From Todxs cuentan: building community and welcoming humanity from the first day of class
This is from a math professor. I am eager to understand how to apply this to a work and facilitation setting. I can see applications for employee on-boarding, project launches, and community meetings and group facilitation. I can also see how this would try the patience of my colleagues.
I am excited and a bit nervous, because I am going to try many new things in class this semester, and although academic tradition dictates that a professor is supposed to appear invulnerable and in control, I plan to put us in learning experiences that will not really be under my control.
The below applies to a employee handbook, project brief, and community meeting agenda and statement of purpose.
The course syllabus is the first official document students receive in a class; it is the first impression they receive about what is valued in the class.
What is the comparable statement we would make for a project team?
Community Agreement. This course aims to o↵er a joyful, meaningful, and em- powering experience to every participant; we will build that rich experience together by devoting our strongest available e↵ort to the class. You will be challenged and supported. Please be prepared to take an active, critical, patient, and generous role in your own learning and that of your classmates.
How do we think about this dynamic within teams and groups in the workplace?
As a mathematics researcher with more than 20 years of experience, I feel pretty confident that my mathematical ideas are valuable. It sometimes takes a special effort to truly listen to students’ ideas without projecting my own views onto them. When I have been able to really make space for students’ thought, we have all learned very innovative and useful ways of thinking about combinatorics.
And how do we engineer for this benefit on our projects?
I have come to understand that when students are engaged so actively, and when we really listen to each other’s ideas, a creative, mathematical magic can happen that I could not have arrived at by simply preparing a lecture and delivering it. In this class, more than ever before, I experienced my students truly take charge of their shared learning experience, take ownership of the material, allow themselves to ask their own critical, insightful mathematical questions, value those questions, and turn them into their own original discoveries. In fact, their insight taught me many new things about classic problems that I thought I understood completely.