Learning Unflattened: Experimenting with self-authorship AND group discovery

Interview with S. Fisher Qua (Principal, Back Loop Consulting)by Keith McCandless (author, Liberating Structures)

What is possible if you take Liberating Structures directly into a classroom? What unfolds when students have freedom and responsibility for designing a peer-to-peer health initiative from the ground up? What happens when Liberating Structures are made a part of everyday learning interactions? How does organizing learning with Liberating Structures muddy the power dynamics and relations among participants?

After a five week immersive learning partnership with twelve college students at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, Keith interviewed Fisher Qua about the experience.

Keith: What did Bates College have in mind when they invited you to teach a course?

Fisher: The five-week course at Bates College was part of an ongoing effort to introduce practitioner taught classes to the curriculum. Students take just this one offering with seventeen hours of classroom interaction. These courses are one element in a broader institution-wide initiative related to Purposeful Work. Purposeful Work represents a radical departure from traditional approaches to preparing students for life after college. It takes a four-year, developmental approach to working with students, infusing the formal curriculum and informal learning experiences with conversations, reflections, and skill-building opportunities. Over their four years, students build an understanding of self, values, interests and strengths and use their experiences in their search for meaning and purpose in work and career. I am a graduate of Bates myself (though prior to the Purposeful Work initiative launching) and the college initially extended to the invitation for practitioner courses to the alumni community. I expressed early interest and put together a proposal for the third year of the pilot effort.

Keith: What gave you confidence to teach a course?

Fisher: Well it certainly wasn’t my content knowledge or expertise! While I do have some experience with community health initiatives, I am neither clinically nor academically trained to do that work.

Truthfully, the thing that gave me confidence was knowing I could rely on the Liberating Structures (LS) repertoire, trust in the social inventiveness of the participants, tap into the wide network of other LS practitioners around the globe for support, and believe in my own improvisational instincts to respond at any given moment.

I was confident that I knew the LS repertoire well enough to anticipate what structures might match with the broad strokes of our work together AND agile enough in my practice to pull different options into the moment depending on the unpredictable ways learning unfolds. Knowing that I wasn’t responsible for any specific ‘content’ related outcomes gave us — myself and the participants — the freedom to shape our collectively learning experience in new ways. Not having to deliver against a pre-determined goal or endpoint made it possible for us to respond productively to uncertainty and surprise as we moved forward.

Keith: And, what was that purpose you were moving forward towards?

Fisher: In my mind, I imagined three purposes for our work together:

• Develop a 30 year learning partnership with the participants
• Introduce & immediately start using LS to discover, develop, and begin building out approaches to chronically difficult health situations on campus — primarily through peer-to-peer interactions
• Immerse participants in an experience of consulting that draws on design thinking, complexity science inspired approaches to strategy, and action research

Keith: Already you are breaking or bending some basic myths & assumptions of classroom teaching: you are giving up the role of sage-on-the-stage; and, you are placing great trust in students to lead or co-lead the way forward. So, what gave you confidence to NOT teach a course but rather share leading and learning with students?!

Fisher: From the very beginning, I was looking for ways to shift the conventional dynamic around who was in control. I never considered the roles of teacher and student to be relevant. For me, this was an opportunity to invest in my own learning and so I was eager to mutually shape the entire experience with the participants. While that dream collided with reality a few times — for instance, there was no getting around the institutional requirement to publish a syllabus and there were instances when I acceded to to the participant’s expressed need for more guidance, structure, certainty & direction — I think we were (mostly) successful in sharing the responsibility and freedom to learn from the very first moments of our time together.

Among the Minimum Specifications that supported this simultaneous-and-mutual shaping of the experience was using the Law of Personal Translocation — inspired by Open Space Technology. Henri Lipmanowicz playfully introduced it on the third day of class and it quickly became a simple rule that governed our interactions together: If you were neither learning nor contributing something, it was your responsibility to move into a situation or place where you could… even if that meant leaving the classroom altogether and diverting attention to other competing commitments and learning horizons.

The most exhilarating part of the experience for me was that I was able to continuously work from the middle of a paradox between confidence and uncertainty. Everyday I was certain something unexpected would happen and was always prepared for surprise.

Keith: I imagine you did not simply show up on the first day and decide to hand over freedom and responsibility to students. What kind of preparation and design work did you put into unleashing students while conforming to conventional teaching requirements?

Fisher: I was relatively confident, based on past consulting and community work, that the Discovery-and-Action research approach we were taking would deliver something of value to our client (Office of Residence Life & Health Education) and users (other students on campus). Unfailingly, in my experience, when people have the patience & discipline to listen, look, and immerse themselves in a relationship with users something ordinary, imperfect, or easily overlooked gets revealed and those observations have the potential to change everything. The trick is sitting long enough with a quiet voice that those subtle-yet-complex insights emerge.

In addition to my own experiential preparation for working in this way, I asked for design help from a variety of colleagues and friends. You, Henri, Carolyn Levy, Anna Jackson, and many others contributed directly and indirectly to the interaction design and specific sequencing of the experience.

I remember meeting Carolyn (who I had only ever talked with by phone) halfway between Seattle & Vancouver (her hometown) in Bellingham, WA and working on a draft of the course proposal. As an instructional designer, she was able to help me localize the abstract ideas floating around in my head and make them relevant to the Purposeful Work initiative goals. Her early guidance opened up new possibilities for how the class could be organized and managed.

Henri worked with me in his impossibly effective ways — playfully-yet-relentlessly stripping away any attachment or illusion I had about my role in the classroom and leaving me with just enough confidence to feel like we could always at least take the next step without know or predicting what the one after that might be. He was uncompromising in expecting an ever-clearer articulation of my purpose for the class. Each time I thought I had arrived at a good enough justification for the existence of the class, he would slyly suggest it was still not a convincing purpose. Eventually, I arrived at a purpose that resembled this: “The course exists in order to establish a 30-year learning partnership with participants through which we discover and develop our individual practice with Liberating Structures”. So far, more than two-and-a-half years into it, the results seem promising! I am in touch with about half the participants and see a few of them semi-regularly. One came to a recent LS workshop in NYC and helped introduce a few of the methods. That was a special moment for me.

This purpose supported us in adapting and changing the focus of the course as we progressed through the 5-week term together. It also demanded a different set of operating principles, or Minimum Specifications, and a focus on creating thicker and denser relational coordination & communication patterns between all of us.

On the conventional side of things, we did need to justify a slightly more tangible purpose to the College. So, to that end, we identified three key areas of focus:

• learning and putting into practice the LS repertoire;
• discovering and reflecting on the purposefulness of our work;
• and, making progress on campus health challenges by identifying a simple set of peer-to-peer interactions & behaviors that support healthy living and a healthy campus culture.

Keith: It seems so bold to rely on surprise and discovery in-the-moment. Was there a point in time in which you decided to risk using Liberating Structures to develop and teach your course at Bates College?

Fisher: No. There was never a possibility that this class could exist without Liberating Structures. I think the opposite is almost true — there were moments when I thought I wouldn’t teach the class if LS couldn’t be a core part of what the participants were learning.

Perhaps the moments where I was most doubtful related to interacting with the existing institutional planning & approval structure for practitioner classes. I needed to make the course look like something tangible that resembled a more conventional course in my proposals. One of the traps I needed continuously avoid as a result of the rigorous planning and preparation was that I risked getting attached to these more directed and preconfigured goals. By engaging in so much up-front thinking and planning, I began to believe the myth of myself as leader or teacher. Things became much more intellectually elaborate and ambitious than they needed to be. Without Henri around to constantly challenge that, I am sure it would have been easy to fall into inherited behaviors and beliefs about my role vis-a-vis the participants.

In hindsight, there are some simple shifts I could have made when communicating with the college about what it is the class was going to be about. For instance, I would have made the class much more explicitly about learning Liberating Structures while applying them to a consulting project. As it was, the class was framed more as a consulting project that participants would complete by using Liberating Structures.

This experience reinforced that it remains challenging for me to lead with LS as the core learning content instead of parasitically attaching it to something else. Even though doing so diminishes and detracts from the subtle and surprising power of the repertoire, it is still difficult and uncomfortable to introduce LS to anyone who hasn’t heard of it AND boldly suggest it can immediately change how groups interact, relate, and learn together. The nonlinear dynamics of LS are unfamiliar and we want to avoid the suggestion that this is magical or fantastical thinking. In the intervening years since working with the Bates participants, I’ve gotten more comfortable with this ambiguity while also seeking more and more precise-yet-whimsical ways of describing LS that (hopefully) maintains the fidelity & integrity of Keith & Henri’s principles.

Keith: It seems you were designing at the micro-scale in regard to peer learning and faculty-student classroom interaction WHILE attending simultaneously to larger scales (i.e., campus culture, social myths about learning, staff-faculty-student relationships). Was it your cunning plan for LS to break out of the classroom… with an eye toward a larger transformation?

Fisher: My initial thoughts about how to organize the class led me to structuring the overall experience in a hedging way so that participants were likely to get something from at least one of the three focus areas (learning LS, reflecting on purpose, and delivering insights and prototypes for campus health challenges). Without being explicit about it, I was exploring what was critical and uncertain about the proposed approach and developing strategies for working with whatever came our way. LS was an essential element in feeling like we were prepared for any scenario.

I gave quite a bit of attention during the initial planning (with incredible inputs from curriculum designers like Carolyn Levy) to the learning & development sequences across a range of ‘scales’. At each scale, I tried to draw out or include a specific set of activities that might help us make tangible progress, even if we were lurching or stopped at other scales.

Distributing our attention, efforts, and focus across scales required quite a bit of discipline (thankfully, Henri & Keith & Anna had my back throughout) and definitely made things swirly. From the individual participant, to the small group, to the full class, to the college department sponsoring our work, to the interdepartmental relationships, to the administrative & academic structures of the college, and beyond to the social mythologies that influence & govern how we organize for learning — I was confident that something surprising and nonlinear would happen in one of these areas that was worthy of our time together!

As with any reflection, certain things are retrospectively coherent. A recent pattern I’ve noticed in myself that is perhaps relevant to the way the Bates experience came together: I do not have ambitions. My goals for the course were not to achieve some dramatic transformation or deliver a terrific output. Rather, I was willing and ready to let the experience show us where we should be more ambitious and let that grow organically rather than trying to make something specific happen.

Keith: Did the dean or leaders at Bates have difficulty in understanding how or why you were planning to distribute more freedom and responsibility with Liberating Structures?

Fisher: To their credit, the people responsible for the practitioner taught classes at Bates gave me lots of autonomy when it came to how specific classroom interactions would be organized. Indeed, many of the people who lead the Purposeful Work initiative (both faculty & program managers) are either actively experiment with flipped classrooms or understand the need to move their own teaching practices in those directions.

It was the things I had little experience with in the conventional planning approach that were most challenging — the need to articulate learning outcomes (students will tell me what they learned as we go!), to predict a sequence of activities (I have no idea where we’ll be three weeks from now, but we’ll figure it out when we get there!), and the specificity of assignments (there will be some stuff to read, maybe?).

Going through the design and composition of the course schedule, syllabus, and proposal process revealed some ways in which I remained tied to and not fully liberated from my own learning experiences as an undergraduate student and my assumptions about how much structure to provide. In my mind, I was ready to show up and see what happens while at the same time desiring structure!

Keith: What happened the first day? You started immediately to offer students more freedom and more responsibility. Did they accept your offer with open arms?

Fisher: Well here’s the storyboard. Even this got adjusted as we went through the day. It was luxurious to have the time to be able to move slowly through the introduction and initial practice of each structure. Henri really helped me with composing & pacing the first few days of the class.

If you don’t want to read through the full storyboard, here’s what I recall happening:

• I pre-set the room by getting rid of the tables, figuring out how to play music, laid out the Surprising Power of Liberating Structures book with a set of design cards, and put up a Kanban of our full set of activities for the first week of class

Photo on the right by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College

• When the participants came in, I had some music playing, said hello, gave a 3 minute introduction to our work together, and then invited them to stand-up and find a partner. We then worked through Impromptu Networking (with the prompt “what do you hope to give to and get from this experience?”) and debriefed the structural elements of the method
• I then asked if anyone was interested in trying to lead another round of Impromptu Networking. Someone cautiously raised their hand. After reviewing the steps & instructions, giving a quick tutorial on ringing the bells, and quickly sorting out the invitation or discussion they wanted to use (“what’s your experience of a difficult health situation?”), we were off-and-running

Photo by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College

• We followed up this second round of Impromptu Networking with another debrief and then asked if another person wanted to try it out. We got yet another volunteer and ran through it a third time
• We repeated this same pattern (me introducing and running a structure the first time and then asking for two volunteers to do the same) in subsequent rounds of 1–2–4-All and What, So What, Now What for the remainder of our first day together
• At the end of the day, participants were given their first ‘assignment’: Select one of the methods from today and go figure out a way to use it tonight. We worked right then on helping each person select the structure they wanted to try out and sorting out the details of the question, prompt, or invitation they wanted to make
• Day 2 began with a Users Experience Fishbowl to debrief what happened the night before and we progressed into the same approach from Day 1 for the rest of the week. This kind of deliberate-and-dense practice quickly built up each person’s repertoire, familiarity, and confidence

While we’d have to ask them what it was like learning in this way, from my point-of-view, we offered far more freedom AND responsibility than might be expected in a conventional classroom or learning environment. One of the great pleasures for me when working with young people is that their defense mechanisms are still under-development (AND it’s likely they were still trained to respect my positional authority in the classroom and so went along with it). Their lack of hesitation was intoxicating to be around. Of course there were moments when they were uncertain or unclear and would turn to me for more guidance or direction and I would offer it, reluctantly.

I believe each person embraced my offer to mutually learn together. And, I suspect that they longed for an invitation to contribute to & participate more fully in their own learning. In my opinion, the structures helped facilitate them safely taking bolder risks when it came to assuming greater freedom & responsibility in shaping the direction forward.

One example of the freedom we offered in the classroom relates to Henri’s first moments with us. He softly-yet-subversively asked me in front of everyone whether I had introduced the Law of Personal Translocation. In the absence of a good excuse — and amid curious looks on the faces of participants — we immediately made it a Minimum Specification or simple rule for the class: If you find yourself neither learning something nor contributing at any point in this class it is your responsibility to exercise your own personal agency and move to a place where you can learn or contribute… even if that means going someplace else entirely. This principle shifted the stakes of the class.

Since so much of the class was organized through group work, the Law of Personal Translocation really put it on the participants to manage themselves. When individual team members started to use the Law of Personal Translocation during a team session, it immediately drew everyone’s attention to the pattern of interaction and, I think, resulted in greater care and awareness about how they were working together.

In hindsight, the Law of Personal Translocation freed me up from worrying about — or taking personally — tardiness, absence, or other signs of disengagement. It made it easy to trust that if someone was not present then it was because they had something more important to do — and what better learning outcome than young people making clear, unambiguous choices about the value of their time and how to spend it purposefully?

Throughout, the most difficult part for me was letting go of my imagined responsibility to ‘educate & teach them’. This showed up both in how overthought much of my planning was AND in what I was pushing for, instead of inviting them to pull us forward towards what mattered. Quickly (with the help of Henri, Keith, et al) I was able to confront my own presumptions about where I needed to TAKE the class. Eventually, I grew more comfortable and confident with the class collectively taking US somewhere.

Keith: So, with a little encouragement, you stopped over-helping and over-controlling students. You responsibly let go of control by replacing conventional teaching methods with LS microstructures. It feels like minimalism taken to an extreme. What did your class experience look like and feel like?

Fisher: I think it looked lively. Initially it was quite sparse — I spent the first whole day prior to the start of classes moving and collapsing all the heavy tables arranged in perfect rows and pushing them up against the windows. The result was a pretty spartan open space with a few chalkboards, an open wall, and the bank of windows overlooking the primary campus walkway.

Over time the room became an artful & colorful expression of our learning journey. In many ways, the room/space itself became a canvas that reflected our discoveries. Everyday we had music of all stripes on. Drawing became an integral part of the classroom experience, too.

Perhaps what struck me most was the body posture of participants. By the second day, students were sitting on the floor, lying down on the carpet. To me, it looked perfectly healthy — even if from the outside it might’ve appeared like we’d returned to an early learning environment. I was proud that we developed the level of comfort to be physically comfortable in the space. There was something tender about the movement back into the floor — as if we were embodying both the intimacy of the learning itself and our research work which meant immersing ourselves at the feet of peers.

First and second photos in bottom row by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College

Keith: What difference did it make to create a space for the artful expression of student discoveries? You were still focused on designing a peer-to-peer campus health initiative, right? What did you hear from the students as they got their feet wet shaping next steps and building on their own discoveries regarding health challenges on campus?

Fisher: What I heard and saw was curiosity in the underlying organization of groups. Given that the content of the course was focused on strategy & health, I was surprised by the depth, quality and sophistication of their inquiry into the nature of organizing. It makes me think that much of what LS makes possible and the insights from complexity science that inspire much of the LS theory are more intuitive than we might have guessed. It seems like there is a know-how about LS that invites, without much prompting, deeper investigation or consideration into the micro-organization of our interactions.

What difference did it make? That’s hard to tell. Mostly I’ve been paying attention to what’s happening now for the participant. My hope is to be able observe the difference it made for them over the next 10 years. Did something happen during our time together that opened up an adjacent possibility? Did a new horizon come into view that re-arranged their view on the world? Did a new relationship form — to others, to themselves, to an idea — that induced enough emotional, intellectual or social entanglement that it led to a developmental advance? Did they move from relying on external sources of authority and truth towards self-authoring their own experience?

These are the kinds of questions I’m most interested in when it comes to understanding & evaluating any difference the class and the structure of our interactions made for the participants.

Keith: You must have bumped into barriers along the way. What were some of them?

Fisher: Many of the barriers were erected by myself — my own imagination limiting how far we went. The barriers that were most insidious mostly had to do with my desire and need to produce something tangible for the client, in this case the student affairs office sponsoring the project. I sometimes found myself selling the result even though I knew that it was the way we were getting there that made the difference.

Keith: I happened to be in the room when students were sharing their research and discoveries with the health and student affairs staff. It seemed the staff were blown away by the depth of understanding and analysis generated by students. Further, the students seemed reluctant about handing over their work to staff. They owned the work and were powerful authors of next steps. Was this a creative tension you were managing throughout the course?

Fisher: There were moments when everyone was struggling with the ambiguity and complexity of the data. The inherited expectation was that we were supposed to be delivering something that resembled a product or more tangible output, rather than a subtle shift in peer relations, personal responsibility, and collective freedom. This created tension and helped us make deeper progress together. The action research helped us understand that what was needed wasn’t a new service, policy, or set of products, but rather tiny shifts in the arrangement of physical spaces, renewed focus on social interactions & relations, and a commitment to sharing responsibility for collective health, wellbeing, and vitality more widely between peers, faculty, and campus staff.

Keith: Your schedule was grueling. Given this was you first foray into teaching, you must have lost your way or experienced “confusiasm.” How did you formulate next steps as the action research progressed?

Fisher: For me, the schedule was addicting. The density, cadence, and thickness of interaction everyday proved deeply satisfying. I am still chasing that feeling and only catch glimpses of it. It is clear that learning environments, when organized with Liberating Structures, change something fundamental about our relationships and that is simultaneously terrifying AND I can’t get enough of it.

Keith: Clearly you believe the outcomes were very positive. What was different about this approach? How did you assess movement forward and student performance?

Fisher: Assessing student learning became one of the key innovations for my own practice out of this experience. Thanks to conversations with Anna Jackson, I introduced a variety of developmental activities/structures that helped each person pay attention to their own learning and that of their classmates in more careful & imaginative ways. We regularly tapped Drawing Together, Troika Consulting, Critical Uncertainties, and some new (though now more common) practices like 10x10 Writing and the Spiral Journal.

Our weekly schedule involved 4.5 hours of interactions on Monday — Thursday. During this time we were focused on learning LS, doing field work, debriefing and making sense of the data participants were gathering, and sharing the experience with others on campus.

Fridays involved 90 mins of weekly developmental reflection and opportunities to integrate learning in a different way. The format of these sessions remained mostly the same, though the topics sometimes shifted. We organized the time into three sequences:

• Individual writing using the 10x10 format with additional freeform compositions based on their responses (we kept about half of the 10 prompts the same week-to-week so that participants could see how their ideas were changing over time)
• Troika Consultations on a developmental challenge or topic selected by each person

• Drawing Together of the previous week’s experience

The individual practices generated artifacts that we gathered each week and at the conclusion of the course used as an accumulated way to describe the developmental narrative that each person had gone through. My favorite example of this came through Drawing Together.

Individual sequences from students

Future drawings from the same participants in the top row

On the final day of the class, I taped up each person’s 4 drawings from the previous weeks. They were invited to look at their drawings with the invitation: “This is the accumulation of your experience. Notice what happened. How do you feel now? Draw your future looking ahead through the lens of our experience together.”

The drawings completely blew me away. Looking at any individual’s full sequence from Week 1 through the future drawing of Week 5 makes it clear that something happened for each person. What I appreciated about the drawings is that the result is perfectly ambiguous AND perfectly evident. For me, the specifics are less interesting than the overall story.

In addition to the individual drawings, we also did a variety of group illustration. The first time was an attempt to notice how each team of 4–5 participants was organizing themselves. We invited the teams to stand around a large piece of paper and start drawing their experience as a team. They could start in two ways: Alone begin in the corners and draw towards each other in the center of the page OR begin with each person adding a symbol and drawing out from an initial set of contributions. Regardless of how the team’s started, every 3 mins I asked them to stop and notice how they were coordinating relationally around the task. It quickly became evident that each group had a different approach to navigating the tension between integration and autonomy when working together.

Towards the final week, we also did a group mural using the Drawing Together symbols. This remains the enduring image for me of the experience. Keith and Anna were there and thanks to some photographic magic, we have this beautiful sequence showing how the full experience of the class came together. No single person authored the experience. No single person can interpret it. The image, for me, is as beautifully complex and messy as the narrative itself. What’s your interpretation or evaluation of the experience?

Keith: You tapped a wide array of learning methods from artists, philosophers, and complexity science. What did you learn from working across disciplines?

Fisher: I owe deep bows for gratitude to many people. Top of the list is you, Keith, for always provoking and drawing out more. I also borrowed liberally from Lynda Barry’s inspired approaches to teaching & learning. Pat King for shaping my understanding of what education can be about — creating opportunities and inviting people to discover how they can self-author their own experience. Henri for pushing the responsibility and freedom to make choices and design the learning experience down to the smallest possible unit — in this case individual students. Anna for making the trek to Maine and generously sharing her experience with the participants while always offering more nuanced lenses through which to view the design & interactions. And, Carolyn for enthusiastically offering to help mould my early thinking into something more deliberate and carefully composed.

Keith: Would you like to offer advice to other teachers getting started with LS?

Fisher: This came up quite a bit as the other practitioners teaching classes at Bates during the same term shared experiences about what was happening in their courses. I would frequently make tiny suggestions about simple ways to incorporate LS into any of their classes.

Perhaps the most direct example was the journalism class. The two practitioners would invite a few students to submit their articles, pull it up on the overhead projector, and then live-edit the students’ work for everyone to see while adding commentary along the way. While there is a justifiable reason for doing this — getting to see how a professional editor thinks about excising a piece of writing — there’s no reason that the responsibility for that needed to rest solely with the professionals. So, instead, we suggested that they try using Troika Consultations. Invite trios to form up, have the first writer share his/her piece with their peers, describe the few places they felt less confident, and then turn around and listen as the pair edited the article and provided commentary — just as the instructor was doing. This kind of peer feedback both let each person practice the editorial role AND make it safe(r) to have work critiqued without needing to submit to the gauntlet of a professional editor working on your piece on front of class.

These kinds of small, simple integrations of LS don’t compromise or compete with the existing content or teaching methodologies. Instead they enhance and complement the learning.

Second, it is remarkable how much trust and willingness the participants demonstrated. Perhaps coming from the professional world I was expecting much deeper skepticism and cynicism from the students, but everyone just jumped right in. The classroom is a very forgiving environment to advance YOUR OWN learning in addition to your students. Don’t neglect what you still can learn from your students!

Keith: Thanks for sharing your experience. Since Bates, is there another teaching and learning experience where you have taken these ideas to another level?

Fisher: What is happening at KaosPilots deserves much more attention and focus. But, we have others who can write about that!

References & Links:

• Descriptions of the different methods & Liberating Structures can be found here, here, and here.
• Collection of complexity science & other learning materials used during the class
• Syllabus 1 — Unconventional
• Syllabus 2 — Conventional
• Some books that directly influenced my thinking about organizing for learning include: Unflattening by Nick Sousanis, What It Is & Syllabus by Lynda Barry, Learning Partnerships: Theories and Models of Practice to Educate for Self-Authorship edited by Marcia Baxter Magolda & Patricia King, Cartooning Philosophy & Practice by Ivan Brunetti, Making Their Own Way: Narratives for Transforming Higher Education to Promote Self-Development by Marcia Baxter Magolda, and Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse
• The course tapped many design thinking approaches and insinuated LS into them. Two brief examples include introducing Wicked Questions as the format for how might we statements and What, So What, Now What as a way to visually and structurally organize affinity mapping. If you are interested in other ways that LS can be brought directly into design processes, please reach out. Fisher@back-loop.com