I've been realising how different the world looks from within and from without the academy ever since I joined the board of a civil society organization in my city. At first, there were moments when I felt like I was talking a different language than the other board members, or rather, it might be more accurate to say that I felt like they were talking with an accent that I couldn't quite make out at times; like every once in a while I'd lose a word or two. It was a strange feeling.Things have gotten better since I began - perhaps I've just learnt the lingo, or maybe I'm just listening more attentively and working out the differences.
But there are real differences between the way we do things in the academy and the way things can get done outside of it. Today we spent much of our day generating outcome measures for each of our programs. Our session was partly educational, teaching board members how to do so, which meant the day was quite long and we didn't get through all of them. But that's beside the point.
What was refreshing was the latitude we had, not only in deciding what our desired outcomes were, but also in the kinds of programs we might choose to undertake. So many times when I think of the kind of outcome planning I do in the university, there are a large number of constraints on it. That's probably because most of the outcome planning that I do relates to course planning, or slightly more broadly, curriculum planning. But those kinds of plans are incredibly constrained: by schedules, by class sizes, by institutional goals, by the limitations of time and available space, and by the sometimes limited forms of evaluation available to assess student learning.
In the nonprofit sector, we have limitations (most often financial), but those limitations are transient; we can change many of those limitations by partnering with other organizations or finding additional sources of funding. The academy is far more static, making it very difficult to think about really doing things differently than they are done right now.
Which means that as difficult as it is to interpret the language, the payoff in freedom to imagine how the world can be a better place and how I can contribute to that, is worth it.