Close encounters that foster change: What Alice Sheldon and PPE 2020 can tell us about educational futures

Abstract

In the preferable educational future imagined here, the year 2030 has seen massive conceptual and structural change throughout systems of education. In the higher educational landscape envisioned only 10 years in the future, institutions of higher education have moved beyond the goals of valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion and beyond recognizing the importance of interdisciplinary curricula focused on sustainable problem-solving. It has embraced those as central tenets as it evolved into the nimble, culturally responsive, and innovative site of learning it aspired to be since the late 20th century. Our institutions of higher education are now designed to educate the adaptive creatives that all professions and future professions require (Aoun, 2017). The catalyst for this transformative change is examined, though not in predictive ways meant to determine new educational policy. It draws from the pandemic, protests, and elections (PPE) that came to define 2020, and it explores a potentially powerful metaphor from a science fiction short story by Alice Sheldon to encourage a reframing of current education praxis. The focus here is on a brief, creative exploration of a future educational scenario that need not be that far out of our aspirational reach.

I write this report about the state of our educational praxis from the vantage point of 2030. It is an exciting time, as the widespread transformative change that began in early 2021 continues unabated and now defines higher education throughout the U.S. The amount of change over the past 9 years has been inspiring and the pace of the transformation surprising. Prior to 2020, even though scholars of future studies had long called for the need to reinvent education by examining the past in order to create an integral and ethical future (Bell, 2004) and long declared it necessary to transcend the limitations of siloed disciplinary specialization (Gidley, 2012), higher education writ large was, as we know, hard pressed to embrace the kind of systemic adaptive change that would make it more responsive to the demands of the 21st century. Aspects of this evolution, of course, were already in existence in a few pilot programs and in pockets of academic/activist work on the margins, but it was the culmination of events in the year 2020 that finally brought long overdue and rapid transformative change to every sector of U.S. society, including higher education. Massive conceptual and structural changes to institutions of higher education came rather suddenly as we moved from reactive to responsively innovative. While initial changes were sluggish and most often a means of survival, agile innovation has become normative instead of outlier behavior across institutions of higher education.

Catalyst for change

Let me begin by reminding us, 10 years out, of the significant convergence of tragic crises that became drivers of change. The trifecta of a deadly pandemic out of control in the U.S. throughout 2020, the power of the bold, brave, and sustained protests after the murder of George Floyd throughout the summer of 2020, and the unprecedented voter turnout and unprecedented illegal challenge to the results of the presidential election of November 2020 generated, in 2021, a movement of truth and reconciliation, reformation and progress not previously experienced in the U.S. Everything that many of us, and most institutions, took for granted as the status quo began to shift and change, gaining unpredicted momentum as the multicultural majority embraced the difficult work of building coalitions for sustainable progress across U.S. society. This convergence of the pandemic, the protests, and the elections is referred to as PPE 2020 in educational circles, a riff on the acronym for personal protective equipment that became the new normal that same year. ¹ Although the underlying causes that led to the escalation of these crises were not new, they were until 2020 too easily ignored by those of us they did not directly affect. And, while we know there was not a simple cause and effect relationship between events in 2020 and our current period of sustained reform and reinvention, it is important to remember and recognize the significance of the crises that led not to momentary or temporary change but to a movement of sustained progress, a shift in society (and the education sector) that continues to evolve here in 2030.

No one and no societal institutions were prepared for the convergence of crises in 2020, nor were we prepared for what each crisis (re)announced to us about the inequities and injustice we allowed to fester in our society. The unchecked spread of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, caused a tragic loss of life and revealed (to those with economic and racial privilege) the depth and scope of the crisis of health and economic disparities in our nation. The gruesome 9:29 min public murder of George Floyd revealed (to white Americans) the longstanding crisis of racism and the resurgent racist violence and terror intended to continue to subjugate people of color (including the terrorizing and murder of black, brown, and indigenous trans women and gender non-binary individuals). And, the illegal efforts to overturn the results of the nation’s 2020 presidential election and the violent insurrection on the Capitol on 6 January, 2021 revealed just how fragile our “democratic” nation was as we witnessed it teetering on the precipice of a descent into an authoritarian nationalist neoliberalism that would have ended any aspirations of ever achieving democracy.

The devastating events in 2020 brought widespread awareness of the dysfunction of so many aspects of US culture, from inequitable access to health care, to racial division and economic injustice, to the increasing unaffordability of education. Mainstream U.S. society, as we know, has not been good at addressing systemic injustice with systemic, sustainable solutions. Yet the culmination of events and the new voices providing new direction from the previously silenced margins has resulted in such widespread change that our multicultural historians have named it Reconstruction 3.0, a new era of reconstruction with a broadly multicultural focus on equity, access, and justice and sustainable environmental protections. It is as important as the first reconstruction era following the civil war and as significant as the second era, the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century. As we continue to sustain our reparative justice initiatives, there is increasing commitment to not allow Reconstruction 3.0 to fade or be subverted as was allowed to occur with previous eras following established gains and cultural change.

The rapid and extensive redesign and reinvention of higher education, however, did face some substantive resistance initially. As campuses closed and we were all forced into an abrupt and quick pivot to fully online teaching in early spring 2020, most of us struggled. Many institutions tried to wait out the pandemic without considering how to reinvent themselves. Notably, and unfortunately, a number of these did not make it through and were unable to thrive in the post-pandemic era. The initial resistance to considering change, along with the steadfast desire to reopen after COVID-19 had abated with the very same curricular offerings, course designs, and pedagogy they had offered as pre-pandemic campuses, led to their relatively quick demise and to the ultimate failure of “The Retro Campus” model (Alexander 2020).

Other institutions began to experiment with the possibilities. The bold and inquisitive among us were inspired to seize the opportunity to rethink everything from curricular coverage and an over-reliance on information delivery to static assessment models and ideas of space and place. As universities and colleges—large, mid-sized, and small; public and private; urban, semi-urban and rural; diverse, minority-serving, historically black, and predominantly white—shifted the nexus of traditional leadership and power relations within their institutions, the movement for transformative change began to quickly reimagine, rebuild, and restructure new models for higher education that were easily and widely adapted. Yet the structural changes that I outline below occurred because of something more than change leadership initiatives we had experienced previously in academe. This amazing widespread systemic shift required more than that. It was instigated and led by leadership previously unrecognized, by those previously unseen by the administrators and governing board members, and often unnoticed by the faculty as well. It was led by those we had previously not seen, not listened to, nor recognized as capable of leading.

From margin to center ²

A little known science fiction story by Alice Sheldon (published in 1973 under the male pseudonym, James Tiptree, Jr) provides some insight as a metaphor for what plagued institutions of higher education and the mainstream US society long before 2020. In Sheldon’s story, “The Women Men Don’t See,” she signifies on the limitations of the genre of sci-fi/fantasy as her story calls attention to the narrow and stereotypical gender roles that continued to inform most of mid-twentieth-century science fiction and U.S. society. In her story, the narrator, Don Fenton, cannot see or relate to women except as existing in relation to men, and thus, he fails to recognize the independence and agency of the character, Ruth Parsons, or her daughter, Althea, throughout the story. While the reader can see Fenton’s error of judgment, the narrator himself never does—he begins and ends the story in the same way, having learned nothing from the journey he has undergone alongside the Parsons women via a plane crash in Quintana Roo and an encounter of the third (and for the women, ultimately, the fifth) kind. Ruth’s perceptions and experience of the close encounter differ from Don’s, but he remains dismissive, incurious, and fearful of the differences he sees. When Ruth decides to explore the unfamiliar, she discovers that the aliens that come to their aid are an advanced and gentle civilization. Don Fenton, though, remains afraid, and cannot fathom why Ruth Parsons and her daughter, Althea, would choose to accompany the extraterrestrials to the constellation Orion, rather than wait with Fenton for their rescue off the Yucatan coast. The fantastical close encounter, in Don Fenton’s fearful, biased, and disinterested view, becomes oddly unremarkable and ultimately unnoteworthy—if only for him. The story begins and ends with Don’s inability and ultimate refusal to see that women are independent individuals, whose insights, choices, and agency differs from his own and from whom he can gain insight (Tiptree, 1973). Although efforts to end gender discrimination for white women had been addressed in some significant ways by the first decade of the 21st century, the same could not be said for the persistent exclusion and devaluing of other cultural identities, including BIPOC and gender non-binary individuals. ³ For academic activists in the post-pandemic era of Reconstruction 3.0, it was time to gently disrupt the structures that continued to disempower the still unseen and unheard on the margins of higher education. For the Don Fentons among us, it was no longer white women who were invisible at the margins. It was the insights, choices, and agency of the unseen diversity of the racially diverse, neuro diverse, queer diverse, diverse first gen/low wealth colleagues, and community members who we had repeatedly relegated to the margins. And in this new era of Reconstruction, the insightful and strategic leadership of the historically unseen and marginalized proved to be the most viable for generating and sustaining transformative change.

Many academics who witnessed brief attempts and temporary moments of potential change prior to PPE 2020 have remarked that those attempts ultimately failed to become widespread or substantive and did little more than nudge the status quo. These same scholars have remarked in surprise at the efficiency and inclusivity of the new Reconstruction 3.0 movement. This new Reconstruction era has been founded on principles that distinguish it from earlier efforts. Rather than replicate power imbalances or “divide and conquer” strategies that had prevented any significant evolution and transformation of higher education, this new collective leadership brought a different perspective on how transformative change is empowered. “Calling out” institutions or individuals was a time-worn strategy that had not sustained the initial power of transformative change in the past. So, instead of calling out and shaming institutions, policies, and individuals, the ethics of “calling in” were embraced as a central principal of Reconstruction 3.0. This strategy focused on welcoming and providing encouragement to all institutions and individuals willing to “lean into” the problem-solving work needed to reshape the form and function of our outmoded models of higher education. While accountability was still an important part of the process, diverse new collaboratives were able to design and implement systemic changes at their institutions with much less entrenched resistance and with more longevity (to date) than previous efforts. Many colleagues are also quick to point out that it was only when those who were historically excluded and marginalized collectively moved from the margin to the center and redefined the purpose of power ⁴ that equity and inclusion efforts were realized.

The Reconstruction 3.0 movement was, of course, broader than the crisis of the pandemic alone, broader than the protest against white police violence against black and brown bodies, and broader than a misinformation-driven false conspiracy that misled many voters. It was a primarily youth-led collective responsive to the convergence of crises intent on leading change in ways no other movement before it had been able to do. Their success has been studied and celebrated in the years since PPE 2020. For example, their unique, large-scale, non-stop peaceful protests disrupted business as usual in order to create change, even as the movement simultaneously coordinated with health systems and worked alongside health professionals to coordinate, organize, and transport community members to vaccine sites and vaccines to communities.

Although the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement faced police and alt-right violence in 2020, they reemerged in the new political landscape of 2021 to help lead the nation on the path to unity that so many were calling for, and the group remains an important driver of change. They understood, as did the vast majority of Americans, that truth and accountability must always precede reconciliation and unity. Some may recall that the BLM guided the new movement in 2021 in the peaceful and relentless protesting of police violence as they simultaneously led the effort to work alongside federal, state, and regional investigative units to identify pro-violence-oriented officers, institute community-policing standards in collaboration with community members, and contribute to the reallocation of funding that led to safer and more responsive units. Their work, as we know, is why we have Community Protection Departments instead of Police Departments everywhere in the U.S. in 2030. And, much like Freedom Summer over 50 years earlier in the second reconstruction era, the Reconstruction 3.0 movement led, gained allied support, and cultivated diverse partnerships as it spread from city to city and town to town, creating proactive support for inclusive and reparative justice, while the U.S. legal system slowly, but surely, held to account criminal behavior that resulted in the insurrection of January 2021.

These reconstruction efforts outside academe are central to an understanding of what has occurred inside our institutions in higher education. What began in mid-2021 in cities and towns across the U.S. changed (some would later argue saved) our “democracy,” and would inform how the academic activists (students, faculty, community members and disenchanted or frustrated administrators) acted collectively. They collaboratively strategized, and peacefully and effectively unsettled the status quo in every aspect of their college or university in order to co-create and lead the implementation of the transformative change we have today. It was a nationally defined effort adapted locally that empowered voices and insights from the margins. My report outlines some of the significant changes that began in PPE 2020 and early 2021 and have continued to evolve.

An overview of our educational praxis in 2030

Space and place

Normative concepts of the space and place our colleges and universities occupied were forever changed by PPE 2020. One of the first substantive changes brought about by the reparative justice initiatives of Reconstruction 3.0 made it essential that each institution recognize the indigenous land it occupied, and create open admission, tuition-free reparations for indigenous peoples wishing to engage in learning at the institution occupying their tribal land. As a part of this process, each institution worked with the tribe or confederacy of tribes in their region to correct the historical record and challenge the “single-story” dominant narrative. At this time in 2030, most institutions have dynamic and interactive corrective memorials that have been created in collaboration with local indigenous artists and designers. These interactive memorials have replaced the static monuments that were commonplace on campuses across the nation, but particularly in southern regions, prior to 2020. Instead of the iconic figure of a founding father or a confederate soldier atop a pedestal, campuses now often have Holographic Memorial Sites (HMS) that proactively educate the viewer about the complex history of the land on which the campus has been built. Students fondly refer to these campus “HMS” as truth and reconciliation “hymns” and the holographs and narratives are often revised and updated by each graduating class in collaboration with local and regional indigenous community members. Rather than hidden histories, students now expect to learn about historical injustices as they learn how to address current issues of inequity, and work to sustain social justice. These holographic memorials are regionally specific, so campuses in the south often have a memorial that also recognizes and honors the enslaved individuals who labored to build the campus, and a large campus in Northern California has, for example, an extensive holographic memorial that honors the history of Chinese immigrant and African American laborers in the building of their university as well as the first transcontinental railroad.

Another widespread reform effort sought to address the problematic relationships between our institutions and the local communities in which they are situated. Prior to PPE 2020, many of our colleges and universities directly changed the landscape of the surrounding community through their ability to purchase property on the edges of their campuses as they expanded to accommodate their growth. Historically, this was most often done without attention to the well-being or displacement of community institutions or individual community members. These campus expansions sometimes included displacing current employees of the institution, as faculty and staff often found themselves no longer able to afford to purchase housing or find affordable rent close to campus. The “town vs. gown” divide, whether in urban areas or small “college towns,” had been viewed as an inevitable result of campus expansion and enrollment growth. Following PPE 2020, the hierarchal divide between campuses and surrounding communities shifted, and “town and gown” collaborations now define the relationships between college campuses and surrounding communities. As part of that effort, traditional appointment procedures to and memberships on college or university governing boards were quickly reinvented in Reconstruction 3.0. Board membership now includes students, staff, faculty, and community members, and appointments are no longer the purview of Governors or wealthy donors. As Board membership collectives were formed, problem-solving that safeguarded and benefitted both the community and the institution became the norm.

Over the past 10 years, the ways we conceive of learning spaces have also evolved. Campuses have continued as sites for in-person connected learning and accessing research equipment, but they are seen as more fluid environments than in pre-PPE 2020. Student-learners, faculty and staff are no longer defined by or restricted to “residential or non-residential” or “on-campus or off-campus” categories. Those are terms we find no longer useful as our institutions became hubs of activity, rather than brick and mortar buildings with separately defined, rigidly delineated spaces for learning, living, accessing resources, archival materials or developing and participating in research projects. Long gone, of course, are most pre-PPE 2020 classrooms with rows of small tables and chairs facing front, sometimes windowless, and always driven by strict timetables to permit routine shuffling in and out on appointed days and times. That was, even for many 20th-century academics, an ineffective Taylorism-like attempt to regulate and schedule learning. It was more focused on the efficient use of buildings than it was on empowering learning. Instead, classrooms now serve as periodic gathering places for learning teams when connecting in-person better facilitates the progress of the collaborative work. Because interdisciplinary team-based projects are essentially the new “Carnegie Unit” and learning is no longer thought to be connected to or measured by “seat time,” our campuses have been able to use space differently. In-person meetings, research labs, learning studios, and flex classrooms are now eScheduled by the curricular Project teams themselves, rather than by a central classroom scheduler.

On most campuses, all classrooms are now flex-design sites, full of advanced technologies that connect individuals in the room to the world (and to a world of learners and diverse experts) beyond. And while there are usually a few large lecture halls remaining on most campuses, they are now technologically equipped to resemble those that host world summits, as they routinely host community-based practitioners, faculty, and students from across the globe. Each seat, for example, has “desktop” touch access to the world wide web, a VR headset, and easy access to multiple languages (including IS, ASL, SEE, PSE, and Cued speech), and all at a speed unimaginable to any of us back in 2020. Most rooms, including large lecture hall spaces, were transformed into flex-mobile (re)designs, so a tiered seating set up is mobile and can be quickly folded into itself, flattened, and moved around to accommodate an Augusto Boal-inspired theatre/dance movement project on the same day. It is perhaps noteworthy to mention that unlike previous learning space redesigns in higher education institutions, these changes were done with and by collaborative design teams that included not just faculty and student users, but also members of the campus staff who maintain classroom technologies and those staff whose important labor keeps classrooms clean and safe. The intentionally broad and inclusive membership of these collaboratives generated innovative designs that surpassed earlier campus classroom redesign efforts in functionality, aesthetic style, and ease-of-maintenance.

Surprising to some but not all faculty was how quickly students relinquished their habits of superficial learning that we had inadvertently encouraged by our limited conceptions of learning spaces and our over-reliance on information delivery (lectures) and traditional assessment methods (quizzes, mid-terms, and final exams). On our contemporary campuses, students no longer lumber unenthusiastically from residence hall to classroom to classroom on a preset schedule wondering why they are forced to take specified classes at the same time each week. Students now use campus learning spaces with their Interdisciplinary Project teams for “time on task” events, such as collaborating on exploring and curating resources from our libraries and digital archive portals, on collaborative learning in research labs, on design thinking in learning studios, and in developing strategies for real-world problem-based learning before heading to an off-campus site. We have been able to shift what often felt like the drudgery of required attendance (for both students taking a class and faculty teaching a class) to a new use of campus spaces driven by new approaches to curricular and pedagogical engagement.

Curricular innovation, educational technologies, and pedagogical praxis

We have seen tremendous innovation in our (re)design and use of educational technologies and in our approaches to teaching and learning, but perhaps one of the most significant changes immediately following PPE 2020 was the complete transformation of higher education curricula. Interdisciplinary Project teams are the new normal on all campuses. Many describe the shifts in our curricula and pedagogy as a useful “mash-up” of interdisciplinary studies meets problem-based learning meets community-based participatory research. Most significantly, the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge through “majors” and “minors” has ceased to exist as we reimagined curricular engagement better able to develop adaptive creatives with 21st-century competencies (Aoun, 2017). Our non-siloed curricular experiences develop active learners who have a realized sense of their own agency and their ability to pose complex problems in ethical contexts as well as be astute problem-solvers (Freire, 1970). The longstanding delivery of content and information or the study of a single aspect of a subject area in isolation from other disciplinary and real-world contexts in a 10- or 15-week course was deemed not agile enough. Instead, curricular content is organized around the wicked messy challenges that began to inform problem-based learning in STEM fields in the early 2000s. Only now the projects and teams are intentionally interdisciplinary, and each project team must include faculty and student participants from the sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, and the arts, as well as community members whose expertise is essential to each Interdisciplinary Project team. Local community members are hired for their uniquely situated and valuable local expertise, ⁵ their abilities to accurately evaluate the local economic and cultural impact, and work side-by-side with faculty to manage, guide, and mentor students (our future civil engineers or city planners or teachers or art historians in training), as well as work with the federally funded civilian conservation corps members (who often work and live temporarily in the area during infrastructure repair or build initiatives). Over the past 10 years, this infusion of federal infrastructure funding, along with our applied learning emphasis in Interdisciplinary Project teams means that across the nation we now have solar panels on every roof, a small wind turbine in every backyard that powers the electric vehicle or tractor charger in every garage or barn; and, of great significance to all communities and campuses, by 2028, we no longer had a digital divide that had once hindered high-speed internet access in so many rural and semi-urban regions prior to 2020.

The inclusion of complex, context-specific ethical problem-solving that examines and addresses historical inequities and current social justice issues in the context of each and every challenge necessitated the integration of humanities, social sciences, and arts curricula into all Interdisciplinary Project teams. No longer do students learn their primary disciplinary area in isolation to other ways of knowing. It is in this way that students explore concepts and knowledges far beyond their primary and secondary academic areas. The multidisciplinary engagement required in our applied learning and problem-solving focus of every student’s Interdisciplinary Project team means that all of our future professionals have an understanding of how areas of expertise are inevitably connected in real-world situations. A future attorney is likely to know more about the significance and impact of environmental racism on a future client, than did their pre-PPE 2020 counterpart, who had one introduction to sociology general education course and one environmental studies elective as an undergraduate. These Interdisciplinary Project teams are a remarkable shift from the curricular models that predate 2020.

Faculty rarely lecture now, at least not as a primary pedagogical method. It is simply not as useful or interesting for us or for our student-learners as it might have been in the pre-PPE 2020 curricular models. The best lecturers and explainers of complex foundational materials have been digitized and that mode of information delivery is accessible 24/7, 365 across disciplinary areas. The work faculty do on Interdisciplinary Project teams may involve a “just-in-time” mini-lecture on a particularly difficult aspect of a problem or concept, but more often than not, they are helping students refine their question-asking and discovery processes. Since most curricular content is now learned via hands-on, minds-on application, and subject areas are now inter-/multi-/cross- or trans-disciplinary in some or several ways, faculty also now work in teams that bring different combinations of knowledge bases together, and we love the innovative, design-thinking engagement that offers us. A few of us remember the pre-PPE 2020 turf battles over disciplinary expertise and research areas, but those have gone by the wayside as well. The collaborative research model that generated two viable COVID-19 vaccines from lab to trial to distribution in record time in 2020 was the legacy of open-source science initiatives that began several years earlier and has become standard practice for research and discovery. As faculty, we have reimagined and reinvented ourselves as co-learners with our colleagues, with our student-learners, and with the community members with whom we now routinely partner in teaching and in research. It is a refreshing change.

Our shift from content-delivery, passive learning to active and applied learning as the norm, has meant that student engagement is no longer an issue, and there are no longer academic research areas intent on figuring out how to measure it as a learning outcome. We shifted the focus from compliant learning to an emphasis on igniting learners’ curiosity (Campbell, 2011). As a result, student-learners now anticipate, expect, and desire learning experiences with faculty and curricula that will expand their ability to explore and discover as they learn to become not passive consumers of information, but increasingly skilled knowledge-producers. They welcome the collegial challenges we offer in collaborative problem-solving because they are no longer studying materials in order to pass a test and receive a grade. Our universities have finally become entirely gradeless (Blum, 2020), as widespread review of years of evidence-based research indicated that grades inhibited learning and learners’ uniquely diverse talents and innate intellectual curiosity. Contemporary learners also develop metacognitive awareness much sooner than undergraduates in earlier eras (who did not have the benefit of this curricular structure). The baccalaureate degree is routinely completed in three or 4 years, and graduates have not only acquired domain knowledge (through application), but they have also developed self-efficacy as “lifelong learners.” That was a much-used, though mainly aspirational, phrase at the end of the last century, but it is now a guiding principle for the ways we educate all learners to become adaptive professionals and critically engaged citizens.

For many of us, the increasing dominance of a handful of vendor-owned educational technologies was problematic even before the increase in online, hybrid/blended, Hy-flex, course designs that surged in PPE 2020. What Audrey Watters aptly named “the incessant creep of technology in education” (2014) continued until 2024 when our curricular transformations helped us to end our over-dependence on ed tech. As challenge- and problem-based learning was adopted in all of the STEM fields, computer science education became a site for student-learners to become coding mini-experts as they deconstructed the proprietary lock-down of tech tools in order to make them responsive to users. The learning management systems (LMS) that once collected data on student-learners without their specific permission, and that had begun to influence too much control on our pedagogical choices by narrowing users’ options rather than broadening them, are no longer a problem in 2030. The LMS has become a portal for connected learning and is responsive to user-demand for design change in large part because student-learners are now empowered to “look under the hood” of the tech tools driving their learning. Much like the reprogramming of an IG-11 bounty hunting droid into one capable only of fostering nurturance in the popular series, The Mandalorian, our educational technologies have been co-opted by the broader communities they serve. Student-learners now co-design our tech tools, serve as an oversight community and as advisers to a reformed ed tech sector.

In “The Women Men Don’t See,” even as Don Fenton witnessed the bold and decisive action of the Parsons women, he refused to see the challenge and opportunity facing him. His fear that any perspective and experience different from his own would negate his value made him unable to see the significance of the extraordinary and powerful action happening right in front of him. The events of 2020 brought new voices and new perspectives to the forefront in our society and across our campuses. A prominent feature of Reconstruction 3.0 that has had a powerful impact inside and outside higher education is our renewed attention to learning to see and listen across difference. It has become an important part of the successful attempts to unify the nation after the political violence of January 2021. Unlike Don Fenton, we have been—individually and collectively—accepting the challenge to do the difficult work of dismantling the bias built into our societal institutions and educational systems. And we have moved from building back better to building new. The focus on learning how to be present for issues and individuals with whom we could not easily find common ground was and remains a complex task. The peaceful protests of 2021 combined Ibram Kendi’s all-inclusive redefining of anti-racist work (2019) and Gregory Ellison’s “fearless dialogues” (2017) with great success. It has become a model we continue to adapt and refine. We embraced these strategies early in the Reconstruction 3.0 era, as it taught each of us how to better navigate our unexamined biases and learned prejudices that can limit our ability to see the power and potential in our close encounters with difference.

The year 2030 is dynamic and vibrant. We attended to the convergent crises of 2020 with full-on open-minded and open-hearted effort and a Freirean critically engaged optimism that suggested that only our cynicism could stop our ability to shape our future. We have so much more we can reimagine and create as we learn to anticipate the challenges that may arise, but we are beginning to learn to invent the future. As unsettling and initially disruptive as transformative change can be, it is also an empowering and preferable response to otherwise unforeseen and overwhelmingly destructive crises.