How Birthing Advocacy Doula Trainings is Doing Education Differently
BADT’s Philosophy
Dominant culture education enacts and upholds systems of oppression in a multitude of ways. It is often inflexible, creates a disempowering power differential between teacher and student, and expects all learners to process in the same ways. Impossible and harmful!
As an organization, BADT strives to do education differently. We want the learning process to feel expansive, open, flexible, and accessible to our learners. This is both a philosophy we hold and a set of practices– both of which are emergent and always growing, transforming, and changing.
We wrote a three-part blog series on BADT’s values that you can check out here to understand the how and why we do things the way we do.
Flexible and Supportive Learning Environment
All of our offerings thus far have been hosted online, and the vast majority of classes are also recorded for rewatching or viewing later. This means that folks all over the country and world can engage with our content and community. Find our pre-recorded and on-demanded classes here.
Beyond this logistical piece, we invite students to come as they are. This could mean attending class from bed, while on a walk, with camera off, with a snack in hand, and so on. Really and truly, we want birth workers to actively practice resourcing themselves. We don’t see the learning environment as separate from work in “the field.”
We incorporate various grounding and orienting exercises into most of our offerings. Sometimes this means playing a song at the beginning of class as folks gather. Other times it means taking a few moments to breathe and be together. We also invite folks to share in the chat how they are arriving. BADT cares about and sees birth workers as whole people, and we are committed to holding space for folks to be and share about their experiences beyond just the learning process.
While the path to certification may be important for some students (and may increase access to work opportunities in their local communities), this is a completely optional process. We encourage students to discern whether certifying is meaningful and necessary for them, and we see all paths as valid.
Space for Continued Growth as a Birth Worker
Our 12-week trainings are deep dives that offer strong foundations of learning. That said, we are committed to offering BADT learners ongoing space to grow and expand in their practices. We offer Continuing Education (CE) courses, as well as workshops to provide containers for birth workers to gain more specialized knowledge and skills in community.
Additionally, we offer continuous space for conversation and resource sharing via the BADT Community App. This is a platform on which students can ask for community resources, share offerings, network, process, and so on. Students from any BADT program will have access to the main BADT space, as well as a group specific to the course they are enrolled in.
One thing we have been delighted to see over time is the way that students connect with one another and create informal groups for studying, accountability, brainstorming, and processing. Sometimes these partnerships grow beyond BADT and folks create offerings together! This kind of community building is essential to sustainability in birth work.
Join Us Online!
Learn more about our ongoing and upcoming courses here, and be sure to sign up for our email list so you’ll be first to hear about new courses, open enrollment periods, and scholarship opportunities for live classes.
If you still have questions we haven’t touched on here, take a look at our FAQs for more info!