Teaching centers typically have a core group of faculty that actively engage in professional development while others are rarely seen. In this episode, Constanza Bartholomae and Terri Hasseler join us to discuss strategies they use to expand participation and build faculty community. Constanza is the Associate Director of Teaching Support and Terri is the Director of the Center of Teaching Excellence and Professor of History, Literature and the Arts at Bryant University.
Show Notes
- Center for Teaching Excellence at Bryant University
- Smith, M. (1994). Local education: Community, conversation, praxis. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).
- Jeffs, T., & Smith, M. K. (2021). The education of informal educators. Education Sciences, 11(9), 488.
- Thackara, J. (2006). In the bubble: Designing in a complex world. MIT press.
- De Bono, E. (2014). Lateral thinking: An introduction. Random House.
- De Bono, E. (1990). Lateral thinking: a textbook of creativity. Penguin UK.
- Nunn, L. M. (2018). 33 simple strategies for faculty: a week-by-week resource for teaching first-year and first-generation students. Rutgers University Press.
- Norell, Liz (2023). Supporting Neurodiverse Students and Faculty. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 313. November 1. (This episode discusses “podcasts and puzzles”)
- Cavanagh, S. R. (2023). Mind over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge. Beacon Press.
- Hochschild, A. R. (2022). The managed heart. In Working in America (pp. 40-48). Routledge.
Transcript
John: Teaching centers typically have a core group of faculty that actively engage in professional development while others are rarely seen. In this episode, we discuss strategies used at one teaching center to expand participation and build faculty community.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guests today are Constanza Bartholomae and Terri Hasseler. Constanza is the Associate Director of Teaching Support and Terri is the Director of the Center of Teaching Excellence and Professor of History, Literature and the Arts at Bryant University. Welcome Constanza and Terri.
Terri: Thank you.
John: It’s nice to talk to you again. I met both of you at the POD conference a few months ago, and that’s when we talked about you coming on the podcast. Thank you for joining us. Our teas today are:
Terri: Well, I’ll go first. As Constanza will tell you, I never have less than three beverages with me at any point in time. [LAUGHTER] So, I have a caramel macchiato, a diet Coke, and a chai.
Constanza: And I have a tea. I’m drinking a Mighty Leaf African nectar tea in the mug I have yet to earn. It’s a Tea for Teaching mug that John so generously gifted us at the conference. And so I’m working to earn it today. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: Oh, we’re definitely glad that you’re here. I have cardamom cinnamon tea.
John: That’s a new one.
Rebecca: I’m trying to cut down on the caffeination.
John: So no more of that harsh tea?
Rebecca: Oh no, I will definitely drink some of that. [LAUGHTER] I’m not giving it up. I said cut down. [LAUGHTER]
John: And for the first time ever, I am drinking water in a Tea for Teaching mug, because I didn’t have time to get tea between my class and this recording session.
Rebecca: Is it warm water?
John: It is cold water, because if I could have heated up water, I would have put you a tea bag in it.
Rebecca: Well, it’s the start of tea. [LAUGHTER]
Terri: That’s so sad.
John: It is. It’s been one of those days, and so we’ll just leave it at that.
Rebecca: So we invited you here today to discuss your work as educational developers at Bryant University. Can you describe your roles and the role of the center?
Constanza: Sure. So I’ll go first. I’m the Associate Director of Teaching Support. And that means I get to spend a lot of time with our faculty. I work one-on-one with faculty in consults ranging from working on specific activities that they might need some additional support on to talking about overarching course goals or objectives, or perhaps speaking about pedagogy. And also I work with faculty in groups, we might be talking about a common theme or we might have unstructured get togethers and meetings. And that’s the best part about my job is meeting with faculty, and I really love what I do. I’ll pass it over to Terri.
Terri: Thank you. I use she/her pronouns and I am the Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Professor in the Department of Literature and History in the Arts. As you noted a moment ago, I started at Bryant University where I am now almost 30 years in the mid 90s and I moved through the ranks of the faculty. I served as a department chair a number of years ago for a department in English Cultural Studies, and most recently served as the Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences. My earliest research actually 30 years ago started in writing centers and pedagogy and I quickly moved into inclusion and social justice frameworks for teaching and learning. And I just moved into the Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence about five, six months ago. So I am very excited about this work, and the inclusion of the work that I’ve been doing in the scholarship of teaching and learning, and training and instruction and pedagogy.
Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the work that your center does?
Terri: Sure., so one of the things that we’re doing in terms of the philosophy of our work and a shout out to our educational technology person, Mary Boehmer and our wonderful faculty fellows. The work we do in the center really focuses on the concept of praxis that Mark Smith talks about, which is that idea of informed committed action. And when we talk about informed, we’re talking about what is it we know? We try to stay research- and evidence-based. We look at the theories and the current information that is out on any subject that we’re working with. And then the commitment, the committed, what we do and why we do it. The ethics… what’s the ethical framework for the work that we do? And then the action is: how do we do that work. And we look at, in the center right now, focusing on issues of creativity, inclusive communities, and the critical notion of kindness. These three concepts bring together student-centered approaches through a teaching-centered lens. We like that kind of inward and outward approach to the work we’re doing. And we are working to build more authentic relationships with teaching rather than performative teaching. And my job in that role is to run a lot of the different programs, work with a number of different partners on campus, and building out our strategic plan and then initiating it.
John: In an earlier conversation, there was some discussion of the Creativity Fellows Program. Could you tell us a little bit about that program, how it works, what its philosophy is and what its purpose is?
Terri: Sure, thank you. We’re very excited to talk about the creativity fellows. This is a program I started a number of years ago it was supported by Robert Shea who was our Director of our Center for Teaching and Learning at the time. Bob is now the Provost at Curry College. The work that we did In that is it was a seminar approach, a one-year seminar devoted to nurturing faculty members and their creative practices. The long-term goal is to fundamentally transform both the teaching practices and the educational philosophies. The program draws from faculty across all the institution, the different schools and programs on the campus. And one of the things that we’re finding is that there are heavy expectations on faculty, they’re expected to be creative… be more creative, and faculty are often at a loss for that. Many feel that they themselves are not creative. They’re trained in critical thinking and content providing, and they often have not been given the skills or the support to pursue what creativity looks like. We’ve also tried to think of creativity in contrast with innovation, innovation tends to be more product oriented, solution oriented: what are the viable solutions? What are the ideas, the methods, the products that one can produce? We’re much more interested in process when we work with faculty. So the premise of the seminar is that we start with the mindset. If faculty do not have an active creative practice, it’s impossible to model and to speak to creativity in authentic ways with students. So the seminar focuses on providing spaces to let faculty fellows develop a creative practice. And we are very literal about this. We talk about creative artistic practices, we do collage, hand papermaking, bookbinding, improv, ceramics, we bring in visiting artists, we have one-on-one creative mentoring, sketching, and we build a community of practice, where we focus on the inefficiency of creativity and learning. John Thackara talks about that in his book In the Bubble, says that creating and learning human beings are highly inefficient. So we make a space where we can be inefficient with each other. And that’s not a space that we create very often in academic settings, because we’re always very product oriented. So again, the emphasis was not on the final products, but the purpose was just to be in the seminar. And we do end with a final installation at the end of the seminar each year, we end with a process of creativity where faculty present their objects that they created throughout the time. And the last thing I will say, too, is what are some of the things that result from this… the work is very risky for faculty, many of them have never made art, or something creative. Many of them probably have not done art since high school or elementary school, or perhaps they have some secret creative practice that they haven’t shared in some time. So this is anxiety provoking, but also very exciting. And we focus on three different things. One, trust the process. We talk about this as purposelessness. Of course, it’s deeply purposeful. The work we’re doing is deeply purposeful, but the focus is on purposelessness, not publication, and in our syllabus we say to them, what if you were given space to play, time to think about it, and a cohort of colleagues to encourage you? What if you were able to participate in activities within which your very presence was the purpose? What if you could play with the distractions to see what they yield rather than immediately aiming for some objective? The second thing we do is we create a room and a space to play and some playmates to play with and do lots of kind of lower-stakes activities with the faculty. One of the first activities we do is we pull them together, and we give them modeling clay. And we say, “create an animal out of this modeling clay that represents your relationship with creativity.” Some might make a cat because they’re curious or a dragon because they hoard creative things, or whatever. And then we talk about why they created what they created. And then we put these animals in a habitat. And we say, “Now you’re all going to be working together with each other, what would be the habitat that would include all these animals?” And they might do something like a garden, or an amusement park, but it gets them immediately getting out of the self consciousness of creating, which we know is also something that is very real for our students. The final part I would talk about is the third tenet that we work with is the fear and its relationship with failure. Risk-taking is a primary part of creative thinking. And the biggest risk is taking these risks in front of colleagues. Our students do this all the time. We don’t. We’re very much experts in our fields. We don’t take beginner learning experiences and demonstrate them in front of our colleagues. And this is one of the things that we do with this activity.
John: As an economist, one of the things that struck me was your comment about inefficiency. Economists focus on ways in which people can use resources more efficiently to get more productive use of their time. So could you explain that inefficiency part of it?
Terri: Yes, no problem. I think that for faculty, a lot of the focus is on production and efficiency and sort of demonstrating to the institution that I published this number of papers, I’ve demonstrated that I know these certain things, I can teach these objects and these content principles. But as an artist myself as well, art is not very efficient, it’s often messy, you have to move between different projects, you have to make lots of mistakes, lots and lots of mistakes, and enjoy the mistakes and see what results from them. And it really takes a while to get faculty comfortable with that idea of being inefficient. There’s a reality to inefficiency too, we’ve got limited time, nobody has time to be inefficient. And so this process allows people to actually be able to put something down as I was a part of this group, and I was given opportunity to be inefficient.
Rebecca: How do you recruit for this program, or who do you tend to attract? Because if folks know that they’re risk taking, but they’re averse to risk taking, [LAUGHTER] then sometimes the people that we might hope really appreciate a process don’t always get included. So how do you nudge people to get involved?
Terri: So we’ve had three iterations. And we hope to have our fourth iteration soon. And we’ve had sort of different models. The first two models, we had small groups of faculty, eight in the first one, 12 in the second one, and then the third model, we did more a series of workshops across campus. And this was supported by two other faculty members who are part of the creativity fellows, Maura Dowling in Finance and Sandra Enos, who has since retired, but was in Sociology. And people are actually very interested in the past. We have had a carrot approach where we do have some perks attached to it that make people interested. But I think also we sell it as a place where you get to play and have some fun with some colleagues.
John: And I think all faculty should experience that process of stretching themselves a little bit, of being uncomfortable, to remind them of what it was like to be a student. So I can see the benefits of that.
Rebecca: I thought I almost saw the word play [LAUGHTER] come out of your mouth, but it didn’t actually come out.
John: I’m an economist.[LAUGHTER] We don’t play, we do serious work. [LAUGHTER] How have faculty reacted to this program?
Terri: So there’s a lot of different reactions… again, that notion of beginner learning experiences, that is really valuable. So people remember what it was like to sit down and do something for the first time. And then I also think it’s important for threshold concepts. When we’ve crossed over the threshold, and we know what is transformative about our discipline, we forget that other people haven’t crossed over that threshold. And this experience reminds them “Oh, yeah, there are things about my discipline that I take for granted that other people who are new to it may not understand.” We spend a lot of time with lateral thinking, Edward de Bono’s work about indirect approaches. So an economist who’s doing ceramics is definitely going to be thinking about this in a very different way. For faculty, they reported greater re-engagement with new learner experiences, a recommitment to a creative practice that they may have had in the past. That was actually a big thing that we noted. They enjoyed a like-minded group of colleagues that they were working with. And also, ironically, even though the focus was on purposelessness, this was probably one of the more traditionally purposeful activities because it produced a significant amount of scholarly research, new courses, new programs, conference work, so a lot came out of that. For the institution, it produced a commencement award in creative expression. Faculty instituted new courses, new programs. And then for students… this was the fun part…. so students also get to see what the faculty produced at a pop-up gallery, pop-up installation that we do, and the students talked about two things that they found were really moving to them about the experience. And they talked about how important it was to see faculty move outside of their comfort zone. One student said, “I found this valuable because it shows that these people who are experts in their fields are willing to take risks. I am sure doing these projects that it felt a little unnatural and it was interesting to see how they dealt with that and created something to be proud of.” And the second thing is that humanizing of faculty, they really saw faculty as human beings. This one is kind of cute. I just love this comment. A student said, “It was interesting to see professors doing the same things we are doing in class, and how proud they were of their work.”
Rebecca: One of the things I love doing is taking classes and learning new things, for some of those exact reasons: feeling vulnerable, remembering what it feels like to be a beginner, etc. You mentioned as you were laying out some of the things that your does, does your role in building community. We know that faculty often work in their own silos and sometimes feel like they’re facing their own unique challenges. But what strategies have you used to break down some of these silos and bring faculty together across campus?
Constanza: Yeah, that’s such an interesting question. And it’s so funny because we don’t often think of teaching as being an isolating practice. But really, if you’re teaching in a classroom, unless you’re co-teaching with someone else, or you’re being observed, you’re the only instructor in the room. So if something goes wrong in the classroom, you only have yourself to consult with in that very moment. And if you’re working through something, the best place that you can go to if your campus has one is a teaching center. Luckily ours does. Thank goodness, [LAUGHTER] because I love having a job. [LAUGHTER] But we find ourselves working with faculty to build these spaces for community because oftentimes, as an instructor myself, I’m not taking the time to build reflection and metacognitive practices into my own routine of teaching. So my teaching routine is “Okay, let me build my lesson plan. Let me do my grading. Let me meet with students for office hours.” But I’m not consciously thinking, “How can I reflect on my teaching?” Or “Where can I meet with other people to discuss this?” That’s our role of the teaching center. And so our job is to help support faculty in forming those connections and to build space for them to share their experiences. Sometimes we might coordinate a lunch to discuss a certain topic or invite one of our faculty to pose a question or discuss a certain problem that they’re facing. Some of the times we draw from our own teaching experiences to give examples of how we might approach a situation or some of the teaching wins that we’ve had or some of the teaching struggles that we’ve faced. Some topics that we’ve more recently covered are first-year teaching techniques, supporting first-generation students, managing student disruptions, course redesign, and Universal Design for Learning. But really, if faculty members come to us and they’re interested in a certain subject area, we’re more than happy to look into it if we’re not familiar with it ourselves, and then come back and design something for them.
John: You mentioned a first-year teaching techniques course to prepare faculty to teach first-year students, and in an earlier conversation, you mentioned that this was something you were hoping to spread throughout the entire faculty. Could you tell us a little bit about what the focus of that class is?
Constanza: Yeah, I got a lot of questions about this at POD actually, because this is something that a lot of universities are hoping to teach about, really. But I was having a conversation with our Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Veronica McComb, and we were casually talking, as one does, with the Dean over coffee. And she was saying it would be really great if we could offer something that would highlight some of today’s students’ challenges and some teaching techniques that would really complement their learning. And I looked at her, and she has a faculty development background, and I said, “Well, do you want me to build a course?” And she said, “Yeah, I’d love it.” And so the idea unfolded, and I began to design our first-year teaching techniques course. It’s a six-week course, which ends up with faculty creating new implementations into their own courses. And although it’s geared towards first-year students, it really applies to all students. So we’ve had two cohorts of faculty go through it already. Our third cohort is about to launch, there are five modules, and they talk about a variety of teaching techniques, some of which faculty may have seen before and may already use but not know that they’re actually evidence based, and some of which are entirely brand new. We use a variety of mediums. So they get to listen to some Tea for Teaching podcast episodes, as well as some other podcast episodes. They get to read some articles. And then we also all read Lisa Nunn’s, 33 simple strategies for faculty: a week-by-week resource for teaching first-year and first-generation students, which is really great, because there are anecdotes within that book from first year and first-gen students themselves with quotes of their thoughts and struggles and comments. And so it’s real and extremely relatable. And it gets our faculty thinking about how they’re delivering content or how they’re approaching students in an entirely different way. And so in the course, we’ve laughed together, we’ve cried together, we’ve met on Zoom, we’ve met in person, and folks get to know other faculty from different disciplines across campus. We’ve had folks who have just started teaching for the first time, we’ve had folks who have been teaching for a number of years at Bryant, folks who are new to Bryant. So it’s a really great way to build community. And I’m glad that you asked about it. But it’s also really helpful and a great way to show those who have been teaching for a really long time, especially, that it’s always really great to reflect upon their teaching practice and to think about how they can reinvigorate that practice and enhance it to fit the needs of today’s students.
Rebecca: One of the other programs that you’ve mentioned is the Course Redesign Institute. Can you talk a little bit about how this program is structured, when in the year it happens, and how many faculty participate?
Terri: Sure, this is something we’re very excited about that we just started this year. It was actually the idea of one of our faculty fellows, and we modeled it on our really wonderful writers’ retreat that we’ve had for a number of years on campus and big shout out to our colleagues in the Krupp library and the Academic Center for Excellence that we work with in planning that. The writers’ retreat is really just: show up, do your writing, we’ll feed you. [LAUGHTER] And we’ll be around to help you if you have questions. And we love that idea, and we love that structure. So what we did is we built into the structure a series of content experts. We brought in people with expertise and accessibility, course design, and open educational resources, and virtual reality and pedagogy, instructional technology, syllabus statements and design. And we brought everyone together in a space in the library. And we essentially just let people do their thing. So we structured it with: buy our meals, we structured it by the times we got together with our meals to be in community. We did not run any sessions in training. We did not have any required events other than strong encouragement to join together during the five meals that we shared together over our time together. And it gave people a chance to sit down and in real time reach out to the people who could help them with questions they were having in the moment. So a group of three or four math faculty, for instance, in our last retreat, were working together. And they would come across something as they were working, they’d say “We have an accessibility question.” They could go right to the person and ask that question. “Oh, we’d like to institute open educational resource in this,” they could go right to that person and ask them. And it was a very productive time, people love being fed. They love being able to just show up and do their work and have immediate response to the questions that they have. Our goal was to do this once a year, but it was so popular, we intend to do it in the fall and the spring, and keep this sort of a very faculty-centered event where they get access to the resources they need right away in real time.
Rebecca: I love the idea of having the meals to bring people together, because inevitably, that probably leads to conversations about the courses they’re all redesigning.
Terri: Absolutely. We’ve had wonderful conversations.
John: I believe you also do some things that bring faculty together a bit more informally. Could you talk about some of the ways that you do that?
Constanza: Well, as Terri has mentioned, we love food. So if there’s a way that we can bring folks together over a hot beverage or a meal, because we’re in New England after all, and as we were joking about earlier, the winters are rough, we’ll do that. So as we’re heading back during the first week of classes, we’ll have a welcome back lunch for faculty. But apart from that, folks will joke, I’ll sit in my office sometimes, but sometimes I’ll also go over to the faculty and staff cafe and I’ll sit over there and faculty will pass through and remember that they have a question for me, or they’ll see me and they’ll sit down and we’ll chat. And so that will be a way to informally catch folks, and remind them to come and visit us or perhaps chat with them about an idea that they have. And if I’m lucky, that’ll turn into a SOTL article or something like that. So I love to catch people in that way. It’s amazing how many questions folks suddenly remember that they have just by seeing my face, and it saves them from sending an email. But also, the more I get to know faculty on campus, the more I understand where their interests lie. And so if there’s a faculty member who has a question, and I know that there’s another faculty member who might have experience with that question and might be able to answer it, I might reach out via email and introduce them. In fact, I’m notorious for doing so. So it’s a way for them to get to know each other as well, because oftentimes, faculty will meet other faculty members in their department, but they may not necessarily know other faculty in other areas. So those are some of the ways that we informally network. Our faculty fellows allow for another space where faculty can get together and meet folks that are not within their discipline. And really any open session that we have in the Center for Teaching Excellence is another way for folks to get to know other faculty who are interested in pedagogy. I love Liz Norrel’s idea that she mentioned on your podcast a few weeks ago about doing podcasts and puzzles. And so shout out to her for that one because I really want to adopt that for our center as well.
Rebecca: Since the pandemic, we’ve dealt with a lot of issues related to student disengagement and increased reports of students dealing with mental health challenges and things like this, and this has really increased the emotional labor of faculty. Sarah Rose Cavanaugh in Mind over Monsters argues for a practice of “compassionate challenge.” How do you address the challenges that faculty are facing in finding a good balance between compassion and challenge?
Terri: So one of the things that we look at… and this is a really important question that everybody is navigating, so thank you for that question… one of the things that we look at is the concept of kindness. It’s one of our three principles. And there is a bit of a problem around kindness as a term, often wrongly defined as doing everything you can to help someone to the point where you start doing the thing that they needed to do in the first place. And this creates learned helplessness, it also can become manipulative. For those of us who are doing this kindness and compassion at work, it can become exhausting and frustrating. As educational developers, we end up doing all the work rather than teaching someone how to do it for themselves. And that can be really hard. So we’ve talked a lot about compassion fatigue, and what happens when working with students who have mental health challenges, as you mentioned, where we start to take on the experiences of the students, and sometimes not appropriately, because there are professionals who should be working in these areas, and we want to support students. So how do we do that effectively, but also make sure our students are getting the best care they can from the professionals who are there to do that work? So we have students who are disengaged, alienated, apathetic, worry about belonging, but we also have faculty who are disengaged, have burnout, have compassion fatigue, wonder about whether they belong to an institution that has changed so dramatically in such a short period of time that it makes sense anymore. The conversation about not being a great resignation, but a great disengagement that faculty are experiencing. And I think that a couple of the issues that we’ve been looking at is that performative care, the way that so much is required of us now as faculty and as educational developers to be caring, that the caring becomes a performance rather than something authentic. And, of course, this is a use of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work on emotional labor, where you start becoming detached and alienated from that labor, because it’s taken over your identity, that you no longer authentically feel connected to that emotional labor. And when we’re dealing with so much endless change, we have to be careful of that boundary between compassion and challenge.
Constanza: Yes, and this is something that we’ve talked about in terms of layers, because if the students are feeling this way, it’s impacting the faculty. And then if the faculty are feeling this way, it’s impacting us as educational developers. And Terri knows the story, but it really hit me when I was at a conference with Terri last year. I’ve always sort of wondered, as one does, how did I end up in faculty development? What’s my real story if someone were to ask, and one of my mentors in graduate school, unfortunately, ended up taking their own life, because they felt as if they didn’t belong, and really, really suffered. And we’ve seen in the news recently, as well, that that is a topic right now that we’re grappling with in higher education too. So all of this to say that, as educational developers, we are seeing faculty being perhaps more vulnerable than ever coming to us with greater challenges than they perhaps have ever come to us with before. And we’re also feeling the ripple effects of all of this. And in some cases, it is very challenging for faculty to come to us with these issues, for all of those same reasons that we mentioned earlier, faculty thinking, “Oh, I’m probably the only one going through this, perhaps it’s not appropriate for me to come and talk about this,” or the opposite extreme, where they are oversharing all of the things that are happening, and we have to figure out how to help support them, and perhaps do that in a way that is most effective, while protecting ourselves at the same time from that compassion fatigue. So if faculty are to trust us, that means that we have to be willing to be vulnerable to a certain extent, as well. And that’s not to say that we bare our entire souls and say everything that is deeper or personal about what we’ve been through. But it does mean that it’s helpful for us to share some stories of our own teaching woes, or to talk about moments that things just didn’t go right. Or to let faculty know, “You’re the third person to come into my office today letting me know about this, so I just want you to know that you’re not alone,” or to let them know “this is a topic that has come up repeatedly, and just to let you know, we’ve heard about it so much that our director has gone and informed the provost too, so we’re going to start having greater conversations as a campus community about it.” And so those are the types of ways that we show up for faculty, because, again, if they’re going to be comfortable with us, we have to show them that we too, are willing to be vulnerable with them. The other thing that I should mention as well is that part of this process is for us to generate community too. So not only do we meet with each other as a team, but we’re also part of the Rhode Island Teaching and Learning Network. So we have educational developers from the entire state of Rhode Island on that network. And we meet monthly to talk about issues, ideas, and concerns that we’re seeing, and that’s a really great space for us all to get together and quite honestly, it is so supportive, and I’m not quite sure what I would do without that network.
Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”
Terri: Our next steps are, as we said a few minutes ago, actually, we were talking about how students feel alienated, discontent, apathy, belonging issues, and our faculty are also feeling some of these same things. And surprise, educational developers are also in that mix. And we are feeling that same sense of disengagement and burnout, and compassion fatigue. And our next steps are to take these subjects that we’re working with and really start thinking about how it impacts our work as educational developers and other educational developers. We do a lot of the support work, and much is required of us, and how are we supporting each other? As Constanza mentioned a moment ago, the Rhode Island Teaching and Learning Network has been a place where we’ve been having some of these conversations this year, and we hope to continue to have them there and on our campus.
Constanza: I think Terri said that perfectly.
John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you again, and we look forward to future conversations.
Constanza: It’s great to speak with both of you. Rebecca, so nice to meet you. It’s so funny when you hear someone’s voice and then, I’m sure you get this all the time, and then you get to see them and I hope to meet you both in Oswego sometime. We’ll make it happen. And I’ll bring Terri with me.
John: That would be great.
Terri: It was lovely to see you both. 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. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.
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