Author: celt

215. Resilient Pedagogy

Posted in access, engagement, equity, higher education, inclusion, learning, online discussions, online learning, pedagogy, teaching
November 24, 2021

The global pandemic resulted in rapid and dramatic changes in instructional practices. These transitions were supported by many resources created and publicly shared by teaching centers and instructional designers. In this episode, Travis Thurston joins us to discuss a superb open access resource on resilient pedagogy that he and his colleagues created with contributions from many thought leaders in higher ed.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: The global pandemic resulted in rapid and dramatic changes in instructional practices. These transitions were supported by many resources created and publicly shared by teaching centers and instructional designers. In this episode, we discuss the creation of a superb open access resource on resilient pedagogy created by one teaching center with contributions from many thought leaders in higher ed.

[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 Travis Thurston. Travis is the Director of the Office of Empowering Teaching Excellence at Utah State University. He is also one of the creators of and editors of Resilient Pedagogy: Practical Teaching Strategies to Overcome Distance, Disruption, and Distraction. Jessamyn Neuhaus, the Interim Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at SUNY Plattsburgh, the author of Geeky Pedagogy, and a frequent guest on this podcast will be filling in as a guest host. Welcome, Travis.

Travis: Thank you so much for having me.

Jessamyn: Hi, Travis.

Travis: It’s great to be here, thank you.

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

Travis: I am not, but I am drinking a lovely orange citrus Mountain Dew Kickstart.

John: Very good.

Jessamyn: Do you need a little burst of energy, Travis? [LAUGHTER]

Travis: Like I always need a little burst of energy. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: I’m drinking some kind of wild orange tea, I just finished it. Really getting wild over here in Plattsburgh. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I am drinking a Tea Forté black currant tea.

Jessamyn: Fancy.

Travis: Very nice.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss Resilient Pedagogy, an open-access anthology that’s designed to assist faculty in addressing the disruptions and challenges associated with a global pandemic and other forms of social stress. How did this project come about?

Travis: This really came about because right at the start of the pandemic here in the United States, this was March 2020, I got really sick after attending a regional Teaching for Learning Conference here in Utah… got home and went to my local clinic here, and it was before we even had COVID testing available in our area. And it ended up being about the same week that our university shut down operations and shifted to emergency remote teaching. And I ended up getting really sick, and I was out for over three weeks. And so I actually missed all of our transition to emergency remote teaching, which I know that actually seems like a good space to be [LAUGHTER] given what most of us experienced. But for me, as someone who has been an instructional designer and supports faculty regularly in their teaching, it was a moment for me where I felt like I wasn’t able to do my part. And so into that summer of 2020, as folks were discussing what we can do moving forward… Jessamyn and I are connected on Twitter, and there’s such a fantastic presence with folks on Twitter. I definitely lean on my community in Twitter. But I saw folks like Josh Eyler discussing this concept of resilient pedagogy, and it really resonated with me. We were in the process of teaching our faculty how to do blended learning for those who hadn’t. And so, as I was thinking about these terms and thinking about how we could support our faculty, we started talking with a few of the folks here at our university, specifically Chris González, who’s a faculty member, and Kacy Lundstrom, who is in our library here. And we decided to take on this project, this idea of putting together the book, as a way to share these strategies that can support faculty members, and ultimately can support our students.

John: A very timely project. [LAUGHTER] You more than made up for your absence right at the start of this. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Travis, how did you find the authors for this collection?

Travis: Yeah, great question. Speaking of Twitter, we put together a call for chapters, and we pushed that out on our social media channels. And we had dozens and dozens of fantastic chapter proposals. And so we went through a process of just blind reviewing all of the proposals that we received, and then selected the 15 that ended up publishing in the chapters. And so we landed with about five of those chapters coming from authors here at USU and 10 of those coming from folks external.

John: And you released this as an open-access text. We really appreciate the fact that you did. [LAUGHTER] Why did you choose the open-access format for it?

Travis: We decided to go the open-access route for a few reasons. One, it was a way for us to get these ideas out in a timely manner, of course. But really, it ties back to our purpose in putting it together in the first place, to try to share it with as many folks as we could. And we felt like an open-access volume would help us to achieve that.

Jessamyn: So the first section of this text deals with theory and foundations. What are some of the major principles of resilient course design?

Travis: That is a perfect question. And I think it’s actually quite pertinent because as we jumped into putting this book together, we challenged the authors not to just stick with one idea or one definition of resilient pedagogy. We kind of left it up to each of them to parse out what they thought resilient pedagogy meant. And so you’ll see in, like, chapter four, Rebecca Quintana and her colleagues there, they had been doing a MOOC on resilient pedagogy in the summer of 2020, taking a lot of these ideas of resilience from other fields, and then applying them to education and what we do with course design. So, in their chapter, they talk about these three principles of extensibility, flexibility, and redundancy, which we see in architecture or even in environmental fields, where we’re trying to support and sustain whatever it is we’re engaging with. So for me, when I start thinking about resilient design and resilient pedagogy, those three concepts definitely come to mind. How can we extend what we’re doing into different modalities that also ties into things like Universal Design for Learning, specifically with our students? How can we provide for multiple means of engagement or multiple means of expression within our courses? The idea of flexibility, I think, is something a lot of us have ran with the last 18 months or so in finding ways that we can not only be flexible with our course design, but also be flexible with each other. And what I mean by that is with our colleagues as we’re working on courses and with our students, as we’re thinking about the requirements that we have. And then I think a great one is this redundancy, which is not only helpful in general as a practice in the learning science of adding in redundancy. But as Jacob Fortman pointed out—he’s another author of that fourth chapter—he was teaching a course on virtual reality, which they typically have resources for within a brick-and-mortar face-to-face setting, and can provide support and troubleshooting. But when they started teaching that in a remote setting and they’re sending this equipment out, they can’t necessarily sit down and troubleshoot with every student. So they started developing additional support materials that can be used for students at a distance. So to answer your question, when I start thinking about resilient pedagogies, resilient design, those three concepts really stand out to me as a starting place for us.

Jessamyn: I always thought redundancy had negative connotations. But I must say, now, the more reminders I get, the more calendar shout outs I get to remember where I was supposed to be, when “Oh, what was I supposed to do here, there?” The more the better. So I definitely incorporate that into my teaching as well.

John: That example you mentioned about moving from a brick-and-mortar institution to online with classes, reminds me of a general issue that came up, in that it was fairly easy to ignore the inequities that our students face when they’re all on campus, when they all have access to computer labs, to the campus network, campus printing facilities, the library, and so forth. But when people moved online, the inequities that our students face in their day-to-day lives became much more visible to faculty. What are some lessons we should take forward from this period of remote teaching that we can use to help create a more equitable environment going forward?

Travis: There’s a couple of things that our institution ended up doing that I think, as we’ve been discussing it, are things we’re going to continue doing. Which when we talk through them seem like, “Well, why weren’t we doing this before?” Like, “Why weren’t we providing these things before?” And they’re things as simple as checking out laptops to students that don’t have technology. Our institution is the land-grant university here in Utah, so we have over 30 campuses across the state. So, for example, at some of our campuses that are in rural Utah, we actually had to set up Wi-Fi areas for students to be able to come and even access the internet to be able to be online doing their work. So there’s really simple things like that, in providing access to the technology, to the infrastructure, that is like a basic necessity to even be able to start doing this work. So from that standpoint, then when we even start thinking about how when students are maybe a little bit cautious to turn their camera on, to show their surroundings, or they keep their mic muted because they’re engaging in childcare while they’re trying to attend class. Or things like this that, like you said, John, are things that were easy to overlook when everyone was coming into the same space. But there are things that we should be thinking about and that we should be providing accommodations for our students and really adapting what we do to fit the needs of the students that we have.

Jessamyn: Switching away a little bit from the student-centered, I have a question. As the pandemic drags on, I’ve started to hear from faculty who are feeling overwhelmed and unable to do any new thing. The returns on their big pedagogical learning, the new things they’re doing are kind of small. And as a thought leader in education, Sherri Spelic, recently tweeted, “I’m tired of being resilient.” The word itself might be taking on some negative, toxic positivity. So how can we encourage faculty to do this to make their courses more resilient without placing a big, additional burden on them or resorting to rose-colored glasses?

Travis: I think I saw that tweet myself, and I may have retweeted it. [LAUGHTER] Because I think it really is pertinent right now for us to think about. There are so many demands on our time. And there are so many inequities and things that we could be trying to account for and trying to adjust for that, yes, we are tired of being resilient. So one of the things, as we were producing this book, I reached out to Jesse Stommel, who again is a fantastic person to follow on Twitter, because he had a tweet over the summer of 2020 with his list of words that he hopes he never hears again, one of which was resilient. [LAUGHTER] And so, I actually asked him if he would be willing to write the foreword for this book, to really play with that term and talk about those differences. And one of the points that I love that he makes in that forward, is that when we talk about resilience, it’s generally coming from a perspective of privilege. That we have the privilege to be resilient, which sometimes gets pushed onto our students, “Well, you know, if you just try harder.” But I think the same can be said with our faculty, and I think that’s why a lot of us have felt that the negative connotation to that term is because we feel like, “Well, you know, just keep doing what you’re doing and be resilient and you’ll get through this.” That was a long preface to my answer here. But for me, what we can do is just continue to make those small steps, make the small changes. For me, I try to emphasize this with the faculty that I support here at USU, that teaching excellence really is a journey. And so we’re just going to keep taking one step at a time as we keep moving forward. And sometimes, yeah, we’re gonna have to step off the trail and take a breather, and that is okay, that is okay. The other thing that I try to remind our folks here is that they don’t have to go at it alone. We have a robust community here—librarians, instructional designers, multimedia professionals, folks here in faculty development like myself—who really care deeply about teaching and learning. And I care deeply about our instructors and our students. And so, making sure that they are able to connect with those people that can lift them up and can support them when they are tired of being resilient.

John: During the period of emergency remote teaching many people were offering classes in this online synchronous manner, and some of that has continued into the following academic year. That differs quite a bit from what two of the authors on chapter three of this anthology, Noffs and Wilson, refer to as optimal online learning. Would you say that this transition and this form of emergency teaching gave some faculty and students a somewhat false sense of what constitutes online learning?

Travis: In a short answer, yes, I do. [LAUGHTER] And we’ve seen this in articles in The Chronicle or opinion pieces here and there, where folks are like, “Well, we tried online learning and it didn’t work.” And for someone who has studied instructional design, and specifically online course design, and has worked designing courses for years and years, what the majority of us were doing during that time was not what we would call “optimal online learning.” [LAUGHTER] And as my kids would remind me, research on this topic was going on back in the 1900s, as my kids would say, we had research on online learning back in the 90s. And a lot of that was, at first a lot of it incorporated synchronous engagement, where we were getting on some sort of technology and engaging with our students, probably with giant headsets. In fact, here in our building at Utah State where our office is located, we’re in the distance education building. And there’s this one particular hallway that has all these pictures of what distance learning looked like before. [LAUGHTER] And so there’s one picture down the hall that has the picture of some professors that they call the “Flying Professors” that would literally get on an airplane and fly to different campuses across the state to bring distance learning. There’s this other great picture of a professor putting this giant laser disc into a machine. [LAUGHTER] And then our very first real interesting innovation was that they had this trackpad that they could write on that would transmit the image to another location, all these interesting innovations. And so I look at things like that and then I look at what we were doing with emergency remote teaching during COVID, and I think exactly that. Like, we just had the wrong sense of what online learning is because there are mountains of research on what good online courses and what good online teaching looks like. And so, for me, and for us, the work is to continue to share those principles, not only as we are starting to shift back to face-to-face. But pre-pandemic, one thing I would always sit down with faculty members and say—when they’re coming to me and they’re going to be designing an online course for the first time, they’ve never taught online and they’re worried about it, they’re concerned about it—I would just tell them, “Good teaching is good teaching. And so it’s going to look different, it’s going to feel different in an online setting. But you have support, and there are strategies and there are ways to get to know your students that have been working for years, and we’re going to help you get there.” And I don’t want to be too critical of our approaches, because we literally were on the fly trying to change modalities. And typically, when we design a new online course, we spend months in development of that course, and training, not three days or a week. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Not three days, while your brain is about to explode trying to cope with a totally unprecedented situation.

Travis: Exactly. All the trauma of a worldwide pandemic, and social justice movements, and all the things going on in the world. Not to mention, I forgot to mention this earlier, but we have students who are food insecure or housing insecure. And so, yeah, of course these things are not going to take precedence, and shouldn’t, we’ve got to take care of each other. But yeah, there are definitely principles and things that we can do that are more effective than some of the emergency remote teaching that happened.

Jessamyn: Following up on that, can you give us some examples of some specific things, some steps that faculty can take, to design courses that are more equitable and more resilient to changing conditions?

Travis: One of my favorite suggestions comes from chapter one with Lindsay Masland. And she begins by giving this great self-determination theory approach to teaching and learning. And an aspect of that is that, as humans, we have this need for autonomy. And for this sense that we have some control and that we’re agents of our own learning. And so we can actually build those things into our courses. And so I would definitely start small with this, there are ways that you could build this into an entire course, but I would start small with an assignment. Look at one assignment and say, “Is this an assignment that I could allow for some choice?” And what I mean by that is: If this is traditionally a written assignment, does it need to be a written assignment? Or have we just always done it as a written assignment? Are there other ways that students could demonstrate their knowledge or understanding for this particular concept? So I would start small with something like that. We actually looked at this pre-COVID because we work closely with our Center for Student Analytics here at Utah State University. So I kind of look at it as a 360-degree type thing. We look at what’s working well for students, and then we think about… How can we enhance that by providing faculty development that helps folks to incorporate these things that are helping students more into their course? And then again, we kind of just cycle through and see what’s working. So one thing we found that was working really well for students was providing simple navigation in their Canvas course. We use the Canvas LMS, and for instructors who were using the tools we have to put in a syllabus to organize some topic or weekly modules, we actually found that, overall, students had an increase in persistence at the university when they were taking one of these courses. But more interestingly, we found that first-gen students who took those courses had almost a 3% bump in persistence when they were engaging in a course where an instructor had taken the time to organize the course well. So we know from the literature and research that when students’ cognitive load is reduced, like, they’re not trying to find where to go or what the assignment is, they can spend more of that effort, more of that brainpower, on the actual learning in the class. So yeah, there’s some small things we can do.

John: And that reminds me of the findings that Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan found in terms of the importance of providing students with more structure in reducing the achievement gaps for first-gen students. There’s quite a bit of research showing that that’s very helpful.

Travis: Absolutely.

John: Section two of the anthology focuses on reflection and practice. You’ve talked about some of the practices that could be helpful, but what are some other specific practices suggested by authors in this collection?

Travis: There’s too many to choose from, honestly. But some of my favorite ones… one comes from Jenae Cohn, who’s fantastic. I love her work outside of this book, but in this book it’s great too. [LAUGHTER] Specifically, she talks about the need for us to build digital literacy skills directly into our courses. So this isn’t a new concept, but I love the spin that she takes on it in saying that, “As more of these courses are using digital elements, we need to be teaching our students how to engage in effective ways with those resources, and building those skills and those supports directly into the course.” So, for example, we have this myth of the digital native, who they were just born to know exactly how to click on the right button in our course. Like, that’s just not a thing.

Jessamyn: No. [LAUGHTER] Have yet to meet one. [LAUGHTER]

Travis: Exactly. So I love that she points out that there are very specific scaffolds, this kind of goes back to that structure thing, there are very specific scaffolds that we can build in, and things we can do to get to know the students in our courses and provide what they need to be successful in our class. So that’s a great one. Another one that I really like is Kevin Kelly and Rebecca Campbell, they talk about what they call “VHS,” which for someone in my age group resonates well. They talk about VHS as a virtual homework sprint. And again, this kind of builds off of what Jenae’s talking about, where you build in time to your course to help students work on projects, and to be productive in what they’re doing. So they frame this in a way that you actually can get together in a synchronous way. You provide some time and space to get to know each other, exchange what’s going on in your life, those types of things. And then you set out with a specific goal, like, “This is the thing that I want to accomplish in the next hour.” And then from there, you can break into small groups, you can break out individually. I kind of picture this… for me in Zoom, I can throw folks out into different breakout groups. And then as the instructor, I can jump around and see where they need help, where there’s some additional support that they could use. And then about halfway through that time period, we come back together, we say, “Great, what progress have you made? What barriers did you hit that you still need support?” And then you kind of go through that cycle again, similarly to what you might see in a work sprint in a tech company or something like that. You provide that scaffolding, that time and support. And really, it’s modeling how to be efficient in getting some of that work done, and how to feel, and giving students access to the help that they need.

Jessamyn: I love that example of how to use Zoom strategically and effectively. It could be very, very effective used that way, I think.

Travis: I know, because sometimes I get caught up in this, “Well, I need to push them into breakout groups for a discussion thing,” and… Well, why don’t we actually focus on some of the work that we need to do and give individualized feedback as we go? So I love the recommendation for that VHS.

John: Not Betamax, it has to be VHS. [LAUGHTER]

Travis: Now we’re aging ourselves, John. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Help, I’m trapped in a Squadcast room with two very nerdy tech guys.

John: And that’s coming from the author of Geeky Pedagogy. [LAUGHTER]

Travis: I love it. Another one… again there’s so many… but my last one I’m going to point out comes from Miriam Moore, and she talks about this idea of getting out of the PPR box with online discussions… the prompt, post, reply box… that we get stuck in. This is something that we see quite often with online discussions. It’s not a new thing to the pandemic, this is common in general. And one of my favorite ways to picture this came from a 2016 article. It’s actually an idea paper by Shannon Riggs and Katie Linder, and they talked about it in terms of an architecture of engagement which I think is just so perfect. But they do this setting, like, picture yourself standing in front of this lecture hall—this small lecture hall, 30 students or something—and you’re teaching this face-to-face class and you want to have a discussion. You would not ask the question, and then go through one by one and have every single student respond to the exact same question. And then you would not, further, go through and want every single one of them to comment on something. I love the visual they created with that because it feels so ridiculous. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Oh, it’s so awkward. The awkwardness is making me nervous. [LAUGHTER]

Travis: Exactly. So that’s what Miriam’s talking about with this kind of getting away from that PPR box, thinking of ways to engage students in real discussion where they can co-create some of these things within the dialog. And so, I talk about this a little bit in the digital power-up strategy. I won’t go too deep into that, but it’s the idea that rather than using a specific question, that you give students different prompts as entry points into the discussion. And it allows them to make the post relevant to themselves, bringing in their own personal experiences, their different backgrounds, into the class. And my colleague, Dr. Mitchell Colver, he kind of describes this as if our online course is a box, a cardboard box if we picture it that way, when we invite students into that box, it should change the box. And so that’s really what we’re trying to do with our online discussions. We want them to be a space for dialogue, for co-construction of knowledge. And we want it to be a space where students can really work with each other and grow and learn along the way.

John: We always end with the question, “What’s next?”

Travis: Yeah, I really love that question actually, so I’m glad you ask it on your podcasts. For us, what’s next with Resilient Pedagogy is really continuing the work. A lot of us were doing this work of teaching and learning before the pandemic, and really, it just continues. Again, one of the points that Jesse Stommel makes in his foreword of this book, is he calls out this line from Lindsay Masland in chapter one where she says, “Do we really need a thing such as resilient pedagogy?” And I love that Jesse says, “We probably don’t.” [LAUGHTER] Because what we actually need is just everyone to continue thinking about teaching in a reflexive way, trying to teach the students we have, and find ways that are going to help us to be successful as instructors and as students. And so for us, it’s just continuing to build those communities and those supports. And so for me, what I really hope comes out of this book that we were able to put together is that it continues to spark ideas, and continues to spark conversations about the things that we can do to continue to improve teaching and learning.

John: It’s a wonderful anthology. I really enjoyed reading it and I’ve shared it with our faculty on campus several times in the past and will continue to do so. Thank you.

Travis: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much.

Jessamyn: Thank you so much, I really enjoyed this conversation. Two of my favorite guys in faculty development.

Travis: Thanks Jessamyn.

John: It was great talking to both of you today.

[MUSIC]

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

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

[MUSIC]

214. Transformative Storytelling

Posted in classroom community, diversity, equity, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, social justice, storytelling, teaching
November 17, 2021

From the earliest days of human society, storytelling has played an important role in transmitting and sharing knowledge. In this episode, Laura Colket and Tracy Penny Light joins us to discuss how storytelling can be used in higher ed to help us reflect on and understand the rich diversity and the commonalities that exist within our educational communities.

Laura and Tracy work together in the Department of Educational Services at St. George’s University in Grenada. Laura is an Associate Professor, the Director of the Master of Education Program, and the Associate Director of the Leadership and Excellence in Academic Development Division in the Department of Educational Services. Tracy is a professor in the Master of Education Program and the Director of the Leadership in Excellence in Academic Development Division. Laura and Tracy are co-editors of Becoming: Transformative Storytelling for Education’s Future, and together they founded the Center for Research on Storytelling in Education.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: From the earliest days of human society, storytelling has played an important role in transmitting and sharing knowledge. In this episode, we examine how storytelling can be used in higher ed to help us reflect on and understand the rich diversity and the commonalities that exist within our educational communities.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Laura Colket and Tracy Penny Light who work together in the Department of Educational Services at St. George’s University in Grenada. Laura is an Associate Professor, the Director of the Master of Education Program, and the Associate Director of the Leadership and Excellence in Academic Development Division in the Department of Educational Services. Tracy is a professor in the Master of Education Program and the Director of the Leadership in Excellence in Academic Development Division. Laura and Tracy are co-editors of Becoming: Transformative Storytelling for Education’s Future, and together they founded the Center for Research on Storytelling in Education. Welcome, Laura and Tracy.

Tracy: Thanks so much.

Laura: Thank you for having us. We’re happy to be here.

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

Laura: I am. I am drinking bush tea and if any of your listeners are from the Caribbean, they will know what that is. But it’s essentially like an herbal tea, lots of good stuff in here.

Rebecca: Awesome. How about you, Tracy?

Tracy: I am, Laura made me go get my tea just for this. So I’m drinking a tumeric and ginger tea.

Rebecca: Nice.

John: And I am drinking a Tea Forté black currant tea.

Rebecca: A good favorite. I’m back to my East Frisian today.

John: Very good. We’ve invited you here to discuss your new book. Could you tell us a little bit about the origins of Becoming?

Laura: So for me, this came from some assignments that I had given over the years for my students who were either wanting to become educators, were currently educators, had been educators for a long time, or were educational leaders. And I had just really seen the power of these different assignments. One of them was an educational autobiography statement, and another one was a teaching philosophy statement. And I started to see not just how powerful those were individually, but when those were written and reflected on in relation to each other, it became even more powerful. And so I knew that I wanted to somehow make this process more accessible to other educators more broadly. And then Tracy and I met and sparks flew, and we both had this shared passion for storytelling, for professional growth, and it really was just a perfect partnership. I’ll also mention that we also collaborated with our colleague Adam Carswell, who’s not here today because he’s running a school in the midst of all of this COVID craziness. And so he’s not here, but he was also involved in the book as well.

Tracy: Yeah. And similarly for me, I have been working with eportfolios for about the last few decades… and so reflection and storytelling…really just an innate part of portfolio pedagogy. And I remember one day, we were sitting in the office and thinking about the power of storytelling and sharing the different experiences that we’ve had with our different assignments. And we had this crazy idea that we should create a center and then I said, “And why don’t we just really aim high and write a book?” [LAUGHTER] So it sort of evolved from there.

Laura: The other thing that I’ll say, too, is that the origin of the title, Becoming, comes from a Paulo Freire quote. He says that, “Human beings are always in the process of becoming.” And I actually have that quote tattooed on my arm for over 10 years now. So when we were writing this, it seemed like that was a natural fit for the title. And speaking of Freire, we really were standing on the shoulders of giants as we created this book, because in addition to his significant influence, we also were influenced by people like Maxine Greene, who says “It’s simply not enough to reproduce the way that things are.” And bell hooks who reminds us that, and this is a quote of hers, “Professors who embrace the challenge of self-actualization will be better able to create pedagogical practices that engage students, providing them with ways of knowing that enhance their capacity to live fully and deeply.” And bell hooks’s book Teaching to Transgress actually had a big influence on me as I was imagining the assignments for my students that I mentioned earlier that became the foundation for this book, because in her first chapter she talks about her experiences as a student in relation to her approach to teaching which she calls “engaged pedagogy.” And so these scholars, and many more, really had a significant influence on the origins of this book. And ultimately, we see critical storytelling in terms of both uncovering our own stories, and also listening to and really hearing the stories of others. How that can help us to interrupt harmful patterns and practices in education and how this process can really be a spark for much-needed transformation in the field.

Tracy: It’s so interesting, I think that often we forget that our students have their own stories. And just encouraging them to know thyself. I remember one of my students created a portfolio and she had a page that was about “know thyself,” and I thought, “Oh, that’s so nice that that’s one of the things that she was taking away from the class.” But really encouraging our learners, and we work with faculty as well, to really dive deeply into who they are, what their experiences have been, and how that shaped who they are as either learners and/or educators or educational leaders is just really something to watch. And I certainly have had the experience working with faculty members who have these aha moments, they’ve never thought about their own stories or where their practices come from. And when they start to uncover those, they realize that they had a really powerful mentor or that they had maybe a terrible learning experience that caused them to shift their pedagogical approach. And it’s just such a nice thing to do in community… to reflect on stories as well as just to do for ourselves. And that’s really, I think, underpinning a lot of the work that we did with the authors in the book, and as we thought through the structure of the book itself.

Laura: I also want to mention our publisher DIO Press, and we chose them because we felt so connected with their mission as a progressive, socially-just publishing house, and it really aligned with what we were trying to accomplish with the book.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the intended audience of your book, and also how your contributors were selected?

Laura: Sure, I will take the audience question. And it’s really intended for educators and educational leaders at all levels, all contexts, subject areas, engaging in this work individually, or even in a group as well. I can give a couple examples of how we’ve been using the book already. One is in the Master of Education Program. Our students this term, in one of the courses I teach, Education in a Multicultural Society, I created a project around this book. And so the students began by choosing groups based on the different sections in the book. So one is “Claiming Identity,” one is “Border Crossing,” one is “Anti-Colonial Ways of Being,” one is “Social Class, Politics and Education,” and then the last one is “Changing Pedagogical Practices.” So they went into groups based on the sections and did a bit of a jigsaw activity around it. Everybody read the introduction and conclusion chapter, but then, in their groups, they read the chapters in their section, and then designed a workshop for the rest of their colleagues in the program around what they learned from the chapters in the book and the implications for being an educator in a multicultural society. So that was a really powerful learning experience for them. And we are also now using the book in a new faculty-learning community that we have started at our university, where the faculty in the community are using eportfolios to reflect on their past and present and imagined futures in relation to teaching and learning. And so we’re using this book in that inquiry community to go through this process with all the faculty who are involved, and so we’re excited to see how that turns out as well.

Tracy: And in terms of how we chose the authors. We really knew that we wanted to have educators and educational leaders from across social locations and from different cultural identities. And, of course—I don’t know if you’ve done this before—when you put out a call for book chapters, you know, you get what you get. And we were just really fortunate that we knew people who we forwarded the call to, they forwarded it to their networks. Similarly, people that I knew from the eportfolio community sort of shared. So, the people that ended up contributing just turned out to be from all different countries, with all different backgrounds, K-12 educators, folks in higher education, educational leaders. So it was just a really fortuitous kind of a thing, and the people who answered the call are the people who participated in the book process itself. So we didn’t set out to target any one group of people, we really wanted a broad set of perspectives for contributing to the book. And then in terms of how the sections of the book unfolded, as people wrote their stories they just sort of logically fell into these really lovely buckets. And we were able to group them, even though there are a lot of similarities across the chapters and a lot of shared experiences, which I think was really something that came out of the whole collaborative process that we engaged in.

Laura: Yeah, and I did want to say something about that collaborative process, because it was really powerful. When we first put out the call, this was before COVID, so their first round, their first draft of their chapters, were all written before COVID and then we gave feedback. And as they were working on revising their chapters, that’s when the pandemic hit us. And so, their revisions included reflections on what was happening to them at the time, which was really powerful. But we also, once everybody had a somewhat final version of their chapter, we shared them with everybody, and we asked them to read across the different chapters. And people were commenting on them and asking questions, and it led several of the authors to cite each other, to shift and change their chapter based on questions that were asked. One of the authors even included all the comments from the Google Doc in her final published documents so that the readers could see that collaborative process and see the ways in which the other authors in the book were contributing to the conversation. And so, again, this is during COVID, so we had Zoom calls with all the authors as they were reflecting on this process, both in terms of their experience writing and reflecting on their own stories, and also reading the stories of others and what a profound impact that had on them professionally. So even just that collaborative process of creating this book already was really profound.

Tracy: It’s so interesting, because I’ve edited a few different volumes. And normally, I have to work really hard to get colleagues to integrate thinking from other chapters into their own. It seems in other contexts to have been much more difficult. In this context, it was such an organic process, and people were so inspired and moved by one another’s stories, that it made it really easy for them to pick up on the threads that occurred in the different chapters. And so it felt like a real gift to us, especially in the midst of the pandemic, to be part of this community of incredible educators who really were working together in a very deep way to put this book together. So it was just really wonderful. I got goosebumps just thinking about that process itself.

John: You’ve talked a little bit about how this has been used in a Master’s class, and you’ve talked a little bit about the benefits to the participants. What are you hoping this book will achieve in the broader audience?

Laura: Sure. So when we started out with this project, it was really guided by three main goals. One was to compile a broad range of personal narratives about learning and teaching in order to better understand both the diversity in experiences but also commonalities. Another was to better understand the connections between peoples’ experiences as learners and their experiences as teachers and educational leaders. And then a third goal was to be able to offer a collection of narratives around teaching and learning to support the professional growth of educators and educational leaders. So now that we’ve completed this book, we can already see the ways in which we’ve accomplished these goals, but even gone beyond them. And we really see three layers of potential impacts. So first would be, for anyone just reading the stories, we hope that it will inspire some change based on seeing how powerful connection and belonging and relationships are in the learning process. So even if someone just simply reads the book, we know it will have an impact for them. But also, the book provides a structure and guidance and motivation for readers to be able to engage in the reflective process themselves. So if people do want to engage at a deeper level, they can follow up the reading by reflecting on and potentially even writing their own educational autobiography, along with their teaching philosophy statement, and consider the implications for their future practice in teaching and leadership. And so, lastly, and I think ideally, people could do this work collectively. And so, as we mentioned, we saw in writing the book, how powerful it was for people to be reading each other’s stories and to be collectively reflecting on this impact on their learning and reflection that was happening through the process… so both in terms of writing our own stories, but also reading the stories of others. And so we really encourage others to read this book as part of a group if that is possible. For us, writing and editing the book really underscored how pervasive trauma and shame are in people’s learning experiences, sadly. But also how powerful connections and a sense of belonging and caring relationships can be in reigniting people’s motivation to learn. And so it became really clear that the need to be seen is really an essential human psychological need. And yet so many of the authors in the chapters of this book shared examples, some of which were prolonged, in which they were not only not seen, but they felt, and this is a quote, “erased.” They saw their culture erased in history books, they felt their identities were being erased in discussions, they felt compelled to erase their home language in order to survive. And as Browning, one of the contributors to the book said, “I walked in a world that challenged my being.” And that is just such a powerful statement to me. And we know that this is also grounded in literature, too. It’s not just these participants’ stories but, for example, Brené Brown describes shame, this is a quote from her, “as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we’re flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.” And so while we as educators can’t control everything in our students lives, we do have the power to be able to help our students to understand that, even if they do experience shame, it does not mean that they’re flawed or not worthy of love and belonging and connection. And if we start to foreground empathy for our students and our colleagues, we can start to combat that shame. And so I think this is one of the big takeaways from the book that we hope people will be able to get from it by reading it.

Tracy: And I would say as leaders in our division, it’s really become part of the fabric of the work that we do with our colleagues as well. We want them to be able to articulate their professional missions. And we want them to have their work aligned with what is really important for them. We want that for our faculty colleagues, as well as our students. And so, I think weaving in this idea of reflection and storytelling and being true to ourselves and knowing that our past experiences can shape our future, but they don’t need to, especially if they have been negative or traumatizing in a way. And I think that’s really profound in this moment because we are in the midst of a pandemic, and I think we’re all collectively traumatized by that experience. And so, it’s going to have to play a role in the work that we do both with our faculty colleagues, and with our students moving forward. I don’t think we can just sweep it under the rug and pretend that we haven’t had these experiences. But I think to, again, have some empathy and understanding for how everyone is managing those experiences, how that impacts what we do in education, and how we can make things better as we move forward, I think that’s maybe one of the things that this kind of work can help to facilitate.

Rebecca: I think one thing that might be worth noting, as Laura pointed out about the idea of following along with reflection, is that there are built-in reflection questions into the book itself. So it’s not like it’s an unguided reflection, right? There’s plenty of guidance there that people might value.

Laura: Yeah, we really wanted to write this in a way that it could be a useful tool for the people who are reading it. You can just passively read it, but you can be much more actively involved as well.

Tracy: And I think that your point, Rebecca, about guidance and prompts is so apropos. I think oftentimes we say, “Have your students reflect on their learning.” Well, where do I start? What does that mean, do I just tell you what I did? How do I…? And we know in the literature that there is a real difference between surface-level reflection and deeper and meaningful reflection, and that that requires some scaffolds. Most people will start at the surface level, and then as we get practice, we become more thoughtful, more intentional about what it is we’re trying to do in the process of reflecting on our learning. And so one of the things that has been an outcome of this book project, and in the Center for Research on Storytelling in Education, is the recognition that we need to have activities and prompts available that academics can adapt, or leaders can adapt for use in their own context, and make it really simple. So we want to make sure that we have a repository of open educational resources that enables people to take up the practice of storytelling, but in a way that leverages the work that others have done already.

John: Do you think by having these stories from faculty, it might help reach faculty who don’t understand the importance of connections in a way that other types of narratives may not affect faculty as well. When they hear from colleagues out there about their own experiences, might that perhaps make a somewhat stronger connection with faculty to help them become more aware of the importance of connections and belonging in their classes?

Tracy: I think the academy can be a pretty isolating place for a lot of people. And we talk a lot about, you know, “What happens in the classroom, stays in the classroom.” It’s not uncommon for people to go in, shut the door, do what they’re doing, and then go back to their office, shut the door, work on their research. And I think what this highlights is that need for community and also the need to hear the stories that you’re not alone. And that was something we heard very often from our authors that they recognized in others’ stories, experiences that they had themselves had, maybe not even in the writing piece that they finished for the book. It surfaced those past experiences. And so, I think there’s a lot of value in hearing that you’re not alone, other people are experiencing similar things and we can work together to make the academy—we’re talking about higher education, but I would say this is true at all levels of education—a more welcoming place, a more inclusive and equitable place, so that we can all feel like we’re visible and that we can be heard and that our perspectives matter.

Laura: Yeah. We heard so many times in our conversations with the authors, something along the lines of “Wow, I didn’t realize that other people had had the same experience or had had a similar experience. I thought I was alone.” And again, these are people who have been in the field for years and years and years, and they’ve been keeping these stories to themselves. So the act of just opening up and starting to share ourselves and to really humanize this work is really, really powerful. So it helps to create connections, it helps to create more meaning in what we’re doing, and it just brings back life to what we’re doing.

Tracy: And it makes me think also, John, of the different stories we tell in education about what it is that we do. So I think what we’re seeing now is the use of storytelling in a lot of different contexts in education. I think about accreditation stories. So how do we make visible the learning that’s happening on our campuses if we’re speaking to accreditors? What do the stories look like if we’re talking to different stakeholders on the campus? And how can we create those spaces so we can actually have those shared conversations? So I think it has a lot of potential for a lot of different spaces when we’re thinking about education.

Rebecca: I’m glad that you brought that up, Tracy. I think one of the things that may not be obvious is perhaps what you actually mean by storytelling. So can I invite you to take a couple minutes and actually describe what you mean by storytelling in this particular book, what you’re trying to promote? I think we’ve kind of hinted at it here, but haven’t directly said it.

Laura: Sure, I can get started, and Tracy, I’m sure you can add, but we really think about storytelling in a broad sense. So in the book, specifically, we asked people to tell their stories of learning in relation to their stories of teaching. And so, we prompt them with questions around critical incidents that they might have had, or people or moments or experiences that had a particular impact on them. But also, in our practice, we engage in storytelling in all sorts of different ways. So one of the things we do, for example, is a three word story—and I got this from Tracy, who I believe got this from some of her former colleagues. But storytelling can be as simple as, “What three words describe yourself as an educator?” And you can stop there, but it ends up being a prompt for further discussion. And if whatever three words you choose, there’s a story behind each one of those words. And so there’s different ways to get people to engage with this. We’ve also gotten into digital storytelling, and people drawing pictures to represent it. So I think there’s a lot of different ways that you can represent your story. It doesn’t have to be a traditional story in the way we think of it. I think people can represent their story through art, through movement, lots of different ways. And so we definitely want to encourage that as well, and hear from readers of the book, different ways that they have told or are telling their stories.

Tracy: Yeah, I often used to encourage my students to tell their story. And I had an activity that I used with them that I adapted from my friend, Susan Kahn at IUPUI, that really comes from the work of Mary Catherine Bateson, where we want to develop these life stories and be able to tell the tales of the lives that we’ve lived. And I always created that opportunity for the students to represent their story in a way that made sense to them. So I did get collages, and I got traditional written stories. I’ve had students who’ve written songs and created videos. So we can tell the story in lots of different ways, and I think it’s the process. Then, of course, you have to think about the context in which you’re embedding the storytelling in and make sure that it fits and aligns with your outcomes, and all of the good things that we know we do with effective backward design. But really thinking about what would be powerful for the learners in our context in terms of storytelling, and then choose strategies that really suit that particular set of outcomes, and then the context in which we’re working. So I’m imagining that in a science class, telling the story will be different than the way my students do in my history classes, for instance.

John: Storytelling has been really important for most of human existence as a primary way of passing on information to future generations. But it hasn’t been used as extensively in recent years. Why have we moved away from that? And why, perhaps, should we do more of it?

Tracy: Yeah, when I saw that question, I kind of giggled to myself because in the eportfolio community, it hasn’t really gone away. In fact, it’s gotten more and more popular. Having worked with portfolios for about 20 years now, it’s always fun for me when I encounter folks on campuses who are like, “We’ve just discovered eportfolios, and we want to create digital portfolios.” So I think in some contexts, it has been around. And I’m Canadian, and certainly more recently, the power of storytelling is coming to the fore, particularly as we deal with reconciliation and indigenous cultures. And, of course, those cultures have a long tradition of storytelling. But going back to the earlier point, often we erased or intentionally didn’t acknowledge that those approaches were valuable. And certainly as a historian, the whole process of oral history is really becoming much more popular again. So I think the context really matters. It did go away in some contexts, and in others it was always there. But I think when I reflect on what happens in education, and I’m sure you’ve both experienced this, you know, you can be on a campus for a long time, and maybe worked on a set of projects, and then the context shifts, and now it’s a new flavor of the month, and we’re going to do this project. And then the context shifts again and it’s like, “Oh, we’re going to try this new thing.” It’s like, “Really? We did that 15 years ago.” But again, I think context matters. And so, going back to this moment of being in a pandemic, and all of the focus that we’ve finally been shining on social justice issues, equity, the way that students just don’t always experience inclusivity in the classroom, they don’t necessarily always feel like they belong. And I would say that’s true of faculty and educators at different levels as well. That this moment is giving us a real opportunity to leverage storytelling practices that, you’re right, have been around for a long time in service of more socially just educational experiences for everyone.

Laura: Another thing I’ll add, too, is that there’s a lot of power dynamics tied up into this, and the more that things become standardized and overly standardized, the less room there is for stories. Stories are still existing, but there’s sort of a grand narrative that the people who are in power, it’s in their best interest to keep that story alive. And so there’s a story about what it means to be a good student, or what it means to be a good school, or what it means to be a good teacher. And I think it’s really important for us to be able to push back against that and fracture that story and add more texture and bring those counter-stories in to question and critique that grand narrative.

Tracy: Yeah, I love that you said that Laura. One of my colleagues, Peter McLellan, has been doing some work on this in particular, and, “How do we train everyone to hear the story that is actually being told?” As opposed to, “How does it fit on the rubric that I’ve already predetermined I’m going to assess that story with?” And that does happen in eportfolios, especially. “Have the students achieved the outcomes in telling their stories in the portfolio?” And what he recognized is that with some of his international students, the rubric didn’t fit very well for the stories that they were telling and didn’t recognize or privilege the fact that they were coming from different places and had different experiences. So he really noticed a misalignment between the rubric and the stories that was really a detriment to the student. Like, you’re not going to get a good mark, because you haven’t basically fit into this box we have ascribed to students in our context. And so I think that there’s such opportunity to recognize where we are using those grand narratives, maybe unintentionally, to frame how we understand student learning. And let’s just jailbreak that altogether and try some new things where we really enable people to grow and learn in a context that really makes sense for them as unique individuals.

Rebecca: You’ve done this a little bit, but can you talk a little bit more specifically about ways that you can use storytelling in classes to advance student learning? So you’ve given an example, like in an education context, can we have a different kind of context to help our listeners see how it might fit for them?

Laura: I can give an example that could be used in any course, really, at the beginning of a course in terms of building community. So, like I said, I have students write their educational autobiographies, but it doesn’t have to be that document. It could be any kind of introductory letter, or who you are as a student, or what you’re bringing into the class, what you’re wanting to get out of the class. It could be any kind of introductory document that a student might create in order to build community in your class. But the thing that I do is I structure sort of a speed dating activity, where the students then have to share through the line. One, they can pick a word, a sentence from what they wrote, or just read directly from it, they can paraphrase, but they share something that they feel comfortable sharing from what they wrote. And they go down the line and listen to each other’s stories and listen to what each other have to say. It’s a really powerful way of building community in your class, regardless of the subject that you’re teaching.

Tracy: We’ve been using, as Laura mentioned, the three-word, or six-word, or professional mission-statement versions of storytelling with faculty. Particularly in terms of helping them to frame their experiences for their portfolios. And that’s been really powerful, because it helps faculty to really figure out how the evidence that they’re presenting does reflect the narrative or story that they want to tell about themselves as professionals. And so that’s been really helpful for students. So, I’m a history professor by training, and I used to just have my students attach a process document to their various pieces of work to tell me the story of, “What did you do to complete this assignment?” So it’s not about their story of learning, necessarily—although it is, because they’re telling me about the steps that they took—but it really helped me to then have a more personal connection to them, and places where they were really being very successful in their strategies, or places where perhaps they had a misconception or misunderstanding about what the process should be. And I always had them thinking about, “What does it mean to do history as an historian?” And so that just created these opportunities to have really interesting conversations with them about how they were finding literature in the library and research, how they thought they should be writing it up. And so, not a story of learning in the sense that we’ve been talking about previously, but a process where you can start to have that conversation and identify, “Oh, gee, a whole bunch of my students in my class don’t really understand how to use the library.” That’s an opportunity for learning in the context of that particular class. Imagine in physics, you could do the same kind of thing like, “Oh, you didn’t understand that the vector was going one way or another…” so you can tell I’m not a physicist. But we often talk about science in the context of medical education here, because we are at a medical school, and it’s really interesting that this applies in so many ways. Students can tell the story or document it on a video of how they’re learning to suture. And they don’t need to have a live patient, they can do it with a beanbag, or other kinds of things. And we’ve had great conversations with faculty here about, “Oh, that would be really helpful for me to know why they think they’re supposed to do it a particular way, and how I can sort of steer them in the right direction if they are doing something that really isn’t in alignment with the process that we’re trying to teach.”

John: The stories you selected for this volume are very inspirational. Could you give our readers just a couple of examples drawn from the narratives in the volume?

Laura: Sure. So this was really hard to just use a couple examples, because each and every chapter was really powerful. So we somewhat randomly chose a few to mention. The first chapter in the book was written by Browning Neddeau, and he is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. He’s also a gay Jewish man, and his chapter really illustrates the way in which our various intersecting identities can shape our learning experiences. So I have a quote from his chapter just to give you a couple examples of the stories he shared. So he says:

In kindergarten, I came home with a vest made out of a brown paper grocery bag and some poster paint prints. School taught me that this is how Native Americans dressed (past tense) and how Native Americans looked (also past tense). It was puzzling because many generations of my Potawatomi family were alive at the time, and none of us wore brown paper grocery bags with poster paint prints for clothing.

And he continues on to say:

In grade three, a paraprofessional/classroom aide in the school asked me to demonstrate Native American dancing to my peers. As I did, she encouraged me to look for bear tracks. This confused me because I was not taught that my people looked for bear tracks while dancing. I was taught that we stand tall to dance and are strong and pride-filled. I dance for my ancestors.

So his stories are incredibly powerful, but another reason I like his chapter is that there are really clear connections to his current teaching practice. So he’s now a faculty member at California State University, Chico. He is involved in teacher education, he has developed a curriculum that really honors Native American perspectives. And he’s also started a research project called the I See Me project where he works with undergraduate students who are considering a career in teaching. And he asks them to critically analyze their school curriculum to identify the places where they see themselves in the curriculum, the places where they don’t, and then supports them in developing a lesson that is more inclusive of their various identities. So he had a powerful chapter that’s definitely worth reading. Another one I would mention is Talar Kaloustian and hers is really interesting because she attended nine different schools across primary and secondary school in five different countries. And she’s not from the US, but a few of her schools were in the US. And so she offers a really important reflection on her experience as an immigrant trying to adjust to US schools. So I’ll share a quick quote from her too. She says:

Mine is a complicated educational autobiography: I attended nine schools, five different countries (six different cities) by the time I was 18. I lived through war, experienced constant interrupted schooling, faced multiple new languages that were not my native one, all while dealing with a family situation that would seem odd to many.

And then later on in her chapter, she talks about one of her experiences as she transitioned to the US. She said:

In LA, I enrolled in a local high school where the counselor at the public school saw that my transcripts were from countries like Lebanon and Saudi Arabia and India, she claimed that she was unable to confirm the integrity of these documents and promptly changed my status to ninth grade. I was almost 18 at this point.

And so again, she makes really clear connections to her current practice. She’s now a faculty member at the Community College of Philadelphia. She teaches English as a second language. And not only does she teach the language, but she really focuses on supporting immigrant students with adjusting to life in the US by forefronting kindness, because she noted, in reflecting on her past experiences and all the transition, that as challenging as it was, there was always somebody who stepped up and showed her an act of kindness that changed her trajectory. And she says in her chapter:

The opportunity to reflect on the key incidents of my own growth as a student, and the impact of this growth on myself as a researcher and a teacher, has led me to discover and learn about the critical role that kindness has played in my life.

Tracy: Yeah, and maybe one more. Our colleague, Antonia MacDonald, who is a literature professor here at St. George’s University, reflects on her experience growing up in a colonial education system in St. Lucia and then her desire for social justice and change-making in the Caribbean. But what I really love about her chapter is that, first of all, it’s incredibly insightful to read about her experience. I think everyone should know a little bit about that. And it’s something that we often have our students recognize that they aren’t really wholly aware that they’re part of a colonial system, or a post-colonial system. And so just surfacing that is really powerful. But she also reflects on her own desire to transform the Caribbean and to make it a more socially just place. That she recognizes her classroom isn’t a democracy, and that she does have power over her students. And so as much as she wants her students to become game changers, she’s really trying to surface that ability in them for themselves, as opposed to imposing her own views on them. And what I took away from her story was that notion that she’s really sensitive to the ethics of the work that she does, and how she doesn’t want to replicate that kind of a system whereby we just train students to think like us. And so really thinking throughout her chapter about the ways that she can engage her students to think for themselves and to themselves desire to make change, rather than her teaching them how to do it, so I really appreciate that in her story.

Rebecca: The collection together is so powerful, and so I hope people will engage and read through and it was interesting to think through our own stories, as you’re reading through other people’s stories to find connections, and to just maybe see your own story a bit differently than you did before. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the Center for Research on Storytelling in Education before we close out today?

Laura: Sure. It’s a research organization that is dedicated to building a community of educational scholars who are focused on investigating and understanding how reading, sharing, listening to, analyzing our stories of learning and teaching, can help educators and educational leaders to create more equitable and more engaging spaces and practices for teaching, learning, and leadership. So this book project, we’re engaged in broader research around this, but this book project was a piece of it.

Tracy: Yeah. I’ll say for me, if I have one hope for the Center, it’s that we can bring the practice of storytelling to everyone and to make it easy for them to engage in storytelling with either their learners or with their colleagues, depending on where they’re situated. And we’re continually collecting stories so that we can share those stories with others. Because, as you said, there’s something really empowering about thinking about your own story in connection to other people’s stories and feeling like you are part of a larger community and that we do have shared experiences and lots of differences. And so how can we learn from both as we move through creating practices for students and for colleagues?

Laura: I’ll also share that we got a grant last year from Spencer to host a conference on storytelling and education, and the pandemic got in our way, but we actually reimagined it in a way that I think was even more powerful than what it would have been otherwise. So because we weren’t able to host an in-person conference, we shifted it to be an ongoing virtual conference series. And so every month we hosted a different workshop or session on different aspects of storytelling in education. One of my favorites is actually the last one we did on the science of storytelling, and I really liked it because that’s not my area. I know that storytelling is powerful because of my experiences and the experiences of others, but to get to collaborate with a neuroscientist around this to better understand what’s actually happening in our brains when we’re hearing stories and telling stories and why it is that storytelling is so powerful for learning. So it’s been a really exciting conference series that we have been engaged in over the past year.

Rebecca: Are any of the materials from that series available online?

Laura: Great question. We have created a website, so there is currently a website that exists. But the last chunk of our money from that conference grant we are using to create a much more engaging and dynamic website where we’re going to turn all of those conference sessions into asynchronous workshops that people can go and complete on their own time, on their own or with other people. So all of those sessions that we did will be available to everybody more broadly, along with additional resources. We’ve created a guide for storytelling and bringing storytelling into the classroom, so that’s available as well. And we’re looking forward to the launch of that new website. We should be launching it in December or January, coming up.

Rebecca: Great, that sounds exciting. We always wrap up by asking, “What’s next?”

Laura: That was a teaser, so definitely we’re excited about the website that’s going to be coming out. We are planning to continue collecting data on people’s stories of learning and data about the experiences of educators who go through this kind of inquiry work. We are continuing to search for more funding to expand this research and play around with it a little bit more, to do some fun things with the data that are a little bit more creative and artistic rather than presenting it through regular writing and publications. But, like I said, we created a digital story, we want to do some other things around sharing this work through art. So we have lots of exciting ideas coming up, we just keep looking for funding, and we have more book ideas as well. So, yeah, I think there’s definitely some fun things that will be coming in the next few years in relation to this. Tracy, anything you would add?

Tracy: Well, and I think at the heart of all of that work, it’s about building community of educators and educational leaders who are interested in this area and learning from them. It’s not about us disseminating, like, “Here’s what you should do.” But rather, we’ve been really keen to collect not only stories, but activities that others are using in their context so that we can really build community. There’s no question that teachers who are doing this work in K-12, we can adapt those activities for higher education. And I already mentioned that we’ve been adapting some of the activities for higher-education leadership. So I think that the sky’s really the limit. We hope people will join our community and come on an adventure with us and we want to learn from them as much as they might learn from the work that we’ve done so far.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us. This was really interesting, and I think gives people a lot of things to think about and perhaps encourages them to tell some stories.

Tracy: Thanks for having us.

Laura: Thank you so much for having us.

John: Thank you, I really enjoyed reading your book.

Laura: That’s wonderful to hear.

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

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

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213. Wicked Students

Posted in authentic learning, critical thinking, engagement, first-generation students, higher education, learning, pedagogy, teaching
November 10, 2021

Much of the training that students receive in college involves working with well-defined problems that can be resolved using the tools and techniques of a specific discipline. In this episode, Paul Hanstedt joins us to discuss strategies that colleges can use to better prepare students to collaborate on the “wicked problems” they will face in the future.

Paul is the Director of the Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington and Lee University. He is the author of Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World, General Education Essentials: A Guide for College Faculty, which is about to go into its second edition, and numerous publications related to general education and writing across the curriculum. He has worked with many colleges and universities in revising their general education requirements.

Shownotes

  • Hanstedt, P. (2018). Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Hanstedt, P. (2012). General Education Essentials: A Guide for College Faculty. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Hanstedt, P. (2021). Helping Students Understand Our Codes: Designing Inclusive Open Curricula. AAC&U Liberal Education Blog. April 29.
  • Jessica Tinkenberg – twitter
  • Standards of Learning (SOL) – Virginia Department of Education
  • Warner, J. (2018). Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. JHU Press.
  • Blum, S. D., & Kohn, A. (2020). Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). West Virginia University Press.
  • Hanstedt, P. (2020). Higher ed needs to redesign gen ed for the real world. Inside Higher Ed (Opinion). February 10.
  • Zull, J. E. (2002). The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Kate McConnell
  • Textbook used at Plymouth State in a wicked problems seminar:  LeBlanc, C. (2019). Tackling Wicked Problems. Plymouth State University.
  • An article by the instructor on the course:  LeBlanc, C. (2019). What is “Tackling a Wicked Problem”? Desert of My Real Life. May 10.

Transcript

John: Much of the training that students receive in college involves working with well-defined problems that can be resolved using the tools and techniques of a specific discipline. In this episode, we examine strategies that colleges can use to better prepare students to collaborate on the “wicked problems” they will face in the future.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Paul Hanstedt. Paul is the Director of the Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington and Lee University. He is the author of Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World, General Education Essentials: A Guide for College Faculty, which is about to go into its second edition, and numerous publications related to general education and writing across the curriculum. He has worked with many colleges and universities in revising their general education requirements. Welcome, Paul.

Paul: Thank you for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

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

Paul: I am drinking tea.

Rebecca: Yes, rejoice! [LAUGHTER]

Paul: I’m actually normally a coffee drinker, but I’m drinking tea. [LAUGHTER] I was part of the new educational developers for the POD organization and Jessica Tinklenberg sent out a care package afterwards. And in my care package was a Stash Tea Jasmine Blossom. I’d already had a 16 ounce cappuccino today, I thought I’d better keep it mellow [LAUGHTER] for later in the day.

Rebecca: Sounds nice and relaxing.

Paul: Yeah.

Rebecca: I have Yunnan Jig again. I think it’s becoming one of my new favorites. I don’t have my Golden Monkey around, so I’m going to have to drink something different. But it is also a golden-tipped tea.

John: I’m drinking a peppermint spearmint blend today… taking it easy on the caffeine.

Rebecca: I don’t know why, John, it’s halfway through the semester. What is wrong with you? [LAUGHTER]

John: I need some sleep, it’s been a stressful semester. We’ve invited you here to talk about a couple of things. We saw an article that you posted on April 29 on the AAC&U blog on “Helping Students Understand Our Codes: Designing Open Curriculum.” But we also wanted to talk to you about Creating Wicked Students. When that book came out, we both looked at it and read through it. But we were at a really early stage in the podcast, so we weren’t quite ready to ask people that we didn’t know who were already on our campus or that we were comfortable inviting because they knew of us already. And that’s long been on our list of topics that we wanted to discuss. So maybe we can start with Creating Wicked Students. What is a “wicked student”?

Paul: Good question. Maybe I should define a wicked problem first. A wicked problem originally came out of city planning. And then it was adopted by engineers because they looked at it and they said, “This is exactly what we’re dealing with all the time.” A “wicked problem” is a problem where the dynamics are in flux, they’re shifting. What the problem looks like on Tuesday and what the problem looks like a week from Thursday can be completely different. Oftentimes, the data is incomplete. Oftentimes, previous solutions don’t apply. Very often, wicked problems are problems that must be solved, you can’t let it sit. There’s oftentimes contention about how to solve it, how to fix it. And almost always—and this is where the gen-ed person in me gets all excited—the solutions for a wicked problem are going to require drawing from a bunch of different fields. So the best example, and it’s a horrible example, but everyone will understand it immediately, is COVID. COVID is the perfect, horrible, wicked problem. The dynamics have been changing constantly. Even now, we’re still waiting to get around the bend and say, “Oh, okay now we’ve arrived.” If it were purely a science problem we’d be in great shape because we would have been done early this summer. But there’s politics in play, there’s economics in play, there’s culture in play, there’s religion in play. There’s messaging and communication and images and memes and social media and technology. All of these things are creating a dynamic quality to COVID that makes resolving it very, very difficult. And, of course, we must resolve it. So that’s a wicked problem. A wicked student is a person who can solve that problem [LAUGHTER] when they graduate from college. But in engineering, what they said when they saw wicked problems is, “Our students need wicked competencies, because they’re going to face, once they leave university, they’re going to face these wicked problems in the field.” So much of what we do in education is tame, static, the answer is at the back of the book, there’s clarity. So a wicked student is a student who can move beyond simple answers, move beyond solving problems where they know the answer because they’ve been told the answer, or they know the answer because it’s at the back of the book, or they know the answer because they apply an algorithm and arrive at a solution that’s clear. A wicked student is a student who can deal with uncertainty, who can struggle, who can ask good questions, who can draw from different fields, who can collaborate well, and who can, when they fail, pause, step back, deliberate, reconsider, and try again. I have a colleague in biochemistry, Kyle Friend, who talks about what he wants his students to finally know is that he gets it wrong 70% of the time, and that’s normal. For so many of our students, getting it wrong is bad, it’s failure. And, frankly, that’s our fault because we create that dynamic.

John: Would you say that most curricula is well designed to create wicked students who are able to handle these problems that are not so well defined, that cross disciplinary boundaries?

Paul: No. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: The end. [LAUGHTER]

Paul: Yeah. So many of the systems that we’ve put in place—in Virginia, it’s the Standards of Learning tests—they ask for certainty and clarity. I’m running a writing pedagogy seminar on my campus right now and using John Warner’s wonderful book Why They Can’t Write. And he makes a point that the five-paragraph theme, which for those of us with composition and rhetoric backgrounds, is the root of all evil. He says, “Actually no, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the symptom of the larger problem.” And the larger problem is our desire to mass produce education, to make education easy, to make our grading easy, to make learning easy so students can feel like they’ve mastered it, because they’ve got the five facts, or the 10 facts, or the 11 dates, or the four algorithms that they need to understand in order to do well in the class. So no, I think so much of what we do is tame.

Rebecca: So if we’re saying, “Yes, please,” to these wicked students, what do we need to do in our classrooms? What can we, as faculty, implement in our course structures?

Paul: Yeah, how long you got? [LAUGHTER] So…

Rebecca: I have all day, if you’ve got all the answers!

John: And there’s a good book on that, too, that people can refer to.

Paul: There is a good book on that, yeah. So any number of things. One is finding ways to bring uncertainty, lack of clarity, into the rhythm of the classes that we teach. Years ago, I was running a workshop and a gentleman named Dan Clark who was then at Western Oregon University, he’s not there anymore, and I forget the institution he’s at. But he talked about Monday morning riddles. You know, you walk in, and whatever field you’re in—whether it be psychology, or accounting, or politics—give a problem and put students in groups and have them not come up with one solution but come up with three solutions, three ways to approach it. And ask them to be able to articulate why. And then put them all on the board and discuss them. And the point is not: there is one answer, and there’s one way to get to that answer. And oftentimes there is, let’s recognize that. But learn to play, learn to ideate, learn to work with multiple paths, because sometimes the first path you take isn’t going to work. And I should say, really quickly, I’m always aware that there are people in the room in various fields, whether it be French or chemistry, where they’re saying, “Well, there are facts, and they need to know the facts.” Yes, it’s not about knowing the facts, it’s about whether or not 100% of our time in the class is about content delivery and content reiteration, or if we create space in there for application of that content, and sometimes application of that content and then discussion about that application, where clarity and certainty isn’t necessarily achieved because that’s not the point. So it can be in our daily practices, we can create exam questions like that. I can, in a literature class, give students a poem and say, “We’ve been studying the Romantic poets, which one of the Romantic poets wrote this poem?” The fact that they’ve never seen the poem isn’t the point. Actually, I might choose to include a poem from a poet they’ve never read. In fact, I might include a poem from a poet who’s not even a Romantic. Thing is, can they analyze? Can they think? Can they explore? Are they being deliberate about their exploration? And what I’m grading them on is not their ability to get to the answer, it’s their ability to travel to make that journey. I could keep going if you want me to. [LAUGHTER] We can talk about paper assignments, we can talk about text selection, we can talk about the goals we create for a course. When do our goals move beyond content delivery? When do our goals move beyond application? When do our goals move into our ideals? I mean, I didn’t go to grad school and then take a job where I was diving underwater for nine months a year in order to just make sure that students could identify passages from Dickens that we’d already discussed. There’s more to it than that.

Rebecca: One of the things that I really love about Wicked Students is, it’s a value system that we want students to embody. And you’ve talked about one way of getting at that and offering space for these messier problems or the journey. What are some other ways within the structure—thinking about syllabus, learning outcomes, assignment design—that might continue to embody those values? It’s one thing to say, like, “We want to do that.” But what does it look like when we’re actually doing it?

Paul: Right. Well one of the things, and everybody’s doing it these days but why not, here’s my nod to Susan Blum [LAUGHTER] and her book Ungrading. One of the things, if we’re going to have this uncertainty, if we’re going to ask students to take intellectual risks, if we’re going to ask students to not freak out when they don’t arrive at the perfect answer, we need to be sure that in our syllabus, and in the day-to-day work of our course, there are plenty of opportunities where the grade is not of consequence, where they are not hurt by the ability to get it wrong. So I talk about ungraded work that happens in the class, I talk about minimally graded work that might happen outside of the class, proportionally graded work where the first time they do it, it’s only worth 2%, and the last time they do it, it’s worth 20%. But they’ve progressed and they’ve gotten feedback. So that would be another one of the ways, even in things like large lectures, the pause… you’re 20 minutes in, you’ve been delivering content to 270 students, and now you pause. And maybe you use clickers, maybe you use PollEverywhere. Maybe you simply put that question up on the screen and say, “So how might this apply here? What do we think? What are the ways to approach it? This is considered a difficult problem, how would you deal with it?” Maybe you simply say to them, “Pair up with the person next to you or jot some notes, think-pair-share, with the person next to you.” And then you just do a little bit of pointing to the room, “You up there in the red sweater, let me know what you’re hearing. Keep in mind that we’re not looking for the perfect answer, we’re looking for thoughtful answers.” So those would be two ways. There’s a lot of other ways. I mean, I like the idea of co-writing our goals with our students. And letting them know upfront that, with this class, it is not about static information, it’s about construction of knowledge, construction of ideas. The goal here finally is, not just for me to tell you what I know or what other people think, but for all of us to approach this material, whether it’s in literature, or in chemistry, so that we take the thinking just a little bit further, or maybe a lot further.

John: How can we sell this to our students, especially our freshmen students who come in from a curriculum that’s very structured, that’s very well defined by disciplinary boundaries, and so forth, and where all the problems have nice, neat, easy solutions?

Paul: And oftentimes, they’ve gotten into university because they’ve been really good at playing that traditional game, right? And here we are changing the rules. [LAUGHTER] Well, part of it is you need to create spaces. You can’t just give them a big assignment at the end of the semester that’s wicked, or a test question that’s wicked, without creating those spaces for them to experiment, fail, and get used to it. But what I like to, frankly, do is walk into class on the very first day, and sometimes… I like to be very dramatic… and I don’t even give my name. [LAUGHTER] I just put that painting up on the screen, and I ask that question that can’t necessarily be answered perfectly, and then I ask them to write. I was at a workshop a couple years ago at a college up in Maryland, where a meteorology professor talked about on the very first day, he hands his students a meteorology map. He says, “Tell me what’s going to happen next? What’s the weather going to be like?” And he goes, “They get it wrong 97% of the time, but that’s not the point. The point is for them to work with it and play with it. And then as the semester goes along, you can periodically hand that back to them, and they can see themselves making progress.” So I think the first step is to begin. So often we try to just say, “If I just repeat it, then they’ll get it.” It’s hard to use words to combat 18 years of experience and 13 years of educational experience. We need to create alternative experiences where they live, where they see it, where they understand.

Rebecca: I know one of the things that we emphasize in design is process over product, often. We have some students who can make a fantastic product, but they do no process.

Paul: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca: And so it always ends up being a really long conversation about, “Well, what was your journey here? Why are you doing that? How does that meet the creative brief? Or how does that meet the problem? How does that solve the problem?”

Paul: Right.

Rebecca: It just looks good… it doesn’t mean that it does anything. So I think we’re always working on ways to emphasize that process piece more, because it tends to get overlooked. It’s like, here’s the beginning, here’s the end, but that muddy, messy middle part—which is the most important part, especially to develop wicked students—is often overlooked.

Paul: I really do like multiplicity ideation, multiple iterations. And maybe it just happens in the planning stage where you say, “Rather than just going into the task…” because there’s very few fields where you just jump into the task… “come up with plan, give me three different plans, three different ways to approach this, three different ways we might design this, three different ways we might interpret this poem, three different ways that we might design this experiment, three different ways that we might think about how to approach culture in rural Germany, three different ways about how to solve this medical problem.”

Rebecca: So three is really important, Paul? [LAUGHTER]

Paul: Three, yeah. [LAUGHTER] I guess I’m sort of focusing on three. Well, I mean, there is a certain sweetness to three. Five is way too many oftentimes, and two is probably not enough. So yeah, I don’t know why I got on three. [LAUGHTER] But thank you for teasing me about that, I appreciate that actually. [LAUGHTER]

John: And as you move through the course, you also suggest that the degree of complexity should be adjusted from the beginning to the end of the term. Could you talk about some ways in which you might do that in a given class?

Paul: Sure, yeah. So the classic example, and I use it all the time, comes from my colleague, Chris Connors, who’s in geology here at W&L. And he talks about how early in the geology course, they’ll provide a rock sample to students. And they’re asking for, in a simplified form, recommendations about drilling or mining. And in the early data sets, there will be one or two pretty clear paths, and a minimum of noise, being data that is meaningless or simply distracting. And if the student’s been paying attention in those early data sets, they should be able to get it, they should be fine. Later data sets, middle data sets, they’re more complex, more noise, and a multiplicity of reasonable answers. Some of which are going to be more self evident than others, and some of which need to be constructed. But the students, if they’ve been growing, they should be okay. And part of what they need to do is not just say, “This is the recommendation I’m giving,” but, “Here’s the why this recommendation, rather than these recommendations.” Latter data sets are just wide open, lots of noise. And the paths of recommendations, the ideas, the thinking, the conclusions that are being drawn, really have to be constructed almost from scratch by the students individually. And so that’s one example of how progression could occur. Also worth noting that you can increase the degree of difficulty by the level of interaction that you have with students: the amount of coaching that you offer, the number of tips or hints that you provide, how much you’re walking around the room, the degree to which you’re having them collaborate versus doing it individually. What I love about the geoscience example, too, is that in many ways it’s, again, as someone who works in literature, that’s what we do in a literature classroom. When I’m teaching Victorian literature, I begin with a relatively simple Victorian text. And then by the end of it, I’m handing them Eliot, which is millions of words, and a lot of noise. And they’re having to build these maps, construct these meanings. And I’ll just point out that construction of meaning, that production component where the student is taking it just a step further, they’re not handing to me a reading of Middlemarch that they’ve read somewhere else. They are building a path, they are collecting the data, they are doing that work. And finally, that’s what we want. If we’re going to graduate these students into this complex, messy, messed-up world, we had better have people who can build that path thoughtfully and deliberately themselves. Otherwise, we end up with a situation where some large portion of our nation might be being misled by other people, hypothetically.

Rebecca: Definitely hypothetically.

Paul: Yes.

John: One of the barriers though, I think, is that our classes and majors and programs tend to be structured very much within very narrow disciplinary boundaries. Would it help if, perhaps, we had more interdisciplinary courses, and activities, and seminar courses, in most colleges?

Paul: Yes. And I don’t want to take us down a rabbit hole unless you want to go with me [LAUGHTER] of general education, and over the last 40 years, the movement has been away from distributional models that say, “Two of math and science and two of social sciences and two of arts and humanities.” Distributions still exists, but the movement has been towards more integration, more blending, more of a recognition that it’s not about what content we’re delivering, but how that content connects to other content. How, when I teach a class on artistic and literary responses to science and technology, I’ll have a student reading Coleridge’s Eolian Harp and giving me an analysis that ties it to string theory in physics. How do we make connections? How do things blend? So, sometimes, yes, majors need to do what majors need to do, and I want to come back to that in just a moment. But gen ed can do a better job of just replicating what majors are doing. Gen ed, it shouldn’t be just about exposure, it should be about synthesis, it should be about reflection, it should be about building something, making connections. And gen ed is going a step further and really looking at the way high-impact practices, for instance, rather than having models that are driven by distribution, they can be driven by high-impact practices: e-portfolios, which is about synthesis, study abroad, internships, undergraduate research, first-year experiences, senior capstones, all of these things that are synthetic. They’re asking students to make these connections. They also push students towards agency, towards really doing the work themselves. A student abroad, one of the reasons that’s a high-impact practice is because from dawn to dusk, they have to cope. Just leaving their dorm room, leaving their dorm, is a complex act. Getting lunch is a difficult, challenging thing where they have to assume agency and do it. So right now, though, I just also want to step back and talk about majors because I referenced that earlier. Let’s face it, increasingly, majors are becoming interdisciplinary. They’re either doing it by building interdisciplinary majors—biochem, gender studies, environmental studies—but even within majors, they’re recognizing the ways that they need to bring things into play. I mean, psychology has shifted from being a social science to more of a hard science, because it’s bringing neuroscience into play. Again, there’s this idea that the world is a messy place. The academy, we’ve got our little hallways and our little cells and our little silos and our little blocks that we built, those are very convenient for us. They’re not necessarily helpful for the students, there’s some convenience and some value to it for the students. But if that’s all they experience, and if that’s all they see, and if we allow ourselves to fall into that, I don’t know that it helps.

Rebecca: So one of the things that often is a hard sell to students is general education.

Paul: Yeah, [LAUGHTER] I’ve noticed that!

Rebecca: It’s advising time around here, so helping students identify things outside of their major that maybe they might be interested in exploring or might be useful to them in these wicked problems as they leave the institution and go into the profession. What’s some advice that you might have in making that sell towards general education? Is part of the issue the way our general education is structured, so it’s not a good sell? Or is it partly just communication?

Paul: Yeah I’ll deal with the communication question first. It is definitely communication, we spend a lot of time on the “what,” and very, very, very little time on the “why.” I mean, in so many places, if it’s not literally a box check, it’ll have a brief description of the humanities, and then it’ll be on to just a list of courses. And frankly, I would say that if you’ve got a particular learning outcome or goal for general education that you want students to meet, and you’re trying to impress them with how important this idea, this value, this goal is, and then you’ve got 700 courses that can fulfill that requirement. I’m sorry, that’s a mixed message because it basically says, “This goal is incredibly important, so important that anything can fulfill it.” And again, oftentimes what’s happening there is the system is set up to please the department or the anxieties that departments might have or to get butts in the seat. So figuring out how to better communicate that “why,” both on the front end and in advising. We have ready answers for why students should take particular courses in our field. Do we have ready answers for why a poet should take a mathematics course? For why a student in sociology should study dance or yoga? We need to work on that. There is nothing wrong with talking to your colleagues and coming up with some answers so that when students come into play, you can sell it convincingly. The other question about the structure, I definitely think that that’s a factor. If we’re selling them isolated little building blocks, it communicates to them what matters and what doesn’t matter, why it’s happening, why it’s not happening. You know, they get distribution in high school, and call me naive or idealistic, but I think even the most cynical, jaded, least-engaged student in the world comes to college and wants something different. They want it to feel like a challenge, that they’re moving up, that they’re going somewhere else, this is something more. And if we don’t give them that, then they come away with that idea that college is just a transactional thing. That’s a failure.

John: I think this brings us quite naturally to your blog post on open gen ed requirements. Could you tell us a little bit about the concerns you raised about having a completely open or very open gen ed curriculum?

Paul: Sure, full disclosure—and that blog was edited to fit a certain word count, this full disclosure was in the original version—my son goes to an institution with an open curriculum. I actually think… and I’m not going to name the institution, I’m tempted but I’m not going to… I actually think this institution does an extraordinarily good job of advising. So that students, no matter what they’re studying, are pushed and encouraged to go into and take courses in different fields. So it can work really well. A couple of weeks ago, my daughter and I were visiting colleges, she was someplace where the guy ended the tour by saying he was there to study economics, he said, “If you told me a year ago, I’d be taking two classes in classics and really enjoying them, I would have laughed in your face.” That’s a win, that’s a well-done job. So open curriculums can work and I want to be careful not to just dismiss them completely. Part of the issue with them, on the faculty side of things, I think, it’s a missed opportunity because it means that faculty from different disciplines in different departments don’t need to be in conversation with each other. I think that’s a loss. And that’s unfortunate, because the more we talk to each other, the better our teaching all-around is going to be. But really, for me, the major concern has to do with students. Not all students come into college recognizing the value of that liberal arts component, that liberal arts dimension that is so much a part of the American educational system and has been almost from the start. My son grew up in a household where we went to Hong Kong for a year to help them revise their university curriculum from a three-year system with just a major to a four-year system that included liberal arts and general education. That’s been written into his DNA, written into his family history. We talk about stuff like this at the dinner table because I’m such a geek. He has an advantage because he walks in and even if he is really interested in studying physics, he knows that there’s a value to taking German courses and philosophy courses and courses in art history. So for him, in an open curriculum, there are not going to be any signposts. As bad as a really highly-structured curriculum might be, there are a lot of signposts, “This matters, this matters, you need to do this, you need to do this.” In an open curriculum with no signposts, the student who has that level of knowledge, that insider knowledge, they’re going to be okay. The student who walks into that setting, for whatever reason, without that knowledge, maybe it’s because they’re from an immigrant family that isn’t familiar with a tradition of the liberal arts, that phrase doesn’t even necessarily mean anything to them. Maybe they’re from a first-generation family. A young woman that I know actually came from a family where her parents had both gone to college, but they were running a business, and that was really their focus, a nd so this idea of the liberal arts and the value of liberal arts just wasn’t part of the conversation that they had. Perhaps it’s because students come from a historically or structurally marginalized background, I don’t know. And of course, we want to be careful about essentializing about any groups. But the fact of the matter is, if we have an open curriculum, and we don’t have some guardrails in place, we’re not paying attention, it can be inequitable. Certain students are going to benefit powerfully, other students are not going to benefit as much. That’s wrong. We’re educational systems, we’re educational institutions, our goal is to progress everybody forward, not just to allow the privileged to continue to be privileged, and the less-privileged to continue to be less privileged.

John: A lot of first-gen students come in with a very specific career goal and a very narrow definition of what courses they think are going to be relevant for that, not recognizing the wicked nature of some of the problems they’ll be facing or the world in which they’ll be living in a few years. How can we build a system that would correct for that if there is going to be a more open curriculum?

Paul: Yeah, well, I’ve already mentioned advising. So part of it is we need to have, as an institution, and as instructors and colleagues, a language of practice, of shared practice, shared understanding, shared values, that we communicate to the students. And one would hope that that happens not just in the advising session, because that’s really kind of too late, but in everything—from the initial literature the student received, to the alums and the alumni stories that we tell in the alumni magazine or the people that we bring to campus to have conversations with our students, the internships we set up with alums, and all of those kinds of things. So that’s one thing, advising, but also advising writ large. I also think we need to create some spaces where reflection and integration is going on. So maybe it’s a completely open curriculum, but maybe in order to sign up for your classes next semester, or maybe in order to complete your work as a sophomore, or as a junior, or you do your senior thesis, you have to have a reflective component that kind of puts some of the pieces together, that does that sort of integration, that synthesis. Students, they’re so busy, and they’re doing so many things. Sometimes we can reflect, but oftentimes we’re just doing. And so where do we build those moments to make sense? James Zull in The Art of Changing the Brain talks about how there are educational experiences, and they’re really just data until the students integrate it and reflect on it. And at that point, they move from data to knowledge, meaningful knowledge. So where do we create those spaces to make meaning out of the experiences that they’re having? Kate McConnell, AAC&U, says, “Assess and then disaggregate your data.” So those are three things you can do: advising, reflection, assessment and disaggregation. Finally, when I talked about this in the essay, and this is one of my favourite metaphors, my colleague, Rich Grant—who’s a physicist at Roanoke College and he’s actually now the acting Dean of the college—he talks about how students come to college with all these experiences, some personal, some educational, some social, some related to social media, and they’ve got this box of puzzle pieces. And again, on some level, they want meaning, they want purpose, they want to know how all these pieces fit together. If all we’re doing in college is just dumping more puzzle pieces into the box, I don’t think that’s success. Some students will thrive with that, other students will not. If our goal is to make sure that everybody thrives, what can we do that’s deliberate and thoughtful?

Rebecca: I was reflecting a little bit on what you asked, John, and then also the way that you’ve been talking about gen ed, and wicked problems, Paul, and I was thinking: I was a first-gen student who didn’t give a crap about gen ed. I remember. I had a couple things I was interested in, so I curated in a way that followed my interests, but I really didn’t see a lot of value in it until later on, when I had an opportunity, really, to work on a messy problem, to work on a wicked problem. And that was in a class that was cross-listed between geography and architecture…

Paul: There you go.

Rebecca: …and worked with community organizations. And then all of a sudden, I was like, “Oh, I need to learn all of these things.” Like then I had like a to-do list of things I needed to learn.

Paul: Yeah, and so they did a great job there of bringing the messiness of life into the classroom. I’ve got a friend who’s an architect, and a very good one, and every time he moves up the ladder in his organization, the problems get messier and messier and messier. And almost from the second stage, he wasn’t prepared for it. So how do we bring that messiness into the classroom, into the academy, into the curriculum? That’s a great example, I love that.

Rebecca: It’s making me think, like, having a really messy problem really early in a college education would be really important to getting students on board with the idea that you need to learn a lot of things…

Paul: Mm-hmm. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: …to have a lot of different kinds of experiences.

Paul: And there are increasingly places that are doing that. I believe Plymouth State is. In the first year, they’ve got a seminar that deals with a messy problem. In the Netherlands, almost all of the university colleges, the small liberal arts colleges and the larger universities, have problem-based and project-based curricula for gen ed, where students are taking these things on from the beginning.

Rebecca: That’s interesting, too, because that means a gen ed class has been designed as a gen ed class from the start, and not necessarily a major class that slots into a category.

Paul: Yeah. In gen ed reform, really, one of the stickiest questions is, “How do we determine what counts as a gen ed class or not?” And in some institutions, if it’s a gen ed class, it has a gen ed prefix and designator, and it is a gen ed class and nothing but. And, on the other extreme is, “Well, anything can count as gen ed.” And then, in between, you’ve got models that have core courses and distribution courses. And the core courses are gen ed specific, regardless… And the line that I constantly give to gen ed committees as they’re doing revisions is, “If you’ve got gen ed goals, you have structure, an apparatus, a process, a protocol in your course approval that honors those goals, unapologetically.” And that’s hard, because you’ve got departments pressuring you. But if we’re going to do it, we have to do it, we can’t just give it lip service and let whatever count.

John: Early in my career at Oswego, I spent one semester serving on our faculty assembly when we were discussing putting together the final stages of a gen ed curriculum. And much of the discussion was basically departments being very worried about losing FTEs, losing lines, and so forth. How can we get past that in these discussions?

Paul: Yeah. One of the things is, in the design process, and in the communication process, about whatever new gen ed models you’re bringing forward for conversation, you have to foreground that there are generally going to be multiple paths into the curriculum. So in the distribution model, well the history department has their own, that’s great because it’s clear, and it’s simple, and there’s assurance, and every department has their own, so everybody’s happy. If you’re going to make an integrative model that’s going to counter that, you need to show the history department that, look, in this model you have your one course. In this model, you can enter it the first year, which is really going to appeal to some people who prefer working with first-year students. You can enter at the capstone level, the senior or junior year, which is really going to appeal to some people who enjoy doing that. Or there’s these interdisciplinary courses over here, which is going to appeal to some faculty who enjoy doing that. Or there’s these hobbyhorse courses over here, that might really be interesting for people who have never been able to teach the bizarre, esoteric topic of their dissertation in a gen ed course, but now you can. And the beauty of that last one, in particular, my colleague, Hedley Freake who is retired from the University of Connecticut, he’s a chemist and he says, “If you give me an option between teaching Chem 101 yet again, or teaching gender and nutrition in developing nations, I’m going to take that latter course all the time, because it’s more engaging to me, it’s more engaging to students. And this is shocking, but the more engaged students are, the happier they are, and the happier I am.” But you have to really be deliberate about foregrounding those multiple entries and the benefits of those multiple paths. Again, it’s the simplicity of the algorithm, and all the experience we have with that safe, reassuring algorithm versus, “Oh, this is new, and it’s different.” And how do we clarify that idea with more than just words? We just had this conversation on my campus yesterday.

Rebecca: Sounds like a wicked problem to me.

Paul: It is, education is a wicked problem! [LAUGHTER] And it’s terrible, right? Because I was thinking, it’s not because education’s the solution. But clearly, we’ve got podcasts, we’ve got conferences, we’ve got discussions. It’s a problem, it’s a challenge, it’s fluid, it’s dynamic. It’s changing constantly, the opportunities, the challenges, it’s all… Gosh, you teach your 9 o’clock class and it goes perfectly, you teach the same thing at 11 o’clock and it’s a disaster. I mean, you know… [LAUGHTER] Why? Because students are wicked. [LAUGHTER] There’s a chemistry there that we can’t control, a dynamic that we have to work with. I love that, and this is it. I mean, wicked problems are engaging. They engage us emotionally, intellectually, socially. They’re exciting, the brain reacts to them, we like puzzles. The part of the brain that wants to solve, that appeals. And I do think that that, again, if we’re thinking about changing the way students think about education. If education is static—you hand me this and I hand it back—that’s disengaging. And a certain number of our students are not going to see the value of that. If, on the other hand, we say, “Here’s a problem, can you solve it?” That’s powerful.

Rebecca: And it’s fun.

Paul: It’s fun.

John: For them and for us.

Paul: Yes.

Rebecca: Dare I say education is fun? [LAUGHTER]

Paul: Wickedly so. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking the big, huge question, “What’s next?”

Paul: What’s next? I think we’re all still recovering. I mean, of course we are. But even those of us who haven’t been ill, the brain, our sort of cognitive power, is still depleted. So naps, naps are next. I’m very excited. I mean, I just got the contract for the revision of the General Education Essentials book last week. And I’m just delighted to be able to take that on because it came out in 2012, I wrote it in 2011, and in those 11 years my thinking has really evolved. And so I’m looking forward to seeing where that goes. I am always with the wicked pedagogies and the wicked problems thinking about, when I do workshops or something, I’m always collecting or trying to collect the examples that people use. So I kind of think, ‘Where can I go with that? Is there another way to approach this? Are there different modes of communicating that can be brought into play?’ I don’t know. So recovery and exploration and maybe trying to find some of the joy that was threatened, if not, depleted.

Rebecca: Yes. More joy, please. [LAUGHTER]

Paul: Yes please. And chocolate.

Rebecca: Yeah. It’s a good side.

Paul: It is, yeah.

Rebecca: Well thanks so much, Paul. We really enjoyed having this conversation and you always bring great ideas to the table.

Paul: Well, thank you. I very much enjoyed chatting with you.

John: We’re really happy that you’ve joined us.

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

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

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212. Faculty Mindset

Posted in equity, first-generation students, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, inclusive pedagogy, learning, pedagogy, race, STEM, STEM education, teaching
November 3, 2021

Research on the impact of mindset has often centered on the mindset of the student. In this episode, Elizabeth Canning joins us to discuss the impact that faculty mindset has on student achievement. Elizabeth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Washington State University. Her research focuses on how to create equitable and inclusive instructional environments.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Research on the impact of mindset has often centered on the mindset of the student. In this episode, we discuss the impact faculty mindset has on student achievement.

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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 Elizabeth Canning. Elizabeth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Washington State University. Her research focuses on how to create equitable and inclusive instructional environments. Welcome, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Thank you.

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

Elizabeth: I’m drinking water today.

Rebecca: Alright, still a good choice. The base of tea, of course.

Elizabeth: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have a restricted set of tea because I brought most of my tea back up to the office, but I’ve been sent home with COVID. So I do have a ginger peach black tea still here though.

Rebecca: That sounds like a pretty standard fare.

John: It is.

Rebecca: I made it out to that tea shop I’ve discovered. And so I have a new one called Yunnan Jig…

Elizabeth: Ooh!

Rebecca: …and it’s a golden-tipped black tea.

Elizabeth: That sounds delicious.

Rebecca: It is very delicious.

Elizabeth: Exotic teas.

John: We’ve invited you here today to talk about your 2019 study that examined the effect of instructor mindset on racial achievement gaps in STEM disciplines. Could you tell us a little bit about this study?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So this study was a study that we did while I was a postdoc at Indiana. It was in collaboration with Dr. Mary Murphy, Katie Muenks, and Dorraine Green. We were really interested in instructor beliefs about intelligence… so whether they believe that intelligence is something that is innate, something that you’re just born with, you can’t change it very much, we call that a fixed mindset. And what we also call a growth mindset is this belief that intelligence can grow over time and change with effort, strategies, help-seeking, things like that. And we were interested in whether instructors’ beliefs about intelligence then predicted the experiences that students have in their classes, and then how well they do in their classes. So we sent a survey out to the whole university, and we didn’t expect a whole lot of responses because faculty are busy and all of that. But we actually got a lot of responses. We had 150 STEM faculty respond to our survey. And so with that, we were able to link their survey responses to the grades in their courses over a two-year period. And we ended up with this fantastic rich data set that we were able to look at students’ grades in their courses.

Rebecca: How prevalent was the fixed mindset amongst the faculty that you surveyed?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So it was pretty normally distributed, shockingly so I think. A lot of people think that fixed mindsets might be more rare. Other people think fixed mindset might be extremely prevalent, but it was pretty normally distributed. It’s a continuous scale so if you graph it, it’s a pretty normal curve. So we’ve got the most people in the middle. And then we’ve got some people at each extreme. But what’s interesting when you look at it, though, is especially on this scale, most people, they won’t go extreme, like the very, very tip of the fixed mindset scale. But they’ll do the next level over. It’s like, “I’m not gonna be that person, but I’ll be right next to it.” So it’s interesting to think about that when you think about the profession of being an instructor, and part of your job is to educate people. But yet we’re finding a significant amount of people have this mindset that intelligence or abilities can’t change.

Rebecca: So you talked about it being a normal distribution, was there any variation amongst race or gender, ethnicity, age, or STEM discipline?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So we get that question a lot. Like, can we predict who it is that has the fixed mindset? Well, this is the only table I’ve ever published that had every single line in it non-significant. [LAUGHTER] So we tested pretty much everything in our data set—whether mindset differed by gender, by faculty race, by age, by teaching experience, tenure status, anything that we had in our data set—and we found no differences by mindset. So it seems like having a fixed mindset or having a growth mindset is prevalent among all faculty regardless of these characteristics. We also looked within departments because a lot of people want to think that it’s, “Oh, it’s those economists or…” [LAUGHTER] looking at you, John. Or, “It’s those computer scientists, or the physicists, or the mathematicians.” But we didn’t find any differences by discipline. So faculty in any kind of discipline can endorse a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. And this suggests that these mindsets are not going to resolve itself on its own. Like if this was a generational thing, then we would expect it to resolve over time, or we could go into a specific discipline and educate faculty, but it seems to be pretty widespread, regardless of these characteristics.

John: That was one of the most surprising things in your study, to me. I was expecting that this would vary, particularly with age, but also perhaps with gender as well. And I was thinking that maybe this would be better over time. One of my favorite quotes from Paul Samuelson, an economist who died a while back, was, “funeral by funeral, the science makes progress,” and I was kind of hoping that that might occur with growth mindsets here, too. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

Rebecca: So we’re left with saying, “Great…” [LAUGHTER]

John: When you were looking at the effect of instructor mindset on student grades, were you also controlling for the characteristics of the students as well?

Elizabeth: Yes. So we controlled for a number of things in our analyses, we wanted to put anything in the model that might predict student performance. So we controlled for whether the student was the first in their family to go to college, their first-generation status. We controlled for their prior achievement level, so their prior GPA before they enrolled in that class. We also controlled for a number of course characteristics. So whether the course was, at this university, a 100 level, 200, 300. So, like, an entry-level class versus more of an upper-division class or upper-level class. We controlled for a number of faculty characteristics as well, like whether they were tenured, their age, how long they had been teaching. And so all of that was in the model to control for those variations in terms of what predicts their grades. Because a number of things we know predict grades, like class size. If it’s a bigger class versus a smaller class, we know that’s a pretty robust finding. And so we controlled for that in all of the analyses.

John: What was the overall effect, controlling for all the other student and instructor characteristics, of instructor mindset on student grades?

Elizabeth: So students, on average, received a higher grade in faculty’s classes where they endorsed more of a growth mindset. And this was, again, controlling for all of those things, regardless of student characteristics, class characteristics, and faculty characteristics. We also looked at this by student race, so we found an interaction with student race. So it’s not just that everybody on average is receiving or earning higher grades in the growth-mindset courses. This is particularly true for students with racial- ethnic minority status. So Black, Hispanic, Native American students performed better in the courses that had faculty who endorsed more of a growth mindset. When we look at the achievement gap between White and Asian students compared to Black, Hispanic, and Native American students, we see that this racial achievement gap is twice as large when the faculty endorsed more of a fixed mindset, compared to when they endorsed more of a growth mindset.

Rebecca: Can we talk a little bit about differences in assessments or the way that courses are structured between the fixed-mindset faculty courses versus the growth-mindset courses, because I think your paper talked a little bit about that as well, right, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth: We couldn’t dig into the specifics of it just because of the scale of this project, but we’ve done a lot of follow-up to see: What is it that faculty are doing in these classes? Because students are obviously picking up on it. It’s not just the belief that you hold near and dear to your heart, this is something that is being communicated to students in some way. And what we know from our other research is that it’s communicated in a lot of ways depending on the instructor, depending on the class. So it can be communicated in your course policies, like how you design your syllabus, how many assessments you give in your class. So, fixed-mindset professors are more likely to have a midterm and a final, and that’s your only opportunity to display your abilities in that class. Whereas the growth-mindset professors are more likely to have weekly quizzes where you can improve over time and see that improvement over time. And mistakes are less deadly in those classes, so to speak. So it’s in the way they design their courses, but it’s also in subtle ways. So what they say in class, how they talk to students who are struggling in their office hours, it’s in their attitude, it’s in a lot of different behavior. And students are pretty perceptive, they can pick up on it pretty quickly.

John: So we can significantly reduce racial achievement gaps if instructors have growth mindsets. Is instructor mindset something that’s changeable?

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think so. We know a lot from trying to change students’ mindset beliefs, it’s actually pretty malleable. You can teach people the science behind how our abilities grow over time, the changes that occur in your brain in terms of neuroplasticity, and faculty are pretty receptive to that. Most faculty want to do things that are going to benefit their students, most faculty want to be good instructors. And so it might just be finding ways to communicate that. In some of our research, we’ve found a disconnect between what faculty think their mindset is and how they’re communicating that, to what students are actually perceiving. And so it might just be communication, making sure that you’re very explicit about what you believe in your class, standing up on the first day and saying, “Here’s what I believe about abilities and intelligence, you don’t have to be, quote-unquote, ‘smart’ to do well in this class. Here are other ways to do well in this class, like learning and improving and using different strategies and things like that.” We also know that there are very critical times where these messages matter more. So there are times during the semester where students are searching for information about their abilities. So when you hand back that first exam grade, or that first assessment that you give in your class, that’s the perfect time to communicate your mindset beliefs, particularly if they’re a growth mindset. Because students are searching, “What does this mean? Does this mean that I’m good at this? Does this mean that I’m not good at this? Am I going to do well, should I drop this course?” It’s a time of uncertainty for students. And so, for faculty to communicate those beliefs during that critical time, it can set forth sort of the snowball effect for how they should view their learning and improvement throughout the semester. There’s a number of ways that faculty can do this in their classes. But back to your original question about, “Can we change faculties’ mindset?” I think so. I think there’s a lot of literature suggesting that we can do that.

Rebecca: And there’s been a lot of money pumped into making these STEM pipelines in the first place. We want them to be effective. So investing in this education around mindset and learning might be a really good use of funds.

Elizabeth: Yeah, one of the things that I think was really shocking about this paper is the faculty that reported their mindset beliefs, there were 150 of them. But when you look at all of the students that they touch, over a two-year period, how many people they teach, it becomes a really big number pretty quickly. So in this sample it was around 15,000 students that these 150 faculty taught over a two-year period. And so, instead of intervening with 15,000 students, you might intervene with 150 people and see similar or maybe even greater effect.

Rebecca: I know from our experience, John, with working with faculty around mindset and around helping students learn how they learn, that faculty who demonstrate a growth mindset are often very willing to share what they’ve learned about learning with their students. And so having an intervention with 150 people then reaches many of those students, because that information ends up being communicated out in a more distributed way.

John: One thing I’m wondering is whether you can separate out, in these results, the impacts of the way in which people teach from the messaging that’s coming up indirectly in other ways? It strikes me that that may not be possible, in that the instructors with a growth mindset provide lots of opportunities for students to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, while those who have a fixed mindset are more likely just, as you said, to use a small number of exams as high-stakes assessments. Is it possible that some of the effect is just from better teaching practices and using more evidence-based teaching approaches that give students these opportunities for more retrieval practice, more spaced practice, and so forth?

Elizabeth: I think that’s very possible. However, we’ve done some follow-up research where we randomized faculty messages within one course. So it’s the same professor, it’s the same structure, some students are getting growth-mindset messages from that instructor, some students are just getting control messages, and we’re seeing really great effects at that level. And so it has to be more than just the way their course is structured. It’s more about the messages that they’re giving students and how to frame mistakes, how to frame ability. We’re providing it at a specific time like I mentioned earlier, and so it’s probably a combination of both. But with this new experimental evidence at the student level, or at the classroom level, we’re seeing that it’s more than just their teaching ability, or the way that their course is structured.

John: What you just described reminds me of a podcast we had done a while back with Angela Bauer at High Point University in Episode 49. In that episode, she talked about trying to reduce some of the achievement gap in their introductory biology classes. And they first introduced some active-learning activities, but there was still a non-trivial achievement gap remaining. So they introduced some growth mindset messaging, and that seemed to remove the remaining racial achievement gaps. So that provides a little bit further evidence that growth mindset messaging can play a significant role in helping to reduce these achievement gaps.

Rebecca: One thing that’s really powerful about that idea, though, is that it may not really take a lot to make a change.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Rebecca: It doesn’t really seem like that much of a financial investment, or even a time investment to make a difference, or at least chip away at the problem a little.

Elizabeth: I think that’s what makes this so appealing to people is because it’s subtle, and it’s also something that can be done pretty easily. So you’re not changing the curriculum, you’re not flipping your classroom that requires extra work and time. Faculty are already overloaded with the expectations of what they’re supposed to be doing with teaching in terms of all their other responsibilities. We have implemented mindset messages at a pretty really basic level. So putting messages in a syllabus, putting messages in an email, maybe a couple videos in the class, for instance. And that’s really it. As long as it’s done in a way where it’s at a critical time, it’s more meaningful for students, and it’s done sincerely, then it’s not a whole lot of extra work.

John: From a faculty member’s side though, for those who may have a fixed mindset who believe that students’ ability is fixed, a conversion to a growth mindset may very well, and that’s consistent with your results, change the way in which they structure their courses. Because if you believe that students can learn by making mistakes and practice, you’re probably going to redesign your courses to build more of that in and that’s, again, very consistent with what you found. And it will be a bit more work typically for instructors unless they can do it in a way in which there’s some degree of automation.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of discussion around rigor, and if you have a growth mindset that it means you’re too soft, and you’re not having a difficult class. So it brings up all these questions about course difficulty and rigor. And I think our perspective and some of the follow-up work that we’ve done in this paper, and in other papers, that the perspective of what is difficult or what is rigorous really depends on who you ask. So if you ask a faculty member how difficult their class is, or what it means to have a difficult class, that’s going to vary quite dramatically from the students’ perspective. So what we’ve seen is that students actually find the growth-mindset professors to be a little bit more difficult or challenging than the fixed-mindset professors, and it’s for that very reason that they have more work to do in the class. [LAUGHTER] They have to make improvements, and they have to redo assignments, and the workload is maybe even a little bit higher, versus a fixed mindset class that might have a midterm or a final, there’s less, quote-unquote, “work” to do in that class. And so it really is in the eye of the beholder what class is difficult and what that means in terms of student achievement.

Rebecca: There’s a difference in regular accountability…

Elizabeth: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: …and therefore feels like a lot more work when you’re being held accountable on a regular basis. [LAUGHTER]

Elizabeth: Yeah, I’ve done some follow-up work, because a lot of people will also think that it just comes down to being nice. If you’re nice and warm and friendly, then people are going to do well in your class, and if you’re not, then people will not do well in your class. And so I’ve done an experiment where we have manipulated that. There’s a laboratory study that we’ve done, where we manipulate whether the message is a fixed-mindset or a growth-mindset message. And then we manipulate whether that message is delivered in a way that’s warm and friendly and positive, versus cold and unfriendly. So this results in four different ways of messaging. The best is always going to be sort of this warm, friendly growth mindset, and the worst is always going to be the cold, unfriendly fixed-mindset. But what’s really interesting is what happens to the two in the middle. If you have the growth mindset but you’re cold and unapproachable, versus a fixed mindset and warm and approachable, How do those two shake out? And what we’re finding is that, very consistently, it’s the mindset message that matters more than the warmth or approachability. So they do interact, of course, it’s good to be warm and friendly. But the message itself also matters. So we can tease these things apart. They are different things, and they have different effects.

John: Since we’ve got you here, we were looking through some of your other research, and you’ve done a number of studies that have looked at the impact of utility-value interventions. Could you talk about what those are, and what you’ve found involving those?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So a lot of the research I’ve done on utility-value interventions was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Judy Harackiewicz at Wisconsin, Madison. And so, utility-value intervention is an intervention that’s directed at students. The way that we implement it is we have students write a short essay. They pick a topic that they’ve covered in class, and they write about how that topic is useful or relevant to them personally. And the way that we’ve done this, we’ve had them do it a couple different times throughout the semester. So they’re reflecting on what they’re learning and they’re connecting it to their own personal goals, their life, and it makes the material that they’re learning more relevant to them. And what we’ve found is that this intervention is particularly beneficial for underrepresented racial minority students who are also the first in their family to go to college. So this group is doubly disadvantaged, they’re disadvantaged due to race, they’re also disadvantaged due to social class. These students have the largest achievement gap in most STEM courses, and they really connect with this intervention. What we found in this research, these students have a particular motivation for going into science. They want to give back to their communities, they want to help their friends and family out after they’re done with college. They have specific goals that may not be met in science courses, or may not have this direct connection to what they’re learning in science. And so, by providing them with this opportunity to reflect on that and connect the material to those goals, we’re seeing that they make marked improvement in terms of their grades in the class. Whenever you do an intervention where you have students write something, and you get really rich data because you can look at what they’re writing about. So we analyzed over 1,000 different essays that these students wrote and we said, “What are they writing about?” We ran them through the linguistic analysis, and they’re really connecting it to those goals. These students are more engaged in the assignment, they’re writing longer essays, they’re more specific in their writing. And that then contributes to learning more in the class, which results in higher grades.

Rebecca: Sounds like, again, a very easy intervention to make or to build into classes. I know that I’ve been doing more of that in the classes that I’m teaching and seeing really good results and having really great conversations as a result with students as well.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think there’s a difference between simplicity and ease of this type of intervention, because it does require the students to put in some effort, they have to write an essay. It also requires some grading on the part of the instructor if that’s not already in your class. So it is a little bit extra, quote-unquote, “work”. But I think it can be done in automated ways to benefit students.

John: And in these studies, you’ve also looked at the effect of student-identified value versus when it’s communicated from the instructor instead. Could you talk a little bit about the relative impact of directly-communicated utility-value interventions from the instructor or those that come from the students?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So from a really practical perspective, we wanted to know, “Do students have to write the essay? [LAUGHTER] Do we have to grade all these essays? Or can we just stand up in front of the students and sort of give them this information, kind of summarize how what they’re learning is relevant to a number of domains?” Because that would ultimately, in a practical sense, take less time. So we did an experiment where we manipulated this, and what we found is that students benefit the most when they get both. So they have a little bit of scaffolding from the faculty member, where they’re given some ideas of how the information might be relevant or useful to them. And then they write about it in their own words and get really into specifics. So a professor can stand up there and say a bunch of ways that it might be relevant, but every student is unique, every student has different goals, every student has different interests. And so, it really needs to be personalized to them. And the process of putting it in your own words and reflecting on it is also useful, right? That’s part of the learning process. You get into the specifics of it and write about it. So, we ended up concluding that it’s both. There’s some scaffolding involved from the faculty member, but then the students really need to generate something for themselves too.

John: I think you also looked at this in terms of the differential effect in two-year and four-year institutions, and you found somewhat different results between a community college and a four-year institution. Could you talk a little bit about that difference?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So a lot of this research has been done, or the data have been collected from four-year institutions, particularly four-year research-intensive institutions. And so, I wanted to see how this could translate to other types of colleges, particularly in the two-year context, because a lot of first-generation students go to two-year colleges. That’s a gateway to a lot of different career paths. And so what we did is we went around to a whole bunch of different two-year colleges, we connected with the instructors there, we tried to tailor it for their students and their context. But ultimately, what we found is that there needed to be a lot more scaffolding in terms of the writing process. So because the intervention was done with students at four-year colleges, we kind of made assumptions about how ready students were to think about utility and think about relevance. And a writing intervention in those contexts just wasn’t appropriate. So we didn’t find the same findings, we actually found that the control essays were more beneficial than the utility-value condition, in these interventions that control is summarizing course material. And that was actually really beneficial for students in this context because they weren’t already doing that in these courses. Whereas in the four-year college, that was sort of the status quo, and they were able to take that next step to make that course material relevant to them. So in working with their instructors, what we concluded is that you can do this intervention in a different way. It doesn’t necessarily have to be writing. It could be done in small group discussions, it can be done in presentations, it can be done in a lot of different formats that might not present a barrier of writing ability or writing practice. A lot of students in two-year colleges take concurrent writing courses in addition to their science courses. And so removing that barrier of writing, I think, would have been necessary in that context.

Rebecca: It’s a nice helpful reminder, I think, for faculty to be thinking about ways to have reflective practice that doesn’t always involve a lot of reading too. [LAUGHTER] Like, if we’re doing presentations, or if we’re reflecting in a video, or reflecting in conversation. These are all other places that provide some variety, too, so that we’re not always grading the same things or having to intake the same kinds of information. That can also be overwhelming to faculty too. So mixing it up is helpful I think. [LAUGHTER]

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think it also speaks to, you know, one-size-fits-all interventions just are not appropriate. So we publish these papers and we say, “Wait, we found these really amazing findings.” But that’s in one context, maybe with one instructor, maybe at one institution, and every student body is different, every class is different. And so, you really need to figure out the needs of your students and meet them where they are, and also take a step back and look at the purpose of the intervention. Maybe it can be implemented differently. Maybe if you take the philosophy of it and customize it for your context, that’s going to be the more appropriate approach.

John: We always end with the question, “What’s next?”

Elizabeth: Well, right now I’m still working on mindset messages. We just got word that we might potentially be getting a nice grant to look at this. And so what we’re going to be looking at is growth-mindset interventions directed at students crossed with growth mindset messages from faculty. The idea is that when you try to get students to believe in a growth mindset, it’s going to be most effective when the environment is supportive of that message so that it’s supported by the faculty member in that class. So we’re going to be looking at that over the next few years in a bunch of different contexts, in a bunch of different institutions.

Rebecca: Sounds like more beneficial, useful, and exciting information.

John: And again, as Rebecca had said earlier, these are really relatively simple and easy-to-use interventions that I think could be much more widely adopted. Well, thank you.

Elizabeth: Yes, thank you for having me. It was great to talk with 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. Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

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211. What Inclusive Instructors Do

Posted in access, diversity, equity, first-generation students, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, inclusive pedagogy, intellectual integrity, learning, pedagogy, race, STEM, stereotype threat, teaching
October 27, 2021

Our students bring a rich diversity in their life experiences, skills, and prior knowledge to our classrooms. In this episode, Tracie Marcella Addy, Derek Dube, Khadijah A. Mitchell, and Mallory E. SoRelle join us to discuss how we can create inclusive classroom communities in which student diversity is treated as an asset and where all students feel a sense of belonging. Tracie, Derek, Khadijah, and Mallory are the authors of What Inclusive Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Our students bring a rich diversity in their life experiences, skills, and prior knowledge to our classrooms. In this episode, we discuss how we can create inclusive classroom communities in which student diversity is treated as an asset and where all students feel a sense of belonging.

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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 guests today are the authors of What Inclusive Instructors Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching. Could you each introduce yourselves to our listeners?

Tracie: Absolutely, my name is Tracie Addy and I’m the Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Derek: Hello, I’m Derek Dube. I’m an Associate Professor of Biology and the Director for the Center for Student Research and Creative Activity at the University of St. Joseph in Connecticut.

Mallory: I’m Mallory SoRelle, and I’m an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

Khadijah: Hello, my name is Khadijah Mitchell. I am the Peter d’Aubermont Scholar of Health and Life Sciences and Assistant Professor of Biology at Lafayette College.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Tracie, are you drinking any tea today?

Tracie: Yes, I’m actually drinking Twinings peppermint tea. I like peppermint.

Rebecca: Yum!

Derek: Today I am just drinking your standard run-of-the-mill tap water.

Rebecca: Always a good option.

Mallory: I’ve got some green tea with lemongrass and mint today because I needed a little kick of caffeine

Rebecca: A mint team around here.

Khadijah: Well, I really don’t need to be drinking caffeine. [LAUGHTER] So I am drinking AHA sparkling water. It’s orange and grapefruit.

John: And I am drinking Twinings mixed berry black tea, because I need a bigger kick of caffeine.

Rebecca: I got here late and didn’t have time to make tea, and it’s really hot, and so I have a glass of water. And this is the first time I’ve ever not had tea for Tea for Teaching. But this is a very inclusive crowd, so I know it’s going to be okay.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of this book project?

Tracie: Yes, I can share about that. So, we were very interested in a lot of different research questions around inclusive teaching, for example: What predicts whether instructors adopt inclusive teaching? What are the barriers that they face? As well as, what can we do to kind of move this forward at institutions? So initially, we were very kind of research-minded, and we noticed that there were other questions that we could explore. Also, in our study, that I know later one of my co-authors will talk about in more depth. And those questions were, “What do inclusive instructors do?” So we ended up collecting a lot of really interesting information about the practices of inclusive instructors. And so that led us to think… Wow, wouldn’t it be wonderful to put this all together into a beautiful story that included the voices of instructors, that included instructors across disciplines, across institution types, across ranks, etc., and put it together in a guide that would really be practical, that would help instructors really think about inclusive teaching in a very practical way? So that essentially initiated this project. And I invited my co-authors who are joining today to partake with me in this project to write the book, and I thought of each of them for very specific reasons. And I value, very much so, their contributions and what they did around inclusion. And we kind of put it all together, and we worked together on this great work. Now, this is also coupled with more studies, some of which have been published as well, that kind of get into this big picture, thinking about inclusive teaching, thinking about… What do we do? How do we do it? And then even further, How do we actually enact it? What are the barriers we face? And how do we overcome or address those barriers?

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what inclusive teaching is, and why it’s important, to kick off our conversation today?

Tracie: Yes and I think it’s so important to define our terms here so that everybody starts off on the same page. So when we talk about inclusive teaching, and especially in the book What Inclusive Instructors Do, we’re talking about teaching that is creating a classroom environment that’s welcoming, so students feel a sense of belonging to the actual classroom setting. And we’re also talking about, that it’s equitable, and it’s thinking about the diversity of learners, and it’s very responsive to that diversity in the classroom. So we’re kind of joining here, this idea of belonging, as well as this idea of equity together, and all the practices, which are many, that we can actually use in our classrooms to be inclusive. And with regards to, “Why is it important?”… inclusive teaching has always been important. Inclusive teaching is excellence in teaching. We publish this book now, but this has historically always been a critical area to think about in teaching and learning. And some of the reasons why… well first, there’s a history of exclusion at institutions of higher education, some are able to be educated and have these experiences, and some are not. And there’s also a lot of good research around thinking about that and belonging. There’s clear research that ties belonging to academic achievement, it ties it to wellbeing for students, and many other important things that we know are really important for students’ success in college. Also, we teach diverse students in many of our institutions. So it really behooves us to really think about that and that diversity. And so it’s important now, it’s always been important. I know, with all of the things happening in our nation, there have been more calls and more attention towards inclusion and equity. But I will say, as I’ve said already, that it’s always been important to actually have environments in our classrooms that students feel as if they belong. We know that that’s a place where students can feel excluded.

John: You also conducted a survey of faculty about inclusive teaching practices. Could you tell us a little bit about the survey that you used?

Derek: Sure. So I’m happy to share a bit about that. Now, as Tracie had mentioned, there’s four of us that worked as co-authors on this book, and we all have different experiences, and backgrounds, and expertises, and roles at our institution. But we didn’t want this book to be just our voices and our four experiences, we wanted it to be much more than that. So with that in mind, we dove into the literature around inclusive teaching—what’s published, what’s the research out there—but really to figure out what’s going on right now and what are inclusive instructors doing, we wanted to have as broad a swath as possible. So working together we created a national survey on inclusive teaching, an inclusive teaching questionnaire, and we shared this both directly to various institutions of various different rank and style, master’s institutions, doctoral institutions, community college liberal arts institutions. We also connected with listservs, and social media, and directly with instructors as ways to share this out. This survey was given for about a month to two months in early 2019. And in the end, we ended up having about 566 participants that had started the survey, over 300 of which reached the end of the survey, and over 200 of which responded to all of the questions that we asked. And it was really interesting, because when we looked at the demographics and the backgrounds of those who responded, we saw a wide range of individuals from different types of institutions, male and female, various backgrounds, various disciplines, whether they were tenure track or not, and also the fields that they worked in. So we really felt like we got a good feel of a variety of different instructors being able to speak to what inclusive teaching means to them, what they’re doing, and how they see it at their institution. Also, geographically, we had respondents from the northeast, from the southeast, from the northwest, from the southwest, and everywhere in between, which was really nice to see as well. So when we did this survey, as Tracie mentioned, we had a few different things that we wanted to know some of them were… What are instructive pedagogies? What are inclusive instructors doing right now? But also, What are barriers they’re facing? What experiences for training have they had? How confident do they feel in their own ability to teach in equitable and inclusive ways? So all of these things were pieces of information that we were able to get from this broader swath and bring in and really pull in and really allow, in a lot of ways, those voices to be the voice of the book.

John: So a very inclusive approach to developing a book on inclusive teaching.

Derek: That was the idea, yeah.

Rebecca: In your first chapter of the book, you suggest that faculty should treat student diversity as an asset rather than employing deficit models that we definitely have experienced in our own educations and perhaps in our institutions. Can you describe ways that faculty can convey this message to students through their instructional practices and actually take advantage of these assets?

Mallory: Sure thing, that’s a great question. So, the idea that we should approach differences in background, experience, personality, skill sets, as an asset to the learning environment, something that improves the learning environment instead of a challenge to be overcome or an obstacle we have to deal with, was one of the most, I think, significant themes that comes out both in the scholarship around inclusive teaching, but also in the words of the folks in our survey. And a lot of examples came out in people’s responses about how they go about doing this in practice. And that begins with course design and syllabus with things like incorporating diverse perspectives in the material you’re assigning in class to demonstrate the value of these different perspectives. It comes from incorporating welcoming statements in a syllabus that explicitly state the value of multiple perspectives in the classroom and devising participatory strategies that are designed to bring those out. It also includes trying to build assignments that take an asset-based approach. I’ll give you an example of one, in a group project where you ask students to identify some of their different strengths: Are you good at researching? Are you good at writing? Are you good at editing? Are you good at presenting? And putting groups together that assemble students who identified different strengths and having them talk about those. The idea that not all students have to be good at every one thing, that we all bring these different strengths to the table. And one of the things that I think is really important for this asset-based approach is knowing something about what those assets are in your classroom. And that requires knowing something about who is in your classroom. So one of the things we also talk about in the book that I think is a good tool for helping to treat diversity as an asset set in the classroom is what we call a “Who’s in Class?” form, which is a form that can be given anonymously to students at the beginning of the semester, to just help and identify what are some of the social identities in the classroom, some of the skills people bring to the classroom, some of the different perspectives that students are bringing to the classroom, to give instructors more of a sense of what that diversity is, and how that can be used over the course of the semester to really improve the learning experience for everyone.

Rebecca: So I’m curious, with a survey like that to learn who’s in the classroom, are those results something that we should be sharing out to students and having a conversation about?

Mallory: Yeah, so I’ll take that and also open it up to Tracie, because she’s done a lot of work in the development of this form. I think the goal is to distribute this, allow anyone who wants to participate anonymously to participate, and then, yes, to share back the aggregate takeaways to the class, because it lets other students know who else is in this class with them. And particularly, I think, for students who might feel like there’s something they’re bringing to the table that maybe they don’t know other students are also bringing to the table. It’s a way of saying, like, “Look, there are lots of folks who are both like you and lots of folks who are not like you. And that’s going to be something that’s going to help us throughout the class this semester.”

Tracie: And I guess I’ll piggyback on that a bit. And I will say, you definitely can share it with your class. I think the important thing is letting your students also know that in aggregate, we will be sharing this. And also, if there’s certain things on there that really does it make sense to share with everybody? …having that discretion too. Because students will share lots of different things on that form, and some of it can be used to introduce this conversation, like Mallory said, and to really think about the diversity of the class. And I know also Khadijah has done things of that nature, she’s actually used the form in her class and done things like that, and has had a lot of positive feedback from students, with that regard. Derek might have done too, I’m not sure, but… [LAUGHTER] I know Khadijah has voiced that to me as well. So I think it’s a good opportunity to really think about who’s in class and a safer way for students… students will often feel more comfortable sharing in that type of format than just asking them without that kind of anonymity tied to it.

Derek: And I can actually just chime in a little bit here too. One of the ideas that Mallory brought up, and then Tracie added to, was getting to know your students. It’s really hard to teach your students in a meaningful and inclusive way if you don’t know who your students are. So finding ways to do that, especially early on in a course—really early, the earlier the better—was really important to us. And that’s where the “Who’s in Class?” form was born. It was born as a way to instead of waiting for, “Okay, I’m going to meet and learn my students throughout the semester, maybe get to know them more at the end with evaluations and things like that,” …what can we do right away? And because the students may not necessarily know us right away, or what our intentions are, we thought that the “Who’s in Class?” form could be most powerful as an anonymous and aggregated way of collecting data. Where students could feel safe, that their privacy was protected, that they could share that information that they wanted the instructor to know, but maybe didn’t want them to know about them in specific. So that’s why we moved that way. Now, in thinking about getting to know your students and being able to really, in a directed way, be inclusive and equitable and support different students with different needs, we do believe that moving from anonymous to a more non-anonymous way of getting that information can be important in a lot of situations. But we think that it’s best when it’s student-directed, when the students decide that they’re comfortable to share that information with the instructor, that’s the time when it’s most likely most appropriate. The “Who’s in Class?” form can be a way to ease into sharing information in a safe way. And then you come, you talk to your class about, “Why did we do the ‘Who’s in Class?’ form? What did we learn in aggregate?” And then you open up and say, “I’m here to extend these conversations, to continue these discussions. I have office hours that are open that you’re welcome to come to and talk to me if there’s any specific thing here that you want me to know that directly relates to you.” I know that Khadijah, at least, has, in some of her courses, used situations where there’s essentially mandatory office hours, I think right in the beginning, like little meet-and-greets where it’s only 5 minutes or 10 minutes, but you’re going to come in and you’re going to meet and you’re going to have an opportunity to talk. And you can share what you want to during that time, but you’re going to get that face-to-face time. And maybe she can talk about that more in a moment or two. But other things that I’ve done, if you have large classes where maybe there’s not a ton of time to have individual meetings with every student, in a lot of my classes, one of the first assignments is an online discussion board using our learning management system, which in my case is Blackboard, where students make a post about themselves and some information about not only them academically, but also their hobbies or interests. They post a picture either of themselves or something that represents themselves. And then there’s an opportunity and encouragement for students to reply in meaningful ways to each other, to get to know each other, because it’s not just about the instructor knowing who’s in the class, but it’s about the class knowing who’s in the class too, for it to be the most positive experience. So that’s been really beneficial. And I as an instructor then take time, and I can do it at nine o’clock after my kids are in bed, to make sure that I respond to each student in a meaningful way and try and make connections where I can, “Oh, you like science fiction, well I’m currently reading this series, we should talk about that sometime,” or things along that line. So I think that starting in a safe, anonymous way like the “Who’s in Class?” form can be a great way to get that ball rolling and, if the students feel comfortable and feel like it would be meaningful, allow them to break that anonymity border by offering opportunity.

John: We’ve been running a reading group along with SUNY Plattsburgh, and this was a topic that was discussed really extensively in one of our meetings, where there was pretty much a consensus that there’s a purpose for both an anonymous form to let people express things that they might not be comfortable revealing, but then also giving students the opportunity to share either with just the instructor, perhaps through meetings, or if it’s a larger class, a discussion forum, or Flipgrid, or VoiceThread, or some other way where they can share their identities with other people. And I think the consensus was, there’s a good purpose for each of these, and some combination might be really helpful.

Khadijah: One thing I just want to add on to what everyone is saying is that the “Who’s in Class?” form has been transformative for my classroom spaces. And I know Derek brought up something about large class size and thinking about large classes, it even can help with that. But I think we also need to think about the other end of the bell curve, very small classes, because even though someone may be not identified, there’s some aspects of their identity that could then disclose who they are. So I think that we also need to be mindful of that. For example, clearly there are visible aspects of our identity that would be able to disclose what a particular student was in a small setting, that would not be as much of an issue with a large setting. But I do think that there is so much power in that. And speaking to what Derek mentioned about the essential office hours, so for every class that I teach, I do use the “Who’s in Class?” form and these essential office hours. And even though the “Who’s in Class?” form is anonymous, people do share with me during these essential office hours, and it really fosters a greater classroom environment in that way.

Rebecca: I love the name essential office hours, I love the emphasis on the “essential.”

Tracie: Absolutely. And I was going to share that the development of the “Who’s in Class?” form was with collaboration with students too. So I asked a number of students about this form, as we were going through the process of creating it, from questions like, “Are these questions that we should ask? How should we implement it or administer this? Would they answer these questions?” And so that was also very helpful. But I will say that working with a number of instructors on the “Who’s in Class?” form in my center, there are a number that actually do have a separate form as well that’s course specific, that’s not anonymous, they add additional questions on that. And then we have all these wonderful variations that, like Khadijah said, the essential office hours and other ways to get to know students, which I think, John, well you mentioned, I think is obviously fabulous. There’s all these different avenues for students to be able to share aspects of themselves with not only the instructor, but as Derek mentioned, with the class. What a wonderful thing that is for building a more inclusive classroom.

John: Once you have this data on who’s in your class, how can you use that to convince students that the diversity of the class is actually an asset to the class? What sort of methods could you use to help convey that message? In particular, how can you avoid issues such as stereotype threat?

Khadijah: Well, I can speak to the first part of your question, John, I think about: what can you do with this data? So I actually summarize the data, and we have a little PowerPoint presentation, and I share that back out to the class so that we appreciate this diversity. I also then go tweak and tailor my classroom to the students that are in the room. So if there are particular issues that may be salient to that group and that population, then we address that as a learning community together. Thinking about stereotype threat, so this is really important, particularly in the discipline that I’m in, in STEM disciplines. So when we think about stereotype threat, we normally think about negative stereotype threat. And that’s the perceived risk of confirming negative stereotypes about a particular social group that a student may be assigned. And what it leads to is this imbalance of how the student’s sense of self, which is typically positive, versus this inconsistent expectation of whatever group that they fall into. And so this is really, really pronounced when we think about various academic disciplines, and notably people who’ve done work in STEM. And what happens is this leads to worse academic performance or a threatened or less of a sense of belonging. So things like the “Who’s in Class?” form that can help with that sense of belonging. I think that there are several evidence-based approaches that we use to mitigate this impact in effect. And the first is really thinking about self-affirmation. So there are a lot of the instructors in our study, and we see the voices in the book. We talk about reinforcing the students’ feelings of integrity and self-worth and that this self-affirmation dramatically reduces the effects of negative stereotype threat. And we know that this can change achievement gaps and bolster this sense of belonging along with initiatives like using this “Who’s in Class?” form. I think one thing to keep in mind is, although we often talk about negative stereotype threat, there also is positive stereotype threat. And so, one way, as instructors, we can combat that, is thinking about the stereotype content model, because this allows for both types of stereotypes. And what happens is this model is a psychological model that’s based on perceptions of warmth and competence. And thinking about particular stereotypes as high or low warmth and competence. And, in particular, we know that inclusive instructors realize that harm can arise from either one of these and depending on visible and invisible identities. So what happens is you can use this stereotype content model across different types of courses, levels, times to acknowledge and reflect on the individual’s own stereotypes, to offer apologies for students that may have resulted in harm, and to carry out actions that would re-establish welcoming spaces. So we like to think about the stereotype content model can be coupled with these three As: acknowledge, apologize, and act. And so that would just be examining your own background and experiences, and apologizing if there’s been any type of misspoken or things that weren’t addressed, and thinking about how to act and take action in the face of some of these stereotypes.

Rebecca: So as we start thinking about some of these ideas, how do we start building these inclusive principles into our course designs? We’ve talked a little bit about the openers, considering some of these ways of acknowledging and recognizing who’s in our spaces, and who’s in our classes, and who’s in our community. But how do we make sure that we continue that thread of inclusivity throughout the entire semester?

Mallory: So I think course design is a really critical tool for inclusive teaching, and particularly the way that manifests in a syllabus. So I’m a political scientist by training, I like to think of a syllabus as a little bit of a constitution. It’s kind of the founding document of your class. It tells us what our common purpose is, it tells us who’s part of this community, it tells us how we act within that community, what we owe to one another, how we participate in that community, and really what we’re doing. And all of those are really integral questions if we’re thinking about inclusive teaching. So in the survey, I would say there are three really broad themes that came out of people’s responses to how they try and enact inclusive practices in syllabus design. And so the first one was really trying to demonstrate that everyone has a place in the field. We think back to what Tracie was saying earlier about belonging, being important, this is an obvious tie-in to that. And so perhaps the most frequent comment that got made in the survey was, probably unsurprisingly, “We should incorporate diverse perspectives on the syllabus,” and also in other course artifacts throughout the semester, but particularly on the syllabus. So that’s one way to demonstrate that everyone has a place in the field. The next big theme that came out was encouraging everyone to play a role in the learning process. And so we could think about that as another form of fostering belonging, but I would also say that’s part of the equity piece as well, providing space for everyone to be an active part of this particular learning community. And so there were a few different ways that came out in people’s responses. So one idea was encouraging everyone to play a role in the learning process by essentially just setting a tone that this will be an inclusive classroom in the syllabus language. So that could incorporate something like having a welcoming or a diversity statement directly in your syllabus. It could also just be the tone of the language you use. Is the language hierarchical? “The professor will do this and the student will do this,” or is it more inclusive? Is it, “Hey, we are doing this, [LAUGHTER] we will talk about these things, we will tackle these assignments.” Another piece of that puzzle was about setting citizenship expectations. If we want everyone to play a role in the learning process, we want to set some expectations for how we’re going to treat one another while we’re doing that. And I think a lot of syllabi are good at setting expectations for what students owe to their faculty. But, one of the things that we talked about a little bit in the chapter that addresses this is also that a syllabus is a good place to set expectations for how students treat one another, but also what faculty owe to students. And so, again, sort of leveling that playing field and establishing we are all in this community, we all play a really important role, we will all have give and take and here’s the responsibilities we have to one another. And then the third theme that came out, in thinking about inclusive course design, was essentially promoting the conditions for everyone to be successful in the course. So that really nails that equity piece. And so, one of the one of the big-picture ways that people implement this is to think about a syllabus as an opportunity to explain to students, not only what you’re doing, which I think most syllabi do a pretty good job of, but also how you can go about doing that successfully, and critically why we’re doing this. So the “what” is sort of setting clear expectations, so that everyone is on the same page about what we’re all trying to accomplish. The “how” is potentially providing resources to help students accomplish those goals. So directing them to the library, directing them to a writing center, if such a center exists. That could also include things like mental health resources to help students navigate the semester, particularly in the past two years that we’ve been having, those can be especially critical. And then also that last one, the “why,” giving a rationale. We all have reasons, hopefully we have reasons, for designing courses in the way that we do. But we often don’t explain those to students. And I think we often forget that students aren’t inside our heads and don’t really know why we’re asking them to do things in a particular way. And so part of setting the conditions for people to be successful is to explain why we’re doing the things we’re doing to students so that they can make strategic choices when they’re in our courses and are trying to be successful in those courses. And then the other really important theme that came out when thinking about promoting conditions for everyone to succeed is, perhaps unsurprisingly, trying to make sure your course design and syllabus are accessible to as many groups as possible. That’s another way that the “Who’s in Class?” form can come in really handy because there are a lot of ways in which we might try to make something accessible to one group that inadvertently becomes less accessible to another. So knowing something about who is in your class, and what some of the accommodations they might need are, can really help you make strategic choices about how to be as accessible as possible. So those were really the big-picture things that came out about how to make your course more inclusive through the design of a syllabus.

Rebecca: Mallory talked a bit about syllabus design and setting a good tone up front, and the survey does that as well. So what are some things that we can do at key touchpoints throughout the course of the semester to keep this feeling of inclusion continuing and that sense of belonging continuing throughout the semester?

Khadijah: So that’s a great question. I would say that welcoming students begins even before the course starts, even before they lay eyes on the syllabus. So I think that you can set this positive tone, you want to think about it like a greeting card, to promote belonging from the beginning. And so we talked about the “Who’s in Class?” form, but even having a video that would welcome them to the course, kind of like a trailer for your class at the beginning. There are things like the physical environment, thinking about that if you’re in person, but if you’re online, think about what are the first images that someone sees when they log on to your learning management course or the course website. Thinking about what type of activities would emphasize diversity and equity and inclusion. And that would be at the beginning, such as the “Who’s in Class?” form, but throughout the semester. And so I think that those things are carried out. Building the relationships with the students are also important throughout the semester. But at the end, I think we never think about how the students, even at the end of a course, feel welcome. It’s never too late. So even on the last day of class, you can highlight as an inclusive instructor, and we saw this throughout our work, how much you’ve learned from the students themselves and thanking them for how much that they taught the instructor. And thinking about, by having this equitable participation that Mallory brought up, that acknowledging that at the end of a course, actually affirms them in their abilities. It encourages them to see themselves as members of that community of practice, and we know this is critical for various disciplines. And wrapping up with giving students a way to reflect and give feedback on how welcome they felt in that environment. And that is really critical, that feedback that they give, for helping make future classrooms more inviting.

John: And you also advocate not just doing that at the end, but also getting feedback from students regularly throughout the semester, I believe. Could you talk a little bit about how you might do that efficiently?

Khadijah: Exactly. So, I think when we think about content, we think about formative and summative assessment. It’s the same thing with the sense of belonging. So you can do a mid-semester check-in. That could be a formal survey, or it could be something as simple as, “What’s working?” I typically take a piece of paper and say, “What’s going great so far?” and “What would we like to work on as a community?” And so that gives equal onus in the shared space in the classroom. But it lets the students know that I’m hearing them and that they belong and what they’re saying is important.

Rebecca: That mid-semester check-in often times well with thinking about advisement and registration for next semester too. So I could imagine really reinforcing a sense of belonging before the continuity of the next semester, or thinking or planning for the future can actually be really useful. And it’s not something I had thought about before, but when you were talking about the end-of-the-semester sense of belonging, our advisement time is coming up right now and registration. So I’m thinking that right now is a really good time to just reinforce and underscore these ideas to make students feel like they really do belong in the spaces that they want to occupy.

John: One of the things we really appreciated in your book was the use of reflection questions. This is something that is really rare in books directed at professional development for faculty. And it probably shouldn’t be, because we all know the benefits of reflection. Could you talk a little bit about the importance of reflection in learning, both for students and for faculty?

Tracie: Yeah, I think that’s a great question and I’m very happy that you appreciated that. We were thinking very intentionally as we were thinking about designing the book in that phase. And you can kind of see there’s like a part one, a part two, a part three, and then these reflection questions embedded throughout, and then also in aggregate at the end of the book too. And so, in general, as you mentioned, reflection is so critical. We know in the science of learning that we need to take these points in time and moments to really think about our learning, to really make sense of it, and see that meaning that we’re making of it, and that we have or are growing. And so, in our book, we thought, it’s so important, this material, that we want you to think about it further. And, as an educational developer myself, I was thinking about all the people also reading the book, and I was like, “Oh, if we were in a setting, like a workshop or something like that, I could ask these questions. Like what would I ask for application or reflection?” And I’d want to have that. And thinking about the book, and talking with my co-authors about thinking about these reflection questions, it was kind of similar where it’s like “Let’s add these in, so that there are these opportunities to actually engage in that process.” With inclusive teaching in general, there’s so many things to think about, to think about how we do it, what we do. And we gave so much information that it was so important, I think, to process it and to allow time points for stopping to actually start to think about it further. The other thing that we thought about in terms of the reflection questions is that we know that, in our bigger study, we found that there are lots of barriers that instructors described to inclusive teaching. One of them was resources, another was discussions, and whatnot. And so, by embedding these reflection questions, it also has easier access if there is a discussion—or a book club, or reading, or opportunities—to actually take this book information and bring it back and talk about it in a community at their institution, whatever that might look like. And so that’s another reason we did include them too. And I think we later decided to include the aggregate too, but I think that was also helpful. And then also just being able to pick through those which you probably want to emphasize more and have that option to do so. Some might resonate more with some than others. So all of that to say that, that’s why we put it in there and I agree that I think it’s a really good thing in books to include that. Especially these types of books we’re really reflecting and we’re really thinking about intentional teaching, in this case inclusive and equitable teaching.

John: So you started writing this before the pandemic and then while you were writing this there was this global pandemic that popped up and it was a period in which there was also a great deal of social stress. How do you think this might influence the willingness of faculty to focus more on the importance of inclusive teaching?

Tracie: So for me, inclusive teaching has always been important as I’ve mentioned earlier. So the fact that all these things happened were just that they were made more public and people became more aware. And now people are trying to change these things a little bit more than the past. So I will say what it did do was really made me think what a timely book… [LAUGHTER] to actually be at this point in time. I think it was a great opportunity. And I think it’s really useful, and we hear that, that it’s been really helpful for many institutions during this time, especially with this increased focus on it, on thinking about these issues as well. I will say that we wrote most of the book, I think a big majority of it, before it happened and then there’s a whole process that happens in making a book so there’s some time. So we did later try to tie in more of the recent things that had occurred a little bit later. But the beauty of it is, it all kind of fit naturally in there anyway. It’s not like we had to majorly revise the book, we just had to address the issues that were facing our nations. So I think, overall, it’s just a timely book. And this has always been important, and we really do need to talk about it, and this increased that ability for us to do that.

Derek: Yeah and I’ll just add, along with increased appetite for tools to help around these ideas of inclusion and equity, there still weren’t so many of those tools out there. So it worked well that we felt that we could provide one of these tools, that we had been working on it, that it was really ready to go out there as this appetite increased. And, specifically related to the pandemic, so one of the the effects of the pandemic on higher education was it forced a lot of institutions and a lot of courses to move to either hybrid or online pedagogies. And interestingly, this was something that we had been considering all along in terms of some of the chapters we were writing and thinking about welcoming classrooms, but also pedagogical means and ways to work, both in and on the ground and in online settings. So as we saw this starting to happen, we did go through and make sure… Are we talking about things and making sure that it’s understood that many of these are applicable, whether you’re in-person or online? And if you are in an online setting, how can they be used in that way as well?

Mallory: Yeah, I would echo, I think Tracie’s exactly right: structural inequalities in academia and society are not new. And I think for a group of four people who are writing a book on inclusive teaching, they’re already thinking about a lot of these. So what was new was maybe the attention of universities, who maybe were not paying attention, were forced to start paying attention, which I think is a good thing. But one of the other things that I think made me reflect a lot on the value of this book, that came out of the pandemic was, in the shift to online learning—as an instructor who was frantically trying to move all of their classes online with a week’s notice over spring break—was how much I valued being able to learn from my colleagues, and troubleshoot things, and benefit from other people’s expertise. And that’s a lot of what we’re doing in this book by drawing on this survey and not just saying, “Well, here’s what the scholarship tells us inclusive teaching looks like.” But saying, “This is what inclusive teaching looks like by people who are in the classroom doing this work, whether they’re formally trained to do it or not.” I think the value of that became even clearer to me, as I was trying to do the same thing with my colleagues on a daily basis. Learn from other people’s expertise as we were trying to navigate this really challenging situation.

Khadijah: So for me, a lot of what my co-authors have said really resonates. I think that I always thought about inclusive teaching before we had such social challenges that have been more pronounced in the media. I think two things stuck out to me as we wrote this book. One of the parts of the book, we talk about what happens when your classroom is disrupted. And I think it’s interesting, we tend to think about internal things that disrupt, so the students or the instructor, but a part of it was what happens with things outside, so these social conditions disrupt our learning. And so, the fact that the book addressed that when so many things were going on, it kind of was a how-to and it gave practical tools, of models and activities that you can do to navigate that. And I think what’s really resonated is that these things that we talked about in the book transcend transient social things. So like Tracie mentioned, something can happen in the future and this book would still be relevant in the way that we think about inclusive teaching, and what would come further down the pipe. So I think that it helped me reflect on current situations, but also kind of forecasting how having these new tools, from people that we’ve learned around the country, how that would help with future application.

Rebecca: I agree, that’s one of the powerful pieces of the book, is that we know it’s going to keep being useful for folks moving forward. And I know that we’re really grateful that we were able to share that with our faculty in our reading groups this year.

John: It does seem from our discussions with faculty that people are much more open to inclusive teaching than they’ve ever been in the past because while the problems and issues have always been there, they were often hidden on campus because you didn’t see the inequity. But when we were teaching students in their own homes, we saw differences in their access to technology, to their living quarters, and other inequities. It was much harder for people to ignore that. And I think everyone came to appreciate the benefits of community and building a strong community as a result of working through the pandemic. I think everyone realized that having a productive community is an important part of our lives. And the importance of that in a classroom, I think, is much more visible to faculty than it had been for many faculty before.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, the big huge question, “What’s next?”

Derek: Well so one of the things that I’ll say, I’ll keep it short and simple. What’s next? Around the book, it’s spreading the word. It’s spreading the word of why inclusive teaching matters, why equitable teaching matters, and what tools are out there. Whether it’s our book or whether it’s some other tool, some other way to get yourself into that realm, and get some understanding and work with your colleagues and learn from the experts. However that happens, that’s great. And for me personally, it’s doing the exact same thing: constantly learning, knowing that I have room to grow, knowing that I can improve in my teaching personally and all of that, and looking externally and reflecting internally for ways to do that.

Mallory: I think, “What’s next?” is such a great question to end on. Because one of the things we focus on in the book is that inclusive teaching is an iterative process. You never reach the end of it, you never get the perfectly inclusive course. And so, “What’s next?” is always revisiting what you’re doing and trying to, both in your own courses, revise and work towards fixing the things you didn’t get right the last time and at the institutional level, trying to build more capacity for inclusive teaching and buy-in. And I think the big “What’s next?” question is: What happens as we move away from the immediacy of the pandemic? What happens when racial injustice is not the main topic of the news? Do we still have the support for inclusive teaching efforts, or does that fade into the background? So I think the “What’s next?” is making sure that the momentum that has been gained is not lost.

Tracie: Yeah, and I would agree with all of my co-authors so far. I think the institutionalization of inclusive teaching would be so wonderful as a next step. So whether it’s, like, not treating it as a fad, [LAUGHTER] but creating it as part of our cultures in our institutions. So I know, like at my institution, we’re working hard towards that in a variety of ways. For me also personally, I do a lot of work around this, and thinking about the research and whatnot. So one of my steps right now that I’m taking is really thinking about the tools that we can really think about and capture practices around inclusive teaching to have that feedback. So we have all these great strategies, but let’s talk about more tools to really get feedback on our actual teaching practices. So I am doing some research around that right now, and I do work with students, student partners, to help us really think about this thing called “inclusion” and this equity as well. And so that’s where I sit in this space. So I’m going to continue to think about tools like Who’s in Class? and then these new tools, and go from there as well.

Khadijah: So, I echo a lot of what Tracie, Derek, and Mallory said. I think for me, of personal interest, when we do a lot of the inclusive classroom teaching, it makes me think about my laboratory. It makes me think about my teaching laboratory and my research laboratories. And I think teaching and mentoring go hand-in-hand in this space. Particularly when we think about DEI and STEM. And so for me, I’m interested in: What does inclusive mentoring look like in these spaces? And what are some of those principles and practices that are translatable from what we think about in the classroom, but then also what may be distinct in the laboratory and mentoring?

John: Well we very much appreciate you joining us, it feels like we’ve been in a dialogue with you all through our semester so far through the reading group. And we very much enjoyed your book, and I hope many other people will join in reading through it and working with it. Thank you.

Tracie: Thank you.

Mallory: Yeah, thanks.

Derek: Thank you so much.

Rebecca: We look forward to seeing all your new work.

Khadijah: 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. Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

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210. A Pedagogy of Kindness

Posted in accessibility, classroom community, engagement, equity, feedback, grading, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, motivation, pedagogy, teaching
October 20, 2021

The informal culture of some academic departments can facilitate an atmosphere of mutual mistrust between faculty and students. In this episode, Cate Denial joins us to discuss how a culture of suspicion can be replaced by a pedagogy of kindness. Cate is the Bright Distinguished Professor of the History Department and the Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Cate is the 2018 to 2021 Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and the recipient of the American Historical Association’s 2018 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award. She is the author of A Pedagogy of Kindness, which will be released as part of the West Virginia University Press’ superb series of books on teaching and learning.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: The informal culture of some academic departments can facilitate an atmosphere of mutual mistrust between faculty and students. In this episode, we discuss how a culture of suspicion can be replaced by a pedagogy of kindness.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Cate Denial. Cate is the Bright Distinguished Professor of the History Department and the Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Cate is the 2018 to 2021 Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and the recipient of the American Historical Association’s 2018 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award. She is the author of A Pedagogy of Kindness, which will be released as part of the West Virginia University Press’ superb series of books on teaching and learning. Welcome, Cate.

Cate: Thanks for having me.

John: We’re really pleased to have you here. Many of our guests have referenced you on past podcasts. And you’ve long been on our list of people to invite so we finally got around to that. I’m sorry it’s taken this long.

Cate: Oh, I’m glad to be here now.

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

Cate: I am drinking tea. I am drinking Yorkshire Gold black tea with just a hint of milk in it.

Rebecca: The true British way.

Cate: Exactly, it’s the way of my people. [LAUGHTER]

John: We long have had some of that stocked in our office for our British faculty members because that tends to be pretty much universally their preference.

Rebecca: I have that East Frisian, that’s my new favorite.

Cate: Ooh.

Rebecca: It’s a black blend, of what I don’t know.

John: And I have a pineapple ginger green tea.

John: We invited you here to discuss “A Pedagogy of Kindness.” You’re working on a book version of this now, which grew out of a document you posted on Hybrid Pedagogy in August 2019, and it’s been well referenced by many people. It’s been a useful resource, especially during this pandemic. In this blog post, you talk about your evolution as an instructor. Could you give us an overview of how your teaching approach changed after you attended that Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute at the University of Mary Washington that helped prompt some of these changes?

Cate: Yeah. The Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute in 2017 was kind of the “aha” moment for me. And events had been building up to that for a while. So when I was a graduate student, I was not taught how to teach very well. And I was sort of taught to think of students as my antagonists, to anticipate that they would try and get away with all kinds of things, they would plagiarize, they would cheat, they wouldn’t show up to class, or do the reading. And that my teaching career has been the process of unlearning all of those things. I have been helped along the way by colleagues in K-12 education when I worked with the Teaching American History grant in Iowa for 10 years, by some of my colleagues from Knox College, particularly Gabrielel Raley-Karlin, who is my friend and associate in sociology. And then I also was a participant in some intergroup dialogue workshops at the University of Michigan. And all of those things kind of came together to sort of make fertile ground for the stuff at DPL to sort of land. The Digital Pedagogy Lab is a profoundly kind place, everybody is so well taken care of, there are pronoun buttons, there’s great food, all of your creature comforts are taken care of. And this track that I was in, which was the introductory track, was very focused on how to really care about our students and to interrogate the way that we taught to ask if we were sort of thinking about their needs fully. While I was there that weekend, I came to the conclusion, I had this moment of going, “Why not just be kind?” and that really set me off on this new trajectory.

John: What were some of the practices that you had been using that you moved away from as a result of this Institute?

Cate: I took a long, hard look at my syllabus, and really noticed that the language in which I was speaking to students was very much from a place of authority, sort of on a pedestal, instead of thinking of them as my collaborators. So, I changed the way that I talked about all the policies on that syllabus. I changed the way that I talked about the honor code from being very sort of finger-waggy and sort of insinuating that everyone was going to screw up at some point, to a statement that said, “Hey, I take responsibility for teaching you how to do these things. And I believe that everyone in this class is fundamentally honest,” which is completely 180 from the language I was using before. I stopped taking attendance, I stopped having hard deadlines for assignments of any kind, I became infinitely more flexible with my students. I changed the “I” statements in my syllabus to “we” statements and really emphasized that I thought of students as my collaborators. Everything changed. Everything changed because I looked at it from a completely different vantage point after that moment.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that comes up when we say “kindness” is that people confuse that with “being nice,” or just being a pushover, having no standards.

Cate: [LAUGHTER] Yes.

Rebecca: …a laundry list of things that are associated. Can you talk about what you mean by “being kind”?

Cate: Kindness is definitely not niceness. I like to say that niceness is okay with lying, and kindness is not, it is unkind to lie to someone. And kindness often means telling very hard truths. But kindness is about three things in teaching, I believe. The first is justice, the second is believing people, and the third is believing in people. So justice means knowing who is in a classroom and who isn’t at any given time. Being super attentive to our positionality, and thinking about our social identities, and those of our students. Thinking about student needs in all their complexity. So having a basic needs statement in my syllabus, making sure I have fidget toys for students, I bring a huge bag of snacks to class, those kinds of things. So really thinking carefully and honestly about where I’m standing and where they’re standing. Believing people means that when people tell me that their printer died, their dog ate their homework, they had the flu, that I believe that on every score. I always feel that it is better to risk the idea that someone might pull one over on me, than to inflict more hurt on a student who’s already in crisis. So I always err on the side of belief. And then believing in people means believing that students can be our collaborators. So, changing the way that I grade so that my students and I do that together, changing the way that I think about our conversations as a class when we’re doing class discussion, and structuring those to make sure that everybody feels heard. Making sure that students get a say in what we read and what direction the course goes. And all of those things, I think, are integral to showing compassion and making the classroom a compassionate space.

Rebecca: I’d like to pick up on one of the ideas that you just presented, which was this idea of grading with students, not something we often hear. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like?

Cate: Yeah. So, I’m a big proponent of ungrading, and ungrading is basically a big umbrella term for any action that gets us away from having numbers and letters on assignments, at any point. So there’s a big spectrum, you can do very small things that contribute to an ungrading atmosphere, and you can get rid of grades altogether if your college supports you in that. So, at my institution, what I’ve done is my students and I put together a list of grading standards, things that we think constitute each of the grades on the grade spectrum. And then when they turn in their first paper, they also turn in a self-evaluation of their work. And some of the questions are very mechanical: Did you turn it in on time? Did you ask to turn it in late? Did you do what the assignment prompt said? And some are much more open-ended: In what ways was this assignment an act of exploring new intellectual territory? I always end the self-evaluation with: “Is there anything else I should know?” …which is a great space for students to be able to tell me all the myriad things that are going on as they’re trying to focus on this assignment. And then the students and I either sit down together or Zoom together to have a conversation about what they think their grades should be. And sometimes we reference those standards that we talked about already in class, and then what I think perhaps their grades should be, and we discuss it. We talk about what are the two big things they could do that would make their assignment even better. And we focus on what you can do next. So we come to an agreement about what a grade should be. And my role in that is, really, to make sure that people don’t undersell themselves, and to make sure that people are accurately summing up the work that they did, rather than, some students have said to me before, “I don’t want to seem conceited by saying I get an A.” So there’s all kinds of little hiccups that I have to take into account.

John: I think a lot of faculty resistance to ungrading deals with those two extremes with students who may undervalue their work and students who overvalue it. Do these discussions with students help correct their perceptions and help give them a better understanding of what they’ve actually learned?

Cate: I think so. And I think that having the conversation about grading standards before we even get to awarding a grade is a really integral part of the process. So we co-create those standards, and they get to say if they want to edit a line, take something out, put something in. So we’ve already had a really great conversation about what grading is, and why I approach grading this way, before we ever get to the point where we’re going to grade an assignment together. In the four years that I’ve been doing this…a little over four years now… I have never had someone overestimate their abilities. But I have had many students who have underestimated their abilities for a variety of reasons. And so, it’s great to be able to say, like, “I think you’re underestimating yourself, let’s bump that up.” And to explain why, also, so that they have a better sense going forward of what they’ve achieved, and what they can continue to achieve.

Rebecca: One of the things that you also highlighted, Cate, is the idea of flexibility. And I think the phrase you used was “infinite flexibility.” [LAUGHTER]

Cate: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I can imagine many faculty really running away from the idea. [LAUGHTER] Can you talk a little bit about why you shifted to flexibility and what you mean by flexibility?

Cate: Yeah. When I say “infinite flexibility,” I don’t mean you have no boundaries and you do whatever. What I mean is more, there are so many ways in which I’ve been called upon to be flexible, that I couldn’t possibly enumerate them. There are different kinds of ways every time. So, what do I mean by flexibility? I mean, I plan my courses so that I have the time to be able to have softer deadlines, for example. So I set aside some time for these grading conversations in the week that a paper is due, but also in the week after because I know there will be students who need extensions. And so I make sure that I have plenty of time to be able to have those conversations with them, no matter when they’re going to turn in that paper. It means fostering an atmosphere where students feel okay saying, “Something’s come up, I really need that extra couple of days.” And I don’t force disclosure, so no student needs to tell me exactly what is going on in their life in order to get that extension. It’s really just a question of saying, “Hey, I need this thing,” and then it’s theirs. Flexibility in readings, being able to change things on the fly as things are revealed to be too easy, too hard, finding exactly the right mix for a particular community of students. Flexibility about time off. When do we all just need a break and a mental health day? Those kinds of things. Flexibility in terms of the kinds of assignments that I make, and the things that I asked students to do for a grade. That’s really important too, I think.

John: You mentioned giving students more ownership of the course and that flexibility certainly would be part of that. But you also, I believe, talked about using UDL principles in your class. Could you talk about some of the ways in which you’ve implemented UDL strategies?

Cate: Yeah. So the design of my syllabus is something that I thought a lot about on that score, in terms of making sure there’s always alt text where I have images, making sure that there are images that help guide people to certain pieces of information so that it’s not a wall of text that faces a student at any one time. Making sure that there’s lots of resources in the syllabus for students who might need extra help, whether that’s tutoring or talking to me, or connecting with our office for disabilities. In the classroom it has meant things like bringing in a large basket of fidget toys and encouraging people to use them. Making sure that, wherever possible, I have both a text version of something, and an audio version of something if it’s available. Making sure that if there is an audio version of something, there’s a transcript. Making sure if I’m uploading videos, that those are transcribed also and have subtitles. So all of these things adjust with me, trying to keep in mind: How can I reach the maximum number of students as possible at all times knowing that many of my students may have things like learning disabilities, but they’ve never been diagnosed? Or, they can’t afford to have them diagnosed. So planning things so that I try and catch as many things as possible that I can anticipate, and then being flexible with other requests as students make them of me.

John: Do you give students multiple ways of demonstrating their learning?

Cate: Yes, I do. So, one of my favorite assignments is the unessay. So that is an assignment where I ask students to show me what they have learned in any way that does not involve a major paper. I used to give them the option of a paper or something else. But I found that people often chose the paper because they thought it was the safer route. And what I was interested in was getting them sort of outside of that thinking and trying something experimental. So I’ve had students make food and diaries, and do embroidery, and make quilts and dioramas and maps and street plans, and just an amazing variety of ways to show me what they’ve learned in a given term. That also means that they can tailor that to what they are best at, right? So there are other assignments in the term that are written papers. So this assignment, if you’re someone who doesn’t write papers well or really struggles to write them well, this is a moment for you to show me that you can rap, or you can sing, or you can play guitar, or you can make something. And for the students who really find papers easy, this is a moment to refine another skill, to get really good at making a presentation, for example, or to think about how to visually communicate their knowledge. So I think it has something for everybody.

John: And for you, I imagine, it’s much more fun to listen to these different forms of assignments.

Cate: It’s super fun. And their creativity just astounds me every time that I do the unessay and I do the unessay in almost all my classes. I would not have thought, for example, to make a star quilt in a course about native history. But one of my students decided to research the kind of sewing that students were asked to do at some of the boarding schools, and found the long history of star quilts in native culture, and then decided to make a very simple one for themselves. That was a tremendous project where they learned so much about native history in the 20th century, and I would never have predicted that in a million years. Their vision of what they can do is so much bigger than what I can imagine on my own. And that’s one of the real delights of the unessay, is getting to find out all the other things that they’re good at, and all the ways they can draw connections to places around campus, other things they’re doing, other disciplines that they’re really interested in.

Rebecca: Cate, when you have students complete an assignment like an unessay, is there some sort of companion to go with that to explain the learning that occurred while they were doing that activity?

Cate: Yes. So there are a couple of other pieces that go with it. The first is that when the students make a proposal to me for what their unessay will be, they also have to turn in our grading standards modified for that project. So that’s another place where the grading standards come in really useful. That means that when I’m going to grade everything, I have an individualized grading sheet for every single project and can sort of just go through them one by one. Students also turn in a reflective paper where they reflect on what they learned by making or doing their project. And those are some of the best pieces of writing that I get to read. They’re much more informal than a paper would be. But they are these wonderful spaces where students are incredibly honest about where they struggled, and how they overcame those struggles, and what the projects have meant to them, which is really exciting.

Rebecca: For those reflective assignments, do you have specific prompts that you encourage students to respond to, or is it more open than that?

Cate: It’s much more open. I just say, “You know, I want you to reflect on what you learned during this process.” And they can take that in any direction that they want.

Rebecca: One of the other things that you brought up, in terms of flexibility, were less rigid deadlines. But a lot of faculty are often very concerned about workload or other things that could occur if the deadlines were relaxed. Can you talk a little bit about how you manage your time with this flexibility? You’ve talked a little bit about the conferencing and making sure you have conference time, but when you’re getting many things in over the course of the semester, how do you manage that?

Cate: I have reduced the number of assignments that I ask students to complete. I used to have many, many more. And I realized that some of that work was busy work, and that I would rather have fewer assignments that took longer, and where students were more engaged than lots of little bitty assignments throughout the term. Some of it is planning, some of it is planning to give myself a different kind of time to grade these things. So, in the grading conversations, like I said earlier, being able to have sort of time spread over two weeks, instead of just one, to get everything graded. It’s also about talking to students about exactly how much time they need to get the assignment done. So you raised the question of workload like, “Aren’t we going to add to students workload and their stress if they’re just putting these things off?” But what I found is that I can’t predict when their workload is highest. And sometimes my assignments really make for a crunch for them, because everybody’s expecting everything at the same time, such as around midterms. So saying to a student who asked for an extension, “How much time do you need?” Then perhaps a conversation where we can say, “I just need a day,” or “I need two.” And it never becomes a situation where I’m like, “Turn it in whenever you want.” [LAUGHTER] It’s much more about, like, “Let’s realistically think about what extra time would be useful to you, without it becoming an open-ended thing that can drag on forever, and really become a problem.”

Rebecca: That’s a really important point because having infinite deadlines is not helpful for anyone. It’s not helpful for us as instructors, and it’s not helpful for students.

Cate: Absolutely.

Rebecca: We all get motivated by deadlines, even if they are a little flexible. And as professionals, we know that our deadlines are a bit flexible, often.

Cate: Exactly, yeah.

John: So, do you think that pandemic has made people more open to consider a pedagogy of kindness as they’ve observed some of the struggles more directly of our students?

Cate: I think that has been the case, yes. I think there is tremendous momentum towards pedagogies of care. I think that we’ve also experienced the pandemic for ourselves. And we have been overworked and stressed out and worried about our families and friends and communities. And we have needed kindness, we have needed the breathing room that this can provide. So, I think that it is both seeing the real challenges our students face often because for the first time we were inside their homes, and seeing some of the material circumstances that they were living in, hearing from them about the challenges they were facing mentally and physically, but also reflecting on our own experiences and knowing what would help us. And we didn’t always get that help ourselves. And so being able to provide it for others, I think, has been a really good thing.

John: What is the anticipated publication date for your book?

Cate: I don’t know. And that is because I needed a little kindness myself this summer, and for my deadline to be a little bit flexible. My original due date was September 1st for delivering the manuscript but I had some major health challenges this summer. And so I wrote and asked if I could have some more time, and I was very glad to be working with an editorial team that was great, and that gave me that extra time. So, the book manuscript will be delivered this Fall, but I’m not sure where that will put things in terms of a publication schedule.

John: In the meanwhile, your “Pedagogy of Kindness” blog post is available to anyone who would like to read it, and it’s a very useful resource. And you’re joining a great collection of books there, we’ve had many of the authors on and we’ve referred to these books very often. And we’ve used many of them for our reading groups, and we share many of them with our faculty.

Cate: Yeah, I was once given the advice by one of my advisors that, when you’re thinking of publishing somewhere, look on your bookshelf and see where all the rest of the books come from. And when I looked at my bookshelf on pedagogy, everything was coming out of West Virginia University Press, and so I knew that that was exactly where I needed to pitch my book.

Rebecca: I know you have many people waiting for it, and we’re all excited to read it.

Cate: I’m very excited to finish it, so…[LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I’m sure. The best part about having things on a to-do list is crossing them off. [LAUGHTER]

Cate: Exactly, yes.

John: You’ve been running the Bright Institute for a while, could you tell us a little bit about this?

Cate: So the Bright Institute was something I came up with five or so years ago. We got a very generous donation at Knox College, from the family of Edwin and Elizabeth Bright. And it was to facilitate the teaching of history before 1848… American history before 1848. So my idea was to bring together other liberal arts professors from across the country who also focused on that time period, so that we could try and help people with some of the challenges that liberal arts professors face. So we generally have less time to devote to our scholarship and to keeping up with readings in the field. We tend to not get grants or fellowships at quite the same rate as our colleagues at big research institutions. And we are people who have a lot of responsibility for teaching. So the format of the Bright Institute is that every summer there is a two-week seminar. The first seven days of that seminar are about reading scholarship in some particular field within early American history. We’ve had some just incredible conversations in those parts of the seminar. And then the last three days of the seminar are devoted to pedagogy. So taking the content knowledge that we now have, and thinking about, “How do we apply that to the classroom situation?” And then to help with research, we give everybody who’s a part of the Institute $3,000 every year to fund their research or to take them to conferences, there’s lots of ways that people have used that money to support them in this scholarship.

Rebecca: That looks like something to look forward to every summer.

Cate: Yes, one of the highlights of my career [LAUGHTER] is to be able to support so many people in doing such incredible work. And it’s such a delight to bring everybody to Galesburg every summer and have 14 other people who all do the kind of history I do. We tend to be kind of isolated on our campuses, we’re very often the only person who does early American history. And so to have this wonderful team of people with whom you can talk about scholarship and teaching is just so filling.

John: I wish we had more of that in all disciplines.

Cate: Me too. And I wish that I could replicate this… like I personally had the funding to replicate this for say, community college people, for precarious academics. It seems to be working very well, and I would love to see that model replicated in other ways.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for all this information and things to think about as we’re moving into next semesters, next classes, next academic years. We always wrap up by asking, “What’s next?”

Cate: What’s next, most immediately, is finishing the manuscript and getting that off to my press. And then after that, my college just won an NEH grant. So next summer, I will be leading a team of students in researching the dispossession of native nations from what is currently called West Central Illinois, building out on a website that some students and I have already built, and going to visit the communities that were dispossessed, to build relationships between the college and those communities. So that’s a really exciting thing to have on the horizon for next summer.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting.

Cate: Yeah, it is. And we just found out about it, so it’s brand new information. [LAUGHTER]

John: That’s wonderful news, congratulations.

Cate: Thank you.

John: We’ve really enjoyed talking to you. We’ve been looking forward to doing that for a while and thank you for joining us.

Cate: Thanks so much for having me.

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

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

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

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209. Military-Affiliated Students

Posted in accessibility, classroom community, diversity, equity, higher education, inclusion, learning, mental health, online learning, support network, teaching, trauma, veterans
October 13, 2021

One student population that is often overlooked in campus DEI initiatives is the population of military-affiliated students. In this episode Kenneth James Marfilius joins us to discuss ways to support and include this segment of our student population in the classroom and on our campuses.

Ken is the Director of the Falk College Office of Online and Distance Education and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Syracuse University. While on active duty, Ken served in the U.S. Air Force Biomedical Science Corps in multiple roles: as an active duty clinical social worker, mental health therapist, family advocacy officer in charge, and as manager of the alcohol and drug prevention and treatment program. He has taught courses on topics such as social work intervention, military culture, and social work practice, psychopathology, and others.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: One student population that is often overlooked in DEI initiatives are military-affiliated students. In this episode we discuss ways to support and include this segment of our student population in the classroom and on our campuses.

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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 Kenneth James Marfilius. Ken is the Director of the Falk College Office of Online and Distance Education and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Syracuse University. While on active duty, Ken served in the U.S. Air Force Biomedical Science Corps in multiple roles: as an active duty clinical social worker, mental health therapist, family advocacy officer in charge, and as manager of the alcohol and drug prevention and treatment program. He has taught courses on topics such as social work intervention, military culture, and social work practice, psychopathology, and others. Welcome, Ken.

Ken: Thank you, John.

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

Ken: I have a chai tea in this September fall day here in Syracuse, New York.

Rebecca: Sounds like a perfect flavor for the season.

John: And I am going off season with a spring cherry black tea.

Rebecca: Don’t wish the best seasons away, John. Fall is the best.

John: I really like this flavor.

Rebecca: I have an East Frisian tea, which is a black mix from my new favorite tea spot.

John: Could you start by telling us a little bit about your background in the U.S. Air Force?

Ken: Sure. So I received what’s called a Health Professional Scholarship Program direct commission during my graduate studies. And during my graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, I did some work with veterans, specifically working on the inpatient psychiatric unit, at the VA Medical Center. Upon graduating, about two weeks after graduation, I was shipped off to commissioned officer training in the Nashville Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. In post-training, I would go to my first duty station, and almost instantly begin seeing active duty service members. We served, almost 100% of the time, just folks in uniform at this particular installation. And within the mental health clinic, there’s three areas. So traditional mental health, seeing anywhere between six to eight clients a day, and again, in this situation, both uniform. And there’s the family advocacy program, and I served as director of that program for some time. And that’s really both prevention, but also treatment. And so you can look at it as sort of a stood up DCFS or CPS on the installation. So we would get referrals for child and adult maltreatment cases, and that would range from anything from physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, etc. And then there’s the ADAPT program, which is the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment program. I also served as director forf that program for some time. And similarly, we would get referrals. It could be a command-directed referral, it could be a self-referral, it could be a medical referral, etc. Anything from low-level treatment to inpatient treatment, we would get referrals from issues that might have occurred off the installation, ranging from public intoxication to DUI, etc. So that’s sort of the three arms specifically in Air Force mental health that I operated in, in addition to other roles. I transitioned out of the Air Force in 2016, moved back to the northeast and worked as director of the HUD-VASH program, which is the Housing Urban Development VA Supportive Housing, under the Healthcare for Homeless Veterans Program at the Syracuse VA Medical Center. And during that time I also designed, and still do teach, a course on military culture and mental health practice. That’s a bit about my background in the Air Force, the VA, and also now at the institution.

John: A few weeks ago, when the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, there was a lot of political discussions about this, where each party was blaming the other for how that came about. And one of our colleagues, who has a son at West Point, was concerned about how this might be addressed in classes since we do have many veterans in our classes. The concern was basically that the impact of those discussions might be hurtful to those people who had risked their lives serving in Afghanistan. What might be a good way of addressing these topics that would be sensitive to those people who have served?

Ken: Yeah, thank you John. Yeah, so you mentioned, sort of, politics and let’s stay away from that and focus more on wanting to express support and empathy for all of our military members and their families who have invested and sacrificed so much for and with our allies and our partners in Afghanistan. I would be remiss if I didn’t first acknowledge the Gold Star families. A Gold Star family is an immediate family member of a fallen service member who died while serving in a time of conflict. And unfortunately, we now have a new cohort of Gold Star families with the most recent attack at the airport in Kabul. So they’ve been at the forefront of my mind. And it’s very normal for family members, and also veterans, and those actively serving right now, to have a sense of sort of loss, grief, suffering, that can feel overwhelming. It’s also normal for them to be experiencing all different types of difficult and unexpected emotions. They range from shock to anger, even potential denial, guilt, or disbelief. With the current situation that has unfolded in Afghanistan now, it is in the living rooms of all Americans. For a long period there it has almost been the forgotten war, because it has gone on for so long. And I’ve heard from active duty and veteran populations, that there’s really this sort of feeling of the need to do something in this moment, rather than feeling helpless. And so, it’s important to note that these feelings about the current situation are normal reactions to abnormal and complex and ongoing situations. They don’t make veterans weak, but actually make them strong. So acknowledging that it’s acceptable to experience them. And paying attention to those feelings, while talking with fellow veterans, active members, family members, and friends, is actually a sign of strength. So what can we do as instructors, faculty members, or even staff members, working at institutions of higher education? When you’re in the classroom, there’s really no way to pinpoint or acknowledge who’s the veteran in the classroom, right? You might be able to sort of run a report on the back end, if you’re so inclined, or perhaps it’s self-reporting, it comes out during initial introductions. I still think it’s important to not just assume, and particularly not just assume that it’s going to be a man, right? Because there’s a significant increase in females raising their right hand and serving in our military, which is a phenomenal thing. And that ultimately increases the amount of female veterans who will also be attending our classes. Given the nature of the recent long-duration wars in Operation Enduring Freedom, OEF, and OIF, Operation Iraqi Freedom, we have folks who are going back to study in institutions of higher education across the country, who have either witnessed combat operations or know of someone who’s gone to combat operations. And so, to your initial question, it’s important for we, as instructors, as professors, as staff, to be aware of those situations. And so how do we do that? Well, there are services. I know here at Syracuse we have a wealth of services on our installation. We’re the number one private institution in the country for veterans, and there’s the Office of Veteran Success, there’s the Office of Veteran Military Affairs, there’s different types of certificate trainings, the Institute for Veteran Military Families. We also have what’s called an “Orange Door” program. So in different colleges and departments across the institution, you have an orange sticker, if you will, or door hanger, to let veterans know who may be passing by your office, that there’s an advocate there that can help talk to you. Again, it’s not an academic advisor, but it could be sort of a life situation, or career decision, or something that’s just going on culturally. So I think it’s important to have these advocates, in any way or fashion, at different institutions so veterans do feel welcome and accepted. Now, actually in the classroom… So we have to understand that there is a divide between military life and civilian life. And what does that mean? Well, in the military, it is hierarchical, it is paternalistic, at times, in nature, it is very structured, it is collectivist and not necessarily individualistic, it is mission-focused. So there’s a shift there. When we come back, and we transition from active duty to veteran life, it is potentially a sense of loss, or “What is my identity? How do I find my way?” Often, you know, if we’re speaking specifically about undergraduate study, you might have an individual who just got out of high school, an 18-year-old, with a veteran who might have been through combat operations and might be 27 years old. So I think we have to acknowledge that there are differences. They’re not necessarily peers in that sense, because there’s different life experiences. It’s very positive for both the 18-year-old and the 27-year-old to interact and discuss those different experiences and not to alienate. And so, that level of understanding, that level of training, that level of conversation… in faculty meetings, in staff meetings, needs to be occurring because veteran populations fall under the umbrella of diversity, and they represent this sense of diversity, and we must honor that. There’s some times I’ve heard anything from a veteran hijacking a conversation, if you will, sort of talking about their experiences, to veterans feeling as if they’re not quite sure how to enter the conversation from what they’ve witnessed or experienced. So you mentioned, at the top of the hour here, that you talked about this idea, that sort of politics and blaming this way or blaming that way, and then the veteran’s sitting back and like, “I wasn’t involved in that, I was out there to do the mission. I raised my right arm to sacrifice myself with my brothers- and sisters-in-arms, and my experience is fundamentally different.” Because the mission is not what’s being talked about at that time. So understanding that there is a range. You and I, Rebecca, can be at the same place at the same time and witness the same exact traumatic event. You may come out feeling okay. Yes, was it traumatic? For sure. I may come out feeling as if there’s an impact on functioning. That functioning could be occupational functioning, it could be in the classroom, it could be social functioning, familial functioning, that could potentially lead to something like post-traumatic stress, and what we call post-traumatic stress disorder in the DSM-5. And it’s important to not just conflate and/or categorize like, “Oh, you’ve been in combat operations or you’ve been in the military so what about PTSD?” Mental health, and we can get into this a bit more, but mental health is much broader than just talking about PTSD as it pertains to veterans.

Rebecca: A lot of things that I’m hearing you talk about, Ken, that are making me think about my own experience in the classroom, but just also the conversations I’ve had with colleagues, is that I was looking up statistics just to see, like, I wonder how many students in higher ed are military or veteran populations. And the number I was finding was somewhere between 5 and 6, depending on the report, and in graduate studies about 7%. But I also think that often, when we’re talking about our student populations, this is a population that doesn’t come up in conversation. It’s completely invisible, similar to students with disabilities. It’s a population that sits there and may not be visible, necessarily. It’s an identity that’s existing in our classes, that we almost don’t recognize is present. Can you talk about ways in our classrooms where we can honor an identity that maybe isn’t seen without pointing out a specific person?

Ken: Yeah, that’s a good question. And I think it is sort of this overarching respect, human dignity. Understanding that we all come from different walks of life, whether it’s an individual that has a disability, or veterans alike who are both veterans with a disability, right? So there’s a couple of factors there.

Rebecca: Indeed.

Ken: But also to include cultural backgrounds, right? And race, and gender, all these are sort of present and need to be acknowledged. And so how I operate as a professor is, I’m not going to, first day of class, be like, “All right, all veterans in the classroom raise your hand!” or go through it like that. I’d say, “Let’s set some ground rules and expectations for a welcoming environment, and that, ultimately, I’m not here to tell you what to do. We’re here to interact with one another and learn from one another.” I tell them that I expect to learn as much from you as you do from me and maybe even more. So every class that I have every semester, I’m learning something new. And the way to do that and cultivate that is to provide that sort of sense of safety, regardless of subject. Provide that sense of safety so we allow these individuals to feel comfortable engaging in that process, both direct and indirect levels of communication. That one individual, like I mentioned, who might not talk too much in class, is potentially constantly observing, actively listening, taking in this information, and has sort of a byproduct of that entire process. I also want to talk about trauma. So, I’ll sort of go back and forth from talking about, in my specific research and teaching, it’s obviously military and veteran focused, but what we’re seeing is trauma affects children. There’s this notion of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, that’s in the research. And so if it’s affecting children, well, they’re basically children and then before you know it, they’re graduating from high school, and they’re 18 years old, and now they’re considered an adult. But those traumatic experiences don’t leave them. Just like with a veteran, those traumatic experiences don’t necessarily leave them. So, the effects of trauma on children are far more pervasive than often us adults can even imagine. What does that mean and why am I talking about that, how that can impact the classroom? So following a child’s exposure to a traumatic event, or a veteran’s exposure to a traumatic event, there are a range of symptoms that may occur. Anything from a sense of arousal, being on edge, or constantly being worried, or the sense of rumination. There’s negative mood and cognition, so blaming oneself, or diminished interest in pleasurable activities or even school. Avoiding, consciously trying to avoid some level of engagement, not thinking about that specific event. And even re-experiencing, that can play out in potential nightmares or constantly replaying it over in one’s mind. So the symptoms resulting from this trauma can directly impact the student veteran, or the student’s ability to learn in the classroom, because they may be distracted by this level of intrusive thought about that particular event, preventing them from really paying attention in class, studying, or doing well. We also know exposure to violence has an effect on IQ and one’s ability to ultimately read. So as a result, some students may avoid going to class altogether. And so I think it’s important to have this sense of…what is trauma, who it affects, and not just looking at trauma as PTSD.

John: And certainly there have been a lot of additional sources of trauma. Now trauma has always affected a large share of our students but I think the number of students who have been affected has gone up quite a bit with the pandemic. And it’s also become much more obvious to faculty who are more directly observing trauma that might have appeared to be hidden to them in the past. What can faculty do to address the trauma that has affected so many of our students for any reason?

Ken: Yeah that’s a great question, John. I always come from the idea that we can’t address something that we don’t know about. So I think the first step is to educate, and it’s really on us as individuals and ultimately as a collective, is taking this seriously, right? And so how do we educate? Well, there’s sort of this idea of formal education, going to seek it out, reading about it, researching about it, going to events, but it also is talking with our colleagues about it, and actually experiencing it. So first and foremost, what is trauma-informed care? It sort of now has become a buzzword and I don’t look at trauma-informed care just for a mental health provider. If you really want to effectively implement trauma-informed care, it needs to be the frontline staff, the administrative assistant that might be interacting with these students first, it needs to be additional staff, it needs to be the janitor or the custodial, it needs to be the professor in the classroom. So it has to be a collective effort, and really sort of a cultural shift within the entire organization. Trauma-informed programs and services are really based on that understanding of some of the vulnerabilities that I mentioned or triggers a trauma survivor may experience and how they may impact the way that the individual accepts and responds to services.

John: You mentioned how one symptom of trauma is disengagement and lack of feeling of connection with classes. What are some symptoms that faculty might observe that might provide a clue that there’s an issue there that needs to be addressed?

Ken: Sure. There could be disengagement, but there can also be a level of confusion, difficulty concentrating. Let’s say that you’re noticing that there’s a shift in behavior, whether it’s through a written assignment, or maybe that individual was engaged and is no longer engaged. And I think there’s a balance there too, right? Because you want to be careful, and this happens quite a bit, is not to just call that individual out in the classroom because that would only make the problem worse, alienating and isolating that individual. So what I like to do is potentially talk to the student after class, just do a general check-in or maybe it’s an email and say, “Can we hop on a Zoom? I noticed a shift in the behavior, I just want to know that you feel supported by me as the instructor.” And that lends to an additional conversation where, okay, I am supporting this individual, this individual understands that they’re being supported, but they may need another service. And so we can’t just sort of be the end-all-be-all, the nexus of our students’ lives, we have to be able to be knowledgeable of the resources at our disposal and leverage those resources. And if we’re talking about veterans, specifically, what type of resource? Are we talking about academic resources, we’re talking about counseling? We have, at Syracuse University, right across the street is the Department of Veteran Affairs. We have, like I mentioned, peer-to-peer programs, which are often very successful in having veterans talk… specifically with the most recent incident in Afghanistan, having that sort of peer dialogues about, “Hey, what are you feeling? Are you feeling this too?” And just have that sense of normality, to say, “Oh, I’m not going crazy,” if you will, “This is normal.” And then situations may resolve on their own, or there might be sort of a level of psychological distress, acute distress, that needs to be tended to. And so, if it needs to be elevated to potentially having to see a mental health expert or provider, making sure that we’re training to get them to the resources that they need.

Rebecca: One of the things that I’ve been experiencing this semester is certainly an observation of students who are actually more open to talking about mental health generally. And that, when students are experiencing some distress in that area, actually being a little bit open about it, which makes it easier to refer them to resources. But also sometimes it becomes an impairment in being able to learn in the classroom, and that some additional accommodations might need to be had. And so some of those students may never have thought about reaching out to an office like Accessibility Resources or a disability office for supports. But these are students who are now getting support because we had a conversation, and it’s something that they never, ever would have thought of doing on their own and maybe wouldn’t have done on their own. I just thought it was something that was a definite shift from what I’ve seen previously.

Ken: Yeah, this is such a great point. Again, you don’t know what you don’t know. So the asset is you, Rebecca, right, that you’re aware of these services. And I even talked to my students about this, who will be clinicians in the field of mental health providers is, we have to acknowledge that we’re not going to know at all, but we need to know where to connect them to. And so, with that being said, you hear a lot about the increase in younger individuals, and specifically students at the undergraduate and graduate level, seeking out these services. And I think we have to come from this notion that there is strength in seeking help, right, there is a purpose in caring for one another. Reaching out for social support ultimately protects all of us. It protects you, it protects your family, the ones who care about you, your communities. I say that a stronger veteran community is a stronger American society. Same goes for other students. I like to talk less about stigma, and more about the inherent strengths of the human condition. We all have them. We must continue to find them, use them to help one another. And the beauty of technology today is that this could be done via text message. It can be done over a phone call. It can be done in a virtual Zoom session. Again, there’s so many options at our disposal, and it’s a unique opportunity in our society to actually leverage them to benefit all of society. And so I want to look at the increase in individuals seeking services as not necessarily a negative, but actually a net positive, and I think this gets conflated in saying we have a mental health crisis. It’s like, well where the same individual is saying, “Now we actually have these services.” And so it moves from, in which we are, a very much a reactive society to a prevention-based society. And so if we can get folks into services sooner, then there’s better outcomes. We know this in research, there’s better outcomes across the lifespan.

Rebecca: One of the things that I’ve been doing this semester, and really probably has been promoted by the pandemic, but something I will definitely continue doing beyond the pandemic is actually just bringing up mental health as a thing that we should be concerned about as individuals. And students have responded really positively to just even having that on the agenda for a moment, just acknowledge that that’s a thing that we should be thinking about. So that’s really definitely, I think, shifted the conversations we’re having in class and the desire for community. So I’m feeling a lot of the things that you’re talking about as it being a real positive that people are being a little more willing to talk about these issues. One of the things that I struggle with sometimes is thinking about how sometimes we talk past each other when we have really different experiences. And one of those can be military and civilian talking past each other because they have such different life experiences often. I mentioned before we were recording that I had listened to season six of NPR’s Rough Translation podcast called Home/Front: Conversations Across the Civilian-Military Divide. And there’s a series of episodes that talk about how people see different circumstances differently or experience the same thing differently, as you were mentioning before, Ken. Can you talk about strategies that we can use in the classroom to help us not talk past each other, but help us explain and listen?

Ken: So I think I’m going to talk here, from my sort of veteran experience, but it has a lot to do with civilians, if you will, also. So I’ve seen firsthand that serving in the military, in and of itself, is often not the sole reason that a veteran may experience mental health challenges. Actually, sometimes, it’s quite the opposite. So it certainly can be, and often is, a contributing factor. However, what I’ve seen in my work as both an active duty mental health provider and my work in the VA, is that mental health challenges—that may be anything from trauma, or depression, anxiety, suicide—is a very complicated and complex topic, and it does not discriminate. So we do know that prior trauma is a significant risk factor for the development of PTSD and mental health disorders… complex trauma. What we see in the research again, ACEs. So, let’s break that down, what is that? So traumatic experiences that occurred during childhood and adolescence. We have evidence to support that does have an effect on one’s health across the entire lifespan. Multiple ACEs pose a significant risk for numerous health conditions: PTSD, substance use disorder, depression, suicidal ideation. Research points out individuals with military service have higher ACEs scores, but why? Well, individuals who experienced traumatic experiences during childhood may seek sanctuary in the military. This can be very positive. We should also be exploring the associations between childhood trauma and mental health problems, both in veteran populations and our overall student population, and how this impacts the rise in depression and PTSD. For prevention, we really need to hone in on these predisposing factors and have an awareness of the vulnerabilities. Because nearly half, nearly half of the suicides in recent wars have been from individuals who never deployed. You also need to be psychiatrically evaluated before you go on a deployment, so you’re looking at physical and mental fitnesses. So I believe that to really sustain improvement in the veteran health, we must first understand the critical need to sustain the improvement in the overall public health, because these veterans are civilians before they enter the military. And when they transition out, they’re often integrated right back into the communities that they came from before service… they’re part of the social fabric of our society. So with that being said, the military mirrors society, which makes this a societal issue, and a community-wide effort in response. And so we need to create awareness, to have these conversations that you’re talking about, Rebecca, about the complexities of experiencing mental health challenges, and its impact not just on the veteran but their loved ones, not just on the student but their loved ones. It’s imperative that we work together as a society and work together on sustaining the improvement in the overall public health. Because again, a strong nation leads to an even stronger military and veteran population, both physically but also mentally. You’ve heard me say now “community-level” a couple of times and so it’s like, what can we do at the community level? We need the right services in place, communities that have the means to allow these individuals to not just survive, but ultimately to really thrive. So if we attack this head on from a prevention standpoint, we need to be providing our children and adolescents with parent-support programs, job trainings, mentors, access to education, not just access to education, but actually access to quality education. Family-centered schools, including embedded mental health services, or embedded trauma-informed care conversations. And survival services like access to medical, dental, mental health care, safe stable affordable housing, access to food, and breaking down barriers. Because if they don’t have access to these basic survival services, how do you expect them to have a critical conversation with a trained mental health provider when they’re worrying about where their next meal may come from? And the single most important factor in developing resilience in children who become young adults, this can also be said for adults, is to have a stable and committed relationship with a supportive parent, caregiver, or other adult. And that needs to be done on the local, county, and national level, and across our institutions.

Rebecca: A lot of this seems like it needs to happen way before they get to us in higher ed.

Ken: Correct. Before they get to us in higher ed, and as they continue on their journey in higher ed.

Rebecca: Are there things that we can do in the meantime, while we’re helping to advocate for these things in higher ed? I’ve heard you talk about certain services, and of course we would want to advocate for those on our campuses. I know we have many of these things on our campus, for sure. But what about within this classroom space? Is there something we can do at a classroom level?

Ken: Sure, this question also comes up. It’s like, folks in the community often ask, like, “How can we help?” It’s like “oh, the magic eight ball…” this is what you can do. I don’t think there’s one single answer. I do think though, number one is through actively listening, expressing empathy, being willing to be part of what I call an integrated network of support, building folks up, not tearing them down. One mental health provider can be a huge help. However, they cannot be the nexus of one’s life, there must be linkages to support in place.,,,for veteran populations to replicate that camaraderie that they experienced in the military, which is a significant protective factor. Perhaps most notably, Rebecca, is expressing to these individuals that they’re not alone in this process that we call life. And it’s important to engage in the language, so they don’t feel othered, begin to isolate themselves, which only perpetuates the cycle and the risk involved with developing depression, or anxiety, or even post traumatic stress disorder.

John: Going back to Rebecca’s point about people talking past each other, and your earlier discussion of the diverse array of students we have in our classrooms with very different backgrounds. We’re having a reading group on inclusive teaching on our campus, and a major theme from that is encouraging faculty to treat diversity as an asset. Are there any ways that you use to encourage people to express their different identities and to bring that as an asset into the class discussions?

Ken: So a specific exercise and assignment that I try and do in all of my classes, you might be familiar with it, Rebecca and John, is there’s one sheet of paper, and it’s called an identity wheel. And you break it off, and you begin to critically evaluate and do some deep thought about: “Where do you come from? And why do you identify this way?” And how identities change over time, and that is a positive thing. And so I have to talk about one’s core belief system. Before the age of seven, we believe everything that we’re told. And so, often, like-minded people in our communities around the country gather together, that even goes for race. And so, in some ways, that’s close-minded, because you haven’t been exposed. And so, beginning there, at what point did you start to critically challenge yourself, that, “Hmm, what I was actually told, I’m not quite sure if that’s true, or that’s factual? Where did that start?” And then ultimately, “Why did it change? What were you exposed to? Was it a teacher? Was it a peer? Was it a sporting event? Did you go off to some type of camp?” Often the first time that this happens is when they leave their high school and go to college. They’re exposed to individuals of different cultural backgrounds, different religions. It’s like, “Oh, I never even met someone who was from that particular religion.” And so, I think the best way to continue to first, have an understanding of where it comes from, what is our core belief system. Being willing to challenge our core belief system. This is the diversity conversation on how we treat others, but it’s also how we treat ourselves and ultimately, the impact that it has on our mental health. So if we do not have a firm awareness of our core belief system, it really affects the way that we think. Ultimately, it affects the way that we behave, it has an ultimate effect on how we feel. So it’s always a really good starting point to say, “Okay, what do I identify with? How do I identify myself?” Someone says, “Hey Ken, introduce yourself.” Is it, “Hey I’m a veteran, I’m a professor…” Like, that’s a starting point, but I want to get a little bit deeper into that, and to the students, I say, “You don’t necessarily have to share that in the collective, but I have to get you thinking from that frame.” So, that will help you in your academic journey, that will help you in your interpersonal relationships, but it will also help you in your, sort of, professional and your career trajectory in life.

Rebecca: Yeah I love those wheels, a great way to open doors into many conversations and a great thing to do early on in the semester, for sure. We can provide a link to an example of that in the show notes.

John: That was one of the topics in Cornell’s inclusive teaching MOOC that we participated in a number of times and taken faculty through. And that is something that many of our faculty have introduced at the start of the class to help people recognize their identities and their perspectives, and to talk about the value that all these perspectives can bring to the discussion.

Ken: And consistently engaging in this process, talking about the education, it’s also sort of continuing self-exploration. How can I continue to engage in a dialogue with those around me, and not this sort of constant debate, right? The media is filled with debate and competition. We can get a lot further as humanity, not just here in the U.S., but across the world, if we can engage in dialogue about these differences, and how we can continue to sort of build each other up in sort of a united front.

John: Do you have any other suggestions for our listeners?

Ken: You asked the question earlier, “What can we do more of?” And another question that’s floated my way is, “Is there a need for more mental health services?” My answer to that is, I actually think that, in many ways we’ve become, in certain areas we’ve become, specifically in higher education, resource rich. So I think it’s this idea that it needs to be the right services in place. And to all the family members, caregivers, veterans, civilians, who are wondering what they can do, sometimes it’s very simple. It’s call the veteran, call the military member and ask how they’re doing, call the student and ask how they’re doing. Like I say in the veteran community, you never know that that call, it just saved someone’s life. Especially an individual who was going through, potentially, a traumatic situation or is alone by themselves for quite some time at their house and getting that phone call can really change some things around. So I think it’s we, as a collective, need to keep it very simple, and start there and have that dialogue, reach out and be supportive of one another, and then we can start to create those linkages.

Rebecca: Imagine that, just being a nice human being.

Ken: There you go.

John: Your earlier discussion of the need for support for veterans reminds me of a conversation we had a couple weeks ago, in a podcast that related to new federal regulations. Russ Poulin talked about a concern with the way in which the Department of Ed is treating veterans differentially, depending on whether they’re taking online or face-to-face classes. And that’s been a fairly significant issue in the last couple years during the pandemic, especially when more classes moved online, in that the housing allowance was available only for people who were taking at least one face-to-face class. And they could take the others online. But if they were taking all courses online, they were not eligible for the same housing allowance. And that seemed to be a little bit inequitable, especially during a pandemic, when many classes moved online, and some of the funding disappears for people from one semester to the next, depending on the modality of their courses that semester.

Ken: Yeah, this is a big question because it’s a systems issue and what that system is honoring, honoring residential instruction over online instruction. So this is one byproduct of that. Now if you want to look at, first off, COVID has accelerated the use of online, not just online education, but the way that we communicate. And we’ve found out, in some degree, it’s more effective and efficient. Also the quality, the traditional online, is very different from what online looks like today, in both the asynchronous sphere but also the synchronous sphere. And online education is an access issue, right? We’re talking about equality, we also talk about diversity. I see, now as director of online, that it’s a different student who is applying for the online course, a student who may have work experience, like veterans who have served in the military. They also have families, and so it’s very difficult for them to uproot their family, let’s say, from Texas, but they want a Syracuse University education, and financially and their kids are in school. Now we provide them with that opportunity to get the same sort of faculty expertise within the respective department. Also high-level tech and interaction through video conferencing like Zoom that we all use right now. And so when you sort of drill down to it’s like, okay, the quality of instruction is still there. We’re actually reaching a different type of student, not just veterans, but I also see more people of color who are applying for online education. And why is that? And so I think we have to continue to sort of unbundle what’s going on and not create a dichotomy between residential and online education. Obviously, for some professions and what you need to perform, that may look a little different. But overall, with technology, we’ve gotten really creative on how we can deliver this content. In some spaces, online is of higher quality potentially, because of all the tools that you can use at your disposal. So, I think from your question, the BAH, the Basic Allowance for Housing, for folks who are potentially in service, but folks who are using the GI Bill based on geographic location of what they get their BAH from. And we have to look at honoring online education as the same quality as going to get a residential education. It’s a social justice issue.

Rebecca: Indeed, and something we all need to advocate for.

John: One of the things I’ve noticed in my online classes, and I’ve been doing this for 20-some years now, is that a relatively large proportion of the students in my online classes are active duty personnel. I had one student who, during the Iraq War, apologized for not being able to participate because they were on radio silence. He was on a ship there, and he was not able to communicate because there was an attack that was about to take place. And many of these students were among the best students I’ve ever had, they were really focused, they were really disciplined. They always got their work done on time, and it was always really enjoyable having active duty service people in class because they set a great example for other students. And online education has opened up many more possibilities for people in the military to build a foundation that often continues after their service ends. Could you talk a little bit about that role?

Ken: I’ll backtrack a bit. So I served as an Air Force officer with individuals on the enlisted side who served with me, who did not have a college degree, who might have joined right out of high school where the traditional high school student goes off to college, right, at 17, 18 years old. And what I’ve found is, they are my right and left hand. And they’ve been doing, you know, mental health intake assessments, free screenings, briefing me on the particular case, whether it was an alcohol and drug case, or a family-advocacy case, or a military case where I would get the file and I met with him for 45 minutes prior. And done incredible work in prevention and outreach—whether it pertains to PTSD awareness, mental health, suicide—and then I realized that these folks have real-world, real-life experience. But when they get discharged, or when they transition out of the military, they don’t have a piece of paper to show for it. So they have to go back and then get a whole four-year degree. In addition, in some cases, 10, 15, 20 years of this military experience. And so what online education provides, is an opportunity for, if they’re in uniform, they can begin, potentially part time, taking courses at a reputable institution, because they’re qualified to do so, not alienating them from doing that. And so I’ll use Syracuse as an example. I’m down in Louisiana and I really want to attend and get a Syracuse University education. I can have the opportunity to take online courses while I’m in the military. So when that transition does occur, I’m not only prepared with my real-world experience, but I also have the system backing of what that degree provides for a particular profession. And that’s a significant asset for our military and veteran population and their family members, because their family members are also residing with them, whether it’s on the installation, or on post, or off post in that geographic location, which may even be overseas. So thank you for bringing that up, John. I think that we have to continue to have conversations about access to education, and what that truly means for our military veteran populations, but even our everyday civilians.

Rebecca: I can imagine, too, the ability to have that consistency. Being able to take classes from the same institution when you might be moving around, or changing location, could be really helpful, because that helps have something be consistent.

Ken: Absolutely. And they can start online part time at an institution. And I’ve seen this situation occur, and they can even go residential, if they so choose, on campus when they do transition out of the military. So it gives them a sort of foundation or a head start, so they’re not starting from the first day of college once they get out of the military.

Rebecca: After a really different amount of experience, right, like someone coming straight from high school into a college situation. That goes back to your earlier point about having a first-year student in a college setting being in really two different moments in their life.

Ken: Absolutely. And the experiences are different, but I’ll tell you the symptoms are the same. So when that 18-year-old goes off to college and leaves his or her home for the first time and goes into the dorm room, there’s anxiety involved. There might be some level of depressed mood or lack of concentration, adjustment-related issues, mixed features in some way. Same thing goes for that 18-year-old I saw in my office in uniform. There is anxiety that goes along. There’s depression, right, there’s adjustment-related, there’s phase-of-life circumstances, which is completely appropriate. It’s good that they’re coming to seek these services, to sort of work through them, for longer-term success in one’s life.

John: We always end with the question, what’s next?

Ken: What’s next for me is that I have a book called Diary of a Disposable Soldier. I’m close to getting it published. And on a weekly basis, I would go over to the Syracuse VA Medical Center in the cafeteria and meet with a veteran who was disabled, unable to type for oneself but could ultimately speak. He had found a diary that he had when he served in combat operations in Vietnam. And so he had, after 50 years, had come to grips that he wanted to tell his story. And so I’ve helped him along with several other individuals, get this work completed. Unfortunately, he passed in December. And so it’s my mission, in the coming weeks and months, to get this published and get it out there for friends, for family, folks that he’s served with in Vietnam, and other individuals who are curious about one’s experience during the Vietnam War.

Rebecca: Sounds like a really important and powerful work we can all look forward to reading soon. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It was really great hearing your perspective and thinking through so many important issues related to veterans but also just to our wider community.

Ken: Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, John, so much. Wish you both a wonderful weekend.

John: Thank you for joining us.

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

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

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

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208. Efficient Mentoring and Communication

Posted in higher education, mentorship, professional development, support network, teaching, time management, workload
October 6, 2021

Most successful academics have been influenced by mentors who provided support, encouragement, and guidance. Maintaining effective mentoring relationships can be difficult, though, for academics facing increasing demands on their time. In this episode, Adaira Landry and Resa Lewiss join us to examine strategies that we can adopt to use our time more efficiently when mentoring students and colleagues. We also discuss strategies that we can use to help foster a more compassionate email culture in our workplaces.

Adaira is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, Harvard Medical School student advisor, and an emergency physician, and co-chair of the Diversity Inclusion Committee within the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Resa is a professor of emergency medicine and radiology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. She is also the creator and host of the Visible Voices podcast which covers topics on healthcare equity and a variety of interesting topics.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Most successful academics have been influenced by mentors who provided support, encouragement, and guidance. Maintaining effective mentoring relationships can be difficult, though, for academics facing increasing demands on their time. In this episode, we examine strategies that we can adopt to use our time more efficiently when mentoring and communicating with students and colleagues.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Adaira Landry and Resa Lewiss. Adaira is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, Harvard Medical School student advisor, and an emergency physician, and co-chair of the Diversity Inclusion Committee within the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Resa is a professor of emergency medicine and radiology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. She is also the creator and host of the Visible Voices podcast which covers topics on healthcare equity and a variety of interesting topics. Welcome Adaira and Resa.

Adaira: Thank you!

Resa: So great to be here.

John: Our teas today are…

Adaira: Black cherry by Jenwey Tea.

Rebecca: That sounds good.

Adaira: It’s really good.

Resa: I’m drinking herbal black licorice by Stash.

Rebecca: Wow, we got fancy-time teas today.

Adaira: These are fancy teas. [LAUGHTER]

Resa: We’re very serious people, including regarding our tea.

Rebecca: That’s very important. So you are in welcome company here. I have a HarSha, which is a black blend from a local privately owned Tea Company in the Finger Lakes in New
York.

John: And I’m drinking a commercial blend of ginger peach black tea from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: A favorite.

John: It is one of my favorites.

Adaira: Yeah, I like their teas. I just bought their white peach, actually, and it’s really good.

John: The white ginger peach?

Adaira: White ginger peach. Yeah, I just bought the white one, it’s so good. Those are some really good teas.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss what you referred to as “fuel-efficient mentoring” in an article you co-authored in the Harvard Business Review last year. Pretty much all faculty members can look back and think about mentors who are really influential on their path to higher ed. And we all play important roles as mentors to our students and to our colleagues. But that role can be challenging given all the other pressures we face, especially during the pandemic, which has been going on for a while now. So could you tell us a little bit about the origin of fuel-efficient mentoring?

Adaira: So fuel-efficient mentoring, that article came about probably during the height of the pandemic when Resa and I, we’re emergency medicine physicians, we’re busy, we’re in academia, so we have students and residents we’re training, we’re educators, so we’re teaching all the time, and we felt that we had to pick and choose our priorities in a different way than we were used to. We’re putting forward the shifts, we’re putting forward the protection of our health, and probably de-prioritizing the way we used to support and train others. And we came together to discuss, basically, this concept of: How do we efficiently mentor and support people during this pandemic? Because we felt that it was being pushed to the backseat. And I will say I was a little bit inspired by something that I was doing via Twitter, which was bringing together students who were asking me to mentor them individually and putting them all together onto one Zoom. Just because I was stretched thin, and I was stressed out from the pandemic, I thought, well, wouldn’t it be more efficient to mentor eight or nine students within one hour, than each of them as one-hour meetings separately? And that was probably the start of it. Resa branded the idea as fuel efficient, that’s one of her many talents, because, really, the idea is to preserve ourselves. I think all of us love to educate, all of us love to mentor. But we only have so much time in the day, and we only have so much energy. And so, by being protective of ourselves, we’re able to really mentor people and spread our knowledge in a much more efficient way.

Rebecca: It also seems like then you’re also modeling good ways of finding balance and protecting yourself and things to your mentees as well.

Adaira: Yeah, I mean, I think what I would say about mentorship is that it’s historically been undervalued, under-recognized, but something that is really, really expected of a lot of educators to do. And we wanted to write about it, we wanted to make this a scholarly mission for ourselves to help normalize like, hey, this is something that we can be strategic with, this is something that we can be recognized for, this is something that we can scale. And really bring it up to the standards of, let’s say, someone who does research or gets large grants. Mentorship is a really important part of career development but we have found, personally, that it’s not necessarily recognized in the same way as others.

Resa: And I’ll add that I think people think mentoring is almost binary, this or that. Whereas one of the aspects of mentoring that we worked on is redefining and broadening the definition. Mentoring can take all different shapes and forms, all different styles, all different ages and stages. I think one of the biggest mistakes regarding mentoring is that you’re trying to mentor people like you or look for someone as a mentor who’s like yourself. And, I mean, we think that that’s very limiting, and it may not work out well for you or the mentee. And in fact, those people who seek to do that are usually looking for solely self-fulfilling prophecy. And I’ll say that’s what I saw. When I was finishing my residency training, I had attendings, teachers, pull me aside, and their advice to me was very much self-fulfilling prophecies: follow their path, do what I’ve done. And it almost seemed more to serve them than it did to serve me. And Adaira and I, when we start riffing on mentoring, she knows I really love the concept of peer mentoring. And some of my first peer mentors were my college classmates. They’re not physicians, they’re not in academics, but, wow, can they provide me some of the most useful pearls and pieces of guidance. And one of the highlights of the mentoring process that Adaira just described is those students, those mentees, get to know each other. And so, a psychological safety is created, they get comfortable asking questions in front of each other. And then when Adaira leaves the Zoom room, they have now developed a relationship with each other, and can take some of their own skills, their own questions, their own processes, and their own paths, they can walk on those together.

Rebecca: Such a great point. I know from my own experience that some of my best mentors have been people who are incredibly different from me, and are even in different fields that I am. [LAUGHTER]

Resa: Yep, 100%.

Adaira: Totally, mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s really important to think about who can offer you a different perspective that you hadn’t yet considered. And so I definitely think stretching yourself beyond the field you practice and beyond the institution in which you work is a great start.

John: On our campus we have a formal mentoring program for faculty where everyone is assigned a mentor. And often that will evolve and people will develop their own mentoring networks. But during the pandemic, a lot of those mentoring relationships were perhaps a little bit less strong than they might normally have been, and there was a lack of those hallway conversations in the drop-in to chat about problems. So we put together a group mentoring process where we had a mix of relatively recent younger faculty and some older faculty who met with all the new faculty in a group. And that peer mentoring component of that worked really well because people are going through the same experience and sharing their experiences among themselves can be really helpful. And doing that with students as well strikes me as being a really good idea that, probably, is underused.

Resa: If I could dovetail off of what you just shared, the concept of the structured mentoring programs. I think sometimes those work, and sometimes they don’t work, and we’ve all had those experiences. And when people ask us, “How do you create these relationships and what works, what doesn’t work?” What we found is a few things. So, number one, you try it out, if it’s not working, you don’t have to stay in that mentor-mentee relationship, it’s okay. And in fact, by clearing out a relationship that isn’t really organically growing and going, you’re opening yourself to other new relationships. Adaira has a really good recipe and formula. It’s not 100% foolproof, but it’s a really good recipe for a mentor- mentee relationship to work.

Adaira: Yes, I like it when a pairing has three different things that synergize nicely. And the first is that there are similar energies between the two people, meaning their personalities are complementary of each other. And there’s a similarity, there’s a familiarity that allows people to feel comfortable, naturally, around that other person. The second is when their schedules align, meaning if someone is very, very busy, and the other person is super open and wide, and expects their mentor, for instance, to be just as available, that can sometimes cause a collision. The third is that there’s an overlap or a nice complement to the knowledge gap that one person has and the knowledge that the other person can provide. And so, to me, I think a successful relationship can align along the energies between the parties, the schedule, and the knowledge. And it’s nice when you have all three there. I don’t think it’s absolutely critical, but that’s the ideal.

John: And you also suggest when there’s a formal mentoring relationship, that you share a document in which you talk about the expectations. Could you talk a little bit about that, and why that might be important?

Adaira: I think it’s important to just be clear and direct upfront. And the document doesn’t have to be a formal document that gets notarized, we’re not sort of saying those sorts of things. [LAUGHTER] But we’re saying to write it out, to say it, to make it concrete, as far as what are your expectations. And when I talked a little bit earlier about the three things that are there—energy, scheduling, and knowledge—honestly, the scheduling part, the time, is probably one of the biggest reasons why a relationship could fall apart. Is that someone’s expecting, perhaps, to extract more time from the other or less, or there could be some sort of a malalignment there. And so it’s really important to express upfront, “These are things I can help you with, so I can help you with finance, but only about maybe a few hours over the course of the year, I’m happy to contribute that.” And it seems uncomfortable to express that, but we’re used to, sort of, doing this in other relationships in the world. Let’s say I’m working with a real estate agent. I know offhand how much time he’s willing to devote to that relationship because he’s expressed that from the beginning. And I think in the world of mentorship we feel uncomfortable making it feel like a transaction or giving it that formal nature. But I will tell you, it feels good to just set that expectation up because it feels really bad saying no to someone, it feels really bad saying no. And so if you tell someone, “I’m happy to meet with you once a quarter,” and you say that from the beginning, then it’s out there, it’s out there. And they know that that’s the rules of the relationship. But it’s really tough when you’re expecting that once-a-quarter meeting, and then they start emailing you every month, or every other week, and now you have to say no, now you have to add them into your calendar. And now you start to resent, maybe not the person, but you might resent signing up for the relationship or signing up for the opportunity, or resent the fact that you didn’t say something earlier. You just start to have these negative feelings, and I think that’s not great. So, to me, expressing things upfront: How you’re going to meet, how often you’re going to meet, what are you meeting about? Who’s setting up the emails? All these sorts of things, I think it’s really important to say that upfront.

Rebecca: Are there other strategies or other key pieces of information that we should make sure are in documents or agreements in these relationships to help make sure that they’re nice and healthy?

Resa: One of the points that we emphasize, that I think is an “aha” for mentees, is that they have to play a role in this relationship. It’s not one sided, it’s a back and forth. And, in general, once you state roles, responsibilities, and expectations, people can either deliver and rise or they don’t. What I’ve seen when people have spoken with Adaira, spoken with myself, and read this article, they’re like, “Oh!” like there’s a light bulb that goes off on the mentee side that, “I have a role in this.” And I’ve been surprised, gladly so, that I have mentees say, “You know, I know I’m responsible for reaching out to you, I will follow up with you, I will offer dates.” I’ve recently been reading a book about habits of highly successful people, the classic, and proactivity is rule number one. And so this proactivity, that people need to be the ones to play the role, to outreach to the mentor, it’s been nice to see and it works.

Adaira: And the other thing is really normalizing that not every meeting has to be an hour long or even 30 minutes long. Some meetings can be 20, 10 minutes, 40 minutes long, I mean, you can change it and you can sort of titrate to their needs and what the topic is. But this idea of just because you’re going to meet with the person, you have to block off an hour of your calendar, I think can cause people who are already very, very, very busy to say, “I don’t have time, I don’t have time to do this.” And so what helps us to figure out the purpose of the meeting, the content that will be discussed, and think about: What are the venues? Or what are the media that I can use to meet with this person? And what is the necessary timeframe for us to meet? Every once in a while someone will send me a calendar invite, and that’s speaking to what Resa said earlier, the mentee, I have them send me the calendar invite with the Zoom link or the location in which we’re going to meet. And they’ll put it for an hour and I’ll say, “I don’t think we actually need an hour to discuss your schedule for the next two weeks and how to prioritize your schedule for two weeks. We can do that much faster.” And so, it might require you to sort of train them to be efficient with how they present themselves for a meeting and come up with an agenda. But the goal is to really try to titrate the length of the meetings so that it’s appropriate for the content to be discussed.

Rebecca: Seems like a good rule in many contexts, not just mentorship. [LAUGHTER]

Adaira: Correct, that’s true.

John: Does all the mentoring have to take place in meetings, either in person or remotely?

Resa: Absolutely not, and I really am glad you posed that question. I was thinking as Adaira was sharing, that we have fallen into this virtual Zoom world. A lot can get accomplished back and forth via email, and what I was thinking as you’re setting up the meeting and saying, “Hey, we probably can meet in 20 minutes rather than 60 minutes,” there are a few items that you can actually clarify. And I have a meeting upcoming today and it’s with four people, we’re talking about authoring a paper. And the goal of the meeting is for it to be a working meeting on the document, but we were able to clarify ahead of time, by email, authorship and sort of goal publication location. So there’s certain things that you can do quick, the quick back and forth, or the quick items that you can accomplish in one email, then allows you to clear it off, so when you actually have the meeting, you can focus on what you need to focus on. And one of the things that we like a lot is walking meetings, like, everybody reads about walking meetings, but not a lot of people actually do them. And the beauty of a walking meeting is you’re walking side by side, and there’s a comfort and a psychological safety that develops. And what I found after having a walking meeting is there’s almost a connection with a colleague, a connection with a mentee that wasn’t there before. Because you’re in nature, you’re walking, you’re breathing, and you’re sort of bringing in good energy and allowing yourself and your mind to open in creative ways.

Adaira: Even if you’re not side by side, like, sometimes I just have my meetings while I’m walking by myself outside. And it’s just good to be out there breathing clean air and outside of the computer region of my life and just separating myself. I will do that even if I’m meeting with someone over the phone.

John: You also suggest in that article that it may be useful sometimes to invite the people you’re mentoring to professional development activities or professional activities that you would have been attending anyway so that you can use the time a little bit more efficiently for the purpose of mentoring, as well as for whatever purposes you were using that time for anyway.

Resa: I really like that one. So it’s so much fun, as we’re slowly returning to in-person or other professional events, and even virtual professional events, to invite someone in. Number one, yes, you’re accomplishing the mentor-mentee meeting. Number two, you’re modeling, you’re modeling conversations, you’re modeling behaviors, you’re also networking and helping your mentee network and meet other potential mentors, sponsors, coaches. So it’s very efficient, very effective, and I think I’ve been on the receiving end of such invitations when I’m the mentee. It opens up your world, and it allows you to sort of watch how someone else is doing it, someone who you admire and respect. And you can pick up a lot of information in those ways.

John: And one other thing you discussed in that article is using email when possible, which actually ties into another article you wrote in March 2021, on what a compassionate email culture looks like. Could you tell us a little bit about how a compassionate email culture works and how it can play a useful role in mentoring?

Resa: So the concept of compassionate email, I think, is really important now. Bob Walker, who’s the Chair of Internal Medicine at UCSF, has been placing messages on Twitter about burnout and physician burnout, and actually how much email and the email culture is contributing to that. So we all know we’ve been home, we’ve been virtual, and people are much more in front of their computers or laptops. So you could argue that the inbox has exploded. And Adaira is the one that came up with this idea of writing an article about compassionate email. And the concept is, we don’t have to email as often and as much as we have been, and in fact, we can be pretty efficient about it. And the emphasis in the articles we read were always about protecting yourself, protecting your own inbox. And in this article, we flipped the switch. We said, “No, we want to protect other people’s inboxes.” And I’ll let Adaira start elaborating a bit.

Adaira: You know, I think it comes from our perspective as physicians. So physicians love to care for patients, that’s what we do for a living, but we’re really bad at caring for ourselves. And so, I think for many of us, that’s where we fail when it comes to our in-basket, our inbox, is that it’s hard for us to protect our own inbox, because we would write things and get all sorts of newsletters and emails that just come in, you just feel so overwhelmed. We thought, well, maybe we should think about how we can protect other people. So that was sort of the impetus for that article, was thinking more about creating a culture and being responsible for creating a culture or helping to create that culture, where email isn’t something that you just do whenever you want, you’re thinking about the other person. And so there are different ways in which you can do that, we discuss many of those in the article. I will say one thing that I think is really the secret sauce, is considering the BCC. The BCC has a bad rap, it’s a “blind carbon copy,” it has a bad rap of being something that can be used maliciously, and if you read a lot of articles about it, you will see that. But the BCC is actually a really nice strategy, especially when you’re sending out an email to 100 people, or 200 people, or even, honestly, anything greater than, like, 15, 10 people, you can BCC them. And, in your subject line you write, “Attention: teachers,” “Attention: principals,” whoever it is that you’re addressing, you make it very clear in that subject line who’s all included into that email. But everyone’s BCC’d so that you can avoid that reply all and I’m sure you’ve all been on those threads where everyone’s replying to the potluck, “Oh, I’m bringing macaroni and cheese. Oh, I’m bringing…” Not everyone needs to know that. And so, it’s important to sort of minimize the back and forth, and by having a BCC, if someone needs to reply, they reply directly to you. If you need to send out a summary statement, you can send out a summary statement of all of the replies you got. And that’s it, now you have two emails that were sent out to the large group, the initial one, and maybe the follow up, but that’s it. And so, that’s a small step of considering someone. The other thing is the time of the email. I would say even a year ago, I wasn’t great at this. This is something I’m working on myself where I would reply to someone at, like, midnight, because I was awake, I would send an email at midnight, I would send an email on Saturday that would have a task for that person to do, such as, “Oh, I’m sending you this. Do you mind just when you get a chance editing this?” And someone will say, “Oh, I have a chance. I mean, I can do it now instead of spending time with my kids, I’ll just quickly do this.” And so, by protecting other people by being conscientious of the time of the day, the time of the week, you can, again, just sort of respect the fact that everyone deserves to distance themselves from work. And if we think about how every time we send an email, we bring them back into work, we bring them back into the workplace and all the tasks that they have to do. Then again, we can start to move more towards being compassionate and respecting others’ time. And the goal of that article is really to try to encourage a better culture. And obviously this needs to be a conversation that occurs between some of the key stakeholders, but to really try to understand that we can all contribute to the problem by sending out a ton of emails, by emailing people at any hour, but it’s important to think about ways to mitigate someone else’s burden.

John: And you also suggest that if you’re going to send out those emails, you could use either features of your email program or some type of a plug-in in email, so that you schedule it to arrive during work hours. Could you just suggest some tools that might work for that?

Resa: Thanks so much for that highlight. That’s one of my faves, is the schedule option. Sometimes you don’t even know where these plug-ins and where these preferences are in your email software, but they’re there. And our hospital uses Outlook. And I found in Microsoft Outlook, that I can send my email, I can schedule them to be sent. So we’re not arguing that you need to put off things so that then it’s going to weigh on you and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I need to add that to my to-do list”, you can write the response or you can write the content of the email. However, you don’t have to press send, and in fact, you can schedule that send. And one of the things I also have been working on is my send days and times. Many messages can wait till after the weekend or they can certainly wait until eight o’clock the next morning. And it not only is thoughtful and intentional for the receivers, it also actually has helped me structure when I’m doing my emails, and when I even seek to receive emails. And there are formulas, and there are ways of decreasing your email inbox. As section leader for my group, what I’ve seen is, as I’ve decreased the quantity and increased the quality of my emails, I think it’s been brought back to me. In other words, I’m not receiving any quick, superfluous emails, what I’m receiving is much more intentional and much more quality and much more necessary. Because we’re not saying don’t communicate, in fact, we’re all about communication. Moreover, in the article we talk about speaking with your group, speaking with your sections, speaking with your team, how do they want to structure communication surrounding email? Because, actually, not everybody wants this type of communication. So it’s important to get your group to agree upon the kind of culture they want surrounding email.

Rebecca: Really appreciate that a lot of the work that both of you have been doing is really about protecting self and others through communication, relationships, etc. And I know that you have another article that came out too, about requesting compensation when you’ve been asked to speak. So I was wondering if you could give us a little glimpse of that article as well? I know that often people in academia are asked to give talks, but often just as a favor. [LAUGHTER] So can you provide some tips on how to protect yourself in that space as well?

Resa: I want to start by just saying that, Rebecca, you totally called us out. Adaira and I have felt that there is a playbook. There’s a playbook about how to navigate the workplace. And no one gave us a copy of that book to read. So one of our intentions, one of our missions, is to write articles and to share information that is going to help people. Help people take care of themselves, take care of their team, take care of their work, and take care of their overall culture. So Adaira and I talk about a lot of things in academic medicine. And a lot of what we talk about is not pure academics, and certainly not pure medicine, which is why we found an audience at Harvard Business Review. And the concept of moving from speaking for free, to speaking for a fee, which of course is very catchy, it’s a coming of age, and it’s a rite of passage. And part of how we came to this, what to do, when to do it, is by having a lot of conversations, actually, with mentors and with sponsors. And quite honestly, going back to the playbook and the sports reference, sometimes men seem to get some of the tips and tricks that we didn’t get. So, a lot of my mentors and a lot of people with whom I speak are men. Men friends, men colleagues, men that can tell me how they did it, or how they do it. So in terms of if there are 10 specific things that we recommend, when you’re in a situation that you’re asked to speak and there’s no monetary compensation, there’s no honorarium. And Adaira, do you want to start with some of them?

Adaira: Yeah, and it gets more comfortable asking over time. In the beginning you feel like you might be putting yourself at risk by asking, like, maybe they’ll take back the opportunity or maybe you’ll be judged. But to just be clear, many other people are doing this in various arenas of the professional world. It’s commonplace to get compensated for your time, it’s common to get compensated for your expertise. So as a teacher, or as an educator, or a mentor who’s speaking about your perspective, about your area of expertise, why wouldn’t that apply to you? And so you do have to gain that confidence. And in the beginning, it can be a little bit uncomfortable, so asking upfront is very key. So you wouldn’t want to ask for any sort of compensation at the end of your presentation or after it’s done. This is something, like the terms and conditions, that you’d ask upfront. And it can be very polite, like, “Is there any way that you would be able to provide a professional photograph of me as I’m speaking, that can go onto my website, that can go into a flyer for my next talk?” But that’s a form of compensation, because a nice high-quality photo or a headshot can be used by you later. Or even reduced or completely covered membership fees if you’re speaking for large national organizations, and they can’t offer you money, but perhaps they can reduce your membership fee for the next year, or give you a free trial, right? You can negotiate with them, and this is all in the practice of negotiation and developing comfort with negotiation. So in the article, we go through all 10 of these topics, and some of them, I feel like, I have used very, very, very successfully and now they’re just sort of standard practice. And some of them have taken some time to get used to. And it’s just a personal choice that you would make, but I don’t think you should feel obligated to walk away from any talk without any form of compensation.

Resa: I can add a few more. So a good one is a letter, a letter to your boss, a letter to your supervisor, a letter to your CEO, where the intention is that you get a positive letter, but either with, perhaps, quotes from audience members about how your talk was received, what it did for the group. Another is, say it’s an invitation to speak at a local group, you can ask that if it’s a positive reception, and it’s well received, and they liked you and the content you provided, could they recommend you for a national conference or an international conference? It could be the stepping stone for something that’s larger, that’s more impactful. A final one I’ll share, and this one I thought was obvious, but I think it only becomes obvious once you’ve done a lot of these, is sometimes there’s just no money and they cannot pay you an honorarium. However, they can pay your travel, your airline flight, your hotel, meals, and transfers. And, if it’s a place you’ve never visited, if it happens to be where your college best friend lives, like, why not? There are many ways to think about this, and it should not be an absolute yes-no.

Rebecca: Lots of great tips today. All kinds of ways to be better communicators, advocate for ourselves, and advocate for others. We always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Adaira: For me, as we write, we start to realize what else we can learn about the craft. And so, for me, I’m going to be taking more writing classes, reading more writing books, trying to just learn how to become a better communicator on paper. And that will be my goal for the next six months to a year. I mean, it’s a lifelong goal, but, like, I really want to dive into it.

Resa: And for me, I would characterize it as working on my storytelling. Writing and a lot of what we write comes from personal and professional stories. So working on storytelling through the podcast. I launched the podcast during COVID for the reasons of sharing and amplifying people that are doing things that are subject matter experts, perhaps they’re not being heard, perhaps they’re not being seen. So working on the creativity and the growth of the podcast.

Rebecca: Sounds like some really exciting adventures.

John: We really appreciate you sharing your time with us and we’re very much looking forward to sharing this with our listeners. Thank you.

Adaira: Thank you for having us.

Resa: Thank you so much.

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

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

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

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197. Humanized Teaching

Posted in belonging, edtech, equity, grading, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, teaching, ungrading
July 21, 2021

Looking to the future as an instructor in higher education can seem daunting, especially as we plan for a more equitable future.  In this episode, Jesse Stommel joins us to discuss some of those challenges, search for hope, and discuss ways forward that are ethical, humane and flexible. Jesse is the Executive Director of the Hybrid Pedagogy nonprofit organization, and organization he founded in 2011. He is also the founder of the Digital Pedagogy Lab. Jesse recently served as the Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington. He is the co-author,  with Sean Michael Morris, of An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy, and, with Dorothy Kim, co-editor of Disrupting the Digital Humanities.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Looking to the future as an instructor in higher education can seem daunting, especially as we plan for a more equitable future. In this episode, we discuss some of those challenges, search for hope, and discuss ways forward that are ethical, humane and flexible.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Jesse Stommel. Jesse is the Executive Director of the Hybrid Pedagogy nonprofit organization, an organization he founded in 2011. He is also the founder of the Digital Pedagogy Lab. Jesse recently served as the Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington. He is a co-author, with Sean Michael Morris of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy, and with Dorothy Kim, the co-editor of Disrupting the Digital Humanities. Welcome, Jesse.

Jesse: Hi, it’s good to be with you all. Looking forward to our chat.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Jesse: I’m actually drinking peach honey sparkling water. It’s sort of tea infused.

Rebecca: Okay, that’s good. That counts. Also, it sounds really good. [LAUGHTER]

John: I have ginger peach black tea.

Rebecca: …and I have a decaf Assam.

Jesse: I feel jealous of both of your teas.

Rebecca: It’s sad that we don’t have you in person in our office where we have a giant selection that you could choose from, we’ll send you a picture so you know what you missed out on. [LAUGHTER]

Jesse: Well, we’ll have to do that in the future.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely.

John: They’re slightly aged teas compared to when we last saw them about a year and a few months back, but they are there and some of them we’ll probably have to dispose of. [LAUGHTER] You’ve been a really important voice on behalf of inclusive teaching and very vocal on topics like trauma-infused pedagogy, designing with care in mind, ungrading, and equity more generally. What does it mean to be an ethical instructor as we approach the fall, still amidst the last stages of a pandemic?

Jesse: I wrote a piece with Sara Goldrick-Rab a few years ago, and for folks who don’t know, Sara Goldrick-Rab is an expert in higher education policy, particularly focusing on food and housing insecurity. And she and I wrote a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Teaching the Students We Have, Not the Students We Wish We Had.” And ultimately, the thing that that piece charged me to do, and I’ve been working with Sara for, I think, close to eight years now and her work and the research that she’s done has really put a kind of specificity to my work on inclusive pedagogies and critical pedagogies that has charged me to think really carefully about how the material circumstances of our students affect their learning experience, and also how the material circumstances of teachers affect their teaching experience. And so if I think about how we begin to move back into classrooms, to find our way back to our institutions, to find our way back to the collaborations and colleagues we may have worked really closely with, I think that the key is for us to do really deep work thinking about who are our students? What do they need to be successful? How have they been affected by the last 18 months? And to do that same work with ourselves and our colleagues. Ask ourselves: who are we as teachers? What do we need to be successful? And I think institutions have a charge that they have to be really careful about how they quote unquote, pivot back to business as usual. I don’t think there’s a neat and tidy pivot back. And I don’t think business as usual is the appropriate place for us to turn to at this moment. So for institutions to ask hard questions of themselves, interrogate the things that they may have done to exclude many of the people who found themselves struggling during the pandemic, the things they did to exclude those students and faculty members well before the pandemic, to assure that they don’t continue the kind of exclusive practices that I’ve seen so many institutions coming to grips with in the last 18 months.

Rebecca: I really appreciate the focus that you’ve put on both students and also caring about colleagues and making sure that we’re being reciprocal in thinking about each other as humans and not just robots that we work with or something. In this conversation of getting back to campuses in the fall, what can we do to continue to humanize this practice with our colleagues too, that you just kind of focused a little bit on students, but what does this mean when we’re thinking about our colleagues and our relationships with our colleagues,

Jesse: I’ve been at several institutions that were struggling. So many of the people listening have found themselves at institutions that were struggling, I feel like the whole of public education is struggling at the current moment, but I’ve had some very specific circumstances at the last few institutions where I worked. About 10 years ago, I worked at Marylhurst University in Portland, Oregon, and Marylhurst University ended up closing down because of financial insecurity. And I was there a few years before they closed down and sort of dealing with the environment and watching the writing on the wall get darker and darker. After that, I went to University of Wisconsin-Madison, where the Governor, Scott Walker, obliterated tenure across the system, taking one of the best public education state systems in our country and making it a mockery. And his decision had a rippling impact across the entire institution. And what I found in both of those situations was that in situations of precarity, situations of financial austerity… and in many cases, those are manufactured, and they’re manufactured, especially in the case of Scott Walker, for very particular political reasons. In situations of austerity and precarity, people start to turn on each other, the sort of fabric of the community that existed prior to those moments that I found myself in at those institutions, I watched it erode and it eroded very quickly. And so the importance of being kind to one another, the importance of supporting each other, supporting our students, certainly, but also supporting our colleagues, and the importance of administrations focusing their efforts not on finding a new contract to a remote proctoring solution, which will do harm to all of the students and all of the teachers at the institution, but to focus their investment and their energy on finding ways to support the community that beats at the heart of the institution. That’s ultimately what we have to do. And it’s so important right now, because I saw over the last 18 months, the same thing starting to happen at a lot of institutions. I saw institutions beginning to create cultures that were inhospitable to the kinds of work that we really want to do in education.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that comes up in addition to food insecurity and housing insecurity with our students is that during the pandemic it became visible, I think, for some folks, that part-time faculty, adjunct faculty, also have some of those insecurities that we often just don’t address or think about. How do you see us, as a larger higher education community starting to support those faculty more and really addressing those insecurities? What can we do?

Jesse: I think there’s an easy answer… that we should all commit to having a permanent full-time academic workforce at all of our institutions. And the truth is that when you look at what the expenses are of our institutions, there are ways to cut costs. Imagine an institution that has just spent $500,000, or if you’re the State of Illinois, just spent $23 million on a multi-year contract with a remote proctoring solution. Think about all of that money, and how many adjunct or precarious faculty that money could support. If you think about the pedagogical benefits of making faculty full-time non-precarious, versus the pedagogical deficit that gets created by creating a culture of suspicion at our institutions, there is money being spent on things doing harm to students that could be easily re channeled towards something like certainly student support, supporting students basic needs, or supporting the basic needs of faculty who are struggling. I think that there is a need right now for us to be really honest about how money is getting spent at institutions and how that money signals what our institutions value and what our institutions don’t value. It is quite clear, across the entirety of higher education, that the vast majority of our institutions do not support teachers or the work of teaching. And that is quite clear via the mass adjunctification across our institutions, as well as the failure to properly invest in the preparation of teachers or pedagogical support for teachers. And that didn’t change in the pandemic. I have not seen a huge amount of money suddenly getting funneled into faculty development and support… at most institutions, anyway.

Rebecca: I think many of the things that we’re talking about right now are all things that were happening before the pandemic, they just became more visible to some people during the pandemic.

Jesse: Yeah, and you mentioned food and housing insecurity, and then alluded to other struggles that people were having… mental health issues… certainly, we are all experiencing acute mental health issues because of the last 18 months. But there are so many people who were experiencing acute and chronic mental health issues prior to the pandemic that weren’t getting properly addressed. And if you also think about disabled students and faculty, and the ways that their needs were not being met prior to the pandemic. We figured out how to do remote work and remote teaching in the midst of the pandemic, or we figured out how to do it as best as each individual institution might have done, which is… your mileage may vary, I guess. [LAUGHTER] But, the truth is that there are so many faculty and students who are disabled in various ways who needed that kind of support well before the pandemic.

John: On a positive note, though, didn’t the pandemic help make some of these issues much more clear to faculty and administrators, when they saw the problems that students had in continuing and when they recognize the need to provide support for faculty who didn’t have computer access at home to even connect with their students remotely? Might that perhaps help lead to a change in mindset?

Jesse: On my Twitter bio, I am called an irascible optimist. That was a moniker given to me by Sean Michael Morris. And when he said that I thought: “That is indeed me.” And I’ve worn that moniker ever since he gave it to me, irascible optimist. I’ll be honest that I have been less optimistic in the last 18 years. And I recognize I’m being less optimistic in this initial start to this conversation than I would have been if we had talked two years ago. And part of that is because of what I have seen over the last 18 months, and the deep, deep struggles that I’ve seen so many of my students having, and so many of my colleagues having, and also the failures of so many state governments, the federal government, and institutions to really figure out what to do and how to handle this particular moment. So if I think about what we’ve learned, is that we’ve learned to listen to our gut, we’ve learned to acknowledge the things that we were already seeing. It’s not like suddenly we saw new things over the last 18 months, we were already seeing them. And so we learned that we actually have to take action. One of the sad things and this is going to keep us maybe on the pessimistic place for just a few more minutes, is that I worry that so many institutions came to grips with these things, because these things started to hit them in their pocketbook. And I hate that that was the reason that many institutions started to solve these issues. On the other hand, what I will say is that the kinds of conversations that I’ve had with fellow teachers over the last 18 months have felt incredible. I have felt more connected, even if my work has been harder than it ever has been. I have felt more connected to that work and more deeply connected to the colleagues that I work with. And I have found new connections, because I have seen so many individual teachers struggling and working so hard to help meet the needs of our present moment.

John: And I’m still fairly optimistic because of that. A lot of faculty were able to avoid some of those issues, even though they may have been generally aware of some of the challenges our students face. When they interacted with them in the classroom it wasn’t quite as clear as when they were hearing from students who were dealing with problems of just being at their class because they had work commitments or because they had other responsibilities. And they had network issues because they didn’t have stable network connections, or they were using a laptop that was 10 years old, and it wouldn’t work consistently. And I think faculty in general have become much more aware of the challenges of our students. I’m hopeful, at least, that that’s not going to disappear. And that that could help lead to more consistent support of students once we do return to whatever the new normal happens to be as we move back to more campus instruction.

Rebecca: I’m really hoping that faculty, given this kind of acknowledgement of a wide variety of struggles, will really work together and push administrators and push universities and push systems to change. Because if we don’t speak up together in a unified way, it’s not gonna happen.

Jesse: Yeah, Paulo Freire and bell hooks both talk about what they describe as critical hope… that hope is an action that we take not a passive state, that hope is a work… that hope is struggle. And just that idea that hope isn’t passive, we don’t sit back and wait and hope. Instead, we take the action of hope. And Maxine Greene, also a critical pedagogue, talks about imagining the world as though it could be otherwise. And so her word there is “imagination.” Again, something active, imagining the world as though it could be otherwise requires us to recognize our agency and how we can have a positive impact and a positive effect. And so pushing back where we can, drawing students into these conversations where we are able, insisting that student voices be centered in these conversations, these are things that we can do and that will have a necessarily good impact, even when we’re precarious and where we feel like our job might be at risk, there are still actions that we can take, and it’s a matter of figuring out how do I engage in the work of hope or the work of imagination.

Rebecca: See, we got to a more positive place. [LAUGHTER]

Jesse: Just give us a few minutes. [LAUGHTER]

John: One of the things you’re really known for is your work on ungrading and creating an environment that’s more conducive to learning. Could you just talk a little bit about that?

Jesse: So I’ll just say that I have been quote, unquote, ungrading for 21 years, it’s a practice that I started my first semester of teaching. And it’s a practice that has grown and changed over time. But, I often say that I have never put a grade on a piece of student work in my career. The truth is that that’s not exactly true, because I love co-teaching and when you co-teach you negotiate a pedagogy with your co-teacher, and so I have put grades on individual students’ work but it was always a discussion and a sort of process that I came to with another teacher. The interesting thing is that I’ve been doing this work as part of my practice for 21 years, but I didn’t start talking about it publicly. I mean, beyond just having conversations about it publicly. I didn’t start publicly writing about it, giving keynotes about it, etc., until 2017. So four years ago that I really started writing publicly about this. Ungrading was a word that I had used, but it wasn’t something that an entire way of my pedagogical thought was centered around. So it has been interesting to watch the transition in me as I’ve moved towards talking about this more publicly. And I’ll tell you the reasons I didn’t talk about it publicly. I was a road warrior adjunct for about nine years of my teaching, teaching at up to four institutions, nine classes a term, dealing with the rules and restrictions at four different institutions. And I also felt like my pedagogical approach to grading felt like something between me and the students I was working with. It was no one else’s business. It was a conversation I had with them. And I felt like I wanted to protect that space for students and me to work through that together. The reason that I changed my thinking and started writing more publicly is because, over the last 20 years, I’ve watched education become increasingly quantitative and watched the reliance on learning management systems, which turn students into rows in a spreadsheet and their work into columns in a spreadsheet. I’ve watched institutions grade and evaluate their teachers in increasingly quantifiable ways. And then I’ve watched, obviously, the turn towards algorithms and the Internet of Things and weird tools like plagiarism detection software that again, feels like it reduces us to cogs, and reduces our work to bits, ones and zeros. And so I felt the need to create a larger conversation and dialogue on this because increasingly, I recognize that grades were the biggest thorn in the side of critical pedagogy and the biggest thorn in the side of my pedagogy. And so many people felt like we’re increasingly struggling with grades as the thing that got in the way of them creating productive relationships with students. And ultimately, when I started writing about it, I was amazed at the response. And to some degree, I feel like there were so many people that had hit that wall, and that we’re feeling that increased quantification over many, many years, almost like frogs boiling in a pot of water. And the other amazing thing was how much conversations with the larger community of teachers, a larger community of students, helped continue to evolve and change my practice. I guess one of the other reasons I started writing and talking about it more publicly was because I needed a push. I needed students and colleagues to ask me to work even harder to ask even harder questions of myself. And the last thing I’ll say is that ungrading is just a word. The one thing I can’t stand about the word ungrading is it tries to take a huge variety of practices that push back on traditional grading, and tries to lump them into one word as though there is upgrading tm, you know, the thing Jesse invented and that you can buy from him for $19.99, [LAUGHTER] three payments, and that he’ll deliver it to you and it will be a stack of 20 best practices that if you implement will change your life and make your relationships with students better. And that’s just not the way pedagogy works. That’s not the way teaching works. And that’s certainly not the way something as complex as assessment works. And so ultimately, this has to be an ongoing dialogue, conversation between teachers, between teachers and students. And what works for one teacher in one context with one group of students won’t necessarily work neat and tidily for another.

John: You mentioned that your practice has evolved in some way. Could you talk a little bit about how your practices involving… I don’t want to say ungrading again… [LAUGHTER]

Jesse: No, I did help coin the term.

John: Ok.

Jesse: So I’m all right with us using the word “ungrading.” I think it is good for us to have a word for us to rally these conversations around because we need the energy and the catalyzing force that that term has caused, and so it’s useful and productive in that way. So I’ve done self evaluation, asking students to write process letters, to analyze their own learning, to reflect on their own learning. I’ve asked them to reflect on group and peer learning. And I’ve asked them to grade themselves. And over the course of my career, I almost always give students the grade they give themselves. For the most part, when I change a grade, it’s to raise the grade, especially in situations where I feel like bias has influenced the grades. The thing is bias, even self-internalized bias, affects how we review and evaluate our performance. And the thing that I’ve changed most about is I’ve started to get this nagging feeling that when I have students self evaluate and self grading that I’m taking everything that I don’t like about grades, everything that the research shows is ineffective about grades, everything that is emotionally harmful about grades and giving grades, and taking that and kind of passing the buck on to students. And so my project in ungrading, or my project in my own assessment practice, has always been to turn grades over on their back and inspect them and ask hard questions of them and wonder at them and raise our eyebrows at them so that we feel like we have more agents within a quantified system like we work in. And I don’t think I can necessarily do that by just taking all the problems of grades and passing that over to students. So I’ve started to rethink how I ask students to do that work of grading themselves. One of the things that I found is, over so many years, giving A, A-, B, B+, B, B- is that when students went to grade themselves, they would give themselves something like, “Oh, it’s either an A plus, or an A minus, or it’s a B plus.” And they would quibble these tiny details, which that kind of evidence suggests to me that I had passed the anxiety of grades and quantification on to them. And so recently, in the last two years, I’ve removed A minuses and pluses from the approach that I use, I tell students just round up. And it’s interesting, because the second that I did, that students stopped quibbling the tiny details, and this is really drawn from some writing by Peter Elbow, where he writes specifically about minimal grading, which taking 100 point scale or 1000 point scale and reducing it to a 10 point scale, or a five point scale, or a three, two, one point scale. And the more we reduce it, the more clear it becomes, and the more it communicates, and the more effective it is as an assessment tool. And so giving students less gradations to quibble about. But on the other hand, I also recognize that these are decisions that I’m making, that I still have power in the classroom and trying to think about an inspect my own power and privilege in the classroom and how I can begin to at least dismantle that, not to remove it, because I think classrooms need strong leaders, but at least to dismantle it enough that I’m leaving space for students to sort of carve out their own space within their educations.

Rebecca: Seems to me that a lot of the ungrading work is really tied to this idea of flexibility that you’ve talked about pretty frequently: being flexible as a teacher and offering options, but it’s also in popular in frameworks, like UDL. But I also know that the idea of providing flexibility can cause a lot of anxiety to a faculty member in trying to figure out how to do that and make it manageable and make it sustainable. Can you share some ideas about making that a sustainable practice and also what you mean by flexible options for students.

Jesse: So the interesting thing is flexible does become more complicated. If we are engaging in the work of teaching as a form of policing student learning, or even not policing, just monitoring, even, monitoring student learning, or collecting or gathering student learning or gathering evidence for student learning. The second that we as teachers move away from that role of feeling like we are the evaluators, we are meant to rank students, we’re there to police their learning, we’re there to ensure compliance…. which honestly, even good teachers, so much of that is baked into just how our system is structured, that we do it without even realizing that we’re doing it… even the structure and shape of a syllabus has so much of that baked into it. I think that flexibility becomes a lot easier when you hand that over to the students. So people often say, “Oh, well, you let your students do five different things for an assignment or you let them just pick something… anything?” And I say, “Well, I don’t let them I invite them to do that, first of all.” Second of al, “Well, then how do you manage all the different things you get at different times?” I say, “Well, I don’t consider myself the primary audience for student work, I create a space in my course where they can share this work with one another. And they can give one another feedback.” And then, “Well gosh, how do you deal with all of the requests that you might get?” I don’t ask my students to ask permission. I invite them to modify, remix, to take advantage of flexibility. So in other words, the more that I remove my bureaucratic burden, the more flexibility becomes super easy because if a student says to me, “Well, can I” I can say, “of course you can. I invite you to change, remix,” in some ways, I don’t even have to do the work of considering the request. Because the request isn’t necessary to the relationship. I’m sort of there to offer feedback to students, and to be surprised and to marvel at whatever it is that they end up doing for the course. The other thing that we often do is we think that our role is to rank students against one another. That’s one of the reasons why I can’t stand rubrics, because I feel like the entire structure of a rubric is set up to put student work into neat and tidy boxes. And when we do that, we essentially are ranking students against one another. And so if one student does something that is just in a completely different universe from another, how do you assure that they both earned the A ? Well, ultimately, if you just remove the idea that our work is to compare students to one another. One student does a traditional academic paper and the other gives you a piece of installation art that moves around campus and that you can’t even quite make sense of it. You don’t have to hold them up and say, “Well, how do I really justify giving that piece of performance art an A?” You take it on its own merit, and you recognize what it is, and you marvel at it. And you allow yourself to be surprised by it. The more flexible I am, the more fun teaching ends up being, people often when I say things like that think, “Oh, your classes, just chaos.” And actually, no, I’m a pretty type A person. I’m pretty OCD, I actually structure a really neat and tidy syllabus, the structure of my course, is very organized, partly because I sort of subscribe to improvisation within a frame, which I take from jazz music, but I don’t know much about jazz. So feel free to tell me if I’ve interpreted that completely wrongly. But this idea that we need a frame and a structure in order to improvise within it. And so you set up the sort of guardrails for students, to some extent their boundaries, but it’s more like their guardrails, you set them up so that students feel like they can experiment within the space of the classroom. And then, to some extent, it allows you and gives you the freedom to play without worrying if you’re just going to go completely off the deep end,

John: You mentioned being surprised by some of the things your students have come up with as ways of demonstrating their learning. Could you give us just a few examples of some of the more interesting projects your students have selected?

Jesse: I kind of alluded to it in our last conversation. But this was at University of Mary Washington, and the assignment was to reinvent, rebuild the internet. And the assignment had a very short prompt that gave space for students to interpret the instructions in so many different ways. And the answer to this assignment for a group of students was to create a pile of trash. And that pile of trash had multicolored bits of crumpled paper in it. And it was a piece of installation art that migrated around campus. And they took pictures of it in different locations around campus. And then at one point it showed up in our classroom, and they wrote an artist statement that talked about the detritus of the web, the deep and dark web and all the bits you can see and the bits you can’t see. And that was marvelous. The sort of meat of the project was how captivating and how just seeing this thing, and wondering at how this fit as an interpretation of the assignment. I often come into class, and when I’ve just picked something like a reading or designed an assignment, and I’ve kind of done it instinctually maybe it’s because I’m doing that reading for the first time, I’ll often go into class, and I’ll say, “Why did I choose this reading?” And I mean that honestly, it’s not a rhetorical question. It’s like, this is the first time I’ve taught this and I’m trying to figure out whether it fits and how it fits. And so ultimately, that’s what this group of students’ project did for me, is it forced me to ask myself, “Well, gosh, what is this course even about?” And to me, that project managed to get at the biggest question of the course, which is, what are we even doing here? Why are we talking about the internet, and for me, that was marvelous. On the other hand, another teacher might look at this pile of trash and say, “Hey, that’s just a pile of trash.” And so there’s something idiosyncratic about how we engage with student work. I’ve also read really, really good academic papers. And so even some of those have surprised me, in part because sometimes it’s that punctum in an academic paper where the academic paper is just going along, going through the motions of a traditional academic paper, and then it just veers. And then you have this moment like Roland Barthe’s punctum where all you can see, you almost have it burned into your retina, this sort of moment of friction within the work. And truthfully, those are the most interesting parts of education in general, is the parts where we do something that we weren’t expecting, or where students turn something in that we never would have imagined for a particular assignment.

Rebecca: One of the things that sometimes comes up with flexibilities not just the trepidation of a faculty member, but also of students. When there’s a lot of options available, students sometimes can freeze and not know what to do. You mentioned the guardrails. So how do those function? Or how do you make sure that those students that are overwhelmed by choice feel included?

Jesse: One thing is to have very clear parameters, and I tend to have really short provocations for students… let’s call them provocations instead of assignments, because even the idea of assignment suggests a transactional relationship between a teacher and students, I still haven’t found quite the right word, invitation doesn’t feel strong enough, but maybe provocation is what it is. So I try and be very, very clear to have very explicit instructions. And also to have them very short. I find that so often, we create assignment sheets that end up being longer than the papers themselves. I’ve seen two-page responses that have an assignment sheet that’s three or four pages describing what students should do and their two page response paper. And I think partly we do that because we’re anxious about the questions that we’ll get, and we’re anxious about students falling through the cracks. When what happens is the more words that we put in our assignments, or provocations, whatever you want to call them…. I think I’ll, for the purposes here, I’ll keep calling them assignments. I think that’s fine. We fill our assignments up with language that’s all there, in some ways defensively, but every single word we put in there is a pothole that a student might fall into. It’s a rabbit hole a student might fall down. And I find that the shorter my assignment descriptions are, the less questions I get, the longer they are, the more questions they get. And people just think, well, if I just answer all the questions in advance that I won’t get any questions. And that isn’t how it ends up working out, because students are really worried about what our expectations are. And I think we have to break that down. And the reason that a student feels overwhelmed by choice is because they’re worried about meeting our expectations. And so we have to make sure that, in our language, we make clear, this isn’t about my expectations, it’s about what you expect of yourself. And here’s the thing I don’t necessarily know that works if we’re using traditional grading systems, because ultimately, if you’re putting a grade on a thing, your expectations are what matters. But if you’re giving over some, or even all of that work to students, it starts to break down this idea. They recognize, “Oh, he’s not grading this anyway. So this really is about my expectations.” And if, when I engage with the work rather than approving of it or disapproving of it, instead, I encounter it the way a reader would, by having a reaction to it and telling students what my reaction is. And then I encourage students to do that for each other. Peter Elbow talks about ranking, evaluating and liking… ranking being the thing that we shouldn’t do, we shouldn’t rank students against one another, evaluating being a thing that still has a place because certainly there are times when students do need some amount of evaluation from an external mentor, I think those moments are much fewer than we end up doing. And then he talks about liking, which is just giving ourselves space to appreciate student work, to not have to evaluate it, to just enjoy it, and to respond to it and to be an expert reader for students.

John: Could you elaborate on that notion of being an expert reader for students? What sort of feedback do you provide them as an expert reader?

Jesse: Well, I think one of the things is that so much of our so many of our traditional grading systems call for us to be objective. And we can probably have a whole other podcast around objectivity versus subjectivity and whether they’re even possible. There’s a lot of research that shows the idea of objective grading is just a fallacy to begin with. But I think that it’s about allowing ourselves to have a subjective response, allowing ourselves to bring our full humanity to that moment of engaging with student work, to laugh at it, to wonder at it, to marvel at it, to be silent, to be struck silent, to raise our eyebrows at it, to ask hard questions of it. And so what that might actually look like with a group of students is letting them see me puzzling over it, letting them see me just work through my thinking about what I’m seeing. And so oftentimes, I have students do sort of expos in class where they bring all of their work and they just lay it out, whether it’s a paper, whether it’s a pile of trash, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a documentary, they lay their work out, and we just hang out together and go around and look at each other’s work. And what I sort of see my role there is just to model what it looks like to appreciate the efforts that they’ve made and to encounter their work and talk about my experience of it, as opposed to saying, “Oh, you did this? Well, this needs improvement.” …to sort of hold back that this needs improvement, because there are moments when that’s really important, but then other moments where it isn’t. For example, I taught first-year writing for a long time, and in first-year college writing, it’s not getting to success, it’s about just getting comfortable writing, just getting comfortable in your skin as a writer. And that means not a lot of that kind of evaluative feedback, it means more just here’s what happens to me when I encounter your words.

Rebecca: Some of what we’ve been talking about with this flexibility and ungrading is really starting to get a sense that individual students and members of a learning community really being members and belonging to that community. Can you elaborate on ways in addition to this flexibility idea that might help students from a wide variety of backgrounds feel like they belong, especially those that we saw during the pandemic and we know they existed before that, really struggling or having barriers and helping them really feel like “You really do belong here. You really should be here. We want you here.”

Jesse: I think that we do that from the very beginning and how we structure education at so many of our institutions, the reliance on the idea of seat time. classes that meet two days a week, Tuesday and Thursday for a set amount of hours, classes that meet Monday, Wednesday, Friday, really bizarre ways of thinking about hybrid learning or online learning where there’s too much of a reliance on synchronous engagement. Ultimately, when we make those kinds of decisions with how we structure education at our institutions, we’re telling whole swaths of students: “This isn’t built for you, this isn’t made for you.” And increasingly people talk about adult learners. Well, at the college level, all of our students are adult learners. And increasingly, the vast majority of them are working adult learners. And we’re not doing enough to structure education so that it acknowledges their experience. I had a student who was disabled, he had chronic migraines. And, luckily, at the time I worked at an institution where I was developing a new hybrid degree program. And I had in a sense developed the program not just for him, but for all of the students I was working with, who were like him in various ways, who had no access to education, without serious rethinking about how we build our curriculum. So thinking about when we move online, relying increasingly on asynchronous ways for students to engage asynchronously, because most of the students who turn to online need more flexibility, their time is not their own in many cases. And when we’re designing degree programs, rethinking things like the 15-week semester, rethinking things like seat time, rethinking things like classes that meet Monday, Wednesday, Friday for 50 minutes over the course of a 15-week period. Honestly, I increasingly think that’s absurd. What a weird structure…50 minutes three times a week, how is where a student is at on Monday any different than where they’re at on Wednesday, is 15 minutes really enough time for us to develop the kinds of thinking that we’re trying to get at in our courses. Ultimately, I think, just asking ourselves, are we continuing to teach students in the way that we are just because this is the way we have always done it? Or is this actually what will help students learn and give space for students to learn? Also, if we go back to those adjuncts, when I was a road warrior adjunct trying to teach a Monday, Wednesday, Friday class that met for 50 minutes, that was 45 minutes from my house, trying to fit that into my schedule with my other eight classes, was nearly impossible. What I needed more than anything was not just one approach, I needed to be able to teach one course asynchronously, one course on a tuesday, thursday schedule. So I needed a variety of different things in my schedule. And that’s what a lot of students are needing. The students at my institution, where I’m currently teaching still at University of Mary Washington, so many of them are quote unquote, traditional students who want face-to-face interaction. And so the institution says we are on ground residential institution, we will be back full time, everyone will be back at their desks in the fall. But that’s not what the students actually want. The students want most of their educational experience to be face to face, but they’re struggling to fill a schedule, because they’re also working. And so they need to be able to take some courses online, some courses hybrid, some courses face to face. And they really want to be able to build a much more thoughtful approach to education. And also, when we think about specific classes, some disciplines, some courses, lend themselves to one format, some lend themselves to another. So I think that that’s the way we invite students in is, from the start, actually building with the students. And not just for the students building for those students would be great, but also finding ways to build with them, and to design curriculum alongside of them. So it really meets their needs and challenges them appropriately.

John: One of the things that’s going to be a bit different this fall is that we’re going to have some students who are sophomores, even, who’ve never been on campus. And most students have not been interacting in person in classrooms for the last year and a half or so. What can we do to help create a sense of community when we bring these people together for the first time after this long break from face-to-face interaction?

Jesse: The first thing I’m thinking about is something that I started saying, from the very, very start of the quote unquote pivot to online, right around the beginning of the lockdown last year, I started to say, we need to make sure that it isn’t continuity of instruction that we’re trying to maintain, but continuity of the communities at the heart of our institutions. I don’t know if many institutions figured out how to support those communities online. I think they figured out how to keep the lights on and to keep people taking classes. But, I don’t necessarily know that the communities were maintained. What I worry about as we return to campus is that we will try and pick up right where we left with that continuity of instruction. Rather than realizing that where we need to most place our efforts is not just starting up the wheel of delivering content to students, what we need to do is figure out how to revitalize those communities. And that needs to be a huge part of our efforts. So if every teacher is imagining that they’re going to go back to teaching the same amount of content that they taught before the pandemic… one, they were probably trying to teach too much. They were probably teaching too much at the expense of developing community even two years ago, but recognizing that we need to put a lot more breathing room into our courses. And also a lot more conversation between courses, because communities don’t just exist in a vacuum, you don’t just have a community in your first-period class, and then a community in your second-period class community is living, breathing, and it’s sort of echoes between those spaces. So thinking about what happens between period one and period two. How are those two courses connected? What are students doing on campus? Where is the life of the institution? And how can we invest as much as possible into supporting that, and I don’t think it’s with algorithmic retention software. That is the worst possible thing that I see institutions turning to to try and support community. Algorithms are not going to help us build and maintain community, human beings are the ones who are good at that. So any dollar you’re spending on an algorithmic retention software, please give that to adjunct and contingent instructors.

John: In terms of reducing the amount of content in classes, I think a lot of faculty realized that when they switch to remote or online instruction. Is that something you think people will automatically recognize or do you think people are going to try to go back to how things were before and forget the lessons that they’ve learned about this during the pandemic?

Jesse: I think a lot of individual faculty, individual teachers, individual students will take so many of these lessons back to their work this fall and beyond. I think institutions are much harder to shift. And so the problem is, I don’t know that institutional culture will change in the way that it needs to in order to support the efforts of those students and faculty. And so this is really a charge to institutions and administrators to put that breathing room also in the institutional culture and important ways.

Rebecca: And maybe even really, to push it within a department because that might be a place where faculty can start to expand it out. And think about it. When you were talking, I was imagining a time that seems so long ago now. It may have been 10 years ago, and seems like a really long time now.

Jesse: Yeah, it feels like it’s either a week ago, or like 10 years ago, to me,

Rebecca: I had colleagues that we would, if we had classes at the same time, we would actually schedule activities together. We would cross pollinate to have some of that community. We’d have design challenges and investigate and do different things with each other. We’ve lost some of that play, just over time with assessment requirements and this and that. It has fizzled. So I’m hoping that this fall will bring back the play, bring back the fun for that community that to marinate a little bit.

Jesse: And if I can think of some really practical things institutions can do in order to seed that community that you’re describing. If your institution is not paying adjuncts and contingent staff for faculty development, it needs to. Even Walmart and Subway and Starbucks pays their employees for required job training. But then the other benefit is that those are the spaces where community germinates. Another example is there are so many barriers to collaborative teaching at our institutions, “Oh, well, who’s going to get the credit for it? Whose load is it going to count towards?” If that’s your answer to collaborative teaching, you need to stop right there and ask yourself, “What kind of environment are we trying to create?” And if we want a collaborative environment, if we want a community amongst our faculty, then right then and there, decide and commit yourself to figuring out the obstacles to collaborative teaching, which I’ve watched get worse and worse and worse over the last 21 years that I’ve been teaching. And those are just two small things. And the truth is, they’re relatively easy. There are bureaucratic systems that feel like “You can’t possibly… how are we going to deal with that within our institutional database?” Like get over it, figure it out. [LAUGHTER] The truth is that those are things that we all know we want. I’ve never talked to someone who says “no, no, we don’t want people collaborative teaching” then why don’t institutions charge themselves to figure that out?

Rebecca: So many good questions raised in this conversation, Jesse. As always, I wouldn’t expect anything different with a conversation with you. We always wrap up by asking, “What’s next?”

Jesse: Oh, wow, that’s a really, really large question. What’s next? Okay, well, I’m gonna say that, as some folks listening to this may not know, my husband and I and my four-year old daughter just opened a game and toy store which has a classroom and a makerspace in it. And I am really thinking about how helping my husband with this endeavor is going to push me to think about my teaching in new ways. So, it’s a small retail space, 1600 square feet on the main street of Littleton with a retail section and a classroom and a maker space. We’re going to offer classes for kids and adults, so that it isn’t just about selling people toys and games, but teaching them how to design and make and manufacture their own toys and games. And it feels like a respite for me in some ways… one, to have my own project that I’m focusing on, but also to have a space where nobody’s telling me I have to grade. I just get to decide how I approach the work inside this space. So I’m excited to see how helping my husband with this project informs the rest of my practice and thinking about education.

Rebecca: That sounds so fun. Can I come? [LAUGHTER]

Jesse: Yeah. yeah, yeah, ou can. Do you want to be a teacher? We haven’t hired our first teacher. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That sounds really fun. Actually. I’ve taught makerspace things before with kids. That sounds totally fun.

Jesse: And I guess that what’s next is to find joy in this work, because the last 18 months have been so hard. And I think that joy… bell hooks also writes a lot about joy. Joy is also a practice, joy is also struggle… but figuring out how to find the kernel of the work of teaching that has kept me doing this work for 21 years. That’s really something I feel charged to do.

Rebecca: Perhaps a charge we should all have moving into the fall.

Jesse: Yeah, I’m determined to become an irascible optimist again. We’ll see. Check back with me in a year maybe I would have gotten there. [LAUGHTER]

John: And perhaps shifting some of our focus away from grading can help restore some of that joy.

Jesse: Absolutely,

Rebecca: Indeed, indeed. Thanks so much, Jesse.

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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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