Annmarie Caño
So my job as a leader, from taking that liberation standpoint, was to provide some guardrails, some timelines, connect them with resources and people, but they ultimately came up with the solutions. Like, how do we create a more transparent and equitable hiring process for faculty and staff, and how do we talk to the world about the unique education that we offer so that it will attract people who are aligned with the mission that we have as a Jesuit institution?

Keith Edwards
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host. Keith Edwards, today, I’m joined by Dr. Annmarie Caño to discuss her book, leading toward liberation, how to build cultures of thriving in higher education. We could use that this book offers a transformative approach to leadership in higher education that centers justice, healing and systemic change, drawing from liberation psychology and Latin American liberation theology, Emory advocates for model of leadership that actively dismantles oppressive systems rather than adapting them. Really looking forward to this conversation Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs, we release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browse our archives@studentaffairsnow.com This episode is sponsored by evolve. Evolve helps higher ed senior leaders release fear, gain courage and take action for transformational leadership through a personalized cohort based virtual executive leadership development experience very related to what we’re talking about today. And here on here on education and research experts help institutions transform their strategy, operations, technology and culture. Culture to foster innovation, financial health and student success. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker, author and coach, and I help higher ed leaders and organizations transform for better tomorrows through better leadership, learning and equity. You can find out more about me at Keith edwards.com I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the current and ancestral homelands of both the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples. Let’s get to our guests this book and this conversation. Annmarie, please say hi, introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about how you came to this topic.

Annmarie Caño
Sure. Hi. Thanks very much, Keith for inviting me on and really happy to be here. So I am a clinical psychologist by training, and as you mentioned, the book is based on Liberation psychology, but I did not come to liberation psychology until about five years ago. So in some ways, I feel like I’m a late bloomer, and I imagine that some of your audience probably has a growth mindset and always trying to learn more about what’s going on, especially today and as a leader. So I came up the faculty side of leadership, university leadership, and during that whole the whole time, from going from assistant to associate to full professor, I kept my head down on my research, which was focused on empathy, helping people face really challenging, stressful things going on in their lives, helping couples and families manage that and really focusing on empathy and emotion regulation as the key pieces of that, but I didn’t really think about some of the systemic things that need to change in higher ed until I left my department and took on my first administrative leadership position and started to see patterns across the university that were affecting undergrads, grad students, postdocs, faculty and staff. And it was, it was through that experience when I look back now as a quote, unquote, seasoned professional, I look back and I see the junctures and the points where I learned some things about the general system that needed to change, and how I could contribute to that change, and fast forwarding to now that has led to this, this book idea. So it’s kind of a little synopsis, and I’d be happy to talk more about specifically what liberation psychology or liberation Praxis is, and even provide some examples, if that would be helpful,

Keith Edwards
yeah. Well, let’s begin. We’ll get to the solutions. Let’s begin with a bit of the critique. You offer a critique of higher ed as a hierarchical, corporatized structures of academia, describing how that perpetuates systems of oppression, we hear this critique of neoliberal ideologies. So let’s unpack that a little bit, and then about some of these solutions and possibilities. Yeah, yeah.

Annmarie Caño
So I think if I go back to let me start with a story. So when I I’m first gen college student, Latina, and my dad was an immigrant, so I had all these experiences, and I went to a public high school, and then I go to Princeton University. And wonderful, wonderful education. I got there and wonderful mentors, but the transition into that different space was really, really hard for me. I felt like I didn’t belong. I felt like everybody else knew how to do college. I did not know how to do college, and I internalized all of those experiences. I was like, I’m not doing this right. Maybe they made a mistake. What is like? I really tried hard. Eventually I figured it out, and that’s where my the mentorship came in. But that, to me, is an example of college and university spaces. They’re not made for everybody, and there’s a lot of gatekeeping that goes on, including from the students themselves. There are many times where I felt othered by my peers and and so a lot of that did not make sense to me, even as an early career and a seasoned professor and educator and leader until I started reading about history and the history that I never learned about when I was in school. So if we look at the roots of higher education in the United States, it’s based on anti black racism, white settler colonialism. We think about how the land was distributed, especially land grant institutions, who were the leaders initially, for many of these institutions, what was the purpose of higher education? And in the beginning, was to reproduce a ruling class. And so there are a lot of people who are kept out of that, including women, including religious minorities, all kinds of things. So there’s that’s kind of baked into the history of higher ed. When we look at what’s happening now with the pendulum swinging, and kind of going back to a gatekeeping model of what higher education should be. It’s disappointing, but it’s so it’s not surprising, and a key part of liberation practice is actually reading the reality of the situations that we’re in and kind of looking at why is this happening and why is this happening now. So looking at the history of higher ed helps us see like, oh, well, this is part of this is part of our history. This is part of our it’s like the cultural DNA of higher education. It’s in there. So I find it actually very comforting to know that, that that’s just part of our reality, because then we can imagine what a different future would be. Instead of feeling demoralized and like, why is this happening? This has never happened before, it’s like, well, yes, this is part of a long legacy. So that that critique. Then if we look at how oppression is baked in, then we can see how it affects students, how it affects staff, faculty, the communities we serve, so that we can be more creative about infusing a different way of doing things, approaching approaching admissions and advising and all this, all the work that we do in a different way that counteracts or dismantles and creates a new reality.

Keith Edwards
It really occurs to me, as you’re talking about some of the challenges that you face, how many times I’ve heard people say that I thought they had made mistake in admissions, and it was until I was here, like six weeks, that I realized maybe they’re not going to come get me. I didn’t know how to do college, right? You know, these things are just so common, and I think, like you, you experience them as a me thing, and all the people who I’m thinking of experience them as a me thing, when really it’s a system thing, right? It’s sort of designed and set up that way, maybe unintentionally, unconsciously, but it’s set up that way so that way so that some people experience that, but then they don’t. They don’t experience that as a system problem. They experience it as a me problem, right? And I love the pointing about, sort of the comfort that it is the system thing. It’s not like we’ve made a recent error. This is how it set up. And I that the notion that we have to before we can change reality. We have to accept what is real. What is what is really going on. We have be, need to be able to see the system and the structures and their impacts and how they’re doing before we get into the solutions. A little bit though, a big part of this is, as you mentioned, is rooted in liberatory psychology and Latin American liberation and theology. Yes, I imagine many of the folks watching and listening would love that and not know what that is. So could you just kind of unpack that a little bit for us?

Annmarie Caño
Sure, sure. So liberation Praxis in general. There are many disciplines that feed into liberation praxis, which is is basically theory plus practice. It’s not just some some theoretical idea that sounds nice, it’s actually the doing of it and the learning by the doing. And liberation practice is about helping create systems in which people can be fully human and fully alive, that they reach their full potential. So if you’re, if you’re a psychologist, you might be thinking of like self actualization. And it’s, it is a bit of that, like, how do we be the best people that we can be, the most creative, the most imaginative, really making great contributions to how society works. But it’s not just us going alone, all these individuals doing this, or even groups doing this. It’s really trying to get the system designed, or the environment designed in such a way that it becomes natural for everyone to be able to create and contribute in a way that taps their talents, seeks growth and fulfillment for everybody. So it’s very expansive in that way, liberation psychology specifically, is trying to take this idea that usually, like the psychology that I learned and that I was trained in was very much about, here’s an individual, maybe they’re feeling depressed or anxious about Something, we’re going to provide a treatment that it focuses on their own ways of thinking and feeling and doing and acting, but it’s all like the individual in liberation psychology, we’re saying you can’t understand really an individual’s psyche or individuals experience without understanding the socio political context in which they are grounded. So if we ignore what’s going on in the political sphere and or in the societal sphere, and we just focus on the individual, we’re going to miss a whole lot and maybe even do some harm. So we have to understand that sometimes what’s making people feel depressed and anxious is not themselves, it’s what’s going on around them and how that’s affecting them and diminishing their humanity. And I think that’s very relevant today, because there’s a lot of people feeling like there’s they’re being dehumanized through policy, or silenced or ignored because of an absence of policy, and that dehumanization that’s baked into a system or that is coming from outside the person is naturally going to affect how we feel about ourselves. Some people will internalize that and say it’s me, like what I did in college. I was like, oh, there must be something wrong with me. And so liberation psychology is also about, how do we help break open people’s minds to help them understand that, yes, you bring something to a situation, but the situation is also affecting you, that what you’re feeling may actually be some a symptom of an unhealthy system, not necessarily that you are the one that’s broken.

Keith Edwards
Well, there’s a real need to do the both end of this, right? Because I think if you just focus on the individual, you’re ignoring all the external things that factor and influence. And do that from you mentioned society at the most macro level, but then there’s also institution and family, right? As we get closer, yes, so you have to see the big picture, and also individuals have agency within that big picture, right? And we want to balance that to the both end.

Annmarie Caño
Yes. certainly.

Keith Edwards
yeah. And so, well, I guess the next thing I want to know that’s great sort of grounding. And we talked a lot about that in terms of, you know, someone who’s maybe anxious or depressed, about why that might be and how we need to understand a greater context, and how to navigate that and not just treat them individually, but who’s around you and what’s going on in the world, and how do you make sense of that? And this is focused on higher education and how we structure and organize these institutions and lead them. I’m wondering you could talk through a little bit about some of your biggest influences in this realm, and sort of what has emerged as you’ve applied this. I don’t know if you think about it as a way of thinking or worldview or a mindset or set of tools and approaches to how we lead these institutions of higher education. Yeah,

Annmarie Caño
well, so that first leadership position that I had outside of my department, I. I’ll never forget this conversation I had with a more senior leader. He was a mentor of sorts. His name was Dr Joe Dunbar, and he worked at Wayne State University, as in the medical school, and someone had charged me with finding like we need to create this new mentoring program for faculty and students. And Anne Marie, I want someone asked me, Hey, can you find out who are all the bipoc federally funded researchers at our institution? And this is a huge r1 public institution. So I was like, Okay, this is gonna, this is gonna be hard for me to, like, go through all the data and find it. And I spoke to Dr Dunbar, and he said, Anne Marie, I can name those people on my two hands. Like, that’s all we have. And I remember being shocked, and I was one of them. And I thought, How can this be? Where, where are, where is everybody? And why was I not paying attention to what was happening and why this is and I said, I feel embarrassed that I wasn’t paying attention, especially as a Latina, first generation college student, and I’m not paying attention to these things that also happened to me, and not seeing the connection to the system, the systemic issues. And he said, Anne Marie, it’s okay you did what you needed to do to get to full professor, and now you have an opportunity to change things and to contribute to a different way of doing things. And I was like, yes. So he was a big influence for me to kind of have that shift of, how do I use this authority that I now have to be able to change the system? And, like what you said, it’s a both. And when we talk about liberation, there’s, there is a system. But we don’t just say, Oh, well, the system is like this. There’s nothing I can do. We each have the capacity, no matter whether we have a title or not, what, no matter what our seniority is, either to be able to influence the system and take action. And so that’s, that’s a piece of liberation leadership is being able to see like, Okay, here’s where I am. Here’s the different kinds of privilege and authority and power that I might have, even if it’s influence and not actual reporting authority you still have. You always have influence, and being able to get creative about how do I use that to infuse change that allows everyone to thrive, including people that I don’t see sitting around this table right now? And so that that’s a part of liberation leadership is trying to read the reality for what it is, a big part is knowing who you are in the system, but also who are you in the world and who are you in history, which is also quite I mean, that can be overwhelming, but you know, who do you come from? Who are your people who made it possible for you to be able to be here right now, not taking any of that for granted, and then from that place of centeredness and integrity, being able to scan the environment, to read it for what it is, and then finding those opportunities to accompany people as a leader, which is a big part of Student Affairs leadership. I think student affairs folks are really good at accompaniment, but also trying to look at what are some of the systemic the policy changes, the procedures, how we do our business, how we interact with each other, how we hold meetings. All of these things can be examined in a different way through a liberation mindset that is looking at the the ultimate goal is human flourishing. So if we look at that as our outcome, how do we use all of what we bring to these situations to create this new reality of flourishing versus overwork, burnout, demoralization, despair, and all the other things that are fighting for our attention right now

Keith Edwards
well, and those feelings are also connected to the larger, larger ecosystem, right? It’s not just what I experienced in my department or on my campus, but it’s also what I’m seeing in the news and social media and things like that. I’m just seeing so many people who their micro experience of their direct life, and then the macro experience is sort of blending, leaving us feeling overwhelmed because, well, the papers I have degrade by a certain due date, but also how hopeless and helpless i feel i. A larger context,

Annmarie Caño
yeah, and what’s the point? You know, people are saying, like, what’s the point? People, you know, this thing, this is, like, a it’s a runaway train. There’s nothing we can do about it. And from a liberation standpoint, we would say there’s always something that you can, you can do. Even the smallest thing can make things better for people and for ourselves, I think

Keith Edwards
that it’s really important to emphasize that, because we do see things happening in the world around us, at institutional leadership or at the most macro levels, where it feels like there just isn’t any accountability. People can say and do whatever they want and hurt whoever they want, and there’s just no consequences. There’s no accountability. So why should I play by the rules? Or, Why should I, you know, and you’re pointing to that it’s the little things, right? It’s, it’s using someone’s name that helps them feel a little bit more seen, yeah, and that they they matter, or following up, or making those connections, or, as you mentioned, maybe being in a committee meeting and drawing attention to someone who hasn’t spoken up yet, right? Or maybe leading the committee meeting and letting that factor into the decisions that you’re making, you’re making me think a lot about you mentioned flourishing, also abundance, right? That this sort of zero sum game is kind of a rough game. The other thing you’re making me think about is leadership is a process, not a position, right? Yeah. Or if you think about the chair leading the committee, there’s a position there, but there’s also so many people contributing to what happens there, and all the different things that go on as we go. They’re also reminding me of two other books that have come up. One is Brian Rosenberg’s whatever it is I’m against it, sort of challenging the systems and the structures and then and Jessica Riddell hope circuits, which also is focused on leading for flourishing and higher education. So I love these sort of siblings here in this conversation. I want to move us to accompaniment, which I think is beautiful. But before we get to accompaniment, anything else you want to sort of add in here before we move there.

Annmarie Caño
Yeah, I think one, to me, one of the symptoms of either an oppressive environment or there’s many different ways we can feel kind of squashed or like just the air gets sucked out of the room. Sometimes it’s leadership, certain leaders the way they lead. Sometimes it’s institutional conflicts, but like you said, sometimes it’s the macro, societal level things. When creativity and imagination goes out the window, to me, that’s a sign that oppression is active, and I think part of liberatory leadership is helping people regain that sense of imagination and creativity that first of all, makes the workplace fun. It bubbles over into student like the students enjoy that like it, and it also helps us create more innovative solutions to all the different kinds of challenges we have. So for me, when I see some a leader or somebody influencing a team or a meeting or a conversation in a way where people can start to imagine another future or another way of doing things. That’s to me, like a seed of liberation has been planted. And I think that’s a beautiful outcome of this kind of leadership, is that people become more abundant in their thinking, more expansive. And I just wanted to say that, because that to me is, yeah, just that’s the flourishing part that like when I’m in spaces like that, and people are starting to reimagine how to do things that’s really exciting, even as it may create some conflict or pushback or anything like that.

Keith Edwards
Yeah. Well, we started talking about Latin American liberation theology and liberation psychology, sort of rooted in some Paulo Freire and others. And now you’re with the imagination and possibility. You’re bringing me to Anne Marie Brown, Adrian Marie Brown, and emergent strategy and abundance and all of those things. So we’re bridging a lot of things. Yes, beautifully, a strategy that I had never heard of. So I don’t know if this is new to me or something that you have sort of offered us through this book. Is accompaniment is a very particular thing. Accompaniment as a process and a strategy. Tell us more about this?

Annmarie Caño
Sure. So in Latin American liberation praxis, and I should say, liberate so there are many flavors and strands of liberation Praxis from all over the world. And so when I’m talking about liberation praxis, I’m centering on the Latin America. In strand of this and accompanimento in Spanish that so in English, that means accompaniment. That’s a central feature of Latin American liberation, praxis and accompaniment is not theoretical solidarity, and it’s not the it’s not aloof. It means that the leader is entering into the struggle with whoever it is that they’re accompanying. And so for student affairs folks, it could be their own colleagues and staff, and it can be students, it can be community members, it might be faculty. So there’s so many people that we walk with or a company on whatever journey or through whatever struggle, but it means that we don’t just stay behind closed doors or we stay distant from them. We enter into the struggle. Means we’re going to experience what they experience, and that kind of accompaniment helps us really experience what it is that somebody else might be experiencing when it comes to racism or sexism or a toxic work environment or difficult struggles at home. So it’s really, it’s really being in it means that we’re going to be transformed by being in this relationship with somebody else, it means we need to take care of ourselves, so that we can be able to listen to whatever the pain and suffering is, but also be able to co create solutions, not from a place of I know what’s best for you. So not paternalistic, not not from saviorism, not from a hero complex, but from a place of you, person I’m accompanying are the one who is going through this, and you probably already know what the solution is. Let’s uncover what that is, and let me help you bring that to fruition. So it’s, it’s really, I think a companionmento captures the the whole vibe and feeling and process of that better than the word accompaniment. But accompaniment is the closest that we have in English.

Keith Edwards
Can you say the Spanish version just one more time? A companion

Annmarie Caño
miento, yeah,

Keith Edwards
I think that’s so that’s so beautiful. And I think the thing that I’m thinking about, as I hear you talking about that, is this word with right being with them, and it ties to a lot of what you’re talking about. I think about the version of you that started college at Princeton, if people had said to you, I believe you have everything you need to be successful here. How can I be with you in that? Right? That’s a very different perspective than one, what’s wrong with you? Or two, I’ll get you through right, which I think is such a tempting thing for those of us who are faculty and staff, because we, we, many of us, got into this because someone helped us, yes, and it made a world of difference, and we want to do that for them. But then the dark side of that is that we start solving people’s problems for them, rather than helping them learn to solve their problems for themselves. And when we solve their for them, it’s juicy. We get a lot of praise and affirmation and gratitude and gifts to graduation and the family so appreciative. And when we teach students how to solve their own problems, that’s actually education, but it just doesn’t come with all the kudos and praise and thank you. And I couldn’t have done it without you. So that can, I think that’s a thing for us as educators to sort of be aware of, of just how tempting that can be, and the dark side to this wonderful intention of wanting to help, the dark side of enabling, rather than educating. And so I love as you’re talking about this, this with notion and believing they have everything they need already, that they’re not broken, right? The banking model of education, reinforcing oppressive systems. And then how do we be? How do we be with them? Not they’re good, they have everything so they’re on their own, but they have everything they need. And how can I help remind them of that, or help them see that, or help them? What is the width mean? And I think that with in different contexts, can mean wildly different things, from a very heavy hand to a very light touch, depending on the context the student the situation,

Annmarie Caño
yeah, absolutely. And it’s and it’s messy, it can be messy. And if you don’t like messy, that’s the other temptation of jumping in with a problem solving orientation is this is too messy, and I’m feeling out of my element as a leader. And so let me solve this problem so it it’s not just the like the kudos and the congratulations, but I need to relieve myself from this uncomfortable feeling I’m having as I’m listening to this other person, and it could. Like I don’t like the suffering I like, make like I don’t this, this injustice is really bothering me, and I like, I can’t take it myself, maybe because of experiences I have had or or I don’t know what I’m doing,

Keith Edwards
or I don’t have boundaries around my empathy, right? Yes, and empathizing with you now I’m in with you, yeah, right, which undermines our ability to be with the person, right? Yeah,

Annmarie Caño
and that’s so in the book I talk about, you know, there’s different ways to show a companion me and do. And part of it is like in the one on one meeting or the small group meeting. You know, how do we show empathy in the moment? How do we give people our full attention? But also, how are we paying attention to our own inner experiences as we’re listening to somebody who’s going through something, and if we this is coming from my couple’s work, I had so many couples where the someone would express their fear, anxiety, anger or just depressed feelings about some thing that they’re going through, and the spouse jumping in with problem solving. And you could see the person who is sharing just shut down and be like, Oh, they’re not listening to me. They want to make this go away. They want to solve this problem makes them feel better, or they don’t have to feel what I’m feeling, or they’re tired of hearing what I’m experiencing. And so we did a lot of work with couples that translates very well to leadership, about how do you pay attention in the moment to what you’re experiencing so that you can be present, so that you don’t jump into the problem solving mode too early, and sometimes all it is is just asking, you know, first of all, validating and saying, I’m so sorry you’re going through this. Or that sounds really rough, or thank you for sharing this really tough situation with me. What would you like me to do in this situation? How can I help you in this situation? So turning it back like you were mentioning before, recognizing the other person has strengths. They have wisdom, inner wisdom and knowledge, no matter how young they are. And through that, sometimes you’ll end up with a different solution than what you had concocted in your head, which is the better solution. And I had when I was a dean, sometimes faculty coming to me to talk to some talk to me about something that was happening in their departments or their units, and often it was an interpersonal some interpersonal dynamic, and I would listen and again, try to empathize with them, even if it was something I had never experienced before, just to be like, Wow, that sounds really rough. What would you like me to do most of the Well, half the time it was I just needed someone to hear and believe me. And now that, now that I did this, I feel like I’m going to be okay. I know what to do next. Other times they did want me to do something, or to step in, or to hold somebody accountable for a toxic interaction. And then we would talk about how, well, what do you think would be the best way to do this? How To what extent would you like to be involved? And then we would come up with a really great pathway, instead of me just solving the problem for them.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, a few things that strike me as I’m listening to you. One is a lot of the troubling ways that you’re pointing out are really how dominant culture socializes us to be the hero, to be the Savior, to rescue, to fix, to solve the problems. That’s often how we as men are socialized. That’s how often how white people are socialized. There’s just a lot of dominant culture socialization that can be a part of the problem, which gets to the systems and the liberation psychology and liberation theology. And I think it’s important to know how much we have to unlearn, because even those of us who don’t identify with those things have still been taught those messages as well and internalize those along the way. So again, just a reminder that the power of unlearning some of this stuff can be so helpful. Yeah, and then you were pointing out, go ahead,

Annmarie Caño
well, I was just gonna say, and it’s a practice, like, it’s not something you learn and then it never goes away. And so sometimes at home, my spouse will tell me about something, and I jump into problem solving mode. And because he knows all about my research, he’ll be like, I’m not looking for problem solving. Anne Marie, I just, I just need some validation. I’m like, Oh yeah, that’s, I mean, that’s what I studied for so many years, and what I’m preaching. And then I fall into it too. So it’s, you know, it’s one of those things that you practice, you make mistakes, but it’s a process.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, one of the things I’m fond of saying is we’ve all been very well miseducated. How do we begin to unlearn some of those patterns and habits? The other thing I wanted to mention is that you talked about not jumping in with the problem solving, but really believing that they have the experience, the wisdom, the knowledge, the capacity, and before jumping in with your three ideas about how to solve it, maybe listening to theirs and they they might come up with a better solution. One of the things I’ve found is that even if they don’t come up with a better solution, they’re often more it ends up being a better solution, because they’re invested in it, because it’s their idea, and they want to be smart, they want to feel like they whereas if maybe my idea is better, then they go well, but I don’t know if I trust him. I don’t know if I really believe that. Do I agree? And their application of it might be halfway or maybe even less. So even if the idea they come up with is not a theory, it might be a better because it’s their idea, right? There’s such power in the agency and the ownership and the buy in and the commitment to that. Yes, I’m really getting how we could do this at the individual level. I’m really getting how, if I’m a faculty member and a student is struggling in my class, how I would practice this really getting if I have a student employee in the rec center who I notice is really struggling, how I have a conversation and be with them, but you’re talking about restructuring systems of higher education and leadership so so help us See how we could do this at a more institutional, organizational, structural level. Practice this accompaniment there?

Annmarie Caño
Yeah, well, I’m gonna, I’m gonna move you mentioned earlier how, like, we can kind of see this as, like, a set of concentric circles, so you’ve got the individual, then you’ve got the, you know, dyads or small groups of people, then you have the unit, then the bigger unit, the institution. And then we can even include the board and what’s going on at the state level and all this kind of so we can kind of go back, go out all the way. I’m going to go one level up to department level, and then I’m going to go another level outside of that. If that’s okay, that’s great. So let’s say you’re a department or a unit, or even a school or college with several units beneath them, one way we could practice a companionmento in those larger contexts is trying to again, part of it is reading reality like, what is the history of your unit, including the history of turnover? Who’s new, who has the institutional knowledge, really understanding the people that make your unit tick and where the pain points are. So like that. That means, like, asking a lot of questions. As a leader, I in the different kinds of leadership positions I had in all of our leadership teams, I was usually the one who asked the most questions, because I was trying to understand, like, why, like, how did we When did this policy get constructed, and why? Like, it was probably to address something. Is that something still a concern right now? Or have things shifted where this policy doesn’t make any sense anymore, or who is left out of this policy, or who is more vulnerable because of this thing that we do. So if, if leadership in a unit can start to ask those questions and create the conditions in the unit where other people are also asking questions that curiosity, the psychological safety that comes from that can help identify various strategies, programs, projects, that need to happen next, and which ones may be no longer working. But it’s not just that it’s how you bring people into the conversation, into the problem solving. So when I became a dean at Gonzaga, I started during the pandemic. It was July 2020, and so I couldn’t meet anybody like there was like a double not only was I new to an institution after being at another institution for 20 years. But then I had this big barrier and obstacle of like, not being able to be in places with people. So I had to get really creative about, how do I meet people, and then how do I send the. Email to them and communicate to them in a way that I truly like they have been here longer and probably have some solutions in their head already. I don’t want to be the dean who comes in and says, we’re going to launch these five things without actually hearing what’s going on and at the so this was two months after the murder of George Floyd, also, and the pandemic, and I’m new, so like, there’s all this things going on. Like, okay, I from my take on things, there’s some things that we need to work on, because not everybody feels included or like they belong faculty, staff and students in this very large unit. So I want to do something to promote inclusion and belonging as as a new dean. But again, I don’t know all the pain points and all the struggles, so I put out a call, and I said, All right, everybody, here’s here’s something I would like to work on, I think, with our university mission and with the things that I know about the university and about what you all do, that we have the skills and the capacity to make things great here and for all students, not just some and who wants to work on this with me? And so I just put out an open call. And I thought, These people don’t know me from Eve, and how’s this going to work? But I had 4040, faculty and staff say, like, raise their hands and say, We want to be part of this. And together, we created the priorities that this new council would be working on, and we created working groups. So my job as a leader, from taking that liberation standpoint, was to provide some guardrails, some timelines, connect them with resources and people, but they ultimately came up with the solutions. Like, how do we create a more transparent and equitable hiring process for faculty and staff, and how do we talk to the world about the unique education that we offer so that it will attract people who are aligned with the mission that we have as a Jesuit institution? And I like watching that and being part of like CO creating a different model of how we work together that I think is something that we can do at a systems level. And it was definitely the kind of thing where I’m not the leader who knows everything. I have the position and authority, I’ve got the budget, like, there’s some certain things I can do, but then let’s bring in the people who really know what to do, and so that that merging of creativity and action really provided a model for other people also to see, like, oh, you can do it that way. I had no idea so that that would be an example of accompaniment reading reality. It’s it’s kind of a little bit of everything.

Keith Edwards
I love it because it’s the exact same process as if I were a faculty member and a student was struggling and I wanted to be with them, right? It’s the exact same but it’s just at a group level. And how do we do this here? And it might be your department of five faculty. It might be a dean of a college of, you know, 200 faculty. It might be at an even larger scale, or different scales. And I guess what I’m taking away from that is just a really a focus on on a process, and as the leader, really creating a great process that involves so many different people. Whereas I think traditional definitions of leadership is that the leader needs to know the answer, have the outcome, make the right decision, yeah, and be the all know, or all beer, which gets into the Savior, hero, sort of nonsense that we talked about before, so delicious and so tempting. So putting process, you know, when you’re working with an struggling individual, being with them as a process, when you’re leading groups, how do you facilitate a process that helps everyone in the group bring their life experience, their wisdom, their perspective, their knowledge, their understanding, and let the group do that. And we got to move the group along. We got to slow the gas down. We got to elevate this up. That’s there’s some real nuance and complexity through the process

Annmarie Caño
there, yeah, yeah. It’s a little bit more like leader as facilitator than leader as boss, yeah? Or knower, yeah, then yeah, the ultimate Knower. And I apply this also to my class. Like, we we co create the syllabus. We co create the like, what are the deadlines that will work for the class? Or how do we what would be a rubric that would make sense for this particular project, and I will say for students, the first time I started doing that was when I returned to the classroom after stepping away as dean. And at first they were like, What do you mean? You’re not. Going to tell us when things are due, and you’re not just going to tell us what the elements of this like it it really shakes like for some people, it’ll feel very unsettling. And then some of them will say, Well, you’re not you’re not teaching me, or you’re not leading like they because their definition of teaching and leading are come out of this long tradition that we have. And so it takes a little bit of time for people to realize, like, Oh, I get to contribute. Like, and I have something to contribute. I like, I actually do. And by the end of the course, I had people saying, what this is the best course I ever had. Like, I’ve never had a teacher who, like, help. Like, invited me to co create a course that, and we’re all co learners. So it’s a little bit, you know, it’s a little bit, I don’t know the word for me, is unsettling for some people, and also for leaders and instructors who are going to take that if you’ve only been trained in one way, it does feel a little unsettling, like, like, from for me too. I was like, Oh, this is, this is different. I wonder if I’m doing it wrong, like, taking me back to my first year as a college student, yeah, or

Keith Edwards
your first year teaching the class, yeah. I think the CO creating is such a great just, if we just want to cook it all down, right, this process, and the CO creating is so beautiful. You’re reminding me of one of the things I often say, which is that social change begins with inner work, yes, which is always sometimes empowering, sometimes just such a bummer. I wish, sometimes I wish social change was about changing everybody else, but beginning with inner work and you kind of cooked down, kind of in the middle of a conversation, a bit of a formula, I think. So I just want to give it back to give it back to you. Maybe you have better language for it. Okay, but I was sort of seeing this as a three part process. One is sort of the me centeredness, and then another one is what’s going on, reading reality, and then this doing, which is the accompaniment. So I was sort of hearing centered, get centered, read reality, and then engage in the accompaniment, yeah? How would you clean that up?

Annmarie Caño
I don’t know if I need to clean that up. I think that’s a good, great, yeah. I think that’s a great way to think about it. And that that self work. So in liberation practice, we would call that critical consciousness raising, or critical, yeah, critical, critical consciousness raising, because it’s not just, it’s not just, like, who am I? Like, who am I? Like, that’s part of it, but it’s Who am I in history, and that’s the context in how in context. So, yeah, like, I think about my mom’s from Puerto Rico, and my dad left fascist Spain when he was a teenager. And when I think about the two of them and how they experience their early lives and the different like the impact of colonization on how that affected my mom and her whole family, and continue to impact them in indirect ways, and impacts me now, and my dad’s experience also. And then I think about why I’m an educator, it’s a much deeper explanation than if I just said I love learning like I’ve always loved learning as a little girl. I love learning that’s that’s true, but when you then also look at all the other things that were going on that contributed to my love of learning it and each person’s experience. When you do that deeper reflection, it helps you really know who you are and what your purpose is, so that when you have to make the hard decision, you can do it.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, beautiful, beautiful. Well, we are running out of time, so we always like to end with this question. This is student affairs now. We always like to end by asking, What are you thinking? Troubling or pondering now and then, also, if folks want to connect with you, where they might be able to do that, sure,

Annmarie Caño
what am I thinking? I mean, the whole the whole idea of accompaniment, like we’ve talked about, is really on people’s minds. I’m glad that there is a word and a phrase for people to now kind of say, oh, that’s what I’m looking for. That’s what I’m trying to do. So how do we keep going with that even when things are tough at our institutions or in the world, like keeping that seed, but also protecting ourselves and finding accompaniment for ourselves. Think that’s very important for for leaders and yep. So people can reach me on LinkedIn or on my website, www. Dot Anne Marie, C, A n o.com and I love to connect. I love meeting new people and talking about liberation, leadership.

Keith Edwards
Awesome, fantastic. We’ll get links to all of that in the show notes, and the book comes out July 8, 2025 So you’ll be able to get it, then you can order it now if you want to get ahead of the game, but you’ll be able to find it everywhere then from Hopkins press. And so this has been great. I really appreciate you. I love this. It’s a beautiful idea that sort of builds in so many things. And so thanks so much for your leadership in this space and for writing the book and for joining us today.

Annmarie Caño
Thank you. I enjoyed this conversation.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, thank you. We also want to thank our sponsors of today’s conversation, evolve in Huron. Evolve helps senior leaders who value aspire to lead on and want to unleash their potential for transformational leadership. This is a program I lead along with doctors Brian rau and Don Lee. We offer a personalized experience with high impact value the asynchronous content and six individual and six group coaching sessions, maximize your learning and growth with a focused time investment, greatly enhancing your ability to lead powerfully for social change and Huron. Huron collaborates with colleges and universities to create sound strategies optimize operations and accelerate digital transformation by embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas and challenging the status quo. Here on promotes institutional resilience in higher education. For more information, please visit go.hcg.com/now. As always, a huge shout out to our producer, Natalie Ambrosey who does all the behind the scenes work to make us look and sound good, and we want to thank you our audience for listening and watching and engaging. You can help us reach even more folks by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube or to our weekly newsletter, where we announce each new episode each week on Wednesdays. If you’re so inclined, you can leave this five star review and help us conversations like this reach even more folks. I’m Keith Edwards, thanks to our fabulous guest today and to everyone who is watching and listening. Make it a great week.

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