Many of us work in higher education, including those we work in teaching and learning centers, may find our work accelerated by rapid technological changes and increased stress to be efficient and productive. Smartphones and adoption of technologies such as slack, video communications, and now generated AI helps accelerate organizational culture.
Kerry O’Grady notes in her recent article “Teaching Center Is Not a Reason for Dumping” that many academic leaders “focus more on effectiveness and efficiency.” O’Grady continues to convene “create more workshops, more one stand-up or more training when attending a preliminary meeting or when the original documents are not touched.” She believes that education developers are in a constant state of emergency response, in which case their task is to “retrospectively clean up” rather than “active teaching and learning success program work.” O’Grady asked for a much-needed reset, which felt exciting and institutionally unrealistic.
We have collective teaching and working in higher education in more than 20 institutions over 50 years, which tells us that we have been working with limited agencies to greatly change the alignment of our center with our strategic vision and institutions’ changing needs. In the dazzling pace of constant destruction, we feel the need to find a more sustainable and pragmatic approach. O’Grady’s paper inspired us to reflect on our strategic plans and how we support our respective communities. Although the metaphor of “dumpling ground” has importantly attracted attention to the current challenge, we consider a different metaphor that guides our decisions as we direct the center and support educators.
Dandelions and orchids
Dandelions are versatile flowers – rich, fast-growing and rich flowers. In the context of educational development, dandelions represent a variety of ways developers can adapt to institutional needs, resulting in a widespread rapid output. Dandelion’s work is crucial: it includes programs and resources we create quickly to meet pressing needs. But, like real dandelions, the results of this work are often dispersed without intentional design of growing gardens. We rely on dandelions when we go from meeting to meeting or hold a one-time workshop to deal with emerging teaching problems.
In contrast, orchids require a lot of care and a controlled environment to thrive. The work of orchids symbolizes slow intentional farming – a carefully cultivated project over time. These efforts require patience, consistency and commitment to breadth and depth. Despite the slower process, the results have unique significance and reflect the product of intentional focus. Orchid work requires long-term planning, cross-unit collaboration and thoughtful participation. While orchids can bring beautiful views, the time it takes to plant them may mean we missed many emerging daily needs.
The framework jointly highlights a core question: what systemic issues require ongoing efforts and what challenges can be addressed through rapid, one-time engagement? The approach to balancing dandelions and orchids helps educate developers to meet direct needs while creating room for intentional growth.
Growing relationships
Resilience is not isolated, but through a network of care, mutual support and common experience. To further promote flower metaphors, if our goal in the teaching center is to help educators help students blossom, we also need to model and promote the space and time needed for learning, even if social pressures point in the opposite direction.
Although meaningful relationships take some time to develop, they are of great benefit. Research supports the notion that individuals with highly relational self-constructed individuals (those who define themselves through relationships with others) may better accept inconsistency and instability (both things are very describing life in today’s education). Thus, education developers can promote resilience and adaptability not only by caring for their relationship networks, but also by defining their work in accordance with such networks.
In our own way, we provide space for orchids by emphasizing relationships and time as necessary conditions for educational development. Some of the ways we do this when we do the regular daily “Dandelion” show include:
- Check and reflect on the connection: During engagement, stop regularly for reflection checks, and participants can share their thoughts about new connections, challenges, or gain any collective insights. This can help participants see relationship growth as part of their learning.
- Create opportunities for interdisciplinary interaction: Design group activities that mix participants across different disciplines or roles. Considering discussion prompts requires multiple perspectives to enhance a sense of common purpose.
- Defining emotional outcomes with skill-based outcomes: In planning workshops, emotional goals (such as promoting connections and community) are used as clear goals, as equal goals such as skill-based outcomes.
- Ending with collective reflection: Close the program by inviting participants not only to share new skills, but also to share the relationships or networks they have already started to build. This emphasizes the value of emotional outcomes and normalizes them into a commitment to maintaining these connections beyond the event.
- Participate in personal storytelling: Start the activity with interactive exercises, inviting participants to share meaningful or challenging moments in their teaching or life. This sets the tone for community building and reduces the transition to collaborative work.
- A more creative approach to gaming: Includes an exercise that can activate imaginative thinking, such as using visual thinking strategies or paired motor activities and enjoying a lightweight shared experience.
- Promoted Model Care: Show care in interactions, setting precedents for participants. Show real interest in their insights, making room for personal or contextual details that may make sense to them. Generate collective resources and put the environment of various actors at the forefront.
- Provide candid regarding institutional challenges: Talking directly to the realistic limitations of support that institutions can take; do not over-advocate the possibility, nor avoid the reality of conditions where work is about to happen.
Balance of orchids and dandelions depends on priority and time limits. When stress is high, the dandelion approach can produce quick solutions, while the orchid approach encourages us to eliminate time and lean towards our relationships, even as we keep pushing to maintain the field of flowers.
While it may ruin our metaphor, dandelions can make orchids give way to dandelions. After all, the more deeper relationships develop, the more we will be in contact with teachers and colleagues, which will spread new ideas and possibilities, whether orchids or dandelions.
Metaphor encourages us to ask how and where we can create space and time for deeper engagement. If we want to cultivate an innovative culture, we can’t just grow dandelions, and if we just focus on orchids, we can’t respond promptly to the needs of the institutions. We found that the permission of Dandelions to allow us to plant orchids ourselves allows us to feel more about the relationship between the agency and the relationship with the work we do and the people we are doing with. This metaphor helps us to cultivate and model a more inclusive, supportive academic culture, a balance between collaboration and efficiency, collective resilience and agency responsiveness and meaning.
