I keep an open Google Form to receive feedback related to teaching from students, colleagues, community members, and mentors. All content shared here is shared with express permission.
If you were to offer some advice to someone who was going to be in a shared learning space with me, how would you tell them to prepare, and/or what advice would you give them?
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Leave your expectations at the door. Bring as much of yourself as possible to the learning opportunity.
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This will not be a traditional, transactional learning environment. Trust the process and embrace the slowness. The more open you are going into a workshop with Nathan the more you will take from the experience.
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I would encourage them to be open to shifting their perspectives and ways of being and knowing so that every interaction and initiative they are a part of moving forward will change because they have changed.
What is something you think I am effective at?
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Creating safe and brave spaces for learning. You articulate complex ideas well and explain them in ways that are easy to grasp for novel learners to the topics. You engage the learner and seemingly effortless adapt or bring in their experiences to the learning to make it more accessible for them as well. You take on teaching in a collaborative approach while also bringing in resources for the learners.
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Your offerings always seem to be very pedagogically thought through. They also account for the people in the space in a way I’ve never experienced. You create learning moments/environments that are gentle in their subversive and genuinely invite “more people to bring more of themselves more of the time.”
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Organization, personal passion (you are very clearly engaged in teaching what you feel strongly about!), adaptability in sharing technology or assignment expectations and options for fulfillment. I also feel that you are very compassionate toward students and having not experienced this before I was a bit taken aback at first, but came to really enjoy your explicitly shared intentions of creating a safe space and wanting to support students to succeed.
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The environment you create in the classroom, workshops, and one-to-one meetings feels disarming and welcome to all the feelings and experiences that I might be bringing with me, particularly the ones that have felt unwelcome in other academic and interpersonal environments and dynamics. You offer incredible insight, knowledge, and wisdom that I deeply connect to and want to absorb like a sponge, and at the same time you made (make) me feel that the learning and connecting is mutual and I also have something valuable to offer (myself), which is something I have never experienced with mentors or professors before you, <name>, and <name>. I have also never witnessed before the amount of time and care that you spend to honour the land and people who have experienced significant harm and cost for us to be able to live and learn in these geographical and academic spaces. You create a wonderful container for the time together but also respond meaningfully to the emergent. The ways in which you can make connections and link words, concepts, feelings, and systems together in both the micro and interpersonal and also in the macro and across global systems is brilliant. Your way of being and knowing and communicating and inviting consent and collaboration has challenged and shifted my thinking and perspective and has helped me align my actions more closely to my values. In short, I love sharing space with you.