Off The Shelves: “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters”

This book review comes from a member of the Incubator’s Graduate Leadership Team, Jennifer Linscott, a M.Sc. student studying movement ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences. She uses tiny satellite tracking devices to follow birds as they migrate across the Western hemisphere. She has also worked as a freelance writer and has conducted and written about field research around the world. Here at UofSC, she teaches labs in Ecology and Evolution. Prior to joining the University of South Carolina Jennifer spent more than a decade working in higher education as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Humanities at Baton Rouge Community College and an Instructor and Curriculum Designer at Delgado Community College in New Orleans.

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Priya Parker’s, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (Riverhead, 2018) is an ode to all the ordinary gatherings that structure our time–work meetings, dinner parties, Zoom chats, community events, even class sessions. It also admits what we all know to be true: that many of these events are boring. But it does not have to be this way. Parker explains that some gatherings can be transformative, bringing people together to work through a conflict or arrive at a new idea, changing the way we perceive others or giving us a theater in which to fashion how we want to be perceived. Done well, gatherings justify their demands on our time. Done poorly, they often fail to rise above the tediously uneventful.

For Parker, the problem lies in the fact that we spend so much of our lives gathering and so little time thinking critically about how we gather. When organizers set out to bring people together, they tend to default to structures they have always known, modifying the meeting content but mindlessly reenacting the rituals. What if organizers spent as much time on form as they do on content? If they do, Parker thinks they will stand a better chance of engineering events that serve the purposes for which they’re intended, and her book is a practical guide for making that change.

Of course, reading Parker’s advice now, at a time when gatherings are largely on hold, is something like an out-of-body experience. Educators in particular are feeling the loss of conventional gatherings in nearly every aspect of their work lives. For me, it’s been nearly a year since I taught a lab in person. How strange it is now to remember what that was like: a group of near-strangers filing into a room together, pulling back chairs from the lab benches, sitting down next to each other, talking and shuffling through papers and sharing laptop screens. How quickly all that vanished. 

It’s not that we stopped gathering to learn. In the past year, we’ve found different ways to gather. Classrooms have gone virtual or transformed into sparse spaces where everyone keeps their distance. The temptation is to see these new ways of gathering as poor reproductions of the real thing. We do the best we can for now, muddling through screen fatigue and mute buttons and dropped WiFi connections. Sometime, hopefully soon, we’ll be back together in our classrooms. But what makes Parker’s book so oddly prescient is her insistence that moments exactly like this one, when an old way of gathering suddenly is no longer possible, are not uncommon. In fact, it’s times like these that force us to recalibrate–in a good way.

For educators, this could mean taking time to think about why we assume that gathering must be part of learning in the first place. What’s the point of coming together to learn? How can we translate the best parts of in-person learning into a virtual environment while letting go of rituals that are inessential? And, perhaps more sobering, how many of those rituals have outlasted their usefulness in in-person environments as well, though we’ve never noticed it?

Parker structures her book around eight themes, intended to help organizers recalibrate their events. Many themes are drawn from Parker’s own experience in professional conflict mediation, but they are intended to be broad, as applicable for organizers of church functions as they are for planners of political summits, and much of it translates easily to the classroom. Among these themes are calls to: 

• Figure out a purpose for every gathering. This is trickier than we might think. Parker warns us that the purpose can’t be gathering itself (too vague) nor can we resort to a general category of purposes (like “teaching evolutionary biology,” also too vague and too prone to inheriting a rote template).
• Mobilize authority in order to equalize those who are gathering. Power imbalances always exist in social spaces, Parker explains, and the authority that organizers (including teachers) assume should be focused primarily on equalizing those imbalances.
• Frame gatherings as temporary alternative worlds, governed not by an imperious code of manners (the unspoken etiquette of the university classroom, for example), but by impermanent, non-universal, and explicit “pop-up rules” that apply only here, only now. 
• Open with people. We tend to begin a gathering with logistics–rules, procedures, objectives. But Parker explains that openings should shift attention to the essential reason we gather in the first place: the other people in the room.

Parker’s book is an interesting read for educators thinking about how to recalibrate the social space of virtual classrooms. After all, it is hard to ignore the fact that university instruction was already moving into hybrid environments before COVID hit and that it will likely continue moving in that direction in the years to come. That makes the task of figuring out a new way to gather all the more important.

At the end of last semester, I asked my students what they thought about taking a science lab–which is fundamentally group-oriented–in a radically different format: online, independent, and fully asynchronous. Most told me the same thing: that there were some parts of in-person learning that they missed, but there were also parts of virtual learning they liked better. Perhaps now is the time to figure out which parts they mean.

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters is available to borrow from the Incubator library.

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Off the Shelves profiles books from the Incubator’s growing library. When something here strikes a chord, feel free to let us know — we can lend you a copy of the book, or help connect you with colleagues who have similar interests, for one-on-one conversations or small reading groups.