What it looks like when a staff liberates their learning
In May 2026 we spent two days with the teaching staff of Pedro Albizu Campos High School in Chicago — close to thirty educators at the end of a school year.
We opened by honoring the lands: the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe homelands the school sits on, the generations of Boricua families in the neighborhood, the Taíno ancestors of Borikén, and Pedro Albizu Campos himself, whose name the building carries. Then we built an altar together. Each person brought an object from home and named an ancestor into the room.
The teaching was somatic SEL — how the nervous system actually works, what the body holds and where, and the practices that move it through. We engaged in Liberation Theater: small groups with scenarios from their school, building restorative responses together and acting them out.
The room filled with laughter. Play showed up. And inside that play, the real conversations came — about how to see each other, how to lean on each other, how much they had in common that they'd never said out loud. People left saying they understood their colleagues differently. More compassion and togetherness. A felt sense that they were actually a team.
This is Liberated Learning alive and at work.