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 France.









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 took a carefully coordinated process, so the residency split into two interconnected teams. The Performance Team, eight participants, rehearsed and performed the embodied practices captured by Aalto Studios. Running in parallel, the Curriculum Team, 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 start 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, work made possible by Aalto University's media production facilities, with filming supported through 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: after the team met with Minister Anders Adlercreutz, insights from the residency helped shape a national initiative on togetherness in schools, centred on small embodied practices like greeting, explored as a moment of attention and mutual presence between children and teachers, shared with schools across Finland in 2025.






When

Nov 2025
Structure

2 teams
Performance, curriculumParticipants

35
12 countriesOutcome

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




















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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