Jeffrey Austin Talks Emergent Strategy and Facilitating Educational Change

According to the late Octavia Butler, ”God is Change and in the end, God prevails.” Though Butler passed in 2006, her words resonate deeper than ever. And while she’s no longer able to chart out fantastical journeys across the stars, the philosophy that structures her work is one of the principle inspirations for adrienne marie brown’s book, Emergent Strategy. I won’t try to define the scope of Emergent Strategy in my introduction, but at its essence, it’s an orientation, stance, framework, and spellbook for organizing and facilitating change. My guest this week, Jeffrey Austin, is a literacy consultant with Wayne, RESA in South East Michigan, has been using adrienne marie brown’s work to facilitate team meetings, structure professional learning, and support educators across his district. It takes us the whole of the episode to unearth what emergent strategy is and how it might look in an educational context, but Jeffrey’s brilliant explanations and examples were incredibly powerful and tangible. In fact I think this might be one of my most useful episodes yet for educational leaders and organizers. There are a number of reasons for this, but principle among those is the fact that Jeffrey doesn’t just offer platitudes about changing educational systems. He embodies it. If my intro has you curious, consider this episode your primer for diving into the world of Emergent Strategy. Enjoy!

Jeffrey's Blog
Emergent Strategy (Book)
Literacy Essentials: Disciplinary Literacy (6-12)