Leverage Your TLA Expertise for Publication, Community, Business, and Livelihood // with Yvette Hyater-Adams

Explore how to use narrative-based models to strengthen your professional voice, better communicate who you are and what you do as a transformative language artist, and further shape the emerging field and practice of TLA.

TLA practitioners, artists, activists, facilitators and scholars, we're often asked, “What's Transformative Language Arts?” In this class, we'll hone our abilities and build tools for communicating both the effectiveness of using the written, spoken and sung word for personal and communal change, and the specifics of our individual and community TLA work. Especially when working with people and cultures whose narratives are invisible and silenced, this kind of communication is particularly important to foster a new world of possibilities for healing, creativity and voice. Such models also lift the TLA profession and the reputation of the great people doing good work in the world.

Yvette will use her TLA-inspired model to offer practical “how to” guidance that strengthens the profession, helps you establish an expert voice, and better creatively showcase your work for a variety of audiences and uses. This course provides a framework of three anchors for promoting your TLA skill and expertise: Scholarly Personal Narratives, Authoethnography, and Story Branding.

If you are imagining a way to effectively and passionately convey your the whys, whos, and whats of your practice and to market yourself effectively, this is the course for you. In a nutshell, this course will guide participants to succinctly name: This is my body of work. This is who I am. This is who I work with.

Participants can expect to:

• Share experiences to further the knowledge of the TLA field through writings and professional presentations
• Advocate, educate, and pass on TLA practices to promote learning and development
• Weave between research, writing, practice, theory, and experience
• Develop a TLA niche and target audience to support Right Livelihood
• Apply templates for storytelling

Week by Week

Week One: Introduction to TLA Practice as Personal Story, Research, and Theory: This week, we'll explore who we are, what's our TLA practice, and our goals for the class as well as learn more about various forms of sharing our TLA work to lift up the field of TLA while enhancing our own work.

Week Two: Who Am I and What is My Work: This week, we dive deeper into first person storytelling on our histories and how it connects to our TLA work. We shall produce several short personal essays.

Week Three: Personal Essay Feedback and Introduction to Elements of Scholarship Personal Narrative: We will exchange strengths-based feedback to refine our short personal essays. We'll also be introduced to Scholarly Personal Narrative and ways we can turn our experience into relatable scholarly research that adds value to the TLA field of study. We will begin thinking about possible TLA SPN topics.

Week Four: Diving Deeper into Scholarly Personal Narrative: We will select an SPN topic, how our experience (personal essays) connect with the topic, and how the topic connects to a larger world view. We'll outline/mind map a piece of SPN writing. We'll brainstorm pertinent external resources that need to be noted in our SPN. Through sharing feedback with one another, we can further enhance how we convey our work, experience, goals, capacities, and vision.

Week Five: SPN Manuscript Draft and Brainstorm Uses for our TLA Class Writings: We'll develop a solid SPN draft and exchange strengths-based feedback. We will brainstorm creative ways to use our personal short story writings and SPN manuscript to further our TLA practice.

Week Six: Build a Framework for Story Branding: We'll wrap up class by identifying and selecting publishing outlets, marketing opportunities, and branding options for our refined TLA writings.

Who Should Take This Class

This online class is for facilitators and practitioners (whether you're a writer, storyteller, performer, activist, educator, healer, or community leader) wishing to creatively document your work; craft strong writing of your background, experience and offerings for your print and web marketing materials; and create various form of TLA scholarship centered on your story and vision. This online class works well for individuals wishing dedicated time to write about their storytelling, personal narrative, and narrative storytelling based facilitation practice. This course will help participants write about their practice from a creative-scholar-based framework, and learn how to establish their “brand” and marketing through stories.

Format

Participants can expect to spend 3-6 hours a week in an online format checking out posted resources, assigned readings, brief slide presentations, sample writings for discussion, and templates, creative prompts, and exercises to initiate writing. Participants will receive and give strengths-based and positive feedback when responding to peers’ work.

About the Teacher

Yvette Angelique Hyater-Adams, MA-TLA, Principal and Chief Storytelling Officer at Narratives for Change: I am a writer, teaching-artist, and transformative narrative coach. Currently, my research and writing projects center around analyzing personal experience for women and girls to understand their cultural realities. This social action writing confronts pressing issues that women and girls face, and I publish as research reports, journal articles, book chapters and on blogs. In addition to my writing projects and teaching creative and expressive writing, I help leaders and teams embrace transformative change using narrative models that promote transparency, positive reframing of language, and from a strengths-based philosophy. My history includes deep experience and training in applied behavioral science and mindfulness-based practices. I have a strong business background as Senior Vice President and corporate banker heading up a change management strategy division; as President, and Chief Executive Officer for a boutique change management consulting firm, and as President of a non-profit education institution for adult experiential learning and professional development. Today, I run Narrative for Change, a social enterprise whose mission is creative pathaways for women and girls to advocate for herself and her tribes through written, spoken, and visual storytelling.