The whole campus community is engaged in the mission of the college, and therefore individually we operate as educators in a variety of ways. Conversations to help us all work toward creating compassionate, creative, and effective pedagogy should extend beyond faculty to include administrators and staff in this collaborative work.
It is imperative that all of us across campus feel supported in moving beyond the safe/comfortable but narrow/damaging concept that teaching (or leading or administrating) = “telling people stuff” and into the uncomfortable arena of reflection, change and growth where we feel safe being, simultaneously, teachers and learners. Learners wonder. Learners are curious. Learners are open. Learners are vulnerable. Learners are resilient. Learners connect what they learn to what they know and weave those threads into new possibilities.
All of us engaged in the mission of this college must also be learners.
This shift will be uncomfortable for many faculty, staff and administrators. Historically, LCC has struggled with a culture of sharp division between faculty and administrators surrounding, among other things, the concept of teaching — who are the experts, how it’s done, and even where it happens — but the time is now for uncomfortable conversations among faculty, staff, and administrators regarding our roles as teachers and learners in the context of the overall mission of the college and our shared vision for LCC’s future. In the same way that the challenges that prompted this document (Covid-19, BLM, general pressures on higher ed) have made life uncomfortable, to say the least, they have also prompted incredible innovation, creativity, and collaboration. Discomfort, with support, is a potent fuel for positive change.
We have collectively for too long acted as if there were a rigid division between planning and implementation of change initiatives. But the evidence from endeavors as diverse as jazz music to Silicon Valley tech companies shows that successful innovation depends on a tight and interactive link between the planning and the improvisation that creates the innovations. Indeed, John Camillus argues in the Harvard Business Review that organizations should engage in feed-forward, a practice where widespread improvisation and innovation is encouraged first and the planning-strategizing process learns how to make sense of what worked. Although LCC faces a rapidly changing world and a changing population of students, our history of faculty improvisation and innovation could serve us well if we learn to listen to our own stories and learn from them.
Discomfort, especially the intellectual kind, often leads to innovative and creative solutions or approaches. A fruitful concept for lessening discomfort and facilitating the connections necessary to do the vulnerable work of self-reflection and growth, necessary across the whole college, stems from the general idea that the shortest distance between two people or groups, is a story. Stories provide context and both context and subtext matter as we navigate our uncertain future together. Stories tap into the universal ideas and themes we all experience as humans living on this planet. LCC has many stories of hope, failure, grief/sadness, victory/triumph, resilience, love and justice in and out of classroom settings. We have many stories of powerful teaching and learning moments so let’s learn from them.
