Our team is undergoing a process of re-articulating its guiding principles, and this is a process we would like to engage in through conversation with our whole team. Joseph, Jason and I will each be initiating a conversation in this blog about one of the principles we came up with in an initial conversation. Please comment, or start a new post to share your own thoughts, respond to what you’ve seen others say, or just reflect. We will read what you write, and the eventual statements of our principles will grow from the conversation we have here.
Living Conversation
The work that we do in our roles as members of the Grad Team at CTLT, relies a lot on the concept of a “living” conversation. By conversation we mean as much a conversation with others as a conversation with contextual (physical, inter-cultural, social, pedagogical, etc.) spaces, theories, practices, meanings, processes and applications.
A “living” conversation is a conversation that both breathes and listens, where knowledge creation and understanding take place on-goingly and through the acts of theorizing as a process of complication – The kind of theorizing that takes place in relational, practical and creative ways of making meaning through recursive, reflective, responsive forms of engagement. A “living” conversation means that we do not engage in and/or interact with others, spaces, knowledge, etc., with a non-flexible and predetermined agenda.
Both in the work we do as Educational program developers and as facilitators we enter all forms of conversation with an open mind, we engage in constant questioning of our assumptions and processes, and redirect, redesign, and realign our paths. A “living” conversation also implies that the work we do carries on beyond our involvement with it into other spaces and conversations. It echoes beyond the work that we do and takes on a life of its own.
How do you relate to this definition of a “living” conversation? How would you define it in the work that you do? And how does it impact your work?