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ATI Responds to Racism

Just Inclusion is a Working Group of ATI formed in response to the proposition that anti-racism, and a pro-equity regard towards all people, needs to become indivisible from any other principle informing the work of ATI. Just Inclusion is committed to enabling and contributing to growing awareness, to initiating engagement and to taking progressive, transformative steps towards leveling access wherever inequity arises.

All of us can reflect on our relative access to power and more safely improve our experience and understanding of how to embrace diversity. We undertake to reflect on, and share our learning.

Just Inclusion initiatives include:

  • exploring our biases and how they manifest in our ways of living, our means for teaching and how we communicate with each other;
  • continuing to provide resources for anti-racist and anti-discrimination education, allowing us to recognize and interrupt explicit biases that affect our teaching environment and student/teacher relationships;
  • providing training opportunities for improving listening skills within our profession, including our use of Formal Consensus, and on our members’ teaching and training courses;
  • developing our use of language so that the principles of Alexander’s work are clearly presented such that they are welcoming to people of various backgrounds and needs;
  • offering plenary workshops led by underrepresented people in the Alexander Technique community, with a focus on fostering collaboration and a spirit of belonging, setting the ground for the next generation of ATI members.

As Alexander concluded in Universal Constant in Living....

...if past experiences are not to be repeated, and man [sic] is to gain a better understanding of the nature of the aims and characteristics of the peoples of other nations, as well as his own, he must have a new “means-whereby” for living in the future. There must be a reorientation of our viewpoint upon education, culture, religion, politics, economics, medicine, science, industry and, last but not least, upon class and social relations and intercourse. Such reorientation as I envision is not possible without that fundamental change in guidance and control of the self....

FM Alexander, 1943, Universal Constant in Living, Conclusion Xlll