369. The Present Professor

Show Notes

• Norell, Elizabeth A. (2024). The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Learning. University of Oklahoma Press.
• Schwartz, Harriet L. 2019. Connected Teaching: Relationship, Power, and Mattering in Higher Education. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.
• Denial, C. J. (2024). A pedagogy of kindness (Vol. 1). University of Oklahoma Press.
• Remen, Rachel Naomi (1996). Noetic Sciences Review. Spring.
• Tulshyan, Ruchika, and Jodi-Ann Burey (2021). “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome.” Harvard Business Review, February 11.
• Hammond, Z. (2014). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin Press.
• POD Network
• The Enneagram Institute

Transcript

Rebecca: Faculty often have a teaching persona that they bring to the classroom. In this episode, we discuss the benefits of sharing your authentic self with your students.

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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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John: Our guest today is Liz Norell. Liz is a political scientist and the Associate Director of Instructional Support at the University of Mississippi Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. She is also the author of The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching. Welcome back, Liz.

Liz: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

John: Good to talk to you again.

Rebecca: Yeah. Today’s teas are:… Liz, are you having some tea with us today?

Liz: I am having the excellent tea called Vitamin Water Energy. I believe, actually, I was drinking the same thing [LAUGHTER] the last time we spoke, and we decided that it qualified because it’s water with flavor, so like, it’s tea.

Rebecca: Yeah, clearly. [LAUGHTER] What do you have, John?

John: I am having Kyoto Cherry Rose Organic Green Tea, which actually was something that Rebecca purchased, and it’s delicious.

Rebecca: I’m sure it is John. [LAUGHTER] I’m sure it’s really cherry full. The cherry saga continues. [LAUGHTER]

John: In case you didn’t hear the earlier episode, Rebecca liked the scent of the cherry -lavored black and green teas, but did not actually enjoy the taste of them, so it’s become my tea.

Rebecca: And John loves cherry tea.

John: It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. [LAUGHTER]

Liz: Love it when that happens. Yeah, I listened to your most recent episode this morning, and I heard some talk about cherry tea.

Rebecca: The saga continues, for sure.

Liz: Yes.

Rebecca: …from the same tea shop, I have blue sapphire tea.

John: That’s an old standard now.

Rebecca: yeah, well, I discovered it at that same tea shop, and it’s really become one of my favorites, much better than [LAUGHTER] the cherry tea,

John: …which is arguable. But, in any case, we’ve invited you here today to discuss your new book, The Present Professor. The title of the first chapter is, “Why a book about presence?” and that seems like a good way to start this discussion. So. why a book about presence?

Liz: I am so excited to get to talk about this book, because it’s finally starting to trickle out. And this discussion about presence, I think, we see it in a lot of work that other incredible scholars have done. I’m thinking of Harriet Swartz in particular, talks about presence, but to me, the thing that has come to define the way I think about my own teaching practice is how available am I to notice what’s happening with my students in the room? And to do that requires me to kind of turn off the self-monitoring part of my brain or I just run out of cognitive capacity. And so presence to me is that thing that allows us to be with our students, to recognize when they’re struggling, to read their non-verbal communication, to bring some of our awareness to our own mirroring of their body language and those sorts of things. And so I just feel like this book is the next in a nice line of work. And I know you’ve had Cate Denial on talking about her book. I feel like our two books go together really well. Just to think about what can we do as instructors to try to deal with some of our own social needs, by getting comfortable with ourselves, by turning down some of our anxieties and maybe imposter-ish feelings, so that we can direct our attention to the students who are in a learning environment with us

Rebecca: That cues us up nicely for what we were thinking to ask you next, which is that faculty often have teaching personas that differ from the identity that they share in other aspects of their lives. Why might it be important to be a more authentic version of yourself in the classroom?

Liz: I think we all know when someone is putting on kind of a persona. We can sense in ways that we can’t often articulate when someone is being authentic and when they’re not. And if trust is important, as I believe it is, in creating transformational learning, then we have to reduce the opportunities that students have to feel like we’re kind of pretending to be something we’re not. And I like to talk about authenticity as kind of a spectrum, because obviously who I am when I’m in line at the post office getting frustrated is not who I’m going to bring into the classroom. But that doesn’t mean that by obscuring that part of me that I’m not being authentic. It’s really about thinking about the ways that we interact with people in ways that feel nourishing for us, and how can we bring those ways of being into the classroom to the extent that that feels safe? And I think one of the reasons that I like to think of this as a continuum is that not everybody feels safe bringing their more authentic self into the classroom for lots of reasons, depending on what your identity is and the different aspects of that. And so I never want somebody to feel like they have to bring their fully authentic self into the classroom, because that could actually work against your teaching goals. But thinking about ways that we can bring some of our individualism into the classroom in ways that feel trust building and relationship building is really powerful to help students feel like they’re safe to take some experiments with us, to try things, to be themselves as well. And that all just kind of creates this cascade effect where we build trust and community, and learning can really be quite magical then and fun, really fun.

John: When you bring your full self to the classroom, how does that help create an environment for more transformational learning experiences for our students?

Liz: I’m going to be a little pedantic here, John, and just say, like, maybe not your full authentic self, but like more authentic self. And let me just kind of answer that by way of anecdote. So about a week before we’re recording this, I had a friend who was in kind of crisis, and it was really bringing my mood down, and I’m generally pretty hyper in a classroom, because I get very excited about learning. And so just saying to students, like, “I’m having this thing in my personal life, one of my friends is really struggling, and last week we weren’t sure if she was okay, and that’s just kind of on my mind right now, and I wanted you all to know that,” and I could just kind of see the room… like shoulders dropped, and people were thinking about the ways that we lean on each other in moments when we’re not at our best. And so I think that those moments where we can show a little glimmer of something in our life, and I didn’t tell them the whole story, and my friend’s, I won’t do that here. It’s not appropriate. But just letting them know that something is going on in my life gives students permission to not be perfect all the time. And I really, truly believe that when we start to relate to one another as humans in a classroom, that that’s where we feel, as I said before, safe to take risks, safe to explore, be curious, and connect on a human level in a way that just is that magic of learning.

Rebecca: Wait, we don’t have to be perfect all the time?

Liz: I’m sorry, Rebecca, but no, you don’t. In fact, it’s actually better if you’re not.

Rebecca: That was important to hear.

Liz: Yeah.

Rebecca: Alright. [LAUGHTER] One of the things that you argue in your book is that as instructors, we should focus on service rather than helping or fixing. So maybe we can start by defining what you mean by that, and then also, how might this benefit our students and ourselves?

Liz: So this concept came to me by way of Rachel Naomi Remen, who wrote this wonderful piece called “In the Service of Life,” and I read it for the first time when I was… this is a weird tangent… I was at a prison yoga workshop, so a workshop on how to teach yoga to people who are currently justice involved. And it was a really wonderful piece, because we often think about working with vulnerable populations as “I’m here to help.” And what Remen argues in this piece is that when we help, we create a kind of power dynamic, that I am somehow here to make you better, and it’s a fully one-way relationship that the people who are allegedly being helped feel as a kind of condescension or a “I am not your equal.” Remen says, “if we are serving, then we’re both getting something out of it. I’m coming to you as a human. You’re coming to me as a human, and we are working together in the service of making each other better.” And so I like to think of teaching as a service as opposed to a helping, because I get just as much, probably more, out of my interactions with students than I think that they will for me, because I get to see the incredibly diverse lives that our students are living, and see all the different ways that they face and overcome challenges, obstacles, and it’s just so inspiring every single day. And so I really think that thinking about it in this way can be helpful, and it’s not something that I’ve ever seen talked about in education. It’s a subtle language shift, but I think it’s more about the mindset that’s behind it.

Rebecca: The other place that I’ve seen that language, Liz, is in service learning, and when they use the hyphen in the service hyphen learning, and that it’s not used as a charitable work, but rather where the service is used in exchange, where the service partner is a co-educator, and that it goes both ways. So that’s the other space that I’ve seen it in a really similar way that you’re talking about it.

Liz: Yeah.

Rebecca: …and the hyphen is used to kind of indicate this relationship, as opposed to this like charitable model.

Liz: Well, and I’ll just say, in the high-impact practices literature, service learning is a high-impact practice, but the key to service learning being a learning endeavor is the reflection that we do after we engage in the service, and it’s kind of making meaning of what we’ve done. And so I think that that’s similar to the way that I would prefer to teach, which is to engage in some sort of activity and then reflect on it, to build metacognition.

John: Feelings of imposterism, sometimes called imposter syndrome or imposter phenomenon can create barriers to success and belonging for faculty and students alike, but especially those with minoritized identities. How do you think about imposter-like feelings? And how might we reduce feelings of imposterism for both students and faculty?

Liz: One of the key messages of my book, and this emerged as I was writing, I didn’t know this was going to be a theme, is that what’s happening with our students is happening with us and vice versa, and what’s good for us is good for our students and vice versa. So I do see a lot of faculty, especially earlier career, and especially women or non-white faculty, talking about feeling like an imposter. And in my current role, where I’m working with faculty every single day, I hear this all the time, but our students also feel it. And there’s this wonderful piece that I talk about in the book from the Harvard Business Review called “Stop Telling Women they have Imposter Syndrome.” I think that what we have done with this sort of buzz word, instead of thinking of it as, like this narrow, sort of, I don’t want to use the word clinical, because that feels pathological, but like, as opposed to the psychological phenomenon, we’ve sort of taken what is natural and human and turned it into a problem that an individual needs to solve. And so by thinking about imposterism, imposter syndrome, imposter phenomenon, we tell students and faculty, especially those with minoritized identities, that you need to work on yourself. And I just fundamentally don’t think that’s true. I think we’re all good, but the cultures that we have experienced or created or whatever in higher education, don’t really think about it in that way, and I know we’re going to talk about that more in a minute. So I think that when we’re talking about these imposter-like feelings, it’s that we’re seeing a mismatch between our way of being and what we perceive to be the normal way of being in higher education. So, presence work, working to get comfortable with yourself and being more authentic around our colleagues and students, gives permission to our colleagues and students to be themselves and not feel like there is this mismatch, and so that allows people to just kind of show up as their messy, beautiful selves in service of learning in a way that really does allow for greater feelings of belonging. So that’s how I think about it. And I really hope that the message comes loud and clear through this book, that anyone who’s listening, you are not a problem, and you don’t need to be solved. What we want is for you to know yourself, and that’s what this book is trying to do.

John: And as you’re talking about this, and when I was reading this section, I was thinking, when people are talking about imposter syndrome, that by itself, can generate stereotype threat.

Liz: Exactly.

John: …which is, in a sense, saying you don’t belong here, which is exactly the opposite of the message we want to send to people who may already feel that way.

Rebecca: We talked a lot about kind of modeling authenticity by finding your own presence and being present. Is there a role in discussing that with students or to having a conversation? Or is it about modeling it?

Liz: I think that’s going to depend on what feels authentic to each person. It’s really nice when you start talking about being more authentic, because then every answer can be, “Well, what feels authentic to you?” Right? But there’s a joke in that, and there’s a nugget of truth, which is that anything we do in an instructional context or a work context in general, if it doesn’t feel authentic, then you’re going to lose the trust of the people you’re trying to work with. So I am not a person who has a lot of filters. I tend to just overshare with anyone who will listen. When you read the book, you will get that clearly. [LAUGHTER] One of the early readers said, “Are you sure you want to tell all these stories, Liz?” Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. So I talk to my students about why I don’t try to censor what’s coming out of my mouth. I mean, I do, but I want to be authentic with them, and I tell them why, and I tell them why I think that’s important. But I think other people who maybe have a bit more guardrails up, which I think, honestly, is healthy, just modeling it can be really helpful. I mean, honestly, like, if we could all just be maybe, like, 10 or 15% more real with our students, it would make a seismic difference in their experience of higher education. So not everybody has to be like me and just like, tell everyone everything all the time, right? Just a little bit. Just like let a little bit of your humanity shine through. It would dramatically change the student experience on our campuses.

John: In chapter two, you also talk about a number of strategies that instructors can use to help form human connections with students. Could you describe one or two of these ways that you found to be helpful to build those types of connections with students as part of that sharing of your authentic self?

Liz: I draw heavily here on Zaretta Hammond’s work in her book about Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, and she shares trust generators. So I’m just going to share a couple of ways that I have done this with students. One is trying to make yourself human, and one of the things that I’m always very sensitive to, especially this semester… I’m teaching a math class, it’s actually listed as math. It’s a statistics class, even though I’m a political scientist. But I love statistics, and students who come into this class have high levels of anxiety, and they’re afraid that they’re going to fail. And so I tell them stories about times when I tried to do something and didn’t, academically. And those have always felt like very tender to me, because I like being a good student, I want to be someone who succeeds at everything. But seeing someone in an instructional role who can say like, “I did this thing and it didn’t work out, and I had to kind of swerve in a different direction.” I feel like that that builds some trust and creates some community in the classroom. Another one she talks about is just kind of creating more regular connections with students, and that can mean hanging out where they are. So I’m constantly asking students like, “Can we have office hours at the Starbucks on campus, because I really like a coffee, and I know you’d rather be there” or “It’s beautiful right now, can we meet outside this afternoon and work on some practice problems?” So, just kind of becoming more familiar to them by being in the spaces that they are. And I know lots of people who’ve been on this podcast have talked about office hours as being student hours, not in your office. This is just another way of thinking about the same thing.

Rebecca: In chapter three, you focus on minefields and shelters [LAUGHTER] of academic culture. Maybe first, you can identify what those are…

Liz: Yes.

Rebecca: …but then also maybe provide some examples of minefields and how they might be avoided, and also maybe some examples of shelters.

Liz: Two things I want to say before I get into this metaphor. The first one is that I wrote this book mostly during COVID, [LAUGHTER] and secondly, while I was experiencing some really challenging working conditions at a previous job, and I’ve also had several tours through graduate school. And I noticed as I was writing that I have a lot of kind of military metaphors around academia in this book. So like “tours of duty” through graduate school, and so this metaphor of minefields and shelters just kind of emerged from the writing process. And I like to think of it as: “Where are the places in academic culture, and this will vary by person and institution and discipline, but where are the places where you have to kind of walk a little tenderly because you’re not quite sure when you might accidentally step on or say something that’s just going to kind of create this kerfluffle? Right?” So the minefields for me were graduate school where a certain way of showing up was highly, highly incentivized, and that did not look like having a real life, having kids, having a partner, needing to pay your bills, like having the need for sleep. That was not like a valuable currency in that world. And so that’s how I think about minefields, just like these places where you got to be a little careful about your moves. The shelters are the places where you can lay down the armor, take down your guard, and just kind of be yourself. And my favorite shelter to write about was libraries. I think many of us sometimes kind of forget that the library exists. But these are these wonderful places where the people who work there are just like giddy with excitement about creating opportunities for people to be themselves and learn what they want to learn, and they’re also deeply invested in unfettered curiosity information seeking. A core value of librarians of the American Library Association is free access to information, and so I love libraries. Centers for teaching, which is where I work now, is another place that’s often a shelter on campus. The POD Network, many of your listeners will know the POD Network, the professional organization for people who work in centers for teaching. One of our core values, our core ethics, is confidentiality. So when faculty come to us, we don’t share what they’ve talked to us about, who they are. We don’t report out to their bosses that they’ve even shown up. And so the Center for Teaching is often a really nice shelter where you don’t have to worry so much about self monitoring, and these are the places where we can start to do some of this unpacking of our own baggage we may have acquired along the path to our current role in higher ed, and start to think about how we want to actually bring more authentic ways of being and our values into the work we’re doing.

John: That section really connected to me, especially the discussion of graduate school. I was part of a group of 25 graduate students to enter the class, and I was one of two people to finish, and the other person ended up finishing about a decade later. I don’t know quite how he got that extension, but it was a pretty rough experience, especially in the first year. The intent seemed to be weeding people out as extensively and to as great an extent possible. And that’s not a very positive environment to be in.

Liz: If I may. John, I think my single favorite sentence in the book is in that chapter about graduate school, where I talk about how the currency of graduate school, it’s like a firing squad, where your job is to score the kill shot in somebody’s… again, we’ve got the military metaphors… in somebody’s talk. So when you go to a job talk, when somebody comes to do a presentation, when you go to a conference, when you are in a seminar, you’re trying to, like, find that thing that they failed to account for or did wrong, and just like, annihilate the paper. We are trained to be assassins of ideas, and that is not productive to forming authentic relationships, or even just like being a kind person. And so I think we have to look at those things that we learned in graduate school and make a decision about whether we want to continue to hold those relevant and true, or if we want to unlearn them and chart a different way of being.

John: And similarly, your discussion of the faculty workshops, where there were paper presentations, everyone there seemed to be intent on trying to cut down the arguments of the presenters. And when I went on the job market, I very much was looking for a school that did not have that environment. And I wish we could get away from that, more generally.

Liz: When I wrote this book, I was really hoping that people would come to it with an open heart and an open mind, and I have, facetiously, but also kind of honestly, been calling this book sort of like “self help for college professors.” It’s not, it’s not. There’s a lot of research in here. But I also think that in the academy, we’ve done a historically poor job, as you were just mentioning, John, of helping people understand how they can bring their own values into the important scholarly work that we do. And so I really hope that people come to this book and find something, anything, that will help them learn a little bit more about themselves in ways that can inform their teaching in kind of humanistic ways. And there are lots of different entry points to that. And I hope that people will see this book as like a buffet where you can just kind of sample. And if you want to talk about the Enneagram, we could do that. And if you want to talk about yoga, we can do that. And if you want to talk about implicit bias, we can do that. But no matter where you start or where you end, hopefully we’re reflecting on our own experiences and what we hope our students can learn alongside us in their educational path.

Rebecca: And I love the idea of the “alongside us.” And that goes back to your idea of service that you were talking about earlier.

Liz: Yeah.

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

Liz: There are a lot of things that are next, and I don’t know which one will actually be next next, but I can tell you that I’ve been doing a lot of work, as you all know, because I was here last time talking about it, about neuro divergence, and how can we help support students and colleagues and ourselves in more effective communication practices across neuro differences? I also, for reasons that I don’t need to talk about right now, I have recently gotten very interested in questions around coordinated courses and equity. And this is a “me-search,” as Sarah Rose Cavanagh says… it’s not really research, but I’m sort of noodling on that a little bit. I have a couple of chapters that I’ve submitted to an edited volume about coaching in faculty development. So lots of different things, but I’m just always looking for opportunities to have thoughtful conversations about how to be a more humane academic. And even though I just named three very different things, I welcome ideaIs from just about anyone. So I’m the kind of person who… my colleagues sometimes make fun of me… I’ll send an email to anyone and say, “Hey, we should work on something together,” because, as I always say, like people are already ignoring me, so if they ignore an email, then no loss, right? [LAUGHTER] And the status quo prevails. But maybe they might say yes, and so I welcome others to do that in the same way. If there are things that I can be of service on, I welcome that.

Rebecca: Well, thanks for making us all think about being a little more humane.

John: And your book has so many wonderful examples. You’ve got a really rich collection of professional development suggestions, some examples from a wide variety of disciplines of present professors, and many suggestions on how you can become more present. I really enjoyed reading it.

Liz: Thank you. Can we also just talk about how beautiful this cover is?

John: [LAUGHTER] It is a beautiful cover with a nice lighthouse.

Liz: Gosh, when they sent me the proof of it, I started crying, like immediately.

Rebecca: [LAUGHTER] Well, we look forward to sharing this episode and the book.

Liz: Thank you both for the work you do. I always enjoy listening to your episodes, and I appreciate the opportunity to be a return guest.

John: and you will be on again very soon with a podcast that’ll be recorded at the Online Learning Consortium.

Liz: Yes, well, I look forward to seeing you all soon.

John: We’re looking forward to that too.

Rebecca: Definitely.

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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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