2020 was challenging, to say the least. We faced a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world, we witnessed the exposure of the racist and classist foundations of our economy and healthcare systems, we saw the murder of too many black people by police and racist vigilantes, we watched our elected officials fail to attempt to understand what the rest of us are going through. There is no way that I could capture all of the things that have happened in 2020 here. Through all of this, I learned. I reflected to better understand my experiences. 2020 taught me a lot of things and I wrote about that recently right here. Those lessons will guide how I operate (and have been operating since it’s nearly June!) in 2021. Looking back with some critical reflection gives us time to think about how we can move forward and that’s my hope with this post. I hope to cover a wide amount of ground here with health, work, and what I’m calling extra credit goals which cover everything from the podcast I co-host (Interdependent Study) to work I do in another organization. I also hope to connect those all to the intentions for growth I have for the rest of 2021.
Health
Physical Health
So I definitely gained the COVID-19 pounds. At the start of the year, I wrote in a journal that I wanted to run more as that became more difficult last year so I wanted to get back to some better running form. In the midst of noticing that some of my clothes weren’t fitting quite the same, I stepped onto a scale and saw a number that I hadn’t ever seen before. I decided to register for Noom and, while I’m only a couple of weeks in, it’s going well and I’m learning a lot about my eating habits and being more mindful about what I eat and drink. I’m learning about caloric density and shifting my sweet tooth and snack tooth away from processed high-calorie foods to more fruits and vegetables. And honestly, I’m noticing a lot more about the tastes of foods already. I’m also looking forward to getting back to running more frequently in addition to using the rowing machine we bought used a few months ago.
Mental/emotional
At the start of this year, I wanted to journal more and focus on reflecting. That hasn’t happened much to this point. So I’m stating it here again publicly to motivate myself to write a little more in private. Developing a gratitude practice has a lot of positive benefits for mental health so I also want to pick that back up. I’ve had a subscription to MyLife, a meditation app, for years now and I want to use that more fully. They encourage check-ins to help choose which guided meditation to use and I’m afraid I’ve fallen into a rut of using a handful of the same meditations over and over again instead of exploring longer, more intensive meditations.
Family
My daughter, Molly, starts kindergarten later this year so I want to be engaged in that process and helping her learn and grow in that new environment. As a family, this will be a big transition for us so I want to be there for all of us, including myself, in helping to manage not only the logistics of this big change but also the emotions that come along with large life changes like this. I’m excited to see my little girl continue to grow up and take this next step in her education.
Work
Class -> Training
One of the major things I accomplished this year at work was the transition away from the class I used to manage. We had a class for incoming student leaders (Resident Assistants) that I believe was no longer working. It was bloated and a relatively large amount of work for students over the course of the semester for not much return on the learning for us. And this was for a class that we required them to take so it was essentially training. We knew that the discussion sections we hosted were working. Because, in my experience, when I effectively focus on application and active learning in the classroom or in training students learn more and retain more. From my view, this is because their learning is founded in the peer relationships and reflections that they are learning.
Part of this big change was flipping our in-person lectures into bite-sized video chunks and creating engaging videos from stock pictures and video clips. This process led to me needing to learn a whole lot more about sound editing, video editing, and some specific programs like Adobe Premiere Pro. But also finding creative ways to use Keynote to create these videos. I’d like to continue to create this kind of content as I think that turning 30-minute training sessions that are mostly based in a lecture style into video clips will be a better way to deliver training content as I continue in my career.
Scaffolding
As I’ve been focused on rethinking the entirety of “pre-training” for a large segment of our student leaders, it has also led me to think more about what continued training and development is needed. I think it’s widely accepted that no training or class can cover everything you ever need to know. This leads me to consider how we set training up to emphasize that learning will continue on in the position with both formal training and on-the-job learning. I would love to dive into how I can scaffold learning processes. In my work, I see that meaning that I lay a foundation for concepts, encouraging the application of those concepts through active learning instructional design, and then make connections to the times when that learning is reinforced when a student is in the position. This reinforces both the concepts that the student learned earlier and serves as a foundation for their own self-guided learning as they navigate the day-to-day work in their positions.
Extra Credit
Interdependent Study
I wrote a little bit about Interdependent Study in my previous post. Our original goals when starting the podcast were simply to establish it and create opportunities for us to have honest conversations with each other about the media we had read or watched. Now that we’re 21 episodes in, I think we’ve accomplished that fairly successfully. Now I think we’re focused on growing the audience and trying to “market” the podcast a little bit more. I’m not sure which direction we will take with that but we’d love to see growth in our statistics as we continue throughout the year. We have also always planned to add in guests once we had sort of established ourselves and the show. So now I believe we’ll start to add in some new voices to join our conversations in the next couple of months.
Organizing
I’ve mentioned that I’ve been working with a group dedicated to bringing white men into movements for collective liberation. I mentioned a bit about some things I learned in 2020 while working with them. We spent most of 2020 thinking about how we can grow the organization. My hope is that as we continue to develop effective shared, collective leadership roles and structures that we can effectively figure out how we bring new people in. We need some orientation processes and ways to help connect people to the different functions of the network. We also need to be in relationship with other organizations with whom we can create transformative alliances that would serve as a means of accountability. My hope is that this new leadership group is focused on the long-term growth of the network that gives us strong guiding principles, methods of onboarding new members, and structures for accountability both internally and externally. I’m excited to continue working on those projects throughout the year with my comrades in the network.
Closing
This is what I’ve been working on thus far in 2021 and what I hope to continue to work on. There’s a lot here, but I’m looking forward to finding ways to continue to grow and using these intentions as a platform for that growth.