Our Story

We are Reed Jordan, Erina Keefe, Danya Littlefield, Jonathan Tarleton, Jessica Wolff. We met in graduate school at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Between us we have worked on sustainability and decarbonization, transportation and parks, economic democracy, affordable housing, international development, and immigration. We have served as leaders in city government, directors at non-profits, and part-time professors. We are authors, educators, practitioners, pet parents, and artists. We all seek social transformation and share in the perhaps unhealthy habit of overly analyzing our social world.

Our first effort at creating Personal Theories of Practice began in 2017. We were inspired by questions that students faced in a formal course called "Participatory Action Research” offered by MIT’s CoLab. Our schedules didn’t allow us to take the class, but we, still in recovery as overachievers, created our own parallel study and reflection group in a first-of-its-kind experience. We met multiple times outside of the classroom for structured sessions and experimented with different methods to develop a PTOP. We learned some things.

We still meet quarterly today. Given how helpful we found the initial process and ongoing structure, we put together a set of resources to support future groups of MIT students to develop their own PTOPs. Fast forward almost a decade later, we want these resources to be more broadly accessible.

Acknowledgements

We didn't build this alone; far from it. Lawrence Barriner II was instrumental in developing this process as our facilitator, often charting out sessions and pointing us to resources. We all built on the foundation of MIT CoLab, in particular the lineage of professors who taught "Participatory Action Research," among them Dayna Cunningham and Alison Coffey. There are plenty of similar formations to our PTOP group (e.g., The People's Dreaming Collective) from which we've taken inspiration. You'll see many links to Techniques that we built on. Finally, many thanks to the untold number of friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators from whom we've drawn these practices or who contributed to our individual processes.

Get in Touch

We are always interested to hear how different people are using and adapting these tools and to bring them to new audiences. You can write us at personal@theoryofpractice.xyz. We are working folks and this is a labor of love, so please forgive us any delay in responding.