Category: race

318. Reducing Equity Gaps

Posted in active learning, diversity, equity, evidence-based practices, first-generation, grading, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, race, STEM, teaching
December 6, 2023

Gender and racial equity gaps exist in economics and other STEM fields. In this episode, Tisha Emerson joins us to discuss research on strategies to reduce these inequities. Tisha is the chair of the economics department and the James E. and Constance Paul Distinguished Professor at East Carolina University and is the incoming Chair of the American Economic Association’s Committee on Economic Education.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Gender and racial equity gaps exist in economics and other STEM fields. In this episode, we discuss research on strategies to reduce these inequities.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Tisha Emerson. Tisha is the chair of the economics department and the James E. and Constance Paul Distinguished Professor at East Carolina University and is the incoming Chair of the American Economic Association’s Committee on Economic Education. Welcome, Tisha.

Tisha: Thanks for having me. I’m so glad to be here.

John: I’m very happy to be talking to you. And our teas today are:… Tisha, are you drinking any tea?

Tisha: Yes, my favorite tea, I found a couple years ago, it’s a Golden Moon brand of Tippy Earl Grey.

Rebecca: That sounds nice.

Tisha: It’s delicious.

Rebecca:I have Harvest Memories today.

John: I don’t remember that one.

Rebecca: Well, it is from my little favorite tea shop in Canandaigua, New York, and it’s autumn flavors.

John: Autumn flavor?

Rebecca: Autumn flavors.

John: Do they have leaves dumped in there?

Rebecca: I mean, it almost looks like that. [LAUGHTER]

John: Ok. [LAUGHTER] Well, that’s one way of getting rid of all the leaves that have been falling. And I have English breakfast tea today. So we’ve invited you here today to talk about some of the research you’ve done, and also your new role and your past role with the AEA’s Committee on Economic Education. One of the things that we’ve observed is that there’s some significant equity gaps in economics and in STEM disciplines in general in terms of race and gender. And in one of the studies that you’ve done with this, in a 2023 paper in the Southern Economic Journal, you and KimMarie McGoldrick examined retake behavior for students who are not successful in their initial attempt at completing an introductory microeconomics class. Could you give us just a general overview of this study?

Tisha: First, let me say that this started a long time ago. And we got access to this great data, the MIDFIELD dataset, that was actually originally funded by the NSF to study the gap in engineering education, but it’s student transcript data. So we said, well, you could use that for economics too. And we have. And so this particular study looked at almost 180,000 students who take Principles of Microeconomics for the first time. And what we ultimately wanted to do is to think about the likelihood of success, and actually more so, failure, because a lot of papers already look at success and they stop there, because you have too small of a sample, fortunately, of the failures to continue on to look at them. But when you start with 180,000, you have enough to continue. So we find, as many others do, that, of course, aptitude matters, but that, unfortunately, females tend to be much more likely to be unsuccessful in their Principles of Microeconomics class, as are underrepresented minorities, or URM. And then we follow those students and we say, okay, so if you were, in fact, unsuccessful, and we define that as a grade of a D or an F, so grades that wouldn’t really let you continue in your study of economics, or you withdraw. And we say, if you’re in that category, what do students tend to do?… or first of all, for those students that are unsuccessful, what helps predict that? So given that you are in the unsuccessful category, what is more likely to cause that? And we saw that students who were carrying more concurrent credit hours were more likely to withdraw. Which makes sense, because if you have constraints that lead you to want to be full time, if you start with 12 hours, and the course is not going well… any of them… and you were to drop, then you would not be full time anymore. And so it gives them sort of this flexibility, they have more concurrent credit hours. But we found that students who got D or Fs, given that they were unsuccessful, they tended to have taken more related courses. So things like accounting (financial accounting in particular), calculus, and macro principles. And so we didn’t actually see a lot of gender or racial differences there. But then those students who were unsuccessful (D, F, or W), on retake decisions, we found that women were much less likely to retake if they were unsuccessful. But we did find that women who were of higher aptitude, who were unsuccessful initially, they were more likely to retake. So that was a positive. And we did find that underrepresented minorities were more likely to retake the course, but then more likely to be unsuccessful again, on their second attempt. So there’s some good news, but also, a lot of not so good news.

John: So you were able to follow students over time, how long a time period was there in the data set that you were analyzing?

Tisha: We had over 20 year period of data, but that doesn’t mean we followed any particular student for that length of time. Once we saw that they were unsuccessful, we made sure that they had at least one more semester at the institution so they did in fact have a chance to choose to retake the course or not and then we gave them three years post their initial unsuccessful attempt. And if they didn’t retake it in that period, then we said they chose not to retake.

Rebecca: In a 2019 study in the Journal of Economic Education, you and KimMarie McGoldrick use the same dataset to examine the decision to switch into an out of the economic major. In this study, you find that very few students selected economics as a major when entering college and that 83% of economics majors actually selected the major after taking their first economics course. What did you find in terms of the gender and racial composition of those that selected the economic major?

Tisha: So what we found was that, for the few students who started out as economics majors, so going into their principles class they already had said they were majoring in economics, we found that females were as likely to persist or not. That’s good. And we found something similar for underrepresented minorities, that is the females and URM students who went into the principles class planning to major in economics, they were as likely to persist as not.

John: What happened to those students who were not majoring in economics.

Tisha: Well, unfortunately, females were not as likely to persist and decide to major in economics. There was a larger proportion of females who opted to remain in their original major. So, they come into the principles class, they have some major other than economics, they were much more likely to stay in their other major and not switch to economics. Men were considerably more likely to switch, on average, than females were. But on a more positive note, we did find that students from traditionally underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities and Asian students were more likely to switch to economics.

John: And one thing we should note, and you mentioned this in your study, is that because this datset was focused on engineering, the schools in this sample have relatively large engineering programs and some students switched to economics because economics was perceived as being easier than their original major. So some of this may not apply as broadly to liberal arts institutions that do not have engineering programs.

Tisha: That’s possibly true. And in fact, business majors were even more likely to switch to econ. So it was about 10% of those switching in were switching from engineering and 27% were switching from business. So at the liberal arts schools, to the extent that they don’t have business or engineering, there wouldn’t be that source of majors coming in.

Rebecca: Both of these studies are really interesting. But, how do we think about some strategies to create a more inclusive environment in economics and STEM classes? So what did these studies tell us? What should we be doing?

Tisha: Well, I don’t know that they tell us what we should be doing. They tell us that what we’re doing is not really working.

Rebecca: Fair.

Tisha: …which is unfortunate, because that’s what we’ve been doing for a really long time and we’ve been really unsuccessful at attracting women and underrepresented minorities. So there’s a new sort of strain in the literature that’s really trying to address some of this. And there’s a study, for example, by Porter and Serra, and that was published in 2020. They did a randomized control trial at Southern Methodist University, where they, just by happenstance, picked a couple of very charismatic female alums and they randomly selected which principles classes they would speak to. And this was just like a 15- or 20-minute exposure, where they talked about majoring in economics, and how that helped them in their career. And they found that this significantly increased the number of women from those courses who decided to major in economics and additionally, not necessarily just major, but take more economics courses. And I thought it was really fascinating that there was no effect on men in those treated classes, it was just the women. So that suggests possibly that there’s some room for role models. Other work that looks at role models from other directions, like some of my own work with KimMarie and John Siegfried, didn’t find any evidence that supports the idea of role models. So I think, still mixed, and the exact sort of interaction that students may or may not have with these people I think is going to be important.

John: You’ve done a number of studies on these types of issues, and one of them was looking at the effect of classroom experiments. Could you talk a little bit about what types of classroom experiments have you looked at and what’s the impact of those on students?

Tisha: Sure, I talk about that a lot, because I really love the classroom experiments. I think that they’re a great pedagogical technique. And so since your audience is more general, maybe I’ll explain just what we mean by classroom experiments. And that’s basically the idea that we’re going, in some cases, simulate markets or other decision environments for the students that will mirror the types of environments that we’re talking about in class. So for example, if we’re talking about a market, then we will have students participate in an experiment where some are buyers and some are sellers and they negotiate and trade. In my classes, we always do the experiment first, I don’t talk about any of the concepts. And then we collect the data as we’re going through the experiment on the decisions that they’re making: prices, quantities that are traded, then I’m able to talk to the students about “Well, look, this is what actually happened, this is your actual data that you generated, and now let’s talk about the theory.” And this is what the theory would predict the outcome to be. And they can see how well they match up. And they are able to discuss in class, this is why I chose to behave in this way. And they see how it fits in to the economic theory. And I did a study back in 2001, which was published in ‘04 in the Southern Economic Journal, where we were looking just at the effect of experiments and we looked to see if there was a differential gender effect. And in fact, there was. So you often see that women underperform men in these principles classes. But what the experiment did is it closed that gender performance gap. So it raised sort of everybody’s performance, but it raised the females disproportionately, so that they were closer to the same outcome as the men if they were in a classroom with experiments. So I do think that there is definitely room through pedagogy to improve women’s outcomes, and make them more attracted to economics, but also make economics more attractive to them. There’s a large literature that suggests that women are much more grade sensitive than are men, various people have gone about showing this in different ways. And if you can bring up their performance so that it’s on par with men. And it’s not really even that comparison, but you’re bringing up the females’ performance, then they’re getting better grades, and they’re going to be less likely to want to leave the study of economics.

John: And we’ll throw in a reference to an earlier podcast we did with Peter Arcidiacono, who had looked at that very impact in STEM fields in terms of the decisions of people to move from one major to another. And in particular, in that study, they found that women did better on many of the tests but still left because the grades were relatively lower than in other classes. So one issue I think might be worth addressing is the issue of grade differentials, that if we’re going to continue to assign grades that are lower than most other departments, there’s a good chance we’re going to lose majors in general, but disproportionately more female majors, based on what the research literature tells us.

Tisha: There’s this really cool study, McEwan, Rogers, and Weerapana, 2021. They’re at Wellesley, and so it’s all females, but they were trying to address grade inflation. And what that meant was, of course, there are some disciplines that have higher grades, they had to bring their average grades down, and economics is treated in the opposite direction, and that it actually drew more students into these harder grading disciplines, like economics and the other STEM fields. And so yeah, that’s certainly an issue. I don’t think we’re gonna across the board be trying to treat grade inflation. I don’t think this is published yet. But I was reading another study out of Wellesley, where they were allowing students… I think it was maybe for their gen ed classes… to take them all pass fail. And again, you saw students flowing into these harder grading disciplines.

John: I know a number of schools during a pandemic made all of their first-year classes pass fail, which is a good way of letting students get into a discipline without worrying so much about the grades so they can explore things without worrying about the impact on their GPAs. That might be another useful strategy.

Tisha: Yes, I agree, and then this is really anecdotal, but I’ve heard other people observe the same thing, that women, they’ll be in your principles class, and they’re doing well, but maybe they’re going to get a B plus. And they say, “Oh, either I’m not gonna take another economics class,” or I’ve even had students withdraw at that point, and I’m like, “but you’re getting a B plus, I don’t understand,” but they’re so sensitive to grades. And then there will be male students who are getting a C, barely, and they’ll say, “I’m going to major in economics.” and I say, “Okay, are you sure?” It’s hard to understand sometimes.

Rebecca: It’s interesting to think about withdrawal policies that have really kind of loosened up due to COVID. So our institution changed the policy more recently so that students can withdraw through the last day of classes without documentation. And so students who are doing really poorly might take that option, but as you’re discussing students with higher grades withdrawing, that sounds really concerning that policies like that could be kind of counterintuitive, or really have some other negative impacts. Classes all cost money, [LAUGHTER] and there’s financial impacts to withdrawing.

Tisha: It’s hard to really predict how this is all going to play out. And I have to say, I’ve never heard of such a generous withdrawal policy. At my previous institution, I think they could withdraw up to sort of two weeks out and not even have a W necessarily on their transcript. So this all seems like a lot. There’s a lot of moving parts. But on the positive side, so let me just say, first of all, part of me feels like it’s a little bit too generous. But part of me also thinks back to the work that KimMarie and I did. And if you don’t have that D or F, that you have to overcome, it’s a lot easier to persist, not just in your major, but towards graduation, whether you switch majors or stay. And part of me feels like that’s helpful to the student. So in some ways, I like a generous withdrawal policy, I definitely want students to know what the withdrawal policy is, what the deadlines are, so that they can make a good decision.

John: Yeah, the only concern I have with the policy is that it can lead to students making slow progress towards a degree and they could run out of funding before they complete their degrees. But on the other hand, it does provide a bit of a safety net for students who are adjusting. And as our student body has become more diverse, and we have more first-gen students, and we have more students coming from schools that did not prepare people particularly well for a college environment, it provides a safety net, which has allowed students to take some chances early on and not be harmed. And I’ve seen some students struggle in their first year or so, drop classes, and come back and be very successful, when before they might have been deterred from further study in the discipline.

Tisha: I agree, I can see that.

Rebecca: So, definitely one of the things that I’m always thinking about when students are talking about withdrawing is making sure that they know all of the ramifications. So what does it do to your GPA? What does it look like on a transcript? What are the financial implications? …so they can make a well informed decision. And depending on who they’re talking to, they are not necessarily always getting all of the information, and that can be problematic, too.

Tisha: Yes. So I think that points us to the issue of how important advising is, so that there are well informed advisors and that students have access to them, not just at the end when it’s time to register for next semester, but they have a relationship with their advisor, and feel that they can go in and ask those questions, because as John said, a lot of those students can’t go to their parents, they’re first gen, their parents don’t have advice for them. And even if your parents went to college, they don’t necessarily know all of the rules and regulations of the institution that you’re at. It’s really hard, I think, for students to have all the information that’s necessary.

John: I’ve had trouble keeping up to all the changing information [LAUGHTER] over the last few years. In terms of those requirements. You’ve done some work with cooperative learning. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Tisha: Sure. So that really came out of the fact that I had done a lot of efficacy work around classroom experiments. And KimMarie and I are really good friends. She is a cooperative learning expert. So I should say that she is the expert on CL. And she wanted to do an efficacy study, so we decided to team up and do that. So what we did is unlike a lot of some of the other work in efficacy, is that a lot of the work is comparing lecture. So you don’t do anything to this active learning technique. And with cooperative learning, the students are working on exercises. And when we talked about it, we said you know, it’s really not fair, and not even interesting to compare a student who is in a lecture-based class where they don’t get to see any of these problems to students in a cooperative learning class that are working on these problems in class in teams. So we thought a lot about the collaborative learning approach. And we’re trying to isolate what we thought could be the mechanism that might be driving different outcomes. And what we decided was we were going to compare the active team-based learning to individual learning, working on problems. So in our control, the students were exposed to the same problems, they had the same amount of time in class to work the problems as in the treatment, which was the collaborative learning. It’s just that in the treatment, they were working in teams in this think-pair-share share framework, and we didn’t find a significant difference. So at the end, we said that the cooperative component didn’t seem to be driving any difference. Although there are other people who’ve done work comparing collaborative learning to lecture based and they did find significant positive effects from cooperative learning.

John: One type of thing that I’ve done that seems to have been fairly successful is using clicker questions. Following the methodology of Eric Mazur, students are given a challenging question where typically half or so them will get it right the first time when they’re asked individually. But then they get to talk it over with the people around them, preferably someone with a different answer, they get to debate and argue it and I normally see between a 10 and 20 percentage point increase in the correct answer. And the really absurd answers tend to disappear down to about nothing. So that’s not a very formal study, but that second stage of that process where students are engaged in some peer instruction seems to have had a pretty significant impact. And I point that out to students, that when they talk to each other about it and explain it to each other, they do much better than when they’re working on their own. And I encourage them to try doing that outside of class, to work with other students, because there are a variety of studies… I haven’t seen too many in economics, but there are quite a few studies that find that that type of peer instruction, either in the classroom or outside, can be fairly effective.

Tisha: Yeah, so I’ve observed that too. I haven’t used clicker questions, but just going in and observing my colleagues when they teach, and they are using clicker questions. And I have to say, I’m stunned, because I don’t know how the right answer bubbles up as opposed to the person who had the wrong answer convincing the other of the wrong answer. I don’t know how that doesn’t happen. It’s like magic to me, almost. So part of me wants to think a bit more about what is the mechanism and how is that working? That’d be really cool to do a study on that.

Rebecca: One of the things that’s always curious to me about that particular dynamic is sometimes students discover, as they try to explain something to someone else, [LAUGHTER] that they really don’t know what they’re talking about. [LAUGHTER] They realize, huh, I can’t actually explain this concept, so maybe I’m the one that’s not correct. [LAUGHTER]

Tisha: Maybe that is what’s happening. Because everyone always says, “You have to really know your stuff to teach it,” and so if you are trying to explain it to your partner, you do have to know the material.

John: And when they’re raising objections and you don’t have a counter argument, that can help break down your misconceptions, because getting rid of those incorrect perceptions can be as important as trying to build new ones.

Tisha: Yeah, I could see that and maybe the people who are initially giving the wrong answe are just guessing. So maybe they’re not trying to explain and convince their partner of their answer, I guess. I don’t know. So maybe it’s not magic.

Rebecca: [LAUGHTER] Feels like magic.

John: It does. And it works.

Tisha: When I see it happen, it does seem like magic. In general, I think that active learning is helpful, because I think that women are going to be more interested when you show them the applications, and that when you have active learning, there’s some community building that happens. So you’re illustrating relevance, you’re building this community, giving them a sense of belonging in the classroom, which is a lot of what I think actually happens with the experiments. And then actually also with the experiments, they’re kind of discovering some of the theory for themselves, which is a growth mindset. And there is research that shows that if you can show relevance, belonging, and growth mindset, and develop these in your classroom, that students are going to do better, but that it also is more appealing to females and underrepresented minorities.

Rebecca: There’s lots of things for all of us to think about, even if we’re not necessarily in economics classrooms. Definitely good food for thought. Switching gears a little bit. Can you tell us a little bit about your work on the Committee on Economic Education?

Tisha: So I’m not officially on it at the moment, I’m the incoming chair. But I have served on it in the past. And I’ve been shadowing KimMarie McGoldrick, who is the current chair for the last year. So the committee is doing a lot of really great work. I think. When I first served on the committee, we basically just organized sessions for the American Economic Association meetings. And when I say “just” I don’t mean “just…” Compared to now, it’s just but we have, I think, seven sessions that we organize for the meetings every January. But while I was first on the committee, then chair Mike Watts, who was at Purdue, he said,”I have an idea. We should have a conference, so an all economic education conference,” and we started it while he was chair, and it’s CTREE, so the Conference on Teaching and Research in Economic Education. So the committee is in charge of that. It’s every end of May, beginning of June, depending how the calendar falls. So our next CTREE will be in Atlanta, not that far. It’s on the East Coast, maybe you can join us. And it will be May 29 through the 31st of 2024. We have many other things that we also are overseeing: an educate program, which is professional development for college faculty, and that includes two-year college faculty, in course design, different active learning pedagogies, and we talk about how to bring diversity and inclusion into the classroom. KimMarie actually started this this year, we have a newsletter called EconEdNews. And that features different pedagogies, it features the winner of the AEA Distinguished Economic Educator Award, which the committee also oversees, and some centers that we have for Econ Ed across the country… just a lot of information that’s in there, we have two issues a year. So we’ve had our first two, and our next one will come out in March of ‘24. So just a lot of great work, I think, that the committee is doing and I think really thanks to Mike who started us with our own conference. And then Sam Allgood succeeded Mike and added and then KimMarie is an overachiever. And she added a lot more in her six years as the chair.

John: And going back earlier, early surveys of economic instruction suggested that economists were using much more chalk and talk than many other disciplines were using. So these efforts have been fairly important in shifting people away from that. It’s a somewhat overdue change, but it’s nice to see that happening. And I would love to go to CTREE. But there’s two barriers that I’ve run into one is we run a series of workshops here, right around the same time, and the other is I teach at Duke in the summers. So I either am doing workshops here, or I am in North Carolina teaching econometrics now down there, so I haven’t been able to get there. I would love to go to a CTREE meeting.

Rebecca: I think I would have no clue what’s going on if I went. [LAUGHTER]

John: Oh I think you would.

Tisha: I think you would, I think you’d have a nice time. Everyone there is just so lovely and very engaged in teaching, and just really cares about the enterprise.

Rebecca: It’s nice to see education groups out of these professional organizations to really formulate communities of practice around teaching.

Tisha: Yes, I agree. I think economics, unfortunately, was late to the game. But we’re increasingly appreciating the importance and the importance not just of focusing on four-year colleges, but two-year colleges. So going back to the point of diversity, and the lack thereof in the discipline, the students in four-year colleges that I’ve worked with have predominantly still been very much what economists already looked like. And if we really want to improve the diversity in economics, I think we need to reach down to the high schools to the two-year colleges, and make economics more interesting and accessible.

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

Tisha: There’s lots of things. I guess, with regard to the committee, I’m hoping to just kind of not start anything new in my first term, and keep everything running as well as KimMarie has it now. But then for my own research, I am really interested now in looking at comparing pedagogies. So it’s been a lot of efficacy work looking at a particular pedagogy compared to sort of the standard chalk and talk. But now, how do they compare to each other? Is there a better pedagogy for students? And my first study, and I have the data, so I just have to start working on it will compare experiments to cooperative learning. And I told KimMarie, if experiments lose, then she won’t hear any more about this. I won’t write it up. I won’t talk about it. Because I don’t want to say that experiments lose, but no, I mean, seriously, that’s the next thing that’s first on the agenda. But also, I have a deep interest in diversity questions. KimMarie and I with Scott Simkins have a paper looking at HBCUs compared to PWIs and the study of economics there. And that was inspired by some work that showed that HBCUs contributed disproportionately to the STEM pipeline. And since economics is part of STEM, we thought, “Well, that should be true for economics as well.” So we did some work in that area. And we show that there are some positive contributions from HBCUs to the economic pipeline. But I think there’s a lot more to do there. So I would like to dig down in that. I’ve heard a lot of people at HBCUs talk about secret sauce, and I want to learn what that is. And not just at HBCUs but look at MSIs as well, more generally. And I do want to look at some questions at two-year colleges, so that’s for the next five to 10 years…

Rebecca: You’re going to be busy. [LAUGHTER]

John: For those who aren’t familiar with the terms PWI are predominantly white institutions and MSI are minority serving institutions.

Tisha: That’s correct.

John: Those terms are becoming more and more common, but just to make sure all of our listeners are familiar. Okay, well, thank you. It’s great talking to you, and it’s nice meeting you. And we will keep trying to get KimMarie McGoldrick on the podcast. I’ve been asking her for about four years. She’s been a little resistant, but we’ll see if we can get her here in the future. Well, thank you.

Tisha: Thank you so much. I hope you have a good afternoon.

[MUSIC]

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

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

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

[MUSIC]

279. First-Year Blues

Posted in emotion, engagement, equity, first-generation, first-year classes, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, race, racism, teaching, writing
March 8, 2023

First-year seminar classes can help ease students’ transition from high school to college. In this episode, Tim Nekritz joins us to discuss his first-year seminar class on the history of American Blues in which students explore racial and gender discrimination through the lens of music while also learning to navigate the college environment.

Tim is the Director of News and Media at SUNY Oswego, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, and the developer of a first-year seminar course in American Blues.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: First-year seminar classes can help ease students’ transition from high school to college. In this episode, we discuss a first-year seminar class on the history of American Blues in which students explore racial and gender discrimination through the lens of music while also learning to navigate the college 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: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

>[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Tim Nekritz. Tim is the Director of News and Media at SUNY Oswego, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, and the developer of a first-year seminar course in American Blues. Welcome, Tim.

Tim: Great to be here.

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

Tim: Yes. And I am drinking Tea Forte blackcurrant. It’s excellent, and if John recommends a tea, you’ve got to go with it,

Rebecca: I’m drinking chai today, John.

John: Very good. There’s no jig or anything. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: No, there’s no Jig, nothing crazy. I was at an event and there’s limited choices on our campus event tea selection. Chai is what I chose.

John: And I have ginger peach black tea today.

Rebecca: Back to an old favorite, John.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your first-year seminar course in American blues. Since it’s been a while since we discussed one of the first-year seminar courses here at SUNY Oswego, could you tell us a little bit about the objectives of the course?

Tim: Absolutely. The idea is for it to be a small class, because you really want to build a sense of cohesion there. And I saw that a lot, because students would become best friends right away, despite anything I did or not because of anything I did sometimes, but so it’s building connections with other students and instruction in the institution. It’s very much a gateway course to them being college students, to a degree. We don’t overdo that, but we try to make sure that we can work that into the curriculum wherever we can. There’s a certain amount of college preparatory experience for that, obviously, it’s not orientation, clearly it’s not orientation. For example, I brought in Tina from Excel to talk about career preparation and internships and that type of thing, brought in someone from Counseling Services Center, which I’ll talk more about later, but just try to connect them with some helpful faces and offices on campus. There’s also intercultural competence, which was a big part of this course, which I know we’re gonna discuss more later, …critical thinking skills (so introduction to what that is on the college level), and communication skills and very basic level, whether it might be their first research paper, might be their first oral presentation in college and trying to get them prepared in whatever ways we can.

John: We introduced these classes several years ago, and we had a number of people teaching in the first round of this on our podcast, but that was sometime in the before times.

Tim: Yes.

John: …so we thought it would be useful to review this just a little bit. But it’s also something that the college is expanding. The goal is within the next two years to offer one of these courses to every freshman student.

Tim: Yeah, and we work with Mallory Bower, as well as Kristin Croyle, who are excellent to work with, as far as trying to get people almost over their fears. So it’s like, put in an idea. And as opposed to just like yes/no, they might help you workshop it and there’s pr- preparations where seasoned professors like me, I’m not in the old category, apparently. And so like, “How do you develop your course? What stumbling blocks did you have? What were things that worked?” and that type of thing, which obviously varies from course to course, as we all know. But it’s good, because in a way, we’re building communities here, but we’re building communities among the people who are interested in teaching that class.

Rebecca: One of the things that’s interesting about the first-year courses that are at our school is that they’re intentionally not in the discipline and they’re often interdisciplinary. So can you talk a little bit about your course and how that fits into the bigger picture at Oswego.

Tim: Certainly, I came about designing it in a backward way, which is how I do most things, it seems like, but essentially, I really got an interest in blues and blues history fairly recently. And we got an email from someone named Roger House, Roger went to SUNY Oswego for a couple of years before transferring to another institution. And he’s now an American Studies professor at Emerson College and does a lot of stuff on blues history, cultural history, and that type of thing. And he emailed us a column that he wrote that references his time at SUNY Oswego. And then at the bottom, it said, Roger House is the author of Blue Smoke, which is a biography of Big Bill Broonzy. And at the time, I was reading anything on the blues I could get my hands on. And I read it, and I realize,d everything that he went through, he went away to World War One, and was treated great in Europe… well, relatively great for a servicemen… for someone who’s toward the bottom of the rank, but at least was treated like a human being which he wasn’t used to back home… comes back, the man he worked for, picks him up and immediately degrades him and tells him “You don’t deserve to be in that uniform.” This is a person who sat home and did nothing and he’s telling Bill who served his country, for very obvious and racist reasons, to take off his uniform and put his overalls back on. And that was a big pivotal moment. But it’s also something that resonated with a lot of people. A lot of people who went away to World War One, and then had to come back home and face the indignities of racism. And so then he was part of the great migration to Chicago and the blues scene that arose there and then he was rediscovered because he did some social commentary during the folk revival in the 1960s. I’m looking at this and it’s not dissimilar to Forrest Gump, although not as fabricated, but you’re looking at, okay, all these different parts of 20th century history, and this could be something that’s taught. So I sent an email to Mallory and said, “This is a crazy idea and I know we’re friends, but you can tell me it’s stupid if you want.” But she didn’t. She thought it was great. But part of it is you can really teach cultural history, black history, entertainment history, pop culture history, there’s so much that can be developed here. And then it seemed like the first black women to reach a mass audience were the blues queens of the 1920s, when that became big. Because they could not be heard or paid attention to elsewhere, but then suddenly, out of nowhere, Mamie Smith has a huge hit that sells all these records and record executives are like, “Oh, wait, there’s actually a market for black music” because Mamie Smith was really like the Jackie Robinson, she broke the barrier. It was in part because she had a lyricist, Perry Bradford, who sold his compositions, but because people would buy it, but nobody wanted at that point to record a black artist. And so he got Mamie Smith recorded, and then Crazy Blues became this huge hit and suddenly people realized, “Oh, well maybe this is not a bad thing.” But that being said, what happened immediately is that they started recording white women who tried to sound like black women, which of course is even worse, really. And so they were very hesitant. I was reading things that said, “Oh, and then suddenly, opportunities opened up” …and they didn’t. It wasn’t until Bessie Smith came along with Downhearted Blues in 1923. That just sold unbelievable numbers to all audiences, black, white, anybody. And the record company said, “Okay, well, I guess this is something that we can do.” But there’s so many lessons behind that, and the fact again, that the record companies held off on actually trying to make sure that black woman can be heard, which was amazing, disappointing at the same time. So that’s just one example. And then being able to teach the great migration through the Chicago blues scene. The fact that Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters and all these people came from the south and collected in Chicago, or Detroit, or any city where the jobs were, but then in Chicago, all the conditions were perfect for them to start up an amazing blues scene and just to transform everything, like when Muddy Waters plugged in an electric guitar, and everyone was like blown away by that. But he had to do it, because he was playing in these loud clubs and people were just talking. So he had to electrify what he was doing. But so anyway what I started doing is looking at some of the themes and some of these decades, these eras, and that type of thing, because there’s also just such a long pre-history of African music, African inspired music. And then at one point that drums were banned on plantations because people thought they could send messages to each other, but also the way that the field hollers and the religious music, music that they did just were work songs and how that influenced what came later. The problem is, you could almost do a whole course on that. That’s really way back. That would be earlier American history, but I’d have to inform that and then talk about the fact that you had like the Ma Rainey’s of the world who were already spreading the blues before it was known as the blues. And so laying a lot of foundations with the vaudeville and tent shows, or W C. Handy, and his first blues recordings, but even some interesting things because blues was folk music for the longest time. And then W. C Handy decided to publish it, and suddenly it is no longer folk, it is now commercial. And so how that changed everything. So there’s so many interesting lessons that happen along the way.

Rebecca: So what I’m hearing, Tim, is that you’re using music to sneakily teach history.

Tim: I’m a sneak.

Rebecca: You’re so dangerous.

Tim: I know, it’s horrible.

John: There have been a number of economic articles written on the role that rural free delivery and the Sears catalog provided in the blues because it brought low cost musical instruments to places where there were just no music stores.

Tim: That’s great. I do touch on that a little bit, because, in the rural south, you can’t drive to a music store. But then suddenly, Sears made guitars and other instruments, very inexpensive. So little things I just love because I’m a big fan of James Burke. I know he spoke here a few years ago, in his Connection series and the day the universe changed, about how all these small things come together. And so that’s exactly what I like talking about. That’s a perfect example.

Rebecca: How did you get students engaged in the subject matter? What are some of the kinds of activities that you did with students?

Tim: One of the things that I did because I can’t convey the Blues as well as blues artists can, I would give them a Spotify playlist of like 15 to 20 songs and have them listen to it. The first time I taught it I couldn’t find a book and it’s like, this is easier than reading a book. And then finally, some people talked to me about “You probably should at least get a basic book.” So I have a really inexpensive one. Elijah Wald’s, Blues History, which is I think like $12. I try to be friendly on the budget. And so I would have one on Blues Queen, for example, or then in the mid-1920s, what happened is Blind Lemon Jefferson had a hit song called Black Snake Moan and Blind Lemon does not get the credit. He totally changed the industry with that. And part of that is sexism, unfortunately, because when the record companies were getting the Mamie Smith’s of the world, the Bessie Smiths, was like, “Okay, well, we need to put an orchestra behind them.” And then suddenly Blind Lemon Jefferson has a huge hit. He’s one person, that’s so much easier to pay. And if you have the Bessie Smith’s and Mamie Smith, and the Ida Cox’s, the people who were getting well established, they command more money, economics again, but you find some blind guitarists somewhere, you can pay him less than that, because unfortunately, exploitation is a big part of labor market functions or malfunctions, I guess you would say. Women really dominated the scene for the first five years and then they started going to solo male singer guitarists, or pianists, or fiddler’s, or whatever. And so then I did one about some of the early male artists, then all the Blind Willie McTell and Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Blake. But then I also talked about why that happened, because again with economics, if you’ve got nine kids, and one of them’s blind… basically, there was a sharecropper system, which was again rigged, almost indentured servitude, unfortunately… and so your kids, if you’re in the system, they all had to help you produce. So if you’ve got a child who’s blind, they can’t necessarily do that. But then, especially when Blind Lemon Jefferson started hitting some other people, it’s like a lot of them might have already had them working as buskers and that type of thing, but then the record companies of course, there’s nothing original to a record company, thought “Oh, we’re gonna assign more blind bluesman including the fact there were some who were signed who were said they were blind but weren’t.” And like all these really crazy things. So like I did that. I did one Chicago blues, and then folk blues and social blues and then the British blues boom, which was led by The Rolling Stones, among others. But there’s also a great quote from George Harrison, my favorite Beatle… everyone has a different favorite Beatle perhaps… but he has said “No Lead Belly, no Beatles,” because, again, it’s one of those weird, circuitous things, because Lead Belly, among other things, did a song called Rock Island Line, which was covered by someone named Lonnie Donegan, who actually took the Lonnie from Lonnie Johnson, who’s another great unsung hero. Rock Island Line became a huge hit in Britain and formed something called skiffle. Skiffle was like a combination of blues and folk and a couple other things. And then all these skiffle bands started forming including one called Quarrymen, which was John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and later, George Harrison. And so George Harrison nails it. And the main thing, I think, that the students notice, because I am willing to trade off extra credit for market research. So I have a five point question on the final, which is a bonus question, which is, “What’s one thing you wouldn’t have known if you took this class” and a large part it’s like they had no idea that the blues is the foundation for rock and roll, and inspired jazz, and soul, r&b, funk. And then a really cool thing is Marquel Jeffries from the Institute, who’s also a rapper. I had him come in and talk about the connections between blues and hip hop. And he did a fantastic job with that, because just as the blues has informed so many 20th century art forms, I’m glad that I can introduce that to people because, again, that is cultural appreciation. It is also cultural appropriation too, that is part of this as well.

John: And certainly there was a lot of that in the history of rock and roll.

Tim: Oh, yes, Elvis being a big one. But at the same time, that wasn’t cool, necessarily, but Elvis himself was a big fan of R&B. This is what he wanted to perform. And at one point, they tried a bunch of things, and then he started playing some really crazy R&B tune. And Sam Phillips came in the studio and said, “What the heck are you doing?” And he said, “keep doing whatever you are,” because that was everybody’s ticket to money on the money train. But part of it too, is that people like Sam Phillips knew these R&B records were selling like crazy. They needed to break into the larger and mostly white market. And so they needed a white face to market that with and that’s what they did with Elvis. So there’s a real lesson there. And then there’s so much other cultural appropriation. I know that Larry Watson, who performed very recently, he has a whole song that he did in Waterman theater called “Liar,” which is all about cultural appropriation. It was great. So obviously, it’s appreciation versus appropriation, who’s benefiting from what? The fact that Led Zeppelin then would change a few words on a bluesman’s song and then file the copyright themselves. Janis Joplin did it too. And all these people who very much took advantage of that, but then there are also a lot of people who appreciated the blues. I consider myself someone who preserves it because I like doing old blues songs… not nearly as well as they do… but I at least want people to know who some of the blues pioneers are as best I can.

John: And the Rolling Stones certainly did that and I believe they had Howlin Wolf open for them on some of their early tours.

Tim: Yeah, I showed them a great video that was one of those teenybop shows and they said they wouldn’t perform unless Howlin Wolf played and it’s just kind of hilarious because Howlin Wolf is playing, he’s doing what the Wolf does, and all the kids are bopping to it. And it’s like, “Wow, imagine if they were actually exposed to Howlin Wolf and all these other blues players that they never actually were.” So that could be like an alternative history of suddenly the radio stations that are playing Howlin Wolf might have happened, but it didn’t happen, obviously.

Rebecca: So you had students do a lot of listening and reading, what kinds of things did you do in class? I know you had some interesting projects and other learning activities.

Tim: Well, I will get back to the playlist. Basically, they would come in and the assignment would be let’s discuss at least one song on the playlist and everyone would do it… almost everyone would do it. Some of them want to talk about two or three. I’m like, hey, that’s cool, too. So like, if I’m talking about a blues gospel tune, talk about why gospel blues was a thing. I don’t even know how this existed, but when Ma Rainey’s Prove it on me Blues, from the 1920s, singing about being a lesbian, and you can’t get more marginalized in America at that time than by being a black lesbian. She’s like, “This is me, here I am.” And it almost feels like how did this happen? Because after the 20s, that disappeared for a long time, even that kind of expression. But that kind of showed, and I had people in the class who were very inspired by that, the courage that it took her to do that. And then just weird stuff like Blue Yodel Number 9, which is Jimmy Rogers with Louis Armstrong and Lil Armstrong. So it’s blues, with yodeling and old country and jazz. I read about it in a book. And I’m like, “this shouldn’t exist,” because again, we think of how much music was categorized back then. So those are great discussion exercises. But then the one really fun project I thought was I asked him to write a blues song talking about it could be their perspective or some other perspective. And so I brought in Kyle from the Counseling Center, because he’s big into expressive arts, and it’s like, “Is there anything that’s bothering you that you can sing a blues song about?” So a lot of them talked about loneliness, homesickness, missing friends and that type of thing. Some of them were really deep, and I’m like, “oh, goodness,” some of the stuff that they were writing. The first semester, there was actually a surprise attached to it, in that I had reached out to some friends. And right after Thanksgiving, we get back and we had a concert. And so my friends from a band called The Shylocks, they did two tunes. A third tune was one that was written by someone in the class. And I said, “Guess what we’re doing?” So I had a number of people there, and Kyle, a very well known blues player, Jess Novak, recorded one because she connected with one of the students in the class really well, because Jess talks about the old boys club and all the rest of that stuff. And there’s one student who talked about back home, she would get solos. People were like, “Oh, it’s because you’re a girl.” and all the rest of this stuff and be patronizing to her. But then we did research papers, and she presented on Etta James, and she’s asked if she could sing At Last. I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” And she did and I knew why she got the solos back home because she was really good. But then, to turn that around, I said, “Hey, Jess, remember that student.” And I sent Jess her thing and she performed it. And it was one of those, you could have dropped it back in the 1920s. It was that good. So I had some of them performed live, some of them recorded it as well. And it was just really cool to see because these students, some of them acted all cool, and that type of thing. But some of them were like just very emotional to see people perform a song that they wrote. I wasn’t able to do it last year… lowell, one thing, the cat was out of the bag, perhaps… but it was great because they got to use self expression, but then also see how people interpret songs. So it worked on many levels. And it was a heck of a lot of fun too.

John: When you had them write the songs, did they actually write it down in notation? Or did they sing it? Or did they write it down assuming there’d be a 12 bar pattern underneath it?

Tim: Great question. Basically, I just had them do lyrics. I am not qualified to teach composition. I can teach about writing. Last year, I don’t know what happened, but I wrote about 50 songs. I was looking into sources that talked about songwriting, like Larry Kyle spoke to the class or Jess Novak spoke to the class. I had them talk a little bit about their songwriting experience, how they wrote songs. And of course, with everything, “Well, it depends on the song.” But so I actually did try to workshop with them a little bit. And most of them didn’t really want my help. They just wanted to do it on their own. But I said they could do it in 12-bar blues, but they didn’t have to because obviously the blues has evolved, whether they want to do an ABAB rhyme scheme, or just ABCB or whatever. And honestly, I was looking for effort. Some of them were fantastic. Some of them were not anything that necessarily was going to be recorded. But the effort they put into it, especially if it came from the heart, that was more important to me, just that they learned about self expression. Some of them were already songwriters, so they had a bit of a leg up there. But at the same time, it was really an exercise that was to express themselves. And some of them did fictional stuff, and that’s great, or took something and elaborated on it, but that’s how I write songs too. So yeah, I can’t fault them for that. But so all of them are really good. I just asked them to do four stanzas. That could be four verses, three verses and a chorus, two verses a chorus and a bridge, just to show that they had invested in it. And nobody who turned in a song disappointed me or came even close to it. So I was happy how that worked out. And again, they didn’t know it was gonna be performed. And the performers, I didn’t have them say who wrote it, intentionally. But then one of the performers actually wanted to perform them live… open mics and stuff. And I asked the student’s permission, like, “Oh, totally, yeah,” and that type of thing. They didn’t want their name attached to it. So it’s just that personal to them. And again, I always say I learn just as much from the students as they learn from me. And so I learned a lot about what’s going on in their lives. And by the same time there are people who want to write songs about their blues, but some of them they didn’t necessarily want to take ownership of or let people know how they’re feeling. There’s larger reasons for that than I can fix in a class. But at the same time, I thought it was really great that they at least got that experience.

Rebecca: So I think it’s important to note, if students are writing songs, it’s a first-year class, it’s not part of the music major, there’s a lot of non majors. So students may have ended up in the class because they selected the topic, or because it fit in their schedule. So how did you handle students that were not too excited about writing a song or worried about being outed?

Tim: Yeah, a lot of it was reassurance. There were a few music majors in there. Some of them even said, Wait, I thought this was a jazz history class. I’m like, no, there’s 50 jazz history classes, there’s very few blues history classes. That’s the reason nobody knows about the blues’ role, because blues history is just not taught. A few places have programs. The University of Mississippi is a good example of that. But generally speaking, we all do jazz, because jazz is so much neater and more ornate and doesn’t involve feelings and unfortunate situations and people being murdered for cheating on their lover and whatnot. But so students took it for a variety of reasons. I think you expressed some of that, but also because Mallory is a big supporter, and so she plugged a lot of them into my class the first time around. But for a non-music major, I even said right off the bat, you don’t have to be a music major, but you have to enjoy music in some way. Like if you don’t like to listen to music, this probably is not the first-year class you should take. I talked on what I call syllabus day. I do talk about the songwriting assignment, and then sometimes a couple students might disappear. But I want them to be comfortable with the class. So I try to set the expectations early, we talk about it a lot. And before I give them the assignment, and that’s why I always ask songwriters for advice. But like I had Juliet Forshaw, who actually taught a songwriting class last semester, come and speak to my class. And it’s a trade off, I got to speak to her class. And so imposter syndrome was high. That day, despite all the songs I’ve written, I still don’t feel necessarily like one. And so she came in with her partner, Michael Judge, and so they played some Avalon songs, but also, she went deep into how she created it. And again, there might be people who write the music first, and then write the words and just like, well, that’s not necessarily going to be the case here. I told them, if they wanted to put a lead sheet and put some chords on there, that’s great. There were a couple of people who already did make music. But really, it’s not unlike writing poetry. So that was one of the analogies I used. And so some of them would come up to me with a couple ideas and said, “How do I flesh it out?” and I’d suggest a rhyme or say, “Here’s a great point, can you expound upon that?” …like every writing course I ever took. And so I was worrying that maybe I would get more resistance and more people who just didn’t want to do it, or who I would have to really work to get to do it, but then it surprised me, the day that they were due, they would show up… once in a while they’d be late or other people would send it to me via Google Drive or email and not show up that class just in case….

Rebecca: In case they had to share it out loud or something. [LAUGHTER]

Tim: I think they were afraid of that. And I told them, I’m not going to make you sing it. Of course, I didn’t tell people the first time that someone else is gonna be singing it either. But they took it in stride. And obviously the past couple years have not been the easiest time to transition into a freshman year, especially the year that people came in and they hadn’t been in in-person classes because they graduated from high school, which had been virtual since March 2020. And so I think they adjusted well to being back in class. I think they’re excited to be back in a class and in college. So I think that helped a lot. But generally speaking, they appreciated the assignment. I mean, they didn’t jump up and down and talk about how great it was. But they all put in the effort. I think that says a lot, because I remember it being really hard to be a freshman and that’s back before we had the Internet and other distractions.

John: So how many times have you offered this class now?

Tim: Two times and obviously you learn something every time you teach it, and then it’s like, I’m gonna change this next year. And then next thing you know, it’s like late August and like, “Oh, well, maybe I won’t.” But one thing I’ve been doing too is getting a variety of guest speakers and some of them are musicians. And then like I said, you’ll have people in Counseling Services Center or Tina from EXCEL or just other people who might be helpful just to come in and maybe do like a 30-minute talk. This was an election year, as many people are painfully aware. And so I had some from Vote Oswego come in and talk about that and civic engagement. And sometimes it might be just a 20 minute talk or someone coming in it might be a whole class. But in the case of someone like Kyle, he’s got a background, and he’s a blues fan, because he’s like, “Oh, my God,” when I asked him. His father took him to see Bo Diddley, and I’m like, “I’m jealous of you.” But so he had blues, introduced in his family. So he knew that, but part of it’s to hear all the services we have, which are very important for anybody to have, really, the way the mental health crisis is these days. So it’s great that he got to introduce that and also then the interactive stuff that he did… people understanding how to share how they feel, and that type of thing. So I think I was very lucky with guest speakers. And then it’s always like, “Okay, well, I’m keeping most of them if they can,” because like Marquel was an example of, I got to the 70s, 80s, the birth of rap and hip hop, and the first time around, I didn’t have the subject knowledge to do that a credible job. But then it occurred to me like, “Oh, wait, I know Marquel.” And so he did a whole bunch of research, asked me questions, and then talked about the history of hip hop, and then connected with the blues just so well, I was thrilled to have him and because guest speakers will liven up the class a little bit. And then some of them will do a session like Jess Novak did and they all connected with her immediately, and like they connect with me like that. But that’s why Jess does what she does for a living, and I do what I do for a living. But just I think trying to get some variety in the class, because part of it too, is if it’s class major specific people might be saying, “Okay, well, what can you do with this major or this class?” So I don’t think a lot of people they’re looking to become musicians… a couple of them are, but try to introduce people who can help them in other ways. The good thing for being a non-musician is that it’s, in large part, a history class. It just happens to have a really cool genre that goes with it and I get to listen to music and we have to write a song. It’s not the end of the world. They all survived and thrived with it.

Rebecca: What are some of the themes that came up in their songs? You mentioned that you got a lot of insights into what’s going on in their lives as first-year students and that might be helpful for a wider audience to be aware of.

Tim: One of them wrote a song called Lonely Man Blues that basically talked about being away from his friends, his family. One of them wrote a funny song about dealing with people at the holidays who had different belief systems than him. It was a bit of an angry song. I mean, I could see the Ramones performing the song as well as any blues band. But people would talk about that. And just homesickness. Even as bad as the pandemic has been, and having to learn from your house and that type of thing, at least that’s a familiar place. And for them, that’s really trying to figure out the comfort zone, making friends over again, because you know, social skills took a hit during the pandemic. And so some of them talked about the readjustment of that, or talked about someone who broke their heart. One person, actually wrote what sounded more like spoken word poetry, it was really long, but it was very honest. And it was a way that they expressed themselves about a relationship. So it’s something that they got out of their system. So in a way, they weren’t that different than what you see with normal blues songs, except, like I said, there was much less murder involved, thankfully. I don’t know what would happen if someone talked about murder, but it really was about feeling lonely, about missing people, about wanting more love and that type of thing. So it was, in a way, whether I expected it to or not, it hit on a lot of the themes that classic blues songs did.

John: One of the reasons for these classes is to help students connect to other students as well as to the institution. How did that work in the class? Did the students make a lot of personal connections through the activities you were doing in the class?

Tim: Absolutely. And again, I haven’t figured out how to master that yet, I would like to, but they would just make it organically. There were a couple of people who hit it off and became really good friends. I would like to say that somebody formed a blues band out of this. I don’t think that happened. But the good thing about a class like this is it’s intimate. And people do talk about things. And it’s interesting, because when Kyle was in the room, or Jess was in the room, they would talk about things they didn’t talk about in front of me because I’m their teacher, and I grade them. I had one student when Kyle was there, he said, every day, I feel like I’m going to break down crying, just because of all the stress and that type of thing that anybody goes through at that age. And so I think that they expressed these things.. kind of broke down some barriers among everybody, which I think was good. Obviously, nobody was going to become friends with each other. I took improvisational theater way back in my undergrad days. And that was great because everybody just goofs around and that type of thing. And it is to let your guard down class. And so that’s the tightest class I’ve ever seen was improv theater just because everyone’s just doing silly things. I didn’t do silly things in this, it’s unfortunate, maybe next time. But it was good because for one thing, no one studies this blues history. So they were getting a lot of information that was new to them. But then they would also talk about “Oh, I really liked this artist, this song.” And so people would be like “Oh, I love that song too.” And so there would be some side conversations… sometimes actually about the class… often about other things. But at the same time, I think people saw some commonality because they were all learning a lot of new content. But when they say, “Oh, I really love this, Ma Rainey song, Prove it on Me,” and then somebody else does, too, it’s bonding or these little moments in the things that they like or performers they’d never heard before. One of them did a paper on Blind Blake and I feel like this much qualified for the Blues Hall of Fame, just making a Blind Blake song in 2022, as it was. When they found themselves agreeing on songs, and some parts of history that make people not so happy, but at the same time, for some of them, it’s validating, knowing that these things happened. And for them to realize that this has impact on my life, still, 100 years after the blues started… obviously, racism hadn’t gone away, or sexism… and so to see these things expressed, and to connect with that, and connect with other people, because not every day, but sometimes we’d have some really, really good and honest conversations. And then people connect with each other over that. And maybe it’s not even because they agree, but they learned to respect other people’s viewpoints. And it was always a very respectful class. A couple of people even argued over whether or not things were rock and roll songs. And that was about as heated as we got. [LAUGHTER] I can tell you that much. Because when rock and roll started, the saxophone was the guitar. The guitar solo was a saxophone solo. And some people are like, :”No, that’s not rock and roll…” like, “that is rock and roll.” And so that’s what some of the arguments were. It’s like, well, though, it was kind of 12-bar blues still, there’s more R&B. An example I use is Shake, Rattle and Roll by Big Joe Turner, which was not a tune you would play around your children, I will put it that way. There were some lyrics in there that were pushing the envelope like “when you wear those dresses, the sun comes shining through. I can’t believe my eyes, all the mess belongs to you.” You couldn’t sing that easily in the early 50s. But then what happened is a white band, Bill Haley and the Comets who were very well known, covered it and took out the more offensive part of “the way when you wear those dresses, oh my, you look so nice,” which is a completely different context. There was still some sexism involved in that because there’s the 1950s, unfortunately. So what happened is that Big Joe Turner’s version became a big hit on the R&B track, Bil Haley and the Comets covered it and it became a big hit in America because they were allowed to be on all those airwaves. But just little moments like that that I was able to show or the fact that I think that Big Momma Thorton’s Hound Dog is vastly superior to Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog in every way. But I think when people get new information also, and maybe light bulbs go on over their head, that also builds a bit more of a connection too because these are things again, we don’t teach this anywhere. But it’s an important part of the cultural history and pop culture history and music history.

John: And it sounds like a lot of the intercultural competence that these classes were designed to work on was just built into the structure of the course.

Tim: Absolutely. And that’s one of the things I felt good about, because I knew that was an emphasis. And it’s like, well, this definitely has that throughout the years. For example, even though people will debate whether it’s blues, or it’s jazz, but something like Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday. That was something the fact that it talked about a lynching and all the rest of this stuff. That was something that really moved students ‘cause unfortunately, they might have textbooks and talk about it. But it’s also Billie Holiday, who has an amazing voice. And so this really translated a lot of that stuff. There are a few songs that talked about the welfare system, or Big Bill Broonzy talking about being black, brown, and white, and some of the different situations that people face there. It was just such a great way of conveying this information. And you know, they’re all amazing songs, too. So you read it in a history book, and it can be kind of removed. But when you hear someone singing about this, that becomes very immediate,

John: Strange Fruit just it’s just an amazing song.

Tim: Oh, yes.

John: How did the students react to that?

Tim: If I had to pick one song during the whole semester that got a reaction from them, it was that. They might have heard about lynching. This really painted the picture in words and in Billie Holiday’s amazing voice. So I think that was an example. But there’s also… no one talks about Bessie Smith’s Poor Man Blues, which essentially it’s about all the black soldiers who went and fought for you in Europe, and then you rich man, you don’t want anything to do with us anymore. You want us to fight your wars and that type of thing. And it’s really interesting, because there are some quote unquote, blues historians, I will call them chroniclers who had the audacity to say that the blues are not a political genre, but it’s all political. When you’re poor, when you’re dealing with all these barriers in life, that’s very political. And so it’s amazing that while these were white people from Britain, who had no real background in the country’s history, and so that’s why I wanted to get a lot of the social and protest songs because that’s a big part of the blues. I mean, again, so much of blues… you’re an economist, you know that the economy impacts every part of people’s lives… and if you’re not being paid enough, if you’re not getting employment if you’re being treated badly by the system because of systemic racism, that’s a very political thing. So I think that’s the point that they also got very much from a lot of what they saw. So it was just great to have that opportunity to show people these things. Well, when I say show people, I mean, having way more talented people than me sing about it.

Rebecca: I can imagine that a lot of students and just people in general, listen to music and don’t always pay attention to the details. So having the opportunity to slow down and actually think about the lyrics and have conversations about it and connect it to history is a really different way of experiencing music, and it, I would imagine, translate to other things they’re listening to. Did you have conversations in class about how they might have been listening to other kinds of music differently?

Tim: So many of them know Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. They didn’t realize what a background in the blues, Jimi Hendrix had. Jimi Hendrix was very blues focused, even the Grateful Dead. So much of their stuff is blues. So especially when they saw this with artists that they knew, that helped make that connection a lot. Again, Eric Clapton is very much a conveyor of that, that they all know the Eric Clapton songs, but it’s like, well, that was written in the 1920s and 1930s, by someone who wasn’t Eric Clapton. But to connect all that backwards, or even the fact that to the era when I came of age, Nirvana, and their last performance on Unplugged, where they covered a Lead Belly song, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, and just how moving that was when Kurt Cobain did it in that I think his last performance ever. But then to see people make that connection. Okay, Lead Belly, and of course that was an old folk tale that he was singing, but at one point that got me into Lead Belly. And so just being able to peel back the layers and look at the history and see how that underpins the songs that they listened to. Because a lot of them do listen to what are covers of blues song. And there was a big blues revival in the 1980s, and it’s funny, because if you are a blues historian, you don’t want to admit it, but one person admitted, I hate to say this, but it was because of the Blues Brothers movie.

John: To be fair, there were so many great blues performers in the Blues Brothers movies.

Tim: Yeah, well, and the thing is, the movie company didn’t want to bring in these performers. They wanted “Oh, we have these hot young artists we want to do.” And Dan Ackroyd basically said “Hard no. I’m not doing this unless we’re allowed to bring in these performers who just didn’t get their due or just weren’t as appreciated.” And, so first of all, the music in that movie is great. It’s also very funny, but at the same time, people of a certain academic level don’t like to admit to something as base, dare I say, as the Blues Brothers movie had that impact on it. But then you had a lot of people in the 80s and 90s, like you’re seeing the Fabulous Thunderbirds having a big hit with Tough Enough, the Georgia Satellites having a really big hit with Keep Your Hands to Yourself, which was basically based in a blues structure and so much of the blues rock… the Allman Brothers, so much of what they did was the blues, and they became really big. But the unfortunate thing too, is that that had to do with suddenly becoming a white man’s genre. And generally speaking, like Robert Cray was big, but he was an exception, because by the time we get to the 1980s, most of the people who were playing blues, in large part, who were getting the air play were white men, even though it started with black women. And then also Stevie Ray Vaughan helped break it open too, and we can only wonder what happened if he hadn’t died tragically, but what he brought to the blues is just otherworldly. But he learned a lot of his stuff at the feet of Buddy Guy. Bonnie Raitt started… I think it’s a rhythm and blues foundation, where she basically knew there was all these blues performers. Larry Watson gave her a shout out recently performing on campus because she won a Grammy and is an example of somebody who actually walks the walk and talks the talk and she says, “Yeah, I was inspired by the blues, but I want to give back to the performers who didn’t have the opportunity to do that.” And the problem is like in the 1980s the blues was George Thorogood and I’m just not a fan of George Thorogood. That drove me away from blues for a long time, I think, but George Thorogood performed at Live Aid with Albert King and some blues performers, but they wouldn’t have been on the bill without George Thorogood which is morally compromising to me. But the problem was that there’s still a lot of great people out there. There’s Shamekia Copeland, who is well known. There are some rising stars still in the blues scene. Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, who is like 19 years old and talented and might be the next big thing in the blues. So there’s a lot still out there, but at the same time, that’s not the stuff that’s getting played on most radio stations.

John: Buddy Guy is still touring. It may be his last tour. I think he labeled it as his final tour, but we’ll see.

Tim: Yeah, well, I’ve seen Buddy Guy live twice. I saw him at the [NY] State Fair with BB King, and I think it was Tommy Castro and Susan Tedeschi, maybe.

John: Yeah, I was at that show. I’ve seen him at least a dozen times including twice at his club in Chicago.

Tim: Well, that’s fantastic.

John: … the old location and the new one.

Tim: Yeah, but Buddy Guy is so influential because he can do Jimi Hendrix, because Jimi Hendrix learned from him. He can do Stevie Ray Vaughan because Stevie Ray Vaughan learned from him . He did BB King… well, he and BB just did a lot of stuff together. And BB was a legend, but Buddy Guy stole that show and every show he ever performed at.

John: Yes. And I remember that show. He had just released the Riding with the King album with Eric Clapton. And he said, “Unfortunately, I’m not able to bring Eric Clapton here, but I’ll bring out the next best thing.” And I know everyone around me was hoping that Buddy Guy was going to come back on the stage, but instead it was his other guitarist who came out and performed with him….

Tim: Who was also really good.

John: …who was also really good, but he was not Buddy Guy [LAUGHTER].

Tim: Well, and what’s weird is that you’d look at it in retrospect, when Riding with the King came out with BB King and Eric Clapton, it’s easy to look at, “Oh, look at Eric Clapton doing a favor by letting BB King be on his record.” But it’s the other way around. Clapton… probably any bluesman worth anything would want to record with BB King. But the problem is with the cultural lens of me being a young, stupid, white kid it’s like, “Oh, wow, what an opportunity for BB King.” And it’s like, because Rattle and Hum introduced BB King in another context, too, because U2, they just had Joshua Tree… they could have done anything they wanted. And it’s like “We’re gonna do a movie. And we’re going to meet with some of our inspirations.” and that type of thing. And so they did a song with BB King and Bono… who is not always the most humble person, I will say. If you’re listening, Bono, I’m sorry, you’re still my hero… was just awestruck. BB King gave him a compliment, and he didn’t know how to take it, because this is BB King.

John: One thing with Buddy Guy is he sometimes will get into a mood where he’ll only do one musician for an hour or so at a time. And I was able to get tickets to his January run at Legends. And it was the only day I could make it. I was at a conference there. And it was listed as an acoustic only blues show. And after the first hour and 45 minutes, he said, “This is an acoustic blues show, so I guess I should do something acoustic.” [LAUGHTER] And he did a few songs and they went back to electric.

Tim: Well, it’s interesting because Syracuse was a big home of blues in the 1990s. Like my friend Larry Kyle said, you could get booked three or four nights a week as a blues artist in Syracuse. It’s not that way anymore, but there were a lot of really interesting acts back then. I was writing the course in 2021, and part of me is like is the ending of this going to be tragic? Is this going to be like you’re studying Latin… Womp womp, sad trombone. But then I went to the Blues Festival in Syracuse, the New York State Blues festival, it’s actually the first big festival since COVID had hit. And basically, to borrow a line from our friend Buddy Guy, I learned the blues is alive and well. It just changed a little bit like Larkin Poe, who is one of the bigger names in blues performed there, a couple of sisters, they are white. They’re supposedly related to Edgar Allan Poe in some way. And they have a lot of classic rock there, but huge crowd. Fabulous Thunderbirds performed, I thought they were not even one of the top five bands to perform. But Vanessa Collier, who is amazing… plays guitar, plays saxophone, and is just this great person. She was selling her own merch, she didn’t have to, there’s volunteers to sell your merch, but if you’re the musician selling your merch, you’re gonna do a lot better. And she stayed and signed stuff forever. And so after the start of the pandemic, just seeing a big crowd at all, just seeing how people reacted and how much people connect to that music, and then doing a little more exploration saying that, “Ah, the blues are still alive.” They’re not the blues that existed in the 1920s. To a degree things are drifting a little bit back toward women, toward black acts than they were in the 80s and the 90s. But it’s completely different. It’s so many different things. The same way the blues inspired this, people now have picked up rock and folk and even jam band and that type of thing, and brought that back… like Robert Randolph and the Family Band played. It’s very, very, very much funk that they play. But again, just mind blowingly good. So just seeing how blues has changed, or what we call the blues still exists. So finally, I’m mentally writing the last part of my class, but I wasn’t sure, up until then, whether I could tell them that the blues thrives, despite all this research I’d done on that type of thing and listened to Sirius XM Bluesville every day and knowing friends who played the blues. But to see this, see how it was received, see how many blues fans and how many new fans were won over to the blues… that made it possible for me to finish my class with my head held up high that I was not teaching a dead subject, I was teaching a subject that’s very much alive,

Rebecca: That seems like a good note, then, to wrap up with and we always end by asking what’s next?

Tim: Actually, it’s a funny question. I believe you both know a good man by the name of Jim Early, I’ve been recording with him… a record… which it sounds weird to call it that. And it’s not exactly the most bluesy record. But one of the things that this course has taught me and I tell my students all the time, you shouldn’t wait on your dreams or have someone tell you you didn’t do this. I did not grow up as a musician because we could only afford to have one of my siblings play an instrument and that wasn’t me. And so you don’t go through the system. And while you’re not a musician because you don’t know music theory and all the rest of that stuff. So it wasn’t until I got to college and joined a friend’s band and took a course in piano and composition that I’m like “you know what, maybe I am a musician or at least somewhat of a musician.” But I think so many parts of the blues is about overcoming things, and going against people who have preset notions or trying to keep you down in some way. And certainly I don’t suffer the hardships that the blues people did. But just seeing the creative expression, hearing all this music said, “You know what, I want to do music more and more in my life.” What’s next? Obviously, I look forward to teaching the class this fall, hopefully better, always want to teach better. But I try to introduce some historic research and publish in journals and journals don’t like blues history topics. Shockingly, it’s not a popular thing. I would love to do a book that looks at some of the issues I talked about, about blues women and how they started it and how they were relegated after a while. I’d love to talk to people like Shemekia Copeland, or Vanessa Collier. And there’s a lot of other artists who still cover those albums and that type of thing. I don’t know how to engineer it because so much of what I learned from this class, working with the students is so much of what people don’t know, I would love to write a book, even maybe get one journal article published, although I might have to start my own blues journal to do it. But to really get this information out where more people can get it, because people keep saying, “Oh, I’d love to take your class.” I’m like, “Well, you’re not a freshman and you’re not at SUNY Oswego.” Like maybe I’d try like an open source class or something like that, or find a way to impart these lessons to more people, because it’s certainly something that I realized, when you find knowledge gaps, it’s like, “Well, a lot more people need to know this.” And so how do I get that message out? I don’t know yet. But talk to me in a couple of years, I guess.

John: And it would be good to do some of this while you can still interview some of the people who’ve been in that for a long time,

Tim: Absolutely. Buddy Guy is really the last connection to so much of an era. But there are people out there like Bonnie Raitt would be an excellent interview, I would think. You’re right, because we are going to lose a lot of people who have a lot of knowledge.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much, Tim.

Tim: You’re very welcome.

Rebecca: …very nice talking to you and hearing about the interesting things you’re doing.

Tim: Well, I enjoy talking about it and you all are excellent hosts, of course,

John: …and if I ever retire, my goal is to join a blues band and go on tour.

Tim: I know where you can get a good bassist.

>[MUSIC]

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

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

>[MUSIC]

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271. Should I Say Yes?

Posted in diversity, equity, faculty, gender, gender bias, higher education, mental health, new faculty, professional development, race, reflective practice, self-care, stress management, teaching, time management
January 11, 2023

Busy faculty and staff are known to get things done, resulting in additional requests to engage in service activities. In this episode, Kristin Croyle and Kendra Cadogan join us to discuss how and when to say no throughout your career trajectory.  Kristin is a psychologist and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY Oswego. Kendra is the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer and Interim Director of the James A. Triandiflou Institute for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Transformative Practice at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

  • Ansburg, P. I., Basham, M. E., & Gurung, R. A. (2022). Thriving in academia: Building a career at a teaching-focused institution. American Psychological Association.
  • Thriving in Adademia. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 252. August 31, 2022.
  • Webinar:  The Art of Saying No, National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity.
  • Monday Motivator – “Just Say No”, National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity.
  • Five Ways to Say No, Chronicle of Higher Education (August 28, 2014),Transcript.

Transcript

Rebecca: Busy faculty and staff are known to get things done, resulting in additional requests to engage in service activities. In this episode, we discuss how and when to say no throughout your career trajectory.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Kristin Croyle and Kendra Cadogan. Kristin is a psychologist and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY Oswego. Kendra is the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer and Interim Director of the James A. Triandiflou Institute for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Transformative Practice at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Kendra and welcome back, Kristin.

Kristin: Thank you, John.

Kendra: Thank you so much.

Rebecca: So today’s teas are:… Kendra, are you drinking tea?

Kendra: I’m not. I’m drinking a protein shake [LAUGHTER] if that counts.

Rebecca: I think that might be the first protein shake that we’ve had. [LAUGHTER] So that’s good. Usually we get coffee, diet Coke, etc. How about you, Kristin?

Kristin: I got a tea for Christmas, an early Christmas present. It’s turmeric chamomile, And it’s very tasty.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds tasty.

Kendra: …sounds good.

John: And I’m drinking an Irish Breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: And I have blue sapphire tea again,

Kristin: Oooh. It’s got the best name

John: …that’s getting repetitive.

Rebecca: I know. [LAUGHTER] But I only have like one more pot left. And then I’m gonna switch to something else. Because I’m running out. I think I have one pot left.

John: Maybe you can play a green sapphire or something?

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: So we’ve invited you both here today to discuss the challenges faced by those faculty and staff who made the mistake of being productive in some service role, and then continually get asked to do more. We often hear that expression, “if you’d like to have something done, ask someone who’s a busy person.” And we know both of you have experiences as volunteers to do service work, as well as in your current positions, asking other people to do some work to assist in your roles. Why do we end up with such an uneven division of service requests of faculty and staff?

Kristin: One thing I love about starting with this question, because we’re going to talk about some strategies that people can use to think about service and say no, but you didn’t ask that as the first question. What you asked was about the structure of the institution, and what makes the structure of higher ed create uneven service roles. So, without answering to start with, I’m just gonna say, I love that as an entry question, because it’s easy to talk about the difficulties people have saying no as an individual issue, but it’s an issue that people can develop individual strategies for. But it’s not an individual issue, it’s an institutional issue, it’s an academia issue, it’s a structural issue. So, good question. And I’m gonna start by saying that there is no good institutional tracking of service. I’m sure all of us on this podcast have asked people to serve. But it’s not like we’re looking at a list and saying, “Well, this person is already advising two student orgs and serving on six committees and doing all of these other things.” There’s no master list. So we can’t look and say, “Oh, it would be so much.” And, at the same time, I also realized that’s a total cop out answer, because, even though there’s no institutional lists, we also know, don’t we? Like I could ask this person who is chairing faculty assembly… you know that’s what she’s doing. I could ask this person that I’ve seen at the last 12 committee meetings that I went to, and that’s not at one committee that’s at 12 different ones. [LAUGHTER] So, on the one hand, there is no institutional tracking, but on the other hand, the frequent targets, we know who they are. So, why don’t keep asking the same people? What do you think, Kendra?

Kendra: I think that those are all great points, Kristin, and I totally agree. You mentioned the chair of the Faculty Senate, who happens to be a woman. And I think that segues into another trend that we see really well, which is that we often see women and minoritized faculty being asked to do things more frequently. I think some of that is related to just some antiquated stereotypes that we have about gender and ideas about human being nurturing, and all of those things, and maybe willing to please, or able to serve and roles that we might not traditionally ask male faculty and staff to serve in. But I think that some of it, particularly for women, and I guess for minoritized faculty, too, is about the pressures that women sometimes face in the workplace around their careers and around advancement and wanting to make sure that they’re always going above and beyond to prove themselves. And we never want to say no, because you don’t know how that will reflect on you. And you certainly don’t want to be seen as less capable or not a team player or not willing to take charge or take initiative. So all of those things in ways work against folks and I think make it easier for us to continuously burden certain people with a plethora of requests.

Rebecca: One of the things that you both highlighted a little bit is that the faculty and staff who are regularly involved, regularly volunteering, regularly providing service, become more visible in these spaces. So those are the people that you think of first because they are visible. There’s a lot of faculty and staff who may actually be great folks for particular things but they’re just not as visible as well. I’m not really sure how we raise the visibility of some of those folks too, but I think that is just something that does occur.

Kristin: And part of what you’re mentioning is also that service really is a skill, and that when people do certain things they get better and better at it. So if the Dean is looking for an interim chair from outside of the department, the list of people who has both the skill set and the temperament and proven leadership skills, that’s a shortlist; that’s a very short list. Certainly, as people serve in more challenging roles, they really do develop unique skill sets that make them more easily tapped in the future. But on the other side of it, in asking newer faculty and staff to serve, I don’t know what you do, Kindra, but I actually, in the college, I look at a list, like, here’s the entire list of faculty and staff in the college. And I look down the list to make sure that I’m not just thinking about the people that I have run into and talked to in the last few days, or that have served in a similar role in the past, so that I can think about and tap people who could potentially grow from a service opportunity. So it is both a skill set, but also an opportunity for a lot of different people.

Kendra: That’s a great strategy. Kristin. Typically I try to ask around, I ask for referrals, I ask for deans or the provost or whoever, faculty who maybe live and work in those spaces already to provide recommendations. “Hey, is there someone that you know who’s up and coming or who’s looking for more experience in this particular area that could benefit from me tapping them to do this thing?” [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: One thing we didn’t talk about specifically, is the desire to have diverse voices in many of our service opportunities, and how that is unduly burdensome for some faculty and staff.

Kendra: Yeah, that’s a great point. And I think that’s a big conversation. On one hand, of course, you want representation, representation does matter. Like we say that all the time, and I think that we really, really mean it. But then again, it’s also very easy to fall into the patterns of “these are the diverse faculty that I see or interact with regularly, or who are very active in these spaces, so I’m gonna keep tapping them for the same things.” I think part of the solution to that or a path toward a solution is to make sure that we are centering inclusivity and belonging in our institutional priorities, and really thinking about how we help others develop their DEI skill sets and elevate their DEI practice, so that they can step into those spaces and be impactful and provide leadership and guidance in the way that we heavily sometimes rely upon faculty and staff of color, in particular, a diverse faculty to provide. It’s kind of a long path toward a solution, but I think it’s one way of really beginning to eliminate that problem of constantly overburdening diverse faculty and staff with requests.

John: And part of the issue is the underrepresentation on college faculty and staff of the groups that we have been referring to… and those same faculty and staff, though, often have more demands on them from students, because while our student bodies have become much more diverse, the faculty and staff have not been, and many students will reach out to people from affinity groups that are again, often somewhat limited on many of our campuses, which puts additional burdens on those faculty and staff.

Kendra: Yes, absolutely.

Rebecca: And that service… that’s often invisible, it’s easy to count or say like, “oh, this committee, that committee,” but I think advisement and mentoring that takes a lot of time and energy, and it’s not as well documented. Clearly Kristin already [LAUGHTER] raised the flag that we don’t have a great way of tracking these things anyways, but I think that, in particular, is something hard to quantify, because it doesn’t look the same for everybody.

Kristin: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think that one of the difficulties with this is that the recipient of the service is the student, which makes it highly visible for students, and almost invisible for faculty colleagues. So if you’re advising a student organization that is really active, they may be doing amazing work, and the work that a faculty member is doing as that advisor may be the thing that makes the difference in retaining those students and mentoring them to successful careers, but their colleagues may not see any of it, because it’s happening directly with the students and their colleagues are not going to the student org meetings, because their student org meetings, not faculty organization meetings. So not only is it downplayed sometimes in tenure and promotion materials, their faculty colleagues don’t catch that it’s downplayed. If they were serving in Faculty Assembly or on the Gen Ed Committee, or the Curriculum Committee, their colleagues would say, “Wait, hey, didn’t you do all of this stuff that you didn’t talk about?” But it’s both not given as much credit as sometimes it deserves at some universities, but it also is sometimes literally not recognized because people didn’t see them do it.

Rebecca: So why do we say yes to so many things?

Kristin: Why do we? Rebecca, I feel like you should ans….. No, I’m kidding. You’re actually very good at this.

John: I’m actually asking because I need some advice here. [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: Kendra, why do you say yes?

Kendra: Oh, man, that’s a loaded question. [LAUGHTER] It’s hard to say because it’s hard to say no. It’s hard to say no sometimes. And when you feel like someone is coming to you, because there’s a need that you can fill, sometimes you can get carried away with this idea that you are the person who has to do the thing, because if you don’t do it, it can’t be done. And then there are some of the other things we’ve talked about: the pressures of our careers, wanting to be taken seriously, wanting to be credible, wanting to be able to advance. You can often feel like your path to advancement is going to be barred at some point. If you keep saying no.

Kristin: The number one reason that I say yes, is one that Kendra mentioned, it’s usually because the ask comes from people I care about in professional terms, colleagues that I respect who are doing good work. And if they say, “Can you help me with this good work?” I want to say yes to them. And they’re often asking about issues that I care about… colleagues that are doing good work on things that I think are really important… I want to say yes to that. But I also say yes, because I am interested in a lot of things. And if people say, “I’m going to work on this thing that you haven’t worked on,” sometimes that’ll be a yes, because I just want to learn about that new thing. And when I learn about new things, that is a type of personal growth for me and I get renewed from that. So saying “yes” sometimes also means that I get that personal growth boost. Or there have been times when the ask has been like “You’re the only one who can do this, can you please step up?” …and I know that faculty have that implied experience too, not always like the explicit, someone literally says, “You are the only one who can do this, can you please do this,” but sometimes it’s just implied. And it can be a strong implication like ‘In your small department, you are the only tenured faculty, how about you become chair?” So I do want to question… just push back a little bit. If you stick around in higher ed for longer than about 15 years, you’re going to start realizing there are ways to get the business done, it is almost impossible that you are truly the only way, almost… not 100%, but like 95%. Now, I don’t want anybody to think that they’re really not irreplaceable, because everybody, at least at SUNY-Oswego, I think, is irreplaceable. But do you really have to do that one thing you really don’t want to do? Isn’t there another way that the institution can find a way to get the work done? And if you think about your colleague who’s really good at saying “no,” you see how that works, that there is a way that if this really is going to push you beyond your limits, there’s a way… there’s a way.

John: So what are some good ways of saying no to those requests that push you a bit beyond your limit?

Rebecca: …or that just provide inequity?

Kendra: Well, I think it depends. One of the things that we didn’t really mention was that the flip side of always saying yes, you know, there the positive reasons that Kristin really just highlighted, but there are also some more practical reasons that aren’t always so positive, like tenure, or time spent as an institution. For newer faculty and staff, it can be really scary, or unclear even, about how much can I say “no” to? What is a directive and what is an option? And if you’re new, if you’re not, I think too a lot of times, maybe at even a public institution where you do have some backing of unions, the employment structures are a little more forgiving. In some cases, it can be really scary to say “no” as a new person, a new faculty member, a new staff member. So I think that there have to be strategies for someone tenured and who have been in a place for a long time can employ that will work really well for them, that might not work so well for someone who’s newer. And it’s important, I think, to maybe flush out what’s a good idea for someone who’s been here for a while and what’s the strategy that a newer person might employ to say no.

John: For new faculty who are struggling with all the other commitments they have to do to be successful and advancing towards tenure, what are some good strategies to say “no?”

Kristin: I think it’s a good question that speaks to learning academic culture. And even if you’ve been around a long time, you’re still learning the academic culture, because your role is always changing. It’s a strategy that an Associate Professor uses or a full professor or someone who has transitioned from faculty to staff, there are all kinds of culture change questions. How do you negotiate this new culture? And the first thing I would say is to be clear what you need to do for your job. And if that’s, “I need to make tenure, so I need to publish this much,” if that’s “I now am in a staff position and staff often have less flexibility in saying yes and no, and these are the outcomes that I need to achieve to keep my job.” So part of it is being absolutely clear. You can say yes to 50 things right now. But if you’re on tenure track, and you don’t get your publications, your master service is not going to pay off. So being very clear on what your job is. And if you don’t know, which is a real possibility sometimes, you develop your kind of committee of mentors. Who do you go to and say, “Hey, I got this really interesting request” or even like “I got a cold outreach from a publisher to write up my course as a textbook. I got a cold outreach from this person I don’t know on campus to fill a university wide-service role.”? You got to have somebody to ask So developing your committee of mentors, not one mentor, but your committee of mentors, because they’re all going to have a different view. And then you combine that with delay, especially like the sidewalk ask, you know what I’m talking about, right? Or like I caught you after this meeting, or I’m just going to do this quick ask. So the first answer is to delay. Say “that sounds like a great opportunity. Let me think about it for a day or two and look at my other commitments,” delay, then you go to your committee of mentors. And if you don’t literally have one, John, you had this great book for a new faculty reading group in the fall Thriving in Academia. And I think you also did a podcast, right?

John: We did, with all of the authors.

Kristin: So in Thriving in Academia, there’s a table, a little flowchart, a flowchart that says, with this service request, what do you think about first? And what do you think of next? So if you can’t go to your committee of mentors, you can go to these three authors, as your committee of mentors and check the flowchart. Does the flowchart say you should do it? Or does the flowchart say, Oh really, think hard about this one. This is a no. What would you add? Kendra?

Kendra: I’m just thinking about myself now. How do I usually say no? And now I’m wondering if I say no often enough? [LAUGHTER] Probably not sometimes. But when I do say no, on the rare occasion, what I try to do is also think about who I can point to, to the person asking me for whatever, to actually fulfill the request. So is there someone who’s better suited to complete this project or do this thing than I am? I think about resources. And I try to make sure that rather than just saying a flat no, and leaving someone hanging, I’m pointing them in the direction of someone who can help, someone who can fill the need and hopefully benefit from it, not just someone that I can shove the work off onto, but someone who can really fill the need, benefit from fulfilling that need, and it can be a mutually beneficial situation. I also think about just being mindful of self in those moments. So re-centering self care, we talk about self care all the time in higher ed, we write about it, we research about it, I think we’re actually really bad at it a lot of the times. You have to really center yourself. When someone is making a request, you have to think about yourself. What am I able to do? It’s like they always say on the plane, you have to put your oxygen mask on first, before you put someone else’s oxygen mask on or else both of you will be out of luck. So I think in those moments, you have to really be mindful about centering yourself and tuning in and knowing where you are: what your bandwidth is, what can you give, and is it something that you can do and still be healthy and still be whole and still be able to do all the other things that you’ve already signed up for, that you’re already responsible for? So I don’t know that those are necessarily strategies, per se, but they’re things to think about when you say no. Sometimes you just have to say no, very clearly and concisely, [LAUGHTER] you can’t do it.

Kristin: Kendra, do you have a script in mind when you say no? Like, do you have the words?

Kendra: That’s actually a really good question. I think when I do say “No,” it’s usually something very pleasant. Like, “I’m sorry, I’m not able to do that.” Sometimes I’ll literally just say, “Unfortunately, I don’t have the bandwidth, but here is someone who might help.” Or “here is another option,” maybe another way of accomplishing this task, another group of people who are already doing this work and can give you some additional assistance. So it’s usually like the nice thing that like the pleasant but clear, “No, I’m not able to do that.” And then the “but here’s how I can help you by sending you in this direction or sending you towards these resources.” That would probably be my script.

Kristin: And part of that is because I think your role is unique. And so when people are asking you, they’re really asking you. [LAUGHTER]

Kendra: Yes.

Kristin: So being able to provide another alternative, or another way that you could contribute, is a really nice option. In other choices. There could be just “That sounds like a great opportunity, but right now, unfortunately, I don’t have the time. I look forward to seeing what the results are. I look forward to seeing the report from that committee.” And no, of course, you don’t always have to provide an explanation. You can just say, “No,” you don’t have to say “I’m too busy.” You can just say no. But perhaps that person is going to be someone you’re asking to serve in the future. So it can be nice to continue to develop the relationship even if you have to say no. Something that frequently serving people sometimes forget that they can do is also think about how much time this commitment is going to take and asking for that time back. So let’s say you’re in a small department and your colleague is injured and is out for half of the semester in the course that only you can double up on. So this is one of those where you’re almost irreplaceable, there really isn’t anybody else who can step in. And you know that if you’re injured in the future, you’d really like your colleague to step up. So there’s a little bit of a social contract where you want to say yes, but that’s a significant time commitment. So what are you going to lose from spending your time on that and how can you get it back in the future? So you could ask, if the area of your rub is really financial, you can ask for extra pay, and you probably should get extra pay either way, because it is extra work. But if your area of rub is research productivity, that you’ve been really trying to write, you can say, “Well, if I’m going to do this, then I need a course release the next semester” and negotiate for the thing that you are having to sacrifice to see if you can get it back in a different way. And that is not an unusual thing. So it wouldn’t be like the weirdest thing that anyone has ever asked for, even if you’ve never thought about it before, someone else has thought of that and asked for it before. So you can always ask, what is your trade off =and how can you trade that back? If you’re a junior faculty and your chair is asking you to do something that you really don’t think you have the time to do, but you’re a little concerned about the chair ask you can say these are the things I’m doing right now, w hat would you suggest I take off my plate? How would you suggest I reorganize this? I’d love to say yes to this, but right now I don’t have the time. How would you suggest that I prioritize so that I am ready for my next tenure review? So there are ways… there are ways. But it is good to have a script in mind because we can all say “no” when we’re actually not being asked to do anything, you could just make one up right now. But if you’re in a higher pressure situation where someone you care about their opinion is making an ask right at that moment, it can be hard to come up with an answer unless you already have one in mind. So “that’s a great opportunity. Let me think about it for a couple of days.” Go ahead, use that one, just go right ahead. Even if it’s me doing the ask, you can say it right back to me, I’ll be okay with that.

Rebecca: One strategy I’ve used too is, in that delaying tactic, is always asking for clarification: what the responsibility will be, what the time commitment will be, what the meeting schedule is, so that you actually have enough information to make an informed decision. Because often the ask doesn’t come with all that information.

Kristin: And you know what happens when you ask those questions, right? The person making the ask is like, “Oh, I don’t have answers to all those. We should have goals and a timeline.” … you know, good stuff.

Rebecca: Sometimes you really want to say yes to something because it just is very appealing for whatever reason. What are some strategies so that you can say yes? We’ve mentioned negotiating for time or other resources. But the other thing that I think about is you look at all the things on your plate, and see what are some things I could roll off of, if I want to roll on to something new? Or if I want to pursue something different? What can I get rid of or step away from? Are there strategies for being able to step away from some of the things that you were committed to before that we could think about in terms of strategies for ultimately saying yes, but saying no to something else? [LAUGHTER]

Kendra: One of the things that we didn’t necessarily mention before in the saying “no,” but that applies here is this idea of acting as a consultant. So if a great opportunity comes up, and you really want to say yes to it, but you have a whole bunch of other things that you’ve already committed to, it might be a great time to reevaluate those other things and determine what are the things that I really need to put the legwork into and be boots on the ground on? And what are the things that I can provide a perspective on or give some guidance on in a more passive way, that then frees me up to maybe actually do the heavy lift for this other opportunity? That’s really great that I really want to be involved in. So I think that’s one way to move yourself closer to a yes [LAUGHTER] and an offload of some of the other things that might be standing in the way of that “yes,” Kristin, if you have any thoughts?

Kristin: Yeah, and again, thinking about I say, a five year plan… some people actually have those. I’ve never had a five year plan. But I admire people who do. But I do have my idea of my career trajectory, what I find really rewarding and what I don’t. And when I’m offered a service opportunity that aligns to the things that I find really rewarding, that it is exciting and I’ll learn something new about, and be able to contribute about things that I value, I want to say yes, even if it’s really time consuming. So yes, I look at the combination of things that I’m doing, think about how they contribute to both the things that I value and what the institution has hired me to do, because I do have a job that I have to do. And there are always ways to rollback your commitment on some. Many service opportunities require only an intermittent time commitment, you got to really hit it hard for a couple days here and then you can back off for several months, and figuring out how to fit that together. And consult, consult, consult, ask other people, I actually used the flowchart myself in the book at one point a couple months ago saying, “Oh, this looks interesting. Should I do that?” My flowchart says no. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: And the flowchart can’t possibly be wrong. [LAUGHTER]

John: Actually, the flowchart most often says no, because of concerns about faculty taking on too many responsibilities.

Kristin: Yes, because the first question in the flowchart is, “Do you have the time?” which leads you to “no” a lot of the time but it was also of low institutional value and not really important to me and not really important to anyone else, and I didn’t have the time and like “flowchart says, “no.” I was like, “well, probably right, [LAUGHTER] those are all good points that I should have been thinking more about.”

Kendra: Well, Kristin, I think to your point, too, about going back to your five-year plan and think about your career trajectory, and how well the things you’re involved in are serving you toward that end, it is absolutely okay to go back to previous commitments, and say “I had a wonderful time, this has been a great opportunity. I’ve learned a lot. but this doesn’t necessarily fit anymore in my larger plan. This might not be as helpful for me in my trajectory as it once was, and so I’m going to maybe end my involvement as of such and such a date.” Sometimes it helps to give folks a timeline on your end, clearing your plate for other things doesn’t mean that you have to immediately walk out the door on whatever else you had going on, right? …It’s probably not advisable, actually. But I can tell you that I’ve reached out to folks to ask them to serve on things or to participate in things that they’ve been participating on. And they’ve had really nice responses that are like “Kendra, I really appreciate this opportunity. I’ve really enjoyed the work that I’ve been doing, but I’ve taken on some new responsibilities that are more in line with some of my other interests or other needs or professional development, and so I won’t be able to participate in this anymore.” And I can’t be upset about it, it’s a lovely response. And I totally understand that folks want to develop, they have other interests, they need to be able to spend their time and spread it around sometimes and they’ve really been helpful to me in the time that they were able to engage in the thing that I needed them for. And I’m more than happy to say, “We’re going to miss you so much, you’ve been amazing, but I wish you the best of luck in this new thing that you’re really interested in. And let me know if I can be helpful to you.” Or let me know if these two different interests have any synergies or if there’s ever any way we can collaborate in the future. So it’s certainly okay to sometimes walk back from previous commitments very tactfully and very appropriately, but it can be done.

Rebecca: I think it’s also possible to say yes to just a part of something…

Kristin: Yeah.

Rebecca: …like, maybe the ask is like this big, like, it’s huge, but what they really want you for, or where you could provide the most value, is during a brainstorm session, or designing how something might be implemented, but not actually work on the implementation. So there’s a way to sometimes contribute without committing as much as the ask was originally.

John: …and defining a scope upfront.

Kristin: Yeah, that’s a great point. With all the searches that we do, I hear a lot from faculty about the incredible amount of time that goes into searches, and different ways that departments organize them that burden some people versus the others, but I think that’s a great example. If you can say, ”I’m gonna take candidates out to dinner,” which is a huge time commitment, but it’s very focused, it only happens during the visits, “I don’t have time to review all of the applicants and to serve on the committee in that sense, but I can take them all out to dinner,” there are trade offs that can work better for life in the way that your time is structured, that you can see that other people can’t see. So nobody’s going to suggest to you, how about you just do part of this, but they may be very open to that response.

Kendra: I would say in 9 times out of 10, someone’s asking you to do something and your response is, “Here’s the piece that I can do, I’m not able to provide assistance in these other areas,” that person is going to be more than happy with what you are able to contribute. So those are great points and great ways to be able to clear room to say yes.

John: What are some of the differences in the constraints of faculty and staff when they’re being asked to engage in service roles?

Kristin: I think the differences there are really baked into the differences in the roles, that faculty are expected to serve institutional priorities, but in some ways, almost work as independent contractors. It’s like ”here’s work to do, figure out how you’re going to get it all done in this amount of time, we’re going to come check on you in a year, see how you’re doing,” whereas staff are expected to stress institutional goals on a day-to-day basis. They work much tighter in teams, and their collaborative skills are usually much more highly valued. And because of that, if a faculty member says no, the expectation is well, that’s because they’re busy doing the other stuff that they’re supposed to do. We don’t even need to ask them what that is right now, because they’re hopefully writing. But if a staff member says no, in some ways, it’s weird. Staff say yes. Because so much of their work is being asked, being asked to lead, being asked to run a program, being asked to show up at 11 o’clock at night to serve a midnight breakfast… being asked, and the expected answer in many cases is yes. So being able to constrain the role and say no is often more fraught for a staff member. Kendra, what has been your experience working with staff and helping coach them to shape their time as much as they can?

Kendra: Yeah, that’s a great way to articulate the differences between faculty and staff, I think. I don’t know if faculty have performance programs.

Kristin: …not like that, not like staff do.

Kendra: Yes, exactly. Staff have sometimes very prescriptive performance programs that literally layout, area by area, theme by theme, what all of the duties and expectations are going to be. And then of course, there’s the other duties as assigned. So it can be very difficult for a staff member to say no, and it can also be very confusing, I think, in some cases for staff to understand “What are the things that I can potentially say ‘no’ to? What are the things I’m given latitude on to exercise autonomy and say, ‘No, I’m not interested in this,’ versus what are the things that are more imperative.’” When working with staff, what I try to do is be very clear with the folks I work with, with my colleagues, about what are the expectations and the needs versus the options and opportunities. So I tried to be really collaborative with colleagues and say, “Hey, there’s an opportunity that’s coming up,” or “there’s a need that needs to be filled, you have expertise you have, whatever the reason, I see you as a great fit for this.” Now, the conversation can then go one of two ways. One way, which is what I try to always have it be is, “Please let me know what you think. What are your thoughts about this opportunity? Are you interested? Is this something that you would want to do?” And that gives the staff member agency to think about what’s on the table and to make a decision about whether or not they want to be involved. The other option is to say, “This is something that needs to be done. you’re the person strategically for the job, so I really need your help in completing this.” And that’s less of an option, but at least it gives folks and understanding of like, okay, this is not necessarily optional. This is something that I need to do to be a strategic and fully collaborative member of this team. So sometimes it can be a little tricky. But I typically find that if I’m really transparent with my colleagues, and let them know, “Hey, here’s what I’m thinking about. Here’s why this makes sense. And this is either something that I’m offering to you that you have agency to say yes or no about, or this is something that is part of our strategic plan that I really need you to be responsible for. And here’s what you being responsible for it looks like.” Folks seem to deal with that really well. I think it’s much harder for staff when there aren’t clear expectations and when they’re also not given any input in decision making, when you’re just “voluntold.” …not even really voluntoldl, like literally just, “this is what you’re going to be doing.” It’s always better to include folks in the decisions that you’re making, and to provide as many opportunities for options as possible.

Kristin: Absolutely, you can see the differences in other ways too, like if a faculty member is asked to serve, usually no one is asked except the faculty member, the department chair isn’t asked, the dean isn’t asked, unless it’s someone like, “Can you think of anybody?” and then you suggest them, but usually it’s straight to the faculty member and it’s up to them to figure out whether or not they want to say no. Oftentimes, when staff are asked to serve in different roles, their supervisor is asked first, could you release them for this? Would it be okay with you if they do this? And sometimes faculty who move into administrative roles will start to experience that difference in culture in subtle ways and may not understand, like, what is happening around them? How come when I’m in this committee meeting, only the faculty say no to something. the staff say yes, or how come when I approached this person for help, I got a little cranky email from their supervisor. So it’s good to know that there’s a difference and also to respect that the two kind of different cultures, that both have a role and their pros and cons, and to know what you’re stepping into when you’re asking people to do things.

Rebecca: I think this highlights a little bit of what you were mentioning before, Kristin, about knowing what your role is or what your position is. Because sometimes staff would also have the opportunity to ask a clarifying question like, “How does this fit into my performance plan?” or “How does this help us meet the goals or initiatives that my division or my group is meant to be achieving?”

Kristin: Absolutely.

Rebecca: Because if there’s not alignment there, then that’s a pretty easy “no.”

Kristin: Absolutely. Do either of you two have strategies that have worked for you?

John: I have never been very good at these decisions. Rebecca?

John: I say no, sometimes.

Kristin: How do you do it?

Rebecca: I’ve worked really hard to make sure, and it took a long time to do this, but to align my scholarship and research and creative practice with service and my institutional responsibilities. And there’s pretty good alignment with those things at this time. And when something seems like it’s not in alignment, that’s when I have a pretty clear “no.” When it does seem aligned, that’s when I have a harder time saying “no.”

Kristin: And you don’t want to.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Kristin: That’s a great strategy. And the people I have known and worked with that say no the best, they have developed over time clear guidelines, very much like that. I worked with someone who was really good. This is something I could never do. I could never say no to a student who wanted to work with me in research. I don’t think I’ve ever said no to a student who wanted to work with me in research. I have occasionally matched them to someone who’s a better match. That’s different. But he was very good at saying no to students who wanted to work with him in research, which was like my Achilles heel, but he just had very clear guidelines: “I only work with students who are at this point, X, Y and Z,” and they were not unreasonable things. And then he would say yes to those students. And it opened up time for him to really mentor them. And I’ve been lucky to work with people like you and him. You have a way that you approach your career that you have thought about. This is where my limit is, so I can say yes to these students who want to work with me and really work with them. But I can say yes to this giant time commitment, because I know it contributes to my research and to my service,

Rebecca: I think that it can help to also just have colleagues around you who say “no.”

Kristin: Yes.

Rebecca: …and seek out that camaraderie. [LAUGHTER]

Kendra: I think that’s a great point. And it goes back to something Kristin said about when you’re that faculty member, you don’t understand the faculty staff. dynamic and you reach out to a staff member to ask for help and get a cranky letter or cranky email back from their supervisor. That does happen. But the reality is, I think we need to, again, be more supportive, particularly of newer colleagues. I’m thinking of new staff very specifically, and I’m thinking about this from the perspective of a supervisor. I think it’s really important when we’re mentoring new staff, and helping them develop professionally and think about what the next steps are for them, we also need to provide some additional support to them in helping them to say no, helping them to really prioritize and think about what serves them and what doesn’t. And one of the things that I’ve said to folks that I’ve worked with in the past is they’ll come to me and say, “Well, Kendra, someone’s asking me to do this, or this or that, and I’m not really sure that I want to do it, or I just don’t know.” So like, okay, let’s talk about how this fits into your professional trajectory. Does it makes sense for you, does it make sense in the work that you’re doing? And if the conclusion that we come to is really no, this doesn’t serve you, then by all means, feel free, if you don’t feel comfortable saying to this person, for whatever reason, no, if you’re too new to feel comfortable doing that, then by all means, I’ll be happy to reply as your supervisor and say, “This is not going to work, this doesn’t fit into whatever,” I’ll just say no for you. Or you can always feel free to say, I spoke with my supervisor, she doesn’t think it’s a great time for this, I don’t have the bandwidth. Feel free to throw me under the bus. Because I do think that part of what I have to help folks learn is, of course, how to advocate for themselves and how to be full adult professionals, but it’s also to be supportive, and to help them to kind of get their legs under them. And sometimes part of that is helping them say no.

Kristin: Awesome,

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Rebecca: Please tell us how you’re going to redo higher ed [LAUGHTER] and make this better?

Kristin: That would be awesome. And you know, the funny thing about that question is that it’s always a problem that we don’t keep track of service better. But the other side of me is like, “Oh my gosh, what a pain that would be, a huge amount of work for very little payoff.” Is there a better way to do it? So I don’t have an answer on what’s next for supporting service, except to be more proactive in my request to say this is what the commitment is, let’s talk about your current commitments and how we can shape what you’re doing to support both what you want to get done and what I’d really like to ask you to do, [LAUGHTER] not just the single ask, yeah, not just like, here’s the one thing, but instead to ask in a more comprehensive way.

Kendra: And I also don’t have any solutions for fixing higher ed, unfortunately, at this time. [LAUGHTER] But I do think that we can also make sure to just model the behaviors that we’re talking about, again, just being mindful of our own personal practices and making sure that we’re not just talking about saying no, but that we’re actually doing it for ourselves and so that the folks that we work with and work for can see what this looks like and be mindful for themselves too, about how they need to think and work through this space. I think that’s one small thing we can do.

Rebecca: Well, thank you for joining us.

Kristin: Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.

Kendra: It’s been fabulous. Thank you so much for having me.

Kristin: It’s great talking to both of you.

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

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

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267. Fumble Forward

Posted in classroom community, equity, gender bias, higher education, instructional communication, learning, pedagogy, race, racism, social justice, teaching
December 14, 2022

Preconceptions and biases often interfere with productive discussions and interpersonal interactions. In this episode, Donna Mejia joins us to discuss strategies that she has developed to address these preconceptions and to humanize classroom interactions. Donna is the Chancellor’s Scholar in Residence at the Renee Crown Wellness Institute and an Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Preconceptions and biases often interfere with productive discussions and interpersonal interactions. In this episode, we discuss strategies that one professor has developed to address these preconceptions and to humanize classroom interactions in her classes.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Donna Mejia. Donna is the Chancellor’s Scholar in Residence at the Renee Crown Wellness Institute and an Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus. Welcome, Donna.

Donna: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. It’s nice to be here.

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

Donna: I am drinking tea. It’s quite lovely. I have a rose tea with some vanilla in it.

Rebecca: That sounds quite nice.

Donna: Yeah. What are you drinking?

Rebecca: I have… double checked the name on it this time, John, because I failed recently. This is an All India black tea blend. That’s what it’s called, it’s the official name.

Donna: That’s hardcore.

Rebecca:[LAUGHTER ] But, it’s good.

John: All India, okay…

Rebecca: [LAUGHTER] All of India, I don’t know [LAUGHTER]…

John:…[LAUGHTER] which makes it a more inclusive tea, I suppose.

Rebecca: That’s one way of looking at it, from a brand of tea that has very imperial names as well. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, I’m speaking of imperialism, I have an Irish Breakfast tea, which may very well have come from India.

Donna: Well, there you go.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your chapter in Picture a Professor. The title of your Chapter is “The Superpowers of Visual Ambiguity: Transfiguring my Experience of Colorism and Multiheritage Identity for Educational Good.” Could you tell us a little bit about the chapter to introduce everyone to it?

Donna: Thank you, I’ll be happy to. The chapter is really about my lifelong experience as someone who is visually ambiguous to most when it comes to trying to categorize my ethnicity, and a Creole Choctaw woman with at least six bloodlines running through my veins. And I noticed that in addition to being a woman in education… in higher education, students frequently challenge the authority of women in the classroom and they test us in ways that they do not test their male professors… but I have the intersectional complexity of also being challenged as unsettling for people who didn’t know how to categorize me. They weren’t sure if I exhibit loyalty to black heritage, to white heritage, to any other part of my heritage, if they could even guess what it was. And because of that, I realized that many people had a very difficult time proceeding in personal interactions with me in the classroom, because they weren’t sure what camp I fell into. So rather than seeing me as just an educator, the cultural programming of needing to know who I was prevented them from feeling safe in my classrooms. And it was biases that they were unaware of. And so I really started working with my students to, at the outset of the course, create some pedagogical tools that would allow us all to humanize each other, and not rely on categories, and assumptions of those categories, to determine what our interactions will look like. So, I am working at a predominately white institution. And so even sometimes, the one African-American student in the classroom wouldn’t know how to position themselves to me, because they weren’t sure how black I was in my identity. And so they were afraid to sometimes bring their own lived experiences forward in our conversations. And I just felt that the ambiguity of my parents which left everybody questioning: “Who is she? What is she going to say if I really, really am honest here? Am I gonna offend her, I can’t tell.” And so I decided to have some fun with it, and try and get rid of the fear factor and make it possible for us to all humanize each other. So the chapter is the summary of about three pedagogical tools. I have many, but those were the three that I came back to over and over again, and they’re lovely in their impact, and far reaching beyond just my classrooms.

John: In the chapter, you talk about a few situations where your racial identity was challenged by others, either by black individuals or by white individuals. Could you just tell us a little bit about some of those examples of the challenges that you were faced with there.

Donna: Great question. Interestingly, I remember my first job out of college was an administrative post for a university and I was sent as a representative to recruit in African-American communities, and a parent in the audience contacted the university angry that they would send a white woman to speak to the black community, not knowing that I grew up identifying as black. I’m also Choctaw, indigenous, as a woman. And many times, the departments on the campus that I work with, just didn’t know to loop me in on announcements or events that were happening, because they had no idea that I was also an indigenous bloodline. Probably the most dramatic thing that happened was in South Africa, when a little boy who could not have been more than, say, eight years old, ran up to a car window, and started to scream at me and tell me I was a devil, and that I had no right to live and that I was the enemy of all black people and just screaming at me at a red light while sitting there waiting for the traffic light to change. And then another dramatic incident… last one… I was in Taiwan, in one of the outdoor markets and a group of Chinese women started forming a group behind me yelling at me in Chinese. And at the time, I was not fluent enough to understand what was being said, I was with a host. And I asked the host, “What’s going on?” …and she kept trying to urge me for ward: “Come on, just keep walking, just keep walking.” And I said “I think they’re yelling at me,” and so I said, “Please tell me, what are they upset about? What have I done?” She said, “They want you to remove your wig. They don’t like your fake hair.” And I said “My hair is not fake, I grew this.[LAUGHTER] This is my hair.” And when I turned to face them, and to smile and say, “Oh friends, this is my hair,” they ran up to me and began to try and pull what they thought was a wig off. And so my scalp was getting clawed at and my hair pulled, and security had to run over and escort me out of the market for my safety. So I just feel that it’s less dramatic than it used to be. I would say in recent years, it’s calmed down quite a bit as Inter-ethnic and multi-heritage unions increased around the planet and there are more folks that look like me. I’m far from the only one. I just, I think, have a bit of a neon sign because I wear my hair in its own natural texture, I don’t chemically alter it, I don’t change the color. I have blue eyes, I have honey blonde hair, and I wear it in natural dreadlocks down my back. And so many people just don’t know what to do with that. There’s just too many cultural symbols in a mashup and colliding in their consciousness that they don’t know how to configure in an understanding.

Rebecca: At the start of our conversation, you mentioned having a little fun with this idea in terms of developing pedagogical tools, and one that you’ve talked about as the assumption index. Can you talk a little bit about what this tool is and how you use it in your classes to address implicit bias?

Donna: Thank you. The assumption index is a tool that aims to get at the heart of what we presume to be true about a topic before we have even cracked the book open. So how does it interfere with our learning, we’re trying to get to the heart of that. And I developed this approach at the beginning of the class after being in the classroom and discussing African dance traditions with students. And having many of them describe Africa as a country as opposed to a continent. And realizing that there were distortions in our understandings., I had to rewind frequently, and say, “oh, let’s get back to that assumption. It’s not a country, let’s go from there.” So it really is a set of questions, it can range from 8 questions to 20. I can customize it every time I go into a different topic or a different classroom, and try to get to the heart of what we presume to be true. And so for example, in a dance class, I would say, “Who taught you that dance? How were you introduced to this particular tradition? Where’s this tradition done? Are there movements that are allowed on female bodies that may differ for male bodies? Is there a gender assignment in how the dance was performed? Where is this dance not done? What is the role of observers? Are they involved or not involved? What kinds of dance have you been told not to do?” And so people get a little closer to understanding the value system that they’re coming in with and the reference point they have for normalcy in these traditions. And so, as we start to discuss the results of their assumption index, we get to those beautiful, honest differences of how we’ve all been indoctrinated, and then that gives us a better starting point for analysis. And I feel that in all of the human sciences, a positionality statement is a requirement, is considered good methodology. In some of the hard or other natural sciences, for example, a biologist does not have to give a positionality statement before they write up the results from their laboratory. They don’t have to say, “Hi, my name is so and so. I have this many kids, I was raised in the Midwest. And here are my religious influences and my economic background.” In the human sciences, we know that we are not blank slates, all of us come in with social programming, and most of it absorbed in very subconscious and subtle ways. And so the ability to render that visible before we assume to give ourselves agency in analyzing a topic for me has become critical, very important.

John: And how does this work in terms of student reactions, has it made them more open and helped reduce some of their biases?

Donna: It has, because it has helped negate guilt. They’re able to discuss their differences with curiosity, with some humor. There’s a lot of head shaking and nodding and smiling, and sometimes people getting up and even hugging each other, saying “Oh, that happened to me too. That’s what my dad did, or that’s what my mom did.” And so there’s a little bit of commiserating, but also identifying that no one is wrong, no one is being dishonest. No one is being harmful in their intentions, that we’ve all planted our pins in different places, and then turn to look at the same issue. And so we try to take those different vantage points as a superpower. Like, “What does this look like from your vantage point and your identity and your background? How is this subject situated to your lived experience?” …and each person is allowed to give that perspective with others reserving judgment. And then we can then neutralize those assumptions and talk about it from the tradition’s own perspective. We change the agency and move it to the subject matter. And like “What’s the phenomenology of the participants in this tradition? What are they experiencing as opposed to what we are reading and projecting onto their experiences?”

John: And you mentioned how this works in the human sciences. But you also suggest in your chapter that this could be applied just as easily in a physics class, for example. Could you talk a little bit about how this might be adapted in other disciplines?

Donna: Absolutely. I think an assumption index helps us to understand the biases that exist in even the questions that occurred to us in our studies, the things that we’re willing to investigate. For example, if a physicist is part of a design team, studying an exoplanet, and looking for life on another planet, if they have a worldview, that permit intelligence in other life forms, the kind of approach they’ll have to discovering another life form may differ than if they feel that we’re just a random soup of chemical reactions that happen to be intelligent. And so neither one nor the other may be good or bad in this conversation, but for purposes of an example, it does change the kinds of considerations, thought parameters, and questions that occur to us. And so I feel that at all levels, some type of an assumption index, or some type of positionality statement would serve all knowledge generation and all shared relational analysis. I think it would just serve us to bring a more honest framework. I was just visiting yesterday with a group of climate scientists and researchers. And we were talking about the concept of positionality. It was something that was never covered in their own methodologies. And they were fascinated and hungry and excited about it, because it helped them to understand that we are not completely objective. And it takes pressure off from them, to feel as if they have to walk into a community and be all knowing when they’re conducting a study. And it’s okay to employ some intellectual humility, to build relationships, to start to welcome some participatory research so that we are informed and our assumptions of what we come in with, for example, a scientific study on climate can be much more marginal and in relationship with the communities in which the scientific study is being done. We are no longer treating people as subjects or communities or identities as subjects and instead, we are inviting them into the intellectual generation process for academia. I think that’s a problem that happened in the past that was kind of enshrined by anthropology… that people would run out to a community that they considered exotic and unfamiliar, do some films, make some observations, and then run back to academia, create these studies, show films to each other, and discuss it amongst the intellectual elite. And nowhere in there did you have the voice of the actual participants from the study. And I’ve seen so many examples of it as I research dance traditions from around the world. The documentation was done exclusively in U.S. and Eurocentric communities. And so it really helps us to relocate wonder and awe. Then they can let cultural differences be a point of fascination inform our methodologies and our analyses, rather than feeling as if we have to come in understanding and knowing everything. It’s just an outdated mode of education that is worthy of retirement.

Rebecca: I really love this strategy, because it’s not that complicated [LAUGHTER] to really put into action. And it really sets the stage for interesting conversations and in a way to enter into a topic area. So for people that are interested in trying something like this on their own… So you create an index. Do you have students complete it for homework and then you talk about it? do you do it in class? Can you talk a little bit about what the actual kind of practical nature of implementing it looks like in your class?

Donna: We do it upfront, first day in class. And then we use it as a get-to-know-you conversation afterwards. But I also teach the second tool in the kit that’s offered in Picture a Professor, and that’s called “fumble forward.” So we set some ground rules for the conversation. F umble forward is one of those tools. And it’s a social contract. When someone is about to ask a question in which they may not have the right terminology or the most up-to-date terminologies, if they haven’t located their firm opinions on something yet, or they just think that what they’re going to say has the potential to be harmful or offensive, they can preface their question or their comment by saying, “Hey, y’all, I’m about to fumble with my words.” And that’s short code for the entire community to answer back “fumble forward.” And that’s a contract that we’ve all agreed to, we know what it means. It means that for the next five minutes, we are going to reserve judgment, we are going to allow confusion, we’re going to lean in together. And that means maybe a little bit of verbal surgery and mutual exploration. And it means that we’re not going to leave the class and talk trash about that person, because they had conceded “I’m not sure how I want to say this, but I have a question. I’m trying to locate it.” And I really want students to feel that there’s a safe arena for them to experiment with not knowing. Faculty as well. I use fumble forward questions with questions raised all the time. But before we discuss the assumption index, we practice fumble forward so that as our differences start to come up in that first get-to-know-you speed dating conversation on the first day, if someone says, “Oh, I’m different from how you were raised, fumble forward,” and everyone will say, “Yes, fumble forward,” and they’ll say something like, “Yeah, I was not allowed to do that, it was against my religion.” And then we get into some really interesting exchanges. Your curiosity leads the way. And kindness has been instituted as running the space as opposed to finger pointing weirdness and eye rolling. So I really wanted to bring the curiosity back. Fumble forward allows us to do that.

Rebecca: We’ve got some tools here. We’ve got our assumption index, we’ve got fumble forward, and I believe modeling mutuality is also on the list of things. [LAUGHTER] Can you talk a little bit about that tool as well?

Donna: Yes, I have a pledge that I put on my syllabus so that students have in writing that everything I’m asking them, then I asked myself as well. I think the power differentials in the classroom need to be addressed and called out, because there’s nothing wrong with expectations that really invite improvement and strength and experimentation out of students. But I think many educators forget how intimidating those things can be if they are not articulated or elucidated clearly. They just feel like an unspoken social contract that is held over a student’s head and I wanted to get past that. So I have a syllabus pledge that basically says things such as “Your dignity is important to me, and in return, I need your courage and your open thinking and your active involvement, do we have a deal?” Or I will concede what I have learned openly and tell you what I have not yet learned. And I will give you citations and sources for everything that I do know. Because I believe that the intellectual humility has to be modeled. We don’t need more arrogant go-getters in society. We know where that has gotten this in our current state. It is much better for us to help people to understand how to build relationships, how to understand our interdependence, how to truly embrace, I think, the excitement of building one’s cultural competency in those interactions. And without that kind of practice, they’ll get out there into the world and just create the same harms and perpetuate the same weirdnesses that have us in our very polarized society. And so my effort as an educator is to say, “Choose your topic, we can talk about physics, we can talk about dance, we can talk about biology, we can talk about history, but before we talk about anything, let’s look at what we presume to be true and let’s create mutual respect in how we’re going to unfold this exchange. Those simple things have completely changed my co-working environments, my classrooms, and my family interactions. And I have had the delight of having students return from school breaks in time to say that they used fumble forward at the Thanksgiving table. That it’s that rippling, out and about, because it’s easily accessible, it makes sense and provides us an edge whenever we’re about to collapse into weirdness, like “This is about to get painful. This is about to get weird.” …and instead of panicking, backing off and shutting the room down, people are able to lean in and say, “Ah, I have tools for staying at this edge. I have tools for keeping negotiations going. I have a tool that allows me to listen well.”

Rebecca: That sounds like the toolbox that should be in every first-year seminar.[LAUGHTER]

Donna:[LAUGHTER] I hope it goes far and wide, to be honest with you.

John: Well, one thing we can say is that Jessamyn Neuhaus, the editor of the book, has picked up on this and we’ve been doing I think four maybe five reading groups with her and some of her colleagues from SUNY-Plattsburgh. And on several occasions, she has used fumble forward as a way of addressing difficult issues when people weren’t quite sure how to state something or how to raise something. And so it is spreading and it is having an impact.

Donna: I am beyond thrilled to hear that. And I get reports back all the time, surprising areas. Someone from social psychology contacted me and said, a student in my class said I’d like to share a tool I learned from a woman named Donna Mejia called fumble forward and the instructor knows me and has been well aware of the tool. And she said her heart just warmed and melted and that the whole room felt celebratory for her. So if it’s the one big idea that I was able to give the planet. Hell yeah, I think that’s worth celebrating, that we learned how to talk to each other, with more ease, a little more kindness, and with less fear. I may not be remembered as a choreographer, I may not be remembered as a writer, but if someone 300 years from now says “fumble forward,” and everyone in the room knows what it means. I have made a lasting contribution to humanity that gives me honor and pride and I can take my last breath smiling.

Rebecca: And it’s definitely worth smiling for. I really love how it’s not really simple, because none of these things are actually simple.[LAUGHTER] But it’s such an easy tool to learn. And then one of those things that clearly takes time to perfect.

Donna: It takes practice…

Rebecca:…Yeah…

Donna: …But it provides, perhaps, the foundation to be courageous in their practice. And at the heart of it, I’ve expanded fumble forward into everything from a semester-long course, to a three-day immersion workshop for industry, to K-12 educators finding out what it looks like in K-12 classrooms. It’s being expanded. So the tool leads me, I may have originated the phrase, but the tool itself is taking on a life of its own. And I’d love to see it in many communities.

John: Fumble forward is a wonderful approach when you have a group of cooperative people in the classroom who are all very open and you’ve got a nice sense of belonging. But I can imagine there would be circumstances where that may break down, where someone may come in and regularly engage in microaggressions, or explicit forms of racist behavior, for example. What happens then?

Donna: There is an issue with fumble forward that I have to emphasize in that it’s not intended to be an escape route and it’s not a foolproof tool. As you talked about things being very complex, fumble forward offers the possibility of continuing when an interaction is starting to get strange or become harmful; it finds a reset point. But I have also observed that when people feel they may be outmatched in communication skills or in an environment where they feel they are outnumbered, the folks simply don’t want to address an issue, they will avoid it, their chosen strategy is to completely avoid engagement. So fumble forward is sometimes about trying and then acknowledging that the space to continue doesn’t exist, and choosing a different part of the toolkit. So I would like to say I think communication is always about trying, about leaving the door open and ajar to a possibility. But I’ve also done quite a bit of study around harmful individuals that quite honestly may have pathological levels of communication dysfunction, or may thrive or enjoy inflicting pain, and being tormenting in the kind of words they slang around. So I think we’ve all encountered those high-conflict individuals. And so fumble forward again, is about giving them the possibility to choose differently. But if at times` they’re not willing to make that choice then a boundary is needed. And safety is more important than everything. With individuals that have significantly unseen distortions in their perceptions, or are under the undue influence of harmful ideologies, and oppressive ideologies. My experience is, as a teacher, number one to interrupt harm when it is occuring in the classroom, to hit a pause button and say, “Excuse me, I’m going to interrupt and I need for everyone to take a moment. What was just said has the potential to be incredibly harmful, if not very harmful. I’d like for everyone to take a piece of paper out and take five minutes and capture your thoughts. And then I’m going to ask if you’re willing to share that paper with me and hand it to me as you leave the classroom today. I’d like to make sure I take in everyone’s responses. And then I will address what has unfolded and we will share in our space today so we can have a strategy for figuring out how to situate it in our understanding and share with each other. And so, for example, that’s one tool that I would employ, but to not let people quite honestly enact harm on others in my presence, not on my watch. That’s different from someone saying, “I don’t understand,” or “I disagree.” To me, that is part of classroom dialogue, and has to be protected. So if someone is devaluing another, or if someone is routinely aggressive and tries to basically devalue or dismiss the lived experience or the insights of another, that’s where I would say, “Okay, tell you what, everybody, we’re going to Google this, let’s get some facts first, and then we’ll proceed. And then I want you to capture your thoughts.” I just try not to let it become a slinging mudfest, that we have tools to help people organize their thinking, sequence their thinking, prioritize their talking points, and then even move around the classroom. I think it’s helpful to resituate people from their physical locations to say, “Okay, and folks that would like to discuss this from a ‘yes’ perspective, you’re welcome to come sit over here. Let’s talk to each other for a little bit and get your talking points together. For those of you that disagree with this point, I invite you to come over here by me, and let’s go ahead and rate some talking points, and then start to facilitate exchange, as opposed to individuals feeling like they are vulnerable and on their own in those spaces, trying to navigate hatred.

Rebecca: I really appreciate that you’ve taken the time to underscore boundaries for us because [LAUGHTER] it’s so important. We can say we want to be inclusive and welcoming. But there’s boundaries to that because allowing people to say whatever they want is not actually inclusive. Despite that [LAUGHTER] sometimes that comes up in conversation. But that’s how we make it inclusive, it’s often not. So I really appreciate you talking about the boundaries, but also just walking us through some structures that we can put in place to facilitate something productive because sometimes we don’t always have those structures in our back pocket ready to go and it’s important that we remember to have those and remember what our toolkit is. And you’ve brought us a lot of great tools today.

John: And I really like also the way that you call attention to the problem right at the time, but then give everyone a chance to reflect and think about it and then come back in later, because often things like that can escalate very quickly. And it’s very easy to come up with responses that may not help build a community and may not address the problem, but it may lead to more division in the future. So, it sounds like a wonderful approach.

Donna: Thank you. It’s also hard sometimes locate articulate questions when you are triggered, if something hateful has been shared in a room on your watch, sometimes, trying to come up with a very insightful and progressively welcoming question [LAUGHTER] isn’t accessible. And so giving everyone a moment to think, to land to ground for me is important. But I also do try and say, “What questions will be asked at that situation?” So with someone who shows unbelievable biases and harmful biases in their statement, I would ask the question, “What do you presume to be true about this tradition that you’re commenting? What are your assumptions about it?” And then really take it back to what have they been taught? What are their values? What’s important to them? …and try not to have them feel like they’re under a microscope, but also to say “You put some stuff out there that will require you to be accountable for the harm that it created. So if you’re willing to take responsibility and radical ownership of your words, I also want to give you the opportunity to explain how you came to see anything you did.” And I try to facilitate that process.

Rebecca: I wish I had your class when I was a student. [LAUGHTER] Just thinking about all things that went bad as a student in different situations and how it could have been handled much better.

Donna: Me too, my classroom experiences growing up were frightening at times, unnerving, never comfortable. I can only think of maybe two teachers throughout my K-12 education that I felt I could be myself with. And one teacher in particular, I admired tremendously. And he pulled me aside one day, he called me into his office and said, “How do you do it?” I looked at him, I had no idea what he was talking about. I just said “What?” And he said, “How’d you write that paper?” And apparently, the paper that I turned in for him, he thought was way too psychologically advanced for my age. And he just presumed that I had cheated on a paper. And I had looked up to him so much. And to have him presume that I didn’t have the capacity, the cognitive capacity, to analyze like that made me realize that he’s dealing with his racism in his assumptions. And I patiently managed up and explained bullet point by bullet point, how I wrote the paper and how I proceeded in my analysis and why. And he left me alone for the rest of the class. But when I tried to get into the honors level of his subject matter, he declined to let me get into honors. And again, it was the kind of thing where I was the only black girl in the class. And those are the kinds of experiences where women or folks of color are constantly told you won’t need this information. Women don’t go into this field…or you won’t…or you’re a dancer, you won’t be writing papers the rest of your life. Those presumptions get in the way. And so I have learned to hunt them down first, so that it saves me a little bit more of my life force for other things than having to navigate them.

Rebecca: Well, I appreciate that you’re on the task of remaking our [LAUGHTER] education system…

Donna: There’s so much that’s very antiquated, and yet so much beauty that still exists. But we’re seeing that there is arguably some kind of a failure in our education system that is producing citizens who eschew critical thinking and who are susceptible to undue influence. And so I think, at the same time, we are just starting to get precision of language to be able to unpack some of the inequities in our nation, which is why critical race theory is under attack. It’s because we finally have precision tools to start to understand the legacy of colonialism that we’re living in and through and over, under, and on top of all those things. And I think our ability to exchange has to be protected. And at the same time, our sensitivity around difference has to be upgraded. And so my tools are intended to try and do both at the same time, so that they are not seen as mutually exclusive in the classroom. We don’t have to play it so safe that we can’t unpack things. And yet, we have to allow confusion and creativity to still be a part of our educational process. That’s an investment and it takes time. So I understand that these tools like, for example, taking an entire day on an assumption index out of the classroom, may seem unrealistic, but I promise that it’s an investment that saves you some knuckle headedness through the rest of the course.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking this really big question which feels extra big given the conversation we’ve been having, “What’s next?” [LAUGHTER]

Donna: What’s next, the fumble forward tool is being shared nationally, internationally, with lots of speaking engagements and that’s been a joy. I am on assignment as a faculty fellow at a healing Institute, a health and wellness Institute. So I have been enjoying looking at the interdisciplinary-ness of how to bring these tools into different industries and fields of study. So what’s next for me, I’m involved with a medical study, bringing cultural dimensionality to assessment tools in interoception, which I hope will impact people who are dealing with chronic pain management, and, and cancer and a variety of things. So I’m dealing with the medical school and collaborating with Dr. Yoni Ashar, on giving cultural dimensionalization to assessment tools there. And I feel like I can look at just about anything and say, “Oh, here’s where we have some biases in this tool. And here’s where we have some possibilities to transform the tool.” And so I’m enjoying watching it expand beyond just my initial field of study. I’ve met with physicist, I’ve met with climate scientists, with law professors, I have met with the National Conference of Victim Assistance Workers and law enforcement, it goes on and on and on. And so at the moment, I’m just enjoying the growth of these conversations in the way that I always, at a soul level, hoped they would go. And beyond that, I love to see these healing initiatives root in communities. I love to see people with their identities feeling welcomed. So their whole personhood into all environments that they inhabit, and creating affirming communities for them. And I myself am playing around with integrating tools and mindfulness, I find that if I can start a classroom with a three-minute grounding practice or some mindfulness that does an awful lot for the room as well. So I’m just thinking about how to have educational arenas be humanized, and have more diplomacy. Of course, I’ve got my own fascinations and research and all that. But honestly, all of my energy is going into watching these tools grow and learning from them in watching people interacting with them. There have been some stunning remixes of the tool right back to me. For example, I had a student named Laura, instead of saying fumble forward one day, she raised her hand and before speaking on a particular question in the room, her face went flush and she paused. And the whole room was like uh oh, what’s about to happen? And instead of saying fumble forward, she said, with a very shaky voice, “I think what I’m about to say may be broken, and I’m hoping you can help me fix it.” And it just felt everyone’s heart melt across the room, because she was saying, “Oh, I know, this is messed up. I know, I’m off. But I’m lost and I need some help.” And that’s the kind of learning that shifts our entire life trajectory, not just the classroom for that day, but how we inhabit our lives, how we interact with our children, how we act with our elders, how we discuss politics, and want to see a change.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for sharing all of these with us. We really appreciate having the opportunity to talk to you and share all these tools with everyone.

Donna: Thank you so very much, and wishing you lots of juicy learning in your own life.

John: Thank you and we wish the same to you.

[MUSIC]

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

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

[MUSIC]

260. Antiracist Pedagogy

Posted in classroom community, equity, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, race, racism, social justice, teaching
October 26, 2022

Institutional statements related to diversity, equity, and inclusion are only meaningful if all practices within the institution embody these values. In this episode, Gabriela Torres joins us to discuss how we can become anti-racist educators and do the work of inclusion within our classrooms.

Gabriela is the Associate Provost for Academic Administration and Faculty Affairs and is a Professor and the William Isaac Cole Chair in Anthropology at Wheaton College. She specializes in the study of violence – particularly gender-based violence – and state formation. At Wheaton College, she teaches courses in Medical Anthropology, Global Health, Violence Against Women, and Latin America and Latinx Studies. She is also the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

Show Notes

  • Neuhaus, Jessamyn (2022). Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. West Virginia University Press.
  • Gabriela Torres et. al. (2022). The Change Higher Education Needs Today. Inside Higher Ed.
  • Posse Foundation
  • Sathy, V., & Hogan, K. A. (2022). Inclusive teaching: Strategies for promoting equity in the college classroom.

Transcript

John: Institutional statements related to diversity, equity, and inclusion are only meaningful if all practices within the institution embody these values. In this episode, we examine how we can become anti-racist educators and do the work of inclusion within our classrooms.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Gabriela Torres. Gabriela is the Associate Provost for Academic Administration and Faculty Affairs and is a Professor and the William Isaac Cole Chair in Anthropology at Wheaton College. She specializes in the study of violence – particularly gender-based violence – and state formation. At Wheaton College, she teaches courses in Medical Anthropology, Global Health, Violence Against Women, and Latin America and Latinx Studies. She is also the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus. Welcome, Gabriela.

Gabriela: Thank you for having me.

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

Gabriela: Yes, I’m drinking ginger tea.

Rebecca: Mmmm… love ginger tea. How about you, John?

John: I am drinking, on that theme, a ginger peach black tea.

Rebecca: Not on that theme, [LAUGHTER] I’m drinking a blend called eight at the fort.

John: You ate at the fort?

Rebecca: No, like, the number eight? It’s a blend.

Gabriela: What does that have?

Rebecca: I don’t know but it’s tasty. [LAUGHTER]

John: Is there some gunpowder green tea in there or something?

Rebecca: I don’t know what the eight are but it’s a good blend, it tastes yummy.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss your chapter in Picture a Professor entitled “Beyond Making Statements: The Reflective Practice of Becoming an Anti-Racist Educator.” Could you tell us a bit about how this chapter came about?

Gabriela: Sure. This chapter came about when I was working as Director for our Center for Teaching and Learning, which is the job I did before my current job as Associate Provost. And during that work, we experienced the George Floyd murder, and our faculty were really impacted and wanted to think about how we could do something different. And what we found as CCTL directors was that there really wasn’t a lot of really basic how to… how do you go about thinking about changing your pedagogical practice, really at the level… “How do you start thinking about what teaching is about? What is the purpose of teaching? Who are you teaching for? Is it possible to have any redemptive practice in your teaching? Are there harms that we’re doing through expected notions of ‘I need the students to give me this assignment at this time, I need the students to achieve this level. This assignment, I need the students to do this, because this is the way that the expectations have been set for my discipline.’” And I think professors at our institution were thinking, “Could there be harms associated with these expectations that are taken as a fact and aren’t really questions?” So thinking about how do we start from scratch is where this chapter got started. And the idea of reflective practice being at the center came from the common readings we were doing on what does it mean to engage in anti-racist practice and that anti- racist practice really has to start with thinking within ourselves. How do the things that I do in my classroom and outside of it contribute to entrenched inequalities in higher ed, what is my responsibility in terms of changing those entrenched inequalities? And so those were all the kinds of questions that we began with.

Rebecca: If you’re going to make suggestions to faculty about getting started, about having those conversations with themselves, about what teaching is, what are some of the ways that we get started in this work?

Gabriela: I think we need to look at expectations. Who do we expect is in our classroom? And what characteristics we attribute to that person who we think is in our classroom, that generic person who we’re teaching to? So that’s one area that we really need to question and the kinds of questions we need to ask are, “Is there a gendered and race expectation for the person I assume I’m teaching in my classroom?” And, “where might those expectations have been set for me? Have I even asked myself this question?” And that’s one area of questions you can start thinking about. Another area of questions you can start thinking about is content. So where does the content in let’s say, in my case, Introduction to Anthropology, where does the content for introduction to anthropology come from? Is it a canon that you learned yourself when you were an undergrad? And that you want to make sure that students receive the same canon you did? Have you considered who is actually part of that canon? Have you thought about whether the experiences of students in your classrooms are reflected in the readings that you have? The third area, where I think we need to start asking questions, is around “What are the objectives for the classroom?” And by this, I don’t just mean learning objectives. But what are the objectives in terms of social good that we’re trying to enact in our classrooms? So we are trying to create students that are enabled to make change. And if we are trying to do that, if our objective is an objective that is about going towards a future society, then we really need to think about how we’re structuring those courses. And what does social justice in the course look like? I think it’s really easy to say to colleagues, you should have more authors of color in your syllabus, or you should make sure that you discuss underrepresented groups as part of the content. But I think that doesn’t get you to the reflection that’s really needed to think about “What is our role in higher ed in terms of the social good that higher ed is meant to have?” And actually, probably the reason why many of us got into these jobs in the first place, so that we could actually educate the next generations. And so I think thinking of anti-racism as a reflective practice gets us further than just thinking of anti-racism as a sort of simple retooling that we’re doing, really, almost for performative purposes.

Rebecca: As a designer, what you’re saying is really resonating, because it reflects some of the design framework that I’ve even been talking to my students about recently, is like, you’re probably not the audience. So who is the audience? And they’re not some imaginary fake person with a fake value system. They’re they’re real people that have real goals, and they’re definable in a way. And I’m also hearing a philosophy that I like to talk to students about, which is “do no harm.” I’m hearing like, that resonating. When I’m thinking about some of the things that you’re saying. It’s interesting that the same ideas come up in different contexts, when we’re designing different kinds of experiences, to really be considering and thinking about them as questions to reframe what we’re doing, and maybe make some things explicit. We’re talking about not just learning objectives, but I was hearing you say, well, there’s things out there hidden objectives, perhaps, that we don’t make explicit. So is making those explicit important to this process and making it explicit for students as well?

Gabriela: Yeah, because I think those hidden objectives are really in many ways, what directs how we come to organize teaching for ourselves and the meaning that it has. ‘Cause teaching, for me, is always about the relationships that we have and about how, for the instructor, for the professor, it’s about what they are giving back to the world. And when we think about teaching in that context, really we’re thinking about an identity project. And so, often, we might be engaged in an identity project in practice, that is maybe not the identity project we thought we were engaged in. So when we were working in our Center for Teaching and Learning, and we would ask colleagues to think, “Who is the expected student in your course?” … it became clear that for some colleagues, they actually had a pretty precise picture. I teach in a liberal arts college in New England. So they thought that their student was 18 to 21, that they tended to come from New England, that they tended to be middle class. And so if that’s who you’re teaching towards, then you’re probably ignoring a lot of needs, that students who don’t come from those backgrounds might be having, or you’re not even considering the learning differences that students who come from those geographic backgrounds and class backgrounds might have, because you are assuming this student who isn’t raced, who isn’t gendered, who doesn’t have their fullness. And so even if you think you’re having a redemptive project by teaching something like public health, if you haven’t really thought through your audience carefully, and if you haven’t really thought, “how do we get to the future in which we are not just addressing the needs of the suburbs,” for instance.

John: I think a lot of faculty see their audience as being people who are just like them, and the faculty tend to be very different than our students. How can faculty elicit more information about their students’ identities and their needs?

Gabriela: I think that that can be resolved in multiple different ways. So how do we engage with our students’ identities, and I think we can engage at the assignment level, so we can have assignments that are structured to actually actively engage with students’ identities. There’s a lot of research that suggests that engaging with students’ identities allows us to amplify learning in different ways. And so I think that’s a regular practice, it allows for memory retention, it allows for students to integrate learning into their life course. So engaging students with their identities in assignments is one way to do it. So an example of the way that I’ve done this in anthropology courses is, I’ve asked them to engage in participant observation in a part of their daily life. Sometimes, I’ve asked them to do that when they’ve gone back home, or sometimes I’ve asked them to remember and engage in participant observation of a remembered ritual that they participated in. And so that process of engaging students’ identities and life experiences is one way for professors to find out. It also creates a lot more interesting things to grade and read, frankly. So I think it’s an interesting practice. Another way is to actually engage students in devising parts of a curriculum with you that is based on their interests. Many colleagues at my institution also send a questionnaire to students asking them to share their interests, whether these are topical interests, or to share experiences that they think might be impactful in their classroom learning. I think another way is to ask for course material that students would like to engage in together and to ask students to present that course material. So not exactly giving up part of your syllabus, but maybe integrating different pieces of course material. And students have done that in my courses by suggesting things in forums, which then we bring into the course. So there’s different ways that you can engage with students’ identities and experiences. I think the primary way is by saying that you value those, and that you think of those as relevant to the content of the course. So I think that’s the primary way, and there are different ways to signal that which I’ve just tried to go through.

Rebecca: Sometimes, we have conversations with colleagues where they might say, “Ah, I don’t know if this is really for me, because I don’t teach in a field where talking about race or gender or other types of identity is relevant.” Can you talk a little bit about ways that we might address or approach faculty and colleagues who maybe don’t quite see anti- racist education as an approach that is relevant to them?

Gabriela: I think that’s a really interesting question. And I think, starting from the idea of inequality being fundamental to our society, and race inequality being fundamental to our society, and to the creation of knowledge writ large, I think anyone who is working in academia is working in fields that have been shaped by that inequality. So colleagues that say, who are working in STEM can think about the history of knowledge production in their disciplines, and can find those histories of race inequality. For example, in our own college, we’ve been lucky to have Howard Hughes Medical Foundation funding to rethink STEM, and our colleagues have engaged in self- reflective practice. So for instance, we had a laboratory that was named for the famous biologist, Linnaeus, it was the Linnaeus Laboratory, who also happened to be the biologist that created the framework for racialization. And when our colleagues began to look at the production of knowledge, and that something that they felt was central to their canon, but was also central to racial hierarchies, they felt, “Oh, well, perhaps the naming of this laboratory as Linnaeus Laboratory is not the intention that we had in highlighting the history of our knowledge production and making it central to this lab.” So I think it’s always part of the history of knowledge production in any discipline. I mean, certainly in design, it is. [LAUGHTER] But I think also, in my own discipline, anthropology has been very, very tied to histories of colonialism, public health has been very tied to histories of colonialism. So I think in many disciplines, it just takes but to start unraveling a little bit of threads. And I think we’re all involved. And maybe thinking that we’re not means that the reflective practice is more important to start figuring those connections for yourself.

John: And sometimes even a Google search for decolonizing and then a discipline name will turn up a lot of resources, because there’s a lot of people who’ve been working in this in pretty much all disciplines. In May, you co-authored with a couple of other people in an article called “The Change Higher Education Needs Today,” and that deals with critical race theory. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Gabriela: Sure. The essential argument of that piece that I co wrote with Melba Trevino and Irene Mata, it was that if we think of the backlash that there’s been against critical race theory, we often don’t stop to think how that backlash really impacts those who are raced in the academy and working in the academy as raced persons. We often don’t stop to think about how colleagues who are working on let’s say, Latinx literatures are impacted by the constant backlash against critical race theory. And in fact, there are colleges and universities that instead of thinking about it, have attached themselves to the bandwagon of trying to suffocate critical race theory as something that might be dangerous or problematic. And we argued that instead, actually, if higher ed is truly going to become anti-racist, we need to actively incorporate critical race theory and the persons who are de facto assumed to espouse the beliefs that critical race theory, certainly not every person of color in academe would agree with critical race theory, but they’re assumed to and so what does radical inclusion of persons of color in academe mean? It probably means an acceptance that we do need to think about those raced bodies that we work together with. So that is what we were trying to argue. And we were trying to argue that based on our experience developing a mentoring program for faculty of color in New England, and unlike colleges and universities in the south, there very few faculty of color comparatively in New England institutions. And so we’ve created an inter-institutional program to support each other in persisting and thriving.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit more about mentorship and its relationship to this work more broadly?

Gabriela: Yeah. So I think mentorship in terms of anti- racist approaches to supporting students is something that has been actively used. So for instance, I participated as part of the Posse Foundation’s mentoring of students in elite colleges and universities. And the idea that to create and sustain persistence of students of color, you need to have systems of support that create an environment where people are not just socially emotionally supported, but also taught the rules of the game that are often talked about as the hidden curriculum. I don’t know if you’ve talked through that concept in Tea for Teaching. So for first-gen, and for a lot of students of color, there are a lot of assumptions that let’s say, my children who have grown up in New England and have half of their friends going to college, they already know that when you go to college, you should talk to your professor or go to office hours, you should ask for a syllabus. A lot of first-gen students, a lot of students of color, don’t know those very basic,” how do I engage with?” …even knowing where the rules are located. And so mentoring for students has always been a part. It is also a part for the persistence of faculty from first-gen backgrounds and faculty who are faculty of color. And so I can give you an example of how important that process is. So it’s important for tenure and promotion. But it’s also important for how do you navigate expectations within departments. And so that is work that we’ve been very lucky to have done working as a group of institutions based out of University of Connecticut.

John: In addition to mentoring, are there any other ways that faculty can try to unhide some of that hidden curriculum?

Gabriela: I think unhiding the hidden curriculum is essential. It’s essential for students who have differences in learning, it’s essential for students who have differences of experience, I think it’s even essential for us as educators to do. I don’t think that can be done by putting everything in the syllabus. So I’ve seen colleagues try to put every single rule possible into a syllabus. An effective strategy I’ve seen used is to try to take a nugget of that hidden curriculum, and explain it to students on a regular basis. And so to set as a goal for yourself, which little nugget am I going to explain in each of my classes? So for example, you could decide to explain the structure of a scientific article, there’s always an abstract, there’s always keywords, there’s always an argument that has to be restated in a conclusion. That is a hidden set of knowledge that actually a lot of students don’t have when they first take, say, a public health class. And you could just teach students to just read as a small goal in a class, or you could teach students that they can get help from a librarian to find out how to put in the best search terms. So you could bring in a librarian into your class and have them do a little bit of show and tell of how effective knowing the right search terms can use. So integrating little tiny pieces of knowledge that you assumed that the students would have is a way to slowly get in bite size, accessible pieces into that hidden curriculum.

John: In a just-in-time format, so that when it’s relevant and salient, students are getting access to the information they need.

Gabriela: I think that’s the most effective way I’ve seen it done. I always start with the idea that the syllabus is your contract. And then we talk about what’s your contract? What does that mean? And I think that that is a really important way to also show students… so to tell students about the kinds of relationships that they were involved in. So as a cultural anthropologist, students don’t often think about the kinds of relationships they’re involved in in a course with a professor. So they might be pretty nervous with a professor, they might be pretty dismissive with a professor, but they don’t realize that when they enter into a course, they enter into an agreement to provide a certain set of things to the professor, and to have the professor provide a certain set of things to them. So just even that basic, “here’s the relationship that we’re in” [LAUGHTER] …is a really important part of what it means to make the hidden curriculum visible.

John: And I was thinking not only in terms of helping students learn how to read scientific articles, which is something they’ve never done before. The same might be true in certain types of writing assignments, where some students will come in with preparation in those areas, others won’t, and just providing the structure that Viji Sathi and Kelly Hogan often talk about to support students who haven’t had that exposure earlier can make a big difference, I think.

Gabriela: Yeah, absolutely. That is such important work in terms of how do we engage in assignments. One of the effective ways that I’ve seen as well is to, if you’re going to be using an assignment regularly, is to work with student educational partners. So our current director of our teaching and learning, Deyonne Bryant, has begun a program where we have student educational interns in some courses, where they can test assignments, where they can act as consultants with the professor. That is a really good way for professors to also engage. his is work that has been done for a really long time at Bryn Mawr, and which is also outlined in the Picture a Professor volume. And so I would suggest people have a look at that chapter as well.

Rebecca: As part of this work, institutions make all kinds of statements, we’ve got DEI statements, we’ve got strategic plans around diversity, equity, and inclusion, we’ve got social justice missions at our institutions that often feel separate from our work as teachers. And so what role do teachers have in this work or what role do our classrooms have in this work?

Gabriela: The title of the piece was really reacting to the performativity that surrounded the post George Floyd moment, where businesses and certainly higher ed institutions were making statements. [LAUGHTER] And so I think the one point that is important for me to make is I think the classroom is really a site for making good on any statement that might be made at the institutional level. And actually, the classroom has to be the site where we make good on those statements. So thinking about the work that as professors we might do in the classroom is not untied to those statements, but as actually the space in which we are able to effectively deliver on those statements. So that as faculty members we’re essential parts of any anti-racist agenda that our institution has said it holds. And then I think faculty members need to hold their institutions accountable. So if they are unable to support students, or present the curricula that they need to… so for example, they have insufficient OER materials to make the content that they’re using accessible, and they want support for their institution to develop OER materials, or need different kinds of resources in their libraries, I think that professors do need to think of their role as saying, “I’m trying to make this effective in my classroom, and we’re going to need to be resourced in this way.” So I think tying yourself to institutional aspirations that are located within those diversity and equity statements is really important.

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

Gabriela: I think what’s next is why I moved to this particular role as the Associate Provost, and that is to think about the complicated nature of resourcing diversity and equity work. So diversity and equity work is often an aspiration, but not a resource one. And so thinking about what’s next for me is trying to enact that change by creating the policies, and support, and follow up that we need to truly take on the work of equity in higher ed beyond those statements. And so, I guess, in complementing the accountability that I think faculty members should hold their administrations to, I think what’s next for me is trying to be a partner in that from the administrative end.

Rebecca: …important work to be done, for sure.

John: Well, thank you for joining us. We’ve very much enjoyed talking to you and we hope we’ll be talking to you again.

Gabriela: Thank you so much. Thank you for doing this Tea for Teaching.

John: It’s been a lot of fun.

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing your expertise.

[MUSIC]

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

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

[MUSIC]

254. Teaching Up

Posted in authentic learning, classroom community, engagement, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, race, racism, teaching
September 14, 2022

Creating an environment where members of the learning community can be taken seriously as their own authentic selves requires planning. In this episode, Celeste Atkins joins us to discuss how shifts in context, like reframing an assignment, can impact the way people engage with each other and the content.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Creating an environment where members of the learning community can be taken seriously as their own authentic selves requires planning. In this episode we discuss how shifts in context like reframing an assignment can impact the way people engage with each other and the content.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Celeste Atkins. Celeste is a Sociologist, the Assistant Director of Faculty Mentoring Initiatives, and a Lecturer in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Arizona. She is also the author of a chapter in the Picture a Professor collection, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus. Welcome, Celeste.

Celeste: Thank you.

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

Celeste: I am an iced coffee person. So I actually drink Jot and I make my own vanilla lattes every day.

Rebecca: Wow, that sounds fancy.

Celeste: It’s really easy. Jot is a coffee concentrate, you use a tablespoon full of it and then I use a tablespoon full of vanilla sugar and eight ounces of milk. And it’s delicious and easy and quick.

Rebecca: and caffeinated. [LAUGHTER] I have Jasmine black tea today.

John: And I have ginger tea today.

Rebecca: The title of your chapter in Picture a Professor is “Teaching Up: Bringing my Blackness into the Classroom.” In addition to your chapter in Picture a Professor, you’ve also published other chapters that grew out of your dissertation: Teaching Up: Developing an Intersectional Andragogy. Can you tell us a bit about your dissertation research?

Celeste: Well, I have a background in sociology, but my PhD is in higher education. And so I spent close to a decade teaching at the community college level. And my dissertation grew out of my own experiences as a Black woman in a conservative Arizona town teaching about racial privilege, heterosexual privilege, and those types of things. So what I wanted to do was take an intersectional approach, because there’s literature on faculty of color, there’s literature on women, there’s literature on queer faculty, but not much takes an intersectional approach to see what we have in common and what we don’t. And so I interviewed, I believe, 18 sociology faculty from across the nation at different levels, in different types of institutions, about their experiences as part of a traditionally marginalized group teaching up, so teaching about privilege when they themselves are oppressed in some area. And so we had women, we had queer faculty, we had a couple of faculty who identified as disabled, and quite a few faculty of color.

John: On your website, you note that the chapter in Picture a Professor is based on some unexpected findings from the research in your dissertation. Could you tell us a little bit about the unexpected findings that you talked about in this chapter?

Celeste: Sure. So actually, this chapter is about the part of my dissertation that spoke the most to me, but surprised me the most, which is, when I started to look at differences intersectionally, I found that Black women, in particular, focused on bringing their authentic selves to the classroom. And for some of them it was after they got tenure, for some of them, it was after they felt they had sort of sold their soul in a way. And for me, what I found in my teaching, and why this resonated with me was: I started teaching, I got a lot of feedback, “you’re too aggressive,” “you’re too assertive,” “you’re too scary,” blah, blah, blah. And so then I tried to be like a Disney princess and be really, you know, flowers and butterflies, and very welcoming and soft, and it was fake. And my students didn’t like it, because it wasn’t me. And they could tell it wasn’t authentically me. So after a year or two of that not going well, I decided to just be me. I found a different book that was more intersectional and I started talking about what it’s like being a fluffy Black woman and how it affects how I live in the world. And I would make jokes about it, and I would address it. And then students really responded to it because it was who I am, and my authentic self. And so what these other sociology faculty were doing that’s so important, is modeling different ways of being professional. Because one of the things that’s so hard about hegemonic academia is it’s very heteronormative, it’s very white, it’s very male, it’s very middle class. And so a lot of us do a lot of code switching. And I used to joke about my best friend in college, she worked for a talent agency and I worked in HR and so we would call each other and like, “Good afternoon, may I speak with Michelle, please?” And she’d go, “Who’s calling?” And I’d go, “This is Celeste. What’s up girl? Hey, what are we gonna do this weekend?” As soon as we knew it was each other on the phone, then we would be our authentic self. And a lot of us spend time code switching. But what that does is reinforce the idea that our authentic selves is not okay in academia. And so this chapter about bringing our Blackness to the classroom is about when we show our true selves not only do we find different ways to connect to our students, but we also expand for many their ideas about what faculty are, about what professional is, about what an academic does. I can be an academic and not talk in $5 words, I can be an academic and be very gesture-y and very outspoken and out there and still do quality academic work, and in some ways, reach students that a lot of others who are so concerned at fitting in this rigid box of what is considered proper academia miss.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of classes that you teach that we can start talking about what that looks like for you and how your chapter addresses being in those classes?

Celeste: Well, I’ve gone through a lot of changes during my dissertation journey. And I actually have another chapter coming out about how I felt like I was kind of pushed out of teaching. It is very challenging to be a woman of color, the only Black woman faculty at my institution for part of my tenure, and teaching about these topics in a place that not everyone agrees with. And so I have actually transitioned out of full-time teaching, but I spent my career teaching intro to sociology, human sexuality (which is very fun), race, and gender. And now for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, I teach a diversity class. It’s fully online, but what I’ve done, based on what I’ve learned from my teaching experiences, is I’ve created it in a totally different way. So there’s no book, and it is the closest I could get to a series of guest lectures. So it’s based completely on YouTube videos and I give a little introductory video explaining the concepts. And then I find people who are either experts in the field, or who are personally oppressed in that way to share their stories. Because what I learned is, it’s one thing to hear about the concept, it’s another thing to humanize the people who are going through it. And so we’re actually doing some research on that to see if that approach is more effective. And so that’s currently what I’m working on.

John: And there’s a lot of research that shows the power of narrative. And when they’re personal stories, it has much more resonance with people than when they read about something in a book that seems a bit more distant. So, that sounds like a wonderful approach.

Celeste: I really found that especially when I was teaching human sexuality, I would bring in queer folks, I would bring in trans* folks, I would bring in polyamorous folks. And it went from “Ooh, that weird stuff”or “all those ‘those’ people” to “Wow, they remind me of…” and “They’re just like…,” and that I found was so important in breaking down stereotypes and really making a change.

Rebecca: You talked a little bit about negotiating your identity in the classroom at the beginning and making adjustments and not feeling authentic. How do you feel like you’ve been able to really be your authentic self [LAUGHTER] now? How are you able to arrive at that moment? And what does that look like?

Celeste: Well, when I was teaching face to face, what I would do is literally address the elephant in the room, we would do those, you know, the things that students love so much: come up and talk about yourself. But I would say “Look, I’m a big Black lady. And we’re gonna talk about stereotypes and those types of things”. But people say that I’m intimidating and people say these things, but my students who know me know that I’m here to help you. I’m not here for the money. If you knew what I made, you’d know that. And so I use a lot of humor. I make a point to break stereotypes, especially with my images. And then I make a point to be humorous about the images. So we’ll be talking about deviance, and I’ll say “So not holding a knife to a white lady’s throat is that… what kind of deviance [LAUGHTER] is that?” But I’m also very careful to never show single mothers that are Black. I’m also very careful when I do gangs. I have memes that I use and one is this white guy with a really long beard, riding a pink bike talking about biker gangs, or I have one meme of Sesame Street when I talk about gangs. And so I’m really, really careful to break stereotypes. And I also make sure that when I’m choosing my test questions, I’m choosing the ones that, again, reinforce breaking those stereotypes.

John: So you’ve talked a little bit about bringing your own identity into the classroom and how that evolved over time. How do you help students express their identities in class?

Celeste: I’m really, really careful about how I do examples. I very deliberately find diversity for my images. And again, I try to find things that people don’t think about. So when I’m doing, let’s say, relationships, I’ll show like an older lesbian couple, nobody thinks about old people still being in love [LAUGHTER] oftentimes, when you’re talking to young students. And another thing that I do is I bring in stories of my friends who are very diverse, and the people that I’ve known. And I feel like if you create a safe learning environment, and I do a lot of steps to do that in the beginning, that then students will feel safe sharing. One time, we were talking about border patrol, and we were talking about racial profiling. And I was trying to get across to one student who was either in border patrol or headed to be in border patrol that if you only focus on Latinos, then yes, you will only find drugs on Latinos. If you’re not stopping white people. If you’re not stopping Black people, then you’re not going to find drugs on them. And the argument was, “Well, it’s the cartels. And it’s this, and it’s that.” And finally, another student of mine, who is Latino, and whose father is Latino, but a border patrol officer, talked about being stopped, talked about being afraid, talked about this dynamic of “Yes, there are good officers who aren’t, and yet still, this happened to me, even though my dad is.” And so I tried to create that kind of space where students can shift each other’s ideas by sharing their own narratives.

Rebecca: You mentioned just a moment ago about setting yourself up to be able to have that space for students. Can you talk about some of the steps that you do take to create that environment?

Celeste: Yes, when I was teaching face to face, it was basically the first week, and usually these were two day a week classes, were centered upon creating a safe learning environment. So we would talk about community agreements, and then I would take it further. And I use some things that I learned at WRITCHE and don’t ask me what that acronym is for, but it was something about teaching about sexuality. And so what we did when we went to that workshop was we anonymously answered all of these questions on a survey. And so what I did was I create a survey about: Have you ever had or helped create an unwanted pregnancy? Have you ever used a food bank? Have you or anyone you know ever been to prison? Or Is anyone you know, undocumented? We lived on the border. And so what I would do is I would have my students take this, and I would go to great pains to make it truly anonymous. So I made everybody do a checkmark and not a big X and not a square, and everybody used pencil, and then we would go outside, and we would shuffle all the papers and pass them out. And then we would step in, step out to show who did it. So how many people have been part of an unwanted pregnancy? And we’d have… so I’d say then when we’re talking about reproductive rights, remember, it’s not those people, it’s people in this class. How many people have a family member who’s undocumented? Okay, when we’re talking about this, you need to keep it in mind. So it makes it really personal without outing people that, in this classroom, there are queer people. In this classroom, there are parents. In this classroom, there are people who have been to prison. And so we do that. And then I did a version of the opportunity walk. I know that there are mixed responses to the opportunity walk, but the version that I use starts with basically what we call ascribed statuses in sociology, so the things you can’t control. And so when they get to a certain point, I say “Now stop, look around, these are the things you had no control over.” And I talk about, as a Black woman, I’d be kind of back there in the back as well. And then we talk about the things that they have control over: education, those types of things, speaking up, being an ally, that’s an important one, because that starts to push you back again. And so we look at that. And we end that, and I say, “I want you to think about, again, where you were, it has nothing to do with you. So therefore, when we’re talking about privilege, it’s not about you, you didn’t tell the stork, ‘please bring me down to a rich white family,’ we have no control over any of these social categories that we’re born into. And so when we’re talking about that, then we’re trying to understand.” And then later on in class, I do another exercise called the “oops exercise,” again, talking about intersectionality. And pointing out that even if you’ve got privilege, if you’re white, male, heterosexual, well educated, at some point you were young, and therefore you were oppressed by age, and we like you enough that we want you to live long enough to be oppressed again by age, right? So even the most privileged people experience oppression in at least one category. And so those are the ways that I tried to make it a space where both we can share our own stories, and where we understand that privilege. While it’s challenging, and while we want to think the world is fair, it really isn’t. And we have to look at how we have privilege without it being a personal failing.

John: What other suggestions do you have for creating a more inclusive classroom environment where everyone is part of the class and where everyone’s voice is taken seriously and is heard by the class?

Celeste: I think it’s a balancing act. And I think it depends a lot on the identities or the perceptions of the faculty person themselves. So as a Black person, as a big Black woman, I find it necessary (and luckily, it’s part of my typical approach anyway) to use a lot of humor to make myself seem approachable. And it’s very frustrating because I used to co-teach with a guy who called himself my token old white guy, and he was an English professor. And I would say something about sociologically sound principles that are from my discipline that are scientifically proven, and students would go “well, I don’t …:.” and then he would say the same thing as a frickin English professor, and they would go “Yes, you’re right.” And it’s frustrating. But [LAUGHTER] the reality is, that’s the way it works. So sometimes I do that, sometimes I use my colleagues that way. And sometimes I’m that way, as a cisgender, straight woman, then I provide that added, “It’s not the chip on my shoulder” when I’m talking about issues affecting the queer community. So I think that’s important. I also think it’s really important to listen to your students. I have yet to find a school that has student surveys that address what I want to learn. So I create my own. And then I have students give them back, I have them give them back on the last day of school where I like to be done. So their grades are done on the last day of school. And so this won’t affect your grades. I’m going to give you your grades in a minute. And you can be completely honest, and what would make this class more comfortable for you? And I change my classes based on that feedback. And when you work for a while in one institution, then students tell them and so the feedback at my former institution, students either loved me or hated me. And the ones that loved me were like, “She’s awesome. She’s funny. She does really cool stuff. But she don’t take no crap. So don’t go in there and try to BS her and don’t be late, because she won’t take it.” And then the other ones are like, “Oh, she’s so hard.” Yeah, because I don’t take late work, because I’m trying to also prepare you for real life.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways that you design assignments to make them more personally relevant to students?

Celeste: Oh, yes. One of the things that was really interesting when I started graduate school was I started a minor in a certificate for college teaching. And I was like, “Oh, this will be an easy minor. I’ve been teaching college for quite a while now, so I’m good.” But part that really helped me was designing effective writing assignments. And I saw such a difference when I stopped having students write a paper and started having them do things like write a letter. So in my race class, I would have students, instead of writing a paper explaining to me privilege and intersectionality, I would have them write a letter explaining to someone in their lives, privilege and intersectionality. And if you looked at my website, some of my students did some amazing, amazing letters. And they were students that I wasn’t, in some cases, expecting that type of understanding. But when they’re explaining it, using their experiences is very different than how I explained it. But not only are they showing their understanding, they are teaching me other ways to reach other students. And so I found that very, very helpful. And part of what I do is I build reflection into all of my written assignments. So, what did you learn? How will it help you? Because my argument to students is that sociology is something that they can use no matter what their end goal is in life, you can always interact with people better. And so how will this help you in your civic life? So those are some of the ways that I try to make it more relevant to students.

Rebecca: It’s amazing how a small shift in the frame of a writing assignment can make all the difference, that content is really not any different. It’s just framed in a different way.

Celeste: Yeah. Because when you say it’s not a paper, and you say it’s a letter, then they start to write from their own, instead of trying to regurgitate what I said. When I say it’s a paper, they think I want to hear me, and I hear me talk enough. [LAUGHTER] So I really want them to show me their perception. So, to me, that was the most powerful change I’ve ever made.

Rebecca: Audience matters, for sure.

Celeste: Oh, yes.

John: Much of your work now is in faculty mentoring and faculty development. Could you tell us a little bit about your roles there?

Celeste: Sure. So once I started to feel that I was losing my empathy for students [LAUGHTER] and getting very frustrated in teaching… especially, it’s hard to teach online about race and hot topics, because they don’t really see you as a human being. And they feel really empowered to say things that they wouldn’t say, especially to my face, but they wouldn’t say in a class. And in a classroom setting, first of all, students will call each other out. So I don’t always have to be that person. And second of all, I can revert to: “Hello, we’re going to treat each other with respect, we agreed to this, we wrote a contract about it, we have community agreement.” It’s much more challenging to do that online. And so I began to feel like it was taking too much out of me to try to teach about these in a fully remote setting as I was during the pandemic. At the same time, I was working as a graduate assistant, paying for my tuition, and I happened to land a job in the Office of Instruction and Assessment. And I started to learn about faculty development as a career, which I really didn’t even know existed. And I began to think that is something that I can do. I’d been department chair, I’d been mentoring new faculty, I had done a lot of workshops on time management and classroom management. And so I began to shift my ideas into that was what I wanted to do. At the same time, I was working full time, working at least two jobs, because I was also a graduate assistant, sometimes three or four, and a single mom to a four year old when I started graduate school, and having some challenges with a cohort of students that were half my age who had very different ideas about social justice than I did, like we both wanted the same end result, but had very different ideas about how to go about it and was feeling very isolated and made a friend. And after a couple of years, where both of us sort of mentored each other, we both ended up in assistant director positions. And we started to think about the power of our relationship and how we could help people find that in a less organic way. Because it just happened to be magic. It just happened to be she worked in the office, she had really cool artwork, I walked in and asked about it. And when you see us together, you see this big Black lady and this little… she looks 12, but she’s not… and she’s got blue hair, and people are like, “How are y’all friends?” But at the core, we’re both about helping people. We’re both about social justice. We’re both about making the systems better. And so we bonded in a lot of ways, and we help each other in a lot of ways. And we actually complement each other in a lot of ways. For example, I hate rewriting and I would have not published all those chapters if it weren’t for the fact that she loves editing. So I would write it, she would edit it, and then I would fix it. And that’s how I got through. And we collaborated on a lot of things. And so we had been sort of building out this framework around peer mentoring, and how can we create, systemically, an environment where people could find their sort of match. And during that time, they were also, in the Office of the Provost, hearing that mentoring needed to be focused on and talking about creating a mentoring Institute. So she encouraged me to apply for this position, it’s a brand new position. And so I, in November, received this position, which is Assistant Director of Faculty Mentoring initiatives. And my main goal is to facilitate the creation of the MENTOR Institute. And I like acronyms. So MENTOR is actually an acronym for Mentorship through Effective Networks, Transformational Opportunities, and Research. And that’s really what we want to create. We want to create a place where we share social justice minded inclusive best practices about mentoring, and where both faculty and students and hopefully, eventually staff, will be able to do training and expand their knowledge and do research about mentoring best practices.

Rebecca: Sounds like a really great opportunity to start something new, but something that’s so needed in so many institutions. The mentorship piece is crucial for people, but also it’s so not facilitated. [LAUGHTER]

Celeste: Well, what we found is it’s just very different. In a huge R1 Institution, each college does things their own way. And so what we want to do is synergize and illuminate the great work that’s already been done. We have pockets of really excellent mentoring, and then to help facilitate for those who are going: “Yes, we need to institutionalize this, but we don’t know where to start.” And so it’s been really interesting. It’s been fun. It’s been a lot of work. [LAUGHTER] I’m currently working on our first workshop that’s going to premiere in fall, when everyone comes back, on mentoring practices. And I’m also conducting focus groups with graduate students to sort of understand what’s going well, and where we can fill in those gaps.

Rebecca: Sounds like really important and exciting work, but definitely work nonetheless. [LAUGHTER]

John: Do you have any other reflections on your work on the Picture a Professor project,

Celeste: I just want to say a couple of things. One is that I really hope that people will take the time to look at this book, because I think that part of what’s needed for the culture shift in academia is a shift in how we picture a professor, what a professor is. I spend a lot of time with people going, “where’s the professor?” It’s me. Hello, I’m the professor. And I also want to encourage people who are in graduate school to look for these types of publishing opportunities. I’m still working on my first sort of solo first-author publication in a peer-reviewed journal. I was part of the task force for the American Sociological Association, where we focused on contingent faculty. And as that I earned a first-author credit just because my last name starts with “A,” but I found it really challenging in any other ways to publish in peer-reviewed articles. However, I published three or four chapters of my dissertation by looking for edited anthologies that were coming out in the area that I was publishing. It’s still peer reviewed. It may not carry as much weight, but for me, it was a little bit more of a user friendly way to learn how to publish, to learn how to do rewrites, to learn how to do those multiple versions of wait a minute I thought I was done with this… [LAUGHTER] until it gets accepted, and it builds your CV. So I wish someone had told me that. I just happened to luck into it. And once I got my first chapter, then I started looking for other chapters. So that’s some advice that I wish someone had given me.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for all that you’ve shared with us. We always wrap up by asking, what is next?

Celeste: Well, I’m gonna be 100% honest, because I found bringing my authentic self was the only way to do it. And literally what is next for me is an epic road trip with my daughter.

Rebecca: That sounds awesome.

Celeste: She’s been a trooper for four years while I was in graduate school. She’s been a trooper for two years of a pandemic. And my little extrovert [LAUGHTER], who was stuck at home with just me and her. And I’m pretty much an introvert. So we are going to go on a road trip for two and a half weeks across seven states. And we are going to work on my bucket list, which is I want her to see all 50 states with me before she goes to college. So we’re working on breaking that down. And then professionally, it’s our first workshop. And we also facilitate faculty development communities for promotion. And we are looking into creating some sort of grad student communities in the fall as well. So, that’s what’s next for me.

Rebecca: That sounds like lots on the horizon. Have a wonderful road trip. That sounds wonderful.

John: It does. And thank you for joining us. It’s been great talking to you and we’re looking forward to sharing this episode with our listeners.

Celeste: Thank you

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

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

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247. Picture a Professor

Posted in career path, contingent faculty, faculty, geeky pedagogy, gender, higher education, inclusion, learning, new faculty, pedagogy, race, teaching
July 27, 2022

What does a professor look like? In popular culture the professor is white and male—a sage on the stage. In this episode Jessamyn Neuhaus joins us to discuss the role context, employment status, and embodied identity play in our teaching realities and experiences.

Show Notes

  • Neuhaus, J. (2019). Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers. West Virginia University Press.
  • Neuhaus, Jessamyn (forthcoming, 2022). Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. West Virginia University Press.
  • Harlow, R. (2003). ” Race doesn’t matter, but…”: The effect of race on professors’ experiences and emotion management in the undergraduate college classroom. Social psychology quarterly, 348-363.
  • Garcia, Nichole M. (2018). “You Don’t Look Like a Professor.” Diverse Education. March 29.
  • Jessamyn Neuhaus twitter: https://twitter.com/GeekyPedagogy
  • Pittman, C., & Tobin, T. J. (2022). “Academe Has a Lot to Learn About How Inclusive Teaching Affects Instructors.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. February 7.
  • Mejia, Donna (2021).  Explaining Fumble Forward. YouTube video/ April 19
  • Pictureaprofessor.com
  • Hogan, Kelly A. and Viji Sathy (2022). Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom. West Virginia University Press.

Transcript

Rebecca: What does a professor look like? In popular culture the professor is white and male—a sage on the stage. In this episode we discuss the role context, employment status, and embodied identity play in our teaching realities and experiences.

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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&hellip

John: &hellipand Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer&hellip

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

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John: Our guest today is Jessamyn Neuhaus. Jessamyn is the director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and a Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. She specializes in the study of pop culture, gender studies, and teaching and learning. Jessamyn is also a recipient of the State University of New York’s Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence, and the editor of Teaching History: a Journal of Methods. She’s the author of Geeky Pedagogy: a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers. And Jessamyn is the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning, which will be released by West Virginia University Press this fall. Welcome back, Jessamyn.

Jessamyn: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are&hellip Jessamyn, are you drinking tea?

Jessamyn: I’m drinking coffee. I need to mainline that caffeine as much as possible. And I’m drinking Green Mountain Coffee Island Coconut,

John: &hellipand I am drinking English breakfast tea this morning.

Rebecca: Ah, we match today, John. [LAUGHTER] But mine’s decaf.

John: Since we’re recording five podcasts today, I have six cups of tea in various thermoses here with me, because I’m not going to be leaving this room for quite a while. We’ve invited you here today to discuss Picture a Professor. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of this project?

Jessamyn: Sure, I’d be glad to. I think it really started when I was doing the research for Geeky Pedagogy. And the first chapter in Geeky Pedagogy is about awareness. And it has four kinds of realities that all instructors need to be aware of and cultivate awareness of: identity matters, learning is hard, who our students are, and who we are. And when I was researching that chapter, I read a 2003 article by Roxana Harlow, a psychologist, it’s a 2003 article in Social Psychology Quarterly. And she used the phrase “disparate teaching realities.” And that really stuck with me because of the way it foregrounded: this is a reality&hellip that people’s teaching context shapes their labor as an educator, and that they are not equal, that they are disparate, they’re not the same, that we do not have the same kind of teaching workload, depending on all kinds of circumstances in our individual contexts. Employment status really matters. Embodied identity really matters. Department culture, student population and discipline, all those things really matter. I think too, one of the origins of this project was my background in popular culture, and studying popular culture, and the way that the primary representation of college professors in popular culture is very, very limited. And also, not coincidentally, kind of opposite of myself, the professor we see most of the time in movies and television is the white guy. And he is usually, if he’s being depicted as a good educator, he’s super dynamic and performative. And students are sitting entranced as he lectures and they magically learn, just because he’s such a wonderful classroom performer. So as an introvert, and someone who’s never going to be a kind of super dynamic, high energy, always entertaining performer, that stereotype was lodged in my head, and writing Geeky Pedagogy was a way that I was trying to address and dismantle that super professor stereotype. So as my scholarship of teaching and learning continued, I increasingly became aware of all the intersecting aspects of our identity that might play a role in our teaching work.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the title: Picture a Professor?

Jessamyn: Sure, an early version of this project, a working title or phrase that kept coming up was “you don’t look like a professor.” Hearing that phrase is a common experience, as explained very well in an article in Diverse Education by Nicole Margarita Garcia. She wrote an article by that same name, “You Don’t Look Like a Professor” and she points out, very compellingly, that no matter what the intention of that statement, the result is the negation of one’s expertise and authority. It’s an undermining of the knowledge and abilities that someone has in their role as an educator. Again, it’s not necessarily the intention of the random stranger or the student or the colleague who says, “You don’t look like a professor.” That might not be their intention, but that is the function. You don’t look like a professor, so someone else does. But as the collection started to come together, and I was working with the authors, and I was talking to the contributors about a title, it started to take, I guess, what I would think of as a more positive direction. So at first, the whole collection acknowledges that reality, that those stereotypes are there, and that that disempowering and disrespectful response happens. But then what? What are you going to do with that? How are we going to respond to that? And every contributor to this volume, while acknowledging that reality, also believes in the ability of students and our world to rethink and remake that stereotype&hellip to challenge it and to re-imagine it&hellip remake the role of the professor, even more than just diversifying the image that might be on our TV screens or movie screens. These authors are arguing for really reimagining our roles and redistributing power. They believe in the transformative power of education. So, Picture a Professor really is the nod to the strategies that are being explored in this volume, and that we can, collectively in higher education and as a culture and society, we can picture a professor as anybody, in any body, moving past the gendered and racialized and other kinds of embodied aspects of that stereotype to reimagine what’s possible.

John: You collected a very interesting and diverse group of authors in this collection. How did you find all these authors? How did you select them?

Jessamyn: I put out a call for papers on Twitter. And that really was probably the most important way. I also utilized some of my own networking and connections to reach out to potential contributors. But a big percentage of the people in this selection found me and found the call for papers through my Twitter account. And I think we may have talked before about this, I was really late to social media. Twitter was my first foray in 2019. Because I had just written Geeky Pedagogy and so wanted people to read it, that I was willing to do the unthinkable, [LAUGHTER] which was go on social media to try to get people connected with that book. But it turned out, to my surprise, that it’s been a really great way to connect with a lot of different people in academia and higher education in a way that hasn’t been possible for me working at a small, rural, very isolated, really small state university, and also just being kind of naturally adverse to conferencing and networking anyway. Twitter’s really been my most important personal pedagogical learning network since 2019, and of course, the pandemic just upped that a thousandfold. When I was even more isolated here in Plattsburgh, New York, it was a way to connect with all kinds of people that I wouldn’t just happen to meet otherwise. And that helped me get a lot of interest in the book. I had way more submissions than I had room for. And that was not easy. I’ve been on the receiving end of that email saying, “I’m sorry, this isn’t going to be&hellip” &hellipmany, many times. So I knew exactly how discouraging that could be. So it was a good problem to have, but that was a process, letting people know that there wasn’t gonna be room in the volume for their piece. So I had the luxury of really choosing a highly diverse group of authors and I mean, diverse, not just in issues of identity, but in academic disciplines, in stages of their career. This volume has authors in all stages of their careers, and geographically, so I guess I’m really proud of that.

Rebecca: I love that. In some ways, this book may function as a really key piece of activism so that when they pick it up, and it says picture this is a professor&hellip Like, we have a whole new version. You kind of describe that a bit when you’re talking about the title. But I love that when you open the volume, it’s everything counter to this stereotype. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re hoping that this project will achieve?

Jessamyn: Especially since the pandemic, there has been increasing awareness and attention paid to what many people are terming: the need to humanize higher education&hellip which always begs the question: ”what were we doing before that?” [LAUGHTER] But that recognition of students’ diverse experiences and the really pressing vital need for inclusive teaching practices, recognizing students as individuals in unique life circumstances, framing diversity as an educational asset and increasing our pedagogical practices that maximize opportunities for everybody to succeed, and which I 100% agree with. But also, in addition, as human beings, because students are people and human beings just like us. As human beings, students bring expectations, assumptions, and stereotypes about college teaching and academic expertise into the classroom. If we’re going to talk about: “We need to humanize higher education,” that also includes recognizing and dealing with the human, gendered, racialized, and more, stereotypes about what college teaching and learning looks like. So for example, a recent Chronicle of Higher Education, co-authored with one of the contributors to Picture a Professor, Dr. Chavella Pitman and Dr. Thomas Tobin&hellip they recently published an article that got a lot of buzz&hellip very rightly so&hellip in the Chronicle of Higher Education about, “Hey, if you are going to recommend inclusive teaching practices, keep in mind that embodied identity matters and teaching context matters, and how any one person might implement a teaching strategy really can be influenced by their employment status, their gender presentation, their ethnic, racial identity, their speaking voice, their discipline, their department culture.” That was a gap that I saw in the scholarship of teaching and learning and teaching advice, generally&hellip otherwise, very, very excellent advice and evidence based practices that failed to adequately acknowledge and recognize that our individual teaching context also matters. That was part of Geeky Pedagogy, too, that being an introvert, being not necessarily socially skilled, plays a role in how I’m going to do some of the things that, yes, the evidence shows this is something an effective instructor and educator does. So what does that mean for me, though? How can I make it work for me in my teaching content? So my hope for the Picture a Professor project&hellip what I hope it can do&hellip first, is empower and inspire college educators who recognize their own experiences in navigating student preconceptions and biases, and stereotypes about expertise and authority. But I also hope, and it’s certainly intended to help all readers recognize those systemic inequities in college teaching and how that shapes what can happen in individual classrooms and at the same time, gather strategies for their own classrooms as well, things that you can do right now. And this was something James Lang recommended the first time around in Geeky Pedagogy, and I resisted. But this time, I was like, “Yes, that’s a good idea.” [LAUGHTER] He recommended that each chapter have a bullet point list of teaching takeaways and Picture a Professor does that. And those teaching takeaways are insights and actionable strategies that will help anyone teach more effectively with the caveat that of course your individual context matters, and you will have to adapt and shift and change and some things may work better than others. That would go against the whole premise of the book to say everything works for everyone all the time. There’s nothing like that with college teaching. There’s no magic elixir you can swallow and then magically, this will work for everyone, every student all the time. That’s not how teaching and learning works. But those teaching takeaways really are thought provoking and insightful and should inspire anyone reading to think about how it might be adapted and used in their own classroom.

John: English breakfast tea though, is is a very nice magic elixir, but it may not solve all those problems.

Jessamyn: Caffeine is the magic elixir, yes.

John: &hellipwhich has long been used in higher ed.

Jessamyn: Yes.

John: Your book is divided into four parts: the first day, making connections, anti-racist pedagogies, and teaching with our whole selves. Could you tell us a bit about some of the topics that are addressed in each section?

Jessamyn: Yes, absolutely. Each section offers specific actionable strategies related to that title of the section. So the first section about the first day is all about the vital central importance of the first class meeting. And that’s a great way to start the collection because it takes this truth from the scholarship of teaching and learning, which is that the first day, really the first five minutes, of an in-person class and the first time a student logs into an online class. In some ways, those are the most important five minutes of the entire term. Because first impressions matter so, so much, and it’s so, so vital for students to be engaged right away. In addition, though, the first day takes on even increased importance when an instructor is navigating student expectations and presumptions and assumptions and stereotypes about “what a professor looks like,” or how a college class works. So the strategies that are explored in this section, they all take that foundational good teaching, effective teaching practice, plan extremely carefully for your first day, your first few minutes. And then, in addition to having a fantastic first day, here are ways to interrupt those biases to acknowledge and work with and help students overcome those stereotypes using things that we know work. So active learning, very careful preparation, going to your classroom and scoping it out if it’s in person before the first day so you’re very familiar with the physical space. Engaging students immediately with the content, which has this two-pronged effect. So one, you get students engaged right away&hellip it demonstrates that you care about their learning, you love the content, and you’re going to get them engaged, which is of course helpful for their learning. Also, it demonstrates your expertise, your knowledge, and it gets students right away from the first day knowing I know what I am talking about, and I love this subject, and I’m going to get you to engage with it as well. So that’s some strategies from the first day. Part two, making connections, similarly takes concepts that the scholarship of teaching and learning has shown are vital to student learning: building trust and building rapport with students and the authors take those strategies, explore for how to do them while also contending with student assumptions and expectations. So they look at things like encouraging student metacognition, collaborative rubrics, co-creating a grading rubric with students, and experiential learning&hellip all evidence-based effective teaching practices, and the authors build on those to show, and also these are ways to help students picture you as the professor. Part three digs into some specific anti-racist teaching strategies as ways we can increase student learning and at the same time, challenge stereotypes or de-center a certain limited depiction of professors from the student and instructor standpoint. So like I was saying about the purpose of the selection, humanizing higher education, anti-racist teaching strategies are important for creating inclusive classrooms for our students. They are also important for helping to chip away at the disparate teaching realities that instructors face as well. So that section it was important to me to include that for those reasons. Part four, teaching with our whole selves, gives specific teaching strategies for disrupting bias that students may bring into the classroom, while paying close attention to helping instructors be successful professionally in the classroom helping students learn. So there’s some reflective aspects to those essays, instructors reflecting on the ways they’ve been able to use classroom practices like picking a bias index, for example, in the discipline or creating classroom communities where fumbling forward&hellip that’s Donna Meija’s phrase&hellip fumbling forward is normalized as we struggled to learn, or like Dr. Pitman’s final chapter on the review process and the ways that women faculty of color can proactively get a wide range of feedback about their teaching, and include documentation and evidence from the scholarship about the different biases that women faculty of color face&hellip how to include that in your review process, working towards professional success.

Rebecca: So everyone wants to know, when exactly can we get this book?

Jessamyn: The release date that West Virginia University Press is saying is November of 2022. I’m hopeful it might be out a little bit sooner. And you can also see a lot more information about each author and a detailed table of contents at our book website, pictureaprofessor&hellip all one word&hellip pictureaprofessor.com.

John: And we will be interviewing a few of the authors in there. So there’ll be a little bit of a teaser for some of that information coming up over the next several months.

Rebecca: I know I’m really excited to read it when it comes out.

John: I’ve had it on preorder since I saw you tweet about it.

Jessamyn: And I couldn’t be happier that it’s coming out close to Viji Sathy’s and Kelly Hogan’s book: Inclusive Teaching. That book is going to be a real game changer on inclusive teaching practices to build inclusivity in the classroom. So I think the West Virginia University Press series is really addressing significant major issues and gaps in the scholarship right now.

John: It’s a wonderful series. And I think we’ve interviewed most of the authors now, actually, and we’re looking forward to seeing more coming through. And we did have a chance to meet Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan just a couple of weeks ago here at the SUNY CIT conference. And it was really nice to see them in person after reading their articles and interviewing them on the podcast a few times.

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

Jessamyn: Well, in the immediate future, there is a bonus chapter to Picture a Professor that I promised in the introduction that I wrote. I don’t actually have a chapter in the book, besides the introduction, and that was because I got so many outstanding contributions and proposals that I took out my chapter to leave more room for other people to be published. So I promised in the introduction to include my bonus chapter, which is going to be on student course evaluations and how that intersects with these stereotypes about being a professor. It’s an issue that a number of the authors mention and discuss, but not as the sole focus. So that’s the bonus chapter that will need to be done by November so I need to get going on that. [LAUGHTER]

John: So will there be a Picture More Professors coming out?

Jessamyn: I certainly hope so.

John: Well, thank you. It’s always great talking to you.

Jessamyn: Thank you for having me. I love Tea for Teaching. Everybody should listen to it all the time.

Rebecca: And we can’t wait to read the book.

Jessamyn: Thank you

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

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

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231. Include Instructors in Inclusive Instruction

Posted in active learning, diversity, equity, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, professional development, race, social justice, student course evaluations, teaching, universal design
March 16, 2022

Educational developers often recommend teaching practices that assume instructors are in a position in which they can cede some of their authority to students in order to increase student agency and motivation. Not all instructors, though, are in this privileged position. In this episode, Chavella Pittman and Thomas J. Tobin examine strategies to adopt practices that are inclusive of our colleagues as well as our students.

Chavella is a Professor of Sociology at Dominican University, the founder of Effective and Efficient Faculty, and is the host of the Teaching in Color podcast. She has written extensively about issues of race and gender in higher education in scholarly and general interest publications. Tom is a founding member of the Center for Teaching, Learning, & Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education and several other works related to teaching and learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Educational developers often recommend teaching practices that assume instructors are in a position in which they can cede some of their authority to students in order to increase student agency and motivation. Not all instructors, though, are in this privileged position. In this episode, we examine strategies that are inclusive of our colleagues as well as 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: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guests today are Chavella Pittman and Thomas J. Tobin. Chavella is a Professor of Sociology at Dominican University, the founder of Effective and Efficient Faculty, and is a host of the Teaching in Color podcast. She has written extensively about issues of race and gender in higher education in both scholarly and general interest publications. Tom is a founding member of the Center for Teaching and Learning and Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and the author of Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education, and several other works related to teaching and learning. Welcome back, Chavella and Tom. It’s great to have you back on the podcast again.

Tom: Thank you much, John. Glad to be here.

Chavella: Yeah, thanks so much for having me again.

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

Tom: I am not a tea person. Although I did just restock my cabinet from black tea to green tea. So, we’ll see how that affects my ability to write and function throughout the day. I’m drinking distilled water today. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: A good choice for the body for sure. How about you Chavella?

Chavella: I am drinking water with electrolytes. I participated in a bottle share this weekend. And because I’ve been running a lot more this winter, I can get a little sensitive to dehydration. So, I’m drinking water with electrolytes. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I think a first on the podcast. [LAUGHTER] John, how about you?

John: I am drinking ginger peach black tea.

Rebecca: And I have Golden Monkey today.

John: Back to an old favorite.

Rebecca: It is, it is. I don’t always have it in stock.

John: Advocates of inclusive teaching often encourage faculty to share their power and authority with the students. But you both wrote a February 7, 2022 article in The Chronicle noting that this does not work as well for all faculty. Could you share this argument with our listeners and tell us a little bit about how this article came about?

Chavella: As many things, it came about as a result of my frustration, if I’m gonna be honest, which I always seem to be. On a fairly regular basis, I see folks putting forth ideas like you should do this, you should use that. But it’s often attached with some elements of, for example, during a pandemic, people saying… If you’re still having deadlines for students, then therefore basically you don’t care for students, or you’re like an evil person. And seeing people make these individual level attributes that ignore the structural context of teaching was getting really frustrating for me. And I was having a conversation about it with some folks and Tom was one of those folks. And I said, “I have to write about this, and who’s interested in writing with me about this?” But the general argument is, absolutely, that a lot of times, people perceive teaching as individual choices, and therefore they’re making individual level attributions, not realizing that these aren’t just individual level choices. What we can and can’t do, how students respond to the various things we do, are very much so in the context of our social statuses and identities.

Tom: Absolutely. And as Chavella has said, I stepped in to work on this with Chavella, because… two different sides of the same coin for me. I have been an advocate for universal design for learning for a very long time, trying to lower barriers for our students. At the same time, I was one of the people Chavella was a little mad at, in that my research was moving in the direction of how does Universal Design for Learning underpin all of our other diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice efforts on our higher education campuses? And I was at the same time also advocating for, “Hey, all instructors, please share your power with your students, please be vulnerable,” all that kind of thing. And I was doing that in a blanket way. So the conversation that we were all having when Chevella said, “You know, not everybody can do that.” That was a moment where I came up short. And I thought, I haven’t even really examined this aspect of inclusive teaching. So it turned out to be a really good platform and conversation. When Chavella and I were first having one-to-one conversations about what do we want to actually say, it struck me …and listeners, you might remember the old Highlights magazine for children. And there was always the Goofus and Gallant segment in that magazine. Goofus was the young man who could never do anything right. And Gallant was the one who always did things perfectly and had perfect manners and it was meant to teach children how to do and be in a socially acceptable way. This is kind of the ninja-level Goofus and Gallant article from me and Chavella. I’m playing the role of Goofus. I am the person over 50, white, cisgender, heterosexual male with gray hair. I tick a bunch of boxes for unexamined privilege. And we wanted to contrast that unthinking and unexamined exercise of privilege with the experiences of women instructors, instructors of color, people who are in other precarious places like part-time instructors, and talk about how what is simple and easy for me becomes dangerous, challenging, or a bridge too far for other instructors.

Chavella: I was gonna say thanks, Tom, for admitting that you were in the group of folks that I was frustrated with. I wasn’t gonna out you, but… [LAUGHTER] It’s that level of reflectivity and that level of honesty and the willingness to look at yourself that I’m super grateful for and that we’re trying to encourage people to do, is to actually pause and ask yourself these sorts of questions.

Rebecca: I think it’s really important that we stop and reflect about these sorts of ideas when we’re really in the business of trying to advocate for students. If we want student success, we need our whole community to be successful and included. One of the topics that you brought up in your article was about flexibility in the classroom, specifically around deadlines. But I was curious about whether or not other conversations around flexibility came up as, Tom and Chavella, as you were talking with each other about this article. A lot of things that we see around inclusive practices include things like giving students agency around the format of their projects, or assignments, and other things like this.

Tom: When we were drafting the article—of course, the article can be only so long for The Chronicle—the very first example that came to my mind was, Rebecca, you’re talking about being flexible with formats and giving people choices about how they show what they know and take in information. That’s Universal Design for Learning. That’s one of my areas of expertise. It was one of the first things that occurred to me. And I thought, “You know, we’re not really this kind of reflective with UDL.” It’s kind of ironic, too, because even teaching approaches that center and address learning variability tend also to frame instructors as a homogeneous bloc, who uniformly have status and power that they’re able to transfer to learners. For example, UDL began as a way for K-12 teachers to lower barriers for students with disabilities. Now, because UDL began in an environment in which adults are teaching children, that power, respect, and status dynamic, they’re simply assumed to be tilted heavily toward the teachers regardless of their other identity characteristics or intersectionality. So when UDL began to be adopted beyond the special education curriculum, and in higher education settings, those assumptions about instructor authority went largely unexamined. And so our colleague, Jay Dolmage, suggests that UDL should encompass both learner and instructor variability. And he calls this the intersectional theory of Universal Design for Learning. And so classroom and teaching authority means that students recognize you, the instructor, as having the right and duty to ask them to participate in learning activities and to manage a classroom that’s conducive for learning. The challenge there is that students can perceive, in higher education, that they have greater power than their instructors because of the instructors’ institutional and structural identities, things like age, race, gender, employment status, ability profile, and you name it. So that give and take, that being reflective about who has the authority and power to share and give up extends to lots of other types of flexibility.

Chavella: You’re right, Rebecca, that is absolutely something that we discussed. And the piece that he shared, we had lots of conversations about that. And even just beyond the statuses, or related to the statuses, even assumptions about what technology faculty have access to. I talk about this all the time, the fact that people assume that because I’m faculty, I have access to all sorts of technology, I have access to all sorts of wireless internet connectivity. But I happen to live in a community of people that look like me, which means that our infrastructure isn’t the same, right? So I’m supposed to be having all this variability for students that I may not even have myself. So lots of assumptions layered into what faculty have, even as it relates to UDL.

Tom: And that’s something that Derrick Bell calls “interest convergence.” We tend, if we’re in a dominant culture group, we tend not to say, “Oh, yeah, we should be concerned about our colleagues who are having a more challenging time of things,” unless and until it affects us, right? This is the, “not in my backyard,” or, “I’ll wait until it affects somebody in my family,” kind of thinking. And that interest convergence can really get in our way, because we just assume, “Oh, if it doesn’t affect me, it must not affect many folks.” When the reality of intersectional thinking is that it affects everybody. And it’s useful, not from just a social justice perspective, to take a step back and think about how all of the instructors at an institution are situated to be able to do the work that we’re asking them to do in a safe and effective way. But it’s also a bottom-line business continuation conversation. This has to do with… Are your instructors going to want to come back and teach another semester if they’re contingent? Are your instructors eyeing the door? as Lee Bessette said in another forum. Are they looking to skip to another institution or find another place that gives them a little bit more psychological safety or a little bit more explicit support. So it’s not just the social justice aspect of things, but it’s also the keeping the lights on and making sure that you have talented people working with your students, consideration here as well.

Chavella: It absolutely is a retention issue. Part of what makes this particular issue frustrating for me is because it’s not like faculty with marginalized statuses haven’t been saying this all along. We’ve been saying that all along, “I can do that thing in terms of ability, but it’s going to have different consequences for me, or it’s going to play out different, or it’s going to take more energy for me, or I’m going to get more pushback from it.” So we’ve been saying that consistently. It’s just that the mainstream communicating about the scholarship of teaching and learning hasn’t been echoing that, hearing that, reflecting that. So it very much so becomes a retention issue when you situate it such that you have to do these things or you’re not a good teacher. And then people are having all the push back and sort of emotional energy. And I got a lot of responses after this piece came out from faculty with diverse and marginalized statuses saying, “Thank you,” like, “Basically, I’ve been yelling into a vacuum about this, and no one has heard me.” So for sure, definitely a retention issue.

Rebecca: I know we often don’t hear about a lot of examples of how marginalized faculty are impacted, in part because they feel like they have to be silent about it because they are unsafe, maybe they won’t get tenure and promotion, maybe they won’t get renewed. Do you have any examples that you collected related to UDL that you might be able to share that weren’t included in the article? Because I know that’s the section that got cut.

Tom: And I’m actually looking at the draft where we have those selections here. And with regard to Universal Design for Learning, the challenge that we found was the classroom dynamic shift, where Universal Design for Learning is asking at its core for the instructor to create various paths for the students to be able to move through the instructional space. That’s not actually all that controversial, and it doesn’t open up a lot of risk for folks with marginalized statuses. Where we get into the challenge is at the more approaching-expert level of universal design for learning. We want to move our students from being expert students, the people who know how to cram and know how to study for a test and can tell me back the things that I told them in the classroom. And the risk becomes we’re trying to create expert learners. We want students who can create new information, encounter new situations and apply what they know, and be open and more vulnerable with us. And that requires that openness and vulnerability from us as instructors as well. Part of the challenge with that is, if there’s not a lot of implicit or unearned respect and trust, then you have to establish what that trust looks like. And for folks who have fewer trust resources to be able to build from, that becomes tricky. So I’d love to pick Chavella’s brain here, too. And we’ve got a couple more examples in the kit as well.

Chavella: Yeah, I was gonna say that that beginner part, I think there are challenges for faculty with marginalized statuses. The idea of sort of opening up different paths, the issue becomes… and again, when you think about the scholarship of teaching and learning in general, you’re going to have moments of like, “Oh, yeah, that makes perfect sense.” We know from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, that when you do things that are innovative, or non-traditional, that you can get a bit of student resistance. So UDL requires you to do things that are innovative and non-traditional. So even if it’s just how students submit work, whether they’re doing in writing, or whether they’re doing an audio file, or doing some sort of visual presentation, those actually all open up paths to resistance for faculty with marginalized statuses, just by the virtue of the fact that they’re doing something different. Those things get rewarded for faculty that have dominant statuses, they’re seen as experts. Now we’re questioned, our expertise becomes questioned: “Why is she doing it? That’s strange. I don’t understand that. I’m confused by that.” So I would say that all sorts of teaching choices require students to actually view you as an expert. And if you have some statuses that are marginalized in society, those are all things that students will use to decide that you’re not credible. But we know that those are the practices that are supposed to be done. We know those are the ones that are good for learning. It’s just a matter of who’s doing it that makes it a little bit more challenging.

John: What are some ways in which we can make it safer for faculty to experiment with some new techniques? Or what are some ways that faculty who are in a marginalized position can address some of these challenges? Or might, in some cases, it be better to not try and to use teaching techniques that work best for them in their environments?

Chavella: I would say probably a little bit of mix and match. I’m always like, “There’s no silver bullet.” I wish there were. “There’s no magic wand,” I say that all the time. But it’s probably a little bit of mix and match. Like, if you have your energy, you’re trying to get your scholarship together, maybe not doing things you know students are going to resist, it doesn’t mean that traditional practices don’t work, you can do the traditional stuff. But that might not be the right timing for you. But at the end of the day… I was getting ready to say it doesn’t have anything to do with the marginalized faculty. And part of what I mean is, it’s not their responsibility. The institution should be making changes, the institution should have chances where you can try something innovative and your course evaluations don’t matter. The institution should have an understanding of the ways in which bias gets involved in your student rating, so whether it’s because it’s innovative or you have a marginalized status. I think that a lot of the folks that do this work and our own colleagues need to understand that the way you do things might be different from someone else, and then not to shame, or guilt, or assume that the other person’s way of doing it is less valid or less excellent when it comes to teaching. So all of the sort of, like, needing to be done parts are things that need to be done on the part of the powerful and of the institutions. But I absolutely tell diverse faculty to be intentional and be thoughtful about what they’re doing and what the consequences are going to be for them. And just be very aware that they might get a different outcome, and it might require different resources for them.

Tom: And the flip side of that is also true, that there’s a whole bunch of “don’t do” things that seem kind of intuitive to a department chair, or a dean, or a provost. Because when we hear, “Oh, well, we have to make safer spaces for people with intersectional identities, marginalized identities. And we have to empower them from an institutional perspective.” The first reaction from a lot of folks, especially if they are from dominant-culture backgrounds themselves, is to start looking for the people in their institution who fit the definition… “I’m going to go ask my black colleagues how to work with them.” And the chances are that most of your colleagues, your women colleagues, if you’re a man, your black colleagues, if you’re a white person, they don’t know any more than you do how to do this well. One of the things that I really benefited from is Chavella, this is her research area, she is a trained facilitator. Bring in people with expertise to help you and your institution to come up with policy, practice, and models that suit. Too often we just turn to one another and say, “Well, what should we do?” And that sort of uninformed guessing isn’t helpful and can actually perpetuate harmful situations.

Chavella: Absolutely. One of the other things we talked about as having some frustration is people identifying this as a gap. Like Tom said, this is my area of expertise: the intersection of structural oppression and the scholarship of teaching and learning. But some people will see this gap and be like, “Oh, all of a sudden I see my privilege now.” And then they rush to fill the gap. No, no. No, no, no, no, no. You don’t have the expertise for that, you don’t understand that. So the people with the dominant statuses, that rush to suck up all the air in the room because they see the new shiny thing that they want to pursue. First of all, a lot of times they’re sharing misinformation or things that are misguided, that are actually going to be more harmful for the group that they purport to help. But they’re also silencing the people who actually already have this expertise. So there are a lot of faculty developers and folks that do Scholarship of Teaching and Learning who have some expertise, who look like me, who are people of color, LGBTQ folks, but a lot of us are being drowned out. So that definitely falls in the category of “don’t,” which is, don’t center yourself by trying to fill the gap and sucking up all the air in the room. [LAUGHTER] Look around and actually identify who those folks are and work with them.

Tom: Yeah, am I allowed to say that most people doing land acknowledgments now aren’t actually working with their First Nations colleagues to make things better? That’s kind of what we wanted to do in the article, was to not call people out for doing things poorly or not doing things at all. What we wanted to do was to say, “Here are ways to think about and act that move you away from performative work into intentional allyship. What actions are you actually taking, so that you are using the privilege that you’ve got, even if you aren’t from a dominant perspective? What actions are you taking that help your colleagues? What actions are you actually taking?” And in the article we talk about how I started, when I first got my PhD I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to be the cool professor, and have my students call me Tom.’ And I didn’t realize at that point that me having them call me by my first name meant that some of my women colleagues who were insisting on being called “Dr. So-and-so,” then that was, “Well, why are you being so formal about it when Dr. Tobin says, ‘Call him Tom’?” And I came to realize pretty quickly that they didn’t have that assumed authority. And so if I said, “Please call me Dr. Tobin,” and we were all Dr. So-and-so in the department, that made for a more level playing field. And it also meant that I was showing respect for my colleagues, even in my own classroom, because I was explaining why I was asking for that formal, “please call me Dr.,” as well.

Chavella: And that’s such a good example. And in the research that I do, where I’m collecting stories and information from faculty with marginalized statuses, that happens to be one of the things that comes up all the time. And I know that people think that the titles are a small thing, but they’re not. And so in the article, one of the things that I’m always, when I’m trying to describe to other people, or make it clear to them that there is an intersection between structural oppression and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, is I’m always talking about this idea of a force field. So all those things make it clear that there is teaching authority, professional authority, that there’s some expertise involved. And a lot of times privileged faculty don’t realize, that force field just automatically exists for them, it doesn’t exist for other folks. So having your title is a marker that sort of provides a force field for faculty with marginalized statuses, so that they can do the work that they need to do. They don’t have to worry about people testing the fence, trying to get over the fence, trying to ignore the fence. So very much so, people think that that’s a small thing to be called by your professional title. But it is a reminder to students, and then they behave accordingly, if they’re referring to you by your title. And again, it just gives you the space to be able to do your work when you’re a faculty member with a marginalized status.

Rebecca: One of the things that has come to mind as we’ve been talking today is how often narratives around almost the same circumstance can be different at various tables. And that one way perhaps, to show some allyship is to make that visible in conversations when it occurs. So if there’s an evaluative conversation, for example, around promotion or tenure, and something comes up about teaching, and it’s maybe a different narrative around some of the same techniques, because maybe the teaching evaluations come back negative because they often do. That conversation is different, we can point out, “Hey, this is actually a good practice. And that the research says that these evaluations are often not accurate.” And to try to point to the fact that these narratives are inconsistent. It happens so often, and we observe this all the time. And often people don’t speak up.

Chavella: No, they don’t at all. [LAUGHTER] There are a couple things going on at once. One is people see teaching as this very private activity. So very few people talk about their teaching in general. And then a lot of the folks that are doing the evaluative pieces don’t really actually know anything about the scholarship of teaching and learning. [LAUGHTER] If we’re being honest. They just know what’s normative. So I work with campuses doing all this stuff. I train people how to do inclusive teaching, and how to do the reflective pieces around identifying your own privilege and making it clear about their teaching choices. But I also work with institutions about how they evaluate, and really making it plain to them, how what they’re doing are the most common practices, and then put them in conversation with the best practices. And those are usually opposite. So a lot of the people that are doing the evaluative pieces, absolutely. They don’t know anything about the scholarship of teaching and learning. So the more of us who know, engage in those conversations and have those narratives, I think it could make a huge difference. Absolutely.

Tom: And back to the idea that the changes we want to see are structural and institutional ones. When Jean Mandernach and Ann Taylor and I were doing the research for our book, Evaluating Online Teaching, from back in 2015, we couldn’t include a lot of the horror stories that we heard about how institutions would often hire adjuncts to come back the next term or move people forward on the promotion and tenure line, based only on student ratings of teaching. And so there was that one signal that, as Chavella has mentioned, we know is imperfect and riddled with student bias. And we also know that student ratings of teaching—you notice I never say evaluations, because our students are not qualified to evaluate us—they can share what their experiences were like. And we have to look at those experiences through the lens of what are the biases that they are expressing through that rating system. So when we have just the one signal that we’re making an employment-based decision on, that’s where that bias really creeps in. The other side of that is also true, that when we’re asking peers, or our department chairs, or our Deans to do observations of our teaching, unless there’s a structure in place that asks for very specific teaching behaviors to be observed and then evaluated, then we’re going to bring our own unexamined and unintentional biases, and some intentional ones too, into that process as well. So in the book on evaluating online teaching, we tried to be very clear that even someone who’s never taught online before, can still give a meaningful and legally defensible assessment of our teaching, so long as they understand what they’re looking for, and what we count as teaching behaviors, versus what’s just bias from the face-to-face classroom. And we talked about things like voice tone, pacing, eye contact, use of humor, all those kinds of things that even in the face-to-face classroom, we might be using as proxies for observable teaching behaviors, because we don’t know what those are, or we haven’t done the research or read the research about Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, like we’re coming back to over and over in this conversation. Move that into the conversation about all of your instructors coming from various types of backgrounds, level of preparation, and level of implicit authority that is granted to them by students, dnd you come up with a very similar argument. The challenge for us as administrators, is to be very clear about what we are assessing and measuring when we think about the assessment of teaching quality,

Chavella: Obviously, I cosign all of that. [LAUGHTER] I cosign all of that. I feel like I’m always sort of on a rooftop yelling all of those things over and over again.

John: One of the things we’ve observed at the teaching center is we have a wide variety of young faculty in many departments who are trying to do new things. But their pushback is coming from other people in the departments. Our administration is, in general, quite good at recognizing some of these challenges, but that doesn’t always translate down to the senior faculty in departments. And I think Rebecca and I, at various times, have both had to urge some caution to faculty in trying to get some support for the things they do and some buy-in. What are some ways we could address that issue at the departmental level?

Tom: One thing that we mentioned in the article, and it’s a shameless theft of mine from a colleague at Westmoreland County Community College in western Pennsylvania. He called it the get-out-of-jail free card after the card in Monopoly that allows you to pass through the game more quickly. What we recognized was that our contingent and adjunct instructors who are just coming back from semester to semester, as well as our people who are on the tenure line but not yet tenured, often felt that they had to be very conservative, not take very many risks. And they wanted to do innovative teaching practices, felt perhaps not comfortable doing them as much, or as soon as they wished to do so. So the get-out-of-jail free card, we call that a provost’s letter. We asked our provost to be willing to write a letter that went into somebody’s promotion and tenure packet, or went into somebody’s employment history packet for the adjunct folks, that allowed people to collect, but not have count, the student ratings, any peer observations, anything that was formatively or summatively evaluative of their teaching, for one particular semester, or one particular class where they wanted to do something experimental or take a risk. That provost’s letter, you could apply to do it once every… in our case it was three years when I was in Chicago. And that provost letter changed the academic tenor of the conversation, because people felt that they could take a risk every now and then. And we started to see more people, not only just the faculty members and instructors who were newer to the field, but also those who had been there for a while. It wasn’t so much a case of, “Oh, these new people that are showing me up or they’re taking risks that I would never take.” We saw some of our more seasoned faculty members start saying, “Oh, well, if they can do that, and it actually lowers barriers, not only for the students, but also for me, then I want in on that as well.” And so that was one concrete thing that we’d encourage your listeners, get with your faculty senate, get with your administration, and see if there are ways that you can provide little islands of safety or security for people to do things that might be risky for them in their current roles or in their current progression.

Chavella: I’m thinking about it because I deal with this all the time… the, “What can you do?” Because as we mentioned earlier, I see this ugly endpoint of this. So I see the faculty with marginalized statuses who are about to not be renewed, because they have taken a chance, regardless of whether or not what they did was effective or not, the colleagues are the ones that are gunning for them. Your teaching content is different than what they want. They take offense to that. You’re not lecturing the way that they might do it, like you’re doing something a little bit more active. So they’re gunning for you. And what I would say departments could do that would link back to what Tom was saying a second ago, is you have to have an ally in your department that’s gonna do what I refer to as these collaborative teaching observations, where the person is observing your effectiveness versus judging whether or not you teach exactly like them or not, because that’s a lot of what the review is. So any shift that you can do in a department to get them to realize the evaluation isn’t a matter of… Am I a clone of you or not? And are you actually achieving the things that you have set out to do? Would be an improvement. And honestly, I’m thinking if you even ask the department to ask that question in their evaluation processes, I feel like that might be the punch in the gut that would make them realize, “O-M-G, all we are doing is reproducing ourselves.” I think it would produce a movement that would benefit everybody, not just faculty of marginalized statuses, but any and everybody who’s trying to do great teaching and do a little innovating here and there.

Tom: And that circles us around to one other practical thing that you can do at the department or institutional level. And that is provide anonymity. Get an external group to your institution, bring in an outside consultant, bring in people from another university, and have them offer everybody at your institution, or everybody in your department, an anonymous way to provide feedback about their feelings of safety and their feelings of power in the classroom. You will get an earful. Especially if there’s no way that that information could possibly pass its way back to the department chair’s ear with a name attached to it, you’ll get a much better sense of the comfort and the privilege that people feel that they’re exercising, and the threats, we heard Chavella talk about the force field that many people experience and how it malfunctions a lot. You’ll get a better sense of what your baseline is. And you can start having open and honest conversations. We started this conversation by saying this is an issue that not a lot of people talk about because either A, they don’t feel like they have the power and standing to do so safely. Or conversely, if you’re from a dominant-culture identity, you don’t want to dive in on a conversation like this because you’re afraid that you’re going to say something wrong, you’re going to offend somebody. Here’s the newsflash: You’re going to get it wrong, you’re going to offend a couple of people. It’s still worth having the conversation. And as long as everybody is practicing from a space of goodwill, having that conversation and seeing it as a necessary step toward better diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice, that’s what we want people to be able to do.

Chavella: And actually, I’ll take what he just said a little bit further, in terms of asking the question of, Is it safe or not? I would say just assume it isn’t. I feel like as academics, we want to do all the climate surveys and the folks that are privileged sort of know in their heart, ‘Oh, nothing bad is going to come out of that.’ Nope, you’re going to find out stuff that you probably aren’t going to want to accept. So in a lot of ways, yes, that’s important to do to get the specific examples from your campus in your department. But in a lot of ways, I say skip that step altogether. Assume that folks do not feel safe. Read the literature, because they’re those of us who write these things. We’re on the margins, right? We’re on the margins in our institutions, we’re on the margins in terms of writing. Read what we’re writing and assume that is going on on your campus and start coming up with solutions for what you see in the literature. So don’t wait until you can identify validated results on whether or not you have that problem or not, just assume that problem is at play and get the solutions going.

Rebecca: Yes, yes, yes. Sign me up. [LAUGHTER]

Chavella: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

John: While I don’t think this would eliminate the problem of bias in student ratings, might it be useful if departments at least reconsidered the questions in their student ratings so that they actually focused on teaching techniques that are demonstrated to be successful? So that at least it would more closely proxy what we’d like. Students may not be able to evaluate how well an instructor is doing something, but perhaps questions such as… Does the instructor provide you with feedback on your work? Are you allowed opportunities for revision? Are you given opportunities to express yourself in multiple ways? To perhaps address some of these issues where we’d like to see faculty moving, and perhaps to overcome some of the resistance. Because if all faculty knew they might be evaluated in sending it relates to effective teaching practices, maybe that could move the needle a little bit.

Chavella: I’m always sort of a one foot in and one foot out on this. I’m like, “Ah, we kind of know they’re broken.” So I’m not sure if that’s really where I want people to expend their energy. I want people to expend their energy fleshing out that image of people’s effective teaching, so it’s not just the student perspective. I don’t know if I would encourage people to do that. And I’m not sure how much you can actually improve the questions. Because even the examples that you just gave, some basic psychology research shows that cross-racial interaction people misattribute. So you’re like, “Oh, did they give opportunities for feedback?” Well, the feedback that students might want from a woman will look very different than the feedback they want from a man. You see what I’m saying? So, like, a male faculty member could give two sentences of feedback. And the students are like, “Great! I got feedback from whoever.” But then when a woman does it, if it’s a woman of color, there’s two sentences, all of a sudden, they expected more so to them that’s not feedback. So even the questions that people come up with to avoid bias at the end of the day, we’re all human, we’re going to see each other through these gender, race, social class lens. So yes, so I agree, I think it should be much more about student learning. But I definitely think that we should expand whose voices are included, in addition to what we’re looking at when it comes to teaching effectiveness.

Tom: Indeed, and don’t even get me started on student ratings. We’ve been yelling at the top of our lungs for the past 42 years, that we know how to do psychometrically valid student writing instruments. And then every college and university says, “Oh, we’re going to do our own.” And so the challenge is we’ve had organizations like the Idea Center that’s now part of a larger corporate entity, they’ve been doing the research on what are questions that students can use for ratings that are as neutral, and single barreled, and psychometrically valid as possible. So I’ll second what Chavella is saying here, and let’s go beyond just the student ratings. We, ideally, would train all of our instructors, to understand psychology, to understand statistics, to understand the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, all those things. But what we hire people for is they’re good chemists, they’re good art historians. So we don’t have enough time, people, money, or effort to be able to bring everybody up to expertise in all of these areas. What I’d much rather see is I’d much rather have three or four big ideas that everybody gets behind, and then they figure out how they’re going to do so in their own circumstances. Rather than trying to make everybody feel like they missed the boat, and they didn’t get training, and therefore, they’re at a beginner level in something. We’ve got experts in our campuses and around us, who can help us with the framing of these kinds of conversations, especially when they’re difficult, perhaps especially because they’re difficult. We should not ourselves need to feel like we need to become miniature overnight experts in how to have conversations about intersectional identity, or race, or gender in the classroom, in order to be able to take some actions that help to support our colleagues, create community, and find good ways to enact policies and practices that enshrine those things in the life of our colleges and universities. Alright, I’ll get off my soapbox now. You get the idea.

John: It’s a good soapbox to be on, though.

Rebecca: I really appreciated thinking about the systemic issues that we need to address and thinking through the institutional and departmental level challenges that we need to get on board with and address. But I don’t want to lose sight of some of the really practical reflection points that were in the article.

Chavella: You know what, though? I was going to say, they’re not disconnected. But I think that people think that because it’s a structural thing, it means we can’t tackle it, it’s going to take like one year of faculty senate meetings and changes the handbook. It doesn’t require that at all. And so I think those structural things are very much still connected to really practical pieces… easy, actionable… you could do it tomorrow, or at least by the end of the week. [LAUGHTER] I know that’s true, because this is what I teach campuses how to do.

Rebecca: That’s a really good point. Chavella, for sure. As I was reading the article, I was reading the student incivility section and just starting to think about the kinds of practices we often recommend around establishing belonging and community and wondering “Hmm, what kind of privilege do I bring to that space?” And so that was a moment of deep self reflection for me that went beyond just the incivility piece, but the sense of belonging that we had been heavily advocating for, especially throughout the pandemic, but obviously before that as well.

Chavella: Honestly, even just hearing you say that means that the article did its work, because that’s the question we want people to ask all the time. I don’t think we want people to ask if or when does my privilege come into play? But assume that it does and figure out: “How does it come into play?” …and then make some adjustments. So what did you come up with? Like I want to know, when you think about the things that you do, like what did you come up with in terms of like how my privilege play into how you do sense of belonging? I don’t mean to put you on the spot, I’m sorry. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m not sure if I’ve come up with adjustments yet to be honest, I’ve started thinking about the kinds of activities that I do, the ways that I try to include multiple voices, but also the access to the technology I have to be able to do that. The fact that the institution has given me the ability to teach online synchronously during this time, because of my own disability status. I think about how that might change in person, and what kinds of things that I might do differently. And even the kinds of questions that I’m asking, and whether or not other folks would be able to ask the same kinds of questions. I have a lot of technical skill, I teach web design, I have a lot of technical skill. And there’s a lot of privilege just from that position [LAUGHTER] that I bring to my teaching space that many other faculty don’t have. So I’m often very aware that the kinds of things I do are not necessarily things that other people can replicate in other scenarios. They’re really based on the very specific contexts I’m teaching in, my own position in that context and my own expertise in particular areas. But I also know the kinds of things that I shy away from as a female instructor. [LAUGHTER]

Chavella: Right? Exactly. My brain got stuck at what you said at the beginning of it. So even if we think of this as an illustration, just talking about the pandemic, and sense of belonging, a lot of our faculty with marginalized statuses either structurally or institutionally, right, people who are contingent, or folks of color, women, that did not have options about whether or not they could be online or not. And could you imagine being from a community that’s disproportionately affected by the outcomes of COVID-19 in a classroom, with students where you don’t have a lot of power, and then trying to establish a sense of belonging… the actual physical distance that’s required to keep you, your family, and your folks safe. Imagine that being interpreted by students as you having distance, on top of the fact that you’re different from them, they’re already going to perceive distance, regardless of whether that’s there or not. That’s like basic psychology research. So I got stuck there. So I think you’re absolutely right. These are the questions we want people to be asking of themselves, and making adjustments to make sure that not only might your privilege be affecting how you make students belong, but also your colleagues who might be different from you, because then it becomes: “Well, professor so and so does XYZ.” So it’s about being really mindful of what you’re doing, and how that might make your colleagues be perceived as well.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely. There’s been so many situations where I have definitely acknowledged my privilege. During the pandemic I have stable internet, I have technology, but I’m able to use my camera, I’m not in a situation where it’s unsafe for me to use my camera and my microphone, and all of these sorts of things, and how many other faculty who might be more contingent than myself have had a much more difficult time across many institutions and trying to speak up to get them some of the support that is necessary so that they could function safely. But, also just recognizing that I can’t really imagine what it would be like not to have the privilege that I have. And that’s an important thing to, I think, acknowledge. It’s difficult to imagine that.

Chavella: Yeah, and another thing popped into my mind, this is what popped in my mind immediately before I asked you a question. So sorry about turning it back on you. The idea of a sense of belonging in the classroom, and one of the inclusive teaching practices I teach folks how to do is to have an inclusive teaching statement. But even if people don’t do that, let’s not even talk about that. Let’s just talk about regular scholarship of teaching and learning. And the whole idea that you’re supposed to have guidelines for how you interact in the classroom for the students. Even that… I think that a lot of our faculty with privileged statuses don’t do that, or my version of don’t do that. The way that people do that people say, “Oh, follow the golden rule, or in this classroom, we’re going to treat each other with respect and with civility.” They’re super vague and they’re vacuous. And when you’re a person with a privileged status it means something completely different for you. And when you’re having students who also have privileged statuses, that all means something very different for you. I think, all practices from the rooter to the tooter, essentially, people should be thinking about them in the context of their privileges, but a sense of belonging is absolutely one of them.

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

Tom: I’m thinking about what I’d love your listeners to do next… it is first to do a little listening. Find a way to ask your students, ask your colleagues, ask your administration, questions about how people are supported in the teaching that they do. And then a second action that follows along from that is to determine what kind of action you can take in order to either exercise your own privilege in concert with and communication with other folks, or to find allies who can help you to make an argument for making positive change. So those would be the two things I’d love people to take away from our conversation today.

Chavella: And I would cosign that again. [LAUGHTER] But the “listen” piece, in particular, I would say if by the end of the week, you could find an article or two to read, if you could check out a podcast episode or so… like my podcast is simple and easy to hear about some of these issues. But there are people that are writing about these items. Just learning a little bit about these things on your own and figuring out how you can make slight changes to your practices would make a huge difference. And obviously, I have a book that’s going to be coming out that’s all about all of this, sometime in the near future.

Rebecca: Well, we can’t wait to have you back to talk about it.

Chavella: Yes, I’m looking forward to it. Lots of laughing… that is serious topics sometimes, but I do lots of laughing. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to both of you again, and I think this will cause a lot of people to reflect on their practices and think about how they can be a little bit more inclusive of their fellow faculty members.

Tom: I hope so. Thanks for having us on.

Chavella: Yeah. Thank you so much, y’all. Have a good one.

Rebecca: You too. Thank you.

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

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

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

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229. Inclusive History

Posted in diversity, engagement, equity, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, race, racism, social justice, teaching
March 2, 2022

Most history textbooks provide a narrative that is filtered through the lens of the dominant culture. In this episode, Vanessa Holden joins us to discuss how the study of history can be enriched by including a wider variety of voices and perspectives in historical narratives and in our classrooms. Vanessa has a dual appointment in both the Department of History and the program in African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on African American women in slavery in the antebellum South, the history of resistance and rebellion, gender history, and the history of sex and sexuality. Vanessa is the author of many scholarly publications, including the recently published Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community. During the 2021 academic year, she was selected to be the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Scholar at SUNY Buffalo’s Center for Diversity Innovation.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Most history textbooks provide a narrative that is filtered through the lens of the dominant culture. In this episode, we explore how the study of history can be enriched by including a wider variety of voices and perspectives in historical narratives and in our classrooms.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guest today is Vanessa Holden. She has a dual appointment in both the Department of History and the program in African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on African American women in slavery in the antebellum South. Her areas of interest are the history of resistance and rebellion, gender history, and the history of sex and sexuality. Vanessa is the author of many scholarly publications, including the recently published Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community. During the 2021 academic year, she was selected to be the inaugural distinguished visiting scholar at SUNY Buffalo’s Center for Diversity Innovation. Welcome, Vanessa.

Vanessa: Hi, happy to be here.

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

Vanessa: I’m not. I’m drinking water. I’m a coffee person, I’m sorry.

Rebecca: So you got the water, you got the coffee, all right, all right. As John always says, that’s our most favorite tea on the podcast. [LAUGHTER] How about you, John?

John: I’m drinking iced tea today for a change. Because it’s such a nice, warm, wintry day here with a blizzard going on outside.

Rebecca: Hey! It’s in the 30s, it’s a heat wave.

Vanessa: Oh, that’s like beach weather in Oswego.

Rebecca: Totally.

Vanessa: Yeah.

Rebecca: And I’m drinking cinnamon spice black tea today.

Vanessa: Ooh!

Rebecca: It’s very warming, kind of the opposite of John’s situation.

John: So we’ve invited you here today primarily to discuss your work on inclusive teaching. But first, could you tell us a little bit about Surviving Southampton and the research that you’ve been doing that led up to this book?

Vanessa: Sure. So Surviving Southampton is about America’s most famous slave rebellion, what historians often call Nat Turner’s Rebellion, but I’m really keen to assert should be called the Southampton Rebellion. Mostly because that’s what the people who lived there and lived through it called it. And that’s mostly what it was referred to until historians got a hold of it in the 20th century. And what I do for an event that’s been written about, almost since it happened is I actually just asked the question: How were women and children involved in this really important moment of violent resistance? And of course, when I started to look for women in the archive, I was led to a number of other communities of people in Southampton County who’ve been mentioned, but largely understudied and not looked at. So I do have a chapter that specifically deals with enslaved women. But I also look at free people of color in the county—Southampton County, Virginia had the third highest population of free people of color at the time in Virginia. I look at children and children’s involvement and resistance. And I really center survival not just as endurance. We use the word survivor to mean somebody who endured a natural disaster, a crisis, a tragedy, but it’s also a word we use for the bereaved. So if you’ve read a death announcement, or see a notice on Twitter, it sometimes will list who the deceased is survived by. So I also take time to look at the ways that African Americans were rebuilding systems of resistance, even as trials were happening for rebels, really violent backlash to the rebellion was happening. So even in the midst of really the most oppressive moments of the slave regime, black people were strategizing about how to continue to resist slavery. And really, women are at the center of that labor of survival.

Rebecca: These narratives are often not discussed, especially K12 but also at the college level. How do we start bringing these voices in more? Obviously, your book is helping with this, but how else can we start doing this?

Vanessa: Yeah, I am a very public-facing scholar. I work a lot with public history projects and community groups, and have a real heart for working alongside K-12 teachers. I’m convinced that they’re all geniuses, that they take on mammoth feats every single day in the classroom. And really through my work with the digital humanities project Freedom on the Move, which is based at Cornell right now, but we have a team of scholars who are at universities all over the country. The project’s main goal is to find and digitize every extent runaway slave ad. Right now we’ve got about 44 or so thousand ads in the digitized archive, and a little over 10,000 have been fully transcribed. But through that project, I’ve had the opportunity to work with teaching hard histories and work with focus groups of K-12 teachers, and really hear how impactful dealing with these particular sources can be for K-12 students. That learning about the history of slavery from the point of view of people who were resisting slavery, reading thick descriptions of folks who were fleeing to find family members or striking out for freedom really transforms the way that students are able to access what is and should be a very difficult, painful history. And also thinking about really age-appropriate ways to approach that history, that often students can find people their age who are listed as fleeing from slavery. And that really helps them think through, at an age-appropriate way, the real injustice of slavery and the dehumanizing nature of enslavement while acknowledging moments of resistance and, really, triumph of humanity. So I think some key ways that I’ve seen educators who work with K-12 students bring this history to them is highlighting the ways that people their age experience these difficult histories, and giving them a chance to work with primary sources, to go to the documents, work with them to get through some of the stilted 19th century language to get at experience that hasn’t been interpreted for them that they can really exercise their interpretive skills to understand better.

Rebecca: I love the hook of finding a way to connect. And doing that through finding people of the same age is such a great idea.

John: Have you or this project done any work in having some of the students do some of those transcriptions?

Vanessa: So yes, and that has been a key part of one of the branches of developing the project, is thinking through the accessibility of our crowdsourcing platform. So right now, Freedom on the Move is a crowdsourced database, anybody can log in to freedomonthemove.org, create an account and begin transcribing, or pulling information out of the ads—what data scientists would call coding data, but what historians would call really mining sources for information. And we’ve run into a couple of interesting things working with educators, because the team initially was only researchers. And we sort of imagined that there would be classroom applications. And we’ve really learned from this misstep of not having educators involved from the very beginning. Because, of course, the things that researchers care about are not the things that are most useful in the classroom. And the transcription platform is built for an educated adult public, you don’t have to be a specialist to do the transcription by any means. But there’s a real difference in what, say, sixth graders can read and understand and transcribe, and what someone who is an adult can read and transcribe and understand. One thing that we were pushed to do actually was, and this really was an educator critique, was create a glossary. Because, of course, these documents from the late 18th through the 19th century include racial terms. And we have advertisements in the archive from Spanish speaking areas, from French speaking areas, from English speaking areas. And these racial terms are archaic. They’re considered offensive and racist now, and also students have little or no familiarity with them. And so one of the ways that we had to really provide educators with a tool they could point to, to help students understand this language, understand its context, understand why we don’t use it now, involved us going back and doing the work of writing out a glossary of terms with, really, annotations for how to best understand why enslavers are using the language that they’re using. To get students and user participants to critique the documents, read the documents with a critical eye that these are things produced by enslavers about enslaved people, it’s not the way they maybe would’ve described themselves. So finding both subtle and overt ways to cue in participants, and also teach critical skills, interpretive skills at the same time. So there’s a lot of intellectual work that goes into these sorts of projects. But ultimately, I think it helps students really engage with the sources in really fruitful ways. And we’ve had educators take this in all sorts of directions, to creative lessons, to lessons where students are writing bound poems using the ads and really attending to the emotional affect of this material. Instead of shying away from the fact that this is difficult, leaning in and saying, “Yeah, it should be difficult. And let’s actually do the care work of processing what’s difficult.”

John: Many textbooks, though, do not take this approach, where they leave those voices entirely out. What sort of harm is done to students, when there are these glaring omissions in history?

Vanessa: You know, there’s like a whole series of podcasts you all could do on the textbook industry, and how textbooks happen, and what is and isn’t allowed. And of course, we’re living in a contemporary moment where what reading materials are provided to, particularly K-12 students, where they’re being deeply scrutinized. There are a new wave of bans on materials. And interestingly, a lot of those revolve around the language of discomfort. And I think often the way that issues like racism, sexism, ableism, classism can be approached is with the language of emotion and feelings. So particularly very young people, it’s explained to them, “Oh we don’t use these words that are racist, because they’ll hurt someone’s feelings.” And sure, yes, feelings are a part of that. But the other reason we don’t use these racist terms, it’s not just that it might hurt someone’s feelings, it’s that those terms dehumanize someone. And when that happens, that opens the door for very real violence, and very real physically, financially, materially detrimental consequences. The first step actually is that language, but it’s the steps that follow that language that are the issue. And so I think sometimes, because so much can get wrapped up in only dealing with the first piece, when it comes to feelings, the other pieces get maligned. So then it becomes about well, nobody should ever feel bad ever. And a lot of times that I’ve talked to my own students who often, even at the college level, they’re encountering these sources for the very first time, they’re encountering an in-depth discussion of American slavery for the very first time, some of them have never really heard in any detail the types of violence that were involved in American slavery, that just are omitted, they sort of know slavery was bad and that’s where the lesson stopped. I give them a moment to pause before we really get into the semester and I just acknowledge that this is really difficult material to read and to process. That they’re going to learn about things that they haven’t learned about before, and they’re going to have a feeling about it. And then I say that that’s actually pretty great, because that actually just means they’re human. They shouldn’t learn about the Middle Passage or slave auctions or physical violence, and just be sort of okay with it, or have no emotional response to that. Then in those moments when they’re having an emotional response, that’s just a moment where they are being empathetic human beings. So at those moments where a student learns something that makes them uncomfortable, learns something that ignites an emotional response. It could be sadness, it could be anger, it could be disbelief, it could be a little bit of denial, it could be a whole range of things. That’s actually a moment to pause and acknowledge your own moment of really human empathy, your moment of discomfort. And then to push forward that, “Oh, this is the place where I actually should be paying attention. That, here’s the point at which I’m learning things I didn’t know before. Here’s the point at which I haven’t experienced that before.” I also like to do an exercise that involves watching an episode of Colonial House. Are you both familiar with the series from PBS?

John: I am not.

Rebecca: No.

Vanessa: It’s an early reality television series where they get people to agree, I don’t know how they get them to agree to this, but they get them to agree to live using only materials and technology for a particular historical period for a summer. And then they film them and find out what happens if a bunch of modern people go pretend it’s the 1630s. So there’s this great episode of Colonial House where the overwhelmingly white participants are upset because churning butter is really hard and the corn isn’t coming in. And it turns out building a colony in 1630s Massachusetts isn’t so great, and it’s pretty smelly, and difficult or whatever. And then some Wampanoag people who are descendants of the original inhabitants of the Cape in Massachusetts show up in their traditional clothing. And their point of view of this experiment is very different than the participants. The participants are there thinking they’re doing this educational thing with their kids, even though it’s hard, they have a really positive perspective about what they’re doing. And when the Wampanoag show up, some of them are moved to tears, the way that they’re viewing this little re-enactment experiment is deeply emotional, and deeply hurtful. And they make the point to the participants, you know, “You’re out here playing, but you’re re-enacting this moment, this kind of point of no return for people like us where we were about to lose our homelands, we were about to lose everything.” So I have students engage with a form they’re really familiar with, reality television, before they’re engaging with each other around these topics. And we kind of talk through how this is an iconic period in American history, the Colonial Period. And Americans throw around that word “colonial” like it’s a type of architecture or a type of clothing. Americans don’t really think about it as a system of oppression, even though a key moment of our history is throwing off colonial rule. And we talk about it, it’s the exact same experience. The people who are playing colonists aren’t there with evil intentions, they think this is like a summer learning thing. And they’re confronted with a community of people who can look at the exact same thing, and say, “No, this is actually really harmful. And here are all these things you haven’t thought about at all.” And it creates a really helpful moment because, of course, in an African American history course we’re going to talk about the American Revolution, we’re going to talk about the American Civil War, we’re going to to talk about westward expansion, we’re going to to talk about all sorts of moments that they probably have watched movies about, they’ve maybe read really celebratory accounts of, or just accounts that are just like, “Well, that was just meant to happen, that people moved westward, that just happened. And moving on.” That doesn’t account for other people’s experiences. So it gives them a moment to look around the room and say, “Oh, I might be sitting next to someone for whom a moment in American history that I’ve always thought was celebratory for them is actually a horrible thing to remember. And it involves all these other dimensions that they just have never been asked to think about before.” And so give students a moment because, of course, some of the people on the show get really defensive. And so rather than have them start to learn difficult things and get defensive with each other, they can actually talk about these people on the TV. So we get a lot of that out of the way before we get to, “Okay, now you’re reading a slave narrative, and you’re learning really horrible things. And you see some place names you recognize, when you get into it.” Now, we have this common text to come back to and say, “Oh, there are different ways to remember this. There are different perspectives about what exactly happened. And the version I learned has particular consequences.”

Rebecca: I really love the idea of having something to try on that conversation without it feeling like it’s actually a conversation about you. It’s safe to have a conversation about something that’s not you, like the TV show, as a way to work through those ideas, and deal with some of those emotions that you were talking about that certainly come up that make you be defensive about certain topics, potentially. I love that you have that grounding and shared moment with each other. I’m sure it actually helps make everything else be far more productive during the semester.

Vanessa: I mean, there’s a great moment where one of the participants says, “Oh, I never thought that I was being an imperialist.” And then inevitably a student of mine will say, “The name of the show is Colonial House. [LAUGHTER] Like, what did you think?” So then he kind of really gets it like, “Oh, you’re using these terms to describe, I don’t know, buckle shoes and funny hats and architecture, but you’re not thinking about, ‘Oh, I’ve re-enacting a process of incurring on other people’s lineage.’ Like, that’s what I’m re-enacting.” It’s not just churning butter. It is a lot of butter turning, but it’s not just that. [LAUGHTER]

John: I also really like that approach of letting people look at it through this third-party lens. We’ve talked about that in some other situations, where that’s really effective when their own personal emotions and feelings are not put at stake in the same way. But I imagine some difficult conversations will come up during your class. How do you help prep students to deal with those issues when someone is offended by something that someone else says because they weren’t considering other perspectives?

Vanessa: I try to… and this is some work that I do in the first few weeks before students, I think, are even really aware, because the first few weeks of class are all about setting the stage, not just material that they need to know, but also practices that I want them to engage in throughout the semester. So I begin to set up early a culture of common texts for the class. So that first documentary clip screening that I show, it becomes a common text. It’s the first day of classes, sometimes they think, ‘This is just a throwaway exercise,’ or ‘Dr. Holden is just trying to engage us or whatever.’ But I start to build into this culture of, we have common texts in this course that we go back to. Part of learning in my field, at least historical methodology, is work with historical sources. So I begin to build piece by piece that in this class, it’s less about you talking about your own opinions about things, and more about us discussing common sources and common texts. So I’ve had, of course, a number of situations. Sometimes it’s students speaking without thinking. Sometimes they are in the middle of having an emotional response to something, dnd so what comes out of their mouth hasn’t taken into account all the other things we’ve read. Sometimes though, I’ve actually had a couple situations a lot earlier in my career, where students are just trying to test me or test my knowledge or see if they can knock me off kilter a little bit by saying something just outrageous just to see if I’m going to take the bait or engage. And typically what I do is turn the whole class back to the common texts. So I had a student once make a really disparaging comment about a group of Thai immigrants who were actually being forced to do unfree labor in Hawaii on pineapple plantations, because we were talking about contemporary cases of unfree labor and slavery. And the student just off the cuff said, “Well, these people aren’t Americans, why should we even care about them?” Which immediately resulted in gasps for the rest of the class. And so I said, “Well, let’s answer that question. Okay, this half of the class go back to this document, this piece of the class go to this document, and this piece of the class go to this document, let’s interrogate this. A: Why aren’t these people Americans? How is it that people who are not Americans are ending up in this labor situation? B: What is the landowner getting from this? And C: What connections can we make? Why should we care?” And this took the wind out of this particular student’s sails, because I think they really hoped I was going to really go in and yell at them or say something out of pocket. And instead, it was up to their classmates. And what came out of that, A: Really made clear that the class as a whole was not going to accept this. And B: Got students back into the documents in a way that felt way more immediate, I think, than it would have if they felt like, “Oh, clearly everybody in class with us agrees that this is horrible.” And it also set up some expectations for appropriate ways to handle disagreements in class. I do that a lot. Teaching the American Civil War here in Kentucky is always interesting, because the Commonwealth did not secede from the Union. But it’s a very contentious topic. And what folks often know is what family members have told them or things they read themselves in historical fiction or more pop historical texts. And seeing the primary documents for the first time can be kind of startling with just how explicitly racist people of the 19th century really were. And so I found myself in a number of situations making clear, we’ve got to go back to the sources. And I’ll say this, my subject position in the classroom is something that I have to be very aware of, as a woman, as a person of color. Sometimes students expect somebody like me at the front of an African American history course or an African American studies course. But when I’ve taught broad U.S. courses, I’m not who they think is going to teach them American history. And it would be silly for me to not be aware of that. But oftentimes, that means my pedagogical practice has to be really transparent, I have to be really clear. This is what I’m asking you to read, this is why I’m asking you to read it, and this is what outcome I expect for there to be. And some students are surprised that I’m that transparent about pedagogical practice. But in a time and place where student evaluations are as biased as the research tells us, I think it’s really, really important.

John: This might be a good place to transition into a discussion of inclusive teaching practices. And one aspect of that might be that sort of transparency about what you’re doing in class and why you’re doing it. Could you talk a little bit about your philosophy of teaching and how you go about creating an inclusive environment in your classroom? Some of that has come through already, but what are some other specific steps you might take?

Vanessa: Sure, I approach my classrooms as a collaborative space. Of course, there’s a power differential, and my job as a professor is different than students’ jobs as students. But I find that, actually, the more transparency, the better. So clearly laying out expectations, but also being really clear about what my expectations for myself are. So students are often surprised that I’m pretty upfront, “Here are the ways that I am available to you. And here are the ways that I can help you outside of those hours I’m not available to you.” Modeling healthy boundaries around what is my obligation to this course, allows them the leeway to say, “Oh, one of the things I need to do is set up what my boundaries are around my coursework.” [LAUGHTER] I’m very clear. I don’t expect that you are only thinking about my class all the time. So you should just know that that’s not an expectation I have for myself. So let’s talk about the times when I am thinking about this course. Beyond that, I offer them as expansive a menu as possible of inclusivity policies. And I think when students think about accommodation in class, they often think only of visible disability and that’s it. And so in my syllabi, in my first day of class presentation, I make super clear that anybody can be eligible for accommodation, and the ways to go about advocating for that for themselves, that there are processes involved. So I mention everything from care responsibilities, I have a number of students who are parents, I mention military service, I have a number of students who are in ROTC, or they’re in the National Guard. I talk to athletes in my classes. I talk to students who may be figuring out for the first time that they have learning needs that are now becoming apparent in their first year of college, they just, it hasn’t been diagnosed, it hasn’t been looked into, tested, treated, all those things, and then give them all the resources I possibly can to access those services. And I’ll say that it actually lends itself to really good classroom management, because it opens the door for students to talk to me early and often. I can’t tell you how many times I have students who are parents that are surprised that I note care responsibilities, particularly for young children. And I just say, “Look, as your professor, obviously I can’t help you with the direct physical care of your children. But when a two year old has an ear infection, they have an ear infection. So here are ways you can get in touch with me, here’s how we work on how your assignments work. This is something you can bring up to me as a mitigating circumstance for assignments.” I also bring a sense of, and this is where common texts come in too, that nobody’s joining the course because they know everything that we’re going to cover already. That everybody is at a space of learning and a space of growth. That this classroom is an opportunity to ask questions, it’s an opportunity to sometimes get things wrong, it’s an opportunity to be called in about various prejudices you’ve never really interrogated before. And to really set up the expectation that what’s important is not that you know all the right things to say every single time. But what’s important is that you’re open to learning, and that you’re open to understanding. And I think that setting up that environment as collaborative is really important. That it’s as much about the questions that they ask as the lecture terms that I talk about. To really be clear that students have agency in their own learning process. And some catch on, and some lean in and some don’t, that’s just the nature of classrooms. But affording them that agency then has resulted in some really fascinating takes on the material I have to cover.

Rebecca: So one of the things that you’re describing, Vanessa, is in your classes, students are doing history, right? [LAUGHTER]

Vanessa: Yeah.

Rebecca: No matter who they are, they’re doing the practice of history, because they’re looking at primary documents and things. But we also know that there are students who may not come to a particular class or a discipline because they don’t see themselves represented or people like them representing the field. How do we help to bring students in through the door, and also keep them there, so that we do have a wider perspective in each of our disciplines?

Vanessa: I feel like I’m really fortunate because I end up with, at least in my African American history courses, I end up with a pretty self-selecting population. So, typically, I end up with students who already have some subject interest in African American history. So they’re not particularly surprised, for example, that we’re going to talk about slavery at some point. In my general American courses, then that can be a little hit or miss. But in my AFAM courses, students tend to, like I said, expect somebody who looks like me at the front of the classroom, expect to talk about these issues. Something that I find is that students often arrive on campus with a pretty limited view of what’s available on university campuses. There are some majors that have professions directly related to them. So they know if I go pre-med, then I’m going to become a doctor. That’s a thing. I know what that is. If I major in history, there’s less of a clear, professional path. And that’s true with a lot of the majors that are available on university campuses. And we know from this side of the desk, like, “Oh, no, there are all these applications for all these different types of inquiry. They’re all these different ways to think about the world.” But students often are just trying to figure it out. And I just find a lot that students don’t realize what can be known, if that makes sense. They’ve taken history courses, because they have to in high school. They can be pretty cursory. And that’s not the fault of educators, it’s often the fault of a whole other set of mitigating things like standardized testing schedules and what textbooks are available and these sorts of things. I know I was told frequently growing up that the kinds of things I was interested in in U.S. history, just couldn’t know them. They just weren’t knowable. There were no sources for that. So I think sometimes when I go to these major fairs, or I’m trying to reach students at our black students center and say, “You know, you could take whole courses on this.” Some of it is just about showing up in spaces where students are already, being visible on campus. I’ve gotten more interest in my classes just walking through the classroom building and having students say, “Wait a second, who are you and what do you teach? I didn’t even know that there were black professors in the history department.” Meanwhile, we have like eight tenured black professors in our history department. So not just assuming that students know what’s available to them. I also think there’s something to be said for university advising. This is different at every institution, but the sorts of courses that advisors are slotting students into sometimes has way more to do with whatever the core curriculum demands. So for example, now that my African American History course to 1865 is part of our core curriculum, I know that that’s going to get that course in front of the eyes of way more students, and students who would have self-selected into the course, had it been part of that core. And so I also think that there’s something to be said for really solid intro course teaching, because that’s the place where you can really capture students’ interest and give them a sense of what’s available to them.

Rebecca: It’s also the place where we often rely on part-time faculty, it’s a different experience, often at the first year, not always, but that happens more often than not that introductory classes may be taught by faculty who aren’t there all the time, or who are new to the field. And not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily, but it’s not always engaging students with the people they might be working with as they go through all four years.

Vanessa: Well and I think students have really very real and understandable considerations. I know at my institution, a lot of our students, they’re very career minded. We have a number of students who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, they do not have the extra funds to just play around in elective courses, they’ve got to get things done. I get it, I understand. I’m not going to disparage them for that. That makes a lot of sense. So sometimes the kind of exploratory moment of, “Well, who’s in what department? Do I see myself in this? Is there a way that I can learn the histories that apply to me?” That’s not the priority. And I get it. I think, as a faculty member, and I’ve talked to my colleagues about this too, what we want to pivot and do, really, with real intention is find ways for us to serve students better with the kinds of offerings we make. And that has meant actually putting in the time and the paperwork to make sure that our courses fulfill particular requirements. We’re in our first couple of years of having an African American Africana studies major at U.K. We had a minor for a while, and now we have the critical mass of black faculty to really provide an Africana course progression in the history department. And so these things really do matter. And I think as faculty, that’s also something to think about when we’re advocating. I’ve seen, I don’t know how many job ads for scholars of color, for research areas around minoritized people, and that’s fine. But it really does take more than one person to step in. To really serve a student population, you really have to have a whole constellation of folks. And so tackling issues of diversity and inclusion on this side of the desk are super essential to tackling those issues for our students.

Rebecca: So I’ll be your next student, I’m going to sign up. This sounds like a really good course to take. [LAUGHTER] I’ll be moving.

John: I was thinking throughout this that Vanessa and I worked at the Duke University Talent Identification Program for several years, and I never got a chance to sit in on any of her classes. And I was just thinking, I wish I could do that now.

Vanessa: Oh, man, I was a baby. He met me when I was a rising junior in college.

John: At first, but I think you also did it into graduate school, didn’t you?

Vanessa: Oh yeah, yeah and I did teach some of my own courses, which was a lot of fun. It’s always fun in the humanities, because it’s this area that I found students, particularly students who are slotted into the gifted track, they end up doing STEM things, sometimes the social sciences, sometimes, but they found the humanities challenging in ways I don’t think they expected because you can’t evaluate them in the same way. And they were just so much fun. So much fun to work with.

John: Now, you went to SUNY Buffalo in 2020, as this visiting scholar. It may not have been the greatest time to be able to do as much outreach and meet quite as many people. Could you talk a little bit about your experience at the start of this pandemic?

Vanessa: Sure. So a couple interesting things that were just happenstance because, of course, we couldn’t have possibly seen any of those coming, except for in a broad sense that like pandemics are possible. But what that would even look like most people didn’t really think about. So two things. So in 2018, I agreed to develop an online course for African American Studies, as a part of a graduate certificate program in diversity and inclusion. It’s an accelerated course that runs for eight weeks. And it’s exclusively online and asynchronous. And so back in 2018, I said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I would do that.” I developed it over the summer of 2019. And then ran it for the very first time spring semester 2020. And ironically, it wrapped up right at spring break, just in time for everything to shut down. And then the other course I had was full of senior seminar papers that now they couldn’t leave their houses, let alone go to archives, it was a complete mess. So I have this completely online course. I did all of this work, thinking through asynchronous pedagogy and thinking through… How would I cover an intro to African American studies that quickly? How do I make sure that the rigor is at a graduate level, but also accessible to undergraduates? And I put in all this time and work. And now for the first time since then, I’m actually going to teach that course the second half of this semester. But I’ll be interested to see for students what the differences are, because initially with the course, actually, the learning curve for students was pretty steep. I think there’s an assumption that students, at least before this pandemic, there is this assumption that students just are born with devices in their hand, and they just automatically know how to use whatever random teaching platform exists. Honestly, this move to more online teaching, or even platforms like Blackboard or Canvas. What you make available on those platforms, there’s a whole sharp learning curve for students, they don’t necessarily know the functionality of the Canvas website, and they don’t know where to find things. And you really have to teach them to use the course, if that makes sense. And so I’ll be interested to see if there’s any difference now that the students that I’ll most likely have in this course will have had, at least part of their education has happened online, remotely during the pandemic. I’ll be interested to see if they’re more adept at it, or if it feels too demanding, because it’s assuming conditions of a different time and place. So we’ll see. It’s designed to be really, really flexible, because it was designed for people who this is the one thing that they’re doing this semester towards their certificate, and they might have a full time job or whatever. The other thing about the start of this pandemic is in 2019, I got invited to apply for this program at Buffalo. I moved to the University of Kentucky from another institution. So even though I was going up for tenure, I wasn’t eligible for sabbatical yet. So I knew that if I wanted some time away, I had to go find the funds somewhere else. So this was a great opportunity. Looked like a great time to get involved in a different intellectual community. And I knew western New York was gorgeous. And it was like, “Yeah, this will be wonderful.” And then the pandemic happened. [LAUGHTER] So I moved up to Buffalo and I spent time in Buffalo and came back and forth to Kentucky. It’s actually only eight hours by car between the two places. You know this but Buffalo’s about as far west as you could get without being in Canada. And yeah, Buffalo is such a cool city. And I got to experience none of that. [LAUGHTER]

Vanessa: I did eat wings while I was there, and they are better. They’re different there than they are other places. And I had a lot of great colleagues. But there just wasn’t the opportunity for the kinds of collegial bonding or collaboration. My cohort was wonderful. And I was putting the finishing edits on my book. It was really good for me to have that time out of the classroom, sort of dodged dealing with early pandemic stuff. I will also say that New York’s approach to the pandemic, very different than Kentucky’s. Initially in Kentucky, we had a lot of really common sense measures around safety in the pandemic. And that eroded pretty quickly in ways that New York was way more cautious. City of Buffalo was way more cautious, for example I had to quarantine for 14 days every time I left the state and came back and I experienced two different types of availability of testing. In Kentucky we had really good testing really quickly. Experiencing the pandemic and two very different states was a little bit of reality whiplash. I felt like I was beaming down to a new planet each time I would go from place to place. And then I experienced that again, just this fall, I gave a talk at my graduate alma mater at Rutgers and I got off the plane in New Jersey, it was like I was on a different timeline where the pandemic was still happening, versus Kentucky where very few people wear masks in public and mandates are few and far between. So it’s been a wild ride. It was a really weird time to have a fellowship like that. I think I still got quite a bit out of it. And I enjoyed my time up in Buffalo. I really wish that it had been a non-pandemic time. And I did get to go to Rochester and see Susan B. Anthony’s house and Frederick Douglass’s grave. So I felt like I got to have my one big field trip, but I’d have been doing a lot more field tripping had I been there any other time.

Rebecca: Definitely a weird time to be doing things. [LAUGHTER]

Vanessa: Yeah, just figuring out travel in general. We had pretty early access to vaccines in Lexington, and so I was vaccinated relatively early, but New York did not. So I would go from an area where the city has really high vaccination rates to then New York where they just were not available yet.

John: Interesting times.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely.

Vanessa: I told my students sort of jokingly, “History is way more fun to study than to live through.” [LAUGHTER] We’re all ready for some precedented times. It turns out, yeah, living through a historic global pandemic, not fun, not a fun time. And they all chuckled. That’s why I always sort of scratch my head when people find out I’m a historian and they ask me, “Oh, well, what time period do you want to live in?” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, no I’m good. We’ve got enough going on right here. Yeah, I’m good.”

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

Vanessa: So it is been since the 1930s, that we’ve had a synthetic work about slavery in Kentucky. And so currently, I’m the Director of the newly started Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative. It’s a project to both tell the black history of our university from its founding in 1865 to present, and a multipronged research initiative to study slavery in the bluegrass. So we’re working on a history of African Americans in Bourbon with one of our partners right now. We’re working to make some public documents more accessible to community members. In collaboration with and partnership with our local county clerk’s office. We have a number of research projects going on African American contributions to the University of Kentucky. And my hope is to take really the broad range of research that’s happening across a project right now, and do a project on slavery in Kentucky. It’s famous for being one of the hubs of the internal slave trade, but the depth of knowledge about that sort of stops there. So I’m going to do work where I’m at and delve into this archive. I’m a Virginia specialist, and when I got here I was bowled over by the amount of material that still exists here. In Virginia there are a lot of burnt counties, because lots of cities were burnt to the ground in the American Civil War. But this place didn’t secede, so they have all of their documents. And I think it’s really powerful, particularly for descendant communities, to have a lot of what they often already know from oral histories and community historical memory, acknowledged, preserved, and presented in accessible ways. Not just for researchers, but for community members, for communities that have their roots here, but have moved on to other parts of the country. So yeah, I’m Kentucky focused and the Bourbon project doesn’t hurt. I’ll say that’s one of the perks of living here.

Rebecca: Sounds like a great project and a really worthwhile endeavor and a good way for us to be thinking about the different spaces we live in, and the records that are kept, and what’s here and what’s not.

Vanessa: Yeah, I try to keep things as local as possible wherever I’m teaching. Because if students can recognize street names, or they recognize names from buildings in the work that we’re doing, it just makes it feel so much more present.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you again, and I really enjoyed reading your book Surviving Southampton.

Vanessa: Thank you. Thank you.

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

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

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John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

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226. Rooted Jazz Dance

Posted in diversity, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, race, racism, social justice, teaching
February 9, 2022

Our disciplinary practices have histories that are important to acknowledge and share with our students. In this episode Lindsay Guarino, Carlos Jones, and Wendy Oliver join us to discuss jazz dance, its roots, and how instructors can decolonize the curriculum.

Lindsay is an Associate Professor of Dance and Chair of the Department of Music, Theatre and Dance at Salve Regina University. Carlos Jones is a Professor of Musical Theater and Dance and Associate Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the State University of New York College at Buffalo. He is also a performer and choreographer whose works have appeared on television, film, and regional theater. Wendy Oliver is a Professor of Dance and Chair of the Department of Theatre, Dance and Film at Providence College. Lindsey, Carlos, and Wendy are co-editors of Rooted Jazz Dance: Africanist Aesthetics and Equity in the Twenty-First Century.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Our disciplinary practices have histories that are important to acknowledge and share with our students. In this episode we discuss jazz dance, its roots, and how instructors can decolonize the curriculum.

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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 guests today are Lindsay Guarino, Carlos Jones, and Wendy Oliver. Lindsay is an Associate Professor of Dance and Chair of the Department of Music, Theatre and Dance at Salve Regina University. Carlos Jones is a Professor of Musical Theater and Dance and Associate Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the State University of New York College at Buffalo. He is also a performer and choreographer whose works have appeared on television, film, and regional theater. Wendy Oliver is a Professor of Dance and Chair of the Department of Theatre, Dance and Film at Providence College. Lindsey, Carlos, and Wendy are co-editors of Rooted Jazz Dance: Africanist Aesthetics and Equity in the Twenty-First Century. Welcome Lindsay, Carlos, and Wendy.

Lindsay: Thank you.

Wendy: Thank you.

Carlos: Hello.

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

Carlos: I am, I’m drinking chamomile.

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: Nice and relaxing.

Carlos: Yes.

John: Lindsay?

Lindsay: I have a big tall glass of ice water. Exciting. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: But energizing.

Lindsay: Yes, it is. Refreshing.

John: A nice ice water on a nice cold wintry day here in upstate New York.

Lindsay: Yeah, right? [LAUGHTER] It’s cold here too in Rhode Island.

John: And Wendy?

Wendy: I’m typically drinking jasmine tea.

Lindsay: [LAUGHTER] How appropriate.

Rebecca: Typically? Hmm.

John: Typically… but today?

Wendy: Meaning my cup is empty.

Rebecca: Oh, no, that’s so sad. [LAUGHTER] And I have English breakfast tea.

John: And I am drinking, and I think a first, the same as you: English breakfast tea.

Rebecca: John and I never drink the same kind of tea.

John: It’s a matter of principle. But this time we didn’t have a chance to coordinate that. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah, we’re not in the same place. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your new book, Rooted Jazz Dance: Africanist Aesthetics and Equity in the Twenty-First Century. Can you tell us a little bit about how this project came about?

Lindsay: Wendy and I co-edited another textbook called Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches that was published in 2014, and Carlos was a contributing author to that book. That particular book really positioned jazz within its roots. We went to great lengths to study the history of jazz from its roots in West Africa, and then looking at the continuum and the things that impacted the continuum. The conversations that emerged from that book were readily acknowledging the roots of jazz. Many people previous to that time weren’t necessarily saying the roots of jazz were West African. They maybe had that knowledge, but it was just not central to their teaching, or to the discourse in general. The conversations really shifted to look at: “Okay, now we know that the roots are here. We know that this is because of enslavement that we got jazz to this place, that it’s embedded in our American culture, but what do we do with that as practitioners? As teachers? As educators? How can we make sense of that in the classroom? And how can we have the tools? Especially, I myself, as a white person, how do I do that responsibly?” So I remember distinctly Wendy and I having a conversation, we went out and had coffee and lunch, and I pitched her this idea for a new book, and in that conversation, we were like, “We need Carlos to do this with us, or else this book can’t happen,” and I think Wendy emailed Carlos, and Carlos was like, “Yeah, I’m in,” and the idea was born, it was that simple.

Carlos: Yup.

Lindsay: Am I missing anything there, Wendy?

Wendy: I think that was a great summary.

Carlos: And I said, “Yes!” And off we ran.

John: So how did you select the contributors for this project?

Wendy: Well, many ways. I think we started by inviting people from our first book, who are all jazz experts, to submit an abstract for this book. We knew that this book was going to have a different frame of reference. So we weren’t automatically going to keep the same authors, but we invited them to give us their ideas. Then we were in the midst of making an outline for the book because we didn’t want to just have an anthology of random articles about jazz dance. We wanted to have it make sense and have a particular pattern that led somewhere, that had a logical progression, and we did that. I think we must have revised our outline about 10 times at least, right?

Carlos: [CHUCKLE] Yeah.

Wendy: What we did was we looked at the abstracts we had and then if they didn’t all match up with our outline, we posted a call for authors on several websites where professional dancers congregate, and we were able to find people that way.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how their traditional approach to teaching jazz might mislead students about the origins of jazz dance and why this book is so important?

Carlos: Well I think that most of us have learned jazz dance, either through, initially a studio system, meaning private studios, you know, go to class, take your children to class. Then moving through the academic system, higher education, particularly if we are getting degrees and moving forward. And what has been traditionally or typically taught throughout all the years, is a version of jazz dance that did not embrace, or incorporate or use rooted material. And if it was, it wasn’t specifically identified. That has been the really, by and large, the large expanse of that. Even, I would say, to what most people see presented either in television, film, on stage, what you would see has no real connection to the roots of where it began. So, that teaching of that jazz dance, many of us have experienced that. It’s not until you have these personal investigations, as we’ve done, to really go back and go, “where does this come from and how did we get here?” …do you then start to unearth all of that that’s happening. Now, that’s not to say that rooted jazz dance wasn’t going on, but it hasn’t necessarily been mainstream, or given the platform or the space to be seen and carried and moved forward. And there are many layers to how that has happened. I would say that is how the traditional approach to teaching it has happened in our country since, I’m going to say, you know, the mid-20th century, when it began to be popular and began to be used as a commodity that shifted it and changed. So there was a split in who owned it and who moved it forward. The voices that carried it forward or have the means, capacity, power, etc, to move it forward, moved it forward without acknowledgement of those people that were the innovators in the beginning, which were primarily African American people and it was rooted in African aesthetics. So that is the training and the teaching that has happened throughout.

Wendy: Also in higher education, the dance departments were predominantly oriented around modern dance in the early part of the 20th century and jazz dance wasn’t really part of the curriculum at all. So it was pretty much ignored in colleges and universities for a long time. When it did become more popular in higher education, probably in the late 70s or so, I think the kinds of jazz dance that were being taught were mainly from a white perspective, rather than a black perspective and the majority of people teaching in higher education (not only in that time but also today) are still white. So that really skewed the presentation of the material.

Lindsay: Also adding on to that, one thing that is worth noting is when you look at jazz music, where that’s situated within academia, jazz dance never found its grounding in the same way. So jazz music has been part of institutions for decades now. There’s festivals, there’s conferences, there’s journals, there’s all this energy around jazz. It also goes without being said that it is also moving towards whiteness. The very act of putting jazz music in the academy stripped jazz music from its black American culture, and from a place where it’s social and communal. And although there have been movements in a direction that is honoring the black American roots within music, a lot of the jazz music programs in academia are more white than black. When we look across the whole spectrum, we have jazz music, which has been growing and increasing in stature over the years. For some reason, jazz dance never found its foothold. It just became marginalized over time, and we make that very direct connection in the book to racism. Jazz reflects racism in America.

John: For our listeners who are not as familiar with the history of jazz dance, could you provide a little bit more information about where jazz dance got its start?

Carlos: Ok. Wooh, this is so dense. So in the interest of time, I’m going to try to move through this very quickly. There’s no doubt that enslavement, and the movement of Africa migrating to the country, came in contact with other cultures, and that is the birth of jazz. That happened because of exchange of ideas and so forth. You really can connect it back to early spirituals, because of all that communal, and work within the family unit and the soul and the spirit, and joy. And then connect it into early forms of entertainment in terms of minstrelsy, and Ragtime involved and moving forward. As it evolved, and we get to what we know is jazz, true jazz, which is coming into the early 20th century. And we have that explosion, and you get to the 20s, and Harlem Renaissance and all this stuff. It is amalgamation of all those experiences up to that point. So that jazz, that movement that occurred and that happened, speaks specifically about jazz movement, dance, comes out of that. It’s birthed out of that experience of African Americans who are having the opportunity coming off of the late 1800s, and so forth, and have an opportunity as we move into the 20th century to explore and be and have a culture that is vibrant. Their communities where now they’re growing in education, and they’re having all these experiences. So they have these places where they dance, and they can go and be free, and be in their own environment, which many of us have heard about… those nightclubs, and the Savoy ballroom, all of that jazz stuff happens there. And that’s when the innovation aligns with the music and it goes, and we build these steps which we call rooted, that are happening, swing, lindy, etc, going that way. What happens is, as our country begins to love it, and it’s massive, and everybody’s enjoying it, and there’s opportunity to make it into a commodity to sell and be commercial. And we put it into platforms, as I spoke before, television, film, musical theater at that time. And then there became a few people that decided it needed codification: to teach it, and train it and move it forward. As they did that, they began infusing Eurocentric forms: ballet, etc, and so forth. That primary space of that, and I’m talking about jazz dance, again, the movement, actually factors it, that’s what we call the continuum now, because we live on a continuum of the jazz dance and what it looks like… fractures it and begins to have all of these offshoots of what people call styles of jazz, as it fits that venue. Musical theater, jazz, commercial jazz, club jazz, these things are happening as people start infusing other things on top of it. That’s what gets translated forward, and we started teaching it in studios and we started teaching it in different ways, but what gets left behind in that process, are those rooted African-American and Africanist aesthetics. That gets left behind in favor of these other things, which seem to be, for lack of a better term, more refined. And so we move that technique out, and now we’re seeing something that looks more akin to ballet, or modern, or other things, and it gets commercialized and moved into other forms. And also, our music changes. So we’re going into the late 20th century, and our music changes, and jazz music goes one way, and as we electrify a little bit more, and rock and roll, and soul and all that comes in. So jazz in a social form, jazz dance, as we sell it, in our commodity, follows that path. It leaves jazz music and follows that other path. So what you see today is that… stuff that was created, so that we fit in Broadway musicals on a Broadway stage. That does not necessarily mean it held on to the roots, or something that is in a commercial, or something that you see on TV, or even on the concert stage. So that’s a real quick sort of pathway. Again, it’s more detailed, and we have this jazz tree in the book that you can look at that really talks about all that. It really illustrates how it fractures out.

John: And there happens to be an excellent book on that coming out very shortly. [LAUGHTER]

Carlos: Right, exactly.

Lindsay: I was going to add, Carlos, the tree is such a helpful analogy for someone that isn’t familiar with jazz because the tree shows the roots in West Africa, but then the influences that come in later are European. But then there’s also all of this movement because of the Diaspora, the way that the enslaved were bought and sold across continents and through the Caribbean, into South America, into the southern part of North America. Then from there, the very core, the trunk of the tree, all the way from the roots till today is still situated in blackness. And as you get into the branches, that’s where we see these European cultural ideologies that are really centering other forms and decentering the black American roots.

Carlos: And that’s really important to really note what Lindsay just said because what happens is, and this cycles back to the question you just said earlier, where we have been giving tribute or homage or paying close attention to are the branches, versus the trunk and the core.

Wendy: And in that image of the tree, we also included dance forms like tap and hip hop, which aren’t exactly the same as jazz, but they come from the same roots and the same trunk of the tree.

Carlos: Correct. In fact, early tappers were called jazz dancers, because they danced to jazz music. They just had rhythm on their feet.

Lindsay: Those histories are one and the same. And I think what’s also interesting for us is the way that we carry this type of embodied history in us. And as we’ve made our own efforts to decolonize the knowledge that we hold in our bodies, that’s equally as important as discussing the history and the theories and all of the things. So how can we dismantle these ideologies? How can we interrupt the conventions that reflect something other than what the rooted core of that idea is, what the essence is? And I know for myself, when I was working on our first book, I really started questioning… oh, this thing that I’m teaching in the studio is really centering white American ideology. And I had to strip away a lot of the layers because I knew it was there, I was taught all of these things. It just wasn’t at the center, it wasn’t at the forefront of my practice. And so I think that those are the conversations that we keep having are, “How do you get to the essence?” And that’s also, I think, where the elusive, transformative, transcendent power of jazz is. So the closer we get to that, I mean, that’s the juicy part.

Rebecca: The tree image is really useful for people outside of the discipline, as was a personal story that was shared on a recent podcast episode of Rough Translation by LaTasha Barnes in an episode titled “May We Have This Dance?” where she talks about exploring the Lindy Hop that she had learned in her family. She’s a professional dancer, and then traveled to Sweden to learn Lindy Hop. And she was kind of like, “Why am I doing this?” And so hearing that story not too long ago, and then hearing your description of the branch really brings that all to life in an interesting way.

Carlos: I think I would say too that, by the way LaTasha is also a contributing author in the Rooted Jazz Dance book, but that was so poignant for me, because I think that is the experience of many people, particularly African Americans, because you would think that we would understand and be perpetuating moving forward the experience and the rootness of our ancestors. And that maybe my fellow authors who are white, had different experience in, as Lindsay said, decolonizing their body and their training experience. But that’s not the case. I had to do the same thing too, because what I was taught as I moved through, was through the lens of whiteness, and that’s all I knew. And so I knew that it existed like LaTasha did, and I had that experience in my family, but it was something over there. That wasn’t what I needed in academia. And that wasn’t what I was asked to bring forth in academia. So it was like learning a whole new language and leaving a part of me out. And It wasn’t till then I went back in to re-investigate, when I finally really went back and invited it back into my life, went, “Oh, that’s what I was missing. I left a part of me away.” So I think that that is very much all of our experiences, regardless of cultural background.

Lindsay: And the irony with that, is that there is this dance form that’s an indigenous American language here, and yet, it’s been marginalized in a way that, we’re placing value on a form that’s coming from a different country. We have this form that, like Carlos is explaining, that’s rooted here, it’s rooted in our very American experience, and yet, we value other things.

John: How does this affect the students who are learning dance? You’ve talked about this a little bit, Carlos, but in general, what’s the impact of having this misappropriation of the roots of jazz dance on the students who are studying it?

Carlos: Well, I think the impact, depending on where you look at it, first of all, the art form continues to move forward without all the information. And so you get more, more, more, more of those branches and black fracturing out. So that’s one of the impacts. I think, for the student, although they may not know this, they have missing information. And we want students in education, regardless of your field, regardless of your subject, to have inquisitive minds, and think and ask questions and have full information, not a single information. And I think that, in line with how we’re looking at education across the board, about decolonizing classrooms, having inclusive practices in our teaching, gives us more information, even to students where the information may not be the primary culture. If you’re always only studying about you, then you are sort of myopic in your space. So I think that’s what it does with jazz dance. And I think they lack richness, and what they can then produce and teach and move forward because again, they only have part of the information. So I think that’s some of it.

Wendy: I think this relates to the topic of whitewashing, where you get incomplete information. But it’s not just that the information isn’t complete, but the power structure is such that all of the glory and credit goes to white people for making an art form that really began with African American culture. So the problem isn’t just missing information, it’s how the imbalance of power and how some people got credit for something that was perhaps not only inappropriate, but it was misleading in a very negative way. And now we’re having to correct the problem. So I think it was harmful to our dance community to not have these things out there on the table, because now we’re having to go back and say, “Uh! We got that one wrong, we got that one wrong,” and make amends to the best that we can. But the problem is that jazz dance has kind of run away in a certain direction. If you look online under the term jazz dance, you’re probably not going to see a lot about the Africanist aesthetic, unfortunately. So the preponderance of dancers believe that jazz looks a certain way, and that way is more balletic, more white. And that’s a problem because what those dancers are doing is something interesting, something that could be very artistically valid, but it’s not really what jazz is or was.

Lindsay: One of the things I think students struggle with, there’s that initial, like, they’ve been deprived of knowledge. They come into higher ed and all of a sudden they’re learning things that they had never been taught before, and they didn’t realize the things that they didn’t know. So oftentimes that’s met with just shock and some anger even, but after that, for me and my teaching, sometimes it gets a little bit messy. For some students, they really take ownership of that and run with it and they want to be responsible, and also innovative, recognize that jazz isn’t this thing that happened in the past, and to do it today we need to be anchored in this era, we can move it forward and still be responsible. And this is resistance that… I don’t know if resistance is the right word, but we’ve encountered this even within our jazz community of dance educators, where there’s the questions that come up about, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this form. What is my role? If I’m not African American how do I engage with this art form that wasn’t mine to begin with? Where does ownership lie? What does it mean today, to not be black and to participate in this?” So it’s prime time to have this conversation. It’s not only relevant, it’s necessary, and I think it’s ultimately where we need to go as educators to be more inclusive in our spaces and recognize the needs of our students.

Rebecca: One of the things that was really standing out is something that Carlos said earlier about the personal, cultural, and familial experience of feeling other, like outside of. And maybe a need to help students recognize that their personal experience is valid and an important part of how they interpret and understand what they’re learning and that it belongs in the academy. It’s not that it doesn’t belong here, but historically, in many fields, like we’ve said, your personal experience is not relevant to this ivory tower in some ways. And something that, Lindsay, you’re saying that is resonating with me is also thinking about what it means to be a steward of a particular kind of cultural form. I’m a visual artist, so many of the things that you’re talking about resonate with me in a similar way, it’s just a visual form that I tend to work in.

Wendy: I’ve just been reading a book about culturally relevant teaching in dance. It’s Nyama’s book, McCarthy-Brown, and there’s a whole section on, for instance, how to teach ballet in a culturally relevant way. It’s a white art form, but maybe your students are predominantly non white. What do you do with that? How do you make it relevant? And a lot of what she has to say about that whole project, and not just in ballet, but in all dance forms, it’s really about getting to know your students and understanding where they’re coming from culturally and allowing that to be part of the curriculum in some way, shape, or form. So I think for jazz, for some people, there may have been black vernacular dance in their growing up. And for others, it’ll be something they’re not at all familiar with. So it could be an interesting exchange amongst students and with the teacher’s guidance.

Lindsay: Rebecca, I was just going to say to that point you made, you had alluded previously to the LaTasha Barnes NPR podcast. And she used that term, “cultural surrogate,” and I just thought that that was so perfect for what we do, especially as a white person, you’re carrying this form with respect and honoring the tradition, but knowing that, for me, these aren’t my elders, my ancestors, and recognizing what the role of my ancestors possibly was.

John: This discussion seems to be part of a broader issue in which we see a lot of whitewashing of much of the curriculum in all academic disciplines, where the focus tends to be on the supremacy of Western cultural traditions, Western Europe, and so forth. Should people in all disciplines focus on decolonizing the curriculum within their disciplines?

Wendy: Sure. Well, there’s so many diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts right now, on campuses across the country, that I believe that administrators in higher education, even college presidents, have finally realized that we cannot move forward in the 21st century without doing that, exactly what you said. We need to do that across the college and across the curriculum. And I think colleges are taking this on, but it’s an extremely slow process, unfortunately, because it takes time to create new courses, get them through all the proper channels and approved, and then find appropriate people to teach them, and so forth. Plus, there’s the whole business of changing people’s minds about what the curriculum should be, because they’re so attached to… Oh, teaching all about the Greeks and the Romans and the beginnings of Western civilization, and, “If I have to teach about something else, some other continents, that gives me less time to do the things that I am familiar with,” and so forth. So I think people are having a hard time making the shift, and it’s probably not going to happen within the next five years, but it’ll happen over time.

Carlos: Yeah, I think that it is important that we look at it across all disciplines. I’m not so utopian in my thinking that it’s going to happen overnight. I do think it’s going to take time, but I also want to encourage people that I think that small things can happen soon, quickly, and you can make those efforts which can make a world of difference. And also, I like to look at the positive side of things, and as you can introduce something, I think people have a fear of it changing, or we’re not going to do it in its pure form. And I think you can support what needs to happen within that discipline, but have different viewpoints on it. And what I think that does is, it empowers people to take ownership with their own self within the space, which then helps them feel that there is a place for them, and then they have a better educational experience. I’m talking from the student point of view right now, “I’m engaged, I am important, I do matter. This is important and so I can be successful.” And I also think this is important to understand that because we see things from different perspectives, it doesn’t mean the object changes, and I think, Rebecca… artists, we look at it, we see different things, and I think that that happens, whether it’s English or math or science, whatever. We can see something happen from different perspectives, which is undoubtedly colored by our background and our culture and stuff. And it’s still what it is, we just see it from a different thing, and how do we articulate that and come up with the same message, but we all have a different sort of way of saying it. So I think that’s also what we have to realize… is when we are talking about being inclusive in our teaching and moving beyond that and decolonizing, we’re not saying, “Change it.” It’s how you recognize that people have different views of how they see it and experience it.

John: It’s enriching it, not limiting it.

Carlos: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And how fun is that when you talk to someone and they say, “Well, I saw this,” and you go, “Oh, I never saw that.” Now you have two or three more ways of looking at it, and it’s still the same thing.

Rebecca: Carlos, you mentioned small things we can do. Can you give some examples of small things we can do within the classes that we’re in control of?

Carlos: Absolutely. I think, well, to go back to what I just said, in terms of how you talk about what you experience. We have had a tendency to say, “Okay, you’re going to answer it, and you’re going to answer it, and you’re going to do it in this way.” But maybe I am from a culture that we have a real, real, real big oral tradition. And so we’re very skilled at telling information or talking about what we experienced, or what is happening, or working through the process, because we always do that. So we can get to those finer details, through language, or through talking about it, as opposed to writing it down. There are different ways that cultures experience moving information forward. So you can make an exercise where you change up how we do it, and that will undoubtedly diversify, decolonize. Maybe it’s the music, maybe you’re doing it in music, or maybe you do it in art. I know that the African American culture likes singing and rhymes. That’s where the jazz comes from. So why not add that? Or allow someone to do that as they answer your question. Very simple. Something like that.

Rebecca: Lindsay or Wendy, did you have other examples of ways to improve the inclusivity of the classroom?

Lindsay: I would just say, representation matters. Look at the sources that you use. Are you using readings from mostly white scholars? What video clips are you showing? What information, what source material are you giving your students? Are you actually representing the students that are in your class? Do they see themselves in the work? And then I think that we also have to take responsibility ourselves, like… What is your positionality in relationship to the work that you’re teaching? What is your identity? And how can you be aware of your own identity in relationship to all the students in the room. I would also just add reach into the community and have the conversation. So I think that within our book, we have this community where we’re having these conversations around this work, but at my institution, I’m part of other cohorts where we’re talking about race, and teaching, and how we can be more inclusive and more anti-racist. And this work doesn’t have to happen on your own, it doesn’t have to happen in a silo, the action is more real, and you can be held accountable if you’re doing it within community.

Wendy: Just as an example, I’m teaching a section of a course which is beginning ballet, and I’m having students read three articles and write a paper on the articles. I was looking for articles that would talk about ballet in different cultures, and also with people who aren’t white. So I found something on the Final Bow For Yellowface, which is an organization that was created a while back, and it’s been working against stereotyping agents in ballet, particularly in the Nutcracker. And then there’s an article on a Latina dancer, who’s dancing in this country with a ballet company. And then a woman named Chyrstyn Fentroy, who was a black ballerina who wrote about her experiences in a top ballet company and how she was experiencing whiteness in that company. And all of these articles are just a way to say to students without even having to say anything… Look, a lot of different people do ballet. Ballet may have been a white form when it started, it is not anymore exclusively a white form. Here are some examples of people who have succeeded, and although there are still issues and problems within the world of ballet, it is much more open than it used to be. I mean, people do it all over the world. It can look different depending on who’s making the ballets and who’s dancing them. So there’s room for a lot of different kinds of people within even the supposedly whitest of dance forms, I think. And then with other dance forms, you can certainly do the same thing, just find ways of representing, as Lindsay said, who’s in your class, looking for ways to make sure that people know that their culture is represented in this art form.

Lindsay: And I would just add without making assumptions about people’s identities, I think it’s important to talk about their identities, and that’s something that I think maybe comes more naturally for those of us in the arts, where there’s a lot of self reflection and conversation that happens. But I think it’s really important from the beginning of this semester to talk about identity culture, and then not have to make assumptions about anyone in the room.

Rebecca: I found that one of the most interesting responses I had from students by providing different material for them to digest related to design was an article that had them look at the idea that some fonts and typefaces misappropriate other cultures. Their minds were blown.

Wendy: Oooh!

Rebecca: And they continuously over the semester kept bringing this up, like, they had never thought about that. It’s interesting how one very short article [LAUGHTER] can have such a big impact on the way students see something.

John: This book project came together during the neverending pandemic that we’re working through now. Could you tell us a little bit about what it was like putting this together and working on this during the global pandemic?

Wendy: Kind of like what we’re doing right now.

Carlos: Yeah.

Wendy: We all got on Zoom and talked. And then we went to a couple of conferences before Zoom, where we got to meet with people in person, but a lot of it was done on Zoom.

Carlos: Lots of phone calls.

Wendy: [LAUGHTER] Yeah.

Carlos: Lots of phone calls, and late night questions, and sending things back and forth as you edit, and you look at it. Yeah, a lot of that.

Lindsay: Also just the way that the pandemic, especially that March of 2020, to June, July of that year, how it forced us into isolation, but I think it also kept us connected. And it forced us to really deepen the work that we were doing, I can see the way it comes through in the pages. I’m not sure what the book would have been if we weren’t doing it in a pandemic. So I think that there are some aspects of it that allowed us to take really full and complete ownership of what we were doing. And, like I said, build within community because no one wanted to be alone during that time period and this was a way for us to stay connected.

Wendy: Also the killing of George Floyd was big. That really impacted our discussions as well.

Lindsay: Mmhmm.

Carlos: Yeah, I would say I think that some of the racial, civil unrest was actually a focusing thing because we began looking at the chapters and what people were trying to contribute, and it was a barometer for staying on task, like, “Well, no, that deviates out, this is where we need to be, because this is what we have to answer, and if we don’t answer that, we can’t move it forward.”

Lindsay: It really did crystallize some things though. I remember, Carlos, being on the phone with you one day, when we were having that conversation about how people were talking about the roots of jazz. And everyone says the roots are West African and European, right? And I remember us having that conversation where, “We’re not talking about the African American component. How can we be saying this?” That became a through line in the book, Carlos, right? And Carlos really pulled that apart for me and opened this whole channel where we were like, “We’re not talking about those 400 years in between 1619 and the jazz era, and that’s where the jazz happened.” So I think for us, it really did crystallize a lot of things and gave us permission to talk more openly about them.

Carlos: So I think that’s what the pandemic did for that. And as a side note, to bounce off of that, what I think is important to say is, that’s very important, because it’s very easy to be idealistic. It’s lofty to say, “It came from Africa,” or, “It came from Europe,” and have these places which are really wonderful, rich spaces for information, and we know that things came to this experiment we call America, United States. But what we often don’t talk about is what happened in that time, because it’s painful. But we have to talk about it because out of all of that pain was so many wonderful things that happened, so many wonderful things that happened. Jazz dance is one of them.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking the very loaded question… What’s next?

Carlos: I think what we are excited about, and Wendy and Lindsay please jump in if I’m missing something, is moving this information forward. So immediately, the book is being released. How do we move forward? How do we have conversations like this? How do we keep having people have it and take it and move it forward? I think people are excited about getting into the curriculum and the class. So I think that that’s what’s immediately next… Can we keep this energy moving and having these greater, deeper conversations?

Wendy: I’d love to go to conferences with the three of us and present on the book. It’s not just about our work, I mean, a lot of other people wrote for the book, and I think there are a lot of good ideas in the book. Some of it has practical applications and could be used in the classroom, some of it’s more theoretical. And the idea is that if enough people in higher education and elsewhere begin to grasp these ideas, and get an idea of how to implement them themselves, that we could change the way jazz dance is approached across the country. I mean, that’s a pretty big ambitious goal.[LAUGHTER] I’d love to see us at least instigate that concept, so that eventually, everybody understands that the roots of jazz dance are West African, and that it developed because of a particular situation in our country. So eventually, hopefully, it will be taught in a fuller, more complete way.

Lindsay: There’s a part of jazz that is so personal, and this is actually something that came up in the book, where I remember at one point us feeling like some of the chapters just weren’t hitting home. And we were trying to guide the authors, and then we realized that there were just some places that people needed to talk in the first person. It’s not like our traditional scholarship, where we’re always distancing ourselves or looking at it from a distance, it really does need to come from that place of who you are, how you feel, all of those things coming together. And so I guess my hope is that, moving forward, people will take that ownership as an individual to go in the studio, and to figure out what jazz is, what rooted jazz is, in their own body, in their practice, but then also bring it back to the community. Because as much as jazz is about individuality, it’s also about community. So how do we bring that back together, and grow as a community with some shared values and shared understanding?

Carlos: I think that even cycles back to an earlier question you had, when you were talking about how we decolonize or be more inclusive. And traditional scholarship and those working in diasporic art forms or diasporic information, Africana Studies or philosophy or whatever, the scholarship hasn’t been viewed in the same light as something else because it is different, the viewpoint is different. As Lindsay said, it’s personal, it’s about that journey, because, talking about jazz dance, that is the birth of it. It was about how we experienced it as a community, and how you shared that information when you hit that dance floor at any of the clubs, ballrooms, Savoy, whatever. How you shared that, and what information and electricity happened there, that is the essence of it, it is so deeply personal. And so to stand out and look at it from way at a distance isn’t true to the essence of what it is.

Lindsay: And one more thing that we didn’t really discuss that I think is important off of Carlos’s last point, is the way that we really do call for people to explore the jazz music continuum. It’s so vast, it’s so relevant today. There’s just an endless wealth of music that you can look to for inspiration. And jazz dance comes from jazz music. I will say in my own practice, when I was dancing to pop music, it was easy to take it in a direction that wasn’t jazz, but when you turn on jazz music, there’s something else that comes from there that will keep you tethered to that essence. So in that similar call, we hope that people will take that step back into the studio and look at their practices. I hope that we return to just celebrating the music that gave birth to the form.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for sharing some of the history of jazz and your stories around the book. I know there’s a lot of valuable information within our conversation for people across a wide variety of disciplines.

Wendy: Thank you for having us.

Carlos: Thank you very much. This has been a joy

Lindsay: Thanks for the invitation.

John: Well thank you. It’s great talking to you.

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

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

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

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