Our Wild Minds
Next Cohort Begins in Fall 2024 (Dates TBA)
6-Month Live Course Begins June 2023
Kaitlin Smith, MSW trained in psychodynamic and behavioral psychotherapies at the University of California San Francisco Department of Psychiatry and Smith College School for Social Work. Kaitlin is currently a PhD student at Harvard University in History of Science where her research interrogates some of the conceptual foundations of psychology and its intersections with African American Studies.
In addition, Kaitlin has completed certificate programs in Ecopsychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute (2021) and Gifted Psychology with psychologist Jennifer Harvey Sallin through Intergifted (2022).
No. Though the facilitator (Kaitlin) has undergone clinical training as a psychotherapist, this course is not meant to reproduce what happens in a therapy group.
The design of Black Brilliance Circle isn't conducive to delivering the type of support that a person in crisis needs most. If you're going through this, you're encouraged to connect with a mental health professional (here is a great resource for this) to address any acute challenges that you may be facing. Once you have more mental and emotional bandwith available to partake in a non-clinical community learning experience, please consider reconnecting with us here!
This is a difficult question to answer, but this essay touches upon this topic and captures how giftedness and twice-exceptionality are conceptualized within the Black Brilliance Circle course.
It is worth noting that there are some organizations (e.g. MENSA) that admit members based on IQ test while some other organizations are exploring qualitative measures for locating various forms of intelligence and their degree of expression in individuals. Though these tools can be useful for capturing dimensions of a person's functioning, the project of crafting a definitve science that can reliably index another's intelligence(s) and interior landscapes is a fraught enterprise riddled with inevitable blindspots in the facilitator's (Kaitlin's) view.
For the purposes of the application process for this course, the central criterion is whether the applicant is likely to gain from the course's offerings at this moment in time based on the self-description they submit. This posture honors the reality that human beings possess multitudes that often resist definitive classification via existing identification methods and focuses only on ascertaining course-participant fit.
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