194. Minding Bodies

Visualize a classroom. Perhaps there’s a whiteboard in front with students seated. We tend not to think of the outdoors or students actively moving around or engaging all of their senses. In this episode, Susan Hrach joins us to explore embodied cognition and how we can leverage sensory input and physical space to support learning. Susan is the Director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and an English Professor at Columbus State University. Susan is the author of Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning.

Shownotes

  • Hrach, S. (2021). Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning. West Virginia University Press.
  • Verschelden, C. (2017). Bandwidth recovery: Helping students reclaim cognitive resources lost to poverty, racism, and social marginalization. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Transcript

Rebecca: Visualize a classroom. Perhaps there’s a whiteboard in front with students seated. We tend not to think of the outdoors or students actively moving around or engaging all of their senses. In this episode, we explore embodied cognition and how we can leverage sensory input and physical space to support learning.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Susan Hrach. Susan is the Director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and an English professor at Columbus State University. Susan is the author of the recently released Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement affect Learning. Welcome back, Susan.

Susan: Thank you. I’m happy to be back.

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

Susan: I’m sorry to say that it’s already gotten hot here and I’m drinking a cold water straight from the fridge.

Rebecca: That sounds actually nice and refreshing.

Susan: It is. We keep cold, refillable glass bottles in the fridge to be able to grab.

Rebecca: Perfect. How about you, John?

John: Well, for the first time on this podcast, I believe, I’m drinking inced tea instead of regular tea. I’ve been in meetings since very early this morning and have not had a break to go down and heat up some water. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I think you might have had iced tea one other time.

John: Possibly.

REBECC: I know we have a friend of the podcast who will let us know. Today I’m having English breakfast. So when we hear the word cognition, we tend to think of heads and brains and not necessarily the rest of our bodies. And in your book, Susan, Minding Bodies, you challenge the assumption by introducing us to the term embodied cognition. Can you define what you mean by embodied cognition for listeners and maybe introduce the six principles that your book is organized around?

Susan: Sure, yeah. So the way that I am defining embodied cognition is a recognition that your whole body and your immediate environment really play a role in your thinking process. So internally, your heart rate, your spikes of cortisol or endorphins, your digestive functioning, maybe externally, the position of your limbs and your posture, your prior experiences. And then most importantly, the level of bodily energy that you bring to any moment of perception is all simultaneously at work in cognition. So I read a lot of neuroscience, especially from the past couple of recent decades, is when the embodied cognition work has really taken off. And I came up with these six principles just to provide a framework for understanding it for me and for the book. So the first one is to recognize that our bodies are constantly moving, one scientist explains that we might more accurately think of ourselves like clouds or waves than objects. And because we’re constantly moving, our bodies try to conserve energy. And brains use a lot of energy. So that’s important for our efforts to conserve it. So the way that we partly conserve energy is by engaging affordances around us. So that’s tools, it can be other human beings. And then because we’re such social creatures, and we engage each other as affordances to our thinking, each of us affects each other’s ecosystems of thinking. We can directly affect the other person’s experience or perception of any given moment. The fifth one is that we construct knowledge through embodied experiences. And then last but not least, our bodies reward learning in a physiological way, we experience pleasure when we learn under the right condition.

John: Following up on that, you note that our brains have evolved to conserve energy by basing predictions on past observations, while ignoring most of the input being taken in by our senses. And how does that limit our ability to understand the world around us and to learn?

Susan: Yeah, that’s huge. So this whole default prediction mode was something that it took me a while to kind of revise my own prior understanding of how thinking operates. But basically, your brain is trying to conserve milliseconds of time predicting what it expects to happen next. And it will anticipate what it expects to happen in a way that is also able to override what does happen. So that explains why if you are at the scene of an accident, and different people have different accounts of what they saw, it’s because their brains are literally being shaped partly by what they expected to see. And that’s why some people can be so sure that they saw the witness holding a gun, but there was no gun. Those are all just reflections of the way that brains are not really reliable recorders of perceptions. So the way that you can override that default prediction network is basically to bring a huge amount of energy, bodily energy, to being present in the moment and being very open to your sensory perceptions and also just having enough energy to be really self aware about what you’re encountering. And so having the opportunity to explore something from a different perspective, to connect your prior knowledge to something new. Those are ways that you give yourself the best opportunity to be present in the moment and resist the pull of that default prediction network.

John: And that’s a useful skill, I think, for us all to acquire. And I think we’d have a much better political climate, if we could help everyone get free of those biases or help to escape some of those biases.

Susan: Yeah, you know, it’s really hard. I think it’s most important for us to just know about it and be aware of it. I don’t know that we can completely escape it. This is just how our brains are wired to work. But yeah, I mean, even this new development of like the deep fake news, it’s sort of based on our predictive brains, because we’re not paying close enough attention to the image to recognize the telltale signs of how it’s been faked. And so those attempts to persuade people are relying on the fact that our brains are willing to just jump over the step of being as observant as possible.

Rebecca: In the first chapter of your book, you focus a lot on physical space and how space impacts learning. And you open by noting that a student in a college class is expected to spend about 112.5 hours sitting down and you use the phrase “sitting is the new smoking.” Can you explain to our listeners why we should reconsider this?

Susan: Yeah, sure. And I can’t recall exactly how I came up with the 112.5 hours, I suspect I might have gone to the accrediting body’s site in which, you know, they list seat time… isn’t that a terrible phrase?

Rebecca: A very terrible phrase. [LAUGHTER]

John: We should note that while we’re recording this, you are standing to get around this.

Susan: I am, and Rebecca…

Rebecca: Me too. Me too.

Susan: And Rebecca too. That’s right, Yeah, you can find articles about this pretty much every day in the popular press. I’ve stopped saving them, because there’s no point in having it in 500 different places. But the bottom line is, especially in the past 40 years, 50 years, we’ve engineered movement out of our lives in a way that’s been really detrimental to health, even if you get a really intense workout at the gym once during the day, that’s not enough to override the whole day of sitting. And so I don’t like the word exercise as much as movement, because exercise implies that like, “Okay, we’re going to set aside this special time to do this special activity.” And really, what would be better for our overall health is just to get a lot more movement worked into just our ordinary activities. So that’s because human beings evolved over all of these years up until the last 40 or 50, to spend a lot of time walking, moving, being outside, having the normal hours of daylight, kind of regulate our sleep patterns, eating a wide variety of foods that are natural. And so we’ve changed all of that in the not too distant past. And in order to recapture some of that conditions for human health, you have to be a little bit of a weirdo these days, you have to resist the car, you have to say “Actually, I’m going to purposely make myself take the stairs, or I’m going to use my body to transport myself from one place to another,” and it’s countercultural. But if we do work in more ways to move around as ordinary part of our day, our whole health, and therefore our brain health will be more resilient. And they’re just learning about the ways that that impacts our overall aging and resistance to disease, as well.

Rebecca: As a residential campus that’s got a lot of green space and walking space. I know one thing that both faculty and students really missed during the pandemic was walking from building to building, maybe not during snowstorms. But on a nice day, we had a lot of walking in our daily lives and had to find a way to do that when we were working remotely. But now I think a lot of us have been working remotely and found ways to do that, like maybe taking a break from the screen by taking a quick walk or folding some laundry or doing some other things that get your body moving as a part of the work day that I think we’ll all need to be thinking about as we head back in the fall. And just think about how to keep movement or reintroduce movement, [LAUGHTER]

Susan: Yeah.

Rebecca: …whatever the case may be, depending on the circumstances you were in when you were working more remotely.

Susan: That’s right, Rebecca, and I’m glad that you mentioned that just because the environment is not all about just your personal choices that we’ve also paved over the universe, and, [LAUGHTER] in the case of campuses that are not residential, made it really difficult to get around using your own bodily effort. And maybe you’re living in a place where it’s not very conducive. There aren’t sidewalks or safe places to walk in. Those are the harder, longer term challenges that we face as sort of reversing the way that the past half century has engineered movement out of our lives.

John: Yeah, and I’ve been thinking myself that one of the reasons why so many of us have Zoom fatigue is we don’t have those little walking breaks. I know when I’m teaching in a large class, I often use a step counter. And I often would get in a mile, or a mile and a half of walking during an hour and 20 minute class period. But then I was thinking, I was doing that, but those students were stuck in those seats. What can we do to give our students more opportunities to benefit from more motion, rather than just asking him to sit in place constantly.

Susan: Um hmm. That’s right. And I’m so glad that you raised that point, too, because we are the lucky ones, we’ve got freedom of movement in the classroom. And you’re right, your experience of getting all of those steps in during class, I think, is the experience of lots of faculty, and that blinds us to the fact that nobody else in the room has had the opportunity to get those steps. So really, if we can use any opportunities to get students moving around, that’s the ideal use of the space. If we can change up the arrangement of the furniture and get them to help, that’s giving them a chance to be up and about. If we can change their whole experience of the space by leaving the classroom on occasion that will help them to be more alert and give them a little bit of bandwidth recovery. So you’re probably familiar with this bandwidth concept that Cia Verschelden has used in her book: Bandwidth Recovery. It has to do with basically giving students the opportunity to be mindful of how much energy it takes to be a learner and give them opportunities to recover bandwidth that’s getting sucked up by other things, whenever we have the opportunity. Another thing I would suggest is open the blinds in your room. So how many times do we go into a classroom and someone has turned it into a cave, because they needed it to be very dark for the PowerPoint? And so be a stealth natural light provider by resisting the shut blinds, and, if your windows open, open your windows. Fresh air is a wonderful thing to have in a classroom.

Rebecca: So Susan, what about some of the spaces I teach in that have no windows? [LAUGHTER]

Susan: Right, exactly…

Rebecca: That’s where they put all those computer people… in the basement of buildings. [LAUGHTER]

Susan: Yes. Well, I started sending to our print shop pictures that I’ve taken with my phone camera that are of trees and sky and outdoor scenes. And I just get them to blow them up and put them on foam board and hang them as sort of pretend windows, and people comment on it all the time. “Ooh, that’s so beautiful.” When I say “Right, yep, not expensive, not hard.” But it really changes the feel of a room to at least have an image, a beautiful natural landscape, on the walls.

Rebecca: I’ve had the opportunity to teach quite a few classes where we’ve had travel abroad components where we are doing place-based learning and really being able to be outside and walking around and really using our full set of senses. In fact, one of the classes I co-taught with a colleague of mine, Chris McEvoy, the whole framework of the class was around the five senses in India.

Susan: Awesome.

Rebecca: …which was amazing.

Susan: Yeah.

Rebecca: But then I think about classes like my web design class and think “Hmm, I would really love to get around.” So as I’ve read your book, I’ve been brainstorming ways to break down those ideas. But one of the things that we do when we have these travel classes is often alert students to things that they don’t expect, because we’re so used to sitting in a classroom and not moving. So we say things like “there’s a lot of walking, there’s stairs, there’s heights,” all these things that we have to alert students to because they’re not expecting it in a learning situation. So when we start thinking about these embodied experiences, what are some things that we need to do to prepare students and to make sure that students who may have mobility limitations that might not be visible, for example, or maybe someone who’s really sensitive to the sun, there could be all kinds of things that we’re not thinking about, how do we make sure that everyone’s going to be able to participate or be included in these embodied experiences?

Susan: So this is a really important question. And I’ve thought a lot about it too, because inclusivity is so important. And I would say, as a blanket statement, no activity is so valuable that it would override the need for inclusivity. So, that’s first priority, but my approach to movement in the classroom is more in line with UDL, universal design for learning, principles than trying to create extra work for the accessibility office by providing three more things that students need to ask for accommodations for. I really would not want to do that. So every activity that you plan really should have options. You should think it through really carefully, walk it through if you can, be able to describe really transparently and well in advance what to expect. And then think about options. And I needed to do this even for new faculty orientation, because you never know when somebody has twisted their ankle the day before, and they show up with crutches, or somebody who is in their last trimester of pregnancy. There’s just all sorts of things that affect our mobility, that we need to be able to plan for people to participate in whatever way that will be manageable for them. So options, I think, are the key thing. As you get to know your students in your class, you will find out whether there’s somebody who has a really significant reason to not be able to go outside, for example, or that we need to really give plenty of time for this person to be able to move outside of the classroom or even inside of the classroom, I think an atmosphere of respect and encouragement and the way that you build community with your students. Those are all things that should be the bigger context of any activity that you plan, so that it doesn’t become a source of exclusivity in any way, but just something to negotiate, and something to discuss together to figure out what will work. And the other aspect, I would say that’s important here, and I get this from the Faculty Development Center at the University of Pacific where Leslie Bayers and Lott Hill have been doing really great work for years in embodied kinds of faculty development, is to be really clear about the difference between things that are uncomfortable, and things that are unsafe. So they say sitting on a blanket in the grass may, for you, think about this… is it uncomfortable in a way that you could stretch a little bit to try to imagine how this might be an experience that will be okay for you? Or is it actually unsafe, for whatever reason? And that distinction might be important for students, because you’re right, a lot of them as you said, this is not what they expect from a college class. So they need some time to absorb it and to know what to expect.

Rebecca: Susan, do you introduce any of these ideas in your syllabus, for example, or introduce how you might use movement in the class on the first day.

Susan: I do I do. So I started including under the material list, an old towel or blanket, and I tell them why I prefer days where we might be going outside. I haven’t had anybody say that that was objectionable, or that that was going to be a problem. In fact, a lot of them said, “Oh, I don’t need to sit on anything, I’m fine on the grass.” So that gives them just the opportunity to know that if you feel like you’re not gonna want to sit directly on the grass and you bring something you don’t care about getting dirty to sit on. The other thing that I’ve done just this past semester with my class that was mostly online, is that I spent the first night.. we actually did a guided meditation the first night. And so I spent a while telling them that we were going to begin each class with contemplative practices and why, and that I wanted them to feel like they had the opportunity to transition from whatever crazy things were going on in their lives outside of this class to being fully in the moment and present. And that I was very aware of the way that the pandemic has been stressful for all of us, and that I wanted to give them a chance and some space and time to regain some serenity, some quiet, some ability to reflect and that I had done this research to show that their learning would be enhanced. It would be more smoothly facilitated if they were given the opportunity to quiet their busy brains and prepare for the rest of the class just by taking five or 10 minutes at the beginning to do something a little unorthodox. And they were totally receptive. Nobody said, “This is weird. I’m not doing it.” I mean, they immediately were game to kind of close their eyes and listen to the recording of the guided meditation. And there was one student [LAUGHTER] who came in a little bit late that night and we’re all sitting there with our eyes closed in complete silence. And I thought, well, this has got to be an interesting moment, you know… [LAUGHTER] …walking into a class on the first night and the professor and everyone else are just sitting there quietly with their eyes closed, but I was able to explain to him what we were doing afterwards, and they were cool with it.

Rebecca: On the same idea, Susan, I was doing a lot of warm up drawing activities and things in my design classes at the start of class during the pandemic and students really noted how helpful that was for the same reason, to refocus or get into the space of the class and allow them to stop thinking about all the things going around them. So I got a lot of feedback at the end of the semester. about that.

Susan: Oh, that’s great. I think a lot of us have recognized in the virtual environment that you just really have to find a way to begin that is the icebreaker activity almost every time. Like you’ve got to make that transition somehow,

John: As we move into the fall, we’re moving into a situation that’s very different, where many students have not been in the classroom, and people who are going to be sophomores may not even have been on the campus that they were enrolled in. What can we do in our classes in the fall to take advantage of some of the notions of embodied cognition to help our students be successful as they transition into a new environment?

Susan: Well, I would say if you have the opportunity, as you’re planning your fall syllabi, to plan a couple of experiences that would be connected to your content, and perhaps involve taking your students somewhere else on campus than your classroom. That would be one really interesting thing to experiment with. If you have the opportunity to take them to somewhere on campus, that’s even more exciting. But of course, the logistics and the resources might be more time intensive. The other thing people might consider for this fall is having… and again, the natural sciences and the arts are so lucky in that all of their disciplinary work is lab or studio enhanced as well. But for those who don’t have a normal lab or studio as part of their disciplinary context, can you create that inside of your own classroom? Can you bring some objects to explore and have students touch and move around with or draw, for example, smell maybe, in a way that you haven’t tried before. That would give them a really hands-on sensory experience with an object that your discipline values, or here’s another inside of the classroom idea. If you haven’t used those giant sticky pads that you can just stick on the wall, the sheet-size paper with markers, or if you have access, maybe through your Center for Teaching and Learning, to portable whiteboards that you can pass out to each student or just a couple of students per whiteboard, can you think of just one new activity you might try in your classroom that would have them using those tools. So those are affordances for learning, and they give students some sort of more tactile experience that will help the learning to be experienced in an embodied way. I do believe that students are more willing to jot down tentative ideas or be more just free with their initial ideas with whiteboards because they’re just so easily erased, that it feels a little bit safer to go ahead and just jot some things down.

John: We’ve been through this experience where most classes were taught virtually, but it’s likely some of that’s going to be continuing as we move into what we hope to be a post-pandemic future. How can you take advantage of some of these concepts of embodied cognition when you’re teaching students virtually say with either asynchronous courses or synchronous remote classes?

Susan: Right? So I imagine that others have read these pieces about Zoom fatigue. And this is great because the people who work in cognitive psychology have been trying to figure out why is it so tiring for us to be on Zoom all the time, recognize that human beings are not really accustomed to staring straight into each other’s eyeballs, uninterruptedly. This is exhausting for us. And then they also recognize that we are not used to staring at our own faces for hours and hours, and that’s super distracting, and also exhausting. And so I think we’re adopting some new practices that recognize what was a little unnatural about the virtual meeting, the fact that we need a break from looking at ourselves that maybe, I think, some of the platforms now have even adjusted so that the default setting is for you and your little square to be minimized, which is helpful. But just to recognize that it’s important for us to have a break from staring into each other’s eyeballs and planning moments to say, “Please turn your cameras off, because we’re now going to have a little stretch break. And I’ll guide you through twisting in your chair, touching your toes, doing a little bit of chair yoga so that we can bring our attention back to the conversation here.” Those are things that we might now recognize as important to do in synchronous meetings. I think there’s also some attention we could pay in the online universe to space. So students should know that their space matters, the place where they’re learning remotely is worth paying attention to. I think it would be great at the opening of an online asynchronous class, there could be like a special assignment to prepare the space where you’re going to be primarily engaging with the course. Can you think about what will make it a more productive happy space for you? What are you staring at? Where’s the desk facing? Can you change up the arrangement of the room in a way that will make it feel more pleasant for you? Or is there somewhere else you might go outside of your house? And how can you make it into the most pleasant kind of learning space for you? And that has to do with relatively superficial things? Can you think about the fresh air in the room? Do you need to make your bed? Are there ways that you can have that space, give your brain the best opportunity to function. And then also, I think the opportunity to get your students away from the screen through activities and assignments that you design to be done elsewhere is just a really worthwhile thing to try. If you can assign podcasts and tell them, specifically, “I want you to not sit and stare at the computer while you’re listening to this, I want you to do some chores, or take a walk or do something else that requires movement so that you can be absorbing this audio experience while you’re moving your body, and tell them why. Because this is often an opportunity for your brain to be more alert and awake and absorb the material in a different way than it would if you were just sitting and vulnerable to opening three more tabs and doing other things.”

Rebecca: There’s one thing that was sprinkled throughout your book that I was really happy to see but also a really important thing to pay attention to. And that was you open today talking about how all of our systems are kind of connected to cognition and the digestive system and all of these things. So students who might be going hungry are not having nourishment or not having warm clothes to go outside and these other things. So I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about some of these other barriers that students might be facing that are impacting their sensory experience and their embodied experience while they’re learning?

Susan: Yes, absolutely. And I think the number one problem there is sleep deprivation. And so a couple of years ago, we had Roxanne Prichard, from the Center for College Sleep come and give a talk to faculty and staff and also students and coaches at the beginning of the year. And people have told me,I’m not exaggerating, that that changed their lives, because it was so shocking to learn how much we really disadvantage ourselves and our own ability to function best by getting too little sleep. If we prioritize the need for sleep in order for our whole bodies and our brains to function at our best, it really matters. It makes a difference. It improves your performance so that you are able to do things more quickly and more accurately, and you save time that you maybe thought you were needing by getting less sleep. So setting your assignment deadlines at like 5 pm instead of midnight, sends a signal to students that you value, their ability to wind down and sleep in the evening and telling them there’s some great infographics and things availabl… I have a reference to this in my book as well… that will share with them exactly how sleep impacts their cognitive functioning and can impact their grades. I think there’s even been some SOTL work that shows how students GPAs were affected when they change their sleep habits. So that’s one thing. And then of course, their nutrition is another thing. And this is again, you got to be really kind of countercultural, like it’s so easy to just feed them pizza all the time and donuts and soda and what’s in the vending machine on your campus. And you really have to be assertive and challenging to get the whole campus to recognize this is really working against our main mission, which is to help support brain growth. And so we could have trail mix in the vending machines instead of just potato chips and doughnuts. That would be a step.

Rebecca: What’s easy for me as an art and design faculty member to think about how to have [LAUGHTER] embodied experiences in class and how to use our senses. But I don’t think that’s so obvious to faculty and some other disciplines. Can you talk about some ways to use the senses or to have more movement in maybe spaces that aren’t so obvious?

Susan: Yeah, well, I think one of the things that we need to do is just be willing to absorb the notion of flexibility. So even just on the recent past years, I remember looking at some of these designs for active learning spaces where they had a bunch of not uniform furniture. It was like “oh, here’s a grouping of stools and high top tables and here’s some sofas.” And I use a lot of group work, and I kept thinking like, how could I do that unless there’s round tables that each have four or five chairs around them. That’s messing with my sense of what my primary mode of delivery is. And then I had to sort of gradually come around to recognizing that people really like choice and options, and they like to be able to choose where they are in a space and how their perspective is. And there’s really no reason that groups need to be sitting in uniform spaces with exactly the same tables and chairs. You can still have groups and let them choose whether they want to sit on the floor, or perch on sofa arms, or be in some space that doesn’t have uniform furniture, and it will be okay. In fact, they might like it more, because they’ve got this choice and variety in their learning experience. There’s just these tiny things about the space that we inhabit that can help to make the experience feel a little bit different in any discipline. But there’s also practices that might be familiar to people like the concept of the gallery walk or stations where you’ve got them moving around the room to contribute to different pieces of the content on different walls of the space. And those have been recommended as active learning practices for a while now, because they’re opportunities for students to be interacting, but embodied cognition explains in a new way, why they work, it’s because you’re getting people up and moving around. And so I think any faculty member in a discipline, even that has not traditionally been as focused on sensory experiences or movement or objects, it just needs to reflect on what made you fall in love with that discipline yourself. Was it the smell of the books? Was it the handling of the special objects that might seem sort of mundane, like some sort of a measuring tool or something that we wouldn’t necessarily think of as being especially exciting, but offers a more tactile kind of way into understanding the concepts. I think individual faculty members are going to come up with their own really creative ways of figuring out how to bring students into a more direct experience with the thing itself that gets them so excited.

Rebecca: That sounds like a key piece is moving away from just always being so conceptual in our heads and just into some sort of physical realm or space.

Susan: It’s true. And I think part of what we excel at in higher ed is conceptual and abstract thinking and this is why we have achieved advanced degrees and become disciplinary experts, because we’ve moved into this conceptual and abstract realm with our disciplines that we’re now prepared for, because we have also moved through other encounters with our discipline that might have been more embodied. But we didn’t necessarily acknowledge or recognize them in that way. And I think of one of my early experiences in graduate school. And this is going to date me for the technology, but was working with the microfiche or the microfilm. Do you remember those? And it was like this big giant… [LAUGHTER] it was like an X-ray machine or something, you put your head in there. And you have to get the reel from the special library container and put it in and figure out the movement controls to be able to see the thing magnified. And I remember telling my professor, it was a little bit like time travel because you could kind of get lost in these really old documents that were suddenly blown up in front of your face. And she said to me, “Ah, you’re in the right place. You belong here.” I mean, that was a fantastic response for her because I was just thinking, “well, I guess I’m some kind of weirdo. [LAUGHTER] I liked the microfiche.” But that was a very embodied experience of the text for me. And as I got to be more credentialed, I was able to go to archives and actually handle these rare objects myself. And that was like sensory explosion because it was just so exciting to be able to touch these old, old things and see the handwriting and it was transforming.

John: Well, I guess the challenge for us is how we can create experiences like that for our students who may not have those microfilm readers or access some of those objects.

Susan: Yeah, and I think the library, the museum, the archives, the places on your campus, where we don’t normally think of them as classroom spaces. These are the places we need to be taking our students.

Rebecca: So we always end by asking: “What’s next?

Susan: So I should say, I’m really enjoying just having readers at this point and being able to have conversations like this one, because you spend a long time thinking about all of these things in writing and trying to carefully craft the whole message so that somebody will be listening to it. I’m not really looking ahead to a new book or anything, because I’m just enjoying the conversations that are arising from this one at the moment. But I am, and we’ve talked about this briefly the last time I was on the podcast, continuing to pursue a certification in coaching. And so I’ve got a course I’m taking this weekend in somatic coaching, or using embodied principles to help people be able to have a felt sense of the change that they might want to make in their lives, or how they’re in touch with what they know and what they’re figuring out about, where where they are and where they want to go. I’m really excited about that.

Rebecca: It’ll be interesting to see how that work ties with your embodied cognition work, moving forward.

Susan: Yeah. And I feel like I have such a good grounding now in the science of it, that I’m just really excited to hear from other people who have been practicing what that looks like in a one-on-one conversation. What do they actually ask the person who’s being coached to do with their body or to tune into, so I feel like my brain is rushing ahead and predicting, but I’m going to be open.

John: Excellent. Well, thank you. It’s been great talking to you again, and I’ve really enjoyed reading your book.

Susan: Well, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to reach a broader audience and just to talk through some of these ideas, because they are, in some ways, really common sense and in other ways, sort of a radical new way of looking at them.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m looking forward to processing your book as I’m thinking about my fall classes.

Susan: That’s great.

[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]

150. Pedagogies of Care: Sensory Experiences

This week we resume a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, Martin Springborg and Susan Hrach join us to discuss how sensory experiences can be used in an object-based learning framework to enrich student learning.

Martin is the Director of Teaching and Learning at Inver Hills Community College and Dakota County Technical College. Susan is the director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and an English Professor at Columbus State University. Martin and Susan both contributed to the Pedagogies of Care project. Martin is co-author with Natasha Haugnes and Hoag Holmgren, of Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts. Susan is the author of the forthcoming Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: This week we resume a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, we examine how sensory experiences can be used in an object-based learning framework to enrich student learning.

[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 guests today are Martin Springborg and Susan Hrach. Martin is the Director of Teaching and Learning at Inver Hills Community College and Dakota County Technical College. Susan is the director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and an English Professor at Columbus State University. Martin and Susan both contributed to the Pedagogies of Care project. Martin is co-author with Natasha Haugnes and Hoag Holmgren, of Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts. Susan is the author of the forthcoming Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning. Welcome, Susan, and welcome back, Martin.

SUSAN: Thank you.

MARTIN: Thanks for having us.

John: Our teas today are:

MARTIN: Actually, it’s very hot in Minnesota right now. It’s like, it feels like 100, but it’s truly 93-94 degrees. So, I’m drinking iced latte with vanilla almond milk. It’s really tasty.

Rebecca: That sounds good.

SUSAN: Nice. I’m having a similar heatwave issue. I’m drinking sparkling water that has cucumber and strawberry flavor.

Rebecca: Well, that sounds good.

SUSAN: It’s my current summer favorite.

Rebecca: I, despite the fact that it’s 90 here, still am drinking hot tea because, I don’t know, I have a problem. [LAUGHTER] I’m drinking a summer berry green tea.

John: In our last podcast recording, you mentioned the summer berry green tea and I forgot that that was something they had at Epcot, and I saw my own, so I am drinking the summer berry green tea that I picked up in Epcot last November. It’s very good.

MARTIN: Can I ask a tea question, as long as I have two tea aficionados here?

Rebecca: We can try. [LAUGHTER]

MARTIN: So, my afternoon drink of choice is Earl Grey tea and coffee in the morning, Earl Grey in the afternoon. But I know there are different schools of thought on how you should steep this tea. So, just give me the definitive steeping on Earl Grey tea. That’s what I’m after.

Rebecca: I have a tea pot that does it itself.

MARTIN: Buy the tea pot that that does it for you.

Rebecca: It’s like you put in the kind of tea and it just does it.

MARTIN: Okay.

John: You specify the type and the strength and it brews it to that level. Yes, but, I think four to five minutes is normally recommended.

MARTIN: I’ve heard three, I’ve heard five. So, I’m like, should I just do four and split the difference?

John: Four is probably pretty safe, I think.

MARTIN: Alright.

Rebecca: Yeah, I clearly can’t handle it myself. so I have a tool to do that for me.

MARTIN: Thank you.

John: I have the same one. It’s a Breville tea maker, it’ll brew tea and you just pick the type, and it will even drop the basket in once the water has reached the appropriate temperature,

Rebecca: …and take it back out, it is the most expensive teapot you can possibly buy. So we invited you here today to talk about your contribution to the pedagogies of care project. Can you tell us a little bit about this project?

MARTIN: Yes. So, there’s a Teaching and Learning Series that West Virginia University Press has been engaged with for some time now. I want to say a couple of years we’re going on. So there are many authors within this series. Mainly the books are just short, to the point, for faculty, here’s how to do this thing. Tom Tobin, I’m just going to credit him and Tori Mondelli, both of them for starting this. Basically, when the crisis hit and we all were involved as directors for teaching and learning and other roles on our campuses, were responsible for helping faculty move courses online, and myriad other things, Tom and Tori got the gang together on Twitter and just said, “Hey, let’s put something together.” And that’s really how this thing started to form. We had a couple of meetings to talk about how we would do it, and we just did it. Everybody took on a part of it. And Susan asked me if I’d come on board with her object-based learning session, which I was happy to do. But now that the resource is out, it’s been made available to everybody. It’s an open educational resource, and anybody can use it for however they’d like.

SUSAN: One of the fun ideas that Tori and Tom suggested from the beginning is that it would be a multimedia collection. And so we tried to keep the videos and podcasts to no more than 20 minutes, or maybe a little bit over 20, but not much. And there’s infographics and PDF articles. And so I just thought it would be fun to have an audio-only entry and fun to collaborate. And so Martin’s area of expertise fit in nicely with the topic I wanted to address and we were off to the races.

John: It’s a really nice resource. I know we’ve shared it with our faculty and many teaching centers have shared it with their faculty.

MARTIN: Thank you.

SUSAN: It’s great to know.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s definitely been popular on our campus. I’ve certainly been eating them all up and digesting what’s there and taking advantage. And in your particular entry, you talk a lot about object-based learning. Can you start by explaining to our listeners what object-based learning is?

SUSAN: Sure. Yeah, so I’ve heard it referred to both as object-based teaching and object-based learning, but it comes from the fields of museum education and art history and archeology where the object is the primary way into knowing more about a culture or a time period or an aesthetic sensibility. So new neuroscience of learning is affirming that that just works really well as a structure for human learning in general. So I take the sequence from a book that I have found really useful by Guy Claxton called Intelligence in the Flesh. But he identifies these three steps to learning: the first step is noticing, the second step is imitating, and the third step is practicing. And so object-based learning focuses mostly on that first step, noticing, as sort of the foundation for how you’re able to imitate well and then practice well after that. So, I first became familiar with this by going to a pre-conference workshop at POD in 2018. And Jessica Metzler, from Brown’s Sheridan CTL, did this great session called “Ways of Seeing” and she took us to the Portland Art Museum and we all sat around and looked at this sculpture from, I think it was the Anglo Saxon period. None of us had any idea what it was. And so it was perfect because it was an interaction with a primary object for us to be able to start a series of questions of inquiry.

John: Could you explain how this might be used in other disciplines? Certainly, we can see how statues might be used, but how might it be used perhaps in the STEM disciplines or in other fields?

SUSAN: So, if you think about just a sort of an experience that everybody’s had… just to be more concrete about this noticing, imitating, practicing… something as simple as tying your shoes. How did you learn how to tie your shoes. Well, you had to notice what your parent or somebody was trying to get you to notice, and then imitate what they were doing, and then practice a lot yourself, right? So any discipline that’s conducting an experiment or analyzing any kind of text, and I mean that in the broadest sense of the word, think about the way that you wrote your first scholarly article. You had to notice how other people did it, and then imitate them. And then just practice your own a lot. It’s just the sort of formula that works really well for almost any kind of learning. And it starts with noticing. And so, whatever object you might take to have your students notice carefully is the place to begin. For example, something that sounds kind of abstract, I taught a translation studies course about a year ago, and I structured the whole course on just that three-part premise. We just noticed a lot of things about how translators were approaching the task. And then we tried to imitate various approaches, that we had already noticed that they took differently, and then the students were able to start practicing their own versions of translation with, I think, a much more informed sense of what they were doing,

MARTIN: Well, my background, before I got into faculty development was in the visual arts, I taught photography and art history for about 20 years prior to getting into faculty development. One of the courses that I taught was co taught between myself and a creative writing instructor. And so I taught the photography side of that class or half of that class… and the creative writing for that part, the students use photographs as primary sources to really start that writing process for the various pieces that they wrote during the course. And so that’s another example of how the photo was the object.

John: It sounds like the first part of this is just helping students develop the skill of focused attention, so that they learn how to pay attention to things that they might not normally focus on. And, as part of that, you describe a sound walk activity as an example. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

SUSAN: Yeah, I’d be happy to. Sound walks are pretty much self explanatory. You send the students… I mean, you could do this indoors as well… but outdoors works better. Just out for As short of a period of time as you might feel you can spare, and tell them that their task is to just only notice what they can hear. And it’s best if they can immediately write down all of the series of things that they can hear. It’s okay for them to write down something that they can’t identify, that’s something they notice in the soundscape. But if you have them go outside, and then they’re walking, which builds in movement, which is automatically better for opening up our brain’s ability to absorb things, and then ask them to take this shift in their normal perception that just like triples the impact of their ability to notice things, to perceive them in a new way. And so it’s sort of like priming the brain for learning other things, because you kind of take in your brain out of its normal autopilot mode, it’s more open and receptive to noticing other things.

Rebecca: I’ve taken a similar approach in some of the things that I do in my classes as well because I teach primarily web design. And students often are familiar with websites, they go to them, but they go to them as, like a consumer, and not as a maker. So they don’t really notice unless they take the time to slow down and look in a different way.

SUSAN: That’s perfect. Yeah, that’s a great example. I mean, I think a lot of education in general is helping people to learn how to shift their perception of things, and then also to remain open. Once you’ve changed your mind once, that’s not the end, you’re going to continue to have that sort of open and curious attitude to be able to continue shifting your perception as a lifelong learner. So I feel like it’s just such a foundational skill in higher ed in general.

Rebecca: So Martin, can you describe some of the ways that you might use the same method in a more visual environment, rather than just in audio?

MARTIN: The object-based learning, as Susan mentioned, is pretty native to disciplines like art history, visual arts. Certainly, for example, in teaching art history, that’s an easy use, you’d bring students to a museum, and you have a guided time with them, where you guide them in that exercise of looking at something and applying it to something that they’re going to do back in the classroom or on their own time in preparation for the next class or a discussion. So, we together look at a piece or pieces, or they have their own itinerary, where they have pieces that they need to find focus on, make notes about. If you’re teaching that kind of class, reproduce in sketch form, and then bring that back to an assignment or assignments that they will produce back at the college. I feel like my discipline is an easier application for object-based learning than what we’re talking about the expansion of that into other disciplines. In our podcast, we talk about taking object-based learning and applying it to the STEM fields, for example.

SUSAN: And I want to add too, I mean, I think visual attentiveness is really its primary mode, but I sort of narrowed down for our podcast because we knew we wanted to keep it under 20 minutes, let’s just talk about two of the senses. But, you could do a lot with touch, I think. And I’ve seen some really great pieces, some museum ed pieces about physically handling objects, and the way that students can learn things about any sort of texture or object through just paying a little bit more attention to its tactile existence. And, I’m in literature, it’s not the first field you would think of as being tied to an object that way, but, you know, books, people have very deep attachments to the physical book. And I don’t think that we stop often enough to just talk about what that means. If you bring your students to the archives, for example, and they’re allowed to handle an older book, what does it smell like? What’s the texture of those pages like? What is the cover like? Those are all really interesting ways for them to find their way into being more curious about the object itself, the text itself. And for the most part, we just sort of present the thing as if the content inside is really all that we need to pay attention to. And really, it’s the full experience of that material object… the type font… the way it was produced… you know, all of those things about the history of the book are fascinating, and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to visit archives and deal with archival manuscripts. And it really did transform the way that I looked at early texts when you can look at the physical handwriting of the person who produced it, touch the paper that they touched, it’s a very human way into the study.

MARTIN: And these practices are not just good in theory, like “Oh, it’d be nice to bring a class out of the archives so they can smell books,” or have that experience of touching and interacting with those as primary sources. I don’t want to get us off on a tangent right now, but a project I’ve been working on for some time is photographing faculty teaching in the classroom, to just document what that looks like, and some very real examples of what Susan is talking about. So, I was just at Princeton photographing a class where they actually were down in the archives, and they had books that they were leafing through… old rare texts that were one of a kind to illustrate the points that the faculty member was trying to make in this humanities class. Another, I was at Caltech not too long ago, photographing a geology course, where the instructor was passing out rocks that the students could actually feel, touch, experience, as he was talking about that kind of rock. So, it’s used all the time. It’s maybe more prevalent than people actually realize.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that’s interesting is we often try to tell stories about our experiences. And those embodied experiences include all of our senses, but we often try to capture it in one medium, and we don’t always think about all the other senses. So, I think taking this time to notice, and notice in different senses. Maybe then, as a visual designer, it might be really interesting or important to to notice all the other senses instead of just the visual in studying something, because we tend to preference the modality that we create something in.

John: It’s all creating additional connections for people that make it easier, perhaps, to integrate the information.

SUSAN: That’s right. And I think even, just to build on what Rebecca was saying about how we tend to privilege one sense, and it’s often sight, but I think it’s helpful for students, even imaginatively, to start noticing how something might feel with their other senses. So, as an example, I did a little experiment with my Renaissance Lit students a couple of years ago, and I read them the description of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, which is particularly violent, and it’s an exciting thing to read about, but it’s a little gory, and I asked them to respond to it by doing a little imaginative exercise about putting themselves in that room. And they could be anyone in the room. They could be just as a witness, they could be an observer, or they could be the executioner himself, or they could be themselves, sort of as time travelers. And then I asked them specifically to talk about what the temperature of the room felt like, what it smelled like, what sorts of internal sensations they were feeling as the execution unfolded. And I got this really great set of responses back from them. A lot of them are studying creative writing. So I, you know, was partly designing this exercise because I know that’s the writing that they’re interested in doing, but it was just really fun. And I think if you were teaching history, or really any field in which there’s some sort of story that you could read and have people kind of imaginatively place themselves at that moment, maybe the moment of something important that happened in your discipline, it gives them a more embodied way to connect, even just imaginatively, with it.

Rebecca: in this era of social distancing and virtual spaces and screens, do you have some suggestions of ways to incorporate object-based learning in new ways, than maybe some of the ways that we talked about which might really require being in close proximity or in small spaces like an archive that you might not have access to in the fall?

MARTIN: Well, there are primary sources all around us, we just need to step outside. And with a little guidance from the instructor, students should be able to have those experiences anywhere that they might safely explore in the world right now. So, it doesn’t really need to involve, for example, going to a crowded museum or another crowded space to find primary sources. You can, for example, go back to geology again. And you can easily go on a field trip yourself without human contact to locate the kind of rock or material that your instructor wants you to find and reference and be in the presence of and touch. That’s just one example.

SUSAN: Yeah, I love thinking of ways to get people out from behind the computer and the screen. I mean, I think the whole vision of online learning that we have right now involves people being planted at their desks behind their computer, and oh my gosh, we just need to find ways, like Martin said, of sending them out on field trips on their own, to do whatever might be productive. For you to ask them to leave their desks and go investigate. It could be something in their own kitchens. It could be something outside. I just recently had the opportunity to teach an introductory level interdisciplinary course, and I used this wonderful book I would recommend to anyone by Bonnie Smith Whitehouse that’s called Afoot and Lighthearted: A Journal for Mindful Walking. And she’s got 50 different writing prompts that you can assign as part of taking walks with the students. They’re super thoughtful. She’s got all sorts of great references to important thinkers and their philosophies about walking and why it matters, for example, to social movements. And so, it was so timely, in fact, with the recent Black Lives Matter protests and what just walking means for human beings in a bigger sense. What are we doing with our bodies when we use them in those ways? And so the course was based on physical movement and the creative brain, and I asked the students to pursue some sort of creative project and, oh my gosh, they picked the most fun collection of things. They were crocheting and building furniture and tie-dyeing t-shirts and baking and so they were doing these creative activities, but they had to walk and journal and then see what sort of effect that had on their creative process. And it was great fun, and I also felt like it was the sort of thing we all needed, me included, at this particular moment, I don’t think it was what any of them were expecting from an academic course. But, they did a lot of writing, and they put into the online discussion board, all sorts of sensory things. So, they would record 20 seconds of their walk through the neighborhood. And we could hear their footsteps and we could hear the lawn mower and we could hear the birds and it was just such a great way into students’ environments. That was unusual, and that made the course feel like it was jumping out of the computer in a way. So that was something I feel really lucky to have been able to just use as an experimental summer class. And we had a good time.

Rebecca: One of the things that you mentioned in your work is using podcasts as a way of noticing. Can you talk a little bit about ways that we might use podcasts?

SUSAN: Well, yeah, I think in a similar kind of way, to get students away from their desks and from sitting, there are so many great podcasts now, and there’s lots of educational podcasts that are connected to everybody’s discipline and touching on current themes that make it feel really relevant. And that material is just out there waiting for us to curate, and adopt, and include in our courses. And then, I think, if you can direct the students to listen to an episode of something that you find relevant for your discipline and tell them that the assignment includes you must take a walk while you’re listening to this or do some other sort of movement that does not require you to be mentally focused on the movement. So cleaning, I think, painting a room, or maybe driving long distances… I wouldn’t want somebody to be too distracted in their driving, but not doing homework for other classes… let’s put it that way… an activity you could participate in and listen to the podcast at the same time. I think that’s really kind of the ideal way for them to be able to experience an audio only delivery of content, and also have them not sitting in front of their computers.

Rebecca: What I really love about hearing about podcasts is it actually gets students to start doing some professional development. It’s modeling some of those kinds of things that they might do professionally as well, to continue knowing and learning and noticing new things in the field. It almost get them in the habit really early. [LAUGHTER]

SUSAN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is, I think, at least the current mania for adult learners. And also, so many people are really attached to their books on… Well, I would say books on tape, but they’re not really books on tape anymore, or CD… they’re audio books. So I suppose it depending on the book, you could also assign students to read a primary text as an audio book and see how that shifts things, how it changes it up,

Rebecca: Especially when it might be in the author’s voice or something and changes how you’re understanding it or you’re hearing that person with their words and their emphasis.

SUSAN: Oh, so that reminds me of one other little exercise that I can recommend, which is, if you’re in a classroom, and you could do this with social distancing, and you have a podcast or an audio interview or something that you want the students to hear, you can have everybody listening to it as a group, but give them individual spots to stand along the whiteboard, or if you’re lucky enough to have portable whiteboards where they can be apart from each other, and have them standing and taking notes and doing whatever sort of sketching or doodling or things come to mind as they’re listening to the audio piece. And then when it’s over, everybody gets to share their notes together, and you can kind of see what everybody picked up on as a group. It’s really great. It’s a nice way to have them build on each other’s knowledge and also to sort of watch how other people take notes, and how other people process things. But I wanted to ask Martin, because I saw at some point in the spring that a number of museums had started making their collections more available as virtual tours, did you pay any attention to like which ones we might want to look at? Or do you remember which of the museums were doing that sort of virtual gallery walk?

MARTIN: I didn’t, and I haven’t been teaching for a while now. But because, through Google, I would frequently have my online students visit museums around the world, and then do virtual tours. So even though if the museum itself didn’t have that capability, you can go to Google Arts and Culture and do a tour through Google, that Google has set up for you. That’s a really great resource for anyone using Arts in the classroom to take advantage of. Of course, there are places like MoMA, etc… they have virtual tours set up already that are, in my opinion, they’re just a little more limited than what Google has available. But, since they’re produced by the museum themselves, they’re also a little better quality than what Google has to offer. But, at any rate, the student can go through a museum virtually and it’s experience, kind of like you’re walking the halls.

SUSAN: That’s great. I didn’t know about the Google Arts and Culture.

MARTIN: Yeah.

John: And more generally, there’s a growing number of virtual tours that are provided to historic sites, to other locations, where if you have even Google Cardboard, you can get that 3D experience with your smartphone, which provides a somewhat richer experience at times when travel may not be as likely or when people can’t afford travel in general.

SUSAN: Sure. That’s a good point, John,

SUSAN: John’s reference just now to visiting historic sites made me think about the way that I initially got interested in sensory learning, which was because I’ve had a number of wonderful opportunities to teach abroad. And it was such a striking difference to lead students through historic sites and have them walk in the footsteps of either a character from a story or the author of the story. I started designing these assignments called “You are There” reading experiences where we would go to the place and then read the thing that was written in that place or about that place. And I just enjoyed those learning moments for me and for the students so much that it became sort of a driving challenge for me to figure out how we can replicate that, when obviously, we can’t take everybody 3000 miles away to have a “You are There” reading experience. So, what can we do with our bodies on campus, in the environment that we’ve got, that would allow them to have a similar sort of portal into a distant world? Our archival library is focused on an American collection and I didn’t think there was anything in there for me, as a early modern British person, to be able to take the students to and then when I talked to the archivists, they said, Well, you know, our earliest two maps are colonial maps. They were made by French and British mapmakers and the dates were like 1592 or something and then it suddenly clicked for me… wait a minute, 1592, that is me. I can take my students to our library even though it’s focused on Americana. And we had a great session with those maps at the library because we could see how the French wanted to make the territory of Louisiana exaggeratedly large. And the British wanted to make their colonial territories exaggeratedly large. And so neither of the maps are particularly accurate, but they definitely show the bias of their creators and it was just really wonderful to be able to stand in front of these large-scale maps and have the archivists also talk about them as not meant for actual navigation. They were like propaganda pieces. So, you never know when you might find something on your campus that lends itself to a “You are There” moment.

Rebecca: It’s funny that you mentioned study-abroad things because I’ve also done a lot of classes with travel, and I did some similar kind of sensory work and had students experience a similar kind of space, like a cafe or something, in our town… like at school, and then do the same kind of activity abroad. And then we compared those different experiences. And we did it for different kinds of spaces, even wayfinding and the different ways you might get around. How you might get around in a building you’re not familiar with on campus versus how you might navigate in a different place where you might not speak the language.

SUSAN: That’s brilliant. I love that.

MARTIN: That kind of exercise is still completely doable. Even though we’re somewhat cooped up right now, you can still get out of your house, I had an assignment every semester in my photo class that had students go back home if it was possible, or go to another place of significance and do a guided looking and photographing exercise of that site, which is an exercise and learning experience that is completely doable still and safe. But, it’s so important to get out in the world and be guided through exercises like that.

Rebecca: I was in a webinar yesterday where they did an acknowledgement of the native land that they were on and then encouraged everyone to do the same that was participating in the webinar and took us to an online site that would actually tell you if you weren’t aware. And that’s another way of experiencing your space in a different way and thinking about it in a different way. Although not necessarily sensory, it still kind of gets to that place-based information, which I thought was really powerful and really interesting.

SUSAN: That is really interesting.

MARTIN: And with a place of significance, there’s no way to experience that in a book. You can’t really truly understand what Frank Lloyd Wright was trying to do with Prairie Design unless you go to a place and experience how it fits within the landscape. You can see lots of pictures of it for sure, and books, but you have to be there at some point. You have to be present at one of those sites to understand that kind of work.

SUSAN: But I think we can do a really good job with priming students to have that moment when they get to see Frank Lloyd Wright house have as big of an impact as it possibly could by doing things like Rebecca was saying about. You teach them how to just shift their perception in familiar environment. And then, I think, even just the looking at the photographs of a place that they may eventually visit leads to that really excited anticipation of seeing this thing that they’ve been guided to notice carefully and feel like they have a lot of prior knowledge and experience about before they get to see it in person. It helps to, for example, when you do finally get to go to a museum, feel like it’s just this huge thrill to see some object that you’ve been staring at in a book for a while. It’s a different thing than being guided through rooms full of paintings that you’re seeing for the very first time, and you don’t really have the context to appreciate why this is a big deal. I noticed that when I did a one-week Spring Break travel program, because I had been really skeptical about how that could possibly be a long enough time for students to understand cultural difference, for example. And, I mean, it is too short of a time for them really to go through the full journey of feeling alienated and rejecting the new culture and then coming around to understand partial differences in cultures, but we got to use our two months in the classroom before that spring break travel to get everybody pretty excited about when they would get to see these things in person. And they were completely thrilled… starstruck… about getting to see things that, if we had gone on your typical six-week summer program, I would have been standing in front of whatever saying, “Okay, here’s this important architectural piece, and here’s why you should care about it.” And everybody would be sort of zoning out because they just didn’t have enough prior context to appreciate why it matters. I mean, I think sometimes later on in life, people go, “Oh, hey, I saw that once. Now I understand why it was important,” but it’s hard to do that on the spot.

MARTIN: Totally agree. We can prime students to be completely raptured and excited. I saw that all the time with photographs and other pieces of art that they would experience only in books and then go see these larger-than-life-size things in front of them, that had only been 8 by 10, or 5 by 7 pieces of image on pages. And like you were talking about earlier… audio sources, so, like reading a poem yourself or having it read in class, and then hearing the poet read it… completely different meanings… and you’re completely blown away. People laugh at me because… I’m just going to go to this place… and this is a stupid thing. But, I always make this argument to my teenagers, “You should see the movie before you read the book, because if you read the book: first, it’s gonna ruin the movie; and if you see the movie first, it only makes the book that much better, because there’s so much more in it. And I’m gonna stand by that argument. I think it works.

SUSAN: I see exactly what you’re saying. I mean, I think what that speaks to is kind of layering sensory experiences together as a way of making them the most profound. I get that

John: More generally, we try to integrate new knowledge with our existing knowledge,and we need some sort of structure, some type of scaffolding to tie it together. And I can see that case. I’m not sure I’d make that argument about always watching a movie first. But, I can see the value of that. And if you re-read a book, you notice a lot of things you don’t notice the first time, in part, because you have that larger framework and structure. And I think that can be applied, to some extent, to learning in any discipline, because no matter what discipline it is, you’re trying to help students develop the ability to have focused attention on what that disciplinary lens has, in terms of what is important within that approach to viewing the world. And people need to be trained. And I think in any of these things, students come in and start learning a little bit and they notice some things. But if we want to continue their development in the discipline, we have to provide more scaffolding to help them learn to appreciate or learn to focus on more detailed things within the world around them. And I think that’s a process we need to work on, no matter what discipline we’re working on. And tying in more senses to that I think could be helpful. Just as an example that I think Rebecca and I can refer to, maybe need a little bit more so. When we first started recording podcasts, if we had a 20-minute podcast, it would take maybe an hour for me to edit it. And then now I’m spending about maybe 12 times as much time, maybe 20 times as much time editing many of the podcasts, because, initially, you just go through and you take out the obvious issues, but then you start noticing more things, you start noticing the sibilance after you’ve leveled things, you start noticing more background noises that you wouldn’t have noticed. earlier before we started recording. For the first year or so of our podcasts, we were recording in a place where there was a toilet flushing and sinks running all the time, and doors closing, and a coffee grinder and a blender. And at first, we didn’t really notice that because it was part of our everyday life. But the more I focused on the audio, the more those things jumped out. And that’s what we have to train our students to do in any discipline. In economics, what I try to do is help students see things in the world that they wouldn’t have otherwise noticed, it was just part of their environment. And sometimes I’ve had students do video projects where they actually go out and analyze behavior. And that type of experience of looking at it with this different lens helps them see the world differently in ways that essentially transforms their view of the world from that point onwards.

SUSAN: I’m so glad you refer to economics there because there’s a perfect example of a discipline where you’d say, “Okay, I don’t know how this connects at all, right? And you can definitely see how shifting their perception by paying attention to different things, noticing different things, is grasping the concepts that they need to learn in order to understand economics. But it’s also, I think, just really important to remember that perception is an embodied process. It’s hard to make that happen by just sitting still at your desk and listening quietly.

Rebecca: The other thing I appreciate about thinking about object-based learning and sensory experiences is that it reminds us that objectivity actually has a point of view, tight? [LAUGHTER] We often think that there’s no bias in objectivity, but it does. And it really brings the subject to the forefront in that there is subjectivity to everything that we experience around us and actually gets us to pay attention to that subjectivity rather than thinking that you follow some design principles and somehow you’re being objective and doing good work, rather than thinking about what that actually means as an experience of something.

SUSAN: Yeah. And I think a challenge about teaching as we become more and more expert at what we notice, is that it takes a lot of effort for us to remember what it’s like to be a novice, and I think that’s a source of a lot of grumbling and frustration among senior faculty. We teach new students all the time, but over decades, it can feel like “I have told them this 50 times already, why are they not learning it” …because you have said it 50 times already, but you haven’t said it to the same 50 sets of people.

Rebecca: It’s a good reminder. [LAUGHTER]

MARTIN: You do have to say that with each set of new students,

SUSAN: it can seem sort of shocking, sometimes, when you’re an expert at something that people can’t see what you can see.

John: I know I have had that experience where I’d just say something in class and I said. “Didn’t we just talk about it?” In the same room, I had, but it was a semester before. [LAUGHTER] Oh, yeah. Yeah, we do feel like we’re repeating ourselves a lot, but we have been over many, many years,

MARTIN: I’m coaching my faculty right now in using or applying the Transparency in Learning and Teaching framework that Mary-Ann Winkelmes has been talking about for a while now. And, hear of that is writing your assignments in a way that makes it possible for students who are not native to your discipline to understand what you’re talking about. So that’s in a document. You don’t have to say it 100 million times because it’s written and if they have questions they ask, but it’s transparent from the get go. Like this is what I’m breaking it down in a way that somebody who’s not like me is going to be able to understand.

John: And I think that’s especially important in a world in which we may end up doing more of our instruction asynchronously or online… where in the classroom, if you come up with explanations that aren’t quite complete, students can ask questions right then. But if you’re doing something in an asynchronous online environment, students are kind of left out there on their own. And it is especially important that we have detailed instructions that will fill in those gaps. And that you have a mechanism where students can ask you easily and get quick responses, either ask you or ask other students so that they’re not left out on their own trying to figure out what you meant, when it was perfectly clear to you, but it’s not so clear to a novice. And I think one of the things you mentioned in our earlier podcast with you that sharing this with colleagues and other disciplines might be a good way of getting that sort of feedback, where if they can figure out what you’re asking people to do, then students would be able to.

MARTIN: That’s very true.

SUSAN: My students always do a good job of letting me know where I haven’t been clear. [LAUGHTER] Even when I feel I have made the TILT so explicitly detailed, I’m always surprised.

John: I know in faculty development workshops, sometimes we’ll explain something which, because we’ve been talking about these things so much, it makes perfect sense to us. But ,then we have to go back down a little bit and explain what assumptions we were making and what the basis for that is. Because, when you’ve said the same thing many times, it’s easy to forget that people may be new to some of the concepts.

SUSAN: That’s right. And I appreciate what Jim Lang has, I think, tried to do with the series that he’s editing, which is about books written by human beings, for other human beings, is to try to get away from language that could potentially be offputting to people who really do care about their teaching and want to improve, but are a little resistant to talking about alignment, or maybe the other terrible “a” word, assessment.

John: Susan, could you tell us a bit more about your forthcoming book?

SUSAN: Yeah, so I’m super excited about my book coming out. It has been a year’s-long process for me. I’m not a neuroscientist, I had a chance to learn a lot about embodied cognition, which is sort of an emergent subfield in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. But it also borrows from centuries of philosophy. So Wittgenstein, for example, was interested in embodiment. And so it’s a work of integration. I’m trying to pull from a lot of different, maybe even an eclectic, set of sources in order to think about how… if we pay attention to the body… how does that change learning and classroom teaching in college? And so one of the first questions is, what is learning look like if it does not involve everybody coming in and sitting down in a chair? I’m sort of stimulated by thinking about how classrooms might be radically different by just turning inside out some of the things that we think of as normal. Why do we think sitting down in front of a desk is the way that we study something. I mean, just as an example of putting these things into practice, I’m standing right now, because my research convinced me, and as well as my lived experience, that we think better on our feet. And we think even better while we’re walking, which is why the peripatetics, the Greek philosophers walked as a part of their practice. So, it’s sort of a wacky book, it’s going to be for people who are willing to maybe try some unusual unorthodox things in a classroom. It asks us to pay attention to internal movement, as well as external movement and the senses, and then to think about our physical environments as well. So, I have a section on learning outdoors and thinking about the space of your classroom. And one of the things I lament about the age of PowerPoint is that we often walk into a room and it’s been turned into a cave because everyone pulls the shades down immediately, so that you can see the light of the screen better. And I mean, there couldn’t be a worse, less stimulating, mind-opening environment than a bunch of chairs facing a screen in a dark room. So, those are the sort of assumptions that that book is questioning and ways to kind of shake it up and follow what we’re learning about the brain to be better teachers.

Rebecca: I can’t wait to read it.

John: When is that coming up?

SUSAN: It will be out in spring 2021. I think it’s going to appear in the fall catalog from WVU press. So probably we can start orders in the fall.

Rebecca: Yay.

John: Excellent.

SUSAN: Yeah.

John: And Martin, we talked a little bit about your book in an earlier podcast, but could you tell us a little bit more about when that’s coming out?

MARTIN: So, it’s just for this podcast, in case folks just don’t listen to the other podcast, but listen to this one, the project I just briefly mentioned earlier, where I make photographs, of faculty teaching, that is the project that’s behind the book that Cassandra Horii and I are working on together right now. She’s the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach Director at Caltech. So, she and I have been working on this project together for quite some time. I’m making photographs, we’re using the photographs to talk faculty about their teaching afterwards. The working title is What Teaching Looks Like: Post-Sscondary Education in America. And what we’re doing is really, we’re writing a series of essays, 10 in total, and then there are 10s of thousands of photographs that we’re condensing down into about 200 or so final pics that we’re actually using to illustrate the things that we’re talking about in educational development so much these days, including object-based learning. So, for example, those photographs I mentioned earlier, handing around rocks in a geology class, students poring over primary texts in Princeton in an archive. Those are the kinds of photographs that we’re showing in this book. So, that should be out next year.

SUSAN: I can’t wait to see that. Martin, I almost feel like maybe we can get our books shrink wrapped as a set, because I was lucky enough to be able to include some illustrations in my book. I can’t wait to see your pictures because it was really hard for me to find pictures of anything except students sitting down in desks all looking straight ahead. Like, that’s what the picture of teaching has been. But it sounds like your book is going to do such an important job of awakening us to what else it might look like.

MARTIN: So, we’re just blowing the lid off the stock photo industry in higher education. [LAUGHTER]

John: Excellent.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m looking forward to both of these books, for sure.

John: Me too.

Rebecca: We always wrap up by asking, what’s next? You already talked a little bit about your books, but we didn’t ask our actual question of: what’s next?

MARTIN: What’s next, in reality for me is, while I do have a check-in with Cassandra tomorrow to talk about some of the essays that we’re writing for this photobook, the immediate pressing thing for me is preparing the faculty that I serve to teach online or continue teaching online throughout fall semester, and really, it’s a heavy lift, but I don’t want to make it sound like it’s too much of a drudgery to do that, but we’re preparing in actuality, and everybody’s doing this, for a semester that we don’t fully know yet what it’s going to look like. It’s frustrating. But, that’s what’s next, really.

Rebecca: Sounds like a good time.

MARTIN: Yeah.

SUSAN: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] I’m feeling that too. I mean, obviously, this has been such an intense period for faculty developers, I mean it’s sort of sinking into me more week by week that not, just within our own little communities, but the general public. I mean, there’s pieces in the New York Times now. I mean, they get it the general public goes, “Whoa, this whole educational enterprise, it’s experiencing some really challenging re-envisioning at the moment,” and so it feels like we’re doing really important work, but it’s hard. So to answer the question, “What’s next for me in that arena,” I’ve been pursuing a coaching course this summer in order to be more effective at one-on-one faculty development and helping people to set goals and pursue the things that will make them feel more fulfilled as faculty members, not just in the teaching arena, but in terms of their research and scholarly and creative activities, the service that they do for the institution… just being more intentional, I think, about carving out our careers. And coaching is a field that, it hasn’t been used much within higher ed, but I think has a lot of potential to help everybody.

MARTIN: What course is that Susan?

SUSAN: There’s a number of them. It’s certified through the International Coaching Federation. So, the coaching organization I’ve been taking the class through is called the Center for Coaching Excellence. It’s based in Minneapolis, actually. And so they offer a series of certification programs. And it’s been a real challenge. I mean, writing the book was really growing into new territory for me, and this is really new territory as well. It’s learning how to ask powerful questions. And so I’m still feeling very novice.

Rebecca: Feeling nervous is a good thing for developers to be feeling as we’re helping faculty go into new territory. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I think we’re all novices in many of the things we’re entering into this fall.

Rebecca: Well, thank you both for joining us today and the really powerful work that you’re doing and the conversations that you’re bringing to the table.

SUSAN: Thank you so much for the opportunity. I’m super excited to be on your podcast.

MARTIN: Me too.

John: We very much enjoyed talking to you and we look forward to seeing your work.

SUSAN: Thank you both. Thanks, Martin.

MARTIN: Thank you all.

[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. Editing assistance provided by Ryan Schirano.

[MUSIC]