Crafting Pedagogies of Togetherness Residency 2025



About
 Process
 Residency team
 Participants
 Partners


In November 2025, thirty-five teachers, researchers, social entrepreneurs, artists, and embodiment practitioners from twelve countries gathered at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, for the next chapter of a curriculum shaped over several years through the collaboration of Arawana Hayashi, choreographer and founder of Social Presencing Theater, and Ricardo Dutra, social designer, researcher, and educator. First prototyped in U.S. high school contexts, the work had already been carried forward through the residency in Paris.

Helsinki carried a long-held aspiration, to document these embodied practices in a way that could be shared more widely, not as a static curriculum, but as an open invitation for educators and people working with youth to reflect on, adapt, and create their own practices of togetherness.
Process                   Performance and Curriculum teams         Evolving conversation         Impact
Producing fifteen pedagogical films required a carefully coordinated process, so the residency was organized into two interconnected teams. The Performance Team, comprising eight participants, rehearsed and performed the embodied practices filmed by Aalto Studios. Running in parallel, the Curriculum Team, comprising twenty to thirty participants, explored the curriculum's purpose, structure, and potential through presentations, dialogue, embodied inquiry, and arts-based processes. The two groups came together at the beginning and end of each day, each contributing something distinct to the same whole.
Rather than producing a fixed curriculum, the residency cultivated an evolving conversation about what pedagogies of togetherness might become. Alongside the filmed practices, participants explored why these pedagogies matter, how they might be adapted across different educational settings, and what kind of education they make possible. This work was supported by Aalto University's media production facilities, with filming made possible through a collaboration between Aalto University and the Presencing Institute.    
Building on the collective prototyping developed in Paris, Helsinki translated these emerging practices into the Crafting Pedagogies of Togetherness living curriculum, now on the Presencing Institute's website as an open invitation for educators, artists, and people working with youth aged 15 to 25 to explore, adapt, and create their own pedagogies of togetherness.
That foundation has already become the basis for a 20-hour educator training programme, to be piloted across schools and youth contexts in India, France, Finland, South Africa, and Brazil. It also opened a channel to the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. Following a meeting with Minister Anders Adlercreutz, insights from the residency helped shape a national initiative on togetherness in schools, centred on small embodied practices such as greeting—reimagined as a moment of attention and mutual presence between children and teachers—which was shared with schools across Finland in 2025.
When

Nov 2025

Structure

2 teams
Performance, curriculum

Participants

35
12 countries

Outcome

15
Pedagogical films


How the two teams split

Performance team
8 participants, filmed at Aalto Studios


Curriculum team
27 participants, dialogue and inquiry

Residency Team
Agathe Peltereau Villeneuve
Anne-Sophie Dubanton
Arawana Hayashi
Candice Marro
Marina Seghetti
Ricardo Dutra
Participants
Thirty-five teachers, researchers, social entrepreneurs, artists, and embodiment practitioners, from twelve countries, many of them returning from the Paris residency to keep building on what they'd started there. Split across a Performance Team of eight and a Curriculum Team of twenty to thirty, they met each morning and evening to bring the two threads back together.
"If I allow myself to dream, I can imagine education at large shifting from the current modern obsession with autonomous, rational individuals towards growing much stronger relational roots. [...] It would no longer merely be about what any one person can know, but what we might become together."

Mathias Poulsen, play activist and researcher            
Partners








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