Some research on the Art of Hosting and education

I was having a great conversation today catching up with colleagues from the New Jersey Education Association who have long used the principles and framework of the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting for their work. One of their offerings is the NJEA Teacher-Leader Academy which is an accredited course in participatory leadership for New Jersey school teachers. It is anchored entirely in the four-fold practice.

In chatting today, I was sharing with them some of the published peer-reviewed and other research that has been done over the years on the Art of Hosting specific to or adjacent to education. I threw a bunch of links in the chat, and before I close the tabs, I thought I’d record them here for posterity.

• Practicing the Art of Hosting: Exploring what Art of Hosting and Harvesting workshop participants understand and do. A paper by Jodi Sanford, Nicholas Stuber and Kathryn Quick looking at the results of several Art of Hosting workshops done in the early 2010s at the University of Minnesota.
• Cultivating Change in the Academy: Practicing the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter within the University of Minnesota. An open source ebook on teh application of this work throughout the university.
• Learning to facilitate deliberation: practicing the art of hosting. By Kathryn Quick and Jodi Sanford and published in Critical Policy Studies in 2014. This paper talks about how deliberation practitioners learn deliberative practice through this training.
• What the f…has research got to do with the Art of Hosting. A video of Jodi discussing this research from a gathering on harvesting in 2017.
• Hosting humanizing practices in times of complexity: Lessons to be learned from Paulo Freire. This is Elizabeth Hunt’s master thesis which links the Art of Hosting to Friere’s work.
• The Art of Hosting in Education – Shifting mindsets using participatory methodologies and practices by Laura Weisel, which documents especially the role of participatory methods in educational settings
• Parent Cafes: The Gift that Keeps on Giving. A interview with Lina Cramer who spent many years using World Cafe to convene Parent Leaders within and around public school in Illinois.

I’m struck at how much of the research here focuses on methods. There isn’t A LOT on the four fold practice as a scaffolding for leadership and facilitation practice. My friends in New Jersey are underscoring the importance of that, and I hope at some point they will contribute to this body of knowledge with their own reflections on the work.

We continue to explore this world, most recently through an annual Reimagining Education offering that is called by Jennifer Williams along with me, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle. This has been a truly amazing offering the past three years and we will offer it again in 2026 in a new location in the fall.