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Tales from Real LifeReflections on a Faculty Committee AssignmentAbout three years ago, I was asked to chair a university committee on learning communities. The task was to research the concept and report to the provost. I've often been down this committee-chairing road before, but I certainly didn't anticipate what followed. It has turned out to be an unusual and exciting experience, and it's not very often we can say that about committee work in higher education. At the first meeting, my committee promptly recreated our "official" charge. Together, we launched what has now been a three-year odyssey into the complex question of how a large institution comes to grips with the desire to be a community. Promised three to five meetings max, we met almost bi-weekly for a year, and the experience was more than just talk. The theatre arts faculty led us through movement-based and other non-verbal representations of our problem-strategies that almost never find their way into "real" committee work. The architects in our group introduced photography and new ways to graphically represent existing communities. At a convenient point, we did give the provost a handcrafted report that is still talked about because it has yet to be relegated to the report junkyard. And our work goes on. Why are we still working together? The answer must lie in the good problem
we stumbled upon, or perhaps in the rich collaborations of such a diverse
group. Wonder if this has anything to do with learning communities? |
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