In everyday conversation about the state of the world, we often hear folks lament that some people want to learn while lots of people are just not interested in growing or advancing their education. Books@Work believes that this assumption is faulty and that a spark of learning exists in most people. Now that hundreds of workers have participated in Books@Work seminars, it has become increasingly clear that the spark of learning becomes a flame (or even a fire!) when individuals of all backgrounds and job categories come together to discuss important ideas through literature. And the results have helped illuminate the importance of recognition as an element not only of personal growth, but also of positive outcomes in the workplace.
Often we think that recognition comes from rewards or pats on the back, but research has shown us that real recognition comes when people engage in experiences that promote self-confidence and self-respect as well as mutual respect for others.
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Professor Michelle Rankins led a lunchtime seminar on two poems by Maya Angelou during the first Cleveland Single Moms Conference in October. The group read “Phenomenal Woman” in unison, forceful and strong voices booming through the open air of the Cleveland Galleria. The Single Moms Conference offered Books@Work the chance to reach readers who might feel isolated. “When I read it, it made me think that beauty is internal,” one participant said. “When you find your inner strength,” another noted, “no one can touch you.”
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Talking about books is an opportunity to see even more perspectives and to gain a nuanced approach to our own. If we live in the echo chamber of our own heads and never listen to alternate voices, we risk missing the ways our thinking has become cramped or trapped–and we’ll never learn to disagree productively or to speak up at work, either.
Paying attention to and learning from other perspectives enriches our sense of the world and our place in it. It can help us feel less isolated, less cut off from people who disagree with us. It can help us find kindred spirits in even the most unlikely places. And, instead of “complaining because the rose bushes have thorns,” we are reminded to “rejoice because the thorn bushes have roses.”
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Inspired by Ann Kowal Smith’s previous reflection on the power of experience, Books@Work Board member Karen Nestor reflects on the ways in which that experience is compounded through social interaction of the sort provided in Books@Work seminars. She writes, “In Books@Work we have seen the exponential power that is unleashed when people share their life experience with others in new ways and begin to challenge their assumptions about the world and each other.”
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We have a societal narrative that says that busy, working people have no interest in high quality literature, or in challenging themselves to explore complex texts. This narrative permeates the current national dialogue on education as a means to get a job rather than learning to become a better learner (and a better worker). It fuels the humanities “crisis” about which we read so much. Underlying these messages is the insidious belief that the liberal arts – literature, the arts, history and culture, the natural and the social sciences – belong not to the working classes but somehow to the leisure class and the leisure class alone, as if critical thinking, communication, intellectual debate and skills of analysis, resilience and reinvention should be rationed or parceled out to a narrow few.
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