HIGHER EDge

Dr.

My name is Nancy Glock-Grueneich, I am author of this blog and I can be contacted at nglock@higheredge.org. I live in Santa Cruz with my dear husband, Ray–and today, as it happens, May 29, 2009, is our 15th wedding anniversary! We are giving ourselves the gift of each getting our blogs started. (His is www.raysnewsnotes.info where his well grounded and insightful, and all too occasional, comments on the news and public affairs may be found.)

I am currently President of HIGHER EDge, a non-profit dedicated to building our capacity for a livable future, and on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Public Participation. 

I have forty years experience facilitating complex and contentious conversations among diverse constituencies. I occasionally mediate, facilitate and consult on visioning, strategizing, organizational development, movement-building and community action, for local officials, NGO’s and citizen initiatives. I’m seem to be best at helping people to find their way through especially sticky problems and to understand each other better. And I have a passion for eliciting and enabling cooperation, and sharing the emerging solutions to seemingly intractable problems. These stories, and tools, offer hope and guidance as we cope, worldwide, in with what are likely to be–unless we are awfully fast in changing things, the toughest times our species has ever faced. And they offer some of what we need to make the most out of what may also prove to be times with greater potential than we’ve ever had for making a new kind of world, if only out of necessity–one that works for all.  

My own current priorities intertwine. One is on developing a comprehensive model and pattern language for matching to the particularities of different situations, precisely those processes of participatory problem-solving, deliberative democracy, conflict resolution, personal growth, and systemic transformation, that are most likely to meet the need. To fulfill the goal, or, better yet to tranform it.

At the same time, I am writing some papers and working on two books: In Storming the Gates of Our Future: Higher Education and Human Survival, I argue that forces already at work open wide in our world offer an unprecedented opportunity to realign the emerging global system of higher education towards higher purposes, transforming the core curriculum and all of the professions and reorienting public schooling.

Citizen Solutions, the other book I am working on, will be a handbook of tools to enable citizens to share fully in solving their most urgent problems, local and planetary. It has a comprehensive model of how different forms of public engagement interact and what elements affect their success in different settings. 

If all goes well and I live long enough, I want to find authors and edit a series of textbooks for general education core classes, each based on what is needed to create a livable future. I will write a book for English composition that will emphasize collaborative reasoning and problem solving.

I have a doctorate from Harvard University in Philosophy and Education and a baccalaureate in Anthropology and Sociology from California State University at San Jose.

I spent 16 years as a state official in charge of faculty development and curriculum design for the 108 California Community Colleges. I trained faculty in teaching critical thinking across the curriculum. I authored the system’s Curriculum Standards Handbook, and trained several thousand faculty in new program development, curriculum design, cultural inclusion, design for distance learning, and the infusion of critical thinking skills into all college level courses. Her facilitation work has grown partly out of this experience of working with some 45,000 faculty and staff from a Chancellor’s Office with little direct authority and where everything in the field needed to be done by agreement of all constituencies.

Right after I retired, in May, 1999, I worked for three years as Vice President for Learning for the Foundation for California Community Colleges, making friends with Silicon Valley folks and firms, and serving on an educational mission to Ghana to explore how distance learning could broaden access to tertiary education in developing countries.  As for my own teaching, it has been mostly at the undergraduate and graduate levels, for a total of twelve years, in the fields of educational philosophy, policy and research, curriculum design, instructional methods, organizational development, performance management, and managerial writing. 

Prior to those experiences, for three years, I had my own business training federal managers including the INS, Navy, and the Department of the Interior, in performance management, problem solving and communications. And I did a stint as a Senior Technical Writer for Data General Corporation, learning what I could of computers and corporations, and then as a Senior Researcher for studies on the cultural boundaries of smoking and the symbolic meanings of energy consumption.

And earlier, I did a variety of exciting things that warm my memories whenever I get to “wishing I were young again”. I taught, directed, consulted on and/or evaluated educational programs at all levels, including daycare and high school, worked with Native Americans, villagers in rural Mexico, and prisons. In 1976, when Boston was under judicial orders to desegregate, I led a community education team, that worked under the auspices of Boston University. We broke through entrenched racial mistrust to enable parents to cooperate in the exercise of their newly mandated powers to oversee all aspects of their children’s schools–and that memory has kept me going in many of tough moment since.