Category: games

294. The Allure of Play

Posted in active learning, engagement, feedback, games, higher education, learning, motivation, pedagogy, play, role-play, simulations, teaching
June 21, 2023

Student learning is enhanced when active learning activities are used in instruction. In this episode, Victoria Mondelli and Joe Bisz join us to discuss how principles of game design can be used to create engaging active learning experiences. Tori is the Founding Director of the University of Missouri’s Teaching for Learning Center and is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. She had previously served at the teaching centers at Mercy College and at the CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College. Joe Bisz is a learning games designer and Full Professor of English at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College. Victoria and Joe are co-authors of The Educator’s Guide to Designing Games and Creative Active-Learning Exercises: The Allure of Play, which was published in March this year by Teachers College Press at Columbia University.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Student learning is enhanced when active learning activities are used in instruction. In this episode, we discuss how principles of game design can be used to create engaging active learning experiences.

[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 Victoria Mondelli and Joe Bisz. Tori is the Founding Director of the University of Missouri’s Teaching for Learning Center and is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. She had previously served at the teaching centers at Mercy College and at the CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College. Joe Bisz is a learning games designer and Full Professor of English at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College. Victoria and Joe are co-authors of The Educator’s Guide to Designing Games and Creative Active-Learning Exercises: The Allure of Play, which was published in March this year by Teachers College Press at Columbia University. Welcome Tori and Joe.

Joe: Hi.

Tori: Hi.

Joe: Thanks for having us.

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

Joe: Oh, yes, classic chamomile.

Rebecca: …in a mug that looks handmade?

Joe: It looks handmade. But that’s just to make people think I have other skills as well. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: How about you, Tori?

Tori: Today I have a Starbucks espresso and cream in a fancy, fancy glass because it’s so special to be with you today.

Rebecca: She has upped to a stemmed glass. [LAUGHTER] How about you, John?

John: I am drinking a peppermint and spearmint tea in a Tea for Teaching mug.

Rebecca: That’s good. I have a cacao tea.

Tori: Very nice.

Rebecca: Cacao tea… the cocoa plant. And so it’s actually made from the plant rather than with tea leaves. So it’s not chocolate flavored. Made from the cacao plant. It’s very tasty.

John:I heard cat cow?

Rebecca: Cacao.

John: Well, I was thinking of the animals.

Tori: I was thinking of the yoga pose.

John: That’s right.

Tori: Cat cow. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your book, The Educators Guide to Designing Games and Creative Active Learning Exercises. What are the advantages of using playful activities in learning?

Joe: Well, I think I can take this start. Basically the foremost advantage of being playful is that your exercise can recapture the ageless allure of learning. As children,the first way that we all learn was by probing our environment, playing with it, inventing mock scenarios and then changing up the rules. As adults, I think that in our rush to instruct, our exercises can often become top down, and we can miss opportunities to inspire wonder.

Tori: Yeah, and I’d like to add, that’s why Joe and I really wanted our book to show teachers how to build their own creative active learning exercises to be easily appliable. We mostly come at it from a non-digital aspect. So we are recommending using basic materials, paper, cards, tricky questions, puzzles, point systems and role plays as some of our most common tactics.

Rebecca: Although, lucky for us, there’s plenty of digital technology that can make all those things happen in other environments too.

Tori: Exactly, and the book does have that. We have different sections of the book “design online,” and so recommending those tools as well.

Joe: Low-key though, low hyphen key.

Rebecca: So we know that students play games for hours, often weeks, months, and engage in things for long periods of time as they master new games and get engaged with their friends. What are some principles of game design that we can use to create and maintain student engagement in our classes?

Joe: This actually began some of our early research before the book, thinking in this direction. When designers make mainstream video games, or even elaborate board games, escape rooms, or interactive installations in museums, whether for children or adults, there’s often a lot of difficult content that needs to be taught. So as you mentioned, the designers rely on tried and true principles of interactive design to make these experiences feel engaging. In fact, there’s been a lot of work by other researchers in the past 20 years, exploring variations of these principles, and suggesting that we teachers can learn from these principles. But most of the focus was on proving the research rather than articulating how to apply these principles in a practical manner. This led to our own research collaboration, and eventually our very successful and hands-on professional development workshops. They use our methods.

Tori: So we have several sets of principles in the book, and I think this will be a perfect opportunity to tell you about our engagement principle. And we have five of those. The first one we call “narrative and fantasy,” the basic idea being that people need to hear stories that give context to what they’re facing in their own lives. The next one is “networked or sensory environment,” the idea that people thrive when they’re communicating in social groups using digital smart tools and multimedia. The next one, we would call “fast or random access,”
many people like processing information non-linearly and even simultaneously. Next is a classic one, “challenge,” people really want to challenge them feels achievable and personal. And the last one is also sort of a classic, I’d say, and that’s “rewards,” what we call “frequent rewards” or “feedback,” that we really as human beings crave feedback on our choices, even if that feedback is abstract, like .4 miles or something along those lines.

Rebecca: Can you share a couple of examples of what those engagement principles look like in the classroom?

Tori: Yes, Joe, do you think now’s a good time to talk about the simple mechanics?

Joe: Yeah, I think so. And this is basically a way that learning activities can be, as we could use the word converted, or transformed into some kind of playful activity. So there’s a spectrum, we think, to making an exercise more playful, or engaging. Of course, the first step is to just have it be active, have the learner actually be doing something other than just listening, the next step is to add a fun element. These are elements which researchers have shown add engagement or playfulness, we’ve classified some of these into what we call the five simple mechanics. And let’s see if we can explain them using audio only. So make the pace of your exercise a little bit random, or a little bit rapid. That’s two of the simple mechanics, rapid or random, or you can make its goal involve some kind of reward, such as points, badges, or some kind of rivalry, a little bit of competition, or students cooperating against a challenge, which still has competition, or some kind of roles. And we define roles pretty broadly, it could involve themes that have concentrated moments of emotions like feelings of suspense, it could be playing a historical, or fictional character, or just the students being on teams, and each student has a particular responsibility. So if just a part of it has one of these simple mechanics, not the whole thing, then you’re already on your way to creating something playful, so at least those moments would be playful.

Rebecca: So you’ve mentioned the five simple mechanics, can you give an example of what that looks like? So you’ve provided a frame, provided some playful things that we can think about, what would an activity maybe look like using something like that?

Tori: So one of the games that I like to play in the Teaching for Learning Center with faculty, and then what usually happens is they figure out ways to use it in their classroom, is a game that Joe designed a few years ago, we call it icebreaker bingo. So you can imagine a bingo card where there are prompts on each of the squares. And when people come in the room, and they’ve never met each other before, but there’s a common thread, those prompts will relate to that thread. And you circulate around the room and you go up to different people, you obviously introduce your name and other important details, and then you get right to it. You can ask them up to two of the prompts. And if they are true for them, they sign their initial, and then keep moving through the room. So the first person to get five across or five down or five of a kind, we have categories would shout “bingo.” They can think about the simple mechanics at play in that wonderful icebreaker certainly is random. Usually people don’t come up with a strategy for it, they just go up to random people and ask random prompts. And then they also can kind of get into the role of being an interviewer and selecting different prompts based on the ones that they like. The rewards is really strong in that particular icebreaker because there’s that joyous moment of explaining bingo, and then we’ll usually have a prize. And the rival factor is very heavy in icebreaker bingo. So that’s one that has a lot of these engagement principles, and is very popular with faculty and students alike, and can be just for general getting to know each other, but also could be used a little bit as a kind of quizzing mechanism as well.

Joe: And I like that Tori gave an example of what we would call basically a more full fledged game. But our listeners can also think about the simple mechanics as just little sprinkles onto something. So for example, for random, we have something that we named monkey wrench challenges, where you have any kind of standard activity with the students that are working on something. But then you make a point of changing things by calling out a sudden challenge that requires the students to alter their approach. So maybe it’s a new perspective by which they’re looking at the material and other concepts and kind of new information that they have to find. And even though you’ve planned it out, probably, unless you have a deck of these things that you’re drawing from, it’ll have a nice taste of random and nonlinear and break the order that students were doing something and therefore, for reasons known to these researchers, feel somewhat pleasing.

John: Can any active learning activity be converted into a more playful structure.

Joe: I think so because if we look at it as a spectrum, moving from active learning to adding a little bit of play, even if the rest of your exercises is exactly as you’ve already designed it, then anything can be converted. It’s just a question of whether one, after analyzing the need for what you’re trying to achieve, whether it needs it. The longer you have an activity that goes on that you might consider or your students might consider to be passive, we would argue the more the need for some element of it to change the pace, or to change the goal, so that it could feel a little bit more playful.

Tori: And Joe, in our decade plus time of doing this work, have you ever had an occasion where somebody came to you for advice on making a learning activity more playful or gameful where you’ve had to turn them away? I could say I have not, we always find something.

Joe: No, definitely not. Especially if they’re already crossed the chasm, and they’re actually interested in making a more playful,

Rebecca: …perhaps the very first step, right? So you note in your book that learning activities might be focused on skill and drill, or focus more on deep learning. Can you talk a little bit about how we can do a playful activity or a game for each of those different kinds of learning?

Tori: Yes, definitely. And if you’ll let me just kind of explain a little bit on how we classify skill and drill versus going more towards deep learning. So skill and drill, what we’re really talking about here are sort of facts, factual, and foundational knowledge that’s needed either in a discipline or sort of a general education curriculum. And so it’s really things that people need to commit to memory, just basic ease and facility with those facts or figures, that kind of thing. And then when we’re talking about deep learning, we start to move into the ability to, for those who love Bloom’s Taxonomy, is like moving into manipulating information using higher order thinking, but to do that in a way that really will be long lasting, because even over time that certain things can evaporate. That’s just human memory. So when we talk about games for deeper learning, it’s not enough to use the engagement principles and the simple mechanics. And there are ways of structuring it so that we get students to grapple more deeply with content and do things with content. So we’re delighted to bring the complex mechanic to people and readers with the ALLURE method. Joe, do you want to talk about that?

Joe: Yeah. So it’s perhaps a little unexpected in our book, because a lot of people who are talking about games are focusing on the engagement element. And immediately, we do talk about that. But we’re actually firm believers that, in addition to being engaging, well designed games and playful activities, can carry, as Tori was saying, deep learning principles taken from the cognitive sciences. So before the book, I started doing some research on ways that faculty were already approaching learning activities in the classroom. And I came up with a classification system that Tori also expanded on with me for the purpose of the book. And we looked at how these things could carry some of what we call deep learning principles, such as identity situated meanings, and the ability to pass information to students through cycles of expertise, so that the students slowly becomes a master and then is challenged by new information. We call these the complex mechanics, and to them will instantly be very familiar, I think, to most of our audience. One of them is called “trivia questions.” It’s pretty much the most common type of playful activity that educators use in the classroom. Another one is called “simulations,” which is also very common, especially at the high school level. And that can involve debates and roleplays, which in our opinion, are an example type simulation, also arguments. Very complex mechanics, we call “cut ups,” basically about sequencing puzzles, reordering information, mixing it up, and having to put it back together. Other ones would involve classification type exercises, such as sorting or matching. So these are already hard-core activities that are done sometimes in the classroom. But we’ve linked them to some of these deep learning principles and have explained how these teachers want to design something but they don’t want to reinvent the wheel, they could just look at one of these nine complex mechanics and they’re sort of gameful approaches, creating something. We also have deduction exercises, common to scavenger hunts, brainstorming, which is definitely playful and feel like a kind of game and interpretive exercises such as improv. I was just at conference a few days ago, called Playful Learning and improv was everywhere. It was the heart with all these teachers just talking about and it was so interesting to see all these examples of playful improv in order to illuminate the concept.

John: In your title, you have the ALLURE of play, but ALLURE is used there not just as part of the title, but it’s also an acronym. Could you tell our listeners what the acronym stands for?

Tori: Yes, A – ask where to apply the play. L- list the mental moves. Second L – link the mental moves to the play. U – understand how the learning principles operate. R – run the activity game. And E – evaluate the learner experience. So that spells ALLURE, and that’s our six-step method, the backward design guide. And we’re so happy that it worked out because we just love the word “allure.”

Rebecca: Can you walk us through those steps in how a faculty member might approach their class and designing an activity?

Tori: The first step really, an educator wants to ask themselves or work with a small group to really inquire in their own curriculum about where, to use a business term, where would the return on investment be for your student learning? Joe and I are believers that if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. [LAUGHTER] So where are students struggling? Have you taught this class before? Is there a bottleneck in learning? Is there something that’s holding them back from the learning? And we think game-based learning is the ultimate in active learning pedagogy, as really, really strong to help students through and be successful. We advise educators to look at the curriculum and go where the student learning is being held up for some reason. Maybe there’s a student learning bottleneck, because cognitively it’s a difficult concept. Or maybe there’s an affective blockage. So Joe and I are strong proponents of game-based learning as the best active learning strategy. And so we think that you can go to your toughest student learning challenges and apply game-based learning there. So that’s what we’re really asking in step one is, where do you think you’ll have the most bang for your buck? Because game-based learning does take a good amount of talent and time put into it. So making judicious decisions. Is there a place where students are bored? Is there a place where just, semester after semester, you lose half the class, and to go ahead and apply your energies there. The next step, list the mental moves, really gets at when you have a student learning outcome that you’re working with for students in a class, oftentimes, that’s written in a way that is a little obtuse, you have to break it down to really get at what the student is actually doing mentally, what are the mental acrobatics that are going on there? So this is where we will say, “Let’s get granular. What are we really talking about? What are the mental moves?” Joe and I are both very inspired by the decoding the discipline scholarly community, and they have had, for decades, really strong practices in faculty working together, two faculty from different disciplines to help each other break down what the expert is really doing. And so the first couple of steps of the ALLURE method are really picking up on that tradition of where do you want this learning game to be successful in your curriculum? And then what is really going on at a minute level, the kinds of thinking steps, the kinds of mental moves that students need practice with. And then the third, I like to think of link the mental moves to the play… it really is the magic of the whole ALLURE method. Because when Joe developed the complex mechanics, he categorized them according to Bloom’s Taxonomy level. Now, what this does is it really takes a lot of guesswork out for educators who want to apply the method. Now all of a sudden, they can drill down on nine of the complex mechanics and say, “Well, I want the complex mechanics that are really going to help my students. say with analysis.” And then that gives them a subset of choices, that they can choose the complex mechanic that foster more analysis and build that in as the game play, so students are really practicing analysis, getting feedback on that analysis. And it’s really quite time efficient, thanks to that categorization.

Joe: So Tori just reviewed the first three steps: ask, list, and link. The last three steps are understand, run, and evaluate. So as soon as the teacher has finished thinking about what are the actual steps the students are doing, and connecting it to one or more of the complex mechanics, this is the moment when we ask them to brainstorm roughly what their playful activity will look like. So in the book, they take 20 minutes, putting together some ideas, making connections, then they have some tea, take time off and we move on. So this is all about the end of link moving into understand how the learning principles operate. Within understand how the learning principle operate, they then do a debrief and they’re examining what they came up with. And they’re comparing it to all the mechanics and principles that we’ve been teaching them so far in the book, not because their activity needs to have all of these things, that they’re looking for. have perhaps missed opportunities, or things that can be refined, or mechanics that they were working on, but perhaps didn’t come across as thoroughly as possible. We call these checklists. And they’re just going through and reevaluating their approach, and then tweak it one more time. In the next step, we have run the activity game. So ideally, the teacher would talk to either some play testers or some fellow colleagues in their discipline, and talk to them about what they’ve come up with, one more last chance for feedback. And then they would present it in the classroom to their students. And we have different methods for collecting student feedback and taking notes on what they’re saying. We realized pretty early on in our own workshops, that a lot of teachers are actually just uncertain how to even run an activity game in a classroom, much less one that they’ve designed. There’s so many facilitation issues to think about. So within our step, run the activity game, we also walk teachers through thinking about common facilitation issues that will come up such as: Do I have the right kinds of desks to hold these games or activities? Do I need a projection screen? How many teams are there going to be? Should students be in teams. In all these concerns, they can think about them ahead of time and have a good strike plan. After the activity game is run, we go to the last step, evaluate, evaluate the learner experience. And we have different rubrics and ways that the teacher can think about how successful was the students’ experience of this? And how might the activity game be iterated upon and changed for next time? Because we all know, we slowly work on our exercises, and we make them better year after year, till perhaps we get tired of them, or we put them aside for a while.

John: When you present this material, I imagine there’s some faculty who are resistant to the whole concept of building play into classroom instruction. How do you address that with faculty?

Tori: I never force it on them. We start with: “What brings you in today?” And we talk about we sort of have a co inquiry process of like, “What’s going well, what’s not going so well?” And then wel don’t always bring the play or the games at first. It seems like mostly when I advertise a game-based learning community of practice or a workshop, you’re sort of already getting people that are open to it. But I can tell a nice anecdote about working with the political science department. I started working with them about four years ago, just on a course redesign because their student success, or the grades, were not where they needed to be… a large enrollment course. And so we just started working together to boost student attendance, students really weren’t coming to class as they should be, and to boost presumably student learning, but they really had some assessments that I thought could be improved upon. So I was even questioning how much learning are we really evaluating here. So we began and worked with each other for a couple of years, just doing classic active learning redesign, before I even broached the subject with them about playing games. And what brought that about was an internal grant for $100,000 became available to do innovative creative teaching and learning. And so when I pitched that idea to them, I think our relationship and my credibility with them, that we’re not just adding bells and whistles, we’re really talking about some proper teaching and learning principles to not only boost engagement, but to deepen learning. And it’s been a wonderful project. And we have new board games and card games, we’re going to have our first video game. We’re working with Adroit Studios, our gaming lab on campus. And so they are very, very pleased and had never really been in game-based learning before.

Joe: And adding to what Tori’s saying, I think often the teachers just want to see like a little hook, a very quick understanding of what they could do to be playful. And then from there, they start getting other ideas. So we often lead with talking about simple mechanics. So we might say, well, for example, you make something a little bit more rapid, maybe you’re giving a certain amount of time for students to answer the question, not like a test question that’s worth something, but during an activity just to make it a little bit more playful, 10 seconds to think about something. Or taking another aspect of the rapid simple mechanic, one might have a very long activity that students have to do. There’s been research showing that if you can chunk that activity into shorter segments, perhaps that are assigned a certain amount of time, not really above timers, but just to get through all of them the day, students can more easily see the discrete tasks and operations you’re supposed to be performing in each of those segments. Make something a little bit more random. We mentioned earlier about the monkey wrench challenge, and try to use a little bit of roles in what you’re discussing. Roles are linked to narrative, and it really does help to give a theme or some kind of narrative directivity. For example, for discussing an essay, or a textbook entry, or any concept, tell a quick story that illustrates some of the concepts from that reading. Or ask the class to actually help you write a short creative introduction to the boring essay that everyone had to read or that you’re reading in class, and to use a narrative hook in that short introduction. So now we’re using the power of analogy and of fiction, well, not really fiction, but sort of narrative to help students see sort of a more macro way of tying concepts together before doing a deep dive. So these are all little ways to think how to quickly and briefly be playful.

Rebecca: I hear both of you describing some really interesting things in the classroom. But I also know that faculty can be really anxious about trying something new, or trying to make something happen. And as exciting as it can be, taking that first step can be scary. You’ve mentioned some of the simple mechanics and I heard you say something about low stakes and the way that you’re applying about points and not being a big test or a test question. Can you talk about the little ways to get started?

Tori: My favorite way to introduce faculty to this whole new world is to invite them to play a game Joe made years back called: “What’s your game plan?” And this is a wonderful card game in a team. And it’s cooperative play. And it’s a brainstorming game. It has been just a joy bringing faculty together where they can be playful together, and see what they come up with. It uses a lot of the simple mechanics, so it’s a great way to introduce them to the simple mechanics. And they can either bring a lesson objective that they have, or Joe’s deck has some common lesson outcomes. So it really takes the edge off. And they can just relax in what Joe and I like to call the sandbox, and just say: “Be creative.” …give them permission to play themselves. And that is one of my go to. I mean, there’s not a semester that goes by that I don’t lean on What’s your game plan? So grateful to Joe for making that. And then I guess we could also say: “Well, let’s start at the beginning with the ALLURE method.” Step A: ask where to apply the play and once you have that student learning bottleneck that you want to look at, maybe you’re not ready for the complex mechanics, but you can think about two or three of the simple mechanics that you can add to an existing activity you have for to convert even maybe a lecture or a mini lecture into something a little bit more playful, where the students are interacting with you in some way.

Rebecca: So I’m always curious to ask what’s your favorite, or one of your favorites… because we obviously can’t have favorites… your favorite game or playful activity you’ve seen implemented in the classroom.

Joe: I talk about this example a lot, my heart goes there immediately. One of the complex mechanics I was talking about, I said something about one called cut ups, which comes from sequencing ideas together. And I was trying to think about how to use this in the writing classroom since I’m an English professor. I was getting a little bit stuck looking at it on the level of just words, like cutting up a sentence, at the level of the word… reordering it. This is really only teaching grammar and I wanted something a little bit more sophisticated that was about reading and writing. And about this time, one of my colleagues, Julie Cassidy, without us really even having a conversation told me that she’d come up with something. She showed it to me. And basically, she had taken, I think it was a four paragraph essay, that was published about crab fishing. So we have something that’s explaining a procedure, how to do something, to cut up this essay on the level of the sentence. So, there are like 25 sentences, carefully inserted in an envelope so they don’t all get lost. And then we had a low-level writing classroom where the students were very weak. She brought it in, in groups of five, dropped an envelope in front of them, said, “Okay, put it in order.” She’s describing this to me, and I’m very excited. So I did the same thing about a week later. And it was incredible just to see their faces so utterly focused on the task in front of them. And one of them would like, move their hand forward to move a piece of paper with a little bit of timidity, but with deep interest, and then the other one would gently touch your hand and say, “No, no, it goes over there.” Then like “ah,” [LAUGHTER] and they’re like stroking their chin and moving. And this went on for like 12 Intense minutes before the groups had basically all solved the order for a possible order that made sense of the essay. So of course, they’re looking at transitions, their reading for sense, so there’s close reading here, they’re thinking of ways that information can be ordered for their own writing. And then a great way to follow up an exercise like this is to ask students to write their own mini essay. It’s teaching some kind of procedure, like creating a recipe. So this was a great example because it goes beyond just a quick moment of play into something that’s a longer activity and where you can really see the deep learning happening with the students. That’s one of my favorite examples.

Tori: And I have one also that’s quite well known for deep learning, and that is the whole suite of games called Reacting to the Past. So I’ve had the honor of attending and playing a lot of these games, and they are deeply immersive role-playing games. Most of my experience is with history games, but they’re all across the curriculum, even in some of the sciences now. And here I just marveled at the amount of hard work that students will do in order to play their characters really well and meet their objective. So, the writing of speeches and other kinds of rhetoric and communication, the behind the scenes faction politicking, they’re willing to do, the, I would say, transcendence of one’s own identity to kind of widen perspective of other that goes on in these games. Kudos to Mark Carnes and all of the reacting creators and trainers around the country and around the world who are doing such great work with that. At the University of Missouri, we have recently made a game that’s akin to Reacting in the sense that it’s a role playing game. But it’s more of a card game than a reacting game, and it teaches students about bureaucracies, and how frustrating bureaucracies can be, but that hiring more people isn’t always the right scenario. So it takes the role-playing mechanic and then we throw in unexpected stress bombs, we’ll call it, of the government goes on furlough, all of the workers have to cease what they’re doing for 20 minutes or something like that. And it just has all of these likely events or unlikely events that can happen. And the students are really in their roles to solve a problem. So we’ll take things from current events, like recent scandals or problems and have the students work through that. And then there’s a peer review piece of it, where they’re actually scoring each other’s solutions. And that’s been really wonderful to help the faculty create, and we’ve been play testing it and we’re really excited to bring it to a live real class in the fall.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting.

Tori: Thank you. Yes.

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

Tori: Well, Joe, and I do a lot of professional development events, we are often going to conferences. I’m really excited coming up soon, I’m gonna get to take ALLURE abroad. I have a trip to Thailand to Prince of Songkla University to present there. And then I’m going to Germany in the fall for the Decoding the Disciplines conference. Joe, I know you’re always doing lots of things, if memory serves, you’re going to Gen Con, this summer to do a lot of workshops.

Joe: Yep. So for any teachers listening who will have a strong interest also in playing tabletop games, there’s a conference, a convention called G-E-N C-O-N, Gen Con. And they have a pre-day, an earlier day, which is all about using learning games and thinking about games of education. And I’ll be running at least four or five workshops there, just for all you applying the ideas behind learning games.

Tori: And we always love for people to get in contact with us. You can reach us through AllureOfPlay.com, our website. We have a growing contact list that we’d like to keep people apprised of our different online workshops and in-person opportunities. And there’s a lot more on that website.

Joe: Yeah, we’ve even …was it two years ago, Tori? …there’s a whole section on our website about using playful activities online. So on your discussion board, your Zoom class, we made a video that walks teachers through thinking about these ideas, also how to design in the lowest easy possible for the online space, basically through using PowerPoint, and creating little things students can manipulate and using your class should that be of interest to you, and also a lot of other free resources and activities and games that you can download.

John: We’ll share a link to that in the show notes file that will accompany this episode.

Rebecca: Well thank you so much, Tori, and Joe for sharing ALLURE with us.

Tori: Thank you, so great to be with you

Joe: Thank you very much.

[MUSIC]

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

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

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248. Reframing Academic Expertise

Posted in classroom community, collaborative learning, engagement, games, higher education, learning, metacognition, pedagogy, reflective practice, teaching
August 3, 2022

Professors are generally represented in popular culture as white male experts who dispense knowledge to their students through lectures. Young female professors are often encouraged to portray themselves as authoritative figures, even when this role does not reflect their personalities and their educational philosophies. In this episode, Rebecca Scott joins us to discuss how she has rejected this stereotype by sharing vulnerability and building classes that rely on the co-creation of knowledge.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Professors are generally represented in popular culture as white male experts who dispense knowledge to their students through lectures. Young female professors are often encouraged to portray themselves as authoritative figures, even when this role does not reflect their personalities and their educational philosophies. In this episode, we discuss how one professor has rejected this stereotype by sharing vulnerability and building classes that rely on the co-creation of knowledge.

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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 Rebecca Scott. Rebecca is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harper College, and also a guitarist and vocalist in the band Panda Riot, which just released their fourth album. She’s also the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by our friend Jessamyn Neuhaus from SUNY Plattsburgh. Welcome, Rebecca.

Rebecca S.: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

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

Rebecca S.: I’m drinking coffee.

Rebecca: Oh, a coffee drinker….

John: Well, we drink coffee too, once in a while.

Rebecca: Very occasionally, but not on this podcast. [LAUGHTER]

John: I am drinking Irish Breakfast tea this morning.

Rebecca: Oh, it sounds like a good theme. John. I have English breakfast this morning.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss your chapter on “Reframing Academic Expertise through Vulnerability and Metacognition” in Picture a Professor and some of the other work that you’re doing. But before we discuss this, could you talk a little bit about your institution, and the courses that you teach?

Rebecca S.: Harper College is a two-year college, or community college, in the suburbs of Chicago. And, because we’re a community college all my classes really are introductory classes or don’t have any prerequisites anyway. So I mostly teach Intro to Philosophy, Critical Thinking, and Ethics, then I occasionally get to teach Biomedical Ethics and the occasional honors class. And in the fall, we have a new program that’s a social justice studies distinction. So I’m going to be teaching an Intro to Philosophy class that’s specifically for that Social Justice Studies program at our college.

Rebecca: Your chapter title is really intriguing in Picture a Professor. Can you talk a little bit about or give us a little teaser on how you reframe academic expertise through vulnerability and metacognition?

Rebecca S.: In that chapter, when I was approaching this question of how do we address these kinds of biases against professors who come from marginalized identities, the way that I came to this question is, when I was first starting out, people would give me a lot of advice about, “Oh, you know, you’re young, and you look young, and you’re a woman, and you have to be really careful.” And I feel like a lot of the advice I got was that I needed to be like, strict and I needed to be like, hard, and I needed to take on this authoritative stance so that people would give me credibility. And it just felt really not who I was. It just wasn’t me. And it works for some people, I think, and that’s great. I’m not in any way saying that people shouldn’t necessarily do those things. But for me, it really just was not the way that I wanted to teach. And so I’m always trying to figure out how can I have authority and credibility in a way that feels authentic to who I am. And so this got me thinking about the ways that part of the problem with the sort of stereotypical image of the professor is not necessarily that we don’t have enough different kinds of people occupying the role of the professor, but that the whole concept of the professor is part of the problem. And so in my chapter, I’m thinking about how can we think about not just having different kinds of bodies and people occupying this social role, but what ways do we need to actually change the social role in the first place? And so I think that the kind of epistemic authority that a professor has is often this individualistic, like knowledge is a kind of property that is sort of won through this genius and hard work or whatever, and not thinking about the ways in which knowledge is constructed and maintained in communities. In my chapter, I’m thinking about how do we teach in a way that presents academic or professorial or epistemic expertise in a way that acknowledges the ways in which knowledge comes about in and through communities. And so the vulnerability and metacognition are sort of like two strategies. So for me, like kind of leaning into the vulnerability and modeling epistemic humility when you don’t know things and being engaged in the process of coming to know rather than seeing knowledge is something that you arrive at, like “Now I’m a professor, so I know all the thing and you are the students and you don’t know the things and let me figure out a way for you to have the knowledge that I have,” …because even in, I think, constructivist or collaborative models of education, I think there still tends to be this like, individualized aspect. And there isn’t always like a true sense in which the space of the classroom is co-created, co-constructed by the community that we are all a part of… the professor and the students. That’s the sort of overall approach that I took to the challenge of the question.

John: How do you sell this to students? Because that’s an approach that they may not be familiar with based on their past educational experience.

Rebecca S.: Yeah, this is always, I think, a really big challenge, especially when you’re trying to do something that’s sort of radically different, and you want to do it in 16 weeks, and they’ve had years and years of education going against it. I also do things with games and play and game-based learning. And I actually have found that cultivating an attitude of playfulness can go a really long way towards breaking down some of the ways of being that students have been sort of trained to be in in the classroom. And so I think that there’s a way in which, if I can open students up to laughing and having fun, and just getting in a different kind of physical and mental space, then can sort of start to chip away at some of that. And I don’t think it’s possible to do in one semester. This is another thing about the problems with stereotypes. There’s not some magic pedagogy that’s going to eliminate racism, you have to accept the limits of what we can do in one class as one instructor for one semester. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I really like some of the work that you’ve been doing related to games in the classroom. And we’re hoping that you might expand upon that a bit. And one of the things that struck me about… I think it was a blog post that you wrote about Dungeons and Dragons in the classroom… that you talked about how the people participating in the game, create the world and create the experience together, and that the knowledge of the space is created together. And it seems really tied to the work that you have posed in Picture a Professor. Can you tell us a little bit about how you’re using Dungeons and Dragons to teach ethics?

Rebecca S.: For me, when I first played Dungeons and Dragons, I was in my 30s already. I’m not one of these like lifers forever with DnD, but I realized how many parallels there were with the players and the Dungeon Master and the teachers and the student, because the Dungeon Master has a particular role to play, or the Game Master in a role-playing game. And it’s an importantly different role than the role that the players have. And I think the same is true, it’s not that the teacher and the student are the same in the classroom. But what’s really exciting about role-playing games, or at least tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, is that what the game is about, like what the values are… Is this going to be a game where we mostly focus on strategy and try to get as much money as possible to buy all the cool weapons or whatever? …like, that’s one way the game could go? Or is this like going to be a funny game where we’re just like joking around and getting into high jinks and whatever, are we going to explore some really serious things with identity and characters, like all of those things can be a Dungeons and Dragons game or a role-playing game. And it’s not something that can be dictated from the Game Master. It’s something that comes together through the creative, collaborative storytelling of the game itself. And so I think that there’s just so many parallels with teaching, where the teacher does know more things, and does have a responsibility to make sure that everyone’s involved, everyone’s included, everyone’s enjoying, everyone’s achieving the goals. There’s a certain responsibility of the teacher or the Game Master. And there’s a certain kind of knowledge and a certain kind of expertise. But what the game is, is fundamentally co-created,

John: Do you use that directly or indirectly to help share your teaching philosophy with students?

Rebecca S.: I do always try to share with students why we’re doing what we’re doing. And I’m trying to be intentional about making transparent, especially when we’re doing something weird.you knowe… I’m like, okay, alright, come on, like, you guys, humor me, we’re gonna try this thing. It may totally fail, but we’re gonna try it. So I’ll often talk to students about my teaching philosophy. I’m not sure that I’ve ever actually made that particular idea explicit, and maybe I should. So I think it’s more implicit. But now you’ve made me think that I probably ought to make it explicit.

John: Or maybe have them think about it and make the connections themselves.

Rebecca: Can you talk about how Dungeons and Dragons has unfolded in your ethics class, and what that assignment or activity actually look like?

Rebecca S.: So the way that I’ve constructed it now is that it’s the last four weeks or so of the semester. So it’s after we’ve covered a bunch of material. My dream is to figure out a way to make it the whole semester, but I haven’t quite gotten there yet. So we have several units and we study different philosophers, different ethical theories. So we do Aristotle and we do Mozi, an ancient Chinese philosopher, we do have Simone de Beauvoir and existentialists, they see a bunch of different ethical theories. And then for the last four weeks of the class, in groups, they create a character based on one of the philosophers that we’ve studied or one of the theoretical frameworks that we’ve studied. And so they have to come up with a backstory, like what kinds of experiences would someone have that would lead them to have an existentialist ethics or like, what kind of a person would be a Kantian and they have to pick a class. So they’re like, would Beauvoir be a wizard or a Paladin or whatever. And so they have to pick a class. And then they create their character. And in Dungeons and Dragons, there’s an alignment system. I have my own kind of alignment system, so they have to say whether they’re more focused on contextual factors or universal principles, that they have to pick their alignment for their character. And then we play the game. So I describe a scenario and then they have to say what choices their characters would make in a given situation. So I’m like, okay, you’ve all been called here by the Queen whose son has been kidnapped, and she sends you off to go rescue her son. So they’re all like, “Yes.” But then as they’re leaving the towns, and people say, “Actually, we don’t like the queen, we don’t want a monarchy.” And then they have to decide like, “Okay, do we save the queen’s son, which we made a promise to do, but that’s going to perpetuate the monarchy or do we help these rebels who want to bring in democracy.” And so there’s different decision points along the way, and they have to decide what their characters would do. And then they write reflections at the end of each day of the game, where they say, what decisions they thought fit well with the ethical theories and which ones they think could have been better and why. So they do some post-game reflection.

Rebecca: How have students responded to this kind of an experience?

Rebecca S.: So I’ve done some surveys and things just to ask students, and I don’t think I’ve really gotten anything really negative, everyone seems to think it’s fun. They say that it’s really helpful as a review and as application of the ideas. Some of the students get super into it. So that’s always fun. And I think that’s true with any activity you do. Like, you’re always going to have those students that are just like, “This is my thing” and run with it. So that’s really fun. And those students are not always the students that are necessarily the most engaged in the other parts of the class. And I think that’s really a benefit too of doing these kinds of different sorts of activities, because you have a student that maybe hasn’t had positive experiences with academics so far, but they hear Dungeons and Dragons and they’re just ready to go. And then even the students that are not as familiar with it, they have fun with it, too. And some of them kind of get into it unexpectedly. I also don’t force anyone to play. So one representative from each group plays each day, but I always make sure everybody has the chance to play, but they have the option if they just want to observe and do the reflections, that’s fine. So I think that helps with some of the potential discomfort that some students might have. But what I find overall is that the humor of it is really interesting, and really solidifying of both knowledge and community. So for example… I think I talked about this in the blog post, because this is just my favorite example… but I had a student who was playing a character inspired by Kant, and one of Kant’s principles is you’re never allowed to lie. And so they were sneaking into this goblin cave and the Kant characters, like, “I can’t sneak, it’s a lie, it’s deceptive.” So he goes in and announces that they have arrived at the goblin cave, and everybody laughs because everybody’s in on the joke, because everyone knows that Kant says, “You’re not allowed to lie.” And so there’s this kind of inside humor that is possible. That really is like, “Oh, we learned something this semester, we all now get this Kant joke that, at the beginning of the semester, no one would have understood.” It creates this sort of in-group thing, but not in a negative way. But like a positive way, like we’ve all learned this together. And we have this shared humor now. That I think is really fun.

John: In one of your tweets, you mentioned that you were planning a course that would involve some world building, could you tell us a little bit about that?

Rebecca S.: So I agreed to do some pedagogy through world building for this book that’s going to be coming out. It’s for a case study for the book. And it may or may not actually even be included in the book, but a bunch of faculty are doing some world building and writing about it, and then we’ll see what happens with the book project. So I agreed to do that. And then I’m also doing this class for the Social Justice Studies program. So I was like, “How can I match these up?” And so I was thinking about how to teach with world building, and the first thing that came to my mind is Plato’s Republic. So Plato’s Republic is a dialogue by Plato where he is exploring the concept of justice and he imagines this ideal city that ends up not being ideal in the end, but he’s trying to envision what would justice look like in this city and so he creates this world with its own myths, and with its own laws and rules and education system and marital practices. So I was thinking that it would be fun if we started with Plato, and then had students create their own just world where we think about what is justice? And what would justice look like in all these ways. This is the plan so far… there’s a site called World Anvil that is a world building site that people use for making role playing games, but also novels and things like that. And it’s kind of like a wiki. So essentially, the students are going to be creating a wiki of their world. And so we’ll have to decide what we want to focus on, because obviously, we can’t do everything. So we’ll have to think like, do they want to talk about education systems, do they want to talk about criminal justice systems, do they want to talk about religion? So they could come up with their pantheon of deities, if they want. What would religion look like in a just society? Would everyone have the same religion? Would there be no religion? The topics will be student led, I’m going to have a list that they can pick from, then the readings will be determined by like, we decided to do religion, and I’ll give them some readings, and then the assignment will be to build that part of the wiki, the religion part. And recently, I just started thinking, we’re not going to get very far in one semester. So what if this was like a project that the next time I teach this class, they take up, and we keep building the world. So, it may end up being a long project where each class picks up where the last class left off, which I think would be really cool. This is still in the planning stage,… the next couple of months to really nail it down. But that’s where I’m at so far. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I really love the idea because it involves students in a lot of decision making, and really contemplating the ideas about social justice. So they would need to have some background knowledge, and then have discussions and co-create and co-decide on things and so it seems like a much more active way of engaging with the material, then maybe a traditional paper or other kinds of activities, like quizzes and stuff might have.

Rebecca S.: Yeah, and I think having this project, it’s kind of problem-based learning, in a sense, I guess. It’s a little bit different. But having that sort of shared project, I think, also hopefully will create a different kind of engagement and motivation.

John: It sounds fascinating. Can we go back, though, to your chapter in Picture a Professor? You’ve talked a little bit about vulnerability and how you share that. But could you talk a little bit about how you build metacognition into your classes.

Rebecca S.: So philosophy classes in general focus a lot on class discussions. And I think sometimes students think, “Well, what do I really learn from a discussion?” So going back to this idea of the professor is the one that has the knowledge, like, “Well, I’m here to learn from the professor and not from my classmates…” or they think that a discussion is just saying things, just whatever comes up, and I promise this is going to get to metacognition. And so what I focused on a lot is thinking about how to improve class discussions and how to help students think about what they’re learning from class discussions, by thinking about conversations in terms of academic moves. I didn’t invent this idea, but I’ve really tried to take it and develop it. So this idea that when you contribute to a discussion, you’re not just saying something, you’re asking a clarification question, or you’re posing a hypothetical, or you’re disagreeing with someone, or you’re agreeing with someone and saying why, or you’re connecting to your own experience, right? So there’s these specific things that you’re doing. You’re not just saying things, you’re doing things in a conversation. And from a social justice perspective, you can also do things like welcome someone into the conversation with a question or exclude someone or silence someone. So the idea that saying things does things is, I think, one of the most important ideas I want students to come away with. So I do a lot of work with having students identify what moves they’re making in a conversation and thinking about and reflecting on what kinds of moves are most productive, or are there any moves that we don’t want to make, like fallacy or ad hominem, like illegal move. But having students reflect specifically on what sort of contributions they’re making or how they’re moving a conversation forward. And this is not just for conversations, but also for writing, or you can also identify moves that people are making when you’re reading a text. And this is also a way of recognizing the communal nature of knowledge because one of the move can be to thank someone for helping you see something in a new way. Like that’s a move too, like showing gratitude to someone else, or acknowledging someone’s contribution or summarizing what someone else said or asking them to clarify. So there’s a lot of different activities that might be involved, but they’re all about sort of metacognitively reflecting on academic discourse, whether that’s written or spoken, and specifically identifying the ways in which we see through that, that this is us together creating a community rather than each individual person gaining knowledge on their own.

John: So how do you implement that specifically in terms of students reflecting on that? Do you have them engage in a conversation and then reflect back on their participation? Or are there other techniques that you use?

Rebecca S.: Yeah, I’ve tried a bunch of different things. So I’ve tried a game version, where it have the different moves on cards. And it’s an idea I got from Ann Cahill at Elon University. So she actually had a deck of these cards. And then I’ve tried that where I deal out the cards, and then they have to look for an opportunity to play their specific move. And that works kind of okay, but I haven’t had complete success with that, because students often find it difficult to find the moment for their card, or they want to say something and they don’t have the card for it or whatever. So I think that’s fun as a way of introducing it and practicing it, but it can interrupt the flow of the conversation some. What I did recently in an online class this past semester, is I actually divided the moves into different levels. So things like “connect your own experience,” most students can do that relatively right away. Whereas “identifying unstated assumption” like that’s a really hard move that takes a lot of work and practice. So for their first paper, I use Perusall, and so they comment on the text and respond to each other. But in their responses to one another, they have to identify the move that they’re making. So they’re responding to a classmate and they’re saying, “Okay, I’m going to agree and give a new reason. I’m going to disagree and explain why or I’m going to propose a hypothetical or whatever.” So I have them actually, in their discussion posts, identify the move that they’re making before they make the move. So that’s one way I’ve done it. And then I’ve also just done some things where I have them just write reflections on the discussion and identify moves that have been made or moves that haven’t been made, and why haven’t those moves been made? So things like that, also.

John: Do you have them use tags in Perusall for the types of moves that they make?

Rebecca S.: That’s a good idea, I have not, I only a very basic Perusall user. I was using Discord for awhile. And this is really fun, I actually had to make custom emojis for the different moves. So that was a fun activity at the beginning where they had to come up with an image to associate with the moves, it didn’t really play out fully in terms of the way that I envisioned it. But I think there’s still promise with that approach as well, I just need to pursue it more.

Rebecca: I like the idea of actively having to be conscious of what kind of move you’re making while you’re making it. That does seem like it may work a little bit better in an asynchronous environment where people have time to think about what move [LAUGHTER] they’re making, rather than in a synchronous context. When you were talking about conversations, it was reminding me of a really interesting conversation that we had, on our campus, with our workgroup on accessibility practices, with some students with disabilities, who identified that conversation, like classes that focused on discussion, felt really inaccessible to them or were hard to follow because they were having a hard time pulling out what to take away from the conversation. So you led this little segment about that. So it made me start thinking about how could we slow things down a little bit to be a little more cognizant of what we’re doing and maybe give time to digest what’s happening rather than the rapid fire and not being able to keep up. Although it maybe isn’t a natural flow of conversation, it does make you think more about what it is that you’re doing before you’re acting.

Rebecca S.: Yeah, that’s a really great point. Now that you mention it, I do think that it is often more successful in asynchronous classes. And in the synchronous classes, it’s often more of a after-the-fact reflection, but I think that it could be useful to have students plan out their moves in advance of the class. It’s like in preparation for the synchronous discussion and then, see then maybe not just like, here’s your card, make your move. And everyone’s like, “I don’t know, you have to pose a hypothetical right now?” But if everyone knew the moves that they were supposed to make in the class that day in advance, I think that would actually work really well. So I’m going to steal that and do that. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah, that might be interesting. I think one really good accessibility practice for any kind of presentation or activity is for people to know what’s going to be expected of them in advance so that they do have time to think so I’d be interested to hear, whether or not if you do that, how that plays out. So I know inclusivity is important to you. Can you talk a little bit about how some of the practices that we’ve been discussing today promote inclusivity? Or the ways that you think about setting up activities to make sure that people feel included?

Rebecca S.: Yeah, so I’ve been thinking a lot about inclusivity and creativity and vulnerability and playfulness. And I think it’s always tricky, because I think that sometimes we have this idea that there’s some sort of ideally accessible and inclusive class, that if we just keep opening and opening and opening and opening that somehow eventually it will include everyone equally. And I don’t think that that’s possible, because I think that when you really get into the concrete details of things, something that works really well for one student might be more difficult for another student, and how do you balance and weigh these kinds of complicated decisions? Nothing is ever just straightforwardly more accessible or more inclusive, I don’t think. So, I think it’s much more complicated than that. So the way I’ve been thinking about it is actually through a philosopher that I mentioned in a Chapter, Jose Medina, his book is called Epistemology of Resistance. And he talks about the need for epistemic friction. He talks a lot about the ways in which people who have a lot of privilege don’t encounter enough epistemic friction. So there’s this way in which things are too smooth and too easy, and you’re not challenged enough. There’s not enough resistance that you face if you have a lot of privilege. And he talks about the kinds of… I don’t want to say benefits, because that’s not quite right… but, the ways in which having a marginalized or oppressed identity can create the opportunity for developing certain virtues, certain epistemic virtues, not to say that it’s a good thing, like, obviously, it’s a bad thing. But what he does is he kind of flips things on its head where he says, we often think about privilege as benefiting people who have privilege. But there’s also ways in which privilege isolate you and prevent you from being able to know things or learn things or develop certain skills. So to get back to inclusivity, I’ve been thinking about being a teacher is about managing epistemic friction. So the idea that at certain times, certain students in certain contexts actually need a little more friction, and certain students need a little less friction. And so rather than thinking about creating some ideally open space, it’s about managing the kinds of friction that students run into. So some kinds of friction are unjust and should not exist. They’re not even friction, they’re just obstacles. But some kinds of things that are difficult or uncomfortable or challenging can be really good and beneficial for learning. But it’s really tricky to know which students need what and you always have to be very careful about presuming that you know what students need, of course, but I’ve been thinking about designing classes in terms of eliminating unjust epistemic friction, but creating opportunities for certain other kinds of friction, and thinking about accessibility in terms of that, like, is this a productive kind of challenge? Or is this an unfair or unjust kind of challenge? Because it’s not about whether it’s difficult or not. Learning is difficult. It’s like, is it the right kind of difficulty? Is it the right kind of challenge? Is it fair and just and promoting of the learning rather than the opposite of that, if that makes sense.

Rebecca: I like the word choice that used of obstacle versus a challenge. An obstacle is something that it shouldn’t be there… [LAUGHTER] versus a challenge is something that we would hope students actually do experience as students, because challenges can help us learn.

John: How do you set students up for this, because some of those discussions could be somewhat challenging for people who don’t want to have their beliefs challenged, who have really deep beliefs, and are resistant to learning new things, [LAUGHTER] or new experiences.

Rebecca S.: This is where I think that modeling some epistemic vulnerability is really important and humility. And so, for instance, I teach critical thinking, and I had this activity all designed, and I was excited about it and I thought it was gonna be great. And it was terrible. And I said to the students, at the end, I was like, “Well, that didn’t work at all. Like that was a disaster.” And then I’m like, “okay,” then it was like, “You guys, I have another class in 15 minutes. I have another section.” I’m like, “Quick, what do I do? How do I make this better? How do I save the next class from this terrible disaster?” It wasn’t that terrible, but it was just awkward and didn’t really work. And then they were like, “Oh, well, the problem is that you thought that we wanted to talk about these things. But we actually don’t care about these issues that you think we care about. We want to talk about these other things like ‘Do aliens exist?’ or whatever.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” So in the next class, they ended up debating whether a hot dog was a sandwich. And I thought, this is so silly. Why are we talking about this? But they got really into it. And I told the next class, by the way, the last class sucked, and I changed everything. So here we go on the fly. And so I let them know that I made a mistake or I was wrong. I miscalculated how things would go and I made a change. And now we’re going to try it. And at the end of that class, there was this student and he had changed his mind about whether a hot dog was a sandwich. And he was really resisting admitting that he changed his mind. And so it was just like, I’ll call him John. John. His name’s not John. So I’m like, “John, you were wrong about whether a hot dog was a sandwich. He was like, “No.” John, you were wrong, right? And then everyone’s like, he wouldn’t say it, and I’m like, “Can you say ‘I was wrong?’” …but it’s really funny at this point, everybody’s laughing. And then finally he stands up. And he says, “I was wrong about whether a hot dog was a sandwich.” And everybody laughed and laughed. And I feel like it’s a really tiny way to admit that you’re wrong. But for me to admit times when I’m wrong, and then to celebrate students when they are willing to change their mind, even about something silly, it’s not going to get people to be totally open to changing their mind about controversial topics by the end of 16 weeks, or whatever. But it’s like, a little opening into practicing that habit of being willing to say, “Yeah, I was wrong about that.”

John: That reminds me of a podcast I listened to recently, I think it was Planet Money, or Planet Money Indicator, where one of the issues they were discussing is whether a burrito is a sandwich or not, because in New York State that affects its taxable status. So, it was actually a major political issue.

Rebecca S.: That’s so funny. I’m actually having my critical thinking students debate whether hot dogs are sandwiches right now in my asynchronous class, and actually, there’s not enough friction at the moment. They’re all like, “Yes, the hot dog is a sandwich, because it’s meat between two pieces of bread.” And I’m like, “No, the whole point is for us to practice disagreeing with each other.” So maybe I can throw in the podcast, or I can find some article.

John: I’ll include a link to that in the show notes. You discuss vulnerability a few times, might that be a little bit risky for a younger female professor in terms of the known biases that exists in terms of student course evaluations?

Rebecca S.: I think it’s really important for me to say that, yeah, I’m marginalized in the sense that I’m young-ish, female, professor in philosophy in particular, where there’s not a lot of women. There’s also things that I can do that other faculty can’t do. I have a lot of privileges as well. And I’m white and certain personality things, I think I can, like, get away with things. Everybody’s different. I don’t think there’s any wrong way necessarily, I’m not saying everybody should do what I do at all. I don’t think that that’s true. But at the beginning I was talking about what felt authentic to me. I think I needed to find a way to be able to be myself in the classroom. And so I don’t think that I can give some sort of universal prescription that will work for everyone. And I do think it’s risky. But I also think that the risks are unavoidable. I was saying before, that we’re not going to eliminate sexism or racism, oppression in the classroom, because our classes are part of the world. And those things exist in the world. So while I think it’s risky, I also think that it’s just risky to exist, [LAUGHTER] and that we are vulnerable, whether or not we want to admit it. This actually comes from Judith Butler, but there’s not really like whether we are or aren’t vulnerable. It’s just how do we manage our vulnerability. And so I think it’s not even necessarily about being more vulnerable. It’s just a different way of managing the inevitable vulnerability of being human. And being a teacher is super vulnerable. Being students also, humans are vulnerable, and that’s beautiful and scary. And so I probably framed it in terms of more or less, but when I think about it, I don’t actually think it’s about more or less vulnerability. It’s like, how do we manage it? Do we acknowledge it? Do we not acknowledge it? And I don’t think necessarily that we need to acknowledge it all the time. And different people are going to have different ways of thinking about it. But I do think it’s important to acknowledge epistemic vulnerability to a certain extent, because I think that it’s true that no one knows everything. And I think it’s harmful to perpetuate an idea that there is some sort of place you’re going to get to where you don’t need to continue learning. So I do think that epistemic vulnerability is important to acknowledge; other kinds of vulnerability, I think, may or may not be, it depends on the person.

John: And I would think it would also help to nurture a growth mindset in students when you acknowledge this epistemic vulnerability, letting them know that that’s just a normal part of learning, that there are many things they don’t know, but they can get there.

Rebecca S.: I share with them sometimes my own experiences of writing a dissertation and how difficult it is to get critical feedback. I don’t think necessarily everyone needs to do that. But I think that, for me, opening up a discussion where if I’m about to give them feedback on their writing, talking about what it’s like for me to get feedback on my writing and how that can be hard. And here’s sort of what I do when I’m about to read comments on something. Sometimes I need to take a minute. So, there’s ways of sharing that depending on your comfort level, but I do really think that acknowledging our humanity can be a really good and powerful thing.

John: We know you teach in a community college with a very high teaching load. And you mentioned you have a baby in the background there. But you also are playing with a band and you’ve released your fourth album, how do you record with a band and create music while also being a full-time faculty member with a heavy teaching load?

Rebecca S.: I’ve no idea. [LAUGHTER] No, I, you know, don’t sleep… No. Well, to be honest, and talking about, like acknowledging humanity and vulnerability, the last year has been incredibly difficult with a new baby. And it has been really, really, really hard. I have done it somehow. But I don’t actually think that the last year has been my best year of teaching, having a new baby. And I think that acknowledging that that’s okay, I’m still doing the best that I can, and things are going to get better now, both like daycare, and like, whatever, having a lot of support. I mean, you don’t do these things alone, also, I think. And so, I mean, I’m really lucky to have my husband who largely works from home. And he’s takes care of the baby a lot of the time, and he’s also in the band, and then having the ability to get a babysitter sometimes. So there’s a lot of ways in which the way that it works is the result of luck, and privilege and support. But then also, I think that if you’re doing things that you really care about, and that you love, you try to find ways to make it work and you just find ways to be more efficient. And like with teaching, one of the things I’ve realized is my impulse to want to reinvent everything all the time is not always what serves students the best. And so thinking about what I want to do, because I’m really excited about some new idea, sometimes doing the thing that I’ve done a million times that I know works is actually better for students and for me. And so thinking about that, too, like, my approach to teaching was always like, “Oh my God, every semester, I’m gonna do something wild and crazy and completely different, every single time.” And it’s unsustainable for me, but it doesn’t actually serve students. So I still do my experiments, and I think I always will, but I think being more deliberate. Okay, I’m going to take on this one project, I’m going to redesign this one class…

Rebecca: …and not like ten?

Rebecca S.: and not all of them.

John: And not redesign everything in the class, which I think Rebecca and I also have a tendency to try to do.

Rebecca: Yes, I’m trying to be more sustainable, my new approach.

Rebecca S.: And I think that oftentimes, it is better for students, I think that sometimes it might not be exciting for me, but it’s their first time experiencing it. And so I think that’s important to keep in mind.

Rebecca: Or you rotate between the things that you’ve invented, so that you stay interested, they’re still well established.

John: And the second time you do things you often have learned from past attempts at doing them, and they often result in better learning outcomes for students.

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

Rebecca S.: Yeah, so I guess I’ve already talked a little bit about what’s next in terms of like this world building class I’m working on. I’m also writing a bit about my role-playing game for ethics. I’m also working on something more about cultivating playfulness. So I’m interested in thinking more about exactly what it is about playfulness that I think is so meaningful and important and how that can be serious play. So I’m really interested in thinking more about these connections between playfulness, creativity, and inclusivity.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting.

John: It does, and are you working on your next album?

Rebecca S.: Not yet. It just came out June 10. So we take a long time to write songs. So expect another one in like four or five years. [LAUGHTER]

John: We were doing a little bit of research on your work, and I ended up spending a lot of that time listening to music while Rebecca was actually reading your blog posts. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca S.: Nice. Awesome.

John: I enjoyed it, it was really nice. Thank you.

Rebecca S.: Thank you.

John: Well, thank you. It was really great talking to you.

Rebecca S.: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was awesome.

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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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