Aug 24, 2021
Dr. Jane Vella and Peter Noteboom are joined by Marian Darlington-Hope, community organizer and former co-owner of GLP, to discuss the axiom, “Begin with the end in mind.” In 1986, Marian read about a workshop at Tufts University and was immediately drawn to its focus on how to avoid all the things she was trying not to do as a professor. The workshop was led by none other than Jane, and within a few years Marian became one of the first owners of Global Learning Partners. In this episode, Marian and Jane reflect on how critical it is to have a clear vision. As Marian’s mother used to say, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”.
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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.
PETER
Hello, I’m your host for today’s episode. My name is Peter Noteboom and I serve as the President of Global Learning Partners. Today, Jane and I are joined by Dr. Marian Darlington-Hope to explore the axiom, “beginning with the end in mind.” Welcome. So let’s begin by rooting ourselves in our history, as we always like to do to tell us how things began. Marian, could you tell us just a bit about yourself and how you came to know Jane and how you came to know about Global Learning Partners?
MARIAN
Sure. I was a young faculty member, had just started teaching a year or two and I actually met Jane at Tufts. And she was part of this workshop and her description was everything that I was looking not to do – like not lecture. I was already always putting people in groups and what I was frustrated with, was the idea that sometimes it would work, and then I teach the same class to a new group of learners and that – and some of them flopped. And so, you didn’t write the word system, but what was really exciting to me that there’s a way that we could have learners engaged, without the boring lectures. Nothing is wrong with lectures, I think they’re great, but that was sort of all you’re kind of prepared to do coming out of a, you know, PhD. I was teaching adult learners, so, I was teaching folks who had been in the university, started college at some point in their life and now they were coming back.
JANE
Wonderful.
MARIAN
And so, when I heard about this – the course, and this is before there was a formal GLP, I went to North Carolina and spent five days early on and I came back a convert, that it was – the design was really important. And there are all these wonderful axioms, I know, you’ve probably covered, like, “having too much what for the when,” having too much content, and – but just really thinking how – the importance of the design steps. And then, I became part of Global Learning Partners when we moved into that direction. So that’s sort of a 25 year history, maybe, no longer than that, in a quick nutshell. But it was the best thing I ever did.
PETER
Thank you, Marian. One word that you mentioned earlier too, Marian, “system,” and when I think about the axiom that we’re here to talk about today, “beginning with the end in mind”, there’s a lot of system in that axiom. Jane, can you tell us where does this axiom come from? “Beginning with the end in mind”.
JANE
We talk about the purpose, the end, and for me yesterday, I had this absolutely magnificent insight, Jane, the end of this ecology – Peter, to quote you, it’s an “ecology.” It’s a way of thinking, a way of acting, a way of making decisions. It’s bigger and I thought yesterday, “Jane, you cannot name the end, except the proximate one.” The one for this podcast, or this course. Or I’d like to say this life, it’s infinite. It brought me to tears yesterday when I had that thought. And, so, if we begin with that end in mind, I think I can be then, a little more open to some crazy ideas I get. I throw crazy ideas, Marian, at dear Valerie. I said, “filter this.” But they come and they come because the end of this ecology, this epistemological system is a real big revolution. I mean, it’s putting so many things on its head and you mentioned something so important, Marian, that you heard, in that first course, the importance of the preparation. Many people say this is – this is too hard. I said, “Hey, what’s hard is the preparation and you cannot neglect it.”
PETER
Sure sounds familiar. What about you? What, what does the axiom mean to you? We’ll begin with the end in mind.
MARIAN
You sort of get your PhD. and you get your first job, you cover material. And to make sure that you’ve, you know, done certain things, and you – so you have all these lectures, which I didn’t like it when I experienced it and so I assumed there were some other folks like me out there. So, what it meant for me, and actually, it reminds me of an – of my- an axiom of my mother’s was, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” And, so, it reminded me of that in the sense that there needs to be, what is it I want students to be able to do at the end of this course, what is it that I – what’s the knowledge base? What are the skills, what is the perspective I would like them to be able to embrace at the end of the course? And, so, once I started there, then – and I also, of course, took Jane’s course, then the learning tasks, which I then learned we’re calling them learning tasks, weren’t just an interesting activity to bring people together, it was the task, which is always designed for the learner, was part of that end. And, so, my – my – I would call them my exercises, didn’t flop anymore, didn’t – regardless, because the end means really working through all of those steps of design, and sometimes to rework them and recognizing that it’s iterative. So, you’ll begin with the achievement based objectives and all of them have been so important. Just even thinking about the who. And the one time I didn’t pay attention to the who, I taught a course – one of my courses was in diversity, was in a management program and I taught a course in diversity. And I didn’t pay attention, because I knew the material, I had really developed a good design for this course, but what I didn’t do was pay attention, the fact that the class was going to have 21 – out of – 21 men, out of 25 students. So, there were – minority were going to be women and most of those folks in there had just experienced a merge of two companies in that same area and they had colleagues and friends and others who had lost their job. So, I come in, this Black woman, to talk about diversity – is the last thing they wanted to hear about. If I had done that bit of the needs assessment, so I could really figure out who’s the who, I would have known about the merger, I would have known that it was going to be majority male, and that a lot of men had lost their jobs and- by bringing these companies together. I would have known that and I wouldn’t have walked in – and it was a four hour – we had these shortened courses where you would have a session that was four hours long, and you did that for five weeks.
JANE
Oh!
MARIAN
Yeah, right?
PETER
Wow.
JANE
What a lesson, what a lesson.
MARIAN
Oh, God, after the first session, I went home, and it was an hour’s drive home. I was just in tears. I felt beaten up the entire time. They challenged me on everything, even my identity. “Who are you? And what – and what school did you go to? And what do you know? And I think all Americans, we hate affirmative action, because look at what it did – good people…” and I was just not prepared. And, so, preparation meant really paying attention not to the fun parts of the design, all- every step of the design, every one of those was just as important. And I never allowed myself to do it again.
JANE
Oh, what a lesson for you, Marian. Wow.
PETER
Yeah, it’s just a really great story about what that axiom means and what it looks like. And maybe if I could jump in, I’d like to, just to point out to our listeners that, did you hear Jane talk about this axiom at the biggest possible level? The ecosystem or the ecology of – of life? And now, you’ve heard Marian speak about it, but at a micro level, right down at the ground in a learning event. And I might add, that it’s also kind of – it’s – what’s interesting about these axioms to me, is that they’re true at many different levels. They try to put their finger on some timeless truth. Even for Global Learning Partners, we say that we envision a world in which deep learning drives our collective well being.
JANE
Beautiful, yes.
PETER
That’s how we begin with the end in mind, in terms of Global Learning Partners as an organization itself.
MARIAN
Oh, that’s wonderful.
PETER
Jane, I wonder if you – if I could ask you, you’ve given us the big picture view of what it looks like even at a life level, what about a story from your time as a teacher and a learning facilitator?
JANE
There’s – there’s so many, Peter, I – my first thought, as you asked, was every single event that I’ve gotten involved in, I would like to go back and do some of those courses again with a wider end in mind. I read yesterday from my dear teacher, Walter Brueggemann, this line, which moved me so deeply and I sent it to Valerie and said, “Well, this is I think, is what you do every day, dear.” And the line from Brueggemann was, “There are two things we have to consider, the large vision and the particularity of the situation or the individual we’re working with.” The large vision AND not either/or, but “and”. If this is a system, Peter, it’s a bit complex.
PETER
Complex, but elegant, I might say.
JANE
I’ll- again, dear, I love the word. And also, it is what Marian said, ignore in the system. It’s like saying someone put a car together and they didn’t check that the brakes were working. Well, you can’t ignore anything because you crash, and boy, Marian that that was –
MARIAN
Painful.
JANE
Painful, sweetheart, painful and you don’t forget that. That’s the particularity. And again, there’s nothing in the – what we call it the principles and practices that you can say, “in this case, this doesn’t…” – no.
PETER
That’s so important and maybe this also is – it’s a mystery to me where this comes from too, but it’s just so important. It’s vision. Or when we speak the end in mind, it means you need to have some vision for what that end of mind is and where – how do you cultivate that vision? Where does it come from? What I – what is, especially for others, or alongside and with others? How do you manage those power dynamics? I wonder, Marian, do you have more reflections? Or what other reflections do you have on the, let’s say, the particular relevance of this axiom for today’s work?
MARIAN
Basically, I’m actually going back to being a community organizer – can you imagine, I’m going to be 70 next month and this is what I’m doing. So, I’m not teaching in the same way and I think right now everybody’s a bit anxious. And I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and there is building going on everywhere, and so people are concerned about folks, you know, who are – who have been left out, historically. And, as we watch MIT and all the biotech kind of eat up spaces and whatnot, and well, the city’s done great work, folks who’ve been activists are often just behaving in ways that- they’re so angry. And, I think what I’ve gotten from the steps of design and why this is important is, so what are we going to do about it? What’s the end goal? If you say it’s the overthrow the city hall then – but if you really, if we can get clear about what is it we want for housing in the city, in our neighborhood? Because we are right next to Kendall Square, which is growing, you know. We’ve got Google and we’ve got Microsoft, you name it. They’re all there now. And, just to remind people, that we can’t – we can’t fight everything, we need to choose the battles that are important and know what we want out of them. We don’t just want to battle. I’m always saying that, let’s decide what it is we want to accomplish, because there’s so much to do. And, people- you generate energy and some of these old organizing techniques, of getting people involved in areas that matter to them and then from there, people are willing to go some next steps. But, let’s start with what’s important to them – what’s important to all of us? And that’s what we mean by “the end in mind,” what would make you feel like you’ve accomplished something? Which, of course, is an important part of what we’ve learned in Global Learning Partners – to name it, not just be vague about it, it needs a name and then it needs an action. And, so, if we want to preserve this building for housing, we have to be clear that we want to preserve a particular building, that might be closed and no one’s clear what they want to do about it. Name it.
PETER
Thank you so much, Marian, for that. Jane, as you reflect on what you heard Marian say, What’s, what’s one final closing reflection you’d like to offer?
JANE
Wow. I think two things Peter and Marian. What Marian said of the particularity of her work in Cambridge there with the community, and the need for the other side of the coin of vision. And, I see two things, I see your, Peter, your message on the web page, “We dream – we vision?” Would you say that, again?
PETER
“We envision a world, in which deep learning drives our collective well-being.”
JANE
Wow, collective well-being, means inclusion.
MARIAN
Yes, that’s perfect.
JANE
So the vision is of inclusion, nobody’s left out, nobody. Wow and that’s the particularity and the vision I see, Peter, is also on the website. The means is dialogue, the end is learning. We’re here to help people learn, and to help ourselves learn. And the purpose of it all, as you put it, Marian, so wisely, is peace. So, I want to ask a question of everybody who’s listening. How do you spell peace? In your life, in a particularity? And in terms of the vision, in a world where your beautiful grandchildren, Marian – I’m sorry, I’m crying again – but the beautiful grandchildren can live with joy.
MARIAN
Yes, yes.
JANE
Exactly, sweetheart. Well done, Peter. Thank you.
PETER
And here we are, back at the big picture again, just where we started.
MARIAN
Thank you, Peter. Yeah, thank you, Marian, for joining Jane and I today. I want to give you the last word, as in practicing Dialogue Education for a long time, you just told us about the lifetime of experience. What’s one final wisdom you’d like to leave with us today? Some insight, a new axiom that’s – that you’ve come across recently that rings true for you? A final word. I think it’s really about finding joy. I know, how does that connect to this, but in all of this, even when I – when I was teaching, there was nothing more exciting when learners came together and were so excited about what they’ve learned and what they’ve accomplished. They were joyful. It wasn’t simply, “Oh God, I passed,” it was joyful. And I think in the work with- given, you know, the whole world, what’s- other things that are going on, that when we can find some joy in our collective work together, it really warms my heart. Not- knowing full well that there’s still a whole lot that needs to be done, I can really relish in the joy in that moment when we’ve together – have moved the pebble a little bit. It’s just very exciting and I – and for me, it’s very meaningful.
PETER
That it is, wonderful.
JANE
Thank you, Marian.
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.