Why Martin Luther King, Jr. never gave his I Have a Business Plan Speech

 

Unless you put yourself on news diet in higher education or have tossed out all the emails from your university, you’ve been deluged with news about the new kids on campus, innovation and his big brother, disruption.  The innovation movement influences the naming of buildings, the funding of new initiatives, the design of curricular offerings and the branding of programs for our students. What I want to address here is not technological innovation, machine intelligence nor the rise of the robots; I want to address social innovation.  As a twenty-year student of civic engagement on campuses, I’ve been tracking the introduction of programs in social innovation and social entrepreneurship across the country. As chronicled by Ashoka U, more courses are being taught, more faculty are on board, more programs of study are being created and more campuses are signing up to be Changemaker campuses, forty-five universities here and abroad. All to the good. That is how programs are created and make their way into the academic mainstream. Like any new program or discipline that aims to make a place in higher education, problems are framed, claims are advanced, journals are founded, organizations are created, and work begins to establish a presence on campuses.

What is so new about innovation? In some flavors of social entrepreneurship, there is a claim that social entrepreneurship is the panacea we have all been waiting for, that it is new, that it is distinctive and that is far superior to other approaches to social change. In 2015, McBride and Mlyn offered their critique of social innovation’s embrace in higher education, privileging new ideas that will be birthed by our students, instead of carefully teaching them the skills that it really takes to put sound ideas in place—those civic skills and community organizing strategies. As they note, “Engaged citizens know the roles of public, private, and nonprofit sectors and the tools that leverage their work together”.

A recent article in the New York Times takes the recent batch of entrepreneurs to task for solving all wrong problems, those that address the lives of the privileged and connected, paying lip service to social improvement in a cynical use of the term “changing the world”. In Design: The Invention of Desire, Jessica Helfand berates the impulse to destroy, creatively or not. Is “nothing worth saving…is it necessary to start from scratch every time?” According to Helfand, the principles that should guide innovation are not clever branding schemes or the launch of programs that affect people’s lives with the idea that we should fail fast and fail often. As she argues, the values most important for innovation include “empathy, humility, compassion and conscience.” I just looked it up in Google; there is no app for that.

When we think about educating our students for lives and work in the 21^st century, we must not neglect their lives as active members of their communities, whether they become volunteers, board members, teachers, social workers, philanthropists, artists, activists, opinion leaders, public officials or other roles.  In a recent issue of Humanities, Danielle Allen reminds us that we ignore our job to nurture “participatory readiness” in our students, preparing them for lives of civic and political participation. The role of arts, humanities and social sciences is particularly important here, although as scholar and teachers, it is also our job to create new tools that fit new social, economic and political challenges.

Fifteen years ago, at the behest of the leadership of the Campus Compact, I co-taught a year long course titled American Traditions of Philanthropy with Brown University Professor Ann Dill. We enrolled students from elite schools, from the public university, four-year college and community college, as well as a private college whose focus was business education and another private Catholic college. After a year’s worth of lectures and an end-of-the-semester community project, we asked students to article their philosophies of doing good. The students from the public four-year and community colleges stipulated that their obligation was to give back to the communities that had nurtured them by becoming teachers, social workers, and health professionals. The students from the business college believed that their role was to apply their management skills to direct nonprofits, which they believed were poorly managed. They contended that doing so would go a long way to changing the world. The students from the private Catholic university saw themselves empowering community members as citizens. Their role was as community organizers. Finally, the students from the elite universities characterized their role as thought leaders and organizational founders. They saw the current landscape of nonprofit organizations and government agencies as inadequate to serve and change communities; new organizations needed to take their place. These differences in how these students saw their roles in the world were striking—some as direct service workers, others as community organizers, still others as managers and finally others as founders and innovators. We need to be sensitive to the ways in which we empower our students and help them understand their agency in the world.

As we consider which students and campuses are in the community engagement and social innovation fields, we can ask which of our students are truly empowered to be social entrepreneurs? Which are delegated to do more direct service without much access to take up leadership or management roles? We should be clearer about these differences and understand to role of campus culture in citizen making.

Great examples of programs on some campuses aim to marry skills in developing and organizing resources, in working with teams, and with critical analysis. Students don’t create new enterprises until they have worked in the problem space. Students and recent graduates whose goals are social entrepreneurship need time “apprenticing with a problem” as Papi-Thornton characterizes it, understanding how organizations already in place define the problem and their theories of change. Working with others and against the current model of the entrepreneur as a single heroic individual develops the skills and orientations citizens need to truly make a difference.

Paul Light’s Driving Social Change reminds us that transformational change never employs such one tool. Advocacy without the passage of laws gets us nowhere. Volunteerism without a larger conceptualization of the roots of the social problems may be short sighted and misplaced. Without those who are preserving the social safety while others are creating new organizations, many would suffer. No question, we do need new blood and new thinking that addresses problems with which we have become too comfortable. I would argue that we should help our students understand that an array of tools is required for social engagement that improves the lives and communities. Students should understand the role of important books, films and other media that have brought issues to the fore, the role of the civil and the public sectors, the history and life cycles of social movements, and when and why a new organization should be created. Importantly, they can appreciate that a business plan is not a social movement. The anchoring of social entrepreneurship in some business schools has tied them to the business plan as the way to organize for social change. Business thinking that points to ramping up and scaling projects may not the best fit given the complicated nature of social problems. Context matters. Echoing many calls for increased civic education, students need to better understand the tools of citizenship and advocacy. We need to expand the tools students master for involvement in the community, not shoehorn them into narrow views of how change happens.

The good old days when grandmothers were dying

I have been teaching for nearly twenty years. I started a career as a newborn Ph.D. in a tenure track position when I was fifty years old. So, although I haven’t made my whole living by teaching, I do have the experience of teaching young people across a few generations and as an adjunct an even longer trace of time.  In the past two years, I have noticed that my collection of students excuses for missing classes has moved from the very solid,

My grandmother died. I won’t be in class tomorrow but can visit your office hours so that I don’t fall too far behind.

to the extended and complicated,

The grandmother of my roommate has died. I need to go to the week-long wake, the days- long funeral and need to live with her parents because they cannot get through this without me.

Or, when the holidays used to occur,

Professor, I will miss class on Wednesday to celebrate Passover. I wish our university recognized this holiday. Can we meet to go over the lecture that I missed next week?

Now, the run up to the holidays is something more like, “

My parents bought me cheap tickets for a flight home, so I won’t be in class Monday, Wednesday, Friday and the next Monday and Wednesday. We got an unbelievable deal. I know that with the high cost of tuition, you understand this. That’s OK. Right?

As a professor, many of us are understanding when illnesses, contagious or serious, befall our students. We are happy to accommodate them. A professor can tell when the sneezy feverish student with the pink eye presents a danger to the rest of the class. I urge students to get better before they return to class, to attend to these illnesses because the college classroom is really an incubator for disease. After two decades in a classroom, I am pretty certain that my immune response is better than my peers who have only been exposed to older people who are already suffering from something not contagious.

Recently a student told me he would be missing class because of a scheduled medical procedure. When I expressed my concern for his health, he comforted me by saying,

Oh no, professor. It’s not for me. It’s for my cat; she needs a rabies shot.

I am too well socialized to reply sarcastically to such a statement because I know to the student, this seems like a perfectly reasonable excuse.

Another student met me at the end of class,

Professor, on the first day of class, I told you I won’t be here next week because I have to go a wedding. I hope you remembered and that is still fine.

I was thinking, “Gosh, she has to take all that time to go to a wedding. I should probably send a gift or at least a card. How thoughtless of me.”

While I was scheduling class presentations at semester’s end, a student reported he and his study partner couldn’t make their report on Monday because the basketball formal ball was the night before. Hmm, I thought. There must be a Cinderella thing going on here. Why would an event the night before interfere with a presentation at 11:00 the following morning? I think I was supposed to understand that any formal dress occasion or any party involving college students meant excessive drinking and that a hangover wouldn’t allow them to do their best work. I should understand that this is way college life is.

I have also heard in an email from a good student that he would be missing class that afternoon.

Dear Professor, I just learned that my uncle has dementia. I won’t be able to make it to class today.

I would put that email in the category of non-sequitur unless maybe the uncle was the person who reminded the student to come to class and he wouldn’t be available to do that because he just got dementia. Or maybe, it was just hard for the student to accept the diagnosis, which says a lot about how sensitive and caring the student is.

Another wrote that a person close to his family has passed away and that he didn’t think he’d feel up to giving a presentation in class. I can sympathize, of course. I feel awful each day that I have to confront these excuses. But my worries about the fall of Western civilization and how students will navigate their way through the world when chances are grandmothers and uncles and cats and celebrities will routinely demand our attention and empathy. But how did coming to class fall to such a low priority, making it like a drop-in center instead of a commitment to learning in a community? How did we as adults allow this to happen?

Hmmm. I grow nostalgic. Wasn’t it nice when students tried to gin up an excuse that reflected their concern for the judgement of the teachers? Not to disrespect cats, of course. But, really. I should have a list in my syllabus of acceptable excuses so students wouldn’t have to spend anytime at all spinning a palatable way to ditch class (in their minds anyway).

And, of course, the second half of these appeals always include a request for a dispensation. Many ask, “Are we doing anything important in class that day?” or “Will I miss anything?” They search for your approval. This happens frequently enough that we should create some standard responses to this question, as well. Here is one that I have been working on.

Dear Child,

Openeth your ears and hear me well lest these words fall on hard ground, lest the dominions be called into battle and great torrents of fury shall flow. On said day of your absence, all the wisdom contained in Chapter three shall be poured forward and shared with grace and sentiment with your brethren. Those brethren shall not, with severe penalty, pass on to you, the secrets they shall learn that day. Blessed be me. And, even if those brethren could   pass such wisdom, verily it may fall on sterile soil. 

There, that seems clear enough.

It should be stated that the vast number of students seem engaged in their learning. But it should also be stipulated that, in my experience, there has been a change in the college classroom and in university culture. This is true in elite universities, as well as other less prestigious institutions.  There is more negotiation by the students over content, grading, assignments and other matters. It is as if they were coached by someone before they left on a trip to a foreign land, “Never pay retail. You can always bargain them down.” And, they took this lesson to their universities. Recently a student tried to convince me that his B minus grade wasn’t that far from an A minus and that he knew and I knew that he  knew the  course material dead cold. He was convinced that I could be argued into believing this was the case. This lasted about thirty minutes. I felt like I was being deposed in a criminal trial.

Finally, he asked,

Well, actually, what is it to you, if I get a B- or A-?

I explained that I would have loved to have given him an A, if he had earned it. But raising his grade wasn’t fair to other students who had done better than he had and got the grades they earned.  This was very hard for him to understand. I think he was about to argue that if students wanted better grades, they should simply put effort into arguing for them. I reminded him that I had accepted late work from him and allowed him to re-submit a poorly written essay. He may not have even earned the B-, actually.

That drew things to a close. Well, actually, I used the legitimate excuse of having to attend a meeting to end the conversation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can an old dog teach new tricks?

It remains a question whether someone who has taught successfully (as measured by student evaluations and peer assessments) at the undergraduate level can teach students of her/his own age. After all, a skilled kindergarten teacher may be out of place and skill-set in high school science or maybe not. Maybe, the meta-talent of teaching (deep understanding of content, profound comprehension of where students are, the ability to change tone, accent and appeal, the meeting of where students are with the challenge of where they will be after an encounter with the material) rests far above the content and specifics of teaching physical science or English. Maybe, some of us are master teachers, who are not only good in specific classrooms and subjects, we can also think about the process of teaching broadly and deeply. Some gifted teachers may be able to teach almost anything to anyone.

The actual genius and mastery of teaching is in itself a rare thing. Despite fifteen years of college-level teaching, I am nowhere near being that exceptional teacher but if an interest in self-improvement and a commitment to engaging teaching were half the formula, I would be well on my way. To teach the transferability of my teaching chops, I decided to teach a course at our local lifelong program housed at the local university. Typically, these programs are geared to adults sixty years and over and are peer led. No tests, no credit, no stress—just the joy of learning. Courses include history, arts, wellness, creative expression and others as well as travel and special interest groups. My plan was to teach one concept in sociology (the sociological imagination) and have older students apply this to their lives. The sociological imagination suggests that we cannot understand our own lives without understanding the social, historical, political and cultural environments of the time. This concepts fights against our tendency to believe that we are self-made women and men and points us to an examination of generational differences, changes in norms and values, changes in material conditions and much more. The students were challenged to write short autobiographies and then translate these into creative projects, fashioning sociologically informed stories of their lives. The class was to meet for three sessions in early December 2017.

The challenge of the comfort zone

As the time of the class drew near, self-doubt and panic began to set in. Could I take an exercise that worked with undergraduates to a classroom where students ranged from their mid-sixties to their late-eighties? Could I interest students in sociological ideas? Would they be willing to share their observations about their lives in a setting like this? Could I reasonably expect students to create class projects in such a short time? And, could I do this in three weeks of classes that were 90 minutes long? And, most importantly, after teaching undergraduates for such a long time, what made me think I could teach people my own age and above? As I wrote earlier, are those teaching skills really transferable?

I have to admit to suffering a nightmare before each of the first two classes. These were completely typical anxiety dreams, the first about not being able to get to my classroom because the elevator had disappeared and left in its place was a drawbridge that was up. The second involved teaching a classroom full of mustache wearing lumberjacks in a room with twelve doors, all opening in rapid succession. When I followed a noisy marching band to quiet down, I got lost in my own college in the toy department and couldn’t find my classroom again. Completely normal. That I still suffer from these after teaching so long is a topic for another essay. Let’s just stipulate that I did not imagine that teaching students my own age would be a walk in the park.

However, I must say that I very much enjoyed working with older adults. It is a wonderful experience to share the benefits of the learning one has done, as an older teacher and as an older student. Because I have been working with these ideas for so long, I have distilled the essence and promise of them. My version of sociology may be pretty far from versions held by other sociologists. I suppose this is the case for poets, as well. I may oversimplify the ideas that are core to the discipline. But, for me, these concepts and theories are profoundly helpful for people to understand who they are in the world. And, because, older adults have an opportunity to look back and reflect on their lives, the sociological imagination allows us to see both broad strokes of history as well as the contingent natures of our life paths.

Organization of the class

The course met three times. During the first class, we discussed the sociological imagination and the ideas of sociologist, C. Wright Mills. I asked each of the students to tell the class about his/her career and the paths not taken—careers that, in retrospect, they may have pursued had circumstances been different. In a class of sixteen, only one man would have followed the same career path. I also asked the students to identify five historical events that happened during their lifetimes that they believed had the greatest impact on them. With a twenty-year difference between the youngest and oldest student in the class, we readily identified the differences between growing up as a child of the depression and experiencing childhood as a member of the baby boom generation. The impact of these differences could be readily traced to the older students’ life courses. For the second class meeting, students were tasked with writing a three-paragraph autobiography, which they would share with other students in class.

In the second meeting, students exchanged their stories in small groups, where I asked them to identify common themes and differences. Out of these conversations emerged several points of agreement and common understandings. In this class, I offered a number of resources where students could research their histories.

For the third session, students were asked to begin to think about a creative way to tell their life story or to focus on a transformational event. Not all students were prepared to do this assignment. However, a few were and these were insightful expressions. Many students noted that they had never thought about the historical context of their lives; others said this assignment prompted them to begin chronicling their life story for their children and grandchildren. Still, others reported that they began to better understand their life course after doing some research on historical events. Students who took up the challenge of doing the creative project used the metaphor of life as a great unveiling, as a bookshelf with stories to be told and as a spreadsheet with pluses and minuses and large fields of undetermined outcomes. In this final class, I also distributed The Summoned Self by David Brooks, the columnist for the New York Times, an essay that explores the contingency of careers and life plans which I thought would resonate with a number of the students.

In my undergraduate teaching, I always do this assignment along with the students in my class. On one occasion, I create a three dimensional board game with Chutes-and-Ladders-like paths signifying unearned good luck and undeserved bad luck all winding through historical events and personal mileposts. Because I have spent most of the past twenty years as a PhD sociologist, I sometimes imagine that I have already examined every facet of my life worth examining. However, in the assignment, I focused on my year as a VISTA Volunteer and realized for the first time how profound that experience had been. In fact, I ended up dividing my life into Before VISTA and After VISTA. I got to include Parables, little books where events of that year taught me lessons I am still processing and missing photographs where images of people and events that were key are missing from my scrapbooks. This exercise took research—fact checking and memory checking— to make the story complete. I found it incredibly rewarding, despite the fact that I thought I had already covered this territory of my personal autobiography. Having the opportunity to discuss this project in the comfort of a classroom of my peers made all the difference for me.

The next round

With few exceptions, the students recommended that the course be taught again, offered in five or six sessions instead of just three. Most observed that they would continue working on the project they began in class. Students also observed that the course included just enough sociology. I know that from the experience of teaching this course that older students like small group work. They also appreciate a speaker who speaks loudly and clearly and who writes carefully on the board. Some are interested in more reading related to the topic; other less so.

I aim to think more clearly about the learning styles and approaches of the older student. Many have wonderful experiences that would readily be the subject of some compelling story-telling. If in the next round of this course, we can build up sufficient trust among the members of the class, I would like to showcase these stories in a public setting. With two semesters left to teach at my university, I am also more sensitive and aware than ever of the importance of understanding the students in front of me, from their generational membership to their culture to the ways in which the world manifests itself to them. What I most interested in is what I can learn from them in the limited time we have together.

 

 

 

Remarks for 2014 HerStory dinner: Four steps to living a life of purpose summarized in eight minutes

First, I am delighted to have the honor to speak to you this evening. Friends, faculty, staff, family members, our leaders, President and Mrs. Machtley. This dinner is one of my favorite events here on campus. I leave here feeling recharged and reminded of how blessed I am to be in the company of such exemplary young women and the brilliant, talented and dedicated staff and faculty that bring us all together. Thanks from all of us for the tireless efforts of Toby Simon, Carolina Bogeart and many many more people who make this event happen.

So, I am going to take advantage of this opportunity to share with you, for the first time ever on this stage or any other, my four-step formula for living a good life in just under ten minutes. Based on a lifetime of research and reflection, I will lead you quickly through these steps and hope that you find something valuable and true in what I have to say.

To me, living a meaningful life is more important than anything else we may achieve or possess. My four points are to imagine, to contemplate, to visualize and to reflect. So, let’s get right to it.

STEP ONE Imagine all your possibilities. Living a life where you follow someone else’s dream cheapens the whole enterprise. You may have heard it a million times but it bears repeating again. Life is more amazing than you can plan for. As Alice Walker wrote, “Expect nothing, live frugally, on surprise.”

Don’t put off doing good or following a passion until you are rich and your children enter college. In my life, I have owned a computer consulting business and been a humorist and comedian. It is true that when I was 45 years old I debated whether to chase a career as a stand up comic or to pursue a PhD. To the great relief of my best friend, Tina Fey, I went the professor route and well, she went her own way. I still dream of being a back up singer in a girls group–think of the Supremes, the Shirelles, Destiny’s Child. Check this out—and sing along if you’d like—– ShooBop, ShooBop. I dream of being TechGirl, a superwoman in a cape who would arrive at the scene when your cell phone is dying and your computer seems to need an exorcism.

I have been a construction worker, an aide to the Governor, a child welfare worker. I worked at the state prison. I didn’t know that I was called to teach until I was in my mid-forties and didn’t understand my own sexuality until I was in late thirties. As I said before, one never knows.

But I have a strong creative spirit and I haven’t for a minute thought that I should drown these other interests so that I could be fully a professor. It doesn’t work that way. You are so much more than you know yourself to be at this age.

Of the life we may live, Marcel Proust wrote,

The only true voyage would be not to visit strange lands but to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is.

Unlike many of your advisors, I will urge you not to focus too soon or too narrowly. Be everything. Pursue much. Think right now of something you have been passionate about that you have let go studying in school or moving down a narrow road. Go down that other path and embrace it. It’s what makes you special. In his lovely poem, Langston Hughes wrote,

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

 STEP TWO Contemplate your galaxy and your orbits. As a sociologist and by temperament, I see the multiple ways that we are connected to people across the planet and back through generations. I think of everything that makes us what and who we are. I think of the people in my personal orbit and how they have influenced me. The steady hand of my now deceased mother who, as proud as she was that I graduated from college, would pull me back into her orbit when she thought I was wandering too far from my working class roots. Or the influence of my oldest friend in the world, a Trappist monk, who reminds me of how distracted my life can be, how far I can range from being fully alive. I think of my friends who have rescued me from deep dark depressions and those whom I saved from other tragedies, an attempted suicide, an abusive husband. I think about the mothers in prison that I’ve met and the children in foster care I have encountered who have fashioned my view of justice and right and wrong more powerfully than have my education and religious training have. These people are all treasures in my life. Think carefully about whom you allow to serve as your guide, as your northern star. Put people in that galaxy who can make you a better, more authentic, more compassionate person who can be challenged to do better.

And think about the gravitational force you exert on others and how you make them better and more loving, more caring, more cared about—or just the reverse. Be always on the search for inspiration; for people and books and ideas that feed your curiosity and push you away from complacency and self-satisfaction.

STEP THREE Visualize the person you would like to be. Even at my mature age, I think about all the potentials we are, all the projects we could begin, all the interests we can pursue. I must say that in many ways, the days that you are living now can be the most challenging times in your lives. We say that these are the best times of your lives but people your age face so much uncertainty. Whom will I marry? What will be I do for a living? How will this all turn out? This uncertainly was true when we were young and it is certainly true now. It is simply a stage of life.

Live your life so that when you are a bit older you can say that I gave it my all, that I was never bored, that I lived my life as if it were a profound gift, that I made beautiful use of the talents, all of the heart, all of the love that had been bestowed upon me. At the end of the day, I can solve that big equation and see that I gave away much more than I took.

STEP FOUR Reflect upon our bounded fates. I am certain that you have heard of Lean In by Sheryl Sanberg of FaceBook. What she means by leaning in is to take up challenges, to put yourself forward, to show them what you’ve got, girl! I’ve been thinking that leaning in is not sufficient if we really want to make a difference, so I tell a short story here. In my mid-twenties, I accepted a position at the state prison where I was the only professional woman in a decidedly male and macho environment. Six months into the job, it was time for my performance review, which determined whether I would keep my job or be asked to leave. My boss said, “Sandra, you’re well liked here; people find you easy to work with; you are very pleasant person; you are an excellent writer.” My gosh, I thought, this is going well. But then he said, “The BEST thing about you is that you think JUST like a man.” Amazed I was to hear this. Actually, I was so young and so undeveloped in my feminist thinking that I took it as a compliment, as a testimony to my, I don’t know, clear thinking, my lack of drama, my ability to understand sports metaphors? I don’t know really. But I know he meant it as a good thing, something that distinguished me from the rest of the women he thought he knew. And while I accepted the complement and was promoted soon after our conversation, I did nothing at all to convince him that I was NOT the exception, that plenty of women thought as clearly as any man, were as smart, and as capable, and in some instances, doing their work in more exceptional ways, just to be considered average. I regret my actions that day—leaving that “compliment” on the table and not making the situation right.

So, I want to propose is that you lean together, not alone; that you don’t just make the mark for yourself, but strive, as you move along in your careers and lives, to advance the case for other women and for others that you believe don’t benefit from easy privilege, and are not part of the insider group. You are old enough and savvy enough to know what I am talking about here. You know in your heart that some of us just don’t get the breaks we deserve–some of us don’t have access to the golden rings. And if you don’t know that, if you don’t feel that, if you think everything that you have you have earned entirely on your own merit, if you feel no obligation to others who have less but deserve more, then we have failed you in your education and I am sorry about that. In this world, it is impossible for us not to make a difference, good or bad. Martin Luther King, Jr. said this beautifully, when he suggested that we are tied together in the single garment of destiny.

As members of this generation, you have been given opportunities that are unprecedented in our history. With so many possibilities and so much promise, we expect a great deal from you. We want you to be happy, to put your talents to good use, and to see the world for what it is, a place of great magic and mystery and fun and hard work. You will be blessed with many gifts and more importantly; you will face challenges that without doubt will reveal your deepest character. You cannot escape this life without ecstatic joy and unbearable pain.

For the seniors in our audience, you know that we love you, that we will miss you for everything you have contributed to Bryant, for lighting up our lives, but more importantly, for the spirits that you are.

May all of your paths shine brightly and may you light the way for others. Thank you very much for your kind attention.

Speech delivered at Bryant University, March 31, 2014.

Imagine.Engage. Reflect. Repeat: Forty years of civic work

An anniversary is always a good time to take measure of where we have been, where we are and where we might go. So, when I look ahead, Compact’s thirtieth anniversary next year provokes me to consider the arc of the work we do and to consider my own path within this larger story. Next year, I also mark a personal anniversary. In 1971, I joined VISTA, finding my way to southeastern Alabama for a year of service–a short 45 years ago. This year turned out to be the most determinative event of my life. From that year, I can trace an unsteady path from my sojourn in the south to my early career in child welfare and corrections to my later time at the Compact’s national office twenty years later to my current position as a faculty member. Throughout all of this work, one question has haunted me–whether working in the state prison or behalf of foster children or building houses in Alabama or teaching sociology at a private university: how do I understand what I am doing when I aim to be of service? And after decades of being in the company of some people who I think are the finest I will ever meet, I think this question haunts many of them, as well.

We could consider this question as a standard reflective practice—a way to understand our experiences—but I think it is much more important than a learning exercise to tick off as end a particular project. I think of questions like these as our life’s work, creating and calibrating the compasses we use to steer our hearts, minds and souls. I think about how the purest of intentions have formed some of our local, national and international efforts to do good and I have to consider why and how these so often go awry. I think about how those of us who do this work appear to those whom we aim to help. In my own experience, I think about how a ragtag group of twelve long-haired young people from the north looked to the poor black folks in rural Alabama when we showed up to “help.” I reflect upon what their white neighbors may have made of us and our intentions. So many decades later, I can still hear the echoes of those conversations when my host family asked, “Didn’t your family need you at home?” or when the waitress at the restaurant said to us, “Things must be very bad down here for you to trouble yourself to come all this way.” All those misunderstood motives for our being there put me on a path to question my own reasons and purposes for service.

That year of service taught me many things, most of which were most likely not the part of any administrator’s strategic plan. Our planned projects—building houses, organizing the community improve the distribution of commodity foo, extending family planning—became so complicated and difficult that I finally understood that the art and science of helping and bettering the world was much more complex than simply planting that disposition in one’s heart. The challenge was to not allow those difficulties and complications to stop us from doing what we believe ought to be rightly done. This is as true on our campuses today as it was in rural Alabama forty years ago.

There are many benefits to being a member of service-learning and community engagement communities. I have never worked in a field where there are so many individuals to emulate. I find myself taking on mentors who have no idea I have chosen them to guide and enrich my work. One of my heroes, Ira Harkavy quoted Chilean sociologist Eugenio Tironi in a recent speech.

The answer to the question “What kind of education do we need?” is to be found in the answer to the question, “What kind of society do we want…If human beings hope to maintain and develop a particular type of society, they must develop and maintain the particular type of education system conducive to it.

This point is a critical one if we in higher education believe we have something to offer to the public, as a public good, well beyond career training and a narrow agenda. And, I would argue, well beyond mandatory community service projects and days of service. What I have learned after two decades in this field is that we need to be both ambitious in our aims and humble in our approaches. I will try to make these points as clearly as I can. First, I have been thinking deeply about what we need as citizens and members of our communities to be full-fledged members of our community. In teaching sociology at Bryant, I try to help students understand all the ways that their lives are implicated in the lives of others. So, we think about ways to be more conscientious in what and how we consume, to be more thoughtful about philanthropy, to be better informed about public events, to be careful researchers, to design new approaches to social problems, and to be accountable for our actions, especially those meant to do good. This is what I meant about ambition or maybe, more correctly, vision. It is just too easy to keep doing what we have been doing without considering how we might take on more. As Tompkins reminds us,

 The classroom is a microcosm of the world; it is the chance to practice whatever ideals we may cherish. They kind of classroom one creates is the acid test of what it is one really stands for.

Onto my second point. The lesson here may seem remote. A recent article in the New York Times traced the impact of the campaign to distribute millions of mosquito nets to eradicate malaria—an effort that has had multiple unanticipated negative consequences. Play Pump met with a similar fate. Great excitement over a cool idea. Millions of dollars to ramp up and spread this innovation. Six months later, most pumps were out of service and residents were left with less access to water than they had before the pumps were installed. We don’t have to go to far off regions to find other instances where our own intentions went away. As I wrote earlier, these issues are complicated. This is not to say that we are not obligated to do much better and bigger than we do at doing good; the second lesson suggests we be as careful with the lives and life-spaces of others that we seek to help as we would be of our own lives and communities.

New York Times columnist David Brooks offers two paths for living a worthwhile life. The first, the well-planned life, is the one we typically suggest to students–that they find their passions and follow these. We argue that it is only when we are deeply inspired by own dreams that we accomplish anything of significance. Brooks suggests an additional path, which he calls the summoned life. In contrast to the first model, individuals drawn to the summoned life believe that, as Brooks writes, that “life isn’t a project to be completed; it is an unknowable landscape to be explored.” And because of this, we have to be open and engaged to pose the questions that Brooks suggests, “What are these circumstances summoning me to do? What is needed in this place? What is the most useful social role before me?” To these questions, I would add, “And what can we do as educators to help students develop those visions, skills, and values that get us closer to the society we want?”

Let’s name names

Let’s name names

I have long been fascinated with memory. Thirty years ago (or was it longer than that?) I wrote a piece about forgetfulness, foreshadowing my current disability by decades. Maybe, it was all those knocks to the head I suffered as a young tomboy with more energy than grace, when I repeatedly fell off my bike, or ran into walls, or slipped on the ice, or got knocked out in some touch football game with boys twice my size. I did know enough algebra and physics to understand that other bodies carried more mass and volume than I did and that a two hundred and fifty pound boy could easily fling a 105 lb. girl into the trees with a simple wave of a big paddle-shaped hand. In any case, this memory loss falls hard upon me as I take my place at the top of the pyramid, not the class pyramid. No, just the little hierarchy and pecking order in my job and in my family. There is no one left to take charge but me. My job as a professor puts me right in the crosshairs of the slings and arrows of the young and the impatient.

As a college professor, I am in the classroom with seventy or more new students each semester. Research shows that this is important that you remember their students’ names as soon as possible even they still don’t know yours at the end of the year. So, I pledge to myself that I will learn their names as soon as I can. Not only for courtesy’s sake, but so that I can call on them even when they don’t want to be called on. Maybe, as they are in the middle of imagining eating a nice juicy burger for lunch or thinking about taking a nap or just about to grab their smart phone to distract them from what’s going on in the classroom. So, names are important to me, as well. It is embarrassing to refer to them by other descriptors like, “You there. Yes, you—the young woman who’s paying attention to me. Yes, nod your head. Good. Please, poke the student next to you and ask her to climb back into the classroom. That’s right! Thanks.”

Last week, two weeks into the term, I called on two students using wrong names. The class thought this was very funny. Not like joke-funny, more like, “we are so embarrassed for YOU” funny. Like roll-your-eyes-funny. I quickly recovered and pulled their correct names out of memory. (I called Kristin “Karen” and Katie “Kristin”—I didn’t think that so bad. Bad would have been calling Kristen “Kenneth” and calling Katie “Kim Kardashian.”) My brain was at least in the correct mnemonic space. There are semesters when I have had three young men in my class—all named Kyle, all about 5’ 10”, all wearing campus gear, all dark haired with a little beard, all in the back row. How to keep them separate in my mind?

More challenging is another case. I have a girl (Madison) in my introductory sociology class who wants to be called Steve because another girl named Mariah wants to be called Monica. She was explaining to another student that Mariah is her slave name; she wanted me to accommodate her request, which led to a series of similar requests by other students. Give them an inch on issues like this and pretty soon, they all want to be called Harry Potter, and then you really can’t figure out who deserves which grades because Harry has earned A’s, B’s, C’s and F’s on his exam.

So, to address this problem with learning student names, I am thinking perhaps, that I should ditch their given names and tag these students myself using my own assessment of their qualities and my own creative spin on their characters. What is nice about this scheme is that these names can be used each semester since from one semester to the next, there’s quite a bit of consistency in their behaviors and appearance.

For that student who keeps looking out the window,

  ‘the boy who turns to the light,’

 

 

For the boy who wears flip flops in the winter,

‘the boy whose feet don’t freeze,’

 

 

For the girl who complains each time I give an assignment, ‘the girl who whines without rest,’

For the boy whose baseball cap is way too big, ‘the boy with hat like a tent,’

For the third boy who is named Kyle in my class (see the discussion above) ‘the one who is named like the other two,’

For the boy who is always late, ‘he who arrives on the tortoise,

For the boy who nods off in class, ‘the  one for whom sleeps comes during lectures’

For the girl who never reads the material and seems satisfied to pretend she has by making up answers that are wrong, ‘the storyteller with the false tongue,’

 

For the girl who brings neither book, nor paper nor pen to class, ‘she who bets on hope,’

For the boy with longish hair and big dimples, who seems always to be in the company of

three beautiful young girls who seem to do all his work in class,

‘the coed whisperer,’

 

For the young woman in the first row who keeps texting during class despite my warnings and harsh looks ‘she who raises my blood pressure’

And for the male athletes who are too big for the classroom furniture, ‘the boys whose knees climb the desks,’

Also in class are

‘yawning boy,’ ‘the girl with jewels in her nose,’ and ‘shiny blue nails.’

And, because of divine intervention and good luck, each semester, in my classroom, I find my favorite student, ‘the girl who smiles at the wit of her elders.’

 

 

 

 

From Penguin to Oblivion

This essay was written at the end of June 2013 as the culmination of a course in creativity and play for professors at my university. As faculty development seminars go, this was certainly longer and much more engaging. If ever there was a teachable moment, this was it.

From the Penguin to Oblivion:
A Journey through the Creative Process

Introduction

“Wherever you are, there is somewhere further you can go.” Ingold

In this essay, I will redraw the path I took during the academic year (2012-2013) tracing a journey from teaching to play to creativity and back again. As Ingold (2007) observes, some journeys don’t simply take the traveler from point A to point B. Indeed, this story tracks a wayfaring walk where the sites along the way tell the tale as much as does the wayfarer’s scripted walk. This is not a journey limned by a GPS device. In fact, it is much the opposite. It is a walk that doesn’t map clearly or coherently. Until the end, perhaps, when the hero (me) understands the purpose and portent of the trip in the first place which is to take a different journey the next time and to have my students along for the walk. We could take the car or the bus with a guide setting out on a prescribed tour but that would be a different journey with another professor.

This is also a journey of discovery as a professor. Renowned educational philosopher, Parker Palmer, argues that we cannot teach without courage (Palmer 1998). In The Courage to Teach, he argues convincingly that professors need the courage to be ourselves in our teaching–no more, no less–but deeply ourselves. In taking up this challenge, he asks the most important question, “Who is the self that teaches?” He notes that many of us who choose to teach carry in our minds’ eye the image of “the” professor we wish to become—a brilliant lecturer, a compelling storyteller, the captivating theoretician, or the Socratic genius. However, as Tompkins (1990) notes, a focus on performance is on what sociologists call impression management can get in the way of student learning. Balancing those images with the mandate to be truly ourselves can set us on a journey of creative self-making and refashioning. It is hard enough to appear in front of a class of thirty young men and women, who are tamped down in the expectation of “another boring class,” determined to be more confident, competent and well-organized. To be more alive, more mindful, more fully realized, more authentically ourselves–maybe, that’s just too much to expect. As she writes,

The classroom is a microcosm of the world; it is the chance we have to practice whatever ideals we may cherish. The kind of classroom situation one creates is the acid test of what it is one really stands for (Tompkins 1990, 656).

I am a late career academic, joining the professoriate as a sociology professor in my fifth decade. I have a lifetime of experience in the so-called “real world” behind me, but not really behind but rather infused in direct and indirect ways. These influence my teaching and research, of course. As Florida Scott-Maxwell writes in The Measure of My Days,

You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done…you are fierce with reality (as cited in Palmer, 1998).

Like many things done later in life, I have found learning to be a professor a steep curve. During this last academic year, I have taken the challenge—to bring my creative side to my classroom. This means making deeper and more inspired connections between the work I do off campus in music, photography, creative writing, community engagement, and other pursuits with my teaching, research and service.

As I will discuss later in this essay, I have long tolerated a division between my left-brain and right-brain orientations to the world and have found this a useful conceptualization of how one understands and approaches the world (Edwards 1979; Pink 2006). In the past academic year, I had decided to be divided no longer. Like Whitman’s Song to Myself where he rejects “resistance to the brain that divides,” (cited in Hyde, 211). I am seeking a way to bring a richer way of encountering teaching and the world I teach into the classroom.

In my application to join the Faculty Creative Fellows project, I suggested that I would be good candidate because I considered myself a creative person and was eager to meet with other faculty members to talk about how to be more creative in my teaching. I also wanted to work on a new course in the sociology of creativity, a long interest of mine. Finally, I was interested in developing a proposal to the administration at Bryant University for a commencement award that recognized creative expression, the first such award in the institution’s history. I jumped into this faculty development opportunity without much concern about the design or content of the yearlong commitment. I trusted our leaders, Bob Shea, Director of Faculty Development and Terri Hasseler, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, and imagined that the experience would be productive and enriching.

Jumping into play with one toe in the water
I can summarize my thoughts coming into the Creative Fellows course—happy anticipation. The course presented for me a way to use play and creativity to build a bridge from my creative side to my teaching side and back again. I must admit I have been hesitant to do this in any deliberate or well-considered way prior to this opportunity. My initial definition of play and creativity equated this with stepping out of my routines, my planned day, my left-sphere dominated brain and to let play evolve slowly perhaps, and steadily, or maybe, not at all. I see play and creativity as my counter weight to boredom and repetition, on and off campus. Buddha said that we cannot walk into the same river twice because of the nature of impermanence in our world and in our lives and I believe that this is the case for teaching, as well. I cannot to teach the same class twice—the students are different from last semester’s class; we are living in the world together and have common, yet different experiences; I may have just read an article that has me reconsidering my understanding of school reform, for example; I may be weighing the impact of some new research. I always aim to change the script but increasingly, I am interested in changing my role and my character. In wading through the daily business of our lives, we can play out our roles, superficially and alienated, as if the act of teaching was indeed a performance. Ask anyone who is pretending to be doing something in a half engaged spirit–like teaching–and it is easy (and painful) to feel deadened by a lack of imagination, energy and creativity. The drive to do something new and more authentic may take us back to play as inspiration.

As I participated in the seminar, these themes of divisions, categories, and tensions have reverberated through much of my work created for the course. As I trace my life’s path, I see multiple forks in the road. A sharp turn toward one direction, which in good time and order, sends me back the other way, usually by way of a long meandering, and not wholly conscious choice. In my career, I have had many jobs with few consistent themes. My life mirrors what Mary Catherine Bateson (1989) proposed reflected the lives of women—a composed life, not a straight line stretching from point A to Point B, but rather one knitted together with themes, where each age echoes another. I do see those themes in my creative work and my professional work but my mapping out of these developments suggests nests, networks, cul-de-sacs, dead ends, and tendrils—a far stretch from a planful, left-brained path where one step is a necessary and sufficient precursor to the next stage.

During my career and personal life, I have always been blessed by creative ideas, by flashes of work I want to do, of ideas I wish to pursue. In the creative exercises we been assigned, I had no end of ideas but I was always challenged to execute these in a shape that follows my early vision. This play-work to me is similar to the back- and forthingness of any endeavor. One takes a step, is blessed with an insight, sees how one thing leads to another or away from it, and waits for a shout of inspiration while deeply engaged in something else. The essential genius of the Creative Fellows project was that it has presented challenges to us to create something that wasn’t there before—not manifested anyway. Stephen Johnson (2010) writes about the long hunch—the slow evolution of ideas that seem to emerge one day fully formed when, in fact, the mind has been crafting and tooling those ideas on a slow course of development. With the “adjacent possible,” creativity comes with connections and communities, with broadly seeking inspiration and putting one’s toes and eyes in places where the unfamiliar is encountered. This is exactly where the Creative Fellows project brought me.

I loved the purposelessness that was part and parcel of the instructional design in this course and found myself turning toward the projects that Professor Hasseler assigned as a meditative practice—to clear my mind in order to create something that the noise and busyness of faculty work in a complex organization typically drown out. Now, my challenge is turning a richer focus toward teaching and writing. STOP

The source of these ideas has been a lifelong tug of war for me between what some would characterize as right vs. left brain dominance, as intuition vs. rational analysis, as divergent vs. convergent thinking, as expansive thinking vs. more narrow working through. Play and creativity have always been for me a way to fashion projects for myself—inside the classroom and beyond it–that are both creative and intellectually challenging. Play creates the ideas and the insights and the work to get the project organized and moving ahead moves into another dimension.

A few years ago, I became a more serious photographer taking pictures of seaweed that had washed up after southeasterly storms on Narragansett beach. The images were lovelier and more stunning than I had imagined they would be. I decided to make a structured study of the seaweed, researching the genus of seaweed, identifying their characteristics, studying the geology of the sand, the shape of the tides, the lines and whorls of the water at the edge of the beach and writing about the history of seaweed on the southern New England coast. This all come together in self-published books using Blurb software. What was interesting to me was that taking the images AND researching their vocabulary added on a dimension to my experience of walking the beach that made it a richer, more compelling experience. So, although I walked the same walk for twenty-three years, it was by no means the same walk any longer. Experiences like this left me open and excited about play and creativity.

Seeing the forest and the trees
Like most non-artists or even artists who decide to move into another medium, I had a great fear and trepidation of making art. Reframing this as play made this work easier. I see some direct connections between play and creativity and productivity, not in the sense of efficient production of work but instead in the fomenting of ideas I am interested in pursuing. So, the obstacles that I can typically put in my way of doing the work I should be doing can be readily enough managed if I allow myself the place and time for the joy of play.
One obstacle for me is that I seek novelty. I love to learn new things and explore doing something new, with or without guidance, usually without, so I seldom move to a place of mastery in these fields. I like to improvise, to move along my own path of exploration. While I have been playing music for nearly fifty years, I am just now taking music lessons but I am realizing the power of a teacher to guide me through. That is embarrassing for a teacher to admit, I imagine.
Besides the time and place to create, I would add courage, not so much to make, but to share what has been made. Recently, I have shared some writing I have done with colleagues. The courage to fail, or to succeed, is less essential when one is committed to the private making of things and ideas. I think these concerns surface as real obstacles to building creativity into my daily routine. The sharing with a safe community would be a blessing. I know that I have certain creative strengths and struggle to be recognized for those; I also know that my personality keeps me modest and safe and not willing to grab attention for achievements.

Learning a new language to think about process
The projects we did in the course created opportunities to provoke thinking about presenting ideas and concepts. Through the mapping and genealogy exercises, I struggled with using new media (new to me) to tell stories I have telling myself for years. However, with these new challenges, I discovered important insights that hadn’t surfaced previously. My aim in The Begats was to create a structure of lines around objects and people that would knit together a divided self. I have often thought of this with me a central figure framed by two figures that represent that divided self—somewhat linked together with lines of attribution—sort of like an annotated paper doll. I did find to my great surprise that when I went to my collection of photographs for this project, I found huge holes—key events and turning points with no photographic trace.

The exercises we did in class–whether it was making pottery or drawing mandalos or map-making or genealogy–really stretched me. I understand that I was more “successful” in some exercises than I was in others. In some, I didn’t understand the instructions as well as I could have; in others, I was hesitant about my ability to draw or add color. The lessons here for me were profound with a link to Vygotsky’s work (1978) on the zone of proximal development work and its implications for scaffolding in teaching. I understand more clearly why and how hard it is for students to understand directions for projects they have never done before. I thought of the craft of learning my discipline of sociology and how so much goes on in learning vocabularies and conceptual organization of ideas. I also learned here that like me, students are afraid to fail. Finally, in terms of my own work with the exercises, I recognized that I create the idea of what I want to do and find it frustrating to understand how I am going to bring that vision to reality. My talent fails me, unless I work it over and over again. Perhaps, we don’t as mature professors and adults believe that we can reach out to new fields of endeavor, experiment, and go beyond our comfort zone, fail, and try something else. And perhaps, in our traditional teaching, we have passed on that unfortunate premise to students, as well.

The courage to change back to me
It is hard to make art when there is so much in one’s mind about the process and the product. This class has pushed me to carefully consider the “monkey mind” and the act of work and play. I have taken several classes on memoir writing and have tried to teach myself to draw, as well. For a while, I was writing humorous pieces and getting them published here and there. I have also recently taken up the mandolin—the first time in my life that I am taking music lessons—and will join an ensemble this summer—screwing up my courage here to show what I have learned and can do.

In the creative process, I work hard to mold and re-mold. I love creative insight when no march down a linear path would have gotten you where you wanted to be—someplace new. As a result of this course, I have more confidence in my creative energy and interests—not necessarily my talent–but instead a deeper focus on the questions and practice around the creative process, not only as it applies to my creative work—poetry, photography, social problem solving–outside of the classroom, but in the classroom, as well.

The whole nature of play with other faculty members was enormously engaging for me. When I had the chance to listen to other faculty talk about their fears of failure, of performance anxiety, it helped me to understand the nature of my own hesitancy to create, think, and act outside the boxes we typically create to manage our self-images as professors, as experts in our disciplines, and as creators of learning opportunities.

The wayfaring way forward
I intend to use a new course (The Sociology of Innovation and Creativity) that I am designing as a touchstone for the lessons I have taken away from this experience. This course will explore how ideas and innovation emerge in social settings examining some texts that trace the conditions that lead to great periods of innovation and creativity. We will also examine the characteristics of groups and organizations that frustrate or enhance creativity and problem solving. Students will develop a creative portfolio, examining how their skills, orientations and dispositions to creative problem solving change over the semester.

As a teacher who considers herself creative, I know I can do more in the classroom to encourage students to be more creative by scaffolding ways for them to develop their “creative” muscles.

I will be applying for a Faculty Innovation Grant to support a new project that develops toys for poor children to address the issue of “toy deserts” (Bellafante 2012). This project can readily adapted to use in my courses, to build creative problem solving skills in students. Finally, I hope that the Creative Fellows can work with other faculty to further build and sustain this work on campus. Can we create some supports on campus that celebrate and push our creative selves? Can we develop a community of practice? A flash mob? A pick-up band? An informal group of faculty that can work across disciplinary boundaries and come together around projects of common interests and new ones, as well? As Ingold noted as the start of this essay, no matter where you are, you can go further. That is the key lesson here for pedagogy and practice that emerges for me in this creative adventure.

Works Cited
Bateson, Mary Catherine. Composing a Life. New York: Grove Press, 1989.
Bellafante, Ginia. New York Times, 2012 8-December.
Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence. Los Angeles, CA: J. P. Tracher, 1979.
Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. 2nd edition. New York: Random House, 2007.
Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Johnson, Stephen L. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. New York: Penguin Group, 2010.
Palmer, Parker J. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1998.
Pink, Daniel H. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. New York: Riverhead Press, 2006.
Scott-Maxwell, Florida. The Measure of My Days. New York: Penguin Books, 1983.
Tompkins, Jane. “Pedagogy of the Distressed.” College English 52, no. 6 (October 1990): 653-663.
Vygotsky, Lev. Mind and society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.

On Diversity: Lessons from Diversity University

For several years, I have been involved in the Diversity University event at Bryant University. Led by staff members, this challenge invites students to use creative means to tell a story about diversity that means a great deal to them. Because this university has a business focus, few of our students have any formal training in the arts. Courses that offer training in the arts and creative expression are few and far in between although  faculty members like Terri Hasseler, Martha Kuhlman, and others are making some inroads in our curriculum. The article shown below was printed in the online version of the Archway student newspaper at the end of the 2013-2014 academic year. The published article also includes some images from last year’s presentation of the students’  work at REDay (Research and Engagement Day).

Everything I knew about diversity, I re-learned (and more) at Diversity University

by Sandra Enos, PhD. Associate Professor of Sociology

Diversity can be a loaded term; it can be narrowly interpreted to cover those classes of people covered by special protections in civil rights laws—gender, race/ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation. Or it can be so expansive and superficial that it undermines the real difference that our unique humanity permits and reveals. Similarly, the word tolerance is also problematic. It connotes a begrudging acceptance, “Yes, I will tolerate those people but that doesn’t mean I have to like them.” So, how do we talk and think creatively and meaningfully about embracing our differences and encountering each other as full realized human beings?

One challenge of living in a complex world is the disorienting realization that our lives will be characterized by a constant mandate to reconsider what it is we think we know about whole categories of people. There is a greater chance in this day of globalization and mashups that we will encounter others who may seem quite different from ourselves in culture, language, values, and heritage. And these encounters are, of course, a two-way street; while we are wondering what to make of these “strangers,” we can also imagine what it is they are making of us. And given the great shifts in our worlds, how do we know who we are? How do we remain open to seeing the great and grand differences among us, some of which matter deeply and others not at all?

Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock and civil rights activist, writes of the difference between the comforts of home and the challenges of coalition building. What she means by the former is being among “our people,” when we can speak our minds, say what we mean with hardly a concern about starting a fight about contentious issues. Think about how freely you can talk about gun control, income inequality with some of our friends, acquaintances and family and how difficult that would be among others. Think of how hard it is to talk about race, sexual orientation, different abilities and social class in certain groups. The ease of being with like others is being a home, in Johnson Reagon’s terms. But little gets accomplished in these silos; it may be comforting but it is no way to get things done. In coalition building, a political act, we cross over those boundaries because we are trying to do something that is important to “our people” and others. We want to change a policy; we want to build a better community and to do so, requires the help and support of others. Reagon acknowledges the difficulty of this but suggests that communities can’t be built without those who can cross over. Some might call this radical empathy–ability learned through the experience of constructive encounters with difference where one’s emotions are raw and unsettled and where we confront beliefs that we may be uncomfortable acknowledging.

Over the past few years, students have used photography, film, sculpture, script, spoken word, song, music and dance to reveal what couldn’t be expressed otherwise. They have shared their experiences, observations and understandings and have urged us to break out of our bubbles to a deeper appreciation of the diversity around us, which leads me to the importance of enlisting our entire community in diversity. Like the book that inspires the title of this essay, I am going to list just four lessons that I have learned from my involvement in Diversity University over the past several years.

Let’s play: Build opportunities for creativity

I would argue that nothing worth learning can be learned just once. I would also suggest that difficult and challenging concepts like diversity may be best learned through experience and through art and creative expression. That is what I consider the genius of Diversity University, the staff-run event that celebrates diversity by challenging our community to present creative paths to diversity. Create these opportunities and our community, most notably our students, will rise to the occasion and exceed our expectations.

After being involved in this event for many years, I can state without equivocation that our students are hungry for opportunities to showcase their creative abilities and insights. And, as members of the audience, I can also say without fear of contradiction that the lessons that the students impart are powerful and compelling. We have featured these presentations at REDay where we have the opportunity to speak with the students about their work and its evolution. It is clear that students have worked long and hard; that the messages they conveyed were heartfelt and, in some cases, hard and challenging to express.

We are all teachers and learners: Students as teachers and leaders

We are socialized and oriented to do good. We are placed in sensitivity training groups and instructed to be welcoming and open. But, many people hear this as superficial externally imposed “political correctness” when these lessons should be much deeper. These lessons are not academic clinical ones; they are lessons that are about character and disposition. The “faculty members” at Diversity University are students with something to share and the talent and inclination to bring it to the Bryant community. I would suggest here that these lessons may be among the most powerful that our students will hear. Bearing witness to their own struggles or advocating on behalf of others presents our community with an “up close and personal” view of how these students see the world and encounter it. These are not worn out PowerPoints on diversity and why it is good for us; these are powerful expressions of the impact of stereotypes on our self-confidence, of the effect of being judged by others as inferior, and of the feeling of being invisible to others except as a code for “other.” We need to enlist these students and their projects in any of the work we do on diversity; we need to fully enroll them as teachers and leaders.

We are all learning and growing: Fixed and flexible mindedness

Underlying the premise of Diversity University is a belief that we can change and that we are constantly changing. This embraces the idea of a growth mindset and challenges the premise of a fixed mindset. With a growth mindset, we believe that individuals can open their minds, find lessons everywhere, question their deeply held assumptions and learn from failure—all on a path to growth. A fixed mindset suggests that we are stuck with the talent and beliefs that we have, that in-born dispositions prevail, and that one can’t change human nature. The students who present at Diversity University speak eloquently of their own growth, how their ideas have changed and developed, and how their encounters with others have fashioned them into quite different people than they were just a year ago.

We all count: Rendering the invisible visible

It is too easy to see a community like ours as unitary, where the majority rules. Many of the presentations at Diversity University point our attention to the great variety of people in our midst. Images and interviews with individuals who escape the attention of our “official” cameras and press help us to understand that everyone has a story here and that many of those stories challenge the popular premise that Bryant is a business school where students learn to be managers and where few are creative or imaginative. By seeing the creative chops of our students—whether it is Amanda Spaziano’s brilliant spoken word, Kendra Hildebrand ‘s beautiful mannequin sculpture, Rohan Vakij and Benjamin Heineneyer’s compelling Humans of Bryant, Mikayla LaRosa’s provocative documentary or Migena Dulaj’s lovely media assemblage or any of the other presentations we have seen over the years—we affirm a richer, fuller and complicated cultural and social identity for our community.

Diversity University presents us with great opportunities for growth—faculty, staff and students. The call for presentations goes out in the spring semester for an event in late March. It is never too early to imagine what you could do. What does our community need to learn from you? What creative talents are you eager to share? Please join us next year!