Hikma Collective Podcast Hikma Collective

“What does being a scholar mean to you?”

How do we create learning communities that offer participants the agency to thrive? This question is at the heart of our “Beyond the Academy” research initiative in partnership with researchers Andrea Webb and Jillianne Code at the University of British Columbia. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, we have gathered insights from professional learners who know firsthand what it means to teach, be taught and co-create knowledge: PhD Students and alumni. In this episode, we share some of our findings, implications, and next steps for this ongoing work. 

Topics covered in this episode include: 


What does being a scholar mean to you? 
Professional agency within and beyond the academy 
Communities of practice and the benefits of building a constellation of communities 

 Dr. Andrea Webb spent a decade as a classroom teacher and department head before returning to higher education as a teacher educator. Her research interests lie in teaching and learning in higher education and she is involved in research projects related to Threshold Concepts, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and Social Studies Teacher Education.  

Dr. Jillianne Code is a Canadian researcher, educator, and learning scientist specializing in learner agency, online learning technologies, and the impact of social media on student success and well-being. As the Director of the ALIVE Research Lab at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Code studies agency ‘unbundled’ from formal education, including video games, virtual reality, technology education, and social media communities.

"Everybody wants to be heard. They have a story to tell."

Music is a universal language that can activate a community. In this episode, Dwandalyn Reece discusses her work examining the material culture of music, telling stories across contexts, and making knowledge accessible to general audiences. 

 Topics covered in this episode include: 


Telling the stories behind the objects of music to reach people 
How to determine whether what you’re doing has an impact 
How listening better helps build relationships 

Dr. Dwandalyn R. Reece is Curator of Music and Performing Arts at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and curated the museum’s permanent exhibition, Musical Crossroads for which she received the Secretary’s Research Prize in 2017. Reece has collaborated with other SI units on such programs as the 2016 NMAAHC Grand Opening Festival, Freedom Sounds: A Community Celebration and the 2011 Folklife Festival program, Rhythm & Blues: Tell it Like It Is. She is chair of the SI pan-institutional group Smithsonian Music and is currently working on the NMAAHC and Smithsonian Folkways collaboration, The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, and serving as co-curator of the Smithsonian Year of Music. 

"It's that interconnectedness that really defines Indigenous ways of knowing."

In this episode, we share highlights from our Hikma Office Hours event about Indigenous ways of knowing and how to work with partners and collaborators in a meaningful and respectful ways to drive change. Camille Callison brings expert knowledge and lived experience to our conversation about Indigenous knowledges, reconciliation, and building relationships in library, archival and cultural memory praxis. 

Topics covered in this episode include: 


Getting comfortable talking about truth, reconciliation, and “Indigenous ways of knowing”
Better practices for collaboration and partnership with Indigenous communities 
Connecting scholarship with local knowledge to advance better policies, practices, and tools

"I don't break things without consequence."
In this episode, Brittany Brathwaite discusses her willingness to break the rules in order to change the world, our society, or ourselves for the better. Brittany shares insights from her work interrupting health inequality for women and girls of color, supporting women and non-binary owned businesses, and creating a community of practice for youth workers.

We cover topics such as:


What is a worker-owned co-operative business model
Countering the idea of disruption in innovation
Advice for building more humanity into business and operationalizing your values both externally and internally

“The practice of entrepreneurship is the ‘how,’ and the social is the ‘why.’”

In this conversation, author and social entrepreneur Madeleine Shaw invites us to reimagine the landscape of entrepreneurship. She shares insights about how we are all unlearning something, how flexibility is the new balance, and how we can create the conditions for social change using empathy, storytelling, and community.

Topics covered in this episode include:


Employing the tools of entrepreneurship to build the scaffolding for social change,
The importance of nurturing relationships,
How to communicate productively with people who might not share the same values, and
Encouragement and advice for people just starting out and for those who want to start doing better

Speaker Bio: Madeleine Shaw is a social entrepreneur and author based on unceded Coast Salish territory (Vancouver BC). She is best known as the co-founder of Aisle (formerly Lunapads), one of the first groundbreaking ventures in the world to commercialize reusable menstrual products. In 2014 she founded G Day, an event series for girls, and in 2018 she launched Nestworks, a family-friendly coworking community. In her first book, The Greater Good: Social Entrepreneurship for Everyday People Who Want to Change the World, she offers encouraging tips and reflections for aspiring impact-based entrepreneurs.

Check out The Greater Good: https://madeleineshaw.ca/the-greater-good/

“It’s a way of honoring the knowledge and experience that’s in the room.”

Generative questions are a way of entering a conversation with a new or existing partner and honouring the knowledge and experience that’s in the room. To kick off Season 3, Hikma’s founder Erica Machulak shares 3 tips for asking generative questions to spark authentic conversations with your potential partners and collaborators.

These tips will help you:


Start collaborative projects on the right foot,
Surface potential connections that may not always be intuitive or visible, and
Maintain relationships over time.

In the episodes that follow in this season, we talk with some of our dream mentors and show firsthand how we use generative questions to leverage our empathy and curiosity to move conversations forward.