Course:LFS350/Week 06 Fall 2016

Overview

• The objectives of the flexible learning sessions are to provide students with time to engage with their community-based project and be exposed to different perspectives on the theories and concepts explored in class.
• The first hour of this session will be devoted to presenting and discussing your project proposal to your community partner and members of the teaching team
  • See Project Presentation for further details

Objectives

After completing this session, you should be able to:

• Begin implementing your project activities with substantive feedback on your proposal from multiple sources
• Explain why diverse teams are more likely to solve complex problems
• Define Cognitive Diversity and Psychological Safety and explain how they contribute to high achieving groups
• Consider how behavior, identity and action is shaped by and shapes an individual's efforts to engage in positive change in the food system.

Required Readings and Resources

This week, our flexible learning content focuses on recognizing the value and benefits of diversity when addressing complex issues. As transdisciplinary collaboration becomes increasingly common (and necessary - see Session 1 readings) in food system scholarship and practice, it is important to be able to explain why and how diversity makes us collectively smarter and better at problem-solving. However, just having diverse team membership is not sufficient. It is important to be aware of the impact of identity, social location, and patterns of implicit bias that play a role in creating a psychologically safe space for everyone to collaborate in a meaningful way. I suggest engaging with the material below in the order they are listed. We will return to the idea of diversity as it relates to working in contexts of uncertainty in the 3rd Flexible Learning session .

• PODCAST - Vogt and Goldman (2016). Raising the Bar. Gimlet Media. [Podcast]. Begin at 12mins.
• Phillips, K. W. (2014). How Diversity Makes Us Smarter. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/
• Reynolds, A. and Lewis, D. (2018). The Two Traits of the Best Problem-Solving Teams. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved August 22, 2018 from https://hbr.org/2018/04/the-two-traits-of-the-best-problem-solving-teams
• Payne, K., Niemi, L., and Doris, J.M. (2018). How to Think about Implicit Bias. Scientific American. Retrieved on September 2, 2018 from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-think-about-implicit-bias/

• MODULE: Power + Privilege. Engaged Scholarship. University of Memphis. (You do not need to complete the quiz at the end of the module)