Category: community based learning

259. Experiential Learning

Posted in authentic learning, collaborative learning, community based learning, diversity, engagement, equity, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, learning, motivation, pedagogy, social justice, teaching
October 19, 2022

Course content and instructors are often forgotten once a  semester concludes. In this episode, Breanna Boppre joins us to discuss how experiential learning can humanize course content and provide meaningful and rich experiences that stick with learners for many years. Bree is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University’s Department of Victim Studies. She is also the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Course content and instructors are often forgotten once a semester concludes. In this episode, we discuss how experiential learning provides meaningful and rich experiences that stick with learners for many years.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Breanna Boppre. Bree is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University’s Department of Victim Studies. She is also the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by our friend, Jessamyn Neuhaus. Welcome, Bree.

Bree: Thanks for having me.

John: We’re very happy you can join us.

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

Bree: I sure am. I am drinking a tea given to me by my close friend and department chair, Shelley Clevenger. She gifted me this tea. It says, “you’re magic” on the front. And one of the ingredients is “luster dust.” So the tea is actually blue with glitter.

John: That is a first, I believe.

Bree: It’s very unique, and it’s herbal tea. It tastes great.

Rebecca: Does it taste sparkly?

Bree: Mmmm, if sparkly had a taste, this would be it. [LAUGHTER]

John: So, we’re having a sparkle party.

Bree: Yes, definitely a sparkle party. [LAUGHTER]

John: I’m drinking a black raspberry green tea.

Bree: Ooh, yum.

Rebecca: And I have a jasmine black today.

Bree: Nice. That sounds good too. Not quite as sparkly as mine, but… [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Definitely not, and not as blue, either. [LAUGHTER]

John: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your chapter in Picture a Professor. Before we discuss your chapter, could you tell us a little bit about your department and the classes that you teach? Because we have not run across a Department of Victim Studies before, and I think it would be helpful to learn a little bit more about that.

Bree: Yes, I would love to talk about our department. It’s actually the first and only Victim Studies Department in the nation, and so this is really unique for us to have this opportunity. We’re housed in the College of Criminal Justice. So we’re a subset of criminal justice but we like to think of ourselves as different, both in what we study and teach about, but also the way that we do things. So we are very much community engaged. We emphasize caring and kind pedagogy, and we emphasize things that engage with the community to help survivors. And so, we have a lot of campus events. We have a lot of events dedicated to building awareness, but also donations and things for organizations in our community that helps survivors. And so, it’s really a great opportunity. I’m really excited to be here in the Department of Victim Studies. I’ve been here just over a year now. And the classes that I teach… violence against women, and I teach it more as gendered victimization. So we talk a lot about how gender and stereotypes shape victimization and harm. I also teach a brand new class that I created called “transformative justice,” which is a survivor-led movement aimed to address harm and violence without relying on systems that cause additional harm and trauma. And so, preventing harm and crime in the community before people end up in prisons and involved in the system. So that’s a really cool class that I’ve enjoyed teaching. I also teach family violence, and I teach research methods at the grad level, and that’s what I was prepping right before the podcast. So those are the classes I teach. I’m really excited about them. It’s heavy content, for sure, but I enjoy it.

Rebecca: I can imagine that teaching such topics really often includes students who are also victims and there’s some challenges in that arena as well. Can you talk a little bit about some strategies that your department uses to support survivors who are in your classes?

Bree: Yeah, so I can talk about what I do personally. So I’ve done a lot of research beyond teaching about the impacts of trauma, and I actually have a background in cognitive behavioral therapy and counseling techniques. And so, I interned as a grad student with community corrections and would engage in these counseling type classes for men who are on probation and parole. And one thing that I noticed was that the amount of trauma that these individuals have experienced, you can’t treat someone separate of that trauma. And so, that’s very much how I teach in the classroom as well. I’ve relied a lot on other scholars, like Karen Costa, who’s done a lot on trauma-aware teaching, who I know was a guest on the podcast multiple times, and others who, instead of teaching business as usual, we have to center the experiences of survivors and recognize that the vast majority of students have survived something traumatic at some point in their lives, whether it’s victimization, sexual assault, things like that, but even the adversity that they’ve encountered throughout their lives. That has has an impact on their experience in our classrooms. And so, I have used Nicole Bedera’s method of survivor-centered teaching, she has an amazing article in Teaching Sociology that really centers survivors in how we teach. And so, oftentimes, and even myself, when I first started teaching, and a student would disclose to me something related to victimization, because a lot of students feel close to me, they see me as that caring empathetic person. And so, I have had a lot of disclosures throughout my teaching. And at first, I wasn’t exactly sure how to handle it, because we know Title IX, we know that we are mandatory reporters of certain victimization and of certain things that we’re told, but not everything. And so my role as a professor, I’m very aware that I am not a licensed counselor, and I take that very seriously in referring out, as Karen Costa says. And so, I’ve done a lot of work to understand the role of Title IX and my role as a mandatory reporter, and that has really helped me know effective boundaries to myself and my teaching while also supporting students. And so, Nicole Bedera recommends really understanding each institution’s Title IX office requirements, because they can differ across institution. So one of the first things I did when I came to Sam Houston State was reach out to the Title IX office, and really try to understand what I am mandated to report. And now in every victimization related class, I have a module about survivor-centered teaching and self care. And so, in that module, I explain to students what they disclose to me, how that could potentially trigger a report, because I want them to be empowered and informed. I want them to know that if they disclose specifics, that if it occurs on campus, or a campus event, that’s something that I have to report, and if they don’t want me to report, they can disclose those things in a different way. And so, that takes more of the ownership on students and the power and agency to them, rather than to me, and it’s made me a lot more comfortable when students do disclose because I have a lot of assignments where they reflect, and that’s where the experiential learning background comes in. I’m very much about reflection, and so a lot of the students, I prompt them to reflect on the material and that prompts them to often disclose that they have survived something in their life that’s similar. And so, being empowered and informed, both as the students and me as the professor, having those survivor-centered and trauma-aware tools have made me a lot better able to address it in a supportive and empathetic way.

John: That transparency should make students feel much more comfortable and as you said, empowers them to make decisions that are best for them, which I think provides a much better relationship.

Rebecca: So it’s worth mentioning, if you’re interested in Nicole Bedera’s work, she was on episode 201, “Beyond Trigger Warnings.”

Bree: Highly recommend her article. Seriously, this changed my teaching for the better in many ways, and I’m a huge fan of her work.

John: We’ll include a link to that in the show notes. So the title of your chapter is “Using Experiential Learning to Humanize Course Content and Connect with Students,” and you’ve already addressed a little bit about how you use experiential learning. Could you expand on that just a little bit in terms of how you do this in your classes?

Bree: Yeah, so I actually started engaging with experiential learning as a doctoral student. Our PhD program is actually unique in that it had a required teaching and pedagogy class, which is shockingly rare for academic PhD programs, especially in criminology and criminal justice. So I was really fortunate to have that experience where we learned about teaching and pedagogy before we even entered the classroom. And so, we had to explore different approaches and write up what we envision our teaching approach to be, and one of those approaches that always stood out to me was experiential learning, and part of that interest in experiential learning was my own experience as an undergrad student. When I think back to my classes, one of the most vivid memories I have is in a corrections class, we toured a local prison, and I can still remember the weather that day, how it felt being in that prison. It was very dank and dark, which is similar to most prisons. [LAUGHTER] And so, that feeling of being there, I can close my eyes and still envision that day of touring that prison that really stuck with me. And the power of experiential learning to have that impact, to engage with multiple senses, your sight, your hearing, your smelling, you’re feeling the temperature, all of that has an impact, and I especially think it’s important for criminal justice in teaching classes related to prisons, which is what I taught for many years at Wichita State before coming to Sam Houston State, and those experiences are really what stand out with students and have that high impact. So that’s part of why I decided to focus on experiential learning for my pedagogy, especially early on, and we would do things like go on prison tours, or we would go on tours of local domestic violence shelters. I would take the students to these locations, and as I’ll talk about later on, when we discuss experiential learning online, there’s potential issues related to accessibility there. But if the students are able, it really is an immersive experience, and it’s really beneficial for them to go to these sites with the support of their instructor to gain that experience… that hands-on, what would a job in this area be like… but also to connect with people who work in the field. Because often my students have gained internships or jobs from going on these tours, the agencies also view it as a potential hiring or recruitment opportunity. So it’s really beneficial for me as the instructor, but also for the students and for the agencies in the field to connect directly with often juniors and seniors who I teach, and they’re going to be graduating soon and want to do something with that degree. So that’s really the “why” for me. It’s also very humanizing, and I talk about it in the chapter as a method of inclusive teaching. Because for me, I was never one of those people who wanted to be the sage on the stage, I’m much more into collaborative learning, and being more of the guide on the side. And so, I found with experiential learning, it really helped us build community and experiences together. Every time, I swear, when we would go visit the prison, something would happen. So one time we went and it was chow time, which is food time, and they offered to let us try the food. So that was a big experience for many students that we still talked about after and that’s, again, a big part of experiential learning is the reflection piece. So we would reflect on that experience together in class, we would talk about it, but also students would reflect on it on their own through reflection papers. And so, as I’ve evolved these approaches, one of my favorite parts of experiential learning is service learning. And so, service learning is really taking experiential learning to a next level, where we’re incorporating real-world experience, learning and applying concepts to helping actual agencies or a community of need that is identified by the students in the class and using that volunteer work to help and engage in civic engagement.

Rebecca: Those shared experiences are really powerful. We’ve seen these in many different situations, whether it’s service learning, or field trips, or study-abroad opportunities where groups of students are together, and they have this shared moment. It helps them connect, but also it’s a place to relate content back to that they all know, because they were all there, which has a lot of power. So you hinted at this already, Bree, but we know that you’re teaching entirely online now. So how do you go from visiting prisons to your current circumstance of teaching online and how do you bring these experiential components in that modality?

Bree: Yes, so I’m not gonna lie. In spring 2020, when the pandemic hit and we were told, “You’re going remote for two weeks,” and then that two weeks turned into the rest of the semester, I freaked out a little because I relied so heavily on the in-person, and the experiential learning is a big part of that. I did freak out. And so, I had never really taught online before. I taught one summer class online previously, it was a, quote, “canned class” that I couldn’t really change or adapt from. And so, I freaked out a bit. And then I remember the last class before we went online, I got a text from my colleagues saying, “the provost is about to announce, we’re going online.” I was like, alright, we’re going to stop what we’re doing: “What has worked for you as students online and what has not worked?” and we workshopped together, what the rest of the term was going to look like. And so, a lot of them mentioned, “we love these aspects of the in person, that community building, the humanization.” And so, I really had to think carefully and critically about, okay, how do I accomplish that online? And so, like I mentioned, the way I teach, I don’t like lecturing. I will lecture for like 10 minutes at a time, but you will never see a class where I’m just lecturing for an hour, that’s not enjoyable for me. And so, I tried to think about how to translate that to the online platform. Because often, I would pepper in my lecturing with other videos, with activities, we would do Kahoots, we would do group breakouts, we would do all these things,“oh, my gosh, how do I do this online?” So I came up with this approach, in our activities, where I would really think through how we did this in person, and try to modify it for online. So even though we can’t be in the classroom physically, at the same place, the same time together, how can we still achieve this community remotely. And so, I would do things like the Kahoots, the quizzes, the community sorts of activities to try and accomplish that, and with experiential learning, I’ve taken a lot of aspects of experiential learning, especially the reflection piece that has become very important to my pedagogy. And so, it may not be the traditional experiential learning anymore for me online. There’s parts that I incorporate, but I’ve really have had to adapt. And so, some of that includes being more creative about these big project-based assignments that I have. So I read Susan Blum’s, edited book, Ungrading, which is awesome. And so, inspired by that, I started assigning eportfolios, where students will experientially go through these modules, and they have reflection questions guiding them, and they write up kind of like this blog-style summary of the content, like they’re explaining it to someone who has no background in criminal justice victim studies, they have no idea what any of this is, and they’re explaining it to someone else. So it is very much like a blog. But then the second piece of those module reflections are reflecting on their learning, and that’s where they really think about their experience during the module, even though it’s online, even though they may be sitting watching TV or they may be having childcare during while they’re trying to learn. A lot of my students are single moms or in caretaking roles, they have a lot of other things going on. And so, they’re reflecting on that learning experience, despite all the other things that are going on in their lives. And so, that has been really key for me, that reflecting not just on the content, but their learning experience. So that’s been a way that I’ve adapted experiential learning. I still incorporate service learning as much as I can. So there’s four main types of service learning and direct service learning is the one that we often think of, when students go to a physical location and volunteer. Now, during the pandemic, that was not possible. So a lot of the agencies that I worked with, especially prisons, they shut down access, students were not allowed to come there. So I had to think differently about creating opportunities for civic engagement and advocacy. And so, some of the things that I’ve done are infographics and public service announcements to build awareness about social issues and taking that a step further to create those specifically for campus organizations. Or even now I’m partnering with local agencies, nonprofits, who may not have the resources to devote to social media and branding, and my students are actually helping with that by creating social media campaigns and things like that. And so, I’ve just tried to be creative. We have unlimited technology, we have so much available to us that is web based, or internet based, that students have access to, like Canva. Oh, my gosh, Canva is the best tool that I’ve incorporated, and they make these data visuals and public service announcements through Canva and they can even do it on their mobile phone. So it makes it really accessible for them, and it gives them a way to make an impact, even though we can’t have that direct service learning experience.

John: Could you tell us a little bit more about some of the service learning activities that your students have been engaged in?

Bree: Yes. So, I again, teach research methods, which often is not the favorite class, both from students and instructors. It’s often seen as a more boring content area, which is fair. There’s a lot of jargon, there’s a lot of complex concepts for students to learn. But I have found that experiential learning is even more important for teaching research methods. And the way that I do it is through research-based service learning. Well, because of the pandemic and because of agencies shutting down and not having direct access, I’ve been focused more on helping our campus community because that is an organization that I have access to and that I’m directly involved with. And so, some of the things that we’ve done in the past is we had students and I create surveys together for their fellow students in the university to fill out and then students, they create the survey questions. They think through research questions, how to create measures and concepts related to those questions. I facilitate this process, but they’re doing a lot of it firsthand, and then we distribute the survey online to students across the campus, they see how many students respond to the survey, which is often 10 to 20%, and they see the implications of that, and then they work through the data themselves. I’ll compile it in an Excel file for them, and then they create data visuals. They interpret the results, and then together, we compile a report that we give to university stakeholders. And so, that has been a really rewarding, and accessible version of service learning for me… is that research-based service learning, and it’s also beneficial for me. As pre-tenure, 40% of my position is research, 40% is teaching, and then the 20% is service. So I find that research-based service learning really combines all aspects of my scholarship together, and it makes it this really rewarding aspect of my teaching that has been successful both in person and online. And so, that has been a really cool avenue that I also have gone on to publish the results, and that has led to peer-reviewed articles and things that are important towards my tenure. So I wanted to bring that up, because I know a lot of fellow instructors, they see service learning or experiential learning and are like, “Oh, that all sounds great, but the amount of time that goes into it is a lot, especially when you’re working with external agencies.” And so, I really promote research-based service learning as this accessible alternative that can also benefit those faculty and instructors that are expected to do research as well.

Rebecca: Finding those connections between service, teaching, and research can always be really challenging. But when you can find those connections, definitely a worthwhile endeavor. I know that I’ve had similar experiences. Can you talk a little bit about students’ response to service learning, as well as your community partner? And I guess in this case, it would be your campus stakeholders?

Bree: Yeah. So I’ll back up a little. When I taught in person, one of the first service- learning projects I did was for the local drug court. And so, the drug court manager would actually come to our class, and we presented the results to her. And so, that experience of being live, us handing her the results, talking about the results together as a class, that made it really rewarding for both me and the students. And so, as a result of that drug court partnership, one of my students actually got an internship at drug court, which was super cool. That may not have happened organically otherwise. And so, students’ responses have been very positive to both service learning and experiential learning broadly. I think that both teaching and learning online can be very isolating. That was my fear of teaching online, was losing that connection, and that connection from what I’ve learned from Michelle Pacansky-Brock and Fabiola Torres on Twitter, I’ve taken trainings with them on humanizing course content. They are amazing. What I’ve learned from them and doing trainings about online teaching is that really the connection matters, and there are still ways that we can get that connection through humanization. And so, I think building those connections for students’ research shows, especially for underserved students, first-generation college students like myself… I was a first-gen student… those sorts of efforts to build that community and build that connection between student and instructor but also among students is really key towards their success and retention. So I have noticed, just taking the extra effort to send out personal check ins to students to get to know them as human beings, has greatly increased my student evaluations, but also my fulfillment and enjoyment as an instructor, because I read Kevin Gannon’s work, Radical Hope, it’s on my bookshelf over here, and he mentions this tension, often between this authoritative type of instruction where often instructors are seen as adversaries, and instead, there’s things that we can do to connect with students. So we go into this role of being allies to students, and that’s really where I see my role as empowering and supporting students rather than enforcing rules and teaching during the pandemic really, really brought that to light for me, that often these rules, especially around late work, and imposing late penalties, and strict rules around that, that’s not sustainable. And so, it’s also not inclusive, especially for our students, who many of them, again, are mothers, they’re in caretaking roles, they’re parents, they have full-time jobs already outside of their class that they’re taking with me. I think that instructors maybe forget that students have these full lives outside of this one class that they’re taking with you, and I try to be really mindful of that. And so, students’ responses to experiential learning have been great. My response has been great. The stakeholders have also really appreciated being able to connect with students. When we sent out the report to stakeholders for the campus survey, one of the interesting findings was there’s this care center on campus that offers free mental health referrals and academic assistance to students in crisis, and based on our survey with criminal justice students, only 25% even knew that the care team existed. And so, I shared this with the care team. I’m like, “Look, I know the amazing work you do. I’ve referred various students to you but largely, students don’t know you exist, which might be impacting self referral.” And so, students in that class gave recommendations for how to build awareness of the care team, and the following semester that I taught this class, we partnered with care team and created a social media campaign to build student awareness about who the care team is and what they do. And so, that was a really cool way of legacy teaching where we built upon what one class did in a semester, which was Spring 2020, where everything was wild, and it took a lot to get done in one semester, with the beginning of a pandemic, we built upon that in a second semester, to really create actionable things that the care team could use to build awareness about what they do for the campus.

John: You mentioned a focus on inclusive teaching, could you talk a little bit more about some strategies that you use to create an inclusive environment in your classes? You’ve talked about some of these, but do you have any other suggestions? Because I think everyone’s trying to make their classes more inclusive now and any tips you could provide would be helpful.

Bree: Yeah. So I think for me, a big part of it has been educating myself. I’ve taken a lot of trainings, I’ve had trainings specifically on Universal Design for Learning, inclusive teaching. So some of those trainings that I took actually had us listen to interviews from students about their experiences as first-generation students, as students who English is not their first language, as students who are full time working and caretakers. Listening to their stories really helped me design my classes in a way that is more accessible. I design my classes being very empathetic and mindful of the students who enter our class. So SHSU is a Hispanic-serving Institution, more than 50% of my students are first-generation college students, so I automatically design my classes for that population, and in turn, like we see from Universal Design for Learning, that has benefits for everybody. So if you design a building with a ramp for individuals who can’t walk, that ultimately can benefit other individuals. The ramp makes it easier for them to get to the building to get inside. So I really embrace that approach in my teaching, and I try to be inclusive from the start. Again, educating yourself is a big part. I’ve done a lot of work on anti-racist pedagogy and just in everyday life, so that has been really helpful for me as well. And then I’m not perfect by any means. I try really hard, and there have been times where things have come up and students have felt safe enough to bring it up to me that there was potentially issue with how something was presented or delivered in the class, and I think my biggest advice is, when that happens, take a step back, take a pause, and really use empathy to listen. This student took time out of their everyday life to come to you and explain how this content or how the delivery made them feel. So I know that the first instinct might be to be defensive. But I think it’s really important to take a step back and try to really understand where the student is coming from. And actually I have this situation in the fall and it ended up turning out to be a really informative and transformative experience for me, but also for the student and now the student still keeps in touch with me and emails me often about updates in her life. And so, I think that’s a really big part of teaching in a way that’s empowering and supportive, rather than being authoritative and the sage on the stage when you share that power, and that’s important for me teaching in victim studies, because I teach in our victim services management program, which is the master’s degree. The students who come into this program are rock stars, they have worked in the field for years, they are running nonprofits, they are doing all this amazing work already. And so by sharing the power, and by me recognizing I have this degree, and I have some experience, but their experience is just as valuable and important as mine. I think that is really setting the stage for inclusive teaching and that’s what I embrace.

John: You mentioned a collaborative environment in your classes. What role do students play in creating content for your classes?

Bree: Yeah, so that’s actually my ultimate goal for students. In a lot of the effective online teaching trainings I’ve took, a lot of what we give to students is stuck on the learning management system. If you give a student an assignment or a quiz, they submit it, and they may never have access again. So a lot of the assignments I give them are getting off the learning management system and giving them tools and things that they can have beyond the semester. And so, some examples of that are, again, creating eportfolios. So they create these eportfolios that they use throughout the class, they create their intro background page where they talk about themselves, as much as they want to share or not, they can keep it anonymous if they want to. But they create this front page, which is personalized to them. And then they have different sections where they have module reflections. They have a course glossary, where they define key terms for each module and put the term and the definition there. And so, I started this approach… again, after reading Ungrading. But also, when I think back to classes, I had this really cool class about serial killers. And we created a portfolio with case studies about each serial killer, and I hung onto that thing for like a decade. I even gave it to my grandma who was super into crime shows and she wanted to read it. And so, I was like, this is something that is missing when we teach on the learning management system, and it’s something that I want to facilitate for students. Online, I think the eportfolio fits best rather than a paper portfolio. And so, it’s something that they can take with them and,it was funny, I was at a campus event, it was a campus ally training, and there was a staff member there who said, “Oh, you’re Dr. Boppre, one of our student workers is taking your class and she showed me her eportfolio that she made in your class and was so proud of it, and it looks so cool.” I’m like “That is gold. If that is what happens as a result of my teaching, I have achieved what I wanted to.” I want students to end my classes with some creative item that they develop throughout the class, and that they’re so proud of and so excited about that they’re sharing it with others. And so, the eportfolios, I definitely love those. I also assign infographics, which I think I mentioned earlier. So students create these visually appealing flyers with information about controversial issues in our field. So for victimization related classes, they’ll talk about intimate partner violence, violence against women, and they’ll summarize the research. They will do what they would typically do for a research paper, but in this visually appealing, accessible format. Honestly, I can’t tell you that I’ve ever shared a paper from class with anybody from undergrad, but I would share an infographic. I would show someone and say, “Look at what I’ve done,” and that’s what students tell me, they’re really proud of that infographic that they’ve created. And so, that has been really rewarding for me is to help facilitate these students’ creations. I’m not gonna lie, it does take a lot of tutorials and working through students to develop these skills, but I tell them, I’m very purposeful about the technology that I choose for classes and I’ve honestly had to ditch some approaches for some that are more useful and relevant to their future careers. But I really focus on the tools and technology that I think will best serve them in their future careers no matter what they do. And so, that’s why I emphasize these eportfolios, because you’re developing a website, and I have a personal website for all my scholarship, but I’ve used Google Sites to create community exhibits, I’ve used them to present research presentations. I’ve used these web design skills for so many other things that I can envision for other students and the same with the infographics and getting used to using Canva. We live in an ever growing society that wants information quickly and visually, especially like TikTok, Instagram… that is the reality that we live in today. And so, these approaches really fit with where we’re going in our society. And so, learning Canva, you might make an infographic for class, but then you have those skills to make a flyer for an event at work, or you have those skills to create an infographic for something else related to your class or for your career. And so, that’s really what I emphasize, these creative, project-based finales is what I call them, because they help students create something and cultivate skills that will benefit them far beyond the end of the semester.

John: David wildly refers to those assignments that end up in the LMS and disappear at the end of the semester as “disposable assignments.” And the type of thing you’re describing are the non-disposable, open pedagogy type things that students often find much more engaging, because they have much more meaning to them, and I think you’ve described that quite nicely. So we always end with a question, what’s next?

Bree: So I’m entering my fifth year on the tenure track. So, I’m still very much focused on research. But this upcoming semester, I’m actually putting all of the trauma awareness and the survivor centered teaching into my research-based service-learning project with students. And so, we are actually going to ask students about survivor-centered teaching and trauma-aware teaching and we’re going to do a survey and focus group with students. So I’m really excited to test students’ reactions to these approaches and the need. That’s ultimately what I want to demonstrate, the need for these approaches from an empirical standpoint, and involving students in that process. I think that’s going to be really powerful. One of my students in my summer class actually inspired me to do this because we were having a zoom session, and we talked about survivor-centered teaching, and she’s just like, this is the first time I’ve ever felt empowered to tell my story, because in every other class, I have felt silenced by these Title IX and mandatory reporting warnings, I just have not felt comfortable or able to share. And so that is a big part of my future in what’s next, is continuing to empower students to tell their stories and to view students as the whole student, and how these life experiences shaped their interactions in the classroom and the eportfolios is a way that I get to do that. They do get to share their stories and reflect on it. But I’m always looking for what more we can do, and that’s really what I want to focus on. Because these life experiences, even my own life experiences. Both my parents were incarcerated throughout my life, I grew up visiting my dad in prisons for 15 plus years. Every weekend, I was at the prison. To say that experience has no impact on my teaching or learning would just be ridiculous to say. That had a huge impact on who I am, how I learned, how I teach. And so, I’m very upfront about that with students, and I also want to empower them to have their own stories and reflect on how it impacts their experiences, because education truly can be transformative. It was for me as a first-generation college student, as someone with those life experiences in my childhood. Being able to go to college transformed my life, and if I can play a small role in that for my students, that’s my ultimate life goal and that’s why I’m here.

Rebecca: Thank you so much Bree for sharing your really great techniques and providing us with a lot of things to think about as more of us are teaching online and thinking about experiential learning and service learning in those contexts.

John: And we noted on your website, you have a word cloud that lists some words that students have used to describe your teaching, and the most frequent words were fun and creative. But right behind those were unique, amazing, informative, thorough, and awesome. And that would be a nice aspirational goal for many of us, to see those types of responses for students, because I suspect that those wouldn’t be the most common words that students generally use for most of their classes. So thank you for joining us, and I hope you’ll be back again in the near future.

Bree: Yes, I was so excited to come. A lot of my pedagogical heroes have been on this show. So I’m very honored to be here and thanks so much for having me.

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

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

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

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105. Globalizing Classes

Posted in collaboration, community based learning, community organizing, diversity, engaged scholarships, globalization, higher education, international education, learning, motivation, pedagogy, service-learning, social capital, teaching, teaching centers
October 30, 2019

Improvements in communication and information technology have resulted in an increasingly interconnected global economy. In this episode, Dr. Blase Scarnati joins us to discuss ways in which our classes can be modified to help prepare our students to productively participate in this global environment. Blase is a Professor of Musicology and the Director of Global Learning in the Center for International Education at Northern Arizona University.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Improvements in communication and information technology have resulted in an increasingly interconnected global economy. In this episode, we discuss ways in which our classes can be modified to help prepare our students to productively participate in this global environment.

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Today our guest is Dr. Blase Scarnati. Blase is a Professor of Musicology and the Director of Global Learning in the Center for International Education at Northern Arizona University. Welcome back, Blase.

Blase: Thank you. Really glad to be back with you both.

John: We’re glad to have you here again.

Our teas today are:

Blase: I’m drinking my everyday green tea. Chinesegreen tea Dragonwell Long Jing.

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: I have English Breakfast tea.

John: I have a pure peppermint tea. So, something plain.

We’ve invited you back to talk about your work with global learning. Could you tell us first a little bit about your role as a Director of Global Learning at the Center for International Education at NAU.

Blase: Primarily I work with faculty and departments, especially through our Global Learning Initiative, and the Global Learning Initiative (or GLI) is an across-the-curriculum global education initiative sited in all undergraduate programs and our liberal education program…also explicitly uses co-curricular experiences such as residence hall programming, department activities, community engagement, and so forth. And GLI established three interconnected and interdependent ideas that were all based and drawn upon long-standing campus values that were articulated as university-level thematic student learning outcomes around diversity education, global engagement, and sustainability. And so we kind of approached what global education can be in a very innovative way rather than just, like many institutions, privileging study-abroad-based experiences. We really broadened it out, and really defined it as diversity education, global engagement, and sustainability. And through that, when we were working to implement them at the department level, we really were asking departments not just to kind of hook up, to reach up, to those University outcomes, but rather recast them through the discourse in the discipline, so that departments truly would own those outcomes rather than just attend to them. We went about this after a lot of campus conversation for several years and it was adopted in 2010 by our faculty senate. Then we began to work with departments to implement and develop ways for them to think through…to create department- and program-level outcomes around those three thematic university level ones. And we used a backward design process: developing the outcomes, developing assessment strategies, and then determining sort of scaffolded learning experiences across the major curriculum. And especially with emphasis on reimagining courses; not just tossing courses out or adding courses, specifically. So how can you really get to the nub of modifying and internationalizing your particular courses. In 2012, GLI contributed significantly towards NAU earning the prestigious Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization awarded by NAFSA. And more recently, we’ve been shifting away from working with departments and program curricula and focusing on individual faculty and their courses. And we do everything from individual consultations and dialogues about individual courses. But, most excitingly, we’ve organized a lot of large-scale frameworks that we’re calling collaboratives that bring together faculty, undergraduate, graduate students, particular programs, community members, all to kind of begin to think through how different courses different programs can really more deeply internationalize their efforts. Jean Paul Lederach, the great peace organizer and theorist has talked about large, flat, flexible, democratic platforms. And that’s what we’re really trying to pursue because, if you have a chance to listen to my other podcast with you all, we’re really focused on a lot of strategies that are based in community organizing theory and practice and that’s been my driving approach.

Rebecca: I have a question, Blase, based on some of the things that you’ve already mentioned. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of learning outcomes that you were using for backwards design related to individual faculty. I think sometimes we have an image of what that might mean, but might have difficulty applying it to different kinds of disciplines.

Blase: Sure, the university level outcomes are really quite broad based. And they were rather intersectional in the sense that sustainability was also leaning into diverse spaces. We’re talking about sustainable communities and so forth and cultures with an idea that it can accommodate…if we built these really large boxes that lean almost into one another like Venn diagrams, then that would offer kind of the maximal amount of space for programs and departments to dialogue and think through them. And really, the individual departments…It was quite quite diverse. Some were very, very specific and targeted about really hard skills that they might need that would help them establish careers…be hired out in post baccalaureate efforts…and others were a lot broader. In the humanities, for example, they were much more expansive, and it was really quite diverse. So all ultimately address skills and competencies, but they were framed very, very differently. And the key point for us was that they were really rooted in disciplinary discourse. So, they were truly real and meaningful for faculty in the department so they could use them as tools to help their program move and prepare their students to succeed in the world that their discipline works with students to place them successfully in.

Rebecca: You do Musicology, right? So are you in the music department at your school?

Blase: Yeah, I’m a professor of musicology…music history. I do work with critical improvisation studies, popular traditions. I teach courses in reggae and country music, and jazz…and yeah, and in music. we’ve approached them in sort of interesting ways: sustainability comes about through…for example, my wife is an oboist and between global learning and lots of pressures with urban expansion in Africa, the wood that they source for that particular instrument has become quite scarce and rare. And there’s also lots of issues about appropriating other cultures’ resources and so forth. So, that’s really driven a lot of internal dialogue about what are we doing, how can we do it and what other alternatives might be available? Initially, of course, they went to oil-based solutions, you know, looking at polymers, but then they’ve been exploring other kind of sustainable woods and just ways to go about and reimagining and still achieving really high levels of performance and expressiveness, using an instrument that will allow them to do that. But again, with alternatives and there’s been real efflorescence in the oboe world around having lots of different woods being used and explored. And our theater colleagues were looking also at green ways to save energy: reusing, using non-toxic paints in their flats and their staging. So there’s been a lot of different ways. And some of its quite strategic and often overlaps with other ways in terms of economic efficiency, given tight budgets and so forth. But at the end of the day, that’s the reality. For example, we make and create and help to enable students to be effective performers and music educators, they’re dealing with audiences and the world and they have to come to terms with that. Within that is what I can contribute about uncovering lots of issues about how does music function in and as culture? And what are the resonance around whose music is being played? How’s that identified? How is it commodified? Who owns that music? Who can speak for it? And it’s a quite fraught history in the US and and European traditions vis a vis world music. But this can help unpack a lot of social justice focused issues within disciplines. Many pursue them overtly. Some that’s kind of bubbling a bit more in the background. So in music it’s been, in spite of popular culture’s music, quite forward art traditions and so forth. It’s more akin to museum systems in the visual plastic arts. So it’s a little bit quite contested in some ways, a bit behind some other areas. So it’s been useful to help disciplines turn over the field a bit and help to move themselves in productive directions.

John: What other types of experiences have been used on other departments to try to reach this goal?

Blase: Well, when the department itself has embraced the institutional imperatives of the wind filling the sail as one where one has to complete it, it’s baked into the program reviews that occur every six years internally, and so forth. And, at the same time, what’s also driven a lot of it is student demand. Just one example… our Department of Philosophy went through this process…and all dear friends, but it was a bit pro forma. And, you know, it wasn’t necessarily the deepest engagement compared to some other departments. But a couple years later, they came back in and wanted to re-examine and reestablish new outcomes for their program to really deepen their practice and their thinking. The discipline had changed, and there was a huge student demand. Once they started opening opportunities in courses and uncovering these issues, like linking it more close to the bone of what’s gone on in philosophy courses, then students were really driving that change. So, really, to kind of get to the nub of the matter when you start talking with a colleague, and they’re saying, “Well, how can I do this in my class?” And that’s always a very, very interesting conversation because in some ways, it can be challenging because they may be frustrated, they see where things are…the state of the world. They’re driven by their own passions and values, their disciplines also, and sometimes bringing that to bear within a curriculum that they may have inherited from someone else in the department over the years, or a particular course, then how do they go about working their way through that? And that can be a very, very rich conversation.

Rebecca: It sounds like that’s the conversation we should have. So, Blase, how can I globalize my classes? [LAUGHTER]

Blase: From my perspective, there are two ways to go about globalizing your course. First off, there’s no need to scrap it, throw it away and start over. No one’s talking about doing that. There are two approaches. One is to work within the existing outcomes for the course. And the second is designing additional outcomes for your course that specifically address why your students should be globalizing their work. That might be a formal outcome that you place if you have the latitude to add that to your course or an informal one that can help you frame your thinking. So in the first one…working within the existing outcomes. We would have a conversation and frequently would just…first off, get off campus…go someplace and have coffee. You kind of break down the routine of this is me in my role, you as a faculty member in your role…I mean, I’m a faculty member too, but I come to them within this other frame…and get someplace where you can begin to think and imagine and begin to talk about what have they always really wanted to do in the course around some of these issues. So, how can you take those outcomes and find ways of moving the learning and moving and modifying learning experiences…projects…what you do…what you read…what you think about…what you discuss in the class… so that it has a more global dimension. And some of that can be shifting readings, shifting the locus of activity or thinking through a problem and where it’s sited, and then helping your students that may not have a lot of experience in that discipline, thinking about those things. So, helping them understand how you really think and work within that discipline with these issues. So the first one is the easy one: where can you substitute? Where can you supplement? Where can you modify? What can you change? The second one, it kind of gets at things at a deeper level and probably something that’s more impactful. So, if you design your own courses’ outcomes, you’re really going to have to think through: Why are you doing this? What will it enable your students to do? To what purpose? …and, given the restrictions you might have, that might be just lurking in the background, helping you make decisions about what you want to alter. What new sorts of ways of doing and knowing that you want to explore with your students, up to you just add it as another outcome and discuss it with your students as you walk through the learning outcomes in the first day when you go through the syllabus quickly and begin to consider what are we going to be doing in this class and why?

John: When faculty have bought into this, how have they responded?

Blase: Most are really, really enthusiastic and people tend to seek this out if they are aligned to the overall goals of the project. In the early days, sometimes we had reluctant departments or departments that there wasn’t a working consensus to move forward in any particular direction. And those were more difficult conversations. These days generally working with individuals or departments that they’re highly aligned with this. So it’s a matter of what more can we do? How can we do that? And the restrictions aren’t about globalizing the course or trying to internationalize different activities or projects. But, often it’s how can we do this with little to no additional economic support? So we can’t buy resources…we can’t send our students necessarily independently out. And then how can we expand where our curriculum is, and I can introduce them to colleagues in the Center for International Education and we operate not by using a service where our students pay and go abroad using a services infrastructure. Like many places anymore, we have individual departments…have reciprocal agreements with other universities that our students would go and take a range of courses in the study abroad experience and they would come back. They would transfer right in. Students are not going to be missing any time in their progression towards a degree. They pay our own internal tuition. So their scholarships and financial aid cover those expenses. We also have a very generous level of support for travel for those students in need, especially in economically challenged groups. So, there’s a lot of infrastructure that the department or the individual faculty member may not have. But we can begin to put people together in a broader network to help them as an individual faculty member achieve aspirations or collectively as a program, or our whole department. Oftentimes, it’s frequently very, very exciting because, if you kind of are talking at that level of what have you all wanted to do, then let’s figure out a way to make that happen. That’s a very catalytic encounter and a catalytic discussion because it’s full of possibilities. I always try to shift the conversation to what else is possible? What have you never had a chance to do? Don’t worry about the 1001 reasons not to do it, they’re always there. But let’s figure out what that is, then we’ll go and figure out ways to remove the barriers or to provide the resources if we can. So, it’s usually a very satisfying work. And it’s usually a very uplifting conversation, because people take that energy inside and really begin to spin it. So, they’re lit up, and how excited they are infects others in their networks and groups and it can kind of feed off of one another. And much like we were talking about earlier conversation, if you get enough activity going, and you begin to saturate the airspace as much as you have the latitude to do, you can create a locus of gravity that starts to pull others in. And that’s just based upon your active network of folks that are collaborating together.

Rebecca: Can you talk about some specific examples that you think are really powerful implementations of globalization of a class or a curriculum?

Blase: Sure. One early example that I use to open up conversation with departments because I usually would go in into a department meeting and here’s what this project GLI is all about. And then “How do you do it?” That’s the next question. One really great example was out of our civil engineering department, we have a big school of engineering of civil, electrical, and so forth. And they often have core courses that all of the different threads within civil engineering would take together and one of those courses had a bridge building project. So, it had two major components. One was you need to design the bridge. So, you need to do the mathematics…the engineering of a bridge that will span a particular distance…that will carry a particular load…and then the materials and construction management side of that. So, then how do you actually actually create that bridge. So, it was actually a semester-long project, and it was quite complex. On the surface, that sounds fairly easy, but it is very real world, because that’s what these students would do when they leave. And they would join a construction corporation and they would be building bridges and other types of projects. So, engineering wanted to globalize that project. They thought this was one place where they could really make an impact. The faculty sited the bridge building project in Kenya. And that’s a country where we have a lot of reciprocal programs and our engineering students are working and taking courses and working in programs there. So, it still addressed the very technical side of what was needed in the course. So they still design and engineer a bridge that carries load…that spans a particular distance. But now that it moved the construction and the materials management into an international frame, and in a particular country, where there are infrastructure issues. How do you ship and transport or source locally materials. And again, that actually aligns absolutely with what their students need because their graduates are getting hired by major international corporations that build projects all over the world. So, that actually gave them a richer set of tools that came out of that learning experience. So, they accomplished everything they needed. Plus, they were able to internationalize it in a way that helps students develop tools that were even more necessary, and actually more salient to their success in the future. I think that’s a very, very quick, powerful little story that gets a “How can you take something and make some changes to it, that actually brings more to it?” So it doesn’t just globalize, but it actually opens up a set of possibilities and experiences that are multiplied. So, it’s not just here’s one way that we can do this to globalize this learning experience. But then, how can we, at the level of outcomes truly, how can we develop a richer set of tools that our students can use to succeed as they go out and seek to build a richer life?

Oftentimes inertia and perhaps a department, for example, or group of faculty, they may think it’s a good idea, but they don’t see a ready quick access point. Civil Engineering, they saw it almost immediately. And they said, “Well, we can do this.” And then it led to “Well, what if we do more of this? How about if we went here, as opposed to there…just so they move down the road pretty rapidly. For example, with Physics and Astronomy, we had a chair that was actually part of our planning group that helped design the whole Global Learning Initiative. And she was very, very interested in wanting to help move the department in this direction. And they were quite split. And it wasn’t just the astronomers versus the physicists, but it was actually a more generational split and that was just peculiar to their department at the time. So, there were a lot of very senior gray lions that really didn’t want to go in this direction. They thought it was counterproductive. They thought it was beside the point. And so that opened a lot in a very long conversation. And over five years or so, there was some change, retirements and so forth. And younger faculty and then the rising senior faculty began to have conversations about what it can be within their context between physics and astronomy. And we’re lucky we’re adjacent to a number of indigenous nations, the Navajo Nation, which is as large as all of New England for goodness sake. Within that’s the Hopi reservation downstate, various Apache groups, and it’s a very rich international space that way. So colleagues in Physics and Astronomy started working with colleagues in the community college system on the Navajo reservation. And so they started bringing in traditional knowledge holders. So, within astronomy, they started offering courses around indigenous cosmologies. So, they were actually helping their students to think in very different international ways using different frames for how do you conceive the founding of the cosmos, and the workings of all that is out there. Even the most rigorous, focused astronomer that is working in radio astronomy, or some other variation of across their wide range of disciplinary practices, then they’re beginning to open up what’s possible, how and what does it mean to be talking about these things? And when I know that I’m talking about it through my contemporary U.S. international sort of frame, that’s one frame. And there are other ways that might be useful to think about the facts, the activities that we do, and what the information we receive. And then what does it mean to put it together in an argument and an explanation. And by thinking through other cultural dimensions that expands their abilities to do that imaginatively, creatively. I come out of the arts, so I’m kind of hard wired to want to do things very improvisatory creative ways. And from my perspective, the more we can all think about, how can we be catalytic and creative in our own disciplinary work? I think that’s the exciting place because it shifts you, not from the core to the periphery, but oftentimes to willfully and intentionally walk to that edge, where your discipline is interacting with all these other disciplines. And that’s a very fruitful and very exciting place to be, because that’s where new knowledge can come about really quickly, as you begin to fuse and think differently and expanding what’s assumed. For me, that’s personally and intellectually this very, very exciting work. And believe me, I can’t follow the details of my colleagues in physics and astronomy when they start unpacking things, but I can get and be really lit up by the direction that they’re going, and their excitement and what they’re seeing as possibilities. Because once colleagues find that this is a fruitful path, then that leads much like we found with physics and astronomy, and certainly the example from engineering, that leads to “what else is possible?” So, you just keep opening and opening and opening. And that’s where we all want to be, especially in a time when most or institutions are getting squeezed in terms of economics. That’s a very empowering place to be.

Rebecca: You’ve mentioned this is a fruitful place for new knowledge. That seems like a good transition to thinking through the lens of students and seeing the world in a different way.

Blase: Yeah.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the student impact that you’ve seen, or maybe even a specific student or a specific story that might help us envision how this plays out?

Blase: I work with faculty who work with the students, but I just get that energy and how they’re able to create new things. And then especially as I see colleagues being able to morph and continually transform what their course is, so that it’s not just, we take something static, we’re going to do some window dressing, and job done, and that’s good for another 20 years. But, once you start moving the pieces, that energy, that motion, that kinetic sense just keeps going and flowing, and students are really excited about it. And what I hear are those more collective pressures to do more. And we have some assessment too: that we had over 80% of our undergraduate programs in just three years out of 91 of the programs at the time, complete the program level GLI process that comes with outcomes assessments and a curricular map of learning experiences. Study abroad, because what we did was we talked to study abroad and asked the departments to position a semester in the program in their sequence of courses where students could go abroad, take courses at institutions that they have confidence in courses that they’re taking, and come back so they’re not losing any time towards the degree. And we saw 136% increase in the number of students going abroad over eight years between 2011 and 2018. And also those students that went abroad, I owe this all from my colleague, Angelina Palumbo, the Director of Education Abroad here in the center. But students that go abroad also have a 87% graduation rate, which is about more than 10% higher than our average graduation rate, which is not bad, but still, that’s quite impactful. Everything from the example when I was talking about colleagues in philosophy, where once they started opening up some of these issues and giving voice to them, their students were asking for more. That’s sort of the level that I encounter.

John: Was the expansion in study abroad programs due to the global initiative.

Blase: Well, I mean, you know, it’s kind of a chicken and the egg thing. We had a new senior international officer (using the jargon, SIOs), Harvey Charles, who was a really, really innovative colleague. He was our SIO. I was working with him. We brought a whole bunch of people together. Basically, he established a presidential task force to help to internationalize the campus. The President was behind that. And working with Harvey, we brought from two or three of us that were focused on curriculum. Out of that task force, we invited 40 colleagues to come together to draft this Global Learning Initiative. And part of that was a concerted effort to expand study abroad. But what had been holding it back was the very things that we were able to address through the curricular side of GLI, that there was many programs didn’t have a targeted semester where their students could study abroad without falling behind. They didn’t have any particular countries or institutions that they had reciprocal relationships and confidence in their curricula. So, it was all at the same time, everything coming together. But the details of how many positions were added it actually tripled the number of positions working in education abroad. But again, that was in response to the huge increase of number of students that were going from our campus. And then also they were busy recruiting international students. We have a couple of thousand international students on campus. And that’s other parts of the infrastructure within the center that GLI wasn’t directly related to or focused upon.

Rebecca: You talked a little bit about economic barriers being a barrier for faculty and making change. Did you come across any other barriers other than maybe you talked about generational differences too?

Blase: Yeah.

Rebecca: Were those main barriers or did you see faculty coming up against some other barriers that they had overcome?

Blase: Some disciplines are just really deep…their disciplinary ways of thinking and knowing they’re highly aligned, right? They’re there…sociology, politics, and international affairs. There really wasn’t much of a discussion in terms of, they’re already doing a great deal of it, then let’s maybe see what else is possible. For a lot of other individual faculty, when we talk to them, or programs that are thinking about picking it back up…it’s kind of a reluctance either, like we’ve talked about before, I’m not sure how to go about moving and making further change, and/or this is a time when everybody is really stressed. On our campus, we’ve lost 60% of state funding in a decade, which is a radical truncation of our support. We’ve shifted to pretty much tuition-based funding, and that’s created enormous pressures…that level of tenure density has plummeted. So, there are a lot of lecturers and a plurality that’s a one-year non-tenured position here on our campus. It’s created a lot of internal pressures and schisms and issues and many faculty don’t have the additional emotional capacity to want to willfully step forward and say I want to create more change and uncertainty and chaos in what I do. When I was referring a little bit earlier to inertia, it’s not just intellectual laziness, it’s often just exhaustion. What’s happening nationally, I think has been exhausting many in the academy, and our politics, the level of incivility that’s increasing and rising on campus. Arizona… you just have to have one person agree in a public forum so that you can videotape and that could be the person behind the iPhone, if they’re agreeing to do it. And that’s all this needed. And of course, these courses and classrooms are public spaces. So, we’ve had lots of faculties classes being put up and being pilloried by different websites, various political perspectives, and some of its been in the Chronicle over the last couple of years. So, it’s been a challenging environment. There are many things going on that are tapping people out. But, for me, what has been the thing that always allows us to continue to succeed? If you’re talking about very mechanical things, or this is an obligation…we need to achieve these program outcomes, that doesn’t stir many people’s souls. But, if you actually have, in advance, thought about how can you position your initiative so that it’s focused and grounded in the values of your community, your literal community or your institution, then people can connect in ways that aren’t just focused on disciplinary interest or compliance. You know, you’re tapping into their heart and what they care about as a person and what motivates them. Again, sustainability in my own discipline of music, there’s a discourse there, and there are ways that one can think through it. But those colleagues (and I count myself) that are very passionate about the future of the planet, we’re motivated to do much, much more, and we’ll seek that out. So amid all the turmoil and depletion of energy and the exhaustion, if you can find ways to shift that conversation into this catalytic space that talks about possibilities, that taps into what people believe and what they value and what they care about deeply, then you’re feeding that conversation from a place that will enrich and nourish rather than just take away, exhaust, and grind you down into submission.

John: We always end with the question, what are you doing next?

Blase: Well, what I’m doing next is continuing on and more and more explicitly going back to the well of community organizing methods, strategies, and theory to help us come together collaboratively. For me, faculty on our campus, and I know a lot of places, feel increasingly radically disempowered either by state legislatures, distant boards, priorities that may be economically driven or politically motivated that are not aligned with where many faculty are themselves. And we tend to wait until we grow quite gray for change to come from the top. So, I’m a firm believer of coming together with colleagues to focus on what’s possible, what can we do together, and actively doing that. And good administrators will be happy to jump in front of that train and take all the credit they want. God bless them. But, just what can we do together to make this a better place, a richer educational space for our communities and for our students? That’s largely pretty much everything I’m doing. Of course…presenting, publishing, writing and more writing, but like everybody else, that’s the thing that really kind of keeps me lit up.

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us.

John: Yes, thank you for joining us. That was a very good discussion.

Blase: Very much appreciate it. Thanks 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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Brittany Jones and Kiara Montero.

88. School Partnerships

Posted in collaboration, community based learning, higher education, K-12, learning, mentorship, professional development, teaching
July 3, 2019

What does it mean to have a collaborative learning community inclusive of faculty, professionals in the field, and current students? In this episode Dr. Christine Walsh and Kara Shore join us to explore one such partnership that is rich in mentorship, professional development, and mutual respect that could serve as a model for other schools and programs.

Christine is a visiting assistant professor and professional development liaison in the curriculum and instruction department at SUNY Oswego. Kara is a Principal at Leighton elementary school here in Oswego.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: What does it mean to have a collaborative learning community inclusive of faculty, professionals in the field, and current students? In this episode we explore one such partnership that is rich in mentorship, professional development, and mutual respect that could serve as a model for other schools and programs.

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Dr. Christine Walsh and Kara Shore. Christine is a visiting assistant professor and professional development liaison in the curriculum and instruction department at SUNY Oswego. Kara is a Principal at Leighton elementary school here in Oswego. Welcome.

Kara: Thank you.

Christine: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are…

Kara: Sweet tea…

Christine: …and Jasmine tea.

Rebecca: Those sound good.

John: Ginger Peach Black tea.

Rebecca: And I have Christmas tea in July.

John: So we’ve invited you here to discuss the partnership between the Curriculum and Instruction department at SUNY Oswego and Leighton Elementary School. Tell us a little bit about that program and how it got started.

Christine: Sure, I’ll start. SUNY Oswego’s School of Education has a long standing relationship with Oswego City School District. I came to the college in 1990 and we had already been working together in preparation of high quality teachers, both elementary teachers and secondary teachers…. teachers in the school district except our in-service students for practicum for student teaching placements. And so in the 90s, we began a PDS—Professional Development School—partnership across Oswego County, and Oswego City School District has really been at the forefront of that since the 90s. I’ve been the PDS liaison here for about 10 years and so it just makes sense to continue enriching that partnership in many different ways. And this is our third year now in the Leighton-Fitzhugh learning community and it really is reaching its richest quality at this point, and in part because of Kara coming in as principal there.

Kara: Thank you, Chris, for saying that—for me when I came in three years ago, really got off the ground running as far as starting this partnership. And we did some planning in the first summer that I came. And really what we talked about was, and these are kind of Chris’s words I’ll use—how can we make it clinically rich—was the term that she used and, kind of thinking about that as we go forward, how can we make it so that our student teachers, or rather the student teachers that come to us from SUNY Oswego, how can we make it so that they are really getting all the experiences that they would have once they’re hired as a teacher? And so we know that from being teachers ourselves that six to eight weeks of student teaching and maybe some practicum hours is certainly helpful in that goal, but it’s really not seeing the whole picture of really what happens in a school day to day and so that’s really kind of where we started from. And then it was all the details that we had to get situated so that we can make sure that it was clinically enriched for those students that were coming into the program.

Christine: The superintendent in the Oswego district now, Dean Goewey, actually approached people in our President’s office here at the college and he said, “What can we do to really cement this relationship to go beyond what other districts are doing with SUNY Oswego School of Ed, to honor a clinically rich experience for undergrads for pre-service teachers, and bring professional development in for in-service teachers?” And so he kind of has a vision of this very strong collaborative learning community. And he said, “I’m going to give a classroom in Leighton elementary school to SUNY Oswego. This is going to be a dedicated room. The technology belongs to SUNY, the equipment, the furniture belongs to SUNY, faculty from SUNY will teach their courses there.” And so our students now take courses right at Leighton—their three education courses in the fall are right at Leighton—so we bring their faculty in to meet Kara’s faculty and staff. They’re an integral part of the professional development we do with teachers, our pre-service candidates are a part of our professional development now which in other districts, pre-service teachers really don’t become a part of professional development—they’re just taking their coursework—but we like to see the two populations together, send the same messages to both groups, and it is a true learning community. We sit down every month, and all the planning is collaborative. And in those ways, it’s really become so much richer than we expected.

Kara: And really, by the students being part of that professional development, they are able to have that professional development and their classes right on our campus at Leighton and then they’re able to take that learning and go right into the classroom. So it’s not removed by a few days or a few weeks, it can happen right away. So, as we know with all learning, you can put it into practice right away, you have a better chance of solidifying what it is that you’ll be doing when you’re working with the children.

Rebecca: What do our students say about that experience of taking classes at Leighton and then being able to have that direct experience in the classroom?

Christine: I do want to start off by saying that we’ve morphed from the Leighton learning community into the Leighton-Fitzhugh learning community, because Leighton is a relatively small building now that the district office is housed there and we had so many pre-service candidates interested in being in the program, we now rely on the Fitzhugh elementary school right down the road, and the principal and teachers there are very much a part of this learning community too. And so our candidates take their classes and go right into the classrooms at Leighton or they jump in their car and they go right into classrooms at Fitzhugh and it’s seamless for them. I think they appreciate that they’re not just on campus. They know that they need to learn as much from people in schools as they’re learning from people at the college and without one of those partners, they’re not getting a really true learning experience and a realistic learning experience. We need the K-12 setting for teacher preparation, and we feel they need us in many ways as well. And so it’s not an either-or situation, I think we respect the whole package and our students now, we can see the light bulbs going off for the pre-service teachers. And they go right from class where they hear about this particular theory or method of instruction, and then they go right into their host teachers classroom and they work with children for so many more hours than what our state ed requires for teacher prep and they see it happening and they say “No, I really don’t like how that’s working,” and they question it and they really are more critical thinkers because they’re in the schools more. So they’ve got that theory-practice connection down pat.

Kara: And I would say that just my own experience as a student teacher way back when, I would have never thought to go into the principal’s office. I don’t think I remember who the principals were in the places that I was put into as a practicum student and/or student teacher. And really, I have connections with those students. So not only are they working with us day to day, they really become part of our staff in everything that they do. They’re eating lunch in the same places the teachers are eating their lunch, often. Sometimes they’re in their own classroom, so the college classroom rather so that they can have their privacy but a lot of times they’re right with our teachers even down to eating their lunch. I have parent meetings and when I have parent meetings with students, they are part of those meetings. We have CSE meetings which are special education meetings, we have open house, all those things that invite our parents in to speak with us about their children, and now these pre-service teachers, these student teachers from SUNY Oswego, they are all a part of that process. So I really get to know them as well as they get to know me so I think that’s a big distinction between what we would normally see if students are just doing those six weeks.

Rebecca: I can imagine that most students don’t think of going to the principal’s office because that would be a bad thing. [LAUGHTER]

Kara: That’s right. That’s right and we’ve got to change that, right? That paradigm shift on that. So it’s very true, it’s very true.

John: It seems like a much richer experience than they typically would receive in in-service teaching where they’re just there for a few days or portion of days each week with much more immersion in a much more realistic environment.

Christine: Absolutely. Right from the beginning, we know that the college culture and climate is so different from what we live in the schools. Our schedules are different, our calendars are different, the whole energy is different in these two settings. And so it’s so interesting to work with one foot in both places, and our candidates too, they need to be flexible because things don’t always go as planned when they’re out in the schools or when they’re at the college and they have to juggle more things on a regular basis than a typical practicum student or student teacher, but we think that’s a good thing because they have the support there. They have the support from more college people in that same location, they have support from the building principal, the host teachers in that building. It is a real learning community because there’s no hierarchy and that’s a model that I think is so important for new teachers to grasp… that it doesn’t have to be that we have to have a boss or a boss of a boss and that teachers are leaders and they need to be able to connect and communicate with administrators, teachers, it doesn’t matter what your title is. And I’m finding in our learning community, we really have that communication without the fear of hierarchical constraints, which happens in a lot of places.

Kara: Yeah, and I’m really glad you mentioned that Chris—to kind of backtrack a little bit what you said a few minutes ago—it’s that professionalism. It’s understanding what it is you need to do when you walk into a school building and how you need to carry yourself. And sometimes that’s not something we might learn in a college class. But it just becomes natural because they see everyone around them and they experience what everyone else is doing. And so because of that, it just sort of happens on its own, which is, I think that and of itself, if I’m going to interview some candidates in the summer, and I’m interviewing candidates that really had those experiences and they can talk about those experiences, that interview is going to look a lot different than just someone that’s kind of talking to me about maybe theory that they have learned in a classroom. Not that that’s a bad thing—that’s a really good thing and an important thing—but if they can actually talk about how they put that into practice, that learning that happened in the classroom, that’s going to be a real strong candidate that I know is ready to go and is ready to work with whatever students come in front of them.

Rebecca: I can imagine that in a lot of disciplines, not just education, that students have a mental model of whatever the discipline or whatever the job is going to be that’s very different from what it actually is and in part because their experience of it may be from a consumer point of view or as a student rather than as a faculty member. It’s the different side of the coin. Or maybe they have pictures of what that might be from media, which doesn’t include all of the nuance that we actually experience in our jobs. So I can really imagine how much being immersed in that way can really help them understand the interconnectedness and how all these pieces work together rather than thinking, “Here’s my little hole that I’m going to exist in.” rather than realizing that everything’s connected and that you do have to adjust based on other people, bigger picture things, strategies that are being used within the entire school rather than just in a particular classroom, et cetera.

Kara: Yeah, and I think you find out very quickly if this is what you want to do. There’s lots of articles out there, lots of data, that shows that there’s a lot of teacher burnout, and so in trying to be proactive around that, I think this is one of the ways that we do that because I think students come out and they really know, “Is this for me, is this what I have passion for? Is this what I want to be doing for the next 20 years?” So I think it really gives them that guidance as well.

Christine: It’s not an easy job, not at all. Sometimes when you’re sitting on campus in a college class and you’re studying, you’re reading out of a book, you’re reading articles, you’re reading current literature, you’re talking theories, you’re talking methods, without the practical context to connect it to, and not just a short time that you’re in this context, but you’re really—like you were saying—you’re immersed in this context over and over and over, that’s when connections are going to be made. And so those practices inform both what we do at the college, and then we reflect on what’s happening, and that informs hopefully what the public schools are doing and how they can change.

John: One of the things you mentioned was the professional development aspect of this for teachers in the school. Could you tell us more about that program and how that works?

Christine: This fall, for example, we start out with a cohort of practical students. It is the semester before they student teach. We bring them out. We start in August, the schools don’t start until September, so we have a little bit of time to meet them, work with them. We’ve already recruited host teachers that we’d like to match them with, and we have an orientation at the beginning of that semester because hearing expectations right from the beginning in the school, that they are expected to do this work in has been found to be super valuable. So host teachers hear what the expectations are for their work with our candidates. Candidates hear expectations, not only from our principal, but the PDS liaisons and their professors that semester so everyone’s on the same page for this whole semester. This is what we expect our experience to be like. This is what our requirements are. This is what professionalism looks like in a public school versus walking around a college campus in terms of behavior, dress, social media. I love this work because we take the elephant right out of the room right from day one. There are no questions about what is expected in a public school classroom with children. And in this day and age, you have to be extra, extra cautious, careful, explicit. And it’s different from hanging around a college campus for four years.

Kara: Right, and we’ve been fortunate the last couple of years—maybe even three—but I think it’s been the last couple of years, we’ve been able to invite those pre-service teachers when we have opening day for staff. They’ve been a part of that. So we’ve done some team building exercises and just really get to know each other and that’s what we kind of do when we come back as a staff just to say hi to everyone, and “Welcome back, and how was your summer? And how did things go? And what’s something you’d like to talk about that you’d like to celebrate? What are some goals for the beginning of the school year? What are you thinking?” And they’re all a part of that. So not only are they getting to know our staff,as far as pedagogy goes, but they’re also getting to know our staff as, “What are your interests? What are our interests? What do we have in common?” And I think that’s critically important. As we work with students—no matter what grade level you work with students—making connections with students, we know how important that is. We know that that’s always been important, but we know that in 2019, it’s extra important that we are making relationships with kids. And so the teachers themselves are learning how to do that with these pre-service teachers and they’re learning how to do it back with their host teachers so that when students come into the room when school starts, they’re ready to do that. They’re ready to make those relationships from day one because they’ve already practiced that in the summer.

Rebecca: What a great way to have everyone feel included. I think that sometimes the internships, pre-service teachers, kind of drop-in drop-out like they don’t ever feel fully integrated or included and it sounds really great that when your staff come back, they’re all a part of the same thing.

Kara: Yes. And a perfect example of that is that when our student teachers are out sometimes—because we all are out sometimes, we all get sick sometimes—the students are asking where they are. They asked me were those pre-service teachers are. That would have never happened in the past so I think that’s a great concrete example of how much the kids really start to depend on them being in the classroom.

Rebecca: Can you elaborate a little bit more on what your students get from our college students being present so frequently?

Kara: Sure, absolutely. So we sort of know as teachers and buildings that the more that we can differentiate what students are learning, meaning the more that we can give them experiences and they can actually work with and be concrete… let me give you an example. Let’s say we’re getting ready for our science fair. And so for our science fair, typically, we would have one classroom teacher, we might have a teaching assistant in a room, and we might have anywhere between 20 and 25 students. So you can imagine that the teacher kind of goes through, “This is what needs to be on your poster board.” But then the students have to work independently. They usually will have a rubric and they can go through that rubric and they can look at all the things that should be on the poster board. And then when they’re all done with the finished product, the teacher might rotate around the room, they’re finished with the product. The teacher sort of goes over with them what that looks like. That’s fine, except for you are an end product and you hope it all went well. Okay. But with other student teachers in the room from SUNY Oswego, they are working with kids, two and three kids at a time, and they’re really helping them through that process. So by the time they have a finished product—for example, a science fair project—those students are really able to talk about what it is that they went through when they were learning it. And the student teachers—pre-service teachers—are able to really talk about where students started, and where that growth came from and as they went along, what that looked like. And that’s very different than just saying, “I’m the teacher standing in front of the room, this is what you’re going to learn, and then I’m going to grade you on this product of what I think you should have learned,” versus actually doing it and being a part of the process. So certainly they are doing that every single day and that’s across all disciplines. That’s in social studies, that’s in math, that’s in science, that’s in ELA. Also, we’re able to really take our reading groups, we’re really able to look at data and say, “These are the two or three students that really need this extra support. Now we have that person to give them that extra support.” So great to look at data—very important—but if you don’t have the staffing to then support that, when those students need that extra help, that what happens is kids get into groups, and so you might have a group of six or seven students and they’re still this high and low. That all goes away because we have those extra students that are able to do that and able to teach that reading just like alongside with the supervision of the teacher, of course, but they’re able to really work independently with those students and give them what they really need.

Rebecca: So, much more personalized learning is happening.

Kara: Absolutely.

Christine: We hear stories all the time from the host teachers at Leighton and Fitzhugh, about how much more they can accomplish in a lesson or in a given day. Some of our students even before student teaching, our college students are there three full days a week and taking courses. And so they get to see the children from when they get off the bus until when they get back on the bus at the end of the day, up to three full days a week. And so we watch them go from full-time college student to semi-professional, and then through student teaching into a full professional life—and it’s a really beautiful transformation within a year, their last year of college. But without this setting and without the collaboration, those stories wouldn’t be coming out and the richness really wouldn’t be there. But the professional development is a big part of that. We have a list of PD offerings every semester for host teachers and candidates. It begins with the orientation that we talked about, the opening day for teachers that Kara talked about that our candidates are invited to every year, and then we do something called instructional rounds where our candidates and classroom teachers are invited to do a lesson study. Two of Kara’s teachers had volunteered to do demonstration lessons for their colleagues and our candidates. And so we structure a data collection tool where we’re looking for specific pieces of instruction and elements of classroom learning and teaching and we literally go in and observe the teacher and then we debrief with the teacher afterwards, and it’s a really great form of professional development. Our candidates learn a lot, the in-service teachers, the practicing teachers learn a lot about their own teaching, “What am I doing? What am I not doing? How could I do that better?” And then they can start using their colleagues as resources. Many say, “Gee, I didn’t know you knew how to do that. How did you learn how to do that? Can you teach me how to do that?” So the learning community really is just bolstered by all the PD that we offer to both schools.

Kara: YEAH, And I’m really glad you said that, Chris, because that’s something that I have found to be just really, really an important piece of all this is that often, once we become practitioners out there in the field, we kind of go with what we learn and go with what we think we do well and that’s how that works. And so having that growth mindset, that growth model, is something that we know we should be as teachers. We should be lifelong learners, but how do we actually do that? And so by having that PD, instead of being told, “This is going to be the flavor of the week that we’re going to do for this month,” or “This school year, this is what we’re going to do, and we’re all going to jump on board, and this is how we’re going to teach reading,” let’s say for example. And we do it and certainly we’re good about following through and being good soldiers, but we don’t really know why we do it. And we don’t really know if we’ve grown because we don’t have that time to really reflect. This really gives us that opportunity to do that. An example I have of that is one of the professors Dr. Duffy, who is a professor here at SUNY Oswego. She did some PD around spelling and she did it with the adults—including myself—and there were things that we didn’t know. So we know as adults that we know how to read, but we didn’t really know why we knew how to read or how to read, and so the students really almost knew more than we knew, because they had been learning it and for them, it wasn’t anything that had to be retaught or relearned. And so we actually were reaching out to them for them to help us so that we could be working with the students. And that’s magical. That dynamic is not going to happen in any other setting, that we as the practitioners would be reaching out to the pre-service teachers. So I think that’s a good example of something that really, what we learn is going right into the classroom and how it’s a partnership, not, “I’m the supervisor and you’re sort of the student.” It’s really that partnership. That’s just I think a good example of that.

Rebecca: It sounds like really powerful interdependence. That doesn’t always happen.

Kara: Absolutely.

Christine: It is now. I think it has grown to be that.

Rebecca: Yeah, I can imagine things don’t always start that way. You have to really get to know and trust.

Christine: Trust is a huge part. If we go back three years, I remember walking into Kara’s office and introducing myself. “I’m your PS liaison!” “Oh, okay. Nice to meet you.” It was her very first month on the Leighton campus and, “I have a classroom in your building,” and “Let’s go see my classroom,” and it’s very awkward. It is awkward because it’s brand new for both of us, we don’t know each other, we think that we understand the vision, but it hasn’t really been created yet. All the pieces haven’t been thought through and it’s up to us to create whatever it is. And so it’s exciting and a little scary and weird all at the same time.

Kara: I would agree. We all come from a different place and so we all prioritize differently and I think what we had to do is we had to get in sync with that and have an understanding of the other person’s role and perspective. And I think that’s where we’ve all shown growth so that we can really provide the best model possible for those students that are coming in to learn from us.

Rebecca: It already sounds a lot, like really rich and deep and full of trust so I can imagine that it will continue getting even more rich as your partnership grows over time.

John: And it’s really convenient how close Leighton is to the college. It’s less than two miles away, so students can even walk there and back.

Kara: Yes, absolutely. In fact, I have—this is aside—but we have two students from SUNY Oswego that are part of our AmeriCorps program, and one of the students actually walks from campus so that makes a big difference that students have that accessibility.

Rebecca: So you’ve talked a little bit about the professional development aspect and the relationship that the campus has with providing some professional development opportunities for existing teachers at Leighton and Fitzhugh. Can you talk a little bit more about how that works?

Christine: Sure. We have ongoing professional development based on what our planning committee has decided the teachers would like and what our candidates like and need, and so the planning is always collaborative and then we have a semester long—or year long plan even—but it’s always grounded in what the district has set as their strategic plan, their initiatives. And so because we’ve been a part of Oswego City School District for so many years, we have relationships with people in the district office, in the buildings, we know that they have had two initiatives going on really for the last several years: explicit direct instruction and trauma-based teaching. And then recently they brought in an early literacy initiative that’s across the county. But one great thing about the Leighton-Fitzhugh learning community is that we really zero in on those initiatives. We don’t want our candidates learning things that aren’t going to be useful once they come into their practicum and student teaching. So for example, we have right now, mindfulness classes being offered—not only at Leighton and Fitzhugh but we’ve extended beyond to other buildings in the district. Oswego High School and Oswego Middle School had been involved in those courses for a number of years. We have yoga being taught in three of the buildings in Oswego City School District at no cost to the teachers here, these are all college professional development opportunities that we would like to provide and continue providing to help the district meet their goals. We do PD usually once a semester on giving and receiving quality feedback. So we know one of the sticky points of being in a relationship with a pre-service teacher, for the classroom teacher, is they’ve been dealing with children for many, many years. They haven’t necessarily been communicating with adults in an evaluative or critical thinking kind of way, and so we know the host teachers really are in a position to help our candidates in constructive ways. We don’t want them to be overly critical, but they have to be able to say when they see something going on, “I’d like to sit down and talk about this,” and really hit the nail on the head with that. And at the same time, our candidates—as they mature and become professionals—they have to have the language and the courage to go to the principal or go to the host teacher and say, “I’m really struggling with such and such, can you help me with this?” So giving and receiving quality feedback is a topic for PD that we’ve done a number of times. Co-teaching is a PD that we offer that’s very successful too.

Kara: I think just to add to that, Chris, I think that when the students and the teachers are working together to problem solve through what’s going on when they’re in the classroom, they can always refer back to those experiences that they’ve had during those PD sessions. So it’s not only that it works well when they’re working with students, but it also helps them work together as a team because truly, once the student has been there—I would say after their first or second practicum experience and they’re really part of that pre-service teaching mode—they really are doing that planning with the teacher. And so to be able to have those skills of feedback like Chris had said, is really important because often there isn’t enough time in the day to do that once you’ve started teaching. Once you’re live, you’re live. So to be able to do that ahead of time and even know what questions to ask, or what feedback to give, or why that would even be important, I don’t think is something we would have done before, and now it’s just part of our routine.

Rebecca: That just sounds really great.

John: It does, and one of the things I really like about it.. you mentioned the growth mindset idea. But when our students are there working with teachers and seeing that they’re going through professional development with them, I would think that would help build a growth mindset and help encourage them to become lifelong learners and realize that this is an ongoing process. That’s a really nice aspect of the program.

Christine: Absolutely. For too long we’ve seen such a division between what we experience in a teacher ed program on campus and what the real job looks like, feels like, demands of us, and really we have broken down a lot of that. We’re not completely there yet—we have a lot of work still to do—but for public school people to respect the contributions of teacher educators and for us to respect the jobs, the intense super-demanding jobs of classroom teachers and principals and then to bring all of that together, I think that’s where the power is.

Kara: I think it really forces us to reflect as practitioners because you have these folks around that are really depending on you and looking up to you and watching and we are modeling for them. And so really being able to talk about that, it’s one thing to be doing the job, but after you’ve done it for a while, you don’t so much really talk about it with anyone anymore. But really, that conversation has to happen so that it is rich for those students when they come into our building. So, it helps us be better I think, too, because we want to make sure that we’re doing right by our students that come in.

Christine: It heightens the professionalism just by having us in the building. And it helps us question how and why we do what we do. And we are watching them in action—it forces them to do the same. What are they seeing right now? And what are they thinking about what they’re seeing? And then we come together and talk about what we’re all seeing.

Kara: You have to be willing to be vulnerable to grow and I think that’s a big piece. And I can’t say enough for my staff that really has taken students and really, that’s the word I would use would to be vulnerable, that they really kind of put themselves out there so that the students will be able to go and teach thousands of students for years to come, which is really the ultimate goal… to be able to do that and to be able to give back to their community. Often many of them stay right here in Oswego and that’s really another one of the initiatives that the superintendent is looking at is, “How do we keep our community vibrant? And how do we keep students going?” And I think that’s definitely a piece of that.

Christine: In one of our PDs we invite the HR, the personnel director from Oswego City Schools in for a few minutes so that she can show our candidates how to apply for substitute teaching positions in the district. And it is quite a process, to go through the online application to come in for the interview, to become Board of Education approved. And so our candidates have to want to substitute teach to go through that whole process. But there’s such a shortage right now of high-quality substitute teachers everywhere we look. And so we feel at the college that we want to help address that problem by encouraging our candidates to apply to sub, get board approved. They’re very happy that they can then make some money and then be present in the school more if they could substitute teach and be present in their classrooms more than what they’re required to be. That’s the best marriage of all. We’re really helping both institutions with it. And we do have several board approved candidates in both buildings right now getting great subbing experience.

Kara: I would agree and I think that it really gives them a sense of value. Often they come in and out of fairness to the student teachers—the pre-service teachers, I know I keep using those words interchangeably—but I think that it’s a big commitment for them, and Chris kind of alluded to that. They really have to set their own lives aside to make this commitment because they are spending so much time with us. And I think it validates all of their hard work that we would trust that they could sub and they could be with those students. I think that gives them a sense of confidence and a sense of competency that the work that they have been doing is certainly the same kind of work that they’ll be doing when they’re out in their profession,—hopefully—a few months down the road once they graduate and get a position. So it’s about can you do the job, but also we know in teaching that you psychologically you have to be present all the time and you have to give 100 percent to the kids all the time. They expect that, they need that, they deserve that. And I think for our pre-service teachers to be able to actually do that, and to develop their own style, that’s another piece that you don’t necessarily get with the six weeks. But with us, they have learned what their own style is and how they’re going to go about managing a classroom and teaching the students in front of them.

Rebecca: I can imagine, especially in teaching teachers, but also in other areas that you’re teaching professionals. I’m a graphic designer, I teach graphic designers, which is also a professional degree, that the more you interact and integrate with the profession and know what’s going on and know what the challenges are, the better you can instruct your students and adjust the curriculum in higher ed to better serve what students are actually going to need in the field. So I can imagine, Chris, that being so embedded in the district right now in the way that this program is working, that you’ve learned a ton about how we should be educating future teachers, and have you had any adjustments to the curriculum as a result?

Christine: Well, I think that I am in a unique position being at the college full time and part of my load being out in schools. And so I do bring a lot of information to both groups as I learn it. I bring observations to both groups. I think that’s the only way good change can happen is if we keep those lines open and keep watching and learning from each other. We do have a ways to go, I think. Ideas are kind of popping in my head right now about ways in the future that we could really start bringing college folks and public school people together. Years and years ago I wrote a grant so that half of my load at the college could be covered and I taught a half day every day in a sixth grade ELA classroom in Oswego County with an ELA teacher. We co-taught every day and then on Fridays, I brought my literacy students out to that building to watch us co-teach and then debrief our literacy lesson afterwards. And it was ages ago that that happened, but I still think “Wow, how could we really start learning from each other in very practical ways, and then bring that back to our respective roles? So has our curriculum changed? I think it is starting to. We have a strong link with state education (as do public schools), our standards are changing, state ed regs are changing, what they require of for certification for our in-service teachers it’s constantly changing, and so we have to be in communication with CiTi BOCES, with public schools, with state ed, we can’t be isolated. And we have to keep reaching out and seeing that the schools are continually reaching out to us to be partners in that. So, taking a look at a syllabus, for example, and let’s sit around the table and we’re all looking at a copy of the same syllabus for a methods of instruction course. And all the eyes looking at that document are coming at it with a different lens and wow, what a conversation that would be. “Well, I think the new teacher should have this and this and this in there,” and other people think, “Oh, no, we don’t need as much of this as we have. Let’s take it out,” and just getting into those deep, professional discussions about what’s the most important thing for new teachers to know. I hope that we can keep going in that direction.

Kara: And I think as students go back to their professors, and talk about their assignments and what it is that they’re doing and give their experiences, I think that plants some seeds, and I think that’s what we can hope for going forward.

Christine: One of our methods professors said to me recently, “After I taught this course the first time, I looked at it and said, ‘You know what, they don’t need two research projects. They’re out in the field, they’re out with children all the time. I’m going to cut one of those out. I’m just going to do one research project and get rid of the other one and let them do some action research in the classroom.” Teachers are collecting data all the time on many different things. They’re observing kids in so many different ways and so that’s the research that is valuable, that we can learn so much from. We need books, we need articles, we need current research studies on teaching and learning. But we need action research that’s going on every day with kids in classrooms, too.

John: I noticed in an article on your arrival here that you had done some work at NORAD, before moving into teaching. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Kara: Sure. Yes, I was in the Air Force and I actually was stationed in Colorado Springs, Colorado, it was about 1990, 1991, and I actually got to work in NORAD. And so that’s where we tracked Santa Claus. So, when I first came to Oswego and they asked the questions around what makes you unique and so we always kind of talk about, “Yeah, I worked inside of a mountain and we track Santa Claus.” And certainly, the United States Air Force does other things besides track Santa Claus there, but certainly it’s all about that problem solving. So when I was in the Air Force, very much there is always an end result. And we don’t give up and we have to figure out a way. There is no “Oh, it didn’t work out. We’ll try better next time.” It’s “We’ll keep working at it till it does work out.” And I think there’s some real same sort of ideas here when we talk about this partnership, that we keep growing and we keep learning, we keep problem solving, and that we don’t give up. Because think about how sad the children would be if Santa Claus didn’t come, right? and NORAD failed… So we want to do the same, think about how our children would fail if we weren’t doing our very best for them every day in a school setting. So, I think they definitely are the same in that way and I think the other thing is that when I was certainly working there, really it’s about how can we do things smarter, how can we do things differently, so that we can still get the same result but we’re not getting “stuck in the weeds” as they say, and I think that we did that at NORAD and I think we certainly are doing that with this program. What are those things that are critical and key to making it—like Chris has always said—that clinically rich environment for our students, for the students of the campus, for all the practitioners that are working with them? So, I would say those are the two things that are alike. No Santa Claus that Leighton though, but while I’m still working on it. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Sightings coming soon.

Kara: Yes, right, sightings coming soon. That’s right.

John: Although apparently there’s Christmas Tea in July.

Rebecca: Yeah, well, you know… hey…

Kara: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

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

Christine: Oh my goodness, we have a wonderful cohort coming in in the Fall, I can’t wait to meet them. I’m just excited to keep going into classrooms and seeing the work that our candidates are able to do. We did not have as high enough expectations of them until we began rich partnerships in schools. These candidates are able to do so much more before they even come student teaching than we ever imagined that they could and so capturing that, capturing concrete ways that they are growing in ways that we’re affecting the children in the elementary school—Kara says we’re not going to stop until we figure this out—we need tangible evidence that this is powerful and that it’s working. We know that it is, it’s not just anecdotal, so we want to look at it through a research lens.

Kara: Right. And I think that the way that we do that is that trust that Chris talked about earlier. I think the more we and/or the way we continue to have that trust with each other, the more we’re going to be able to talk about what’s working well, what are some things that we might want to do differently, and what does that look like? And then let’s actually try it, let’s not just talk about it, but let’s really put it into practice and then see what happens. If we have to take a step back, then we do. But if we don’t, then we know that this is something going forward that we can kind of put in our toolbox.

Rebecca: Sounds really exciting. Thank you so much for spending some time with us and telling us about this partnership.

Christine: You’re welcome.

Kara: 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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Kim Fisher, Chris Wallace, Kelly Knight, Joseph Bandru, Jacob Alverson, Brittany Jones, and Gabriella Perez.