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SATE 2025 November course with Jacob Sam La Rose

Jacob Sam La-Rose invited participants to delve into abstraction steering us indirectly into poetic generation. Please find a poetry-adjacent exercise we played called the “Stretched-Bridge Metaphor” where we had to choose a random animal as a pathway into expressing emotions indirectly. This was one of many hugely engaging and fun activities that we could weave into our teaching lives especially in an age of information glut and cognitive offloading to AI. Jacob’s exercise helped us hone our skills of observation by transcending our initial discomfort and surface level engagement. In today’s classroom providing space for attention and creation is primordial. 

I hope you get a glimpse into the JOY we shared with and thanks to Jacob Sam La-Rose via the following exercise:

THE ANIMAL of MY EMOTION e.g. “The Penguin of our Joy” aka the layered personification exercise!

The Penguin of our Joy with Jacob Sam La Rose! 

By Orlaith Nellen

The penguin of our joy does not waddle in circles.
Donning his dinner-party tuxedo
He struts in sync with creativity’s elevation.

Redundant flippers flip learning on its head.
Who needs flight with a streamlined body that divulges depth of plunge?

Housed in his plumage counter-shaded nuance
Insulates from the ignorance of reigning pieties.
His is a tribalism of inclusion.
Unsettling the colony.

The only “backward” feature?
Tongue barbs.
Stopping slippery platitudes while
Celebrating
The capture of all things creation.

• Here I used the anatomical features of an actual penguin namely the flippers that are futile when it comes to flying but that serve as essential tools for swimming in the depths (of our thoughts and hearts). The backward facing tongue barbs that serve to catch and hold onto slippery fish were used to show how joy is to be found in the awareness and resistance of hackneyed phrases that block critical thinking and empathy. Jacob helped us bend the barbs to evade confirmation bias. The fact that a penguin in its piebald attire encompasses both tones that are too often used to separate humanity (white versus black) were used to show how he stands as a symbol of unity. His very nature is inclusive which counters the colonialist mindsets that thrive on division. I employed the 3 collective nouns that you could use to describe a group of penguins (waddle, colony and tuxedo) opting for the tuxedo deliberately. The joy we had with someone as creative and ethically inspiring as Jacob therefore fed into this poem via the animal of choice. We all walked away with a plethora of such activities and backdoor entries into the hearts and minds of our students. Connection and creation being the foundation for lifelong learning.

Orlaith Nellen,

For the SATE Committee

See here for the minutes of the 2025 AGM.

SATE AGM 2024

On 22nd November 2024, we met in Fribourg / Freiburg in the Collège St-Michel / Kollegium St. Michael for the SATE AGM 2024. The guest lecture was by Kirsty Logan on “Between Shortbread and Heroin!””

[More to follow...]

After the AGM, we had a lovely dinner at Le Belvédère Restaurant - good food, pleasant company and lively conversations!

See here for the minutes of the 2024 AGM.

Last updated: 2 September 2025