150. Pedagogies of Care: Sensory Experiences

This week we resume a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, Martin Springborg and Susan Hrach join us to discuss how sensory experiences can be used in an object-based learning framework to enrich student learning.

Martin is the Director of Teaching and Learning at Inver Hills Community College and Dakota County Technical College. Susan is the director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and an English Professor at Columbus State University. Martin and Susan both contributed to the Pedagogies of Care project. Martin is co-author with Natasha Haugnes and Hoag Holmgren, of Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts. Susan is the author of the forthcoming Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: This week we resume a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, we examine how sensory experiences can be used in an object-based learning framework to enrich 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: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are Martin Springborg and Susan Hrach. Martin is the Director of Teaching and Learning at Inver Hills Community College and Dakota County Technical College. Susan is the director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and an English Professor at Columbus State University. Martin and Susan both contributed to the Pedagogies of Care project. Martin is co-author with Natasha Haugnes and Hoag Holmgren, of Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts. Susan is the author of the forthcoming Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning. Welcome, Susan, and welcome back, Martin.

SUSAN: Thank you.

MARTIN: Thanks for having us.

John: Our teas today are:

MARTIN: Actually, it’s very hot in Minnesota right now. It’s like, it feels like 100, but it’s truly 93-94 degrees. So, I’m drinking iced latte with vanilla almond milk. It’s really tasty.

Rebecca: That sounds good.

SUSAN: Nice. I’m having a similar heatwave issue. I’m drinking sparkling water that has cucumber and strawberry flavor.

Rebecca: Well, that sounds good.

SUSAN: It’s my current summer favorite.

Rebecca: I, despite the fact that it’s 90 here, still am drinking hot tea because, I don’t know, I have a problem. [LAUGHTER] I’m drinking a summer berry green tea.

John: In our last podcast recording, you mentioned the summer berry green tea and I forgot that that was something they had at Epcot, and I saw my own, so I am drinking the summer berry green tea that I picked up in Epcot last November. It’s very good.

MARTIN: Can I ask a tea question, as long as I have two tea aficionados here?

Rebecca: We can try. [LAUGHTER]

MARTIN: So, my afternoon drink of choice is Earl Grey tea and coffee in the morning, Earl Grey in the afternoon. But I know there are different schools of thought on how you should steep this tea. So, just give me the definitive steeping on Earl Grey tea. That’s what I’m after.

Rebecca: I have a tea pot that does it itself.

MARTIN: Buy the tea pot that that does it for you.

Rebecca: It’s like you put in the kind of tea and it just does it.

MARTIN: Okay.

John: You specify the type and the strength and it brews it to that level. Yes, but, I think four to five minutes is normally recommended.

MARTIN: I’ve heard three, I’ve heard five. So, I’m like, should I just do four and split the difference?

John: Four is probably pretty safe, I think.

MARTIN: Alright.

Rebecca: Yeah, I clearly can’t handle it myself. so I have a tool to do that for me.

MARTIN: Thank you.

John: I have the same one. It’s a Breville tea maker, it’ll brew tea and you just pick the type, and it will even drop the basket in once the water has reached the appropriate temperature,

Rebecca: …and take it back out, it is the most expensive teapot you can possibly buy. So we invited you here today to talk about your contribution to the pedagogies of care project. Can you tell us a little bit about this project?

MARTIN: Yes. So, there’s a Teaching and Learning Series that West Virginia University Press has been engaged with for some time now. I want to say a couple of years we’re going on. So there are many authors within this series. Mainly the books are just short, to the point, for faculty, here’s how to do this thing. Tom Tobin, I’m just going to credit him and Tori Mondelli, both of them for starting this. Basically, when the crisis hit and we all were involved as directors for teaching and learning and other roles on our campuses, were responsible for helping faculty move courses online, and myriad other things, Tom and Tori got the gang together on Twitter and just said, “Hey, let’s put something together.” And that’s really how this thing started to form. We had a couple of meetings to talk about how we would do it, and we just did it. Everybody took on a part of it. And Susan asked me if I’d come on board with her object-based learning session, which I was happy to do. But now that the resource is out, it’s been made available to everybody. It’s an open educational resource, and anybody can use it for however they’d like.

SUSAN: One of the fun ideas that Tori and Tom suggested from the beginning is that it would be a multimedia collection. And so we tried to keep the videos and podcasts to no more than 20 minutes, or maybe a little bit over 20, but not much. And there’s infographics and PDF articles. And so I just thought it would be fun to have an audio-only entry and fun to collaborate. And so Martin’s area of expertise fit in nicely with the topic I wanted to address and we were off to the races.

John: It’s a really nice resource. I know we’ve shared it with our faculty and many teaching centers have shared it with their faculty.

MARTIN: Thank you.

SUSAN: It’s great to know.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s definitely been popular on our campus. I’ve certainly been eating them all up and digesting what’s there and taking advantage. And in your particular entry, you talk a lot about object-based learning. Can you start by explaining to our listeners what object-based learning is?

SUSAN: Sure. Yeah, so I’ve heard it referred to both as object-based teaching and object-based learning, but it comes from the fields of museum education and art history and archeology where the object is the primary way into knowing more about a culture or a time period or an aesthetic sensibility. So new neuroscience of learning is affirming that that just works really well as a structure for human learning in general. So I take the sequence from a book that I have found really useful by Guy Claxton called Intelligence in the Flesh. But he identifies these three steps to learning: the first step is noticing, the second step is imitating, and the third step is practicing. And so object-based learning focuses mostly on that first step, noticing, as sort of the foundation for how you’re able to imitate well and then practice well after that. So, I first became familiar with this by going to a pre-conference workshop at POD in 2018. And Jessica Metzler, from Brown’s Sheridan CTL, did this great session called “Ways of Seeing” and she took us to the Portland Art Museum and we all sat around and looked at this sculpture from, I think it was the Anglo Saxon period. None of us had any idea what it was. And so it was perfect because it was an interaction with a primary object for us to be able to start a series of questions of inquiry.

John: Could you explain how this might be used in other disciplines? Certainly, we can see how statues might be used, but how might it be used perhaps in the STEM disciplines or in other fields?

SUSAN: So, if you think about just a sort of an experience that everybody’s had… just to be more concrete about this noticing, imitating, practicing… something as simple as tying your shoes. How did you learn how to tie your shoes. Well, you had to notice what your parent or somebody was trying to get you to notice, and then imitate what they were doing, and then practice a lot yourself, right? So any discipline that’s conducting an experiment or analyzing any kind of text, and I mean that in the broadest sense of the word, think about the way that you wrote your first scholarly article. You had to notice how other people did it, and then imitate them. And then just practice your own a lot. It’s just the sort of formula that works really well for almost any kind of learning. And it starts with noticing. And so, whatever object you might take to have your students notice carefully is the place to begin. For example, something that sounds kind of abstract, I taught a translation studies course about a year ago, and I structured the whole course on just that three-part premise. We just noticed a lot of things about how translators were approaching the task. And then we tried to imitate various approaches, that we had already noticed that they took differently, and then the students were able to start practicing their own versions of translation with, I think, a much more informed sense of what they were doing,

MARTIN: Well, my background, before I got into faculty development was in the visual arts, I taught photography and art history for about 20 years prior to getting into faculty development. One of the courses that I taught was co taught between myself and a creative writing instructor. And so I taught the photography side of that class or half of that class… and the creative writing for that part, the students use photographs as primary sources to really start that writing process for the various pieces that they wrote during the course. And so that’s another example of how the photo was the object.

John: It sounds like the first part of this is just helping students develop the skill of focused attention, so that they learn how to pay attention to things that they might not normally focus on. And, as part of that, you describe a sound walk activity as an example. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

SUSAN: Yeah, I’d be happy to. Sound walks are pretty much self explanatory. You send the students… I mean, you could do this indoors as well… but outdoors works better. Just out for As short of a period of time as you might feel you can spare, and tell them that their task is to just only notice what they can hear. And it’s best if they can immediately write down all of the series of things that they can hear. It’s okay for them to write down something that they can’t identify, that’s something they notice in the soundscape. But if you have them go outside, and then they’re walking, which builds in movement, which is automatically better for opening up our brain’s ability to absorb things, and then ask them to take this shift in their normal perception that just like triples the impact of their ability to notice things, to perceive them in a new way. And so it’s sort of like priming the brain for learning other things, because you kind of take in your brain out of its normal autopilot mode, it’s more open and receptive to noticing other things.

Rebecca: I’ve taken a similar approach in some of the things that I do in my classes as well because I teach primarily web design. And students often are familiar with websites, they go to them, but they go to them as, like a consumer, and not as a maker. So they don’t really notice unless they take the time to slow down and look in a different way.

SUSAN: That’s perfect. Yeah, that’s a great example. I mean, I think a lot of education in general is helping people to learn how to shift their perception of things, and then also to remain open. Once you’ve changed your mind once, that’s not the end, you’re going to continue to have that sort of open and curious attitude to be able to continue shifting your perception as a lifelong learner. So I feel like it’s just such a foundational skill in higher ed in general.

Rebecca: So Martin, can you describe some of the ways that you might use the same method in a more visual environment, rather than just in audio?

MARTIN: The object-based learning, as Susan mentioned, is pretty native to disciplines like art history, visual arts. Certainly, for example, in teaching art history, that’s an easy use, you’d bring students to a museum, and you have a guided time with them, where you guide them in that exercise of looking at something and applying it to something that they’re going to do back in the classroom or on their own time in preparation for the next class or a discussion. So, we together look at a piece or pieces, or they have their own itinerary, where they have pieces that they need to find focus on, make notes about. If you’re teaching that kind of class, reproduce in sketch form, and then bring that back to an assignment or assignments that they will produce back at the college. I feel like my discipline is an easier application for object-based learning than what we’re talking about the expansion of that into other disciplines. In our podcast, we talk about taking object-based learning and applying it to the STEM fields, for example.

SUSAN: And I want to add too, I mean, I think visual attentiveness is really its primary mode, but I sort of narrowed down for our podcast because we knew we wanted to keep it under 20 minutes, let’s just talk about two of the senses. But, you could do a lot with touch, I think. And I’ve seen some really great pieces, some museum ed pieces about physically handling objects, and the way that students can learn things about any sort of texture or object through just paying a little bit more attention to its tactile existence. And, I’m in literature, it’s not the first field you would think of as being tied to an object that way, but, you know, books, people have very deep attachments to the physical book. And I don’t think that we stop often enough to just talk about what that means. If you bring your students to the archives, for example, and they’re allowed to handle an older book, what does it smell like? What’s the texture of those pages like? What is the cover like? Those are all really interesting ways for them to find their way into being more curious about the object itself, the text itself. And for the most part, we just sort of present the thing as if the content inside is really all that we need to pay attention to. And really, it’s the full experience of that material object… the type font… the way it was produced… you know, all of those things about the history of the book are fascinating, and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to visit archives and deal with archival manuscripts. And it really did transform the way that I looked at early texts when you can look at the physical handwriting of the person who produced it, touch the paper that they touched, it’s a very human way into the study.

MARTIN: And these practices are not just good in theory, like “Oh, it’d be nice to bring a class out of the archives so they can smell books,” or have that experience of touching and interacting with those as primary sources. I don’t want to get us off on a tangent right now, but a project I’ve been working on for some time is photographing faculty teaching in the classroom, to just document what that looks like, and some very real examples of what Susan is talking about. So, I was just at Princeton photographing a class where they actually were down in the archives, and they had books that they were leafing through… old rare texts that were one of a kind to illustrate the points that the faculty member was trying to make in this humanities class. Another, I was at Caltech not too long ago, photographing a geology course, where the instructor was passing out rocks that the students could actually feel, touch, experience, as he was talking about that kind of rock. So, it’s used all the time. It’s maybe more prevalent than people actually realize.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that’s interesting is we often try to tell stories about our experiences. And those embodied experiences include all of our senses, but we often try to capture it in one medium, and we don’t always think about all the other senses. So, I think taking this time to notice, and notice in different senses. Maybe then, as a visual designer, it might be really interesting or important to to notice all the other senses instead of just the visual in studying something, because we tend to preference the modality that we create something in.

John: It’s all creating additional connections for people that make it easier, perhaps, to integrate the information.

SUSAN: That’s right. And I think even, just to build on what Rebecca was saying about how we tend to privilege one sense, and it’s often sight, but I think it’s helpful for students, even imaginatively, to start noticing how something might feel with their other senses. So, as an example, I did a little experiment with my Renaissance Lit students a couple of years ago, and I read them the description of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, which is particularly violent, and it’s an exciting thing to read about, but it’s a little gory, and I asked them to respond to it by doing a little imaginative exercise about putting themselves in that room. And they could be anyone in the room. They could be just as a witness, they could be an observer, or they could be the executioner himself, or they could be themselves, sort of as time travelers. And then I asked them specifically to talk about what the temperature of the room felt like, what it smelled like, what sorts of internal sensations they were feeling as the execution unfolded. And I got this really great set of responses back from them. A lot of them are studying creative writing. So I, you know, was partly designing this exercise because I know that’s the writing that they’re interested in doing, but it was just really fun. And I think if you were teaching history, or really any field in which there’s some sort of story that you could read and have people kind of imaginatively place themselves at that moment, maybe the moment of something important that happened in your discipline, it gives them a more embodied way to connect, even just imaginatively, with it.

Rebecca: in this era of social distancing and virtual spaces and screens, do you have some suggestions of ways to incorporate object-based learning in new ways, than maybe some of the ways that we talked about which might really require being in close proximity or in small spaces like an archive that you might not have access to in the fall?

MARTIN: Well, there are primary sources all around us, we just need to step outside. And with a little guidance from the instructor, students should be able to have those experiences anywhere that they might safely explore in the world right now. So, it doesn’t really need to involve, for example, going to a crowded museum or another crowded space to find primary sources. You can, for example, go back to geology again. And you can easily go on a field trip yourself without human contact to locate the kind of rock or material that your instructor wants you to find and reference and be in the presence of and touch. That’s just one example.

SUSAN: Yeah, I love thinking of ways to get people out from behind the computer and the screen. I mean, I think the whole vision of online learning that we have right now involves people being planted at their desks behind their computer, and oh my gosh, we just need to find ways, like Martin said, of sending them out on field trips on their own, to do whatever might be productive. For you to ask them to leave their desks and go investigate. It could be something in their own kitchens. It could be something outside. I just recently had the opportunity to teach an introductory level interdisciplinary course, and I used this wonderful book I would recommend to anyone by Bonnie Smith Whitehouse that’s called Afoot and Lighthearted: A Journal for Mindful Walking. And she’s got 50 different writing prompts that you can assign as part of taking walks with the students. They’re super thoughtful. She’s got all sorts of great references to important thinkers and their philosophies about walking and why it matters, for example, to social movements. And so, it was so timely, in fact, with the recent Black Lives Matter protests and what just walking means for human beings in a bigger sense. What are we doing with our bodies when we use them in those ways? And so the course was based on physical movement and the creative brain, and I asked the students to pursue some sort of creative project and, oh my gosh, they picked the most fun collection of things. They were crocheting and building furniture and tie-dyeing t-shirts and baking and so they were doing these creative activities, but they had to walk and journal and then see what sort of effect that had on their creative process. And it was great fun, and I also felt like it was the sort of thing we all needed, me included, at this particular moment, I don’t think it was what any of them were expecting from an academic course. But, they did a lot of writing, and they put into the online discussion board, all sorts of sensory things. So, they would record 20 seconds of their walk through the neighborhood. And we could hear their footsteps and we could hear the lawn mower and we could hear the birds and it was just such a great way into students’ environments. That was unusual, and that made the course feel like it was jumping out of the computer in a way. So that was something I feel really lucky to have been able to just use as an experimental summer class. And we had a good time.

Rebecca: One of the things that you mentioned in your work is using podcasts as a way of noticing. Can you talk a little bit about ways that we might use podcasts?

SUSAN: Well, yeah, I think in a similar kind of way, to get students away from their desks and from sitting, there are so many great podcasts now, and there’s lots of educational podcasts that are connected to everybody’s discipline and touching on current themes that make it feel really relevant. And that material is just out there waiting for us to curate, and adopt, and include in our courses. And then, I think, if you can direct the students to listen to an episode of something that you find relevant for your discipline and tell them that the assignment includes you must take a walk while you’re listening to this or do some other sort of movement that does not require you to be mentally focused on the movement. So cleaning, I think, painting a room, or maybe driving long distances… I wouldn’t want somebody to be too distracted in their driving, but not doing homework for other classes… let’s put it that way… an activity you could participate in and listen to the podcast at the same time. I think that’s really kind of the ideal way for them to be able to experience an audio only delivery of content, and also have them not sitting in front of their computers.

Rebecca: What I really love about hearing about podcasts is it actually gets students to start doing some professional development. It’s modeling some of those kinds of things that they might do professionally as well, to continue knowing and learning and noticing new things in the field. It almost get them in the habit really early. [LAUGHTER]

SUSAN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is, I think, at least the current mania for adult learners. And also, so many people are really attached to their books on… Well, I would say books on tape, but they’re not really books on tape anymore, or CD… they’re audio books. So I suppose it depending on the book, you could also assign students to read a primary text as an audio book and see how that shifts things, how it changes it up,

Rebecca: Especially when it might be in the author’s voice or something and changes how you’re understanding it or you’re hearing that person with their words and their emphasis.

SUSAN: Oh, so that reminds me of one other little exercise that I can recommend, which is, if you’re in a classroom, and you could do this with social distancing, and you have a podcast or an audio interview or something that you want the students to hear, you can have everybody listening to it as a group, but give them individual spots to stand along the whiteboard, or if you’re lucky enough to have portable whiteboards where they can be apart from each other, and have them standing and taking notes and doing whatever sort of sketching or doodling or things come to mind as they’re listening to the audio piece. And then when it’s over, everybody gets to share their notes together, and you can kind of see what everybody picked up on as a group. It’s really great. It’s a nice way to have them build on each other’s knowledge and also to sort of watch how other people take notes, and how other people process things. But I wanted to ask Martin, because I saw at some point in the spring that a number of museums had started making their collections more available as virtual tours, did you pay any attention to like which ones we might want to look at? Or do you remember which of the museums were doing that sort of virtual gallery walk?

MARTIN: I didn’t, and I haven’t been teaching for a while now. But because, through Google, I would frequently have my online students visit museums around the world, and then do virtual tours. So even though if the museum itself didn’t have that capability, you can go to Google Arts and Culture and do a tour through Google, that Google has set up for you. That’s a really great resource for anyone using Arts in the classroom to take advantage of. Of course, there are places like MoMA, etc… they have virtual tours set up already that are, in my opinion, they’re just a little more limited than what Google has available. But, since they’re produced by the museum themselves, they’re also a little better quality than what Google has to offer. But, at any rate, the student can go through a museum virtually and it’s experience, kind of like you’re walking the halls.

SUSAN: That’s great. I didn’t know about the Google Arts and Culture.

MARTIN: Yeah.

John: And more generally, there’s a growing number of virtual tours that are provided to historic sites, to other locations, where if you have even Google Cardboard, you can get that 3D experience with your smartphone, which provides a somewhat richer experience at times when travel may not be as likely or when people can’t afford travel in general.

SUSAN: Sure. That’s a good point, John,

SUSAN: John’s reference just now to visiting historic sites made me think about the way that I initially got interested in sensory learning, which was because I’ve had a number of wonderful opportunities to teach abroad. And it was such a striking difference to lead students through historic sites and have them walk in the footsteps of either a character from a story or the author of the story. I started designing these assignments called “You are There” reading experiences where we would go to the place and then read the thing that was written in that place or about that place. And I just enjoyed those learning moments for me and for the students so much that it became sort of a driving challenge for me to figure out how we can replicate that, when obviously, we can’t take everybody 3000 miles away to have a “You are There” reading experience. So, what can we do with our bodies on campus, in the environment that we’ve got, that would allow them to have a similar sort of portal into a distant world? Our archival library is focused on an American collection and I didn’t think there was anything in there for me, as a early modern British person, to be able to take the students to and then when I talked to the archivists, they said, Well, you know, our earliest two maps are colonial maps. They were made by French and British mapmakers and the dates were like 1592 or something and then it suddenly clicked for me… wait a minute, 1592, that is me. I can take my students to our library even though it’s focused on Americana. And we had a great session with those maps at the library because we could see how the French wanted to make the territory of Louisiana exaggeratedly large. And the British wanted to make their colonial territories exaggeratedly large. And so neither of the maps are particularly accurate, but they definitely show the bias of their creators and it was just really wonderful to be able to stand in front of these large-scale maps and have the archivists also talk about them as not meant for actual navigation. They were like propaganda pieces. So, you never know when you might find something on your campus that lends itself to a “You are There” moment.

Rebecca: It’s funny that you mentioned study-abroad things because I’ve also done a lot of classes with travel, and I did some similar kind of sensory work and had students experience a similar kind of space, like a cafe or something, in our town… like at school, and then do the same kind of activity abroad. And then we compared those different experiences. And we did it for different kinds of spaces, even wayfinding and the different ways you might get around. How you might get around in a building you’re not familiar with on campus versus how you might navigate in a different place where you might not speak the language.

SUSAN: That’s brilliant. I love that.

MARTIN: That kind of exercise is still completely doable. Even though we’re somewhat cooped up right now, you can still get out of your house, I had an assignment every semester in my photo class that had students go back home if it was possible, or go to another place of significance and do a guided looking and photographing exercise of that site, which is an exercise and learning experience that is completely doable still and safe. But, it’s so important to get out in the world and be guided through exercises like that.

Rebecca: I was in a webinar yesterday where they did an acknowledgement of the native land that they were on and then encouraged everyone to do the same that was participating in the webinar and took us to an online site that would actually tell you if you weren’t aware. And that’s another way of experiencing your space in a different way and thinking about it in a different way. Although not necessarily sensory, it still kind of gets to that place-based information, which I thought was really powerful and really interesting.

SUSAN: That is really interesting.

MARTIN: And with a place of significance, there’s no way to experience that in a book. You can’t really truly understand what Frank Lloyd Wright was trying to do with Prairie Design unless you go to a place and experience how it fits within the landscape. You can see lots of pictures of it for sure, and books, but you have to be there at some point. You have to be present at one of those sites to understand that kind of work.

SUSAN: But I think we can do a really good job with priming students to have that moment when they get to see Frank Lloyd Wright house have as big of an impact as it possibly could by doing things like Rebecca was saying about. You teach them how to just shift their perception in familiar environment. And then, I think, even just the looking at the photographs of a place that they may eventually visit leads to that really excited anticipation of seeing this thing that they’ve been guided to notice carefully and feel like they have a lot of prior knowledge and experience about before they get to see it in person. It helps to, for example, when you do finally get to go to a museum, feel like it’s just this huge thrill to see some object that you’ve been staring at in a book for a while. It’s a different thing than being guided through rooms full of paintings that you’re seeing for the very first time, and you don’t really have the context to appreciate why this is a big deal. I noticed that when I did a one-week Spring Break travel program, because I had been really skeptical about how that could possibly be a long enough time for students to understand cultural difference, for example. And, I mean, it is too short of a time for them really to go through the full journey of feeling alienated and rejecting the new culture and then coming around to understand partial differences in cultures, but we got to use our two months in the classroom before that spring break travel to get everybody pretty excited about when they would get to see these things in person. And they were completely thrilled… starstruck… about getting to see things that, if we had gone on your typical six-week summer program, I would have been standing in front of whatever saying, “Okay, here’s this important architectural piece, and here’s why you should care about it.” And everybody would be sort of zoning out because they just didn’t have enough prior context to appreciate why it matters. I mean, I think sometimes later on in life, people go, “Oh, hey, I saw that once. Now I understand why it was important,” but it’s hard to do that on the spot.

MARTIN: Totally agree. We can prime students to be completely raptured and excited. I saw that all the time with photographs and other pieces of art that they would experience only in books and then go see these larger-than-life-size things in front of them, that had only been 8 by 10, or 5 by 7 pieces of image on pages. And like you were talking about earlier… audio sources, so, like reading a poem yourself or having it read in class, and then hearing the poet read it… completely different meanings… and you’re completely blown away. People laugh at me because… I’m just going to go to this place… and this is a stupid thing. But, I always make this argument to my teenagers, “You should see the movie before you read the book, because if you read the book: first, it’s gonna ruin the movie; and if you see the movie first, it only makes the book that much better, because there’s so much more in it. And I’m gonna stand by that argument. I think it works.

SUSAN: I see exactly what you’re saying. I mean, I think what that speaks to is kind of layering sensory experiences together as a way of making them the most profound. I get that

John: More generally, we try to integrate new knowledge with our existing knowledge,and we need some sort of structure, some type of scaffolding to tie it together. And I can see that case. I’m not sure I’d make that argument about always watching a movie first. But, I can see the value of that. And if you re-read a book, you notice a lot of things you don’t notice the first time, in part, because you have that larger framework and structure. And I think that can be applied, to some extent, to learning in any discipline, because no matter what discipline it is, you’re trying to help students develop the ability to have focused attention on what that disciplinary lens has, in terms of what is important within that approach to viewing the world. And people need to be trained. And I think in any of these things, students come in and start learning a little bit and they notice some things. But if we want to continue their development in the discipline, we have to provide more scaffolding to help them learn to appreciate or learn to focus on more detailed things within the world around them. And I think that’s a process we need to work on, no matter what discipline we’re working on. And tying in more senses to that I think could be helpful. Just as an example that I think Rebecca and I can refer to, maybe need a little bit more so. When we first started recording podcasts, if we had a 20-minute podcast, it would take maybe an hour for me to edit it. And then now I’m spending about maybe 12 times as much time, maybe 20 times as much time editing many of the podcasts, because, initially, you just go through and you take out the obvious issues, but then you start noticing more things, you start noticing the sibilance after you’ve leveled things, you start noticing more background noises that you wouldn’t have noticed. earlier before we started recording. For the first year or so of our podcasts, we were recording in a place where there was a toilet flushing and sinks running all the time, and doors closing, and a coffee grinder and a blender. And at first, we didn’t really notice that because it was part of our everyday life. But the more I focused on the audio, the more those things jumped out. And that’s what we have to train our students to do in any discipline. In economics, what I try to do is help students see things in the world that they wouldn’t have otherwise noticed, it was just part of their environment. And sometimes I’ve had students do video projects where they actually go out and analyze behavior. And that type of experience of looking at it with this different lens helps them see the world differently in ways that essentially transforms their view of the world from that point onwards.

SUSAN: I’m so glad you refer to economics there because there’s a perfect example of a discipline where you’d say, “Okay, I don’t know how this connects at all, right? And you can definitely see how shifting their perception by paying attention to different things, noticing different things, is grasping the concepts that they need to learn in order to understand economics. But it’s also, I think, just really important to remember that perception is an embodied process. It’s hard to make that happen by just sitting still at your desk and listening quietly.

Rebecca: The other thing I appreciate about thinking about object-based learning and sensory experiences is that it reminds us that objectivity actually has a point of view, tight? [LAUGHTER] We often think that there’s no bias in objectivity, but it does. And it really brings the subject to the forefront in that there is subjectivity to everything that we experience around us and actually gets us to pay attention to that subjectivity rather than thinking that you follow some design principles and somehow you’re being objective and doing good work, rather than thinking about what that actually means as an experience of something.

SUSAN: Yeah. And I think a challenge about teaching as we become more and more expert at what we notice, is that it takes a lot of effort for us to remember what it’s like to be a novice, and I think that’s a source of a lot of grumbling and frustration among senior faculty. We teach new students all the time, but over decades, it can feel like “I have told them this 50 times already, why are they not learning it” …because you have said it 50 times already, but you haven’t said it to the same 50 sets of people.

Rebecca: It’s a good reminder. [LAUGHTER]

MARTIN: You do have to say that with each set of new students,

SUSAN: it can seem sort of shocking, sometimes, when you’re an expert at something that people can’t see what you can see.

John: I know I have had that experience where I’d just say something in class and I said. “Didn’t we just talk about it?” In the same room, I had, but it was a semester before. [LAUGHTER] Oh, yeah. Yeah, we do feel like we’re repeating ourselves a lot, but we have been over many, many years,

MARTIN: I’m coaching my faculty right now in using or applying the Transparency in Learning and Teaching framework that Mary-Ann Winkelmes has been talking about for a while now. And, hear of that is writing your assignments in a way that makes it possible for students who are not native to your discipline to understand what you’re talking about. So that’s in a document. You don’t have to say it 100 million times because it’s written and if they have questions they ask, but it’s transparent from the get go. Like this is what I’m breaking it down in a way that somebody who’s not like me is going to be able to understand.

John: And I think that’s especially important in a world in which we may end up doing more of our instruction asynchronously or online… where in the classroom, if you come up with explanations that aren’t quite complete, students can ask questions right then. But if you’re doing something in an asynchronous online environment, students are kind of left out there on their own. And it is especially important that we have detailed instructions that will fill in those gaps. And that you have a mechanism where students can ask you easily and get quick responses, either ask you or ask other students so that they’re not left out on their own trying to figure out what you meant, when it was perfectly clear to you, but it’s not so clear to a novice. And I think one of the things you mentioned in our earlier podcast with you that sharing this with colleagues and other disciplines might be a good way of getting that sort of feedback, where if they can figure out what you’re asking people to do, then students would be able to.

MARTIN: That’s very true.

SUSAN: My students always do a good job of letting me know where I haven’t been clear. [LAUGHTER] Even when I feel I have made the TILT so explicitly detailed, I’m always surprised.

John: I know in faculty development workshops, sometimes we’ll explain something which, because we’ve been talking about these things so much, it makes perfect sense to us. But ,then we have to go back down a little bit and explain what assumptions we were making and what the basis for that is. Because, when you’ve said the same thing many times, it’s easy to forget that people may be new to some of the concepts.

SUSAN: That’s right. And I appreciate what Jim Lang has, I think, tried to do with the series that he’s editing, which is about books written by human beings, for other human beings, is to try to get away from language that could potentially be offputting to people who really do care about their teaching and want to improve, but are a little resistant to talking about alignment, or maybe the other terrible “a” word, assessment.

John: Susan, could you tell us a bit more about your forthcoming book?

SUSAN: Yeah, so I’m super excited about my book coming out. It has been a year’s-long process for me. I’m not a neuroscientist, I had a chance to learn a lot about embodied cognition, which is sort of an emergent subfield in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. But it also borrows from centuries of philosophy. So Wittgenstein, for example, was interested in embodiment. And so it’s a work of integration. I’m trying to pull from a lot of different, maybe even an eclectic, set of sources in order to think about how… if we pay attention to the body… how does that change learning and classroom teaching in college? And so one of the first questions is, what is learning look like if it does not involve everybody coming in and sitting down in a chair? I’m sort of stimulated by thinking about how classrooms might be radically different by just turning inside out some of the things that we think of as normal. Why do we think sitting down in front of a desk is the way that we study something. I mean, just as an example of putting these things into practice, I’m standing right now, because my research convinced me, and as well as my lived experience, that we think better on our feet. And we think even better while we’re walking, which is why the peripatetics, the Greek philosophers walked as a part of their practice. So, it’s sort of a wacky book, it’s going to be for people who are willing to maybe try some unusual unorthodox things in a classroom. It asks us to pay attention to internal movement, as well as external movement and the senses, and then to think about our physical environments as well. So, I have a section on learning outdoors and thinking about the space of your classroom. And one of the things I lament about the age of PowerPoint is that we often walk into a room and it’s been turned into a cave because everyone pulls the shades down immediately, so that you can see the light of the screen better. And I mean, there couldn’t be a worse, less stimulating, mind-opening environment than a bunch of chairs facing a screen in a dark room. So, those are the sort of assumptions that that book is questioning and ways to kind of shake it up and follow what we’re learning about the brain to be better teachers.

Rebecca: I can’t wait to read it.

John: When is that coming up?

SUSAN: It will be out in spring 2021. I think it’s going to appear in the fall catalog from WVU press. So probably we can start orders in the fall.

Rebecca: Yay.

John: Excellent.

SUSAN: Yeah.

John: And Martin, we talked a little bit about your book in an earlier podcast, but could you tell us a little bit more about when that’s coming out?

MARTIN: So, it’s just for this podcast, in case folks just don’t listen to the other podcast, but listen to this one, the project I just briefly mentioned earlier, where I make photographs, of faculty teaching, that is the project that’s behind the book that Cassandra Horii and I are working on together right now. She’s the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach Director at Caltech. So, she and I have been working on this project together for quite some time. I’m making photographs, we’re using the photographs to talk faculty about their teaching afterwards. The working title is What Teaching Looks Like: Post-Sscondary Education in America. And what we’re doing is really, we’re writing a series of essays, 10 in total, and then there are 10s of thousands of photographs that we’re condensing down into about 200 or so final pics that we’re actually using to illustrate the things that we’re talking about in educational development so much these days, including object-based learning. So, for example, those photographs I mentioned earlier, handing around rocks in a geology class, students poring over primary texts in Princeton in an archive. Those are the kinds of photographs that we’re showing in this book. So, that should be out next year.

SUSAN: I can’t wait to see that. Martin, I almost feel like maybe we can get our books shrink wrapped as a set, because I was lucky enough to be able to include some illustrations in my book. I can’t wait to see your pictures because it was really hard for me to find pictures of anything except students sitting down in desks all looking straight ahead. Like, that’s what the picture of teaching has been. But it sounds like your book is going to do such an important job of awakening us to what else it might look like.

MARTIN: So, we’re just blowing the lid off the stock photo industry in higher education. [LAUGHTER]

John: Excellent.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m looking forward to both of these books, for sure.

John: Me too.

Rebecca: We always wrap up by asking, what’s next? You already talked a little bit about your books, but we didn’t ask our actual question of: what’s next?

MARTIN: What’s next, in reality for me is, while I do have a check-in with Cassandra tomorrow to talk about some of the essays that we’re writing for this photobook, the immediate pressing thing for me is preparing the faculty that I serve to teach online or continue teaching online throughout fall semester, and really, it’s a heavy lift, but I don’t want to make it sound like it’s too much of a drudgery to do that, but we’re preparing in actuality, and everybody’s doing this, for a semester that we don’t fully know yet what it’s going to look like. It’s frustrating. But, that’s what’s next, really.

Rebecca: Sounds like a good time.

MARTIN: Yeah.

SUSAN: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] I’m feeling that too. I mean, obviously, this has been such an intense period for faculty developers, I mean it’s sort of sinking into me more week by week that not, just within our own little communities, but the general public. I mean, there’s pieces in the New York Times now. I mean, they get it the general public goes, “Whoa, this whole educational enterprise, it’s experiencing some really challenging re-envisioning at the moment,” and so it feels like we’re doing really important work, but it’s hard. So to answer the question, “What’s next for me in that arena,” I’ve been pursuing a coaching course this summer in order to be more effective at one-on-one faculty development and helping people to set goals and pursue the things that will make them feel more fulfilled as faculty members, not just in the teaching arena, but in terms of their research and scholarly and creative activities, the service that they do for the institution… just being more intentional, I think, about carving out our careers. And coaching is a field that, it hasn’t been used much within higher ed, but I think has a lot of potential to help everybody.

MARTIN: What course is that Susan?

SUSAN: There’s a number of them. It’s certified through the International Coaching Federation. So, the coaching organization I’ve been taking the class through is called the Center for Coaching Excellence. It’s based in Minneapolis, actually. And so they offer a series of certification programs. And it’s been a real challenge. I mean, writing the book was really growing into new territory for me, and this is really new territory as well. It’s learning how to ask powerful questions. And so I’m still feeling very novice.

Rebecca: Feeling nervous is a good thing for developers to be feeling as we’re helping faculty go into new territory. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I think we’re all novices in many of the things we’re entering into this fall.

Rebecca: Well, thank you both for joining us today and the really powerful work that you’re doing and the conversations that you’re bringing to the table.

SUSAN: Thank you so much for the opportunity. I’m super excited to be on your podcast.

MARTIN: Me too.

John: We very much enjoyed talking to you and we look forward to seeing your work.

SUSAN: Thank you both. Thanks, Martin.

MARTIN: Thank you all.

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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. Editing assistance provided by Ryan Schirano.

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143. Pedagogies of Care: Creativity

Is creativity something you value in the work that students produce? In this episode, Natasha Haugnes and Martin Springborg join us to discuss ways to spark, motivate, and support creativity.

Natasha has served in faculty and curriculum development at the Academy of Art University and as an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts. Martin is the Director of Teaching and Learning at Inver Hills Community College and Dakota County Technical College, Natasha and Martin both contributed to the Pedagogies of Care project and are two co-authors (with Hoag Holmgren) of Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts.

Show Notes

  • Haugnes, N., Holmgren, H., & Springborg, M. (2018). Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts. West Virginia University Press.
  • Pedagogies of Care
  • Haugnes, N., & Russell, J. L. (2016). Don’t Box Me In: Rubrics for Àrtists and Designers. To Improve the Academy, 35(2), 249-283.
  • Haugnes, N., & Russell, J. L. (2008, 2014) “What do Students Think of Rubrics? Summary of survey results: Student Perceptions of Rubric Effectiveness
  • Sawyer, R. K. (2011). Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation. Oxford university press.
  • Deci, E. L. (1972). Intrinsic motivation, extrinsic reinforcement, and inequity. Journal of personality and social psychology, 22(1), 113.
  • Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (2001). Extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation in education: Reconsidered once again. Review of educational research, 71(1), 1-27.
  • Inoue, A. B. (2015). Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: Teaching and assessing writing for a socially just future. WAC Clearinghouse.
  • Nilson,. Linda (2019). Specifications Grading. Tea for Teaching podcast. August 21.
  • Tharp, Twyla (2006). The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life. Simon & Schuster
  • Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT)

Transcript

John: Is creativity something you value in the work that students produce? In this episode, we discuss ways to spark, motivate, and support creativity.

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are Natasha Haugnes and Martin Springborg. Natasha has served in faculty and curriculum development at the Academy of Art University and as an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts. Martin is the Director of Teaching and Learning at Inver Hills Community College and Dakota County Technical College, Natasha and Martin both contributed to the Pedagogies of Care project and are two co-authors (with Hoag Holmgren) of Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts. Welcome Natasha and Martin.

Natasha: Good to see you. Yay.

Martin: Thanks for having us.

John: Our teas today are:

Martin: I’m drinking coffee this morning.

Rebecca: Always… Always the rebels.

Natasha: Well, I had my two cups of coffee and now I’m on to Wild Sweet Orange Tea…

Rebecca: That sounds good.

Natasha: … and it’s delicious. Yeah.

Rebecca: I have iced Scottish afternoon tea

Natasha: Afternoon? Huh…

John: And I am drinking Tea Forte Black Currant Tea. We’ve invited you here today to discuss Natasha’s contribution to the Pedagogies of Care project and your joint work on Meaningful Grading in the Arts. Natasha, could you start by telling us a little bit about your contribution to the project?

Natasha: Sure. “Nurturing the ‘aha moment’” is the topic of the video made. And it was based on one of the tips in the meaningful grading book that I co-authored with Martin and Hoag. This video focuses on the “aha moment,” or that moment of insight in the creative process, and how to really nurture students and invite them into that moment. I focused on the “aha moment,” which could also be called the moment of insight in the creative process because it really is associated with kind of joy and happiness and magic. And there are a lot of cultural myths around insight and creativity in general, but especially these magic moments. People think they come out of the blue, that they’re come down from God, that they’re somehow related to some innate ability. And research shows us, and people who are creative practitioners know, that this is not entirely true. So, I just decided to kind of hone in on that moment. In my work at the Academy of Art University, I have worked with a lot of students and a lot of instructors who are often drawn to creative fields because of the joy and they really want to engage in that, the joy of the creative process. But then when the students get to school, and when the new instructors come to teach, they often get really drained. And they find that there’s so much hard work and there’s so much stress in the classrooms, even in things like painting and graphic design and moviemaking classes, students seem to get really rundown, and they don’t connect with those moments of joy. So, this results in frustration. At my own school, we were seeing pretty high dropout rates of students at a certain point and I actually ended up working with at-risk students in my role as the Resource Center Director at the Academy of Art University many years ago, and that taught me a lot about working with students and engaging them in their creative process. A lot of the students I worked with, they were sent to me by an instructor who would say “This student is just not engaging. They’re really sloppy in their work. They’re really lazy. They’re not putting the time in.” And when I talk to those students, I would find patterns that really ultimately meant that they weren’t understanding their creative process. They were doing things like brainstorming a whole bunch of ideas, and then trying to finish one, but then getting distracted and thinking, “Ah, I’m going down the wrong path, I’m going to do this other project, I need to take this other approach…,” and they would go down another path, and then they would abandon that path, and they would take yet another approach and pretty soon it’s time to go to class and the project they’re presenting for critique looks like it was done at the last minute. Again, this is really frustrating for the student and the instructor. And I realized I needed to learn a lot more about the creative process in order to work with these students and help them connect to that joy, help them understand how the hard work connects with the joy, and help the teachers understand how the hard work connects with the joy. I think it’s really imperative that our faculty understand creative process and define it so we can teach it to our students. And this is especially important for students whose livelihood depends on creativity, like a game designer, a graphic designer, even an illustrator can’t just go to work and hope that insight comes, they need to learn how to have some control over that, not only for their own work, but just so that they continue to enjoy what they’re doing.

John: It sounds like part of the problem is that people think that creativity is just something that people either have or don’t have, and they don’t see that it involves a process that includes a lot of work. What types of things can we do to nurture students in making the connection between the work that they do and that aha moment to get them to that point, so that we don’t lose them on the way.

Martin: One thing that I talk about quite frequently with faculty, no matter their discipline, but especially in the creative fields, and one thing that we go back to quite a few times in Meaningful Grading, is rewarding failure and grading process versus grading that final product. If you value the development of a creative process and you value your students diving into the waters that they’re sort of murky, they cannot be afraid to do that. And at the same time, they should also be aware that you’re rewarding that effort and their engagement and what can be kind of a scary process for them, especially if they consider themselves non-artists or unable to do art because they don’t have some innate knowledge of it. So, as you develop grading systems, making sure to work into those grading systems those things that you truly value about that process and about your course.

Natasha: I think it’s really crucial. And something that I try to point out in the videos is breaking it down, scaffolding the process for them, breaking it down into small accomplishable steps and explaining to them: “No, this is not creativity, this is not your whole project. This is what you need to do now. And here’s what you need to do, and you need to put the work in to do it. And then you can move on to the next step.” I think that’s really important, and it’s just really important for the instructors to do that. We often have the overview, we understand the process, we have faith that they’re going to get there, but the students don’t, necessarily, and so that’s kind of what leads to those patterns of procrastination that we see with the students who aren’t doing so well. They put things off, they don’t understand the importance of that early hard work that you really have to just put in in order to get the payoff at the end.

Rebecca: What are some ways that you recommend building in experimentation or risk taking into the grading system? Because those are often things that we value in creative fields, but are harder things or things that we don’t always build into our evaluation systems. We might focus more on the principles of design or something technical, [LAUGHTER] because those are easy to measure.

Natasha: You’re a graphic designer, aren’t you, Rebecca?

Rebecca: I am. [LAUGHTER]

Natasha: I think graphic design is actually a really great example of a place where you can get really bogged down with rules, right? I mean, you can approach graphic design almost as a mathematician and just kind of go “ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink” and you can create stuff that follows the rules, but doesn’t really have a lot of creativity to it. And I guess one piece of advice, this goes to a recommendation that I’ve included in the video, but really simplifying criteria. Again, if you can break down the steps and have each step just be assessed on one or two criteria, that allows students to kind of say, “Okay, I’ve met the goal, now I can do what I want. I’ve done what that teacher needs to see, [LAUGHTER] and I’m going to pass, and now I can really play with it.” In some research that I did with a colleague of the Academy of Art University quite a while ago, we did this big study, twice actually, called “Student Perceptions of Rubric Effectiveness.” We found a common pattern in students’ responses, the students that really liked the rubrics said that they liked the rubrics because it told them exactly what they did have to do. And then once they checked off all those boxes, they could just run with it, and that was very freeing to them. We can talk later that a rubric is not always perceived that way, for some students, it kind of acts like a creative constraint. But, I think if we can keep the criteria to a minimum, that can allow students to know what they have to do and then have fun with it.

John: One of the things I noticed in reading through your book, and also in what you were just talking about in terms of giving stories scaffolding, is so much of the advice that you give could apply in pretty much any discipline. While your focus is on the arts, students don’t have the same expertise that we do. And the tasks that they’re facing are much more challenging and require much more processing. And they don’t always come in with that growth mindset. Much of what you’re talking about basically, is how to help students move from this binary view that they’re either good at it or they’re not to recognizing that learning is work, and that they can get better as they develop. And it was nice to see how closely this was aligned to the advice we try to give in so many disciplines.

Natasha: I totally agree, John, and actually I was in a conference at the University of Missouri where they actually viewed this video, and the person who was facilitating the workshop that I was lucky enough to be able to attend from the comfort of my own home office here, she’s a scientist, and she actually put up a map of the scientific method and said, this is the creative process and this is not the exclusive domain of artists and designers by any stretch of the imagination. So, I love having those cross-disciplinary conversations. I actually teach writing and ESL, and so I see some crossover there. I guess I’m just reluctant to offer a lot more advice to teachers of physics and math and economics and things like that, simply because I don’t have as much experience with those instructors. I’ve been exclusively art and design skills for a really long time. Martin, maybe you can speak to that. You have a lot more majors at your colleges.

Martin: Especially in those foundational courses, you’d certainly get students coming in at a variety of levels. So, they have past experiences, or they don’t, and those with past experiences sometimes come in with quite a bit of knowledge or experience in the arts. So, they’ve had a lot of high school experience, for example, that puts them at a different level than the other students in your class that are truly beginners and don’t have any prior experience and consider themselves very much non artists. So, one thing that’s important to do, just getting to the practical here, if you’re in an arts course teaching at that foundational level… or really going back to your comments about this crosses disciplines, no matter what discipline you’re in, if you’re teaching that foundational level course, getting everybody at that same base level at the beginning. Purely speaking from past experience here on this one point, I taught photography for about 20 years. And in my intro courses, I would frequently have students come in that had high school experience, and they had learned something and could demonstrate that thing. But, at the same time, they learned it in a, I’m not going to say the wrong way, but in a bad way. They picked up some poor practices from their previous education in that, and so you have to make an effort to untrain that a little bit and get them to that same process that you want everybody to engage in, at that very beginning level. So, that step and that effort also makes those students who are truly coming in as beginners and don’t have any previous experience realize that “Oh, yeah, this is something that I actually have to learn and that everybody has to learn and these students who come in with previous knowledge, it’s not just some inherent skill or ability that they have in the arts. Another thing that I found really helpful, in sort of leveling the playing field and making it apparent to those truly beginning students, is using my past beginning students who have come into my courses with no experience, using their products as exemplars when I’m talking about how I want somebody to do something. So, if I’m talking about an assignment, I’m using examples from, and I’m pointing out the fact that these students came in from like, say, they’re nursing students or their automotive students, or this student came in with zero knowledge, and this is the thing that they produced, and it’s actually an ideal example of what I want you to produce in this assignment. So, using that, and going back to those examples shows those students who come in as true non-native or true beginners, that that level of achievement is possible.

John: I think that was an interesting point, too, that also shows up in other fields. I know people teaching computer science often will note that it’s much easier to teach people who are true beginners than those who had been self taught or perhaps picked up something in a course, where perhaps not an optimal pathway was given to them. The importance of unlearning things, perhaps, or breaking down the structures that people have and replacing them with stronger structures, can be as much of a barrier as people who are struggling just to get to that initial level. And that I imagine is particularly true in the arts.

Martin: Yeah. And going back to what I mentioned earlier about valuing process, maybe they do produce a product, that’s roughly the same result, like if they come up with the same result, but the process that they engaged in to get to there is so much more complicated and convoluted than what you’re trying to get everybody to engage in. So, they do need to go back and learn process. They do need to be at that same level as everybody else in your course.

John: One of the issues that often comes up in discussing creative fields is the importance of intrinsic motivation. Could you elaborate a bit on how we can help develop intrinsic motivation for students in these fields?

Martin: So, another thing that we talk about or that we bring up in Meaningful Grading frequently is the building of a community in an arts classroom and how important that is. That community is the intrinsic motivator. For example, if you make that a primary goal of yours in a course, you would then grade heavy on participating in that community at the beginning, knowing full well that the goal you have is to make that a more intrinsic reward for students and to back off on the grading or drop it all together, that participation component. So, that they not only learned that after they leave your course and after they leave an arts program that an arts community is vital. Like you can’t develop work in some sort of vacuum. As an artist, you have to be engaging with others, but also within your course, it’s just showing them and it’s creating that intrinsic value. Like, what’s bringing me back to this class day after day is not the grades that I’m getting from my instructor, but the vast resource that I have in these 30 other classmates that are able to give me feedback and support. And that also show me what they’re working on… that give and take. So, that’s one example of building in that intrinsic value.

Natasha: Correct me if I’m wrong, Martin, but a huge part of that community is critique. It’s critique discussions, right?

Martin: Exactly, hours and hours of it.

NATASHSS: …and helping students to understand that just getting that conversation, it doesn’t even have to be feedback, but a conversation, and engaging people to talk about your work does build intrinsic motivation. That’s the big payoff that we’re working towards.

Martin: And if you don’t have that tight community in that class, when you get to the middle or the end of that class, when you really want students to be engaging honestly in critique, it’s going to be like pulling teeth. You have to foster that community so that students feel comfortable, that they can open up, they can give opinions about other’s work, and accept opinions about their own work.

Natasha: I kind of want to get into a little bit of that intrinsic/ extrinsic motivation research. And I guess one of the things that got me into this field, and my obsession with grading and creativity, which people kind of look at me and they say “You talk about grading in art school, shame on you.” But the thing that was so confusing for so many of these at-risk students that I worked with before was they were engaging in those conversations, or they thought they were, with their instructor and their instructor would say things like, “Yeah, you know, you’re doing great, keep going.” And that can mean “Keep going. You got to keep working. ] 3 handclaps] But you’re not there yet.” But the student was hearing it as “Yeah, I’ve done it. Good enough.” Right? And so that student would say, “I got a D+, I don’t understand. Like, what’s going on? The teacher likes me…” or “the teacher said I was doing great.” And so they weren’t able to suss out the actual evaluation in those conversations, especially these new students. So, this is where it is so important to actually have grading systems that align with those conversations and that reflect those conversations. Keith Sawyer, he is like the creativity guru who I follow. He’s amazing. He wrote this book called Explaining Creativity. And there are a couple of pages in this book, Explaining Creativity, where he does essentially a synopsis of all the research on the effects of reward and grading on creativity. And there’s some things that we can look at here that are kind of important… that yes, we can extinguish intrinsic motivation with grades, we can do it by giving As for everyone. We can do it by just throwing grades that are completely unconnected to the actual conversations we’re having in class. And we can do it when we grade students and use a whole lot of really judgmental language and convey that judgment. That will all really decrease intrinsic motivation and creativity. But a lot of that early research on intrinsic-extrinsic motivation goes back to the Edward Deci studies, I believe, and he actually did more work on this later. And there’s a more nuanced conclusion that he came to later that when grades and rewards are perceived as information, when these grades and rewards are based on the quality of work that students are turning in, that can actually enhance creativity, and it can really build intrinsic motivation. But even when you’re using grades well, they shouldn’t be emphasized too much. This is the conversation that I often had in faculty development when I was working with new teachers. Oh, come to class, you’ll get five points. Five Points, that’s not why you come to class. You should not be coming to class to get the five points; you should be coming to class because the conversations are important. That’s why we want you here… and just changing the script in how we talk about grades. You need to have a grading system that has a lot of integrity. But, we should not be banging that over our students’ heads all the time, it should be kind of in the background just running along in the background. And what we communicate to students is the intrinsic rewards of all the work that we’re having them do.

Martin: And that’s why your grading system has to transform a little bit over the course of a semester, going back to that grading heavily on participation at the beginning of the course, where you have to get the students to the course to participate in the beginning for them to realize that there’s value in those conversations. If nobody shows up, they aren’t going to have conversations, but then that can change and it can evolve over the 16 weeks or 10 weeks or whatever length your course is.

Natasha: Yeah, and there are those students who really do care about grades I find in art and design school, there’s a certain subset of students who really don’t care, and that’s fine. And so they’re kind of on their own path, and they’re often doing well. But there are those students who really care and there are the students who are on the verge of failing out of school so they have to care. And I find that just understanding that, instructors need to leverage that knowledge to convince students to do stuff that we want them to do… that we know will do them good anyway, right? So if I say, “Okay, you’re going to be really a grade grubber… you want an A do these things,” and they’re the things that they need to do anyway. It’s a way of kind of tricking them into doing what we want. If you’re grading what’s important in your course, it’s going to work out, it’s going to work out for the students who really care about the grades, for the ones who don’t as much, hopefully, they’ll just be intrinsically motivated to understand why they need to engage. But grading what’s important is really crucial in that, I think.

Rebecca: One of the things we’ve talked a bit about is scaffolding and helping provide structures. So if we were to provide structure for faculty who are thinking about the idea of building a grading system that has the values that we’re talking about, things that really they care about or are important to their class, what are some of the steps you would recommend they go through to actually develop that system so it actually does reflect the values that they want?

Natasha: Well, [LAUGHTER] my answer to that is it’s ultimately working towards a rubric. And again, that can be kind of a bad word. I’m the one who’s been walking around the art and design school for 25 years saying, “Let’s build rubrics. And let’s do normings.” And I had a photography teacher tell me one time “Natasha, you gotta understand when you say “norming” to an artist, I mean, that’s like death, you know?” So I’m like, “Ah, sorry.”

Martin: There’s a reason why we don’t have assessment in the title of our book.

Natasha: Yes.

Martin: That was on purpose.

Natasha: It was by design. Absolutely. For the really grade-averse instructors, I start with a conversation. And I usually start with grading because that’s a really good entryway. And I’ll just say, “What are you teaching? And what does that look like? And what does it look like when a student does it? And what does it look like when a student doesn’t do it?” And really, that’s where you start. And then I think the next step is really getting real student work in front of this instructor or this department or this cohort of instructors who are teaching the same course… different sections of the same course. They need to look at the student work and they need to say, “Well, yeah, that one meets the criteria for this course that doesn’t.” Why? Why not? Having those conversations, that’s like the best investment that I think any department or any instructor can make into really focusing their teaching and to improving assessment is just think about how you’re making what you teach visible. And then what does it look like when it’s acceptable and when it’s not acceptable, when it meets the goals and when it doesn’t meet the goals? And then it just moves on from there. And if what you think is important, the quality of the color print in your poster, or the resolution on your screen of your logo, or whatever the heck you’re talking about, it might be process. So again, what does that look like? Well, I want to know that they’re listening to the feedback and really taking it in. Well, how can we make that visible? Maybe I have them do a little recording or do a short paper saying here’s all the feedback I heard, and here’s how I responded. “Joey told me I should change the concept, but I didn’t like that idea because…, so I’m not going with that…” and actually have them make that thought process visible. So, it takes some, again, creativity on the part of the instructor in the field of the teaching and learning. But usually, if there’s something really important that you’re teaching, you can have a way to make it visible and figure out what you’re looking for. And what does it look like when there’s evidence that the student has done what you need them to do? And what does it look like when that evidence is not there yet?

John: I usually meet with new faculty and generally ask them what would they like to see workshops on and, about six or seven years ago, one thing that was requested was a workshop on evaluating creative work. So I reached out and we got four people from different departments. We had someone from art, someone from music, someone from theatre, and someone from English. And they put together a presentation of how they evaluate creative work. And one thing that was in common was they all used rubrics, and they all talked about how there are certain fundamental skills or processes that students have to follow. And that’s what they embed in the rubrics and it surprised a lot of people in STEM fields who were attending because they were much less clear about what they were expecting from students and They expected something that would be much less well defined. And so one of the things they also emphasized, and you’ve talked about is that it’s telling students exactly what they’re expected to do and what types of things they need to demonstrate in the work before they can embellish on that. And that was a really important feature in all of their discussions, the same arguments show up in your book. That surprised many people outside of the creative fields.

Natasha: Oh, those are my tribe. That warms my heart to hear that, John. That’s exciting, yeah.

Martin: One of the added benefits of using rubrics is that time saved as well. Faculty time is a precious commodity. And if you can convince them or just show them how much time will be saved by simply having that rubric available, and using it as a guide, as you’re going through the assignments that are piled on their desk, it’s a convincing argument.

Rebecca: So, we talked a lot about building in values into our evaluation system. Can you talk about some of the things we should avoid doing.

Martin: I can speak to that a little bit. So, one thing that I’ve seen a lot of arts faculty members do… from a student perspective. So, coming up through the arts, one thing I’ve seen a lot of, and heard stories about, is the instructors bringing their personal bias, their own career and background, and that subjectivity in general, to the process of evaluating student work. So I’ve heard some pretty bad horror stories about that. For example, I’ll just go into one story quickly because I think just every faculty member who’s hearing this should know that this is never something that you want to repeat. So all the work, as you can imagine, all the prints, lining the board during critique and the instructor just, without words, just going across the board, pulling work down and throwing it out the window. Like if he doesn’t like it, right… if it doesn’t meet his criteria, which are a mystery, by the way…

NATASHAS: I’ve been in those classrooms. I’ve seen that.

Martin: Tell non-arts people about these stories, and they’re like, “no.” Yeah, it really happened. So remembering that you got to check your personal bias and your personal preference for art at the door and rely a lot on, or more on, having students engage in self evaluation, like did they feel like, and how do they feel like, they have made this, or communicated this, through their work, this issue that they think is important through their work. And if it doesn’t, like if you’re not understanding, then engage in a conversation about it. Like how they feel they’re getting there and where you think they’re not getting there. So using that as a starting point instead of your own, “I am the authority on art, and this is why this does not work.” That’s a huge demotivator.

Rebecca: I think one of those biases that a lot of faculty might bring to the door, is the history of white art created by white individuals.

Martin: This is the history of art, it’s all white male.

Rebecca: If students are creating their work from different cultural perspectives, and the faculty member is not up to speed on other cultural perspectives, we’re enforcing essentially a white supremacist point of view and system. So how do we engage in those moments in a way that’s productive, especially if we don’t understand the cultural background that something is based on?

Martin: Yeah, if students can’t place themselves in the history that you’re talking about, you’re referring to, how are they to imagine themselves in that world in the future?

Natasha: I’m gonna offer just one little tip here because yes, I hear you, Rebecca, and we see it everywhere in the overwhelming influence and sort of self-perpetuation of the white colonialist culture, even in our art classes. Something that we found when we did our rubrics research was that students, in general, really love rubrics, it helps guide their work. But what they really loved… even more than the grid of language… was samples, examples of work, examples of work that span the quality. Here’s an example of something where somebody tried really hard but they didn’t quite hit the mark. Here’s some examples of passing work. Here’s some examples of work that really hits it out of the park. And it’s really important not to have one example, especially in a creative field, because what happens then? The students who are not very competent will copy. Here’s an opportunity to allow for many different interpretations and really show those to your students. Consider using student work from previous semesters from a diverse range of students with diverse content. And that gives students something to connect to, it helps them see themselves in the class, it helps them understand that you, as an instructor, see them and value them. And that even though you have these criteria, there are many ways to reach those goals and reach those marks, those criteria that you’re putting out.

John: And so, by including a range of examples too, from different genres or different approaches, so that it does not become just a Western culture, perhaps. In recent podcasts we’ve done with Kevin Gannon, for example, he talked about decolonizing your syllabus and just suggesting that when you’re putting together your syllabus or searching for examples or exemplars, you could just do a little Google search on decolonize your [insert subject matter here] syllabus, and you can often find some good discussions of that with some good resources that you can build in.

Natasha: Yeah.

Martin: Yeah.

Natasha: This is incredibly important. In my work at California College of the Arts, there’s a very active group of instructors. They’re working on decolonizing the classroom, anti-racism, anti-racist pedagogies, and I’ve learned a lot since I’ve been in teaching there. I haven’t been there for a very long time. But I guess there’s a book called Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future by Asao Inoue. And he speaks quite a lot about assessment. And the point he makes about assessment is he says, in order to really decolonize your classroom, we need to be careful how we talk about quality, because quality so often is really culturally loaded. It’s so loaded that it is really hard for us to even untangle what we see and what we look for. And as a response to that, he really emphasizes grading on labor, grading on the work. And this, again, relates to some of the topics that are in this little video I put together although I don’t really call it this by telling students and taking all that quality judgment away from your rubric and from your assessment and just saying, create 50 of these things, [make 50 taglines, make 50 photographs, write five different thesis statements for your paper or write five different opening lines for your paper and just do that. And that’s the way of just asking for labor. You’re just saying do this work and it doesn’t have to look a certain way or be a certain way. But if you just put some effort into this, you will do well. This is a way of assessing work that actually pans out much better for students of color, students from cultures that are not traditionally represented very well in the faculty at colleges and university. So this is something I’ve been really taking to heart a lot. And in my writing class, I’ve actually, at CCA, where I teach freshmen composition to non-native English speakers, everything is graded on pass not passing yet. And so that really emphasizes the labor. If they’re not passing yet, the implication in that not passing yet grade is that you will do it again. Just do it again. Do it again. Nope, still not quite right, do it again. There have been a few students who have redone their essays four or five times, and it’s painful. But wow, they learn… they learn. And again, the trick is in not having five pages of criteria, but having a pretty narrow band of criteria that we’re looking for here that doesn’t get really niggly about the quality.

John: It sounds like it’s a specification grading system that you’re using. And it’s also building in something much more explicit than the “keep going” message that can be misinterpreted. So giving students the opportunity to try something to not quite get there, but to encourage them to continue working on it more explicitly than perhaps students always hear.

Natasha: And I’m glad you mentioned specifications grading, Linda Nilson has been a huge influence on the way I think about teaching and grading. She’s got a lot of really good thoughts out there for sure.

Rebecca: One of the things that’s really easy to evaluate is something that’s technical that has a right or wrong answer. How do we evaluate in a rubric format, things that are more qualitative, like the amount of experimentation or risk taking or other things that we might value in terms of creativity? Can you give us a concrete example?

Natasha: Actually, we have a a whole tip in our book about risk taking. There’s some really interesting ideas about ways you can really force students into making some mistakes and talking about them. There’s so much that comes up that seems, at first, like it’s going to be really hard to describe it in a rubric. But again, if we just get instructors and people who teach these disciplines together, talking about things, usually they can come up with something much more concrete, even if it’s not a cut and dry technical skill. Concept is one and I have some examples of like before and after for rubric wording. And often when we first write out a rubric, we might use some really sloppy language like “The concept is sloppy. It’s lazy. It just doesn’t work.” That just doesn’t work, right? [LAUGHTER] And so that might be the first draft. But then you start looking at some student work and talk with your colleagues. And you’ll find some more precise language will come out. Often when we talk about concept… I’m talking about the context of maybe an advertising campaign. But the concept is predictable. That’s a concept that is not acceptable is predictable. It’s the first thing that comes to mind when people think of this product. So, that is not a good concept. So there you go. Now we’ve made something a lot more understandable to the students and to the instructors when they’re using this rubric to grade later. And it can help you move forward in a way that that judgmental language won’t. It just makes the students feel bad. It makes the teachers frustrated, because we’re like, “Oh, it just doesn’t work.” But actually taking the time to look again at a range of work that doesn’t meet or that does meet the expectations for this thing that seems really nebulous at first usually you can manage to articulate it, and if you can’t, then maybe that’s not something you’re actually teaching in your class and maybe that’s outside of what you’re assessing. This is another tip that we come up with quite often. I think oftentimes instructors who fear grading, they think that they need to grade the art and you can’t grade art. No, you can’t grade art. You can’t say Picasso was better than Twyla Tharp. You can’t compare people and grade artists in a holistic way. Your grades should be based on what you’re teaching, and the objectives for your class. And we can communicate to our students, this is what we’re looking at here. You’ve also done this other stuff really well, but in our class, we’re really looking at this, so this is what your grade is based on. And that’s a really important factor in this whole endeavor, as well. One other little trap, I think, that faculty members can fall into when we talk about assessing grading or assessing creative work is that when we sit down to write our criteria out often the first thing we want to talk about is that incredible piece that that student two years ago did, it was amazing. It was mind blowing, it was so good and students need to see this and you get into those conversations. And that’s fun to talk about with your colleagues and you pull up that student’s work. And you talk about how great they were and what they’re doing now. Yes, that work should be shared with other students, that’s exciting. We have to celebrate those moments. But for the student in the middle of the pack in your class who’s kind of struggling, we need to think about what’s acceptable. That’s why it’s really important to really focus on that line between what meets expectations and what doesn’t meet expectations, because there are some students that just really need to work on that. [LAUGHTER] There are others that are going to blast through that and do really great things, but the ones that need our help are usually the ones that are hovering around that middle area.

Rebecca: So, we’ve talked a lot about rubrics and grading and evaluation, kind of assuming that we’re living in a perfect little world in some ways. But as we all know, right now, in this moment in time, there’s a lot of extra stress of COVID-19, protests related to Black Lives Matter, and any numerous other health things that are coming up because of COVID-19, remote learning. [LAUGHTER] All of these things, there’s lots going on. And so students are under more stress than normal. Students are often under a lot of stress, but this is like extra stress. So in these moments, what are ways that we can help promote creativity and also help our students really feel supported and being able to learn whether they’re on this point in the spectrum or they’re finding being creative really therapeutic and helpful, and all the way to students who just feel like they’re frozen because there’s so many things going on in the world, they feel like they can’t move forward.

Martin: I think now is a great time to be engaging students in creative process. It’s what gets us unfrozen. I’m speaking purely from my location at a Community and Technical College. If we can get students to engage in those often elective courses outside of their major or area of focus that allow them the opportunity to dive into those things that they are feeling a lot of stress about or anxiety about. It helps students be more successful in those courses that they do have to get through as a matter of course for their program of study.

Natasha: Oh, boy, these are hard times. I think, just most immediately from the video, the nurturing the aha moment, I think that it’s even more important than ever to break down our projects into small steps and help make those steps really kind of distinct from each other. I think that’s something that’s happening for students now, and for us, is we’re sitting and we’re staring at the screen all day long and it can become this big blob of existence where one thing bleeds into the other. And if we can really make the steps a little bit distinct, including a few steps where the students just disengage from all social media and anything online where they can actually be alone, without all of the electronic stimulation. I think those are things that can really help nurture their creativity. And also just I think there’s this funny paradox right now that we’re all alone. We’re all isolated. And yet, if you’re sitting there on your TikTok and Instagram and all day long you’re connected and that can be really, really stressful… and so convincing students to take a break from that, telling them we’re going through another step now. [LAUGHTER] And keeping things again really simple so that they can have that opportunity to use what we’re doing in our classes as a springboard to express themselves. Encourage them to incorporate what’s going on in their own life into the work that we’re doing, including examples and acknowledgments of what’s going on in the world. Really important. And it’s a fine line. I’ve just talked about this with my co teacher about how we’re going to be discussing Black Lives Matter, the latest George Floyd protests, and the Black Lives Matter protests, and the defund the police protests with our students who are mostly from Mainland China. Where do we even begin with that discussion? How do we do that without completely stressing them out, but also using it as an opportunity to feed their curiosity and acknowledge their own stress around these issues? So we need to let them know that we’re a safe space for everybody to engage and really help them break down things into small packages and celebrate their achievements. And again, let them keep working if they’re not quite there yet. Let them do it again. Let them do it again, let them do it again, I found myself being very forgiving on deadlines,

Martin: We also have to help faculty realize that they’re safe to engage in those redesigns and those conversations, and that comes from at that administrative level, engaging this at a college or institutional level. So that you aren’t leaving faculty to figure this out on their own. At my two colleges, for example, we have this new initiative that will run all the way through next year, and actually, for the next three years, probably called Equity by Design. And so we’re starting with a team comprised of administrators, directors, faculty, helping each other understand what this effort is going to be at a college level.

Rebecca: One of the things that you’ve both emphasize is kind of these small steps. And I think a small step for an expert might be different than a small step for a beginner. [LAUGHTER] Can we just take a minute or two to describe the differences between what an expert might think of as a small step and what might be in practice an actual a small step for a student.

Martin: One thing that we have been engaging in at my colleges is the TILT framework of Transparency in Learning and Teaching by Mary-Ann Winkelmes and her team. Mary-Ann came to one of our colleges in January and actually spoke and I’ve been facilitating communities of practice at both colleges on this topic this year. And in that work, there’s a realization as faculty review each other’s assignments and each other’s syllabi that you’re not starting at square one, you’re actually starting at square five, because we have to so often take a step outside of our disciplines to realize that, like you just said… So, what’s complex or complicated to one student is not for another and vice versa. So that transparency effort helps us to really outline the steps of an assignment, even those small steps. And so I’d encourage any family member struggling with whether or not to start at this point or that to review that transparency literature a little bit to engage with their colleagues, share assignments, and ask their colleagues whether or not they’re starting in the right place.

Natasha: That’s such a good question, Rebecca. The expert/novice thing is just something we grapple with all the time as instructors, especially if we’re teaching a new course… something that I’ve had to do in my own class… I was just thrown into a very new course for me a couple of years ago. And we did a new project on public service announcements this last semester, and I start something in class, I told the students “Now, choose a topic from this list of public service announcements that you’re going to create. And first thing you have to do is do some research. So let’s look at some websites.” And by having them do that in class and seeing what they come up with, I start to say, “Oh, right. [LAUGHTER]] They’re going to TikTok, you know, they’re going to these kind of places I didn’t even anticipate, and that allows me to then say, “Okay, I need to actually really scaffold this down.” I don’t want this to take two weeks of my time, I want them to find a credible source and then I ended up giving them a list of basically five places they should look. And you might say that is oversimplifying it, but again, this was just a step in the process of a larger PSA that they needed to make. So I needed to really like clamp that down. But I think if we can have students start in class and actually watch what they do, that gives us a lot of information about how big a step they’re willing to take on. And again, the little creative process chart that I put in the video that I created, I think a lot of creative practitioners, people who are really established, they’ve internalized this process, and they even don’t even want to put it on the line. They’re just like, “Oh, you bounce around, you know, you go back and forth and it’s not a linear thing.” And that’s not actually helpful to a new student who’s really nervous, who’s really stressed, who’s in school for the first time. They’re paying a ton of money to go to art school and their grandparents are really pissed because they should be an accountant. That’s intense. And so these students really need things broken down. And I think that just an awareness of our own expertise is a good starting point, and taking our cues from the students.

Rebecca: This has been really interesting. We always wrap up by asking what’s next? \

Natasha: What’s next, Martin? [LAUGHTER]

Martin: What’s next for me is to finish this book I’m working on with Cassandra Horii. We’ve been doing this project together for the past decade or so. I’ve been making photographs at colleges and universities across the country. We use those photographs that I make in classrooms in faculty teaching to help faculty think about their teaching practice. So we do this form of photo0based teaching consultation. So we’re putting those thousands of thousands of photographs together into a book. And we’re working with the same press that Natasha and I were with, West Virginia University Press, on that book. As far as my other life as an administrator in higher education, what’s next is figuring out what fall semester looks like. How are we engaging students? And in what space are we engaging them? Are courses going to be offered HyFlex, we don’t know? Are any courses going to be conducted face to face? Some of them have to be. You can’t teach arc welding at a distance. There’s some of that that has to be hands on. So figuring out exactly how we’re engaging students in this next phase is what’s next for me.

Natasha: I’m going really micro because these are really big questions. I’m going to keep working on the curriculum for my ESL class. I am now not in faculty development officially anymore at my university in an official role. My current role is that I coordinate and write the curriculum for one level of the English for non-native speakers at the Academy of Art University. And it’s exciting. So I’m working on actually integrating more of the anti-racist ecologies. I’m working on incorporating even more creative process readings and practices into my ESL course in the new zoom world, also really trying to figure out how to get students conversation practice in zoom. That’s the really tough one. So, I’m very much just kind of looking [LAUGHTER] about two feet in front of myself right now. And boy, as far as the bigger issues go, I don’t know. Let’s check in again in the fall. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I think that’s fair.

Natasha: This afternoon, I’m going to make a creative genealogy for myself. I’m making a creative family tree, because I’m having my students do this next week when we start class and I’m going to do it for myself as a sample for them and also just to see what it’s like to go through that process. So that’s actually been really fun. That’s my fun thing that I’m doing.

Rebecca: It’s all about balance.

Natasha: Yeah.

John: Well, thank you. This has been fascinating. I really enjoyed reading through your book, and I’ve enjoyed your contribution to the Pedagogies of Care, and it’s been really great talking to you. Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah. Thank you so much.

Natasha: John and Rebecca, it’s been a really fun conversation. Thanks so much for inviting us.

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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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142. Pedagogies of Care: Equity and Inclusion

This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, Dr. Cyndi Kernahan and Dr. Kevin Gannon join us to discuss what faculty can do to foster an inclusive and equitable class climate for all of our students.

Cyndi is a Psychology Professor and the new Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. She is also the author of Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Class: Notes from a White Professor. Kevin is the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and a Professor of History at Grandview University. He is the author of Radical Hope: a Teaching Manifesto. Cyndi and Kevin are both participants in the Pedagogies of Care project, created by authors in the West Virginia University Press series on Teaching and Learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, we discuss what faculty can do to foster an inclusive and equitable class climate for all of our students.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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John: Our guests today are Dr. Cyndi Kernihan and Dr. Kevin Gannon. Cyndi is a Psychology Professor and the new Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. She is also the author of Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Class: Notes from a White Professor. Kevin is the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and a Professor of History at Grandview University. He is the author of Radical Hope: a Teaching Manifesto. Cyndi and Kevin are both participants in the Pedagogies of Care project, created by authors in the West Virginia University Press series on Teaching and Learning. Welcome back, Cyndi and Kevin.

Cyndi: Thanks.

Kevin: Thank you. Great to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Kevin: Mine is no tea. I’m drinking Diet Pepsi in a large cup because I need my caffeine in bulk today. [LAUGHTER]

Cyndi: I came prepared, I have apricot black tea.

Rebecca: Well, that sounds good.

Cyndi: It’s very good.

John: …and I have a Tea Forte Black Currant tea.

Rebecca: I’m rocking iced tea today because it’s 90 degrees. [LAUGHTER]

John: I’ve had many iced teas already earlier today. Is it that warm? [LAUGHTER] Okay, I knew it was getting a little warmer here. We’ve invited you here to talk primarily about your contribution to the Pedagogies of Care project. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Cyndi: Yeah, this collection was started by one of the authors in the West Virginia University Press series on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education that I know you all have had several episodes about. It’s edited by Jim Lang, there’s several contributors. And so we were all asked if we would like to contribute something that would then be provided during all of this time of pivoting to online and uncertainty as sort of a way to provide some quick educational development materials for folks.

Kevin: Yeah, the intent of it was to have it be open access, creative commons license, freely available. And in this time of pivot, there are so many resources out there about how to use this tool, how to do that tool, how to move on to Blackboard in 90 seconds or whatever that may be. But, the larger issue of “How do you do this in a way that acknowledges student needs and your own needs and how do you still keep the type of learning space that’s so important for student learning at least relatively intact, given all of the upheaval?” And that’s what I think the real strength of the collection is, this idea that we need to understand things like tools and techniques. But, we still need to be coming from a larger perspective of care, of empathy, of affirmation of the fact that our students are in just as much of uncharted territory as we are.

Rebecca: in this podcast that you share as part of this collection, and in your other work, you both focus on maintaining productive relationships in the classroom community. And although this is always important, it seems really important right now. Can you talk a little bit about some of the strategies that we can use to maintain productive classroom conversations, especially dealing with difficult issues?

Cyndi: Well, this is something I’ve thought a lot about and I know Kevin has too, because, especially right now, with all the protesting that’s happening, I know that there’s a lot of questions about how to address this or whether to address this in the classroom. So, maybe we can get at the when you should later, but I think having a good connection with your students is always really key. If you’re going to talk about difficult issues, it’s really important. I mean, that’s one of the things I’ve discovered in teaching this and one of the reasons why I want to write about it, because I feel like there wasn’t a lot of writing about the importance of having a good strong connection to your students. And part of that, I think, is about bringing an attitude of compassion as much as possible to your students and to the classroom, seeing them as people, developing a relationship with them, because then that’s going to engender the trust that you need to have those sorts of conversations. And that’s difficult to do. But it really does start on the first day with a lot of the really, I guess, sort of simple things that we think about when we think about a good classroom climate. So, introducing yourself to your students, making sure that they know who you are recognizing them as people and human beings as much as possible. There’s a lot of specific techniques that we could talk about that I have in terms of like how to do it, but I guess I would just say for now, one of the main ones that I keep coming back to is the focus on structure, so having the classroom discussions as structured as possible. There’s a lot of pieces to that. But that’s sort of the overall thing is like having a plan for how you’re going to do it, having a structure for how you’re going to do it. So that then that makes students comfortable to share things. You just sort of open things up to a broad “let’s talk about the protests, “you’re not going to get a lot of participation, because the students are not going to know what to do. They’re not going to know how to behave in that environment, and especially if you don’t have an existing relationship with them where everybody feels seen and valued, then I don’t think that’s necessarily going to work so well.

John: In both of your books, and in our past interviews with you, you talked about setting ground rules for discussions. That’s fairly easy to do and comfortable in a face-to-face environment. Will the same type of procedure work as well if people are starting classes in a remote setting?

Kevin: Yeah. And I think it becomes even more important in a remote setting. So, the things that Cyndi is talking about in terms of structure, in terms of expectations, in terms of an environment where it’s a known quantity of what the discussion is about, and what its purposes are, and have we been transparent with it… all of that is so much harder to do in an online environment (or mostly online environment), whether you’re talking synchronously or asynchronously. So, I think some of the things that are useful to do in an online environment… the discussion forums tend to be a real staple of online teaching. Discussion boards are sometimes where discussion goes to die, certainly in a learning management system. So, I think the first thing to think about is “What tools are we using to engage with students and are there ways that we can get away from just the simple discussion board? Can we do blogs? Can we do messaging apps like GroupMe, or something like that? Is there a Slack channel? Are there other sorts of interfaces where this will work for students?” I’m a big fan of the tool VoiceThread where students can record video and audio, but you need an institutional or a personal license for that, so that may not be an option for everybody. But I think the key to it is how are we building presence because in a face-to-face class, of course, there is the literal presence, the physical presence that we have with one another. In an online class, the research on it talks about… they frame it as social presence as one of the key facets of creating a community of inquiry in your online class. So, how are we building social presence, where we are real people with one another in this course? And so even if we’re discussing things asynchronously, we’re still discussing with people, not screens. And I think that’s a really important thing for us to be able to do. It takes a lot of effort, certainly in the first part of the course. One thing that I would certainly recommend instructors who are teaching remotely do is your first discussion with a class you know, a lot of times it’s an introductory post or something like that… consider having a discussion about discussions; ask your students what’s worked, what hasn’t. We all have experience with this now from the spring. So, this is a good way to kind of process some of that. What helps you learn? What helps you discuss? What gets in the way of that? What expectations do you have towards this space? How can we collaborate in setting those sorts of expectations for all of us? Those are really good ways to start in any class format. But, in an online format in particular, that’s a great way to start building that community and presence right away.

Rebecca: I’d like to circle back to the idea of structure a little bit more, because I think that a lot of faculty think they’re very structured. We all have a structure and it makes sense to us. [LAUGHTER] In a face-to-face classroom or something that’s synchronous, there’s the ability to improv. And it’s a performative kind of thing that happens that’s not as easy to do in an asynchronous environment, or just a different thing to do in an asynchronous environment. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by structure and the kinds of things that really need to be in place?

Cyndi: Yeah, the examples that pop to my mind for structure, and I know there’s a lot that’s been written about this particularly in inclusive pedagogy too, so there’s a lot of ideas, but what I mean is that you first make sure students are looking at the content outside of the class, getting familiarity with it, writing their thoughts, either in a blog post or in comments or questions, that’s frequently what I do is have them write those first so that I can see them and that way, I have something to work with. I sort of know what they’re doing and then I have a structure when I come into the class of how I’m going to use that and they know how that’s going to be expected. So, they know I’m going to call on students based on what I’ve read. And even within that, you can also do… I know there’s a lot of good work that’s been done on something called inner teaching, and also reading group roles, where you give students very particular roles to play. And so in that way, you’re setting up the expectations of what they’ll be doing and how they can expect the class to feel every day. And so if you’ve done that, those are just a couple of ways you can do it. So the discussion comments ahead of time, or like I said, the very specific roles or posts that they make, so that then they know it’s not just going to be this open discussion, but there’s going to be that piece to it. So that’s one way in which I sort of think about structure.

Kevin: And in an online format, one of the things that might be useful to do is to think about the prompts that you use to start a discussion, sort of open-ended questions like “So. what do you think?” …you’ll get a wide variety of things, but it might not be the stuff that anyone’s looking for. It’s also worth considering what role students might be able to play in this so might students be taking a lead and be responsible for posting the prompt and sustaining the discussion for that particular week or that particular module. One of the things that’s useful to think about in that regard is working with students explicitly on like, “Hey, what makes this work? What’s a good question? What kind of questions do we really want to be asking here in terms of not just getting at particular content or answers, but in sustaining a conversation?” …and one little tweak I made, I use blogs as my principal form of discussion when I teach online, is when a student is writing their, what I call the lead author posts or the leader for that particular week, I encourage them to end their posts with a series of questions just like we might see at the end of a section in a textbook. So, we’ll have some thought questions, “What do you think about these things in your assessment? What might be the most important factor?” …etc, etc. And so they’ve written a post, they’ve started to elicit ideas, but then they’re providing that direct springboard for other students to jump into the conversation. And I found that to be a really useful way to get discussion started much more quickly in an online environment because they have that cue and that signpost, like, “Here are the specific things that I can start responding with.” And then the conversation can go from there.

Cyndi: Yeah, just one more thing, too. I was thinking like, do you do that in small groups? Because I was thinking that can be another structure piece too, especially online. I know, one of the complaints that I heard a lot in the spring was I have to read everybody’s posts, and they’re so long. And you know, I don’t know. And so it seems to me like having folks in groups, and we will certainly do that in the classroom face to face when we have them. So having those sort of breakout groups where they’re just responding to a few people seems like that might be a good structure piece to to transition to online.

Kevin: Yeah, coming from the small college environment, my classes are all 30 people or less, so it’s a little more manageable. But you’re right. In a larger group, that would be the strategy I would recommend is creating groups. And you might have those be consistent throughout the course or you might change them up. But that way, it’s not an overwhelming thing. And you’re not just clicking through discussion posts to respond because then you’re going to get the stuff that’s just sort of pro forma, almost resentful, replies. So keeping that cognitive load manageable, I think is a really important part of it.

John: You mentioned VoiceThread a few minutes ago, and I’ve used voice thread, I’m not using it right now, but I’m probably going to be switching over to Flipgrid. But one of the things that happened there is I had two discussions going each week one was done in VoiceThread one was in text. And one of the things I noticed, and students commented on this at the end of the term, too, is that when they were reading the text discussions in the other forum, they were hearing the voices of the people there. So it created much more of a sense of presence, you got more of a feel for the people, they were no longer just words on the screens, you already learned more about their personalities. And it made the discussions much more alive than the typical discussion board.

Kevin: Yeah, again, social presence, the degree to which the other people in the course are actual real human beings. And VoiceThread is a great tool for that because it adds exactly that, you hear the person, you see the person, you have that image associated in your head. We use Blackboard as our learning management system here and the threaded discussions… Instructors would come and “I just can’t sustain a discussion,” and I couldn’t and I’ve been teaching online for six, seven years now, and It finally dawned on me that if you look at the actual interface of those discussion boards, they don’t look a thing like what our students encounter when they engage online with other people. They actually look like, I’ll date myself here, but in the early 90s, when I was an undergraduate, the old BBS’s, with the sysmod and the thread, you know, that’s what a Blackboard threaded discussion looks like. That is ancient history for students, [LAUGHTER] in terms of how they’re engaging online. And so I moved to a WordPress blog, because it looks like Yelp, it looks like social media, it looks like things that they’re already used to engaging in. And so I do think one of the things we could do to create presence is add media, add video with a tool like VoiceThread. But even the interface itself is a place that looks like a place of engagement for our students. That’s a really important consideration, I think.

Rebecca: I use Slack for a similar reason, because it allows for asynchronous conversation, but it also has the ability to be immediate in a way that threaded discussions don’t feel that way. And you can @mention people… [LAUGHTER]

Kevin: Yeah.

Rebecca: …like the things that students are used to being able to do.

Kevin: Yeah I have some colleagues here who run a graduate program in athletic training and it’s cohort based. In each cohort slack is the main tool they use throughout the program. And they’ve been super successful with it.

Rebecca: I wanted to follow up a little bit on the difference between the spring and the fall in that, in the spring, many faculty were in a face-to-face environment, and they had established relationships in person with students and then moved to an online environment, which is really different than if a group needs to start online and maybe move to face to face later or maybe stay online. So, can you talk a little bit about establishing that community when it might have to start remote especially for faculty who aren’t as familiar?

Cyndi: I have less experience with that. I have not taught a ton online but I think the social presence idea is super key. I mean, in the courses that I’ve taught online, I find that to be useful. So, using as much short video and voice as much as possible so that they get a sense of who you are as a person and asking them to do things that are personal and low stakes in terms of like just getting to know you. I know sometimes when I’ve taught, like having them post pictures of their dog or cat or things like that. I have not gotten outside of the LMS as much as it sounds like Kevin, you have, but it seems like using other tools that allow for, like you said, it to look more like what they’re used to seems like it would be a useful thing. One quick thing I would add that I’ve been thinking about a lot is, again, I teach about pretty difficult topics often, particularly when I teach about race and racism. And so something I’ve been thinking about a lot is like how to create that presence when I’ve never taught that class online until this last March when I suddenly was, but I was grateful that I had those established relationships. And I think going forward one thing that I’ve been doing the last couple semesters, especially for my students of color, and especially I think, given the environment now, I always reach out to sort of let them know that while I have a lot of expertise around racism, because I’m a white person I don’t have the same sort of lived experience that they have of race and racism, and I don’t expect them to answer exactly, but I just sort of say like, “I want you to know that I recognize this,” so that you see this. And I’m thinking that that’s going to be especially important teaching in this format going forward over the next year, I’m gonna want to make sure that I’m definitely reaching out to students, particularly students of color to let them know that, because I know that that’s an important piece of making them feel a part of the community. And I’m going to be trying to develop as many other techniques as possible, because particularly in that class, and in a lot of what I teach, I think it’s just going to be super important to develop that sense of belonging and compassion. And that’s going to be harder to do, in some ways, without being able to see them so often.

Kevin: I would echo Cyndi’s emphasis on the idea of presence and ways that people can be seen for themselves and students can be seen for themselves as opposed to just sort of avatar pictures or even generic avatar images. Sean Michael Morris has a great thing that I’ve seen him write a bunch in his work on online in critical digital pedagogy where he says we need to be teaching through the screen, not to the screen, and such a simple way to put it, but I think that’s really the difference. So one practical tip on that line is video is great… short, quick, they don’t have to be super fancy produced. I record intro videos with my phone in selfie mode. And in fact, having them a little rough around the edges actually, I think, kind of helps in terms of being authentic. Someone who I think is really good at this and has a lot of good ways to get started with videos in online teaching is Mike Wesch, W.E.S.C.H. And a lot of people have heard of him. He’s been doing a lot of stuff since our online pivot. But I really like his approach to the use of videos. And I really like the way that he talks about if you haven’t done this sort of stuff before how you might get started, and what you might think about doing and de-complicating it for us. So, a Google search will bring up his website and he’s got some great resources and materials there. And I’ve spent a lot of my faculty colleagues look in there who have had questions about effective use of videos. But again, to what degree are we real people in an online learning space? Anything that we can do to raise that. And regular communication is so important too as Cyndi talks about, whether it’s with individual students or the whole class, you know, check it In emails. It requires a lot more monitoring maybe in terms of are people in the space and, not… you don’t want to turn into like a surveillance tech or anything like that. But, by the same token, it’s very easy for students to drift away in a class that’s mostly online, and we need to be really cognizant of that.

John: One of the factors there that makes a difference is economic inequalities, where students in low-income households may not have the same access to high speed WiFi, to computers, and other tools. What can we do to try to maintain an equitable and inclusive environment when students have very different resources for connecting to classes?

Cyndi: Yeah, this is so challenging. I think one thing is just to know for sure that that is a problem. And so I know a lot of us in March did little surveys to find out where the students’ at, what sort of access do they have? Are there any issues that we need to be aware of? I know on our campus, there was so much concern that students not having access wouldn’t even know because they wouldn’t be getting an email, that we sent out postcards to every student just in case, to try to make sure that we caught all of them. So, those are some things. I think also really pushing your institution as much as possible to provide resources because a lot of this, it’s so upsetting because it’s so disempowering, or at least that’s how I’ve experienced it, because I know that there are students who have very simple needs. I was talking to one student on the phone, one of my advisees, I was doing advising over the phone in March or April, and we have a fair number of rural students from Western Wisconsin, and she was talking about living in a house where there were mice that would chew through the cord so that then their WiFi, you know, they would lose it. And it’s just like, “Oh, that’s such a terrible problem that I don’t know how to fix.” Like, “I don’t know how to fix that.” And so like really pushing our institutions to provide as much as possible to those students to find out who they are, to make sure that we’re providing them with a laptop, at least something loaner, some sort of hotspot, maybe, that they can use for WiFi. I know lots of campuses did that. We tried to do that. But really pushing administration in our campuses to remember those students and to help them, because at the faculty level, it can be really difficult to solve some of those problems. I mean, sometimes you can, but it can be difficult if there are those sort of material problems.

Kevin: Yeah, at a small school like mine, it’s easier to do those sorts of things. Because most of us know the students well, and it’s easier to communicate and you know, touch base with one another. But at larger institutions, this is imperative, right? Because oftentimes, it’s going to be the faculty member who’s probably most aware of where the lack of access or spots are in our own particular course. So, what’s the communication channel to try to get those things resolved? So, every institution, their faculty need to know who do I approach to help problem solve this? What’s the protocol? How are we going to figure this out? So many institutions got access to CARES Act money, for example. So, emergency grants to students, little Chromebooks and things like that, but we can’t guide those resources efficiently if we don’t know where they need to go. So, “What’s the communication plan?” is the biggest one and then as Cyndi points out, how are we finding this from our students? So, a quick survey about, not just access, but availability, like there’s a difference between access to WiFi and ready availability of WiFi. If the public library is still closed, does this person still have access, right? [LAUGHTER] Or is it still available? So details we can get in terms of where you’re at right now? Do you have steady access to internet? What’s the connection like rate it from zero to 10, with zero being the mice have chewed the cords and 10 being I can stream three things at once, right? …and try to get as much of a sense as we can, because then that informs the choices that we make. There’s a lot of online practitioners right now who are saying in the stuff we’re designing online, make it so students can do it on a phone. And I’m a big proponent of that. If we’re going to be moving into remote instruction, this is not what most students signed up for. And so we need to make sure that they can still access. So, don’t have students uploading and downloading large video files, for example, be conscious of how we might be forcing students to use parts of their data plan. So, streaming things might work but what platform are they streaming it through? Was it something thing that has a good mobile app, for example? If you’re using Zoom, is that a good mobile app as opposed to Skype? And then reach out to your colleagues, if you’re not quite sure what the answers to those things are, because those are important considerations in those sort of routine choices we make in creating learning spaces, especially if we’re in for a remote fall.

Rebecca: I think along those same lines, and those same surveys asking about that availability in terms of caretaking jobs like actual time, because they might have signed up for a class at a specific time, but that might not actually be their availability. There’s, I think, a lot of assumptions that faculty might make that we shouldn’t be making.

Kevin: Right. I think one of the things that folks really struggled with this spring was the expectation that we could just continue classes synchronously as normal. And I think, very quickly, a lot of folks learned that that is not the case. And if we end up this fall with maybe some in person, but some online, and I think that’s the best-case scenario. For the students who are online, we can’t expect synchronous, we just can’t if they’re not on campus. So we need to be thinking really hard about what the pathways to learning are and are those equitable are those inclusive… the equivalency of an in-person versus online synchronous versus asynchronous. Those are some really important decisions that need to be made. And they need to be made from a, I think, planning for the worst as opposed to the sort of magical thinking that everything will go away. It will be normal in August because I don’t think it’s responsible for us to approach our planning that way. He said pessimistically… [LAUGHTER]

John: Realistically.

Cyndi: Yeah, realistically. Yeah, I feel like that synchronous/asynchronous is such a challenge too in terms of thinking about our own classes. I mean, it seems like, yeah, that is difficult, I think sometimes to get folks to understand from an equity perspective, that really, if you are online, even if you have to suddenly pivot to it, or you’d plan for this, but then it’s going to be mostly online, which is, like Kevin said, I think probably most likely, just really understanding and helping your colleagues to understand that that really does need to be asynchronous. And I know that’s really hard for people. I think there’s a lot of maybe grief is the right word around sort of like having to give that up. And there’s also a lot of focus on “Well, if we just get the right cameras, and if we get the right kind of technology, then somehow we can still do it synchronously.” But all of that assumes, first of all, that the students can like download or have all the bandwidth for that to be able to, like livestream that or whatever. But it also assumes that they can be available during those times. And I have a lot of fear because, just because it’s on the schedule, let’s say right now, like we’re registering new students right now, I’m doing that all day tomorrow. So, there’s this expectation that somehow they should be able to do that without really thinking through what it’s like for those students. So, I feel like that synchronous, asynchronous is a real thing that a lot of us need to focus on and help other people understand better.

Kevin: And even with the synchronous piece too, not to say we could never do synchronous stuff, but I think when we’re requiring students, if you’re needing participation, you might want to rethink that as a strategy. And then, what kind of opportunities might be available for students? Are there different windows of time where they could drop in, as opposed to only at Monday from 1:00 to 1:50 and that’s more work on the faculty side, plain and simple, but if you want to preserve that part of a course then you have to put in the extra work to make sure that it’s accessible for all your students. And I think in some cases, that’s a perfectly appropriate strategy. And for schools like mine that are doing the HyFlex model of preparation, there is a synchronous element to it. But it’s heavily modified from what our usual expectations are. So, I think we need to really think through that clearly, before we start making design choices.

John: So, the HyFlex model can be pretty challenging for faculty, because basically, you’re developing the equivalent of two courses… where you’re developing some activities that are synchronous, and then equivalent activities that are asynchronous. How are faculty reacting to that? I know we’ve done a series of workshops here, and that was not a concept that appealed to all faculty at this point, having come right off of this spring semester.

Kevin: And that’s the thing there is that sort of sticker shock to it, where you look at it, and you say, “Oh, this is a lot.” …and it is. And so what I think what administration needs to do is to acknowledge it and affirm that effort. Are there ways that you can support that faculty or even if you can’t be handing out money left and right are there ways that small stipends can be given? What kind of faculty development support are you giving faculty? How are you going to help guide and mentor them through that? I think one of the things about the HyFlex model that is appealing is one of its core principles is the idea of reusability, that there are learning activities and artifacts that could be used across these different modes. And I think that’s something that we could really take advantage of. One of the things that I think could work really well is that the students who are attending asynchronously online doing equivalent learning activities, might those activities be leading a discussion online that involves the whole class. So, the whole class is still participating, but there’s a little bit of a level up in terms of the effort and the direction that’s coming from students on the asynchronous side. So, they’re doing equivalencies, you’re still building community, you don’t have students who are in separate tracks and never meeting. The HyFlex model to me seems to be most effective when we’re able to braid these things together as much as we can. But, you’re right. It’s not like you’re designing three separate courses, but it’s certainly more than designing one course. It’s somewhere in between there. And what that means is work, plain and simple, and I think administration, the people who are cutting the checks, need to realize the scope of effort that goes into that, in particular with what we’re asking our part-time colleagues to do in terms of preparing for the fall, because I think it’s a perfectly reasonable response for an adjunct faculty member to say, at the same rate of pay as a normal semester course, that I can’t do that for this. And so what are we going to have in place, because a lot of times in institutions, it is our adjunct colleagues who are teaching our hundred-level courses or courses that really intersect with a large number of students. And if you’re not supporting adjunct faculty anyway, you’re doing it wrong. But certainly in this process of HyFlex, we really need to be paying attention and directing resources to that group in particular.

John: One of the things you mentioned is an argument I’ve tried to make to faculty here, which is to focus your time on activities that can work in any modality and have most of the graded work done asynchronously, so you don’t have to spend as much time creating completely separate assignments and then create things that support instruction in any way and then you’ll have them if things get back to normal in semester or two or three or four. And that seemed to help a little bit, but people were still not entirely convinced.

Kevin: The one thing about the HyFlex model too is if we do have to go fully remote in October or whatnot, if you’ve already created that pathway, that’s going to be a lot easier to do than it was in the spring. And I think one of the things that I really saw in the spring that kind of gladdened me was there was a lot of extending of compassionate grace to faculty and to students, that we’re all figuring this out together. I don’t think that’s going to be the same case for the fall, there is going to be this like, “Okay, y’all had some time to think about this.” If there is this sort of pivot that has to happen, hopefully, we’re a little bit better prepared. And so John, I think your ideas about the way to structure those assignments and to have them asynchronously and have those things that work across modalities. Those are some of the key strategies to that kind of preparation.

Rebecca: I think we talked a little bit earlier about the ongoing protests related to George Floyd’s death and the unrest related to that in addition to COVID-19. And so faculty are feeling concerned about that and wanting to make sure that they’re addressing all kinds of inequities, not just the ones that bubbled up from COVID-19, despite the fact that those are the same inequities that existed before COVID-19… they just became more visible. Can you talk a little bit about ways that faculty might better prepare themselves for dealing with these kinds of issues and these kinds of conversations in the fall? We’re getting a lot of questions, especially from white faculty, about not feeling prepared to address issues of racism, for example.

Cyndi: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot in terms of like, a lot of people are putting out statements, for example. So, institutions are putting out statements often coming from Chancellors and Presidents. And I’ve been thinking more about, rather than doing things like that, actually doing the work of trying to make your classes as inclusive as possible. I think sort of a cliched way to put it, but what matters is what you do, not really what you say. So, I keep thinking about a couple things. There’s like two pieces to this in my mind. There’s like the inclusive pedagogy piece of it, which is the work that may not be the talking about difficult ideas, but you’re addressing the actual inequity, right. And so really thinking about, and there’s a lot of good guides on inclusive pedagogy. I know Kevin’s written about this Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan had a great advice guide in The Chronicle and their book will be coming out soon-ish, I think… not sure exactly when, but they have a lot of good ideas and have written a lot about it. But actually doing that work and really thinking about your class in terms of being as inclusive as possible. Because, when you’re doing that, then you are doing that equity work, whether or not you’re making a statement about it. So, that’s one thing. I think the other thing too is that if you do want to talk about it sort of being as prepared as possible, and this gets back to this idea of structure, but it really doesn’t go well. If you don’t know a lot about these issues from your discipline’s perspective, I think it’s a good idea to find out. So, let’s say you teach a course where traditionally you don’t think these issues would come up. I have a good friend who works here who’s a mathematician who talks a lot about the idea of math and white privilege, which is really a foreign concept to a lot of folks, but like he’s done the work to understand that even though it’s not his specialty area, and he talks about it in class, and it’s hugely helpful for those students. In addition, you could also just look at your field overall, in terms of, and I know, Kevin, I’ve heard you talk about this, like looking at who are your textbook authors and then just making that visible to your students like, “Here’s who these authors are. Here’s how this field has been inequitable. Here are some ways to think about this field overall and look at the resources that I’m sharing with you where I’m trying intentionally to be equitable.” So, really just doing the work less about statements and more about actually doing that work of trying to find ways to bring it in that are relevant and understanding it really well before you try to talk about it. Because when you know it, and you have a plan for how you’re going to talk about it, and a plan for helping students make sense of it, like this is why I’m talking about this, this is why this matters in this particular field, you’re going to be a lot better off than if, say, you just sort of wanted to open it up and ask people to talk about their feelings about it. You could do that. But I think you have to do that in a context where you’ve already done a lot of work to prepare them for that. So, I think it takes some effort to get ready for that but it’s certainly doable and definitely worth it because it helps those students to feel seen and to feel a part of the class in ways that they probably usually don’t.

Kevin: And in terms of the work that we need to do as faculty members as well, now is not the time, for example, to email one of your black colleagues and say, “Help me learn about anti-racist work.”

Cyndi: No, no, no.

Kevin: That’s sort of let’s put that out there. I’m a white man. For those of us who identify as white, there is an onus on us to do the sort of work to interrogate, not just inequities, but whiteness and how whiteness works at the university. And so the questions we need to be thinking about already are certainly heightened now. Does our faculty and staff at our institution, does it look like our student body? The answer to that is probably no. So, what’s being done about that? How are we addressing that as an institution? What am I doing in the classroom to promote a sense of belonging for all of my students? Belonging is key. And again, in an online or mostly online environment, it becomes even more important. How do I belong in this class as a learner? Am I seeing ways that I can personally connect with the course material the instructor, my peers in the classroom. So, how do we foster that sense of genuine belonging and welcome. That doesn’t mean that you do the equivalent of sit in a circle and sing Kumbaya for the first class. But, it does mean students are not just brains on sticks. [LAUGHTER] And students are coming to us just like as we’re coming into this work, it’s been a hell of a few years. Our bandwidth is weird, our attention spans are weird. There’s anxiety, there’s ambient stress. So, let’s recognize that and acknowledge that for our students when we think about the choices that we make when we’re designing our learning spaces. Even if we may not think our material is political, or has to do with race, the lives that our students are living are political and have to do with race, for example, and they are not coming to us from a vacuum. And I swear we didn’t pre-plan this, but I will promote Cyndi’s book in this regard. It’s been super useful. And again, for those of us who are white, I found it really helpful and thinking about the ways as a historian that I’m approaching the subject with my students, but also as a faculty developer and working with colleagues too. It’s a great book full of concrete suggestions about how to do this kind of work, especially if it’s not a type of work that you’ve been doing or felt like you’ve been asked to do before. So, that’s one good starting point.

Cyndi: Thanks!

John: And I’d like to throw in that we regularly promote both of your books with our faculty because they really do a nice job talking about creating an inclusive environment in classes, which is something we all have to worry about.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s a teaching and learning conversation. Do all our students have the equitable opportunities to accomplish the goals for the course? If I create course goals, these course outcomes, Dee Fink calls them the significant learning experience, if not all of my students have the opportunity to get the same significance in the learning experience, then that’s a problem. We are breaking promises that we made to students when we admitted them to our institution. So, yeah, it’s all of our work to do

Rebecca: To follow up on something that Kevin said about this isn’t the time to reach out to our faculty of color for advice. Instead, I’d like to recommend, if it’s a topic that you don’t have a lot of practice talking about, is to work with a few colleagues who also need to practice, and practice with each other. Open up the conversation and give yourself the opportunity to practice before you’re practicing in front of all your students.

Cyndi: And there’s so many resources like that’s one of the things in this moment. Like there’s tons of lists of books going around. Right. And really good podcasts. I mean, I certainly have no shortage of recommendations. I’m sure Kevin does, too. There’s lots of stuff out there where you don’t need to ask people individually, you can read about people’s lives, you can read about their experiences and take them seriously. And the more you do that, and the more you listen in that way, the more prepared you’re going to be. But, I love the idea of practicing too. Let’s practice talking about these awkward topics. It’s an excellent suggestion.

Rebecca: We want our students to practice, right? So, we might as well practice, too. [LAUGHTER]

John: One topic that came up in our earlier podcast with Kevin was the notion of decolonizing your syllabus and one of the issues when we address that idea with many faculty is that there may not be many voices from other groups. One of the questions that comes up often is, might it be effective just to address the systematic exclusion of those other voices in the classroom, to at least address the issue and recognize that it’s a problem.

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. getting students to critically interrogate the silences in our disciplines at our fields, I think is really important decolonization work. And it’s an easier thing to do in a discipline like history where you can sort of trace who got to write the history when, but I think it gives us a chance to talk about what are ways of knowing what type of knowledge claims are valued? …the western emphasis on so-called rational objectivity? That’s a very culturally specific product. And so if that’s the dominant paradigm in let’s say, a math course, then what does that mean? Is that the only path? And when we think that we’re learning something that’s true with a capital T, objective with a capital O, chances are it isn’t. And if there aren’t other perspectives, then yes, absolutely, let’s have those conversations about why that’s the case. I think sometimes the silences are more powerful of a learning tool than anything else and getting students to look for those silences, to look for those spaces, and understand that they’re there, that by their absence is a really effective way to get at some of this larger work.

Cyndi: Yeah, that’s part of what I meant about bringing it into classes where you might not think it fits or whatever, because you don’t normally talk about it. But, you can look at the field in a meta way and say, like, who’s in this field and who’s not who’s being published and who’s not. And over the weekend, there was a great series of tweets, I forget the hash tag on it, but it was like, people were comparing their book advances, you guys might have seen this. And so it was like this comparison of white authors and black authors. And you know, the discrepancies were very large. And usually people don’t talk about what their book advances are. And so this might be a way let’s say, if you’re teaching literature, where you could show like here, look at this field, look at whose voices are being heard, who’s being published, in a meta way. And again, what that does, and the research is pretty clear on this, is by pointing out those discrepancies, you’re often validating the students of color in your class who know that there’s this discrimination there, but they maybe don’t have the data or the information and then by providing it, you’re validating that experience for them and helping them to feel seen and belong in the class. So yeah, that can be super useful.

Rebecca: I think it’s also sometimes faculty don’t know how to find out about other scholars in their field. And I think that at one point, I felt that way, too. I didn’t know who they were, they weren’t in my community, because I wasn’t including them in my community, right? [LAUGHTER] And my community wasn’t including, but finding a couple of voices, you only need a couple, follow them on social media, and then follow the people who respond. All of a sudden your social network and the people that you follow and the voices that you hear expand greatly, and it can really help in terms of just knowing what’s going on in a bigger picture. Something as simple as that can actually expand your knowledge really quickly.

Kevin: Yeah. What are you consuming in terms of your intellectual work? And asking yourself that question, and then what am I consuming and where am I getting it from? And what is the production of that intellectual work look like? Then making changes accordingly. As white scholars, it’s very easy for us. In fact, almost always, we default into communities of white scholars, given the structures of inequity that are in place. This isn’t something that will happen by accident. It’s the diversification of our intellectual work and our intellectual world, the consumption of knowledge and the production of knowledge. We have to make the mindful effort to do that. It’s not something that’s just going to happen because social media is a thing. It’s how we’re using these platforms and tools, it’s so important.

John: One of the things you emphasize in your Pedagogies of Care project is that it’s more important to focus on learners rather than content. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Kevin: The mantra that I always use is covering content is what instructors do, not what students do. So, if your strategy is revolving around, I’m going to cover X. Okay, great. I know what you’re gonna do in this course, but what are your students going to do? And when we think about it that way, then we start asking some of the questions that’ll lead us to, I think, more effective choices.

Cyndi: Yeah, that’s what I love so much about your book. Kevin, and what was so great about it was like, I already felt like I was focused a lot on the relationship because I don’t think a lot of learning can happen without the relationships, but your book really helps to like flip that lens to think about that piece of it… like, what are the students doing? Because if it’s just about content, it gets into that classrooms of death concept that you talk about really nicely in the first chapter. Because, yeah, it’s not there.

Kevin: Yeah. And it’s not to say that content isn’t important…

CYNDI… Oh, yeah.

Kevin: …that we should just get rid of, but everything in a balance. And right now, a lot of the classes that we teach don’t have that balance. And it comes down to what do we want our students to be able to get out of these courses? They’re not going to remember all the content within a year. So, that seems like an enormous waste of time, if that’s our exclusive focus.

Rebecca: I think one lesson that I’ve noticed faculty have taken away from this spring. And of course, I’ve been mostly an innocent bystander, because I was on sabbatical, is that faculty were slashing content as a way to pivot and recognizing that maybe all this isn’t necessary… so that you can focus on some of these bigger ideas, like the way that a discipline works, or ways that we connect or work together as scholars in a particular field.

Kevin: Yeah, and nothing exploded… [LAUGHTER]

Cyndi: Right.

Kevin: You know, the world didn;t end. Although it does seem like it did end on some days. [LAUGHTER]

Cyndi: A little bit.

Kevin: But, all of a sudden we realize what’s been possible that we had thought wasn’t the case. And I think those are really important lessons for us to take from this spring going forward.

Rebecca: I think the language that you use in your book, Kevin is about being an ally for students, can you talk a little bit more about ways that we can be better allies and what we shouldn’t be doing?

Kevin: So, I’ll use an example actually, from a conversation that probably happened in a lot of places this past spring with our online pivot, and it certainly happened at my institution, and that comes with online proctoring for exams. All of a sudden, as students are taking tests online, we need to proctor them, and if you look at the way that these proctoring services work, Shea Swauger wrote a really good critique of that in Hybrid Pedagogy several weeks ago, but this is surveillance tech. This is really kind of creepy stuff, and just objectively speaking, and it costs a lot of money for resource-poor institutions like mine, this is a significant investment if we’re going to do these things. And I think what happens as we immediately went into this place where we assumed that given any opportunity to game the system, that that’s exactly what students would do; that that would be their default reaction. I think if you look a lot of the rhetoric about, well, how do we make sure they’re not cheating? And how do we make sure that we’re fair to everybody? And how do we prevent this? And how do we prevent that? That’s an adversarial position, we’re assuming that our students are adversaries by default, and they know that. They hear us when we treat them like that. And students want the same things that we want out of our courses. They want meaningful learning, they want the course to be a good experience, they want to get something out of it, even if it’s a course they’re taking to check a box as they see it. Students want their courses to not suck, as opposed to suck, and I want my courses to not suck as opposed to suck. So, we have a confluence of goals. So, I think we need to be really careful about the narrative that we construct of students because it is very easy to default into this adversarial outlook. And as we’re really grappling with all sorts of sort of new questions and materials and tools in online teaching and learning, this is a real problem. So, we need to really think about the choices that we’re making institutionally as well as in our own class at what those choices are saying, either implicitly or explicitly, to our students.

Rebecca: The first prompt of the semester: How do we all make this not suck?

Kevin: Yeah.

John: We should have said that explicitly in that workshop we gave to faculty for the last couple of weeks. [LAUGHTER] It’s really good advice.

Kevin: I mean, I hate to use all sorts of technical language there, but sometimes you gotta chime in. [LAUGHTER]

John: We always end with the question: What’s next? …which is something we’re all thinking about these days.

Cyndi: I think two things for me. One is, like I said, I really want to make sure that I’m teaching about racism and prejudice online as strongly as possible, because that is new and I’m going to be doing that again. So, that I think is going to be one focus. The other focus is going to be the brand new Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning that we have at River Falls, which I’m very excited about. But boy, the timing is strange. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Impeccable, really.

Cyndi: It’s amazing. So, I accepted that position, like at the very end of February, beginning of March. And then of course, the world sort of changed and upended and ended and so figuring out how to help my campus instructors as much as possible. So, that’s gonna keep me busy.

Kevin: Yeah, about the same for me, we’re working a lot of intensive training this summer in particular with HyFlex course design and teaching as well as everything, sort of the nuts and bolts of here’s how to use this particular tool to the larger kind of bigger sessions on things like course design and integrated course design and things like that. So, I’m getting good at a lot of tools that I had sort of known about, but hadn’t used before, because I’m field testing a lot of things for faculty and making tutorial videos. So, that’s what’s next is the next module in this training I’m building. But also, I’m currently teaching a course on teaching African-American History online. And so that course is in a much different place now than it was even when it started earlier in the summer. It is the first time my institution has offered a course in African-American history. Our curriculum needs to be decolonized in many ways. And so what’s next for me is building on what so far has been a really, I think, kind of powerful set of experiences with the students who are enrolled in this class and thinking about how we take that work and sustain it as opposed to have it just be a summer course that goes away.

Rebecca: No shortage of big tall demands. [LAUGHTER]

Kevin: None whatsoever and it definitely keeps me off the streets and out of trouble.

John: Well, thank you both. The last time we talked to each of you things were a little more calm. I think Kevin was the last podcast we had when this was just getting underway, and before most campuses closed, and it’s nice to follow you and to see how things are going and all the great things that you’re doing and thank you for your wonderful work.

Cyndi: Thank you.

Kevin: and thanks for having us.

Rebecca: Thanks for having us.

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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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141. Pedagogies of Care: Students as Humans

This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, Sarah Rose Cavanagh and Josh Eyler join us to discuss how we can enhance student learning by designing our classes to provide a strong sense of class community and using immediacy cues to maintain instructor presence.  Sarah is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing Education with the Science of Emotion and Hivemind: Thinking Alike in a Divided World, and numerous scholarly publications. She is the Associate Director for Grants and Research at the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College, the Co-Director of the Laboratory for Cognitive and Affective Science, and also Research Affiliate at the Emotion, Brain and Behavior Laboratory at Tufts University. Josh is the director of Faculty Development, and a Lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. Josh is the author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective Teaching.

Show Notes

  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion. West Virginia University Press.
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2019). Hivemind: The new science of tribalism in our divided world. Grand Central Publishing. (We used her original title and not the one that the publisher assigned in the discussion.)
  • Eyler, J. R. (2018). How humans learn: The science and stories behind effective college teaching. West Virginia University Press.
  • Pedagogies of Care Project
  • Christopher Emdin
  • Costa, K. (2020). 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos: A Guide for Online Teachers and Flipped Classes. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Kathleen Matthews
  • Cavanagh, Sarah (2017). “All The Classroom’s a StageThe Chronicle of Higher Ed. June 27.

Transcript

John: This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, we explore how we can enhance student learning by designing our classes to provide a strong sense of class community and using immediacy cues to maintain instructor presence.

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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 byJohn Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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John: We are very pleased to welcome back our two guests today: Sarah Rose Cavanagh and Josh Eyler. Sarah is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing Education with the Science of Emotion and Hivemind: Thinking Alike in a Divided World, and numerous scholarly publications. She is the Associate Director for Grants and Research at the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College, the Co-Director of the Laboratory for Cognitive and Affective Science, and also Research Affiliate at the Emotion, Brain and Behavior Laboratory at Tufts University. Josh is the director of Faculty Development, and a Lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. Josh is the author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective Teaching. Welcome back, Josh and Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you.

Josh: Thanks very much.

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

Sarah: I’m not. I’m quite thirsty because I was going to be drinking seltzer but I left it downstairs.

Josh: And I have some basic cold H2O here.

Rebecca: Yep, yep. We know how it goes with this with the two of you. [LAUGHTER] Uh hmm.

John: Just not cooperating, but probably half of our guests don’t, so that’s okay. And I’m drinking ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: …and I have black currant today.

Josh: Nice.

John: We’ve invited you back today to talk about the project you created for the Pedagogies of Care project. In our three previous podcasts, we’ve talked to other people in the project. So, we’d like to hear a little bit about what you jointly contributed to this project. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Josh: Sure, definitely. As you know, this is part of a larger project with West Virginia University Press authors. We wanted to kind of approach this topic of Pedagogy of Care from the social angle and in both of our books we talk about sociality and the overlap between sociality and emotions and I thought it’d be a lot of fun to collaborate with Sarah. We’ve talked about some of the same topics in different and complementary ways in both of our books. And we really wanted to bring some of that research to bear on how we create classrooms that honors students as human beings in ways that really advance the work of learning.

Sarah: And I would just contribute that there it was a lot of fun to collaborate with Josh on this, and also that it was his idea to team up. And I might not have done it because I was feeling kind of lazy. [LAUGHTER] And so, when we first started talking about the possibility of some of the authors contributing to this project, I didn’t know if I would join in, but then when Josh invited me, how could I say no?

Josh: And I just want to note that nothing is further from the truth then Sarah being lazy. [LAUGHTER]

John: Without giving away too much about your contribution to the project, could you tell us a little bit about what your focus is in this?

Sarah: Sure. I think, as Josh noted, we really focused on emotions and sociality, because that is kind of the touchpoint between our two bodies of work, and we really wanted to communicate in a pretty brief format. As you’ve probably heard from the other contributors, the intention was that these be easily digestible, short, accessible pieces that different Centers for Teaching Excellence or educational developers could use in their own work with their own faculty. So, we wanted to just briefly touch on the fact, and convey the message, that is really important for educators to realize and communicate in their own classrooms that they themselves are a person with their own unique style and flair, that they know that their students are people and see them as individuals, and that you tend a little bit to the community of your classroom. And so those were some of the major points that we wanted to convey in a very brief format.

Josh: Yeah, and I think that’s absolutely right. And it’s also true that we wanted to model a little bit about what we were talking about. So, we wanted to keep it light, we want to inject a little bit of humor. We wanted to make it more of a conversation, to capitalize on ways that faculty can do that in their classrooms as well.

Rebecca: We’ve talked a little bit before about how faculty don’t always think about tending to that community piece as much as we need to, especially in this moment. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of adjustments the faculty might need to make to attend to that community piece a little bit more?

Josh: You’re right to pinpoint this moment particularly, because especially if you started out teaching face to face, and then having to suddenly shift into an online format, that can be jarring, especially in terms of how you continue the community you developed in the face-to-face environment, and how you also heighten and maximize it. And they’re just different things that you need to do. One is, and we do mention this in our project, communicate with students as often as possible, let them hear from you, let them see you through video as much as you can. And to focus on what I think really matters most about social interaction, and that’s collaborating with other human beings. And there are lots of great ways to do that, even asynchronously,but you have to look for them and spend some time, I think, figuring out how to implement them effectively.

Sarah: And, I think, on my campus, we’ve been talking to students in a couple of the different offices on our campus, like the Student Success office has been polling students and interviewing students about their experiences this spring. And one of the things that we heard from a lot of our students was that they missed the in-the-classroom experience, not even seeing us and learning from us, but the interactions with the other students. And that one of the things that they thought that some faculty did really well in the remote switch, and some did less well, was create opportunities for them to engage with each other still. And to have that experience, whether it is in breakout rooms in Zoom or on the discussion boards for collaborative projects that they’re working on, where they still got to interact with each other and their fellow peers.

Josh: One of the things that, I don’t think we mentioned it in our project, but social media, which is where all the four of us have interacted, that’s asynchronous social interaction. I mean, I may see a tweet from eight hours ago that I’m responding to and so, definitely ways to make it meaningful. But as Sarah was saying that there’s so much of what students value is talking to each other and being with each other.

Rebecca: Wait Josh, you don’t interact with me at 5 am [LAUGHTER]? That’s when I do most of my tweet interactions. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: Right. I do a lot of late tweets as well. [LAUGHTER] I’m not an early morning tweeter.

Sarah: I follow an unusual number of people from the United Kingdom for some reason. But I always noticed this, that the whole ton of my social network will be posting about going to bed and a bit late, what? Or the day being done.

Rebecca: It’s funny how that jars our experience a little bit. I wanted to follow up on something that you started with Josh, which was the moment of starting in person and moving to online, whereas in the fall, we might have the opposite experience, where we might start online and move to in person. Can you talk a little bit about some of the strategies that faculty could consider to establish that community when it wasn’t already established from that in-person engagement.

Josh: A couple of things about that. I think that some of the strategies we were just talking about, forging community in the online spaces early, and often, will be key. I also think that one key difference between now and the sudden emergency shift is that our institutions have a lot more time to be able to at least try to solve the problem of access to technology, which opens the door for more synchronous elements that we couldn’t necessarily do because of equity issues. I know rural Mississippians, this is something we were thinking a lot about at my university, how do we get students the capabilities? But now we’ve had some time and I think it’s possible to do a little bit more synchronously, keeping it optional, hopefully, again for equity reasons, but more ways to do that. Now when we move to face to face, I think this is really important. It’s not going to be the same face to face that it used to be, right? I really have been talking to a lot of people about the psychological impact of faculty walking into a classroom for the first time in a mask, seeing students in masks and trying to manage community and the social dynamics of the classroom in a very new and emotionally fraught situation. And honestly, when I think about that setting, I turned to Sarah’s book immediately because it’s a good guidepost for how we might navigate that.

Sarah: I don’t know if you all saw this, but on social media there are a lot of people were talking about Purdue, I think it was, University was talking about putting up Plexiglas between the professors and the students. So, not only masks, but actual physical barriers, perhaps. And I think those are very wise points that Josh made, this is going to be a new normal, as everyone keeps saying, not back to normal.

John: One of my favorite responses to that was Robin DeRosa’s, who suggested that it’s basically making the person two dimensional. It’s like they’re on a screen, on this two-dimensional surface. And then she suggested, maybe there’s other things we could do if that’s how we’re going to do it. So, it was a nice suggestion.

Josh: I also think that virus particles can travel over Plexiglas. It’s a strange solution to me. I don’t know.

Rebecca: …not to mention, it reinforces hierarchy. And so, if you’re trying to establish a flattened space…

Josh: Right.

Rebecca: …where you have more of a community that certainly is not going to work, if one person is behind a wall, and somehow everybody else doesn’t deserve a wall.

Josh: Right.

Rebecca: I don’t know if I want a wall, but…[LAUGHTER] Speaking of odd equity issues.

Sarah: And I think that faculty are also going to have to be very intentional if we start online, as online faculty probably have always been intentional about getting to know our students, about designing parts of the online community where students are recording videos or talking about their likes and dislikes. It’s very easy to get to know your students in that interstitial five minutes before class and at the end of class where you just chat a little bit, and the online environment doesn’t have that built in. And I think that we’re going to have to build it in very intentionally,

John: I’ve actually found, because the two classes that I was teaching that were not online were face to face. And there was a little bit of a cushion there, when with one of them, it looked like we were going to go remote. And then the other one, the decision had just been announced that that was going to happen in a few days. So I asked them, in both cases, and they at least claimed initially that they all had technology and good WiFi connections, and they preferred remaining synchronous. So, my classes continued to meet synchronously, although more activity shifted to online activities and we cut down on some of the actual contact hours a little bit in both of the classes. One of the things that happened was I’d log in a few minutes early and invite students to stay after the session ended. And there were a whole lot more interactions before the class started and at the end. As long as you build in opportunities for that interaction before and after class, it can work pretty nicely and you no longer have that podium in the way between you and the students as you might in a large lecture hall.

One of the things that’s common to the approaches you take in each of your books relating to teaching and learning is you focus on the importance of focusing on the human beings in the classroom and not the student per se, that students are not just recipients of knowledge, the role of emotions is really important, the connections they have a really important. Could you talk just a little bit about the importance of focusing on the people in the classroom?

Sarah: Yes, I think that part of that is something that we’ve gotten across a little bit already in our conversation is just attending to a sense of community and that human beings are so social, and so motivated by our own sociality. But, I think a new point I’d like to make is that we also need to think about, in the classroom, the idea of co-creation and what Chris Emdin calls “co-generating dialogues” and the idea that we are all learning together and that we are all creating this learning environment and the learning that occurs in that learning environment together, both the instructor and the students, and that they are learning from each other as much as they’re learning from us. And we’re learning from them. And so I think that they should have some say in shaping the work of the classroom and shaping the direction of the discussions that are occurring. I’m a big believer in autonomy and choice in terms of the format of some of the assignments, the structure of some of the course…the topics even. And I think that when you think about the classroom as a social setting, that brings that to the surface, that idea of co-creating the learning environment.

Josh: Building off of that we’re all humans in this room. And if anyone’s ever had the experience in the classroom, where a student came up with a point that you’d never thought of before and you have that kind of epiphany, or there’s something that moves the students and you in the classroom, it’s just so clear that the classroom is a vibrant, human space. And I also really truly believe that teaching is one of the most human professions, that there’s a real vulnerability in a student saying, “I need to learn something, will you teach me that thing?” And the same is true for the person in front of the classroom to admit when we don’t know something, or to admit that we’re wrong, or to work through something that we haven’t really thought completely about. And so I think that that makes the classroom such a place that’s alive with activity. And so I think that, you know, our sociality is part of that, but it’s one piece of this larger equation.

Rebecca: Related to this idea, I’ve heard a lot of students concerned about the social experience of being in college that’s beyond just the classroom and how that feeds into their classroom participation and being a member of a community, and really faculty too, like those spontaneous moments where you interact with someone that you weren’t planning to because you bumped into him in the hallway or you see them somewhere on campus. Can you talk a little bit about some of those differences and ways that we might help, not really compensate for that, but just kind of care about that those things are missing and that there’s a loss of that and maybe facilitate or create new opportunities that would be different, but something that would allow for some community in a different way to form.

Josh: That’s a really pertinent question because I see a lot of discussion about “What is the value of being all together on a college campus? What does the face-to-face experience really mean and why does it matter?” And a surprising variety of thoughts about that question. So I think that we really need to be thinking about opportunities for students to engage and collaborate and talk together about things other than just the courses that they’re taking. We might learn lessons from the coaches on our campuses who are doing this very thing. They’re bringing their teams together. Sometimes they’re reviewing films, sometimes they’re just having community building events online, you know, watching a movie together and there are ways that even a college’s residential life staff could engage groups of students in doing something like that. I mean, we’ve seen for years faculty doing live film viewings with their students using hashtags and things like that on Twitter. I think Facebook now has a watch together feature so that you can all watch and make comments. So yeah, I think there are lots of opportunities that we just need to explore a little bit.

Sarah: Yeah. And my campus is exploring a lot of this and not necessarily the faculty groups, but the residential life and student success groups, and I know athletics, and they’re all trying to brainstorm “What are ways that we can create those moments?” And they’re trying to explore Zoom parties and the co-watching and town halls and everyone bring breakfast. [LAUGHTER] It’s really tricky because I think it’s a lot easier to do the teaching and learning bit online and I think that we have a lot of leaders in online learning who have developed wonderful techniques and there’s lots more we can explore. I think that’s the harder piece at residential colleges. Lots of students are commuting and don’t have a lot of those experiences. But, those who are at residential colleges, that’s what they’re there for. And they’re not used to having to be home with their parents or in these other scenarios. And they’re really hungering for that face-to-face connection. And I think that we have to come up with some creative solutions, such as the ones that Josh noted, but I think it’s a trickier business than the teaching and learning, actually.

Josh: I agree.

Rebecca: I think one thing that strikes me about the role that a faculty member could play in something like that is if something comes up in discussion, where you could connect a student to other students that are even in other classes that you have, or other faculty or other members of the bigger college community, that might be a way to help them make more of those spontaneous connections [LAUGHTER] that they’re not gonna make in another way, it’s almost they’re facilitated, but we might need to be a little more on our game about trying to help people make those connections.

Sarah: That’s great.

Rebecca: I know I got a random email from a colleague I hadn’t seen in a long time, just saying like, “Oh, I haven’t seen you in a long time.” And it was really nice. It felt spontaneous actually. [LAUGHTER] It wasn’t expected. So, I think if we take those moments and try those things, both with our colleagues and with students, it might help a little bit to make people feel connected, but also spark something exciting in a moment of excitement or a moment of care.

John: I was fortunately able to see the video before it being officially released. And I really enjoyed the format, the humanity that you display, and the really nice storytelling that provides some nice sense of narrative and some nice connections. Could you perhaps share one or two of the recommendations you provide for faculty in addressing the near future of teaching?

Sarah: One point that I tried to get across is this concept of immediacy and immediacy cues and this was something that I was struck by when researching The Spark of Learning, that there were so many different research studies and the research, really they were in different topics. They were investigating extensive student learning: did the students enjoy the course? Did the professor enjoy the course? Self ratings?… all these different variables. But, for so many of them, the professor using or not using immediacy cues was really important and what immediacy cues are are just simple, often nonverbal, ways of communicating that you are present and in the moment… so, things like eye contact, gestures, varied vocal tones. And I think a lot of these immediacy cues are easier to do face to face than they are online. But, I think when you translate immediacy on to online environments, a lot of it, and Josh mentioned this already, is frequency of responsiveness, just dipping into that online community a lot and responding to students, I think, is a way that, even though you’re not in the shared space with them, you’re demonstrating that you are present and that you are available to the students.

Josh: One of the other things we were talking about was the nature of care itself as kind of the intersection between our social natures and emotions, and that this crisis has really revealed in ways that I don’t think we’ve talked about very well in higher ed, how important it is to create a caring learning environment. It’s not easy to talk about emotion in higher ed. As soon as you broach the subject, suddenly, people are like, “Woah, that’s not my job. I’m just the expert.” And of course, that’s not true. But, I think that this circumstance really brought to the fore how important it is. And it’s also really important to note that caring is affective labor and has been disproportionately done by women and faculty of color. And so, this moment is an important moment to underscore that this is part of the work of teaching, it should be shared by every single person who steps into a classroom. And so I think that was another thing that we tried to wedge in to a lot of what we were saying.

John: Going back to the concept of immediacy, one of the things that your video demonstrates is, if we are teaching remotely or teaching online, how videos can be used to create a nice sense of instructor presence. Because watching the video, you’ve got a nice sense of humor there, you’re making points effectively, and people are seeing you there, which provides a little bit of a connection, not necessarily the same one as in the classroom, but much more so than if it was just an email being sent to the class. And I thought that was really nice modeling of perhaps how we could do that effectively.

Sarah: Thank you.

Josh: Thanks, John. I very rarely hear that I have a nice sense of humor. So, I appreciate that.

John: I didn’t mention the name. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: Right. Oh wow… Just cut me…

Rebecca: This is supposed to be the Pedagogies of Care, John…[LAUGHTER]

Josh: Right.

John: That came through for both of you and I think it was done really well. And one thing I’d like to recommend is Karen Costa’s book on 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Videos.

Sarah: If you didn’t, I was going to plug that book as well. I have actually two copies because I got mad at Amazon because it didn’t ship me it fast enough, and everyone else had their copy. And so I ordered another copy direct from the publisher, which is probably what I should have done anyway. So I have two copies on my bed stand.

John: I have it both on Kindle and in front of me, actually, I had to look over to my computer just to get the title right.

Josh: Yeah, it’s a great book, it’s important to have by the side of the computer at this point.

Sarah: And I think it’s going to require a lot of learning. I just wrote an essay that I don’t know if it will go anywhere, [LAUGHTER] about the fact that we expect our students to be lifelong learners, and we talk a lot in committees, especially about liberal arts education, and that we want our students to be agile and think lightly on their feet and be able to respond with new learning when there are crises or technological or societal changes. And I think we instructors need to do a little bit of that right now. And so I am going to be exploring new technologies and digging through Karen’s book and I’m not someone who knows a lot about video or recordings or any of that, but I am going to spend a good part of my summer trying to learn new things so that I can be a more effective teacher because we’re probably going to be disrupted in one way or another for a while.

John: Now is not the best time to talk about the wonders of living through a pandemic, but it does provide a nice example of faculty modeling the process of learning, because certainly this spring, everyone had to learn some new skills, no matter how proficient they were with either online or face-to-face teaching, their courses were not designed for the sudden shift. And there were some major adjustments, and it did remind students of the fact that we’re all learners in this together in ways that might not always be transparent to students.

Sarah: Love that.

Josh: Yeah, that’s true. And I think students get a lot of credit for being good sports about it, and being patient with that learning process, especially with faculty who were honest and open about the fact that we were learning as we were going.

Rebecca: I wanted to follow up a little bit on the modeling of videos, because one of the things that both of you are excellent at is telling stories and not all faculty are as proficient or have as much experience as storytellers, or even think of themselves as storytellers. But, I think it’s a really good way to connect people together is through story. Can you talk a little bit about advice that you could give faculty on how to use story as part of their teaching methods?

Josh: Well, I guess one piece of advice is that faculty know their disciplines inside and out. And they’re always stories behind the major discoveries, the major players, the “true Hollywood story” of the discovery of x, right? And faculty know that. And so that’s not a personal anecdote. So, they don’t want to reveal that and it’s not content that they have to generate. It’s deeply embedded in the material they’re already teaching. And so I’ve worked with Kathy Matthews at Rice and she’s a beloved teacher and scholar there and she was just so brilliant about teaching through story. She’s a biologist, and when she talked about DNA, it was several class periods of hearing about all the stories that went into Watson and Crick and Rosalind Franklin and all the things that led up to that. And students loved it. And they learned a lot through it, so we can find the stories that we already know, that’s a part of the lore of our discipline, and share those.

Sarah: I love that. I agree. And I think that one of the things that we faculty have, besides knowledge of these stories, is almost stories about the information that we’re sharing and how it all fits together. And that’s one of those big things, of course, that distinguishes novices from experts, is being able to see that overall pattern. And I think that when you tell that information in stories, whether it’s the big discoveries or something else, that the students can see those connections, it’s more easy for them to access that web of knowledge. And I think that my upper-level neuroscience class, I sometimes joke, is more like a gossip column. In a lot of fields, there are these huge arguments always going on and controversies. And I really try to people those, and I’ll put up people’s pictures from Twitter, [LAUGHTER] and describe those. And when those arguments are a little bit personalized, and they have faces, I think that it’s really engaging for the students to think about who they agree with more and things like that, rather than if it were just static knowledge. Also, one thing that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about, is the fact that we also engage in our own story, and almost the semester is a story, and that it’s important to get in there and interrupt the story a little bit. We were joking in the beginning of this interview, that I’m a bit of a control freak. And I think that one of the things that I fight against, in terms of my own teaching, is I really like everything to follow a smooth pattern, but I think that more learning occurs when you interrupt your own story and kind of throw everything to the winds and pass things up. And, again, let the students help co-create the story of the semester. And so I think that’s another way that I see storytelling and teaching weaving together.

Josh: Yeah, I love the idea and I completely agree. The semester has a narrative arc, each class period has a narrative arc to it, and capitalizing on a good beginning, middle, and end is a really powerful teaching strategy.

John: And I think this is something you addressed in your book.

Josh: Part of the Sociality chapter is about how storytelling is one of our first teaching behaviors, and something that I think we see in Sarah’s work a lot too. And she was just talking a little bit about this, that we process information better when we make it into a story. And I think that that’s a really important way of thinking about learning.

Rebecca: I think it’s just a good idea to keep stories in the front of our minds as some faculty who maybe are used to telling stories in person shift to being online where they might write in a more sterile way, where it might be a little more cut and dry depending on their discipline, and that they might need to weave some of that personality into what they might write or share or videos or whatever they make in an online environment that might not seem so obvious.

Josh: Right. In fact, they could imagine that the videos that they produce are the stories and that they can get the content and the facts through some other means.

Rebecca: As you both know, we always wrap up by asking: what’s next?

Sarah: Well, as I said earlier, what’s next for me is a lot of learning. So, I’m going to be exploring the world of online teaching. I’m working on the committee at my college to get our faculty all trained, they have a lot of varying experience with online environments. And we’re going to try to have the fall semester be even better than the spring semester. And in terms of me personally and things I’m working on, I’ve been working on a new writing project that has a lot to do with storytelling and interruptions and also improv in the theater.

Rebecca: You’ve got me intrigued. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: That sounds fun. Coincidentally, I’m on the same committee that’s Sarah’s on, but at my university.

Sarah: So much fun, isn’t it? [LAUGHTER]

Josh: It is. So, we’re deep in the weeds of helping prepare resources for faculty regardless of what kind of environments they’ll be in. And so, in that realm, one of the things I’m really focused on is getting some programming for trauma-informed pedagogy up and running at the end of July and August. So, just at the moment that people are designing their courses and thinking how I’m actually going to do this, they’re also thinking about that. Personally, I am still in the middle of writing a book on grades and grading and so still trying to plug along with that as best as you can, in a situation like this. So, keeping on with that.

Rebecca: It’s nice to have projects to kind of work on a little bit at a time, given that large amounts of time seemed completely impossible to me at the moment. Both of these projects sound really exciting. So, I’m looking forward to hearing about those. I know we’ll have you back to talk about them when their…. [LAUGHTER]

John: We will invite you back, at least. We hope you’ll come back. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I don’t know if you can stand us another time.

Josh: It’s always fun.

John: I am curious, though about the improv, though. Could you tell us just a little bit about that?

Sarah: Yeah. Well, I wrote a piece for The Chronicle years ago now on the interconnections of teaching and acting. And that’s actually a big part of one of the chapters in Spark of Learning is the extent to which teaching is a performance profession. But, this work’s a little more focused on the student perspective and the student mental health crisis and the lessons and growing that improvisational forms of learning can offer for students who might be struggling with those issues.

Rebecca: Sounds deeply needed right now.

John: It sounds fascinating, and a book on grading is something that a lot of people want, especially after what’s happened this spring, looking at alternatives to grades and the motivational issues associated with grading. I’m looking forward to both of these,

Josh: This became a little bit more relevant than I thought it would be. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Yeah! Relevance is good when you’re talking about writing.

Josh: Yeah, it is. [LAUGHTER] That’s right.

Rebecca: Well, thank you, as always, for joining us. It’s always great to hear your perspectives and think through things with both of you.

Sarah: Thank you.

Josh: Yeah. Thanks for inviting us.

John: Thank you. It’s great talking to you again.

Josh: Have a great day.

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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. Editing assistance provided by Ryan Schirano.

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139. Pedagogies of Care: Digital Reading

This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, Dr. Jenae Cohn joins us to discuss concerns about, and the affordances that are associated with, reading in a digital environment. Jenae is an Academic Technology Specialist at Stanford University and the author of Skim, Dive, Surface: Strategies for Digital Reading in the College Classroom, which will be released by West Virginia University Press as part of the superb series edited by James Lang.

Show Notes

  • Cohn, Jenae (2021, forthcoming). Skim, Dive, Surface: Strategies for Digital Reading in the College Classroom. West Virginia University Press.
  • Carillo, E. C. (2017). A writer’s guide to mindful reading. WAC Clearinghouse.
  • Pedagogies of Care (Sneak Peek) – video trailer –  website
  • Plato (360 BCE). Phaedras
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion. West Virginia University Press.
  • Mueller, D. N. (2009). Digital underlife in the networked writing classroom. Computers and Composition, 26(4), 240-250.
  • Smale, M. A., & Regaldo, M. (2017). Digital Technology as Affordance and Barrier to Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Smale, M. A. (2020). “It’s a lot to take in”—Undergraduate Experiences with Assigned Reading”. CUNY Academic Works, 1–10.
  • Lang, James (2020, forthcoming). Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. Basic Books.
  • Hypothesis
  • PowerNotes
  • Perusall
  • PowerNotes
  • VoiceThread

Transcript

John: This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, we discuss concerns about, and the affordances that are associated with, reading in a digital environment.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Dr. Jenae Cohn. She is an Academic Technology Specialist at Stanford University and the author of Skim, Dive, Surface: Strategies for Digital Reading in the College Classroom, which will be released by West Virginia University Press as part of the superb series edited by James Lang. Welcome, Jenae.

John: Welcome.

Jenae: Thank you for having me.

John: Our teas today are:

Jenae: I have got a white and green tea blend with jasmine today. It’s really delicious.

Rebecca: That sounds good. I have Scottish afternoon tea

John: That’s a little bit stronger, isn’t it?

Rebecca: I like it. It’s good.

John: And I am still drinking English Breakfast tea.

Jenae: A black tea crew. I respect that in the afternoon… a little pick me up.

John: And it’s grading time here so I need the extra caffeine.

Jenae: Yeah, I get that. Makes sense.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss your book, Skim, Dive, and Surface. Could you tell us what motivated your work on this topic?

Jenae: Absolutely. I have always found great solace and inspiration in reading. I’ve considered myself a reader for my entire life, and I noticed as a reader when I was in college that I largely depended on tried and true techniques for remembering content from reading: from highlighting and note taking in the margins to drawing little doodles and scribbles. And when I transitioned to graduate school, when I was getting my PhD, I was reading longer, more complex texts. And at that point, I really didn’t have the resources to be printing everything out hundreds of pages of reading a week, to do those techniques that had served me so well as a college student. So I think at that point forward, I started thinking a lot about how does our media, how do our spaces for reading, shape what we’re able to glean from a reading and how we’re able to orient ourselves to the really critical task of reading and being readers. And this became even a more acute kind of question for me when I started teaching first-year composition, and I saw my own students struggling in the same way that I was struggling as a graduate student with trying to get through really new and challenging complicated texts that were changing our orientation, not only to reading texts, but just being readers. And so I kept mulling over this for years and years, and my research kept dancing around it. And then by the time I got to my job at Stanford, it really struck me that it was the time to start writing a book that would help people recognize and see these real distinctions, but not from a language of a deficit model, and not from the language that was kind of coming out the 2016 moment that Google made us stupid, or that smartphones are bad for our brain, like those dialogues are still happening, much to my great dismay, but to actually provide sort of a more open and inclusive and, I think, kind of compassionate take on the possibilities of reading across spaces and finding promise and hope for readers to be more flexible in different ways of reading, especially when it comes to academic context.

Rebecca: I find your work really exciting because I was always an avid reader, even when I was young, but when reading academic texts, it’s a really different kind of reading, like reading fiction is really different than reading an academic text. And I remember when I was in sixth grade, I had an intervention because I was struggling with our Global Studies class because I had really poor reading comprehension on the topic. And I was lucky that a family friend happened to be the reading specialist and helped me out. But otherwise, no one had taught me how to read those kinds of texts, and I really struggled.

Jenae: Oh my gosh, I love that story, Rebecca, because it really speaks to how your context can shape your behaviors and how you approach that task. And I love that you’ve even worked with a reading specialist. I think we take for granted that if you can read in one space, you can read in another space. You are an avid reader and able to really dive into fiction, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily could read those more technical texts or texts that were speaking to different audiences and engaging with different purposes and it’s easy to take for granted, especially at the college level, that the students will have sort of equal proficiencies if they’re able to like technically read, but we know when we get to higher ed context, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Rebecca: So, like me, I think a lot of students don’t get training on how to read academic texts or critical texts when they’re in K-12. So what do you recommend? Or how do we help students transition to college reading?

Jenae: I think there’s a few ways we can begin. First, I think that what college instructors can really do is help demystify the purposes of reading. I think that a lot of instructors, and I’ve done this myself, assume that just if you say, “Okay, read chapter one of this book,” everyone will understand what the purpose is of reading chapter one of the book, but that’s not necessarily so, especially since in different contexts and disciplines those purposes for engaging with a particular chapter article might be really different. And I think as instructors too, we want to think about what we want students to get out of the reading. Do we want students to be reading for content? Are we trying to help them understand a particular concept and how that concept might be in dialogue with something from an in-class discussion or a lecture, or something else, or we want the students to read what we call reading rhetorically, or I want them to read to understand the strategies an author’s using to communicate a claim. So in writing classes in particular, rhetorical reading might happen when we’re trying to understand a particular historical context or moment that might be shaping how an author might be orienting to a topic, to kind of understand the context around that reading, or understand the writer’s writerly moves. So someone who’s also trying to read to understand a written genre might be another thing we need to help students understand when it comes to purpose. So, in the sciences, you might have students read a scientific article to understand: “This is standard format in the scientific article structure: the introduction, methods, description, results.” There’s always sort of a standard pattern to that. That’s all to say, I think just making our purposes clear is Thing number one, Thing number two, that I think instructors could do to help students really develop a stronger sense of being a reader, is to also help them understand different approaches to note take, and to think about how they glean important pieces of information from a context. And different students will do this in different ways. So I certainly wouldn’t recommend a prescriptive, like note-taking model that everyone has to do. I think that it over determines a certain kind of thought process. But there can be a moment, and I think a lot of instructors don’t think of themselves as having to teach academic skills, but it can be really valuable to make explicit: “Here’s the skill you’ll need to develop to do this work.” And to have an open discussion with students: What do you do? Why do you do these kinds of behaviors? How does this help you learn? And to make that really explicit. These are just starting points. The real expert on academic reading proper, I would point you to Ellen Carrillo, she has a great book for college students called Mindful Reading. Ellen Carrillo’s work about really bridging students to academic reading skills is like the best place to start for instructors who want to start at the foundation of what it means to help students read. I cite her a lot in my book because I think her work is really quite foundational to this thinking,

John: As you noted, the type of reading skills vary quite a bit by your discipline. Reading a chemistry article is very different than reading a math paper or reading a novel or reading poetry. Should each discipline include something about teaching students, what’s important in reading in that discipline early in a student’s career?

Jenae: Oh, I think that would be tremendously helpful if, in an intro course, that was a part of the unit. It would help students recognize what it means to be a professional in that discipline too, which can also help students I think, from the level of choosing a major and deciding what academic conversations they want to remain a part of in terms of their career. I think that many students, and I know I was this way in college, don’t tend to see the subjects as communities. We call these discourse communities: mathematicians, chemists, compositions, they’re all part of different discourse, communities that have different goals and functions and ways of communicating and behaving. So the more visible we can make those sorts of tacit understandings of how people communicate, the more we can demystify a bit of a hidden curriculum around how disciplinarity, how intellectual thought, operates. And I think that can be really exciting for students to see “Oh, people who are in math and chemistry, they have a way of talking. It doesn’t mean I’m stupid. [LAUGHTER] It doesn’t mean that I can’t get it. It just means that it’s a community that I don’t know yet, and that I want to understand better through accessing and unpacking what it means to be a reader or a writer in that space.”

John: You need to know the language of the discipline to some extent to be able to participate in the conversation.

Jenae: Exactly. That’s a great way to sum it up. I was like the “too long, didn’t read” version of what I just said.

Rebecca: I think another space where you’re switching contexts is between the physical environment and the virtual environment, which many of us are experiencing maybe more intensely now [LAUGHTER] than we had in the past. I know that while I was on sabbatical, doing research, I found myself doing a lot more reading online in digital format than I ever had before, because our physical library was closed. [LAUGHTER]

Jenae: Yeah, how was that for you?

Rebecca: At first, I was really resistant and I read every single physical book that I had first. So, I could take notes in the margins and things that I was used to and accustomed to doing. But I’ve recently read a couple of texts on my Kindle and really love that I can highlight and take notes there and then end up with a digital file that’s searchable. It’s actually way more useful, but I had never really been forced into trying a new way of reading.

Jenae: Fabulous.

Rebecca: So, I think it’s interesting to start thinking about how do we help students take advantage of some of the affordances that a digital environment actually has, rather than just the resistance. And one of that, for me, is like moving from reading from my computer to a Kindle, which has the e-paper, which is a little better in my eyes and it’s a little more comfortable of a reading environment, but then taking advantage of those tools and techniques that are built into some of the software that’s available.

Jenae: Absolutely. You’ve pointed out several really great affordances to digital reading, where you’re able to archive your notes in a particular space, organize them, create certain kinds of like topical categories for the notes that you’ve got from your Kindle. So, you’re already opening up so many of the wide world of possibilities, especially when it comes to academic reading, in your own experience of having the library closed up for you. So, I really enjoyed hearing your thought process around that.

John: But if students haven’t done much academic work prior to coming to college with e-texts, the skills that they had, as you mentioned in the intro to your book, in terms of dog-earing the pages and using highlighters and so forth, might not translate as easily unless they’ve perhaps learn to adapt with those. Rebecca talked about the ability to take notes and index them, but students don’t always know how to do that. And one thing that complicates it a little bit is they may get their books in different formats, some may be on a Kindle, some may be in Blackboard or Canvas or some other learning management system, and others may be PDFs. So how do we help students with that transition?

Rebecca: And also maybe faculty? Because sometimes I think that’s a barrier, too. [LAUGHTER]

John: I think that’s probably a more common barrier… we’ve had some people give us all sorts of interesting explanations of why books are better, most of them based on neuromyths that have been debunked for decades. But there is this perception that the tangible nature of a book makes it better in some way. Just as, you know, the book was seen as being bad when it was first introduced, because it weakened the need for people to develop their memories. I think people feel the same way about electronic texts. So how do we get past those barriers on the part of faculty and students?

Jenae: Right. Wow. Lots of good questions nested in that one question. And I will say that in the first part of the book, I talk about history, affect, and neuroscience as kind of categories of ways that instructors, in particular, might find their own resistances or anxieties, as I put it, reflected. John, when you mentioned that people once worried that the book was going to destroy memory. And Socrates and Plato had a famous dialogue about this in the Phaedrus. Right, that’s like an anxiety that’s just been really… there’s historical echoes actually all around the world that I detail in the book. That was a really fun section to write because I love history, too. But anyway, I’ll get to your question here, which is how do we help students make this transition? And again, I think we have to unpack that in a few different ways. And one is sort of starting with meeting both students and faculty where they are, engaging, I think, in some dialogue around “Why do you like a paper book? Why do you like to use a physical highlighter? Why do you like to doodle in the margins?” We’ll learn interesting things, and in the book, I do a little bit of a lit review of some major surveys that have been done around faculty and student perceptions of reading on paper and reading on screen and I’ll offer the really like two-minute gloss version of that, which is that the stated reasons these surveys have found is that, for both students and instructors alike, it is familiar. And there’s a perception that it’s better for their memory and attention. And you’re right, John, too, that some of that comes from neuromyths. Some of it just comes from feeling. A lot of the surveys are about, again, to the affect point, “I like the way the book feels in my hand.” “I like the weight of the book.” People, and this is my favorite, would even say things like “I like the smell of the pages.” And that’s all about feeling, that’s about emotions and the cognitive work are tied, of course. And I actually thought really distinctly of Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s work about this, that we can’t unpack the emotions from the learning itself. So all that’s important. So I say you have to start the dialogue there with your own local community and there might be some echoes of that national conversation. And so recognizing why you feel those ways might also help you to see how those feelings or how those perceptions translate into lived experience. A lot of the studies on moving students from print to digital environments are also focused on the memory and retention. And studies have mostly found that students do tend to remember more when they read on paper, but it’s because they don’t actually have strategies for reading in digital spaces. So, something else we might do is, to return to the earlier part of the conversation in some ways, at least, make explicit that there are strategies they’re using in the first place: “Wow, you really like to use the highlighter? What are you doing when you use the highlighter? Oh, you’re pointing out the most important parts of the section? Why is it important to find the most important parts of the section? How are you doing that? What do you do with that information?” Once you find those most important parts, then once you isolate out those skills and what you’re doing with them, we can think about: A. not just how you replicate that in a digital environment, but what a digital environment does differently. So, this is also, I think, part of the conversation needs to include making explicit what the affordances are of a digital environment beyond the fact of it being on a screen, recognizing that paper is a technology. And just as much as that laptops’ are a technology, your Kindle’s a technology. The other technology that I’ll throw in where I think students are doing a bunch of reading these days as their smartphones, I’ve had instructors tell me, “Wow, I’m so horrified that my students are doing all the reading on their phone,” and my response is “Well, especially now on this COVID-19 moment, our students might not have access to laptops that work that are as fast as their 5G network on their phones.” So, I think now more than ever, we have to be really accommodating in thinking about where mobile, and where the affordances of mobile, fit in… What kinds of applications and tools are available across these spaces to, again, both replicate the great labor and thinking around print, but that also take advantage of the easy abilities to link content and connect content across different spaces, the ability to curate and create collections of information across different spaces, and that ability to tag and sort different sets of ideas to see relationships and connections between ideas. This is just sort of the tip of the iceberg in terms of possibilities. I will say I recognize the constraints, I think, of digital environments. We can’t ignore things like screen fatigue. Rebecca, you talked about getting tired, your eyes getting tired reading on a screen, I feel that too. The blue light that emits from screens is really exhausting for our brains. I think probably everyone’s experiencing this even more in our move to living on the internet and our COVID-19 moment. So, I think part of this is also figuring out what are the strategies for avoiding fatigue. And in some ways, this can be good for our learning too. It might inspire us to take more breaks, to work in shorter and more concentrated bursts of time and to recognize and have a clear purpose in mind by working within those shorter bursts of time as well.

John: We’ve just been talking about faculty resistance to reading on mobile devices. But, faculty also often seem to have a resistance, back in the days, a long time ago, when we used to be in the classroom at times. There used to be this resistance to students using mobile devices in the classroom. Would you like to talk a little bit about how students, perhaps, might be using mobile devices in ways that may not be as negative as faculty might expect them to be.

Jenae: Yeah. Isn’t it funny how like mobile bans and laptop bans feel like that was so long ago at this moment of recording? Yeah, there’s a big chapter actually in the book about laptop and mobile device bans, because I think that context might come back again. We’ll see. So anyway, yes, there are number of, I think, productive things students are doing with mobile phones in class. One is that students might be using mobile as really their faster internet connection. I will say that mobile networks tend to be a bit more reliable than even if you are face to face. On-campus Wi Fi networks can be very unreliable. And it can certainly be more reliable than students’ home networks. But in the context of class itself, it might actually give students a more stable connection, which can mean greater access. From a learning and engagement perspective too, what students also might get from mobile that I think is really exciting, is the ability to do really flexible note taking and archiving of work. So mobile apps have the real benefit of being able to use your finger or a stylus to actually draw and annotate and nimbly really respond and react in real time. I actually have an activity in the book where I even suggest that instructors create an assignment where they think of students working through their reading as they might create like an Instagram or Snapchat story, where they can take quick screenshots with like emoji reactions from different parts of the book as a way to engage with it. So I think that our students have found really creative ways to engage. They might not realize that those are creative ways to engage. There’s actually a lot of literature that shows that sometimes students get a little uncomfortable when instructors try to like make their class like “My class is cool, it’s like Facebook for learning.” So I don’t know if I would go that direction. But rather, it’s really saying, “Hey, here are tools you can use to do the things that are really good for your learning,” rather than saying, “Learning is just like Facebook,” which makes some students feel a little bit like their lives are getting too uncomfortably blurred. I’ll say one last thing about the mobile phones in class, which is that for many students who are either working from home or staying connected to the family, it’s important to recognize that students might be needing to connect with people outside the classroom during class. That might seem like a distraction, but for many students, if they are caretakers, for example, they might need to be reading off of their phone, to also be checking to see “Okay, does my parent need me right now? Does my sibling need me right now? Does someone else I’m caring about really need me to stay connected and engaged during class?” Some people refer to these behaviors as being part of the digital underlife. Derek Mueller has a great essay about this concept that I think is really valuable. Maura Smale, I should say, and Mariana Regaldo have done really great work on how students are thinking about mobile as sort of lifelines to the world outside. So, I think that the benefits to mobile happen both at the learning level, but also the access and connection and inclusion level. And I don’t know, man, I don’t think we need policing of how our students are engaging with devices in class, as part of the work of showing compassion, I think, towards our students, is trusting and recognizing good intent. And if students don’t want to engage, they just want to disconnect, even if you ban the devices, maybe they’ll doodle and zone out.[LAUGHTER] So, like there are lots of ways to be distracted and the device is sort of a red herring in a way for that, in my opinion.

John: I found many ways to be distracted as a student long before there were cell phones. So, I fully agree with that. And it can also be a good indicator, if the instructor is walking around and sees a lot of students doing things that aren’t related to the class, that maybe there’s not as much engagement there as you might like.

Jenae: Yeah, exactly.

John: One of the differences between an e-text and a book is that generally the book doesn’t have pop-up messages that might interrupt your focus and attention. Most mobile devices, though, do. What can we do to help students perhaps better manage the distractions that they deal with when they’re reading on a mobile device?

Jenae: So this is tricky, because our brains respond to novelty. And of course, mobile phones have been designed to be addictive. [LAUGHTER] With all those pop-up notifications and things that fire off our endorphins. There’s a concrete tip, right, like encourage students to disable notifications for certain kinds of apps. Not all of our students know how to do that. I think, there is often assumptions too about a traditional college-aged student, or I’ll put traditional scare quotes in the air that our students between 18 and 21 know everything about all digital devices, because they are… and I just love this expression… digital natives… not a real thing… it doesn’t exist. [LAUGHTER] Because even if you’re born when technology’s invented, it doesn’t mean that you are adept at it in every single context and environment. So, I think offering some explicit, just tactical, infrastructure advice around that. The other thing that’s not a technical piece, that’s a cognitive piece, again, to help students recognize their purpose in reading too. So when you veer away to check a notification from your reading, why? Is it because you’re bored? Is it because the text is confusing? Is it because you simply just want to read the notification? Just recognizing and making clear what your intentions are as you’re reading can also be a way of managing attention. The other thing I’ll add around distraction, I think it’s important to recognize that attention does not look the same for every student, either. There are some students who I think actually read really well when they’re multitasking, so to speak. The example I go to is when teaching composition I always have students who work with like 5000, tabs open, approximate number, and they’ll often sort of flip between those tabs, and as an instructor I often asked about students; workflow, cause that’s just of interest to me. And many students will share that they’re looking at Wikipedia for an encyclopedic explanation of something they’ve read, or they’re looking up a word in the dictionary, or they’re looking for an image that illustrates something the book described. So sometimes that ability to kind of flip between different things might look like distraction. It might look like it’s not on task when, in fact, it very much could be tied into the task. Of course, those tabs could also be, you know, the latest TikTok stream, or whatever students are watching right now, which of course, can divert attention and isn’t particularly good for memory. But, I think that mindfulness about why they’re reading and why they might click a notification, just making that explicit, right. And rather than just being some sort of a punishment for the sake of being a punishment, or a better way to put this is rather than just sort of deriding the action as a given… really unpacking the assumption that distractions always bad, and thinking through what does it really mean to be distracted? And I suspect Jim Lang’s newest book on Teaching Distracted Minds is actually going to be a really helpful complement to some of this conversation, too. So I think that’s another text I’m really looking forward to reading as part of this conversation as well.

John: We are too and we’ve actually scheduled an interview with him in a few months when it’s closer to coming out to talk about that book.

Jenae: Oh, fabulous.

John: We’re very much looking forward to it, and I think many faculty will be.

Jenae: Super relevant.

Rebecca: I think related to some of the distraction stuff that you’re talking about to is format, and that digital texts come in different formats. And the idea that students are not digital natives, that they don’t just somehow magically know how to use technology unless we’re showing them how to use it. I found that showing students how to take advantage of accessibility features and alternative formats and the ability to make their text reflow, and things like that, has really opened doors for students because they just didn’t even know that those features were available to them and really changed how they experienced texts or other media on their devices, because they could really change how they could actually consume it or interact with it.

Jenae: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought up accessibility features. Because, you’re right, that text to speech features, screen reading features, even the visual accessibility features that are part of digital technologies… even just understanding where the alt text is… and where, like, image descriptions might be, makes a difference for all learners. This is of course part of a universal design for learning philosophy, that when students are aware, to your point, Rebecca, of the technologies available to them, it’s all students who benefit from that because it gives them multiple models for engaging with those ideas. It gives them multiple models for potentially representing ideas themselves. And so the book really actually deals with UDL philosophies, at its core. I almost had an entire chapter dedicated to UDL. And then as I was revising it, it’s like, I can’t even have just one chapter. This has to be strung into every chapter in this book. And to me, that’s the most compelling reason to encourage students to read in digital spaces, the most compelling reason to encourage faculty to overcome, I think, sometimes resistant perspectives about what digital reading doesn’t offer is, think about the range of students you’re seeing, their ranges of circumstances, their ranges of thinking about the world. And when you open up all these new possibilities for reading in digital spaces, you get to include so many more people who maybe never thought of themselves as readers, right? Who weren’t those avid readers reading their paperback books in the bathtub at three in the morning. That was me. It might be just a different group that you get to bring into the fold and who get to maybe experience reading as they might have never thought of reading before. I found like a million think pieces that were like “Are audio books real books?” Does it mean something to read an audio book, and I did a little bit of like a forehead slap. “Of course, reading an audio book is reading a book. It’s still reading.” But when we disparage based on media, we just exclude so many potential people we could just bring into the fold of being readers and finding people who want to be excited about reading.

John: So besides the accessibility and the UDL nature of this, there’s also some advantages, I think in terms of perhaps the cost of digital readings. College textbooks have grown in price fairly dramatically over the last 30 or 40 years to become a much larger share of college costs. So, by encouraging that, aren’t we also perhaps making education at least a little bit more affordable?

Jenae: I hope so. And certainly the OER movement is really tied to these conversations about accessibility. So, yes, I think that the more we can point students to digital resources that might reduce those kinds of costs, we respond to a major faculty concern. Surveys from EDUCAUSE and the Babson survey group actually suggest that one of faculty members’ major concerns is this very question of affordability. So, if we could be more open minded about the ways that we teach certain academic skills, we kind of kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. We manage to kind of help solve the affordability piece, while also expanding out accessibility options. And I think OERs could be even more powerful as a resource, if we help students understand how to leverage them beyond the ways that they might just read a website, which if you look to research and usability studies and user experience, a lot of people read websites in what’s been called like an L-formation, like the eyes sort of scan only a portion of the page. It’s not really reading in depth. And that’s because people have certain behaviors or attitudes about what they’re trying to find on a website. And you can spend hours and hours thinking about the user experience of website and where you place the pieces to draw attention to the most important pieces of information. And so that’s a matter of training, right? We know that website genres invite certain kinds of reading. So, if we open it up to students, we say, “Hey, you’re going to be doing all your reading online in this OER, that’s a more affordable option. How will you identify the important pieces? What’s going to be your behavior through this text? This isn’t just like reading the website for the news. It isn’t just like going on your Twitter feed. This operates in a very different way. Here’s how we can leverage that and not just sort of feel like we’re following the same patterns we do with other pieces of kind of flattened out web content. So, I deviated a little from your affordability question, but it got me thinking about the UX side as well.

Rebecca: I think one of the exciting things that you discuss in your book, but also capture in the infographic that you are including in the Pedagogies of Care project are some really interesting ways that students can read in a digital environment that allows us to make connections and interact with other people and other texts. Can you talk about some of the ways that we can use digital texts that people don’t always think about.

Jenae: Sure. So, I have a framework that’s at the core of the book. I don’t call it the five C’s for digital read, I call this the digital reading framework, but it is the five C words. So, some of the strategies include connection, curation, contextualization, creation, and what I call contemplation. And so some things people might not think about is when I think especially with connection and curation. We’ll start with curation, that’s actually the first item in the framework. Reading is always an act of curation in many ways. When you take a text, unless it’s just something you’re reading for fun. I should say reading is always an act of curation in an academic or a learning context, because you’re trying to sort of parse out what pieces of information or what examples are the best examples to help me make a claim, remember an idea, draw a conclusion, whatever the case might be. And so with a digital text, what you can do is you can make that curation process visible by… and this is simple… this isn’t even high tech: copying and pasting parts of your text into a taxonomy of your own design that helps you to see “Oh, right, this collection of quotes is really about this topic that I’m learning about in my class.” “Oh, wow, this text A and text B are both speaking to content area one.” You can really bridge that much more easily than on paper when you might have to, you know, an old school technique would be to make like note cards, where you write down the quotes and their different paper books that correspond to these topics. It’s a great strategy, but pretty cumbersome and time consuming, and difficult to manage if you don’t have access to print books, like the moment we’re in right now. So, that might be one strategy that is exciting, I think, for a digital environment, especially. I’ll point to creation as another example. So one of the benefits of being in a digital environment is you can really manipulate text easily. And that goes to everything from modifying fonts, especially if you’re just reading something off of like, an HTML regular old website. You could copy and paste that text into any word processor, you could change the font colors, shapes, sizes, to create different kinds of taxonomies. and customize that more, even in text like a PDF document that you can’t customize the design of text itself, you can still lift parts of that text, you can convert it into different file forms to modify the appearance as well and create something new for you a different kind of map, that’s not just limited to highlighting and doodles, but is actually dealing with and manipulating the words themselves. You can’t lift words out of a print book. So it’s kind of cool to think about what could you do if you could take these words. In the creation chapter I give an example of an activity where you could even create like a visualization of the text itself or create like an audio guide through your text, or maybe you lift those words and create word clouds or mind maps to see relationships between ideas that way. I’m sort of riffing abstractly here because I think you would do this differently depending on different concrete disciplines and contexts. But I think that the framework itself offers lots of different options that I point out the creation and creation categories in particular because in many ways it is the most unique for the digital context and might be the most surprising to people who might think of reading as just a process of underlining, and maybe leaving notes in the margin. There’s a lot more ways to think about and play with the ideas you get from text than just like “This idea is cool” or like “I have a question here.” You could expand a lot more and do a lot more and do a lot more to make text dynamic, I think.

John: One of the things I’ve been using in a couple of my classes for the last couple years is Hypothesis, where I have digital versions of some readings, generally working papers and studies, within the LMS. And then students go through and annotate it and tag it, which kind of forces them, I think, to analyze things a little bit more deeply. And they can comment on each other’s and so forth. And it’s been a really useful tool, which wouldn’t work very well with a physical text.

Jenae: Yes, I love the collaborative component of a tool like Hypothesis, too. It makes reading social, which is something we also lose out on sometimes, unless you go to a used bookstore and you find like the treasure of a book that has someone else’s old annotations. That’s like one of my favorite things of all time. I miss used bookstores in our COVID-19 moment, I have to say. But, Hypothesis, it’s like getting to uncover that treasure of seeing how someone else thought of something, to make it clear that no one text exists in isolation, that you always necessarily need to have text together. I always feel reluctant to cite myself, but I’ll do it since I’m talking about my book in this podcast, anyway. I actually wrote a book chapter all about social annotation in an edited collection about marginalia, that I think speaks to exactly what tools like Hypothesis do. There’s actually a ton of great tools on the market now that do similar things. Perusall is also really good for doing what Hypothesis does. It’s a bit more of a closed system than Hypothesis. It doesn’t exist on the open web, it kind of locks it into a class community. I think there are pros and cons to that. PowerNotes is also a really cool tool that’s new on the market, where students can also collaboratively comment on each other’s. It’s not annotations tied directly to the text, but you comment on annotations in an outline view. So, it kind of privileges how students are rearranging ideas and building them into a topically formed outline. In the book, I have an appendix of tools that will be current as of the writing. Unfortunately, in any book about technology, the instant you publish it, some of it’s obsolete. So I tried really hard in the book not to get too tied to particular tools, because I wanted the concepts to be sort of translatable, because the sort of secret to this book is it’s about digital reading. But really, it’s more about having an expansive attitude to what it means to be a reader in the first place. And it happens to be responding to digital media as the technology that is most prevalent and most centrally part of our lives right now. But I think it’s really valuable to talk about particular tools to make this more concrete. That’s why there are tools in that appendix. And John, I love that you’re using Hypothesis. Have you tried out that too, Rebecca, or other kinds of annotation tools like that?

Rebecca: I haven’t, but I’m looking for an option that will allow us to also comment on images and layout.

Jenae: Yes.

Rebecca: So there’s some limitations to Hypothesis in the ways that I would want my students to use it. So, I haven’t quite found the best solution yet for what I’m hoping I can get in place for the fall?

Jenae: Yeah, I really would like to see a tool that does better image annotation too.

John: That might be an interesting application of VoiceThread, for example, where students can put the image on the screen and either put text notes to it or annotate the image directly, or just talk over it.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s really like Hypothesis and VoiceThread need to like talk to each other and make a tool that combines some of the features of both, [LAUGHTER] because I like the fact that you can go to an actual web page and interact with something in that space where it was designed, because the design piece of it is actually important to me, and it’s dynamic nature, rather than just taking screenshots. So, that’s where I’m finding limitations in the tools currently.

Jenae: VoiceThread is a great recommendation though, John for engaging with multimedia. I love that students too can comment with either text or audio or video. And this conversation’s really speaking to the importance of space and making options and opportunities available. And to Rebecca’s point about limitations, it’s also important from the instructor side to know… Rebecca, it sounds like you have a really clear sense of purpose, what you want your students to do. It sounds like you have that too, John, and that’s where we really want people to begin… this is my technologist side speaking… we want people to begin with their own pedagogical purpose, with their goals, before they start selecting tools. That’s the danger in this conversation about digital reading is that we start first with foregrounding the tool and don’t think about the why. So I always like to begin with that purpose piece. It’s important to go down the features rabbit hole, because part of how we shape the environment. But, we also don’t want ta decision to adopt novel things for the sake of adopting novel things.

Rebecca: I think the foundation of compassion in the work that you’re doing is really important too, because it really is a very inclusive perspective in who’s involved in reading, why we’re reading, and it’s against the deficit model. I really appreciate the idea that there’s like a future of reading that’s exciting and new, and we can all be a part of it, that really supports this moment today. And I’d like to hear a little bit more about some of the compassion pieces of your work if you would be willing to share them.

Jenae: Sure. So, I’d say put up like the UDL piece that kind of gets strung throughout. This compassion piece to me gets threaded throughout the book in the same way that I think my work on UDL, or grappling with UDL, gets threaded across the book, because I think a student-centered philosophy is inherently compassionate. If you’re thinking about who’s going to be a part of your learning experience on the other end, and recognize that students are really bringing good intent into the classroom… when you start from that space and saying, students are the ones experiencing this learning. And for the most part, we have to trust our students to want to come and and have agency in their learning experience. I think something that’s important when you center compassion is recognizing, too, that not every student is like you. I know for me as a really enthusiastic reader, it’s easy occasionally to feel disheartened when students don’t like to read, or don’t want to read, or don’t do the reading. At the end of my book, in my conclusion, I talked about hearing lots of hallway conversations as an instructor about “Oh, I’m so upset. My students never do the reading. They don’t like to do the readings.” and that can feel sad because we want people to feel as excited about what we assigned to them as we feel about it. A third thread in the book then is sort of saying, “Hey, when you can open up your practices, you also help students come at reading where they are.” a student-centered design philosophy says, “You’re going to find your own enthusiastic pathway in here.” And we also need to recognize as part of the compassionate philosophy, also a forgiveness side of like, “If you don’t like this, this isn’t what you like, that’s cool, too.” I was never a strong STEM student. And so I remember in college, I never put very much time… I took like the dinosaurs class for my science class, which I thought be like the easy science option. It was not. I’ll just say that. That was like one of the hardest classes I took in college was the class on dinosaurs. We had to identify dinosaur bone structures. [LAUGHTER] That was really tough, but I can still tell you the different kinds of dinosaur hips, just saying, if you ever want to know, that the dinosaurs have two different kinds of hips. So, I learned things but that’s not to say that like I did the bare minimum in the dinosaurs class to learn the dinosaur bone structures. And I think that we have to accept that our students like that our classes might not be the class, this might not be their major, this might not be what they’re passionate about. So, the more options that we give, to helping them kind of get into this, the more we can again, recognize, see, appreciate, where they are at different moments. One last thing I’ll say about compassionate courses in our current moment, where we’re all sort of forced to be remote, this compassion is even more important. So, I see understanding the possibilities of digital reading as yet another way to include students who might not have preferred to read on screen, but who find they’re forced to because they don’t have access to printers to make paper copies of their readings, they don’t have access to the library, because every library everywhere is closed. And so, a part of this is saying, “Hey, you can still get what you need. Do what is motivating you right now, even if you don’t have access to these materials, rather than kind of falling back to this model of ‘being online is deficient.’ ‘Reading digitally is deficient,’” and saying “Look, it doesn’t have to be, and it might not still be your preference.” I mean, I think lots of students at this moment are going to appreciate face-to-face instruction even more. Many might find a lot to love about remote learning, it’s going to be a range. But again, the more options we can give, the more we show compassion to the different circumstances and needs that might be shaping our student experiences. So, kind of a long answer to that question, but there’s a lot to unpack there too. I think.

John: We always end with the question, what’s next?

Jenae: So a few things are next, given that the book will not be out until sometime in early 2021, I am designing right now as workshops and webinars around components of the book that I’m hoping will make certain pieces sort of portable and accessible in the meantime, since as at the time of recording, a lot of colleges are deciding about remote learning options, hybrid learning options, HyFlex learning options, so I’m hoping to tie in some conversation about digital reading with designing in different course models and how we could design learning activities around reading and writing that might be aligned with some online course design work. So I’m really, really excited about thinking through those possibilities. Another component, and I don’t know if this is a piece of writing yet, or something else. But a big piece of the book that I had to cut was about how digital reading operates in the service of developing digital literacy. I’m really interested in thinking about how, in our moment of being more connected and more remote, how colleges can better support students in acquiring digital literacies of various kinds, whether this is using different kinds of software applications for learning, or whether this is just becoming sort of more aware and critical of the infrastructures and tools that shape our reading experiences. I have a chapter in the book that’s all about kind of the dark underbelly of EdTech and the ways in which, even with adopting new tools, we need to be mindful of the lifespan of digital archives as in things that are on the web live forever. [LAUGHTER] And there’s still a lot more awareness raising we need to do and questioning we need to do of people who design EdTech solutions to make sure that we’re remaining cognizant of student safety and privacy. And as instructors, we need to know how to ask good questions about data collection, even around work like reading that might feel like it’s sort of innocuous and not terribly invasive. It still could be, depending on what students are reading or what they’re commenting on. So, I do think that there’s more work, I would like to do that interrogates how we help students become more aware and more critical of the infrastructures in which texts are available to them. And on the instructor end, I’d like to help think about how instructors themselves might develop the literacies to also be able to question and adopt ethical solutions for reading as well.

John: I’m really looking forward to reading your book, and I’ll put it on pre-order as soon as it’s listed somewhere. And we will share a link to your infographic and any other things you referred to in our show notes.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m looking forward to reading your work and also your new work that you’re thinking about and ruminating over and also the workshops and things that you might do related to your book prior to your book coming out. Thanks so much for joining us.

Jenae: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

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

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