Drawing to Celebrate Summer
Drawing has a special way of allowing us to tune in to nature's rhythms. It’s a simple practice that can bring us to a mindful state anywhere we go. In this course, we’ll cultivate an openness to unexpected outcomes as we celebrate the bounty of summer and the high energy of the longest day of the year.
Learning the secrets of the perfect pizza with Handsome Pizza
This hands-on pizza workshop will take you from powdery flour to crisp crust. Learn the basics of dough, stretching and topping pizzas, and how to use a wood-fired oven. We'll also pass on tips and tricks for getting the best results in your home oven. In just a few hours we'll cover everything you need to know to make some truly excellent pizza! The best part: dinner + a drink is included in your tuition.
Tools for Developing Accessibility Technology
This workshop provides an introduction to digital accessibility standards and practices and gives participants hands-on experience with assessing, testing, and implementing accessibility practices in the physical and digital realm.
The time, talent, and energy of your staff is your organization's most valuable resource. How well do you invest in it? The top-down, hierarchical model of training no longer works. In this one-day workshop, you'll build skills in teaching of others at work and everywhere else . You’ll learn a progressive model of pedagogical theory (how people learn), how to teach to where your learner is, and how to implement it in your professional and personal life. Designed for managers, parents, or anyone who has to communicate knowledge to others in their lives.
Deepen Your Roots with Local Trees
Expand your connection with the place we live by tuning in to the world of trees and learning how the flora of our bioregion is in flux. Understanding the species we share our home with positions us to be advocates for conservation and offers tools for reimagining our personal and collective relationships to nature.
Tools for Radicals and Futurists
Apps and content, platforms and startups, industry and conventions: we hear a lot about the entrepreneurs, engineers, and companies that shape the digital landscape. But what about the communities who are working all the while to radicalize and transform the world, and to enact power-from-below using digital technology?
Change Your Palate, Change the Future
Ninety percent of the world's calorie intake comes from just 30 crop species. With a rapidly changing climate affecting many of those crops, we’ve got a problem. In this course, learn how crop diversity, a.k.a. agrobiodiversity, is the key to sustaining our food resources.
Do you do any training of others at work? Teaching is a fundamental life skill. The majority of value in any organization is the knowledge of its workers. How do you pass it on and make it more effective?
In this one day workshop, you’ll learn the basics of pedagogical theory (how people learn), how to teach to where your learner is and what they need to know, and how to implement it in your professional and personal life. Designed for managers, parents, or anyone who has to communicate knowledge in their lives.
Drawing to Connect with Winter's Rhythms
Drawing has a special way of slowing us down, allowing us to tune in to nature's rhythms. It’s a simple practice that can bring us to a mindful state anywhere we go. In this course, we’ll cultivate an openness to unexpected outcomes as we record our observations of the dark season’s wonders.
Deepen your connection with the place we live by tuning into the world of trees. Understanding the species we share our home with positions us to be advocates for conservation and offers tools for reimagining our relationships to nature.
How did bitters go from traditional digestive medicine to quirky cocktail ingredient? Reclaim ancestral digestive medicinal knowledge and make your own bitters in this hands-on workshop.
Good Science for Better Health
Taught by Jeff Rubin
We are bombarded with claims that medications, special diets, equipment, and personal treatments can improve our health, looks, and lifespan. How can we wade through it and end up with something useful?
The human story begins 3 million years ago, but written history dates back a mere few thousand years. This course will take us to the brink of what we know and what we don’t. The evolution of physiology, technology, and culture are frames for examining prehistory to ponder who we are, where we've come from, and where we need to go.
Teaching isn't about content delivery. It's about sparking the desire and ability in others to learn the content without you. This class is for anyone who wants the skill set to effectively share their knowledge with others. It is for anyone to wants to advance professionally, be a better parent, or lead an intellectually fulfilled life.
Electricity powers everything around us. Computers and electronics have changed our behavior so dramatically that it's difficult to understand how we were before it. Do you know how to control electricity? In this course, we will offer hands-on projects so you can learn how electricity works in your computer, vehicle, and home. You'll learn some cool electronic things you can build cheaply and easily. Lastly, we'll discuss a larger question: the ways in which electronics control us.
In this class, you'll learn how to recognize 12 common plant families and how to identify species using a plant key. Understanding the species we share our homes with positions us to be advocates for conservation and offers tools for reimagining our personal and collectives relationships with nature. By the end of the course you'll have created your own guide to the major plant families - and you will have fresh eyes for the plants that live right outside your door.
We use math all the time, because we need to. Understanding it helps you reason better, opens up new career paths, and helps you access a wider variety of interests. If you're one of the many people who hated math in school, or thought it was useless "in real life", this class is for you. Explore basic math concepts through experience: nature, technology, construction, cooking, finances, and reading comprehension. Math is how you sail and bake; math is engaging and beautiful.
What does yoga have to do with the mind? How does it impact our behavior, our thoughts, and our feelings? Much of what the West is now discovering in psychology was written about 2000 years ago in the Yoga Sutras. The wisdom is more applicable than ever to our stressful times and lives today. The class is interactive. We will apply what we learn from the text to our lives: how we think, how we resolve conflict, how we discover our real selves.
Whether drawing on Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, or a general social justice orientation, critical psychologists show that mainstream and pop psychologies tend to reinforce the injustices of the societal status quo. Critical psychologists instead push for a psychology dedicated to radical social transformation. This course is an overview of critical psychology, and it serves as an introduction for those who may want to go on to pursue some of these threads more deeply.
Technology allows historically marginalized people to share their experiences with massive audiences. The two big issues this class explores are how online media impacts evolving gender norms and how design of social media platforms impacts who participates in online conversations. We explore gender- and race-based harassment online, discuss changing conceptions of privacy, and look at how political activists use social media to push for change.
What will a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake likely do, and how will it affect you and those you care about? What should you do before, during and after? We will discuss all this and more, including self-protection, the most important items to have in an emergency kit, tips for communicating with loved ones after an earthquake and suggestions for making your home safer.
For millennia, cultures have identified adolescent rites of passage as critical to success. They understand this life stage to be pivotal and accord it considerable resources. Explore the purpose of adolescence, how it is attuned to cultural renewal, and how to create a culture of rites of passage to support the youth journey into adulthood. This class is for parents, those passionate about culture, and anyone working with youth.
Why do seemingly ration people make irrational financial decisions? The emerging field of behavioral economics studies the predictably irrational financial behavior. We examine how people fall into common patterns of thinking in how we spend, save, borrow, invest, and waste money. We'll also talk about how our family histories play into how we value and understand money. This fun an interactive course will open your eyes to how you can make better financial decisions.
Who's tracking you on the Internet? With the rise of privacy concerns in digital spaces, encryption technology has become an increasingly important modern topic. But the practice of secure communication, and the practice of trying to break it, have been around for centuries. Come examine the origins of cryptography, from Caesar ciphers to modern day techniques and even learn some basic crypto methods that can be done by hand. More importantly, learn the principles of cryptography and digital privacy to protect your data more securely.
What Health Science Research Should I Trust?
We are bombarded with claims that medications, special diets, equipment, and personal treatments can improve our health, looks, and lifespan. How can we wade through it and end up with something useful? This class will cover basic concepts and methods, offering guidelines on how to evaluate what’s out there, tips on spotting bad science, and maybe even some insight into how our brains work.
How to Teach Workshop
Teaching is a fundamental life skill. What sex is to genes, teaching is to culture --it's the only way we humans pass it on. Want to learn how to do it well? Subjects include communicating so people understand, designing great curriculum, and facilitating dialogue in the classroom.
Observation drawing has a special way of grounding us in the present moment. Meet some intriguing and subtle late winter plants of Portland and learn their stories. Using drawing as a way to explore urban flora, slow down to observe the details that make species unique. Use simple tools—pencil, ink, and paper—to explore the beauty of the nature all around us in midwinter. You’ll leave with a series of works that are a record of your curiosity and observations.
are the biological, medical, and social impact of genes and the processes they regulate? this four-week course will cover the science of genetics and disease, and the real world implications of predicting or estimating disease risk by way of knowing your genetic code. We will also discuss the methods, policies, and controversies involve din genetic testing. Appropriate for any adult with who has taken high-school level biology and chemistry. Space is limited to 25 students.