authentic learning – Page 2

377. Civic Pedagogies

Posted in active learning, authentic learning, civic engagement, community based learning, engagement, higher education, learning, motivation, pedagogy, STEM education, teaching
January 22, 2025

Class discussions of public policy issues can be challenging in our politically polarized environment. In this episode, Lauren C. Bell, Allison Rank, and Carah Ong Whaley join us to discuss a new resource that suggests a variety of strategies that encourage students to address their differences and to engage productively in civic engagement projects.

Allison is an Associate Professor of American Politics and chair of the Department of Politics here at SUNY-Oswego. Lauren is the inaugural James L. Miller Professor of Political Science and Associate Provost and Dean of Academic Affairs at Randolf-Macon College. Carah is the Vice President of Election Protection at Issue One and is a co-chair of the American Political Science Association’s Civic Engagement section and a member of the APSA’s Civic Engagement Committee. Allison, Lauren, and Carah are editors of Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics, which was recently released by Springer.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

Bell, L. C., Rank, A., & Whaley, C. O., ed., (2024). Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics. Springer
Civic Education and Engagement, American Political Science Association
American Democracy Project, AASCU
Whaley, Carah Ong and Kylie Holzman (2024). “Toward the Transformative: The Benefits to Students of Reimagining Civic Pedagogy,” in Bell, L. C., Rank, A., & Whaley, C. O.(Eds.) Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics. Springer.
Bonneau, Chris and Jordan M. Fields (2024). “Tearing Down Walls: Teaching Political Science in Prison.” in Bell, L. C., Rank, A., & Whaley, C. O. (Eds.) Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics. Springer.
Smith, Andrew (2024). “Toward a Critical Theory of Service-Learning at Hispanic-Serving Institutions” in Bell, L. C., Rank, A., & Whaley, C. O. (Eds.) Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics. Springer.
Equity Center, University of Virginia
Baldwin, D. L. (2021). In the shadow of the ivory tower: How universities are plundering our cities. Bold Type Books.
Strachan, J. Cherie (2024). “First Comes Trust: Civic Engagement Strategies for Jump-Starting the Civic Voluntarism Model.” in Bell, L. C., Rank, A., & Whaley, C. O. (Eds.) Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics. Springer.
Meagher, Richard J. (2024). “ENACTing Engagement: Teaching State-Level Advocacy.” in Bell, L. C., Rank, A., & Whaley, C. O. (Eds.) Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics. Springer.

Transcript

John: Class discussions of public policy issues can be challenging in our politically polarized environment. In this episode, we discuss a new resource that suggests a variety of strategies that encourage students to address their differences and to engage productively in civic engagement projects.

[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 Lauren C. Bell, Allison Rank, and Carah Ong Whaley. Allison is an Associate Professor of American Politics and chair of the Department of Politics here at SUNY-Oswego. Lauren is the inaugural James L. Miller Professor of Political Science and Associate Provost and Dean of Academic Affairs at Randolf-Macon College. Carah is the Vice President of Election Protection at Issue One and is a co-chair of the American Political Science Association’s Civic Engagement section and a member of the APSA’s Civic Engagement Committee. Allison, Lauren, and Carah are editors of Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics, which was recently released by Springer. Welcome Lauren and Carah, and welcome back, Allison. It’s been a while since you’ve been on the podcast.

Allison: It has.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Lauren, are you drinking some tea today?

Lauren: I am. I have English breakfast tea.

Rebecca: Always a good choice. How about you, Carah?

Carah: I am, actually I made my favorite Rishi’s tumeric and ginger tea.

Allison: I have continued my trend of rejecting tea and have this diet coke. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: And although we’re friends, Allison, I don’t like the rejection of tea. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have a black raspberry green tea today.

Rebecca: And I have, in holiday season, I’ve got a candy cane tea.

John: In my backpack I actually had two packages of Christmas tea, but I got here too late to dig it out. We’re approaching the holidays. This will be released in January, but we’re recording it right before the Christmas holiday. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your new book. Can you tell us a bit about the origin of this book project?

Lauren: Yeah, I’m happy to describe the origin of this book project, because in some ways, it almost didn’t happen. Carah was invited to a meeting with the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan at APSA back in, I think, fall of 22 (the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting). And they were inviting her to talk about a potential book project. And over lunch, before the meeting, Carah said to me, “I have my hands full. I have a lot of things going on. Will you come with me to just kind of hear their proposal, but ultimately help me say no?” And I said, “Sure, I’m happy to do that. You have no obligation to say yes to another project. You are over-committed as it is.” And then when we got there, we had a really wonderful conversation about the need for scholarship and discussion of how to engage students in an era of divisive politics. And toward the end of the conversation, I found myself enthusiastically embracing the idea of this book, Carah was probably elbowing me in the side. I don’t know. I was so [LAUGHTER] overwhelmed by how much potential I thought the project had, that instead of saying “no,” we found ourselves wrapping up the meeting by saying, “Well, when do you need our proposal?” And so that’s the sort of origin story for this book, although then Carah followed up and brought Allison into the project as well.

Carah: I think the next day, I took Allison for a walk and said, “Hey, [LAUGHTER] I think you should join us in this.” [LAUGHTER]

Lauren: Yeah, Lauren committed me to something that [LAUGHTER] she told me I should say no to. So guess who else is getting roped in?

Allison: Happy to be roped in.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how the contributors were selected for inclusion in the volume?

Carah: It’s a pretty straightforward story, actually, we just put out an open call for proposals, we circulated among the American Political Science Association’s Civic Engagement Section. We also circulated it amongst the American Democracy Project at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. We were really looking to go beyond just political science, although political scientists were primarily the contributors, but we were trying to get diverse perspectives, diverse regions, diverse ranks in terms of tenure and promotion, as well as trying to get some from backgrounds in student affairs as well. And then we also really encouraged partnerships between professors and students. And I ended up co-authoring a chapter with a student as well, Kylie Holzman, who is in her third year now at the University of Virginia.

Lauren: The Bonneau and Fields chapter is also a co-authored faculty member, and I guess by that point, former student contributed volume. But Jordan Fields was one of Chris Bonneau’s undergraduate students who was in law school at the time that they prepared their contribution. So it was nice to see that. And we did have some practitioners who ended up being part of the project. We tried to be inclusive. I think that was the main object of what we were looking for. And then we also tried to work with proposers. So when people submitted proposals that maybe weren’t exactly on the mark or didn’t exactly fit in with what we had envisioned, we went back to them several times to try to, in an iterative way, make sure that what they were offering to do would find a nice home. And I think in the end, we were successful with nearly all of those, although some proposers ultimately decided not to continue in the process.

John: One of the challenges facing people in pretty much all disciplines today, which grows out of the political polarization, is that we see divisions in terms of the understanding of reality between our political parties, so that some people strongly believe in 17th and 18th century economics and science, for example, and others perhaps may take into account what we’ve learned over the last few centuries. But in a classroom when you have people with such different views of reality, how do you address classroom discussions when people are coming in with very different views of the reality in which we’re living?

Allison: So I think actually naming that as part of the challenge of teaching civics is a key component. So rather than treating that as something that we’re kind of implicitly striving to overcome in our pedagogy, actually naming that for students as sort of what the starting point is that in order to have a sort of civic space, we have to be able to pull those differences out, and so part of it is actually making that part of the pedagogy to work through. I think the other part of that strategy is actually no longer, at least for me, being able to assume students are going to come in and I’m going to throw out a prompt and we’re going to have a conversation. It’s that you actually have to seed conversations in a much more intentional and thoughtful way in terms of the resources that sort of pre-structure any kind of classroom conversation than we’ve had to do in the past.

Lauren: Yeah, I will maybe not name it in quite as explicit ways as Allison described, but I do tell my students that I am comfortable with them articulating whatever viewpoints they want to articulate, and it’s not my job to tell them that their opinions or their views are wrong, but it is my job to correct for factual inaccuracies, and I think for me, establishing that my role is about looking for objective facts. And I think that gives me a certain credibility with the students, because they know that if I’m really pushing back it’s because I’ve identified a factual error in the position that they’re taking, not because I disagree with the opinion that they’re expressing, and I think it’s a different way of being explicit as you sort of structure those conversations, but that has been what has worked for me. It allows the students to know that I’m not going to call them out because I disagree with them, but that I will push back when they provide information that is just factually inaccurate.

Carah: There’s a couple of ways I’ve approached it, and my approach has also evolved over the years as times have changed. I have been teaching at the higher ed level since 2008 and one of the things I started doing, particularly after the 2016 election was to, at the start of each class, rather than me setting out norms in a syllabus on the first week of class, we actually write the norms together, and I pull suggestions from students in the room. I give ideas of what’s worked in the past, but we come to an agreement together about how we’re going to approach the material, with the spirit of inquiry and creativity, being willing to receive feedback, to be willing to question things from other perspectives, and then also being open minded, but then let them come up with norms of how they want the course to proceed, how they want the discussions to proceed, and then we come to an agreement and vote on it and make sure that there is consensus about how we’ll proceed. And on many occasions, I’ve had times when the discussion goes off the rails, [LAUGHTER] when someone feels that one of the norms was violated, or perceives or receives information in that context to have violated the norms, so we pull the norms back up and have an open conversation about what happened. And then another thing is, and I name in the syllabus, that I don’t call myself the professor, I call myself the facilitator of the course. I see myself as facilitating the learning, that trying to give them more agency in the process. And I think that helps too. Sort of similar to what Lauren said, I’m presenting myself as sort of a neutral arbiter, that I’m coming in, not trying to tell them what to learn, but rather, this is an experience we’re all going to do together.

Rebecca: You started kind of hinting at some of these things, but can you talk a little bit more about additional ways that faculty across disciplines can build a climate in their classrooms where students feel comfortable sharing their views that might not be popular with their classmates.

Allison: So I will say readily, this is something that I struggle with a lot with intro level classes. One of the things I have tried to do, which I will outright say has failed, is in that kind of norm setting conversation, which I also do at the start of the class, almost always someone will say, and a number of students will agree, “One of the things I want to do is hear other people’s opinions.” They will actively say that that is something they want out of an introduction to American government and politics class. And so I’ll emphasize it like, “yes, that’s such a great idea,” and we’ll talk about why that’s something that they want out of the classroom experience, and then four weeks later, no one has raised a viewpoint that does not clearly fit [LAUGHTER] the kind of normative conversation that we’re having. And so I’ll kind of reference back to “You guys say that this is something you want. Why won’t you participate?” And what I’ve often then ended up reverting to is a lot of short writes, anonymous short writes that students turn into me, and I then use that to essentially seed the conversation without sharing names, so it provides a space… like they want it, and they are very hesitant to actually, with their kind of face and name, raise the opinion, but they’ll provide it and then they’ll have a conversation about it when those opinions are divorced from people. And so I don’t think that’s that’s the ideal situation. I’d still very much like to get them to the place where they’re willing to own the position that they have, but at least for a number of classes, that has been a good middle ground strategy to get the ideas out, so that people know that their ideas are being shared and they’re hearing ideas that they want to hear, even if we can’t quite get all the way to ownership of the ideas in the room.

John: So that anonymity helps make students feel more comfortable sharing their views that they might not be willing to do it otherwise. That makes sense.

Lauren: For me, I am at an institution where our student body is pretty evenly split in terms of their partisan identification. And I can say this with some authority, because Randolph Macon has been doing a mock election every four years since 1968 so we can actually look back and see how our students say they would vote if they were voting in the presidential election. And so we know our student body is almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, or at least in terms of their voting habits. And so I actually use that as an entry point into talking to my introductory political science students, my Intro to American government students. Part of why I think sometimes students are reluctant to speak up is that they assume nobody in the room will agree with them. And I think when they hear that there are more than likely half the people in the room that are going to share your perspective, at least to some degree, I think that can be useful as far as breaking the ice or adding to their comfort level. I think it also, for me, then serves as a good reminder, if conversations start to get a little bit heated or slanted toward one perspective or the other, to be able to say, remember, there are likely many people in this room that would disagree with you, and then I can use that to say, “What would the opposing viewpoint look like?” And so, of course, I think all of us who teach political science get really good at playing devil’s advocate. We have to. But the question that you asked, I think, was also broader. It was, what about kind of elsewhere on our campuses, and for my administrative role on campus, I have a pretty helpful vantage point to see kind of what happens in other departments and in other disciplines, and I think a lot of faculty are really uncomfortable talking about political issues, and so when those kinds of questions arise, they tend to freeze. Again, I’m thinking outside of Political Science primarily. And I think one of the cases that this edited volume makes is that getting connected into the community or forming civic habits doesn’t necessarily mean being political in a partisan way. It means identifying those ways in which whatever it is that you do, connects to your community, and trying to get your students out into that community, doing those things, listening to the community members, learning about how problems exist in a practical setting. And I’ve seen that, for example, our Environmental Studies faculty do that all the time. They have real world clients that they bring in for students. Our sociology students are out working with communities of color or minority language communities in our area. And so other disciplines, other departments, can take some of those habits of citizenship that get talked about extensively throughout this volume and apply those without having to get political, which I think makes so many of the non-political scientists I know really, really uncomfortable.

Carah: I think one of the things, just to further elaborate on what both Alison and Lauren said, is that context really matters, and different things are going to work in different communities, in different populations of students. But the important thing is that we are thinking about creating learning experiences that really are focused on addressing public problems. And of course, we’re going to have to define what those public problems are, and there may be disagreements about how to address it, but finding ways to work together and finding the means for different communities and populations to actually contribute meaningfully to solving those problems. So I think one of the greatest contributions in the book comes from Andrew Smith, who talks about working at a Hispanic serving Institution in Texas and thinking about what the needs are for students in that context, and many of the students, of whom are from different communities. And so really, starting from the point of who are the students I’m working with, what are their needs? What are the community’s needs? And how can we work together in mutually reciprocal and beneficial ways, so that we’re not extracting from the community? We’re not seen as “saving the community,” right? But we’re creating experiences where we can work together. And I think that’s a really important element for overcoming political polarization, because it’s contributing to re-humanizing groups that we might not particularly engage with on a regular basis, and it fundamentally is about solving problems in an era where it’s been challenging to do so because of the othering, because of negative campaigning, because of all the things we know that has contributed to political inequalities and economic inequalities.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that sometimes happens is a lack of trust between students and communities, faculty and communities, institutions and communities, and all the different iterations of those different combinations of people, and maybe also the data that informs some of those projects. Can you talk about how to build trust amongst those groups and also maybe the data that’s used on those projects?

Carah: So this is a major challenge, and this was something where, as we were preparing a proposal to establish an institute for community-engaged research at the University of Virginia, which is now the Equity Institute. This was one of the things where I spent a lot of time interviewing members of the community in the surrounding area. And this was a problem that came up over and over again about hearing that many researchers dive into communities, that they’re extractive of that knowledge. The communities don’t ever know where that knowledge goes, so there’s a lack of ownership, and yet it’s being used to create additional lines on CVs and to get grant funding, and the benefits don’t always necessarily go back to the communities from which we got that knowledge. So I think there’s a greater understanding of this, or a growing understanding of this. I think we have a long way to go. One book I’d highly recommend is In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower. That’s a fantastic book that talks about many of the inequities between universities and institutions of higher education and their communities. But I think there’s really important ways in which, as teachers, as professors, we can think about building lasting partnerships. So when I’m doing the civic engagement course, I’m starting from a point of, where is the community need that we can actually meaningfully contribute to? Does the community partner want us to work on it? And is there something that we can do where the students are contributing that is beneficial to the community, but then the students are also learning? And it’s also really important for the student learning experience, because it means that they’re not just doing paperwork or doing some organization’s social media like a typical internship would, but it is actually engaging in meaningful ways. And then making sure that the community organization actually has a product, has that knowledge that they can hold on to. And I think there’s a lot of great work and opportunities to do those kinds of courses. The challenge is they’re not always rewarded in the tenure and promotion line for people like me who want to teach courses like that, and they’re also super intensive for the professors and the community partners, because it’s really about building relationships and sustainable relationships. It’s not going to be just a one-and-done class. It’s something that’s going to carry on from year to year.

Lauren: Several of the contributors to the volume actually talk about the importance of building trust. We have contributions that involve advocacy work with an addiction recovery organization in Maine. There’s the Bonneau and Fields example. Again, they’re doing prison education. So those are cases where you have practitioners engaged with the folks from their local universities, and they have to build a community of trust, because the issues that they’re managing, the personal characteristics of the people that they’re serving, require a certain degree of care, a certain degree of confidentiality. And so I think the volume and many of its contributors really do emphasize the importance of that trust building, and it requires, I think, the faculty member working very carefully with their students to make sure the students understand the importance of what they’re doing out in the community and how their work will affect the people that they’re working with. But I think that’s a really important point, that any kind of community-engaged work, whether it’s research, whether it is engaged pedagogy, all of that has to involve really being thoughtful and explicit about how you’re building trust and maintaining it, And Carah mentioned not exploiting a resource. Just kind of go in and then take what you can from that organization. You have to be contributing something back to it, and ideally, these are longer term partnerships, not just one-and-done kind of engagements, unless that’s what the community partner is looking for.

John: You’ve been talking a bit about these various types of civic engagement projects. Since the pandemic, a lot of faculty have been complaining about students not being that engaged with class work. But might these types of projects where students are actually doing something in the community, where they see that they’re making a difference, and they can see the intrinsic value of the work, does that give students more of a sense of value in the work, giving them perhaps, a little bit more intrinsic motivation for engaging in the work, and is that something, perhaps that should be done in other disciplines a bit more as well?

Allison: I think there’s actually two ways of thinking about the question that you asked that I think the book has chapters that give purchase on both. I think one is to help students think about how some of the skills that I think we lost, just as a people during the pandemic, are actually really necessary for democracy and so being able to engage in conversation with one another, have those relationships with students in the classroom: why it matters that you come in and you make small talk with somebody for a little bit before class starts, as opposed to just staring at your phone. One of the pieces that I really love from this book from Strachan that talks about this idea of Madisonian virtue and the need for a kind of civic friendship and relationship building that underlies democracy. And I think that that’s a little bit different than kind of an intrinsic motivation for doing work where you can see the good happening, but it is about there are skills that come from being in community with people in a classroom that in and of themselves have some good and that can kind of help students make a difference. And I think in some ways, that’s about faculty thinking about why it’s worth it to actually build that classroom community that then can set the stage for some of these bigger civic engagement projects. So kind of thinking about, what are the skill sets that underlie student engagement initially, and their value, and then kind of a set of chapters that really talk about how getting students engaged, giving students something tangible that they’re working on, where they can both see that kind of intrinsic or internal and external efficacy, I think, in the Political Science language. And for that, I would think about Meagher’s chapter on ENACTus, which is a fantastic program that I would frankly love to try to figure out how to get at SUNY Oswego, where students actually take part in significant advocacy and lobbying on a piece of legislation at the state level. And so for students to think about being able to build skills that are really kind of pushing forward on a specific issue area, where they can make a difference and are really interacting with people who have the capacity to make certain kinds of decisions. I think that those kinds of activities can be huge for student engagement.

Carah: I was so inspired by Rich Meagher’s chapter that I basically adapted it [LAUGHTER] and taught a year-long course last year at the University of Virginia, where the first semester of the course, the students in the course viewed artificial intelligence as an up and coming challenge that Congress was not making any progress on. Some states have done some work to address it in the policy arena. So anyway, the students spent the whole first semester working with a legislative champion, researching, presenting policy options; and then the second semester, they worked to introduce legislation, testified before a Senate committee in the Virginia State Legislature, organized a lobby day with leave behinds, advocated until the legislation was passed, and met with the executive branch in Virginia, and the legislation was ultimately signed by the governor. And I think one of the things from that experience was they were so engaged and so excited because they were learning something substantively. They were actually practicing the skills. It built their sense of efficacy, because they learned how to engage with the state legislature. They learned the different hearing processes, and then it was bipartisan legislation so they could see people working across the aisle and again, going back to the previous question about reducing polarization, it became about solving a problem. They also learned that some of the solutions are driven by what’s politically feasible. Not all of their options were accepted, but one was and so they actually got to learn the real world process, and the students were incredibly enthusiastic. So I think part of it is, again, sort of seeing what else is out there, seeing the amazing work that’s being done by professors across the country, figuring out what works in your context, and then providing those opportunities so that students can be engaged.

Lauren: I think we’ve known for a long time that active learning pedagogies, regardless of discipline, result in better learning outcomes for students, and so whether it is adapting something that a reader finds in this volume, or whether it’s looking at some of the introductory and prefatory material where we, collectively as editors, talk about some of that existing research on active learning. I think this volume, I think the research that undergirds it, really suggests that one way to overcome that kind of apathy among students or that lack of engagement is to really put them in charge of their own learning and to make them responsible for getting something out of the activity. And so whether that’s doing a simulation in the classroom where they’ve got to take on leadership roles, whether that’s doing the sort of advocacy work that Rich talks about in his chapter, whether it’s even doing an internship where, independently, they’re going down and working in a particular context, whether it’s the General Assembly, or whether it’s an internship where they’re taking water samples because they want to ultimately do environmental science, anything that makes them responsible for their own learning, for developing their own initiative, I think, is going to contribute to helping overcome the problem that we’re all seeing, which is a lack of student engagement. But I don’t think we have to reinvent the wheel. I think we’ve known for a long time that the kinds of pedagogical approaches that these contributors have taken to the next level can be implemented across the board, regardless of field of study, to engage student learners.

Rebecca: So there’s lots of great examples that you’ve provided and got us really excited about thinking about civic engagement, but we’re definitely thinking about what’s next. [LAUGHTER] So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Allison: I’ll say that for me, what’s next around civic engagement is trying to grow, hopefully, a program that I was able to get support from the provost for on our campus this year, which was a civic lesson plan mini grant, so basically providing $250 travel grants as incentives to faculty who were willing to put one class period’s worth of civic content into their classes. And so I was able to draw in faculty from our human and computer interaction program, from chemistry, from psychology, from a range of locations, math, and work with them on developing one lesson plan around civics that would fit with the content they were already teaching. So for instance, a lesson on puzzles this year in an introductory math course now talks about gerrymandering as a puzzle, and a class on accessibility and human computer interaction actually looked at voting systems from around the country and thinking about doing accessibility checking and assessment of voter programs. And so I am really interested in trying to continue figuring out those conversations, of really meeting other faculty where they are to help them think through what are the civic questions that they’re comfortable with that meet their kind of time and risk tolerance and teaching style in order to help build more civic capacity on our campus.

Lauren: We have a really short term “what’s next,” because I am deep in the process of planning my January term study travel course that goes to Japan, where from January 13 to the 28th I will be in Japan with 22 students learning about how the Japanese government functions. That is about as civically engaged and in the specific location as you can possibly get. But longer term, institutionally, Randolph Macon does not have the optional Carnegie endorsement for civic engagement. And so longer term, one of my goals for my administrative role is to move us toward that classification. I think we’re doing the work, but I don’t think we have done enough to demonstrate that yet in a sort of systematic way, and so my own personal goal is to see us obtain that classification within the next few years.

Carah: So I moved this year to be full time in the nonprofit space, and then I’m teaching a course at UVA. I am really trying to focus right now on thinking about the broader pro- democracy movement, and hoping to do additional work that really links community-based organizations and national organizations that are engaged with academic institutions and specifically with professors, so that there can be a better matching between research needs and teaching needs, and sort of the broader movement in civil society.

Rebecca: Sounds like some really wonderful projects are underway.

John: Well, thank you for joining us. This is an issue that we’re going to have to be facing for quite a while now, because I don’t think we’re going to see a reduction in polarization and social media and social networks. So it’s an issue we all have to address. Thank you for putting this together and providing this resource.

Lauren: Thank you for having us.

Allison: Yes, thank you.

Carah: Thank you so much.

[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]

374. The Disengaged Teen

Posted in authentic learning, engagement, higher education, learning, motivation, teaching
January 1, 2025

Educators at all levels have raised concerns about growing student disengagement. In this episode, Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson join us to discuss their new book, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, which examines the causes of, and possible solutions, to this problem.

Rebecca is the Director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, where she leads global studies on how to better support children’s learning, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Jenny is an award-winning journalist who spent over a decade at The New York Times before pioneering coverage on the science of learning at Quartz. She now writes a column on education in Time.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

Anderson, Jenny and Rebecca Winthrop (2025). The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. Penguin Random House.
PISA scores
Transcend
CASEL
Reeve, J. (2015). Giving and summoning autonomy support in hierarchical relationships. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 9(8), 406-418.
Reeve, J., Vansteenkiste, M., Assor, A., Ahmad, I., Cheon, S. H., Jang, H., … & Wang, C. J. (2014). The beliefs that underlie autonomy-supportive and controlling teaching: A multinational investigation. Motivation and Emotion, 38, 93-110.
Reeve, J. (2016). Autonomy-supportive teaching: What it is, how to do it. In Building autonomous learners: Perspectives from research and practice using self-determination theory (pp. 129-152). Singapore: Springer Singapore.
Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti (2019). Helicopter Parenting. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 78, April 24.
Doepke, M., & Zilibotti, F. (2019). Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids. Princeton University Press.

Transcript

John: Educators at all levels have raised concerns about growing student disengagement. In this episode, we discuss research on the causes of, and possible solutions, to this growing problem.

[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.

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John: Our guests today are Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson. Rebecca is the Director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, where she leads global studies on how to better support children’s learning, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Jenny is an award-winning journalist who spent over a decade at The New York Times before pioneering coverage on the science of learning at Quartz. She now writes a column on education in Time. Rebecca and Jenny are the authors of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better which will be released in January 2025 by Penguin Random House. Welcome Rebecca and Jenny.

Rebecca W.: So nice to be here.

Jenny: Thanks for having us.

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

Rebecca W.: I sure am. I’m drinking Earl Grey, which I drink most mornings.

Rebecca: And how about you, Jenny?

Jenny: I am drinking chamomile because it is my afternoon and I have to ease up a bit on the caffeine.

John: And I am drinking a black raspberry green tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds nice. John, I have a London Strand breakfast from when I was in London earlier this year from the Twinings flagship store.

Rebecca W.: That sounds delicious. [LAUGHTER]

John: Very nice. So, we’ve invited you here to discuss The Disengaged Teen. Can you tell us a bit about the origin of this book?

Rebecca W.: Yeah, I can start. It’s Rebecca. I was very shocked during COVID. I have two adolescent boys, one was in third grade, one was in sixth grade, and I was shocked to discover that I had misjudged which of my boys was really engaged and which one wasn’t. And as someone who’s worked in education her whole career, for several decades, I thought, “Gosh, this does not bode well for other parents who don’t have this set of expertise,” and knowing how important student engagement is in children’s achievement and developing learning skills and mental health, and all the good things, that was what really motivated me to reach out to Jenny and say, “Hey, let’s partner up.” So Jenny has her own reasons, I’m sure, for saying yes. [LAUGHTER]

Jenny: Well, the timing was perfect. I was a financial journalist for almost 20 years before I switched to education. And I switched because I had my own kids, and I felt I wanted to better understand how they learn and how to support their learning. And I was shocked at how little there was on that topic in the mediums that I’m used to in journalism. So education was traditionally covered very much in a sort of siloed political, charter/non-charter, standards, changing standards, teachers unions. Those were the topics, which are very important topics, but it is one of many, and having covered finance for so long, and seeing how sophisticated it is in terms of way we organize the coverage, the number of people we put on it, and the sort of intensity of the coverage, I was really very disappointed to see how little attention was spent on teaching and learning and understanding learning as a process better, and as a parent, understanding how to support a child’s learning better. So instead of complain about it, I decided to do something about it. And Rebecca asked me to write a book. So we dove in together.

Rebecca: You begin the first chapter with a discussion on the results from the program for international assessment, an international test administered to 15 year olds. What happened to the scores about a decade ago?

Jenny: We started to see the scores in reading and science start to go down in about 2010 and in math, about eight years later they caught up, at which point they had gone from declining gently to kind of falling off a cliff. So there was a very precipitous and alarming decline in these PISA scores. And that’s not what we should see. What we should see, as systems invest more in education, we should see those scores climbing, and we know more about how kids learn and we implement those practices in classrooms. So this was not the expected trajectory. Rebecca, do you want to add anything to that?

Rebecca W.: I think you nailed it. The thing that was particularly worrisome is how, across the board it was, across so many different countries.

John: That decline is rather dramatic, and it was interesting to see that it had begun before COVID, because often this type of discussion takes place within the context of COVID, but that certainly accelerated things. But the issue was already beginning before that. Could you talk a little bit about some of the harm that results to societies when we see this sort of decline in the cognitive skills of students?

Jenny: Well-educated scientists cure diseases and ease discomfort. Well-educated knowledgeable entrepreneurs drive innovation. Well-trained engineers create bridges and make sure they don’t fall down. Really, at the center of everything we want in a society is a well-educated citizenry. There’s sort of multiple layers, but we have tremendous problems [LAUGHTER] in the world, and we need people to be educated to solve these, both in the content of science, math, English language arts, but also in skills, really kind of critical thinking skills, and interdisciplnary skills and tying together things and working with other people, and communicating well and listening to others. So I think when you see those scores falling off a cliff, we’re only measuring one very narrow subset of skills, and those are declining, and they’re very important skills. We’re not even measuring a lot of the other ones. But there’s a lot of evidence that we’re not doing a particularly good job on those either.

Rebecca W.: The only thing I would add to that is how critical these skills are today, but especially over certainly the next decade, given the rapid increase of generative artificial intelligence. So we’re particularly concerned about the fact that so many young people seem to not be able to think critically enough around texts that they read, or how to think about using and applying math. You’re much more susceptible to manipulation, fake news, this infodemic that is spreading around the world, as the UN Secretary General calls it. So to us, that’s also incredibly concerning.

John: Not everyone prefers having low-information voters, for example. [LAUGHTER]

Jenny: Yeah. and I’d love to build on that, and Rebecca, I want to kind of give this one to you, because you know so much about it and have done some deep work in this. But I also just think, and we haven’t sort of said it outright, but we should, which is, for a democratic society, you need educated citizens, and data suggests we’re less educated in a moment where we really need to be building, weaving, civic society together and not tearing it apart. That is another reason we should be very, very concerned about this decline in skills and decline in knowledge.

Rebecca W.: Well said.

Rebecca: The book relies on data from large data sets. Can you tell us a bit about the data that you relied on?

Rebecca W.: Sure, we culled from a lot of different sources, but largely four [LAUGHTER] main bodies of data. First, we did a massive literature review around student engagement in the US, but elsewhere, we looked at studies around the globe, and so that was from all types of disciplines. The second, we did a lot of qualitative research, where we interviewed almost 100 young people, largely between the ages of 10 to 18 and often their family members and often their teachers, to really start getting a vision of their experiences in school. And then we partnered with an organization called Transcend, which is a nonprofit in the US, working in the K through 12 space, and did research that included a nationally representative survey of over 65,000 students and a sort of similar survey of almost 2000 parents. And in those surveys, we were asking questions around students’ schooling experiences. So what were they experiencing when they were at school? Did they have any choice around how to do their work? Did they feel they belonged? Do they feel like there was someone they could go to if they had fallen behind and needed academic supports? A whole bunch of those types of questions. And then we asked… it wasn’t matched parents to the exact students, because there was way more students than parents… but then we just asked parents of that same age group what their perceptions were of students’ schooling experiences. Did they think [LAUGHTER] students felt like they belonged and had friends. Did they think students had supports to catch up if they were behind or had choices over how to do their work in school, et cetera, things like that. So that’s sort of primarily the sets of data that we used.

John: What did the data tell you about the status of students in terms of their perceptions of well being, etc.?

Jenny: We found what others have found, which is that the kids are not alright. There were sort of really alarming levels of apathy and stress. And when you dig into that combination, it’s particularly toxic to think about that, that so many kids feel both overwhelmed and extremely disengaged, extremely apathetic, so kind of bored and overwhelmed at the same time. And I think at a moment in their lives where they feel kind of primed to do stuff and to be part of something. I’m like, how did we pull this off? How have we managed to both bore them and overwhelm them at the same time? I mean, [LAUGHTER] it seems like kind of an epic feat, not one that we really want to repeat. Terms that we heard over and over again from these interviews with young people: unseen, very unprepared for the world in front of them, a little bit hopeless about the state of affairs in the world, and a little bit helpless to change things, bored and overwhelmed I mentioned. So just you kind of put all of these feelings of their experience in school, and it doesn’t translate to motivation. That doesn’t translate to: gosh, I really want to go to school tomorrow. And so that was very telling.

Rebecca W.: One thing I would add to that, which Jenny and I were both really concerned about, was, in addition to everything, she just said, there was a real sense among many students that they couldn’t change things, that they didn’t really have the power, or they didn’t see the possibility of how they could make school more interesting to themselves, or change things in their lives, and it can be very defeating when you feel done too and like you don’t have an opportunity to have volition in your life around things you care about. So that was very concerning for us.

Rebecca: Having no agency at all, or feeling like you have no agency, is certainly not something that’s motivating, that’s for sure. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca W.: Exactly. It’s totally demotivating. If you feel like you have no opportunity to actually have a voice or change things in your daily life that you might be able to do, have a different tactic, do better, if you only could shift something.

Jenny: They’re feeling this lack of agency at a moment where developmentally, it is crucial to the formation of their identity. So the timing of this is just particularly tragic, because when you think about what adolescence is, it’s separating from a caregiver and finding your own tribe and finding your way to live in the world. To do that, you need the experiences which give you the information to form the kind of person you want to be and the sort of tribe you want to join, and the partner with whom you’re going to mate with later on and in this moment, developmentally, where they want to be, craving doing and being and trying, they feel, like I said, helpless and hopeless and without agency. And that is not ideal for adolescent development.

Rebecca: One of the things our colleagues often talk about, and we see in reports pretty consistently, is the lack of student motivation. And educators have reported these concerns consistently for a very long time. What is different in this moment? What’s changed?

Rebecca W.: We really puzzled with this. We really puzzled with this question. Because if you look at the data on student disengagement, kids have been disengaged. It’s gone down a little bit, especially because of COVID, but basically at high levels for a long time. Kids have said that the things that most bother them is school-related pressure for a long time, and this is before the advent of cell phones. So you have kids who are disengaged, especially as they get older, that has existed for a long time. And then we think what’s going on is you’ve got disengaged kids in school. You’ve got the advent of technology like social media and cell phones that are really fun distractions, and the skills that young people really need to thrive in work and life are getting farther and farther away from the normal academic teaching of what’s going on in school. So 50 years ago, most employers were really prioritizing good literacy and numeracy in the US, those were sort of the most requisite skills, and those are needed, but they’re necessary, but not sufficient. Colleges want young people to have invented or patented something… I’m exaggerating, but not totally… to get into competitive schools, [LAUGHTER] and there’s increasing pressure for honors classes and AP classes, and what we’re asking kids to be able to do has sort of gotten out of hand in some ways, and gotten farther away from what this reality looks like when they leave the school walls. So this combination of sort of feeling it’s irrelevant inside school and technology being very distracting, and I would say there’s also been well documented less choice and decision making that young people have over the last couple decades, this sort of sense of not being in control over much of their lives. Those sort of three things, I think, has kind of created a toxic combination all really leading to unmotivated young people.

Jenny: Yeah, I would just build on that a tiny bit and say, as you all point out, and as Rebecca points out, there’s always been a gap between what happens in school and what happens in the real world, that that gap is like a chasm. It’s just much, much bigger, and kids are much more aware of what the world will demand of them because of smartphones. They see what the world is out there. They were a little bit protected before [LAUGHTER]. You saw in your community or in your school what that world was and now, they sort of see it a lot, and I think that feeling of unprepared for the world that’s coming is much more profound.

John: This seems to extend into older age groups as well. We see a decline in fertility, more people are choosing not to bring children into the world, and a lot of it seems to be tied to this same sort of environment where people are not very optimistic about the future and they do feel this lack of control.

Jenny: Absolutely.

Rebecca W.: I think that a lot of the sort of things that people talk about in terms of personal self improvement and, in adults, whether it’s mindfulness and/or developing friendships and connections or finding meaningful work and interests, or, you know, there’s a whole industry to help adults [LAUGHTER] sort of get out of their funk and improve their lives. And I think a lot of these things are sowed in school where young people don’t have a lot of chances inside school to really pursue their interests. They aren’t developing what the folks at CASEL talk about as confident self awareness, where they have a sense of who they are and what path they might like to start on, and if they want to change paths, they’re confident enough to try to figure out how to do that as they go, and all of that is needed to be the author of your own life, which is affirming and creates optimism. And without that feeling, it is hard to move through the world.

Rebecca: You note that more engaged kids learn better, perform better, feel better, and live better. And you describe four modes of engagement, resisting, coasting, achieving and exploring. What types of behavior would we observe for students in each of these modes?

Rebecca W.: So the passenger mode is where kids are coasting, and these are kids who are showing up to school, not disrupting class, but putting in minimal effort, zooming through homework as quickly as they can. They may enjoy school because they have friends, but they don’t necessarily see the relevance of what they’re learning to the real world, to their daily life, and they’re doing what we would call surface learning. They’re not going deep [LAUGHTER] and they may be getting good grades. Some of them may be struggling, so it’s often because school’s either too hard or too easy that kids decide to coast. So that’s passenger mode, and that’s most kids. In middle school and high school, we found that about 50% of kids said that their schooling experiences were sort of “meh,” ones that were not inspiring or terrible, either way, they were sort of coasting along. So that’s the first mode. The second mode is achiever mode. And these are kids who are trying to be perfect and trying to be excellent and get top marks and excel in extracurriculars. And teachers and parents love achievers. Society loves achievers, and achievers can be very happy because they’re doing very well, but there is a dark side. We talk about the achiever conundrum, where a lot of kids who spent a lot of time in achiever mode tip into unhappy achiever mode, where they replace their performance with their sense of mattering, so they feel that they only matter if they do well, so getting a bad grade is sort of the end of the world for them. These kids often have quite a bit of anxiety and mental health challenges, and they’re often very fragile learners in that they don’t really want to take risks. One of the quotes that I think about a lot when we talk about this mode was a kid who was really in achiever mode for a long time saying the thing that she hated most about school that drove her crazy is when teachers didn’t tell her exactly what to do to get an A, a good score, because that’s the sort of mindset [LAUGHTER] of achiever mode. Tell me exactly what to do and I’m gonna go get it. It also limits creativity being in achiever mode too often. So in middle school, high school, that’s about 30% of kids. And then you’ve got the third mode, which is kids in resister mode. These are kids who actually do have a fair bit of agency. It’s just not pointed towards the learning in school that parents and teachers and adults want them to be doing, and they’re using their voice in whichever way they can to say school isn’t working for me. So they are the classic quote, unquote problem children disrupting class, class clowns, not doing homework, skipping school, or leaving school altogether, ultimately, if you can’t re-engage them. So, they often need a wide range of supports to bring them back, because they’re often resisting for different things. It could be they’re deeply overwhelmed, they’ve gotten behind in work. It could be a family issue, and they need extra support. But we found that if you can remove some of the barriers and give them, actually, more autonomy and freedom to pursue their interests or take on responsibility, they do have agency, and they quickly can move to explorer mode, which is the fourth mode. And explorer mode is what we talk about as agentic engagement, which is the term in the academic literature, and that’s where kids are getting good grades, they are happy and they’re developing the resilience, the learning to learn skills needed for an AI world. So it’s the trifecta that you want. It’s just that less than 10% of kids grades 3 through 12, and less than 5% of kids in middle school and high school say they have the regular opportunity to explore in school, and this is where kids’ agency meets their engagement levels, and they are able to ask for things or make suggestions, or find creative solutions to make their learning environment more interesting to themselves and more supportive regardless of the context they’re in.

John: Preschool kids are very much engaged in that exploring mode, and as they enter schools that seems to fade a little bit with each year of schooling. Why is this breaking down? We bring in kids who are intrinsically motivated to learn more and curious. Why is that fading so rapidly in the early years of schooling and continuing through the schooling process?

Jenny: There’s the real intersection of development and sort of what we do to them. So a lot of it is the environment we put kids in, which does seem to dampen curiosity. There’s not as many opportunities to ask questions, or for a teacher with a big class to answer every kid’s questions, a toddler asking sort of 60 to 100 questions a minute, [LAUGHTER] it feels like as a parent. Obviously, that’s not possible. So there are a lot of reasons that in that trajectory from sort of primary elementary school up until middle and high school you see kids disengaged. The top reasons are it’s too easy or too hard. They’re not in their zone of proximal development. They’re either bored or overwhelmed, and so they check out. That’s the easiest approach to that. Mental health problems is increasingly a reason. It’s very hard to engage if you’re anxious or depressed or neuro-divergent. There are a lot of neuro-divergent kids, and that needs to be recognized and diagnosed so that you can put in place the supports to make learning more accessible. A lot of kids experience bullying or discrimination. That would be a very important reason that kids disengage. A lot of kids don’t feel they belong, and belonging plays an essential role in learning. We have a whole chapter on this that… I really love this phrase: “belonging uncertainty,” when you feel you don’t belong, you are looking for evidence to confirm that you don’t belong, and you are very unwilling to do the things that you need to do to learn. In a moment where you don’t feel you belong, you are not going to ask for help and confess to an entire class that you don’t get it. That’s a very brave act. I don’t understand, could we slow down? Could you repeat that? That’s hard to do in college, much less in middle school, when you’re really kind of in the throes of that identity development. And as we’ve talked about in this conversation, this lack of choice is a profound reason that kids disengage. They don’t feel that they have an opportunity to put themselves out there in any significant way, so why try? So we don’t give them limited opportunities. We’re not saying, choose your own adventure in school. That’s one dramatic approach. But another is, you have a homework assignment that you’re going to assign. Let’s offer three ways to do it. That little bit of choice really resonates, because you start to feel a little bit in control, and so you feel a little bit more motivated to do it. It’s very similar to offering a toddler: peas, corn, or carrots. You’re not saying, “Do you want vegetables or don’t you?” You’re saying, here are the three vegetables, which one do you want? And suddenly they feel I get to make this decision, I’m going to eat carrots versus I don’t want any vegetables. So scale that up. And when you get in middle and high school and in college, that’s why so many kids actually can get re-engaged in college, because they can start to exercise a little bit more choice and agency over their schedule. Whether they’ve developed the sort of learning to learn skills and study skills to be successful is a different story. But I do think that you see a number of kids sort of get to college and find a thing. A couple kids in our book, they got to college and the combination of feeling less controlled and having some choice over what they could pick in terms of classes and how structured their days allowed them to re-engage in a way that they were unable to do in high school.

Rebecca W.: I would also chime in and add that the structure and design of schooling, I think, really impacts this downward slide of disengagement, because we see a huge dip from elementary school to middle school. That’s really where, all of a sudden, you get kids reporting many more passenger and resister experiences than achiever and explorer experiences is that switch from upper elementary to middle school. And some of the design features are having multiple classes, not having one teacher who is sort of your go to, who knows you very well, and that continues. So it’s important for educators to have subject matter expertise, of course, so they can teach well. But the entire sort of design of having siloed, not necessarily connected different subjects can be quite mind numbing to kids, plus they feel a little bit lost in the shuffle. They don’t necessarily have a place to belong in traditional schools, in traditional design of schools. Now, lots of folks are playing with how to redesign middle school and high school, but I think that has a big role to play.

Rebecca: You’ve hinted towards some changes that K-12 could promote, where they could promote student agency and engagement. Can you elaborate a little bit more on what some of those design changes could be to maybe improve engagement?

Rebecca W.: Yes, I think we have a whole section towards the end of the book suggesting organizations that are doing this work, if readers want to go be champions in their communities or in their institutions, and there is a spectrum. So on the one hand, you could really work with teachers themselves to use autonomy-supportive teaching practices. This work comes out of Johnmarshall Reeve and his colleagues, so 20 years of research on this, which really is shifts in style. You don’t have to shift your curriculum or your lesson, a bit of tweaks on the lesson plans or your disciplinary approaches as an educator. But it is things like Jenny said, offering choice on homework. It is things like being vulnerable enough to ask students at the end of a lesson, and if you have a large class, you can give everybody either an electronic exit ticket or a sticky note to say, what’s one question you want to explore tomorrow or you didn’t understand, and then taking that feedback and shifting it. So there’s small things like that that actually engage them and give them more agency. There’s also more profound design changes. We interviewed a number of students for the book who are in big picture learning schools, which basically take the traditional school day in their high schools and three days a week they’re in class doing their courses, and two days a week they are in internships in the workplace where they are developing all sorts of life skills and collaborative problem solving skills and critical thinking skills. And then every week their entire high school career, they meet with an advisor, the same advisor and the same small group of kids in their advisory across all four years. If done well, of course, they become like a little family, and it’s a go to person, and they debrief on their internship experiences and what they’re learning from them. Because, of course, you can learn a lot of these quote, unquote, 21st Century Skills anywhere in life actually, it doesn’t have to be inside a classroom around academic subjects.

Jenny: I would add two things. I would say a K-12 timetable is a zero-sum game. And I think we’ve been willing to push more content in because we’ve decided what we care about, and let’s do more of that. And I think Rebecca and I would say that agency is the skill that needs to be developed, and it needs to be developed through the ability to make choices and to exercise that. And so I would argue that that skill actually is worthy of cutting up some time and that it will help with everything else. It can help with the other academics, but take away a little of the content and put in its place an ability for kids to make some choices. So I’ll give you an example. In a lot of countries around the world, you can do something called an extended project qualification in your final couple of years of schooling. Y ou pick a subject, and it’s very carefully designed such that you have to go find your advisor, you have to design a timetable. 20% of your grade is your ability to manage a project over a year. It’s a time management skill, and another 30% is the quality of the sources you choose. So at 50% you are not assessing the content of that project. You are assessing some skills we know are going to be incredibly important in college or in the workplace, the ability to manage multiple demands, to ask for help, to know when you’re falling behind, to change your mind, and all of that. So I can really envision, and we’ve interviewed some schools in this process who did studios or projects just carving out some time to say, even if you assume they don’t learn anything, which is 100% not going to happen. But let’s just give some credit to those who say not enough knowledge acquisition happens, they are developing other skills, and those skills are worthy of the time we are taking away from other things. And the gravy, the cherry on the ice cream sundae, is that it will make kids happier, which we should care a lot about. [LAUGHTER] You know, we should care deeply about that as a factor to motivate, but just as the sort of we would like our kids to be happy. So I do think the timetable is a major barrier, but it is one that is surmountable, and I think we can be creative, and it doesn’t mean that we have to give up all standards tomorrow if we do this.

John: Much of this discussion reminds me of a discussion we had earlier with two economists, with Fabrizio Zilibotti and Matthias Doepke, who talk about differences over time and across countries in the amount of freedom that children have outside of school and how much of their lives are controlled. And what they observe is that in those time periods and in countries where there’s more income inequality, parents tend to put much more structure on children’s lives. And I’m wondering if this could be related to the lack of autonomy that children may have outside of the classroom, where they spend a good deal of their time. So it does seem like in the US, in particular, where we have an extremely high level of economic inequality and there’s a lot of pressure on children from their parents and other sources to do well in school, that perhaps that lack of autonomy, both within schools and outside of school, might be leading to some of this disengagement. If that’s the case, is that something that parents perhaps should work on, providing students a bit more autonomy and choice and control in their day-to-day lives. Would that be helpful?

Jenny: Absolutely. I interviewed them and did a couple stories on them, and I read their book, and I would say my favorite conclusion from that book is that parents aren’t crazy. Parents are responding to the environment that they’re in. So our responses may seem irrational, but they’re rational within the context that we’re in. And so in Sweden, where you’re almost guaranteed a university place, there is a lot less stress around what kids need to do in that process. I’d say between the US and the UK, there are very different markers, and those markers of how you get into university then shape everything that comes down. So to me, the thing that’s challenging about what you’re saying, I think it’s 100% true, and I think parents do have the influence. We showed this in our book, and there’s a ton of research to defend this. We know that parents have a lot of influence, but that you have to be brave. You have to say, is this a long game? I care about my kid and their happiness more than I care about feeding a system that is insatiable and does not care about my kid. And so I think part of why Rebecca and I wrote this book, it requires the confidence of knowing that long term, these bets pay off, investing in agency over more math. Not that math is irrelevant. We’re not saying knowledge doesn’t matter at any turn, but investing in agency, in choice, in a little bit of freedom, and definitely giving them autonomy so they can figure out who they are. That will 100% pay off in the long term, but it might not pay off on the math test tomorrow, and it requires bravery on the part of parents, and that’s hard, it’s hard to be brave in the face of a system that is telling you otherwise.

Rebecca: It seems like there’s a lot of bravery in this discussion. [LAUGHTER]

Jenny: …name of my substack: how to be brave.

Rebecca W.: We talk about in the book that one thing explorer mode does, if you give kids the opportunity to be in explorer mode in school or out of school, is it helps them be brave, because it takes bravery to chart your own path. It takes some element of bravery to think about what you were really interested in and try to pursue that regardless of what other people around you might be telling you to do. And I think more and more, it’s going to take some level of bravery to navigate this huge shift we have coming with AI that’s going to be massively shifting how our jobs work, what skills we need, how we’re teaching… kids are gonna have to have the courage and gumption to figure things out as they go, [LAUGHTER] and to tack and weave and navigate. It takes bravery to do that. You don’t need as much courage to follow a well trodden path that someone has told you just to walk along.

Jenny: We cite and we spoke with a developmental psychologist named Ron Dahl in this book, and said something to me that really stayed with me, and it comes up at different points in the book, which is, you can’t tell a kid to be brave. They need an opportunity to be brave and feel what it is to be brave to then feel a little braver. I mean, it’s very obvious when you say it out loud, [LAUGHTER] but when you think about it in the context of learning, what opportunities are we giving young people to be brave, so they feel the benefit of that bravery and they want more of it. And so we’ve loved that framing.

Rebecca W.: Yeah, one of the quotes I love most in the book is from a young woman who was a total achiever mode her entire time in high school, got to an Ivy League university and had a total meltdown because she didn’t have that internal explorer muscles and that bravery. She didn’t know what the path was, and it was very disorienting. And she said, “You know, I wish I’d had failure therapy [LAUGHTER] in high school.” We were like, “What do you mean? What is failure therapy?” And she said, “Well, I never once failed in high school, and I didn’t know what it felt like to not be able to do things perfectly and then have to pick yourself back up again.” And that is a form of bravery. So just to give some color to Jenny’s point, I’m not saying we should go around and fail all our kids, but give them an opportunity to struggle and figure out how to get out of it again.

Rebecca: We have a lot of students that enter college who haven’t been in explorer mode, as you just illustrated, they might have been in an achiever mode, or they might have been coasting along. How do we help ignite explorer mode as college faculty, knowing that maybe they don’t have the skills quite yet to be in explorer mode. How do we help ignite them to be in that mode and support them to be in that mode when we probably think that that’s what college should be about?

Jenny: I have a great example of that from university, and then I’ll pass it over to Rebecca, but I interviewed a Clayton Spencer who was the head of Bates, and she developed a program called purposeful work, which kind of had three prongs, but one of the key prongs was asking faculty to bring practitioners into the classroom. And you will probably not be surprised to learn that there was quite a bit of resistance to this when it was presented. But her idea was that you’re teaching these wonderful classes, you have this incredible content that you are imparting to these kids, but they don’t know how yet to tie it to the real world. They don’t get the relevance piece of it. The practitioners by dint of having them come in… four practitioners a semester, if it’s a psychology class, it might be a doula, it might be a nurse practitioner, it might be a social worker. They come in, talk a little bit about their day, and you’re starting to get these data points as to, “oh, wait, this matters in the real world.” Okay, I’m gonna double down on why this particular experimental method is really important. It can really feel quite disconnected. And I think one thing that I think college professors could do is to try to connect it better, and that can be outsourced. They shouldn’t be expected to be able to draw those connections, but inviting practitioners in would be one way. And this program is also another example of timetabling. They decided to use every January to do these kind of mini-courses, but four weeks doing something with zero stakes. It does not affect your GPA. It is literally all about explore something you love, see how it goes, and bring that back to the classroom. And it’s just four moments in college to try something, no stakes, no GPA affected, collecting data here. For students who have to work in college it might have a different structure. But I thought those were two interesting attempts to try to build relevance, help kids find their purpose, and also break up the school year a little bit.

Rebecca W.: Another way that I think college professors could be incredibly helpful in helping young people develop these explorer skills is really sending the message that they can advocate for themselves. Often, of course, and we could ask you guys, one assumes that young people come to college or university with these explorer skills already, but often they don’t. So we interviewed one young man who lived in Dallas, and he was first generation. His family had immigrated from Latin America, a first-generation college goer, and he had learned to really advocate for himself in high school, because he did great the first two years, and then started to struggle when classes got a lot harder, and he had someone in the front office. It wasn’t a college counselor, but I think it was like the assistant principal or something, to sort of take him under his wing and say, you go talk to the teacher and ask them this question, and then here’s how you study, and here’s how you can ask for help and communicate like “I’m flailing. I need help, but I care.” And he had really gotten those skills. So when he showed up in college, he was very excited. It was a big deal, and his first sort of core course for his major, he found super difficult. It was super hard. He didn’t quite have the academic knowledge to really excel. And midway through, he was getting a C, close to a D. And he was like, “Oh my gosh, this is my major.” He knew it was something he wanted to do. And he went to the professor and said, “I’m really struggling. I don’t know what to do. I know I need your help to help me succeed.” Like he had the gumption to say that. And then the professor also had the perfect response. She said, “I got your back.” She sat him at the front. It was a very large lecture class. You guys have talked about pedagogy for large classes, but she sat him at the front. She paired him with two other top students in the class. Introduced him, said, “Hey, I’d like you guys to be in a study group together.” They ended up becoming sort of best friends, and he aced the class. So any of those strategies to really let kids know they can advocate for themselves and when they do, taking it seriously and really trying to find ways to help them, I think can be incredibly helpful.

John: We always end by asking, what’s next?

Rebecca W.: One of the things that I have started to do organically, not planned, is use these modes as language with my team members, particularly my young new fresh out of college, or maybe fresh out of their masters, team members, early career team members who have spent a lot of time in achiever mode. But also I always look for a fair bit of sort of explorer tendencies, and they often get overwhelmed with the large task lists that we have at the Brookings Institution to do every day. And one of the things I’ve been telling them is, look, you can modulate between modes. [LAUGHTER] Sometimes you just gotta get it right. Sometimes you gotta really create something, and sometimes tasks are not that important. You can go in passenger mode, do the bare minimum, and it’s enough to be fine. So I’m beginning to experiment about what these modes look like in the workplace. Jenny, what about you? Over to you.

Jenny: I’m in the process of writing something about launching, so sort of launching from college into the real world. And Rebecca’s saying how relevant everything that we’ve written in this book is for that moment as well. So it’s kind of relevant all the way through, is the bottom line. But this idea of, in this really tricky moment, of even if you’ve succeeded in college, suddenly the workplace seems very fuzzy, very fast changing, very hard to get a toe hold, very choppy right now, it’s not so much about the job as it is about the sort of projects or gigs, or less kind of I’ve got my job, I will succeed, and more kind of forever hustling. There’s the complaint I’m hearing more, the forever hustling and feeling like you’re not getting anywhere, and sort of using the modes to build the self awareness to try to target those searches and think more about kind of how I fit in in the world and what I want to do versus what’s available, just so it doesn’t constantly feel so completely overwhelming, that’s sort of like, well, I’ll just try everything, and I don’t really know what I want, and I’ve never had to really ask myself this question. And there’s this kind of paralysis that can come from that and be like, “Okay, well, let’s think about these modes, and how do you show up in the world, and where are you most comfortable, and what do we need to get out of,” and so I think this sort of developmental period, launch period, I think, is interesting to me right now.

Rebecca: Well, both of those sound really interesting as the next phase of this work. Thanks for a really great conversation.

Jenny: Thanks for having us.

Rebecca W.: Thank you for having us. It was really fun.

John: Well, thank you. You’re doing some really great work on a topic that’s incredibly important.

Rebecca W.: 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.

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369. The Present Professor

Posted in attention, authentic learning, classroom community, emotion, engagement, higher education, learning, teaching
November 27, 2024

Faculty often have a teaching persona that they bring to the classroom. In this episode, Liz Norell joins us to discuss the benefits of sharing your authentic self with your students. Liz is a political scientist and the Associate Director of Instructional Support at the University of Mississippi Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. She is also the author of The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

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

Transcript

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

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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

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

John: Good to talk to you again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: And John loves cherry tea.

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

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

Rebecca: The saga continues, for sure.

Liz: Yes.

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

John: That’s an old standard now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: That was important to hear.

Liz: Yeah.

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

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

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

Liz: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Liz: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liz: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liz: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: We’re looking forward to that too.

Rebecca: Definitely.

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

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

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366. Connecting to Core Values

Posted in authentic learning, classroom community, diversity, engagement, equity, evidence-based practices, first-generation, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, income inequality, learning, motivation, pedagogy, racism, social justice, STEM education, teaching
November 6, 2024

Engaging and motivating students starts but doesn’t end with inclusion. In this episode, Bryan Dewsbury joins us to discuss ways of connecting class content to students’ core values to prepare students to productively engage with their communities as we work with our students to make our disciplines more equitable.

Bryan is an Associate Professor of Biology at Florida International University. He is the Principal Investigator of the Science Education and Society research program, an Associate Director of the STEM Transformational Institute where he directs the Division of Transformative Education, and a Fellow in the John N. Gardner Institute. Bryan is also one of the co-authors of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. He is the developer of a free MOOC on Inclusive Teaching, offered through the HHMI Biointeractive and Science and Education Society. Bryan is a highly regarded keynote speaker and workshop leader.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

FIU STEM Transformation Institute
FIUTeach
Zimmerman, J. (2020). The amateur hour: A history of college teaching in America. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Locke, John (1689). Two Treatises of government.
Lepore, J. (2018). These truths: A history of the United States. WW Norton & Company.
This I Believe
Watson, J. D., & Stent, G. S. (1968). The double helix: a personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA: text, commentary, reviews, original papers. Norton.
Dewsbury, B. M., Swanson, H. J., Moseman-Valtierra, S., & Caulkins, J. (2022). Inclusive and active pedagogies reduce academic outcome gaps and improve long-term performance. Plos one, 17(6).
Diane Ravitch
Howard Hughes Medical Institute Biointeractive Program
Inclusive Teaching – free HHMI Biointeractive MOOC
Dewsbury, B. M. (2020). Deep teaching in a college STEM classroom. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 15(1), 169-191.
Mary-Ann Winkelmes – Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT Higher Ed)
Mary-Ann Winklemes (2023). Transparency in Learning and Teaching. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 290. May 24.
Harrison, L. (2021). Relationship Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College. By Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert, 2020. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Transcript

John: Engaging and motivating students starts but doesn’t end with inclusion. In this episode, we discuss ways to connect class content to students’ core values to prepare students to productively engage with their communities as we work with our students to make our disciplines more equitable.

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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 Bryan Dewsbury. Bryan is an Associate Professor of Biology at Florida International University. He is the Principal Investigator of the Science Education and Society research program, an Associate Director of the STEM Transformational Institute where he directs the Division of Transformative Education, and a Fellow in the John N. Gardner Institute. Bryan is also one of the co-authors of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. He is the developer of a free MOOC on Inclusive Teaching, offered through the Hhmi Biointeractive and Science and Education Society. Bryan is a highly regarded keynote speaker and workshop leader and he recently provided the keynote address at the Academic Affairs Retreat here at SUNY-Oswego at the start of the current semester. Welcome back, Bryan. It’s good to see you.

Bryan: Thanks for having me back. I hope that the welcome back means that I was good the first time. [LAUGHTER]

John: People are still talking about your keynote. They were really impressed.

Bryan: Well, I’m glad you all enjoyed it. How are you all doing?

Rebecca: We’re doing great. Today’s teas are:… Bryan, are you drinking some tea?

Bryan: I’m not right now because I actually did have some for lunch. So I’m on campus right now at FIU, Florida International University, and I had lunch with a colleague, and we did have some tea. So, does earlier count?

Rebecca: Sure. Do you want to tell us what you had earlier?

Bryan: I don’t know if I said this in the last episode I was here, but I grew up in Trinidad. I know I said that part, but when I was growing up, the main tea that at least my mother would buy is Lipton. Like it’s almost to the point where most of us didn’t know there were other types. [LAUGHTER] So you come to America and you see, like 19 labels in the grocery, but of course, because of that, that’s kind of the tea I like the most, because that’s just what I was used to. So when I do see it, I like to have it. I’m not a big tea drinker. Oh, that sounds like sacrilege to the podcast, but when I do drink tea, that’s sort of my preference, and it’s just maybe kind of a nostalgia thing. So that’s what I had.

Rebecca: That makes sense.

John: I have a tea which is new to me. It is a black tea with cherry from one of Rebecca’s local tea shops, and I forgot the name. I had to rush here from a meeting, so I didn’t get a chance to jot down the name. But it’s delicious.

Rebecca: Oh, I’m glad you enjoyed it. I’ve mentioned it before. I think the smell of the cherry teas are really good, which enticed me to buy them. And then I discovered I like, absolutely hate the flavor of cherry teas.[LAUGHTER] And so I gifted them all to John because he likes them. I have just a Scottish afternoon tea today. John.

John: Very good.

Rebecca: Nice and plain, without any cherries. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your work on inclusive teaching. Could you tell us a bit about how inclusive teaching has become a substantial focus of your work?

Bryan: Yeah, so it’s a good question to answer, because, how do I put this? I actually don’t think it has. It has, but it hasn’t. Let me explain why. I do talk about inclusive teaching a lot, but the real focus of my work is education that is designed in a way that everyone can access it, and when they access it, they can be their best selves in that experience. And when they are their best selves, then they become this really engaged, loving, thriving participants in an evolving democracy. That in three sentences, if that was three sentences, that’s the thing we are trying to unpack as a group, not just through research, but through communication, through professional development. And so the inclusive part is a step towards that big a goal, because for the thriving to happen, for the access to happen, we have to sort of figure out, what are the barriers that are currently present that don’t allow people to be their best selves when they’re in a classroom, that don’t allow students to access certain institutions, that don’t allow them, even when they do access them, to graduate with the kind of credentials and the kind of mindsets and ways of knowing, ways of being, that allow them to understand how crucial it is for them to be engaged participants in a democracy. So inclusion is part of the riddles that we are trying to solve, but it’s not the end point, and to that extent, we have written a lot about it, I’ve talked a lot about it, but I think it’s important for people to know that our goals are bigger than that, without diminishing inclusive work, our goals are much bigger than that.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about your work in the STEM Transformational Institute in particular? I think it’s interesting in that role, how the role of democracy in your work, in moving democracy forward, fits into STEM because we don’t always hear those in the same sentence,

Bryan: Yeah. Well, yeah, or never, right? So I think that there’s two questions you’re actually answering. So I’ll talk about the institute first. It’s a pretty remarkable group. I’m one of several fascinating individuals who work here on the faculty side. Many of us, like myself, have a departmental appointment, whether it’s biology, engineering, physics, math, chemistry, and some other percentage of our appointment is with the Institute. What that allows is most… all of us, actually… were trained in some STEM discipline at the undergrad and PhD level. And so we can teach the classes. We can teach basic science classes. We can think about that ecosystem and that culture, right? Biology culture, physics culture, but discipline-based education research compared to other fields of research in biology, physics, or any of the above is relatively recent. And I think there is an understandable challenge of traditional STEM scientists in understanding and evaluating the kind of work that people like myself do. And so having a place like the STEM Transformation Institute creates several things. Number one, a community, for those of us who are thinking about education research in STEM to collaborate, to be in community, to ask questions, to write grants together. But also, there’s a mechanism for us when we kind of go through the ladder process for the STEM transformation Institute, to contribute some kind of understanding, to put all packages in perspective. Obviously, when you have this amount of faculty, and I think it’s maybe 20 of us, I can’t remember the exact number, some economies of scale benefits come with that. And so you can write bigger grants, because you have the intellectual capital there, you can have much more collaboration across the different STEM disciplines and with non-STEM disciplines. And then the Institute also has a unit called FIUTeach, which mainly focuses on training pre-service STEM teachers, a pretty robust, maybe the nation’s largest learning assistant program, undergraduate learning assistant program. And there might be some other pieces to it, but those are kind of the three things we tend to be known for on campus. So now, pivoting to your question about STEM and democracy, without taking up your whole podcast [LAUGHTER] giving a history lesson on Enlightenment thinking, the STEM instruction that we are seeing in classrooms today is really a product of maybe, I would say, a mix of the post-World War Two US higher ed-government alliance that kind of proliferated at that time, and the Humboldtian model of graduate education that became popular in the early 1900s. I think John Hopkins may have been the first place that some of that started and then some of the Sputnik-era stuff. And so the way too superficial summary of it is, if you were trained as a subject matter expert in STEM, your role in class was basically to tell people stuff. It wasn’t, perhaps said explicitly, but you were a big gatekeeper to that information. Because, remember, there was no World Wide Web, there was no Google search. In some cases, there wasn’t even really a lot of textbooks, right? And if there were, prohibitively expensive. So the only way you got to find out how big the glaciers were in in the Arctic was to hear the person who got on the boat to go there to talk about it. And there’s some other pieces to it. And I would encourage listeners to read the book Amateur Hour by Robert Zimmerman, because it’s discussed way more specifically and way better than I’m describing it, but there was some gender dynamics to this, because remember the normal schools that existed in the 60s and 70s, and who were the faculty there, and then, because of that association, how college faculty felt about teaching as a skill in and of itself. So there’s a brief period where there was some discussions about college professors getting trained. That died. [LAUGHTER] That didn’t last very long. So okay, I’m saying all of that to perhaps take us even further back to the role that Enlightenment thinking played in the Declaration of Independence, and more specifically, the influence that Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, in particular, who wrote Treatises of Government played an influence in Thomas Jefferson and some of the language that you see in the Declaration of Independence, and I’m thinking of one line in particular: “We submit these truths” to “a candid world…” Book recommendation: Jill Leporie These Truths, some of this is me interpreting her writing. It’s basically kind of saying, Look, man, we have these 13 colonies, we’re gonna try this out. We’re not gonna get everything right. We’ll see what happens and we’re gonna have to keep working at this. And in the same way, the scientific method and Enlightenment thinking comes with some expectations of critique, self critique, public critique, falsification, seeing new evidence and changing your mind on things and all of the above moving towards the sense of whatever you’re trying to understand. It improves over time because you are willing to keep refining and refining and refining. So in so doing, STEM, or specifically, science, has so much to teach us as citizens of a nation that is constantly trying to improve and what an improvement process looks like from a social perspective. And this is what I tell students: same when you collect data and okay, right now, it seems like you can’t disprove your knowledge, however you want to put that, but somebody’s going to come across and collect different data and critique those assumptions and improve on your methods. And that’s how we have vaccines that could be made in like two hours now, right? I mean, I’m exaggerating. So that same humility you have to display when you approach your intellectual pursuit is the same humility that I’m asking you to think about when you are in the public domain, when you are at church, when you are listening to news, when you are making consumer purchases, when you are listening to information come across your television. When you have to absorb all of the endless data that exists out there, that same critical mindset, but also mindset of humility that we ask of you in this culture of science and the culture of STEM, that has transferable lessons to other parts of how you live your life. And I think it’s a very under discussed component of STEM teaching, of how just STEM itself and science itself, the practice of science, is discussed with students. And I guess, Rebecca, what I’m basically said to you in five minutes is that we lean heavily into it, right? We talk about these things openly.

Rebecca: That’s great.

John: And we’re living in a world where we do need an informed citizenry, because there’s so many sources of information out there that are not so reliable, and the development of those critical thinking skills are incredibly important right now, given all the various sources of misinformation.

Bryan: And part of it too is I’m only… I don’t know if I should say only… but I’m 44, so I’m old enough to have grown up in a time when you had to go to an internet cafe to check your email for $20 an hour. We lived through this just remarkable transition of information ubiquity. I mean, I had a Encyclopedia Britannica set from A to Z like my mom used to joke with me, I would read it like a book. That’s how nerdy I was, right? And I remember looking at those 18 books or whatever, and thinking like, how much information is in here. You have that times infinity at the click of a button. I would just wonder, if we don’t pause long enough to reflect on what a sea change that is in terms of having easy and quick access to information. Now, that’s not the same thing as having knowledge. [LAUGHTER] So now the challenge has shifted. So if maybe initially it was being able to access that information and knowing all of the beautiful things that is happening around the world, now it’s how do you sift from all of this to pick out the information that’s useful, that’s credible, that’s reliable, that’s truthful. And I think our teaching and the way we think about teaching needs to shift with that. I don’t know, man, sometimes John, Rebecca, I have all due respect for online classes, this is not like a for or against, but I’ve always taught in person throughout my career, and I just absolutely love it. But as a commodity, and using the class that I teach a lot, intro bio, all of the learning outcomes I have in my syllabus, all of them, you can find a very good lecture on YouTube for free. You’re not gonna find maybe the test bank and all that. I get it, all of that, right? So in terms of accessing the information that we talk about in the class, the tuition and the three credits, and Bryan Dewsbury, I’m not a buyer. You just need a laptop and good working internet. So what is the added value I provide? What’s the added value that the institution provides by asking you to fork over a tuition check and housing and gas money to get to campus and all of that stuff, to physically be here. And I’m really curious, just as a thought experiment, if you were to put that question to all instructors, what will we say? What can we honestly say? Maybe 10,15, 20 years ago, you would say, “Well, how else would they know how DNA replicates? [LAUGHTER] I got a PhD in DNA, so therefore I have the right to tell you, right?” But I don’t think that argument holds as much water anymore, any water. And that, to me, is not perhaps the challenge, is the opportunity of the new information landscape.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that you bring up the encyclopedia in that kind of curated experience, but there’s also curated experiences online. Sometimes it’s hard to find those curated experiences to know that something’s of good quality, but even if it’s a curated experience, and even if it’s an inexpensive or free experience, you still have to have the motivation and the determination and the context, maybe, to put the pieces together to kind of figure it out on your own. [LAUGHTER] If you have something on the side, like you’re trying to do. How many of us have tried to sit and learn and do something on your own? I’ve been sitting and trying to crochet in the round in the evening, and I sometimes get frustrated using a video. [LAUGHTER] I want someone to show me how to do it, like, sit there and I can ask questions, and I want it to be interactive. This is just one example of just a thing that you want to learn from a person and have a dialog and be able to troubleshoot and have someone’s expertise to work through. And you think about the opportunity that you have as a faculty member to curate experience with readings and activities and classroom experiences, and then faculty maybe complain that students don’t engage in that full experience, and sometimes it’s because students can’t quite figure out what’s relevant to the next step or whatever. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways that you might connect those assignments or other things that you’re doing in your classes to give students that relevance, or to actually answer your own question, like, what is it that we’re doing in our classes that give the students the reason why to come to class or why to do this experience, as opposed to do it on the side?

Bryan: Yeah, great question. Rebecca. So I’ll give you three examples that address your question, perhaps in slightly different ways. To me, another way of asking your question is when we do something in a class or when we have things in our syllabus or curriculum, why is it worth doing? That is a fair question for somebody, especially at the prices college is asking students to pay. That is a fair question to ask. And there are perhaps too many situations, maybe not intentionally, where there is an implicit eat your vegetables approach in that, “because I said it’s worth doing,” right? Like I have the great book, and I’m the PhD, and it’s worth doing, and so therefore you should believe. And I think my first part of my answer to you is to make that “why” more explicit. So we start the class not even talking about bio. First assignment is a reflection assignment that I shamelessly stole from National Public Radio called “This I Believe,” it’s on, it’s a public website, it’s: thisIbelieve.org/guidelines and the prompt asks… I’m summarizing here: “Describe the values that shape your deepest passion.” Before we get into anything technical. I want us to start this community by reflecting on what your why is, because your why, if you understand that clearly, or if you at least begin the mental process of exploring that, that is a big of why you’ll be motivated to be your best self, pursuing the technical piece. This could have easily been, you show up and I give you a bunch of materials, you show me if you know it or you don’t know it, and move on. But forcing you to really ask: “Well, why pre med? Why medicine? There’s so many things you could be doing in biology. There’s so many other great things you can be doing with all the other majors in this school. Why that choice?” So that sort of begins a very particular kind of conversation, because I expressed them my why and why I chose to be a professor, and why that was exciting to me, and why I love this class and love them. The second thing is, when we’re doing certain activities, regardless of what the subject matter is, they are implicit behaviors in how you do a technical task and get a solution that I think in a lot of times in a lot of teaching approaches, it happens as a function of the class, but it’s not made explicit that those behaviors are very important skills that you should be developing as you go forth as a technical expert. So when you put students in groups, for example, it might make things easier to grade, because now you’re just doing x divided by four or whatever assignment, there’s that piece. And I understand, like, you know, what the active learning literature says about group work and things like that, but what you’re really doing, my friends, is you’re teaching people how to work with difference. If you set those groups up right, If you talk about what positive group behaviors look like, what implicit biases look like, you are preparing them for a world of work, a world of engagement, where they will be in one type of group or the other. I can’t think of a profession… well, I could think of one, but not that many… where you will essentially be solo and so some of those group behaviors that really makes group work effective, like active listening, respecting silence, by hearing different opinions, being willing to accept critique, being able to give respectful critique. We have whole discussions about what that’s like and why it’s important. So it’s not just going to groups, and we hope everything works out. It’s going to groups, and this is a thing, and in order for this thing to go, well, let’s actually have a discussion about why that thing matters. The third part of my answer is, at selected points in the semester we try to make, or not try, we make very clear the ways in which scientific practice intersects with society. And this is where I think people get a little confused, perhaps, about what we mean by inclusive or equity-minded teaching. I remember once I saw on Twitter, and I know Twitter is what it is, right? But somebody put a statement that said, what is so inclusive about the mass of boron? [LAUGHTER] And I get where they’re coming from. I get why they would say that, but it, of course, betrays a misunderstanding of what we mean when we talk about inclusion in a classroom, there’s a lot of technical things that we discuss in an intro bio class, and not everything we talk about, we sort of bend over backwards to then relate it back to some social context. But there are things that do allow themselves to make that connection very, very clear. And the connection basically comes down to: science doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Science is done by people, and the people is human beings who ask those questions. Human beings ask those questions, and human beings decide which questions to ask. They decide which questions are the important questions to ask. They decide when they ask those questions, and they carry out studies, they decide how those studies are conducted. And they don’t only decide how those studies are conducted, they interpret what data they collect from those studies, and they write the narrative that comes out of that analysis, that comes out of that interpretation. This is not to demonize any particular individual who does anything on any one of those steps, but it is to point out the reality that since the bridge between the existence of nature and life and life science and our understanding of how this works, if the bridge is the human being or human beings plural, who help us to understand that, then by definition, the social positioning of that individual, of those individuals, may sometimes color how we come to understand the world as a collective. And we have slight examples of this: that they took, what 10, 15, years to ask what female chimpanzees did, because only men were in the field, right? And then we have very, very dark examples of this when we thought eugenics was a real thing and we were sterilizing disabled people in North Carolina. So throughout history and even today, we are saying to students that you will go forth to be some wonderful whatever you plan to be, whether it’s medical doctors, whether it’s health professionals, public health, whether it’s research scientists, whatever it is. And there will come a time when you will be a decision maker. You will be the one they come to to try to understand, how do we reduce COVID rates? How do we keep people safe? And when you get this, it’s important for you to understand that COVID doesn’t care who it infects, the differential rates of deaths and the differential rates of infection is not because the virus itself made that differentiation. It is simply following a pathway that was already constructed along social lines. And so if you really want to get at the root of the problem, you have to understand how those social lines were constructed. I’m not saying you have to get a PhD in Sociology, but I’m saying I have to know enough to be dangerous. And so that’s the argument that’s made to talk about Flint, Michigan when we talk about the effect of lead on the nervous system. That’s the argument we make to talk about Tuskegee when we talk about the study that took place there. And it’s not to say, and this differentiation is important, This is not to just say that “Hey man, America is a terrible place. We’ve done some really terrible things.” I mean, we have done some terrible things in history, but what the goal of that discussion is to say “but we can learn. We can do better.” We have examples of looking back and saying “That was a mistake.” As a social science researcher, every study I do, I apply for Institutional Review Board approval because those things happened. It’s unfortunate that those things had to happen, but now we know better. So it’s important that that piece is there because sometimes, unfortunately, the narrative or the interpretation of having these discussions is you’re just trying to make people feel bad. You’re just trying to make America to be this terrible place. And no, no, it’s a great place, because of the capacity to learn. So anyway, I hope that answers. Those are the three parts all woven together, Rebecca. I hope that’s fine.

Rebecca: Thank you.

John: So. much of what you’re discussing there is just finding ways of helping students connect what you’re teaching in classes to their own lived experiences, rather than just seeing it as this isolated material separate from the societal context in which it exists?

Bryan: Yes. Yes would be the short answer to that. And just to get into the specifics, right? I mean, I think sometimes a listener might hear like, “Okay, now do I have to go and find out every single student’s life specifics and find something that connects to that? And again, I’m not saying that that’s what you have to do. I think it’s good, and I appreciate that some people have very large class sizes, so sometimes some of these strategies can become overwhelming, depending on what your load is. But there are low-lift ways to get a sense of who your students are, where they’re coming from, what was the class they took before yours? If you’re at an institution where there’s sort of a very set matriculation pathway. If most of them are coming from local high schools, there are ways for you to get at least a summarized sense of the students that you teach. The other piece to it, though, is not just like, what’s your community, let me make it relevant. The classroom is also a place where you hopefully get introduced to an understanding of the world that you may not have encountered had you not come to that classroom. Part of the beauty of teaching is the ways in which we open students up to new experiences, new ways of thinking, including ways that may challenge the ideologies and ways that they had before they walked in the door. I’m not saying that this is what you were doing, John, but sometimes people think about culturally relevant teaching, and it gets trapped in a “if you’re from this neighborhood, let me talk about this neighborhood.” It’s like, well, no, it’s way more than that. It’s way more than that. One of the blessings of a country like this is the amount of diversity there is across so many lines, and you need to have to physically live next to the diversity, to know and learn and appreciate and just see its beauty. This is another place that college does it just through the classes, through texts, through learning, through studying, through inquiry, you learn more and more about the world and yourself. So it’s a little bit of both.

Rebecca: Along the same lines, one of the great things about being a faculty member is that same thing, that the students bring some really great experiences that we haven’t had either, and allowing them to bring their stories and experiences into the classroom allows us to continue to grow and learn on a constant basis too. It’s great when they can bring those things too.

Bryan: I mean, especially when you grew up going to internet cafes to use the internet. At this point, they’re coming in with high-speed computers in their pockets, right? [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah.

Bryan: They grew up in a completely different environment. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So you started off explaining how you get to know your students a little bit at the beginning, you start not even talking about biology in a bio class. Can you talk a little bit, maybe further down the line in the same class, and how civic engagement may enter into that same course later down the line?

Bryan: Yeah, so and this, you can perhaps consider this more social context than civic engagement, but I just so love this assignment and love the kind of discussions that come from it. We talk a lot in bio class about DNA as a molecule and all of that stuff, and it’s chemical structure. But we also spent some time talking about what led to the discovery of DNA. It’s a fascinating story. It’s a story about a time when there were not that many high-resourced labs in science. And so you can look up the book Double Helix, if you want to get a fairly brief version of it. But there’s also a story where if you were a woman in science, how the community responded to you, was very different to how they do now, although they’re pretty well documented cases where, not in all cases, that have changed, right? And so it does open up a conversation. First, we talk about the lack of credit that Rosalind Franklin initially did not get, but then we also talk about where we are now. There’s a really good documentary called Picture a Scientist solely focused on that issue, and we have discussions about why those things matter, and the role that power and hierarchies and power dynamics play in the experiences that people have. And I really want to emphasize, this is not to say I’m preparing you for a doom and gloom world and everything will be terrible. I’m preparing you for reality. And the reality is, I certainly wish for you a lot of great experiences, and I think you will mostly have that. But the reality is there’s still a lot of work to be done for us to get to the place of equity that we claim we have, [LAUGHTER] and the discussion of the gap between what we think we have and where we need to be is really my invitation to you to help work on that problem, but also to be aware of what may come when you get there. And I hope listeners take my comments in that spirit. So to the extent, Rebecca, that’s sort of an example of what you might encounter when you get out there in society. That’s one example of a conversation that takes place.

John: In addition to the issue of trying to make STEM classes more engaging for students, one of the problems that we see is that there’s some pretty significant differences between the DFW rates for first-gen students, for Pell eligible students, and students from historically minoritized groups, which is tied to differences, in large part, in the quality of education that they receive, and that serves as a barrier where many students enter into college planning to go into a STEM field, but end up not being as successful and then either transferring into other disciplines or leaving college altogether. What are some ways in which we can overcome the opportunity gaps that students face if they haven’t come in with as strong of a preparation for success in STEM?

Bryan: So a couple years ago, I published a paper about inclusive teaching methods and active learning methods, and a big crux of that paper, we talked a lot in the paper about what we did in the class and how much we cut content to really focus in on this sort of very social relationship-driven model of teaching. And in that paper, we not only reduced the DFW rates that you just described, John, but also when that group went on to future classes, they did fine, not just fine, they actually did better comparatively to peers from other sections. And some people, perhaps who hadn’t read the paper yet, kind of assumed that when we said everybody did fine, it meant everybody got As. And that is not the truth. We have a pretty high pass rate, but the class size average over the years that I taught it was in the 150s, it was a large class, and then maybe 10 or 15 years, there wasn’t a ton of students who… we had a very diffuse assessment model, a lot of quizzes, a lot of case studies and other stuff like that. And so what I’m saying that to say is that I don’t want people to feel that, for students who may come into your institution, who had 18 years of a social structure that wasn’t set up to engineer the best out of them. It is very difficult to right all those wrongs with one semester of an intro class. Now, at the same time, I can hold multiple truths in the same conversation, it is all well and good. In fact, this is just my personal belief, I don’t know if everybody shares it. I do believe, no matter what your circumstances are, even if they were really terrible, that within you there’s your potential to be great at science. There’s a potential to be great at biology. The question then becomes, given all of that history, what is needed to get you to a place where you can see that and take the reins of the chariot and go be your best self. And sometimes that may mean half of that first semester. Sometimes that may mean two semesters of Cs or failing a class and coming back. But the important thing is, I start from a place of the potential is there. I don’t know when the light will start to shine, but I’ve been doing this job for now almost 11 years, and I’ve been with students It took years for that light to switch. So what would happen, I can just tell you, on the ground with that intro bio class, for some of them that turn around point came like nine weeks in, and it’s one of the most satisfying and gratifying experiences as a teacher. When you see that student is like, “Ah, it’s not that bad.” And of course, by that time, there isn’t enough assessment for them to magically get an A between mid-October and December, but they might get to C plus, might get to B minus. They have to really nail a bunch of stuff. But here’s the difference, when they start the second semester, not with me, when they start the second semester of the institution, your now a different person. You’re not the same person who came in first year not sure of yourself, not confident, didn’t think you belonged in science, had a fixed mindset about math and all of that stuff. No, no, no. Now you know, yes, if I have the right strategies, I have proven to myself, and some of this is coming straight from motivation theory. I have evidence that if I take the right approach, good things will happen. And that’s why I brought up this paper. That’s why those C pluses in first semester turn into As in their second semester, because you’re not dealing with the same student. So that in a nutshell, is my lesson, in that there’s a whole discussion to be had about primary and secondary education. There are brilliant people having those discussions, read everything. Diane Ravitch writes, that’s a whole discussion we need to have in this country. There is also a role that institutions of higher education can play in that discussion, but specific to people who are privileged to teach classes, especially at the introductory level, that to me is a mindset I would like to have, assume the best, assume that it’s there, and know that the work that to teach, if I had to define teaching, to teach, is a degree to which you can walk a student from their current state of readiness to that place where they see what their potential can really be. That, to me, is the act of teaching, the content is part of the mechanism of the vehicle that drives that process. But teaching is a process, and that’s the process,

John: So encouraging a growth mindset is really critical to this process, it would seem. But the other thing is, you’d have to design your course in a way where you can’t use too many high-stakes assessments, especially early on where students could get deterred. You need to provide some mechanism so that students can, by the end of the class, get those Bs or C pluses and so forth, right?

Bryan: So, yeah, I mentioned earlier in this conversation a diffuse assessment model, right? And that’s done on purpose. So the psychology behind the high-stakes assessment, especially ones that are early. If it’s super high stakes and very early and they don’t do well a couple issues: One, mathematically, it makes recovery very difficult, you’re already down to a B minus after exam 1, you don’t have much wiggle room to even pass the class; the second thing is, and this is why I like to talk about teaching as a process and a relationship, because there’s a psychology to it… there’s a psychology that you need to understand, especially with first-year students, and what it means to transition into this environment. We don’t have enough time on this podcast today to summarize all the literature on emerging adulthood, on sense of belonging, on John Henryism, that all these things that are invisible, that are in the air and that even the students themselves may not be able to articulate, but it’s happening. And so what it means to be a teacher and be able to read the subtitles and see how certain behaviors are indicative of some of those processes happening, that’s the challenge. So your high-stakes exam, especially that first one, could be simply measuring the presence of those psychologies, not actual ability, not actual learning. You can just be capturing the fact that somebody is scared to death. You could be capturing the fact that somebody is carrying the weight of a generation at home and you must be a doctor, you must be this, you must be that. And that’s high stakes. This is playing out on that exam. They’re never going to say it to you that way, but it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. [LAUGHTER] And so part of the diffuse assessment model is to say, “Look, I am going to do my best to design assessments that accurately reflect learning, and the stakes are going to be high enough that I think you will take this seriously. But the goal of these assessments is to provide both of us, myself and you, the student, information that gives us some sense of where you are in this learning journey. And when we get that information, depending on what it says, we can have a discussion. We can have a specific discussion.” And I can say things like you do really well on recall questions, but you seem to struggle when I say explain. You have all of the language of this process in there, but it’s actually not coming together as a story. I can give you feedback that’s very, very specific, because with the sort of fixed/growth mindset dichotomy, giving you things that are changeable is what gives you an opportunity, it gives you an avenue to change your behavior. If I just said you need to try hard, what does that even mean? So I hope I’ve been underscoring the deliberateness of everything, everything, even from the way feedback is given, to how and why we set up exams in certain ways and how much we do. It’s all based on, again, this philosophy of teaching is a process.

Rebecca: I think we often use the word specific and say specific all the time, but you’ve just illustrated what you mean by specific, which is really helpful. So it’s really fun to talk, and we could talk forever and ever and ever, because there’s lots of fun things to talk about, and you’re teaching such interesting classes in interesting ways. But one thing we want to make sure we get to before we wrap up today is the asynchronous class that you’ve developed on inclusive teaching. Can you talk a little bit about this course and who the target audience is?

Bryan: Yeah, so this course was a collaboration between my program and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Biointeractive Program. It is based on a paper I wrote back in 2019 called “Deep Teaching in STEM.” The secret is that, yes, it says STEM because it went to a STEM journal, but the things we talk about in that paper really applies to all teaching. The other secret is that there’s nothing in that paper that’s particularly new. It’s just that we in STEM had ignored it for so long, and so perhaps that’s why we felt a need to re-center some of those ideas that, oh, by the way, it might be good to build relationships with your students and know who they are as people, and not just treat them as student ID numbers that need a grade. So that paper talked about five components that goes into what we call deep teaching, and those components then came to represent a module on that massive open online course. One of the key features of that course we wanted to really model was the very sort of introspective, spiritual, even soulful, way we think about teaching and we are asking listeners and participants in that course to be reflective. We wanted to model that in how the course itself was delivered. So we were very selective in who we asked to guest lecture, and the nine lectures are very, very long. We’ve infused at the end of each module. So there’s a main module, and there’s sort of four sub-modules that represent each component. Every main module, one of the sub-modules is an artistic piece. So we commissioned a painting. We had poetry, spoken word, even a Negro spiritual, and it was not random. They all thematically connected to what the module is talking about. And it was built in a Canvas shell, which is, as a MOOC, it’s free for anybody to access. But also what we’ve done is we’ve been working with a lot of universities who uploaded it onto their own Canvas shells and running faculty learning communities with a local facilitator going through the LMS. And the course has many practical, specific things. You want to think of a reflection in your course, here are some examples of prompts. So you want to have more transparency in your assignment, consider Mary-Ann Winkelmes’s framework. But what it also has, especially because of the nature of the way the course was set up, just a lot of moments for reflection. We didn’t want it to feel like a worksheet. You just go through this, do that. Go through this, do that. Like, when you hear somebody talk about motivation, like, think about when you were motivated, what made you motivated, and sit with that reflection, because that sort of empathetic approach is what really is going to make the course impactful for you. There are many 1000s of people who’ve just done it by themselves and have found a lot of meaning for it, but we’re really having a lot of fun seeing universities do it as a FLC on their campus. So that’s a nutshell. I think the web name is a little long for me to remember, but I know if you just Google inclusive teaching biointeractive, it should be the first thing that pops up.

John: And we’ll include a link to it in the show notes as well. I see that you have two books coming out in a little over the next year. Could you talk a little bit about those?

Bryan: Yeah, so it’s actually three, but one is not in the next year, right? So the two that I’m working on, one I’ve been collaborating with just a wonderful group, Peter Felton, Isis Artze-Vega, Dan Bergen, and Leo Lambert. Leo nd Peter wrote a book a few years ago called Relationship-Rich Education, which is just phenomenal, and that has led to a few follow ups. So we’re working on one of the follow ups to that project, so more details on that soon when that’s a bit further along. The other book, I’ve been collaborating with a colleague on campus. We’ve been interviewing people about telling personal stories, about times when they either felt a sense of belonging or have not felt a sense of belonging in STEM, and as somebody who comes from a storytelling background, from a literature background, the use of this discipline and this art form and this communication style, I think, is an underused approach in science in general, especially when you’re trying to convey something like that. And so I’m just very grateful for those people who’ve been willing to share their stories with us. So that will come on as an anthology, and, I guess dates TBD, but pretty excited about it.

Rebecca: Those both sound like really exciting projects. So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Bryan: Well, I would say what’s next, like my most sort of next next, so I’ve been part of a group, a Gates Foundation funded group that has worked pretty hard over the last couple of years doing a landscape analysis that trying to identify what are some of the things that institutions around the country are doing to do equity-minded practices, especially in the intro classes. And that landscape analysis incorporated a lot of things like document analysis, interviews, data mining, and things like that, and we are launching the findings of our analysis as a report on October 25 in Washington, DC, at FIU, in DC’s campus there. It’ll be a free report. Obviously, there’ll be a Zoom link for anybody who wants to attend, and the report will be made available on our website. And we’re pretty excited about it, because there just is a lot of institutions doing great things out there. And to this point, we hadn’t seen a place where those great things were just collated in one place. And the obvious next step from this project is to take those great practices and say, “Okay, now that we know what’s good and who’s doing it, and how it’s worked, where they were, can these things all simultaneously exist in one institution? Can we learn from all of these best practices and say, if we have a goal of success for all on our campus, this is a place where we can look to to get some real both like comprehensive but specific ideas on how to make that happen. So that’s October 25 and pretty excited for that launch.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting.

John: And we’re looking forward to hearing more about these books once they are ready to come out. Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you again, and we look forward to more conversations in the future.

Bryan: John, it’s always a pleasure. Hopefully next time in Oswego.

John: That would be great. [LAUGHTER]

Bryan: Alright, man, thank you.

John: Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you.

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

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

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362. Teaching Digital Storytelling

Posted in active learning, authentic learning, collaborative learning, critical thinking, engagement, equity, higher education, inclusion, information literacy, international collaboration, learning, metaliteracy, online learning, open pedagogy, pedagogy, storytelling, teaching
October 9, 2024

Digital storytelling provides students the opportunity to bring their lived experiences into the classroom as creators rather than consumers of knowledge. In this episode, Tom Mackey and Sheila Aird join us to discuss ways digital storytelling can be used to increase student information literacy, critical thinking skills, and to support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Tom is a Professor of Arts and Media and Program Coordinator for the BA and BS degrees in Digital Media Arts at SUNY Empire State University. He is the recipient of a 2022 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities and the recipient of several other awards for his teaching and mentoring work. Tom is also the co-author of several books and two MOOCs that focus on metaliteracy. Sheila is an Associate Professor and European Director of International Programs at SUNY’s Empire State University in Prague, in the Czech Republic. Her work broadly focuses on cultural history and public scholarship with a particular focus on public history, pop culture, children of colonial enslavement, and issues of race in the African Diaspora community. Sheila has presented her work in many domestic and international venues and has co-authored two papers with Tom. Sheila and Tom are the co-editors of the new book, Teaching Digital Storytelling: Inspiring Voices through Online Narratives, published in 2024 by Rowman and Littlefield. They also co-authored the framing chapter for this volume based on their collaborative development and teaching of Digital Storytelling as a virtual exchange between SUNY Empire students studying in Prague and the United States.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

Aird, Sheila Marie, and Thomas P,. Mackey, eds. (2024). Teaching Digital Storytelling: Inspiring Voices through Online Narratives. Rowman and Littlefield.
Tom Mackey and Trudi Jacobson. (2018). Metaliteracy. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 52.
Global Stories blog
Virtual Museum
Metaliteracy.org blog
StoryCorps
StoryCenter
Animation Block Party
OpenAI
StoryCenter Ethical Practice (contains StoryTellers’ Bill of Rights on pages 7-8.)

Transcript

John: Digital storytelling provides students the opportunity to bring their lived experiences into the classroom as creators rather than consumers of knowledge. In this episode, we discuss ways digital storytelling can be used to increase student information literacy, critical thinking skills, and to support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

[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 Tom Mackey and Sheila Aird. Tom is a Professor of Arts and Media and Program Coordinator for the BA and BS degrees in Digital Media Arts at SUNY Empire State University. He is the recipient of a 2022 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities and the recipient of several other awards for his teaching and mentoring work. Tom is also the co-author of several books and two MOOCs that focus on metaliteracy. Sheila is an Associate Professor and European Director of International Programs at SUNY’s Empire State University in Prague, in the Czech Republic. Her work broadly focuses on cultural history and public scholarship with a particular focus on public history, pop culture, children of colonial enslavement, and issues of race in the African Diaspora community. Sheila has presented her work in many domestic and international venues and has co-authored two papers with Tom. Sheila and Tom are the co-editors of the new book, Teaching Digital Storytelling: Inspiring Voices through Online Narratives, published in 2024 by Rowman and Littlefield. They also co-authored the framing chapter for this volume based on their collaborative development and teaching of Digital Storytelling as a virtual exchange between SUNY Empire students studying in Prague and the United States. Welcome Sheila, and welcome back, Tom.

Sheila: Thank you.

Tom: Thanks so much. So happy to be here. Appreciate the interest in our new book.

Sheila: Absolutely.

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

Tom: I sure am. So, I’m drinking Celestial Seasonings Tangerine Orange, Zinger.

Rebecca: Nice. And how about you, Sheila?

Sheila: I am drinking hibiscus tea in a Starbucks cup, but that’s okay.

John: And I am drinking lady gray tea in a SUNY- Oswego School of Education mug, which was given to us when we moved into this new recording space by the dean of the school.

Sheila: Nice.

Tom: Great.

Rebecca: We’re enjoying our nice space here, for sure, and I have a nice cup of Hunan jig, which I brewed this morning.

Sheila: Great.

Tom: That’s great.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss your new book. But first, could you talk a little bit about what a digital story is? How would you define this?

Tom: Well, the idea of a digital story is that anyone with access to digital resources can really write, plan and produce their own personal narratives. So this is an idea that’s been around now for, I would say, a few decades, and there’s been a lot of interest in this, but it really is about being able to tell your story using digital technologies. And the idea, too, is that you don’t have to have the most expensive tools to do that, these could be freely available tools that are online, and, again, really empower people to tell their story.

Sheila: Absolutely, and as Tom said, today, since we’re so technologically connected, anyone with a cell phone, and we know that through some of the things that are coming through social media and people creating narratives and developing narratives, but in this particular instance, this is about teaching students how to not only use their cell phones, but introducing them to free and different editing software and going through steps in order to come out with a finished product.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how your book, Teaching Digital Storytelling, came to be?

Sheila: The back story is Tom and I both were teaching digital storytelling in our own sections. While in Europe, we came up with the idea to bring the students that were in Europe into the learning environment with the students that were in the U.S. So that was how he and I started working together and creating an environment for the students to work together, which we thought was brilliant, because we just think that… you’re an academic, you just think like, “oh, that’s a brilliant idea.” [LAUGHTER] And so we worked it through both with the Executive Director of International Programs, Francesca Cichello, and she was very happy about our ideas. So Tom and I worked feverishly to create the course. And while doing the course, we were also writing some articles. And then one day, Tom really came up with the idea and said it would be good for us to put together scholars from all over the world in this book. And it was particularly perfect since we were working with students in Europe as well as the US, it made sense to have an international perspective. Tom can go a little further on how that worked, but that’s the initial way that we started the conversation to create the book.

Tom: And that’s perfectly stated. That’s really how it happened. And it is interesting that this idea of a collaboration between the two of us then really launched the idea of the book, which was also really supporting collaboration, focused on teaching digital storytelling. So this course we’ve both been excited about as Sheila mentioned. We’ve both taught it individually. It’s really a legacy course that’s been a part of the online program for many years at Empire State University. And I think having that experience of teaching it together and thinking about how to revise the course, or this virtual exchange between Prague and the United States, had a lot to do with how the ideas developed. It’s interesting that when we got together and we decided to do this, again, virtually, a fully online course, we really took a close look at it, and I know we’ll be talking about metaliteracy later on, probably, but I do want to point out that we really did a really full revision of the course for this particular exchange, so that the core of it is still there. But even though I’ve been doing all this work with metaliteracy. Sheila said, we really need to build more of those metaliteracy ideas into it. And the idea of a metaliteracy is that students are reflective. They see themselves as producers of information. So that alignment between metaliteracy and the course really worked out perfectly. So we revised several of the core assignments in the course to build more of the metaliteracy components in it so that students could, not only participate in this virtual exchange between Europe and the US, but they also were able to think about themselves as metaliterate learners through this experience. So that was a key point too in the book is that when we decided to do the book, it was building this collaboration. We were hoping really to get interest from authors from around the world, which is what we ended up with, which we’ll talk about too. So we’re very excited that it has that international component, which was key to our experience. But we also asked all of the authors to really look at their experience teaching digital storytelling from around the world through the lens of metaliteracy. So some of them may have already been familiar with meta literacy if they were not. This provided them with an opportunity to look at their own teaching through that particular perspective, which I think also contributes to really what we have here with this book, Teaching Digital Storytelling.

John: We’ve discussed metaliteracy on an earlier podcast with Tom and Trudi Jacobson, and we will share a link to that in the show notes. But could you redefine for those listeners who don’t remember that episode or missed that episode, what metaliteracy is?

Tom: Sure, so I’ve been developing this idea of metaliteracy. And as you noted, this was really a full collaboration between me and Trudi Jacobson from the University of Albany, and we had been working together, really, for decades. And the idea originally started as this idea of reframing information literacy, so thinking about information literacy in a new way, and trying to move beyond just skills development, that is finding, locating, using information, which was an older definition, to really thinking about a meta literacy that’s more of a holistic, overarching, comprehensive framework that really encourages students to think about themselves as knowledge producers, specifically in the kinds of new environments that we’re in. When we first advanced the idea, it was thinking about social media, in particular, online communities that’s now evolved to the kinds of AI environments that we’re in, and specifically generative AI, and thinking about how Gen AI impacts the production experience. So no matter what environment a student is in, the idea is that they develop a metaliteracy mindset that prepares them for that information environment. That’s really important, because we know that these environments are always changing. And the AI experience, of course, is a really, kind of a revolutionary change in how we understand the production, distribution of information. AI is having an impact on all aspects of our life right now. So the idea, then, is that students think about themselves as producers of digital content, both individually and in collaboration with their peers. So that works perfectly for a course about digital storytelling where that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Rebecca: So the publication is part of the series of books on innovations and information literacy by series editor Trudi Jacobson, who we just mentioned. Can you talk a little bit about how the digital storytelling assignments helped to develop the student information literacy and metaliteracy skills that you’ve been talking about?

Tom: Sure, well, let me first say I really appreciate you mentioning that this is part of the larger series. And when we first brought the idea to Trudi Jacobsen, who I’ve been working with all these years, she loved the idea, so we really had her support, and then she was able to support us as we proposed this to Rowman and Littlefield. I also had this great opportunity to work with Charles Harmon, who I had worked with on several of my edited books with Trudi earlier in my career, so it’s really exciting to have that collaboration and to have Trudi’s support for this idea and how we revised it to include metaliteracy components.

Sheila: The course is staggered and in a structured way, to take students from step one, step two, to get through the process. Now with meta literacy, we found it because I love the whole idea of it, because I think that it puts students in a position to think about who they are in terms of not only a production, but even their learning ability. Are they more upfront? Are they more behind the scenes? How do they work within these different environments? So some of the things in meta literacy, like, do you prefer to work singularly? Do you want to work in a group? Are you more of a leader type? And so it makes the students delve into who they are in terms of a learner. And I think that is extremely important, because I think that part of teaching students who they are is oftentimes skipped in the educational and the learning environment, so to bring them in slowly, because, as we know students think, “Oh, digital storytelling, this is going to be a walk in the park.[LAUGHTER] I’m just going to do a little thing.” And that is so not what this course is about. So the first thing we have them do is a selfie, and in that selfie they can do it any way they want. And we got some really great stuff, because some students did anime, s ome students just sat in front of the camera. They were more comfortable with that. Other students did voice overs, and so it gave them an opportunity to create a hello to everyone in the course in any way they wanted to. So that’s an interesting thing, because usually, sometimes, students want to be told exactly what to do, and that’s not the case here. There are certain requirements, but you kind of have free reign to develop these narratives and stories however you wish. And believe me, we’ve had some interesting stories. So the selfies begin to connect them to the meta literacy framework. And Tom and I talked about this, wanted it in the very beginning of the course, because then that would inform how they went forward.

Tom: Absolutely, it’s really a great way to talk about that. And I really like the way, too, you mentioned that it’s making students aware of themselves as a learner, sort of that broader perspective. So we get them to do that right from the very beginning. The idea of a selfie too is everyone is familiar with the idea of taking a selfie picture. So the idea of a selfie video, I think it places them in a situation that they’re a little bit more comfortable with, that they kind of get what that is. They know what that is. So that means sure that they have to be on camera. But if they want to use an avatar, because some students don’t want to appear in front of the camera, that’s okay, they can start with the avatar. That first assignment is important too, because it’s an introduction to the course. They introduce who they are, where they’re from, whether they’re from Prague or the US. And the other thing we ask them to do. With metaliteracy, there’s a visual model that kind of simplifies and explains what this is. So it shows that the core four domains of learning, including metacognitive, affective, behavioral, cognitive then it shows as a central ring that shows the characteristics of the metaliterate learners, such as being productive, civic minded, things like that. But then the outer ring is focused on the roles of the meta literate learner, such as being a producer, a researcher, a communicator. So with that first assignment, that visual model, we present the model to the students, and it really had a big impact, I think, on the assignment itself, because we asked them to do more than just introduce themselves. We also asked them to select one of the metaliterate learner roles that they identify with the most. So it’s interesting. Some students will say, “Yeah, I see myself as a producer.” Others say, “I see myself as a communicator or researcher,” and that allows them, too, to say a little bit more about themselves. So maybe at work they’re an effective communicator, or maybe in their own time, working with social media, that they’ve already produced video or images or things like that. So it really allows for an excellent introduction to the course, while they’re also starting to investigate this metaliteracy model. So we really bring them into the conversation. It’s not just applying a model to our teaching, it’s really inviting students to think about the model themselves and to start grappling with what meta literacy is. Also, Sheila, I think you’ve really made a great point in terms of how we envision this as a kind of scaffolding. Throughout the course of the assignments, we go from the selfie video to then an assignment about mobile learning, so that we ask students to produce a digital story with their mobile device, because so much of what we do today is with our cell phones, and that’s really fascinating, and that gets them out in their community. So it gets them beyond just working with their laptop. They really think about what they can do as a digital storyteller with that cell phone that they always have in their pocket. Then the next assignment, again, kind of scaffolding, goes to a theme of empowerment, which is core to metaliteracy, because the whole idea, if you become aware of yourself as a metaliterate learner, then you are empowered, because you can make decisions about your learning. So it’s not just gaining insights about who you are, that’s a key part of it, but it’s then being able to identify, perhaps, where you need to improve. And that is empowering for students, and that, I think, is probably one of my favorite parts of the course. Sheila, I don’t know what you think of that, but when they really talk about empowerment, of their own empowerment, people in their lives who have empowered them, your parents or friends, or maybe even celebrities that they look up to, or authors, musicians, things like that, that, to me, is a real turning point in the class where they’re producing really sophisticated work, and they’re working with one of the key themes of meta literacy, which is empowerment.

Sheila: Absolutely. With that empowerment piece, it gives them freedom to bring forward what empowerment means to them, and they take different routes, like nothing is the same. And as Tom noted, some of them might do personal things. It might be a family member or whatever. Others might talk about a movement, others talk about a moment in time when they felt empowered. And I think that this is the beginning of them opening up and feeling some sort of autonomy in what they will create moving forward and realizing that, this course, you have to work. You have to actually do the work. This is not about memorization. This is not about a test in terms of you must answer these questions properly or you fail. This is practical and giving them experience that they can use moving forward, whether it is to document an older family member’s stories, whether it’s to document your community, whether to look at what’s happening outside, in terms of the world around us, and what are those things that make you feel that you are empowered? So it’s a great exercise that puts them in place for what is yet to come.

Tom: And I just want to jump in too with one other point, because as you were talking about that, it made me realize too that here’s another key aspect of our teaching digital storytelling, that also influenced the book, because this idea of students introducing themselves through the selfie and then also the empowerment piece is also key to another core theme to the book, which is diversity, equity, and inclusion. We really see this course as opening up conversations about students, their identity, who they are, and that was something else that when we put the call out to all the authors, we were hoping for international perspectives, which we certainly gained. We were also hoping for a discussion about metaliteracy. But the other core part of this book is really every chapter author focuses how digital storytelling really promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Sheila: Exactly. Very important point, yes.

John: Certainly, by having students tell their own stories, it automatically brings their lived experiences into their course. So I could see how that would be very useful. How might digital storytelling connect to campus DEI initiatives?

Tom: I think that the idea of digital storytelling, it’s a course, but what we do in this course could certainly be utilized in courses that are not about digital storytelling, which is, I think what we have in the book. There’s some authors who utilize digital storytelling techniques to support these ideas. So I would think that, in terms of campus initiatives, this idea of getting students to really utilize these digital tools, which continue to change, and now with certainly the generative AI revolution, this would be a great way for students to think about the production of their stories. Sheila, what do you think about that?

Sheila: I would say that, how does it connect to campus initiatives? I think by creating a safe environment for students to create a story and to share, because sometimes it’s very personal, and so for them to feel comfortable and safe in this environment and to produce it and edit it, can definitely connect to campus DEI issues, because this is another approach. This is not just, “Oh, we’re going to read this.” This is what DEI is, we’re going to try and do these initiatives. Students are living those DEI experiences in real time. And as we saw, like, particularly around the COVID era, students were sharing what that was like for them, depending on who they were, where their cultural place is in society. And I think that this, as Tom said, is definitely as connected. And I think it would be very useful for students to be involved in these sort of narratives across campuses. I think it would weave a fantastic story on how DEI is useful, how it has impacted them, what their experiences are, and I think that puts them more in the conversation, other than, “Oh, this acronym, DEI, I don’t know, it doesn’t really affect me,” or “I don’t know about it,” but when you give people a camera, a pen, and a piece of paper, it shifts the paradigm, and it shifts kind of like in public history. So public history is a bottom-up approach, not a top- down approach. And connecting digital storytelling to this is that you’re empowering your students. You’re empowering the people that now, the way we use technology, are able to share their story across different venues and take different approaches to do that. So, yes, I think it can be connected very much so.

Tom: Yeah, I think it’s interesting too, because it allows students, as Sheila said, to really utilize these digital tools that they all have access to, and in many ways, to reclaim that space, because there’s so much misinformation out there. There’s so much disinformation, especially sort of where we are right now, and it allows students to be reflective, to be ethical producers of information, telling their authentic story. At the end of the day, that’s really what we’re doing in this course, and it’s what we’re trying to advance and encourage with our authors, and they just did an amazing work in that area. So again, it’s also kind of a democratization of technology, because we’re saying, as Sheila pointed out, we’ll give some parameters, we give some suggested ideas for digital tools. But we also like it when they find tools that are easily accessible to them. They don’t have to buy a very expensive product to produce digital stories. So I think making them aware of that environment, that they are really the ones doing this kind of research to find interesting tools and then to use those in a productive and ethical way to tell their authentic story. I mean, that’s what the course is all about, and that’s really what the book is about.

Rebecca: I think it’s really important to underscore that storytelling is such a powerful way to communicate, and data is a powerful way to communicate, but the literature just really describes this power, and that literature is really extensive. Can you talk a little bit about why storytelling is so powerful as a form of communication?

Sheila: Well, storytelling, as we know, is ancient history. No pun intended, right? But it is something that’s been going on for years and years and years, and I think that because, prior to this technology, there were people in control of whose story they told, how they told the story, what they wanted to tell in their story, who would be excluded from the story, who would be included in the story. And so digital storytelling is an absolutely powerful tool in that regular everyday folks can take back that power and inform and properly display and write and direct and do this script and this story board and create and weave a story that is important to them, important to their community, and it puts them, so to speak, in the game. It’s no longer the idea of, “Well, I can’t buy a $10,000 camera, I can’t even buy a $1,000 camera. I don’t have the editing tool.” That is now passe. All you need, is a cell phone. On the flip side, if you want to do a non visual, all you need is a recorder. You can do an audio podcast. So I think, and I know Tom and I agree with this, storytelling is powerful and in the hands of the right people, it can evolve and include many more people than it would without digital storytelling, because then they have to go the traditional way, and that was very difficult at one time, it’s no longer as difficult, which means that the market gets flooded with good, bad, and ugly and indifferent things. But teaching in the environment that we teach, we’re coming from an angle where ethics is extremely important, using the proper materials are important, and we teach that all the way along. And then you do you, you create your story using what you’ve learned thus far, and you can share it just with the class. You can share it if you have a YouTube, Instagram, whatever. And then there’s something we can talk about after. And we have a museum that we’re further developing. And the idea of the museum, which started years ago, was to have an environment to put students’ work, because I always felt that sometimes students do some really great project, and then what? Where is it? They put in all this work all semester, and in that moment when they present, okay, this is great, But then, where is it? Well, ask permission for students who wish to have their work put in the museum, then it becomes a living space. So if they want to connect their family to the museum, their friends. If they’re going for a job in marketing or whatever, and they say, let me show you a little something I did while I was in school. They can connect, and it’ll be there, hopefully forever and ever, and demonstrates the work that they do. And that is another way of empowering students and letting them know that their work is important, and we put it in this environment, and it’ll be there till whenever, because we’ve had some great submissions with the students’ permission to put in the museum, which we hope to further develop. Well, we will. I don’t even hope to, we shall further develop it. I don’t believe in “Well, we tried.” No, we’re going to do it. We’re going to develop it further, and invite others to put their students’ work in the museum as well. It has a lot of good reasons for having it and what we’re doing.

Tom: That’s a really great point. And this was really Sheila’s idea, because it was based on a virtual museum that we’re using in digital storytelling was based on Sheila’s experience in public history. And so she had a virtual public history museum, which we’ve since adapted to this particular course. And it is important to this idea of narrative, because students, again, with their permission, they get to share their stories, and we get to see this over a period of time, and we’re really gaining quite a collection of student work that is, in many ways, instructive. So a key aspect of metaliteracy, one of the roles is teacher. So that learner as teacher. And in many ways, they’re doing that through their collaborative work. And we make them aware of that in the course. But I think they’re also doing it through the sharing of their stories that they’ve produced. It allows others to see the kind of work that can be done. And again, it gets to this point of how important narrative is. And students, I think, as producers of digital stories, I think they become much more discerning of the kinds of narratives they see on a daily basis, which is really important. So it allows them to be more analytical. It allows them to be more of a critical thinker in terms of the content they are receiving on a daily basis, because there are all kinds of digital stories. An advertisement could be a digital story. The kinds of political ads we’re seeing now, those are narratives, and we want students to be really discerning and as they access and review that information, one way we do it, too, I just thought of is, in addition to having them as producers, we also share with them and ask them to analyze digital stories that are about personal narratives. So there’s some great resources out there, StoryCorps, StoryCenter, Animation Block, which is really focused on animation in particular. So we’ve done some curation of really effective digital stories that we ask students to analyze as part of the online discussions and as part of their engagement with the readings that we provide as well. And I think that also contributes to their ability to analyze the kinds of narratives they see on a daily basis, and also being able to produce in an effective, ethical way, their own personal narratives, which are important. And one last thing I’ll say about this too, is that in the course, the writing really is a key part of this. So digital tools are important, but Sheila mentioned the script. So script writing, we spend quite a bit of time on just the words and having students really think about what they’re going to say, how they’re going to map this out as a professional script. They also have to do a visual storyboard, which is another key part of planning. So before they even jump into the digital tools, we really want them to reflect on what they’re writing, what it’s going to look like visually, and how all the pieces really come together through the digital story.

John: One aspect of what you both mentioned is that when students create this work, it’s very different than the type of work they do in many of their classes, where they write something up, they submit it to the learning management system, and then at the end of the term, it goes away and they never see it again. David Wiley refers to that as a disposable assignment…

Tom: Yes.

John: …and having something that lasts beyond the term, that they can share with people, that they can put on their LinkedIn profiles or share with their friends, their family, and so forth, is a really valuable experience. One of the other things, though, you’ve been talking about, is that you mentioned the course that you’ve taught together, and also that’s the basis for the first chapter of this. Could you tell us a little bit more about how the class is structured and how students interact between the two countries.

Sheila: The course, from the very beginning, attempts to bring them in together in the selfie, in the introduction, tell us a little bit about yourself type of thing, which they do in the selfie video. And throughout the course, it’s broken down into different steps, we have discussions. And so with the discussions, a student is required to make a comment based on the topic and readings of the week. They then have to respond to minimally two or more students on their posting. And by that, we don’t mean, and we specifically say like that doesn’t mean, “Thumbs up. Great post, looking good. Thanks a lot.” We explain to them that it’s a conversation and your comment is a continuation of the initial comment, so you want to come in like, “Oh, whatever, like, I didn’t know that. Now I understand. But according to this reading, this is what happened.” Or according to this video I saw this. Or the video that the original poster might have used, a student will say, “You know what? I went back and looked at that, and that was really interesting,” or, “that was really different.” So from the very beginning of the course, we bring them together, because we talk about this all the time, community. We say our course is a community. We’re in this together, and so it’s interesting. When it comes time to give feedback, students are very cautious when they have to reply, very cautious. And they tend to want to say everything nice, which is great, but also we want them to be respectful and comment in a way that makes the original poster either rethink or think about what they may not have seen, what they may have said, and how it’s being interpreted by others. So Tom, you can further expound, but I think that’s it in a nutshell.

Tom: Yeah, I agree completely that the kind of cultural exchange happens from that very first assignment, because as students are talking about themselves and which of the metaliteracy roles they identify with, they’re sharing something about themselves and their place and where they are, where they live. And I think that that really opens up the eyes of the students in Europe and the United States. The mobile story too, I’ve noticed, again, because a lot of students will take their cell phone, they’ll go out and they’ll show themselves in Prague and walk around Prague. So I think that’s really enlightening for the students in the US to see that. And keep in mind, these are Empire State University students who are studying in Prague through a partnership program. They don’t always have a lot of interaction with the US students, and that was one of the problems we were trying to solve. And Sheila really wanted to initiate this, it was how can we get the Prague students and the U.S. students, who are all earning degrees from Empire State University together? So this virtual exchange really allows that to happen, because otherwise it’s not a traditional international exchange program. Students studying in Prague are earning our degree, and so this really brings them together. So that’s really where I think the cultural exchange starts to happen. The other piece I want to build on with the discussions that for every digital story that’s produced, there’s also a peer review that’s a part of that assignment. So students really have to look at the rubric that we use for evaluating and they’re supposed to use that to really evaluate the work of peers. And as Sheila noted, sometimes they might be a little shy in those kinds of conversations, but because they’re working with the criteria, that really helps them to do that. So that’s also a kind of exchange of ideas. Then I think the culminating project, the closing project, while these are all individual stories, that does have interaction through peer review, the final collaborative project, students work together as a team to explore a social cause. So it could be climate change, for instance, a lot of students are very interested in that, which is encouraging, and they’ll do research on climate change, and then they’ll work together as an international team. And we make sure that we definitely when we put the teams together, we make sure there’s always enough of that kind of exchange to happen, so that as they’re working together they learn about each other, they learn about who they are, they learn about where they live, their culture, which is really important. And of course, some of that, they have to face some challenges. Sometimes they’ll complain a little bit about the fact that there’s a time difference, a six-hour time difference, and we say, “Well, we would like you to work in teams for some of this. So that means you have to try and coordinate some time to do that. But also a lot of this can happen asynchronously.” But I think even working through those challenges, is really productive for them, because that’s the real world. If you’re going to have virtual collaboration around the world, that’s what you’re going to have to deal with. And they ultimately work through it really well. And I think, in many ways, those final projects are probably some of the best projects in the class, and it’s just so inspiring to see the kinds of social causes they take on and that they address in a rational research-based way, and then how creative they are. It’s also that key metaliteracy piece that I mentioned earlier, of learner as teacher. That’s one of the key roles you play in these kinds of environments. And they’re doing that. A student who might be highly skilled with the digital tool is explaining to other students how that works, or maybe a student who’s a very strong writer is kind of sharing that work as a writer, and they’re really helping each other out. It’s very much a teacher/learner, mentor/learner, I would even say, kind of experience which brings it all together to why the focus on metaliteracy is really key to this digital storytelling course.

Sheila: The other piece is that with the metaliteracy framework, when we break the students into groups, so there might be four to five in a group, and they are responsible for choosing what their position will be. So who’s going to be the editor, who’s going to do the filming, who’s going to do the narration, if they’re going to use music, how’s that going to work? And so everyone in that group is supposed to take on a job and then do their piece and bring their pieces together to work on a final project. As Tom mentioned a moment ago, sometimes there’s perceived issues. “Oh well, I’m in Prague, six-hour difference, or I’m in New York, I don’t know, I can‘t. I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” And I always come back with “this is real world stuff that you’re doing. And so what would you do if the CEO of your company is on one continent and you’re on another, and you have work to do and you have to present. How are you going to do that? So this is a mini prep for you to learn how to adapt to different environments, because the traditional environment is slowly going away.” And so we have people working remotely all over the world, with people from different time zones, different regions. And so what do you say when there’s a 12-hour difference? Do you say, “Well, I’m sorry I’m sleeping or I don’t have time?” No, you’re going to find a way to work through it. So this is a mini exercise. This is your boot camp in learning how to adjust and work with eople that are not physically in front of you, that are not physically in your time zone, and are a part of your project. So there’s a lot of practical experience for them in this course as well. And as you noted, it’s not your traditional course. And students come in at first thinking, “Oh, I could do this in my sleep,” until they see, “uh oh, I actually have really do some things in here.” And that’s when it becomes interesting. And I love watching the changeover as they go through it. And they start learning, and they feel a little more safer in the course, and they start taking chances, and they’re creating different projects and different narratives is absolutely wonderful. And as Tom also mentioned, with that final project, it has to be on a social issue. So whether it be homelessness, mental health, drugs, climate change, they get in, and you can see the passion for the topic by the very final product they produce together. It’s absolutely wonderful. I love this course. I absolutely love it. I love working with Tom on this and this museum idea was thought of and developed many years ago. And a colleague of mine at Empire, Lisa Rappel, she was initially involved with me to get it done, and then life got in the way. So it was kind of just sitting there. And when Tom and I got together with this course, and I was so excited, I thought, “oh my god, we can use the museum,” and Tom and I got busy and started working with it. So we’re hoping to kick it up a notch, and you have to stay up on technology and so you never get a break, because soon as you learn something, it’s like, “oh, okay, great. Well, that’s passe.” Now we’ve got a new thing, so we’re going to work on making that museum even better than what it is right now, and it’s pretty good right now, but we want to kick it up a notch, and particularly with all this AI that’s going on, and this AI is developing as we speak, it’s important for us to create this environment that uses technology in a very responsible way, while teaching the students as well.

Rebecca: So you’ve both mentioned many aspects of ethics and AI, so maybe you can share a little bit about how you’ve incorporated that into your course.

Tom: When this openAI initiative brought so much attention to AI, the very first thing we did, in addition to the digital stories, there’s an assignment early in the course where they have to write about the ethics of digital storytelling. So that’s the assignment we first revised because we really wanted students to reflect on the ethics of AI, and there’s so much creative potential as well. So you can see how that’s also wrapped into this course, but that’s really the assignment we first revised, and we changed the questions and changed the resources, and really asked students to really think about what are the ethical implications of generative AI for producing digital stories. One of the resources for that assignment is something from StoryCenter. It’s the Digital Storytelling Bill of Rights. [LAUGHTER] So students get to think about the Bill of Rights of a digital storyteller and also the subject of digital stories. But I think revising that assignment was really important because they really have a chance to think about those ethical aspects which are so key. The other thing about this course is that we promote, in addition to freely available digital tools, it already had a very strong component about the use of materials that are openly licensed through Creative Commons. So we don’t want students using resources just by downloading things from the web. They have to be either public domain or Creative Commons. Now AI opens up much more potential. I think in our next revision, there’s more we actually want to do with the course, to really give them permission to use Dall-E, for instance, to create images. And also, of course, there’s now new generators for creating video, and that’s something we’re going to embrace and build into the course. Instead of telling students “don’t do it,” we’re going to ask them, “How can you do it in an ethical and responsible way?”

Sheila: Exactly, exactly, because it’s with us, it’s not going anywhere. So, we’ve got to figure out a way to incorporate it in a responsible way and make them ask the question, instead of being the sage on the stage, that’s not what we do with this course, we want to invoke their critical thinking and for them to think about what is happening around them in a way that makes sense, as opposed to us telling them, “ Oh, this is not good, you don’t need to do that.” Because they don’t listen anyway. So it’s better to let them learn how to discern and how to critically analyze and think on their own. I think that’s what we want from all our citizens.

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

Sheila: Well, I think what’s next is… well, there’s several things the sky’s the limit, right? But I think that another revision to the course for next spring, as Tom said, to really input AI and figure out how we want to do that, and to hopefully get some grant money… anybody listening… to help us upgrade the museum, because we believe it’s a wonderful space for students, and I think that walking the road of life and seeing what narratives I could think about and get involved with, and more co-teaching with Tom, because I thoroughly enjoy it. We love it. We absolutely love it.

Tom: Yeah, we really do. You can tell. Sheila and I have known each other so long, and we just love working together in the teaching and the research. And I agree completely. I think that the revision to include more AI components is definitely what we want to do this year. I think continued research presentations, talking about the book. We’re really excited about the book. I’m really interested too… I think we both are… in continuing to engage with some of the book authors who contributed to this book. We were so excited that three of the authors or author teams are from South Africa. So when we put the call for hoping for these global perspectives that we’re able to reach that. The book itself covers, in addition to our perspectives, just looking at the table of contents, we have authors who write about meta-theater as digital storytelling, the metaliteracy of memes, digital book making as a form of digital storytelling, local history, story maps. There’s so many creative ideas out there that if we could continue to promote this idea of digital storytelling building it into the curriculum, helping campuses to advance their DEI initiatives, that would be amazing. So I think that’s what we’re really hoping for, and that’s the idea of the book too is that this gets the conversation going. It’s our experience, but then it’s also building on our experience to bring in other scholars and teachers and students.

Sheila: And this all evolved out of our engagement with students in the course, so they’re at the core of everything that Is transpired after that as a result of the course.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your book and all of your stories.

Sheila: [LAUGHTER] Thank you.

Tom: Thank you. We enjoyed it. [LAUGHTER]

Sheila: Absolutely. And may digital storytelling just keep on going and going and going. Thank you so much. This is wonderful.

[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]

359. Privacy Booths

Posted in authentic learning, edtech, educational technology, higher education, learning spaces, mental health, open pedagogy, privacy, student podcasts, teaching
September 18, 2024

There are few private quiet spaces on most college campuses where students can record podcasts or converse online with counselors or health care providers. In this episode, Michael Revenaugh and Forrest Warner join us to discuss how Hamilton College addressed this by providing students with privacy booths and soundproof recording spaces

Michael is an instructional designer who specializes in video and audio production at Hamilton College. Forrest Warner is also an instructional designer with a focus on 3D modeling, graphic design, visualization, spatial analysis, and video and audio production, also at Hamilton College.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

Transcript

John: There are few private quiet spaces on most college campuses where students can record podcasts or converse online with counselors or health care providers. In this episode, we examine how one campus addressed this by providing students with privacy booths and soundproof recording spaces.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are Michael Revenaugh and Forrest Warner. Michael is an instructional designer who specializes in video and audio production at Hamilton College. Forrest Warner is also an instructional designer with a focus on 3D modeling, graphic design, visualization, spatial analysis, and video and audio production, also at Hamilton College. At Educause last year, Michael and Forrest presented on the use of privacy booths at their institution. Welcome Michael and Forrest.

Forrest: Hey, thanks for having us.

Michael: Yeah, thanks.

Forrest: We’re super excited to be here.

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

Michael: I do not currently have tea, I apologize, but my go to is a Celestial Seasonings mint magic.

John: Very good.

Forrest: I’m rolling with chamomile this morning. I like to keep it calm, keep it smooth in the mornings. This is nice.

Rebecca: That sounds good.

Forrest: What are you all drinking?

Rebecca: I have Hunan Noir.

John: …and I have spring cherry green tea.

Forrest: Very nice.

Rebecca: We invite you here today to discuss the use of privacy booths on your campus. Can you talk a little bit about how this initiative started?

Forrest: So Mike actually joined us kind of just after we had started this initiative. And actually I started just after they had actually even come up with the idea. Nhora Serrano, our director, and I believe is was also Brett Olsen, were working on expanding podcasting on campus. And what we were running into, and I think I talked to you about this while we were at EDUCAUSE, was we have spaces on campus that can do those kinds of things, but they’re department specific, so you have to be taking courses in that department in order to have access to those spaces. So if you ever wanted to use any kind of recording equipment or anything like that, it just wasn’t available to you, unless you happen to be taking a video course, an audio course, whatever. So they were looking to expand in the library to give them better access. And the idea they had come up with at the time was to get a couple of free standing audio booths. We had ended up finding a model that we liked. Studio Bricks was the company that we had, the plus one model, which was kind of meant for like one and a half people. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know how you fit a half person there, but whatever.

Michael: I think our record was four at one time, [LAUGHTER] students decided that they could get in there. It was evocative of phone booth stuffing. [LAUGHTER]

Forrest: Yeah, and I mean, the booths were great. We had them for a year. It was kind of leading up to the renovation that we ended up doing that following summer. So that would have been the fall of ‘22 is when we got them. They worked really well for what they were. They were kind of like a phone booth style booth. It had audio proofing, and they had a dedicated computer, audio equipment. We had Shure microphones in there as well. It was a nice little space, and really just kind of like, “Hey, let’s see if this is something the students are interested in.” And right off the bat, we had a lot of action from that. And then, leading into the renovation, we decided to go all in, and we built four of the audio booths, one of which we’re in right now, which are much larger, and then we can talk about it more detail a little bit. But great spaces… get used a lot. The data is like off the charts. We’re getting a lot of information, a lot of people using the spaces. So yeah, very cool.

Michael: Yeah. We had a bit of a unique opportunity to transition, because the first floor of the Burke library here at Hamilton underwent a gut renovation in the summer of ‘23 so we could remap the entire floor plan, and we did, and we moved some things around, and were able to allocate space specifically for these four booths. So it wasn’t found space, we could build them specifically to our needs, which was great.

John: And the booths that you’re referring to and that you’re sitting in right now seats two comfortably. How many people could fit inside of one of those?

Forrest: The rooms are like eight by eight…

Michael: Yeah, eight foot by eight foot. So we have two dedicated microphones so people can do interviews or projects, like we are doing currently, but we also have some more video applications. As you can see, but our listeners can’t, behind us we have pull-down green screens. We have three point lighting installed in them too. And we also have ceiling microphones that we can switch to. So if people want to do any sort of smaller video project, newscast, what have you, they can use those things as well, but we did primarily design them with podcasting in mind. So as far as fitting people in here, I think the most I’ve done is 10, and that’s usually like new student orientation or Parents Weekend or faculty instruction. Like, here’s the things that we have, come on, like, let’s all get into this one so I can point out all the cool stuff and then shoving them in that way, but I think typical student usage maxes out around four or five, and they seem to be able to do that with no problem.

Rebecca: How soundproof are these studios?

Forrest: Fairly, fairly soundproof. They’re nice because they do have some paneling. Actually, the gray paneling you can kind of see right now, that’s all sound paneling. And also the door itself has soundproofing capabilities as well, so it does stay very quiet in here.

Michael: Yeah, I unfortunately don’t have a number on it, but walking outside, I’m unable to hear conversations that happen. And I’m sure if screaming started, then it would get through, but for any mid-range conversation, you can’t hear anything from the outside.

Forrest: Which is obviously ideal.

Michael: Yeah.

John: Between the smaller privacy booths and these larger rooms, how many of these do you have on campus, and how do students access them? Are they just open all the time, or must they be reserved in advance?

Michael: That’s a great question. We actually have four currently: the two modular ones that we used, we have shifted out of the library, we’ve repurposed them, and currently [LAUGHTER] they’re trying to figure out what to do with them. We were demonstrating a need for this student privacy, and it’s just kind of figuring out where on campus they would best go, as far as like existing blueprints and footprints, and where the students would be able to find and access them. In terms of scheduling for our four permanent booths, they are open whenever the library is open, but they must be scheduled. We currently use the 25 live scheduler, which is the system that the campus uses, so students are limited. They can book up to three hours a day in the production booths, and then the next day they can get three more. But we try to limit it that way and encourage students, as much as possible, to make reservations, especially towards the end of the semester, when they are getting very crowded, and also just for our use in data collection. One of the frustrating things that we run into is we have the statistics that we’re able to collect, but because the booths are open all the time, we know that they’re being used a lot more than the recorded data reflects, because students are seeing that there’s an open door, I’m just going to pop in there and not fill out a form online, because why would I? I’m right here.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how you’re seeing the spaces used? What kinds of projects students are doing in them?

Michael: Sure, in our data collection, we basically ask to avoid any infringing privacy. We ask if they’re using them for an academic purpose or other. And other encompasses a wide…

Forrest: …everything

Michael: … range of things, either someone’s personal podcast project, we’re seeing a lot of telehealth and therapy sessions going on, we’ve partnered with the Wellness Center on campus, so students that partake in online therapy are frequently looking for some place to go, that they don’t have two or three roommates hovering around all the time. So they’re pointing them in our direction to let them know that these resources are available. Job interviews are another big one for students looking for internships or opportunities after they graduate.

Forrest: Yeah, the big thing to note about Hamilton in particular is that it’s an entirely residential campus, so every student lives on campus, and finding the time and space just to gain a little bit of privacy is actually really difficult. And like Mike said, it’s difficult if you’re in your room trying to do a counseling session, and then your roommate and three of their best friends bust into the room while you’re doing that. It’s like, oof, really hard to do that, it can probably be really annoying in general. But these spaces, again, right from the beginning, we didn’t mention that we partnered with the health center, and they’ve been a great partner, and they’ve been directing students to these spaces. So if they want to do their telehealth in some place private, this is available to them. And these have been really great for those purposes, on top of the academic uses. It’s kind of like the added bonus for finding that people are probably using these spaces more for those uses than academic at certain points. So the data has been really great, and even just the amount of reservations has been really great. A little bit of data is actually really telling. So the students have been really helpful with that.

Michael: Yeah, also completely separate from the technological aspect, I believe they’re popular just for quiet study spaces as well. So sometimes I’ll come in in the morning and all of the keyboards and mouse and everything will just be pushed completely out of the way. The students just set up their own computer, and we don’t know what they’re doing, [LAUGHTER] so it could just be studying or small group work, but they’re available, and as long as they’re not stepping on each other’s toes as far as the schedule is concerned, it’s up to them what they want to do.

Forrest: Yeah, so far, so good.

Rebecca: I think what’s nice is that it’s in the library, so there’s no stigma to maybe what the space is being used for; whereas, if a space is in a particular location, like if the space was in a health center, or if the space is in career services, or if the space is in a particular location, then there’s an assumption of what someone’s maybe doing in that space. But because that’s in the library, that’s a multi-use space, and there is less stigma attached to maybe why someone’s using this space. So there’s less judgment or less concern about why someone’s using this space, and I really like that about this particular project.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. There’s less stigma if you’re setting up a therapy appointment and you don’t want people to know, say “Oh, I’m just going to the library,” and it’s completely fine. It’s also a universal space on campus for everyone, which allows it to be more welcoming. We talked about the other booths that are in the studio arts building. And if you are a government major who’s never stepped foot in that building, then there’s kind of a territorialism about it. It’s like, “Oh, I have to go to this science building, but I’m not a science major. Are they going to know that I’m not a science major and chase me away?” It’s like, no, the library is for everyone, so everyone is welcome to come in and use these spaces. And we think that has really been reflected in the numbers.

John: How have faculty responded? Have they increased the number of digital storytelling or podcast projects in response to the availability of these booths?

Michael: Well, that is another role that we as instructional designers have on campus, is that we offer course support. So I primarily take the lead in podcast assignments, so I make myself available to courses that express interest in it. So we see that ebbs and flows. There tends to be more in the fall than in the spring, but faculty are adding more podcasts in terms of final projects to their courses. Some other language faculty will take advantage of the technology for pronunciation and recording that way… small group discussion for a less like fully produced final project.

Forrest: I mean, it’s really kind of from all over the place, and it’s interesting, and actually, this is probably a good time for me to kind of walk through those numbers, just to kind of give you an idea of the general response over time. We introduced the freestanding booths in the fall of ‘22. We got a total of 76 reserved hours, which was primarily aimed at the academic which was like, “Yeah, that seems like a pretty good number.” We were pretty excited about it. And then in the spring of ‘23 we ended up with 181 reserved hours, which is a huge jump. And we’re like, “Hey, yeah, man, these are catching on. This is awesome.” We’re feeling good about going into the fall with the new booth. Fall ‘23 after the renovation had happened, we went from 181 to 934 reserved hours. So again, that was like, “holy moly.” And actually, that’s, I believe when we talked, that’s what you saw. We also have some additional data from this past semester. We went from 934 to 1496 reserved hours. So another 60% jump in usage. And really exciting. Again, it just kind of shows you like, they want this. And I think we had about 300 unique users to the space, potentially, students that would have never spent time in the library, to students that tend to spend time here, but just they’re like, “Oh, this is a really great resource.” So yeah, we were really excited to see how much these are actively getting used. And this is primarily student usage.

Michael: Yeah, there are some faculty that use it for research. They conduct interviews. Actually, one of our college archivists has started doing oral histories. So he’ll bring in community members and use the production booths to record oral histories of departments or initiatives that the college has done over the years, and then back those up in the college archives. So we’re just seeing a really wide range of use in them. And it really speaks to there has been a need for spaces like this.

Forrest: I think leaving it open has always been kind of the way to do it. It’s not creating this wall like we said, it’s like giving people as much access as they can get and just see what they do with it. And I think if you gatekeep or whatever, you’re just holding yourself back. So this has been a really great experiment. I think it’s been very successful for us.

Rebecca: Is there so much demand now that you need more booths?

Forrest: It’s a good question.

Michael: That is a good question. I don’t think we’ve maxed out, again, we’re kind of hamstrung with our data from the people that actually reserve the booths, versus just going and use it. In my personal experience, if I’ve ever run into a conflict, like, oh, I have this booth reserved, and I come down and someone’s sitting there working on something. I’m an adult, so they tend not to give me any pushback. And I say, “Excuse me, I have this booth reserved,” and they leave immediately. But we also have our digital media tutors who are in the library, and then, just conversationally, we haven’t really heard of any conflicts.

Forrest: Even, like, sometimes there’s even open booths available. So if for some reason, somebody was in your space, you could go over and just reserve it real quick, because we keep reservation QR codes right on the doors. So if anybody walks up at any time is like, “Hey, I want to pop in the booth, they can reserve right then.”And we do get lots of walk ins. The data we gave you is only a percentage [LAUGHTER] of who’s actually using the space.

Michael: Again, as is perhaps predictable, towards the end of the semester, around finals week, once those podcast projects are coming due, we do see a big spike in the usage, and then they’re pretty much booked as long as the library is open. But the library also adds extra hours then too. So I don’t think we’ve yet maxed them out, [LAUGHTER] but there’s an additional building that’s being built behind the library and has potential for additional spaces in this vein.

Forrest: Yeah, it’s essentially a Center for Digital innovation, and it’s supposed to help us expand into things like we built the new Makerspace with the new renovation. This will hopefully be more of some spaces dedicated, some probably a little bit more, I don’t want to say intense, but getting into things like robotics or metalworking,

Michael: Yeah…more purpose built, as Forrest mentioned, as part of the renovation, we’ve made a makerspace which houses our 3D printing and virtual reality, and unity and video game development, but we were a little bit hamstrung by we were renovating a space and things that require access to ventilation, like soldering or circuitry or things like that, unfortunately, we weren’t able to fit into that particular makerspace.

Forrest: The new building will have more of those capabilities, again, allowing folks to expand the capabilities and what they’re able to do safely. That’s always the concern with any of these spaces, just making sure everybody knows what they’re doing, and obviously not sitting there breathing in toxic fumes is always a good thing.

Michael: And Hamilton’s slogan, “Know thyself,” and it’s an open curriculum, so the entire college really encourages student exploration and trying new stuff. So all of the things that we’ve been doing here at the Library really fit that mission.

John: You mentioned that towards the end of the semester, there were a lot of student podcast projects coming due. Could you give us a feel for the types of classes in which podcast projects are used, or some examples of the types of podcast assignments that have been assigned there?

Michael: I’m working with one class right now that is in the Classics Department. It’s a mythology course, and it’s going to be a modern retelling of classic myths. And so are going to be working with scripting those out. I think one of the more successful ones that Forrest and I both worked on was in the art department, which was a course on architecture and politics.

Forrest: …art history.

Michael: …art history, yes. So it was a course focused on the intersection of politics and political environment, and how that influenced the type of buildings that were being built and vice versa. And that was pretty fascinating.

Forrest: Yeah, and that was partnered with a WordPress workshop. So the students were doing some web design as well, and they were able to incorporate their podcasts into their web pages that they were creating as part of a course website. And obviously we’re able to add a lot more media and other things to it. So it was really a cool, really multimedia project, and the students really did a lot of work.

Michael: Yeah, some examples from that were: one student did like the new Buffalo Bills stadium and how taxpayer money is used for certain private building projects. There were a couple that were very Hamilton-centric. One building in Hamilton has a very historic wallpaper to it. However, it is also problematic, and it’s just like, “what is the tension between preserving this very famous printmaker piece of history, but how do you properly present that when it does have its flaws? So they’re really well produced and well thought out. And then with course help, again, with the supplemental materials available on their WordPress websites, they were really well presented as well.

Forrest: I mean, you probably get a couple different courses that are like, some are like, they want more of a production value. And then some are like, a little bit…

Michael: I’d say most of the ones we work with are kind of the NPR-style journalistic reporting, but I also worked with a professor in the creative writing department who wanted to give students experience reading their own work. So they would record themselves reading short stories, and then added a little production element, like some spooky music beds or sound effect underlay to emphasize parts of that. And then there are some people that are just like, I want four students to read this article and have a discussion about it on microphone, and then don’t need that edit at all. Just 20 minutes. Hit record, hit stop, turn it in.

John: Sounds like a nice mix of projects.

Rebecca: What role does the library play in preserving some of this work and archiving it?

Forrest: Our primary role is support. We work with the faculty to help them design these assignments, figure out when we’re going to come by and work with the students, give them general support after the fact, and we help them with things like they’re looking to clean up everything. We’ll work with them on that. And then if they want to actively put that out into the world, sometimes, like, especially with things like websites and things, faculties want to make sure everybody can see what the students are making, what they’re doing, which I think is really exciting. Those will continue to exist in that form. Sometimes faculty members don’t want that stuff out in the world too, and they want the students to feel that they can do these assignments discuss in a way that they want to still keep their opinions relatively private, so they might not put those out into the world, and depending on the project, I think sometimes those end up in the archive, but I think that comes from the faculty end more than anything, not necessarily that we do that automatically. So I think if it’s going to be part of the long-term archival process at the college, I think they can just actually work with our on-campus archivist and make it available.

Michael: Yeah, I think they primarily land as student projects, and we make them aware that if you want to share this, either some things that you need to be more mindful of. Music rights is one. But if professors just want their students to go nuts, have fun, this is only for in class, then sure your intro can be Beyonce, but if you want to then share this out in the world or put it in a portfolio to bring with you to a job interview, then you might not want to do that. But, in general, once they’re student projects, they belong to the students. We’ll sometimes have a copy of them, like on Blackboard, if they host them that way. And then it’s as far as archiving, it’s basically like, do we archive student papers? Not particularly. So even the WordPress sites, once they get up, we make it clear to the professors, like, yeah, we built this website for your class, and it’s your responsibility. Like, how long do you want to keep maintaining it? Or make sure, like, the links don’t age out, or you end up, like, with a broken page that people can get to in four years time. It’s relatively new, so we are still negotiating that as we get new projects coming in.

Rebecca: For folks that might want to get started in creating media booth or privacy booths on their campus, what advice might you have in kind of those initial steps to get started or starting a conversation about that on their campuses.

Forrest: I got a feeling most campuses actively could use the privacy spaces. I mean, even just seeing what we’ve gone through, I’m sure there’s lots of ways to apply that to any college at any size. Again, we’re a unique size. We have about 1800, 1900 students. Again, they’re all residential, so it’s easy to kind of like focus them. For us, we were lucky enough to be able to have the resources to afford to purchase things like the freestanding booths. They aren’t cheap. I wouldn’t say everybody could just go out and do that, but you could easily change a space that maybe isn’t getting used very much into a podcasting space. Again, just to kind of prove the point, see if it’s necessary, you know, soundproof it how you can, get the equipment that you can, and then advertise it as an open space. The students actively respond. They definitely love the access, particularly if you’re running into the same issues that we’re running into with departmentally kind of blocked off spaces… things like that.

Michael: I’d say, location, location, location. And it’s a tough choice, because space is at a premium, and we understand that there’s a lot of things that need to happen, but if you can find a space in a building that is open to the entire campus that students feel comfortable in, that students naturally pass, or that is on their way to somewhere else, like centrally located, and that would be good. But again, it’s a delicate balancing act, because you want them to be as soundproof as possible, but you also want there to be a lot of people around.

Forrest: Just hiding these in the basement somewhere, I think, is probably not, even though that always seems like it would make sense. It’s like, if they don’t see them, they’re just not going to use them.

Michael: Yeah, out of sight, out of mind. Just put them somewhere that the students would go anyway.

Rebecca: Do you think partnering with the health center or wellness center was actually really important in the initial steps of your project?

Michael: Absolutely. I’d say yes, very much so, as far as publicizing them to the students and making sure that we had the right setup, making sure that the right equipment was here, making sure that students knew about them and felt comfortable. This Wellness Center also donates fidget toys. So we have in each thing, we have baskets of toys and things that people can manipulate with their hands when they’re doing therapy, just that sort of somatic processing. So invaluable resource to connect over there and just make sure that the students know about it. Because again, communicating with students, I don’t think we’ve really fully figured it out. You can blast them with emails all you want, but if they see, oh, library, delete. Like getting students to internalize the information is an ongoing challenge, so I guess the more angles you can get them with communication from the Wellness Center, communication from the library, communication from their faculty, just to get feet in the door.

John: In terms of the rooms that are set up for podcasting, what type of software do you use, and do you provide any training or instructions for students on how to record?

Michael: Yes, hardware wise, we have our Shure SM7Bs. We also have a Vocaster 2…

Forrest: …audio interface. The audio interface, very simple to use, just relatively compared to some of the more complicated things out there, especially for first-time users.

Michael: And for our audio processing and editing, we use Audacity primarily. It’s free, it’s open source. It gets the job done, an equity issue. Students have been paying enough for tuition and books to be like, “Oh, okay. And for your final project, you need to buy Adobe.” Yeah. [LAUGHTER] We do offer support for like GarageBand and Audition and a few other things that if students want to use it, then, yeah, we can help them out with it. But in course support, I default to Audacity. I encourage them. It’s free, platform agnostic. Download it right now. Typically for core support, I will do two workshops. I will do a pre-production and things to keep in mind, and then I’ll do a post-production where I do an intro to audacity in class for those ones. But also our digital media tutors are trained up on Audacity and can at least do the basics. So if you have a question and when you’re in the booth, flag them down. I h ave office hours, and I’m always happy to walk through things or troubleshoot any problems that students have.

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

Michael: Coming up next? We are learning how to best utilize our green screens right now. They’re really easy to use with like Zoom backgrounds, but finding a good video processing software that is more intuitive or easy for the students to take advantage of. So there’s a little tweaks here and there across the board.

Forrest: And now we’re prepping for the new building, one of the things we’re actually doing more of too, because again, we built the maker space last summer. We got through a year with it, and we’re like, okay, we survived. Everything seems to be working and helping bring people into the space. I know we’re working with our students, our DMTs, who were primarily just tutors in the past. We want to get the space a little bit more active and a little bit more engaging for them and the students on campus. So we had been doing some what we called lovingly Makerspace Mondays, and those were staff led in the past. Those are events that would take place on Monday evenings, where we would need some sort of workshop that was more meant for fun. Those were great. Staff have a hard time doing them the whole semester, so we’ve opened it up to our DMTs, who are actually going to help us provide programming throughout the semester and hopefully bring in a lot more students in general, just to see what’s available. They don’t have to necessarily follow, kind of like, Hey, we’re doing 3D printing VR or whatever, the students, the DMTs, can explore areas that they’re particularly interested in. It could be crafty. It could be computer based. You can do stuff about ChatGPT. You can do stuff about air dry clay. So there’s all these different options. And again, we’re just trying to open it up. so people feel like, “oh, I can do a lot more here than I thought.” So again, just trying to get the word out and yeah, usually that’s through word of mouth, which, honestly, even with the production booth, I think was part of what made it successful was actually more about word of mouth than direct advertisement. So if you make a good interesting space, the students will find it,

John: And those numbers you reported certainly attest to the importance of that word of mouth in spreading the word about the availability of these resources. It sounds like a really nice arrangement.

Rebecca: Sounds like a lot of fun.

Michael: Yeah, definitely.

Forrest: It is that too. Yeah. When things succeed, you always feel good, and then you just have to, if things aren’t going as smoothly as you want, you just tweak it up and make some changes and keep pushing forward, right? So I feel like we’re been super successful here. And there’s other areas I’m sure we could do a little better in, and we’re just going to keep pushing forward.

Rebecca: Well, it’s nice to hear some updates from my hometown.

Forrest: Clintonian?

Michael: Nice, that’s awesome.

Forrest: I’m from Sandy Pond, so both my parents graduated from Oswego, which is where both of you are at, right?

Rebecca: Yes.

Michael: Both of my parents graduated from Oswego as well, teachers all day, right? [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Some hometown exchanges. [LAUGHTER]

Michael: That’s right, [LAUGHTER] my wife is a native Clintonian

Rebecca: Small world. Thanks for joining us.

Michael: This was great.

Forrest: All right, yeah. Thank you for having us.

[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]

345. New Era – New Urgency

Posted in authentic learning, engagement, grading, higher education, learning, pedagogy
June 12, 2024

Public confidence in the U.S. educational system has been declining while reports of student disengagement have been rising. In this episode, Deborah Pomeroy and F. Joseph Merlino join us to discuss the possibility of repurposing our educational system to better support the needs of our students and our society.

Deborah has over 50 years of education experience and is professor emeritus at Arcadia University. She has co-directed a Dewitt-Wallace grant, Students at the Center, for inner-city schools in Philadelphia and was actively engaged in the Bioko Biodiversity program in Equatorial Guinea. Joe Merlino has spent 39 years in education. He has been a principal or co-principal investigator and/or project director on numerous federal grants. He currently directs a seven-year USAID grant in Egypt where a team of US faculty are co-developing 180 new undergraduate STEM teacher-preparation courses for five large Egyptian universities.

Deborah and Joe are co-founders of The 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education where Joe has served as president since its founding in 2007. They are also the co-authors of New Era – New Urgency: The Case for Repurposing Education, which was recently released by Lexington Books.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

Pomeroy, Deborah and G. Joseph Merlino (2024). New Era – New Urgency: The Case for Repurposing Education. Rowan and Littlefield.
The National Commision on Excellence in Education (1983). A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.

Transcript

John: Public confidence in the U.S. educational system has been declining while reports of student disengagement have been rising. In this episode, we discuss the possibility of repurposing our educational system to better support the needs of our students and our society.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Deborah Pomeroy and F. Joseph Merlino. Deborah has over 50 years of education experience and is professor emeritus at Arcadia University. She has co-directed a Dewitt-Wallace grant, Students at the Center, for inner-city schools in Philadelphia and was actively engaged in the Bioko Biodiversity program in Equatorial Guinea. Joe Merlino has spent 39 years in education. He has been a principal or co-principal investigator and/or project director on numerous federal grants. He currently directs a seven-year USAID grant in Egypt where a team of US faculty are co-developing 180 new undergraduate STEM teacher-preparation courses for five large Egyptian universities.

Deborah and Joe are co-founders of The 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education where Joe has served as president since its founding in 2007. They are also the co-authors of New Era – New Urgency: The Case for Repurposing Education, which was recently released by Lexington Books.

Welcome, Deborah and Joe.

Deborah: It’s great to be here. Thank you so much.

Joe: Thank you.

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

Deborah: I am. I have a cup of chai right in front of me.

Rebecca: Perfect. How about you, Joe?

Joe: Yes, this is English breakfast tea.

Rebecca: Oh, yum.

John: And I have a black raspberry green tea today.

Rebecca: Nice. We got green tea in the office today. I have a raspberry Jasmine green tea today.

John: We’ve invited you here today to talk about your new book. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of New Era – New Urgency: The case for repurposing education?

Deborah: Well, that’s an interesting story. We actually started the book over 14 years ago when we were working on the math-science partnership for Greater Philadelphia. And it was the culmination of work that both Joe and I had been doing, both independently and collaboratively, in education reform. And we were beginning to develop our ideas about education reform. And we’ll go into those in more detail later. But we started the book, and we actually got quite a bit of the book written. And then we were interrupted by a meeting with the Minister of Education from Egypt, who came to Philadelphia with a group of colleagues to study STEM schools in the US. And as a result of that meeting, we ended up working on this USAID project in Egypt, helping the ministry develop a series of model STEM schools. And when we got into the work there, which was basically 24/7, 365 days, and we were joking around that many times, it felt like we were drinking water from a firehose, it was so intensive. And we were never able to go back and finish our book. But as we were doing the work, we sort of looked at each other a number of times, sort of laughing and saying, “This is the last chapter of our book,” because in the last chapter, we hit envisioned what real transformation could be in education, and we were actually doing it and it was so exciting. And so we decided that we needed to recast the first part of the book, and then add this whole latter part of it, because we actually have a case where our ideas have been able to be put into place and have worked just amazingly well. And so the book is actually a total of 14 years in the making.

Rebecca: So I’m really curious about the word choice of repurposing because you could have probably picked many, many titles. Can you talk a little bit about why repurposing is your word choice in the title?

Joe: We felt, through our reform efforts that were difficult to implement, that the single most durable element that prevented reform from happening was the inability of teachers and students to articulate why they were teaching what they were teaching, as opposed to all the other possibilities of what you could teach per subject. So why are you teaching algebra? Why not statistics or probability? Why are you teaching it the way you’re teaching? So the idea of purpose, which is answering the why, was what we found to be lacking. That’s why we felt purpose was the central idea of the book.

Rebecca: I knew there was a key reason.

Deborah: When we started work in Egypt, the first questions that we asked them were: What are your aspirations for the future? And for the outcome of these schools? In other words, what do you dream these graduates could do and become, and when they were able to start to articulate that, and we’ll go into that in more detail later, then we built the entire curriculum and assessment system around that purpose. And so we found that that, in fact, was the linchpin for this transformative reform.

Joe: After our meeting in August of 2011. This is like a year after the Arab Spring in Egypt, that’s when the Egyptian delegation came to Philadelphia. Four months later, we found ourselves in Cairo, I did, and two other colleagues of mine. And so we’re sitting in the first school, which is outside of Giza, and it’s in the middle of nowhere. I mean, it’s 30 miles, it’s just dirt and dust in this building. And we’re sitting in the principal’s office, and looking around wondering what’s happening and in bursts the first deputy minister of education in Egypt, and he says, “Welcome to the dream.” [LAUGHTER] And we’re looking around, and we’re saying “there’s nothing here.” So we had the opportunity to rethink things, and for them to rethink things. And I’ll just say one other thing real quick, is that the purposes of education derives from your aspirations for your country or for your community, and that defines what your purpose is. And that’s what we did in Egypt.

John: And you begin the book by talking about how the purpose of education has evolved over time with a little bit of lag, because educational systems tend to adjust slowly. Could you describe how educational systems have responded to changing societal needs?

Joe: Okay, I’ll try to do this in 60 seconds, if I can, the 400 years. [LAUGHTER] For me, it was a tremendous learning experience. We have, in our time, the ability to have the internet, to have digitized libraries, and search engines. So you can go back and actually look at primary sources. So it became a real learning experience for me as I went through it. But we started with the idea that we’ve been in this business for a while now, from the early 80s to now, and we could see the development of the Nation at Risk archetype that has defined our era here. And we wondered about, are there other archetypes? Have there been other paradigms? Have there been other purposes of education other than, right now, preparing kids for the global economy, which was the idea of the Nation at Risk? So we started by looking at the earliest instances of purposes, and we found it was the religious schools in New England, the Calvinist idea of preparing kids to be a part of a religious community, salvation was the key. And then we looked at, “Well, why did that happen? Why was it salvation?” So we looked at the English history and why people came to the United States was to form a new Israel. That was the vision of the Puritans. And then we looked at how this may have changed over a single lifetime. We talk about in our lifetime, how much change there has been if you think about yourselves and your grandparents. So we looked at history through the lens of five lifetimes, laid end to end. We said, “Well, what happened during these lifetimes?” And you see a tremendous amount of change that happened, that’s what we described in each lifetime, but along with those changes have been associated changes in the purposes of education. So I’ll just give you a quick example. So from this idea of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, from this idea of a religious community, came the idea that as more immigrants came in, there was different religious sects. And there was conflict between these sects, so much so that when William Penn came to Philadelphia in 1682, he brought the Quaker ethos, the idea of the Quaker schools which was based on religious tolerance, and peace. And so it became another purpose of education. And he founded the first Quaker school here in Philadelphia. So that’s an example. Another example is the industrial revolution. There couldn’t be industrial education if there wasn’t an industrial revolution. So that’s what we did.

Rebecca: It’s really done a good job of setting the stage of how change has occurred over time. Can you talk a little bit about how the current system aligns or does not align with our current societal needs?

Deborah: Right now, the paradigm that is pretty much driving education in the US is college and career success. And many schools that I’ve worked in, for instance, have that plus perhaps lifelong learning as part of their school mission and vision. But how does that define the curriculum as such, and there’s really a mismatch, and what would a curriculum look like if we’re really focused on lifelong learning? And while the college and career success is driven so much by standards and by test scores that really are quite empty when it comes to looking at what we need as a society going forward. And going forward, we need people who can collaborate together, we need people who are very well versed in assessing the truthfulness of information and resources, we need people who can listen, we need people who are critical thinkers in terms of being able to deconstruct problems and analyze them and look at their resources and so forth. We need people who know how to recover from a failure and actually see failure as a source of learning and from which positive things can come. Those qualities are not served by high test scores in math and reading and by a curriculum which is so focused on teaching a course to prepare students for the next course. Where does life come in? …students who understand citizenship, who understand the civics of our country, and the government, and our system of checks and balances within our nation and what it really means to be a responsible voter. And on top of that, our students are in a culture in which they are dealing with the effects of pandemics, they’re in a media culture, they’re in a culture of diversity, because our kids below the age of 18 are more brown than white, that demographic is increasing in the country and we’re going to become more and more diverse. We’re dealing already with major effects of climate change. On a more personal level, the kids are dealing with bullying and Infowars, drugs, gun violence, immigration, you name it, and where on earth does the current curriculum prepare students to deal with the culture that they are facing in their own lives and what we need as a country going forward?

John: And I think everything you’ve said are things that everyone would agree need to be addressed. And there have been lots of attempts to bring these things into the school system in terms of an emphasis on lifelong learning, critical thinking, an ability to interpret information, and yet we still see the same basic curriculum being used. Why have previous efforts at reform failed?

Joe: That was the basis of the book. That’s why we wrote the book, because we’ve been doing reform efforts for decades. But we’ve been operating within this bubble of this Nation at Risk archetype, and it’s not relevant to where students are and where our country is. So the curriculum has been set, and then there’s justifications for it, rather than starting at a blank slate and saying: What’s our aspirations? What do you want to do? and then working backwards and deconstructing the subjects to fit that purpose? Like, I’m a math teacher, or I used to be a math teacher. I’m a recovering math teacher, [LAUGHTER] but I also was a philosopher and a cognitive developmental psychology, etc. There are so many different subjects and areas of interest that could be taught, not just in math, but in everything. So why this? Why this curriculum? So when we redesigned the STEM teacher preparation program in Egypt, we had to design an entirely new program. So I went to Cal Poly who was one of our partners, and we had a design session with them. And so it was a group of people at Cal Poly. And I said to them, “we’re going to design a new teacher preparation program.” And I said, “Imagine a teacher preparation program with no courses. What would it look like?” And they were stunned at the question, but eventually, they came around and after three hours, they started to think about it. And they actually did come up with courses, but it was a whole different program than they would have done otherwise. And so I would challenge people to say, what if in high school, there was no college as there was in the first half of the 20th century, it was mostly just high school, there was no college. So what would high school look like? Why would it be there? So the impediment to reform when you get right down to it is the lack of a coordinated coherent philosophy of a school that can inform the curriculum choices that are made. And that this curriculum, that biology talks to chemistry and math talks to each, the humanities are included as a central idea of a school because one of the big problems of people is getting along with each other. So you need history, you need literature, you need to understand human behavior and what triggers you. This is absent, you’re not going to get that from precalculus. And I’m not saying that precalculus isn’t important. But Latin teachers would argue that Latin is important for different reasons. So this is why it comes down to what’s your vision for the kind of life you want to live and the kind of world you want to live in? And then let’s package that in a way that relates and is integral to a child’s life.

Deborah: So, in schools today, many teachers do try to include projects and problem solving with their kids. And we know that that’s very much a part of the pedagogy in many schools today. But the problem solving and the projects are, may be related to the subject matter, and may be of interest to the kids, and maybe not. But the way we did it in Egypt is the schools were designed around the premise that the graduates would be prepared to address the grand challenges of Egypt. And we have grand challenges like climate change, alternative energy, population growth, urban congestion, disease prevention, and so forth and so on. And so all of the courses are designed to provide students with the concepts and skills necessary to address these grand challenges. And so the projects that the students do are projects that are directly related to these grand challenges. And these challenges are things that the kids see every single day when they look out the windows or on their way to school. There are problems that are so pervasive that everyone in Egypt [LAUGHTER] looks around and says “Can’t we solve these problems.” And so what we’re doing is we told the kids, this is what we’re preparing you to do. And so when the kids undertake a project, or work on problems, they’re real, and they’re urgent, and the kids are empowered to think about the fact that they could become agents of change in their country. And that is so different from the kind of projects that we do in our schools today. And when I talk about all the challenges that we face in our society, and the kids are facing in their lives every day, those could be some of the kinds of challenges and problems that a curriculum is trying to address. And those are things that are very, very real and meaningful to the kids. And it sort of takes the kids back to when they were five and six years old and wanted to make lemonade stands to meet the needs of somebody in the community who needs money or something. That altruism, that wonderful altruism of smaller children that somehow gets taught out of them, or many of them, not all of them, certainly. But anyway, I’m trying to take what Joe is saying here and putting it into some very, very specific kinds of things that are so different between a school which is purpose driven, with a purpose which is meaningful, as opposed to a purpose which is really meaningless.

Rebecca: You described in Egypt kind of a context that was ripe for change, and ready to re-envision, repurpose, what would need to happen here to better align our schools for today’s needs in the US?

Joe: I’m glad you asked that. So we brought the process that we used back here to Philadelphia, and we convened a group of 120 people in eight design studios. We had a small grant to do this. And we asked them that question, we said, “What’s your vision for the greater Philadelphia area? What kind of society would you like to live in in the next 10 years?” And we spent time articulating that and then out of that came different purposes of education. It was, you might say, a mission statement… or more than a mission, it was a purpose statement that came out of that vision. And there was like eight elements of that purpose. I’ll give you two of those elements. One had to do with diversity, “how do you live in a diverse society?” And then the second one was, “What are the unifying elements for that diversity?” So if that is your top line theme, you might say then if you’re in biology, how would you exemplify that theme? Well, you talk about biodiversity. And then you talk about evolution as being the unifying principle of biology as one of those things. For chemistry, the diversity of the material world through the elements. And well, what’s the unifying principles to that? So you look at the natural world diversity, which is immense, and then you look at the human world of diversity. What unites us? We have tremendous diversities, not just around race and religion, but personalities and cognitive abilities. So it gets to then how do we live together among all of this kind of human and natural diversity? What unifies us? Kids want to know that. They have to deal with all of us, otherwise, you just get gangs. So that theme of unity and diversity can cut through all of the subjects, look at music, my God, and yet there’s a unifying principle. So those are the two elements, and so when you then sit a group of experts in a room that have diverse subjects, and you say, “Alright, here’s your theme: diversity, unity, you’re a biologist, tell us how would you structure the subjects along those two themes?” And we did the same. And out of that, then we create a curriculum. So it’s like a rug, warp and woof, the threads of a rug becomes an integrated curriculum from that, so that when a student comes into that school, they understand what the school is about, and why they’re learning what they’re learning.

John: How has that worked? How have the changes been received?

Joe: The people who participated were really amazed by the process, and they got a lot out of it. The next step in that is then developing the curriculum, and then implementing it. So we attempted to do that with the School District of Philadelphia. And they were not interested, even though we had this process. But why we were so thrilled and still are thrilled with our work in Egypt is that we talked directly to the Minister of Education, we were in meetings with him, we had his first deputy minister, who is still directing the project. So at the very highest level we had buy in. President El-Sisi visited one of our schools in Minya, Egypt and said, “My God, these students are amazing. I want 100 More of these schools.” And more recently, the minister and the head of the Parliament said we want to have this idea throughout all of our schools,17 million in Egypt, the elements of that idea. So what the biggest change has been in this process is, and the students will tell you, not me, the students will tell you is that they came in as individuals in a competitive environment. They came out of it, they had a personal transformation of seeing something greater than themselves, cooperating with each other, and thinking of it as “we” rather than “me.” And boy, wouldn’t that be great in this country if we had that spirit of let’s just work on this together?

Rebecca: I think your story really attests to the importance of some of the grassroots kind of components of reform as well as real support from leadership.

Joe: Exactly.

Rebecca: You also ventured into Bosnia Herzegovina. Can you talk a little bit about what that project was like there?

Joe: So a lot of this stuff happens through serendipity. We didn’t go out and apply for Egypt, they came to us, quite by accident. So the same thing happened in Bosnia Herzegovina which, as you know, it was a terrible situation back in 1991 with the breakup of Yugoslavia and tremendous genocide there. Save the Children had been working there on a USAID grant to work on a STEM school. This is in 2017. And it wasn’t working out too well. So they called on us, based upon our work in Egypt, and we went over there. And we did the same process with a group of university people and other officials of this design studio. We said, “What’s your aspiration for your country?” And their aspiration was: we want peace, and we have tremendous unemployment, and also people are leaving the country. So we want to be able to have peace, have people work together and not fight each other and be employed. So for them, they came up with the idea that the purpose of education is to be equipped to participate in a knowledge-based economy (KBE). I said fine. Well, what are they? So they listed 10 sectors of a knowledge-based economy? I said, “Fine, alright, so we have design studios, where we list these sectors and the elements of the sectors and then across this matrix was the subjects. And from that they developed a K to 13 curriculum that was integrated around these KBE sectors. So our role there was not to develop the curriculum, but to consult on the process by which they could do it themselves. And so we worked there for a couple of years. And we developed the curriculum app, an application, that was a relational database that had all of this curriculum in four different languages. So, it was interesting.

John: In your book, you advocate moving towards a more purpose-driven curriculum, but we’re living in a country where there’s a tremendous amount of political polarization and a lot of divisions, where there is a already a lot of pressure on schools to move in different directions tied to the local politics of people in that community. What can be done to move towards a consensus on the goals of the educational system in the US.

Deborah: There are a couple of principles that we need to deal with. One is that conversations have to happen across the sectors of community, whether we’re talking a local community, as a community of as large as a state, or national. One of the things of course, we don’t have a national education system as such here. The closest we get to a system is at the state level, but really, decisions are made much more at a local level. And we have tremendous diversity, even within the state of New York, for instance. I mean, you have one of the largest urban areas in the world, and then you have extremely rural areas, and with levels of affluence and poverty at the greatest extremes of the continuum. But conversations need to happen, but they need to be carefully facilitated, because you just don’t get in and say, “Well, what are we going to do?” You have to have very careful guidance and structure in this kind of design studio with everybody buying into the idea that things need to change. And we need to be able to really discuss freely and openly. And I think one of our beliefs is that when you have these discussions, I believe personally, and I’m a bit of an optimist in this respect, that we’ll find that many people, even from very diverse sectors, whether it’s politically or demographically or whatever, really have the same aspirations. I think the key is to identify the shared aspirations, and maybe where they aren’t shared, maybe there’s a way to forge unity between those. So I’m going to stop at this point, and then let Joe continue on with that.

Joe: I think that’s true. I think the key is to have a diversity of voices, and not just the loudest voices. And it needs to be, as Deborah said, very well facilitated in a process that doesn’t allow just the loudest voices to dominate. So that’s part of the process of developing that. But I think you also see that if you do a design studio in Oswego, for example, and then you also did it in Rochester, New York, and you did it in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, I would bet a bag of bagels that you’re going to find a lot more commonality [LAUGHTER] than you would usually think of it, because a lot of people just want to live, they want to have a family or they want to have success. There’s common human aspirations. But we live in a different time period than we did 1800s. So those aspirations have got to reflect the technology and the culture and the context of the times. And why that’s necessary is that you just can’t come in and impose a curriculum, you have to have buy in and acceptance… not to go back to Egypt, what we did was, we had to make sure that it was accepted. So if you have these aspirations, then you design the curriculum, you get affirmation from the curriculum, and everybody knows what the goal is. And once you decide you want to do it, and you have the authorization, if you will, from the decision makers at the policy level, financially, you can do it within a couple of years.

Rebecca: I love that you have great stories about success, and that it’s possible, because I think a lot of times it feels impossible when there’s a lot of division. One of the things that we’ve focused a lot on is the K-12 arena. What role does higher ed have in these conversations? Or what part of the conversation should we contribute to? Most of our audience are faculty and staff, administrators and things in higher ed institutions?

Deborah: I think higher ed has a huge role in several respects. Number one is if you change the way you’re teaching students so that they come out of their high schools with different sets of skills, and a different knowledge base and these kids go into their traditional university classes, there’s going to be a major disconnect. And again, I don’t want to beat the drum about Egypt, but very quickly a story that our students every semester, do a major semester-long, what we call a capstone project. And these are evaluated by outside evaluators. The very first time we did this, among the outside evaluators was a dean of engineering at the University of Cairo. And afterwards, she said, “Oh, my goodness, these kids are at the level of my master’s students or even above, and here they are just sophomores.” She said, “This is just amazing.” And I turned to her and I said, “These kids are going to be coming to your university in a couple of years. What are you going to do?” And she looks stunned. She was absolutely silent. She recognized the disconnect. And so that’s what we would call sort of a ground-up push for change, but there have to be other changes as well. Faculty need to be provided with a kind of support to do their own transformations in their courses and their pedagogy. And that has to be a huge change. But that won’t happen unless they see the need for change. And so that’s why we think actually starting in the high school is a great place to do that. But it also has to come from the leadership of the universities themselves from the top down, so we have all three working together. And of course, the first change has to be on teacher preparation. But changes have to happen in other courses as well, and those will be slower and probably take longer to implement. But the teacher preparation implications for this kind of curriculum, this kind of way of pedagogy and his way of assessment… we haven’t talked about that yet… are really quite significant.

Joe: You’re not going to be able to redesign schools, like we’ve been talking about, without the participation of universities for a number of reasons. One is that people look to universities for permission to think differently, they trust the expertise of professors. So they want to make sure that if they do this, it’s not going to hurt their child’s chances of college. So you need a partnership, a very strong partnership with the University to make that happen. And you need leadership from the President and Provost to give it the heft to make it happen. And so universities have been and would be indispensable to making this thing happen.

John: And many of the discussions at universities are along the same lines, in terms of the purposes that you’ve mentioned at the start of this recording session, it just hasn’t quite made it into the curriculum to the extent which might be needed to truly affect that type of change.

Joe: So in part of my research, I came across the report on general education that was done at Harvard in 1945, after World War Two, and it was about what you needed to live in a free society. And it was a very strong statement about the need to prepare students both at the college and secondary levels to live in a free society and what that meant, and how central the humanities were in that process, but also, that you cannot just teach math or the sciences for their own sake, that there has to be a moral arrow to it as well, because we saw in Germany in World War Two, how engineers and scientists were used in nefarious purposes. And I think universities are caught in this dilemma that students want to come to universities because they want to get a better job. But universities have a social mission too, and it’s more than just private gain that you’re doing with a student, you really want to transform that student into something more than who they are already and to enculturate them with a grander sense of obligation and duty. That’s really the value of higher education and the institutions, as I see it. And I see them as indispensable. So we wrote this book in a way to give a history and a sense of permission and a way to begin talking about these issues with some common language. That’s why we wrote it, because we realize universities have the same problem. Your Gen Ed courses, what do you have in those? But also institutionally, where are you going? What are you about?

Rebecca: I definitely agree with all the things that you’re saying. And I’m appreciative that you’ve written this book. One thing that Deborah had mentioned was assessment. So I wanted to see if we could pick up on that thread very quickly. So when we’re thinking about a purpose-driven mission and curriculum, how does that change the way we assess things? Assessment has been a big subject on the podcast more recently. And so I think it ties nicely into a lot of the things that we’ve been exploring.

Deborah: Well, I’m really glad you picked up on that, because that was absolutely critical. But what we have to do is we first have to decide what is success? And we can’t answer that question until we know what the purpose is. And I was just in a group of educators last night, and they were talking about what are the challenges of grade inflation. I said, “Well, what happens if we change the way we grade so that there can’t be such a thing as grade inflation?” And so what we’re talking about is a way to so radically change things like through the kind of evaluation I was mentioning, where students do projects and they have outside evaluators, is it complicated? Yes. Is it challenging? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely. Can you have grade inflation when you use rubrics and do blind evaluation and so forth? Yeah, yeah, you can get rid of those things. But the bottom line question is: how do you define success? And that has to be driven by the purpose which has been, as we have mentioned, deconstructed into what are the skills and concepts necessary to achieve your aspirations?

Joe: In the book we talked about the tyranny of math scores, that and English language arts has been the sine qua non of achievement and value in schools, and if you look at New York’s test scores, for example, for grades three to grade eight, math and science scores, the gap between low income and non-low income people stays the same from third grade all the way to eighth. And that’s predominantly the black and brown, so the gap remains the same. And if you just focus on math, you’re always going to be in a situation where you see these kids as deficient in some way. Whereas if you have the idea that there’s many different things that you can measure, other than math scores, that are of value, you open up the possibility of trying to find assets within students. And you also, through your assessment, you have to allow students to fail, and then to recover from that failure by learning something new, and not feeling that they are labeled… you know, it’s the growth mindset idea. So there has to be assessments that do that. And I’ll just say one last thing, you know, whenever someone learns something, particularly if it’s a misconception they have, and then they come to a correct understanding, there is a moment of vulnerability, where they say, “If I’m going to learn, I have to open myself up to different ways of thinking.” That’s an extremely vulnerable state. So if you have an assessment system that is judgmental, kids are not going to be learning, that’s why it stays the same in terms of the achievement gap.

John: I think there’s growing recognition of that in higher ed, which is why there’s so much discussion of alternative grading systems that encourage students to recognize that making mistakes is part of learning, and not penalizing them by what they come in not knowing but evaluating them based on their achievement by the end of the term.

Joe: Well, we’ve submitted a proposal with UC Berkeley on elementary assessment schemes using learning progressions as a framework so that if you’re traveling from Oswego to Albany, for example, let’s say Erie, Pennsylvania, you have a roadmap of where you’re going. And if you’re not quite in Erie, you’re somewhere in the middle. Well, that’s where you are. It’s not that you’re a failure to go to Erie. That’s where you are. So having this sense of measuring progress, but not evaluating it in terms of whether you’re failing or not, but you’re informing the student, “Okay, you have achieved this much. Here’s where you need to go next.”

Rebecca: Well, I’ve loved our conversation today. There’s lots to think about at an individual level and a social level, institutional level, policy level, there’s a lot of levels. But we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Deborah: Well, our book has just come out. And so we are really interested in trying to start these conversations, just as you have given us the opportunity to do today and get people to start to think about the ideas that we have. We wrote it with a general audience in mind. But although it’s an academic book, definitely in that respect, it’s being marketed by our publisher as an academic book, but we really want to try to reach a more general audience and get these conversations started. So we want to spread the word, we want people to start thinking about some of these ideas, and maybe talking amongst each other in small book groups or something as: “What do you think the purpose should be?” …and start it both as a grassroots and at all levels, get these conversations going?

Joe: Yeah, for me, it’s not about telling someone what their purpose should be, or giving them our idea of what the purpose should be. I mean, I have my private idea, but more it’s the process by which it’s arrived at in a sense that it can be done. So we look at this as a sharing of our ideas and opportunities. We’ve been struggling with this for many, many years. So when we’ve had this kind of success through this process, that we want to share it. We don’t want to own it, we’re giving it away. That’s what the whole idea of the academy is about. So we’re hoping that through these interviews that we’re doing here, that people will find value in these and will read our book and have discussions about the process and about how things are in their own places. And that there hopefully will be a critical mass developed. So that’s what we’re doing right now.

John: Well, thank you for joining us. You’ve raised so many interesting questions that need to be addressed for education to be more effective. Thank you.

Deborah: Thank you.

Joe: Thank you. You’ve been tremendous hosts.

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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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344. Failing Our Future

Posted in authentic learning, engagement, equity, feedback, first-generation, grading, higher education, inclusion, learning, mastery learning, motivation, teaching
June 5, 2024

The traditional grading system that we are all used to is of relatively recent historical origin. In this episode, Josh Eyler joins us to discuss research on problems associated with traditional grading systems and possible solutions at different scales and in different educational contexts.

Josh is the Director of Faculty Development, the Director of the ThinkForward Quality Enhancement Plan, and a faculty member in the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective Teaching and a forthcoming book, Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do About It.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

Eyler, Joshua R. (2024, forthcoming). Failing Our FutureL: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It. John Hopkins University Press (pre-order link)
Eyler, J. R. (2018). How humans learn: The science and stories behind effective college teaching. West Virginia University Press.
Brookhart, S. M., Guskey, T. R., Bowers, A. J., McMillan, J. H., Smith, J. K., Smith, L. F., … & Welsh, M. E. (2016). A century of grading research: Meaning and value in the most common educational measure. Review of educational research, 86(4), 803-848.

Transcript

John: The traditional grading system that we are all used to is of relatively recent historical origin. In this episode, we explore research on problems associated with traditional grading systems and possible solutions at different scales and in different educational contexts.

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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 Josh Eyler. Josh is the Director of Faculty Development, the Director of the ThinkForward Quality Enhancement Plan, and a faculty member in the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective Teaching and a forthcoming book, Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do About It. Welcome back, Josh.

Josh: Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here.

John: We’re happy to talk to you. And it’s been a while. Today’s teas are:… Josh, are you drinking tea with us today?

Josh: Well, you know how I roll, you guys, I don’t have tea, but I have some lovely water. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So tasty. I have a Scottish afternoon today.

John: And I’m trying to cut back on caffeine, so I just have a peppermint tea today.

Rebecca: Well, if you wanted to cut back on caffeine, you could join Josh with water. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: That’s true. [LAUGHTER] Come join the club, John. [LAUGHTER]

John: I suppose that probably would not be an unhealthy thing to do. [LAUGHTER] And I have been drinking a lot more water recently.

Rebecca: So, we invited you here today to discuss Failing our Future. Could you tell us a little bit about how this book project came about?

Josh: Sure. Yes. So it has a couple of origin stories, actually. One is that when I was writing How Humans Learn a few years ago, I was working on the final chapter on failure. And I kept coming across research on grades and grading and the obstacles that they set up to learning. And certainly if you’re thinking about failure as a tool for learning, you immediately are confronted with the fact that in systems that prioritize grades, they push back on the natural cycle of learning, where we try something, we fail, we get feedback, we try it again. Grades are set up in the opposite direction, they arrest that process before it can really play out. And so that is what piqued my interest. And I don’t know that I could say honestly that I thought I was going to write a book about grades at that point. But I knew that it was an important element of what I was discussing. So I’d say a few years after that, I think what we were seeing was a lot of discussion about grades, a lot more experimentation with it. That led me to want to write a book for a broader audience, one that certainly included educators, but one that cut across the K-12, higher ed divide one that was also for parents and policymakers and students, one that really took a bird’s eye view of the larger conversation about grades, trying to pull all of what we know together so that we could move forward as a community to try and enact change. So that’s what got us here. And the process was certainly longer than I expected due to the pandemic, but it was also just a very illuminating process. And I heard some heartbreaking stories as I did interviews for this. But overall, I’m really proud of the work.

John: And you mentioned addressing this through the entire educational spectrum. And I think it’s important to address it through the whole system. Because by the time we see students in college, they’ve already been indoctrinated into a system of grades, and there’s a lot of resistance to change, and also a lot of damage, perhaps, may have been done by the use of grading systems early. Could you talk a little bit about how we ended up with this system of grading, which has been so much a part of the educational culture from kindergarten on up?

Josh: Sure, yeah. And you’re right about the fact that students are conditioned for at least 12 years before they get to us to think about grades as being the most important thing about education. So how did we end up here, we could have a podcast episode that would last five hours if we really wanted to dig into that. But I’ll focus really on the more recent history. And that is that the A through F letter grade scale that we have is really about 125 years old. Our first records of a full letter grading scale come from Mount Holyoke in the 1890s. So they were the first to implement it. Back then it was A through E. They later dropped the E because they were afraid that people would think that they were excellent when they were not, you know, God forbid that we allow people to think that they’re excellent. And so they dropped the E and added a letter where there could be no mistake about what it meant, and that was an F, for failure. So that’s when it began. But that system, the letter grade system, was not formalized, or standardized, really until the 1940s. That is when you see a majority, in fact, of school districts and colleges and universities adopt that system. And what I think is most important about that, actually two things. One is that none of this has ever been inevitable, that the 1940s is less than 100 years ago, so this is not something that was cast in stone at the minute the American educational system began; it has changed and can be changed. The second thing, though, is that all of these schools, districts, all of these colleges adopted that system, not because they thought it was the best way to document student learning, but simply because it was the easiest way to communicate across institutions. They felt that if they had a common system that they could communicate more effectively between themselves. So it was not about student learning. It was not about student progress or growth or development. It was simply about communicating. That’s how we got here. And now we’re trying to figure out where do we go next? How do we undo some of the damage that has happened since that time?

Rebecca: Speaking of damage, do you want to underscore what some of that damage is? [LAUGHTER]

Josh: Sure, and I know that there’s room for reasonable debate about the terms that we use here. But I honestly really do think we can use the framing of damage and harm when it comes to grades. And in the book, I have several categories. The first and most obvious category for that damage has to do with learning, that grades set up obstacles to learning. They inhibit curiosity, they inhibit creativity, they inhibit risk taking, they affect intrinsic motivation. This is painfully obvious, but grades are classic extrinsic motivators, which means that they are very good for getting people to do things that they would not otherwise want to do. Extrinsic motivators operate effectively, if your goal is compliance, you want to get people in seats, you want to get people to turn things in on time, you want to get people to say things in class, grades work for that. But if what you’re interested in is learning and quality, that’s what you need intrinsic motivation for. The grades can get people into learning spaces, but they in no way ever guarantee that a student will learn even though they are actually in the environment. So that’s really important. Environments that prioritize grades also incentivize cheating, and they just stand in the way of a lot of different things. But that’s just the academic part of it. Obviously, those are important, but to me, they’re less important than some of the effects of grades on students’ lives and wellbeing. Grades magnify and mirror inequities that have always been a part of the American educational system. For example, students who attend poorly resourced high schools have fewer educational opportunities, fewer textbooks, more teacher turnover, all the things that are tied to less-resourced schools. And what that means often when they get to college, they have experienced what we call opportunity gaps, which show up in their grades, especially in Gen Ed courses. So those grades that you see in the first couple of years of a student’s college experience, one who has experienced opportunity gaps, those are reflections of the past, they’re not indications of the student’s potential. They are indicators of systemic inequity. So that’s just one of many examples that we could rifle through. Grades are surveillance technologies. They’re often used for punishment, especially in high school, but kind of across the board. So that’s another category. inequities. And then the final one, the one that we’re getting more and more research on now, maybe than we’ve had in the past, and one that I personally care a lot about is that we have evidence now that grades are a contributing factor to the mental health crisis in teenagers and young adults, the academic stress caused by grades. We have a number of research studies pointing us toward the significant contribution of grades to that mental health crisis. So lots of areas here, I think, beyond the classroom. And that’s really our central idea of this book that grades have long afterlives, well beyond a semester, well beyond the classroom, that affect people’s lives, sometimes just in the short term, but often in the longer term as well.

Rebecca: Josh, you went from going from grades are no fun to grades are a super downer. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: Yeah, well, that’s the message. It’s a happy book, Rebecca. [LAUGHTER] It’s not going to win any awards for a happy smiley story, that’s for sure. [LAUGHTER]

John: One concern that some faculty have about moving to alternative grading systems is that, while intrinsic motivation is something we’d all really love to see in our students, there may be some tasks in our disciplines that students have to master which may not be as intrinsically rewarding as others, but they might still be foundational for students to be successful. If we move away from grading systems, what type of motivation can be provided to help students master those tasks that may seem tedious and may not be quite as intrinsically rewarding as other areas that students just find much more interesting?

Josh: Well, that’s a great question. There are a couple of things I’d like to address about this. So first of all, it’s not that we’re talking about either having traditional grades or having no grades, and nothing in between. What a lot of people are doing in the area of alternative grading practices is experimenting with a whole range of models. And so particularly for the types of courses and disciplines that you’re talking about in that question, John, I have found that many faculty gravitate toward a model called standards-based grading, where you can identify the skills, the content knowledge, the disciplinary norms and necessities that are important for students to develop. And the grade for the course is based, not on individual performance on exams, but how many standards they meet, over the course of the semester. And as a feature of that particular model, often students are given multiple attempts and multiple ways to meet the standards. So that’s part of releasing the pressure valve a little bit for students that gives them room to grow and honors the fact that individuals learn at different paces. So it doesn’t matter when in the semester that they hit the number of standards in order to get their A or B, because the process is a fundamental part of that grading model. So I think that’s really important. Another thing that often comes up in these conversations, though, is the fact that we do in fact, have gradeless colleges in America. The one I feature in the book is Evergreen State College in Washington. And they don’t have any grades at all. They have fully narrative transcripts. They give only feedback over the course of the semester. And they teach all the disciplines. So they have found ways to heighten the intrinsic motivation, and to use feedback to really help students navigate the path toward the goals that they have for themselves and for the class. So there are ways to do this. You don’t need grades to keep people in the seats or to have them do things that might draw on less intrinsic motivation. I think there are ways to structure our learning environments that allow us to do similar work without the pressure of traditional grades. And I think that’s the ultimate point here. I think what a lot of folks in this area who are interested in grading reform are trying to promote is not necessarily just ditching grades outright, although we could talk about that if you want, but reorienting students relationship with grades, the messages that grades send to students, so that it’s not necessarily an evaluation, but a tool helping them develop their skills and to push their learning forward.

Rebecca: It’s always been interesting to me that the A through F system was meant to provide some standardized ways of communicating between institutions yet, if you look at any single institutions’ body of syllabi, you can see that the grades mean entirely different things [LAUGHTER] depending on a class, like some might be about attendance, some might be about success on a test, some might be about achieving learning objectives. So it seems like if it was meant to communicate anything [LAUGHTER] across institutions, it certainly isn’t meeting that objective. I don’t know what my question is. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: I’m so glad this up, though.

Rebecca: I had a question, but I think I lost it. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: No, I’ll answer it. There’s a question in there, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Thanks for helping.

Josh: What you’re talking about there is what I call the measurement fallacy. And so there has been more and more work over the last few years, including one that I absolutely love, called A Century of Grading Research, where a team of experts dives into a massive amount of material. And the conclusion that they come up with is that a grade is nothing more than a subjective indicator by an individual instructor on a student’s progress toward that individual’s goals for a particular course. So I set the goals for my course, a grade that I would give is nothing more than an indicator of how much progress a student has made on my goals for my course. They call them learning intentions in this paper. It is not in any way, a kind of universal certification of learning in a particular course or discipline. Nor does it mean that the student who gets a certain grade in my course would get the same grade from my colleague down the hall teaching the same course. It is a truly subjective indicator of progress. And because of that, we cannot really say that grades measure what we have been told that they measure and what our educational systems have assumed that they measure, which is learning. They’re not universal measurements of learning, they’re subjective indicators of progress in the course.

Rebecca: And yet they’re used to make all kinds of decisions about students.

Josh: They are, and you’re absolutely right.

Rebecca: It’s very interesting. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: So I think there has been a lot of ill placed weight on grades without a subsequent amount of investigation into what grades have meant, and continue to mean. This is also what fuels the furor over supposed grade inflation. And there are lots of other tendrils of problems, when you begin to put so much emphasis on grades to do so much work in our educational system.

John: You mentioned Evergreen State College, but another college that had gone in that direction, very successfully was New College, and I teach in a program at Duke in the summer, and I had two TAs from New College, and they were two of the brightest people I had ever worked with, and their mastery of the subject matter was very much equivalent to that of other students I had who came from institutions with very traditional grading systems. So they certainly didn’t seem to be damaged by that. And yet, there seemed to have been a bit of a hostile takeover of New College. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: Yes, there has been but there is not evidence yet that the hostile takeover has affected that gradeless model. There was some discussion that I read in transcripts of board meetings about that grading system, but it has not changed yet. And I’m glad you brought up New College, John, because, and they have this on their website, as recently as last year, they were able to boast that they were producing students who went on to get the highest percentage of STEM PhDs in the country, relative to their size as an institution, which says a lot. If you are a gradeless institution, and your students are succeeding at that rate in STEM PhDs, it means that they’re learning not just content, but also the skills that are necessary to do that level of advanced work. So I think that that says a lot for what is possible, even within systems that do not have anything close to a traditional grading system.

John: And I should note that one of those students did go on to a PhD in economics. And the other student went on and picked up a master’s degree in data analytics. And they’ve succeeded very nicely, despite the absence of grades [LAUGHTER] in their college career. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: Imagine that.

John: When we began this discussion, one of the things you noted was that under traditional grading systems, the grades at the end of courses often reflect differences in the opportunities that students face before they enter our classes. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Josh: Absolutely. So you have the reinforcing of those gaps, you have extensions of those gaps. So if you think about what happens to a student who comes into a college course with those opportunity gaps, and then is in a system, for example, where grades are curved, so not only then are they trying to bridge over those equity gaps, but their grades are really reflective of those gaps. But now they are also competing in a curved grade system with their other fellow students, many of whom have had more practice at the kinds of exams and the kinds of questions and the kinds of teaching strategies that they’ll see in those courses. So it just starts to pile on top of each other. And I think that this is something that we just don’t talk enough about, it’s just assumed, and many of these students are labeled unprepared or not ready for college, which places all the burden on them rather than this more systemic problem that I think we really need to face. Because we don’t talk enough about it, we assume that grades have to be a part of the landscape of education. And because of that, we, and I say we as the community in education, we’ve just been willing to tolerate all of the issues that grades have brought with them without really pulling back the curtain and looking at what the issues really are.

John: And we lose so many students in the first couple of years of college and many of the students we lose are those who come from low-income school districts, whose parents had less education, and who just come in with less preparation. And that’s not a very equitable way of providing an education.

Josh: Right, absolutely. And so this shows up on all kinds of metrics that colleges care about: retention, progress, graduation, all of which, by the way, are tied to grades and GPAs. That grades are the gatekeepers for keeping those students enrolled and moving through to graduation. So yes, that’s a major problem to address with respect to those students who are coming to us with fewer opportunities and from school districts with fewer resources. I think we need to really investigate the traditional ways of being In higher education, really look closely at them, reimagine them in order to create systems that have equity at the center and where we are actually, I think, invested in student success and helping those students from those different backgrounds to succeed.

Rebecca: I think the other thing to underscore related to equity issues is not only does an institution maybe have policies about grades and decisions are made at an institutional level, but at the federal level grades are used for financial aid. And so if you don’t hit a certain grade point average, and if you don’t have a certain number of classes that you complete successfully, so you’re not withdrawing from them, or having incompletes, etc, then you might not be eligible, you could lose financial aid. So whether or not a student has demonstrated growth in any kind of way doesn’t matter. It’s down to this idea of grades. And depending on the classes they’re enrolled in and the different things that grades mean, we’re essentially not allowing students to proceed because they can’t afford to.

Josh: That’s absolutely right. The more you really take the magnifying glass to this, the more you see how implanted grades are in all of these decisions, and all these key points in a student’s academic career, bringing in financial aid, I think, is a wonderful example of their gatekeeping function. And the idea that you’re raising there, that it doesn’t even give students a chance to try and bridge those equity gaps. It doesn’t honor their growth or development at all, it says you got less than a C average in your first year, therefore, we are not giving you any more money to move through the university, and so many leave, many dropout. And I think that there is a better way to do things.

John: And many of those students who leave end up with a fairly significant burden of student debt that they still have to pay, further increasing the inequity. What types of alternative grading systems do you discuss in your book, you mentioned standards based grading, but what are some of the other areas that you encourage faculty to consider?

Josh: Well, the book is divided into two parts. And the first half is all the problems and the second half is possible solutions. And so there’s a chapter for parents on what you can do in the home to help your children reorient their own approach to grades. And then the last chapter is about systemic change. But the one in between that is focused on what teachers in K-12 and faculty in higher ed are doing in their own individual classrooms to help with this. And so, there’s a whole range. There are the models that are related to standards-based grading, I call them the cousins: they’re standards-based grading, specifications grading, competency-based, mastery-based, proficiency-based, they’re all not very different from each other, they just have slightly different names, and maybe a few modestly different features to them. So that’s one bucket. Portfolio grading is one that I recommend for folks who just want to dip their toe in the world of alternative grading, because a portfolio model, you’re giving a lot of feedback throughout the semester, a lot of opportunity to revise and redo assignments. But ultimately, the portfolio that is turned in at the end of the semester gets a fairly traditional grade associated with it, it’s just that that grade honors the whole arc of the work for the semester. So that’s another one. Contract grading, and its various branches that we have recently seen. So classic contract model was developed in the middle of the 20th century. And it looks something like this: here’s a list of things to do for the course, if you do 15 of them at a satisfactory level… I’m just making up that number…if you do 15 at a satisfactory level, you get an A for the course, you do 12 you get a B, etc. That’s a contract model. More recently, there’s been a version of it called labor-based contract grading,…very prominent in writing studies… that tweaks it a little bit to emphasize more the amount of work, the amount of writing that students do over the course of the semester, and that is tied to fulfilling the particular contract. And then if we’re looking at a spectrum of grading models, with portfolio grading being one of the more conservative of the alternatives, on the other end of the spectrum you have what some people call ungrading and other people call collaborative grading where there are no grades throughout the semester, only feedback, lots of student self assessment, self evaluation, and then at the end of the semester, the students proposed their grade and the final grade is determined through a conference between the instructor and the student about that proposed grade. So there are lots of things that people are trying. I tried to send two messages about this, one is that my goal is hopefully to help faculty find models that will work best for them and their students, that it’s not a one-size-fits-all model. The same thing that works for me may not work for my colleague in the next classroom over. So that’s important. The other thing is that you do not need absolute fidelity to any one of these models. It’s not like Moses came down from the mountain, with tablets that you had to follow to the letter, lots of people are mixing and matching and taking elements from a host of different systems that they find works for them. So I’ve yet to find someone marching down the checklist for engraving or for contract grading, everyone’s kind of putting their own spin on it, and that’s good. Well, it’s actually not only good, it’s important since our contexts vary so significantly across higher ed.

Rebecca: As a lot of faculty start considering these different alternative models, collectively we can start to initiate culture change, kind of with a grassroots model. But systemic change requires policy change and other things as well. Can you talk a little bit about what role we might have in pushing forward some of those agendas as well?

Josh: Like I mentioned before, a major reason for writing this book was because my observation was that a lot of people are talking about grading reform, but they’re all coming at it, understandably, from their own perspective, the faculty perspective, the administrative perspective, the policymaker perspective, and the parent’s perspective. And I think that if we’re thinking seriously about systemic change, we need to have everyone on the same page collaborating to move change forward. All that is to say that I think about this question quite a lot. There’s certainly examples that we have of recent systemic change, some of the University of California schools have changed their grading systems in significant ways. Western Oregon just dropped the lowest grades on the scale, they’re no longer available to give. I just met someone a couple of weeks ago from Bryant University, they’re moving to collaborative grading at scale for their first-year seminar courses. So it is happening, what it requires is a network of people across an institution, all of whom believe that this is not only the right thing, but they understand how to use policy to make the reform happen, but also how to tell the story in a way that all the different constituencies can see themselves in it, and can agree that this is the direction that they need to head. So the networking is important, understanding how policy shapes grading habits and processes at a university. If you’re part of a public system, which I know you and I both are, you need to understand how the system policy and the state policy plays into this as well. So that requires having that network of different people at different positions in a university to really move that work forward. But what I really want folks to know is that you’re not alone in this, that there are lots of people thinking about this, and lots of people who are doing this work, sometimes under the radar, sometimes above the radar at institutions, and that one person taking a step is a step toward change. But multiple people taking the same step together begins to create a movement toward change. And so I want people to know that. I also want people to know that there are blueprints out there for how to do this work, that there are people who study grading reform, there are models out there for successful institutional reform. Given my work for the book, I think we have a lot to learn from K-12 school districts. There are so many of those each year that are transitioning to standards-based grading across the district. Last year, for example, the entire city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, all their school districts moved to standards-based grading. So this is happening. And the more we learn about process, the more we draw on our colleagues’ network and expertise in these areas, the more we work kind of as a collective in higher ed to push this forward, the more change you’re going to see.

John: We give a lot of workshops on campus and some of them are focused on alternative grading systems. We haven’t seen quite as much movement with that among faculty as I thought we perhaps might, because during the pandemic, a lot of people were open to trying some very different things. But there’s been some resistance. We’ve had a number of people trying it, but it hasn’t caught on quite as much as I had expected it to. Why are so many faculty resistant to moving away from traditional grading systems?

Josh: Well,I think this varies from place to place. But I will say that I think that a major thing that we all face as faculty is the pressures of time. Everyone wants to do their best for their students, I really do believe that, but when you’re faced with such a limited amount of time in which you can change elements of your course, you’re probably going to gravitate immediately toward the kinds of content that you’re teaching in the course in the assignments, the course design pieces of it, or you’re going to think about active learning strategy that John and Rebecca talked about a few months ago, rather than addressing the thing that is at the very foundation of our educational systems in America. That’s not going to be the place that you go first, [LAUGHTER] kind of an upheaval of everything that you have known about education. So I think some of it is just, in a system where we all have very limited time, and very few resources, where do you put your efforts, and I think that is driving some of that. I also think we’re kind of seeing this interesting bounce back that followed that period of innovation at the beginning of the pandemic. I think what you see is almost a defensive response to that period of innovation, that what we really need to do to bring students back and re-engage them in the coursework is to try and somehow recapture what our image was a traditional education pre-2020, that we need to move backward toward that rather than capitalize and extend the innovations that we were doing in the early stages of the pandemic. I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush on that, but I have seen some of that elasticity, that rubberband effect, in talking with folks across the country about some of these issues. So I think those two things are at the forefront of why some folks might resist that. And none of those really has to do yet with really trying to unpack people’s own philosophies of education, or how their grades and their grading models tie into their values that they have with respect to education. So that’s even kind of a deeper level that you can’t even get to until you address some of these other concerns.

Rebecca: And when we’re crunched on time, things that we’ve done before are easier to implement. And it’s also hard to find time to reflect on our practices and to do some of the things that you’re talking about, in thinking about how our values align with what we’re doing. We’re really good as institutions of talking about equity, but we don’t always fully analyze how our practices impact actual equity.

John: And we were all the products of a graded system. And we were somehow successful in that, or we wouldn’t be in these positions. And so I think there may be a little bit of psychological resistance to changing something that has been so fundamental to our own experience.

Josh: Yes. I think a huge capital Y-E-S [LAUGHTER] to both of what you’re saying, that Rebecca, your point, we are not very good at really interrogating how our practices may or may not be aiding our equity goals or advancing our equity goals. And John, yes, we have succeeded in graded systems. And I do think the psychological is a part of it. If we were able to do it, why shouldn’t other people be able to manage this? I think that is what some people think. And more than that, I often see a kind of defensive fallback. Part of this is natural, in that we love our disciplines and devoted our lives to our disciplines, but a fallback toward if I get rid of grades or if I change my grading system, what does that mean for the standards of my discipline, for how people will engage with my discipline? And so I think that’s a psychological element of this as well. And it comes out in arguments about rigor and standards, but what it’s really about is the individual psychology, I think, of the person making the argument.

John: Are there other topics from your book that you’d like to discuss that we haven’t?

Josh: I think the reform efforts that I have seen succeed, and those that have failed, always have hinged on communication, at every level. Why are we doing this? What is the purpose of it? How do we bring people into the process very early on at all levels. At the K-12. level, that means parents, teachers and administrators working together. I think at higher ed, it means utilizing the expertise of faculty right out of the gate, allowing them to shape the narrative and the conversation and the direction and draw on administrative and staff resources to help enact that vision, rather than having a top-down mandate that you had to change your grading. That’s never gonna work in higher ed. But I will say that the communication is what drives all of that work. And it is the hinge that either allows one of these efforts to succeed or fail.

Rebecca: Well, we have a lot to think about, but what’s next, Josh?

Josh: So, what’s next? Well, the book comes out at the end of August and so I’m really excited to launch that and to finally have it in people’s hands and have lots of conversations about what’s in there, hopefully, So, that’s what’s immediately next. I am thinking about the next project that has something to do with the students who are coming to college now are the students who their entire K-12 experience has been shaped by the Common Core, and the obsession with standardization in America, and so what does that mean for higher ed? And what does that mean for those students and their learning? So, I’m in the very early stages of trying to think about that a little bit, but that might be what the next project is.

Rebecca: You always have great projects, Josh, and get us thinking about really important topics. So thanks for your work. I’m looking forward to sharing your new book.

Josh: Well, thank you both very much. It’s always a pleasure to be on this podcast, one of my favorites, and I’d love talking to you both about all these issues, so hanks very much.

John: It’s great talking to you again, and I’m looking forward to receiving my copy of this book in the summer. I ordered it as soon as I saw the notification that pre-orders were available.

Josh: I appreciate that, John, 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.

[MUSIC]

342. Infographics

Posted in attention, authentic learning, engagement, feedback, higher education, learning, pedagogy, peer review, rubrics, teaching
May 22, 2024

When papers and projects are due at the end of the term, students often procrastinate even when the projects are carefully scaffolded. In this episode, Michelle Kukoleca Hammes joins us to discuss how a series of infographic assignments, combined with peer and instructor feedback, provide an engaging and productive learning experience. Michelle is an associate professor of political science and a CETL Fellow for the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at St. Cloud State University.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

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Transcript

John: When papers and projects are due at the end of the term, students often procrastinate even when the projects are carefully scaffolded. In this episode, we discuss how a series of infographic assignments combined with peer and instructor feedback provide an engaging and productive learning experience.

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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 Michelle Kukoleca Hammes. Michelle is an associate professor of political science and a CETL Fellow for the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at St. Cloud State University. Welcome, Michelle.

Michelle: Hi. Nice to be here.

John: We’re looking forward to talking to you. Today’s teas are:… Michelle, are you drinking tea?

Michelle: I am. I don’t always drink tea, but I made sure this morning I did. And so I’m actually just drinking a green tea, a milk tea. It’s not quite as good as others I’ve had. I have a colleague from Wales who makes the best green tea, but it’s good this morning.

John: …and Rebecca?

Rebecca: I have a Hunan Noir Tea, which is very tasty.

John: You left out the Pinot.

Rebecca: I know. [LAUGHTER]

John: Okay. And my tea is a black raspberry green tea.

Michelle: Sounds nice.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today, Michelle, to discuss how you’ve been using infographic assignments in your online comparative politics classes. When you first started teaching this course, what kinds of assignments did you use?

Michelle: I use a variety of assignments. I’ve been teaching this course for 27 years now. And then this is mainly for my intro level comparative course. But I’ve adapted it for upper levels too, so mainly traditional assays early on. As I moved to the online environment, I would still have them do a major paper of a country study. And so pretty traditional assignments for the most part, but I wanted to make some changes for the online environment especially.

John: So what made you decide to change to infographics?

Michelle: Well, a few things. One is I felt that students were doing these papers that were quite lengthy in their country studies, and they would turn them in at the end of the semester. And we never really had a chance to talk about the elements of them in depth prior to that. And so I really wanted to change that. So it wasn’t just the end of the semester. And they weren’t sharing them with each other, because of the format of them as just being a lengthy paper, it wasn’t the kind of thing that they would be interested in exchanging with each other. And then frankly, I was getting a little bored, [LAUGHTER] the format, not so much the content or their insights, but the format just became very boring. We all know that when you’re working with one individual paper, it can be really exciting to have that dialogue with the student. But when you have a stack of papers, it suddenly becomes too daunting. And so I was just looking for a way to make us all happier, actually.

Rebecca: That sounds like a good motivation. [LAUGHTER] Can you talk a little bit about what the infographic assignment is?

Michelle: So I will talk about in terms of that intro level comparative politics class. One of the things that there’s not time to do in any semester is to really cover every country in the world, obviously. First of all, I wanted to make sure that students could pick their own country that they have an interest in, and that would broaden the number of countries we would cover. And then I switched it to infographic for the online component because there were a few things I wanted to do with it. One is to retain the goals I had in mind for them learning about a country. But also then I wanted to tie in some best practices for online presence in the classroom, for example. My discussions, I was also unsatisfied at the beginning, we learn as we go along, and my discussions tended to also be maybe a little stale, or I’d throw out a question and I would get very similar answers from everybody. They were going back to the textbook and giving me something rather than being creative or energetic in their own answers. And so the way the infographic works is I have about 10 through the semester that they have to do. And so it’s basically breaking up the country study into smaller pieces, so that they have different topics as we go along the different topics in the class. And then before they submit them to me, they submit them into the discussion for the appropriate week. And that way, all the other students can see them, it gives them a lot of different skills. One is that they are able to critique other people’s work, they are gaining more knowledge about a variety of countries. It allows them to practice skills on their own in terms of working together. So I don’t see these always as only individual assignments, although that’s how they’re graded, but kind of a group work assignment that they can all enhance each other. And so there were a lot of ways in which I wanted to bring different elements into the same assignment, particularly because I didn’t want to have to think of how to bring these elements in and do different assignments for each thing I wanted to bring into the classroom. Having one assignment that was consistent really helped them.

Rebecca: It sounds like by having a consistent assignment, you do have to learn how to do the assignment over and over again, that part of it is covered. You do it one time and then it’s clear how to do the assignment and then you can focus on the content and the material.

Michelle: Yeah, exactly. And one of the other things is, unlike just having one country study at the end, there was a lot more formative assessment that could go into it. So exactly that, where we’re able to help build skills up early on. Some of the content early on is pretty simple. The first one is making an infographic about the demographics of the country. And so it’s pretty simple, but it allows them to get the first skills if they’ve never used, for example, Canva, or other programs that allow them to make an infographic. So they get their feet wet with that. It allows them to think about how to communicate in a different way other than a paper, because I also began to think about my intro level students who many would become political science majors, but many wouldn’t. And so in a course that they were using for general education, they’re not going to be writing political science research papers. And so allowing them in different ways to express themselves I felt was another skill that they could bring.

Rebecca: It was nice to see this scaffolding, separating out some of the technical skills from the content, because often we’re doing all of those things at once. And it sometimes can be unclear whether or not it’s a technical skill that is lacking or the lack of understanding of something. So separating those out of it really does seem like it would help have a clearer sense of where students are. And, as we know, [LAUGHTER] if you try to ask students to do too many things in one bigger assignment, then certain things end up edited out. And that might be the thing that was really critical. So it’s nice to have those separate assignments to focus in on those.

Michelle: Yeah, exactly. And I really enjoy the fact that, rather than focusing on grading a long paper, I’m able to go through that process with them. And then also in discussions, it gives me so many opportunities to re-teach something. So if I’m noticing in someone’s infographic that they’ve made an error, or they have a misunderstanding of a concept we’re working with, then all the students in the class can see me correcting that and doing it in a gentle way, that seems a little bit less high stakes for students that because it is just this one assignment, and I’m making this one little correction here, but I think it benefits everybody.

John: So for those students who haven’t done much work with infographics or with graphics in general, do you provide any instructions or recommendations to them? You mentioned Canva, do most students use that? Or is it a mix of tools?

Michelle: They usually do end up using Canva, because that is one of the tools that I put in the directions. And so I have quite lengthy directions in terms of guiding them through accessing technology, allowing them to know that they can use various different technologies, depending on their accessibility to them. There are some really great programs that of course, cost money or pro versions. But I let them know that for our purposes, they can certainly just download a free version of a program. They could really even do it in the Microsoft Office Suite in a variety of ways if that’s where their skills lie. And of course, that’s something that all the students have access to on campus. And so I do get them lengthy directions, they’re not all my directions. I don’t feel like I need to reinvent the wheel. So I just include several videos from YouTube that talk about how to use Canva. And those are sufficient and actually probably better than I can do. And so I put those out there with other directions, I give them alternatives. And then of course, if they’re still stuck, then they can always work through it with me. We can have a Zoom meeting where they pull up their materials, and we work on putting it together.

Rebecca: You mentioned that students were sharing infographics with each other, it sounded like maybe through a learning management system or something. Can you talk a little bit more about what that sharing looks like and the kind of feedback that students are giving one another.

Michelle: So the learning management system we use here is D2L Brightspace, and there is of course, like in most learning management systems, there’s that built in discussion feature, so I just use what’s already there. I don’t mind using third-party applications., but it just tends to make things trickier. So I just use the discussion. Have them post it right to the discussion, and have them use the discussion tools, whether it be just typing in or using some audio or other tools to give feedback to each other. And I find that the discussions are so much more lively. Even more than I expected. The first time I used it, it was for a summer class and I thought “okay, I’m gonna try this now because it’s summer, and no one wants to be sitting writing a 20-page paper in summer. What am I going to do?” So I put it out there for the summer class and I thought, Okay, well, maybe they’re busy with other things or they’ve got excitement in their own life over the summer or they’re working a lot of hours. I had never had such lengthy discussions go on in any class before that. They really enjoyed looking at each other’s work rather than just from me. Many of the students chose countries that reflect an interest they have, maybe it’s somewhere that they’re actually from, although I usually try to encourage them to broaden a little bit. But that also brings such a benefit to the rest of the students. So we do have students who do that. I have students who maybe have gone on vacation somewhere or have a family connection somewhere, I’ve had some that have been stationed in the military, and come back, and they want to talk about what they noticed when they were there, so they put a lot of that in the infographics. I found just use the basic tool, but allow it to be opened up for them. And I also try in discussion, and I do this even in other discussions that I have online, because I usually try to hang back for the first bit, quite a bit. I allow that to be organic. And then I’ll go in and make sometimes just a summary of everything that’s been said or things that I need to correct. So that it’s not simply another lesson from me. But I have that ability to correct when I need to.

John: You mentioned the first infographic assignment had them work with demographic data and display that, to what extent are these assignments tied to the specific course work that you’re doing during each of the 10 assignments?

Michelle: For most of those 10, they’re directly tied to the material for the week. So for example, the textbook will have a chapter where we’re talking about government structures, presidential systems, parliamentary systems, et cetera. And so the infographic for that week will be directly related. So they’re going to do an infographic laying out the government structure. And then another module will be on political parties and how they work in various parts of the world. And so it’ll be directly tied to: “So show me your country, and show me the main political parties in your country. Tell me what their main ideology is. Tell me who’s in power now… which party? And what does that mean for the policies that get put forward?” Another one would be one on current events, the last one that they do is: “Well, what’s going on there now? …and “With everything you know about your country now, what do you predict for the future for them? How do you think they’re gonna solve this?” So a little bit more policy oriented… also, “look at what they’re actually doing in terms of legislation and implementation.” And I also do one… I don’t use the textbook anymore, but it’s something I used years ago that I retained the content in a module, which is to look at the concerns of any country in terms of every country’s concern with prosperity, security, and stability. And so I asked them to just put out an infographic that asks them to assess threats to those things, and looking at their country. And so it’s a little bit on the current events side, but it’s focused for them in terms of every country needs to be aware of its security… what’s happening?

Rebecca: You’ve hinted that students are really engaged in these assignments because of discussion forums. But can you elaborate on just the general sense of what students have been able to accomplish by shifting to this format, and also their engagement with one another?

Michelle: I think, several things, some of which I’ve mentioned. So the formative assessment part, I think they gain a lot from not just getting comments at the end of the semester, oftentimes handed in that last week. And then, frankly, I don’t expect that every student has even read my comments at that point. So just having the opportunity to fully engage throughout the entire semester, and so we’re not also dealing with, “Oh, I have three days before this paper is due. So let me think about it today, make a plan to think about it more tomorrow, [LAUGHTER] and then maybe I’ll do it the next day before it’s actually due.” And not that that’s all students, but I know when I was an undergrad that happened to me. So I think that just slowing them down, allowing them space to actually think about their country in multiple ways, and not have it be “Okay, we’re all working to doing your own country study at the end of the semester,” but having them actually engaged the whole time, I think is of great benefit to them. And I think they learn a lot more. I think that taking it in these smaller chunks, actually has made them research a little bit deeper on each of the topics because they’re not overwhelmed with “Okay, I’ve got all of these topics now to cover in this country study.” And so they tend to just do it in a way that is most efficient for them, let’s say. And so I think this gives them that way to back up a little bit and actually enjoy the process of learning rather than the process of an assignment only.

John: I think you’ve made a really good point there about students’ tendency to procrastinate. I was thinking back to when I was an undergraduate, and actually a graduate student as well. And I can’t recall a single time when I didn’t start writing the paper the day before it was due. I spent a lot of time gathering materials, taking notes, and organizing and putting an outline together, but the writing generally took place in just one day. So, [LAUGHTER] this is forcing students to engage in a little bit more spaced practice, to engage with the material regularly, and I think there’s a lot of benefits over that rather than the traditional way of just rushing through and getting it done right before it’s due.

Michelle: Yeah, exactly. And I’ve adopted that in other classes too, the idea of doing a lot of prewriting throughout the semester. So I’m a big believer in the prewriting process, and it’s very valuable, and it is doing work. But when I mentioned earlier, sort of they spend the day thinking about it, I’m thinking more of myself as an undergraduate thinking about not the assignment, but thinking about the fact I have to do an assignment.[LAUGHTER] So it’s more anxiety, not so much productive work on the content of what I’m doing. And so yeah, the prewriting work for any assignment is really great. So I’ve been trying to shift that mindset. I also teach a research methods course in my department and I teach our senior seminar. And so the senior seminar, especially, just making it about an entire semester-long process, I think, has taken a lot of pressure off of them. They seem a little relieved by the end, it’s not as daunting,

Rebecca: It definitely seems like it deepens the study and the engagement, not just because it’s broken into smaller pieces, but because it’s a consistent country the whole time and because it’s a consistent kind of assignment the whole time, it really provides a structure to be able to do that. I’m curious whether or not any of your other colleagues have also shifted to doing assignments in this format, or other similar kinds of strategies.

Michelle: I can’t really say. I know that in my department, we’ve talked about them a lot. And so I think people are adapting parts of them. I don’t think anybody does it the full way that I’ve described in terms of the full semester, but we have talked about just different ways of communicating. I think that’s going to shift again, obviously, AI is something that everybody is grappling with how to best use. So I think there’ll be some shifts coming. But I can tell you that I was Interim Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and now I’m a faculty fellow there. And I’ve talked to a lot of people across campus, and some of our off-campus partnerships about this assignment, because I get really excited about it. If you haven’t noticed, this is my favorite thing. And so I’ve talked to a lot of people, and I just can’t be sure how many have actually applied some of these things. But they certainly seem interested, and they’re certainly searching out the same types of things I was searching out: how to make things, first of all, more authentic for the students, how to engage the students more with themselves in an asynchronous class or with other students. Even in a synchronous class or on-the-ground class, you could still have the same assignments. You might want to introduce them differently, you might want the discussions to take place in the classroom, rather than obviously online, because you could engage in person that way. So you can do kind of a round robin around the room, maybe… any of those techniques. But I also let the students know that, for them, they will become a mini expert by the end on that particular country. So they should all understand the topic areas but. becoming an expert on the individual countries that’s all their own. And so I hope that colleagues, no matter what field they’re in, can find some way to utilize that. Otherwise, they’re probably just a little sick of hearing me talk about it. [LAUGHTER]

John: Speaking of fellow faculty, has anyone else shifted to using infographics at your institution as a result of your work with us?

Michelle: Yeah, I can’t be quite sure. But I do think that in talking to a lot of faculty that they are shifting modes of communication for students, and I have talked to people who are much more expert at creating infographics themselves. You can do it very, basically, but you can also get really creative and high level with it. And so I oftentimes collect infographics I see for other fields, so I share those with faculty. I’m not sure. It’s one of those things that I so appreciate a podcast like this because sometimes teaching can be a lonely endeavor. We’re a little bit maybe shy about sharing what we do, because we’re afraid it’s not measuring up necessarily to what others are doing. So it’s a good question, though, and I think that that’s something that maybe I want to engage… maybe in a workshop in the future on campus and bringing faculty in and seeing who’s doing this type of thing, or maybe another brand new idea that’s even better.

Rebecca: I think one question that often comes up from faculty when we’re talking about kind of alternative formats or unessays or other [LAUGHTER] ways of not necessarily doing a more traditional essay kind of assignment, is how you evaluate the work. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how you’re evaluating these assignments, just to give faculty a sense of what that might look like and what that feels like in comparison to a more traditional kind of assignment?

Michelle: Yes, that’s a great question. I’ve talked in many ways about why I did these assignments in terms of just making it a more engaging process. But in terms of measurable, assessable goals, I do use rubrics, and have laid out exactly what skills I’m assessing. So I do have a section of the rubric that is based on the skills of communication. I have a very low stakes, low number line for things just like visual engagement, because I don’t want it to be students worried about the visual engagement when they need to learn the political science concepts. but I want to let them know that that’s important. So I have in the rubric descriptions in each of the columns about visually engaging: Does it bring the reader in? Is it easy to read? So I have that skill section, I have a section specifically on the content itself: Do they understand the concepts? Are they using the language that we use in political science? And then I also have sections for pretty typical traditional looking at their writing and seeing if it’s appropriate writing levels, tell them take a look at other people’s infographics… go out in the world and look at the bottom, there will be the sources, you need to include those, you need to not leave those off. So even practice that they would get in papers about citing things, if they put a graph in, you still have to say where this graph came from. So the practice that they would normally get are the same skills. And so I just lay it out in a rubric for them, as I do with most of my assignments. Of course, the rubric is not secret to the students, that goes out with the very first assignment: this is what you should be looking for. I’m going to use it for grading, you can simply use it as a checklist. You can use it to evaluate other students and give them feedback and tell them where you think there could be improvement. And so I think that the assessment itself is pretty typical to what I would normally do when thinking about an assignment: What are my goals for the course? How does this assignment help to meet those goals? And then how do I convey to the students whether or not they’re meeting those goals? Or essentially where they’re at in the process of becoming expert in that goal.

John: Do you use one rubric for all the assignments? Or are there separate ones for each of the infographic assignments?

Michelle: So I’m a big believer in constructing the outline once and then using it, but having different content in it. And so I use the same basic rubric for each of the assignments. And then I give the feedback in that content area really is the main portion. In the content area, I will make some changes to what they need to do specific for that assignment. So if it’s political parties, I would have expectations about what types of things they’d understand about political parties. And so that will change but my basic outline of what that looks like. And I’m a big believer in that kind of consistency in everything. So I can tell you I do that also with just how I set up the modules. And so my modules always have the same outline. There’s an intro with the learning outcomes for that specific module: what can you expect to learn this week, then the section with textbook readings. So this is what you’re going to dig into and read in a very traditional way. Then there’s a whole separate content section, which might be a video I’ve created, it might be videos that I found online that they should be engaging in. And then I usually have a pre-test and post-test quiz, and then the assignment for the week. And in this case, always associated with that assignment discussion. And then always at the end, I have a section, another discussion, which is I just call “Ask the professor,” And it’s another space for it. I always have to tell them every time I put the same heading and I say, “Don’t ask personal questions here, [LAUGHTER] but if you have a question that everyone can benefit from on the topic this week.” So that’s just an example of how I feel that it just makes it easier for me to focus on what’s in each of those boxes, rather than recreating the format. And I think students really take a lot of comfort in knowing after a couple of week: this is the rhythm, this is what I’m expected to do. And so now they’re focused on different content, but they don’t have to relearn a different set of skills. So going back to your question about the rubric, and is it the same? I do that because then they get used to what skills they’re bringing, and then they can hone that same skill over time, they can go back and look at their rubric grading and see their improvement over time. And I’m also a liberal user of the comment section on rubrics. I know that a lot of people tout rubrics for the time-saving part of it. So oh, you can check these boxes, and it makes it easier. And there’s some of that. But I can’t stop myself from also than opening up that box and just writing a ton of things to them. So I think that, again, it’s one of those things where the rubric itself becomes a really good outline. And then it’s just a matter of what I choose to put into my grading when I do the rubric.

Rebecca: High structure is always helpful for folks, that’s for sure.

Michelle: That’s very reassuring.

Rebecca: I feel like there’s a story behind why infographics as opposed to something else. What led you to infographics as opposed to some other alternative format?

Michelle: So like I said, I’ve been at this 27 years, so maybe I’m just getting old, but I feel myself saying in my head: “Well, kids nowadays don’t have the attention span for writing a 20-page paper.” And that’s not necessarily true. But as I talked about before, maybe they just have to be taken through that process. It can’t be just one big thing. And that was long before the internet, people talking about decreased attention spans. But I do think there’s something to matching up with the way in which they use visuals in their daily life. So they utilize memes, they look at infographics in various formats, I find a lot of them in social media in different areas. So I try to structure discussions in a way that is very much like the way they’re already engaging on social media. So yeah, the story is really how could I find a way that it’s something that their mind is already used to, that they can then apply it in this way. And also the other story, my husband is the County Administrator here in our county. And so I was in his office one day, I was the Assistant County Administrator and I was in his office one day and from the League of Minnesota cities, they had an infographic, a stack of them on the front table about: what does county government do? And that was really the last push I needed because it was so well done. And I thought, “Okay, this is what we need, people need to understand what levels of government do.” People often come to the county with situations that have nothing to do with what counties are actually able to do for them, and so what does your county do? What can it do for you? And I just thought, “How brilliant is that? To put it in that way.” And so I just really was sold on on the idea that infographics can really be fairly deep teaching, if they’re done well. We get so used to the academy and everything has to be these long papers, but rather than bemoaning the fact that the attention span has gone away, I’m just finding a way to adapt to that. So how do students engage with each other? And let’s make that happen.

John: And I would imagine students are more likely in the future to be creating infographics than they are to be writing 20-page papers unless they’re going on to graduate study.

Michelle: Yes, absolutely. That was the other part of it is that this wasn’t really authentic… the 20 page paper… particularly in that intro, liberal education, general education course. That was not authentic to what they were going to be doing. And I felt that in political science, if they were going to be political science majors, they would get that deep research component in other courses and upper-level courses in their capstone. And so I felt that it wasn’t necessary to put them through a 20-page paper. And the reason I keep saying 20 pages is because I realized that the amount of content you need in the country study is pretty lengthy to really understand the country, and so it really was about 20 pages, I just felt that that wasn’t engaging to people, no one was engaging each other with a 20-page paper. And so it had to be something that you could look at more quickly, you have to have the skill of condensing the material, you really had to be really pithy with how you were presenting the material so that someone can get it in a very quick way. And so I feel that allowed them to engage. And then even if you assigned a student to engage with another student’s 20-page paper, pair them off, have them do peer evaluation, they weren’t going to do more than one at that length. Maybe if you cut it down to a 10-page paper, you could have them have a group where they exchange it among three or four people, but that’s still not as big as I’m able to get by having everybody in a class post their infographics so that you can all see huge variety of work in the span of scrolling through normal social media. And of course, I’m asking to do a little bit more, but in some ways, it’s almost that they don’t even notice that part of it because they’re just scrolling through and saying: “oh…” Comments that I get most on the first assignment have to do with “Oh, I’m so glad you chose to do that country, I’ve always wanted to go there. Have you ever been? …because it looks so interesting.” So it doesn’t start out as this deep political discussion. But because of those comments in the first week, I’m convinced of the engagement that starts to come from it. One part that I didn’t mention is I also put in the directions, that if they want to add something, like a fun fact, about the country on any of these infographics, they should, and I’m surprised at how many students then choose to do that on every single one of the infographics at the bottom. There’s a fun fact. And I’ve been amazed by what they’ve come up with. There are things that I don’t know about these countries. I thought, “this is fun.” So I do think that students take to it, they want to show other students their country, they want to say, “Hey, I learned this thing. Isn’t this cool?” And then I get to learn things I didn’t know.

Rebecca: Sounds like a great way to build community and to have a first interaction with a discipline, which sometimes can be off putting. And this sounds like a really positive way to get people interested in a discipline as well.

Michelle: Yeah, I think so, and I hope so. I hope that that does make students more likely to maybe take an upper level, look at us as a minor or major. And I will say, talking so positively about this assignment, because it’s worked so well. But I can also talk to you in a podcast about all the assignments that haven’t worked well, that I don’t get this excited about, that I can’t say were this level of success. And so when we were talking about coming on the podcast, I wanted to highlight this one, because of course, it’s the success. I wanted to show what has actually worked. But, of course, there’s a lot of ones that haven’t. So I do feel that I’ve hit on something here that can be very useful, that I’ve been really satisfied with, and my students seem to be really satisfied with.

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

Michelle: So that is a great question. I’ve been thinking about that for a while. How do I take this to the next level? So I think one thing that’s next is sharing this out more. We’ve talked a few times about looking at other faculty and seeing if they would adopt something similar to this. So I think that’s one aspect. I think another aspect is to just continue to refine the assignment in a way that gets the most student engagement. I’d also like to see these assignments, if we can have them maybe printed for my asynchronous online classes. This particular class I teach mainly online now, I rarely teach it in the classroom another colleague has those sections. And so, right now, it’s simply archived either as the students own individual file, or in D2 L. And so I’d like to think about ways in which maybe we can archive them, maybe print out them in poster form and have them in the department so that people can maybe again, engage, get interested, a student walking by who’s not in political science who’s hanging out in the hallway waiting for their next class to begin, and starts reading the stuff on the walls and start saying, “Oh, that’s kind of interesting,” and maybe starts to get engaged. So looking at it outside of the particular classroom, I think would be a really exciting way to go with it.

John: Well, thank you. I’ve really enjoyed hearing more about these assignments. And I think it’s something that could work in many disciplines.

Michelle: Yeah, I hope so. And exciting for me would be now to sit back and kind of watch what other people do with it. And oh, okay. I hadn’t thought of that. That’s really cool. That’s always the most exciting part for me from the CETL angle is really just seeing how people take off with something in a way that I wouldn’t expect. And it’s been a pleasure talking with both of you.

Rebecca: I always love a good conversation about interesting assignments. So thanks for chatting with us and sharing in depth how the assignments work over the course of the semester.

Michelle: You’re welcome. My pleasure.

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

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

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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337. Pre-College Programs

Posted in authentic learning, diversity, engagement, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, learning, teaching
April 17, 2024

The transition from high school to college can be challenging for many students. In this episode, Sally Starrfield joins us to discuss the role pre-college programs can play in preparing students for college. Sally is a traveling Corporate Facilitator as well as an HR and Educational Consultant based in Durham, NC. She consults with precolleges to create revenue streams and identify courses and faculty that are appealing to academically curious middle and high school students. She has worked in a variety of instructional and administrative roles in North Carolina public schools. She designed professional development curriculum and provides career counseling for seasonal employees at Duke University. Sally served as the Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at the Duke University Talent Identification Program from 2009 to 2018 and then worked as an HR Specialist, Assistant Director, and then the Director of precollege programs at Duke University from 2019 through 2023.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

Sally Starrfield (on Linkedin.com)
Jessamyn Neuhaus and Maggie Schmuhl (2023). Unessays. Tea for Teaching podcast, Episode 315. November 15.
Dance Your PhD

Transcript

John: The transition from high school to college can be challenging for many students. In this episode, we discuss the role pre-college programs can play in preparing students for college.

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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 Sally Starrfield. Sally is a traveling Corporate Facilitator as well as an HR and Educational Consultant based in Durham, NC. She consults with precolleges to create revenue streams and identify courses and faculty that are appealing to academically curious middle and high school students. She has worked in a variety of instructional and administrative roles in North Carolina public schools. She designed professional development curriculum and provides career counseling for seasonal employees at Duke University. Sally served as the Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at the Duke University Talent Identification Program from 2009 to 2018 and then worked as an HR Specialist, Assistant Director, and then the Director of precollege programs at Duke University from 2019 through 2023.
Welcome, Sally.

Sally: Thank you, John. Good to see you. Hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Hi.Today’s teas are:… Sally, are you drinking some tea with us today?

Sally: I am. I am drinking Mandarin ginger on this cold day in North Carolina.

Rebecca: Nice. I was just thinking it was like a heatwave here. I walked outside in the nice sunshine.

John: Yes, and the temperature here is I think was about 19 when I came on campus this morning as part of that heatwave. But we did see this big yellow thing in the sky, which we hadn’t seen for a while, so that was kind of nice.

Rebecca: How about you, John? [LAUGHTER]

John: I am drinking ginger peach green tea today.

Rebecca: Nice, and I have a jasmine green.

John: I suppose that we should note that I met Sally through my work at the Talent Identification Program and then at pre-college programs. So we’ve invited you here today, Sally, to discuss the role that pre-college programs can play in helping prepare students for college. Most secondary and much college instruction is targeted at the average students in a class. And we’ve talked a lot in this podcast about those students who are not very well prepared by their schools for the academic challenges they will face in college. But might this also sometimes occur for students who are quote unquote, gifted and talented?

Sally: Absolutely. We all know that differentiating instruction for each student is difficult no matter if they are at one end of the academic spectrum or the other. We all know of those stories of highly gifted, curious, academically inclined individuals who are not successful in school. Oftentimes, school is not designed for kids who are really energized by one subject or one topic. A lot of times schools are designed to make adult pleasers out of kids from a young age: “Sit in this desk in this row for this amount of time until you are called on.” And that doesn’t work for all students, and especially as they get older, and they start to think for themselves and question for themselves. So we do have a lot of academically gifted students who fall through the cracks, and who just are not successful in regular schools. And we see with the burgeoning online schools and various options, a lot of those students are opting out of traditional schools. And that’s why pre-college programs are often a really good answer for some of that curiosity that they have intellectually, and without the pressure of grades that traditional schools require, as the gatekeeper to go on to the next grade, or that’s how success is defined, is by a grade,

Rebecca: Do some students become bored and perhaps just give up in the K-12 system?

Sally: Oh, yeah, absolutely, and John and I have talked about this. We have witnessed this multiple times through the years in programs with our summer students. And we also know of a very successful award-winning professor at a prestigious university who was one of those students when he was a kid and just barely getting through seventh grade and then came to an academically gifted program at Duke in the summer. And when his parents met with the instructor at the end of the summer, and the instructor was talking about how he was just one of the most gifted students and such a good leader and really took on the serious roles in the classroom of leading the other students and using the university library and using every resource the university had to further his curiosity and his intellectual drive. His mom repeated the name of the kid [LAUGHTER] and said “No, my son is usually the one who’s in trouble, who’s told to sit in his seat, and to not question authority.” And he was like, “Well, that doesn’t apply here. He used this opportunity to lead.” And so that changed his whole trajectory in school because his mom knew that he had the capability. And he went back to the school and she went back to the school and said, “We’ve got to do better for him. This traditional way is not working for him. When he is allowed to lead, when he is allowed to question and go deep into a subject, he can really be successful.” And we know that’s true for a lot of our gifted kids who get bored. What we know about gifted students is that they want to go in depth into a subject, not just the wide breadth. When they’re in traditional schools, they’re in a classroom for 45 minutes to maybe an hour and a half, maybe four classes to eight classes a day, depending on the school schedule. And when we’re looking at students in pre-college programs, they are in a class anywhere from three to maybe even six or seven hours a day, and it’s one subject. So they’re going into that depth and really learning and satisfying those intellectual questions that they have, those big questions that so many of our academically inclined students, maybe not students who are driven by grades, but students who want to know the answers to their burning academic curiosity.

John: One other thing that I’ve often observed is that there have been some students who were told they’re gifted and talented while they’re in K through 12, and they can just coast through their classes without really doing a lot of work, without really facing very much challenge. And many of them, when they come to college, get really surprised when they’re faced with their first really substantial challenge. Might that be another role for pre-college progams in just giving them this sort of challenge that they’ve never been exposed to, so that they learn strategies for dealing with that, and perhaps develop a bit more of a growth mindset? Because if they’ve been told all through their K through 12 career, that they’re just really bright and really talented, it’s really easy to get this fixed mindset. And then when they face their first challenging course, sometimes they just give up and disappear.

Sally: Absolutely.

John: Might pre-college programs be effective in giving students a challenge without them having to worry about grades, without them getting to a college class where they haven’t learned any of those strategies, and they might end up not doing so well in college?

Sally: Yes, absolutely. I think that one of the beautiful things about pre-college programs is most of them do not offer grades, there are some that are designed to give college credit. Those do have grades associated with them. Sometimes they are just pass/fail, but the majority of the programs for academically and intellectually gifted students and pre-college programs, they are for the sake of learning, they are for the sake of enrichment, based on courses that students want to take. And so, without that pressure of grades, learning for the sake of learning, it just frees up a lot of that emotional energy, that angsty-ness [LAUGHTER] that’s associated with high-pressure situations in schools and with parents, and all that tension is just gone when you’re learning for the sake of learning and when you’re with like-minded peers. But John, to your earlier point, yes, there are a lot of students who are often the smartest kid in their class, maybe even in their school, maybe even in their town. They’re used to winning the science fair. They’re used to winning the state spelling bee and things like that. And then they get to a pre-college program, and they say, “Oh, these are all the other kids [LAUGHTER] from the other States and around the world who are doing the same thing.” And it can be little fish in a big pond, as they say. And they can have impostor syndrome. And you and I have both seen this. There are some emotional response sometimes from the kids, and they’re like, “I’m not supposed to be here.” And so that challenge sometimes is disconcerting at first, but it is what all of us need. We don’t grow in our comfort zone. We grow when we’re challenged. And that’s true of our students as well.

Rebecca: In addition to maybe not having grades, what are some other ways that these kinds of programs provide some of that emotional support or that growth in that area?

Sally: Yeah, I think a lot of it starts with just being aware that like-minded people, your age-mates are not always your idea-mates. And we put kids in schools with kids who are just their age. And so when we put them in classes that they have selected, that they are interested in, and the kids are in an age range of maybe eight through 10th grade, and they’re all studying econometrics, which is not something they would study in most of their middle schools and high schools, or astronautical engineering, they are finding these like-minded peers, and they have these discussions that they couldn’t have in their regular schools with their peers. And also, the discussions are different with their instructors, and rather than what they would be in their regular schools with their teachers… who are trained teachers… but when we’re looking at our instructors, they’re subject matter experts, who most of them have taught on the college level, even if they’re graduate students, they’ve taught some undergraduate classes. If they’re faculty they are used to teaching undergrad or even graduate students. So that helps our students in pre-college programs as well.

Rebecca: I Imagine another aspect of these pre-college programs is living on a campus and living away from home. Can you talk about that aspect of the program and some of the transitions or learning that happens for students in that aspect as well.

Sally: Test driving college is a big part of a pre-college program. So even learning to do their laundry, living in a dorm, sharing a room with a roommate. Most pre-college programs, students do share a room with a roommate. And that’s where a lot of their learning and their growth comes from. Because sometimes they’re meeting people from another country. Most pre-college programs do attract a global audience. And so even for a lot of our students, just meeting kids from other states or kids with different interests, because the kids usually who are sharing a room, they are not always in the same class, and anywhere from 8 to 20 classes offered, depending on how large the program is, each term in a pre-college program. So yes, there’s a lot of exposure there. And we do replicate the college experience where they have office hours, so they can be with their instructors. And we encourage that. And so it’s that test drive of college that helps them be more prepared wherever they end up at university.

John: One of the big topics in higher ed, and we’ve been talking about it quite a bit on the podcast is the use of alternative grading approaches compared to the traditional grades with letter grades or numeric grades and so forth. And much of the discussion focuses on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. In the Duke TIP program, and the later pre-college program, how was learning generally assessed?

Sally: So, if your listeners haven’t listened to the Unessay episode that you all did, it’s my favorite episode, by far, because that was new information for a lot of people. Pre-college programs, they haven’t been calling it that unessay necessarily, but they’ve been doing alternative assessment for years. So in a pre-college program, that’s one week to three weeks long, there’s not a lot of turnaround time for grading and all that; there’s not a full semester. So it’s very rare to assign a traditional research paper. But the students have the same access. They have the Library, University librarians, and for our students, many of them have never been to a university library. And there’s this vast difference between a middle school and high school library and a university library. They have access to our laboratories, very often for the science classes, and to law libraries, for law classes, and courtrooms and things like that. So when they are in these real-life simulations, and often going out into the community to experience, for an architecture class, they usually end up going to an architectural firm and interviewing architects. So having these conversations, these interviews, working with librarians, working with people who are working in the field, working alongside doctors for modern medicine, disease, and immunology class using patient simulators that the med school students are using at the university, all of those things, that is learning and that can be assessed just with the students in office hours talking to their instructor, they can be assessed with their reflection journals at the end of the day. They can do presentations, and I’ve seen some really creative ones too. Kids make up a series of memes about their experience they had going to a water treatment plant for an environmental science class. So there’s no limit on the way to assess their learning. And especially when we’re looking at classes that are not for credit, they’re truly for enrichment. And make no mistake, it doesn’t mean that it’s less important in their academic career, or in their preparation for their professional careers and for their college career, because this deep seated yearning that they have to learn these topics often propel them to the success they later achieve in life. And John, you can tell so many stories about that, from your former Duke TIP students and Duke pre-college students who have gone on to do amazing things academically and career wise, and books they’ve written, and you stay in touch with a lot of your students. So the relationships and networking they’ve created.

John: We’ve had several of them on the podcast. I think our most frequent guest on the podcast was in one of the early cohorts at the Talent Identification Program before I started there. I didn’t start until 1987. But the first cohort was in 1981. And I also knew many of the other people from the early years because many of them came back on staff for several years. So I got to know quite a few people from the early cohorts as well as the students I worked with later. It’s a really impressive group of people.

Rebecca: I think it would be interesting to have John talk a little bit about his assessments and his classes too, because I know he’s done some really interesting things in the classes he’s taught.

John: Well, long before, there wasn’t even a term called on essays, I used to do the same thing in the TIP program, where I told students, they had this capstone project, and it could be in any format they want. And some of them did debates. Some of them wrote songs, they created a wide variety of ways of demonstrating their learning. And one of the things I had given them as an option, based on the Dance Your PhD competition was I said, “if you want, you could do some type of interpretive dance illustrating some concept.” And for several years, they didn’t take me up on that. But then for three years in a row students did, they wrote a song that they performed or sung, while they were doing the dance to illustrate some of the concepts they had learned. They had a lot of fun with that, and I recorded all those, and I let them share it with their parents, and so forth. More recently, I’ve been teaching in the pre-college program, which is a shorter program. So there’s not as much time to prepare such things. But students do presentations at the end, where they present their research, and parents are able to attend either in person if they’re picking up the child at the end of the term, or they can watch it over Zoom. So most of the parents were able to watch the students do their final presentations. And that’s something that both the students in the program and the parents have really enjoyed.

Rebecca: Such good examples, right?

Sally: And we have to remind your listeners that you’re talking about doing interpretive dances about economics and economic terms and econometrics. And so there’s just a creativity that the unessay, if we want to give it a label, allows for and the other thing that I think that these type of assessments do is, I think a lot of times in our traditional schools… and I say this as a career educator, I had started out as an English teacher, I was a literacy specialist, I was an assistant principal before I worked at Duke… and so I think that what we do is, in our efforts to be creative, we tell the kids “Oh, do a group project,” and we all have been in those group projects that are just absolutely terrible experiences. And they’re not about learning, and it’s just about getting through. But a lot of times we think, “Oh, this student, they can take on different roles, and they can work from their strengths.” And when we’re asking adolescents to work with other students who they may or may not [LAUGHTER] get along with, and that they’re still trying to figure out their own strengths. And then we’re putting them in these simulations. It can be really difficult and just kill the joy of learning. So I like the unessay and the non-traditional assignments for assessment, especially when students have the option to work individually, or to work with a group, but I am not a believer in forced group work for adolescents. We all do it in graduate school. I’m sure you have MBA students listening and I know what your life is like. And so it is all group work all the time for a lot of you. So we do want students to thrive individually in their assignments, and still allow creativity there.

Rebecca: So, programs like this are expensive. [LAUGHTER] What role do need-based scholarships play in offering some equitable access?

Sally: They are so expensive. And the majority of the expense is feeding and housing the students. And so for most of the programs more than 80% of the cost, and this can be $5,000 for a week sometimes. And that can be daunting to families, but more than 80% of that is feeding them and housing them. And remember, they have round-the-clock supervision. So there’s a lot of staffing that goes into it. So yes, having financial aid is essential. And most pre-college programs do have some sort of financial aid. And there are also community-based organizations that will often support students in their summer programs, and you can Google community-based organizations support for pre-college programs. And it just depends on the community you live in. Here in North Carolina and the Research Triangle Park area, some of our larger companies are tech companies, some of them are pharmaceutical companies, support students when they write and just ask for it. And they write essays about why they want to study at a pre-college. And also pre colleges, they’re associated with universities, usually, and so the universities have a vested interest in this as well. And they want students to want to go to their universities. And so sometimes there’s support from certain departments, a lot of times there is an endowment, especially if it’s a long running pre-college program. And so there are options for financial aid, and most of them offer, sometimes the term “scholarship” is used, but a lot of times “financial aid” is used. And I think a lot of people are surprised, I’m in touch with a lot of families who are surprised and like, “Oh, I think our family might make too much money.” But what they do is they look at this the way a lot of universities are looking at financial aid now, it’s depending on how many children you have, how many children you have in college. And so if you have a family two to more children, and you already have a student in college, they’re often taking that into account and are able to provide at least partial financial aid often.

John: Both the TIP program and the pre-college programs primarily serve students with high levels of academic performance. Might students also benefit from pre-college programs targeted at first-gen students and students from school districts that are not well equipped to adequately prepare students for college-level work?

Sally: Absolutely. I will say that because students know going into a pre-college program, especially the ones where you’re taking one class for maybe six to eight hours a day, a minimum three hours a day, it’s pretty self selecting. It’s usually students who are very academically curious at least. And there are a lot of first-gen students who come through, a lot of them just need to be told about the opportunity. So maybe they haven’t learned about it from their siblings or their parents at home. But we have a due diligence as pre-college providers to make sure that we are talking to the guidance counselors, we are talking to the organizations that are working with first-gen students, that are working with students from less advantaged communities, socio-economically. And so, yes, there’s definitely a place for making sure that there is full access. And that starts with just making sure that our marketing materials are inclusive, they need to be inclusive. You will often find that there are people working in pre-colleges who will translate for parents. Our courses are taught in English here in the US in pre-college programs. But many pre-colleges have assistants for working with parents who their first language is not English, whether they’re based here in the US or globally. So yes, definitely, we want to have that replication of the college experience where students are meeting diverse people. And so that’s going to be socioeconomically and where they’re from.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a little bit about potential enrollment funnels that might come out of pre-colleges, but what are some of the other benefits to colleges and universities for offering these pre-college programs in the first place?

Sally: So, highlighting what their strengths are and using their resources that they have. If they have an MBA school, and if they have…, I can think of one university that has a Bloomberg simulation center for stock market trading… and so highlighting, that students remember that, that’s just great advertising in what they offer, and getting it known to students from other parts of the country or parts of the world. But also a big benefit is the employment that can come for the university from this. Undergraduate students are needed to be teaching associates, they’re needed to be residential assistants in the dorms, they’re just essential to helping the pre-college students acclimate to the campus and showing them around, making them feel comfortable, making sure they’re safe. And having graduate students test drive their own teaching. And it’s really important for us to remember that many of the pre-college programs really focus heavily on STEM, and a lot of our graduate students have been research assistants, but a lot of them haven’t been to Asia. And so this is a good opportunity for them to be TAs, to then learn how to be instructors and most pre-college programs have a really strong pedagogical training, where they are bringing in the staff ahead of time, they are teaching them online before they come in, and doing a lot of professional development with them about teaching and pedagogy and assessment. So it can bring a lot of revenue to a university, it can bring a lot of jobs to the undergraduates, the graduate students, the faculty, postdocs, and so it’s quite the revenue arm for many universities.

John: And along the lines of graduate students and undergraduate students benefit. I’ve had quite a few students who were undergraduate students, sometimes from Oswego some were from other institutions, who, by working in the Talent Identification Program, were able to use that in the graduate applications, which increased their chances of getting teaching assistantships. I can think of at least six or seven of my former students who wrote that up in their applications and it certainly didn’t hurt their chances for being accepted and getting funding in grad school.

Sally: Yes, I often serve as a reference for our staff. And I was contacted by a prestigious law school, there was a student who was kind of on the bubble, but they looked at his experience working with pre-college students in the summer and how much he had done with mock trial simulations with the students, and that pushed him over the edge. And now he’s doing very well. And I think you and I both have seen him on CNN multiple times. John, I think you know who I’m talking about. So I know that there’s a lot of benefit from hiring undergrads through postdocs to work with pre-college students. And often some are hired from the university where the program is located. But most often they are brought in from across the country and sometimes from across the world. And that just adds to the richness of diversity for the program for the students. And it’s such a great networking opportunity for the employees of the program to learn about other people and their experiences within different subject area disciplines and what their university experiences have been.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a lot about STEM programs, Sally, what about the humanities and the arts?

Sally: Yes. So when I started working with these programs in 2009, it was common to have a class on Shakespeare for a seventh grader. And remember that these classes, we want to make sure that pre-colleges are offering classes that they wouldn’t typically have access to in their regular schools. But as we have seen the STEM revolution, that’s what parents want to pay for. That’s what these pre- college programs are predominantly offering. And oftentimes when humanities and arts classes are offered, they don’t fill and they sometimes end up getting cancelled. And so we are looking at pre-colleges as revenue streams for universities, so they’re going to usually offer what parents are going to pay for and where the demand is. And so with the rise of STEAM, there were some arts classes and some humanities that were interwoven in with some of the science and technology. We have a long way to go there to go back to where we were even 20 years ago, to highlight the arts and humanities, and so we have to show value to the parents who are paying for it and to universities. We don’t always just offer the most popular classes, we can offer classes with a smaller number of students. And so just finding that balance is tricky.

Rebecca: And it’s a continuing problem in all of higher ed as well to continue to make the argument for arts and humanities and the importance that it has and the place that it has in our society.

Sally: Absolutely. And I think pre-college programs are a way to do this. Pre-college programs, we know can be funnels for university admissions. And so if we have a student get really excited about a theater program, or some arts or humanities course, they can end up pursuing that at a university. And so it’s definitely worth pursuing, I think, from a pre-college curriculum perspective, writing the curriculum for it, and from a university perspective of offering it.

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

Sally: So what’s next, I just really believe in pre-college programs, because I know that they are life changing for so many students, and as many have told me, life saving for some. And so what I am doing now, as I am doing a lot of consultation work with different pre-colleges and looking at their goals, looking at ways that they can use their universities’ resources to create revenue streams, to create programs that are appealing to students, and also how they can partner with their admissions departments. Where do they want to highlight their strength as a university, as a college? And where are they being inclusive to these students so that they want to try it out for a summer and then possibly as their undergraduate experience? So yeah, my consultation work, my consulting, is really fun and having that experience from the education side and also from the HR side, makes it a really deep dive that’s rewarding.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for sharing a little bit about pre- college programs with us today.

John: Thank you, Sally. It’s always great talking to you.

Sally: Thanks, John. I’ve enjoyed our many many many summers together. Great to talk with you Rebecca you as well.

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

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

Ganesh Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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