Note: I’ve written this post on my own time, on my own computer, on my own internet, in my own house. This post is a personal reflection and does not represent the beliefs of my employer. I will likely make mistakes, I will miss some perspectives, and I commit to learning and taking responsibility for what’s mine. I’m writing this with urgency because I think the current times demand it. This is an invitation for educators of goodwill to put fortitude, hope, and courage into the collective pot to share and borrow as needed. Below is what comes to mind for me today.
A love letter to my comrades and vocational companions: educational developers, instructional consultants, faculty/grad/postdoc developers, people who work in teaching centers and academic affairs offices in higher education.
They want us scared, sad, and lonely. They want fear responses of freeze and fawn, paralysis and compliance. Doom, despair, catastrophe, hopelessness. They want us to lose connection with each other and our inner compass of higher good. It leads us to physical, physiological, emotional, psychological, and spiritual violence within ourselves and with each other: us/them, urgency, scarcity, blame, carceral logics, manipulation and coercive control, fear conditioning, dehumanization… The moral injury to our individual and collective psyche is too high and the stakes for all life are too high. This is unmanageable and not ok. F**k Doom.
Educational developers have remedies for this era, responses for this kind of destructive violence. I see the light in each of you that expands my heart and gives me hope. Your leadership tools are needed.
You are conveners. Learning communities, communities of practice, scholarship of teaching and learning collaboratives, gathering spaces, hubs. You know how to rally people, teams, and programs around the common causes of teaching and learning support. You know how to bring people together across boundaries like disciplines, departments, resources centered management, and ways of knowing and doing and communicating. You know how to speak a common tongue that invites in people’s higher selves for the good of the whole.
You know how to cultivate flow. Collectives, assemblages, liminal spaces, third spaces, in-between spaces. You know how to piece things together in new ways. You know how to hold environments of cooperation, collectivity, connection, compassion, courage. You know how to hold spaces where fear, the inner critic of judgment and doom, and the ego mask can exist and also take a back seat. Spaces where we can get to what’s true about our shared existence. Spaces where the heart can speak about what is loving, kind, creative, life-affirming, and courageous.
You are story-keepers and story-sharers. You are generous with the wisdom of ancestors and elders who have thought about our contemporary concerns. You are attuned and understanding with those walking uncertain paths. You hold space to witness instructors’ dilemmas and dreams. You know the power of counter-narratives, disconfirming evidence, and counter-spaces to disrupt illusions, challenge distortions, anchor in reality, raise consciousness and conscientiousness, be optimistic and hopeful and inspired, dream radically and ethically, and act responsibly.
You know how to encourage the collective’s ethical wisdom to guide decisions. You know how to invite the multitude of voices and experiences – the rational and the intuitive, the empirical and the embodied – for the consideration of the collective good. Honesty, hope, courage. Responsible, ethical, consent-based practice. Self-determination and autonomy. Stewardship. Accompaniment. Servant-leadership. Principles and process. Both teacher AND learner. Humility.
You are creative. In the many coffee dates and walk dates and lunch dates I have had with educational developers lately, I have learned about so many of your creative talents. Painters. Sculptors. Writers. Improvisers. Dancers. Musicians. Singers. Bakers. Weavers. Gifters of small delights. These are also ways you convene, cultivate flow, keep and share stories, and contribute positively to shared existence. These are renewable, enduring, human and humane, energetic sources of inspiration, joy, and expression. Keep doing that and sharing that and integrating that expertise into your vocation.
There’s so much more, but this is a good start. I am grateful for what I have learned about our capacity for goodness by working alongside you.
Katie Kearns 