Category: first-generation

394. Pacific Oaks’ Approach to AI

Posted in diversity, edtech, educational technology, equity, faculty learning community, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, professional development, teaching
May 21, 2025

Generative AI tools are challenging traditional models of college instruction. In this episode, Camille Huggins, Yolanda Carlos, and Orlando Saiz join us to discuss how Pacific Oaks College is working to use these tools to more effectively support student learning. Camille, Yolanda, and Orlando were participants in an AI Institute offered at Pacific Oaks College this year.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Generative AI tools are challenging traditional models of college instruction. In this episode, we examine how one college is responding to more effectively support student learning.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are faculty and administrators at Pacific Oaks College. Since we have several guests participating today, we’ll have each of our guests introduce themselves, describe their role at the institution, and state what type of tea they are drinking.

Camille: My name is Camille Huggins. I am a core faculty at the Pacific Oaks College for the last five years, and I’m Caribbean, so I like that strong Lipton yellow label tea. It has a lot of caffeine to it, it’s a good little balance with the lemon. New Yorkers, we love a lemon, no milk, so that’s what I’m doing today.

Yolanda: Sounds good. Camille, my name is Yolanda Carlos. I’m core faculty at Pacific Oaks College. I’m over at the BA and MA Early Childhood Education degree program, and I love Earl Grey with a bit of milk.

Orlando: My name is Orlando Saiz. I’m an administrative faculty and Director of Research at Pacific Oaks College in the EdD Early Childhood Education program. I normally drink coffee, but today I’m having the loose-leaf spearmint tea.

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: Yeah, some yummy tea choices for sure. John, are you drinking any tea today?

John: I am drinking a ginger peach green tea today.

Rebecca: Nice, John. I’ve switched things up, John, I have chai today.

John: That’s been a while.

Rebecca: I know, I know.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the AI initiatives that you’ve been working on at Pacific Oaks, located in Pasadena, California, where it’s much warmer than it is here today. So first though, could you tell us a little bit about Pacific Oaks College and its institutional mission?

Yolanda: Sure, I’d be happy to. So yes, you’re right. The weather here in Pasadena, year round, is beautiful, and the Pasadena Children’s School began in Pasadena, California in 1945. It was started by six local families as a children’s school, which believed that each individual possessed an inner light worth nurturing. It later became a teacher training institution founded on Quaker values of community, equality, and peace, which would offer a progressive education that would help the world heal. Pacific Oaks College was established in 1958. The mission of the college is to train future professionals to be of service and positively impact their communities, to help, and not harm them. Presently, the college is focused on building competent professionals who are culturally aware, respectful of the communities they serve, open and willing advocates focused on justice, fairness, and prepared to advance or lead in their profession.

Rebecca: Our institution has a somewhat similar history in that it started off as a teacher prep institution as well. That’s kind of fun to hear a related story. Can you talk a little bit about the student population at Pacific Oaks?

Camille: So we have a majority is online. 80% of our school is online right now. So we have a combination of asynchronous, synchronous courses. We still have some on the ground students, because we transitioned from on the ground to online during the pandemic. So around 2022, 2023 it became that perhaps this works better, because our students were more interested in doing online courses than on the ground courses. Our typical student body… we are a Hispanic-serving institution…. are Latino middle-aged women in their 30s to 40s. They are working, they have children, they’re married. So sometimes English is not their first language. They have maybe went to school. If they went to our bachelor’s program, they may have had some remedial courses or whatever. But if they are in our master’s degree courses, which is a lot of our courses, they would have gone to college, but they’ve maybe had a gap between bachelor’s and master’s about eight to 10 years. So the academic acumen is the issue when they first get to school. So we have to spend a lot of time really trying to hone in on their learning abilities and basically help them get themselves to match what the rigor of the program is. But yeah, we love these kind of women. They are in the trenches. They are not into lofty ideas. They’re into really learning the skill sets that they are basically trying to gain because of our programming, which is marriage and family therapy and social work and education. It’s a very professions-based kind of school, so they spend a lot of time really getting skill sets, being practical. They’re very practical in understanding what they need to know, and we really help them with their skill sets.

John: In November of 2022, ChatGPT appeared right before finals at the end of the fall semester, and it resulted in some fairly significant effects on higher ed, how did faculty at your institution respond?

Yolanda: Some instructors embraced ChatGPT initially quite readily, and others even used AI apps for assignments to enhance them. Other faculty were hesitant and wanted more information. P.O. is a smaller higher ed institution, and with that being said, we have the ability to be nimble and to add changes to our assignments as needed and to keep up with best practices. P.O. is part of The Community Solution (the TCS) system. It’s a centralized infrastructure and culture that supports six higher ed education institutions. In the spring of 2023, TCS provided a conference space for our system faculty to showcase AI, living out the mission of embracing a culture of learning. So faculty across the institutions presented and all worked collaboratively in experiencing AI in a variety of modalities at our central location in Chicago.

Camille: So I think, how did we embrace it Is that, for the students, we kind of looked at it as a plagiarism kind of situation… so punitive, this is going to stop them from learning blah, blah, blah. And as we got into the AI Institute for the AACU we discovered that this can really help the students. We said our student body is first-generation women, mostly Spanish-speaking, different languages, and so forth. So AI can help them with writing. AI can help them getting their thoughts in order. A lot of times, these students ask, “How do you want this assignment to go? How do you want this assignment to look?” And I thought, AI can help them in that avenue as well. The more you saw a lot of these applications come in ChatGPT starts it off, but then you got Deep Seek, you got Claude. You have a lot of different platforms. You realize that this can really be used to help them educationally. So for us, as faculty, we maybe have been using it secretly. I started using it just to do emails, you know, “write this nicer, put my thoughts and write it nicer,” but we started to not look at it as a negative, but this can be the mechanism of the future. It’s like autocorrect. I can barely spell, but autocorrect makes me look as though I’m passing national spelling bees.

Orlando: I’m relatively new to the institution, so I wasn’t around in 2022, I was working at a different institution, but right away, I was invited to join the AI committee at our school, and I found it very interesting the tools that were available that I was completely unaware of, and just to see how there’s certain programs and GPTs where they can serve as a tutorial and be of service to students, faculty, it’s just amazing. I’m very much looking forward to what the future holds.

Rebecca: So you’ve kind of given us a little bit of a base for how folks were initially responding to AI. Can you talk a little bit about ways that faculty are now using AI to support the educational mission, whether that’s in curriculum or educational activities or other uses?

Yolanda: Recently, I’ve been focused on the basic logistics in application of AI, student use to complete assignments or to create assignments. And so, for example, there is in one class a poem they have to develop. And with that, I used an AI tool for them to download, a free use, to put in their poem, and this AI app creates a video with music, with words and with pictures, and it brings to life their poem. And the students were really excited about that. It really helped to bring that assignment to the next level and then at the institutional level, our Pacific Oaks college AI team has been working on developing the institutional policy for AI usage, for students, faculty, and our community, for example, we believe that it’s important for students to submit their assignments and documents in a format that can be screened for AI usage by the systems that are made available to faculties for screening Word documents. For example, we use Turnitin. We want students to be able to generate and create their own content and use AI as a support for developing ideas, not writing their papers for them. So as an institution, we’ve been engaged in critical discussions and in planning around the use of AI in the classroom, and then also distinguishing the human element, or the connection, versus automated AI machinery, tools, and apps. We encourage the using of AI for brainstorming, creating ideas. This should always be followed by student-created content, rather than the use of AI tools and prompting to create or develop assignments.

Camille: To add to that, I’m the chair of the Faculty Council for our college. On a macro level, we basically engaged in a lot of conversations. We’ve had a lot of staff meetings with the adjunct faculty as well as regular faculty, about AI and how to engage with it for ourselves, as well as for our students. Another thing we did was, as Yolanda said, we are part of a larger system of six universities, we invited the larger system to come in and do a two-day training on UDL (universal design for learning) and then AI. And we’ve been looking at making collaborative initiatives between the UDL and the AI systems to basically incorporate it in our classes as well. Another thing we’re doing is working on a policy, it’s a working policy, as Yolanda situated, but also we have not really introduced it to our students. So that’s our next part of our journey is basically how to appropriately engage students and basically give them a demonstration. I think students really benefit from a demonstration. They definitely, when in online schools, they really benefit from one one-on-one personal interaction via Zoom. They really like it. So that’s what we’ve been working on as well.

Orlando: Just to add to that, in advising doctoral research students, some of my students are using AI platforms to organize their sources. They can engage in mind mapping, and I think it’s a helpful tool for the literature search, even though I don’t think it’s a good idea for them to fully rely on that. I think a good mixture of human capacity versus AI platforms and tools to complement each other are important.

John: Let’s go back to the use of AI to support UDL. Could you talk a little bit more about how AI tools are being used to support a universal design for learning approach in the course?

Camille: So UDL has a lot of different facets to it, audio, visual. What I’ve really been looking at is the growth mindset piece, because what we’ve noticed with some of our students, I’ve been doing some one one-on-one. We’re gearing up to do focus groups with them. We got a small grant to basically implement UDL in the entire college. And so what I noticed with our particular students is that they don’t want to necessarily identify as having a learning disability. That’s just not their thing. But what they talked about, in a very roundabout way, was the lack of confidence, the lack of really being scared to look for assistance. So I was thinking that we need to implement a growth mindset kind of component into our teaching modes, as well as, and AI can help with that, because it can help give you courage to ask questions. You can ask AI to look at how we can integrate: “I’m having difficulty understanding this assignment, I’m having difficulty understanding this article. Can you break it down for me so that you can make more sense?” So integrating an AI component with the UDL will help enhance their learning abilities. So that’s what we’ve been kind of structuring. And I heard from the students that they really were having issues with just self confidence, which makes a lot of sense based on the fact that they haven’t been in school in years, and everything is just moving at lightning space as far as learning acumen. So that is one way.

John: One of the things you mentioned earlier was that students come in with fairly differentiated backgrounds in terms of their prior knowledge, and they have to get up to speed. Have they been using AI to help fill some of the gaps they may have had in their prior learning experiences.

Camille: I’ve noticed it in their assignments, yes, but what I’m learning is also they just put in the assignment, but they don’t put in the reading material. So the assignments come across very superficial and not necessarily depth of critical thinking or any kind of reflection of the reading. So the AI won’t even put in references in it, so the references won’t match what’s in the coursework. So getting them to not use it in the underhanded way… You’re using AI, I have no problem with you using it, but it has to be used to assist you, not do the work for you, and that has been the bridge that we’re trying to cross.

Rebecca: You mentioned the large percentage of your coursework being online, and I know that faculty, in a lot of our conversations around AI, have been really concerned about using AI in online environments, because it’s a little bit harder to distinguish the human from machine-generated. Can you talk a little bit more about ways that you’re helping students move in the direction of the assisting and not doing it for them, so where it’s not an academic integrity issue?

Yolanda: So, what I’ve been using is what’s called the AI sandwich. I’ve been working with students to help them understand how they can use AI like, for example, if they have a topic, but it’s really broad, to helping them brainstorm using AI to narrow down their topic or to develop ideas for topics, and to help them to create and understand how to develop a good, concise thesis statement for their topic. And then, with that being said, the next step is how to gather their data, so using AI to create questions for interviews, for surveys, and then methods for data collection for their action research project. But with that being said, then I go into the humanization of AI, and I shift the focus to our model for P.O. It’s the head, heart, and hands model. I talk to them about, when we’re completing assignments, it’s not just to complete the assignment, but it’s to gain that knowledge, not just to regurgitate it, but to have that passion, because then it’s in the heart. So it’s the knowledge in the head, the passion in the heart, then our practices, our hands, that comes forth in our practices, and that sets us apart from others, and that’s something that AI cannot do for us. That’s something that we as the human, that’s how we humanize the use of AI, but the human-to-human, I talk to them about how AI has helped you generate these questions, these surveys, but you’re going to be conducting these interviews, you’re going to be writing the anecdotal records. You’re going to be taking the raw notes and submitting those, perhaps maybe taking voice recordings or video, but then we can take AI to help organize those for them, so that then they can maybe create their outline, and then they can submit their papers. How I do it is they submit it in chunks, and then I review and we’re in revision state, and I provide feedback. The feedback I provide is using a tool called VoiceThread where I provide specific assignment feedback using what’s called VoiceThreads, where they can see me, they can hear me, and if they need to, they can also see the wording as well. So it touches upon all learning modalities.

John: I have used VoiceThread in the past, and I’ve really enjoyed it. I had to drop it because my classes were large, and just listening to all the audio responses took far too many hours.

Camille: I know Orlando, you did some AI stuff. You’ve been doing it in your doctoral program.

Orlando: Yes, just thinking about most of the students that I teach are at the doctoral level, and most of them are engaging in doctoral research. So if you consider that traditional approaches versus futuristic or current approaches, most of the material that students are engaging in at that level is meant to be challenging. They need to learn research and it’s important to learn statistics and different methodologies. So I’m super open to new tools that they can use, but it’s difficult to substitute AI tools with general educational tasks that are meant to help students advance and to gain a wealth of skills. But some of the newer tools that I’m becoming aware of, and that I’ve noticed could be helpful as a tutorial for statistics and for research methods, even research design. There’s one called Julius AI, where you could drop your data in there and it can spit out a result. If it doesn’t spit out the right prompt for you, you can re-prompt it until it gives you what you want. I’ve tried it with simple data that I’ve had, running a correlation. It gives you everything you need. So I mean, if students are struggling with conceptualization or just to have the right terminology, because it is important to verbalize your research in a way that’s accurate and specific. So I think the AI tools could truly help for that, as well as general organizational tools. NVivo is another research tool that students are using. I’ve used it in the past as well. It is fueled by machine learning now, so creating those hand-coded or manual themes that was done in the past is probably going to fall a little bit by the wayside, but I still think there’s some value for students to learn the traditional way and to mind the author’s recommendations from grounded theory and from phenomenology. I think there’s some real value in that, and they could really showcase the ideas that they have. My exposure to AI is relatively new, and it started when I began teaching here at Pacific Oaks and I joined the AI committee. My doctoral program is very new. This is an inaugural class, and previous development of the doctoral research manual included a passage for plagiarism, to guard against plagiarism. After reading some material, particularly AI for Teachers, by Jose Antonio Bowen. I noticed the finding in there that faculty generally do not do well recognizing AI passages versus AI itself. So I thought this is something that I need to step up, and it has to do with academic integrity. So I wrote a follow-up passage to that where students’ work will be detected for AI passages. It doesn’t say how many passages or the percentage, but I think it’s going to be important for students to understand that they can’t just copy and paste their whole doctoral dissertation and that be acceptable, and there has to be some systems in place to guard against that.

Rebecca: So you’ve mentioned using Turnitin and tools like that to detect AI. Can you talk a little bit about ways that you’re managing false accusations or false positives on AI use?

Camille: So I don’t really trust Turnitin. Let me just put it out there as a misnomer. I feel as though sometimes they see as plagiarism, and when I actually look at the paperwork, it’s like they use the same word the 10 million times and it’s been picked up. So I don’t know if I don’t trust Turnitin or I don’t know how to use it properly. We put it out there like that, and so I don’t really rely on it as much, especially for those who English is not their first language. What I’m looking for is execution of how they write. When I did my PhD, I wished there was a ChatGPT back then, I had to hire an editor who was from another country, and that scared me. I was like, I’m paying you, and I was born in America and speak English, and I’m paying you… she was like from Ukraine or Russia… to edit my paperwork. So because of that, I had to learn how to write. Something about that was not sitting well with me. So I had to learn how to write. And I felt as though ChatGPT and one of these things can help you to learn how to write. In Spanish, the adjective comes after the actual noun, whereas in English, it comes before. And so I thought that this would help them. If, in fact, they can learn how to write, I can overlook plagiarism. What I can’t overlook is them not using the readings and the learning resources that I provide for them. I grade on how they write, and that’s really good, but I also grade on use of learning resources, and I think that that was more important to me than the other thing. Another thing is a lot of them don’t know how to use it properly, so they don’t even see the attachment upload document to put in their articles. So that tells you that maybe sometimes they’re just cutting and pastes. And if you’ve never noticed in ChatGPT, they’ll say the same thing different ways, and it’s up to you to pick up on which way to say it. So me catching them there has been very helpful. Orlando’s correct. Sometimes you can’t tell, but then that’s good, because then you’re learning how it’s supposed to be written in the first place, and then ChatGPT also has a lot of spaces in between, so I’m teaching them not to cut and paste. I want to teach them how to use it in a sense that it can craft a paragraph for you, as opposed to you just cutting and pasting. So catching them in that area has been helpful to me. But again, I will say I don’t know much about Turnitin. I don’t trust your plagiarism readability. So I go in that direction.

Yolanda: I agree Camille. They also have a disclaimer in there, so it kind of is a little bit on the nebulous side. And typically, when I go in and I look, because I think that’s a humanization of anything that we’re going to be using, it still requires us to take that step, to go in, to look at, and to make sense of the meaning of what has been submitted. And then I agree with you. We’re looking for content. Do they really understand this content, and can they apply what they’ve learned? Are they applying this in a real case scenario. But when I’m looking at Turnitin, it flags references, and that tends to be the large chunk of it. When I can see that it’s flagged references. And I’m looking to see, are they in seventh APA edition? Yeah, they are. It’s flagging them because they have submitted this in the revision before this. And so those are things to keep in mind as well. Nothing’s perfect, but it’s learning how to use the tools that we do have available to us that’s important.

John: So you’ve all talked a little bit about how students are using AI, and Camille mentioned how she’s used it to help shape emails. Are many faculty using AI to help develop curriculum, to help develop learning activities, to create various scenarios or other ways in supporting their instruction.

Camille: It has really helped me, and I think other people are doing it too. I’m in the social work department. My other faculty have not caught on as much as I have, but it really helps me with case studies, because my classes are more applied. It helped me develop case studies that make sense. They have better characterizations, like they’ll sit there and say, identify mental health symptoms and then identify environmental stressors. And I was like, “Yeah, I never thought about creating it in that way.” So I think that has been very helpful. It has helped me create quizzes, exams in a lot of ways. So I’m in love. I’ve subscribed to ChatGPT as well as Claude. I’ve been trying out Deep Seek and you know, the platforms can go on and on and on. We were just told that there’s an AI for curriculum development that’s specific for lesson plans and so forth. So I’m going to look into that as well if there’s a free trial. So I’m into it big time, my colleagues, not quite yet, I don’t think. And I’m also a writer, so it helps me with contextualizing ideas and in figuring out what’s out there right now, and so I can look at different articles. I think Deep Seek is pretty good when it comes to accuracy and references, because I check it constantly against what’s in there and what’s outside. But I love it, and I think this AI Institute really opened my eyes to the vast applications that are out there that I think we all should know and not get overwhelmed by. It’s like Bitcoin. You don’t know what’s going on, but I’m really excited about it.

Orlando: Yeah, for myself, I tend to use Copilot. I think it’s helpful, since it’s kind of integrated into the browser that I use, and it’s helpful to summarize long passages, to bullet point them. But also, as a writer, I use it if I’m struggling to find a source. I’ll just drop a prompt in there, and it’ll help me to generate a few more sources that I wasn’t aware of. But at first I was a little resistant. I was just unaware of how it worked and how it operates. But I’m starting to learn more and more, and I do still have a concern about privacy, so I won’t drop students’ whole papers in there, just because it’s not my work. It’s something that I’m not in charge of, and is not my property. So I’d rather just kind of use it in a broader sense, just to kind of quicken my pace in the work that I do.

Camille: I just want to put it that a student told me about ChatGPT. That’s how I first learned about this whole thing in the first place. And I always say I talk to young people because they know and keeping up with them. I’m 53 and I officially have no idea what’s hot anymore, what’s happening. I’ll have to admit it, but this student was like, “Why aren’t you using ChatGPT?” and I’m like, “What are you talking about?” And when it came I was like, “Whoa, this is just next place to go.” So I’m open to it, because the young people know about it, and I’m glad that they have it, because it makes life easier. But you have to know how to prompt. I think that was the biggest thing. Learning how to prompt it and yield it to what you need is what been the biggest challenge.

Yolanda: For me, I have mainly used the app. So initially I discussed how I used one for a poem, and it was Lumen5. It’s an animated avatar video program that they download for free, and they’re able to create this beautiful video with the poem that they developed and they created. What’s really cool about it is that they get excited about an assignment that before was just something that they just went through and they just jumped through the hoops. Well, now with that Lumen5, it’s just kind of has brought things to the next level, and I also use ITSE standards for educators. It’s how to use AI and AI tools for educational purposes. So that’s something that I do and use, and I’m stretching and finding new apps at different times, and then having students go in. I use it as kind of like a pilot program. I’ll pull it in, and I’ll say, “Well, this time, we’re going to use this.” And I’ll say, “it’s not mandatory. Those that you want to use it can use it. Those that don’t want to use it can use the regular standard assignment.” And it’s amazing to see that the majority of them choose to use the AI tool.

Camille: It also creates flyers, if you do that. And it has helped me with ethics applications. So, yeah, it’s a part of my life. It’s on all my laptops [LAUGHTER] and my computers. It’s kind of embarrassing now, but people say, “Oh, you’re leaning on it too much. And if you lean on it too much, it becomes they take over your ability.” But I’m directing this. I’m still involved. I’m the creative director of what I will use and what I won’t use, and I’m still a part of the equation. They haven’t taken me over, have they?. This is the kind of philosophical questions you ask yourself.

Yolanda: Amen, that’s the humanization of AI.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that I’ve heard you all talk about today is that the AI Institute gave you some concentrated time to practice and explore and learn, and kind of set that time aside so that you had the time to do that. I think often it’s one of those add-ons, like in my free time that none of us have, that we might explore these things. So it seems like that dedicated time was a really valuable and important investment for each of you to really integrate it into your work.

Camille: Yeah, we had a staff meeting because, you know, again, our Senior Vice-President of Academic Affairs, he’s really interested in it to kind of go, how can it be used for our professional use? And I remember my colleague and I, we created a case note: “How to Write a Case Note through AI.” And I think that just was, like, blown away. The other faculty were like, “Wow.” If you know anything about social work, you could write it as a SOAP note, which is a subjective objective assessment plan. You can use it as a DAP note, which is a diagnostic assessment plan. So we used it as a demonstration about all the different ways you can write case notes. Now there are AI systems to help with case notes in social work agencies which Is like: you put the paperwork in, put the information in, and they will create yourself an intervention plan. So I think that’s the good thing about Pacific Oaks College, because we’re such a profession-based kind of college, you’re teaching Marriage and Family Therapy. It’s one of the biggest marriage and family therapy schools on the West Coast. And then social work we just got basically a couple of years ago, using AI to help with you as a professional, I think has been great. So doing it with the teachers was the first thing, faculty, and now we’re going to try to see if we can do it with the students.

John: So you all participated in the institute. What proportion of the faculty participated in the institute? And do you still have some faculty who are resistant to trying AI?

Camille: For the Institute, it was seven of us. Three of us showed up today, but the seven of us. One, the Dea,n has moved on to another position, but everyone else has maintained. has stayed. More and more people are interested because of the fact that we’ve been doing staff meetings. And I was very surprised, because when I set up the TCS, which is the system-wide AI and UDL classes, it was like three hours of their time Monday and Tuesday, and everyone showed up. Everyone showed up. Everyone’s interested. And every time we do it, they’re like, “Wow.” Every time you see in the chat, “This is mind blowing.” So I think they’re interested. But we haven’t done anything formal to basically quantify how interested they’ve been and how involved they’ve been, but we’ve shown to them, AI is here to stay, it is valuable, and it can be used by anyone.

Yolanda: I believe we have developed a survey tool that we’re going to be sending out to faculty. So that’s something that we’re going to be looking at, gathering the data of their familiarity with the use of AI. And then I think we’re going to do a pre- and then a post-, and then we’ll probably then follow up on that, because that will denote the need.

Orlando: I think, as well, at other larger institutions, that have decided on a specific platform to use, as far as AI, and how to integrate that into the school’s existing tools. We’re still in the process of deciding about that. I know some of the schools, they use a paid version of ChatGPT or CoPilot. We’re still in the phase of selecting the best platform, but I know there’s some good options out there, and I think it really will add to and cause us to progress in our programming.

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

Yolanda: So preparing for the unknown. What I would say, first is we need to focus on relationships, the ability to connect with others, so that they can collaborate and work in teams together, because this is the 21st century workforce need. Second is helping our students with resiliency, I also like to call it flexibility, because the one thing that is constant in life is change. That’s the one thing that we can depend on, is change. And resiliency is the ability to push through obstacles and to have the confidence to act on the new knowledge that they have to create the change they want to see in the world. And then lastly, this is a P.O. core value is reflection. All of our assignments generally have a reflection piece that’s weaved in there for them to reflect upon. So I always tell them it’s important to stay humble enough to reflect upon changes that need to be made, and then the courage to act on the next steps that need to take place.

Camille: What’s next? Institutionally speaking, what I like is the fact, though we are a part of a system which is TCS and the six universities, the wisdom of the President was that he didn’t want a uniform AI platform for each school. He thought that we have a law school, we have a medical school, they’re going to need different kind of AI platforms than us. So we have been given the authority to autonomously pick our own AI platform that will work best for our particular students. We are keeping our students heavily in mind. We want to make sure that AI is used ethically and with integrity, but while being helpful to them. So we’re rolling out a policy that’s going to help them in that sort of way. We are also redoing our plagiarism handbook and basically incorporating AI and making sure that that kind of meets and it’s more seamless. We are definitely trying to pick a platform that kind of works for education, marriage and family, and social work, three different distinct professions, but yet very similar in a lot of ways. We’re also working on an AI manual, to some degree, to basically figure out how all the different components that come with AI, rethinking it and reshaping it. We have not done a review of our faculty manual in about 10 years, so that’s also being incorporated. We’re in the midst of change at Pacific Oaks, so AI came perfectly so they can be instituted in our paperwork and our regulations.

Orlando: As an institution, I think we’ll continue to serve as possibly thought leaders for the topic of AI. A lot of us are integrating it into our work, and I can see that continuing in the future. I think we all have a great idea about responsible use of AI, and I think that will definitely continue. Personally, I’m working on writing another book chapter. Most of my materials have been on doctoral researchers. So this new chapter is about doctoral research agency, where it’s based on a lot of material I’ve been looking into. Part of that should be focused on helping students to adapt and prepare for the future. As Yolanda noted, I think the skills of adaptation and integration are important, and AI could definitely help with that process. And yes, overall, just using AI to help prepare students for the future, whether it’s in the job market or for personal enhancement. I think that’s all important, and we could definitely motivate students in that way and help them to navigate that process.

Rebecca: Well, thanks for joining us. It’s nice to have a little case study of how a particular institution is working through AI.

John: And this is an issue that all campuses are facing. So it’s great to hear how you’ve been addressing it. Thank you.

Yolanda: Thank you for having us.

Orlando: Thank you.

Camille: Thank you so much. I hope that we were informative. We’re trying to move to cutting edge while keeping our tradition and our principles.

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

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

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389. Inclusive Math Instruction

Posted in access, classroom community, diversity, engagement, equity, first-generation, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, learning, math ed, pedagogy, race, reflective practice, STEM education, teaching, Uncategorized
April 16, 2025

Undergraduate math courses, as traditionally taught, often serve as barriers to entry into many STEM disciplines. In this episode, Aris Winger joins us to discuss strategies that can increase student success and reduce equity gaps in student outcomes in these classes.

Aris is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Gwinnett College. His current areas of interest include equity in mathematics education, culturally responsive teaching, and social justice mathematics. He is a co-author of the book series Advocating for Students of Color in Mathematics and is the Executive Director of the National Association of Mathematicians.

Transcript

John: Undergraduate math courses, as traditionally taught, often serve as barriers to entry into many STEM disciplines. In this episode, we explore strategies that can increase student success and reduce equity gaps in student outcomes in these classes.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Aris Winger. Aris is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Gwinnett College. His current areas of interest include equity in mathematics education, culturally responsive teaching, and social justice mathematics. He is a co-author of the book series Advocating for Students of Color in Mathematics and is the Executive Director of the National Association of Mathematicians. Welcome Aris.

Aris: Thank you for having me.

John: It’s great to see you again. You were here not too long ago to do some workshops on our campus. Today’s teas are:… Aris, are you drinking any tea?

Aris: Oh, I am not drinking tea. I’m drinking water. Yeah, my family is a big tea drinking family, but I’m just a water drinker.

Rebecca: That’s okay, water is the foundation of tea.

Aris: Yeah, that’s right. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I’m drinking Blue Sapphire today, John.

John: Back to an old favorite.

Rebecca: It is, yeah.

John: And I am drinking Lady Grey.

Rebecca: Oh, nice, I had that not too long ago.

Aris: Excellent.

Rebecca: So in most colleges and universities, passing rates in math classes are lower than most other disciplines, and we’ve invited you here today to discuss strategies that would allow more students to be successful in the study of math. First, though, can you tell us a little bit about your own educational journey?

Aris: So yes, I was valued in math from my earliest mathematical memory, and so my earliest mathematical memory was with my mother, who was showing me the future. I remember going up to her and, like, “Mom, look, two plus three is five.” She was like, “soon you’ll notice that two and she put an x 3 is six.” I was like, “What’s that?” She’s like, “You’ll see.” And then from there, like, early on, I was doing two-digit multiplications faster than other people. And then the teachers around me were like, “Oh, you’re good, you’re fast, you can do this.” And so I say, “Oh, I guess I can.” And so I started to develop sort of a math identity. That is to say that it became part of me to be, quote, good at math. And I kept that for a long time. And when life got rough for me, when I was younger, I could always go to math and be safe at math, because I felt an identity. I felt good there, I felt valuable in mathematics. And so it just became a deep part of my identity. So that meant that I was going to major in math. That meant that I was going to be a mathematics professor the whole nine. So I continue to go back and look at that story to see my through line. And I’ve had to change the story, by the way. It used to be, in this journey that I’ve had, I’ve had to change the story also, because the story used to be, “Oh, I’m just smarter than other people,” when, in fact, the story really was that I’ve been trained. And really making this understanding that not that drinking the Kool Aid, that somehow I’m ordained to have a mathematical brain, I’ve been trained, and I deserve to say that I was trained, because I put in a lot of work. And so if a surgeon can say they were trained, a mathematician can say that they were trained also, and so for 10 years, from 1995 to 2005 I got a bachelor’s, master’s and PhD in mathematics. That 10 years was training.

John: A very large share of students that we see in college say “I’ve never been good at math”. Why do so many students come in struggling with math or believing that they’re not capable of being successful in math?

Aris: Yeah, well, it’s because they’ve had mathematical experiences that weren’t optimal for them. And so there’s a narrative that I want to interrogate, and I’m thankful for this opportunity to speak out, an interrogation of a narrative that we have to call into question. And so it is this notion that somehow math has done something to us and math has done nothing to us. So when someone says that they hate math, they’re not talking about the body of knowledge that’s the greatest body of knowledge in history of the human experience. They’re not talking about that. They’re talking about a human relational experience they’ve had in the culture of mathematics that humans have built about how we do math, particularly in the western context. And so whenever someone today says, “Oh, I hate math,” then I just say, lots of my colleagues say, “Oh, I’m sorry that happened to you.” I just say, “Who was it? What grade? Tell me what happened.” And then often they will say, “Oh, it’s this person, here’s what they said to me,” or “here’s why I didn’t like this class.” Lots of times they also say it was when the letter showed up. And so for me, what helps me is that I try to return to the innocence of the person that is talking to me. So when someone says that, I’m thinking about a kid sitting in the chair and then all of a sudden, they’ve been doing percentages, they’ve been doing proportions, and then all of a sudden someone writes an X up on the board and says, I want to know what X is. And for some reason, it blows this person away, like I have no idea what’s going on. And that person starts to, maybe for the first time, feel unsure, feel like they don’t belong. Now, there are all these feelings that are showing up that never got attended to. And we know in this discipline, the way that it is taught, that that cascades, because then this builds on the next thing, which builds on the next thing, and then all of a sudden you find yourself, “Whoa, I gotta get out of this thing.” Now, the tragedy that we have in our society is that we have lots and lots of our young people who are getting out of the discipline of mathematics, and it’s the most important, [LAUGHTER] right? And so that’s the tragedy, that’s the crisis, that we have so many people leaving our discipline. And so I want to be clear, that doesn’t mean that everyone needs to be a math major. That means that the world that I dream of is one in which we’re all connected and thriving quantitatively. What does that mean? That means that we are allowing ourselves, or we have the permission, to ask quantitative questions like, “Why does that cost that much?” and “is that the right percentage rate for my mortgage?” and “why don’t I want that payday loan?” Right now we have so many silent people quantitatively, because the predominant space in which we think quantitatively is in school, and so in school, school mathematics, systematically, is about some other narratives that we continue to uphold, like speed and correctness, and it doesn’t allow for the imagination to grow. So the answer to your question is that these experiences, when we see the people today in our colleges, they are, in terms of math, they are an extension of a past experience that is over a decade long. And so I want to return all of our kids back to that, in a sense, to “Wait, you know, you’ve had a math experience that has been difficult.” And for me, one of my goals is to create a new narrative for those people who come into my class, and not just for them. And so if I can get a young person or old person, whoever’s in my class, to think differently about math, then maybe they get their cousin to think differently about math and their little sister. And because, again, you never know who’s watching and who’s going to see how you interact and how that impacts them.

Rebecca: You’ve talked about our individual experiences with math and how much they vary, and they vary across elementary and secondary school districts as well. What can college math instructors do to help address these inequities in prior knowledge?

Aris: The first thing I would think of is that each college instructor needs to look at each of their people as an individual. And so for me, for so long, I would go to my pre-calculus class or college algebra and say, “Okay, I’m teaching that group,” and that was 11 years ago. And today I go in and I’m saying, “Oh, I’ve got Sammy, I’ve got Mark, I’ve got Jamal, I’ve got Lisa, I’ve got Tiana, right? I’ve got this group of people, and I’m teaching this subject today. Given who I have in my class, what should I be doing today? And how should I do it today?” And so there is a returning, or perhaps introducing, for the first time, a humanity of the people who are in my class. And so that’s the first thing. Just acknowledge that you’re teaching a group of human individuals Now, from there, there’s an acknowledgement that you yourself come from a culture, come from an experience, and that that’s going to impact the way that you teach. And so then, now, at this point, how is it that we can develop a good relationship between yourself and the people who you’re going to be engaging with for the next 14, 15, 16, weeks in this discipline, and then thinking about also this balance between your relationship with those people and the content, and which one comes first. And so for so long, it’s like, “Oh, I gotta get through this. I gotta get through this. I gotta get through this topic, this topic, this topic, this topic.” And the thing that keeps me up at night is that, in our discipline, there’s a crucial question that’s lacking in our discipline still, and it is the question I think we have to ask ourselves, is, “How do my students feel?” Somehow, the question of how my students feel when I give back assignment and it’s marked up with red, or if Pearson MyMathLab says that, “No, that’s incorrect,” and they’ve been working on it, or if they’re in ALEKS and they’ve been working on a topic for 35 minutes, and ALEKS says, “You know what, I think you should move on.” How that makes them feel? Or maybe a policy that I have of no late homework, even though they have two jobs, all of that. How is it that what I do in a space where I have all the control, how does it make my students feel? And then to rectify that with how I want them to feel learning the greatest discipline in the history. Now we know how I want them to feel. I want them to feel curious. I want them to feel empowered. I hold knowledge that I’m trying to convey and explore, for them to be super powerful, super engaged and literate quantitatively. And so I want all these positive emotions, and yet all these negative emotions are happening. And so part of my job as a professional, I see, is to try and ease that tension, to have them try and learn it, but also for them to feel joy, to feel curiosity, to feel great about themselves, right? And so I was at the joint math meetings, and I was giving a talk, and at the end, I was talking about feedback forms, that you’ve got to get feedback from your students in order to understand what’s going on with them, because you don’t understand what’s going down, that was the bold claim I was making as a teacher. A person in the audience at the end said “I wanted to push back.” Now I love pushback, because lots of great things come out of pushback, just like I want to push back. And I was like, “Okay, great.” And then he says, well, sometimes you shouldn’t listen to their feedback, because I had a student, and we were in class, it was a class of five, and we went through the whole semester, and I could tell they hated the entire experience, but then they came up to me a semester after this semester, came up to me and said, “I hated every moment of your class, but I learned all the material.” And then he said, “that’s the reason why we should ignore our students’ feedback.” And then I responded to him. But then afterwards, after the talk was over, I went out, and he pulled me aside. It’s like, “See I did my job.” And I said, “But wait, so this person got all the content from you, but this person hated every moment in this class, and you think you did your job,” and to anybody who’s listening, that if students got all the content but hated every moment of it, then we haven’t done our job. And that, I want to imagine us doing mathematics and them getting content in connection to the greatest discipline and being who they are, loving every moment. And that’s the dream, and that’s hard, because when you get back a C minus, how can we have someone have joy and get a C minus? And these are hard questions. I don’t claim to have the answers to these, but again, this is tension, but we have to continue to dream, because we have in our hands, we have in our expertise, this great discipline that we have to continue to pass on to people, but pass on to people in joyous ways.

John: Given the diversity in what students come into our class knowing, though, it’s hard to come up with a method of instruction that provides sufficient support for all students while still helping them learn more. How can you build that…

Aris: No, no, what you just said is false. Now, it might be true that we have not been able to do it yet. So what you just said, I respectfully disagree. I think that what you said is true if we continue to do what we’ve been doing, there’s no doubt about that. And so that’s what I mean about dreaming. And so I’ve come on to this podcast to dream with you. And so when you dream, you can’t say stuff like that, because then there’s no openness to be like, “Okay, wait, how can we do something else?” I agree with you that if we keep doing what we’re doing, then… and so let’s unpack that. That means that I go in front of somebody, I go in front of a class, and this happens to all of us. It’s a great problem. You go in front of the class and mathematics, the way it is built now, says that, “Oh, you must have prerequisite knowledge.” And so that means that we think of math in school as a body of knowledge, more than a natural human activity. And this tension, we have to make sure we elucidate and make clear that we can think of math as a body of knowledge, or we can think of it as a place where people get to play. Now, in one of those with the natural human activity, everybody just needs to come, explore, think about mathematic questions. This is the math circles space where you just play. You make it an introductory question, and it’s set up so that there are multiple entry points, and you just go after it, and then you have someone who’s facilitating, who’s valuing every single contribution. Notice I didn’t say answer, every single contribution. Or you can think of our discipline as this compendium of knowledge, where, over the last, however, many centuries since the dawn of humanity, we’ve been collecting all of these mathematical facts into one big thing that, again, is the biggest dossier of human knowledge that humans have. But if you think about it that way, exclusively, then when you come into pre-calculus, then when I look at you, then I’m thinking, “Do you know enough college algebra?” And if I do that, then I’m being exclusionary from the jump. The first day of class, we’re being exclusionary subconsciously, to all of our students, to some of them, right?

John: You interrupted me in the middle of the question. The next part I was going to ask, I think, would get to the points that you’re making, that we want all of our students to be successful in developing their knowledge, but given their differences in backgrounds, what are some strategies we can use, perhaps to leverage peers in class, or in other ways, to help provide that sort of support for all of our students, no matter where their starting point is?

Aris: I think that’s a great question, and it’s true that given if–then statement, if the if I call in the question, I will not hear the then. So yeah, that’s why I interrupted you. So what we have to do is, again, we have to change the narrative of what a teacher thinks. And so now, and I’m about to get into trouble, stepping all the way back, the challenge with our students in mathematics is really a challenge with our professors. And so this means that there are lots of us who are superbly comfortable, who have lifetime jobs with tenure, who have been successful in quotes. What does that mean? That the way they think about success has been, “Oh, I’ve had five to 10 students come back and say, ‘That was a great experience. I have students who are going to graduate school. I have students who are doing research.’” And so the revelation for me was, wait, I’ve had hundreds of students, and I’ve gotten dozens of feedback, [LAUGHTER] and I’m using the dozens of people… like you only hear from the people who are doing great, because the people who don’t like you aren’t going to tell you to your face, right? And so I’ve had biased feedback and like, “Well, wait, what happened to this person, this person, this person, the person I don’t even remember, was I really serving them?” And I actually don’t know the answer to that. And so there’s something about each of us as professors completely being rigorous about how we teach and critical of the way we teach, so that we continue to use new methods. And so this is happening in our discipline, where lots and lots of people are now doing active learning, lots and lots of people are doing less lecture. And so this is not a critique on lecture. It might be a critique on lecture with five people, or it might be a critique on lecture with 300 people. But again, like if you’re lecturing to 300 people for however long, how do our students feel? Later today, I’m doing some stuff with Math for America, and last year, when I did some stuff with them, I had a person and I’m gonna ask whether this is similar for them tonight, who has 35 students in 45 minutes, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And that person has said, “Well, I can’t do anything but lecture, I’ve got to get the content out.” And this is in the context, of course, in K through 12, where you might have your state forcing you to make sure you do well in the course tests. And so they’re under so much pressure. But again, as we imagine, I’ve seen people do active learning with 35 people in 45 minutes, and so that’s something that you just have to try. So the first thing I want to say is that, what have you been doing? Have you gotten the feedback that it’s working? What are the grades look like in this system and continue to try new things. And so you’re not going to do stuff overnight. The thing that I don’t want to see is that you’re doing the same thing you’ve been doing the last 25 years. That we can’t have. And so I am making a call of action to our professoriate to try something new, be bold, and what better time to do it is when you can’t be fired. We have a lot of anti-tenured, tenured people, in the sense that a big part of the point of getting tenure is to then explore, say what you feel, to not be put in a box. And then that’s sometimes when we become the most conservative. I do want to shout out, though, our lecturers and vital faculty, the visiting, the instructors, the tenure track, the assistant professors, and so forth, that are also thinking about these things, who don’t have the job security, who may not have the ability to be creative in the classroom also, because then they might be judged for it, or say, you know, “You can’t do it that way and don’t have that job security, also.”

Rebecca: As someone outside of mathematics, it seems to me like there’s a role for faculty in other disciplines to play here as well, because there’s a lot of fear mongering around math, I think, from other disciplines and things, maybe from their own mathematical experiences. But I know, as a designer, I’m constantly helping students try to find some relevance to the math so they’re not so scared of it, because I think it’s really important for their work in just about every discipline.

Aris: Yeah, I think there’s a big disconnect between mathematics and all the other disciplines. And again, to your point, I think it’s because everyone has their own walk with mathematics, and oftentimes it’s not a positive. So that means sometimes we get advisors outside of math who are saying, “Oh no, no, don’t take that. You don’t need that extra math class.” Or we get people who are just like, “Well, let’s just get you through math as quickly as possible,” or whatever. For me, that just means we need to be having more conversations like, “What does it look like?” I’m dreaming again. What does it look like for a designer to sit down with a math professor, or the two departments to sit and talk together and say, “Okay, well, what do you want mathematically for our students? What do you want design-wise, for our students? How do these things intersect?” And so we’ve been in a silo, mathematicians for a while. People just leave us alone. And now we see what’s happening. Math departments are closing. People are losing majors because now we thought that we could just do our own thing, serve, have our majors, but now people are really starting to ask the question, “Well, wait, the way that you’re teaching. It doesn’t feel like it’s so relevant.” For too long, we’ve asked, “Well, how am I supposed to use the quadratic equation in real life?” And actually, I don’t think we properly responded to that, because I think the proper response is that, “Oh, solving the quadratic equation is useful in cognitive agility in this way, this way, this way. And in addition to that, you’re right, [LAUGHTER] right?” Yeah, that like “Doing this exercise is helpful in these ways, and you probably won’t see it in the future.” And so that’s why we made quantitative reasoning, that’s why we have these other courses. But that took us a very long time to do that, to actually respond to people, like my school didn’t even have a quantitative reasoning class until finally, we looked at all the DFW rates and it was just like, “Well, we have to do something else.” Now, what happened there was this movement from college algebra to college algebra and quantitative reasoning didn’t have to happen, but it was a “Wait, we’re not moving on college algebra. At some point we think college algebra has to be this. And therefore, if you want these people to succeed, then we have to create this whole other space for them.” Again, as I dream, I would imagine that mathematicians as teachers would say, “Well, wait, maybe we could teach it differently,” but we didn’t do that. But I think lots of times, mathematicians and math faculty are movable objects like “No, it has to be taught this way.” And then very few people outside the discipline can come up to it and say, “Well, no, can’t you change?” And them saying, “You can’t change, because it has to be like this. We’re the experts.” But when I also think about other disciplines, I get jealous. Yeah. I mean, because, like, other disciplines get to talk about the great ideas and the systems that I’m in that I see we don’t get to talk about the great ideas. The notion of infinity is one of the great ideas that mathematics brings to the world. And so when I think about Calculus II and sequences and series, and people are going to start to groan when they listen to this, that we fail to see that we’re talking about how infinity operates, one of the many ways that infinity operates, and it’s an absolutely brilliant idea that very few people talk about because we’re too busy talking about ratio tests, and then you just get bogged down in what tests are we using, or does this have a limit? And you just forget that the notion of adding up an infinite list and getting a finite number is like so unbelievably profound. But political science gets to talk about justice, U.S. history gets to talk about the Constitution, and philosophy gets to talk about God, and over here, we have just as deep things, but we’re so tied up in procedures and making sure that you have the right minus sign. Do you see the difference that I’m bringing up? That in literature, people get to read Toni Morrison, and I’m not saying that I’m jealous that they have better things. I’m saying we have just as good things. But why is it that we are bogged down in this minutia, but they’re not critiquing Toni Morrison’s grammar. They’re just reading Toni Morrison and becoming better humans. Where is the becoming better humans in Calc I, where’s the becoming better humans in algebra? And that’s the open space that I dream of in our classes.

John: I’m hoping going forward, that we will still see students studying the Constitution in history classes. [LAUGHTER]

Aris: That’s right.

John: That may be changing in the current environment. [LAUGHTER]

Aris: I shouldn;t be laughing.. I don’t want to laugh, but I also don’t want to cry. That’s right. [LAUGHTER]

John: Sometimes we have to.

Aris: That’s right.

John: But as you’ve noted, students often come in with this fixed mindset, and they often have not had that much success in their experiences before they get to us. Should there be, perhaps, more effort in society to transform K-12 math instruction so that we don’t lose so many people from a discipline that’s so important?

Aris: I agree with that, and I think we also have to be careful. So I have no time for figure pointing, because what I’ve seen when I do professional developments all the way K through 50, whatever it is, right? As I just go, yeah, that I always see the pointing back. And so when you go to the ninth grade, it’s like, well, eighth grade, and then eighth grade it’s like, well, it’s Elementary, and then Elementary, it’s like, well, it’s the parents, and then it’s like, it’s the reverse induction, right? You just go back, well, then maybe we shouldn’t have kids at all, right? …if you want to just keep doing that. And so I think we’re all in this. And so there are two things, you come to a young person, you come to a student who’s had a bad math experience, and they’re a sophomore, and it’s the first day of class, and so you know they’ve had a bad math experience, and so you can’t send them back into K-12. They can’t go back. And so we can say, “Oh, this might be… and I have said this earlier, that this is a response of a bad math experience they had earlier.” And yes, we need to fix that. But this person’s in front of me today, and so I don’t want us to be confused that, “Oh, that this person is a lost cause.” The responsibilities on me now to create a better mathematical experience for this person and to help them as much as reasonable, and we can need to, as we were saying earlier, have conversations with K through 12. So what are real, fundamental conversations between math faculty and K through 12 faculty. And so what’s nice particularly about Oswego is that you all have the opportunity to make real connections to the K through 12 places, to schools that may feed into Oswego, and sit down with the faculty and say, “Oh, what’s happening?” I’ve seen this happen out west at Sonoma State, where they have relationships with K through 12 schools, and they’re having those types of conversations. Now, those conversations aren’t easy, because there’s status that you have to disrupt about in the space and that you just have to deal with, but once you break that stuff down, become one in community, then you can start to have real conversations about, “Oh, wait, you’re teaching this, but we’re teaching this. And so when did they end up learning this? And oh, do you really have to teach that?” Yeah, and you just have good conversations.

Rebecca: As we’ve been talking today, was thinking about an early experience I had in my teaching career where my previous institution I was invited as the non-math faculty member to join an assessment retreat and spent an entire week out of town with the math faculty, who I really didn’t know very well, and we had a great time, and found all kinds of connections between our disciplines. And for me, I think that was a really important opportunity. So I thought it was a really wonderful opportunity to collaborate across disciplines and to get a better understanding of what the faculty in that department were doing, what some of their objectives were, but also I shared what some of the art and design students, some of the struggles that they have, and I thought it was a really rewarding opportunity, and I actually had forgotten about it until this conversation. [LAUGHTER]

Aris: That is fantastic. That’s fantastic.

Rebecca: But it sounds right along the lines of what you’re advocating for as a way to share and disrupt and move things forward.

Aris: Absolutely, absolutely.

John: From society’s perspective, the rate of return to higher education, despite the popular perception, is pretty much at the highest we’ve ever seen, and that’s especially true in STEM fields. And yet, students of color, though, have been seriously underrepresented in STEM fields, perhaps partly because of underrepresentation in faculty and in their prior interactions. What strategies could be used to help reduce some of those inequities in terms of the mix of students who are entering into STEM fields?

Aris: Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of things. So this is an individual and a systemic issue. So individually, I think you have to go all the way back and say, “Well, what does it mean to be of color? What does it mean to be a student of color? What does it mean to be a person of color?” And again, the challenge is that people don’t even want to ask that question. Like, student of color or person of color, came into the vernacular at some point, and we just didn’t stop and say, “Well, wait, what does that mean?” And so when I say that I am black in the United States of America, people who are listening, what does that mean to you? If you’re listening to this five weeks from when we record and I say that I’m black, what does that mean to you? What do you think that means to me? Now I want to be clear. The reason why I ask is because when Lakeisha comes to your class, and Lakeisha is a young black woman, and you haven’t even thought about what it means to be black, then are you going to try and convince me that you’re prepared to teach Lakeisha? Do I want my daughter in your class? And the reason why I bring this up is because it means everything to me to be black, it means everything to me, and you haven’t even thought about what it is. So now I’m coming to your classroom, and there’s something fundamentally important to me, and I look at you and I already know the signs that it doesn’t mean anything to you. And so then you are already positioned to me as someone who doesn’t even care about me. And now let me step all the way back. Everybody’s nice, everybody’s a good person. Everybody’s loves their family, loves the country. Everybody’s nice, nice, nice, nice. I’m not talking about nice. I’m talking about love, actually. I’m talking about realizing the nature of the place in which we live, the United States of America, which is again a place of ultimate brilliance, but a place that also has had significant struggles, tragedy and terrorism amongst people of color and black people in particular, right? We can be both, brilliant and have terroristic backgrounds. And so for me, that’s the first thing on an individual level when we think about again, when I said earlier that we have to think about our students individually, that is tied to, “Wait, that person is black in America, that might mean A, B, C, D, and E.” Now it could mean that. It might not mean that, but sociology is a thing. Sociology is real, and the studies show that, about marginalization, how people feel. Stereotype threat, microaggressions, those things are real things. And so that means, again, we need to be educated about what that might mean. But let me take 17 seconds… that for me to be black means two things at least. It means that, again, I come from a miraculous people. I come from a group of people who have been terrorized and stigmatized for centuries in this country, and somehow, our most profound voices, our most powerful voices, are ones that are trying to teach love and justice for everybody. That’s a miracle, like somehow, like in the face of all of that ugliness, our leaders come out talking about love and justice for every single individual. Being black also means that I’m part of a social constructed category where I am not getting things that other people are getting because of skin color, and that’s personally, and that means systemically. And so both of those things are happening, are a part of who you see in me. But what that means is, when you look at someone else who is of color, then you might say, “Oh, that person’s walking around in this society, and they might be experiencing stuff just because of the color of their skin.” And again, coming back to that fundamental question, “How might that make them feel? How might they be struggling today to learn some of the stuff that I’m saying.” And most importantly, how is it that in these four walls for this hour and 15 minutes, in a space that I fully control, how is it that I can make this space different, different from what the rest of the world has told them their whole life? So that’s the personal one. Now, systemically, I’ve been thinking a lot about mentorship, and so if we have 17 students of color, 17 marginalized students in whatever category, whether it’s women in STEM also, 17 students at my institution who are part of a category, a social category, they might be black, they might be whatever, then the question for me becomes, how is it that we get them the right mentors, and that means that focused attention by someone who is ahead of them on the road for their goals, someone who is going to sit with them and look in their eyes and have them convinced that, at least for that hour of that meeting, that no one else in the world as important as they are to that person, someone who is going to awaken something within them, all potential that they didn’t even realize they had. And so when you have good mentors, then you provide pathways for people that they didn’t even think were possible. Now, of course, the challenge is, how is it that we need to train good mentors? We need to get them out there. Right now, we are not trained to be good mentors, particularly across identities, particularly across racial identities and cultural backgrounds. And so my immediate hope is that we would get mentors to people about what it means to be a STEM professional, because what mentorship also does is it gives people who are trying to get into STEM, STEM identities. It opens the doors for them to be like, “Oh, I can do this.” For 25 years, I’ve heard young people say, I saw this person, I interacted with this person, and I realized that I can do this, particularly when Ketanji became a Supreme Court justice. I just remember the very next day, a 16-year old black girl said, “Now that this has happened, a whole world has opened up for me.” I just want that to sit with the listener, that this person will never meet Ketanji. They simply need to just see her become a Supreme Court justice, and now a whole world is opened up for them. Now that’s just from 1000s of miles away. If we can somehow get mentors to each of our young people who are trying to do this, then it gives them, like this personal connection too. It makes it even powerful.

Rebecca: Some of the change that you’re talking about, the dreams that we’re dreaming together, definitely are some of the long game… [LAUGHTER]

Aris: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Yes, yes, yes.

Rebecca: What are some of the short game moves that we can make to get to that longer game?

Aris: Yeah, so then I think it depends on who I’m talking to. So then if I’m talking to someone who’s seasoned, who’s comfortable, who is going about their life, and it’s easy, again, as we said before, I want you to say, “Well, I want to do something bold and different.” And again, I guess the first thing I would say to you is, “I want you to send your students the feedback.” We can do this in multiple ways. I want you to have some real conversations with and get some real feedback from your students about how things are going with you and whether you are doing your due diligence and uplifting people in the discipline of math. If you are new or you have little power or you’re just moving up the ranks, there’s something about also looking at your practices, but being able to get a critical mass, like just joining other people. I think this is true for the older faculty too, but just joining communities and listening to how other people teach and how other people operate in their craft, they continue to just be educated. So again, that’s on the individual level. On the systemic level, I’m looking at our leaders. So then I’m talking to department heads. I’m talking to deans and to presidents and provosts about doing more than just not rocking the boat. And so when we have young people, when we have these disparities in STEM across racial lines, that’s on you, leader. So I’m really trying to push leaders to just say, “Okay, wait, not under my watch.” 17 years from now, I want you to be able to say, “Maybe things have not change, but here are the three things that I tried and they failed, and even in the failure here the 15 things we learned,” that the too many leaders who would just come into position and just try to keep things still and when in fact, your job may be to shake things up so that more people can thrive. So I just met so many leaders that have just been like, “Let me just come and steer the boat,” when, in fact, you may need a whole new boat. You may need to be on a new river. Yeah, so I’ll say that, in that delineation, I mean on the individual level, you’ve got younger faculty, older faculty, and then they might be doing things, but then at the systemic level, our leaders need more courage. They just need more courage. And so the challenge that I have, and it goes back to what we said earlier, is that in order to get courage, you have to be compelled. There has to be a compelling reason for a leader to say, “You know what, I’m going to do the thing, and y’all are not going to like me. We’re going to make classes unified at the 1000 level for math, because this is what our students deserve. And I don’t care what you think about, because the data says that having classes that are completely different from professor to professor makes students suffer, and therefore we must unify. Let’s get to work on it together. And if you don’t like it, okay, we can talk about that too, but this is what we’re doing.” And so that person who does that is compelled by the suffering of our students. The lack of access for our students is the driving factor. There must be something that compels leaders to change, otherwise they won’t.

Rebecca: I wanted to follow up on the feedback forms because you’ve mentioned that throughout our conversation today, and for someone who’s like, “Yes, I will do this,” what would be in said feedback form?

Aris: Oh, thank you for saying that. It would be questions that if they got the answers to, it would shake them and make them really uncomfortable. The thing that I want to say, that I should have said from the beginning, is that it’s comfortable or outstanding, you only get to be one. It’s comfortable or outstanding, you only get to be one of those. And so when I created my feedback forms, and I started filling them, and I started putting in the questions, like, oh, wait, if I actually heard the real answer to this, I’m not going to feel good. And then part of me said, Well, that means it needs to go on there. And so what does that look like? That means like, “Am I doing a good job? Am I giving you everything you need? What do you want me to change?” That one’s not so bad, but it’s just like, “Did I say anything that bothered you? How is my language?” It’s just stuff that like, are you having good time, right? So that’s about me, and so how can I just be better? But then the thing that was transformational for me is when you ask anonymously, people about their lives, and just say, “What’s your biggest challenge today? What are you going through right now? What excites you the most? What do you do when you’re not in school?” So feedback forms do so much if you are authentically digging into them and asking questions that might push you out of your comfort zone, because it’ll change you forever. Because when someone says that all your math problems are binary in terms of gender, and it leaves me out, then it changes the way that I teach forever. Forever. One sentence changes the way I teach forever. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s tons of feedback forms out there, so you can go and investigate those. But for me, it’s “Okay. How am I doing?” And “Who are you as a person?” I have colleagues who give them out after tests also who have, like, logistical and utilitarian reasons for giving them out. But for me, as you might imagine from what I’ve said so far, I’m trying to figure out, am I doing a good job in humanizing you, and who are you as a human.

John: Is this something perhaps that people should do at the start of the semester, just to gather some information about who the students are in the class as well as during the class?

Aris: Yeah, you’re giving them out a lot. Yeah.

John: And you mentioned anonymity. I’ve gone back and forth on that in terms of gathering information about students. Students are likely to be more open when the forms are anonymous. On the other hand, if there’s specific concerns for specific students, there’s some benefit of knowing who the students are. And I’ve sometimes done a mix of those things, where I’ve had some things which were just anonymous and others where students let me know at the beginning of the term, in particular, if they have any special concerns or needs or any challenges they faced in classes in the past.

Aris: I appreciate that, yeah. And so I definitel moved the anonymous route. And then I will say that some of you wrote some things that I think you and I need to talk about personally, and I hope you know who you are, and say, yeah. And then I don’t know if I get any more specific than that, because of anonymity reasons, but yeah, so I try to open the door that way. But yeah, I like your idea of mixing them for sure.

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

Aris: Oh, just the same old, same old. And that’s enough, [LAUGHTER] right? So, yeah, I wake up every morning with a mission, and I’m thankful for that. I’m overwhelmed by that, that I am trying to serve people. And first, it starts with my own daughter, my wife, and then I get to then interact with people who are trying to change their lives forever. When you’re in college, when you’re in the educational process, when I’m teaching in K through 12, those young people in particular don’t have the vision yet to understand the path that they’re on. But in particular college, even though some of those people have been forced to go to college, they are there and they’re trying to change the trajectory of their whole life, and to play a role in that is a gift, and I have to treat that with care. And so I wake up every morning just trying to figure out how in the world can I help that person on their educational journey. And that’s all I want to do. And so I’m in a sweet spot where I can do that every day and make a living. So I’m superbly thankful for that. So for me, in general, I’m always trying to make quantitative spaces better for everybody, because better quantitative spaces lead to better quality of lives. And so across so many different levels, if you see me, I’m either with my family, or I’m playing pickleball, or I’m trying to make quantitative spaces better for people for better quality of lives.

Rebecca: …sounds like a good balance.

Aris: Yeah, that’s right. [LAUGHTER] That’s right.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you again. And again, we really enjoyed your work here back in January during your visit.

Aris: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for your thought-provoking ideas.

Aris: Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you 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.

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382. The Demographic Cliff

Posted in diversity, equity, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, teaching, Uncategorized
February 26, 2025

The number of high school graduates in the U.S. is expected to decline for several years. In this episode, Peter Ghazarian joins us to discuss the experiences of higher ed institutions in Korea and Japan, which have recently experienced similar reductions in college enrollments. Peter is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego. He has worked in international education in the US, UK, Germany, and Korea. Peter’s work focuses on higher education, leadership, public policy, multiculturalism, and human migration. He is the author of a very recent article on higher education and an aging population in the U.S.

Show Notes

  • Ghazarian, P. G., Bhandari, B., & Chen, S. (2023). ” It can be chaos here”: International Student Experiences of US Higher Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education, 15(1). 33-34.
  • Ghazarian, P. G. (2025). Higher education and an aging population in the USA: learning from the experiences of Korea and Japan. Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, 1-7.
  • Grawe, N. D. (2018). Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. United States: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • School of Ocean Futures, Arizona State University

Transcript

John: The number of high school graduates in the U.S. is expected to decline for several years. In this episode, we discuss the experiences of higher ed institutions in Korea and Japan, which have recently experienced similar reductions in college enrollments.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Peter Ghazarian. Peter is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego. He has worked in international education in the US, UK, Germany, and Korea. Peter’s work focuses on higher education, leadership, public policy, multiculturalism, and human migration. He is the author of a very recent article on higher education and an aging population in the U.S. Welcome back, Peter.

Peter: I’m very glad to be here. Thank you.

John: Today’s teas are… Peter? Are you drinking tea?

Peter: I am drinking tea. I’ve got a spearmint tea here

Rebecca: That sounds nice and refreshing. I have a Lady Grey today, John.

John: And I have a ginger peach green tea today.

Peter: I love a good ginger tea. I’m always in favor of that.

Rebecca: We invited you here today, Peter, to discuss your article, “Higher education and an aging population in the USA: learning from the experiences of Korea and Japan,” which was first published on January 5 of this year. Fertility rates have been declining in all the industrialized nations, and the number of high school graduates is expected to reach a peak in 2025 followed by a gradual decline. Have some US regions already been experiencing this decline in college-age populations in response to internal migration patterns?

Peter: Yes. So we hear all the time about this demographic cliff that’s coming, that’s going to have a profound impact on higher education in the United States. And for quite a bit of time, I just felt like it may just be scare mongering, because I hadn’t really looked at the data directly myself, and it almost seemed as though it might just be an excuse for structural change in higher education, a way to justify changes people already wanted. But then I decided to dig a little bit deeper, and I saw that there is some pretty profound change coming, especially in particular regions of the US. So in the northeast and in the midwest in particular, we’re seeing a lot of internal migration to the south and to the west, and a lot of urbanization that is kind of hollowing out rural areas that play host to a lot of these smaller, tuition-dependent higher education institutions that really put them in a vulnerable position.

John: So, in this study, you’re comparing the US experience with that of Korea and Japan. Could you talk about why you selected Korea and Japan as a basis for comparison?

Peter: Sure, absolutely. So there were really two major reasons why I decided to go with Korea and Japan. One is that they’ve already experienced this phenomenon. It’s been going on there already, and so it’s an opportunity to kind of peek into the future of what it might look like further down along the line, and the types of things we might want to prepare for before this is upon us. And then the other reason is just because I spent so much time there, a good 7, 8, 9 years in Korea working in higher education, and I realized that a lot of the things I was hearing here kind of echoed what I was hearing at faculty meetings and in press releases at my former institutions, since it kind of tickled something inside me like, wait a minute, I’ve heard this before, and it inspired me to go and look back at exactly what had been going on.

Rebecca: You kind of mentioned that Korea and Japan have been dealing with these issues for a bit of time. What was their experience like? Were those institutions closing? merging?

Peter: Well, I mean, they’re still dealing with it now. They haven’t really solved the issue of a very low birth rate, and the impact that it’s had on higher education has primarily been a push towards mergers, and that, I think, has been facilitated by a number of environmental characteristics in those places that is helpful and conducive to the merger of higher education institutions, just because they’re much more dense in terms of the population distribution. There isn’t nearly as much land as there is here, and very large populations, and so even with population decline or population aging in certain areas, there’s still a relatively large number of people within a certain range around particular institutions. And so mergers become much more feasible, because if there isn’t enough to support two institutions, if we bring them together and make one, we should be able to get by. And so, yeah, I would say mergers by far have been the most common response in both Korea and Japan. Though Korea has had its fair share of closures as well.

John: In your paper, you talk a little bit about the types of mergers that were occurring in Korea and Japan. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Peter: Yeah, so I mentioned earlier that there were some characteristics that help to allow these mergers to go forward, and one of them is some of the patterns that we see in ownership of the higher education institutions in Korea and Japan, because there was such a boom in higher education not so long ago, like in the past 50 years, a lot of these institutions are actually owned by similar groups or similar individuals or families, and so they would successfully establish a four-year institution and then want to open a polytechnic or a trade school of some kind, or what we would call a community college, but there would be called a junior college, and that made it very easy. If the same group of people own both institutions and they realize both are struggling, well, we’ll cut out some of the overhead costs by merging these together. And there was also some policies in place from the government that sort of pushed these institutions to do this as well, because the governments in both Korea and Japan wanted to preserve a certain amount of stability in their higher education systems to prevent what people might perceive as collapse, and so there was a kind of gradual, gentle pressure to merge institutions over time that seemed to be helpful towards getting this done.

Rebecca: So what are some of the factors that affected the likelihood of institutions in Korea or Japan to survive these demographic shifts?

Peter: I would say that the major sort of elements that played into whether or not an institution could survive were: their location, rural institutions were particularly vulnerable; their size, smaller institutions struggled more; and then their focus, comprehensive four-year institutions tended to fare better unless they were both rural and very small, those institutions were very vulnerable. It was like a combination of those things. If you were rural and remote, you’re in trouble. If you’re rural and very small, you’re in trouble. The other was the focus, four-year institutions tended to be all right. They tended to do okay, because what we started to see in Korea and Japan is that as there were fewer and fewer people applying for admission, it was easier to get a position at a four-year institution, and that a lot of these two-year institutions were almost overflow in the past, where they would take on students who had wanted to go to a four-year institution but weren’t able to get admission, and so they settled for a two-year option before moving into the workforce. But now, because there weren’t as many students applying, institutions were more willing to take on these students who otherwise may have gone to a two-year institution, which left two-year institutions really struggling to get a sufficient number of students to be able to support themselves.

John: And as you noted with internal migration decisions in the US, with people moving to the south and west and moving away from rural areas, we’re already seeing some colleges being hit. What are some of the ways in which US colleges have dealt with this, or perhaps failed to deal with this?

Peter: I would say that the institutions tend to take three different sort of outlooks to this issue or this problem of demographic cliff that they see coming. Some institutions are trying to really cut back to reduce costs, and they use it to justify changes they make at their institutions, which can be unsettling to faculty. I’ve seen, for example, programs merge or programs close where even tenured faculty have lost their positions as a result of this sort of hard-nosed approach that’s being adopted by some administrations, and then it’s justified through the need for cost cutting in anticipation of these changes that are going to be coming to the institution. Another approach is a sort of like plug your ears and whistle. Some institutions have just really been kind of hoping for the best in the long run, and this might have an impact on others, but it’s not going to have an impact on us, and they’re just kind of going forward with business as usual. And if the reputation of the institution is strong enough, then they are likely to come out all right in the end, because while there might be some displacement in terms of who had gone there before and who goes there now, in the end, their situation isn’t going to change that much from what they’ve experienced in the past. And so it’s understandable why they would kind of take this sort of rose colored glasses approach to the situation. And then finally, we’re starting to see some institutions who realize that they’re going to need to change, but they’re not exactly sure how. And so they’re kind of preparing themselves to be able to change. They’re communicating out to faculty, to staff, and to administrators, that there are challenges coming at us, and we’re going to need to be able to make some changes to how we do things. And so they’re starting to instigate, for example, new thinking about how programs should change and how the structure of the institution might need to change, and really encouraging, internally, people to prepare themselves for doing something different so that they can survive in a new environment. And so I would say that’s sort of the third approach, the getting ready approach. The first is really all about cutting, the second is, “Just forget about it. It’ll be okay,” and the third kind of priming the pump, if you will, for future change that is going to need to happen in higher education institutions.

Rebecca: You noted there are some landscape differences between the US and Korea and Japan in terms of population density and literally the amount of land in different spaces. But can you talk about what we can learn from the experiences in Korea and Japan and ways that we might move forward here?

Peter: So I came into this thinking that there would be clear takeaways, but instead it left me feeling a little nervous about the situation in the United States, because in Korea and Japan, you had a highly interested government that was pretty deeply involved in maintaining the stability of higher education, whereas in the United States, the government is much more remotely involved. They’re not really directly getting into the nitty gritty of the provision of higher education within the country, they’re only really indirectly a part of what’s going on. And the good will that we see between higher education in Korea and Japan and the government doesn’t really exist here to that same extent. And so we don’t have someone looking after us…

Rebecca: …like a safety net…. [LAUGHTER]

Peter: …yeah, a safety net. And so the government in Korea and Japan, they created policies to make mergers more smooth, and they would use Ministry of Education reviews of higher education institutions to make adjustments to quotas for students at institutions to reduce the impact of demographic decline across the board, so that was more shared, but also so that institutions that scored lower on ministry reviews of their institution, or institutions they believed to have a lower quality were kind of cut off over time from this pool of students, so that there was a gradual change as time went on. But we don’t really have that here. It’s much more… it’s a free market, and people go where they want to go, and that can be really destructive, and it can bring a lot of change from one year to the next year, where institutions expect something, and then all of a sudden they just don’t have enough students to keep going on. And so the other sort of element of it is that there’s a positive public opinion of higher education in Korea and Japan, the sense that it’s a public good that we need, that we can’t live without, and I feel like people are questioning that here in the United States, and so we don’t have that same level of public goodwill to rely on as well. The one exception to that that I have is that there’s a strong connection between alumni and the institutions that come from here in the United States. So we do see some cases where alumni are sort of riding into the rescue, like Sweet Briar College, where alumni came together and donated to keep the institution open, to prevent it from closing. And so we do see some of that grassroots support coming from people who have a personal connection to the institutions. But I would say that that’s going to be the exception, rather than the rule. It’s just, I mean, alumni, you can only ask so much.

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s great news. When I was reading your article, I was like, “Oh, yeah, okay…”

John: One way of addressing this, and many institutions have been, is that we’ve had a lot of underserved populations in the US, people from low income communities, people who are first-generation college students and students from historically underrepresented groups have much lower college attendance rates, and this is a period of time when the rate of return to higher education is the highest we’ve ever seen in the US. But there may also be some political issues there, because in order to bring in some groups from lower income households, it does require larger amounts of subsidies, and we’re not seeing that same sort of increase. In this political climate, do you see that as being very likely as perhaps a way of expanding the reach of higher education and perhaps improving our rates of intergenerational income mobility?

Peter: Yeah, I would say one of the unique sort of opportunities available to us here in the United States is the fact that we have these large pools of people who maybe traditionally haven’t taken part in higher education, and as a result of which we can kind of cater to bringing in new people into higher ed, bringing in first-generation students, and it’s good for institutions because they can better respond to the fact that they don’t have as many applicants as they had in the past, or they don’t have as many students as they had in the past, and it allows them to support themselves. And it’s good for the students, because, as you mentioned, it opens doors economically to new sort of opportunities available within the US economy and different lifestyles within different social classes. And so I would say that, yeah, absolutely, that there is this unique opportunity here in the United States, but there are certainly challenges. The programs that are designed to help us with retention and to making adjustments to the way that we do things in higher education to be more responsive to the needs of students who are coming from a first-generation background are the very programs that are under threat now with the change that we’ve seen politically within the United States. And so this lifeline that we had is at real risk now because all of the effort that we’ve put into making higher education a more open and welcoming place to people coming from backgrounds that traditionally didn’t take part in higher education may feel less welcome as a result of a lot of these programs being shut down. In fact, I’m working on a study now on the impact of DEI programs having been made illegal in the state of Texas, and how that’s impacted the student experience there. And so I’m very interested to see what sort of results we get from that study. But I have a feeling that it’s not going to be all good news.

Rebecca: One of the other areas for potential enrollment growth that’s been discussed quite a bit in the US is the admission of more international students. There’s a lot of desire for international students to get US education, but you note that the political climate has become less welcoming. What’s the future of this looking like right now?

Peter: And this wasn’t true, not just in the US, but also Korea and Japan sought to attract more international students. They saw it as a potential way to respond to declining numbers of domestic students and provide support to institutions, and some institutions were quite successful in being able to draw international students. I wouldn’t say that higher education across the board really succeeded in Korea and Japan, but there were some key institutions that really excelled at this, and it became a niche for them that allowed them to sort of weather the storm. Here in the United States, I would say that we’ve always been a top choice destination for international students around the world. And so it’s pretty clear that we could rely on this, or it was pretty clear we could rely on this in the past, but what we’ve seen is that there was kind of an unfortunate mix of developments that occurred within the country that have made us less attractive as a destination. The first of which that comes to mind would be just COVID-19 really tarnished the image of the United States, just in the response and in a sense of sort of chaos that students felt while they were here in the United States. That they communicated back home, a sense of lawlessness, almost in the country, that this is a place where people don’t follow the rules and where there isn’t sort of a clear, organized response to issues or problems as they emerge, and that was very bad [LAUGHTER] for U.S. higher education, just because that type of damage to a country’s image is very difficult to come back from. It lingers. It’s almost generational change when people shift in their view of a particular country, and so that plays into decisions around where to go to study. And then the other you sort of alluded to is political change, and I don’t think it’s as simple as just a shift in administration, but we’ve witnessed in the public discourse a real change in how people talk and think about people who are coming to the United States from other countries, and people feel that, they feel that they hear it in the discourse. And you know when you’re not welcome, you know you’re visiting someone’s house, and you hear them talking about you in the kitchen, and they’re not saying nice things, unless you really, really want to be there, you’re just less likely to stick around. And I think that that has really contributed as well to this decline we’re seeing in the numbers of international students who have come to the United States. And so again, there’s always going to be institutions that because due to their reputation or due to their location, are still going to draw on a large number of students. But it’s not going to be a safety net for institutions who are most vulnerable to this decline, places that are located in rural areas or who are specialized in a particular academic area, or institutions that are very small, these are the places that are the least likely to attract international students, and so it’s just not a good solution, or it’s not the solution that many had hoped that it would be, at least at this time.

John: One other thing you talk about in your paper a little bit is shifting the focus of the course offerings and the focus of the programs offered by institutions. Can you talk a little bit about how that’s been done in Korea and Japan, and whether institutions here are already starting to do this a bit, and perhaps, might that be a way of maintaining the relevance and the strength of a larger proportion of higher ed institutions?

Peter: I think institutions are still trying to figure out how they can change the curriculum to make them fit into the society that we live in. And we see pressure on institutions coming from the labor market and then from this new discourse around accountability for institutions in terms of student outcomes in the labor market. And it makes me a little nervous, to be honest. I’m not sure that it’s necessarily a good thing, and in Korea, at least, I don’t know about this as much in Japan, but in Korea, we saw things like funding for our departments being tied to the percentage of students who were full-time employed with benefits a certain amount of time after graduation, and that funding levels for departments would shift to the point that even positions could go away. If you cannot provide successful employment outcomes for students, then the justification for that program or for those positions might go away. And so that created a lot of discomfort among faculty and among administrators who really felt the squeeze in terms of everything we do has to be targeted in some way to a particular job, and we need to be preparing students in some way for work. Everything we do has to be focused on getting students ready for work. And I think that that’s disruptive and not helpful for higher education. I think that those things are absolutely very important, but that they fly in the face of the mission of a lot of higher education institutions, and that there’s a real danger of losing touch with the original purpose of these institutions. And so I would say that I think I much more appreciate the efforts to just prepare people for change without necessarily knowing which direction we’re going to be headed, because otherwise, some of this is [LAUGHTER] quite disruptive and it’s destructive as well. It makes me a little bit nervous.

Rebecca: Given your experience, what role do you see faculty playing in shaping the future change that needs to come?

Peter: Well, in some places, we are seeing faculty taking a more proactive role in creating new programs and to creating even new schools. So I don’t know if you’ve heard much about, I believe it’s Arizona State University, they have, like a School of Ocean Futures and some pretty new sort of ways of organizing what the programs that are available at the institution with a clear focus on the future. So that they’re hopeful that students that come out of these programs are able to find a place in the future world, at least as they envision it. And so I think faculty members who sort of take the lead in this work and help to sort of reorganize higher education around what might be needed in the future, they have a role to play there if they’re able to do that. But in a lot of cases, faculty members are very resistant to any sort of change, and so, in fact, they’ve kind of become antagonists to any of this work. And I understand that. Higher education looked a certain way for a very long time, and that’s what people sort of envision it’s going to continue to look like in the future, and they are cynical about any sort of changes that others are trying to impose on higher education, and maybe rightly so.

John: And one of the ways, I think that we’ve seen that in the wider universe of colleges and universities is gutting some of the traditional liberal arts departments and majors. We’ve seen some schools give up music departments or give up art departments, or art history, or sometimes seriously cutting back on history or math and other areas. I gather that that’s something you probably would not advocate for as part of this transition to the future.

Peter: Liberal arts institutions are the greatest threat is the reality of it. So the institutions that we’ve seen closing in the Northeast in particular have been small liberal arts institutions, and so I am very much in favor of the mission of these liberal arts institutions, personally. But if people aren’t going because that’s not what they’re looking for in higher education, then the problem we have isn’t with the programs we’re offering. There’s a program with what people perceive as being valuable in the society and how social values have changed over time, that people aren’t interested in learning about music and they’re not interested in learning art, and that’s, to me, is terrifying, [LAUGHTER] but it’s the reality of what we’re seeing in terms of demand is that people want this very clear economic benefit as a result of attending higher education, and if they don’t see a clear one-to-one correlation, that they tend to be more dismissive of it as something that’s not necessary or something that they don’t need, which creates a lot of this pressure, and it’s used to justify things like gutting out some of these programs like you mentioned. I think higher education has grown dangerously sort of disconnected from public life, and that people see higher education institutions as something that’s very removed and something that’s stuck in the past and something that isn’t really tied to sort of public opinion and the public discourse, and that puts us in such a dangerous position, and so that really, really makes me worry about the future for higher education, because there isn’t a clear vision about where do we fit in the society of the future, what role do we play? And we’re becoming increasingly vestigial, almost, in the way that people talk about and think about higher education, in a way that leaves me very worried.

Rebecca: That seems like the critical difference too, that you identified in your study, really between the differences between Korea and Japan too, right? Is that really how it played out?

Peter: And even at a personal level, I could feel the difference working in higher education as a faculty member in South Korea. In society, I was awarded a certain amount of respect from anybody who learned that I was a professor or a faculty member, and people would seek out my opinion or seek out my participation in programs in a way that I just don’t see here in the United States. In a way, when people learn I’m a professor in the United States, their response is very different from in Korea, and that was sort of a warning bell for me in terms of, this is how they see higher education here. It’s very different from what I had experienced in other settings.

John: And on that cheery note… [LAUGHTER] you had mentioned the shift out of the Midwest and the Northeast into other regions of the country. So what types of differences do you see between the experience of the Midwest and the New England region in terms of the response to these shifts?

Peter: So I would say that the sort of the major difference that we see between the Northeast and the Midwest is that in the northeast, there were more successful mergers, and that has to do with the fact that there is less distance between institutions in the northeast, it is a little bit more densely populated, and so oftentimes the institutions that were having trouble were able to reach out to neighboring institutions, especially smaller institutions, would reach out to larger neighboring institutions, and they were able to come to some sort of agreement where they would merge. There’s one exception to this in the Northeast, where two similarly sized institutions, neither of which were struggling, this was Berklee College of Music and then the Boston Conservatory, they just spoke with each other and decided we should share these overhead costs that we’re dealing with, and we’ll become one music institution within Boston, and otherwise, it tended to be smaller institutions that were struggling reaching out to larger neighbors and getting some help and becoming a part of that larger neighbor. And oftentimes they would fill in sort of an area of relative weakness within that larger institution. Something that comes to mind, for example, is Wheelock College joining Boston University and becoming sort of the specialized college in education and human services within Boston University. And so there were some pretty happy stories there about mergers working out. It was more remote, small liberal arts institutions in the Northeast that were the most likely to close, and that contrasted a little with the eastern Midwest, where a lot of the times we saw religious affiliated institutions were the ones that were struggling. There were quite a few Christian colleges that weren’t able to find a way forward. And in terms of the mergers that we saw, they tended to be highly specialized institutions that were sort of gobbled up by neighbors that didn’t have a program or any offerings in that area, and saw it as an opportunity to expand out what they offered at their institutions. So the stories were pretty similar, but there were some differences in terms of the success rate of mergers and the types of institutions that were struggling in those different regions.

Rebecca: Well, with all that good news today, we always end by asking, what’s next?

Peter: This was a very, sort of a zoomed out look at what’s going on here in the United States. And I think that there’s some real value in taking a closer look at the stories of these institutions, those that do end up closing and then those that are able to make it through. And so I’m hoping to do a series of comparative case studies looking at institutions around the Northeast. There’s even one that’s quite close to us here in Aurora, New York. I think it’s Well’s and so I’m hoping to take a closer look at some of these institutions and their stories but haven’t decided the exact sort of focus I want to take. But part of me wants to look at the impact on the local economies of places that do close. What’s the sort of impact that we’re seeing on the people that live around the places where these institutions used to be located, and the places that do succeed, what role did their relationships to their local community play in their ability to kind of make it through and so I’m still in the brainstorming phase there, but this is something I’ve been thinking about doing.

John: Well, thank you. This has been such a cheery conversation, but it’s one that all institutions have to address, because we are going to be coming up to some really challenging times, and if higher ed institutions are to survive, they’re going to have to be a little bit creative and maybe more flexible in terms of addressing the changing environment in which we’re living.
But studies such as this, though, can perhaps give us more information about what paths have been successful. So thank you, and we’re looking forward to hearing your future studies.

Peter: Thank you, and thanks for having me on.

Rebecca: Yeah, thanks for the zoomed out look. I think that’s helpful for everyone to get a good grasp on what the landscape really looks like and how it does compare to some other places.

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

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

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381. Transition to College

Posted in engagement, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, learning, motivation, pedagogy, teaching
February 19, 2025

Many students experience challenges transitioning from high school to college. In this episode, Beckie Supiano joins us to discuss changes in the K-12 environment that impact student preparation for college. Beckie is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. She began her work at The Chronicle as an intern in 2008 and is a co-author, with Beth McMurtrie of The Chronicle’s Teaching Newsletter.

Transcript

John: Many students experience challenges transitioning from high school to college. In this episode, we discuss changes in the K-12 environment that impact student preparation for college.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guest today is Beckie Supiano, a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. She began her work at The Chronicle as an intern in 2008 and is a co-author, with Beth McMurtrie of The Chronicle’s Teaching Newsletter. Beckie’s insightful articles have been a regular source of inspiration for us as faculty and many of our past podcasts were the result of things we’ve read in your articles. Welcome.

Beckie: Thanks so much for having me.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Beckie, are you drinking any tea with us today?

Beckie: You know, I’m not really a tea drinker. I have finished my morning pot of coffee, and I’ve switched over to sparkling water over here.

Rebecca: I would say probably many of our listeners are right on team Beckie. How about you, John?

John: I am drinking a ginger peach black tea today.

Rebecca: I’m back to drinking that candy cane tea that I’ve been drinking lately. It’s really a nice blend of black and herbal mint.

John: Interesting, although that may not work so well once we hit the summer, you may want to finish it up by then. It just may seem a bit non seasonal

Rebecca: at the rate I’ve been drinking it, it may happen.

John: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your recent article: “Some Assembly Still Required: How K-12 reforms and recent disruptions created Gen Z’s baffling habits.” College faculty have, as long as there have been records, complained that the K-12 system left a lot of students unprepared for college, but the gap between high school preparation and college expectations seem to have gotten quite a bit worse in recent years. What are some of the changes in student experiences and in the K-12 environment that have made this transition more difficult for both the students and for the faculty who will be teaching them?

Beckie: I’ll mention this article is part of a series that my colleague, Beth McMurtrie and I and another colleague have been writing for really about the past year, called “Teaching Gen Z,” which was really our attempt to describe and untangle a lot of what professors have been noticing with this group of traditional age students. And so we got to a point where we sort of thought, “Oh gosh, you know, we really do need to go look at what’s been going on in K-12.” I hear you, these complaints that “students are coming in unprepared” and “something must be up with schools” are long standing, but there are some things that really do seem to have changed that are important, and obviously that’s what the article is trying to make sense of here. I will say it’s like, “Oh, something must be going on before these students get to college.” And I think one thing I’d like to underscore is it doesn’t seem to be just one something, and I think that’s part of what makes this very complicated, but also what makes it really interesting. A lot of my article looks at the test-based accountability movement and some of its unintended consequences in terms of what is and isn’t focused on in a lot of schools, and how that sets students’ expectations for what education really is. But there are other things too. There’s been a really significant drop in reading for pleasure, which turns out to be a very important thing in terms of students’ reading ability, also the teacher shortage and what that’s meant for who’s in front of classrooms and what they’re doing. And the rise of technology to supplement classroom instruction is related with that last point on the teacher shortage, too. And then, of course, we have the pandemic, which exacerbated lots of existing trends and created some new challenges. And everyone’s still trying to make sense of how that’s all played out, unfortunately, and what some of the longer-term impacts are. And then there’s really the role that schools play in society, and how many things they’re really being asked to do beyond simply educating our country’s children. So what that means, just to take sort of one piece of it that professors are very interested in, students are not getting as much practice reading books or longer articles inside or outside of school, and so professors are noticing that students are having a harder time doing the kind of reading they’re expected to in college. And if you sort of look at what’s going on… again, both in and outside of school before students get there… you can kind of get a little bit of a better handle on why it might be that way.

Rebecca: One of the things that you talk about in your article is the No Child Left Behind Act and just legislation in general that’s intentions are to help our education and our society, but there are sometimes some intended consequences. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Beckie: Yeah, absolutely. So, No Child Left Behind, the federal law signed in 2002 was intended to raise the floor on student performance in school, which I think most people could agree is a good goal. It was a bipartisan effort, and the idea here was that there are groups of students, especially sub-populations, who would be more at risk, students who are members of minority groups or low-income students or in special education programs, and before it was sort of easy to mask if those students were not being well served by school, if they weren’t performing well, and the law was really designed to make it harder to have students kind of passed along through school without getting the education they were supposed to. But what happened is there needs to be some sort of way to evaluate are schools actually educating these students, and the way that that was done is standardized tests. And just like so many things, once you introduce a way to evaluate performance and make it a high-pressure thing where everyone has a lot at stake, everyone’s going to focus on how to look good in that evaluation. And part of what you see is that some of the things that schools might do to try to improve test scores in the short term might be misaligned with things you might do if your goal were longer-term learning. And there are lots of examples of that, and a lot of it’s become more clear now.

John: So, along with the No Child Left Behind Act there was this increase in standardized tests. How did the introduction of these standardized tests affect the way in which classes are taught? One of the examples you mentioned is how 10th graders were taught the Pythagorean theorem. How did that change in response to some of the standardized testing, as well as the breadth and depth of coverage on many other topics.

Beckie: Yeah, so that example about the Pythagorean theorem is one specific example from a test of 10th graders in Massachusetts that a professor I spoke with at Harvard, Dan Koretz, mentioned in our interview that I thought was just such a nice example. So basically, you can reverse engineer these tests to figure out how to help students perform well on them. So in this instance, this example that he gave me, the Princeton Review, figured out like, oh, there’s this pattern where this particular test, for this group of students in this state regularly asked a question on the Pythagorean theorem. And because students cannot use calculators on this test and the Pythagorean Theorem requires using square roots, they’re really only a few kinds of questions this could possibly be, like, if you memorize a few sets of ratios, you can pretty much get the question right, whether or not you understand algebra, and really, whether or not you understand the Pythagorean Theorem. It’s just a sort of test strategy that you could use to perform well on this item, and that’s a problem for a few reasons. I mean one, it means that the item can’t really tell us if students understand math, because they don’t have to [LAUGHTER] to get this question right. So this item, which is one of a small sample of questions used to test: “Do you understand algebra generally?” can’t really be effective at answering that question for us. But a related problem is that if you know that certain material is going to be tested on and again, if there’s a lot of pressure to shore up student performance, there’s all the incentive in the world to really focus on those aspects of a subject in your preparation for students. So lots of practice on specific parts of math, specific reading skills, lots of short passages of reading and writing, because that’s what students would be evaluated on. And so you see this reallocation that certain subjects are emphasized to the detriment of others. And then within subjects like math and reading that were really emphasized, only certain pieces of those subjects would really get attention, which could lead to nice looking test scores, but would also lead to students not having the full preparation they would need to build on those skills in future work, including at college.

Rebecca: When we’re talking about standardized testing, other systematic assessment rubrics also became increasingly common in high schools and colleges. And in your interview, one of the faculty members that you interviewed, Ethan Hutt, suggests that this has made it more difficult for students to create more interesting writing assignments. Is the increased prevalence of rubrics also an outgrowth of the nature of standardized testing?

Beckie: Yeah, so I think that’s a really good example. A rubric can be helpful if students are supposed to come up with a certain type of answer when they’re answering a question on a test. Writing can be kind of formulaic at any level, but there’s some variation in how formulaic it is, and students have been kind of conditioned to write to spec, right? I hear from professors all the time, just interviewing them in our day-in, day-out, coverage of teaching that students really seem to think they are being asked to come up with the answer, the right answer, the answer the professor has already thought of and is walking around with and expecting to hear back, even if students are being asked to share an opinion or talk about their personal experience, something that presumably the professor can’t really have a predetermined answer for. And you can kind of see how this all connects. And so what Hutt was saying is students just feel really lost when they’re asked to just write an essay on a topic. They expect a lot more granular instructions of exactly what to do to deliver the kind of product that the professor wants and will give a good grade to, and when he’ll tell them, like, “I don’t really have that, that’s not really what I do,” they don’t believe it. They think he just won’t tell them. And I’ve heard similar things from other professors as well. I think it’s long been the case that college students are asked to work at a higher level, that they have more freedom to kind of spread their wings and try things out. But it seems like professors are noticing that this group of students, rather than kind of enjoying that and running with it, feels kind of stuck or anxious or just doesn’t know how to proceed without a lot more explicit direction.

John: And that’s put a lot more pressure on college faculty also to use rubrics with assignments, which, again, can limit creativity in students’ writing. We’d like to have students develop some creativity and be able to analyze material, but if we are requiring them only to focus on a narrow subset of their disciplines, might that do some harm to their ability to be productive members of society in a world where they’re not going to be just completing assignments designed to a rubric, or where they’re not going to be getting standardized tests, but they have to deal with real-world problems.

Beckie: Yeah, I think that there’s a lot of concern about all of what you just said on the part of faculty, and it’s hard to figure out how to communicate to students what you really are trying to get them to do, and it’s hard for these reasons, and it’s hard because of generative AI. There’s a lot going on here that’s working against trying to convince students to think critically and do their own creative work, and kind of to find their voice. And that seems to be something that is a heavier lift for everyone involved, sure.

Rebecca: Along those same lines, at the college level, university level, we’re expecting students to be independent and have autonomy and really take those reins. Are there things happening in the K-12 system that are reducing student autonomy? Is that in response to the high-stakes testing and rubrics and all the standardization?

Beckie: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I think, in terms of how to go about completing the work that does seem to be in play. And some of it, I think, is just also about the way you think about education, and what it’s for. The testing regime is performative, like you’re getting a test and you’re performing on it, and your performance is really important. That’s really different from other ways of thinking about education as being a process. And I think many people in higher education and gosh, you know, many people in K-12 too, would understand that the process thing is important. We’re supposed to be lifelong learners. This is how you go about learning anything. A lot of times, people will talk to me with illustrations of like, “How do you learn to play a sport or a musical instrument?” This is sort of how humans learn. We have better and better handle on that from research on learning, but it’s tough, I think, to get students to shift gears. And this is, I think, interrelated to something that professors also experience, where students are very grade motivated, and I think it’s easy for professors to be exasperated by that, but especially at a place with a selective admissions process like, oh gosh, you know, students have been really strongly conditioned to think about their grades, or they probably wouldn’t be in your classroom at all. And it’s hard to turn that off.

John: And much of this seems to be related to the changes in incentives that K-12 instructors and administrators face because the funding they receive may be tied to the success of students on these standardized exams, but by narrowing what students are studying, or narrowing the range of topics addressed to those things that can be captured in multiple-choice exams and standardized tests, one of the things you’re suggesting, I think, in the article, is that students are missing out on some of the wider explorations and a wider breadth of learning that perhaps might have been more common in the absence of some of the standardization. Is that correct?

Beckie: Yeah, it’s interesting. Some of the education scholars I spoke to emphasize that before all of this, if you go back pre-2002, and there were even some earlier efforts in this direction before that, you just probably had a more uneven landscape. Like a really good teacher could do some things that would be harder to get away with now. But also that isn’t to say that’s always what happened. Teaching was probably a little more uneven before, which is interesting to think about. But this narrowing, I think, is interesting. One of the things that came up again in my reporting here, I also looked a bit at the Common Core, which is designed to help students be college and career ready. Again, like really good intentions there, but there’s this idea that, okay, most of us out in the working world, most of the reading and writing we do is shorter things. It’s emails and memos and reading an article that’s kind of shorter. It’s not sit down and read this book and then write a term paper, and that’s not what most people are doing. But it seems now that there are some things about reading whole books that change the way people read. Their reading ability is different if they only read like snippets of things and don’t have to think about like, “What is this author’s argument in some sort of a context beyond just some little passage?” And another example that came up is history, if you’re reading in history, like as a subject, and then in college as a discipline that, in addition to giving you access to a different disciplinary understanding of the world, would also enhance your reading ability in ways that just doing reading drills won’t. The reading drills can maybe bring up that floor, but there’s some ceiling there that students aren’t getting the ability to work toward, and it’s interesting just thinking about how these things are interconnected. Another dimension that came up in my reporting was students reading for pleasure. And if you think about it, oh, it makes sense. If you just read more of anything, you learn more stuff, and you can make connections between the things you learn when you’re reading this book just because you’re interested in whatever to other things you’re learning at school and elsewhere, and to just take that piece away has a lot more consequences than maybe would be apparent if you’re just thinking about the basic things that everyone needs to know.

Rebecca: One of the things that came up in your article, but we’re also just observing in our landscape is not just short-form reading, but there’s a plethora of videos available, podcasts available, AI available. For example, even on The Chronicle website, [LAUGHTER], now there’s an AI tool to get information fast. It’s great. It’s helpful to be able to get information in a lot of different modalities. There’s real strength in the ability to get information in multiple modalities. There’s benefits to that, as well as maybe some detriments to not always using all the modalities available.

Beckie: I think it’s interesting, and it’s hard for professors to figure out how much reading and writing, per se, really matter as a way to get information or a way to convey what you know. But I think, for most of them, it’s hard to imagine that there isn’t something important about those skills in particular,

John: I remember when I went to high school sometime last century, a while back, but it was really common for us to be asked in English classes and in social science classes to read multiple books in the semester or in the course of the academic year, but with the introduction of the Common Core standards that you’ve mentioned, the focus on that is a bit different. One of the things you suggest is that the Common Core focus is more on close-reading skills, which encourages practice with close-reading skills. How might that be harming students’ ability or interest in engaging with larger texts.

Beckie: When I talked to a professor, James S. Kim, who studies reading and the development of that, one of the things that came up was that there was a sort of virtuous cycle with reading, like, if you read more, you get better at it, and reading at length is just different. I mean, I think close reading is an important skill, but you can work on that while you’re reading something longer, and the reverse kind of isn’t true. And I think part of what’s emerging is that there are so many different things going on with reading, and focusing just on close reading doesn’t enable students to be able to be well prepared to do all the things they need to do with it when they get to college. Reading in college does work differently. It’s supposed to. You read differently in different courses, and that’s always been a hump for students, but it again, seems to have changed. One of the education professors I interviewed for my story was describing how her students in like, not a first-year course, didn’t read the directions correctly on an assignment, and she had to kind of go back and do that with them. And her argument, this is Julie Cohen at UVA, her argument is that this illustrates to her that it’s the teacher shortage, that someone who’s gone through the right preparation to be a classroom teacher would have covered this in high school, and students just aren’t getting enough practice with it before they get to college. That’s her read on the situation. But we’ve heard this from other professors too, that some of this is even just like a simple reading comprehension issue.

Rebecca: One of the things that we haven’t quite touched on yet is the introduction of smartphones and apps. We talked a little bit about AI and video and things and how they’ve predominated our media landscape, but what about the access to smartphones and high school students and earlier having access to these.

Beckie: There’s obviously a lot of debate around this, and I’m not sure that anyone has it all completely figured out, But there are real concerns about attention and certainly time you’re spending scrolling on your phone is time you’re not spending reading for pleasure. That seems kind of obvious. Some of this is about what’s going on outside of school. And then one of the professors I talked to, Morgan Polikoff, at USC, was saying that he thinks a sort of underappreciated dimension of this is that there’s this idea now that younger students don’t read, won’t read, and sort of a hesitation to expect it of them, right? Like, oh, we have just used something that students are going to participate in. And so his argument is that there’s sort of this acceptance of like, oh, students won’t do this, so let’s not even try to make them.

Rebecca: I wonder if that’s tied to whether or not we have role models that are doing that. I’m thinking about my own daughter, who’s in second grade. We’ve instituted family reading time mostly because we want to read, so she has her own sets of books so that she’s reading, but that’s because we’re all spending time reading. And if that’s not a culture in a space where a kid is, where people aren’t reading all the time and they are on their phones, then the expectation might be to be on a phone.

Beckie: I think it’s an interesting question. There’s obviously, like, more than one way you can be using your phone, and I think a lot of us do a lot of reading [LAUGHTER] on our phones too, but from the outside, it’s not always even clear if that is actually what you’re doing. And when I talked to James Kim, he did talk about that, what parents are doing matters here too. Are you talking about school and even if you are reading, is that visible to kids? And we know a lot of adults aren’t reading either.

John: And smartphone apps are designed to get attention, there’s a large financial incentive for the developers of those apps to build apps that capture attention, and so it’s a tough competition, from a student’s perspective, between something that provides this immediate gratification and interesting content, or learning something in more depth, which may be a little bit more tedious, which was a challenge that wasn’t faced in much earlier cohorts.

Beckie: Yeah, I mean, I’ve definitely talked to some students who are aware of that problem. I did another story for this series about students struggling to work independently and just needing more support to do ambitious work in a course, like a big paper or project. And that’s something that came up talking with students about their own habits. It is hard. And I think it’s hard even for those of us who are past that part of our lives, that distraction is real. And I think there are a lot of people who don’t really have the option of just putting the phone in a drawer for large stretches of the day, because they have to be reachable. And if you’re reachable, you’re reachable. It’s definitely a hard thing for students, and I think one that I think a lot of us can sympathize with.

Rebecca: One of the conversations that I had recently with a colleague, and we were having with some kids, where the kids were like, “Well, can you just Google that for me, if you don’t know the answer, like, just look it up.” Yeah, we used to have to, like, look in an encyclopedia, go check out a book from the library, [LAUGHTER] and just like the difference in how quickly you can get an answer to a question versus having to work a little bit to get an answer to even basic questions about whatever.

Beckie: It’s really interesting. And then I think the challenge is then easier to get an answer, but harder to know if it’s a good answer, right?

Rebecca: Yeah.

Beckie: I mean, I think that’s hard for, again, lots of folks who are long past being a student and just figuring out, okay, you can search for something, but how do you evaluate the answers you’re seeing?

John: So, generative AI and hallucinations provide students with some serious challenges there, too, in interpreting or examining the accuracy of information that’s being provided.

Rebecca: There’s a long thread on blue sky recently about hallucinations related to summaries and searches about some basic science topics. So if a kid’s like looking up a basic answer to something it could be completely inaccurate. It would be a topic that would be somewhat simple to answer, but the answer that they’re getting because they’re looking at the AI summaries are just completely inaccurate.

John: Although it has been getting better…

Rebecca: Yeah, It’s getting better, but…

John:… to be fair.

Rebecca: Again, these were searches that just happened in the past.

John: So one of the other things you talk about is the impact that the pandemic has had on student preparation for college. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Beckie: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s hard to tease out exactly what’s gone on here, just from covering pandemic teaching while it was going on, I think there was a long period of just everyone kind of wishing very hard that things would go back to normal this time, like, okay, next semester, we’re gonna be back to normal. Okay, next semester, [LAUGHTER] we’re gonna be back to normal, and I can sympathize, again, with why people had that expectation, but there are some things that really do seem to have shifted. One question is, did students just not get whatever they were supposed to learn during the period of emergency remote instruction, which, of course, looked different at different schools, like, how long did that last for and how did it work, and how much instruction were students really getting during that time, and how much were they actually expected to do their work? And as time goes by, the students coming into college who have been younger and younger whenever that happened, and have had more time to kind of regroup from that and catch up in various ways. But other things change too, and part of what seems to have changed is expectations. For a while there, students in high school were given a little more ability to push back on expectations, to say, like, “We really can’t do this. You’re asking too much,” and to be listened to in a way that they probably wouldn’t normally be. And I think, even for folks who think that was the right way to proceed during that time, it’s been hard to come back from, like, this idea that deadlines and grades and you really do have to do this stuff, just haven’t come back. And someone else I spoke with, Elena Silva at New America think tank, was describing that even just the question of, like, “Why are we here at all in the first place?” I mean, before you kind of close physical schools for a stretch of time, I think for many students, it wouldn’t really occur to them, like, “Oh, why are we here at all? What could we be doing instead?” And then she pointed out, a lot of the rest of us never quite went back to working the way we normally did, but students have kind of been expected to do that, and there’s a little more pushback and like, “What is this all for?” And it’s something I hear so much, again, from my higher ed sources, from professors, from faculty developers, like giving students that “why,” that reason, is just so important. They seem to need it more now. Getting some buy-in from them that, like, this isn’t just some busy work you’re being forced to do to like kill time, but we’re actually trying to give you something valuable, and being able to really articulate what that is, is not a silver bullet, but it does seem to be a necessary first step in a lot of cases.

Rebecca: How has the pandemic affected student preparation for college?

Beckie: I think that it’s really such a mixed bag. I talked to Tim Renick, who has all this great data from higher education in Georgia looking at entry-level courses there, and he said, like, “Oh, we really saw, like, this immediate pandemic era hit in student performance in these intro courses, but we seem to have worked through that.” Like students have kind of bounced back to normal on that front. But I do think there’s more to it than just “did you kind of get the content that you can build on in this next course?”…all these other things around, like how to function as a student, the independent work, and the sort of understanding of why you’re there, and the ability to kind of forge ahead with that. Those things do seem to have taken a hit. The other article I wrote for this series about students working independently, described that, like a lot of professors, years out from pandemic teaching, have found that if they really want students to deliver some big project or paper or deliverable, if you will, from their course. If they really see that as important, they have to create more time and space for students to work on it, give them more feedback, maybe give them more class time. It seems like students are having a harder time doing work on their own outside of class, and professors have to decide, like, if they really want that work to happen, they might have to sort of change the way it gets done, including where, including it might have to happen more when the professor is available to students in class.

John: Along with the changes in the way students were learning during the pandemic, there were also some pretty substantial learning losses that were shared fairly unequally across the population. All the students who were in elementary or high school during that period ended up being quite a bit behind the usual rate of progression. International standardized test scores like the PISA have been steadily declining, but there was a precipitous drop during the pandemic where students are about anywhere from six months to a year behind in terms of where they would have been in terms of math scores and reading scores, but those gaps are pretty unequally shared. There’s a pretty high variance in that, which again, presents some problems. What sort of things might college faculty do in addressing those learning losses and also the disparity in those losses that occurred across our student populations?

Beckie: I think this is a huge challenge. And again, it’s something that predates the pandemic, but was magnified by it. I mean, students are not getting the same kind of preparation for college. A lot depends on where you went to school and what resources you have available in your school and at home, and that’s long been true, but it’s, I think, kind of easy to pretend that it isn’t, that students are coming in and they’re all kind of expected to sort of do the same thing wherever they’re coming from. I hear a lot of debate among faculty about whether it’s on them to help students do things like learn how to study, learn how to read the directions. Know that you can’t just sit there with your textbook and a highlighter at the library, and then do well on your STEM exam in college. And on the one hand, professors are in their role because of their subject matter expertise… that’s very important to them, and in a lot of courses, making sure that students have a handle on certain material for specific reasons for the future is really the name of the game, and I can understand why people really center that. But I’m hearing a lot of other professors say, like, “Well, if students come in and they don’t know how to do something, even if it’s something kind of basic we all think they should be able to do, we have to teach them now, like they can’t do the work of the course if they don’t know how to study, or they don’t know how to read the way we expect them to read, or they don’t know how to write the way we expect them to write. And even if that doesn’t seem like it’s within the parameters of your job, if students haven’t gotten this somewhere else by the time they get to you, they’re not gonna be able to do well in your course without it, then you do have some responsibility to help them figure that out, and it’s really a lot to ask of professors. It’s not like there’s extra time for that, and also it’s not something that professors necessarily know how to teach students. They don’t have the same kind of training as a K-12 teacher. Some professors really don’t have much training at all in teaching, and it’s really complicated to figure out why people are missing something that they’re missing, and what they need to kind of get there, and if you’re seeing different kinds of misunderstandings or mistakes or gaps than in the past, like that does really put a lot more work on faculty. But what’s going to happen if they don’t try? Like, what’s going to happen to those students?

John: The No Child Left Behind Act was put together to try to make sure that the quality of education was raised for all students so that we weren’t losing more students along the way. And it’s resulted in some changes that probably help students at the bottom a little bit more, but it also may limit the range of topics that students learn and the depth of topics. But in terms of colleges, one of the things that we encourage faculty to do in terms of creating an inclusive teaching environment is to provide more structure on assignments, to use rubrics to make expectations more transparent. That has been shown to reduce some of those equity gaps in outcomes, but it might also tend to reduce the time that students spend on developing critical thinking skills. So that’s a trade off that I think is at the heart of some of this discussion, both in K-12 and also in college discussions. We want to make sure that all students have equal opportunities, but perhaps some of the strategies we’re using to do that might limit learning for all students to those things that we’re focusing on in our rubrics or a test. Do you see any way of resolving that, other than continually experimenting to come up with the best balance?

Beckie: Yeah, I don’t think I have the answer there. It’s hard, and I think it’s hard to ask anyone teaching, meet students where they are and then get them where they’re supposed to be. That’s a tall order, always, and it seems especially hard now. It reminds me a bit of the pandemic era debate on how much flexibility to give students and how much structure, which kind of cuts similarly, like, Okay, it’s a crisis. Students need flexibility. They don’t have time, they can’t meet these deadlines. And then it kind of turns out as time goes on, like, oh, the same students whose lives beyond the classroom really require them to have flexibility also really need structure, because they haven’t gotten the same opportunities to figure out how to build it for themselves. And so how do you support both of those things? It’s hard, and I think like figuring out how to create more equitable conditions, I don’t think you can create equitable conditions, given the very different background students are coming from. But to move toward that and also really support learning is hard, and I think there are things that professors are doing to try to help students that end up not helping all of them or not working out as intended. And yeah, I think there is constant experimentation with that. I think it’s kind of hard to overstate how difficult all of this is if you really care about it and try hard to make it better, as many of the people I talk to in my job are oriented to.

Rebecca: As you were asking your question, John, I was thinking, it’s not just like critical thinking, it’s like creativity, there’s just a lot of space there, I don’t know if balance is the right word either, right if we can find a balance, it’s just like, how do you keep all of those things in the kitchen [LAUGHTER] while you’re cooking as ingredients? So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Beckie: Yeah, that’s a hard question, isn’t it? One of the thoughts I had as I was working on this K-12 story is just how hard it is to remember what it was like for there to be this bipartisan education effort. Consensus is too strong, but like, just sort of this shared understanding, even of like, what are the problems and how might they be tackled? That feels just very unfamiliar right now, [LAUGHTER] even though I was there writing about some of this as it was happening. So that’s just sort of wild to think about. I think for colleges and professors, what’s next, I think, is partly just recognizing there does seem to be something that isn’t just a short-term shift in play here, and just kind of accepting that, I guess, and figuring out some way to try to hold things together in light of that. There’s sort of this crisis approach that everyone was in for a while, and that’s faded. But. It does seem that student work habits and expectations really have changed, and figuring out how to move forward with that is going to continue to be important. Again, one thing I have been thinking about is, is there some shift in what happens in class, and what does that look like? I’ve talked to a lot of individual professors who are rethinking that, both because of these student preparation issues and also because of AI and the possibility that students will turn in work that they haven’t really done work on themselves, would obviously be enormously complicated to expect students to be in class more during college, but that’s one of the things I’ve started wondering about. I mean, this sort of expectation that you spend a couple hours on your own doing this independent work for every hour you’re in the room seems like it’s kind of broken down. And so what do you do with that? I think there’s an answer there for professors, and then there’s the much harder kind of system level answer to that.

John: Well, thank you. It’s been great talking to you. And we’d also like to put in a plug for The Chronicle’s podcast. Could you talk just a little bit about that?

Beckie: Sure, The Chronicle has a fairly new podcast called College Matters, which is hosted by my colleague Jack Stripling, and it’s a great way for people inside and outside of higher ed to kind of follow along with some of the big issues of the day. Jack features Chronicle journalists and also some of the people we write about, expert sources, policy makers, folks who work on campuses. And it’s a really fun listen, because he’s a really good interviewer, and I would encourage folks to check that out.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us. I know that you’ll continue being an inspiration for our podcast and always a good read.

Beckie: Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

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

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

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380. Chatbots to Support Learning

Posted in edtech, educational technology, equity, first-generation, higher education, learning, pedagogy, rubrics, teaching
February 12, 2025

Generative AI tools have made it easy to create custom chatbots. In this episode, JeVaughn Lancaster joins us to discuss the process of creating chatbots and some potential uses in higher education. JeVaughn is the Manager of Instructional Design at Lynn University. JeVaughn’s work using generative AI to support effective course design resulted in a Best in Track award at the 2024 OLC Innovate Conference. Some of her more recent work on this topic was presented at the OLC Accelerate Conference in November 2024.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Generative AI tools have made it easy to create custom chatbots. In this episode, we discuss the process of creating chatbots and some potential uses in higher education.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is JeVaughn Lancaster. She is the Manager of Instructional Design at Lynn University. JeVaughn’s work using generative AI to support effective course design resulted in a Best in Track award at the 2024 OLC Innovate Conference. Some of her more recent work on this topic was presented at the OLC Accelerate Conference in November 2024.
Welcome, JeVaughn.

Jevaughn: Hi. Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

John: It’s good to see you. I saw you at your session, which is what resulted in this invitation. So we’re really glad to have you join us. Today’s teas are:… JeVaughn, are you drinking any tea?

Jevaughn: I actually do have tea. It’s been my heart and soul for the past couple weeks, I should say. It is a ginger honey tea, but I added a splash of soursop. I don’t know how to explain what a soursop is. So you can drink just that one. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: …sounds good. I have a London Strand breakfast.

John: And today I have a Darjeeling tea.

Rebecca: So, today we invited you here to discuss your work developing GPTs to serve as chatbots that support faculty. Can you start first by describing what a custom GPT is, or maybe even what a GPT is? [LAUGHTER]

Jevaughn: Oh, yes, that is, I feel, the perfect way to start before we talk a little bit deeper in what a custom GPT is. GPT really stands for generative pre-trained transformers, and a lot of people really get that confused. But when we say generative, that’s exactly what it does. It generates content based on a multiple of things, like patterns, responses to questions. A lot of people know ChatGPT as the essay writer, [LAUGHTER] lo and behold, but that’s really generative. So it generates things. Then when it gets into the pre-trained aspect of it, it is trained by a huge data set of information that people feed into the GPT. So every time somebody enters a prompt, it continuously trains it and builds that data set to be a little bit bigger. And then the transformer part. I like to always say that the transformer part is like a multitasker, so it puts all those little data bytes and pieces together to analyze it. So it’s almost like using a learned language. It identifies a variety of patterns, and again, like I said, it’s a multitasker. So it brings in all of these bits and pieces of information and then generates the response to your prompt, making it a GPT. So with that said, a custom GPT is really dedicated to a specific task of something that you do often on a daily basis, that you just want to make your life a little bit easier so you want to customize something for your immediate needs. So I really think that’s what a custom GPT could be, in a nutshell.

John: So in order to create one of these custom GPTs, you do need a paid chatGPT account, and initially to use one, you needed a paid GPT account, but that’s changed. Are there any restrictions on the use of GPTs that others create for free users?

Jevaughn: Yeah, you’re right. So before, when someone created a GPT, in order to share that, the end user would also have to have that paid subscription. But now with the updates, it’s so easy, because what happens is that the paid user can create a GPT and then share that and as long as you have an account set up, a username and password, it doesn’t necessarily have to be paid, you’re able to then use that customized GPT.

John: So that means that instructors can create GPTs for their students, and people in professional development roles can create GPTs to share with their faculty, which is what you were presenting on there.

Jevaughn: Exactly, and I feel that it makes everything so much easier, because you have those that are really into it, and they’re creating all different types of customized GPTs on so many different topics. And then those that may not be as great with technology that they’re not really able to put these things together. However, it’s so easy to use by adding in those prompts, it’s already built and customized for whatever it is that they need, so it really makes life a little bit easier. Now, there are a couple things that a free subscription might struggle with, even when using a custom GPT, and there are a few restrictions that they have. So, for example, tokens, they won’t be able to submit as many prompts as someone else with a paid subscription. Or if there are bandwidth issues, if there’s a lot of people using ChatGPT in one instance, someone with a free account may struggle. They may have a lot of slow responses to their GPT.

Rebecca: At OLC Accelerate, you provided a presentation on creating GPTs? Could you describe the process of creating a GPT?

Jevaughn: Absolutely. Oh, my goodness, that’s the fun part. And I think a lot of people feel that it’s a lot more difficult than it really is to do. It’s so simple. So when you’re logged into your ChatGPT account, there’s a little button on the left side that says, “Explore GPTs.” Once you click on that, it’ll open up this toolbar, and on the right side, you click on it, and it says “Create.” And it has a list of prompts that you can follow along to really help you build your GPT. It’s going to ask a description. So there’s where you say this is what this custom GPT is going to do. You can keep it short, sweet and to the point, because it is what it is, it’s the description. And then after that, it’s going to ask you some instructions. So what are you going to instruct that GPT to do? And this part is really important, because it’s almost like guiding the GPT on what to do. You’re training it. And just like any other GPT model, you have to train it and you have to fine tune it and customize it to fulfill your needs. So because of that, you want to add in things like, if you’re building rubrics, what are those specific criteria that you want if you ask it for a rubric, if you’re using it for grading, you’re going to want to have to put in those specific details: “Well, I don’t want my feedback to be more than 100 words,” or “I want it to be in a nice tone.” You really have to give it these specific instructions so that your GPT will give you the output that you’re really looking for. So after you do the instructions, there’s a section called knowledge, and that part is really important, because there’s where you can do things like upload specific documentations that you want your GPT to pull from, and that’ll give you more straightforward responses. So rather than ChatGPT searching random articles or information that it finds on the internet, it’s going to first go by the knowledge you provided. It’s all part of the GPT training. So for example, at OLC, we created a GPT that was almost like a teacher’s assistant. And it was important because we found that a lot of faculty members struggle with learning objectives and how to create it and align it. So with that, we took the Bloom’s Taxonomy chart, and there’s some people that still like the old Bloom, some folks like the new Bloom’s. Then there’s the digital Blooms. So to make everyone happy, we uploaded all three [LAUGHTER], so there’s no discrepancy at all. And then there’s many specific things that you can also add in. So if you’re looking for things that have to do with universal design for learning, you can link to the UDL page from CAST. There’s so many things that you can do so it can give you that information that you want when you ask it as a prompt. So all of that is going to be built out into the knowledge section. So you’re building something that you can utilize to help you with your information. If you are conducting research, or if you’re using it to help you with research, you can link specific databases that you would use so you find those peer- reviewed articles. There’s so many things that you can do to train it, and then, hey, if you find out something’s not working, you can edit it and fix it and go back. [LAUGHTER] So after you finish adding your description and giving it your instructions, you can then also give it some talking points. You know, when you log on to ChatGPT, sometimes it’ll give you four different options. You can add in question prompts. You can do that, and then you can say, “Okay, now that we’re done, what are we going to name you?” And it’ll offer you suggestions for a name, it’ll offer you suggestions for an icon image, and you can generate it, save it, and you have your custom GPT. [LAUGHTER] Again, it’s a lot easier to accomplish than it seems.

Rebecca: I know it sounds so intimidating at first, like, make a custom GPT is like,” Ah, I’m not qualified.”

Jevaughn: Yeah, it does. It does. And then when you get into it, it’s just like, “Wow, I really just did that all by myself,” [LAUGHTER] and you can customize it down to how it’s responding to you. I have a friend and a colleague that has it sound like a Southern belle every time it responds to them. It’s amazing, the things that you can do with your GPTs. You can really customize it and personalize it.

John: And it’s really no more difficult than just interacting with ChatGPT in other ways. When would you use a custom GPT rather than just interacting directly with ChatGPT?

Jevaughn: I think if you want specific tasks done, because there’s so many times when you are working with just regular ChatGPT, you have to prompt after prompt after prompt until you really get the output that you want. If it’s a task that you’re doing 10 times a day, it’ll be more stressful sometimes, I think, in my opinion, to continuously prompt to get things down to right where you want it, rather than have this custom GPT that I can upload an assignment that I just created and say, “Hey, can I have an analytical rubric off of this and it’ll just give me the output that I need immediately with one question.

Rebecca: Are these custom GPTs less subject to hallucinations?

Jevaughn: I think so. I think that they really are, because once you feed it that information, and once you feed it that knowledge, it’s always going to pull from there first. Now, there’s something that I have noticed, when a lot of faculty members try to look for content, it’ll definitely hallucinate a lot of links. So a lot of the links are always, I feel, fictitious. You would click on it, you’d get the 404 code. You’ll get “this video no longer exists. However, if you actually search for that author, you’ll find it, 9 times out of 10 you’ll find it. So I feel that it’s definitely reduced the amount of hallucinations. And then in your custom GPT also, if there’s a database that you frequent that some people will link it to Google scholar or something that may not be behind a paywall, you’ll be able to go right to it as well. Or I’ve even suggested that with those links and titles that the GPTs might give you, log into your institution’s library and see, 9 times out of 10, you might find it there too. So yeah, in my use I’ve noticed that it reduces hallucinations.

John: Going back to your earlier response, where you suggested that it’s good for things that you might dorepeatedly, you’ve also suggested that it could be good if you want to create something that you share with others. So could you talk a little bit more about how faculty have responded to the GPTs you created to assist faculty? Have many faculty been using it, and how have they reacted to it?

Jevaughn: Oh, my goodness, my faculty absolutely love it. [LAUGHTER] They love it. And then also they’ve had suggestions to take it to the next level. It’s incredible. So first and foremost, I mentioned those pesky learning objectives. For whatever reason, it’s hard for a faculty member to think about alignment in the sense of using those specific words. They’re definitely experts in their own areas and maybe teaching and pedagogy is not one of them, so sometimes it could be a little bit more difficult. So one of the main things that all the faculty love is those learning objectives, because they can say, “Hey, I need this aligned properly.” Now, one thing that I did receive was that some faculty members noticed that when I first created it, they noticed that it wasn’t aligning to the correct course level. So maybe a 100-level class was getting “create” or something in the higher levels of objectives. So I had to go back in, I refined the GPT and say, “Hey, if a faculty member asked for 100-level, I want it to align with these levels of Bloom’s. And if it’s a 400 level, I wanted to align with these levels of Bloom’s.” So then once you regenerate it and you save it now, hey, as soon as somebody reopens the link, they’re getting all of those updates in real time, so now they’re able to help with their alignment a little bit better. So their suggestions really come in handy. I appreciate it. I listened very carefully at those.

Rebecca: Can you talk about some productive uses for GPTs to support instructors and students?

Jevaughn: Yeah, definitely. So for faculty members, I already mentioned those rubrics, there’s rubrics, and that’s such a time saver right there, because I know that that’s really my pain point when it comes to course development. So yeah, there’s a lot of things that faculty members and students can use customized GPTs for. So, for example, I’ve seen a lot of faculty members use it to create lesson plans. We have two and a half hour block scheduling, and there’s many times where some faculty members teaching four classes in a block, it’s tough sometimes for them to make sure that they have their daily lesson plans. They create timed daily lesson plans to keep them on track for their two and a half hour block. Quizze, is straightforward. You can upload a PDF chapter and say, “Hey, can you create me a quiz with 20 questions?” And you’ll be able to get those and of course, you’ll have to tweak them a little bit. I would never say, to take whatever it is that a regular GPT or a customized GPT, and just copy and paste and put it in your class. We don’t want to do that. As educators, we always want to fact check anything that any type of AI gives us. But again, it’s a time saver. You want to help save your time and your brain power to do tasks that will more benefit the students than staying and creating rubrics. [LAUGHTER] Discussion questions is a really big use case, and I’ve seen faculty members do this for both asynchronous and face-to-face classes. For the asynchronous that’s really self explanatory, but for the face-to-face classes, I’ve seen it really help the discussions flow nicer in the classroom, because now, if the faculty member is discussing an article or a chapter, they take that same article, run it through ChatGPT, and they ask for discussion questions. And it really helps enhance the course, because they get brand new course discussion questions every day, or if they’re teaching it multiple times throughout that block, each class has a different question and a different discussion, which really, really helps. Feedback and grading, I already talked about that. A big use case is accessibility needs. Now accessibility is growing, and UDL, we preach all the time, and there’s many times where you just can’t figure out how to make an assignment accessible, but you can get those suggestions from ChatGPT as well. Now, on the student side of it, it’s awesome because students can use it as tutors. And I know that I was telling them at OLC that I created a custom GPT for my son in math, and it’s just an adaptive learning so it’ll provide, depending on how you create it, the one that I have will provide multiple questions, and he’ll have to answer it, and if he gets it wrong, it’s adaptive. So it’ll break the question apart and say, you got this part correct, this part correct. But let’s focus more on this step, and it’ll take him on a step-by-step journey. And then after he completes 20 questions, he gets a report, a spreadsheet saying all the ones he got correct, all the ones he got incorrect, and it showed him the steps of where. So really good for student tutoring. Another thing is research help. It definitely is great for students. I’m a dissertation chair myself, and I help the students use AI to leverage their work. So I just had a student that had Zoom focus groups and interviews, so the ChatGPT was able to transcribe the audio, it was able to create pseudonyms for each attendee, so it’ll help the privacy, and it was able to pull out themes, so now the student is able to spend that brain power on other parts of the research and that content really and not spend hours of time trying to transcribe items. It’s really interesting, and I feel that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so many things, so many different use cases that all of these GPT models can do.

John: In terms of creating a tutor, one of the first things I did after seeing your session was I created a tutorial for my intro micro economics course, because the book I’m using is tied to an OER textbook. So I could upload the whole textbook to it and ask them to use it, and also have it ask students initially, what they know about the topic, ask them what they have questions about and then have them ask their question, but then guide them to an answer, rather than directly answering the question. And it works remarkably well. And because it’s trained just on the textbook that I’m using, I haven’t seen any substantial hallucinations. And so far, it’s been working well.

Jevaughn: It’s incredible when you’re able to really dive so deep, to be so specific, and accomplish those things with AI. And I mean, I can even say after one of the faculty members created a GPT focusing only on assignments, so he has the GPT assign students, I think it was like six different research papers, and what happens is that everything is uploaded into that knowledge base, and then from levels easy, mid, difficult, by difficulty, and then once the student enters their name, it will never give the students the same assignment twice, and it will always give the student one of each level of difficulty depending on what week of instruction they’re in. It’s amazing how far and how creative everyone has become customizing these GPTs.

John: Should we be careful in uploading information about our students in terms of personal information? Might perhaps we want to use pseudonyms or something else for students so that they’re not being trained on information specific to individual students?

Jevaughn: Absolutely. Yeah, data privacy is really, really important, especially when we’re talking about students, because we have to be so careful. Remember, anything, especially if you’re not in a paid account that you upload to ChatGPT is then used to train future models and versions of it. However, what I found out is that according to ChatGPT now, both the free version and the paid version allows you to say if you’re okay with sharing your data or not. On the Settings icon, there’s a data control button, and one of the options under data control is to improve the model for everyone. Now, if that is turned on, they’re taking all of the data that you put in and using that to train but if you turn it off, it won’t share your data, and it’ll delete those conversations, so it won’t share anything. Now is that 100%? I don’t know. Who knows? Personally, I don’t 100% trust it, so I don’t feel like I would ever upload actual student data, God forbid, financials or anything like that, but I would still be careful on it, but that’s just an added step of security to turn that off and make sure that you’re not sharing or you’re not giving them the right to use whatever information that you upload.

Rebecca: It also seems like if we’re having students using GPTs in our class, that talking about data privacy and things might be a topic that we might want to cover with our students. You want to talk a little bit about ways to maybe do that with students?

Jevaughn: Absolutely, and I think that really goes with the whole topic of AI literacy. I always recommend to faculty members that, hey, number one, if you’re going through some of these information sessions and you’re learning how to use AI in your classroom and you’re using AI to create those discussion questions, let’s teach the students the proper way of also using AI ethically in their academic work. So I think that a conversation that should be had. I’m sure that high schoolers are already having those conversations. I know that my son, who’s in 11th grade, definitely is with his teachers, but I think that that’s a conversation not only to have right on entry when the students are entering the institutions, but constantly, it should be everywhere. It should be in the syllabus. It should be in that very first class of every semester. You want to make sure that students are aware that whatever it is they upload is fair game unless they protect themselves. I mean, we had to have those conversations with social media also. So I feel like this is just the next layer.

Rebecca: What’s your advice to instructors about disclosing their own use of AI to their students?

Jevaughn: I think it’s important, because I feel that students are really less motivated to use it for non practical purposes. [LAUGHTER] If they know that their instructor is using it as well, they know that their instructor is well versed in the use of AI, they’ll be careful, and they’ll be very focused on their content, rather than putting in a prompt and submitting it. My advice to faculty members is always, “Hey, you can go ahead and disclose that you’re using AI, but also give your students the opportunity to focus their brain power on what you feel is more important.” So my example is that, for me, I’m all about the content. I want to make sure that my students know the content, forward, backward with their eyes closed. I want them to know that, however, if there’s a presentation, go ahead and use AI to create that PowerPoint. I can care less as long as you know that content, you can focus that brain power on solidifying that content and using AI as an assistant for you. And I feel like that would be one of the better use cases, or the better discussion that a faculty member can have with their students rather than saying, edit your paper using ChatGPT.

John: One concern that a lot of faculty members have is that students may be using this as a substitute for learning instead of as an assistant for learning. What can we do to encourage students to use AI to facilitate their learning and not to short circuit that learning?

Jevaughn: Yeah, I think that it will really enhance the overall conversation and relationship between the student and the faculty member, because now the student is able to go off on their own and ask all of these questions of inquiry to their GPTs and then come back to their faculty member, or their professor, and say, “Hey, so I was thinking about x, y, z, and this is what I found.” So now the faculty member would have the responsibility of saying, Oh, my goodness, this is wonderful. Let’s discuss it more, and it’ll help the student boost his confidence, or the faculty member can say “Mmmm, you don’t have that quite right. Where did you find your information? Let’s figure this out now together that you’ve already went out on your own to try to ask the question.” And I feel that these days, a lot of students are lacking that wow moment in their educational career. I think most of us just had a wow moment that’s memorable. It’s always important to make some type of learning memorable, and I think a lot of students are losing that. And I think a lot of students, and maybe even faculty members, are losing that even more with all of these AI, but if we have the ability to let the students go fish and learn on their own without having that negative point against them saying, oh my goodness, I’m using AI, am I a terrible person? Rather than helping the students utilize it the right way. That might just be their moment of making that educational moment memorable for the student, because you’re now on their level in how you can adapt to their educational needs. And I think that’s really important.

John: And our students come in with really diverse prior learning. And one benefit of AI is it provides an opportunity to bring everybody up to a higher level, because it can address their specific needs. It’s available 24 by seven, and it allows students to get help when they need it, where they need it, on the specific concepts and topic they need, as long as they’re not doing that as an alternative to actually learning. So with every aspect of AI, there’s some really strong positives, but there’s also some really serious concerns, and I think we all have a lot to learn about how to use this effectively, but for me, at least, it strikes me as being really silly to try to ignore AI and assume that this is not an issue we need to deal with, because students are going to be working with AI in some form for the rest of their lives, and not preparing them for that world strikes me as being not particularly helpful for our students.

Jevaughn: Yeah, I agree. At this point, we’ve all realized that it’s not going anywhere, it’s going to evolve [LAUGHTER] and move on to so many different things. So we have to be adaptable to technology. AI, it’s updating as we speak. [LAUGHTER] It’s learning more and more as we speak.

Rebecca: And I think that one of the things that really strikes me is that you were pointing out motivating curiosity, and when someone is indicating that they were curious, to not smash it, regardless of whether or not their curiosity led to a correct answer. And I think one of the things that I’ve experienced with students, even prior to the surge of AI is that sometimes when students are asking questions, even when they were just Googling answers, is the way that they were asking the question was where their misconception lies. And so sometimes having inquiries about how they were asking the question, or how they were using AI to answer their own questions could be an interesting way to engage with students, and opening the GPT and exploring with them could be a great exercise to do with students.

Jevaughn: Absolutely and having these types of discussions with our librarians, I found out, and I didn’t know this until maybe right before that conference in November, [LAUGHTER] that actually, when you’re working with APA and student writing, it’s an APA requirement that the student attach the entire conversation with the GPT as an appendix. And that part I didn’t realize. So if the student puts in their paper and say, I want this. I want that, they have to include every word of it so they can’t delete those conversations. I was floored by that. I had no idea. I’m like, well, that’s interesting. I never knew that APA required that, but according to our librarians, they do,

Rebecca: But also not a bad thing for faculty to request. Sometimes, if we’re asking students to use AI or use a GPT as a way to get to an answer to use as a learning tool to show their work, it’s something they can save. [LAUGHTER]

Jevaughn: It’s true, and most institutions use tools like Grammarly, and I know that a lot of our faculty members require students to check their work through Grammarly to make sure that the grammar and punctuation. But then there’s the new Grammarly, where it does just that. It records every keystroke that the students are typing to say, “the students typed this,” this part came from AI, this part was copied and pasted from this website, and all of the rest of it seems to be human text. And then the students can create a share link and share it with their instructor, and you see it in real time as the students are drafting their papers. It’s amazing. I mean, AI has come such a long way from where most people think it began two years ago. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Feels a little creepy, but okay. [LAUGHTER]

John: AI has been going on for decades, and it was always something that was going to happen soon, and then all of a sudden, it arrived, way before anyone expected anything this powerful to be released with an interface so friendly.

Jevaughn: Yeah, no warning, just boom, here we are. [LAUGHTER]

John: …right before finals.

Jevaughn: Yes, yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Alright, so I always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Jevaughn: As far as AI [LAUGHTER] or GPTs is concerned, I think about it all the time, again, from where it started to where it is now. I was just reading where there’s a K-12 school in Colorado that has two-hour intensive AI instruction, and it’s completely done by AI, the instruction, the curriculum, everything, and the rest of the day it focuses on life skills, which, to be honest, that’s dwindling a little bit with all of the gaming and all the other technologies, there’s got to be a gap somewhere. So focusing on life skills isn’t bad, but I think in the near future, I feel that we’ll see a lot of enhancements when it comes to that data security, because it’s such a hot topic right now. We’re already doing so much with accessibility, but I think that’s going to be a huge push when it comes to AI and ethics and the ethical concerns behind it. Who is actually behind those keys training. So we really have to think about that. And honestly, I feel that’s where it’s going. Of course, it’s going to advance when it comes to the databases and the types of knowledge that it provides, but I think in the near future, we’ll see a lot of ethical concerns and a lot of data privacy concerns being targeted.

John: Well, thank you. This has been a fascinating conversation, and your presentation inspired me to start creating GPTs because, at the time, I didn’t realize that free users could access them. But now that that’s there, it opens up so many possibilities for supporting students and for supporting instructors and anybody more broadly. So it’s a really nice improvement.

Jevaughn: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s so exciting of where we’re going.

Rebecca: Thanks for a great conversation. And it really is important for folks to understand that it really isn’t that hard to create them. It sounds really scary and really intimidating, but it really isn’t.

Jevaughn: Yeah, the platform is already built for you. You just have to feed in that information. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you. This has been great.

Jevaughn: Thank you guys so much for having me. So much fun.

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

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

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366. Connecting to Core Values

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

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

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

Show Notes

Transcript

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

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: That makes sense.

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

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

John: Very good.

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: That’s great.

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting.

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

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

John: That would be great. [LAUGHTER]

Bryan: Alright, man, thank you.

John: Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you.

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

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

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358. Essentials of the New Science of Learning

Posted in attention, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, equity, first-generation, first-year classes, higher education, interleaved practice, learning, metacognition, neuromyths, pedagogy, reflective practice, retrieval practice, spaced practice, stereotype threat, teaching
September 11, 2024

Most freshman students enter college with little knowledge of evidence-based strategies for successfully navigating the college experience. In this episode, Todd Zakrajsek joins us to discuss a variety of approaches that students can use to more efficiently achieve their learning goals. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the Director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published six books (so far) in the past five years. His most recent book is Essentials of the New Science of Learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Most freshman students enter college with little knowledge of evidence-based strategies for successfully navigating the college experience. In this episode, we explore a variety of approaches that students can use to more efficiently achieve their learning goals.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guest today is Todd Zakrajsek. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the Director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published six books (so far) in the past five years. His most recent book is Essentials of the New Science of Learning. Welcome back, Todd.

Todd: Well, thank you. It’s great to be back.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: Todd, what do you got today?

Todd: Oh, today I have a white ginger pear.

Rebecca: Nice.

John: Very nice. And I am drinking something similar, a ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: Nice. I’ve got Cardamon Cinnamon.

John: Nice.

John: We were just talking to you a few months ago about your last most recent book, but we’ve invited you here today to discuss your newest most recent book of the year. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin story of The Essentials of the New Science of Learning: The Power of Learning in Harmony with Your Brain.

Todd: When I worked on The New Science of Learning: Learning in Harmony with Your Brain, that book, its third edition has gotten up to be about 265 pages, and the book was actually written for students. It is still for students, but when it started, the whole concept of this book is it would be used as kind of an ancillary text in a class. And a friend of mine out in California used it in a community college in a developmental math class, and they found, actually, when they used the book in the class, that the attrition rate went down. And for developmental math, that’s a very important concept. In fact, the students who did pass for the next semester, the students who had learned about the science of learning, that attrition rate was even further down. So it’s helped out a lot. The problem is, once it gets up to 265 pages, you can’t use it as kind of an ancillary book. You know, “Read this chapter, it’ll take you 10 minutes.” The New Science of Learning is built more to be like a primary book for a first-year seminar course. So this book, being The Essentials, allowed me to come back and add some new things about AI and a few other things. Is kind of a streamlined version of that that can be used in a class, so that you could say to your students, for instance, “Hey, on Wednesday, make sure you read the chapter on sleep,” and then you talk about the content. When Wednesday comes along, you spend five minutes talking about sleep, what did you learn? And then you move on with the content. And that’s how you can infuse it in the class.

Rebecca: Why isn’t this material taught to students earlier in their education process.

Todd: Aaaah… this is a question that we’ve talked about before with other kinds of science of learning things. It’s frustrating. I take the breath because it’s frustrating. It’s funny, across country, if you ask students two questions: “do you like to learn?” and “do you like school?” you tend to find that the students will say yes to both those questions until they hit right about third grade. In third grade, we start picking up some of the testing and really focusing more on content, and at that point, we start telling students, you need to learn these things, but we don’t tell them how. There just is this assumption that because people are learners, that they can learn it. But learning out of a book is very artificial in terms of how we evolved. So the concept is students should be taught that, and I really believe they should be taught that starting in about third grade. And could you imagine a student that comes into college that has spent eight or nine years learning how to learn along with the content that they have? I think it would be amazing, but typically not done, so it should really be done as soon as they get to college and as quickly as possible. And it doesn’t matter who I talk to. I have talked to students from all kinds of disciplines. I’ve talked to students in medical schools, nursing programs, a lot of the health professions, they do a ton of content really fast. I’ve talked to students in philosophy and history and psychology, and almost invariably, people will come up afterwards and say, “Why doesn’t anybody teach us this stuff?” And so the students see value in it too. We get focused on content, and we don’t tend to do it.

Rebecca: It’s interesting, Todd, that you’re saying that there’s a wide range of people that are hungry for this information because before we were recording, I was doing graduate student orientation. I was talking to a couple of MBA students who had been out in the field, into their career 10 years, coming back to school, and I had embedded some of this kind of information in their online orientation. They said, “Oh yeah, I watched this TED talk that you had included [LAUGHTER] about the science of learning, and it was really great. It was so interesting.” And I had included that study from Michelle Miller.

Todd: Oh, yeah.

Rebecca: And he had read it, and it was fascinating. He’s like, “I was so surprised that I didn’t know some of this stuff.” So we’re talking about it at lunch today, and they were all talking about, “Yeah, that was really interesting. I’m so glad you included that.” But it just goes to show that it doesn’t really matter who our learners are. They’re really hungry for this information, and it’s really valuable to them.

Todd: Yeah, I will say quickly, in terms of the book that a lot of this is drawn from, which is The New Science of Learning, the full version of it that I have at the end is, if you find this valuable, or if you’d like to just ask other questions, I put my email address in there and just send me an email. And I got an email like, three weeks ago from a student who’s going into a health professions field, and he’s going in as a post grad. I mean, he’s going in as a master’s student, and they’re all required to read that book coming into the class, so it’s at any level. In fact, faculty find a lot of the stuff new and interesting to them, so we should teach it to everybody. Somebody should write a book about it.

Rebecca: Huh.

John: And fortunately, you have.

Todd: Hey, [LAUGHTER] me and a couple other people have too.[LAUGHTER]

John: So you mostly focus on effective learning strategies and how students can use the time more efficiently in learning. You also provide a lot of other advice to students about challenges that might arise for different students or students in different categories. Could you talk a little bit about some of the other advice you provide in addition to those directly related to learning?

Todd: Yeah, there’s a lot of other things that I think are really important. There’s a chapter on how we learn and a chapter on how we remember things, which learning and memory are separate, and those talk about the structures and the way we do that, but there’s so many other things that come into play, and a lot of things from social psychology. Everybody talks about cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology, but if a person understands exactly how to learn. If you’re really, really frustrated at the time you’re trying to learn, it doesn’t matter the actual cognitive structures, because the social part of it just wipes that out. And so things like microaggressions, how we perceive other people and how we interact with other people, has a huge impact on learning. Stereotype threat, whenever we get in a situation, if we’ve got a person who is a minority within a class. So it could be a male in a nursing program with mostly women. It could be in some discipline that has mostly men with a woman. It could be a student from an underrepresented group. When there’s an individual there that doesn’t typically come into the play, they’re under this pressure all the time that if they do poorly, then it reflects on “Well, maybe men can’t do nursing,” and so there’s extra pressure on them, and they tend to struggle with that. And things like imposter syndrome, almost everybody I’ve talked to at some point or another says that I don’t feel like I really belong, or I don’t feel like I know as much as other people think I know. And so those types of things, along with goal setting and dealing with or helping people who are working. I mean, what happens when you’re trying to work? Huge proportion of our students now work part time, but there’s a large portion also that work full time in addition to being full-time students. So a lot of those things can be drawn into this whole concept, and all those things are in the book.

Rebecca: One of the topics that you discuss is managing cognitive load. Can you talk about some of the recommendations you make related to this?

Todd: Yeah, cognitive load is one of the foundational things. And if you’re a listener and do not understand what cognitive load is, one of the best things you can do is get up to speed on that a little bit. A place to start, I always say, is Wikipedia. And if there was a motto that I would throw in there, it would be Wikipedia, great place to start, and a hideous place to finish. And I just want to point that out there, because there’s some stuff you can get pretty quickly. But here’s the thing with cognitive load, is it basically boils down to there’s only so much information your brain can process at any given time. And if you try to do too much, then it pretty much shuts down enough in one area so that it can process a different area. Be a little bit like if you’re putting together an IKEA bookshelf for the very first time, and your significant other comes into the room and says, “Hey, where do you want to have lunch?” And you may very well say, “Not right now,” and your brain’s just full with all of these parts and how things are supposed to fit together. Once you put 10, 15 IKEA bookcases together, you could carry on a conversation with somebody else while you’re doing it. And that’s an all cognitive load issue. The first time you do something, it is taxing, and it takes extra energy for your brain to sort out all the pieces. But the more you do something, the easier it becomes. And this is why, as an expert, you have to be careful. Because as an expert, I might say to my students, read this article, this 10-page article, and I might read that 10-page article very, very quickly, because I’ve read this kind of stuff over and over and over again, but the novice is going to take way more time because it’s their first time doing it. So we can talk to students about the fact that this is going to be hard when you start, and then as you do it, more and more, it’ll be easier, and that’s a cognitive load issue. As you actually work on things as combinations, as things come together, you build what are called schemas, and those are like scripts that all come together, and as you activate a whole schema, then that’s just there. If I go golfing, I don’t have to think about every little piece of that. Or if I’m driving, I don’t have to think about how hard I turn the wheel and turning on a turn signal and everything else. I have a schema for being in a car and the types of things you do. So as we practice and go through these things, that’s the cognitive load issue. There’s going to be heavy cognitive load, which we have to be cognizant of, and then, as we do it, it becomes easier. And then there’s another piece to this. Is if there’s things in your environment that don’t help you to learn, but they take up cognitive energy, so a conversation by people on the other side of the room, pretty much everybody in here listening this has probably, at some point been reading something, and people are talking, and you either say, “Excuse me, could you quit talking?” Or you pack up and go someplace else. If you’re reading a hard article, that will happen. If you’re reading something like a novel, people can be all over the room talking, and you don’t care. That’s a cognitive load issue. Hard article, high cognitive load, an easy thing, lower cognitive load. This is one I will jump in there and say, too, this is an area that AI has me very concerned. Because as you start anything, you start at the foundational level, and it’s challenging, but as you work with it over and over again, it becomes less and less challenging, then you can move up to more complex things. If AI is doing the simple foundational stuff for us, then we don’t develop that base that allows us to kind of automatically process something, so that we can move to a higher, more complicated thing and then practice that and go to a higher, more complicated thing. If AI is doing a chunk of it, we don’t ever develop the base of it. And so I’m concerned with respect to cognitive load development and how AI might come into play with that, but that’s the two-minute version of a topic that we spend two or three class periods on [LAUGHTER] in a course in psychology.

John: One of the many other topics you address in this book is metacognition. Why is developing metacognition so important? And what are some strategies that students can use to increase their metacognition?

Todd: Yeah, cognitive load is huge. Metacognition is right in there next to it. And metacognition basically boils down to knowing how much you know, knowing how much you’re thinking about something. It’s the process of thinking about the process, and we often don’t do that. It’s actually kind of fascinating when you chat with people, is they’ll engage in a behavior and not think anything about what they’re doing. So we fall into patterns. And so I’ve had students for years that will come in and say, “You know, Dr Z, I’ve read the chapter like four times and I’m still struggling.” And I’ll say, “Well, why did you read it four times?” It’s like, “Well, I need to to learn it.” “Isn’t there any other way you could learn it?” And as I’m asking these questions, I’m trying to bring up a metacognitive concept of let’s reflect on your learning process. If you’re struggling with the material when you read it, it may very well be that two, or three, four more times… In fact, research has shown that you’re probably not going to learn anymore, because if you’re not paying attention to your cognitive functioning, you may very well be reading while you’re daydreaming about something else. And the reason I mention that is that that is not being aware of your processing of information. So again, something that all of us have done, you finish reading a chapter of a book, or you finish reading an article, and just as you get to the end of it, it’s like, “Oh, my word,the entire time I was thinking about bacon or lunch of some kind.” And if that’s the case, you’ve just wasted that time. So for metacognition, it’s kind of thinking about how you’re studying, evaluating it, to what extent are you successful When you sit down and study for an hour, and if you quiz yourself, do you know more or don’t you? So practicing with that, thinking about while you’re studying, what’s going well and what’s not going well. If you’re frustrated in your surroundings and you’re having trouble processing, then you can make changes. If you don’t think about it, you can’t and then also thinking back. So after I take a test or after I study, I can think what went well and what didn’t go well. And that’s all kind of metacognitive things that, because of the way we live, we just don’t tend to do them. And so you know people who will repeat the same pattern over and over and over again, and we use phrases like, “You’ve done this four times, it’s always failed. What were you thinking?” And when we say “What were you thinking?” we’re actually asking a person, to what extent are you engaging in metacognition. But quite frankly, the “What were you thinking?” it’s such an automatic statement that it really doesn’t pertain to thinking.

Rebecca: Feel like a next interesting leap might be to talk about the myth of learning styles, which is something that people often cycle through and say often as well, like, “I’m a visual learner, and this isn’t in a visual style, so I can’t possibly learn it.” And this is something that you address in your book as well.

Todd: Yeah, I think foundationally, first of all, for anybody listening, I’m pretty sure you probably know about learning styles, but if you don’t, there’s a whole concept out there by Neil Fleming came up with this in terms of the learning styles index. And essentially, you take 13,14 quiz questions and you answer these questions, and based on how you answer them, you’re categorized as typically, either a visual learner, an auditory learner, or a kinesthetic learner. A couple of foundational things. Number one, anytime there’s some kind of a test that you can take on Facebook or online or in a quiz book or someplace or even somebody reading 13 items to you, and that’s supposed to tell you how you function as a human being. We’re way more complex than that. Psychologists will ask hundreds of questions to come up with a response that says based on the hundreds of questions that we have, all these validated questions, we believe you will tend to do this. Now, think about that for a second. That’s after a whole battery of tests. They’re saying we think you tend to do this, which has got a lot of hedging in it, which is different than 13 items, “Oh, you’re a visual learner.” So keep in mind that it doesn’t work that way. Number two is that there’s nobody who scores like every item is all on visual or every item is on kinesthetic. If you tend to answer, let’s just say 40% of your answers are on visual learning, and 30% are on auditory learning and 30% are on kinesthetic learning, you’d get categorized as a visual learner because that had the highest percentage. But really it’s a 40-30-30. Why wouldn’t you be categorized as all three? But boxes are easier to deal with, so the learning styles has lots of concepts behind it. Research will also indicate or show you pretty quickly if you read through this stuff, it’s just not how learning works. I would just love to say this, because I don’t want to just say learning styles isn’t good. Here’s the concept Is basically the best way to learn is to practice with the material in a way in which you want to retrieve it. If you want to actually dance, the best way to learn is kinesthetically, by dancing. You might get some auditory or visual information of here’s what the pose looks like, but by and large, you’re going to want to dance. If you’re going to want to be able to recognize certain kind of prints from Monet versus Manet or somebody else in painting, then probably the best thing to do is look at a lot of paintings. Visual would make sense there. Semantic learning, if you want to remember something, you’re probably going to want to read it or hear about it, and so you want to practice it in the way you’re going to retrieve it. The reason people love this concept of learning styles is people love to take quizzes that put them into boxes. I don’t get this, but people take quizzes all the time. Here’s 10 ways to determine what kind of a spouse you are, or five things you can do to figure out what kind of parent you are. We love to do those. And the problem is that learning styles comes along and people think that’s how I learn. And based on what you said at the beginning, Rebecca, when a student says, “You don’t use many images and I’m a visual learner, therefore I can’t learn from you,” they won’t learn from you. But they won’t learn from you because they’re a visual learner, they won’t learn from you because in their head they’re thinking, I can’t learn from you. And when your brain is processing, “I can’t learn this. I can’t learn this. I can’t learn this.” there is so much cognitive load dealing with the fact you can’t learn it there’s no room for learning. So if you think of yourself as a visual learner, I would say, just think about it in terms of you like to use visual things to help you to learn, but there’s a lot of other ways that you can learn as well.

John: Going back to an earlier location in your book, one of the things you talk about as a suggestion for students is that they avoid dichotomous thinking, and you also add in a discussion in the essentials book of generative AI. So this is kind of a mashup of those two concepts. But will the use of generative AI be helpful or harmful for student learning?

Todd: Yes, [LAUGHTER] yeah, the dichotomous thinking, I will say, just to address that very quickly, is that whole concept is that it’s the weakest kind of thinking. It’s basically you put somebody in a box and you don’t have to deal with them anymore, because this is them. That person’s a very aggressive individual. Everything gets interpreted as aggressive because that’s who they are. We don’t stop and think about on a given day, maybe a lot of bad things have happened; on a different day, maybe good things happen. So maybe they tend to be more aggressive, but they’re not just yes/no, you are/you’re not. So AI… people have asked multiple times, is this terrible or is this good? I tell you, everything has nuances. So the bad side, I do think AI is going to be really tricky for us, because humans, in fact, all organisms, will take the easiest route we can. In many respects, we should. If we are going to work and it’s five miles away and there’s a car in the driveway, taking the car makes a lot of sense. So I should take the easy way. However, there’s going to be times when I’m going to want to be physiologically in good shape. I might need to run. I might want to walk up a flight of stairs. I might just want to live for a while, in which case I should work on helping my heart to be better. And the human body is fantastic, and the more you push something, the more it will develop. And so I love to ask students, for instance, I’ll say, “Anybody in here run or jog?” And a whole bunch of hands will go up, and I’ll say, “Why? You got cars. You should just take a car.” And somebody will say, “Well, yeah, but I want to be healthier.” I’ll say, “Perfect. Let’s talk AI for a minute.” For AI, if we let the AI do all the things for us, then we don’t develop those things. And so if I’m taking a poetry class and I just keep having AI write the poems, write the poems, write the poems. It can do it. I can edit them, but I’m not going to learn how to write and how to express myself. And so the issue we’re going to have is, if we don’t learn how to do those things, especially at the beginning level, kind of the cognitive load thing, we’re not going to be able to do them when it’s more complicated. So I think we have to be very careful of that. And for faculty, I think we have to be very careful about focusing on things like academic misconduct. Yes, there are students who will use AI to cheat, but students didn’t start cheating because AI came along. Based on the culture in your classroom, the rapport you have with your students will make a huge difference in the extent to which students will engage in academically honest behaviors. So anyway, those types of things, we’ll watch out for. The good side, there are so many things that this is going to be able to use for good. For instance, we know from study after study after study that the more you practice at something, the better you become. And we have said, I have said for years too, the best way to learn anything is to teach it to somebody else, if you don’t have a family member or a roommate, that you can teach it to, then teach it to a dog, teach it to a sofa, just teach it. And the concept there is, the more you explain something, the better you get at it. AI is beautiful for this, because it can work with you. Actually, I tried something recently I thought was so much fun. I told AI, and the scenario in my head was, I’m a student in a psychology class, and I just learned the routes of persuasion by Cialdini, and now I have to remember how this persuasion all works. Well, one of the best ways to do that is to practice with it. And so I fired up ChatGPT and the prompt I gave it was, “Hey, how about if we do a role play? I’m going to be a car salesman, and you’re going to be in the market to buy a car. You do have enough money, you could buy today, but you want to be a little cautious, because you want to get input from your family, and you want to make sure you get a good value and get the kind of car you want. So overall, if I really can sell you, you’ll buy, but otherwise you’re going to wait. What do you think?” And then ChatGPT typed out, “This sounds like fun. Can you show me some vans?” And so then I said, “This is a van,” and I started to sell it. Now, the reason I’m mentioning this is that I could use all my different persuasion techniques that I learned, and ChatGPT kept asking me questions back. So I’d say this van has something about scarcity. Here’s a good one for scarcity. It’s one of the principles to persuade people. I said, “Whis is the last van on the lot. And so ChatGPT said, “Oh, that’s unfortunate, because I’m really interested in the van. Is there a possibility of getting another one if this one sells before I actually sign the paper?” And now what ChatGPT has just done is to see if they could reduce that concept of basically a quantity issue of scarcity. If this is the only van, a human would basically say, “Oh no, it’s the only van. I better get it before somebody else does,” so with ChaGPT, it says, “Can you get another one from a different lot?” And if I said, “Yep”, then the scarcity goes down a little bit. So then I have to think, “Oh, how can I bring scarcity back in a different way? It’s on sale, but the sale is going to end at the end of this week, so we’re going to have to make a decision fast… that scarcity in a sense of we don’t have much time. And so the point is that I role played with ChatGPT for about 20 minutes on these principles of persuasion. We’ll be able to do that. We’ll be able to do simulations. We’ll be able to do repetition. I can say to ChatGPT, and I’ve done this one. “Give me 10 multiple choice questions about metacognition for a student in a second-year college course, and the course is on the basics of cognition.” The better prompts you lay out there, the better it will do. It asked me multiple choice questions. And the last one I’ll mention for this, because there’s so many different ways you could do it, I actually gave it a definition of metacognition. I wrote out kind of what it is, and then I just put it in ChatGPT, and I said, if I answered a question of “What is metacognition?” with this response, and I was a senior in a cognitive psych course, because it’s different from being a first-year student, but it’s going to give you feedback: “If I’m a senior in a cognitive psych course, what grade would I get?” And I purposely made it bad, and it said you would get an “F” on this. And then I said, “Why?” And it explained a couple reasons why. And then I rewrote it, one of the best responses I could possibly dream up. And then ChatGPT said, “this is a good solid A minus.” And I said, “Why is this an A minus?” And it pointed out that I hadn’t done very much on the reflective component. And I thought, “hmm, alright, I did miss that piece.” And so when I can practice quiz questions like that, I can have it ask me multiple choice questions. And much like Khan Academy, when Sal Khan came up with Khan Academy, he said, one of the things that students love about this is you can go and watch the same video four or five times, and it doesn’t get frustrated with you. ChatGPT, you can struggle with learning a concept, it’s never going to get frustrated with you because you’re struggling. Whereas a human might say, in their head, it’s like, “Oh my word. You should have gotten this by now.” So I know that was a very long answer. It’s a huge, huge issue in education right now, but we can’t be focused on the academic misconduct side of it. We really need to be focusing on how can we use it to instill deeper learning?

Rebecca: That’s a nice transition to one of the other topics that you have in your book, which is maybe something that faculty might be interested in knowing is in your book, [LAUGHTER] which is that you advise students to spend two hours outside of class for every hour they spent in class, which is definitely an expectation, I think, that many faculty have, but it’s not always conveyed to students. I know I mention it to students, [LAUGHTER] but can you talk a little bit about that?

Todd: Yeah, so I put it in there, and it was funny because it was a section I put in the book, and one of the reviewers looked at it and said, “Why did you put this in here? And then it was funny because the editor was reading the book and said, “I love the fact that you put the breakdown in there about how much you should study and how much time you should commit, because people don’t normally know this stuff.” And so I put it in there because I think people struggle with this, and for students to understand, if it’s a course that requires extra work and things, if it’s a three-credit hour course, you’re expected to do two hours outside for every hour inside. This is the way the system was built up. So a three-credit hour class is going to take you about nine hours a week. The three hours in class, then the two-to-one ratio will give you six hours outside of class. This is why, if you take 12 to 13 credit hours, or 13 to 14 credit hours, it’s considered full time, because 13 credit hours would put you up around 39 hours total, when you put all the hours together, and that’s a full-time deal. And by the way, just so I don’t forget this, or I put it off to the side, if it’s an activity course, something you wouldn’t do anything outside, that’s why a one-credit hour class might meet for three hours, like a jogging class or something, racquetball class, because there’s not outside work. The two-to-one ratio kind of thing, all of that’s done in class. So that kind of gives you a sense of how much you should be studying. Here’s the tricky spot, nobody does it. I shouldn’t say nobody, very few people do it. The reason is that a lot of students can get by with studying less than two hours outside for every hour inside class. And when students will say they don’t need to, or faculty will say they don’t do it, and people focus on the fact that, “Well, you know, students don’t really have to spend that much time.” I love to respond with, oh, so they all are getting 100% on their quizzes and tests and perfect papers, right? And to that, we say, “Well, not really.” System’s set up that you expect a lot of B’s and C’s and D’s. Well, what if you spent two hours outside for every hour inside? It would be a very different thing. But the problem again, is, “Whew, if students are not spending the two hours outside for every hour inside, and then you are, then it seemed like you’re taking more time, and you feel like, why am I spending all this time when they’re not?” And so we look to other people, and unfortunately, we don’t do that. But I can tell you, for students, if you do actually sit down and study for two hours outside of class, for every hour inside class, and do it before the class period. When you walk in, you already know material there. You understand the foundation of it. And if the instructor is doing a good job, they’re pushing you and showing you connections and everything, you can process that because you have the material. If you walk into class after skimming a Chapter, you don’t have the foundational material to make the classroom more effective for a learning situation.

John: I was really happy to see that advice there, because I tell students the same thing, and they always seem really, really surprised. Or in an online class if you tell them they should expect to spend nine hours there, there’s often an even larger surprise, because they think it’ll take as much time as what they spend in high school, which is often zero outside of class and with an online class, zero doesn’t work very well, especially. So I’m glad you included that. But one of the other things you include in your book in terms of advice to students is you talk about various fallacies, and one of those is a sunk cost fallacy, which is something that we talk about quite a bit in economics, especially behavioral economists. So could you talk a little bit about this fallacy and how it might affect students?

Todd: Yeah, sunk cost is something that I always covered in psychology, because I love the concept, psychological concept. It’s really important a sunk cost basically just simply means, how much energy or resources have you put into a course of action. That’s basically it. How much have you sunk into this thing? The problem is for humans, is we overestimate the value of that. If you’ve worked on a paper for six hours and it turns out you’re heading in the wrong direction, best thing you can do is pitch the paper and just start over. But people say, “Well, wait a minute, I’ve put six hours in on this. I must be able to salvage something of it.” And I watched a woman on television years ago, and I think it was Ukrainian eggs. It was when they hollow out the eggs, you get the insides out, and you cut half of it away, so you’re dealing with, like a little half of a shell. And they do these beautiful, intricate things inside the shell. And she pointed out, she said, “If you ever drop one of those, the best thing you can do is stomp on it,” because if you drop it and it cracks, you try to fix it, and you spend so much time trying to fix it, because the sunk cost is, “I’ve already put hours into this,” then you waste a lot of time trying to fix it, your better bet is just to throw it away and start over.” And that’s why she said stomp on it, so you’re not tempted to do that. So in your work, we’ll do this all the time. We try things, and we get all this investment… we might be in a class that’s just we’re flunking the class, and this is always hard, and you always want to always talk to an advisor if any students are listening, or tell your students always talk to an advisor before you ever drop a class, because it can have ramifications, especially if it drops you down to part-time status. But if you are going to flunk class, the best thing you can do is just stop working in that class. Take the F if you’re past the drop period, and just focus your energy somewhere else. And students will often say, “but yeah, but I’ve already put so much time in this.” And when I was teaching intro psychology, this is a particular one is students would come in with like, 50% average and come into the final, and I’d say, it doesn’t matter, you’d need a 98% to get a passing grade. You’re going to get an F. And the students say, “Well, yeah, but I put so much energy this I’m going to try” and I’ll say “If you’ve averaged 50, you’re not going to score above an A plus. It’s just not going to work. Take your time and study for your other classes and then come back and take this class next semester.” So we do this a lot. We have people who will stay in relationships because they’ve been in relationships for a while. So it’s like, I’m gonna hang in there when, you know, maybe it’s the end of the relationship. We’ll have people that put so much money into a car they’re gonna keep driving it. It might come to a point you just need to get rid of the car. So sometimes we’ll chase a course of action because we put so much money into it. The one thing I do want to point out, though, that’s important, is that sometimes sunk cost is very helpful. So if we’re in a job, for instance, that we’ve been in for five years, and we run into a really rough spot, we might say, “Well, I’ve been working pretty hard. I’m working my way up in this. I’ve got a lot invested. I’m going to stick this out.” A relationship’s another good example. Relationships do have rough times. And if you have been dating someone or married to somebody for a period of time, then it’s like, “I’m going to get through this because I have so much invested.” So a sunk cost can help you if down the road, it’s a good thing to stay in, but you’d be tempted to leave. College is a good example. I mean, junior year, a lot of people would quit, but it’s like, “I’ve already got three years in, I’m going to finish.” But at other times, we’ve got so much in, and it’s time to cut it loose. And this is the part where I love to tell people, when I was an undergraduate, I was a criminal justice major at first, and then I switched over and double majored with psychology, and then I ended up with a psych major and a criminal justice minor and a sociology minor, and I am one class short of having a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. And every time I tell that, there are people in the group that says “You should just take that class,” and I’d say, “Why?” And they say, “Well, because you’re one class short, you’ve got all that invested.” And to that, I get to say, “At my age, I’m getting close to retirement age. I’m never going to work as a police officer. I don’t even think those credits would count. But even so, what I did is I got to a point where I thought, is it worth it for me to spend a semester to finish this when I don’t believe it’s anything I will ever do. I worked with a police department for a short period of time. At the end, decided I just didn’t want to go that route. There’s no reason to finish that.” But even listening today, if I tell you, in an entire bachelor’s degree, I just need one more three-credit hour class, the inclinations to say, “Well, you should take it.” That’s a sunk cost.

Rebecca: As I’ve been listening to you talk today and thinking about the things in your book, and I was also thinking about a lot of the things that some of our faculty panelists said at our graduate orientation, I was very happy that a lot of those things aligned. That’s always good. And one of the things that came up actually at orientation was the recommendation from one of our panelists to really think about some wellness things like sleep and exercise. And that’s something that came up and eating well, which is something that is in your book. Can you talk a little bit about some of the benefits of having adequate sleep and engaging in exercise that you talk about in your book?

Todd: Yeah, it’s funny, because when I’m talking to students, especially, if there’s quite a bit of material, there’s invariably somebody will say: “So if there’s just one thing I should really work on, we’ve talked about the testing effect, practicing over and over and quizzing yourself. We’ve talked about things like interleaving, where you mix materials together, or spaced learning, where you space it out. And for memories, is to practice over and over types of things, and to say, “Which one should I really focus on?” I said “sleep.” The best thing you can do to be better at learning is to make sure you have a good chunk of sleep. Not only as a restful person, do you process information faster, but while you’re sleeping, you actually consolidate memories. You could study all day long, all through the night. Take a quiz, and you’ve all done this at some point, do okay on the quiz, because that’s right during the learning period, come back a week later, or final exam, for sure, and it’s like none of it’s there. Well, it’s because after you learned it, you never slept, which allows your brain to consolidate it. We actually now know that different stages of sleep will consolidate certain semantic like meaningful things. A different stage of sleep will solidify and consolidate repetition, like movement, so the kinesthetic things. So the physiology of what your brain does is really important. By the way. I was just reading something the other day too. I can’t cite it here, because I didn’t know I’d be talking about it, but it talked about the correlation between low levels of sleep and later cognitive decline, because while you sleep, the brain kind of flushes out all of the toxins, so to speak, and all the stuff it doesn’t need. It consolidates the stuff that’s important. It gets rid of the rest. And if you don’t sleep, a lot of that becomes muddled across time. And so sleep, physiologically, is just an amazing thing for you. And so that’s a really, really important thing. Exercise is another one. Regular aerobic exercise is just good for the learning process. I had a student that told me one time… it was funny, we were chatting about this… and said he does the best learning during basketball season when they’re exercising all the time. Coach makes them sleep an adequate amount, because it impacts your play, of course, and if it impacts your play. It probably impacts your learning too, right? So the concept there is that he said he always did better during basketball season because he was sleeping better and exercising better. Eating is the same thing. We know that simple sugars are not as good as complex carbohydrates. There’s actually ways that we can process this in terms of memory, and it doesn’t take very much liquid at all. If you get dehydrated, a little bit of dehydration, you have cognitive decline. In fact, it’s funny, because if you talk to somebody who is a health professional and you say, late in the day, “Man, I’m just confused and really having trouble processing things,” one of the first things that will ask you is, “How much did you drink today?” So it does have an impact on that. So, adequate hydration, not too much, but the right amount there, good nutrition, sleeping and exercise, those are four ways right there that you can actually impact your learning of material in classes… oh, and your health. I’d like to point out too that it’s one of those things that’s got the best side effect there is: it’s really good for learning and it’s also good for living.

Rebecca: One of the key tips that came up from our students and our faculty was to actually schedule some of those to make sure you’re doing those things.

Todd: Oh, totally. Yeah, eating too, I have to admit for myself, especially when it’s hot out. I didn’t understand this when I was younger, but I can eat breakfast and work outside in the yard, come in, drink a little bit, go back out, sit down and read a book and do some stuff, and realize at eight o’clock at night’s like, “Oh my word. I didn’t eat today,” and so I’m suddenly hungry, but then it’s late, so you’re eating at eight, nine o’clock, which is not ideal. But if you schedule it while you’re busy, and stick to it. If you’ve got it scheduled, you’re gonna eat at one o’clock or noon, and the bell rings summarize where you’re at, go eat, and then come back and then pick it up from there. Because if you think “I’ll just finish this section and then I’ll eat,” there’s been lots of study through the years that says that’s not as good as stopping, noting where you are and then coming back for most people.

John: And one of the things you talk about in your book is scheduling. And you also suggest there that you include a little bit of slack, because things don’t always take the amount of time that you anticipate. Could you talk just a little bit about that?

Todd: Yeah, I kind of laugh about this one, because, yeah, people are hideous at estimates. Almost everybody is. But I will tell you, folks with ADHD are particularly bad at it. And part of the issue you run into with ADHD is it’s not just that you’re distracted, is that you’re thinking to yourself, I will do this task, it will take like, 40 minutes, and then I’ll go do this other task. When I got tested for ADHD, after three questions, like, we’re good, we know exactly where we’re at. Anybody who knows me says you don’t need any kind of test. We’ve known that for years. I wish somebody had told me 10 years ago. But the reason I mentioned this is that I’m working really hard at some metacognitive kind of process of estimating how long it’s going to take me to do something. I set off the block of time. When the timer goes off, then I think about: “What did I do? What worked well? What didn’t work well?” That process takes seconds to do, by the way, it’s like, okay, “did it work or didn’t work?” And then if it does work, I think about what I did to kind of set that up. And if it doesn’t, I think about that. But I will tell you that I will often start out with a to do list of 10 items, and I’m sure that I’ll be done by noon, and so by 6pm I’ve gotten through three of them, and I still have seven to go. So I put those seven on my to do list for the next day, and then, because I am a super genius… I always use that phrase whenever I follow it with something that’s not super geniusy… but I’ll take those seven items and I’ll just put them on the to do list with another 10 items, and then I got 17 items that I’m going to do tomorrow, because that’s going to be easy to get through them. I’ll just do them really fast, and then I get through like five things. As you practice at that, you can actually practice at estimating how long things will take you, put it into a schedule. I did this was an intro psych class. It was one of the most impactful things I’ve done. Is the teacher had us keep track of one week in one-hour blocks. Like, if you sleep for eight hours, you block off and say, I slept. But then if you read, you put a block in for reading, and while you’re awake during the day, he had us doing metacognitive exercises too. You estimate how much do you think you’ll get done? How well did you do? And then you just put a grade in the block. So if it’s going to be I’m going to read the to read this chapter in this two hours, and I get through half of the chapter in the two hours. And I’ve done this other stuff, I get like, a D. And what I found was that I’m very effective in the morning, from about 6 am until about 10 am I can cram through… oh, it’s just so good. And then I find out that from about 2 to 4 pm I’m just awful. I have enough extrovertness in me that if I’m talking to somebody, it’s fine, but if I sit down to read something or work at something, it doesn’t work. So I schedule these things in. So I’m kind of coming back to the schedule, but I schedule these things in, but also try to make estimates of how long things will take. I will finish with this, tell your students, or ask your students, I guess, at the beginning of the semester to keep track of, as they read the first couple pages in every book, jot down, after five pages, how long did it take you, and figure out the average amount of time it takes you per page. Because students don’t understand this, and they’re not good at estimating their time. And I’ve had students before who are going to tell me, for the final exam, they’re going to reread all the chapters. And I say, how long is that going to take you? And they’ll say, “I don’t know.” And I’ll say, “The exam’s tomorrow. What do you think it’s going to be?” And students will tell me that they thought they could read a chapter in an hour, or the whole book in like six hours. And then they find out that their average is eight minutes a page, and say, “Alright, well, at eight minutes a page, you’re not going to read a chapter of 35 to 40 pages in an hour.” But the point is, it may be that you have a novel in English class that you average one minute a page. You might have a physics book where you average 20 minutes per page, and you might have a philosophy book where you average five minutes a page. If you know that, you can make some estimates. And so talk to your students about making those estimates. But rolling that all together, kind of figuring out estimates on how long things are going to take, and keep working at it, and then using metacognitive strategies to think about when it’s going well and not going well. And I’m still working at how to do this.

John: And that issue of cascading to do lists, one of the things I found is that there’s a lot of to do apps that you can put on your smartphone, and when the list gets too long, just start another one.

Rebecca: That’s what I do. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Well, there’s a great strategy that I really do like. You list the really important things as A’s and then B’s and then C’s. And the one strategy I read one time was great. It says, Put all your things on the list, put down your A’s, your B’s, and your C’s, and then delete all your C’s. [LAUGHTER] And so it’s that same kind of a thing as at the end of the day, they’re not going to get done, just pitch them. But yeah, we put too many things on the list. I’m trying right now. Actually, I’ve reframed it in my head, and I’m desperately trying to put down the amount of stuff that I think that I can get done by noon, and I still block off eight until 6pm but I put my to do list thinking this can get done at noon. If I get done at noon, you know what? I’m only gonna work a half a day. And when I’m better at it, I’ll probably put more items on the list. But for right now, yesterday, I still was working till 8 pm on my stuff that should have been done by noon. An another little tip I’ll give you… I’m getting better at some of these… I always make up my to do list now just before I go to bed, when I’m as tired as I can be during the day, because if you make a to do list in the morning when you’re feeling really full of energy, then you’re very optimistic. If you do it when you’re exhausted, it’s a little closer. [LAUGHTER]

John: I believe that behavioral economists refer to this phenomenon of underestimating the amount of time required for a task as the planning fallacy, and I believe that I’ve heard that the people who are most productive underestimate the amount of time required by more than other people tend to, otherwise they’d never undertake many of the tasks that they engage in. There was a Freakonomics episode on it that I just listened to recently.

Rebecca: In my design class, I have students keep time sheets for their projects and things, and that helps them become more aware of how long it takes them to do different parts of projects, so that if they were to take on freelance work or whatever, they have more of an idea of how long it actually takes them to do things, so that they could more adequately charge for work if they were to do that.

Todd: Rebecca, that’s a really, really important skill to teach them, because you could make up your mind you want to have a design company or a landscaping company, whatever it is, and if you’re hideous at estimating time, you’ll be out of business very quickly. When you explain to somebody, “Yeah, I’ll cut your loan on every week, and I’ll only charge you $20 because I think it’s going to take 10 minutes,” and then it turns out it takes two hours. You can’t stay in business like that. So I think that’s a great skill. See, we started out with the why don’t we teach these cognitive things early? This is one of those that you are doing, which is great. Teach them how to think about time.

Rebecca: Well, we could talk about really important things we could teach students all day long, but we do need to pay attention to our time, which we are not always good at doing. [LAUGHTER] So we always wrap up by asking: “what’s next?”

Todd: Probably just the last items on my to do list is next, [LAUGHTER] but right after that, I’m working on a couple things. So one of them is a book on lecturing and active learning. The research does not say that the active learning is more effective than lecturing. The research is very clear that says, when you combine the two, lecturing with active learning, it’s more effective than lecturing alone. So I’m working on a book that’s balancing the two. And then the other one is, I’ve really become pretty passionate lately about people that are not built for the way the educational system’s built. I love to use the phrase that education is kind of built for fast-talking, risk-taking extroverts. I’ve got that in the book, and actually in a couple of the book. And the idea is in class when the teacher says, “Could somebody tell me…” there’s hands going up before you actually get to the end of this question even from some people, individuals who think really fast, who are okay if they’re wrong, they’re taking a shot at it, and they’re extroverted in that they like to really have the energy to be around people. If you’re not one of those individuals, you’re actually at a disadvantage all the way through the educational system whenever something’s run like that. And so the other thing I’m working on right now is, how do we help the individuals who are shy, who are on the autism spectrum, who maybe have depressive episodes, individuals with food insecurity, housing insecurity, all these types of individuals who walk into a classroom and when they do really well, it’s because they’re doing so much more work. I should be careful. I don’t want to discount the people who are working hard in the classroom, but there’s individuals who are working way harder than other individuals, and there’s got to be a way to balance that a little bit. That’s what I’m working on now too.

Rebecca: Sound like really important, interesting projects.

John: And will those both be ready this year, or [LAUGHTER] will it take a little bit longer for those?

Todd: Probably Tuesday, I think… maybe Thursday. It’s interesting. I will say that I really love writing. It’s obvious, I’ve got several books out now. But I work with an editor. I have my own editor that I’ve hired now, and the reason I did that is because I’m not an editor. And what I used to do on books is I would write something and I would spend more time trying to edit it and get it to sound right than I was actually writing. And so the reason that I’m kind of cranking books out right now is I write it, I send it off to my editor, my editor reads it, comes back to me and says,” I like what you did here, but you might want to change that.” And then I just zip into the next thing. So it takes me about four months to write a book now. And so I would suspect that we will see one of those heading off… well, it won’t be too long.

Rebecca: Must be there on the early part of that list, that stuff before noon.

Todd: When I mentioned that keeping track of the day, it’s a really, really important thing. It’s because, yup, that’s exactly what it is. My writing time tends to be between 7am and 10am and then all my committee meetings are in the afternoons.

Rebecca: Prioritize.

Todd: Yeah, it’s like recording this show. Huh, look at this, 3:46 pm… Ha! Right, between two and four.

Rebecca: I did notice that. I was making that note,

Todd: Uh huh, I knew you were. Boy, we should do this sometime at 10 am You wouldn’t believe how fired up I am the.

Rebecca: Alright, but that’s when I prioritize my writing and doing stuff too.

John: We always enjoy talking to you, and we’re very much looking forward to talking to you about those next books as those approach,

Todd: I always love coming to this program. I get to sip my tea, which is always good, and chat with two of my favorite pod people.

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us, Todd.

Todd: Thanks for inviting 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.

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355. Class Dismissed

Posted in access, diversity, engagement, equity, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, income inequality, learning, race, racism, social justice, support network, teaching
August 21, 2024

Institutional racism in the form of redlining and unequal access to educational and housing opportunities have left generations of students without equitable access to higher education. In this episode, Anthony Abraham Jack joins us to discuss the challenges that first-gen students face and what colleges and faculty can do to reduce these inequities.

Tony is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Boston University Newbury Center and Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Boston University. Tony’s research has appeared in numerous scholarly publications and he is the recipient of numerous awards from the American Sociological Association, American Educational Studies Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He is the author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students and Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Institutional racism in the form of redlining and unequal access to educational and housing opportunities have left generations of students without equitable access to higher education. In this episode, we examine the challenges that first-gen students face and what colleges and faculty can do to reduce these inequities.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Anthony Abraham Jack. He is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Boston University Newbury Center and Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Boston University. Tony’s research has appeared in numerous scholarly publications and he is the recipient of numerous awards from the American Sociological Association, American Educational Studies Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He is the author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. His new book, Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price is scheduled for release in August. Welcome Tony.

Tony: Hi. Thank you all for having me.

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

Tony: I’m actually drinking water, but I was actually thinking about going to get the Bengal spice tea that’s in my cabinet right now.

Rebecca: That sounds yummy, maybe afterwards, huh?

Tony: Indeed.

Rebecca: I have a new tea John that I got when I was in Scotland. So this is a 1903 blend from Pekoe Tea Edinburgh.

John: Wow. Yeah, I saw some of the photos from your world tour there while I’ve been in the classroom here, so just rub it in a little bit.

Rebecca: I’m trying. [LAUGHTER]

John: …and I am drinking an Irish Breakfast tea..

Rebecca: that’s on theme

John: …from Wegmans [LAUGHTER] here in Durham, North Carolina.

Rebecca: So, Tony, we invited you here today to discuss your forthcoming book, Class Dismissed. But first, maybe it’d be helpful if you tell us a little bit about your own educational journey.

Tony: There are two things that I always share about getting to this spot of being an educator and being an academic is: I’m a head start kid and I’m a first generation college student. Those two things are central to who I am and the work that I do. If it were not for Head Start, I would have a very different educational trajectory. Head Start put me in a school across the tracks, literally, in Miami. I went to a school that I wasn’t zoned for, because that dividing line that was McDonald’s Street. I was supposed to go to that dividing line of McDonald’s separated West Grove from Coconut Grove, where the Bahamian settlers were who cleaned up behind the white, wealthier families that live on the other side, and the schools were night and day in many respects, from the resources that they had, even class sizes were a little bit different. It was just a very different place. And what’s interesting is, if you were to come to my office right now, I actually have a map of Coconut Grove, and it literally says Coconut Grove Negro district, and on this official city map, you actually see the line that was drawn by city officials to say where black people could and could not live. That was fundamental. Head Start, it didn’t remove me from that history, but it didn’t make me travel the same path that that history would force me to any other way. And I’m a first-generation college student. I’m the son of a security guard. My mom actually helped segregate her middle school that she then worked at for 31 years as a school monitor, and my brother is a janitor who actually works at my old elementary school. No one in my family extended learning beyond college, but they made it possible through everything that life could throw at us, that made it possible for me to go to college, and those two things fundamentally shape who I am. As a Head Start kid, I can’t help but think about being from Coconut Grove. Every city in America has their Del Mar divide, that street that separates the richest and the poorest. Thinking about like it is in St Louis, I live very close to ours, and my education trajectory looks very different from everybody else who I went to school with. So many people who I live next to had a very different trajectory. So those two things really speak. And I was very fortunate to end up at Amherst College for undergrad, and then I came over to Harvard University to pursue my PhD. And to be honest with you, I haven’t left school yet. Since the moment I entered through Head Start, I have not left school. It’s been a lifelong dream to be a forever student, and I’m living it.

Rebecca: I’m living that lifelong student trajectory as well. [LAUGHTER]

John: Me too. The history of redlining and dividing districts and federal funding and loan availability in terms of those redlined districts, which weren’t always labeled that way, but they were still treated that way in terms of the availability of FHA loans and so forth…

Tony: Exactly.

John: …for a remarkably Long time, led to some horrible inequalities in terms of school financing.

Tony: Yeah, how the United States did policy for transportation. When you think about I-95 they literally drove highways through neighborhoods and say, “Okay, black people live over here, white people can live over here”. Even, how we handled the GI Bill, even though it was supposed to be one of the most universal policies. One, it wasn’t universal because so many women were not available for it, and then yet, the racialization of it was also a major aspect. So yeah, between redlining and blockbusting. So actions that real estate agents would say they would purposely introduce a black family in a neighborhood selling a house at like 125% of its value. But then when those whites who did not want to have a black neighbor, they were quick to sell and leave, and neighborhoods began going from all white to all black in that very short period of time. And you think about the resources that left because of income differences and segregation, weighed down by racism with income, I was removed from some of that, because Head Start placed me at Coconut Grove Elementary, and the principal there, Don Beebe, said he gets to stay. Not everybody had that opportunity.

John: And you talked about some of this in The Privileged Poor, where you talked about some of the inequities in colleges based on the amount of privilege that students had. Could you talk a little bit about the thesis of that to help set the stage for your more recent book?

Tony: Yeah, The Privileged Poor came about because of two things, and very much personal experience, but in two ways, experiential personal experience, how I experienced as a student, but it also what I had to grapple with as a graduate student, because as a student, I was trying to figure out what was going on when I got to Amherst, because so many people had gone to boarding school like Andover and Exeter and Saint Paul, or these really, really ritzy prep schools like Hackaday and Sidwell Friends and Nightingale I had graduated from a prep school in Miami, but from Head Start to 11th grade, I was a public school student. I had a football coach who liked athlete students but didn’t like student athletes, and so I transferred schools my senior year because I didn’t want to be under that kind of regime. And then Amherst called that football coach and said, “Hey, do you got a student who can pass our test?” He said, “Yeah, we got a kid this year,” and the rest was kind of history. The reason why I tell that story is because when I got to Amherst, I discovered that my individual detour through a private school was actually a well established on-ramp to elite colleges because of programs like Prep for Prep, A Better Chance, the Wight Foundation (W, I, G, H, T), and all these other programs that place lower income and sometimes lower income students of color into boarding day and preparatory high schools. So I’m like, “Okay, this is different.” This is people come from all over the place. It’s not just the rich people who are coming from these ritz y places. But then I got to graduate school, and as a sociologist, I’m reading about these inequalities and cultural inequality and race and all that stuff, but no one who’s writing about education is speaking about these students. They kept speaking about students as a monolithic group, really like they were painting with one brush stroke, and I was like, “Well, they got half the story right.” A lot of the people who I knew did struggle with isolation and difference and culture shock, but the other half of students, roughly, did not, like I had friends who studied abroad in high school for a year. I had friends who had flown on private jets. I had friends who had experiences that I only saw on movies and TV shows, like Gossip Girl. And so I put my experience as an undergrad in conversation with what I was learning as a graduate student and say, “Hey, something’s going on here.” And what I learned is colleges were hedging their bets. They were getting their new diversity from old sources. They were increasing the number of lower income students, but they were not saying was that they were going to private schools to get those students. And my research show that one half of lower income black students at elite colleges like Amherst and Harvard are actually the alumni of those boarding, day, and preparatory high schools. And so when I was dealing with all of that, that’s what came up with the privileged poor. Privileged poor is an oxymoron. It’s about somebody having little economic capital but having high stocks of cultural capital. They had been to elite places before. They had traveled to Tulum, they had traveled to Martha’s Vineyard, they had traveled to Nantucket, all of these very, very ritzy places. And when they got to college, they were in their fifth year of boarding school, really, and I contrast their experiences to the doubly disadvantaged, those lower income students who don’t have that same experience. And the reason why it was important to me to draw out this distinction was because any program that we created to help students in college, especially lower income and first year in college students, it would miss the mark, because if we had these two modal groups, these two people who are on different sides of the coin, if we try to navigate right down the middle, we will miss out on so many students. And so I use the privilege poor and the doubly disadvantaged, kind of like the miners’ canary, I’m able to show when and how class matters in college, both symbolically through cultural capital, those taken for granted ways of being that are valued by colleges and universities, but then also economic capital. I’ll give you just two quick examples. One, who knows what office hours are? Who’s comfortable using them? And who knows how valuable they can be, not just for your present but also your future? Usually, the literature and other people say, it’s usually the wealthier students, people whose fam went to college, I show that it wasn’t just those from money who felt comfortable, but those who had experience that only money could buy, the privileged poor and the middle class were more comfortable, the doubly disadvantaged were not. They got access to the letters recommendation. They got access to institutional resources at a higher rate than their lower income peers. But when campus closed during spring breaks, and it was about how much money you had in your pocket, now how much cultural capital you have in your mind, it didn’t matter whether you were privileged poor or doubly disadvantaged, you went hungry. And so I was able to show how students’ trajectories to college shape their pathways through college in a new and novel way. And so The Privileged Poor allowed me to engage with policy as well as academics and reducing some of the inequalities on campus.

John: The Privileged Poor was written before the pandemic, but then the pandemic hit and you started working on this new book. Could you talk a little bit about what you observed there and how that led to Class Dismissed?

Tony: Yes. So The Privileged Poor was published in 2019 and I was very fortunate that in the years in between now and 2019 I got to visit a lot of college and universities that have begun working with them to change their policies, and to date, over 80 universities have changed their dining hall policies to account for food insecurity on their campuses, both from small liberal arts colleges to large public institutions and every institution in between. And so I was having this good rapport. And The Privileged Poor also focuses on life on campus. It tries to understand how class shapes students’ engagement with their peers, professors, and the policies that govern campus life. And one thing that kept gnawing at me was that a question that The Privileged Poor cannot answer head on because of what wanted to focus on then was about students’ lives off campus, especially their families in their neighborhoods, and how that continues to shape how they move through campus. Class Dismissed came about because I was asked to do a project about how black students were experiencing inequalities on campus, especially during the pandemic, and I said I like the premise, but to fully understand how inequality shapes how students move through campus, I want to expand who I’m speaking to and the questions that I’m asking with a particular focus: how does the inequalities off campus shape daily life on campus? And that’s how this project began. I was invited to do this study by William Julius Wilson, a preeminent sociologist, and I interviewed 125 Asian, Black, Latino, Native, white and mixed students to understand truly how COVID exacerbated the very inequalities that universities were ignoring, especially how structural inequalities like poverty, segregation, the lasting legacy of redlining and blockbusting, which we already talked about at the beginning of this conversation, continues to shape how students move through campus, and I was very excited and intentional about including more groups to study, because I want to show you just how different their experiences are, especially by inclusion of Native students, who are sadly one of the most overlooked groups of college students that we have, to be able to show not just the lasting legacy of redlining and blockbusting, but the lasting legacy of land theft and disenfranchisement, deepens our understanding of what universities need to do to prepare for these students. I know we probably want to get into it, but there’s something about understanding where students come from that really shapes our understanding of where they return to and when COVID shut down campus, even if the policies for these closures were correct, we show just how ill prepared we were to help students navigate that transition. And again, and I say this in the book, this book is not a COVID book. This book is not about COVID. This book is about the inequalities that existed before that were worsened by campus closures and the pandemic. Because I really wanted us to understand where students come from and how that continues to shape their life, both as a springboard into more opportunity, because in the book, I talk about students who were able to take on unpaid internships during the pandemic. Even as the pandemic shut most of the world down, crippled some countries to the brink of bankruptcy and collapse, there were students who were taking on unpaid internships at venture capital firms, compared to then being able to show well, yeah, lower income students also took on unpaid labor, but it took on a very different form, and yet new is I’m actually going beyond just saying that both groups of students took on unpaid internships or unpaid labor, I actually show that the skill sets that are used by lower income students to carry out the work that are thrust upon them often requires a higher level skill set than those used by those in unpaid internships who complained about the grunt work and the busy work that they were able to do. But here’s the rub, whose CV is going to say what? Whose CV is going to have the right title? Whose CV is going to have the right employer? Whose CV is going to have the right detailed job description? And whose CV is going to remain silent about all the extra work that they did in addition to classes, in addition to other familiar responsibilities? So that’s why I said, to me, I hope people take away from the book that yes, COVID had a different effect on students. But I really want us to pay concrete attention to the way in which so much of what I talk about existed before March 2020, before campus closed, and these processes were continued for generations because that black box of unpaid labor that happens for lower income students, that wasn’t created four years ago, that has already existed. But then I try to also offer concrete things that we can do to begin to understand this. Because I don’t know if you all remember, in the early 2000s the Common Application introduced the familiar responsibility question to understand why students are, for example, not part of Glee Club and key society and playing a sport. And some people like, “well, I work,” or “I take care of my grandparents, “and they saw this familiar responsibility question really changed the way in which admissions officers were able to get a texture of students’ life. I asked a simple but a fundamental question in the book, Why do we have this at the end of high school, beginning of college, to help students get into college, but we have nothing like it on the way out? What are employers missing by not understanding the unpaid labor that all students do, and not just those who go to familiar places, by venture capital firms or a senator’s office or some of the other things, knowing that the work they do is mostly grunt work that doesn’t give them any kind of true experience.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that all of these inequities have existed forever, and COVID did make things more visible, but that doesn’t mean that a lot of change has occurred. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways that colleges continue to fall short?

Tony: Yeah, one of the things that I highlight in my work is, oftentimes, I don’t want to say the actions, but the happenings of the most overlooked offices on campus. And I’ll talk about like, you know, the Dean of Students Office and other places like that. And to give you an example, I talk a lot about academic leave policies in the book, and the reason why is because it often shows both the class biases and the, quite frankly, ignorance that colleges have about where students come from, and I talk a lot about where students come from, because we’re talking about universities that are reaching out and saying, “We want you. We want a student from every state and every type of community, like we want to diversify our campuses along all of these lines.” But are you ready for it? If you want it, you get credit for recruiting it. But are you ready? Do you actually know what students need? The reason why I talk about leave policies is because I exposed in the book the very class and paternalistic approach that we take to it. When a student wants to take a year off and do an internship or just take a year off just to travel, the only thing they have to do is email that Dean and say, “Hey, I’m not coming back next semester.” They fill out something, but it’s usually very light work. If a student is asked to take the time off, and a lot of people will say, “Well, it’s probably because they cheated, or that something like that,” it’s often not because of the work. It’s because they are struggling to manage the expectations of home and the reality of college. When universities tell students that they need to leave campus for academic leave, they almost act like parole officers and put a whole bunch of responsibilities on students, new responsibilities on students as they are going home. So even though a student is at their most vulnerable, many universities require students to work a full-time job and take class at a local university while they are away from campus. There are some universities that require letters of recommendation from that employer. Now to middle-class America, that may not sound so outrageous, but what if you come from a community where 50% population have jobs and the other half do not? What if you come from a community where you’re not only the first person in your family to go to college, you one of a few people in the entire community to go to college. Who is comfortable and familiar with writing the types of letter of recommendation to assess your mental ability when you are fighting to get a job at the local fast food joint or Walgreens or CVS or Duane Reade, because that’s all the jobs that you could possibly apply for in your area. If we don’t understand the geography of inequality, especially as it pertains to access to employment, access to schools, access to mental health counselors or individuals who can assess that, are we truly helping students when we’re giving them a task that can’t be done, not while they’re home? There are some students who had to leave home after they have left college to go to a place to be able to fulfill that because they live on the reservation and finding work in that way was impossible? What about our students who come from more rural communities where jobs aren’t as available as the apples on trees? There are so many things, and so I use students’ experiences to not only show how different those who come from privilege and those who do not, how different their college times are. But I also relate that to policies that we could actually change on the college campus to address the inequalities. It’s heartening that the University of Rochester, for example, has a program that they’ve had for years called the Take Five program, because they know that lower income students disproportionately have more disruptive life events that undercut their academic experience. They were like, you are admitted under this take five program, because we know that this time that you are investing in higher education is often going to be punctured with moments that leave you so broken and bruised you might take a week or two slower. And so I try to highlight those other things. And the reason why I talk about policy here is because, as I was doing this book, I was inspired by the work in The Privileged Poor, where I was able to get universities, for example, to change their dining hall policy. And so I sent out a theme for the book. I said, “Well, now that we know what we know, what are we going to do about it? What’s the point in just writing about inequality if we’re not going to address it? If students’ stories give the general scaffolding of policies that can be adopted, why not listen to them? Why not let that inform the universities that govern campus life?” I just want to bring attention to that because the fact of the matter is, as our communities become ever more diverse, by geography, by race, by class, we must pay attention to those sending communities in the same way how any immigration scholar will tell you country of origin matters because US policy differs, differs because of their relationship with each country. The same thing applies. Harvard and BU and Amherst have real nice diplomatic relations with Greenwich Village, with the Upper West Side, with Palo Alto, very great diplomatic relationships; from Coconut Grove, from Detroit, from parts of Brooklyn, from parts of Cleveland, St Louis, not so much. We don’t understand, and because we don’t have an understanding of that inequality, it’s hard for us to adopt policy that is receptive to it, because, again, to ask a student to take on a full- time job when they come from a community where jobs have been gone for a generation, is giving them a task that they cannot complete. The sad part about it is those requirements were not always relaxed during COVID19, some universities still required students to work during it. One student told me that she had to petition to get two part-time jobs to count because that was all she was able to find during the pandemic. And because what she come from, there weren’t a lot of jobs, and then she had to take on these two part time. Now, this is the same person who lived in a house with a family member who was on dialysis. This is the same person who lived with immunocompromised people, and she had to petition yet again and say, “Hey, I am afraid, deathly afraid, to go out to work. Please don’t make me because I’m fearful of hurting my family member.” She had to petition for it, because universities weren’t flexible enough to actually realize the consequences of it, or they were so rigid in their policy. And this book is not a book that is organized by, “Oh, this is policy, let me see the effect, right?” No, the book is organized by understanding how students dealt with the inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic in their families, finances, in the fault lines along race on campus. And when you look at the family dynamics and the consequences of it., you just see how it’s important to understand that students, especially lower income and first-gen college students, they’re not running away from home. They’re trying to get away from the things that make home hard. That’s why so many first gens are driven. It’s not because they don’t like home, it’s that they don’t like aspects of home that make life hell, whether that means having to do, as I talk about myself, whether that means having to do homework by candlelight because the power was out more often than not, whether it was not having your own bed or your own space to be, or enough to eat, those are very real thing. But I also want to highlight the ways in which university policies make coming from those spaces even harder, and to some students, they almost felt intentional.

John: So far, we’ve mostly been talking about institutional policies. But what role do individual faculty members play in this?

Tony: Individual faculty and staff are also important players in this, So, I’ll give you an example from the book. In the book, I show how universities have a segregated on-campus labor market where students are almost divided by social class in what jobs they go after and what jobs they get. What I show is that middle class students, or rather, students who are comfortable engaging with faculty were more likely to get research, teaching, and course assistantships. They were more likely to be in quote, unquote, those like life of the mind positions, the academic kind of heavy lifting work of the University. Students from lower income backgrounds who were not comfortable engaging with adults were more likely to be in manual labor positions like barista, grounds keeping, janitorial. That was happening long before the pandemic hit, and then when campus closed, and what I’m able to show in the book, is that lower income students who weren’t comfortable lost their jobs, those who were comfortable with faculty kept their jobs, and even increased their hours. I talk about this being directly about what faculty can and cannot do because so often assistantship jobs, whether it’s course, teaching, or research, those jobs aren’t even posted. Those jobs are doled out in office hours. Those jobs are people who are tapped for those positions. But if you are not in those spaces, even if you’re the best qualified because you know the material, you don’t get that job. In the end, what I show is the students who needed more were given less. The students who needed to earn more money to support themselves and their family were given fewer hours, less resources, and less support. The students who needed less, at least financially, were given more: more hours, more money, more support. It increased the disparity that what these jobs can do, and importantly, let’s then move beyond the pandemic. If you have a job when you have high faculty interactions, you not only get paid today, but you get a letter recommendation tomorrow. But if you have a transactional job where it’s pay for services rendered, that’s all you really get, is the pay today, there aren’t readily available opportunities for you to use your job to fully access institutional resources. Yet, if you work for me or any faculty member, there’s a greater likelihood that you will be able to access something from our networks, whether it’s, “Oh, I’m going to be meeting with the Director of HUD,” or “I’m meeting with this Director of a movie, they’re giving me three extra tickets. why don’t you come with me?” All of a sudden, you’re meeting people in different kind of ways. Or I. can put you on to say,”Hey, this person’s hiring next year. You should think about interning there.” These are just like very, very real opportunities that students who are connected to faculty members who are in the know or who can connect them with it, do more. They get more and so that’s why I want to challenge faculty. And faculty have great autonomy and greater access. One chemistry professor, for example, can hire as many students as an entire office like a dean of students. Some chemistry professors’ labs are 20 or 30 people strong, and half of them are undergraduates. So we have power within ourselves. I was doing a professional development program this weekend, and I met a Dean, and he said that he just changed the rule that if a faculty member does not list the job on the university’s website, they will not be eligible for a benefit that the college gives for hiring undergraduates. And I applauded them for that, because that is a step in the direction that I think we all should go. Because, as I also show in the book, when you make explicit the hiring process, lower income students from all backgrounds, whether it’s public or public school or private school, or their familiarity with elite environments, they’re more likely to apply or feel that it’s an opportunity that is available to them.

Rebecca: I think in this example and the previous example, you’re really highlighting the relational aspects that are really important for students to be successful in various ways, both on campus and in the next steps after campus. And you’ve really highlighted the idea of both in the example of the petitioning, and even knowing that petitioning is an option or building relationships with faculty, and even knowing that’s an option to get opportunities and highlighting the idea of making things more explicit. Is that the direction that institutions need to go in is developing policies that really highlight transparency, or are there other suggestions that you have for institutions?

Tony: I mean, transparency is huge, but it’s not just transparency. I think it’s also translation, because the more we leave to random connections, random conversations, or random moments of, “Hey, you look familiar,” or “Hey, do you take my class?” …the more we will see these class processes to continue, because students who are comfortable will avail themselves to more resources because they know how the college works, students who are not especially lower-income students think that hiring, grades, internships, fellowships, should be about the work, and yet, sometimes doing the best is not what gets noticed. It’s being present. It’s being in the room. I always tell the story of, when you apply for the Rhode to go to Oxford for study, you need eight letters of recommendation, eight. Who knows eight people, and not just know them, but who knows eight people who know them well enough to write true letters of recommendation for them, to endorse them for one of the most prestigious, if not the most prestigious, undergraduate award you can receive? You can be a 4.0 student, but if you’re a 4.0 student who has never been to office hours, who has never attended a faculty and student-faculty dinner, that has never worked for someone in their lab, do you have an advocate on campus for you who can say anything else, other than they were the top performer? But if you were a student who got like a 3.85, not quite 4.0, but still A range person, but you went to office hours because you didn’t do as well on your first exam, and you started going, and you develop a rapport with a faculty member, and you begin to work with that faculty member on their project. And then when that faculty member goes away for a week, sometimes you babysit their dog, or you become a member of their lab and their family, that letter is going to reflect that connection. But we leave so much in that black box of the hidden curriculum about how you should navigate college, and we almost never talk about employment. As a matter of fact, as I argue in the book, university takes a very hands-off approach to on-campus employment. We were like, “Just use this website or attend this job fair.” Job fairs are not neutral ground. We say “wear business casual.” What does that mean? As one student told me, “I don’t know what business casual was.” Some people may hear us talk in this conversation and be “Well, like, this is duh, like, it’s business casual. Get some loafers, get a jacket. Of course, you’re going to go and talk to a faculty member.” If anyone is having that thought right now, I would want them to ask themselves three questions: “What’s the highest level of education of the person who raised me? What job do they have? and how similar or different was my high school to the college that I went?” We have to remember, people with PhDs are 12 to 25 times more likely to have a PhD parent. Faculty members are like doctors, dentists, and the vets. It’s a hereditary position. So many faculty members have not only family members who have PhDs, but who are the children of PhDs. Again, through studying students’ experiences, through their families, finances, and the fault lines along race on campus, I was able to expose the way in which students move through campus on uneven and unequal grounds, long before the pandemic, and was able to chart how much rockier it got.

John: So, we’ve talked quite a bit about institutional issues and institutional policies, as well as some things specific to faculty. One of the things that happened with the pandemic, though, is faculty, often for the first time, recognized the extent of some of the inequities that their students were facing when they were seeing students who had trouble accessing wireless networks, or accessing Zoom, and struggling to share a computer, or being busy taking care of sick relatives or other issues, and there was at least a bit of recognition of some of these inequities. But I’m wondering if maybe faculty are backing a little bit away from that now as we’ve moved a bit further from the pandemic. A lot of people were a little bit more relaxed about deadlines and other policies and were a little more aware of the role of the hidden curriculum and so forth, but I’m not sure that that’s continued at the same level we’d like.

Tony: And that’s one of the reasons why I hope that this book doesn’t take us back to COVID, but it resurfaces the lessons that we learned through it, with some new ones, of course, because for me, I don’t want us to have this “get back to normal,” this post-pandemic normal, this new normal. The new normal is too easy. It will all too easy become a replication of what we had before if we don’t take these inequalities into consideration. If we don’t understand the way in which class shapes how students move through campus, and how race often exacerbates those differences, we just go back to what we had. We need to strive for something more like an equitable campus. We haven’t seen that.

Rebecca: Moving towards an equitable campus requires some hard work and change, and sometimes that’s something that people are really afraid of.

Tony: Yeah, I was thinking about something I said, it was like: “Simply following the impulse to get back to normal will only be a setback. If we return to normal, we will return to what was. We will once again be held hostage to the inequities that plague higher education and society alike. We will once again hold ourselves and our institutions back from being what we could be, what we should be. Let us not yearn for normalcy. I don’t want to be normal in the sense of the normal operating procedure. We need things to disrupt the normal operating procedure, unless our intention is to harm the very students who we are paying millions to recruit, retain, and graduate. If your intention is to do that harm, then you can go back with the new normal that’s basically going to be what we had part two. But that is not your intention, then you need to rethink and reframe many policies.”

John: In addition to the need for institutional change, are there some specific things that faculty can do in their classes to help reduce some of the effects of the inequities that our students face?

Tony: I’m a sociologist, and I already get in trouble for being as prescriptive as I am in the sense that “you’re too applied,” I’m like, “Well, again, now that we know, we know what we’re going to do about it,” but I don’t want to be so prescriptive that I limit the imagination of faculty. I’ll give you an example: in reading The Privileged Poor. I talk about the fact that we always say when office hours are. We almost never say what they are. And my work on office hours has spurred hundreds of faculty to begin to define office hours on their syllabi and on the first day of class. I want them to be similarly inspired. And here’s where it gets fun. Some people were in class 10 minutes early, and walked the class to their office to show people where they are. I never said to do that. I want to put people on the path to understanding the nature of America and how it comes to campus. We all don’t have the same streets to walk down. Some people gladly take a walk at night and stretch their legs. Other people know that that is a luxury that could cost them their life. And I say America, not saying that we are not global institutions, but we also know the larger context of the recruitment of lower-income students, especially in no-loan financial aid policies that are at nearly 80 no-loan schools in America. The vast majority of them only have no-loan policies for U.S. students. For me, that’s why I say America. And so I don’t want to be so prescriptive and tell fabrics what they need to do, but I do wish more people knew about redlining and blockbusting. I do wish more people knew about land theft and settler colonialism, and not just in the historical context, because we love to say that happened a long time ago, like Jim Crow laws were a long time ago. I’m like, “No, they weren’t.” I wish we understood the present-day manifestations of those inherently disenfranchising practices, because if we did, I think we would come to understand the reality that the greatest determining factor of an individual’s life chances in this country is a zip code in which you are born. In the land of the free, home of the brave, the place of unbound opportunity, if I know your zip code, I can predict how old you are going to be when you die, if you go to school, if you will graduate from high school, what college you would go to. Neighborhood isn’t destiny, but it almost feels sometimes that those who make it out took a detour that was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. There was a moment, there was a broken light that said, “turn here” instead of keep going and getting stuck into a different path. And so I just hope that this book spurs conversations on campus, not only to revisit some of the most invisible policies that have rather large impacts on student life, but also thinking about how we move through campus.

Rebecca: I hope a lot of faculty and administrators and other folks involved with our institutions read your book and really come together with creativity and have some interesting solutions or experiments to make change happen. We always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Tony: What’s next? That is a great question. I told you I’m first-gen. I never got to do a college tour when I was in high school. I didn’t know what a college tour was when I went to the prep school, you know, I was around a whole bunch of rich people, and they were like, “Oh, well, we’re gonna take a week through the California schools and a week through the New England Schools.” And I was like, “whatever I can’t see online when I’m at school on a computer because I don’t have internet at home, it won’t be seen.” And so I always say that when I go and share the work with people, as I’m invited to campus. This is my college tour. And so one thing that I look forward to about what’s next is visiting campuses to share the book. And also I am knitting another baby blanket for my graduate advisee, who just welcomed his first child into the world with his wife. And so that’s what’s next for me, is the book tour and a baby blanket. I actually just went and got the yarn this weekend, and I chose a pattern.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting, a nice balance.

Tony: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: And we do appreciate your book tours. In fact, we very much appreciated when you visited Oswego after your previous book. And I know shortly after that visit, a lot of people stopped calling office hours, office hours, and started using other names and moved them to other places to make them a little bit more welcoming. So I know that was a fairly immediate effect of one of those college tour visits.

Tony: Actually, Oswego was my last in-person visit before campus closed.

John: Yeah, we closed just a week or two after that. I think. I remember that, yeah,

Tony: I think I came up on March, 7th or 8th, I believe, and campus closed on March 10. [LAUGHTER] It was my last visit. I got off the plane, I was like, “Yeah, this is a different world we are living in.

John: Well, we were glad you made it before everything shut down.

Tony: I am too

Rebecca: …extra memorable. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you. We really enjoyed talking to you, and we’re looking forward to sharing this episode and to reading the book, which should be arriving shortly, my pre-order went in a couple months ago.

Tony: Awesome. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us.

Tony: Thank you all so much.

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

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

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352. Enhancing Inclusive Instruction

Posted in diversity, equity, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, race, racism, reflective practice, social justice, teaching
July 31, 2024

We often don’t have the opportunity to hear directly from students about inclusive teaching practices. In this episode, Tracie Addy, Derek Dube, and Khadijah A. Mitchell, the authors of Enhancing Inclusive Instruction, join us to explore how student perceptions of inclusive teaching practices align with the growing consensus on what constitutes inclusive teaching.

After serving as the Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning at Lafayette College, Tracie will be transitioning to a new role this summer as the Director of the Institute for Teaching, Learning, and Inclusive Pedagogy at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. Derek Dube is an Associate Professor of Biology and the Director of the First-Year Seminar Program at the University of St. Joseph in Connecticut. Khadijah A. Mitchell is an Assistant Professor in the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in the Temple University Health System and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Temple University College of Public Health.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: We often don’t have the opportunity to hear directly from students about inclusive teaching practices. In this episode we explore how student perceptions of inclusive teaching practices align with the growing consensus on what constitutes inclusive teaching.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guests today are: Tracie Addy, Derek Dube, and Khadijah A. Mitchell. After serving as the Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning at Lafayette College, Tracie will be transitioning to a new role this summer as the director of the Institute for Teaching, Learning, and Inclusive Pedagogy at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. Derek Dube is an Associate Professor of Biology and the Director of the First-Year Seminar Program at the University of St. Joseph in Connecticut. Khadijah A. Mitchell is an Assistant Professor in the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in the Temple University Health System and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Temple University College of Public Health. Welcome back Tracie, Derek, and Khadijah.

Derek: Thank you so much.

Tracie: Thank you.

Khadijah: Thank you so much.

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

Tracie: I am drinking tea. And I love that I’m drinking it from my Tea for Teaching mug that John gave me at the POD conference in November. And the tea that I’m drinking is just a simple kind of peppermint tea.

Rebecca: Sounds wonderful, and in the best mug possible. [LAUGHTER] How about you, Derek?

Derek: I’m just drinking water. But I would also like to shout out to my mug, which is actually a mug that I recently received from an instructor in my first-year seminar program here where the second semester of our first-year seminar program is a service-based learning course. And this mural that you see on the mug, and also behind me today, is one that their class created as a means to, as it says, inspire and engage and unite the globe around topics of digital and media literacy and things like that. So shout out to the mug, more so than the beverage within the mug.

John: It’s a very impressive mug and image behind you.

Rebecca: And something good to drink to, for sure. [LAUGHTER] How about you, Khadija?

Khadijah: So, I am drinking organic spearmint tea, and my mug has my name on it and in the spirit of inclusivity, this is probably the first thing I’ve ever had with my name on it. [LAUGHTER] When I go on vacation, I never get a keychain. So I’m very excited to drink the spearmint tea out of this mug.

Rebecca: I love a special mug. John and I don’t really have special mug.

John: Well, I do…

Rebecca: Oh you, do. Right.

John:…from the SUNY Oswego School of Ed, because we moved to a new recording room that they’ve loaned to us after we lost our other one. And along with the room, we got a tea mug, a nice insulated one.

Rebecca: And what kind of tea are you drinking?

John: In line with what we’ve just heard, I am drinking a peppermint spearmint blend today.

Rebecca: I missed the mint protocol today, unfortunately.

John: You didn’t check the calendar?

Rebecca: I didn’t. I’m sorry. [LAUGHTER] But I have a nice Jasmine black tea this morning, which feels nice and springy.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your new book: Enhancing Inclusive Instruction: Student Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Advancing Equity in Higher Education. Your previous book, What Inclusive Instructors Do, was the basis of a very well received faculty reading group that we ran at SUNY Oswego, in collaboration with Jessamyn Neuhaus at SUNY Plattsburgh. So this book is a superb follow up. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of this new book and how it connects to your earlier work?

Tracie: Absolutely, John, pleasure to do so. So when we think about inclusive teaching, and when I think about it, I would say in general, we know that instructors started at different points in their journeys. And when we wrote What Inclusive Instructors Do, we really knew that it will be really helpful just to have the voices of instructors who do that work, and their thinking about how they think about it, their mindsets, their values, etc. But also kind of distill it into some principles and practices that were very practical, because we know that that speaks well to instructors, but also that would allow them to reflect on their teaching. So after What Inclusive Instructors Do, we knew that instructors aren’t the only voice, right? [LAUGHTER] So we also knew that how important it was to really get students involved and students seeing the benefits of inclusive instruction, how did they experience these spaces in terms of their sense of belonging, welcoming environment, the feelings that it’s equitable or fair as well. So that kind of elicited our next step to really do a study on students and to find their perspectives. And a couple of things that we were able to do with this study, which I think is really helpful and useful for anybody, whether they’ve read What Inclusive Instructors Do or not, is we were also able to identify and ask students aspects according to what are the pitfalls? What have you seen not be inclusive? So that emerges kind of more strongly also in this book than the first book, for example. So we were able to really capture their experiences and these are students from a variety of institution types. They’re coming from a variety of classes they’ve been taking, various identity backgrounds, etc. So it really feels like now we’re talking about students like students [LAUGHTER], it’s their voice in this book. So Enhancing Inclusive Instruction, basically is just that, so that we can have a more comprehensive picture understanding of an inclusive classroom. What does it mean to students? What does it look like for instructors? And the beauty of it, and this is something that I’ve been speaking about a lot is, how are these alignments? What are the alignments between these two perspectives? What are the differences between these two perspectives? And how can we use this wider body of knowledge by having these viewpoints to really inform our practices in what we do in the classroom. So in general, both books, you can read both, you could read one, either/or, but they really were meant to really support inclusive instruction, no matter where an instructor is in your journey.

Rebecca: As a user experience designer and interaction designer, I really love the very student-centered or audience-centered nature of this book, and really bringing those voices to the forefront. Could you tell us a little bit about how you found the student participants to participate in your project.

Derek: So much like we set out with the goal of hoping that our teaching is as inclusive as possible, we also wanted that to be the case for our study, and our recruitment in the voices that we were hearing back from. So we made extensive efforts to have as broad a population be able to give us feedback, to participate in our surveys and our interviews. And that’s an important part, there were opportunities for our student respondents to reply via survey or via a virtual interview where they could potentially even go further and have deeper conversations around some of the topics if they wanted as well. So in order to recruit, after many collaborative meetings between myself and Tracie and Khadija, we came up with a broad spending plan to recruit students through using connections that we had, various educational listservs like POD, social media. We directly communicated with various institutions across the country, their teaching and learning center specifically, but also faculty that we knew that were invested in this type of work. And this included institutions at the community college level and research intensive institutions, liberal arts, HBCUs, colleges for students who learn differently, and basically any type of college you can think of. We also did lean on and take advantage of an opportunity to leverage technology through cloud research, to expand our reach as well. And through all of this, we did end up with well over 300 responses from various students when looked at geographically or institutionally that were very diverse. And we felt good with that as a basis for which to move forward.

John: One of the things we really appreciated when we were running the reading group was the reflection questions you had embedded in what inclusive instructors do. And this book also contains reflection questions spread throughout each of the chapters. While most teaching centers do encourage faculty to engage in reflective practice, it’s nice to see that embedded in the books that they’re reading. But might this be even more effective when faculty are reflecting on the student voices that make up so much of the focus of this book?

Khadijah: Right, so one of the things that stood out to us, when we did survey the inclusive instructors, there was a particular quote saying that inclusive teaching is a perpetual work in progress, informed by research, dialogue, and reflection. And when we think about that, in the context of incorporating student voice, it’s a perfect example of this. So when we think about research, actually collecting data from our students thoughout our courses, and I mean that as a community of inclusive instructors, and really fostering dialogue, and to be honest, what we found from what students say it is, that dialogue means we have to be willing to share and discuss and actually negotiate the space in our classrooms. And when we think about reflection, thinking that there’s no one set of practices for every inclusive instructor that we can act, and we’re not superheroes. So you can’t do all things, but you can do what you can to be responsive to your learners’ needs at the same time. So with that being said, when we came up with these reflection questions, and actually thinking about one of those quotes from the instructor, we saw that there were some mirroring with the first book in terms of course design, and creating a welcoming environment and conducting the course. But really, we saw that there were these 13 key themes, and that, although sometimes they reflected what we saw in the first book, we actually saw new themes emerge. So we really wanted to write reflection questions that captured that, that would help you delve deeper in thinking about the student perspective. And I think to echo something that Tracie mentioned, we really thought about potential pitfalls with these questions that we wouldn’t have thought if we didn’t speak with the students from their perspective to basically avoid certain types of things that may not have been the best for course design or maybe didn’t make everyone feel welcome, or when conducting the course. So that was very encouraging, the way that we could tailor these reflection questions based on what the students said.

Rebecca: And I love that so much. One of the tools that you developed and described in the book is the Protocol for Advancing Inclusive Teaching Efforts, or PAITE. Can you describe this instrument for our listeners?

Tracie: Sure. So the Protocol for Advancing Inclusive Teaching Efforts is a classroom observation protocol that enables instructors, in a formative way, low stakes, to obtain feedback on 15 specific instructional behaviors that are considered inclusive, equitable types of behaviors. And this protocol actually emerged from my work. And it’s a lot of what I’ve been doing in my own work is really thinking about tools that can support our instructors in building more inclusive classrooms. And so this PAITE actually originated from that. And we co-created it with students. So the student partners that work on a lot of the inclusivity efforts that I’ve done at my institution, basically supported this work and helped us measure reliability, et cetera. They were like, you know, the researchers, they helped us think about and devise it. So this particular protocol, I think, has been pretty impactful. We’ve done hundreds of observations with it at the institution that I was previously at. And thinking about all the debriefings, and all the feedback, it really supported instructors in thinking about their inclusive teaching practices. In fact, I like to share some of the responses that I’ve seen or heard them have around it. Some of them and even some of the student partners will actually, in future classes, they’ll say, “Am I doing this?” “Am I doing that?” They’ll actually reflect on the codes that are embedded within this protocol and continue to think about their practice. And that’s actually a very positive outcome of this. If they’re actually putting it in their awareness, awareness is critical for knowing are we actually doing these things that we say or hope we are doing in the classroom, and that has actually helped them really think about their teaching differently. And then some of the students said that actually, when they go to their own classes, they’ll start to think about the codes, because they’re so immersed in actually doing a protocol or conducting it with their partners as well. So that has been really great to see. And so we included it in the actual book, it has like a separate methods kind of paper, or how we developed it. But in the book, it really talks about how it can be used, and how it aligns a lot of the behaviors, and I’m actually doing a lot of this interesting mapping, align with what the perspectives of the students are, and also our instructors in What Inclusive Instructors Do. So it provides a really beautiful way to think about your teaching and monitor your approaches, reflect on your teaching, by actually having that data from your actual classroom. And I think it’s just really been helpful. We’ve embedded it in a variety of different academies and institutes, and different programming at my previous institution.

John: So you mentioned the themes that have arisen from the student interviews. Could you talk a bit about those themes?

Khadijah: Sure. So we saw 13 themes. And interestingly, seven of them centered on inclusive course design. So I’ll elaborate on the two that were the most prominent. We were really interested and surprised to see that maximizing student engagement from the first assignment and throughout the course. So the student has highlighted the importance of that first assignment, and several of them, they really believed that it helped them have a high degree of engagement. But also it was important that it required little content mastery, and built upon their existing knowledge. And there was a lot of positive feedback from successfully completing that first assignment. Students referred to short-term as well as long-term positive emotions from that first assignment. So that was really interesting. And group work… we often think about group work in higher education as a seminal active learning strategy, different learning teamwork, and things like that. So a lot of the students also echoed that, that it maximized the engagement. But what we saw them speak about was the pitfalls from their perspective with the group work, but in particular, those students that were neurodivergent and had disabilities. And so some students along with autism spectrum disorder, and also attention deficit hyperactivity disorder mentioned that, in that particular context, they didn’t feel most engaged with that. Student choice was very prominent. We talked a lot about: flexible deadlines were really important, individual student preferences on assignments and exams and accessibility needs and I think many of us are going to talk a lot about mental health and student well being. So that was very clear there. So those two were some of the key things, but also, including course policies that respectfully consider student time, structures that are easily followed and designed for student success. And students really wanted to encourage feedback on the instructions, diversity of materials, and finally, accounting for the type of course delivery. So I think in a post-COVID19 world, they talked about the importance of in person and hybrid and online themes. So that was the last theme that we saw in that regard.

Rebecca: When you quote students, you include references to their identities. And when faculty first start teaching, they sometimes assume that students in their classes are maybe just as they were as a student, but the mention of the diverse student identities in the book, hopefully help [LAUGHTER] remind faculty about the diversity of their students, and may also help encourage faculty to use a version of the “Who’s in class form.” Can you talk a little bit about that?

Derek: So with Inclusive teaching, I think identity is a key word to be keeping in mind, this concept of identity, this concept that everybody that enters the classroom has their own unique identity that brings with it a wealth of assets, but also potentially some personal bias. And this goes for the instructor just as much as the students if not more, and with the role the instructor is playing, it might be most important there to acknowledge it. So why we include the identity information that our student respondents shared willingly within their surveys was to that reason, for some of our faculty, for our readers, for our instructors, to acknowledge that the students that are responding are not identical to us when we were students, or us as we are now. But also beyond that, to acknowledge that no two students are the same. And we’re seeing different identities across these student respondents. And with all of this in mind that even the idea of teaching to the average student, well, there is no average student really, and that creates significant issues, to the idea of inclusive teaching. So for all of these reasons, we did think it was really important to include those identity aspects of the quoted students that was shared. We think this helps frame the quote, with some context, some important context, and hopefully also makes the quote more real for our readers. This came from somebody, a real person, a real student. So I do think, to your point about the “who’s in class form,” and things like that, that once we as instructors recognize and are aware of the diversity in our student populations, it becomes much more clear that getting to know our students is critical to teaching inclusively, and to including them in the learning process. So you mentioned the who’s in class form, which was part of the first book, and that’s certainly one way to do it that we’ve had a lot of success with. I’ve personally used it for years now in every class that I’ve taught since its development, and had just great personal experience and positive feedback from the students. There was a study that was published that showed student perception and instructor perception also very positive for the who’s in class form. So it’s a tool that we share, because we want it to be available for instructors to use, they don’t need to reinvent the wheel in this situation. It’s a great way to start from the very beginning from the first day like Khadija was mentioning with that first assignment being important… also, that first day, that first interaction, that first relationship building step to be one where it says, “I want to get to know you because you matter in this classroom.” So that’s one tool that we offer up to our readers and want them to be aware of, but there are other ways to do it as well. And I think that it’s important for instructors to think critically about their classrooms and their institutions and their contexts and determine what works best for them within their class to get to know their students.

John: You mentioned the importance of the context for instructors. And one of your chapters in the book focuses on providing advice for historically excluded instructors and their allies, because faculty are often in a very different context in terms of how students perceive them and how students perceive their identities. Could you talk a little bit about some of the things that you emphasize in this chapter?

Tracie: Yes, perfect segue. So in this chapter, we really wanted to emphasize that we see you, we hear you, like understanding instructors from historically excluded backgrounds can have different experiences in the classroom, as you mentioned, John, a bit, but also to give some advice and encouragement and support for how to still do this work because we know that a lot of instructors even from historically excluded backgrounds, in even my experiences and me being one [LAUGHTER], we know that there’s a lot of investment in this. There’s a lot of investment and then the importance of this. So some of the advice we give is general advice. What we know that students really appreciate in general and then also some really concrete advice to really support them in having the evidence that they are teaching well. [LAUGHTER] So the first thing to really think about and we talk about in this section is just care, like, how do we demonstrate care for our students, and regardless of whatever identities, care is critical. We also talk a little bit about other types of strategies. Some of them may or may not resonate with folks, again, all of the stuff we give as options to really think about, to experiment with, to practice with, to really think about what makes sense for you. So we give a couple of examples from people who’ve actually been doing this work as well. So things that have been published around storytelling, thinking about your story and who you are, what you choose to share with your students. And you might withhold some things, you might share some other things, and there’s good reasons for that, depending on your identity as well. We also talk a little bit about engaging your allies and advocates, because you really want to have people in your departments, and at your institution, who really value and can speak highly of your teaching, they know that you’re doing a good job, and they can advocate for that. So engaging them in various ways is important. We have these great tools we talk about, the PAITE, etc. So being able to actually have data that actually shows that you are doing things that align with what the research and evidence says can support students and their success in the classroom. So collecting that information, and just making sure you have it when you need it. And just for your own practice is also really critical, I think, for instructors, in this way, too. So those are just a few of many types of guidance that we do give in this section. I think it’s really important to consider what makes the most sense. I will say, in working with instructors, and also thinking about myself as a black woman teaching as well, it’s so contextual. It’s just like you can’t say that this will happen in this course, or this or that with this instructor. But we know that there’s a lot of variation that can happen. And I think a lot of these different guidance points can really help equip people to really think about what makes sense for them in terms of how they engage with Inclusive teaching practice. And the last thing I’ll share is that even in What Inclusive Instructors Do, if we break down and disaggregate the instructors a bit, we see a lot of instructors successfully talking about doing this work from historically excluded backgrounds. And so we know like it’s happening, we do it in our classes, as well. So this is not being meant to be like discouraging at all, but a very encouraging chapter. And just having some tools and equipment to kind of continue so that you also can be seen that way at your institution and you have that information.

Rebecca: I love these themes of reflection and data and being able to tell your story of who you are as a teacher and why you’re doing these inclusive practices and that there’s evidence that it’s working and supporting your students. Chapter 10 of your book focuses on a topic that we’ve certainly talked about a bit on this podcast, and it’s all over the news and conversations in higher ed, which is AI and instructional practices. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways in which generative AI can support an equitable learning environment?

Derek: I think it’s a really important topic right now. And on the ground, what I hear most commonly instructors talking about, and faculty talking about are the challenges that AI presents us around commonly topics like academic integrity, like, “Oh, here’s my assignment, my students are just going to go to [insert AI platform here] and complete that assignment and then submit it. And it’s hard for me… the tools for understanding if that occurred or not, can be challenging still at this point.” But I think what our chapter wanted to do more than focus on those challenges is kind of flip the table on that and focus on what are the potential benefits, like you mentioned, to increasing equity in the classroom and inclusivity in the classroom? And they are manifold, when you take the time to actually look at it and think about it. And I think the chapter goes over a number of examples to show how this can be done. In terms of benefits that we see AI being able to be leveraged with in the classroom, incorporating and developing more efficient learning experiences is certainly one of them. It can kind of balance prior knowledge gaps that students come with to the classroom by being a tool which can be used for brainstorming and ideation and things along that line, so that maybe a student can go to a platform with a particular question or broad topic and use that platform as a tool to help kind of narrow down something that they want to explore more deeply, get some ideas that maybe they didn’t have the knowledge that they brought with themselves to class to come up with that idea on their own, but now they can get there, and it can kind of even up that playing field a little bit. There’s also additional benefits to multilingual learners in terms of helping learn the language that their course is being taught in, writing more fluently and efficiently, and better understanding written material that’s present. It can help personalize learning in a really equitable way. There’s a portion of the chapter that speaks to the idea of using AI as an additional support for overcoming kind of the muddiest points in a classroom. So if an instructor is either directly asking students what is the most challenging topic, what is the muddiest point, those points could then be used and imported into an AI platform to help navigate those situations, or it could just be pointed as a tool that students could use on their own when they come up with their muddiest point and when they find a topic that’s challenging for them. Now, of course, all of this has to go within the concept of how reputable is the response that we’re getting, how trustworthy is the output of these different platforms. But that also actually leads into what a really potentially beneficial assignment tool would be with this, which is the idea of using these platforms, seeing what their responses are, and then having the students kind of fact check and revise and edit and think critically about those responses. And there’s an assignment there where students can essentially take a prompt, import it into an AI platform, see what they get back, and then the assignment is actually go through this, revise this, edit it, fact-check it: “What would you change?” And that can be a really great way to enhance the critical thinking and evaluation aspects that we’re really trying to build in a lot of our students with, again, narrowing and balancing what’s needed for kind of background knowledge coming in. So there’s these and many other mechanisms that are talked about in the chapter, including ones for, as instructors it can be a tool to brainstorm ideas for: “What are the most inclusive ways I can teach on this topic? Give me a list of 10 of these?” And then the instructor can look through that list and say, “Hey, which one of these might work best for my class context? And how can I adapt that to work for me?” So there’s lots of ways in which AI can be a really positive tool, as long as we use it in that way, and are appreciative and recognize the potential challenges that it also faces.

John: It’s certainly a bit of a challenging time in terms of professional development for faculty, because as you said, so many people just say, “this is just another tool for students to cheat,” because they haven’t really played with it that must themselves, they haven’t really seen the potential. And I think that’s something that all teaching centers are going to have to continue to work on quite a bit to help faculty become more aware of how these tools can be used to complement other forms of learning, rather than as a substitute, which is what they’re concerned about. So in addition to your two books, what are some other strategies that faculty can use to help create a more inclusive environment in their classes? I know, you’ve talked about some of them, like the “Who’s in class form,” and so forth? But what are some other ways that faculty can work to become more inclusive? Or what are some of the things faculty who have not thought about this much should start focusing on most immediately?

Khadijah: That is a great question. I think, yes, we have a ton of great resources, like books and tools like PAITE, and our lived experience. There’s something that I really think this particular study and process and talking to students that really resonated with us is thinking about nonverbal communication. Often people think inclusive teaching takes so much effort, but even thinking about your personality, you’re smiling. So for example, smiling, warm and welcoming tone, being thoughtful about tone. For example, students say not getting angry. So to throw back to something that Derek mentioned, is thinking about your instructor background, and what type of strategies or the nonverbal communication are you communicating. So that is definitely easy if you’re in person. [LAUGHTER] But if you’re online, some things that I think you can think about is the use of thumbs up, clapping, things like that. Something that recently came up for discussion was when you are online courses, do you tell your students to change the tone of the thumbs up so that everyone is reflected in that space and welcome? Students have actually responded that they feel more included in that space with nonverbal communication. So using emojis in emails, some students actually thought that made their instructor more approachable, but I will say, that being an instructor in 2024, you have to watch that. There is a pitfall there. Studies have shown overuse of the emojis, induce sometimes less confidence in the instructor. I think, being mindful of any strategy that you can use to be mindful of the nonverbal communication. But the verbal communication I’ll say, unequivocally, I keep going back to this… [LAUGHTER] the mug… it is really important to know names, say names correctly, and to use chosen names. So name tents can help with that, using an annotated class roster, seating charts, photos, mnemonic devices, student introductions, those things are concrete. And I think the last thing I would say, is actually telling jokes. So a lot of instructors use humor in college and university classrooms. So that tends to go over very well, there’s a positive effect on students in the learning environment, and making people feel included. But again, a word of caution, thinking about how the joke can land. So it could be very powerful in that way. But also wanting to be mindful if you’re going to, in fact, use that particular strategy to make your students feel welcome.

Rebecca: Well, we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Tracie: I’ll share a little bit about some of the things that I’m working on. So with regards to my scholarship, I kind of hover between teaching and learning and also educational development in general. And so a couple of things that are exciting, I think, for the future is we’re currently proposing a multi-site PAITE study. And so that study will dig deeper into the impacts of, we’re hoping, of the PAITE in the classroom. Since now, we’ve been using it a lot, but we don’t have all the data from the classroom and the experiences of students and the instructors. So we’re going to be doing a multi-site study in the next year or two. So hopefully, you’ll see that come out. Another project that we actually just finished off, a smaller project, we talked about group work, students experiences with group work, and that being a challenging area. So we implemented an intervention this past year at my previous institution, in collaboration with another center, and several classrooms, several instructors in their classrooms. And so we did collect some data on that. We just are synthesizing it. So we’re gonna hope to write that up and also share the resource that we use, that was an intervention that we created that students use to help empower them to really have more effective group work experiences, more inclusive, more equitable kinds of experiences. And then a couple of things I’m working on in an educational development realm, we just collected data from the POD community and outside on educational development right now in our times, so we can track how it changes. So we’re in the process right now, this summer, of starting to write the book, which will be the next one… it’s written like almost every 10 years educational development in the age of… and we’re gonna ffill that in [LAUGHTER] based on the results of the study, and then some other educational development things. And lastly, as was mentioned earlier, I’m moving to a new institution. So I’m going to launch a new Institute for Teaching, Learning, and Inclusive Pedagogy. So that’s going to be very exciting to really think about what’s next there, it will be launching the first center at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and it will have embedded within it all of this inclusive stuff. So there’s so many things to bring there and to increase and expand.

Derek: Yeah, for me, I mean, I think coming out of the work of this study that led to this book, I think where I am is continuing to spread the word, but then also putting it into action. And that means personally, for me, in my own teaching, taking all the things that I learned through this process of listening to students, working with my fantastic colleagues, and writing this book, and having conversations like these, putting that into action, and making sure we’re walking the walk, so to say, because that’s the only way this actually happens. And in my role at the University of St. Joseph, again, I’m not only a instructor, a faculty member in the biology department, but I’m also the director of the first year seminar program here at USJSJ.. a two-semester long program. It’s a true first year program, where the first semester is a three-credit course that is kind of half transitioning to college and half an academic component where the students get to dive into college learning. And the second semester is a one-credit course where it’s service based and meeting the mission of our university to engage in compassionate service. So as in my director role, I am thinking a lot about how do we help students transition to college in their first year? And I think there’s a lot that we can gain from listening to students. And that was reported out in this book that can be leveraged there. So building in some of these ideas of really getting to know the students, engaging in opportunities for student choice within our first-year seminar program itself as well, kind of coming out of the work of this, I’ve created a college success portfolio that we’re implementing in the program. We implemented it for the first time this past year that ties a lot of these features in that allows students to talk about right off the bat, their first assignment is nothing to do with the content, but it’s the “Why are you here? Why college? What are your goals, both in college and out of college? And this is something that the students can succeed with, right away to kind of set that form and let them know that their instructors here at the institution care about them as learners, and that the learning that they’ll go through will be personalized for them. So something that we’re piloting here at the University of St. Joseph trying out but long term would be something that we would hope to share out with the greater community and hopefully help those first-year experiences at institutions around the nation and globe.

Khadijah: Well, for me, there’s one thing that really struck me as we worked on these two projects, was that inclusive teaching is very similar to inclusive research mentoring. And so I do a lot of research mentoring. There’s a lot of teaching strategies in dealing with different types of learners in a research laboratory setting, so I’m really interested in going in the direction of thinking about how some of these strategies and things that we learned translate to a research mentorship context. And also, because I’m at an institution now that has graduate students and postdocs, really train the next generation of inclusive instructors, and particularly those that are in STEM spaces. So when I’m working with a mentor to our postdoctoral advisory committee here, and trying to get them excited about being inclusive instructors as they transition to their next phase.

Rebecca: We’re looking forward to hearing about all the things that you’re continuing to do because you’re making an important difference in our teaching and learning community. Thanks for joining us.

Khadijah: Thank you.

John: It’s great to see all of you again and talk to you again. And this time, we shouldn’t let it go quite as long as between our last discussion and this one.

Derek: Thank you so much for having us again. It’s been a pleasure.

Tracie: Yes. Thank you.

Khadijah: This is so fun. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Either that or you’re enough to write books faster, one or the other. [LAUGHTER]

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

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

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351. Extending Kindness

Posted in classroom community, engagement, equity, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, teaching
July 24, 2024

Beginning faculty often receive warnings that lead to antagonistic relationships with their students. In this episode, Cate Denial joins us to discuss how a pedagogy of kindness can build productive learning environments for all students.

Cate is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College. She is the winner of the American Historical Association’s 2018 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award and sits on the board of Commonplace: A Journal of Early American Life. She is also the author of A Pedagogy of Kindness, one of the first publications in the new Oklahoma University Press series on teaching and learning, edited by Jim Lang and Michelle Miller.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Beginning faculty often receive warnings that lead to antagonistic relationships with their students. In this episode, we examine how a pedagogy of kindness can build productive learning environments for all students.

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

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by

John: , an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Cate Denial. Cate is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College. She is the winner of the American Historical Association’s 2018 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award and sits on the board of Commonplace: A Journal of Early American Life. She is also the author of A Pedagogy of Kindness, one of the first publications in the new Oklahoma University Press series on teaching and learning, edited by Jim Lang and Michelle Miller. Welcome back, Cate.

Cate: Thank you.

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

Cate: I am. I am drinking Harney and Sons Decaf Earl Grey.

John: …very nice.

Rebecca: It’s a great choice. I have a green tea today.

John: A what tea?

Rebecca: I don’t know it’s just green tea. [LAUGHTER] Sorry.

John: And I have a peppermint spearmint blend today.

Rebecca: Sounds nice and calming. So we’ve invited you here, Cate, to talk about the Pedagogy of Kindness. I think we last talked to you in October of 2021, when the book project was just getting started. And our discussion focused on a “Pedagogy of Kindness,” an essay on the topic that you posted in I think, August of 2019. This essay was such a great resource that helped so many people and I know, our community here was really interested in the subject. Can you talk a little bit about how this essay evolved into a book?

Cate: So, as I wrote the essay, there was so much I wanted to say, and I had to sort of just express it in the most concise form that I could. After I was done, I was sort of pondering the other things that I wish I’d had the space to be able to include. And then Josh Eyler, who is now at the University of Mississippi, messaged me and said, “Hey, I think this needs to be a book.” And I was like “Me too.” [LAUGHTER] So I started thinking of what I would do to make it a longer treatment. And I wrote up a proposal, sent that off, and started writing, pretty much straight away.

John: In this book, you argue for a teaching approach based on kindness. You note that many people, though, confuse “kindness” with “being nice.” How do you define “kindness?” And how is it different from “being nice.”

Cate: So, being nice is a lot of what we do in academia, nice lies, nice will do anything to just get along, it will avoid conflict, and it will just try and paper over cracks in our institutions, whereas kindness is fundamentally honest. So it means you’re going to have some really tough conversations with your colleagues and with your students. You’re not going to mislead them about how they’re doing in your class. And kindness is really about accountability, it’s about positionality, and it’s about responsibility. And those are all things that I think niceness just elides.

Rebecca: I know that I found myself saying many times after reading your essay: “Telling the truth here or letting a student know what their real situation is, would be the kind of thing to do. [LAUGHTER]

Cate: Exactly,exactly. And I often have people, as I go around the country and talk to other faculty, ask me: “Exactly how do you have these conversations, when the student comes to you and says, ‘this terrible thing has happened, and please just excuse this paper,’ or ‘don’t include this in my grade’…and you have to, especially if you are in a professional school, for example, or a medical school or something like that.” And that’s when that distinction between niceness and kindness really comes into play. Because niceness is just about getting along. And kindness is like, “Well, let’s have a real conversation about what’s going on here. Why these expectations are, what they are, whether it’s possible for us to make some kind of adjustment here, or whether this is a moment where we really have to talk about what your future is in this course, or in this program,” things like that.

John: In the introduction to the book, you note that this is not quite how you started teaching, that you started teaching, like many of us, with a somewhat different focus in terms of interactions with students. Could you tell us a little bit about your perspective when you first entered teaching?

Cate: So when I first entered teaching, I was brand new to teaching. I had got my degree in England one month before I stepped into a classroom in the United States. I did not know the United States educational system well at all. I felt like a complete fraud, and the limited training I had had at my graduate program really encouraged me to think of my students as antagonists, to assume they were going to cheat, they were going to try and get one over on me, that they wouldn’t do the reading, that they were going to try and negotiate for a grade that was not what they deserved to get, things like that. And walking into a classroom like that prepares you for battle [LAUGHTER] at every single moment, which is a terrible way to walk into a new relationship of any kind. It’s especially demoralizing and damaging, I think, when you are walking into a classroom, so I had to unlearn the business of thinking that my students were up to no good. I had to unlearn the business of thinking that my students were fundamentally not interested in their own education.

Rebecca: You mentioned your four day visit to a digital pedagogy lab, and how that impacted your teaching. Can you elaborate a little bit on that and share that story?

Cate: Yes. So I went to the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute in 2017, which was in Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was the most incredible experience. I went because I had the feeling that I was lagging behind in bringing digital tools into my classroom. And I thought this would be where I would learn those things. And I certainly had that opportunity. But the first thing that I was asked to do in the intro track, was to tear apart everything about my teaching, in a really good way. I was in a track that was led by Chris Friend and Sean Michael Morris. And they asked us to reflect upon everything about our pedagogy. Why were we doing things in the way that we were doing them? What was the rationale that we had for the choices we were making, and the way we addressed our students and the kinds of things that we have happen in our classrooms. Everything about that institute was predicated on kindness. And it’s not that someone actually said at some point, “Why not be kind?” But that was the subtext from everything from… it was the first Institute I think I ever went to where there were pronoun pins that people could take when they registered. There was really generous swag, there was this wonderful ethos of sharing, everybody rolled up their sleeves. and really worked hard at turning everybody’s teaching materials into something even better than what they arrived with. There was really no hierarchy. It was just a wonderful community experience of trying to get better at what we do.

Rebecca: Sounds like such a great experience, and an opportunity to really critically reflect on your teaching, which we don’t always take the time to do.

Cate: I didn’t even know I needed to do it. [LAUGHTER] So by the time I went in 2017, I was more than 20 years into my teaching career. And I thought I was pretty great at teaching at that point. But what the digital pedagogy lab made me realize was that no matter what my goal was, as a teacher, all of the documents in my course, my syllabi, my assignment sheets, the way I handled introductions, all kinds of little things, really told a different story. And they told that story of antagonism that I had been socialized into as an early instructor. And I think that is something we are socialized into globally in higher ed.

John: One of the things you talk about is finding out a little bit more about your students. Because when many of us start teaching, we tend to assume that our students are similar to us, they have similar backgrounds, they’ve been prepared in ways that were similar to ours, maybe they weren’t quite as good as students as we were. But many people start off by assuming that students will be just like them. And yet you note in your introductory chapter that as many as 71% of undergraduates in the United States are non-traditional, under a teaching approach that focuses on kindness, how might faculty begin to address the diverse identities and needs of our students?

Cate: So, I think the first thing that we need to do is take stock of who our students are. And so we need to think about the demographics on our campus, that information is usually pretty easily available. As I travel around the country and visit different campuses, I always pause and look up on their websites, what is their diversity rate? And how many low-income students are there? How many people get Pell Grants? How many people are first-gen? How many people are returning after taking some time off? Or maybe have a GED? There’s all kinds of ways in which our students are not that sort of stereotypical 18 to 22 year old, straight white student who is perhaps in a sorority or fraternity or does athletics or anything that sort of gets caught up in the stereotype of who students might be. I’m really interested in what happens behind that. Even if a student walking into my classroom is, for example, a straight white student who is 18 to 22 years old, or maybe is an athlete, maybe is in a sorority. That doesn’t mean that those things tell me who they really are. They don’t tell me what is going on in their home life. Do they have kinship obligations and responsibilities? What is happening with the way that they’re funding their education, all kinds of different things. So I think pausing at the beginning of the term and really getting to know who our students are, is vital if we’re going to meet them where they’re at in our classrooms. So there’s lots of ways of doing that. There are ways of sending out surveys to our students, either before the semester begins or right as it begins. There are ways to have conversations in class to make those introductions a little bit more substantial than just, “Hi, my name is….. And my major is….. , and I’m taking this class, because….. So trying to gather that information, and also reflecting on how my identities are showing up as I walk into a classroom. I think those are really important parts of what we do.

Rebecca: What are some of the ways that adopting a pedagogy of kindness changes the ways that instructors and students interact?

Cate: I think it is all about undermining that presumption of antagonism. If we do not assume that our students are out to get us, But rather, that our students, in the vast majority of cases, are actually really invested in being there, and are perhaps a little bit scared of us, that they are a little bit uncertain, a little bit unsure, maybe they are first years, or this is their first class in a certain discipline, or they’ve been out of school for a while. There’s all kinds of ways that they might be very, very nervous coming into our classrooms. And so I think, taking the time to think about that, and address that, and make space for that, so that our students are not some sort of terrible, antagonistic, cruel set of people who really don’t want us to succeed or for themselves to succeed. That’s just not based in reality.

John: And I would think it would be a much more enjoyable environment, both for students and for the instructor, when there’s that trust between students and faculty.

Cate: Yeah, I actually have a blog post that I wrote, I think back in 2016, called the first-day jitters, that was about how nervous I would get before I would meet my students for the first time every semester. And once I changed my outlook and stopped expecting antagonism, I stopped getting nervous. I walked into the classroom and was excited about what was going to be co-created in that space. And it made an enormous difference to me and to my students. Certainly, I saw it in the ways that they interacted with one another and with me in our classroom spaces, but it changed everything for me about showing up as a teacher.

Rebecca: One of the things that you’re pointing to or hinting at is the idea that the pedagogy of kindness also applies to being kind to yourself. Can you talk a little bit about ways that instructors can be more kind to themselves?

Cate: Yeah, I think the number one way in which we can all be really kind to ourselves is to have impeccable boundaries. [LAUGHTER] I think it’s really important that we not prostrate ourselves, not give beyond what we are capable of giving, and have a really good understanding of what our capabilities are. So for example, if I am someone who is stringing together three jobs to make a livable income, if I have a family, if I have caregiving responsibilities, if I have a really long commute, all of those things are in the mix. And I cannot then be someone who 24/7 is simply available to my students. I don’t think that’s healthy, even if you don’t have any of those other responsibilities or considerations. I think that we all need time to have downtime, to have rest, to have play to, have pleasure. But I think that we need to be able to say, “I am available by email between these hours, you can expect an answer from me within a certain period of time.” Communicate those things incredibly clearly to our students. And that means that we’re also modeling for them that it is okay to take time for yourself and to have good boundaries.

John: In the second chapter of your book, you focus on the syllabus, which is often one of the first forms of communication between the instructor and students. Quite often the syllabi look more like legal documents than they do a welcoming introduction to the course. What are some of your suggestions on how to demonstrate kindness in your syllabus?

Cate: So an exercise that I was asked to do at the Digital Pedagogy Lab was to read my syllabus with a critical eye and ask myself who I was addressing when I wrote it. And what I found was that I was addressing someone who I assumed was going to screw up somehow. I assumed that they were going to disappoint me they were going to let me down, that they were going to try and get away with something… that old antagonism rearing its head. So then I had to stop and go, “That’s not who I think my students are, so why is that reflected in the language I’m using in my syllabus?” So then I stopped and I rewrote. And I kept in mind a student who is very real, I pick students to have actual students in my mind when I’m writing my syllabi, or when I’m revising them. And in addressing those students, I was able to make my language welcoming and warm. It doesn’t mean that it’s soft, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have boundaries and that I don’t have expectations. It simply means that I’m talking to them as I would if we were in person. That’s one thing that I learned to do. Another is that I learned that for many students, syllabi are impenetrable walls of text. And I’m sure all of us, in our time, if we haven’t written that syllabus, have seen that syllabus, maybe when we too were students. Those are really hard for students who have things like ADHD, for example, to be able to parse, to find the important information. They don’t look welcoming. They look like legal documents. And so I’ve changed my syllabi, for example, to have really colorful welcoming headers. I make a point of always saying “welcome to the class,” as the first thing that you see on the syllabus. I make a point of emphasizing relationship early and saying, “This is how you can get hold of me. Here are what my student hours are and what student hours mean.” And only then do I get into the stuff like, here’s what we’re going to read and here’s the assignments we’re going to do. It’s all about establishing warmth and a relationship from the get go.

Rebecca: How do you balance that approach with some institutional policy or other things that you maybe have to include in a syllabus that don’t have that same tone and tenor?

Cate: Yeah, that’s a really big consideration for a lot of people. There’s a lot of boilerplate language that has to go into many syllabi. So there, I borrow from Remi Kalir, who has students annotate the syllabus, and I’ve been doing this for several years. Now, my students get the syllabus at the end of the first class session, and they take it away for homework and they annotate it. I give them a really simple definition of what annotation is. And then in our second class period, we come back and they get to tell us what their questions were, what their comments were, what seemed unusual to them, what really stuck out and we have a conversation about all of that. And if you have a bigger class than I do, this is the sort of thing that you can have small groups do or you can have parents do. And then you can have people report out some of the things that they thought were most pressing. What that does is it returns to students some agency, and they can comment on the language shift, the tonal shift between the things you wrote and the things that you have to include, and you can have open conversations about “So why do you think we have to include this stuff? And what are ways that we could say this differently?” or “What is the way that you understand this best,?” Having that conversation is really important in allowing students to talk back to that document. And to make it clear that it’s a human creation, that it’s not just spit out by a machine somewhere, that there are people behind it, and that we are collectively always polishing and revising our syllabi in light of these relationships that we have on our campuses.

Rebecca: In smaller classes, I’ve done the annotation in a single document. And it’s been really interesting to have students comment on each other’s comments in a digital format, too. And it really brings some interesting things to light.

Cate: That’s a great way of doing it. I tend to have my students do it individually, just because they don’t know each other very well yet. And I found that my students tend to respond better to individual documents, and then a group discussion, but it works differently with every single instructor and every single set of students. So there are multiple ways that people could do this kind of annotation.

John: You did mention that this syllabus is not something spit out by a computer, but last week, we had a workshop where one of the things I suggested was that faculty may want to submit their syllabus to one of the AI tools out there and have it checked for inclusive language or to rewrite it in a more inclusive manner. And I think a lot of people found that, in that case, the computer did a better job than they did [LAUGHTER] in terms of creating that inclusive syllabus. But, at the other extreme, one of the things I’ve often done and I think you mentioned this in your book is in smaller classes, co-create the syllabus with students at the very start of the semester.

Cate: Yeah, I teach a course on history pedagogy. And there I give my students blank sheets of paper and say “Here’s your syllabus,” [LAUGHTER] and then they get to start brainstorming the things that they should put in syllabuses. They’re experts at syllabi, they read them all the time, they see many more than most of us do. And so they brainstorm what they think it should include. And then I put them in small groups. And together, they start to talk about, “Oh, that was a great idea you came up with, I didn’t think of that. Let’s put that in our syllabus.” Then we write their syllabi up on huge post-it notes that we put on the wall. And then everybody gets little post-it notes. And they get to walk around, and I ask them to do what I was asked to do at the Digital Pedagogy Lab, which is to say, “Who is the student that these authors are imagining as they write the syllabus?” Write it on your little post-it note, put your reactions on the wall. And what they very quickly learn is that they too have absorbed the idea that students are antagonists, students can’t be trusted, students are going to mess up somehow. And so then, as a class, we sit down together, and we say, “Okay, we don’t want to do that. We don’t want to make those assumptions. So how are we going to write a document that accurately sets out expectations, that also supports and that communicates trust?”

Rebecca: In chapter three, you focus a bit on assessment. And many faculty note that when students do less well than maybe they thought they were going to or anticipated on a graded activity, they might become disengaged or lose interest or disappear. Can you talk a little bit about ways that we can make our assessments more equitable, and to make expectations more transparent to our students?

Cate: There are so many ways that we can do that. Including students in the process at all points, I think, is a way that we can never really go wrong. But I think that one of the most important ways we can approach assessment is to think about, are we being inclusive? are we giving our students the tools they need to be able to show us what they know?…because so often, what we’re actually grading or assessing or giving feedback on is, how they write about what they know, or how they make an equation about what they know, we’re not actually just finding out what they know, what they have learned. So giving them multiple ways to express what they know, is a great way of leveling the playing field of allowing students who maybe don’t excel at writing to still be able to show “Hey, I have been thinking, I’ve been turning this over and over, I have some new appreciation for whatever it is art, or music, or fishbones, or an equation, or set of chemical compounds.” So in my classes, it’s traditional for history to be assessed through writing papers. And I certainly do have my students do written work, I don’t get rid of it altogether. But I also make an assignment where my students get to create projects. And they can do anything they want to, except write a paper. So they do things like make quilts, and food, and board games, and they knit and make pottery. I’ve had people make raps and sea shanties. I’ve had people dress up as pirates and come talk to us about a day in their life. All of these things are based on historical research. All of these things have a reflective component at the end. But for a student who really struggles with writing, for example, this gives them a way of being able to show me they have been learning that term, that they have done research, that they’ve really engaged with the class material in a way that doesn’t limit them in any way.

John: In chapter 4, you address kindness in the classroom. Could you share a couple of ways in which faculty can display kindness in their classroom interactions?

Cate: I think one of the most basic and important ways that we show kindness in the classroom is we learn who our students are. And that means names. And that is increasingly challenging. It depends on how many, if you’ve got 300 students in your classroom, how do you learn their names? I tend to have smaller classes. So it is really doable for me to learn their names, but I still rely on tools that helped me do that. So I bring in name tags, and for the first several sessions, my students will write their name on their name tag, and if they feel comfortable, they’ll put their pronouns on there too. I know that Vigi Sathy and Kelly Hogan talk about having name tents in their big lecture classes. And those name tents are also color coded. So then that helps them put people into small groups. People can turn those name tents on their end when they want to indicate they want to participate in conversation. They’re wonderful, wonderful tools. So there’s lots of resources out there that sort of suggests there are many, many ways to make sure that we’re getting to know our students, but I think that’s a really basic thing we do that says, “I know who you are. I know when you’re here, I really appreciate you being here and being engaged in a classroom activity.” I also think that it’s important to teach our students how to be in that space together. I think this is really important coming out of the height of the pandemic. We’re not done yet. but we are coming out of those most acute years. And certainly I have seen among my students on campus, that there was a period of time where it was odd for them to interact with other people because they hadn’t had practice. They had been in lockdown. They had been at home. They had been doing school online. And so we really had to sort of think about how do we interact? How do we talk to one another? How do we show that we respect one another? When something goes wrong, how do we show that we are accountable and responsible? How do we apologize, and mean, it. These are all things that we need to teach, as instructors to make sure that our classrooms are kind spaces in which learning can really happen.

John: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners that we haven’t yet discussed?

Cate: One of the things that comes up in the conclusion to my book is that it’s very easy to feel tossed around in higher education, like we’re in tiny little boats on a very large and angry ocean.[LAUGHTER] And certainly, there are structural problems that need our attention in higher ed. But we’re not powerless. And we get to make changes in the spheres that we control. And we get to approach our students, as fellow human beings who matter, we get to treat ourselves as people who matter. And kindness is the fabric of that, it’s what weaves everything together. It is the material from which we build inclusive spaces, and spaces where people’s words and ideas are valued. And without kindness, we end up with places that are disrespectful, we end up with places where people do not feel like someone’s listening to them. So I have the metaphor, that little boat being tossed around in my conclusion, but ultimately say, if we can just be kind to one another, then we can sort of temper that storm.

Rebecca: It’s a great image to end on, for sure in your book. And it’s such a great metaphor for really thinking through what sometimes it really feels like to be in higher ed, not only with our students, but with other colleagues. There’s lots of ways to bring this kindness work into other spaces within higher ed outside of the classroom as well.

Cate: Yeah, I agree. And one of the projects I’ve been involved with over the last couple of years is something called Care in the Academy, which is about showing kindness and care to each other. So focused on faculty, focused on staff, focused on those relationships, and how we show one another that we matter to each other.

Rebecca: Can you share some examples about what that might look like in spaces outside of the classroom?

Cate: Yeah, so some really concrete things that we recommended after 18 months of really thinking critically about this issue were things like extended bereavement leave. Places tend to give us three, maybe five days and they’re immediate. And the idea is that whatever mourning or immediate grieving you need to do will happen in like a week. And that’s just not practical or realistic, or how humans work. And in many cultures, it’s also not reflective of the way that people process death. So we talked about having maybe another three to five days that you can use for a year after someone passes and you can mark an anniversary, or maybe there is a ceremony that you need to attend. Or maybe there is a ritual that you need to perform, and you take time away to be able to do it. It’s a very small thing, but it makes such a difference in sort of saying we respect what a difficult time this is for you. Trying to improve reimbursement culture, there are so many people who are stringing things along on their credit cards, basically making loans to their institutions, and trying to speed up the process by which they are repaid as a basic form of respect, I think is really, really important to the way that we all function around one another. To not assume that people are sitting on vast mountains of cash that they can just make available to do things like go to conferences or to travel to another town or whatever the thing is. I think that’s also really important.

John: That’s especially true for junior faculty, for people who are contingent faculty and who are struggling a bit because this occupation does not pay all that well. It gets a lot easier once your kids are out of the house and you’re past those stages, but it’s a struggle for a very large share of faculty.

Cate: Especially given student loans being what they are. This lasts a very long time.

Rebecca: It’s something that sometimes faculty have in common with students and we don’t always recognize or acknowledge that.

Cate: Yeah, I agree. And I think our students don’t often look at us and think, “Oh, wow, they’re still paying off their student loans.” [LAUGHTER] They tend to see us as something other than precarious. Whether we are in a contingent position or not, very often our financial lives are in some kind of precarious situation, just because the reality of funding higher education careers is what it is right now.

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

Cate: What’s next is that I am going to go read a book about biomimicry. And biomimicry is looking to the natural world for patterns that all organisms share, and taking wisdom from those patterns. So it helps us in terms of ecology. But I just heard a podcast that was applying this to the way that we organize our institutions, and thinking about the way that organisms heal after fire or clear cutting or a flood, for example, the different jobs that different organisms have in the recovery process, and thinking about how we make really resilient institutions and organizations by looking to the natural world. So I know very little about it. I’ve listened to that one podcast. So I am going to go read a book that is all about that topic.

Rebecca: That sounds really fun.

Cate: Yeah, I think so.

John: And I think we’ve all needed a bit of resilience over the last few years with the challenges we’ve all faced. So it sounds like an interesting way of addressing that issue.

Cate: Yeah, I’m hoping I will get some fresh ideas.

Rebecca: Reading stuff that’s unfamiliar is always a great way to reinvigorate our own work.

Cate: Yeah, and I have not really considered biology since I was 16 years old and took my GCSEs. So this will be a real treat and a delight to exercise part of my brain that hasn’t been exercised in a while.

John: Well, thank you for joining us. It’s great talking to you. And I really enjoyed reading through your book. It grew from this very nice, useful essay that many of us were reading through during the pandemic, to a much more elaborate discussion of how to be an effective teacher in all aspects of teaching.

Rebecca: Such a needed robust resource.

Cate: Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to be with you today and have this conversation. And I really appreciate all your kind words about the book.

Rebecca: We look forward to talking to you in the future, hopefully the near future.

Cate: Thank you.

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

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

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