INTERDEPENDENCE
The future of the global knowledge economy may be to find, evaluate, use, and synthesize information needed to address problems that are otherwise difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, or changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Human sentiment is often unpredictable and can significantly affect not just political issues, but also reputation and performance. Stakeholders may have radically different world views and different frames for understanding the problem. Such problems require interdependent efforts often large groups of people who work together to converge on one solution, or alternatively, recognize different approaches or answers that involve higher-order faculties. Architectural design theorist Horst Rittel coined the term "wicked problem" in the mid-1960s to describe the complex and ill-defined problems of planning and policy. Wicked problems, and efforts to resolve them with solutions and interventions, are today preeminent concerns of all sorts of people, from artists and professional managers to software developers and lawyers.
Yasmin Benoit and the Intersectional Burden Series
Isaac Chenoweth
In June 2024, a woman named Yasmin Benoit became the first asexual ever to lead a pride parade, an accomplishment worthy of praise, yet met with hatred. It is inexcusable that members of the queer community would participate in such blatant racism and colorism, while unflinchingly backing a movement that preaches inclusivity. There are no rules against asexuals dressing in revealing clothing, none against being a model, and certainly none against being of a darker skin tone. This situation has illustrated that even the most inclusive of groups can fall victim to what I’ve come to identify as the Intersectional Burden Series (IBS).
Communication and Leadership through the Lens of SASA
Ramanpreet Kaur
What do you think of when you hear the words communication and leadership? Do you think these two words intertwine with each other, or do you think they can hold as being two separate components? I believe both communication and leadership have an effect on each other when they can lead to success. For me, some key components of effective leadership and communication come from listening, encouraging, adapting, being determined, being empathetic, reliable, and being a strategic thinker.
Leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills are the foundations of life, and without these crucial components, no one, regardless of their future career, would be able to succeed in the real world. Shadowing an organization—the South Asian Student Association (SASA)—that spreads cultural awareness and joy throughout James Madison University by hosting events and welcomes anyone regardless of their cultural background to join, is a prominent example of teamwork and cooperation. By overseeing the executive team’s meetings, taking pictures of their events, writing notes about the leadership qualities possessed, and how the team collaborated together, demonstrated a realistic inside look that may occur in the real world.
This will all be beneficial if one wants to pursue a career as a marketing manager. It stresses the importance and reality of seeing a team and how they really overcome the challenges and barriers while also celebrating their success. Not only that, it highlights the behind-the-scenes action of what it takes when working as a team.
There are multiple perspectives on how different leaders go about leading their team. SASA’s executive team displayed effective collaboration skills, passion, enthusiasm, and crucial interpersonal skills that are needed to have a positive outcome. The organization never gave up and accomplished all of their objectives they wanted to conquer. All in all, having effective communication and exceptional interpersonal skills are necessary when being a leader.
One real-life example that I will forever remember and cherish would be when I was shadowing a SASA general body meeting and one of the executive members came up to me. He asked how my first semester was going and started a good conversation. That later led him to recognizing the challenges and how hard it is to actually run an entire organization. He told me that it was more time-consuming than he thought it was going to be and that it’s hard to get people to come out to the events and make sure they are having a fun time. The moment that I will forever cherish was when he thanked me for all the hard work and dedication I put into SASA when I was in charge. It felt good that I had an impact and someone recognized my effort. I told him that since it was his first year being on exec, it will get better once the whole team finds a groove and continues to build on making the organization better.
Communication is the most important component in life that is overlooked by many. Believe it or not, you have been communicating since you were a baby and will continue communicating for the rest of your life. Communication also ties in with teamwork. Leadership isn’t about a title; it’s about influence. The South Asian Student Association spreads cultural awareness throughout JMU by having events, meetings, and regular hangouts. I got an insider's look at how the executive team collaborates and the current president's leadership qualities. I was there to observe, and my input was sometimes needed when asked. Effective leadership, strong interpersonal skills, and crucial communication skills will help one thrive in both personal and professional endeavors. SASA helped me realize two new things about myself: one, I have what it takes to be a leader, and two, how passionate I am for the South Asian culture. If I could find a marketing job that incorporates South Asian culture and I could utilize my creative skills, I might have found my dream job. All in all, leadership and communication are the two main components for my future career, and I’m glad I got to shadow a real-life example with SASA and see a glimpse into my future.
Lessons in Climate Change
Olivia Williams
Science is something that we start learning about in elementary school. We explore the water cycle and the different waterways in our state. My favorite activity involved growing caterpillars, watching them turn into butterflies, and then releasing them. However, there is a major issue that’s not being taught in Virginia schools: climate change. Virginia state standards don’t require anything about climate change to be taught, and they received an F from the National Center for Science Education on a study of how each state's public schools address climate change.
Recently, a bill proposed in 2022 that died in committee would have required instruction on climate change. Why, other than it not being in the standards, aren’t teachers teaching about climate change? More than half of teachers do not cover climate change in their own classrooms or talk to their students about it. Why? Sixty five percent say it's an outside subject area, 20% say the students are too young, and 17% say they don’t have enough materials. The drive and will to teach is there--just not the how.
What follows are activities from the VA agriculture program that meet the standard for their grade level and address ways of teaching about climate change to students.
A Bee's Life. Students and teachers talk about the bee life cycle--from the queen laying her eggs in the hive, to the growth of larvae, and cocooning to turn into pupa. This lesson also addresses pollination and how it is necessary in a bee's life. Pollination must occur in order for flowering plants to reproduce. Pollen grains can be transferred by wind, water, bees, butterflies, other insects, birds, and bats. Bees are attracted to fragrant flowers and the nectar and pollen in these flowers. The bee stops at a flower to suck the nectar, and the pollen grains get stuck to the bee’s body. Then, when the bee moves to another flower, the pollen grains are transferred from the first flower to the second. Insects are needed to pollinate a variety of fruits, vegetables, and legumes. In fact, about one-third of the human diet is derived directly or indirectly from insect-pollinated plants. About 80% of plants are pollinated by bees. Within Virginia, about 80 of Virginia’s most popular crops, valued at about $80 million, rely on pollinators. To address climate change you can talk about what would happen if pollination were to decline. This lesson addresses Virginia state standard 4.2.
Water Cycle in a Bag. Water is important not just to humans but also animals and crops. But the earth has a limited amount of water. The water that the earth has constantly cycles in the environment. This is called the water cycle, which is made up of five steps: sunlight, condensation, precipitation, evaporation, and accumulation. Sunlight energizes the cycle. Evaporation happens when sunlight heats up the water from lakes, rivers, and oceans and turns it into vapor or steam. This water leaves the lakes and rivers and goes up into the air. Condensation happens when the water in the air (vapor) gets cold and changes back into as rain or snow. Clouds are formed during condensation and, when the clouds release rain or snow, precipitation happens. As the water falls to the earth it collects in various lakes, rivers, streams, and oceans in a process called accumulation. Some of the water will remain on the ground and soak into the earth for plants to use. Teachers can address climate change by talking about the effects that pollution has on the water cycle. One option is to dye the water to show the effects of acid rain. This lesson addresses Virginia state standards 3.7 and 3.8.
The desire for climate change education is there. The issue is that resources to teach are simply not available. By providing easy activities and the structure to teach them, climate change can be easily added to student learning. There needs to be statewide efforts in school districts to add climate change lessons to curriculums. Climate change isn't going away, and it's important that we make future generations aware of what is going on and how they could help.
From I to We
Jonny Morris
I’ve come to a hard and necessary truth. For the majority of my life, I’ve acted on an ideal which told me, "Independence is necessary for success." As a teenager and young adult, I was a part of one team-sport, for only one season, and I did not glorify nor follow team sports. The activities that caught my interest were ones like snowboarding, yoga, writing, and hiking. Some of these may involve people, but to me, they were all independent by nature. Entering my twenties, I realized that the people I was surrounding myself with were not beneficial for my wellbeing or my ambitions, so I separated myself from people. Shortly after this period of time, I went back to the community college that I had dropped out of and started a new job. Though I worked well in groups and was laid-back enough in nature to easily form friendly bonds, I was not one for study groups or personal relationships outside of a task or setting and formed no-to-few strong ties to the people at either work or school. I saw reward in that, and in fact achieved what I’d heard described as “academic excellence."
In the summer of 2019, I became a certified yoga instructor, and began training as a life coach. That fall, I transferred to JMU after graduating from Blue Ridge Community College. I started working as a yoga teacher at a local studio and gym, and I began working with clients as a life coach. I was achieving. I was praised by those who saw what I was doing and taking on. Yet, despite doing much and being constantly in contact with and surrounded by other people, I felt alone. I often felt loneliness as a product of my excessive "busyness."
As I transitioned into 2020, I pledged to develop more and better relationships. COVID-19 through a wrench into my intentions. I turned some of my attention to connecting with people on social media, but beyond the Zoom calls and phone calls, I became physically isolated. This was nothing new for me. Throughout my years of putting focus into my independent achievements and personal growth, I was accustomed to being alone, and I very much cherished the time spent with myself.
In the fall of 2020, I joined the Independent Scholars program at JMU. Perhaps I was subconsciously drawn to Independent Scholars by the ideals that I attached to the term "Independent." I decided to create an undergraduate major in Leadership Development. I created this major to better myself, to mold a college education to my specific interests: collaboration skills, problem-solving skills, and knowledge and competencies of leadership. I, me, my, myself, and mine. My life, thus far, has been primarily about my own interests. Becoming my best self. Separating myself from others so that I may have total control and influence over my success.
But the hard and necessary truth that I have come to acknowledge is:
Leadership requires interdependence.
This idea of interdependence frightens me. I see now, through reflection on my feelings and points of resistance, that I haven’t felt safe putting my success and fate in the hands of others. To rely on others, for me, was a weakness. I also haven’t felt worthy or competent or stable enough to allow others to put their success and fate in my hands. Those thoughts were rooted in independence, believing that tying myself to others was an all or nothing trade-off of influence for all parties involved; thinking only that I or they would be solely responsible for them or me.
There is no leader without people and the connections between the leader and the people. Facing this realization, I know that it is right, and I know that it will be the challenging.
Under the “I”, under the ego;
I am learning and experiencing to help us grow.
Empathy in Medicine
Kaitlyn Gentille
Individuals possess a broad toolkit when engaging in human interaction. We may be overly intrusive, too sincere and genuine, or completely impassive. Identifying the correct response to another person is a challenge and a skill that isn’t innate for most people. It takes time, patience, and dedication in order to identify the proper linguistic expressions and physical actions in a given situation. In the medical field, this is a skill that isn’t taught. Perhaps it should be. Some doctors are overly attached to patients, thus affecting their ability to properly treat. Human connections can cause difficulties. Some physicians see their patients as medical diagnoses and prognoses that they must treat and cure. There is a fine line between being able to connect and resonate with a patient and letting emotions cloud one’s judgement. Many people, not just individuals entering the medical field, should explore and learn about how to communicate empathetically without diminishing work productivity and efficiency.
Being empathetic means conscientiously choosing to extend oneself and give another individual your undivided attention. As Leslie Jamison said in her book The Empathy Exams, this choice is, “committing ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations,” in order to, “get inside another person’s state of heart or mind.” While there is no denying the significance and importance of empathy, research has shown that “about 70% of health care professionals find it difficult to develop empathy with their health care users.” This shocking number should incentivize the continuous learning and development of empathic communication in any profession.
Additional studies have shown that some physicians are most empathetic at the beginning of medical school, and “gradually lose their ability to be empathetic with time due to the nature of medical training and intrinsic demands.” Other studies show that some physicians try to “dehumanize” their patients in order to cope with daily stress and be more effective. Despite some of these findings, empathy is nevertheless a crucial and critical skill in order to communicate and understand the patient.
Beginning to first identify that being able to empathize is a key skill in understanding others and their differences – as well as appreciating the experiences that others may go through that one cannot relate to specifically – is absolutely necessary in all aspects of professional life. Which does more harm, connecting too much with the patient, or being completely unattached in the first place? I have to think that being able to connect and understand is key to a healthy doctor-patient relationship. This skill must become a priority in education, and be reinforced throughout a physician’s career, in order to have a society with more empathetic medical practice.
Complexities of Healthcare: The Need to Know Something about Everything
Simon Anderson
We can never learn everything about everything. Fortunately, we don’t need to know everything about everything. Many people know a lot about something but almost nothing about a lot. To thrive, we need to know at least something about a lot, which will give us some knowledge about everything.
Education at every level – from high school electives to college majors to graduate studies – primes us to view the world as unidimensional. You’re either a left-brained or right-brained person; a STEM student or an arts student; a biology, chemistry, physics, humanities, hospitality, or sociology major. Students are consistently being partitioned off and told to focus on what they’re good at.
Interdisciplinarity is acknowledged only in as much as STEM students being told that sometimes they’ll need something from the arts students and vice versa. For example: science majors make the paints the artists use, and the arts majors make the movies the scientists enjoy. Much of our education has taught us to have a single focus, and to use other people to fill in the gaps. Each person is coerced into learning everything about a single something, and we are told that society will collectively learn everything about everything. This view carries with it assumptions that people and their disciplines are totally independent from each other, and that every person will have constant access to the knowledge of every other person.
This is presents a difficulty for medical students. Despite encouraging a focus on physical science in medical education, medical practice is more than cells and chemicals. People also have psychological and sociological needs that medical professionals must take into account. Some medical professionals lack these skills. They are a product of their education. They know a lot about chemical and surgical medicine and nothing about the people they’re used on. In many professions this disintegration of fields isn’t a problem. If you need to know something about a person’s background you have time to look it up or ask around. Hospital work is too fast-paced for this. The medical worker has to be able to call upon wisdom gleaned from the humanities while still exercising their scientific knowledge. This need for a single individual to have a familiarity with both physical science and the humanities flies in the face of the characteristics of a medical education presented above.
The interdependence of medicine and humanities is often presented to pre-medical students by wats of a case study of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The scenario is laid out for the students: the Witness arrives in the ER losing blood through some injury. The students recommend a transfusion. This is where medical knowledge is required: the student has to know that this is an appropriate treatment that can be done quickly. The Witness refuses the transfusion. The instructor then poses an interesting question. She doesn’t immediately ask us to come up with alternatives. Rather, she asks us why the Witness refused.
It is here that the neglect of humanities education becomes apparent among the pre-medical students. A student says that it is because Jehovah’s Witnesses believe prayer will save the patient. This is completely untrue. The Jehovah’s Witnesses official website even makes a point to say that faith healing is not a practice that Witnesses follow. Should these students have taken related humanities courses – especially sociology, anthropology, or religion courses – they would know that Jehovah’s Witnesses object to full-blood transfusions due to scripture. Various passages in the Bible forbid the faithful from eating or otherwise consuming blood. An ER doctor faced with this scenario wouldn’t have time to Google this information. The doctor needs humanities education along with their science courses to know this.
This in itself isn’t enough to demonstrate the importance of interdependent humanities and science education, though.
This interdependence is demonstrated by theological research into alternatives to full-blood transfusions. For instance, the doctor’s scientific training tells them that they need to stop the bleeding. Jehovah’s Witnesses have established treatments that do not violate the doctrine of abstaining from blood. The doctor’s scientific training guides them in the direction of stopping the bleeding, and their anthropological/theological knowledge reminds them that, while Witnesses cannot receive full blood, they can receive transfusions of clotting factors and immunoglobulins (the latter to prevent infection while the wound heals).
A doctor obviously cannot rely only on humanities knowledge, but also cannot rely wholly on science and still respect the wishes of the patient. The two are interdependent. They build upon one another to achieve the desired and necessary end. Dividing scientists from humanists doesn’t work given the complex situations that arise in medical settings. The COVID crisis is making the interdependence of biological knowledge and sociological perspectives even clearer.
Prospective medical professionals need to know a little about many things (i.e. biology, chemistry, anthropology, history, sociology, physics, psychology) to craft a solid understanding of how their field operates relative to the world. They must know something about a lot to understand something about their “everything.”
Fashion is a Multifaceted Industry
Anna Lee
Fashion is a multi-faceted industry that contains a supreme amount of interdependence. Art, business, and marketing are the primary disciplines in this specific industry, but it could also admittedly contain many other inspirational points of view like the social and natural sciences. Everyone who succeeds in fashion depends on primary fields. But the global fashion system also draws on different academic perspectives, not to mention the producer/consumer relationship.
Outside of what I would consider the primary academic disciplines of the fashion industry are the human and natural sciences. Natsai Audrey Chieza is the founder of Faber Futures and Co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks’ Ginkgo Creative Residency. Natsai thinks in an interdisciplinary fashion. She wants to know how design and biology are co-dependent strategies for innovation. She understands the threats of both human-driven activity and climate change, which allows her to “explore and build transformative models for production and consumption,” with a goal to work with nature in order to create a sustainable future. Chieza inspires us to make fundamental changes in the industry (2017 TED talk). This is the origin of some of my own top design ideas such as, the safe dyeing of fabrics and the use of recycled and recyclable materials. I want to not only help the environment, but also engage an issue that many find important.
Chieza says that“[p]ublic pressure is becoming an increasingly important political force pushing industries and governments towards the right direction when it comes to making fundamental changes to human activity in aid of the environment.” She shows that, more than anything else, the need for interdependence is the responsibility not only of the producer, but also the consumer who holds the power to make change.
Fashion is dependent on everyone because everyone wears clothes. Need scrubs? Got scrubs. Need a suit? Got a suit. Need a dress? Got a dress. Need a costume? Got a costume. The consumer is the focus. Fashion is not about the designer or the pattern maker or the seamstress. Fashion is about the consumer through and through! Fashion is about us! Just like the food we eat, the clothes we put on our backs is designed to make us feel both fulfilled and happy. They are what we want. As we choose to further focus our morals and values on the environment we will adapt. Natsai Chieza understands this vantage point. Chieza states, “Design brings in a different point of view rooted in how society, systems and products interface with one another. Successful design is able to innovate processes, production models and even our own thinking in response to cultural and socio-economic contexts, and our preferred futures.” Fashion is a response to the needs and wants that the customer lays out, making it an extraordinarily interdependent and interconnected industry.