Category: writing

324. Unmaking the Grade

Posted in blogging, engagement, feedback, grading, higher education, learning, motivation, pedagogy, reflective practice, teaching, ungrading, writing
January 17, 2024

A growing number of faculty have been experimenting with ungrading. In this episode, Emily Pitts Donahoe joins us to discuss her ungrading approach and the documentation of this process on her blog. Emily is the Associate Director of Instructional Support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: A growing number of faculty have been experimenting with ungrading. In this episode, we discuss one instructor’s ungrading approach and her documentation of the process.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Emily Pitts Donahoe. Emily is the Associate Director of Instructional Support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. She experimented with ungrading and chronicled her experiences in her Unmaking the Grade blog. Welcome, Emily.

Emily: Thanks. I’m really excited to be here.

John: We’re very pleased to be talking to you. We talked recently at the POD conference, and I’m looking forward to this additional conversation.

Emily: Yes, where I got this lovely tea for teaching mug from John, which I’m so excited about and drinking from right now.

John: And since this is only audio, Emily was holding the mug [LAUGHTER]…

Emily: I’m showing it off.

John: So our teas today are:… Emily, are you drinking tea in that mug?

Emily: I am. [LAUGHTER] I am drinking tea out of my tea for teaching mug. I’m a big tea drinker. And so today I’m drinking my favorite tea, which is a strong black tea called Scottish morn. And I got this tea from a tea shop called Apothica in Niles, Michigan, which I used to go to when I lived in South Bend, so highly recommended if you’re in that area.

Rebecca: Sounds wonderful. I was ready for you to say that you had coffee or something in the tea for teaching mug so it’d be completely blasphemous… [LAUGHTER]

Emily: Never.

Rebecca: …because coffee is one of the most frequent flavors. [LAUGHTER] Emily, you’re doing it right. [LAUGHTER] I have blue sapphire tea today.

John: And I have Irish Breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: So, we invited you here today, Emily, to discuss your experiences with ungrading. Your blog is based on your spring 2023 course experiences but your ungrading experience predates this course. Can you tell us a little bit about your initial experience with ungrading?

Emily: Sure. So I have a background in Writing and Rhetoric and English literature, and so a lot of what we do in Writing and Rhetoric, I think, is already pretty aligned with some ungrading goals and practices. So in my courses, students have always had the opportunity to revise their work based on feedback, and include it in a final portfolio, and most of their grade is based on their revised work. So it’s not just that they get graded and then that’s the end of it, they always have a chance to improve based on feedback. The first time that I stopped putting letter grades and percentages on student work was in spring of 2022, when I was teaching a general education literature course at Notre Dame, and so the course was on pre-modern and early modern literature, but with a focus on how the texts that we were studying might help us examine or wrangle with some of the questions that we’re preoccupied with as a culture and society today, and thinking about how those texts might relate to student lives. So it was a course for kind of all levels and all majors, which I think made it a good course to experiment with. So I had first-year students all the way up through senior-level students from engineering and business and English and psychology and all kinds of different majors. So like all teaching experiments, I think there were definitely some kinks to work out after that first course; they never go exactly right the first time. [LAUGHTER] But I would say that, overall, it was a huge success. And that’s not because I did it perfectly, or even because I did it particularly well, but because I think ungrading really helped some of my students move beyond this idea of the school as a points game, to help find their interest and their motivations to study the material that we were studying for their own purposes, and to focus on developing the skills and knowledge that they wanted to develop rather than on attaining a specific grade.

John: And the second time you did this, you created a blog describing the process. What prompted you to create the blog?

Emily: So, I was inspired by a post written by Robert Talbert, who’s the co-author of a recent book, Grading for Growth, which I really highly recommend on alternative grading, and he and David Clark, his co author, also had a blog and substack newsletter on Grading for Growth. And so in December of 2022, Robert posted a stop, start, continue for the ungrading community. And if you’re not familiar with stop, start, continue, it’s an evaluation exercise used for mid-semester reflection, very often in classrooms where the instructor or another facilitator will ask students: “What kinds of teaching practices or classroom practices would you like to stop, start, or continue in the class?” And so Robert’s post was a stop, start, continue for the ungrading community. And one of the things that he recommended that the ungrading community start doing was getting into the weeds and writing in detail about the daily experiences and specifics of upgrading, so: what we’re doing, what kind of successes we’re having, what challenges we’re encountering, how we’re adjusting in real time, and he recommended keeping this as the kind of blog or like a captain’s log of weekly reflections. So when I read his post, I thought, “Well, I could do that. It didn’t sound that hard, and it sounded like a lot of fun.” So that was what prompted me to start writing weekly reflections to share some of the methods that I was using, successes and challenges that I had, and even some of my doubts or misgivings about some of the things that I was doing in the class.

John: And just as an aside, we were so impressed by Grading for Growth, that we’ll be using it in the spring reading group here, both at SUNY Oswego and at Plattsburgh with Jessmyn Neuhaus. So we’re very much looking forward to that. And Robert and David will be giving a keynote address at the start of our workshop series in just a few weeks in early January. So we’re very interested in doing more of this on our campus as well.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about your decision to delay posting the blog until after the semester ended?

Emily: Sure. So the selfish reason is that it’s supposed to be an unfiltered look at the ungraded classroom. And part of me thought, what if I messed this up so badly that I’ll be embarrassed to talk about it. So it was partly that, but I would say the more important reason is that I thought it might be weird for students if I was talking in public about what was happening in the classroom in real time. And I was concerned that it would damage the relationship of trust that I wanted to build with my students if they knew that I was reporting on our conversations to a larger audience about the class. So I offered to hold things for that reason. But the other thing that I wanted to do was make it clear to students that I was writing these reflections that might later be published, and then to get their input on them. So some of what I shared on the blog, I didn’t really want to share without getting students consent to do that. But I also wanted to get their input on some of the things that I was talking about. So I believe really strongly in taking a students as partners approach to higher education and learning experiences. And I try to employ that in my educational development work in the classroom. So that means bringing students into conversations about teaching and learning and asking for their experiences and their expertise as students really and then using that to inform our practice. So delaying the posting allowed me also to get some input from students and to be able to share some of their thoughts and opinions on the blog whenever I could.

John: In reading through your blog, your spring 2023 class seemed really interesting. Could you describe that for our listeners?

Emily: Yeah. So this is the second course in our sequence of first-year writing courses here at the University of Mississippi, but it’s a little bit different. So for the second course in the sequence, students have the opportunity to take either Writing 102 or Liberal Arts 102, and I was teaching Liberal Arts 102. And so the goals of each course are really the same. But Liberal 102, as we call it, is conducted within the context of a research area in a specific discipline. So that means that it can have a very specific theme. So some of my really excellent colleagues in the department and in other departments have taught courses like writing about true crime, or the rhetoric of sports, or I believe there’s a course on fashion. So because one of my areas of expertise is teaching and learning, the course that I taught was called Examining Higher Ed Teaching and Learning in a College Classroom. And so I think this is a great course for first-year students as they’re entering this next phase of their education to reflect on where they’ve been and where they want to go. And so what we did was looked at questions like: What’s the purpose of a college education? Why are we all here? What kind of benefits does it provide to individuals or to society? What kind of collective benefits does it provide? And then how are those benefits enacted or engendered in the classroom. And so we explored a lot of debates around higher ed in the US and students have an opportunity to reflect on and draw on their own experiences as students and their expertise as students, and then integrate that with larger areas of research on education or current events in education. And then they communicated their ideas about education to audiences outside of our classroom. And so it was really, I think, an ideal course for ungrading because we could talk about grades, not only as a matter of course policy, but also as a core subject matter. So in the beginning of the semester, we read Alfie Kohn’s piece “The Case Against Grades” and talked about it both as a way to introduce the course grading system and as a kind of larger prompt for reflection about grades as an issue of concern in higher education right now.

John: And it sounds like a great opportunity to have students reflect on what you’re doing as you’re doing it. How did students respond to this?

Emily: So I think every time I’ve ungraded a class now, and I’m currently on my third ungraded class, students have responded a little bit differently every time and of course, every individual student is also different. I think there are three broad categories of response that I see. One is just enthusiasm; some students are really excited about ungrading, and usually that’s students who feel that, for one reason or another, their grades in the past haven’t been representative of their learning or who feel that some of their creativity or their risk taking has been stifled by their desire to get a good grade. So I wouldn’t say this is a lot of students, this is probably a smaller group of students, but some students are really excited about it. I would say another group of students are really hesitant because ungrading is a big unknown for them, especially for students who are dead set on getting that “A” grade. It can be really nerve racking not to know kind of where you’re at in the middle of the semester. When I get negative feedback on ungrading, it’s almost always students who say,”This is really interesting, but I never know where I’m at.” And so they’re really concerned about how they’re going to measure their progress. But they’re not thinking about their progress in learning, they’re thinking about their progress toward a specific grade, which is really understandable because grades are important. And so that’s also a smaller group of students. But I would say, by far, the biggest reaction I get from students is something like cautious optimism. So I always start ungraded courses with a conversation about grades and learning, and I ask students to share with me their experiences of grades and share with each other. And very often, they have a lot of negative experiences to share, and sometimes positive experiences as well. But we talk about the relationship between grades and motivation and grades and learning and they have a chance to reflect on that. And so I use these conversations as a jumping off point to explain why I use the system that I do and how I think it will benefit them as learners. And I think students find it really helpful to be able to talk about their experiences with grading openly and to be heard by a teacher. And I think that that alone makes them more willing to buy into the system. So once it’s explained fully, and once students start to see the potential benefits, I would say that most of them are cautiously optimistic.

Rebecca: I think that largely aligns with my experiences and explorations when ungrading as well. In your class, you included five different assessments and opportunities for revision. Can you talk about and describe these assessments?

Emily: Sure. So the first thing that students had the opportunity to do were weekly writing practice assignments. So these are what you might think of as formative assessments, they’re preparation for class discussion and major assignments that mostly involve reading or short writing prompts. And these students weren’t able to revise, they either kind of did it or they didn’t. But then students had an opportunity to do more longer major assignments, which are more typical assessments for the writing class, a series of papers and a multimodal kind of project or two, with an imagined audience kind of outside our classroom. And so these students could revise up to three times if they wanted to do that. And so I had to, for this class, adjust a little bit and do slightly fewer assignments than I might have done in a traditionally graded class, because the expectation is that students would be doing more intense work on each assignment in their revision. I also asked students to do self assessments periodically throughout the semester. So students would answer a series of questions about their progress toward the learning goals, about their goals for the remainder of the semester. And they would also propose a current grade for themselves based on evidence that they provided. And this is a similar activity to what we did at the end of the semester to determine their course grades. They were also assessed on their final portfolio, which had revised versions of their major assignments. So their work… basically as good as they could make it… their best version of their major assignments, plus another final self assessment of their work in the class. And then they were also assessed on class engagement, so their class attendance, their preparation for and participation in class discussion, the timeliness of their work, their support for the learning community and fellow students and things like that.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how you provided your feedback on those assessments?

Emily: Sure. So for the writing practice assignments, usually I just wrote a sentence or two in response to students work to let them know if they were on the right track, or they may be needed to adjust slightly as they prepare for their major assignments. For the major assignments, I did do a lot of longer written feedback, and a lot of this looked like feedback that I would give in a traditionally graded class. But I think it was a little bit more oriented toward future growth, rather than reflecting on past work. It was giving them a lot of direction on how they might want to revise to make their work better in the future, not just for future papers, but for this particular paper. And with that feedback, I also gave them a rubric, where I marked kind of where I thought they were at along the specific assessment categories and criteria that we were using for that assignment. So for example, we might have a category for audience and purpose. Students could see whether I think their work on that category was still developing, whether it was at the level of proficient or whether it reached the level of excellent, so I had these different categories and these different kind of progress metrics, where I would indicate this is a skill that I think you’re still working on, or this is a skill that you’re doing really well in. And I also provided feedback to students through our individual conferences. So we met once at midterm, I met with each individual student, and then once at the end of the semester, to have a face-to-face conversation about how students were doing and if they needed to make any adjustments to reach their goals for the rest of the semester. And I didn’t give any feedback through letter grades or points. Those are not really great forms of feedback. They don’t actually give us a lot of information about our progress. So most of the feedback that I provided was kind of qualitative feedback.

Rebecca: You just talked a little bit about rubrics as part of a feedback that we were providing students, can you talk a little bit about how those rubrics were developed?

Emily: Yeah, so I’ve tried several different methods of creating rubrics. And one of the things that I like to do is co-create them with students or get students input on rubrics. And I attempted to co-create rubrics with students in two different classes and have done it a few times. And sometimes it’s a huge success, and sometimes it really does not work very well at all. And in my spring class, it didn’t work very well at all. [LAUGHTER] So basically, what I’ve done previously is ask students what they think makes a good argument or a good piece of public writing, or whatever it is that we’re working on. Or I ask them what kinds of things they believe their writing should be assessed on, and how we would determine whether or not their writing is successful. And then we have a conversation about that. I make notes on the board as we’re talking. And then I go away and distill those notes down into a rubric with about five categories in which student work is assessed. And then there’s the three metrics, so developing, proficient, and excellent. And sometimes this works really well. But in my spring class, I think the students were really at a loss when I asked them about assessment, and even when I asked them what good writing looks like. And I think that’s because that no one has ever asked them to think about that before. They’re used to being told what their work should look like by someone else, and then trying to conform their work to those expectations, or to someone else’s standards. And obviously, we need to have standards and expectations for student work. But one of the things that that does is get the students only thinking about what the teacher wants and not what they want. They’re not thinking about what they want their work to look like, or what their standards are or what they’re trying to accomplish. And so I think, ultimately, if we’re preparing students for the real world, whatever that is, this is what we want them to be able to do, not just to blindly follow somebody else’s standards, but to create and work independently in a self motivated way, and then assess their work independently. So I think we have to kind of start with baby steps in that process. So in the spring course, the rubric activity really turned into a conversation about how students have been assessed in the past and why they’ve been assessed that way. So when I ask them about their experiences, how their writing had been assessed, they would say things like, we were graded on the word count, or we were graded on whether or not we included two sources in every paragraph. And then we use that as a jumping off point to talk about the principle behind those what they viewed as arbitrary rules. And so if your teacher is concerned about word count, it’s because they want you to make a substantive argument. And what does a substantive argument look like? If your teacher is concerned about including sources, it’s because they want you to make an argument based on strong evidence. And so what would strong evidence look like? And so we use that conversation to think about the assessment criteria for their college level work, and how that might be similar or different from what they experienced in the past. So in that way, I do think that conversation was helpful. And I do think based on my few experiences, that it helps to have students extrapolate criteria from some examples, rather than from thin air, kind of as I was asking them to do, but either way, having a transparent conversation about what students are being assessed on and why and a purpose behind the criteria is key to their success.

John: In one of your blog posts, you describe some of the writing assignments that you used in your class, and they seem quite interesting. Could you describe some of the writing prompts that you gave to students?

Emily: Yes, I was really excited about some of the assignments that I developed for this class. And I think I’m going to keep using them or versions of them in future classes. So for this class, I had a menu of assignment options. So the students could, for each major assignment, choose the kinds of projects that they found most compelling, or they would really draw on your strengths. And I thought this was important, partially because we were working some with generative AI in the class. And I’m sure everyone is aware by now some very serious data privacy concerns, ethical concerns around the use of generative AI. So I didn’t want to mandate that students work with AI if they didn’t want to, and some really didn’t want to. So I tried to offer them several options. And I was really happy about some of the options that I came up with. So obviously, one of the things that I was thinking about going into this semester was how to deal with generative AI and I have a lot of thoughts about that. But one big way to think about how to discourage inappropriate use of AI or encourage appropriate use of it is to think really carefully about assignment design. So one of the things that I did to help students navigate AI was lean into some multimodal work, think about argumentation in media other than writing or that kind of worked alongside writing. So we didn’t abandon writing entirely, but I did include a photo essay as one possible assignment in a menu of options. And for this course, I asked students to take a look at a book of photographs by Cassandra Horii and Martin Springborg that’s called What Teaching Looks Like. It’s a really, really cool book with candid photos of college teaching. And so we use this book to talk about visual rhetoric and also to use the photos as a launchpad for this discussion about college teaching practices and students’ experiences in the classroom. And so the assignment that students did based on their work with this book was to create their own photo essay called “What Learning Looks Like.” So instead of what teaching looks like, what learning looks like, with a specific audience and purpose in mind. So that was one of the assignments that I liked. Another one that I thought was really promising was something called “share your story,” which asks students to tell a personal narrative about their educational experience, and then connect that to a larger issue of concern or a body of research in higher education. So of course, this is not totally AI proof. ChatGPT can make up a story, but it can’t tell my students’ own stories. And I think most of us really like to tell our stories to other people. So I think that provided a little more motivation for students to do their own work. And then the last assignment that I really liked was an assignment that actually asked students to work with ChatGPT. So they created a prompt based on a template that I provided for an argumentative piece that they then fed to ChatGPT, so they gave ChatGBT the prompt. And then they took the ChatGPT output and critiqued it. So they annotated it, noting what pieces they thought were strong, whether or not the piece had weaknesses, and what those weaknesses were, where it might need revision or overhaul. And then they had to totally rewrite the piece that ChatGPT produced and make it their own. So they had to do a substantial revision. And then they had to annotate their own work and tell me why they made the revision decisions that they did. And so I want to clarify that I do think it’s important that students learn to generate first drafts on their own, because drafting is an essential part of the writing process, and it’s where a lot of the thinking happens. But I like this assignment as just one assignment in the sequence, because it does help students learn about generative AI and develop some AI literacy. And it also helps students get over that terror of the blank page. So a lot of students procrastinate because they don’t know how to get started. They’ll open their laptop to begin a paper and stare at the blank screen. And I find it really difficult to get over that first hump of starting work, and just close their laptop and go away and try it again later, usually the night before it’s due. So I think starting in this way, with a ChatGPT prompt and an essay gives them a jumping off point, and it’s an easy way to help them start building the confidence they need to do their own first draft.

John: We should mention that we did talk to the authors of What Teaching Looks Like, and we’ll include a link to that discussion in the show notes. One of the things you described in your blog is that having this ungraded environment encourages students to be perhaps a little more open and honest with their instructors, but that could lead to some challenges in terms of additional emotional labor. Could you describe the challenges that you faced in this class with that?

Emily: I think one of the big themes in the spring class in particular was that I asked students to share with the class and for audiences beyond the class about their previous experiences in school, or their current experiences, and I think this also happens in a lot of ungraded classes. One common method of introducing an unfamiliar grading system is getting students to think about their previous experiences with grades. And so one thing that happened in this particular class is that students’ related a lot of past educational trauma to me, and usually that involves bad experiences with previous teachers. And I’m really glad that they were able to speak honestly about that sort of thing. And I think it helped them to have a teacher take them seriously when they related those stories. At the same time, it was pretty difficult to navigate those conversations, because I was managing their emotions, my emotions, and also doing that when sometimes I only knew one side of the story. And so that was a little bit difficult. Another thing is that students in this class didn’t seem to feel that their grade depended on telling me what I wanted to hear. So I think they were a lot more honest about their views than in other courses that I’ve taught. So in my traditionally graded classes, or I think, in any class where students are discussing hot button issues, they tend to think that they’ll be graded more harshly if they express views that the instructor disagrees with. So very often, I think, they try to say what they think you want to hear rather than what they really think. And that didn’t seem to happen as much in my spring course. I had several students endorse viewpoints that I definitely disagreed with whether they knew that or not. And I think that’s good, because students have to sort through their own views and values. But it also required me to do a lot of thinking about how I would approach and address students not just whose views I disagreed with, but whose expression of those views might be damaging to others or to themselves. And so, we need to do some work around community building and relationship building in the class. And then of course, when you build relationships with trust with students, they’re more likely to tell you about the personal problems that they’re facing, whether that’s their mental or physical health or their personal relationships or family emergencies or grieving. And it’s really just a lot. And I do sometimes lay awake at night worried about my students. And there’s a lot of care work happens, I think, in all classes and also especially ungraded classes. And so there’s a lot of work in referring students to other resources and helping them navigate campus resources, and also just a lot of kind of management of your own emotional state [LAUGHTER] that has to happen. So I did want to be honest on the blog about some of the emotional toll of the work of teaching in general and of ungrading too.

Rebecca: You’ve described the care work, you’ve described individual conferences with students, you’ve described students’ anxiety over not knowing where they are sometimes and allowing substantial revision. Can you talk a little bit about how all of those things play into workload and how you’ve managed things?

Emily: Yes, this is a good question. And I feel like I have a very complicated answer to whether or not ungrading has increased my workload, because I get asked this question a lot. In my traditionally graded classes, giving all that feedback felt like a waste of time for a few reasons. First, because I had the sense that students weren’t really reading the feedback. So we know from research that when students receive a letter grade and also feedback on their work, they tend to see the grade and then ignore the feedback, or at least receive the feedback as a justification for a grade, rather than something that’s going to help them improve their work in the future. So I also spend a lot of time in traditionally graded classes worrying about how students would receive my feedback if they got a low grade on their paper. So how could I write feedback that would be appropriately honest, but also appropriately encouraging, so that students didn’t just see a C-minus or a D on their paper, and then give up and throw it in the trash. So I don’t really worry about those things since I’ve adopted ungrading. I provide feedback honestly, and with the mindset of a coach rather than a judge. And I provide it with at least some confidence that students will read it and use it. So they have plenty of opportunity to revise. And in fact, their ultimate achievement of the course is measured by their growth in specific areas and their demonstration of learning that arises from taking a piece of writing from not so good to much better. And so the expectation is that what they turn in the first time is not their best work and they’ll only get to their best work after they incorporate feedback. So I do spend a lot of time responding to student work now that I’m ungrading. But the process is more efficient because it accomplishes my goals rather than wasting my time. And it’s more enjoyable, because it causes me less angst. So I guess it is more work to provide feedback, but it’s also more efficient and enjoyable work. I think I feel kind of the same way about individual conferences with students, that it does take quite a bit of time to do those and it would be, I want to acknowledge, so much more difficult, it may be impossible to do if I was teaching more classes and more students. I’m very lucky that I teach small class sizes. And because I work in educational developments and work in a teaching center for most of the time, I only teach one course at a time. So I think there are ways to do this with larger courses, but I’m very fortunate in my course to be able to conference individually with each student twice in the semester. And those conferences are incredibly time consuming, and they can be really draining, but they are also really joyful. And I think it’s really important that students are able to have those one-on-one conversations with me. And they are much more, I think, effective in accomplishing a lot of the goals that I have for student learning than just simply doing written feedback or peer review or things like that. Having that face-to-face time to give students some individual attention is a really both enjoyable and effective part of the learning process.

John: A question that often comes up from people who have not tried ungrading is how well do students’ perceptions of their learning align with your perceptions of the learning when you do have to assign those midterm or final grades in the class?

Emily: Yeah, this is a really good question. And I would say I’ve had to do a little bit of work on my process to make sure that our expectations are aligning well. Sometimes, there are cases where students don’t automatically start off knowing what I expect from their work and what good work looks like, even when I thought that I was clear about that. So that is an issue that I’m working on. I would say for the majority of students, they do understand what good work looks like. And when they’re asked to provide evidence for their course grade, most of the time they know what good evidence looks like and are able to demonstrate to me in really, sometimes ways that I hadn’t anticipated, that they really had learned in the class and progressed and improved their work. For those students who struggle, and I think it’s more frequent for first-year students to struggle with this than more advanced students, for students who do struggle, I think it is important to be able to show them models of student work early in the semester so that they can get a sense of what a successful assignment looks like or what’s kind of level of expectations we have for what student work counts as really excellent work. So that’s been really helpful. And I’ve also made some changes to my class this semester to help clarify for students a little bit what kind of evidence might be good evidence for specific grade proposals in the course. So if they are really shooting for an A or B in the course, what kinds of actions or behaviors or demonstrations of quality work do they need to be able to show in order to attain that grade?

Rebecca: I know one of the things that I struggled with in some of the classes where I’ve done ungrading is that sometimes the midterm conference feels like it comes too late. So I experimented, I think once with like a one-third, two-thirds, three thirds approach, but then that was so much more conferencing.

Emily: Yeah.

Rebecca: So I’m curious about your timing and how the midterm time works in the classes that you’ve been teaching.

Emily: Yeah, I think that’s where the self-assessment assignments come in. So I do think midterm is quite late for students to be getting the first level of feedback. And so I have students do a self-assessment form, I guess, a quarter way into the semester. So we start that process really early of having them look back at the work that they’ve done, and propose a grade for themselves based on that work. And when they do those self assessments, I don’t conference with students every time they do a self assessment, but I do look at where their grade proposals are. And I’m able to say if our expectations are very, very different, or assessments of that students work is very, very different, I’m able to reach out and say, “Hey, I don’t think we’re aligned here, and here’s why.” And being able to intervene early on that I think is really important.

John: We’re recording this near the end of the fall semester of 2023. And you’re currently teaching another ungraded class, could you tell us a little bit about what types of changes you made from the spring class to the fall class?

Emily: Sure, there are a few changes that I’ve made, because there were some things that I think did not go very well in the spring and I wanted to try to improve that. So what didn’t go well was that I had a real problem with attendance, there were quite a few students who struggled with their attendance, especially in the latter half of the semester, and quite a few students who struggled to submit their work on time kind of throughout the semester. And that made it difficult for me, but I think more importantly, it made it really difficult for the students who once they missed an assignment, they found it really difficult to get back on track. So my challenge is really to figure out how to motivate students to attend class regularly and submit work on time without penalizing them for absences or late work or without a kind of point system to encourage them to show up to class and to submit their work on time. So that was one thing I wanted to address. And then the other thing is that students’ anxiety about not knowing where they stand in the midst of the semester at any given point. So what I developed to address all of those challenges was a course progress tracker. And so this is a document, a pretty comprehensive document, inspired by David Clark’s Grading for Growth post about grade trackers that I read during the summer while I was designing this course. And so the document is really a series of tracking worksheets in three different categories. So the first category is readings and assignments, students can see each week at a glance what work they have to complete, and then they can check off boxes as they complete that work, and then note, if there are assignments they’re submitting late, they can record those late submissions. There’s a category for attendance and engagement where students can check off the classes that they attend, and then make notes about their in or out of class engagement during each week of the semester. And then there’s a section… the most important section… for learning and growth where students can remind themselves of what the course goals are, and then track their progress along those goals, so they can see and make notes about where they’re still developing, where they’re doing excellent work, and how they’re improving their writing as the semester goes along. So, so far, it’s been going really well. And I’ve had fewer challenges with attendance and late work this semester than last semester, though, I can’t say to what extent that’s just a result of a different population of students or the fact that it’s fall instead of spring. So I will add that caveat, but I have surveyed students about their use of the progress tracker last week, and I’m really looking forward to diving into that next week. So the last thing that I think the progress tracker does, which I didn’t totally intend, but which has been really excellent, is that I think it helps students a lot with their self-assessment work, which they also struggled with, to some extent last semester, or I should say, maybe I struggled to teach really well. So I had a realization at the end of last semester, that when I sat down to think about a student’s work over the course of this semester, I was really thinking about three things. And so the first thing is quantity. How much work did students do? How much labor did they put in? How many assignments did they submit at a satisfactory level? How many class days did they attend? How much time did they spend on their major assignments? So that was one category. The second was quality. So how good was the work that they were doing according to the standards that we laid out? Was it still kind of developing work? Or was it excellent work? And then the third thing was growth. So how and how much did student work improve over the course of this semester? And can they demonstrate that they’ve gained knowledge and skills that they didn’t have before? Or can they demonstrate that they’re better off from having taken the course. And so while we’ve had conversations about those things in the spring, I never articulated to myself or to my students, that particular model; I never kind of said it in quite this way. So the last section of the progress tracker includes a guide to determining final letter grades for students. And it gives them space to think about quantity, quality and growth, and how that might contribute to the grade that they propose for themselves, if they’re interested in the specific letter grade. And it gives them a sense of what kinds of evidence they could provide if they want to show good evidence for a specific letter grade. So you can provide good evidence for an A if your work rises to the level of excellent on multiple assessment categories. Or if you attended class every time that you were able and submitted the vast majority of your writing practice assignments. So all of these things are good pieces of evidence if you want to propose an A grade for yourself. So there’s some flexibility there, I don’t prescribe exactly what students have to do for a specific grade, but I do make suggestions and say, here’s a guideline for you. If you’re confused about what kinds of work you need to be doing, or what you need to do to demonstrate that you’ve attained a certain letter grade, you can take a look at this guide, and learn a little bit more about what the expectations are. Currently, it’s just something for the students to use for themselves. I have provided time in class for students to fill out sections of it, because I think that if I did not ask them to do it in class, they might struggle to keep up with it outside of class. But I think maybe in the future, I will consider asking them to keep up with it. And then periodically checking in on those progress trackers throughout the semester so that I can intervene early, if there are any issues and maybe leave comments on the documents to let students know if I think they’re struggling in a specific area, or if they’re doing really well in a specific area. I am playing around with that idea for my next version of the class.

John: So we always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Emily: So this spring, I won’t be teaching an undergraduate course, but I will be working with graduate students who are preparing to teach their own Writing and Rhetoric courses. And I’m really looking forward to talking with them about teaching. And I’ll also be continuing to write about ungrading on the blog. So specifically, I’m hoping to share a bit more about what I learned from my experiences this semester. And I’ve been collecting data from my current students about their use of the progress tracker, about their use of AI in their writing this semester, and about their feelings and impressions of ungrading. And what I’m planning to do throughout the spring is share some of those student thoughts with the readers of the blog, and I’m really excited to be able to share students’ ideas about ungrading and other topics as well.

Rebecca: Sounds great. We’ll look forward to reading that for sure.

John: Thank you, Emily. It’s great talking to you and we look forward to future conversations.

Emily: Thanks, this has been fantastic.

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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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311. Upskilling in AI

Posted in artificial intelligence, edtech, educational technology, feedback, higher education, learning, pedagogy, teaching, writing
October 18, 2023

With so many demands on faculty time, it can be difficult to prioritize professional development in the area of AI. In this episode, Marc Watkins joins is to discuss a program that incentivizes faculty development in the AI space. Marc is an Academic Innovation Fellow at the University of Mississippi, where he helped found and currently directs the AI Institute for Teachers.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: With so many demands on faculty time, it can be difficult to prioritize professional development in the area of AI. In this episode, we examine a program that incentivizes faculty development in the AI space.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Marc Watkins. Marc is an Academic Innovation Fellow at the University of Mississippi, where he helped found and currently directs the AI Institute for Teachers. Welcome back, Marc.

Marc: Thank you, John. Thank you, Rebecca. It’s great to be back.

Rebecca: We’re glad to have you. Today’s teas are:… Marc, are you drinking tea?

Marc: I am. I have a Cold Brew Hibiscus, which is really great. It’s still very warm down here in Mississippi. So it’s nice to have something that’s a little bit cool. That’d be refreshing.

Rebecca: That sounds yummy. How about you, John?

John: I am drinking a peppermint spearmint tarragon blend today. And it’s not so warm here. In fact, my furnace came on for the first time yesterday.

Rebecca: Yeah, transitions. And, I have English tea time today.

Marc: Well, that’s great.

John: So we have invited you here to discuss your ongoing work related to ChatGPT and other AI tools. Could you first describe what the AI Institute for Teachers is and its origins?

Marc: Sure, I think that when I was last a guest here in January of this year on your show. And it seems like 1000 years ago [LAUGHTER], but during that spring semester, I really took a much deeper dive than the original pilot with a lot of the generative AI tools in the fall. And we started noticing that the pace that big tech was deploying these tools and integrating these with existing software from Microsoft and Google was only accelerating. So in about April or May, I went to my chair, Stephen Monroe, and said, “I think we need to start training some people to get them prepared for the fall,” because we kind of thought that fall was going to be what it is right now, which is a chaotic just sort of mash up of sort of everything you can imagine that some people dive in deeply, some people tried to ban it, some people are trying to do some critical approaches with it too. So we actually worked with the Institute of Data Science here at the University of Mississippi, and we got some money. And we were able to pay 23 faculty members $1,000 apiece to train them for a day and a half about everything we knew about Generative AI, about AI literacy, ethics, what tools were working in the classroom, which wasn’t. And their whole goal was to go back to their home departments over the summer and serve as ambassadors and help prepare them for the fall semester. And we started that, we’ve had funding for one Institute, and now we’re doing workshops, and searching, as we all will, for more funding for doing,

Rebecca: How did faculty respond to (A) the incentive, but (B) also [LAUGHTER] the training that went with it?

Marc: Well, not surprisingly, they responded really well to the incentives, where you can pay people for their time, they generally do show up and do so as well. We had quite a few people wanting to take the training both internally from the University of Mississippi and then people started finding out about it, because I was posting it out on Twitter, and writing about it on my substack. So when we had interest from graduate students in Rome, interest from other SEC schools wanting to attend, and even interest from a community college in Hawaii. Definitely seen a lot of interest within our community, both locally and more broadly, nationally.

Rebecca: Did you find that faculty were already somewhat familiar with AI tools? I had an interesting conversation with some first-year students just the other day, and we were talking about AI and copyright. And I was just asking, “Hey, how many of you have used AI?” And I and another faculty member indicated that we had used AI to make it safe to indicate. And many of them really kind of shook their heads like “No, they hadn’t,” and they were unsure. And then I started pointing to places where we see snippets of it, in email and in texting and other places where there’s auto-finishing of sentences and that kind of thing. And then they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I have seen that. I have engaged with that. I have used that.” What did you find faculty’s knowledge?

Marc: Extremely limited. They thought of AI as ChatGPT. And one of the things we did with the session was basically frame it out as “Look, this was not just going to remain as a single interface anymore.” One of the things that actually happened during the institute that was completely wild to me was the last day, I woke up that morning. And I’d signed up through Google Labs, and you can do it as well, to turn on the features within the Google suite of tools, including in search and Google Docs, and Sheets and everything else. And they gave me access that last day, right before we began. And so I literally just plugged in my laptop and said, “This is what it’s going to look like in Google docs when you have generative AI activate in Google Docs. it pops up and immediately greets you with a wand with a phrase “Help me write.” And what I tried to explain to them and explained to faculty ever since then, is that it makes having a policy against AI very difficult when it shows up at an existing application with no indication whatsoever that this is in fact Generative AI. It’s just another feature that’s in the application that you have grown up with, from many of our students’ perspectives their entire lives. So yeah, we need to really work on training faculty, not just in the actual systems itself, but also getting them outside of that mindset that AI that we’re talking about is just ChatGPT. It’s a lot more than that.

John: Yeah, in general, when we’ve done workshops, we haven’t had a lot of faculty attendance partly because we haven’t paid people to participate [LAUGHTER], but what’s been surprising to me is how few faculty have actually explored the use of AI. My experience with first-year students was a little different than Rebecca, about half of the students in my large intro class had said that they had explored ChatGPT, or some other AI tool. And they seem pretty comfortable with it. But faculty, at least in our local experience, have generally been a bit avoidant of the whole issue. I think they’ve taken the approach that this is something we don’t want to know about, because it may disrupt how we teach in the future. How do you address that issue, and getting faculty to recognize that this is going to be a disruptive technology in terms of how we assess student learning and in terms of how students are going to be demonstrating their learning, and also using these tools for the rest of their lives in some way?

Marc: That’s a great question. We trained 23 people, I’ve also been holding workshops for faculty too, and again, the enthusiasm was a little bit different in those contexts, too. And I agree that faculty, I feel like they feel overwhelmed and maybe some of them want to ignore this and don’t actually want to deal with it, but it is here and it is being integrated at phenomenal rates in everything around us too. But if faculty don’t come to terms with us, and start thinking about engagement with their technology, both for themselves and for their students, then it is going to create incredible disruption that’s going to be lasting, it’s not going to go away. We’re also not going to have things like AI detection, like it is with plagiarism detection to come in and save the day for them too. And those are all things we’ve been trying to very carefully explain to faculty and get them on board. Some of them though, just aren’t there yet, I understand that. I empathize, too. This is a huge amount of time that you spend on these things to think about and talk about as well. And we’re just coming out of the pandemic, people are exhausted, they don’t want to deal with another, quote unquote, crisis, which is another thing that we’re seeing too. So there’s a lot of factors that are at play here that make faculty engagement, less than what I’d like to see.

Rebecca: We had a chairs’ workshop over the summer, and I was somewhat surprised based on our experience with other interactions with faculty, how many chairs had used AI. The number was actually a significant number. And most of them were familiar. And that to me was encouraging [LAUGHTER], it was like, “Okay, good, the leaders of the ship are aware. That’s good, that’s exciting.” But it’s also interesting to me that there are so many folks who are not that familiar, who haven’t experimented, but seem to have really strong policies around AI use or this idea of banning it or wanting to use detectors, and not really being familiar with what they can and cannot do.

Marc: Yeah, that’s very much what we’re seeing across the board too, is that the first detectors that I’m aware of that really came online, I think, for everyone was basically GPTZero, there are a few others that existed beforehand to IBM had one called the Giant Language Testing Lab. But those were all based on GPT-2, you’re going back in time to 2019. I know how ridiculous is it to go back four years in technology terms and think about this… that was a long time ago. And we really started adopting that through education or seem to be adopted in education based off of that panic. The problem is in incidents of education putting a system like that in place, it’s not necessarily very reliable. TurnItIn also adopted their own AI detector as well too. A lot of different universities began to explore and play around with it, I believe, and I don’t want to be misquoted here or misrepresent TurnItIn. I think what they initially came out with it, they were saying there was only 1% false positive rate for detecting AI. They’ve since raised that to 5%. And that has some really deep implications for teaching and learning. Most recently, Vanderbilt Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning made the decision to not turn on the AI detection feature in TurnItIn. Their reasoning was that they had, I think, in 2022 some 75,000 student papers submitted. If they had the detector on during then that would give them a false positive grade about 3000 papers. And they just can’t deal with that sort of situation through a university level..No one can. You’d have to go through it investigating each one. You would also have to get students a hearing because that is part of the due process. It’s just too much. And that’s one of the main concerns that I have about the tools that it’s just not reliable in education.

John: And it’s not reliable both in terms of false positives and false negatives. So some of us are kind of troubled that we have allowed the Turnitin tool to be active and have urged that our campus shut it down for those very reasons, and I think a number of campuses, Vanderbilt was one of the biggest ones, I think to do that, but I think quite a few campuses are moving in that direction.

Marc: Yes, the University of Pittsburgh also made the decision to turn it off. I think several others did as well, too.

Rebecca: It’s interesting, if we don’t have a tool to measure, a tool to catch if you will, then you can’t really have a strong policy saying you can’t use it at all. [LAUGHTER] There’s no way to follow up on that or take action on that.

Marc: Where we’re at, I think, that for education, that’s a sort of conundrum. We’re trying to explain this to faculty. I think much more broadly, in society, though, if you can’t have a tool that works when you’re talking about Twitter, I’m sorry, X now, and understanding if the material is actually real or fake, that becomes a societal problem, too, and that’s what they’re trying to work on with watermarking. And I believe the big tech companies have agreed to watermark audio outputs, video outputs, and image outputs, but they’ve not agreed to do text outputs, because text is a little bit too fungible, you can go in and you can copy it, you can kind of change it around a little bit too much. So, definitely it’s gonna be a problem, too when state governments start to look at this, and they start wondering that the police officer taking your police report is writing this with their own words, the tax official using this as well, too. So it’s gonna be a problem well outside of education.

Rebecca: And if we’re not really preparing our students for that world in which they will likely be using AI in their professional fields, then we’re not necessarily doing our jobs and education and preparing our society for the future.

Marc: Yeah, I think training is the best way to go forward too and again, going back to the idea of intentional engagement with the technology and giving the students these situations where they can use it and where you, hopefully if you’re a faculty member, you actually have the knowledge and the actual resources to begin to integrate these tools and talk about the ethical use case, understanding what the limitations are and the fact that it is going to hallucinate and make things up, and to think about what sort of parameters you want to put on your own usage too.

John: One of the things that came out within the last week or so, I believe,… we’re recording this in late September… was the introduction of AI tools into Blackboard Ultra. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Marc: Oh boy, yes indeed, they announced last week that the tools were available to us in Blackboard Ultra. They turned it on for us here at the University of Mississippi, and I’ve been playing around with it, and it is a little bit problematic, because for right now, what you can do is with a single click, it will scan your existing materials in your Ultra course and it will create learning modules. It will create quiz questions based off that material, it will create rubrics, and will also generate images. Now compared to what we’ve been dealing with ChatGPT and all these other capabilities, this is almost a little milquetoast by comparison. But it’s also an inflection event for us in education, because it’s now here, it’s directly in our learning management system, it’s going to be something we’re going to have to contend with every single time we open up to create an assignment, or to do an assessment. And I’ve played around with it. It’s an older version of GPT. The image version I think is based on Dall-E, so you would ask for a picture of college students and you get some people with 14 fingers and weird artifacts all over their face, which may not be the one that would actually be helpful for your students. And while the other learning modules there are not my thinking necessarily, it’s just what the algorithm is predicting based off the content that exists in my course. We have that discussion with our faculty, we have them cross that Rubicon on and saying, “Okay, I’m worried about my students using this, what happens to me and my teaching, my labor, if I start adopting these tools. There could be some help, definitely, this could really streamline the process, of course creation and actually making it aligned with the learning outcomes my department wants for this particular class.” But it also gets us in a situation where automation is now part of our teaching. And we really haven’t thought about that. We haven’t really gotten to that sort of conversation yet.

Rebecca: It does certainly raise questions about, obviously, many ethical questions and really about disclosing to students what has been produced by us as instructors and what has been produced by AI and authorship of what’s there. Especially if we’re expecting students to [LAUGHTER] do the same thing.

Marc: It is mind boggling, the cognitive dissonance, with having a policy and saying “No AI in my class,” then all of a sudden, it’s there in my Blackboard course, and I could click on something. And, at least at this integration of Blackboard, they may very well change this, but once you do this, there’s no way to natively indicate that this was generated by AI. You have to manually go in there and say this was created. And I value my relationship with my students, it’s based off of mutual trust. I think almost everyone in education does. If we want our students to act ethically, and use this technology openly, we should expect ourselves to do the same. And if we get into a situation where I’m generating content for my students and then telling [LAUGHTER] them that they can’t do the same with their own essays, it is just going to be kind of a big mess.

John: So given the existence of AI tools, what should we do in terms of assessing student learning? How can we assess the work reasonably given the tools that are available to them?

Rebecca: Do you mean we can just use that auto-generated rubric right, that we just learned about? [LAUGHTER]

Marc: You could, you can use the auto-generated rubric separately from Blackboard. One of the tools I’m piloting right now is the feedback assistant, it was developed by Eric Kean and Anna Mills. I consulted with them on this, too. She’s very big on the AI space for composition. It’s called MyEssayFeedback. And I’ve been piloting this with my students. They know it’s an AI, they understand this. I did get IRB approval to do so. But I’ve just got the second round of generated feedback, and it’s thorough, it’s quick, it’s to the point. And it’s literally making me say, “How am I going to compete with that?” And maybe the way is that maybe I shouldn’t be competing with that, maybe it’s I’m not going to be providing that feedback. But then maybe then I should be providing my time in different ways. Maybe I should be meeting with them one on one to talk about their experiences, maybe that way. But I think you raise an interesting question. I don’t want to be alarmist, I want to be as level-headed as I can. But from my perspective, all the pieces are now there to automate learning to some degree. They haven’t been all hooked up yet and put together a cohesive package. But they’re all there in different areas. And we need to be paying attention to this.Our hackles need to be raised just slightly at this point to see what this can do. Because I think that is where we are headed with integrating these tools into our daily practice.

Rebecca: AI generally has raised questions about intellectual property rights. And if our learning management systems are using our content in ways that we aren’t expecting, how is that violating our rights or the rights that the institution has over the content that’s already there.

Marc: A lot of perspectives of the people that I speak with too, their course content, their syllabi, from their perspective is their own intellectual property in some ways. We get debates about that, about the actual university owns some of the material. But we have had instances where lectures were copyrighted before in the past. And if you’re allowing the system to scan your lecture, you are exposing that to Generative AI. And that gets at one aspect of this. The other aspect, which I think Rebecca is referring to is the issue with training this material for these large language models itself could indicate that it was stolen or not properly sourced from internet and you’re using it and then you’re trying to teach your students [LAUGHTER] to cite material correctly too, so it’s just a gigantic conundrum of just legal and ethical challenges. The one silver lining in all this, and this has been across the board with everyone in my department. This has been wonderful material to talk about with your students, they are actually actively engaged with it, they want to know about this, they want to talk about it. They are shocked and surprised about all the depths that have gone into the training of these models, and the different ethical situations with data and all of it too. And so if you want to just engage your students by talking to them about AI too, that’s a great first step in developing their AI literacy. And it doesn’t matter what you’re teaching, it could be a history course, it could be a course in biology, this tool will have an impact in some way shape or form in your students’ lives they want to talk about, I think maybe something to talk about is there are a lot of tools outside of ChatGPT, and a lot of different interfaces as well, too. I don’t know if I talked about this before in the spring, the one tool that’s really been effective for a lot of students were the reading assistant tools, one that we’ve been employing is called ExplainPaper. They upload a PDF to it, it calls upon generative AI to scan the paper and you can actually select it to whatever reading level you want, then translate that into your reading level. The one problem is that students don’t realize that they might be giving up some close reading, critical reading skills to it as well too, just like we do with any sort of relationship with generative AI. There is kind of that handoff and offloading of that thinking, but for the most part, they have loved that and that’s helped them engage with some really critical art texts that normally would not be at their reading level that I would usually not assign to certain students. So those are helpful. There are plenty of new tools coming out too. One of them is called Claude 2 to be precise by Anthropic. That just came out, I think, in July for public release, it is as powerful as GPT-4. It is free right now, if you want to sign up for it as well too. The reason why I mentioned Claude is that the context window, what you can actually upload to it is so much bigger than ChatGPTs. I believe their context window is 75,000 words. So you can actually upload four or five documents at a time, synthesize those documents. One of the things I was using it for as a use case was that I collected tons of reflections for my students this past year about the use of AI. It’s all in a messy Word document. It’s 51 pages single spaced. It’s all anonymized so there’s new data that identifies them. But it’s so much of a time suck on my time, just go through to code those reflections. And I’ve just been uploading to Claude and having it use a sentiment analysis to point out what reflections are positive from these students, in what way, and it does it within a few seconds. It’s amazing.

John: One other nice thing about Claude is that has a training database that ends in early 2023. So it has much more current information, which actually, in some ways is a little concerning for those faculty who were trying to ask more recent questions, particularly in online asynchronous courses, so that ChatGPT could not address those. But with Claude’s expanded training database, that’s no longer quite the case.

Marc: That’s absolutely correct. And to add to this rather early discussion about AI detection, none of the AI detectors that I’m aware of had time to actually train on Claude, so if you generated essay… and you guys are free to do this on your own, your listeners are too… if you generated and essay with Claude, and you try to upload that to one of the AI detectors, very likely you’re going to get zero detection or a very low detection rate for it too, because it’s again, a different system. It’s new, the existing AI detectors have not had time. So the way to translate this is don’t tell your students about it right now, or in this case, be very careful about how you introduce this technology to your students, which we should do anyway. But this is one of those tools that is massively popular, a lot of people just haven’t known about it because, again, ChatGPT just takes up all the oxygen in the room when we talk about Generative AI

John: What are some activities where we can have students productively use AI to assist their learning or as part of their educational process?

Marc: That’s a great question. We actually started developing very specific activities for them to look at different pain points for writing classes. One of them was getting them to actually integrate the technology that way. So we built a very careful assignment, which called on very specific moves for them to make both in terms of their writing, and their integration of the technology for that. We also looked at bringing some research question, building assignments that way. We have assignments from my Digital Media Studies students right now about how they can use it to create infographics. Using the paid for version of ChatGPT Plus, they can have access to plugins, and those plugins then give them access to Canva and Wikipedia. So they can actually use Canva to create full on presentations based off of their own natural language and use actual real sources by using those two plugins in conjunction with each other. I just make them then go through it, edit it with their own words, their own language too, and reflect on what this has done to their process. So lots of different examples, too, I mean, it really is limited only to your imagination in this time, which is exciting, but it’s also kind of the problem that we’re dealing with, there’s so much to think about.

Rebecca: From your experience in training faculty, what are some getting started moves that faculty can take to get familiar enough to take this step of integrating AI by the spring?

Marc: Well, I think the one thing that they could do is, there are a few really fast courses. I think it’s Ethan Mollick from even from the Wharton School of Business put out a very effective training course that was all through YouTube, I think it’s like four or five videos, very simple to take, to get used to understanding how ChatGPT works, how Microsoft’s Bing works as well too, and what sort of activities students can use it for, what sort of activities faculty could. Microsoft has also put out a very fast course, I think takes 53 minutes to complete about using generative AI technologies in education. And those are all very fast ways of basically coming up to speed with the actual technology.

John: And Coursera has a MOOC through Vanderbilt University, on Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT, which can also help familiarize faculty with the capabilities of at least ChatGPT. We’ll include links to these in the show notes.

Marc: I really, really hope Microsoft, Google and the rest of them calm down, because this has gotten a little bit out of control. And integration of these tools are often without use cases, they’re often waiting to see how we’re going to come up and use them too. And that is concerning. Google has announced that they are committed to releasing their own model that’s going to be in competition with GPT4, I think it’s called Gemini by late November. So it looks like they’re just going to keep on heating up this arms race and you get bigger models, more capable and I think we do need to ask ourselves more broadly what our capacity is just to keep up with this. My capacity is about negative zero at this point… going down further.

John: Yeah, we’re seeing new AI tools coming out almost every week or so now in one form or another. And it is getting difficult to keep up with. I believe Apple is also planning to release an AI product.

Marc: They are. They also have a car they’re planning to release, which is the weirdest thing in the world to me, that there could be your iPhone charged in your Apple Car.

John: GM has announced that they are not going to be supporting either Android or Apple CarPlay for their electric vehicles. So perhaps this is Apple’s way of getting back at them for that. And we always end with the question, what [LAUGHTER] is next, which is perhaps a little redundant, but we do always end with that.

Marc: Yeah, I think what’s next is trying to critically engage the technology and explore it not out of fear, but out of a sense of wonder. I hope we can continue to do that. I do think we are seeing a lot of people starting to dig in. And they’re digging in real deep. So I’m trying to be as empathetic as I can be for those that don’t want to deal with the technology. But it is here and you are going to have to sit down and spend some time with it for sure.

John: One thing I’ve noticed that in working with faculty, they’re very concerned about the impact of AI tools on their students and student work. But they’re really excited about all the possibilities that opens up for them in terms of simplifying their workflows. So that, I think, is a positive sign.

Rebecca: They could channel that to help understand how to work with students.

Marc: I hope they find that out, there’s a positive pathway forward with that too.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you and you’ve given us lots more to think about.

Marc: Thank you guys so much.

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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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304. ChatGPT Inspired Course Redesign

Posted in assessment, authentic learning, critical thinking, edtech, feedback, higher education, learning, pedagogy, simulations, teaching, writing
August 30, 2023

AI tools such as ChatGPT have the potential to significantly disrupt how we work and how we learn. In this episode, Don Donelson joins us to discuss a course redesign strategy that could help prepare students for a world in which AI tools will be ubiquitous. Don is a senior lecturer in the Miami Herbert Business School at the University of Miami. He is a recipient of the Spring 2016 University of Miami Excellence in Teaching Award and the Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award from the Miami Herbert Business School.

Show Notes

Transcript/h3>

John: AI tools such as ChatGPT have the potential to significantly disrupt how we work and how we learn. In this episode, we discuss a course redesign strategy that could help prepare students for a world in which AI tools will be ubiquitous.

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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 guest today is Don Donelson. Don is a senior lecturer in the Miami Herbert Business School at the University of Miami. He is a recipient of the Spring 2016 University of Miami Excellence in Teaching Award and the Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award from the Miami Herbert Business School. Welcome back, Don.

Don: Glad to be here.

John: Today’s teas are: …Don, are you drinking tea?

Don: I am. It’s the same tea that you’re drinking, black currant, and it’s great.

Rebecca: It’s a John favorite for sure. I have a Tazo Awake tea today.

John: Does that mean you’re woke? That may be an issue down in Florida.

Don: …not in a private school.

Rebecca: It means that I couldn’t make a pot of tea. I didn’t have time. So I had to use a single tea bag. [LAUGHTER] That’s what it means.

John: And I am still using the mug from Australia that Clare McNally gave me with kangaroos all over it.

Rebecca: I like that mug.

John: I do too.

Rebecca: I look forward to seeing it in person.

John: Soon.

Rebecca: Yeah, you’ll be back soon, right? A couple weeks.. I’ve got my grad studies mug. We’ve invited you here today to discuss your plans to revise the graduate and undergraduate core courses in critical thinking and business communication at Miami Herbert. Can you tell us a little bit about this course?

Don: So this course started at the grad level, MBAs in particular, in 2008. That’s what I was hired to teach. And it grew with the program, expanding into specialized master’s programs. And then it went out into the undergrad program. And it’s a core course required for all full-time business students, undergrad and graduate. This past year, we had 46 sections of undergrad courses and 21 sections of graduate courses, about 900 students or so in total.

Rebecca: So a really small situation going on here.

Don: Oh, yeah, very small, [LAUGHTER] no problems with scaling or anything like that.

John: What was the typical focus of this course in the past before this revision that you’re working on?

Don: So the course was called “Critical Thinking and Effective Written and Oral Communication,” and it lived up to its name. It was about those three things. At the time that we started in 2008, we called them soft skills. We don’t use that phrase anymore. We like to call them fundamentals, something of the sort. We think that soft skills sends a bad message. But it’s been overhauled three times, this will be the third overhaul since. And the things that we would do in the courses, from the very beginning, the main evaluations would be based on writing memos and giving presentations

Rebecca: Which should be about the kind of communication you’d be doing in business. [LAUGHTER]

Don: Yeah, it’d be based on hypothetical cases, some non-hypothetical cases, the standard Harvard Business publishing 10, 20 page case on “How did Netflix beat Blockbuster?” or something of the sort.

Rebecca: What prompted this big overhaul?

Don: Well, the accreditation body, AACSB, required program evaluation. And it’s sometimes an annoying task that people do just to go through the motions. But what we found, the first time I went through it, was that we actually learned a lot from going through those motions. And so in my department, at least, we institutionalize curriculum audits on a semester basis. And so, in between the fall and spring semesters, we have a shorter meeting, where we kind of look at what happened in all the instructors, faculty teaching in that space in the fall, what happened and what worked, what didn’t work, and we might make some minor revisions. And then at the end of the spring semesters, we’d have a little bit of a longer meeting. And the last few of those had turned out some opportunities for change.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what some of those opportunities were?

Don: Yes. So we found that this is a challenging course to get buy-in from the students. And so we still haven’t figured out 10% of what we can figure out about teaching in this space, I’m sure. But one of the things that we’ve seen is that it is somewhat of an innovative curriculum, and one of the challenges with being innovative is students haven’t had material like that before. It’s a core course. And so students have to take it. And there’s always challenges with that. But this is a bit of a different challenge. And so I was talking with John the other day, he has some core required economics courses for business students, and some of the challenges that come with that. But this is a bit different in that those students know that economics is a field of study. And they know that people take economics courses, and there’s a textbook and critical thinking and communication. They’ve been taught kind of as separate. They’ve been add ons in other courses, not as a discrete course itself. And so we think there’s some challenges with that. And really, the challenge that we’ve seen, in addition to that, is that from the faculty view, critical thinking and communication are not separate things, they are one thing. And so critical thinking, I would call it problem solving, is really what we’re teaching. But communication is a component of that. And from the student view, we’ve had a hard time getting them to see those as integrated. And so when they do a memo, that’s an evaluation metric, they see it as: “Well, that’s just looking at the writing and not critical thinking.”

Rebecca: That’s interesting. Some of the things that we’ve done in our design courses around critical thinking and writing across the curriculum, my department, which is art and design, is doing some of those same things. We would do projects and embedded in those projects would be things like memos and other ways of communicating as a way to critically think about the decisions that our designers were making on things. But we would run up sometimes against the same kinds of challenges, like how do you really make that feel practical, that’s relevant, and then also keep it interesting. And it helped, I think, in those cases, because it was tied to a project. So is that a challenge that you face in this particular class is because there are these kind of standalone case studies, and it’s hard for students to buy in or get them into a business space?

Don: That’s one of the things actually I think that’s going to be changed is more of an arc to the course. And one of the things that I’m looking at is more integration of assignments. And so things building more towards the other assignments, and so we have skills building on top of each other. But, ideally, the assignments that they’re doing all build towards one culmination assignment, capstone type project.

Rebecca: Where does this course fit into their other required courses? Is it something that happens in the beginning? or in the middle? towards the end?

Don: So that’s partially an administrative question that is dependent on staffing. We see some students wait until the very last semester to take it, particularly the students who don’t have English as a first language, but they can start taking it as early as their sophomore year. But usually, it’s junior.

John: What’s the difference between the undergraduate and the graduate versions of the course?

Don: So the graduate versions are taken on a quarterly basis, and the undergraduates on a semester basis and so there’s more contact time in the undergraduate version of the course. They use different materials, and they’re more in depth. And so much like you would see with undergraduate economics classes, the graduate version of the economics classes might have similar titles, but go far more in depth into the material.

John: So one of the main issues is that students don’t see the critical thinking aspect of it as being important in their writing. How are you going to change your course to focus a bit more on the development of those critical thinking skills?

Don: Well, this is where I need to go back and add more to what Rebecca asked before about what prompted this because of course, ChatGPT prompted a lot of the revisions as well. And so ChatGPT, AI in general, while it’s kind of an independent axis of revision, we were thinking about some of these other problems well, before ChatGPT even became a thing that people were aware of. But they go hand in hand, really. A lot of the problem that I’ve seen with the writing assignments, and why students don’t necessarily view them as critical thinking and focus on the writing, is because there’s writing for aesthetic, and then there’s writing for substance. And if you’re teaching anything about writing, you kind of have to be teaching both. But when you’re teaching both together, the students tend to focus more on the aesthetic. And they connect it back to English composition classes that they might have taken in ninth grade or 10th grade. And those classes are certainly very important. But they’re a bit different than what we’re doing in these classes. And so I think it primes them to approach the course in a way that is not really conducive to getting what we want out of it. And so with AI, well, it remains to be seen, but it looks to me like you don’t need to be teaching the aesthetics of writing so much anymore in a class like this. And so I’m going to experiment with just not. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: It’s interesting, because in design classes where we were doing some similar kinds of things, aesthetics obviously always come about, because if we’re doing visual design, aesthetics are a part of that conversation. But we would have the same thing. It was like, “Well, that looks nice. That reads nice. It just doesn’t say anything.” [LAUGHTER]

Don: Right. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So it’s interesting that we bump up against these same kinds of challenges across a wide variety of disciplines. And that ChatGPT does offer some opportunity to focus on some different things.

Don: Absolutely.

Rebecca: I’m curious what exactly you’re going to focus on and how you’re gonna leverage ChatGPT in the context of this class.

Don: So I think ChatGPT is an insane, wild, amazing tool. And it’s going to only be more wild, more insane, more amazing next month, [LAUGHTER] or six months from now. But I see it really changing the way that I teach, the way I prepare for teaching. So kind of on the end of creating lesson plans and what it does for me as a teacher and the kinds of things that I can do in a class that I wouldn’t be able to do in a class before without a lot more hours in the day. And then also, from the student side, changing the way that they do assignments. They’re not going to be writing memos outside the classroom in the way that they have in business for decades and centuries. They’re going to be using ChatGPT. And so if, in this course, which is meant to be a practical course, we can’t make it practical if we’re not allowing them to use the tools that they’re not only going to be encouraged to use, they’re going to probably be required. And so if they don’t use ChatGPT in the future, they’re going to have bosses saying, “Why are you spending X amount of hours on this client memo instead of doing something else.” And so we really need to prepare them for that world. There’s been some early research and I’ll get John the citations, but we looked at research over the break between fall and spring, this past year, some preliminary research about the kinds of jobs in the way the labor market is going to be affected in the future by AI and ChatGPT and the jobs that were predicted to be the hardest hit in terms of reduced wages, and just reduced demand are jobs that involve writing and the jobs that were predicted to be the most insulated from Ai were jobs that involve problem solving and critical thinking. And so really, when you look at that research, it doesn’t even give us a choice. Even if we weren’t thinking about making some kind of revisions before, we’d probably need to just on that alone.

John: So is the focus now shifting more to the critical thinking skills and a little bit less on the basic structure of writing?

Don: Yes. And that’s really where even though the impetus for the revisions were independent, in practice, they’re not going to be that independent. And so it really dovetails nicely. And so I’ll give you an example, if a student is writing a memo, where a business is making a decision between two or three different courses of action, and one of the main criteria is the profitability of those courses of action, the structure is kind of guided by the math of profitability. So if you’re not talking about revenues, independently of talking about costs, you’re not proving profitability. And so when we talk about structure in this course, that’s really what we mean. But students very often, because of some of the things I’ve talked about previously, they’re looking at it as far as like the five-paragraph structure. And that’s not really what we mean. And so by being able to focus less on the aesthetics of writing, and more on the substance, I think we’ll be able to undo some of that priming,

Rebecca: …almost like this shift to articulating the decision making…

Don: Yes.

Rebecca: …rather than talking about writing, because articulating, it could be verbal, it could be in written language, it could be in a lot of different formats. But the point is that you thought critically about the issue, and how you made the decision. [LAUGHTER]

Don: Yes, exactly. In presentations, I’ve never had as much of the same problems as we have in the memos. Part of that, I think, it’s because of contemporaneous feedback. My students early on learned that this comment is kind of a trolling comment. And it’s not really meant as a attaboy or attagirl. But, sometimes a student will give a speech, and when they’re done, I’ll say, “I’m very impressed with your public speaking skills.” And they think, at first in the early parts of the class, that that’s a compliment. But they realize that that’s actually not a compliment. What I really mean is “No one would be buying what you’re selling, no one would be buying this stock, no one would be making a decision based on this, but you have very impressive charisma and confidence.” And that’s not really what we’re about, maybe in politics, but that’s a different question.

Rebecca: I’m curious about integrating ChatGPT as part of the process. Are you thinking about requiring students to reveal and discuss how and why they use ChatGPT in particular instances, and how they leverage the tool.

Don: So I think part of it is going to be first showing them how ChatGPT is not a critical thinking tool. And so I think it’ll be kind of walking on the escalator backwards for a bit just so that we can walk forward. It’s not going to be ChatGPT’s here, so you should use it. Go. ChatGPT is like a personal assistant, who is extremely capable and competent, but will do precisely what you tell it to do, and nothing else. The input you give it determines the quality of the output. And so if you go to ChatGPT, and you say, “I’m writing a letter of recommendation for Rebecca, and she was a great student, and she’s applying to law school period,” it’s going to give you about what you would imagine…it’s going to make up some stuff about Rebecca, it might even not get what program you’re in right. It’s not going to use the last name because I didn’t give it one. And it’s going to give you a very fluffy, perhaps disingenuous response. Now if I give ChatGPT a really robust stream of consciousness almost about Rebecca Mushtare was a student in the spring of whatever and she got this grade and she did phenomenal in these areas. And this assignment she really stood out most because of this, this, and this, it might give me a much more usable response that I can then play with. And so I think that’s going to be the first to instruct students on: what it does not do, which is critical thinking. And from there, I think they’ll have to use it however they feel comfortable. We’re still going to have some writing assignments that are scored. But what I’m hoping for is that these changes will make it so that they’re focused much more on the critical thinking parts of it. And so for some students that might look like writing a fairly complete draft on their own, and then putting it into ChatGPT and telling it to edit this for brevity and clean up grammar mistakes or do something of the sort. For some students, it might be much more of a back and forth kind of a conversation with ChatGPT, which I think a lot of students will be surprised to learn that it functions in that way. And when I find myself using it, it’s mostly as a conversation. Like, I didn’t like what you did here, cut that part out and do this again.

Rebecca: It’s funny that we don’t always think about it as a chat tool, despite the fact that chat is in its name.

Don: Yeah, exactly.

John: Before making this major change in your curriculum, have you experimented with any changes in this course recently to put more focus on critical thinking skills before introducing ChatGPT?

Don: Yes, so in some of the sections, especially at the graduate level, since we have so many different master’s programs, when I first started, it was MBA, and pretty much that’s it. Now with where the business world is going, there’s a lot more demand for specialized skill sets. And so we have, in addition to MBAs, we have a Masters of Science in Finance, a Masters of Science in Sustainable Business, so on and so forth. And each of those sections afford some opportunity to take things in a different direction, really, not even just an opportunity, but we kind of want to, to be more responsive to those fields. And so in the graduate sections, we’ve had some isolated ability to experiment with more problem-based learning, which I think ChatGPT goes really, really well with on the faculty end as far as creating problem-based learning curriculum. But we haven’t experimented with the AI component of it yet, really, because it’s so new, and it doesn’t feel like it right now…it kind of feels like it’s 20 years old, but yet haven’t used it. But it’s very new. And so I don’t know about every other institution, but we don’t move at the pace of jets when it comes to curriculum revision at the University of Miami. We move, I think, faster than probably most but still, it takes time. And so we haven’t had the opportunity to do anything with the AI yet. But we’ve revised in the past couple years to focus more on some of the problem solving in some of the graduate sections.

Rebecca: The faculty member in me heard I can use ChatGPT to help me with problem-based learning classes, and I want to know more about that.

Don: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER] So if you type into ChatGPT, you have to give it really, really good direction: the who, what, when, where, why…that you are a professor teaching a negotiation class. And it is a upper-level, undergraduate course. And you are going to create simulation practice for negotiation in which you play one role and the student plays the other, and you will create a scenario and interact with the student, but wait for the student’s response after each of your responses. And then at the conclusion, give the student feedback based on what you know about the science of negotiation from a management sciences perspective, as well as a legal perspective. And then you hit go, you will be blown away with what ChatGPT starts to create. And so it will give you a little blurb. A couple of weeks ago, I did something of the sort, and it said, Sally is the owner of a handmade furniture manufacturing company in North Carolina and has been contacted by so and so that owns a furniture retail store. And so and so has been impressed with Sally’s furniture and wants to arrange a distribution agreement. The meeting begins over the phone and so and so ask Sally what her goals are in this arrangement. And then that’s where I would type in and I said my goals are to reach this level of profitability and to have a productive long-term relationship with the other party, and it responded back. So it can create an entire dialogue that you can then ask afterwards, once you tweak it and say, “Well, I liked this part of it. I didn’t like this part of it, write the Python code for this, and it will write the whole Python code and allow you to turn it into a web-based interactive program. It’s really quite wild.

John: So basically, it gives every faculty member the ability to create interactive simulations for their classes, which could be done for pretty much any topic I would think.

Don: Absolutely. In the past that kind of thing was in some courses, probably a bit aspirational. It’s the kind of thing that would probably require some kind of course leave to develop it. And for faculty who become really comfortable with it, it will get to a point where it’s doable within a day or two of a lesson. And so you can on kind of miniature scale, you can do these on a daily basis, really high quality ones.

Rebecca: It sounds like something that we can use in a lot of contexts in higher ed, including if we want to do simulations for interviews for new positions or other things as well, if you’re trying to better understand how someone might approach a problem.

Don: Absolutely. I think that’s a very good application, in fact.

John: One of the things though, that I think has generated some panic for a lot of faculty is the effect that this may have on how we assess student learning. So how can faculty address issues related to the ethical use of artificial intelligence?

Don: Well, I’ve never known any faculty to ever panic over a technological innovation…sarcasm ended. So I think faculty have to assess this on their own, but also part of the community. One thing that I think’s going to be an early problem are faculty doing things in a different way, I think that’s probably unavoidable. And so I say all that as kind of a disclaimer that my approach and what I think our approach is going to be in my department, and even if the disclaimer applies to that, I don’t even know that for sure, is perhaps going to be different than others’ approach. And so since this course is supposed to be so much of a practical course, and the writing is on the wall, no pun intended, well, it’s in the AI software, I view that we really have no choice. And so there’s been a lot of commentary in The Atlantic magazine, a lot of commentary in the higher education journals. And most of that I have seen focused on this question, but using as an assumption that it’s wrong to use ChatGPT. And so the easiest way to make it not a question of cheating is to allow it to be used, and then it’s not cheating. And so that’s the direction that I’m leaning in. And I think, ultimately, for the practical tools, for the practical courses, that’s going to be the direction it goes. But again, I can’t even speak for my own department on that, because we’re so new in this.

John: And that will be an issue, I think, everywhere, as it has been in the past with things like calculators, or smartphones, or even Apple watches, I remember getting all these memos coming in from various places at one point to make sure your students are not using a smartwatch while they were taking an exam, because somehow the answers are going to miraculously appear on that tiny little screen for the test that you’re giving them.

Don: Right. And I think you can’t really separate the assessment design and the student response to the assessment in this. There are going to be some courses, I can imagine, in different disciplines, that they’re focused on more fundamental foundational skills, that it’s going to be more of a challenge for them. Well, I’m not saying that students don’t need to know and learn about the aesthetics of writing; that has to keep happening, but not in this course. And so I don’t know how the faculty in those spaces and really the 9th and 10th grade composition teachers that I talked about before, I don’t know how they deal with it, probably in person assessments, that sort of thing. But for this practical application course, I would view it really as kind of training track runners to hop on one foot. And so that wouldn’t be very practical. And so if you have a cheating or plagiarism or honor code policy that requires them to only use one foot, then it would be plagiarism for them to run on both feet. But that wouldn’t be very helpful. And so I really viewed ChatGPT as the same thing in a practical sense, if you’re plagiarism or honor, code policy defines ChatGPT as out of bounds, you’re training them to run on one foot.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a lot about the writing component, and really building in stronger structures to focus on critical thinking. One of the other issues that you identified was that students don’t necessarily see the intrinsic value of the course or like get the buy-in. Can you talk a little bit about the ways that you’re redesigning to help with that piece of it as well?

Don: Yeah, and so certainly a lot of students do get that. But it really depends on how intrinsically motivated they are. And I think it requires faculty to kind of sell it somewhat. And so in my courses, I’ve found success with selling it in that way, which I really don’t like to do. And it’s something that a lot of faculty probably think is kind of an icky thing to do. But for instance, I will repeatedly tell students, I’m not here to make myself feel good. I’m not here to make myself feel smart by putting you all down. I’m here to help you all get jobs and to get promotions at those jobs and do well in your careers. And so I will focus a lot on kind of pointing things out as criticism that I also tell them these are not affecting your grade, however, X, Y and Z. And so little things like in a presentation if they go…you know, we have to have time limits for presentations because it’s basic math, we have X number of students, 75 minutes in a class session, we have to have time. And so when it comes to a student has five minutes and they go over, what do you do? I’m not going to take off on grades for that. But I am going to point out for a student that, in some settings, if you’re given a time limit, that’s because the CEO has another meeting five minutes after you start and you will be cut off, not because they don’t like what you’re saying not because you haven’t followed the directions, but because they’ve got somewhere else they need to go. And so a lot of the problem I think, is just students are so focused on grades, to the shock of everybody, [LAUGHTER] that when the things that you’re grading and are affecting their grades are these kind of…and aesthetic isn’t the right word, but they would view grading something like that as a bit ticky tack. And when you’re scoring things like that, it’s much harder to have a serious conversation about the nitty gritty substance, and how, if you’re trying to prove that this course of action is more profitable than the others, and you didn’t provide any support for the change in costs, you really can’t have accomplished your goal. You don’t get the same attention from the students in the same response, if you’re also talking about things like, well, “you went five and a half minutes when you only had five minutes,” or “You didn’t use 10 point font when you were told to use 10 point font and that ChatGPT, with that second example with that 10 point font, if the instructions said 10 point font and the students input the instructions it produce it in the appropriate formatting.

John: And I know in the past, when I’ve graded student papers, I, as many other people do, spend far too much time correcting grammatical errors, reminding them that there’s a difference between singular and plural or the difference between all the various homonyms out there. Might be easier for us to evaluate student work when we can actually focus on the arguments they’re making, and their ability to engage in critical thinking, rather than getting ourselves so tied up in all this minutia, which I always try to avoid doing, but when I see so many errors in student work, it’s hard not to at least correct some of it so that they could become more proficient. In the future, they may not need to have that type of correction.

Don: Yeah, John, I think you really hit the nail on the head there. You really feel like you have an obligation to correct those. And when communication or writing is one of the titular topics of the course, even more so. But I have always felt that you get diminishing returns on the things that you focus on. And every time you’re talking about grammar, you are not talking about the critical thinking, and the grammar does matter. I can tell you that I have lots of conversations with CEOs with HR directors, etc, in the ongoing effort to make sure that my curriculum is responsive to what’s happening in the market. And one thing that I consistently hear is grammatical errors, spelling errors on slides or in cover letters are catastrophic. And it’s not because they’re nitpicky, it’s because the markets are so competitive, that they get a window that’s maybe 5% or less of what someone’s actual quality as a candidate may be. And that’s just something that there’s going to be some other candidate that is just as qualified and equal in every other way that didn’t make grammatical mistakes in their PowerPoints, and so on and so forth. And so it is important, but it doesn’t matter how good your grammar is, how compelling your vocabulary is, if you are missing some of the logical components of the argument, you cannot be correct.

John: And when students get feedback, where they see dozens of comments on it, the easiest strategy is to focus on correcting those small grammatical errors that are riddled through it. You might also have told the student that they don’t have a very substantive argument. But if they’re going to make a lot of corrections, it’s easier for them to focus on correcting the grammar and ignoring the more fundamental problem.

Don: Right. The very first writing assignment I ever did as a graduate student was a 50-page memo and I got back no comments anywhere except for on the front page: “Do you talk like this?” I think probably somewhere [LAUGHTER] in between those two is ideal. But you’re exactly right, that the more that we focus on things like grammar and tense and such things, the less we can focus on the meat and the critical thinking.

Rebecca: It’s funny how that often is the level of polish would be something that goes from someone that’s got like a really high grade to like an excellent grade.

Don: Right, exactly.

Rebecca: Something that’s foundational, that’s often not how our feedback structures work. And even if we keep form and function feedback separate and even weight them very differently. It’s really easy to address the form issues, because it’s almost like a series of checkboxes and it doesn’t require a lot of thought because the critical thinking part’s the hard part. And so it’s funny that even if they’re weighted differently, and to keep the comments separately, students will always flock towards the thing that’s kind of easy to fix. I mean, who wouldn’t? Then it becomes a checklist.

Don: And that’s exactly really kind of where this boils down to me, it’s not to say that those things aren’t important. They’re still very important. But in the world in which ChatGPT is a real thing, which it now is, and will continue to be and only be more powerful than it is, the juice that we get out of spending time in class or in feedback, in office hours, whatever it may be, talking about those sorts of things, is getting much less of a return than it did before ChatGPT. I am not a walking detector of 100% perfect polish by any means. But it seems to me that the product that ChatGPT can produce, in terms of those things that you were speaking about, Rebecca, is pretty dang good and hard to distinguish for me from highly polished products. But again, where it is easy to distinguish is this is a load of crap [LAUGHTER] that is fluff and has no substance to it, but a very polished load of crap, but nonetheless…

Rebecca: It’s pretty crap. [LAUGHTER]

Don: Exactly. It’s very pretty crappy with a nice bow,

John: …which reminds me of some work that I graded just the other night, where spelling and grammatical issues have mostly disappeared in student essay responses since the advent of ChatGPT, but the substance is not always there. And there were many responses that I provided feedback on which said, “this is a really nice response, but not to the question that you were asked to address.”

Rebecca: Yeah, or you spent two paragraphs and you haven’t actually said anything yet.

John: So teaching students how to use ChatGPT or other AI tools more effectively might allow them to be more productive in their learning as well as beyond their college experience.

Don: And might allow us to make for more productive learning environments as well.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a lot about course content, and what to maybe focus on and not focus on. One of the most important things a course has is its syllabus or course outline. Can you talk a little bit about course policies and the way that you might make change in that realm?

Don: Yeah, so I think you’re gonna have to be more detailed than you probably are used to being in terms of putting language and syllabi, very specific and upfront. And so some of the policies that I’ve seen that I’ve liked elements of and are going to end up including in the syllabi the explicit weaknesses of ChatGPT. It is not a critical thinking device, it will produce responses only as deep or as shallow as you instruct it to. You are still responsible for the critical thinking, essentially, and very explicit in terms of what’s allowed, what’s not allowed. And I think also, it would probably be a good idea for faculty to be putting in explicit language that what is allowed in this course, is not necessarily the same as what will be allowed in other courses, and it is incumbent on students to navigate those differences themselves.

Rebecca: And part of the reason why things might be different across courses is because the focus of those courses is different and really helping students understand that there’s reasons why policies might be different in other classes. It’s not necessarily arbitrary.

Don: Right, exactly.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Don: Well, what’s next is I figure out how to do all this stuff, [LAUGHTER] and not just to talk about it.

Rebecca: …and you’re gonna send us a memo, right with that in it. [LAUGHTER]

Don: Oh yeah. Yeah, I’m happy. [LAUGHTER]

John: …or at least have ChatGPT generate a memo explaining….

Don: Exactly. So yeah, what’s next is to put this stuff into action. Of course, as I mentioned, some of the things here have already been experimented with, the non-ChatGPT parts of it at least, but really kind of integrating them and seeing if what I am imagining is what comes to fruition in terms of do these things dovetail as well as I think. I really think that they do. …that kind of pre-existing urge to go more towards the critical thinking element, and really, I think, does dovetail well with the AI, but putting it into practice, it will be over the course of probably all of next year. And so there’s going to be some experimental sections, most of the sections are probably not going to look very different than they did in the spring. And I think that’s probably a very good plan. But there’s going to be some experimenting in some of the sections at the undergraduate level, and part of a faculty learning community on problem-based learning. This course is going to be participating in that in the fall. And so a lot is going to come out of that, I think, as well.

John: Do you think there’ll be much buy in from other people teaching the course?

Don: So, students, by and large, do not like writing. Faculty, by and large, do not like grading writing. And so I don’t think this is one of those political monsters of how are we going to get this through? How are we going to make these changes work? I think there’s probably a lot of people who have nervousness about how you would make these changes. But with those two facts that I don’t think you’d get much disagreement from, I think even across disciplines, I don’t think it should be that difficult for this to be implemented

Rebecca: Well I hope you’ll join us after you’ve implemented some of the things to share some of your reflections and let us know how it went.

Don: I’m happy to.

John: Well, thank you, Don.

Don: Thank you.

[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]

279. First-Year Blues

Posted in emotion, engagement, equity, first-generation, first-year classes, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, race, racism, teaching, writing
March 8, 2023

First-year seminar classes can help ease students’ transition from high school to college. In this episode, Tim Nekritz joins us to discuss his first-year seminar class on the history of American Blues in which students explore racial and gender discrimination through the lens of music while also learning to navigate the college environment.

Tim is the Director of News and Media at SUNY Oswego, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, and the developer of a first-year seminar course in American Blues.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: First-year seminar classes can help ease students’ transition from high school to college. In this episode, we discuss a first-year seminar class on the history of American Blues in which students explore racial and gender discrimination through the lens of music while also learning to navigate the college environment.

>[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

>[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Tim Nekritz. Tim is the Director of News and Media at SUNY Oswego, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, and the developer of a first-year seminar course in American Blues. Welcome, Tim.

Tim: Great to be here.

John: Our teas today are: …Tim, are you drinking tea?

Tim: Yes. And I am drinking Tea Forte blackcurrant. It’s excellent, and if John recommends a tea, you’ve got to go with it,

Rebecca: I’m drinking chai today, John.

John: Very good. There’s no jig or anything. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: No, there’s no Jig, nothing crazy. I was at an event and there’s limited choices on our campus event tea selection. Chai is what I chose.

John: And I have ginger peach black tea today.

Rebecca: Back to an old favorite, John.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your first-year seminar course in American blues. Since it’s been a while since we discussed one of the first-year seminar courses here at SUNY Oswego, could you tell us a little bit about the objectives of the course?

Tim: Absolutely. The idea is for it to be a small class, because you really want to build a sense of cohesion there. And I saw that a lot, because students would become best friends right away, despite anything I did or not because of anything I did sometimes, but so it’s building connections with other students and instruction in the institution. It’s very much a gateway course to them being college students, to a degree. We don’t overdo that, but we try to make sure that we can work that into the curriculum wherever we can. There’s a certain amount of college preparatory experience for that, obviously, it’s not orientation, clearly it’s not orientation. For example, I brought in Tina from Excel to talk about career preparation and internships and that type of thing, brought in someone from Counseling Services Center, which I’ll talk more about later, but just try to connect them with some helpful faces and offices on campus. There’s also intercultural competence, which was a big part of this course, which I know we’re gonna discuss more later, …critical thinking skills (so introduction to what that is on the college level), and communication skills and very basic level, whether it might be their first research paper, might be their first oral presentation in college and trying to get them prepared in whatever ways we can.

John: We introduced these classes several years ago, and we had a number of people teaching in the first round of this on our podcast, but that was sometime in the before times.

Tim: Yes.

John: …so we thought it would be useful to review this just a little bit. But it’s also something that the college is expanding. The goal is within the next two years to offer one of these courses to every freshman student.

Tim: Yeah, and we work with Mallory Bower, as well as Kristin Croyle, who are excellent to work with, as far as trying to get people almost over their fears. So it’s like, put in an idea. And as opposed to just like yes/no, they might help you workshop it and there’s pr- preparations where seasoned professors like me, I’m not in the old category, apparently. And so like, “How do you develop your course? What stumbling blocks did you have? What were things that worked?” and that type of thing, which obviously varies from course to course, as we all know. But it’s good, because in a way, we’re building communities here, but we’re building communities among the people who are interested in teaching that class.

Rebecca: One of the things that’s interesting about the first-year courses that are at our school is that they’re intentionally not in the discipline and they’re often interdisciplinary. So can you talk a little bit about your course and how that fits into the bigger picture at Oswego.

Tim: Certainly, I came about designing it in a backward way, which is how I do most things, it seems like, but essentially, I really got an interest in blues and blues history fairly recently. And we got an email from someone named Roger House, Roger went to SUNY Oswego for a couple of years before transferring to another institution. And he’s now an American Studies professor at Emerson College and does a lot of stuff on blues history, cultural history, and that type of thing. And he emailed us a column that he wrote that references his time at SUNY Oswego. And then at the bottom, it said, Roger House is the author of Blue Smoke, which is a biography of Big Bill Broonzy. And at the time, I was reading anything on the blues I could get my hands on. And I read it, and I realize,d everything that he went through, he went away to World War One, and was treated great in Europe… well, relatively great for a servicemen… for someone who’s toward the bottom of the rank, but at least was treated like a human being which he wasn’t used to back home… comes back, the man he worked for, picks him up and immediately degrades him and tells him “You don’t deserve to be in that uniform.” This is a person who sat home and did nothing and he’s telling Bill who served his country, for very obvious and racist reasons, to take off his uniform and put his overalls back on. And that was a big pivotal moment. But it’s also something that resonated with a lot of people. A lot of people who went away to World War One, and then had to come back home and face the indignities of racism. And so then he was part of the great migration to Chicago and the blues scene that arose there and then he was rediscovered because he did some social commentary during the folk revival in the 1960s. I’m looking at this and it’s not dissimilar to Forrest Gump, although not as fabricated, but you’re looking at, okay, all these different parts of 20th century history, and this could be something that’s taught. So I sent an email to Mallory and said, “This is a crazy idea and I know we’re friends, but you can tell me it’s stupid if you want.” But she didn’t. She thought it was great. But part of it is you can really teach cultural history, black history, entertainment history, pop culture history, there’s so much that can be developed here. And then it seemed like the first black women to reach a mass audience were the blues queens of the 1920s, when that became big. Because they could not be heard or paid attention to elsewhere, but then suddenly, out of nowhere, Mamie Smith has a huge hit that sells all these records and record executives are like, “Oh, wait, there’s actually a market for black music” because Mamie Smith was really like the Jackie Robinson, she broke the barrier. It was in part because she had a lyricist, Perry Bradford, who sold his compositions, but because people would buy it, but nobody wanted at that point to record a black artist. And so he got Mamie Smith recorded, and then Crazy Blues became this huge hit and suddenly people realized, “Oh, well maybe this is not a bad thing.” But that being said, what happened immediately is that they started recording white women who tried to sound like black women, which of course is even worse, really. And so they were very hesitant. I was reading things that said, “Oh, and then suddenly, opportunities opened up” …and they didn’t. It wasn’t until Bessie Smith came along with Downhearted Blues in 1923. That just sold unbelievable numbers to all audiences, black, white, anybody. And the record company said, “Okay, well, I guess this is something that we can do.” But there’s so many lessons behind that, and the fact again, that the record companies held off on actually trying to make sure that black woman can be heard, which was amazing, disappointing at the same time. So that’s just one example. And then being able to teach the great migration through the Chicago blues scene. The fact that Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters and all these people came from the south and collected in Chicago, or Detroit, or any city where the jobs were, but then in Chicago, all the conditions were perfect for them to start up an amazing blues scene and just to transform everything, like when Muddy Waters plugged in an electric guitar, and everyone was like blown away by that. But he had to do it, because he was playing in these loud clubs and people were just talking. So he had to electrify what he was doing. But so anyway what I started doing is looking at some of the themes and some of these decades, these eras, and that type of thing, because there’s also just such a long pre-history of African music, African inspired music. And then at one point that drums were banned on plantations because people thought they could send messages to each other, but also the way that the field hollers and the religious music, music that they did just were work songs and how that influenced what came later. The problem is, you could almost do a whole course on that. That’s really way back. That would be earlier American history, but I’d have to inform that and then talk about the fact that you had like the Ma Rainey’s of the world who were already spreading the blues before it was known as the blues. And so laying a lot of foundations with the vaudeville and tent shows, or W C. Handy, and his first blues recordings, but even some interesting things because blues was folk music for the longest time. And then W. C Handy decided to publish it, and suddenly it is no longer folk, it is now commercial. And so how that changed everything. So there’s so many interesting lessons that happen along the way.

Rebecca: So what I’m hearing, Tim, is that you’re using music to sneakily teach history.

Tim: I’m a sneak.

Rebecca: You’re so dangerous.

Tim: I know, it’s horrible.

John: There have been a number of economic articles written on the role that rural free delivery and the Sears catalog provided in the blues because it brought low cost musical instruments to places where there were just no music stores.

Tim: That’s great. I do touch on that a little bit, because, in the rural south, you can’t drive to a music store. But then suddenly, Sears made guitars and other instruments, very inexpensive. So little things I just love because I’m a big fan of James Burke. I know he spoke here a few years ago, in his Connection series and the day the universe changed, about how all these small things come together. And so that’s exactly what I like talking about. That’s a perfect example.

Rebecca: How did you get students engaged in the subject matter? What are some of the kinds of activities that you did with students?

Tim: One of the things that I did because I can’t convey the Blues as well as blues artists can, I would give them a Spotify playlist of like 15 to 20 songs and have them listen to it. The first time I taught it I couldn’t find a book and it’s like, this is easier than reading a book. And then finally, some people talked to me about “You probably should at least get a basic book.” So I have a really inexpensive one. Elijah Wald’s, Blues History, which is I think like $12. I try to be friendly on the budget. And so I would have one on Blues Queen, for example, or then in the mid-1920s, what happened is Blind Lemon Jefferson had a hit song called Black Snake Moan and Blind Lemon does not get the credit. He totally changed the industry with that. And part of that is sexism, unfortunately, because when the record companies were getting the Mamie Smith’s of the world, the Bessie Smiths, was like, “Okay, well, we need to put an orchestra behind them.” And then suddenly Blind Lemon Jefferson has a huge hit. He’s one person, that’s so much easier to pay. And if you have the Bessie Smith’s and Mamie Smith, and the Ida Cox’s, the people who were getting well established, they command more money, economics again, but you find some blind guitarists somewhere, you can pay him less than that, because unfortunately, exploitation is a big part of labor market functions or malfunctions, I guess you would say. Women really dominated the scene for the first five years and then they started going to solo male singer guitarists, or pianists, or fiddler’s, or whatever. And so then I did one about some of the early male artists, then all the Blind Willie McTell and Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Blake. But then I also talked about why that happened, because again with economics, if you’ve got nine kids, and one of them’s blind… basically, there was a sharecropper system, which was again rigged, almost indentured servitude, unfortunately… and so your kids, if you’re in the system, they all had to help you produce. So if you’ve got a child who’s blind, they can’t necessarily do that. But then, especially when Blind Lemon Jefferson started hitting some other people, it’s like a lot of them might have already had them working as buskers and that type of thing, but then the record companies of course, there’s nothing original to a record company, thought “Oh, we’re gonna assign more blind bluesman including the fact there were some who were signed who were said they were blind but weren’t.” And like all these really crazy things. So like I did that. I did one Chicago blues, and then folk blues and social blues and then the British blues boom, which was led by The Rolling Stones, among others. But there’s also a great quote from George Harrison, my favorite Beatle… everyone has a different favorite Beatle perhaps… but he has said “No Lead Belly, no Beatles,” because, again, it’s one of those weird, circuitous things, because Lead Belly, among other things, did a song called Rock Island Line, which was covered by someone named Lonnie Donegan, who actually took the Lonnie from Lonnie Johnson, who’s another great unsung hero. Rock Island Line became a huge hit in Britain and formed something called skiffle. Skiffle was like a combination of blues and folk and a couple other things. And then all these skiffle bands started forming including one called Quarrymen, which was John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and later, George Harrison. And so George Harrison nails it. And the main thing, I think, that the students notice, because I am willing to trade off extra credit for market research. So I have a five point question on the final, which is a bonus question, which is, “What’s one thing you wouldn’t have known if you took this class” and a large part it’s like they had no idea that the blues is the foundation for rock and roll, and inspired jazz, and soul, r&b, funk. And then a really cool thing is Marquel Jeffries from the Institute, who’s also a rapper. I had him come in and talk about the connections between blues and hip hop. And he did a fantastic job with that, because just as the blues has informed so many 20th century art forms, I’m glad that I can introduce that to people because, again, that is cultural appreciation. It is also cultural appropriation too, that is part of this as well.

John: And certainly there was a lot of that in the history of rock and roll.

Tim: Oh, yes, Elvis being a big one. But at the same time, that wasn’t cool, necessarily, but Elvis himself was a big fan of R&B. This is what he wanted to perform. And at one point, they tried a bunch of things, and then he started playing some really crazy R&B tune. And Sam Phillips came in the studio and said, “What the heck are you doing?” And he said, “keep doing whatever you are,” because that was everybody’s ticket to money on the money train. But part of it too, is that people like Sam Phillips knew these R&B records were selling like crazy. They needed to break into the larger and mostly white market. And so they needed a white face to market that with and that’s what they did with Elvis. So there’s a real lesson there. And then there’s so much other cultural appropriation. I know that Larry Watson, who performed very recently, he has a whole song that he did in Waterman theater called “Liar,” which is all about cultural appropriation. It was great. So obviously, it’s appreciation versus appropriation, who’s benefiting from what? The fact that Led Zeppelin then would change a few words on a bluesman’s song and then file the copyright themselves. Janis Joplin did it too. And all these people who very much took advantage of that, but then there are also a lot of people who appreciated the blues. I consider myself someone who preserves it because I like doing old blues songs… not nearly as well as they do… but I at least want people to know who some of the blues pioneers are as best I can.

John: And the Rolling Stones certainly did that and I believe they had Howlin Wolf open for them on some of their early tours.

Tim: Yeah, I showed them a great video that was one of those teenybop shows and they said they wouldn’t perform unless Howlin Wolf played and it’s just kind of hilarious because Howlin Wolf is playing, he’s doing what the Wolf does, and all the kids are bopping to it. And it’s like, “Wow, imagine if they were actually exposed to Howlin Wolf and all these other blues players that they never actually were.” So that could be like an alternative history of suddenly the radio stations that are playing Howlin Wolf might have happened, but it didn’t happen, obviously.

Rebecca: So you had students do a lot of listening and reading, what kinds of things did you do in class? I know you had some interesting projects and other learning activities.

Tim: Well, I will get back to the playlist. Basically, they would come in and the assignment would be let’s discuss at least one song on the playlist and everyone would do it… almost everyone would do it. Some of them want to talk about two or three. I’m like, hey, that’s cool, too. So like, if I’m talking about a blues gospel tune, talk about why gospel blues was a thing. I don’t even know how this existed, but when Ma Rainey’s Prove it on me Blues, from the 1920s, singing about being a lesbian, and you can’t get more marginalized in America at that time than by being a black lesbian. She’s like, “This is me, here I am.” And it almost feels like how did this happen? Because after the 20s, that disappeared for a long time, even that kind of expression. But that kind of showed, and I had people in the class who were very inspired by that, the courage that it took her to do that. And then just weird stuff like Blue Yodel Number 9, which is Jimmy Rogers with Louis Armstrong and Lil Armstrong. So it’s blues, with yodeling and old country and jazz. I read about it in a book. And I’m like, “this shouldn’t exist,” because again, we think of how much music was categorized back then. So those are great discussion exercises. But then the one really fun project I thought was I asked him to write a blues song talking about it could be their perspective or some other perspective. And so I brought in Kyle from the Counseling Center, because he’s big into expressive arts, and it’s like, “Is there anything that’s bothering you that you can sing a blues song about?” So a lot of them talked about loneliness, homesickness, missing friends and that type of thing. Some of them were really deep, and I’m like, “oh, goodness,” some of the stuff that they were writing. The first semester, there was actually a surprise attached to it, in that I had reached out to some friends. And right after Thanksgiving, we get back and we had a concert. And so my friends from a band called The Shylocks, they did two tunes. A third tune was one that was written by someone in the class. And I said, “Guess what we’re doing?” So I had a number of people there, and Kyle, a very well known blues player, Jess Novak, recorded one because she connected with one of the students in the class really well, because Jess talks about the old boys club and all the rest of that stuff. And there’s one student who talked about back home, she would get solos. People were like, “Oh, it’s because you’re a girl.” and all the rest of this stuff and be patronizing to her. But then we did research papers, and she presented on Etta James, and she’s asked if she could sing At Last. I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” And she did and I knew why she got the solos back home because she was really good. But then, to turn that around, I said, “Hey, Jess, remember that student.” And I sent Jess her thing and she performed it. And it was one of those, you could have dropped it back in the 1920s. It was that good. So I had some of them performed live, some of them recorded it as well. And it was just really cool to see because these students, some of them acted all cool, and that type of thing. But some of them were like just very emotional to see people perform a song that they wrote. I wasn’t able to do it last year… lowell, one thing, the cat was out of the bag, perhaps… but it was great because they got to use self expression, but then also see how people interpret songs. So it worked on many levels. And it was a heck of a lot of fun too.

John: When you had them write the songs, did they actually write it down in notation? Or did they sing it? Or did they write it down assuming there’d be a 12 bar pattern underneath it?

Tim: Great question. Basically, I just had them do lyrics. I am not qualified to teach composition. I can teach about writing. Last year, I don’t know what happened, but I wrote about 50 songs. I was looking into sources that talked about songwriting, like Larry Kyle spoke to the class or Jess Novak spoke to the class. I had them talk a little bit about their songwriting experience, how they wrote songs. And of course, with everything, “Well, it depends on the song.” But so I actually did try to workshop with them a little bit. And most of them didn’t really want my help. They just wanted to do it on their own. But I said they could do it in 12-bar blues, but they didn’t have to because obviously the blues has evolved, whether they want to do an ABAB rhyme scheme, or just ABCB or whatever. And honestly, I was looking for effort. Some of them were fantastic. Some of them were not anything that necessarily was going to be recorded. But the effort they put into it, especially if it came from the heart, that was more important to me, just that they learned about self expression. Some of them were already songwriters, so they had a bit of a leg up there. But at the same time, it was really an exercise that was to express themselves. And some of them did fictional stuff, and that’s great, or took something and elaborated on it, but that’s how I write songs too. So yeah, I can’t fault them for that. But so all of them are really good. I just asked them to do four stanzas. That could be four verses, three verses and a chorus, two verses a chorus and a bridge, just to show that they had invested in it. And nobody who turned in a song disappointed me or came even close to it. So I was happy how that worked out. And again, they didn’t know it was gonna be performed. And the performers, I didn’t have them say who wrote it, intentionally. But then one of the performers actually wanted to perform them live… open mics and stuff. And I asked the student’s permission, like, “Oh, totally, yeah,” and that type of thing. They didn’t want their name attached to it. So it’s just that personal to them. And again, I always say I learn just as much from the students as they learn from me. And so I learned a lot about what’s going on in their lives. And by the same time there are people who want to write songs about their blues, but some of them they didn’t necessarily want to take ownership of or let people know how they’re feeling. There’s larger reasons for that than I can fix in a class. But at the same time, I thought it was really great that they at least got that experience.

Rebecca: So I think it’s important to note, if students are writing songs, it’s a first-year class, it’s not part of the music major, there’s a lot of non majors. So students may have ended up in the class because they selected the topic, or because it fit in their schedule. So how did you handle students that were not too excited about writing a song or worried about being outed?

Tim: Yeah, a lot of it was reassurance. There were a few music majors in there. Some of them even said, Wait, I thought this was a jazz history class. I’m like, no, there’s 50 jazz history classes, there’s very few blues history classes. That’s the reason nobody knows about the blues’ role, because blues history is just not taught. A few places have programs. The University of Mississippi is a good example of that. But generally speaking, we all do jazz, because jazz is so much neater and more ornate and doesn’t involve feelings and unfortunate situations and people being murdered for cheating on their lover and whatnot. But so students took it for a variety of reasons. I think you expressed some of that, but also because Mallory is a big supporter, and so she plugged a lot of them into my class the first time around. But for a non-music major, I even said right off the bat, you don’t have to be a music major, but you have to enjoy music in some way. Like if you don’t like to listen to music, this probably is not the first-year class you should take. I talked on what I call syllabus day. I do talk about the songwriting assignment, and then sometimes a couple students might disappear. But I want them to be comfortable with the class. So I try to set the expectations early, we talk about it a lot. And before I give them the assignment, and that’s why I always ask songwriters for advice. But like I had Juliet Forshaw, who actually taught a songwriting class last semester, come and speak to my class. And it’s a trade off, I got to speak to her class. And so imposter syndrome was high. That day, despite all the songs I’ve written, I still don’t feel necessarily like one. And so she came in with her partner, Michael Judge, and so they played some Avalon songs, but also, she went deep into how she created it. And again, there might be people who write the music first, and then write the words and just like, well, that’s not necessarily going to be the case here. I told them, if they wanted to put a lead sheet and put some chords on there, that’s great. There were a couple of people who already did make music. But really, it’s not unlike writing poetry. So that was one of the analogies I used. And so some of them would come up to me with a couple ideas and said, “How do I flesh it out?” and I’d suggest a rhyme or say, “Here’s a great point, can you expound upon that?” …like every writing course I ever took. And so I was worrying that maybe I would get more resistance and more people who just didn’t want to do it, or who I would have to really work to get to do it, but then it surprised me, the day that they were due, they would show up… once in a while they’d be late or other people would send it to me via Google Drive or email and not show up that class just in case….

Rebecca: In case they had to share it out loud or something. [LAUGHTER]

Tim: I think they were afraid of that. And I told them, I’m not going to make you sing it. Of course, I didn’t tell people the first time that someone else is gonna be singing it either. But they took it in stride. And obviously the past couple years have not been the easiest time to transition into a freshman year, especially the year that people came in and they hadn’t been in in-person classes because they graduated from high school, which had been virtual since March 2020. And so I think they adjusted well to being back in class. I think they’re excited to be back in a class and in college. So I think that helped a lot. But generally speaking, they appreciated the assignment. I mean, they didn’t jump up and down and talk about how great it was. But they all put in the effort. I think that says a lot, because I remember it being really hard to be a freshman and that’s back before we had the Internet and other distractions.

John: So how many times have you offered this class now?

Tim: Two times and obviously you learn something every time you teach it, and then it’s like, I’m gonna change this next year. And then next thing you know, it’s like late August and like, “Oh, well, maybe I won’t.” But one thing I’ve been doing too is getting a variety of guest speakers and some of them are musicians. And then like I said, you’ll have people in Counseling Services Center or Tina from EXCEL or just other people who might be helpful just to come in and maybe do like a 30-minute talk. This was an election year, as many people are painfully aware. And so I had some from Vote Oswego come in and talk about that and civic engagement. And sometimes it might be just a 20 minute talk or someone coming in it might be a whole class. But in the case of someone like Kyle, he’s got a background, and he’s a blues fan, because he’s like, “Oh, my God,” when I asked him. His father took him to see Bo Diddley, and I’m like, “I’m jealous of you.” But so he had blues, introduced in his family. So he knew that, but part of it’s to hear all the services we have, which are very important for anybody to have, really, the way the mental health crisis is these days. So it’s great that he got to introduce that and also then the interactive stuff that he did… people understanding how to share how they feel, and that type of thing. So I think I was very lucky with guest speakers. And then it’s always like, “Okay, well, I’m keeping most of them if they can,” because like Marquel was an example of, I got to the 70s, 80s, the birth of rap and hip hop, and the first time around, I didn’t have the subject knowledge to do that a credible job. But then it occurred to me like, “Oh, wait, I know Marquel.” And so he did a whole bunch of research, asked me questions, and then talked about the history of hip hop, and then connected with the blues just so well, I was thrilled to have him and because guest speakers will liven up the class a little bit. And then some of them will do a session like Jess Novak did and they all connected with her immediately, and like they connect with me like that. But that’s why Jess does what she does for a living, and I do what I do for a living. But just I think trying to get some variety in the class, because part of it too, is if it’s class major specific people might be saying, “Okay, well, what can you do with this major or this class?” So I don’t think a lot of people they’re looking to become musicians… a couple of them are, but try to introduce people who can help them in other ways. The good thing for being a non-musician is that it’s, in large part, a history class. It just happens to have a really cool genre that goes with it and I get to listen to music and we have to write a song. It’s not the end of the world. They all survived and thrived with it.

Rebecca: What are some of the themes that came up in their songs? You mentioned that you got a lot of insights into what’s going on in their lives as first-year students and that might be helpful for a wider audience to be aware of.

Tim: One of them wrote a song called Lonely Man Blues that basically talked about being away from his friends, his family. One of them wrote a funny song about dealing with people at the holidays who had different belief systems than him. It was a bit of an angry song. I mean, I could see the Ramones performing the song as well as any blues band. But people would talk about that. And just homesickness. Even as bad as the pandemic has been, and having to learn from your house and that type of thing, at least that’s a familiar place. And for them, that’s really trying to figure out the comfort zone, making friends over again, because you know, social skills took a hit during the pandemic. And so some of them talked about the readjustment of that, or talked about someone who broke their heart. One person, actually wrote what sounded more like spoken word poetry, it was really long, but it was very honest. And it was a way that they expressed themselves about a relationship. So it’s something that they got out of their system. So in a way, they weren’t that different than what you see with normal blues songs, except, like I said, there was much less murder involved, thankfully. I don’t know what would happen if someone talked about murder, but it really was about feeling lonely, about missing people, about wanting more love and that type of thing. So it was, in a way, whether I expected it to or not, it hit on a lot of the themes that classic blues songs did.

John: One of the reasons for these classes is to help students connect to other students as well as to the institution. How did that work in the class? Did the students make a lot of personal connections through the activities you were doing in the class?

Tim: Absolutely. And again, I haven’t figured out how to master that yet, I would like to, but they would just make it organically. There were a couple of people who hit it off and became really good friends. I would like to say that somebody formed a blues band out of this. I don’t think that happened. But the good thing about a class like this is it’s intimate. And people do talk about things. And it’s interesting, because when Kyle was in the room, or Jess was in the room, they would talk about things they didn’t talk about in front of me because I’m their teacher, and I grade them. I had one student when Kyle was there, he said, every day, I feel like I’m going to break down crying, just because of all the stress and that type of thing that anybody goes through at that age. And so I think that they expressed these things.. kind of broke down some barriers among everybody, which I think was good. Obviously, nobody was going to become friends with each other. I took improvisational theater way back in my undergrad days. And that was great because everybody just goofs around and that type of thing. And it is to let your guard down class. And so that’s the tightest class I’ve ever seen was improv theater just because everyone’s just doing silly things. I didn’t do silly things in this, it’s unfortunate, maybe next time. But it was good because for one thing, no one studies this blues history. So they were getting a lot of information that was new to them. But then they would also talk about “Oh, I really liked this artist, this song.” And so people would be like “Oh, I love that song too.” And so there would be some side conversations… sometimes actually about the class… often about other things. But at the same time, I think people saw some commonality because they were all learning a lot of new content. But when they say, “Oh, I really love this, Ma Rainey song, Prove it on Me,” and then somebody else does, too, it’s bonding or these little moments in the things that they like or performers they’d never heard before. One of them did a paper on Blind Blake and I feel like this much qualified for the Blues Hall of Fame, just making a Blind Blake song in 2022, as it was. When they found themselves agreeing on songs, and some parts of history that make people not so happy, but at the same time, for some of them, it’s validating, knowing that these things happened. And for them to realize that this has impact on my life, still, 100 years after the blues started… obviously, racism hadn’t gone away, or sexism… and so to see these things expressed, and to connect with that, and connect with other people, because not every day, but sometimes we’d have some really, really good and honest conversations. And then people connect with each other over that. And maybe it’s not even because they agree, but they learned to respect other people’s viewpoints. And it was always a very respectful class. A couple of people even argued over whether or not things were rock and roll songs. And that was about as heated as we got. [LAUGHTER] I can tell you that much. Because when rock and roll started, the saxophone was the guitar. The guitar solo was a saxophone solo. And some people are like, :”No, that’s not rock and roll…” like, “that is rock and roll.” And so that’s what some of the arguments were. It’s like, well, though, it was kind of 12-bar blues still, there’s more R&B. An example I use is Shake, Rattle and Roll by Big Joe Turner, which was not a tune you would play around your children, I will put it that way. There were some lyrics in there that were pushing the envelope like “when you wear those dresses, the sun comes shining through. I can’t believe my eyes, all the mess belongs to you.” You couldn’t sing that easily in the early 50s. But then what happened is a white band, Bill Haley and the Comets who were very well known, covered it and took out the more offensive part of “the way when you wear those dresses, oh my, you look so nice,” which is a completely different context. There was still some sexism involved in that because there’s the 1950s, unfortunately. So what happened is that Big Joe Turner’s version became a big hit on the R&B track, Bil Haley and the Comets covered it and it became a big hit in America because they were allowed to be on all those airwaves. But just little moments like that that I was able to show or the fact that I think that Big Momma Thorton’s Hound Dog is vastly superior to Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog in every way. But I think when people get new information also, and maybe light bulbs go on over their head, that also builds a bit more of a connection too because these are things again, we don’t teach this anywhere. But it’s an important part of the cultural history and pop culture history and music history.

John: And it sounds like a lot of the intercultural competence that these classes were designed to work on was just built into the structure of the course.

Tim: Absolutely. And that’s one of the things I felt good about, because I knew that was an emphasis. And it’s like, well, this definitely has that throughout the years. For example, even though people will debate whether it’s blues, or it’s jazz, but something like Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday. That was something the fact that it talked about a lynching and all the rest of this stuff. That was something that really moved students ‘cause unfortunately, they might have textbooks and talk about it. But it’s also Billie Holiday, who has an amazing voice. And so this really translated a lot of that stuff. There are a few songs that talked about the welfare system, or Big Bill Broonzy talking about being black, brown, and white, and some of the different situations that people face there. It was just such a great way of conveying this information. And you know, they’re all amazing songs, too. So you read it in a history book, and it can be kind of removed. But when you hear someone singing about this, that becomes very immediate,

John: Strange Fruit just it’s just an amazing song.

Tim: Oh, yes.

John: How did the students react to that?

Tim: If I had to pick one song during the whole semester that got a reaction from them, it was that. They might have heard about lynching. This really painted the picture in words and in Billie Holiday’s amazing voice. So I think that was an example. But there’s also… no one talks about Bessie Smith’s Poor Man Blues, which essentially it’s about all the black soldiers who went and fought for you in Europe, and then you rich man, you don’t want anything to do with us anymore. You want us to fight your wars and that type of thing. And it’s really interesting, because there are some quote unquote, blues historians, I will call them chroniclers who had the audacity to say that the blues are not a political genre, but it’s all political. When you’re poor, when you’re dealing with all these barriers in life, that’s very political. And so it’s amazing that while these were white people from Britain, who had no real background in the country’s history, and so that’s why I wanted to get a lot of the social and protest songs because that’s a big part of the blues. I mean, again, so much of blues… you’re an economist, you know that the economy impacts every part of people’s lives… and if you’re not being paid enough, if you’re not getting employment if you’re being treated badly by the system because of systemic racism, that’s a very political thing. So I think that’s the point that they also got very much from a lot of what they saw. So it was just great to have that opportunity to show people these things. Well, when I say show people, I mean, having way more talented people than me sing about it.

Rebecca: I can imagine that a lot of students and just people in general, listen to music and don’t always pay attention to the details. So having the opportunity to slow down and actually think about the lyrics and have conversations about it and connect it to history is a really different way of experiencing music, and it, I would imagine, translate to other things they’re listening to. Did you have conversations in class about how they might have been listening to other kinds of music differently?

Tim: So many of them know Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. They didn’t realize what a background in the blues, Jimi Hendrix had. Jimi Hendrix was very blues focused, even the Grateful Dead. So much of their stuff is blues. So especially when they saw this with artists that they knew, that helped make that connection a lot. Again, Eric Clapton is very much a conveyor of that, that they all know the Eric Clapton songs, but it’s like, well, that was written in the 1920s and 1930s, by someone who wasn’t Eric Clapton. But to connect all that backwards, or even the fact that to the era when I came of age, Nirvana, and their last performance on Unplugged, where they covered a Lead Belly song, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, and just how moving that was when Kurt Cobain did it in that I think his last performance ever. But then to see people make that connection. Okay, Lead Belly, and of course that was an old folk tale that he was singing, but at one point that got me into Lead Belly. And so just being able to peel back the layers and look at the history and see how that underpins the songs that they listened to. Because a lot of them do listen to what are covers of blues song. And there was a big blues revival in the 1980s, and it’s funny, because if you are a blues historian, you don’t want to admit it, but one person admitted, I hate to say this, but it was because of the Blues Brothers movie.

John: To be fair, there were so many great blues performers in the Blues Brothers movies.

Tim: Yeah, well, and the thing is, the movie company didn’t want to bring in these performers. They wanted “Oh, we have these hot young artists we want to do.” And Dan Ackroyd basically said “Hard no. I’m not doing this unless we’re allowed to bring in these performers who just didn’t get their due or just weren’t as appreciated.” And, so first of all, the music in that movie is great. It’s also very funny, but at the same time, people of a certain academic level don’t like to admit to something as base, dare I say, as the Blues Brothers movie had that impact on it. But then you had a lot of people in the 80s and 90s, like you’re seeing the Fabulous Thunderbirds having a big hit with Tough Enough, the Georgia Satellites having a really big hit with Keep Your Hands to Yourself, which was basically based in a blues structure and so much of the blues rock… the Allman Brothers, so much of what they did was the blues, and they became really big. But the unfortunate thing too, is that that had to do with suddenly becoming a white man’s genre. And generally speaking, like Robert Cray was big, but he was an exception, because by the time we get to the 1980s, most of the people who were playing blues, in large part, who were getting the air play were white men, even though it started with black women. And then also Stevie Ray Vaughan helped break it open too, and we can only wonder what happened if he hadn’t died tragically, but what he brought to the blues is just otherworldly. But he learned a lot of his stuff at the feet of Buddy Guy. Bonnie Raitt started… I think it’s a rhythm and blues foundation, where she basically knew there was all these blues performers. Larry Watson gave her a shout out recently performing on campus because she won a Grammy and is an example of somebody who actually walks the walk and talks the talk and she says, “Yeah, I was inspired by the blues, but I want to give back to the performers who didn’t have the opportunity to do that.” And the problem is like in the 1980s the blues was George Thorogood and I’m just not a fan of George Thorogood. That drove me away from blues for a long time, I think, but George Thorogood performed at Live Aid with Albert King and some blues performers, but they wouldn’t have been on the bill without George Thorogood which is morally compromising to me. But the problem was that there’s still a lot of great people out there. There’s Shamekia Copeland, who is well known. There are some rising stars still in the blues scene. Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, who is like 19 years old and talented and might be the next big thing in the blues. So there’s a lot still out there, but at the same time, that’s not the stuff that’s getting played on most radio stations.

John: Buddy Guy is still touring. It may be his last tour. I think he labeled it as his final tour, but we’ll see.

Tim: Yeah, well, I’ve seen Buddy Guy live twice. I saw him at the [NY] State Fair with BB King, and I think it was Tommy Castro and Susan Tedeschi, maybe.

John: Yeah, I was at that show. I’ve seen him at least a dozen times including twice at his club in Chicago.

Tim: Well, that’s fantastic.

John: … the old location and the new one.

Tim: Yeah, but Buddy Guy is so influential because he can do Jimi Hendrix, because Jimi Hendrix learned from him. He can do Stevie Ray Vaughan because Stevie Ray Vaughan learned from him . He did BB King… well, he and BB just did a lot of stuff together. And BB was a legend, but Buddy Guy stole that show and every show he ever performed at.

John: Yes. And I remember that show. He had just released the Riding with the King album with Eric Clapton. And he said, “Unfortunately, I’m not able to bring Eric Clapton here, but I’ll bring out the next best thing.” And I know everyone around me was hoping that Buddy Guy was going to come back on the stage, but instead it was his other guitarist who came out and performed with him….

Tim: Who was also really good.

John: …who was also really good, but he was not Buddy Guy [LAUGHTER].

Tim: Well, and what’s weird is that you’d look at it in retrospect, when Riding with the King came out with BB King and Eric Clapton, it’s easy to look at, “Oh, look at Eric Clapton doing a favor by letting BB King be on his record.” But it’s the other way around. Clapton… probably any bluesman worth anything would want to record with BB King. But the problem is with the cultural lens of me being a young, stupid, white kid it’s like, “Oh, wow, what an opportunity for BB King.” And it’s like, because Rattle and Hum introduced BB King in another context, too, because U2, they just had Joshua Tree… they could have done anything they wanted. And it’s like “We’re gonna do a movie. And we’re going to meet with some of our inspirations.” and that type of thing. And so they did a song with BB King and Bono… who is not always the most humble person, I will say. If you’re listening, Bono, I’m sorry, you’re still my hero… was just awestruck. BB King gave him a compliment, and he didn’t know how to take it, because this is BB King.

John: One thing with Buddy Guy is he sometimes will get into a mood where he’ll only do one musician for an hour or so at a time. And I was able to get tickets to his January run at Legends. And it was the only day I could make it. I was at a conference there. And it was listed as an acoustic only blues show. And after the first hour and 45 minutes, he said, “This is an acoustic blues show, so I guess I should do something acoustic.” [LAUGHTER] And he did a few songs and they went back to electric.

Tim: Well, it’s interesting because Syracuse was a big home of blues in the 1990s. Like my friend Larry Kyle said, you could get booked three or four nights a week as a blues artist in Syracuse. It’s not that way anymore, but there were a lot of really interesting acts back then. I was writing the course in 2021, and part of me is like is the ending of this going to be tragic? Is this going to be like you’re studying Latin… Womp womp, sad trombone. But then I went to the Blues Festival in Syracuse, the New York State Blues festival, it’s actually the first big festival since COVID had hit. And basically, to borrow a line from our friend Buddy Guy, I learned the blues is alive and well. It just changed a little bit like Larkin Poe, who is one of the bigger names in blues performed there, a couple of sisters, they are white. They’re supposedly related to Edgar Allan Poe in some way. And they have a lot of classic rock there, but huge crowd. Fabulous Thunderbirds performed, I thought they were not even one of the top five bands to perform. But Vanessa Collier, who is amazing… plays guitar, plays saxophone, and is just this great person. She was selling her own merch, she didn’t have to, there’s volunteers to sell your merch, but if you’re the musician selling your merch, you’re gonna do a lot better. And she stayed and signed stuff forever. And so after the start of the pandemic, just seeing a big crowd at all, just seeing how people reacted and how much people connect to that music, and then doing a little more exploration saying that, “Ah, the blues are still alive.” They’re not the blues that existed in the 1920s. To a degree things are drifting a little bit back toward women, toward black acts than they were in the 80s and the 90s. But it’s completely different. It’s so many different things. The same way the blues inspired this, people now have picked up rock and folk and even jam band and that type of thing, and brought that back… like Robert Randolph and the Family Band played. It’s very, very, very much funk that they play. But again, just mind blowingly good. So just seeing how blues has changed, or what we call the blues still exists. So finally, I’m mentally writing the last part of my class, but I wasn’t sure, up until then, whether I could tell them that the blues thrives, despite all this research I’d done on that type of thing and listened to Sirius XM Bluesville every day and knowing friends who played the blues. But to see this, see how it was received, see how many blues fans and how many new fans were won over to the blues… that made it possible for me to finish my class with my head held up high that I was not teaching a dead subject, I was teaching a subject that’s very much alive,

Rebecca: That seems like a good note, then, to wrap up with and we always end by asking what’s next?

Tim: Actually, it’s a funny question. I believe you both know a good man by the name of Jim Early, I’ve been recording with him… a record… which it sounds weird to call it that. And it’s not exactly the most bluesy record. But one of the things that this course has taught me and I tell my students all the time, you shouldn’t wait on your dreams or have someone tell you you didn’t do this. I did not grow up as a musician because we could only afford to have one of my siblings play an instrument and that wasn’t me. And so you don’t go through the system. And while you’re not a musician because you don’t know music theory and all the rest of that stuff. So it wasn’t until I got to college and joined a friend’s band and took a course in piano and composition that I’m like “you know what, maybe I am a musician or at least somewhat of a musician.” But I think so many parts of the blues is about overcoming things, and going against people who have preset notions or trying to keep you down in some way. And certainly I don’t suffer the hardships that the blues people did. But just seeing the creative expression, hearing all this music said, “You know what, I want to do music more and more in my life.” What’s next? Obviously, I look forward to teaching the class this fall, hopefully better, always want to teach better. But I try to introduce some historic research and publish in journals and journals don’t like blues history topics. Shockingly, it’s not a popular thing. I would love to do a book that looks at some of the issues I talked about, about blues women and how they started it and how they were relegated after a while. I’d love to talk to people like Shemekia Copeland, or Vanessa Collier. And there’s a lot of other artists who still cover those albums and that type of thing. I don’t know how to engineer it because so much of what I learned from this class, working with the students is so much of what people don’t know, I would love to write a book, even maybe get one journal article published, although I might have to start my own blues journal to do it. But to really get this information out where more people can get it, because people keep saying, “Oh, I’d love to take your class.” I’m like, “Well, you’re not a freshman and you’re not at SUNY Oswego.” Like maybe I’d try like an open source class or something like that, or find a way to impart these lessons to more people, because it’s certainly something that I realized, when you find knowledge gaps, it’s like, “Well, a lot more people need to know this.” And so how do I get that message out? I don’t know yet. But talk to me in a couple of years, I guess.

John: And it would be good to do some of this while you can still interview some of the people who’ve been in that for a long time,

Tim: Absolutely. Buddy Guy is really the last connection to so much of an era. But there are people out there like Bonnie Raitt would be an excellent interview, I would think. You’re right, because we are going to lose a lot of people who have a lot of knowledge.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much, Tim.

Tim: You’re very welcome.

Rebecca: …very nice talking to you and hearing about the interesting things you’re doing.

Tim: Well, I enjoy talking about it and you all are excellent hosts, of course,

John: …and if I ever retire, my goal is to join a blues band and go on tour.

Tim: I know where you can get a good bassist.

>[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]

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277. Write Like a Teacher

Posted in audience, commitment devices, engagement, feedback, higher education, instructional communication, learning, professional development, storytelling, teaching, writing
February 22, 2023

Teaching faculty regularly help novices acquire new knowledge and skills. These same skills allow faculty to write effectively for audiences beyond their academic disciplines. In this episode, James Lang joins us to discuss his new book that is designed to help faculty write for broader audiences.

Jim is the author of six books, the most recent of which are: Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (now in a second edition); Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty; and On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching. He is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled: Write Like a Teacher. A former Professor of English and the Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University, he stepped down from full-time academic work in 2021 to concentrate more fully on his writing and teaching. Jim has served as a keynote speaker and workshop leader at over 100 colleges and universities, including SUNY Oswego.

Shownotes

  • Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it. Hachette UK.
  • Lang, J. M. (2021). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. 2nd ed. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Lang, J. M. (2013). Cheating lessons. Harvard University Press.
  • Lang, J. M. (2008). On course: A week-by-week guide to your first semester of college teaching. Harvard University Press.
  • The Saratoga Tea and Honey Company
  • Articles by James Lang in the Chronicle of Higher Education
  • Sarah Rose Cavanagh (2023). Mind Over Monsters. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 272. January 18.
  • Julie Jensen
  • Sathy, V., & Hogan, K. A. (2022). Inclusive teaching: Strategies for promoting equity in the college classroom. West V

Transcript

John: Teaching faculty regularly help novices acquire new knowledge and skills. These same skills allow faculty to write effectively for audiences beyond their academic disciplines. In this episode, we discuss a new book that is designed to help faculty write for broader audiences.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is James Lang. Jim is the author of six books, the most recent of which are Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (now in a second edition), Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, and On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching. He is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled: Write Like a Teacher. A former Professor of English and the Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University, he stepped down from full-time academic work in 2021 to concentrate more fully on his writing and teaching. Jim has served as a keynote speaker and workshop leader at over 100 colleges and universities, including SUNY Oswego. Welcome back, Jim.

Jim: Thank you.

John: Today’s teas are: … Jim, are you drinking tea?

Jim: Of course. Always.

John: …still David’s Tea or some new tea?

Jim: No, actually, I have two children at Skidmore. And there’s a tea shop there called The Saratoga Tea and Honey Company. I have to go to Saratoga Springs every few months, and I stock up on tea there. So I totally favor robust black teas, so I’m either drinking English breakfasts or Irish breakfast, Irish breakfast gives you a little more of a boost.

Rebecca: It sure does, it’s one of my favorites too.

John: And I am drinking a Tea Forte black currant tea, but with some honey from Saratoga Tea and Honey.

Jim: Ahh!

John: I love that tea shop. I go there at least two or three times a year. There’s lots of conferences up there.

Rebecca: Yeah. And I have Awake tea this afternoon, so I can be more awake this afternoon. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: I know that feeling.

Rebecca: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your new book project. Can you tell us a little bit about the project?

Jim: Sure. So this is my first book focused on writing, even though I’ve always been interested in writing and about how academics can reach wider audiences for their work. And the premise of the book is that the reading experience for nonfiction work, whether it’s an essay or book, should be a learning experience. And so we want to think about how do people learn from the page, as opposed to learning in the classroom or outside of the classroom in real life settings. And so the argument that I make is that those of us who teach, whether we are academics or teaching at other levels, we have either sort of education or experience or instincts that help people learn. And so this knowledge that we’ve gained from like a doctoral programs, or our teaching experiences, or we have good instincts about what to do in the classroom, and we can take that knowledge and put it into our writing practices in order to help create good learning experiences for people on the page. So that’s the core argument of the book. And what I try to do is bring together the many years I’ve been writing about teaching and learning, and sort of take the research I’ve done and arguments I’ve made about effective teaching, and to put them into this new context. And my goal really is for academics who want to try to reach out to broader audiences, whether that’s academics outside of their discipline, or even outside of academic readers altogether, and to help them achieve the goals that they might have about how to promote their work. And a big part of it is we have the opportunity to make the world a better place, if we can help readers understand the importance of the work that we do. So that’s kind of a sense of what’s kind of driving me into these arguments. I think it’s a good idea if they can, and they’re interested in doing that, reach out to readers outside of their discipline and I want to be able to help them to do that.

John: So much academic writing is written to a very narrow academic audience, which tends to exclude most people from reading the work that most academics do. And as you said, academics, especially those who are heavily involved in teaching, have skills in taking complex concepts and trying to relay them to an audience that does not have the same background. But most academics don’t tend to do that. And you seem to be in a really good place to write a book like this, given all the writing that you’ve done, your role as the longtime editor of The West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning, as well as your role as a faculty member. So how did these roles come together to help you prepare for this book? 4:09:25

Jim: So obviously, I’ve had a lot of experience writing as a writer myself, trying to reach out to outside audiences beyond my discipline. And I think one of the things you just said is important. Most academics know how to write like, this is something we have to do to get degrees and promotion and tenure and all that kind of stuff. We know how to do it. But when we’re writing to other academics, they’re in our discipline, so we have a lot of shared disciplinary background information. And then we also can sort of assume a little bit more attention to our work, essentially, from disciplinary readers because I can push your attention a little further than I can someone who is outside of the discipline, so like, you’re willing to stay with me for a little bit longer to go a little bit more deeply into the core ideas. But a non-academic reader needs more information, they need some more background information. They need to be kind of guided along with kind of signposts along the way, to be told stories, kind of different forms of evidence. So all these things are things that we do in the classroom. And so I think one of the things I really want to be able to do with the book is to sort of empower people. And my work as a writer about education, I view that as empowering as well. I want to be able to show people, for example, in my book on Small Teaching, I want to show people, there’s a number of small things that you can do, that are going to make a difference. And I hope that’s an empowering message, and I hope this message will be the same for writers. You know how to do this stuff, you’ve been doing it for a long time, and you’ve seen that other people do it. So it’s a kind of a process of kind of taking your knowledge here and just applying it to a new context. Now, to get to your question, I’ve been trying to do that for a long time. And I have a column I’ve written for the Chronicle of Higher Education, I’m approaching 200 columns at this point. And then I also have always been interested in seeing where else my writing could go. I like to challenge myself as a writer. So I’ve reached out to places like newspapers and magazines, and probably have a couple of dozen essays published in those places. And some of my books also kind of reached out to broader audiences. So first of all, I was drawing from my own experiences. And that’s not just about the writing, but also the process, like what does it look like to reach out to an editor, for example, at a major newspaper and try to get your work in that forum. So with the writing, but also then the process of getting yourself published and promoting your work, the book kind of covers all that stuff. But also, I think the reason that I really kind of wanted to address this topic is because I edit a book series as well. And so I’ve acquired, I think, 15 books for that series. Now, I co-edit with Michelle Miller. But I did probably all those first 12 to 15 ones that I worked with the authors all the way through from the first getting that query email to getting it through being approved, revised, and then getting it out there and trying to help them with promotion. So like guiding multiple people through that process, which I love, it’s like one of my great joys in my life now is to help people get their first books published. I really learned a lot. And I kind of found myself saying the same thing to authors, like, “Here’s a few things that you need to do that can help make this book more successful.” And so with that knowledge, I kind of want to say, “Okay, I want to be able to put this stuff down.” I get all these hopeful email queries when people have a lot of hope in their voices, or even on the page. And, you know, they want to get their books published, and they’re stumbling on some very common obstacles. And so I wanted to be able to have this stuff available in print so I could not only share with those folks, people who are looking to publish with us, but anybody who wants to publish, whether it’s a book or even an essay. So I do try to cover both of those things as well, writing books, but also writing about essays or various kinds of media platforms: newspapers, magazines, websites.

Rebecca: It’s interesting, because no matter what discipline you’re in, you’re usually trained on how to publish in a very particular way. And then all the other ways seem very mystical.

Jim: Absolutely, that relates to the fact that we’re so very familiar with the sort of processes and the kind of arguments that we make in our discipline. But then we kind of just jump a little bit away from that and we’re kind of in a different world. That’s true, not only of the publishing process, but also the writing process. So like, one of the things I often have to explain to authors is you have a disciplinary tradition of evidence. So in your discipline, evidence looks like this, right? It’s numbers, or its experiments, or its literary texts, whatever it might be, but you’re trying to reach now beyond your discipline. And so those people are completely used to seeing evidence in this form. And it’s fine for them to just sort of stay in that place. But when you’re reaching out to other readers, in the same way as a teacher, you have to try to reach out to multiple kinds of learners, you have to do the same thing as a writer. So yes, I might write for an audience of people who are interested in writing in literature, but I have to be aware that some people are gonna say, “Okay, well show me the facts,” essentially, right, or the statistics, or what experiments have been done to sort of show this is really true? So like, as a writer who’s trying to reach people from multiple fields, or even outside of academic fields, I need to think about how am i varying my evidence? What kind of evidentiary traditions am I drawing from? So like, when you start looking at these kinds of things, you see, yes, the things that I normally do in my academic writing, I have the skills, and I just have to learn to kind of expand them a little bit and sort of move them around a little bit in order to reach some different kinds of folks.

John: We’ve been doing two reading groups a year here, and most of the books that we’ve worked on have either been books that you’ve written, or books in the West Virginia University Press series. And there’s some things I’ve noticed that tend to be common to all of those. And I’m curious to see if you’d agree, [LAUGHTER] but all of them are very solidly backed by evidence with appropriate citations, either in the footnotes or in the bibliographies. But they all tend to be free of disciplinary jargon and they tend to have a lot of use of narrative where they’re bringing in examples with actual faculty members from a variety of disciplines, showing the wide range of applicability of the techniques that are being discussed. Was that something you tended to focus on explicitly? And is that something you encourage faculty moving into these new areas to focus on?

Jim: Absolutely. I mean, those things are definitely core messages that I’m giving to authors. The first is having some kind of practical application to it. Now that should be a true teaching book, right? There’s to be some kind of takeaway for the reader. But no matter what you’re doing, I always try to emphasize to academic authors, there should be something that the reader can take away that’s concrete. It might be a new way of thinking about the world, but it could be new advice about something, how to do something differently in your life, join a movement, or make a change in something you’re doing. So having some kind of takeaway, I think, is really important. But again, when talking about the sort of evidence piece of this, the fact that stories are really important in this because stories, they’re not like a logicians perspective, maybe they’re not the best forms of evidence, but they still really help people understand the ideas, and so they put the ideas into sort of a place where I can try to relate them, and see like how my experiences compare to the experience in the story. And so one of the things that I often will see academic authors who have this sense, “I should give an example or two,” those examples are often very lifeless, they’re like a one sentence sort of very abstract description of something. And I try to say to people, “Look, if you’re gonna tell a story, tell it well, use images, give me a little bit of detail about it, the story is going to really resonate with me when it’s a story that I kind of enjoy reading and that I can somehow try to relate to.” I kind of came to this discovery for myself as a writer, because I typically tell some personal stories in my own writing, right? So Small Teaching includes a story about me ordering green tea at my local coffee shop. And so what I’ve discovered is that when I go to like conferences or workshops, people will remember that story. And they’ll use it to kind of reach out and make a connection with me. And so like, I’ve also had people say, “You told this story about teaching your daughter how to drive and then I was thinking about that when I was doing the same thing and I had the same ideas that you did.” And so it creates these opportunities to let people share their own experiences with the book or with the author. I try to tell people, you don’t have to share your whole personal life, but just occasionally, having stories like this, whether they’re about you or somebody else, they do help people see the material in a new way.

Rebecca: It definitely makes them far more readable and brings things to life. I’m curious about this book project and the timing, and why write this book now?

Jim: Yeah, so this book is sort of coming out of, first of all, the West Virginia University series definitely has been growing and so it’s really kind of exploded in terms of the number of titles that we’re putting out. And so seeing more and more of these kinds of issues coming up in the proposals in the books that we are seeing, and so I wanted to try to get these ideas out, as I’m going out through new manuscripts and working with new authors. That was a part of it. I also had a kind of big personal issue that came up with me over the last couple of years. And so that gave me a new sense of commitment to this kind of work, not only teaching for me, but also about writing. And you kind of feel like this kind of sense of that I wanted to start working with writers in a more formal way, both in this book, and then maybe going forward and also doing more developmental editing for academic authors who would like to expand their audiences. So this is like a moment where I’m trying to make a transition here. I still want to teach and I’m still going to write about teaching. But I do want to also think about moving more into the space of working with writers and writing about writing myself. And part of that was… the short version of the story, which is a long story. [LAUGHTER] In October of 2021, I was diagnosed with something called myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart. And that often heals itself for people when they get it. But in my case, it went the other way, this happens sometimes. It kind of essentially destroyed my heart over a space of a few weeks, the time between I went into the hospital, just because I was having like an irregular heartbeat… otherwise, I was fine… and the time I was on advanced life support, it might have been two weeks. And so this sort of crashed into our lives. I was on advanced life support for a couple months. I wasn’t expecting to survive, but I did. And I got a heart transplant and I had a stroke during the surgery, which is a long surgery. I woke up from all that. And finally, initially, I couldn’t speak also because of the stroke I had. It was complete aphasia, so I had to learn to speak again with flashcards and speech therapy, and my wife would work with me every day. So after all of that, that kind of focuses your mind a little bit, it kind of helps you realize, okay, you only got so many years left on the planet, what do you really want to do in those years? And so it has helped me realize that I want to still continue teaching. I’ve made incredible connections across the world with teachers by writing about teaching, and I love to talk to academics. They’re the audiences I feel most comfortable with. But I feel like at this point, now I have something different to offer them, not just sort of advice about teaching, but also to help them become more successful as writers.

John: And now you’re sharing it with writers, not just the dozen and a half or so writers you were working with at West Virginia, but with writers all over the world. And I think that’s providing a really nice service.

Jim: Thank you.

Rebecca: It’s amazingly incredible, for sure.

John: We’re awfully glad you have recovered so amazingly well. And I remember seeing you post about that on Twitter after you were already in the process of recovering and I had wondered why you had gone into the background there and you hadn’t posted anything for quite a while and it was a bit of a shock. And I think when you posted that you got many, many people commenting.

Jim: Yes, yes, definitely. The community was very supportive, not only the community of my family and my friends here where I live, but also many people around the world, sent me messages and asked about how things were going and offered support and prayers and thoughts and all that stuff. It was very heartening.

Rebecca: You mentioned multiple times about kind of shifting gears a little bit or shifting focus. But to me, if we look at the things that you’ve been involved in, and the things that you’ve written about, you’re really staying true to faculty development. [LAUGHTER] It’s just faculty development with a slightly different focus, but certainly the kind of support that we’ve seen from you in different ways of faculty life.

Jim: Yeah. And actually, in my last years at Assumption, before I decided to step away from full-time academic work, I was moving in that direction as well, because I was responsible for our new faculty orientation as the director of our teaching center. I like to work with junior faculty to help them navigate the different channels of academic life, including service and research and teaching. And so because I had visited so many other institutions where I had often been invited to give workshops or lectures, and had visited many teaching centers and had opportunities to have dinner with lots of people around the country and talk about academic life, I felt like I was kind of gathering a lot of good ideas from all these different places. And I wanted to be able to bring those ideas back to my own campus. So I was always trying to give this information or these ideas or this advice to faculty I knew and were working with. And again, as I’m kind of just stepping away from those concrete roles on campus, although I’m still going to continue to teach on a part-time basis, I want to be able to keep expanding that work outside to other academics who could benefit, not only in their teaching, but also in their goals as writers too.

Rebecca: I think it’s helpful to hear stories as faculty think about different ways that their faculty lives unfold over time, and how that might evolve, as they shift focus on things and maybe want to focus more on teaching or want to focus more on research or more on writing as they develop over time.

Jim: Yeah, this was definitely something that characterized my career. I started as a normal tenure-track faculty member in English and I did that for quite a few years. And I was just kind of looking for a change, a lot like many people after you get tenure, and I was kind of looking for something new to see like, “Okay, I’ve kind of cleared that hurdle, what could I do differently now?” And then I became the director of our Honors Program. And that kind of captured my interest for a while. And then I got kind of interested in these kinds of semi- or part-time administrative positions. And so then became the director of our teaching center. And so I think it’s a good point, especially as we move along in our academic careers, we can look out for other opportunities, and make shifts and draw on different strengths over the course of our careers. So stepping away from full-time work was a big one. And I actually made that decision just about five months before I went to the hospital. So I had five months of like a “early retirement.” [LAUGHTER] But that was a big decision. But I still am very happy with what I’m doing now. And I’m sure gonna continue to look for other ways to challenge myself. And again, kind of keep that focus going on faculty development, though, because as I said, I just was at Williams College last week and giving some presentations there, went out to dinner with folks. And I was just kind of sitting there thinking, “These are my people.” Like, I feel very comfortable with the faculty. I love to have the fascinating conversations that learning about people’s… all the strange stuff they research and the very specific things that people write about and think about, the cool courses they teach. I just love those conversations. I love being in those rooms. And I kind of want to keep doing that work. And as a writer, it’s a huge audience, right? The amount of people in this country, for example, just alone, that are working in higher education, right? So I’m not limiting myself as a writer, I’ve got this huge audience that I can try to reach. And I just feel very comfortable writing to folks in those positions.

John: And you’re still serving as a teacher, just to a much broader audience than when you were in the classroom.

Jim: Yes.

John: In January, we released a podcast with Sarah Rose Cavanagh, and she talked about how you were working with her on a writer’s group. Is that a strategy that you’d recommend for faculty who are working on writing?

Jim: Yeah, writers’ groups are essential. All my recent books have emerged from writers’ groups. There’s different kinds of writers’ groups. So it’s worth noting the kind of taxonomy of these different kinds of ways to work with other people on your writing. The first is to sort of get a bunch of people who sit together and try to write in each other’s company, essentially, right? So that’s just: you make a time, identify a place, we come together and we kind of support each other, just sort of by being together essentially, right? So that’s one kind of writers group. There’s an accountability kind of group, that’s a second kind, where we’re gonna say, “Okay, everyone needs to have 2000 words by this date, everyone’s going to finish their articles by this date.” And then we’re gonna get together, we’re going to celebrate that or, for example, we’re all working on an article, we’ll get together every month and we’ll share things that we’re struggling with or the things that we’re doing well. It’s almost kind of like a little bit writer’s group therapy, essentially, we’re like supporting each other. The last kind is critique groups, and that’s what I’ve always been part of, where we actually send each other’s work in progress and we read it and then we get together and we give each other feedback. So to me, you can have any kind of writer’s group that you want to be in is going to be good, it’s going to support your writing, and that’s a good idea. Julie Jensen does a lot of work on writing, she argues that academics should not be in content critique groups, because you don’t need people outside of your discipline to be giving you feedback, because that’s going to happen as part of the peer review process. But if you’re going to write for readers outside of your discipline, then I think content critique groups are actually essential, because we’re gonna get from that is that people who are outside of your discipline, who don’t have the same background information that you do… “actually, I’m confused by this, like, you give me this big explanation, but there’s something that I’m missing here.” You’re not gonna get that from somebody in your discipline, because they’re gonna know what the background information is. So I think content critique groups are really important if your ambition is to write for people outside of your discipline. And so content critique groups, for me, they have the function also of accountability, because we meet essentially, once a month, and we have to have something for that meeting. We don’t put a hard number on it. But for me, it might be a Chronicle essay, or it could be current chapter. And I know that group meeting is not going to do anything for me, unless I’ve given something to the group. It’s helpful for me to give feedback to other people too, but I want it to be helpful to me, so I make sure that something is ready for it. So essentially, it’s an accountability group and we also talk about problems too. It’s like it does the other things, but I just think it’s really important for writers to have someone outside of their narrow field, give them their perspective on whatever you’re writing.

John: One thing has struck me as being common with each of those groups is that issue of accountability. We often refer to it in economics as a commitment device, that when you have that deadline, when you have to provide something at a certain time, or even if you’re just going to sit together and write at a certain time, it’s so easy to postpone things like writing and having that commitment makes it so much more likely that people will actually achieve their goal.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely, wespecially when you’re doing a longer project, like a book, you’d start the process with, like a deadline two years away, right? But the writers group, for me, gives me the structure, I need to actually finish it, because I know, “Okay, I want to get this chapter done, so that I can then get the next one done. And if I do all those things, at the end of the two years, I’m gonna have a book. Otherwise, there’s no hard deadlines, except for the one. And so to produce 80,000 words, for something that’s two years away, we’re not good at that kind of thing, [LAUGHTER]as humans, unless we really kind of put deadlines along the way. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Are you implying that faculty needs structure? … and scaffolding too? [LAUGHTER]

Jim: Yeah, absolutely. Giving structure. And that reminds me, that’s another thing that I like, as a part of the book actually is thinking about the importance of structure, not only for writers, but also for readers. When you look at an academic article, for example, in social science disciplines, it’s got a set structure to it. It’s got the introduction, it’s got the literature review, the experiment, the method, that kind of thing. But if you’re in like a humanities discipline, and you’re looking at reading an article about like literary theory, it’s just gonna be like, sort of paragraph after paragraph after paragraph like just kind of a long series of paragraphs, which just kind of guide you from beginning to end. But when you look at work that is published outside of the academic world, it often has lots of sections, subheadings, little titles along the way, those things are really important to help a non-academic reader through complex material in the same way we do it in the classroom. We help students, we guide them through our slides, for example, our stuff on the board, or like dividing the class in three or four parts or something like that. Again, this is stuff that we kind of do instinctually in the classroom, because we know the students are gonna zone out. [LAUGHTER] So we kind of guide them through the material, we need to do the same thing in our writing, too. And I like to think about these as attention tools of writing. And so the use of breaking up the text, and that’s sometimes may mean just like sections and subheadings, and all that kind of stuff. But also like bullets, you don’t need to go crazy, but you want to make sure that you are breaking up the page, or the argument, with these structural elements.

Rebecca: Jim, you’re suddenly like an interaction designer. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: Okay. Wait, what do you mean exactly by that?

Rebecca: So, an interaction designer would say something like for usability purposes, you would do all the things that you just described, and they’re also accessibility principles. So they’re good for so many reasons.

Jim: Yeah. Okay, I like that.

Rebecca: It’s gold. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: I like that.

John: And right before I arrived here, I went over to our provost office to pick up a couple of big cartons of books by Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan from West Virginia University Press for our reading group this semester. And one of their main arguments is the importance of structure in helping people make connections to help break down complex topics into these manageable chunks to help people understand things much better. And it sounds like this is, as you and Rebecca have both said, is really important in many, many different contexts.

Jim: Yeah, I believe their work about high structure is so important. And I’ve definitely kind of imported that into the chapter in which I discuss these issues. But the other thing to think about again, from like a reading perspective, so if I’m reading a work, for example, I’m not going to sit and read a book, a 300-page book by an academic writer in one sitting. So I need places to stop and come back. And so maybe I can’t get a 30-40 page chapter in. But if I have opportunities to stop, [LAUGHTER] close the book, and come back to it, and I can come back to a subheading, which is going to tell me, “Okay, that’s what next. Oh, right, that’s what I was just before, and here’s what’s coming.” These are opportunities to come away, come back, and be able to return to the argument, and not be lost when I return to it. And this is just probably always the way that we’ve read. But this is how we’re definitely doing it now, as we’re bombarded with so many different things that can interrupt us. So having those kinds of opportunities to pause and renew the reading experience are important.

Rebecca: But the use of subheadings, in particular, I find helpful as a reader to just get reoriented, especially when you’re coming from a different place. And then I need to transition to an entirely different place, just looking back to those couple of subheadings that came before can immediately get you into that place again really efficiently. So I love it when writers do that, for me as a reader.

Jim: If they’re done well, it will show you an overview of the whole argument, essentially. So I think those are really important to help guide the reader through what they call the through line. The through line is the thread that connects everything in the book, the overall argument, and the subheadings, kind of hanging off that through line. And so I think they really are important for academic writers to do for other kinds of audiences.

Rebecca: Heck, I would like it sometimes just with my own discipline… more subheadings, please. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: I agree, I agree.

John: This is a little bit different. But one thing that really bothers me when I’m reading a novel on my Kindle late at night. I always like to stop, if not at a chapter break, at least at a paragraph break. And I was trying to read last night and I had to skim through about six or seven pages on there before this paragraph ended, [LAUGHTER] and it helps to have those little breaks that are logical stopping points. And writers don’t always do that.

Jim: No, no, one of the points may be I’m trying to push you through some difficult materials, so I get that. But even if you don’t have the sub headings, for example, if you look at the articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education, they might not have subheadings, some of them do, but sometimes will just be a break. So like the paragraph ends, there’s like some whitespace, and then a new section starts, even that’s better than just the sort of constant unbroken series of paragraphs. And I also think it’s also just good for visual, your eye glosses over when you open to a page, and it’s just a huge block of text. That’s intimidating. And so the subheadings, the breaks, all those things, they give a break both for your eye and for your brain.

Rebecca: And even just encourage a moment of pause and reflection, like, “Oh, we’re moving to a new thing. Do I know what I just read? [LAUGHTER] …so I can move to the next thing?” I’m at that moment to double check.

Jim: Yeah, that’s true. They’re great transitions, too. And those moments of transition are often the times when we step back and say, “Okay, so I have this, and what am I curious about as we’re gonna go forward down here.

John: One of the things you mentioned earlier is that your book includes a discussion of the whole process of publishing. Because while academics do a lot of writing all through their academic careers, most academics have not been very heavily involved in publishing. And I don’t think most of them have many ways of getting that information unless they happen to know other people who have been successful in it. So having a book like yours, I think, would be really helpful in providing faculty with information that they just don’t have in their own experiences.

Jim: Yeah, so there’s a chapter which just focuses on guiding people from a query to publication. So like, what are the actual steps of this process? What are the kinds of things you will need in order to be able to get to that moment when you see your work in print? And so, essentially, I tried to boil it down to four things: three stages and then one sort of central recommendation about how to get this process started. The three things are essentially the query, the query is sort of the short email they’re gonna give. And for me, those are really important because they give me a sense of what’s the question or the problem that you’re addressing? What’s your argument? And why are you the right person to do it? So like, to me a query has got to do those three things, but not much more than that. It’s not like an academic job letter, where it’s five big paragraphs that covers two pages. No, I want to be able to read this thing very quickly and get a sense of who you are, what the project is, what’s going to be interesting, what’s unique about it, all those things. A query letter is like our handshake, where we’re going to kind of introduce ourselves to each other. The proposal, often, that’s all you need for a newspaper or magazine is a query and then the article or something. But for a book, you have to have this next stage of the process, which is a book proposal. And those are a lot of work. A book proposal might be 50 pages, because it’s going to include a overview of the book, which is usually like one to two pages, it’s going to have an author biography, which might just be a page or so, it’s going to have a chapter outline and that might be five or 10 pages. A chapter outline, not just a table of contents with like titles, but at least a paragraph or two for each chapter, and then a writing sample, which should be like at least like a chapter. So that we’re talking about like a 50-page document here. And it also should include… this is gonna vary from publisher to publisher… but it probably will also include a short analysis of the competition, so that you can use that as a way to show what is gonna be different or new or unique about your book. And sometimes publishers will also want like a marketing or promotion overview, like what are you going to do to help support the marketing and promotion of this book, for example. If you have a podcast, if you have a huge social media presence, if you are planning to attend a bunch of conferences in this field, you have connections, all those things can contribute to a sense of what kind of marketing or promotion you would be able to offer for your book. So that’s a big document. It’s really important when we see like student writing, for example, or those of us who teach student writing, sometimes the first page or two kind of gives you a sense of, okay, kind of the quantity of the students writing. Often, the same thing might be true for the proposal. From a couple pages, I can usually get a sense of how experienced the author is, is this project right for our particular series, what kind of writer they’re going to be, in terms of both of their writing, in terms of what kind of person they’re gonna be to work with. But as long as I get over those sort of initial couple pages and I’m still interested, then the proposal really has to show me that it’s going to work as a full book. Once you get past that, then it kind of just goes through the different processes of what’s going to happen to your book when you turn it in, essentially: the review process, copy editing, proofreading, working with a cover designer, the author questionnaire, which is a huge document that is going to help support what you’re going to be able to do support the book. And then also, often there’ll be a call with the marketing and promotion team, so kind of guiding people through that whole process. So those are the three stages I talk about in the book and try to give basic information and advice about that. But the thing I start with is, whenever possible, submit your work to a person. And what I mean by that is not just submitting to “Dear editor” or something like that, do a little bit of basic research on the publication and the person that is going to be sort of giving the initial review of your work. And there’s easy ways to do that, you can look on the web pages of the publisher, acquisition editors will typically have like a short description of what they acquire. You can also look at, like what other books they published. And one of the ways to do this is very simple. Most books will have an acknowledgement section, you can see who edited the book, and whether it was an agent. And so you see those two things. And if you look at books in your area, at the publisher you’re trying to target, you’ll be able to piece together a sense of “Okay, what kind of books does this editor tried to publish?” then you can sort of reach out to that person and say, “Look, I’m a huge fan of this book, which I know you edited and I feel like mine would fit well with this series that you’re overseeing,” whatever it might be. So try to get a little sense of the person that you’re writing to. You can be specific about why you are writing to that particular person at that particular publisher. And that’s something that we don’t have to do typically for academic disciplinary journals or something like that, right? We’re just sending it off to like a email box or just sort of being very objective, “Dear editor, here’s my work,” essentially. But as you’re reaching outside of your disciplinary journals, or academic books, you want to be able to be a little bit more deliberate about reaching out to a specific person.

Rebecca: What you’re describing also sounds a lot more relational, just generally.

Jim: Definitely, and I also make the argument in the book that it sometimes can seem like an adversarial relationship, sometimes between you as an author and an editor, because they’re like the gatekeepers. And they’re going to tell you, “No, we don’t have the money for that table to put in your book,” or an sometimes you can get frustrated as an author. But what’s really important to remember is, we are on your side, the editor always wants you to be successful. And so sometimes we might say things which are like, “You shouldn’t do this,” or “we don’t want to do this,” and “we can’t do that.” And that can be frustrating for an author. But I promise you, I am not like waiting there to kind of stamp an F on your query, [LAUGHTER]. I want you to be successful. Every query that comes in, there’s like a little sort of grain of hope that I’m hoping that this is going to be an amazing book, it’s going to change this person’s life. That’s the best scenario for me, I help someone write their first book, and it’s really successful. And so I’m hoping for that for everybody that writes to me. And I think that the same thing is true for editors. So always keep that in mind. These are the people that want you to be successful, and you have to treat them accordingly. Just be aware of that in terms of how you respond to them, react to them, and then you try to be like a good citizen of the book in the process.

Rebecca: So Jim, when can we get this book?

Jim: Yeah, so I’m finishing it right now, actually. I have one chapter left, I expect to finish it within the next month. So it’s probably be late 2023 or early 2024.

Rebecca: So I’m looking forward to it.

Jim: Thanks.

John: And as you mentioned before, that publishing process does take a lot of time.

Jim: That’s one of the places where it can seem adversarial to an author, right? Why are you taking so long to do this. I gave you a manuscript, why does it take a year to come out? But, I try to go through that stuff in the book. But there are good reasons. And all those reasons are is trying to help you make the most successful book

John: incentives are compatible between the author and the editor, because both parties benefit from having successful books.

Jim: Absolutely.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Jim: Yeah, so this book. It’s funny because I had the idea for this book. And I’d written the proposal for it partially, because I had also left my full-time academic position. I was thinking about these issues. And so I sent the proposal actually out before I got sick. And then I signed the contract in the hospital. actually. [LAUGHTER] So that kind of renewed my commitment to it. So that’s kind of been all I’ve been doing since then. But then once I finish that, and I just have already in my mind now, probably I’m going to write some kind of memoir of what I have experienced and what I’ve learned from that. My first two books actually were memoirs. And so I haven’t been in that genre in a while, but I think I had experiences now there’s probably memoir worthy at this point. [LAUGHTER] So yeah, that’s probably the next thing that will happen.

John: Well, we’re looking forward to reading all of them. So we wish you success on that. And it’s great talking to you again.

Jim: Likewise. Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah, thanks, Jim.

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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.

[MUSIC]

274. ChatGPT

Posted in artificial intelligence, edtech, educational technology, higher education, information literacy, intellectual integrity, learning, pedagogy, teaching, writing
February 1, 2023

Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has been the focus of a great deal of discussion and concern in higher ed. In this episode, Robert Cummings and Marc Watkins join us to discuss how to prepare students for a future in which AI tools will become increasingly prevalent in their lives.

Robert is the Executive Director of Academic Innovation, an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Digital Media Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia and is the co-editor of Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom. Marc Watkins is a Lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. He co-chairs an AI working group within his department and is a WOW Fellow, where he leads a faculty learning community about AI’s impact on education. He’s been awarded a Pushcart Prize for his writing and a Blackboard Catalyst Award for teaching and learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has been the focus of a great deal of discussion and concern in higher ed. In this episode we discuss how to prepare students for a future in which AI tools will become increasingly prevalent in their lives.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Robert Cummings and Marc Watkins. Robert is the Executive Director of Academic Innovation, an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Digital Media Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia and is the co-editor of Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom. Marc Watkins is a Lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. He co-chairs an AI working group within his department and is a WOW Fellow, where he leads a faculty learning community about AI’s impact on education. He’s been awarded a Pushcart Prize for his writing and a Blackboard Catalyst Award for teaching and learning. Welcome, Robert and Mark.

Robert: Thank you.

Marc: Thank you.

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

Marc: My hands are shaking from caffeine so much caffeine inside of me too. I started off today with some I think it’s Twinings Christmas spice, which is really popular around this house since I got that in my stocking. My wife is upset because I’m in a two bag per cup person. And she’s like saying you got to stop that, so she cuts me off around noon [LAUGHTER] and just to let me just sort of like dry out, for lack of a better word from caffeine withdrawal.

Rebecca: Well, it’s a great flavored tea. I like that one too.

John: It is.

Rebecca: I could see why you would double bag it.

Marc: I do love it.

Rebecca: How about you, Robert?

Robert: I’m drinking an English black tea. A replacement. Normally my tea is Barry’s tea, which is an Irish tea….

Rebecca: Yeah.

Marc: …but I’m out, so I had to go with the Tetley’s English black tea.

Rebecca: Oh, it’s never fun when you get to go to your second string. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I am drinking a ginger peach black tea from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: Oh, an old favorite, John.

John: It is.

Rebecca: I’m back to one of my new favorites, the Hunan Jig, which I can’t say with a straight face. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the ChatGPT. We’ve seen lots of tweets, blog posts, and podcasts in which you are both discuss this artificial intelligence writing application. Could you tell us a little bit about this tool, where it came from and what it does?

Marc: I guess I’ll go ahead and start, I am not a computer science person. I’m just a writing faculty member. But we did kind of get a little bit of a heads up about this in May when GPT3, which is the precursor to ChatGPT was made publicly available. It was at a private beta for about a year and a half when it was being developed, and then went to public in May. And I kind of logged in through some friends of mine social media to start checking out and seeing what was going on with it. Bob was really deep into AI with the SouthEast conference. You were at several AI conferences too during the summer as well, Bob. It is a text synthesizer, it’s based off of so much text just scraped from the internet and trained on 175 billion parameters. It’s just sort of shocking to think about the fact that this can now be accessed through your cell phone, if you want to do it on your actual smartphone, or a computer browser. But it is something that’s here. It’s something that functions fairly well, that you make things up sometimes. Sometimes it can be really very thoughtful, though, in it’s actual output. It’s very important to keep in mind, though, that AI is more like a marketing term in this case. There’s no thinking, there’s no reasoning behind it too. It can’t explain any of its choices. We use the term writing when we talk about it, but really what it is, is just text generating. When you think about writing, that’s the whole process of the thinking process and going through, being able to explain your choices and that sort of thing. So it’s a very, very big math engine, with a lot of processing power behind it.

Robert: I completely agree with everything Marc’s saying. I think about it is, and I believe it’s true, Marc, as far as we know, it’s an open AI, but it’s still using GPT3, so it’s really the same tool as Playground. I think it’s really interesting that when openAI shifted from their earlier iteration of this technology, which was Playground and there were some other spin offs from that as well, but that was basically a search format where you got an entry, and you would enter a piece of text and then you would get a response, that when they shifted it to chat, it seemed to really take it to the next level in terms of the attention that it was gathering. And I think it’s rhetorically significant to think about that, because the personalization, perhaps, the idea that you had an individual conversation partner, I think is exceptionally cute. The way that they have the text scroll in ChatGPT so as to make it look like the AI is “thinking” to maybe push this out when it’s immediately available. I think all of that reminds me a little bit of Eliza, which is one of the first sort of AI games that you could play where you play the game to try to guess whether or not there was another person on the other side of the chat box. It reminds me a bit of that. But I can certainly see why placing this technology inside of a chat window makes it so much more accessible and perhaps even more engaging than what we previously had. But the underlying technology, as far as I can see, is still GPT3, and it hasn’t changed necessarily significantly, except for this mode of access.

Rebecca: How long has this tool been learning how to write or gathering content?

Marc: Well, that’s a great question. So it is really just a precursor from GPT3. And again, we don’t really know this because open AI isn’t exactly open, unlike their name. The training data cuts off for this model for ChatGPT about two years ago. And of course, ChatGPT was launched last year at the end of November. So, it’s very recent, pretty up to date with some of that information, too. You can always kind of check the language model and see how much it actually, as we say, knows about the world by what recent events it can accurately describe. It’s really interesting how quickly people have freaked out about this. And Bob’s, I think, building off of that, I think he’s very right that this slight rhetorical change in the user interface to a chat, that suddenly people are able to actually interact with, set off this moral panic in education. You guys know this through the state of New York, New York City schools have now tried to ban it in the actual classroom, which I think is not going to work out very well. But it is certainly the theme we’re seeing not just in K through 12, but also higher ed too… seeing people talk about going back to blue books, going to AI proctoring services, which are just kind of some of the most regressive things you could possibly imagine. And I don’t want to knock people for doing this, because I know that they’re both frightened, and they probably have good reason to be frightened too, because it’s disrupting their practice. It’s also hopefully at the tail end of COVID, which has left us all completely without our capacity to deal with this. But I do want to keep everyone in mind too, and Bob’s really a great resource on this too, from his work with Wikipedia, is that your first impression of a tool, especially if you’re a young person using this and you have someone in authority telling you what a tool is, if you tell them that that tool is there to cheat or it is there to destroy their writing process or a learning process, that is going to be submitted in them for a very long time. And it’s gonna be very hard to dissuade people of that too. So really, what I’ve just tried to do is caution people about the fact that we need to be not so panicked about that. That’s much easier said than done,

Robert: Marc and I started giving a talk on our campus through our Center for Teaching and Learning and our academic innovations group in August. And we’ve just sort of updated it as we’re invited to continue to give the talk. But in it, we offer a couple of different ways for the faculty to think about how this is going to impact their teaching. And one of the things that I offered back in August, at least I think it still holds true, is to think about writing to learn and or writing to report learning. And so writing to learn is going to mean now writing alongside AI tools. And writing to report learning is going to be a lot trickier, depending on what types of questions you ask. So I think it’s going to be a situation where, and I’ve already seen some of this work in the POD community, it’s going to be a situation where writing to report learning has to maybe change gears a bit and think about different types of questions to ask. And the types of questions will be those that are not easily replicated, or answered in a general knowledge sort of way, but they’re going to lean on specific things that you, as instructor, think are going to be valuable in demonstrating learning, but also not necessarily part of a general knowledge base. So, for instance, if you’re a student in my class, and we’ve had lots of discussions about… I don’t know… quantum computing, and in the certain discussion sessions, Marc threw out an idea about quantum computing that was specific. So what I might do on my test is I might cite that as a specific example and remind students that we discussed that in class and then ask them to write a question in response to parts of that class discussion. So that way, I could be touching base with something that’s not generally replicable and easily accessible to AI. But I can also ask a question that’s going to ask my students to demonstrate knowledge about general concepts. And so, if both elements are there, then I probably know that my short answer question is authentically answered by my students. If some are not, then I might have questions. So I think it’s gonna be about tweaking what we’re doing and not abandoning what we’re doing. But it’s really a tough moment right now. Because, as soon as we say one thing about these technologies, well then they iterate and they evolve. It’s just a really competitive landscape for these tool developers. And they’re all trying to figure out a way to develop competitive advantage. And so they have to distinguish themselves from their competitors. And we can’t predict what ways that they will do that. So it’s going to be a while before, I think, this calms down for writing faculty specifically and for higher education faculty generally, because, of course, writing is central to every discipline and what we do, or at least that’s my bias.

Rebecca: So I’m not a writing faculty member. I’m a designer and a new media artist. And to me, it seems like something that could be fun to play with, which is maybe a counter to how some folks might respond to something like this. Are there ways that you can see a tool like this being useful in helping or advancing learning?

Robert: So, we’ve talked about this a bit, I really think that the general shape to the response, in writing classes specifically, is about identifying specific tools for specific writing purposes in specific stages. So if we’re in the invention stage, and we’re engaging a topic and you’re trying to decide what to write about, maybe dialoguing with open AI with some general questions, it’s going to trigger some things that you’re going to think about and follow up on. It could be great. You know, Marc was one of the first people to point out, I think it was Marc said this, folks who have writer’s block, this is a real godsend, or could be. It really helps get the wheels turning. So we could use in invention, we can use it in revision, we can use it to find sources, once we already have our ideas, so identify specific AI iterations for specific purposes inside of a larger project. I think that’s a method that’s going to work and is going to be something that gets toward that goal that we like to say in our AI Task Force on campus here, which is helping students learn to work alongside AI.

Marc: Yeah, that’s definitely how I feel about it too, and to kind of echo what Bob’s saying, there’s a lot more than you could do with a tool than just generate text. And I think that kind of gets lost in this pipe that you see with ChatGPT and everything else. I kind of mentioned before Whisper was another neural network that they launched just quietly back in the end of September start of October of last year, that works with actually uploading speech. It’s multilingual. So you can actually kind of use that almost like a universal translator in some ways. But the thing that’s, like outstanding with it is when you actually use it with the old GPT3 Playground… I say the old GPT playground like it’s not something that’s still useful right now… it uploads the entire transcript of a recording into the actual Playground. So you actually input it into AI. If you think about this from a teaching perspective, especially from students who have to deal with lecture, and want a way to actually organize their notes in some way, shape, or form, they’re able to do that then by just simply issuing a simple command to summarize your notes, to organize it. You can synthesize it with your past notes, even come up with test questions for an essay you need to write or an exam you’re going to have. Now from a teaching perspective, as someone who’s like try to be as student-centric as possible, that’s great, that’s wonderful. I also realized those people who are still wedded to lecture probably going to look at this, like another moral panic. I don’t want my students to have access to this, because it’s not going to help them with their note taking skills. I don’t want them to be falling asleep in my class as if they were staying awake to begin with. So I’m going to ban this technology. So we’re going to see lots of little areas of this pop up throughout education, it’s not just going to be within writing, it’s going to be in all different forms, the different ways… that I’m right there with you using this tool to really help you begin to think about in designing your own thought process, as you’re going through either a writing project, some people using it for art, some people use it for coding, it’s really up to your imagination of how you’d like to do it. The actual area that we’re looking at has a name, I don’t even know it has a name until the developers we’re working with, guys at Fermat. So there’s this article from a German university about beyond generation is what they call the actual form of that. So using your own text as sort of the input to an AI and then getting brainstorming ideas, automatic summaries, using it to get counter arguments to your own version notes. They use it also for images and all different other types of new generations too. So it’s really out there and like I think ChatGPT is just kind of sucking all the air up out of the room because likely so it’s it’s the new thing. It’s what everyone is talking about but so much has gone on, it really has, in this past few months. The entire fall semester I was emailing Bob like two or three times a week and poor Bob was just like “Just stop emailing me. Okay, we understand. I can’t look at this either. We don’t have time.” But it really was just crazy. It really is.

John: What are some other ways that this could be used in helping students become more productive in their writing or in their learning?

Marc: It really is going to be up to whatever the individual instructor and also what the student comes up with this too. If your process is already set in stone, like my process is set in stone as a writer, I think most of us are too as we’ve matured, it’s very difficult to integrate AI into that process. But if you’re young, and you’re just starting out, you’re maturing, that is a very different story. So we’re going to start seeing ways our students are going to be using this within their own writing process, their own creative process, too, that we haven’t really imagined. And I know that’s one of the reasons why this is so anxiety producing, because we say that there is a process, we don’t want to talk about the fact that this new technology can also disrupt that a little bit. I’ll go and segue to Bob, too, because I think he’s talked a little bit about this as well.

Robert: Yeah, one of the things that we’ve come together in our group that Marc’s co-leading is, we’ve come together to say that we want to encourage our students to use the tools, full stop. Now, we want to help them interpret the usage of those tools. So really being above board and transparent about engaging the tools, using our systems of citation, struggling to cope as they are, but just saying at the beginning, use AI generators in my class. I need to know what writing is yours and what writing is not. But, then designing assignments so you encourage limited engagements, which are quickly followed with reflection. So, oh Gosh, who was is Marc, a colleague, that was, I think, was at NC State in the business class where last spring he had students quote, unquote, cheat with AI.

Marc: Paul Fyfe, Yes.

Robert: Yes, thank you. And so he, in so many words, he basically designed the assignment so that students would have AI write their paper and almost uniformly they said, “Please, let me just write my paper, because it’d be a lot simpler. And I would like the writing a lot more.” So that type of engagement is really helpful, I think, because they were able to fully utilize the AI that they could access, and then try a bunch of different purposes with it, a bunch of different applications with it, and then form an opinion about what its strengths and weaknesses were. And then they pretty quickly saw its limitations. So, I mean, to specifically answer your question, John, I do think it can be helpful with a wide range of tasks. Again, invention stage, if I just have an idea, I can pop an idea in there and ask for more information and I’ll get more information. Hopefully, it will be reliable. But sometimes I’ll get a good deal of information and it’ll encourage me to keep writing. There are AI tools that are good about finding sources, there are AI tools that will continue to help you shift voice. So we’ve seen a lot of people do some fun things with shifting voice. Well, I can think of a lot of different types of writing assignments where I might try to insert voice, and people would be invited to think about the impact of voice on the message and on the purpose. And let’s not forget, so one of the things that irks Marc and myself is that a lot of our friends in the computer science world think of writing as a problem to solve. And we don’t think of writing that way. But, as I said to Marc the other day when we were talking about this, if I’m trying to write an email to my boss in a second language, writing is a problem for me to solve. And so Grammarly has proven to us that there are a large number of people in our world who need different levels of literacy in different applications with different purposes and they’re willing to compensate them for some additional expertise. So I had tried to design a course to teach in the fall, we were to engage AI tools, specifically in a composition class, and I had to pull the plug on my own proposal because the tools were evolving too quickly, Marc and Marc’s team solved the riddle because they decided that they could identify the tools on an assignment basis. So it would be a unit within the course. And so when they shrank that timeline, they had a better chance the tools they identified at the beginning of the unit would still be relatively the same by the time they got to the end of the unit. So getting a menu or a suite of different AI tools that you want to explore, explore them with your students, give them spaces to reflect, always make sure that you’re validating whatever is being said if you’re going to use it, and then always cite it. Those are the ground rules that we’re thinking about when we’re engaging the different tools and then, I don’t know, it can be fun.

Marc: You mean writing can be fun? I’ve never heard such things.

Rebecca: It would be incredible. One of the things that I hear you underscoring related to citations, it was making me think about the ways that I have students already using third party materials in a design class, where we use third party materials when we’re writing a research paper, because we are using citations. So we have methods for documenting these things and making it clearer to an audience, what’s ours and what’s not. So it’s not like it’s some brand new kind of thing that we’re trying to do in terms of documenting that or communicating that to someone else. It’s just adapting it a bit, because it’s a slightly different thing that we’re using, or a different third party tool that we’re using or third party material that we’re using, but I have my students write a copyright documentation for things that they’re doing, like, what’s the license for the images that they’re using that don’t require attribution? I go through the whole list, the fonts that they’re using and the license that they’re using for that? So for me, this seems like an obvious next step or a way that that same process of providing that attribution or that documentation would work well in this atmosphere.

Robert: I think the challenge, and Marc and I’ve talked about this before, the challenge is when you shift from a writing support tool to a writing generation tool. So most of us aren’t thinking about documenting spell checker in Microsoft Word, because we don’t see that as content that is original in some way, right? But it definitely affects our writing, nor do we cite smart compose, Google’s sentence completion tool. But how do you know when you’ve gone from smart compose, providing just a correct way to finish your own thought, to smart compose giving you a new thought. And that’s an interesting dilemma. If we can just take a wee nip of schadenfreude, it was interesting to see that the machine learning conference recently had to amend its own paper submission, Marc was pointing this out to me, their own papers submission guidelines to say: “if you use AI tools, you can’t submit.” And then they had to try to distinguish between writing generators and writing assistance. And so that’s just not an easy thing to do. But it’s just going to involve trust between writers and audiences.

Marc: Yeah, I don’t envy the task of any of our disciplinary conventions trying to do this. We could invest some time in doing this with ChatGPT or thinking about this. But then it’s not even clear if ChatGPT is going to be the end of the road here. We’re talking about this as just another version of AI and how he would do that. I’ve seen some people arguing on social media about the fact that a student or anyone who is using an AI should then track down that idea that the AI is spitting out. And I think that’s incredibly futile because it’s trained on the internet, you don’t know how this idea came about. And that’s one of the really big challenges with this type of technology is that it breaks the chain of citations that was used to actually, for lack of a better word, to generate text. I was gonna say to show knowledge, but it can’t really show knowledge, it’s just basically generated an idea, or mimicked an idea. So that really is going to be a huge challenge that we’re going to have to face too and think about. It’s going to be something that will require a lot of dialogue between ourselves, our students. And also thinking about where we want them to use this technology. I think for right now, it’s something that you want to use a language model with your students, or invite them to use it too, tell them to reflect on that process, as Bob mentioned earlier too. There are some tools out there, LEX is one of them, where you could actually track what was being built in your document with the AI, which sort of like glow and be highlighted. So there are going to be some tools on the market that will do this. It is going to be a challenge, though, especially when people start going wild with it, because when you’re working with AI, when it just takes a few seconds to generate a thing and keeping track of that is going to be something that will require a great deal of not only trust with our students, but you really are going to have to sit down and tell them, “Look, you’re gonna have to slow down a little bit, and not let the actual text generations sort of take over your thinking process and your actual writing process.”

Robert: Speaking a little bit of process right now, I’m working on a project with a colleague in computer science. And we’re looking at that ancient technology, Google smart compose. And much to my surprise, I couldn’t find a literature where anyone had really spent time looking at the impact of the suggestions on open-ended writing. I did find some research that had been done on smaller writing. So, for instance, there was a project that asked writers to compose captions for images, but I didn’t see anything longer than that. So that’s what we did in the fall, we got 119 participants, and we asked them to write an open-ended response, an essay essentially, a short essay in response to a common prompt. Half of the writers had Google smart, compose enabled, and half didn’t. And we’re going through the data now to see how the suggestions actually affect writers’ process and product. So we’re looking at the product right now. One of our hypotheses is that the Google smart compose participants will have writing that is more similar, because essentially they will be given similar suggestions about how to complete their sentences. And we expect that in the non-smart compose enabled population we’ll find that there was more lexical and syntactical diversity in those writing products. On the writing process side, we’re creating, as far as I know, new measures to determine whether they accept suggestions, edit suggestions, or reject suggestions. And we all do some of all three of those usually, but the time spent. And so we’re trying to see if there’s correlations between the amount of time spent, and then again, the length of text, the complexity of text, because if you’re editing something else, you’re probably not thinking about your own ideas, and how to bring those forward. But overall, what we’re hoping to suggest, and, again, because we’re not able to really see what’s happening in smart compose, we’re having to operate with it as a black box. What we’re hoping to suggest is that our colleagues in software development start inviting writers into the process of articulating our writing profile. So let’s say, for instance, you might see an iteration in the future of Google smart compose that says, “Hey, I noticed that you’re rejecting absolutely everything we’re sending to you. Do you want to turn this off?” [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

Robert: Or “I noticed that you’re accepting things very quickly. Would you like for us to increase the amplitude and give you more more quickly?” Understanding those types of interactions and preferences can help them build profiles and the profiles can then hopefully make the tools more useful. So, I know that they, of course, do customize suggestions over time. So I know that the tool does grow. I think as John you might have said, you know, how long is it learning to write, well, they learn to write with us. In fact, those are features that Grammarly competes with its competitors on. It’s like our tool will train up or quickly. At any rate, what does it mean to help students learn to work alongside AI? Well, what I believe, when it comes to writing, part of what it’s going to mean, is help them to understand more quickly what the tool is giving them, what they want, and how they can harness the tool to their purposes. And until the tools are somewhat stable and until the writers are invited into the process of understanding the affordances of the tool and the feature sets. That’s just not possible.

John: Where do you see this moral panic as going? Is this something that’s likely to fade in the near future? And we’ve seen similar things in the past. I’ve been around for a while. I remember reactions to calculators and whether they should be used to allow people to take square roots instead of going through that elaborate tedious process. I remember using card catalogs and using printed indexes for journals to try to find things. And the tools that we have available have allowed us to be a lot more productive. Is it likely that we’ll move to a position where people will accept these tools as being useful productivity tools soon? Or is this something different than those past cases?

Marc: Well, I think the panic is definitely set in right now. And I think we’re going to be in for some waves of hype and panic. We’ve already seen it from last year. I think everyone kind of got huge dose of it with ChatGPT. But we were kind of getting the panic and hype mode when we first came across this in May, wondering what this technology was, how would it actually impact our teaching, how would it impact our students too. There’s a lot of talk right now about trying to do AI detection. Most of the software out there is trying to use some form of AI to detect AI. They’re trying to use an older version of GPT called GPT2 that was open source and open release before openAI decided to sort of lock everything down. Sometimes it will pick up AI generated text, sometimes it’ll mislabel it. I obviously don’t want to see a faculty member take a student up on academic dishonesty charges based on a tool that may be correct or may not be correct, based off of that sort of a framework. TurnItIn is working on a process where they’re going to try to capture more data from students that they already have. If they can capture big enough writing samples, they can then use that to compare your version of your work to an AI or someone who’s bought a paper from a paper mill or contract cheating because of course, a student’s writing never changes over the course of their academic career. And our writing never changes either. It’s completely silly. We’ve been sort of conditioned, though, when we see new technologies come along to have it’s sort of equivalent to mitigate its impact on our lives. We have this new thing, it’s disruptive. Alright, well give me the other thing that gets rid of it so I don’t have to deal with it. I don’t think we’re going to have that with this. I’m empathetic to people. I know that that’s a really hard thing for them to hear. Again, I made the joke too about the New York City school districts banning this but, from their perspective, those people are terrified. I don’t blame them. When we deal with higher education, for the most part, students have those skills set that they’re going to be using for the rest of their lives. We’re just explaining them and preparing them to go into professional fields. If this is a situation where you’re talking K through 12, where a student doesn’t have all the reading or grammatical knowledge they need to be successful and they start using AI, that could be a problem. So I think talking to our students is the best way to establish healthy boundaries, and getting them to understand how they want to use this tool for themselves. Students, as Bob mentioned too, and what Paul Fyfe was doing with his actual research, students are setting their own boundaries with this, they’re figuring out that this is not working the way the marketing hype is telling them it is, too. So, we just have to be conscious of that and keep these conversations going.

Robert: Writing with Wikipedia was my panic moment or my cultural panic moment. And my response then was much as the same as it is now. Cool. Let’s check it out. And Yochai Benkler has a quote, and I don’t have it exactly right in front of me, but he says something like all other things being equal, things that are easier to do, are going to be more likely to get done. And the second part, he says is all of the things are never equal. So that was just like the point of Wikipedia, right? Like people really worried about commons based peer production and collaborative knowledge building and inaccuracies and biases, which are there still, creeping their way in and displacing Encyclopedia Britannica and peer-reviewed resources. And they were right, if they were worried because Benkler is right. It’s a lot easier to get your information from Wikipedia and if it’s easier, that’s the way it’s going to come. You can’t do a Google search without pulling up a tile that’s been accessed through Wikipedia. But the good news is is now the phrase about Wikipedia that she’s is that Wikipedia is known as the good grown up of the internet, because the funny thing is that the community seems so fractious and sharp elbowed at first about who was right in producing a Wikipedia page about Battlestar Galactica. Well, so that grew over time, and more and more folks in higher education and more and more experts got involved and the system’s improved, and it’s uneven, but it is still the world’s largest free resource of knowledge. And it’s because it’s free, because it’s open and very accessible, then it enters into our universe of what we know. I think the same thing holds here, right? If it’s as easy to use as it is now, the developers are working on ways to make it easier still. So we’re not going to stop this, we just got to think about ways that we can better understand it and indicate, where we need to, that we’re using it and how we’re using it, for what ends and what purposes. And so your question, John, I think was around or at least you used productivity. So I don’t agree with his essay, and I certainly don’t agree with a lot that he’s done, but Sam Altman, one of the OpenAI co-founders, does have this essay, his basic argument is that in the long run, what AI is doing is reducing the cost of labor. So that will affect every aspect of life, that it’s just a matter of time before AI is applied to every aspect of life. And so then we’re dropping costs for everyone. And his argument is we are therefore improving the lives and living standards of everyone. I’m not there. But I think it’s a really interesting argument to make if you take it that long. Now, as you mentioned earlier about earlier technologies… the calculator moment, for folks in mathematics. My personal preference would be to have someone else’s ox get gored before mine is, but we’re up, so we have to deal with it. And our friends in art, they’re dealing with it as well. It’s just a matter of time before our friends in the music, obviously our friends in motion capture are dealing with it, I think you’re handling it in design as well. So it’s just a matter of time before we all figure it out. So that we have to sort of learn from each other in terms of what our responses were. And I think there’ll be sort of these general trends, we might as well explore these tools, because this is the world where our students will be graduating. And so helping them understand the implications, the ethical usage, the citation system purposes, it’d be great if we had partners on the other side that would telegraph to us a little bit more about what the scope and the purpose and the origins of these tools are. But we don’t have that just yet.

Marc: I agree completely with what Bob said, too.

Rebecca: One of the things that’s been interesting in the arts is the conversation around copyright and what’s being input into the data sets initially, and that that’s often copyright protected material. And then therefore, what’s getting spit out is derivative of that. And so there becomes some interesting conversations around whether or not that’s a fair use whether or not that’s copyright violation, whether or not that’s plagiarism. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on whether or not these similar concerns are being raised. over ChatGPT or other systems that you’ve been interacting with.

Marc: Writing’s a little bit different, I think there are some pretty intense anti-AI people out there who basically say that this is just a plagiarism generator. I see what they’re saying, but any sort of terminology with plagiarism, it doesn’t really make sense. Because it doesn’t really focus on the fact that it’s stealing from one idea. It’s just using fast and massive chunks of really just data from the internet. And some of that data doesn’t even have a clear source. So it’s not even really clear how that goes back to it. But that is definitely part of the debate. Thank God I’m not a graphic artist, ‘cause I don’t know, I’ve talked to a few friends of mine who are in graphic arts and they’re not dealing with this as well as we are, I can say that, to say the least too. And you can kind of follow along with some of the discourse on social media too. It’s been getting intense. But I do think that we will see some movement within all these fields about how they’re going to treat generative text or generative image, generative code, and all that way. In fact, openAI is being sued now in the coding business too, because they’re copilot product was supposedly capable of reproducing an entire string of code, not just generating, but reproducing it from what it was trained on too. So I think it is an evolving field, and we’re gonna see where our feet land, but for right now, the technology is definitely moving underneath us as we’re talking about all this in terms of both plagiarism and copyright in all the things.. And I’m with Bob, I want to be able to cite these tools and be able to understand it. I also am kind of aware of the fact that if we start bringing in really hardcore citation into this, we don’t want to treat the technology as a person, right? You don’t want to treat the ideas coming from the machine necessarily, we want to treat this as “I use this tool to help me with this process.” And that becomes complicated, too, because then you have to understand the nuance of how that was used and what sort of context it was used in too. So yeah, it’s it’s going to be the wild west for a while.

Robert: I wanted to turn it back on our hosts for a second if I can and ask Rebecca and John a question. So I’ve could remember the title of Sam Altman’s essay, It’s Moore’s Law for everything. That really, I think, encapsulates his point. What do y’all think as people in higher education? Do you think this is unleashing a technology that’s going to make our graduates more productive in meaningful ways? Or is it unleashing a technology that questions what productivity means?

Rebecca: I think it depends on who is using it.

John: …and how it’s being used.

Rebecca: Yeah, the intent behind it… I think it can be used in both ways, it can be used to be a really great tool to support work and things that we’re exploring and doing and also presents challenges. And people are definitely trained to use it to shortcut things in ways that maybe it doesn’t make sense to shortcut or undermines their learning or undermines contributions to our knowledge.

John: And I’d agree pretty much with all of that, that it has a potential for making people more productive in their writing by helping get past writer’s block and other issues. And it gives people a variety of ways of perhaps phrasing something that they can then mix together in a way that better reflects what they’re trying to say. And I think it’s a logical extension of many of those other tools we have, but it is also going to be very disruptive for those people who have very formulaic types of assignments that are very open ended, those are not going to be very meaningful in a world in which we have such tools. But on the other hand, we’re living in a world in which we have such tools, and those tools are not going to go away, and they’re not going to become less powerful over time. And I think we’ll have to see. Whenever there’s a new technology, we have some people who really praise it, because it’s opening up these wonderful possibilities, such as television was going to make education universal in all sorts of wonderful ways and the internet was going to do the same thing. Both have provided some really big benefits. But there’s often costs that are unanticipated, and often benefits that are unanticipated, and we have to try to use them most effectively.

Robert: So one of the things I‘ve appreciated about this conversation it’s that you guys have made me think even more, so I want to follow up on what you’re saying, and maybe articulate my anxiety a little better. So Emad Mostaque, I think is his name, is the developer or the CEO of Stability AI, and he was on Hard Fork. And I listened to the interview and he basically said, “Creativity is too hard and we’re going to make it easy. We’re going to make people poop rainbows.” He did use the phrase poop rainbows [LAUGHTER] but I don’t remember if that was exactly the setup. And so I’m not an art teacher, but I’m screaming at the podcast. No, it’s not just about who can draw the most accurate version of a banana in a bowl, it’s the process of learning to engage the world around you through visual representation, and I’m not an art teacher. So that’s my fear for writing. I guess my question for everybody here is, do you think these tools will serve as a barrier, because they’ll provide a fake substitute for the real thing that we then have to help people get past? Or will that engagement with the fake thing get their wheels turning and help them find that as a stepping stone and a reduction to the deeper engagement with literacy or visual representation.

Rebecca: I think we already have examples that exist, that the scope of what someone might do so that it appears, looks, feels really similar to something someone already created. So templates do that, any sort of common code set that people might use to build a website, for example, they all then have similar layouts and designs, these things already exist.That may work in a particular area. But then there’s also examples in that same space, where people are doing really innovative things. So there is still creativity. In fact, maybe it motivates people to be more creative, because they’re sick of thinking the same thing over and over again. [LAUGHTER]

John: And going back to issues of copyright, that’s a recent historical phenomenon. There was a time when people recognized that all the work that was being done built on earlier work, that artists explicitly copied other artists to become better and to develop their own creativity. And I think this is just a more rapid way of doing much of the same thing, that it’s building on past work. And while we cite people in our studies, those people cited other people who cited other people who learned from lots of people who were never cited, and this is already taking place, it’s just going to be a little bit harder to track the origin of some of the materials.

Marc: Yeah, I completely agree. I also think that one thing that we get caught up in our own sort of disciplinary own sort of world of higher education is that this tool may not be really that disruptive to us, or may not be as beneficial to us as it would be somewhere else in some other sorts of context. You think about the global South, that is lacking resources, a tool like this, that is multilingual, that can actually help under-resourced districts or under-resourced entire countries, in some cases. That could have an immense impact on equity, in ways that we haven’t seen. That said, there’s also going to be these bad actors that are going to be using the technology to really do lots of weird, crazy things. And you can kind of follow along with this live on Twitter, which is what I’ve been doing. And every day, there’s another thing that they’re doing. In fact, one guy today offered anyone who’s going to argue a case before the Supreme Court a million dollars if they put in their Apple Air Pods and let the AI argue the case for them. And my response is, if you ever want the federal government to ban a technology in lightning speed, that is the methodology to go through and do so. But there’s going to be stunts, there’s already stunts. And Annette Vee was writing about GPT4chan, which is a developer that used an old version of GPT2 on 4chan, the horrible toxic message board, and deployed that bot for about three days where it posted 30,000 times. In 2016, we had the election issues with the Russians coming through, now you’re going to have people with chat bots do this. So it can help with education, definitely, I think that we’re kind of small potatoes compared to the way the rest of the world is going to probably be looking at this technology. I hope it’s not in that way, necessarily, I hope that they can kind of get some safety guardrails put in place. But it’s definitely gonna be a wild ride, for sure.

John: Being an economist, one of the things I have to mention in response to that is there a lot of studies that found that a major determinant of the level of economic growth and development in many countries is the degree of ethno-linguistic fractionalization, that the more languages there are and the more separate cultures you have within the society, the harder it is to expand. So tools like this can help break those things down and can unleash a lot of potential growth and improvement in countries where there are some significant barriers to that.

Marc: Absolutely. I just really want to re-emphasize the point that I brought up at the beginning too, especially now in the wake of what Bob said too. I was not introduced to Wikipedia in a way that would be interesting or anything else. I was introduced to this as a college student with a professor saying to me, “This is a bad thing. This is not going to be helpful to you. Do not use this.” Keep that in mind, the power that you have as an educator when you’re talking about this with your students too, that you are informing their decisions about the world too, about what this tool actually is, when you’re introducing talking about this with them, when you’re actually putting the policy in place of yourself of saying “This is banned.” And I just kind of want to make sure that everyone is really kind of thinking about that now with this because we do actually have a lot of power in this. I know we feel completely powerless in some ways. It’s a little odd that the discussions have been about this. But we actually have a lot of power in how we shape the discussion of this, especially with our students.

Robert: Yeah, that’s a great point and I’m glad you raised it. My question is, I wonder, John, as an economist, and also what you think Rebecca as well, do you guys by the Moore’s Law for Everything argument? So 20, 30 years from now, does generative AI increase the standard of living for people globally?

John: Well, I think it goes back to your point that if we make things easier to do, it frees up time to allow us to do other things and to be more creative. So I think there is something to that.

Rebecca: Yeah. And sometimes creativity is the long game. It’s something that you want to do over a period of time and you have to have the time to put into it. I think it’s an interesting argument.

John: I have been waiting for those flying cars for a long time, but at least now we’re getting closer to self-driving cars.

Robert: I was about to say they gave you a driverless car instead. [LAUGHTER]

John: But, you know, a driverless car frees up time where you could do other things during that time, which could be having conversations or could be reading, it could be many things that might be more enjoyable than driving, especially if there’s a lot of traffic congestion.

Rebecca: …or you could take a train, in which case, you’re also not driving, John

John: …and you’re probably not in the US, [LAUGHTER] or at least not in most parts of the US, unfortunately.

Rebecca: Well, we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Marc: What’s next? Oh, goodness. Well, again, like I said, there are going to be waves of hype and panic, we’re in the “my students are going to cheat phase.” The next wave is when educators actually realize they can use this to actually grade essays, grade writing, and grade tests, that’s going to be the next “Oh, wait” moment that we’re going to have to see too. That will be both on hype and panic too. And to me, it’s going to be the next conversation we need to have. Because we’re gonna have to establish these boundaries, kind of in real time, about what we want to actually do with this. They are talking about GPT4, this is the next version of this. It’s going to be supposedly bigger than ChatGPT and more capable. We know all the hype that you can kind of repeat about this sort of thing too. But 2023 is probably going to be a pretty wild year. I don’t know what’s gonna go beyond that. But I just know that we’re going to be talking about this for the next, at least,12 months for sure.

Robert: I agree with Marc, I think an discipline at least, the next panic or I don’t know, jubilee, will be around automated writing evaluators, which exists and are commercially available. But the big problem is the research area known as explainable AI, which is to me tremendously fascinating, that you can build neural nets that will find answers to how to play Go, that after I don’t know how many hundreds of years or even 1000s of years that humans have played Go, find winning strategies that no one has ever found before, but then not be able to tell you how they were found. That’s the central paradox. I would like to say I hope explainable AI is next. But I think, before we get explainable AI, we’re gonna have a lot more disruptions, a lot more ripples when unexplainable AI is deployed without a lot of context.

John: One of the things I’ve seen popping up in Twitter is with those AI detectors that apparently ChatGPT, if you ask it to rewrite a document so it cannot be detected by the detectors, will rewrite it in a way where it comes back with a really low score. So it could very well be an issue where we’re gonna see some escalation. But that may not be the most productive channel for this type of research or progress.

Rebecca: Sounds like many more conversations of ethics to come. Thank you so much for your time and joining us.

Marc: Well, thank you both.

John: Well, thank you. Everyone has been talking about this and I’m really glad we were able to meet with you and talk about this a bit.

Robert: Yes. Thank you for the invitation. It’s been fun to talk. If there’s any way that we can add to the conversation as you go forward, we’d be happy to be in touch again. So thank you.

John: I’m sure we’ll be in touch.

Marc: The next panic, we’re always available. [LAUGHTER]

John: The day’s not over yet. [LAUGHTER]

[MUSIC]

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

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

[MUSIC]

236. ePortfolios

Posted in assessment, authentic learning, feedback, grading, higher education, learning, pedagogy, teaching, writing
April 20, 2022

As David Wiley has noted, “disposable assignments” often have small impacts on student learning. In this episode Nikki Wilson Clasby joins us to  discuss how one campus has used ePortfolios to create authentic learning experiences in their English composition courses.

Nikki is the coordinator of the English Composition Program at SUNY New Paltz.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: As David Wiley has noted, “disposable assignments” often have small impacts on student learning. In this episode we discuss how one campus has used ePortfolios to create authentic learning experiences in their English composition courses.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Nikki Wilson Clasby. Nikki is the coordinator of the English Composition Program at SUNY New Paltz. Welcome, Nikki.

Nikki: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

John: Thanks for joining us. Our teas today are… Nikki, are you drinking tea?

Nikki: I am certainly drinking tea, yes.

Rebecca: Woohoo!

Nikki: Would you like to know what it is?

Rebecca: Yes!

John: Yes!

Nikki: [LAUGHTER] So this is an exotic blend called Tetley, a very strong British brew, which we Brits love, unless you’re a PG Tips fan, but Tetley’s pretty up there. And I have it with 2% milk which is the best way to drink it.

John: Most of our colleagues on campus from England tend to drink Yorkshire Gold.

Nikki: Mmhmm.

John: They seem to prefer that to the other options.

Nikki: Yes, well I am a Yorkshire lass, but I have to say Tetley has that kick that I need. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Good to know. I think today I have Scottish afternoon tea.

Nikki: Ooh!

John: And continuing with the theme I have an Irish breakfast tea from Twinings.

Rebecca: Oh!

Nikki: Oh very nice, that’s a good one too. I like that one.

Rebecca: This crew needs some strong stuff today.

Nikki: We need some scones now. [LAUGHTER] Then it will be complete.

John: We’re recording this at 12:30 today, and I’ve already had five meetings today including a class.

Rebecca: This is my second pot.

Nikki: I’m impressed. [LAUGHTER] You can come and have tea with me any day.

Rebecca: [LAUGHTER] Perfect. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss the use of ePortfolios in the Composition Program at SUNY New Paltz. But first can you tell us a little bit about your role at New Paltz?

Nikki: Yes, I am the Coordinator of the Composition Program. I stepped into this role two years ago, and I am also a lecturer. And so I teach mainly our upper-level writing and rhetoric courses where I specialize in visual rhetoric. And I also teach courses in what we call Practical Writing and Design which is a new course dealing with a sort of blend of graphics and writing. And I also teach a FIG, a First-year Interest Group, for the Communication Disorders. And I run practicum for our TAs.

Rebecca: So you’re not busy or anything?

Nikki: I’m not busy at all, no. Plenty of time for drinking tea. [LAUGHTER]

John: And plenty of reason to drink that tea with the caffeine.

Nikki: Which is why I drink Tetley, yes. [LAUGHTER]

John: So, we invited you here, though, because we heard about the common use of a WordPress site for the creation of student ePortfolios. And I think the first question we have to ask is… How did you possibly get agreement within a department on the use of one platform?

Nikki: [LAUGHTER] Actually it’s pretty simple, there’s no drama involved here. So in 2019 the composition committee reworked our three-credit English 180 Composition II course to a four-credit GE course, which we retitled English 170 Writing & Rhetoric. And we had been using print portfolios for a long time, and so during the process of revamping our course the composition committee reviewed how we could improve our portfolio assessment. And Matt Newcomb, who was the coordinator at the time, and I had been long advocating for ePortfolios. So during our meetings we decided that it would be a good time, seeing as we were revamping this course, to introduce ePortfolios into our curriculum. And we’d looked at options in Blackboard, but they were just too…

John: Awful? [LAUGHTER]

Nikki: Yes, too awful, but just by happenstance and pure serendipitous coincidence the university at this time decided to just opt for a CampusPress system, and they adopted Hawksites. And so it was made readily available for us to use. And so the timing was perfect, we just jumped on it right away and said, “Yes, this is what we want. This is the way we’re going to go.” So because Matt and I had been advocating for ePortfolios for so long it was pretty simple to get our program on board with the project.

John: And we should note that the Hawks are the campus mascot for SUNY New Paltz. And that Hawksites is just a campus-wide instance of WordPress, I believe.

Nikki: It is, yes. That’s exactly what it is. We just gave it the name Hawksites. Yes, it’s a campus-based university blogging website and ePortfolio tool.

Rebecca: Are students developing these in this more beginning course, and then working on the same portfolio throughout their entire curriculum?

Nikki: Well, this is what’s really interesting. So the faculty are allowed to use the ePortfolios as a tool for however they want to integrate it into their program, so they have free rein to do whatever they want with it. And we all use it in different ways and to different degrees, depending on our comfort level with technology, and how it fits into our curriculum. But as a composition program we use the ePortfolios for assessment purposes, so I can tell you a little bit about how that is organized. So whereas we can have free rein to use them however we want, we do have some very specifics that we need for our assessments. Would you like me to tell you about those?

Rebecca: Love to hear about those.

Nikki: [LAUGHTER] Okay, so for English 160 which is the basic, very first writing course, students have to go through this ePortfolio assessment at the end of the semester to determine whether or not they are fit to move on to English 170. So this is the tool that we use to make sure those students are ready for the more vigorous program. So for that 160 assessment process the students have to upload to the ePortfolio, or at least be able to visibly show on the ePortfolio, they have to have two of their strongest assignments, and they also have to have their revisions for those assignments. They can choose whichever ones they want to put on, but they have to be two major assignments. The only requirement is that they have to show that they have been able to write in different modes, different genres for different rhetorical situations. And there needs to be an element of research in their citation, you know the beginning stages of that research process. And obviously we’ll be looking for the standard of their writing as well, that’s why the revision aspect is really important. So that’s what they’re required to do for the ePortfolio. And then the 170 students, they have different requirements. But let me just backtrack just for one second. So across the board for 160 and 170 as part of the ePortfolio requirements, all the students have to create a reflective cover letter that goes up front in their ePortfolio. They write that reflective cover letter at the end of the semester and we give them questions, guidelines as to what to tackle. And what we want from them is a sort of critical overview of their progress during the course. And they have to cite examples of their writing to prove their case. So it’s a persuasive letter, and our assessors read that first, so they’ll read that reflective cover letter. And that gives us a very clear sense of what the student understands about their writing process, and that makes us feel a little bit better about whether they’re ready for 170 or not. It shows that they’re applying the techniques and skills that they’ve learned throughout the semester to that cover letter. So the 170 students, we have a very specific framework for our 170 Writing & Rhetoric program, it’s based upon a wicked question. So a wicked question might be… What should we eat? Or how do we save the world? Or what does it mean to be human in a digital landscape? And all professors can choose whichever kind of wicked question they want, that they’re excited about, and then they base all of their assignments around that wicked question. That gives us a lot of flexibility for Writing & Rhetoric, which is wonderful. So the semester is divided into two sections. We basically require two major assignments that are argument research based, and then each of those two large assignments has two smaller assignments that help students gear into those big assignments. So, for instance, you might have a proposal with an annotated bibliography that leads to a research paper. So students have to choose one of those sections. So in the ePortfolio we want to see two smaller assignments leading to a large assignment. We don’t need revisions at the stage for 170, we acknowledge that revision is part of the process, and that they will be revising anyway for those papers. So that’s the structure of the assignment sequences for those two ePortfolios. And then beyond that we add other things into the ePortfolios as we see fit. So, for instance, this semester we have our internal assessment which is for our 170 students, and that’s on basic critical reading. So that’s kind of how our ePortfolios are set up. And then at the end of the semester we have a system set up where we review each other’s ePortfolios based on a common rubric that we have put together. So that’s basically how it works.

John: It sounds like a great approach in ensuring standardization across their classes and making sure that all students meet the requirements to move on.

Nikki: It is, it’s very effective. We have lots of conversations afterwards about who’s on the cusp, borderline cases, and so it’s very democratically pieced together. And then of course we have to work on individual cases of students who are failing for various reasons. And it’s a pretty good system, and it’s been very effective over the last two years that we’ve been using it.

John: This is more of a technical question about the organization… Is each site organized by class or is it by students? In other words, does a student have their own WordPress account that they use and create an ePortfolio that is unique to them across all their classes? Or is there a class site where all the students in the class post their work? Or is it some combination of the two?

Nikki: So what happens for us is that in our composition program, we have a template on Hawksites, and our students create an account through Hawksites, and they are given the template that they have to use. So they are essentially creating their own account on Hawksites for our classes, and it’s unique to them. It’s not something that we share with other classes, this is specifically for our class. Does that make sense?

John: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: So just to clarify, if a student was in another class, in another subject area, they may have an additional site.

Nikki: Correct, students can create as many accounts as they want on Hawksites for individual programs. I have about 10. [LAUGHTER] It’s fantastic. It’s such a good resource, we love it.

John: I’m hosting a variety of WordPress sites as well for different purposes.

Rebecca: Me too. One thing I think that’s always important to ask when we’re talking about ePortfolios, is whether or not that student work is public to everyone, public just to members of the community, your classroom community? Or are they private? Or do students have a choice of the privacy settings?

Nikki: The students have a choice of privacy settings. But what we encourage students to do is to select the option that allows only people within our university that have a university ID and login to be able to access it, and only the people that the students give the link to, or the people that the faculty give the link to. And this allows us to share those ePortfolios amongst the people who are going to be assessing. So there is some choice for the students, but it also gives us the option to share easily amongst our colleagues. But I want to add something into this too, that within our template that we had created at Hawksites, we have a permissions policy embedded into the site. And that is a basic form and students can sign it, they can say yes or no. We ask the students, “Would you mind If we shared your portfolio for teaching purposes? Would you mind if we shared some of your work for research or for teaching methods?” And students can pick “yes” or “no” for all of those. And that’s nice to have that there on the ePortfolio, so whenever we’re looking for examples we can check the permissions pledge and see who’s agreed and who’s not agreed, and then of course we respect the students that haven’t signed it. So there are some levels of privacy within our cohort of teaching. There is a blog function on our Hawksite. It’s up to the professor whether they use the blog or not. But as they stand, the students can’t see each other’s ePortfolios, those are private. But there is a blog function within Hawksites, and faculty can choose whether they decide to share that blog function with other students or not. I have used that function for a different project, but I haven’t seen anybody take advantage of that because we also have Blackboard which has its own blog function too.

Rebecca: How have students responded to the idea of using ePortfolios?

Nikki: That’s a really good question. It very much depends on the instructor and how the instructor teaches the ePortfolio component. I can tell you that for TAs who are new at trying to grapple with this technology and pedagogy, some of them have in the past waited till the very end of the semester to have the students upload their work. It’s too stressful for students, they can’t handle it. It’s a lot of work to put a good portfolio together. So I make the TAs have the students sign up for an account within the first two weeks of the semester. And I encourage the TAs to find ways to get the students to engage with their ePortfolio on a low-stakes non-graded level just so that they can learn how to use all of the functions and the tools. And also get them in the habit of using their ePortfolio as a working kind of document, and not something that just gets shoved to the end of the semester. So it really depends on how it’s taught. But if you do teach it with those kinds of sensitivities in mind, and you don’t stress the students out, I find my students in particular love using their ePortfolios. They enjoy engaging with them, they enjoy seeing their work look professional on the site, they enjoy the option of using a more web-based writing process for embedding videos, hyperlinks, uploading images, embedding their beautifully designed Google slide presentations into their site. So they do enjoy that process. I give them time in class to do it so it’s very therapeutic for them. But they also appreciate learning some of the real-life skills that comes with curating an ePortfolio, and they recognize that this will help them later. So the enthusiasm for it is pretty high, and most students feel very proud of their ePortfolios by the end of the semester because they have something to show for all of their hard work, and it looks good. So they’ve adopted it really well. My worry about students is they do all this work, and they hit the submit button for grading, and then that paper disappears down the black hole never to resurface, and then they just move on. And it’s a shame because that work is good work, and we want our students to feel like they have a stake in the writing process, they have a stake in scholarship and research, and the ePortfolios provides a really nice platform for allowing them to think of themselves in that respect, and not just the humble student that struggles, if you like. [LAUGHTER] Helps them feel a little bit more professional.

John: David Wiley refers to those types of assignments that students post in Blackboard, or submit their paper at the end of the term and never see again, as disposable assignments. And having something that looks professional that they have access to, and that they can share and feel good about, is something that students really value. I’ve had students write some books in my class, and they really enjoy seeing this final product. It’s something that they can share with their friends, with their parents, with potential employers, and link to on their resumes and so forth or on LinkedIn, and they’ve appreciated that tremendously. I think you do some of the same, right, Rebecca?

Rebecca: Definitely the students love it when it’s like… It’s a real thing, a real shareable thing, with real audiences. [LAUGHTER]

Nikki: Exactly, and that’s the key thing, right? Especially in rhetoric having that real audience, it’s super, super important.

John: And in my experience it leads to a much higher quality of work when they have that non-disposable assignment. Have you seen the same?

Nikki: Yes, I totally agree. There’s a level of accountability that goes on there. So when you’re racing off an essay at the last minute and submitting it, it disappears into the black hole. With the ePortfolio it comes back to hit you in the face, and you can’t put that stuff on the web, you have to go back and revise it. And it’s really nice being in the classroom and having the students respond to your comments and make those revisions. And then you kind of hear the penny dropping, it’s like, “Oh boy, I really didn’t do this very well, I better snatch this up for the ePortfolio.” And it is very reassuring to see that in action. So yeah, it’s lovely.

John: So how have other composition faculty responded? Are they all comfortable with it? Was there any resistance?

Nikki: That’s a really good question. I know, for me, I’ve been involved in this sort of work for a long time, I came from Iowa State University here and we’ve been working with ePortfolios for a long time. And that switch, going from the paper portfolios which I hated [LAUGHTER] sorry, I hated them… Going from the paper portfolios to the ePortfolio, that’s a big mind switch to go through. So we had to work with our faculty, encourage them to set up a Hawksite of their own so they could experiment, help them feel comfortable sharing those Hawksites in the classroom so they could use that as a teaching tool. So initially there was some learning to do, and that’s great, I mean that’s great, that’s fine, perfect. So it took a while to make that switch to ePortfolios, but now that we’ve made that switch, I think we all recognize that it’s so much more accessible, it’s so much easier to organize, it’s so much easier to assess. We’ve only been doing it since the fall of 2019, but I don’t hear any complaints [LAUGHTER] about the ePortfolio. It is part of what we do now. So it’s good.

John: And that was perfectly timed to be ready for the pandemic.

Nikki: You know, it was perfectly timed for that. And what I like about it, and I think what we all agree we like about it, I encourage the faculty to have the students post the links to the faculty right from the very beginning. So that way we can just go in periodically, and we can just monitor what’s happening on there, and then we can give direct feedback to students about it. So it is, it’s a wonderful tool.

Rebecca: One of the things that you’ve mentioned is this template that you share out, and you mentioned some of the permissions that you allow students to choose. Can you talk about some of the other features of the template itself that you share with students? Like, what are some of the things built into it?

Nikki: Yes, so the template has the tabs already constructed so that students don’t have to work out how to recreate those. Obviously we teach them how to generate new tabs, but the basics are already there. So it has a homepage tab, so we encourage students to post a photograph of themselves and think about how they want to present themselves to a general audience as a student. So they have that, we work on that side of things. And then we just have the tab for the reflective cover page. Then we have the tabs for the individual assignments and their revisions,and then we have the permissions tab. And then we also include on the ePortfolio, this is a new feature, during the pandemic we had a lot of issues with attendance and accommodating students who were sick and who were in quarantine, so what we did was we posted the essentials of the course policies on the ePortfolio. And we had students acknowledge and sign that they had read them, and that they understood what those different policies were for attendance, for assignments, for what they needed to do if they were sick, all of those things we put on their ePortfolio site. So it became a quick reference guide for students that they can just pull it up, and they could see what was required of them. But also for us as faculty when students were suffering, or not keeping on track, or getting to the end of the semester and things were not looking good. We could pull that up, we could see who had signed the pledge and we could say, “Look, policy said that you needed to do this, this, and this, and you didn’t do those things.” And so that helps stem the flow of the great appeals at the end of the semester which I have to deal with. So that worked well for keeping students on track, and keeping that information transparent and clear.

John: And you have it in writing, digital writing.

Nikki: We have it in writing, and the students sign it. So it helps them take accountability for their part in this process. They can’t say, “Oh, I didn’t know about that,” when it’s on the ePortfolio and they’ve signed it. It’s like, “Mm, well apparently at some point you did read this.” So that helps. Not all students read it [LAUGHTER] of course, but at least it’s there though, that’s the important thing. Those documents are not buried somewhere else, they’re visible, they’re right up there. And I think that’s really, really important, and I’m really glad that we decided to do that, especially over the pandemic. It’s been helpful.

John: And I know I always read all the terms and conditions when I sign up for a new software package, and so forth.

Nikki: Of course we do. [LAUGHTER] The other thing that I want to add in there is that, for me, some of the professors do this too, but I have my students create a writing journal tab in their ePortfolio, and they have weekly writing journal prompts in there. And I do that so that students have a safe space just to write, and to reflect on what we’re doing in class, and to apply those ideas to material that they’re interested in. And I set that up because I wanted them to feel like they owned their ePortfolio, that it was their ePortfolio, that it was their personal sort of diary, if you like, of all of their work. So that tab is very important for my classes, and my students enjoy doing that kind of work.

Rebecca: You also mentioned earlier that the work looks professional, so I’m assuming then there’s some stylistic things that are built into the portfolio as well. There’s at least a base look for things, no?

Nikki: There is a very basic look, and I would love to be able to include more design tools in the ePortfolio because we don’t have a choice of font style, we can move our images around [LAUGHTER] to a couple of places. It’s very, very rudimentary, and it would be really lovely if we could add a few more tools in there to make it look even better.

John: So everyone in composition has agreed to use templates, but it sounds like they might use them all differently. Is that correct?

Nikki: Yes. Thankfully, even though the design elements are pretty rudimentary, there are some tools to change the actual overall look within the basic template. The students can change the background image, they can change colors, they can personalize it in a way that suits them which is really nice. So yes, that’s fun, and those are good skills to teach the students as well.

John: What about different sections of the course? Is there a standardization in terms of how the platform is used? Or does that vary from instructor to instructor to some extent?

Nikki: It varies from instructor to instructor depending on their comfortability with technology, and how they want to integrate the ePortfolio into their program. I’m not a standardization sort of person, but we do have… the basic elements for assessment are standardized, they have to have those specific elements for assessment. But apart from that they are free to use those ePortfolios as they wish, and that’s the way that I want it to be.

Rebecca: One of the things that might be helpful for listeners too, earlier you were talking about your assessment process, and that people from other sections review work, that you’re reviewing work of the students of other instructors. So I’m wondering if you’d talk a little bit about the logistics of how that actually works. Because I think for some folks it can be such a big undertaking, so hearing stories of how other people organize those sorts of things can be helpful.

Nikki: Yes, so first of all students have to be eligible for an ePortfolio review, that’s the first step. So students have to have completed all of the assignments and all of their requirements, like the library instruction, oral presentation, all of those things. The student has to have at least a D to be able to be eligible. So that sort of weeds out some of the stuff. And then what the faculty do is we take seven portfolios per class, and that’s a random selection, so you take the first student on your roster, and then every fourth student gets to go in that pile. So each faculty member has seven students randomly selected for ePortfolio assessment. Plus, we have then any student who is borderline, any student that is just clinging on there, or any student that a faculty member is really unsure about, so that goes into the pot too. And then my assistant and I, we create ePortfolio partners and we specifically place, for instance, seasoned faculty members with new TAs. And that’s the way that we do it, so we choose who assesses whose work. And that makes it a very organized system and a fair system, especially for the new TAs who are not sure about what to do, at least they’re working with someone who has experience. So that’s how we do it, and the assessments can take place whenever is convenient for that particular pair, as long as all of the results are all tabulated and submitted by a specific time period. And then after that time period we’ve got some space here to work on ePortfolios that have issues. So once that rudimentary assessment is done then anything anyone is concerned about can be given to my assistant and I, and we’ll go through case by case any of those borderline cases that we’re worried about, we can work on those. So that’s kind of how it works, and it’s a really good system. It works really, really well, it’s very efficient, it’s fair for everybody. At the end of the semester, you know we’re tired, the faculty have already been through all of the ePortfolios and given their verdict, and then we double check with those seven to make sure, it’s really a calibration thing to make sure that everybody’s on the same track. And I need to preface this by saying that all faculty members have to go through a standardized calibration training at two points during the semester, so we make sure that everybody knows how to use the rubric and can apply it effectively. So with those checks and balances it actually works out incredibly well.

John: Are there standard documents that you share with people, and then you see how they evaluated to compare against the benchmarks, for the calibration?

Nikki: Yes, we do. We have a standardized rubric, and then during our retreat sessions we will selectively pick, like, a very, very borderline portfolio for people to assess. We put people in groups, and then we make them grade the ePortfolio with the rubric, and then we discuss it and we talk about what’s working, what’s not working. And if there’s any huge discrepancies in the assessment of those ePortfolios we talk about what was going wrong with those discrepancies. So it’s pretty organized, and it’s pretty efficient.

John: It seems like a really nice way to provide equitable and fair assessments that adhere to the standards that you’re trying to meet. I’m impressed.

Nikki: Thank you.

Rebecca: You talked a little bit about students needing to meet standards to go through the portfolio assessments. Does that essentially equate to their ability to continue on in that particular program?

Nikki: Yes it does. If they’re not meeting the basic requirements for an ePortfolio review, technically it means they’ve failed. And so what we do with those students is we then decide… How did that student fail? Did they fail on their own merit? Or did they fail because they tried and tried and tried but just couldn’t get it? So we have standardized measures here that says, “Okay, so if a student has been trying really hard, and they just didn’t get it, then we will allow that student to repeat the course.” So we have checks and balances there for those students.

John: So this program is used universally in the Composition Program. Have similar practices been adopted by other departments at New Paltz?

Nikki: I’m ashamed to say I don’t know, and the reason for that is because I don’t get out much to see. [LAUGHTER]

John: That’s not uncommon especially during the pandemic.

Nikki: Yeah, I just don’t know, and I feel embarrassed to say that, but I came out of teaching a 4/4 load into this position. So that’ll be one of my next step projects is to figure out who else is using them on campus and talk to them about how they’re using those ePortfolios.

Rebecca: So another thing that is worth considering is… You mentioned that students can choose some privacy settings and things. How long do students have access to these portfolios after they’ve created them?

Nikki: As far as I know students have it for as long as they’re a student.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked about assessment being a primary motivator and maybe some professional skills as being a good motivator for putting ePortfolios in place. But are there other advantages to using student ePortfolios that we should be thinking about?

Nikki: So apart from the ePortfolios for the students being an opportunity to see themselves as professional communicators, to help boost their ethos and their confidence. I think we talked a lot about what the students get from this, but from a faculty’s perspective the ePortfolios are a fantastic tool because they are so accessible, they’re easy to coordinate for assessment, we don’t have to wade through buckets and buckets of paper. And also we don’t have to, [LAUGHTER] I know this sounds like a really minor thing, but when we used to do the paper portfolios we’d do the portfolio assessment, and then we would call the students into our offices to break the news to them whether they’ve passed or not, and give them their paper portfolio back, and a lot of students didn’t come. So we ended up with piles, and piles and piles of portfolios in our offices and it’s like, “Well what do we do with those?” I found it really distressing. You know, if you’ve got four classes and 120 students, and every semester, and then they just pile up, that was distressing. So to switch to the e-system just feels better on my soul, [LAUGHTER] for the planet doing this. But the ePortfolios, they’re just such a good tool for faculty for teaching, for training other faculty, and for sharing what we do with our students with each other, and sharing ideas and seeing what the possibilities are. The ePortfolios just offer so much more potential for pushing what writing and rhetoric is, and what we do with it in the classroom. So from a pedagogical point of view, I can’t imagine going back to paper portfolios. It’s just a fantastically amazing, creative, and soul-satisfying tool to have at your disposal.

John: That’s a really nice, positive note to end on.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, What’s next?

Nikki: Well, so last summer my colleague Rachel Rigolino and I used Hawksites to develop an online tutor training site because we need more TA tutors in our system to help with the writing program, and that was really successful. And so what we want to do now is to extend that. We would like to develop a Hawksite for our TAs so that we can put all of their innovative teaching ideas into a Hawksite, so that it’s accessible to everybody for sharing ideas. And that’s a really big project. So that’s our next big step, to do that.

Rebecca: Sounds like it’ll be really helpful, and really exciting to work on.

Nikki: I think so. I think it will be vital. [LAUGHTER]

John: This sounds like a really good program, and thank you for joining us, and thank you for sharing this with us.

Nikki: Thank you, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much.

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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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

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225. A Sea of Troubles

Posted in critical thinking, engagement, learning, motivation, pedagogy, teaching, writing
February 2, 2022

Students sometimes see our courses as abstract, irrelevant, and separate from their lives. In this episode, Bill and Elizabeth James join us to discuss a teaching approach that explicitly connects literature with contemporary culture and students’ lived experiences. Bill and Elizabeth are both public high school teachers in Stockton, California, and the authors of A Sea of Troubles: Pairing Literary and Informational Texts to Address Social Inequality.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Students sometimes see our courses as abstract, irrelevant, and separate from their lives. In this episode, we discuss a teaching approach that explicitly connects literature with contemporary culture and students’ lived experiences.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Bill and Elizabeth James. They are both public high school teachers in Stockton, California, and the authors of A Sea of Troubles: Pairing Literary and Informational Texts to Address Social Inequality. Welcome, Bill. And Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Thank you for having us.

Bill: Thank you very much.

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

Elizabeth: Coffee.

Bill: Coffee. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Oh, a coffee pair, I see, mm hmm… best kind of tea ever.

John: Coffee has been dominating our recent podcasts.

Rebecca: It has been.

Elizabeth: Ours is just pure parental desperation. We’re in the last leg of December and teachers and everything. So, I’m pretty sure it’s Folgers. And it’s a necessity.

Rebecca: Do you feel awake then?

Elizabeth: Indeed. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: And, while this is being released a little bit later, we’re recording it during the week before Christmas, so I’m drinking Christmas tea here.

Rebecca: Today, I have a Blue Sapphire, which is a black blend.

John: So we’ve invited you here to discuss A Sea of Troubles. Could you tell us how this book project came about?

Elizabeth: Phil and I are a married couple that also teach at the same high school, and that’s where we met. So when the pandemic started, we were trying to balance home life, and we’ve got two little kids here, and a plague and the move to Zoom teaching, and in the midst of all this there was still the conversation of will the spring exams still be happening, those state tests and what will we do for the kids? …which seems silly, and sort of looking at the tree instead of the forest situation, but Bill had the idea that it spoke to a larger issue of this question in education of incorporating nonfiction. So there was this weird situation where the world was nothing but nonfiction stories of very important things that everybody needed to understand right now, and that the stakes were very, very high. And then we were prepping our students with “here’s an excerpt from a brochure from Yosemite National Park. This will be how you know whether or not you can investigate a nonfiction text.” It’s like, well, one of these things is not like the other. So, it started with his pitch to me was: “It’s like Hamlet, you know, it’s the sea of troubles. We’re just looking at the sea of troubles. What if we just acknowledge that reality?” And then the second half of that is, as long as we’ve known each other, one of the things that has really bonded us as teammates and teachers is this true belief that literature is the way to get kids hooked and improve with their reading and writing and critical thinking, and that all of the se, in our estimation, oftentimes really boring, condescending, sort of lowest common denominator tasks. That’s how you lose kids, you don’t get them. So we had fought this nonfiction incorporation, kind of our whole career being like, “You don’t need it, because if you’re doing literature right, you’ll get all that other stuff.” For once, it seemed like what if we just put all of the really low bar stuff all the way to the side and said, teach Romeo and Juliet, but let’s also talk about the tragedy of growing up and Bildungsroman, and all of these sorts of things that kids are really going to connect with and that are going to serve them well [LAUGHTER] with encountering nonfiction texts. So we tried to bridge that gap and sort of saw a natural marriage there and an opportunity for it, and then started writing furiously from that point forward.

Rebecca: One of the things I really like about this book is the guidance provided around some very specific activities. Can you talk a little bit about how each of the chapters is structured?

Bill: Sure, each chapter pairs a pretty commonly taught literary text that’s probably in schools textbook rooms, probably available, probably being taught at that school, and then pairs that work with a current social issue, a sort of universal social issue that somehow is reflected in that book even if the book is centuries old, and sort of builds a unit around that pairing. For example, we pair Merchant of Venice with racial injustice, A Raisin in the Sun with socioeconomic injustice, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with abuse of power, and so on and so forth.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And I’m so glad we’re here today, because one of the sort of unintended consequences is people, just skimming through, and there’s this idea of like, “Well, this is what I should do with Romeo and Juliet or with To Kill a Mockingbird, and it’s not that at all.” It’s just reimagining these iconic texts that we’ve been teaching for decades now in classrooms, and keeping them fresh and applicable to the world around us. So nothing is mandated as if it should be this, it’s just us, like good teachers, modeling possibilities. And what we hope happens is teachers are welcome to use whatever they want from it, but that it sets them on fire to really look at their syllabus, and throw the baby out with the bathwater and just start again with what these books that they’ve been teaching forever could do and how they could reflect the world today around them and their students.

John: And making those connections for students should make those texts come alive in ways that traditional instruction is not very likely to do. How did you select the specific social issues that you’re using for those connections?

Elizabeth: Yeah, it was hard, actually, in the last leg of it, there’s the part when you’re writing a book where you go, “I had an idea, not a book, leave me alone…” you know, there’s no way we’re going to get this done. By the time it went off to the publisher, we reached out to Rowman and Littlefield and said, “We’ve got an idea. What if we double the length of it? Turns out, we have five extra chapters.” And they said, “You can do a second volume, but we can’t do this this term.” We had to cut a lot we had. My favorite one that we cut, that I hope comes back in some sort of later iteration, is we had Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao paired with Woman Warrior, and it was going to be issues of immigration and first-generation versus second-generation issues. That’s something our student population is intimately concerned with, and all kinds of stuff. At the end, we were looking for things that were most globally applicable. Would you say that’s right?

Bill: Yeah, I think so.

Elizabeth: Yeah. It felt almost arbitrary, what landed, because for the past couple of years, it’s felt like everything is that important right now, so it was hard to narrow it down. I hope that there’s a second book in the near future. [LAUGHTER]

Bill: Yeah. I think at some point we realized that we were following a couple threads, one being otherness and one being abuse of power, and the issues kind of fall into one of those threads.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit more about otherness? That was something that I had picked up on as well. Can you talk about why otherness is important to explore in a writing or a literature class?

Elizabeth: Sure, it wasn’t something I encountered until my post-grad work. I started teaching when I was 23, and feeling my way through the dark, like all sorts of new teachers. I remember thinking, “Well, that makes sense.” I didn’t know there was a name for this sort of common denominator here. And then once I started reading more about it, and studying and writing about it, it just seemed like it spoke to so many things. So I often teach Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and that’s a really great one because it’s on so many levels, an issue of otherness. That didn’t make it into the book because I don’t think I could keep myself to a chapter talking about Beloved but that was the book I used to introduce it to with students, and it resonated so quickly and clearly to a roomful of teenagers. That feeling of implicit and visible power structures that were dominating their lives but slippery, and sometimes could not be held to account and they had all had a coach or a teacher or a friend group that was sort of living through othering one or many people, but they didn’t have the language for it yet. So it became this very natural framework for so much literature, not all of it, but so much of it could be taught through there. And what I loved about the framework is it created this humanity to these books that had been hard to get to. For instance, twitter, generally speaking, is very mad at The Great Gatsby recently. I don’t know if you guys have followed this, like, why are we still teaching this book? And I think those conversations are valid, and we should have those conversations, but my students who… we’re a title one school, they’re socioeconomically disadvantaged, they’re a majority immigrant population. They relate to The Great Gatsby from 100 years ago, and what they connect to at a gut level is that feeling of he’s done everything right, and he’s still being kept out of the clubhouse. Jay Gatsby is a hero and a fool all in one and look at how they’re othering him and it doesn’t matter that the houses don’t match, the yearning for your merit being enough to bring you in, does match and they still highly connect to it. They believe that it is then a tragedy that they are reading and they recognize it as a tragedy. And so that’s the sort of reimagining that we hope teachers start doing. As we get into these conversations, and school boards are going crazy about, don’t show this to my kid, and this is what’s wrong, and all of the sort of noise that is happening all of a sudden around education. What can students learn and how is it reflecting the world around them? That should be the first and the last beat of that conversation as far as I’m concerned

John: How do you recommend introducing the concept of otherness to students?

Elizabeth: Well, the exercise that’s in the book, and I like this one, is just a quick write, and I say: Write, not for a grade or anything, but just as clearly as you can, write about a time that you felt othered, that you felt like you were being excluded. It can be at a macro level, or a micro level, write it in first-person present tense, it’s happening right now, and focus on concrete details.” And they do and the roomful of teenagers tells their sad story about the thing that happened to them that changed their life, and sometimes we share out or sometimes I say, “Thumbs up if it was this, or just sort of those broad stroke things, and the room just sort of lights up going, “Yes, I too, have been wronged. I too have been excluded and it is tragic, and finally I’m seen.” And I have them flip the paper over and I say, “Okay, we’re going to do it again, this time, write about a time you othered somebody else, passively or actively, including but not limited to, you watched it happen, and you let it happen. Write about that.” And every time a roomful of 35 kids, it’s that, “oh no” kind of recognition, [LAUGHTER] passing their face, and they all have a story to tell about that too. And they never think about that story. And they never connect their participation in othering as also tragic. So it becomes this very natural discussion of “How can this be a universal experience? How can everybody go through it and recognize the hurt of it, and yet, simultaneously, everybody participate in it to another person? Why do we not learn this lesson? Why is this, throughout time and space?” You know, when we study Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, we’re going to see it and we’re going to see it in Junot Diaz, or whatever contemporary stories are in The New Yorker this week, there’s still issues of otherness. Why can’t people move past doing this to each other? And then that creates a sort of shared humanity around whatever unit we’re going into, and it seems to be pretty powerful for kids.

Bill: Something else we try to come back to a lot in the book is the use of language in the service of otherness and how different ways that language, from propaganda posters to a tweet, can be used to “other” groups of people, and the effect of that. Which just seems like something important for the kids to be able to recognize and be aware of.

Rebecca: And probably it’s something they hadn’t considered previously. I know that as I was reading through the examples, and although I’m not an English or literature teacher, I do teach in the arts, and I was thinking about all the ways that the same kinds of things can be done with other media.

Elizabeth: Absolutely, and that’s really the goal. I mean, I would love them all to be students of literature, and get their doctorate in it. I want them all in elbow patches standing at a lectern, someplace, loving it, but on the other hand, I would sure settle for the hundreds of kids we get to teach each year going out into their communities and recognizing when they are being manipulated, and when somebody has figured out a pattern to enact action, and that they can recognize that and then critically consider whether or not they agree with that or not, themselves, instead of being swept up in repetition or phrasing or syntax. Just because it gets said a lot doesn’t make it true, which is something they’re coming to.

John: Could you give us some other examples of some of the pairings between literature and contemporary issues.

Bill: Another chapter is on authoritarianism, and pairs 1984 and Animal Farm with that issue, and the idea behind that one is that 1984 is a book that we’ve taught for over a decade, but for many years we would teach the book through a literary lens. We would usually have some culminating assessment where the students write their own dystopian short story, or they do research on totalitarianism in the 20th century. Then around 2018, it just became apparent that we need to be looking at these leaders around the world who are just repeating exactly what is in this book, and students need to be researching that, and making those connections. I think the first time I did it, I did that version of the unit. It was right after Jamal Khashoggi had been killed. So we had kids presenting on that and using information that had come out that day in their presentation and connecting it to the novel.

Elizabeth: Yeah, it was really powerful because people were running up to Bill being like, “We need 15 minutes cause we’re reading this article, and we have to cross-reference it. So, they had to change their presentation because it was happening in real time. What a beautiful example of: “We have Orwell’s text, and we can still be English teachers teaching 1984.” We can still do our exercise on character foils, and the three-act structure and we can still discuss syntax and ironic juxtaposition and we can do all of the sort of English teachery things we need, but that does not mean we need to sacrifice how the art speaks to the world and how the world speaks to the art which is so much more engaging for students and arguably so much more important.”

Bill: We also have a chapter on genocide and ethnic internment in Night and Farewell to Manzanar and we have gender inequality in The Handmaid’s Tale, and then our last chapter is sort of more abstract. It’s taking To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet, and then looking at just the tragedy of growing up.

Elizabeth: I think that’s landed as my favorite, maybe primarily because when you’re an English teacher, you know you can count on having to do your Gatsby unit, and your Romeo and Juliet unit, and your Mockingbird unit. I had started to feel really stale in all three of those things and feel like, “Ok, this is the part where I do this tap dance… then they’ll say this, and then I’ll do that, and I’ll say…” and I love teaching, in part, because if it ever feels stale, you just get to recreate what the job is, which is great. But, this is a lens that I found, to begin with, with Romeo and Juliet, and it just made so much sense, the thing that kids will say is they’re just stupid. They’re not really in love, it’s lust. Why are we still reading the story and calling it a tragedy if it’s just two dumb teenagers? And, the conversation became: “But they didn’t know that. So does it matter? If it feels real to them, does it matter?” Some of the nonfiction that we paired was studies that said that for a teenager falling in love does the same thing to the brain chemistry as doing cocaine. That it feels like a high, that it creates a physical high to that extreme, and they were reading this biochemical research about brain activity in teenagers. And then it became this question of, “Well, what’s real anyway?” We can see this, because we have the prologue in the beginning, saying that there’s gonna be blood on the floor at the end. They don’t know that. They are right in their present tense, doing the best they can. Kids really appreciated the dignity that that gave things that they were experiencing in their lives right now. Because they might be going to math class, high on love cocaine, and they can’t learn statistics that day. I mean, that is what’s happening, it’s such a weird time to be alive, and to give them sort of the language to discuss how distracting and distracted and very real it is to them. And then the other thing we talked about was the secondary storyline in that play and Mockingbird is growing out of relationships, childhood intimacies, and we paid a lot of attention to Romeo and Mercutio, who are established as best buds in the beginning and the tragedy of Romeo just not confiding in his friend yet. He’s become a man who’s in love with a woman and partner there, but Mercutio cannot understand why truth is not being told… the betrayal of an intimate friendship as one person grows past needing that friendship as their primary relationship in their life. And I’m watching kids faces, just really soak it in because then the bell rings, and they go to lunch, and they live a manifestation of watching their friend go to the boyfriend and girlfriend and leave them alone at the table, and the pain of that. All of a sudden Mercutio picking a fight to prove his loyalty, it makes so much more sense. I’m not fighting with these kids who are below grade level, who are struggling with grammar and stuff. I do not have to decode the Shakespearean language, they can find it in that big fight scene, and it is moving them. So it wasn’t necessarily a social issue. But we wanted to put it in there as a universal experience. It’s both necessary to go through the tragedy of leaving childhood behind, but it is a tragedy, and something does sort of die and never come back. It would be terrible if it didn’t happen, but it’s got to happen. And then in the midst of COVID, and lockdown and going to school on Zoom, one of the tragedies for us was just watching all of these students and even our own children, recognizing the world was a scary place, and the stakes were high and losing some of their childhood as a result of it, because the world was closing in. So we wanted to include that chapter to give voice to that sort of unspoken tragedy of how do you stay a kid in this world during this time?

Bill: And another angle to that chapter is, Jim Finch is 12 years old and Juliet is 14 years old. So we’re usually teaching these works to students about that age, and just seeing those characters, particularly Jim Finch, just realize the ugliness of the world that the grown ups have given them and have created for them. I think that’s pretty relevant to our students as well. One of the connections we make in the book is to the students in Parkland.

Elizabeth: Yeah, we end the book with a discussion of the Parkland students, the survivors who went to school that day, and so many before them, and probably so many after them who are going to have to deal with this reality of this place of learning colliding with the world around them that is so adult and so unimaginable. They’re going to have to realize that the two worlds collide, there’s no getting out of that. We ended the book with them because it was this metaphor for what we think we need to give kids. Not a world full of tragedy, but an absolute belief that they’re ready to encounter the world as it is, and an absolute belief that they are smart enough to engage in the world around them today right now. That they are worthy of having a seat at the table. That they can recognize change that needs to happen, and that they have the power to enact change, and that the world needs to give them that recognition and that dignity. That the world needs more kids who are ready to encounter the sea of troubles, and [LAUGHTER] whether or not the kids are ready, the sea of troubles is waiting for them. So we’ve never had a classroom full of students that we didn’t think, “Oh, okay, we’ll be okay. Look, who’s coming.” You know, it’s the thing that makes it the best job in the world, hour after hour, just a whole new batch of wonderful kids walks in the door that you trust so much, and that you just want the best for, but sometimes the best isn’t waiting. So we really wanted to create a book that was for teachers, but also spoke to what we thought students needed and deserved. I wish that we could protect them from the tragedy of growing up, but I don’t think we can. So now we’ve got to trust that they’re ready to meet it and do everything we can in service of that.

John: And I think this book helped prepare them for that yourself.

Rebecca: Yeah, I really love the agency that is afforded to students throughout the book, and in the way that you’re even speaking about enacting some of these kinds of lessons in class.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think that’s really important. We try to anchor everything on inquiry based, you know, not just to stand and deliver, but to give the foundation and then say, “Trust your brains, go find it. Show me what you got.” That’s the other part that just makes it great. I tell students, “We’re not doing language arts.” I mean, that’s part of it, but we’re studying fine art. And so, art speaks to your audience, and that’s going to change and evolve. Your reaction to the art is significant and important. By the end of the term, we’re always like: “Well, what did you think of it? Now, critique it. You have the language for it, and the ability to do that, like a scholar, and this art is for you. It’s not for you to recite what I told you it was about.” So that’s always my favorite part where they come in hot with their opinions about it.

Rebecca: So you’ve given us a lot of examples in a high school or middle school context. Can you talk a bit about how we might use some of these strategies in a college setting?

Elizabeth: Yeah. I teach it to a junior college as well. I think it’s almost a lens more structured for university study. So sometimes the content gets more easily absorbed and it’s much less awkward to discuss with people who are no longer living with their parents. So, for instance, I just wrapped up a Handmaid’s Tale unit at the college I work at. One of the tasks was to find… because we were still on online learning,you know, discussion boards and trying to keep it relevant and real time and everything… post an article from the last two weeks, anywhere around the world, where you see something “handmade-y” going on around the world. Something that sounds like it could happen in Gilead, or certainly Gilead would go: “We should try that.” And then we’ll have a discussion about it online. And everybody came up with everything, and I would love to say, “these were not domestic articles” …some of them were. And it created a lot of buy-in for “I’m taking my English 101 course. I’m marching through this thing I have to do for my degree, but at the same time, it’s a good example of a beautiful piece of art, so beautifully written, really compelling, and constantly evolving to reflect the world around us.” Students really got into it. I would have just scrolled past that story on twitter, I would not have even opened. It would’ve just been like another piece of noise to bum me out. But, then to engage with it and see it’s sort of global context was eye opening to them and that was really, really powerful. I think it’s weird the books we decide to teach at high school vs. college. It’s always seemed bizarre to me that Romeo and Juliet comes up when kids are freshmen. I mean, it’s very racy stuff. I’m comfortable with it, but you could also certainly teach it at university level. So we’ve tried to put in iconic books that you would get throughout the continuum of education to speak to teachers. We want it to be usable to teachers wherever they are. So there’s this sort of Farewell to Manzanar and To Kill a Mockingbird, but then there’s also One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Handmaid’s Tale and stuff like that that you wouldn’t see until you were older, and could speak to a number of issues. But, hopefully, teachers won’t feel like it’s written just for high school. I don’t think it is. At university, you have so much more freedom in your syllabus to really pick a lens and go for it. So I hope college teachers pick it up and give it a shot.

Bill: On the other end of the spectrum, Liz teaches at the college level, and she’s using a lot of this same stuff. She teaches Merchant of Venice and Handmaid’s Tale in her English 101. Then on the other end, I teach a weird school where we have middle school kids and high school kids. So I teach high school and middle school. So like, for example, our entire Night and Farewell to Manzanar chapter is actually an eighth grade unit. So I think we’ve got stuff for middle school, high school, and college level.

Elizabeth: Yeah, we purposefully did not put what grade each unit was used for, because we want teachers to imagine how it can reflect their classroom and their students. It’s weird to put it out there like “This is how we do it” because the whole point of the book is there’s an idea that nonfiction standards can be and should be met in the classroom, but it must be authentic, and it shouldn’t be superficial, and assuming that they can’t read or they can’t think. Let’s have it reflect the world and our current unit. So we wanted to make sure that we just modeled the idea, and our hope is anybody who purchases or reads the book is going: “You know what that makes me think of is this unit that I do that is not in this book, but what if I… fill in the blank…” and sort of empowers them to reimagine what the classroom can be in the 21st century, without leaving the art behind? The kids love the art and they need the art too, right, Rebecca?

Rebecca: Definitely.

Elizabeth: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That’s what I was thinking. Yeah. While I was reading the book I, and browsing through the various chapters, I was really in that space thinking, “Wow, this is a really great way to bring value to the arts, which often are devalued and a way to better communicate how the arts actually help us understand the world around us, because it makes it so explicit.”

Elizabeth: Yeah.

John: And I think more generally, this approach could be more productively used in pretty much any discipline so that people are not studying the content of their discipline in an abstract context, but relating it to things in the world around them and I think it’s something that we probably all should try to do a little bit more of.

Elizabeth: Yeah, we’ve been recently running some professional development workshops for other content areas of how to bring in current nonfiction texts, to discuss the content they have. People have been on board with it. I thought we were going to really struggle in the math and sciences, but it turns out, when you start that conversation, there’s so much. The problem is where’s the time and there’s only so many minutes and everything feels so finite, but the content of real-world applicability of these concepts in the sciences, and, I mean, climate alone. The teachers were really enjoying the idea of “the reason we learn basic chemistry is because it has these effects later on.” So I’m getting kind of excited to talk to a broader audience of educators about it, I think it could be very cool.

Rebecca: I also like kind of the opposite of that. Maybe a space that’s already very focused on nonfiction, and bringing in fiction as a way to explore through story and bring some of the concepts to life and see them in context. So sometimes we’re not always able to do something that’s actually in real life or have that specific example or it’s hard to envision that without maybe the story world around it.

Elizabeth: Absolutely.

Rebecca: Fiction can really help with that.

Elizabeth: Yeah, we have a team teacher in the history department that we work with a lot, and we’re constantly pairing up the history syllabus with the literary syllabus, and then doing units where there’s a commonly graded assessment in both classrooms and they have to demonstrate skills from both disciplines. The students always say they learned so much more when they took those sort of fake parameters off of “I’m in history class, and I do this, I’m in English class, and I do that.” When one starts reflecting the other, it really opens up the world to them and is the best learning that they get.

Rebecca: Yeah. So you’ve talked a little bit about some culminating projects and assessments that you’ve recommended in relationship to these literary pairings? Can you talk about maybe one other example?

Bill: Sure, some of our chapters just have a traditional essay as a culminating project or a culminating assignment, but one example would be our Night and Farewell to Manzinar chapter. It ends with an awareness campaign for what is happening to the Rohingya and to the Uighur in Myanmar and China respectively. So the the unit obviously, is about the Holocaust and it’s about Japanese-American internment in World War II. The students research those topics as they’re reading the books. Then of course, we read those books through a literary lens, but then it ends with looking at what is happening today in these particular countries to these particular groups of people. It’s a very interesting unit because I did it two years ago before the pandemic, and then I’m doing it again right now. In both cases, I was able to use articles that were published that day in class. Last week, we did an article that was published that day about the Rohingya suing Facebook for I believe, I think it was $150 billion for not suppressing hate speech enough, and leading to people losing their lives. The idea behind it is students create a presentation, create the visual aids for an awareness campaign on our campus, with the idea that most people don’t know about these atrocities that are happening right now in our world. And then they do it in class for a grade, but then when they go out. We get other teachers to sign up and they go to other classes in other disciplines and do the presentations. They do them at department meetings on department meeting days. They go off to different departments and do it for teachers. It’s a real awareness campaign. In the end, we have posters around the campus, and it’s a fun project. It’s real world-y, and it’s a nice alternative to the essay.

Elizabeth: Yeah, and it teaches advocacy and that their voice matters, and that they have information that the world needs to hear about.

John: One of the other examples, as you mentioned, in your book is abuse of power. How could you possibly have found any contemporaneous examples of that?

Elizabeth: You know, I’m telling ya… The problem was, what to put in and what not to put in. And like we said at the beginning, we pitched a two volume edition right off the bat, because how does one choose? In the text we included a chapter that uses One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and I chose that one because I remember seeing that movie, and weeping and absolutely knowing McMurphy was a hero, and absolutely knowing nurse Ratchet was a villain. But we started talking about it through the lens of, is anything ever going to happen to nurse Ratchet? Is a boss ever going to know what’s actually going on? What is in her HR file? Probably nothing but commendation. It’s a great text because it speaks to the experience of not having anything tangible to point to wrongdoing, but knowing in your gut, in your soul, that this is not on the up and up and that this is not right, that an abuse of power is taking place. So I would talk to my students about have you ever seen a teacher hunt a kid? From kindergarten to today, have you ever seen a teacher have somebody in their sight that is always getting in trouble, that will get called out for a thing that two people could have done five minutes before or five minutes after, but that kid’s gonna get nailed for it? And every single kid had had a coach or a teacher or a babysitter who they had watched pick on somebody they had power over. Then we looked at a lot of nonfiction articles and research about what power does to the brain. Which was something I was interested in learning about in the past few years… how heady that could be for people and how it often leads to corruption and a lack of empathy, and the inability to imagine the experience of others. We looked at that Stanford Prison Experiment that does show up in college textbooks right away, but my kids hadn’t seen it yet. It was new to them and they couldn’t believe how quickly people bought into pretend roles that a person and a person walk into a room and one becomes a prisoner, and one a big prison guard, and what people will do with a title and a badge. It spoke heavily to that. In the midst of writing that chapter, the George Floyd story happened. I mean, I had a draft of it, and again it sure isn’t the first time this has happened, it won’t be the last time it happens. There’s the tragedy of that. We spoke in my class about the group of people who are on the sidewalk, begging that police officer to get off of his neck… filming it, but nobody rushes him because he’s a cop, you know what I mean? How can he be completely outnumbered… the numbers are not in his favor… of people going: “You have to stop, you have to stop, you’re hurting him.” And because of who he is in society, versus who they are, they can’t save a man’s life. That happened after I had a draft of this. So when we talk about using the art to reflect the world. I didn’t have to bring that connection up, my students brought it up as soon as I opened that Zoom link the next morning. They knew they had just seen a Ratchet. They knew they had just seen a sacrifice, a human sacrifice, in the face of perceived concepts of power and they were moved by it in a way that I’m so glad they were. So we talked about them sort of experiencing it. When I ask them, if they’ve ever seen it, if they’ve ever seen a teacher hunt a kid, most of them have and the next question is, “Well, what did you do about it?” I have yet to have anybody say, I talked to the principal, I wrote a letter, I stayed after class… they don’t do anything, they let it happen… [LAUGHTER] because there is a perceived power structure, and nobody hands out a pamphlet on the first day of school and says: “Be quiet.” All have this implicit messaging that we get from infancy onwards. The other thing that I really like about that unit is we get to talk to kids about anger, which is not something that anybody ever does, and the righteousness of anger. Clearly the destructive qualities of it too. But, Cuckoo’s Nest is a story about people constantly being told to calm down and being called crazy when they get upset. That feels very relevant too, right now. Sometimes, we should get pissed and I think it’s okay to talk to students about that, no matter their age, that some anger exists for a reason, and that anger is a valid emotion. It can destroy things, and you have to be careful of it, but my God, if we can’t get angry at some things, then what are we doing here? Aren’t we all just sort of sedated? Again, this idea of starting from a place of really believing in the dignity and quality of our students, as people, and as people who are absolutely ready to talk about this stuff as adults, because the adult world is encroaching and has encroached, even if we’ve never given voice to it. So that, to me, stays sort of the goal, I think. I didn’t know I knew that when we were writing it but now with some perspective it feels like the goal of the whole text is to demonstrate how proud we are of the work that we get to do almost primarily because we trust the students can do it and trying to show other teachers to grant that grace to students as well and believe in them enough to equip them for that sea of troubles.

John: What was it like time writing this during the pandemic?

Bill: On one hand, you know, it probably benefited us on the amount of time we had at home to work on it. On the other hand, as we’ve talked about before, it’s a book where we’re trying to connect literature to the real world, and just so much kept coming at us in the real world. It just kept shifting these chapters, we’ve got these drafts on Google Docs that we’re just rewriting daily, as the situation underneath it keeps shifting.

Elizabeth: Yeah, our first book, Method to the Madness, was about getting kids just to write and critically think and sort of some strategies for that. And we had a babysitter who could come into the home and watch the children and then we would leave the home and sit at Starbucks for three hours on Sunday and go and go and go and go and then return to our home with our small children. At one point, I took a picture of Bill and I have our laptops sort of balanced precariously on our knees, and there’s like a kid hanging from the tree house and another kid pulling his leg, and I said, I hope it’s a book at the end. This is how this is going, one sentence at a time. Early mornings, late nights, slightly distracted. It’s a blur. I know, we wrote fast, and we were trying to both make it feel timeless and timely. But, we didn’t want it to not make sense five years from now for teachers that pick it up. But, I think everybody just experienced a time warp right? How long did it take? a month? 10 months? I don’t know. I know I was wearing the same sweat pants. [LAUGHTER] But, it was crazy. And then paired with that, just this real belief that we wanted to get it out there quick because whenever we went back to the classroom, we were going to assume that our experience would mirror everybody’s experience of “It can’t be the same anymore. We have to evolve into teaching through this.” So we wanted to get it into as many hands as possible, as everybody makes that weird adjustment.

Rebecca: We always wrap up by asking: What’s next?

Elizabeth: I was exhausted by the time we sent it off, but now I’m pretty pumped about how it’s being received. It’s so cool doing stuff like this, because, again, we work three doors down from each other and we come back to this house. It’s been such a shared experience teaching this stuff and writing about this stuff to see it out in the world and teachers all over the country really enjoying it and starting to use it. It makes me want to dig out that second volume and get all those chapters we cut out and I think I’m ready. I’m almost ready.

Bill: I think that the first book we did together came out in 2016. I think it took a lot and then when we were done, it was like “Okay, now we never have to do that again.”

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Bill: And then it took about two years and I was like “Oh well maybe we have ideas and we’ll do another one and then I guess you’re coming around to that point, again. Because I was after we finished this one, I said “Okay now we never have to do this again.”

John: It sounds like you have a good start at a second volume. So you have some momentum going

Elizabeth: Yeah, we’re not out of troubles yet. I haven’t come to the end of the list.

Rebecca: Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that list has a bottom. [LAUGHTER]

John: …a rising ocean of troubles.

Elizabeth: Indeed. Credit John with our next title. [LAUGHTER]

John: We really enjoyed reading your book and I’d love to see more of this coming out and thank you for joining us.

Elizabeth: Thank you for having us, this is really special

Bill: Yeah, thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

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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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

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220. Perceptions of Education

Posted in engagement, equity, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, teaching, writing
December 29, 2021

As faculty, we have our own views of the role of education in our society, but do students share these views? In this episode, Josh Eyler joins us to discuss his first-year writing class that invites students to deeply examine their understanding of the role of education in society.

Josh is the Director of Faculty Development, the Director of the ThinkForward Quality Enhancement Plan, and a faculty member of the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Mississippi. He is also the author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective Teaching.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: As faculty, we have our own views of the role of education in our society, but do students share these views? In this episode, we talk with one faculty member about a first-year writing class that invites students to deeply examine their understanding of the role of education in society.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Josh Eyler. Josh is the Director of Faculty Development, the Director of the ThinkForward Quality Enhancement Plan, and a faculty member of the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Mississippi. He is also the author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective Teaching. Welcome back, Josh.

Josh: Thanks, Rebecca. Thanks, John. Thanks for having me.

John: We’re happy to have you back. Today’s teas are… Josh, are you drinking tea?

Josh: Ha ha ha… [LAUGHTER] You know the answer to this. I am not. Although I feel like I’m always letting you two down on this one. But much like Ted Lasso, I still have my water. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: At least it’s a nice healthy choice.

Josh: True.

Rebecca: And the base of tea. I have a new one today, I have Blue Sapphire. It’s a black blend, also from this new tea shop.

John: So it’s not a black and blue blend.

Rebecca: There’s something blue in it, some sort of flower, I think, I hope. [LAUGHTER]

John: Some type of beetle, probably, yeah.

John: And I have Twining’s Prince of Wales tea today.

Rebecca: That’s a good choice, John… an unusual choice for you, though, might I add.

John: It is, we’ve got all this tea sitting around for the last year and a half, and I don’t want it to go bad. So I’m trying to hit into some of the less commonly consumed teas. And it’s good.

Rebecca: So earlier this fall, you posted a note on Twitter about an assignment that you were doing with students about defining education. And I was hoping you could tell us more. I was at first very intrigued, and now I just want to know more. So here you are.

Josh: Well, the context is that I was teaching a first year writing course, and with about 20 first-year students, most of whom had been on Zoom for a year and a half with their high schools. And so we were all together for the first time, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to build the course around the idea of education. It’s always good for a writing class to engage with students’ real-world experiences anyway. And this, to me, kind of intersected with their experiences during the pandemic, and something that they have experienced themselves for 12 or more years. So, we built it around education… really took a number of different approaches. We read Paulo Freire and bell hooks, and even Plato, The Apology of Socrates to sort of get at the political implications of education and citizenship. And it all culminated actually with an assignment where they had to draw on some of the readings we did and go find some resources as well to build their own kind of philosophy of education. What is the purpose of education? So we started with, and I think this is the assignment that caught your eye… as someone trained as a medievalist, I love etymology, and education has a fascinating and wonderful etymology as an English term. It comes from two different Latin words that got conflated over time and sprinkled with a little French as it came into the English language. But those two Latin terms are educare and educere. And educare, In Latin, means the training or rearing of a child, the raising of a child, and educare means to lead out of or away from, and the combination of those two are just fascinating to me, because one, educere is deeply philosophical. What does it mean to lead out or away from? What is the thing that we are leaving from and where are we going? And the other one is deeply pragmatic and logistical. What is the actual pragmatic purpose of education? And that is to help children grow into adults who can build meaningful lives for themselves and the community in which they live. And so that assignment was essentially to look at these two terms, think about them and argue for how we can or cannot see them at play in our current educational systems. And so many of them kind of split this I’m into two, really looking at each term on its own and came up with some really great insights, I thought. So, that’s kind of where we started and then worked our way up to what is the purpose of education from their perspective.

John: Could you tell us some stories about that first assignment and how students responded?

Josh: Well, the first response to it was wide eyed looks of horror, I think, [LAUGHTER] that their first major writing assignment in college was gonna dig into Latin etymology. [LAUGHTER] But once we got beyond that, I think the essays were in a number of wonderful directions. The analysis of that logistical pragmatic term was, as you would expect, I think, that looking at their last 12 years of education is really a step-by-step process to better inform them and better prepare them for the world. It was the philosophical term, that educere, the leading out of or away from where things got really fun and interesting. So, for some of them, it meant leading to or giving people the tools to a better life, whatever better or more meaningful meant to them. For some, it meant leading out of a forum way of seeing the world and to a new perspective on things they had never considered before. And some of them overlapped and intersected with those ideas. But that to me was the jumping off point that I wanted them to see at the outset of the semester, that education is not just about, here’s your book, here’s your test, here’s your assignment, that there’s a bigger reason that we do this. And some of that reason we can all agree on, and some of it is also deeply personal to the people who are going through it. So, that was a nice kind of setup to the semester, as we went on.

Rebecca: What was that conversation like in class, as they were digging through their different perspectives and understanding that they didn’t have the same perspectives.

Josh: It was a couple of different things. One is that they were intrigued that they were even being asked about their education. And so maybe I should have expected it. But we did spend a significant amount of time at the beginning of the semester, really addressing that head on, that they never been asked to think critically about their educational process. And so we talked about why that might be and why it benefits people to think critically about the systems that they are a part of, or are placed in, or enter into willingly. And we took some typical facets of education, standardized testing, the five-paragraph essay was one that we really started with, because its big shadow, like Mount Doom, looms over writing courses everywhere. And so that was a useful one to say, “Well, why have you been taught this? What purpose does it serve in high school?” And those are both potentially instructive, but also potentially harmful purposes in terms of their future work. And so we started with that. We, of course, talked about grades… that was a major avenue of discussion, both because of the subject matter, and this question about thinking about education critically, but because the course was ungraded, as well. And so I was asking them from day one to continually reflect on their experience with grades, how grades have functioned for them in their education, and how might we think about them differently. Once we got the ball rolling, and they thought, “Hey, it’s okay to say things that may not be entirely positive about being in school,” they just ran with it. And so it was really meaningful conversations, I think, from there.

Rebecca: What a great way to establish community at the beginning of a class. It’s like a shared experience, sorting through the words, but also education as a shared experience. So it seems like a great way to establish community, a sense of belonging, right up front, before diving into some of the big projects that I know you had ready and waiting for them.

Josh: It was fun. And I do think that because education is a shared experience, it did allow for some of that community building that was really organic.

John: Did they come to a shared definition of education by the end as a result of that discussion?

Josh: No, they didn’t. And that, to me, is a good thing. I think that really what we can do, and what departments of education from across the country can do is problematize the idea of the systems of education, really seeing it moving from a perspective where I am a lone student understanding my own experience in school to these are systems that have been around for a long time, and here’s how the systems function, and let’s look really critically at that. Whether we.arrive at the same conclusion about a different element of the system is less important than seeing it, not as an individual experience, but something that is much larger than that.

John: You mentioned ungrading. Do you think that doing this within the context of an ungraded class may have helped increase student motivation and engagement with the topic?

Josh: Well, I think maybe a little. I think that once you begin to critically interrogate the idea of grades, you sort of open the door to anything and everything in terms of assessing the different aspects of education. And so I used ungrading, I’m not a sole advocate for ungrading methods. I think there are lots of models that people can find. But I do think that, in this case, they knew that I myself was adamantly questioning the idea of traditional grading. I think they felt more comfortable in engaging in these other types of conversations.

Rebecca: And I believe that you ramped up to the end of this semester in doing a large project, a podcast project, right?

Josh: Well, that could have been a part of it. There was a multi-modal project in there that the department utilizes in the first-year writing classes. No one took me up on the podcasting. [LAUGHTER] But, there are lots of really interesting projects involving social media, video, and things like that.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the structure of that project and what the choices were, what the parameters were?

Josh: Pretty open, actually, although we did think critically about the use of social media and some of those other modes. Right prior to that, they had finished their biggest essay of the semester on their perspective on the purpose of education. And then the multimodal assignment was asking them to cast that argument in a different genre, essentially taking the argument and expressing it in some other way. Many did a series of memes and reflected on that. Some did video, I had two people do a TikTok kind of encapsulation of their arguments. So it was really trying to just say, “How do we communicate this in other kinds of media?” But it all went back to that bigger assignment about the purpose of education.

John: In one of my classes this semester, we spent about two weeks talking about the economic role of education in terms of its impact on earnings and so forth. And my class was pretty evenly divided between those who bought into what we call the human capital model, that education makes you more productive, it increases your skills, and that’s why people get paid more as a result of having more education, and the signaling model, which suggests that education provides a certification that you’re of a high level of ability, which ties back to that grading concept… that basically you’re being assessed in terms of how able you are. And I was really surprised at how many students bought into that latter model, who saw education not really so much as increasing their skills and giving them new ways of looking at the world, but they saw it primarily as just a credential that’s going to give them higher earnings. I think in other disciplines, that’s probably less common. Most of the students in my class are business majors, and they’re often taking their courses with a very specific career goal in mind. Was that an issue for some of the students in your class?

Josh: Yes, to some extent, and that is also kind of a drum that’s been beat for them for at least some of their education. But I had quite a few business majors in my class. And so this came up fairly often, actually. And what I would say is, some students, probably by the end of the semester, really embraced that model,that here are the things that you need to do in order to achieve that certification that signals that you have been adequately prepared for whatever career you are pursuing. But the reason that I stuck Paulo Freire, bell hooks and Plato in there is because it’s really hard to read any of those essays and think this is all the education is for. You may disagree that the connections between education and politics and citizenship is less relevant, but I don’t think you can argue that it’s not relevant after you read them. So some, I think, still embrace the signaling models. It became, I don’t want to say more nuanced, but it did become more complex for them.

Rebecca: So in their final papers and projects, what were some of the conclusions that they arrived at? You mentioned at the start that they were fairly diverse in their response.

Josh: Yes, well, it really ranged from the perspectives that John was just talking about to one of my favorite, and I’ll paraphrase, because I can’t remember the sentence exactly. So it ranged from that up to that “it helps us to be the best version of ourselves,” and all the ways that the classes that we take in the schools and universities that we go to help with that. It kind of comes back to the beginning of the semester, too. And if you think about those twin ideas about education, the signalling/certification model is very much aligned with the pragmatic training of a child approach to education. And I don’t fault them for that, I think that’s part of what’s communicated to them. I think it’s part of the way our society is set up. And then you have this other more philosophical notion of education. And then some of the purposes of education essays really, ultimately aligned more with that particular approach to education, that perspective on it. And so the best version of ourselves helps us to discover what we want to be, which is sort of the same, but also career- and life-oriented, right? What it is that we want to be and what we want to do, and so there’s lots of different contours all along that spectrum.

John: What were some things they saw education as leading people away from as part of that more philosophical approach.

Josh: Some of them thought that it was old habits of mind, old ways of thinking, old methods, old perspectives, to getting more diverse perspectives, diverse viewpoints, and thereby broadening our sense of the world and our understanding of the world. For some it was that, for others…. they were specifically talking about university education with this perspective… it was leaning away from a place that seems safe and knowable and regimented to a less well known terrain for them in college and university life. So we’re moving away from one model into another model that allows them to have more agency but it’s also scarier at the same time. And so they saw that as a leading away from. At least several people talked about leading away from ignorance into enlightenment, and that’s most philosophical, and probably the best sense of that term as it was originally used, I think. So yeah, it kind of ran the gamut.

Rebecca: I can imagine that doing the same assignments during a time that wasn’t a pandemic would have been different. Did that play into the conversations and the way people responded, maybe having experiences online during the pandemic?

Josh: Yes, and did both in a small way for that assignment and then a larger way for the course. One student actually did write in that first essay about COVID, and how I had changed his experience with education. And so that did come up, that there was more about the purpose shifting for them, as they saw what has happened over the last year and a half. And, you know, being together and learning with a teacher, I mean, those were all things that they talked about. And then over the course of the semester, they actually read some news pieces about the impact of COVID on education. So we did talk then in larger ways about how this may have reshaped at least some aspects of our work together.

Rebecca: I’m always curious to ask faculty about their own reflections on an assignment or a path that they took in a class. So what are your thoughts, having done some of these assignments and having had this frame for this particular class? Is it something you want to do again? Are there things that you want to do differently?

Josh: I would definitely do it again. I think the shared common experience of education is one that just leads to fruitful discussions and meaningful reflections on the readings that we’re doing, and you can see that in the writing as well. It’s not as much work to conceptualize something with which they don’t have any experience. Although I think that’s a very valuable part of education. I think that, for my goals in a first-year writing class, it helps make the leap a little bit easier for them when they’re thinking about things that they have a lot of experience with. So I’d definitely do that, again, were I to teach another first-year writing class. As with any class, there are other things that might have them read. I had them watch the movie Pleasantville, which all of them liked early in the semester. And that’s a great movie about what it means to learn something new, and how that’s a very powerful experience. And so they’re supposed to reflect on the movie’s idea about that and then extend it to: “How can we see more of this in education today?” And so I might move that to a different part of the semester, kind of rearrange it a little bit, add a few more writing assignments in, but I think, largely, it worked overall, at least from my goals. And I think in the final reflections that we had for the ungrading model, we were able to talk together, I think, really fluidly and fluently about education, and what they’ve learned about it. Now in the different department, where I’ll be talking about this all the time with future teachers, which has long been a goal of mine. So there I’ll be doing the same thing, but just in a different context.

John: Did this stretch students into an area a bit outside of their comfort zone, because they’re used to talking about topics that are very narrowly confined to the boundaries of the discipline.

Josh: Yes, it did. And whether or not we were talking about education or not, we could be talking about anything, the open-ended nature of the assignments was initially, I think, something that had to wrestle with, and I did hear a lot of comments early on about that particular issue with the writing assignments. I can remember back to being a freshman or first-year student and can remember what that would have felt like. But I think scaffolding that process and giving support structures to help them… lots of feedback along the way. And I know that there are fellow colleagues in writing departments everywhere who have the exact opposite philosophy as this, and I respect that very much. But I do think that having an open-ended assignment that asks them for their own ideas, ultimately… at least the hope is that it… grants them some agency by the end of the semester; that they do have thoughts that are relevant to a really complex, nuanced discussion. That someone, their instructor and their peers, are acknowledging that they have something to contribute to that conversation, and whether or not it needs more development and the mechanics of writing, that’s something that every writer works on. But if we can help students get to the point where they recognize that they have something to contribute, that they have a voice that can make the kinds of claims that can add to that debate, that’s for me is kind of half the battle or more of a first-year writing course. So, helping them see how to navigate the open-ended questions can hopefully lead to that. And I did see growth, different for every student, but I did see growth in that latter area over the semester.

John: If you can get students to think more about learning and about how they learn and about the purpose of learning, that seems to be a great way of introducing them to more metacognitive reflection, which we know is helpful for learning.

Josh: And because the class is ungraded and metacognition and reflection is such a part of that model, the two did align. So they did a ton of reflecting on their own writing, reflecting on their own learning, reflecting on their participation. Then, of course, the midterm and the final reflections. where they propose a grade and then try to justify that grade. So yes, I do think that there’s a doorway there to thinking about education through the work of the class that helps them with that reflective part.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the scaffolding you did have in place for the open ended nature of the essay, especially towards the end? So big project, open ended, daunting, first-year students… How did you guide them through that scary process?

Josh: So a couple of different ways… all of the essays themselves had open-ended questions. So, you’re scaffolding up to the biggest one: what do you think is the purpose of education? But, even that first assignment that we talked about was “Here’s what the two words mean. What do you think?” So, it’s a small, but open-ended question, so gradually getting bigger and bigger as we work up to that, and pairing my feedback on those assignments with “Okay, here’s a great idea here, we need to see more evidence, need to expand it a little more.” So, we get more open ended. So that was a part of it. And also the length of the essays, they began very short, two pages at the most, really to get them comfortable, because there’s nothing more terrifying than saying, “Here’s a huge open-ended question, write six pages out of the gate,” [LAUGHTER] when many of them may not have written a paper that long before. So I started with very short essays and gradually worked up to that bigger one, which was five or six pages, which I think is about right for a first-semester writing class. It gives them something to work with. So, scaffolded in two ways.

John: Did you do any work with peer feedback, or did you provide all the feedback to students?

Josh: I did most of the feedback, there were some opportunities for peer feedback and I think that that, of course, is an important part of developing as a writer. I was doing so much that was different in this class, you know, changing my grading model a little bit and building in lots of different kinds of structures. I decided that true to the mantra of faculty development across the board, don’t change everything at once, or don’t add 50 new things, pick some things to add. So, that I would save for a different iteration, find a way to build that meaningfully in now that I have the structure that I can rely on. So, there wasn’t a ton of peer feedback, but that is something that I think I would do differently in future iterations of it.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how you implemented ungrading into this course, as well. Obviously, ungrading has become a very popular topic recently, but also can be really daunting to figure out how to implement, especially the first time.

Josh: I’ve used a number of different grading models from contract grading to portfolio grading. So, I haven’t done the quote unquote, traditional grading for a long time, but just only recently moved in to ungrading, really inspired by the amazing colleagues that are doing it and have written about it and provided really solid guidelines for how you could do this, regardless of your discipline, but also a little bit of the research I did for How Humans Learn on failure that then led to this book on grading. I’m just mired in all of this research that is just so depressing about what grades do to students. And I just got to a point where I said, if I know this stuff, and I don’t do anything about it, I’m kind of complicit in perpetuating the system. So I just have to take the lead. And so using lots of the guides that are out there, Jesse Stommel, and Susan Blum and David Buck, and there’s a huge K-12 community called Going Gradeless, and there’s Aaron Blackwelder and Starr Sackstein, and some other folks there who were important guides as well. I will say this, that it was the most time I have spent on course design in a very long time. Most of the work for this kind of model happens at that stage of things. So I started very early, weeks ahead of when I would typically start to do this, because it just takes a lot of time to get the setup right, so that it’s navigable by students, it makes sense, it gives them enough time to implement feedback. And there are lots of threads that once you open the box of ungrading that immediately come up like what are you going to do about due dates? If you’re not going to give grades, and yet they have to turn things in to get feedback, how do due dates function in there. And so I learned from a lot of people on social media who use something that they called “best by dates” with a form that essentially says: here’s the target date, if you can’t meet that, just send me this form that tells me when you will turn it in, but know, that like milk, the later you submit, the less feedback I can give you, essentially. And so that was the accountability piece that a traditional grade used to, or at least I imagined that it used to, serve for due dates. So that’s an example of what pops out of the box once you open it and have to suddenly think about. So, there was a lot of work on the course design stage, but I found that it actually saved me time during the semester. Now, I’ll say a couple things about that. I think that my students in the ungrading class probably improved as much as students in a traditional grading class. But dispositions and behaviors like confidence and motivation and taking intellectual risks, they were dramatically different. And stress and anxiety just plummeted. And so to me, there’s an interesting question at the center of all of these debates. What’s the purpose of this? And hopefully, I think we’ll get more research on models like upgrading over the next few years that will address some of these questions. But if performance was the same, what is it that we’re trying to do, and if we can say, these dispositions increased dramatically, and that they may pay dividends down the line for students. If a student develops confidence in their abilities, what you hope is that that continues to grow and that that can be utilized to improve their achievement and performance along the way. So that’s kind of an aside, but that’s something that I found as I was going through this, but the reason it saved me time is that you no longer have to make comments. And this is true of other models as well. You’re not making comments on papers to justify a grade, which removes not only time, but I always found it psychologically distressing, right? It’s an A minus or B plus, and which one is it? And now I had to go back and add some comments to justify the fact that I gave it a B plus rather than an A minus. And so this was just coaching, this was strictly: “great idea, build on it,” “here’s some suggestions for you…” and just went through each paper like that. There was no sense at the end that okay, now I got to go back through and look at this again, did I do the right thing? Is it really an A minus and not a B plus. So that saved me time along the way that I could devote to working with them individually and as a group. So time on the front end saves time during the semester. And I think some of the folks to do ungrading in STEM and social sciences may not necessarily find that to be true. And I’ve heard some of them talk about that. But at least for the Humanities, I do think that there’s the potential to save time during the semester on the commenting and the feedback.

John: But at the end of the course, grades still have to be assigned. In most cases, I think people do it through some type of discussion with the students and let students suggest a grade and then there’s some type of reflection or some type of discussion. Is that how you handle the process of assigning those grades that the college requires at the end of the course?

Josh: Yes, that is definitely how I did it. So I borrowed a great strategy from that K-12 community that used Google forms to do the midterm and final assessment. It’s great because everything can be in the same place, they can answer questions and upload revisions, and do all these things all in the same place. And it really made that part of the ungraded model, that part of the course, a lot easier and really facilitated these conversations. So, we have to enter midterm grades for first-year students here. That served as a trial run, a practice run, for the final conversation where yes, they do propose a grade, and we have a conversation about that. Now, the way I handled it to make those meaningful for the students, and to hit the goals of the class, a couple of different things: one is that I borrowed one piece from the labor-based-contract grading movement – that’s pretty common in writing studies and maybe elsewhere, too – and that was, I said that in order to make it to this final conversation, where you could propose your grade, you had to complete all the work of the class. So that’s a pretty standard labor-based contract, you have to do all the things, and then from there, there are other things that you can do. And so if they did complete all the work we had that conversation, but if they did not complete all the assignments, the highest grade they could get was a C, and we still talked, but they knew that doing all the work was a prerequisite for having this upgrading model benefit them, essentially. And that, to me, was an acceptable compromise on accountability, because you cannot learn the goals of a writing class if you’re not doing the writing. And so that’s sort of the baseline. But the other thing was that we talked a lot throughout the semester, what does a grade mean? And at the beginning of the semester, it was much more about them, what does a grade mean to you? What does it feel like to be graded? What has your experience been with grades? At the end of the semester, closer to this conference, we shifted the conversation to what does a grade mean to people external to the class who are looking at it on a transcript? What does it mean to your major advisor? What does it mean to a graduate school? What does it mean to a medical school? What does it mean to a future employer if they see this grade versus this grade versus this grade on a transcript? So we talked about that as a way to set them up for: your grade proposal must solely be based on your writing, let me handle your reflection on your participation and your contributions and how hard you work. I’ll use that in my part of this conference to bump up your grade if I think you’ve graded yourself too low, but you need to propose your grade and justify it based solely on your writing. And so that was a major component of what they had to be thinking about. And it can be easy, of course, to say, “Well, I think I deserve an A, because I worked really hard.” So we wanted to take that out of the equation, but make it meaningful and justifiable by having them think about what do other people think of when they see a grade in Writing 101. So we did all that. And my experience with ungrading is almost entirely positive. I think that, for the most part, students gave themselves grades that I agreed with completely that they were spot on in terms of the progress in their writing and their contributions in class. Some observations I would make is that there were several folks who I will admit graded themselves very high, much higher than I thought was appropriate. And so we had a conversation about that. And by and large, they said, “Okay, yeah, you’re right.” And so it was kind of a negotiation. But that number was very small. I’d say the bigger thing that I want people… and people have been talking about this, so this isn’t a revelation, but I think there needs to be more awareness of this… is the group of students, largely women, in this case, who graded themselves too low. And so my conversations with them were twofold. They’re number one, this is way too low. Why are you giving yourself this great, I’m moving it up to this grade, because of X, Y and Z. And the other part of those conversations were all about talking to them about how good their writing was, and the confidence that they need to carry with them from that into other classes. So it was much more about dispositions and behaviors than it was about what did you get on this essay. But it was also some of the sociological components of education being borne out in a single class. You see those who grade themselves high, those who grade themselves low and the dynamics there in between.

John: Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve seen a lot of discussion of alternatives to traditional grading systems. Where do you see that discussion going?

Josh: Well, you know, I think there has been a lot of conversation about grading models, certainly over the last couple of years. But, I’m thinking more over the last few months. And what I have noticed a little bit that the discussion, the conversation has changed a little bit, that it’s moved from kind of a united front of advocacy for thinking about grading differently to more that people are on different teams promoting one particular model over another, and I’m not going to single any model out because I think you can see it across the board. And that to me is a little concerning for a couple of reasons. One is we’re not far enough in the movement to address traditional grading models to suddenly have this internecine warfare, right? [LAUGHTER] It can be easy to look on Twitter and think education is completely reformed. But those, I think, who work in centers for teaching and learning know that the reality is that change is a very slow, step-by-step process, that we are making progress, but that progress is still yet to unfold in many corners. And so I think, because change is hard, and because change is methodical and takes place over a lot of time. I think that in our conversations about grades, I’m hopeful that as a community, we can get back to a place where we can say, “Okay, we all have different motivations for adopting which model we do, but we need to come together a little bit to continue advocating for change overall, rather than adoption of a model,” which is where I think the conversation has drifted to… adopt this model, not let’s think about grading, and let’s make some change. I’m not denying that it is useful in any kind of change to have different personalities, different types of people, you need the flag wavers, to say this is a great model, you need that. You also need people to take a more nuanced approach and say, let’s look at what works for you and your students, and together, I hope we can continue to push that message.

John: There’s certainly a lot of interest in alternative grading systems. And at our campus, we haven’t seen a lot of adoption of that yet. But there’s a lot of discussion, and there’s a lot of people considering that. And I think there’s a lot of benefit in keeping many options open as alternatives until people get a chance to explore them, see how they work, and then modify them based on their own circumstances. Have you seen much adoption of alternative grading systems on your campus?

Josh: I see more and more every semester. And so, this is kind of what I mean about the pace of change. There is a ton of interest. I don’t know what the right analogy is, but you think of interes, there’s a lot. Then you think of considering adoption, there are fewer. Then you think about the people actually adopting, many fewer than that. But I see that pool, which to me is the critical pool for change to happen, expanding each semester. And I think maybe next semester, the semester after, we’re gonna have a panel of faculty here who have been trying out different kinds of models. So I remain optimistic about all this, I just think that we need to be cautious and aware of the rhetoric that we use, and how that can affect the people who are on the fence between thinking about adoption and adoption. That can be a big gulf to cross. And I think we need to work to shrink that end to bridge it. And so I think we just need to be aware of that.

Rebecca: Those are really great points, Josh. And also, depending on the context of your class, you might teach different classes and different models are going to work in those different classes more effectively. [LAUGHTER] There’s not a one size fits all for even an individual instructor, if they’re teaching different kinds of classes.

Josh: That’s absolutely true. And if we can get to a place where people see enough value in making a change, and find a model that really works well for them, that makes me happy. That is the right step, I think, to take.

Rebecca: Thanks so much for sharing your example. I think sometimes one of the hardest things to envision is: How would that happen in my actual class? It’s easy to read guides and get a general sense of something but the practical application and what it actually looks like in an actual class becomes hard to put your finger on.

Josh: Right? Absolutely. And I agree, and I’d love to hear lots of people talk about the logistics, what do they do on a day-to-day basis and what do they do in the planning phase? …which to me is always the trickiest part. So, I agree.

John: We always end with the question. What’s next?

Josh: [LAUGHTER] What is next, John? [LAUGHTER] Speaking of Pleasantville, actually that’s the question that it ends on, which students love. There’s no conclusion here. But what is next? I think I’m still working on the book that I referenced about grading. I’ve done a ton of interviews that have just been mind blowing with K-12 and university educators from across the country, not just about practices, but about how do we get systems to change, which is the last chapter of the book. And so, still working on that, and I hope to keep plodding away over the next few months.

John: We’re looking forward to that. And that is coming out from West Virginia University Press.

Josh: Yes, it is.

John: …an excellent series.

Josh: Well, thank you. Yeah, I’ve had nothing but amazing experience working with the editorial team there. So it was just a natural fit.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your stories and experience. We always like talking to you, Josh.

Josh: Yeah, and I appreciate the invitation and I love chatting with you guys.

John: And someday maybe we’ll see you at a conference and we’ll bring some tea [LAUGHTER] to put in that water.

Josh: And I will gladly drink that tea that you bring. Yes.

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

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

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152. Motherhood, Poetry, and Academia

Posted in diversity, higher education, inclusion, inclusive pedagogy, learning, learning spaces, pedagogy, teaching, writing
September 9, 2020

Pursuing degrees and careers without role models can be challenging, no matter what the discipline. In this episode, Camille Dungy, an academic,  mother, and poet, shares her journey as a learner, teacher, and writer.

Camille is a professor in the English Department at Colorado State University, and the author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. She is the author of four collections of poetry for which she has received many, many awards, including the Colorado Book Award, and the American Book Award. Her poems have been published in dozens of anthologies, many of which begin with the word “best” in the title. Camille is a recipient of a 2019  Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other awards and fellowships.

Show Notes

  • Camille Dungy
  • Dungy, C. T. (2017). Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History. WW Norton & Company.
  • Dungy, C. T. (2017). Trophic Cascade. Wesleyan University Press.
  • Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1816). Kubla Khan. (written in 1797)
  • Baldwin, J. (2013). The fire next time. Vintage.
  • Ta-Nehisi, C. (2015). Between the world and me. New York: Spiegel & Grau.
  • Joan Didion
  • Dungy, Camille (2020). This’ll hurt me more.
  • Macdonald, H. (2014). H is for Hawk. Random House.
  • Duke Lemur Center
  • Ruth Ellen Kocher
  • Cave Canem

Transcript

John: Pursuing degrees and careers without role models can be challenging, no matter what the discipline. In this episode, an academic, mother, and poet shares her journey as a learner, teacher, and writer.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare , a graphic designer.

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

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MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Camille Dungy. Camille is a professor in the English Department at Colorado State University, and the author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. She is the author of four collections of poetry for which she has received many, many awards, including the Colorado Book Award, and the American Book Award. Her poems have been published in dozens of anthologies, many of which begin with the word “best” in the title. Camille is a recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other awards and fellowships. We’ve also worked together back at Duke when we were teaching in the TIP program for a number of years in North Carolina. Welcome, Camille.

Camille: And it’s great to be here. Hello.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Camille: It’s summertime, so I make this big concoction that I turned into an iced tea with all kinds of herbs and flowers and roots and things like that. It probably has way too many healing properties and so it goes over to being stimulating and exciting.

Rebecca: Sounds good. [LAUGHTER] It sounds exactly like what we need right now.

John: And you did talk in your book about enjoying tea rather than coffee. So, it was nice to see that as well.

Rebecca: Clearly a good reason to be a guest.

Camille: Absolutely. I am a firm believer in the power of tea.

Rebecca: How about you, John?

John: I am drinking Tea Forte Blackcurrant tea.

Rebecca: Ah, an old favorite, huh? [LAUGHTER]

John: Yes.

Rebecca: And I’m drinking Irish breakfast tea today.

John: So we’ve invited you here to talk about Guidebook to Relative Strangers and about some of the challenges we’re facing during these really challenging times. Could you tell us a little bit about your decision to transition into nonfiction for this work?

Camille: Absolutely. I’m not entirely sure that transition is the best word because I published a book of poetry within months of publishing Guidebook to Relative Strangers. So, branching might be a more accurate phrase for what it is that I was doing, or am doing when I’m writing prose; it’s just a branch of the writing process. But prose allows different kinds of depths of inquiry, it allows me to kind of stick with something for 20 pages in a way that I haven’t figured out how to do in a poem. And, in all honesty, when I was writing many of the essays in Guidebook to Relative Strangers, my daughter was very, very young, and I was trained in what I call the person from Porlock School, which is a kind of play on the Coleridge poem, Kubla Khan, where he goes into this deep reverie and he’s in this trance-like state and he writes this beautiful poem, and then the person from Porlock knocks on the door to sell him something, and it interferes with his reverie and he’s never able to return to that poem again. But, when you have a small child, you have a person from Porlock knocking on your door every five minutes, [LAUGHTER] and I needed to figure out a way I could keep writing, even through all of those interruptions and shifts and changes. And it turns out but for me writing prose, I can walk away in the middle of a word, come back some hours, days, even months later and pick up where I left off. And so it became a mode where I could stay and continue to write even as I was figuring out how to adjust my life around this new human.

John: I think Rebecca can relate to that very well right now.

Rebecca: Yeah, I was just thinking, yes, I have been transitioning and doing some other kinds of creative work currently, with the shifts and what have you of having a small child, for sure.

Camille: Absolutely.

John: Rebecca and I recently completed a faculty reading group this summer that included James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. These were both written to pass information from one generation to the next to help prepare for survival in a world characterized by systemic racism. Guidebook seems, in some ways, to be a similar message from you to your daughter. Did these authors perhaps influence work?

Camille: Baldwin is actually writing to his nephew. And that seems also important in this idea of the expanded view of who our children can be that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a child that was birthed from your loins, as it were. And in the case of influences, Baldwin always and absolutely fundamentally is one of the major writers in the English language, in my opinion. He’s just a fantastic writer. And so is always an influence and a guide and an ambition [LAUGHTER] to be able to write as saliently and sagely and attentively about person and culture and identity and community and self as Baldwin was able to write. Coates’ Between the World and Me came out well into my writing process. In fact, I think I was probably already at press by the time that that book came out. So, I’ve read it, but I don’t consider it to be an influence. You know, we’re roughly peers, I think Coates and I in terms of age and such. And so there are many similarities, I think in our perspective on what it means to be Black in America today. And having both claimed Baldwin, to different degrees and in different ways, that it becomes unsurprising thst there’s that kind of reflection. I would say that another influence of mine was, and this is more closely to having to do with being from California and being a mother would be Joan Didion. And there’s a lot of the work of Joan Didion, the way that she works as a journalist and a reporter and talks about history and enfolds history and historical commentary within a contemporary view of the world. And also the ways that she really juggled being a mother of one child, became also a model and a directive for me, as I was writing.

Rebecca: In the first chapter, you observe that Americans don’t care much about the things that concern people who aren’t like them. And when you belong, you can overlook the totality of otherness, the way that being other pervades every aspect of a person’s life. As someone who is white and had often avoided conversations of race and in trying to actively engage in them, I think you’re really capturing something that a lot of white folks experience by using words like colorblind…

Camille: um hmm

Rebecca: …and put out into the world. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Camille: Well, I mean, I can talk about it from my perspective, I actually don’t fully understand the need for that level of erasure. But, one version of it has to do with white supremacy, which we do understand. It’s this kind of power drive to dominate and eliminate the importance of others. But, I don’t think that that’s the drive that you’re talking about, and that antagonistic view of what white supremacy means. I think what you’re talking about has more to do with ease and creating a sort of placid world where everything seems simple and direct and understandable and never uncomfortable, and the moment you begin to engage identity in a way that brings in history and oppression and marginalization and isolation and any of those things, the dinner party gets uncomfortable, [LAUGHTER] and the conversation gets uncomfortable. And that is frustrating to people who are trying to make a sort of placid world. And it’s easier then to just pretend as if everybody is the same, and there’s no differences, and there’s no frustrations and there’s no systemic roots of violence and a separation and suppression…. which is easier for some people, obviously, than others [LAUGHTER] to believe and to carry on that charade. And so I feel like when I’m navigating, I’m very, very frequently navigating primarily white environments. I’m always sort of threading that needle of people wanting to be comfortable and have everything be nice and easy, and I’m sort of raising my hand and saying, “Hey, here I am in the room with all these realities that may or may not frustrate your attempts at that kind of simplicity.”

John: Could some of that be because the beneficiaries of privilege might find it easier not to contemplate that and to just wipe that whole issue aside?

Camille: Absolutely. It’s a lot simpler to wipe that whole issue aside. It’s a lot simpler not to interrogate your own complicity in institutions of systemic oppression. It’s a lot easier to see yourself as the nice person who’s having this dinner party and is inviting all these people into your home, then to understand the history of redlining that meant that you and many generations of your family were able to have homes in this neighborhood, whereas mine was only able legally to start living there in the 1970s. So, those kinds of conversations get really, really quickly uncomfortable for people, and so it seems easier to not have them. I don’t believe in that ease. I don’t believe that that ease is productive in any way towards moving us forward. But, I do think that right now, what we’re seeing in this country is that tension between the ambitions and dreams of our founding fathers and the omissions of who were included in those dreams, and what it means that those dreams were really always only written for a very small margin of people. And we’ve been pushing and pushing through the centuries to create a more inclusive reality. And as we do that, we really have to look at the history and understand what it is. And so a lot of my writing does that. I’m writing about the now. I’m writing about my own life and my own family and my own experience, and I cannot do that without then circling back to the historical precedents that got us here.

John: You describe a story that your maternal grandmother told you about why your great grandfather left Shreveport. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about that to help put this in perspective?

Camille: This story is really interesting, and as I told it in the essay, it’s a little bit confusing because, I don’t know where my grandmother was in this story. At best, she was an infant, my great-grandmother might well have been pregnant with her at the time. She tells the story as if she was there, but it’s difficult to understand, with the dates as we understand them, how that knowledge would have been there. And so this becomes one of these examples, like it’s impossible for my family to retell this story without really kind of being bodily involved in it, even though it may have happened before those people who I am familiar with were ever actually alive. The story is that my great-grandfather had a thriving metalworking business, and it was so thriving as to become a threat to the white people in the community. And so, one day he arrived in his shop and found the body of a cousin who was working with him, laid out dead on the table with a note attached, telling my great-grandfather that he had to be out of town before the sun set. And so he had to get together his entire family… If my grandmother was an infant at that time, that would have been about six children, and get all of them out of that home and into a new place, in a new state, quite literally. And so that kind of threat against a man who had a thriving business and was doing really well and therefore became a problem to the established order of things, that the threat was leveled by way of a murder, right? And the threat of more murder and more damage… that danger and challenge also [LAUGHTER] lives on in my family through that story and lore. And I know it’s part of the way that my grandmother lived her life and the way that she raised my mother and the way my mother raised me. So, that was over a century ago now, and it still lives quite as in the present in my family.

Rebecca: Earlier, I was reading one of your more recently published poems, “This’ll hurt me more,” and I was thinking about how, as you were describing the nonfiction or prose version, connecting your present with the past comes up a lot in your poetry as well. Can you talk a little bit about the use of the “switch” in that poem, and how that connects to the past and present?

Camille: In that poem, it really began with me looking out my window here in Colorado and seeing this kind of lilac bush and thinking, “Oh, that looks like the kind of thing my grandmother would have told me to go out and get a switch, if she was going to spank me.” I should say here, I actually don’t ever remember my grandmother spanking me, I just remember her threatening to spank me, and that was enough… [LAUGHTER] … like sufficient. But I was always fascinated with that word “switch” and where it came from. And it was years and years before I could ask my grandmother where, and she had no answer really, it was just that it was the word that she was raised to use for some sort of thin device that you would use to spank an unruly child. And then the poem goes into a number of situations in my own life, where people are actually punished or threatened with punishment or actually die and the danger that exists in living as a black person in America, and so it all, as much of my writing does, it braids and builds and folds and there’s multiple different stories that come into one space to come to a final cohesive statement.

John: One of the things you talk about quite a bit in your work is issues of identity. In your book, you talk a little bit about the very many names you assigned your daughter when she was young, in different circumstances, while recognizing that eventually she has to choose her own identity in our teaching, should we focus a little bit more on issues of identity? A group of faculty at the college participated in a MOOC on creating inclusive classroom environments, and one of the things that was emphasized there is having students explore their identities. Could that be an effective teaching strategy?

Camille: I use it, [LAUGHTER] always in my writing, and I try to be really pretty open about how I introduce that. So, for instance, in introductions, I will quite often ask for information about what name do want us to call you? Where are you from? And that may not mean your postal address. It may be like where’s your heart from? I now have been pretty stable for this portion of my life, but when I was in graduate school and I never really felt like I was from where my mail went. And so I always want to actually hear where my students really call home. And that seems to be an important part of identity, to understand that. And another one, we often say, you know, what’s your pronoun? And there’s very direct reasons for that question. But I feel like that question also may put people who have alternative pronouns in a unnecessary spotlight, right? When there’s one person in the room who goes by an alternative pronoun, then they become the different one. And so I offer that as a possibility, and I also say that one of the reasons that we ask for your pronouns is that we don’t want to misidentify you, right? We don’t want to misgender you or call you something that you don’t respond to. And so if there are other things that we may not be able to see about you, but are important to who you are that you don’t want to be misidentified in this way, please feel free to bring that into the space here now as well. And in that space here in Colorado, for instance, we have a lot of people of Native American descent who don’t read that way visually, but it’s an important part of their identity. And that’s a space where that can come out. And what other ways that people with invisible disabilities or who are differently abled in some kinds of ways, that’s an opportunity for them to bring that forward. Like, sometimes I may be recording things, or sometimes I may be doing something that looks kind of off to the norm. And this is my time to just tell you that this is going to happen, so it doesn’t have to be a big deal. It just becomes a space where in the very beginning of class, we can just say who we are, and say how we want to be seen and how we want to be known. And in my creative writing classes, it’s become really freeing. I’ve had a number of students who then, for the rest of the semester, are able to write into that space without a whole bunch of questions and workshop about who is this and why is this because that’s already come forward. So, yeah, I just think it allows for those kinds of questions, and those kinds of openings and opportunities… allow for community to be built, in which we actually understand people for who they believe themselves to be. That seems important.

Rebecca: I think It’s interesting that you’re bringing that up in the context of creative writing and how it can be freeing. Do you find that when people are trying to hide their identity, for whatever reason, it prevents creativity or prevents them from having a voice in the way that maybe they want to?

Camille: I don’t know. I mean, so many things prevent creativity. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Indeed.

Camille: …I think just innumerable things. And so in some senses, yes, that can be something. If you were really ignoring something at the core of you, something that’s troubling you or guiding you in some way and you can’t acknowledge it and see you, it may make honest writing harder. It may make honest revision harder as well, because people might see things and you resist that. On the other hand, you know, H is for Hawk, right, which is partially about Helen MacDonald’s own story of grieving but it’s also partly about E.B. White’s, like lifelong closeted self and the ways in which that lifelong, tortured ,closeted self also helped write some of the great books of the 20th century, because he was grappling with staying closeted in those ways, and it came out in fantastic characters. So yes, in some ways, I think, for me, it is important to be open and honest and searingly truthful, but I don’t think that, necessarily, it would be on the whole right to say that you could never write good [LAUGHTER] writing if you’re not honest in that way. For me, the reason that that’s important is… I just don’t think many of us have very much time. I think we’re all just incredibly busy all the time. Now, during the time of COVID, our busyness manifests differently, but we’re still busy. And, now there just seems to be so much more laundry. I don’t understand how there’s more laundry. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I agree. It’s like, skyrocketed, right?

Camille: It just makes no sense. So, these kinds of things… and I just feel like if you’re going to give me the time to sit down with something that I’ve written and spend 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 12 hours, reading one of my books, you should be actually reading truth, right? You should be reading an honest representation of life as I see it, and know it, and understand it. And so it’s a way of my honoring your time and your care with my time, with my book, that brings me to write with sometimes frighteningly radical honesty about my own life.

Rebecca: Thinking about time moving into fall classes and things, how are you thinking about time, and helping students think about time?

Camille: I’m trying to think about how to teach in… and we’re supposed to go back, but I just don’t believe it to be true. [LAUGHTER] I don’t think it’s really going to happen. And I don’t think it should. And so I’m trying to think about my classes in a really hybrid form that allows them to write out of their own worlds and the class to be happening kind of asynchronously for some portions of it, not all on Zoom, some audio elements, so that they can hear my lectures while they’re doing their laundry, [LAUGHTER] or out taking walks or doing these kinds of things. And some of those audio lectures would have, like pauses, where they would be given writing assignments right in the middle of their lives. I think this summer, I’ve taught a couple of online courses, the community of writers, which is a week-long course with the students and faculty have to write a poem a day, every day, and one of the things that I thought was really great about it in the virtual form (they called it the Virtual Valley this year) was that the students then had to make a space in their own homes, to create this habit, and to create this practice in the place where they live. Normally you go to California, you’re in the valley, you do this thing, and then you come home, having been somewhat transformed by this experience, but how do you translate that back into your normal life? Now, they’re in their homes, they’re in their lives, they’re telling their family, this is my hours, where this is my task to do, and, hopefully, that continues into the rest of their days, right? …that they built this sacred space. And so, that’s my hope, is that I can help my students in this more hybrid form to be able to do what I’ve always been trying to teach them to do, to build a practice. John knows me way back when I used to teach at TIP. There were these things that I would do, and our old director just thought I was a hoot, because I would have to get permission to take the kids to the Lemur Center or to take them to… Remember…, what was that place called? The Rainbow Co-Op. or something. There was that weird, like Co-Op that was off campus, and some of these kids had never been to a grocery store that wasn’t a Safeway or a Kroger [LAUGHTER] or something like the giant box store. And this was like, they had like little mini bananas that were green, or red. And they had all kinds of like the bulk bin, and I would have these kids walking up and down the aisles looking at food that was packaged really differently than what most of them had ever experienced. And that was the exercise. I didn’t really care. The poems were bad because they just had this experience. It was like not about how good your grocery store poem was, it was about how good their powers of observation became, when they were moved into a slightly different environment. And so that, to me, is always the key, right? …that’s at the base of Guidebook to Relative Strangers is all of a sudden, I’m traveling all over the country, I’m in these different environments with a new sidekick, right? [LAUGHTER] I’m traveling with my daughter, which meant that I all of a sudden have really different interactions with people than I’d have before. And as a writer, my job became chronicling that and figuring out why this felt different and what got revealed because that little schism was created that had enough difference that I was forced to look… and that, to me, as we move into the fall, and I honestly think, I’m a Doomsayer, but I honestly think the spring of 2021 also, we’re gonna have to help our students, and our colleagues, and our administrations, learn how to just accept this reality as a reality rather than trying to swivel back to what it was before. What is our new reality? What do we see? What are the advantages? and how can we build on those?

John: I think we very much agree with that. [LAUGHTER] We didn’t have any say in how instruction was being organized here, but I’m really worried about it, not just because of the health risks, but also because of the pedagogy involved.

Camille: Um hm.

John: … that teaching a group of people who are wearing masks and who are far enough apart so they can’t comfortably talk to each other, is going to be a very different, and I don’t think, a very productive environment. But, we try to support people as best we can. It’s going to be a challenge, in any case.

Camille: Absolutely.

John: One place in the book, you note that in 2013, you were one of only 12 African American female professors in your field. And that’s not uncommon in many disciplines. It’s certainly true in economics as well. What are the costs of the lack of diversity in higher ed?

Camille: Yeah. So now, I’ve kept a running tally with the women, Ruth Ellen Kocher, who was the poet with whom I started this tally and started thinking about this. Now we’re up to about 22. So, that’s actually a radical increase. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, as a percentage it is.

Camille: But it’s still a very small number. So, my husband just turned in his tenure materials, and in the process of doing so he discovered that they were 16. I’m pausing because I don’t remember what it is 14 or 16. And the reason is, for my study, it was one of those numbers and his study is the other number, right? And so not that much different for 1100 faculty members to have 14 or 16, Black tenure line faculty, and that’s male and female, and I think one transgender person in that number. So, that’s not very much. The cost of that is, at a school with 1100 faculty members, it’s very, very likely that students will never have an African-American professor, that they’ll just go through their whole education system without ever having one. I thought about when it was that I’d ever had contact with a black faculty member in my field. I had one female professor in college and one male professor who told me that I shouldn’t try and become a creative writer, because… I guess he was trying to protect me… but because it was so competitive and difficult to feel that I shouldn’t bother, and I should do something else. So, in terms of supportive faculty members, that means something, right? …to not have ever had somebody who looked like me, for whatever complicated reasons we might say, had experiences like me, who was on my side. In other ways, those three faculty members that I can think of, which is a lot… if you ask people in my age how many, to say I had three at all… they were all literature people, they weren’t Creative Writing people. But, they weren’t actually particularly similar to me. They had really, really different upbringings. They were regionally very different. They were obviously aesthetically different, because they were in literature and not creative writing. So, I actually never really had the kind of mentor that other people very frequently have, moving along the way. I had mentors, I had support. You don’t get to the position where I am in the world without having mentors and support, but I didn’t have black faculty mentors and support until I was already in a tenure-line position. I was going to become a professor. I’m a fourth-generation college professor, it was going to happen. The likelihood of this being the path that I took… my sister’s a professor, the woman I chose as my daughter’s godmother is a professor, like this is in my blood. This is who I’m going to be. But what about the people for whom that is not the case? The first-generation college students, they have no idea what this could look like. If you can’t visualize yourself in those positions. If you don’t have people who you feel that you can trust that you can go to for advice. If you have people who have unconscious or very conscious biases against African Americans and their intelligence skills and their organizational skills and their sense of comportment, or any of those, and those biases get passed down to how they treat you in the classroom. All of those things become deterrents for people’s ability to thrive in this chosen field. And I think the more that we can eliminate those kinds of obstacles by increasing the kinds of people we see who may look like a person who we believe we may become in the future, the more radically inclusive our democracy can become. I just think that that’s important. I just think that our ability to become the best of who we can possibly be is, in many ways, influenced by what we see around us as possibilities. That was a long answer,

John: …but a very good one. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah. It’s an important one.

Camille: It’s a complicated question, right? It’s a really complicated question. Obviously, it’s not something that’s going to be able to happen overnight, based on the fact that the doubling of the number of black women poets in the country, it’s a doubling of that number, but it’s still only about 22. But I also think that there’s lots of small ways where this happens. And so it happens in who’s at the front of the classroom. It happens based on who’s on editorial boards for magazines, journals, book publication houses, because that decides what materials that come forward for publication appear to be relevant, necessary, interesting, right? It happens on what kinds of people are agents in the representation houses. It happens in terms of what kinds of summer opportunities people have? I know that Cave Canem, which is a home for black poets, which was founded in 1996 and has a summer workshop fellowship and also has a lot of regional workshops that they do all kinds of programming, like the kinds of programming that have come out of Cavey Canem over the last… what is that now?… we’re at 25 years… is incredible. But that was the first time that I encountered black poets at the head of the classroom. I was already a tenure-track professor. And that was the first time that I had black teachers teaching me poetry. And it changed the kinds of conversations that we had to have in the classroom, right? There were certain kinds of cultural cues that were just… we didn’t have to… let’s pretend we’re translating from another language, Like we didn’t have to italicize those Spanish words. [LAUGHTER] Because they were just moving in and out from Spanish and English is just like what huge parts of the culturism in America do. And so I italicize the Spanish words, this is a very strange kind of colonial idea of those are different than us. And many writers who work between Spanish and English have been really pushing against that marginalization of the Spanish language through italicization. So those kinds of things change our writing, and we get more teachers, we get more people publishing, we get more people writing and talking about that. I think our literature flourishes. And when our literature flourishes, our imaginations flourish. And when our imaginations flourish, our culture can thrive.

Rebecca: Yes. [LAUGHTER] …exclamation point. 32.02

John: You mentioned that there was expectations that you’d go to college. And I think also in your book, you noted that this goes back a few generations in your family, at least your grandmother’s generation, where I think you’ve said that all the siblings went to college and your grandmother’s cohort, all 12

Camille: of those children who were born between roughly 1900 and 1930. All 12 of them went to college. That’s incredible. It is.

John: When I read that, I was thinking one of my grandfathers only had a sixth-grade education, and that was not that uncommon at the time. So that gave your family quite a bit of an edge that many of our first generation students, as you noted, don’t have today. It is something we need to address. One of the things you mentioned in your book is that you would diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And I didn’t know that until I read this. So how are you doing with it now?

Camille: Many of my friends and acquaintances only five bucks, I’ll get these texts like I didn’t know I’m on page thought of that. I didn’t know that sorry. Okay, which actually circles back to that radical honesty, conversation. It’s not something I talk about. It’s not like I don’t lead in conversation with it. It’s not really part of my outward spoken identity. And yet, I didn’t feel like I could talk about the vulnerability of my body without talking about that aspect of it, and of my experience, and a lot of these essays would have been written around the time of the big Obamacare debates and in many ways, the reason that I am fine and nobody has to know this about me is that I have excellent health care because I have really good insurance through my employer. Ask stay employed because I can’t run the risk of not having medical insurance, as so many people in this country are in jeopardy because of their state of employment or not employment or the ways that their employers set up medical care. We put people’s bodies at risks, their lives at risk, their ability to live productive, non sick lives. So that was, I don’t write that directly into that essay, it’s body of evidence that there was that conversation was going on around. And so in that sense, there are a number of things about who I am in this country, being a woman of childbearing age raises my mortality risks significantly in this country above most other developed countries and being a black person obviously raises my mortality risk in this country exponentially. And then having this chronic condition means that at any moment, and you know, any morning I could wake up and everything could look different, which is the case for everybody but it But right there in my brain and in my nervous system in a way that it’s not the case for other people. And so I just felt like to write about that sense of kind of perpetual background Jeopardy that I live with. I had to include that other piece. But the long or the short answer to that is I am doing great. I’ve got a really fantastic medical team and really great treatment. And I’ve mostly don’t even notice that that is an issue.

Rebecca: Maybe one of the last things that we can add a little bit about is maintaining the career while raising a child. I don’t know it’s a particular interest to me. How old is your child, Rebecca? She’s three.

Camille: Oh, my goodness, those are good years, but wowza.

Rebecca: You’ve noted that several women writers lose essentially out on an entire book because of family. Can you talk a little bit about your experience being a mother and an academic and a writer, and then also maybe how that is playing out differently for folks during the pandemic. Well,

Camille: right, I mean, I do definitely feel like the pandemic has brought forward a lot of buried realities in this culture. And so nothing new has manifested because of the pandemic, but because of the stresses on our culture due to the economy issues. And due to the kind of peril that the virus causes. We’re seeing so many things. And for the most part, we’re seeing child caregivers who are very frequently women bearing the brunt of this situation, and not a particularly active interest in figuring out ways to accommodate this fact. Right. So plenty of people are like, well, we’ll just send the kids back to school and that’s gonna be their childcare. I’m like, Well, I don’t know. But every single one of my daughter’s teachers has children. So now, they’ve got this complicated question of like, how do they take care of their own children? Wow. Taking care of my child, my friends in France are getting paid to stay home and watch their children by the government. That’s the way that that is happening and many other first world nations, but not here. This is not your question. My answer part of it is like, there’s really no way to talk about a lot of these things without going in a lot of different directions. And so I feel sometimes my essays are really leggy, and that they’re braided essays. And they follow several different narrative threads at one time, and I hope that they tie together, but they just definitely go in a lot of directions. And that’s part of why essays could work because I can really dive in and talk about those things at great length in a way that I have not found myself to be able to do in poetry to that degree, but part of it is because I just don’t think that any of these questions have easy answers. Did they have any answers? We’d answer them already. We’d have dealt with it right? But they don’t And so we need to look at them in lots of ways. I think to be artists at a mother is an incredibly difficult thing, or a working person and a mother is an incredibly difficult thing. And I don’t think our country was designed to support that. Now I’m going to circle back to history again and say, you know, like, our country was essentially designed on slavery, and servants, right? It was built on the idea that other people would be helping the wealthy and the powerful to do all their daily things that they would be nannies in the house, that they would be House Cleaners that they would be cooks and maids, and etc. And as we mechanized and created vacuum cleaners and washing machines and other sorts of devices that would take the roles of those poor white or black or Latin x workers, then who took that over, it was the middle class women, right that they were then be put In the vacuum cleaners, they would be running the washing machine, it was like never really a system built in to figure out how the labor gets done. And the work outside the home gets done. And we just never evolved. And we’re seeing that now. And so those of us who are working parents, particularly working mothers, and then if you add to me, like, I’m an artist, I’m a professor and writer, that’s really two jobs. It’s hard to have two jobs and raise a child, I have a really great partner. And so I have the faith in the fact that my kid is not going feral in the process, and I don’t have the kind of partner who kind of tabulates like, I’ve watched the kid for eight hours. Now it’s your turn for 12. And so that really helps me that I have that. And I also have figured out just I write her in to the work, what I’m living in now is a world where I’m observing my child a lot and so those observations end up in The work rather than trying to separate those two things, but get included. And I think my other piece of advice for working parents who are sort of trying to do another thing, like being an artist is to just people talk a lot about stealing time. But I would call it more like making time just finding those little pockets of time that can accrue to become something pole. So there’s a essay at the very end of the book called differentiation, which only was able to be written because I was completely overwhelmed by I think she was three and a half or four years old at the time, and that was an incredibly time consuming era. She loves books, but she couldn’t read yet. So who was reading those books all the time, right? She loved art, but like you couldn’t leave her alone with watercolor. So you know, it’s just like full, complete involvement as a parent, so I just wrote for 20 minutes a day. That’s it. 20 minutes a day I recorded Everything that I could. And eventually that 20 minutes a day became the feed work for what was the essay, I wouldn’t have been able to write that essay without all the detailed notes that I had been taking in the 20 minutes. So those 20 minute exercises were not the essay, but the essay could not have happened without those. And so that’s the permission that I like to give to working parents is you don’t have to write for eight hours a day, like that model probably just isn’t going to work and you’re going to be frustrated trying to find it, what’s the minimum amount of time, what’s the minimum maximum that you can create for yourself, and for me, it was 20 minutes. For some people, it may be as small as five, but that just brief period to just record all you can to be that person you want to be with the knowledge that you’re preparing the soil for the time when you have time again.

John: You mentioned earlier the issue of the fragility of the body, especially black bodies. One of the things you describe in your book is the experience of being pulled over by the police in Minnesota. And you place this in the context of things happening, man, which sound remarkably like things happening now with Trayvon Martin at the time, Jason Harrison, Eric Gardner and camera rice. So could you tell us a little bit about that, and perhaps what types of things we might want to do in our classes to provide support for students when these things happen?

Camille: Ah, right, the experience of being pulled over in Minnesota, so close to where later that falando casteel death happened in the same general area after our pullover and now we have the George Floyd story. And then I also speak in the same essay about a lynching that happened in the town we visited in Duluth, Minnesota, earlier in the 20th century. And I think one of the things that’s important to me When I think about all these just ongoing brutality against black people in this country is that ongoing nature is that for some Americans when this new name or this new incident crosses the headlines, it feels like, Oh, this is today, there’s just horror that has happened just yesterday or just last month. And for many of us, we’re like, oh, again, another, right, and the names pile and the incidence pile and the terror which is what the point of it is, the terror piles up and the fear of moving around freely and a lack of belief that we can move around safely. It comes from years of systemic violence and being passed off as individual incidents. And so to me part of the importance of writing about these things in such a connected manner is to talk about the ways that these seemingly individual incidents are part of a culture fabric that needs to be reworked entirely. And part of what happens for me, I think being a writer is a way of being a teacher is that when you write these histories, you write these ways of digesting and understanding and coping with these histories. And you provide tools for your readers slash students and to be able to address them as well. But part of it again comes from honesty and openness, both on my part as the author to write the stories as accurately and in as much detail as I can and has to do with the readers to be able to absorb and be willing to really, truly acknowledge circling back to the conversation that we had earlier about discomfort to be able to sit with the discomfort and then not just push it away, but to work to try and make fundamental change. And so as teachers, one of the things that we need to do really listen to our students, when they express the kind of discomfort that you’re talking about john, I’m really understand how the institutions with which we’re affiliated are either repeating these kinds of traumas, either by ignoring or pushing them aside or trying to diminish them or just not addressing them for the students. And by truly listening into by truly trying to make systemic change within the institutions with which we have any power connection, which may just be our by your own classroom, it may just be that classroom that we’re in that we can create a space of true comfort and true seeing for people. And it’s not easy. As I said, that space for black poets that I described 20 years ago. It’s 25 years of work and effort and community engagement and growing new poets and growing new teachers and new professors that that new boom of young black poetry professors have come through that organization and have built and developed some kinds of communities. And so how can we be part of building communities, organizations, structures, classrooms spaces that create this kind of support that mean that those who have died before us don’t die in vain, but really become part of true change? So I’m heartened Yes. I’m heartened by the summer and the summers kind of large outcry towards social justice. I’m also aware of the fact that I have seen searches like this over and over and over in my own lifetime. And so I want to make sure that the momentum lasts and that the energy and the outrage remains not just for those of us who are at direct risk, but for all of us because I think all of us are at direct risk, whether it’s your body on the line, or not.

Rebecca: Definitely powerful things to be thinking about really finding ways to support students and our communities that we live in, and the communities we don’t live in.

Camille: Mm hmm. you volunteered to do a reading for us.

Rebecca: Alan heard or got volunteered.

John: I think it was

Camille: recently, the perfect word for that, which is to be voluntold.

Camille: We do a lot of that.

Camille: Yes, I will be happy to read I’m gonna read a poem from Trophic Cascade, which is the collection of poems that came out within months of Guidebook to Relative Strangers. And some of these poems were written in the same mindset or the same kind of sensibility that the FAA developed. And so this poem that I’m going to read, came out of a trip, as many of the essays and guidebook to relish show strangers come from trips. This came from a trip into the San Francisco Bay. I was living in Northern California at the time and I went into the San Francisco Bay, there’s an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, the prison An island most people are familiar with is called Alcatraz. I probably don’t need to tell you anything about Alcatraz. Except for that, you know, it was really difficult to escape from Alcatraz, there’s another island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, which is called Angel Island. And it was the closest relative in our time would be the immigrant detention centers of the day. People say that it was very similar to Ellis Island because it was this immigration stop off point. But you only ended up on Angel Island if there was an issue with your papers. And so in some senses, it was much more like a prison or detention center where you’re held for untold amount of time until you were either sent back where you came from, or allowed to go into San Francisco. So this poem is kind of doing the same thing that I’ve been talking all along about bringing in history and also my contemporary situation. And the other thing that we didn’t talk about very much and guidebook to relative strangers is my I sort of obsessive interest in ecological environmental questions. And so that also is coming into play in this poll. What I know I cannot say we sail to Angel Island, and for several hours I did not think of you. When I couldn’t stop myself Finally, from thinking of you, it was not really you, but the trees, not really the trees, but they’re strange pods blooming for a while longer. A bloom more like the fringe fan at the tip of a peacocks tail than anything I’d call a flower. And so I was thinking about flowers, and what we value in a flower more than I was thinking of the island or its trees and much more than I was thinking up you. recursive language ties us together. linguists say I am heading down this road. I am heading down this road despite the caution signs and the narrow shoulders I am heading down the curvy road despite the caution signs. And then narrow shoulders because someone I fell in love with wants to live around here, right there. That is an example of recursive language, every language. Nearly every language in the world demands recursion. Do things bring us together more than our need to spell out our intentions, which helps explain the early 20th century Chinese prisoners who scratch poems into walls on Angel Island. And why a Polish detainee wrote his mother’s name in 1922. I was here, they wanted to tell us and by here, I meant the island and they also meant the world and by the island, they meant the world they knew. And they also meant the world they laughed, and the world they wanted to believe could be there as the world they knew required passwords. Think of Angel Island immigration station is purgatory, the guide explained he told tales of paper files Others picture Brides, the fabrications of familiarity, so many lives depended on inquiries demanded consistency. Despite the complications of interpretation, an English one would ask how many windows were in your house in the village? How many ducks did you keep? What was the shape of the birthmark on your father’s left cheek? and Japanese and Cantonese, Danish, Punjabi, the other answered, then it all had to come back to English. The ocean is wide and treacherous between one home and the other is there can be no turning back. No correction once what is said is sad. Who can blame the Chinese detainees who car pawns deep into the woods on Angel islands walls? Who can blame the Salvadoran who etched his villages name? A few things tie us together more than our need to dig up the right words to justify ourselves. Travelers and students we sailed into the bay disembarked on Angel Island. I didn’t think about you, which is to say the blue gum Eucalyptus is considered a threat, though we brought it across oceans to help us desired first for its timber because it grows quickly and was expected to provide a practical fortune. And when it did not enlisted as a windbreak desired still because it is fast growing and practical. The blue gum has colonized the California Coastal forests, squeezing out native plants dominating the landscape and increasing the danger of fire. I should hate the blue gum Eucalyptus, but from the well of their longing, by which I mean to say from their paws. You know what I mean? I hope their original home from the well of their longing blooms explode like fireworks. I love them for this. Do you hear me? I absolve you You are far too beautiful and singular to blame.

Camille: I have a thought that there was another poem that might be a better tie in to everything that we said and it’s much shorter. Can I read that and then you guys can decide which one you want to use, we decided to use both. Here is the next poem. This is a poem from my collection trophic cascade, which as I said, I was writing along the same time that I was writing guidebook to relative strangers. The incident that I described in this poem happens on my daughter’s second airplane flight. The first airplane flight she ever took, we went home to meet her namesake great grandmother. And the second airplane trip she ever took was work trip with me. She was four months old, and I went to Washington DC to do some work with the National Endowment for the Arts. So you can picture this child as a very, very young child in this poem, frequently asked Question number seven. Is it difficult to get away from it all? Once you have had a child I am swaying in the galley working to appease this infant who is not fussing, but will be fussing if I don’t move. When a black steward enters the cramped space at the back of the plane, he stands by the food carts prepping his service. Then he is holding his throat, the way we hold our throats when we think we are going to die. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. He is crying. Oh, my God, what they did to us. I am swaying less my brown baby girl make a nuisance of herself. And the steward is crying, honest man tears seeing you holding your daughter like that. For the first time, I understand what they did to us, all those women sold away from their babies. he whispers. I am at a loss now, perhaps I could fabricate an image to represent this agony. But the steward has walked into the galley of history. There is nothing figurative about us.

Rebecca: so vivid, so powerful.

John: I was just going to use exactly those words so powerful,

Rebecca: and really appreciate the level of detail be in that moment.

Camille: And I think for me, it was one of those first experiences like really vivid experiences of Wow, I’m having an entirely different interaction with this person that I would have had before I had this baby in my arms and that interaction is absolutely about the present moment. And it’s just Deeply inflected by the past and a path that neither of us ever physically lived through, but which we are historically always reliving. And so the concerns in that poll essentially became the lens through which I wrote all the essays in the collection,

Rebecca: I always find it really interesting how having a child opens up conversations that maybe one wouldn’t have had otherwise, it would have been unspoken, otherwise. Mm hmm.

Camille: All kinds of conversations and with people you wouldn’t converse with. I like to tell a joke that when she was little, and she traveled with me, and we traveled a lot, and then the kid by the time she was three and a half had already accrued her own frequent flyer, award ticket, but often on flights, like Southwest are the kind of place where you could choose your seat, I will very frequently have an empty seat next to me and it’s just unconscious bias, and people just leave the seat next to the black person open, which honestly is sort of fine in those kinds of instances, right? It’s like one of the very few times where that works out. Okay, but it never worked out with the kid. And I was always like, I’ll get that MTC. And then I can put the baby in the MTC and then I wouldn’t because the unlikeliest of people would come and take that seat because they wanted to sit by a baby. And then they can’t talk to the baby, they can only talk to the baby’s keeper, right? And so like, we would end up having these conversations that I would never have had, because they would have never put themselves next to me. And it was a beautiful thing. And it seemed to be worth recording and thinking about both what had divided us and also what bridged us.

Rebecca: I think that segues kind of nicely into the way that we always wrap up our broadcast, which is asking, what’s next so many bridges to the past? And

Camille: what are the bridges to the future? I know, I think I’m doing the same thing. I’m writing poems and essays and I can toggle back and forth and it just depends on how much time I have and what my mood is and what my level of obsession is. I’m really thinking I’ve lived in Colorado for seven years now. Which is longer than I’ve lived in one home for a very long time. And so I’m finding myself really rooting down. I can’t travel right now because of COVID. And I’m so I’m looking out my window and walking around my land and thinking about where I live in deeper, more complex ways. And I’ve had the ability to do and it’s been pretty interesting on the page to see what new discoveries I’m able to make. And a lot of them are just new discoveries. I’m making, like other people know these things. And I’m just coming into their knowledge. And so that’s always fun. Well, thanks

Rebecca: for such a wonderful conversation and being so generous with your time.

Camille: Thank you.

John: Thank you. It’s great to talk to you again. It’s been far too long has

Camille: been john, it’s really good to see you and talk to you and Rebecca, thank you for your part in this conversation.

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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.

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