At Books@Work, we recognize (and constantly emphasize) that the opportunity for reflection with others shapes our learning and our performance. We are always learning – about our participants, our company and community partners, about the books we use to spark reflective conversation and the benefits of reading and talking together. In this spirit of self-inquiry, we’d like to take moment ourselves to look back and reflect upon what we have observed in 2015.

Over the past year, Book@Work did not slow down. On every metric, we have grown, from the number of programs (50% growth from 2014) to the number of companies, participants, books and professors (and the colleges and universities in which they teach). We have brought Books@Work to eight states and have commitments to expand in several more by the end of the first quarter of 2016. We have earned the vote of confidence of several national and local foundations, whose investment in our work has made it possible to build our capacity and reach truly deserving audiences. As we further parse and analyze our 2015 performance, we will continue to share our statistics with you, in more detail.

But for this post, we are thinking about a few of the many interesting lessons we have learned this year – the lessons that will shape our growth as we move forward in 2016.

• Books@Work brings people together from all levels and areas of an organization, but it also holds a very special power for natural teams.

By engaging in extended conversations with one another away from the topic of work, team members learn to recognize each other’s contributions and to trust one another more fully. As one participant reflected, “we’re having dialogue outside of work or sports related topics, and we’re boosting our creative and critical thinking skills as a team.” Another said, “people feel more comfortable with each other, and they are more forgiving on conflicts and differing opinions.” And as a senior leader recently reflected, “The [people] on my team who participate are more engaged than the rest of my organization. They don’t need someone to push them to get things done.They take initiative, responsibilities. And it creates dialogue – during the program, and in the cubicles.”

• As powerful as Books@Work may be in an organization, there is an equally powerful need in the community.

Over the past year, we’ve worked with From Lemons 2 Lemonade, the first annual Cleveland Single Moms conference, the Intergenerational School, a Cleveland charter school and the VA Domiciliary at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical center. Our participants have included parents, mentors, non-teaching school staff and veterans. What’s more, our community network has expanded to a formalized relationship with the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western University, the Cleveland Humanities Festival and the Chautauqua Institute.

In the community, as in companies, people yearn to find ways to grow, engage and connect. In our program with From Lemons 2 Lemonade, in partnership with the East Cleveland Municipal Court, single mothers in a court-mandated life skills class used literature to think about and learn from their own experiences. “The poems we actually write, it made me feel better about myself when I left here,” one said. A participant in the VA Domiciliary program told us that “It was awesome to see and feel the critical thinking being done, and to see the creative juices flow!” And a parent at the Intergenerational School credited Books@Work for its important role in community building, something they need “because it’s an urban school district and we’re all trying to pull together with disparate backgrounds, disparate cultures, different ways of looking at things. Unless we have common ground, you can’t have that civilized conversation that community-building needs.”

• The literature seminar in the workplace or the community is a different – and at times richer – experience than the literature seminar in the college classroom.

Our participants are adult learners, and they bring a wealth of knowledge to the seminar. In many senses, they are co-creators of their learning experience with us. As Emily VanDette wrote about teaching at the Chautauqua Institution, “I embraced the opportunity to connect with the story and with other readers on a personal level [. . .] and to appreciate the personal and intellectual connections the readers in my seminar made to the same book. [. . .] Leading a seminar around a book that I haven’t taught or studied gave me the opportunity to be, truly, a part of the conversation, approaching the book with the same, fresh reading eyes as the rest of the group, and in that way, the conversation built upon our shared encounter and different experiences.” Because our seminars derive their power and efficacy from conversation, participants must be willing to bring their experience to bear on a text and share with others. Professors must be able to help individuals connect literature to their lived experience and be willing even to share their own.

In addition to the critical thinking practice offered by analyzing literature, our participants learn to voice their thoughts and to listen to, and appreciate, differences of opinion. They value their own contributions and those of others. Further, because participants are such powerful creators of this learning experience, book choice is more critical than in a traditional college classroom, where the professor’s knowledge is expected to fill in students gaps. If we have learned anything at all from a busy 2015, it’s that we must continue to empower adult learners – in many contexts and from all walks of life – by offering them literature with and about which they can engage and from which they can learn together.

Image: Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhone, 1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

The Incredible Staying Power of James McBride’s “The Color of Water”

Recognizing Others and Ourselves Through Literature

The Element of Surprise: What Stories Help Us See

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