An Imperfect Map

Kate Daversa : Episode 010

Kate Daversa is a Senior Online Programming Coordinator at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. We have flipped the roles for this episode and she joins me on this podcast as the interviewer. She's got some great questions about topics including possible career paths for a person starting out in learning experience design, whether she needs a portfolio, and how to position ourselves as partners with faculty and subject matter experts. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and I hope you do too!

Wei Zhu: Episode 009

What is the state of Learning Experience Design? What should a person coming into this field be thinking about? Today on the podcast we’re doing something a little different. When we spoke back in the summer, Wei Zhu was a student in the Instructional Design program at University of Texas in Austin. For this episode, we flipped things around so she is asking the questions and I’m doing my best to answer them. The reality is that this has always been a tricky field to start in, and COVID has only complicated things. In our conversation, Wei asks some terrific questions and we explore some of the obstacles and opportunities that people have. I’m Jason Gorman and this is An Imperfect Map. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Wei Zhu!

Learning Financial Moxie in the COVID Recession: Ean Price Murphy: Episode 008

There is no stress like financial stress. It can be suffocating, especially when you can’t spot a way out. In the early ’90s my dad was a real estate investor. He flipped houses, and he rented out his property. When the savings and loan scandal happened, it wiped him and our family out overnight. We lost our home, and my dad filed for bankruptcy. He never really recovered, never found his way back onto his feet. He talked a lot about what it was like to have that bankruptcy hanging over him, and how it limited him for the rest of his life. Having a first-row seat to all this… it hangs over me, too. I can get irrationally worked up over even the smallest financial bumps in the road. It is suffocating. Running a small business has forced me to get a much better handle on all that. Getting accounting advice was the very first thing I spent money on, and being able to account for each dollar is as satisfying as it is calming. Not that I don’t still have my occasional freakouts. With the fallout from COVID, financial fear is everywhere, and my guest today is here to talk about what we need to learn, why we need to learn it, and how we should start so that we can breathe deeply. Ean Price Murphy is the founder and owner of Moxie Bookkeeping. Moxie is not a typical bookkeeping service, and Ean, as you will hear, is not your typical bookkeeper. Moxie Bookkeeping & Coaching: https://moxiebookkeeping.com/ [https://moxiebookkeeping.com/]

Elizabeth Wilcox and her book The Long Tail of Trauma: episode 007

Preorder The Long Tail of Trauma by Elizabeth Wilcox here: https://www.amazon.com/Long-Tail-Trauma-Memoir/dp/1950584623 [https://www.amazon.com/Long-Tail-Trauma-Memoir/dp/1950584623] As a child of the 80’s this is the second pandemic my generation has lived through. The first was, of course, the AIDS pandemic. The generation who grew up in the 70s has a completely different relationship to sexuality than my generation does. As a kid, I was taught that having sex was risking death. And of course, it was. Now as a parent I can see the trauma of that experience impact my parenting. Right now, as of this recording, there are over 617,000 deaths worldwide from the current pandemic. My children are coming of age in a time where being less than 6 feet from a person might kill them, and might kill the people they love. This is an ongoing traumatic experience. I do not know what the long term effects will be, but I do know that what’s happening now will probably be the most defining event of their generation. We know that effective learning very often MUST be a social experience. What happens when the social experience is also a potentially deadly experience? How might this trauma play out for our kids? And what does it mean for how they might parent their kids? I’m Jason Gorman and I’m very excited about this episode of An Imperfect Map. In this interview, I talk with Elizabeth Wilcox who is the author of the upcoming book, The Long Tail of Trauma. The book will come out in November with Green Writers Press and is a look at the inheritability of trauma and its effects across three generations of women, ending with Elizabeth’s own mother. I read the book and loved it, and recommend you pre-order it today. The story is honest and raw, and gave me a lot to think about with regard to our current situation and the future it could create.

“The classroom is the world, not the brick and mortar” - Micaela Bracamonte of the Lang School : Episode 006

Today on An Imperfect Map I talk with Micaela Bracamonte, the founder and head of the Lang School in New York City. She founded the school because she couldn’t find the right school for her own young child years ago. That’s amazing enough, but she didn’t have a career in education at that time! We talk about her vision, and I learn a lot about what grit and ingenuity can look like for a school leader. She sees this time and disruption as an opportunity to learn and improve the fundamentals of the educational experience rather than just a time to “get through” the crisis. It’s inspiring stuff. The Lang School website: https://www.thelangschool.org/ [https://www.thelangschool.org/] Article from the New Yorker about a Lang School remote music class: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-great-zoom-school-experiment [https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-great-zoom-school-experiment]