The Gero-Punk Project

The title of the presentation I gave this past Wednesday was “Leading your Team as a Life Long Learner,” and, as I’ve confessed to you (and to the participants), I didn’t initially reflect on the title of the presentation – probably because it wasn’t a title of my own making meant to capture what I intended to focus on in the presentation – until I was a couple weeks out from the day and I had to really start jamming or else disaster would ensue.  Once I put my attention on the title, which I assumed was meant to signal to me what the workshop organizers intended me to speak about, I realized that there were some interesting implicit propositions hidden behind the title.  I realized that perhaps I wasn’t just meant to provide some sort of generalist presentation about lifelong learning – What lifelong learning is, why it is important, how you become a lifelong learner, etc. but to make some strong connections between how developing one’s self as a lifelong learner makes one a better leader in the workplace.

(I should perhaps offer an additional confession and let you know that left to my own devices I’d not have chosen to frame the presentation in this way. I’m resistant to the instrumentalization of learning, by which I mean, for me lifelong learning is about committing one’s self to developing as deeply as possible throughout the human life course in order to become the fullest human being one can be, not just about acquiring the knowledge and tools necessary to be a good citizen, a productive member of society, or a good team leader, though a derivative outcome might be that one becomes a “better” leader, a “better” citizen, etc.)

So, let’s just say that I found myself in a bit of a quandary because I realized that I had been invited to facilitate a learning experience that had certain implicit outcomes attached to it and that these outcomes weren’t the ones I would have chosen to design a learning experience around. As well, I realized as I pondered the propositions hidden behind the title that I didn’t resonate to the propositions, nor to the title, but that some others did resonate to the propositions and the title and that I had been offered and accepted the opportunity to facilitate a learning experience to which others were committed and that I had to find a way into fulfilling my obligation which (hopefully) met the participants’ needs but also allowed me to work from a place of personal integrity.

When in a quandary such as this, I try to remember to do the following: Calm down and breathe so that I can slow time and stay open rather than close up; and move my mind to a more capacious space, that is, find a way to shift my thinking so that it is expansive enough to contain and hold together the different, seemingly incommensurable ideas or assumptions I am feeling muddled by.

In the case of the presentation on “Leading your Team as a Life Long Learner,” this meant that I needed to take on the propositions hidden behind the title and spend some time pondering what I think makes for a good leader, and how my conceptualization of lifelong learning might connect with my emergent model of what it means to be a good leader, as well as what might be meant by “team,” and what my experiences have been as a member and leader of various teams, and what has worked and not worked for me and for others.  As well, I needed to spend some time soberly examining my resistance to the propositions hidden behind the presentation title, thinking critically about my own conceptualizations of lifelong learning, leadership, etc., asking myself: Where do my strongly held ideas come from? Why do I hold them so strongly? Why do I feel resistance to other ideas? What would happen if I tried on other ideas?

What began to emerge as I did this critical self-reflection work was the insight that perhaps the best way into the presentation was to invite the participants to engage in reflection and discussion around some juicy questions that grounded them in their own experiences as learners, because for any learning to be truly meaningful, transformative, and powerful it must be fundamentally about the project of developing and becoming who we want to be in the world, and each individual must discover and enact  this ongoing process on their own behalf. (Perhaps a “good leader” is one who can support others in their own self-determined and directed process of deep learning and development.).

So,  here are the questions we — the presentation participants and I — reflected upon, did some free-writing around, and had a fantastic discussion in response to:

• In your own travels through your life course, how would you describe yourself and your experiences as a learner? How have you changed as a learner as you’ve grown into adulthood?

• How do you envision yourself as a learner as you grow even older?

• What are some of the best learning experiences you’ve had? And what are some of the not-so-good learning experiences you’ve had, and why?

• What, in your experience and to your way of thinking, differentiates the best from the not-so-good learning experience?

• What excites you about learning? What scares you about learning?

• How do you know learning is happening, in yourself or in others?

•  When you are engaged deeply in learning, how does it feel?

These are the kinds of questions one might contemplate periodically – annually, at the start of the school year, perhaps? Or on the occasion of one’s birthday? Or maybe before taking on a new, huge opportunity or adventure? Wouldn’t it be cool to be 86 and look back over forty year’s worth of journal entries in response to these questions, to get to witness one’s self learning and developing over time?

I’d invite you to engage these questions. And if you’d like to share what you discover, here’s the place to do so.

A couple of months ago I was invited to offer a presentation on “Leading Your Team as a Life Long Learner” at a workforce development conference. The conference is tomorrow, and today I am finally getting down to the business of being sure I have a lucid plan for my presentation. And yesterday was the first day of Winter Term at my university.  And I feel as though I’ve just barely re-entered “normal” life, whatever “normal” is, after several weeks of feeling profoundly jangly as I adjust to an altered reality in my personal life. Of course, when I accepted the opportunity to offer a community presentation on lifelong learning I didn’t have foreknowledge of the tumult on my near-future horizon, and while I did know that the presentation would fall on day-three of the new term I was optimistic that over the winter holiday break I’d find plenty of time to work on my presentation (and on other projects as well).

Like my Gramma Jewell always liked to say, though I am pretty certain she poached  it  from John Lennon: “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” Yep, that’s exactly what happened to me. Life.

So though I am nervous and I feel as though I’ve been negligent because I wasn’t ready to rock this presentation two weeks ago (or even two days ago!), I am also weirdly glad to be in the middle of a complex process that simultaneously involves reflection, healing, discernment, and, well, deep learning. What better energetic inspiration for a presentation on lifelong learning than one’s own lifelong learning experiences in real-time?  (Oh, I forgot to mention in the opening paragraph that I’m also trying to participate in a MOOC MOOC.  A “MOOC” is a “massive open online course” and the MOOC that I’m participating in sponsored and facilitated by the keen folks at www.hybridpedagogy.com provides a deep immersion in teaching and learning in a MOOC environment. If this doesn’t demonstrate that I am committed to my own ongoing learning – or that I’m now completely unhinged – I don’t know what does!) 

As I’m writing this essay I’m noticing that in fact the examples I’m giving of the kinds of learning I’m engaged in right now – by choice and against my will! – – actually signal something potentially interesting about how we might think about lifelong learning: lifelong learning has more to do with a way of thinking about one’s self as a human being as one travels through the life course (and about other human beings as they travel through the life course) than it does to the particular form or content of any learning experience.  In other words, lifelong learning is a sensibility, a commitment and an enactment, not reducible to engaging in a particular formal or informal learning opportunity, nor mostly about being a good and responsible citizen, nor about remaining a “productive” member of society as long as possible, nor about what to do with one’s time once one is no longer engaged in “formal learning” (If, indeed, one has been fortunate enough to be able to afford to do so.).

(Perhaps this is the moment in the essay where you, my reader, get antsy, hoping I’m about to tell you what lifelong learning really is, if it isn’t reducible to these things.)

Well, as I said, I’m still working on my presentation (and I’m counting on falling back a bit on the thinking and work with others I’ve done over the past couple of decades around all of this!) and I wouldn’t want to give too much away ahead of the performance, but I will say this (and you’ll please let me know what you think as well):

When I contemplate what the pre-requisites for and promise of a commitment to lifelong learning might be I have this sense of hope about my own and others’ capacities for ongoing, lifelong deep development, for living a precious human life of meaning and purpose. I have the realization that to cultivate this hope requires me to practice a kind of brave openness to the complexity of reality and human experience, even in the face of things I don’t understand or things I don’t want to have to change about myself or my life or things that can’t be changed about others or situations.  And also that curiosity is part of all of this – curiosity about other creatures (human and not human), about the nature of “self,” about the nature of reality. And there’s something ethical and…or…even spiritual having to do with interconnectedness, how we are each of us a part of larger groups: families, eco-systems, communities, workplaces, societies, the planet, and as such we have roles and responsibilities to reflect upon and enact with intentionality and care.

There’s more….I can feel other notions, warm and shimmering somewhere in the middle of my back, working their way up my spine.

Thanks for listening. I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow.