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Showing posts from 2015

reading Tim Gunn's story

I have not ever been a conventional academic.  Oddly, this popular book came to me from a highly academic friend whose research into Oscar Wilde's life has dovetailed with an interest in Tim Gunn.  So I read Gunn's Golden Rules:  Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work  by the man himself. Gunn has taught at Parsons, and while many of his anecdotes are about Project Runway, his role on that show is as a kind of teacher.  So this book is really a long story about living as a teacher. It was heartening to me to see that even Tim Gunn must occasionally deal with the scorn of students.  Quote, heavily excerpted: "Two of the best designers... seemed to have disdain for me.  It was a lot of scorn to soak up.  I said to one of them:  'I feel an obligation to each of you, and an aspct of that is to give you equal time in the workroom.  But if you don't want it, we can talk to the producers.'  But they kept having me there, and it began to hurt." (p. 22)

interactive storytelling and leading forward

In some ways, these are less storytelling per se and more story play, but it's certainly interesting to see this pop up in the Chronicle blogosphere. http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/starter-exercises-for-interactive-storytelling/60303?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en Tomorrow I lead a 3.5 hour workshop for the Leading Forward training on campus for Advancement (read: fundraising).  This is the fourth or fifth such workshop I've developed for them, this one called "Your Leading Story."  Highlights include an overview of storytelling (teller, tale, audience) as a concept and as a practice, ethical storytelling practices, the importance of retelling and listening to the development of a story, authenticity in leadership, and two workshop sessions on "your leadership story" and on using concepts from The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner as a basis for a leadership-focuses presentation illustrated with stories of successful leadershi

what is reading storytelling?

Welcome to the first post of my newly remodeled (one might almost say reincarnated) blog.  In the past two years, since tenure and the coda (below), I've taken a brief sabbatical (Aug-Nov 2013), started a new position (Interim Assistant Dean for Student Affairs, and then Assistant Dean for Student Affairs as of Aug 2014), and found that reorganizing, managing, and growing a team with eight staff members takes much of my creative energy.  However, it's an honor to be in a position to serve our students at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and to work with such an exceptionally professional team. Storytelling has been part of my regular teaching for just over a decade, with a course by that same name and a Storytelling Festival every spring.  Here's the latest iteration of the course description: Fundamental principles of the art of storytelling including techniques of adaptation and presentation; content and sources of materials; methods of learning;