Learning Unlearning: Rethinking 'Community Engagement' (I'm Talking About You)

By: Bridget Woodbury

I write to you often, as the Director of Community Engagement, whether my name is attached to my words, or not. I also spend a lot of time with your words: reading posts you tag us in, checking out links you share on social media, and learning about what your organizations are doing that impacts our area of interest at the intersection of arts & cultural education & social justice.

In addition to managing our communications strategy and audience analysis, I specialize in Adaptive Impact Planning, an alternative to strategic planning that I developed as part of my Master’s thesis. Creative Generation recently underwent this process internally — we aim to practice what we preach — and I found myself with three follow-up questions that I’m hoping we can all talk about.

Who is our educational community?

Our last blog series was about mentorship — specifically the idea that no one is just a mentor or just a mentee. We aim to build an online community focused on arts & cultural education as it intersects with social justice. That seems pretty straightforward, but it actually opens up a lot of avenues to explore, especially in terms of who we want to be in conversation with. We often work with teachers, teaching artists, arts administrators, school administrators, advocates, and funders; but we spend less time working directly with students and parents, for example. We are relatively young creatives ourselves, but we’re not teenagers or school-aged children. What about folks that don’t identify as artists, but do use protest art and music? I think we enthusiastically welcome conversation with those people.

What is our responsibility to that community?

Assuming we want to learn from and share with all of the kinds of people I just mentioned, what do we owe them and what do we owe ourselves? Some takeaways are nonnegotiable: On social media, abusive comments are a hard “no” and we will delete and block at-will. At our in-person events, we insist on microphones for Q&A because it makes the content more accessible in the room and also allows us to broadcast that information on behalf of our partners, which makes the content more accessible on a broader scale. We aim to create a safe space for folks to share and to make that space available to any many people as possible, but we also need to create an incentive to engage — and in the interest of total transparency: I haven’t figured that out yet!

My goal in creating these blog series was to talk to you all directly and hopefully have you talk back, but y’all might not be ready to talk to us in the ways we’ve invited you to talk to us.

I have worked in communications, marketing, and member engagement in a dozen different ways and I find that the challenges with teaching and learning are nearly universal. Often if you can get a conversation going, it’s not much work to sustain it, but what does that spark look like?

And, especially, what does that spark look like as we are increasingly teaching and learning in digital spaces? I’m not sure yet! What do you think? And how would you tell me what you think? Email me? Reply to the tweet or facebook post that featured this link? Tag us in an instagram live? Share the link on LinkedIn with your take?Something else?

How do we fulfill that obligation?

I ask those questions because we do very much want to know the answers, but also because they demonstrate our broader question and/or answer; the thing I hope to learn and teach through this post.

I have a Master’s Degree in Arts Administration. I have years of experience in dozens of ways to talk to other people. I have read books and blogs, attended conferences and seminars, and looked at dozens of examples of community engagement strategies. But none of those things can teach me how to talk to you.

You are the only one that can teach me that.

And that is one of dozens of things you are uniquely qualified to teach within our community — the online community focused on arts & cultural education, as it intersects with social justice, that I mentioned earlier. What can you teach that community and what do you hope to learn from it? How can we help foster an environment where you you want to learn and unlearn? How can we make our online spaces feel safe for the vulnerable acts of sharing your expertise and re-evaluating what you thought you knew?

We don’t usually open our comments, but I’m opening them on this post. General wisdom states that an open comment section is more likely to yield abusive comments and offensive language, but I think Creative Generation should be open to unlearning that! What do you think?