Between Growth and Fixed

A shorter blog this week instead of a podcast episode because it is a long weekend and I have family support responsibilities. I was at a meeting yesterday where one of the questions that was asked was "how have your values changed over time?" And this kind of question always gives me pause because I feel that somehow I have been innately the same human morally and values wise since I was old enough to know what morals and values are (and the difference between the two). But I know that somehow I must have changed in some way, but it is either too small a way to notice or somewhere in the historical registers of my mind that have been taken over by the ability to remember every song lyrics from the 1990s.

The things that I believe in are pretty fixed and it is that fixity guides my commitment to the work that I do both in my job and in the different types of community work that I do. But there is also space for growth in that work, and necessarily needs to be space for growth in that work, in that I commit to actively listening to community folk and learning from their lived experiences and the stories they share. To sitting with their truth, pain, and being responsive to needs and asks.

In accessibility and disability space growth mindsets kind of live in an icky space. As Stella Young says in her TED Talk, "no amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp" and growth mindset kind of asks us to do that smiling at stairs sometimes. But we do need to have space to grow, as learners, as humans, as members of society. So like with most things, where we throw "it's complicated" out there as a response and hope it sticks, the reality is that it is in the liminal where the most opportunities for learning happen. 

Students in our spaces, just like our peers, come to spaces with their own lived experiences and values. Some of them can feel pretty fixed, but others may be ready for growth and that is why they are at university or college. We are at a time where we need to cultivate that in-betweeness (which seems to be a theme in the work I do). There is no checklist for life, just like there cannot be a checklist for HigherEd. Yes there are important contextual pedagogical practices, but how do we promote the interstices, and an awareness of those interstices?

These are the thoughts that I am preoccupied with right now, in the not-quite yet long weekend of the long weekend, in the almostness of a break of a different kind. So when we ask someone if their values have changed, maybe it is because they honestly can't remember the person they used to be before a thing happened, a move, a new school, a new friend. And we can learn so much from the acknowledgement of that space between growth and fixed.