Community listening
I am spending time in 2025 working on two things. Exploring ways my experience might contribute to community, learning and progress at a very local level outside of formal organizations. Think: City, neighborhood, apartment communities. Digging into my ancestry and family history, I didn't start out with this
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[This is a thinking-out-loud piece. No answers, just exploring.] Dr. Shirin Vossoughi, Associate Professor of Learning Sciences at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, shared her work on inclusive teaching at a recent faculty meeting for instructors in the Master's Program in
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Let me tease out two ideas. Design is - must be - a communal practice. And many more of us are designers than we might believe. Together, these two ideas might change the way many of use view the work we do and our role in addressing issues of equity and justice.
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I am working out loud this academic quarter, a bit, in conjunction with two courses I co-teach with some amazing colleagues. What's coming together is some inspiration on the intersection of work we do in using and applying design practices - design thinking - and the work we do
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It's the start of 2021 and I bring with me this lesson about being an educator: The job is, with care, to create moments for people to think. I've contemplated this lesson for several years teaching graduate students. The professionals who come to our masters degree
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I've been back in the classroom this fall and winter, co-teaching MSLOC 430 Creating and Sharing Knowledge. Two things are new. Our program moved to a new community platform - from Jive to SAP Jam. The platform provides the space for both formal and informal engagement with students,
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Recently, I had the opportunity to speak at the annual conference of the Association of Change Management Professionals Midwest Chapter. I shared my thoughts on what is an on-going work-in-progress: The learning journey required to move beyond being empathetic and to actively practice co-creation when we
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I have the good fortune to be co-teaching two courses at Northwestern University with the talented Teresa Torres, whose work with teams and leaders in the product world is changing how they connect the dots between user research and product design decisions. We co-lead the Designing for Organizational
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I first started teaching in higher education in 2006. Two years later I moved to a full-time position at Northwestern University - part staff role, part instructor. This, after 20+ years as a corporate leader and consultant working at the intersection of technology, learning and knowledge management. Pedagogy - the methods
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I am currently re-reading Donald Schon's classic The Reflective Practitioner - How Professionals Think in Action (1983) along with An Urgency of Teachers - The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy, a 2018 compilation of the essays and articles of Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel. This was not an
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Learning from success I recently attended a conference where, upon reflection, I am once again just struck by the challenge of aligning on outcomes in the workplace. And how the inability to do so absolutely kills our capacity for organizational learning. The context in this case involved community management professionals
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I just re-read a post I wrote in June, 2015, reflecting on a challenge posed by educator and author Cathy Davidson. Why Start with Pedagogy 4 Good Reasons, 4 Good Solutions If your goal is equality in a world where inequality is structural and violent and pervasive, you can