Instructor Spotlight: Luke Brown
What inspired you to teach this course?
For over a decade, I have been an English instructor and dialogue facilitator. I have long wanted to create conditions for people to more deeply engage with one another as they explore the richness of our shared world. I decided to pursue an interdisciplinary PhD in Education as a way to better understand how we can encounter each other more fully. Yet, in striving for dialogue between people, I realized how few intentional places and times we have to more deeply dialogue within ourselves. We all contain multitudes, and these multitudes need time and space and ritual and play to be heard. Different traditions and practices of retreat offer us a way to design experiences where we can more fully welcome our complexity, rewater our motivation, and feel our interconnectedness with entities outside of ourselves. After seeing how powerfully participants from different walks of life responded to retreat practices, I knew I wanted to teach a course on retreats and learn alongside Tufts students!
How do you define retreat?
The language of retreat gets thrown around a lot these days to mean just about any kind of gathering, but for me, a retreat has a number of intentionally designed elements. A retreat is a specific rhythm of rituals cultivated in a particular place. A great retreat serves three intentions, to varying degrees, of reorientation, renewal, and rewilding. A great retreat invites us to (1) reconsider our orientation devices of life: the assumptions, beliefs, relationships, and passing thoughts which contour our daily lives; (2) renew ourselves with sources of creativity, consolation, and restoration; and (3) rewild ourselves by engaging parts of us we have not embraced as readily in the past and engaging with nature to celebrate awe-inspiring biodiversity.
Why is retreat important in today’s sociopolitical landscape?
Our world continues to accelerate. We are constantly bombarded with encouragement to be more, do more, and achieve more. Technological developments—including social media, AI, and our chronically online lives—have been replacing human time with machine time. Our national political culture has become soundbyted and streamlined with provocateurs replacing policymakers. Instead of speeding up to try to be ever more efficient, retreat invites us to slow down, reorient to now, and embrace sustainable habits of interdependence. This allows for truly transformational learning.
Luke Brown is an educator, researcher, and dialogue facilitator currently pursuing a PhD in higher education at Boston College. A scholar-practitioner of formative education, he has over ten years of experience in creating inclusive, impactful learning environments. You can read or listen to his public-facing work on retreats.