Yay, we failed! It’s one of my favorite games to lead in workshops with 10s to 100’s of individuals. We play it early and I listen for the rounds of "Yay" that fill the air along with hands and laughter.
It’s never clear how a group will play with making mistakes. How will they jump in to supporting each other, to celebrating hesitation or not remembering or just getting something wrong, in this case a name.
Leadership is not restricted to a given age. It is an activity, a performance, that can be learned and grown. This is a core principle of the workshops and coaching offered by Dr. Raquell Holmes, who created improvscience to develop and support leaders throughout the scientific enterprise.
What is an extraordinary science community? This is one of the questions that I, along with a number of creative educators and researchers, am asking as we create the bi-annual Cultivating Ensembles in STEM Education and Research (CESTEMER) conference. The conference theme this year is Cultivating Extraordinary Science Communities: Re-imagining Arts, Humanities and STEM.
My first blog post that introduced the company, improvscience, answered the question: "What do you mean, improvscience?" More people, across the country and the globe, are asking: what does it mean "to improv" science?
Loretta Cheeks attended the CESTEMER conference in 2015 and wrote to reflect on her experience.
This year, Dr. Raquell Holmes and members of the improvscience team will be participating in the student programs at the The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, better known as SC, in a number of ways.
Dr. Raquell Holmes has attended, and presented at, the Performing the World conference since 2001. She spoke with Dr. Neil Bardhan for an interview about her experiences with the PTW community.
Dr. Raquell Holmes founded improvscience five years ago. Over the past five years, fulfilling the mission of improvscience to help scientists work and communicate more effectively with one another, we have provided performance-based trainings for over 2500 scientists, educators and administrators. We have grown and helped others to grow!
Ben Taylor specializes in curriculum development that translates scientific research into hands-on educational resources for informal outreach and the K-12 classroom. He has been a professional improvisor with Atlas Improv Co. since 2008 and he attended the Cultivating Ensembles in STEM Education and Research conference (CESTEMER) in June 2015 in Berkeley. He wrote about his CESTEMER experience:
