Expertise is distributed
Faculty, staff, campus partners, and affected communities hold different forms of knowledge the work needs.
About the Collaboratory
Expertise across roles, collective inquiry, and supported change
The Sensemaking Collaboratory brings people across campuses, disciplines, and roles into a structured learning process for challenges that resist quick or isolated solutions.
The name
Why a collaboratory?
A collaboratory combines collaboration and laboratory: a shared environment where people can work across organizational and geographic boundaries. The name emphasizes both the relationships required for shared work and the experimentation required for learning.
For the Sensemaking Collaboratory, the institution becomes a setting for shared inquiry. Faculty, staff, students, leaders, and community partners can bring different forms of knowledge into the process, investigate challenges together, and develop responses that can be tested and refined. The mix of participants may differ across cohorts and contexts.
Meaning is made together
Carefully sequenced activities help groups make assumptions, patterns, tensions, and possibilities visible.
Action produces learning
Small, informed moves create feedback that can refine both the plan and the group’s understanding.
The Collaboratory team
Four co-developers and co-leads
Denise Bartell, Bryan Jones, Jessica A. Leveto, and Eric Taylor jointly adapted, developed, and lead Kent State’s model and process. Their combined perspectives span sociology, psychology, earth sciences, teaching and learning, evaluation, student success, and institutional change.
Where the approach began
From Miami University to a Kent State adaptation
The local Collaboratory grew from Kent State team participation in Miami University’s 2024 Sensemaking for Student Success institute. The approach was adapted for regional-campus context and combined with design thinking, inclusive dialogue, reflective practice, and knowledge transfer.
