Cohort 1 Culminating Meeting
May 9, 2023, 11:00-2:00 ADT | 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm CDT
Goals:
- Celebrate the work of AK UNiTE Cohort 1
- Consider individual and collective next steps
- Reflect on the cohort and community of practice experience in the context of planning for the next cohort
Pre-meeting work
- Use the following form to reflect on your experience as part of the cohort
- Your reflection will be turned into a workspace page, visible to AK UNiTE participants and leaders but not the public. The reflections will be used to prompt discussions during the workshop.
Program
11:00 - Welcome and goals for the day - Rachael and Cailin
11:10 - Warming the space activities - Cindy, Erin, & Alison
11:20 - Participant sharing - John
- Each participant shares the thing they are looking forward to doing next with what they've learned as part of the project. (From the Pre-work reflection). Participants will discuss similarities and differences in the group's action plans.
- Notes Page
12:20 - Discuss synthesis of the sharing - Cailin
- Big take-home messages about individual work
- Revisit the synthesis of our sharing and add as needed
- Notes Page
Themes
- Time is tight and this work can be hard to make time and space for as all the other things are rolling along at the same time. Busyness and being spread thin is a common challenge.
- Working together on mentoring - not having to do it all ourselves - is a positive way forward and might conserve energy and make problems that look too big manageable to approach.
- It's easiest to be excited about a new idea, opportunity, network etc. at the beginning. And it's a little harder to manage the reflective practices of considering how to follow through with the idea intentionally and making time for the community building, planning, making time. These might be the key to making the work possible after the initial excitement.
- Planning for change is going to be critical to keep on track. Evolution of a network, external forces, people changing positions etc. are inevitable and considering how to manage them before they happen will be helpful.
- Want to keep sharing out what has been learned and the new ideas about how to learn and where to learn from. Looking for new people to share with.
- We can change the culture away from the Western-based structures in higher education that aren't working for us.
12:30 Break
12:45 - Community of Practice Writing Exercise - John
- Communities of Practice spend time writing up a short summary of the issues their group wanted to address, what they did, and what they learned. Use the templated pages to draft your text.
- The point of this activity is to develop a short write-up of each group's effort for the public website.
1:30 - Synthesis discussion - Rachael
Looking ahead to supporting the next Cohort, we will discuss:
- What to make sure to keep
- What to try that would be new
- How do people want to be involved moving forward
We will keep notes in a Jamboard.
Other things that came up in the discussion of the jamboards
- Radical Gratitude Spell link
- There will be more cohorts - the first one was smaller than proposed so there are stipends available.
- Funds in the NSF budget can be for stipends or travel. Not for speaker honoraria or renting spaces etc. that are out of scope for this project.
- There may be other opportunities to apply for funding in the future for other, new activities - this is for us to decide.
- The project is planning on having a student who has experience with community development involved this summer. This might invite new opportunities for programming.
- There is funding for developing CUREs (see CUREnet for more about what CUREs can look)
Rachael is really excited about baby moose.
2:00 - End