Is there a story that comes to mind with you either in a classroom or perhaps in a community where someone with significantly less knowledge and expertise than you have in a particular area did inform and shape your thinking, or perhaps someone in the room that you just got to observe who had a lot more power or a lot more knowledge, where that beginner's mind, a novice perspective actually illuminated something again, either for you or for someone that you got to observe. Yeah,

I mean, gosh, this is a which one do you pick situation? I mean, it's a great question. And I think, especially in higher education, for a lot of us, we're prepared. We're professionalized in a way that moves up. And I always have to remind these undergrad students when they're like, I was just walking on the sidewalk a couple weeks ago, having this conversation of like, you know, when you have that realization of an undergraduate degree really is about this broad sweep of understanding. What does it mean to be a human? Right? How do we make sense of information? What's all the stuff going on? And as you move kind of up, especially in kind of an academic way for maybe masters into PhD and things like that, you're, you're, you're, you're focusing in on the content, right? Methods, maybe the focus, the area that you're exploring, all that sort of stuff. And so, for a lot of us in higher ed, I think there's that moment that like we can know a whole lot about less, right? In some ways that we feel more justified in making certain kind of claims. And paradoxically, you also recognize how little you know about a bunch of stuff because you know more about some, but not all. So I think there's something really fascinating, particularly when we think about things like epistemology in higher ed and kind of really wrestle with what does that even mean, not just as like a topic for a seminar class, but like fundamentally, how do we know? And a big part of my research now and shaping now really back into graduate school and earlier was this recognition of knowledge exists in lots of places. You know, Frank Fisher, who wrote a lot about democracy and expertise. He's a retired professor now, Professor Emeritus at Rutgers. It really just kind of turned me on to like, how do we think about technical knowledge and expertise and kind of lay knowledge and I was really fascinated, actually, particularly in kind of stock, doing this line of research in my doctoral program, but around the role of like emotion and deliberation. And there are all these stories of how there were like issues going on. And in a lot of ways we set up the panel of the experts in the front of the room and they're going to tell everybody like, this is what's this is what's going on or if you choose this, this is going to happen, right? Here's your kind of your smorgasbord of things and here it is. And there was this one clipping of the paper I was collecting all the stuff at that time. And it was this line about basically this transformative issue in a community. And basically, the folks who are showing up who were going to be most directly affected by whatever decision was made. It was like, leave your emotions at the door, right? And I just remember being struck by that of like, what is it that makes it so easy for us to kind of shut out certain ways of experiencing the world and kind of seeing it or having some visceral reaction to what's going on, which is a little bit different than what you were asking, but in a more direct way, one of, I like books. This is audio. So there's no visual component in justify or close your eyes. And that's your driving. Yeah. So so so imagine I've had people walk into my office for the first time. They're like, Oh, yeah, this is exactly what I thought. Right? So there's just stacks and all this sort of stuff. But one of the books that is kind of all my desk right now and I'm just rereading it again, looking at it in a slightly more cursorway this time, but it's called braiding sweetgrass. And it's the subtitle is indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teaching of plants. And so not so much the plant piece to me, but I think when we think about who knows. And what do they know that so often we can, I think, default into that category of like, oh, they're a PhD if we're talking about higher ed, or they're the person who's the local government or they're the planner. And so let them let them tell us what we should do or go on in contrast to the person who's who's lived in the place for maybe decades. Right. And so that's when I mentioned Fisher, like he's got some fascinating work of, of communities decades ago who were recognizing there's a cancer cluster. What's going on? What are the environmental factors that couldn't be fixed or figured out by the outside experts? But it turned out it was all the moms and the community who figured it out. So when we think about that, right, how do we recognize and value that I think is a really, really important thing. And as we prepare students, no matter what level of education we're doing is to remind them, like as much as we acquire kind of the technical knowledge and then the greater expertise about it. That we shouldn't shut out others who don't have those kind of credentials. And also for ourselves, like we might be able to speak from a place that's not only lined up in the way that seems like that's how we're supposed to how we're supposed to know something. So at the heart of all of this kind of dialogue, deliberation work really is this sense of how do we kind of create space for not people just to have conversation, but for us to do, I think, the difficult work of making democracy. Work as it should. And that being rooted in the idea of people having a sense of power and agency over their lives.