The Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College
Jun 12, 2010 at 09:06PM 13 Comments 
I am pleased to announce that I have accepted an appointment as a Fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College.
Back in November, I was catching up on some highlight presentations at TED2009 when I remembered a bunch of buzz on Twitter about a talk by Bennington College president Liz Coleman on reinventing liberal arts education. I was gobsmacked. Really, it was one of the most inspiring talks I'd ever seen on TED, and struck me on many levels. I'd since watched it several times, especially when I'd get a little down in the dumps in my own work trying to think of new ways to harness technology innovations to promote better and healthier democratic deliberation models in this country (nevermind the fact that the political climate in America can be downright toxic). But along with a pile of other talks, articles, essays I come across daily, shelved it into my permanently overflowing reference file labelled, "Do It Like This, Cupcake..."
You can probably imagine my utter shock and amazement when I received an email from Elizabeth Coleman in March requesting a meeting. She had seen my talk at Cusp'09, and wanted to explore the possibility of me becoming involved with Bennington's ambitious new CAPA Program. She flew to Santa Fe days later, and I had the privilege of having the most thrilling twelve hour marathon conversation (yes, 12 hours straight, no interruptions) with one of the most incredible minds and spirits I'd ever encountered. My head spun for days.
Long story short, after several visits to Bennington to see their amazing campus setting, the impressive under-construction CAPA building designed by the briliant Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, meeting with the incredible minds of the faculty and students, getting over the fact that I haven't been in a serious academic setting in over two decades, I concluded that this was going to be the beginning of a pretty incredible journey for me, for my intellectual and creative life.
I begin a four-week residency and will be teaching a CAPA module this coming fall semester. I'll be teaching something about the politics and economics of American Democracy, something about the society that dwells within simultaneous overlapping, and at times contradictory, systems, something about the complex interplay of rich, and oftentimes competing, personal and tribal narratives that comprise what we call our political lives, something about how to visualize one's self in this n-dimensional cluster-eff of American politics and what one's possible trajectories through it might be; all of which, of course, with a few unorthodox methodological twists that perhaps only a career designer and design-thinker can bring to a creatively and intellectually rigorous academy like Bennington College (can you say, "Walls of Post-It-Notes"?..). I'll be figuring out the details in earnest this summer. Sweating it out, to be precise...
Thank you, Liz and Bennington, for rolling the dice on a wildcard like me, for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime. Looking forward to this fall. Absolutely thrilled.
Reader Comments (13)
Amazing. Good luck on your new adventure, and I'm glad you'll be influencing young minds at such an imporant juncture!
Congratulations! Looking forward to more blog posts on your experience.
Very cool Gong! Congrats! :D
That's pretty awesome! Congrats!
Congrats! What a great story!
Great setup! I can't wait to hear the rest of the story. Congrats.
"A few unorthodox methodological twists that perhaps only a career designer and design-thinker can bring?" Sounds like exactly the right thing for higher education. Congratulations!
Fantastic news, congrats.
Just when I thought you couldn't get any cooler. Congratulations!
Make sure you don't botch it up.
In fact, really make sure you don't botch it up.
You will probably not botch it up.
Great story. I think you found the career that you wanted to pursue and that is teaching. It is really interesting to teach politics to orient people about governance and civil and political rights as well.