133. Signature Pedagogies

Many disciplines have well-developed signature pedagogies that are designed to help students develop the skills needed to view the world from their disciplinary lens. In this episode, Regan Gurung, Nancy Chick, and Aeron Haynie join us to discuss signature pedagogies and to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged us to adapt our teaching approaches and encouraged faculty to seek out and share pedagogical advice as we attempt to provide enriching learning experiences for our students.

Regan is a Professor of Psychological Sciences at Oregon State University, Nancy is the Director of the Endeavour Foundation Center for Faculty Development at Rollins College, and Aeron is the Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of New Mexico.

Show Notes

  • Gurung, R. A., Chick, N. L., & Haynie, A. (2009). Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Regan Gurung (2018). 54. SOTL. Tea for Teaching Podcast, November 7th.
  • Schulman, L. S. (2005). Signature Pedagogies in the Professions. Daedalus, 134 (3), 52-59.
  • Angela Bauer, Professor and Chair of Biology at High Point University
  • Catherine Denial, Bright Professor and Chair of History at Knox College
  • Punch Through Pandemic With Psychological Science – Course description at Oregon State
  • Huston, T. A., & DiPietro, M. (2007). 13: In the Eye of the Storm: Students’ Perceptions of Helpful Faculty Actions Following a Collective Tragedy. To improve the academy, 25(1), 207-224.
  • Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2006). Understanding by Design (Expanded 2nd edition). US: Pearson, 2005, 16.

Transcript

John: Many disciplines have well-developed signature pedagogies that are designed to help students develop the skills needed to view the world from their disciplinary lens. In this episode, we examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged us to adapt our teaching approaches and encouraged faculty to seek out and share pedagogical advice as we attempt to provide enriching learning experiences for our students.

We should note that this podcast was recorded shortly after our campuses shut down in mid-March, but the discussion today remains as relevant as it was at that time.

[MUSIC]

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.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are:

Regan: Regan Gurung,

Nancy: Nancy Chick,

Aeron: and Aeron Haynie.

John: Regan is a Professor of Psychological Sciences at Oregon State University and had been a guest on an earlier podcast. Nancy is the Director of the Endeavour Foundation Center for Faculty Development at Rollins College. And Aeron is the Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of New Mexico. Welcome, everyone.

Regan: Thank you, John.

Aeron: Welcome.

Nancy: Thanks.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Regan: I’m drinking some Darjeeling tea grown on the family estates on the foothills of Darjeeling.

Aeron: And I’ve just been enjoying some nice loose Earl Grey tea from the St. James Tea Room in Albuquerque.

Nancy: And since I’m in Florida where it’s 93 degrees outside, I’m drinking some strawberry fizzy water.

John: My tea today is Irish breakfast tea.

Rebecca: With your lack of selection because it’s all locked up. [LAUGHTER] Mine is blackcurrant tea today.

John: Regan, Aeron, and Nancy are the co-authors of Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind and a follow-up volume Exploring More Signature Pedagogies. We’ve invited you all here today to talk a little bit about signature pedagogies and how that might relate to the situation we’re experiencing today, where faculty have suddenly, with very little notice, moved to remote teaching in the U.S. and for much of the rest of the world. Could one of you first define what is meant by a signature pedagogy?

Regan: We’ll let Nancy take this as this was her idea that got us all started.

Nancy: Okay, signature pedagogies were originally defined by Lee Shulman in 2004 when he had culminated some of his research on the professions and learned about how professors in those professions taught in ways that captured the ways of knowing, doing, thinking, and valuing of those professions. So the examples that he often gives… in law, law is typically taught with the very Socratic questioning, the spitfire Q&A, where the students need to recall details from cases on the spot, which very much resembles the courtroom; and in medicine, you have the rounds where the group of students and the doctor move around to a patient and diagnose collaboratively based on what they find in a very quick report from the patient, and that is how medicine works. And so Shulman ended his 2004 keynote at The International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning with a challenge to the academic disciplines. What are your signature pedagogies? What are the ways that you do or can teach in ways that embody the ways of knowing, doing, thinking, and valuing of your disciplines?

Aeron: In putting together this volume that we co-edited, one of the questions that came up from many of our authors was, “Are we describing the way that our discipline generally teaches, which we can think of that as a default or a traditional way? And how is that different than a signature pedagogy?” And I remember many of those conversations, and the real distinction is that the default pedagogy isn’t something that’s necessarily been examined as really helping promote ways of thinking as a practitioner, and so I think that’s an important distinction to make, too.

Regan: I think just building on that point, I remember a conversation with Angie Bauer, where she talked about how biology does it a certain way, but there are better ways to do biology signature pedagogy, and I think that was the very neat thing about their chapter, where they said, even though biology does it this way, there’s a better way to do biology.

Nancy: And I know that one thing that really triggered her and the other authors, and I don’t remember where this came from, maybe it came from Shulman, is the question of “What does it mean to think like a biologist?” And that question seems to open up a world of teaching when it comes to thinking about signature pedagogies and I think that’s really what we’re talking about.

John: So signature pedagogy, basically, is an ideal way in which people are training to become participants in the discipline, but not all disciplines have developed a very good alignment between what they’re trying to achieve in terms of student outcomes and the way in which they actually practice it, and that shows up in a number of the chapters. In fact, the chapter on economics I paid a little more attention to because it was pretty clear there that economics, at that time at least, did not have… and it still doesn’t, to a large extent… have a very well defined signature pedagogy, that there’s not always a very close alignment between how people teach and what types of skills they’d like to develop. If the purpose of a signature pedagogy is to help people understand the world through the lens of the discipline, i s this something that faculty generally make transparent to their students?

Aeron: I think no, in many cases, no. And I think that partly, that’s because as an expert, it’s so obvious and natural to us to look at the world as a historian or as a sociologist, or a biologist; that we don’t realize we’re doing it, and that’s one of the things that I think can be really lovely drawing on our experience and editing all of the different chapters is to realize that we actually do have a signature pedagogy, that we do have a disciplinary way of looking at the world, and as a faculty developer, I try very much to get instructors to think about articulating that in a way that makes sense and that’s coherent to undergraduate students, and I think this is particularly important with the general education core courses. The students in a gen ed course aren’t really going to be interested in learning a bunch of content just for the sake of providing a foundation that they can do cool stuff with, meaningful stuff with, later because that might be the only course they’re ever going to take in sociology or history or biology, so it’s so important to give them a more authentic and meaningful experience of seeing the world through that disciplinary lens. So I think this is important work to think about why your discipline matters. So right now, in this moment, if a student is struggling with being able to keep their attention span and prioritize your class over all of the other worries that they have, and child care and all of those things, why should they care about your class? And I think that we always need to articulate that. Why does history matter? Why does biology matter? We don’t always do a good job of explaining that, but it should always be something that we address. “Why should you care about my class? Why do I think it matters?” And say that in a way that makes sense to students.

John: How does this relate to the situation we’re facing now in terms of different disciplines’ approach to how they try to train their students, when suddenly they move from the modalities they’re used to into one that in some cases, they very rarely have experienced?

Aeron: I think we’re probably all seeing, as faculty developers, which is what all three of us are doing in many ways. At this point, what we’re seeing is that different departments have different anxieties, different specific anxieties about how to transfer, sometimes their default pedagogy, and sometimes we can say a signature pedagogy, but a specific way that they believe learning needs to be enacted or has often been enacted in the classroom. For example, we have a lot of science faculty saying, “Okay, so how do we do our science labs online?” or I’ve also had conversations with folks in art studio, “So how do we do metals? How do we do printmaking remotely?” and foreign languages as well. So on one hand, I think that really shows that different disciplines are impacted in different ways in terms of thinking about “how to,” and this is what’s so extraordinary about this moment, really kind of immediately, without much planning or forethought, just pick their courses up in the middle of the semester and pivot them to online. So that’s quite different than I think what Nancy is going to lead us to talk about in terms of stages two or three of this experiment, which is what would be a more reflective, thoughtful way, or evidence-based way to create a signature pedagogy online.

Nancy: And I build on that… You mentioned studio artists, and I’ve been having some really fascinating conversations with some of the artists here and they’re talking, like you said, about “How do we do printmaking or metallurgy,” or whatever but they’re also talking about “How do I do critique with a static desktop and my students are working on their art in their living rooms.” And so people are not talking about glossy and fancy technology, we’re talking about “Take your phone camera,” and the students take their phone camera and walk around and show their sculpture or their watercolor. So it’s this real foregrounding of the pedagogy even more than the technology, because I think when we talk about developing online courses, traditionally, we talk about okay, everyone is assumed to have a really nice computer with an LMS, and we focus on the LMS. But now, like Aeron said, it’s foregrounding the key pedagogies in these different departments.

Regan: I think that’s where the problem comes in, in some ways, when we talk about how well are faculty taught to train to teach in the first place. Because, interestingly enough, even before the pandemic, if we think pre-pandemic, there were many faculty in many disciplines who were not teaching their students the habits of mind of their profession. So in two volumes of multiple chapters, every author in those chapters are people who’ve taught about teaching, who’ve been reflective about that teaching, who’ve trained themselves to teach, and I think now when each of us look out at our respective campuses as directors of centers for teaching and learning, you see the vast number of individuals who aren’t really even teaching according to the signature pedagogies of their discipline, and that was pre-pandemic. Then you add the pandemic, and you build in all those factors about technology and remote teaching and things like that. So in many ways, this is a great wake up call for so many to say, “Do I even have the fundamentals of teaching down? Let me build on those fundamentals.” Because when it comes down to it, it’s engagement, right? One of the big questions that I see coming up is “How do I engage my students online?” And I think for all of us who’ve taught online before, we have a great advantage, there are a number of faculty who have never taught online and it’s a whole new way of thinking. So I think thinking about signature pedagogy is almost a luxury. I hope we can get there. Let’s get everybody going. When Nancy talked about different stages, today is day one of spring term at Oregon State, and so the last week was crazy. We have 1,300 faculty and 3,000 plus classes that had to move from face-to-face to online but all of last week, I can tell you, we weren’t fielding pedagogical questions, we were getting “How do I use Zoom? How do I use the LMS?” I think those pedagogical questions I’m looking forward to starting next week, not even this week.

Aeron: Yeah. And I want to add to that, I don’t know what day we’re on. This is the world’s longest month. [LAUGHTER] But we’ve been teaching, supposedly, pivoted to online for maybe I guess a week, officially. And I will say that last week, some of the most interesting conversations, and again, we did it primarily department by department. Some of our most interesting conversations were with faculty who were either able or forced to take that big view and just say, “What’s the most important thing? What do I really need students to experience or engage in through this semester, when the semester is over?” And actually some of the art studio faculty… I want to give a shout out to here at University of New Mexico, they’re extraordinary… they really had a very human and humane response, which goes to Regan’s point about engagement and connection and all of the evidence about belonging and they were really concerned with their students on the most human level. “How can I stay connected to my students? How are my students doing both medically and emotionally?” And they kept asking questions, “I’m worried about our graduate TAs, I’m worried about our graduate students.” So I think there have already been, here and there, some productive conversations about “Okay, we can’t continue the plan that we began when we originally planned this Spring 2020 semester. So if we’re going to scrap it, what’s most important?” And I want to give a shout out to Professor, and I don’t know how to pronounce her name, it’s Cate Denial in Knox College in history. This is on the Twitter, she shared that she had just changed her semester, and instead of the planned lessons in history, she gave them all notebooks and nice pens and said, “Record what’s happening to your individual lives right now and then we’re going to store these in the Knox College, I believe, library because your reflections are going to be part of an historical artifact.” And that is a way for us maybe to think about how signature pedagogies could eventually really revitalize these conversations. What does it mean to think like a historian? It means to think about that this will someday be history, and how do we decide what this was like? And how can students if all they remember from this semester is, “Oh, I’m actually part of history and my thoughts and my everyday experience might be interesting for folks, 20,50,100 years from now, that’s a really important thing, and it kind of a little bit segues into this conversation about the signature pedagogies in courses for majors versus gen ed students who aren’t going to be majors.

Rebecca: I think what’s really interesting is the idea of thinking about what it looks like to be an expert in a different field and how they’re going to perceive this experience in helping students process their experience through that lens, whatever that lens might be, and you’ve highlighted a couple of those examples could be really powerful. It also is one of those opportunities that we can do a multidisciplinary approach to studying something specific, which I think is really exciting.

Regan: I think what’s interesting here and the way you mentioned the historian taking history, I didn’t think about what we’re doing in this way, but we at Oregon State created a brand new class for coping with the pandemic and it’s called Punch through the Pandemic using Psychological Science. And in the lens of signature pedagogy is… talk about meta-metacognition, right? We’re psychologists offering a course on coping with the pandemic using psychological science. So there are all these different levels there going on and I bet you’ll see more of that going on as different disciplines take their lenses towards dealing with what’s going on. You know, John, you mentioned Econ, I bet all the economic stuff going on here and public health, and what a great opportunity to make learning real for our students, even more real than it has been.

Nancy: We’ve also seen this happening with literature and the art. I think of all of the examples on social media of people writing poetry, or sharing poetry, or sharing powerful photographs or works of art. Just how people are using the arts and humanities right now. As Regan said, to cope with what’s happening, we’ve been having these conversations for so long about the death of the humanities, and we are certainly seeing that the arts and humanities are far from dead. So I think they’re right about how this moment is really revitalizing a conversation about the role and the importance of all the disciplines and how they are all contributing to understanding and surviving and thriving soon, hopefully, in this moment.

Aeron: Absolutely, Nancy, and I wanted to give a shout out. A friend of mine has a daughter who’s just been accepted to Oberlin College, and as an admitted student, she got an email inviting her to be part of a two-credit interdisciplinary course that looks at economics and writing and sociology and biology and math, I think, and maybe others examining the virus and if the students who are admitted elect to take this course it would count for credit. First of all, I’m so in awe of them being able to get this faculty to develop something so rich, so quickly. Being at a large state university myself, I can’t quite picture how we would do that. But what this would do, I think, is very much as Nancy was saying, this would allow a freshman student to see, “Okay, here’s this big event that’s happened that’s impacting my life in all these ways. How does looking at the world with the lens of a sociologist, how does that help me start to answer this question of what’s happening? How does art and literature help me understand this question? How does history help me understand this current moment?” My daughter’s only in high school, but boy, I wish that she was able to take a course like that right now because what’s happening instead, and her school is lovely and her teachers are wonderful, but what at least started happening for her online schooling as a sophomore in high school, they were continuing the lessons as they had planned them and there’s such a disconnect between her lived experience and now being online and just having to do work in these separate, disparate disciplines that really aren’t connected to each other and aren’t connected to this important historical moment. And even though the virus has made this more intense, isn’t that what happens anyway? …that students go in and they take a bunch of courses that are not connected to each other, and they’re not connected to the lived realities of our students’ lives in the historical moment. So it’s making it more pointed, but I think that this is a critique we can make of higher ed and K-12 education in general.

Nancy: Just to build on that, I feel like we need to throw into the mix… some years ago, Therese Huston and Michele DiPietro did some research on how students reacted and what they needed, basically, from their professors after 9/11, after Hurricane Katrina, after some of the early school shootings, and among a range of ways that professors reacted, ultimately what these students wanted was for their professor to do something, to do something that, like Aeron says, connects whatever it is that’s happening to their lived reality. It can be small, it can be large, but I think now we’re not just talking about a moment of silence. I think what we’re seeing is an opportunity, like Aeron says, to use this moment to more fully integrate everything we know about learning across the disciplines. So I think this is a real moment to reach the lived experiences of students’ lives in the way that our disciplines are being enacted at this very moment. So it’s this fascinating kind of alignment of the stars for some really rich learning once we’re all ready to get to that stage, I think.

John: We threw out the plan for my class tonight. We’re going to be focusing on the economics of recovering from a pandemic. But one of the things I’m hearing is this notion that this is a great opportunity to think more deeply about our disciplines and about how we train our students. Instructors tend to teach in very much the same way that they have always seen and they tend not to change. There’s a lot of inertia in how we approach life, more generally. But there was a suggestion that everyone’s been getting instructions basically, to focus on “What are the most important learning outcomes that you want your students to have by the end of the class?” and “What’s the most efficient way of getting them there?” And this is forcing people to rethink everything about their teaching, and might this be a good opportunity to develop the signature pedagogy of their disciplines?

Nancy: You know, that Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins are alive and well right now and very excited because this is truly a moment of uncoverage. Aeron was the one earlier who talked about how people are really thinking, “What’s most important, what do I want my students to remember?” So we’re talking right now about everyone is going through this process of uncoverage, getting rid of that coverage model and really focusing on what’s important.

Aeron: Yeah, and as much as I agree with Nancy, and I love how you’ve been, John, sort of pivoting your course, I also want to say that I’m nervous that it may not go as optimistically this semester and, as we can all imagine, that there’s opportunities, but I’m also worried that what we’re really going to find out is that a lot of faculty find this process so frustrating. And we Regan said at the beginning of our conversation, that a lot of initial comments are about the technologies and not the pedagogy. I myself had a problem going from Zoom to a Zoom Pro account, and I got frustrated. I’m the Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and I thought, “My goodness, if I’m frustrated for a few minutes, what are the rest of the faculty experiencing?” So, this is not the ideal way for this to happen, aside from loss of life and all of that, but just pedagogically and institutionally, it’s just not the best way for this to happen, so it is an opportunity. I don’t know what we’re going to see. I’m thinking myself, and my excellent staff are spending a lot of time thinking, “How can we best support faculty in leading them into these larger, richer conversations, and away from just conversations where they’re focusing on the mechanisms of teaching?”

Regan: I think it’s also, when you think about the conversations, one of the neat things that I keep trying to remind people of when I talk to them about the remote switch is when you go online and when you are relying on Zoom, but more importantly, you’re relying more on your LMS. Now the opportunities to essentially have one-on-one conversations increases dramatically, and I think what’s going to happen, that we haven’t started talking enough about yet, is what if, in two weeks from now or three weeks from now, faculty are sick and students are sick. I think there are many disciplines where we focus so much on the dynamics of the course that we don’t think about “How is the student actually taking this?” and what’s going on in their lives that could influence how they experience the course, and I think this is the time that that realization and openness is more important than ever. And I’m sure we’ve all had conversations with individuals who will say, “Look, that’s University 101,” or “That’s Academic Student Services’ job, not mine,” and I think right now the realization is no, it’s all of our jobs.

Nancy: And Regan, I really appreciate you saying that because part of me is cringing a little bit at the idea of an opportunity because all of us right now, we’re seeing not only the people getting sick and people dying, but as Aeron said earlier, faculty are first and foremost right now worried about their students. Yes, we have to make all this transition to an LMS, to Zoom, to whatever, but first and foremost, “Are my students okay?” Those are the conversations that I’m hearing and, “Are my colleagues okay?” So right now again, we’re in that early stage where I don’t know if it’s an opportunity for anything right now. R ight now we have a moment of care for each other and our students just to make it work, and just to survive and thrive together, then we’ll get to some, I think, pedagogical opportunities.

Rebecca: I think the reminder of care is really important, care for ourselves, care for each other, and I think students are demonstrating care for their faculty as well. There’s a lot of stories of students reaching out to faculty to make sure they’re okay too and I think that just demonstrates how we’re all human and that humanness is coming out right now. And the care that goes both ways actually is coming out in these communities. So I think that’s really important. And being forgiving of yourself as you’re teaching in these crisis moments. It’s not gonna be perfect, and I think reminding everyone that it’s not going to be perfect is a good thing to be doing. But then looking forward to, not in a joyful way necessarily, the idea that we may need to be planning for this again in the summer, and in the fall, depending on how the virus experience unfolds, that’s when some of these signature pedagogy ideas could maybe start to be implemented.

Aeron: I think that the way that I’m seeing signature pedagogies is the way that disciplines are reaching out and I know there’s a lot of resources being shared by historians. I know there’s folks in the sciences that are sharing resources and in math, so that is a movement toward a sort of disciplinary signature pedagogy approach, which is “How can we share methods and ways of engaging in this new modality that will be effective?” What, of course, we hope eventually can be afforded is some sort of evidence-based way of evaluating the effectiveness of these new modalities. For the record, I’m not saying that we should study this semester, I just mean, in general, that we do want to go toward evidenced based. But, thinking about compassion and flexibility, which has been our mantra in every department consultation, compassion and flexibility for our students and for ourselves. Again, shouldn’t that be our mantra all the time, because even though we don’t always have this many people facing a health crisis and employment crisis, and mental health crisis, we have students facing those things and faculty and staff facing significant health challenges, and mental health challenges, and economic challenges all the time. It’s just not all happening in the same way. And so probably you’ve all seen and read studies and disability rights folks saying “Well now you know what it’s like to really have to think about these health concerns and to feel isolated,” and I think that’s a really important part of this conversation, that some form of this virus has been going around all the time. People have been affected in many ways, people have been losing jobs, people have been overcome by stress that makes them unable to perform cognitively at the level that we keep expecting, so I wanted to throw that out there too.

Rebecca: I think it’s really interesting to see how all these things that tend to be invisible have become visible, and that maybe is a really useful outcome of this experience.

Nancy: This really is a moment of forced empathy, if you will, and it’s hard not to think about how desperately we needed to empathize with each other in the historical moment we were in a few months ago. And now we have this moment where we’re having to really think about people across the globe and people who are very different from us in ways that I think a lot of people haven’t, so it is this moment of care and empathy and compassion.

Regan: I just sort of, especially at this time where many faculty may be struggling with “How do I teach this in this format? How do I do what I normally did in this remote teaching environment?” And it actually reminds me of something when we edited the first book in particular, where I know for me, as a social scientist, reading all the other chapters was really neat to go, “Oh, that’s how you do it there. That’s how you do it there.” And I know something that the three of us shared with all our authors, and even the readers, is don’t just read the chapter from your discipline, read the other chapters. And at this time, I think of that because I go, you know what? There may be another discipline’s signature pedagogy that may help you in your discipline at this time, and I think that’s just another neat thing about nicely describing a signature pedagogy for your discipline, because the reality is some of the elements and how you do it may really help somebody from a different discipline… and the example about the art critique and the phone… yes, that makes perfect sense for a sculpture, but that also makes sense If I want to do something in a different format in what I’m doing.

Nancy: Actually, Regan, that’s a great example because the conversation with the artist and using the phone for critique came as some scientists were talking about doing a biology lab with students with their phones so they could see what the students were doing. so that’s exactly what you’re describing, an example of one discipline working out its signature pedagogy in this environment, and another saying, “Aha, that’s how we can do ours.”

Rebecca: We’ve had a lot of those interesting intersections, not just at this time, which has certainly happened. We’ve had a really nice social media group that’s been helping each other out and sharing some of those ideas and examples, but also, I’ve run an accessibility fellows program that is cross disciplinary too and those kinds of things happen all the time, where it’s like I’m trying to overcome this accessibility barrier, and then someone from another discipline has encountered something, it’s not exactly the same but has some of the same kinds of issues, like in sciences, and the arts, for example, certainly helped each other out a lot in that area. So I think it’s always fun and maybe a nice opportunity to get to know colleagues and ways of knowing that are different from what you always have experienced before. One other question that I had thinking about signature pedagogies is maybe a lot of disciplines haven’t really thought about where remote plays into their discipline, or what it means to be a professional, and if this is an opportunity to think about what kinds of remote experiences actually happen in our disciplines, as professionals or the kinds of things that we engage in that maybe we might start incorporating into our classes anyways. And this might be an opportunity to experiment, maybe not right in this moment, but maybe as we plan in moving forward.

Nancy: I’m just thinking about all of the authors I’ve seen who’ve come out and said “If you’d like for me to visit your class, now I can do that,” or virtual book launches. So I just think even in my discipline of English, how it’s making the authors, and publishers, so much more accessible.

Aeron: Yeah, it’s interesting. We’ve had a little bit of a controversy here at the University of New Mexico. Arts and sciences, I believe, last semester issued a statement saying that faculty have to be present a certain number of days on campus, and I think that this comes from an understandable desire to make sure that faculty are accessible to their graduate students and on committees and that they’re doing service to their department. But we’re starting to see already, even before this current moment, that there are faculty who are just as engaged, if not more so, remotely than folks who are next door in their office with the door shut. So that notion of what does it mean to be present? What does it mean to be engaged? What does it mean to do good work and be a good colleague, I think is being further troubled in this semester.

John: Following up on that a little bit, one of the things that a lot of faculty had said is that they’re going to continue using Zoom or other tools to connect, to hold office hours, because we have a lot of students who commute who just can’t make it very easily to office hours because of schedules, and they found it really helpful as a way of students showing what they’re working on, sharing the screens, and so forth. And my department is continuing a workshop series, but it’s now going to be offered over Zoom and that makes it a whole lot easier for people who are more distant, who don’t have to commute into campus. So, I think we’ll see a lot of those things being rethought when we return to something that’s a semblance of normal.

Nancy: And it’s really helping us push back against that narrative that you cannot have community in virtual environments. That’s been a narrative for a long time, and we’ve known, in pockets, that that’s not necessarily the case, that it can be done, if done intentionally and deliberately, and I think we’re seeing that right now on a global scale. So, I think you’re right. Redefining presence, redefining community, redefining collaboration with great implications for the classroom.

Regan: And I think something else that’s going on here is, to build on that a little bit, we’re discovering some exemplary ways to use this technology that are being shared more, but that probably would not have been shared as much if this was not going on. I think within every discipline, there’s a lot of variance, and there are some faculty who have better developed signature pedagogies who are maybe practicing them more, and some who are not, and I think with the amount of sharing that’s been going on now, I think there’s a little bit of an equalization or where more people are getting access to a “best practice” of doing something that they wouldn’t have been paying attention to before. I’m liking that notion of edits. “Here’s how we can do labs better, here’s how we can do our critiques better.” That’s been shared more than I think it was before, so the way that is getting more scholarship on teaching and learning out there than I think it would have.

Nancy: Another really important thing that’s happening right now is exactly what Regan’s talking about, this sense of sharing. The social media communities built up around teachers, educators, people in specific disciplines sharing resources, sharing advice, sharing experiences on a global scale. During the first week when this happened, I was helping to moderate a Facebook group for educators started by a woman in Thailand who I’ve never met, and in five days, there were over 90,000 members of this group. So we started to divide them down by grade, but just the level of sharing is unprecedented, to say the least. So I really appreciate Regan’s point about the role of scholarship in that sharing, and earlier Aeron talked about the role of evidence-based practices as part of that sharing.

Aeron: That sense of generosity that goes across disciplines and across institutions and across countries as well, I think that is the most powerful message from this crisis as globally, we are all connected, and we’re going to sink or swim together. And we’ve seen even on our campus, a lot of generosity, and folks who are more experienced with online tools volunteering to be consultants, participating graduate students offering, volunteering as well, who are more savvy with tools, and it’s really been lovely to see that.

Rebecca: If we think a little bit about next steps or moving beyond the next few weeks, which are really urgent, and we finish up the semester and we start thinking about reflection. What are some of the things that you want to encourage faculty to reflect on as they move forward?

Regan: I know from a center perspective, something that I’ve been actively trying to do, even right now, is trying to anticipate what the next needs of the faculty would be, and I think, like we’ve all talked about, right now it’s still stage one, “Let’s get remote and let’s get comfortable doing that.” And I think we might anticipate those next level of questions. The next level of needs is key, but I think, again, building on what we just said in terms of the sharing, I think what’s happening is these really neat signature pedagogies are emerging from different schools and different colleges, and I think being able to capture that and then connect with some of what’s been emerging at other institutions is pretty key. I mean, I know locally when I speak to, let’s say, engineering, I hear certain ways that tackling the lab situation and they talk to forestry, and then try to get to share across there, and I think the immediate next step seems to be alright, let’s come up with a better way of sharing these signature pedagogies even amongst other universities in the same disciplines, I think would be pretty neat way to go. So, it’s informal right now, and I think we’re tiptoeing towards a better way of doing it.

Aeron: We’re in the process also of thinking about our phase two after the triage and I think one thing seems apparent, and that is that we’re going to always need to have a remote component or an online component. I hope that in moving ahead that faculty who hadn’t interacted with our teaching center will realize, “Well, okay, this is a resource.” And also will be a little bit less nervous about having Zoom meetings and putting things online. But I think the most powerful thing will come when people, after this semester is over and all of us sit down and think, “Okay, what was lost by pivoting to remote teaching and learning and what wasn’t lost?” And I think a lot of that, going back to how is it changing us as professionals to work remotely? I’ve spent probably as much time as the rest of you thinking, “Okay, what do I miss? And what, strangely, do I not really miss that much? How productive can we be in non-traditional ways, and how engaged can we be in non-traditional ways?” That will be interesting, I think, when the dust settles and when this semester is over and we really have some time to reflect, for us to ask “What was lost? What is it that we want to build into our courses for the fall, and what do we realize that we can live without?”

Nancy: That idea, that part of the reflection is prioritizing, based on “What did I learn would work well, and what can I live without?” as Aeron said… What I actually would like to see people reflecting on afterwards has nothing to do with signature pedagogies. It’s more “What did they learn about being human?” And what did they learn about, I hesitate to say, work-life balance, but that’s the phrase that we all recognize. So much of what’s happened over the last few weeks has forced people to really not only think about “What’s important in my course, what can I get rid of and what do I really need to focus on in my course?” but with our entire lives, and I think we’re going to, in a few weeks or months, start looking back and really re- evaluate how we spend our time, how we spend our time in our courses, how we spend our time preparing for our courses, how we spend our time as faculty, how we spend our time as friends and partners and family members and humans. And I think all of that coming together, that kind of integrated way of thinking about our lives is parallel, or maybe the other side of the coin of, the integrated way the disciplines right now are helping to make sense of what’s happening to us. This is really just all about integrative thinking.

Regan: This is the scary reality for me, that at the end of this we’re gonna ask the same question of both our lives and our classes, which is what’s really important, especially when we think about learning outcomes. At the end of all this are those learning outcomes that so many people sweat so much to cover, was that really important? How our learning outcomes gonna change, I bet that’s gonna be different coming this fall.

Aeron: Backwards design your life.

Regan: There you go, there you go.

Rebecca: I think one thing that’s interesting that you’re highlighting is the idea that to be able to articulate your own disciplinary way of looking at things, you almost need to know what other ways of looking at things are. So, by looking at other chapters of your book, for example, or exploring as we’re figuring out ways to handle our current situation from other disciplines, it’s a good way to then be able to articulate the ways that we actually learn and see the world in our own discipline. By knowing what we don’t do, [LAUGHTER] can be really helpful. Our worlds have collided, there is no silo between my personal life and my work life at this moment, as we noticed when my two-year-old walked in earlier when we were chatting, and I think that that’s important, that integrated way of thinking has been forced because there is no possibility of silo at the moment. Before it was really easy to exist in silos or really separate our personal lives from our work lives.

Nancy: Remember, it wasn’t that long ago when a man was being interviewed on the news and his child walked into the room, and that hit the news all over the place because it was, “This doesn’t happen, and isn’t that cute,” and now it’s just reality.

John: But it does open up some possibilities of better connections with students during this event, because they are in their home, they’re really scared, and I’ve noticed, at least, that they’re much more likely to open up about their concerns than they would be in a typical class session, because in class they see it as very narrow, very focused… when they’re sitting at home and they’re worried and they come in a little bit early or they stay a little later, they’re much more likely to open up about all of their issues and talk about how the class is going as well, but also their concerns and what sort of barriers they have in ways that many faculty don’t normally discuss with students, or at least not in a large-class session. Going back to a point that was made just a few minutes ago, there’s the suggestion that for gen ed classes, it’s really important to convey to students why it’s important and so forth, but it’s also important within disciplines. This came up a little bit in the chapter on economics where economists often say that they’re trying to prepare students for grad school, yet those students make up probably less than 1% of most of the students in our classes, and that’s something that perhaps a lot of faculty don’t always think about. And if we do focus a little bit more on the things that motivate students and why students are in our class and trying to help explain to students why this is important and why it’s interesting, maybe the focus that people are getting now might help people work to address that more generally to improve their disciplinary approaches as well.

Aeron: As someone with a PhD in the humanities, I don’t think we should be thinking about educating future graduate students at all. I think we should be thinking about, in gen ed courses, educating future citizens and human beings.

John: We always end our podcast with a question. What’s next?

Regan: I think something that has a lot of pedagogical implications I know, and life implications, is how long are we going to look at this as, and I think I’m really glad that we’ve moved from the “Let’s reassess every two weeks,” to a school is closed through the fall, or at least to the summer. And I think decisions like that really help people cope and get control, and I think that’s something… I know it’s a mid-range plan… is really getting people used to the fact that we’re looking at minimum this for three months, and don’t do something just for today, change that house around, change that routine around now, because who knows, and I’m one of the most optimistic people normally and I continue to be so, but I just worry about when our students actually start getting sick and when our faculty start getting sick, because they are going to, and I think a lot of what we’re talking about, I saw a meme just last night, “The Titanic’s going down and the musicians are still playing.” This is happening and we’re worried about remote teaching, and it’s important, but I don’t know if we’re having enough discussions about the big picture.

Rebecca: Our contingencies need contingencies.

John: One of my colleagues mentioned that she received a note from one of her students that her mother has been diagnosed with this, and we’re going to be seeing a lot of that, that is a serious issue.

Nancy: What’s next for me, perfectly in line with what Regan was saying, what’s next for me is, it’s a beautiful day outside. We’re on lockdown, but we’re allowed to go outside if we stay away from people, so I’m going to go for a walk.

Rebecca: It’s raining here, but I’m going to do the same thing.

Regan: I teach online in an hour, but I think I’m going to take the dog outside in the meantime.

Aeron: And I’ve never been so happy to be in under-populated New Mexico, where really you never are going to be within six feet of someone, and so I’m going to go take a nice long hike. Shout out to SUNY, I’m a SUNY grad, SUNY Binghamton, SUNY Buffalo.

John: Thank you for joining us. This has been a wonderful conversation.

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you so much. Really good conversation.

Aeron: Thanks for inviting us, it was such a good excuse. Well, nice to meet you too, but so nice to see you, Regan and….

Regan: Good to see you guys.

Nancy: Yay.

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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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