292. From Suarez’s Basement

Students often do not see themselves as having the potential to become the experts that will define their field. In this episode, Francisco Suarez joins us to discuss his podcast project which is designed to supplement class activities and to connect students with professionals. Francisco is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at SUNY Oswego and as the host of From Suarez’s Basement, a video podcast that was a recipient of the 2021 Communicator Award of Excellence by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: Students often do not see themselves as having the potential to become the experts that will define their field. In this episode, we discuss a podcast project designed to supplement class activities and to connect students with professionals.

[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: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Francisco Suarez. Francisco is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at SUNY Oswego and as the host of From Suarez’s Basement, a video podcast that was a recipient of the 2021 Communicator Award of Excellence by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts. Welcome, Francisco.

Francisco: Thank you for having me. This is awesome. I’m glad to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: … Francisco are you drinking tea?

Francisco: I’m drinking a delicious tea, it’s an imaginary tea. [LAUGHTER] I have this beautiful tea cup that I’m opening right now… sorry for the sound… that say Tea for Teaching, which is the name of the podcast. And yeah, having a delicious hot tea. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I am drinking a cranberry blood orange black tea from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds nice. I don’t think I’ve had that one. John,

John: We have plenty of it.

Rebecca: I’m sure I could stop buy and get some.

Francisco: How about you?

Rebecca: I have just an English breakfast today. I think. No. Yes. It’s been a long day already. Yeah, I think it’s Awake tea which, I think, it is English breakfast. It has a name called Awake, but it is technically an English breakfast tea. That was way more information than anybody needs.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss your video podcast. Could you tell us a little bit about the focus of the podcast?

Francisco: Sure. First, thank you for having me. It’s always good to be between friends nd this is a very cozy environment actually. I have to say we’re having tea. Well, From Suarez’s Basement, you can imagine, [LAUGHTER] it was created in the basement of my house during the pandemic, I was trying to find something to do to don’t go crazy or make my family more crazy than we already were stuck at home and to put my creativity to work. So I decided to start a podcast that has to do with experts in the communication media and the arts, visual storytelling in specific because that’s what I love. And the idea was to create bridges between experts in those fields, and the audience, which is very much concentrating students and faculty. That doesn’t mean that the podcasts doesn’t have a general audience. So I started in the basement of my house, very small, like everything that we started with a small idea, and having grow very much, which I love it. And again, we have conversation with those experts that are working behind some of your favorite TV shows, or films, produced shows, artists, musicians, you name it, anybody who can bring me a good conversation, that’s where I’m interested in. You can sometimes have guests like me talk a lot or guests that don’t talk a lot… nothing… zero. But that’s how we start.

Rebecca: You mentioned that you started it during the pandemic to keep those around you from going crazy and yourself…

Francisco: Ah yes.

Rebecca: …not to go crazy. But clearly you had some other motivations…

FRANCSICO: Yes.

Rebecca: …probably around students and things. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Francisco: Yeah, of course, the part ofnot going crazy is the joke part. The serious part about the podcast is that I believe very much in the interaction of my students with the professionals in the field. I’m in love with education, I’m in love with the process of mentoring the students. So to give this opportunity to students to have conversation with cinematographers and set design, costume design, you name it, was always the intention, to create this connection between the students and those experts. Because you know, the funny part… we all are professors here… a lot of our students in those chairs, and they never realize that that person that you admire so much was once sitting in that chair, too. They see us so far away. It’s like, “Oh, my God, I’m going to talk to the set designer of Bridgerton.” It’s like, “Wow, this is amazing,” like, “but this person was you in some point in life.” So if we can create that connection, I think, that’s what is the beauty of the podcast is to see the students realizing that that person or the other end is no much different than you. So the motivation is to really keep my students engaged and optimistic about the future, especially when the pandemic hit, I think, we all were not very optimistic. But students in general were like, “Okay, what is a career’s going to be? Where I’m going to find a job?” So I say, if these people that are actually working in this industry can give some kind of wisdom to the students, I think they will feel a little more better, then things will get better. So that’s how we start but again, little by little it grows. So it’s all about education, connection, networking, and created a sense of belonging to industry. That’s what I like.

Rebecca:I know one of the things that John and I experienced when we started this podcast is we started with some of our local colleagues and started branching out and then we were continuously surprised by how many people would agree to come on to share their experience and expertise. And you’ve had some really wonderful guests on your podcast. Can you talk a little bit about what that experience has been like?

Francisco: Yeah, it has been fantastic. I cannot say who is coming in season five, but now I’m just recording season five, and have this amazing conversation with a Grammy Award winning singer, and I’m like I cannot believe I’m talking to this person. But not only that is a conversation that makes it so special, truly, truly special. So how that happened is like everything right? It’s true. When I started my first guest, and all my guests are important, but what I’m saying were people that I knew: friends, professors from here, from SUNY Oswego, until I start getting the point where my first big guess was the production designer for Game of Thrones. She’s not only produced Game of Thrones, and a lot of other TV shows and movies, so she was a big deal. And because of her, then other people start following her. I think, and this is important, because the podcasts have an educational component to it, that makes a big difference. When I send the emails to the managers or the agents of these experts, I’m always very clear this is not about just gossiping. I don’t want to know if you broke up with your boyfriend, or whatever. This is about, I wanted to understand that this is an educational tool. And I think that educational component have allowed these very prestigious guests to say, “You know what, I can take 20, 25 minutes of my time, and be sure that I can contribute to the education of the listeners of the podcast. So little by little have been growing and as soon as you get kind of a big one then other ones start following. But like I say, for me, the titles, if you want to call it titles, or awards are not necessarily the attractive aspect. Is this guest someone who’s going to give me a good conversation, and that I’m going to learn something new from it. So you can have Oscar winners and Grammy winners and Emmy winners and all these stuff, but in fact, I’m not going to say who, but I was very excited about this guest, I was like, “Oh my god, this is awesome.” Oh my, it was so difficult [LAUGHTER]… dry, dry, like yes or no answers. In fact, at some point, I was doubting to air the podcast, because it really wasn’t too much there. But again, I say, “Well, it’s a big name like it will bring other people into the equation.” So I did air it, you can guess. What I’m saying is that you never know what you’re going to get. But the process of getting these prestige experts are getting easier because of the educational component of the podcast, and because now the list is getting better and better.

John: One of the things we found following up on this was that we had a few big guests as you did that brought in a much larger audience, but one thing that really amazed us was how many people would agree. I found it much more difficult to get some of our own faculty and the people we know to join than people we’ve never met. That surprised me quite a bit in terms of how many people agreed to be on it. Do you get a lot of positive responses?

Francisco: Yes and no. I sent around 20 email, from those 20 emails, I get around three. So that’s the average more or less. It takes me 20 emails to get three of the possible guests. And then it’s a back and forth between agent, a manager, and then time commitment. So it’s difficult in that sense. But I get around three from 20 emails that I send. And then from people that are my friends, and now that the podcast is growing, the other ones are like “I can be in your podcast, like I would love to talk about this and that. I found people from the UK that are big, big, big in their field, I just interviewed the director of Ted Lasso, which is one of my favorite shows right now. He’s from Ireland, actually, the sweetest guy ever. And he was so humble, so easy to talk. So for some reason, some people from the UK seems to be very approachable in compare with maybe some people here in the US where it’s like, “Oh, he doesn’t have the time or she doesn’t have the time or they don’t have the time,” like “email us in three months.” And I do. In three months I’m going to be emailing you. It’s cool to see students like “How professor? How? You say “because I told you nothing is impossible.” Like that is the point. If you ask this question to yourself, and I say this to a lot of my students that want advice, “What do I have to lose?” And the answer is probably nothing. I don’t understand why you will not do it. So I don’t have nothing to lose to send an email to Tom Hanks. What is I can’t get? No he’s too busy. Which probably he is. But you will be surprised. Maybe the guy is like, “Well, yeah, sure I come 20 minutes to talk to this crazy Latino guy.” I don’t know, but I don’t have nothing to lose. Right? And that is the beauty of it, when students see reflecting themselves into the process, that issue is not much that you can lose.

Rebecca: How have you used your podcast in teaching and within your department?

Francisco: The teaching aspect is that if you go to the website, which is fsbasement.com, we have there a tab that is called teaching resources. What I do is I record both, I record video and I record audio, in the two formats. Those videos are being used already by faculty members not only in my department, but outside of SUNY Oswego, which is also very excited when I get an email from a professor from NYU, or from USA, or any other university to say, “Hey, you know, I’m loving what you’re doing, I got to show your podcast about production design or set design in my Set Design class, because the amount of knowledge studies combined in those 30 minutes is amazing. It really is.” My goal is hopefully to write a book, not necessarily about podcasting, but about the knowledge absorbed to those… we are now season five, so we’re going to have already like sixty episodes already produced. But I ask, for example, one of the questions I asked to the guests, that is a common question is about perseverance and rejection. And it’s so good to hear so many different guests talking about how to deal with rejection, and what it means to persevere in an industry that you most have that in you. So is a lot of knowledge there that for me, I want to be sure that the podcast doesn’t end just with the first air of the podcast. So professors of any university can go to the website, go into the tab of teaching resources, and they can found by category… if you teach cinematography is a bunch of videos there with cinematography; if you teach set design, there’s a bunch of video of set design. So it allows easy access to these interviews that are more or less a short masterclass, I think is great.

John: Do you use assignments with your classes based on the podcast? And if so, what types of learning activities do you use?

Francisco: And in fact, if you go to that tab, not only i give you the video, but I give you already what you can do in your class. So it’s basically you go there, and you have a whole day of lecture where you can watch the video and then you say, “Okay, you can do these activities based in what the video is about it.” So if you go there, you not only have the video, but you have activities or questions related to the video. You can do kind of a short quiz of okay, what do you learn through these videos? So the questions that are already there. The actual episodes have the questions that we did in the episode. So if you are a professor and you’re looking for a specific question about how to build a set in the desert, you probably will find it there. And you just can use that piece of information for it. So each of the episodes have an assignment, put it that way. It is a lot of work, because we need to pull apart the episode and be sure that what is here, where were the questions, what kind of assignments we can do is some bit of work, but I love it. That’s exactly what the podcast is about.

Rebecca: Well with all those nice assets that you have going with the podcast, I imagine that’s why you’ve decided to do seasons…[LAUGHTER] to help manage that a little bit.

Francisco: Here’s the thing. The market is telling you, I want my podcast delivery very much at the same day, same time, with this timing periods. Our podcast is bi-weekly. So is every two weeks that come out. But having seasons allow me to say okay, we need to get a break. Normally the break is during the semester, because I’m too busy with other stuff. And then I use summer and part of the fall semester to do everything I have to do with production, post-production, and then I accumulate, let’s say around 12 episodes. I try of course, as information is no by any specific time. So we don’t talk about things that happen necessarily in a specific week or month or things like that. So I can air an episode six months later if I want. But yeah, I like it. I like to talk like you can see. [LAUGHTER] So it’s perfect for me. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’re still on our first season….

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: …and a very, very long season. We did have a break last summer, literally actually, when a car ran over my leg and broke it. So we took four weeks off for that.

Rebecca: ….first four weeks ever, John.

John: …the only time we’ve ever missed publishing an episode. It’s nice to be back on track. At times a break would be appealing…

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: …but it’s still fun, so we’re still doing it.

Rebecca: There was a design education podcast that I listen to a lot that, it wasn’t video, but it has a similar kind of feel to your podcasts that I used to use all the time when I was teaching our capstone class. And I’d pull out like portfolio ideas and application ideas and like collate little snippets from various things and students really responded to of hearing someone else say the same things that I would have said anyways.

Francisco: That is always the case, right? It’s crazy. It is. it is. Listen, is no easy job. But for me the hard part is not the production process, is more the breaking noise process. Because of digital era, we are very lucky to be sitting here and having a great conversation and for me podcasts is the new mass communication, a way for people to be able to express themselves. I always say it’s not about quantity. It’s about quality. He doesn’t matter if you have 200 listeners to 2000. As long as 200 listeners come to you every week, that’s what you’re looking for. But the issue is, because of the digital era, there’s so much noise out there, unbelievable amount of noise. So I think I spend more time sometimes not even producing and getting the guests and all this stuff, is how I’m guarantee these awesome interviews I have with any of my guests can reach where I want you to reach. So the whole TikTok, on Instagram, and is quite a lot. Because again, there’s a lot of noise out there. So you need to figure out what is the best way to reach your audience, for sure.

John: You talked a little bit about how these podcasts can be used in classes, how have students responded in your classes to the podcast.

Francisco: Very good, I think very good for two reasons. First, because again, the main goal of the podcast is to create a bridge between the experts and the students. And the actual episode brings so much knowledge to the students. But I do see it’s something very special when students see his own professor struggling with a project and putting the time and the effort in that project. It’s almost like I’m walking the walk, I think it’s how you say here, right?

Rebecca: Um hm.

Francisco: I think that creates a student sense of okay, this guy is also trying to get to a goal to a specific dream that I have. So I think that create a very interesting relationship with your students. I don’t talk about how you do your podcast in the sense of my own experience, but not only the sense of what the theoretical aspect, or academic aspect of the podcast is, but by my own experience. So that creates a different type of relationship with your students. But they have been reacting very well. I put them… I don’t overdo it, because I feel also like, “Okay, this guy is like so full of himself. Now, he wanted me to watch every single episode.” But when it’s an episode for example, in my screenwriting class there’s two episodes there that for me are gold. One is with the writer of Only Murders in the Building, he’s a-co creator and writer of it. And he explained very interestingly, how to write for a crime show and how it works. And then the other one was, he’s a creator and writer of Inside Number 9, which is a British show. She’s fantastic and he had been the reason for so many years. And he gave a lot of good, good information about character development, what it means to develop your character first before you develop your plot. So I use those episodes as an amazing way for them to be able to get that information from these experts. So then I test them the next day, they have like a short quiz about it, just to be sure that they really watch or listen to the podcast. So they have been reacting quite well. One of the assignments I’m doing in my screenwriting class is that they need to write an episode of Inside Number 9, based on what they learned from the actual creator of the show. And that worked really, really well. It’s very interesting to see what they write. The whole premise of the show is episodical, so it means each episode is a different story. So they don’t match. But one of the things about the show is that it always takes place in one specific location. So there is no switching location. So it can be Inside Number 9 can be inside warehouse number nine, or inside aeroplane number nine. So all the plots take place inside that space, and that’s very difficult to do. [LAUGHTER] And they are brilliant. The stories are fantastic, so I 100% recommend that. What are you watching these days?

Rebecca: I don’t want much watch TV. [LAUGHTER] Not a good conversation. I don’t watch much TV. [LAUGHTER]

John: I don’t either, but Only Murders in the Building was a really good show.

deal.

Francisco: It was amazing.

John: I’m looking forward to the third season.

Francisco: Yeah, I’m very looking forward to it too. It’s very well written.

John: Meryl Streep is going to be on the third season.

Francisco: Yeah.

Rebecca: If the target audience isn’t like five year olds. I’m not watching it, you know. [LAUGHTER]

John: It might work very well work, hough, because you’ve got Steve Martin there and you have….

Francisco: Martin Short. Yes, yes, and Selena Gomez, which has been a revelation to me how good of an actor she is. But also love to see her interacting with these more mature actors. And it’s a great, great show. I am a TV junker because, well, first, that’s what I teach. [LAUGHTER] But I watch from reality TV to, you name it. And the beauty of it is that streaming media have allowed openness of storytelling that we didn’t have before. Maybe a little oversaturated at this point, but it still, I think, is in for our students here how at SUNY-Oswego or any students who want to pursue storytelling it’s a fantastic time because 20 years ago, maybe, the hallway was very narrow. You go to NBC, CBS, the regular networks. Now it’s like hunting season all these…Apple TV and Hulu are looking for new content and that allow our students who want to pursue that to have a better opportunity to tell the stories that we didn’t have before.

Rebecca: It’s certainly an exciting time to be in that field.

Francisco: It is, it is. I watch a lot of things and sometimes, I’m amazed. So much like washing many films, the production value. Well, Game of Thrones is a good example of a brilliant production design where I always say, in order for you to have a good visual storytelling, you need three aspects: good writing, good acting, and good production value. If one of those three aspects are no present fully in their full potential, you lost me as an audience. So writing, I started watching shows where something’s like, “Man, this is bad writing,” like the way their characters are talking feel very cheesy. Then acting, well, we know what acting does, right? You can really have a beautiful script. But if I don’t believe that you are rocking hard, oh, I’m out. And then production design, I’d say, “Well, if the dragon doesn’t like a dragon, I’m out.” So it’s the combination of those three things. And I think what I tried to teach in my classes is that… depends on the class, right? …if you are in the screenwriting class, you are concentrated in the screenwriting aspect, but if you are in the video production, isn’t only about how to frame, isn’t only about how to shoot, it’s the production value. And I love when students get out of their dorms because I say “I don’t want to see the lake, please don’t show me the lake, I see the lake too many times at this point and try to film your stuff outside your dorm room, so you feel real.” So of course, they need to work harder. And they need to go to downtown to a diner and ask for permission to record a dating scene in the diner and I say, “Well, that makes a huge difference.” It’s not the same to record a dating scene in Lake Effect Cafe here on campus grounds, going to an actual diner create a different reality. So anyway, that’s my approach. But that’s what I love so much watching TV to actually peek in those things.

Rebecca: Yeah, I can imagine students really digging the idea of getting to hear from a writer or a producer or a set designer, and then doing a project based on what they’re saying. Because it does provide that frame for something that feels real…

Francisco: Yes.

Rebecca: …and not forced, which I think a lot of students struggle with.

Francisco: Yeah, the other thing that I think is important is that I try to have co-hosts in the show. And I invite students to be part of the co-hosting, because they bring a completely different perspective. I could have my very fancy intelligent questions, I guess, but the students really have all the questions… actually sometimes surprised me. it’s like, “Wow, this is such a good question.” So bringing students is really important for me to have those co-hosts. And the beauty of it is, I do have three examples at this point, of students who have been co-hosting my shows, and these three students are now working for the guests, because that relationship is established because the guest was so impressed so impressed with the questions and the maturity of the co-host. I love it when someone says “Professor Suarez, you’re not going to believe it, I’m going to do an internship with blah, blah, blah. And then they call me and say “By the way, I’m actually not working full time as an editor. I have a student who’s doing a first set design called a set design assistant for some shows in NBC. But that bridge was because of the podcast. And that’s what it’s all about. In the website actually is the final tab of the website is something called mentoring program where students can sign up… somebody who is looking for a mentor. But also my guests can sign as a mentoree, so they can actually dedicate 40 minutes of a student meeting with some of these students. So it’s all about creating this community. And you’re a good example, the podcast is just a tip of the iceberg. It’s just a sense of communication. But it’s about creating a community of people who love education, who are in education and academia. And so I think that sense of community is very important for me.

John: We always end with the question, what’s next?

Francisco: What is next? That is a great question. I want to find other platforms to distribution of the podcast. That is very important to me. So more people that I can reach the better. I think that’s a goal we all podcasts have. Not for the sense of the quantity again is for the sense of the quality. Now, From Suarez’s Basement is a PBS WCNY radio station, which is great because it’s giving a huge platform of people listening to it. Of course, it’s in their regular Apple podcasts and Spotify, and those kind of regular things. But I would like to see if I can get all the kind of distribution, especially the visual aspect of it, to see if we can put those videos to work in another way. But more than that, my aspirations is to be persistent, to keep going. I think that is important. I think that this project, in the specific, are teaching me that if you put in the hard work and you keep going, it get back to you. And I think students in this day, or this generation in general, we are living in a time where immediate gratification is all about you post something, and you get 200 likes in two seconds. So they feel like, “Oh, if I don’t get 200 likes, or if I don’t get 200 followers, or I’m going to drop this, this doesn’t work.” And then I’m saying, “Oh, actually, that’s not how it works.” When you say what is next is to remind myself that this is a long trip. And I’m willing to go into that trip and see what cool things come on my way, awards or new guests or being here with you guys. But, what I what is next? I’m not sure. Hopefully, again, reach more audience and the podcast is used more and more by other universities. And the book, I want to write a book, again, not necessarily about how to podcast. There’s so many books already out there about podcasting and what kind of equipment do you need. I want a book that brings the experience of these experts into a text that, if you read it, you can learn very much from these interviews, for sure.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for sharing this great project with us.

Francisco: No, thank you for having me. This is fantastic. And I’m loving my imaginary tea here. [LAUGHTER]

[MUSIC]

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.

[MUSIC]

105. Globalizing Classes

Improvements in communication and information technology have resulted in an increasingly interconnected global economy. In this episode, Dr. Blase Scarnati joins us to discuss ways in which our classes can be modified to help prepare our students to productively participate in this global environment. Blase is a Professor of Musicology and the Director of Global Learning in the Center for International Education at Northern Arizona University.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Improvements in communication and information technology have resulted in an increasingly interconnected global economy. In this episode, we discuss ways in which our classes can be modified to help prepare our students to productively participate in this global environment.

[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]

Rebecca: Today our guest is Dr. Blase Scarnati. Blase is a Professor of Musicology and the Director of Global Learning in the Center for International Education at Northern Arizona University. Welcome back, Blase.

Blase: Thank you. Really glad to be back with you both.

John: We’re glad to have you here again.

Our teas today are:

Blase: I’m drinking my everyday green tea. Chinesegreen tea Dragonwell Long Jing.

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: I have English Breakfast tea.

John: I have a pure peppermint tea. So, something plain.

We’ve invited you back to talk about your work with global learning. Could you tell us first a little bit about your role as a Director of Global Learning at the Center for International Education at NAU.

Blase: Primarily I work with faculty and departments, especially through our Global Learning Initiative, and the Global Learning Initiative (or GLI) is an across-the-curriculum global education initiative sited in all undergraduate programs and our liberal education program…also explicitly uses co-curricular experiences such as residence hall programming, department activities, community engagement, and so forth. And GLI established three interconnected and interdependent ideas that were all based and drawn upon long-standing campus values that were articulated as university-level thematic student learning outcomes around diversity education, global engagement, and sustainability. And so we kind of approached what global education can be in a very innovative way rather than just, like many institutions, privileging study-abroad-based experiences. We really broadened it out, and really defined it as diversity education, global engagement, and sustainability. And through that, when we were working to implement them at the department level, we really were asking departments not just to kind of hook up, to reach up, to those University outcomes, but rather recast them through the discourse in the discipline, so that departments truly would own those outcomes rather than just attend to them. We went about this after a lot of campus conversation for several years and it was adopted in 2010 by our faculty senate. Then we began to work with departments to implement and develop ways for them to think through…to create department- and program-level outcomes around those three thematic university level ones. And we used a backward design process: developing the outcomes, developing assessment strategies, and then determining sort of scaffolded learning experiences across the major curriculum. And especially with emphasis on reimagining courses; not just tossing courses out or adding courses, specifically. So how can you really get to the nub of modifying and internationalizing your particular courses. In 2012, GLI contributed significantly towards NAU earning the prestigious Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization awarded by NAFSA. And more recently, we’ve been shifting away from working with departments and program curricula and focusing on individual faculty and their courses. And we do everything from individual consultations and dialogues about individual courses. But, most excitingly, we’ve organized a lot of large-scale frameworks that we’re calling collaboratives that bring together faculty, undergraduate, graduate students, particular programs, community members, all to kind of begin to think through how different courses different programs can really more deeply internationalize their efforts. Jean Paul Lederach, the great peace organizer and theorist has talked about large, flat, flexible, democratic platforms. And that’s what we’re really trying to pursue because, if you have a chance to listen to my other podcast with you all, we’re really focused on a lot of strategies that are based in community organizing theory and practice and that’s been my driving approach.

Rebecca: I have a question, Blase, based on some of the things that you’ve already mentioned. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of learning outcomes that you were using for backwards design related to individual faculty. I think sometimes we have an image of what that might mean, but might have difficulty applying it to different kinds of disciplines.

Blase: Sure, the university level outcomes are really quite broad based. And they were rather intersectional in the sense that sustainability was also leaning into diverse spaces. We’re talking about sustainable communities and so forth and cultures with an idea that it can accommodate…if we built these really large boxes that lean almost into one another like Venn diagrams, then that would offer kind of the maximal amount of space for programs and departments to dialogue and think through them. And really, the individual departments…It was quite quite diverse. Some were very, very specific and targeted about really hard skills that they might need that would help them establish careers…be hired out in post baccalaureate efforts…and others were a lot broader. In the humanities, for example, they were much more expansive, and it was really quite diverse. So all ultimately address skills and competencies, but they were framed very, very differently. And the key point for us was that they were really rooted in disciplinary discourse. So, they were truly real and meaningful for faculty in the department so they could use them as tools to help their program move and prepare their students to succeed in the world that their discipline works with students to place them successfully in.

Rebecca: You do Musicology, right? So are you in the music department at your school?

Blase: Yeah, I’m a professor of musicology…music history. I do work with critical improvisation studies, popular traditions. I teach courses in reggae and country music, and jazz…and yeah, and in music. we’ve approached them in sort of interesting ways: sustainability comes about through…for example, my wife is an oboist and between global learning and lots of pressures with urban expansion in Africa, the wood that they source for that particular instrument has become quite scarce and rare. And there’s also lots of issues about appropriating other cultures’ resources and so forth. So, that’s really driven a lot of internal dialogue about what are we doing, how can we do it and what other alternatives might be available? Initially, of course, they went to oil-based solutions, you know, looking at polymers, but then they’ve been exploring other kind of sustainable woods and just ways to go about and reimagining and still achieving really high levels of performance and expressiveness, using an instrument that will allow them to do that. But again, with alternatives and there’s been real efflorescence in the oboe world around having lots of different woods being used and explored. And our theater colleagues were looking also at green ways to save energy: reusing, using non-toxic paints in their flats and their staging. So there’s been a lot of different ways. And some of its quite strategic and often overlaps with other ways in terms of economic efficiency, given tight budgets and so forth. But at the end of the day, that’s the reality. For example, we make and create and help to enable students to be effective performers and music educators, they’re dealing with audiences and the world and they have to come to terms with that. Within that is what I can contribute about uncovering lots of issues about how does music function in and as culture? And what are the resonance around whose music is being played? How’s that identified? How is it commodified? Who owns that music? Who can speak for it? And it’s a quite fraught history in the US and and European traditions vis a vis world music. But this can help unpack a lot of social justice focused issues within disciplines. Many pursue them overtly. Some that’s kind of bubbling a bit more in the background. So in music it’s been, in spite of popular culture’s music, quite forward art traditions and so forth. It’s more akin to museum systems in the visual plastic arts. So it’s a little bit quite contested in some ways, a bit behind some other areas. So it’s been useful to help disciplines turn over the field a bit and help to move themselves in productive directions.

John: What other types of experiences have been used on other departments to try to reach this goal?

Blase: Well, when the department itself has embraced the institutional imperatives of the wind filling the sail as one where one has to complete it, it’s baked into the program reviews that occur every six years internally, and so forth. And, at the same time, what’s also driven a lot of it is student demand. Just one example… our Department of Philosophy went through this process…and all dear friends, but it was a bit pro forma. And, you know, it wasn’t necessarily the deepest engagement compared to some other departments. But a couple years later, they came back in and wanted to re-examine and reestablish new outcomes for their program to really deepen their practice and their thinking. The discipline had changed, and there was a huge student demand. Once they started opening opportunities in courses and uncovering these issues, like linking it more close to the bone of what’s gone on in philosophy courses, then students were really driving that change. So, really, to kind of get to the nub of the matter when you start talking with a colleague, and they’re saying, “Well, how can I do this in my class?” And that’s always a very, very interesting conversation because in some ways, it can be challenging because they may be frustrated, they see where things are…the state of the world. They’re driven by their own passions and values, their disciplines also, and sometimes bringing that to bear within a curriculum that they may have inherited from someone else in the department over the years, or a particular course, then how do they go about working their way through that? And that can be a very, very rich conversation.

Rebecca: It sounds like that’s the conversation we should have. So, Blase, how can I globalize my classes? [LAUGHTER]

Blase: From my perspective, there are two ways to go about globalizing your course. First off, there’s no need to scrap it, throw it away and start over. No one’s talking about doing that. There are two approaches. One is to work within the existing outcomes for the course. And the second is designing additional outcomes for your course that specifically address why your students should be globalizing their work. That might be a formal outcome that you place if you have the latitude to add that to your course or an informal one that can help you frame your thinking. So in the first one…working within the existing outcomes. We would have a conversation and frequently would just…first off, get off campus…go someplace and have coffee. You kind of break down the routine of this is me in my role, you as a faculty member in your role…I mean, I’m a faculty member too, but I come to them within this other frame…and get someplace where you can begin to think and imagine and begin to talk about what have they always really wanted to do in the course around some of these issues. So, how can you take those outcomes and find ways of moving the learning and moving and modifying learning experiences…projects…what you do…what you read…what you think about…what you discuss in the class… so that it has a more global dimension. And some of that can be shifting readings, shifting the locus of activity or thinking through a problem and where it’s sited, and then helping your students that may not have a lot of experience in that discipline, thinking about those things. So, helping them understand how you really think and work within that discipline with these issues. So the first one is the easy one: where can you substitute? Where can you supplement? Where can you modify? What can you change? The second one, it kind of gets at things at a deeper level and probably something that’s more impactful. So, if you design your own courses’ outcomes, you’re really going to have to think through: Why are you doing this? What will it enable your students to do? To what purpose? …and, given the restrictions you might have, that might be just lurking in the background, helping you make decisions about what you want to alter. What new sorts of ways of doing and knowing that you want to explore with your students, up to you just add it as another outcome and discuss it with your students as you walk through the learning outcomes in the first day when you go through the syllabus quickly and begin to consider what are we going to be doing in this class and why?

John: When faculty have bought into this, how have they responded?

Blase: Most are really, really enthusiastic and people tend to seek this out if they are aligned to the overall goals of the project. In the early days, sometimes we had reluctant departments or departments that there wasn’t a working consensus to move forward in any particular direction. And those were more difficult conversations. These days generally working with individuals or departments that they’re highly aligned with this. So it’s a matter of what more can we do? How can we do that? And the restrictions aren’t about globalizing the course or trying to internationalize different activities or projects. But, often it’s how can we do this with little to no additional economic support? So we can’t buy resources…we can’t send our students necessarily independently out. And then how can we expand where our curriculum is, and I can introduce them to colleagues in the Center for International Education and we operate not by using a service where our students pay and go abroad using a services infrastructure. Like many places anymore, we have individual departments…have reciprocal agreements with other universities that our students would go and take a range of courses in the study abroad experience and they would come back. They would transfer right in. Students are not going to be missing any time in their progression towards a degree. They pay our own internal tuition. So their scholarships and financial aid cover those expenses. We also have a very generous level of support for travel for those students in need, especially in economically challenged groups. So, there’s a lot of infrastructure that the department or the individual faculty member may not have. But we can begin to put people together in a broader network to help them as an individual faculty member achieve aspirations or collectively as a program, or our whole department. Oftentimes, it’s frequently very, very exciting because, if you kind of are talking at that level of what have you all wanted to do, then let’s figure out a way to make that happen. That’s a very catalytic encounter and a catalytic discussion because it’s full of possibilities. I always try to shift the conversation to what else is possible? What have you never had a chance to do? Don’t worry about the 1001 reasons not to do it, they’re always there. But let’s figure out what that is, then we’ll go and figure out ways to remove the barriers or to provide the resources if we can. So, it’s usually a very satisfying work. And it’s usually a very uplifting conversation, because people take that energy inside and really begin to spin it. So, they’re lit up, and how excited they are infects others in their networks and groups and it can kind of feed off of one another. And much like we were talking about earlier conversation, if you get enough activity going, and you begin to saturate the airspace as much as you have the latitude to do, you can create a locus of gravity that starts to pull others in. And that’s just based upon your active network of folks that are collaborating together.

Rebecca: Can you talk about some specific examples that you think are really powerful implementations of globalization of a class or a curriculum?

Blase: Sure. One early example that I use to open up conversation with departments because I usually would go in into a department meeting and here’s what this project GLI is all about. And then “How do you do it?” That’s the next question. One really great example was out of our civil engineering department, we have a big school of engineering of civil, electrical, and so forth. And they often have core courses that all of the different threads within civil engineering would take together and one of those courses had a bridge building project. So, it had two major components. One was you need to design the bridge. So, you need to do the mathematics…the engineering of a bridge that will span a particular distance…that will carry a particular load…and then the materials and construction management side of that. So, then how do you actually actually create that bridge. So, it was actually a semester-long project, and it was quite complex. On the surface, that sounds fairly easy, but it is very real world, because that’s what these students would do when they leave. And they would join a construction corporation and they would be building bridges and other types of projects. So, engineering wanted to globalize that project. They thought this was one place where they could really make an impact. The faculty sited the bridge building project in Kenya. And that’s a country where we have a lot of reciprocal programs and our engineering students are working and taking courses and working in programs there. So, it still addressed the very technical side of what was needed in the course. So they still design and engineer a bridge that carries load…that spans a particular distance. But now that it moved the construction and the materials management into an international frame, and in a particular country, where there are infrastructure issues. How do you ship and transport or source locally materials. And again, that actually aligns absolutely with what their students need because their graduates are getting hired by major international corporations that build projects all over the world. So, that actually gave them a richer set of tools that came out of that learning experience. So, they accomplished everything they needed. Plus, they were able to internationalize it in a way that helps students develop tools that were even more necessary, and actually more salient to their success in the future. I think that’s a very, very quick, powerful little story that gets a “How can you take something and make some changes to it, that actually brings more to it?” So it doesn’t just globalize, but it actually opens up a set of possibilities and experiences that are multiplied. So, it’s not just here’s one way that we can do this to globalize this learning experience. But then, how can we, at the level of outcomes truly, how can we develop a richer set of tools that our students can use to succeed as they go out and seek to build a richer life?

Oftentimes inertia and perhaps a department, for example, or group of faculty, they may think it’s a good idea, but they don’t see a ready quick access point. Civil Engineering, they saw it almost immediately. And they said, “Well, we can do this.” And then it led to “Well, what if we do more of this? How about if we went here, as opposed to there…just so they move down the road pretty rapidly. For example, with Physics and Astronomy, we had a chair that was actually part of our planning group that helped design the whole Global Learning Initiative. And she was very, very interested in wanting to help move the department in this direction. And they were quite split. And it wasn’t just the astronomers versus the physicists, but it was actually a more generational split and that was just peculiar to their department at the time. So, there were a lot of very senior gray lions that really didn’t want to go in this direction. They thought it was counterproductive. They thought it was beside the point. And so that opened a lot in a very long conversation. And over five years or so, there was some change, retirements and so forth. And younger faculty and then the rising senior faculty began to have conversations about what it can be within their context between physics and astronomy. And we’re lucky we’re adjacent to a number of indigenous nations, the Navajo Nation, which is as large as all of New England for goodness sake. Within that’s the Hopi reservation downstate, various Apache groups, and it’s a very rich international space that way. So colleagues in Physics and Astronomy started working with colleagues in the community college system on the Navajo reservation. And so they started bringing in traditional knowledge holders. So, within astronomy, they started offering courses around indigenous cosmologies. So, they were actually helping their students to think in very different international ways using different frames for how do you conceive the founding of the cosmos, and the workings of all that is out there. Even the most rigorous, focused astronomer that is working in radio astronomy, or some other variation of across their wide range of disciplinary practices, then they’re beginning to open up what’s possible, how and what does it mean to be talking about these things? And when I know that I’m talking about it through my contemporary U.S. international sort of frame, that’s one frame. And there are other ways that might be useful to think about the facts, the activities that we do, and what the information we receive. And then what does it mean to put it together in an argument and an explanation. And by thinking through other cultural dimensions that expands their abilities to do that imaginatively, creatively. I come out of the arts, so I’m kind of hard wired to want to do things very improvisatory creative ways. And from my perspective, the more we can all think about, how can we be catalytic and creative in our own disciplinary work? I think that’s the exciting place because it shifts you, not from the core to the periphery, but oftentimes to willfully and intentionally walk to that edge, where your discipline is interacting with all these other disciplines. And that’s a very fruitful and very exciting place to be, because that’s where new knowledge can come about really quickly, as you begin to fuse and think differently and expanding what’s assumed. For me, that’s personally and intellectually this very, very exciting work. And believe me, I can’t follow the details of my colleagues in physics and astronomy when they start unpacking things, but I can get and be really lit up by the direction that they’re going, and their excitement and what they’re seeing as possibilities. Because once colleagues find that this is a fruitful path, then that leads much like we found with physics and astronomy, and certainly the example from engineering, that leads to “what else is possible?” So, you just keep opening and opening and opening. And that’s where we all want to be, especially in a time when most or institutions are getting squeezed in terms of economics. That’s a very empowering place to be.

Rebecca: You’ve mentioned this is a fruitful place for new knowledge. That seems like a good transition to thinking through the lens of students and seeing the world in a different way.

Blase: Yeah.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the student impact that you’ve seen, or maybe even a specific student or a specific story that might help us envision how this plays out?

Blase: I work with faculty who work with the students, but I just get that energy and how they’re able to create new things. And then especially as I see colleagues being able to morph and continually transform what their course is, so that it’s not just, we take something static, we’re going to do some window dressing, and job done, and that’s good for another 20 years. But, once you start moving the pieces, that energy, that motion, that kinetic sense just keeps going and flowing, and students are really excited about it. And what I hear are those more collective pressures to do more. And we have some assessment too: that we had over 80% of our undergraduate programs in just three years out of 91 of the programs at the time, complete the program level GLI process that comes with outcomes assessments and a curricular map of learning experiences. Study abroad, because what we did was we talked to study abroad and asked the departments to position a semester in the program in their sequence of courses where students could go abroad, take courses at institutions that they have confidence in courses that they’re taking, and come back so they’re not losing any time towards the degree. And we saw 136% increase in the number of students going abroad over eight years between 2011 and 2018. And also those students that went abroad, I owe this all from my colleague, Angelina Palumbo, the Director of Education Abroad here in the center. But students that go abroad also have a 87% graduation rate, which is about more than 10% higher than our average graduation rate, which is not bad, but still, that’s quite impactful. Everything from the example when I was talking about colleagues in philosophy, where once they started opening up some of these issues and giving voice to them, their students were asking for more. That’s sort of the level that I encounter.

John: Was the expansion in study abroad programs due to the global initiative.

Blase: Well, I mean, you know, it’s kind of a chicken and the egg thing. We had a new senior international officer (using the jargon, SIOs), Harvey Charles, who was a really, really innovative colleague. He was our SIO. I was working with him. We brought a whole bunch of people together. Basically, he established a presidential task force to help to internationalize the campus. The President was behind that. And working with Harvey, we brought from two or three of us that were focused on curriculum. Out of that task force, we invited 40 colleagues to come together to draft this Global Learning Initiative. And part of that was a concerted effort to expand study abroad. But what had been holding it back was the very things that we were able to address through the curricular side of GLI, that there was many programs didn’t have a targeted semester where their students could study abroad without falling behind. They didn’t have any particular countries or institutions that they had reciprocal relationships and confidence in their curricula. So, it was all at the same time, everything coming together. But the details of how many positions were added it actually tripled the number of positions working in education abroad. But again, that was in response to the huge increase of number of students that were going from our campus. And then also they were busy recruiting international students. We have a couple of thousand international students on campus. And that’s other parts of the infrastructure within the center that GLI wasn’t directly related to or focused upon.

Rebecca: You talked a little bit about economic barriers being a barrier for faculty and making change. Did you come across any other barriers other than maybe you talked about generational differences too?

Blase: Yeah.

Rebecca: Were those main barriers or did you see faculty coming up against some other barriers that they had overcome?

Blase: Some disciplines are just really deep…their disciplinary ways of thinking and knowing they’re highly aligned, right? They’re there…sociology, politics, and international affairs. There really wasn’t much of a discussion in terms of, they’re already doing a great deal of it, then let’s maybe see what else is possible. For a lot of other individual faculty, when we talk to them, or programs that are thinking about picking it back up…it’s kind of a reluctance either, like we’ve talked about before, I’m not sure how to go about moving and making further change, and/or this is a time when everybody is really stressed. On our campus, we’ve lost 60% of state funding in a decade, which is a radical truncation of our support. We’ve shifted to pretty much tuition-based funding, and that’s created enormous pressures…that level of tenure density has plummeted. So, there are a lot of lecturers and a plurality that’s a one-year non-tenured position here on our campus. It’s created a lot of internal pressures and schisms and issues and many faculty don’t have the additional emotional capacity to want to willfully step forward and say I want to create more change and uncertainty and chaos in what I do. When I was referring a little bit earlier to inertia, it’s not just intellectual laziness, it’s often just exhaustion. What’s happening nationally, I think has been exhausting many in the academy, and our politics, the level of incivility that’s increasing and rising on campus. Arizona… you just have to have one person agree in a public forum so that you can videotape and that could be the person behind the iPhone, if they’re agreeing to do it. And that’s all this needed. And of course, these courses and classrooms are public spaces. So, we’ve had lots of faculties classes being put up and being pilloried by different websites, various political perspectives, and some of its been in the Chronicle over the last couple of years. So, it’s been a challenging environment. There are many things going on that are tapping people out. But, for me, what has been the thing that always allows us to continue to succeed? If you’re talking about very mechanical things, or this is an obligation…we need to achieve these program outcomes, that doesn’t stir many people’s souls. But, if you actually have, in advance, thought about how can you position your initiative so that it’s focused and grounded in the values of your community, your literal community or your institution, then people can connect in ways that aren’t just focused on disciplinary interest or compliance. You know, you’re tapping into their heart and what they care about as a person and what motivates them. Again, sustainability in my own discipline of music, there’s a discourse there, and there are ways that one can think through it. But those colleagues (and I count myself) that are very passionate about the future of the planet, we’re motivated to do much, much more, and we’ll seek that out. So amid all the turmoil and depletion of energy and the exhaustion, if you can find ways to shift that conversation into this catalytic space that talks about possibilities, that taps into what people believe and what they value and what they care about deeply, then you’re feeding that conversation from a place that will enrich and nourish rather than just take away, exhaust, and grind you down into submission.

John: We always end with the question, what are you doing next?

Blase: Well, what I’m doing next is continuing on and more and more explicitly going back to the well of community organizing methods, strategies, and theory to help us come together collaboratively. For me, faculty on our campus, and I know a lot of places, feel increasingly radically disempowered either by state legislatures, distant boards, priorities that may be economically driven or politically motivated that are not aligned with where many faculty are themselves. And we tend to wait until we grow quite gray for change to come from the top. So, I’m a firm believer of coming together with colleagues to focus on what’s possible, what can we do together, and actively doing that. And good administrators will be happy to jump in front of that train and take all the credit they want. God bless them. But, just what can we do together to make this a better place, a richer educational space for our communities and for our students? That’s largely pretty much everything I’m doing. Of course…presenting, publishing, writing and more writing, but like everybody else, that’s the thing that really kind of keeps me lit up.

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us.

John: Yes, thank you for joining us. That was a very good discussion.

Blase: Very much appreciate it. Thanks so much.

[MUSIC]

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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Brittany Jones and Kiara Montero.

51. Engaged scholarship

Many of us live and work in communities where there is a strong town and gown divide. Building trust, engaging authentically, and developing deep understanding through intergroup dialogue takes time, patience and the right structure. In this episode, Dr. Khuram Hussain, an Associate Professor of Education and Interim Dean at Hobart College, joins us to explore a model of engaged scholarship that challenges the academy to engage in dialogue with and work alongside the community to address pressing local issues.

Show Notes

Transcript

John:Many of us live and work in communities where there is a strong town and gown divide. Building trust, engaging authentically, and developing deep understanding through intergroup dialogue takes time, patience and the right structure. In this episode, we’ll explore a model of engaged scholarship that challenges the academy to engage in dialogue with and work alongside the community to address pressing local issues.

[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]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Dr. Khuram Hussain, an Associate Professor of Education and Interim Dean at Hobart College. Welcome, Khuram.

John:Welcome.

Khuram: Thank you for having me.

John:Our teas today are:

Khuram: I’m actually drinking coffee. I hope that’s ok.

Rebecca: You and most other people. [LAUGHTER] We’ll let it go.

Khuram: I will end the day with tea.

Rebecca: Ok, perfect. I think we had a recent guest who also ended the day with tea. Today I have chai.

John:And I have pineapple ginger green tea.

Rebecca: Well, that sounds good. You always are far more adventurous than me.

Khuram: If it’s any consolation, I have a little cardamom in my coffee, which I typically put in my tea, but I really like it in coffee as well.

Rebecca: That sounds good. I should try that.

Khuram: I highly recommend it.

Rebecca: Do you have an advice about how much?

Khuram: One. One is good.

Rebecca: One is good. [LAUGHTER].

Khuram: If you want it a little stronger you can crack it and then let it sit and it’ll be even more cardamom(y). [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Perfect. [LAUGHTER]

John:We see you’ve done some work with engaged scholarship and service learning. Could you tell us a little bit about what is meant by engaged scholarship for those who aren’t familiar with it?

Khuram: Engaged scholarship is essentially the integration of community needs with learning and it involves addressing community needs along with whatever respective disciplines and skills a scholar may apply to a particular condition. It could be anything from developing a literacy program that is also being useful and utilized in a community, but drawing from that community in order to make sense of what questions you want to answer. So, you’re not drawing it just from a review of literature or from a body of scholarship that emerges from conferences or a community of scholars, but in fact from a variety of voices within the community itself. It’s a much more community relevant approach to even designing research before you actually do it, and it spills out into community engaged teaching as well.

Rebecca: What got you involved in engaged scholarship?

Khuram: I first had the opportunity to do engaged scholarship as a professor of education at Hobart William Smith. I was teaching a course on the civil rights movement and a colleague approached me about volunteering to serve as a professor at a maximum-security prison, and the program there was run by a Bard Prison Initiative where long term inmates were given the opportunity to enroll in an undergraduate program. And so I taught the exact same course that I was teaching on campus within the educational space that they had created for prisoners (maximum security prison) and that was my first chance to think about the ways in which the needs and realities of communities outside of campus and inform the work in learning on campus and could also inform my notions of scholarship.

John:Your work is a form of service learning in terms of the student involvement in it. How does your approach differ from the more traditional service learning approaches?

Khuram: I think that a lot of what I have seen in traditional or conventional service-learning approaches is that there’s a great focus on the ways in which our students will learn by “doing for” communities. So how can we help children learn how to read? How can we provide food to food-scarce areas? And that becomes such a central narrative and the assumptions that young people have about what service-learning is is that we’re gonna learn through service for, and what I think is unique and special about the kind of work that many folks are doing today and I hope to be a part of that (and I hope I have been a part of that) is to do service with. To move from that model means we are required to collaborate and to take a much more team-based approach to service work and the learning then moves both ways. The service then moves both ways, and that I think is the fundamental difference between what we’ve been trying to do the last few years and what we’ve often seen provided to students.

Rebecca: How does your engaged scholarship relate to the service-learning projects and things that you do with students?

Khuram: In part, the ways in which engaged scholarship works is by providing students and faculty and community members an opportunity to create knowledge out of the questions and concerns that emerge in community related work. So for instance, we started an initiative known as “Tools for Social Change” some years ago, and before we looked at any kind of service project we looked at the ways in which the community saw itself. How did long-term residents see college campus residents? How did college campus residents in the same city see long-term residents of the city? And put them into intentional dialogue, first through interpersonal relationship building and then talking about social and structural issues that have informed their understanding of themselves within the city. And within larger structures of identity, race and class particularly. After they developed that understanding we asked, “Ok, what does this community mean to you? Where do you feel empowered? Where do you feel isolated?” Based on the answers to that, we were able to map out a different kind of geography. Even though we had developed a sense of connection and collectivity as members of a community that had been dialoguing all semester, we were operating within a city that was deeply segregated and divided, and so it was from there that we looked at scholarship. We looked at research that we could pursue, and one of the first things that became really important for us to consider was the way in which the economics of the city and the capacity of some to gain access to jobs opportunity was very different than it was for others. And so we ended up taking that initial group and developing wider groups that would go out into the city and inquire… essentially do a self-study of the city about the economics and economic opportunities that were available. And so essentially it was these two stages: first of engaging in dialogue; coming to an understanding of what shared community work could be and then going out into the city with the same participants and essentially conducting appreciative inquiry and having students and faculty and community members (long-term community members) interviewing members of the community, and we were out at the Salvation Army, we were in barbershops, we were in laundromat, we were in every corner of the city and particularly in corners of the city that didn’t often have a strong voice or were not well represented, I should say, in conversations about economic development. We were able to take those, transcribe them and give them to members of the working group that are trained qualitative researchers. They synthesized that, summarized it, and we were able to present it to the city. So, here we’ve created knowledge and we’ve created it through a certain kind of process, right? You might want to call it bottom-up, but I like to see it as horizontal; it’s relational knowledge, and that, I think, is one of the most powerful things about service-learning with as well as engaged scholarship with.

John:That group that was doing the analysis of the data… Were they faculty? Were they students? Was it some mix?

Khuram: It was some mix, but here you do have kind of a hierarchy of knowledge and skill, I should say, in terms of how to do this, and so students and community members were trained by ethnographers and researchers on how to hold a tape recorder, what kinds of questions, and how to ask questions, the ethics of confidentiality, and then they went out and they conducted (after receiving a few weeks of training) these interviews in the community and it was the researchers, mostly faculty, that then booked and analyzed that data and ultimately synthesized that data, but every turn there was some part of this that was democratic and collaborative. Even the questions themselves were questions that the participants generated in concert with other community members. What is it that we want to know about ourselves? And so those were the questions that were ultimately used when we did the broader interviews.

Rebecca: Sounds like a really powerful way of breaking down the town-gown divide that happens in a lot of communities where there’s an institution of higher education.

Khuram: I think that it was transformational for all of us. I don’t think anyone could truly have appreciated what was going to happen, and I think part of it is because it was an open conversation and we sustained a certain level of openness, curiosity, and vulnerability to each other as well as what we hope would come out of it, and I mean for me it’s transformed the way I think about everything from teaching to service to even social action and the role of institutions of higher education in really engaging in communities, and so the power of it, I think, was also to reveal what’s possible that we are capable of operating on different terms and the institutions of higher education do not need to be paternalistic in their engagement with communities and they do not need to take a charity-based approach in their supportive communities; they can be collaborative, it just requires us to match strength to strength to define the things that are going to be valuable for college students and faculty and staff to learn from communities and what communities will benefit learning with their work with institutions of higher education.

John:It strikes me too that this type of project could be much more sustainable. Many service-learning projects or one-off projects where the students work and do something in the community or to the community or for the community, but when you get the community itself engaged it swould seem that that could, at least for some types of projects, set the stage for continued collaboration, either with later groups of students working with them or with the community itself. Has there been much success in continuing the efforts once the classes ended?

Khuram: I first off want to say that I absolutely agree that service-learning is conventionally structured as a one semester project-based or hour-based experience, and it’s usually focused on alleviating one particular social issue, and what we have found is that it’s necessary to do year-long initiatives and we’ve been very fortunate to see that this initiative has been able to sustain itself for over three years, but that’s required us to allow it to evolve into what it needed to and one of the biggest parts of that has been that it has been untied from any particular course. It used to just be tied to my classes and so students would do service learning project were tied to classes they were taking with me. Now, students are participating as participants in independent studies, they’re participating in different working groups that sustain themselves a little bit more autonomously, and that is also true for a lot of long-term community residents that have joined smaller working groups. There’s a working group on food insecurity, there’s a working group on political representation, there’s a working group on economic empowerment and economic opportunity, and so any one of these working groups becomes its own kind of autonomous community that intersects with long-term residents and college students and faculty and staff and that, I think, is a sign of progress and health, is when the institution of higher ed that’s tied to these projects doesn’t need to own it, control it, and manage every aspect of it. If it can become a little bit more fluid and have its own purpose outside of a predetermined purpose from the institution, it becomes more organic and more impactful often.

Rebecca: The continuity that set up in a structure like that of “community who doesn’t go away” versus students who drop in and out as they go through four years—they’re a member of the community but then they often leave—seems like it’s a really useful model for not only making the learning better but just making the impact better. Can you talk a little bit about the community’s response to these projects.

Khuram: Yes, drive-by service-learning isn’t the way to transform communities or students; it requires a real, authentic engagement, and I think when you put people in real situations you get real outcomes and that’s across the spectrum. So you’re going to get people that are going to collaborate, develop great friendships, but you’re also going to get friction and struggle and honest expressions of frustration with one another. And so that becomes a part of it too, so our students need to learn or end up learning—whether they need to or not—the ways in which their participation is both important but sometimes limited. They are going to sit and be witnesses to long-standing struggles in a community; for instance, long standing struggles between law enforcement and communities of color, and they’re going to find their own footing in those spaces; they’re going to need to make sense of how to be an ally, how to be an advocate for an inclusive community that they now belong to, so the stakes become a little bit more real. But I would be a little bit disingenuous if I was going to imply that it’s neat and tidy. I’ve received pushback at times. I remember we were holding a dialogue and I had said that we’re really starting to build some really empowering opportunities here and someone coughed and said, you’re from the colleges; you have all the power. It was a great check on my own assumptions about how I was being seen in that space… that participating in a community activity while still being associated in some ways representative of a very wealthy, multi-million dollar institution in a post-industrial Rust Belt City is not going to play out in someone else’s mind the way that it might in mine. Now what I’m proud of in that work is that someone felt that they were in a space where they could call out people’s unseen or unacknowledged privilege, and that I thought was really important for other people to see, and for me to experience, but it also means that tension in real relationships is ongoing. Honestly, we are not dealing with a utopian situation where we’re all playing on equal terms; we’re coming with different levels of capital and different levels of support within that community, so even as we do this work, my students are good to remember, as am I, we cannot be tourists in other people’s lives, that if we have certain privileges this is a place to take responsibility for some of them.

Rebecca: In a situation like this where tensions can be high, differences big sometimes, and you’re trying to dialogue, how do you set up that environment so people feel safe, like the situation that you’ve just described.

Khuram: Always sit in a circle. Always begin with some expectations. What do we need from each other to have respectful and productive and meaningful conversations? Let’s create those standards together and revisit them every time we sit in circle together. Have people that are prepared to facilitate, that have training or are getting training in facilitation; that needs to be, I think, a critical piece of that, because while it is important to hear from everyone, there is a lot of value in having someone who can reflect back some of the bigger messages and patterns that are emerging in the conversation, someone that can point to the standards that we’ve set for ourselves and what we expect as our best way of engaging, and to remind people that there are strategies that we’ve identified when things get really heated where we want to go with that. So, I think being very intentional about creating a dialogical space, and for us, the use of intergroup dialogue and a lot of the pedagogical strategies developed by the University of Michigan Intergroup Dialogue were very important and helpful resources to get started.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that I was hearing here that I want to just note, is if you’re having one of these conversations that you should have a facilitator and that the facilitator is not really participating in the conversation but rather facilitating the conversation. I think that can be challenging if we want to be involved in those conversations, but you need to make sure that you’ve picked that person and that person is staying as a third party.

Khuram: Yes, absolutely. And we typically have two people that will facilitate and that way there’s still some opportunity to give feedback or response or to slightly move out of a facilitator role, at least in terms of being able to share some ideas. But yeah, it does require you to pull back a bit. But having two facilitators… and it isn’t something that can’t be learned; I don’t think that people have to be lifelong professional facilitators. Most teachers are facilitators, and most of us have some experience facilitating or mediating conversations between others. As much as it’s important to start with people that have a background in facilitation, I think ultimately you want to end in a place where many of the participants feel comfortable and can contribute to the facilitation process over time, so we would meet every week. Ideally, we wanted to prepare people for their opportunity to do some facilitating. At this point we’ve seen dozens of participants go on to do much more formal facilitation in other spaces. That’s something that I’m very proud of and I’m very proud of them, I should say, for what they’ve accomplished.

John:You had mentioned some broad categories of tasks and working groups. What were some of the specific projects that were undertaken by people working in these projects in the community?

Khuram: All of these emerged dialogically as members of the campus community and long-term residents of the community talk through ways in which they felt connected and disconnected. We had four big ones, I’d say. We had community police relations, economic opportunity, food justice and food insecurity, and political representation. I’ll touch on each of them a little bit and then if you want to know a little bit more about any one of them I can pause. So, for food justice and insecurity, part of the challenge was an immediate one where it was about galvanizing community members to glean food and to increase access to fresh food, so we had volunteers doing gleaning. In the midst of that they were also looking at the president’s food deserts and dialoging along with community members about their access to nutrition and presenting some of those findings to the City Council and the Mayor. Or police community relations, we had two dedicated members who were part of a standing committee known as the Community Compact that met with different members of law enforcement and city government on a regular basis to talk about police-community relations and to develop programs to engage the community as well as to address certain policies. Then we have political representation, and for that what we saw was a wonderful volunteer energy of members of our entire group that went out and facilitated dialogues between political candidates and community members. Unlike conventional town halls where you’d have people sitting behind a table or behind a podium, we chat in circle with political candidates, and we had facilitators asking questions and facilitating dialogue in a pretty different kind of environment than I think a lot of us have when we engage with people that want to be elected, as well as elected officials. So we ran those, along with giving people an opportunity to register to vote. For economic empowerment, we trained facilitators to go out into the community in pairs and to hold circles in different corners of the community… in laundromats… in a variety of public spaces… to ask them what were the ways in which they were experiencing opportunity and what were the ways in which they were limited from economic opportunity. We also explored with them if they could wake up tomorrow to a different city, what would it look like? What opportunities would exist? And we took all of that and made it a final document called the “Big Talk in a Little City,” which has become an important and integral part of the city’s long-term commitment to economic empowerment, and so, not only are those voices and stories included in an official document, those voices and stories are now helping to shape policy and resource distribution in the city.

John:How have students reacted to this? Have any of them considered careers as working with communities and such things?

Khuram: For some of our graduates this has been life-changing. I think that one of the most fundamental things that we did well was simply to put people that would otherwise never have encountered each other in the same room and to ask them to share their stories and to talk about themselves. Developing those personal relationships between people that would otherwise pass each other on the street without a glance. People that had age differences, 40, 50, 60 years, people that had racial and socio-economic differences and geographic differences were suddenly having dinner at each other’s table, knew the names of family members, and knew the smallest things about one another were coming to their respective graduations and ceremonies and really becoming participants in each other’s lives. So, for a lot of our undergraduate students, having an opportunity like that is so deeply transformative because now policy is not just a matter of abstract equity and justice; it’s a matter of empathy and equity. You feel differently for someone who feels like a friend or family when they are in need and that informs your approach to policy and your approach to work in a community differently. So, we’ve had students that have gone on to do some really powerful work in law clinics, AmeriCorps and have stayed in the community to do some of that work because it was so transformational and they committed so much of their learning to this kind of engagement that they want to continue it. We do have a few folks that took a gap year between graduate school and stayed on, or decided to pursue a different kind of professional path because of the work they did.

John:That’s impressive.

Rebecca: It’s really exciting.

Khuram: I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it.

John:Could you give us some idea of the scale of this—how many students are involved and how has it grown?

Khuram: We started with a relatively small group of about 20 students and 20 long-term community members, and in terms of active participants, it never really went much bigger than that, but it sustained itself over time and it also engaged a lot of other students and long-term community members for months at a time. What I mean by that, for instance, is a lot of our sustained participants would engage their friends, their roommates, their neighbors to come to our weekly sessions. So, we would oftentimes have topical session that were open to the public and those open sessions we could have up to 60, 70, 100, 200 people at those sessions, and so we had an active presence for quite a long time in the community when the courses were running, and now that we have the working groups there’s smaller numbers, but again, their impact, I think, in some ways is deeper because they’ve sustained some really deep work. One of the most incredible things that I saw the students do was they developed a course that would involve high school and college students learning together; so they essentially wanted to do what we were doing through these community dialogues in the high school. They wrote a course proposal, they submitted the course proposal, and after a few revisions and edits it was approved by both the college and the high school and we had a small group of about a half-dozen college students and a half-dozen high school students that took a course together at the high school. And that’s not a lot of people—but that doesn’t—what an incredible experience that they’re participating in something they helped codesign in order to address an issue that they perceive to be real across these age differences and community differences; that these teenagers and these college students together identified this town-gown divide and saw high school and college as a way to build bridges and constructed a course to do that and then participated in that course together. To me, that’s a kind of deep, transformative, impact that doesn’t quite reflect big numbers, but big experiences.

John:It’s certainly a testament to the impact that it had on those students that they were willing to do this and interested and motivated to do this.

Khuram: Absolutely.

John:How have your colleagues responded?

Khuram: I think that my colleagues have been excited, and I think that for many of them it created a new opportunity for them to engage. So, we’ve had faculty that have come in as participants, we’ve had them lead certain workshops and activities. They’ve come in with their expertise within their respective disciplines and fields. So, we’ve had a really great showing of faculty support. And part of it is we did not host this work on campus. We were very intentional about finding a place and space that was both a place that could be shared as well as a place that was easily accessible for long-term community residents, and so we found ourselves at the oldest black church in the city and a place that many of my colleagues had never been… that many people in the community had never been, and it was in the part of the city that is still segregated across a number of lines of race and class, and yet it was one of the most racially and socioeconomically diverse spaces that you could sit in in the city and here it was in a historically or at least currently segregated space… and so I think the opportunity for faculty and for staff to engage with a community that they’re really caring about in a context that seemed more inclusive was really exciting and affirmed a lot of their values. I think this is something that people really want, it’s just a matter of creating the opportunity so that they can engage in it. I don’t think that most faculty or staff want to engage in these kind of vertical relationships with communities. It’s just how we’ve been doing things for so long.

Rebecca: Seems like your background in teaching about equity and teaching about intersectionality and doing some research in the classroom about these topics set you up really well to do this work. Are there tips or other things that could provide faculty who don’t have that same background that you could share to give us a doorway in?

Khuram: I think that in some ways having a background as a scholar in any kind of social justice or equity field can be a barrier, and here’s why. That work is always in your head and it is disembodied in the institution, and the institution is, by its very nature, disembodied from the communities that it surrounds. And so you can very easily be a deft and prolific scholar of social inequity and convey and facilitate inequity in your actual life. So really it’s not a guarantee of anything. I think the measure of your capacity is in the doing, and I think it’s really about addressing questions. Who am I inviting to the table? Where is the table? Who is not here? What do I need to ask now to get who’s not here, here? Those are the more important questions, and I think if we don’t presume that there’s a certain kind of institutional privilege that comes even with being able to wax philosophical about questions of equity, then we’ve already lost the plot. We’ve got to honestly think about the spaces and places in which we’re doing our work and the kinds of privileges that we need to interrogate about ourselves before we can do any of this work in equitable and meaningful ways, and so I would say this work is for everybody, and this work is for anybody who is willing to really work with community members and to find shared purpose with community members. It’s willing to listen and learn from… and is not just interested in providing to.

Rebecca: Those are such great reminders… and empowering to make sure that we can all find a way to help and work with the communities that we live in.

Khuram: Yeah, and sometimes it does mean maybe rethinking a service-learning project that’s a semester long and seeing if you can map it out over a year. Would you spend a semester just creating relationships between students, yourself and long-term residents of a community just in that exploratory project? and then say, “Ok, out of this what have we identified collectively as a community need that we can address as a class?” …so that you get, of course, that buy-in, which is so important, but there’s a truly transformative possibility that is emerged that simply wasn’t there until you took the time to really connect and build that relationship, so I’m also in practical terms a really big proponent of year-long service-learning initiatives and moving away from the pressures of a semester-long initiative, unless you’re willing to do half a semester of really just relationship building and collective meaning-making and then cut the service piece a little shorter.

John:We usually wrap up the podcast with a question: “What are you going to do next?”

Khuram: What I would like to do next is to start preparing and supporting students to be the initiators of this work. I am currently working with a couple student groups that are creating their own curriculum and their own activities to engage people in the community with. Right now it’s a youth-to-youth, college student and high school student initiative, and the aim there is to just be a guide on the side, to really maximize whatever space and context I can help create for students to develop their own initiatives for engagement. Again, along these principles of working with, but to see our students become the guides that they need that our students can be the leaders that they’re looking for and that they can help develop leadership in their communities, and so for me right now what that involves is again having college students and high school students connect and collaborate and learn from each other with really very little use of faculty and take from us what you need and build what you must.

Rebecca: Sounds really exciting. Thank you so much for all that you shared today; I think it gives us all a lot to think about. Not just think about it; we need to take action too. [LAUGHTER]

Khuram:Thank you.

John:Thank you.
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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. Theme music by Michael Gary Brewer.