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212. Faculty Mindset

Posted in equity, first-generation students, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, inclusive pedagogy, learning, pedagogy, race, STEM, STEM education, teaching
November 3, 2021

Research on the impact of mindset has often centered on the mindset of the student. In this episode, Elizabeth Canning joins us to discuss the impact that faculty mindset has on student achievement. Elizabeth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Washington State University. Her research focuses on how to create equitable and inclusive instructional environments.

Show Notes
Transcript

Shownotes

Muenks, K., Canning, E. A., LaCosse, J., Green, D. J., Zirkel, S., Garcia, J. A., & Murphy, M. C. (2020). Does my professor think my ability can change? Students’ perceptions of their STEM professors’ mindset beliefs predict their psychological vulnerability, engagement, and performance in class. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(11), 2119.
Harackiewicz, J. M., Canning, E. A., Tibbetts, Y., Priniski, S. J., & Hyde, J. S. (2016). Closing achievement gaps with a utility-value intervention: Disentangling race and social class. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(5), 745.
Bauer, Angela. (2018). “Closing the performance gap.” Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 49. October 3.
Canning, E. A., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (2015). Teach it, don’t preach it: The differential effects of directly-communicated and self-generated utility–value information. Motivation Science, 1(1), 47.

Transcript

John: Research on the impact of mindset has often centered on the mindset of the student. In this episode, we discuss the impact faculty mindset has on student achievement.

[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 Elizabeth Canning. Elizabeth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Washington State University. Her research focuses on how to create equitable and inclusive instructional environments. Welcome, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Thank you.

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

Elizabeth: I’m drinking water today.

Rebecca: Alright, still a good choice. The base of tea, of course.

Elizabeth: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have a restricted set of tea because I brought most of my tea back up to the office, but I’ve been sent home with COVID. So I do have a ginger peach black tea still here though.

Rebecca: That sounds like a pretty standard fare.

John: It is.

Rebecca: I made it out to that tea shop I’ve discovered. And so I have a new one called Yunnan Jig…

Elizabeth: Ooh!

Rebecca: …and it’s a golden-tipped black tea.

Elizabeth: That sounds delicious.

Rebecca: It is very delicious.

Elizabeth: Exotic teas.

John: We’ve invited you here today to talk about your 2019 study that examined the effect of instructor mindset on racial achievement gaps in STEM disciplines. Could you tell us a little bit about this study?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So this study was a study that we did while I was a postdoc at Indiana. It was in collaboration with Dr. Mary Murphy, Katie Muenks, and Dorraine Green. We were really interested in instructor beliefs about intelligence… so whether they believe that intelligence is something that is innate, something that you’re just born with, you can’t change it very much, we call that a fixed mindset. And what we also call a growth mindset is this belief that intelligence can grow over time and change with effort, strategies, help-seeking, things like that. And we were interested in whether instructors’ beliefs about intelligence then predicted the experiences that students have in their classes, and then how well they do in their classes. So we sent a survey out to the whole university, and we didn’t expect a whole lot of responses because faculty are busy and all of that. But we actually got a lot of responses. We had 150 STEM faculty respond to our survey. And so with that, we were able to link their survey responses to the grades in their courses over a two-year period. And we ended up with this fantastic rich data set that we were able to look at students’ grades in their courses.

Rebecca: How prevalent was the fixed mindset amongst the faculty that you surveyed?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So it was pretty normally distributed, shockingly so I think. A lot of people think that fixed mindsets might be more rare. Other people think fixed mindset might be extremely prevalent, but it was pretty normally distributed. It’s a continuous scale so if you graph it, it’s a pretty normal curve. So we’ve got the most people in the middle. And then we’ve got some people at each extreme. But what’s interesting when you look at it, though, is especially on this scale, most people, they won’t go extreme, like the very, very tip of the fixed mindset scale. But they’ll do the next level over. It’s like, “I’m not gonna be that person, but I’ll be right next to it.” So it’s interesting to think about that when you think about the profession of being an instructor, and part of your job is to educate people. But yet we’re finding a significant amount of people have this mindset that intelligence or abilities can’t change.

Rebecca: So you talked about it being a normal distribution, was there any variation amongst race or gender, ethnicity, age, or STEM discipline?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So we get that question a lot. Like, can we predict who it is that has the fixed mindset? Well, this is the only table I’ve ever published that had every single line in it non-significant. [LAUGHTER] So we tested pretty much everything in our data set—whether mindset differed by gender, by faculty race, by age, by teaching experience, tenure status, anything that we had in our data set—and we found no differences by mindset. So it seems like having a fixed mindset or having a growth mindset is prevalent among all faculty regardless of these characteristics. We also looked within departments because a lot of people want to think that it’s, “Oh, it’s those economists or…” [LAUGHTER] looking at you, John. Or, “It’s those computer scientists, or the physicists, or the mathematicians.” But we didn’t find any differences by discipline. So faculty in any kind of discipline can endorse a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. And this suggests that these mindsets are not going to resolve itself on its own. Like if this was a generational thing, then we would expect it to resolve over time, or we could go into a specific discipline and educate faculty, but it seems to be pretty widespread, regardless of these characteristics.

John: That was one of the most surprising things in your study, to me. I was expecting that this would vary, particularly with age, but also perhaps with gender as well. And I was thinking that maybe this would be better over time. One of my favorite quotes from Paul Samuelson, an economist who died a while back, was, “funeral by funeral, the science makes progress,” and I was kind of hoping that that might occur with growth mindsets here, too. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

Rebecca: So we’re left with saying, “Great…” [LAUGHTER]

John: When you were looking at the effect of instructor mindset on student grades, were you also controlling for the characteristics of the students as well?

Elizabeth: Yes. So we controlled for a number of things in our analyses, we wanted to put anything in the model that might predict student performance. So we controlled for whether the student was the first in their family to go to college, their first-generation status. We controlled for their prior achievement level, so their prior GPA before they enrolled in that class. We also controlled for a number of course characteristics. So whether the course was, at this university, a 100 level, 200, 300. So, like, an entry-level class versus more of an upper-division class or upper-level class. We controlled for a number of faculty characteristics as well, like whether they were tenured, their age, how long they had been teaching. And so all of that was in the model to control for those variations in terms of what predicts their grades. Because a number of things we know predict grades, like class size. If it’s a bigger class versus a smaller class, we know that’s a pretty robust finding. And so we controlled for that in all of the analyses.

John: What was the overall effect, controlling for all the other student and instructor characteristics, of instructor mindset on student grades?

Elizabeth: So students, on average, received a higher grade in faculty’s classes where they endorsed more of a growth mindset. And this was, again, controlling for all of those things, regardless of student characteristics, class characteristics, and faculty characteristics. We also looked at this by student race, so we found an interaction with student race. So it’s not just that everybody on average is receiving or earning higher grades in the growth-mindset courses. This is particularly true for students with racial- ethnic minority status. So Black, Hispanic, Native American students performed better in the courses that had faculty who endorsed more of a growth mindset. When we look at the achievement gap between White and Asian students compared to Black, Hispanic, and Native American students, we see that this racial achievement gap is twice as large when the faculty endorsed more of a fixed mindset, compared to when they endorsed more of a growth mindset.

Rebecca: Can we talk a little bit about differences in assessments or the way that courses are structured between the fixed-mindset faculty courses versus the growth-mindset courses, because I think your paper talked a little bit about that as well, right, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth: We couldn’t dig into the specifics of it just because of the scale of this project, but we’ve done a lot of follow-up to see: What is it that faculty are doing in these classes? Because students are obviously picking up on it. It’s not just the belief that you hold near and dear to your heart, this is something that is being communicated to students in some way. And what we know from our other research is that it’s communicated in a lot of ways depending on the instructor, depending on the class. So it can be communicated in your course policies, like how you design your syllabus, how many assessments you give in your class. So, fixed-mindset professors are more likely to have a midterm and a final, and that’s your only opportunity to display your abilities in that class. Whereas the growth-mindset professors are more likely to have weekly quizzes where you can improve over time and see that improvement over time. And mistakes are less deadly in those classes, so to speak. So it’s in the way they design their courses, but it’s also in subtle ways. So what they say in class, how they talk to students who are struggling in their office hours, it’s in their attitude, it’s in a lot of different behavior. And students are pretty perceptive, they can pick up on it pretty quickly.

John: So we can significantly reduce racial achievement gaps if instructors have growth mindsets. Is instructor mindset something that’s changeable?

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think so. We know a lot from trying to change students’ mindset beliefs, it’s actually pretty malleable. You can teach people the science behind how our abilities grow over time, the changes that occur in your brain in terms of neuroplasticity, and faculty are pretty receptive to that. Most faculty want to do things that are going to benefit their students, most faculty want to be good instructors. And so it might just be finding ways to communicate that. In some of our research, we’ve found a disconnect between what faculty think their mindset is and how they’re communicating that, to what students are actually perceiving. And so it might just be communication, making sure that you’re very explicit about what you believe in your class, standing up on the first day and saying, “Here’s what I believe about abilities and intelligence, you don’t have to be, quote-unquote, ‘smart’ to do well in this class. Here are other ways to do well in this class, like learning and improving and using different strategies and things like that.” We also know that there are very critical times where these messages matter more. So there are times during the semester where students are searching for information about their abilities. So when you hand back that first exam grade, or that first assessment that you give in your class, that’s the perfect time to communicate your mindset beliefs, particularly if they’re a growth mindset. Because students are searching, “What does this mean? Does this mean that I’m good at this? Does this mean that I’m not good at this? Am I going to do well, should I drop this course?” It’s a time of uncertainty for students. And so, for faculty to communicate those beliefs during that critical time, it can set forth sort of the snowball effect for how they should view their learning and improvement throughout the semester. There’s a number of ways that faculty can do this in their classes. But back to your original question about, “Can we change faculties’ mindset?” I think so. I think there’s a lot of literature suggesting that we can do that.

Rebecca: And there’s been a lot of money pumped into making these STEM pipelines in the first place. We want them to be effective. So investing in this education around mindset and learning might be a really good use of funds.

Elizabeth: Yeah, one of the things that I think was really shocking about this paper is the faculty that reported their mindset beliefs, there were 150 of them. But when you look at all of the students that they touch, over a two-year period, how many people they teach, it becomes a really big number pretty quickly. So in this sample it was around 15,000 students that these 150 faculty taught over a two-year period. And so, instead of intervening with 15,000 students, you might intervene with 150 people and see similar or maybe even greater effect.

Rebecca: I know from our experience, John, with working with faculty around mindset and around helping students learn how they learn, that faculty who demonstrate a growth mindset are often very willing to share what they’ve learned about learning with their students. And so having an intervention with 150 people then reaches many of those students, because that information ends up being communicated out in a more distributed way.

John: One thing I’m wondering is whether you can separate out, in these results, the impacts of the way in which people teach from the messaging that’s coming up indirectly in other ways? It strikes me that that may not be possible, in that the instructors with a growth mindset provide lots of opportunities for students to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, while those who have a fixed mindset are more likely just, as you said, to use a small number of exams as high-stakes assessments. Is it possible that some of the effect is just from better teaching practices and using more evidence-based teaching approaches that give students these opportunities for more retrieval practice, more spaced practice, and so forth?

Elizabeth: I think that’s very possible. However, we’ve done some follow-up research where we randomized faculty messages within one course. So it’s the same professor, it’s the same structure, some students are getting growth-mindset messages from that instructor, some students are just getting control messages, and we’re seeing really great effects at that level. And so it has to be more than just the way their course is structured. It’s more about the messages that they’re giving students and how to frame mistakes, how to frame ability. We’re providing it at a specific time like I mentioned earlier, and so it’s probably a combination of both. But with this new experimental evidence at the student level, or at the classroom level, we’re seeing that it’s more than just their teaching ability, or the way that their course is structured.

John: What you just described reminds me of a podcast we had done a while back with Angela Bauer at High Point University in Episode 49. In that episode, she talked about trying to reduce some of the achievement gap in their introductory biology classes. And they first introduced some active-learning activities, but there was still a non-trivial achievement gap remaining. So they introduced some growth mindset messaging, and that seemed to remove the remaining racial achievement gaps. So that provides a little bit further evidence that growth mindset messaging can play a significant role in helping to reduce these achievement gaps.

Rebecca: One thing that’s really powerful about that idea, though, is that it may not really take a lot to make a change.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Rebecca: It doesn’t really seem like that much of a financial investment, or even a time investment to make a difference, or at least chip away at the problem a little.

Elizabeth: I think that’s what makes this so appealing to people is because it’s subtle, and it’s also something that can be done pretty easily. So you’re not changing the curriculum, you’re not flipping your classroom that requires extra work and time. Faculty are already overloaded with the expectations of what they’re supposed to be doing with teaching in terms of all their other responsibilities. We have implemented mindset messages at a pretty really basic level. So putting messages in a syllabus, putting messages in an email, maybe a couple videos in the class, for instance. And that’s really it. As long as it’s done in a way where it’s at a critical time, it’s more meaningful for students, and it’s done sincerely, then it’s not a whole lot of extra work.

John: From a faculty member’s side though, for those who may have a fixed mindset who believe that students’ ability is fixed, a conversion to a growth mindset may very well, and that’s consistent with your results, change the way in which they structure their courses. Because if you believe that students can learn by making mistakes and practice, you’re probably going to redesign your courses to build more of that in and that’s, again, very consistent with what you found. And it will be a bit more work typically for instructors unless they can do it in a way in which there’s some degree of automation.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of discussion around rigor, and if you have a growth mindset that it means you’re too soft, and you’re not having a difficult class. So it brings up all these questions about course difficulty and rigor. And I think our perspective and some of the follow-up work that we’ve done in this paper, and in other papers, that the perspective of what is difficult or what is rigorous really depends on who you ask. So if you ask a faculty member how difficult their class is, or what it means to have a difficult class, that’s going to vary quite dramatically from the students’ perspective. So what we’ve seen is that students actually find the growth-mindset professors to be a little bit more difficult or challenging than the fixed-mindset professors, and it’s for that very reason that they have more work to do in the class. [LAUGHTER] They have to make improvements, and they have to redo assignments, and the workload is maybe even a little bit higher, versus a fixed mindset class that might have a midterm or a final, there’s less, quote-unquote, “work” to do in that class. And so it really is in the eye of the beholder what class is difficult and what that means in terms of student achievement.

Rebecca: There’s a difference in regular accountability…

Elizabeth: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: …and therefore feels like a lot more work when you’re being held accountable on a regular basis. [LAUGHTER]

Elizabeth: Yeah, I’ve done some follow-up work, because a lot of people will also think that it just comes down to being nice. If you’re nice and warm and friendly, then people are going to do well in your class, and if you’re not, then people will not do well in your class. And so I’ve done an experiment where we have manipulated that. There’s a laboratory study that we’ve done, where we manipulate whether the message is a fixed-mindset or a growth-mindset message. And then we manipulate whether that message is delivered in a way that’s warm and friendly and positive, versus cold and unfriendly. So this results in four different ways of messaging. The best is always going to be sort of this warm, friendly growth mindset, and the worst is always going to be the cold, unfriendly fixed-mindset. But what’s really interesting is what happens to the two in the middle. If you have the growth mindset but you’re cold and unapproachable, versus a fixed mindset and warm and approachable, How do those two shake out? And what we’re finding is that, very consistently, it’s the mindset message that matters more than the warmth or approachability. So they do interact, of course, it’s good to be warm and friendly. But the message itself also matters. So we can tease these things apart. They are different things, and they have different effects.

John: Since we’ve got you here, we were looking through some of your other research, and you’ve done a number of studies that have looked at the impact of utility-value interventions. Could you talk about what those are, and what you’ve found involving those?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So a lot of the research I’ve done on utility-value interventions was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Judy Harackiewicz at Wisconsin, Madison. And so, utility-value intervention is an intervention that’s directed at students. The way that we implement it is we have students write a short essay. They pick a topic that they’ve covered in class, and they write about how that topic is useful or relevant to them personally. And the way that we’ve done this, we’ve had them do it a couple different times throughout the semester. So they’re reflecting on what they’re learning and they’re connecting it to their own personal goals, their life, and it makes the material that they’re learning more relevant to them. And what we’ve found is that this intervention is particularly beneficial for underrepresented racial minority students who are also the first in their family to go to college. So this group is doubly disadvantaged, they’re disadvantaged due to race, they’re also disadvantaged due to social class. These students have the largest achievement gap in most STEM courses, and they really connect with this intervention. What we found in this research, these students have a particular motivation for going into science. They want to give back to their communities, they want to help their friends and family out after they’re done with college. They have specific goals that may not be met in science courses, or may not have this direct connection to what they’re learning in science. And so, by providing them with this opportunity to reflect on that and connect the material to those goals, we’re seeing that they make marked improvement in terms of their grades in the class. Whenever you do an intervention where you have students write something, and you get really rich data because you can look at what they’re writing about. So we analyzed over 1,000 different essays that these students wrote and we said, “What are they writing about?” We ran them through the linguistic analysis, and they’re really connecting it to those goals. These students are more engaged in the assignment, they’re writing longer essays, they’re more specific in their writing. And that then contributes to learning more in the class, which results in higher grades.

Rebecca: Sounds like, again, a very easy intervention to make or to build into classes. I know that I’ve been doing more of that in the classes that I’m teaching and seeing really good results and having really great conversations as a result with students as well.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think there’s a difference between simplicity and ease of this type of intervention, because it does require the students to put in some effort, they have to write an essay. It also requires some grading on the part of the instructor if that’s not already in your class. So it is a little bit extra, quote-unquote, “work”. But I think it can be done in automated ways to benefit students.

John: And in these studies, you’ve also looked at the effect of student-identified value versus when it’s communicated from the instructor instead. Could you talk a little bit about the relative impact of directly-communicated utility-value interventions from the instructor or those that come from the students?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So from a really practical perspective, we wanted to know, “Do students have to write the essay? [LAUGHTER] Do we have to grade all these essays? Or can we just stand up in front of the students and sort of give them this information, kind of summarize how what they’re learning is relevant to a number of domains?” Because that would ultimately, in a practical sense, take less time. So we did an experiment where we manipulated this, and what we found is that students benefit the most when they get both. So they have a little bit of scaffolding from the faculty member, where they’re given some ideas of how the information might be relevant or useful to them. And then they write about it in their own words and get really into specifics. So a professor can stand up there and say a bunch of ways that it might be relevant, but every student is unique, every student has different goals, every student has different interests. And so, it really needs to be personalized to them. And the process of putting it in your own words and reflecting on it is also useful, right? That’s part of the learning process. You get into the specifics of it and write about it. So, we ended up concluding that it’s both. There’s some scaffolding involved from the faculty member, but then the students really need to generate something for themselves too.

John: I think you also looked at this in terms of the differential effect in two-year and four-year institutions, and you found somewhat different results between a community college and a four-year institution. Could you talk a little bit about that difference?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So a lot of this research has been done, or the data have been collected from four-year institutions, particularly four-year research-intensive institutions. And so, I wanted to see how this could translate to other types of colleges, particularly in the two-year context, because a lot of first-generation students go to two-year colleges. That’s a gateway to a lot of different career paths. And so what we did is we went around to a whole bunch of different two-year colleges, we connected with the instructors there, we tried to tailor it for their students and their context. But ultimately, what we found is that there needed to be a lot more scaffolding in terms of the writing process. So because the intervention was done with students at four-year colleges, we kind of made assumptions about how ready students were to think about utility and think about relevance. And a writing intervention in those contexts just wasn’t appropriate. So we didn’t find the same findings, we actually found that the control essays were more beneficial than the utility-value condition, in these interventions that control is summarizing course material. And that was actually really beneficial for students in this context because they weren’t already doing that in these courses. Whereas in the four-year college, that was sort of the status quo, and they were able to take that next step to make that course material relevant to them. So in working with their instructors, what we concluded is that you can do this intervention in a different way. It doesn’t necessarily have to be writing. It could be done in small group discussions, it can be done in presentations, it can be done in a lot of different formats that might not present a barrier of writing ability or writing practice. A lot of students in two-year colleges take concurrent writing courses in addition to their science courses. And so removing that barrier of writing, I think, would have been necessary in that context.

Rebecca: It’s a nice helpful reminder, I think, for faculty to be thinking about ways to have reflective practice that doesn’t always involve a lot of reading too. [LAUGHTER] Like, if we’re doing presentations, or if we’re reflecting in a video, or reflecting in conversation. These are all other places that provide some variety, too, so that we’re not always grading the same things or having to intake the same kinds of information. That can also be overwhelming to faculty too. So mixing it up is helpful I think. [LAUGHTER]

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think it also speaks to, you know, one-size-fits-all interventions just are not appropriate. So we publish these papers and we say, “Wait, we found these really amazing findings.” But that’s in one context, maybe with one instructor, maybe at one institution, and every student body is different, every class is different. And so, you really need to figure out the needs of your students and meet them where they are, and also take a step back and look at the purpose of the intervention. Maybe it can be implemented differently. Maybe if you take the philosophy of it and customize it for your context, that’s going to be the more appropriate approach.

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

Elizabeth: Well, right now I’m still working on mindset messages. We just got word that we might potentially be getting a nice grant to look at this. And so what we’re going to be looking at is growth-mindset interventions directed at students crossed with growth mindset messages from faculty. The idea is that when you try to get students to believe in a growth mindset, it’s going to be most effective when the environment is supportive of that message so that it’s supported by the faculty member in that class. So we’re going to be looking at that over the next few years in a bunch of different contexts, in a bunch of different institutions.

Rebecca: Sounds like more beneficial, useful, and exciting information.

John: And again, as Rebecca had said earlier, these are really relatively simple and easy-to-use interventions that I think could be much more widely adopted. Well, thank you.

Elizabeth: Yes, thank you for having me. It was great to talk with 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. Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

[MUSIC]

211. What Inclusive Instructors Do

Posted in access, diversity, equity, first-generation students, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, inclusive pedagogy, intellectual integrity, learning, pedagogy, race, STEM, stereotype threat, teaching
October 27, 2021

Our students bring a rich diversity in their life experiences, skills, and prior knowledge to our classrooms. In this episode, Tracie Marcella Addy, Derek Dube, Khadijah A. Mitchell, and Mallory E. SoRelle join us to discuss how we can create inclusive classroom communities in which student diversity is treated as an asset and where all students feel a sense of belonging. Tracie, Derek, Khadijah, and Mallory are the authors of What Inclusive Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching.

Show Notes
Transcript

Shownotes

Addy, T. M., Dube, D., Mitchell, K. A., & SoRelle, M. (2021). What Inclusive Instructors Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
Addy, T.M., Dube, D., Mitchell, K.A. (2020). “Fostering an Inclusive Classroom.” Inside Higher Ed (Opinion). August 5.
Request the Who’s in Class? form from Lafayette College
Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(6), 878.

Transcript

John: Our students bring a rich diversity in their life experiences, skills, and prior knowledge to our classrooms. In this episode, we discuss how we can create inclusive classroom communities in which student diversity is treated as an asset and where all students feel a sense of belonging.

[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 the authors of What Inclusive Instructors Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching. Could you each introduce yourselves to our listeners?

Tracie: Absolutely, my name is Tracie Addy and I’m the Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Derek: Hello, I’m Derek Dube. I’m an Associate Professor of Biology and the Director for the Center for Student Research and Creative Activity at the University of St. Joseph in Connecticut.

Mallory: I’m Mallory SoRelle, and I’m an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

Khadijah: Hello, my name is Khadijah Mitchell. I am the Peter d’Aubermont Scholar of Health and Life Sciences and Assistant Professor of Biology at Lafayette College.

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

Tracie: Yes, I’m actually drinking Twinings peppermint tea. I like peppermint.

Rebecca: Yum!

Derek: Today I am just drinking your standard run-of-the-mill tap water.

Rebecca: Always a good option.

Mallory: I’ve got some green tea with lemongrass and mint today because I needed a little kick of caffeine

Rebecca: A mint team around here.

Khadijah: Well, I really don’t need to be drinking caffeine. [LAUGHTER] So I am drinking AHA sparkling water. It’s orange and grapefruit.

John: And I am drinking Twinings mixed berry black tea, because I need a bigger kick of caffeine.

Rebecca: I got here late and didn’t have time to make tea, and it’s really hot, and so I have a glass of water. And this is the first time I’ve ever not had tea for Tea for Teaching. But this is a very inclusive crowd, so I know it’s going to be okay.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of this book project?

Tracie: Yes, I can share about that. So, we were very interested in a lot of different research questions around inclusive teaching, for example: What predicts whether instructors adopt inclusive teaching? What are the barriers that they face? As well as, what can we do to kind of move this forward at institutions? So initially, we were very kind of research-minded, and we noticed that there were other questions that we could explore. Also, in our study, that I know later one of my co-authors will talk about in more depth. And those questions were, “What do inclusive instructors do?” So we ended up collecting a lot of really interesting information about the practices of inclusive instructors. And so that led us to think… Wow, wouldn’t it be wonderful to put this all together into a beautiful story that included the voices of instructors, that included instructors across disciplines, across institution types, across ranks, etc., and put it together in a guide that would really be practical, that would help instructors really think about inclusive teaching in a very practical way? So that essentially initiated this project. And I invited my co-authors who are joining today to partake with me in this project to write the book, and I thought of each of them for very specific reasons. And I value, very much so, their contributions and what they did around inclusion. And we kind of put it all together, and we worked together on this great work. Now, this is also coupled with more studies, some of which have been published as well, that kind of get into this big picture, thinking about inclusive teaching, thinking about… What do we do? How do we do it? And then even further, How do we actually enact it? What are the barriers we face? And how do we overcome or address those barriers?

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what inclusive teaching is, and why it’s important, to kick off our conversation today?

Tracie: Yes and I think it’s so important to define our terms here so that everybody starts off on the same page. So when we talk about inclusive teaching, and especially in the book What Inclusive Instructors Do, we’re talking about teaching that is creating a classroom environment that’s welcoming, so students feel a sense of belonging to the actual classroom setting. And we’re also talking about, that it’s equitable, and it’s thinking about the diversity of learners, and it’s very responsive to that diversity in the classroom. So we’re kind of joining here, this idea of belonging, as well as this idea of equity together, and all the practices, which are many, that we can actually use in our classrooms to be inclusive. And with regards to, “Why is it important?”… inclusive teaching has always been important. Inclusive teaching is excellence in teaching. We publish this book now, but this has historically always been a critical area to think about in teaching and learning. And some of the reasons why… well first, there’s a history of exclusion at institutions of higher education, some are able to be educated and have these experiences, and some are not. And there’s also a lot of good research around thinking about that and belonging. There’s clear research that ties belonging to academic achievement, it ties it to wellbeing for students, and many other important things that we know are really important for students’ success in college. Also, we teach diverse students in many of our institutions. So it really behooves us to really think about that and that diversity. And so it’s important now, it’s always been important. I know, with all of the things happening in our nation, there have been more calls and more attention towards inclusion and equity. But I will say, as I’ve said already, that it’s always been important to actually have environments in our classrooms that students feel as if they belong. We know that that’s a place where students can feel excluded.

John: You also conducted a survey of faculty about inclusive teaching practices. Could you tell us a little bit about the survey that you used?

Derek: Sure. So I’m happy to share a bit about that. Now, as Tracie had mentioned, there’s four of us that worked as co-authors on this book, and we all have different experiences, and backgrounds, and expertises, and roles at our institution. But we didn’t want this book to be just our voices and our four experiences, we wanted it to be much more than that. So with that in mind, we dove into the literature around inclusive teaching—what’s published, what’s the research out there—but really to figure out what’s going on right now and what are inclusive instructors doing, we wanted to have as broad a swath as possible. So working together we created a national survey on inclusive teaching, an inclusive teaching questionnaire, and we shared this both directly to various institutions of various different rank and style, master’s institutions, doctoral institutions, community college liberal arts institutions. We also connected with listservs, and social media, and directly with instructors as ways to share this out. This survey was given for about a month to two months in early 2019. And in the end, we ended up having about 566 participants that had started the survey, over 300 of which reached the end of the survey, and over 200 of which responded to all of the questions that we asked. And it was really interesting, because when we looked at the demographics and the backgrounds of those who responded, we saw a wide range of individuals from different types of institutions, male and female, various backgrounds, various disciplines, whether they were tenure track or not, and also the fields that they worked in. So we really felt like we got a good feel of a variety of different instructors being able to speak to what inclusive teaching means to them, what they’re doing, and how they see it at their institution. Also, geographically, we had respondents from the northeast, from the southeast, from the northwest, from the southwest, and everywhere in between, which was really nice to see as well. So when we did this survey, as Tracie mentioned, we had a few different things that we wanted to know some of them were… What are instructive pedagogies? What are inclusive instructors doing right now? But also, What are barriers they’re facing? What experiences for training have they had? How confident do they feel in their own ability to teach in equitable and inclusive ways? So all of these things were pieces of information that we were able to get from this broader swath and bring in and really pull in and really allow, in a lot of ways, those voices to be the voice of the book.

John: So a very inclusive approach to developing a book on inclusive teaching.

Derek: That was the idea, yeah.

Rebecca: In your first chapter of the book, you suggest that faculty should treat student diversity as an asset rather than employing deficit models that we definitely have experienced in our own educations and perhaps in our institutions. Can you describe ways that faculty can convey this message to students through their instructional practices and actually take advantage of these assets?

Mallory: Sure thing, that’s a great question. So, the idea that we should approach differences in background, experience, personality, skill sets, as an asset to the learning environment, something that improves the learning environment instead of a challenge to be overcome or an obstacle we have to deal with, was one of the most, I think, significant themes that comes out both in the scholarship around inclusive teaching, but also in the words of the folks in our survey. And a lot of examples came out in people’s responses about how they go about doing this in practice. And that begins with course design and syllabus with things like incorporating diverse perspectives in the material you’re assigning in class to demonstrate the value of these different perspectives. It comes from incorporating welcoming statements in a syllabus that explicitly state the value of multiple perspectives in the classroom and devising participatory strategies that are designed to bring those out. It also includes trying to build assignments that take an asset-based approach. I’ll give you an example of one, in a group project where you ask students to identify some of their different strengths: Are you good at researching? Are you good at writing? Are you good at editing? Are you good at presenting? And putting groups together that assemble students who identified different strengths and having them talk about those. The idea that not all students have to be good at every one thing, that we all bring these different strengths to the table. And one of the things that I think is really important for this asset-based approach is knowing something about what those assets are in your classroom. And that requires knowing something about who is in your classroom. So one of the things we also talk about in the book that I think is a good tool for helping to treat diversity as an asset set in the classroom is what we call a “Who’s in Class?” form, which is a form that can be given anonymously to students at the beginning of the semester, to just help and identify what are some of the social identities in the classroom, some of the skills people bring to the classroom, some of the different perspectives that students are bringing to the classroom, to give instructors more of a sense of what that diversity is, and how that can be used over the course of the semester to really improve the learning experience for everyone.

Rebecca: So I’m curious, with a survey like that to learn who’s in the classroom, are those results something that we should be sharing out to students and having a conversation about?

Mallory: Yeah, so I’ll take that and also open it up to Tracie, because she’s done a lot of work in the development of this form. I think the goal is to distribute this, allow anyone who wants to participate anonymously to participate, and then, yes, to share back the aggregate takeaways to the class, because it lets other students know who else is in this class with them. And particularly, I think, for students who might feel like there’s something they’re bringing to the table that maybe they don’t know other students are also bringing to the table. It’s a way of saying, like, “Look, there are lots of folks who are both like you and lots of folks who are not like you. And that’s going to be something that’s going to help us throughout the class this semester.”

Tracie: And I guess I’ll piggyback on that a bit. And I will say, you definitely can share it with your class. I think the important thing is letting your students also know that in aggregate, we will be sharing this. And also, if there’s certain things on there that really does it make sense to share with everybody? …having that discretion too. Because students will share lots of different things on that form, and some of it can be used to introduce this conversation, like Mallory said, and to really think about the diversity of the class. And I know also Khadijah has done things of that nature, she’s actually used the form in her class and done things like that, and has had a lot of positive feedback from students, with that regard. Derek might have done too, I’m not sure, but… [LAUGHTER] I know Khadijah has voiced that to me as well. So I think it’s a good opportunity to really think about who’s in class and a safer way for students… students will often feel more comfortable sharing in that type of format than just asking them without that kind of anonymity tied to it.

Derek: And I can actually just chime in a little bit here too. One of the ideas that Mallory brought up, and then Tracie added to, was getting to know your students. It’s really hard to teach your students in a meaningful and inclusive way if you don’t know who your students are. So finding ways to do that, especially early on in a course—really early, the earlier the better—was really important to us. And that’s where the “Who’s in Class?” form was born. It was born as a way to instead of waiting for, “Okay, I’m going to meet and learn my students throughout the semester, maybe get to know them more at the end with evaluations and things like that,” …what can we do right away? And because the students may not necessarily know us right away, or what our intentions are, we thought that the “Who’s in Class?” form could be most powerful as an anonymous and aggregated way of collecting data. Where students could feel safe, that their privacy was protected, that they could share that information that they wanted the instructor to know, but maybe didn’t want them to know about them in specific. So that’s why we moved that way. Now, in thinking about getting to know your students and being able to really, in a directed way, be inclusive and equitable and support different students with different needs, we do believe that moving from anonymous to a more non-anonymous way of getting that information can be important in a lot of situations. But we think that it’s best when it’s student-directed, when the students decide that they’re comfortable to share that information with the instructor, that’s the time when it’s most likely most appropriate. The “Who’s in Class?” form can be a way to ease into sharing information in a safe way. And then you come, you talk to your class about, “Why did we do the ‘Who’s in Class?’ form? What did we learn in aggregate?” And then you open up and say, “I’m here to extend these conversations, to continue these discussions. I have office hours that are open that you’re welcome to come to and talk to me if there’s any specific thing here that you want me to know that directly relates to you.” I know that Khadijah, at least, has, in some of her courses, used situations where there’s essentially mandatory office hours, I think right in the beginning, like little meet-and-greets where it’s only 5 minutes or 10 minutes, but you’re going to come in and you’re going to meet and you’re going to have an opportunity to talk. And you can share what you want to during that time, but you’re going to get that face-to-face time. And maybe she can talk about that more in a moment or two. But other things that I’ve done, if you have large classes where maybe there’s not a ton of time to have individual meetings with every student, in a lot of my classes, one of the first assignments is an online discussion board using our learning management system, which in my case is Blackboard, where students make a post about themselves and some information about not only them academically, but also their hobbies or interests. They post a picture either of themselves or something that represents themselves. And then there’s an opportunity and encouragement for students to reply in meaningful ways to each other, to get to know each other, because it’s not just about the instructor knowing who’s in the class, but it’s about the class knowing who’s in the class too, for it to be the most positive experience. So that’s been really beneficial. And I as an instructor then take time, and I can do it at nine o’clock after my kids are in bed, to make sure that I respond to each student in a meaningful way and try and make connections where I can, “Oh, you like science fiction, well I’m currently reading this series, we should talk about that sometime,” or things along that line. So I think that starting in a safe, anonymous way like the “Who’s in Class?” form can be a great way to get that ball rolling and, if the students feel comfortable and feel like it would be meaningful, allow them to break that anonymity border by offering opportunity.

John: We’ve been running a reading group along with SUNY Plattsburgh, and this was a topic that was discussed really extensively in one of our meetings, where there was pretty much a consensus that there’s a purpose for both an anonymous form to let people express things that they might not be comfortable revealing, but then also giving students the opportunity to share either with just the instructor, perhaps through meetings, or if it’s a larger class, a discussion forum, or Flipgrid, or VoiceThread, or some other way where they can share their identities with other people. And I think the consensus was, there’s a good purpose for each of these, and some combination might be really helpful.

Khadijah: One thing I just want to add on to what everyone is saying is that the “Who’s in Class?” form has been transformative for my classroom spaces. And I know Derek brought up something about large class size and thinking about large classes, it even can help with that. But I think we also need to think about the other end of the bell curve, very small classes, because even though someone may be not identified, there’s some aspects of their identity that could then disclose who they are. So I think that we also need to be mindful of that. For example, clearly there are visible aspects of our identity that would be able to disclose what a particular student was in a small setting, that would not be as much of an issue with a large setting. But I do think that there is so much power in that. And speaking to what Derek mentioned about the essential office hours, so for every class that I teach, I do use the “Who’s in Class?” form and these essential office hours. And even though the “Who’s in Class?” form is anonymous, people do share with me during these essential office hours, and it really fosters a greater classroom environment in that way.

Rebecca: I love the name essential office hours, I love the emphasis on the “essential.”

Tracie: Absolutely. And I was going to share that the development of the “Who’s in Class?” form was with collaboration with students too. So I asked a number of students about this form, as we were going through the process of creating it, from questions like, “Are these questions that we should ask? How should we implement it or administer this? Would they answer these questions?” And so that was also very helpful. But I will say that working with a number of instructors on the “Who’s in Class?” form in my center, there are a number that actually do have a separate form as well that’s course specific, that’s not anonymous, they add additional questions on that. And then we have all these wonderful variations that, like Khadijah said, the essential office hours and other ways to get to know students, which I think, John, well you mentioned, I think is obviously fabulous. There’s all these different avenues for students to be able to share aspects of themselves with not only the instructor, but as Derek mentioned, with the class. What a wonderful thing that is for building a more inclusive classroom.

John: Once you have this data on who’s in your class, how can you use that to convince students that the diversity of the class is actually an asset to the class? What sort of methods could you use to help convey that message? In particular, how can you avoid issues such as stereotype threat?

Khadijah: Well, I can speak to the first part of your question, John, I think about: what can you do with this data? So I actually summarize the data, and we have a little PowerPoint presentation, and I share that back out to the class so that we appreciate this diversity. I also then go tweak and tailor my classroom to the students that are in the room. So if there are particular issues that may be salient to that group and that population, then we address that as a learning community together. Thinking about stereotype threat, so this is really important, particularly in the discipline that I’m in, in STEM disciplines. So when we think about stereotype threat, we normally think about negative stereotype threat. And that’s the perceived risk of confirming negative stereotypes about a particular social group that a student may be assigned. And what it leads to is this imbalance of how the student’s sense of self, which is typically positive, versus this inconsistent expectation of whatever group that they fall into. And so this is really, really pronounced when we think about various academic disciplines, and notably people who’ve done work in STEM. And what happens is this leads to worse academic performance or a threatened or less of a sense of belonging. So things like the “Who’s in Class?” form that can help with that sense of belonging. I think that there are several evidence-based approaches that we use to mitigate this impact in effect. And the first is really thinking about self-affirmation. So there are a lot of the instructors in our study, and we see the voices in the book. We talk about reinforcing the students’ feelings of integrity and self-worth and that this self-affirmation dramatically reduces the effects of negative stereotype threat. And we know that this can change achievement gaps and bolster this sense of belonging along with initiatives like using this “Who’s in Class?” form. I think one thing to keep in mind is, although we often talk about negative stereotype threat, there also is positive stereotype threat. And so, one way, as instructors, we can combat that, is thinking about the stereotype content model, because this allows for both types of stereotypes. And what happens is this model is a psychological model that’s based on perceptions of warmth and competence. And thinking about particular stereotypes as high or low warmth and competence. And, in particular, we know that inclusive instructors realize that harm can arise from either one of these and depending on visible and invisible identities. So what happens is you can use this stereotype content model across different types of courses, levels, times to acknowledge and reflect on the individual’s own stereotypes, to offer apologies for students that may have resulted in harm, and to carry out actions that would re-establish welcoming spaces. So we like to think about the stereotype content model can be coupled with these three As: acknowledge, apologize, and act. And so that would just be examining your own background and experiences, and apologizing if there’s been any type of misspoken or things that weren’t addressed, and thinking about how to act and take action in the face of some of these stereotypes.

Rebecca: So as we start thinking about some of these ideas, how do we start building these inclusive principles into our course designs? We’ve talked a little bit about the openers, considering some of these ways of acknowledging and recognizing who’s in our spaces, and who’s in our classes, and who’s in our community. But how do we make sure that we continue that thread of inclusivity throughout the entire semester?

Mallory: So I think course design is a really critical tool for inclusive teaching, and particularly the way that manifests in a syllabus. So I’m a political scientist by training, I like to think of a syllabus as a little bit of a constitution. It’s kind of the founding document of your class. It tells us what our common purpose is, it tells us who’s part of this community, it tells us how we act within that community, what we owe to one another, how we participate in that community, and really what we’re doing. And all of those are really integral questions if we’re thinking about inclusive teaching. So in the survey, I would say there are three really broad themes that came out of people’s responses to how they try and enact inclusive practices in syllabus design. And so the first one was really trying to demonstrate that everyone has a place in the field. We think back to what Tracie was saying earlier about belonging, being important, this is an obvious tie-in to that. And so perhaps the most frequent comment that got made in the survey was, probably unsurprisingly, “We should incorporate diverse perspectives on the syllabus,” and also in other course artifacts throughout the semester, but particularly on the syllabus. So that’s one way to demonstrate that everyone has a place in the field. The next big theme that came out was encouraging everyone to play a role in the learning process. And so we could think about that as another form of fostering belonging, but I would also say that’s part of the equity piece as well, providing space for everyone to be an active part of this particular learning community. And so there were a few different ways that came out in people’s responses. So one idea was encouraging everyone to play a role in the learning process by essentially just setting a tone that this will be an inclusive classroom in the syllabus language. So that could incorporate something like having a welcoming or a diversity statement directly in your syllabus. It could also just be the tone of the language you use. Is the language hierarchical? “The professor will do this and the student will do this,” or is it more inclusive? Is it, “Hey, we are doing this, [LAUGHTER] we will talk about these things, we will tackle these assignments.” Another piece of that puzzle was about setting citizenship expectations. If we want everyone to play a role in the learning process, we want to set some expectations for how we’re going to treat one another while we’re doing that. And I think a lot of syllabi are good at setting expectations for what students owe to their faculty. But, one of the things that we talked about a little bit in the chapter that addresses this is also that a syllabus is a good place to set expectations for how students treat one another, but also what faculty owe to students. And so, again, sort of leveling that playing field and establishing we are all in this community, we all play a really important role, we will all have give and take and here’s the responsibilities we have to one another. And then the third theme that came out, in thinking about inclusive course design, was essentially promoting the conditions for everyone to be successful in the course. So that really nails that equity piece. And so, one of the one of the big-picture ways that people implement this is to think about a syllabus as an opportunity to explain to students, not only what you’re doing, which I think most syllabi do a pretty good job of, but also how you can go about doing that successfully, and critically why we’re doing this. So the “what” is sort of setting clear expectations, so that everyone is on the same page about what we’re all trying to accomplish. The “how” is potentially providing resources to help students accomplish those goals. So directing them to the library, directing them to a writing center, if such a center exists. That could also include things like mental health resources to help students navigate the semester, particularly in the past two years that we’ve been having, those can be especially critical. And then also that last one, the “why,” giving a rationale. We all have reasons, hopefully we have reasons, for designing courses in the way that we do. But we often don’t explain those to students. And I think we often forget that students aren’t inside our heads and don’t really know why we’re asking them to do things in a particular way. And so part of setting the conditions for people to be successful is to explain why we’re doing the things we’re doing to students so that they can make strategic choices when they’re in our courses and are trying to be successful in those courses. And then the other really important theme that came out when thinking about promoting conditions for everyone to succeed is, perhaps unsurprisingly, trying to make sure your course design and syllabus are accessible to as many groups as possible. That’s another way that the “Who’s in Class?” form can come in really handy because there are a lot of ways in which we might try to make something accessible to one group that inadvertently becomes less accessible to another. So knowing something about who is in your class, and what some of the accommodations they might need are, can really help you make strategic choices about how to be as accessible as possible. So those were really the big-picture things that came out about how to make your course more inclusive through the design of a syllabus.

Rebecca: Mallory talked a bit about syllabus design and setting a good tone up front, and the survey does that as well. So what are some things that we can do at key touchpoints throughout the course of the semester to keep this feeling of inclusion continuing and that sense of belonging continuing throughout the semester?

Khadijah: So that’s a great question. I would say that welcoming students begins even before the course starts, even before they lay eyes on the syllabus. So I think that you can set this positive tone, you want to think about it like a greeting card, to promote belonging from the beginning. And so we talked about the “Who’s in Class?” form, but even having a video that would welcome them to the course, kind of like a trailer for your class at the beginning. There are things like the physical environment, thinking about that if you’re in person, but if you’re online, think about what are the first images that someone sees when they log on to your learning management course or the course website. Thinking about what type of activities would emphasize diversity and equity and inclusion. And that would be at the beginning, such as the “Who’s in Class?” form, but throughout the semester. And so I think that those things are carried out. Building the relationships with the students are also important throughout the semester. But at the end, I think we never think about how the students, even at the end of a course, feel welcome. It’s never too late. So even on the last day of class, you can highlight as an inclusive instructor, and we saw this throughout our work, how much you’ve learned from the students themselves and thanking them for how much that they taught the instructor. And thinking about, by having this equitable participation that Mallory brought up, that acknowledging that at the end of a course, actually affirms them in their abilities. It encourages them to see themselves as members of that community of practice, and we know this is critical for various disciplines. And wrapping up with giving students a way to reflect and give feedback on how welcome they felt in that environment. And that is really critical, that feedback that they give, for helping make future classrooms more inviting.

John: And you also advocate not just doing that at the end, but also getting feedback from students regularly throughout the semester, I believe. Could you talk a little bit about how you might do that efficiently?

Khadijah: Exactly. So, I think when we think about content, we think about formative and summative assessment. It’s the same thing with the sense of belonging. So you can do a mid-semester check-in. That could be a formal survey, or it could be something as simple as, “What’s working?” I typically take a piece of paper and say, “What’s going great so far?” and “What would we like to work on as a community?” And so that gives equal onus in the shared space in the classroom. But it lets the students know that I’m hearing them and that they belong and what they’re saying is important.

Rebecca: That mid-semester check-in often times well with thinking about advisement and registration for next semester too. So I could imagine really reinforcing a sense of belonging before the continuity of the next semester, or thinking or planning for the future can actually be really useful. And it’s not something I had thought about before, but when you were talking about the end-of-the-semester sense of belonging, our advisement time is coming up right now and registration. So I’m thinking that right now is a really good time to just reinforce and underscore these ideas to make students feel like they really do belong in the spaces that they want to occupy.

John: One of the things we really appreciated in your book was the use of reflection questions. This is something that is really rare in books directed at professional development for faculty. And it probably shouldn’t be, because we all know the benefits of reflection. Could you talk a little bit about the importance of reflection in learning, both for students and for faculty?

Tracie: Yeah, I think that’s a great question and I’m very happy that you appreciated that. We were thinking very intentionally as we were thinking about designing the book in that phase. And you can kind of see there’s like a part one, a part two, a part three, and then these reflection questions embedded throughout, and then also in aggregate at the end of the book too. And so, in general, as you mentioned, reflection is so critical. We know in the science of learning that we need to take these points in time and moments to really think about our learning, to really make sense of it, and see that meaning that we’re making of it, and that we have or are growing. And so, in our book, we thought, it’s so important, this material, that we want you to think about it further. And, as an educational developer myself, I was thinking about all the people also reading the book, and I was like, “Oh, if we were in a setting, like a workshop or something like that, I could ask these questions. Like what would I ask for application or reflection?” And I’d want to have that. And thinking about the book, and talking with my co-authors about thinking about these reflection questions, it was kind of similar where it’s like “Let’s add these in, so that there are these opportunities to actually engage in that process.” With inclusive teaching in general, there’s so many things to think about, to think about how we do it, what we do. And we gave so much information that it was so important, I think, to process it and to allow time points for stopping to actually start to think about it further. The other thing that we thought about in terms of the reflection questions is that we know that, in our bigger study, we found that there are lots of barriers that instructors described to inclusive teaching. One of them was resources, another was discussions, and whatnot. And so, by embedding these reflection questions, it also has easier access if there is a discussion—or a book club, or reading, or opportunities—to actually take this book information and bring it back and talk about it in a community at their institution, whatever that might look like. And so that’s another reason we did include them too. And I think we later decided to include the aggregate too, but I think that was also helpful. And then also just being able to pick through those which you probably want to emphasize more and have that option to do so. Some might resonate more with some than others. So all of that to say that, that’s why we put it in there and I agree that I think it’s a really good thing in books to include that. Especially these types of books we’re really reflecting and we’re really thinking about intentional teaching, in this case inclusive and equitable teaching.

John: So you started writing this before the pandemic and then while you were writing this there was this global pandemic that popped up and it was a period in which there was also a great deal of social stress. How do you think this might influence the willingness of faculty to focus more on the importance of inclusive teaching?

Tracie: So for me, inclusive teaching has always been important as I’ve mentioned earlier. So the fact that all these things happened were just that they were made more public and people became more aware. And now people are trying to change these things a little bit more than the past. So I will say what it did do was really made me think what a timely book… [LAUGHTER] to actually be at this point in time. I think it was a great opportunity. And I think it’s really useful, and we hear that, that it’s been really helpful for many institutions during this time, especially with this increased focus on it, on thinking about these issues as well. I will say that we wrote most of the book, I think a big majority of it, before it happened and then there’s a whole process that happens in making a book so there’s some time. So we did later try to tie in more of the recent things that had occurred a little bit later. But the beauty of it is, it all kind of fit naturally in there anyway. It’s not like we had to majorly revise the book, we just had to address the issues that were facing our nations. So I think, overall, it’s just a timely book. And this has always been important, and we really do need to talk about it, and this increased that ability for us to do that.

Derek: Yeah and I’ll just add, along with increased appetite for tools to help around these ideas of inclusion and equity, there still weren’t so many of those tools out there. So it worked well that we felt that we could provide one of these tools, that we had been working on it, that it was really ready to go out there as this appetite increased. And, specifically related to the pandemic, so one of the the effects of the pandemic on higher education was it forced a lot of institutions and a lot of courses to move to either hybrid or online pedagogies. And interestingly, this was something that we had been considering all along in terms of some of the chapters we were writing and thinking about welcoming classrooms, but also pedagogical means and ways to work, both in and on the ground and in online settings. So as we saw this starting to happen, we did go through and make sure… Are we talking about things and making sure that it’s understood that many of these are applicable, whether you’re in-person or online? And if you are in an online setting, how can they be used in that way as well?

Mallory: Yeah, I would echo, I think Tracie’s exactly right: structural inequalities in academia and society are not new. And I think for a group of four people who are writing a book on inclusive teaching, they’re already thinking about a lot of these. So what was new was maybe the attention of universities, who maybe were not paying attention, were forced to start paying attention, which I think is a good thing. But one of the other things that I think made me reflect a lot on the value of this book, that came out of the pandemic was, in the shift to online learning—as an instructor who was frantically trying to move all of their classes online with a week’s notice over spring break—was how much I valued being able to learn from my colleagues, and troubleshoot things, and benefit from other people’s expertise. And that’s a lot of what we’re doing in this book by drawing on this survey and not just saying, “Well, here’s what the scholarship tells us inclusive teaching looks like.” But saying, “This is what inclusive teaching looks like by people who are in the classroom doing this work, whether they’re formally trained to do it or not.” I think the value of that became even clearer to me, as I was trying to do the same thing with my colleagues on a daily basis. Learn from other people’s expertise as we were trying to navigate this really challenging situation.

Khadijah: So for me, a lot of what my co-authors have said really resonates. I think that I always thought about inclusive teaching before we had such social challenges that have been more pronounced in the media. I think two things stuck out to me as we wrote this book. One of the parts of the book, we talk about what happens when your classroom is disrupted. And I think it’s interesting, we tend to think about internal things that disrupt, so the students or the instructor, but a part of it was what happens with things outside, so these social conditions disrupt our learning. And so, the fact that the book addressed that when so many things were going on, it kind of was a how-to and it gave practical tools, of models and activities that you can do to navigate that. And I think what’s really resonated is that these things that we talked about in the book transcend transient social things. So like Tracie mentioned, something can happen in the future and this book would still be relevant in the way that we think about inclusive teaching, and what would come further down the pipe. So I think that it helped me reflect on current situations, but also kind of forecasting how having these new tools, from people that we’ve learned around the country, how that would help with future application.

Rebecca: I agree, that’s one of the powerful pieces of the book, is that we know it’s going to keep being useful for folks moving forward. And I know that we’re really grateful that we were able to share that with our faculty in our reading groups this year.

John: It does seem from our discussions with faculty that people are much more open to inclusive teaching than they’ve ever been in the past because while the problems and issues have always been there, they were often hidden on campus because you didn’t see the inequity. But when we were teaching students in their own homes, we saw differences in their access to technology, to their living quarters, and other inequities. It was much harder for people to ignore that. And I think everyone came to appreciate the benefits of community and building a strong community as a result of working through the pandemic. I think everyone realized that having a productive community is an important part of our lives. And the importance of that in a classroom, I think, is much more visible to faculty than it had been for many faculty before.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, the big huge question, “What’s next?”

Derek: Well so one of the things that I’ll say, I’ll keep it short and simple. What’s next? Around the book, it’s spreading the word. It’s spreading the word of why inclusive teaching matters, why equitable teaching matters, and what tools are out there. Whether it’s our book or whether it’s some other tool, some other way to get yourself into that realm, and get some understanding and work with your colleagues and learn from the experts. However that happens, that’s great. And for me personally, it’s doing the exact same thing: constantly learning, knowing that I have room to grow, knowing that I can improve in my teaching personally and all of that, and looking externally and reflecting internally for ways to do that.

Mallory: I think, “What’s next?” is such a great question to end on. Because one of the things we focus on in the book is that inclusive teaching is an iterative process. You never reach the end of it, you never get the perfectly inclusive course. And so, “What’s next?” is always revisiting what you’re doing and trying to, both in your own courses, revise and work towards fixing the things you didn’t get right the last time and at the institutional level, trying to build more capacity for inclusive teaching and buy-in. And I think the big “What’s next?” question is: What happens as we move away from the immediacy of the pandemic? What happens when racial injustice is not the main topic of the news? Do we still have the support for inclusive teaching efforts, or does that fade into the background? So I think the “What’s next?” is making sure that the momentum that has been gained is not lost.

Tracie: Yeah, and I would agree with all of my co-authors so far. I think the institutionalization of inclusive teaching would be so wonderful as a next step. So whether it’s, like, not treating it as a fad, [LAUGHTER] but creating it as part of our cultures in our institutions. So I know, like at my institution, we’re working hard towards that in a variety of ways. For me also personally, I do a lot of work around this, and thinking about the research and whatnot. So one of my steps right now that I’m taking is really thinking about the tools that we can really think about and capture practices around inclusive teaching to have that feedback. So we have all these great strategies, but let’s talk about more tools to really get feedback on our actual teaching practices. So I am doing some research around that right now, and I do work with students, student partners, to help us really think about this thing called “inclusion” and this equity as well. And so that’s where I sit in this space. So I’m going to continue to think about tools like Who’s in Class? and then these new tools, and go from there as well.

Khadijah: So, I echo a lot of what Tracie, Derek, and Mallory said. I think for me, of personal interest, when we do a lot of the inclusive classroom teaching, it makes me think about my laboratory. It makes me think about my teaching laboratory and my research laboratories. And I think teaching and mentoring go hand-in-hand in this space. Particularly when we think about DEI and STEM. And so for me, I’m interested in: What does inclusive mentoring look like in these spaces? And what are some of those principles and practices that are translatable from what we think about in the classroom, but then also what may be distinct in the laboratory and mentoring?

John: Well we very much appreciate you joining us, it feels like we’ve been in a dialogue with you all through our semester so far through the reading group. And we very much enjoyed your book, and I hope many other people will join in reading through it and working with it. Thank you.

Tracie: Thank you.

Mallory: Yeah, thanks.

Derek: Thank you so much.

Rebecca: We look forward to seeing all your new work.

Khadijah: 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. Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

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203. Critical Race Theory

Posted in bias, equity, higher education, inclusion, race, racism, teaching
September 1, 2021

Multiple states have introduced legislation banning the discussion of critical race theory at all levels of public education. In this episode Cyndi Kernahan and Moira Lynch join us to explore what these bills actually say, the motivations behind them, and the impact this has on teaching in higher education. Cyndi is a Psychology Professor and the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. She is also the author of Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom: Notes from a White Professor. Moira is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics, Geography, and International Studies, also at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls.

Show Notes
Transcript

Shownotes

Education Week. (2021). Map: Where Critical Race Theory Is Under Attack.
Anderson, C. (2016). White rage: The unspoken truth of our racial divide. Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Flood, Brian (2021). Critical Race Theory critic Chris Rufio says “intellectually bankrupt’ media is hiding the truth. Fox News. June 24.
Vestal, Shawn (2021) The tale of critical-race theory and the bullied Boise State student falls apart. The Spokesman Review. May 26.
Critical Race Training in Education. Website mentioned by Moira in which conservative activists are tracking what is being taught.
Depenbrock, J. (2017, August 23). Federal judge finds racism behind arizona law banning ethnic studies. NPR.
Jardina, A. (2019). White Identity Politics. Cambridge University Press.

Transcript

John: Multiple states have introduced legislation banning the discussion of critical race theory at all levels of public education. In this episode we explore what these bills actually say, the motivations behind them, and the impact that this has on teaching in higher education.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Cyndi Kernahan, and Moira Lynch. Cyndi is a Psychology Professor and the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. She is also the author of Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom: Notes from a White Professor. Moira is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics, Geography, and International Studies, also at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. Welcome Moira, and welcome back, Cyndi.

Cyndi: Thank you.

Moira: Thanks for having us.

John: Our teas today are…

Cyndi: I’m drinking blueberry green tea.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds good!

Moira: I had English breakfast and I left it downstairs.

Rebecca: Oops. [LAUGHTER] I have Earl Grey although Moira, don’t worry, I came initially with just a cup of hot water and I was like, oops, that’s not tea.

John: And I have ginger peach green tea. Is your blueberry green tea the Tea Republic one?

Cyndi: It is, I love them so much.

John: I do too. It’s really good.

Cyndi: And I took a page from you guys. I have to say we’re opening our CTL space officially next Tuesday. We were supposed to open last year but pandemic, and I took a page from y’all: I bought a kettle and tea because you guys inspired me. {LAUGHTER] So we will have a tea maker at the UW River Falls CTL space.

Rebecca: Representing, awesome!

John: Nice! We actually, I should note, have three. We have two tea kettles and we have a Breville tea maker, which will set the temperature and the strength of the tea for each of the major types of tea.

Cyndi: Of course you do.

John: We’ve been doing this for a while now.

Rebecca: Yeah, hashtag tea nerds.

John: We’ve invited you here, to talk about a column you wrote for the Cap Times on a bill that would ban the discussion of critical race theory in K-12 and higher education in the state of Wisconsin. What has happened with this bill? Has it passed or is it still under discussion?

Moira: This is a bill that… there’s actually two parts to it… There’s a Bill 409, which is targeting universities and colleges in Wisconsin. And then there’s a Bill 411, which is targeting K through 12 schools. And it hasn’t passed. It was proposed in June, just this past June… 2021. And then they only recently had a public hearing, a pretty divisive and rancorous public hearing, on August 11th on the bill, but no, it hasn’t gone to a vote yet. So the bill, basically, is banning particular concepts from the classroom. That’s its intent, including ideas like that one race or sex is superior to another, a person is inherently racist by virtue of his or her race or sex, a person should feel guilty for past acts committed by people of his or her race or sex. And there’s a few other pieces of language, but also it includes language that schools that would engage in instruction, that aligns with these ideas, would lose 10% of their annual state funding. There’s a couple other pieces to the bills, too, that are important to mention about ideas around educators publishing their curriculum, making it public and that being monitored in some form if this bill should pass. And that would be at the college and university level, but also at the K through 12 level. It also has some language on training. So institutions that are training on diversity and inclusion, for example, would be subject to some of these same ideas about what they can and cannot talk about in their training.

Cyndi: EDUCAUSE is keeping up with this, a lot of places are keeping up with this, I think the Chronicle of Higher Ed has a map as well. And there are 12 states that have passed something like this. And they all look a little different. So, Wisconsin’s looks very similar, I should say, because there’s a strategy here, but there are 12 states who have passed things like this, and there are variations on them. There’s more that seemed to be focused on the K-12 system, but many of them are focused on higher ed as well, like Florida really stands out as being very focused on their higher education system. So you can go and look, I think the EDUCAUSE article is really good, I can send that to y’all, but it sort of shows you like the map and where each state is in terms of where these bans are at. So this is a pretty serious issue going into the Fall semester.

John: We can share a link to that in the show notes. This has been a phenomenon we’ve been seeing a lot recently. We saw it over the previous four years in the White House with many federal agencies and we’re seeing it again in lots of red states, it appears. Why is this happening?

Cyndi: Yeah, I can start. I don’t think it’s any accident that a year ago, we were still talking about… I mean we still are talking about… the protests around George Floyd and the summer that we had that was so remarkable in terms of how many people went out and protested. So I think this is a response to that. That’s what it feels like to me. And it’s an ongoing response. We see this when you look at the history of race and racism, where there’s movement and backlash, movement and backlash. Carol Anderson writes about this really well. Many people write about it well, but that book in particular, White Rage, is a great source where she talks about that sort of movement forward and the backlash, and so I think it’s part of that. I think it’s always been part of a larger political strategy too, which I know Moira can speak better to than I can around using this in terms of gaining votes. I know you can speak to that better than me.

Moira: Yeah, I would agree with Cindy, that I think there’s a lot of backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement. And a lot of times the legislation even brings that in to the conversation or you hear that at school board meetings a lot in terms of what people perceive that movement to be, and whether they see it as a threat or not. And that often goes along with what people are speaking about at school board meetings and in college university settings around this type of legislation. But it is definitely stemming from a political strategy, in the sense that a Conservative activist, Christopher Rufo, spoke on Fox News last summer, talking about critical race theory in particular and how it was kind of this insidious element or form of indoctrination that was really moving through the education system. And that got the attention of President Trump. And he wrote a new Executive Order in which you can see much of the language in the legislation across the states, as Cindy described, taking their language directly from the Trump executive order, making sure that this was prohibited as much as possible in the educational setting. Biden has since rescinded that Executive Order since coming into office. But this is definitely a strategy that Conservative activists acknowledge and others also acknowledge ahead of the 2022 elections and beyond. And so there are different folks who are… you’ll see in conservative political party members… that are making statements, people who are interested in running for president eventually, that are definitely taking a stand on this and making sure that their voice is heard on this legislation in their own state or in other spaces. And so it’s definitely kind of part and parcel of how cultural wars have played out in the past in politics in which parties use a particular cultural hot point hot button issue to rally voters and constituents toward them on a particular cause.

Rebecca: In the past year, we’ve seen many campuses really pushed towards diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, whatever those are, and whatever those look like on a particular campus, they’re different, but there’s definitely a movement in that direction throughout higher ed. how is this impacting that movement? What are the long-term implications of this kind of legislation happening across multiple states in these moves to really have equity in higher education, and really, in K-12, too?

Cyndi: I think it complicates it, and anybody who reads the Chronicle or Inside Higher Ed on a regular basis knows that there’s always been backlash against higher ed, the idea that what we’re teaching is indoctrination or somehow wrong and brainwashing students, liberalizing students, that that idea is not new. I think what this does is it just sort of raises the stakes even more. As someone who teaches about this and works on initiatives like that on my campus level, I’m very involved in all of that work. And so it feels like we’re under even more scrutiny. So there have been incidents on this campus. For example, over the summer, there was a website that was inadvertently linked to our website, and it generated a lot of controversy on the right. And there was a lot of pushback. And so there were people calling the campus and saying, why are you linking to this website? We shouldn’t have necessarily been linking to that website, and again, it was an inadvertent mistake. But it was so clear to me over the summer, when this happened, like “Wow, people are really watching closely.” And so I think that’s part of what complicates that work is that there’s just going to be a lot of scrutiny, a lot of watching what we’re doing. And we already know, and this happens on a lot of campuses, that campus web pages are looked at closely, what instructors are teaching are looked at really closely. I thought the situation at Boise State was really instructive. If you all followed tha, where the Idaho State Legislature took funding away from Boise State and gave it to another Idaho college because allegedly there was this incident where a white student was shamed in an online class around racism. But when you actually dug into it, that student was not shamed by the instructor. There was some back and forth between the student and other students in the chat. It was a synchronous session, but the instructor actually handled it beautifully. The instructor checked in on the student to make sure they were okay. She saw that there was some conflict between students and handled it really, really well, I thought, from my read of the reporting of that. But that incident of allegedly a student being shamed was sent to a legislator who then, just based on that hearsay, said, “Okay, we’re taking $400,000 [I think it was] away from the school.” So I think the scrutiny is part of what really complicates this and makes it harder to do that work.

Moira: I think one of the problems, to your question, Rebecca, about what kind of impact too, is the critical race theory has become this catch-all term for anything that is taught in K through 12 settings or colleges and universities that’s related to race, anti-racism, systemic racism, racial injustice. I mean, the list goes on and on. And as Cyndi has said, these courses have existed for a long time. There’s a lot of work on this in different settings and different forms. So there’s a lot of confusion about what critical race theory is, and is not. And most of the laws that have been passed and that are even being considered don’t even have that term in the law, or if they do, it’s not accurately characterized. So it’s become this vessel to control how race and racism is taught in these settings. And that’s a very powerful instrument. And I want to give you an example, there’s a website called criticalrace.org in which Conservative activists are basically keeping tabs on everything that they can find that colleges and universities teach or had programming on or training related to race, anti-racism, etc. But when you go through different colleges and you look at what they take notes on, it’s not critical race theory… Is there a course? Yes or no? They actually just list anything that has race or anti-racism in it. So it could be a speaker that spoke two years ago, it could be a program for first years on anti-racism, it could be a lecture, it could be training, you can see it’s just this catch-all list that they are collecting to identify a problem. But what’s not clear is what the problem is, in terms of collecting this list of information from a college or university. It’s not clear in this website, for example, what is problematic about any of this programming or how it fits into this larger narrative of it being indoctrination.

John: Is there any evidence that critical race theory is actually being taught anywhere in the K through 12 environment?

Cyndi: Not that I know of, this is just from listening to reports about it, but it wouldn’t make sense for it to be taught in a K-12 setting. I mean, even in undergraduate classes, I’ve never formally taught critical race theory. And part of what’s confusing about it, and I do think it’s sort of useful, I guess, as a catch-all term for the folks who want to stop any discussion of racism, because it’s like this projection screen that a lot of stuff gets thrown on. I mean, really, if you look at the definition of critical race theory, part of what’s so complicated about it is it’s not one thing, it’s really a framework. So it’s a way of looking at things like laws and policies across a variety of domains: health care, education, the justice system, etc., and saying, “Let’s look at where there are racial disparities and disadvantage and let’s try to understand that.” So it’s looking at those things with a critical lens. One example I might give from work that we do is I was thinking about a financial aid policy of verification, I’m sure you all are familiar with this, that ensnares tons of students, including lots of my students, where you have to go through and provide more documentation to be able to receive your financial aid. A critical race perspective on that would say, “How is that happening? How is that disproportionately harming students of color?” …because it is, and there’s research that shows that it is. So that’s what CRT is, is it’s looking at things from a critical framework and saying, “Let’s look at it and see the ways in which racism is operating here that we might not recognize, because that’s one of the sets of assumptions is that it’s systemic, it’s not just individual.” Race is a social construction. Depending on what source you look at, there’s like five or seven different assumptions that are made within the framework of CRT. So, it really wouldn’t make sense for it to be taught to little kids. And then even at the college level, you might not necessarily teach in that way. I mean, I know most of what I spend my time teaching are really those core assumptions, which are understanding how race is a social construction and what that means. Understanding what it means that racism is systemic, and not just individual. And I think when you drill down, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, what I think people really want to ban is feelings. They want to ban people’s feelings around this. So there’s a lot of emphasis, if you listen to the way legislators talk about this, they’re very worried about white people being embarrassed or shamed. And so the idea is, let’s not teach about this in this way in which we think about it as this large encompassing framework, because there’s the assumption that that will make white students feel uncomfortable and embarrassed and ashamed to be white, when I would argue if you’re teaching well, and most people I know who teach this teach very well, that’s not a pedagogical technique that we use. We don’t want to shame people because they don’t learn in that way. And so that’s what’s, at least for me, as one who’s taught about this for so long, is so maddening. It’s like you’re mischaracterizing the way we teach and also mischaracterizing what it is that we’re teaching. It’s not critical race theory. It’s before tha,t just trying to get on the same page of what race is what racism actually is.

Rebecca: It sounds to me like many of the objectives of people who are pursuing this legislation is to just ban discussion of racism, and particular history. And I know that even when I was a student, many perspectives weren’t taught in K-12. So is it a return to a status quo of teaching a particular perspective and only offering that perspective and pushing against other perspectives being offered? Or is it something else?

Moira: I teach international relations and international relations, as a field, was silent for decades on race. So you just didn’t see people publish about it, Textbooks didn’t cover it. It’s just this gaping hole until more recently, textbooks have chapters on race and world politics or more chapters on post-colonial theory, for example. And some of that is also very American-centric. The way Americans taught it in universities was very narrow. However, in other parts of the world race was very much part and parcel of how you would learn about International Relations at the college level. And I talk about that with my students, because when we read about recent world politics, and we look at post-colonial theory, it’s incredibly helpful for them to be able to see historical patterns and systems that have shaped foreign policy decisions, that have shaped why a country’s development has stayed at a lower level as opposed to a higher level. It gives them tools to understand and make sense of some of the outcomes we see that don’t always make sense, especially in places very far from here that are very hard to understand if you have only lived United States and don’t have a lot of context for what’s happening in other parts of the world. So even just being able to explain really diverse patterns of development, conflict, stability in the African continent, is something that the colonial lens, and the colonial period helps them to grasp and make sense of particular outcomes. And we couldn’t do that unless we talked about racial oppression. We talked about colonialization and the slave trade. We couldn’t make sense of that, without that context of institutional racism. To your point about are we going backwards, in that field of international relations, I’m only recently seeing this great movement forward. And actually, textbooks are now a lot more inclusive of these histories than they used to be and so I’m very sensitive to this, because I can see it just moving away. And this omission and this silencing could really have a huge impact on an international relations course.

Cyndi: Yeah, it definitely seems like we’re just getting started and actually including other people in a lot of our curriculum. I think about psychology and the ways in which so much has been left out. And it’s just now starting to be included. So again, I think this is kind of that backlash piece that we see where finally this kind of history and work is being included. And it’s like “No, no, no, wait, wait, wait, we don’t want that.” And, you know, we’ve seen this before. The Tucson School District, they attempted to ban ethnic studies that was ultimately overturned. But it took many, many years to get that changed. So I think that’s what we’re seeing, there’s movement forward, it’s a little bit more inclusive, there’s more focus on it. And it’s interesting, because the backlash is so swift, even to just a little bit of inclusion. We still know… the Southern Poverty Law Center put out a report… I think it’s been a couple of years ago now, looking at the K-12 system showing that really slavery is not taught well, for most American students, it’s not taught particularly well. But even just a little bit of inclusion has sparked this intense backlash. And again, I keep thinking about how so much of it is focused on feelings. It’s very interesting. We don’t want anybody to feel bad. And there’s this assumption that students will feel bad if they learn, essentially, the truth about American history and American present. They just really irks me as an instructor, because that’s not what I see. Students like learning this for the most part. I mean, I have some resistance. But for the most part, students are grateful. The number one comment I always get is, “Why did no one tell me any of this?” And so what I see is that they’re grateful to learn the truth and the flaws and the messiness of our history and who we are as people. They’re grateful for that for the most part.

Rebecca: I would think the most tricky feelings are actually the ones of being betrayed or like, lied to.

Cyndi: Often, there’s a lot of guilt. I’ve talked about that a lot. There’s a lot of guilt, there’s a lot of helplessness. “How do I deal with this?” And so, you know, there’s a lot of management of those feelings. So yeah, that’s a great point.

Moira: I think, too, one of the interesting patterns that we’re seeing with these laws, and it’s the same for Wisconsin, in terms of the proposed bills, is that there isn’t data or evidence of how any of this education that they seem to be pointing to is harmful. They say it’s harmful, and the feelings are being hurt, as Cindy was saying, but we don’t have any data or evidence of harm. And even in the hearing on August 11 in Wisconsin, some of the people testifying, the senators, but also teachers, asked about that. “What is the data? What exactly do you want us to not do? What do you think is harmful?” And it’s difficult for some of the sponsors of the bill to answer that question. They actually couldn’t answer that question on August 11. And I think that’s really telling,

Cyndi: It’s often just all anecdote. It’s just like the Boise State example. It’s like, “Well, I heard someone said that there was this” …and even the thing that kicked part of this off with Christopher Rufo that Moira was referencing earlier was, I believe it was a city worker in the city of Seattle who had seen a presentation and just took a picture of the slide and send it somewhere. So it wasn’t necessarily bad feelings, it was just like, “This could make me feel bad or something,” I think. So it’s very amorphous and there’s a lot of assumptions being made that aren’t well evidenced at all for this.

Moira: And everything out of context.

Cyndi: Yes, very much so.

John: Is this related to a concern about the decline of the white majority that had controlled the narrative for so long, and perhaps a backlash to that, which is showing up in voter suppression efforts in so many other areas?

Cyndi: Yeah, I think the backlash framing is interesting. Right now I’m reading a great book. Ashley Jardina, is a political scientist who wrote the book, White Identity Politics. I’m not all the way through it. It’s really fun to read so far. But she talks a lot about that, about how there’s this salience around white identity that’s happening now, because of this demographic shift. And so that this is part of that larger thing. So there’s this sense of threat. And this is a response to that. So I think it makes our job as teachers, when we teach about this, more tricky and more challenging in some ways, but it’s of a piece with what we’ve always had to deal with. And I think a lot of the techniques for working with it are probably going to be the same. I know at the K-12 level, it’s harder for them, because they have less academic freedom. But I think at the college level, a lot of just good teaching is the way that we’re going to have to continue to work with this backlash and threat that people feel.

Moira: I would agree. And I think that you hear whiteness and white identity and white privilege more often, I think, in a positive way, in the sense that it’s not these kind of niche areas or people. The good part is that people understand that more. And they understand that white identity is constructed just as much as black identity, just as much as any other racial category, they’re all constructed. And so I think, at least in my experience, when I talk to students about that, in that way, that social construction is this very real phenomenon, not just of identities, but many things. Sovereignty is a social construction. Norms have evolved over time about what states can or cannot do. It becomes something more within their grasp to know that this is a product of social forces that have huge impacts that we take for granted, that we internalize… myself and my peers… that we can dismantle, we can challenge, we can push against in the name of justice, in the name of more equitable outcomes. And I think it’s a tool that can be harnessed in that way. And so that’s something that I think absolutely produces the backlash, to your point, because people understand it as a movement to make people feel bad about whiteness, but actually, we all have constructed identities. And so we all are grappling with the ways in which those constructions are harmful.

Cyndi: And I think that actually gives us part of the way through this as teachers, I would say, because I’ve always thought about these two, sort of broad categories for thinking about teaching about race and racism. But even more so in the face of this, like I’m thinking about them more. So, one is the focusing on that institutional layer of things. We have so much focus on: “Are you a good or a bad person? Are you racist or not?” Particularly for white students. And if we can get beyond that, and really think about, “Yes, there is this individual layer, like the attitudes you hold, the behaviors that you display, but there’s also this bigger institutional part, where, as Moira said, all of our identities are constructed, and all of us are part of these larger systems, that we didn’t really ask to be a part of.” And so in many ways, that’s very freeing and liberating for students to see that, “Oh, yeah, I’m part of this harmful system, but it’s harmful to me, too.” It’s not as harmful to white people as it is to people of color, but there’s harm for everyone. It’s not just about me, it’s about this larger system. And that helps to, I think, get students away from just sort of the feelings of it, feeling bad, feeling guilty. It’s like, “No, let’s look at this in its entirety.” So I think that’s a really important thing when we think about how to teach in the face of this larger layer of scrutiny, is that, actually, that focus on the institutional level is helpful. That’s ironic, because that’s the thing that they want to ban. But I would argue that that’s actually a useful thing if you don’t want people to feel as bad. There’s some level of feeling that’s going to be there. But getting away from that, I think, is really helpful. That, and just creating as much belonging and community in your classes… you need to, that’s the second thing. And one more, I’ll just add, I’m a white instructor, and I’m tenured and all of that… it’s much easier. I think it’s really incumbent upon all of us in higher ed to recognize that this is a lot harder for instructors of color. It always has been and this makes it even harder. And for people who are adjunct instructors, graduate students, people who are not tenured yet, this is a really important issue that I hope that colleagues and administrators are paying attention to, I really do.

Moira: I just want to add one thing about the focus on the individual. The legislation ,even an opinion from an Attorney General in Arkansas recently just lists all these things that she sees as potentially violating anti-discrimination laws. But she only uses the language of the individual, the individual will feel this, the individual will be made to… So I think that, if we just step back for a minute and think about how social studies courses are taught in the K through 12 level, and we talk about how history courses… just very broadly for a minute… history courses are taught at the college and university level, they are never about who in this room is responsible for what happened. “This historical event that we’re talking about today, are you responsible? Are your ancestors responsible?” History has always talked about painful events. History courses, or social studies courses, have always talked about painful events, painful events in our history or others’ histories. And it isn’t about your ancestors’ responsibility or individual’s responsibility in the room. We talk about different forms of oppression. Even if you just think about workers’ rights at the beginning of the 20th century, when we think about who is oppressing or who was not giving a fair treatment to people in coal mines or in factories, we don’t talk about people’s ancestors in the room when we’re talking about those oppressions. We’re talking about that as a historical event that we learn from and that we then think about systems going forward from those events, our workers rights movements, child labor laws, etc. And so I think that’s something that is worth reflecting on, that that is the norm. What Cindy is describing is the norm. And many teachers in Wisconsin also said, this is the norm in terms of how we teach history, but it’s not about individual fault or blame.

John: We’re lucky in New York state that we don’t face this issue. But what can we do as individual faculty members to help push back against this type of thing?

Cyndi: Maybe I’m naive, but I really think teaching well is really important. And a lot of what we all know, in terms of good pedagogy, being inclusive, creating as much community as possible, creating a strong sense of belonging, I think all of that is going to be useful to fight back against the sort of stereotyped ideas of what we do as college faculty, and that we’re not brainwashing, we’re not doing that, what we’re doing is trying to bring students along and help them learn, I think about that Boise State instructor who really did what you should do in a situation like that. And so doing as much of that as possible and being focused on each other and being protective, like what I said before about really thinking about who are the more marginalized instructors on my campus that are doing this work? And do people really understand how hard that is? In my department, we take it for granted that the folks who teach statistics and methods, that’s harder, and their evaluations might not look as good as the folks who are teaching other stuff, like what I teach, social psychology, or things like that, that are more “fun.” I think, as colleagues, being aware how difficult this is and how hard it is, I heard a colleague this morning, say… she teaches about racism as part of a communications course… and she said, “I’m going to be taping my lectures, and not just so students have more access, but also because I am concerned that what I say could be mischaracterized, and so I want to make sure that I have it on the record.” And that’s the thing, that if you don’t teach about this, you might not understand that people are really afraid and feeling paranoid, for good reason. Because there is, like I said, that heightened scrutiny. So I think understanding that heightened scrutiny, pushing back against as much as possible, pushing our legislators to truly understand what it is we actually do instead of what it is that they sort of think that we do, and also being involved in our local communities like the school boards and things like that, because this is, as Moira said earlier, this is strategy, and it’s happening everywhere. So my guess is even in New York State, there’s probably some school districts where this is coming up, I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be. it’s a nice big state, so I’m sure that that’s happening there. So that’s what comes to my mind.

John: Even though there hasn’t been any state legislative motions on this, we certainly have students who will share those views and who will push back. And while I don’t believe it’s happening in our institution, certainly in many institutions in New York, students have recorded portions of videos and posted them and so forth. I think that point you made about an instructor recording their classes to protect themselves is a suggestion I’ve often made to faculty, because people will sometimes say, well, what if I say something that I shouldn’t? I said, “Well, first, you probably shouldn’t be saying things that you shouldn’t.” But they’re concerned that students may take something out of context. And I said, “But if you have the video, you have the context, you’re much less likely to be protected if a student’s there with a smartphone, taking bits and pieces of what you’re saying and then perhaps editing parts of that out of context. It’s much better to have it within the setting.” I’ve actually encouraged people to record their classes to provide that sort of protection, if they’re not discussing really sensitive issues.

Rebecca: One thing that I wanted to ask a little bit about is you mentioned before about how many fields are just starting to be more inclusive in their classes. For example, in our design classes, we actually are providing more examples from different types of designers from around the world. Do you see some of this legislation and this pushback, starting to push back on some of that inclusivity or giving some instructors who are just starting to introduce some of these ideas… where maybe the topic isn’t about race and racism – that’s not the subject matter of the class – but you’re trying to be more inclusive, you’re moving in this direction. What should we be thinking about as instructors who are doing this work for the first time, or we’re just doing it more than we ever had before?

Cyndi: Yeah, I think it’s a real concern. I always make a distinction between inclusive teaching generally, which isn’t necessarily talking about racism, or systems of oppression. And there’s a lot of good work on that, I would just shout out Viji Sathi, and Kelly Hogan who I know you all have had on and they have a book coming out next year about inclusive pedagogy that I think is gonna be awesome. And so in working on those techniques, and I find a lot working with instructors that you hear a lot like, “I don’t want to talk about that, I don’t know how to talk about that, that’s going to be too controversial and I won’t be able to cover it.” So maybe don’t start there. Instead, just start with some of these inclusive teaching practices as much as possible. And then working into adding that content as much as possible. And just using as many outside resources as possible to make you feel comfortable. So, I always say, “Go look at your professional association, because they’ve thought about this, there’s going to be a diversity committee in the American Chemical Society, I think, is what it’s called, I’m probably getting that wrong. My chemistry friends will correct me, I’m sure. But there’s a diversity committee who has thought about this, like how do you increase representation. So use that and don’t try to recreate the wheel. And also make sure you just start again with those good inclusive teaching practices, which don’t necessarily require you to be talking about really controversial stuff, but allow you to still create as much equity and access. So I know the new center at Uni of River Falls, we’re going to be running some inclusive teaching workshops this year. And that’s part of why is because we want to make sure that we’re giving people the tools to be able to do that as much as possible.

Rebecca: But certainly a strategy we’re using here as well. We had Viji Saffy and Kelly Hogan here right at the start of our semester to kick off some inclusive pedagogy workshops.

Moira: Yeah, I would just add that this is in the frame of mind for inclusive teaching, but also this idea of pay attention to the different experiences in your classrooms, and also look at what kinds of voices are in your readings, who is not being heard, what perspective is not necessarily being heard here. That’s obviously an element of inclusive teaching. But I think it’s something that is easily overlooked. I’m going to speak for political science, because that’s mine, and they are terrible at this. And I’ve just been at institutions where you get a diversity assignment with your course, if you have a certain level of multiple voices and perspectives being taught on your particular international relations topic, for example. And that’s an odd system that many of us universities have, it’s this extra thing that some courses will do to include a variety of voices on the subject of foreign policy, for example, when the norm is to not do that. But if you do that, you will get a designation. And that’s my own experience in political science, I’ll only speak to that. But I think that that’s something to reflect on as a department, whatever the discipline you’re in, in terms of “What do these designations tell us if you have a system like that? What does it mean for what we’re teaching and what we’re bringing to our students in our department? And how could we do better?”

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

Cyndi: Well, the semester is next [LAUGHTER]… the semester starting next, I’ll just say two other quick things: we’re opening our official CTL space next week, which I’m very excited about, because we have not, at UW River Falls, had a center. Well, we started in March of 2020, which is not a time you should start a center, but we did. [LAUGHTER] So we were virtual for the whole first year. And also I’m working on a research project with a colleague in our sociology department, where we’re looking at how do students learn about structural racism most effectively? And how do they learn it across different sorts of classes? So, intro level sociology versus an upper-level course like mine. So that’s what’s next for me is looking at that data and following up on that to better understand that process for students.

Moira: I’ll also say, no matter what discipline you’re in, what’s happening, this pattern and this movement that we’ve been talking about is something that is worth talking about, with young people at the college level, no matter what discipline you’re in, to kind of pose it as “What do you know? What do you understand about this? What have you heard? What questions do you have?” kind of topic, it could be an icebreaker, it could be further into the term, but just in terms of even just hearing from them about what they think about their own learning at their campus, and how this may or may not affect what they do, and put it in their hands to hear a little bit about what they think you don’t hear a lot from the students in these debates. Obviously, young people, people of elementary school age are not necessarily going to testify at a hearing. But I think that’s an important absence here is that we don’t hear from young college students necessarily all the time about what their interests are, what they understand of their experience on campus.

Rebecca: Imagine that.. asking students.

Moira: Ask the students! [LAUGHTER] That’s a great point.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for your insights, and food for thought as we move into the fall semester.

Moira: Yeah. Thanks for having us.

John: Thank you for joining us.

Cyndi: Thanks so much for having us!

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

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

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195. Supporting Faculty Equity

Posted in bias, diversity, equity, evidence-based practices, gender, gender bias, higher education, learning, mentorship, pedagogy, race, teaching
July 7, 2021

Women faculty of color experience significant workload differences in course loads, advisement, and dealing with micro and macro aggressions. In this episode, Chavella Pittman joins us to discuss specific steps that we can take to reduce barriers and move towards equity. 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 and is widely sought after for workshops and consultation services related to diversity, equity, and inclusion issues in higher education.

Show Notes
Transcript

Shownotes

Effective and Efficient Faculty
Teaching in Color podcast
Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19251-19257.

Transcript

John: Women faculty of color experience significant workload differences in course loads, advisement, and dealing with micro- and macro-aggressions. In this episode, we discuss specific steps that we can take to reduce barriers and move towards equity.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Chavella Pittman. 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, and is widely sought after for workshops and consultation services related to diversity, equity and inclusion issues in higher education. Welcome, Chavella.

Chavella: Thank you. Thnk you.

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

Chavella: I’m not, I’m drinking water and looking forward to going to grab a craft beer in an hour or so. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Of course, we’re recording early in New York.

Chavella: Well, that’s why I had to add in a few hours. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I’m drinking English breakfast today.

John: I just finished a ginger peach black tea and now I’m drinking a blueberry green tea.

Chavella: Oh…

Rebecca: Cup number three, isn’t it John? …it’s pretty early.

John: It is, we had a meeting earlier where I went through two versions of ginger peach black tea.

Chavella: You’re making me want to go get my tea. I’m in the midst of camping. But I have packed with me some hibiscus leaves to make tea and some ginger tea that I picked up in Bali. So you are encouraging me to have tea after I get off.

Rebecca: I think that sounds like a great plan.

John: I drink ginger tea a lot. It’s really nice.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss the challenges faced by female faculty members from minoritized populations. College faculty members are disproportionately white and, in many disciplines, disproportionately male. Can you talk a little bit about why this results in workload differences.

Chavella: The main issue is that our institutions, regardless of the composition of the student body, a lot of our institutions have made commitments to producing students that can function in a diverse society, that can make a difference in the world. But, the faculty that are particularly suited to do that, in terms of maybe their statuses, or their research, or their experiences, or their pedagogy, happen to be faculty that are from diverse backgrounds. And so, those are the folks who are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, whether it be for service, in the classrooms, in their research, etc. So it’s pretty much the commitments that our institutions are making that’s requiring additional workload for those faculty. Now, obviously, other faculty can do that work. But that hasn’t been the case. These faculty are the ones that are doing it. And they’re often hired to do it, essentially. Our institutions are saying that they can prepare well-rounded students, but they don’t have well-rounded personnel and talent to do so. And the folks that they bring in are usually taking the load of that, because the same way that our students haven’t been prepared by diverse faculty, our faculty and staff haven’t been prepared by diverse folks. So, even with the greatest of intentions, the folks that we have set forward to prepare our students in this well-rounded way, they themselves are not prepared. And they themselves don’t have those skills and abilities. So the folks that we bring in who have those mindset, those perspectives, that expertise, are overloaded, because they’re having to do that work to prepare students, but also to compensate for the fact that their peers don’t have that capacity either.

John: Does this also translate into higher advisement loads for faculty in these groups?

Chavella: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So when you have diverse students, odds are they’re going to flock to the people who have interests similar to theirs, that look more like them. So even if students aren’t formally assigned to you, they make their way to you. But it’s not just the diverse students, some of the majority students to see, “Wow, this faculty member is doing research that’s related to this social justice thing that I’m interested in, but none of the other faculty are doing it.” So you end up advising more students formally and informally as a result because they are drawn to those folks that have a broader perspective or have experiences that are missing from the institution. So it absolutely translates into higher advisement. I just reconnected with a student , again, a white male student, so like on top of the students of color that I had, a white male student that I advise as an undergrad,just found me and I had a Zoom meeting with him last week. And I gave him the perspective and the scholarly information that he was not getting from his other faculty. And he became very interested in a lot of these issues. So it’s not just the diverse students, the majority students are flocking to these faculty as well.

John: Might the same thing be true of white faculty and male faculty approaching people who might be able to provide support when difficult or challenging issues come up? And certainly we’ve seen a lot of difficult and challenging issues over the last few years.

Chavella: Oh, my goodness, yes, absolutely. I try to tell people like I know that their request seems like it’s always just one small request. But it’s a drop in the bucket. If you can imagine how many emails I get weekly, asking me to do those things. I don’t want to implicate my own campus. But obviously, I get them on my own campus. But I also get them from organizations, I get them from people that might know me broadly. And it’s a lot. And if you think about the fact that the majority of our women of color faculty are not tenured and at less junior ranks, like the service load that that puts on people, it takes away from their ability to do the research. But people really do get offended. So when your faculty colleagues are like, “Oh, I’m just making this one small ask,” but they don’t understand that you’ve probably gotten five or six just that week. And then, because they don’t have to do that work all the time and face the resistance and the navigation that’s required by that, they don’t realize that not only is it a time toll, it’s an energy toll, and it’s risky. So yeah, that’s exactly what I was saying about our colleagues not having the capacity for this work, but they’re coming to us to do it. And it’s a lot, it’s a lot. And it doesn’t mean that folks don’t want to be helpful, but you can’t do things for other folks to the detriment of your own career or well being. And a lot of times it’s set up that way, that expectation is set up that that’s what needs to be occurring.

John: And especially for junior faculty, it’s hard to say no, sometimes, I would imagine,

Chavella: Absolutely. It’s really hard to say no, even when I was junior, I had senior mentors that helped me navigate how to say no, and how to often say no, that didn’t sound like a no, how to say something that will make the person take the request back, or take something off my plate, or whatever it was to acknowledge that that was labor on top of other labor and the costs or consequence it might have for me, so I’m very grateful for the senior folks who did that for me. And I try to do that now for women faculty of color, for sure.

Rebecca: That reminds me of one of your episodes of your podcast that focuses a lot on the classroom and actual teaching and the labor that’s involved with that. Can you elaborate a little bit on those ideas and how the workload associated with actually being in class and teaching is something that we tend to overlook?

Chavella: Absolutely, absolutely. And I’ll forewarn anyone who listens to those is that you’re going to hear me sound frustrated, because people really do overlook that labor. What I hear most often is people say, “Oh, no one gets tenure for teaching, or no one gets denied tenure, because of teaching.” But that’s not true. It’s not true at all. And what you hear me talk about in those podcast episodes, and in some of my research, or we read other people’s research on the classrooms, is that those faculty, their navigating minefields, essentially, they’re being harassed by students, by colleagues for the content, their careers are at threat because of evaluations. They’re trying to prepare for the inappropriate resistance that they’re going to get in the classroom. And because they’re spending so much time and energy doing that, they are not able to do the research that they need to get tenured, whether it’s just the time or the emotional labor required, it just doesn’t leave space for people to get the research done. So it drives me a bit bonkers, that people really overlook how this stuff plays out in the classroom, because they think it’s not important. But the reason they think it’s not important is because they don’t experience it, and they don’t see it. And they don’t understand how much of a drain it can be and really derail people’s careers. But yes, I talk a lot about that on the podcast.

John: And you also had written a paper about classroom disruptions primarily involving white male students engaged in disruptive behavior in classrooms. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Chavella: I think a lot of what I’m trying to do for the most part is give voice to the experiences of women faculty of color, because they are overlooked and invalidated. And it’s like missing or people try to find ways to explain it away. But honestly, there isn’t space for the voices of the experiences of women faculty of color. So that article that you’re talking about, in particular, was a research project that interviewed folk and it was about their teaching broadly. So it wasn’t even focused on the disruptions. But the pattern that became really clear was that all the women faculty of color, regardless of discipline, how much teaching experience they had, and their rank, because sometimes people say, “oh, once you’re senior, you won’t have to deal with it.” That’s not true. I’m a full professor. But guess what, I’m still black. [LAUGHTER] I’m also still a woman. And so what was found in that research was, again, across all of those differences, the women faculty of color had the same experiences with white male students in particular, over and over again. They would challenge their authority in a variety of ways. They would make them feel at threat, whether getting in their personal space, some sort of physical threat, or engage in behaviors that would make their careers seem like they were at threat. They would inappropriately challenge the legitimacy of their scholarship. Like they would say, “This is just your opinion.” It’s like, “No, this is expertise. This is scholarly expertise.” So those were just a couple of the themes that were in that data. But those things are common, and they happen on a regular basis. And that’s not acknowledged. And so that’s why I tried to do that research, and try to get it out there as much as possible, because people don’t realize that these are the dynamics that women faculty of color, a lot of them, not all of them, are dealing with in their classrooms.

Rebecca: There’s a lot of the “and” like, it’s the advisement… and the classroom… and course load [LAUGHTER]. They all really add up. Can you talk a little bit about the course load issues?

Chavella: Oh, my goodness, yes, you would think I just started researching this stuff. I’m still having visceral responses to it. When people tell you things anecdotally, sometimes people try to say like, “Oh, that’s not true.” When you look at the data, and see who’s getting the new course preps , who’s being assigned the service courses, which tend to have higher loads. Those tend to be our women faculty of color. Other folks are able to sort of choose, select, be assigned smaller courses, niche courses on their research. And that’s not happening. So for the most part, women faculty of color have higher loads. And again, to give you anecdotal, to see what that looks like, I was just talking with a black woman faculty member yesterday. And she told me that a piece of paper was passed along at a meeting, and her name was just next to three courses. And it happened to be three new course preps at the same time. And so people aren’t watching, essentially. They’re not keeping track of the assignments, they’re not ensuring that there’s parity. So she was completely frazzled, trying to get those new courses all prepped at the same time. And I think two of them were grad-level courses. So yeah, so that’s what it looks like is that when you look at the statistics nationwide of the loads for women faculty of color, they’re more likely to be assigned service courses, intro courses, and new preps. And that’s labor. It’s much easier to teach a course you’ve taught before. It’s much easier to teach a course that has 15 folk in it than one that has 50, 75, 150, essentially.

Rebecca: Beginning courses can take a lot of a toll on any faculty member when you have a lot of students who might not be interested in the subject matter. But you have that layer of extra convincing to do on top of all of this too… [LAUGHTER]

Chavella: Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.

John: And you also have discussed some of the issues in terms of the pedagogical approaches that are used. Could you talk a little bit about some of the differences that appear there in terms of how faculty of color might teach differently in some ways than what students are used to in other classes? …or faculty are used to?

Chavella: Yeah, you’re right. Students and faculty… being used to… So, again, when you look at the research on faculty, what marginalized statuses, women faculty of color, in particular, they tend to use more… and I haven’t landed on like a particular label. Sometimes I say, innovative practices, but they’re not usually innovative. They’re just non traditional, you know what I’m saying? They don’t lecture the whole time. So that group of faculty doesn’t really stand in front of the classroom and lecture. They tend to do things that are more interactive. They tend to do things that are more participatory, whether it’s emancipatory teaching or the pedagogy of the oppressed, or whatever. I don’t advocate for or against any particular type of pedagogy, but just trying to make it plain that according to the scholarship on teaching literature, these are all the pedagogies that are transformative. These are the ones that are learning centered, and they’re doing that. And a lot of times they’re doing it intuitively, sometimes they’ve studied about it. But we know that graduate programs don’t really prepare faculty to teach. [LAUGHTER] Some of them are doing intuitively… some of them found their educational experiences lacking until they’ve read a little bit about… they’re doing it differently. But they’re engaging in all of these effective pedagogical practices that really transform students in all these different ways. And that are shown to teach them well, but they get great resistance from both students and from colleagues because they’re not used to them. So they’re doing the right thing. It’s just different, and there’s a lot of resistance to the fact that they’re doing something that’s different, even though they can usually demonstrate that the students have learned.

Rebecca: We already know there’s a lot of bias in course evaluations that students perform on courses. But when we have these other active approaches, the questions that are often on those evaluations don’t even match either.

Chavella: Exactly.

Rebecca: So it’s almost like a double whammy there.

Chavella: It is, and I’m opening up a can of worms. But the can of worms that I’m trying to not open is essentially that there’s a lot of misalignment between what our campuses say is great teaching, what’s on our course evaluation forms, and what’s actually in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and what’s in a repertoire of what the people who are doing those evaluations actually know. For many of those pieces, there’s usually just a misalignment and disconnect between those pieces.

John: There was that study at Harvard done a couple years ago now, which found that students tend to find lecture much more effective, despite all the evidence that lecture is less effective than active learning techniques. So when you add in other forms of bias, that becomes fairly challenging. Anyone trying to use effective pedagogy has to make a case to students about its effectiveness. But when you add in some racial and gender bias, this problem may be a little bit worse, which may also tie into teaching evaluations, either by students or by observations from peers.

Chavella: My faculty development business is called effective and efficient faculty, because I am trying to find the easiest ways to get solutions into people’s classrooms and on the people’s campuses. I read all the literature so that people don’t have to do all that. I communicate it back to people in a way that they can learn it really quickly, but so that they can act on it. And I tell them the actionable pieces, because sometimes that becomes like a stall tactic. People are like, “Oh, I need to research and I need to read and we need to get this through committee… and our women faculty of color, don’t have time for that. So we need to get that stuff going as quickly as possible. And what you said, I mean, highlights what I was trying to say gingerly about the disconnect. All the research says that when you do something different in the classroom that students aren’t used to, your evals are going to go down. But people don’t take that into account when they’re reviewing you for tenure and promotion. Those people don’t know that research, they’re not reading it, they’re not applying it. It’s not connected. And to me, that’s what the problem is. So in terms of like, how do you address all of this, I think there are some institutional actions that people can take. And the first thing you can take is to bring the research to people. So if they’re not going to go to the research, bring the research to them. So people should be trained more on what effective pedagogy looks like. A lot of the people who are evaluating our teaching, are evaluating based on what they would do. And, eh…, that might not be right, for a range of reasons, [LAUGHTER] …might not be the right approach. It’s not grounded in research. But also we shouldn’t be evaluating people on whether or not they’re clones of us, what it is we would do, particularly if they’re people with different statuses. And I’m always trying to tell people, everybody based on their discipline, their pedagogy, their teaching style, what works for you might not work for me. And so there needs to be some flexibility. So, that’s the first thing, is that people need to be trained on what effective pedagogy is. That’s step one. The other things that can be done are, this is going back to the idea of classroom disruptions, every campus should have a classroom disruptive behavior policy, and if you don’t like the word disruptive, you don’t like the word policy, fine. It can be whatever language you like. I know that that sort of raises people’s hackles. But there’s a student code of conduct, you should be looking at it. And when it lists like, here are the things that are prohibited any place on campus, just make sure the word classroom is in there. Because sometimes people think, “Oh, that doesn’t apply to the classroom.” Hello, that’s where the work at a university occurs. Of course, it applies to the classroom. But let’s make it explicit by putting it in there. Some campuses have separate policies about classrooms, that won’t be a one-size-fits-all for faculty, because, again, people teach in different ways. What’s appropriate in one classroom might be not for another, you can yell out answers in my class, another faculty member might want you to raise your hand. But there’s a way in which you can write a policy that makes it plain that classroom management is going to occur in the classroom, and that there are going to be behaviors that will be disruptive to that classroom, and that those are not allowed, and that here are the consequences for that. And while that might make people uncomfortable, those policies already exist on our campuses, for dormitories, for public speaking events, for the dining halls, etc. And so it’s actually already normative to let students know that in order for us to sort of work and function as a community, here are the guidelines by which we should operate. And here’s what happens when you don’t abide by those guidelines. So the classrooms need to be looped into that. Student ratings, now that’s a can of worms. People will defend those things to the day that they die. I don’t get into that squirmish, that’s not the squirmish that I get into. The squirmish that I’m more interested in is I want people to read more about what the folks that make those things themselves say about their use in personnel reviews. They’re not saying they’re supposed to be used in personnel reviews. The history of those things are to give people feedback. So when you’re doing that new, innovative, fun thing, they’re meant to be a way for you to get feedback from that. They’re not meant to be evaluative and some of the items that people use, like the overall item that they actually say like “don’t use that item at al…” then people are like “that’s the best item to use.” So we need people to learn more about what student ratings say and don’t say about effective teaching and we need people to be trained, taught, learned, well versed, on what to do with the data from them. So if we’re going to use them in reviews, what is the best practice methodologically and statistically for how we use that data? So we need people to know that. And I think, just broadly, we need people to understand how to evaluate teaching for tenure and promotion. And they don’t. People might be methodologists in their discipline, and they know how to do that perfectly. None of that seems to translate to how we evaluate teaching on our campus. And again, none of these things are things that should take two years of committee work and five years of faculty governance meetings. I definitely teach people really direct simple things that they can do and shifts that they can make to get this into play. But I think those are the main magic wands, teach people about effective pedagogy, learn about student evaluations, learn how to use the data soundly, learn how to evaluate teaching, and make sure that you reward effective pedagogy. So don’t just learn about it. Don’t punish it, reward it… a novel idea. And to make sure that faculty have resources to get support off campus, because a lot of folks get relegated to the teaching center as though something’s wrong with them, like “Oh, go to the principal’s office, you got bad evals, go get fixed.” We want to make sure people have resources to go to other places where there maybe aren’t eyes. I know that teaching centers stay out of the evaluative process, but they’re overwhelmed. They’re overworked. People have put so much stuff on their plate and may not actually know some of this research, with intersections with women faculty of color, they may not have as much experience supporting women faculty of color. So you need to make sure that you give faculty resources to get the support they need off campus. So lots of magic wands.

Rebecca: So speaking of magic wands, I know you have some about workload related to advisement and course loads. Can you talk a little bit about those?

Chavella: Oh, yeah, absolutely, and these are simple. So this is actually a really good example of what I mean when I say, “Oh, even though I said a magic wand that sounds like it takes forever, that it’s really easy to resolve.” So for teaching loads, this is the magic: track them. Make an actual chart where you track people’s loads. And how many courses are service loads? What are the numbers of the loads? How many are their new preps, and you just want to keep track and make sure that there’s some equity, some equitable distribution across that, or maybe not even equitable, because if you know you’re going to give a woman a faculty of color a whole bunch of service stuff, then that means that they have a lighter load. But you need to track the load. And you need to be more mindful about the teaching assignments moving forward. So just track them. People don’t do that at all.

Rebecca: I think sometimes these things seem so obvious. But we need to say them out loud.

Chavella: Yes, absolutely. Yes, simple excel sheet, anyone can do that. They could do that today, if they wanted to.

John: And while this wouldn’t eliminate bias in evaluations, might it be worth having institutions revise their teaching evaluations, or any rubrics they use for peer evaluations, to focus a little bit more on evidence-based teaching methods in at least a general format, to nudge all faculty to move into the use of better teaching techniques, to reduce some of the disparities that are being observed there.

Chavella: Absolutely. And honestly, that’s what I teach people to do. And when you do that… obviously, bias is still going to exist for humans… but it gives you more evidence instead of just the bias, essentially. So one of the things I teach people to do is, this gets back to what you were saying, Rebecca, that someone might be using a different pedagogy, but that’s not represented on the evaluation form in any way, shape, or form. So one of the things I teach folks how to do is evaluate the faculty member on what they were trying to do, that’s usually not represented anywhere in the evaluative process. So what were they actually trying to do? How are they trying to get there? And what’s the evidence that that’s what they did? If you just start there from how you evaluate teaching and learning, because it’s an evidence-based approach, that goes a long way. So even if students are having resistance in some other way or form on evaluations, if you have some data that say I wanted to make sure that students knew how to apply a theory to something real world, and I say, “This is the strategy I use to teach students how to do it, I write about that and I explain it. And then I produce data that shows the students learned how to do that. That’s evidence versus the student rating of them having resistance to the strategy I used to teach them or their resistance to the topic. It’s a much better process.” So yes, an evidence-based process is way better than what most of our campuses are doing now, which is just looking at the evals and looking at the scores and saying, “This person is a great teacher, this person isn’t a great teacher.” But, that’s not what the evaluations are saying at all. They’re student reactions to various things about the faculty member: their course content, their personality, their pedagogy, their statuses. Students love lecture, but when you do objective measures of what they learned, they haven’t learned. Student reactions are important information, but they’re not always important information about whether or not effective teaching occurred.

Rebecca: Definitely. Learning’s hard.

Chavella: Yes.

Rebecca: I imagine that all of these things tend to show up in our student evaluations, because it’s just not always a comfortable experience. And so that tends to be reflected rather than whether or not they learned something.

Chavella: Exactly. And the research supports that.

John: In addition to in-class challenges, women faculty of color are likely to face other microaggressions from colleagues. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Chavella: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll cling pretty closely to the teaching ones, because I think they’re the ones that are overlooked. People talk about a lot of the other things that go on. Essentially, what happens is that the same way that students can be resistant, institutions want us to come in and provide these broad perspectives and these new ways of knowing and doing, but the colleagues are as resistant as the students are. So colleagues are like, “Well, why are you teaching that? You are teaching this, that means that you’re not teaching that, and that’s the canon…” like you have to teach so and so. Or if it’s like a survey course, and the person’s like, “Well, guess what… other people were around and involved in the development of this. And I’m making a point to include those voices that were omitted.” Colleagues resist that, it challenges their own preparation and expertise, and etc. So I hear that all the time, that people are like, they’re being told to not teach something, they’re being told to only lecture. So their advice for students resisting the teaching that they do that’s transformative, they say, “Well, just lecture, if you know, students don’t like that, just lecture.” So they’re effectively telling them to engage in the teaching practices that are popular, versus the ones that are effective. And so, on a regular basis, I’m hearing that a woman faculty of color is being told, “Don’t teach this particular topic, it’s not actually scholarship, don’t teach in this particular way, don’t make students call you by your title,” like, “oh, let them call you by your first name.” …just the level of, I don’t know, I wanted to say control. But that’s what it is. They’re trying to control their content, their pedagogy, their interactions with students, from their lens, not from the lens of that person with different statuses. And again, it’s not benign, this isn’t just interpersonal stuff, these are going to be the folks that are reviewing them. These are gonna be the folks that are voting on their tenure, these are going to be the folks that don’t understand that they haven’t been able to complete their book or their article because they’ve been told you have to get your course evaluations up. How the heck do you do that? Where’s the magic wand for that? That’s the magic wand I want to find. And the ones I know of are like the trickery ones, like: “give them pizza, give everyone A’s.” I’m not suggesting that at all. But these are the things that they’re being suggested to do to get their evals up. And faculty can be pretty aggressive and territorial about what’s taught in a class and how it’s taught. And that varies by disciplines, like I can think of a couple of areas of disciplines that people are very territorial, because, I think, for them, it waters it down, or it makes their stuff not seem as valid. So colleagues have been very aggressive about what women faculty of color teach and how they teach it… in their reviews, not just interpersonally, but in their reviews. And if people end up not tenured as a result, they get pushed out.

Rebecca: And then we wonder why there’s no faculty of color.

Chavella: Not only that, we wonder why there aren’t any. And then if you say, “I think teaching’s a problem, they’re like, “Oh, no, that’s not it.” It’s one of many problems, obviously, but it has to be on the list. And it usually isn’t on the list at all… just thinking of, again, of all these things that happen with colleagues around these topics. And in the water cooler talk like faculty member goes back and tells the majority member faculty member, “Well so and so’s teaching XYZ in her class ,”or “I don’t like so and so, they’re mean” or “this person doesn’t seem approachable.” The watercooler talk that gets rolled into some of the antagonistic colleagues that women faculty of color have, because students have come back and said, “Well, they’re unapproachable,” like they’re not unapproachable, you’re just not used to dealing with black women, or you’re not used to dealing with Asian- American women or your lack of experience might be causing some discomfort that may make you miss perceive that interaction. But that’s making its way back to colleagues and colleagues or passing judgment and that’s working its way into interactions versus them sort of pausing and saying “something could be going on.” But again, our colleagues aren’t used to having interactions with these statuses either, so they’re navigating at the same time the students are,

Rebecca: …which makes it very hard to mentor…

Chavella: Yes.

Rebecca: …because there’s many generations that need to undo learned behavior and learned biases and to start working on institutional and cultural change. But it takes a long time.

Chavella: Absolutely, absolutely. It doesn’t have to take a long time, you can make some small shifts in how you evaluate teaching and how you evaluate teaching what you do with student ratings, there are very small things that you can do that will make a huge difference, like you said, just looking at the dang gone teaching assignments, actually taking into account what the faculty member was trying to do when you evaluate them. People don’t do that. They’ll tell you, “Oh, that’s biased. It’s like teaching to the test.” Excuse me, how do you know if my teaching was effective if you’re not even looking at what I was trying to do?” You’re only looking at the student ratings. That doesn’t make any sense. But it’s what a lot of people do, and they stick to it, right? And that’s what we’ve always done. That’s how we evaluated so and so, so it’s not fair to change now. Well, those ways of being stuck are things that maintain inequality, essentially.

John: You’ve talked about some ways in which institutions can make changes, are there any other things that institutions can do or individual faculty and departments can do to help reduce some of these challenges?

Chavella: Well, I’ll definitely revert back to all the magic wands I said earlier, and I will get like a broken record, because I want people to start those places. And like Rebecca said, they seem so easy, but a lot of people don’t state them out loud. Not only do people not state them out loud, but when they hear that they sound easy, they don’t do them, either. They’re like, “Oh, that won’t make a difference.” I’m like, wait a minute. So I will say the same things over and over again and encourage people to do them. So, same things. So what I would love for people to do, administrators or institutions alike, pull open your student code of conduct and see if there’s anything in there explicitly about classroom behavior. I want people to do that, immediately. I would like people to look at the definition on their campus for what’s effective teaching, and then look at their student rating form and see: is there alignment? Now that doesn’t mean revise the heck out of the student rating forum to increase alignment, because the student rating forum isn’t the place for all of those evaluative things to occur, there has to be some peer evaluation involved in that, but at least looking will shake up the way people feel that the student rating form is like the beginning and the end of the evaluation for faculty. Look at your peer observation process, is that aligned with the institution’s definition of effective teaching? Do the ratings form or the observation form, take into account what the faculty member is trying to do? See, these are all very simple things that institutions can do, like how do we incorporate what the faculty member was trying to do that day into what we’re observing, into what we think the data is telling us? So these are very small shifts… and then start putting some money aside. Our women faculty of color have been beat up this past 14,15,16 months, like, the shouldering of the emotional labor of the pandemic, of folks’ heightened awareness for racial injustice. It’s been a lot of us, you know, doing a lot of that labor. And so people need to put their money where their mouths are, I’ve had a couple of kind of painful moments of women faculty of color saying that they’re suffering on their campus. They make their way to me, and an institution has said, “No, we have a teaching center.” And I’m like, “Uhhh, the teaching center isn’t equipped to do that for a range of reasons. They’re overloaded, all the teaching and learning people are like “pandemic, much?” like, “have you not noticed, our hands are full.” People really need to free up funds to help people get the support that they need for these things. So those are the things I would suggest people do as individuals. Make money available for women faculty of color, look at their classroom disruption policy, look at their student evaluations, their peer observation form, learn about the dang gone research on student rating, learn about how to evaluate teaching, and the real call to action: “Don’t take two years or one year of committee to do it, make a change that you’re going to enact in fall.” And if you need to figure out how to do that, and that seems impossible, then make your way to me, and I’ll help you figure it out.

Rebecca: I love that your approach is so actionable. I think a lot of times we spend our time in some conceptual space, spinning our wheels, not doing anything, but you’ve given us many very specific, very actionable items. So I hope our listeners will take your lead and just take those steps.

Chavella: I hope so, because I’m watching the women faculty of color that get weeded out through negative tenure promotion reviews, or renewal reviews if they’re like adjunct or something like that who leave the institution. So while people are spinning the wheel, people are suffering. So it seems like an intellectual exercise to some people. But it’s like “Hello, people’s livelihood and health are on the line.” So I don’t have the luxury of all that committee work. I’m trying to support folks now, because they needed to support yesterday, but I’m trying to help them now.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking what’s next? It seems really, really, really loaded.

Chavella: Well, I’m writing a book, actually, I’m writing a book. And again, that same frustration, anger, and hope that you hear in my podcast is pretty much what the book is about. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. And I think I thought that, at some point, institutions were going to catch up, particularly as more research has come out even when it’s not about race or gender at all, when research has come out that says these are the best pedagogies, here’s the best way to do this, that and the other I thought great people were going to start making hard left turns and do something different, or the more and more research that comes out on women faculty of color’s experiences around teaching, I thought, “Oh, great, people are going to make a turn.” They’re not. And so I’m writing a book. And the book is explicitly for women faculty of color to help them navigate the challenges that they’re most likely to face. And to do it using the scholarship of teaching and learning. And it’s very much so about helping them be their most authentic selves in the classroom and finding joy, but protecting themselves from the review process. So it’s all about retaining women faculty of color, but allowing them to also continue to teach authentically and joyfully and I’m frustrated that I even have to write the book. But I’m hopeful, because I know that I can get it into people’s hands and they can feel much more empowered until their institutions catch up, essentially. So that’s what’s next.

Rebecca: Unfortunate that it’s a needed resource.

Chavella: Yes.

Rebecca: But, glad that we have someone who can write it.

Chavella: Yes, thank you. I’m excited about it.

John: And much of what you’re advocating is just doing better at our jobs and teaching more effectively, which is something I hope we’ll all take seriously in moving forward. But progress has been slow, as you’ve noted.

Chavella: Yes, absolutely.

John: And we should note that if anyone would like to learn more about these topics you’re Teaching in Color podcast is available on all podcast platforms, and is one that people should listen to.

Chavella: Yes, it’s interesting, I hope that people will find it interesting. And I wanted to say that the podcast and the book that I’m writing, even though it’s directly for women faculty of color, I do want allies to listen, participate, and buy, because the more that they know, the more they can make some of these things normative and get some of these changes moving. So I’m very intentionally writing to women faculty of color, because they’re usually ignored and silenced. But there’s a lot there for allies to learn. So, whether they’re allies in a teaching and learning space, or ally administrators, or ally faculty, there’s a lot for them to learn from the podcast and from the book to help them support these folks to be successful.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us today and for all the work that you do.

Chavella: Thanks so much for having me and for encouraging me to go enjoy that tea that I have.

Rebecca: There’s always time for tea.

Chavella: Yes.

John: And we hope we’ll be talking to you again in the future. Thank you.

Chavella: Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much.

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

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

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142. Pedagogies of Care: Equity and Inclusion

Posted in access, classroom community, covid-19, diversity, equity, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, online learning, pedagogies of care, pedagogy, race, remote learning, social presence, teaching
July 1, 2020

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

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

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

Gannon, K. M. (2020). Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. West Virginia University Press.
Kernahan, C. (2019). Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom: Notes from a White Professor. West Virginia University Press.
Pedagogies of Care collection
West Virginia University Press Series on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.
GroupMe
Slack
VoiceThread
FlipGrid
Mike Wesch – YouTube Channel, ANTH 101, twitter
Viji Sathay and Kelly Hogan (2019). Want to Reach All of Your Students? Here’s How to Make Your Teaching More Inclusive: Advice Guide. The Chronicle of Higher Education. July 22.
Viji Sathay and Kelly Hogan (2020). 8 Ways to Be More Inclusive in Your Zoom Teaching. The Chronicle of Higher Education. April 8..
Fink, L. D. (2013). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. John Wiley & Sons.
Shea Swauger (2020). “Our Bodies Encoded: Algorithmic Test Proctoring in Higher Education.” Hybrid Pedagogy. April 2.

Transcript

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

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

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

Cyndi: Thanks.

Kevin: Thank you. Great to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

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

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

Rebecca: Well, that sounds good.

Cyndi: It’s very good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Realistically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cyndi: No, no, no.

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

Cyndi: Thanks!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CYNDI… Oh, yeah.

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

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

Kevin: Yeah, and nothing exploded… [LAUGHTER]

Cyndi: Right.

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

Cyndi: A little bit.

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

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

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

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

Kevin: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: Impeccable, really.

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

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

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

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

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

Cyndi: Thank you.

Kevin: and thanks for having us.

Rebecca: Thanks for having us.

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

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

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118. Biases in Student Evaluations of Teaching

Posted in bias, higher education, learning, online learning, pedagogy, race, scholarship of teaching and learning, teaching, teaching evaluations
January 29, 2020

A growing body of evidence suggests that student evaluations of teaching are subject to gender and racial bias. In this episode, Dr. Kristina Mitchell joins us to discuss her recent study that examines these issues. After six years as the Director of Online Education at Texas Tech University, Kristina now works for a science curriculum publishing company and teaches part time at San Jose State University.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

Chávez, K., & Mitchell, K. M. Exploring Bias in Student Evaluations: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity. PS: Political Science & Politics, 1-5.
Colleen Flaherty (2018). “Arbitrating the Use of Student Evaluations of Teaching.” Inside Higher Ed. August 31, 2018.
Disciplinary organization statements on student evaluations
- American Historical Association (2019). “American Historical Association signs onto ASA Statement” – September.
- American Sociology Association (2019). “Statement on Student Evaluation of Teaching.” September.
Peterson, D. A., Biederman, L. A., Andersen, D., Ditonto, T. M., & Roe, K. (2019). Mitigating gender bias in student evaluations of teaching. PloS one, 14(5). – A study that indicates that informing students of the bias in student evaluations mitigates the bias.

Transcript

John: A growing body of evidence suggests that student evaluations of teaching are subject to gender and racial bias. In this episode, we discuss a recent study that examines these issues.

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

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by

John: , an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Dr. Kristina Mitchell. After six years as the Dir ector of Online Education at Texas Tech University, Kristina now works for a science curriculum publishing company and teaches part time at San Jose State University. Welcome back, Kristina.

Kristina: Thank you.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

John: Diet Coke?

Kristina: Diet Dr. Pepper, actually. [LAUGHTER]

John: Oh… I’m sorry.

Rebecca: Switching it up. [LAUGHTER]

John: And mine is Prince of Wales tea.

Rebecca: I have Christmas tea today. I know, I switched it up.

John: Ok.

In one of your earlier visits to our podcast you discussed some of your earlier work on gender bias in student evaluations. We’ve invited you back today to discuss your newest study, with Kerry Chavez, entitled “Exploring Bias in Student Evaluations: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity.” Could you tell us a bit about the origin of this new study?

Kristina: Well, one of the things that seems to be inevitable when someone publishes a study on bias in student evaluation is that there’s always a reluctance to believe the results by some in the community. And most often there will be some question about what was being controlled for or how the selection was done or the sampling or the research design. So really, the first impetus was just to shore up the existing findings and continue to demonstrate the potential bias that might exist. But, in addition, there’s a real dearth of research on race in student evaluation. So, the research on gender bias and student evaluations is becoming more and more robust, but there’s not very much yet on race and ethnicity. And so we were presented with the opportunity to do… it almost presented itself as a natural experiment with 14 identical online sections of the course and with different professors in each one with different genders and races and ethnicities. So, we took it as an opportunity to shore up the gender literature and expand the race literature.

John: And so, the only difference in the course, was the welcome video, if I remember?

Kristina: That is the only difference in the course. Everything about the course: the lectures, the assignments, and even the emails that the students received when they were corresponding with the course and instructor. Those were all identical. We had a course coordinator, which was me, and I was sort of the behind-the-scenes person who was filtering through all the emails to make sure that the students were getting the same tone, the same style, everything the same about how they were interacting with their course.

John: And how long were these videos.

Kristina: The videos were up just about three minutes in length Everyone read an identical script that just told them the professor’s name and sort of had a generic message about how they were looking forward to a good semester. It was a summer course, it was just a five week course. And that was the extent of the students’ direct interaction with the professor in a way that wasn’t filtered through a course coordinator.

Rebecca: Although they all thought they were interacting with the instructor, right?

Kristina: Yes, they all were told that this instructor was theirs. And of course, the instructor was instrumental in the management of the course, we just made sure that the professor was not directly facing the students without it being filtered through a coordinator, just to make sure that each professor was responding with the same tone and the same information,

John: …which sounds like a lot of work for you.

Kristina: It was a lot of work for me. But fortunately, it really allowed us to control for literally everything. We controlled for absolutely everything that you could control for. When I was doing the research, when I was compiling all of the data, getting everything ready, I was just thinking to myself, “Surely there’s no chance that I’m going to find significance.” Like “All of this was for nothing, I’m going to either have to publish a null result that could potentially undermine other people’s research on gender and racial bias.” I just thought, “There’s absolutely no way we’ve controlled for far too much for there to ever be any bias.” So, it was just astonishing to find that even with all of that control, we still found a statistically significant difference. Even with a small sample.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how many students and sections were involved?

Kristina: So, there were 14 different sections, each with a different instructor and about 200 students per section. And the students enrolled in the sections, all at the same time, when registration opened. There wasn’t necessarily any reason to think that any particular section was characteristically different than any other section. They all kind of filled up about the same.

Rebecca: Did they know the instructor name and things ahead of time when they registered?

Kristina: They did. When they registered, they were able to see what the instructor’s name was. But considering that, once again, the eight sections at a time that would open up for registration, and these were intro classes that every student needs to take to graduate, we didn’t really think that there was any reason to believe that students would be drawn to any instructor, especially since it’s an online course.

John: When we talked about an earlier study, you mentioned that this was sort of like a jobs programs for political scientists in Texas.

Kristina: We always joke that Texas, having made it required for students to take two semesters of political science to graduate with a public university degree in Texas, we call that the Political Science Professor Full Employment Act, because it ensures that we will have many students needing to take our classes in Texas. Unfortunately, now that I’m in California, only one of those classes is required. So, it’s slightly less full employment, although, I’m still getting to teach both online and face to face here in California.

Rebecca: Was there both a qualitative and a quantitative component to the current study?

Kristina: Sp, this one, we focused primarily on the quantitative component. In our earlier study, we spent a lot of time doing text analysis of the comments that we received. In this study, we didn’t do anything quite as rigorous as a full content analysis, in particular, because the number of comments was so low. But we did review them, we looked through them, and we did code them sort of as a positive or a negative comment. And the reason that we did this is because there really shouldn’t have been any reason for any difference in comments whatsoever. Once again, other than the welcome video, students never were directly interacting with a professor in a different way. So, for example, if a student emailed a professor and the professor needed to respond, the professor would tell me as the course coordinator, the messaging that needed to go out… you know, the answer to the question that the student needed, but I would compose that in my own words. So that means that all of the responses would be filtered through the way that I would say it, as me, the course coordinator. So, there’s no difference in the kinds of interactions that students had with the content with the course or with the professor. And yet, we still found that women received negative comments, A]and men did not. One of the professors who was in the study, he was laughing and saying he was going to keep his incredibly positive review in his tenure file, because he was told he was the most intelligent, well spoken, cooperative professor that the students had ever had the chance to encounter. And once again, those were my words. I was the good one. So, the professor just was laughing and saying he was going to include that in his promotion file, even though he didn’t do anything. Whereas women, we saw comments like “She got super annoyed when people would email her” and “did not come off very approachable or helpful.” It was me, it was always me. They were both hearing my words, but because they were filtered through someone of two different genders, they perceive them differently. And that’s really consistent with the literature that shows that students expect women to behave in nurturing ways: to be caring, to be helpful and friendly, whereas they view men as competent experts in their field.

John: In terms of the magnitude of the difference, how large was the average effect of the perceived gender of the instructor?

Kristina: So, when we look at just the overall average evaluation score between men and women, we saw about a 0.2 difference. So, on a scale of five that may or may not be substantively important, and that’s a question that, of course, still remain, whether the 0.2 difference is important in a substantive way, but given that student evaluations are used in promotion,hiring, and pay grade decisions, any statistically significant difference is concerning, especially in a situation like this where we controlled for everything. When we looked at the white versus non-white difference, just looking at the overall average, we didn’t find a significant difference. Those significant differences didn’t start popping up for ethnicity, until we used an OLS regression and included final grades as a control there as well.

John: How did you measure the students’ perceptions of their instructors’ ethnicity and gender? While gender may often be correctly guessed by watching the instructor’s welcome video, ethnicity may not always be obvious. What did you do to assess this?

Kristina: Absolutely. So, it is a little bit more difficult to decide whether a student will know what ethnicity there professor is. So we did, ask both for gender and ethnicity because, of course, gender isn’t always obvious. But we decided to show pictures of the professors to a group of students who were Texas Tech students, but who were not enrolled in any of the courses. We just showed pictures of the instructors and asked the students to tell us what they perceived the person’s gender to be, and if they perceived the person to be white or non-white, and so we used a threshold of: if 60% of the students perceive the professor to be non-white, then we said, “Okay, then we’ll count this person as non-white, whether or not they identify as that or not.” For example, we had one professor in the study who is a Hispanic man, but has blond hair and blue eyes, and so none of the students accurately identified his ethnicity. So, we didn’t count him as non-white in the study because the students perceive him as being white.

John: Were the names informative in cases like that.

Kristina: In that case, the name perhaps could be informative, the very long and complicated Venezuelan name, but that might not initially look to students as a Hispanic name. So, students might see Garcia or Gomez and think Hispanic person, they might not see Sagarvazu and think Hispanic person. Other names that might give students more of a clue of non-white were our Asian facultes. Some of those names could potentially give the students a hint in advance of what ethnicity their instructor was going to be. But again, we don’t really think that students were choosing these online sections based on the professor’s name, especially because students were used to the idea of just taking introduction to political science online at Texas Tech University, and likely weren’t really thinking which Professor should I choose?

Rebecca: So given these results, which should we be doing?

Kristina: You know, I have been saying a long time that the use of student evaluations in hiring, tenure, promotion and pay decisions should just be outlawed. It’s absurd that we’re still using this. I understand that there is a need to measure teacher effectiveness, especially in terms of how students are learning. So it’s really important to try and find alternate measures of this because student evaluations of teaching are flawed for so many reasons; one being students aren’t really very good necessarily at evaluating their professor’s effectiveness as a teacher. Sometimes professors who are really challenging and perhaps really getting the most out of their students are also getting some low evaluations. But, most importantly, for employment law purposes, these are discriminatory. If women and faculty of color are being treated differently in these criteria or evaluating them differently, then we need to find a different way to evaluate them and

John: You’ve made them good cases here again, and I think this contributes to the evidence on that. What might you recommend that campuses do to provide evaluations of instruction?

Kristina: I think that’s a really great question. I think that we should start with exploring your evaluations of teaching to see if those suffer from the same biases because they may, and they might not be a better alternative. Other things that might be worth exploring are portfolio-based evaluation… so, allowing professors and teachers to tell their administration why they’re a good teacher, instead of looking for some objective measure of this, I think teachers and professors who are intentional with their practices would be able to put together a really successful portfolio that would show their administration that they are effective. There’s also some talk about using assessment-based measures, things like standardized testing or exit exams or student portfolios. Those might suffer from problems as well. And one thing that I found, especially now as people in the law profession have started reaching out to me for my insight on these kinds of cases, is that it’s really difficult to show in a court case that we should get rid of a discriminatory practice if there’s not an alternative to that practice. So, what attorneys have told me is that, “Yes, maybe they’re discriminatory, but if the university needs to measure teaching effectiveness, and we don’t have a good alternate way to do it, a court is likely to just let it stand.” So, I think it’s really important that our next move in the research agenda is to try and find out what practices might be able to measure effectiveness without suffering from the same bias.

Rebecca: I think that’s a really good point to help us understand the urgency of doing these things, and coming up with alternatives and really what the real impacts are, rather than a small difference in pay or something people might write off as being whatever. But, if things are going into lawsuits and things and then just letting it stand, even though you can demonstrate that it’s biased, then I think that makes it a little more urgent for people who might not be motivated otherwise.

John: And while a 0.2 difference may not seem like much, that’s often a good share of the range from the highest to lowest evaluations in departments. So, in terms of the rank ordering of people that can make a very significant difference in the perceived quality of their teaching,

Kristina: Especially when departments sometimes use a “Are you above the mean or are you below the mean…” 0.2 could very well kick you above or below the mean in terms of your scores, which, you know, also seems Like a really bizarre way to measure whether you’re effective… if you’re above average than you are, if you’re below average, then you’re not. I’m not really sure that that’s really an adequate way to measure anything. But, one thing that we have seen is a couple of universities move toward a different way of evaluating their teaching effectiveness. Ryerson University in Canada recently decided that student evaluations of teaching in their current form could no longer be used because of these discrimination issues. And a university in Oregon, I can’t remember if it was University of Oregon or Oregon State, but one of them has just moved to a much more open format of teaching evaluations, where students aren’t just saying 2 out of 5 or 4 out of 5. Instead, they’re asked to provide a paragraph with some insight on the effectiveness and if the questions are worded appropriately, then maybe we can see some real useful feedback, because I know I found a lot of useful feedback in my student comments. Really open-ended comments, I think, can also lead to inappropriate things like comments on appearance or comments on personality, but directed prompts… “What would you change about the workload?” …those kinds of questions… might produce some really valuable feedback.

John: If the questions are on things that are fairly objective that students are qualified to evaluate, that could be helpful.

Rebecca: Sometimes students are really insightful on those things if you’re specific and start with the evidence-based practice, and that’s not the thing that’s debatable, but how it’s implemented, or the scaffolding or the timing, those are all things that could be really helpful. And they often have good ideas about these things if you open up a dialogue with them.

Kristina: Exactly. And I think that using student evaluations in this way is helpful to those of us who teach and I think that comes back down to what is the purpose of student evaluations? Why are we doing them? If it’s to try and improve our teaching practices, then let’s use it for that purpose. Let’s ask them directed questions where they have a chance to tell us what they liked and didn’t like and then let us filter those responses to improve what we’re doing. Instead, we’ve almost turned them into this gatekeeping mechanism to keep people from getting promotions, to keep people from getting hired. And it’s especially punishing to our adjuncts. And as our adjunct professors make up a larger and larger share of the teaching force, the fact that they could be not hired again, or offered fewer classes or no classes at all just because of a 0.2 difference on their teaching evaluations. It’s really concerning.

Rebecca: It’s also in some ways, a way of advocating for making sure that we spend time in the classrooms with part-time faculty and know what is going on. Sometimes we reserve those classroom visits and informal feedback with our peers to only tenure-track faculty rather than expanding that across part time faculty as well. And I think we can all gain insight from seeing a wider range of teaching practices inside and outside our departments across full-time and part-time faculty,

Kristina: And even letting our part time faculty conduct some of these peer evaluations. Now that I’m teaching part time, I really see a difference in what it’s like to be part-time faculty. And it’s great in a lot of ways. It gives you a lot of flexibility. And it gives you a lot of time to have fun with your students. And it’s a challenge in a lot of other ways too. But I think that the lines of communication between faculty and students and between different types of faculty… we can really nail down that as the purpose of student evaluation. I think it would help a lot in making them more useful.

John: One of the approaches that some departments have started to use in terms of peer evaluations is not to leave them too open ended, but to have very structured ones. And some of them involve very structured types of observations where you just record what’s happening at fixed time intervals in terms of who is participating, what is the activity, and so forth. And that, at least in theory, should provide a more neutral measure of what’s actually taking place in the classroom, and could also provide more insight into whether evidence-based practices are being used, which could lead to more positive developments in terms of how people are teaching.

Kristina: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. I think sometimes it can be really difficult to give or receive a truly unbiased peer evaluation because it’s really easy to start saying, “Oh, the students looked like they were having fun.” What does that mean? That’s not really objective. But I think it’s also important to recognize that a 1 to 5 scale of students saying this teacher is effective is also not objective in any way. So, the idea of there being an objective measure of teaching effectiveness, I think we should move away from that idea.

Rebecca: That’s a lot of food for thought.

Kristina: A lot of tea for thought. [LAUGHTER]

John: That’s true.

But, this is coming from more and more directions now. Several disciplinary associations have issued statements indicating that student teaching evaluations not be used as primary instruments in promotion and tenure decisions. And I think we’re going to be seeing more of that, especially as the research base grows.

Kristina: And there is some good news for the listeners who might be looking for, you know, in the meantime, what can we do about this? How can I help? One recent article, it did a sort of small pseudo-experiment, quasi-experiment, where they gave their students some information about this research before they had the students fill out their student evaluation forms. So, they just briefly told the students that sometimes their student evaluations may be biased based on race, gender, or ethnicity. And they found that it was able to mitigate some of that bias. So, in the meantime, if we’re looking for ways that we can try to address this, it’s important most especially for our allies, who are white and who are men to be advocates in this… to take the time in their classes to say there’s evidence that these evaluations may be biased in favor of a certain kind of faculty member. If we can make sure that messaging is getting out there from the right people who can help, then we can start to mitigate some of that bias.

John: We’ll share a link to that study in our show notes.

Kristina: You know, I think that of course, being a white woman myself, I am more comfortable and qualified in my sort of native talk about gender bias. Hopefully we can get more faculty members of color to join us in this research agenda because it’s meaningful for them as well, because our research is starting to show that this bias exists for them as well. And there’s simply just not enough discussion of that in the conversation. One thing that we did not publish in our study because it was just sort of a side question, but when we were asking students what their perceived gender and race of the pictures was, we threw in a question just for fun to ask them “Do you think you would have difficulty understanding this professor’s English?” because one thing that we hear so many times from our colleagues with accents, is that this comes up regularly in their evaluations. And we threw in this question and what we found is that our Asian faculty members, the students all said… I mean, not 100%, but vast majority of the students said, “Yes, I think I’ll have trouble understanding the faculty members English.” And some of our Asian faculty members speak with heavily accented English and some don’t. And interestingly, our Hispanic colleague that I mentioned earlier with blond hair and blue eyes, has a very thick Venezuelan accent and no students were concerned about being able to understand his English. So, I think these elements need to be brought into the conversation as well. And I want to see, hopefully, people that are sort of more native to that discussion, and that it might be more meaningful for them, join in to start doing this research. If there are any co-authors out there, I’m happy to start a new study.

John: The effects you found for ethnicity were relatively weak compared to the effects for gender. But, with a larger sample size, you might be able to get more robust or stronger results on that.

Kristina: Absolutely. So in our difference of means test, ethnicity didn’t come out as significant. It did come out of significant in our regression, but the substantive effect was a little lower.

John: And you were unable to do interactions because of the size of the sample, right?

Kristina: We only had one non-white woman. And so I don’t think our statistical analysis program would have been very kind to us with only one observation in our interaction term.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up, Kristina by asking, as you know, what’s next?

Kristina: That’s a great question. My current position is in K-12 science curriculum. So I still teach part time, but I’m heavily involved in the curriculum world at the K-12 level now. And one thing that’s been really different is that K-12 teaching is definitely more dominated by women than higher education is and I would love to start looking at how we can get our K-12 students to be primed to think about women and men as equal in the sciences, because thinking about their high school teachers as their teachers, and then they go to college and they see men as professors could potentially continue to exacerbate those biases. So, I’d really love to start doing some research and exploring how we can change our children’s attitudes towards women in the sciences from the ground up.

Kristina: That sounds really interesting.

John: And it’s important work and that’s an area where we certainly could see a lot of improvements.

Rebecca: Well, thank you for joining us, as always an interesting conversation and many things for us to be thinking about and taking action on.

Kristina: Thank you. Always a pleasure to join.

[MUSIC]

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

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

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96. Inclusive Pedagogy

Posted in activist pedagogy, bias, classroom community, classroom management, discussions, diversity, equity, evidence-based practices, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, inclusive pedagogy, instructional communication, learning, pedagogy, professional development, race, social justice, stereotype threat, teaching
August 28, 2019

Many of us strive to be inclusive in our classrooms but may not have the training to be as effective as we want to be. In this episode, Dr. Amer F. Ahmed joins us to explore inclusive pedagogy and to encourage us to consider our roles as both instructors and learners in intercultural contexts.

Amer is the founder and CEO of AFA Diversity Consulting LLC. He previously served as Director of Intercultural Teaching and Faculty Development at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, as faculty at the Summer and Winter Institutes for Intercultural Communication, and as a member of Speak Out: the Institute for Democratic Education.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

Dr. Amer Ahmed
- Website
Freire, P. (1970). “The “banking” concept of education.” in Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury publishing USA.
National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE)

Transcript

Rebecca: Many of us strive to be inclusive in our classrooms but may not have the training to be as effective as we want to be. In this episode, we explore inclusive pedagogy by considering our roles as both instructors and learners in intercultural contexts.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

John: Today our guest is Dr. Amer F. Ahmed. He is the founder and CEO of AFA Diversity Consulting LLC. He previously served as Director of Intercultural Teaching and Faculty Development at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, as faculty at the Summer and Winter Institutes for Intercultural Communication, and as a member of Speak Out: the Institute for Democratic Education. Welcome.

Amer: Thank you.

Rebecca: Today our teas are:

John: Are you drinking any tea?

Amer: Not at the moment, but I like jasmine tea and green tea.

Rebecca: Yum!

John: I’m drinking pineapple ginger green tea.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds yummy.

John: It is.

Rebecca: I am drinking my good old English afternoon tea.

John: …for a change.

Rebecca: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve invited you here to talk about your work on creating inclusive learning environments. Could you tell us a little bit about what you’ve been doing and what you recommend?

Amer: Yeah, well, in recent months, I’ve been spending a lot of time with various campuses, working with faculty, working with teaching excellence of faculty development units, and diversity officers, on building capacity around inclusive teaching and inclusive pedagogy at various institutions around the country. It’s a big area of emphasis and focus these days for a number of institutions. It’s a tremendous challenge that many institutions are facing in terms of the classroom environment for students in higher education. My work has been on diversity, equity, and inclusion in a number of different arenas within higher education. But more recently, beyond just the broader strategic and institutional strategies and efforts that I work on, there’s been a lot of focus on the classroom and working with faculty on building capacity around that.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by inclusive pedagogy. I think that that’s a term that’s being used a lot, but not defined often.

Amer: Yeah, I think that one thing I learned by working in a faculty development unit was that many faculty have not spent a lot of time in their training and development around teaching in general. Quite honestly, as scholars, we’re trained to be researchers. And then as a result, as a default, we often teach the way that we were taught. And the reality is that there’s historical systems of inequity that are built around who’s privileged in terms of what cultural norm feeds our privilege in the way in which teaching and learning has been traditionally occurring. And Paulo Freire talked about banking and depositing… just the faculty member and the teacher as an expert, just dumping information into students as passive recipients and regurgitators of that information and knowledge. And I think that teaching, really… many people say it’s an art and the idea of pedagogy as a process, right? …that we engage with our students. An inclusive pedagogy, I think, really emphasizes who we are as teachers and learners, and that we all are teachers and learners, but that who we are and our identities and our backgrounds and experiences are all resources for learning. And then the question becomes, what is the process for us to harness the benefits of all those unique backgrounds and experiences and identities that we each bring as related to the content of the course, or of what we’re focusing on in the learning environment? And so I just think that a lot of times, we’re really focused on the content, and of course we should be focused on the content, but less focused on who is in the room, engaging the process of learning.

John: How can we tap into students’ identities? How can we find out information that’s relevant for the course?

Amer: Yeah, well, I think where I try to start is recognizing that we can’t know everything about everybody, right? And again, that’s where we have to think of ourselves as educators as learners as well. We don’t know it all (about anything, certainly), let alone the idea of who our students are. And as a result, can we develop some core competencies and skills around understanding who we are in relationship to who we encounter and have some intercultural skills that position us to be able to learn who our students are, and to draw from who the students are. So then it gets even back to the course design of: have we designed our course to leverage who are students are… to bring that forward. And then to be aware of our biases, when we’re aware of we are in relationship to others, we might realize that, oh, maybe I have some pre-existent stereotypes or perception of what it means to be X, Y, and Z. And instead, can I build a process where students are really articulating who they are, how they understand what we’re engaging in the content of the course in relationship to their backgrounds and experiences. And so I think that, for faculty, I think a lot of the fear is, “I’m going to mess up, I’m going to say the wrong thing.” So can we create a learning environment where it’s okay to make mistakes, but we’re going to do the best we can to understand as much as we can about one another and position ourselves to be able to draw from that to learn?

Rebecca: You said something about designing your course to leverage identity and leverage who’s in the room and who the learners are. Can you give an example from a specific course of what that kind of courses I might look like that does take advantage of that?

Amer: So I taught a global implications of hip hop, race, and spirituality course last fall at UMass Amherst. And one of the projects that I had the students work on was, after we learned some kind of key principles and issues as related to hip hop, and learned some examples of hip hop in different places in the world. I asked them to bring in an example and share an example in the course of hip hop somewhere in the world, that met some of these principles and concepts and ideas that we were talking about. And for me, it was just so fascinating to learn about all these examples. I mean, I’m familiar with a lot of examples of hip hop in different places in the world. And there was plenty that I was not familiar with… examples from Russia, examples from Iran. And it was really interesting to see how students were drawing from their backgrounds and experiences as oftentimes, not always, as a rationale for why they picked that example. So for one student, his roommate was Iranian and he learned a lot about Iran from his roommate. And that’s how he learned about hip hop in Iran and so he wanted to share that with the class. We have other examples of the Dominican-American students wanting to share examples from the Dominican Republic. So not every example was drawn directly from their own personal identity, some of it was just from their experience, but they felt connected to it in a different way, because they had the room and permission to connect who they were. And then we did other things in the course, to really try to harness that. But they understood that their background, experiences, their trajectories, were valued. And then part of how that was also articulated in the course was in their reading responses. I made it very clear to the students that I don’t want just a summary of what the reading was, I’ve read it, you know, I know what’s in it. What I’m curious about is, how do you understand yourself in relationship to what you’re reading? How does it connect to your background and experience? And I think that creates way different responses from students, and for me to affirm when they’re connecting the content to their experience, when I’m validating that that’s what I want… that’s what I like to see. Because whether we like it or not, they’re going to elevate us as faculty members. So they need to know that it’s okay, that that’s what we want. And the incentive is in that. I think for us as faculty, the course becomes less rote. How many times have you heard a faculty member saying, “I taught the same course, again, last semester, I’m teaching it again, this next semester.” You know, no two courses should ever be the same, because you never have the same people in your class. So the question is, what have you done in the class to be able to harness who’s in the room… to make it a new experience every time for you, as well as, of course, a new experience with the students.

Rebecca: It sounds to me like you do a lot to set up a very safe space for learning and discussion. Are there some things that you do at the beginning of the course or in your syllabus to actually set that stage to have those conversations and make students feel comfortable about sharing those experiences?

Amer: Yeah, and “safe space” has become a little bit of a loaded phrase these days. Can you truly make a learning environment truly safe given some of the trauma and backgrounds and experiences that people are bringing into the classroom? And so obviously, many people have been talking about brave spaces these days. Can we find ways to be courageous? But part of how we do that is to try to create mechanisms of safety, to whatever degree we can, for students to want to be courageous and brave and sharing who they are in the classroom. And so for me as a person who started my career in student affairs, just norms… working through creating a set of norms and agreements with your students at the beginning of a course. And this is something that’s widely done in co-curricular learning spaces, as you bring folks together for dialogue. But what I’ve learned is that a lot of faculty don’t do that. And many faculty feel like that’s a waste of time, I’m trying to get to the content. And it’s just one more thing to do. But I think it’s important for students to feel like they’re able to articulate what it is that they feel like they need to be able to be their full, whole authentic selves… participating and engaging the classroom. And sometimes that means students being able to articulate their comfort level with verbal communication, whatever it is, confidentiality, different kinds of expectations that they put out. And as a faculty member, you’re not telling them necessarily, they might say exactly what you were thinking, but the sense of ownership of what’s happening in the classroom… and that I had some kind of say over how we’re going to engage, so that I can feel comfortable bringing myself forward. And so what I do is I create a Google doc. So whatever they come up with, I put that into a Google doc and I make that available to everybody throughout the course, if anybody has concerns about the list that was created by them, they can always let me know and revisit it if they feel like there’s something that’s not working or that I’m not ensuring that those agreements are being held to. But again, it means that I’m not telling them how I expect them to engage. They’re articulating that… again, different ownership over what’s happening in the classroom. And so that means that we’re decentering ourselves in the process, and more of a facilitator role of the learning that’s happening, I think, for a lot of faculty, that seems ludicrous. Like, I’m the expert, I’m the one that went and did all this work to be able to share. But I think the question is, what is the learning that we wanted to see occur? Is it about us downloading this information, and students may or may not grasp all of it, or feel connected to it and be disinterested and disengage in it? Or is there a way for them to connect to it, where they actively engage the learning where they’re more centered, and the idea of student-centered learning where who they is centered more. The faculty member may be decentered more, but that opens up the space to be able to bring more of who everybody is into the learning process.

John: It sounds like one of the important components then is devising learning activities that bring this out, that gives students the opportunity to express themselves and their identity through the activities or through the assignments. Is that correct?

Amer: Yeah. And that’s the reason why faculty need each other as resources. And they need faculty development and teaching excellence offices and units as resources, because every faculty member cannot be expected to come up with all these different kinds of activities. Faculty need support, they need support to be able to do this. But there also needs to be incentive, there needs to be some kind of value in the institution for it to be worth their time. Because it’s like, why am I going to take all this time, energy and effort to be a better teacher, if my entire path to tenure and full professor doesn’t value that in any way, shape, or form, right? So that’s where my system lens comes in around that. So it’s a combination of faculty wanting to teach, and for our academic affairs areas to provide the resources and support a faculty to actually want to develop these skills,

Rebecca: You mentioned the role of teaching center. Can you talk a little bit more about the role that you see teaching centers in helping faculty move forward? What kinds of services or tutorials or what have you?

Amer: Yeah, this is a really evolving space in higher education from my purview. I mean, I’m fortunate that I get to see a lot of different institutional environments, situations in working across so many contexts. Again, we have so many different kinds of institutions, some institutions have really robust resources, and some have one person. And some of those one-person offices are understandable on a really small, private liberal arts institution, but maybe without a lot of resources. But I think what I see universally is that the resources that are made available to faculty are usually voluntary. And then the tendency is that we see junior faculty more likely to tap those resources and I think that it may create goodwill amongst faculty, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into reaching a broad swath of faculty. And so that’s really, I think the big question is, are we going to have resources that actually reach a number of faculty, and are there going to be some incentives and or expectation of faculty utilizing those resources. Increasingly I’m learning more about trying to make more resources available online, and not just links to articles, not just some basic resources, but literally full blown professional development… learning opportunities around effective teaching. But the next piece is the inclusion piece. So there’s a varying degree to which inclusion is focused on in these Teaching Excellence offices. And so what I found as a diversity, equity, and inclusion professional coming into that area, and finding myself to be one of the few people of color around in the field, I mean, obviously, around the country, you’ll find a decent amount. But generally, there’s not a lot, I didn’t come across a lot… So, I haven’t so far. There are some out there. Not to say that you have to be a person of color to advocate for inclusion. But it might be in a lot of context: “Oh, and by the way, we want to try our identities matter and we want to try to be inclusive in some kind of way,” as opposed to a real emphasis and real commitment to embedding it into every aspect of how we engage teaching excellence. And I think that that is something that is very much in process and a lot of places. I see there to be a lot of bifurcation between how we talk about teaching in general, like a lot of people don’t talk about student-centered teaching as a practice of inclusion. A lot of people don’t talk about backwards design of courses as a process towards making a more inclusive classroom, but it is… and so how do we connect in a more clear and articulate way how those mainline, mainstream, faculty development teaching excellence practices connect to broader efforts and work of inclusion? That bifurcation, I think, perpetuates faculties perception that the inclusion piece is not relevant, especially if they’re in a field that they think the content of their work is not relevant to those conversations.

Rebecca: I think it’s interesting that in a series of episodes that we’ve had on inclusion, this kind of theme bubbles up frequently… that evidence-based practices are a good way to start to be inclusive. And focusing on teaching and being student centered is a good way to be inclusive. So it’s interesting that that kind of bubbles up once again in this conversation. I think it’s also interesting to hear you talk about because I feel like I’ve experienced this a bit, that there’s teaching center stuff and that’s like one silo. And then diversity/inclusion is another silo. And accessibility and disability is another silo. But they’re all interconnected and we don’t often interact necessarily or work on things collaboratively in a way that could be useful. I think your background in student affairs also is another area where that’s its own silo. And those folks don’t necessarily interact with the academic folks as often as perhaps they could, because there’s a lot of different expertise in both of those silos, essentially, that benefit from one another.

Amer: Yeah, the student affairs piece was exactly where I was going to go. It was just shocking to me to move across from student affairs to academic affairs, and find out that norms and agreements were just not something that most faculty did and was not even like on the radar. I just was shocked by that when I first encountered it. I’ll never forget my first staff meeting… and coming from a student affairs background, you’re student centered, you’re thinking about students all the time. And I just remember, it was just in a staff meeting, saying, “You know, why don’t we get a student perspective on what they think faculty need?” And I was just looked at, like, I was an alien. I mean they were just like, “What are you talking about?” “Why would we ever ask a student?”… you know, and it’s like, because they’re the recipients of what faculty do… you know what I mean? So they have another perspective that could be valuable in getting us to think about what faculty need, not just hearing from faculty about what they need, but hearing from students too. So there’s all these different ways in which se silos end up creating challenges and I feel blessed and fortunate that I’ve worked across them. And it gives me a lens and perspective, but I increasingly find that that’s not typical as I work across the country.

Rebecca: Do you have some examples of really successful ways that folks have worked across areas or have been a little more integrated in the way that they think about inclusion and evidence based-practices and student and academic affairs that are worth maybe sharing as a model?

Amer: Well, I would say that anywhere that that’s happening, there’s a robust diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, structural work that’s working collaboratively across the institution. Because those areas, if they’re going to be effective, they have to be collaborative with Academic and Student Affairs. A senior Diversity Officer at a cabinet level, needs to have a good relationship with the Provost, and needs to have a good relationship with the VP of Student Affairs. So most of the examples that I know, there was a robust infrastructure around that, and where that more synergistic work is housed varies. Sometimes that can be within a Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, where they’re doing some academic support resources, they may be working with a teaching excellence office collaboratively. I can think of Wake Forest as a place that I knew some of those things were happening. But I still think that, in a lot of places, too much of this is dependent on personnel-dependent relationships, and not structurally positioned to really create the expectation that these areas and some dotted lines in the org chart to really say that we think that these things are directly relevant and important and need to be connected. But yeah, too often teaching excellence and faculty development units are not at all connected to the diversity apparatus. I think it’s starting to happen because the Chief Diversity Officers are increasingly focused on the academic affairs area, and the need to engage that tough slog and the fact that students are protesting all over the country about their experiences in the classroom, but a lot of it usually depends on your Provost. And do they see the connection? Are they committed? Do they want to have a strong relationship with their senior Diversity Officer at a Cabinet level? Some institutions, their senior diversity officer is a Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion under the Provost and those are the places that I think you tend to see more of a natural connection because they’re within the same division of the institution. But oftentimes, in my experience, that silo between Academic and Student Affairs is a chasm, which is true in most institutions. But I think in a lot of those institutions, and they might have a separate focus on diversity within Student Affairs that is really operating almost autonomously from what’s going on the classroom stuff.

John: Let’s bring this back a little bit more to inclusion in the classroom. You mentioned a couple things that faculty can do. One is having students create rules for engagement in discussion and creating more activities that naturally bring students more in. Are there any other suggestions you have on what faculty who would like to start making their classroom more inclusive could do to make some progress in this direction?

Amer: Yeah, there’s obviously work that you can do in the content in terms of who are the authors, what perspectives they’re bringing of the content. Because if every single person that you’re citing for the content of your workshop is a white man, then at this point, most fields have a broader selection of people to draw from, or at the very least, highlighting key contributors to a field who are from backgrounds that have been historically marginalized, and noting their contributions. And so that’s a long way of saying there’s a curricular way to get it as well, that’s important. I’ll never forget my first English class in college, and it was a requirement, I went to Miami University in Ohio, and, you know, white male teacher, but he decided that all our reading was going to be World Literature translated into English from around the world. And I was writing my assignments, I thought, “Okay, whatever, I’m just going to do my homework and respond to these readings.” And again, it’s also about does the faculty member value the perspective that you’re bringing, and he made a point to make clear to me, like “You’re articulating perspectives, that are really different from anything I’ve ever heard, and from anybody else in the class.” And for me… and I think this is particularly true for younger students… is that I had never heard anybody say that to me before. Like, I didn’t think there was a value of being South-Asian and Muslim. I just thought it would made me different and weird from the majority, I didn’t think that was an asset. I didn’t think that there was something valuable to that. I didn’t know that what I saw and my perspective, that that was a resource for what was happening in the classroom, but he did. He valued that and he wanted to leverage that and he wanted to help me understand why it was valuable, so that I would be more willing to share my perspective, if I wanted to, towards what was happening in the classroom. And that’s why you have to set up the agreement about how we’re going to engage, so that I’m going to want to share that. Because I think, oftentimes, faculty in the desire for that student who might be a different background from everybody else to share, they may end up tokenizing, unintentionally, that student. And so that’s why it’s better to build it into the process, where you’re drawing it out from students, and they’re really making the connection on their own.

John: Because if you’re going to ask students to be representative of some group, you run the risk of stereotype threat and so forth, and making them feel more marginalized. Right?

Amer: Right. That’s part of those core intercultural skills and competencies we have to learn is that our identities are complicated. For students to be able to self articulate how they understand what they’re engaged in, in the learning, as related to their experience, it’s all about creating an environment where they’re going to want to do that.

Rebecca: I think kind of highlighting the idea of a personal note on an assignment. that is thoughtful… could be brief, but demonstrates that you’ve read, you understand, and that you’re interested,… that can go a long way in setting up the environment when everybody’s around so that private encounter can be really important to more public interactions. And I think that we don’t always think as faculty like the power in doing something, frankly, that’s fairly simple like that.

Amer: Yeah. So I had their weekly readings… and again, I made it really clear that I want to know about what you think, how do you connect your background experience to what we just read? How does this resonate for you? Don’t regurgitate it, because I read it. And the thing is that now they’ve spent some time connecting it to their experience before they’ve gone into class. And so for some students, they’re not comfortable just improvising in the moment in class. And so what I’m saying is that, when we engage in the conversation in class, you can draw from what you wrote, you don’t have to come up with it on the spot. Some students, they’re more comfortable with that; other students they’re going to want to look at what they wrote to really be their prompt. And here’s the other thing, as a faculty member, I know that they wrote it. And so if they don’t feel comfortable speaking or engaging, I’m not going to penalize them for that, because I know that they read it and I know they connected to their experience already. And obviously, you’re going to try to do what you can small group work, dyad work, other kinds of ways of getting them to engage, because some students are just not going to be comfortable engaging in a large group setting.

Rebecca: You mentioned a few minutes ago about intercultural competencies that faculty need to obtain. Can you outline what some of those are, so that faculty that are newer to this area, or really interested in inclusion but really haven’t thought about the competencies that they need to obtain… the little checklist of things to think about?

Amer: Yeah, and I will say that it’s really important to note that it’s a lifelong process, right? For all of us. We’re all learning, we’re all encountering, we all have assumptions and I think that sometimes I think it’s important to highlight that we all are in that process, because sometimes it feels like we’re saying, some of you have to learn and the rest of us, we already got it. Maybe because I was South Asian and Muslim, I had to adapt and adjust to more types that I’m more aware of more types of things automatically through my experience. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a whole lot to learn still. Let me just give you a quick example. I was at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity a couple weeks ago, and I’m sitting in the car with three Pacific Islanders and we’re going back to our hotel from a social gathering and I find out that three of us are Muslim in the conversation. Now, I have to admit, I did not think that I was going to be in a car with two other Muslim people, given that three of them were Pacific Islanders; that was just my assumption that I made that clearly turned out to be incorrect. Now, I didn’t articulate that until later… I mean, I told them, because I was like, yeah, I have to be honest. But there was enough trust in those encounters and relationships. But my point is that we all are capable, we all have that learning to do, we all are going to make our assumptions and so forth. Some of the core competencies around intercultural development are self awareness… for me, the foundation is self awareness, we have to be able to spend some time reflecting on who we are, how do we understand ourselves and our experiences, our biases, our styles, our identities, including social identities in terms of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class. For folks from other countries, maybe race might not be something that they’re used to thinking about and that’s fine. So for somebody coming from India as a professor, okay, well, if it’s not race, then I know that there’s caste and there’s religion, and there’s other historically based systems of inequity. How does that shape your understanding? How are you positioned in relationship to those things? How does that shape your understanding of the world in their experience? I always find it to be interesting that we are asked to be self reflective as researchers, but not as teachers. I think that’s really an interesting thing. So absolute foundation… because to me, if you don’t have that foundational level of self awareness, you don’t have the reference point that you need to be able to empathize, which is the next key competency, and that when I say empathy, it’s validating someone else’s experience as true for them. We don’t have to agree and this is another area in which academics struggle, right? A lot of times we think that well, because I’m entitled to my point of view, no matter what, then I don’t have to be empathetic, because I don’t agree with you. And that’s not necessarily the case. So if a woman is saying to me, a woman identified individual, shares with me that she feels uncomfortable every time somebody is around, and I say that I’m sure they mean no harm, it doesn’t make me a bad person, it just means I’m not being empathetic. I’ve just dismissed how she feels and what her experience is and so it creates unnecessary barriers between us. If I did something like that, what’s the likelihood of that person’s gonna want to come to me the next time something’s going wrong for them? So when we work on it, it makes us more approachable. It makes us more trusted in these things. Another competency or skill is tolerance for ambiguity and I think this is a big one. Being okay with the fact that you don’t know all the details all the time and that’s okay. I did not know I was going to be sitting in a car with two other Muslims out of the three other Pacific Islanders in the car. But quite honestly, when they disclosed it, I wasn’t like, “Wow, I didn’t see that coming.” I didn’t do that because I’m like, okay, I didn’t know. I sat with the ambiguity, right? …rather than trying to make them feel strange for the fact that they’re Pacific Islander and Muslim. So for me, I get people asking, “What are you?”

And I’m a little bit racially ambiguous. And I’m like, “Well, I’m a person…” …you know.

“Well, where are you from?”

I’m like, “Well, I’m from Ohio, originally, and…”

”No, where are you originally from?”

And that can happen the first time you meet somebody. We don’t have a relationship… we haven’t established one… and I don’t necessarily feel like sharing my entire ancestral lineage with someone the first time I meet them. And some people are okay with that. Some people like being asked that. To me, I get asked that so often I’m like, “You know, I’m good.” I feel essentialized and tokenized in those situations and that creates a barrier… Again, unnecessary. So can we sit with that ambiguity? And that’s tied to things like patience, but it is good to be curious, a lot of people are like, “Well, isn’t it good to be curious and want to know”and I’m like “Yeah, that’s great.” Now with that curiosity, be patient and sit with the ambiguity as long as you can. But it’s important to be curious, because if you’re not curious, you don’t even want to know. So it’s important to be curious. These are some of the core competencies and skills that it’s helpful for everybody to work on, to position ourselves to be more likely to be successful. And then it’s like, knowing that we’re all going to make mistakes, and can we create an environment with enough trust to where we understand that mistakes will be made? And I think that’s important as well.

Rebecca: And the key there, right, is that there’s mistakes with both faculty and with students, right? Anybody can have mistakes.

Amer: Anybody is capable, so then it becomes how we navigate that and I think that’s part of those difficult conversations… concerns that a lot of faculty have these days.

John: How would you suggest faculty address that if they or a student makes an insensitive comment that offends other people, what would be a good approach?

Amer: Well, there’s a whole set of things tied to our whole conversation about how you create the environment. So there’s a prep in terms of how you create the environment for navigating moments like that. But then there’s like, what are you going to actually do in the moment? …and one of the things that some of my colleagues and I have talked about is that you’re allowed to pause… you know what I mean? …like to take a moment and really try to reflect. I think, also, it’s really helpful to ask clarifying questions. Can you help me understand what you mean by what you’re saying? Or where are you coming from? Can you help clarify? Because I think sometimes when we react, it’s not always necessarily operating from the clearest place and so asking the person who’s sharing to be a little bit clear about where they’re coming from, and the basis of their rationale for why they’re saying what they’re saying. That preps work and working on your intercultural skills, those are the things that are going to help you to be more likely to recognize that something is occurring. I think one of the number one things that students get upset by is it something that they view as problematic has come up and been said or asked and the faculty member didn’t notice it, didn’t recognize it, didn’t note it, didn’t say anything about it, didn’t address it, just kept on going. So there’s two things here. One is that if that happens, you’re allowed to go back the next class, if you reflect or a student contacts you and say, “Hey, you know, there was something that happened in the last class that I just want to address.” I know, folks are like, “I gotta get to my content,…” but you have to remember that you may have just lost a bunch of students in your class… they’re not going to trust you and they’re not going to go with you the rest of the course, if you just keep going. So you still have an opportunity to come back at the beginning of the next class, and to say, “Hey, I was reflecting” and to address it then, so that the rest of the students know that you are aware, and that it does matter to you, and that you’re going to try to do whatever you can to address it. And you may have to say we’re not going to resolve this here, but I do want to acknowledge that there were some concerns or x, y, and z. I think it’s important that we know that there were different sentiments or feelings or whatever. So those are some of the initial things that I really try to get folks to think about.

Rebecca: One of the things that I heard you say without directly saying it, I think, is that sometimes our gut reaction might be judgmental.

Amer: Yeah.

Rebecca: And it comes out that way, rather than from a place of wanting everybody to learn.

Amer: Yeah, I think this is an important thing for a number of people, of a number of trajectories and backgrounds. And what I’ve been talking about a lot is the difference between reacting and responding. Responding requires critical reflection, reacting is like that you have a stimulus, and then you do exactly whatever your response is to that stimulus. This is important for everybody. But I think if you’re from a marginalized identity, I think this is a big one, because students can say things that are triggering for you that you may have been traumatized or marginalized as a faculty member, I think that’s part of the reason why it’s important to do a lot of self work and reflection. And I think part of what we need to talk about is faculty getting the time to be able to be reflective, and that that being a value, that that is actually valuable for faculty to have the time to be reflective about who they are and what they bring to the classroom. Because the thing is that when we react, that’s when we’re more likely to draw from our implicit biases, that’s when we’re more likely to commit a micro aggression against a student, that’s when we’re more likely to do those things. And so we need the opportunity to reflect, to take the time to really understand who we are in relationship to other colleagues, with our students, so that we’re more likely to bring our best self into the classroom. That also involves faculty getting the opportunity to engage one another around these conversations. The number one thing I’ve noticed around the faculty development spaces around teaching is that they love the opportunity to talk to one another about what they’re experiencing, and what’s working for them and where their challenges are, and so forth. And they need the opportunity and space to do that. And I know that’s hard. Sometimes it involves faculty unions, and contracts and stuff, but I think we just got to make it part of what we do and ee got to create space for faculty to engage each other on these things.

Rebecca: Are there things that we think we should also address that we haven’t addressed yet?

Amer: I do want to note that I know that we’re in a very intense political and social climate in multiple trajectories and I don’t want to sound like I’m creating any false equivalencies. There’s hate, and there’s people being targeted for their identities and that’s a factor for what’s going on and that’s horrible. But there’s also, what I refer to as the culture of campus social justice elitism, in which I think we’ve created a new hierarchy around the language and discourse of social justice. Actually, there’s a reason why I talk the way I do around this stuff, and not constantly using an elitist form of discourse of social justice. And part of that, for me, is rooted in the fact that I was an activist before I came into the work… and more connected to grassroots activism. What I would say to my students sometimes is, let’s take all your big words, because they’re replicating what the academy is doing. It’s teaching them these words and languages and it’s like a way of showing that they know, which is where all the incentives are in the academy. None of the incentives are around not knowing, they’re all around knowing. So even around social justice stuff, I’m going to be performative around how much I know. One of the things I used to say to my students when I was at the University of Michigan, and I was like “let’s go to Detroit, where some people are organizing in the community. Let’s take all those words. And let’s just see how that’s going to go. These are the communities that you say that you advocate for and… you know what I’m saying?” …and I think they know. I think part of what we have to recognize is that it’s not just what students are doing, they’re being positioned to do certain things, whether it’s the impact of technology, whether it’s the way the Academy is structured, whether it’s where they are developmentally if they’re young adults, we have to continue to account for that. And so part of why we have to do our work is so that we don’t take it so personal. And yes, it’s hard. It is frustrating when students come at us in some of the ways that have been happening these days. And quite honestly, I think part of the reason why faculty are engaging these resources these days more is because they’re scared to death that they’re going to get blasted on social media, because they’ve heard it happen to a colleague or someone they went to graduate school, and they really don’t want that to happen to them. I wish that wasn’t the motivating factor for some faculty, but increasingly it is. So I’m not going to say that I have a magic wand. And I get, on a general level, the challenges of our time and the moment. But I don’t think that that’s a reason to not engage these processes and not to be committed to it. And we have to do that with authenticity, and recognizing that we also don’t have all the answers. So all we can do is just do the best we can. And if we’re committed to it, we can go down a path towards creating a more inclusive learning environment for all.

John: And whatever brings faculty to this if they create a more inclusive learning environment, it’s all to the good.

Amer: Yes, exactly. Absolutely. One of the reasons why I made sure that I prefaced what I said with “I don’t want to minimize the fact that there are people being attacked for their identities these days.” First of all, I’m part of one of those groups that gets attacked incessantly and demonized so I fully understand that. But secondarily, I think part of it is that we’re in this binary dualism of like, if you say one thing, that means you’re the opposite. Or if you say one thing that that means that you’re planting your flag in the ground. And this dualism means you’re either on one side or the other. And I think the academy shouldn’t be about dualism, I think it should be about exploration of knowledge, which is much more nuanced than dualistic camps on things. So I really do think that we need to actually start valuing and emphasizing not knowing, and I think that would actually make our teaching better.

Rebecca: I love that idea. Not knowing and being curious. That is really what the Academy is actually about. That’s what learning is about. It’s actually the not knowing.

Amer: That’s what it’s supposed to be about.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Amer: But I do think that the systems of the academy position us to replicate the idea that the only thing that matters is knowing; that critical thinking, even just epistemologically, we say that critical thinking is… in many cultural contexts, intellectual critical thinking knowledge is only one paradigm of knowledge, and that there’s other forms of knowledge that we can draw from. And that’s part of what we have to be open about. And that’s part of what our students are bringing from their various trajectories that they’re coming from… many different types of ways of knowing and being in the world.

John: We always end with the question, what are you doing next?

Amer: Well, the most immediate next thing is that I’m, in terms of professionally, is that I’m giving a keynote at a Jesuit institution diversity conference, I’m really excited about that. I’m very interested in the idea of connecting more intentionally religion and spirituality to broader intersections of diversity, equity, and inclusion, I think that oftentimes gets separated out. And I think for a person like me, who is part of a community that’s targeted, partially because of racism, but partially also because of faith, that I think is something that we need to spend more time being willing to engage. And I think too often in the academy we’re dismissive of religion and spirituality as something that is intellectually weak.. You know, weak minded or something. So it’s something that I’m particularly interested in, and I’m actually going to be co editing a volume focusing on that, which I’m really excited about as well.

Rebecca: That sounds really interesting and definitely fills a space that’s very empty.

Amer: Yeah. And particularly on a practical level, like how do we actually support and work with students and various constituencies on our campus around that?

John: Well, thank you for joining us. This has been a fascinating conversation, and I hope it helps lots of people in moving towards a more inclusive environment.

Amer: Thanks so much.

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you so much for your insights, This was really, a really productive conversation.

[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.

92. Diverse Classrooms

Posted in bias, classroom community, discussions, diversity, equity, evidence-based practices, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, pedagogy, professional development, race, social justice, stereotype threat, teaching, teaching centers
July 31, 2019

The student population in most colleges and universities is becoming increasingly diverse during a time when much public discourse is characterized by growing political polarization and divisiveness. In this episode, Melina Ivanchikova and Mathew Lawrence Ouellett join us to discuss a MOOC that is being developed at Cornell University to help faculty nurture a productive learning environment for all of our students.

Mathew is the founding Executive Director at Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation. Melina is the Associate Director of Inclusive Teaching in the center.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

Teaching and Learning in the Diverse Classroom Online Course
President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)- 2012 Report
The Tea for Teaching Podcast- Ep. 49 with Angela Bauer

Transcript

John: The student population in most colleges and universities is becoming increasingly diverse during a time when much public discourse is characterized by growing political polarization and divisiveness. In this episode, we discuss a MOOC that is being developed to help faculty nurture a productive learning environment for all of our students.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are Melina Ivanchikova and Mathew Lawrence Ouellett. Mathew is the founding Executive Director at Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation. Melina Ivanchikova is the Associate Director of Inclusive Teaching in the center. Welcome.

John: Welcome.

Melina: Thank you. It’s nice to be here.

Mathew: Thanks. Delighted to be here with both of you.

John: Our teas today are…

Mathew: I’m drinking Sea Buckthorn and Siberian Blueberry from Mongolia.

Rebecca: Wow, yummy.

John: That’s impressive.

Melina: And I decided to go the rebel route and I am drinking coffee.

Rebecca: That is a true rebel.

Melina: I apologize to all of your listeners who might be dismayed to hear that there’s a coffee drinker here in the afternoon.

Rebecca: Again, yeah… [LAUGHTER]

John: About half or more of our guests are drinking coffee or something else.

Rebecca: I have my nice boring English afternoon tea again.

John: And I have ginger peach black tea.

Mathew: Black tea’ s always appropriate. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Can’t go wrong. So we invited you here today to discuss the teaching and learning in the diverse classroom course that you’ve been developing at Cornell. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin of the project?

Mathew: Sure, when Melina and I were introduced I guess, when we became colleagues back when I first got here, we were looking for a project that could play up to the strengths of the merger of our units. So part of being the founding director is two units came together. And I’ll spare you all of that, other than to say it was a great opportunity. So one thing was finding a project that had some heft for our newly formed unit. But second, and perhaps the primary part of this origin story was the inaugural address by President Martha Pollack, who was newly installed as President. In fact, the first thing I did when I got to Cornell, the first public thing I attended, was her inauguration. And in the context of her remarks that afternoon, she talked at length about the importance of creating an inclusive learning environment for all students. And I thought, well, I know just how to do that. And now we’ve got this fantastic staff. We have the skills and the expert knowledge that we can actually do something that would benefit our campus, but also might be something with a usefulness for people out on other campuses that might not have the same opportunities or resources.

Melina: And I’ll add to that to say a little bit about the context in which the course has emerged, which is that Cornell, probably like many other campuses across the US, was rocked by several events that happened both on campus and off campus. Moments of slurs being used in public… events that were very demoralizing and just strained the learning climate for students here. So, within that context, we’re also thinking about how to support our faculty and teachers in the classroom to be able to reach out to students and warm up the learning environment.

Mathew: Yeah. I would want to add, though, that this course is not in response to those. This isn’t a reaction to these sort of community and campus incidences. Mostly it’s to prove the point that at Cornell we’re as vulnerable to them as every institution in America. There’s really very little inoculation against it. And so what we thought is that if we could do something that had utility for our faculty that appeal to them and help them, that it might also appeal and be of use to faculty at other schools and colleges as well.

John: I saw a little bit of that at a presentation at a conference a few weeks ago, and I was really impressed. Could you tell us a little bit about how the course is structured?

Melina: Sure, we’re using a framework that has five different dimensions to it. And it’s the way that the course is organized. So we begin by asking instructors to reflect on themselves: “Who are you as an instructor?” And then who are students? How do you get to know who your students are? How do you help them get to know each other? What do you know about the students at your institution in general? And then how do you teach? What are the teaching strategies that you use? What is your pedagogy and part of that is talking about what you can do to prepare in advance for a hot moment that might arise, as well as what to do when there is a hot moment that arises. And then what is your curriculum? Both from the perspective of the content of what you’re teaching, but also how your discipline looks at the world, how has your discipline wrestled with diversity and inclusion at the broader disciplinary level. And then ending with really thinking about the learning environment and thinking about action planning, what are some changes that you can make to your course? And then what we’ve been seeing in those is that people think beyond the course level from changes small to broader and more systemic.

Mathew: So just to tag on to that, people have been thinking about their ongoing learning… things that they can do to continue to advance their own development, things that they can do at the course level, interventions that they might make at the departmental level. And that’s pretty exciting when they want to go out and talk to their colleagues. And then, third is thinking at the college and or the institutional level changes that they’d like to see happen in terms of the larger climate. They have actually been really ambitious and pretty exciting.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the timeline of the course?

Mathew: Yeah we, like everybody in higher-ed, are always looking for that sweet spot. And anyone who works with faculty or as a faculty member knows that there are about five or six weeks in the dead center of the semester where we might have half a chance of getting your attention. That’s it. That’s the sweet spot. And so the whole intentionality around the course being four weeks long was so that we could load it right in the middle of this semester, not right at the opening of the start of the launch of the semester, but also ending before the Thanksgiving holidays. Knowing that once people return to campus, faculty and students alike are all on the downhill slope and at that point it’s all about wrapping the semester up.

John: How many times have you offered it now at Cornell?

Melina: We’ve offered it twice, we just wrapped the second run of the course. And and I’ll just add to what Mat said earlier that we estimate that it takes people about 10 or 15 hours to get through the course. It’s asynchronous, and we release modules each week.

Mathew: And I should add too, just for transparency, we let people take as long as they want. So even though the course officially runs for four weeks, we can get tons of requests for extensions, and we’re happy to grant them. I mean, it’s just like teaching a group of undergraduates… we understand, mostly we want people to feel like they can complete the experience.

Melina: Yes, and we should say that the version that we’ve run on the Cornell campus is going to be transformed into a MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course, that’s set to run in November this year. So that will be open to anybody.

John: And you’re running that on edX.

Melina: That’s correct.

John: And there is a sign up form on your website and we’ll include a link to that in the show notes so people can be notified to join that when it’s available. I’ve already added my name to the list. Rebecca and I have talked about and we’d like to run a cohort here, through that as well.

Rebecca: Yeah, that’d be great. Can you talk a little bit about how faculty have responded in the last couple of cohorts that you’ve had?

Mathew: Sure. Well, I’m really gratified to say overall, we’ve had a very positive response and the only negative has come when people have run out of time when they said “You know, I’m just crazy busy and I wish I had more time to do a deeper dive.” So in terms of regrets, that’s one end of the continuum. But we also are, I think, assessing the utility of the course… of the usefulness of it… by people’s expressions of learning outcomes. So we do a pre-post with… this is just only for the on-campus cohort. But we’ve had fantastic responses along a whole range of outcomes, some we hadn’t expected, and others we had hoped for. Do you want to give some examples?

Melina: Sure. One thing I wanted to say that was interesting is that we also offer face-to-face opportunities. And we were wondering, were we going to get the same folks who come to those coming into the course? But instead, we’ve seen quite a range. One of the things that surprised me is that we asked people how many years they had been teaching. And so that range goes from zero years to 20 to 25, even 30 years of teaching and all along the continuum and quite a large percentage of people who have been teaching for more than 10 years. So that inspired me just thinking about how many people are committed to lifelong learning and willing to think about what’s happened in my classroom, my demographics have shifted, what is all this buzz around diversity? We’re getting folks who are really curious and willing to think and learn together. And so the response among faculty has been very inspiring because the core of the courses are these fantastic videos where instead of giving lectures through the videos, we’ve asked people to tell their stories about their lived experiences and their teaching practices. And we have faculty, staff, and student voices in the course…

Mathew: graduate students

Melina: …graduate students…

Mathew: and undergraduates

Melina: …and these testimonials, people they’re just… you have a visceral experience as you’re watching and listening to those. And so over and over, we heard the comment of faculty saying things like, “Well, I knew my students were people. But now after I’ve seen all these different points-of-view, I got to hear really personal things about them that I normally wouldn’t ask my own students. I have a much deeper sense of the challenges that they’re facing.”

Mathew: And the reverse is true, too. We’ve had graduate students say to us, “I had no idea my faculty member had anywhere near that sort of experience.” So, referring to a video where two of our colleagues talk about being first-generation college students, and having come from very poor backgrounds, or very poor working class backgrounds, and it was a revelation to our undergraduates that there might actually be faculty here who’d come from a similar kind of lived experience. The other thing that’s just been, I think, really a good metric for success is that people have often talked about wanting to go back and talk to their colleagues. And I think that, as Melina is talking about the nature of the videos, is that there’s so few opportunities to talk about this aspect of one’s teaching. You might, for example, sit on a curriculum committee or you might get into conversations about grading or end-of-semester evaluations, but rarely do you get invited into a more authentic, deeper, personal link between who you are as a human being… fully… holistically… and what you bring to the classroom. So I think the videos do a fantastic job and I want to put a little bit of a pitch in here. Melina facilitated all of those videos and I think she just did a fantastic job in getting people to relax and warm up and feel comfortable telling their story. It’s really powerful.

Melina: Thank you. The other core piece of the course is reflection. So throughout the course, there’s moments where we prompt participants to think about their own lived experience or their own socialization. And it becomes a very personal contemplative process. So I think that’s also one of the things that I’m seeing among the faculty participation is that yes, they’re active on the discussion board, but they’re also just really active and looking at the pages and reading the material. And it’s nice that you can track all of that information in online courses. You can really see how people are interacting.

John: How have faculty responded? Has it been growing? Does there seem to be a lot of interest? And I seem to remember something about there being a fair amount of administrative support there too.

Mathew: I’m really happy to report from the first time we offered it to the second time there’s definitely what I would call an upward trend line. We have far more people register in the spring. So that was a huge sigh of relief from Melina and I because of course, you know, if word on the street was negative, no one would have signed up. So we were immediately gratified that we probably have a 25% jump in registrations. And interestingly enough, we’ve had a number of department chairs who have been genuinely engaged as participants. We’ve had some Associate Deans… and I’m very proud of this fact, our president and provost both worked through the course themselves, because they wanted to be able to talk about it in a first-hand way. And it’s hard to express my gratitude to them for setting the tone as our senior academic leadership cohort to really send the message that this is something we all want to pay attention to. And I think we’ve had also the other group that can particularly be challenging in faculty development work to get to get engaged with this, senior post-tenure folks. And as Melina mentioned, we have a number of people who are full professors who’ve been teaching for quite a while, who said, “Yeah, I’m going to swing back around and take this course.” And both semesters we’ve done almost exactly a third, a third, a third. Graduate students and post-docs. Tenure line or laddered faculty and a full range within that from pre-tenure to post-tenure. And then about a third academic administrative staff who have teaching us some component of their job:, folks from academic advising, the Learning Services Center, other sorts of student activities related positions. But it’s made for an extremely interesting conversation. And I think everyone would say that they’ve benefited from that.

Melina: Yeah, one of the things that we made available as an option was for self-selected groups to take it as a cohort. So this is something that we were also hoping that when the MOOC comes out that some faculty development centers might offer a cohort experience for their own campus. And so those groups have been able to have leaders emerge from their own group and they have their own face-to-face sessions where they discuss the content of the course and take it just one step further.

Mathew: So we’ve had two experiences of that, that I think maybe would be interesting. I’ll share them. One is we teach an introduction to teaching in higher-ed course for graduate students, doctoral students, and post-doctoral students and they participated as a cohort. And that’s a natural affiliation. And just as you’d expect, they loved it, they got a lot out of it, it was enormously interesting for us to have them in the course. The other group that’s been equally interesting have been the department chairs who have been coming to it for a variety of different reasons. But the one I want to highlight is the idea that as you hire new faculty into the department… thinking about their orientation and onboarding, both to the department, but also to the institution. And that’s been a really interesting goal. And I thought, really, if I can say, this is a kind of a selfless goal, people really are thinking about the community writ large, and how to help people accelerate their integration into the values and the priorities of our institution. That was not something Melina and I had anticipated. We thought, sure, this might at some point contribute to new faculty development. But we really didn’t think of it as an orientation for department chairs in which they could then begin to think about their approach to teaching and learning and a way to communicate that with their new colleagues.

Rebecca: That sounds really interesting. Can you also talk a little bit about some of the specific ways that, through reflection, you’ve seen faculty talk about how they have changed their teaching or the impact that the class is actually having on their own classroom?

Mathew: Sure. Melina loves this question. Yeah.

Melina: So we did some interviews to explore…

Mathew: … just that…

Melina: … just to ask that question. So we have a testimonial video, which we can show you later. There’s a couple of stories that really stood out in my mind. One was a woman who went back to her guest speakers list. This was out of the Business College and realized that all of her guest speakers were white men. And she thought, “Wow, I can’t believe this happened to me. I thought that I was aware of this issue, but I really need to actually have a systematic way of looking at my curriculum so that I make sure that I have a diverse offering. I can try harder. There certainly are some women business leaders I can reach out to.” So that was one and another comment was somebody saying, “I do so much work in the community around advocacy for women’s issues, but I never bring that part of myself into the classroom, because I just don’t know how to do it. But now I’m thinking that it’s actually important to show this side of myself and I want to be able to share that a little bit more with my students.” Those are kind of my two favorite but…

Mathew: … there’s there’s a third one I love. One of our colleagues who’s a full professor here, talks about how she flunked out of college initially, and probably wouldn’t have finished except that another faculty member of hers reached out to her… and really encouraging and supportive of her and helping her figure out a way to finance her way back into school and to complete the program. And I think that’s sort of visceral level of authentic crisis, that undergraduates can often feel like they’re in that alone or that no one else has had that experience before them, or just that they’re in it alone. And so I think her willingness to sort of frame that, she used the course and the reflection exercises to frame that out as her story. And then she actually, this spring, shared it with her students. She had, I think, 12 or 15 people show up in office hours literally crying their eyes out in gratitude that she had shared that story because the amount of stress that they were feeling and isolation they had been feeling and that no one else in the community had put themselves out in a way that resonated that deeply for them. So I thought that was a moment where, of course, we’re not advocating that everybody just stand up and start babbling. But I think in a thoughtful way, she picked the right time and the right place, and the right amount of self-disclosure, and it had a genuine, immediate impact on her students. She teaches a large lecture undergraduate section, and as we all know, that can feel pretty anonymous to begin with. So I think that was just really lovely.

Melina: So one of the questions that comes up for folks is when and how much information to share about themselves and their backgrounds and identities. So she felt like, “Oh my students aren’t going to care about this part of me.” But midway through the semester, she noticed that some students seemed to be having trouble in class. So that was when she strategically shared this personal story and then had folks coming in and just thanking her for being open about herself and sharing.

Mathew: It was really a beautiful moment. So one of the outcomes, one of the ways I think we know the course of success is when we hear these kinds of stories back… because most of our colleagues, I would say, 99.9% of our colleagues have a good heart. They want to do the right thing. They want to connect with their students, but they just don’t know how to do it in a nuanced and appropriate kind of way. So this colleague is an excellent example of someone who was willing and ready… just needed a strategy to shape it in a way that was appropriate to the academic environment and to her role as a senior faculty member. So, I think one of the things Melina and I have been surprised about is the amount of willingness coupled with the amount of trepidation. There’s just a lot of self-consciousness on people’s part about wading into these issues because as we know, faculty are deeply socialized to not get out of their realm of expertise, you know, “stay in your lane,” as they say. And so we’ve heard over and over and over again, “I’m not trained as a therapist. I’m not trained as a diversity expert.” Well, welcome to the world. Most of us are not trained therapists or trained diversity experts, and so the exercises and the content of the course is really meant to build a sense of efficacy, just a way to get started. So we’re very clear with participants that this is not meant to be an activity that’s an end in and of itself. It’s meant to be a bridge onto further deeper relationships and experiences.

Rebecca: Can you talk about some other strategies in addition to self-disclosure that are revealed in the course that might get people itching to take the course once it becomes a MOOC?

Mathew: Well, one aspect of the course that I love is we focus a lot on active learning and student centered pedagogical strategies. That’s not the same as focusing on social justice and diversity issues, but it’s a predicate for it. It’s a super helpful way to get started. So we have just loaded the course with all sorts of very practical pedagogical strategies that act to warm up the learning environment by making it more active learning and more student centered. And we’ve tried to keep these things sort of discrete enough that you could peel off one or two of them. So we’re trying to break down this idea that either you go in and you do everything and all of a sudden you’re our diversity expert, or you don’t do anything. And by trying to give people options of two, or three, or four, or five different things that they might consider doing even in just one class session, it doesn’t mean you have to reframe your entire semester long course. But what our experience has been is that the response from students is so overwhelmingly positive when you move in that direction, that there’s a lot of internal motivation to keep moving in that direction to keep layering in active learning strategies. A lot of these are pulled from the PCAST report in 2012. And for a lot of our STEM colleagues, it’s helpful or there’s utility in being able to suggest the pedagogical strategy and then link it immediately to the research that supports its efficacy. And that’s been helpful on our campus.

Melina: Another thing that’s persuasive is hearing it directly from the students. So instead of having this giant checklist of “here’s all the little pedagogical tricks, tips, and tricks,” we try to be pretty thoughtful and reflective so it doesn’t become advice giving or something like that. But in the interviews, we did ask students to answer the question, you know, “Do you have an example of a time where you really felt a sense of belonging that was created or facilitated by a faculty member in your time here at Cornell?” And so the feedback we got from faculty talking about those stories was things like, “Oh, now I really understand.” Like, for example, we had a young, gay Asian male student who took a course where a faculty member just acknowledged that don’t expect to see any references to gay relationships in this literature, because this was a time where that was just severely censured. And so he just felt so glad to have it be acknowledged that it was an absence. So that’s something you might not think of, but you hear a student talk about it, and then you start to slowly get a picture. You hear lots of little stories like this, of a black student talking about what it feels like to be at a primarily white institution, and what has made a difference to ameliorate the stress that comes with that… hearing it from students and often the strategies that go with them are incredibly practical. Like break the ice, offer a genuine opportunity for students to get to know you as a person, have office hours that are kind and open, be really clear and transparent about how you’re grading. Some of the strategies are super practical and you wouldn’t even think of them as diversity strategies necessarily, but they do reach students well.

Rebecca: We had a similar experience with a cohort of faculty that I’m working with related to accessibility. And we met with some students who take advantage of some disability resources we have available on campus. And so we met with some of those students and talked about their experiences in their classrooms and what has made them feel welcome and not. And we had some very same positive reactions like, “Oh, I didn’t realize that a discussion class could be more tricky for you if you’re taking notes and things because you might not always know what the clear takeaways are if we don’t go back and summarize what was it that we just talked about.” So sometimes it’s just really small, easy things that a faculty member could do. We just don’t necessarily think about it. So I think those student responses are just so powerful and really helpful.

Mathew: I totally agree. Another example that we’ve gotten very positive responses to is that when there’s been a national or regional or a city-wide or a campus-wide incident that’s happened that we know has resonance for our students, we have sent out some strategies for faculty to use in the classroom, beginning with just acknowledging that it was rough. This was rough to experience this, whatever that is, fill in the blank and letting students at that point know, you just acknowledge that this happened. And you don’t have to go any further than that. Just acknowledging, “Over the weekend such and such happened in downtown or it happened on campus and I want to acknowledge that and ask you to be sure to take care of yourselves… reach out to your friends… your family… reach out to services on campus, and here’s a short list of services that you might take advantage of.” But just that aspect of acknowledging it, students find profoundly helpful. So if you’re not making, as Melina’s example was so eloquent about, taking it out of invisibility, and making it real and bringing it into the classroom environment. Because one of the things that we know is that students care most about how their faculty interact with them. So in the college experience, we know there are two key predictors of undergraduate success. One is meaningful relationships with their faculty. The second is meaningful relationships with peers. And so even though the student affairs folks and the residence hall folks are wonderful people, and they do a fantastic job. If they’re not hearing acknowledgement from their faculty, if these issues aren’t coming up in class, then there’s a huge gap for that… they really feel the absence intensely. So we in the course try to give participants strategies depending upon their level of comfort. So I always say, “You don’t have to go one step further other than say, “Wow, rough weekend, be sure you take care of yourself.” And then move right into your content.” But just that moment, those two or three minutes of acknowledging the moment and acknowledging students are real people and they have significant feelings about these incidents can make a huge impact on their experience of the environment. All the way to the other end of the continuum where we have a wonderful colleague who will literally throw out the curriculum for the day, put people into individual writing exercises, and then into dyads and then into small groups and into a large group to process what the implications are for whatever happened for them individually, and for us as an academic community. It’s a continuum in what we try to reassure people… as anywhere along there is useful. Anything is better than simply ignoring it, and starting with where you feel ready.

Melina: Yeah, so one of the outcomes we’ve heard from faculty is them saying, “Well, you know, I sort of got the message from the senior administration that I should acknowledge but I wasn’t fully convinced. But once I took the course, I realized, Wow, it really does matter to them. They really do care about this, it really does make a difference. And now I have to figure out how to do it.”

John: Bringing that in through student voices, I think is a really effective way of doing that. And I was very impressed with the sample videos that you showed at that conference a few weeks ago.

Rebecca: I think the time and space that you give faculty to reflect on those moments is really important. Just in the conversation that we’re having, I was thinking back to moments as I was a student when things like that had happened. And there was one moment that sticks out in my mind that I don’t remember any other faculty handling an incident. I was a student during 9/11 and I remember one faculty member in particular did that throughout the curriculum thing. I was in a creative degree so the conversation was, “Hey, it’s really hard to make when you’re scared and things are going on, and you’re not sure what’s going on in the world. Sometimes it can be difficult to make, but sometimes it can be therapeutic to make.” But we talked through what that means is a professional when things like that happen in the world. And that stuck with me forever since then. I think it can be really powerful, whether big or small or a big amount of time or not. And I think taking the time as a faculty member to remember some of those moments that you had as a student is also really powerful.

Mathew: I love your story. And it’s one of the learning outcome goals for the course which is that you do not need to be an expert. You don’t have to have an answer. You just have to hold the conversation and facilitate a moment of reflection and connectivity. And I think in faculty lives, there’s such a drive towards being an expert and delivering an expert’s answer, or solving the problem that I think one of the big takeaways from the course is that with this sort of engagement, you really just have to be present and be authentically yourself. And that in and of itself is the work.

John: One of the issues that many underrepresented groups have to deal with is stereotype threat. Are there any particular strategies that are addressed through the course to help faculty reduce that?

Mathew: We do explicitly address both stereotype threat and also other sort of key concepts that I’ll come back to in a moment. But in particular, with stereotype threat, some of the ways that that can get triggered is unconscious and unintentional. Where you, for example, ask someone to answer on behalf of what you perceive of their community to be. And so some of the discussion guidelines that we give people and some of the resource materials that are a part of the course go explicitly in setting up environments where you can anticipate and ameliorate stereotype threat from the very beginning. And part of that is making really public your perception around mindset. And this is one of the most popular strategies, but also really effective… to make it clear that you believe that intelligence isn’t inherited, and it’s not static, that we get better at things by practice and by application. For example, we often say, “We wouldn’t have accepted you as the university if we didn’t believe you have the acumen. But having acumen is not the same as having all of the prior preparation that some of your peers might have had. And so figuring out what you need in terms of strategies and learning how to learn, those are things that you can achieve, that we would expect that you would need to work at them.” So even being at Cornell University was extremely interesting. We have a very well prepared undergraduate student body in many respects, just pretty spectacular people already. But a proportion of, a group of them, have come through high school just sailing through. They never really had to develop really coherent strategies for learning because they were just always ahead of the curve. They get here their first semester, their first prelim or mid-semester exam and it’s often quite shocking. And I think for many of them very destabilizing. For example, the first year I worked here, the daughter of a good friend of mine was a first-year undergraduate student as well. She got an 80 on her first exam and literally collapsed. I mean, she literally thought she wasn’t cut out for college. She shouldn’t be here. This was too big a reach for her. She was never going to be successful. And I was still trying to wrap my brain around, “How is an 80 failing?” But this is a kid who never in her life had ever seen the 80s. She lives in the 90s or the hundreds. She’s never seen the 80s before, but all of a sudden the level of competition across the institution is at such a level. And I think that’s true in many institutional settings from community colleges right up through university. And so helping students learn some concrete strategies for, at sort of at a meta-level, learning about themselves as learners is another way to ameliorate that. So we have a lot of strategies like that in the course too.

Melina: Yeah, and I’ll add to that even when we don’t say this is how to ameliorate stereotype threat ABCD, a lot of the strategies are doing exactly that. And we’ve just put them in the course where it makes the most sense to have them. So at the beginning of the course, we talk about things things you might consider as you’re establishing your learning community within your classroom, including how to help students get to know each other. One of my favorite all time icebreaker exercises is to invite people to tell the stories of their name… like the origin of your name story. When we think about bringing the whole person into the class… just allows people to share some cultural information because our names are encoded with all sorts of cultural information, whether you’re married or not, whether you’ve changed your name, immigration patterns, history of oppression… are also encoded in names. We also have a very high percentage of international students on campus so that enriches the name stories as well, because you get different naming traditions. Names tend to mean different things across different cultures. So over time, you also get a bigger picture of how the world works based on people’s name stories. So that’s just a little example of that. We had another faculty member who sort of shares how he uses an identity pie activity to share a little bit about his own identity. So not just a single identity axis. So that also helps to ameliorate stereotype threat because you prompt someone to anchor themselves in the complexity of their identities and then you’re not just a Latin-X student in the classroom, or a person speaking with an accent that sounds different from most, or a person with a disability. You’re just much more than that. And I think that’s probably one of the strongest features of the course. Because it’s sort of something that comes out throughout every aspect of the course… is just people are more complex. Here’s ways to welcome that in.

Mathew: Yeah, social identities pie is a great example of what we try to do in this course, both giving people an opportunity to reflect on their own growth and development, but then to have an exercise that they can peel off and use with their own undergraduates. So that we would expect that that would be useful to you personally, but also it would be a fantastic tool to carry away and use in the classroom. You know, of course, depending upon your subject and your specialization. And so through the whole course, we try to develop what I would consider sort of heuristics or models that help you individually, but also, I think could be really useful for you as a teacher and instructor in helping your students grapple with these issues as well.

John: So modeling, in the course, how courses can be delivered to address these issues effectively.

Mathew: Yeah, that’s exactly our goals

Rebecca: How incredibly meta. [LAUGHTER]

Mathew:But that’s some of the fun of it, I think. And we try to be really transparent about that in the course. So we have what I would call annotations all along in the course. “Here’s something we’re going to ask you to do that we also think would be useful to carry over into a classroom as well.” And some of the discussion questions are really about, “What was this like for you? And do you think this would work for your students as well?”

John: I’m going to throw in a reference to a past podcast we had. You mentioned how building a growth mindset can be really effective. We did an interview last year, I believe it was, with Angela Bauer at High Point University who uses growth mindset messages, weekly in classes, and it’s been found to have a significant effect on reducing performance gaps in the classes there… effectively eliminating them.

Mathew: It’s amazing what a few well chosen messages can do. And as Molina mentioned, it’s a great way to prime students, but it also makes transparent what your values are. So one of the exercises in the course that we asked our participants to do is to craft a multicultural or a diversity and inclusion statement. You can call it whatever you want. But just to put out there for students to read in the syllabus. Here’s what I think an inclusive classroom looks like. And these are the attributes of it. And these are the behaviors associated with it. And this is why I think it’s important in the context of the course but also in the context of the discipline. And it’s remarkable how effective that is. If you do nothing else, but that to strike out and make your own values transparent to your students, it can be pretty amazing.

Rebecca: So when can we start taking this class?

Mathew: Oh… the fall… we would be delighted to have you participate. And also we really hope to stay in touch with people who do take it and use it as a learning experience for a faculty learning community on their campuses. To be quite honest, that’s been one of my number one goals all along, of course, has been to serve my own institutions community here at Cornell. That’s our number one priority. But we think there’s relevancy. We think what’s going on here is pretty common. And in fact, a lot of campuses and a lot of faculty are likely starting at similar places. And so our hope is that you can take it yourself, but also grab it and bring in a bunch of colleagues at your own institution and have a shared experience, primarily because we think that you will be able to tailor this to your institutional context. I think it’s really important to make it personal and make it authentically linked to your legacy, your history, your current demographics, whatever the initiatives are on campus. We hope that this will be situated within a more robust conversation at the campus level.

John: When I was seeing the initial presentation on it, I texted Rebecca about this and said, we should run a cohort on this in the fall. We’re very excited about the possibility.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely.

Mathew: One thing I would just want to add is that we’re going to design the MOOC so that people can take it individually, as well as as a cohort. And I want to reassure people that we’re deeply aware of how constrained faculty are for time, it’s just really tough to carve stuff out. Even if your heart is there and your intentions are gold, it can be really challenging. So we’re really going to try to send the message that it’d be ideal if you could do this within the context of a group, but you could also just grab and go. You could jump in and hopefully it’ll be a benefit to you individually as well.

John: We’ll share links to information on that in the show notes.

Mathew: One thing I would say is that I think people have found it a lot less scary than they thought it would be. It’s very important to know that we don’t have a subtext or a secret agenda of hunting for the racist. That’s not our goal. It’s not how we facilitate the course or how we facilitate the MOOC either. And so Molina and I were laughing about the fact that a lot of people have had prior experiences with diversity related training or professional development or workshops. And we were laughing because I’ve heard this since the 90s from people saying, I took a consciousness raising workshop in the 70s. It was horrible, and I hated it and I’m never going back. Or these opportunities come to people as mandated top down HR related expectations. So you have to take this course and sign it before you can get your contract. And we’re the antithesis of that. This is strictly voluntary. It’s strictly collegial. And it’s meant to be an opportunity, as you were saying, to get meta… to just step back from the doing and have a chance to think about resources that are useful in shaping our thinking, which in turn will shape our behaviors. And for most of our colleagues in the faculty, I just want to underscore it’s not that there’s a lack of willingness. There’s just time to get the resources and have some focused time to think these things through and apply them in a tailored bespoke manner to their own context and discipline and courses. And I think that’s what the course really offers. It sort of gives you this lovely little bubble of a garden in which to sit and reflect and think in ways that you don’t typically have in the course of a day.

Melina: You know, one of the things that we’re seeing in our survey data is that people’s sense of responsibility around this issue increases… goes from “The university should do this, but I don’t have to do” this to going to “Oh, yes, this is about me and what I do.” There’s just a much higher level of awareness and excitement about being a part of it.

Rebecca: …probably speaks a lot to the idea that reflection is a very valuable teaching tool.

Mathew: Yes, and one that as instructors, we know this, we know this, but it’s easier said than done a lot of times.

Rebecca: I’m really curious about… behind you under window. There’s a tomato.

Mathew: Yeah.

Rebecca: …it looks like a tomato.

Mathew: It is a tomato. Thank you. [LAUGHTER] I’m going to tell my husband who’s an artist who doesn’t think I can draw that you recognize it as a tomato. So, thank you. It’s the pomodoro technique.

John: That’s what we were wondering, actually. I think Rebecca and I both had that thought.

Mathew: I cherish when I can get literally five minutes in a row to complete a thought. And so I’ve taken to taping over the class and my door with a tomato to signal my colleagues. I’m here. I’ll be available in a moment, but I’m just trying to get one thing done.

Rebecca: So you’re human then.

Mathew: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh my gosh, yes, yeah.

John: So since you’ve created the course, could you tell us a little bit about your background in the area and your experiences related to the course?

Mathew: One thing I love, which is completely accidental… is that Melina and I are both from New Mexico. And that has absolutely nothing to do with anything except it’s extraordinarily rare to meet another person from New Mexico. So I just love that… that’s just as sort of a weird thing we have in common. She actually grew up there. But I was born there, but didn’t really live there in my childhood, but you lived there. The other thing that we share in common is we both have traveled a lot internationally our entire lives. Melina and I have both been, what I would call third-culture kids where we’re American by citizenship, but also culturally, it’s much more complicated than that. And I’ll let Melina tell her part of that story. But I think that’s been really important in our growth and development and of our approach to these issues. So my father was a pilot in the Air Force. He was a fighter pilot in the Air Force for his career, and we moved a lot and we moved all over Western Europe and all over the eastern seaboard of the United States. So in my own lived experience, I’ve had a lot of opportunity to both be an insider and an outsider. And that has, I know, shaped my approach to this work as sort of a specialization level. I have a doctorate from University of Massachusetts Amherst, in multicultural organization development. So it’s my research area, as well as sort of my lived experience. And I’ve been out as a gay man for a really long time… since probably high school… early high school and growing up in a military community and also State Department community, my dad was a military attache, I think that really shaped me… sort of that fitting in, but not fitting in, that a lot of times it’s called code switching where you have to sort of adopt a certain set of behaviors or certain narrative form to fit in whether that’s your home base or not.

Melina: … What about being a white man… [LAUGHTER]

Mathew: Oh, yeah. Yeah… John and I have this in common… we’re both greying a little bit or at least I’m greying and so I walk into the classroom and I get an enormous amount of privilege, a benefit of the doubt. People automatically assume I belong at the front of the classroom. I’ve never been mistaken for our grad students, even as a grad student… people always thought I was faculty. But because I teach in social work, my specialization areas and my practice was in social work. And so I taught at Smith College in the School of Social Work for about 10 years. And always, whenever I do this work, I have to lead with “What’s a white guy know about diversity? And who am I to be at the front of the classroom?” And so I have, of course, as you’d imagine a pretty comprehensive response to that. But mostly, I like to lead with the idea that this is everybody’s work and that white men have a role in this as deep and as important as women of color. It’s just two ends of the continuum. But if white guys aren’t involved, and we’re not taking it seriously, particularly with a privilege that comes from being an academic, than I think we perpetuate misogyny, and patriarchy, and racism in deep ways. So I think I can see when I do that when I start right off with, “Okay, I know the first question on your mind is, ‘What’s a white guy know?’” I can see the visceral level of relief in the room because it was on everybody’s mind and until we address that I know we can’t get on to the work of the course or the session or whatever. So it’s pretty fun.

Melina: So a little bit about me. I’m an Associate Director of Inclusive Teaching here at the Center, which is a new position… a new role since last July. And before that, I was focused on supporting global and intercultural learning at Cornell. And my interest in this particular area has been sort of bubbling and growing throughout my entire life as Matt alluded to. I grew up bilingual and bicultural, Argentinian-American and spent part of my childhood living in Uruguay, where my mom and her family still live. And doing that kind of cultural code switching of realizing I was an American at I think age 10… having these moments of self awareness that sort of continue to grow. And I still continue to have the moments where I realized “Oh, I had a blind spot in relation to not really understanding this particular other way of being in the world.” So and I’m a poet by training, which I think has honed my observation skills. And I’m a former faculty member, I used to teach English at a community college in Massachusetts where I was specifically hired as a bilingual bicultural faculty member to do quite a lot of teacher training and faculty development, actually, around that particular identity category. So I also had to contend with the complexity of being a white identified Latina woman and what that means and seeing my Latin-x students eyes get really big and be like, “Wow, I didn’t even know there were white Latin-x people.” When they didn’t believe I could speak Spanish until I would speak Spanish to them. And that would sort of challenging the assumptions of who we are and I love the discomfort that comes from being in the soup that is the complexity of identity and learning from how people’s experiences of being misread or mislabeled or misunderstood inform us about how to do better in terms of building inclusive communities. So the work at Cornell… there’s a lot of work to be done… but it’s also an exciting moment because there’s a lot of people on deck thinking about this. So the response we’ve seen from the faculty and then the President… also being able to speak about this is incredibly inspiring. And then also going out to other campuses and meeting you in New Paltz and seeing other people are hungry for these conversations too, and students have a lot of place to think about their identity formation. And faculty, they’re not often necessarily asked to unless there’s suddenly an occurrence or an opportunity or an invitation. So I like being able to offer those moments of invitation to think about this together.

John: We’re glad that you do. It’s a very nice resource.

Rebecca: Yeah, we’re definitely excited to explore it with our colleagues here.

So we always wrap up by asking: what’s next? [LAUGHTER]

Mathew: Well, now that we’re concluding the second iteration of the on-campus course, the next is to actually write the MOOC. And we’re also going to write a Course Guide. So for folks like yourselves who might host or facilitate a learning group there, this is a genuine invitation to feedback. We think that we’re going to have a really fine course… it’s going to be worthwhile… but we also always know there’s room for improvement and so we’re hoping that this will be a sort of a virtuous loop of feedback from participants. And the course from the fall to the spring changed a lot… we learned a lot… and I expect that the same will be true of the MOOC as well.

John:That’s something we all should do with our courses, which is, again, a nice practice to share.

Rebecca: Oh look, reflection comes back again.

Mathew: Absolutely. [LAUGHTER] Absolutely.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us today.

Melina: Thank you

John: Thank you. We’re looking forward to continuing the conversation through the MOOC this fall.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely.

Mathew: Absolutely. It’d be really fun in another year, assuming that we get it written and published, and that you get a chance to convene a cohort… it’d be really fun to come back and do it again and talk about what was it like, from your perspective, your experience on the ground? That would be really, really solid.

Melina: We can interview you for your own podcast.

John: Yeah,that would be a nice twist…

Rebecca: That would be fun.

Mathew: That would be fun, yeah.

John: We did have someone do that. It caught us by surprise because we weren’t ready for that.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: But fortunately, we have the ability to edit. [LAUGHTER]

[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.

90. Blackish Mirror

Posted in authentic learning, discussions, diversity, first-year classes, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, race, stereotype threat, teaching
July 17, 2019

First-year students are often enrolled in survey and introductory courses that offer limited interactions with full-time faculty. In this episode, Mya Brown and Ajsa Mehmedovic join us to discuss a model in which students have the opportunity to explore interesting and complex issues in a more intimate setting in their very first semester.

Mya is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at SUNY Oswego who developed the Blackish Mirror first-year seminar course. Ajsa was one of Mya’s students in this class.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

SUNY Oswego First Year Signature Courses- Black·ish Mirror: A Study of Black Characters on Television (THT 198) – (a short video introduction to this course)
Where do good ideas come from? Freakonomics podcast, episode 368.
Fredrickson intensive on rapier dagger training

Transcript

John: First-year students are often enrolled in survey and introductory courses that offer limited interactions with full-time faculty. In this episode we discuss a model in which students have the opportunity to explore interesting and complex issues in a more intimate setting in their very first semester.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are Mya Brown, an Assistant Professor of Theatre at SUNY Oswego, and Ajsa Mehmedovic, one of Mya’s students. Welcome.

Mya: Hello.

Ajsa: Hello there.

John: Our teas today are….

Mya: I actually am not drinking tea. I have coffee and water.

John: Okay.

Ajsa: I’m drinking chocolate mint. It’s a great experience. I definitely recommend

Rebecca: Yumm. I think I’m leaning on my old favorite of English afternoon tea.

John: And I have blackberry green tea.

Rebecca: You’re both here today to discuss your first-year signature course, Blackish Mirror. Mya, can you talk a little bit about the class and then Ajsa, maybe you can talk a little bit about your experience in the class?

Ajsa: Of course.

Mya: Absolutely. I was really excited when I heard about the opportunity to create a first-year signature course. I’m on the task force for this new pilot program that we brought in here to SUNY Oswego. It was started by our Provost Scott Furlong… and Julie Pretzat, the Dean of the School of Communication, Media, and the Arts, reached out to me as a potential professor for a course, as well as someone to sit on that task force to help develop this pilot program. The thing that really drew me to it was the opportunity to get in with brand new students to the university and help them discover how much Oswego can be their home and also discover who they are as individuals so that they can contribute to society in a positive and impactful way. When it was presented to us instructors, it was presented as an opportunity to teach students how to be students. But, obviously, we don’t want to condescend students, right, or make them feel like they just absolutely have no idea of what they’re doing… what choice they made to come here… So we wanted to empower them through this course. And you know, they say a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. We thought, let’s teach how to be a student through something that the instructors are really passionate about and something that students would potentially be really passionate about. And I always, as a theater instructor, am trying to focus on social justice issues through plays that I read and introduce in my courses. Also, I’m on the play reading task force here. So I’m contributing to the season that we choose at Oswego. And I’m constantly looking for content that speaks to social issues that we find in the community. I looked at this as an opportunity for me to incorporate some social justice issues, specifically in relation to the African-American community in the classroom, while also teaching students how to be successful in college. So, I really wanted to focus on the evolution of the black character on television. So in the course, we went all the way back to Ethel Waters, which is the very first African-American character that’s seen on television. And what we were reflecting on was things like how much screen time our minority actors getting on television. Also, what kind of occupations are we seeing them in? What kinds of relationships are they engaging in? So we went all the way back from the 30s to present day. And I think the discoveries that we made in class were some really awesome discoveries. And we saw this trend in television where it was really kind of kid gloves with the character and introducing this new kind of character to the general public. And then we saw the gloves come right off, and we saw lots of “in your face” when we got to about the 1970s, the 80s, the 90s. Then we noticed this trend of kind of going away from taking the gloves off and putting them back on and we thought that that was actually quite interesting. Kind of early 2000s is where we saw this character almost regressing.

Rebecca: Like whitewashed

Ajsa: Yeah…

Mya: Yeah, definitely getting whitewashed and regressing back to what we saw

Ajsa: the norm…

Mya: …originally, right, with what was appropriate, what was inappropriate content for these characters. It was a great opportunity for us to have open discussions about what we were seeing, these trends we were seeing. And I think one of the major questions that I asked the class… you help me with this Ajsa… “Are the images that we see in the media influential in our thinking about a specific group of people?” That was the major question we wanted to answer over the course of the semester. And I think we all agreed…

Ajsa: Yeah, we came to a conclusion, and we definitely agree with that statement. And we got to see how the social norms are first ever made with the first ever character presented and then going into the gloves. And that whole aspect is really interesting to see that whole give and take aspect.

Mya: Even I was shocked and surprised by this trend that we saw in the evolution of the character. I think when I came up with this concept in my mind, I thought that it would be this very clear upward trajectory. But I found that it was not, it was definitely this kind of roller coaster ride that we went on with some really great highs, but also some really kind of low lows. And yeah, the most, shocking thing was discovering that some of those low lows are occurring now and in the most present time that we have. In this time where we think that we’re so progressive right now, and “we’ve come such a long way” since segregation and things like that. I don’t know how far we have actually come when we reflect truthfully on society, the images we’re seeing. We also ask things like, what’s the responsibility of media to tell truthful stories, to tell diverse stories to uplift the community through their outlet? What is that responsibility? Is there a responsibility also with the creators? …so we talked about that as well with the directors. Should they be checking their biases, because this is being presented to the community as a whole.

Ajsa: We actually had a moment where we talked about modern-day society, we talked about different things that are arising during Halloween and the whole cultural appropriation. And it was really exciting because we could see how the course was outlined. But there were definitely moments where we would stop and talk about real-world applications. Definitely reflecting what you’re talking about how it still matches society now. And it was just a whole experience that we all as a whole were learning together. Because this was like her first pilot having this class and it was just a really over the board genuine class.

Mya: Yeah, thank you, Ajsa. I was hoping that that’s what the students would get from it. So it’s really great. And I knew that you did.

Ajsa: Yeah

Mya: But it’s always great to hear that reflected and see it reflected in what you’re doing now. So one of the major components of this class is community and making sure that the students feel a sense of home here at Oswego. We did a scavenger hunt…

Ajsa: Yeah.

Mya: …in the very beginning in small groups so that they were able to get to know each other a little bit better before we dive into this really deep kind of content and subject matter and I think that was useful. Also…

Ajsa: We had check-ins.

Mya: We had regular check-ins.

Ajsa: Yeah, during the semester we’d talk about like our applications with that, or in the sense like how you’re going to college, and different relations with the dynamic of having a roommate, the dynamic of coming from home. And it was just so interesting because we had this setup of the class, we were able to get into deeper content and not just say, “We’re good. We’re having a good time. This class is boring.” We actually had reflections on how we feel emotionally and how we feel like biased in a sense. And it was a really great experience.

Mya: It was also nice too, they had an opportunity to reflect on “how’s it going in the dorm?” What are maybe some things that you could do? What are some problem-solving skills that you could develop, and we just shared openly. So it was great to hear these varying opinions on how to address situations and people would say, “Oh, I never even thought about that. I’m going to try that next time.” So they were teaching each other, as well as me teaching them, as well as them teaching me.

Rebecca: So, it sounds like you had a really authentic experience and around some really tough issues. Both personal issues of that transition to college, but also about some really interesting questions around race, which is never an easy conversation to have really. So how do you each think that the class was set up that really supported the ability to have those authentic, deep, real conversations that everyone felt trusted and safe?

Mya: Yeah, I think that’s a really great question. And I do this in all of my classes, I really try to set it up in the beginning, I let them know that, “Hey, I was once in your seat and I am an advocate for you. I am an ally for you. And this is a safe place.” So I really try to reinforce that through my actions and I model that behavior in the classroom. Would you agree Ajsa?

Ajsa: Mm-hmm. I feel like Mya is actually one of those professors that actually cared, has such this in depth interest in how you’re going as a person. She was always easy to find outside the classroom or have independent conversations with the content was affecting their lives. It was just so interesting to have that bond with her because she is a Director. So sometimes students don’t always have that connection. So, I definitely see her as such a genuine authentic person, it really reflected in the course

Mya: Yeah, I think it’s really important. If you are transparent with the students then they will buy in, you know. I mean, and honestly, there’s nothing to buy into. It’s just more of they’re comfortable and they’re confident that they can be who they are because they see you being who you are. It is empowering.

Ajsa: I think we’re definitely lucky that our class was 19 people. And we had such a diverse group. In the first day we had discussion, we went around the room saying, Why did you take this course? And it was so interesting seeing everyone be so raw, because you never get asked that question like, “Why are you in this Gen Ed? …but this course was so different, because no one expected it to be so in depth and be such a good scan of society. And I always said when I came to this course. I was like that general expectation of college, like “I’m in college now, I’ll talk about politics and this whole aspect.” I was like, “This is this course.” And I think it was great that everyone was so diverse and so willing to be open and we all came to class… our favorite class. We also sat in a circle…

Mya: It was really important to me for us to sit in a circle and typically in a lecture-style course that’s not the way we handle things. However, in theater courses, we are constantly in circles. So I think I took that for granted because it’s just the nature of what I do. But once I incorporated it in this course, I realized how powerful it is to be in a circle. And not only would the students sit in a circle, but I would join the circle as well. I think it’s very important that they saw me as someone who was a part of the whole, not someone who was this outside force who was like regulating what they were doing, but as someone who was engaging with them. So in order to do that, I sat in a circle with them as well. And this idea of the circle, it allowed us to have eye contact, there was definitely more unity that was already just… it’s implicit in this format. Also, and I didn’t realize that this was happening at the time, I’m not sure if you realize this, but Jen Knapp, our Associate Dean, she came in and she observed the course and one of her reflections… that I was like, “Oh, wow, I totally take that for granted, I didn’t even think about that…” was how we were able to have this civil discourse in class and she noticed that students always said their names when they were referring to what someone else in the course said. If they were reflecting on or responding to something that Ajsa said they would say, “Oh, well, when Ajsa this thing…” and that was commonplace in the classroom, did you even notice that? It’s not something we planned it just organically….

Ajsa: Yeah.

Mya: …happened.

Ajsa: We never said like, “Okay, if we talk to someone make sure we say ‘Tom’” …it just happened. And I always say this course actually made friends in this course… after I see a lot of them… We’ve been in shows together or in general, we say “hi,” and I’ve never had a course especially not a Gen Ed. You’re like, “Oh, there’s Mike Gold in the back.” It’s like, “Oh, I know, his beliefs. I know his values.” And it was just so exciting having that circle because you could hear and see everyone’s voice, you could see the distinction. And it was just really great having that connection with different students because everyone had different opinions on different topics. So I think that was definitely a strength of the course.

Mya: I actually was really concerned with whether we would be able to have a civil discourse on these kinds of topics and I was so impressed with the class because there were definitely some differences in opinions and some very strong conflicts that happened in the course. But they handled them very well. It was always respectful. And there was always an acknowledgement of the other and their perspective and then just a “Yeah, but I think … and the reason why is because of my experiences…” and we all were open to listening to each other in a way that I’ve not seen in a classroom before.

John: Did you have a class discussion on ground rules for the discussion before the discussions commenced?

MYSA: We did but it was really brief. Honestly, it was like “Respect each other. This is a free space. It is very comfortable, that kind of like general basis…” but I think it happened naturally. Because once a professor sets the tone, you kind of realize what the course can be… what’s appropriate. And I always say there’s some professors who just teach by the book, they don’t really look at the subject material, but I feel like Mya was always ever changing. Always you could tell she had her heart in the class. She always tells her own experiences, but the episode she chose… or next semester she’s going to take this episode out…. And I think it was really genuine having that reflection with the teacher and having her have her own opinions in there, too. It was just really ongoing.

Mya: I think it’s important that students understand that professors are not infallible. And it’s important for professors to present that as well. And again, just be transparent. But if they understand that their opinions matter, which is what I made sure I implemented from day one, then I think they feel more free to voice their opinions.

John: Did it help that you were looking at this through the lens of fictional media, rather than dealing with circumstances that people were directly involved in?

Mya: I think so. I think it creates a sense of distance that makes it…

Ajsa: …comfortable, yeah…

Mya: …a little easier to approach. Yeah, but with all of that subject matter, even though it was fictional, it’s all based in reality, due to the nature of it. And so everyone could relate in some way or form to at least one character in each episode. And it’s like, “Oh, I know that girl,” or “Oh…”

Ajsa: “I am that girl.”

Mya: …”that is me.”

Ajsa: Yeah. I think it was also a great experience because while we had media, we also had our own personal reflections. So it was like a mix. The episode set the tone. So, it wouldn’t be anything to touching… nothing like triggering that we have to like vocally say our experience first. And then after, naturally, people would speak up, and it got to a point that at the end of the semester we all raise our hands. And we all want to talk at the same time because we were just so into it and really involved. And it always felt comfortable to just talk in that class about whatever the subject material was.

Mya: And if for some reason an opposing idea didn’t come up, I would play devil’s advocate. And I really find it important that students are able to form some kind of sense of empathy so that they can put themselves in someone else’s shoes, see it from someone else’s perspective. And I always say listen for understanding, not to rebut. So I think they really absorbed all of those lessons and they use them really well in the class.

John: You mentioned that people came in with some strong opinions. Did you see those opinions evolve in response to the dialogue?

Mya: Yes, actually.

Ajsa: Yeah, I did.

Mya: Yeah, that happened a lot.

Ajsa: Yeah, people would vocally say, like, “I never thought about that before. Okay, you’re right. Or they would say, “That’s not my personal view. But I understand where you’re coming from now.” And it was just great, because there’s not many times people will take theirselves out of that out-of-body experience and listen to the other end. So… just a really good experience going through that.

Mya: Yeah, I agree.

Rebecca: I was just re-listening to an episode of Freakonomics about where great ideas come from. And they were talking about some research related to dissonance or people that disagree. And that when you have a room where someone feels comfortable enough to disagree, the ideas and the depth of a conversation or a deliberation like in a jury, considers much more evidence. And so, I think it’s kind of interesting, if you were playing devil’s advocate, if no one had brought up a different point of view, and you brought it up, then that was always present in your classroom. So I wonder if that helped the conversation evolve.

Mya: I think it absolutely helped.

Ajsa: It did.

Mya: Yes.

Ajsa: It was like throwing a wrench… it was so exciting.

Mya: Yeah, and then they had to deal with it, right? Instead of just everybody could pile on… they had to actually deal with the opposing side of things. And we couldn’t just ignore it because we all felt the same way.

Ajsa: Yeah, it’s like a whole theme of the class was once an opinion is said you can’t ignore it. You have to have reaction to it. It just happened naturally. But the whole experience… listening to other people and always valuing everyone’s input… which is such an interesting things in modern society now. I feel like people just talk over each other or don’t really have the time to think about actually what’s going on. So I think it was great having everyone’s voice heard in that class.

Rebecca: So a key learning point was listening?

Ajsa: Yeah.

Mya: Active listening.

Ajsa: Active Listening.

MYSA: Right? Yeah, it was very clear that listening is not just “You hear it.” [Overtalking] but “You hear it, you process it, you form an opinion on it.” So actively listening to the other… again, for understanding and not just so that you can rebut or prove them wrong or something, but to actually get in their shoes and see it from their point of view, so that I can maybe soften your heart a little bit or expose you to something brand new that you had absolutely no idea about. And that’s why I think the diversity in the class was something that really helped as well. I do wish we would have had more diversity of gender, it was a pretty female heavy course. And there were no non-binary students in the class either. So maybe a little more diversity in that area would be nice. So that we could address some of those topics as well. [Overtalking]

Ajsa: We had a lot of different majors. because it was a gen ed course. There wasn’t any one that was all theater or anything in that sense.

Mya: …and I think it definitely served its purpose. I’m excited to teach it again next fall.,

John: What would you do differently?

MYSA: I feel like I might have missed the boat a little bit on the opportunity to introduce some time-management skills. We did a little bit of that, but I think we could have done a lot more, so I would incorporate more of that. But the biggest change that I have for this next fall coming up, is I’m going to have a TA which I’m really excited about. Yeah, so I recruited someone from the course to assist. I’m actually going to call her a peer mentor instead of a teaching assistant… But I think to have that element of someone who’s sat in that exact same seat, and not too long ago, will really be helpful for the students. Even though I’m pretty good at getting students to feel comfortable with me and open up to me and use me as a resource for absolutely anything, I feel like it is easier for you to talk to someone in your own age, who has a more recent and current experience with the class, the subject matter… the transition into the university. So having that peer mentor component, I think it’s going to really enhance the course and I’m excited about that.

Ajsa: I also feel like you mentioned resources. This course was really heavy in depth of resources on campus. She taught us Blackboard… I never knew about that… That was so in depth learning about that because we had our first journal that was due. We had journals with personal reflections in them. And also we had this whole experience going to the Writing Center, your reflection, one of them was going to an involvement fair. They’re having extra credit if you go to these are in musicals or different productions. It was just really great having that full over the board experience, because I feel like I’ve never had a course taught me the resources on campus, but this one did. And it was really good for freshman.

Mya: Yeah, I think the scavenger hunt really helped with that, would you say?

Ajsa: Um hmm.

Mya: So I sent them to places like the Women’s Center, the library, the Writing Center,

Ajsa: Cooper…

Mya: …literally just everywhere on campus you could think of that has a support component to it for the students. I made sure that they went to those places, just so that they knew there are so many resources on campus. I remember when I was a freshman, first semester and I was just completely overwhelmed. Like “What is this new world?” …because university… it’s very much of a bubble of its own world. And the rules are totally different than what we’re accustomed to from high school. They’re also different than what you’ll experience in the real world….

Ajsa: Yeah.

MYSA: …just to let you know.

John: …unless you choose to stay….

Mya: Unless you stay? That’s true.

John: Which many of us have done.

Mya: Yeah, but just introducing them to all of the awesome opportunities here. And I’m so proud to see them take advantage of those opportunities beyond the classroom Ajsa was just in the main stage production of Fun Home that we did here. She also is in directing scenes, she did them last semester. She’s also doing them this semester. Another one of our students was in Fun Home. Yeah, from that course. Two of the students from that course actually traveled with me to London. So they really are getting exposed to the university. And these great resources and opportunities that we have here, in a way that they wouldn’t have been exposed had they not taken this course.

Ajsa: Just in general, I see them involved in different things. One of them is my Psych class. I just think it’s so exciting having that connection, because it’s not like a regular class… you just had calm… it’s like you actually had to hear each other, so it’s like, these are my friends even if we weren’t close. You just know who they are as people.

Rebecca: Mya, can you talk a little bit about what you learned teaching this course that you’re applying in some of your other courses?

Mya: Yes, absolutely. The major change that I’m making in my other courses is to the syllabus. I’ve learned how important a tool it is, I think before I just kind of looked at it as a necessary evil or something. And the style of my syllabus was totally archaic. I mean, it was literally nothing but words, white piece of paper with black words on it, there’s nothing. But now for this one, I actually incorporated pictures… there’s color… I used a graph to do the grading breakdown. So for my rubric before it was just columns, and these are the assignments these are the points that are allotted, this is what you need to get. But this time I used to color and I put it in a pie graph and I tried to state things as questions. I’ve added a lot more personality to the syllabus than I ever had before. Before, it was just pure facts. This is what you need to do for this. But this time I engaged it in question formatting, so that they would have to think about things that were on the syllabus versus “Oh, this is a bunch of information. I hear it all on the first day. I forget about it. I don’t ever look at it again.” But it was an actual tool that they were able to use in class. And I placed things on there, like little tips for success in the classroom, that they could apply to any class, not just this class. And so hopefully they could use it in their other classes. I also had a form that we use that kind of guided them when they did their reflections on the shows that we watched in class. And I heard from an advisor that one of my students shared it with them and said, I’m using this in my other courses. So that made me say, “Oh, I’ve got to use in my other courses.”

So definitely changing the syllabus to make it a little more welcoming… opening… add a little more of my personality to it… adding some color… some pictures… some visuals… so that it’s exciting. It should excite them instead of make them feel like “Oh, here’s another syllabus, recycle this thing.”

Ajsa: That was our one requirement: to have the syllabus on us. The first day, we went through the whole syllabus and she was teaching us this is what a college syllabus is. And these are the dates. And it was actually so useful because in high school, you have a syllabus that doesn’t mean anything but in college, it’s like yes, this date, that’s your paper, no changing. But this one obviously was ongoing, but it was really exciting having to learn that tool in the course because as freshmen you don’t really realize how important it is. And it was just really great seeing those tips reflecting on it. And I think that’s something that definitely taught me the importance of syllabus.

Mya: Another thing Rebecca… you will be excited about this. I’m going to work on this this summer… is making my syllabi accessible.

Rebecca: Big smiles on my side.

Mya: I know. I knew you would love it. Now, I’m going to come to you for assistance with that as well, because I’m not well versed in how to do that. But I think it is absolutely necessary. And that’s the next steps that I would like to take with all of my classes.

Rebecca: Thumbs up. Ajsa, can you talk a little bit about what you got from the course that you’re using in your other classes?

Ajsa: I definitely understand the whole perspective of hearing everyone’s voice and definitely seeing the other side to any issue… any conflict. I think that’s definitely useful in the real world. And in general, any communication you ever have with any other person… and I think definitely getting involved. Not many courses tell you “These are the resources, please go to them.” And I think this course like Maya was saying definitely gave us all the foot in the right direction and made us all student leaders in a way… and confidence. I think it definitely made us feel comfortable talking and feel comfortable with our values.. our morals, I think it’s definitely something that has taught us growing up in maturity I feel like personally. And of course tools in my other classes like Blackboard and the Writing Center.

Mya: Another element of the entire program, the pilot program was that we do attend these outside of class activities. And so some professors and I got together. These other professors were also teaching first-year signature courses. And we thought, “Okay, how can we combine our courses in one single event?” So we had the Luke Cage event. Do you remember that one?

Ajsa: Yeah, I went. I had a free t shirt… it was great.

Mya: Yeah, it was really great. That was Allison Rank. Jessica Reehar, Margaret Schmull, Amy Bidwell. We all got together and we were like, “Okay, how can we incorporate social justice and the black character on TV and comic books from yours and gender identity from yours and health from yours?” And so we came up with a viewing of an episode of Luke Cage and then a talkback afterwards. And the students in my class all reflected on the event and said, “We felt so prepared for it.” What I noticed is that my students were the ones who were the most engaged in that talk back. And I think it is because it was a very similar format to our class. So they felt empowered. But what was really awesome is that through them speaking up so freely and confidently, you literally saw it trickle off to other people and other students within that audience. And they all started to feel empowered to speak up and quite confident to do so. And it was really a great event and an awesome opportunity for me as a faculty member to engage with other faculty members from other departments that I would never typically get a chance to do something like this. And also for the students to engage with other faculty members from other departments, especially at this young time in their careers here at Oswego. They were introduced to some faculty who now it’s like, “Oh, well, Allison Rank is awesome, I think I’m going to take a class with her.” So it was a really great opportunity for us to introduce these students to some of the other opportunities on campus outside of theater, and outside of these resource and support services, but also these academic opportunities that they could have with fellow faculty members. I really appreciated that we were able to do that. And we’ll do much more of that in the future.

Ajsa: It was actually pretty funny. I sat next to this girl who’s in one of the other courses and she was like, “Oh, my God, I don’t know how to do this. I have to do a paper for this course, with what we’re doing a reflection on. And I was like, “My Professor, she’s right up there.” And I was like, “We do this all the time.” And she’s like “That’s your Professor?” And I was like, “Yeah,“ and she’s like, “Wow, that seems like a great course.” And we’re just having this whole” discussion and I sat a little bit away from my class so I could see all of them. And I was like, “Yeah, all those people talking like in the second row, that’s my whole class.” And I actually saw it trickle down to everyone else. And in the event we also had trail mix being passed around for the health and wellness and there was on it, how you can make this trail mix in the dining hall and how accessible it would be. And it was just such a good experience. You could just tell everyone was like genuinely involved. It’s so authentic and really just good experience all around.

Mya: Yeah, that was Amy Bidwell. She’s “Okay. How do I use my nutrition course in relation to this Luke Cage thing?” and she had that idea of “Oh, we can provide a healthy snack…” and it was a great opportunity to teach the students how you yourself can go make this healthy snack just right here in your residence hall.

John: It also saved on the budget too

Mya: It did. [LAUGHTER]

Ajsa:I just know that personally, in my own life, I always talk about this course and tell everyone and all the theatre students come up to me and they’re like, “I really wanted to take that class with Mya. It sounds great.” And this is my first ever experience with Mya. I never had a theatre course with her it was just this. So I think my experience with her was so different than other theatre students because I saw her more discussion wise and more about like her own values. So, It was such a good experience to see a professor like that. And also my regular students that I tell this course about always like, “That’s a great course. I wish I was a freshman so I could take that course.” So I would love to one day, see it open to everyone. But I also think it’s a really good application for freshmen. It does its job.

Mya: Yeah, I actually had lots of students who were like, “Hey, I want to get in that course… that Blackish Mirror course that I heard about. And I’m like, “Oh, sorry. Only first semester freshman.” …which I think is a necessary part of that formatting because of what it is exactly that we would like them to leave the course with what the…

Ajsa: course objectives

Mya: …course objectives are.

Rebecca: I just heard a student say course objectives

Ajsa: Mya Brown taught me that… that’s how I know what course objectives are.

Mya: Yes, Julie and Scott will love that. [LAUGHTER]

But, see, I think those are the things that you take for granted that are they actually absorbing these kinds of things? So using that first semester to make it very clear and very plain to them… the importance of those things is changing for your experience in university.

Ajsa: Yeah, when I took this course, on the first day, when I said, “Why are you in this course?“ I had a friend in theater department recommend… like, Oh, I was “Do you know anything about this course? I’m just a freshman.” And they were like, “Mya Brown’s teaching that course” and I was like, “Yeah…” and they were like “I didn’t know she had the course… she’s an amazing teacher… take anything Mya Brown has.”

Mya: Aww.

Ajsa: …and I just remember being able to feel like “Yeah, this is a great experience. I don’t know what she’s like in her other classes, but this one was a great experience… always recommend. So I think it’s just nice having such a beloved and caring teacher teach this course because it makes a whole welcome and friendly setting in a….

Mya: I think that’s an absolute necessity in whichever faculty member is teaching, they must have a passion for it. We actually initially started calling this program “passion courses” In the beginning, but then it was like,”Mmmm, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s appropriate, let’s maybe go away from that.” But it is true that you have to have a passion for the subject matter. And you have to have a passion for reaching young people, and helping them to discover who they are as people so that they can optimize their potential, and then give back to society. If you’re not interested in doing that, you’re just interested in the subject matter, you’re probably not the right person to teach this kind of course. I think you definitely have to have a full investment in the student as a person, not just as a student in your course. Can I help them discover who they are?

Ajsa: It was a really good experience because while she does theater, she was also involved in everyone else also. There were students that were like, “Oh, I’m doing this I’m doing a civil service trip or I just got involved in this position on campus.” And typical “Oh My God, tell me more about it. That sounds great”. It was never just like a focus on a theater driven students it was always focused on everything all across the board, just really inspirational and just really supportive. And I think we can all relate that Maya was our like mom and like support system on campus when we came here and no other professor cares about what you’re doing on campus or how is your dorm life. She always cared.

Mya: Oh, thank you. They made it easy, though. I mean, I just loved this class.

Ajsa: We’re so lovable, yeah.

Mya: And I think if all freshmen could have this kind of experience coming in, it just will increase their chances of graduating… of being successful at the university level… and then taking it beyond university.

Ajsa: Student leaders… the whole aspect.

Mya: I do have an idea for a new course as well, which my rough working title is Revenge of the American Pie. And for this one, I would like to do a survey of films, specifically 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. And the way they are approaching some issues and relationships and what’s appropriate… how that is affecting society. And we’re seeing the results of it now with the “Me too” movement. Women feel like they have to protect themselves and they have to dress a certain way. And they’re taught these things based off of what they see in media. It’s your fault is

Ajsa: …how sexualized they are.

Mya: …if something happens to you… Right, how sexualized they are. And then men are kind of empowered to, or embolden to feel like they can do whatever they want with a woman because of some of these films that we saw early on. And I call it Revenge of the American Pie, because Revenge of the Nerds, and American Pie kind of inspired this look and this survey. So I always try to do a little play on words with the titles. But I really feel like we’re seeing the results now, of those harmful images that we saw in films from the 80s and 90s and early 2000s. We’re seeing the results and the effects of those images. And that messaging that was in some of those movies, we’re seeing that now Again, this Me Too movement era. And I think it’s important that we address that and we have to address it with young impressionable minds because that’s where the change happens. This is why I thought Blackish Mirror was so important. And why I would love to, maybe in the future, do the Revenge of the American Pie. I definitely think that’s really important because a lot of people notice the 80s 90s, mid 2000s are very raunchy and modern days very PC and every once in a while… I don’t get it like back then it was appropriate when it’s like the question is, was it appropriate or was it too much? People don’t ever know the line. Allso, I would love to say about Blackish Mirror was that we never just focused on the black minority, we focused on everything. One of the things we said right off the bat was “You know, you can always notice sexism… you can always notice anything in there… any kind of bias… any kind of minority… feel comfortable talking about it and definitely like the African American everything in a whole sense was a big focus, but we’re always open to anything you want to discuss… always like social norms and social constructs. I definitely feel like this course was over the board just inclusive.

Mya: Yeah, there were several things that we picked up on that were social thinking issues. There was a episode of Benson that we watched…

Ajsa: That’s what I was thinking about.

Mya: Is that the one you’re thinking about?

Ajsa: Yeah.

Mya: And there was lots going on there with gender inequality. Also with some immigration issues that came up… and Blackish Mirror, we used it as this opening to discuss any biases that we saw or social injustices that were present, and how we can reflect on them today. And it was not just “Can you identify these things?” And “Can we reflect on these things?” We took it further and said, “What can you do about these things to impact society?” So the final project was a public service announcement. They had small groups and they identified issues from the episodes that we viewed and discussed throughout the semester. And they then had to choose something as a group that they wanted to address and create a public service announcement to hopefully inspire some change towards that issue. And how do you think that assignment went?

Ajsa: It was so interesting because we had to get cameras from the library. And a lot of us are not media majors, not cinema. So, we’re just like, “How do you wear a camera? Is she like for real?” And it was just such a cool experience, because the product and results were actually really good. They’re great content… we watched them in class. And it was just really interesting where everyone took it and how we didn’t choose our groups… we were put into the groups… so it was like universal thought. It wasn’t one person was leader. You had your friends saying “I’m interested in this.” So are you. This is our group. We had to sit there and kind of spit ball and talk about like, “What do we collectively want?” And that was just a great experience having, and I think it was appropriately challenged. It was definitely something that is intimidating at first and then you do and you’re like, this is doable. This was really great.

Mya: I think that’s what university is. It’s intimidating at first. But then once you get into it, it’s like I can do this. I can totally handle this. I think that that’s like the broader message that they were able to leave the course with is “Yes it might be difficult, but there are support systems… reach out… be confident… and also allow yourself to make mistakes. No one’s perfect. So allow yourself to make some mistakes and understand that you’re not alone in this. I think that’s another thing that was helpful with all of the group work. Nearly everything we did was group work.

Ajsa: Yeah. And also something that I remembered a student said was “Once you have this course, I can never look at media the same. It rewires your brain… You thought to look at it as like a whole inclusive thing because while we look at the episode and expect a minority then we would notice different things of sexism, etc, in it that we would never even pick up on naturally before this course. And I think it really helps open your mind and just makes you better human beings.

John: We always end with the question: What are you doing next? You’ve already addressed some of this, but what are some of your next projects for each of you?

Mya: Well, I am actually going to the University of Michigan for the Fredrickson intensive on rapier dagger training. I’m prepping for next season… I’m directing She Kills Monsters, which is this excellent play about this girl who finds herself in a position where in order to get to know her little sister, who unfortunately passed away, she plays her D&D module, her Dungeons and Dragons module. So she meets her sister in this D&D world. They fight all these monsters… they bond… and it’s this really great look at grief, and how we can overcome it.

Ajsa: Personally, for me, I’m really involved on campus. I’m hoping to be a summer RA this summer. And also I am really involved in the civil service trips. I did one for Alabama. And I built a house in, Alabama and it was great and I’m really getting involved and would love to do another one. So I’m planning that and, in general, I’m just doing all these different aspects that I am involved in on campus and just having this whole touch on campus life. I certainly love that whole aspect.

Rebecca: Great.

John: Thank you for joining us. This was a fun conversation and I’m looking forward to hearing about more iterations of the course in the future.

Mya: Thank you.

Ajsa: Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you so much.

[MUSIC]

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

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

89. Teaching About Race

Posted in active learning, classroom community, diversity, equity, evidence-based practices, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, pedagogy, race, social justice, stereotype threat, teaching
July 10, 2019

Class discussions of race and racism can be difficult for all participants. In this episode, Dr. Cyndi Kernahan joins us to discuss ways of building a classroom climate in which these issues may be productively explored.

Cyndi is a psychology professor and Assistant Dean for Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin – River Falls. She’s the author of Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Class: Notes from a White Professor, which will be available from West Virginia University Press in Fall 2019. The book will be part of the Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Series edited by James Lang.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

Dr. Cyndi Kernahan
- College website
- Personal website
Kernihan, Cyndi. (2019). Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom: Notes from a White Professor. West Virginia University Press.
Mindset Scholars Network
Friedrich, Alex (2013). “MCTC Instructor: I was Reprimanded for How I Handled a Racism Debate.” Michigan Public Radio News. (A discussion of the case involving Shannon Gibney)
Rabin, Roni Caryn. (2019) “Huge Racial Disparities found in Deaths Linked to Pregnancy.” New York Times Upshot. May 7.
Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American psychologist, 52(6), 613.
Radio Replay: The Mind of the Village – Hidden Brain Podcast – March 9, 2018.

Transcript

John: Class discussions of race and racism can be difficult for all participants. In this episode, we discuss ways of building a classroom climate in which these issues may be productively explored.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Dr. Cyndi Kernahan, a psychology professor and Assistant Dean for Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin – River Falls. She’s also the author of Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Class: Notes from a White Professor, which will be available from West Virginia University Press in Fall 2019. The book will be part of the Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Series edited by James Lang. Welcome, Cyndi.

Cyndi: Thanks.

John: Welcome. Our teas today are:

Cyndi: I actually I just have water although I am a big tea drinker usually.

Rebecca: I’m drinking golden-tipped English Breakfast tea.

John: That’s a new one.

Rebecca: I know I’m branching out! [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have blueberry green tea today.

Rebecca: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your forthcoming book, Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Class: Notes from a White Professor. Can you tell us a little bit about the book?

Cyndi: Yeah, the book is essentially my answer to a question to my earlier self. So when I started teaching about the psychology of racism about 20 years ago, when I first started here, I felt desperately in need of help, because I’d always wanted to teach about the psychology of racism but it was much more difficult than I anticipated, as most teaching often is. And I was very young and new and I wanted a guidebook and there really wasn’t one. And so I kind of have had it in my mind for a long time and about five years ago, I started thinking seriously about how to do it. So the book is meant to be sort of a guidebook. It’s got both my own experiences, but also a lot of evidence in it. I’m a social psychologist, so there’s a lot of evidence from my field that I think is very easily translatable to the classroom in terms of how to learn and how to think about these issues because they’re hard to teach. It’s hard to teach about racism, I think. There’s a lot of difficulty in it. There’s a lot of evidence and also just sort of my overall philosophy about how we can teach it in compassionate but very honest ways. And so that’s my overall thinking…making sure that you tell the truth but that you tell the truth in a way that doesn’t alienate your students and keeps them engaged, which I think is kind of a can be a difficult line to walk. So, that’s kind of what it’s about. It covers a lot of different things, student resistance, creating a good climate, how to take care of yourself as an instructor when you teach this sort of stuff. But, those are some of the basic ideas.

John: A few years ago, with the election of Obama, there was some people who claimed that we had moved to a post-racial society. I think evidence since then has shown that that hasn’t quite been the case.

Cyndi: Yeah.

John: And I think the book is particularly well timed because these issues are in the forefront with the news all the time. How do you begin to address issues of race in your classes?

Cyndi: First of all, I think that idea of the post-race thing is really interesting, and I see it a lot in students. I mean, I’m just finishing up teaching this class now. We’re in our last week of classes now, it’s finals next week. And when most of my students, most of whom are white, came to the class a lot of them just have this colorblind idea, which is similar to the idea of post-race, like we’re done…sorted that out in the 60s, it’s all good. And it’s obviously not…and so they believe that we’re in this equal playing field, which we’re not really in obviously. And so that’s kind of a starting point. I talk about that in the book, this colorblind ideology that most Americans share. The first order of business is sort of getting through that. And so there’s, I think, two main things that most students and most people (especially white people) need to understand. One is that colorblindness isn’t really possible, even though we think it should be the norm, it’s not really the ideal. So that’s one thing, but then also that there is this larger structure of what people in my field would call institutional racism or structural racism. And that’s the piece that I think most white people, most students don’t really get: that racism is not as people said, individual acts of meanness, it’s also these bigger things that affect us that we don’t think about. That’s usually where I start. We talked about what race is and what it’s not, what institutional racism is, and what it’s not. So I think that mostly answers your question as to where we start.

John: And that feeling of colorblindness is that more unique to white students, perhaps than students of color?

Cyndi: I think it’s more unique, but it’s not exclusive to white students. Students of color can often struggle with that understanding of institutional racism, and structural and cultural racism, as well. If you look at attitude surveys, it’s not unusual for people of color to say that they don’t necessarily see it in institutional or structural terms. Or you’ll see surveys, they’ll ask, “What’s more important? Individual behavior or institutional laws and policies?” And almost all Americans with the exception of really recent immigrants and Native Americans, I think, say that the individual behavior is more important. And as a social psychologist, I would say, actually they’re both important. But as far as what impacts your life more, it’s those big, broad institutional, cultural stuff. So I think white students are more likely, but not only.

John: How do you make students more aware of those issues? How can you help get them past that notion of color blindness?

Cyndi: One answer is a lot of evidence, but it’s how you deliver that evidence. My usual way to try to get these things across is to combine a lot of statistical evidence, a lot of broad evidence, with stories and examples that are representative. So I try really hard in my content, like I don’t just cover a bunch of psychology experiments, and I don’t just cover statistics. I try to have that together with individual stories of people’s experiences. And I also think discussion is really key. So I don’t lecture in this course, really much at all. I’ll do some mini-lectures. But, that’s never the main thing that I’m doing because I think it’s really important for them to read, and then come to class and process all that stuff. Because the number one thing that happens, again going back to the misconceptions they come in with, is that they realize that there’s all this stuff that they didn’t know. So we cover a lot of history, for example, and there’s all this history of how we got to the racial categories that we have now that they’re just like, “No one told me this.” And they need to hear other students say that too. That’s part of also creating that climate is like, “Oh, I’m not weird or stupid for not knowing this. All these other people didn’t know it either.” And we talked a lot about, “It makes sense that you wouldn’t know because we don’t really teach it in our K-12 system very well for most students.” So, I think it’s a bunch of things. I think it’s what the content looks like, it’s how the class is structured, it’s how the evidence is presented. I think all those things matter.

Rebecca: Many faculty members avoid talking about race, especially in classes that are not about race specifically.

Cyndi: Yeah.

Rebecca: So can you address maybe why faculty do that, and how to help faculty overcome that fear?

Cyndi: I think fear is the main reason. And there’s different types of fear. One is: I don’t want to be the bad guy and I don’t want to be confrontational, which is understandable. Many years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who taught in our English department, and she was teaching something called ethnic film and literature. And at the time, I was coordinating ethnic studies, and I really wanted her to teach that class again so that I could get it back into the rotation. And she just told me…we were at a party and she said, “I’m not teaching that anymore.” I said, “Why?” And she said, “Because I have to fight with them about whether or not racism is a real thing. And I don’t want to do that anymore.” She didn’t want to put up with the resistance, essentially. And she didn’t want to have to be what she felt like was the bad guy to deal with that resistance. And so I think that’s a big piece of it. If I try to tell students the truth about this stuff, they’re just going to resist and then I’m going to have to deal with that discomfort. And that’s a real fear, particularly for instructors of color. I mean, they’re all these national examples, right? …of people getting called out by their universities for basically just telling the truth in their classes and trying to teach institutional racism. The most famous example was Shannon Gibney over at Minneapolis Community and Technical College near where I live, and she was officially reprimanded by her University, basically for teaching what I teach, because she was getting pushback from white students, essentially. So I think that’s part of it. Also, it creates a lot of dissonance in students which was related to the resistance, so knowing how to deal with that dissonance can help students feel okay about themselves even as they recognize that they hold a lot of these beliefs and they haven’t really been very critical about it. So I think that all those things, all those types of fears play into why you don’t see people covering it.

Rebecca: How do you suggest maybe faculty get over that or feel prepared for that resistance or can actually deal with that in the classroom and not feel shocked or distressed or overwhelmed.

Cyndi: The big key, I think, is being prepared and feeling like you know how to talk about it. I’ve also heard a lot of instructors say, “I don’t feel like I have enough knowledge.” For white instructors, they feel like they don’t have the right or the credibility to talk about it. So that’s sort of an issue, and for instructors of color, there’s a whole other set of things. If you look at the research for them, there’s just a ton of microaggressions that they often have to deal with. They’re also seen as not being credible purveyors of this information. So that’s an issue. So I think just a couple things: one being as prepared as possible. So knowing your subject really well…being clear that when you teach the class, you’re gonna be clear with the students like, this is the evidence we’re going to use. So you’re not coming at it, like it’s all people’s personal experiences or opinions. That I think is where it gets especially hard. But if you know that, you’re going to come back to this scholarly base of evidence that usually makes most of us more comfortable, because that’s how we roll. …and people had this misunderstanding of teaching about race: “Well, it’s all just opinion.” I once had a student say, “How could you possibly give us a test on this? I mean, it’s just all people’s opinions.” I was like, “No, not quite. [LAUGHTER] There’s definitely evidence there. There’s psychology, there’s sociology, and there’s history and we’re going to use all of those things.” So I think that part of it is knowing that you have this common base of information. And also knowing what to expect…how to deal with the resistance, knowing what the resistance looks like, I have a whole chapter on what resistance looks like and how it manifests in white students versus students of color and how to think about it and how to deal with it. So I think that can be helpful too.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about maybe one or two ways that we tend to see resistance and a couple of strategies that we might be able to use to overcome that?

Cyndi: Yeah, I think, in general, what you see with the research is that white students tend to be more resistant than students of color in general. They tend to be more vocal about it than students of color. One sort of broad distinction you sometimes see is that students of color are more likely to leave if they’re the minority in the classroom. So, if you have mostly white students (which is a lot of what I deal with, and maybe I have a few students of color), you might get more passive resistance on the part of the students of color, they sort of withdraw a little bit more, because they don’t want to be the one student saying things in the class and then being really looked at or targeted in that way. And for white students, they just tend to be more comfortable speaking up about this, particularly in the primarily white environments. So I think the ways to get around resistance are: 1. always sort of coming back to the evidence that you’re using. And if you set the table at the beginning of the class that can usually work so you can come back to: “Okay, here’s what we’re going to focus on.” So for example, I’ve had students say in class, when we talk about wealth disparities or something, they might bring up a particular person that they know who doesn’t fit that. And so what I found is useful as I don’t fight with them about whether or not their story is true. I don’t know the wealth of this individual family of color. So if I tell you that the wealth disparity is like 10 times… white families have on average 10 times the wealth that black families have…and they say, “No, no, there’s this one family I know. And they’re, they’re really, really rich…,” you know, as sort of an anecdotal thing. That’s a way you see resistance manifest, right? And so instead of arguing back and forth about whether or not that family is rich, which is useless, you can just undercut that and talk about the general wealth disparity. So, that’s one way to do it. That’s obviously pretty mild resistance. If you have consistently students questioning evidence, which doesn’t happen as much as you might think, bt it can happen, but it can happen, then I sometimes will take that out of class. For students of color, the way I try to work with the resistance you often see there, which is that sort of passive withdrawal because again, they don’t want to be targeted within a predominantly white classroom, one technique I use is to send an email really early in the semester that says something along the lines of, “We’re going to be talking about racism all semester. Your classmates may look to you to be a representative, just know that I know that you don’t need to do that. That’s not your job. And I’m not going to expect that of you, because I want to try to make those students especially feel as safe as possible. And I also recognize too, I reinforce to them: “I’m a scholarly expert on this. But this is your lived experience and I recognize that. Not saying that one is better than the other, but just I see you and I see that your experience is going to be different than the white students in the class. And so that’s the way I try to short circuit that withdrawal from class as much as possible. And most students, at least so far, have appreciated that…and also just acknowledging way up front that this is going to be new to you. You’re going to be uncomfortable, I put it in the syllabus: “You’re going to feel uncomfortable, this is not comfortable stuff to talk about, and so just know that it’s coming.” So those are a few things.

John: Do you recommend having the class come up with rules of engagement or discussion on these issues.

Cyndi: I definitely do. I mean, I have some that I think are important, but I let them drive that discussion. And then I add them in if I feel like maybe they’ve missed them, or something. And I usually have them. Actually, I think I learned this from an earlier version of your podcasts, someone was on talking about having the students working groups to develop their rules of engagement. And so I did a little bit of that on the first day this semester, let them talk about it in small groups before we talked about it in large groups. And then I just take a picture of what those agreed upon discussion groups are and I post them up on Canvas, so that that way they can come back to them. Yeah, we have a whole discussion about discussion: about what it should look like in our class, how we want to engage. One big question we always talk about is do you want to raise your hands or just talk? How do you want to handle somebody upset? They always think it’s going to be more contentious than it actually is, at least so far in my experience. I haven’t had a whole bunch of anger or confrontation. So that’s been so far that’s worked well.

Rebecca: What are some of the consequences of not dealing with race specifically in classes or subject matter that doesn’t directly indicate that race is going to be a part of the conversation? So we often hear this from faculty in math or science, or I would even say in my area of design where it’s not obvious that race might be something that should be discussed. What are the consequences of completely avoiding it?

Cyndi: Well, obviously it marginalizes it. So, it turns it into something that only some people can do. Only some people can cover these topics, only some people are allowed to on some level. And it’s interesting you ask that because this has come up on my campus in the last couple of years in a couple of different ways. Because we have, I don’t know if you all have it, a diversity requirement, but we do. So we have one course, American Cultural Diversity, that students are supposed to take. And there’s been sort of a…fight is a strong word, but…argument over who should be teaching those courses. And I don’t think just anyone should be teaching them. But I do think people can develop an expertise within their own field. So for example, I have a colleague (and we have a very big agriculture college on my campus), and she teaches soil science and crop production and all that sort of thing. So that’s an area where you think, where’s the race going to be that but it’s deeply in it because she’s teaching these future farmers and folks working in that industry. And there’s so many immigrants that work in farming. So she developed and she developed the expertise on this. And she developed a class on immigration…migrant farm workers, essentially. She and I talked about that course many times when she was in the process of developing and starting to teach it. She teaches it regularly. And I think the advantage of that is that, for the students who are majoring in that college, that’s going to feel very relevant for them. And so again, I think people have to develop some expertise to do it, and then they need some tools for how to teach it. But we all need tools for how to teach it because it’s hard. So, I think it’s important because it allows people to be more motivated to see how it relates to their specific field. I also have a colleague in math, who has talked a lot about trying to develop some courses around race and whiteness and math. You may recall, there was a math professor, I think, in Illinois, who was writing about white privilege and math and got a lot of haters online, essentially. Basically a really good scholarly analysis about the way white privilege works in math. And that stuff is really useful for students. It helps them connect in ways that are relevant to them.

John: You mentioned using narrative. While evidence is useful, it doesn’t always reach all of the students. I’ve been teaching about discrimination in my labor economics classes for decades. And it’s remarkable how resistant people are to facts. Because they rely on the sort of narratives: “My third cousin twice removed is this exceptional case. And it means all this evidence is wrong.” But you mentioned using narrative perhaps in a constructive way to help students understand that. Could you give us some examples of that?

Cyndi: Yeah, sure. Like the example that pops to mind right away was a really powerful piece that I used this semester on black maternal death rates, you may know that they’re wildly disparate, right? There’s a huge health disparities when it comes to race and healthcare. And so there was a really nice piece that was actually in the New York Times Magazine. That was this really good combination of a personal story of one woman and her experience. She lost a baby and then she was pregnant again and dealing with that… and there have been all these famous cases. Serena Williams most famously talked about her complications during birth and not being believed by doctors. So this piece was really great because they both had her story but then woven into it, it was a really well written piece. It had all the statistics, the differences…And the students…I gave it to them over a two-day period, because it was pretty long, and we discussed it for two days. And I just used it as this larger example of implicit bias in the healthcare industry. And these larger statistics on the disparities, the wealth gap…it illustrated a bunch of things that we had already covered. And the students loved it. It was hard for them to read, but they were very engaged with it. And some of the questions I got were excellent. And I’ll just say, too, I think one important thing is that when you come into a discussion, it’s really important to have a base to discuss with. And so, every day they have to read and post questions. I don’t give like reading quizzes, but they have to post questions so that I know that they read or at least mostly read, and I grade them. Because if you don’t do that, then your discussion is not good at all. If people don’t have a base of evidence to work from, you’re not going to get anywhere. And so those types of materials…I’m always looking for them…where they have that combo of the broad statistics and also the individual stories…and yeah, I know economics, it’s really tough to get those pieces. It’s the same for psychology can be really hard to find, but they’re useful.

John: Well, certainly in immigration and discrimination in labor markets, there’s a lot of examples out there and lots of good content.

Cyndi: Yeah, there definitely is. You just got to always be on the lookout.

Rebecca: So, what happens when it’s a conversation where the discussion point wasn’t going to be race, but then it becomes race. There isn’t a piece that you’re going to discuss ahead of time. But it pops up in conversation, it needs to be addressed. Do you have any strategies for handling those more impromptu situations that occur?

Cyndi: Well, for me, I think I always go back to then, either being honest that I don’t know enough to comment on it. What that question makes me think of are when students will bring up current examples, either that I don’t know or that I don’t know enough about. And so I will always try if I can to find some relevant psychological data or evidence or sociological data or evidence that I can bring it back to. And there have been times when if current events are happening, and I feel like I don’t know enough, I’ll just say, I don’t think we know enough. So if we have time, maybe we all spend a few minutes on our phones trying to find some information and you can do that right in class sometimes. But I always see myself as sort of a guide in terms of helping them sort through what the larger patterns are in terms of that evidence. And I think if you create a decent enough climate where they trust you, that usually can work. But yeah, the impromptu stuff can be tough, particularly if it’s not your area. I think that’s where, again, being prepared is hard. And I think you can just say, if this isn’t your area, like, “Let me go and find some more. Let me go find some stuff out and then we’ll come back to it.”

John: On dealing with things in the moment, how would you recommend people respond if someone makes a comment that somewhat racist without realizing the impact of that?

Cyndi: A really good example of that happened actually in a colleague’s classroom on campus this semester, and he called me after it. I forget what the term was, but a student had used a term in class that he found offensive and he was pretty sure other students found offensive and he didn’t really deal with it in the moment. And so he called me and asked what I thought. And I think one of the strongest ways to deal with that is, oftentimes, students don’t realize or people don’t realize that a turn might be offensive, or it might seem offensive. And so a lot of times, and what I advised him (and he said, it worked pretty well) is to go into those conversations, discussing it in terms of kind of a growth mindset idea. You know, here’s this term that was used…it’s offensive for some folks, but some folks might not understand why and then maybe talking about why that is. The word “colored” gets used a lot… “colored people.” And it makes sense in some ways that white students now who are very young wouldn’t know that that was an offensive term in the 50s and 60s. And so they use that term because they hear people say, people of color and then so colored people seems like a normal permutation of that, right? But it’s really not. It has this very unique history and so you could talk about how “Here’s this history that you may not have understood. And here’s this term that people didn’t use to describe themselves, it was used about them. And so that’s part of what makes it offensive.” And it’s normal that language changes and it evolves. And there’s plenty of examples you can bring up around that, like we talked in my classes about the word queer and the way that shifted over time…and language evolves…and so just sort of accepting that you’re going to make mistakes, you’re probably going to say things that might be offensive, but what’s the mindset that you bring to that? Do you bring the mindset that it’s normal, and you’ll figure it out, and you have to make your classroom safe for that too. So that it’s not like people are being called out and told that they’re saying the wrong word. We talked a lot in class about the difference between willful ignorance, like, “I know it’s wrong, but I’m gonna say it anyway” and just ignorance…like just really not knowing and coming out that and I give examples of my own, like times I screwed up…things I’ve said that were wrong, as a way to help them see that you’re never finished. I’ve been doing this for like 20 years, and I still make mistakes. I think that helps.

John: When you’re setting the classroom discussion rules, would that be a good time to bring that up?

Cyndi: Yeah, I think so. I think that you could, you could talk about expecting people to make mistakes. In the rule setting phase, you can talk about not expecting perfection, and how people will make mistakes and that’s all right, and ways to sort of come back from that, and gently talk about it rather than calling people out.

Rebecca: How do you handle microaggressions or other behaviors that might happen in class, that aren’t just like a word or whatever, but it’s something that’s happening or you see a pattern of behavior with a particular student. And maybe it’s something that you feel like you need to handle one on one. How do you usually handle those kinds of conversations?

Cyndi: Dealing with those. It’s usually much better one on one, because again, just like anybody, if you if you were to call someone out in class, then you’re likely to just get defensiveness and nobody’s going to be able to hear it. So what I’ve done in the past has been to talk to students one on one rather than to frame it as “You’re a bad person for doing this,” it’s like, “This is what I’m seeing. This is the pattern that I’m seeing. This is how I think it could be perceived” …and then just listening to what you hear. And you have to have a fair amount of trust with a student to be able to do that. But in general, I think whenever it comes to talking about someone’s racist behavior, it’s always better to focus on the behavior rather than the person. This is why when you hear national conversations about is that person a racist, I always want to throw my radio or my phone or whatever because it’s so frustrating to hear it framed in that way. “Is someone a racist?” is not a useful question. And I never quite sure what that means, because the goalposts always move, in terms of like how we think about what that word means. So, instead, focusing on the behavior, this is the pattern I’m seeing this is a problem. And I think if you’re in a moment where (this would be less with students, but more with colleagues) where you’re seeing this happen, and it’s directed at a person who has a lot less power in that moment… so like, a person of color, for example…you could step in and say, “This is what I’m seeing, and this is how I think about it.” So you’re not putting it on the person who was maybe the target of it. But you are saying in that moment, I see this and I see that this is a problem. That can be harder to do and less with students, I think more with colleagues. But, in general, it’s just sort of noting that it’s happening and being honest about it without necessarily saying you’re a bad person for doing this.

John: Last fall, we had a reading group addressing some of these issues. And one of the issues that came up in a lot of discussions is how to address these issues with colleagues, particularly those who are evaluating you for retention, promotion, and similar issues…

Rebecca: or hiring…

Cyndi: That is so hard when someone is in a position of power. Because if you’re the job candidate, there’s just no way that you’re going to be able, in that moment, to be able to do that.

John: What if you’re a junior faculty member on, for example, a recruitment committee and you observe comments or behavior that seems to be biased in some way. What would you suggest to a faculty member in that position?

Cyndi: I think you could go back to the sort of something called micro resistance. And there’s been a little bit written about this. In terms of how to deal with it, again, not making it about the person but just saying like, this is what I’m hearing, this is what I’m seeing. This is how I feel about it. And so you make it more about yourself. In extreme situations, and I’ve certainly been in them and seen them, you could go to other people that you trust on the committee and say, “This is what I’m seeing. This is what I’m hearing.” This is slightly different, but I had a slightly different but I had a student come to me last week and say that she’s in another course. And she’s hearing this from an instructor. And so then I was able to go to that department chair and say, what’s happening? So, I think using your mentors, using your colleagues, if you’re in that lower-power position; and if you’re in a higher-power position in those same spaces, try not to make the target responsible for that. If you’re a man, and you’re seeing sexism, it’s useful to just call that out. And again, not calling the person out, but just saying, “This is what I’m seeing. This is the pattern.” We talked about this actually, there’s an interesting anecdote in my class this last week. We were talking about this micro resistance thing and one of the students is a softball player and she’s on the softball team. According to her, there’s one black softball player on the team and everybody else is white. And, according to my student, whenever racist things will come up, like, they’ll all look at the black student to ask her “Is this okay?” And we talked in class about like, maybe that’s not fair to put that on the student of color. This white student feels like she really wants to be an ally, like she really wants to be an advocate. So we talked about, well, maybe you just say what you think about it, rather than asking her “Is it okay?” or going to her afterwards and saying, “Do you feel okay about this?” Because what is she going to say in that moment? I mean, she’s in the minority…the black student is, and so I think that can be a useful way to think about it too, because a lot of times we want the person who’s lower in power to like, excuse it and make it okay. And that’s really not fair. And I think it happens just because people don’t think about the power dynamics at all. They just don’t think about it. It doesn’t occur to them. And so trying to be more intentional about what is the power in this situation and trying to be more fair.

John: One of the issues if there’s a small number of minorities in a class, one potential issue might be stereotype threat. What are the consequences of that? And how can we address that perhaps by making it a more supportive environment?

Cyndi: Yeah, stereotype threat is really interesting. I know a lot about this. Actually, I’ve given lots of workshops on this, in addition to like implicit bias and stuff, too. And it’s a real problem. The consequences are…they’re sort of short term and long term. So the short-term consequences of stereotype threat is that you have students who underperform. So in a test situation or on a writing assignment, where you have a student who is feeling stereotype threat as a result of race or gender or social class. And so then it just create that extra layer of anxiety and stress, essentially. And it’s not always apparent. And you don’t necessarily know that that’s what you’re experiencing. But we know from the neuroscience research that, you just have less working memory in those moments because of stereotype threat. And so the short-term threat is that you underperform. The long-term consequence is that students disengage from the area altogether. So this is why we hear.…I’ve heard it so many times from my female advisees…“I’m not a math person. I’m not a science person. And I think it happens in art as well. I don’t know about design specifically…

Rebecca: um hmm.

Cyndi: …but you’ll get like, I’m not an art person. I’m not creative.

Rebecca: I can’t draw.

CUNDI: I can’t draw, yeah, that’s it. That one’s, I think, less about race, maybe a little bit more about gender, but it’s a very similar thing of like, “I don’t feel like I can do this. I’m not creative.” And so I’m just going to withdraw from it altogether. And so you see what Claude Steele calls dis-identification. So I’m just going to dis-identify with that field. It’s just not my thing. I’m going to go get my self esteem somewhere else. And obviously, that has serious consequences if the thing you’re dis-identifying with is school altogether. And so that’s why we see this underperformance over time with students of color and with women in math and science. The ways to get around that…there are a few. There’s a whole set of interventions that social psychologists have developed that can be really powerful. I guess I would send listeners to the mindset network web page. I don’t know if y’all have ever seen that. It’s mindsetscholarsnetwork.org. But it’s a bunch of social psychologists who have gotten together to create these really pretty low-cost interventions around increasing belonging…using values affirmations… Utility value is another one…growth mindset. There’s a bunch of them and there’s a little tweaks that you can do in your classes to help that. The other big intervention, and you can sort of call that active pedagogy. So there’s really good research that the more active your class is, that’s going to be good for everybody. But, it’s especially good for your students of color your first-generation students and your students who are women in math and science and engineering courses, where they’re more likely to feel that thread. That as an intervention itself is really great. There’s a ton of really nice discussions of that, and studies of that that you can find in terms of active pedagogy being an inclusive pedagogy. Because, in general, you want students to have a sense of belonging and you want them to feel included, and that’s going to help to undercut that, because really all stereotype threat is about is about a lack of trust. So everybody thinks it’s a lack of confidence in the student. It’s not. They don’t trust the environment to be fair, and so that’s why they disengage and they pull back. And so you want to you want to do everything you can to keep that trust.

John: …and they build more of a sense of community with their fellow students.

Cyndi: Absolutely.

John: I’m going to our conference in a few weeks, and one of the activities there is something called “sip and paint.” A friend of mine tried to convince me to do that. And my reaction was “No, the last time I painted I think I was seven years old.” [LAUGHTER] So, there’s a gender issue perhaps with the artwork thing.

Cyndi: Creativity. Yeah.

John: You mentioned implicit bias. My labor classes are online and one of the things I do is I have them take some of the Implicit Association tests, and then discuss them. And they tend to be pretty comfortable discussing many of them, but they tend to be much less comfortable discussing race.

Cyndi: Oh yeah.

John: But one of the things that led to some really good discussions are the associations between gender and careers.

Cyndi: Yeah.

John: And a lot of female students remark on how surprised they are that they associate women with home activities and men with careers. But, one of the things I note from the students who tend to perhaps have the more resistant attitudes towards facts in general, from other discussions, is that they tend to question the tests themselves and say, it’s clearly set up to demonstrate a bias when that bias really doesn’t exist. And those students are really hard to reach and we can keep giving them facts. But I’ve never been completely successful in getting through that barrier, at least in any one course. Any suggestions?

Cyndi: It’s really tough. As a social psychologist, I feel pretty comfortable talking about the Implicit Association test, but it is really hard to describe well, so that’s one problem with it, because you try to explain “No, no, like 25 years of research…” When I still had paper versions of the literature, I gotta bring in my big giant folder and I just sort of slap it on the desk and be like, “They’ve been studying this since 1995. But, like you said, the facts don’t always help. One thing I think that helps with them understanding implicit associations, is to depersonalize i… and I have some great podcast and book suggestions and article suggestions on how to help them understand what implicit associations are. But really, it’s not about them as a bad person. And that is one way I found to get at it. There’s a phrase that gets used by Mahzarin Banaji, who was one of the test co-creators and she talks about implicit associations as the thumbprint of the culture, which is really accurate, you know. So it’s not you’re a bad person, you have implicit bias… like, we all have it and it’s the thumbprint of the culture. You’ve been learning since you were a baby, what’s associated? what’s good and what’s bad? I mean, it really is that crude. It is your brain saying, “This group is bad. This group is good” over and over and over again, you get those messages. So if you can de-personalize it, I think that can help a lot. I have found that using the podcasts that I have on it, and some of the more newsy articles and they cite the researchers, that can be really helpful, too. But yeah, it’s they want to criticize the test all day long. I’ve gotten to where I don’t have them take the test until after they have a decent grounding in the science because they’re very resistant to the idea. They think the test just sucks.

John: At least those who have their preconceptions not confirmed in the way they’d like them to.

Cyndi: Yeah, because again, they think this means I’m a bad person. They think it’s the racism test. There’s a King of the Hill episode. I don’t know if y’all have ever seen that show, but I used to love that show. And there’s an episode where Hank has to go take the racism test, because he’s worried that his dog is racist or something. I can’t remember the full thing of the story. But, that episode is one of my favorites because it’s like, “Okay, let’s see if he’s racist.” But, that’s not the way it works, folks. I’ll have students sometimes say like, “We should just have all cops and all teachers and all judges take this test. And then we’d know who to hire…” and I’m like, “There’d be nobody left. There wouldn’t be enough people left to do all these jobs.” And I think if you talk about it in that way, it can make it so that it’s not a moral failing, which is, I think, why they’re so resistant.

Rebecca: I’ve done something as a follow up to doing some of the tests in my classes where I had students look at their portfolio of design work, and just see who was represented in the materials that they made. And what they usually do is discover that either it’s a lot of people that are just like them, or that it’s white and young….

Cyndi: Yeah.

Rebecca: …which some of the people in the class may not fit that particular group, but that’s what they’ve still represented. And that helps a lot, because we talk about, “Well, it’s easier to design for a group of people that you’re around all the time, perhaps”

Cyndi: Yeah.

Rebecca: Or, You know, know what, like this particular population, maybe preferences, if that’s a group that you’re a member of. And that sometimes helps too because it kind of breaks down some of the total ownership or blaming a student for something. It becomes more of that cultural identity piece.

Cyndi: Yeah, you can ask them, like, “Who’s most of your friends? Who’s in your environment?” I have them write journal entries all semester. I don’t say “Go find the racism and tell me about it” I just say like, ”Just tell me what you observe in terms of both race and gender.” Just like “What do you see? Who’s doing what jobs? Who’s in what space?” and that helps them too to start to see the stuff that they just sort of take for granted, because it’s the water that we all swim in. We’re all very segregated. And so I think it’s good for students to recognize that and then how that plays itself out in who you select to design, for example, and who comes into your consciousness. So again, thumbprint of the culture rather than moral failing…bad person.

Rebecca: I also do an activity in my capstone class where I ask students like, who are there five designers that inspire them, and then I end up with a pretty small list when we aggregate all of them together. And then I say, I’m going to ask this question again later in the semester, and I expect these lists to be really different. [LAUGHTER]

Cyndi: Yeah, that’s good…makes them explicitly think about it.

John: We always end with the question, what are you doing next?

Cyndi: I want to write more about these issues. What I really want to do is run some workshops for faculty. I’ve done a couple. Most of my workshops have been on stereotype threat and
implicit bias. So I would like to run more workshops on this topic in particular, like how do you teach about racism rather than teaching inclusively. That’s fun to talk about too. But how do you how do you teach about race and racism? I would love to do more of that. And I would also like to write more about these issues. Because I think it’s hard to do. And so I would like to just have more conversation. I’m also hoping eventually to maybe write a different book about inclusive pedagogy. We’ll see. I’m not sure. it’s a ways off.

John: And when is your book coming out?

Cyndi: It’s supposed to be November, I believe, November or December.

Rebecca: Well, I know that will probably have a line of people now that really want to make sure they get their hands on your book, because…

Cyndi: I hope so.

Rebecca: …there’s a lot of books that deal with these issues conceptually, but not in a practical way.

Cyndi: I could not find a lot on teaching about it. Like I said, I wanted the guide that I wish I had for myself 20 years ago, but I there’s just there’s not a ton. There’s a lot of good chapters on it in some edited books, but there wasn’t a lot that had sort of an overarching idea. So that’s what I wanted to try to do.

John: We were looking for that just last year. So, we will have it on pre-order very soon.

Rebecca: Yeah, Definitely.

Cyndi: Cool. Thanks.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us. This was really great.

Cyndi: Yeah, thanks so much for asking.

John: Thank 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.