Losing the in-between spaces where trust forms

Engagement crisis from classrooms to workplaces

Daniel Atlin: We're in the middle of a very messy experiment, right? And, and we're seeing it play out. So on, on Mondays I actually teach a course. So I teach a course on change leadership for a polytechnic in Canada. And, it's, it's a very fascinating experience to me because it's an online course, and students have the, the option of seeing it live or viewing as a video afterwards. It's a very small class, but almost everyone views it afterwards. We have to look at new mo-modalities as well, and, and ways to be able to, to, you know, ensure that we actually have that engagement too, because without that, we're, we're having A real crisis, I think, of engagement. And I think that's a societal sort of thing. We could probably talk about this for an entire podcast. But I, I think the lack of engagement we're seeing, you know, is, is, is a signal. That's a stressing signal, I'd

Kathryn Gorman: say. I, I entirely agree with you. And, and, and to take that point into, in, into school education, it applies at, at higher education level, it applies in the workplace. But at schools, there's been much talk in the UK post-COVID about an attendance crisis. And that was very loud for a little while. And then gradually voices started saying, no, no, no, this isn't an attendance crisis. That's the visual manifestation of it. This is an engagement crisis. And it, and it goes to relevance, how much people feel that they belong, that they're seen, which is the point that you made earlier. It goes to all of those things. And, and you don't deal with that by slapping penalties on people, you know, and dealing with it in that kind of draconian way. It, it calls for something far more profound than that. It's not about whether you're there or not, although some people would argue being there is You know, is, is part of the problem. Yeah, the, the engagement, do you feel that you've been met,

Tamara Zaple Rolfs: you

Kathryn Gorman: know, in that

Tamara Zaple Rolfs: place? And the adaptation of the courses, like you're saying, Daniel, you know, the, the tempting thing is to offer that online and you can access it when you want, and, you know, that's That's easy, isn't it? And you can get the qualification, but if we're needing people to do that collective Sensemaking, and I love that term, radical collaboration, which we're going to need more and more, then actually they need to be in the same space for at least some of the time to do that work together. So, it's going to have to be very thoughtful and intentional around how to provide that for people in their learning, I suppose.