with pen and blade
The trick to creating freedom to experiment, learn from error, and develop self-reliance, is a structure that actively supports those behaviors. I talk a lot about how you can't teach students to be independent thinkers and active problem-solvers if your class structure is built around obedience and rigid adherence to pre-set patterns. You also can't [...]
I originally wrote this piece as two separate Facebook posts, published a few days apart. The first was a very personal vent about some of what I've been dealing with over the past few months, and the second a concrete call to action for folks in my martial arts community. I'm sharing both here in [...]
The following collection of first-hand accounts and supporting documents is the combined work of Claire Wemyss, Sylvie LaRiviere, Jon Mills, Kris Meier, and myself. It details a series of incidents and patterns of behaviour spanning ten years that we believe demonstrate that Devon Boorman, director of Academie Duello, is a harmful influence in our community [...]
If I could give one single bit of teaching advice to everyone, it would be: Let your students do it wrong more often. I know it's hard. You want to help them. You want them to know what you know. You want them to do things right so that they can get more "good" reps [...]
One of my favourite parts of this year's Swordsquatch was being on the Making HEMA Awesome for Everyone panel with my fantastic colleagues Isaiah Baden-Payne, Beth Hammer, and Shane Malone. The goal was to talk about diversity and inclusion in the HEMA community in concrete, actionable terms, and to share our success stories of building [...]
Kajaswords 