243. Trauma Aware Pedagogy

Show Notes

• Costa, K. (2020). 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos: A Guide for Online Teachers and Flipped Classes. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
• Jaschik, Scott (2022). “Provosts Stand Firm in Annual Survey.” Inside Higher Ed. May 11.
• Thompson P. and J. Carello, eds. (forthcoming, 2022). Trauma-Informed Pedagogies: A Guide for Responding to Crisis and Inequality in Higher Education.
• Brown, A. M. ProQuest (2017). Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press.
• My Fest 2022
• Brown, A.M. (2021). Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation. AK Press.
• Lang, J. M. (2021). Small Teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. John Wiley & Sons.
• Darby, F., & Lang, J. M. (2019). Small Teaching Online: Applying learning science in online classes. John Wiley & Sons.

Transcript

John: Since the start of the pandemic, there has been much discussion about student disengagement in their classes, but little discussion about why student engagement has declined. In this episode, we examine the role
that ongoing trauma has on students and all members of the academic community.

[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 Karen Costa. Karen is a faculty development facilitator specializing in online pedagogy, trauma-aware teaching and supporting ADHD learners. Karen holds graduate degrees and certificates in higher
education; trauma and resilience; trauma-informed organizations; and neuroscience, learning, and online instruction. She is the author of 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos, and has served as a facilitator for the Online
Learning Consortium, the Online Learning Toolkit, and Lumen Learning. Through her business, 100 Faculty LLC, Karen offers supportive, fun, and engaging faculty support and development to faculty from all over the world. Welcome back, Karen. Thank
you for having me back. It’s been a couple years, believe it or not,

John: It seems like it was just yesterday, it was like right after we got that announcement about campuses shutting down for a couple of weeks until COVID was over.

Karen: I looked back at my calendar, and I think it was April 2, 2020. So early COVID days, there was so much we didn’t know. And here we are two years and change later, still dealing with so many challenges. Yeah, wild.

Rebecca:: …with this very small pandemic. [LAUGHTER]Today’s teas are… Karen, are you drinking tea?

Karen: I feel that I should be, but I’m not. I wish I could say something clever here. I wrote a book with the words “simple and sustainable” in the title. I’m a simple person. I drink water all day long out of my water
bottle. And I have nothing interesting to share. I can say that I’m very proud that I kicked my diet coke habit… not that I’m judging anyone that still carries that. I have simplified [LAUGHTER] over the past couple years, down to water pretty
much.

Rebecca:: And water is the foundation of tea.

Karen: Oh, there you go. Thank you. [LAUGHTER] I feel better?

Rebecca:: How about you, John,

John: I have something not quite as simple, but pretty close. It’s just a simple peppermint tea today.

Rebecca:: That sounds good. Sounds like the perfect kind of tea for the day, I have a hot cinnamon spice for the day…

Karen: Interesting.

Rebecca:: …which is not my normal choice.

John: When we last talked to you, as you noted, it was very early in the pandemic. And we talked about trauma-informed pedagogy during what we hoped would be, as

Rebecca: said, a relatively short experience. But now we’ve had a little bit more experience with this pandemic and with trauma on the part of pretty much everyone involved in higher ed or in anything else in the world.
So we thought it might be good to revisit the issue of trauma-aware pedagogy. It might be helpful if we start with a review of what’s meant by trauma-aware pedagogy.

Karen: Yeah, it’s surreal that I’m coming back here a couple years later to talk about this. And it’s strange that so much has changed and also it feels like so little has changed as well from a couple of years ago. So
it’s wild… this work. When I spoke to you in 2020, I had been doing this trauma-awareness work on a much smaller scale. And to be honest, I had felt like there really wasn’t a ton of interest in it. I would find other people who are interested
in it and get so excited: “Oh, you want to talk about this.” And then the interest level soared. And I have been sharing this work with so many educators over the past couple of years. And they have helped to inform the way that I think about
trauma-aware pedagogy. So it’s been really wild. In short, in honor of, again, keeping it kind of simple, trauma-aware pedagogy, for me, it’s about looking at trauma through the lens of pedagogy and looking at pedagogy through the lens of trauma.
It is not about being a clinician or aiming to be a therapist for our students. I am always very clear about that with people. We want to have a very clear scope of practice, very clear boundaries. I am not, certainly, a clinician. However, pedagogy
is my area of expertise. So I work with faculty to help them develop a fundamental awareness of: what is trauma? We hear that word tossed around, what is it? And how does it show up in our classrooms? How does it show up on our campuses? It shows
up in our relationships, it shows up in our relationships with colleagues, with administrators, with students, and how does it impact students’ ability to learn? And we can work around that. There are strategies that we can use in our classrooms
immediately to help address some of those things. Certainly one of the things I would add is that I’ve been talking more about this concept of collective trauma over the past six months or so, really with this idea that, again, as you mentioned,
this is still ongoing. And there is really, in my awareness, there is no end in sight. And we see this intersecting with so many other social ills and challenges and climate change. So we are being called to ask questions about the very fabric
of society and higher education. So I’m absolutely still talking to folks about the impact of trauma on student learning and in your classroom. And also, I would say, now, much more of my work is around this idea of collective trauma, and what
is the future we want to create for higher education and the world? That wasn’t very simple, but… [LAUGHTER]

John: …it’s a relatively complex problem.

Karen: Yeah, I did my best.

Rebecca:: Maybe we can start with a little bit of conversation about the impact that trauma has on student learning and some strategies we can use in the classroom and then move up to these bigger institutional kinds of
conversations and system conversations.

Karen: Yeah, absolutely. So, trauma shows up in the classroom… one of the primary ways is how it influences what we call executive function. So those are things like focus, concentration, time management, the ability to
prioritize… Did I already say decision making? …if not, that’s one of them. So we talk sometimes about executive function skills as the little CEO in the brain who is directing everything. And trauma really puts a stress on those executive functions,
our brain actually diverts resources away from executive functions toward survival mode. And I always remind people, that’s really not a bad thing at all, right? That’s why we’re still here, because we learned to focus on our immediate survival.
That is why we’re still here. However, in higher education, when people are focusing on their very survival, that certainly impacts their ability to succeed in that traditional higher education learning environment. So we can come at this from
a lot of different angles, that, again, as I was just talking about, that really begs the question about what is the higher end of 2022 in the future going to look like but in the immediate, what I’ll say is that faculty can do things like simplifying
their messages, not sending out huge info dumps of information, being very mindful about not overloading students. We can offer appropriate supports, such as task lists for each week of a course. Students and faculty that I work with and me, we
love checklists. So things like that can be very helpful. When people are having a tough time deciding “what do I work on next?” …offering, for example, videos with assignment tutorials, to clarify expectations, being flexible with deadlines,
oh, this is such a big one. It does and doesn’t baffle me. There were formal policies put in place in 2020. Faculty were told you really need to take these late assignments, we need flexible late policies, we move toward pass fail. We are two
years into this pandemic, we have report after report after report about the mental health challenges that people are facing… life threatening mental health challenges. And those policies, those flexible learning policies vanished, probably sometime
around spring 2021 or early 2021. And that’s wild to me, like it’s just completely out of alignment with all of the [LAUGHTER] science of learning and the realities of the mental health challenges that folks are facing. This is difficult stuff
to talk about. I literally was just reading a report an hour ago, we just saw record numbers of overdose deaths, looking at the 2021 data. This is the context in which we are all learning. So anything we can do to be more flexible, to be more
supportive, to direct students to additional resources, is going to relieve some of that burden. We cannot do it all, we cannot fix trauma writ large with our pedagogy. I do think we can help to mitigate it. At the very least we can be a kind
word in the midst of this storm for our students.

Rebecca:: There’s a lot of conversation happening about disinterested students. But what you just described, Karen, I think is what faculty are responding to… the inability to plan and make decisions and manage time. And
that comes across as being disinterested in learning, but maybe it’s just not being able to function in our current system.

Karen: I would argue that we are functioning in the way that we were designed for lack of a better word in that we are focusing on our very survival. So one of the analogies that I give people is: if you’re teaching and
a building in this building catches on fire and your students are all running out of the door, and you stop and say “Why aren’t you focusing on my lecture? Why aren’t you focusing on this group activity?” or “We’ve got a big test coming up. We’ve
got a review session right now, what are you all doing? Where are you going?” That is the mindset that so much of this student “disengagement” framing and discussion and discourse comes from. Why aren’t students paying attention to these things
that are not related to their immediate survival? And instead, they are very interested and focused on these things that are very much related to their immediate survival. And when you frame it that way, I think it helps people… well, people who
are willing to face that reality. To consider it in a new light, it feels like we’re blaming students for running from a burning building, for focusing on their very survival. And I would add, we are then putting a pressure on faculty and staff
to put out a fire with their pedagogy. Whether you’re in the classroom or teaching outside of the classroom in a tutoring center or a library, it seems that there is this energy of what teaching strategies can you use to stop students running
from this burning building. And again, we’ve got these students whose very fundamental human rights are being stripped from them, and a huge increase in eco-anxiety, which another way we can frame that is, eco-anxiety is looking at the reality
of climate change and our general failure to act on that. And we wonder why students are not interested in the upcoming exam. I think students are interested in the realities of their lives, and that higher ed is going to have to figure out how
to speak to the realities of our lives.

Rebecca:: I think related to that is also the reality of faculty lives.

Karen: Yeah.

Rebecca:: There’s a lot of focus on conversation on supporting students and not necessarily on focusing on supporting faculty, staff, and all the people that make higher ed run.

Karen: Well, if I may, this morning, there was some data that came out from Inside Higher Ed report, I think it was called the Provost Report, I’m sure we can put it in the show notes. And something like only 4% of Provosts
interviewed said that they strongly agreed that there was a specific plan in place to support faculty and staff mental health. Only 4% strongly agreed with that. How is that not 100%. We have seen this coming…. again, I see a report every day
that is talking about faculty burnout, student burnout, broader mental health issues, and this is not being addressed on campus by our leadership. I really see my work is at the intersection of faculty and student success. And this is a really
big challenge. And to be honest, I am increasingly telling faculty and staff to stop investing their time and energy in places and people who are not investing in them, and to think about how they can create smaller, more inclusive spaces and
communities, regardless of what their administration is not doing [LAUGHTER] in order to protect their wellness and to start working toward creating a better, more inclusive, future for all of us, because so much of our leadership just is not
showing up to do that work.

John: I think one of the reasons why the official policy on campus is to back away from the request for faculty flexibility with deadlines and so forth, is a recognition that faculty have been overwhelmed. But yet, I think
a lot of faculty are still being quite a bit more flexible, and that adds to the stress that they’re dealing with. Because when you have lots of students turning in lots of work at random times, it makes work a little bit more complicated. Do
you have any strategies that might work well for faculty who are trying to be flexible, but still trying to find time to deal with their everyday stress?

Karen: I’m so glad you brought that up. Because yes, absolutely. I agree with you. And I want to come at that from two angles. And I might forget the second as I’m talking about the first. But, the first thing I want to
say here is that institutions could choose to invest in supporting faculty through reducing their course loads and reducing class sizes. Now I know some people that are listening to this just said, “Oh my gosh, Karen, that’s never going to happen.”
It could happen. We make choices about our values through where we invest our time and energy and money. And if your institution, for example, is invested in, I don’t know, I’ll throw out proctoring technology and spending tens of hundreds of
thousands of dollars on these tools that we have increasing amounts of data that they don’t even work, number one, and that they do harm to students, particularly students of color, and students with disabilities. So If your institution is investing
in those, they can certainly choose to re-invest instead in creating systems and structures that allow faculty to have more time to do the work of inclusive teaching, which includes adapting to deadlines and giving students flexibility. It doesn’t
mean you get rid of deadlines, it doesn’t mean you get rid of structure. It means that we meet students where they are and help them as best we can. I want to direct my answer first to leadership and say if this is something that research and
science is showing us that we need in light of the findings we have right now about this mental health crisis in faculty and students, then start investing in faculty and students. So the second thing I would say is to the faculty: we cannot sit
around and wait for leaders to do what is right, we have to act in this moment with what we have. So I’m taking a breath here because there’s so much work to do. And I’m just watching people continue to suffer and struggle. And it seems like the
theme is that leadership is not showing up for people. And what people tell me, time and time again, is that my institution has betrayed me, it has failed me, and I have just lost faith. Okay, I had to get that out. What I invite faculty to do
is to do what they can. So trauma-aware teaching is not self sacrifice. So it is not: “I am going to make myself sick, or put myself into worse burnout or into burnout to take care of my students” …because that in the long run does not take care
of your students. That means that you’re not able to do your work, and you’re not able to support your students as effectively, and we don’t want that. So the first thing that I tell people about trauma-aware teaching is that we have to take care
of ourselves. That is our responsibility as humans, that is our responsibility as educators. And this is murky and messy, but we do our best to take care of ourselves. We say no to whatever we can, perhaps, that doesn’t immediately impact our
wellbeing or our students wellbeing. And we focus on what we can do. We find supportive communities to talk about this in a real way, to talk about the hard stuff. I have been part of communities of faculty who have been able to show up together
and just cry at what is going on and listen to each other and listen to each other’s family stories and life stories. And then we carry on with the work of teaching. So do what you can, this is not about being some perfect teacher, there are things
I could probably do to be more flexible and inclusive, that are just not within my bandwidth. I have a book chapter coming out in a book called Trauma-Informed Pedagogies about this concept of a scope of practice for educators. And I think that
might help some people to put a very practical structure around this. And what it really causes us to ask is: “What belongs to us?” and “What are we qualified to do?” amd “What is not ours or what can I refer to somebody else?” But we cannot do
everything for everyone. We can do the best that we can where we are and continue to take care of ourselves. And I know that so many faculty are doing that already and have been doing that. So, know that it is not your fault if your institution
does not invest in supporting faculty and students. Do what you can where you can and take care of yourself.

Rebecca:: I love that advice. I think there’s some struggle, though, probably for faculty, depending on their position… that some faculty can easily do that and others can’t or can’t do as much or can’t be as flexible
because of their own circumstances. And then students say: “But XYZ faculty does this. Why can’t you do it too?” Do you have some advice for how to handle some of those situations and to support one another?

Karen: Absolutely. So I’m an adjunct myself. So I think that would be one category of folks that we might be talking about here. I have chronic illnesses, I have disabilities, I have ADHD. And I also carry many privileges
that protect me from some of those particular challenges. So again, we can only do what we can do where we are with what we have. In that case, depending on your relationship with those students or with your students in general, one of my pieces
of advice is to talk to and be transparent with students. And perhaps I would have a conversation with them about how faculty, in general, are not always going to teach in the same way and the pros and cons of that. And I also might enlighten
them into the fact that different faculty have different resources at their disposal and different expectations. I would start by being transparent with students. And then I would certainly, to the extent possible, be raising my hands… I say that
to people a lot, raise your hands to whatever extent you can with what power you have, to administration, in meetings,amongst leadership to say this is the reality of what is happening. This is what my students need. This is the bandwidth that
I have to give it to them and the limitations that I’m facing them. And we need to invest in faculty and students. The more of us that are pushing for that… Do I expect them to listen? No, but I long for the day when they will. And I will continue
to ask, for as long as it makes sense. And the other thing I would say is to faculty who do have that privilege and power, we need your voices to be advocating for us on campus. So we need you to be calling for an investment in faculty and students
in a way that supports the least resourced among us.

John: Over the course of the pandemic, faculty became much more aware of student trauma that had always been out there, but it became so much more obvious. Do you think that’s something that faculty will carry forward
into the future, or as we move more to traditional classroom teaching, will people forget some of the inequities that our students face?

Karen: I would like to believe that we are facing a future where we will have the luxury of forgetting, I do not think that is the future that we are facing. If I’m being completely honest, I think that what’s coming is
going to be… I’m mindful of saying this… but I think that what’s coming in terms of climate change is going to make the past two years look not as difficult. And they were incredibly difficult. I think we are going to face increased challenges.
I say to people, pandemics are a symptom of climate change, we can expect more and more intense and more frequent pandemics, in addition to all of the other life threatening, species threatening, impacts of climate change. So I don’t think we’re
going to have the luxury of forgetting, I will say that the vast majority of faculty that I work with are incredibly caring, are curious about what they can do to support students. That’s not where my concern lies. I’ve been reading a lot of the
work of adrienne maree brown. She talks about and writes about a system called emergent strategy, and it’s about shaping change. And I’ve been really diving into her work, thinking about how do we shape change in higher education. And one of her
mantras is “small is all.” So we get together in these small communities. And we make these small choices and changes, whether it’s raising our hand and a meeting, or giving a student an extension, and we recognize that every small act matters
and builds towards something bigger. And the faculty that I work with are doing that work right now. What I’m trying to figure out is where do we go from here? If our leadership and administration are focused on this idea of “it’s post pandemic,
it’s the new normal, everything’s wonderful, everybody’s back on campus, isn’t this great?” …and they are refusing time and time again to address the realities of our lives. Where do we go from there? And again, I’m increasingly finding myself
telling people: “think about where you are investing your time and energy, and if that makes sense for our current reality and the future that we want to create.” And I hope that administration and leadership will start to get on board more with
that. I think faculty and staff, by and large are, with some exceptions, are already doing so much of that work.

Rebecca:: Karen, what’s the future that you want to create?

Karen: You know, I’m hosting a workshop on this, part of My Fest 22, a group of educators are putting this together. And we’re gonna get together for 30 minutes, because small is all. And we’re going to talk about emergent
strategy. And one of the questions is: “What is the higher education that we want to create?” I will say that as somebody who is fairly newly diagnosed with ADHD, that I have been part of communities in the past couple years, with fellow ADHD-ers
where we get together online, which is accessible for me, and we ideate and we create and we’re weird, and we’re wonderful, and there’s not really these rules and boxes that we’ve so long been forced into. And it’s just like an explosion of creativity
and goodness. And I was at a conference recently. There was a lot of sessions, it wasn’t for ADHD folks, but the session I went to was about ADHD folks. And later in the day, the conference organizers said this was our most engaged session. One
of the things I think about is having our ADHD learners, our disabled learners, our neurodivergent learners, really centering them in the future of higher education. We are the ones who are coming up with new ideas. We are the ones who see connections
between ideas that other people, neurotypical people, don’t see. We are the ones who have often suffered greatly and been let down by institutions and been so savvy and strong in adapting and figuring out how to do it with no support. And I would
love to see a higher education that starts to center these learners and these educators. Because the sky is the limit, there are no bounds to our brains. So I would love to see a higher education that does that. An example of that: I like to go
really big and out into outer space and then bring things back down to planet earth for people. We have long had these centers for… sometimes they’ve recently been called Centers for Disability, but they were long the Disability Center, Center
for disabled students, different names, but they’ve been focused and grounded in that accommodations model. We’re starting to see centers for neurodiversity pop up. And they are not just for students who have a formal disability diagnosis, they
are for all students, because we need to educate non disabled or pre-disabled folks. And we need to educate folks without learning disabilities, about the gifts and challenges of these populations. And they are centered around… I use the term
strength-based, challenge aware, so they’re not deficit based. And I really think these could be sort of hubs for a new, brighter, more colorful, more interesting, more inclusive, higher education. They are few and far between right now. But when
I talk to campuses about ADHD, people get very excited about this idea. I was at a workshop with a school in New Jersey a couple of weeks ago, and someone said, “I’m starting that on this campus.” And I was just like, “Oh, my gosh, this is emergent
strategy.” This weird lady named Karen showed up to talk to your faculty, and you got this idea. She learned it from somebody else. And now this person feels motivated to create the center on their campus for neurodivergent students. What could
be next? Those are the reasons to be hopeful when we see those small connections and people sharing and building off of each other’s ideas. And I could go on and on, but that was the first thing that popped into my mind for a future for higher
ed. So I’m gonna trust that it came into my mind for a reason. But there’s so much there. And I think that question is really important for everybody to ask themselves. So I’m glad that you asked me. Thank you.

John: Could you comment a little bit more on the focus that many faculty and administrators have had concerning student disengagement during the pandemic?

Karen: Yeah, my primary goal is to really help us reframe this idea of student disengagement, which often is equivalent to student blaming, and putting the weight of the world on faculty and staff. As I mentioned, that
Provosts’ report, I have never, other than when it came out of my own mouth, heard anybody talk about provost engagement or provost disengagement, I would like to see that on the cover of the Chronicle, or on the front page of Inside Higher Ed.
Why aren’t we talking about that when only 4% are saying we have a concrete plan in place, which leads me to believe 96% aren’t doing that work. So let’s talk about provost disengagement with the realities of students and faculty and staffs lives,
I would like to have that conversation. So we got to be curious about the systems here. Why are we so hyper focused on this conversation about student disengagement? One, we got to reframe the fact that students are very engaged in taking care
of themselves and their families and communities. And why aren’t we focusing on leadership and their engagement? Higher Ed doesn’t live in a bubble. What about our elected representatives engagement with the reality of students and faculty and
staff lives, the judicial systems engagement, we could go on and on here, but we zone in on students, and we blame students and then again, we wonder why faculty aren’t putting some pedagogy on it to fix it all. So that was the main thing I want
to invite people to think about is whenever you hear that phrase, student engagement or student disengagement, to think about systems, to think about power, to think about whose engagement we aren’t talking about, and to be really critical and
thoughtful about that conversation,

Rebecca:: I really agree with you, Karen. I’m always thinking about the design of things as a designer. And so what was this designed to do?

Karen: Yeah.

Rebecca:: …and what does it support? And how does the design need to change if we want things to change?

Karen: Right.

Rebecca:: …but we have to be willing to redesign.

Karen: Yes, I love that. And I have that design background as well. And we have to be willing to redesign. Is this the higher education that we need in this moment in time? That’s a scary conversation to have. I’ve been
prepping a workshop and one thing I have in there is what I’m calling “the great letting go.” But I think we’re going to have to let go of some really deeply held attachments in higher education and in our teaching, to redesign for the world that
we have now for the students that we have now, for faculty and staff. We are entering into what I suspect is going to be a really intense volatile era. And all hands need to be working toward, again, creating, imagining this brighter future. And
I’ve been saying this a lot lately, higher education was built to exclude me, it was built to exclude, I would say, most of us who are currently teaching and learning in it. And so many of those systems and structures that were built around exclusion
are still how we do business and how we teach and learn. So I talked before about where are you going to invest your time and energy? I’m very careful lately about where… it’s something I learned in the pandemic, and I had learned it before, but
I learned it even more. Where do I have power? Where don’t I have power? Where do I want to invest my time and energy? Who do I want to spend time with? Who do I want to learn with? And I want to be with people who are looking to create that more
inclusive, more colorful, brighter, higher education.

Rebecca:: I think there’s probably many of our listeners who are ready to do that too. [LAUGHTER]

Karen: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Rebecca:: There’s many of us that would like to see change and are working towards change, so we’re glad that you’re speaking out, Karen.

Karen: And that’s why I have adrienne maree brown’s books next to me. Sometimes I just hold on to them, adrienne maree brown’s books: Emergent Strategy, and then I recently got her book Holding Change. So I think one of
the critical conversations we can be having right now is how do we shape change? That is a question that adrienne maree brown is asking. How do we work toward this higher education that we want to create and a world where people all have enough,
and where everybody can show up as their weird and wonderful selves and be supported and learn together? And do that in service of not only humanity, but the entire planet and all species. What does that look like? And emergent strategy is a tool,
it’s a tool to help us shape change. When you’ve got no resources, when you’ve got an administration that does not seem to be willing to acknowledge these realities, people who are interested in protecting the elite, rather than opening up these
systems, what are you going to do? How are you going to move through your day? And I feel like why I’m so drawn to emergent strategy is it gives me answers about how to do that work. Small is all. What can I do? What small thing can I do to move
this idea or conversation or energy forward in this moment. And I do the next best thing. And that’s been so helpful for me.

Rebecca:: I love the idea of taking these small steps. It makes it much more manageable. Yeah, exactly.

John: And making small changes that make your classes more inclusive so that they do work for everyone, no matter what challenges they face, can do a lot to help our students.

Karen: Absolutely. There’s a book series, I know Jim Lang, and I think Flower Darby did it online, called Small Teaching. So these ideas are out there, they’re circulating. And I think the more of us that are gathering,
again, in these smaller, inclusive communities. Divest from the spaces that are not supporting us, take your time and energy away from those and put them to where this work is already being done. So many of our marginalized communities have been
doing this work for centuries. Let’s invest our time and energy more mindfully to intentionally shape change in higher education.

John: It’s also very similar to Tom Tobin’s notion of the “plus one” strategy, make small changes and do it incrementally and it can add up to a much larger change over time.

Karen: Yeah, and we can do that in our classrooms. And I think we can also do that in this broader work as advocates for higher education as a whole and moving again toward a more inclusive system or redesigning the system,
as we just said: plus one, small teaching, emergent strategy. We have systems in place that we can look to to do this work.

Rebecca:: Culture changes when the people involved in the culture make a change.

Karen: Yes.

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

Karen: I have some fun things planned coming up. Again, I’ve been really focused on doing the work that just feels right in my body and that has a spark. I mentioned that emergent strategy workshop coming up. I am the,
I guess, person who will be welcoming people but not actually facilitating a Zine workshop. Remember Zines from the 90s? We’re going to get faculty together to do that work. And I also have imminently, hopefully, some really cool workshops around
what we’re calling climate action pedagogy or CAP for short. So helping faculty to infuse principles of climate action into their classroom. It will involve if you couldn’t figure it out already, it’ll be relying on principles of emergent strategy,
which is really exciting. And then I’m taking time off this summer. I’m very excited for that and protective of that time. So, good stuff coming up, again, very focused on small communities, supporting faculty and students, investing in faculty
and students, and doing whatever small thing I can where I am. I don’t know what’s coming, I get absolutely overwhelmed at times, and hopeless at times. And what I find really is critical for my mental health and for my work, is to just ask that
question, take that time to feel that way, and then to ask that question: “What can I do? What small thing can I do?” …and the future is really quite terrifying, but what I’ve realized lately is that I’m gonna go out swinging and fighting. And
I’m not certain about really anything, but I know that I’m going to do everything that I can, while I can to make this world a better place.

John: We very much appreciate all the work that you’re doing.

Karen: And to you all I want to say that, I was sharing with

Rebecca:, earlier, I’ve been working on a podcast, it’s going to be 10 episodes, and I know how many episodes you all have recorded, and I knew it was going to be more work than I thought it would be. But it’s definitely
like that, and then some. So thank you all for investing your time and energy into holding this space for educators. And I have a new glimpse into how much work it is. And we so appreciate all of the work that you do.

John: It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun. And we get to talk to some great people like you.

Karen: Good.

John: Thank you.

Rebecca:: Twice. [LAUGHTER]

John: Three times.

Rebecca:: Three times, yeah.

John: Actually, we first talked about 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Videos….

Karen: Oh my gosh.

John: …which is something that our faculty have loved.

Karen: Okay, that was lost in the pandemic brain. So that’s interesting. People send me things that I’ve written or said, and I go: “That’s really nice. I have no recollection of that, but it’s really nice.” [LAUGHTER]
Our brains make choices. [LAUGHTER] Thank you. Third time’s the charm. It’s great to be here with you again.

Rebecca:: Well, thank you so much for joining us. We always appreciate having you and value everything that you do.

Karen: Thank you.

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

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

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