Connection, Conversation, and Community on Campus: Finding Ourselves in Time and Place at the University

Connection, conversation, and community on campus: Finding ourselves in time and place at the university
Walking Reflection Session
Thursday, June 9, noon–1:30 p.m.
Meet at the reflecting pool, followed by lunch and discussion in the Stuart T. Rolfe Room (ADAL) | Lunch and refreshments provided

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Co-facilitated by Jen Schulz (Interdisciplinary Liberal Studies), Jen Tilghman-Havens (Center for Jesuit Education) and David Green (Center for Faculty Development)

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities.

-Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

To close out the academic year, we invite you to join us to encounter the physical space of the campus as we are “Finding Ourselves in Time and Place at the University.”

Where have we been?

In virtual spaces, gatherings and panel discussions co-sponsored over the past year by the Center for Jesuit Education, Center for Faculty Development and Consortium of Interdisciplinary Scholars, your weariness, your creativity, your despair and your hope have been heard.

• Last spring you were invited to co-create a virtual memorial wall titled “What We Have Lost/What We Have Found” as a way to bear witness to both our suffering and our well-being throughout the first year of the pandemic.
• At the start of fall, when many of us returned (temporarily) to campus, you were invited you to co-create another virtual space for witnessing the complexity of these journeys titled “The Many Paths Back.”
• Over fall and winter, we explored the ways in which we continued to invite our students into embodied practices even in our Zoom classrooms; considered how we “spend our time” with one another and with our students in our university lives; and discussed how we might conceive of "trust" in the dislocated pandemic university.

These explorations have occurred virtually and have thus underscored our continued physical separation from one another.

Yet this sense of separation and dislocation is not new: More than 20 years ago, Rebecca Solnit lamented that technologies were already “eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between.” Her book – Wanderlust: A History of Walking – is a series of meditations on the ways in which moving through a physical landscape invites us into internal landscapes that reconnect us to our own temporal journeys. It provides our inspiration for this end-of-year event.

Where now?

Faculty, staff, administration and trustees are invited to (re)encounter ourselves and each other in the physical space of Seattle University’s campus. We will meet at the reflecting pool outside the Chapel of St. Ignatius and will create pairs out of the participants so that each of us can take one of our community members on a journey through our own stories (of time and place) at the university. Each pair will be provided with prompts to help send you on your way as you move together about campus.

After 30 minutes we will all rejoin each other in the Rolfe Room for lunch and reflection on what we discovered in our journeys and what might be possible for us as a university community moving forward with deeper insight into one another’s stories.

If you have any access or mobility needs, please let us know as part of your registration. And if the weather is unfavorable, bring your raingear or bumbershoots for the journey; we have an indoor space in reserve for gathering at the end.

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