Vulnerability and Excellence
Inspired by a friend, who coaches Para-Olympic athletes and intentionally explores the concepts of excellence and healthy competition, I was pointed to a conversation between Brené Brown and Pippa la Grange. La Grange is a sport psychologist responsible for coaching World Cup/Olympic teams. Based on this podcast, I started asking questions about excellence and relational vulnerability in science, which I'd always held as mutually exclusive.
In elite performance cultures (sports and business), psychologists are employed to promote and support excellence. Academia is an elite performance culture, with all of the associated strains. Why do we not prioritise psychology, relationship and mental health? In business, there is money, but sports and academia are both essentially luxuries, funded through third parties. Sporting excellence strategies nevertheless prioritise sports psychologists, enough to make it a viable career option. As far as I am aware, science psychologists do not exist in South Africa, and are rare internationally.
This conversation shone a light on the parallels between the competitive sporting world and academia, and had me exploring uncomfortable questions about my own motivations, including
the difference between shallow wins (driving fear towards the next 'win') and deep wins (a sense of contributing to society),
the difference between pursuing success and pursuing mastery, and
the difference between the finite game (short term) and the infinite game (legacy, service, and outward rather than personal impact).
These women spoke about learning to value and delight in the process, completely releasing control over the results, and the tangible results this approach produced in their teams.
Success vs Mastery
It stimulated some questions around teaching, at undergrad and postgrad level,
Do my students know these differences?
How do we evaluate student performance, within the infinite game?
How do we interact with the publication drive and competition for funding, in the infinite game?
How do we interact with local impact and justice/diversity questions, in the infinite game?
What will the infinite game, mastery and deep winning look like, in a tertiary classroom and research team?
The following sentence from the interview struck me,
"The academy trains us to be experts. The academy does not train us well to be vulnerable". They propose that the bridge between relational learning and true excellence is vulnerability.
They describe sports as a vehicle for reconciliation and deep identity, and my intuition says science holds similar — or even greater — potential. In the midst of endless discussions of "Water Wars" in my work at the Water Institute, describing the impending conflict in the midst of increasing water scarcity, I recently encountered a publication in which UNESCO pointed out that the environment drives collaboration as much as war. They noted, in a thorough historical review of environmental relations, that the first post-Apartheid agreement in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) was around water stewardship (the 1995 Protocol on Shared Water Systems). Soil health has a similar transboundary relational potential, that I am excited to tap into, at communal, educational and governance level.
In my Teaching
This is what I hope to facilitate in my teaching. Three critical questions I ask in pursuing this in day-to-day teaching is,
"Do my students feel known, and have the opportunity to express themselves completely freely?"
"Do my students feel safe to take risks?"
"Is my work facilitating the students' relationship with their town: each other, business, industry, academic departments, as well as the physical rivers, soils and mountains?"
Practically, this has involved developing classroom experiments inviting reflective, relationship-oriented tasks to match every rigorous scientific task (brief examples inserted below).
Local Contexts & Classrooms: LCT & Storytelling
The outworking of intentionally building spaces of safety for personal expression and relationship, is a natural wrestle with true diversity. If I repeatedly ask the three difficult questions above, about students being known and in relationship with each other, it necessarily involves the hard work of creating spaces for diverse backgrounds — and navigating all of the conflict that brings. Students will only feel safe if everyone in the environment is free to express themself. In the current local and international climate, this is challenging. But, I have a suspicion that without the messy, hard work of relational intentionality in our classrooms, it will remain completely impossible.
I am working closely with Marnel Mouton (Senior Lecturer in Biology), who facilitated all of the incredibly creative teaching opportunities for me since 2020. She recently (2019) won the Centre for Teaching and Learning's 'Distinguished Teacher' Award. She co-authored a book on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) with Mags Blackie, a lecturer in Chemistry who is also a recipient of this award, and who I have also spent significant time learning from in the last two years, in different contexts. I am grateful to be learning about this tool, as it is another bridge between the 'hard' sciences and 'soft' research that allows us to use a version of data-gathering and -processing to understand the emotional and personal dynamics in our classrooms and students, which is particularly critical at Stellenbosch University, and any other research organisation I join.
Examples: Relational Reflective Questions
I have used some of these, in various forms, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not. I am learning to pitch relational reflection questions to the level of scientific understanding and excellence. These questions carry the risk of diluting the focus from the science, and must be phrased carefully within strong scientific teaching.
Request the students write the standard research paper on local water quality parameters, based on literature. After submission, invite students to spend half an hour alone with their feet in the Eerste River, (a) at the source, Jonkershoek, (b) every 1 km, as it moves through the town. Past industry. Past upper-class homes. Past Kayamandi. Ask them to record their interactions. Ask them to record relational interactions with the people around them. Where were they scared to put their feet in the water? Why? Pollution? Crime? Poverty? Map the pollution points. Map agriculture and industry. Map the points where there is active governance (municipal workers daily cleaning routes; water quality monitoring). Ask how justice and relationship impact their interpretation of the scientific data.
Group discussion and written pieces, linking their experience of academic teamwork in undergrad with a vision of teaming up to solve societal problems. Have them spend time openly discussing the challenges of relationship in their classwork, and super-impose those conversations on real-world problem-solving teams (government, inter-departmental). Use templates for real funding bodies (Global Challenges Research Foundation; Water Research Commission of South Africa; Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). Designing projects to promote inter-faculty friendships at student level.
The integration of scientific principles into daily life. As an example, in one course, I invited students to engage with the local research on intermittent fasting (by Ben Loos and Anna-Mart Engelbrecht, SU Physiology). I also asked them to explore the Nobel speech on autophagy by Yoshinori Ohsumi, and follow (medical) Dr. Jason Fung’s popular work on fasting and health. I simply asked about their personal decision to integrate the science into daily life, after synthesizing the information. Conversations ranged from experience with religious fasting to risks like anorexia, brought to the task by the students themselves.