The UW Voices Campaign and UW-Madison Learning Communities for Institutional Change & Excellence (LCICE) is sponsoring an open house for members of the university community to learn about an important professional development opportunity on Wednesday, April 29, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Virginia Harrison Parlor of Lathrop Hall.
- Are you a faculty member who wishes to engage all students and support their success in your classrooms/labs?
- Are you a student interested in developing your capacities for relating across all human differences, becoming a global citizen?
- Are you a staff/administrator striving to further hone your skill sets for supporting and implementing the new Diversity Framework?
- Are you a researcher interested in building lasting mutually beneficial relationships with your community-based partners?
Join us for a conversation about which professional development initiative is for you. You’ll have the opportunity to meet with past participants to learn about their experiences in our learning community. RSVP preferred.
What is a Learning Institute (LI)?
The LI is a unique opportunity for honing your personal leadership capacities to support the University’s strategic priorities and diversity goals by participating fully as a leader within your work or educational context. It is a nine month long initiative where participants engage weekly in a sustained dialogue within a learning community. The community setting is safe and respectful, yet challenging. Through facilitated small and large group dialogues, reflective writing, readings, DVDs, activities and exercises, participants develop their leadership capacities to effectively interact with members of our community across multiple social identities (Gender, Class, Race/Ethnicity, Ability, Age, Sexual Orientation, etc.), and to build open, dynamic, and respectful working and learning environments for all.
Over the 9 months of LI, as a participant you can expect the following outcomes:
- To fully explore your, “spheres of influence” i.e. exploring how can you make a difference? ;
- To acquire tools and skills to help build inclusive working/teaching/living environments;
- To effectively interact and communicate across all human differences;
- To learn and practice ways of engaging with intercultural conflict;
- To build inclusive and equitable relationships across campus and the greater Madison community;
- And to develop confidence in your personal leadership style
LCICE is a unit in the Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement (DDEEA) that offers academic-year and semester-long Learning Communities (LCs) to help build institutional capacity to implement our strategic diversity initiatives and develop our abilities to engage effectively in a globally interconnected workforce and world. The success of this university in its mission as a world-class teaching, research, and public service institution depends on nurturing a diverse body of students, faculty and staff to foster innovation and excellence.
To achieve this mission, the Learning Communities provide a forum for active participation in dialogue focused on creating working, learning, and teaching environments where everyone is heard, valued and included. Through dialogue, one learns how to engage in transformative changes of behaviors, policies, and procedures that collectively impact the campus climate for ALL community members.
For more information go to: go.wisc.edu/lcice
“…an honest forum to explore the injustice and divisive exclusionary behaviors and what we can do to take action for equity and social justice.”
– Leadership Institute Participant
What are Learning Institute participants saying?
Experiences with the Leadership Institute have enabled direct changes in my teaching style and content. These changes have led to classroom realities that more fully engage all students, where all students feel comfortable sharing their perspectives and understandings, where all students benefit from the broader, more diverse and more inclusive insights that are synthesized. The personal impact extends far beyond the classroom, to behavioral changes with my wife, children, friends and faculty, and enables attitudes and mechanisms to better recognize and address both individual and group behavior that systematically excludes others and removes opportunities for learning and growth . . . I strongly and without reservation recommend that every person at the University of Wisconsin participate in group learning experiences with the Leadership Institute. I believe those experiences can create the important and too often ignore fundamental changes that are needed in the campus and community climate. – (Associate Professor, School of Business)
LI (as we call the Leadership Institute) had a surprising impact on me personally: I thought that I would go through the nine months inspired to blaze trails and [quote] “make a difference.” What
happened instead was a long and strange period of deep looking, accompanied by grief, anger and agitation. It was the opposite of what I expected. When I read the assigned Parker Palmer material in
our last month together (a piece entitled “Leading from Within”), I began to understand how the process was working in me. Palmer said: The problem is that people rise to leadership in our society by a tendency toward extroversion, which too often means ignoring what is going on inside. [And] while inner work is a deeply personal matter, it is not necessarily a private matter. [T]he essence of being
together in inner work…avoids the invasive and violent notion that we have in our culture of … ‘fixing each other.’ [T]his is education for leadership that is not simply about the skills to manipulate the external world but also the personal and corporate disciplines of the inner world. This is the very thing that the UW’s learning communities are about. – (Staff, Wisconsin Public Radio, University of Wisconsin – Extension)
I’m a senior level academic staff member. I’ve been here at UW-Madison 22 years. I’m an alumnus of the leadership institute . . . I currently serve as the Information Technology Policy Consultant under the CIO’s office. I help the CIO and others create and implement policies . . . [I think] the learning communities are highly effective because they seek to change the climate in the only way that really works here at UW-Madison: bottom-up, one heart and mind at a time. The learning communities . . . help the participants develop the skills needed to change the way they work with and relate to women and people of color . . .People need to understand the need, understand their personal role in effecting change, and develop the necessary skills to create a “bubble” around themselves in which intolerance cannot exist, and in which diversity is not just accepted, it is celebrated. – (Academic Staff, Division of Information Technology)