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Several teachers at NMC have been experimenting with non-traditional grading and the effects it has on student motivation and learning. Come explore a variety of models and talk through ways it might work in your course.

Facilitators: Nick Roster, Stewart Jack
Location - Room: WH14

Sign up HERE!

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Providing resources for students to succeed in challenging times

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Providing resources for students to succeed in challenging times

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Many students struggle with issues like food insecurity, lack of access to affordable housing and child care, mental health pressures, loss of income, etc. These issues are even more pronounced due to the pandemic. Come discuss the issues you are seeing our students struggle with as well as learn about some of the resources NMC and the community offer. Then investigate and develop other ways that we collectively and individually can help students meet their basic needs.

Facilitators: Lisa Thomas, Madison Thompson
Location - Zoom: Click here to join!

Sign up HERE!

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Adopting or creating open educational resources 

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Adopting or creating open educational resources 

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What is OER? How does it work? What resources are available for finding, using, modifying and sharing materials? Who can you count on for help? Session will include discussion, self-paced learning, and individual office hours. Bring your laptop and plan to do some exploration! Watch for a special celebrity guest!

Facilitator: Joelle Hannert
Location - Zoom: Click here to join.

Sign up HERE!

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Why are you excited about this topic? What are you hoping to learn?

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Why are you excited about this topic? What are you hoping to learn?

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Creating a new post-pandemic customer service experience 

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Creating a new post-pandemic customer service experience 

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Creating a welcoming and positive experience online or in-person is challenging since the pandemic for your customers/ learners. What have we learned about customer service during the pandemic? Join this learning and panel discussion to explore best-practice in supporting students/employees and the public.

Facilitators: Shannon Schultz, Denny Nguyen, Kristy McDonald
Location - Beckett 215 or WH103

Sign up HERE!

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Why are you excited about this topic? What are you hoping to learn?

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Michigan Colleges Online is an initiative of the Michigan Community College Association and the 28 Michigan community colleges (including NMC). The MCO provides this opportunity for the member institutions as a way to increase student success and completion, reduce costs for students and allow for inter-institutional collaboration with faculty.

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LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: OER @ NMC

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LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: OER @ NMC

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This is a Padlet. Please sign up for your topic. Feel free to add and review resources on any topic. Watch the video below to learn more about NMC October Conference and your role in it!

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This is a Padlet. Please sign up for your topic. Feel free to add and review resources on any topic. Watch the video below to learn more about NMC October Conference and your role in it!

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Do you have an idea for a TOPIC you'd like to see explored?

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Do you have an idea for a TOPIC you'd like to see explored?

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Click here for the Call for Proposals form.

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are open groups. You can leave a comment, add a resource or commit to joining this group in October.

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is for closed groups meaning you can't join them unless you are a part of that team. This is likely a department with a specific task for the day. These are listed here as a way to share the learning happening all over NMC.

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Do you have a fabulous resource to contribute?

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Do you have a fabulous resource to contribute?

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Even if you aren't planning to participate in a particular learning group, you may have amazing resources to enrich the day. Go to the bottom of the column and hit the + sign. From there you can use the arrow to upload a doc, the link to add a weblink, or the triple dots to get to a whole list of things you can add. And on behalf of your colleagues, thanks!

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Why is a sense of community important? How does it impact the student or employee experience? What difference does it make? What can be done throughout the college to help create a culture of belonging? Join this group to explore this topic and possibilities at NMC.

Facilitators: Hollie DeWalt, Betsy Boris
Location - Zoom: Click here to join

Sign up HERE!

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EdTech - Transition to a new video platform

Facilitator: Terri Gustafson
Location - West Hall 15
Closed Group

Sign up HERE!

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Rethinking the Comp Sequence and Capstone

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Rethinking the Comp Sequence and Capstone

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Comp faculty + library liaison
Revision of the comp sequence and capstone project

Facilitator: Michael Anderson
Location - SH103/105
Closed Group

Sign up HERE!

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Why are you excited about this topic? What are you hoping to learn?

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Using design principles for better documents, presentations, and flyers 

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Using design principles for better documents, presentations, and flyers 

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Do your documents need more life? With just a basic knowledge of design principles, your documents can go from boring and hard to read, to lively and easy to understand.  We will cover the basics of type and color selection, object alignment and page layout using word processing and presentation software, and Adobe Spark, a free Web-based design app. We’ll help you emphasize what’s important to help you better get your message across. You will spend the afternoon taking an existing project of your own and applying what you’ve learned.

Facilitators: Alison Thornton & Alex Smith
Location - Zoom: Click here to join
Meeting ID: 964 8953 2984
Passcode: 251520

Sign up HERE!

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Mapping the Student Financial Aid Journey

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Mapping the Student Financial Aid Journey

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Financial Aid Staff will spend the day researching best practices and software options and create a visual map of the financial aid journey.

Facilitator: Linda Berlin
Location - Zoom: Click here to join
Closed Group

Sign up HERE!

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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Colleges, for generations, have encouraged new students to "find their place" in student organizations on campus. That's bad advice, writes Lisa M. Nunn in College Belonging: How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life (Rutgers University Press). Nunn, a professor of sociology and the director of the Center for Educational Excellence at the University of San Diego, writes that the traditional approach puts too much of the onus for belonging on the new student. And this approach, she writes, is particularly bad for first-generation college students.

Nunn answered questions about her book via email.
Q: What's wrong with the "find your place" message colleges typically give students?
A: The problem is that the message implicitly puts the onus on the students to find their own belonging. Yes, we do have to make some effort to join new communities or orgs; we can't just shut ourselves up in our dorm rooms and never talk to anyone. But also, I can't just walk up to a new group I want to be a part of, knock on the door and demand belonging. It doesn't work like that. Belonging only happens when the group offers it to me. When they welcome me in and make a place for me. When the group makes me feel valued and important. I can't simply go out and get belonging for myself just because I want it. It has to be given to me by a community.

So the call to "get out there and find your place" might be helpful to nudge students out the door, but it sets up an expectation that it's my responsibility to find my own belonging. And if for some reason I don't feel like I belong anywhere in campus life, then the message is clear: it's my own damn fault. No matter how hard I tried to find my place, if I didn't find it, I'm the one who failed. What my book argues is that the responsibility lies with communities for welcoming students and weaving them into the fabric of campus life. When a student feels alone and adrift, she is not the one who failed. Her campus community has failed her. It's a sociological perspective on how communities work and how belonging works.
Q: Is that message wrong both for first-generation students and for other students?
A: What I found in 186 interviews with students on two different campuses is that continuing-generation students have a more straightforward path to belonging. It's not perfect; there are ups and downs, and of course, college life is new for all first-year students, so there are adjustments they have to navigate. But continuing-gen students -- particularly those who are in the racial majority on their campus -- are more likely to feel at home at college more readily than first-generation students and underrepresented students of color. So, this message -- "find your place" -- doesn't pose as big of a burden for them. Many continuing-gen students are able to dabble in a few clubs, student orgs or teams and find a couple that feel right without too much effort. For these students, campus feels like it is just teeming with other people who are similar to them, who enjoy the same activities, who care about the same issues and who seem to genuinely want them around.

First-generation students, on the other hand, more often describe "finding their place" as a struggle. Joining club after club, trying org after org, searching for a place where they feel at home, searching for people who make them feel wanted and valued. And feeling frustrated by the awkwardness and disappointment when yet another group is not the right one. As I point out in the book, these clubs and orgs and communities are withholding belonging rather than offering it. But from a student's perspective, these feel like moments of personal failure. And rejection stings. It requires enduring courage and a great deal of effort to "find your place" when campus feels like it is teeming with people who don't get you or aren't interested in who you are in the first place.
Q: How does belonging differ when talking about campus social groups and academics?
A: One of the most interesting findings in this project is the way that students talk about belonging as happening in three distinct realms. There's social belonging that takes the form of friendships as well as membership in clubs, teams or student orgs that make you feel important. The kind of group where you know you would be missed if you didn't show up one day. There's also campus-community belonging that takes the form of feeling comfortable in your own skin as you walk around campus; feeling that the amenities and events exist for you to enjoy, designed with you in mind. And you feel entitled to partake in them. There's also academic belonging, which takes the form of feeling competent in your classes, like you have what it takes to keep up with others, maybe even feeling confident enough to raise your hand in class or talk to a professor one on one. Students I interviewed made it clear that having belonging in one realm does not automatically lead to belonging in any other realm, even though there is some connection among them. For example, I might have found some really great friends who are a second family to me, but when I'm walking through the student union or sitting down in class, I might still feel alienated or out of place. I might doubt whether I should be at this college at all.
Q: When the new students is a member of a minority group, how does that change belonging?
A: Many college campuses are white spaces -- certainly the two in my study are. So it's perhaps not a surprise that underrepresented students of color described more obstacles to social belonging and campus-community belonging. They didn't see much of their heritage reflected in campus events or curriculum. They didn't see many of their favorite foods in the campus markets or their favorite music playing in the rec center or their favorite fashions in the bookstore. They were more likely to describe dorm roommates that made them feel invisible or irrelevant, or who eyed them suspiciously. This wasn't the case for every student of color, of course, but these were salient parts of the college experience for some.

One important dynamic is something that came through interviews with white students. They overwhelmingly said that they value ethnoracial diversity and desire to be part of a student body that includes people from different races, ethnicities and backgrounds from themselves. However, when they talked about it, they described a kind of ideal for ethnoracial diversity in which nonwhite students would blend themselves in to campus life without making a fuss. Many white students saw it as the task of others to "integrate," "fuse," "mix" or "coexist" (all words that students used in interviews) without making anyone else feel uncomfortable about it.

In the book I call this a desire for nice diversity, drawing on Angelina Castagno's ideas about the ways that niceness is foundational to whiteness. Accordingly, many ethnoracial majority students (white and, at one of my campus sites, also Asian) expressed dismay and frustration when students were part of clubs or orgs that centered on an ethnoracial identity, such as the popular Latino-Chicano Resource Center at one campus in my study. White students perceived it as divisive, exclusionary and, well, not nice, when students of color "huddle off together," to use one respondent's phrase, instead of blending themselves in to the larger campus culture. So, underrepresented students of color felt -- quite accurately -- a sense of distrust and a withholding of belonging from ethnoracial majority students around campus.
Q: What is your advice to colleges that want to make students welcome and to have them succeed?
A: In the book I offer nine suggestions for campuses. Let me highlight just a few here.

For starters, eliminate both discourse and thinking that encourages students to "find their place." Replace it with welcoming messages based on the assumption that the entire campus is their place. As faculty, staff and administrators, we bear responsibility for fostering a sense of belonging for students. In order to meet their belonging needs, we need to communicate to students through our everyday interactions that they are important. The university exists because students exist.

Next, put your money where your mouth is. If you claim that first-generation students' academic success is important to you, then support resources should be amply funded, run by highly competent staff and located in a visible, central part of campus, not tucked away in a low-trafficked corner or basement someplace. If your campus has programs it prides itself on such as community engagement or nature conservancy or artistic endeavors or something else, ensure that the programs are attractive to the entire range of your student body. Firstly by subsidizing the cost for low-income students. Secondly, if, say, first-gen participate at lower rates, ask them why. And commit to making changes that make the programs more inviting, rather than trying to convince first-gen students to find your programs desirable as they are.

I also suggest implementing practices of not only reaching out to students, but also reaching in. First-gen students, like all of us, do not know what they do not know. We can't expect them to come up with all the right questions to ask. We need to reach out to them directly to invite them to make use of the writing center or the wellness office or the library or the academic advising office and we need to tell them exactly what that place can do for them. Further, we need to find ways to reach in, to ask how they are doing, to check in on that class they are retaking from last semester, to inquire about how well they are getting along with their roommate. Do not wait for first-gen students to come to their RA or the wellness center or a professor's office hour with their concerns. First-gen students are impressively self-reliant and often save asking for help as a last resort. We need to create structures where someone knowledgeable checks in on individual students and helps them problem solve without being asked. We can minimize the heartache of trial and error for them that way, not to mention the hours and hours wasted on strategies to solve problems that bear no fruit. Well-timed mentorship and routines of offering unsolicited advice can make students feel cared about and important.

We are the campus community. It's up to us to offer the gift of belonging to students.

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Author discusses her book on 'College Belonging' and first-generation students

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Colleges, for generations, have encouraged new students to "find their place" in student organizations on campus. That's bad advice, writes Lisa M. Nunn in College Belonging: How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life (Rutgers University Press).

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Exploring how you can help all learners be successful.

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Exploring how you can help all learners be successful.

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Whether you work in the classroom or the office, learner diversity is real and impacts interactions with each other. Participants will gain a deeper understanding of what people on the autism spectrum experience including anxiety, poor executive function, and distractibility. Participants will explore a variety of techniques and strategies to support our students through a universal design approach. Participants will have the opportunity to reflect on their own practice and brainstorm ideas for implementing the strategies and skills learned.
Join this session to explore challenges with learners on the spectrum or experiencing other learning obstacles. Learn techniques to support learning for these individuals and to improve your interactions with them.

Facilitator: Nancy Gray
Location - SH209

Sign up HERE!

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Developing student retention strategies and using MySuccess for student success

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Developing student retention strategies and using MySuccess for student success

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Let's innovate to create an overall first-year engagement and experience for our students. Join this topic carried forward from a FedEx Day project in 2020. We will explore existing student services and support to optimize our services, including the use of MySuccess to provide a coordinated engaging experience to support student retention and success for all students.

Facilitator: Lindsey Dickinson, Sally Smarsty
Location - Zoom: Click here to join

Sign up HERE!

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Supporting MLK Day and DEI initiatives in the classroom

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Supporting MLK Day and DEI initiatives in the classroom

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NMC is launching a Martin Luther King Day Celebration for spring semester. How can you create an inclusive approach to your classroom curriculum to support this event and NMC's DEI initiatives? Bring your potential curriculum to revise using a DEI lense to support an inclusive classroom environment and course content.

Facilitator: Brandon Everest
Location - Zoom: Click here to join

Sign up HERE!

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Math Faculty - Adapting to curricular changes - recreating corequisition courses and aligning curriculum with new textbooks.

Facilitator: Deb Pharo
Location - Room: Math Center
Closed Group

Sign up HERE!

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Developing a graduation contingency plan for GLMA cadets without commercial vessel sailing

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Developing a graduation contingency plan for GLMA cadets without commercial vessel sailing

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GLMA - develop a contingency plan that will allow GLMA cadets to graduate within four years without the ability to sail on a commercial vessel.  This plan will only be put into place if commercial berths are not available.

Facilitator: Jerry Achenbach
Location - Zoom: Click here to join
Closed Group

Sign up HERE!

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Chemistry Faculty - Lab kits for students are great, but they are not cheap! We will research chemistry lab kits and create our own to support student success.

Facilitators: Mary Jo Elliott, Blake Key
Location - LB207
Closed Group

Sign up HERE!

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We have course sequence guides but what about all the other learning students need?

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Researching and planning for the Technical Learning Lab 

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Researching and planning for the Technical Learning Lab 

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Tech Division
1.  Update timeline for learning lab

2.  Determine the part to be built

3.  Specify equipment needed

4. Order remaining components

5.  Identify learning lab credential

6.  Investigate fluid power trainers

7.  Research and Planning

Facilitators: Jason Slade, Michael O'Connor, Technical Instructors
Location - Room: PS151
Closed Group

Sign up HERE!

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Tech Division - NMC is collaborating with multiple Startup organizations (see http://nmsw.co) to create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurships. Following Lean Startup principles, we are validating that there is student interest in this community initiative by providing a student informational session in West Hall during Oct. PD day. This "day off" will prevent class schedules from being a barrier. Student will learn about Traverse City Startup Community and the planned events and participation. More importantly, NMC is learning tools and processes used to drive innovation, e.g. testing of assumptions. These models drive concepts that educators often hear like "fail fast", but they don't necessarily understand the processes used when determining success or failure early. Learning will continue through the NMC event schedule as part of Startup Week on May 13.

Facilitators: Keith Kelly; Steve Rice
Location - WH106/107
Closed Group

Sign up HERE!

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EES - Work with and learn the new registration system, Lumens. We will continue learning how to enter new classes and retrieve reports in Lumens. Application by all participants will be practicing adding new classes and pulling reports.

Facilitator: Laura Matchett
Location - Zoom: Click here to join
Closed Group

Sign up HERE!

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Managing projects effectively for any size projects

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Managing projects effectively for any size projects

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Execute your initiatives and ideas by learning to effectively manage your project(s). This session will provide an overview of the fundamentals of project management, as defined by the Project Manamgene Insitute (PMI). Concepts that will be reviewed include creating a  clear set of objectives, timelines, identifying resources and key stakeholders, along with other tools to support the successful implementation of your project. Bring your project ideas, large or small, and apply these principles to your work.

The objective of the session is for you to develop a concise project scope and rationale, a high-level timeline, budget, definition of the project's success factors, a SWOT analysis, a stakeholder and communication strategy, and risk assessment specific to the project you have identified.

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Revise your student employee training process to create a productive work environment and experience for students at NMC and beyond.

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Revise your student employee training process to create a productive work environment and experience for students at NMC and beyond.

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Do you want to make a bigger impact in the lives of your student employees? Student employment benefits the student and NMC, but can we do better? Join this session to learn about best practices in training and managing student employees. and resources and strategies for building essential skills. Collaborate and learn ways to apply this learning to improve our existing student experiences, through meaningful skill-building opportunities as we help our students thrive in our workspaces and beyond.

Facilitators: Kerrey Woughter, Amy Pflughoeft, Lori Hodek, Emily Crull
Locations - WH 104/105 and Zoom: Click to join (Hybrid session)

Sign up HERE!

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Developing a Social Responsibility Gen Ed Outcome

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Developing a Social Responsibility Gen Ed Outcome

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The Curriculum Committee subcommittee - We will work on developing a new general education outcome for social responsibility and will work on composing a rationale and artifact sample description that can be presented to departments and other NMC stakeholder groups.

Facilitator: Melissa Sprenkle
Location - Zoom: Click here to join
Closed Group

Sign up HERE!

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Requisite for Economics. I recommend that statistics be a requisite ECO 201 and 202.

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Requisite for Economics. I recommend that statistics be a requisite ECO 201 and 202.

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Communications is fantastic? Not sure what we're looking for here... But we are fantastic, so that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

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Digging deeper into software and procedures

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Digging deeper into software and procedures

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Records & Registration Staff - Topics include Reverse Transfer, Parchment Transcript Order Training, Articulation Practices, and Web Pages Review and Updates.

Facilitator: Cindy Deemer
Location - Zoom Morning: Click here to join
Location - Afternoon meeting: Click here to join
Closed Group
Sign up HERE!

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This article reviews goals of student employment, including career readiness.

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Tips for Training Student Employees- University of Colorado-Boulder

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Tips for Training Student Employees- University of Colorado-Boulder

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Capstone Review Agenda for October PD Day (Tuesday, October 12)

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Launch into the OER Universe! This course includes eight self-paced online learning modules that serve as an introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher Education. An additional section provides opportunities for further exploration and discovery of OER initiatives in Michigan.

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Lessons learned: looking to a post-Covid era  and the impact of hybrid work

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Lessons learned: looking to a post-Covid era  and the impact of hybrid work

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Great work doesn’t always happen between 8 a.m. - 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, in a
building on campus. Sometimes it happens at 5 a.m. over a cup of coffee before you wake the kids for school, or at 7 p.m. after you’ve taken your mom to get her groceries for the week. Our students’ lives also don’t fit neatly into regularly scheduled “work hours.” The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to try new ways of working and in the spirit of NMC’s highest value, we have learned a lot. What more can we learn? How can we incorporate these lessons into our work?

Facilitators: Mark Liebling, Diana Fairbanks, Lynne Mortiz
Location - Zoom: Click here to join
Closed Session

Sign up Here!

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An opportunity for Academic Area Office managers to share what's working well and to learn from each other.

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An opportunity for Academic Area Office managers to share what's working well and to learn from each other.

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Share and collaborate on recent methods and techniques that have been effective in maintaining “the office” during COVID and working remotely.  Topics include: getting signatures, Banner SCTALLY vs. Self Service Schedule Tally, getting supplies to remote employees, maintaining communication: texting, instant message, Zoom.

Facilitator: Bonnie Shumaker
Location - Zoom. Click here to join.
Closed Group.

Sign up Here!

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How Schools Can Help Students Navigate Pivotal Moments (EAB)

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How Schools Can Help Students Navigate Pivotal Moments (EAB)

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Along their college journey, students will encounter a series of crossroads. How well they navigate these crossroads, known as Pivotal Moments, can mean the difference between success and failure.

Pivotal Moments can vary across schools, departments, majors, and even individual students. But while individual Pivotal Moments may differ, EAB researchers have found three underlying reasons why students often struggle at these turning points, ultimately affecting their ability to succeed.

Explore this infographic to understand the kinds of Pivotal Moments students encounter, what can go wrong as they attempt to navigate them, and what schools can do to help.
Learn more about understanding and designing interventions for Pivotal Moments.

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How Schools Can Help Students Navigate Pivotal Moments | EAB

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Explore the kinds of Pivotal Moments students encounter, what can go wrong as they attempt to navigate them, and what schools can do to help.

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How one university prevented 40% of potential course withdrawals

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How one university prevented 40% of potential course withdrawals

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https://www.google.com/url?q=https://nmc.zoom.us/j/91210513385?pwd%3DVFNVTEhncjhqUkI0Q3hJeGU1S3A3UT09&sa=D&source=calendar&ust=1633459051070569&usg=AOvVaw0XaQ3aXvJTaMoBwnabvj0y

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A great model - no re-inventing wheels here!

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Albion College Blueprint for Belonging Action Toolkit

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Now that you’ve submitted the FAFSA® form, it’s time to complete the financial aid process. Take a few more steps to cross the finish line and get your money.

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A forward-thinking planning session on best practices and challenges

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A forward-thinking planning session on best practices and challenges

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The Music, Audio Tech, and Dance faculty will begin the day by doing some self-reflecting and planning in regards to successes and areas of improvement in current flexible instructional delivery. The team will then gather to share both concerns and best practices related to flexible and hybrid instruction. The day will culminate in a forward-thinking planning session as we discuss needs of the department, opportunities for collaboration, and plans for growth/sustainability for the next five years.

We will be learning best practices from our colleagues. Because Music, Audio Tech, and Dance instruction are intrinsically tied to in-person instruction, we will learn from each other how to navigate the murky waters of flexible and hybrid instruction.

Facilitator: Jeff Cobb
Location - Room FA102
Closed Group

Sign up HERE!

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 We'll determine what our goals are for these events and modify them as necessary to support the museum's strategic plan. 

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 We'll determine what our goals are for these events and modify them as necessary to support the museum's strategic plan. 

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The learning portion will involve us looking at data from past events including attendance, costs, pros and cons, etc. From there, we'll be able to determine what the future of each event, and find out how those events factor in to the overall mission and vision for the museum.

Facilitators: Chelsie Niemi, Nicole Zeiler
Location - Dennos Museum
Closed Session

Sign up HERE!

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Diversity is What You See, Inclusion is What You Do

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Diversity is What You See, Inclusion is What You Do

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Simulation of a company in which promotions are biased to favor one population (blue), showing how ... [+]
P. Gaudiano

If, during a meeting with 20 people, you were to ask everyone to define the term "diversity," you would probably get fairly consistent definitions. If you asked the same 20 people to define the term "inclusion," you would start to see a significant amount of inconsistency and lack of clarity. If you then started to ask about terms like "belonging," "access" and "equity," the meeting might quickly devolve into a brawl.

In my experience, the confusion and disagreement often arise from the fact that, when we use the word "inclusion," each of us makes subjective assumptions about what that word means and its implications. For instance, I recently participated on a panel in which one of the panelists said they did not like the concept of inclusion because "...it creates a flawed, inequitable power dynamic between the organization and the individual, and can also be seen as detrimental to diversity." While I agree that an inequitable power dynamic is undesirable, I completely disagree with this way of defining the term, and in fact I am a firm believer that inclusion (at least in the way I define it) is essential to foster and increase diversity.

This example should make it clear that the confusion and disagreement are primarily due to the fact that language can be very imprecise in conveying meaning. But it should be equally clear that a shared vocabulary and clear metrics are essential to making progress in this space: if those of us who believe in the power of diversity and inclusion can't agree among ourselves about such simple things as the definition of a key concept, how can we ever hope to help those who are interested in embracing more diverse, inclusive and equitable organizations, let alone change the minds of those who need to be convinced?

One of the things I enjoy about the scientific grounding of my work is that it forces me to strip away subjective elements and get to the core of how things actually work. At the heart of the approach is the use of simple and intuitive computer simulations that capture key aspects of how companies function, and how diversity and inclusion manifest themselves and impact both the employees of a company and the company as a whole. Similar to video games like the Sims, SimCity and many others, these computer simulations replicate individuals, their behaviors, and the way they interact with one another and with their working environment.

For example, my colleagues and I developed a simulation of a simple company to show how gender bias in the promotion process impacts a company's performance and level of diversity (see the picture at the top of this blog), and another simulation to show how diverse leadership can lead to more diverse teams in a variety of contexts, from startups to the US presidential administration. In order to develop these simulations, we had to ask ourselves: what are the most basic behaviors and activities that we need to capture? What interactions take place among employees, and between employees and the company? How might we represent the impact of diversity and/or inclusion?

Being forced to think about recreating an organization from the inside out, i.e., by actually thinking from the point of view of the individual employees and their experiences, helped us to clarify how we can think about-and define-diversity and inclusion. It is from this principled approach that we have derived our definitions:

· diversity is a measure of how an individual's personal characteristics differ from those of the normative majority of an organization;

· inclusion is the act of ensuring that people's experiences within an organization are not impacted negatively as a result of their personal characteristics.

First, let's consider diversity. Suppose you wanted to build a computer game that replicates the detailed activities of your company, down to the level of individuals. In order to replicate, for example, the demographic makeup of your company, you'd need to have a snapshot of the personal characteristics of your employees, and make the simulated employees have personal traits that match those of your real company. Once you have done that, you would not even need to run the simulation to see the demographic makeup of your simulated company; in other words, diversity is what you observe, or see, about the people in your organization.

But in order to understand how the company actually performs, you would need to start endowing your simulated people with behaviors: this might include coming to work in the morning, working on projects, taking vacations, and so on. One key observation that I have described in detail in earlier blogs is that inclusion is invisible, and that what we notice are situations that make us feel excluded. With rare exceptions, experiences of exclusion result when an employee interacts with other people: a member of the leadership, a direct manager, a peer, a subordinate or even a client. Hence in our simulation we need to specify how people interact with each other. And this is where inclusion comes in: if one person makes another person feel excluded during an interaction, that is a failure of inclusion. For a company to be inclusive, people have to interact with one another without making others feel excluded. In other words, inclusion is an action.

Of course, diversity and inclusion are intertwined: the way that one person interacts with another, and the probability that the interaction will make one person feel excluded, often depend on the personal traits of each person. Hence we can say that a company is highly inclusive if, even when people with different traits interact with one another, the behavior of one person does not cause the other to feel excluded.

Ultimately, if we want a company to be more inclusive, it is the people who cause exclusion that need to change their behavior-and, in some cases, the company has to instate policies to prevent experiences of exclusion from occurring, or taking corrective action when they do occur. This is why we say that "inclusion is what you do." Trying to describe the sense of inclusion or belonging that an employee feels is not very useful unless we can understand who made them feel excluded, and what exactly happened in the interaction that made them feel excluded.

Similarly, this is why we think of Diversity as simply something that we see. We can't look at a person, and, just based on their personal traits, determine how they will act or feel.

Finally, thinking about diversity as what you see and inclusion as what you do helps us to understand some key limitations of many current D&I efforts and initiatives. For one thing, conducting inclusion surveys that simply ask how included someone feels, is of limited use: unless you ask exactly who and what made them feel less included, simply knowing someone's level of inclusion is like knowing that someone is not feeling well, but having no idea of what illness they may have. For another thing, simply trying to "force diversity" by hiring more people from underrepresented segments of the population, without actually changing the way people behave in their interactions with other employees, is extremely unlikely to yield any improvements.

It is only when we learn to identify sources of exclusion and take actions to minimize them, that our companies will be able to sustain a growing level of diversity and to enjoy an inclusive environment where all employees have an equal opportunity to thrive and succeed.

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Diversity Is What You See, Inclusion Is What You Do

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While I agree that an inequitable power dynamic is undesirable, I completely disagree with this way of defining the term, and in fact I am a firm believer that inclusion (at least in the way I define it) is essential to foster and increase diversity.

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Valued and Seen: Why Belongingness is the Most Essential Feeling at Work

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Valued and Seen: Why Belongingness is the Most Essential Feeling at Work

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“Valued And Seen”: Why Belonging Is The Most Essential Feeling At Work

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People are craving a more meaningful, flexible and fulfilling experience at work. And 25% are ready to leave their current jobs to find it, if they have to.

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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When I first began to quarantine, now well more than a year ago, I felt as though I'd been upended into some modernized Dantean hellscape. Not one of the deeper circles, where you're frozen in ice and someone is gnawing on your head. Just one of the benignly malign upper spheres, where you wander aimlessly between your desk and the fridge, endlessly refreshing the New York Times homepage. Just like normal, only more so.

What I felt was the uncanny lived experience of contrapasso: that literary device -- famously employed in Dante's Inferno -- where a sinner's suffering mimics the nature of her sin. Let the punishment fit the crime.

Before COVID-19 hit, modern life had already left us atomized, rootless, addicted to our smartphones. Over the past year, that life has become ironically intensified: we have spent our days shut inside our single-bedroom apartments, all human connection mediated by a screen, ripped from our communities.

The college classroom has been no exception. Only a few weeks into the pandemic, the Jeremiahs of higher education were already prophesying a world in which a Brady Bunch of jerky, pixelated faces would become a permanent pedagogical norm. But despite the tribulations of the past year, I've emerged reassured that liberal, residential education will never be wholly supplanted by online learning. Screens just can't offer what students are seeking: the chance to live and learn with peers in close-knit educational communities.

I have made a career of co-creating educational communities, first at Deep Springs College and then with my own nonprofit, Tidelines Institute (formerly the Arete Project), which runs similar programs of shorter duration. By tearing such communities asunder, COVID-19 has thrown into sharp relief their immense value. The pandemic, it seems, will pass. So as we start thinking toward the fall semester, now is the time to reimagine and reinvigorate educational communities for when the gates of academe finally reopen.

What is an educational community? In part it's a social community, as might arise within a dorm or athletic team. But it's an intellectual community, too, one with a vibrant life outside the classroom. The educational community opens out from the classroom into personal relationships, extracurriculars, work, meals: lived together and oriented toward learning.

Educational community is the very best thing that that the residential college offers. The two together prove that education is not just about content mastery but the growth of the whole human being. While I'm glad I remember a couple things about The Divine Comedy, the truth is that I've forgotten a lot of material from my undergrad days. It's not that the content wasn't important. It's that it played second fiddle to the vibrant world of inquiry, debate, experiment and social relationships that coalesced around it. In college, I shared that world with a small cadre of peers and professors. Academic content provided substrate and sustenance, but it was within the community that my education took place. It's where I grew up.

This is what so many young people seek in their college experience. This is why every college tour guide speaks winningly of those all-night meaning-of-life ramblings they enjoy with their roommate. This is why one alum of an intensive humanities program advised incoming students to forgo 1 p.m. classes: so that cohort discussions begun in the classroom could continue over lunch and through the early afternoon.

And this is precisely what online education will never supplant. Administrators charting a post-pandemic course for their institutions would do well to heed both the scholarly evidence and financial prognostications in favor of educational communities. Substantial research links close-knit cohorts with an array of positive learning outcomes, including literacy and critical thinking gains, improved performance in STEM courses, and college persistence. Online education, meanwhile, can often be associated with higher attrition, larger achievement gaps and widespread student dissatisfaction. And for the number crunchers out there, while the price point of online education may have an immediate financial appeal, alumni giving is dismal among recipients of online education. Alumni donate to the places where they made memories, formed friendships and navigated the transition to adulthood together with their peers. (Deep Springs, for example, has an enviable alumni giving rate nearing 50 percent.)

Deep Springs and Tidelines Institute are admittedly outliers, striving to bring the educational community to its most vital incarnation. We've done it by creating little islands where a tiny number of inhabitants -- students, staff and faculty members -- participate equally in shared work and a shared world. While not wholly abjuring hierarchy or division of labor, any community member might chair a hiring committee or swing a hammer, parse Hegel, analyze data, or lead a camping trip.

Those two institutions exist outside "normal" academe, but they offer lessons that can be adapted for traditional colleges. Indeed, many institutions already offer educational communities of one kind or another. For those that don't -- or that wish to create more -- here are a few general precepts.

Cohorts are key. Educational communities should be porous but composed of a network of thick relationships. It must be possible for individuals to really know one another. Six might be a minimum size, while 50 might be a maximum.

Students must share an enduring intellectual experience. The content itself can vary widely but should include at least one course running, ideally, for a year at minimum. Directed Studies at Yale University is one such example.

Experiential opportunities work wonders. They strengthen student relationships, forge community identity and help students integrate theory and practice. Wilderness & Civilization at the University of Montana has effectively coupled substantive coursework and outdoor exploration.

Diversity is a necessity. Educational communities run a grave risk: that students might self-select into peer groups that look, think and act alike. But peer learning is crucial in such communities, which means students must come bearing different backgrounds and beliefs.

... but not always. Some students flourish most in communities where they share common stories with their peers. That is particularly true for students coming from marginalized backgrounds, for whom a strong community can be a deciding factor in college persistence. The ScHOL A²RS House at the University of Connecticut offers one of many excellent models.

Shared meals are great. Shared living space is even better.

Educational communities don't need to be totalizing; after all, this is not The Secret History. They can include French majors and physics majors, soccer stars, climate change activists, and classical pianists. They can manifest as formal programs like those mentioned above or, easiest of all, they can arise spontaneously.

I know what a huge lift it is to create a new program. Faculty members without that bandwidth can still cultivate educational communities. They can encourage seminars to adjourn directly to lunch or coffee where conversations can continue informally. They can advise students to set up directed readings with a handful of their peers. They can connect students with similar interests to one another. And, when formal programs do exist, they can steer students in the right direction.

The pandemic has shown us how precious educational communities are, and how necessary. Nowhere else in modern life do we have the spaces and structures that can support such communities, and believe me, I've looked. They are the product and the pride of residential colleges alone. When we finally emerge from this banal inferno, let's be ready to help them flourish.

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COVID has demonstrated the immense value of higher education communities (opinion)

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When I first began to quarantine, now well more than a year ago, I felt as though I'd been upended into some modernized Dantean hellscape. Not one of the deeper circles, where you're frozen in ice and someone is gnawing on your head.

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This is a wonderful blog from a trans, autistic person.

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Trans and Autistic: a Tale of Two Zoom Meetings - Reframing Autism

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Written by Kai Ash The most common piece of advice I hear after coming out as trans is that I [...]

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Another wonderful article to help us understand the autistic brain.

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Written by Ginny Grant CW: Pathologising language, mental illness
'Overall Ms Grant's presentation was consistent with an individual who has clear symptoms of ASD. [...] Her eye contact is either missing or overly intense. [...] Her communication is blunt and frank. She has been able to mask many of her symptoms by observing what are normal, acceptable behaviours and adapting to her surroundings. [...] In my opinion she meets the criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder according to the DSM-5.'

I sit at my kitchen table holding a letter - the clinician's report that confirms that my various strengths, passions, differences, and difficulties all boil down to 'Autism Spectrum Disorder'.

This is a surreal moment: at thirty-nine years of age, I have lived out almost half my life expectancy without understanding an integral part of my being.

It is also an unsettling thing to find yourself described in such a detailed, pathologised manner, although I do understand that this is the medical community's convention. But honestly, I'm puzzled by some of the descriptions. I'm proud to be 'blunt and frank' - essentially straightforward, yes? - sounds like a great attribute to me. The eye contact thing gnaws at me too. 'Missing or overly intense'? Jeez, you can't win.

As my eyes skip over the clinician's various remarks, there are echoes in my mind of comments that have been made to me, about me, many times over the years. Comments that have contributed to my habit, now deeply ingrained, of 'masking [my] symptoms' and 'adapting to [my] surroundings'.

It is well known that this masking or camouflaging can have a damaging impact on an Autistic person's wellbeing and contribute to Autistic burnout and mental illness.

Weeks earlier, I'd sat in the waiting area of a clinic specialising in adult assessment of neurodevelopmental differences, wading my way through psychometric screeners. What a mindbender they were! Next, I was ushered into a practice room for a two-hour interview with a clinical psychologist known for her expertise in Autism assessment. Would she see the Autistic traits I saw in myself? Or would she think I was wasting time and money in pursuing an assessment? Well, apparently not.

I felt extremely nervous in that interview, but the clinician was warm and reassuring. She explained that really, she just wanted to have a conversation. I noted she used identity-first language (i.e., 'I am Autistic' or 'an Autistic person' as opposed to 'I have Autism' or 'a person with Autism') - favoured by an overwhelming majority of Autistics - which to me was a welcome mark of respect towards the Autistic community. I knew she was making an effort, as identity-first language would have been in direct opposition to the person-first language that is usually drummed into allied health students in their studies.

To my surprise also, rather than focus on the things I didn't like or struggled with, the clinician focused on the things I liked and excelled at. She honed in on my knack of weaving words together as a writer. My focus on minute detail within text as a book editor. My love of and aptitude for numerous foreign languages. My penchant for patterns, both textual and visual. My rather profound memory, ready to dredge up particles of the past at any moment. My logical, rational approach to life. Oh, and my interests - so many of them over the years - which apparently are considerably more distinctive than the neuromajority.

After a long discussion, the clinician shuffled some papers - those psychometric screeners I'd grappled with earlier - mumbling yes, yes and nodding at what she saw. She revealed that I had scored highly on those screeners - in other words, I nailed them, in the most Autistic of ways! The clinician told me then that my life experiences were very much in parallel with those typically experienced by Autistic people. And my medley of mental health diagnoses - major anxiety and depression, OCD, and an atypical eating disorder - were exceptionally common co-occurring conditions among Autistics, and that exact triad too.

The clinician concluded the interview with words to the effect of, 'You have so many strengths - strengths that come from being Autistic. The world needs people like you, Virginia. The world needs Autistic people.' Huzzah!

And that was that. I paid and left the clinic with my dear Autistic friend G, who had kindly driven me across the city to ensure I made it to my appointment on time, knowing that I find navigating and shopping centre car parks extremely nerve-racking. Only a few months earlier, G and I had become friends unexpectedly, sharing similar perspectives, a deep love of memes, and now our Autistic neurology, too. G and I chuckled for a long time afterwards at how, on the way out of the practice, she had told the clinician bluntly, frankly that she had diagnosed me first. It seemed just about anyone could see my Autism - well, other Autistics could see it, anyway.

After reading the written report, I let the pages drop to the table, breathing a long sigh of relief. I finally had a word - an explanation - for my thoughts, my feelings, my perceptions. And now I had written proof of it. I was exhausted.

I took the next few months for myself. I just wanted to let the diagnosis sink in. For a long time afterwards, I had flashes in my mind of experiences - from my childhood, from my adulthood, some fond memories, others rattling - now perceiving them through the lens of a self-aware Autistic person.

It is an uncanny thing to view your life through an entirely new lens, and that of a neurological developmental difference. Although it has been confronting to return to some of those memories, I can finally make more sense of them, fit them into neater boxes.

Slowly, over the next 12 months, I began disclosing the discovery of my Autistic neurology to friends and family members when the opportunity arose and it felt natural, comfortable. I decided to be completely upfront about my Autistic identity and that people could take me or leave me just as I am.

Eventually I found the courage to write two pieces for this blog, in which I presented my experiences of motherhood and the eating disorder in an Autistic light, that I shared on my personal social media channels. No one expressed great surprise. Some sent warm, supportive messages. Others were silent, perhaps unsure of the best response and clearly deciding that no response was the best option. One person unfriended me ...

Although some friendships seem to have dissipated since sharing my diagnosis, I have formed new friendships too, with other Autistics, both online and in real life. These are people with whom I found I had an almost immediate, intuitive connection. We understand each other effortlessly. And regularly, when I feel the need for connection, I'll reach out to these friends in the Autistic community, often in ways that may seem unorthodox to the neuromajority, because we Autistics have no time for small talk - or perhaps I'll just send a meme and wait for their laughing emoji.

I stash the report in a folder. I decide I shall not dwell on its contents any longer. I wanted confirmation of what I thought to be true of myself, my authentic self, and I got the answer I was seeking. I now understand myself better, and others have a framework by which to understand me better too - if they choose to do so. I embrace my authentic Autistic identity with pride. I have found my people - the Autistic community and its allies. I am happy.

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'Blunt and Frank': Embracing My Autistic Identity - Reframing Autism

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Written by Ginny Grant CW: Pathologising language, mental illness 'Overall Ms Grant's presentation was consistent with an individual who has [...]

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Autism Acceptance Not Awareness: A Perspective Shift Is Needed

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Autism Acceptance Not Awareness: A Perspective Shift Is Needed

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This is from Forbes. Enjoy!

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22 June 2019, Berlin: "My autism is great" is written in English on the poster of a participant at ... [+]
picture alliance via Getty Images

Unlike some other awareness campaigns Autism Awareness month is not universally liked by the Autistic community. If you follow the #ActuallyAutistic hashtag on social media, or any of the prominent advocates, you will most likely encounter posts throughout the month of April on this subject. I encourage you to read it direct from the source and learn the history that has created so much friction around this annual event. This video from Autistic advocate Sarinah O'Donoghue on the BBC sums it up well.

A large part of the problem is that awareness has not proven effective at improving the lives of Autistic people. In fact, these awareness drives often lead to the widespread dissemination of misinformation and outdated perspectives, causing further difficulties for people in the community. With no one ensuring the accuracy of the content that gets shared we frequently see harmful myths getting more traction than the truth, and non-autistic voices speaking over Autistic ones. Here's a link to an article signposting Autistic AAC writers (augmentative and alternative communication devices) and here's a link to a blog explaining why some Autistic people find Autism Awareness Month triggering and traumatic.

I've watched the April Autism season unfold with a flurry of talks, webinars, articles and social media. I've kept relatively quiet, listening to voices in the Autism community and considering how best to amplify the sentiments in my writing. Here's my advice.

Not A Mystery To Be Solved

The most radical act you can perform as an ally to Autistic people is to accept them exactly as they are and beyond that to celebrate them and their neurotype.

Whilst co-occurring conditions, a spiky profile and the social model of disability may create struggles in their life, most Autistic people are not looking to be "fixed". In fact, there is even an Autism Pride day (June 18 th) so that Autists can have a day to celebrate their identities independent of the infantilising memes and online harassment that sadly come their way during April.

The concept of Autistic pride can seem strange to those who only understand Autism through the lens of the mainstream media. The dominant narratives in this sphere tend to be the socially isolated white male and the struggling parents trying to raise a child who is different to the other kids.

Whilst it is sadly true that parents struggle and Autists often do experience social rejection from their neurotypical peers, the perspective in which these things are the fault of Autism itself is loaded with ableism and fails to reflect on the society that is exacerbating these problems rather than supporting inclusion, understanding and acceptance.

The deficit model is dominant and pathologizes neurodivergent identities so that they are understood by the general public as an illness to be cured rather than a different but entirely valid way of being. Many of the difficulties that Autistic children and adults deal with would be drastically reduced if people around them simply understood their different neurobiology and accommodated it. The knowledge is readily available and yet we continue to try and "convert" them to bring their behavior in line with what most perceive as the norm despite the trauma this approach causes.

This is one of many reasons that the puzzle piece symbol has been widely rejected and replaced with the infinity symbol. It suggests both that something is missing and that Autistic people are a mystery.

Autistic Pride

Let's consider then a different world, one in which all neurotypes are celebrated for the rich diversity they contribute, just as we do with unusual hair or eye color, specific skills and traits in athleticism, art and variety of personality for example. The world would be dull if we were all the same.

In this world we would respect all forms of communication such as gesture, behavior, sign language and AAC devices. In this world a non-speaking child is simply someone who uses a different language to those that prefer speech.

In this new world we have shed our judgements about tone and body language so that people who are direct and factual are taken at face value and those that don't make eye contact are not criminalized simply for protecting themselves.

How about a world where Autistic stimming is considered no different from nervously tapping your pen or doing a little clap when you are excited? Or where lining things up into perfect rows is admired as creative play in the same way as the child drawing their family.

If we could create this level of inclusion and acceptance so many of the problems that Autistic people and their families face would be removed.
Permission To Thrive
Here's some links to autistic people presenting their experiences and the very real issues they are facing in work, education, diagnosis and the criminal justice system, which I hope will provide broader overview than the typical puzzle pieces and calls for sympathy that we neurominorities can find patronizing.
Emma Dalamayne in the Huff Post
Tyla Grant who set up a fund to support more Black and Brown Autistic people with diagnosis costs.

Harvey and Me, the BBC documentary about services for Autistic adults.
Siena Castellon in the New Scientist Charlotte Valeur in the Times Kristy Forbes in her own blog
The world is ready for more practical advice, actual steps that can be taken to improve the lives of Autistic people. As a closely related ADHD cousin to the Autistic community and an ally to all neurotypes, my sentiment converges here. We are interested in change, not awareness. Knowledge about genetic phenotypes and prevalence rates are less helpful than ideas for improvements to the school day, the working environment, policing, the intensity of information overload expected in everyday modern living.

Autism cannot be separated from the Autist, it is a major part of a person's identity and treating it like a problem to be solved is demeaning. Awareness is not enough and acceptance is the conversation we need to be having

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Autism Acceptance Not Awareness: A Perspective Shift Is Needed

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These awareness drives often lead to the widespread dissemination of misinformation and outdated perspectives, causing further difficulties for people in the community.

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"Rude" things Autistic people do and what it actually means

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"Rude" things Autistic people do and what it actually means

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There are many things which are unequivocally rude: Being let out on a busy road and not giving a nod of thanks: rude. Resting your sweaty feet over a theatre chair when someone is sitting in front of you: rude. Casually mentioning that someone's newborn looks like a potato cross-bred with Gollum... yeah, speaking from experience, it's probably best to not go there.

However, while in some cases it's easy to identify what is and isn't rude, autism can be a different kettle of fish. This is because, whilst autistic people are entirely capable of being purposefully impolite, there are also many aspects to our quirks which can be misconstrued in this way. As such, here are 10 examples where an autistic person might seem rude and how you can help.

1. We Don't Listen

'I'm sorry can you repeat that?', 'okay, now one more time?', 'uhuh, and what were we talking about again?'. Conversing with autistic people can, at times, feel like speaking to a brick wall. You may find that, no matter how many times you rephrase a sentence, it never seems to land and this can seem downright rude.

However, autistic people aren't actually struggling with hearing your message, in fact, we probably heard you loud and clear. The problem is that our bodies also process everything else around us with the same level of importance. This means that a tree blowing in the wind, a dog barking far away and your voice might all sound a bit muffled and mixed together.

If this is the case, don't just say 'Never mind' and walk away (this happens all the time and it sucks). Instead, try asking the autistic person if they would like to move somewhere with fewer distractions or maybe come back to the topic when things are a bit less busy. Raising your tone or being sharper isn't likely to change anything other than making everyone feel worse.

2. We Seem Distrustful

Have you ever tried to plan a trip to the shops with an autistic person? The preparation we go into could put a Navy Seals squad to shame! Nevertheless, this doesn't stop us double, triple and quadruple checking the arrangements from the day of the plan to the moment of the event and you may rightfully feel overly interrogated. Yet, in many cases, this has nothing to do with the person we are putting under the spotlight.

What's really happening in these situations is that, as autistic people mostly work on certainties, we find the relaying of a perfect plan fulfilling, in a manner that is in equal parts pleasing and comforting. What's more, I've always found that, if someone else tells me a plan, it seems more definite, and therefore even more satisfying (although I am often oblivious to how annoying the repetition is for others.)

In this instance, just knowing the reasoning behind the action is a solution but, if you really find the constant requests tedious, try stating with authority that 'nothing has changed' and that you're 'not going to bring it up again unless something does'. Tough love at its finest.

3. We Laugh at Inappropriate Moments

When I was at school, we use to have an annual sponsored silence in which students would raise funds on the anniversary of WWII. For the event, a guest speaker would be invited to discuss their experiences of living through one of the world's bleakest times and, every year, I would start laughing uncontrollably. Inevitably I would be punished by teachers, but the look of disapproval from fellow students was far worse.

Since then, laughter in autistic people has come to be understood a bit better - with the prevailing theory suggesting that, as laughter is one of our most innate methods of communication (being one of the first expressions a human has before language), it could be that when autistic people are experiencing high emotions, our body immediately falls back on to this inherent response and gets the giggles.

Subsequently, to interfere with an autistic person during this time is to tell them to not feel at all and so, while it's okay to move us to a more secluded environment, it's not okay to scold us for reacting in a way which has been incorrectly perceived as rude. [read more about the of challenges of autistic emotional regulation here].

4. We Space Invade

Have you ever heard of the amygdala? It's this almond-shaped lumpy mass which sits inside our cranium and it's thought to be the reason we have emotions. Amongst other things, the amygdala is great for registering fear, when something isn't quite right and it's why, in most of us, we feel stress and unease when someone steps too close.

However, for autistic people, our minds don't have such a clear-cut relationship with the amygdala and it's why, whether we've known you for a minute or a decade, we aren't afraid to space invade when we start a discussion. Of course, this doesn't explain why we can get so close but, in my experience, our proximity is directly related to the passion we feel about the conversation (particularly when it's a topic near and dear to us).

So, if an autistic person is a bit too close to your personal space, don't be offended as, the only danger you're at risk of is the boredom of having to hear the intricacies of a diplodocuses' eating habits during the Kimmeridgian Age. Still, if you have something better to do (although it's hard to imagine anything more riveting) try telling the autistic person you need some space - just remember to be tactful.

5. We Cancel Plans at the Last Minute

It's always a bit of a gut punch when you're all dolled up ready to head out and, suddenly, your partner in crime cancels. But, what's more frustrating is when that person (who is almost certainly schedule obsessed) comes out with some lame excuse for why, i.e. 'my car broke down whilst I was on the way to wash my hair and I suddenly came down with the flu as my dog ate my homework...'

In reality, the autistic person in question would probably prefer to have had all the above happened as, the truth is, they likely have been hit by a truck of anxiety. This has been the case for me on so many occasions (so much so that I missed my own surprise party) and, believe me, no matter how disappointed you are with us, we are likely to feel twice as bad about it ourselves.

So, if this happens to you, try and not pile onto our woes and maybe encourage us to open up about the thoughts holding us back. If we mention that we do want to go out, but are anxious about the unexpected, offer us a get out of jail free card by saying something like 'We can leave whenever you want' (and actually do). Furthermore, if the anxiety really is too much, why not move the evening plans to a lesser packed venue, such as someone's home? Fun doesn't always have to involve overpriced drinks.

6. We Seem Condescending

Okay, so this one isn't half as bad as TV/Movie makes it out to be (where every autistic depiction is some snooty scientist who wants you to know they know it all). However, it's not entirely inaccurate to say that autistic people can come across as a bit pompous or patronizing from time to time.

Known as 'little professor syndrome' (which, honestly, is way more patronizing than anything), this condescending behaviour is often misplaced passion and it comes as a result of autistic people knowing a lot about something and, subsequently, wanting to share every minute detail of it - even if it might be already obvious for the person we are speaking to.

If you see this as annoying/rude (and I wouldn't blame you if you did), then it's okay to gently let an autistic person know that you would like to talk about something else. However, the chances are this won't stop us from continuing our monologue, as it brings us genuine joy to discuss topics like this (even if our audience isn't sharing the feeling).

7. We're Too Honest For Our Own Good

You would think that being truthful was something you would want to promote but, in the interest of sparing someone's feelings, apparently, we're expected to lie from time to time and, what's more, if you don't then you're the jerk!

Known as a white lie, this is something many autistic people have struggled with, due to our literal way of thinking. However, recent studies into autistic people and lying have suggested that it's not quite as simple as we won't lie because we can't. Instead, reports from Queen's University have found that, when autistic people do speak out of turn, it's because we see the make-believe as mean and often believe that it will be less upsetting, to tell the truth (no matter how harsh it may be).

Given the reasoning behind this, I think it would do more harm than good to try and change this behaviour in autistic people. So, if you ask us a question you don't like the answer to, just remember that this is an opinion; an opinion which, though indisputable in our eyes, is not necessarily fact.

8. We Leave Conversations Abruptly

Like modern-day Houdinis, autistic people are prone to a disappearing act or two. However, unlike the magicians of the past, we're not exactly subtle about it. This can sometimes be observed when we are smack bang in the middle of a conversation and then, once we've said our piece, abracadabra, we're as good as gone.

In truth, conversations can be hard work for autistic people, as finding the meaning behind the amalgamation of expressions, words and tone is a long and tiring process. Conversely, We're the ones that can get left behind in discussions and, with so much new information bombarding us, our automatic fight or flight kicks in and we're outta there.

If you want to help an autistic person in these circumstances and ensure that we don't prematurely vamoose, give us plenty of opportunities to ask for more information (in case we get lost) and, maybe, consider speaking more slowly (although not so slow that we get bored or feel like we're being talked down to).

9. We Are Loud

Although autistic people are often cited as being introverted, it seems that our mouths didn't get the memo, as many of us struggle with keeping a level volume. This can lead to many inappropriate moments in places like hospitals or museums where, despite silence being encouraged, we inadvertently make more noise than my Fiancée on mornings when I have told her I'm having a lie-in.

In many cases, this links back to the challenges we have with regulating our senses - as we may be unaware of how loud we are being (because everything sounds relatively on the same volume). Similarly, when gauging the sounds elsewhere, we might incorrectly believe that we need to speak out to be heard over the background - even if our voice is only competing with the sound of a librarian shuffling around a few rooms away.

This one is a toughie to manage as, if someone is like this once, they are likely to do it again (even during the same conversation). For this reason, just explain to us that we might need to be a tad quieter but do so with sensitivity and patience. I know this is something I do all too often and I'm always a bit embarrassed to realise everyone has been listening to me and my foghorn mouth.

10. We Don't ALWAYS Follow The Rules

There are many rules in life which we have to learn that are never taught. For example, we say 'thank you' for a gift regardless of whether we like it, or asking if someone else wants the last slice of anything (no matter how much you want it yourself). The problem is, these subtle social guidelines are everywhere and, more often than not, autistic people break them without a second thought.

Obviously, it is not an autistic person's intention to break these rules, it's just that, as the autistic mind works on absolutes (favouring things that are certain over things that aren't), it can be a challenge to understand many of these acts - wherein nearly all cases they go against how they would seem i.e. if someone asks 'how are you?' they don't always actually want to hear how you are, they just want you to say 'fine' and then you can move on.

Nevertheless, whilst autistic people aren't great at getting the message when the message hasn't been made clear, we are incredible at memorizing what we are told and are brilliant at following instructions to the letter. Therefore, if there's some kind of rule that an autistic person doesn't seem to be following, just tell us. it's not like we want to be naïve to this and, what's more, if you know we struggle and aren't doing anything about it, well that, my friend, is perhaps more rude than anything we do.

Carry on the Conversation:

What are some autism misconceptions which you would like to clarify? Let me know in the comments below. And, if you want to learn the truth behind autistic meltdowns, check out this article: Exploring Autism: What is an Autistic Meltdown?

As always, I can also be found on Twitter @AutismRevised and via my email: AutisticandUnapologetic@gmail.com.

If you like what you have seen on the site today, then show your support by liking the Autistic & Unapologetic Facebook page. Also, don't forget to sign up to the Autistic & Unapologetic newsletter (found on the sidebar on laptops and underneath if you are reading this via mobile) where I share weekly updates as well as a fascinating fact I have found throughout the week.

Thank you for reading and I will see you next week for more thoughts from across the spectrum.

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10 "Rude" Things Autistic People Do (And What They Really Mean) - Autistic & Unapologetic

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Rude, impolite, uncouth, these are a few ways that autistic behaviours are described, and here's why each of these assumptions couldn't be more wrong.

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Beyond Diversity- How Firms are Cultivating a Sense of Belonging

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Beyond Diversity- How Firms are Cultivating a Sense of Belonging

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In January, senior executives at Citigroup shared personal stories with the entire global organization, livestreamed in 96 countries. One told how, earlier in her career, she had routinely avoided revealing that she never went to college. She said that any time a group conversation turned to 'what school did you go to,' she dodged answering or changed the subject.

"You would not believe how much of a [positive] impact that [story] had on the people in the audience," said Sam Lalanne, a senior vice president of Global Diversity and Talent Management at Citi. He noted that anecdotes - especially from high-level people - about the struggle to fit in, or to be their authentic selves at work, can be a powerful tool to nurture a sense of belonging among an entire workforce.

Another story Lalanne re-told came from a senior executive who was of Southeast Asian descent. In an earlier job, that individual felt that he stuck out like a sore thumb among his white colleagues. His decision was to "own it," said Lalanne: he grew a very large beard, rendering him even more noticeable. "That was reaffirmation for him that he belongs."

Increasingly, companies are adopting the stance that diversity and inclusion isn't enough: there must also be a sense of belonging for all employees. Lalanne referred to belonging as "the evolution of the journey." But what is it exactly, and how can companies achieve it? At the recent "Fostering Belonging at Work" event at Wharton, which was part of the Leading Diversity lecture series, he and other panelists from prominent firms discussed their ongoing efforts.

Moderating the panel was Wharton management professor Stephanie Creary, an identity and diversity researcher. "What is this 'belonging' thing all about? Do we really need a new word?" she asked the speakers.

Rebekah Bastian, a vice president of culture and community at Zillow Group, said that the superior business outcomes often associated with having diverse teams can't be achieved without a sense of belonging. It's not enough to simply include people at the table, she said, but to "amplify everyone's voices, clear barriers ... and appreciate each other for our unique backgrounds." Both she and Lalanne said that a sense of belonging means that people can bring their full selves to work, and not feel like they're a different person there than at home.

To Lalanne's point about storytelling, Bastian said Zillow uses the technique as well. "We do a lot of internal story sharing of different employees and what their experiences have been ... and about different cultures, traditions, and backgrounds."

Lalanne noted that whereas diversity often gets linked to numbers and percentages, belonging "is about how you feel" when you're at work. "Do you feel valued? Do you feel like you should be there? Do you feel that your insights, commentary and perspectives matter?"

It's not enough to simply include people at the table, Bastian said, but to "amplify everyone's voices, clear barriers ... and appreciate each other for our unique backgrounds."

Eric Solomon, a chief marketing officer in residence at Blackbird Global and a former executive at Google, said that in order to achieve a sense of belonging, it's important to lay the groundwork by creating an atmosphere of compassion and acceptance. "I really focus hard - almost every time I've led a team - on starting off with the idea that you can teach people how to be compassionate to each other, and that you can talk about psychological safety."

Creary remarked that Solomon, as a white male marketing executive, didn't fit the conventional image of today's business diversity champion. She noted that "oftentimes the face of diversity initiatives is someone who looks like me - female, [and from an] underrepresented minority group in the U.S.," and asked Solomon how he became involved in diversity efforts.

Solomon said that while working for nearly a decade in Big Tech - companies which he said "aren't known for warmth and compassion, necessarily" - he found himself trying to apply his softer skills. He also became determined to act if he perceived unfairness - for example, when it came to his team members' salaries. "I made sure I was speaking up to say, listen, a woman at the same level is getting paid less than a man.... I had a big hand in going to Laszlo Bock, our head of HR [at Google] at the time, and saying, 'This is not acceptable; I'm not going to take it.'"
The Importance of Tone

One of Solomon's previous positions was chief marketing officer for Bonobos, a digitally native men's clothing brand now owned by Walmart. He was asked by Creary if Bonobos had effective ways of helping its executives - in particular white male executives - feel connected with efforts toward diversity, inclusion and belonging.

Solomon said it helped to have a founder like Andy Dunn, now a senior vice president of digital consumer brands at Walmart. "Andy Dunn has been quoted as saying the world would be a better place if women ran it... So when the core DNA of the organization has that tied into it, it makes it a lot easier for people to be on the same page."

Solomon added that the organization had worked hard to establish core values including compassion, empathy, self-awareness, judgment, and intellectual integrity. "There was already this idea that there's going to be caring at the heart and soul of what we were doing, so I don't think it was a challenge at all to get people on board."

"I really focus hard - almost every time I've led a team - on starting off with the idea that you can teach people how to be compassionate to each other, and that you can talk about psychological safety."- Eric Solomon

Citgroup's Lalanne also commented on the importance of "tone at the top" toward fostering a sense of belonging. "Our CEO, Mike Corbat, has really pushed us on our diversity, inclusion, and belonging agendas. And it really comes from, what does he preach, what comes out of his mouth, how does he execute against the things that we see around us."

Lalanne went on to say that in 2017, Citi made a major shift in its diversity and inclusion strategy. Until then, all messaging had come from the chief diversity officer, "not from the CEO, not from the executive management team. Really, it was two separate organizations." Then Citi redesigned its affinity groups (internal employee advocacy networks focused on groups including African-Americans, LGBTQ people or veterans). Under the new arrangement, each affinity group had two leaders: one who identified as part of the group, and one from the CEO's executive management team.

The change, said Lalanne, was a way to link diversity and inclusion efforts with the organization's top leadership. The executive management team individuals also serve as "allies" for the affinity groups.
Being an Ally
The panelists agreed that allyship can go a long way toward building a sense of belonging. An ally is someone who isn't a member of a particular underrepresented group but serves as a supporter and advocate. Creary spoke about how allyship is increasingly championed these days and asked the panel how they are fostering it in their organizations.

Zillow has eight affinity networks, according to Bastian, and all of them have a need for sponsorship and allyship at high levels of the company. But she also emphasized having people across these networks become allies for each other. "You have some elements of privilege with your identity and you have some elements of oppression.... So everyone can be an ally for someone else."

Some of the specific ally activities she mentioned were participating in Slack channel conversations for various networks; coming to affinity events, and providing mentorship or sponsorship. She also noted that her team invites the individual affinity networks to set their own parameters for how they would like allies to be involved.

"Our CEO Mike Corbat has really pushed us on our diversity, inclusion and belonging agendas. And it really comes from, what does he preach, what comes out of his mouth."- Sam Lalanne

"One of my team's big goals for this year is to create more pathways for allyship," said Bastian. She added, "I won't stand up here and say we have that all figured out, but it's something that we really try to focus on."

Lalanne noted that his team at Citigroup has actually generated a "toolkit" - a step-by-step guide - for being an ally. There were a few chuckles from the audience and Lalanne commented, "It kind of sounds backward, but it's not." He explained that a guide can be useful to the many employees who are open to the idea of allyship but simply don't know how to take action.
How Belonging Translates Outside the U.S.
The panelists talked about the challenges of improving belonging at companies with workforces that extend outside the U.S. Solomon mentioned that when leading teams in organizations that are heavily Silicon Valley-based, he perceived that people working on those teams in other countries tended to feel "disconnected ... [they were] not feeling included a lot of the time because of the nature of [Silicon Valley] organizations."

Lalanne, as a diversity executive for a large multinational corporation, said he also faced roadblocks. He referenced among other things the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU's sweeping data privacy law which took effect in May of last year. "It has the right intentions, but it's severely limiting of what we can do from a diversity perspective." He explained that diversity professionals want "more and more data" - not less - in order to better understand the needs of, and opportunities for, various demographic groups.

Asking non-U.S. employees to even volunteer information - to self-identify on surveys - can be an issue, Lalanne said. For example, in some countries Citigroup cannot ask employees about sexual orientation and gender identity because it's illegal for people to identify themselves as part of certain groups. He said that progress is being made, however: In the past year, the company has gone from asking those questions in only eight countries to 39 countries, including "some challenging ones such as Singapore and India."

International limitations notwithstanding, the panelists agreed that successful belonging efforts need to include as many employees as possible. "In order to have progress, you can't just preach to the converted," Lalanne noted. "You have to bring in everyone. Everyone has a role to play." On a similar note, Bastian stated, "A lot of the barriers that we need to address are directly tied to underrepresented populations and their experiences, but the solution is tied to everybody."

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Beyond Diversity: How Firms Are Cultivating a Sense of Belonging

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In January, senior executives at Citigroup shared personal stories with the entire global organization, livestreamed in 96 countries. One told how, earlier in her career, she had routinely avoided revealing that she never went to college. She said that any time a group conversation turned to 'what school did you go to,' she dodged answering or changed the subject.

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BRAD FELD Drawing Board on Startup Communities - Bing video

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Tentative agenda

1. (12:00) Video - NMC student success stories

2. (12:05) Welcome from President Nissley

3. (12:10) Introduction to Startup – Brad Feld video

4. (12:15) Introduction to Traverse City startup ecosystem

5. (12:25) Introduction to Lean Canvas – Problem(opportunity) and customer

6. (12:30) Student breakout 1 – process – how can I participate?

7. (12:45) Report out

8. (12:55) Introduce spring’s Startup Seminar as a solution

9. (1:00) Student breakout 2

1. Test assumption that Startup Seminar is a viable solution

2. Brainstorm issues/problems/ideas

10.  (1:15)Report out

11. (1:25)Next steps

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Exploring Autism: What is an Autistic Meltdown

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Create a more welcoming school environment for autistic students

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Create a more welcoming school environment for autistic students

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10 education things your school can do to make education better for autistic students

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Explore the 10 simple adjustments schools can make to create a more inclusive and rewarding school environment for autistic students.

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Check out the 8 week Hawk Owl Experience!

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Conceiving of student employment in academic libraries as an educationally purposeful experience requires adopting a learner-centered pedagogical approach to student employee job training. Adopting such an approach is triply beneficial: it makes that job training more effective; it identifies training as an opportunity to pursue learning goals that support the growth of students as information literate critical thinkers; and it emphasizes the distributed nature of teaching and learning in the library, pointing to the need to support supervisors of student employees as educators and learners themselves. Focusing on the pedagogy of workplace training for student employees thus provides a point from which to redefine the community of learners the library supports, and disrupt hierarchical distinctions among the library's many teachers and learners.

Introduction

Teaching and learning happen in more ways, and in more places, in the academic library than we commonly assume. And one of the most obvious and overlooked arenas of teaching and learning in the academic library is student employee training. Training and learning are frequently set at odds with one another. Training is often devalued because it happens in the workplace rather than the classroom, and is perceived as having limited aims and scope, not necessarily being overseen by experts, and not prioritizing the needs of learners. But to view training and learning as separate domains elides the fact that, for both trainee and trainer, training is learning. If we say that our aim is to help a specific group of people "develop a set of key component skills, practice them to the point of automaticity, and know when and where to apply them appropriately," are we describing workplace training or classroom learning? To separate or oppose them is to create a false dichotomy that obscures the rich educational opportunity presented by the seemingly mundane task of ensuring that student employees know how to do their job.

We can more fully realize that opportunity by approaching training with a learner-centered mindset, and utilizing evidence-based practices not just from the academic library literature, but the scholarship on teaching, the science of learning, and the fields of instructional and training design. In this article I argue that explicitly thinking of job training as learning, and approaching it from a pedagogical orientation, is imperative because it makes for more effective training, identifies a valuable opportunity for libraries to achieve their learning objectives and support student success, and can foster an organizational culture of care and learning that encompasses all staff. Training is an unexplored site for expanding where, how, and for whom the library is a partner in learning.

Improving job performance

The most immediate and, for busy supervisors, pragmatically compelling reason for conceiving of training as learning is to increase its effectiveness. Reconceiving of training as learning emphasizes the need for thoughtful design of both form and content, and points to the benefits of training that is learner-centered and evidence-based-that is, grounded in proven approaches to learning. These are approaches that libraries use to support student learning in other contexts, and that in this instance might draw not just on the scholarship around teaching and learning, but also on workplace training and instructional design, which frequently overlap and intersect in their findings and recommendations. Though their end goals might differ, there are practical commonalities aplenty between Teaching With Your Mouth Shut and Telling Ain't Training -between problem- and inquiry-based approaches to classroom learning, and learner-centered approaches to workplace training, that both move away from the instructor as the principal conduit of enlightenment.

Advancing student learning

But we can think of training, and of those who train, in more expansive and nuanced ways-and in ways that identify and make the most of the very real connections between training student employees and the larger educational objectives of academic libraries. That might involve, at one level, deploying proven pedagogical practices to increase the effectiveness of training. But at another level it means recognizing that training can have a purpose larger than just effective job performance. McClellan and colleagues identify training as a "structured learning opportunity." But that structure doesn't have to be characterized by hierarchical knowledge transmission, and that learning does not have to be restricted to the mechanics of accomplishing a specific task.

Indeed, besides the fact that such decontextualized learning is less likely to be effective, it also represents a naive appraisal of what's happening during job training. Student employees are always inevitably learning more than "just" how to shelve, or discharge returned materials, or scan documents. We are always already conveying more than how to accomplish a task when we train. To that end, it's worth considering what our student employees are learning about the library and the workplace when we don't devote care and attention to training. But if we provide that care and attention, are intentional in how we frame training, and connect it to the organization's key learning goals, then training student employees more obviously becomes an opportunity not just to improve their performance as employees, but to shape their thinking as students. And it's an opportunity shared by all student employees, whether they're in a position or program crafted to function as a HIP or not. Setting its connotative baggage aside, training then is simply a word that signals that we're concerned with learning in a workplace context. Training can combine both the short-term goal of enabling someone to independently do something required of them as part of their job, and broader aims around supporting the growth of critical and information-literate thinkers.

Approaching training as learning prompts us not just to think about what student employees need to know or be able to do, but also about how we want them to approach problems, what questions we want them to be able to ask, and how we want them to reflect on their work and learning. Learning, as Stolovitch and Keeps note, is change, and in training employees we're concerned not simply with the transmission of information, but with changing people, with transforming learners. That change-which challenges, modifies, and extends the mental models of learners-can be informed by student learning outcomes that exceed job requirements and align with the stated educational goals of academic libraries and the colleges and universities they serve. Mapping the alignment between training goals and institutional learning outcomes is beneficial on a number of levels. It provides a framework in which student employees can identify the educational value of their work, and connect it to and integrate it with other learning experiences; it provides objectives for supervisors to build training and employment experiences around, and avenues for reflecting on how to make those experiences educationally purposeful; it furnishes concepts that can be folded into an expanded approach to performance evaluation, and can be used in assessing the learning impact of training and employment programs; and it enables the library to discuss its support for student success in language shared across campus.

Starkel affords an example of what such goal alignment might look like in practice in her description of how student employment and training in Butler University's Information Commons program is aligned with the university's values and its nine institutional learning outcomes. And Grimm and Harmeyer have recently mapped the tasks, knowledge, and skills required of student employees at Purdue University Archives and Special Collections against the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, demonstrating that information professionals can create work environments "built to impart educational growth, critical-thinking, and problem-solving skills." As Grimm and Harmeyer show, those skills are in fact required to successfully accomplish many of the jobs students hold in academic libraries, which makes incorporating them in job training imperative for student success at multiple scales. The Framework "envisions information literacy as extending the arc of learning throughout students' academic careers and as converging with other academic and social learning goals" - and it converges too with training competent student library employees.

Translating these ideas into concrete features of training can be as simple as remembering to provide learners with rationales that explain why a particular skill or task is important, and how it fits into the big picture of the employee's job and library's mission. It might also include, for example, creating brief two- or three-question reflection prompts, and providing a couple of minutes for students to respond to them at the end of a training session-prompts that ask them about what they're learning, and how it connects to, adds to, or changes what they already know. It could involve learners practicing and applying what they're learning in a range of different situations, or providing outlines or maps that student employees can fill out or create as they learn, in order to draw connections between and suggest a structure for what they're learning. Such interventions support student employees in successfully learning how to do their job, but they also support their learning about how to learn, and encourage them to make connections among the skills, concepts, and ideas they encounter across their academic and non-academic experiences. The result is training that both effectively deepens job learning and fosters metacognitive skills, integrated learning, and an awareness of how certain principles or approaches might apply across a multitude of scenarios. And these are features of educational practices-like HIPs-that strongly support student engagement and accomplishment.

This approach makes training an exercise not in student employees "teaching themselves," but one that can incorporate specific practices that encourage autonomy and foster higher-order thinking. We can create structured opportunities for learners to discover information about the library, explore the parts of a process, or investigate a database for themselves, perhaps even with the goal of having them share what they've learned with their peers. We can design training activities that ask student employees to make decisions, use their judgment, and grapple with the kinds of problems germane to their position. We can provide space for them to fail, reflect on what went wrong, and try again. In following this path, the trainer doesn't abdicate responsibility or operate solely from a "hands-off" position, but provides guidance and structure within which student employees can exercise their autonomy and agency, and work with the trainer to build the skills necessary not just to their job but to their development as learners.

A critically-informed training pedagogy also foregrounds the reciprocity of the teacher-learner relationship, emphasizing that those roles are fluid rather than fixed. Throughout the term of a student's employment, we can learn from their lived experiences, their perceptions of the library, and the knowledge they bring with them from other arenas of work and learning. In the context of job training specifically, we can learn from student employees about that training itself-about the experience of participating in it, its effectiveness, its ellisions or omissions, and how to do it better. Both new and continuing student employees can and should be co-creators and critics of their work-learning experience at the library, including training. Activating student employees' existing expertise in the course of training, and having them contribute to rather than just receive that training, realizes the two-way learning opportunities that inhere in both student employment and job training. They point to student employment as a catalyst for change in the library, and student employee training as a learning moment that can exceed hierarchical models of knowledge transmission.

Creating organizational change

Thinking of student employee training as learning reorients it from being a peripheral chore that gets in the way of the real and important work of the academic library, to something that is actually at the very heart of the academic library's educational mission-directly connected to supporting student success not just in the very particular and local context of the job they've been hired to do, but in the broader arc of their college and life journey. And identifying the work of student employees, and of training student employees, as educationally purposeful redraws the boundaries of teaching and learning in the library. In particular, it highlights the importance of supervisors-many of whom are not librarians-to student learning, and the need in turn to support their learning. The fact that student employees are students is generating an increasing amount of thought about how to make their work experience educationally valuable. The fact that student employees are employees, however, might also create a route via which to think about the learning of other library employees, and develop continuities between the care taken with, and the practices and models used in, student and staff learning-which coincide at the point of the student employee and their supervisor. Thinking about the learning of student staff might prompt us to consider further supporting the learning and success of all library staff, especially those who supervise student employees, and to recognize that the community whose learning the library supports is not just "out there." As Wilkinson and Lewis note, "Education is a core mission of all libraries. Libraries should make the same commitment to educating their personnel that they have made to educating their users."

If training is learning, supervisors are themselves, of course, not just learners but also educators, a designation that disrupts typical demarcations around who in the library teaches. McClellan and colleagues suggest that a good supervisor can operate like a good professor in creating "a positive and open atmosphere for learning." However, Markgraf notes there may be "hesitation among some staff to refer to themselves as educators, and [...] resistance among faculty to cede any part of that role to colleagues outside of the classroom." Student employee training highlights, nevertheless, that clear distinctions between these terms and roles do not hold-supervisors "train, instruct, and educate [...] One is not more important than the other. All three work together." Indeed, as Reed and Signorelli point out, "almost everyone within a library or non-profit organization is a trainer-teacher-learner." Our official titles and place within the library hierarchy don't map in obvious and straightforward ways onto the work around learning that we actually do. Thinking of supervisors as teachers might produce some dissonance and difficulties. But supervisors are already fulfilling that role and doing that work: "we spend more time with the student employees on average than any one professor, counselor, or advisor," and spend that time "educating, training, helping to form students' work ethics and habits." Burke and Lawrence refer to this as "accidental mentorship," but if we recognize the work of supervisors as directly contributing to student learning, then we can be more intentional about supporting them in this role, and untangling the "mixed signals" they receive "regarding the time that they spend training and managing student employees." Thinking about effective, pedagogically-informed student employee training requires conceiving of supervisors as both teachers and learners and seeing the learning of students, student employees, and full-time staff as interconnected and integral to the learning mission of the library.

Conclusion

This article advocates incorporating not just student employment in general, but job training for student employees specifically, into academic libraries' educational practices. Such an argument points to a need for further research on and assessment of the relationship between student employment, training methods and programs, and student and supervisor learning. What support do supervisors need to effectively facilitate training as a learner-centered experience? How do we reconfigure the structure of our organizations to recognize supervisors as educators? How can we track the impact-on student employees, supervisors, and the work of the library-of adopting a learner-centered approach to work and training? Answering those questions, and others, will work to shift hierarchized distinctions between types of learning within the library, and allow us to identify further overlooked educational opportunities and other arenas in which we might bring learner-centered approaches to bear to the benefit of library staff and users, as does looking anew at job training for student employees. Reexamining student employee training from a learning perspective can not only improve job performance and advance key learning outcomes; it can also reconfigure assumptions about who "does" teaching and learning in the library, confound hierarchical distinctions that hinder organizational learning, and contribute to a reflective, learner-centered library, characterized by care, in which the learners are both patrons and staff.

Acknowledgements
With many thanks to publishing editor Jaena Rae Cabrera, internal reviewer Ian Beilin, and external reviewer Cindy Pierard for the many generous and insightful comments that have enriched my thought and writing on this topic; to Paul Moffett, for his time, support, encouragement, and getting excited about doing new stuff in Access Services; to Michelle Niemann, in-home writing coach and interlocutor par excellence; and to the student employees in Access Services at IUPUI University Library, from whom I learn so much, and who make going to work a pleasure.
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Footnotes

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Training Matters: Student Employment and Learning in Academic Libraries

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Conceiving of student employment in academic libraries as an educationally purposeful experience requires adopting a learner-centered pedagogical approach to student employee job training.

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Caroline Clarke: The Essential Power of Belonging | TED Talk

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Author and journalist Caroline Clarke explores our fundamental need for belonging and how critical it is not only to every individual’s fulfillment and success but to our collective wellbeing and future. Drawing from her work as Women of Power Chief Brand Officer and her own family’s journey with…

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Customer Service - Presentation

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Here are some articles we've found related to customer service, and tool/resources that people have found during the pandemic.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Session PPT

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Store photos and docs online. Access them from any PC, Mac or phone. Create and work together on Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Your co-workers are your "customers," too! Establishing communication norms could help set expectations and make communicating easier. This could help you help each other and make sure everyone's on the same page.

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Back when we were in the office, we all knew the unwritten rules of communication. If someone had large headphones on, they probably were focused on work, and didn't want to be interrupted to gossip about the latest drama. Or if your team was about to have an important meeting with a client, you would quickly run through last-minute questions before walking into the room.

We all learned these communication norms by observing our colleagues. But now with the rapid shift to hybrid work there is a need to create new rules for digital communication. Somehow it seems that the more platforms we have at our disposal, the more complicated digital communication gets.

I published a research study with Quester this month called " The Digital Communication Crisis " to understand the challenges that we all face in workplace digital communication. Through a survey of almost 2,000 office workers, we found that over 70% experienced some form of unclear communication from their colleagues. This leads to the average employee wasting four hours per week on poor or confusing digital communications, which adds up to an average annual amount of $188 billion wasted across the American economy.

Here's an example of one organization that was struggling with this very issue. The organization brought me in to assess a team's digital communication channels. The division leader wanted to know why there was so much daily dysfunction: missed deadlines, emails ignored, reports of uncomfortable chat room conversations, and a lot of peer-based passive-aggressiveness.

It didn't take me long to discover that the team in question was using its collaboration tools in every which way but the right one. In the team's hands, Microsoft Teams chat had become a devious way for members to avoid video-call collaboration. Members were also sharing the same messages and documents using multiple collaboration tools, making it hard for anybody to know where to go for what. Finally, some members were commenting on tasks using 10-word IM messages, without explaining if their message was an opinion or a request for action.

Eventually, the team and I created norms around the best, most proper use of every communication channel. Here's what we built:

Setting Collaboration Channel Norms

Using this chart as your template, set guidelines for your own team. As I discuss in my new book, Digital Body Language, I recommend scheduling a meeting with the sole purpose of having this norm-establishing discussion. To foster an open dialogue, frame the meeting as a group brainstorm and working session. Here are a few questions to get the conversation going:

1. What's been the most collaborative experience you've had in each of these channels?

IM (Microsoft Teams, Slack, Skype, etc.)

Email

Video calls

Texting (if applicable)

2. Based on these positive experiences, what are the norms that we want to set up for each channel? (See the right-most column above for specific examples.) As you set up these guidelines, think about message length, complexity, and response time.

How long is too long for an IM message?

Do we want to put a limit on the number of people to include in a group IM?

When (if ever) is it appropriate to text someone?

What is the expected response time for emails?

3. When we transition to a hybrid office, how will we stay inclusive of our remote employees and avoid potential biases?

4. Given that many of us are working asynchronously, how will we be sure to communicate when we are working while still respecting everyone's personal time?

Once you've established your team's communication norms, the hard part is then making sure they stick - people have a habit of sliding back to their old ways. Mindful of this tendency, I worked with the team to identify two or three channel advocates whose role was to encourage best practices within each channel and give shout-outs to those who were modeling the right behaviors.

We also developed a practice designed to eliminate situations where individuals duplicated content unnecessarily across multiple channels by rolling out the hashtag #killduplication as a response when a message is sent on the wrong channel. If someone does not adhere to the latest hybrid collaboration norms, team members are encouraged to respond with "#killduplication" to make it less of a call out and more of a fun reinforcement to learn the new behavior. The #killduplication phrase is now a staple in the team culture, helping to eliminate wasted time and ensure colleagues optimize the use of each digital medium.

We are in the midst of a major transition from remote to hybrid work. As this shift is happening, it's essential for managers to establish norms around digital communication with their teams. Having a detailed guide will help ensure that everyone on your team is on the same page and has the same expectations - regardless of who is working from where.

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We are in the midst of a major transition from remote to hybrid work. As this shift is happening, it's essential for managers to establish norms around digital communication with their teams. Having a detailed guide will help ensure that everyone on your team is on the same page and has the same expectations - regardless of who is working from where.

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Presented by Default Presenter Produced on: 10/12/2021