131. Trauma-informed Pedagogy

The global COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in serious disruptions in everyone’s lives. Traumatic experiences reduce our ability to focus, to learn, and to be productive. While this has always been true, it is an issue that has often been ignored by higher ed faculty. In this episode, Karen Costa joins us to discuss how trauma-informed pedagogy can be used to help our students on their educational journey in stressful times.

Karen is an adjunct faculty member teaching college success strategies to online students and a faculty professional development facilitator at Faculty Guild. She is a staff writer for Women in Higher Education. She writes regularly about higher education, and her new book 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos was just released by Stylus Publishing. In addition to her education degrees, Karen holds a professional certification in Trauma and Resilience from Florida State University and will complete her certificate in Neuroscience Learning and Online Instruction from Drexel this spring. She’s also a certified yoga teacher. Karen has been working to support diverse learners with trauma-aware practices since 2002.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The global COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in serious disruptions in everyone’s lives. Traumatic experiences reduce our ability to focus, to learn, and to be productive. While this has always been true, it is an issue that has often been ignored by higher ed faculty. In this episode, we examine how trauma-informed pedagogy can be used to help our students on their educational journey in stressful times.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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John: Our guest today is Karen Costa. Karen is an adjunct faculty member teaching college success strategies to online students and a faculty professional development facilitator at Faculty Guild. She is a staff writer for Women in Higher Education. She writes regularly about higher education, and her new book 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos was just released by Stylus Publishing, and I just got my copy a couple of days ago. In addition to her education degrees, Karen holds a professional certification in Trauma and Resilience from Florida State University and will complete her certificate in Neuroscience Learning and Online Instruction from Drexel this spring. She’s also a certified yoga teacher. Karen has been working to support diverse learners with trauma aware practices since 2002. Welcome back, Karen.

Karen: Thank you both for having me back. I didn’t expect to be back quite so soon, but I’m happy to be here.

John: There have been lots of things happening that people haven’t expected recently.

Rebecca: Today our teas are:

Karen: I have a big bottle of water next to me because hydration is one of my healthy practices these days for mind and body, and I have been getting a little tickle in my throat, which is not ideal for podcast interviews. So I’m going with the old fashioned option today.

John: And I am drinking honey green iced tea.

Rebecca: And I’m sticking with my nice and comforting English afternoon tea.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss trauma-informed teaching. In a recent podcast Josh Eyler talked about trauma-informed teaching and he referred to you, so we thought it would be good to have you back to talk about it. Could you tell us a little bit about this approach and why it’s important, especially right now?

Karen: Sure. So I do want to start by just reminding listeners that talking about trauma, learning about trauma, can bring up some feelings, which is a very normal reaction to that. So I just want to remind people, if you notice that, that it’s okay to take a rain check on listening and engaging in this conversation. I also do recommend that even if you feel okay to engage with a discussion about trauma that it’s recommended that you do so in small doses, especially during these very challenging times. And I do think, we talked in the show notes, we’re going to make sure that we share additional resources for folks who might need some support during this challenging time. I’ve got some great links for folks if they would like to check out resources, but just a reminder, it’s very normal to have some of our own emotional experiences come up during this conversation. So I wanted to make sure that that was really clear as we get started. Also, thanks to Josh for giving me a shout out and connecting us, he’s wonderful and he’s doing a lot of great advocacy work, and I look forward to his tweets every day, very grateful for Twitter for keeping us all connected. So, why should we be learning about trauma in the context of higher education and pedagogy in this remote teaching, emergency teaching movement? Well, hopefully, we should have been engaging with it already, we know that trauma is not new. Most of our students, most of our faculty, most of our staff do have trauma histories to varying degrees, and those trauma histories do impact not only our relationships with students or colleagues, but they also impact how we learn, which is how I come to this conversation. So, my interest is in trauma, toxic stress, general stress, and how those all impact teaching and learning in higher education, specifically in the online learning environment, though I’m obviously engaged in that conversation across higher ed. We are all suddenly online now, so that’s where my interest comes in, so helping faculty and staff to utilize our knowledge about trauma and its impacts on the body and the mind and the brain to look at how students are learning and then look at how we’re teaching.

John: Could you tell us a little bit more about how it impacts students’ ability to learn?

Karen: Let me back up a bit and let me define trauma for us. And there’s varying definitions, of course, if you ask 10 different people who work with trauma for their definitions of trauma, you’re going to get 10 definitions. I have some notes next to me because my brain is not quite working the way I want it to these days. One of the places that I refer to is the SAMHSA definition which talks about trauma resulting from an event, or a series of events, or a set of circumstances, an adverse experience that has significant negative results in terms of an individual’s functioning across the various areas, mental, physical, social, emotional, all of those areas. In other words, trauma is when something really bad happens and it impacts us in a negative way. Another definition that is pretty straightforward, one of the foremost researchers in the trauma field is Bessel Van Der Kolk. He wrote a book called The Body Keeps the Score. His short version is trauma is unbearable and intolerable, so when something really challenging happens to us and we have persistent effects from that experience. It’s also important to bring up toxic stress and stress, I think, which are very much related to trauma. So toxic stress is when we sort of reach that point where we’re beyond our healthy limits of stress, we’re going into that area where it’s starting to have significant negative effects in our lives, and then there’s just run-of-the-mill stress that we all experience every day. So, just a few definitions that might help folks and those are not new, those have been around as long as we have, they were here with us before this COVID-19 crisis, and trauma, toxic stress, and stress will continue with us. In terms of how they impact learning, things that we might experience would be difficulty concentrating. I’m sure some folks who are listening to this have experienced that in the past two weeks, certainly before, but very much so in the past two weeks. A disinterest in things that might have previously excited us or interested us, a feeling like we sort of can’t mentally organize it all, that there’s just things swimming in our brain and we can’t really get a hold on it, difficulty making decisions, delaying gratification are all pretty common impacts of trauma on the learning experience… executive function skills I should say. Sometimes you see these referred to as soft skills, which I don’t love that term, but I have to use it because it’s what most people use. Our ability to communicate with people, to maintain relationships can be impacted, our time management, think about things like test taking, which require really intensive focus and our higher-order thinking skills. All of those we know are disrupted when we experience trauma or toxic stress.

Rebecca: What are things that faculty can do to help students learn and mitigate some of that stress, or at least manage things so that they can feel like they can move forward? I know a lot of faculty will also say like, “I’m not a trained psychologist, so this isn’t for me, and I don’t really want to know that my students have had trauma or know their stories and I want to keep this professional distance away from them.” Can you talk through a little bit about the relationship between faculty and students related to trauma, and then also, what are some things that faculty can do to help students when they’re experiencing trauma? [LAUGHTER]

Karen: There’s so much in that question. I’m going to try to tease that out, it was such a great question. We know that most students in your class have a trauma history, we know that. Public health research shows us that around 70% of people have trauma histories, and with what we’re going through now, which I’m looking at as a global trauma that we’re all experiencing to varying degrees, certainly, but at the same time, we can assume that this is impacting all of your students. So first of all, it’s not appropriate for us to expect our students to disclose their trauma to us but whether or not they do, we can absolutely safely assume that the majority of students in your class have a trauma history that is impacting their ability to learn. What’s interesting is that we sometimes don’t go to the next step, which is that this is also true for our educators. So when you get your college diploma you don’t lose your trauma history. The research on rates of trauma in our population holds true across educational levels. So most of our educators also experience trauma. So I do hear that idea of “I don’t want to know about this,” or “I shouldn’t have to deal with this.” This is the reality, this is part of the human condition. So I think it’s important that people know that whether or not you want to deal with it, that it is there. That said, I think the really important thing is to remember something called scope of practice, and this is not a phrase I hear often used in education, but you hear it in social work, in the counseling field, in the medical field. An example of that was something I learned about as a yoga teacher. So just an example, I would have students come to me and say, “Karen, I have a stomach issue. What should I do?” It would not be appropriate for me as a yoga teacher to say, “Oh, you should try this medicine,” or “Have you taken this?” or “Have you done this?” Absolutely outside of my scope of practice as a yoga teacher. Would it be appropriate for me to say “Keep coming to class, keep taking care of yourself, keep your practice up, and listen to your body, and talk to your doctor?” Sure, that is within my scope of practice as a yoga teacher. So absolutely, it is outside of your scope of practice as an educator to offer counseling to your students, to inquire about their trauma histories, to offer any sort of medical or mental health advice, it is appropriate for us to refer. So posting links and resources to internal or external mental health resources and hotlines is absolutely within our scope of practice. Empathy is in everybody’s scope of practice, so that is a great place to start. We can all practice empathy, we can recognize that everyone is coming to this with a lot of challenges and previous challenges as well, not just the new ones that we’re all facing, so we can all practice empathy. An example of something that an educator could do would be, what I’m recommending, is to balance structure with flexibility, so having very, very flexible deadlines. I’m keeping deadlines, but I’m being very flexible with them, and I’m letting students know, “Hey, if this isn’t working for you let me know.” Some students need the structure, and they appreciate the structure and it’s a nice distraction, but I’ve got students emailing me that their kids are sick, or their parents are sick, or they just lost their job. So letting them know, “Hey, take a few days off, and let’s talk on Wednesday. How about nine o’clock? Can we exchange an email or a phone call then?” is absolutely within my scope of practice and balancing structure with flexibility is a trauma-aware teaching practice, I don’t need to be a counselor to do that. So that’s just one example of very many that are being shared. To me, that’s been my guiding paradigm recently. Certainly things change by the hour but balancing structure with flexibility is helping me do what I feel is the best job to keep students on track toward their goals, to be present, to give them a distraction and a focus, but also to honor that they have other survival issues at play right now. Deadlines are not always appropriate in those instances.

John: Would it be helpful to bring up the current circumstances in our class either as it connects to our content areas or just to give students a chance to talk about it with their peers and with their instructors?

Karen: Yes, 110% is my answer on that one. So we also have some good data that a sense of meaning and a sense of purpose is really important to our mental and physical health. So I think within an appropriate context without overloading students, focusing on what we can control rather than what we can’t, is a really appropriate way to discuss this challenge. So perhaps sharing with students one small thing that you’ve done to support people in your community would be an appropriate example of that, sharing a resource for ways that they can contribute, reminding students that the act of staying home and flattening the curve is a contribution, though it can feel small and insignificant at times, it does make a difference, so that they have a sense of meaning and purpose and contribution. For those of us that have the luxury of staying home, one of the things I’ve noticed personally is there is that sense of a lack of purpose and a lack of focus. I was just tweeting about how much I love my students and my faculty that I work with, and when I have those moments of challenge, without pushing myself beyond my limits, to just see how I can help them… so how I can help somebody else really does give me a little boost. So I think it’s appropriate to talk to students about what’s going on in terms of helping them see that they can serve a greater good. And, certainly within the context of our subject areas or content areas, it makes a lot of sense to me. If you teach journalism, for example, my neighbor teaches journalism at a community college. Hi, Sue. How could you not be talking about the coverage of the crisis in the media right now as part of your class? I also do think we need to give students breaks from it though, and not overload them too much, because we’re all a bit overloaded. Most of the mental health professionals that I’m hearing from are encouraging people to be mindful and to limit their consumption. So if students are trying to do that, and they come into our class and we’re overloading them, that would be problematic, but I think gently, mindfully, making sure students know they can take breaks as needed from that content makes a lot of sense.

John: In my seminar class we were talking about, some other issues were scheduled for discussion, but somehow that discussion got shifted over to talking about the economic consequences of this and what types of adjustment policies might be helpful and possible paths for getting through this and resolving it. And we were doing some face-to-face discussions as well as some online ones, and students opened up quite a bit about it, and it seemed to be really productive, and they seemed to really enjoy that opportunity to connect with each other.

Karen: That makes a lot of sense. The other thing that comes to mind is a future orientation, looking toward the future with hope and possibility even though things are extremely challenging and dire and dark right now, remembering that there is hope in the future and having that mindset of looking forward and “What can I do to make things better in the future?” does seem to have positive effects on our mental health and our ability to move forward and take action in our daily lives. So there’s a lot of good research to support that. I love that idea of students being able to engage in that way, with that future orientation. The other thing I’ll add, though, is that I’ve reminded folks, if you have time with your students and you use all that time to talk about “Where are people finding toilet paper?” and “What are you doing with your kids?” and “How are you just moving throughout the day or taking walks in your neighborhood?” I had a friend do that, and she said, “I hope I did okay,” and I said, “You did perfect.” So talking about the crisis in the context of just getting through the day is okay, too. I think, really let the students kind of guide that conversation and see what they need, and then let them take the lead on that a bit makes a lot of sense.

John: That did become a non-trivial portion of those conversations.

Karen: Yeah.

Rebecca: I think an interesting conversation that bubbled up in the pandemic pedagogy Facebook group was about having students do reflections of their COVID-19 experience, but then some faculty really pushing back on that and saying, “Yeah, that’s really good. Some students might really need that, but some students might really need an escape from it as well, and so pushing it or requiring an engagement in that conversation could also be really problematic.” What are your thoughts on that, Karen?

Karen: Yes, it is problematic to require that, that’s my feeling. This is, for many folks, a trauma and we’re all experiencing that to varying degrees. We all come to this with different amounts of privilege, with different protective factors in our lives, but I can’t think of a context where I would require someone to talk about their trauma, that would need to be up to them. I’m certainly writing about it. I write in my journal every day. I had a journaling practice before and journaling is a positive coping mechanism, and we have data that that works really well, but it’s not really somebody else’s place to require that. I would probably give students a choice, let them know that you can talk about this, but here are some other options that are not related to the crisis that you could talk about as well. Choice is always good in our assignments, I think so, and that certainly holds true in this situation as well. I wouldn’t force that conversation. That could certainly cause some additional stress in an already very stressful time.

Rebecca: What are some things that faculty can do, thinking forward to the fall, in being trauma aware in their practices, given that there might be some space for some folks in their relationship to the pandemic, but then for others , it might still be really very prime key thing that they’re still really dealing with?

Karen: I don’t know enough at this point to know what the fall is going to bring. The words that I’m using with faculty and in my own work is, number one, prioritize caring and support above all else, and number two, focus on being adaptable to whatever comes. I can imagine a scenario where we’re brought back out into the world for a couple weeks, and then we go back home for a couple weeks, so I think the ability to adapt is going to be really important. I shared a blog post today from my friend Janice Carello. She’s been writing about trauma-informed pedagogy for years. She’s brilliant, and a real gift to this field in higher education, and one of the things she shared was write everything down. So I just think of that as an example of how we can prepare for this possibility of things changing on the dime throughout the fall and possibly longer, is just being really clear in our communications with students, with our colleagues, and with ourselves by writing everything down, recognizing that our brains aren’t going to quite hold information as well as they used to, and just little things like that, I think. There’s so much outside of our control. We are not, as individuals, able to always do much to make an impact on something of this size, but I can make sure that I’m putting communications to students in writing. So I would encourage people to just look at those seemingly small choices in how they communicate with students, how they plan their courses, how they manage their time and communicate with colleagues and to plan for the possibility of things changing on the dime and, of course, again to prioritize caring and support above all else.

John: Following up on Rebecca’s question, though, when we do come back in the fall, there’s going to be a lot of people who will have lost family members, who will have lost friends, and will be facing potentially a much more uncertain economic future, and so I think this issue of trauma is one that we probably always should be paying more attention to, but it’s going to be something that’s going to be affecting, I suspect, a very large share of our students, as well as many faculty in the fall.

Karen: Yeah, I’ve been talking about that, and it’s tough to wrap my head around, and to really engage with that, because we’ve always had that in higher education. We’ve had students who have lost multiple family members during their college education. We’ve had students who live with poverty and racism, this is not new. What’s new is that we can no longer deny that in the same way that we were before, but I think a lot of us were begging higher education to notice that and to take it seriously and to adapt our teaching and our advising and our institutions to become more trauma aware, and eventually to become trauma-informed, and there was resistance to that, and now, I don’t know if that resistance will continue. I don’t know if people will realize how widespread this is, because of this challenge. It’s a little tough to wrap my head around that, but number one, I would say K through 12 is quite a bit ahead of us in higher education. So for those in higher education who are ready to look at this in a meaningful way, K through 12 has done a bit more work than higher ed has done and we have a lot of models and tools that we can use. So you’ve heard me use the terms trauma aware and trauma informed. One of the models out there, it’s called the Missouri Model. It has four stages that an organization can move through to ultimately become a trauma-informed organization. The first step is to become trauma aware, and that’s kind of how I’ve been engaging with people lately, which is just to start talking about trauma, to recognize what it is and to recognize that it is widespread, that most students and most faculty have experienced trauma and to talk about what that does to our minds and our brains and our bodies and how it might impact learning. So that’s how I’ve been engaging with people. And I expect that because of the widespread nature of this crisis, most institutions will hopefully start to develop more trauma awareness in the coming months, which will ultimately lead to more sustained widespread solutions down the road.

John: I’m hoping that this does make all of us a bit more aware of those issues. For those faculty who are interested in learning more about the impacts of trauma and dealing with their students’ trauma, what resources would you suggest to help them learn more?

Karen: As I mentioned, K through 12 is a little bit ahead of us in higher ed, so we’ve got some great content out there in that K through 12 world. I follow a heck of a lot of K through 12 educators on social media and learn so much from them. So I would encourage folks to really recognize and respect the expertise of our K through 12 educators, folks who have already been doing this work. I don’t want to imply that this hasn’t been happening in higher ed, but it happens in pockets. So we see things like a school of social work within a college or university will have really developed a lot of trauma awareness and maybe even advanced to some trauma-informed practices across that department or that division, but it kind of remains within that pocket. Most institutions probably have some pockets of this going on. Find those people who are doing that work and who’ve been asking for folks to take it seriously for years. This is for all of us. One of the things that I talk about is how we sometimes say “Oh, trauma, stress, anxiety, that’s for Karen in room 312. She’s the college counselor.” That’s how we’ve sometimes approached it. This is not the sole responsibility of the college counselor, the one that maybe we have for 6000 students. She’s already being asked to do far too much with too little. This is the responsibility of all of us. It’s a human issue, it’s a pedagogical issue. This is something that a Vice President of Academic Affairs, deans, faculty, academic advisors should all be educated about and bringing to their staff and their team and educating folks about and learning more about. The other resource I’ll mention is I know we’re higher educators, we like to read. I mentioned before, I’ll remind folks again, The Body Keeps the Score. Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, he’s out of the trauma center in Boston. He has done some groundbreaking work in this area. It’s a very intense read, know that going in, don’t read it in one sitting, but it really gives a good overview of trauma and its impact on people and how they can learn and grow. And the other thing I haven’t mentioned, I’m realizing now that I usually mention up front but my brain isn’t on full capacity, is what Dr. Van Der Kolk does. He’s so good at talking about resilience, and when we talk about trauma, we always do want to make sure that people’s resilience is part of that conversation. I was just listening to him earlier on a podcast, he talks about how trauma really brings out the best of us and the worst of us. It’s important to remember that people are extraordinarily resilient, and that people who’ve experienced trauma have so many assets and so many skills and so much brilliance. Trauma is treatable. There are countless resources out there that will help people through this. As we talk about this idea of widespread trauma and coming back to campus in the fall having gone through this, whatever that looks like, it’s important to remember that resilience should always be part of that conversation.

John: One of the things I’ve been in getting lots of emails from faculty is questions about how to deal with things like students submitting their work an hour or two late or something similar, and I’ve never had to send out so many emails just suggesting maybe this is a good time to give students the benefit of the doubt. It’s a difficult adjustment for many faculty, perhaps, being a little more compassionate and it’s something that we should be doing all the time.

Karen: Yeah, I do want to speak to that and I’ll be transparent and I’m noticing all kinds of emotions coming up in myself there. I like to think of myself as a very big advocate of faculty success. I see faculty and student success as interdependent. I do want to recognize that the faculty that I work with are hardworking, creative, empathetic, and I was just talking to some faculty earlier today… what they’re doing for their students is so inspirational, so powerful. They’re just going above and beyond. I know that there are some faculty who do have a more rigid approach, and if I want faculty to give students the benefit of the doubt, I feel like I have to give faculty the benefit of the doubt too. And I think sometimes we teach how we were taught, and that is just kind of our instinct. I was held to these really tough standards, so I’m going to do that for my students. I’ve also heard this idea, “I’m preparing students for the real world.” This is the real world… right now. This is the real world that we’re living in, with people getting really sick, with our students out there working on the frontlines and just really struggling, people at home with their kids while working, all kinds of things, this is the real world. And I have not ever seen any data that shows that holding students to a rigid deadline improves student success in learning. If anybody sees that please feel free to share it to me, but every ounce of research and data that I know of shows that flexibility within structure works really well for student success in learning, particularly recognizing that, again, most of our students, and just as we do, experience trauma, toxic stress that can impact our ability to learn. So, I know people struggle with that and say, “Well, aren’t I teaching them a bad habit?” I have been utilizing that strategy with first-generation first year students for the past 15 years. What I have found is that students still get it to me, they still have a positive learning experience. When appropriate, I’ll remind students and say, “Next week, I want you to try to meet that deadline.” Am I doing that now? No, but I have in the past, but I always err on the side of flexibility, and it has served me and my students very well. I don’t feel like my students have taken advantage of that. I think it’s built trust in our classroom and not everybody learns at the same pace. At the same time, I want to recognize also that I think sometimes faculty feel that’s going to make more work for them to have things coming in at varying deadlines. Faculty are bombarded and overloaded. So then cut the amount of content down. I’ve mentioned Janice Carello earlier, one of her recommendations is cut the content in half, if that’s what you need to do right now to simplify things for yourself and your students. I’d rather faculty do that. I think that’s a smarter practice in terms of teaching and learning than to hold students to rigid deadlines.

John: What would you suggest for faculty experiencing trauma and just dealing with the everyday stress? What techniques might be helpful in helping us all get through this?

Karen: Hopefully, one of the things I’ve already conveyed is that any conversation about trauma-aware practices in higher education needs to recognize faculty and staff as part of that equation. So, sometimes I hear us talk about student trauma and stress, but then it’s like, apparently, we’re all magically immune to it. That’s just not the case. So a good place to start is for educators, administrators, leaders to recognize that faculty, just like students, have already experienced trauma before this and are experiencing trauma and likely toxic stress now, and to name that and to begin to get educated about that. In terms of individual faculty, again, let’s focus on resilience, let’s focus on what we call protective factors. So, one of the things that’s really interesting in the research on trauma is that one caring adult can make a difference in the life of a child who’s experienced trauma. One caring adult can make a difference. So we do look at things like protective factors, so community support, a caring adult who reaches out, those are really important. What’s interesting that I’ve noticed about those protective factors is that they often come from another person, so I think our connections are really important. We’re hearing people talk about physical distancing versus social distancing. So, making sure that you talk to a few people each day, whether it’s over the phone or over text or in Animal Crossing on your Nintendo Switch, on Twitter, whatever the case may be, I do think hearing someone’s voice can make a difference for me, but just finding some way to connect. Loneliness, there’s a lot of data about the negative impacts of loneliness that was before this, and now we’re all being asked to stay home. That’s obviously creating some additional challenges there. So I would say it’s really important to connect with somebody else, whether it’s a friend, family member, and to stay connected on a daily basis. That goes on my to do list every morning, text my niece, text my nephews, call this person, those are priorities. Other things that I’m doing, movement is really important, I try to stay away from the word exercise because it brings up a lot of junk for people, [LAUGHTER] because a lot of junk has been shoved down our throats about what exercise should be. So, I encourage people to embrace movement, even if that’s pacing in your house. In the book that I mentioned before, The Body Keeps the Score, movement and bodywork is really an important part of managing trauma, so anything that you can do to move. I am getting out in my neighborhood, I’m able to safely walk in my neighborhood and maintain that physical distancing. That does a lot to help me, so movement is really important. Hydration is important. For me, reading is a great option, and again, connecting is just the number on e for me right now to keep myself grounded, and remember that we’re all in this together. But those social connections are incredibly important when dealing with stress.

John: A lot of students and faculty both have reported that they’ve been having Zoom gatherings, social hours, happy hours, and so forth, and also, I think, Netflix Party, the plugin for Chrome is getting a lot of action too, where people watch movies together from wherever they are, and then they chat with each other as if they were in the same place.

Karen: I haven’t heard of the Netflix one, so I’m gonna have to check that out.

John: It’s just a Chrome plugin.

Karen: That’s very cool.

John: My students talked about it, and some faculty talked about that in an informal gathering we had just yesterday.

Karen: And that’s a great example of one of my favorite reminders, which is that students know things, and we can ask them [LAUGHTER] and they will tell us things that we don’t know, so we all just learned something there as well.

Rebecca: It seems like likewise, it might also be important to remember, you know, as you’re saying that students know things… hey, Ada, [LAUGHTER] Just one second. Can you hang on for just one second?

ADA: No!

Rebecca: No? Well, I guess Ada will be on this podcast. [LAUGHTER]

John: And that was our guest host Ada Mushtare joining us for the first time on one of our podcast recordings, and now we return to our regularly scheduled podcast.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that students have been really understanding of the circumstances that faculty can be in. When I’ve talked to other faculty, they’ve talked about how the students have been asking how they’re doing. And I know in my own case, I’ve fallen, in one class, a couple weeks behind in grading, and I said, I’ve been doing eight to 10 hours of faculty meetings every day trying to help people move online, and they’ve been really understanding about all of that in ways that surprised me, because I’d be disappointed if my instructor had fallen that far behind in grading. So in general, I think in some ways, this may have helped both students and faculty connect in ways that they might not otherwise have done.

Karen: What I would classify that conversation under is this idea of humanizing learning. So Michelle Pacansky-Brock is an amazing educator, she has kind of taken the lead on this humanizing online learning movement, and we sometimes also talk about it as humanizing higher education in general. This idea that we can appropriately reveal challenges, failures, interests to our students as a way to build a sense of connection between students and faculty, again, is not new, and many of us have been doing that for a long time, and I think because of this challenge, maybe because more folks are working from home and might have kids running around and pets running around, and not really as much of a choice about distinguishing the personal from the professional, that maybe they are diving into that humanizing teaching and learning movement, and I am glad about that. We know, particularly in the online learning environment, that that can have some really positive effects on teaching and learning. What I would remind people is that we find that when we can build those connections with our students, they’re more likely to persist and to succeed, so find whatever way you’re comfortable with to do that. I don’t think it’s appropriate to reveal the depths of your soul, perhaps, but could you remind students that you’re feeling anxious? Absolutely. Could you let students know that you’re worried about a sick family member? Absolutely. Could you let students know you’re challenged by having kids at home? Absolutely. Do what’s comfortable for you. I always tell folks, if even that makes you nervous, some faculty feel more comfortable just engaging around their content area. So, I tell folks, this is a chance to maybe talk about why you got into your field of study and perhaps how this crisis is causing you to reflect on that choice and what you love about your discipline. That’s an okay place to start too, for some faculty that’s what they’re comfortable with. But, certainly if you’re open to sharing more details, sharing more challenges, I send regular emails to my students. This morning I said, “We’re all still here, we’re hunkered down. We’re saying home. We’re really thinking about those health care workers and frontline workers and we’re so grateful for them.” And then I moved on to some course topics, but it was an appropriate sharing about challenges we’re facing without getting too in depth and it is one of the ways that I connect with my students.

John: Is there any other advice you’d like to share with our listeners?

Karen: I think I just want to emphasize again, the importance of hope, something that we grasp for when we’re desperate, but hope is really a powerful cognitive strategy. The work of Martin Seligman, he writes about something called the Hope Circuit, which is the idea that in the face of just devastating impossible circumstances, if we can find a way to look toward the future with any little bit of hope, that it can help us get through those challenges. So I would just emphasize to people that, for me, hope is a really important research-based strategy that I try to apply in my life. One of the things I’ve been doing at night when I fall asleep, I was perseverating, about all of the scary stuff, and I was projecting into some really dark places and one of the things that I’ve been doing is tried to at that point in my day, to think about a hopeful future and what’s it gonna be like to hug loved ones again, and get to go to a bookstore or the library, which are two of my favorite things to do? And that is one of my practices, and certainly do I go into those other places at other times? Absolutely. But I just want to remind people, I think we can respect and honor the challenges that we’re facing, and also remember hope and resilience, and keep practicing those as well.

John: Excellent.

Rebecca: Apparently, you should talk all the time because Ada is incredibly attentive to you, Karen. [LAUGHTER]

Karen: Oh, hi, honey! [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: She’s listening to you.

Karen: Oh, I love that.

John: And until you can go to the bookstore, [LAUGHTER] you can order 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos. It’s a wonderful book, and for those who are creating videos, either for the first time, or who’d like to do it more efficiently, it’s a really great resource and you can get that from Amazon or directly from the publisher. In fact, there’s a discount code that we’ll list in the show notes as well.

Karen: Great. Thank you.

John: Also, we just discovered we had a mutual friend in common, Leighanne Penna, who I worked with at Duke many years ago, and you went to grad school with.

Karen: Leighanne and I were at UMass Amherst back in 2004 together, and we recently reconnected. She’s in Greece, and I’m going to help her campus do some work with transitioning from land-based to online education. It’s really interesting. They’ve made that shift, and now they’re interested in helping faculty develop those emotional connections online, which I’m really excited about, and I hope others will recognize the importance of doing that as well. But it was great to reconnect with her and to find out about that small-world connection.

John: We always end with the question, “What’s next?” which I think is a question we all have in mind these days.

Karen: So, what’s next for me is [LAUGHTER] some puzzles, watching the Masked Singer with my 11 year old and my husband who are home with me, walking my dog, those are part of my daily routine. And in terms of higher ed, I’m hoping to continue to do more to share this message of the importance of becoming trauma aware in our teaching, whether it’s online or possibly land- based in the future, and just reminding folks that empathy is within all of our scope of practice, no matter what our background and expertise, we can always practice empathy, and hoping to help as many folks as possible. That’s something I enjoy doing, it helps me to stay well, and hoping to just keep serving in whatever way I can.

Rebecca: Thanks so much for taking us on a journey from trauma all the way to hope. [LAUGHTER] It was a really nice conversation.

Karen: Oh, well, yeah, I appreciate that. And it is tough to talk about sometimes. And I know I think that’s one of the reasons that we avoid it, and I have a lot of empathy for folks that sometimes they’re just not ready to come to that conversation, but it is important. I think, that those of us who are ready and prepared to engage in that conversation and to start educating others.

John: Thanks again, especially for joining us on such short notice and it was great to talk to you again.

Karen: Thanks, everyone.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer. Editing assistance provided by Savannah Norton.

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