In Spring 2025, realtalk@MIT partnered with WRAP (the MIT Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication Program) to support groups of lecturers in reflecting on their work, their collective identity, and the future of their program.

First, we trained several WRAP lecturers to serve as peer facilitators and then these leaders each hosted a semi-structured conversation with 4-6 colleagues. The conversation started broad as lecturers reflected on the central question: What should our program be doing over the next five years? What began as a strategic planning exercise quickly became something more expansive.

The conversations surfaced not just ideas, but deeply personal reflections about what it means to lecture at MIT. As WRAP’s director, Dr. Andreas Karatsolis, shared in a retrospective interview, “I definitely think they enjoyed their experience. Here’s an example: One of the conversations was happening in the lounge, which is right next to my office. I was at my office heading out for class, and people were, you know, just starting a conversation. So I go to class, I go to a meeting, and then I come back and they were still there chatting, laughing, you know, that whole thing, and I was like, what is going on? It’s been two and a half hours. What are you guys doing? But it definitely created this sense of… I don’t want to say ‘sense of community,’ because there already was a sense of community, but the sense of, you know, we have the space now to be able to talk about things that normally we don’t get to talk about.”

Marina Rakhilin, Program Lead at realtalk@MIT, explains, “We always try to iterate that the realtalk method isn’t an interview and it’s not a focus group – it’s a carefully curated experience led by participants for their peers. It’s a chance to speak up in ways that we don’t ordinarily make time for and then we help decision makers listen in and take the stories to heart.”

After the sessions concluded, the realtalk team supported Dr. Karatsolis in creating a qualitative codebook and analyzing the conversations for emergent themes. While all conversations started with the same open-ended questions, the themes spanned a wide variety of topics, including strengths, weaknesses, and topics that could necessitate upcoming working groups. Within each of these larger themes were 3-4 subthemes (e.g., “Community and Collegiality,” or “Visibility and Advocacy”). Dr. Karatsolis tagged every quote from these conversations with one or more subthemes in order to make sense of the conversations as a whole.

While the initial goal had been a five-year roadmap, what emerged was a broader sense of connection, possibility, and shared ownership. These conversations helped surface long-standing disconnects and sparked questions about how to move forward, not just within WRAP, but across MIT.

Now, Dr. Karatsolis is working to translate these insights into new audio medleys, visualizations, and a report for campus leadership, but his perspective has shifted: “If I see this process as ‘I got all the data, and now I own it,’ then I’ve failed the spirit of it. My role is to open doors, not close them.” He noted that one of the most rewarding moments was sharing these data back with the lecturers who shared their stories; he noticed them nodded along to the presentation, feeling seen and heard in a way that was not standard for these regular meetings.

Now, the group is excited to launch several working groups on topics identified by the collective, rather than a top-down process. Dr. Katatsolis leaves us with a metaphor about the process of listening to his colleagues: “If you look at the water and there’s sun over it and it’s kind of calm and you might notice little wave or ripple, but if you look underneath, what you’re going to see is those rectangular patterns of the waves as they’re reflecting on the bottom of your pool. But what you also see is movement of these little squares. Think of it as a net, right? A net of light, movement in some direction. The links are very, very important. Somebody said this, somebody said that. Then if you listen closely, it comes together between three different conversations.”If you’re curious about what a realtalk project might look like for your organization, we’d love to talk; reach out to realtalk@mit.edu.