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Friday, May 13, 2011

Discouraged

The last meeting we had with the faculty collaboration was a bit discouraging for me. I have been thinking on it for a couple days and thought I would blog.....This is suppose to be our honest thoughts and ideas, right? I hope so, because here it goes.

I believe some version of what we are trying to do with SUSTAIN-SLO is what education/community/sustainability will look like in the future. There are many reasons I believe this and would like to articulate them here. 1) We are all (faculty and students) stressed out. 2) We are lonely and looking for community 3) we do so many "made up" projects where we make students do all kinds of things. This seems to me such a waste of resources. We could be making a huge difference for the less fortunate among us. 4) Students retain very little of the things we tell them. 5) I am sure there are more.....

Several people in the last meeting expressed a sentiment about the learning initiative saying "we cant do this" "There are too many unknowns" "I don't see how it will work." Not every one had this sentiment, but probably half of us.

What if we just believed we could create something better and kept working towards that goal? What if we thought of the ways in which it could work instead of the ways in which it couldn't?

I have thought about leadership quite a lot since I attended the leadership development workshop last week. What I believe about leadership is that one role of a leader is to "hold the hope." I certainly don't feel like a leader in SUSTAIN (Maybe Linda can take this role - or maybe each of us), but if I were looking for a leader or if I was one I would want to "hold the hope" of making a difference in higher education.

Thanks for continuing on the journey....I believe half the battle is to just show up.