Faculty life can be lonely. We craft research agendas in quiet reading rooms and at crowded conferences, face mountains of grading, and only rarely check in with each other. This life becomes all the more lonesome when our research and beliefs fall outside the norms of our departments or disciplines. 

And yet, so much professional growth happens when we engage with one another – trading notes on teaching, borrowing writing strategies, commiserating in difficult seasons. Are we barred from this sense of community if our beliefs and inquiries are counter-cultural or we feel pressure to stay quiet? Might it actually be exciting heterodox praxis to suggest that communities of practice are essential to our work? If so, how do we build reliable, supportive communities into our professional lives? What practices can prevent us from sticking it out in our own little ruts? 

HxA has spent years uniquely dedicated to cultivating faculty support groups and communities of practice. Participants will walk away from this workshop with:

•  Strategies and approaches for cultivating professional support groups centered on teaching, writing, and campus life;

•  Collaborative reflection on questions like How often should we meet? Where? What should we do together and between meetings?; 

•  Examples of existing and ideal professional group arrangements;

•  A plan for their own in-person or virtual community. 

About Kyle Sebastian Vitale: Kyle Sebastian Vitale, Ph.D. is Director of Programs at Heterodox Academy. He comes to HxA with a background in higher education, program management, and learning theory. Prior to joining the HxA team he supported teaching and learning initiatives at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Yale University, and Temple University. He grew to love the higher education mission while reading, writing, and teaching all things Shakespeare. Kyle has taught literature, writing, and professional development for over a decade, and is co-editor of the book Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy: Case Studies and Strategies (Bloomsbury, December 2021)

As toxic polarization continues its rise, the battle of “us vs. them” tends to flood the zone with sludge. The severity of this problem on campus makes it easy to lose touch with the joy and transcendence of practices that help us embrace our differences and work together toward the production of knowledge. 

In this workshop Liz Joyner, founder of The Village Square (an organization that gathers citizens voluntarily in large numbers to disagree) will help participants explore how a joyful pursuit of open inquiry can do more than just save our sanity; joy might be our most powerful tool for restoring trust in our institutions and each other. 

As one of HxA’s Applied Heterodoxy instructors and co-founder of the Respect + Rebellion project, Liz will share frame-shifting strategies culled from decades of practice, like “taking the carom shot” and “thinking center out,” that bring more joy to our heterodoxy.

Participants will come away with:

• Fresh ways of thinking about challenges educators face—and potential solutions;

• Concrete models that can make disagreement less of a slog and more of a hero’s journey;

• Less fear, more hope. With any luck, more joy.

About Village Square: The Village Square is devoted to building civic trust between people who don’t look or think alike, and has a decade and a half of experience elevating the value of difference of opinion in a way that draws large numbers of people together in the common cause of constructive disagreement. The Village Square talks about the things your mother warned you to never discuss in polite company—politics, religion and race. They’ve hosted hundreds of conversations with tens of thousands of people, leveraging contact and systems theories (and food) to build strong communities across our differences.

 About Liz Joyner: Liz Joyner, a clinical social worker with training in family systems theory, conceptualized The Village Square—what former NEH Chair Jim Leach has since called “a model for the land”—after her experience volunteering in politics convinced her that the way we work out our disagreements in today’s public square is fundamentally flawed. Her organization received a Statewide Impact Award from Leadership Florida and was an inaugural Civvy Award nominee and Liz was profiled in USA Today’s “I am an American” series. A Washington, D.C. native, Liz has enjoyed a lifetime of learning the value respectful disagreement brings to people, problems and relationships—and to a nation that embraces its power—and is stubbornly bound and determined to keep vibrant differences of opinion openly and constructively engaged.

How can high school leaders and educators create a school or classroom environment that encourages open inquiry? How can curricula and pedagogical approaches ensure that diverse viewpoints are fairly represented? What conditions need to be in place for the possibility of constructive disagreement?

Learning environment design informs the extent to which teachers can easily embed the values of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement into their instructional practices. Even when the curriculum is set, teachers can inventively design the environment in such a way that these values are the norm. 

The HxA Way and accompanying instructional frameworks are available to help create such an environment. This workshop will introduce high school leaders and educators to these existing frameworks and offer an opportunity for participants to plan how to adopt or adapt all or pieces of the frameworks into their instructional design. In addition, the workshop will provide the space for participants to brainstorm and test out these ideas with fellow school leaders and educators.

Participants will walk away with:

• Knowledge about instructional frameworks that align with HxA’s values;

• Collections of ideas from peers regarding how to implement these values;

• Preliminary plans for how to adapt their own instructional design.

About Samantha Hedges: Samantha Hedges, Ph.D. is HxA’s Program Manager. She has a background in K-12 and higher education and public policy advocacy. Prior to joining the HxA team, Samantha was an elementary school teacher for Chicago Public Schools and public policy advocate for child and youth public health programs, early childhood education, and youth after-school programs in Illinois. While pursuing her Ph.D., she studied how evidence is used in policymaking for K-12 education and taught an undergraduate course that prepared aspiring teachers to enter the profession. Samantha earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education, a master’s degree in social work, and a doctorate degree in education policy studies.

Many people have mixed feelings about collaboration. On the one hand, they know collaboration is essential to achieve complex goals. On the other hand, they know collaboration is a slog. People pull in different directions. There’s desperately little communication and even less follow through. One person ends up doing all the work. The result? Friction mounts. Projects fizzle. Great people walk.

Here’s why: Very few of us ever receive any formal training in how to collaborate well.

In this interactive session, Deb Mashek will draw on her deep experience as a close relationships researcher, collaboration facilitator, and award-winning teacher to reveal what you need to know to build healthy and productive inter-organizational collaborative relationships.

In this workshop participants will:

• Examine the meaning of collaboration; 

• Reflect on their personal and organizational interests in pursuing truly collaborative projects;

• Identify the extent to which they and their potential partners have in place the necessary capacities and supports for feasible and sustainable inter-organizational collaboration; 

• Explore points of overlap and tension in the mindsets, concerns, enthusiasms, and drivers of potential stakeholders; and 

• Identify specific practices individuals and organizations can take to better position themselves to realize the promise and potential of inter-organizational collaborations.

You will walk away from this session with tools and perspectives to strengthen your current and future collaborative relationships.

About Myco Consulting LLC: Myco Consulting LLC (www.myco.consulting) provides advising and professional development to leaders looking to cultivate collaboration among diverse stakeholders in order to accomplish ambitious goals. 

About Deb Mashek: Deb Mashek, Ph.D. is an experienced professor, higher education administrator, and national nonprofit executive. She is the author of the forthcoming book Collabor(h)ate: Build incredible collaborative relationships at work (even if you’d rather work alone). Named one of the Top 35 Women in Higher Education by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, she has been featured in media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Hechinger Report, Inside Higher Ed, Fortune, Reason, Business Week, University Business Insider, and The Hill. She writes regularly for Psychology Today.

Previously Full Professor of Social Psychology at Harvey Mudd College, Deb served as the college’s Associate Dean for Faculty Development and as the founding Director of the Claremont College’s Office of Consortial Academic Collaboration. She served as the inaugural Executive Director of Heterodox Academy, a national nonprofit advancing constructive disagreement on college campuses. Deb serves on the board of BridgeUSA, is a Senior Fellow at Claremont Graduate University.

Deb is the founder of Myco Consulting LLC, where she speaks, advises, and provides professional development to those seeking to cultivate collaboration among diverse stakeholders to accomplish ambitious goals. 

Imagine you are launching a bridgebuilding initiative. Maybe it’s a campus program, classroom assignment, or a national conference. You take care to create a space where people from diverse identities and divergent perspectives can engage each other productively. You intentionally invite people from a variety of races, ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, political perspectives, and educational backgrounds. But what about religious backgrounds?

For specific historical and cultural reasons, religious identity has often been de-emphasized in efforts to engage diversity proactively, especially in academia. But not only is this a glaring oversight of a frequently salient and often under-attended form of identity, religious traditions and identities also bring unique assets to bridgebuilding work.

Interfaith America has worked with over 500 campuses, multiple Fortune 500 companies, and governmental institutions to inspire, equip, and connect leaders and institutions to unlock the potential of America’s religious diversity.

In this workshop participants will come away with:

• A deeper understanding of the unique, salient, and contested role of religious identity in American higher education and U.S. culture;

• Insight into and examples of the distinctive assets that religious traditions bring to bridgebuilding efforts, and viewpoint diversity moreover;

• Concrete strategies and approaches for more effectively engaging the religious identities and diversities of their context.

About Interfaith America: Religious diversity is a foundational American strength. Interfaith America is building a nation that achieves that promise for the common good. We are a national non-profit working toward an America where people of different faiths, worldviews, and traditions can bridge differences and find common values to build a shared life together. ​Our mission is to inspire, equip, and connect leaders and institutions to unlock the potential of America’s religious diversity.

About Noah J. Silverman: Noah J. Silverman serves as Senior Director of Learning at Interfaith America. He holds an MA in religion from New York University and has been involved in interfaith work for two decades on three continents. In addition to his work with Interfaith America, Noah has served as the Associate Director of Multifaith Education at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City and has worked for Religions for Peace at the United Nations, the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Barcelona, the Interfaith Encounter Association and the Seeds of Peace Center for Coexistence in Jerusalem, and the Tony Blair Faith Foundation in London. Noah has consulted with dozens of colleges and universities and written numerous articles and chapters on the methodology of interfaith cooperation and the growing academic field of interfaith studies, including co-editing Interreligious/Interfaith Studies: Defining a New Field (Beacon Press, 2018).

This workshop draws on Counterweight’s organizational expertise to explore two primary approaches to social justice – liberal and critical. While these two approaches may appear similar to an unfamiliar observer, this workshop clarifies their fundamental philosophical and practical differences, along with their real-world consequences for public policy, academic institutions, and everyday life. 

During the workshop we will explore the liberal approach to social justice with its focus on individualism, pluralism, and universalism grounded in the human capacity for reason and truth. We will examine the benefits of adopting a liberal approach to social justice over a critical one, whose potentially valuable aspects are often lost in its focus on collective identity, conceptions of power, and relative conceptions of truth. 

One need not arrive with an understanding of these terms. The workshop will define them and use an interactive approach to explore why a liberal conception of social justice is essential to meaningful progress and a just world.

Participants will come away with:

• An understanding of critical social justice (CSJ) and the nature of the debate around it;

• An understanding of why CSJ and liberalism are ideologically opposed rather than complementary;

• An understanding of what liberal social justice is, its merits over a critical approach, and methods for adoption.

About Counterweight: Counterweight is a UK-based non-partisan liberal humanist organization and educational platform providing support to individuals confronting illiberal ideology in the workplace and in education. It is committed to liberal values like freedom of speech, tolerance and the marketplace of ideas.