Month: February 2023

Reflecting on what it means to engage with equity, diversity, and inclusion

February 23, 2023 / Christine O'Donnell

Before you read any further, I need to note that this post isn’t meant for everyone, and I think that’s okay, though it does raise some inherent, unavoidable contradictions.

Some context: Last year, I was part of an NSF grant proposal related to a project that’s been around for over 20 years and is coming to the end of its current pot of funding. As a team, we all agreed that our project was behind the times when it comes to explicitly addressing equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI – as an aside, I know that’s not the typical order of the letters, but I like the reasoning of putting “equity” first as the goal of inclusion and diversity [1]). We wanted to use this new proposal as an opportunity to make EDI an explicit part of our project, so we worked with a consultant to help us critically reflect on our processes and project designs. This work was relatively new to my two White colleagues. For myself, I had some amount of experience with critical self-reflection from my prior work addressing EDI in academic departments, research involving culturally responsive and relevant curriculum, and coursework.

After the proposal was submitted, my colleagues remarked how they weren’t prepared for what it meant to do intensive EDI work, and we considered how we might share our experiences with our other colleagues.

And that brings me to this post: as part of reflecting on the process and how I might discuss the process of doing EDI work with others, I needed space to process my own thoughts and write them down. But that also brings up the aforementioned inherent, unavoidable contradictions. I identify as a multiracial cis-gender woman, as part of the LGBT+ community, and as both a scientist and a crafter/maker. Yet my “multiracial”-ness stems from the fact I am half HongKongese and half Irish/Welsh/American, with a very much White-passing complexion. In many ways I am highly privileged. Yet the goal of EDI work is to center the most marginalized voices, and so writing an article about my experience runs counter to that goal. But at the same time, as my colleagues pointed out, they felt they would have been able to engage better with the EDI work if they had a better idea of what to expect.

Separately (relatedly?), I find it hard to write or present about anything related to EDI in a way that can work for all audiences. Instead, I’d rather be clear on who I hope something is useful to (though I welcome feedback from everyone!). In this case, my imagined audience is someone with dominant/privileged identities who has some awareness of EDI and is about to begin engaging with some intensive EDI work.

And with that preamble, here’s some reflections on my experience. Not everyone will experience or react to these things in the same way as me, and there is no “this is the way” or “one size fits all” for this kind of work.

Expect to be uncomfortable

As someone from a STEM background, I’m mostly used to the idea that learning can be uncomfortable [e.g., 2, 3]: essentially, when you learn something new, you’ll initially struggle and be bad at it, whether the topic is quantum mechanics, calculus, or computer programming. It takes a lot of practice to get good at something, and that process involves a lot of failing and stumbling.

However, the “discomfort” from EDI work is a very different feeling. We live in a society that has structures and systems that were developed in a way that was biased towards certain groups, and even though the legal basis for doing so has been (largely) eliminated, those structures and systems persist to this day. A recent National Academies report [4] explored this in detail and called for STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) organizations to actively address these systems.

Learning about these realities leads to some very harsh realizations. Those of us who have identities that are not marginalized have likely benefited from these systems, and also have probably contributed to these systems. For example, I used to advocate for STEM outreach programs that target women and people of color with the goal of “increasing interest” in STEM (which is also a deficit framing), without paying any attention to the realities of STEM that push out and exclude those students. Another example is that I’ve generally been in departments where I had access to mentors who looked like me (cis-female, White-passing), and I haven’t had to go through the thought process of how to communicate or relate to a mentor who didn’t look like me.

Those realizations are uncomfortable. How many students have I hurt by assuming they weren’t actually interested in STEM? How many students did I impact and convince to pursue STEM, only for them to then hit barriers that harmed them and pushed them out? How many students could have excelled in STEM but didn’t have the mentors to support them? How have the standards and expectations we set in STEM denied creativity and de-valued students’ skills and expertise?

Doing EDI work means making peace with the fact that there will be A LOT of uncomfortable realizations, and that is a part of the learning process. I’ve sometimes seen this sentiment framed as “be comfortable with being uncomfortable”, and that’s honestly how I first heard this bit of advice, but I personally prefer the framing of “expect to be uncomfortable”. The idea of “becoming comfortable” doesn’t sit right with me – while it is something that’s an expected and regular part of the work, I don’t like the connotation that it becomes something you’re “okay” with happening. Instead, every instance of discomfort needs to be an alarm bell or a red flag because it means there’s something there that needs to be questioned.

Separating “guilt” and “blame” from “responsibility”

This one might be the most “your mileage may vary” item in this article, but for me, this helped initially as a way to process the discomfort of EDI work. I found that the worst discomfort was over the idea I may have unintentionally caused students harm. I got involved in education research specifically because I wanted to make sure students had better experiences in STEM. How could I have done something so opposed to what I believe in?

For me, one article that helped re-frame my thinking was “White Complicity and Social Justice Education: Can One Be Culpable without Being Liable?” by Barbara Applebaum (2007) [5]. The article’s legalese-like interpretation of culpability and liability appealed to me because of my background in things like high school debate (which itself is probably something to think about, with norms of competitiveness, but that’s a separate article), and it helped me re-frame the blame and shame that I was feeling. Applebaum argued for a distinction between culpability and liability. Because we live in a racialized and biased society, dominant (White) individuals will take actions that reinforce systemic bias without knowing their actions have that impact. However, once they (reasonably) should know something has an impact, only then are they responsible and liable for doing better.
So, sometimes when I’m feeling particularly uncomfortable because I realize I have helped to reinforce marginalization – like when I read about how many active learning strategies implicitly support assimilation to Western norms of debate and communication, and many of the curricula I’ve worked on emphasize active learning [6] – I ask myself whether my lived experiences would have shielded me from knowing what I was doing was wrong. Usually, the answer is “yes”, but now that I know, I have a responsibility to do better, e.g., talking with colleagues and rethinking my own approaches.

Expect to question everything

Given what I’ve learned about the ways I’ve been unintentionally complicit, I also consider it a responsibility to do what I can to identify potential ~~blindspots~~ gaps of knowledge (note: I left the strikethrough in because I only realized the ableist language when revising this article [7]). This responsibility can take many forms, such as reading articles or watching webinars to learn from experts, but another form is questioning everything, especially with the help of a consultant or a critical friend [e.g., 8].

For example, when designing curricular activities, I ask questions about whose knowledge is present, and what kinds of skills or knowledge is “valued” for grades. Or when designing a process for reviewing applications, I ask questions about who is able to submit applications (since the process itself can serve as a gatekeeper) and what characteristics are “valued” in the selection process. Some of these questions can get at the very foundations of a project: Who decided the particular issue being addressed is something of value? Who was included in determining this was the “best” approach to take towards addressing that issue? And honestly, sometimes, these are questions I can answer but can’t (directly) affect, but even in those cases, I think it’s important to ask the question and acknowledge the issue.

EDI work is never done

I sometimes joke that I’m attracted to the kind of work where if we were completely successful, that kind of work would no longer exist. If we could fully address EDI concerns, then someday, theoretically, we wouldn’t need to focus on EDI. But unfortunately, that’s sadly not how the world works. I don’t think it’s hopeless – I genuinely think I can make a difference – but we’ll still be doing this kind of work for a long, long time.

So, this means the process of learning (and unlearning) never ends, and we can always do more to identify ways to address systemic biases. And since there’s aspects of the system I have no agency over, I can always work on finding better ways to mitigate those systems and/or finding ways to increase my ability to affect those systems.

And all of these things can be iterated on, especially as the landscape of EDI work in general continues to evolve and change. One of the things I’ve been pushing for on my projects is to do a better job of being transparent about our successes and our failures, especially on issues related to EDI. While everyone’s path is different, sharing that information can provide inspiration and/or identify obstacles to help those who want to pursue their own EDI journeys.

Part of me wonders, and another part worries, what I will think if I revisit this article in a year or three. Will I still think this is a good article for the intended audience, or will I cringe at what I wrote and consider this article to be a “failure” on my EDI journey?

But that’s not an excuse to put off the work – I have a responsibility to do the best I can, and to keep learning so I can do better.

Unlearning overwork: Embracing Sacred Rest

February 16, 2023 / Linda Strubbe

I was supposed to be playing ultimate frisbee with my women’s league team tonight but instead I was sitting on a bench at the playground beside the fields crying my eyes out on the phone to my father. About work. About how I had way too much to do. I was co-teaching my first semester-long course with a colleague at UBC and the pressure to be ready, prepared, on, awesome, two or three mornings a week for my students, was so much. To be awesome for my colleague, who I was supposed to be helping learn about interactive teaching methods. I knew all the things about how to design and teach a really great active learning course and we were transforming it and I was leading that, and I had beautiful plans, beautiful dreams about how to innovate and make the course awesome. And instead I was just a pile of deep sobs and stress, sitting on the bench at the playground, feeling like I couldn’t be ready, I couldn’t push myself to be ready again for tomorrow. And if I managed it one more time, I wouldn’t be able to do it again, and again, and again, and again, through the term.

Have you been there?

I invite you to take a deep breath with me.

If you want, I invite you also to join me in lighting a candle, and saying a prayer as you blow out the match. That’s what I just did, to start writing this post.

It’s a beautiful thing to want to create an awesome class, an effective and supportive experience for our students, an equitable and inclusive workplace. Yes. And. We so often push ourselves too hard, and/or feel super strong pressure and expectations on us to work too hard, from our academic departments, from society. I think these pressures probably exist in most areas of work, and I think they are especially insidious in sectors that are about helping people, like teaching and equity work. We are here because we want to do awesome things to help our students, and there’s always more that can be done. We can reach out to a few students who haven’t been in class lately. We can create a new interactive activity. We can ask a colleague for feedback on a class session. We can take a workshop on incorporating Indigenous ideas into our curricula. We can brainstorm ways to grade more fairly and equitably. We can give more feedback to students on an assignment. We can read an article (or blog post!) about teaching. We can reflect and write in a teaching journal. We can advocate for more equitable admissions and hiring processes to our departments. And many folks have additional work expectations on top of teaching expectations: advising students, writing grants, doing research, serving on committees. We want to do those things well too.

But there’s too much to do. I’ve been talking with a bunch of physics and astronomy faculty who are doing EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion) work through several projects I’m part of (e.g., APS-IDEA), and a very common theme is not having enough time and burnout. With the extra difficult twist that the people who care the most about EDI tend to be the most overcommitted people — they put deep care into all of their work and so are trying to do way too much, and getting exhausted. From myself, and so many friends and colleagues who are academics and educators: everyone is exceedingly busy, and tired. I’ve been there too: the scene I set above at the frisbee field in 2016 was not isolated, and in 2021 I experienced a very difficult period (of work burnout and other things) that included being unable to work for months. When I was considering taking time off to heal, I kept thinking that was “indulgent.” And it’s not just academics of course. I was struck the other day in yoga class when the instructor encouraged us all to let our stress melt into the floor. So very many of us feel stressed.

When we’re exhausted all the time, we don’t have the space to dream. Of beautiful visions of amazing and liberated worlds we want to create together. To create, for the Joy of it. To try something, change our minds, and try something else. To think outside ten boxes. To be deeply courageous. To do surprising things. To sit in silence and beingness and gratitude and even joy for exactly where we are, right now, in its fullness.

The American theologian Thomas Merton wrote,

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

During that period in 2021, one of the spiritual gifts I received from Beyond was a set of eight spiritual principles for living my life, and one of those is Sacred Rest. It’s not easy, but I’m on a journey of slowly learning how to live it.

Here are some pieces of that journey for me, that I hope might resonate for you too.

Note: I attended a workshop a couple of weeks ago called “Liberating our Time” by Whiteness at Work. Some of the ideas and resources I’m sharing below are drawn from or inspired by that workshop. Thank you, Adaway Group!

Recognizing the capitalist and colonial origins of overwork. There are a diversity of ways of thinking about and relating to time.

“This constant sense of urgency, and this constant frantic expectation for work, comes from a capitalist and colonial relationship to time.” So says Larissa Crawford in this powerful piece called “Time Is A Colonial Construct — Here’s How I Learned To Reclaim Mine.”

In this podcast on Rest as Resistance, Tricia Hersey says, “To not rest is really being violent towards your body, to align yourself with a system that says your body doesn’t belong to you, keep working, you are simply a tool for our production.” Her message is for all of us in capitalist society; she especially focuses on the importance of rest for descendants of enslaved Black people.

So how much “should” we be working? What we in North America are used to as a “typical” 40-hour work-week is of course a human-made construct. (And of course many academics would love to work “only” 40 hours, spending 50, 60, 70+ hours on work per week.) This article describes the origins of the 40-hour work week in the US, which came from collective bargaining and laws to reduce the number of hours for overworked factory laborers.

But the way dominant culture in North America currently thinks about time is not the only way. Different cultures think about time in different ways, throughout the world and history. From the Liberating our Time workshop, I learned about the ideas of “monochronic” and “polychronic” orientations to time. Dominant culture in North America and Northern/Western Europe takes a monochronic orientation to time. There are of course diverse ways of thinking about time within each of these categories, and within any cultural group, but (acknowledging this is a generalization): Many Indigenous, African, Asian, Latin American, and Southern European cultures take polychronic orientations to time.

Here’s a comparison of these orientations from Whiteness at Work. (There’s some good discussion in this article too: Everything about time – Monochronism – Polychronism – Orientation.)

When I read these lists, I feel like, monochronic feels like what you’re “supposed to do,” what you have to do to be “serious,” while polychronic feels like what my heart and soul want — how my heart and soul already are, but monochronic is something imposed on top. Monochronic feels like an externally constructed system of time, while polychronic feels like listening to ourselves. What do you feel?

Monochronism is connected to capitalism and colonialism in deep ways that I’m just learning about. In monochronism, time is people’s labor, a resource to be extracted from us. Polychronism is depicted as less enlightened, less civilized. Colonial powers imposed and continue to impose monochronism on Indigenous people and societies, using it as a tool of oppression towards the goal of extraction. (My understanding is that even colonial powers that take more of a polychronic time orientation for themselves imposed monochronic time for extraction on the people they colonized and enslaved.)

For settlers as well, individual productivity is held up as an ideal for how to live our lives, and a measure of our worth. This paradigm is not quite so physically forced on us, but rather becomes insidiously part of our own psyches as we absorb it through culture all around us. This is harmful for all of us — we all feel not-good-enough, unable to reach or maintain this “ideal” level of productivity — and is particularly harmful for people whose bodies are unable to work that hard, to be that productive.

“Cripping time” is a way of thinking about time from the disability community. In Cripping Time At Work, Katie Walsh writes that “it is the idea that people simply move, think, and speak at their own pace… understanding that our value as workers—furthermore, as people—is not tied inextricably to our ability to produce on an able-bodied timeline.”

Another idea that resonates for me, inspired by reading about Indigenous ways of relating to time (e.g., Larissa Crawford’s article), is that time and work can be seasonal, moving with Nature. To me it makes sense that we might work differently, different amounts and schedules and types of work, at different points during the year. I feel differently about working in the darker, rainier winter months than I do during the summer. Isn’t there even something liberating to feel it could be totally valid — not subversive or secret — to say, it’s a beautiful sunny day today, I’m going to go for a hike instead of working, and I’ll maybe do some more work another time when it’s raining? This clear night with a beautiful full Moon and low tide would be a great night to stay up late and dance at the beach, which means not starting work early the next morning.

There’s a ton to learn here about colonialism and capitalism and time, and different ways of thinking about time. Just knowing that is a step of liberation for me.

Creating the boundaries we need, and celebrating ourselves for expressing them.

I asked at the workshop: What can I say to faculty who want to do great EDI work but feel they don’t have enough time? Desiree Adaway replied: EDI (and I could add: education) is a long game. If we burn ourselves out, we aren’t going to be able to do the work of transforming towards a more just and equitable society. We need to take care of ourselves while doing EDI work, teaching, etc. The urgency of EDI work is very real, and can feel in tension with this. It’s helpful to name and grapple with that tension.

I’m learning how to figure out what boundaries I need and want around work-time, and how to express them to relevant people around me. And not just boundaries of dire necessity, when things are starting to feel really bad and I’m super exhausted, but long before that. I recognize that I have many deep expectations about how society / colleagues think I should orient to time (whether or not I agree), and fears about both expressing my boundaries — and about not expressing them 🙂 I also recognize that my boundaries flex and evolve, and that’s awesome. I’m trying to high-five myself for saying no to things, and also for saying yes-and to things: there are lots of ways to work together with colleagues to figure out a path that works well timewise for everyone. It can all be more flexible than I realize I’ve been thinking.

Developing and gently but proudly owning my identity of how I orient to time (something two friends recently encouraged me to do) is both scary and empowering.

Healing ourselves and listening to our hearts and bodies.

Sometimes I repeat (or sing!) a mantra like I am Enough. I remind myself of my worth as a whole human being, not just/primarily my work.

Sometimes I touch my heart and ask myself the question, What do my heart and soul and body want for how I work? We are educators: it’s not that we don’t want to work, to teach, to do good things for our students and colleagues and the world. Rather it’s the question, What would that work look like if we could shape it exactly the way that our bodies and our hearts and our souls are calling for?

Since that tearful evening at the frisbee field, I’ve been reorganizing my workday, my work schedule, and my expectations for myself within my constraints, while also working to free myself from those constraints.

For example, I’ve learned that I’m usually most productive in the morning, and that I am happiest and work best when I can look out a big window and gaze at trees and sky. So I plan my “hard” work in the morning, and have found big windows where I can work. Then I need to stretch and move my body, so I often have a short walk. I plan my meetings in the afternoons when I can. I have different types of work that I do, e.g., more creative, more analytical, more individual, more social, some for my own joy (like writing this!) and some for others. During the day and week, I try to feel what kind of work I’m in the mood for and move back and forth between those, while getting done what “needs” to get done when it “needs” to. These are often affected by how well I slept the night before, and I try to take a gentler schedule if I don’t sleep well, where I can. When I transition between blocks of work in a day, I often pause a moment for some deep grounding breaths and a short prayer.

I try to have gratitude for and acknowledge the great privileges that help me be able to take these kinds of steps for myself right now. Even just in small ways, I try to help others to have more freedom and rest, too, and aspire to do that more. This is part of acting collectively (more in #4).

I’m putting all of this after #2 because I’ve found we often need to put in boundaries first, to create the space to be able to breathe and heal.

Acting collectively.

This is about societal transformation, not just about individual changes. We are not at all alone in experiencing time challenges. Talking about it normalizes that struggle. When we express boundaries and choose self-care, that’s inspiring to everyone to see, helps others feel stronger to do the same. Larissa Crawford (and others) call for decolonizing time.

As we ask others to honor our self-care, our heart-led timelines, it’s an invitation for us to honor others’ self-care and timelines as well. What could it look like to do that for our colleagues? How do I do this well in some contexts, and what resistance comes up in me in other contexts?

What could it look like to truly honor our students’ own timelines? (The Covid-19 pandemic gave us some glimpses of this.) To decolonize time in our classrooms, in our education system? I think it involves more flexibility, more compassion, and less power-hierarchy between students and teachers — and is ultimately a pretty radical transformation. Decolonization efforts should of course be led by Indigenous folks.

Experiencing joy, reflecting, and dreaming.

This is about relishing and taking great joy in my work when I have the right energy for it, and it is the right time for me to do it! I can deeply love what I get to do in my work, and that’s amazing. Watching more of that joyful work-energy flow for me when I am taking enough rest.

This is about dreaming about amazing worlds we could create, self-reflecting, and listening to others. For me as a white person wanting to do EDI work, I need to take space to really be introspective about places where I might be contributing to or profiting from white supremacy and other systems of marginalization, feeling defensive, and working with those feelings… because they are difficult and it’s hard to look at them. If we’re exhausted all the time, then we’re not going to be able to do that well. Trying to take time to educate myself, listen to people of color and other marginalized communities, engage in sensemaking, understand nuance. Dreaming myself, listening to others’ dreaming, and dreaming together.

Overlapping, not separately: This is also about enjoying the time and space that I’m setting out to preserve for myself. Dancing, meditating, praying, sitting in stillness, having an unhurried conversation with a friend, watching something silly on Netflix, cooking a nice meal, taking a long bike ride.

Remembering that it’s not just about moving away from harmful conceptions of time, but moving towards more beautiful soulful ones.

I wish you well on your journey.

“Exuberant is existence, time a husk.
When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space;
love goes mad with the blessings…
Be kind to yourself, dear.”
Rumi

I acknowledge that I live and this writing took place on the unceded, ancestral, traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada. I identify as a white-European cis-woman settler, immigrant to Canada, child of immigrants to the United States. My identity, history, experiences, and place all shape my lens on what I’ve shared here.

How do you think about time, work and rest?

I’d be grateful for any thoughts and feedback you’d like to share with me on this piece. Thank you so much for reading.

Education for Liberation vs. Education for Assimilation

February 10, 2023 / Sarah Stewart

I’ve been both excited and anxious about writing this blog post. I’m excited that Scott invited me to participate and anxious that what I had to write wouldn’t be academic enough. But truly, that excitement and anxiety is also related to the topic that I’ve chosen. How “academic” is social justice work in education? Is it possible for it to be on par with and seen as equal to more traditional classes and ways of teaching? In education, we talk a lot about decolonization and moving away from “the way we’ve always done it.” But the system is set up in such a way that it seems like change can only be a one-off.

This constant thought process on what it would really mean to expand the possibilities for education has ultimately led to my uncertainty about my dissertation topic in the doctoral program I’m in with Scott and Erin. I know that I want to research and talk about Black women in higher education, maybe including other women of color. I know that I want to write about how we can do “diversity education” and “diversity work” with a real lens of social justice, moving beyond words and nice web pages. To do this work in a way that makes change would require a true disruption of the systems we’ve inherited. And I feel like I often don’t have the time to get my head above water to see the bigger picture or work on it. I’m often too busy doing the work to research it or find the right words to package what I’m doing. So I appreciate this chance to think through what I’m doing, what it’s based on, and what direction I should take in writing down what I do and want to do and why.

I teach a freshman class called Dignitas at the College of St. Scholastica (CSS). Dignitas is a required class for all traditional first-year, in-person students. The goal of the class is for freshmen to learn about the Benedictine values, the CSS community, to build a sense of belonging, and to learn about these things through a specific lens or theme chosen by the instructor. My class’s theme is race and social justice and my class is invitation-only, for students of color only. Students do not need to choose my section and there are students of color every year who do choose other classes. This is important because what we do only works if someone chose to be part of it and is invested.

A big part of my desire to name and package what I am doing comes from my own realization that there are things I do that work and would helpful for other people to know and do in their own ways as the college is talking more and more about the diversity of our incoming classes but also the retention of these growing populations, such as students of color. I know that part of what works is the content of my class but my presence as a Black woman as an instructor is also very important for most of my students. I am often the first person of color that many have had as a teacher and the setup of the class is the only place they’ve ever been in a room of all people of color. These things matter but I’ve had colleagues dismiss them and say that they are unimportant. Only recently have I realized that many of the naysayers are uncomfortable with the idea that things like visibility and the existence of spaces where students of color are not the minority are important. And they are uncomfortable because those aren’t things they can provide as instructors. But why is this any different from skills or situations that those educators can provide that I cannot? In those instances, I don’t blame that educator for what they can do. I simply show up in the ways that I am able to and I feel grateful that my colleagues show up in other ways. This is really about showing up authentically and knowing what need you can fill, not doing everything the same way.

For African American students specifically, I know that I need more time with bell hooks texts and texts talking about education for liberation. While there are naysayers regarding my class, my teaching style, and my course content, my results speak for themselves. Scott is the person who ran the numbers on my course’s success and found rates of retention and persistence to graduation had gone up each year for my students. This is the exact population the school is looking at and those are the exact issues we are supposedly tackling. On a personal level, we have had quite the week in my class. Today, a student talked with me about a friend of hers who wishes she could be in our class, not because it’s “easy” but because she is in a very traditional class with lots of texts and essays. This particular student said she wishes she had a space to really think about issues that are real and important to her and discuss them with her peers. Also during this week, one of my students agreed to let us show the new documentary, “Boys in Blue,” which he is a part of. He also agreed to let me interview him and have the class ask questions. In our class on Tuesday, we did this and there were students thinking and talking about whether they feel welcome at CSS, what it’s like being at a PWI, missing their homes and diversity, and feeling plucked out of a place where they are seen and accepted, only to be set into a place where they are tolerated at best. But they talked too about why they are here and the sacrifices that might be worth it to them and again, why. Then on Thursday, the student was not in class because he went home for a memorial honoring another kid who had been in the documentary but was murdered last year.

We cannot claim to be educators who only worry about “academic rigor” but ignore the personal and the cultural. My students are smart and they are capable. But they are going through so much more than most of their more privileged classmates. And they are going through it constantly. I have many colleagues whose response is to lower expectations for these students or make the expectations higher or to claim that any sharing of the personal is an excuse. The list goes on. But these same colleagues often lament on the number of students who do not persist and it takes a lot of my patience not to scream that there are ways to do it all. So at the end of the day, I often find that I relate more to my students than I do to most of my colleagues and that is because we are dealing with the same issues in different ways. How can we truly educate and work in a way that is geared toward liberation and not toward assimilation?

Everything is different, things never change.

February 2, 2023 / Rafael Palomino

First blooms of the winter from Arctostaphylos densiflora 'Howard Mcminn.' — *First blooms of the winter* from Arctostaphylos densiflora ‘Howard McMinn.’

My first professional transition happened when I went from being a graduate student to working in educational development at UC Santa Cruz. I loved the teaching part of grad school, and it felt natural enough to move into a role focused on helping others develop their teaching, and collaborating on university teaching and learning projects.

When the time came to look for another career opportunity, I turned to industry. I knew my skills and experience could be applied to learning & development, especially in the field of instructional design. But I was much less confident about making that transition, and when I got the opportunity to move into corporate instructional design, I braced myself for a steep learning curve.

Almost three years into the new gig now, I’m happy about what I was able to bring to this new environment, and how much I’ve grown. So, I thought I’d take this post to reflect on three things that surprised me the most about moving from teaching and learning in higher ed, to corporate L&D.

The business context doesn’t change the learning challenges like I thought it would.

To be clear, the business context changes everything. But I thought the world of KPIs, corporate values, regulatory requirements, and other aspects of being in a business instead of a school would fundamentally distort the stuff I like most about being a learning professional. But over time, it mostly just started to feel like different requirements and constraints that any professional feels. I remember being at a POD Conference while I was at UCSC and hearing instructional designers talk about how the accreditation process affected their work. I couldn’t relate to those specific experiences, but I could see how accreditation influenced everyone’s decisions, approaches, limitations, and priorities.

It feels like I’m playing a teaching and learning video game, and I’ve dropped into a new world map and rules with my same core actions. At the core of my job, I still think about how to help people learn things, and how to help people instruct things they’re really passionate about, that they want others to learn. Whatever is going on with that other context stuff, I appreciate that the core of what I enjoy is still very much intact and has room for growth.

School experiences and practices permeate learning in industry more than I expected.

I was really interested in how learning practices, language, tools, and environments would look outside of school systems. I remember starting to “build a network” with industry L&D professionals online, and being surprised at how much discussion there was about classrooms, corporate “universities,” and how to set “passing grades.” Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all, but school experiences really impact how we think learning should look outside of it. I guess I thought those experiences would be more of a starting point than a template.

This does mean that people are a little more open to discussing things like assessment. On the other hand, it can be hard to get passed ideas like, there must be a quiz to pass for it “to count,” for example.

Reading Erin’s post on positionality, I also got to think more about why I always feel some kind of way when employees in corporate training are referred to as “students.” In grad school, I really struggled with the sudden switch from student to instructor in the teacher-student power dynamic, but it was also incredibly useful to think through any time I made an instructional decision. But outside of the school or university context, it feels so weird to bring in this dynamic when working colleague-to-colleague. There are plenty of other power dynamics to consider.

Most of the time, the use of “student” is just an innocuous word choice because people are used to it. But I also notice when this becomes an unexamined dynamic that influences assumptions about colleagues, their prior knowledge, facilitation choices, how and why we assess learning, what kind of environment supports learning, and how tools are discussed and marketed.

Sometimes, we don’t actually care about learning.

A few years ago, I was on a team developing a lab activity for general chemistry students. We wanted them to tinker with physiochemical properties and decided to use software that scientists use to simulate drug interactions. It let students create and design at a molecular level, and get quick feedback on what they’d done. They only were going to use a fraction of the program’s features, so we made a cheat sheet of the commands and functions they’d use most to help them jump in.

I agonized over this cheat sheet. Were we taking away their agency? Were we shutting down productive paths of learning just because we didn’t think it was part of the learning goals? Scott told me to chill, probably. We used it when we taught the lab, and it was fine. We didn’t notice any resistance, the students used it to create some pretty cool molecules, and they made all kinds of connections and explanations about the program’s simulations. All without having to do a long and boring module about how to use the software.

Now, I realize we just made a nifty job aid. And that sometimes, it’s less important that someone learns something than it is to reference something, in the moment of need, to successfully complete a task. That’s performance support, sort of. While not new at all, this was new to me, and now I see it everywhere, from Ikea furniture assembly to flight emergency checklists.

And while “corporate performance” sends off all sorts of alarm bells and whistles in my head, I’ve loved having this approach opened up to me more, and in obvious ways, since I’ve left higher ed. If I’m really advocating for learners (performers?), sometimes the most helpful thing is to do everything except train. Depending on the context of the job, a sound learning experience may be less learner-centric than making useful stuff for people to use when they need it.

I could probably figure out how to better connect these three areas, but more than anything, they’re the things that continue to surprise me in my new environment. There have been plenty of other changes, and some of them easily fade into my new world map and game rules. But I know not to get too comfortable with new environments, and I’m glad there’s so much to explore and challenge my thinking, decisions, and actions.