245. Higher Ed’s Next Chapter

Show Notes

• Gannon, K.M. (2020). Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. West Virginia University Press.
• Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.
• Whiteside, A. L. (2015). Introducing the social presence model to explore online and blended learning experiences. Online Learning, 19(2), n2.
• Lewis, S., Whiteside, A. L., & Dikkers, A. G. (2014). Autonomy and responsibility: Online learning as a solution for at-risk high school students. International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education/Revue internationale du e-learning et la formation à distance, 29(2).
• Whiteside, Aimee, Amy Garrett Dikkers, and Karen Swan, eds (2017). Social Presence in Online Learning: Multiple Perspectives on Practice and Research. Stylus Press.
• Cate Denial, Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh, and Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt. (2022). “After the Great Pivot Should Come the Great Pause.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. February 25.
• Mays Imad. (2021), “Transcending Adversity: Trauma-Informed Educational Development.” To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development. (39(3).
• Hanstedt, P. (2018). Creating wicked students: Designing courses for a complex world. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
• Hidden Brain Podcast.(2022). “Do Less.” June 6.
• Leidy Klotz. (2021) Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. MacMillan.
• Betsy Barre (2021). Student Workload. Tea for Teaching podcast. April 14.

Transcript

John:
During the past two years, faculty have experimented with new teaching modalities and new teaching techniques as we adapted to the COVID pandemic. In this episode, we reflect on what we have learned during these experiences and what we are in danger of forgetting.

[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 Kevin Gannon. Kevin is a history professor who has recently accepted a new position as the incoming director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence at Queen’s University of Charlotte. He is also the author of Radical Hope, a Teaching Manifesto, which is available from West Virginia University Press. Welcome back, Kevin.

Kevin: Great to be here with you both again.

John:
And we just saw you a couple of weeks ago when you provided a closing keynote address at the SUNY CIT conference. It’s nice to have a chance to talk to you a little bit more.

Kevin: Yeah, it was great to be up there with you all in Oswego and I miss the Oswego weather now that I am here where it is 100 degrees outsideinf Des Moines right now.

Rebecca: That’s a little toasty.

Kevin: Yeah, it was not what I ordered, that’s for sure.

Rebecca: So dare I ask, what our teas for today are? So today’s teas are… Kevin, are you drinking tea?

Kevin: I am actually drinking a Diet Coke. Usually about midday, I moved to the cold and bubbly caffeine. So we have made that transition.

Rebecca: Cold seems necessary based on just the temperature outside.

Kevin: Indeed. [LAUGHTER]

John:
And I am drinking a wild blueberry black tea from the Republic of Tea in a new mug that our graduate student at the teaching center had given us just a couple of weeks ago, as a thank you for working with us. And I don’t know why she was thanking us… she made it so much easier over the past year.

Rebecca: Yeah, big shout out to Anna Croyle for all her hard work on the podcast over the last year. And I’m drinking… is it Ceylon? How do you even say that? Ceylon tea?

Kevin: That’s how I’ve always said it. So if it’s wrong, I’ve been wrong. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Me too. It’s one of those where you read mostly and not say out loud. [LAUGHTER]

John:
So we invited you here to talk a little bit about where higher education is going. You talked a little bit about that in the closing keynote address here and we thought it would be nice to get your opinion on the lessons that we’ve learned from the pandemic and where you see higher education as going, or where it should go, over the next few years.

Rebecca: Yeah, those might be two really different things. [LAUGHTER]

Kevin: Right. And I think that’s maybe where a lot of the stress and the angst comes from… that we’ve identified some places that a lot of us think higher education should go or at least a direction or a set of clear directions in which it should head. But we’re not at all certain that that’s actually how it’s gonna play out. And that dissonance between those two things can be unsettling. And I think that, at least from my perspective, that’s where a lot of the kind of stress and anxiety looking forward in higher education is coming from. And we’re obviously coming out, and not even completely out, but sort of coming out of one chapter and into a new chapter and landscape that’s been fundamentally reshaped by COVID, by pandemic pedagogy, and as a sort of immediate context. But of course, all of that unfolding in the larger context of defunding higher education and the sort of slow motion societal collapse that we find ourselves in as well. And I think there’s a lot that’s been laid bare by that. There’s a lot that I think folks sort of knew about intellectually, or were willing to sort of name but now feel much more viscerally and real and immediately, but we’re also really, really tired [LAUGHTER] and stretched thin. What’s the line that Bilbo Baggins says in The Lord of the Rings… “like butter that’s been scraped over too much toast.” [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That’s exactly it, right.

Kevin: Right? And I think that’s where a lot of us, if not all of us, are in some way or another. And so of course, just as we know when we talk about student learning and cognition, the less cognitive bandwidth we have available to do these sorts of complex tasks, the harder those things are. And I think on a macro scale in higher ed, I think that’s where we find ourselves too, facing some of our most difficult problems with less bandwidth available to address them than ever before.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s kind of funny, less bandwidth, but a lot of momentum and a lot of phase two.

Kevin: Right.

Rebecca: It doesn’t always line up.

Kevin: Right? Like the cars going really fast over the cliff, but we can’t steer it. It feels like, and that’s not…

Rebecca: Yeah.

Kevin: …not a comfortable place to sit.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the things that we’ve learned in higher ed during the pandemic?

Kevin: This is a conversation that could, of course, go on forever. But I think one of the things that we learned, that’s central to so much of what we’re trying to figure out now is just how much learning or teaching and learning are social endeavors, are community endeavors. And that’s not to say that they have to be done in the same physical space at the same synchronous time, but that sociality, a sense of community, are vital to any sort of meaningful learning. And of course, we’d learned that mostly in the absence of those thing with the shift to emergency remote instruction and then the ways in which what we were trying to do and COVID either partially or completely shut places down was so attenuated, and for folks who didn’t have a lot of experience in online teaching and for students who didn’t have a lot of experience of being online learners, we lost that community piece, that sociality. It became a series of sort of atomized, fragmented, maybe conversations, but not even really that. I think a lot of what ended up happening was instructors sort of broadcasting things out, like we would send out radio signals in the hopes that some alien civilization would pick up on them, and maybe they’ll land somewhere. And I think that’s how a lot of us felt by a good year or so into this thing. And so I think what we’ve realized now is that, yeah, we lost something really meaningful. We did the best we could speaking broadly. And moving all of higher ed online in about two weeks, that’s not something that we should scoff att. But we also risk permanently embedding some of the things that really frustrated us during that pandemic period, if we’re not attentive to addressing those things now. So I think everything else that we need to, I guess “everything’s” probably too broad a word, but so much else that what we need to address in higher ed springs from that fundamental reality about sociality and community. And in particular, the difficulty of trying to do what it is that we do, either personally, or institutionally, when those things are missing.

John:
We had that initial period where everyone moved to remote instruction for a while. And then even when we came back, it was to classrooms with a lot of distance separating people, and with masks and, in general, a lot of barriers that were not there before. And it’s been quite a bit of a challenge. I think we’ve all tried many things to build community in whatever modality or whatever mix of modalities we’ve happened to be teaching in. What are some strategies that we can use to build communities more effectively in our classes?

Kevin: So I think one of the things that I’m really interested in now, and something I think offers a lot of promise, and I actually talked about this in the talk that I gave when I was with you at Oswego, was the research that we have from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the online world, and in particular, the sort of very venerable community of inquiry model, but in particular, the work that’s been done on social presence as a key part of that, so building social presence on the part of both instructors and learners in an online class. And it seems to me that the insights that underlay the idea of social presence for fully remote asynchronous learning, apply very well in pretty much any teaching and learning space we find ourselves in, either online or on-ground, synchronous, hybrid, or asynchronous. And in particular, I’m really indebted to the work of Amiee Whiteside and her colleagues who talk about what are the components that underlay a meaningful social presence, that is, social presence in the sense of to what degree are the people that are in the space recognized by one another as full human beings, not just avatars or not just user names on a discussion board thread? And one of the most important things that underlays this social presence is what Whiteside and her colleagues called interaction intensity. One of the problems that we had in trying to do pandemic pedagogy was like, “Oh, we’ll do discussion boards,” “oh, our students will be ‘communicating.’ they’ll be talking with one another.” But if you’ve ever taught online, you know that it’s very easy for these sorts of discussion board assignments to become very sort of pro forma empty exercises, respond to a classmate, put two comments here, and students resent them almost as much as we resent having to read them [LAUGHTER] as instructors. So those are interactions, but they’re not what Whiteside and her colleagues would say are appropriately intense interactions. That is I’m not expending a whole lot of cognitive or emotional or socially present labor to engage in those sorts of interactions. And so they’re not really accomplishing what they’re supposed to in that we say discussions help build community in a class. Well, not if they’re designed in a way that doesn’t prompt this idea of interaction intensity. So what are the interactions, whether it’s between individual learners, whether it’s between the instructor and students, or whether it’s between students and the particular course material or ideas that you’re addressing? And whatever online or in-person space this is, what are those interactions like and how intense are they? What kind of cognitive labor are we asking students to do? How are we asking students to invest effort, motivation, and the sort of cognitive lifting to do what we would call higher-order tasks of analysis, of synthesis, of creation, as opposed to just sort of rote memorization or regurgitation? And so that’s one example of what I think is a broader thing that we need to be paying attention to is how are we cultivating all across our higher educational spaces, how are we cultivating that type of interaction intensity, that meaningful work to connect and to engage? Because as any faculty member will tell you, other than money, the other two resources that are the most scarce for us are time and energy or emotional energy, and I think the same is true for our students. So if we’re asking our students to contribute both time and emotional labor to a class, we need to make sure that it’s worth it. There needs to be, and I hate to use the capitalist metaphor, but what return on that investment are students getting? Because that’s going to be the calculus by which they allocate energy and prioritization to the various paths that all of their instructors are asking them to do. And so what social presence research and in particular, this emphasis on interaction intensity, has us think about is what are we asking our students to do? How are we asking them to do it? And is it worth it? What is the return for that? In that sense, it’s us making a promise to students that these are meaningful tasks that we’re asking you to engage in, that go toward your accomplishment of the learning goals for this course, and the overall goal of making this course a meaningful space. So we’re not going to waste your time with stuff that isn’t contributing to that. And so I think being really intentional and informed by a scholarship that’s already out there, in many ways, is going to be of enormous assistance to us moving forward.

Rebecca: One thing that I’ve heard a lot of instructors talk about over the past year is this big gap between students who are really achieving and those that just aren’t, they’re not able to, and maybe a lot of that’s tied to mental health and other things, perhaps, but we don’t necessarily know. But a lot of faculty have talked about this, like big gap, like there’s a hole in the middle. What strategies can we think about institutionally and individually as instructors as we move into the fall to make sure that students aren’t just completely left behind or never get to finish their education or barely begin it?

Kevin: So on the personal level, I think anything that we can do to humanize our instruction. And again, no matter what space we’re in, how are we making these spaces human spaces, spaces for actual human beings and not just brains on sticks, so paying attention to what are the affective dimensions of our courses. Are our courses and our learning spaces welcoming spaces, inclusive spaces, the old idea of seeing courses as a barrier or a weed out space, it was never tenable, but it’s clearly untenable now. But one of the things I worry about is, we’re not going, I don’t think, be able to pedagogy our way out of all of this individually. And I worry that the emphasis might be so much on “here are things that you can do in your individual classrooms, which are great and wonderful,” and we need to be doing them. But they’re not going to fix everything, because these are systemic problems. And so systemic problems demand systemic solutions. And so this is where we have to be thinking institutionally, what kind of resources are we allocating to and for students, and it’s going to be everything, I think, from additional academic support, supplemental instruction, emergency grants, food security, all of these things that are going to have to be in place, and a lot of schools are sort of doing or at least making gestures at doing, but we need to be thinking a lot more systematically and strategically about doing those things. And we also need to be advocating in the communities of which our institutions are apart, because we’re not separated from them. We don’t exist in a vacuum. And the barriers that are in front of many of our students are barriers that come from these larger systems of inequity and deprivation that they are coming out of, and then entering our campus spaces already having their experiences shaped by those things. And of course, we know those barriers don’t exist in any sort of equitable way at all. So this is institutional, systematic work. And I worry that in, again, not post COVID, but in this next chapter, are institutional leaders going to be so nervous about their own institutions’ survival, that they’re scared to take on what for some of them might look like social justice oriented type of work? Is that going to be seen as too political or too activist? And are we going to damage our ability to attract funding? Or are we going to get the wrong kind of attention. And I think ethically, that’s a disastrous way to go about it. But I also think practically, that is a non-starter as well. Schools that run scared from these sorts of things in the next couple of years, are schools that I don’t think will survive.

John:
We often talk about humanizing, or creating a more human presence. And we often talk about that in terms of just humanizing the professor. Would it help if we also focus a little bit more on bringing the students’ humanity and their lived experience into the class because maybe one way of bringing students back in is by helping students connect their own lives and their hopes for the future with what you’re doing in their classes. I think everyone advocates that to some extent, but might there be some ways of using that to help reach out to those disengaged students that Rebecca was mentioning?

Kevin: What a radical concept, recognizing students as actual human beings. Crazy talk, right? [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.

Kevin: But I think what this underscores is that I just said we’re not going to pedagogy our way out of all of these problems. But having said that, and put in that caveat, I think systematic and intentional attention to our pedagogy ,that is what’s the larger sort of philosophical lenses through which we’re looking to view our work? John, you get right at the heart of that question. How do we see our students? Because our students know what we think of them, even probably better than we know what we think of them, sometimes. What we do, the choices we make, the ways in which we engage or not engage with our students send very clear signals to them. And so I think one of the things that is super important for instructors to be doing in this moment is thinking very intentionally about how am I with my students. And so if we’re going to talk about social presence, in what ways am I present? What does that present look like to others? And can my students trust me? Do my students think that I trust them? What am I saying to my students, and all of the sort of broad ways, textual and otherwise? What am I telling them that I think about them? What am I saying about the reasons that they should be taking this class? What is this class going to do for them? So absolutely, being more attentive to the full and complex nature of the students who are sharing this space with us. I mean, we’ve always known that that is a good pedagogical thing to do. We’ve always known that that helps increase, for example, students’ motivation and interest in a class, which leads to more meaningful learning. But I just think ethically, at this point to0, students are our allies, students want what we want, they want our institutions to successfully fulfill the promises that we’ve made. Students may not define successful in the way that we might define it for them, or that may look different depending on where they are in their particular journey in our institutions. But we want the same outcomes. We want that success. And so recognizing that commonality and inviting students to help do that work with us, as opposed to either passively off to the side or in opposition to us, seems like a much better strategy going forward. And so some of that conversation, I think, in the coming year, you know, maybe there’s a sort of a back to the basics kind of nuts and bolts emphasis on just good effective pedagogical technique for humanizing instruction. When Ken Bain talks about the promising syllabus, boom, there’s a way to frame the sort of formal statement of the class, the first formal context some of our students may have with the class. When we talk about creating a good climate for discussion, collaborative expectation setting, you know, what are we doing for tone setting the first day of class, all of these sorts of bread and butter, nuts and boltsy kind of things are well worth revisiting and thinking about systematically in ways that we might not have been able to do the past couple years quite frankly,

Rebecca: I know one of the things that your talk had me thinking about Kevin is all the ways that we need to humanize all the other spaces on our campus and all the processes that feel like checking this box, go through this door, shove around that corner, go to that office, oh nope, you got to go to that office. Nope, just kidding. It’s this other office. Processes that aren’t streamlined or with the student experience in mind, maybe they work for the administrative shuffle that might have to happen, but not always thinking about the student as the human that needs to experience the process also. So that’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about is ways that maybe the social presence idea needs to take form in other places outside of the classroom as well,

Kevin: Absolutely. Because if it doesn’t, what students are getting is one space on campus that is attentive to these things. And then a whole bunch of other spaces on campus that are not, and that dissonance is going to be more telling to students than anything else. So yeah, we’re talking culture change, institutional culture change, which again, may seem like a really heavy lift, given everything. But I don’t think it’s so much additional work as it is a way to focus what we’re already doing to make it more intentional and meaningful, like bringing a coherence to the things that we’re doing anyway, or should be doing anyway, I think that’s the way to approach this kind of work. So one suggestion I always offer to folks on campus on the student services side and the administration side: do a communications audit. How are you communicating? Like, what are the literal examples of the reminder emails you send to students to pay their bill, to register, to drop by the drop date… you know, all this administrative stuff that we bombard students with… read those communications with an eye towards tone, with an eye towards that kind of, I hate to use the phrase but the customer service aspect of this? Because oftentimes what we find is that a bulk of the communication that we’re doing with students, that kind of routine, everyday communication is carrying a very impersonal, almost adversarial, stance that feels punitive, as opposed to supportive. And even if we don’t mean it that way, if that’s our regular constant mode of communication with students, then what are we doing? And what are the consequences of that? Yeah, absolutely. All across campus, as I said in the talk, and as I firmly believe all of our campuses are teaching and learning spaces. Our students are always learning no matter where they are. And so the question we should all have whatever unit or office we’re in is, “Well, what are we teaching and how are we teaching it?” And I think answering those questions in an honest and systematic way can go a long way towards doing that sort of culture change work that I have in mind.

John:
At that conference we mentioned earlier, one of the things that came up in discussion is how some of our campus offices are named, which ties into that communication issue. We have a “Registrar’s” office, and we have a “Bursar,” those are not things that make sense to people, unless they’ve already had some experience with college and maybe simply renaming offices in ways that make sense to students and their role in the university could help a little bit [LAUGHTER] with some of those issues.

Kevin: Absolutely. And, you know, we should be able to answer the question, why would a student need to go to this place? Is the answer to that self evident? If I’m a student, why would I want to go to the registrar’s office? If I don’t know the answer to that right off the bat, that’s an institutional problem. So again, whether it’s the name of the office, or the way in which the services that they offer are communicated to students, there’s a lot of work that we can do as institutions to do this better. As you mentioned, John, some students are going to be familiar with those terms, who come from families where they’re not the first in their family to go to college, for example. So a lot of times the way our campus environments, in terms of the actual workflow of doing business, a lot of times the way that our campus environments are laid out rewards cultural capital, and, as a result, exacerbates the already existing inequities that we see.

Rebecca: I think one thing that students often complain about too, is the sheer quantity of communication, and trying to sort through it all, and when they’re already overwhelmed. And you mentioned before about having to make choices of where to prioritize time and effort and energy and emotional labor. And so sometimes it’s not on email, I sometimes feel that way as well.

Kevin: Yeah, I was about to say… absolutely.

Rebecca: So not only the quantity of what goes out, but also maybe more than one way to get that information.

Kevin: The institution that I’m at now, before I take my new position, has moved some of that communication into text messaging that students can opt in, and I think if students are able to opt in or something like that, that’s great. But I think, to your larger point, so many times individual units are communicating with students without any awareness of what other units are doing, too, which leads to all of us getting carpet bombed by emails. And so one way out of that, again, if you’re thinking about doing this sort of communication audit is compare your results. How many times a week are you communicating with students? And in what ways are you doing that? And might there be ways that you could partner up or collaborate across the unit, so you’re not redundant. And I think sometimes what we might find in institutions is that we’re actually communicating to students at cross purposes with one another, or at least tacitly undermining some of the messages that we might be sending to them. But yeah, when we complain that students don’t ever check their email, like I have a Google account where I sign up for something, or I join a fantasy football league, I use that address, because that’s where all the spam goes. And if I open that inbox, I just look at all the stuff that’s there, and I’m like, “Nope, I’m not even going to deal with that.” So if that’s our student’s university email inbox, with all the stuff that they’re just getting bombarded with from various campus units, I imagine that largely the same thought process is occurring there. And that maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re not checking their email, because we’ve made it much more complex and less, I don’t want to say fun, but a much more onerous process for students to wade through that stuff. And again, this may sound like a simple how big of a deal is email really, right. But it’s like the accumulation of all of these things. And I think that we, as faculty and staff felt this over COVID to, like I can’t do one more email right now, in the objective scheme of things. A 30-second reply to an email is not that big of a deal, but I’m looking at it like I gotta roll this boulder all the way up the mountain and I’m not going to do that. So being attentive to that and being mindful about that, even seemingly esoteric point, I think can make a significant difference.

John:
We talked a little bit about some of the lessons that we’ve learned and things that we might want to take forward. Are there some things that we learned early in the pandemic, that we might be in danger of forgetting as we move forward into what seems like a return to something resembling, I hate to use the word normalcy, but as we move back to more on-site instruction.

Kevin: I think we’re in danger of losing a number of insights that are really hard won insights that we should not lose, that I think it would be a disaster, in fact, if we’d lost. So one of them, I think, is the discovery very shortly into this sort of shift and the pandemic pedagogy, that flexibility and compassion are much more effective than they have perhaps been given credit for across most quarters of higher ed. And again, that’s not to say that from here on forward, we all sit around in a circle and sing Kumbaya, but rather the idea that you can ask students to do really hard things, you could do what people would call rigorous education, but you can’t do it in a space where students feel that the adverse consequences of taking a risk and not succeeding outweigh the benefits of taking a risk and succeeding. I don’t know if that was the most coherent way… but the risk-reward analysis… if students are in a learning space that they see as rigid, as inflexible, as one that is not compassionate, where’s the motivation to do the really hard stuff, the risk taking that we know underlays successful learning in higher education. And so I worry that there’s this rush to “get back to normal,” back when deadlines were deadlines, and not all this mushy crap. If we just rushed to reimpose all that structure, without attention to the shortcomings of those structures, without sufficient attention to were those structures actually facilitating learning or acting as barriers to learning. I fear that we’ll lose that in the rush to sort of reimpose structure on what many folks have seen as a structure-less environment over the last couple of years. I think that it’s entirely possible the pendulum may swing too far back. I’m also deeply concerned that, on the administrative institutional strategy side, that we will lose sight and lose the urgency of the attentiveness to the humanity and well being of not just students, but faculty and staff, just because things might be getting “back to normal.” That next academic year, things will look at least superficially like they did before COVID, full classes, mostly in person and all that kind of stuff. It will be very easy to say that, “Oh, we made it past all of that and things are good now” …without reckoning with the fact that the faculty and staff are absolutely depleted by the last few years. And you can’t just all of a sudden return, “Oh, let’s do all sorts of new strategic things. And let’s do this. It’s business as usual.” I know university administrators are loath to say “this year, we’re not going to do anything new.” Because that sounds like a surrender. But what I would say is, this year use the year to refocus on sustainability and effective mission-driven work. And you can’t do that if you’re starting to pile all this other stuff on. And yes, it’s easy for me to say because I’m not a provost. And I’m not a president, but provosts and presidents right now who are not attentive to how little capacity the faculty and staff have right now are courting disaster for themselves and for their institution, and I think, ethically, are failing as leaders as well, and so I worry deeply. And in the United States, the way we wrestle with our history is often to pretend bad things never happen. And I feel like that’s in danger of happening here. Like, oh, COVID was awful. And man, pandemic pedagogy sucked, but we made it through. And now we’re just going to soldier on as if it never happened. We don’t want to think about this bad time that we had this negative messy thing. I’m not saying that we have to sit in the misery and despair of a global pandemic. But what I am saying is if we’re not remembering what that was like, and how that has changed people, then we are going to fail the people that we work with, or that work for us in our community. And to me, that’s a real threat right now. And I worry a lot about the sort of what I see is kind of a general refusal to recognize that faculty and staff capacity, which was already attenuated pre-COVID. Let’s not get that twisted. But where we are now is a real dangerous point, and becomes even more dangerous, because there’s this illusion of normalcy, that people are laying back over the situation that’s covering up some really dangerous faultlines right now. And I worry a lot about that. That, to me, I think, is probably the most urgent and dangerous lesson that we are are potentially forgetting.

Rebecca: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Kevin: My new position is going to ask me to do a lot of leadership development with my new faculty colleagues. And so I’m dipping back into a lot of the literature on institutional level leadership and governance. And it’s fascinating and interesting, and it’s a new set of problems to solve. But it also, really, I think, just sort of drove home to me again, just how much higher ed leadership sometimes is like capitalism in general, like, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. If we don’t have a 5% growth in the GDP, than our economy is dead. But can you keep growing like that? Is that sustainable? And what are the costs of that? And so this coming year, if institutions are saying, hey, let’s do this new strategic initiative, on top of everything else… like yes, I see how there’s a sort of culture of higher ed leadership that places a real premium on these things, and also a stigma of if you’re not innovating, you’re dying, or you’re withering on the vine, but Cate Denial and Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh, and I think there was one other co-author, wrote a really good piece in The Chronicle, and they call it for the great pause in higher education. That’s anathema, I think, to a lot of institutional leadership, but I think it’s obligatory this year. For example, if you’re in an institution where you’re already trying to recover from an enrollment dip over the last couple of years and your faculty’s burnt out, because you’ve been teaching HyFlex and remote teaching and faculty have been doing that for two years, and many of them have never done it before, so of course, the capacity to continue to do that is depleted even further. If you’re an institution that’s gone through all of those things, and is experiencing now the faculty and staff attrition that those things bring as well and then you decide”, oh, here’s a couple really big ticket strategic items that we’re gonna do for the upcoming academic year,” like, really, is that what you want to do right now, in this moment? Make a major shift to academic programs, or we’re not going to offer three- credit classes, we’re going to do four-credit classes now? Really, that’s what you want to do this coming year, in this moment, that’s a priority. And of course, that example is completely hypothetical, he chuckled. But that’s the sort of decision making process that really worries me, because I just can’t see it ending well, and I can’t see it doing anything but harm in a setting and among a community that cannot handle any more harm.

Rebecca: Yeah, I really appreciate that focus on sustainable work, sustainable systems, sustainable procedures, sustainable everything.

Kevin: Yeah, we’re not going to wellness app our way out of this.

Rebecca:I don’t think a wellness app is going to solve the fact that my daughter has been in 11 quarantines, and I’ve had to figure out how to manage all that. [LAUGHTER] I don’t think that’s gonna work.

Kevin: Mays Imad has written a lot about the collective trauma that we have all undergone as a result of COVID. And I think she’s spot on. And whether it was something that people felt directly or whether it’s the constant disruption, Rebecca, that you’ve been subjected to and your family has been subjected to, or even if it’s just the sort of I have seen all this other trauma unfold in my community, and in my friends, we’re all affected by that and to act as if that hasn’t been a thing, and to say, yes, we need to pay attention to self care this year, self care will be really important, and there are a lot of good wellness apps that you can download for your smartphone or tablet that will help you with this. Like, if that’s all you got, then what are you doing? if that’s what you tell your faculty and just sort of assume that they can pick up the rest from there. And you sit back and say, “Well, I’ve done my duty.” Oh, my gosh, no, not at all. But yet, that’s what’s happened in a lot of places. And that’s what worries me. There’s so much that’s tenuous right now, and so much feels unsettled and raw still. And there’s a sharp edge to so much of the exhaustion, that I worry about irrevocable consequences that come from trying to whistle past the graveyard about all this… which is super optimistic. I know, the guy who wrote a book on hope is talking about the impending collapse of higher education. But again, the things that we say we do in higher education, we’re critical thinkers, we’re sharp people, the capacity to reason our way through these problems. There’s so much capacity in our institutions and leaders of institutions who are not able to draw upon that collective capacity are failing their communities and their institutions. If any place is going to have the tools to work through some of these… Paul Hanstedt calls them the “wicked problems” that we face, right, if any institutions gotta have that, it’s got to be colleges and universities. Will we pick up the tool, though, is the question.

Rebecca: Yeah, the key is, is the collective, bringing the right people to the table and asking folks what they need? And what would help and figuring it out together

John:
…without additional meetings, because that could push some people pass the breaking point, I think.

Kevin: Well, we need to ask what labor are we asking folks to do? Because in order to get through the next year, and in order to redress the problems that we face, there’s some other stuff that’s going to have to go. And so a successful leader, whether it’s a department chair all the way up to a university president are going to be able to answer that question: What is it that we’re going to let go right now to give people the capacity to untie these really complex knots that we’re going to be working on this year,

John:
I’ve seen several podcasts recently, I’m trying to remember the name of the person who was interviewed. One was recently on Hidden Brain, but I’ve seen it on others as well, about the power of subtraction, that we always look at things to add a patch on to fix something which involves doing more and sometimes the most effective solution is to trim out some things or reduce some of the other things that we’re doing that perhaps don’t need to be done in the same way. There may be some ways of simplifying our work and perhaps cutting out some of the things that seem duplicative and focusing on the things that are really essential for the institution and also maybe in our classes, trimming out some of those extra things we keep adding in as we try new techniques. And often we add to the cognitive load facing our students making it sometimes perhaps a bit too challenging as we tried to modify things. We talked to Betsy Barre a while back about that as one of the challenges that a lot of students face during a pandemic, because faculty started learning about evidence-based teaching methods, focusing on retrieval practice lots of low stakes tests, and actually increasing student workloads quite a bit because we’re now requiring students to do the work that we always hoped they did or we always wished that they had done,

Rebecca: dreamed, dreamed… [LAUGHTER]

John:
…imagined they had done.

Kevin: Right.

John:
So yeah, I think that applies in many areas. It may apply in our own classes, it applies to administrators, and I think in our lives in general.

Kevin: Well, that’s another area where some of the scholarship we have about effective online teaching and learning helps us. And here I’m thinking of the work that’s been done on literacy load, how much text do we ask students to read in an online class as opposed to a face-to-face class? And of course, the answer is, if we’re not careful, a hell of a lot more. And of course, what are the effects of that, this increased literacy load? And so what is the broader equivalent of a literacy load? What’s the load that we’re putting on our students right now. again, we have tools that we can use to think about this in a critical way, to address this in a reflective and intentional way. But individually, or class by class isn’t going to cut it again, systemically. What can we subtract? It’s okay to not do all the things. I mean, we’re not doing all the things anyway, we’re just being honest about it. [LAUGHTER] This is what it comes down to.

Rebecca: Yeah, we have to think about our own cognitive load and cognitive lifts as well, not just the cognitive lift of students and the work that they’re doing. There’s work involved with implementing all kinds of things in our classes and stacking them on top of each other and [LAUGHTER] managing that too.

Kevin: Well, and I think that there’s something to that when we look at some of the things that have bedeviled us about student choices and strategies that may not have been effective for students. And this is beyond my expertise. And I don’t know if there’s been research done in it. But my own intuitive sense is, and I’ve experienced this, over the past two and a half years, I’ve been so immersed in the sorts of big ticket really complex things like “Hey, train all your faculty colleagues how to do HyFlex instruction, teach HyFlex courses yourself, do all these things,” that where I dropped the ball was like routine email. I had emails I would just forget to reply. I had a date-sensitive reply for a speaking engagement and I literally forgot to reply. And they were just like, “Well, sorry, we’re not going to bring you to campus anymore. We didn’t hear from you.” And I’m like, “Oh, my God, I totally ghosted this guy.” But I would see the email or occasionally remember, and then my mind was like, “Nope.” And so what happened, I think, was all of my cognitive bandwidth was taken up with so many of these things over here, and then like, basically tried to exist in everything that’s happening in our society, and what could not fit, what I literally had no ability to do, was put things on my Outlook calendar correctly, [LAUGHTER] and reply to routine emails. And I was horrible at it. And I still kind of am, to be honest. And those were not things that were true to that degree before COVID. And so I wonder when we look at students now like, “Why don’t they read the syllabus?” …maybe that’s where that bandwidth depletion is manifesting. I’m sure there’s research on this, I’m sure the psychologists can tell us a lot more than I am sort of incoherently jabbing out right now. But I wonder if going forward that we’re going to be seeing a lot of this, this sort of routine, mundane, seemingly small things, but that add up to a real cumulative weight that can really provide significant barriers in the way of student learning, or in the way of our own effectiveness as teachers and colleagues.

John:
I’ve seen a lot of that myself this year. And if it wasn’t for Google sending me a reminder saying you have not replied to this email from three days ago, or you have sent this and you have not yet received a reply from this person, do you want to send a reminder. If it weren’t for those reminders, I would have missed so much more than I actually did. And that was not generally an issue before the pandemic. And I think part of it is, you mentioned this transition to HyFlex or bichronous or the various modes that we’ve used to connect to students both in the classroom and remotely. It’s a lot more work in many ways doing this. Where do you see that as going? Do you think we will be doing as much of this sort of mixed mode instruction where some students are in person and some students are remote? Or do you think we’ll move back to something a little bit more traditional?

Kevin: That’s the million dollar question right now. And I think that’s something a lot of institutions are wrestling with. I think you have some institutions where you might have administrators who are saying, “Yeah, we’re gonna keep doing HyFlex in certain selected areas, because it’s worked really well. And you have some programs and some disciplines for which that’s an ideal sort of solution. And here, I’m thinking of advanced undergrad and graduate programs in particular. And then you have some places that are like, “Yeah, we’re gonna keep doing these things because students have told us they want to be flexible, but they don’t really know what that looks like and they haven’t communicated that effectively and their faculty is like, “Oh, my God, please don’t ask us to do this.” And I think a lot of institutions are kind of in that space, that there’s this sense that “okay, we’re going to be doing some of this going forward, but we don’t know what that looks like and we don’t know quite how that’s going to happen…” which is, of course, a really stressful place to be for everybody involved, and I think underscores the urgent need for collaboration and communication in ways that we haven’t often done well in institutions even prior to COVID. I think too, as I said in the talk that I gave up at Oswego a couple of weeks ago too, learning has always been hybrid. And I think coming to terms with what that really means, in combination with the expanded set of tools and skills that a lot of us picked up during the last two years, hybridity is going to mean something different going forward than it has up to this point. But that, in some ways, is a difference of scale as opposed to actual nature. I think we have a lot more preparation as instructors for that than we realize. But using that awareness and that preparation and those skills intentionally in an environment that helped us do that, is going to be what’s really important. I think it would be a mistake to say that “Oh, students loved all the convenience of online and hybrid. So we’re going to offer every one of our classes multimodal or HyFlex or if you’re traveling for any reason, just Zoom into class, and we’ll all of us will still use it. Like that’s a mistake. That gets into that territory, where if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything’s a nail. There’s no one size fits all solution. But I think one of the things that we did learn during COVID Is that we did a lot of what I call micro adaption. At my own institution, we were teaching HyFlex, but a lot of our instructors made all sorts of micro adaptions within that modality depending on the nature of their class, who the students were, what the contextual needs were. And I think that those are the things that offer really rich opportunities for us to learn from going forward. But again, what that requires is faculty voice, and not just our full-time faculty, all of our faculty, and in particular, our adjunct and part-time colleagues who are teaching the large-enrollment 100 level courses, who experienced the whole continuum of these things. It’s those voices that have to be at the table when we have these institutional conversations about what does hybridity look like for us, for our institution, for our community, for our faculty, for our students, and for our mission, because that answer is going to be different depending upon the place.

Rebecca: As we wrap up our conversation, I want to ask, what are you hopeful about, Kevin?

Kevin: I am hopeful that we actually are able to untie a lot of these knots. The collective capacity within higher education to solve seemingly intractable problems is there. What I’m hopeful is that we figure out and I say we, especially for those of us who have at least semi-administrative or leadership position, that we are able to figure out how to honor that capacity and to affirm the colleagues who have that capacity and enable them to do the work in ways that are sustainable and not self destructive, which again, is another one of those really complicated knots that it’s hard to untie. But I think the capacity, and the willingness, is there across our higher educational spaces. It’s a matter of doing it in ways, again, that are sustainable and collaborative. Those are things that higher ed has not always done really well. But we have a context now that requires it of us. And I am hopeful that places will rise to that challenge, because I’ve seen what faculty, what staff, and what students have done for the last two and a half years. And it is amazing and resourceful, even if it was messy and chaotic at the same time. And I think out of that comes a set of aptitudes and a greater understanding of the stakes involved to lead to, I think, meaningful solutions that will work and not just in the short term. So it may seem counterintuitive to be hopeful right now, but I actually find myself remarkably hopeful.

John:
As you note in your book, we got into this ultimately, because we are hopeful for the future. We always end with the question. What’s next? [LAUGHTER] …which is kind of what we’ve been talking about.

Kevin: Right.

John:
But what’s next for you?

Kevin: Well, for me personally, it’s moving a whole bunch of crap to Charlotte to start my new job. And I found a storage unit for all the books that seem to have accumulated in my faculty and my teaching center offices over the last 18 years I’ve been at Grandview. So yeah, figuring that out. But I’m at a point in my career where the educational development piece is most of what I do now. I still teach, but I always saw myself as a history professor who does some of this other stuff, too. And that’s shifting now. And so my professional identity and the way in which I’m spending my time and the tasks that I am working on and entrusted with are different than, certainly they were at the beginning of my career, but even in the ways that I sort of thought of myself as a faculty member and a member of an academic community. And so, for me, processing what that means and experiencing that in this new position and feeling what that looks like and trying to make sense of it in a way that resonates still with kind of who I think I am as a teacher, as a historian, as a scholar, as a person. That’s kind of where I am right now. It feels a little unsettling… that transitions, I guess, are never easy, but I find myself in this sort of transitory space that is both fascinating and a little bit frightening.

John:
As is true of so much we’ve experienced in the last few years. [LAUGHTER] We wish you luck there.

Kevin: Thank you.

John:
…and it sounds like a wonderful position.

Kevin: Well, I’m excited to start it and it is going to be a wonderful position and I’m thrilled to be a part of a community. The folks that I’ve met there have been wonderful to me so far, so it’s going to be great once I get this damn move done.

John:
…and Charlotte is a wonderful place to live

Rebecca: Well thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, Kevin. It’s nice to talk to you again.

Kevin: Well thanks for having me back on. It’s great to be with the both of 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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