Critical and Creative Thinking Community Hour events are free and open to all prospective and current students, graduates, faculty, and all others in the CCT and UMass Boston community.
Register below to receive Zoom login details (each event requires separate registration):
Alum panel: Critical and Creative Thinking about Our Persistent Challenges
Tuesday, March 30, 2021, 7:00-8:00pm EDT
Online in Zoom: RSVP here for login details.
Description: We invite alums of the CCT program to participate as panelists in this upcoming community event. Each panelist will provide a summary (about 5-7 minutes) of one of the persistent challenges coming up for you now in your workplace, field, or community. What is such a challenge for you? — one that keeps reappearing, or that never seems to quite go away? What is the role of critical and creative thinking in continuing to address this challenge? How have the current conditions of pandemic shifted your perspective about it or sense of priorities? Following the summaries, others will have a chance to respond and reflect on the connections and insights that have been raised as we learn how graduates of the program have continued to bring critical and creative thinking into their work and lives.
Reflective Practice in a Changing World Dialogue Hour
Friday, April 9, 2021, 12:00-1:00pm EDT
Theme: Downsizing, Decluttering, Minimizing, Simplifying
Online in Zoom: RSVP here for login details.
Description: In this discussion, we explore and reflect together about the complexity in our workplaces and lives, and where we find opportunities and challenges in how we face complexity. Plenty of self-help guides are available to help us to simplify and streamline our physical materials and spaces, schedules, to-do lists, media consumption, professional practices, and community and family life, but how did these areas of our lives become unmanageable in the first place? When does it benefit us to embrace complexity in these areas along with the critical and creative thinking that comes from doing so? What cultural messages and personal influences shape the way that we think about accumulation and reduction? Through a participatory, structured dialogue process, we will consider these questions and uncover insight together about this topic. Optional pre-reading: Complexity Bias: Why We Prefer Complicated to Simple and The End of Minimalism
Taking Yourself Seriously Across the CCT Community
Sunday, April 18, 2021, 2:00-3:00pm EDT
Online in Zoom: RSVP here for login details.
Description: All in the CCT community are invited to join this participatory discussion about the ways that we “take ourselves seriously”. Participants will each have about 5 minutes to introduce themselves and describe one example of some area in professional or personal life where that has happened for you. Taking yourself seriously, in this case, refers to doing something that you couldn’t have imagined doing at some previous point in life. This could be a work-related project or achievement, involvement in community activity, or pursuit of some issue important to your lifelong learning, for example. Samples of work, images, or writings are welcome if appropriate (to be shared through Zoom).
Additional background on Taking Yourself Seriously
Long-time CCT program director and UMass Professor Peter Taylor, who passed away in October 2019, had immeasurable impact on the CCT and university community and wider world through his work in several areas, including science in social context, reflective practice, and critical and creative thinking. One of his many innovations was the concept of “taking yourself seriously”, which was a base for much of his teaching, coaching, and mentoring of students over the years. This idea relates to the way that we come to appreciate the value of our own ideas, support others, and be supported in creating something that is, most of all, important and meaningful to us personally. In this community open house event, we take time to reflect on what this means to us in our continued directions, and in recognition of Peter’s influence on us as engaged lifelong learners.
Peter’s book, Taking Yourself Seriously, asks the reader to consider what happens in times of true engagement and fulfillment with our learning, life, and work directions. Are you following what is important to you personally (rather than being done to meet expectations of others)? Are you building the support that you and others need? He goes on:
“[To move your vision forward], you need to align your questions and ideas, your aspirations, your ability to take or influence action, and your relationships with other people. These concepts can be shortened to head, heart, hands, and human connections. Bringing these 4H’s into alignment… that is what we mean by taking yourself seriously.”
During this event, participants will engage in a sharing activity that puts the idea of Taking Yourself Seriously into practice.
Preparation:
Consider this question: What is one example of something important to you that you have developed or achieved in some area of your work, education, and/or life that represents you taking yourself seriously? Was there a time in the past when you didn’t imagine or couldn’t have imagined yourself doing this, or had uncertainty about how (or whether) it would evolve, or whether you were the person to do it? What happened between that earlier point and now to get you from there to here?
Each participant is asked to prepare an informal presentation ahead of time (about 5 minutes) where you 1) briefly introduce yourself to others, and then 2) tell the story of how you came to take yourself seriously around this particular area/project/achievement and reach the point where you are now. (You may think of multiple ways to answer this; one example is enough in preparing your presentation.)
