Reflecting on my 2015 #365Photo Project

BradBradBradAs the month of January quickly slips into the rear view mirror, I realize it is now or never to reflect on my 2015 #365photo project. I had been watching Alan Levine and others do this practice for a few years and decided it was time to try it.

It was nearly a year ago when I made my only reflective post on the project last year, one month in.   While I can’t come close to the analysis of my fellow #365-er,  Eugene Eric Kim  and all his reflections on his 365 Project, it is worth putting on the reflective glasses and taking a moment. Even my sister prompted me to do this on Facebook. Go Cesca!

My Process

The picture taking process was almost always opportunistic. The value of knowing I wanted to capture and share ONE photo a day really upped my “noticing” while on walks, but if I did not get outside of the house (ah, Seattle’s winter) I found I had to stretch and sometimes even set up a picture. There certainly were stretches where nature was a key inspiration. Spring, Spring, SPRING! Flowers. Patterns of leaves and other natural elements (often juxtaposed with my feet, for some reason – at least a dozen) show up a lot, particularly fallen camellias! There are many of my family, particularly my granddaughters who are irresistible, but I also worry about putting too many pictures of them online.

Taken as a whole, they do tell the story of my year. You can see the travel, the work, the family, the seasons, the food!

The camahogada-tUdGera was somewhat of an issue early on, as I was using a fairly basic, lower resolution phone camera. I got frustrated but people said, CROP and use filters, to use the limitations of the camera as a feature, not a bug. That helped me over the hump, but in the end I’ve used cropping and filters only a handful of times. Lazy? Busy? Probably both. And I got a better phone with a better camera late last year and that FELT more fun. Especially for macros, which I enjoy.

I did NOT have a practical and consistent workflow for my project. I mostly posted from either my phone or one of my tablets to Facebook, MOSTLY got those into an album, and then at the end of the year downloaded the lot and imported them into the more easily sharable Flickr. I think some got lost and mis-categorized and I have totally changed my 2016 workflow for #366photo (yes, leap year!).

This year, every photo gets posted to Flickr using the phone app which also allows me to cross post on Facebook and Twitter. I always cross-post on FB, and sometimes on Twitter if the image is either pleasing to me or has some timely relevance to a wider audience as now only my friends can see my FB posts. I restricted them late last year instead of posting them publicly, mostly to protect my family. I should have done that earlier. When I post to Flickr I can put the image right into an album. Later I can go back and tag, but that is not a top priority.

Reflections

The process itself was wonderful. It was, in a sense, a meditation in paying attention to what is around me. Looking back, I smile at the pworkinprogressictures of friends, my family, of nature and of the many places I visited and food I ate. It is a celebration of the full and rich life I get to live. Here and there it hints at the bumps in the road. I think that is because I don’t really have too many and I don’t really want to make a big deal out of them. If there was one visual theme on bumps, it was fatigue!

The sharing part turned out to be a much bigger surprise. How many people on FB had a little “line of sight” into my life surprised me. The number of “likes” surprised me – people actually PAY ATTENTION to this stuff? The reflections shared with Eugene and Alan Levine were wonderful moments of learning.

As 2016 dawned I had just about decided NOT to do this again. Then the urge crept in. The three things I gained from the project were worth continuing:  a) the practice of noticing,  b) sharing, and c) learning, because life is always a work in progress! (And my workflow for it is already better. The pictures are here.)

My Pictures

I decided it would be fun to select some of my favorite pictures from 2015. As I noted, I was unhappy with the quality of many of my shots, but looking back, some are really pleasing to my eye.

CameliaShoes crappycroppy selfieatwork shadowflowers iliveinabeautifulplace horsechestnutshoes mylarry sandplay melbourne quotidian playginwithpapa




bugs
playjoy shoefrost noticingnature windowdawn furry oldbarge fiddlestilllifeinmontrealbeauty shoestilllife hanginout octasketti friends3 greenlake2 friends2 friends1 fallfeet skyfeet Greenlake squashedcameliapoetry frostyshoe wilddave

Unleashing Joy Through Visual Facilitation – Part 4 of ISS Fellowship

This is the fourth in a series of posts about my ISS/Chisholm Fellowship in Victoria State, Australia. You can find the previous posts here: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. While I intended to write these WHILE in Australia, it has, er, ahem, taken a bit longer.

When Brad Beach (of Chisholm) and I were noodling on what I might share through my fellowship, I was exceedingly happy that he was willing to step out of the more traditional practices and dive into visual or graphic facilitation. We scheduled two rounds of a 3 hour “Doodle, Draw, Learn” workshops to introduce teachers to the power of visuals for engagement and learning. I think we accomplished this well in the workshops. They also reminded me of something else that happens when we allow ourselves to freely draw. Joy fills the room.

IMG_20151117_084544759As before, I’ll share the content points first as reference, then reflect on my experience and share a few words from the participants. Finally, there is a visual artifact at the end with resources, support materials and a deck compiling all the images from the day.

The structure of the workshop is designed around modeling an interactive initial engagement visual activity, unleashing of drawing joy (“I CAN DRAW”), development of icon skills and wrapped up with another visual activity, this time focused on reflection and evaluation. The agenda is communicated using a visual agenda (of course, and from the photo, you can see this works even on wrinkled flip chart paper) and the feedback is captured with video – another visual medium. In the middle I share example visual artifacts and offer a few thoughts so people can get off their feet and rest for a few minutes. This is where we begin the conversation about where to apply visual practices in the classroom – online or offline.

All in all, this is a very ACTIVE experience. But people generally report being energized, rather than exhausted. Interesting, eh?

Process

Here are brief descriptions of the exercises, in case you want to try them:

  • IMG_20151117_090853483_HDRPaired Drawing:  I learned this from Johnnie Moore www.johnniemoore.com/blog/archives/000380.php and have blogged about it. One pen, one paper, two people taking turns drawing a face, one pen stroke at a time with NO TALKING. There are so many ways to relate this activity to your teaching or meeting goals. It is great not only to “break the ice” but to show patterns of communication and collaboration and the interesting effect of assumptions! More photos here.
  • IMG_20151117_100534192I CAN DRAW: This is again a common and fabulous activity that is used in MANY introductory graphic facilitation workshops. I learned mine from the folks at the International Forum of Visual Practitioners (IFVP) and have seen it done many times with amazing variation. The essence is getting up at a wall and using our bodies to draw circles and lines, play with color using chalk pastels and finally getting a sense of the basics of lettering, including size and proportion.Pastels are messy, but they are MAGIC. Something always happens in the room when we use the pastels. I think this is where the joy really becomes visible.
  • IMG_20151112_152422185Visual Vocabulary: This exercise builds off of the circle, lines and lettering of “I CAN DRAW” and introduces basic human forms (stick person, bean or shapes, springs, etc.) I reference heavily the work of people like Dave Gray,  Austin Kleon and others who have generously shared exercises, videos and how-to’s online. You see examples of the resources in the slide deck at the end of this post. OH, and I role model imperfection, believe me!
  • Icon Jam: We follow the vocabulary exercise with a quick round of icon jamming, an activity I learned at an IFVP gathering. I start by calling out a word and asking people to do a quick “telegraph sketch” of the word. Then after a while they call out the words. In one workshop I had them label their icons as a future resource. In the second one, I had people move from paper to paper to both see other’s work, to experience what it is like to “draw on someone else’s paper, and to guess the meaning of the icons. I liked this variation a lot. You can find examples of past workshops here, where we often do this on 3×5 cards
  • IMG_20151111_162410511River of Life: This exercise uses the visual metaphor of a river or a road to stimulate reflection of the past, present and future. In the workshop, the prompt for the past was “what did you expect coming into the workshop.” The present prompt was “what did you learn and experience today.” The future prompt was “what is your next step using what you learned? What more do you want to learn?” Read more at http://www.kstoolkit.org/River+of+Life and more visual examples here.

Application

In the two Chisholm workshops the educators talked about a variety of ways to apply this. There were the expected elements of using visuals to be welcoming and break up text. They spoke of not only the power of visuals, but the power of beauty, as they surveyed the beauty that came out of the “I CAN DRAW” exercise. A few mentioned the utility for working with their more challenging, younger students. Some had to let it sink in, as thinking about visuals in online learning where text has been the dominant form, may take a while.

One of our “non Chisholm” participants, Joyce Seitzinger talked about how she will incorporate more visual activities in the “Learner Experience” workshops she is designing.

Reflections

My key learnings from these workshops affirmed or developed the following ideas:

  • I can get over my attachment that the “I CAN DRAW” exercise MUST be done on large scale paper. We basically had paper that was flip chart sized and I think it still worked. You can’t quite get the full body experience, but it works. This is important because it is hard to find rooms where there is space and permission to do large scale drawing on paper on the walls.
  • Don’t underestimate joy. Make space for joy. Liberate joy!
  • I still would like to find a way to show and practice some of the online options even in a short workshop. I have struggled with this because I feel the foundational experience of working on paper is a must.

Video Harvest/Feedback:

Finally, I decided to try some video feedback vignettes. After I made this video, I realize it missed half the content of the workshop, so I’ll need to do a second try. I’d love any feedback to help me improve on the next iteration!

 

Slides with Resources: Visual Facilitation in Learning – Resource Slides

Rachel Smith on Drawing in the Classroom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tJPeumHNLY

What art can teach us about knowledge work

painting4How Art Reveals the Limits of Neuroscience” by Alva Noë is a fascinating read that asks us to step beyond the idea that we are our brains. It is stimulating me to reflect on some things I’ve been trying to articulate about knowledge sharing and  the transformation knowledge into new ideas, application, etc. It relates to some conversations on how we share knowledge across research projects, between journalists who care about their communities, and people who are trying to improve the world.

In observing how our experience of art changes when someone else shares their experience of the work, Noë writes:

This shift — from not seeing to seeing, from seeing to seeing differently, from not getting it to getting it — is actually very common. We live and learn, look and ask, bring what’s around us into focus continuously. At least part of what makes art different, or special, is that it yields the opportunity not only to “get” something, perhaps something new, but also to catch ourselves in the very act. In this way, art illuminates us to ourselves.

Interestingly, when I started to read it, I was not actually looking at art itself. The experience Noë writes about resonated deeply to my experiences of seeing people take in an idea and transform it into something they can use, apply, and “own” in the very productive sense. Own it in terms of being able to to use it meaningfully. Imagine a way of reducing open defecation, or changing water use habits. Imagine being able to take the building blocks of an idea and transform it into a locally useful solution. She frames it as the “world as the playing field for our activity,” and thus the interplay with it.

“This is not to deny that the world acts on us, triggering events in the nervous system. Of course it does! But the thing is, we act right back. Every movement of the eye, head, and body changes the character of our sensory coupling to the world around us. Objects are not triggers for internal events in the nervous system; they are opportunities or affordances for our continuing transactions with them. The world shows up, in experience, not like a diagram in a brain chart but as the playing field for our activity. Not the brain’s activity. Our activity. Not activity inside our head. But activity in the world around us.”

Now that I’ve read it, I’m thinking about how art can help me address my challenges with knowledge work!! Take a few minutes to read the article.

Art, Brains and Awe

Stephen Downes posted this link in his OLDaily today. Take a moment out of a busy day and look at the images that Greg Dunn has created from images of the human brain. This quote says it all:

Image from Gregg Dunn

Through his art, Dunn hopes to give voice to scientists whose work usually isn’t appreciated by the general public, he said. “Art has the power to capture people’s emotions and inspire awe [in a way] that a lot of charts and graphs don’t have.” Credit: Greg Dunn

via Dazzling Images of the Brain Created by Neuroscientist-Artist.

The Fence of Fear

donkeyFear has played an interesting role in my life. Or better said, confronting my fears has given me the opportunity to do things I would have never done before. For example I was afraid to go to Brazil as a 16 year old exchange student for a year, but it was a life changing experience – for the better. I have been afraid to be “unknowing” and vulnerable when facilitating groups, but those have often been pivotal moments. (By the way, the picture is of me there, many many moons ago!)

But fear within groups and between members has never shown up  generatively. It seems to create tight fences between individuals in the group. Then I read Shawn Callahan (of Anecdote) recent post  about An indicator of group fear in organisations and a wee insight arrived.

First of all, click away and read the post AND take the time to view the video. Do the little exercise. It is worth the 30 seconds of cogitation.

Shawn’s conclusion is that fear is killing creativity. He writes:

Ed Catmull, the CEO and co-founder of Pixar made this point clear in his recent book, Creativity Inc., that this biggest killer of creativity is fear.

I’d say that fear blocks more than creativity. It blocks aspects of collaboration, cooperation, knowledge sharing, learning and even the simple pleasures we CAN have working with each other.

I’ve worked with a number of organizations where fear is palpable. Sometimes it is in the more day to day relationships between team members. Sometimes it is hierarchical, but not always. It isn’t always “the boss” we fear. It may be someone on the team who is bullying or harassing (consciously or unconsciously – most the latter in my observation.) Sometimes it is the very culture of the organization, often from the top, that permeates everywhere.

Slight side note: I want to make a clear distinction that I do not equate fear directly with dissent, diversity or critical thinking. They may show up together. But the absence of fear is not necessarily bland indifference, ok?  In fact, when fear is not present, I think we can better use our disagreements and diversity. So I don’t want to fall into the false trap of surface “niceness.” That kind of niceness can be a response to fear to cover it up and that doesn’t work well either! I’ll also state for the record that being “nice” as in using compassion and respect is something I’m all for. The word “nice” is a tricky one.

What really interests me are the people who seem to be resilient to fear. They don’t let fear of being dismissed, or not “liked” keep them from their own personal brand of excellence.

I find it hard to combat top down fear, so maybe I should pay more attention to those “positive deviants” who seem resilient. Have any clues on why they are that way? How we can nurture more of the resilience?