Faculty often struggle to reduce equity gaps and to foster a sense of belonging and inclusion in their classes. In this episode, Courtney Plotts joins us to discuss course design strategies to increase transparency and to allow students to express and share their own cultural identities as part of an inclusive class community.
Show Notes
- Council for At-Risk Student Education and Professional Standards
- Neuroculture
- Plotts, Courtney (2023). Learning and Online Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion Officers: A Handbook for an Emerging Profession. DBC Publishing.
- Plotts, Courtney (2022). Cultural Intentions: An Evidenced-based Framework for Applications of Cultural Responsiveness in Education. DBC Publishing.
- Plotts, Courtney (2020). The Space Between: Identifying Cultural Canyons in Online Spaces and the use of LatinX Culture to Bridge the Divide. DBC Publishing.
- Plotts, Courtney (2020). The Space Between: Identifying Cultural Canyons in Online Spaces and the Use of Black Cultural Attributes to Bridge the Divide. Independently published.
Transcript
John: Faculty often struggle to reduce equity gaps and to foster a sense of belonging and inclusion in their classes. In this episode, we explore course design strategies to increase transparency and to allow students to express and share their own cultural identities as part of an inclusive class community.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guest today is Courtney Plotts. Courtney is a psychologist who is currently working as a consultant on culturally responsive teaching and community building. She has worked as a K12 public school teacher, as a faculty member in higher ed, and as the National Chair of the Council for At-Risk Student Education and Professional Standards. Courtney is the founder of Neuroculture, and is the author of 4 books that address strategies to bridge cultural divides. She also regularly serves as a keynote speaker on issues related to culturally responsive teaching. Welcome Courtney.
Courtney: Hi. Thanks for having me, so happy to be here.
John: Thanks for joining us. Our teas today are:… Courtney, are you drinking tea?
Courtney: I am. Here’s my mug. I know people won’t be able to see it, but it just says a bunch of thank yous. And I am a green tea drinker. It’s almost done now, but I’m a green tea drinker. How about you all?
Rebecca: Today I have London Strand, John.
John: Another newish one for you.
Rebecca: Yeah, I got that one when I was traveling last year.
John: And I have a green tea. I have ginger peach green tea today.
Courtney: Yeah, now, do you all put stuff in your tea? Are you like sugar, honey? Are you just a naturalist or what type of tea drinker?
Rebecca: Absolutely nothing. You can’t put anything in it.
Courtney: Yes, me too. Me too. Okay.
John: Generally, I am too, although sometimes I put honey in it, but not recently.
Courtney: Awesome.
Rebecca: I don’t think we’ve ever had that conversation before.
Courtney: It’s a very important conversation. That’s a very important conversation to have, because always hear people say, “How do you drink it without anything in it?” I’m like, “just like this.”
John: And our British colleagues generally put cream in their tea. And we have discussed it actually before, when we had some people from the Saratoga area…
Rebecca: Oh, that’s right.
John: …who were talking about Saratoga Tea and Honey, which we do have several varieties of honey from there that we keep in the conference room that we use.
Rebecca: Alright, so we invited you here today to discuss cultural responsive teaching in the current political and social environment. To set the stage for this discussion, can you define culturally responsive teaching?
Courtney: Sure. I think what most people know it as a pretty general premise of these kind of buzz words of openness and intentionality and thoughtfulness and those type of words. But for me, I’m a school psychologist by trade, so for me, how I look at culturally responsive teaching is measuring acculturative stress levels among a student population and then tailoring the teaching to those methods, and that’s how I look at a little bit more scientific. I think that’s one of the challenges historically, is that when you say culturally responsive teaching, it’s so broad sometimes that it’s hard to kind of wrap your mind around what that means for you in your classroom.
John: In higher ed, our student bodies in the last decade or two have become substantially more diverse, but faculty diversity hasn’t quite kept up with this, and one of the reasons for this is that college completion rates are substantially lower for first-gen students and students from historically minoritized populations, limiting the diversity of student bodies in graduate programs. What role can culturally responsive teaching play in reducing the equity gaps that we observe in higher education given this difference in the diversity of faculty and the diversity of student bodies.
Courtney: Yeah, I appreciate that question. I think that, historically, there’s always been this argument about culturally responsive teaching, where it’s content versus delivery. So people will say something like, “well, we need to have more diverse authors, and we need to have more diverse… just kind of more representation.” Where I look at it is the delivery. Is your delivery diverse enough to meet the needs of the people in front of you? And we know historically, our learning structure is very Eurocentric. It’s transactional. It’s completion based. It’s not really relation based the scaffolding is an end to a mean, not a means to an end. So to kind of shift it, it’s really looking at is the teaching that you’re doing reflective of the people in front of you? And that’s the question. And it comes down to the relationship of cognition and culture. And it’s something that’s not looked at a lot very often. It’s always funny when people push back on that, because they’ll say, one has nothing to do with the other. And I’ll say something like, “Well, then why don’t you just start speaking another language right now?” Because if you haven’t been exposed to that, and that’s not part of your culture, then you’re not going to speak another language, and you’d have to teach yourself how to do that. So it impacts the learning environment. I think that’s a shift in discussion that we need to start having, because there are some bodies of knowledge that require certain things. So if you’re a nursing student, you’re going to have to pass that state exam. Those things cannot necessarily be changed. There’s going to be a certain amount of things that have to happen in order for you to get a nursing license. But how that information is delivered to be able to reach that goal is a different conversation. I think just equipping faculty with that information and then the actual teaching skills. What teaching skill is best for what population? When I say population, I don’t mean necessarily racial populations. It could be military to civilian. It could be rural to urban. Maybe you’ve only taught in rural New York and I drop you in Las Vegas. That’s a different population, because the culture of that area is different. So just kind of thinking outside the box that way.
Rebecca: Much of your work focuses on building community and relationships, as you’re just talking about in classrooms. What are some strategies that faculty can use to create stronger and more inclusive communities in higher education?
Courtney: Yeah, I’m about prevention methods. No one needs to be putting out more fires, so any fires that we can prevent are helpful. I think one of the biggest things is thinking about the culture that you make around broader statements. So a lot of times, faculty try to be helpful in the culture of their classroom, and they’ll say something like, “Here’s a syllabus, but I’m willing to be flexible.” But what flexible means to me as an instructor could mean something very different to John and very different to you. So having that discussion up front, “Hey, I’m going to be flexible, but take two, three minutes, talk about that as a group. How do you view flexibility from me?” Because you only have one group that is a fairly general consensus where it’s like, “Hey, a couple days after the due date, I’m okay with that,” but we all know, when we’ve been teaching for a long time, as we all have, that we can say that, but then we have the student who’s eight weeks in and thinks flexibility is starting over from week one in week 8, when it’s a 16-week course. So having those conversations, I think, and really building out the understanding of the academic community that you’re trying to build is critical. Number two is really thinking about the kind of altruistic behaviors that you want to manifest in your classroom. So whether that’s someone being supportive of another student, whether that’s someone showing up in a caretaking role. When you look at how you build community, and you read a lot about it, it’s very again, transactional, where there are all these behaviors that are happening behind the scenes, and we need to bring those behaviors to the forefront. So there are people caring for one another, there are people supporting one another, there are people advocating for one another. All of us have had the one student, and it usually happens once a semester. They’re the student who will ask all the questions on behalf of the class. So they’re more of like an inquirer. They’re seeking this information, and they’re not afraid to ask the questions, right? And they’re doing that on behalf of 26, sometimes 100 and something, other people, because there’s some Facebook group we know nothing about. So really bringing those pieces to the forefront and helping that behavior not necessarily have to be a separate space, and it’s fine that it is, if that’s working for everybody, but as an instructor, we would like to see that stuff in our own spaces. We should be able to see, “Wow, they’re helping, and they’re advocating, and they’re doing these things.” Additionally, I think that looking at a grading component or non-grading component, depending on how you view that, is really kind of assessing your community. Are your students showing things like civility? Are they supporting other minimized voices, no matter what that voice is, whether it’s someone talking about mental health and it’s a business class, or someone’s talking about autism and it’s a language arts class or any of those things, is really looking at those pieces, because there’s certain things that we do want to see from our students, and particularly in face to face, that kind of happens naturally, because people make their groups and they kind of make their friends or their acquaintances or their besties or whatever they do, and in online is a lot more difficult that way. So it’s like, what are we doing to help support those other relationships? And kind of have that same thing happen, just in an online space, in any medium, whether it’s video chat, however they’re communicating.
John: Going back a little bit to the earlier discussion of the cultural background of faculty and the students in our class. Faculty often ignore that, and we’re bringing, though, our own cultural background into the classrooms. And when instructors design activities, they often do it based on their own experiences, without taking into account the students in the physical or virtual room. What is lost when faculty don’t take students’ cultural backgrounds into account in designing learning experiences?
Courtney: Yeah, I think there’s a whole other cognitive piece that we’re missing in the learning. I think that’s a big piece of it. I think that when people naturally show resistance, usually other people show resistance too. So people can sense again, it’s not necessarily about cultural specific, it could be anything, like, “Hey, can I use your stapler?” But you’re kind of looking at me like you don’t want me to use your stapler, right? [LAUGHTER] So I can tell that like that’s not necessarily the goings on here. So the more that we can help faculty identify these things, I think the learning becomes better. And I’m saying this because I’ve heard this from faculty. If I do keynotes or people talk to me about their concern about culturally responsive teaching, they’ll say something like, “Well, I don’t want to get it wrong,” or “I don’t want people to think that I am stereotyping them.” And that’s the challenge, because of the way we did it. The way we did it, puts a lot of onus on people to get it right, get it right every time, and when you make a mistake, it’s a high penalty, and that’s because we’ve been looking at kind of those outside factors, instead of the intellectual piece of it, which is if we were to measure and get some numbers across the board at an institution and get a score about the levels of acculturated stress, then we can start determining the best teaching practices for that body of students, and we can do a college as a whole, or we can scale it to an individual. But overall, I think what’s lost is that there’s a whole other just swath of knowledge and connection with the content that’s lost. And I heard and I can’t remember… I wish I could remember who said it, and lots of people have said it… but I can’t remember the original person who said it, but someone was talking about the slave trade, and they said enslaved people came empty-handed, not empty headed. And I think that just the cultural piece alone of that, it’s like, “Well, just because I’m here and I’m a freshman, doesn’t mean I don’t know things.” And just as humans, it’s not even the teacher student, it’s we’re all individuals. And I’ve had experiences that can make your life richer. You’ve had experiences that can make my life richer. You’ve had experiences I will never understand, and I’ve had experiences that you can never understand. But we can both try. We can both try. And I think that that’s what gets lost in, that it’s like, if I can’t, not me personally, but anyone, can’t kind of get a handle on the olive branch, then how do we move forward? How do we build relationships? How do I feel that I can get to where you are if I don’t even feel like you care that I’m here, as just basic hospitality. [LAUGHTER] So I think those are some of the interesting components of that.
Rebecca: One of the things that you pointed to, or it seems like you’re pointing to, is this idea of transparency, or making things really explicit to students, especially around the syllabus, or some culture around how the classroom might work. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Courtney: Yeah, I think since before COVID and now, uncertainty has just kind of been at a steady, all-time high, and everyone is exhausted from guessing, because what COVID did and what the current political climate has done for the last, I would say, 10 years, but definitely the last five, definitely now, is everyone’s guessing, and guessing is exhausting. I compare it to like living with an alcoholic. It’s like, today you’re gonna come home and this person is the best parent in the world, the next day you’re angry because there’s peanut butter on the counter, the next day you’re raging because there’s socks on the floor, the next day you act like nothing happened. That cognitively is exhausting. So we keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result from students, and I think that’s part of the culture, is the culture of transparency. And I say this with all due respect, it’s just a cultural phenomenon, and I don’t know why this resonates with me so much. It’s just like me, personally, I don’t know that’ll resonate with all the listeners, but I’m 46 and so the people that I am teaching have grown up with a culture where people celebrate on television that they’re not your father. You see what I’m saying, like in TV shows, there are people that literally celebrate not being related to you, where in education, we do the total opposite. We’re trying to build relationships, we’re trying to nurture, we’re trying to develop. And so anything that is not clear, that’s so clear, where, literally, I’ve had students tell me, like, ”Oh, I still don’t know who my dad is,” or “I don’t know who my mom is,” or “I’m raised by what they would call, like a pseudo family,” or something, like nothing is clear, the things that most people are clear on, like, our students have had these really kind of obtuse experiences. And so sometimes you just have to spell this stuff out. And I think that’s just a basic relationship builder is transparency, and that’s just a cultural shift. And I just couldn’t imagine, in my own life, watching television and seeing a parent of mine on television and someone celebrating that they don’t have to deal with me. And it’s like, that’s a cultural thing. And I’m not saying it’s happened to every single student. I’m saying that’s what’s in the ethos of television. It’s a phenomenon. And so when you’re talking about transparency, it’s not that that person’s being transparent, that they’re happy that that person’s being transparent. My point is that it’s just there’s so much fake. The things that you think should be foundational just aren’t. And so again, just going back to that piece is like when we were in school, you just show up, shut up, do the work, and leave. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to work with a professor. It’s not like that anymore. So we have to work harder as instructors to build relationships, and we have to start with foundational things that build relationships, and transparency is one of those. And that’s just how I look at it.
John: So, what are some effective ways of building those relationships with students, in addition to transparency?
Courtney: Yeah, I think just like anything else, like listening to people and really just doing the things that make things clear, as clear as we can make them, I think it comes with, on the academic side, just making sure that what we say we stick to. And again, that’s part of that flexibility piece. These are things that I might change throughout the course. These are things that could change. List them out. I think that really taking the time, and this isn’t my own original idea, lots of people say this, really taking the time to get to know your students. And we have to be honest about the name thing, too. It’s a lot, especially as we get older, to memorize people’s names. It takes a lot of work. And it’s like, some people are going to be able to do that, and some people aren’t. Some of our faculty start to get dementia in their 50s. So it’s like, we have to be honest about like, it’s like, this pressure, like, “Okay, you have 250 students, and you have to know all their names. I’m going to try my best.” Again, for some people that have their mnemonic devices, they know the students. They know the names but it’s like, I trust people, and people know when you’re trying, and I’m gonna try and keep trying, and I’m gonna keep trying to get it right, but it’s like, we set up this thing where it’s like, everybody has to get everything right all the time. That’s just not humanly possible, but the effort 100% of the time is. And so I think that that’s, again, part of that transparency piece is just really saying to yourself, like, “Am I giving my best today?” And being honest with your students when you said, “You know what? I don’t know that I have it to give today. So we might have to do a flipped classroom.” Right? Or we might have to change something in this dynamic, because that’s the relationship piece. That’s the relationship piece. So maybe you were planning to lecture today, but now they’re going to work in groups, or maybe you’re planning to work on groups, but you know what? There’s really some information that you learned at a conference, and you really want to share it with your students. And I really just think it’s the consistency piece. And I think that helps faculty too, because so many faculty that I’ve talked to over the years, it’s like they give and give and give and give and give and they’re burned out too. There’s so many people writing about faculty burnout. Well, part of that is because we never teach faculty in orientation healthy boundaries. Do you even know your own boundaries with students? Because there are some things that I can and will do that would never work for either of you, and vice versa. But it’s like, “Oh, no, I have to be like John,” or have to… you know? It’s just like, “No.” It’s like, “Hey, John, that’s great. I’m gonna try that. That works for me,” or, “Hey, you know what? That wouldn’t work for me,” like we have different personalities. So it’s like really understanding our boundaries as faculty helps students, because we can be our authentic selves when we do that. And I think that that’s just something that’s overlooked, especially for new faculty that are coming on board, because I think they have a tendency to serve and serve and serve and serve and serve, and they’re on all the things that now you’re talking to students at 12:30 at night, and when you have so many students, you have a huge class size, that’s impossible, and we’re setting ourselves up for failure. So we need healthy faculty so we can build healthier students.
Rebecca: Sometimes in in-person classes, it feels easier maybe to build relationships, because you might have that casual time before or after class to get to know students, or you’re walking around class, and can kind of get to know students during that time. And we all know from maybe COVID and being online that you have to be much more intentional in online environments to build relationships, because those happenstance opportunities [LAUGHTER] don’t happen. Can you talk about some of the ways we can be intentional about the clarity piece and about building those relationships in these online, specifically asynchronous, environments?
Courtney: Sure, sure. So I think asynchronous, I think everyone has kind of a different understanding of what asynchronous means, because there’s lots of asynchronous courses where people still offer a video time, like time to video chat or send a video message. So we say, “Oh, it’s totally async,” but you usually end up meeting with a student in video. It usually ends up, at some point, for some reason, there’s usually some meeting. And so I think the question is, “What can you do beforehand?” And this is, again, just my opinion. I think we’re doing enough profiling of the students who are choosing async on the personality side to know how to develop some of those things, right? I think that people are choosing async, and some of them are choosing it because they’re like, “Now I’m going to use ChatGPT, I’m going to cut and paste. We’re going to be done here. I don’t really need the relationship. I’m just going to move on point A to point B. Boom, boom, boom.” And then I think that there’s some students who really thrive in that environment, but it’s more of a one-on-one or small group setting. And then I think there are people who are async, who just need what they need, and can fully move in those spaces and feel very connected. And I think we need more research on the personality pieces that go behind that to know how to develop that. I think right now we’re kind of at a disadvantage, because the scales are starting to tip where we’re just now starting to get faculty that have almost, and I say almost, gone through their whole education in a virtual space. We’re just starting to get some of those virtual high schoolers that are now faculty members. So we don’t know enough about what’s on that profiling side for that. But I would say it’s just the offer in the async of something if it’s needed. I think that’s the thing. I think, really showing pieces of community, really showing, and when I say expectations, having any type of surveys that you can get, any type of data from your students, so you can tweak as you go along. I found when I teach asynchronous courses, that’s the most helpful for me is I’ll send out some surveys just to kind of see what people want. And I built this class, but these people might need something different. So I changed this assignment, and that assignment, I changed that up, and I say, “Hey, I changed it based on your feedback. Here we go.” Because there’s no way to know. There’s no way to know. And it’s getting to the point, as you all know, and as the listeners know that, especially in higher ed, education is getting more tailored, and that’s just going to continue as AI continues to evolve, as our students needs continue to become more clear and specific, and they’re expecting a lot. They’re expecting a lot. So it just comes down to how we see ourselves and how we see all of that developing.
John: There’s a lot of research that inclusive teaching techniques, active learning, and many other things, benefit all students, but especially benefit students who have been historically marginalized. Yet we’re now in a political environment which is not very favorable to education in general, but is especially attacking DEI\initiatives. What are some strategies that faculty and institutions can use in this environment to provide educational experiences that allow all students to be successful?
Courtney: Yeah, I love that, John, that’s a great question. So I think the challenge right now, and I’m sure it’s happening at your college, everywhere I know it’s happening at the college that I’m at right now, is that everybody’s trying to figure out what to do next, and a lot of it is just people are reviewing policy. People are reviewing language of courses and just thinking through like, “Okay, how does this tie to funding?” And this, that, and the other. So that’s a big piece of it, but what I’ve always advocated for, for students, before the new political climate, just in general, is looking at what barriers can we take from faculty to make the job easier and the learning more meaningful for students, because if it’s not those two things, it’s really not beneficial. And so, for instance, one of the biggest pushbacks that I hear about culturally responsive teaching is, and it happens in almost every training, we’re going along, we’re doing the things, we’re learning, we’re growing, and then someone raises their hand say, “Hey, this is great, but I have 250 students, especially if you’re talking about race and ethnicity. How would I know what ethnicity they are? How would I know?” And that’s because we set it up all wrong. So, for instance, think of a case study. Most people who are in higher ed know what a case study is. So there’s a case study. So we write something and we say something like, Zach is a 32-year-old living in Michigan. He’s married to his husband. They do this, they go here, and this is the outcome. What’s happening. And the truth is that demographic information, unless you’re specifically teaching for that person for a reason, means nothing. So take it out and let your students fill it in, because that is the diversity. They will choose who goes in the case study. So anything that’s demographic, you just leave blank and you hand it to them and you say, “Okay, I’m going to put you in groups. We’re going to do some case studies. This is the information you need to fill in: name, ethnicity, age, marital status, orientation, however detailed or not detailed you want to get.” And then you talk about the case study, because that’s what’s going to pivot the content. Because if the end result is about something like law, because you’re trying to teach students a specific statute or something, how it’s going to be interpreted through the lens of that demographic information is going to look different in each group. So not only is it going to look different, but that other piece is going to look different as well, maybe how the statute is applied, or new questions are going to be raised. And you know what? For the students who don’t need that piece of diversity and say, “That’s not for me. I’m fine. Whatever. I don’t care who it is.” That’s fine. But for the students who need it, not only do they have control of it, it’s not something we’re doing, they have control of it, and they’re going to share out. And nobody knows. So it helps with the attention, because nobody knows who it is. But if we all say it’s Jack, he’s 33, he lives wherever, he’s married to his husband, like, by the time we’re the second group in, what else do we have to talk about? It’s Jack. It’s the same guy. It was the same guy in second grade. It’s the same guy in sixth grade, it’s the same guy in 10th grade, it’s the same guy in 12th grade, same guy in undergrad, same guy in grad. So it’s like, that’s how we do it, instead of choosing one case study, and especially if we’re not from that ethnic group. I happen to be biracial. My dad’s black, my mom’s white. But if I was choosing something like, “Oh, I’m going to do a case study, and the person’s going to be Filipino, and this is going to be their experience. I don’t know that that’s their experience. I don’t know that.” But if my student fills that in, they’re the ones, and this goes back to that other question you were asking John about like, what’s missing when we don’t kind of think these things through. It’s what is that other piece? The student is going to give us that information. I’m going to learn something as an instructor. My students are going to learn something. They might even have questions. It’s a whole different thing. So really thinking about things like that, I think it’s just an easy and powerful way to kind of really change a classroom dynamic when you’re talking about type of work.
Rebecca: A lot of times we use the word easy to imply something that maybe isn’t exactly as easy as we say it is. But in this case, it’s less work for the instructor, right? [LAUGHTER] And you’re giving agency to the students.
Courtney: Absolutely, and 250 of them at once, if that’s the assignment and it goes out that week, there’s 250 students. And what I do, just to support the listener, what I do is I actually give a list, because sometimes when our students… I shouldn’t say students… people, in general, when you’re exhausted, it’s hard to be creative. [LAUGHTER] I mean, it’s like “Oooh, if I haven’t slept in a couple days, my depression is kicking up, like I feel like being so creative. it really doesn’t work like that. So, what I do is I give them a list of possibilities, and they can use that list or not. So I give different names, different ethnicities, different ages, kids’ names, and just to try to help the conversation. And sometimes they pick those, and sometimes they don’t. They’re like,” Oh no. So and so is from Nigeria. And we picked this name because we didn’t know, and this is now the capital, we didn’t know that either, and we didn’t know that this was happening. And there they do it like this, but that would never fly in America.” Or “they do it in America like this, but it would never fly in Nigeria.” It’s like, you’re not going to get that with what we’re doing. So yeah, anything that’s easier, that’s my thing. This path of least resistance, and the faculty aren’t wrong, because it’s like, how would you, even with a 16-week time frame, how would you possibly begin to be able to address each student’s need in that way? It’s impossible. Even with a TA, even with a million dollars, you can’t do it. There’s no time. And it’s like, we have to look at ways where, again, we’re embedding it in the actual learning process, instead of something that’s topical.
Rebecca: One of the things that you mentioned earlier was the use of AI, a little bit from both sides. You gave the example of students maybe using AI in online environments to get away with something, but you also pointed to maybe some potential of AI. Can you talk a bit about whether or not AI has a role in making a more culturally inclusive environment in our classrooms. Are those tools that we can use as faculty to help with that end?
Courtney: Yeah, I think it depends on who’s using it and how it’s being used. I think accessibility wise, if we can help our students all have access to it, that’s good, but I think what faculty aren’t prepared for is really the anticipated rejection of AI. So for instance, I’m just using my own personal example. I’ve gone to job interviews where I’ve been the only person sitting in the room, and I’m waiting to go somewhere, and someone will come out, and they’re calling my name and they’re looking right past me, but I’m the only person that’s there. I anticipate that, because a lot of people, when they hear me, they don’t necessarily think that I sound the way I should look, or for whatever reason. The mistakes that AI can make can have an impact and a fallout. So the question is, let’s say you’re using AI in the classroom, and you’re asking your students to develop an image, and I don’t care what, you pick any variable. Maybe your student is dyslexic, maybe it’s a visual component. Maybe it’s just making some assumptions that are stereotypical of AI. Students aren’t anticipating rejection in that arena because they created spaces where they’re accepted. So when you’re in a classroom, you’re like, “Hey, do this,” and there’s 20 something people, and everyone else likes their image, but my image is very derogatory towards me, what’s the policy about how are we rectifying? Are we letting students know, “Listen, we’re fully aware that we’re asking you to use this, but we have an alternative assignment” because we can’t guarantee that you’re going to have the same experience as the person to your left.” No matter what it is, like, I’m left-handed, so everyone in the pictures is right-handed. It could be anything, but it’s like, we don’t think of that fallout, because using Word is not going to do that, but you asking someone to take their own image and making an avatar of themselves could absolutely do that. And again, when you’re talking about things like racism, prejudice, and stereotyping, some of that stuff is expected in certain places, like people are prepared for it. It doesn’t make it right. It just means it’s true. But with AI, the question I have for faculty is, are you prepared for that? Do you have the relationship enough where that student doesn’t take that personally, that it’s coming from you? You are the one who asked them to use this. There was no caveat about this was going to happen. And what do we do when the student has done that image five or six times, now they’re on the 10th or 11th time, and it’s getting worse every time, it’s not getting better. So I think it’s that anticipated rejection we really have to think through as far as policy, as far as what we’re actually asking students to do. Student choice with AI, I think, is huge. I think that we have to know the technology enough to offer choices that provide safety in what we’re asking them to do. I think that’s critical.
John: Are there some ways that instructors can use AI to help create a more culturally inclusive environment in their classes?
Courtney: Yeah, I think so. Definitely with students with learning disabilities or learning differences or exceptionalities, I know that a lot of students have diagnosed or undiagnosed processing disorders, so really trying to pull content together. They know what they want to say, but they have trouble pulling it together. And again, I think that all comes with clarity. I’m teaching right now. I teach full time. And one of the things that I talked with about my students is really talking about, really what the intellectual capital is. Because 15 years ago, if you used the tech, that’s what made you different. But because the tech is getting so good, it’s really going to come back to, and I know people don’t like when I say this, it’s really going to come back to the reading, the skimming and actually knowing the content. And I just had that discussion with my students last week. I said, look, “It’s not the AI use that bothers me, it’s, do you even know if it’s right or wrong when you’re looking at it?” And in some cases, not all, for sure, but if you haven’t read the text, if you haven’t read the research, there’s no way you’re going to know that. There’s absolutely no way you’re going to be able to recognize, “Oh, that’s an error, that is not correct,” because you’re trusting the tech. And once you trust the tech, it controls you. So it’s like, my thing is, well, yeah, some of that might be right, but what are the processes worth teaching students to check those pieces? And that’s my concern, is that there’s already a gap in reading, and so if that gap stays, who controls that intellectual capital? How are we teaching students to value intellectual capital that’s not generated, that’s it’s actually what you know, what you can produce. And even if you’re using generative AI, do you have enough intellectual capital to sit through to get it right? And that’s where I’m trying to help my students is like, you don’t need to love reading and read everything, but you got to have a plan for fact checking. And I think that’s just fundamental. The technology is not going away, and we also need to be comfortable with it enough where we’re going to stop creating assignments that can just use AI to complete the assignment. So for instance, a lot of people, and again, I’m not against it… I teach school psych, We have to write reports all the time… you can write a report with generative AI, and it could be a book report, a psych report, any type of report. But again, do you know? What is your plan? And we created writing assignments, the students turn it in, now, what? Okay, did they learn anything? So we have to flip that where we’re using the AI so much that the next task that we give them, they can’t use it, because now it’s time to actually use your brain, it’s time to think. So, and getting to the point where we’re getting away from brainstorming, and we’re going to have to go to fact storming, because the AI can help brainstorm and brainstorm all day. But how do we get to the fact storming where we’re checking what we’re actually looking at?
Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?
Courtney: Yeah, I think it comes down to just thinking through AI. I think it comes through thinking through policy. I think it comes through thinking about the protection of students with how are we handling anticipated rejection (or unanticipated) and I think it really calls us as higher ed to really think about how we’re designing courses and assignments that use the student as the proxy for learning, not the tech, like the tech should not be the student’s proxy for learning. It should be the student is learning in conjunction with the use of technology, no matter what it is, whether it’s AI or anything. And I think it’s going to take a lot of work. It’s going to take a lot of thoughtfulness, a lot of discussions for the faculty listening. Everybody’s got a lot on the plate. Everybody’s burnt out. This isn’t a one-person show. This isn’t one person overhauling their whole class to do all the things. It takes time. And no matter where you are on the continuum of AI, if it’s not AI, it’s going to be something else, like, wherever you are is okay. I think sometimes there’s pressure to feel like, “Oh, well, everyone’s doing this, so I have to, like, run over here.” But if it’s not going to work for you, it’s not going to work. So until you’re ready for that, it’s not going to work. So be okay where you are, manage what you can, make some new friends, read some new articles, do something, and you’ll get there. But it doesn’t have to be today. And I think just because tech moves fast, there’s kind of an expectation that people move fast, and people usually don’t move fast, definitely not as fast as tech. And you know that if you work in higher ed, so there you go.
John: Well, thank you for joining us.
Courtney: I appreciate you. Thanks again for having me.
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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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