Category: social justice

313. Supporting Neurodiverse Students and Faculty

Posted in access, attention, disability, diversity, engagement, equity, higher education, inclusion, learning, motivation, pedagogy, social justice, teaching
November 1, 2023

Many discussions of inclusive teaching practices ignore the role of neurodiversity in higher ed. In this episode, Liz Norell joins us to discuss strategies that faculty and institutions can use to create a welcoming environment for neurodivergent students and faculty. Liz is a political scientist and the Associate Director of Instructional Support at the University of Mississippi’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Many discussions of inclusive teaching practices ignore the role of neurodiversity in higher ed. In this episode, we discuss strategies that faculty and institutions can use to create a welcoming environment for neurodivergent students and faculty.

[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 Liz Norell. Liz is a political scientist and the Associate Director of Instructional Support at the University of Mississippi’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Welcome back, Liz.

Liz: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

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

Liz: I am not. I am drinking some vitamin water, tropical mango flavor.

Rebecca: So there’s some stuff mixed with water. That’s tea, right?

Liz: Yes, sure.

John: And I am drinking Prince of Wales tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, I like that one. John. Haven’t had that in a while. And I have Awake today. It’s Monday… [LAUGHTER] when we’re recording.

Liz: That feels fair.

John: But it’s getting really boring. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I know. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss issues related to neurodiversity in higher education. Before we start, though, could you define neurodiversity? And how is this different from neurodivergence?

Liz: Sure. So I think these two terms get kind of conflated with one another a lot. And so I tried to be really explicit in talking about neurodiversity versus neurodivergence. And there are a lot of different perspectives on these two terms, and some of the baggage that they carry with them. But when I think about neurodiversity, I just think about a diversity of brains. And so any group that has more than one person is going to be neurodiverse. We all have different brains. But neurodivergence is a brain that works differently than how we typically think of brains working. And there are lots of diagnoses that get put under the umbrella of neurodivergent. Some of the most common ones are autism, ADHD, there’s Tourette’s. There’s lots of other ones, dyslexia, dyspraxia, OCD sometimes gets lumped in there, bipolar disorder will get lumped in there. So neurodivergence is just a brain that works differently than the way we typically think of brains working.

Rebecca: If we’re thinking about college student populations, and I know that this is partially a guess, because we don’t actually know, but how many do we think are neurodivergent?

Liz: The estimates that I’ve seen have been around like one in six, maybe, but I think that it’s probably closer to 30, or 35%, honestly. I think a third is probably a reasonably good estimate. It’s a large number. And I will say that a lot of those students either may not know that they have some sort of neurodivergence, or they may not ever tell us that they have a neurodivergence and we’ll talk more about that a little bit later, I think.

John: What proportion of neurodivergent students have accommodations through campus disability services?

Liz: Who knows? If we don’t know the denominator, it’s hard to know what proportion of people would be registering with accommodations. But I think there are certainly a lot more students who are registering with disability services with an official diagnosis, but there are some barriers to that. And the first one is that it’s really expensive and time consuming to get a diagnosis. So I should say, and I should start pretty early in our conversation by saying that I recently went through the diagnosis process to get a diagnosis of autism at age 45. And it took me a year from reaching out until I had the diagnosis. And I was able to navigate that, because I have some experience interacting with medical teams. I had good insurance, but it still took me a year to get an appointment, and to get the diagnosis. And so there are a lot of students who may not have the tools or the time or the resources to go through that, even if they suspect it. And I went 44 years of my life without even suspecting that I might be neurodivergent. I think there are a lot of barriers to that. And then once you have the diagnosis, it can be very intimidating to disclose that, to go through the campus accommodation process takes so much time and advocacy. And that comes from a population that’s already taxed in terms of their bandwidth and their resources and their just ability to get these things done. So I don’t think that thinking about the numbers of people who seek accommodations is even close to representing the population of students who might have these conditions.

John: It would seem that there’s a bit of an equity issue here in that students from wealthier households, students from continuing generation households, are much more likely to have the resources to go through the process of having the need for accommodations being documented.

Liz: That’s right. And I think this gets into some of the language around neurodivergent versus the neurotypical. A lot of people who are neurodivergent, who have some sort of condition or way of thinking or way of operating have been socialized to think that there’s something wrong with them, this kind of medical model of disability, instead of the more like social model of this is a socially constructed difference. And so to seek out a diagnosis requires a kind of self containment, I think, to recognize that this is not something wrong with me. A lot of people who have a neurodivergent brain probably feel like they should be able to act like a neurotypical person. So they don’t want accommodations because they feel like that is somehow making them less than their neurotypical students. And it’s this medical model that has infused so much of our talk about disability, and especially pernicious here where we know that there are real struggles that students have when they have these neurodivergent brains, that we are just not accommodating well in the classroom.

Rebecca: I do want to mention at this juncture, that we do have an Episode 221 – Disability in Higher Education with Kat Macfarlane that really talks in detail about the accommodation process. And so that’s a really great place to learn more about that process in high detail that was kind of the subject of most of that episode. Most of our college faculty generally haven’t been trained to address issues of neurodiversity. Can you talk about some of the common challenges our neurodivergent students face in classrooms?

Liz: Yes. And it’s absolutely the case that we have not been trained in this. And I think also many of my faculty colleagues, past and present, have this idea that an accommodation is somehow like special treatment that’s making a class easier for students, when we should, John, as you mentioned, be thinking about this as an equity issue. So accommodations are meant to provide equal opportunity for success. And if you’re bringing some of these conditions into the classroom, you’re already operating at a deficit. So what are those? Well, it can be things like being really easily overloaded by sensory information. So we see this a lot with autism and ADHD, where, as someone who now understands herself to be autistic, I think about this phrase, “the lights are too loud,” like, it just feels very harsh. And when people are talking over each other, I get very flooded very quickly. This has been the case my whole life. If there are unfamiliar foods or drinks, that can be really overloading and so background noise, people who are close to each other, uncomfortable seating, these are all things that can show up in our classrooms that can cause someone with a neurodivergent brain to go into a kind of overload. And that, of course, reduces their ability to pay attention and to learn and to retain information. Unclear communication is a huge challenge for people with neurodivergent brains, because it’s often the case that there’s some sort of like inability to recognize sarcasm, or the ability to get some nonverbal communication. Oftentimes, people with neurodivergent brains will interpret everything very literally. And so they miss out on some of the nuance. And for me, it’s been this like obsession with choosing the just right word, because I need it to be precise. And I can get really fixated on that sometimes, in a way that feels very pedantic. But that is really just me very much trying to communicate clearly. When there’s unclear terminology–write professionally, or be collegial, or work well with others–like I don’t know what any of that means. I have no idea. And there’s an assumption that there’s some shared social norms that may not be as visible to people with a neurodivergent brain. There’s a lot of, of course, well documented social aspects to neurodivergence. So just like not really knowing how to work with others in an effective way, or feeling like that sense of, I’m different. I’m broken, I’m not as good as… that I mentioned earlier, can carry over into social dynamics. And then the last one that I think is really important for us to think about in terms of higher ed is executive function. So executive function is that ability to kind of be a taskmaster of your own attention and brain. And so things like prioritizing work, time management, how to take notes, how to make decisions, how to cope with the ups and downs of life, due dates, all of those things like managing systems is really hard when you have a neurodivergent brain. And we often assume that our students have those skills. And so we don’t scaffold them. We don’t help them. We don’t point them to resources, and that can be really hard. So those are just like four big clusters: sensory overload, communication, social interaction, and executive function.

John: How can faculty anticipate or design with neurodivergence in mind, particularly when many students with disabilities choose not to self identify?

Liz: Just being aware of these things that I’ve just mentioned, is hugely helpful. And I think the hard work is really just awareness. So for example, I have heard lots of my colleagues and myself at earlier points in my career, lament about students who are distracted by their cell phones or their laptops, who seemed to need to go to the bathroom three times during a 50-minute class, or who otherwise seemed to be just kind of like disconnected from class. We see that as a sign of disrespect and as of not paying attention. But a neurodivergent brain often really struggles to sit still and make visual contact with another person or object. And so it’s often the case that our neurodivergent students can learn better if they are doing something, the more physical, the better. So for some of my students, it’s things like knitting in class or coloring or doodling. This is actually not them disengaging or not paying attention. It’s them doing something that allows them to focus their attention on what you’re saying. So I like to think about performance of attention, what we often think of as paying attention. So if a neurodivergent student is going to perform attention, they’re probably not actually listening to anything you’re saying, because they’re using all of their brainpower to do the things that you think mean they’re paying attention. With that said, this sort of notion that we have to reorient our thinking about what students are doing and what that means in terms of their engagement with us, I think being really clear about scaffolding what tasks are needed, providing clear deadlines. So Karen Costa, who is just brilliant, talks a lot about ADHD, and she is a person with ADHD. And she talks about the need for more structure, not less, that flexibility can be useful, but you need a lot of structure. And for people with neurodivergent brains, it can be really helpful to have lots of small deadlines that are low stakes with some grace around them, but like clear structure is really important… messaging to students, like, here’s how you do this class. So if that’s working in a group that’s giving specific roles, and asking the students to decide who’s going to be the note taker, and who’s going to be the recorder, and who’s going to be the crazy idea person, and who’s going to be the let’s bring it back to the text person. So just kind of delineating some specific roles, communicating clearly and in multiple modalities. So especially if you’re doing a lot of audio lecturing, or giving up directions, making sure that those are also available in writing. So students can come back to them later when they know that you said something, but they don’t remember what. And then just being really aware of that sensory environment in which you’re learning. So if that’s in a physical classroom, thinking about ways to give students permission to make themselves comfortable, if that’s getting up and walking around a little bit, and just sort of saying, like, I know that that helps some of you concentrate, fine with me if you do that. Telling them that they can get up and leave the room for a couple of minutes if they need a break. If they want to bring in things to play with, color or fidget, create whatever, that’s fine too. A lot of my students like to just sit on the floor. I mean, that sounds like a disaster for me and my middle-aged body, but when you’re 18, it’s like easy to get up off the floor, and so if you want to sit on the floor, sit on the floor, it’s cool, if that helps you be more comfortable. So I think it’s awareness and then just messaging to students that they can do what they need to do. And I just want to say one more thing about this. And that is, even if you are not neurodivergent, even if you are what people define as neurotypical, you can talk about students you’ve had, people you know, friends, family members, colleagues, you know people who are neurodivergent, talk about some of the ways that they have given themselves permission to make their environments work for them. So that you’re messaging to students that you understand and that you support those kinds of self-advocacy efforts. So you don’t have to do all of that on the first day of school, [LAUGHTER], first day of class. It’s a lot, but I often include something on my syllabus that says you may have accommodations or you may not, but if there’s something that I can do to make this class easier for you to participate in meaningfully and be successful in, according to your own goals, then I will do it, as long as it’s something within my power to do. So. You don’t need formal accommodations to ask me to do something to help you.

Rebecca: One of the things that I heard you mention and often come up a lot in inclusive pedagogy and other spaces is the idea of scaffolding. Here, again, we have this assumption that everybody knows exactly what that is all the time. But part of that is really about helping students understand their priorities, perhaps within a class, and also how to manage their time related to certain kinds of tasks. Can you talk a little bit about that component of scaffolding and what that might actually look like in practice?

Liz: Yeah, it’s hard for me to tease that out without thinking about lots of other things too. Because, we, as faculty, are coming into the classroom with certain ideas about what should be important, and what students should want to do in order to be successful, whatever that means. And I have really had to learn over my teaching career to check myself on that, because my priorities are not the same as my students. I remember once I was grading a student’s final exam they had done, it was very, very early in my teaching career, I’m embarrassed to even say what they had done for their final, but it was it was multiple choice and I was grading it by hand, and I told them, they could just stick around. I would grade it real quick, and then give them their final grade, because I had done everything else before then. And I looked at the student who had come to class every day and had really meaningfully participated and said, “Your final grade as a C,” and I was so apologetic, like, “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry. “And this student was like, “YES! I PASSED!” And it was a real moment for me of just like saying, “Okay, you cannot put your own values and goals onto students, because that was literally the student’s dream–was to get a C and not have to take the class again,” I think when we’re talking about students, it’s really having that very frank conversation, like, some of you are here because you are being required to take this class, and I know it wasn’t your choice, and I’m going to try to make it as the least awful it can be for you. And I’m going to ask you to try to invest at least enough time to give it a fair shot. But I don’t expect that everybody has the same goals and so let’s take a moment and reflect on what success for you looks like. And then what do you need to do over the course of the next 15 weeks, or whatever it might be, in order to make that goal. And so we sort of assume that our students’ goals are to get a good grade and to move on to whatever the next thing is. But maybe it’s not, maybe they’re just taking the class for fun, maybe they don’t care about the grade. Maybe they’re an adult learner who has a curiosity about something. After I graduated undergrad, I took an ethics class online–this was like 2001 or 2002 maybe, so it was very early days of online teaching and learning. And I took it through the community college just because I had never taken it, and I thought it might be interesting. It really wasn’t interesting for me. So I just like stopped paying attention. But I did not consider that a failure. Like I got a little bit of information. I also took a macroeconomics class, because I had never taken a macro class; I had taken micro. And it was all online, and I did all the work, but I didn’t turn in any assignments because I just didn’t care about those. I just wanted to learn it. So, I think having these conversations can be really helpful in students figuring out what it is that they want to get out of a class

John: Going to that point you made about structure. This is something we’re seeing an awful lot… certainly in the work on inclusive teaching, in Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan’s book, as well as the work of Mary-Ann Winkelmes on transparency and learning and teaching. There seems to be a convergence that by providing students with structure and support, it can do a lot, it can benefit pretty much all students. In past discussions, when we spoke to those authors, much of the focus was on the benefits to first-gen students and to students who were historically minoritized. But it’s kind of nice to know that the same inclusive teaching strategies also addresses issues of neurodivergence.

Liz: I had an experience at my last job, where I just kept asking my dean, “Give me a set of rules and I will follow them.” And she would say, “Well, just use your best professional judgment.” And I don’t know what that means. I think people with certain kinds of neurodivergence just want you to tell them what to do and they will do it. Give me a set of very clear expectations, and I will meet them and this can work for everyone… just like clarity. And it doesn’t have to be punitive. I’m very fond of Cate Denial’s Pedagogy of Kindness. And this notion that like it should be kind, which can be as Sarah Rose Cavanagh says like a warm demander. I want you to have expectations of me, I want to know that you care about me. But just be really clear, because clarity is kind. And yes, it helps with all of those things. So the first generation students, the historically minoritized, the neurodivergent, lots of different kinds of people are benefited by this. And even the third generation middle class neurotypical student, also [LAUGHTER] benefits from clarity.

Rebecca: Imagine that, not spending all of our cognitive energy trying to figure out what people want.

Liz: Exactly. {LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: What are some of the challenges that neurodivergent faculty face in their careers? We’ve talked a lot about students, but we also know that faculty also exist.

Liz: We do. And we’re not all like cut from the same cookie cutter. I can tell you, just from my own experiences, that higher ed can be really hostile to those who are neurodivergent. I’ve had really great experiences, and I’ve had some really challenging ones. I think that it’s helpful when we’re aware of these things for students, because we often have the most power over their educational experience. But we also share power with our colleagues. And so knowing what some of these things are can help us understand the behaviors of our colleagues that we might have been inclined to read as subversive, or unprofessional, or lacking in collegiality. Those words get used a lot, for a lot of different kinds of identities and traits. Neurodivergence is certainly one of them. So as a woman who’s neurodivergent, that intersectionality means that I’m always on the lookout for that kind of language of like unprofessional and not collegial and you’re being difficult in some way. Well, or maybe I just don’t understand what it is that you’re asking of me. I also think we need to be really careful when we think about this idea of fit. So especially in hiring, we are looking for someone who will fit. But fit often means like me. And it can be very exclusionary to people who have some sort of neurodivergence, because they may not act the way that you do. But that’s actually a strength, I think. When you look at the different kinds of neurodivergent conditions, ADHD brains are so good at hyperfocus. They just don’t always do a good job of like, understanding time, right, there’s a kind of time blindness. But they’re so good at that. And autistic brains are so excited about the things that they’re excited about. And that energy is so captivating. And so these are not weaknesses, these are strengths that can really help us appreciate things in our work that we wouldn’t if we didn’t have those around. So when thinking about working with colleagues, all of the things that I said before, sensory overwhelm, communication, social interactions, and kind of executive function, we should be thinking about those things with our colleagues as well. So when I design a workshop, for example, in our Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, I’m thinking about, “Okay, how do I create a space where the chairs could be moved away from the rest of the group so that people can have a little bit of space and kind of get away from that? Can I dim the lights a little? Can I ask, make sure everybody’s using a microphone, but also let people know that if they want to put in their loop earplugs, as I do, you can do that to kind of limit some background noise. Can I make sure that everything I say is also written down somewhere so that people have something to refer to later? Can I talk about my own experiences in a way that normalizes other people doing the same?” All of those things can be used to make the environment more inviting for our colleagues. The last thing I want to say is that it is so exhausting, as a person with a disability of any kind to constantly having to advocating for yourself. So the more that non-disabled people can lend their support and their voices to advocating for easier pathways to accessibility, the less you’re taxing your disabled colleagues. So thinking about what can I do, that if I did it, would make it easier for a disabled colleague to come behind me and ask for the same?

John: Near the end of the summer you posted on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, something about a podcast and puzzles set of workshops. Have you started that? And could you talk a little bit about that?

Liz: Yes, so I’m really excited about this. And a lot of people who are not at the University of Mississippi are also excited about it. And I’m just trying to get the people on campus excited about it. So the idea here is that, and this was specifically created as a neurodivergent-friendly space. So faculty and staff can come to our center for an hour every other week. So this Wednesday will be our next one. And we play a pedagogy podcast. So we played an episode of this podcast, and we do a puzzle or some other kind of individual or parallel play is what it’s called. So I’m working on a puzzle. It’s in the next room, and I’m not done with it. And it’s driving me crazy, because I don’t like unfinished puzzles. But I have committed to not working on it, except when everybody else is here. But it’s a Funko Pop puzzle of Ted Lasso, so it’s really fun. And we’ve had two of these now, and it’s a small but mighty group who are into this, but the lights are low, it’s indirect, diffuse lighting, there’s lots of different kinds of seating, and one person comes and colors, a couple of people have come and done puzzles. But the idea is that it’s just a way to get together in a social space without the social expectation of small talk. So you can just come and show up and listen to a podcast and leave. If you want to stay and talk you can, you don’t have to, I am hoping that this becomes a movement of podcasts and puzzles. And I’m going to stick with it as long as it takes for me to make it so here, but we have probably like five or six people who have come to one of them. And I hope many more who will as it continues to spread. It’s kind of hard to describe in a website or an email, but I think once people come they see the brilliance of this… I say with all possible modesty. [LAUGHTER]

John: Have people actually finished a puzzle during the course of one of these meetings?

Liz: This Wednesday will be our third meeting. So I think the Funko Pop Ted Lasso crossover puzzle will finish this week, I hope. It’s going to drive me absolutely batty if it doesn’t, and then we’ll move on to another one.

Rebecca: That sounds like a lot of fun.

Liz: It is. And it’s a good way to kind of model why I think so many of our neurodivergent students would really thrive at a kind of way of learning that’s very different than what we’re used to in higher ed. And that’s probably why it’s hard for people to imagine why we’re doing this or what it looks like. But we have writing groups where people come into our room and do their own writing. And just that body doubling of having someone else there, while I’m trying to do something is enormously helpful. And so in this case, like I took two things that I love, that I never make time for because I feel guilty about all the other things I should be doing. So puzzles and listening to podcasts about teaching, and I just put them together. And I hope that more people will see ways to create these spaces that are perhaps a bit unconventional to higher ed. But that can open our imagination to the ways that we can model learning in different ways than the more traditional models that we’re used to seeing.

Rebecca: I like the analogy with the writing group, in that it’s really holding people accountable to do a particular thing, which is to attend to teaching in a different way, by listening to a podcast as opposed to a different kind of workshop or something and allowing them to do something with their hands.

Liz: I also have this very large bucket of fidget toys that I take to every workshop. And I say just borrow a fidget and just play with it and see how that changes your experience of the workshop. And if you find it to be soothing, imagine what normalizing this in your classes might do for your students. So my colleague who’s just a couple of doors down I have one of these little like pop balls that make like these really satisfying noises. And the first time I brought this to a workshop, she said, “Is that the sound I’ve been hearing?” I just play with it all the time.

John: Do you have any other advice for faculty and campuses who wish to better address neurodiversity?

Liz: There’s this phrase in the autism world and the disability world and I’ve been hearing it more and more and it is, “Nothing for us, without us.” And so I can tell you my perspective as someone who is neurodivergent, there’s so much expertise on your campus, and you should talk to those people. So that might be in the disabilities support services area. It might be students in your class, but just like have these conversations and find out, what can I do from my position, whatever it might be, that can make this place more welcoming to people who are neurodivergent? And I think when you’re asking that question, just like with anything else that we might be doing, then people are going to assume good intent. And they’re also going to be much more forgiving, if you make a stumble of some kind, whatever that might be. I don’t know. And so just talk to people, ask them. I feel like this is the most obvious advice that we give as faculty developers, but it’s ask your students, just ask them, they just want to be asked. And so if I was to give any advice that would be that just ask your students: “What can I do that would make this easier for you?”

Rebecca: I know, one thing that we talk a lot about on our campus is that access is really the doorway to belonging. If you don’t have access…

Liz: Yes.

Rebecca: …you’re not going to feel like you belong.

Liz: Just to know that someone is thinking about what you might need is enough to make them feel like they’re included, and that you’re listening when they tell you what they need, would be helpful.

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

Liz: I have so many writing projects that I’m just sort of getting started with. So I just recently finished a manuscript on my book, The Present Professor, that I mentioned the last time we talked. And so that’s going through the publishing process and will eventually go out in the world, I assume, knock on wood. So I’m filling my time while I wait for progress there on, it seems like, about a dozen other writing projects, all of which are just kind of me thinking. I’ve been really interested lately in talking about the role of learning outcomes, and what we decide rises to the importance of a learning outcome. And if I may say this one controversial thing that I just keep saying to everyone I know, I don’t think you as a student should be able to fail a class for doing something or failing to do something that is not a learning outcome of the course. So if turning in something two days late means that I fail the assignment, then shouldn’t that be a learning outcome, timeliness? I don’t know. It just feels to me like, if we’re going to assess learning, then we should be assessing learning, and not all the other things that are performance of learning. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that and a whole bunch of other things. That’s what’s next, something, many things.

John: We had a similar conversation with Kevin Gannon, not too long ago who talked about…

Liz: …performative hardassery…

John: That was the technical term…

Rebecca: [LAUGHING]

John: …but it was…

Liz: Yes

John: …in terms of rigor, who distinguished between cognitive rigor and logistical rigor.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you and we look forward to more conversations in the future. And when your book gets closer to coming out, we’d be very happy to have you back on to talk about that as well as any other topic that comes up in between now and then.

Liz: Absolutely. I so appreciate the work you guys do, and I’m grateful and honored to be a part of it.

Rebecca: It was great talking to you. 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.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

[MUSIC]

310. Community Effects of Incarceration

Posted in equity, higher education, learning, parenting, pedagogy, social justice, teaching
October 11, 2023

Some students receive substantial support on their educational journey within their homes, communities, and schools; others face substantial barriers. In this episode, Arpit Gupta joins us to discuss his recent study that examines the effect of community incarceration rates on the academic performance of children in affected households and on their classmates.

Arpit is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at NYU. Arpit has published extensively in highly ranked finance, economics, science, law, and management journals on topics ranging from housing markets, infrastructure investment, bail, local journalism, racial housing gaps, incarceration, and remote work.

Show Notes

  • Gupta, Arpit and Hansman, Christopher and Riehl, Evan (2022). Community Impacts of Mass Incarceration. May 3.
  • Norris, S., Pecenco, M., & Weaver, J. (2021). The effects of parental and sibling incarceration: Evidence from ohio. American Economic Review, 111(9), 2926-2963.
  • Lazear, E. P. (2001). Educational production. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 116(3), 777–803.
  • Chetty, R. (2016). Improving opportunities for economic mobility: New evidence and policy lessons. Economic Mobility Research and Ideas on Strengthening Families Communities the Economy, edited by Brown, Alexandra, Buchholz, David, Davis, Daniel, and Gonzalez, Arturo, 35-42.
  • Chetty, R. (2021). Improving equality of opportunity: New insights from big data. Contemporary Economic Policy, 39(1), 7-41.

Transcript

John: Some students receive substantial support on their educational journey within their homes, communities, and schools; others face substantial barriers. In this episode, we discuss a recent study that examines the effect of community incarceration rates on the academic performance of children in affected households and on their classmates.

[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;hellip;

John: ;hellip;and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer;hellip;

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Arpit Gupta. Arpit is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at NYU. Arpit has published extensively in highly ranked finance, economics, science, law, and management journals on topics ranging from housing markets, infrastructure investment, bail, local journalism, racial housing gaps, incarceration, and remote work. Welcome, Arpit.

Arpit: Thanks so much for having me.

John: It’s great to see you again. It’s been a while since we last talked… 20 years or so.

Arpit: Yeah, it’s been a while. So I owe my economics career to John having him teach me at a very formative time in my life. Very happy to be back here.

John: Back at the TIP program, way back. And you would have probably done that anyway, because you had a lot of interest in it even back then. Today’s teas are: …are you drinking any tea, Arpit?

Arpit: …just drinking water at the moment.

Rebecca: It is the foundation of tea.

John: It’s one of our more popular teas.

Rebecca: I have an Awake tea today.

John: I have a Darjeeling tea today.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your May 2022 working paper on community impacts of mass incarceration, co-authored with Christopher Hansman and Evan Riehl. Could you tell us about the origin of this study?

Arpit: Yeah, so Chris, Evan, and I were all graduate students at Columbia University. Chris and I were also roommates. And we had a third roommate who was a public defender. So we would just come home and hear interesting stories of his experience at work and things he was seeing. One of the things that he brought home and kind of talked to us was the fact that bail was an interesting process. And there was an interesting random assignment across bail judges. And so that was our first project, it kind of stemmed directly from talking to this roommate and his collaborator on that project. And another thing that he was mentioning is that the way he saw it is that incarceration spells really had rippling effects, not just directly on individuals concerned, but kind of affected broader communities in different ways. And we felt that that was a really interesting insight that has been explored in some other non-economics research. And we wanted to just explore this concept further, because we felt it was an important essential public policy question. And so we spent many years to try to get the right data and setting to explore further at these broader community impacts of incarceration.

John: So earlier studies had found that incarceration of a parent had significant effects on education for children within the household. Could you just talk a little bit about those effects before we talk about your contribution to this literature?

Arpit: Yeah, absolutely. So there is a pretty broad literature on this topic. And I would sort of separate some of the papers that are not in economics from the papers that are in economics. There are a number of great studies that, for example, will track cohorts of people across generations to kind of see what are the rippling long term implications of incarceration. There are a variety of these papers that explore I would sort of describe are the multi dimensional aspects of incarceration on different outcomes for individuals and families that are concerned. And I would sort of characterize this non-economic literature as really highlighting the disproportionate spatially concentrated incarceration. And that’s kind of the key insights of this broader sociological literature, that you think of incarceration as something that affects a lot of people in very concentrated ways and bad ways. The economics literature has taken a little bit of a different approach and has primarily focused on the direct impacts of incarceration, with some literature starting to look at how that also affects household members. A lot of literature has been in Scandinavian countries where they have a different justice system and really good data. Some of those papers have actually found positive effects of parental incarceration on children outcomes, which might make sense if you’re removing, for example, a negative role model from a child’s life or if the criminal justice system itself offers positive remediation, restorative justice, and so forth, that kind of improves someone’s outcomes after they’ve returned from prison. The closest paper to our study in the United States is going to be a paper by Norris and Weaver, which focuses on the effects of incarceration for students in Ohio. And there, they argue that incarceration of a parent improves the odds that the child is going to be involved in the criminal justice system in the future, so that they are less likely to be arrested in the future. And they find more mixed evidence on the education impact. They don’t find much evidence for negative education impacts. But that’s done on the kind of little bits of a smaller sample with larger standard errors.

John: Your study, though, goes a little bit further, because you’re looking not just as the effect on children within the household, but also spillover effects into their classrooms and schools, from incarceration of adults in the household. How did you separate out the effect of differences in incarceration rates from all the other factors that might influence such outcomes in those communities?

Arpit: Absolutely. So this is going to be, of course, a key distinction between how economists think about the problem versus other disciplines. We’re thinking upon the question of identification. How can we identify whether the negative impacts or positive impact you’re looking at can be attributed to incarceration, or are just reflective of other background trends. Let me start first with actually how we think about these effects in aggregate, because that gets at like the community dimension of the problem, which is kind of our central focus. So the big question that we’re really interested in is what happens to a community, when a lot of people within that community are behind bars? How does the impact on that set of individuals spill over and impact the overall community. And of course, this is an even harder identification problem than just looking at the attacks on one person, because you wonder what the omitted background factors that can affect entire communities. But we find that when a county has a relatively more strict set of judges, that actually has a large impact on the overall performance of all the students in the area. So that suggests that there are large impacts of incarceration that kind of broadly affect all the students in a particular area. And that motivates us to think about what is the size of the effect of incarceration on children’s outcomes, and what are the mechanisms by which they’re affected? But we then dig more deeply into thinking about the effects on the directly affected children, those whose parents are themselves incarcerated. There, we similarly use judicial variation, and we also look at the spillovers onto other children in the classroom. So the key innovation, the key contribution, I think, of our analysis is to take this question that has been studied before, but adopt it to the problem, thereby thinking about the more aggregate consequences and the mechanisms by which incarcerations affect broader communities.

John: And you also use an event study approach too, to provide more support. Could you talk a little bit about that part of the analysis?

Arpit: So we use those in both our direct and indirect analyses where we were trying to understand what is the impact on a student if their family member is incarcerated. And the event study approach basically looks before and after that arrest and looks at the outcomes for the children as measured by outcomes such as the test scores, the suspension rates, misbehavior rates, and so forth. So we’re interested in a little bit of a multi dimensional set of outcomes for children, because we want to know both how is this child doing, we want to know whether there are behavioral disruptions that may stem from having a background incarceration at home, that may then affect other children, because if you’re misbehaving in the classroom, that’s something that will negatively potentially affect other children’s learning in the classroom. The event study is looking within the child before and after that arrest period. And we also do that same event study analysis at the classroom level, basically. So looking at what happens to the performance of other students in the classroom, when one of the students’ family members is arrested.

Rebecca: How big was the impact of incarceration on children in the affected households and in the classrooms.

Arpit: So for one individual child, the effects on math and English scores is something 5% of the standard deviation. So it’s an effect that is sizable enough, if you think about many educational interventions as having very heterogeneous effects, and it’s very hard often to kind of get meaningful moves in child performance. But the really big part of the analysis, I think, was trying to reconcile those direct effects, the ones that are one to one and a half percent of the standard deviation against the overall impact of incarceration on the whole community. So what happens if I take a whole county and I change the mix of judges and I have much more incarceration? What is the overall educational impact there? So when we looked at that overall community level perspective, we actually found that changing a one standard deviation in the county level stringency is actually affecting test scores by between one and a half to three and a half of a standard deviation. So we’re basically getting very big aggregate effects that the individual effects alone can’t explain. And so we think that there’s scope for these spillover effects, by which one directly affects how a child behaves in a certain way in the classroom that then spills over to the other children in the classroom that thereby amplifies the effect, so as to generate larger negative overall effects. And one channel that we use to identify those is to look within the classroom itself, not gonna measure all the potential spillovers between children, but it’s one area where we think there’s spillovers, and we think that those spillovers can also account for some fraction of the overall community effect.

Rebecca: Can you translate some of that standard deviation talk [LAUGHTER] to people that don’t know anything about statistics.

Arpit: For example, at the county level, when we are thinking about a one standard deviation increase in the stringency we’re thinking about a 15 to 20% increase in incarceration. So that’s kind of the range of variation that we’re looking at at the county level when thinking about what are the typical shock to incarceration, and that’s a kind of pretty substantial increase in the incarceration levels we’re seeing as a consequence.

John: So you’re finding the effect on any one other student is relatively small, but the aggregate effect on all the students in the class is relatively large. Is that correct?

Arpit: That’s right. So when we look at those other students in the classroom, we’re getting effects for those students in response to the incarceration of a peer’s family members, they’re on the order of 0.3, 0.4 percent of a standard deviation. You should just basically think of that as a really small number. And the only way we’re kind of getting the power to analyze this is that we’re looking at this North Carolina data, which is really great, a lot of people have worked with it, exactly because it is so comprehensive. So we’ve got all the student rolls, we’ve got all the arrest records, all of these are matched together. And so using this really holistic sample allows us to try to quantify these effects that are pretty small for any one individual child, but they’re just a lot of exposures that can aggregate up. And so we think that this classroom disruption channel can explain something like 15% of that relationship between aggregate incarceration and test scores. So it kind of all adds up to explain a more meaningful fraction of this overall relationship between what happens when a lot of people in the area go to jail and what happens to student performance in that area.

John: What sort of mechanism are you hypothesizing might be the cause of the spillover effects to other students in the classrooms?

Arpit: So let’s start with what we can measure in our data. So what we observe is that children who are affected whose family members are incarcerated are looking at increases in suspension days, they’re absent more often, they’re involved in more fighting incidents, typically it takes two people to fight. So that sort of tells us that there are other people involved in the classroom for these affected students. And so we think that this relates very closely to the idea that there are classroom level externalities, and there is a large literature, actually papers by Lazear and others that highlight the importance and implications of classroom level externalities, classroom disruptions, when it comes to learning. It also comes up, by the way, when I talk to people in North Carolina who are teachers. One thing that they really bring up is that children come into the classroom with all sorts of backgrounds that change behavior in the classroom, and that impairs the learning experience for other students in the classroom. So that’s what we can measure most cleanly, is the existence of these behavioral disruptions by students affecting how they behave in the classroom, and influences, through that channel, the learning experience of other children. That doesn’t need to be the only mechanism that’s going on here, there can be other spillover channels between children that we can’t observe in our data. There can also be other channels outside of peer interactions between children through other community interactions between people as well, that we also can’t measure in our data. So we think of this project as really trying to open a set of analysis that we’re considering and thinking about the broader web of social interactions, when incarceration happens.

Rebecca: What are some of the public policy implications of the study?

Arpit: So the challenge, of course, is that you’re measuring one side of the equation, we’re measuring sort of the cost of incarceration, and so you have to balance those against some of the possible benefits of incarceration, because children are also affected by crime in the local community, as well. And so it’s a difficult trade off to try to balance both the costs and benefits of incarceration in tandem. So I don’t think our results actually have a clear takeaway. I think the biggest thing that I personally kind of took away from the analysis is that if we have different techniques, if we have different ways of trying to reduce and address crime, it would be ideal if we were able to lean on ways that rely less on the incarceration channel, which impose these additional externalities and costs and burdens on local communities, and instead found other ways of trying to address and mitigate and reduce crime. So for example, when it comes to a different setting, when it comes to thinking about bail, which is a topic we’ve also researched before, there is sometimes a choice between arresting the individual and putting them in jail, compared to something like house arrest, compared to something like electronic or digital monitoring. These systems are also not perfect. There are also a lot of costs and tradeoffs there. But to the extent that you can find ways of deterring, mitigating, crime that don’t rely as much on the incarceration channel, I think that lowers the spillover negative effects on local communities, I want to mention that, when we look at these multi-dimensional impacts of the original incarceration event on the student, we actually find, consistent with prior literature, that to the extent that we can observe juvenile offenses, we don’t observe increases in crime, if anything, there are decreases in criminal activity. That, again, is consistent with some of the prior literature. And the way to interpret that, I think, is to again think of there as being multiple dimensions by which people are affected. So you can observe that there’s a negative role model effect, you observe someone going to jail for a crime… Well, I’m not going to commit that crime, but you may still act out in the classroom. So we shouldn’t think of the responses to these kinds of disruptive background events as happening on some uniform spectrum of good behavior or bad behavior, but it’s much more multi-dimensional in how people respond to stressful situations.

John: Did you find a difference in the effect whether it was a male or a female in the household who is incarcerated in terms of the impact on children?

Arpit: Everything I’ve said, so far, I’ve been trying to be careful in sort of saying , these are individuals in the household, because really, what we’re doing is the household level match. So we’ve got the address, and so what we really know is that this is someone that lives at this address that is arrested. We view that mostly as a strength of our approach, which is trying to identify household members. It sort of recognizes the intergenerational and complicated family backgrounds many families have, but it does make it a little more challenging to establish the sort of true relationship between individuals. And so one thing that we kind of did there is sort of try to identify probable female parents or guardians, male parents or guardians, or simply assign kind of age ranges and things like that. We did find the effects on children were much larger when we were looking at the incarceration of a female payment. So that kind of makes a lot of sense, if you think that mothers and female guardians kind of play uniquely important roles within the household. And when it comes to the child themselves, the effects were actually pretty similar between boys and girls.

John: In the US, we have one of the worst rates of intergenerational income mobility, might this type of an issue be one of the causes of that, in that in low-income communities where incarceration rates tend to be higher, it’s putting children in those communities at further disadvantage, which can have some long-term consequences.

Arpit: One thing I want to mention is where we’re kind of taking the paper is to adopt the community frame and think about other community outcomes that might potentially change as a result of incarceration. So I do think that probably one of the reasons that we have this, not just low on average in the United States, a low rate of social mobility in the United States, but also it’s very regionally varying rate of social mobility differences across the United States. I remember when the first Chetty map was released that showed the geography of economic mobility in the United States. My home state, North Carolina, is actually incredibly low for social mobility. And that’s surprising, actually, because North Carolina is where everyone’s moving to. It is incredibly economically dynamic, it has lots of job centers, but moving there is low cost of housing. It has a lot of features, which you might expect should be associated with high economic mobility. And in fact, like much of the south and very regionally varying patterns across United States, you actually observe pretty low social mobility. And I do wonder whether one reason for that is that we have these very high rates of incarceration across much of the United States. And that’s not an easy thing to just stop incarceration, because we all know that the system of criminal justice, that is also there to protect in low- income communities from the negative consequences of crime. So the public policy challenges of how to figure out what to do about this are really complicated. But we want to know why is it that people that grew up in the same state that I did, don’t necessarily have great opportunities compared to people who grew up elsewhere. So we’re hoping to use the setting, use this analysis to dig a little bit deeper into this question. And one fact that is kind of already out there that I think is very related, is that analysis by Chetty and others, which looked at the geography of social mobility, found that a big correlate, something that associates strongly with social mobility across United States is the presence of two-parent households. So the number of absent fathers, that associates very strongly with the lack of social mobility in an area. Of course, that is not a causal statement, you could imagine things go the other way. So lack of social mobility kind of impacts in different ways. But I think that’s a diagnostic that is suggestive of the idea that something about incarceration affects broader communities, affects the family formation, affects family stability in ways that impact people’s ability to build stable relationships. And all of that kind of has really persistent negative impacts.

Rebecca: As an educator, this study makes me think about if I’m a teacher in a classroom, I’m kind of experiencing the phenomenon that you’re studying, and the kinds of things that I might consider doing for classroom management or the way that I might better understand even just what’s happening or what I’m observing, I think is food for thought for educators to just be more aware of what’s happening in their communities.

Arpit: The other kind of question, I think, for economic policy is about these measures of teacher value add, which are being thought of as ways of assessing or even compensating teachers for the increase in test scores, that they’re resulting in the classroom that they have, right? And this makes sense to economists we want to value and grade people based on the incremental add that they’ve done to a population kind of coming in. But one thing I actually hear a lot from teachers is they’re very worried about this possibility as something that affects them as a teacher, because they’re saying, “Well, it’s not my problem, if I happen to have a classroom in a particular year where the children are going through a lot of stuff at home, they’re not necessarily going to learn as much, that might affect other children in the classroom as well. And that’s something that I will potentially be judged for, something outside of my control.” And that is a very strong problem for this whole teacher value add methodology, because these kinds of background events don’t necessarily follow a predictable sequence. And so they can kind of happen at various times over students’ lives, over a teacher’s career across different classrooms. And so it’s very hard statistically, to separate out whether a student is doing well or badly because of the teacher, or because of some background events. It also impacts, I think, how we statistically evaluate and think about evaluating teachers.

Rebecca: I imagine it also impacts classroom management and observations of classroom management and other tools that we use to evaluate teachers currently… behavior in that class is different than others, or they have different traumatic experiences impacting their behavior. That’s not necessarily being observed by an observer.

John: And we have put probably far too much weight on teacher and school compensations and budget tied to student performance, because, as you said, there’s so much that’s outside the control of the teachers or the school districts.

Rebecca: That’s also the schools that tend to struggle to get teachers and things too, right?

John: And we’re penalizing those teachers and those school districts, often, that face the most severe challenges and need the most support. You mentioned this dataset from North Carolina is a very rich one, but you had to do a bit of work to get all that data together. Because there is a lot of data on student outcomes, but you also have to tie this to incarceration. Could you talk a little bit about how you matched the household data, or the incarceration data, to the schooling data?

Arpit: Oh, man, this is my favorite part of the project, because it allows me to reminisce about my sort of a Moby whale moment of a project. So I think all of us as researchers need to sort of think about what are the projects that we really want to see live, what are the ones that we’re really going to go to bat for, and this is one of those projects for me. I just felt that this needed to be answered. And so, together my collaborators, we really just spent a really long time trying to figure out how to get the right data for this. So you have to put together the criminal justice records for a given area, you need to put together the education records, and then you need to figure out how to link the two of these. So some states you can get one, some states you can get the other and it’s very hard to find a set of states where the two of them match. So we tried a whole range of states, a whole range of datasets, many times we got very close, but were stopped at the last minute. And finally, we were able to work with the state of North Carolina, which has an excellent set of education records, has these great criminal justice records, and were able to figure out a way of merging and matching the two sets of documents at this household level, have a pretty good sense of the direct linkages between the children in our sample and the criminal defendants and then using the classroom identifiers in the dataset to identify other spillover effects, looking at the broader geographic implications. So all of that wound up working out for us at the end, but it was a long haul to get there. And I think it’s definitely a lesson that I took away from this project that if you want something to do well, you really got to work at it. There’s no substitute for putting in the shoe leather for calling people, cold calling people, emailing people and just hearing no, no, no, no, no again and again and again until you’re able to figure out something that works.

John: And the matching between households for the students and the incarcerated people was based on household addresses. Is that correct?

Arpit: That’s right. So that match was done by the North Carolina education folks. They took their records, they imported the criminal justice records, matched that at the household level, and then gave us a data set that had removed all identifiers that we could work with for research.

John: It’s a wonderful data set and it’s a really impressive piece of work.

Arpit: Thank you very much.

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

Arpit: For us on this project, we’re really trying to see if we can think about some of these broader implications of incarceration on communities outside of the educational impacts that we’ve been talking about so far. So thinking about the impacts on family structure, thinking about whether it spills over into the usage of other government programs, whether it has employment effects, kind of housing market access, I think that there are a whole range of different outcomes, particularly at these broader community levels that I think are shaped by the number of people in that local community that are impacted by incarceration. So I think those are the overall community spillovers, we’re interested in understanding.

John: Well, thank you. This is some really impressive work. And I have to say I’m really impressed by all the work that you’ve been doing in so many areas. You’re doing some wonderful work on some really important topics.

Arpit: Thank you very much, John. I had an economics teacher growing up who inspired me to work on these topics.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much. We’re looking forward to sharing this with our audience.

Arpit: Thanks.

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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.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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290. Transparency in Learning and Teaching

Posted in assessment, backward design, equity, evidence-based practices, feedback, first-generation students, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, metacognition, pedagogy, persistence, social justice, teaching, transparency
May 24, 2023

While instructors know what they expect from students, these expectations are not always clear to their students. In this episode, Mary-Ann Winkelmes joins us to discuss what happens when instructors make their expectations transparent to their students.  Mary-Ann has served in leadership roles at campus teaching centers at Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, the University of Nevada – Las Vegas, and Brandeis University and is the Founder and Director of TILTHigherEd.

Transcript

John:While instructors know what they expect from students, these expectations are not always clear to their students. In this episode, we explore what happens when instructors make their expectations transparent to their students.

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

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

John:…and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Mary-Ann Winkelmes. She has served in leadership roles at campus teaching centers at Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, the University of Nevada – Las Vegas, and Brandeis University and is the Founder and Director of TILTHigherEd. TILT is an acronym for Transparency in Learning and Teaching in Higher Ed. We are very much fans of the TILT approach and have referred to it often in workshops on our campus (and on previous podcast episodes). Welcome, Mary-Ann.

Mary-Ann: Thank you. I’m really delighted to be here with you. And I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you on Tea for Teaching.

John:We’re very happy to have you here. You’ve long been on the list of people we’ve wanted to invite. So we’re very pleased that you’re here today. Today’s teas are:… Mary-Ann, are you drinking tea?

Mary-Ann: I am indeed. And I’m drinking a Sencha green tea today. That’s my new favorite kind of green tea, Sencha.

Rebecca: Nice. I have English breakfast today.

John:And I am drinking a mixed berry Twinings black tea…

Rebecca: Hmmm.

John:…which I haven’t had in a long time. I wanted to mix it up a little bit today.

Rebecca: …mixing it up with mixed berries. So, Mary-Ann, can you tell us a little bit about how the TILT project came about?

Mary-Ann: Sure. This was years back, I want to say in the early 2000s, late 1990s, where I was working at the BOK Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University. And I was leading a seminar group discussions about teaching and learning. And we began to think about the question: “What happens when you tell students why you’re teaching how you’re teaching, just what happens when you tell the students more about your choices as an instructor, how you’re choosing to shape the learning experiences for the students?” And that’s not often something that we think about first when we’re thinking about what’s the content of the course. But we began to think about that a lot. And we had a kind of metaphor about the Wizard of Oz, and pulling back the curtain to show what was happening behind the scenes to build the experience. And then somehow through that conversation, the word transparency emerged. And that became the word that we used pretty regularly from that time on. When I moved to the University of Chicago, that was the word we were using, and it kind of stuck. So that’s kind of where it started. And it started alongside of my career as an educational developer. And it’s kind of been, for me, in the background or on the side, as something that I’ve been kind of tracking along with as a project. It’s still there, it keeps going. And just about a year ago, I began to work on TILT as my full-time job, which I’m really happy to be doing now because it gives me an opportunity, not just to do a guest talk here or there, or a keynote address, which is usually a one time-interaction. But now I have the flexibility to connect with institutions around a longer-term project. So if there’s a faculty learning community that emerges from a first talk that I would give, I get to follow up with them later and see what’s happening and check in with them. Sometimes I get to see the assignments before and after, which I really like. And I invite those now, because we’d like to publish some of those on the TILThighered.com website. And there are some schools that I’ve been working with in the state of Washington for several years now running with their TILT projects. And that emerged from a project we did with the entire state system of Community and Technical Colleges in Washington State. So I have opportunities now like that, where I can work with larger scale TILT projects that take more time, because this is my full-time job now. And I’m really happy about how that’s working, because I feel like it’s getting larger beneficial impact for students in a way that’s more efficient than when my full-time job was at an individual institution.

John:Could you give us an overview of the TILT framework?

Mary-Ann: Absolutely. So the TILT framework is meant to be a very simple tool that is a framework for an ongoing kind of communication among teachers and students. And in all of our studies, we asked teachers to use this framework in their own way at their own discretion, because we know that it’s not really possible to expect that people would do the exact same things with it. So our research is based on the premise that people are using this framework in their own way, at their own discretion, in a way that feels consistent with their teaching style. So there are three parts to this framework: purpose, task, and criteria. And what we ask in all of our studies is for teachers to engage students in conversation about three aspects of a particular assignment or a project or even an in-class activity. Before the students do a piece of work that we want them to complete, we’re asking for teachers and students to have a conversation about three aspects of the work before the students start working on it. And those three aspects are the purpose, the task and the criteria. Now the purpose kind of consists of two pieces. The first part is talking about the skills that students will practice while they’re working on the assignment. And then how are those skills useful, not just now in this course, or maybe in college and other courses, but how are these lifelong learning skills that will be useful for the student in their careers after college or in their lives ongoing? And then the second part of the purpose is about the content knowledge. What new information or what disciplinary information will the students be researching, or gaining, or applying when they’re working on the assignment? And how will that be also similarly useful to them, not just now, or in college, but beyond in their lives? The task, that’s the second part of the TILT framework, and the task is sort of about what are the teacher’s expectations about how students will approach the work? And for the students, it’s kind of like mapping out their game plan, like, what’s the first thing they will do? Will they Google something? Will they go to office hours? Will they go seek out a research librarian? Will they go into the lab and start mixing something like, what’s the first thing they’ll do? And then a sequence of what they plan to do after that until they submit the work. In an ideal world, the teachers and the students would have similar expectations about how that would go. In some cases, though, teachers have a pretty legitimate pedagogical reason for hiding that, that they don’t want students to know how to do the task. And I found this to be the case, particularly in fields where creativity is really important: performing arts, studio arts, even engineering or some STEM courses, where teachers really want students to cast about for a while and kind of use their imagination and see if they can come up with something unique, if not into the discipline, at least unique for the student to try to figure out some new process. And there’s value in that. When teachers want to do that, we did have some pushback from teachers in our original TILT research studies, where they said, “What happens if we don’t want to tell students how to do the work, like part of the task is for them to figure out how to do the work?” So in that case, we asked for those teachers to just say something like, “Part of the purpose of this assignment, in addition to the skills and the knowledge we’ve talked about, part of the purpose is for you to struggle and feel confused, while you invent your own approach to the question.” And we think this is what helps to preserve the student’s sense of confidence and their sense of belonging. Because instead of having that moment of panic of “Oh, no, I don’t actually know how to do this, I don’t even know where to start, I don’t know where the resources are, I don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, maybe this isn’t for me, maybe I shouldn’t be in this major, or in this course.” Instead of going to blaming it on themself or to questioning whether they’re up to the task at all, students can say instead, “I am totally lost right now. And that is exactly where I’m supposed to be. I know I’m on track. I’m doing great. This is the confusion part that comes before the clarity. And I know that because we talked about that and the professor said, this is part of what we expect to happen. This is intentional, this confusion, you’re supposed to feel lost right now.” So that’s sort of what we can say about the task. And the benefit of students knowing upfront what the task is, or knowing how they plan to approach the assignment or the project, the benefit there is that students get to spend 100% of the time they’ve allocated to work on this project, doing their best quality work, and they don’t lose time trying different approaches to see if this or that is going to work or looking for resources that aren’t what the teacher intended for them to be using. Instead of losing time, on the “how,” students get to spend their time so that what teachers receive then is most of the time what we’re looking for, which is “What is the student’s highest capacity right now?” Let’s see an example of the best work that the student can do right now, so we know where they’re at and we can bring them further so that they can advance in their learning. But if we accidentally end up in a situation where a teacher didn’t intend for the students to be confused, they expected the students to take a particular approach that they may have even mentioned at some point in class. So that’s why they think the students know that that’s the expected approach. I don’t want to say the correct approach but at least what they expect students to do. So if we think that students know how to do what we expect them to do, and the students don’t know what we’re expecting them to do, then there’s this chunk of lost time, where what we’re measuring then in the end is what happens after the students spend a chunk of their time lost trying to figure out how to approach the work, and then whatever time is left after that doing their best quality work in the amount of limited time that’s left. So part of the “task” piece of the framework is about what do we want to measure? Right? Do we want to be assessing the best quality work that students can do? Or do we want to be assessing what happens when you give a really varied, diverse group of students a particular assignment to do and you don’t give them 100% clarity about how to do it, and then kind of what you’re measuring is which students have, through no fault of their own, not encountered that information in their lives before coming to this course. And then you also get to identify who are the students that maybe because they had some other kinds of privileges that not all the students had, who are the students that can figure it out faster, because they come equipped with those privileges. So you can begin to see that this is an equity issue. So if talking about the purpose of the assignment kind of speaks to the student’s motivation, and to the value that they will gain from doing the work, and maybe to their ability to assess if they’re getting that value while they’re doing the work, the task speaks to even more of an equity situation where we’re trying to get all of the students to the same starting line of understanding of how to do it, and of having all the resources they would need to do the work to complete the work. And we want to make sure that students are all at that same starting line before they start the assignment. So that’s kind of the equity piece of this. And then finally, the third part of the framework is about criteria. We want students to be able to understand while they’re doing the work, how well are they doing. We want them to be able to make corrections, if they end up with a finished version that doesn’t look like what successful work would look like in this kind of a scenario. But if the students have never seen what successful work looks like, and they probably haven’t, because why would you assign them to do something that they’ve already seen many examples of; they wouldn’t be learning anything new. So kind of by definition, students aren’t going to know what successful work looks like when it meets this or that criterion in the discipline. So what we encourage teachers and students to do there when they’re considering the criteria is to offer students more than just a checklist or a rubric, because the words on a rubric or checklist might mean something different to the student who hasn’t done this kind of work than they do to the teacher who’s really immersed in this kind of work. An example I sometimes offer is, let’s say, I asked students to write up an analysis of a 15th century wooden painted sculpture of the Madonna and child from when I was teaching Italian Renaissance art history courses. In an art history course, the word analyze, like the tasks, the actions that you take when you are analyzing something, that’s a very, very different activity than analyze in the context of an economics course, or in the context of a chemistry course. But if the student hasn’t done this kind of analysis before, you can’t know for sure that they know what you’re asking them to do. So we kind of have to talk that through and students are going to need to see some examples of real world work in the discipline so that they can, with you, in a class meeting, talk about how do we evaluate analysis in this example from the real world, or in that example from the real world. And you won’t find any one example that matches every criterion of the assignment you’re asking students to do, usually, so you need several examples. The benefit of several examples is also that you can begin to talk about the relative success with which different examples are meeting a particular criterion as well. So once we’re in a conversation with students, and we hear back from them, that they’re telling us, what we had hoped they would understand about the skills they’ll practice and the knowledge they’ll gain, that purpose, about how they’re going to approach the work, the task, and about how they’ll know that they’re doing good quality work, the criteria, once we hear students telling us that, that’s the moment that things have become transparent. It is that activity of communication, that conversation with students about purposes, tasks, and criteria, that’s where the transparency comes from. And when we are done with that conversation, we know that students are at the same starting line of readiness In terms of their understanding of what they’re going to do, and also, in terms of their confidence that everyone has the resources that they need, in order to complete that work

Rebecca: What faculty believe is important for students to learn doesn’t always align with the goals of students. Can you talk a little bit about some strategies for bringing these into better alignment?

Mary-Ann: Sure, I think that this kind of speaks to the purpose part of the transparency framework. And often teachers are expecting students to learn something that is very valuable, we wouldn’t spend our time teaching things that don’t have a lot of benefit for students or that they would only use today and it wouldn’t be useful to them later in life. We like to teach things that have value. And so, when we are communicating with students about that value, we’re talking about the skills that students will be practicing. They won’t perfect them on this assignment, but they will begin to strengthen a particular kind of skill set. And they will gain some sort of disciplinary knowledge that can be useful to them later. And we know that sometimes disciplinary knowledge changes over the years as people discover new things and publish new things in any field. Sometimes that knowledge changes. But having some knowledge now does give you important value if you’re going to continue in that discipline or if you want to understand basic principles of a discipline that you might find useful elsewhere. So if students and teachers have a transparent conversation or communication, it could be a written communication, it could be something that they record and put on a website, it could be an asynchronous kind of conversation in an online course. But whatever form that communication takes, I think students and teachers when they’re on the same page about what the knowledge is, what the skills are, that are the focus of this assignment, students will feel more motivated to do the work, because they’ll see that it has benefit for them. And it doesn’t feel like a rote exercise, or just churning out another problem set or another art history analysis paper. There’s some value here that the students know upfront what that value is. And when the teachers hear the students reflecting back to them in this communication, that this is the value that they will be gaining, then we know that students have a kind of motivation to benefit from this assignment.

John:One other issue is that students have come up with some way of learning while they’ve been in elementary and secondary school. But those methods that they picked up are not generally the ones that are most effective. How can we encourage students to adopt learning strategies that they may be resistant to because for example, students, when there have been surveys of what types of learning strategies they found most productive, students often say they prefer to be lectured at, because they learn more from the professor that way. And also, many students don’t like active learning strategies. While they learn more, they don’t perceive it that way. Partly because of those desirable difficulties you referred to before, that when they’re struggling with something, it’s a little bit less pleasant than sitting there nodding and smiling and having everything seem to make sense. How can we encourage students to accept those desirable difficulties associated with learning so that they can learn more effectively,

Mary-Ann: I want to say that this is something that the TILT framework can definitely help us with. And this is not an uncommon phenomenon at all, I even find in my TILT workshops that I do with instructors, that instructors don’t love collaborative learning either. And in fact, many of these TILT workshops that I do will begin with some kind of a research review about “How do we know TILT works? What are the studies and what do they tell us and show us the data?” So we get off on this kind of role, where we’re almost in a traditional lecture format, where like someone’s delivering some information, and people are listening, and then they have questions about it. Or maybe they have challenges to say, “Wait, this doesn’t make sense, let’s talk about this.” And then I kind of switch the method that we’re using. And I’ll ask people to break off into small groups and begin to analyze a particular assignment and talk about where do they see the purposes, the tasks, and the criteria? Before I do that, I acknowledge the fact that we are shifting gears, and that we were doing fine with this sort of Q&A format. You know, look at the research and then think about it and talk about it. Ask questions. Why would I switch that up now? Like we were on a roll, we were doing great. Everybody was sort of on board. Why would I change that now? And so I use the TILT framework to talk about why we’re shifting gears now. What is my purpose in having you use this different method? So if it’s a peer learning method, as it is in the workshops, or as it might be with students in a class, we want to tell students: “Why are we now manipulating your learning experiences this way? Why would I do that to you when I know that sometimes students resist this, when I know that it can be uncomfortable, because I don’t personally always like to do it when I’m in a learning experience?” So if we can tell students, here’s why this is going to benefit you, because you don’t just hear it, but you have to struggle to apply it, you have to fit it not to the situation that I was talking about, where it all sort of makes sense when it rolls over you and you’re hearing it. But you now have to take the principle of what we were talking about, and apply it to this new unfamiliar scenario. And the benefit of that is that you will discover you will hit a barrier at some point in that process, where you will discover the exact piece of information that’s missing for you. You will discover exactly where you hit a barrier to your understanding. And you will have an opportunity right now, right here with me, the teacher in this class, to address that confusing point. And the benefit of doing that now, as opposed to later when you’re doing a graded assignment, is pretty obvious, you get the benefit of having the difficult learning experience in a safe environment that doesn’t lose you any sort of points on your grade. It doesn’t have any negative impact on you the way that it might if you waited until the end of the term to do some massive project and you hadn’t really done a lot of the homework or done a lot of the practices and so you didn’t really know what you didn’t understand until it was kind of too late to do anything about. So I think in short, what I’m trying to say is when we’re asking students to do something uncomfortable, that has a really solid pedagogical reason, that has evidence behind that, it is an evidence-based practice, we want students to know that upfront, because that then will increase their motivation to do it, because they see how they’re going to benefit if they do this thing.

Rebecca: One of the things that students often struggle with is when they start new courses with new faculty, and new ways of doing things and determining what the instructor will expect out of them and out of that learning experience. Can you talk a little bit about how the TILT framework could allow students to shift their focus to learning if it was adopted in the design of the course rather than just an individual single assignments?

Mary-Ann: Yes. And in fact, this is a way that lots of faculty are using the TILT framework, is to think about how do I TILT not just a single assignment, but a whole course. So usually, when people are introduced to the TILT framework, the original ask for all our research studies is would you please do this two times in an academic term, just twice? Because we wanted to see how little change could you make and have a beneficial impact on students’ learning, because small change is much more likely to happen than massive change. But once you’ve made that small change as an instructor, and you see that when you do this with two assignments, there’s some real benefit for students. And on the TILThighered.com website, there are publications by faculty who talk about not just how the quality of students’ work increases, but how the teachers experience in grading, or in responding to students, or in how many students will ask for an extension at the last minute, like these difficulties that teachers often face are diminished, while the benefits for students and the quality of students work increases. So once you begin to see this in the small scale of assignments, teachers then, maybe in the subsequent term, will think about what else could I TILT? Could I TILT in-class activities? Could I TILT a unit of this course? Could I TILT the whole course? And then the effects or the applications can grow. So we can apply this to a single assignment, we could TILT a whole course, we could TILT a curriculum in a department, we could TILT a program, we could TILT an institution’s learning outcomes and thread them through not just all the courses, but through all the co-curriculars too so that students might discover in their work-study job that they’re practicing one of the critical thinking outcomes, that’s a goal for the whole university that connects with what they were doing in their accounting class. And then we can even think about this in terms of a national framework of learning outcomes as well. So there are many scales at which you can apply that to a framework. And one of the things that I’m really enjoying about doing TILT full time, is that I can work with groups of schools, groups of institutions, so not just the Washington State group that I mentioned to you, but several weeks ago I was in the state of Kentucky where working with teams of teachers from institutions across the state, for the whole state system, to think about aspects of how do you map out a path for students to succeed in fulfilling their curriculum? And then how do you pursue that path? How do you complete that path? And in that case, we were using the TILT framework as a strategic planning framework to think about once we know what the plan is, like, once we’ve mapped out our plan for how students can effectively complete their degrees, how do we then communicate the value of that degree, not just to the students who are doing the degree, not just to the students’ families who may be contributing to the costs of doing that degree, not just the costs of the student’s tuition, but the cost of the student not being an earner in that family. And we want to communicate this to all the stakeholders, so the students, their parents, faculty, and staff at the institution, to state legislators who may be voting on packages of funding to higher education in their state, to individual grantors who might be funding particular scholarships. And we want to be able to communicate the value of this degree to every stakeholder in a state system that way. And the TILT framework is very helpful for thinking across multiple audiences, because that’s a pretty difficult task to communicate clearly to all of those different kinds of audiences. But it’s pretty essential for the success of higher education in this country. And so we spent a couple of days using the TILT framework as a strategic planning framework to think about how do you communicate the value of a degree? There are lots of ways that you can apply the TILT framework. Another example is I was working with a school in Texas over the summer, and they were TILTing their entire college success course. Many institutions have that kind of course in the first year, and some of them had TILTed individual assignments. And they decided they wanted to put the team of all the teachers together, and then subdivide that so that a smaller team of teachers was working on each week of the course. And then all the assignments and the lectures or discussions that would go into that week. And then we use the TILT framework as a larger framework to connect that whole course. So that from week to week, the purposes, tasks, and criteria were pretty clear. And students understood the path for all of their learning across that course.

John:Have you tried taking on the Florida Legislature? [LAUGHTER]

Mary-Ann: I have not.

John:That’s a real challenge, I suspect.

Mary-Ann: Yeah, I have worked with schools in Wisconsin. Last week, I was working with a school in Tennessee, right after a couple of their legislators were expelled temporarily. This kind of a framework, I think, can be effective in a lot of different higher education systems and contexts. That’s one of the beauties of it. Because this is something that teachers can do, starting right now, to complement any kind of larger, institutionally driven or federally funded program that might focus on student success. A lot of the time, those programs don’t necessarily feel like they’re directly connected to what faculty members are doing in the day to day in their classes. But using this TILT framework is something that you can do that will advance students’ success that will then make you feel more like you’re connected to these larger ongoing efforts that might be focusing on something that you don’t do directly, like targeted scholarship funding, for example. But that’s part of the beauty of the TILT framework is that it can work in many, many different contexts, and across different scale sizes of projects, as well.

John:And it works nicely for faculty because you end up getting work of the quality and the type that you expect, rather than getting student work that you find disappointing. And similarly, students end up doing work that they’re much more happy with, because they were not guessing at what the instructors want. So it just seems really, really logical. But it’s not always so widely practiced. Your efforts are really helpful for all of this.

Mary-Ann: I think one of the reasons why people might be hesitant to use the TILT framework, you don’t necessarily want to try doing something different that could suck up time that could take time away from delivering important content in the course, and what teachers have discovered and written about and published in the National Teaching and Learning Forum and other places you can see on the TILThighered.com website, what teachers have discovered is that if you take some class time to talk about the purposes, tasks, and criteria for a project before students do it, by the time that practice is completed, everyone has saved time; that time gets recouped, and students have learned a larger quantity of what we had hoped they we’d learn because when we deliver content in a course, we don’t know that students are absorbing it the way that we’d hoped or that they could apply it the way that we’d hoped. So I think by the end of the course, if you’ve used the TILT framework a couple of times, you’re in a situation where you’ve worked in a way that is more time efficient, somewhat, and you arrive at a place that, as you say, is more satisfying for students and teachers, because more of the time has been spent with the students doing the highest quality work possible.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that can be challenging for faculty initially is that if you’ve never communicated in this way, it’s hard to do it the first time, because anything you do the first time is difficult. But once you have a little practice doing it, it’s easy to adopt and expand across a course or across a set of courses.

Mary-Ann: That’s so true. And I think that the way that we’ve structured the TILT framework, it looks so simple, it’s a three-part framework. Applying it then gets you into some complexities that are important to clarify. I think you’re absolutely right, the first time we try anything that’s unfamiliar, just like for students, it’s more difficult. And then we kind of get the hang of it. And then it comes much smoother, and much easier. The TILT framework for starters, is pretty simple. It’s got three parts, right? And I think you could probably share a link to the one-page version of the framework that we give to students, that sort of spells out the framework: purpose, tasks, criteria, the knowledge and the skills. And then at the bottom, there are some of the evidence behind why we know this works and some footnotes, so that students can see on one page, this is a real thing. It works, it helps you. It is, in some cases, equitable, and it is probably worth giving it a try. And if you can see all that on one page as a student, then you might be more willing, especially in a context where a teacher is describing to you why this will be good for you, why this is a benefit for all of us. And then for teachers who have not encountered the TILT framework, when students can bring in this one pager that has some studies listed at the bottom and footnotes, they can see that when the student is asking me, why should I bother? This is actually a legitimate question. This is not a troublemaker student, this is a student who actually knows that they will benefit from knowing a little bit more in advance about this assignment that they’re planning to do. So we try to make it as easy as possible to implement. And then we also try to say only a little bit of this will make a statistically significant difference for students’ learning, so that you only have to try it a couple of times in a whole term. And you’ll probably see the kind of differences that we saw in terms of increases to students’ confidence and their sense of belonging, and their metacognitive awareness of the skills that they were practicing and developing. So if you’re doing anything new or different for the first time, yes, there’s some difficulty to that, but this one is a very, very desirable difficulty. [LAUGHTER]

John:We’ll share a link to that one-sheet document as well as to your website in general. And you do have a lot of research cited on your website. And there’s also some ongoing projects. Could you talk a little bit about those?

Mary-Ann: Yes, we are sharing all the resources that we possibly can on the TILT higher ed website, because we want for everyone to have access to this. Some of the places that benefit most are places that might have the least amount of money that is allocated for faculty development or educational development. So we want to make sure that this is accessible to anyone who would want to try it. And then the studies that we’ve done in the past, there are a few studies that have indicated to us a number of the benefits of TILT. One of the first studies we did was the national study we ran with the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It was funded by TG Philanthropy and my colleagues working on that project were Tia Brown McNair and Ashley Finley. And what we did there was we worked with a group of seven minority-serving institutions from across the country that represented every possible type of minority-serving institution, as well as a range of educational contexts like urban and rural, two-year, four-year, research university, really small in scale, large, residential and non residential campuses because we wanted for teachers to look at our results and see, “Oh, well, this worked for those faculty at that institution, and there are students like my students in that mix, so maybe this would work for my students. And in that study, we started with 35 professors at seven schools and we surveyed about 1200 students and we saw that, for the students who received the more transparent instruction, their competence and their sense of belonging and their metacognitive awareness of the skills that they were developing, those increased, those were higher for the students who got more transparent instruction than for those who got less transparent instruction. And then we also saw in that study some differences that showed us that while all the students were benefiting to a statistically significant level, underserved students were benefitting slightly more. So first-generation students in their family to attend college and ethnically underrepresented students and low-income students have slightly larger benefits than the benefits for the whole group. And then in our second study, we focused on how long does this effect last. So we worked with a group of University of Nevada – Las Vegas students. At the time we were working with that study, University of Nevada – Las Vegas had the most diverse undergraduate student population in the nation, according to US News and World Report. And we know from other studies, like Walton and Cohen’s, 2011, Science Magazine article, for example, we know that when students’ confidence increases, when their sense of belonging increases, they tend to persist longer in a course. So in courses that have higher levels of confidence and belonging, fewer of the students would drop the course, for example, more of them more likely to complete the course. And we wanted to see how long does that last. Is it just that course? And some studies indicate that this could last for a year. And what we did was we kept looking at the retention rates of these students to see how many of them were still registered a semester later, a year later, two years later. And we saw that by the time students were in their third year of university as undergraduates, those students who had received transparent instruction in one of their large gateway intro courses in their first year, those students were a little bit more likely to be still registered as students in their third year. And we’re now tracking that out to six-year graduation rates. So we saw that not only does transparency have a beneficial effect, it’s statistically significant, but that effect lasts for a good long time. And then in the state of Washington, we’re now writing up that study I mentioned with the Community and Technical College System. And I think that TILT is particularly helpful in that environment, because the population of community colleges and technical colleges is a little bit more diverse. And we have more students who belong to that underserved category of students, first-generation, low income, ethnically underrepresented. And what we’re finding from that study is we’re understanding a little more about how does transparency work, and I want to thank all of the researchers who are contributing to all of these studies too, because I’m not an educational statistician, so Daniel Richard, and Carolyn Weisz and Kathryn Oleson are contributing to this study and doing a lot of the analysis, along with help from some graduate students who have been working on this project over the years. What they’re discovering is that transparent instruction has a direct impact on students’ awareness of the skills that they’re learning, and it has a direct impact, similarly beneficial, on students’ sense of belonging. And then separately, sense of belonging has a direct impact on students’ metacognitive awareness and skills that they’re developing. So TILT has this direct effect. And then there’s this other effect between belonging and skill development as well. So we’re finding out more about precisely how TILT works for the benefit of students in these studies. And I think in terms of next studies, I want to be asking questions that really matter to populations of faculty and students around the country. So we open up the TILT research team to anybody who’s curious about this, and a number of faculty have asked about, can we say something more about how this works in an online setting, in an online synchronous setting in an online asynchronous setting, and we’ve got a few publications up on the website about that, but others are looking at that a bit more. And then we have another person who’s looking into just the impact on low-income students to see if we can find out more there about the details of how this works. And I’m really curious to see if we can work with large state systems, what can we find about the most time efficient, most beneficial ways to apply transparency and learning and teaching in community college settings. And I’ve also noticed that as I begin to do more work internationally, because I now have more flexible time to be able to do that, the colleges of applied sciences, like in the European Union, for example, they have a kind of three-year degree that is similarly focused on students’ learning something from their degree like they do here in a community or technical college that will lead them on a path into sustainable long-term employment and a career. So I think that this is going to be a really beneficial place to focus TILT efforts and to do some more research about how can we long term have an impact on not just students’ education, but how that is a pathway into a career. And I’m hopeful that we can find out more about that, like the longer long-term effect of TILT. But I’m also really open to inviting anyone who wants to do more research with the mountains of data that we’re sitting on, to discover something that is of interest to them about how students are learning, and how we can help students succeed more.

Rebecca: I really love all the resources and examples and research materials, worksheets, that are on the website. They’re really handy for folks who are starting out. We always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Mary-Ann: What’s next for me, and then what might be next for teachers and students too. So we’ve talked a lot in detail about how TILT works, and how we know it works, and what more we want to discover about how it works. But I want people to remember that this is really a small effort, it’s a very easy lift that has a really large benefit from the size of that lift. And so I would really encourage teachers and students, if they’re going to do anything at all, even if they have no time to adjust any assignment prompts or to adjust anything about the way that they’re teaching or learning in a classroom. If you use any one single thing, I would say use that framework that we built for the students that has the footnotes at the bottom, and it’s called the “unwritten rules” and that framework, and I think you could probably provide a link to it, that’s what I would hope people would do next, just take that framework with you to anywhere that you’re communicating with your students. And the students will tell you how to make the work more transparent for them. Ask students what they see as the purpose, the task, and the criteria. And you’ll discover very quickly, very efficiently, how you can make that work more transparent so that all students are starting to do the work with the same understanding about what’s expected and with the same set of resources that they need in order to do it. So that’s what I hope is next for teachers and students.

Rebecca: And I hear all the faculty cheering about efficiency, and quick. [LAUGHTER]

Mary-Ann: That’s good. Yeah. So that would be the most time efficient thing to do, I think is to have students teach us more about how to be more transparent. And then in terms of researchers, I’m hoping that researchers will think about what can we learn more about? Can we learn more about what motivates students? Or what forms students’ sense of belonging? Is there anything in our survey data that would shed light on any kind of work you’re doing around that? Is there anything in our survey data that would shed light on more of the research on neuroscience and how that’s impacting learning? Or is there anything in the research that we have in our survey data that might help clarify what would be most beneficial for the very most at-risk students? So if we look at federal government statistics, National Center for Education Statistics about retention rates and graduation rates of different populations of students? Can we double down and look at those students with the very lowest graduation rates? And can we find something about TILT that would be the most beneficial for that population of students? To me, that’s a really important and interesting question. And then I really do want to be finding more locations where TILT could be useful, small scale for teachers and students, large scale for state systems or national systems to be thinking about how to apply this all for the good of students success, and for the satisfaction and time efficiency for teachers work as well.

John:If you’re finding these results of long-term persistent effects from just a single intro course, imagine what would happen if all intro courses use the TILT approach. I imagine the effect would be magnified if it was adopted at a broader level and it is being adopted at many institutions at a broader level.

Mary-Ann: I absolutely agree with you that applying TILT across the largest introductory gateway required courses at any institution would be probably the most efficient way to improve retention and graduation rates. Because if you go for the largest group of students as they enter, and you reduce the number of those students who might be thinking or doubting or wondering if they should continue, and if you increase the number of students who feel confident, who are aware of the value of what they’re learning, in terms of skills and knowledge, and if you increase the number of students who persist from the first year on, then that’s where you’re going to have the best success in increasing retention and graduation rates. I agree with you. I think that’s a really strategically wise place to invest TILT effort.

Rebecca: Well thank you so much. We’re looking forward to sharing this with our listeners.

Mary-Ann: And thank you so much for the opportunity to talk with you this afternoon, I really appreciate it

John:Thank you for all the work you’re doing.

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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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283. Neurodiverse Hiring Initiative

Posted in ableism, access, accessibility, accommodation, co-op, disability, diversity, equity, experiential learning, higher education, inclusion, internships, learning, pedagogy, social capital, social justice, teaching
April 5, 2023

Neurodiverse students often struggle to get co-ops, internships, and their first job because they face significant social barriers during the process of securing such opportunities. In this episode, Kendra Evans joins us to discuss a program at the Rochester Institute of Technology that helps this population of students build the skills needed to navigate the hidden rules of interviewing and supports them through their internship experiences.

Kendra is the Coordinator of the Neurodiverse Hiring Initiative (or NHI) at the Rochester Institute of Technology [RIT]. NHI facilitates myriad programs that build the confidence and job readiness skills of autistic job seekers, provides guidance and support to employers, and creates unique opportunities connecting hiring managers with RIT’s highly-skilled neurodiverse applicant pool. Kendra is pursuing her MBA to better make the business case for neurodiverse affirming workplaces.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Neurodiverse students often struggle to get co-ops, internships, and their first job because they face significant social barriers during the process of securing such opportunities. In this episode, we discuss a program that helps this population of students build the skills needed to navigate the hidden rules of interviewing and supports them through their internship experiences.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guest today is Kendra Evans. Kendra is the Coordinator of the Neurodiverse Hiring Initiative (or NHI) at the Rochester Institute of Technology [RIT]. NHI facilitates myriad programs that build the confidence and job readiness skills of autistic job seekers, provides guidance and support to employers, and creates unique opportunities connecting hiring managers with RIT’s highly-skilled neurodiverse applicant pool. Kendra is pursuing her MBA to better make the business case for neurodiverse affirming workplaces. Outside of RIT, Kendra is a community organizer and serves on various boards. She has three teenage children and a springer doodle puppy, loves her Peloton and logic puzzles, and her last meal would be a soft pretzel and an IPA at a ballpark, preferably Wrigley Field. Welcome Kendra.

Kendra: Thank you for having me.

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

Kendra: I am drinking some tea. I was going to Ted Lasso you and saying I’m really more of a coffee gal. But for the occasion, I’m having a little Earl Grey here in the afternoon.

John: Many of our guests do drink coffee or Diet Coke or water.

Rebecca: I did have a silent share. I don’t know if you saw but I was cheering for the tea. I’m so excited that you had tea. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have Prince of Wales tea today.

Rebecca: And John and I are on the same page because… this is very unusual… but I have the same tea as John.

Kendra: Well…

John: I think that’s the first time in over 280 podcasts.

Rebecca: We chose them independently, and then realized we had chosen the same.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the Neurodiverse Hiring initiative at RIT. First, though, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your path to becoming a coordinator of this program?

Kendra: Sure. I actually started my career as an elementary school teacher and started off very early, realizing that my training, my master’s degree in education, didn’t actually prepare me for the students in my classroom. And so I went on to get a number of different certifications for the teaching of reading to dyslexic students, for a Lindamood-Bell training for processing disorders. And the more I broadened my skill set for working with learning differences, the more and more I kept coming in contact, and was being referred to work with students on the autism spectrum, mostly because of my passion for executive functioning, and how to basically improve those skills in everyone. And so I started as an elementary school teacher, I did that for a few years, became a learning specialist. Then when we relocated to Rochester, I opened my own small business. And while I was working in my brick and mortar social learning environment, RIT found me, my supervisor, Laurie Ackles, and the rest is history. So that’s where I came from. And then of course, I can tell you about the program itself. But that’s my trajectory was basically I’ve taught students pre-K now through higher ed.

Rebecca: You’ve hinted a little bit at your passion towards this work. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin of the initiative?

Kendra: Sure, well RIT started helping students transition from high school to college back in 2008. And one of the reasons that many students choose the Rochester Institute of Technology is because of the career and cooperative placement, we have a very robust, it’s like an apprenticeship program. In order to get your degree and most of our majors, it’s required that you have onsite experiential learning. And after my team had really moved forward in helping students with their social and their self advocacy and executive functioning, and all of the things needed to succeed for the academics in college, we realized that many of our students, even though they had come to RIT for this job experience, were unable to get their foot in the door. And therefore, when you can’t get your co-op that’s required, even though you’ve successfully completed all of the other content area requirements, they weren’t graduating. So this became the next barrier to employment and purpose and belonging in that meaningful adult life that we’re hoping all of our students succeed at. And so, thankfully, we have a gift funded initiative, thanks to the many parents that are very supportive of the work that we’ve done over the years. And so in 2018, we received this gift and pretty much were given carte blanche in order to do the work as we saw what our students needed and what employers were looking for. And in 2018, we started getting our students those first co-ops by partnering with employers and working on job training, and it’s gone from there.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the barriers that you indicated that the students were having or facing trying to get their foot in the door for those co-op experiences?

Kendra: Sure. Well, interviewing is still a dominantly social process, right? We have to pick up on cues. We have to modulate our voice, we have to code switch, we have to dress appropriately. There’s all kinds of unspoken rules that our students are not prepared for. Even though they have the same hard skill set from RIT that their peers have, the social barriers were just really great. And so that’s one of the main difficulties with our students. Also, job descriptions can be a barrier for my students as well, because if employers are not distinguishing between “must-have” skills and “nice-to-have” skills, my students will often not apply to something if their exact major isn’t listed, if they’re like, “Oh, I’ve only had one course in C++, I haven’t had two, maybe that’s not enough.” Those were things that were keeping my students from even applying. There’s also things on the employer side that in addition to the way we’re looking to interview, when we’re looking for a best fit, that concept of best fit in the social aspect of the interviewer can inadvertently exclude this highly skilled talent pool simply because they don’t necessarily give you a warm and fuzzy, let’s say, or they don’t answer a question in an expected way. And so I often make the business case for: “Are you looking for expected? Aren’t you looking to get a job done and bring innovation, let’s talk about what is unique about my students, what they’re bringing that you already want, and what’s going to be different, that’s going to set your company apart.” And so those are some of the barriers in how I work with employers and with students to make that match and just make sure that we’re all speaking the same language,

John: what are some of the skills that the students you’re working with have that would be useful that are not generally recognized in an interview,

Kendra: There are so many. My students are passionate intellectual problem solvers. And I’m not saying that the rest of the RIT students aren’t. But that is definitely something that I will put forward. These are individuals who strive to do their best, they look at problems differently, and they’re going to stick with it. There’s a problem to solve, they’re going to follow it from beginning to end. I often say, and this is very general, but I’m neurotypical, I’m an extrovert, I’m going to spend time at work doing things not always just my work. Whereas I will tell you that my students can hyper focus on that task at hand, and they’re going to work very efficiently to get it done. So there’s just a multitude of things I could talk about, but their problem-solving skills, their stick-to-itiveness. And just their different way of approaching a problem. We don’t all want to be the same. It inhibits the creative process. And if you want to be innovative, we all know that you have to have creativity and a bunch of minds coming together.

Rebecca:So it sounds to me, based on what you’re describing is that you’re helping facilitate matching students to opportunities. Is that the role that the initiative is taking? How are the students getting the placements?

Kendra: So my role, when I describe it, it’s really three main goals. The first is to work with our students, to talk about those unspoken rules, to make them more job ready. The National Association of Colleges and Employers have identified 16 skills. So I work to let them know, “Hey, you’re actually being judged on these things. Let’s talk about them. Let’s practice and let’s teach you how to talk about your experience,” because oftentimes, they don’t realize that they have that. So I work with the job seeker. I work with the employer to implement universal design, so they’re not excluding anyone. And so actually, universal design helps all employees, not just autistic employees. And then yes, I’m the matchmaker, the bridge, the pipeline between the students and the employer. And we come up with creative ways to do that, including reverse job fairs, we partner with our career services office, we have information sessions that are low sensory and low stress, that’s a lot of what we do, is just to make sure that this is an environment that models best practice and how my student is going to be the best performer for your company. So those are the three main aspects of NHI.

John: You mentioned reverse job fairs. Could you explain what that is for people who have not heard of those before?

Kendra: So at RIT, we call it an affinity reception. And if you can picture a job fair, think back to our first jobs where you go into this large auditorium, you have 250 employers, and all the job seekers are dressed in their blazers like I happen to be today. And they go up to their 30 seconds of fame where they’ve got to give an elevator pitch, they got to wait in line, your recruiters are tired and cranky, and the sound is cacophony. It’s a lot. What we do is we bring our students and they sit at the table, we have fewer employers that are coming around which the students get to know who they are ahead of time. We prep for all of that. But then the employers circulate around the tables to our students as opposed to the reverse. And I’m also there as a facilitator to reach out to the employer: “Who are you? What is your name?” It makes the introduction. So I am frequently the matchmaker in all of these situations. And it really lowers the sensory overload, it reduces the stress factor, especially if you know who you’re going to see, you can prep for it. And you also don’t have to navigate, moving around, bumping into people, the crowds, the noise and we, even in that space, have a breakout room as well, so that students can take a break from the table, go refresh, have some water, regulate ourselves, and then come back out and do it again. So that’s kind of the theory as opposed to students coming to you, you’re coming to the job seeker.

Rebecca: We often talk about universal design for learning in a classroom setting but you were also talking about universal design in this interview setting. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like?

Kendra: Absolutely. Just like we would translate an accommodation plan from college to career, the concept of universal design is universal, really. And so in this particular case, things that are very helpful for my autistic jobseekers, which I’ll be honest, very helpful for me, things like, “Could I please have the questions in advance so that I can prepare my best answer?” I’m not going to be surprised and therefore anxious and shut down when we’re going to have our conversation. Things like being able to disclose if I need to have a fidget under the table, and why I’m doing that, being able to talk about the lighting in the room, or like, “Where am I going to go? What can I expect? Who’s going to be there? How long is the day going to be?” …just various things like that. Those are some very small modifications to the process that universally help any job applicant feel comfortable, and therefore bring their most authentic and best self to the interview.

Rebecca: Sounds a lot better to me.

Kendra: Indeed. Ideally, we want an interview to be where we’re learning about each other, we’re learning about the job to be done, and we’re both assessing if we think this is going to be something that we want to engage in together. And the balance of power is always off in those interviews anyway, and especially for the first job out of college, or even co-ops, or before that, right? I’ve only been in college for a year and a half. And my students are already interviewing, right? They’re 20 years old, they’ve never had a job before. And now they’re going into this big data analyst co-op position. That’s a lot of stress for anyone. So anything we can do to minimize the stress and maximize the ability to share the skills that I have. And that’s another thing that companies are doing as well, is changing the interview process, so that instead of all of the questions, it’s “Alright, we’re going to bring you to campus, we’re going to give you a problem, we’re going to have you work on it with some of our other applicants in a team. And we’re going to see how you solve a problem, as opposed to how you talk about how you solve a problem.” So it really is much more skills based. Another thing that if you’re going to have not only getting the questions in advance, but breaking those questions down and making them single step, so that I don’t get lost in some huge, rambling answer is very helpful and making sure that they are less open ended and more, “What is the skill I’m trying to assess with these questions?” That’s another Universal Design tactic that helps a lot. And then one last thing that I’m seeing more and more companies use is, are platforms like HireVue, where they can record their answers. The virtual world, this way nobody has to fly to the new Microsoft campus anymore, we can do it from the comfort of our home offices and have as many recordings as we want. Again, all of us misspeak sometimes, it’s nice to have that do-over because I really am trying to showcase what I can bring to your company and my students bring a lot.

John: So it sounds as if employers are starting to recognize this and learn new skills. What role do you play in helping them learn alternative ways of interviewing?

Kendra: It really depends on the company. And we work with big anchor companies. I’ve talked about Microsoft, I’ve taught SAS, Southwest Airlines, they’re now big players in the field that are realizing that diversity, equity, and inclusion isn’t diverse enough if it doesn’t include neurodiversity. So there are some big dogs in the field that are bringing their HR programs, and they’re really working to make sure that they’re doing best practice. Companies like that will often come to me and say, “Hey, we’re doing this, who do you have for me in these fields?” And I am, in that case, mostly just a matchmaker, I help shepherd my jobseekers through the program. I check in with the recruiter: “How’s it going? Where are they in the process? Do you have any questions?” And I’m a matchmaker to make sure that that pipeline is direct, and they’re getting who they need. There are other companies, and these could be startups, these could be other big companies, but they come saying, “Hi, I’m an HR manager, I’m a data analyst, I’m someone right,” it could be anywhere in the company, that they have someone in their family in their network who’s autistic. And they realize, hey, this is something that would benefit my workplace. This is something that would benefit my person, what can we do? And so if you’re at the very beginning phase, I do a lot of nurturing with those companies talking about where can you get more information? Who are the models that you can look at. I’m here for a consult, do you want to interview some of my students, because a lot of what I do at that stage too, is destigmatizing. Autism, it is a spectrum, and so some people come in thinking that, “Oh, I’m going to do some charity work.” And that’s not at all what we’re doing. In fact, at this point, I’m doing you a favor. This is a talent pool in worker shortage. Trust me, companies really get it at this point in time.

Rebecca: You’ve match made, they’ve joined an organization for their co-op for their experience, how have you worked with companies to help that onboarding process and to make sure that they have a good experience once they’ve gotten the experience?

Kendra: One of the wonderful platforms that we partner with is an organization called Uptimize, and they do online trainings for employees, employers, and they have online training modules. I always give the disclaimer, we don’t know each other well, but I’m a highly critical person, and I hate to waste people’s time. So I don’t often send out professional development if I don’t truly believe in it. And I’ll tell you that I did these modules that were shared with us by Uptimize, and I learned things. And so one of the things that we have with them, because they have a whole suite of trainings, but we have Neurodiversity 101, and a basic module for hiring managers, for HR professionals, as well as supervisors. And so when a company is ready to take our students, I can give them unlimited licenses to share with the team, to share with the executives to share with everyone to try to build awareness, because the truth is, with the increase in diagnosis of autism, we’re all working in neurodiverse teams already, we just don’t always know it. So again, universal design is helping who you already have, and also opening up this talent pool that you’re not accessing currently. So there’s widespread benefits, and I’m giving it to you for free. If you want more, you can then go partner with Uptimize, and they’ll do all kinds of accessory training. But here’s a great introduction that we can give to our hiring managers. I often talk to them ahead of time before they take one of my students. The two main barriers once I have the job with you, would be housing, and transportation, learning how to navigate a new city, being comfortable navigating it, figuring out where you’re going to live for these 10 weeks. I remember doing that as a neurotypical, A-Type 20 year old. And so that’s hard for anyone, it’s exceptionally hard for my students. So that needs to be considered. companies aren’t really providing housing or transportation now, but if you’re going to boast about your neurodiversity hiring initiative, you at least need to have answers for me on how you’re going to direct them to these housing sites, here’s what we’re going to do, how is that going to work. And then I also just help make sure that my students are following through on all the onboarding paperwork and things from my end. And then if you’re an employer that we have a partnership with, I’m available to you. I’ll tell you that most of them don’t reach out to me during the co-ops, but I’m here. So if we need to troubleshoot, if something’s going better or worse than you expected, let me know, let’s take it to the next level. It’s about being the best supervisor you can, regardless, and I’m just an extra tool when you work with my students.

John: It’s wonderful that you have this program at RIT. But is this very common in the rest of academia?

Kendra: Well, there are about 75 to 80 programs across the country that are working in various ways at various levels, some are brand new, some have been around almost as long as we have, in order to help support students through this academic process of college. The goal of college is education, of course, and meaningful employment would be my objective at the end of college. So not all of them are handling it in the same way or have the same programming that we do. But that’s in total, there’s about 75 to 80 across the country at this moment in time, that support through the transition from high school to college. And just as I said, we started with that as well. And now we are helping transition into the workplace.

Rebecca: You mentioned early on about feeling not prepared to support the students you had when you were an elementary school teacher. And I have heard this many times, a faculty member at a college or university saying the same thing, maybe not prepared to teach [LAUGHTER] and then also not too prepared to support this particular group of students or many sets of students that are very different from one another. Can you talk a little bit about strategies that faculty might want to be aware of that could help support students like yours more effectively?

Kendra: Oh, absolutely. The more partnerships we can have with our professors and across campus, that’s one of the things when we talk about where this program is going, that’s something that is critically important, both to the academic success, and then, of course, into the workplace. So my students do very well with written communication, typically, and since most of us are using some kind of my Mycourses or online shell for information, please go ahead and upload those PowerPoint slides, please go ahead and put your notes online. Those are not crutches, if you will, those are actual accommodations that are just best practice. I let you all know that I’ve already got a master’s degree. I’m working on my business degree now. And I’m a graduate student in business. And I get that, as a neurotypical, like that’s just best practice so that I can go further than these notes. Doing those kinds of things, super important. Setting up a culture in your classroom where you can take a break if you need to, and just saying that out loud, so that it’s kind of a culture of the classroom, being aware of what could be overstimulating in your environment. In our lecture halls, it’s not as if we have a whole lot of control, but if you’re in a smaller setting, to just go ahead and look at those things. And sometimes some of us talk more than others. I talk a whole lot, we can have a neurotypical person that’s going to suck up the air in the room. That’s something that we’re used to. Giving students strategies ahead of time or if you notice that, pulling them aside, because they want to be their best selves. I’m constantly raising my hand because I love your topic. I’m very excited to please and I want to engage and if you say something, “I notice how excited you are Kendra, if you could pick just two times that you’re going to share out loud during class, and then write down everything else and email it to me, you can give it to me after class.” It’s just basic classroom management kinds of things. And it’s training our students not just to be good students, but to be good citizens, and to be good employees. And it’s how do we do that give and take that maybe some of us take for granted that we learned turn taking, and we were really good at it, and sometimes people need to be encouraged to take more turns, that would be the other end of the spectrum is that when I’m teaching my career ready bootcamp, the reason that I’m here, I usually have those two different groups. And that’s true among neurotypical people as well. So if I’m going to suck up the air, give me some strategies, so that I’m not alienating my classmates and I’m still engaging. And if I’m too afraid to talk, tell me how you want to hear from me, I can email you before class. Give strategies that show that you want them there and that teach them how to be part of the mix, regardless of whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, or a neurotypical or neurodivergent. Those are some of the really best practices that I can say: share all of that written material, [LAUGHTER] and make sure that you’ve created a culture that just meets people where they are. And like I said, this is universal design. It doesn’t matter if you’re autistic or not. These are just best practices that help everyone. This is something I’m passionate about, and it traces back to my earliest days as a first-grade teacher. As I told you, I went through Orton-Gillingham training to teach dyslexic students because I came out with a master’s degree, and then had no idea how to teach reading. I had no idea what I was doing. That’s whole language, it’s all the stuff. And when I would come back from this very intense training that is specifically for dyslexic students, and I wanted to teach it in my private, high-end, elementary school, I had to justify why I was doing that. Well, why does my student need this particular program, and I was able to say, “Orton-Gillingham breaks language down into pieces. And if I teach this way, it’s the way that this particular subgroup requires in order to learn how to read, we’re keeping reading from them, if I don’t teach it in this one way, but for everybody else that gets it broken down, this is helping them with all of that language that you’re going to hit later on… the words that are not first-grade words, they’re going to be able to decode it, because that’s how their brain works, and I’m just giving them new pieces of the puzzle.” And so when I talk about how I’m teaching reading to first graders, or how I’m teaching job readiness to 22 year olds, it’s the same idea. It’s just: how do we help everyone? …and tailoring our design to be more inclusive, it’s just what we should all be doing.

John: Right now we’re running a reading group that focuses on Inclusive Teaching by Viji Sathy. And Kelly Hogan, and much of what you’re describing seems like the type of structure that they encourage people to use, and small group discussions and providing ways for all students to be comfortable. And we’re seeing that a lot, that there’s so many things converging in terms of things that are effective in helping people learn show up in many different approaches in terms of studies of how we learn, studies of effective teaching methods, studies of creating an inclusive environment. And pretty much all these methods benefit all students, but they particularly benefit those students who don’t do as well without the support provided. And it sounds like this is another form of inclusive teaching.

Kendra: It is. I couldn’t agree with you more. Regardless of the age, we all need to feel safe in the environment. And I’m not going to feel safe if someone’s interrupting me or talking over me. I’m not going to feel safe if I don’t feel like the teacher wants to hear what I have to say. I’m not going to feel safe. If I don’t understand the information or I have sensory overload. It doesn’t matter, we all need to feel safe first. Second, the next buzz would be belonging in higher education, and how am I connecting to my peers and connecting one on one to either my teacher or my professor? How is that working? And then you have the content that comes after all of that. So we really do have to work on our classroom management, we really do have to work on that personal relationship with our students. And then it’s the same in the workplace, we need a safe workplace where I don’t have to mask but I can be my authentic self and therefore I can bring my whole brain capacity to the job, I’m not worried about if somebody’s going to notice something about me or I’m going to feel uncomfortable or they’re going to feel uncomfortable. It translates across the lifespan of a learner.

Rebecca: And most of these things are not difficult.

Kendra: You’d asked about my relationship with either professors or with employers. And I’ll go back to the employer piece because the concept of ADA and IDEA can be scary and intimidating to human resource managers. And so when I talk about what is a reasonable accommodation for my students, most of the time, it’s me asking for a supervisor to just be a very direct and explicit supervisor. It’s things like: can they wear their noise-cancelling headphones while they’re working to kind of drown out some of this din? Are they able to work at home? Are there hybrid options that are available? Is it okay if they take their shoes off under the desk? These aren’t even things that cost the employer any money. These are just sensory regulatory issues, and then it goes into things like: Can you please set a regular weekly meeting with your employee so that my student knows when to come to you. And it goes back to that Which type of person am I? Do I ask way too many questions all the time? Or do I never ask a question and then it’s a barrier for me accomplishing the task. So if I know that I’m going to meet with Kendra every Monday, and I have to bring my list of questions that helps both sets. It also, as the employer, gives me the ability to check in on where you are and advance, because that’s the goal. Even if you’re not considered a teacher or professor anymore, that’s what a supervisor is. Our goal is to elevate our employees and help them reach the next level, at least, that’s my definition of what a supervisor does. So. I like to share that, yeah, and these things are not big cost. They’re big returns on your bottom line, is what it is. So if I can be myself at work, I’m going to work while I’m there. And that’s really what it is.

Rebecca: You talked a lot about at the beginning that the Institute started with the transition from high school to college. Can you talk about some of the things that are important to support neurodiverse students in that transition?

Kendra: Oh, definitely. So there are five pillars to the program. And the one that we’ve talked about would be career and co-op. So we’ll go ahead and move that to the side. Social is a really big piece, that sense of belonging, self advocacy, how do I ask my professor? What are the deadlines? Can I leave the room? Self advocacy and all of those areas. Wellness and health is a really big deal. And the fifth one is executive functioning, where I’ve done all of my studying. That’s what we do, is a lot of executive functioning. So those are the five pillars of the program to help them transition. And we do a lot of work. Also, just like we onboard for a job, we do special onboarding for our students as they come in and their parents. And I think that’s a really important shout out is that oftentimes the support system for all of us gets overlooked… it’s our partners in life, it’s our children, it’s our parents, it’s all of those people. And for students on the spectrum, these are parents that have had to be varsity parents for a really long time to navigate the 504s and the IEPs and all of the social learning that has to happen in K through 12. And so onboarding the parents that this is a young adult, they’ve gotten into RIT, you did this. They’re here, they got this, and we’ve got them. So to do that transition on: “here’s what to expect.” And it’s all the same things. It’s like, “Where are you going to go? Who’s your point person? How are you going to do this when a problem arises… because it’s going to… where do you go?” …and I don’t say that, because you’re autistic, I say that because I can look at both of you and say, something’s going to happen that we have to navigate. And we have to stay emotionally regulated, and we have to problem solve, and we need to know who to ask for help. These are life skills for any person. Again, it’s back to universal design. But that’s part of what SSP, our spectrum support program does, specifically for our parents and students, is a lot of that onboarding and letting them know that we’re here and you earned this, you did this, you’re going to be okay, you’re going to survive, you’re going to thrive, this is going to be great for you.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit more about the executive function part of the program?

Kendra: Well, I always like to talk about executive functioning. So the first thing I’m going to do is tell you my favorite executive functioning 101. I want you to picture a stop sign, S T O P, and when we’re talking about executive functioning, we’re talking about space, time, objects, and people. So if I need to function in any environment, I need to stop and think about those things. Think about an elevator, what’s the space like? How long am I going to be there? Am I supposed to talk to the person? You go through space, time objects, people, and when you transition into college, it’s a big difference, because in K through 12, a lot of that’s managed for you. And then you get sent off to college. Oh my gosh, the schedule changes, the classrooms are different. I have to get from my room to all of this. And I have to factor in travel time. How long do these long papers take? How do I chunk those assignments? So everything we do is space, time, objects, people, and I’ve been using that since I was a first-grade teacher and all the way up because you can chew on that, everybody can understand this is what I’m thinking about in this environment. And so we do a lot of visual scheduling so that you can see your “must dues.” Where are your blocks? How do you plug in the things that you need to accomplish? We do planning on here are all the assignments that are coming up. How long do you think this will take? Time management is often a hiccup for my students. Again, think about the people in your lives. Some of us are really good at some pieces of executive functioning, and some of us are not. I can tell the time down to the second most places, people think I’m a savant, but I can’t organize to save my life. I have 22 tabs open right now on my computer. I struggle with that, and I’m neurotypical and high achieving and mid career and all of those things that you’re supposed to check the boxes off. So when we’re helping our students transition from high school to college, how do you navigate those four things? And some of them you’re going to be stronger at than others. Everybody is. So what are the tools so that you can be independent and accomplish your goals here? And that’s a lot of what we do. And of course, as I told you, there are those five pillars, so when it comes to career and co-op, I have a whole other set of how we’re talking about space, time objects, people. We also talk a lot, as I said, about social and about well being. I remember being horribly homesick. I didn’t like my roommate. There’s all of those things that all of us have to navigate. And so when you don’t like your roommate, because you didn’t get that single, what do you do? How do you navigate this? When you’re lonely, what does that feel like? What are the alternatives? And then of course, if something does happen, we always plug the students into those campus resources. So how are you doing? What do you think? Let’s walk down to counseling. Let’s just walk down together right now. They know they can advocate for themselves, but they also have somebody that’s going to walk on this journey with them, and that’s really important. And it brings, I think, peace of mind, both to the student and, of course, to their families that they’re sending out of the nest for the first time.

Rebecca: I think the things that you’re talking about in terms of executive function should be an all first-year classes, [LAUGHTER] it should be built into the curriculum.

Kendra: I think every professor would thank me, if it was, [LAUGHTER] and I say that about my career ready bootcamp. I would have been so much better off, if I’d have this kind of training going into my first job. It’s universal design. If we were doing this kind of prep for everyone, I think every employer would be happier. But my students specifically need the explicit instruction on “This is what they’re looking for. When you do this behavior, this is how they feel, and this is the outcome when that happens.” You need those behavior maps in order to teach the lesson that is not coming in through osmosis. And to be fair, one of the reasons there’s such an employment divide is, autistic students and adults, they’re not getting jobs, they don’t have any work experience at all. So if you’ve never been in a work environment, how are you supposed to know how to behave in one. I remember, again, as a learning specialist in elementary school, we would go over social situations like a birthday party, any birthday party, I don’t care who it is or what age, there are certain components that you can expect so you can stay self regulated. You can know how much time it’s going to take, you’re going to know you have to bring a gift of some sort, again, space, time, objects, people and here are the classic things. It translates into adulthood and the workplace. Like you need to know how do you code switch? What does that even mean in this new environment? And you can show how you’ve mastered it through your lifespan and here’s just the next frontier. We spend a lot of time doing this, and I will just say, in terms of our program, I’m excited that we have this funding, I’m excited to be able to do this at RIT and for that kind of buy in. In this last year, we used to offer career ready bootcamp, just once per year. I was able, being full time and with the buy in now, we offer it three times, which means if the average incoming population that works with SSP is about 30 students and I was able to get 24 students through the career ready boot camp in this first year. So that’s something that they’re all going to get to take. And so now that we’ve got this model that’s working really well and is self sustainable and that we hope we can take to other colleges to do this. We’re working on different ways to support the student across their learning journey at RIT. And so we’re doing some alternative, like a spring break trip, I’m actually taking a cohort of eight students to New York City in March so that we can go visit four different employer sites. And we’re gonna go over beforehand the T chart of what do you see? And what do you hear? And in these specific categories. Is it an open space, is everybody in a cubicle? Are they talking to one another? Or are they working by themselves in headphones? What is the culture that you observe? How are people talking with a list of, like, what are you looking for? Be a social detective, so that we can then come back and debrief and I’m intentionally going to very different environments, so that they probably haven’t been in a work environment before. And we’re going to some really big ones, and to be able to say for themselves, “Oh, I can do this.” I know what to expect. And not only can I do this, I know what I prefer, and I know why I prefer it. So again, it helps that self advocacy, it helps to be your authentic self. And these are employers that all have neurodiverse programs and want my students. And I have to tell you that that is the most rewarding part of teaching career ready boot camp is when I have SAS come to talk or Southwest Airlines and I get to set the stage with students of “You are wanted. I know you’ve spent your lives feeling other. No, no, they’re here early for you. It is August, they have not posted these jobs yet. They are here to get a front-row seat to my RIT talent.” And you can just see them, they just sit up so much straighter. And in all of the post career ready boot camp survey, that’s what they say… it was just I never thought that people were going to want me… never thought… or it felt so good to have someone come here. And they do, I mean these employers give a 45-minute presentation of how we are thinking about you and your needs and here’s how it’s really great. Oh, and here’s somebody that did it. Like Southwest Airlines started their program last summer and had one of my RIT students and brought her back to career ready boot camp… and to hear her share her experience and what it was like and the students were able to ask like, “What’s your one piece of advice? What do you think you did the best in the interview? What do you think you did the worst?” And this is my best piece of advice that I really want everybody to hear going into this interview. They want to know how you solve a problem. Just like in life. I just want to know that you’re listening to me and that you’re going to try,. I want to know your initiative and your problem solving and so the student comes back. And she says, “I got this question and I didn’t know the answer, and I started to panic. What I did is I took a deep breath and I looked down at my notepad, because we always say, have reasons, have ways to distract yourself. I looked down, and I composed myself, and I looked back up, and I said, ‘I honestly don’t know. But I’ve solved other problems. Here’s how I would approach that.’” And she went into what she would do next. She’s like, “I think that’s what got me the job.” Because again, it’s how do I solve some them? Am I going to give up? Am I going to whine? Am I going to complain? Or am I just going to get to work, because again, these are co-op positions. And then I talk about what a co-op is: “Think of it as a class. This is like the lab to your bio class. This is you getting out and putting those skills to work.”

Rebecca: This sounds like a really great program. We always wrap up our sessions by asking: “What’s next?”

Kendra: I love “what’s next?” I don’t know if you’re West Wing fans, but “what’s next?” is what’s asked by the President every time he’s ready to push the agenda forward. And so that is actually how I kind of live my life is “What’s next?” As I told you, we’ve expanded career ready bootcamp, we’re now doing alternative spring travel. And we’ll do winter term travel with our students to give these opportunities. What I’m most excited about, we’re always looking to increase the impact on our students, we’re always looking to increase the reach to the community, and how do we train the trainer. So that’s a big goal is to be able to take this career ready bootcamp to other universities and show them how they can make it their own and help their students. I’m also working with a lot of partnerships on campus, because that’s where creativity happens, because we were talking, it’s all cross disciplinary. And so we have a program called RIT certified that works with online options. And so this will reach not only within RIT, but wider. And so we’re going to have modules for managers. So if you’re taking an HR class, if you’re taking this managerial certificate, you’re going to get best practices and universal design, so that we can do the reach further. I’m also going to work with our business school to be able to have internship programs, leadership certificates, things like that. So that it’s not just helping the autistic student or the already employed, but we’re planting the seeds so that as each of these people go out into their various networks, it’s a wider spread awareness and knowledge. And so I think those are the main ways that we’re looking to take care of impact is cross collaboration and expanding the model.

John: You’re doing some wonderful work. And I hope we’ll see more campuses and more programs like this, because individuals who are autistic often have trouble finding those first jobs where they’re successful. And we’re wasting a lot of resources that can bring some real strengths to organizations and to businesses out there.

Kendra: That’s true. But as I said before, these are business solutions. This is an untapped talent pool that really the sky’s the limit here. In all spaces, we need to make a bigger table. We need to make room for everyone and make sure we all have a place. So that’s what we’re doing.

Rebecca: Well, I know that we’ll look forward to getting some updates maybe from you in the future about this program and the next things that you have planned.

Kendra: I would love that and maybe you can recommend some tea alternatives for me. [LAUGHTER]

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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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272. Mind Over Monsters

Posted in classroom community, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, emotion, engagement, equity, evidence-based teaching, grading, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, motivation, pedagogy, social justice, storytelling, teaching
January 18, 2023

During the last few years, college students have been reporting mental health concerns at unprecedented levels, straining the resources provided by college and university counseling centers. In this episode, Sarah Rose Cavanagh joins us to discuss the role that faculty can play in addressing these concerns.

Sarah is a psychologist, professor and Senior Associate Director for Teaching and Learning at Simmons University. She is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion and Hivemind: Thinking Alike in a Divided World as well as numerous academic articles and essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lit Hub, Inside Higher Ed, and Vice. Her most recent book, Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge will be released in spring 2023.

Show Notes

  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The Spark of Learning: Energizing the college classroom with the science of emotion. West Virginia University Press.
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2019). Hivemind: The new science of tribalism in our divided world. Grand Central Publishing.
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (forthcoming, 2023). Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge. Beacon Press.
  • Elizabeth Romero
  • Ryan Glode
  • Reacting to the Past
  • Jasmin Veerapen
  • Gary Senecal
  • Miller, L. (2020). Why Fish Don’t Exist: a story of loss, love, and the hidden order of life. Simon & Schuster.
  • Robert Sapolsky’s Publications
  • Auel, J. M. (2002). The Clan of the Cave Bear. Bantam.
  • Kelly Leonard
  • Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-Rich Education: How human connections drive success in college. JHU Press.
  • Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan
  • Michele Lemons
  • James Lang

Transcript

John: During the last few years, college students have been reporting mental health concerns at unprecedented levels, straining the resources provided by college and university counseling centers. In this episode, we discuss the role that faculty can play in addressing these concerns.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Sarah Rose Cavanagh. Sarah is a psychologist, professor and Senior Associate Director for Teaching and Learning at Simmons University. She is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion and Hivemind: Thinking Alike in a Divided World as well as numerous academic articles and essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lit Hub, Inside Higher Ed, and Vice. Her most recent book, Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge will be released in spring 2023.

Welcome back, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.

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

Sarah: No, I always disappoint you. I am yet again drinking coffee.

Rebecca: Yet again, such a stable person in our lives with your coffee. [LAUGHTER] I have blue sapphire tea.

Sarah: That’s a pretty name.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s tasty. And my new favorite.

John: And I am drinking spring cherry green tea here in the midst of winter in upstate New York. We’ve invited you here today to discuss Mind over Monsters. Could you talk a little bit about the origin of this project?

Sarah: For me, I think writing is more organic than it is planned, and so it felt a little bit like the book decided it needed to be written, rather than I decided to write the book. There was just such a groundswell of interest around young adult’s mental health, people talking about it, podcasts, books. And I am a college professor, I’m a psychologist, I am an educational developer. I’m the mom of an adolescent, and so I couldn’t help but be concerned and interested in this topic. And I also felt that, as someone who has struggled with anxiety my entire life, panic disorder in particular, that I had some small bits of wisdom from my lived experiences to share. And so it just all came together.

John: How prevalent are mental health issues among youth today?

Sarah: They’re pretty prevalent, unfortunately. Some people have even labeled it an epidemic. For instance, in 2021, three of the major American organizations dedicated to youth and adolescent mental health joined together and declared a national state of emergency, which was an unprecedented move. And they cited in particular the effects of the pandemic and the fact that already marginalized groups along lines of race and ethnicity, gender, and sexuality and income were bearing the brunt of the psychological effects of the pandemic. But also there’s a lot of complexities surrounding figuring out whether rates have truly changed or whether there’s also changes in stigma surrounding mental health, which are laudatory changes, we want people not to feel stigma, and to come out and reach out for treatment. There’s also changes in the thresholds of the diagnoses themselves, they shift every several years. And there’s also changes in people’s willingness to seek treatment, and also their decisions about the level at which they might need treatment. And so there’s some evidence that a lot of these complexities may be making epidemics seem worse than it is. But what is clear is that more young adults and especially college students are expressing more distress and asking for help with that distress. Counseling centers on campus are absolutely overwhelmed and students are expressing a lot of frustration with not receiving the level and the timing of care that they need in those settings, and so clearly, we need changes.

Rebecca: In a lot of public conversations, we’re hearing debates about needing to show compassion to adolescents who are struggling, but then also others who argue that youth is too coddled. Can you talk a little bit about what you would advocate for?

Sarah: And that’s a delightfully easy setup for me, [LAUGHTER] because in the subtitle of the book is “compassionate challenge and why we need to support youth mental health with compassionate challenge.” And I argue that this debate and tension between compassion and challenge is one of these false dichotomies that we human beings seem to adore. [LAUGHTER] Students clearly need compassion, and I think compassion has to come first. For me, what that looks like is establishing classroom communities and learning environments on campus that are characterized by safety and by a feeling of belongingness. You need to feel safe enough to take risks. And you need to feel that you’re supported not just by your instructor, but also your fellow students and the Student Success Office and all of the people on campus. But once we’ve established that grounding and that safe setting, then I think to truly learn and grow, we do need to take risks, we do need to step outside our comfort zones, and we need to be challenged. And I think that challenge can be very positive. I spend one of the last chapters of the book really digging into the science of play, and how play is all about being vulnerable and taking risks and play can be scary. And you can only play in settings where you, again, feel safe. And I think, finally, what I call compassionate challenge isn’t just important for teaching and learning. As I draw out in two interviews with clinical psychologists Ryan Glode and Elly Romero, compassionate challenge is also really key to addressing anxiety and symptoms of mental health. And I don’t think we’re going to be doing any therapy in the classroom, but learning environments marked by compassionate challenge are ones that are consistent with principles that help address and resolve anxiety, which again, involves facing your fears, and environments where you’re technically safe and there’s a facilitator there to help you manage those risks.

Rebecca: John and I were talking earlier about some of the things that I had observed in my own classroom in the last year with an increase in desire for perfection, like kind of perfectionism or anxiety around not being perfect and not being right and working with students in class and trying to find ways to help students work through that so that they could take risks or could show things in progress to get feedback so that they could continue to improve. Can you talk a little bit more about what that might look like in a classroom?

Sarah: Well, I think that a lot of that brings up assessment and grading. And I think why we see that perfectionism in the classroom is that students are very concerned about their grades, because they believe, to some extent rightly, that their grades are going to translate into future security, and to getting into the right graduate school or getting the right job. And we do this to students. In high school, we train them to be so focused on the grades in order to get into the correct college and I have a high schooler and her grades are constantly just streaming, coming in in real time to her phone. And then we’re surprised when students get to college and they’re too focused on their grades. [LAUGHTER] And so I think that helping students with that need for perfection is probably reforming our grading systems so that there isn’t that need, that that focus on perfectionism isn’t necessarily rewarded in the same way. And instead, we’re rewarding taking risks and doing something creative, and maybe failing and having multiple iterations of something and seeing that work can grow over time, which, I think, amplifies creativity

Rebecca: There’s a lot more focus on process than on the product, then.

Sarah: Yes.

John: You mentioned using play in classrooms, what would be an example of the use of play in the classroom?

Sarah: Well, I think you can directly play through using improv, and especially in the early parts of the semester when you’re all getting to know each other, a lot of icebreakers are very playful. And community building can be very playful. I think there are ways like the whole reacting to the past role playing approach in history. You can easily roleplay in literature classes. So I think you can directly play. I think that what play can also be is almost like a philosophy or a stance that you take, that what we’re doing in the classroom is not dire. And, related to the grading that we were just talking about, there aren’t large stakes, that what we’re doing here is this is kind of a sandbox, where we’re playing with intellectual ideas, we’re testing things out, we’re experimenting. And there’s a sense in which it’s lighthearted, even when the topics are not light hearted, I think that we can take this lighthearted stance with our students. And I think also mixing things up and not getting too into routines, can also be playful. And I feel like I have a lot of tricks in my teaching bag, different discussion techniques and ways of getting us up and moving and things like that. But there’s always a point, kind of through the three-quarter mark of the semester, where they’ve seen it all. And so I try to save one or two things for that point in the semester and kind of throw everything out the window and do something entirely different. And I think that that can be playful as well. And so I don’t think that play in the classroom is all about things that we think of as play proper, like improv and roleplay; it can also be all of these other techniques.

Rebecca: One of the things that I’ve studied in the past is play. And one of the things that’s interesting about play is that there’s rules and there’s structure. And so a lot of times we think that play is just chaos, but actually play almost always has rules. They might not be formal rules, they might be informal rules. But that’s a way that people can feel safe and able to play is that they understand what the structure is and what the rules are.

Sarah: Those are great points.

Rebecca: You think that it’s hard to facilitate because it might seem so foreign, but actually we’re all very familiar with play. And it is actually incredibly structured. We know that structured things can be really inclusive. And so you might be hesitant to try something that seems like it might be unstructured, but I think, lo and behold, play is actually structured.

Sarah: Yeah, and a lot of those classic improv activities have strict rules in fact and one of the rules is that there’s a kindness.So, even when animals play… you know, I watch dogs play a lot at dog parks, and it can get quite vicious looking, but the animals are safe, you don’t harm each other and that is a strict rule of play as well.

John: Some of this book is drawn from research you conducted as part of the Student Voices project. Could you tell us a little bit about that project?

Sarah: Absolutely. So this was a project that grew out of my last grant from the Davis Educational Foundation. I had done a quantitative study that I talked with you all about in the past. And we had some funds left. And I had an honor student, Jasmin Veerapen, who’s now at Columbia, getting her social work degree, and she needed an honors thesis project. And so we collaborated together and ran a qualitative follow up and interviewed students from 35 different very diverse types of institutions across the country. And it was not a project focused explicitly on mental health, but on emotions and learning. So for instance, the first two questions we asked of all of our participants was: What was the best learning experience you have had in college, and tell us all about it?” And the second was, “What was one of the worst learning experiences you had in college?” ..and their insights are all so rich, and I share a number of their wonderful stories in the book. It’s a great pleasure.

John: Would that be something that you’d encourage faculty to do in their own classes?

Sarah: Yes, it was very illustrative, a lot came out of that. And we actually had worked with a consultant, Gary Senecal, because this was my first qualitative research study, and so I didn’t really know what I was doing. And he’s done a lot of qualitative research, and so he was our consultant. And he helped us shape the questions. And I think he had a large role in shaping those first two questions, because they’re just open ended enough that students share very different things, but then they all coalesce, and so it was very informative. And I think many professors could learn a lot asking their students those questions.

Rebecca: You included many narratives throughout your book, some of your own personal stories and some of the stories of student voices from this project. Can you talk about why you decided to include narrative as a part of the book?

Sarah: Yes, when I think about the books that I most like to read, the nonfiction books that I most like to read, they have a really strong narrative component. So I recently read Why Fish Don’t Exist, which was one of my favorite reads out of the last few years. And I love Robert Sapolsky’s books, and I’m a story person. And I mostly read fiction. And so I really enjoy nonfiction that has a strong narrative component. So that was one of my motivations, that I wanted to write a book that was like the books that I like to read. I think that story, though, also is really compelling. I think that there are insights that are embedded in stories that things like quantitative data can’t always tap into in the same way. And I think in particular, for topics like this, and for emotions and for students’ perceptions of their own learning, I think that we need story.

John: In addition to narrative, which is really compelling in your book, you also bring in a number of other disciplinary studies. Could you talk a little bit about some of the other disciplines and some of the other research your book relies on

Sarah: That’s a little, maybe, too far into humanities, I’m a little worried. I am a social scientist by training. And I’m very aware of the fact that there is disciplinary expertise. But I do bring in a lot of humanity’s work, in particular monster theory. So I read quite a bit of monster theory, which wasn’t even something that I knew existed before then, but that’s in there. I do something that I get from my mother. I used to make fun of my mother for always citing literature and stories as evidence for things. I would take an anthropology class and come home from college, and we would talk about it. And she would shake her head at me and say, “Well, that’s not how it happened, in Clan of the Cave Bear. [LAUGHTER] But I do a little bit about that. So I bring in some stories from novels and short stories that I think illustrate the points that I’m trying to make as well. And then I think, most compellingly, I bring in actual experts from their disciplines. So I interview a sociologist about her research on trigger warnings. I interview a Latin American Studies scholar about his work on vocation, which I found so fascinating. And I also interviewed a couple of clinicians, as I said, and Kelly Leonard who is a Second City improv person, and so I bring in those other disciplines through the lens of the people I’m interviewing.

Rebecca: Sometimes it’s really helpful to have these illustrations because statistics can go only so far in helping us understand what that actually looks like and feels like in our classrooms or in the experience that students are having because we can feel really far removed… or I’m feeling farther and farther removed [LAUGHTER] from students and it helps to hear things in their own voices. And we don’t always ask them enough. I wish we asked more.

John: …which is something really troubling to those of us who focus mostly on statistical analyses, and so forth. [LAUGHTER] But it’s true, a compelling story can be much more effective in convincing people of some concept than any number of studies that you might present to them.

Sarah: But we do have lots of citations for people like you, John. But I tried to bring both sources to the table,

Rebecca: …which is good, because you got both of us here.

Sarah: Mm hmm.

Rebecca: So can you talk a little bit about the intended audience of your book?

Sarah: Absolutely. My primary audience, I think, is people who are doing the work of higher education, so college instructors, staff like me who work in teaching centers, and student success offices, administrators, and so it does have a strong higher ed thread throughout. That said, I don’t think there’s a super bright line between especially late high school and early college in some of these concerns. And I think it could be useful for high school educators, especially those who might be advising students about the college selection process. I think that there is some insight and some sections, maybe, that could be of interest to college students themselves, and possibly their parents. But I would want them to know that it’s not a parenting book. I don’t want anyone to pick it up thinking it’s a parenting book. There’s long sections, again, on trigger warnings and institutions needing to actually carry out their DE&I statements. And someone picking it up thinking they’re going to get some pithy advice about parenting is not going to be satisfied.

John: Would this be a good focus for faculty reading groups or book clubs?

Sarah: I think so. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: We think so too. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, it looks like, yeah, it looks like some really wonderful topics that you’re exploring to think about all of higher ed in a lot of ways, and perhaps some reimagining that needs to happen.

Sarah: Oh, thank you.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what we, as educators or people working in higher ed, can do to create a more compassionate and challenging environment for our students? What are some actions we can take?

Sarah: Well, I think you have to do the compassion piece first. And I think that colleges really need to be examining, and I think they are examining, there’s lots of other people sharing this message of compassion and relationship, rich education, thinking of Peter Felton and Leo Lambert’s book. And I think that we need to embed compassion in the atmosphere in the classroom and the dorms. I think that we need to pay a lot of attention to community. I think that we need to shore up resources in counseling centers. I’ve been attending, as part of the research for this book, lots of webinars with people who are looking at this topic from a lot of different frameworks. And there’s a lot of interesting work being done on peer support, which I’m both interested in and also wary of. I think that peers are our natural first source of support. And that peer support could be really life changing for a lot of college students. But just like we shouldn’t be doing therapy in the classroom, I don’t think it’s the responsibility of college students to do counseling for their fellow peers. And they’re trained to spot warning signs and to do the kind of heavy lifting that a lot of counseling involves. And so I think that we’re going to need to dedicate more resources to trained clinicians in our counseling centers. In my interview with Ryan Glode in the book, who is, again, a clinical counseling psychologist, he really feels that counseling centers provide just sort of venting sorts of therapy, and that he’s a strong advocate of cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy, and that students need much more individualized treatment and approaches. And so I think that that’s an interesting thing to explore. And the last thing I would say is, I always say this, but faculty need more support and time, because there’s been a lot of great essays coming out, the last couple of weeks even I’ve seen, about the fact that student success is really faculty success, and faculty are where students get more of their support than anywhere else. And we can try to reach out to them in many different ways, but they land in our classrooms, we know that we’ll see them in their classrooms, even if they’re not leaving their dorm much, they usually come to class. And so it’s an entry point. Mentoring is such a strong part of the college experience and so wonderful for growth and mental health. And so I think that for faculty to really apply all of this and have really close student relationships and really rich classrooms and all of these things, they need more time and more support. And so I think that the two places I would put my support is in the counseling center and then in supporting faculty, giving them the kinds of time and the kinds of support that will allow them to be the teachers that they can be when they have the time to do so.

Rebecca: Are there specific places where you found compassion to be lacking that surprised you in your research? We know that there’s a [LAUGHTER] strain on counseling centers, but were there some other places that really rose to really needing some attention,

Sarah: None of the students we talked to had trouble coming up with either a best or worst learning experience. And the good ones are really, really good. And the poor ones were pretty poor. And so there’s a lot of unevenness, I think, and I think that that, when I talk as I just did about, if you just give faculty more time, then they’ll blossom, and then the students will blossom, and sometimes when I have conversations with administrators about that, or see policies being enacted on different campuses, I can tell that there’s a wariness that if you give faculty time, they’ll just either do more research, or they will check out and that there’s a danger there and we need to work faculty harder. And I do see in talking to the students about their best and worst learning experiences, that the people teaching those worst learning experiences really need to step up their game a little bit. And so I think that there are those pockets out there that still don’t apply themselves to their teaching or look at it as an onerous responsibility. But the good teachers are really fantastic. And so maybe leveling that out a little bit, bringing the worst learning experiences up to the best learning experiences might be somewhere I recommend some attention.

John: One of the areas where people often see a dichotomy between compassion and challenge is in terms of deadlines in courses where material later in the course build on material earlier in the course, it’s really easy for students who are struggling to get further and further behind when they don’t have at least some sort of a deadline. Do you have any strategies for addressing that, besides focusing on the learning rather than on grades? What can we do to help ensure that students make regular progress while still maintaining compassion?

Sarah: Um hmm. I think this is the question of the moment. [LAUGHTER] And I can tell you, I just had a conversation with a reporter at The Chronicle who was writing a whole big piece on just this issue. And we at Simmons just met with our advisory council, who are a group of about 12 faculty who we check in with about what faculty needs are. And this was their number one answer, like clearly. So we’re going to do a panel in the spring at Simmons, where we have some faculty with very different perspectives. We’re hoping to draw out some of these tensions and have this discussion. And so I do think it’s an excellent question. And I think that a deadline is a good example of where compassionate challenge needs to be. I think that all of us need the structure of deadlines. I myself benefit [LAUGHTER] greatly from the structure of deadlines and schedules. And I think especially for college students in the early years, if they’re so-called traditionally aged students, some of the process of those first year or two of college is learning time management and in scaffolding them into good time management. And so I think that structure is very important. As Rebecca was saying earlier, it’s also an inclusive teaching strategy, Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan have written extensively about that. But I think without compassion, deadlines are going to worsen student anxiety, and also it doesn’t make a lot of sense for contemporary life. And so some techniques that I’ve seen are things like using frequent tokens instead of just no deadlines or 100% flexibility with deadlines and things kind of pile up toward the end. You can have tokens where students can have a set number of missed assignments, or dropped assignments, or I need an extra week or two. I think that it’s important in whatever you do, if you are going to be flexible to be transparent with all of the students about it, because I think that some students will ask for flexibility and the other students won’t know that they can ask for flexibility. And a lot of that falls out along the lines where everything falls out and creates inequities. So I think that having some structure, but with some flexibility built in is probably the best way to go. I was interviewing a biology instructor for a different project. And she was telling me what she did is she had pretty close to unlimited flexibility within modules. So she had her whole semester set up in modules, but then you had to submit things within that module, because as you say, especially some fields, the information builds, and if you miss part, you’re going to be in trouble. And so I thought that was another interesting approach. But I agree that in particular when we’re thinking about mental health, that structure is better. And the last thing I’ll say is that at my previous campus, we had a panel of the Dean of first-year students, it was the head of our accessibility office, the head of our counseling center, and then a clinical counseling psychologist from our psychology department about issues surrounding student mental health. And one of the instructors asked about deadlines, and they were all unanimous, they said, deadlines are necessary. The worst thing you can do for a student high in anxiety is allow no deadlines or submissions whenever they like, because that will quickly get them into a negative place, and that they need that structure. So I think it’s a great example of the need for both compassion and challenge.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think about when I hear structure or certain kinds of support is routine. And you talked a little earlier about having some routine, but then disruptions to that routine. Can you talk about why some of the disruptions to the routine might be important, or why not having a routine all the time could be helpful for students?

Sarah: Well, I think the positives of routine are that they’re reassuring, for one thing. I think we all as human beings, it’s relaxing to settle into a routine, and it’s also lower in cognitive load. If you just know, okay, every Thursday, I have a homework assignment, every Tuesday I have a quiz, you don’t have to constantly be scrambling and figuring things out every week. And so I think that routines can be reassuring, and they can also be more transparent and easier to follow along. I think where the disruption is great is it re-energizes. So it’s great to be reassured and calm things down. But then that can get boring and kind of stultifying after a little while. And so once you have established the routine to mix things up once in a while, I think, can be re-energizing. And so I think that’s where a blend of the two can be really powerful.

Rebecca: You mentioned that you do this in your own classes. Can you share an example of one of the ways you mix things up in your own class,

Sarah: it’s not terribly exciting. But the one that I do this most clearly is in my motivation and emotion class. And in that class, we’re covering different topics and we’re reading research articles and doing presentations. And again, I try to mix things up, but I have a set number of things that I mix things up. And then usually right after Thanksgiving, I throw everything out the window and we just spend a week doing something different. And so we used to watch a movie together. And then we would write an essay about the motivation and emotion aspects and the themes that we’ve talked about all semester long, how it played out in those characters lives. And I was showing Lars and the Real Girl, I don’t know if it’s kind of an older movie now and stopped doing that for a while for a number of reasons. But then more recently, in this activity called “making the world a better place.” And I had a selection of psychological science articles, each one that tackled a societal problem, like climate change, or misinformation, and how we could use principles from recent psychological science research and to help improve this societal conundrum. And then we did small group work with snacks. And they would work on little group presentations all together that were very low stakes, and then present them to each other. And we would have a grant competition among them. But it was just this week where the routine was very different.

Rebecca: It sounds like almost a culminating point of the semester, instead of ramping up stress with a big project, it’s ramping down the stress with something that’s applied, but in a more low key way.

John: …but also valuable and fun.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely. To me, it sounds like: “[LOUD EXHALE]”

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

Sarah: Well, I have a new grant. Well, a semi-new grant. And it’s a National Science Foundation Incubator Grant with my co-PI, Michele Lemons of Assumption University. And it is examining assessment, feedback, and grading in undergraduate bio education in particular. And so we had a qualitative portion, we had a survey portion, and we had student interviews, and we’ve just wrapped data collection, So I have a lot of writing and meaning-making and analysis, and then a full proposal grant [LAUGHTER] to write. So on the research side, that’s what’s going on. And on the writing side, I don’t know yet. I have a few possible ideas. I’m in a writers group with Jim Lang, who I know you both know, and his new book, which is going to be fantastic… and you have to have him on the show… is all about how academics can successfully write trade books for a wider audience. And I’ve been enjoying the chapters as he’s been writing them. And I was reading his chapter on where to get your book idea, and I realized that I’ve written a couple of books now from my expertise, but I don’t have to stick with my expertise. I could do something super fun. And so I don’t know.

John: Not that your expertise isn’t fun or interesting. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Well, thank you. And anything I write will obviously have a strong psychology component, it’s just like in my bones at this point. But yeah, so stay tuned. We’ll see.

Rebecca: Sounds like some exciting things down the pike for sure.

John: We look forward to hearing more about that when you’re ready to share that.

Sarah: Oh, thanks.

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

Sarah: Thank you. Always a pleasure.

Rebecca: Yeah, I always learn stuff from our conversations, so I’m looking forward to having you on again in the future.

Sarah: Oh, thanks. Same.

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

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

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267. Fumble Forward

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

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

Show Notes

Transcript

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

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: That sounds quite nice.

Donna: Yeah. What are you drinking?

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

Donna: That’s hardcore.

Rebecca:[LAUGHTER ] But, it’s good.

John: All India, okay…

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

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

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

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

Donna: Well, there you go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donna: It takes practice…

Rebecca:…Yeah…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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265. The New College Classroom

Posted in access, active learning, classroom community, cognitive science, collaborative learning, diversity, equity, evidence-based teaching, higher education, instructional communication, learning, metacognition, pedagogy, social justice, teaching
November 30, 2022

Despite all that we have learned from cognitive science about how people learn, the most common form of classroom instruction still involves students passively listening to a lecturer standing at a podium at the front of the room. In this episode, Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopodis join us to discuss alternative approaches that treat student diversity as an asset and allow all students to be actively engaged in their own learning.

Cathy is a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, the author of more than twenty books, and a regular contributor to the Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She has served on the National Council of Humanities and delivered a keynote address at the Nobel Forum on the Future of Education. Christina is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Transformative Learning in the Humanities Initiative at CUNY and has authored over a dozen articles on innovative pedagogy, innovative pedagogy, environmental studies, and Early American Literature.  She has received the Dewey Digital Teaching Award and the Diana Colbert Initiative Teaching Prize.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Despite all that we have learned from cognitive science about how people learn, the most common form of classroom instruction still involves students passively listening to a lecturer standing at a podium at the front of the room. In this episode, we explore alternative approaches that treat student diversity as an asset and allow all students to be actively engaged in their own learning.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guests today are Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopodis. Cathy is a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, the author of more than twenty books, and a regular contributor to the Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She has served on the National Council of Humanities and delivered a keynote address at the Nobel Forum on the Future of Education. Christina is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Transformative Learning in the Humanities Initiative at CUNY and has authored over a dozen articles on innovative pedagogy, innovative pedagogy, environmental studies, and Early American Literature. She has received the Dewey Digital Teaching Award and the Diana Colbert Initiative Teaching Prize. Welcome, Cathy and Christina.

Cathy: Great to be here. Thank you for having us.

Christina: Thank you so much.

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

Cathy: I am drinking English breakfast tea.

Rebecca: Yes. [LAUGHTER] And Christina?

Christina: I am drinking English breakfast tea.

John: And I am drinking wild blueberry black tea.

Rebecca: I forgot what kind of tea I made this morning. [LAUGHTER] I have no idea. I made nice loose leaf tea this morning, and it’s tasty, but I don’t remember what it is.

John: So you’re drinking a tasty tea.

Rebecca: I’m drinking a tasty tea this morning.

Cathy: Will I be kicked off the show if I say I’m drinking coffee?

John: About a third of our guests do. Yeah, and sometimes water.

Christina: I also have a Diet Coke. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Sneaky, very sneaky.

John: And I had that right before I came over here.

Christina: We’re drinking all of the things.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss The New College Classroom. Could you tell us a little bit about how this book project came about?

Cathy: I can begin. This is actually the third in a series I called the “how we know” trilogy, which I began in 2011 after I stepped down as Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, my previous employer, and was really interested in the science of attention and the neuroscience of learning. So that book really is about the neuroscience of learning. Then I wrote a second book called The New Education which came out in 2017, and was re-issued in a post pandemic version just this past spring. And it’s called The New Education. It’s really the history of higher education and why we inherited the forms we have now and how much higher education was re-created for and rebuilt, redesigned explicitly for the industrial age. And then I wanted to do a kind of installation guide that actually showed people how we do these things, how you take our knowledge of how the brain works, take our knowledge of learning, and how you take our knowledge of history and why we’ve inherited this very cumbersome history and actually do something new. And I thought it would be ridiculous for someone at the end of a long career to be telling other people how to teach. And I had the great fortune to be working with this… Christina will close her ears right now, she gets very embarrassed when I say this… but this utterly brilliant scholar, an Americanist environmental scholar, sound studies scholar who also had written several essays on pedagogy and had won all the teaching awards. And I asked her if she’d be interested in co-writing a book with me. And we started writing it when I was a senior fellow to the Mellon Foundation in my beautiful office overlooking the courtyard of the Mellon Foundation. And then the pandemic hit. We made a pledge to one another that we’d meet every Tuesday and Thursday and write together and we literally wrote, rewrote, re-re-re-wrote, and then re-re-re-re-re-wrote [LAUGHTER] every word together during the pandemic. So when people say, “Can you have a real relationship? Can you have a real project during the pandemic?,” we would say “Absolutely.” And that’s actually kind of key to the book, ‘cause we talked about learning in all its facets online and face-to-face. But that’s the very long version of how I’m the luckiest author in the world to have been able to work with Christina.

Christina: I’m the luckiest. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: It must have been very nice to have the stability of consistent writing times with each other during a time that was so unstable.

Christina: Yeah, it was a lifeline. I live in Brooklyn, near the Barclays Center where a lot of the Black Lives Matter protesting was happening here. And kids will be playing in the street. They had to close the streets on the weekends and weekdays so that kids could get time outside and neighbors could gather together outside where it would be safe. And kids playing on the street, drawing all these beautiful things in sidewalk chalk, and then you’d see police completely decked out, batons out, pepper spray, all kinds of things, getting ready for the protest that was just completely peaceful protesting and a police force that was just prepared for something wildly different. And it was a really dark time in trying to protest and think of a better way, a more equitable institution, an institution that could prepare students for the world, to be citizens of the world and also to fight for social justice and racial justice, and getting together and writing this book. It felt we have even more purpose more so than ever, in writing this and leaning into the active learning methods that really prepare students to participate and engage with the world.

John: You begin the book with something which actually serves as a very nice introduction to much of the rest of the book, which is a story about a 50-person department meeting in which no one was responding to the department chair. Could you just share a little bit about this anecdote?

Christina: Sure. So I was in that department meeting, it was a meeting in which we were given a really big task of imagining the goals for the department for the next 10 years. This is a review that happens every 10 years. And the department chair was standing at the front of the room behind the podium and was like, “Alright, so what are our goals for the next 10 years?” [LAUGHTER] …and everyone was quiet. Because as you can imagine, everyone has things that they want to change, things that they think could be better, and no one wanted to be the first to speak. And it really just felt like one of those situations where there’s a bunch of dry straw, and someone could just light a match. And so I was like, “Okay,” I knew everyone there, and I was familiar with the chair. The chair was very supportive of students, and I knew he was willing to listen. And then I said, “Hey, can we just talk to someone next to us and come up with a few ideas first, before we speak with the whole group?” He’s like, “Sure.” And this is what’s called think-pair-share where everyone thinks about a question and then they pair up with someone next to them or a small group of people. And then when we’re all done, we come back and share what we came up with. And five minutes go by and he is trying to get the attention of everyone in the room, the room has exploded in all this conversation, but everyone is smiling and enjoying talking to the person next to them. They’re thinking more hopeful thoughts with their generous colleagues and students and faculty all together. And when the chair was finally able to call everyone back to order… I’ve done this in 8 ams… the poor people who teach next to me have said that my classes are too loud at 8 am. [LAUGHTER] And Cathy has done this with a lot of people every time she gives a talk, and it takes a long time to get everyone to come back to order. And then people were so eager to share what they had talked about in their groups. And there was a little bit of anonymity, because it was like, “Okay, everyone in my group said this, not just me,” [LAUGHTER] and everyone was willing to share and we started to envision some really beautiful goals for the next 10 years that were really hopeful, that were imaginative, and creative, and beautiful, rather than starting with critique. Or sometimes what happens is, if one person says something, then everyone else kind of jumps on that train, and this way, diverse number of ideas coming out of these different separate conversations. So that’s why we do it.

Cathy: If you want an education-ese term this is called an inventory method. It’s the opposite of the standard seminar where you ask a question and those same three students raise their hand dutifully and answer the question. And sociologists of education have studied who those students are who raise their hand. And they tend to be a good match for the professor in class and race and gender and family background, family income… the people who are most into the class, most likely to get an A plus, most likely to go on to graduate school, most likely to be professors, replicate their professor. And that’s one reason why only 1% of Americans have a PhD and 25% of the professoriate has a parent that has a PhD. We have a system that’s a closed system. When you do an inventory method, like the one that Christina uses, think-pair-share, everybody in the classroom contributes. In that case, it was a meeting. But that’s true in a classroom too. Sociologists of education also tell us that 20% of students graduate from college without ever having spoken in a class unless they were required to speak by a professor. But if we really believe that higher education is about empowering students, not just giving them content, but giving them the tools to be experts themselves, then they have to learn how to articulate those ideas. And of course, some people are shy and then having them write on an index card means they’re still participating , even if they’re too shy to actually say something in class. An incredible method that I learned from a second grade teacher and I’ve done in many situations. Christina was alluding to the famous one I tell all the time about trying think-pair-share with 6000 International Baccalaureate teachers in the Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers auditorium. So they’re all thinking and pairing and sharing on these jumbotrons in the auditorium.[LAUGHTER] It was great. And I’ve also done it with the top 100 performing CEOs of the Cisco foundation. I did this with the Board of Trustees at Duke and John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco was on, he said, “I need you to talk to my executives, because there’s nobody more likely to be reticent about giving comments than one of my CEOs who’s talking to me. Power does that. There’s a kind of silence that happens in the face of power, whether it’s with second graders or a department meeting like Christina was in or students every day in our classes.

Rebecca: I think what’s really interesting about both of the stories that you’re sharing is that we’ve been in those situations where the silence is overwhelming, we’ve maybe have been the person running the meeting or the classroom or also been the person in the audience.

Cathy: And it feels awful, it feels terrible. My students call it’s playing silence chicken. [LAUGHTER] That’s a great term.

Rebecca: It’s a perfect descriptor for sure. So given that we’ve all had these experiences, and also have experienced the opposite. I think probably all of us, or at least most of us have experienced those engaging opportunities. Why do we always default to the one that doesn’t work? [LAUGHTER]

Cathy: Every structure we have in academe tells us our job is to learn from the master. And I use that word in quotation marks, but pointedly, and then repeat back what you learn on a final exam and that’s how you get As. And the students in our classrooms, they’re the winners, not the losers. They got to college because they learned that lesson, Freire calls it the “banking model,” where it’s my head dumping and depositing stuff into your head. We also have studies that go back to the 1880s, not 1980s, 1880s, the Ebbinghaus experiments with memory that tell us we forget 75% of what we’ve learned for that exam within weeks after the exam is over. So it’s not an effective way to learn, but it’s the way we learn. So we’re being reinforcing in a way of learning we only use in higher education and formal education, we don’t learn new skills that way, when it’s not commonsensical to learn from a lecture. I don’t learn how to play tennis from a video. I might look at a video, but that’s not how I get better. I practice and I improve and someone corrects me, and then I change what I’m doing. We all know that. But, for education, we’re told, learn from the sage on the stage. That’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s how you excel and our students have learned how to excel. It makes complete sense that they would think they learned more from a lecture than when they contribute. They’re deferring to the authority in the room.

Christina: And I think that this has been ingrained in them for a long time. We’ve been ranked and rated since birth, literally the first minute of birth ranked against others. And this one wonderful researcher, Susan Engel. She’s at Williams College, developmental psychologist, and she cites a study where kids on average before they go to school, when they’re at home asked about 27 questions per hour. And anyone who has a toddler, sometimes it is well more than 27 questions per hour. [LAUGHTER] My toddler just started asking why about literally absolutely everything. He’s about three. So right on target for asking lots of questions, for being naturally curious about the world. She talks about this. It’s called epistemic curiosity. And Dr. Engel says that once kids go to school, they ask on average three questions per hour, which is just a precipitous drop in getting to ask your questions, getting to know the world around you through engaging with it. And so by the time they get to college, they expect to learn more from a lecture, that they are not experts in the room, and that the person at the front of the room has all of the answers. And they have been trained through standardized testing to believe that there is a right answer, and they just need to be able to get to that right answer. That doesn’t train them to take on the world’s toughest problems and be problem solvers, to find alternative solutions, to think outside the box. And maybe those problems in the world are caused by believing there is a right answer and not thinking that maybe it’s me sitting in the room with all of these other people sitting in the room who could find a better solution or a better answer than the one that that one person has. And that’s how we change society. That’s how we transform our institutions. And I think they’ve just been ingrained in this system for so long, that by flipping it around and saying no, there are 50 different ways to answer this one question or 50 different ways to solve this one mathematical equation, then it’s more up to them. It’s giving them a little more responsibility and autonomy so that they can practice using it when they get out into the world rather than thinking, “Oh, there’s someone smarter than me who clearly has that figured out and they’ll take care of that problem.” That doesn’t really give them the kind of responsibility and accountability that I think that we all need in the world.

Rebecca: What you were talking Christina, I was thinking about a conversation I had with my kindergartner over the weekend, who does still ask many, many questions, some of which I do not know the answer to and so I don’t remember what she was asking me but whatever it was, I did not know the answer. And I said, “I don’t know, we’ll have to look that up” and she’s like, “I’ll ask my teacher, she knows the answer.” She’s in kindergarten, she’s only been in kindergarten for two months.

Cathy: I interviewed kindergarten teachers and first-grade teachers about learning. And almost every kindergarten teacher said, “when kids come to them, they think they can do all these things like ‘I love math, I love music, I love art, I’m an artist,’ by first grade, within six months into the first grade, they know, ‘I’m not good at art, I’m not good at math, I’m okay at language, but I’m very poor at…’ and already have absorbed those kinds of lessons about themselves.” And what you said is great, because it’s like the authority of the teacher is already happening. And then what happens when you absorb those lessons into a self definition. And that’s what we’re working against with active learning, is not just definition of the teacher, but definition of yourself in your role as a person.

John: And that’s hard to correct at the college level, because students have been indoctrinated in this from their very first exposure to educational systems. And when faculty do try using active learning, they often get a lot of pushback from the students. And that’s a challenge for new faculty where their teaching evaluations may have some impact on their continued employment. So it’s a difficult cycle to break.

Cathy: Yes, and it’s one reason why we include the research, serious research with any thing we offer to faculty members about what they can do in their class. And we also talk about the 2014 meta study in the publication of the National Academy of Science that looked at every possible way of evaluating learning and said if this had been a pharmaceutical follow-up study that Eric Mazur, who’s one of the inventors of the flipped classroom, did at MIT because his brilliant MIT students, were all sure they were being shortchanged by active learning. So he had them read serious scientific studies of active learning and then they all thought they were doing great by having active learning, and they thought they were better. So it’s about using the methods that speak to people in order to change the methods because unless you address the actual present situation of the audience, of the students, of the people you’re addressing, you can’t change things, you have to honor that present situation before you can move to something else and make a structural change beyond that.

Rebecca: A lot of the current system of higher education, as you mentioned, is based on a really different era, a really different audience of students and our student populations have changed, become more diverse, there’s more people going to college now than before. So how do we help students who have been through this system that has not really invited them to the table to really get involved. We share some of the research, and what are some other ways we can support them on this endeavor, and to continue helping us change the system.

Christina: Some really great pedagogy out there. One I’m thinking is an assignment that Erin Glass does with her students where they read terms and conditions for all of the technology that they’re using on their campuses. And they have to closely read them and critique them to help them become more aware of capitalist surveillance and what they are required to sign up for. And then they write a critique of that, of the university and of the system that they’re being signed up for, so they’re not only learning more, they’re learning digital literacy. They’re also learning more about the institution that is guiding these things that they’re signing up for. And they’re becoming better critical readers in general. And they’re also talking back to that institution and saying you could be doing better. And so there are ways in which we can give our students real-world problems that are immediately close to them and to their experiences of education, and task them with coming up with something better. And it’s really wonderful that students who come from all different kinds of educational systems to get together and think of what could be done better. Or Cathy also does this where at the end of the semester, a final project could be like, come up with a better syllabus. I don’t know if you want to speak to that Cathy, but I love this assignment.

Cathy: Yeah, I love to end the class where I be in the next class, like I say, “Okay, we’ve had about 12 weeks or 16, depending on the institution that I’m at, together and we’ve done this as a syllabus, and you’ve contributed to the syllabus, the last assignment, and sometimes we make this even as a final exam, is to make a syllabus the next people who take this class will inherit. Put your stamp on it. What did you like? What didn’t you like? That’s an incredible activity and it means it’s but again, using an education-ese term, it’s metacognition, too, because it means students are looking back over everything they’ve learned, which is the best way to beat the Ebbinghaus 75% forgetting because you’re actually processing it, analyzing it, and then trying to come up with some new version that you’re bequeathing to somebody else. It’s a legacy that you’re bequeathing to somebody else. It’s a marvelous exercise and you can do it in any kind of class. It’s quite fascinating to see the different ways people can come up with things. So often people say, “Well, you’re an English teacher, so of course, you’re flexible.” But what about… there’s somebody named Howie Hua, who’s a professor at Cal State Fresno, who on Twitter almost every day he comes up with what he calls mental math problems. And he’ll ask something seemingly simple that you think there’s no other way to solve that, like, “Add in your head 24 plus 36? How did you do it?” And dozens of people respond with different ways to add whatever those two numbers are that I just said, in their head. And it’s fascinating, because the point he’s making is it’s not about the right answer. It’s about, not only understanding the processes, but understanding all the different tools that we can have in order to be better mathematicians, more passionate about science or more passionate about all kinds of learning. So I think any assignment that gives students the tools and allows them, and even better is when they can pass on those tools to somebody else. When Erin Glass does that assignment, they not only critique, but they come up with their own terms of service. What are the terms of service for our class? What’s the community constitution for our class? What are the community rules we’re going to form in this class? …and so they’re already invested in a new kind of structure even before you start populating what that structure is going to look like.

Christina: And I think from the first day, you can really set students up for something different. One thing that Bettina Love does in her classes is she has everything set up and she goes, “Okay, now you tell me when the deadlines are going to be for this.” And so students look at their calendars, look at their schedules, and determine when things are going to be due so that they’re not all due in the same week as midterms or as in the same week as finals. That’s a very student-centered approach, asking students to come up with the learning outcomes of a class. And even in the most restrictive situations, you can add learning goals and learning outcomes, even if yours are set by the department. So I think also asking students what needs to change to better serve them and centering them in that conversation, you can start with your class and then start to think more broadly about a department or a whole institution.

Cathy: What I love about all of these different things, and we’ve borrowed them from other people, one of the things we did was we interviewed so many people, academic twitter was very helpful for that, to find out what they were doing and profile people and amplify people who are doing amazing things. What works best is when something specific, if you say how should we change this class, you get silence chicken. If you say here are the 10 learning outcomes that our department requires us to write, do you have anything else you’d like to add? Maybe work with a partner and come up with your own additions to these required learning outcomes? Students come up with beautiful, soaring, inspirational things that just make you aware that if they’re allowed not to be cynical, students want to have agency and want to have something that will help them in the rest of their life, it’s pretty scary to think about the world out there. And they want and need these things and want to be participants in the shaping of their own life and in their own agency.

Christina: And you’re reminding me too, that there’s this widespread movement right now to rename office hours, to call them student hours, because students are so used to going to the office being a punitive experience. And student hours really welcomes them to come with maybe more than just “I’m having difficulty with this problem set.” “But I want to talk about my career, what can I do with this degree? Or I’m having difficulty with x? Can you help me with y?” I think it really better serves them as well to rename it student hours to show that we actually really want you to come and we really want to talk to you. I don’t want to just sit alone in my office. [LAUGHTER] I want you to be here.

John: What are some other activities or ways in which we could give students a bit more agency? You mentioned the reflection on the syllabus and rewriting a new syllabus at the end. And you also hinted at having students be engaged in the syllabus itself. What are some other ways we can do this during the course of the class?

Cathy: I often quote our friend Jonathan Sterne, who teaches at McGill University because this is the most counterintuitive one. Jonathan teaches various versions of mediasStudies, media information, technology, and disability studies. He himself had throat cancer, and he talks through a voice box that he himself helped to design… a remarkable human being. He teaches classes of 400 to 600 students, and people say there’s no way… how in the world could that be active learning? He hands out index cards and at the end of every class students write down an answer to something he asks. He might ask “What did we talk about in class today that you’re still going to be thinking about before you go to sleep at night? And if there was nothing, what should we have been talking about?” Today’s media if you don’t have anything to say about media in the modern world, something’s misfiring. He has a blog about his learning, and he’s charted how well students have done since you’ve done these simple exercises of having students report back after every class. He also works with TAs who have special sections, and they take the 15 cards from their section, so they know what questions the students have before they go into the session. And then he uses some of those to spur his next assignment. He does this kind of cool thing where he spreads it all the cards and says, “Well, John said so and so. And Deborah said so and so. And Rebecca said, so and so. And Christina said so and so.” So he makes it interactive. He also does an incredible thing. He says, “With this many students, I have to use multiple choice testing, and I know how impoverished multiple choice testing is.” So he sets his students a creative assignment each time, sometimes it’ll be a piece of notebook paper, sometimes it’ll be an index card, and he’ll say, “You can write any crib sheet you want, go back, and you can do anything you want from the semester to help you do well on the multiple choice exam.” And what he knows is what they write on that crib sheet is the learning, right? It’s not filling in the ABCDEs, it’s the learning he also leaves some portion, it might be 5%, might be five points, it might be10 points, depending on the system he’s using. He’s Canadian university, so it’s a slightly different system than in the US. But he leaves some amount free, and students hand in both their multiple choice exam and their crib sheet. And he gives extra points for the crib sheets. He’s even done art installations with some of the crib sheets that students have done. But the point is the way you review a class and organize the knowledge onto some very prescriptive sheet, and he says the prescription is extremely important… he’s a composer as well. So he knows how it’s important is to have rules and to play with those rules. And it’s almost like a game. That’s where the learning is happening. So even in the most restrictive situation, you can still do active learning and learning that’s meaningful to how your students learn and how they retain and how they can apply that learning later.

Christina: A colleague of mine, Siqi Tu, also has her sociology students come up with some of the questions that will be included on the final exam. And you can do this with a multiple choice or a long answer type of exam, and the students develop a question. And then when they submit their questions to the professor to review, they also need to include what skills are we assessing with this question? And is this the right answer? What are the various ways you could get to the right answer? And if the right answer is D, then why are you offering A, B, and C as other but wrong answers? Why are they not the right answer? …things like that, to get students to have this kind of command over what they’re learning, why it’s important, what is worthy of being assessed, and how to go about assessing it and testing that knowledge. They have a lot more agency then in how they are being evaluated. And so their expertise is also being solicited there. And the majority of the learning is happening in creating the question and explaining all of the pieces of how that question has been crafted and what the right answer is and why. And then, at the end, she includes at least a portion of the student-generated questions on the final exam. And so it not only gives them great exam prep, but then they also know better what to expect. And they have more agency and control over how they’re being evaluated.

Rebecca: I really enjoyed some of the titles of the chapters in your book, for example, “group work without the groans.” [LAUGHTER] And I thought, yes, group work without the growns. So they resonate.

Cathy: I used to consult quite a lot with business. And just because of that I helped create the Duke Corporate Education Program, which was for returning executives, when I taught at my previous institution. And the number one expense of management experts who are brought into corporations to help manage more effectively is to help them with group work. And in classrooms, sometimes even in sixth grade, we say “Work in your groups and then do something amazing.” Well, no, we know what’s going to happen. That one person who raises their hand, they were one of the three who raises their hand, and in the group, they’re the one that does all the work, then there’s somebody else who kind of goofs off, and then there’s somebody else who does nothing at all. And we know those patterns, and it’s horrible for all three, it’s horrible for the person who always steps up, they’re not being pushed, and it’s horrible for the person who does nothing or the person who goofs off. So when I do group work, I have students write job descriptions. They write out job descriptions for who is going to do what in the group and I also love to have them do an exercise that I call superpowers. What’s your hidden superpower? What’s your three things you do that you think have no relevance at all to this group but that you know you do really well? It might be playing video games. I’ve had people say they were a clown. I found out that my executive director of the program I run was a professional clown. I didn’t know that. She’s a gorgeous young woman and she was a clown. She’s the last person I would have thought of who would be a professional clown. People have these skills, and what they find out in a group is those skills are not irrelevant, because you’re talking in group work not only about coming up with a product, but about interrelationships. And how you can make all the different parts of your personalities work together coherently to create a final product. Also, I have students put that on their resume. I have them look online at what employers most prize. And it turns out collaboration… duh…because that’s what they spend their money improving. Somebody who can be a great collaborator is somebody you want to hire in a job. So my students can not only put that on their resume, but have a wonderful example. You don’t have to say it’s in a classroom. I worked on a project with four others, and we took that project in from idea to implementation, and my role was the firestarter. That’s a term from computer scientists. I’m especially good at coming up with new ideas and presenting those ideas to a group. Fantastic. And then they don’t grown, they realize they’re learning a skill, not being put back into a pattern that they themselves hate and are embarrassed by or resentful of.

Christina: And I think in addition to telling them why group work is important, that they’re going to end up working in groups for the rest of their lives. Everything I’ve done in any job has been collaborative to some degree, and mostly a lot, like really collaborative. And so I just kind of tell them, “This is not busy work, this is actually good practice for the rest of your life, because at the end of the semester, you’re not going to work with these people anymore. But if you’re in a job, the only way to leave that group is to leave that job and the stakes are so much higher. So first of all, this is good practice.” But I think also, we sometimes neglect to offer students the structures that they need to feel confident in their grade for group work, and to feel confident going into group work. So from the get go, giving students structure for the group work, like a checklist of jobs or asking them to come up with a checklist of tasks that they need to complete, assigning roles, like putting a name next to each item on that checklist, so that it’s clear who is doing what. Teaching them a skill like that is teaching them how to delegate authority, how to be a good entrepreneur, a leader, and pointing that out to them that by creating this checklist and putting everyone’s name next to everything, you’re delegating authority, you’re learning these leadership skills that you need in the workforce, and helping them to understand that it is absolutely okay and totally normal to feel social anxiety before going into a group, particularly after a pandemic, when we really lost the ability to make small talk.

Cathy: It’s exhausting. [LAUGHTER]

Christina: It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting. It is we lost that skill. Oh my goodness,

Cathy: Today happens to be a Monday and I had brunches on Saturday and Sunday and took a nap after each one. I can’t remember how to do brunch anymore. [LAUGHTER] And we’re all in that situation.

Christina: It’s true. I just wanted to add one more thing, which is that it’s not just social anxiety, but it’s also anxiety about grades and grading. And we have a whole chapter about grades. Because no one likes grading. No one likes grading. And I think it’s important too for students to know that they’re being graded and assessed fairly on group work. I’m so having that checklist of roles and turning that in at the end to show who did what is really important. And inevitably, it’s funny because we also put faculty into groups …that transformative learning the humanities… where I work, and this inevitably happens with faculty too, that they get really anxious about working when the ideas aren’t gelling together. And I think it’s really important for students to know how they’re being graded. And if someone’s ghosting or someone’s not pulling their weight or not showing up, give everyone else extra credit for helping to make that work, helping to reach out to that person who’s not showing up or ghosting: “Are you okay?” And a lot of times that person is not okay. And they needed someone to reach out and ask if they’re okay, they need that support. So offering the students who unclog a problem, you can give them a plunger award, literally, that happens in a lot of groups, or do something to recognize someone who goes above and beyond to help resolve those kinds of conflicts and issues, rather than it feeling like “Oh, but my grade is being hurt by someone else.” I think it really helps to foster collaborative community and a learning community where everyone is important. Everyone is valued and everyone needs to be okay for the group work to be successful. How can we help our colleagues, our peers.

Cathy: Around 2005 to 2010 years for my organization HASTAC which I co-founded in 2002… NSF now called it the world’s first and oldest academic social network… we created a wiki and we went to this guy in a garage and asked him if he would help us create a wiki and then the next year he launched Wikipedia… that was Jimmy Wales. [LAUGHTER] So that’s how old, that’s how ancient this is. But with that world, we were dealing a lot with open-source computer programmers. When they would do a job, when a job would be posted on Stack Exchange or another open source site, they would have to find a partner that they’d never worked with before and know if that person was reliable, somebody who could complement their skills, and so they do a badging system. And I worked with the Mozilla Foundation on creating badging systems, where you would write down all the criteria that you need to accomplish a job and you never gave a negative, you never give a negative, you just give somebody a badge if they did something great in doing that, and then somebody else who comes by and wants to look to see if they want to work with that person sees where they’ve been given the right badges and says, “ooh, yeah, those are the things I do poorly and those are things what you do well.” Again, HASTAC calls that collaboration by difference. Not everybody has to do everything perfectly, but you have to know, you have to have an inventory of what people contribute. So in my classes, also, when I’m doing group work, I’ll have students not only write their own job descriptions, but write a list of the qualities they think are most important for the success of the group as a whole. And after every week, when they come together, I’ll have them give badges to the people. I don’t even say how many, what percentage, just give a badge to someone who you think really showed up this week, and give a badge in a different category. You don’t have to tell the person who never gets a badge from any of their peers that they’re not pulling their weight. And then that can be a first step, as Christina said, to doing something like reaching out and saying, “You must feel terrible that nobody’s given you a badge in anything. What’s going on? Is it indifference? Is something going on your life? What’s happening?” Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be punitive. But when you see that none of your peers are rewarding you, sometimes it’s like, “Darn them. I’m doing all the work. But I’m a shy person. So I just make the corrections.” That often happens among computer programmers who often are not the most voluble, personable, people. They used to wording, we’re doing code? And someone will say, :”No, no, no, I was fixing all the code you didn’t see, you just didn’t look and see that I was fixing all the code.” And then you can make an adjustment to and it’s an incredibly important adjustment. I’m working with somebody now who was Phi Beta Kappa, three majors, straight As, et cetera, et cetera, and never spok in college. And when she hears these methods, she says, “This would have changed my whole way of being in college.” Instead of feeling shame of all the people who should not feel shame, she felt ashamed that she wasn’t contributing. And because she was never offered an opportunity to until she wrote this brilliant final exam or brilliant final research paper when her teachers knew but in class, she felt like she was failing. That’s horrible. That somebody that brilliant would ever feel like they weren’t doing a great job.

Christina: I think it also asked how to get students excited. And thinking about what Cathy just said, I like to frame group work as an opportunity to practice being a step-up or a step-back person. So if you’re normally a step-up person, like everyone loves that you’re the first to volunteer to help. It’s great to be a step-up person, but sometimes that doesn’t leave room for stepping back and taking into account all of the things that have been said, and reflecting on the larger picture and finding the forest through the trees. And so I invite students to try to practice if you’re generally a step-up person, try being a step-back person. And if you’re generally a step-back person, try being a step-up person and see how it goes. And I also put all of the really loud step-up people in a group together, and I put all of the really quiet step-back people in a group together, because at some point, they’re going to have to talk and the step-up people need a way to regulate who is talking. And so I think a lot of us try to distribute those people through groups, and that can really change group dynamics. So I like having them all together in various ways to feel comfortable being among peers and navigating those roles and being more aware, calling to mind those roles before group work, so they could get excited about trying something new, and recognize that this is always just practice.

John: Will these methods help to create a more inclusive classroom environment?

Christina: These methods are inclusive because they solicit participation from every single person in the room. Inventory methods achieve total participation, that’s a term from the American Psychological Association, 100% participation, not just the hand-raising few. So these methods are inclusive.

John: There has been a lot of criticism recently concerning the way in which traditional grading systems cause students to focus on trying to achieve the highest grades rather than on learning. Do you have any suggestions on how we can focus student effort on learning rather than achieving higher grades?

Christina: Shifting the focus from grades to learning? A very quick answer would be thinking along the lines of Carol Dweck and using a growth mindset… that we are all learning… that you can do more assignments that are completion-based or labor-based to a satisfactory degree rather than A, B, C, D, F. And I think that one really great model is from Debbie Gail Mitchell, who teaches chemistry in Denver. She decided that an 80 is achieving proficiency. And the goal is to achieve proficiency. And so if you get an 80 on an exam or an assignment, then you receive the total number of points for that exam or assignment. And there’s a total number of points to achieve for the whole class. And so assignment or exam adds up to that. And so students stop grade grubbing or worrying if they’re getting an 83 or an 84. And they focus more on learning.

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

Cathy: At one of those brunches This weekend, I had the privilege to meet someone named Matt Salesses, S-A-L-E-S-S-E-S, who is a novelist who just took a job in the MFA program at Columbia, who’s also written a book called Craft. And the book looks at how we teach writing in writing workshops by looking at novels and noticing how often white-authored novels don’t tell you the race of the white characters, but do tell you the race of the non-white characters, and how much craft through all fields as well as in writing workshops often assumes a putative expert in a putative subject as being white. And then everybody else gets defined. So even when we do the terms like diversity and inclusion, there’s an implicit grounding that the person who has craft and earns that craft is going to be from the dominant race. And it’s a really interesting book that looks at the Iowa Writers Workshop and the principles by which it was written up. You could have done craft as a way that higher education was set up. So many of the people who started and set up the metrics for higher education in the late 19th century were in fact, eugenicists, they really believed there was a biological reason for racial superiority and created a system that reified that prejudice that they had. So that’s just a parting. I just happened to be at a brunch at one of those exotic face-to-face human real experiences this weekend where I met an astonishing person with an astonishing book that I’m thinking about more and more. So that’s a what next for me as of yesterday, but that’s the wonderful thing about active learning is yesterday always has something interesting you can learn from.

Christina: My what next is I’m working on an article right now with a colleague, Josefine Ziebell. We’re both sound studies scholars, and also interested in pedagogy. And we’re looking at the school-to-prison pipeline, and the ways in which school soundscape mirrors the carceral soundscape, and how to give students more sonic agency. And so thinking about silence in the room, thinking about voice, and in what ways speaking up can challenge authority and how that can cost you your life in the worst scenarios. And also just like bells ringing, the time ticking ways in which school soundscape can contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline by regimenting everything about a person’s body and depriving them of their sonic agency, where making noise is considered inappropriate when that is exactly what we need to do to transform these institutions. And so I guess that just studying that I find really interesting right now with Josefine.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for such fascinating conversation today and things to think about and wonderful teasers for your book.

Cathy: Thank you very much.

Christina: 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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264. Collaborative Rubric Construction

Posted in classroom community, diversity, engagement, equity, gender bias, grading, higher education, inclusion, learning, motivation, online learning, rubrics, social justice, teaching
November 23, 2022

Students may not immediately trust faculty who they perceive as being different from themselves. In this episode, Dr. Fen Kennedy joins us to discuss how collaborative rubric construction can be used as a strategy for building and maintaining trust. Fen is an assistant professor of dance at the University of Alabama and the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

Show Notes

John: Students may not immediately trust faculty who they perceive as being different from themselves. In this episode, we explore how collaborative rubric construction can be used as a strategy for building and maintaining trust.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guest today is Dr. Fen Kennedy. Fen is an assistant professor of dance at the University of Alabama. They are also the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus. Welcome, Fen.

Fen: Hi both of you, it’s good to be here.

Rebecca: Our teas today are:… Fen, are you drinking tea?

Fen: I am because I saw that there was a tea list, so I am drinking one of my favorite teas, which is a Lapsang Souchong. And because of the theme of my chapter, I have it in my wonderful mug that says, “What a beautiful day to respect other people’s pronouns.” Cheers.

Rebecca: Cheers. That sounds wonderful.

John: It does and you know, I’ve wanted to drink that tea on here, but I was never quite sure how to pronounce it. [LAUGHTER] I do drink it fairly often, it’s a really nice tea. I keep it separate from the others so the smoke flavor doesn’t infuse the other teas.

Rebecca: See, unlike you, I just embarrass myself by trying to say things I don’t know how to say [LAUGHTER].

Fen: I have a wonderful tea from Plum Tea Company, which is the Picard tea, which is a variant of Earl Grey, which is wonderful.

Rebecca: Nice.

John: And a nice nerdy thing to do too. Many of our guests would appreciate that aspect of it, and we would too. I’m drinking a wild blueberry black tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, That sounds nice, John.

John: It’s very good.

Rebecca: A little different than your normal. I just have Earl Grey today.

John: But not the Picard variant.

Rebecca: Yeah, unfortunately, I didn’t know that that was an option.

Fen: It’s wonderful, I think there’s kind of sweet orange notes in it. I’m a big fan.

Rebecca: That sounds really good. We might have to look, John.

John: So we invited you here, today, to discuss your chapter in Picture a Professor entitled “Collaborative Rubric Creation as a Queer Transgender Professor’s Tactic for Building Trust in The Classroom.” You begin the chapter by noting that transgender and non-binary faculty are rarities in higher education. Could you describe some of the challenges that you face as a non- binary transgender faculty member, who’s also a first-gen student and an immigrant?

Fen: Well, that’s a mouthful. [LAUGHTER] My chapter title is a mouthful and then the question is a mouthful, and well, I will do my best. And so well, I thought about this in advance. And I could give you some of the easiest figures and more objective measures of those obstacles. For example, I worked out quite recently, as an immigrant on an H1 visa, which is a work visa, but not a citizenship or residence visa, you are not allowed to work outside of the contract that you’re hired for. So any work that I’ve done outside of the university, I have had to donate my income to someone else, or just refuse payments. And I worked out that with the money I have lost being an immigrant, I could have put down a second deposit on a house.

Rebecca: …not insignificant.

Fen: No, so it’s not insignificant. The other thing that I think a lot of people don’t realize is that as an immigrant, you can’t really buy your books unless you absolutely know you’re staying in the country. So during my PhD, when you want to look up something, you can’t turn to your wonderful bookshelf and pull down the book that you own, it’s write to the library and see if it’s in stock and see when you can get it. So it’s this little logistical things. And I know we’ll get to gender because the chapter is about gender. But on the first-gen student, something that comes to my mind is: I was in a teacher training and the person giving this training said, “Well, you’re first-generation students, they’re really going to struggle in the classroom, you’re going to know who they are, they’re going to have a hard time knowing how to do things.” And I sat there getting my PhD, getting ready to teach and thinking, I’m not sure I like how I’m being described as someone who’s going to struggle who’s going to have these challenges, and no one has ever said, What advantages does a first-generation student have? What do they bring that other students lack? And so I think sometimes one of the big things is that you’re perceived as a challenge, you’re perceived as someone who’s going to struggle, which means that when you do something that’s original, or creative, or critical, often the response is to say, “Oh, that’s because you don’t understand” rather than, “Oh, this could be a productive direction that other people might want to take also.”

Rebecca: Those are some really good points. I think many of our students are labeled in all kinds of ways that prevent us from seeing all that they have to offer, and how much they can move our classrooms forward and how much we can learn from our students and not have this expectation that they’re going to fail. I really appreciate that you put that right out front.

Fen: I think also, when you follow that line of thinking, a lot of teachers… and I think the book is getting towards this point as a whole… a lot of teachers plan to teach to the students they want rather than planning to teach the students they have. So when they design syllabi, when they design policies, when they design their standards for the course, they picture an ideal student and say how would that student fit in? Rather than saying, “Okay, who is coming into my classroom? What do they need when they get out of it? And how do I take them on that journey in a way that makes them feel engaged, delighted, enthusiastic, valued.” And so we’re talking about Picture a Professor, but maybe not picturing our students is another thing that we could work on.

John: That could be a sequel, Picture a Student.

Fen: Absolutely.

John: I think when we all start teaching, we often have some assumptions about what our students are going to be like. But the reality of our students is often quite different. And that can lead to some challenges for both students and faculty. Following up on that a little bit, what do you do to try to find out more about who your students are.

Fen: So one of the things I tried to do is, think of the people that I hung out with, in my day-to-day life. I hung out with other immigrants, I hang out with first-gen students, I hang out with queer people. And I know about their barriers to coming into education. I hear a lot of people who’ve had really, really awful experiences. And I think about myself, and I was like, “What is the kind of classroom environment that I would have enjoyed? What is the kind of classroom environment that they would have felt happy in and at home in.” So I start with trying to make the door to the classroom as wide as possible, rather than keeping it narrow and forcing students to fit their way through. And then the other thing, I think, what I do is, I started university teaching when I was 23 and I was younger than some of the people in the room with me. And so I didn’t feel like I could step into a classroom and have authority from any degree that I had, or any age that I had, or any status that I had. And so really, if I wanted my students to do what I wanted them to do, I felt like the other end of the deal was I had to know more and teach it really well. And so coming from that perspective, I think, and not thinking of myself as entitled to teach and not thinking of myself as entitled to be at the front of the room, but having to work to be at the front of the room. And part of that work is making a space for the students who are in the room with me. And so I don’t have particular always things that I do. But I try and improve my classroom every semester and make it better for more people.

Rebecca: One of the things that I really appreciated about what you’ve said, Fen, is an underscoring of the term “delightful” multiple times, so that it’s not just something that a group of students can deal with, or it’s survivable, [LAUGHTER] which I think is maybe the bar that is often set, but actually, that you set the bar at delightful. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Fen: Well, it helps that I’ve always really liked being in classrooms. And school for a while was my safe space. Which means that I, in some ways, have in my past, lacked empathy with people who have not found that and who have not liked learning. And it took some hard experiences for me to realize, “Okay, this is something I’m going to have to step away from, because we’re taught often, if you don’t like learning, you’re lazy and it’s something of a personal failure, and you could be doing better.” And then realizing how many people are in a situation where they are taught that academia hates, and why would you want to constantly be in a space that hates you, for things that you have no control over? But when I start to teach things, I think, “How can I share this subject that I find really cool? How can I share it in a way that conveys my enthusiasm to the people I’m teaching it to.” And that’s fairly easy in a dance technique class, because dance is great fun, and also hard work. It is more difficult when you are teaching graduate critical theory. It’s more difficult when you’re teaching the required history course. But I love critical theory and I love history. And I find them really fun. And I think part of the way that you get people to enjoy the classroom is to give them ownership of the material and allow them to not step back at a distance and see the knowledge that is far off that they must aspire to, but put them in the middle of it and say this is work that we’re doing together. I say that I try and teach history, not to teach students history, but to teach the historians of the future, which means we’ve got to have debates and we’ve got to have conversations and we’ve got to have feelings and opinions that are legitimately ours rather than the ones we think we ought to have. [LAUGHTER]

John: That brings into the topic of your article, which is collaborative rubric creation with students. Could you talk a little bit about how you started doing that and how it’s been working?

Fen: Yes. So I really came to this idea of collaborative rubric creation because I was assigned a choreography course to teach for the first time and that gave me the opportunity to think philosophically about how does one grade choreography? [LAUGHTER] How do you grade someone making art? Because that is always… and I talked about this a little bit in the chapter… that’s always a big problem of a question in creative disciplines. There’s not a qualitative answer. There’s not a specific right or wrong. So how do you start to design that. And I must here, give a shout out to Jessica Zeller, who is a phenomenal dance teacher and also a really important voice in the conversation around what we call ungrading, and thinking about how to take down some of these structures of ranking students in boxes. And so looking through her ideas and trying to work out myself, and I thought, “Oh, what if we start the semester by talking about what art means to my students and what they want to do as choreographers,” because not every student wants to be a high-art experimental installation, interdisciplinary maker, even I kind of wish that more people were that thing. I don’t want to make them into me, I want to make them into the best version of them, which means I’ve got to understand what they want And also sometimes knowing that they don’t have exposure to all the things that they might want to be. So what’s the balance there? And I remember the first time I did it, I kind of structured it into their creative process, their self-directed learning and their citizenship. And what happened when we talked about the three different categories is they ran into all their assumptions about what they thought dance was. And so somebody had put down that an excellent choreographer uses partnering. They’ve done these wonderful, like written out on paper, and I said, “Well, do you think all expert choreographers use partnering? Do you think a piece is less if it doesn’t?” And they were, “Oh, wait, no, that doesn’t work.” And I said, “Okay, so what is the skill that’s being used? And we boil down, and so we got past these things that use partnering, like use motif and repetition, and started to realize what was underpinning those ideas, not the ingredients of what choreography had to include, but how you went about making choreography. And one of the big moments for the class was actually when we talked about citizenship, because they talked about “Oh, show up on time and answer all the questions.” And I said, “Well, with that in mind, how can you be a good citizen on a bad day? How can you be a good citizen when you are sick, or stressed out or having a panic attack?” And they went “Oh,” and so rather than, again, these indicators of good behavior and good practice, what is underpinning that or with a sense of being responsible for the space and yourselves and others, which sometimes is going to look different? It might be, “you have to email me and let me know if you’re not being there so I can shuffle the group’s around.” It might look like, “I’m going to take it notes for my friends and catch them up,” it might be “I’m going to zoom into class on a day that I can’t make it to class.” And that is a professional way of being a good citizen. And so it became a really generative conversation. And I went, “Okay, I’m going to do this every time I can.”

Rebecca: Sounds like a really productive conversation, and probably really pushing students to embody what it means to be a choreographer in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise approach the class.

Fen: I think it also gets them past the answers that they’ve just kind of learned by rote. And when I do this in technique classes, I start off by asking them, “What do you want to learn?” And usually, there’s a whole range from people who want to do their situps and their push ups at the start of class every day and get strong, there’s the people who would absolutely not like to do that. There’s the people who want to improvise, there’s the people who do not want to improvise. And when we only kind of pull it together, we see where the biggest priorities are and where, and what’s actually falling off the edges. And then I say, “Well, how do you want to be assessed on learning those things?” And so then, rather than their assessment criteria,being their straight knees and their wonderful athletic posture, we get things coming out, like “my problem solving,” “my adaptability,” “my ability to set a goal for myself and meet it within the range of my body.” And I really enjoy getting them to set goals that they’re invested in, so they understand that they have reasons behind them that they can then work towards, because they’re what they want to be working on anywhere.

Rebecca: One of the things you said a minute ago, in two different contexts was the students don’t always know where they want to be, or who they might want to be, or what kind of choreography they might want to make. How do you help students down that journey to discover and explore? Because that seems very tied to your rubric and your strategies here.

Fen: Yes, it is. And actually, it’s this process of creating trust. And I say that the rubric helps create trust, because they know that they’re not going to have a surprise. But if we’re all invested in the same goals, then we’re going on a path that we all kind of want to be on, which means that I get to say, “Look, I’m going to try something with you might seem really silly, and I want you to try it, I want you to try it for 15 minutes, and then we’ll talk about it, will you trust me enough to be really silly with me for 15 minutes?” And usually the answer is yes, because we’ve already agreed that we’re on the same page with what we want to get out of the experience. And I’m not going to suddenly swerve off into a different direction on my own agenda. So I think this idea of creating trust and buy-in allows me to expose students to a lot of different things, and a lot of different ideas, not because I’m saying this is right and this is where I want you to go even if you don’t understand why. But in the service of these goals that we’ve agreed upon, that we share, I think this will be helpful.

John: So it sounds like this process of rubric creation is not just creating this sense of trust, but you’re also breaking down some of their preconceptions about what the class is going to be about. Do you ever have trouble getting students to converge on a rubric? You mentioned that students come in with very different expectations, How do you resolve some of the differences in those expectations as a class?

Fen: Well, sometimes we just do all of them, if we have time to take different approaches, and we say, we’re going to compromise here, we’re going to do this some days, and not this other days, like I’ll do your situps, a nice, stretchy, soft, warm up, and we’ll see which one we like better. And at the midterm, we’ll check in and we’ll decide which one we like. And if we want to shift things. So, I think that’s how we’re resolving. And sometimes we sit down, we talk about it until we find out what we actually want and where the middle ground is. And on occasion, I say “There are limits what I can provide, and I cannot provide this experience for you. It is out of my skill set. Sorry, this is where you can go and get it.” And I think that two threads that I’m hearing myself say that I want to pull out the idea that things can change, that what you decided at the beginning can shift if it’s not working, and that I am willing to have limits in front of them and say, “This is what I can do and this is what I can’t.” And I think that’s really useful for them as well, because it helps them understand. If I’m there modeling that I get to set limits around my own workload, maybe they do too.

Rebecca: How often do you check in about the rubrics that you designed collectively,

Fen: Formally, not very often. And I think informally a lot, depending on the class. I think the first time I did it, I didn’t check in enough. And there was some confusion about how it would work out at the end of the semester. And it caused more stress than it needed to. And so the next time I followed the same pattern for a quarter of the class, I had regular check-ins throughout the semester, and I would look at like, “How is this working for you? And are you going in the directions that you want to and are you working your way towards these goals and targets,” rather than showing up at the end and going “Okay, now you’re going to be assessed on these things.” So I’ve learned to check in more. But depending on the class, sometimes I check in just as I chat to the students, and sometimes I have scheduled time,

John: How have students responded to the process, have they found it very helpful? Has it helped build that climate of trust?

Fen: Well, especially during the pandemic, thinking about what was reasonable to expect of students was really useful. And I think, because I already had this kind of system in place, I sent out things to my classes saying like, “What can I expect from you in terms of WiFi? Can you make it to classes? If you can’t make it to classes, would you prefer a podcast style or blog style? Or would you want me to just put up a lot of stuff and ask questions? This is the range of my flexibility, what would you like within it.” And so I think that was really, really useful. And I think it helps people who have obstacles to being in the classroom stay in the classroom. And I think that’s the big thing. Every semester, I have to submit my own benchmarks for what I want the students to do and how well they’ve done. But I am allowed to set my own benchmarks. And recently I shifted from what percentage of students are getting an A to, I would rather that a broader perspective of students were getting Bs across a wide range of material. When I submitted that benchmark, I said, “I don’t want to disregard the work of all the people who fought super, super hard to stay in the classroom and get a B in the course, because for some students, that is a huge amount of work. And they put in hours and hours and hours of time and effort and growth to get Cs and Bs in a course and I want the assessment of my teaching to show that I’m recognizing that and I’m trying to make it possible for them to do that. And I am proud of them when they do. A thing I hear a lot from my students is “You genuinely care about us. We know that you care about us,” and I’m really happy hearing that.

Rebecca: A thread that we’ve heard a lot lately is that the methods and things that are meant to be inclusive usually also involve methods that show care.

Fen: And I want to point out the other thing that I remember that a student said to me recently is, “You made me work harder in that class than I’ve ever worked in any class in my life. And I did it.” And so when we’re talking about these inclusive teaching methods and caring teaching, it’s not that we lack rigor, and it’s not that we asked for less. In fact, after we end up asking for more, because you can’t follow a known system, you can’t go to essaydownloads.com, which is not a real website… but I know things like it exist… because it’s not going to work for the kinds of work I’m asking my students to do. And so they’re being asked to meet really, really high standards, but they’re ones that will be genuinely professionally helpful to them as individuals.

Rebecca: You mentioned ungrading earlier and talked about students’ individual growth. Do you have students use the rubric to essentially self-evaluate or are you using the rubric to evaluate?

Fen: That depends on the class. In a choreography class I have the students come to me with a portfolio and a pitch for the grade they think they ought to get based on rubric, and we talk about whether that’s realistic or not. Actually, I’ve never had anybody over pitch, I’ve always had people under pitch on what they think they deserve, which is kind of sad, really. And then in some classes I use the rubrics more as a more conventional grading tool.

John: I think we’ve also heard that quite a bit from people who’ve used ungrading, that they’re more likely to find people who underestimate how much they’ve learned during the course, which is something that surprised me when I first heard it. But now we’re starting to hear that a lot. You mentioned teaching during a pandemic, and I would imagine that that’s especially challenging in a class like dance or choreography. Could you tell us how you manage your classes during a period of pandemic teaching?

Fen: I kind of had a great time. Like, obviously, there’s a lot that was not a great time. But I really admire the work my students did during those times. The commitment it takes to show up on Zoom and dance in your dorm room and keep being an artist is so much harder than it is to be when you’re in a studio among other artists. And they held themselves to that standard. I did talk with students about the reality of how do you give your best attention, which for some people is sitting looking at the computer and for some people is walking around, pottering, while they listen to a lecture and thinking about like, “Okay, what does it take for you to give your best attention today? because I’d rather you gave me your best attention than sat here, not being able to listen.” And I think that was useful. I was very lucky that I got to go completely remote for a semester. And I taught theory classes initially. And then I came back to a mix of theory and practical classes, one of which was choreography. And just like, as I said before, with the students it’s not planning for the class you want to have, it’s planning for the class you’ve got, and I had to do a hybrid class. And so rather than go “Okay, how do I make Zoom get as close as possible to an in-person class,” I said, “Okay, the first five weeks are going to be completely over Zoom, and at the end of it, we’re going to make a film about closeups. And we’re going to think of the dimensions of the Zoom screen and what it takes to be an artist within the tiny box. And so using the restrictions of the pandemic to shape how his class was going to be structured. And in history, again… I’m not sure if either of you have given lectures… but sitting on Zoom and watching a row of empty black boxes with a couple of faces while you try and give a lecture is a special kind of hell. [LAUGHTER] And I talked to my students, and they said, “We really do need lecture content.” I said, “Okay, so one class a week, I will just give you content over a lecture. And the other class of the week, you’re going into breakout rooms, and you’re going to do solo space self-directed learning. I’ll have questions for you.” I had a GTA, who was also in the rooms and they just talked their way through the history and the evidence and the questions and it was wonderful. And when I came back live, it completely reshaped my pedagogy. Because knowing that people were willing to get really deep into conversation further then I could take them to a kind of a guided discussion. And so not everybody wants to learn that way. Some people really do not want to sit and get into a really active lively discussion. And so finding a balance as I’m in the classroom, and there’s more opportunities. I call it “choose your own adventure,” but letting people have flexibility in how they’re learning. There’s lots of different ways to get through the course and that was shaped by Zoom and the necessities of how we teach dance during a pandemic.

Rebecca: So we talked at the top of the conversation about how few transgender and non-binary faculty members there are. And representation, as we know, is very important for our students and for our colleagues and to have a nice, wonderful learning environment. Could you talk about some of the challenges that you faced, as a faculty member who identifies as transgender and non-binary?

Fen: We are in a moment in America, and the world, where we don’t have a cultural consensus that transphobia is wrong, we don’t have a cultural consensus that homophobia is wrong, which means that putting myself out in the classroom is in itself a political statement. And that’s not one that every school wants to get behind. And it’s not one that every student feels necessarily confident about when they encounter me. We’ve got people coming in as undergrads, often I’m the first non-binary person they’ve met. And here I am grading them, and are they going to get into trouble if they get it wrong? And oh, my goodness, it’s a non-binary person at last. Let me ask them all my gender questions. Let me come out to you. There’s a spectrum of responses. But always, there’s a certain necessary caution around what I am allowed to say and who I am allowed to be. So that if somebody does say, “You’re grooming our children, you are putting our students in danger, you are sexualizing people and you are teaching children things that are against their religion.” And there are all things that could come up, how am I going to respond? And what is the record of my pedagogy and my actions going to say in response to those accusations? and that is a lot of weight to carry on your shoulders on a day-to-day basis. To know that the record of your actions might have to answer those questions. And so that’s something I think about a lot. And something I try and be very careful around. I have become more and more known for speaking about these interviews. I have been interviewed by Dance Teacher magazine, a couple of times, I keep my own blog about it. I’m someone that people go to when they want someone to talk about dance and gender now, which again means having a practice and how I shape my words and my presence. But on a practical level, I live in a small city, and even things like going out in the evening… is a student going to be in a restaurant? Or is a student going to be waiting on me and my partner? If someone takes a photo of me out in public with a glass of alcohol in my hand, is that going to come back to haunt me? And so it’s not just my professional life that gets shaped by these issues. But it’s every aspect of my life, where I have to be conscious of, again, what my actions may be held up as evidence for.

Rebecca: That’s a lot of emotional and cognitive energy that goes into all of that, and I imagine a great deal of planning, as you’re thinking about your courses.

Fen: Yes, there’s a lot of thinking, and I want to expose my students to a lot of very diverse material. And also, how do I give them the language of opting out? I don’t want to force anyone to watch things. And I’m actually a big believer in giving everybody the right of refusal in the classroom, most of the time, I work a lot with touch, which means you have to work really hard about consent. I definitely grew up in an era where your body was just picked up and moved around. And so thinking about my students’ right to say no to things, which often results in people feeling more comfortable saying yes to things. And I think in the same way that I sit down with my students and I say my pronouns are they and them, if you have a strong conviction that you can’t use that, you can use something else, I do prefer not to be called Mam, which I think is partly gender and partly British. But given that I’m out in the world, when I’m talking to my peers, and there’s not that level of force and power imbalance, I use they/them pronouns, and that’s what I expect people to use for me. But when it is someone over whom I have a certain amount of power, I think I have to give that little bit of space for them to go, “Okay, I need to think about my beliefs and my feelings and my desires and the power in the situation and know that I’m not going to mess up my entire academic career if I don’t get this right first time.”

Rebecca: Sounds like a lot of grace is extended. [LAUGHTER[

Fen: A lots of people weren’t sure about me coming down to Alabama. I chose to take the job here and I think it’s really important I say I had choices and I chose Alabama, in part because of how hungry the students were to learn, they really threw themselves enthusiastically at new challenging things. And I went, that’s where I want to be.

John: I was going to ask about that. While this could be challenging anywhere, I would think being in the south in general would make it much more challenging, especially given the level of religiosity of many of the students there.

Fen: Well, I think sometimes there’s a stereotype that the South is just an extra level of awfulness than anywhere else. And there’s a certain baseline of awful that you’re going to find absolutely anywhere where you’re a transgender professor. One of the places that I interviewed for a tenure-track position, they kind of grilled me for a long time trying not to say gender, but would I be willing to teach students with different beliefs? How would I manage students in the classroom who might have different ideas than me about how history worked? Which are valid questions, but really not the right question to ask when what you’re trying to say is, “How is your gender going to impact the classroom?” …which they can’t legally asked. And I walked into the interview at Alabama, and the head of dance said: “Just to check before we start the interview, you take they/them pronouns?” I’m like, “Yep.” And he went “Great.” And I was like, “Okay.” So in some ways, academia is a little blue bubble. But there are lots of things about being where I am in a situation that I am that I very much love and I also think that if people maintain this idea that the South is bad and awful, it’s often used as an excuse to stop people looking at their own behavior… we’re much better than the South, they need to change, they need to do things differently. People who are let’s get out of the south, let’s all move up north, whereas the activism down here is very powerful, like really incredible the work that people are doing to try and make the south a more livable place for everybody in it. And that should be respected and recognized, and it doesn’t do people justice to wrap the entire South up in this label of awful. That answer got a little tangled, but I think the summary of it is that there’s a lot of work to be done everywhere, and I’m happy to be doing the kind of work I want to do here.

Rebecca: That’s a very nice, succinct way of summarizing the tangle. [LAUGHTER] But it also always gets tangled, because there’s so many things that pull and push in different directions, and probably really worth acknowledging how much time you probably spend mentoring students who come to you based on your identity, and self-disclose because they’re looking for an advocate and they’re looking for a role model. And that labor is often incredibly invisible.

Fen: Yes. And I think, interestingly, I’m in a department where there’s a number of faculty members who collect… I call them goslings sometimes, [LAUGHTER] but students who, by virtue of identity or life situation, need extra love and support. And I think that every student at some point in their undergrad career needs a little extra love and support. And we are a large department. It’s hard to build those relationships with all the students, but I try not to just be there on the virtue of identity, like I do try and make time for anyone who asks for the time, often because I don’t get to know all the students very well, especially those with LGBTQ identities, you often can’t tell by looking. And so it helps me check my own judgment and make sure that I’m not unintentionally creating favoritism or groups. If somebody needs the help and the time, I want to be able to give it to them to the extent that I can. And I have had to learn how to say “I have X amount of time and then I have to have you leave my office.”

Rebecca: Boundaries, so helpful, so healthy.

Fen: Because if your professor is a person that your professor gets to be a person, just like you.

Rebecca: I feel like that’s such a powerful thing to end on. [LAUGHTER]

John: It is, yes. And humanizing the professor creates a much more positive environment where they do feel more connected to you.

Rebecca: Picture a professor, they are a person. [LAUGHTER]

Fen: Yes.

John: Okay. Well, we always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Fen: Well, I’m on sabbatical right now.

Rebecca: Woo hoo.

Fen: I have just gotten back from three weeks at the Hambidghe Arts Residency Center, which is just absolutely incredible… off the grid in the wilderness of the Georgia and North Carolina mountains. Fresh air. I got back yesterday.

Rebecca: Wow.

Fen: I leave on the 13th of October to go to Philly. I’m helping organize a partner dance event. And I am meandering up the East Coast, different cities ending in Ann Arbor where I am teaching a series of master classes and I’m presenting at a conference, and then I will come home and I’ll see what the next adventure is. But what’s next really is five cities in just under a month.

John: Sounds like a busy but productive schedule.

Fen: I’m really looking forward to it.

Rebecca: I hope you have wonderful travels.

Fen: Thank you

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

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

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Transcript

261. Social Justice Assessments

Posted in access, assessment, authentic learning, diversity, equity, feedback, first-generation students, grading, higher education, inclusion, learning, mastery learning, motivation, pedagogy, social justice, teaching, universal design
November 2, 2022

Traditional methods of assessing student learning favor those students that reside in well-resourced school districts while leaving low-income students at a substantial disadvantage. These grading systems also encourage students to focus on their grades rather than on their learning. In this episode, Judith Littlejohn, Meghanne Freivald, and Katelyn Prager join us to discuss a variety of social justice assessment techniques that can help to create a more equitable environment in which all students can be successful.

Judie is the Director of Online Learning at SUNY Genesee Community College, Meghanne is an Instructional Technology Specialist at Alfred University, and Katelyn is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology.  Judie, Meghan, and Katelyn worked together on a SUNY Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology committee on social justice assessments.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Traditional methods of assessing student learning favor those students that reside in well-resourced school districts while leaving low-income students at a substantial disadvantage. These grading systems also encourage students to focus on their grades rather than on their learning. In this episode, we explore a variety of social justice assessment techniques that can create a more equitable environment in which all students can be successful.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Judith Littlejohn, Meghanne Freivald, and Katelyn Prager. Judie is the Director of Online Learning at SUNY Genesee Community College, Meghanne is an Instructional Technology Specialist at Alfred University, and Katelyn is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Judie, Meghan, and Katelyn worked together on a SUNY Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology committee on social justice assessments. Welcome Meghanne and Katelyn and welcome back, Judie.

Meghanne: Thank you.

Katelyn: Thank you.

Judie: Thank you.

John: Today’s teas are:

Judie: …I have Lady Grey.

Rebecca: That’s a good one…

Judie: …In my DTL mug.

John: …a nice Desire to Learn mug.

Meghanne: I have iced green.

Rebecca: And Katelyn, how about you?

Katelyn: Mine’s water right now, if it were the evening, I would have one bag of peppermint and one bag of chamomile together, delicious.

Rebecca: Sounds nice and calming.

Rebecca: I have hot cinnamon spice tea.

John: And I have black raspberry green tea.

Rebecca: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your work on social justice assessment. Perhaps, we can start with a discussion on what you mean by social justice assessment.

Judie: So social justice assessment considers factors such as race, culture, language proficiency, socioeconomic status, and ability while working to dismantle systems of power, bias, and oppression in evaluation of student learning. So various approaches including equitable assessment, labor based grading, and ungrading, as they relate to the purpose, process, wording, and structure of student learning assessments are included. So we’re trying to focus on the learning that our diverse students achieve as it relates to specific learning outcomes just to mitigate the influence of dominant norms on our students’ grades. So we’ve all been working together for the last couple of years on a SUNY task group that was part of the Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology, which I chair. So we’re a subcommittee of an Innovations in Assessment group, and there’s a couple more of us who couldn’t make it today, but we’ve been a really close-knit group, I think, working together for over two years. And we really enjoyed the project, which resulted in a website with all these artifacts on it that people will be able to access. And we’re hoping down the road that we can continue our work, but we’ll get to that later on in this conversation.

John: And we’ll share a link to the overall website as well as your group-specific component of that in the show notes. So this was partly implied in your response defining social justice assessment, but, what are some of the shortcomings of traditional grading systems in terms of equity?

Meghanne: When we were doing our research on this topic, we encountered many drawbacks of the traditional types of assessments that we all experienced all the way up through school and into college, and I’ll share a few of them. One is that the focus is often on the grade rather than the actual learning process and what the student will actually be able to do, and be able to learn as a result of engaging in the education process. They just focus on the grade, “what’s my grade?” and that sort of misses the point. It creates a system where students are compared to each other rather than having the focus be on individual growth and achievement. It also can put students at an advantage or disadvantage based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability status, language proficiency, and lots of other characteristics that students themselves don’t have any control over. We found in our research that traditional assessments tend to favor white, affluent, high-achieving students, and that really isn’t who most of our students are anymore. So we really need to remove barriers and create a way for students to accurately represent the learning that has taken place.

Rebecca: So you hinted to this in your response about traditional grading systems comparing students to one another. So thinking about that, what role should students play in determining how their learning is assessed?

Katelyn: I’ll tackle that one, and I want to answer it with a disclaimer to start because social justice assessment is an umbrella term that has all of these different strategies that are wrapped up in it, and each of those approaches, whether it’s ungrading, or labor-based grading, might have a slightly different response to that question. They all share the same goal, that students should not be systematically disadvantaged by the assessment mechanisms, and that we want to increase student agency in the classroom. We want students to be active participants in their own learning, but the actual question of how students might participate in determining their own assessments might look very different depending on who you’re talking to and what approach they use. Maybe it’s literally helping design the assessment mechanisms, the grading contract, grading rubric, maybe it’s creating flexible assignments that allow students to determine what learning is being assessed, or in the case of ungrading, maybe it’s just deprioritizing the assessment entirely in order to emphasize the individual student’s learning journey through the course. So I guess my answer, tentatively to your question, is yes, students should be participants in determining how they’re learning is assessed by the big how, and why is going to differ.

John: As you noted, there’s a wide continuum of alternative grading policies that can fit under this category of social justice assessment. Some of them are not that much different than traditional practices, and others are quite a bit different. One approach, which is much closer to the traditional grading systems that people are already using is a system of mastery learning. Could you talk a little bit about what mastery learning is and how that could be used in the classroom to provide a bit more equity.

Judie: So mastery learning is, instead of assessing a student or evaluating a student with one assessment, and giving them that grade, the students are able to go back and revisit the content and work again on any material that they didn’t understand or try things over again. So it’s an iterative process, and they should get some sort of formative feedback in between attempts so that they can understand what it is they need to work on and focus on. And this way, it’s more equitable, because the students are able to take the amount of time that they need to work on the assessment, they can access any review materials that they need to establish their foundational knowledge and continue on. And it just really helps the students learn and grow. And I think it’s a great way to establish foundational knowledge. I use it myself in all the history courses that I teach, and I just think it’s a great process. If you think about it, any athlete, that’s what they do. So if you’re learning how to play baseball, how many hours are spent in a batting cage, or like on the pitcher’s mound, how many times do you try again, and again, and then again, until you are able to do it correctly, or do things accurately? So I always liken it to use that sports analogy, because I really think that helps people understand that students’ learning… you have to practice and you can’t tell somebody something once and expect them to integrate it into all the knowledge they already have, and be able to recall it instantly. So I just think it’s a great way to level the playing field of students so that when you move on to the next part of your content, they all have the same foundation, and they’re ready to go forward.

John: And by explaining it to the students that way, in terms of a sports metaphor, it’s something that they can pretty easily connect to, and I think it also would help to promote a growth mindset, which we know is effective in increasing learning as well.

Rebecca: Another assessment strategy one might use is minimal or light grading that falls under this social justice umbrella, and is a bit different than mastery learning. Can you describe what minimal or light grading is?

Meghanne: Yeah, I’ve seen this described in a couple of different ways. This isn’t something that we really included in a lot of our research, so I kind of looked this up just a little while ago and it’s very interesting. And one approach is more on like the whole course level. And there’s another approach that can be taken on an assignment level. So for an entire course, what an instructor may do is that they would assign assignments throughout the semester, but most of them would not be graded, they would be used as like a conversation piece. And they would be discussed and gone over during class, which would then provide opportunities for the students to seek clarification and for the instructor to provide feedback in the moment. So then the assessment then becomes part of the learning process. So then when there are a small number of assessments that are given for a grade, then when the students get to those assessments, they’re not as intimidating. They’re things that they’ve done with their classmates, they’ve done them with their instructors, they’ve done them in class. So I think it’s a very interesting strategy because it removes a lot of the anxiety that students may have around assessment, because it’s just something that they’ve done in their class. Another take on this that I’ve seen is, on an assignment level, something like a paper, something that may require a lot of revision, where when the professor is grading that assessment, they would maybe not take the time to go through and mark all of the grammar and spelling and mechanical errors, but maybe they would look at a section of that, maybe point out some things the students are doing over and over again, but not mark up the entire paper, but just say, “Okay, these are the things you need to pay attention to that are recurring through your paper.” And then as they read and grade that student’s paper, they focus more on the message that the student is trying to convey and the ideas that they’re sharing, rather than the mechanics and the grammar and the spelling.

John: And one common thing I think, to both mastery learning and minimal light grading is that the goal is to provide students with feedback. In some cases that can be automated. Mastery learning systems involve some degree of automation, sometimes by textbook providers, or perhaps adaptive learning systems, or it could be questions that you put together. But if you’re going to provide feedback on writing, it can require a lot more time. And a minimal light grading approach allows faculty to provide feedback on the most important things without taking up as much time to allow faculty to provide feedback on a wider range of topics, which, again, is I think, to some extent in the same sort of spirit.

Rebecca: Light grading can help not intimidate a student with too much feedback. If you see just a paper completely marked up, it might feel like there’s no possibility for moving forward or revising. But emphasizing what’s most important to change, or most important to focus on can help a student prioritize. And this can be really important to someone new to a discipline who might not know what’s most important.

Katelyn: I’m so glad you said that.

Meghanne: There’s an element of trust there as well, because if we point out what a student needs to focus on mechanically or grammar wise in a small part of that paper, then they can be trusted to then use their judgment to go through it and read it more carefully, and then make those edits based on the feedback that they had received. So it is visually much less intimidating. Plus, it might be a motivating factor for some students too that their professor is trusting them to be in charge of that revision.

John: Another type of social justice assessment involves contract grading. Could one of you talk a little bit about how contract grading fits into this category of social justice assessment?

Katelyn: Sure, I think contract grading is one of those terms that’s gaining some broader popularity and recognition. So it’s probably a term that may be pretty familiar to a lot of instructors at this point. So maybe it doesn’t need a lot of explanation. I’ll just say there’s a couple of different models of contract grading. In some cases, the instructor might provide that contract at the start of the term. In other cases, the instructor and students would be able to negotiate that contract collaboratively together at the start of the term so that students have more of that active stake in the contract itself. Generally, the grading contract would lay out certain requirements which students would need to fulfill to receive their desired grade. And that might include requirements related to attending class or conferences, completing low-stakes assignments, completing major assignments, maybe some page- or process-based requirements. But the bottom line is that the contract gives students a clear picture from day one of the work required by the class so students can look at that contract and know exactly how much work they’re going to need to complete from day one, to get the grade that they really want to receive in the course. I think the additional benefit of contract grading for our conversation is that it decouples grades from assessment so students have more space to take risks in their work rather than aiming for correctness. And on the faculty side, faculty can respond to the content and spirit of the students work as opposed to justifying a grade. I think most important, though, because this system privileges students who are investing the time and effort into their learning, all students have the same potential to earn a high grade in the course regardless of their knowledge or ability with the subject matter prior to the start of the course. So to use another sports metaphor, it works to level the playing field on day one for students who may have very different levels of preparedness and experience with the subject matter.

Rebecca: Another strategy that folks might use, which we’ve certainly talked about quite a bit on this podcast at various times is peer assessment. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like and how that fits into this social justice model?

Judie: So peer assessment, or I tend to call it peer review, helps to build student investment in writing, and helps the students understand the relationship between their writing and their coursework by helping them engage with the writing in a way that encourages more self reflection and works to help them build their critical thinking skills about their own work. And I think it also helps the students learn from one another, because they’re sort of trying to evaluate their peers’ work against the requirements for the course. But then you also look at your own writing in a new perspective, and you learn from what you’re seeing your peers write and from the feedback that you’re receiving from your peers.

John: Might students perhaps take feedback from their fellow classmates a bit more seriously than they do feedback from their instructors.

Judie: A lot of students self-report that they learn more from this peer review activity, because they’re trying to identify and articulate weaknesses that they’re seeing in their peers’ papers, and also in their own. And I think trying to incorporate feedback from both their peers and their instructor into their own work, I think, just helps raise that awareness and any kind of feedback that’s constructive, as they think about it and reiterate it and rewrite their work. It just helps with their critical thinking. And I think just raise awareness of how they write, and maybe they can be more thoughtful about what they’re writing going forward. I think they also, if they question their peers, say “How did you come up with this?I love this idea,” then they can apply some of this, that they’re learning from their peers to their own work, too. So perhaps that’s what you were getting at John, when you asked that question was, they may benefit more from their classmates telling them how they came up with their ideas than from their instructor just dictating what the expectations are.

Rebecca: I would expand the model to include not just writing but also other creative projects and things. It’s certainly a practice that’s pretty common in the arts, for example, to do peer review of student work.

John: And they also get to see what their peers are doing, which can serve as a positive role model. When students see that other people are doing something that they hadn’t considered doing, it could serve as a way of improving their work.

Katelyn: I think a lot of students come into the classroom thinking of their teacher as the sole reader or audience for their creations throughout the course of this semester. So anytime we can expand those audiences and have students thinking rhetorically about who else might be the consumer of their work. I think that that can benefit our students in really important ways.

Rebecca: It also seems like it’s a good opportunity to formulate community around an activity like that.

Katelyn: Absolutely.

John: One of the other areas you address with this group was the topic of labor-based grading, could you talk a little bit about that?

Meghanne: Yeah, labor-based grading removes the focus from the end product assignment and shifts it to the process of creating that piece of work. So students are provided with feedback throughout the process regarding their labor or the work that they put in. And they’re given opportunities to continue working to improve what they’re producing, and to achieve a desired grade based on a contract sometimes, so there is some overlap with contract grading, but not always. There typically aren’t penalties for students who revise and update their work, because that’s part of the learning process. And it really helps students determine what their end grade may be and how much effort they want to put in, because often, they will be given some sort of guideline for what different grades may be achieved based on certain levels of effort, or certain levels of work that are completed. And also there may be opportunities to grade based on completion rather than more of a subjective sort of qualitative grade.

John: So do you mean like using a light grading or minimal grading where you either completed satisfactorily or you haven’t, and as long as you complete a certain number of assignments or activities, you achieve that grade,

Meghanne: That or also if there’s criteria, like a rubric, and they hit all of the criteria, then they receive full credit.

John: Which becomes, actually, I think, a form of specifications grading.

Rebecca: And then one other model that you’ve talked a little bit about already today is ungrading. Can you expand upon that a little bit more?

Katelyn: Yeah, so ungrading works to deprioritize numerical grades or even attempt to eliminate them entirely. So I hope I’m not speaking out of turn when I say, I think that this is the most controversial of the approaches that we have been researching, it tends to get the most pushback from faculty because it is so different from what we have often been taught or trained to do. So instead of focusing on those numerical grades, instructors are encouraged to focus on providing learner feedback that encourages growth. Okay, I have a quote that is from an ungrading expert I’d like to share. This from Sean Michael Morris and he says, quote, “at the foundation of ungrading, lies something that could change school entirely. A suggestion that ranking and evaluation and the concomitant expertise of the ranker or evaluator is entirely an optional way of viewing things.” And I’m going to end the quote there because I think that that important kernel is that ungrading works to dismantle the hierarchy of the classroom and refocus the attention on individual student learning is an approach that requires a lot of trust between student and instructor, and a lot of student buy-in as well. Students have to be invested in the learning that’s going to happen throughout the course itself. And in a completely ungraded classroom, student grades might be based simply on a final student reflection, or even a one-on-one conversation between teacher and student about the grade that the student has earned. But because ungrading really rejects transactional grading systems, the final grade is more of an afterthought than an important outcome of the course, much less important than learning that’s occurred throughout the semester.

Rebecca: So today, we’re recording on August 9, James Lang posted on Twitter about how deep the system of creating actually is that there’s even things like discounts for insurance, for good students, or good grades. And that it’s really challenging to overcome a system that’s so ingrained beyond just our education system, but into many other systems as well. So I think that that, in part, is why there’s such a strong pushback on this particular method.

John: And we’ve always done it that way, at least for the last century or so.

Rebecca: Change is hard.

Katelyn: Yeah, I think that the traditional grading system is really embedded into not only academia but outside of academia as well. And even within a class that takes an ungrading approach, we still face that question at the end of the semester of “Well, what’s the grade going to be in the system?” because we don’t really have the option, at least at most institutions, to say, “No grade, job well done.” At least at my institution, I still have to put in a letter grade for the student. So we can work to reject that system as much as we can. But at the end of the day, we’re still operating within that same structure. And maybe that’s a question of what’s next, right? Like, are we going to see one day a future where more universities embrace this idea of learning for the sake of learning as opposed to learning for the grade? I don’t know.

John: One of the other things you address on the website is how perhaps the use of authentic assessment or UDL types of assessments might improve equity by providing a more equal playing field for students. Could you talk a little bit about how going beyond the traditional term papers and tests might provide a more equitable way of assessing students’ learning.

Judie: I think anytime you use authentic assessment that helps, or generally it allows the students the opportunity to demonstrate their learning in the way that works best for them. The students are writing a term paper, for example, they can write the paper the traditional way, or they can give a presentation or record a presentation, and still provide their citations and so forth at the end. Or they can do something visual, some sort of a PowerPoint or a nice visual display of the topic and again, cite their sources and explain their images to the group so that people understand how they’re meeting the learning outcome. And I feel like that’s just a good way if people are struggling with language, if people are just struggling with writing in general, I think that this levels the playing field, because it gives everybody an opportunity to really show their knowledge and shine and not just pigeonhole themselves into one more paper or one more multiple choice test, if they have test anxiety. Some of our traditional forms of testing or final assessment just set students up to fail. And allowing students to choose to demonstrate their learning in a way that they’re good at sets them up to succeed. And I think that’s what we really want at the end of the day. And of course UDL principles, those are Universal Design for Learning, and that does include equity in its heart. So that would definitely help to keep things equitable in the classroom. If you’re following UDL.

Rebecca: The multiple forms you were just talking about is a great example. [LAUGHTER]

Judie: Last semester, I had a student who, they’re supposed to do a blog post, and the student instead of writing a blog post, he made a video and he did it three different times. So one is on World War One, one’s on World War Two, and the third one was on revolutions, and so, this student stood in front of a whiteboard, and he had his camera set up so he could film himself. And he had his iPad in his hand. So he talked about a battle, say, for example, and he would draw it out on the board. And then he would show his citation on his iPad. And then he had other citations typed up and taped to the whiteboard. And he went on for 15 minutes, and just was making sure he explained things again, and drew little examples. And he was so animated, and so excited about his topic. And you’re not going to capture that on a written exam, or even in somebody’s written paper. It was just tremendous the way he was able to show all that he had learned and all that he was interested in, and the extra research that he had done, because he felt the freedom to pursue this topic, because he knew he was able to express it the way that suited him the past. And it was just amazing. So I think anytime we can incorporate these things, and I understand that there are times when, according to your creditor, or people have to sometimes sit for a specific certification, it doesn’t always fit, but I think if you can fit this type of assessment in, it is definitely worth it. Because just to see the joy in students when they can explore and expand their knowledge, and then feel confident in demonstrating that to you, it’s just tremendous.

Rebecca: I love the flexibility in demonstrating knowledge and understanding and skill sets because in some of our traditional methods, we are arbitrarily assessing something else. So we may be arbitrarily testing how well you can take a multiple choice test or how well you can take a test within a certain timeframe, or how well you can write, whether or not that’s actually the topic. So if I’m learning about history, there’s some learning objectives I’m trying to meet related to history that may or may not include writing. And if writing is not one of those outcomes that we’re hoping for, then we don’t need to be assessing it.

Judie: Exactly. He did this thing on medical advancements in World War One, it was just tremendous and he was so charming, because he just was so wrapped up in it that you just had to root for the guy. It was good.

Rebecca: I love that. So for those of us who may want to move towards equitable grading systems, what are some initial steps we might take? Because it could feel really daunting if you haven’t ventured down this path before.

Meghanne: Yeah, if you are not interested in overhauling your entire grading system, just to try this out, a nd to make your assessments more socially just, there are some adjustments that can be made to existing assignments. And really, the important thing is to consider the learning objectives and really think about what needs to be graded. So one of the things that we’ve talked about a lot in all of our different presentations that we’ve done is whether or not to grade for things like grammar and spelling, and mechanics, and English language proficiency. So in an example, like a discussion board, when you’re really interested in what the students have to say, and their interaction with each other, and the questions that they asked, does it really matter if their grammar and spelling is perfect in that instance, if they’re having a great conversation on a topic, and they’re learning from each other. So that’s one thing that we could suggest. Another is thinking about just the fact that sometimes students have challenges in their lives. They’re human beings, they have families, they have jobs, many of our students are athletes, and they have to travel and they have games and something like flexible due dates is very, very helpful for students because then they’re able to complete their work, certainly within a reasonable timeframe. But if those dates are a little bit more flexible, and they have access to those assignments in the learning management system beyond the actual due date, for instance, then that gives them the ability to complete that work without being penalized. So another mechanism would be in the learning management system, when students are taking quizzes, would be allowing backtracking, allowing students to go back and check their answers, that sometimes is a setting that a lot of professors really rely on, to try to avoid cheating. And as an LMS administrator, that is something that I see a lot. And I think that that can really be harmful to students, because many of our students are told to always go back and check your work. And if they’re not allowed to go back and check their work, that can be very frustrating. And also forcing completion is something that I would recommend turning off because again, that can create test anxiety. And often I think when completion is forced, there’s also a timer. So I think if any timers can be removed as well, then that does a couple of things. It can help remove testing anxiety. But then also, if there are students who require extra time due to a disability accommodation, then the professor at that point doesn’t have to go in and adjust all of the LMS settings for those students, because it’s already open ended and everyone can have as much time as they need to complete that assessment. So it really is just important to look at what the learning objectives are and what actually needs to be assessed. And the goal is always to remove barriers. So another thing that can be done is to just ask students, have a conversation about it, and find out what barriers they’ve experienced.

John: At the start of this. You mentioned the website that you were creating, could you talk a little bit more about what resources are there and how that might evolve over time?

Katelyn: Yeah, so the website, we have been slowly adding resources to over the past two years. And at this point, it’s becoming a pretty robust little outlet for people interested in social justice assessment. So, you go to the website, you can find an overview of the big picture theory of social justice assessment, as well as the various approaches that we’ve discussed today. We also have a really pretty large bibliography of resources for further reading for people who want to learn more about any one of these topics. And we’ve been working to develop a collection of sample assignments from faculty across SUNY. So we’re still working to collect additional sample assignments from faculty who might already be implementing some of these strategies within their classrooms. I think the more we can share those assignments with one another, the better off we’ll all be. I think a lot of us are doing social justice assessment in small ways in our classroom without realizing it. So the more we can share those resources and that knowledge, the more hopefully we can get people on board. So, hopefully, we’ll be able to share that link in the show notes. And people will be able to check that out.

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

Judie: So for our little group, one thing that I think might be next for us is SUNY is updating the SUNY general education requirements that are mandated with the completion of any SUNY degree. And they’ve added a requirement for equity, inclusion, and diversity. So I’m hoping that our group can help contribute resources to that effort, and our website could be one more place where people go to for information on social justice assessment so that they can incorporate those into their courses that are designed to meet the DEI requirement.

Katelyn: Well, I’m gonna go take my one-year old to the pool. [LAUGHTER]

Judie: Nice.

Katelyn: I think, big picture, though, the “what’s next” I want to just give is, I hope that we’ll start to see more institutional support for some of these approaches. I think that there are still a lot of barriers, particularly for contingent faculty who want to embrace some of these practices. So I hope what’s next will be more departmental institutional support for this: more time, more resources, etc. But yeah, my personal what’s next is I’m gonna go enjoy this beautiful day.

Rebecca: Meghanne, do you want to add anything?

Meghanne: Sure yeah, at my institution, I am sharing this information, pretty much any chance I get, I’m meeting with our new incoming faculty in a couple of weeks. And this will be one of the topics that we discuss. And I’m also co-chair of our universal design for learning task force. And we have a few events and projects that we’re working on to spread the word on UDL, and also innovative assessments and social justice assessments as well.

Rebecca: Lots of great things coming and some really wonderful resources that you’ve shared today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Katelyn: Thank you.

Judie: Thank you for having us.

Meghanne: Yeah, thank you.

John: And thank you for all the great work you’ve done on this over the last couple of years and the resources you’re sharing.

Judie: I would just like to say that Shena Salvato is also in our group. She’s at Cortland, I believe. And Chris Price from SUNY is in our group, and they are missed today. They’ve been with us for all our other presentations. I know that Shana in particular wants to get the band back together and have some more meetings going forward so we can keep working together. And it was really good to see you guys again.

Katelyn: Likewise.

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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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260. Antiracist Pedagogy

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

Transcript

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

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

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

Gabriela: Thank you for having me.

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

Gabriela: Yes, I’m drinking ginger tea.

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

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

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

John: You ate at the fort?

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

Gabriela: What does that have?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: It’s been a lot of fun.

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

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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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