Introducing the newest thing in higher (and we really mean higher — like look UP) education: The Flying Pig Academy. A dream of The Village Square (with support from Florida Humanities) for many years, it's finally aloft. The division in American society is big and seems impossible at times to address.
The Flying Pig Academy is kind of an insider's how to.
This Flying Pig Episode: We live in a highly individualistic society, so maybe it's not a surprise that when we're trying to solve a big wicked problem like our deepening political division our approach is based on the individual. Most of us think that we need to wrestle with the problem of political polarization in our own hearts, or we need better skills for talking to people who don't look or think like us. Of course those things are partly true, but The Village Square has learned through two decades of building trust across divisions that human beings are very groupish and that the solution to polarization is at a group level, not at an individual one. Bonus: you get bigger results way more quickly that way. It SCALES, which we need to do more quickly if we're going to really tackle of societal polarization.
Mentioned: Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind
The second in the Flying Pig Academy series is an homage to our intellectual hero (and lucky for us, our friend and colleague) Dr. Jonathan Haidt who - literally - wrote the book for Pigs With Big Dreams.
Here are the rest of our Flying Pig episodes:
- Location, Location, Location
- Carom Shots: Why Working Upstream From Conflict is So Powerful OR how to become a civility pool shark
- Criss Cross Applesauce OR Complexity Changes Everything
- Core Catalyst Model OR What Old Trees Have to Teach Us About Rebuilding Civic Life
- Walk Away from That Box OR Why Fixing Civil Discourse Requires Less Politics, not mr