In this episode, Cally, Heather, Lois and Louise (CHLL) dig deeper into the big ideas that surfaced within each generational cohort group: listening, climate change, interconnectedness and hope. Learn what the number one common concern was for people in each of the distinct conversations.

LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE

• Mark Borchalt suggests models such as the Integrated Learning Specialist Program that Cally and Scott Flox visited and that was highly influenced by Lois Hetland and colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Project Zero.
• The CHLL podcast shares and spreads transformational practices such as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and resources suggested by Derek Fenner as strategies to sustain the life weight of communities that have been damaged and erased through schooling.
• Arzu Mistry recommends David Sobel’s Place-Based Education to fully utilize the resources of local community and environment as the starting place for curriculum development, strengthening community bonds, appreciation for the natural world, and a commitment to citizen engagement.

We are CHLL: Cally, Heather, Lois, and Louise. In our last episode, we shared what happened in the six generational focus groups that we met with last year, including members of Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, boomers, and the greatest generation. We listened to some of their clips and introduced listeners to their ideas and the issues that arose in the focus groups when we were talking about the opportunities facing the world and education today, and how they intersect. In this episode, we go deeper. We look at the big themes that surfaced from all the focus group conversations as a whole. We examine the nuances that distinguish them from each other.  We pored over the recordings from these conversations, and it's provoked new ideas for each of us. We share themes from the conversations that resonated with each of us individually.

WE NEED MORE LISTENING IN THE WORLD AND TO REDUCE CONFLICT IN OUR CONVERSATIONS

Cally Flox: An overarching problem discussed by everyone is that there's not enough listening in the world. There's so much conflict in our conversations. I know we mentioned this briefly in the first two episodes, but it's really remarkable that every group raised the importance of being able to listen to people with different perspectives. Across generational cohort groups, the inability to listen and be curious about differing viewpoints was a problem that participants felt affects our ability to seriously work together towards better outcomes on any of the other difficult issues. In our high-school group, Grace was the first one to name that she thought listening was the biggest problem in society:

Grace Blumell: “That's an issue that’s common where I live. We're so quick to discredit other people and tell them that the experiences they're having is not really what they're having. I think really listening and understanding people as best as we can, and not telling people that they're experiencing something when they're not experiencing something. I think that's an issue that's throughout the world. We don't really listen.”

Maia Monahan: “I agree, I think it's just being curious without being judgmental, and being open and not immediately jumping to conclusions. It's curiosity without judgment that I think is missing.”

Cally Flox: Grace describes feeling dismissed by older, more experienced people:

Grace Blumell: “My grandparents cannot listen to me. It's once again putting yourself in somebody's perspective. They can't validate my experiences or the experiences of others. And I think it's causing an extreme divide in families and within relationships, because they're just not willing to think about things as if you were another person, or you identified differently, or you came from a different background. I think it's really hard to have talks with people from different generations, when you think oppositely.”

Cally Flox: To improve listening, Mark, from our beta group, reflects inward:

Mark Borchalt:  “Am I fully valuing who I am inside the circumstance? Conversely, am I also honoring the person that I'm working with? More importantly, are we constantly reviewing the context of our circumstance, so we're finding the grand truth around that, so that we can honor all three simultaneously? When there's conflict, we recognize, ‘Oh, it's because I'm not honoring myself, I'm not speaking up, or because I'm shouting over the other people and I'm not allowing them to speak, or that we've totally gotten off track here.’”

Cally Flox: Paul Hetland, from the boomer group, and Angelo from the Gen Z group, offer additional strategies for listening:

Paul Hetland: “When I look at polarization, I'm trying to get a sense of what it is the polarized sides agree on. I think that's where the problem lies. My view, our society has become increasingly vertical. The conversation is up and down. It needs to be much, much more horizontal and across boundaries that you're suggesting. Working to create that—I don't know how we do it—but focusing on common ground as the key aim in education is important.”

Angelo Gallegos: “Rather than just believing in what you think is true, I think both sides should try to understand each other rather than believing what you think is true. Just try to understand them, and let them try to understand you.”

Cally Flox: The art of listening really requires that we self-regulate deeply so that we can respond instead of react. During COVID, I think there was a lot of fear and a lot of anxiety. I think we lost our ability to regulate our own emotions, and we became reactive. Because we weren't able to monitor and regulate our own emotional and mental health, communication broke down. Listening is dependent on the ‘power of the pause’—stopping, breathing, and choosing to respond instead of react. When we can master our internal space, that's when we can be good listeners. This is particularly true with information that scares us, like climate change.

CONCERNS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE, WARFARE, AND POWER

Heather Francis: Climate change was an urgent issue that people talked about in our focus groups. There was broad agreement across all of the cohorts that climate change is a most pressing issue of our time. Here are Matt, Mark, and Paul from three different focus groups:

Matthew Teitter: “I was worried about the utilization of nuclear weapons. Very concrete, kind of like the idea of using low-yield or tactical nuclear weapons. Whenever something like this happens with a war going on with a superpower that has nuclear capability, I'm concerned about the survival of the species. A longitudinal effect of that is ecological collapse related to and/or directly influenced by anthropogenic climate change. These are the long-term issues we have to face. I think the questions about how to tackle those issues—which are so huge—dovetail with the idea of, ‘Do you even touch those third rails?’ because they don't have easy answers.”

Mark Borchalt: “Because if we no longer have an environment that is healthy to live in, where are we going? How are we going to fix that? It seems like the world’s

view is that we want things to get bad enough before we really respond and act.”

Paul Hetland: “To me, the overriding and most important issue is climate catastrophe.”

Lois Hetland: The groups had a lot to say about the issue. Here's my niece, Maia, and my brother Paul.

Maia Monahan: “Because the COP26 summit is going on right now, climate change is at the forefront of my mind. Climate change is something that is going to affect everybody at some point in time. While other issues definitely affect a lot of people, they affect fewer numbers. But climate change is going to somehow do something to all of us at some point. It seems like a really big issue that we're facing.”

Paul Hetland: “I think the failure is the failure of humans to understand their place in the natural world. And that, I think, has been exacerbated by the institutions that we have created and that we now have allowed to govern us.”

Lois Hetland:  Marco, a millennial, and Rafael, from the greatest generation, both in California, added:

Marco Alberto: “It feels like there's a big disconnect with the land. This disconnect relates to the idea of dominance over another person. People want to dominate, have power over somebody, power over land. These colonial forms of thought need to wither away.”

Rafael Jesús González: “Climate change, warfare, and capitalism. They are all intertwined and self-supporting. They all are causes and effects that are intimately wedded together.”

Heather Francis: One more clip from Paul:

Paul Hetland: “Somebody in a class in Tucson, AZ, was asking Noam Chomsky if there is a potential solution or way through climate change under capitalism. His response: ‘You better hope so, because there's nothing, nothing else on the horizon right now that has that kind of scale.’”

Heather Francis: I remember Paul saying that and feeling, “Yeah, we have to do something.”

Lois Hetland: We have to change our own minds and those of others, and we have to do it fast. We can't even be tempted to believe there's nothing we can do.

Heather Francis: Paul’s words really stood out to me: we just have to do something. We need conversations about it. We can't just talk about it with scientists. We’ve got to talk with artists, with educators, with policymakers, with construction workers, with transportation workers, with business. These need to be interdisciplinary conversations.

INTEGRATED THINKING AND LEARNING: EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED

Louise Music: A consistent thread from all these conversations is that none of these problems are standalone. Everything is interconnected, including our divisive public discourse. The inability to listen to people or work with people who have different beliefs and ideas relates to these urgent issues like climate change that result in huge population migrations and lack of access to food and water for huge populations of people. In turn, those migrations connect to the racial, economic, and ethnic inequities, poverty and war that we're facing—all are intimately tied together. These global issues intersect with the issues in education, and the artificial way that we compartmentalize children's experiences in classrooms, where there's 50 minutes in science and 50 minutes in history, and you're lucky if you get any art at all.

Lois Hetland: This model doesn't teach students to think the way they have to think to address these global issues in a holistic way.

Heather Francis: It teaches students that everything is siloed, and that is not how the world works.

Louise Music: It simply perpetuates an inability for people to appreciate the systemic intersections of the problems that are facing society. We stay in the same holding pattern.

Mark, a boomer and dance educator, describes a school he worked in where the faculty had actually worked hard to develop strategies that integrated the curriculum so that students could see how the issues they were studying fit together, and how they themselves fit in.

Mark Borchalt: “There are very simple platforms. I was a teaching artist at an elementary school. Every year the faculty met to decide on an overall theme for that year. All of the teachers and all the faculty would gear their curriculum towards that one subject. There was a cross- reading across the curriculum. The teachers all respected one another immensely. They would say to the students: ‘In math class, you're doing this. Do you see how that affects what you're doing in science and language arts?’ Because they respected the multigenerational aspects of where the kids were in their learning, it all fit together. The children all felt like they were a valuable part of the school, that they were valuable contributors to their education, and not passive participants in a system foisted upon them.”

Heather Francis: That was the conversation, Louise, where you shared about the way your work at the Center for Integrated Learning had really tried to make connections and a web of knowledge with different ages, disciplines, and partners.

Louise Music: We were able to bring people who were looking for more than the test and deliver situations that you're talking about, Alyssa. These people were interested in doing more. We brought Lois and researchers and artists and teachers across the curriculum together to do great work, make connections, and make the work visible. We built a real community by connecting artists, arts teachers, math teachers, high-school people, parents, universities, and we realized that it was an ecosystem. We realized that everyone's knowledge really mattered.

Alyssa Dixon:  “I love that word ‘ecosystem.’ That makes so much sense to me. I appreciate your emphasis on intergenerational respect, because I think that's a source of great division: I remember at my school sometimes feeling like some of the older generation teachers when they talked to me, they were implying: ‘You think you know what you're doing, but you really know nothing, because you're young.’ But those were the same people who were asking me to come down and help them with reading an email, because they didn't know how to do really basic things. That attitude immediately caused an emotional divide. I'm sure I did things too, unintentionally, that added to the division. I love the concepts and the image of working together as an ecosystem, knowing that all of the different parts rely on each other. I teach my students about ecosystems: that when you take out one thing—even if it’s really small—it affects all of the other parts of the ecosystem because they are dependent on one another. I really love helping professionals see that, so that they really can thrive in the way that I think a healthy ecosystem would.”

Louise Music:  Arzu Mistry, a member of Gen X, community artIst, and social practice scholar spoke about how important it is for educators to think locally, and to ground study and curriculum in a foundation of place.

Arzu Mistry: “To me, one of the reasons that we are so inept at engaging with the dynamics of a floundering ecology is that we have really detached education from its context and people's relationship with place. People’s relationship with place is definitely the ecological world around us, the physical world around us, our cities, our oceans, our rivers, our mangroves, and also the communities of the other species, the beyond human species that exist within those dynamics.  We do talk about science, and I think there is more and more connection to teaching science within a context. When we detach science from the humanities, I think we lose that relationship of place, and how everything ultimately comes back to people's relationship with place. Looking at mass migration across the world, so much of that migration is actually induced by climate change, even though it is subsequently layered with political, social, and religious rationales.   It's because crops have failed. Economy is broken because supply chains don't work. All of this comes back to people's relationships with place. To me, it is a huge chasm in education. The fact that we teach the same things in India as we teach in a US classroom really confounds me.  What are the contextual dynamics that we are engaging with? How do we validate community learning? Are we able to give credits for community learning versus just in school learning or institutional learning? How do we do that?”

Louise Music: I was really impressed with the clear lines people drew from how we teach content areas in classrooms and how we specialize and separate issues in the world, and the impact that those attitudes and behaviors have on how we actually treat each other and the resulting divisiveness that we're encountering right now in our country. Steven Baugh, a retired school superintendent from the greatest generations group, made the connection between how human beings are treating the natural resources on our planet, and how we treat ourselves and other human beings.

Steven Baugh: “I suppose we have an opportunity to learn to deal with one another, to value one another and respect one another. I also wanted to comment on the increased women's movement, the ‘Me Too’ opportunities, that means women coming forth with their creativity, with their intelligence, and being accepted, and so forth and so on. Also, the Black Lives Matter movement is an effort that has real promise in bringing those who are marginalized more to the forefront.”

Louise Music: Matthew Teitter, a millennial and public school principal, had further ideas about our systems of power that perpetuate inequities, and the need for systems that are inclusive of everyone.

Matthew Teitter: “I gravitate towards universal design for learning–UDL. UDL drew its inspiration from universal design that really started in architecture back in the 60’s. When you design a building, you design the building for everybody: it’s accessible–you put ramps in so that Stephen Hawking in an electric wheelchair, or Usain Bolt, the fastest human ever walked the face of the earth, can both come into the building without any barriers. I think that philosophy has multiple applications across all industries and sectors. I was even taught to focus on the middle, find the ‘barometer kid,’ and just use that student, or maybe a small group of students, to dictate how fast you go. I feel like universal design, or UDL, is founded on the idea of focusing on the people in the margins, in all various aspects, and being inclusive in that way. Include people that struggle the most and the people that flourish the most; hopefully, in that swath of humanity, you will also reach people in the middle, but it won't be just the people that are in the middle. I think it'd be interesting to vary things along the lines of educational attainment, wealth and income, and systems of power, making sure you're talking about different identities, gender, race, sexual orientation, all those things.”

Louise Music: Listening to these conversations really deepened what was an initial premise of our CHLL group, that by addressing the issues in education, we really have a chance—maybe our only chance—at addressing these complex and terrifying issues that we're facing as human beings on this planet. Also, these conversations reinforced our idea that the two are intimately tied together. That's where we really can make an impact and where we need to address the knowledge that's out there.

WHERE TO FIND HOPE FOR EDUCATION AND THE WORLD

Lois Hetland: I am most impacted by the unwavering hope for the future in every single conversation. Personally, I can feel overwhelmed and discouraged; it's easy enough to believe we can't make a difference or that things won't change. There's certainly plenty of evidence of that—but we heard so many determined voices. They said clearly that thinking this way really isn't a viable option; they offered suggestions for how to hold on to hope: first, they told us that in complexity there's good and bad, and they said we need to pull out the good. Second, our guests remind us to work with what we've got. Here's Alyssa, talking about the good technology can bring.

Alyssa Dixon: “You bring up the point that before people wanted to feel connected because they were more individual, and now people feel so connected that maybe they want to feel more individual. I feel like the internet has made it so that we're so connected everywhere that it almost has an opposite effect—where people perhaps find themselves separated into echo chambers. That feeling can add to that divisiveness. Simultaneously, with things like climate change, the internet allows us to see other parts of the world that we maybe weren't aware of before. We're seeing these impacts: ‘Yeah, maybe my neighborhood looks fine, but look at the ocean, look at these other countries, look at areas of the world that I wasn't aware of.’ It’s interesting that the internet can be such a blessing that raises our awareness, and that also can make us be able to connect so intensely that it—in a way—divides us as well.”

Lois Hetland: Mark addresses the shadow side of social media:

Mark Borchalt: “So often, social media especially is used as a bully pulpit: people

trying to boost themselves up by putting someone else down. That's a terrible and tragic thing that's occurred in the world.”

Lois Hetland: But Mark also says there are wonderful things:

Mark Borchalt: “In the past 20 years, documentaries have been made that offer glimpses and windows into the worlds that people couldn't have imagined before. I think that helps breed empathy.”

Lois Hetland: Here's Paul, urging us to work with the systems we've got, and Steve Baugh, specifically addressing the system of public education.

Paul Hetland: “We have to aim, it seems to me, at something other than perfection being the enemy of the good problem. We have to aim at something that's going to work, more or less, through present systems.”

Steven Baugh: “Since we have a public school system that has the responsibility for the majority of children in our country, we need to find a way to truly educate teachers, prospective teachers, to have a a philosophy and a practice of what it means to provide access to knowledge for all children, to provide a nurturing pedagogy, to accept a stewardship responsibility for helping the young to become their best selves.”

NEW EDUCATION PRIORITIES

Lois Hetland: Speaking of education people had plenty to say about what we need to do about that, to use it, and to change it. Paul here is talking about education, focusing more on community and ecology.

Paul Hetland: “How can education be more oriented towards community and ecology and the place of people in the world? Regardless of the kind of education you are able to offer your children, they may not survive a full lifetime under the current conditions unless something happens much more broadly.”

Lois Hetland: Mark's talking about focusing education on using our minds fully:

Mark Borchalt: “What I've always seen is that there's a huge potential in regards to not only how we think and learn, but this idea of a rational mind and intuitive mind that requires both sides of our being to see and understand and live in the world.”

Lois Hetland: Raphael is talking about centering love in education:

Rafael Jesús González: “We have to make a revolution. We have to make that revolution a revolution of consciousness and bring heart to it. The only thing that is going to save us is love.  That's the thing that you have to learn to do first and primarily. Learn to love and teach love. No matter what you teach, no matter what curriculum you have, if it is not rooted in love, it is not only useless, it is dangerous.”

Lois Hetland: Arzu continues in that line.

Arzu Mistry: “Some of the things that came up right through the conversation is this dynamic of love and fear. You began the conversation with the question, ‘What are the urgent issues that we're dealing with?’ Automatically, that brings up fear. We're scared of climate change. We're scared of this war on differences. We’re scared of homogenizing everything. We’re scared of the capitalist agenda and how overpowering it is. I think that this whole dynamic of love and falling in love—like how the things that we're scared of—who's engaging with those things in love and through love? I've been talking with Lois a lot about David Sobel's work. He talks about kids' relationship with place. He says that if you teach a kid about the rainforests dying, or the polar bears going extinct, all you're doing is getting them into a space of helplessness. They have no way to act. Instead, if they develop a love for plants, then they have some way to relate to the rainforest; or if they develop a love for animals, then they have some way to relate to that polar bear. So the dynamic of how do you foreground love and love as the basis of connection versus on fear as the basis of disconnection? Find out who is engaging with these urgent issues through love, and not fear, not imposition, but emergence.”

Lois Hetland: Hope is the responsibility of every one of us. We don't have the choice to give up.

Jerry Kelly: “You can't say we're doomed. You know, the longest journey starts with the first step. And it's going to be a long journey, but you have to do it.”

Lois Hetland: I learned so much from that. I mean, it was really remarkable to me to have it be so obvious to people that I might drop out with despair. Also, I think the thing that really, really hit me as I've been learning more about BIPOC kids and education, especially black kids and education, is that love must be at the center of education for all kids. This idea is antithetical to what has happened in our schools. That gives me fire in the belly to change that as much as I can.

Louise Music: The message I got from these conversations is that just like kids need love, we all do. Hope comes when we understand that we can't do it by ourselves, we can only do it when we really connect with each other.

Cally Flox: Neurophysiologist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang poignantly announced that all schools need to be organized around relationships. That simple principle is born out in neurophysiology and in education research. Relationships are everything.

Louise Music: Cally, I want to know more about how we can build on those relationships that need to be the heart of every child's experience in school, and where it's happening. How do we build on that to make meaningful relationships more of a real lived experience for everyone?

CATALYSTS FOR POSITIVE CHANGE IN EDUCATION AND THE WORLD

Cally Flox: We know that relationships happen one person and one story at a time. We have lots of people talking about how to reach across the aisles and engage in conversations and get to know people and shine a light on what works. Finding the highlighted pieces, and the things that are really making a difference. Here's Mark talking about that.

Mark Borchalt: “Well, just for example, in some of the brief conversations that I've had with Louise, and I've had some really in-depth conversations with Lois, and some really good conversations with Cally and it's not like we don't have the templates. I mean, looking at what Louise was able to accomplish in Oakland—under some challenging circumstances—I think, ‘Well, why aren't we looking at it as a model and saying, ‘How do we  transfer that? How do we translate it?’’”

Cally Flox: People in our focus groups spoke to the many great examples everywhere where people are finding new and powerful ways to educate our children. Our goal is to surface ideas that shift the focus away from status quo thinking that doesn't support a healthy future, forward to ideas where people are working together, and often locally, toward human and life-affirming solutions. Derek Fenner points out that we all have so much to learn from our local communities.

Derek Fenner: “There are plenty of global examples out there. We can look to the Zapatistas, we can look at models across the east, all over the world, of autonomous communities that are doing this and that have done it. We can look at Italy, Reggio Emilia. You know, you can look at all these things and all these places and have models. Two important people I think to bring into the conversation, as you move forward in this, is the work that Django Paris and H. Samy Alim are doing around culturally-sustaining pedagogies. They posit that culturally-sustaining pedagogy is whenever education sustains the life weight of a community that has been, and continues to be, damaged and erased through schooling. They wrote a book of research on this with a lot of different people that are showing these models across the country and in the world. The work of Matt Hearn, D Schooling Society, was a global model of the unschooling movement, but it had lots of great case studies of these things that are happening. There are places where it is successful. There's just not a lot of light shining on it.”

Cally Flox: Mickey points out that there's a lot of wisdom in examining what doesn't work. Sometimes we're illuminating our failures.

Mickey Zibello: “Referencing a prior statement from Derek about institutions not wanting to let in things that might threaten them. Generally speaking, you said, ‘Shining a light on some of these examples of where these things are working, and working better.’ To see what’s working, you have to help people see the current system isn't working. People say, ‘Why do we need an alternative system?’ I think it's doubly true of conservative communities. I think perhaps all of us, to some degree—or many of us—just follow the path. The status quo is the path that exists and you don't really question it, yet voices are questioning our silence. A big part of this with education, I think, is shining a light on what's not working and how it could be better instead of just doing the same old way just because that's what we do.”

Cally Flox: The wisdom of our octogenarians focused on global themes of love and truth. Here's Stephanie.

Stephanie Tolan: “One human being can make a massive difference—even a child, as we know, with Greta Thunberg, and others. Even one child can make a difference. I really think it's critical to help us focus on the one here, and the one there, and the tiny idea over here, and then try to blow on those flames a little bit and share it with somebody else that may not have heard about it yet.”

Cally Flox: Stephanie's vision of elevating individuals and fanning the flame can be applied to finding excellence in not just people but in the community and in schools, one story at a time.  Whether we look at non-examples, or positive examples, we can identify indicators of transformational education. That's what we plan to highlight on future episodes of this podcast. We want to shine the light on people, ideas, and stories that model hope and possibility and to blow on those flames, so they can ignite and spread.

LOOKING AHEAD: TURNING IDEAS INTO ACTION AND LEARNING FROM WHAT IS WORKING IN SCHOOLS NOW

Lois Hetland: One thing that surprised me was when Derek talked about the importance of making sure that we give back to the people who share their stories with us. He made it very clear. He emphasized particularly how important that is for marginalized people. He talked about making sure that they gain resources from sharing with us. It is our job that when others share these stories, these gifts with us, that we really need to think about how we're using them to create action, to solve the challenges they're facing.

Louise Music: We came together because we knew that each of us were connected to communities of practice that were doing very powerful work. We were holding a big hope at a really dark time of isolation and pandemic. And we said, ‘How can we stay connected in that?’ Everyone we talked are all connected to communities. One of the things I'm excited about as we move forward is creating a website or other places where we can help people find each other, and look at and learn from the action that people are already taking. Implementing that idea from Stephanie to take what's already there and blow on the flame so that these communities collaborate to make a bigger, warmer future.

Cally Flox: Rafael described the power of finding new, creative ways to be in touch: because of the pandemic, we're all out of touch—like staying in touch through eye contact, because we don't hug or shake hands as much as we used to. Or, staying in touch through digital mediums: podcast conversations and website conversations.

Louise Music: A silver lining from the pandemic is that we've really learned how to use technology to have really productive close relationships and conversations.

Lois Hetland: Another thing Rafael said was he really wanted us not to be timid. He said, ‘Go out there and love. We've got to learn how to love and go out there and blast out with it.’ That was very compelling to me.

Heather Francis: Talking about learning in the pandemic, learning to use Zoom, and the way we've come to podcasting as a technology to help us blow on the flame to have and share conversations: I want to think about podcasting as an expression of love. Because as Rafael said, we need to focus on love. I feel love in this group of CHLL, because we've spent two years online; people doubt that online technologies help people find group flow, or love—but we have found it. We have to blow on our own flame, we have found love online. We have found love in a group of like-minded people, in conversation.

We've used technology to facilitate those conversations. I'm really looking forward to more conversation in the future. Future conversations will go deeper into climate change, race, violence, and will focus on the relationships we are building. We're not going to have generational cohorts anymore. We're going to have mixed multi-generational conversations: high-school students talking with octogenarians and millennials being the conductor between the older and younger, the horizontal line of the lifespan.

Lois Hetland: There's one more huge challenge.People talked about the idea of echo chambers; the blue bubble—we're in it, where we are. It's critically important that we reach out to people who we don't normally speak with. It’s critically important to try and figure out how we can start to hear more voices than the voices of our friends. I want to make friends with people I don't usually speak with.

Louise Music: We're going to open our hearts to others.

Cally Flox: The first thing we do is turn towards one another, and create islands where we feel safe and secure. The second thing we do is to build bridges to different islands. It's time for some bridge building.

Heather Francis: I'm really excited for our multi-generational conversations in the future. Plans are currently being made. When they're ready, you can find all the details here on the CHLL podcast, or on our website. Up next in our last episode of this introductory series, we are each going to take a turn to reflect on what it means for each of us personally to be a part of this group and project.

The CHLL podcast is produced by the BYU ARTS Partnership. Special thanks to James Huston for editing Tavin Borrowman for the artwork, and Scott Flox for the music. If you like what you've heard, please leave a review. This helps tremendously as we work to bring more people to our CHLL conversations. You can find the show notes and more about CHLL at the chllpodcast.com or on social media. Our handle is @chllpodcast. That's CHLL for Cally, Heather, Lois, and Louise. We can't wait to chill with you next time.