NCHC 2021 Conference

Walking back to the hotel was a little like walking to the Eiffel Tower…

Between October 27th and 31st, I attended the NCHC 2021 Conference, in Orlando, FL.

… well, OK, it was at Disney World.

I am not a fan of Disney Theme parks and was a little irritated at the isolation of the hotel. This effectively required us to pay the Happiest Prices on Earth for everything, and I was grateful to be doing this on Development money. Registration included a pass to EPCOT for the Food and Wine festival (an opportunity to spend even more money), and while I considered not going, I didn’t want to be a spoilsport. I spent most of my time hanging out in Japan, then took a leisurely walk back to the hotel. Even in “hyper-real” Disney version, being back in Japan made me a little misty.

Since NCHC overlapped with the MCAA conference, at which I was presenting, I was only able to engage with the conference sessions on Thursday and Friday, but there was a lot of value in the sessions I attended. I was particularly interested in the City-as-Text material, and it was thrilling to be in the room with Bernice Braid herself.

The opening keynote by Thomas Riddle set the tone for much of the conference that followed. While it was an unashamed paean to all things Disney, his quotation from Imagineer John Hench, “all thinking starts with perception,” anticipated the sessions on City-as-Text; the reminder that Design Thinking begins with empathy anticipated the sessions on leadership, perfectionism, and portfolio assessment; and the concept of education as immersive experience (capture attention, engage the senses, and elicit emotional responses) anticipated the session on “Everyday Arts.”

I attended three of the City-as-Text sessions—I would have attended more, but the schedule got a little crowded. Dr. Braid participated in two of them, usually wrapping things up with pithy observations. While I had a sense of the process, and had experimented with limited applications, I was grateful to have the chance to see some actual implementation with a bird’s-eye view. Dr. Braid commented that we tend to “fall into stories” or “follow a script” without realizing it. Frequently, we serve as the lead actor in these narratives, although sometimes we take the bystander’s role. Dr. Braid insisted, however, that there are no bystanders—people pay attention to us in different ways when we navigate public spaces, and part of the goal is to notice how they respond to us. The way we look affects what we see, and the moment we become aware of that, and feel our perception shifting is called the “turning point.” The applications described in the presentations were fascinating, one involving working with archival material in London, and the other with a well-structured investigation of Beverly and Salem, MA (in service of discovering compelling, original research topics). I have a City-as-Text course in the planning stages, and I found a lot useful direction here.

The third City-as-Text session began with a consideration of Disney as a “hyper-reality”—the presenter began with a quotation from Umberto Eco to the effect that in the search for the utterly authentic we end up creating the utterly false—and this, of course, was right up my alley. Sadly, I was not able to continue the walk-through of the hotel in search of “the seams” in Disney’s fantasy world… but then, I often feel that I only see the seams here. The presenter also described some fascinating applications of Place-as-Text in retail spaces: what is the consumer experience at The Gap, for example? What do we see first? Where are we led? In the grocery, why do we all instinctively “hang a right” as we go in (and why is the Produce usually what’s there)? All thinking begins with perception, indeed. There’s a lot to meditate on here.

My intermittent pull to administration attracted me to the leadership session. At first, the material seemed pretty routine: good advice, but not earth-shattering. I was particularly struck with the importance of defining the role (clarity of expectations) and intrigued by the idea of a leadership coach (I might follow up on that). At the end of the session, however, they handed out scenarios for us to discuss, and I found myself at something of a loss. From the description, I had trouble discerning what the problem was, and if this had been an interview, they would have thanked me and sent me home. In retrospect, however, I think there was as much wrong with the prompt as there was with my response. It was a complex situation, and there was a lot that wasn’t explicitly communicated. While I’m not good with the “chess game” (which is where this problem sat), this might have been easier to navigate “in the field.” The bigger problem for me, I think, would be finding empathy to work with my more difficult colleagues.

The perfectionism session contradicted my intuition, interestingly. There are two types of perfectionism, Evaluative Concern (the bad one) and Positive Striving (the good one). research shows that honors and non-honors students show about the same incidence of EC, and honors students typically show more PS. It gets more complex (the two can coexist in varying amounts), but my biggest takeaway was that, if not as big a problem as I had intuited, EC is indeed a problem, and, if honors and non-honors students exhibit it at about the same level, I am justified in addressing it in both arenas. Thus, the most important thing is to supplement my Growth Mindset pedagogy with “adaptive coping skills,” including positing reframing, humor, planning/goal setting, perspective, social connection, and self-compassion. I believe I can do that. The mindfulness stuff is also apparently a good idea.

The “Portfolio-Lite” session, to me, was a really good example of reading the signal through the noise—the presenters had done an admirable job of keeping the focus on their values and understanding their student population as they designed their portfolio pedagogy. It wasn’t glamorous (it was on paper!), but it was well-suited to the problems they faced, and accordingly, was finding success. For my purposes, I think their concern for helping students to recognize and communicate their strengths is worth stealing. I really appreciated their observation that the portfolios helped strengthen the students’ attachment to the program as well. I hadn’t thought of that, but the “look at what you’ve built” factor is worth a great deal.

Finally, from several strong-looking choices, I chose the “Everyday Arts” session because it dealt with community engagement. I was a little disappointed with this session to begin with, but as a stimulus to think for myself, there was substantial value. If I expect to connect with the local arts scene, I will need to do more legwork, essentially. Some of the big takeaways from this session included trying to change the way students regarded the community and their own connection to the arts. as well as considering the way artists communicate compared to the way we as the audience communicates. I have some reading to track down…

This breaks open some ideas for the Country Music class, though… first of all, contacting the historical society, local museums etc. to find out about the presence/importance of music around High Point, looking into local venues for live music and finding out when they play what (how often, etc.), and so forth. I’m also interested in the idea of looking for Country Music on campus (and in town?): where is it and where isn’t it. In the places where it isn’t, why isn’t it? What about the music makes it (in)appropriate?

Bernice Braid’s comments that City-as-Text changes the way we view research also got me to thinking that, yes, if what we expect colors what we see, than research is tricky indeed. I will tend to make Mayuzumi and Sihanouk into what I think they should be—I might make some connections that Osborne, Chandler, etc. missed, but I will need to weigh the evidence carefully.