Reciprocity in Leadership and Learning: Negotiating Impactful Partnerships

“Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed”.

This vivid experience, voiced in Love Letter to The Earth by the philosopher and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, is an empowering reminder that our thoughts, words, and actions can become wiser, if we give ourselves the chance to experience daily life with: 1) a sense of wonder toward the natural forces, and cycles, surrounding us; 2) flexibility around what we take to be true in the moment; 3) and an ever expanding sense of responsibility to one another.

Bruno Verdini, in conversation with Shigeru Miyagawa, will explore the kind of pedagogical steps, materials, and activities that have contributed to increasingly center negotiation, decision-making, leadership, and diplomacy teaching and research at MIT around fostering concrete opportunities for students to nurture this enhanced sense of awareness as part of their life-long journey in defining their own moral compass. By exploring the ways in which this approach, amenable to be re-shaped and replicated across a wide variety of fields, can nurture our classroom experiences, the conversation with attendees, both faculty and students, aims to collaboratively contribute to shed light on the ways in which our approach to pedagogy can meet the challenges of our times with hope, enthusiasm, and trust at its core.

Faculty, students, and staff are invited to participate and share comments and reflections.

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Dr. Bruno Verdini, author of MIT Press’s Winning Together, is a recipient of MIT’s D’Arbeloff Award for Excellence in Education and MIT’s Teaching with Digital Technology Award. Co-founder of MIT’s Department of Urban Planning Concentration in Negotiation and Leadership, his Art and Science of Negotiation and Leadership in Negotiation: Advanced Applications, have been two of MIT’s highest ranked and most popular electives for five years in a row, with over 600 students from 20 different departments pre-registering per year. Building on his experience in natural resource management conflict resolution, mediation, and collaborative decision making with governments, firms, and international organizations around the world, his interdisciplinary teaching and research with young professionals and executives at MIT and Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, brings to bear a multi-faceted heritage with roots in three continents and diverse spiritual traditions.

Professor Shigeru Miyagawa is Professor of Linguistics and Senior Associate Dean for Open Learning. Author of multiple books and articles, Miyagawa co-directs Visualizing Cultures with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, John W. Dower. Prof Miyagawa also chaired the OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee and served as Director of Online Education for the University of Tokyo. He produced the multimedia program, StarFestival, starring George Takei.

Read MIT student Isioma Osubor's reflections on this xTalk.