Sep 21, 2021
On this final episode of Simply True, Jane is joined by all her co-hosts – Rebecca, Val, and Peter – to reflect on the axiom, “Learning is in the doing and deciding.” Val and Peter share similar stories – they met Jane over two decades ago, early on in their careers working in international development. After experiencing the incongruence of coming into a community as outsiders and finding themselves telling, they both were eager for another way to facilitate learning. Whether learning Portuguese by singing along to the music, or leading long-term organizational change processes, sometimes the deepest learning happens when learners can do and decide for themselves.
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This show is produced by Global Learning Partners and Greg Tilton Jr, with theme music composed by Kyle Donald.
Read the transcripts for the episode below.
JANE Welcome to Simply True, with yours truly, Dr. Jane Vella. On this podcast, we sit down with dear friends and colleagues from over the years to do one thing: explore the simple truths behind some of my favorite sayings in Dialogue Education. REBECCA Hi, I’m Rebecca Hutchins, co-owner of Global Learning Partners, and your host for today’s episode of Simply True with Dr. Jane Vella. Today’s episode is slightly different, as Jane and I are joined by my co-hosts and partners Peter Noteboom and Valerie Uccellani to explore the axiom, “learning is in the doing and deciding.” Welcome Val and Peter, it’s great to all be together. PETER Good to be here. VALERIE Hello. REBECCA Val and Peter, I’d love to start by having you both say a bit about yourself, and how you came to know Jane. VALERIE Shall I jump in, Peter? PETER Please, Valerie. VALERIE It’s earlier in New Orleans, so, I get to go first. So, I have a Master’s in International Public Health and very shortly after getting my degree, did a fellowship in Brazil with UNICEF, where I was plunged in to a new world of learning and teaching, although I didn’t quite see it as that at that time. We were traveling around Northeastern Brazil and we were, really in retrospect, imposing ourselves in communities and in homes. Weighing children, talking to mothers and other caretakers and then telling them what they should be doing to take better care of their children. I see it as that now, because I was fortunate enough that in about 1990, it was, I was working for a large international consulting firm based in Washington DC, and back doing a lot of travel to and fro Latin America, international public health work. And I had the opportunity to meet this Dr. Jane Vella, who I knew as someone who had been a leader at Save the Children, and was there to help us craft a training package for frontline staff in Central America. And at that time, and maybe even still today, Jane was quick to gently invite people to come sit at her home with her and learn about learning. And I was so glad that I was in a position where I had some professional development dollars that I could spend through my employer and I accepted her invitation. And I went down to Raleigh, and I spent five memorable days, this was 1990, I was six years out of college. And I spent those days sitting in Jane’s living room, realizing that already so early in my career, I had been really feigning dialogue, rather than really engaging in dialogue with people about their lives, their realities, and what useful information, you know, there might be for them. And so I was able to then go on back to this international consulting firm and some side work – I went as a trainer to Peace Corps in West Africa, and then in Southern Africa – and just in the next few years, did some work with migrant families in the Midwest and I brought, I grappled with what Jane had taught us about the principles and practices of adult learning. And I applied them in every way that I could, I just experimented, and I’ve been doing that till this day, and my gratitude for Jane and her work cannot be overstated. JANE Oh Val, that’s beautiful, dear. REBECCA It is beautiful. I- in all these years that I’ve known you, Valerie, I did not know that story. So, thank you so much for sharing that. PETER We share some similar themes there. I was in the mid 90’s with my wife, Jeanette Romkema, we were working in West Africa and I had the good fortune of working with folks who knew about “Training for Transformation,” that series of three manuals by Anne Hope and Sally Timmel that, you know, were grounded in Paulo Freire’s insights. And I really had, let’s say, a theoretical understanding of the importance of people taking charge of their own destiny from reading the books, but I didn’t- I hadn’t seen it in practice. I didn’t have training necessarily in how to do it. I believed it, but when I was working with communities in Niger in community self-help programs – and these were programs about keeping your harvest and selling it later, buying goats and raising them and selling them after there have been fattened, literacy programs or even a small first aid kit in the village and savings programs. When we sat down with the village women or the village men or whatever community group there was, I was really telling, I wasn’t really listening, and I felt an incongruence there. I too, was young, I was in my early 30s, and thinking back on it, I wonder about the relationships we had then – they were genuine and they were real, for sure – and for a 30 year old white guy to be telling women who – how to run their lives and how to improve their economic status or whatever, it does cause one to wonder. But anyway, it was a very interesting, for me and for, I think, for others, too a very interesting time. But I also had an occasion to take an educational leave of absence, connected with the birth of our second son, Jude, and as I got on the airplane and one of my colleagues said, I was kind of talking with her about this incongruence I felt. And she said, “you should look up Jane Vella when you get back to Canada.” So I did that. When I got back to Canada and had a little bit of free time I looked up Jane in the phone book, we had phone books then, and I called her up and she answered and she said, “come down next week, there’s a course, five days worth, you’ll love it! It’s just what you need, I’m just getting started.” So, we went to Raleigh, and we were at the retreat center there, Avila Retreat Center, which was a fine place to be and the first thing I remember coming in, we had this bulletin board with 50 cards about Popular Education and I’m like, bingo, this is exactly what I want to learn. And so I just felt voracious the whole time I was there. And as we went through day one, and day two was just like swimming in water. But, of course, the first thing we had to do was to do a practice teaching and so I was pretty excited about telling what I knew about praxis and how that worked in Niger and all that, and at the end of my 20 minute or 30 minute practice session, Jane says, “how about a little more dialogue?”- JANE How about! PETER -So, that was the conversion moment. Both that particular time and the five days, I’d never considered – never thought of education in the same way again and I too will always be grateful for that insight. Yeah. JANE If I may, when I met Peter, and you went through some work with me, you asked me a wonderful question. I remember it so well, you asked, “Is this epistemology or is it theology?” And I said, “yes!” PETER Of course you did! REBECCA That’s great, thank you. Okay, we’re gonna switch gears a little bit, because we’re here today to discuss the axiom, “learning is in the doing and deciding”. So Jane, I wonder what you can tell us about where this axiom comes from? JANE We can follow up on – on Val your story and Peter’s story, because I believe that people are earnestly looking for that, what’s the word I want, a process, a frame that they can use when they start training or teaching or any kind of education at any level. They’re searching for that and they have read buckets of theory. That was your experience, Peter, you could say you knew the theory. How do you put it into process? As Peter said, “I want to know how to do this,” and the answer came somehow – the learning, not the teaching, but the learning is in the deciding and the doing. And that kind of enigmatic and yet, that’s exactly what we do when we design a good learning task. REBECCA Nice. I like what you said there, Jane, that it emerged from your experience together. JANE Yes, no question about that, dear. And in a sense, I love the phrase I wrote once, “I don’t know how this all happened. I just happened to be there to catch the falling star.” I love that phrase. And it’s true, I just happened to be there, ready, looking for it. REBECCA Okay, so Val and Peter, maybe Val you might want to go first, what stories come to mind with regards to this axiom, “learning is in the doing and deciding?” VALERIE Oh so many, oh so many! But when I first started reflecting on the stories, I was showered, I was showered with examples of this axiom ringing true for my own learning experiences. Like first those were the stories that came to mind. I found myself going way back to when, as I mentioned, I was going to be going down to Northeastern Brazil, and I needed to learn Portuguese and I needed to learn it rather quickly. And yes, I engaged a tutor, a Brazilian woman who lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I had graduated. The way that I learned it was not through her teaching, as much as it was her creating a space for me to do it and make decisions about how I was going to do it. So, for example, I remember her noting that I’d like to dance and I like to music and so she started just giving me this Brazilian music to listen to and said, “sing along with the lyrics,” I’m like, “I don’t understand all that- what they’re saying,” like, it just doesn’t matter. Just like say the word, say the words, have it come out and you’ll start to understand from the meaning.” And it was such a fantastic way to learn the language. And I think about that example a lot when I’m designing and teaching, because I have always found it helpful to be thrust, if you will, into an opportunity to do something to try something and then to make decisions about how I want to do it and decide it, and to have a guide at my side. So, that was really one of my- the first stories that came to mind that has been really helpful for me throughout my career. REBECCA Peter, how about you? PETER Yeah, that’s- when I think about answering that question now, I am in a different stage of my life. When that- that axiom was really taking shape for me in the early 2000s. We were teaching, “Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach,” almost every week or every other week and working with so many different people. And the – the phrase “learning by doing” is just so important and so powerful and then to add in that “deciding,” really all about that verb choice, about what are people going to do with it and how will it lead to a decision and to change and to transfer? But at this stage of my life, I’m no longer sort of leading that kind of workshops about Dialoge Education, or designing with others learning and change programs. But I’m more in a governance and executive leadership kind of role. And I really like this axiom in that space, because so much of what you do as an executive leader and in the governance zone is to facilitate others learning a whole new process, not just in a 90 minute timeframe, or even two days or a week, but over six months or a year or even longer, and really encouraging people to learn through doing and then the- come to bring it to a decision-making point so that you actually, you know, lead an organization or community through change. And especially at a governance level, I often think about the formulation of recommended decisions for a Board to make. And it’s easy to say we’ll adopt the financial statements or take a look at this program, document and receive it, but if you really want governance people to be engaged in the process, you need to design many steps leading up to the adoption of a program plan. Last week, for example, we just adopted a three year program plan that took three years to design, by the way. REBECCA Oh my goodness. JANE Wonderful, wonderful. PETER Three years ago, we did work on mission and vision. And two years ago, we did for- work on operating guidelines, and just in the last year we’ve selected program priorities. So just the whole long process of leading people through a long-term change process for me just really relies on that, on this axiom of “doing and deciding.” JANE Beautiful. VALERIE Rebecca, if I may jump in, Peter, as I’m listening to you, I’m realizing that I think one of the reasons why this axiom and so many others that- that we hold through our work applies equally to the individual as it does to the collective– JANE Yes. VALERIE –right, it’s both. In a learning process every individual learns by doing and making decisions for themselves and being clear where they’re able to make those decisions and where those decisions are being made for them. And having transparency around that. And also I think at a group level, whether it’s a group of 10 strategic leaders in a room, whose work we might be facilitating, or an organization, or in your case, a network of institutions and organizations working together, at whatever scale, it’s the learning is in the doing and the deciding, JANE And may I come in here, it sounds Rebecca and Val and Peter, so much like the dialogue in Dialogue Education is not between a teacher and a learner, but among learners of whom the teacher is one. Because all of us, and I can say that at this time of my life, all of us have the ability to learn something new every day. And it’s what you said Valerie, about being aware of the learning and deciding, “hey, thank you, I’m in,” or to say, “hey, no, I’m not ready for this. Tomorrow, tomorrow.” REBECCA It’s so true, though, we do – I learn something new every single day. Whether it’s the other day when Valerie taught me something about grammar or last night, when Andy taught me that if the power is out, and there is no traffic light, everybody has to stop. JANE Wonderful, wonderful, wonferful and that excitement is what keeps us alive. And I don’t mean alive in the sense of being well, or being agile – alive with joy, with delight, because it is delightful, it is delightful. What I’m learning these days just knocks me out. REBECCA It’s true, learning is delightful, whether it’s driving, or it’s about grammar, or it’s about a book about business and leadership skills- JANE Exactly, exactly. REBECCA -so it is delightful, no matter how big or small the topic is. Thank you. JANE Exactly and imagine the healing that’s involved in such a new, what’s the word I want, such a new perception or such a new position to take? Because I hear too much, “oh, I can’t do that,” or, “I did this and it was dumb,” or, “I was stupid.” And I say “not- you can’t say that in my house. I have to live here, the words go into the walls.” REBECCA Val and Peter, I wonder what story might come to mind from a time when the two of you were working together? JANE Oh, be kind then folks. PETER Maybe I get to go first this time. VALERIE Okay. PETER I’m thinking about the time that we worked with some folks and was it Alabama or Mississippi, who had – were recovering from the after effects of the oil disaster in the Gulf Coast. And it’s always a pleasure and a privilege to work with Valerie, but in that course, in particular, I really learned about her incredible ability to imagine the effects of what we’re doing on, let’s call them the end learners, the people for whom this is designed for– REBECCA Okay. JANE Yes. PETER –not – not necessarily the designers who you’re working with, the trainers who will design the workshop, but the folks that they’re working with– JANE Yes. PETER –and what their concerns are and what they might be interested in, what they might need. Just that ability to imagine and to empathize and to tell others what that experience would be like, or even just to ask the right question about “how will that feel for those people?” That’s one of Valerie’s incredible gifts. JANE Beautiful. VALERIE I have to say it reminds me of a story of, in those early days that I was mentioning earlier at the big international consulting firm there in D.C., and I remember our very first what they called a retreat – but of course, it was a lot of hard work and a meeting, it wasn’t such a retreat – but it was a room full of people at a lot of small tables and we were – as we were given the task of that – that required us to talk about our clients and – and generate some ideas about working with the clients and so forth. And it wasn’t until there was the report-out afterwards that I realized, ah, I had been defining client totally differently than everyone else in the room. For them, the client was the funder. It didn’t even occur to me, did not even occur to me to think- Of course not. – of that as our client. The client, to me, were the community members who were going to be impacted by all that we were planning in those four walls. And I have to say, Rebecca, when you ask about work with Peter, the bulk of the work that Peter and I have done together over the years is co-building, along with you and Jane and others, this small company that now is – that is Global Learning Partners. And I think one thing that I have always so appreciated about our take on our work, is that we do have the bigger picture in mind, we do have always in mind, “how is this going to impact people?” I love that about that – that frame, I think it shapes everything really. JANE It does, Val. REBECCA It does. I feel pretty lucky every single day to be a part of it. JANE Oh, Rebecca. REBECCA Good. Thank you so much, Val, and Peter and I guess we’ll wrap up with this, as people who have been practicing Dialogue Education for many years now, what’s one final wisdom that you would like to leave our listeners with today? PETER Attention must be paid. JANE Oh, Peter. PETER That’s another one of Jane’s axioms, I think – JANE Oh , Peter. PETER –or maybe she picked it up from somewhere else, I’m not sure. JANE Yes. PETER But – but I don’t know, just listening, being alert and not trapped by the clock or the time or the deadlines. But just listening and being alert and paying attention to – to what’s going on in yourself and your own social location, and what privileges you’re bringing to the conversation, but also to what’s going on with the people and in the community. REBECCA Thank you. How about you, Val? VALERIE I think very much in line with that, especially looking at listening to yourself. The reason why I – at the beginning of this conversation went to a story about my own learning is that I think being aware of our own learning makes us good teachers, because often we tend to shift and design and teach in a way that wouldn’t quite work for us. So, my final words would be, hey whenever designing, sit and reflect on, “hmm, if I were one of the learners in this event or if I were one of the people in this learning organization, what would work for me?” And that’s probably going to be your best design. JANE Beautiful, Val. The authenticity that emerges from that is working. REBECCA Absolutely. Thank you, everybody so much for coming together today. This was fun. VALERIE Thank you so much, Rebecca, and thanks, Jane and Peter, for a life long of learning from you. PETER Here, here! JANE Thank you, folks. I want to say I’m with my favorite people in the world. Thank you. OUTRO (MEG) Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Simply True with Dr. Jane Vella. This podcast is produced by Global Learning Partners and Greg Tilton, with music by Kyle Donald. If you enjoyed the show, consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast player. To find out more about Global Learning Partners, whether it be our course offerings, consulting services or free resources, go to www.globallearningpartners.com. We invite you to sign up for our mailing list, subscribe to our podcast and find us on social media to continue the dialogue.
JANE Welcome to Simply True, with yours truly, Dr. Jane Vella. On this podcast, we sit down with dear friends and colleagues from over the years to do one thing: explore the simple truths behind some of my favorite sayings in Dialogue Education. REBECCA Hi, I’m Rebecca Hutchins, co-owner of Global Learning Partners, and your host for today’s episode of Simply True with Dr. Jane Vella. Today’s episode is slightly different, as Jane and I are joined by my co-hosts and partners Peter Noteboom and Valerie Uccellani to explore the axiom, “learning is in the doing and deciding.” Welcome Val and Peter, it’s great to all be together. PETER Good to be here. VALERIE Hello. REBECCA Val and Peter, I’d love to start by having you both say a bit about yourself, and how you came to know Jane. VALERIE Shall I jump in, Peter? PETER Please, Valerie. VALERIE It’s earlier in New Orleans, so, I get to go first. So, I have a Master’s in International Public Health and very shortly after getting my degree, did a fellowship in Brazil with UNICEF, where I was plunged in to a new world of learning and teaching, although I didn’t quite see it as that at that time. We were traveling around Northeastern Brazil and we were, really in retrospect, imposing ourselves in communities and in homes. Weighing children, talking to mothers and other caretakers and then telling them what they should be doing to take better care of their children. I see it as that now, because I was fortunate enough that in about 1990, it was, I was working for a large international consulting firm based in Washington DC, and back doing a lot of travel to and fro Latin America, international public health work. And I had the opportunity to meet this Dr. Jane Vella, who I knew as someone who had been a leader at Save the Children, and was there to help us craft a training package for frontline staff in Central America. And at that time, and maybe even still today, Jane was quick to gently invite people to come sit at her home with her and learn about learning. And I was so glad that I was in a position where I had some professional development dollars that I could spend through my employer and I accepted her invitation. And I went down to Raleigh, and I spent five memorable days, this was 1990, I was six years out of college. And I spent those days sitting in Jane’s living room, realizing that already so early in my career, I had been really feigning dialogue, rather than really engaging in dialogue with people about their lives, their realities, and what useful information, you know, there might be for them. And so I was able to then go on back to this international consulting firm and some side work – I went as a trainer to Peace Corps in West Africa, and then in Southern Africa – and just in the next few years, did some work with migrant families in the Midwest and I brought, I grappled with what Jane had taught us about the principles and practices of adult learning. And I applied them in every way that I could, I just experimented, and I’ve been doing that till this day, and my gratitude for Jane and her work cannot be overstated. JANE Oh Val, that’s beautiful, dear. REBECCA It is beautiful. I- in all these years that I’ve known you, Valerie, I did not know that story. So, thank you so much for sharing that. PETER We share some similar themes there. I was in the mid 90’s with my wife, Jeanette Romkema, we were working in West Africa and I had the good fortune of working with folks who knew about “Training for Transformation,” that series of three manuals by Anne Hope and Sally Timmel that, you know, were grounded in Paulo Freire’s insights. And I really had, let’s say, a theoretical understanding of the importance of people taking charge of their own destiny from reading the books, but I didn’t- I hadn’t seen it in practice. I didn’t have training necessarily in how to do it. I believed it, but when I was working with communities in Niger in community self-help programs – and these were programs about keeping your harvest and selling it later, buying goats and raising them and selling them after there have been fattened, literacy programs or even a small first aid kit in the village and savings programs. When we sat down with the village women or the village men or whatever community group there was, I was really telling, I wasn’t really listening, and I felt an incongruence there. I too, was young, I was in my early 30s, and thinking back on it, I wonder about the relationships we had then – they were genuine and they were real, for sure – and for a 30 year old white guy to be telling women who – how to run their lives and how to improve their economic status or whatever, it does cause one to wonder. But anyway, it was a very interesting, for me and for, I think, for others, too a very interesting time. But I also had an occasion to take an educational leave of absence, connected with the birth of our second son, Jude, and as I got on the airplane and one of my colleagues said, I was kind of talking with her about this incongruence I felt. And she said, “you should look up Jane Vella when you get back to Canada.” So I did that. When I got back to Canada and had a little bit of free time I looked up Jane in the phone book, we had phone books then, and I called her up and she answered and she said, “come down next week, there’s a course, five days worth, you’ll love it! It’s just what you need, I’m just getting started.” So, we went to Raleigh, and we were at the retreat center there, Avila Retreat Center, which was a fine place to be and the first thing I remember coming in, we had this bulletin board with 50 cards about Popular Education and I’m like, bingo, this is exactly what I want to learn. And so I just felt voracious the whole time I was there. And as we went through day one, and day two was just like swimming in water. But, of course, the first thing we had to do was to do a practice teaching and so I was pretty excited about telling what I knew about praxis and how that worked in Niger and all that, and at the end of my 20 minute or 30 minute practice session, Jane says, “how about a little more dialogue?”- JANE How about! PETER -So, that was the conversion moment. Both that particular time and the five days, I’d never considered – never thought of education in the same way again and I too will always be grateful for that insight. Yeah. JANE If I may, when I met Peter, and you went through some work with me, you asked me a wonderful question. I remember it so well, you asked, “Is this epistemology or is it theology?” And I said, “yes!” PETER Of course you did! REBECCA That’s great, thank you. Okay, we’re gonna switch gears a little bit, because we’re here today to discuss the axiom, “learning is in the doing and deciding”. So Jane, I wonder what you can tell us about where this axiom comes from? JANE We can follow up on – on Val your story and Peter’s story, because I believe that people are earnestly looking for that, what’s the word I want, a process, a frame that they can use when they start training or teaching or any kind of education at any level. They’re searching for that and they have read buckets of theory. That was your experience, Peter, you could say you knew the theory. How do you put it into process? As Peter said, “I want to know how to do this,” and the answer came somehow – the learning, not the teaching, but the learning is in the deciding and the doing. And that kind of enigmatic and yet, that’s exactly what we do when we design a good learning task. REBECCA Nice. I like what you said there, Jane, that it emerged from your experience together. JANE Yes, no question about that, dear. And in a sense, I love the phrase I wrote once, “I don’t know how this all happened. I just happened to be there to catch the falling star.” I love that phrase. And it’s true, I just happened to be there, ready, looking for it. REBECCA Okay, so Val and Peter, maybe Val you might want to go first, what stories come to mind with regards to this axiom, “learning is in the doing and deciding?” VALERIE Oh so many, oh so many! But when I first started reflecting on the stories, I was showered, I was showered with examples of this axiom ringing true for my own learning experiences. Like first those were the stories that came to mind. I found myself going way back to when, as I mentioned, I was going to be going down to Northeastern Brazil, and I needed to learn Portuguese and I needed to learn it rather quickly. And yes, I engaged a tutor, a Brazilian woman who lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I had graduated. The way that I learned it was not through her teaching, as much as it was her creating a space for me to do it and make decisions about how I was going to do it. So, for example, I remember her noting that I’d like to dance and I like to music and so she started just giving me this Brazilian music to listen to and said, “sing along with the lyrics,” I’m like, “I don’t understand all that- what they’re saying,” like, it just doesn’t matter. Just like say the word, say the words, have it come out and you’ll start to understand from the meaning.” And it was such a fantastic way to learn the language. And I think about that example a lot when I’m designing and teaching, because I have always found it helpful to be thrust, if you will, into an opportunity to do something to try something and then to make decisions about how I want to do it and decide it, and to have a guide at my side. So, that was really one of my- the first stories that came to mind that has been really helpful for me throughout my career. REBECCA Peter, how about you? PETER Yeah, that’s- when I think about answering that question now, I am in a different stage of my life. When that- that axiom was really taking shape for me in the early 2000s. We were teaching, “Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach,” almost every week or every other week and working with so many different people. And the – the phrase “learning by doing” is just so important and so powerful and then to add in that “deciding,” really all about that verb choice, about what are people going to do with it and how will it lead to a decision and to change and to transfer? But at this stage of my life, I’m no longer sort of leading that kind of workshops about Dialoge Education, or designing with others learning and change programs. But I’m more in a governance and executive leadership kind of role. And I really like this axiom in that space, because so much of what you do as an executive leader and in the governance zone is to facilitate others learning a whole new process, not just in a 90 minute timeframe, or even two days or a week, but over six months or a year or even longer, and really encouraging people to learn through doing and then the- come to bring it to a decision-making point so that you actually, you know, lead an organization or community through change. And especially at a governance level, I often think about the formulation of recommended decisions for a Board to make. And it’s easy to say we’ll adopt the financial statements or take a look at this program, document and receive it, but if you really want governance people to be engaged in the process, you need to design many steps leading up to the adoption of a program plan. Last week, for example, we just adopted a three year program plan that took three years to design, by the way. REBECCA Oh my goodness. JANE Wonderful, wonderful. PETER Three years ago, we did work on mission and vision. And two years ago, we did for- work on operating guidelines, and just in the last year we’ve selected program priorities. So just the whole long process of leading people through a long-term change process for me just really relies on that, on this axiom of “doing and deciding.” JANE Beautiful. VALERIE Rebecca, if I may jump in, Peter, as I’m listening to you, I’m realizing that I think one of the reasons why this axiom and so many others that- that we hold through our work applies equally to the individual as it does to the collective– JANE Yes. VALERIE –right, it’s both. In a learning process every individual learns by doing and making decisions for themselves and being clear where they’re able to make those decisions and where those decisions are being made for them. And having transparency around that. And also I think at a group level, whether it’s a group of 10 strategic leaders in a room, whose work we might be facilitating, or an organization, or in your case, a network of institutions and organizations working together, at whatever scale, it’s the learning is in the doing and the deciding, JANE And may I come in here, it sounds Rebecca and Val and Peter, so much like the dialogue in Dialogue Education is not between a teacher and a learner, but among learners of whom the teacher is one. Because all of us, and I can say that at this time of my life, all of us have the ability to learn something new every day. And it’s what you said Valerie, about being aware of the learning and deciding, “hey, thank you, I’m in,” or to say, “hey, no, I’m not ready for this. Tomorrow, tomorrow.” REBECCA It’s so true, though, we do – I learn something new every single day. Whether it’s the other day when Valerie taught me something about grammar or last night, when Andy taught me that if the power is out, and there is no traffic light, everybody has to stop. JANE Wonderful, wonderful, wonferful and that excitement is what keeps us alive. And I don’t mean alive in the sense of being well, or being agile – alive with joy, with delight, because it is delightful, it is delightful. What I’m learning these days just knocks me out. REBECCA It’s true, learning is delightful, whether it’s driving, or it’s about grammar, or it’s about a book about business and leadership skills- JANE Exactly, exactly. REBECCA -so it is delightful, no matter how big or small the topic is. Thank you. JANE Exactly and imagine the healing that’s involved in such a new, what’s the word I want, such a new perception or such a new position to take? Because I hear too much, “oh, I can’t do that,” or, “I did this and it was dumb,” or, “I was stupid.” And I say “not- you can’t say that in my house. I have to live here, the words go into the walls.” REBECCA Val and Peter, I wonder what story might come to mind from a time when the two of you were working together? JANE Oh, be kind then folks. PETER Maybe I get to go first this time. VALERIE Okay. PETER I’m thinking about the time that we worked with some folks and was it Alabama or Mississippi, who had – were recovering from the after effects of the oil disaster in the Gulf Coast. And it’s always a pleasure and a privilege to work with Valerie, but in that course, in particular, I really learned about her incredible ability to imagine the effects of what we’re doing on, let’s call them the end learners, the people for whom this is designed for– REBECCA Okay. JANE Yes. PETER –not – not necessarily the designers who you’re working with, the trainers who will design the workshop, but the folks that they’re working with– JANE Yes. PETER –and what their concerns are and what they might be interested in, what they might need. Just that ability to imagine and to empathize and to tell others what that experience would be like, or even just to ask the right question about “how will that feel for those people?” That’s one of Valerie’s incredible gifts. JANE Beautiful. VALERIE I have to say it reminds me of a story of, in those early days that I was mentioning earlier at the big international consulting firm there in D.C., and I remember our very first what they called a retreat – but of course, it was a lot of hard work and a meeting, it wasn’t such a retreat – but it was a room full of people at a lot of small tables and we were – as we were given the task of that – that required us to talk about our clients and – and generate some ideas about working with the clients and so forth. And it wasn’t until there was the report-out afterwards that I realized, ah, I had been defining client totally differently than everyone else in the room. For them, the client was the funder. It didn’t even occur to me, did not even occur to me to think- Of course not. – of that as our client. The client, to me, were the community members who were going to be impacted by all that we were planning in those four walls. And I have to say, Rebecca, when you ask about work with Peter, the bulk of the work that Peter and I have done together over the years is co-building, along with you and Jane and others, this small company that now is – that is Global Learning Partners. And I think one thing that I have always so appreciated about our take on our work, is that we do have the bigger picture in mind, we do have always in mind, “how is this going to impact people?” I love that about that – that frame, I think it shapes everything really. JANE It does, Val. REBECCA It does. I feel pretty lucky every single day to be a part of it. JANE Oh, Rebecca. REBECCA Good. Thank you so much, Val, and Peter and I guess we’ll wrap up with this, as people who have been practicing Dialogue Education for many years now, what’s one final wisdom that you would like to leave our listeners with today? PETER Attention must be paid. JANE Oh, Peter. PETER That’s another one of Jane’s axioms, I think – JANE Oh , Peter. PETER –or maybe she picked it up from somewhere else, I’m not sure. JANE Yes. PETER But – but I don’t know, just listening, being alert and not trapped by the clock or the time or the deadlines. But just listening and being alert and paying attention to – to what’s going on in yourself and your own social location, and what privileges you’re bringing to the conversation, but also to what’s going on with the people and in the community. REBECCA Thank you. How about you, Val? VALERIE I think very much in line with that, especially looking at listening to yourself. The reason why I – at the beginning of this conversation went to a story about my own learning is that I think being aware of our own learning makes us good teachers, because often we tend to shift and design and teach in a way that wouldn’t quite work for us. So, my final words would be, hey whenever designing, sit and reflect on, “hmm, if I were one of the learners in this event or if I were one of the people in this learning organization, what would work for me?” And that’s probably going to be your best design. JANE Beautiful, Val. The authenticity that emerges from that is working. REBECCA Absolutely. Thank you, everybody so much for coming together today. This was fun. VALERIE Thank you so much, Rebecca, and thanks, Jane and Peter, for a life long of learning from you. PETER Here, here! JANE Thank you, folks. I want to say I’m with my favorite people in the world. Thank you. OUTRO (MEG) Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Simply True with Dr. Jane Vella. This podcast is produced by Global Learning Partners and Greg Tilton, with music by Kyle Donald. If you enjoyed the show, consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast player. To find out more about Global Learning Partners, whether it be our course offerings, consulting services or free resources, go to www.globallearningpartners.com. We invite you to sign up for our mailing list, subscribe to our podcast and find us on social media to continue the dialogue.