Most books and resources devoted to professional development focus on strategies that faculty can use to create a positive learning environment for our students, but generally assume that everything will work as expected. In this episode, Jessamyn Neuhaus joins us to discuss her new book, Snafu Edu, which acknowledges the reality that everything does not always work as we hope that it will, and suggests strategies for addressing common situations in which things go wrong.
Jessamyn is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence and Professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University. She is a historian and the editor of Teaching History: A Journal of Methods. Jessamyn has published extensively in scholarly publications in the areas of history, pedagogy, and cultural studies. She is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Teaching. Jessamyn is the author of Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers, and the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. Her newest book, Snafu Edu: Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom will be released shortly by the Oklahoma University Press series on Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Education, edited by James Lang and Michelle Miller.
Show Notes
- Jessmyn Neuhaus
- Teaching History: A Journal of Methods
- Neuhaus, J. (2019). Geeky pedagogy: A guide for intellectuals, introverts, and nerds who want to be effective teachers. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.
- Neuhaus, J. (2022). Picture a professor: Interrupting biases about faculty and increasing student learning. West Virginia University Press.
- Neuhaus, J. (2025). Snafu Edu: Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom. Oklahoma University Press.
- Neuhaus, J. (2003). Manly meals and mom’s home cooking: Cookbooks and gender in modern America. JHU Press.
- Neuhaus, J. (2011). Housework and housewives in American advertising: Married to the mop. Springer.
- Harlow, R. (2003). ” Race doesn’t matter, but…”: The effect of race on professors’ experiences and emotion management in the undergraduate college classroom. Social psychology quarterly, 348-363.
- Barbeau, L., & Happel, C. C. (2023). Critical teaching behaviors: Defining, documenting, and discussing good teaching. Routledge.
- Lauren Barbeau and Claudia Cornejo Happel (2025). Critical Teaching Behaviors. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 390. April 23.
- Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-rich education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it. Hachette UK.
- Palmer, P. J. (2017). The courage to teach guide for reflection and renewal. John Wiley & Sons.
- Miller, M. D. (2024). A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Student Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can (Vol. 2). University of Oklahoma Press.
- Pittman, Chavella (2025, forthcoming). Empowered: A Woman Faculty of Color’s Guide to Teaching and Thriving. University of Oklahoma Press.
- Piven, J., & Borgenicht, D. (2010). The worst-case scenario survival handbook: travel. Chronicle Books.
- Norell, Elizabeth A. (2024). The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching. University of Oklahoma Press.
Transcript
Rebecca: Since we began this podcast in November 2017, we’ve had hundreds of opportunities to have extended conversations with many innovators, researchers, educators, thought leaders, and advocates working to support student learning. We are grateful to all of our guests who have so generously contributed their time, to the new friends and colleagues we’ve gained, and for all of our listeners. We’re excited that our friend and colleague, Jessamyn Neuhaus joined us to celebrate in our 400th episode.
John: And now we return to our regularly scheduled programming.
John:Most books and resources devoted to professional development focus on strategies that faculty can use to create a positive learning environment for our students, but generally assume that everything will work as expected. In this episode, we discuss a new resource that acknowledges the reality that everything does not always work as we hope that it will, and suggests strategies for addressing common situations in which things go wrong.
[MUSIC]
John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
[MUSIC]
Rebecca: Our guest today is Jessamyn Neuhaus. Jessamyn is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence and Professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University. Jessamyn is an historian and the editor of Teaching History: A Journal of Methods. Jessamyn has published extensively in scholarly publications in the areas of history, pedagogy, and cultural studies. She is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Teaching. Jessamyn is the author of Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers, and the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. Her newest book, Snafu Edu: Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom will be released shortly by the Oklahoma University Press series on Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Education, edited by James Lang and Michelle Miller. Welcome back, Jessamyn.
Jessamyn: Thank you. I’m so glad to be here.
John: It’s good to see you again. Today’s teas are:… Jessamyn, are you drinking tea?
Jessamyn: Tea is my afternoon beverage, and we’re recording this in the morning. So I’ve got a very large cup of high octane coffee.
Rebecca: A good way to power the day.
Jessamyn: Exactly.
Rebecca: I have Yunnan Noir today.
John: Very good. And I have a ginger peach green tea today.
Rebecca: Nice. We’re invited here today to discuss Snafu Edu. Can you tell us the origin story of this book?
Jessamyn: Yes, so John and Rebecca, let me take you back in time to the late 1990s, dawn of the internet age. Grunge was king, and I was pursuing my doctorate in U.S. History and Gender Studies, and in doing that research, I became just utterly fascinated with 20th century prescriptive texts, things that reinforced sociocultural and especially domestic ideology, normative domestic ideology. I mean stuff like cookbooks, etiquette guides, 1950s mental hygiene films. And so as a scholar in the archives, that’s what I loved examining in the most, this evidence, these leftovers, of what people at different points in time had decided was the best, most ideal way to live and be, especially at home and at school. And if you’re fascinated by those things, here’s a shameless plug, check out my first two books, which were published in my work in history. One’s on cookbooks, and one is on gender and advertising representation of housewives. So anyway, as a scholar of teaching and learning, I’ve always had that little research fascination in the back of my mind. I kind of question about how advice and research about teaching reinforces certain norms and ideals, not intentionally or consciously, but as discourse, as texts doing ideological work in culture. So I was always thinking, could I maybe write something about teaching, give actionable advice about teaching, like in real life, that interrupted some of those prescriptive ideals. I wanted to write a book that would be useful in people’s daily teaching work. That was the great joy after I published Geeky Pedagogy was hearing from people who were able to use it in their just day-to-day work and drawing on the abundant research about effective teaching practices, and at the same time, in Snafu Edu, I wanted to emphasize that that daily teaching work is, in a word, it’s messy, and it’s not a matter of if, but when something will go awry. And then that was all percolating, and it got cemented in the post-pandemic years so when something had really, really gone wrong in a major way, and the time was right for me, as an author, because I’m fortunate at this point in my career to have something of a platform. I’m no James Lang or Sarah Rose Cavanagh, but I have the ability in the world of educational development and in scholarship about teaching, I have some power to get my work published and to speak to people about things I think are important, the things that I believe need more attention, that we need to talk about more. I’m in a position to be able to articulate those and get some listeners. And what I wanted to articulate this time in this book, is, OMG, things can go really, really wrong in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: I know when I was reading, Jessamyn, I felt like you totally captured the messiness, and certainly the messiness of my classroom and many other colleagues that I have. [LAUGHTER]
Jessamyn: Excellent.
John: And I think that will resonate with probably all of your readers. So, speaking of readers, who is the target audience? Is it for faculty just starting off, or for faculty at all stages of their careers?
Jessamyn: Well, my audience is anyone who’s in an instructional role on a college campus. I have been thinking more and more about the ways that teaching happens, not just in classrooms, not just with professors, but all kinds of people in designated staff positions as well. And I am very attentive to what Roxanna Harlow termed disparate teaching realities, meaning that teaching labor is really shaped by every individual’s intersectional positionality, including our embodied identities. And so my hope is that, with those things in mind, anyone and anybody in any teaching context can find it useful. I do think it will be useful for anyone at any stage in their career, but I think it’s going to especially resonate with mid-career educators, basically, anyone who’s been teaching long enough, and it might just even be a couple classes, but anyone who’s been teaching long enough to have made some serious bloopers and experience students making big mistakes too.
Rebecca: Definitely does something to establish some sort of [LAUGHTER] community around the realities of teaching.
Jessamyn: Yeah, so you have some experiences to think back on. I would say, especially for a large section of us, the experiences that kept you up at night, that you tossed and turned, reliving, wondering what you should have done differently, torturing yourself about what went wrong, it would be helpful to have a couple of those in your mind when you pick up this book.
Rebecca: So, I know that we’ve talked about, and you’ve certainly written about in your work, the idea that one size fits all professional development doesn’t really work. So can you talk a little bit about why there’s just no simple solutions to the common problems in education? [LAUGHTER]
Jessamyn: Yeah, I mean, humans gotta human. [LAUGHTER] Nobody’s a widget moving through the world like a product on a factory belt. Every person has their own unique set of experiences, life circumstances, pet peeves, passion projects. I know, for example, Dr. John Kane is a musician and makes a lot of time and effort in his life to play music. There’s things that just matter to us more than maybe matter to other people. And especially in our work, everybody’s bringing with them into the classroom a whole huge honking set of emotional and cognitive baggage that they’ve acquired during their previous or even concurrent experiences in educational settings. I mean, it’s a lot. And also what we’re here to do is incredibly hard. Learning is very, very hard. It often, usually always entails setbacks, and that includes learning how to teach effectively. So, in my view, this reality needs more direct and specific highlighting in discourse about teaching. We just need to talk a lot more about the fact that teaching is not a perfectible activity. And it’s not that anyone’s out there saying teaching is perfectable. No one would say that consciously, but there’s a real strong subtext and a lot of discourse about teaching that, in even, like otherwise, really excellent advice about teaching that, if you just do it, everything will be fixed, everything will be perfect, and that’s not possible.
Rebecca: You talked about the bloopers, but I think a lot of people feel really isolated when those bloopers occur, or those are the things [LAUGHTER]they don’t want to share.
Jessamyn: Yeah, exactly, for many reasons, teaching in higher education is absolutely a closed door culture, and it’s really hard to describe to people who are not college teachers, even people in K through 12, like the dynamic, where if another professor walked into your room when you were teaching, it would be shocking. You would stop. You would be stunned. What are you doing here? …would be absolutely the feeling. It’s a closed, locked, barricaded door around teaching in higher education. So yeah, the stakes are super, super high for when something goes wrong.
John: One of the issues that you’ve just mentioned is that people are working in their own little silos. And when things go wrong, they often don’t talk about it with other people, and as a result, everyone imagines that [LAUGHTER] everything’s going really well for everyone else, and then you have those sleepless nights. And faculty respond to that in different ways. Some people will blame themselves and will struggle with it. Other people might blame their students, and we see a lot of that as well….
Jessamyn: …or both… [LAUGHTER]
John: …or some combination thereof. Why are faculty so resistant to share their experiences with other colleagues?
Jessamyn: I could sum it up in two words: graduate school. A whole bunch of us, not every single person, but a whole bunch of us in higher education, we’ve been quite literally trained in how to wield our intellect like a weapon, and to always try to be the smartest person in the room. I’m exaggerating, and obviously our positionalities, identities, really shape our experience with graduate school. But I do think there’s a culture in academia that feeds perfectionism generally, that you never expose your vulnerable underbelly to the other smarty pants in the room. And I think teaching is especially fraught because of our limited and limiting ideas about what good teaching looks like.
Rebecca: How do we start to normalize this idea of discussing our snafus? Is there things that professional development like teaching centers should be doing? Are there things that administrators should be doing?
Jessamyn: Well, I have two thoughts on this. One is highly aspirational, [LAUGHTER] probably not possible. One is more immediately doable. So in my utopian vision of life as a college educator, everyone will gather every spring for a campus wide oops day, like the only thing we’re doing is discussing all the things that we personally did wrong and all the things that went wrong in our classrooms. And we could include some brainstorming about what to do better next time, but that wouldn’t be the main point. The main point would be, we’re gonna bring out into the light, all the monsters under the bed, the things that went wrong. And as we know from every story about monsters ever, like, once we bring them into the light, they’ll shrivel up and blow away. So probably not too realistic, but more practically speaking, we can advocate at every stage and in every way that when we’re formally evaluating teaching that we need better language and systems for recognizing and then documenting every instructor’s growth narrative of teaching advocacy. I’m really influenced here by the book Critical teaching behaviors: Defining, documenting, and discussing good teaching, by Lauren Barbeau and Claudia Happle, they offer a framework based on six identifiable instructor behaviors, and they argue there’s a vast amount of work that effective teachers do before, during, outside of class meetings in order to facilitate student learning. So leaders, that includes your promotion and tenure chairs, department chairs, administrators, they need to do everything they can to define effective teaching as a career-long process, and that has to include pedagogical learning and reflection, trying new things, assessing and adapting, and importantly, that in that growth narrative, because it’s about growth and learning, there will be mistakes and missteps, but that is evidence of growth, not evidence of ineffective teaching.
John: You mentioned the work by Lauren Barbeau and by Claudia Happle. We had an earlier podcast with them in the spring of 2025 and we’ll share a link to that in the show notes. To help build this sort of discussion, it’s really important that teaching centers have the trust of faculty. And one of the things I think we’ve both seen is that when we have faculty reading groups and people are talking about things that work well and things that don’t work well, it helps to develop that sort of trust. Would this book be a good focus for a faculty reading group?
Jessamyn: Yes, I think so, of course. We would want to ensure, this is one thing I do mention in the book about classrooms, but we want to ensure psychological safety for our participants, making sure that everyone feels able to share ideas, bounce ideas off, and maybe flop, like, maybe suggest something that doesn’t really make sense, and definitely share all the things that we have personally flubbed. So framing it as we’re here to build our growth mindset and think about ways to keep moving forward in our own growth narrative, keeping those things in mind and maybe even more importantly, right now, I think this would be a good book for our present moment when, in fact, there are so many very, very big, truly, almost incomprehensible things going very, very wrong for higher education. These are being brought mostly by outside political and legislative attacks on our curriculums, on our programs, other essential aspects of our day-to-day work. I mean, it’s a true shit storm, and I wrote this before, the past administrative… what would you call it?
Rebecca: …the list of executive orders? [LAUGHTER]
Jessamyn: Yes, exactly. So I don’t discuss it in detail, but one thing I do mention, and what is happening now, is the beep storm that is happening right now on the heels of another major beep storm was the pandemic years, and even more, like for most faculty, the incredibly fast spread of generative AI has taken another big bite out of our cognitive emotional and even our physical stores of energy we have for teaching. So, it’s a good time to think about how educational development can support pedagogical wellness, and how something like a book club is not only a chance for us to learn stuff from experts in research about teaching, but also, and maybe right now more importantly, a place to build connections and community by talking honestly with each other about teaching and that has to include all the things that can and do go wrong. And I would take it as a very big personal victory if, in discussing this book, we could draw on the power of humor and laughter, even rueful laughter, maybe defiant laughter. I don’t mean mocking. I don’t mean laughing at students, but maybe by not always having to take ourselves so super seriously, we can counteract some of the incredibly demoralizing and discouraging realities about teaching, the ongoing disparate teaching realities, the perfectionism. I know not everyone is willing or able to engage in kind of self-deprecating joking that is my go to but that’s one reason I shared a bunch of my worst mistakes in this book. So if you can’t share your own for whatever reason, this is my public permission for you to use mine.
John: We’ll be doing a book club on our campus this fall, so we’ll let you know how that goes.
Jessamyn: And anyone who is doing a book club on Snafu Edu, I’m very happy to zoom in to do a Q and A with your group.
Rebecca: Awesome. I couldn’t help but imagine, while you were describing your utopian oops day, like a lot of laughter and things like “bravely sharing their blunder award,” or something, [LAUGHTER] like where everyone votes for the best blunder. [LAUGHTER]
Jessamyn: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] The face plant award, yeah.
Rebecca: Yeah, yeah, yeah.. I wanted to just share that I imagine that as it being a very joyful event, [LAUGHTER] despite the hard conversations.
Jessamyn: Yeah, that would be fun. I’m there. Send me an invite.
Rebecca: All right, sounds good. [LAUGHTER] You suggest a general approach throughout this book, addressing challenges in our classrooms, and summarize it with the acronym, STIR,, S-T-I-R. Can you talk about what STIR stands for and how one might use it?
Jessamyn: Sure, with the caveat I get that there’s already too many acronyms, and this is a pretty cheesy one, but part of the reason I went to the acronym is because of when things do go wrong, it’s hard to think clearly, and sometimes a snappy acronym can help keep us on track, can help us bring back to the present moment. So this particular one, it’s a variation on other kinds of conflict resolution strategies such as SOAR, which is stop, observe, assess, react. For Snafu Edu. I’m suggesting, for my audience of other brainiacs and eggheads in higher education, is Stop, Think, Identify, and Repair, and it’s just a way of framing some of the preparation we can do for when the snafus hit the fan, a reminder that in situations that pose problems, when things are about to go wrong, when things might go wrong, when things are going wrong, we can usually exercise some agency in the classroom and interactions with students by taking a beat to use our big brains, then think about what all might be going on, to approach with curiosity based on what we know from our research and the scholarship for teaching and learning from our wisdom of experience, try to identify what’s going on, and then to the extent that it’s possible, taking steps to repair the snafu. And this is a good place to note that my book doesn’t address the very worst case scenario for any classroom, active shooter threats or other kind of physical danger. That’s 91,1 not STIR.
Rebecca: I really like that you chose repair for the R, because there’s a lot of other words you could have maybe chosen that was a really important choice.
Jessamyn: I think so. It evokes trying to patch something up to the best you can. One thing that I really wanted to avoid was some of the cliches around making mistakes, or the discourse about making mistakes that it’s always inevitably going to lead to a good outcome. With the right “can do” attitude and the right frame of mind, you can always turn it into something really positive. That’s not true. I don’t believe that, and I didn’t want to even accidentally reinforce that with the word
John: Your book is broken up into five parts that address challenges in teaching and learning associated with inequity, disconnection, distrust, failure, and fear. Could you give us a couple of examples of some of the problems associated with these issues and how you might perhaps go through that STIR approach?
Jessamyn: Sure. The most important thing I want to say first is the thing that Snafu is really adding to the conversation is that those five things create problem and obstacles for learners and for us as educators. Most books about teaching, including my first book, Geeky Pedagogy, they focus mainly on the learner’s experience and strategies for addressing and reducing obstacles to student success and then conversely, research on like inequities faced by instructors often doesn’t also fold in that students are navigating those inequities as well. So in Snafu Edu I want to make sure that when we talk about things going wrong in the college classroom, we are talking about everybody in the college classroom, including us, including the instructors, including the TAs, including everybody. So for instance, inequity, systemic intersectional inequity, it exists no matter how much certain politicians want to convince us that it doesn’t… it exists. It creates obstacles to student learning, and it creates obstacles to effective teaching, especially for any faculty member who doesn’t, quote, unquote, look like a professor. Disconnection and distrust are also aspects of higher education that researchers have been showing for a long time really interfere with success, with major upticks in the post-pandemic era for obstacles to students’ academic success. So, like when a student just doesn’t feel connected in any meaningful way to the subject or the institution, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to persist, and Felton and Lambert’s book, Relationship-Rich Education shows us pretty darn definitively. But so too do instructors need to experience some sense of connection to their work, to the students, in a professionally appropriate way, to their institution. Otherwise things snafu up our work. They get in the way of our success. And distrust, so talk about snafus in the classroom, trust is just the bedrock for what we do, but often not central in our minds when things go wrong. So take for example, here’s one, 100% of people listening to this podcast will have experienced students engaging in non- class related scrolling, emailing, texting, online shopping and so on. There are many and many complicated reasons that our devices are so distracting in the classroom. There’s a bunch of strategies we might use to cultivate attention, covered really well, most recently by James M Lang’s book, Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus, and What You Can Do About It. But even before all those strategies, we have to be aware that these interactions, even like you see it out of the corner of your eye, they can seriously erode our trust in students as a group. Another one that I think many listeners and readers will relate to is how even one, like literally even one, deliberately cruel, demeaning or even thoughtlessly worded comment on anonymous standardized end of student evaluations, how much that can damage our trust in students. And speaking of student behaviors, another one where it’s really important to think about it in terms of the snafu is fear, because student fear can manifest in behaviors that on the surface look like something else entirely, and not coincidentally, look like things that really can just drive us right up the wall, something that looks like complete disengagement, even hostility or inattention. It might be rooted in students’ really deep psychological physiological fear, completely unrelated to us, related to something else in their school experiences, related to something in their life circumstances. And I guess the last couple things I’ll say is that these snafus, one thing that really became clear as I was doing the research is that they’re both very common and systemic and almost universal, but then they’re also really shaped and defined in unique and individual ways. So, take failure. What does it mean to fail in college? What does it mean to fail in academia? I mean, we have some system wide metrics, like, literally an F for failure, but how that’s experienced by students, how they define it, is really shaped by their life experiences, their goals, their personality traits, what fields they’re interested in, and so on. And failure is tricky too, because by its very nature, learning has to include some failure. You have to do something not very well…and that might include, really just completely dropping the ball… you have to do something not very well before you can learn how to do it well, and that includes teaching. But again, we’re working in these bigger systems that can really interfere with our ability to engage in productive failure and mistakes.
Rebecca: Each part of your book uses a similar organizational structure where you kind of describe the problem, discuss possible repair strategies when things go wrong, and concludes with a discussion of proactive approaches and a go bag, [LAUGHTER] that reduce the likelihood or severity of the problems in that section. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose this particular organizational structure?
Jessamyn: Yeah, I so appreciate that question, because I really wrestled with how to structure the book in a way that supported my argument, we have to normalize mistakes, missteps and things going wrong in teaching and learning, and when I say normalize, part of that is recognizing that they take a real toll on us, that again, I didn’t want it to be like this cliched view of mistakes. I didn’t want it to read like I was saying, “Oh, well, we mess up sometimes, but it’s all a glorious process of learning, and we’re gonna hop on our Mr. Mess, the learning unicorn. We’re gonna fly up to the rainbow of perfect teaching and learning.” No. Things going wrong, it can really suck, and it’s not always resolved in a productive way. Sometimes things go wrong, period. There’s no silver lining, there’s no wisdom gained. It’s just bad and things go wrong. So the structure, how I thought about how to do this, the first section really is just an overview, but it lays out some of the most compelling evidence from the research about why things go wrong because of inequity, disconnection, distrust, failure, and fear. And I want to start there to really enforce why these snafus can be expected, and then building on that, the next chapter, again, is working to normalize snafus by focusing on what to do when they happen, and keeping in mind that, again, positionality and context always matters, and that the repair suggestions in the next section, they always have to be adapted to your teaching context, your personality, and what will work for you with where you’re at. But I didn’t want to just leave it there. I did want to make sure that readers were empowered as much as possible to exercise agency wherever and however they can. And increasing agency is my response to the snafus caused by fear. The opposite of fear isn’t exactly agency, it would be something like courage, like Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, but I think courage is just a little bit too judgy. It’s a little bit too much to say to people, things go really wrong, but you have to be courageous. I don’t think that’s sufficient, in the year of our Lord 2025 to say, “be more courageous.” I think, though we can say for students as well, in the face of fear, that we can find ways to exercise agency. Agency is limited. It’s limited by things outside our control often, but there are places where we can exercise it in teaching and learning, in our classrooms, in our actions, in our course design. So those last chapters in each of the sections gives an overview of some, it’s not all of them, it’s just a selection of a couple high impact practices for increasing equity, increasing connections, increasing trust, increasing success and increasing agency. And in all cases, it’s about how to increase those things for ourselves as well as our students.
John: Can you give us an example of something going wrong in the classroom, some possible repair strategies and how to ameliorate future related issues so that people come prepared for such problems?
Jessamyn: Sure, let’s talk about one super, super common snafu that on the surface may seem like a small issue, but once you’ve delved into it, it touches on some really big ways that things can go wrong and can create real obstacles for teaching and learning: names, our names, and more specifically, learning, correctly pronouncing, and using each other’s names in class and in interactions with students… and wait, before everyone who teaches huge lecture classes of hundreds skips ahead. This does apply to all of us, all of us working in higher education or really, actually, any human person in any professional or social situation, names matter. Names always matter, even if you personally, you as an individual cannot memorize every single student’s name in your 300-person, 400-person lecture. That doesn’t mean that names aren’t important. I mean, they’re not just like labels. They’re not just widget labels. They’re the first and foremost expression of our subjectivity, of our ability to act and be in the world. And so to be recognized by names is to be recognized as a person. The scholarship on teaching and learning very clearly shows that when an instructor learns and uses student names, even if, like in a huge class, they can’t learn every single name or use them every single time. It improves students’ rapport with, perceptions of, the professor, and it can improve learning and engagement. But I would argue, just as important is students learning and using each other’s names, and students learning, correctly pronouncing, and using… and this is maybe controversial… but using a professor’s last name and their title. Yep, I’m going on record here to say that when you’re working with them in the classroom, in a class, students should call you Professor such and such, or Doctor so and so, because and here’s where names intersect with some of those big potential snafus. Names, and for professors, titles are closely tied to inclusivity in the classroom. So inclusivity, meaning that every single person, including the professor, has the maximum opportunity to learn, to engage with the material and to improve their skills. So professional titles really matter, because professors from historically marginalized populations must navigate, must mitigate, students’ preconceptions and stereotypes about academic expertise and authority. So just in short, students are more likely to call women and to call all faculty of color by their first name or Mrs., like in my case, than to call us professor. And of course, students’ sense of belonging and willingness to participate, even attend class, is demonstrably improved when people there, including the professor, know their name. But let’s be honest, it’s really hard. Learning names is really hard in any setting, and I have to give a major shout out here to Michelle Miller’s book. It’s a short guide, A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Student Names. I mean, like chef’s kiss, it should be required reading for everyone in higher education. There’s a lot of ways and means for learning student names, helping students learn each other’s names, and here’s where Snafu Edu comes in. There’s also so many ways this can go wrong. We can get students’ names wrong. We pronounce them incorrectly, we stumble, we fumble, and sometimes that can be pretty disastrous. Sometimes that can be in a way that reinforces stereotypes, that undermine students’ sense of belonging, and that is the same with students using each other’s names and students using our names incorrectly or not knowing them. So all those things could go wrong. When this happens to me, I use the first two repair strategies I discuss in the book for when I mess up a name, students messes up my name, I use a script. That’s my first strategy, and I apologize, my second strategy. So when I say a script, I don’t mean like a memorized monologue you’re using word for word, like a robot in every situation. I don’t mean literally a script like actors use, but I do mean having at the ready a collection of short phrases, a couple sentences that we can do almost automatically in tense or difficult situations. We are human people. When we’re dealing with other human people, we have some biological, even social, cultural, learned responses to potential conflict, problems, defensiveness. We may default to fight, freeze, fawn, or flee. Fawn was new to me, just recently. I know fight, freeze, or flee. Fawning means people pleasing, trying to appease someone, bending over backwards to placate and eliminate any perceived threat. So script in this context, doesn’t mean memorize, but does mean practice, like you have stood in your office and practiced. This is something Chavella Pittman, in her work, has recommended to faculty as well, that you do need to practice what you’re going to say. Now maybe you are so socially skilled and extroverted that you never for one second feel the need to practice your words. And if that’s true, like, how nice for you, like, [LAUGHTER] I love that for you. Good for you. But for the rest of us, scripts can really help. So my two combined strategies, scripts and apology, when I call a student the wrong name or I don’t remember their name. “I’m sorry, [Use the correct name].” That’s from Michelle Miller, like you got to use it to learn it. “I’m sorry, [Correct name]. Names are important. We’ve all been working on remembering them. I apologize for my error.” That’s it, short, simple, no need to get into any like explanations or defensiveness, just “sorry about that.” And to be clear, apologizing is never fun for anyone, and again, positionality and context always matters. It won’t look the same for everyone every time, but when we mess up, and we will mess up, a short, quick apology is an effective repair strategy. Using a script can ease the pain of that. And I have another one for when students call me, it’s usually Mrs. Neuhaus. Sometimes they try Jessamyn, but that’s can be hard to say, so they might default to Mrs. Neuhaus. So I have a script, and it’s something like, “Thank you for that question or comment. Before we discuss it, I just want to remind you that when we’re working together in this learning community, I asked to use my professional academic title, Professor Neuhaus. I know it’s not easy to remember, using everyone’s names isn’t easy. I appreciate your effort to do this,” something like that. These are my repair strategies, because of the ways that those small moments can really create big, big snafus in equity, trust, and connection, for educators, for us and for our students. So the final part of your question was, then, how might we reduce this in the future? It’s not easy. Again, from Michelle Miller’s work, I know that the key thing is to make it a priority and put in the time and effort to learn names and also structure classes and class activities so students can learn and use each other’s name, and more broadly, learning and using names goes to two important strategies I outline for increasing equity. We want to plan for learner variability, and we also want to plan for learner biases. So we want to proactively structure activities, office hours, interactions, knowing that we must expect and hey, let’s be joyful about this. We celebrate diversity as an academic asset, and that includes every unique and individual name. So that’s great. Let’s plan for that. Plan for ways to do that. If it means I’m going to have a shorter class the last day of our first week, because I’m going to make names the priority and I need time to practice them, then that’s what I’ll do. And two, the second one is also important, planning for ways that learner expectations or assumptions can flare up around names. So instead of getting caught in, “Oh my God, who is Mrs. Neuhaus, I spent so long in graduate school to get my PhD, do not call me Mrs. Neuhaus,” [LAUGHTER] like and then snapping “It’s Doctor, not Mrs.” I mean, that’s true, but is that helpful? Is that a good way to build connection, trust, equity and to move on productively? And does it feel good for me to do that? No, no, better is to have that practiced response, that script in my mind so we can address it and move on.
Rebecca: …In a much more calm fashion. Each chapter ends with a section called “gear for your go bag,” which we mentioned a little bit earlier. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose the metaphor of a go bag for these sections?
Jessamyn: Sure? Yeah, two reasons. One, just on a practical note, and especially for books like this one, that’s kind of crammed full of actionable teaching advice and you’re generating a lot of ideas as you’re reading it, it’s really helpful to have that concise summary at the end of the chapter. But second, I just love the metaphor. It resonates with the quotes that I use throughout the book, from the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. I deliberately chose this book, and I wanted to use it because it’s this very tongue in cheek, but also factual guide for surviving ludicrously terrible situations: your parachute doesn’t open, you get stuck in quicksand, you have to land a plane even though you’re not a pilot. And when I use it in my book, it’s this rejoinder to sanctimonious teaching advice that downplays or even ignores the reality of things going wrong, like “No, things go wrong.” So having a go bag in that context, it means you’re packed and ready for when things go sideways. In popular culture and in prepper world, it means you’re packed, ready to go when the apocalypse hits. So in the book, it’s just my little bit of a snarky way of saying we can at least have a few things to grab when something goes wrong.
John: What would you say is the major message that you’d like your readers to take away from this book.
Jessamyn: Sure, I have to start with a shout out to Liz Norell. She’s the author of The Present Professor. She was an early reader of Snafu in manuscript form, and she helped me identify and articulate three major ideas that run through the whole book and that I would like readers to take away into their teaching practices: humans mess up, inequities exist, but the super teacher does not exist. And don’t get me started too much on the super teacher. I’ll take up all the rest of my time. But since we haven’t mentioned it yet, the super teacher, I want you to think about the last time you saw a college professor character on a TV show or film, and specifically, were they teaching? And if they were teaching, what they were doing, they were lecturing. They’re always lecturing, but they’re not just lecturing. Their lectures are on this inherently fascinating topic, usually like psychosexual violence [LAUGHTER] or like serial killers. And students were mesmerized. They show, they always show… They depict the students. Nobody’s scrolling, nobody’s sleeping. They’re nodding. They’re eagerly raising their hands to ask questions. And after his, it’s not always, but often it’s, his lecture, his highly entertaining lecture that he gave with no notes whatsoever, the students might even feel moved to applaud. I mean, I ask you applause. Okay, so such depictions, they’re more than just amusingly inaccurate representations of the college classroom. They express this really persistent and powerful, limited and limiting assumption and expectation about what good teaching and authentic learning looks like. So it’s not just bad for teaching. It’s bad for learning, because in this representation, students do nothing but sit there and get entertained and somehow their heads are magically filled with knowledge. So it undermines our own self efficacy. It can undermine our self image. It really contributes to stereotypes around professors, and they are just born that way. The super professor’s not like going to the workshop and reflecting on pedagogical practices, and they’re definitely not messing up and then making an adjustment trying to do better. So it would make me really, really happy if, because of reading my book, any educator who gets caught in snafu, the first thing they think of is, “yep, humans mess up,” and then going forward, figuring out what to do next, keeping in mind that inequities exist, they’re reality, shaping everybody’s teaching and learning contexts, and that nobody can live up to that really impossible ideal that doesn’t reflect how teaching and learning actually works in real life, to stop, think, identify, and repair to the extent that is possible.
Rebecca: That seems like a great note to wrap up on, but we always wrap up by asking, “What’s next?”
Jessamyn: I am really excited about my current book project, which is going to be a guide for college educators to designing, assigning, assessing and, most importantly, enjoying, unessay projects.
Rebecca: That sounds fun.
Jessamyn: It’s going to be fun.
Rebecca: I like the underscore on the enjoying.
JESSMYN: Yes, yes. It’s the biggest ace in the hole for talking about unessays is that people who put in the work to design them, because it’s not easy, and assess them, also not easy, report that they have fun assessing them. That’s like a mind blowing, reality shattering statement, instead of slogging through grading, counting every minute you could have fun doing it. Yeah, let’s talk about that.
John: Fun is good. [LAUGHTER] Well, thank you. It’s always great talking to you, and we’re looking forward to future conversations.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Jessamyn: Thanks for having me.
Rebecca: I always appreciate that you put a full range of human emotion in talking about teaching and learning and enjoy your storytelling. So I’m glad folks will have the opportunity to read Snafu Edu soon. Thank you so much.
[MUSIC]
John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
[MUSIC]