Category: universal design

326. UDL in Action

Posted in accessibility, active learning, authentic learning, diversity, equity, feedback, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, social justice, teaching, universal design
January 31, 2024

Universal design for learning, or UDL, is a framework to help us design more equitable learning experiences. In this episode, Lillian Nave joins us to discuss how she has implemented a UDL approach in her first-year seminar course. Lillian is the Coordinator of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Student Success at the Appalachian State University Hickory Campus and a senior lecturer in a first-year seminar course at Appalachian State University. She is also the host of the ThinkUDL podcast. She is the recipient of several teaching awards and often serves as an invited speaker on UDL issues.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Universal design for learning, or UDL, is a framework to help us design more equitable learning experiences. In this episode, we discuss how one faculty member has implemented a UDL approach in a first-year course.

[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 Lilian Nave. Lillian is the Coordinator of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Student Success at the Appalachian State University Hickory Campus and a senior lecturer in a first-year seminar course at Appalachian State University. She is also the host of the ThinkUDL podcast. She is the recipient of several teaching awards and often serves as an invited speaker on UDL issues. Welcome, Lillian.

Lillian: Thank you very much. And I applaud you on all of the monikers that I currently have attached to my name that often don’t make sense. So, very good. And of course you said Appalachian in the way we say it down here in North Carolina and I don’t have to throw an apple at you. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, I’ve heard it so many times on your podcast that I wanted to be sure we got that down.

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

Lillian: I am and I brewed it specially for our interview today, it is Bengal spice, which is a Celestial Seasoning herbal tea that is caffeine free. I went caffeine free a while ago, and it’s fantastic and I don’t have to put sugar or honey or anything in it. It has cinnamon sticks and it’s delicious and my best friend in the world got me hooked on it. And it always just makes me feel warm inside and makes me think of the lovely conversations I have with the people who I’ve drank tea with in the past. And I also have iced tea because I continuously drink iced tea and this one happens to be actually just a Crystal Light [LAUGHTER] iced tea as well.

Rebecca: And I did notice, of course, and must state that there was a Tea for Teaching mug involved.

Lillian: Yes, exactly, and I appreciate that. John saw me at a conference and I was so happy to get my Tea for teaching mug that I made sure I was drinking from it today.

John: And I am drinking a peppermint spearmint blend today… also caffeine free today.

Rebecca: I am drinking a highly caffeinated afternoon tea [LAUGHTER] to make up for everybody’s caffeine deficits.

Lillian: Well, I have plenty of chocolate throughout the day that is not caffeine free.

John: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your work on Universal Design for Learning. We probably don’t have many listeners who aren’t familiar with UDL, but for those who are not as familiar, could you provide an overview of Universal Design for Learning.

Lillian: Of course, and I’d be glad to. Universal Design for Learning is a way of thinking, I would say, about teaching and learning that relies on three main concepts that include: engaging your students, providing accessible materials for your students, and varying the ways that your students can explain to you that they’ve learned something. And it is all based on neuroscience and also a lot of research that tells us that all of our students are different. Variability is the norm. And so we have students in higher ed that come from all different backgrounds, different cultures, different preparedness levels, different abilities and disabilities. And in order to reach all of our students, it’s important to think about that variability and universal design for learning gives us some really specific things to look out for. And three areas or categories: the engagement, the representation, and providing multiple means for those and multiple means of the student to express their knowledge. And so that’s like the general overview, but there are like so many weeds, that I can have a podcast [LAUGHTER] and talk to people about all of the different intricacies of UDL. But in general, that’s it in a nutshell.

Rebecca: I know we’ve talked about it a bit on our podcast before in terms of the difference between UDL and accessibility. But for those who haven’t heard those previous episodes, can you talk a little bit about the difference between those two ideas?

Lillian: Yes. So, accessibility is a part of Universal Design for Learning. You cannot have universal design for learning without attention to accessibility. But accessibility alone is not universal design for learning, it’s a part of it. And I like to think of UDL as like a three-legged stool. If you take out one of those legs, the stool doesn’t function anymore, it will fall over. And one of those legs is multiple means of representation. It’s typically the center column that’s purple if you look at the UDL guidelines at UDLguidelines.org. CAST puts those out. And that middle column about representation is about providing multiple forms of representation, so different texts or audio files, or making sure your font is readable too, especially for dyslexic students. So accessibility is about making sure that all students can access materials, that they have the ability to make sure they can actually get at that information. And this is less common now, but there used to be like those PDFs that a professor copied out of their book when they were a student and it has all their like markings and stuff in it. And then they would just like make a read really bad copy of it, and hand it out when everybody still used paper all the time, or maybe it’s on a screen. And those oftentimes were not accessible. And that means if a student needed a screen reader to read it, or even if they just needed to make the font bigger, they couldn’t because it wasn’t an accessible document, a screen reader couldn’t read it, meaning if a student was dyslexic or even blind, they had really no way to get at that information. So when you make your documents accessible, and you make your class accessible, you are making sure that everybody really just is on an even playing field, and they can get at that information. But in addition to accessibility, you want to make sure you’re also giving lots of opportunities for students to express what they know in different ways. And you’re also engaging with the students. And those two other things are not included in accessibility. That’s what makes up UDL.

John: How did you become interested in UDL?

Lillian: Well, I started working with our Center for Teaching and Learning in 2016 as a faculty fellow and I started doing faculty development as a one-course release for quite a while. And in doing that, we became part of a grant that was in three North Carolina institutions that was called College STAR. And STAR stands for supporting transition, access, and retention. And it was a two-pronged approach where there was a lot of student development, so tutoring centers and things like that. And then there was this other side, and that’s the part I got interested in and got pulled along with and that was supporting faculty. And to do that we used Universal Design for Learning. And I was just part of that grant. And that ended up me being the Universal Design for Learning Coordinator at Appalachian State. And I started going to different departments and introducing that at workshops and that sort of thing. So I became kind of the UDL girl or UDL lady for App state, which I think is about 2016 when that started, and then I saw it, like I’d never heard of it before, and I’d been teaching since 1997. And then I thought, oh, boy, this is really good, this makes a lot of sense. And so I started implementing it as well in all my classes.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a little bit about UDL principles broadly. So can we dig into maybe a specific example, like your first-year seminar course? That sounds pretty interesting.

Lillian: Absolutely. So my course right now, I teach one called intercultural dialogues, and I get first-year students, and so I love it that they’re small, under 24 students. This past year, I was at our new campus in Hickory, and I only had 18 students there. And we get to work on intercultural competence, which is one of those major things that colleges want our students to know. It’s a 21st-century skill, and it is about understanding our own cultures, and then understanding that other people have different cultures. And then how can you mindfully act and interact with somebody from a different culture. And I have heard some students, at the end of the term, say “this is something everybody should know, like, this is really, really important.” They’ve seen how important it is. But at the beginning of the class, like nobody wants to be there. Nobody wants to take a first-year seminar course. They’re usually there because it’s Tuesday morning and they have an open slot. I’m in that unenviable position of teaching first-year seminar, and it’s that Gen Ed requirement that nobody wants to take. So I want to make it interesting, and I want to make it worthwhile for them, and so we learn about our own culture and then I also match students up with students abroad. We’ve worked with students in Doha, Qatar, in China, in Morocco, in Germany, Thailand, and Japan in the past year, and they work on intercultural competency skills and talk about things like power distance in the classroom, or some of the UN Sustainability Development Goals, like gender equality by 2030. And so they’ve done some things with students in China about that. So the class itself is about intercultural competence. And I have infused a bunch of UDL into this class over the years. And so it wasn’t all at once, but it took a while. And so that means I have multiple ways for the students to get at that information. So there is never just one way to do the reading. It’s either accessible or I’ve recorded a voice audio file for students. So we have a lot of commuter students at this campus, and so actually, we have zero students who live on campus in our new campus in Hickory. It is a new campus, it just started and so there are no dorms, there’s only one building and we’re all in that one building. And so students come in, they have jobs, and so UDL is very helpful for me to think about those students who have various commitments of their time. So they could listen to the audio file rather than read the book, because they’ve got a 40-minute commute to come into campus or something like that. So they’ll have an audio or video. I’ve used H5P, which is on our learning management system, which is like an interactive video, there’s VoiceThread, which is another way to be kind of interactive for students to participate. And so there’s always multiple ways for them to get at that information. And then there’s multiple ways that I ask them to tell me what they know. And they’ve done concept maps, so we have very little like, “write me a paper,” there’s very little of that my class. And that’s also a culturally competent type of teaching thing, because we often in an individuated, Western academic model, we prioritize reading and writing, reading and writing, reading and writing. That’s always what it is. And yes, we need to have very good readers and writers. But there are lots of other ways to learn and express your learning that might be more prevalent in other countries and in other cultures. And so they’ve had to draw some of their answers, they’ve had to give me a visual representation, they’ve written a poem, drawn a cartoon, and tell a story. One of their first assignments is to bring in something that expresses who they are, a cultural artifact. And then the last class that we just had recently, I asked everyone to name everybody else’s cultural artifact, so they learned about each other that way. And it was things like a keychain or one student brought in the T-top of his T-top convertible car. [LAUGHTER] Because the car was really important to get him around and all that stuff. And engagement is the last part. But it’s really the first part that gets students interested in the activities and in the learning and why they should learn. So I start off with a liquid syllabus, which is a syllabus that students can access outside of our learning management system, and they can see what we’re doing, and they get a video of me talking to them. And that’s supposed to be engaging. And then they have a lot of authentic assignments working with students overseas. And this year, because I was finally back in an actual classroom and not doing remote teaching, as I have been since 2020, I took students up to New York City. And Appalachian has this amazing loft that actually anybody can go stay at so all of your listeners could go and stay at Appalachian’s loft, and it’s very inexpensive. It’s like $70 a night per bed, and it’s these two rooms of 10 beds each. And we took students up there to actually learn a lot about culture. We went to the Tenement Museum, they looked around, and it was very cool. So experiential type of education as well. So that took like years before I got to that rendition of how I teach that course. But those are all UDL principles that guided me.

John: You mentioned collaboration with students in other countries, what types of collaborative work did those students do in your classes?

Lillian: They had specific zoom meetings that they had to do personally one on one. So one of them is that students got matched one on one with fellow students in Morocco. And they were supposed to talk about the difference in power distance in an educational setting. So power distance is the amount of power that people in a group expect and believe should be shared or held by the people in that group. So in an educational setting, if you’ve got a first-year student who comes into a large lecture hall on a college campus, there is a larger power distance for that instructor who will pretty much lecture to those students, students don’t raise their hand all that often, there’s not a lot of back and forth, there’s not a lot of flexibility, they probably don’t even know the students’ names. And so that would be an example of a larger power distance. A smaller power distance might be in a classroom, like in my classroom, I say, “You can call me by my first name, you can address me in this very informal way. We’re not going to have a lecture, we’re going to be in small groups, and then we’re going to share our ideas.” And that way, there’s a lot more voices, there’s a lot more talking. And that can happen in various times throughout the semester. I may do a lecture, I may not. And so my students were talking with students in Morocco to find out about their understanding of what power distance was. And do you call your professor Dr. Smith? Or what do you address them by? Are there rules about when you can address your professor and those sorts of things. So that was one of them. And then we worked with students in China, and this one was a series of three Zoom conversations. And all of our students had to set all these up. They were all in English because our partner students wanted to do this in English, and most of them had never spoken to a native English speaker. So this was a really good goal for them. And in China, they can’t have Zoom, not allowed. And so the students had to receive our invite from our students, and their first session was kind of an introduction: who they are, what they’re doing, for about an hour. The second was a second list of questions, which was about: Who takes care of children? Who goes to work? Who do you live with? Do you live with an extended family? Do you live with a nuclear family? And it was really about gender roles. And one of those things that’s a national cultural dimension is something called achievement versus nurturance. And that continuum has also been called in the past: masculinity versus femininity. And it’s how much a culture believes that men and women should adhere to somewhat stereotypical gender roles. So are there women CEOs, and stay-at-home dads? In some countries, that happens in some cities. That happens a lot more than in other countries. Do you put more emphasis on earning a higher wage? Or on having the flexibility to work from home? Like, where are you on that? And so the students talked about that. And then in the last session, they talked about: if you could change anything, what would you see that might improve your country from where it is now and that sort of thing. So they got to do some really authentic conversations with people around the world, and the students in China were 12 hours ahead. So my students were meeting sometimes at two in the morning, but they were up, [LAUGHTER] it didn’t matter.

Rebecca: So it sounds like there was a lot of coordination with counterparts around the world to make sure that you designed experiences for both sets of students that met, maybe not the same learning objectives, but learning objectives that were relevant for each population.

Lillian: That is exactly it. And it was my colleague in China, who said she wanted to do something about the sustainable development goals from the UN. I said, “Okay, well, let’s try and look at that.” And it worked for each one. And it is a lot of coordination for the faculty. And so I would meet with my fellow faculty member several times throughout the semester. And so we got the dates right for when we’d have Thanksgiving, nobody else had Thanksgiving break, and we have holidays, and they started a month early or a month late, and so there was a lot of coordination. And then they had to give me the list of all the students and I needed gender, too, because some students wanted to stay within their own gender, women, especially, in Morocco where some were less likely to speak to male students, who wanted to stay with female students. So we wanted to be culturally sensitive to those types of things. So there was a lot of beginning coordination to set those things up.

Rebecca: I wanted to circle back to one other thing you said too, in that you mentioned your classes developed with all these UDL principles over a significant period of time.

LILIIAN: Yes.

Rebecca: I want to know how you got started, what was the first thing you implemented? And how did that set a trajectory for the others?

Lillian: The first thing, way back when, probably 2016, 2017, like the big aha moment for me, was not doing the same thing all the time, and not having to grade everything, meaning maybe we were just going to do some honestly experimental assessments in class that were kind of fun and authentic. And I didn’t have to grade everything. And when I kind of let go of that, it opened me up to some more ideas. And then I thought, well, I don’t need them to write a paper, because I really have a specific goal in mind. And the goal doesn’t necessarily need to be a paper that then I’d have to read, [LAUGHTER] it made my life easier too. Maybe they just needed to demonstrate their understanding of these concepts. And so like one of the first things we do is draw an iceberg, and talk about how the culture that we see here, taste, feel, smell, all those five senses, that’s about 10% of what makes a culture. And when we think about culture, it’s usually just those things, it’s like, “Oh, you eat this special meal on Lunar New Year, and you have these special foods, and the kitchen always smells this way, or we dress up in cultural clothing, or whatever.” But that’s really only 10%, the tip of the iceberg. And then we have to get really deep into what our values and beliefs and assumptions we make. And that’s typically the hard part of the class. And so I just had students either draw an onion or an iceberg. And then they had to kind of point to where this was, what are your deeply held beliefs and assumptions, and that culture is so much more. And it’s a lot easier, I think, to conceptualize it as a drawing than it is to write me a paper about what your deeply held beliefs are, [LAUGHTER] and where they align with the things that I can see on the outside.

John: You mentioned that the first thing you had done was reducing grading and doing more formative assessments, which is beneficial for students too because it takes some of the pressure off and gives them the opportunity to try something, make mistakes, and learn from that without any penalty. Is that something that you’d recommend for someone who’s interested in exploring UDL, as a first step, if they’re not already doing that?

Lillian: Absolutely, I think it frees up both the student and the faculty member to kind of see what works. And so much of Universal Design for Learning is about feedback, feedback from the students. And that is a major portion of UDL. And I should have said that at the very beginning, that you really want to be figuring out what works for the students and what works for you. So I do think that’s a great way to think about it. And also, the flip side of that coin, to me as well, was whoever is doing the work is doing the learning. So if you are always lecturing to your students, it’s hard, like, you got to put together this great lecture, I always felt like I had a top hat and a cane, you know, walking into my lecture, and yadda-dat-dah, I’m gonna, like dazzle you with my art historical knowledge, and make it interesting. And I was doing a lot of work to do that. And I have slowly moved into kind of the other end of this continuum, from lecturer into facilitator. And if I can facilitate the students working together, or a lot of feedback back and forth with me or with each other, then they’re actually risking some things like “talk to your neighbor about this,” and they don’t have to raise their hand in front of the large class, they’re actually trying and risking and doing these smaller things. And that’s where I see the learning happening. If they’re just listening, that’s fine, that’s great too, but the more they can participate in their own learning, the better it is, that I’ve seen, certainly in my classes, the more they can do, the more they’re learning. But it doesn’t mean I have to evaluate every single thing that they hand in, or that they produce. And I can certainly, on the spot, kind of tweak things and say, “Okay, let’s turn it into this direction,” or something like that. But it was the: “I don’t have to grade everything they do” and “The person who’s doing the work is doing the learning.” And it was like freedom for me to try all of these things that were totally not what I had done as a student, or had valued as a student or an instructor because I was very much in that: “Alright, you’ve got a 15-page research paper, a midterm, and a final, and that’s the art history course.” And I don’t do that anymore.

Rebecca: Well, it sounds like not only is there a benefit to the faculty, in terms of workload, joy, [LAUGHTER] etc, but also an emphasis on self efficacy for students and building confidence.

Lillian: Oh, yeah. Exactly. And they’re trying things out, and they’re seeing what works. And that feedback is really important, a big part of UDL.

John: And you mentioned that it took you time to build to where your courses currently are. Is that an approach you’d also recommend to faculty who are beginning to introduce UDL principles, because it can be a lot of work completely redesigning or transforming your teaching?

Lillian: Absolutely. I don’t know if I could have done this stuff early on in my career, because I was worried about how I looked and was perceived. I was very young, and so I think I needed to feel like I was in charge. And that power sharing was too difficult for me as a young instructor. So I understand that. And now I feel much more comfortable in the classroom. And I feel that being a facilitator is really helpful for the students. And sometimes they just want to sit and listen, but that happens too. But it took a long time to get there. And the course has evolved over a long time. And you try new things. Tom Tobin and Kristen Behling talk about the plus one mentality, just trying one new thing. And that’s what happened, is when I started this course, we weren’t speaking with students in other countries. That just sort of happened when I went to a conference and made some friends in other countries and said, “Oh, I bet this would make a lot of sense to add this in.” It’d be really authentic, which is one of the engagement principles is having really authentic learning experiences. And I used to be like, “Oh, you’ve got to plan everything out, and it has to be perfect.” And now I see that I fumble through a lot of things. And every once in a while something sticks, and it’s good. It’s a practice. They say being a doctor is more of a practice. I think being a teacher is very much a practice to see what works and what worked in my class five years ago, doesn’t necessarily work now. Things that were really fun and hot at some point, you know, like making memes is pretty fun right now, but we didn’t do that 10 years ago, and we probably won’t do it in another five years, like, what did you learn? Let’s make a meme out of it. It’s evolving.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that we’re talking about a course about culture. And you’re describing how the culture of higher ed or institutions or our classrooms also evolve. And that evolution requires risk both on the part of the instructor as well as on the part of the students, and that the UDL principles are really allowing that risk to happen on both ends.

Lillian: Yes, and sometimes there are forces outside of our control that make that more difficult, and it’s not an enviable position. So things like I wish I didn’t have to grade, but we still have to have grades in the end. And so how does that fit into your course. And so I know a lot of folks are using ungrading. I know you’ve talked with Susan Blum and Josh Eyler about various different kinds of grading, which I think is like a later on kind of thing for UDL. Start with accessibility, make sure your stuff is readable and devourable by all of your students, and then start kind of playing around with it. And then maybe I think that ungrading or different kinds of grading structures might be the last step on that process. But to each their own.

John: One of the issues involving student variability is that some students might be resistant to some of the approaches that you’re using, because there have been a number of studies that show that students often prefer to be lectured at. And it seems like they’re learning more that way, despite the evidence that that’s less effective. How do you persuade students to be open to trying new approaches to learning?

Lillian: Great question, I know exactly what you’re talking about, like students, they’re like, “this is how we learn best,” and then you actually poll their knowledge. And students in an active learning situation who kind of hated it are much more knowledgeable than the students that were just in a lecture where they really liked it, because that was kind of safe. And in the last year or so I’ve heard myself saying this a lot when I do speaking, and when I’m talking to folks, is I think everybody needs to be uncomfortable in the classroom, some of the time. We don’t want the same students to be uncomfortable all of the time. So that means varying those different ways that we assess students, so it’s not the “alright, every week, you’re writing a paper,” oh, that also gets boring. But for your great writers, it’s fantastic. But are we really finding out what that student knows? Are we finding out that they’re a good writer. And so maybe that’s a poem, or maybe it’s a concept map, or there are other ways to assess that info. And so I tell my students, like, I’m really conscious about that, like, you probably aren’t going to like some of these things, but your neighbor isn’t going to like the next thing. And so having those opportunities that you have to step out of your comfort zone, to get into the learning zone, but not all the way out to that outer edge of the target, which is the panic zone. And that’s actually an intercultural competence idea that I learned in that field. When you study abroad, the only way you’re really learning is if you’re in that learning mode, like if you go to Germany, but you’re living with a bunch of Americans, and you never speak German, and you go to McDonald’s, and you’re at an English speaking school, then have you really learned much about German culture? So you should go outside of that comfort zone. Maybe you’re living with a local family, and you have to speak German, but you don’t want to go and you are in like a chaotic household and they don’t speak English, and they haven’t made sure that you have any food, and you don’t feel safe, and all the classes you are way ahead of you in your German speaking. And so you’re not learning much either, you’re kind of panicking. So it’s that learning zone we have to be in and so I think in our classrooms, we need to do that too, have multiple different ways for students to express what they know, which is one of our UDL guidelines. And I am very overt when I tell students that. And I found that with student evaluations, like I would get student evaluations where they asked like, “Did you practice critical thinking skills?” And they’d be like, “No, like, I totally didn’t at all.” [LAUGHTER] And then the next year… and I think I learned this at like an academic conference… the next year, throughout the course, I’d be like, Okay, we’re gonna do this critical thinking exercise, this thing that we’re doing right now, this is about critical thinking, you’re going to use your critical thinking skills because this thing that we’ve done, that’s a critical thinking skill. Guess what? The evaluations… way up. [LAUGHTER] Exactly like you’re pulling back the curtain and you’re saying, like, here’s actually why we’re doing it, and this is what you’re doing. And so I think explaining that is really helpful. And then the students know why they need to do something like what I’ve asked them to do, why am I writing a poem or why am I drawing an iceberg? And I think we do need to tell students that and not just have them guessing, because then they’re going to be in the panic zone and not learn so much.

Rebecca: That’s a really good point to remind students that being uncomfortable and taking risks is actually part of the learning process. Can’t remind them too much.

Lillian: Yeah, exactly. It’s necessary. And they do want to just sit and doodle. And not that doodling is bad. But they just want to sit and listen and have us do all of the work. But it’s like, I know this stuff, so why do I need to explain it? You could just watch a video of me talking. We need to get you into grappling with this and doing the stuff that I know you don’t want to do and you don’t want to be here because it’s a first-year seminar and you’re a first-year student. So my heart is with all of those folks that teach Gen Ed [LAUGHTER] to the students who don’t really want to be there.

Rebecca: Switching gears a bit now, can you talk a little bit about how you started the ThinkUDL podcast?

Lillian: Yes, it’s going back to that College STAR grant. We were getting into doing like workshops, and so I was working with other universities in North Carolina. And we had a PI, the head of it was at our East Carolina school. And I said, “Do we have any multiple ways to do this. They were doing research and then some workshops. And it just made sense to me like, we need a podcast, like this would be so off brand for UDL not to have multiple means for us to get this information out. And a podcast has the added bonus of being asynchronous, so people can listen to it whenever they want. I’ve always had transcripts, too. So if you don’t want to listen to my voice, which is totally fine, you could read the transcript and you can get that information, you can see the resources. So there are multiple ways to get it. But there was money from that original grant that sent me and my shout out to Tanner, who was my first sound engineer, and we went to a podcast convention in 2018 in the summer in Philadelphia. And seriously, I didn’t know a thing at all. I didn’t even listen to podcasts then. The only one I’d heard of was the Teaching in Higher Ed with Bonni Stachowiak, and then like, “Okay, we’re gonna try it.” And the very early episodes are, I think, awful. But luckily, Tanner kind of cleaned them up. But there was a Chris Farley on Saturday, live long, long time ago, so I’m showing my age here. But he would interview, in these sketches. He’d interview people that were amazing, like Paul McCartney from The Beatles, right? And he would just fumble the whole time. Like, “Wow, so you were in the Beatles? Wow. Yeah. That’s great. So can you tell me like, what’s it like being a Beatle?” And that’s what I felt like the whole time, [LAUGHTER] like “Wow. Okay. All right.” So it took a while. But the grant helped it and for about three or four years it was grant funded. And now I’ve turned it into its own nonprofit. And Texthelp is now a sponsor. And so they do the editing for me because the grant ended. And Tanner, he was part of that grant. So i had to kind of move on. That’s how it started.

John: So you’ve been doing this for a while now with the podcast, and we’ve been listeners since the very beginning. What do you enjoy most about podcasting?

Lillian: Well, ours came out around the same time. So the nice Tea for Teaching, right? It’s like 2018. And so I enjoy talking to people. If you’re still doing it, you have to enjoy talking to people. But that’s the best thing. I talk to people just all around the world because I do want it to have a worldwide focus. And so I have listeners, the top five are in the US, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and the UK, and so English speaking countries, yay. But you can see like, all over the world on six continents that people are listening, and I had a listener in Australia say, you know, I was walking on the beach, near my home, on the coast of Australia. And that just blows my mind that people are actually listening. But mostly it’s like, I get to just learn about new ideas all the time. And you would think UDL like it’s so focused on UDL, like, there would not be enough, like I should be done with this, but there’s so much.There are 31 of these checkpoints in Universal Design for Learning, and as you mentioned, it’s really overwhelming. Like if you were to go and just look at the guidelines, it’s like a whole bunch. And it’s like, how am I going to do that? You can’t, you can’t do it all. You can’t just redesign your course right away. And so there’s just all these little conversations I can have to help people understand what you can do. And then I get to talk to really interesting, witty, awesome, brilliant people all over the world. And that’s the best part. If I could just do that, like that was just my job, I would love that.

Rebecca: Definitely something that John and I enjoy too. It’s kind of an introvert’s dream to talk to [LAUGHTER] a lot of individuals one on one rather than having to network through a conference or something like that. It’s a good opportunity to have really in-depth conversations with folks that might not have the opportunity to have otherwise.

Lillian: Yeah, my brain is always seeking out the new. And so I love like, “Oh, that’s a neat idea.” And then I’ll send them an email, and sometimes they write back, and “oh, I really love to talk about this, it’s cool.” And so I’ll read their article or their book or whatever. And then there’s something else shiny that I get to go talk to other people about. And it’s just been helpful for folks. And honestly, I just didn’t expect there’d be listeners, and there are listeners. And so that’s just really fantastic.

John: We started out as primarily to meet our campus audience needs for commuting faculty, and so forth. And then we were amazed at how it caught on and spread. And it’s given us that opportunity that you both mentioned, to talk to some really interesting people doing some really interesting work. Before that in the teaching center, we talked to people at a workshop, and we might hear from one faculty member for three or four minutes, maybe 10 or maybe they’d come in for a consultation. But usually that was about a problem or an issue they were facing, but it just provides a wonderful chance to connect to people that we normally wouldn’t be able to talk to. And we see an interesting article, and then reading through it and getting to talk to the people doing the research in depth, it’s really a valuable experience.

Lillian: Yeah, everybody should be a podcaster just to have these conversations. You don’t even have to record them. It’s just really neat. And so it’s given me that like, “Hey, I have a podcast,” like a reason for me to be intrusive in somebody’s email. Like, I really want to talk to you about this. This is really cool. Would you talk to little old me? If so I have a podcast. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I’m amazed at the number of people who say yes.

Lillian: Absolutely, me too, like, “Wow, you’re actually going to talk to me. That’s so fantastic. I appreciate that.”

Rebecca: We’re definitely a part of a really wonderful community of practitioners.

Lillian: Yeah, it makes a very thankful and it’s so cool, because I have listened to Tea for Teaching for a long time. That’s actually my most listened to podcast for teaching and learning. I enjoy the fact that there’s two of you, and you kind of go back and forth and just interesting topics. So I’ve enjoyed yours, ever since the birth of our podcasts in 2018. They’re siblings. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: They are.

John: So we always end with the question. What’s next?

Lillian: I am so excited about what Appalachian State is doing. About two years ago, they bought a building in a town called Hickory, North Carolina. And our main campus is in Boone. And it’s a beautiful campus up in the mountains. And I happen to live halfway between these two cities. And so I was going up to Boone to teach and it is about 42 minutes to get up. And you have to go over the eastern Continental Divide, over the Appalachian Trail, over the Blue Ridge Parkway in order to get from my house into Boone to teach. And that’s great. And it’s the most beautiful commute I think in the world. But it also gets foggy and icy and weather and I was enjoying it, and it was where I would listen to podcasts. But Appalachian State is now the first university in the North Carolina system that now has two campuses. And so we’ve opened this campus in Hickory, it is a commuter campus, and some brave students, we have about 250 to 300 that have started this past fall of 2023. It has birthed this campus. And so I get to teach there, and I get to do some faculty development. And it’s really exciting to be on the ground floor of a new campus. And it’s the only one in the North Carolina system. We’ll have other campuses, but there’s no multi-campus university for us. It’s like being in a startup, except I don’t think I get stock options. That’s the only bad thing. [LAUGHTER] And so meeting new faculty, some faculty are teaching for the very first time. And so there’s no like institutional culture that they’re jumping into at this new campus, although we are very much a part of the Boone campus. It’s new. And there’s only a very small number of faculty there. So it’s like being at a small liberal arts college in a state system. And it’s just really cool. And I’m loving meeting the faculty there and helping with teaching and learning and UDL and all that stuff. So that’s like the next big thing is Appstate Hickory, and it’s really exciting.

Rebecca: Well, I hope you have a wonderful adventure. [LAUGHTER] It sounds like a really fun opportunity.

Lillian: Yeah, in fact, I’m in a group of faculty, we have like a community of practice, a peer mentoring circle we call it, and we’re calling ourselves the Hickory Adventurers, because like, we don’t know what’s going on, [LAUGHTER] and we’re trying to figure it out together.

John: You get to help shape what’s going on, which is a really nice place to be.

Lillian: Yeah, it’s fantastic. I’m excited. And I think I’m just that kind of person. It’s new and shiny. And I’m there.

John: I think we’re both that way a bit. And that is one of the risks of having a podcast, you get to hear about all these great things that people are doing, and there’s always a tendency to try to do many of them. And that can be a bit overwhelming, not just for us, but also for our students.

Lillian: Yes I know I have to peel it back [LAUGHTER] just a bit, don’t go overboard.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us, Lillian. I know we’ve wanted to talk to you for a while.

Lillian: Absolutely. I’m so glad and when you contacted me, I was super excited. So thank you so much for having me on Tea for Teaching. I’m gonna show my mug that nobody can see ‘cause it’s a podcast, but I love my Tea for Teaching mug, and thank you for having me.

John: Well, thank you for joining us. It was great talking to you and we’ll look forward to more conversations in the future.

Lillian: Great.

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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.

[MUSIC]

288. Mobile-Mindful Teaching and Learning

Posted in edtech, evidence-based practices, higher education, inclusion, learning, mobile, pedagogy, social media, teaching, universal design
May 10, 2023

Faculty generally design courses on their computers, but many students interact with courses through mobile devices. In this episode, Christina Moore joins us to discuss the benefits of being mobile mindful in course design.

Christina is the Associate Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She is the author of Mobile-Mindful Teaching and Learning: Harnessing the Technology that Students Use Most, which was recently released by Stylus Publishing.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Faculty generally design courses on their computers, but many students interact with courses through mobile devices. In this episode, we discuss the benefits of being mobile mindful in course design.

[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 Christina Moore. Christina is the Associate Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She is the author of Mobile-Mindful Teaching and Learning: Harnessing the Technology that Students Use Most, which was recently released by Stylus Publishing. Welcome, Christina.

Christina: Thank you so much. So glad to be here.

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

Christina: I am.

Rebecca: Woohoo,what kind? [LAUGHTER]

Christina: I have to, of course. I am having honey vanilla chamomile tea. Just something refreshing and light.

Rebecca: That sounds perfect for a Friday afternoon. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have one of my usuals, ginger peach green tea, today.

Rebecca: I just got a new shipment of my blue sapphire tea pack. So I’m back to drinking that. It’s a good spring tea.

John: And it’s all sparkly, isn’t it?

Rebecca: It’s not sparkly, it’s blue sapphire.

Christina: I never heard of sparkly tea, but I’m intrigued.

Rebecca: There is. We need to get our hands on some.

John: It was the same episode where you describe that tea. We’ve invited you here to discuss Mobile-Mindful Teaching and Learning. You note that you started writing this book on your phone? Can you tell us a little bit about the origin of this book project?

Christina: Yes. So probably the very first step is my interest in Universal Design for Learning. I find it to be a really useful framework for thinking as expansively as possible about how students can learn and how we, as instructors, can be involved. So my very first interest into mobile-mindful teaching in earnest was reading Tom Tobin and Kirsten Behling’s Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: UDL in Higher Ed, and they have a chapter on “Meet the Mobile Learners” that was really this important call to learning with our phones and how, as educators, we’re really missing out if we’re not willing to consider the role that that could play, and I thought the argument was really convincing. So I started to do just a little bit of exploration into the topic. And that was probably in January 2020. And then a couple months later, COVID hit in earnest. It really upended our lives. I’m a mother of two young kids, and they were two and four at the time. So it was sometime in late March or early April, that we had been so cooped up, and we had used the family minivan so seldomly that we decided just to play in the car, that that would be the activity; not moving in the van anywhere, just playing in there. The kids would crawl around, listen to the radio… it was just one of those really comical moments just totally different than life in general. And it was really during those days that I was using my phone for work a lot more than I ever had before, because I just sometimes needed to keep things moving while we didn’t have childcare. I would read articles, I would take notes on how they might apply to something else I needed to write or work on that day, or it would spark an idea. And it was really at that point that I realized, it’s not just 18-, 19-, 20-year olds who want to learn on their phones, it’s really something that all of us, at least the vast majority of us, take advantage of. And during certain periods of our life, we need to lean on them more heavily. So I actually started to realize this while I’m sitting in the van, and I started writing down some notes about this experience. I was connecting back to some of the things I started to read and work on earlier. And then I sent the piece to EDUCAUSE and they were really interested in publishing it. It was a really short piece, but I was really surprised with how many people resonated with that, because mobile learning is still something that tends not to excite most instructors, it just feels like this distraction device, something people don’t want to think about, we’re already frustrated about it. But a lot of people recognize themselves, I think, in the story that I told and in some of the practical places to start. So in many ways that was sort of the seed to what would become this book, because honestly, while my interest has been in educational technology for a while, I would not have guessed, I would have written this book, but really it was the need to address something that I think we’ve been ignoring, or just haven’t been able to find a really accessible entry point to as far as a really good learning opportunity and even a good teaching opportunity for us. I was really inspired in this book to say “Okay, let’s come up with a starting point for at least considering what role mobile learning can play. And let’s start developing our curiosity and see where we go from there.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about who the audience of the book is?

Christina: I really tried to make this book to the person who is excited about teaching, they really care about their students’ learning experience, even if they’re not so excited about the idea of students learning on a mobile device. And I would describe the audience that way, because I think that’s the audience that a lot of the enthusiasm around mobile learning has been missing. And we haven’t had that critical mass of instructors who are finding a good entry point in. So I would say it’s like the learner first, tech second, type of instructor who uses technology, normally, because they see it has a real benefit for students. And they may not always be comfortable with it, but they’re willing to try things as long it isn’t too overwhelming. So with that audience in mind, I really tried to take a beginner approach to tech. I explain how QR codes work, how you can create one, might even explain what the share icon is, because that’s really important for fluid learning and connecting our learning experiences. But I also allow space to dive into more course activities and possibilities that you can do with students, even if you don’t feel completely mobile tech savvy, because I’m somewhat in that boat as well. Of course, I learned a lot through this book, but I hope I did some of the learning and pre work so that faculty readers and other educators can just feel free to try things out, even if they’re not totally sure how they feel about these things.

Rebecca: Can you define what you mean by mobile learning, just to make sure that we’re all on the same page early on the conversation?

Christina: Yeah. So mobile learning, first and foremost, makes us think of learning on a smartphone, which mobile learning can sometimes mean like tablets, and even non-smartphones. But we’re normally talking about smartphones, phones that have the capability to connect to the internet, especially because increasingly, most people, most adults, have mobile phones. But I do think a little bit larger about mobile learning as well, just acknowledging the fact that we learn in motion. I think a lot of us sit in front of a computer for a lot of the work that we do. But what I try to guide us to think about is the fact that we learn and work in multiple places, with our laptop, with our phones, while we’re on a walk, while we’re on a drive. We do not stop learning or stop thinking the second that we are no longer in front of a screen officially working on things. So I also try to tease out that much larger idea of we are learners in motion and that we are learning and responding to our environments.

John: And smartphone ownership by students is close to being ubiquitous, nearly all students have a smartphone. And they normally have them with them all the time. And they use them regularly for learning. Yet there is some faculty resistance to students using smartphones in the classroom. How do you address that when faculty say “I don’t allow smartphone use in my classes?”

Christina: I think I take a balanced approach to this. So first, I acknowledge that and understand. I think even our students don’t really like how distracted they constantly feel by technology. Our institution actually just facilitated a student engagement panel with students talking about creating a collaboration around student engagement and learning with faculty. And even that was expressed by the students themselves. And that was corroborated by the research that I looked into. So, I think, and I have this mantra a lot throughout the book, which is somewhat the mindful aspect of it as “Well it’s okay, let’s acknowledge and notice that we have that skeptical feeling, but sort of suspend it and just be a bit curious.” So my first piece of advice is to talk with students directly about this issue, because our classes look different. They’re small, they’re large, they’re gen ed classes or major classes. So I think it helps to first talk with the students, maybe on the first day, if you’re discussing the course syllabus, “What should tech use look like in the class?” It can either be in class or in an anonymous form where you’re saying: “Some research has found that cell phones can be distracting not only to the person using it, but to the person next to them. How do you feel about this and your learning environment?” Then that can help at least bring them into the discussion, so that with whatever you decide, they feel like they have had some say and input, or at least some understanding of why you do what you do. That being said, I would definitely not support just a total tech ban. And that’s because, and the book does get into some of this research, there’s pretty strong indication that students are using these phones for e-texts, sometimes they are caregivers who really feel anxious if they don’t feel like they’re going to know right away if there’s an issue and they’re the primary contact. So there’s lots of evidence that by banning this technology altogether, we can do real harm to the students who really need it the most, which overwhelmingly are women, or people of color, and people with disabilities. So I wouldn’t encourage a total tech ban, a conversation with students, and really, similar to what James Lang has talked about in his book Distracted, that we don’t have to take an either/or stance, it’s not really reasonable to expect totally undivided attention. I mean, think of any faculty meeting and how many phones are even out during those. So just thinking realistically, but also maybe guiding your students, like, which point in class do you think it’s really important to put away the phones because you’re just talking to one another, and then maybe prompting students to do that. Whereas other active learning situations, you might not worry so much about the technology being used, because the activity itself is so engaging that you don’t really have to worry about that. So overall, I actually encourage us to think more about the mobile learning possibilities outside of a classroom, because I actually think that that’s where its virtues come out a lot more than it’s vices.

Rebecca: I’m really struck by the idea of this fluid learning and learning on the go. [LAUGHTER] And having learning in your pocket and work in your pocket. Your story was reminding me that just the other day, I was enjoying the nice weather, but had a lot of work to do, so I got out my mobile device and I talked through the presentation I needed to give so I could get an outline done while I was on a walk without having to be at a computer. And there’s lots of ways that we can use our devices. We talked a little bit about QR codes, and that might be one obvious way to use a mobile device in a classroom, but what are some of these other ways to use a phone that are in these other spaces that we don’t always expect?

Christina: So I think your example of being on a walk is one that I talk through, because part of the book, a fairly large section of the book is called “Start with Self.” And this is really guiding us through the basics of what it means to be a mobile learner, what are some basic skills that will help you actually become more familiar with what it is to be a mobile learner firsthand, because we’re really not used to thinking of ourselves in that way. And I like the walking to sort of get a break, but you’re still actually being very productive. And maybe you’re being more productive because you’re breaking up your thinking, your body is moving, your muscles are moving, so your brain is likely going to be better and more responsive. But I think, for most of us, we have to sort of walk through the steps of “Okay, but how do I make that happen? How do I use voice to text in order to be able to speak into the phone and have the text written out? Where do I do that? What app do I use?” And along with fluid learning, which is the idea that we design learning activities so that if we do our learning in one place, we can then access it in a useful way, in a different context, a different device, in a different situation. So it gets into that decision of am I taking my notes in a app that I can easily access when I do decide to sit back down at the computer? So I think going through those simple steps of “Okay, what buttons do I have to press? How do I find out how to do that? What tools and processes are going to work best for me?” I think is something that we have to start with, because many of us aren’t used to putting all of those pieces together. But just to use this example, again, the idea of being able to walk and learn in a productive way, is a really good example of something that’s good for our bodies that in a way actually takes us away from screens a little bit because we’re not so focused, even on the screen in front of us, we’re just using it basically as a recording device. And that’s why I do like us to think a little bit broader about mobile learning because yes, it is learning that is made possible because of phones but it is not always just us with our thumbs staring at this teeny tiny screen, but it’s also how it allows us to take pictures of things that we find so that we are actually connecting whatever we’re talking about in class to something that we are seeing in a completely different context. And if we think about the application that we make possible, how much more powerful is that learning that we’re able to take it from our environment, and then find some way to share it with our classmates, such as a shared messaging platform or a shared folder where people can put their pictures, I’ve heard really amazing examples, especially in like biology and STEM fields, where instructors are using, whether it’s something like social media or just a shared photo folder, where both the instructors are sharing photos and asking their students to identify them, sometimes on a daily basis, where also students are actively collecting samples via photos. And then they are working as a class together to label the genus or species of whatever leaf, plant, or whatever that they have identified. So I think that answer was a little bit mobile in and of itself, it might have kept going, but I think it provides some examples.

John: In the title of your book, you use mobile mindful, rather than mobile learning. Why is that distinction important?

Christina: Even stepping back to when I was thinking of mobile learning directly, I was really wanting to use my phone more productively so less mindlessly, because I was noticing I was just going to my phone to pass the time. And I was doing things I wasn’t even interested in or was consciously thinking of. So I began thinking, “Okay, how can I redirect this habit into something that is more intentional?” So that’s one reason for the use of the word mobile mindful is this idea of intention, and using our phones for the things we actually want to do rather than just for this pure distraction. But I also use the word mindful with it as a hopefully less intimidating and less techie sounding approach to it. So when I think of mobile mindful, I think of something that’s mobile aware, or mobile-ish, or it’s an adding a piece to our already existing rich ecology for learning that we create in our classroom. And just adding this as like an extra tool, an extra really powerful way to connect all of these pieces together and help our students learn more often and think about the content more often. So it’s a mindful approach to mobile learning, but also like, let’s start with mobile aware before we like go diving into mobile learning. So I contrast it with mobile first learning, which some people are doing amazing work on, which is putting in the constraint and challenge of let’s try to create a whole learning environment that can take place on a phone. That is not the approach that I take in this book. I think it’s productive for most college and university instructors to first start with, “Well, how can this be one piece and one delightful added element to all of the good work that we’re already doing?”

Rebecca: I’m curious in your role as an instructor and in a teaching center and your interactions with students, what are some of the most interesting ways you’ve seen that students have just adapted to using their phones to help with learning?

Christina: Well, I’ll answer the question, but I’ll also add something to it that I think is important for us to realize, that once we go through the learning process of being a mobile learner ourselves, there may need to be a little bit of prep work that we also do with students. Well, a lot of our students have only known the world that is mobile phone capable, it doesn’t always mean that they are ready to be mobile learners. They have definitely internalized messages that phones are bad for them, phones shouldn’t be in the classroom, even though they bring them in anyway. So there’s very much this vice type of attitude towards it. And therefore they haven’t had always a lot of opportunities to use their phones as these powerful learning devices. So I would add sort of the caveat of “Yes, students are doing amazing things and can do amazing things, but they may need to be guided into it a little bit just as much as we do.” So with that being said, I would say that some of the exciting things that students are doing and going back to QR codes, I really liked the example of audio essays that were taken to specific places. And again, QR codes have become so much easier to both use and create. You can basically create them from any browser. The QR codes in my book are purposely created for free by right clicking on any website and there’s a drop down option that says create a QR code. You can create fancier logo specific ones, but I decided to just use the default one as sort of a demonstration of the fact that they are really easy to create, and that’s how I went about it. So I think even just adding an element to maybe research presentations or things for a specific audience where you say, “Okay, how could you use a QR code to direct people to a different learning element?” And so it might be directing them to a piece of audio where you’re explaining something that is in a very specific environment. So again, thinking about learning being mobile is you are creating learning experiences that take place in very specific locations, or could take them to a form that they fill out or a petition or something like that. So I think it creates a lot of convenience and thinking about your audience and makes it a little bit more creative. And then the one other really interesting use that I cover, and I talk about the ethics of mobile phone use and inviting students to use their mobile phones. That’s actually a really good opportunity to get students to think more critically about the data being collected on them. So some faculty have done really interesting work in places like statistics, or other data analysis type of classes, and students have been invited to download the data that is collected about them on social media or on Pokemon Go, especially those that are mobile dependent, like especially Pokemon Go. It not only teaches the students a really useful content skill and applies it, but it helps them be a little bit more critical about what is actually going on behind the scenes when they don’t actively take a role in limiting data sharing about what they’re doing and where they are. So I think that type of application of getting students to think and actually dig into their own data is a really good example of what I think faculty could start to find as really exciting about mobile-mindful teaching, as they start to see that there is a lot they can have students do that really isn’t as possible in other ways.

John: You mentioned QR codes. When they first came out, they were really useful tools, but you had to dig up a specific application to scan them. Once smartphone manufacturers allowed the cameras to directly read and respond to QR codes, it became such a game changer in terms of their use. I don’t think I’ve given any presentations, either in class or at a conference in the last three or four years, except during the time when all instruction was remote, and then I was more likely to drop URLs in the chat. And it just opened up so many great possibilities for sharing resources with students, with colleagues, and so forth. I’m still amazed at the number of faculty who don’t know how to use QR codes. And I was really glad to see you had a discussion of that in the book in terms of how instructors could use those within their classes. You mentioned a little bit about the use of QR codes, but how might instructors use that in their class?

Christina: Yeah, so and just as a funny note, back to the audience, my mother is reading my book, and I asked if she’s tried any of the QR codes yet. And she said, “What’s a QR code?” [LAUGHTER] And I said, “Oh, maybe you haven’t gotten that far in the book yet.” But then I was explaining it to her. And she’s like, “Oh, it’s what’s been on all of the restaurant menus.” I was like, “Yep, those are the ones.” So I also think of like, you don’t know what a QR code is and you’ve seen it, but you haven’t connected the dots. I’m hoping that this book will connect a lot of the dots. So I will give a couple of really useful examples of an instructor intentionally using QR codes. So, I think in the spirit of Universal Design for Learning, it can be really nice to add QR codes to print handouts, because I think sometimes students do like to have print handouts because it helps them resist some of the distraction that comes with phones. They like having something tactile, but by putting a QR code on them, if they would rather consult something on a phone and take digital notes, they immediately have that option. So I think that’s something that’s fairly easy that can be done if you use print handouts, but want to be conscious of people potentially using mobile phones, or directing people intentionally to other websites by using their phones. My other favorite, which I think is also useful in other contexts, is when you want to get quick feedback from your audience, such as students, displaying a really big QR code on a projector. And then even in a really large class, they can pretty easily scan it and then they can give you some really useful feedback that you have in a digital form that can be automatically analyzed or you can quickly go through it. So I think of some of the really classic active learning strategies that we may be familiar with such as exit tickets, what you want to know from students at the end of class. It might be the muddiest point, where you want to know what students are still confused on, or one-minute papers, where you want a really quick reflection about what they’ve learned in the class. So by displaying that QR code, students can take the form there, and then you quickly have all the data. Inversely, you can also do this at the beginning of a class, if you want to ask students, either three review questions, or you want to ask them three questions that are just going to prime the pump of whatever you’re about to discuss to sort of see what they know before you’ve even covered it. While I didn’t do it with the QR code, this was one of my favorite mobile learning activities that I tried the last time that I teach. Because it was an asynchronous online course, I wanted to get a sense of students feeling like I am responding to what they’re learning and thinking. So I would start the week with a really short form and say, “This will take you five minutes, I just want to know what has your experience been doing primary research? Do you know the difference between primary and secondary research?” And then I could address that feedback directly into my instructional video. So it would create that sense of presence, even though it was an asynchronous course. And by telling them it would take them five minutes, they did it right away. So like, that’s kind of the magic of micro learning, which is, I think, one of the superpowers of mobile-mindful learning is if you can break things down into smaller chunks, students will do it. And that’s kind of the interesting course design pedagogical challenges, to figure out how to get things into smaller pieces.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that we often assume is that the students who are using their phones for learning or to complete work are more traditional aged college students. But from my experience, [LAUGHTER] it’s often adult learners who are using their phones the most, because they’re often double timing as your example in the van [LAUGHTER], or at soccer practice or during swim lessons and trying to complete a module or reading the captions on a video, or [LAUGHTER] any number of other things, getting a start on a paper or trying to edit or providing feedback to peers or something. So they’re taking it with them, and often maybe in an environment where there’s other things going on, but trying to make progress on something in the little snippets of time, those small chunks of time that might be available.

Christina: And that’s what I think is useful about thinking of this fluid learning environment is, of course, we don’t always want to be learning in that context. We want our students to think deeply, we want them to have time to really mull over ideas and work in larger chunks of time. But what I’ve come to realize is that there really is quality learning that can happen in those snippets of time, mostly by frequency. Because I think a lot of times with the way activities and courses are set up is that the students are cramming right before class, the last possible minute, to do everything they were supposed to do over the last week. And we know from experience that this does not produce quality work. And it doesn’t bring into our class, a really curious thinker who’s really been mulling over these ideas. So I think if we reframe this sort of micro learning as “How would your students think differently, if they thought about your course content four times a day, even if it was in really small snippets?” They would probably be a lot more prepared and have more interesting things to say once they do sit down with that hour to work on things. So even if we sort of dread and don’t love the idea of our students doing things while waiting in line for five minutes, or being in a waiting room for 10 minutes, I think reframing it as like this is a piece that will contribute to a longer work period. I think that’s a lot more inspiring.

Rebecca: You know, from my own experience, I get more reading done, because sometimes I have my device read to me and I can do that in the car or in other places… maybe not good for research kind of reading but good if I’m trying to get background knowledge on something or keep up with something that’s current.

Christina: Rebecca, you’re narrating and describing exactly the types of things that I want readers to notice about themselves, about how they learn, because I think we normally don’t notice these things. We just sort of do them because we’re trying to just do what we can. And what we want to get students to notice about their own learning emotion as well.

Rebecca: I mean, I’m a designer who designs for mobile devices, so I’m already sold. [LAUGHTER] But I think it’s important that we recognize how often people are using their devices already, and all the ways that we could use them that we don’t always know that we can. My students are often really surprised when I show them some of the features that are available to them on their phone that make their lives easier.

Christina: Yes. Exactly. And that’s why we have to take students along with us and pointing things out like, “Oh, do you know how to do this? Do you know that the learning management system has an app? Do you know that it will give you push notifications when I message you, so you don’t have to worry about catching up on my emails as much?” I think those little nudges like, “Oh, did you know or how do you keep notes on a phone?” I think those types of nudges and getting them in the right direction will help in your class and throughout their whole lives.

John: And you mentioned that you got started on this through a UDL approach. And smartphones enable a lot of assignments that can be done in multiple modes. Could you talk to us a little bit about how instructors might use that to give students multiple ways of demonstrating their learning?

Christina: Yeah, this reminds me of a course activity that I propose in the book. And it’s called “untethering the research presentation,” because I predominantly teach writing and rhetoric to first-year students, they’re required courses. So I think students are really used to doing slide presentations for their classes. And I think they do that because we’re comfortable with them and so it just becomes this routine thing that doesn’t have a lot of love and spirit behind them. So I think this idea of untethering the research presentation is like, let’s think of this in a little bit of a different way. If we’re not using slides, what else can you do? Is it a really engaging discussion without technology? Is it a video? Is it coming up with a social media campaign. And what I like about that idea is not only is it a more creative and authentic way to put whatever they’ve been researching into action with a real audience, but it gets them to think in a different way about how that information lives. So I think mobile learning can be a really important part of this, especially if students are thinking about who their audience is. They may determine that their audience is going to best be reached on a mobile device. So if they’re doing a video, and they determine that their audience is most likely going to look at this on a phone, how are they going to design that video accordingly? If it’s on social media, then doing something in portrait might be the best because it scrolls through better that way. So I think prompting our students to also be, depending on their field, be prepared to be mobile practitioners and how they can reach a mobile audience. Another example I use is if you are a math educator, we hear about the new math and reaching out to parents about how to guide them through that. How many of your parents are likely going to maybe be smartphone dependent, meaning that the only reliable internet they have at home is on a phone? So how are they going to use that sitting next to their child helping them with math? So I think by posing those types of ways of presenting information for a specific audience, is a good example of both inviting students to express their learning in a way that they are comfortable with and excited about and speaks to their strengths, but also getting them to think about the audience for the work that they’re doing too, and how to demonstrate that learning to an audience in a way that is relatable and accessible to them.

Rebecca: So one of the things that got me really curious about how students are using mobile devices is actually, how they might even engage in the learning management system. So we talked a little bit about having an app, but also sometimes there’s a web version that’s made responsively, and also exists on the mobile device. And what I’ve discovered often is that those are sometimes different, or the way you even get to information material is different. So that’s always something that I start talking to my students about is like, “Okay, if you’re using the app, you can do this one thing, if you use the website, you can use this other thing.” I’m mentioning this, in part, because the way that students are engaging with their materials sometimes is really different if they’re in the app of a learning management system versus the website version of it. We might have micro lessons or small activities that we’re doing on our devices, like videos and things and those experiences might be really different. I’m curious about the ways that we can help faculty become more aware of the different ways our students are using their learning management systems, even on our mobile devices.

Christina: Yeah, so that’s great. And I’m glad we’re bringing it up. I highly encourage us to regularly take mobile test drives through our materials. I think it’s a really good place to start. So pull up your syllabus on a phone, what does it look like? How easy is it to navigate how when you open up links that are there? How many clicks does it take or how many taps if we’re thinking mobile mindful? How many taps does it take for them to get to the content that they want to get to? So I think actually going through the tactile experience of going through your course materials on a phone is really insightful, because I actually hope that you’ll find things work a lot better than you expect, because I think mobile accessibility has gotten a lot better. And I think sometimes we might still be thinking in like a 2004, even 2012, realm of like, where everything just looked terrible on the phone. I think we might be surprised when we actually go through that things scale, and are more responsive than we expect. So I think that that’s a great place to start. If you use the learning management system at your institution, and you’ve never looked into whether they have an app, you can do that. Download it. You might discover things, like I mentioned sort of offhand earlier, that there are push notifications whenever you use the announcements forum, or whatever it’s called in your learning management system. So students get that right away, rather than hoping that they get into their email. So you may discover that there are certain surveys that work okay, but if you maybe used a slightly different tool, or you broke up the question in a different way, it might be even more responsive. And that might make you think, “Okay, if I actually just break this one 30-question quiz into three 10-question quizzes and open up that access so that they can take it as many times as they want, and then I tell them in class, I want you to do these, you can do them on your phone, it’ll probably only take you 10 minutes a day, I mean, then you start to think of how much they’re practicing and reviewing the material so that they don’t even have to think about it anymore, they can get right into the more complex thinking. I think even that test drive mentality of like, “Okay, let’s see how it looks,” then I can sort of guide students on what I think works well on a mobile phone and what I think doesn’t work well on a mobile phone. And then even, and this is what I was doing throughout the book, is taking screenshots that I wanted to save and show in class, okay, this is how it looks. It really helps reinforce that for students, and then going through your course texts, trying to identify what works well, on a mobile device, tell students to do that. You might also feel free to say: “This one text, it really doesn’t respond on mobile well, that’s something I would say to do on your computer, to do offline.” I think talking students through those options really gives them a lot more agency, because I think a lot of our impulse is to say, “Don’t use your phone for the course, it’s not designed that way.” But they are, for different reasons. Sometimes, they’re just going to do it that way. So if instead we can say, “Well, the discussion forums work well if you do a video post, but otherwise, if you need to cite things it might not.” So by giving them an action and plan, rather than just saying, “Don’t do it,” I think that’s gonna get us a lot farther. And I know that in doing this test drive and thinking about how we can leverage those five and ten minutes, it actually got me really excited to think about quiz design, how I get feedback from students, and even how I design my instructional videos. In the UDL mindset, I started to record my videos the same, but I would just pass them on to YouTube as well, instead of just in the learning management system, and then I would have a link that says access on YouTube. And then I would make that into a playlist. It’s not really any extra work, it’s just organizing them into one list. And then it gives students the opportunity to just keep playing through, which we probably know, as mobile consumers ourselves, is that it’s easy to get us to buy in, if it’s only a three-minute video. But then we’re like, “Okay, let’s just do one more three-minute video. And then we’ve been watching videos for a half hour very easily. So if we can use that capability for good, [LAUGHTER] I think that can be something exciting for us.

Rebecca: Christina, did you just suggest designing a learning rabbit hole? [LAUGHTER]

Christina: I sure did.[LAUGHTER]

John: We gave a workshop recently where we encouraged people if they were using videos in their class to do the embed, rather than sending students to YouTube, because that rabbit hole could often take them in directions away from the course. But if you’re directing them to a playlist with a whole series of videos, then having that rabbit hole could be very useful.

Rebecca: That’s downright sneaky.

Christina: Yeah, but let’s use the sneakiness for good. But, doing the test drive, we can also recognize where things are distracting if we tried to take them to a mobile device. And we might just be transparent about that, and for that reason, suggest that they don’t go in that direction. So it’s why it’s this mindful approach. It’s just being aware of what works well and what doesn’t, and giving our students some direction accordingly.

Rebecca: Sometimes that test drive can reveal even little details like should this open in the same window or a different window?

Christina: Mm hmm.

Rebecca: Because some tools are fine on a desktop, but as soon as you try to do it on the mobile device inside of the learning management system, it’s a nightmare.

Christina: I think that’s actually a really good example of how I think going through this thought process will reduce friction, and overall just improve the teaching design in general, because we found that with online teaching, too, is that when people began teaching online overall…I mean, as long as they did it, right, of course, and took a good approach… it actually often increased the quality of their in-person or on-ground learning as well, because it was just a different way of thinking about it. And it helped you see where there were barriers that you could take away. So I think that’s a good example of, it just helps you pay attention to the learning experience in a different way that could give you really good insight overall.

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

Christina: Well, first is, a little bit of a break. [LAUGHTER] I definitely want to talk about the book, and I will be, but I’m taking just a little bit of a pause. But during this pause, I’m actually putting together content for a blog to kind of be the “what’s next” of the book, because the book is an invitation and it’s a framework for us to get started with mobile learning. But from there, I know that there are people doing brilliant things with mobile learning, or they’re going to have lots of light bulbs that go off because of this book. So I want to continue the conversation. I didn’t want it to end with the book. So I plan on contributing content myself, but also inviting people to share their mobile learning strategies, victories, challenges, stories. So I may provide my email address so that people can feel free to contact me if they would like to contribute something. I’m gathering up goodies so that I can start to share them out into the world. And then I also want to work with faculty to research how the application of these strategies are going, because I’d like to see the evidence and put them out in more formalized ways so that we can really build and make this a practice that is more common, more accepted and really is convincing that it is what students need and provide guidance on how to do it well.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for the book and really thinking about introductory audience.

Christina: Thanks a lot. This was great.

John: I really enjoyed reading the book and I’m really happy we can share this with our listeners.

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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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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.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our 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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253. Designing for Trauma

Posted in ableism, access, accessibility, accommodation, belonging, disability, emotion, higher education, inclusion, inclusive pedagogy, learning, self-care, trauma, trigger warnings, universal design
September 7, 2022

 Universal Design for Learning principles were developed to make our courses more accessible for all students. In this episode, Andrea Nikischer joins us to discuss how universal design principles can be expanded to address the trauma that can adversely impact student learning. Andrea is an Associate Professor and Program Coordinator for the Adult Education Program in the Social and Psychological Foundations of Education Department at SUNY Buffalo State.

Show Notes

  • Nikischer, A. B. (2021). Universal Design for Trauma.
  • Nikischer, A. (2018). Life after# MeToo: Understanding the impact of adolescent sexual assault on education and career. International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research, 17(10), 86-98.
  • Horsman, J. (2013). Too scared to learn: Women, violence, and education. Routledge.
  • Horsman, Jenny (2006). “Who will hear? Who will see? The Impact of Violence on Learning: A Historical Journey.” Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme. Ending Woman Abuse, Vol. 25 No. 1.
  • Horsman, Jenny (2005). Moving Beyond “Stupid”: Taking Account of the Impact of Violence on Women’s Learning The International Journal of Educational Development, Gender Equality in Adult Education, Vol. 26, Issue 2.
  • Nikischer, A. (2019). Vicarious trauma inside the academe: Understanding the impact of teaching, researching and writing violence. Higher Education, 77(5), 905-916.

Transcript

John: Universal Design for Learning principles were developed to make our courses more accessible for all students. In this episode, we examine how universal design principles can be expanded to address the trauma that can adversely impact student learning.

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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 Andrea Nikischer. Andrea is an Associate Professor and Program Coordinator for the Adult Education Program in the Social and Psychological Foundations of Education Department at SUNY Buffalo State. Welcome, Andrea.

Andrea: Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s great to be here.

John: Right before this. We were talking a little bit about this, and you were a student here. So welcome back.

Andrea: Thank you. I loved my time at Oswego State, and I still have my mug and my sweatshirt in my office at Buffalo State. So it’s great to continue being part of the SUNY family.

Rebecca: It’s so great to have you here. Today’s teas are:… Andrea, are you drinking tea?

Andrea: I am. I actually love tea. And today….

Rebecca: Yay!

Andrea: …I’m drinking my regular afternoon tea, which is a double green matcha from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: Nice. And I noted like a really beautiful mug.

Andrea: I am an avid tea drinker since I was in my teens. So it’s wonderful to be able to talk about tea… one of my favorite subjects.

Rebecca: it looks like a mint colored mug with, is it butterflies?

Andrea: They are birds, birds of peace, I think is the theme of the mug.

Rebecca: Awesome.

John: And I am drinking a ginger tea.

Rebecca: And I have English breakfast today.

John: And next time you’re on campus, stop by the CELT office where we have over 100 teas available.

Andrea: Oh, I’d love to.

Rebecca: …always welcoming tea drinkers.

John: We invited you here to talk about the presentation that you gave at the SUNY Conference on Instruction and Technology. Rebecca was able to attend that… I wasn’t able to because I had to be in another session at the time. So this is a chance for me to catch up a little bit on that and so that we can share this more broadly. Your presentation was titled Universal Design for Trauma. Maybe we should start by talking about how prevalent trauma is.

Andrea: That is a really great and, I think, complicated question. I actually have been working with trauma since really right out of my undergraduate degree at Oswego. And I started work at a rape crisis center. And I worked in the sex offense squad of a police department as a victim’s advocate. And my interest, when I moved into education, was in studying the impact of trauma on educational outcomes and what I call the life pipeline or career and life trajectories. But when I wrote this paper, it was 2019 in the fall, before COVID, before we knew what was coming. And at the time, we were really looking at statistics, around 70% of adults in the US will have experienced trauma at some point in their life. Obviously, depending on what age group we’re talking about, the statistics will be different, but over the course of the life around 70%. Now, today, post COVID with the extreme increase in gun violence and mass shootings, with a televised violent attack on the US Capitol, with a war, climate disasters, and crisis, I think it’s really difficult to measure what the true number is, and that, indeed, the best response is to assume that close to 100% of the population has dealt with some form of trauma in their life, and certainly through the global pandemic and more recent crises. As I’m sure you know, here in Buffalo, we had a white supremacist mass shooting, towards the end of the semester. Our students live and work in that community. And so for us in returning to school in the fall, we will certainly be treating the situation as if every student has a history of trauma.

Rebecca: You and others have investigated the impact of trauma on academic outcomes. Can you talk a little bit about this research?

Andrea: Absolutely. There’s a fairly large body of quantitative research in Europe, as well as some studies here in the US, showing a clear, significant negative relationship between trauma and academic outcomes. Trauma is interrupting the academic process leading to lowered academic success or achievement, as well as lowered career status or career achievement. And really, some of the research can show that over the course of a lifetime, we’re seeing actually a significant reduction in earnings. So you’re seeing the sort of interruption points when trauma is experienced during youth and adolescence that is interrupting the educational outcomes. So if we’re seeing that trauma before age 16, some of the studies before age 18, or 21, we’re seeing that interruption during adolescence, during emerging adulthood, that really important period between 18 and whenever you become an adult, which, you know, can vary based on who you are, but usually we’re looking at 18 to 29 and beyond. That’s the most important sort of period for setting up your future career and earnings. So when we see trauma happening before or during that period, we’re seeing the most significant impact on educational outcomes, career outcomes, and again, lifetime earnings. I conduct qualitative research. And so I’m building on the work of Jenny Horsman from Canada and other researchers who’ve studied, through qualitative methods, the direct impact on education. She has really terrific work, “Too Scared to Learn,” and my research validates and extends her previous work showing that, specifically sexual violence, makes it extremely difficult to learn, work, complete assignments, engage in the educational experience during adolescence or emerging adult. And, so my participants were raped or sexually assaulted as a child or as a teenager. And we really went through how that process impacted their educational trajectory. And the results are just very significant in terms of how they describe the change in their relationship with schooling after the sexual assault. So you have students who are honor students, all As, dropping to Cs, Ds, Fs, and really nobody asking about trauma. What is going on here? Lots of questions, but nobody getting the key question of was there a trauma? …and specifically was there a sexual assault or sexual violence? The last piece of that point is that, for my participants, we are talking about a significant change to their engagement with schooling. And one of the most famous, or I should say, one of the most moving quotes from my research, which has been published in a few different areas. One of my participants said, “I go to school, and they want me to know about the first, second, third President, but I don’t care about the first, second and third President, I’m thinking about going home to slit my wrists, schooling just doesn’t have importance anymore.” And so I had participants who spoke about having commitment to schooling, wanting to go to Ivy League schools, wanting to have really significant career aspirations. And then after the sexual assault, just completely focusing on an eating disorder. Schooling was replaced by this unhealthy mechanism for dealing with trauma. So, right now, trauma is widespread. And we don’t know yet what the long-term impacts will be for the students of the COVID pandemic, for the students dealing with widespread school shootings and fear of mass shootings. But we have a clue from the previous research that there are serious risks to long-term educational outcomes and career achievement and earnings.

Rebecca: There’s been a lot of conversation during the pandemic about digital accessibility and universal design for learning to address students with disabilities and mental health has certainly come more into that conversation. And you’ve proposed a universal design for trauma. Can you talk a little bit about what that framework looks like? And how that relates to Universal Design for Learning?

Andrea: Oh, yes, I’d be happy to. Let me start by saying I’m building off the amazing work done with universal design, starting with construction accessibility questions and moving into learning. And in fact, many scholars had previously tied trauma and mental health directly to accessibility concerns. I’m certainly not the first to make that connection. But I think I was in a great position having the experience working in trauma as a rape crisis counselor, and then moving into education, teaching 100% online for the last 10 years, having that sort of perspective, both worlds. For me, universal design is all about making sure that all of our students can fairly and successfully participate in learning. And so we’ve done a lot of work thinking about accessibility in a variety of different settings, but not much had been done in terms of asking questions about trauma. For my work as a rape crisis counselor, and through my research with survivors of trauma often was discussed that students would struggle in particular scenarios in their education. So a universal design builds on this great previous work of Universal Design for Learning, and focuses specifically on addressing the needs of students with a trauma history. Like all forms of universal design, this benefits everyone. So even if you don’t have a trauma history, sometimes you may experience distress if content is presented in a way that is not thoughtful, and that content has the ability to cause distress among the students. So trauma triggers are something we talk a lot about in the trauma field, and certainly is a major issue of concern in educating students with a history of trauma. Trauma triggers are really very personal typically. So it might be a site, a smell, a song, something that brings you back to that trauma. But there are some content areas that are universally considered universal triggers or universally triggering: content on war, content on sexual assault, sexual violence, content on suicide. These content areas can even cause distress in students without a trauma history. So universal design is certainly focused on students with a trauma history, but has the ability to make the learning environment more successful for everyone, healthier for every student.

Rebecca: In your framework, you lay out five principles for universal design for trauma. Can you give us a little insight into those five principles?

Andrea: Yes, I can. So these are the five things that I focus on in my work. So there are certainly other things that I think can and should be brought into the conversation. But for me, the five things that I really focus on when building a course, address what I think are some of the most important concerns for students. So I should say, I teach courses on sexual assault and family violence and other areas that are potentially universally distressing. And so I started building this concept of universal design, probably 10 years ago, in what I call “teaching sensitive topics online.” I did a lot of presentations and writing and professional development about teaching sensitive topics. But universal design goes beyond that to say that every class has the potential for triggering past trauma. So it’s not just those courses teaching sensitive topics, but all courses. And one of the reasons I moved into a more universal focus was because a lot of my students in my courses who were not being taught anything potentially distressing, were disclosing violence to me in personal journals, and other assignments, in large part because they knew my professional history and research area, but also because trauma can be triggered outside of those universals. But let me talk a little bit about those pieces that I’ve included in a universal design for trauma. And the first one is strategic content planning. So the first question educators must ask themselves: is this trauma content central to the learning objectives of the course or program? So when we are teaching a course, truly any course, the first thing we want to do is scan that course to see if there is any potentially distressing content included. And again, we’re looking for those universal trauma triggers: war, violence, violent imagery, sexual assault, police violence, etc. So the first step is really to say, is there anything in this course that could trigger trauma? And the next step is to say, if it’s here, does it need to be here? I’m very concerned about the what I call gratuitous inclusion of trauma content. I am a dedicated proponent of academic freedom. I never want to tell any faculty member what they should teach or what they can teach, but I do encourage faculty to take a close look at all materials they use that have the potential to be distressing and/or trigger past trauma and to ask themselves, is this content necessary in this course? Is it directly linked to the student learning outcomes? Is it the best possible resource to use in this course? I teach courses on family violence. The entire course is potentially triggering, I cannot remove that material, nor should I. It is directly linked to the student learning outcomes. So it’s going to stay in the course. But I’ve had other courses where I’ve wanted to include something. One example would be my diversity course, where I’ve had materials included and I’ve had to go back and reconsider if it is the right way to approach the material we’re covering in the course. Even if the materials linked to the student learning outcomes, it’s asking, Do I need to include this potentially distressing, potentially triggering, content in the course, that’s step one. And then if we do need to include it, we move on to another step, or how to deal with that. But I’m very concerned about just including a story about incest in a certain community, because we like the story, and then not really thinking about how the trauma of that story may impact the learning in the course, because we don’t want our students learning to be stifled because they have been triggered or are experiencing distress. So it’s really about the thoughtful process of selecting materials that are directly linked to our student learning outcomes, and not including any gratuitous.

Rebecca: So for folks that aren’t typically teaching topics that would be universally triggering, this first step is the key one for them to focus on?

Andrea: Well, yes, I mean, it’s the beginning. I think they’re all key in their own way [LAUGHTER]. But this one is most closely linked to our step on content and trigger warnings, which is an important part of the process. But I do think this is one that opens a lot of faculty’s minds to what is going on in their own course. A lot of faculty members, if they are not explicitly teaching a course on a sensitive topic may not be doing the thoughtful review of content to sort of find where there may be the potential for trauma or stress. So this is definitely a universal step that applies to all faculty members teaching all courses, both those with trauma content, and those that do not focus on a trauma topic.

John: A while ago, I ran into a situation where I had a reading in my introductory microeconomics class that looked at the marginal cost and marginal benefits of trying to improve safety on airlines by adding additional exit doors and such things. What I didn’t realize was that I had a student in the class whose father had just been shut down in the Gulf War, just a week or so before that. And ever since then, I’ve been much more careful in selecting material that might have that sort of an impact, because it was something I had not considered and it had not been an issue before, until it was.

Andrea: That is such a great point. And even I, who have been working in this issue of teaching sensitive topics for so long and thinking about trauma, have found that in the courses that don’t focus on a sensitive topic, I’m more likely to not be as thoughtful about the potential impact of materials. Thank you for sharing that example. Very relevant.

Rebecca: So I think the second principle in your framework is trigger and content warnings.

Andrea: Yes, and step two, the second principle is really connected, obviously to the first step or principle in that, if we have identified content that has the potential to trigger past trauma or cause distress, then we need to include the trigger and/or content warning. I actually did a project on trigger warnings, a research project around 2018. And you may remember 2015-16, there was a lot of heated debate about trigger warnings: Are we coddling students? Are we dumbing down the curriculum? Are we violating academic freedom? And where I landed on that in this research project was that this in no way requires a faculty member not to teach something. It simply is a matter of accessibility for their students. By telling your students in advance that something potentially triggering or distressing is coming, you give them the opportunity to prepare for that learning. When a trigger comes out of the blue, when you’re not expecting it, that is one of the most high risk times for having a negative reaction or a negative trauma response. So it doesn’t require faculty to change what they’re teaching or to eliminate rigor in any way. It simply allows students to know in advance that the content may be challenging to them in some way. So it was great that I was able to do that research project before this. And in fact, several scholars who were on the… it really was a debate… many of the papers were written as a debate. Many of the scholars on the side of the pro-trigger warning debate linked it directly to accessibility. And so I was able to sort of build from their wonderful work and from the arguments they made in that 2015-16-17 trigger warning debate. So what is a trigger warning? What is a content warning? it does not need to be complicated. I train the medical students at the University at Buffalo in family violence identification and reporting. And my number one takeaway is do not overcomplicate, it does not need to be complicated. All you need to do is say, we are going to be talking about, reading about, watching a film on, whatever the activity is, a topic that could be distressing to some students, please know that this content is coming. And then I always refer them back to the resources on campus and in the community. It can be one sentence, a simple heads up to let students know this may be distressing content. And if you’re on YouTube, or Twitter or Tik Tok, you’ll see actually a lot of these videos and imagery is now labeled with those really quick trigger and content warnings. Just a sentence is fine. Again, you’re just letting the student know: it’s coming, I don’t want to catch you off guard.

John: The next point in your framework for universal design for trauma is what to do about those situations where there may be some content that will be triggering for people. And what do you suggest in those cases?

Andrea: So my next step, or principle, whatever we want to call it, is alternative readings and assignments. So I always encourage faculty who are teaching particularly courses that are focused on sensitive material, but even those that include some unit or smaller section, with potentially distressing or triggering material to set up, where possible, alternative readings and assignments. So I’ll give you some examples of what I do. In my course on family violence, the whole course is potentially triggering. I cannot remove every reading and assignment. But I am very thoughtful about how I approach the work in that course. For example, we read a autobiography, which describes the experience of a sexual assault during college and the long-term impact on that woman’s life, including drug addiction, recovery, and moving on through the phases of her life. I like this book, because it shows the long-term impact in a narrative way. As a qualitative researcher, i love those narrative data. But there is one chapter in the text, which is an extremely graphic description of the stranger rape. And so I label this reading ahead of time, I tell students before the course begins, before they have bought their books, on the reading calendar, and in several locations. You do not need to read this chapter. This chapter is distressing, it is potentially triggering, and you don’t need to read it to get the value of the text. It is a chapter you can eliminate without any repercussion to your learning about this topic. So, in that case, we’re still reading the book, but we’re taking out the most distressing part of the text and I always make it optional. And a key point of any alternative reading or alternative assignment is that it has to be universal. You cannot ask a student to come to you to seek an accommodation. We do not want to force a trauma survivor to come to us to disclose their trauma, to seek an alternative reading or assignment. Please don’t do that. It needs to be built in… that universal design, right? That is the whole concept of universal design, is it is built in for everyone. So that optional chapter is optional for everyone, it does not matter what their trauma history is. And in that same course for the final assessment, which is really the big culminating assessment for the course, I allow the student to choose from five different options: a research paper, a book review, a lesson plan, a community service experience, or creating a domestic violence workplace protocol. I do this because it gives students choice and agency over how they will engage in a very time consuming way with content that is potentially triggering. So if one of my students is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, they may be very comfortable creating a domestic violence workplace protocol, that material may not be triggering to them in the same way that forcing them to write a paper about childhood sexual abuse would be. Perhaps they want to write a paper on elder abuse… also fine. We’re allowing them to decide, for them, what is the best, healthiest way for me to engage with this content? And how will I be most successful. And I can tell you as a faculty member that grades many, many graduate papers, having a variety of different projects come in every semester is a benefit for me too. It makes that grading process much more interesting. And students love it. And it is very closely linked to Universal Design for Learning which values choice for students. And in adult education, we value that self-directed learning and giving students the agency to really tie their work to what’s important to them in their career or personal life.

Rebecca: You mentioned earlier about providing access to campus and community resources as one of your key steps. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Andrea: Absolutely, and that is step or principle four. I am extremely focused on this. And I really tell faculty everywhere I go, I tell faculty, I do this and ask them to do this. And I show them my Blackboard course site. And in all of those Brightspace meetings, I’m asking where can I put my campus and community resources. I build campus resources and community resources. It has to be both. Some students will never see assistance on campus. Many students who’ve experienced trauma do not want to relive that trauma where they go to school, where they work, and they would rather seek services off campus. You have to provide both campus and community resources so the student can select what is best for their needs. But I build in those campus and community resources on my syllabus, of course, but also right on my Blackboard course page, soon to be Brightspace. I put them in the left-hand navigation bar at the top, they are front and center in every single course that I teach. And in the post COVID world, not post-COVID, but world after COVID came, students really need these resources. We’re finding at Buffalo State, as I’m sure you are at Oswego, that the student needs for crisis intervention and mental health counseling and support are extensive. So it’s been very well received by my students. And I just build it in, make it a priority. Every time you log on, you can see that there is help for you should you need it. This is also important for me because I have worked in the field as a crisis counselor doing crisis intervention, doing street outreach and advocacy. But I am not a counselor at Buffalo State. And I cannot counsel my students at Buffalo State, it would be unethical for me to try to take on that role. So I want to make sure my students can go to someone that can provide those services to them. And so before they try to come to me to seek those services, which I cannot ethically provide, I’ve made sure they know where they can go. And if they come to me, I listen and refer, listen and refer. That is my role as a faculty member. F aculty cannot and should not be providing counseling,

Rebecca: Such good reminders. I think often when faculty are thinking about trauma, they’re thinking this is not a thing I can take on. I’m not qualified. I don’t have this expertise. But the reminders that the job here is to refer and to provide those resources is a really helpful one.

Andrea: Yes, absolutely. It can be scary to think about opening the can of worms and that’s the phrasing the survivors in my research study used particularly related regarding their K through 12 teachers thinking maybe they didn’t want to ask me questions about if I was a survivor because they didn’t want to open that can of worms. They didn’t know how to deal with it. But a faculty member’s role is to listen and refer. We are not counselors, and even though I am qualified, it would be unethical for me to attempt to do that in that role.

Rebecca: I remember from your presentation that you also talked about having students reflect on a self- care plan to make sure that they have actions that they can take in case they did become distressed. Can you talk a little bit about that? And does that relate to this step?

Andrea: Yes, it does, thank you.

Rebecca: I took good notes. [LAUGHTER]

Andrea: Thank you so much. Yes, a self care plan is critical. All of my students do a lot of work with personal journals. As an online instructor, I find that journaling is a great way for me to have a one-on-one conversation with my students in a safe and private space. And so the first journal entry in every course every semester is setting your goals and objectives for the course. What do you hope to learn? How will you know you’ve learned it? What do you need from me to be successful in this course? And then I include the question: please create a self-care plan for the semester. How will you take care of yourself if you encounter distressing content, or distressing situations in this course, and in that personal journal, the students can begin to build that self-care plan. I can comment on that plan, remind them of those campus and community resources and be sure that they have thought in advance about what they will do if they experience distress or trauma.

Rebecca: Is that something that you recommend for courses that might not be those sensitive topics?

Andrea: Yes, many semesters, I have more disclosures in courses with no focus on trauma content, but perhaps we are talking about K-12 schooling and a student is brought back to an incident of bullying. And they’ve been triggered by content that was not directly related to bullying, or a potentially triggering topic, but they were brought back in time, and in so doing, they experienced dis stress. I do it in every course. I recommend everyone do it in every course universally, because it is an easy step. And again, our students, particularly right now, are experiencing so much in the world that a self-care plan is, I think, extremely valuable for everyone in every course.

John: And the last principle you list is instructor protections. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Andrea: Absolutely. This is one of my passion projects is thinking about and talking about the impact of teaching, researching, and writing trauma on a faculty member. So I’ve written about my own experience with vicarious and secondary trauma in an article “Vicarious Trauma Inside the Academe” published in the journal Higher Education. It’s an autoethnography that really goes through a process of discovering I was experiencing secondary traumatic stress, and learning how to deal with that in my various roles, certainly starting with my work as a rape crisis counselor, but then experiencing it again when I was interviewing and transcribing those long and painful qualitative interviews from survivors of sexual assault, and dealing with them. My role on campus as an expert and being asked to watch a film and comment on what to do. I often found myself in a situation where it was assumed that I would be fine just because of the role I have on campus or as a researcher, as a writer, whatever it may be, but a faculty member is not immune to the distress from the content they are teaching and from student disclosure, even in courses where I am not teaching trauma content, students disclose to me, they find me on campus, they come up to me at poster sessions, they seek me out because they know what I’ve done and what I do with my research. And so that has had an impact on me and I have tried to speak about it and advocate for faculty members taking care of themselves. In my scholarship, I really put it at a higher level. I think our campuses need to take care of their faculty members a little bit better than perhaps they have in the past. The world is changing. We are dealing with students with high levels of stress, distress. We are dealing with mass shootings in our community, with political instability, with a range of illnesses and viruses and global pandemics. It is not an easy time to be a faculty member. And it is not helpful to pretend that we are immune to feelings because we are not. And so I always talk to faculty about taking care of themselves. What is your self-care plan? Because for me, when I experienced that secondary traumatic stress, I couldn’t write. These journal articles took a lot longer than I wanted them to, because I just couldn’t go back to the material to repeat it again. It is difficult to do the work well, if you are not healthy, if you are dealing with stress, distress, or potentially vicarious or secondary trauma. And so, for me, that’s a big piece. This is, I would say, an exploding area of research. So, there is just myriad scholarship right now coming out around faculty members, instructors and teachers and their own experiences with trauma, secondary trauma and secondary traumatic stress. So there are many wonderful articles available for those faculty members who’d like to read more, and I am always available. If anyone ever wants to have a chat about teaching sensitive topics or about universal design for trauma or just dealing with trauma in our students and in the world, they are welcome to email me and I am always available to my friends in SUNY and beyond.

Rebecca: What are some things that you would recommend faculty think about for a self-care plan? I know this is something that’s on the minds of a lot of faculty having gone through a couple of years of teaching during a pandemic and really dealing with a lot of student disclosures.

Andrea: Absolutely a very pressing issue. I actually spoke at a professional development conference at Fredonia this winter break, which was 100% focused on self care: How do we take care of ourselves? How do we deal with this very chaotic world, very distressing world, stress and distress and trauma, when it doesn’t end, it really compounds. So if the COVID pandemic was over, we’d all be dealing with the potential distressed trauma and after effects of that, but we would be ideally moving forward and healing. It’s not over. It’s changing and growing and shifting, and we have no idea of what is coming next. That is really a dangerous situation when it comes to trauma. Because when the trauma is ongoing, we just don’t have the time to heal. So self care becomes that much more important. Things I think about: One, preparing yourself, doing a trigger warning for yourself for those weeks, months, days that you will be specifically dealing with trauma content in your course. Two, making sure you understand what your roles and responsibilities are. Many faculty members are not aware that they are a mandatory reporter on campus for sexual assault and for domestic violence. Many faculty members do not know about the campus care team or emergency response team. It is really important for faculty to educate themselves on what their roles are, their responsibilities are, and who is available to assist them. Faculty are not alone. And if they feel like they are alone, the threat of distress and trauma is much greater. But I know that when I get a disclosure, I first have to report it through the online system if it is a recent disclosure. I rarely get disclosures that are current. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever had one where a student is currently experiencing sexual assault or domestic violence, though certainly, many faculty do receive these. I think it’s just a matter of teaching graduate students online. It’s a different setting, but I am prepared for those. And the first step for any disclosure, no matter when the incident was, is to report through your campus reporting system. And then I contact the care team and I often go directly to the dean of students to ask for help. What do I need to do here? Can you remind me about my legal obligation? I’ve given the student resources, what else can I offer the student? if I am at all concerned about suicidal ideation, I immediately involve the crisis response or care team to assist with that, knowing that I have a team of people behind me, that I can email the Dean of Students, and she will get right back to me is extremely helpful, because a really big threat is feeling like you are alone. So preparing for content in advance, understanding your roles, responsibilities, and who is on campus to help you, and then doing those things, which to you, are self care. Buffalo State has offered meditation courses just about one every two weeks. I have taken all of them. That’s something that is really helpful and useful to me. For other people, it may be exercise or reading a certain book or going to a friend’s home, whatever it is, that’s the personal piece. So you have the campus understanding and then the personal piece as well.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for sharing such really important content, especially as we head into the fall and faculty are nervous and anxious about what this next semester of pandemic might look like.

Andrea: Thank you for having me. And just the last thing I’ll say is that faculty should know that they are not alone, and that their distress, stress, or feelings of trauma are justified by the world that we are living in, and that no one needs to pretend they are above the humanity of the time that we’re living in. And so I hope your campus and all of the campuses across SUNY and beyond begin to really prioritize the mental and emotional health, not only of students, but of faculty and staff asd well.

John: I think that’s an issue that all of our campuses need to focus on. And it’s been a tough time out there for everyone. So thank you.

Andrea: Thank you.

John: And we always end with the question, and which is very much related, of “What’s next?”

Andrea: Well, what’s next? I’ll answer it in several ways. One, I think that we need to continue the conversation and really advocating for addressing trauma in our higher education classes. Research, every setting in higher education must become aware that trauma is here, it is in our society, it is impacting our students, it is impacting our faculty, and we cannot pretend it is not an issue of concern. So for me, I’ll be continuing to write about and advocate for trauma concerns being addressed in higher education. I am working on the online oversight committee at my campus, and I’m working with one of the instructional designers. We’ve talked a lot about creating more training opportunities for faculty members related to learning about trauma and addressing trauma in their courses and among their students. So I’m excited to continue that work as well. But ultimately, the world has changed, higher education has changed. We are never going back to the world that we had before. And so we have to adapt to those changes that have really come very quickly in the past few years. And so step one is sort of admitting that higher education isn’t going to be what it used to be, and that we are ready and willing and able to do what needs to be done to help our students be successful. Because I expect in the fall, we are going to have students with a myriad of very significant challenges. And we are going to have faculty who need to be prepared to help those students address those challenges.

John: And it is a positive sign that students are so much more willing to disclose their mental health concerns than I think they ever had been in the past that may make secondary trauma a little bit more challenging to address, but it does allow us to get support to students when it’s needed.

Andrea: Absolutely, absolutely. And again, really making sure faculty understand they don’t have to solve the students’ problems. That’s not your role. You are a teacher, your role is to listen refer and, where needed, to connect directly to those campus resources like your care team and your sexual assault response office.

Rebecca: Thank you so much.

Andrea: Thank you so much for having me. I love the opportunity to be back virtually on the Oswego campus and it was wonderful speaking with you both.

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

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

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231. Include Instructors in Inclusive Instruction

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

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

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

Show Notes

Transcript

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

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: I am drinking ginger peach black tea.

Rebecca: And I have Golden Monkey today.

John: Back to an old favorite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chavella: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: You too. Thank you.

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

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

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

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178. Teaching for Learning

Posted in active learning, classroom community, engagement, evidence-based practices, flipped class, higher education, learning, motivation, online learning, pedagogy, peer instruction, remote learning, teaching, universal design
March 10, 2021

As we again begin planning for the uncertainties of the fall semester, it is helpful to have a rich toolkit of evidence-based teaching practices that can work in multiple modalities. In this episode,  Claire Howell Major, Michael S. Harris, and Todd Zakrajsek join us to discuss a variety of these practices that can be effectively matched with your course learning objectives.

Claire is a Professor of Higher Education Administration at the University of Alabama. Michael is a Professor of Higher Education and Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Southern Methodist university. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of Fellowship Programs in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Claire, Michael, and Todd are the authors of many superb books and articles on teaching and learning in higher education. In June, they are releasing a second edition of Teaching for Learning: 101 Intentionally Designed Educational Activities to Put Students on the Path to Success.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: As we again begin planning for the uncertainties of the fall semester, it is helpful to have a rich toolkit of evidence-based teaching practices that can work in multiple modalities. In this episode, we discuss a variety of these practices that can be effectively matched with your course learning objectives.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are Claire Howell Major, Michael S. Harris, and Todd Zakrajsek. Claire is a Professor of Higher Education Administration at the University of Alabama. Michael is a Professor of Higher Education and Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Southern Methodist university. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of Fellowship Programs in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Claire, Michael, and Todd are the authors of many superb books and articles on teaching and learning in higher education.

Rebecca: Welcome, Claire and Michael and welcome back, Todd.

Todd: Thank you, Rebecca.

Michael: Good to be here.

John: Thanks for joining us. Today’s teas are:

Todd: I got myself a nice hibiscus tea, in my favorite little mug.

Rebecca: Awesome.

Michael: And I have a nice regular Co’ Cola.

Claire: Chocolate milk, signing in here. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I think that might be a podcast first, Claire. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: I’m 12, basically. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I’m drinking Scottish afternoon.

John: And I’m drinking ginger peach green tea. We’ve invited here today to discuss the forthcoming second edition of Teaching for Learning: 101 Intentionally Designed Educational Activities to Put Students on the Path to Success, which forms a nice acronym of IDEAS. The first edition provided faculty with a large variety of evidence-based learning activities that faculty can adopt to enhance student learning. These were grouped into eight categories of teaching approaches, lecture, discussion, reciprocal peer teaching, academic games, reading strategies, writing to learn, graphic organizers, and metacognitive reflection. What will be new in the second edition?

Michael: Thanks, John, for the overview and also for having us here today to talk about this. We’re very excited about the second edition. I think we’ve got a great team here, I so enjoy working with Todd and Michael on it. Basically, we’ve kept the same structure that you mentioned before, we have the same eight categories. We have the same structure within each chapter where we move from research to practical tips and specific ideas that people can use in their own classes. The idea is that it is a very broad kind of technique that we include when we include the techniques and when we talk about the research. So it is something that people from all disciplines and fields could in theory use for their own classes. Now, in practice, people have to make decisions about what will work best for their learners at their institutions and their disciplines and fields. So that part has stayed the same. We have updated the research from the first edition to the second. So it’s five years later. So we have included many new research studies to support the message and what the research shows us about what works well in higher education, what has been shown to change educational outcomes of learners, what can faculty do in particular that will help student learning. Another thing that is new in this edition, and I think this is really timely right now, is a focus on online learning. So in the first edition, we talked a lot about how these would work in in-class or onsite settings. In this edition, we go that next step and say, “Here’s some of the theory about what it means to do this online and here are some techniques.” And then within each specific idea, we say specifically, here are some tools that you can use to implement this in an online environment. So we have spent a lot of time working through that. We know how many people have shifted from onsite to online or hybrid courses and how important this is for successful teaching right now. So there’s a big focus on that.

Michael: One of the things as we were going through working on the online elements of this. that’s only become that much more important in light of the pandemic, is understanding the ways to blend the in-person technique and technology together. And that’s something, I think, as we’ve certainly gone through the last year everyone has done that in a much more detailed way. But I think what we’ve in part set out to do here, because we started working on this before the pandemic, is there elements of technology and teaching that faculty should be including afterwards after the pandemic is over? …And so one of the things I think readers will be able to take away. This is not a book written in response to the pandemic… that we can take these various techniques, take technology, take the understanding of your learners and context, as Claire mentioned, and then together figure out what is the best activity in your setting. Think that’s, as we set out identifying the various techniques throughout the book, is understanding that no class, no instructor is going to be comfortable with everything. So we’ve tried to give what I like to think of as a broad menu for faculty under each of the broad topics but also in terms of individual strategies and techniques that faculty can use in their setting. And the hope is, if you need an idea to use in your class that day, you can pick this book off the shelf, and somewhere in there, it’s going to be something that’s gonna work.

Rebecca: I think we really love the mix of both the research and the practical aspects of the book. I think sometimes either it’s just practical, or it’s just the research, and it’s hard to bring them together. So having everything in one place is very handy. [LAUGHTER] Faculty like that. We like convenience for sure. One of the things that I’ve been doing some research on recently is some students complaining about this online environment being so text heavy. And so I’m kind of curious if you could talk a little bit about maybe some of the research on graphic organizers and some of the strategies because that’s a visual way of handling some information in a time where students are feeling really bogged down by text.

Michael: I think to your first point, this is critically important. As we first started talking about this book in the very, very early days, one of the things we wanted to do was to bring together both the research literature, what do we know from the scholarship, but also what are the practical things that faculty need to know how to implement these ideas. And so we very much kept that. That DNA was part of our very early conversations, and is still part of the second edition. And I think one of the things that we found in terms of writing the book, and I think, as we’ve heard from folks who’ve read it, subsequently, is to be able to have access to the research for faculty, those of us who are in teaching centers, and faculty developers, we live this stuff every day, we know where the research is, and what the most recent findings are. For most faculty, whether at an institution focused on teaching, or even researchers, that access is much more difficult to find, right? It’s spread out in hundreds of journals, most of which just folks in the disciplines don’t necessarily read. And so trying to bring that out, and also insights from related disciplines. This is very difficult to access all this literature, because it’s spread out in so many different outlets, it’s in books, it’s in journals, it’s in places like podcasts, there’s all these places to get the information. It’s really difficult, I think, for a faculty member with a limited amount of time to dedicate to course planning and preparation to find all these resources. So that’s what we wanted to do was bring that together, but also remembering that faculty need to be able to take all that information, I think it’s all of us have worked with faculty, we found that they want to know that it’s researched-based, and what those research findings are, but then they want to quickly get to: “Now, what do I do with this information?” And so that’s the way we’ve set up the book is we’re going to go through the literature, if you want to do a deep dive there, all of that information is there. But then we also want to be able to provide some really tangible tactical things for a faculty member to do. And so as we designed all the ideas and thought about the updated literature, that’s still the core tenet of what we want to do.

Todd: Next. I think the second part of the question,you said, Rebecca, was the visual aspects, specifically. So, I thought Michael covered it really, really well. But there’s a whole section in the book with graphics, of course, and just so many different ways you can use the tools that are out there: concept mapping right now, and doing word clouds, and setting up different ways for people to share a space and to drop in photos and images. And there’s a lot of them in there. And I like what Michael said in terms of there’s so much information, it becomes really overwhelming. So my educational technology list is 118 different educational solutions right now that are being used. And so what we try to do in the book was spread out not all 118 of them, but we spread them out. So if you’re interested in concept mapping, here’s a program called Cacoo. And if you want to do word clouds, there’s the traditional WordClouds. But there’s also AnswerGarden, which gives you a little bit more opportunity to put some text in there. But. lots of things on graphics.

John: Going back to that division of teaching and research and practical tips . The research is not just on the general principle of how these things work, but specific studies of how the individual tools or the individual approaches have been used, and that I found really helpful. In the new addition, is this most appropriate for people teaching synchronous courses, or you mentioned that there’s the addition of online components, are the online components primarily asynchronous online, or synchronous online, or some combination of those.

Todd: Actually, that’s great, because this was a really exciting project to do. And one of the things we did to update the book was we went in, and actually, there’s not 101. The title of the book is 101 Intentionally Designed Activities. I would challenge anybody who wants to sit down and rattle off 101, I want to hear you do it. Because when Claire and Michael and I got together we did, we said yeah, 101 sounds great. And we got up to 100. And then everything started to sound like a variation on something we’ve already done. So the hundred and first one is actually a do it yourself intentional. Isn’t that great?

Rebecca: It’s perfect.

Todd: Take your information and apply it. And the reason I bring this up is that means there are 100 in there, 100 different suggestions we have of how to engage your students. For this second edition we went through and we came up with one synchronous and one asynchronous way of doing each one of those. So this book actually has 200 different ways to engage your students in synchronous and asynchronous classes. And I got to tell you that I was really impressed with the team here. To be able to pull that off is really, really challenging. Some of them are very easy. If you want to basically do a small group discussion or post something, you use Padlet or something is really easy. Some of them became really interesting. So for instance, Kahoot! is a great adaptation to something like a Jeopardy type of thing. But then how do you do something like Jeopardy in an asynchronous course, where it’s going across time? So we’re digging through and Kahoot! It turns out has a way of doing that. So, really excited about having different ways of doing this in both synchronous and asynchronous class.

Claire: John, you mentioned how much research there is about the individual techniques. And I just want to share that there is so much research being done in education right now. It’s just blossomed as a field of study, and that’s wonderful. But I think Michael alluded to the fact that faculty members don’t have time to sit down and read 1000 studies, but we do, right? We did. And so we’re sharing that information. We’ve synthesized and collated and culled out what didn’t look like such a good study, or trying to make it into something that’s accessible for faculty who are busy and may not want to read that much educational research… I don’t know, hypothetically. So we are trying to say, “Okay, here’s what it says,” and then definitely apply it to practice. You also mentioned the distinction between onsite and online. I think that distinction is becoming a little more blurred than it used to be. When I teach an onsite class anymore, I’m still having my learning management system set up, there’s still stuff that I’m doing through the learning management system, there’s still stuff I’m doing online. When I teach online, I still have, maybe not face-to-face meetings, but I have Zoom meetings, I have these synchronous ones. And it just is not such a hard and fast distinction, I think. It’s like “I do this with people in the room in real time, or I do this through the technology.” And I think we can use things in all kinds of settings, and that’s what we’ve tried to share a little bit. And I do want to give a shout out, or a special credit to Todd on this. Because there are some things that, like he said, just one technique, how would you do it on every one? I’m like, “Oh, well, that’s an assignment, you submit that through your LMS.” And Todd’s like, “No, here’s 47 different other ways you can do that.” [LAUGHTER] And it’s like, there are some really creative ideas, I think, in there about different tools that you can use to do things in different ways. And so it’s not all just submitted as an assignment through your LMS. There are a lot of really cool tools out there, and to go back to Rebecca’s point, can make things more visual and more creative. And I think that involves students in ways that producing more text may not. It’s like “Oh, wow, I get to make this beautiful, professional looking product and share that with others.” And that causes or at least creates an opportunity for engagement in ways that others can’t. So yeah, we tried to share some good ideas about how to use technology. And that technology might be in an online class, or it might be in a hybrid or hyflex class, or it might be in an onsite class where you use technology in a way that supports onsite learning.

Rebecca: I really need to know what strategies were the most difficult to come up with across platforms or cross modalities. I must know. [LAUGHTER] You have to share.

Todd: There was one that took me about four days to get to and so here’s one for you. One of our onsite ones that we did was Pictionary, you know, drawing. So you divide your class into two teams, and somebody takes a marker and starts to draw. And then of course, everyone has to yell out an answer. Do that in an asynchronous class, that becomes challenging. But I stumbled across a program… actually, I shouldn’t say stumbled across, I’ve used it a couple times. But as I was thinking about this, after a couple days, I was thinking, “No, you got to turn that a little bit.” So there’s a program on there called Formative. And Formative is something that you basically come up with an image that you start and you draw like a circle or something and you present that to the class, And then each class member draws what they see of that, and then you can get feedback on that. And it suddenly occurred to me as instead of having people guessing back and forth real time that way, what you could do is provide the basic image for the class and then say, “Okay, I want everybody to draw something and submit it on this date. And then the first person who can figure out what it is, you basically write in.” And so it’s a way to do kind of Pictionary in an asynchronous way. But that was one of the trickiest ones.

Rebecca: That’s funny that you mentioned that particular thing, Todd, because I’m teaching a class this spring, a new class for me, where I was trying to come up with a way of doing Exquisite Corpse, which is a folded paper drawing, where one person would draw a head and then you try to do the body and then the next person does legs or something… something like that with my class. And I came across an example of having different boxes, essentially in a whiteboard app, for each student. And I’m going to do pet robots. And so everybody draws one part of the robot, the nose, and then you pass it to the next person. And then you say, like, “Oh, draw the head,” or whatever. So it’s a way of doing that. But that took me a good few days to come up with a solution.” [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Yeah, it does.

Michael: Well, I thought I knew a lot about technology. And as Claire said, Todd would pull something out that never ever heard of before or heard of, but I never thought to use it in that way. And I think that was one of those challenges is, anytime you’re writing a book, you don’t want to be obsolete by the time it comes out. And so it’s always tricky with technology, because websites change and services change and the ability to do different things change. But I think what we were able to do in the end was, even though it may reference a particular website or software, the underlying design principle will hold even as we get different technology over time. And I think that was one of the things we struggled with five years ago, because I’m just not sure technology across all 100 ideas was there. But I think now we’re at the place where you could at least have some semblance of how you would do this, even if that particular service was no longer available.

Todd: I really liked that you said that because the one that I’ll have to admit, one of the very first times I did exactly what you’re thinking of here is I love doing gallery walks in classes, the traditional gallery walk. And I’m sure the listeners know, but you set up four or five flip charts, you put students in groups, smaller groups, each groups in front of a flip chart, they respond to a prompt, different prompts for each flip chart, and then you rotate and you keep rotating until you come back essentially to the first one. and I thought about it for a little while and thought this would work out really well on a Jamboard. So you go to Google Jamboard, and you set up five boards and people go through it. But just like Mike was just saying, if Jamboard goes away, alright, let’s do it with Padlet. And if Padlet goes away, alright, we’ll do it with something else. So once you think this is a way through technology to do this, then it becomes actually fairly easy to find other ways to do it.

John: For faculty who are reading this for the first time, and they see now 200 techniques, maybe only 100 of which might apply for their courses, they might be tempted to try a lot of those. Would you recommend that people who are redesigning their courses or restructuring their courses try doing many new things all at once? Or should perhaps they use a more gradual approach?

Claire: I think the answer to that question depends a lot on who the faculty member is. I think some faculty members want to go all in and try a lot of new things. I think some might do well trying one new thing, and seeing how that works, and then trying another use thing. I also think that again, it depends on who your students are, what your discipline is. A lot of our techniques, though, are things that can be done in addition to other things. Like you might lecture for 10 or 15 minutes, and then do a think-pair-share. Or you might do a punctuated lecture where you stop and say “What are you thinking about right now?” …or something like that. So these are ones that can be incorporated into what faculty are already doing for the most part. So I really think it depends on what the faculty member wants to accomplish and what works best for their particular situation.

Michael: I agree with Claire, I think there’s a notion of, depending on how many times you’ve taught the class, for example, there may be a different freedom to innovate in different ways. I think the other part though, is we have to be careful if we talk about teaching innovation in this way, is beginning with the end in mind. Changing something for the sake of changing something is not a good idea to use one of these techniques. The idea is: know what you’re trying to get the students to learn. What is the content you’re trying to get them to learn? And then look for a technique that best gets you there. Certainly, as I talk to faculty, and think about ways they might do something different in class, you’ve got to start at that point, then decide what is the most effective way to get your students there. Now as much as I love all of the ideas in the book, they’re not all going to work in every situation, even if you were game to try them all. And that would probably not be an effective way to teach class. But if you know what you want your students to learn… and then we always preach backwards design, there’s a reason we do that. We start there and get them to “what we want to know” and then figure out what’s the best way to do that. And I think that’s, to me, when I think about using these activities in my own classes and as I talk to other faculty, is if I know what I’m trying to convey, I can then say, “Well, now I need to go look for a game because this might be content that’s a little dry, or I know from the past that students don’t enjoy it as much. So maybe a game would be a good thing to spice it up a little bit.” Or if I know this is really important content, and they need to understand it in a very specific way. Well, now let me look for a lecture activity that I can convey that content. So I think that, if you know what you’re doing, then you can use the book and we’ve got the full menu available to you. But if you don’t know what type of restaurant you’re going to, the menu is going to be gibberish.

Claire: I absolutely agree with that. I do want to follow up with one thing though. I would say for the person who is, and surely nobody’s still doing this, lecturing for 50 minutes without a break. Even if you don’t know why you’re going to stop every 15 minutes to do a short thing, like maybe an interpreted lecture or pause procedure or something like that. Even if you don’t know why, go ahead and do it, [LAUGHTER] because it will help your students learn better is why. That’s the answer. We all know about human attention span and all that good stuff, but also just varying the activity a little bit and giving them something to reset their attention span will be really, really helpful to their long-term learning. So even if you don’t have the perfect learning goal crafted out, if you could just stop every 10 or 15 minutes and give them something to do, something short to reset their attention span and get them back on track, they’re going to be able to listen to you more in that next lecture segment. So I absolutely agree with Michael, the one caveat is just stop every 10 or 15 minutes and do something different.

Todd: I love what you just said there, Claire, but I’m not even sure its attention span. I don’t think it’s attention span. And I mean, that is part of it. But cognitive load.

Claire: Well, that’s part of it, too. Yeah.

Todd: Anytime you’re trying to learn something new, how many times have you start to watch a video, a YouTube clip on how to do a change your carburetor on your lawnmower or whatever, that you have to stop after about three steps and say, “Whoops, wait a minute, what was that stop again? We’re the experts and we start spewing all this information. And I love that Claire said that. And I live by backward design. So, I love that one too. But the one thing we know from all the research, that’s the most clear thing out there is that putting something with a lecture always enhances learning. If you’re only doing the lecturing, and then you put something with it, it always does better. My biggest fight over the last three or four years, the research doesn’t actually really say it’s lecture versus active learning. If you read the research, the titles will say that at times… people argue that all the time. It’s not lecture versus active learning. The research is lecture alone versus lecturing with active learning, and lecturing with active learning kicks butt all the time. So I love that.

Rebecca: There’s a lot of faculty who are now teaching online synchronously, which is, you know, a newer modality that’s not written about quite as much. And John and I’ve been talking about that a bit the past few months on our podcasts.

John: …certainly, since March.

Rebecca: Yeah, I guess it’s coming up on a year. But I know one of the things that faculty are struggling with is ways to do some of these activities and build community online as part of that and get students connecting with their peers. Can you talk about some strategies that might be in your book that we could point faculty to looking into more?

Michael: You know, it’s such a great question, because I think if I think about all the way back in the beginning of March, when we had faculty on our campus that have never heard of Zoome before, we’d had Zoom for a while, but most people had never had a reason to really use it. This is the single biggest challenge I think our faculty have faced. For some getting in the learning management system was a struggle, but we could get past that fairly easily, at least to a threshold to be successful. Learning what to do… and I think to some extent, it gets to Claire’s answer about lecturing, we still have a number of faculty that do lecture almost exclusively. And so, as soon as the pandemic took hold and we moved online, we had faculty that were just lecturing the entire time. And particularly, I think this is somewhat better at least for some student populations, you know, the internet capabilities and things. We were all just overloaded, right? Yeah, and nobody could get on and constantly got the messages about connectivity problems, and Zoom and all the rest. And so faculty started recording lectures, then what happened, at least with our students, there was no reason to go to class anymore, I can watch that lecture and put it on two-times speed. And I can get out of class in half the time I used to. We’ve had a lot of conversations with faculty about how to make that time important. And especially for some faculty who are concerned about, “Well, once I record all my lectures, you don’t need me anymore.” Well, if all you’re doing is doing those recorded lectures, we probably don’t need you anymore. But do the thing that faculty are best at. It is building communities. It’s encouraging curiosity and creativity and all those things that get those of us in teaching, really jazzed to get up in the morning and go to class, be it in-person or online. And so I think for me, and as we’re thinking about some of the techniques, the more complicated the modality gets, whether we’re talking about something like hyflex or synchronous online, I think in some ways, that’s where getting back to the basics can be helpful. So using some of the lecture and discussion techniques, where you take a break and change as we were talking about just a minute ago. I also think breakout rooms… and I know this is something I think Claire’s talked about before… breakout rooms can sometimes be an extra layer of complication we may not need. And so thinking about the ways that small group discussions can be had in Zoom, or any online platform, but I think that at the end of the day, for me, it’s when we’re using complicated technology, and it may not be complicated technology wise, right, but different modalities that we’re not always comfortable teaching in, and none of us would have designed in an ideal setting. We’re clearly far from ideal. But if we can take some of those basic ideas… think-pair-share as an example. That’s one that we’ve been using for forever. Can we use that in an online platform in a way that you’re not trying to do too much technology. We had faculty early on who were trying to use every piece of technology in every class session, and they couldn’t remember which login, and then this would crash and that would crash. It was just too much. So using the basic functionalities, some of the discussion techniques where you can use the chat window, I think many faculty are probably not using some of those basic functionalities as much. So I think that’s, to me, as you’re looking at the various techniques, if you can make it easier, the more complicated the student situation is. If you know you’ve got students that are working all day and come into class at night, then maybe being super technical in different software packages… that may not be the time to do that. If you’re working with traditional 18-year olds who are savvy using a lot different technology than maybe you could. And I think that’s for me been one of the lessons of the last almost year now is can we get back to basics, and then let the technology help us to reach our students, build a community, build their engagement, use Zoom to access office hours and some of those kinds of things in which I think we’re finding our students are having much more engagement with, if we can get them to show up. So that’s to me, if we can get back to the basics, then it would be helpful, I think, for both faculty and student learning.

Claire: I’d like to pick up on this too. And that’s in part, I’m a mom, I have a 10th grader, the 10th grader is in the room right next to mine, I can’t help but overhear sometimes. I try to stay focused on my work and not pay attention, but the house is only so big. And so I’m just hearing things, and some of his teachers…..well, they’re all wonderful people… they’re lovely, lovely people doing excellent work and a pandemic. But some of them will talk for the full 60 minutes of the class. And I’m going to tell you, my kid who is a wonderful, lovely person and a really, really good student, like you might expect… both of his parents are profs, we’re nerds, we’re a nerdy family. So he does well in school, he is not managing to stay focused for those 60 minutes. I will see him get up and go to the kitchen, maybe walk through, there may be a little pacing. It’s just not happening. And then there are other teachers who will do some of the things that are in our book to mix it up. And he is in there. He’s engaged. He’s talking to the screen, talking to the teacher, he goes into breakout rooms, they’ll ask a question like, “What did we talk about last week,” like “Today, I learned…” “What did we talk about last week? And why is that important today?” Or they’ll say “Okay, so what do you think is gonna happen in this experiment that we’re about to do in chemistry?” …so like an anticipation or taking a guess kind of thing. They might occasionally go into breakout rooms to work a problem or to compare their notes for the session. They might break out and do some kind of jigsaw activity where they work together and then they teach each other. They might even do just a quick prewriting, they’ll say, “Write for a minute, and then we’ll take their responses.” And it is like night and day, he doesn’t leave the room, he is focused the whole time, he is able to maintain that attention and engagement. It’s not just attention, like Todd said, it’s more than that. It’s the ability to hang on, to concentrate, to process, for his working memory to really be able to stay with the whole thing. And so I think that what we can do is use some of these techniques when we’re teaching these synchronous things. So we’re not just giving everybody Zoom fatigue. So we are giving them good educational experiences, and not just 60 minutes wall of sound from the teacher, because that’s just not the best way. They’re not going to learn the best in that kind of situation.

Todd: Well, I heard a learner recently put it in the way that really helped me out. She said “I think about classes as to whether or not I could spend the entire class period ironing or not.” [LAUGHTER] And she said, “If I could stand up and iron an entire load of clothes while class is going on.” And all I could conceptualize in my head is “Oh, that’d be the same as like watching a soap opera or a television program while you’re ironing.” And she said, “Yep, if I can do that, I don’t need to be in class, I can just look at the recording later.” But just like what Claire was just saying, if you’re doing all those things, my goodness, it’d be interrupting your ironing all the time. [LAUGHTER] Make them do something. One of the things so fascinating about teaching is that you’re constantly straddling a line that has cut points of boredom and frustration. You got to be above boredom, you got to be interesting enough or present information in an interesting enough way that people will attend to it. But you can’t do it in such a complex way that they’re frustrated by it, because they just can’t get it. And so how can you take a learner and engage them, but not frustrate them? And that’s what you have to always be looking for techniques or ways to do that.

Michael: You know, it’s funny you say that Todd, because right before we started recording, I went out, and I’ve got a sixth grader and he was in the kitchen and getting some peanut butter cookies my daughter made this weekend. And I said, “What are you doing?” And he said, “I’m getting some peanut butter cookies.” I said, “Okay, what are you supposed to be doing?” Oh, I’m in class.” The laptop’s upstairs. He’s downstairs in the kitchen. And he had his headset on and was listening. But I contrast that with other times when, like Claire, I go past and he’s in class and when he’s got a notebook out and he’s working. His art teacher right now… because I think in some ways, certain disciplines are kind of naturally inclined to go this way…. With art, he’s got different media out, he’s got his markers, and his crayons and colored pencils and different type of paper, and he’s doing this stuff. And then he’ll be in another class, and he can go to the kitchen and get cookies and not miss a thing. And while yes, we’re all doing the best we can, I do hope when we come out of this, there’s going to be some lessons we take away from it. And one of those being: if we can just hit record and walk away, that’s maybe not the best thing for an hour class or even longer for those who have longer classes. But if we can engage students, if we can stop for a minute, if we can make them think, if we make them do something, the combination of those two things. It’s hard right now. If somebody was trying to do active learning for an entire 60 minute class, that also would be really hard to do right now given everything. But this blend, as Todd said earlier, the research shows when we can put lecture and active learning together and put some of these different techniques together, that’s where I think we’re gonna see some benefit. And I think that’s true whatever we were teaching, if we were talking about K-12, or higher education, or anything in which you are trying to communicate.

Todd: And that made me think of something else too, real quick, that I just heard a session done by someone who works at Zoom. And keeping in mind, Zoom is not static. For those of you who are using Zoom, it’s changing all the time. So they have now changed how the reaction buttons are used. They’ve got them set up in a much more easy format, they have some things that stay there until you take them off, some things that don’t, there’s all these other techniques too. Closed captioning, Zoom has finally got it, it just was launched, I believe, yesterday, or the day before it came out. I got students who have babies, they can’t have the sound on. I mean, that’s a new thing that’s good. They’ve got another one now and they blur out the background. And here’s what I really love about this with the guy who was explaining it, he said, “We’re now gonna have the capability instead of virtual backgrounds to blur the background, we did that for a more equitable situation for students who are uncomfortable with their housing situation. I was blown away that that’s the reason the guy said they did it, not because “Oh, here’s another thing that people would like.” So again, the technologies keep changing. But we as teachers, it’s what Michael and Claire both said too is we as teachers have to decide what to do and why, again, back to backward design.

Claire: And I’d like to pick up on the point too that, I think right now, making connections with other human beings is really, really important. And that’s not just watching your teacher on TV, that is actually having some kind of meaningful exchange where you get to talk to another human being. And a lot of people haven’t left their houses not much since March, or they’re not in class, they’re still online, just making that human connection is absolutely essential. And some of our techniques allow for that. They’re putting people together where they’re connecting, either through discussion or group work or something else. And I think those things, even if they’re just for a brief period of time, are probably some of the most important things we can do right now.. is give them that space and time for exchanging ideas and sharing and making that contact.

Todd: My gosh, and I know we got to move on.. this question we’ve been on it for a while, but Claire, that was such a great concept. I remember, a student in one of my classes from almost 30 years ago, and it was a night class, she kept dozing off. And I kept walking by her desk and saying, you know, “Maybe you better go splash some water on your face,” and I walked by again, and “Maybe you should just like walk around the building once real quickly.” And at the end of the class I talked to her real quickly and I said “How are you doing? I’m really concerned about you.” She said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry. I almost didn’t come to class tonight, because I just worked a double shift and I’m absolutely exhausted. But this class is the only time during the week that I feel like a real valued human being.” You know, what Claire said, even without the pandemic, a lot of individuals are in home/life situations. They’re in jobs where they’re not appreciated by their colleagues. I mean, it’s one time during the day that students can feel like they mean something. And so even more so in the pandemic, but yeah,Claire. I’m glad you said that. I hadn’t thought about her for a long time.

Claire: Nice. Yeah, it is connections. It’s very important and very meaningful. And students, I truly believe they really appreciate those opportunities all the time, but especially right now when their opportunities are more constrained than they might normally be.

Rebecca: Not just students as faculty…. [LAUGHTER]… the interactions too. I remember last semester there were times when I had some really nice deep conversations with some of my students and it was like, “Wow, alright, this is the first time I’ve had a conversation with someone who’s older than three.” [LAUGHTER]

Claire: …outside the immediate family… it’s lovely.

John: We thought we’d ask each of you to share one of your favorite techniques that are in this book,

Rebecca: …or most impactful for you

Todd: …comes down to a lot of different things. But sometimes I’m actually gonna jump in and say it’s kind of a combination. It was one that I didn’t actually do, but it was one I just saw, but a technique… these techniques are so cool. Having a person open a Google form. We’ve mentioned Google forms several times in the book, but asking a quick question for the Google form of “What do you think about this?” The learners then typed what they thought, the individual was able to take those very quickly, download those into a word cloud, and then presented the word cloud. Now we’ve got AnswerGarden as a word cloud that we mentioned on a couple of the IDEAS, and Google forms is something else we use in it. But the ability to capture that information and turn it into a visual that quickly was just one that I thought was really amazing.

Michael: I think my favorite is one, it’s called “Houston, we have a problem.” And it’s taken from Apollo 13, of course. And it’s that great scene in the movie where the engineers have to figure out how to get the oxygen thing working on the spaceship. And so they have all this stuff. And you can’t give them new supplies and new tools, because they’re halfway to the moon. And there’s this great line: “you have to make this fit into that using just this.” And so what I love about this is it’s fundamentally problem solving, but it brings together knowledge and skills. And so you give students, and it can be different depending on whatever class of course, it can be a set of terms or methodologies or equipment or whatever it might be, but the students have to take these things and figure out how to use them. And I love the notion of that. I use versions of it in my own classes, the notion of having students take something, even things that might be out of the context of the class, or even the discipline, and figure out how to make it work. Because I do think fundamentally, to me, it gets to what you do when you leave us. The academy’s this great place where we can play with ideas and information and learn skills, but it’s somewhat sanitized, it’s hard to really get to the messiness of what students are going to face when they leave us. And that, to me, is such a great activity where you’ve got to figure out how to get to a solution, and you don’t have all the information, you may not have everything you need to solve it. But you collectively as a group have to come. So I think we called it a game, I’m not sure if it’s entirely a game, there’s probably a game element to it. But I just love the notion of students having to work together and kind of fight to a solution.

Rebecca: Michael, did you say that you do this in some of your classes?

Michael: I have,yes. Probably my favorite way to do it is for research design, actually, and give students a variety of different data sources and analytic techniques, and a question they’re trying to solve. And so they have to decide if I’m going to use this quantitative data or I’m going to use this qualitative method or I’m gonna use a survey, and they’ve got to figure out how to do it. Amd I usually do it in a fairly compressed amount of time, because what I’m trying to do is quickly think about the tradeoffs in making methods decisions and research develop. And so they can’t do everything they want to do. But they have to figure out how am I going to be able to answer this research question. And so it’s real simple where I usually give them like index cards with terms in them, but then they have to work through and figure out the way they would do it. And what’s often is impactful is to see how the other groups, for the same question, how they got to a different way to get to the answer, then it opens up some great conversations about the methods and rigor and validity and trade offs in research. And it’s kind of a fun way to learn about those ideas.

Claire: I like a lot of those. And it’s really hard for me to choose. But I’m gonna say jigsaw, just to pick one out of a hat, really. And I think jigsaw… I mentioned it earlier, it’s where you create base groups, and students work in base groups to study something and learn about it, and to decide how to teach each other. And then you recombine groups, one person from each base group joins the team. So they then teach each other what they learned in their base groups in their jigsaw. And I think it’s a wonderful technique to encourage collaboration. And it involves students. It engages them. I have a story about it. I teach a college teaching course. And I remember one year early in my teaching of this course, I wanted them to know about the history of college teaching, I thought it was important to have them understand where we come from and how we’ve gotten to where we are. So I created this lecture. It was so long ago, y’all, that it was on overhead. Remember the clear overhead slide you put on the overhead projector, it was like that. And when I teach, one of the things that I do that’s pretty useful is, at the end of every class, I take notes on how things went, and then I put it away, and I pull it out the next year I’m teaching or the next time I’m teaching the course. And so I had created this lecture about the history of college teaching, about pedagogy in higher education. And I gave it, and the next year I came back and I looked at my notes and it said “This was bad. [LAUGHTER] This was really bad. This was bad for you. This was bad for them. [LAUGHTER] Don’t do it.” I had no memory of that at all. I thought, “Oh, good, I’m gonna give my lecture. I’ve already got it done and everything.” And so I… [LAUGHTER] …I pulled back and said, “Alright, what I’m gonna do is a jigsaw with this.” So I gave each group a period of time: y’all got the colonial period, y’all got the antebellum period,” and so forth. So there were four or five periods, I don’t remember how many I divided it into, and they got together and then they taught each other. And they broke out into their new groups, taught each other. They were using games to teach each other. I think they busted out like Jeopardy and Pictionary and all these great things. They were so engaged and into it. And they learned so much more, I promise, through that jigsaw than they ever would have through my lecture. And it was just a really good and useful activity. So that remains one of my favorites for that reason. But I also want to add that I like a lot of the metacognitive activities. It’s one of the best ways to improve the learning, right? But I think it’s something that we don’t always think about doing. And so things like wrappers or even opinion polls, or the “today I’ve learned…” “what’s the most important thing you learn today?” They take so little time and can really, really deepen learning

Rebecca: And that’s only three or four out of 200. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Well, I gotta say, while we were chatting about that, and Claire was talking about, I just pulled up the chapter that we just finished. And if I have it right here, there’s 14,000 words in that chapter. That was the metacognitive chapter. So this is a pretty dense book in the sense of there’s tons of stuff, but if anybody’s interested, we have 14,000 words on metacognitive strategies, [LAUGHTER] the research behind it, and how to apply it.

John: And that’s something that most faculty tend to ignore. So, including that I think is really, really helpful. The evidence on that’s overwhelming.

Claire: It really is. And I would say maybe not dense, like I don’t think it’s a real dense read. I think it’s chocked full of goodness, right? Here’s a lot of… [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Well, that’s a good point.

Claire: …rich… information rich, yeah.

Todd: I’m actually curious to see how the new books gonna look, though, because when I was looking to the as we were going through updating everything, the standard out there is you’re supposed to change 20% of the material, I think we added something like 30% new material over and there was nothing to take out, because there was nothing in there that was outdated. Nothing we’d written from the first edition was no longer valuable. So the previous book plus about 30% new. So it’s gonna be a very meaty book. But it’s a good resource… not meant to be read from cover to cover. It’s just meant to open it up to what you need.

Rebecca: So when can we start reading this book? Exactly.

Todd: The book will be available in the latter part of June.

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

Todd: In the universe, or…

Rebecca: However you really want to address this, because there’s a lot…

Michael: Todd, do you wanna go first?

Todd: Sure. I think what’s next is just to get through spring. Michael brought it up too, and we’ve kind of touched on it. This is really hard…. the pandemic, with everybody shifting to everybody, we know months and months and months ahead of time that we’re going to do this…” We all want to get back together. So for many of us, UNC Chapel Hill was right at the lead of this one, is students arrived on campus, and seven days later, they shut it down. And then spring came along. And it’s like, “Okay, but now we’re going to be able to be face to face, right?” And we’re still doing either online teaching or emergency remote teaching. The differentiation, of course, the online teaching is a very thoughtful process where people put together this whole package of how you deliver education and emergency remote is we just do the best we can with the time we got. So I think the “what’s next” is to get through the spring, take the summer, I wholeheartedly believe in the fall we’ll be closer to being back together in classrooms. And then I think it’s coming back to what both Clair and Michael have said, is pulling the essence of some of the really cool things we’ve learned and embed those into classes for faculty members who have never even considered teaching online a year and a half ago or a year ago, to now implement those strategies. And so I think that’s what’s next is: how do we find some good out of all of the garbage that’s been happening? And that’s what I’m looking for. Pathological levels of optimism. I think we’re going to get through it and then we’re going to be better off in the future than we were in the past. I’ll use one quick example of this because I work in a medical school, flu rates are almost non existent this year. And I knew that was going to happen six months ago, because nobody took flu that serious… I shouldn’t say nobody, a lot of people didn’t… 30 to 50 thousand… it’s hard to get these numbers, sometimes 30 to 50 thousand people a year die from the flu. And now what we’ve got is a whole population that knows we should wash our hands, stay home when you’re sick, and don’t be in each other’s space all too much and wear masks when you need to and because of that I think next flu season is going to roll around and I think people are going to put their masks and stand back, and we’re going to see flu rates with maybe 20-30 thousand people less dying every year. So with teaching, with health, I think down the road is putting new practices into place.

Rebecca: Sounds like a lot of metacognition might be going on.

Todd: I’m a metacognition nerd. [LAUGHTER]

Michael: So I agree with Todd, I think there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from the pandemic, and what’s going to happen afterwards. I think the other really negative implication of the pandemic is that this moment of equity and inclusion has been too easily forgotten, I think, in corners of higher ed, myself included at times. We’re so trying to get through the day that this reckoning that’s happened, I worry that those of us in higher ed have forgotten it. And so we absolutely need to take some lessons from the pandemic for teaching. But I also think we’ve got to continue to work on the inclusion in our classrooms, be it an in-person classroom or an online classroom. That work is gonna take a lot longer than the pandemic, I suspect, but is equally as important.

Todd: Boy, Michael,I’m really glad you just said that, because this whole thing has shown a huge light on the inequities in our systems. I think the inequities are huge. And I really do hope we can, at least with the big flashlight on there, maybe we can sort a few things out. But I’m really glad you said that.

John: Those inequities became much more visible to faculty with the shift to remote teaching, it was really easy to ignore these differences when everyone has access to the same computer labs, the same wireless network, the same study facilities and some degree of food security with meal plans on campus. But when students dispersed and went home, all that broke down, and faculty suddenly had to become aware of that, and faculty are attending workshops at rates I’ve never seen before. Our attendance has just skyrocketed. And a lot of people have come to appreciate backwards design and building new things into their classes. So I’m really optimistic about many of these things. But we certainly need to do a whole lot more work on equity and inclusion issues.

Claire: I think one thing I’ll say is that faculty aren’t typically taught how to teach, it’s not something we usually take classes on in graduate school, it’s not something that we receive a lot of training before doing it. Most of us have to learn through trial by fire, or we have learned by watching our own teachers, growing up, going through grade school and high school and college, we figure out what works by being participants in it. So I think the result of this is a lot of us haven’t had, again, that formal education in how to teach. We don’t have the research grounding, the theoretical background, and a lot of times when we’re just starting, we don’t even have the practice. So what this pandemic has done has changed that, because we’ve shifted to a new modality that most of us have never engaged with before. Most of us hadn’t taught an online course, or an emergency remote course, and so we’ve had to figure it out on the fly. But what I think this is done is put it in the forefront. All of a sudden teaching is something we really have to think about is something we really have to figure out because I’m doing it in this whole new way, and I can’t just bank on what I suspect works, I have to figure out this new system. And so I think we do have a lot more people thinking about it. I think we also have more institutions investing in professional development in ways that we haven’t before. And we have more faculty participating in professional development than we have before. And so I think it has highlighted teaching in a way that it hasn’t been for everyone for a while. And I think that’s good. If we’re looking for some kind of silver lining here, I think we can say that, all of a sudden, people are at least more often really aware of teaching and thinking about what makes good teaching. And when you have to plan out an online course, it really makes you think through the process. I know we went in March to emergency remote teaching, but a lot of us were teaching online in the fall. And so when you have to think through a whole course in this new way, you really have to think through the process from start to finish. And I think it changes the way you think about teaching, to teach online. And I hope in good ways, like Michael’s saying, I hope that we can learn from what we’ve done and figure out, “Hey, this is stuff that works really well” or “This is stuff that maybe doesn’t work as well,” and that we can take that back into whatever teaching mode we are in in the future. So I do think that there has been a big shift, and I think that’s going to stay with us. I expect we’re gonna see more things done online going forward. And I don’t want to say completely online. I am absolutely not saying higher ed is going online. I’m saying people may use some of the pieces of online activities that worked well for them. They may do an online assignment if they never did before, or they may have a Z oom virtual office hour or something like that. So I think there are going to be some things that we take from this experience.

John: And I think Todd has a book coming out on that, which we discussed in a podcast that was released on January 27.

Todd: Oh, Creating Equity-Based Digital Learning Environments. Oh yeah, I remember that.

Rebecca: Maybe that one? Yeah.

Claire: I want to add too that, I think faculty… I want to believe this… have become more aware of the need for compassion in their classes. I mean, it’s easier when everybody seems healthy and well to say, “You know, no late assignments,” or whatever, and “it’s in the syllabus,” and my late policy is this. But I want to think that people understand that people are sick, or caring for sick people, and that life circumstances are changed, maybe they have their little kids at home with them. I think it’s important to be compassionate for students and to understand their needs. And I think this is highlighted, in addition to equity and inclusion, just some more issues, that people have lives. And they’re different when they’re not on campuses, and that we can be compassionate and kind to people. And that doesn’t make us any less rigorous or whatever. It just means that we’re kind and compassionate, and I think our students will learn more when we are more aware of them as humans.

Todd: we’re seeing that in the POD network, and the Lilly conferences, the stuff you just brought up, Claire, anything dealing with mindfulness and compassion, those types of things. People are just swarming to those sessions, they just love those things. Because it’s vital right now.

Claire: You know, sometimes students will, when I send out something, and I’ll say… I just sent out a note to a student today, and said, “Oh, your assignment didn’t come through, I think you didn’t respond to a peer, so it didn’t come up in the gradebook. I just want you to know, I’m not going to count off late, please just get it done.” It’s just like, “Oh, my gosh, thank you so much for reaching out. I so appreciate it.” It’s like: “who hurt you?” You know… [LAUGHTER] This should not be like this. And this has happened time after time, where I’m just like being a nice human being to say, “hey, you missed this,” or, “hey, don’t forget this,” or whatever. And it’s just this overwhelming response. And I don’t think it needs to be that way. I think we need to show students that we do care about them and understand their situations and just want them to learn. And that doesn’t mean I’m a softy, I don’t want to say that we don’t need to expect them to work hard and do the work and show up and all that. We absolutely do. We just need to understand their circumstances as well.

Rebecca: And not assuming that mal intent. I think sometimes that’s what was happening before the assumption that “they did it on purpose”, or they’re skipping out or something rather than just being like a reasonable human being who made a mistake or forgot something.

Claire: Or you hear the thing, “Oh, their grandmother died. How many grandmothers do you have?” Well, it doesn’t matter how many grandmothers you have, you know, it’s like stop being that way. Maybe they do actually have three grandmothers or maybe they have situations that they don’t want to tell you about. Give them the benefit of the doubt until you can’t, I think. But that’s me. That’s me. Not everybody feels that way.

Todd: Here’s the quick teaching tip on this one I’ve just stumbled in this years ago, and it worked out really well. For me, I will have eight to 10 kind of general “rules.” Just don’t lie to me. Just be honest about stuff. And when I ask you a question and for those types of things, I’ll just say, “Here’s 10 things.” And I did this with face-to-face classes a lot. And I’d say now get into groups of four and come up with two or three things for each group that you’d like me to consider. What are some additional things you’d like me to consider. And the reason I brought this up is because of what you just said, Claire with the “who has hurt you.” The very first time I did this, I just thought this would be a neat way of showing them. It’s a communal organization. I have expectations. So do you. One of my students started out by saying, “If another student starts to attack me, don’t come to my defense. But please moderate the conversation. I can fend for myself if you’ll control the situation.” I thought, well, that’s a really good one. The next one was “If we provide an answer, and it’s wrong, please don’t call us stupid.”

Claire: Oh my gosh.

Todd: And I thought to myself, they’re not making this up. They’re saying things that have happened to them. And so again, the quick teaching tip is on your first day of class, it can be online or it could be face to face, is just “Here are some of my expectations. And now I’d like to hear what are your expectations.” And that’s where you find out who’s hurt them and you address it.

Claire: I’ve also heard of people doing like “life happens” passes the you get one assignment or two assignments or whatever, it is no questions asked. Use the card when you need it. And I don’t need to see your doctor’s note. I don’t need to see anything. Just you have your passes and use them as you will. And I think that’s a fine way to handle it. Or you can just listen to them and say, “Okay, you can have an extension.”

John: Well, thank you. This has been a fascinating conversation and it was great talking to you. And we’re looking forward to the new edition of your book. Your first edition was invaluable as a resource. And this sounds like it’s going to be even more.

Rebecca: It’s like next setting, level up. It sounds like.

Claire: Thank you.

Todd: Yes. Thank you both.

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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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172. Advancing Online Learning

Posted in access, accessibility, backward design, chunking, diversity, equity, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, OER, online learning, pedagogy, social justice, teaching, universal design
January 27, 2021

We’ve focused a lot on faculty switching modalities during the pandemic, but even experienced online instructors have faced new challenges redesigning their courses to work for students with limited computer technology, network access, and quiet study environments. In this episode, Kevin Kelly and Todd Zakrajsek join us to discuss how universal design principles can be used to provide learning equity and human connections in our online classes.

Kevin works with colleges and universities as an educational consultant and teaches as a faculty member in Education at San Francisco State University. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of Fellowship Programs in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Todd is also co-author of Dynamic Lecturing that we’ve discussed on earlier podcast episode. Kevin and Todd are the authors of Advancing Online Teaching: Creating Equity-Based Digital Learning Environments, recently published by Stylus publishing.

Show Notes

The Excellent Teacher Series

Resources and tools

 References

  • Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12, 257-285.
  • Tobin, T. J., & Behling, K. T. (2018). Reach everyone, teach everyone: Universal design for learning in higher education. West Virginia University Press.
  • The psychology of progress bars. Spindogs. Samuel Merritt University.
  • Baker, R., Dee, T., Evans, B., & John, J. (2018). Bias in Online Classes: Evidence from a Field Experiment. CEPA Working Paper No. 18-03. Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis.

Transcript

John: We’ve focused a lot on faculty switching modalities during the pandemic, but even experienced online instructors have faced new challenges redesigning their courses to work for students with limited computer technology, network access, and quiet study environments. In this episode, we discuss how universal design principles can be used to provide learning equity and human connections in our online 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: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Kevin Kelly and Todd Zakrajsek. Kevin works with colleges and universities as an educational consultant and teaches as a faculty member in Education at San Francisco State University. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of Fellowship Programs in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Todd is also co-author of Dynamic Lecturing that we’ve discussed on earlier podcast episode. Kevin and Todd are the authors of Advancing Online Teaching: Creating Equity-Based Digital Learning Environments, recently published by Stylus publishing. Welcome, Todd and Kevin.

Todd: Thank you, Rebecca.

Kevin: Thank you.

John: Our teas today are:

Kevin: I’m drinking Irish breakfast tea with honey from our backyard beehive.

Rebecca: …can’t get any more fresh than that.

Kevin: Nope.

Todd: Well, I just finished hibiscus tea. But now I have my big old bottle of water to get me to the next round.

Rebecca: Excellent. And I have Christmas tea.

John: And I have ginger tea. We’ve invited you here today to discuss Advancing Online Teaching. Could you tell us a little bit about how this very timely book came about?

Kevin: Well, Todd and I have known each other for years and years. And it just so happened that one day he was telling me about a series of books that he’s created. And he invited me to work with him on a book about online teaching. And we’ll get into more about how that evolved, but Todd maybe can fill in the gaps in my memory there.

Todd: No, this is perfect. And you know, I take credit where credit is due. Sometimes you just get really, really lucky, and Kevin and I this round got really lucky in a way. I wanted to mention the fact that we’ve actually been working on this book for about two years. This isn’t a situation where suddenly everything went to emergency remote teaching and we threw a book together. We started about two years ago working on this, we’re both massively busy folks. And so kind of kept picking away at it and running back and forth with edits and kind of kept working on and working on it. And then it was about December of last year, we talked about it and said, let’s just get this thing done, put some time aside and just crank away at it. And it was about six weeks later that everything started to go sideways on teaching. And so then we talked it over and really focused hard. And within about three months, I guess, got it done, because it takes about six months in production. What I mean by lucky is we had enough of it as a framework, that had been years of work, that we could then dump it into something that we could get out very quickly. And at a time that I think is going to be real helpful.

John: One of the things I really like about your book is it’s focused from the ground up on inclusion, equity, and the use of universal design for learning. Could you talk about why you chose those as the foundation of course design?

Kevin: We wanted this book to be different in a few ways. Many of the books out there about online teaching focus either on the technology side (what buttons do you click to make a discussion forum take shape or what have you), and some of them will focus on the student side (how do you actually facilitate those discussions?). But with work that both Todd and I have been doing in different circles, we decided that we wanted there to be an underpinning, if you will, of these different concepts so that they would be infused in everything people do, not just a tack-on at the end, the way you might find in a college of education: “Oh, here’s a class on how to make your courses more multicultural,” Instead of infusing that into every aspect of every course. We kind of viewed it like when you go to the eye doctor, and they put one lens down and say “Are you clear or fuzzier now?” And now we have these three lenses, you characterize it as inclusion, learning, equity and universal design for learning. But we frame it as universal design for learning, learning equity, and human connection, which is a little bit broader than inclusion. But it was really important for us to really think about: “Hey, there’s a human at the other end of that internet connection when you’re having a teaching and learning experience.” And we don’t want to lose sight of that. What do you think, Todd?

Todd: I think that’s a really good point. And I think the biggest one still is that concept of coming back over and over again to remember the human in the exchange. It’s really easy to post things out there and open quizzes and do all those things, and forget the fact that when you open the quiz the student who might be taking the quiz may be in a car in a McDonald’s parking lot, because it’s the only place they can get internet. So we really wanted to hit that over and over again,

Rebecca: I really appreciated too, the extensive coverage on accessibility and things as well as part of that discussion, which sometimes gets overlooked, which is really unfortunate,

Kevin: Right, and we also wanted to make sure that accessibility wasn’t the only frame through which to view Universal Design for Learning. Often many people think about it that way, but we think about, “Hey, these are accommodations for students with busy lives. These are accommodations for students who may speak English as a non-native speaker. These are accommodations for people who are parents and juggling one device amongst themselves and other people in the house just trying to get work done and survive.”

Todd: And that’s how we did a lot of the themes, and it comes up over and over again. You don’t design something so that you provide an opportunity for a person who has some kind of challenge, you design so that that challenge doesn’t matter anymore. So if a person does take a little bit more time to cognitively process, you could certainly make extra time for that person. Or you create an exam with no time limit, and then it’s no longer an issue. And so Kevin was phenomenal at finding a lot of different ways of, again, constructing the learning environment, in an online situation, so that challenges don’t matter anymore, to the greatest extent possible.

John: Many of the earlier books focused on an ideal condition where students working remotely were students who had good equipment, good connections, and plenty of time to arrange for this. But that’s not the student body, I think, that we’re generally seeing. Even without the pandemic, we see increasing diversity in the students and the time commitments and the challenges they’re facing while they’re enrolled in college. So, I think that focus is really good.

Todd: I think that’s a really, really important point, because is in the past, students who are in online classes chose to be in online classes. And there are certain types of students, my daughter is one of them, she does much better in an online course than she does a face-to-face course. She’s got a lot of learning challenges, and it just works better for her. But what we found with emergency remote teaching about 9-10 months ago, is that everybody, faculty and students who had no interest in being in online environments, were all there, which means there was a tremendous mismatch. So the other things we’re really working on with the book is if you find yourself in that mismatch, how can you match it up a little better?

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about ways to overcome some of the racial and ethnic achievement gaps that we see online and some of these other maybe economic issues or just experience differences between students who have a lot of experience online versus students who are new to online?

Kevin: Sure, and I would characterize the equity-based gaps that we see…and often we hear them referred to in reports as achievement gaps… but the literature now encourages us to use words like education debt, so it’s not on the doorstep of the student. But, are we making student-ready colleges as opposed to college-ready students. And so, one of the groups I mentioned in the book Peralta Community College District, I’ve got six years of data, I’ve been looking at their work with students of all varieties, and the only data you can really get in a disaggregated form is for ethnicity, because it’s in the student information system, the database that has characteristics about the students, but the fields for first-generation student, the fields for veterans, the fields for students with disabilities, sometimes aren’t filled in at all. So you won’t be able to tell, to the same extent, that there are either biases, assumptions, or institutional barriers that negatively impact students’ motivation, opportunities, or achievement. So when we get to different things that work for different groups of people, Universal Design for Learning really helps because it allows us to construct multiple pathways for people to succeed. And those multiple pathways may need to take into account that some students are interdependent learners, as opposed to independent learners. They grew up in a culture where everybody’s sitting around the table, and they’re learning as a group, as opposed to individually off on your own reading a piece of text and answering questions about it later. And so to create opportunities for students to learn interdependently with small-group projects or discussions, gives those students who come from, whether it be their family or their identity, their culture, gives them opportunities to succeed in ways that we may be not fostering with highly independent, self-directed learning activities that we commonly see in online courses.

Todd: I want to mention the fact that what Kevin just pointed out is phenomenal in terms of making sure that we’re kind of helping create good learning opportunities for students. But a lot of times people will make that mistake of thinking what we’re talking about here is meshing in learning styles. And you have to be very careful because the literature is very clear on learning styles… it’s one of the trickiest things to debunk out there. We’re not talking about teaching to a given learning style, we’re talking about a situation that if a student is in an environment, for instance, where they’re low bandwidth, and you know, watching videos is going to be really hard… text based material will be a lot better. If you’ve got a student who’s an incredible writer, but they’re extremely shy, then asking them to create a video might be really hard for that person, but creating a paper is not. So, it’s helping to match the types of preferences and abilities students have, not teaching to that learning style. So I just want to make sure there was no misunderstanding there.

Kevin: What you said, Todd, just made me think of some of the research that we’ve been looking at to build the Peralta Equity Rubric. I’ll come back to that in a second. But there’s research that shows that African-American and black students, if they don’t see themselves in the course materials, are less motivated. So back to Rebecca’s earlier question about what can we do? We can make sure that the images and media that we use to represent the content and topics in our courses are also reflective of the students in our classroom, whether that classroom be face-to-face, hybrid, or fully online. And so those types of strategies extend beyond just “What is the content?” but how are we presenting it, as well.

John: One thing that struck me with Todd’s comment is that it may be the case of someone in an environment where writing is easier for them or more natural while video might not be, but for a student who is interacting with a course primarily Through a smartphone, it’s quite possible that the video may be the easier form of representing their knowledge rather than trying to type a paper on a smartphone.

Kevin: Correct. And one strategy that I’ve started using in my own class is for students who may not have access to a device, I had a student who first made me aware of this challenge who was living in his car. And so he didn’t have access to a computer on a regular basis unless he went to the 24/7 lab. So he started using Google Docs and then I told him about Dragon apps so that he could do voice to text. And then I got smart enough, somebody told me about Google Voice, which is a free phone number that students can leave a voicemail message. And so now that student can just write with a pen and paper, not worry about typing it at all, and then read it as a voicemail message just like a book on tape, I can still grade it with the same rubric, but that student has fewer barriers to reach the particular goal with respect to that assignment.

John: You mentioned the equity rubric that you developed at Peralta colleges. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

Kevin: The short version of the story is that they were moving from one learning management system to another, from Moodle to Canvas. And at the same time, they decided they were going to write their first ever distance education plan. And based on some data that one of the team members had identified during her sabbatical, when you look at the average between all students in face-to-face courses and online courses, that average of retention and success kept shrinking so that students in online courses were catching up. But when you disaggregate that data by ethnicity, you see that Asian students and white students are well above the average and black African-American students, LatinX, Hispanic students, were below. And so we saw that we couldn’t just think about this in one way. And we decided in that distance education plan they wrote for the district, that they wanted the two core values driving the plan to be the learners themselves and equity. And so we didn’t want it to just to be a document sitting on a shelf collecting dust. And so we started looking at how do you operationalize helping faculty members infuse learning equity into their courses. We went out on the web and couldn’t find anything, the closest thing we could find was the University of Southern California has the Center for Urban Education, and they have five principles about equity by design. But that wasn’t very practical for a teacher learning how to infuse equity. So we just went out, looked at all the research that either showed an equity-based gap that negatively impacted student’s performance or an equity-based intervention that positively impacted student’s performance. And those research efforts led to eight criteria that we wove into this rubric. And now we’ve been using it to train faculty. I’m using it in my own course. And it’s been exciting to see how the whole district is responding. It’s gone from an equity rubric to an equity initiative over time,

John: Is that something you share publicly?

Kevin: It is. Yes, if you go to the Peralta website, and we’ll make sure you have the link for your show notes. But the rubric itself is a creative commons document. The training, which is on a new version we’re going to launch in just a couple weeks, we’re putting in the Canvas Commons for free. There’s a bibliography that’s quasi-annotated, that shows the literature pertaining to each rubric criterion, and document that explains some of the core concepts. And some of my work involves taking that rubric and turning it into a framework. And I like to see it,if you’re familiar with Photoshop, or any tool where you have layers on top of layers. The Universal Design for Learning matrix is a grid three by three that helps you identify the checkpoints for integrating UDL principles into your course. And so I thought it would be a nice add-on, it’s not the same as, it’s a new set of ideas for faculty to start weaving in equity principles. So for example, in Universal Design for Learning, we think about different ways of presenting content based on the format, audio and text, or video and text. And then with learning equity, you think about “How do we present multiple perspectives on that, so that we have different ages and ethnicities and backgrounds and cultures and identities, carrying their ideas on the same topic?” And from there, we’ve taken it forward and built it out into a core part of the book.

Rebecca: It’s a much needed thing… grateful that you guys worked on that. I know it’s something that in doing a lot of accessibility related work and UDL work with our faculty and trying to bring in equity more holistically, it’s challenging, because it’s all these disparate resources and trying to make all the connections, it’s nice to have them all in one place.

Kevin: Well, I have to say one of the things that led to the success of this project was the fact that we had such a diverse group working on it. We had people from all walks of life: students, staff, faculty, and it’s one of the things I’m most proud of is the work I’ve been doing with that Community College District

John: Changing the topic just a little bit, you advocate a backwards-design process, as many people do, but you also emphasize the importance of creating learning objectives at the level of course modules as well as at the level of the course and also making those explicit, not just in the syllabus, but also in the course module. Could you talk a little bit about why that’s important?

Kevin: I constantly refer back to what I call the psychology of the progress bar. And so if you’re familiar with progress bars, we as humans are not satisfied or motivated until it’s 75 to 80% complete. So when you have, for every course that you’re taking, and imagine a student with a normal load is taking four or five courses, let’s say you have an average five to 10 learning outcomes at the course level, that’s potentially 40 to 50 learning outcomes, or progress bars, that you’re trying to measure your progress over the course of the 17 weeks. So that means you’re waiting until week 12 of any semester to know how you feel about how you’re doing in a course. So that idea behind having module level learning outcomes means that you’re breaking things into small chunks, students can see that they’ve reached those outcomes right away. They dovetail or fall under the umbrella of those larger course-level outcomes, but provide checkpoints along the way for students to tell how they’re doing and stay motivated. Again, that motivation for persistence and success are key factors in helping our students in these online courses. And then, obviously, Todd brought a whole lot to that conversation, because he knew, just on the back of his head, the entire history of the term “learning outcome,” and why we use that instead of the word objective in the book, Todd, what do you think?

Todd: I’ll just mention this quickly, as I think it’s important for the book, because it seems like folks just love to argue about whether you’re really looking at outcomes or objectives… and goals, we totally get, everybody sees those as being separate… but outcomes versus objectives. So we kind of outline in the book, the different ways that people have actually defined those terms. But one of the cool things about this is that it was back around 1962, that a book was written about objectives, it goes back to the 1800s. But in 62, there was a specific book that was written that says, looking very, very carefully, what is the behavior that’s being done? How’s it being done? What’s the criteria for success, and we should be able to document those things so that we can objectively look at whether or not a person has achieved this. Then in about the late 80s, early 90s, the outcome-based education came along. And the big push was from objectives to outcomes. With the idea being that we’re going to define the outcomes of something we should be able to identify what is the behavior? What’s the criteria for success and how they go about doing it? And then they cited the same research from the 1960s. So we have two or three pages in the book of the folks who say, “Oh, no, no, it’s not objectives, it’s outcomes.” We say, Where do you think that came from? So at this level, and we’re not trying to be rude about it, but it really doesn’t matter. If you’re not writing a thesis on this, what’s important is that you can write a statement that says, “By the end of this unit, by the end of this class, by the end of this whole section, a student should be able to, or will be able to…”, and so that’s what we really went for, but kind of waiting for the feedback. The book’s brand new… out right now …of waiting for the hardcore education folks to kind of explain that we had outcomes and objectives wrong.

John: I gave a workshop on this topic in June for people preparing courses for the fall. And that was something that people from our education faculty were raising, saying, “Well, are these really objectives? Or are they outcomes?” And my point was, it doesn’t really matter. These are the things we want students to be able to do. And let’s just work on helping them get to that point, because both terms are used generally interchangeably, from what I’ve seen.

Todd: Yeah, totally.

John: And in describing them, you do use the SMART acronym. One issue I’ve run into is that there’s many different variants of that acronym, but you adopt one that actually pretty much the same one we had used here on our campus. Could you describe that SMART acronym?

Todd: It’s kind of going to come back to the same thing you were talking about for outcomes versus objectives. For a smart outcome, it is very important for It to be specific, that it’d be measurable, achievable, realistic, time bound, sometimes people change realistic for reachable. And so these words will bounce around a little bit. But I think what’s important, it’s almost… in drawing this analogy to Bloom’s taxonomy, people get so hung up on Bloom’s Taxonomy to say, is this knowledge or is this understanding? You know, it’s foundational. If it’s foundational, I’m good with that. There’s a difference between knowledge and understanding versus application versus synthesis. On a SMART outcome, there’s a difference between writing an outcome that’s just not reachable, it’s not timely, it’s not measurable, those are problems. So again, as far as I’m concerned, as long as you got something that’s specific and measurable, and probably reasonable, those are the big ones. But, that’s what we’re really after.

Rebecca: I love the emphasis on chunking things into small pieces to manage cognitive load, not only of our students, but also of the faculty member teaching the class… because just like students who may have those 50 outcomes they’re trying to head for, faculty are also trying to manage that and keep track of that for their students as well. So I like the idea of the cognitive load management for everybody involved in the learning process and really keeping it organized, which is a key thing for any sort of learning design, to make sure that people know how to move forward.

Todd: Well, yeah, I’m going to say that I think probably one of the most important aspects of creating any kind of learning environment for your students is it comes down to cognitive load. I mean, it really is, because at any given moment, if you have too much to do. For anybody out there who doesn’t know what cognitive load is, think about, like, the expressway. And so you got information coming in, if I’m looking over and I see somebody walking by, and I just watch him for a minute and see what their outfit looks like, that’s one thing I can do. If a friend is talking to me, I can listen to the friend. if they’re talking to me in the car while the radio is on, and then it starts to sleet outside, I’m thinking, you know what? …trying to keep the car on the road, listen to somebody talking, and having the radio is too much. And so it’s just too much material coming through at once. And it’s kind of like when the expressway has too many cars coming in at once, and everything comes to a grinding halt. So what we have to be really careful of is that the more you do something, the easier it becomes. And the more you have frameworks for doing things, the more easily you can do it. So as we build these kind of structures, students can process a lot more information. But that’s the cognitive load. And everybody has that feeling of sitting down to read something and getting about two paragraphs in and saying, “Yeah, not now, I just can’t do this right now.” That’s cognitive load. And we do it all the time. The most important thing to keep in mind is, if you’re an expert at something, the process is very easy, because it’s repetitious, but your students are novice, so they’re going to face a lot higher cognitive load. So the thing that you think, “Oh, this is easy…” they’re holding on by their fingertips. So be mindful of that cognitive load, I think, is really important, from the work of Sweller in the 1980s.

Kevin: And just to build on that and to go back to Rebecca’s concept about the chunking and how important that is, it also serves today’s students. So recently, I was a moderator of a student panel at a conference. And we had in the same panel, a working mother. She was a single mother of two kids and in her 30s. And she said, “Sometimes I’m just trying to get the work done. I’m not aiming for the A, even though I would love an A, I’m just trying to get through this credential so I can get a degree and get upward mobility socially and socioeconomically.” And so thinking about chunking as a universal design for learning concept, where students can track their progress when they’re having to bounce between different priorities, academics, worklife, family obligations, this makes a streamlined pathway. Using Todd’s expressway, we’re creating a carpool lane for busy people.

John: And it also matches with your discussion earlier of the checklist type idea, that when students are given a project, say “write a paper by the last day of the term,” it’s really easy to procrastinate. And then quite often, when people did that, it became overwhelming, and it just never got done. By breaking it up into smaller chunks, you’re keeping the cognitive load lower on each chunk, but you’re also dealing with those human tendencies to procrastination and so forth, to make it easier for people to keep the work manageable to stay on track and not to put things off, because they’ve got many other things that at the moment seem more pressing than something due a month later, or two months later.

Todd: Yeah. And John, you brought up something that’s hugely important there, that so much of this stuff is interwoven. And I think it’s hard for a lot of folks to see all of the different connections that are out there. But if you do a project, just like you just said, that’s due at the end of the semester, students wait till the last minute because they will. As a faculty member, I’ve had reports for Provost that I’ve waited until the last minute to do, but that creates the high pressure. Cognitive load goes up, You start thinking “I can’t do it.” Once I started thinking I can’t do it, now I’ve got to pass this class. And so I started looking out online, maybe there’s a paper I could just buy. So suddenly it becomes an integrity issue. And so a lot of times when you look at the research on students who will do unethical things, or cheating in the classroom, it’s almost always based on pressure. People don’t cheat on things that they don’t feel pressure about. So when you have all these checklists, that Kevin pointed out, through the semester, you keep the cognitive load down, you keep the pressure down, then the need to cheat, so to speak, you take that away. So there are really things that we can do to create a better environment for the students that don’t entice them into these unethical behaviors.

Kevin: Well, and one strategy that we put in the book is to not only provide the due dates, but provide start dates. And when you break up a project into chunks, you can have a first draft, you’re gonna have feedback from a peer, and have those all lined up so that students see it’s not just one thing at the end of the term, and they’ll just wait until the last day. But instead, “Oh, I need to start my draft because I need to turn that in. Even if you’re not going to do a whole lot with it as the instructor, but you’re going to provide opportunities for students to interact with one another to get feedback about their work before they turn it in. All those things are important. I’ve gone to the extent where I have students take a snapshot either digitally on their computer, or with a phone picture if they have a paper-based calendar and show that they have allotted the correct amount of time each week for my class. And I give them, if they want, the ability to download or use an online to-do list that basically sends them reminders to start and finish things up.

John: And that feedback that they’re receiving all the way through also reduces the ability to engage in academic dishonesty and it reduces the benefits of it because none of the tasks are unmanageable. It works a lot of ways.

Rebecca: I really appreciated all of the equity framework built into your book, but I have to admit the chapter I went to first was “managing your workload when teaching online and I think maybe a lot of faculty might switch to that immediately right now, in this moment in time. Can you talk a little bit about some of the strategies to reduce workload for faculty as well?

Kevin: Sure, I’ll start, but I know Todd has lots of ideas to jump in. So a couple things, one, and we’ve referred to this before, and not in this interview. But, Tom Tobin has a book with Kirsten Behling about universal design for learning, and in it they propose this “plus one” strategy, just think about one thing that you can do. So while we present a lot of ideas in the book, it’s chock full of ideas, we recognize that, unless you’re going to do a full course redesign over a summer or something like that, you re lly are going to find that the maximum strategy that will help the most students at that particular time. And so when you’re talking about workload, part of it is parsing out the work of modifying your course. The other is thinking about strategies that will help you maybe be more equitable in how you reply to students in a discussion forum. There’s research that shows it, and that particular study by Stanford 94% of the instructors replied first, and sometimes only, to names that look like white male names. So a strategy might be to create a spreadsheet showing that you have responded to all the students equally throughout the semester, just tracking your own progress. Until they have tools like that in the learning management system, we have to do it ourselves. That increases the workload in some respects, but also decreases the workload in terms of, “Well, I know that I’ve talked to Todd three times already this semester, but I haven’t answered Rebecca once.” If I’m worried about whether or not Rebecca is going to stay in the class, the way to demotivate a student is to give them no feedback whatsoever. So that increases our workload when we get those administrative calls from our department chairs or Associate Deans saying, “Hey, your DFW rates really high.” So just thinking about different things that you can do over time, and also ways of working with colleagues. If you’re teaching a class that has more than one section, you might be able to strategize who’s going to do what this week. The ability to leverage open educational resources, so you don’t have to create something from scratch, but maybe modify it to meet your needs. There’s all these different ways that you could manage your workload in the online course development, and also the course facilitation.

Todd: The other thing I would add to that is… I think it’s really important, everybody’s in firefighter mode, especially right now. You’re just trying to get… tomorrow is all you’re trying to do. But I can remember being a faculty member about 35 years ago, I was kind of in that same framework, too. I know that now is tremendously just pressure for everybody. But you know, last year wasn’t just easy, and three years ago wasn’t simple. So we’re always in this field where, because there’s an unlimited number of things we can do, and if we care about our students and we’re pretty bright, and keep trying to do new things, we’re always kind of overworked. So I think this is no different than a lot of other times, you got to take stock of where you’re at and what you can do. And I think budgeting a little bit of time, even every week just for 20, 30 minutes, and specifically say to yourself, low-hanging fruit stuff… What could I do that would actually cut down some of unnecessary work that I’m doing right now, and not decrease the learning for my students? I could take a thing out here, and they’re still going to learn just as much. Or what’s something that I could add that, after a very short period of time, the cognitive load wouldn’t be bad, because it might take me a couple times to figure it out. But once I got it figured out, then I can do something that takes very little time and has a lot more growth for my students. And so just taking stock once in a while, because I will tell you that I remember when EXCEL came out. So when Excel came out, a friend of mine said, you got to get your gradebook into Excel. And for anybody who’s listening that’s old enough to remember carrying around the green book… the little green book that we all wrote up all our notes with. I had five exams where I dropped the lowest exam. And I was doing my class with 600 students in those green books. And it took me two years before I finally tried Excel, because I was too busy to try it. So my framework now is to say, “What if I had budgeted 30 minutes to try that?” I think in the end, it only took me about 30 minutes to an hour to actually run it in Excel. But I never took the time. So what we’re advocating for is, as busy as you are, take just a few minutes to just say if I jump off the treadmill, what could I do that would take less time?

John: This is going to date me a little bit, but I only used one of those little green books back in 1980 and 81. And then I picked up a Timex Sinclair computer, one of those early things, and I wrote a grade book program and I was using that up until the time I got a spreadsheet. I think Lotus 123 was the first one I used and then Excel after that, and then the gradebook in the LMS. I hated doing all that by hand. So I’ve always tried to automate it.

Todd: Before we move on. You know, I do want to point out, just for nostalgia, that there was nothing in society more powerful than that little green grade book because anybody in higher education had seen that book before. And I can remember my sister got in a car accident and these surgeons would come in, different people come in, and they were very dismissive of us, almost all of us. But, I was grading one time and one of them came in and saw that book and stopped and says, “What do you teach?” And then we got into this really nice conversation and it suddenly occurred to me, even the physicians fear the green book.

John: One of the things you emphasize throughout your book is building human connections in online courses. Could you talk a little bit about some strategies that we can use to do that effectively?

Kevin: So first is being aware of opportunities where students can interact with one another or interact with you, the instructor. And so that awareness then extends to “Okay, we’re going to build it into an assignment but in a way that helps students understand that that’s part of what you want to achieve.” And so we often look at instructions for, let’s say, a discussion forum where it’s maybe a paragraph maybe two of how they should respond to your original prompt, and then please reply to two other students. And so giving them some feedback about what do you want to happen in those replies? Do you want them to extend what the other person did by finding resources that would be helpful for the argument they’re making? Is it to probe or clarify when that student’s not making enough points to really make it clear what they’re trying to say? And so giving them some ideas, and then when we pull in the equity angle, on top of human connection, we can say, “How does your connection to this and your background and your identity map to what you’re experiencing with your student classmate?” And so getting them to start interacting with one another at different levels, also increases that sense of human connection because they know each other better? A lot of instructors I know, especially in fields, maybe like STEM, they’re worried about adding things to the class that would take away time from other important activities. And so it’s finding those ways to do both. I’m a big fan of both/and as opposed to either/or. So, if you’re going to have a discussion, then maybe “How does this physics concept apply to your background? How is it useful in your life?” And so there’s still thinking about the physics concept, instead of just a chance to socialize with your classmates. And then moving on from there.

Todd: I love the way Kevin just covered the one aspect. Another thing we’ve talked a lot about in terms of this human connection is there’s an old phrase that “we teach the way we were taught.” And it’s actually a way to excuse folks for lecturing because like, “Well, I was lectured to, so I lecture.” I don’t actually believe you teach the way you were taught. I think that… in fact I know, back when I was an undergraduate, and we’re talking about back in the late 70s, early 80s, there were faculty members doing service learning, there was small groups, we did problem based learning, we had a lot of different things. I loved this one guy who did storytelling lectures. I don’t teach the way I was taught, I teach the way I best learned. And that makes a lot of sense, because if we really don’t stop and take into consideration other people, every one of us has a way we learn. And we think, “Oh, you know how students will learn best is you do it like this.” And it’s the way you learned. And so what I think the thing is, is we got to break away from this concept of teaching the way we best learned. And by the way, as evidence of this too, you’ll have some students who will do phenomenally well in your class. If you sit down and talk to them, they tend to learn just like you did. And that’s why the class is going so well for them. So I think, for me, what I try to do is to say “Who in the classroom….no matter how I’m teaching, who in the classroom is struggling right now?” And so if I’m teaching something where people raise their hands and just shout and answer quickly, I’m actually teaching to the fast thinking, low concerned extroverts… the people who don’t mind making mistakes. And if I stop and think for just a second, who is that not benefiting? Well, somebody who needs to take a few more minutes to think, a person is a little bit more introverted, or an individual who’s really self conscious about making mistakes. So that’s a part of trying to find that human connection to of getting away from just assuming everybody out there like us

Rebecca: As a slow thinker, I really appreciate that.

Todd: And you know, it’s funny, I just want to say is, I think that’s really, really important. Because people will make jokes about that all the time. It’s like, “Well, you know, we introverts…” They’re all learners. And this is one thing I just loved working with Kevin on. He’s one of the kindest, most human oriented people I’ve ever been around. But constantly be thinking, if somebody makes a joke to me and says, “Well, you know, I’m kind of introverted. So I don’t know if I’ll fit in here.” I’ll say, “Well, wait a minute, how can we make that work? And it’s not a joke. Let’s talk that through.” Because education is by and large, built for fast-talking risk-taking extroverts. That’s just who education had been built for. And online learning actually changes that game, which is why some students dislike it, and others love it. But they’re all humans out there. So we do have some students who are really struggling now with online learning, who wouldn’t be doing much better in the classroom right along with the people again, who are doing much better because we’re online.

John: And we should try to design our courses to work for all sets of students.

Todd: Yeah.

Kevin: There you go.

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

Kevin: Well, I would say, Todd described how this book evolved over the course of a couple of years. And during that couple year period, this thing called a pandemic happened. So obviously, there’s more that we could be doing. And so I know, for myself, in conference presentations and workshops that I conduct at colleges and universities, I’ve been trying to fill in different gaps to help people with immediate needs that we may not have been able to get to to the book, otherwise it would have been an encyclopedia. We packed that thing full of ideas, but I think Todd just constructed a website. I’d love to find ways to engage the community around the equity challenges that they’re facing and help folks identify what this really looks like in a course. When you’re talking about learning equity or Universal Design for Learning or human connection. These can seem like abstract concepts. And so when you’re saying, “But I’m designing an online course, I need something that I can see.” So getting examples of that, not just by the ones that Todd and I put in the book, but by others. Stories that students tell about things that helped them, those are the things I think would really bolster this book and make it achievable for people who are busy and just trying to help their students. What do you think, Todd?

Todd: I think that’s great, Kevin, and I guess that’s, for me, the same type of thing. We’ve written the book, I think it’s an amazing material, quite frankly, and I’m in awe of it at the end. And I’m not saying that just because I’m the co-author of the book. It’s got so much information packed into it. And so we did set up a website, theexcellentteacherseries.com, because this is part of that series. And it’s going to have information on it. So I think what’s next is what Kevin was just talking about, just continuing to put tips and different suggestions on this so it can be a living project, as opposed to a static book. The book itself kind of launches you and then we have this living project that people come back to and contribute with.

John: Thank you. I really enjoyed reading your book. And I’ll strongly recommend it to our faculty here. And we very much appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.

Todd: Thank you.

Kevin: Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you so much for joining us and sharing all of your rich information.

Todd: Appreciate that. Thanks for the opportunity.

Kevin: Yeah, and the chance to have some tea.

Todd: Oh, yeah. Gotta love the tea.

Rebecca: Tea is very important.

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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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149. Academic Ableism

Posted in ableism, access, accessibility, disability, diversity, equity, higher education, inclusion, inclusive pedagogy, learning, pedagogy, social justice, teaching, universal design
August 19, 2020

COVID-19 has raised the profile of equity issues related to disability as more and more of higher education has shifted online even though many of these issues were very relevant to many of our students and faculty before the pandemic. In this episode, Jay Timothy Dolmage joins us to discuss how ableism is systemic throughout higher education and ways of moving towards equity through universal design.

Jay is a Professor of English Language and Literature and the Associate Chair of the Undergraduate Communication Outcome Initiative at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of multiple books including Disability Rhetoric, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education, and Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: COVID-19 has raised the profile of equity issues related to disability as more and more of higher education has shifted online even though many of these issues were very relevant to many of our students and faculty before the pandemic. In this episode, we discuss how ableism is systemic throughout higher education and ways of moving towards equity through universal design.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Jay Timothy Dolmage. Jay is a Professor of English Language and Literature and the Associate Chair of the Undergraduate Communication Outcome Initiative at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of multiple books including Disability Rhetoric, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education, and Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability. Welcome, Jay.

Jay: Thanks so much for having me.

John: Today’s teas are:

Jay: I’m drinking coffee, actually… got my coffee right here… second coffee of the day.

Rebecca: We welcome rebels. It’s okay. [LAUGHTER] I have Scottish breakfast tea today.

John: And I have an earl grey today.

Jay: Well, I had an earl grey doughnut yesterday. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I think that counts.

John: That’s close enough.

Jay: That’s my contribution.

Rebecca: That actually sounds like a really interesting doughnut.

Jay: It was delicious.

Rebecca: So, we invited you here today to share some of your extensive research around disability, ableism, and universal design in higher education. And I thought it might be helpful if we could start with some definitions. Can you talk about how you talk about some of these terms?

Jay: I think that’s a great question. Because I think the truth is, a lot of people, when it comes to disability, they’re worried about getting things wrong. That’s the experience a lot of people have is “I’m worried I’m going to say the wrong thing. I’m worried that ableism is something that I’m going to be accused of, because I get the language wrong. It’s an issue of representation and I don’t exactly understand all the rules, and so I don’t want to talk about it and I don’t want to think about it. I want to keep it away.” And so I always want to talk with students and with colleagues about those definitions. I think the best way to define ableism is it’s a structural phenomenon. It’s present within the ways that we build our societies. And universities are the perfect example: that we value a particular set of things, most of which are pretty much impossible. But then we structure our interactions, we structure the value systems, the kind of false meritocracies that we build around the idea that we should all be perfect. That’s different than what you might call disablism, which is direct stigma against disabled people, actions that are targeting disabled people to hurt them or discriminate against them that are intentional and that are about our society’s dislike of the idea of disability, in part because we want to push it away from ourselves as much as possible. So, the two things work together because it’s ableism that makes us devalue disabled people. But it’s also ableism that structures a world in which it’s very difficult to admit when we fail, or when we struggle. It’s very difficult to admit that success is not easy and that privilege is not distributed equally. And the truth is, the university is a perfect case because it’s so difficult to dismantle or to address ableism in the university because it demands that the people who are in positions of power understand and admit that they came into those positions through an ableist system. That’s very difficult for people to do. But it’s so important for us to do. And the truth is, I believe, actually, really, really good educators understand that. They understand that the ways that they learned, the ways that they came to particular positions of privilege, were not fair, and that they need to change… that we don’t want to continue to perpetuate a system, like the ones that we learned within, that we gained our privilege within. That’s the last thing that we want to perpetuate. But, for other people that’s very difficult to let go of. And so you see these things very built into the structures and interactions of academic life. So that would be how I define ableism. Universal Design is an anti-ableist approach to education. It begins with the idea that, for example, higher education is uniquely conservative, that we don’t change very much, we’re very slow to change. And the ways that we teach are very outdated, and they don’t educate in the ways that we would hope they do. They reproduce privilege really well, but they don’t educate very well. They don’t acknowledge the diversity in our classrooms. It’s funny, because the values that universities espouse… If you look at a mission statement of the university, it’s all about innovation and dynamic diversity and change and progress. And then classrooms are still running students through tests. And they’re memorizing things. And they’re being timed. It’s very Fordist, right? We want this startup culture. But we have a very assembly line pedagogy. So universal design is the idea that you can design teaching, in this case, Universal Design for Learning, with the broadest group of possible learners in mind. And if you do that, you will be a better educator, it will help all students. It was originally a movement in architecture, and it was the idea that you design a physical structure, like a house or a public building, so that everybody in the community can access it equally. And it’s actually not that hard to do. A lot of architectural features are either decorative or they’re not very functional. I always use an example for students of the doorknob, if the goal is to get to the other side of the door, standard old-fashioned twist doorknob is a terrible technology, a universally designed door would just open for you. Or it’s a doorknob that can turn either way, or a latch that you can hit with your elbow, or the kind of door that you can nudge with your hip as you go through. The goal is to get through the door. So, why would you have an old-fashioned doorknob? And I ask people to think about that in terms of what are the things in your teaching where the goal is to get to the other side of the door, but what you’re actually testing is people’s doorknob acuity, [LAUGHTER] and you’re actually excluding people from getting to the things you want them to get to, which are membership in an intellectual community, a contribution to the classroom, the ability to develop your ideas and try things out. We want students to do all those things, but we create things like participation policies, like timed tests and exams that just make it impossible for a huge group of students to participate. And we often don’t notice that we’re doing it. So, universal design says from the very beginning, let’s plan for the broadest possible group of students, let’s remove as many barriers as we possibly can. And that that’s opposed to the approach to teaching that says, let’s do it the way that we’ve always done it and if somebody needs an accommodation, they have to go get it themselves. And it’s temporary. It’s like Las Vegas… that one thing that I’m changing for that one student in this class this one time stays with that one student in that one class. If we took all the accommodations that we’d ever given, and we said, “I’m doing this for all students now from now on,” we’d become much better teachers. And we’d also stop students having to go through that work of medically and legally verifying disability, that’s a costly process. And it marks students out for kind of being worn out by those processes. And I believe we lose an unbelievable number of students every year in higher education in North America, just because we have the wrong doorknobs.

Rebecca: When you think about it like that, that’s really an incredible way of thinking about it. One of the first things we did when I had my daughter was changed the doorknobs in our house so she could get around.

Jay: Well, it is a different orientation to space once you’ve experienced disability, once you’ve seen the world in that way. And even for non-disabled people, once you’ve looked at the ways that an accommodation helps somebody and invites them into the conversation, and then you don’t want to reproduce that barrier anymore. And the tough part is, as soon as you begin doing that, you kind of have to fight, we have to fight to remove a lot of barriers to education, it’s not as easy as it should be; it should be a lot easier.

John: One could make the case that this is more important now than it ever has been because education is one of the most important determinants of income distribution, and is a primary cause of the growth in income inequality in our country. The barrier there is having more and more of an effect on people’s future income, careers, and so forth, so it is important that we break these down. One of the ideas in your book, Academic Ableism is how ableism and eugenics were deeply rooted in the foundation of education in North America. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?

Jay: That is such a powerful segue. And it’s gonna be a segue to a bit more of a cynical take, to be honest with you, because I think that the truth is a lot of these systems remain because they’re very effective. And I alluded before to the idea that most people don’t want to reproduce inequitable social structures, but it’s not true. I think a lot of people really do want to perpetuate those structures, and…

Rebecca: …especially because it’s easier…

Jay: …it’s easier, it’s profitable. There’s very little motivation to expand that access, and to challenge that meritocracy, because it’s so functional; keeping people in debt is a powerful motivation. And the data on this is pretty shocking. The average disabled student carries at least 50% more student debt than a non-disabled student. It takes them so much longer to get through school, and we know, for example, these predatory online universities like Trump University. Trump University itself… if people don’t go back and look at that case… and they really should… they were predatory in looking for disabled students. Those were seen as the most desirable students because they would pay tuition and then they wouldn’t finish. And if you have students who will pay tuition and then not finish, you can keep replacing those students every year with new, more vulnerable students. And then, on the other hand, we’ve seen recent policies in the states where state university funding models are hinged around retention. And on the surface, that’s a good thing. In Canada, the funding for the university system is very, very public here. We don’t have much funding hinged to retention. So universities really don’t have much motivation at all to keep students and if students fail out, it’s seen as their fault. The university is not seen as responsible at all. Although if we had real demographic data around the students who we can’t retain, I think it would be shocking. We just don’t keep that data. But in the States, state universities began to have their funding hinged to retention, and instead of that making them better about changing how they teach students so that they could retain a different, more diverse, group of students who are coming into university, they began gaming the system. And you talk about eugenics, I believe that the admissions process at most major North American universities is a kind of proto-eugenics. They’re looking for students from particular zip codes, because those are the students who will come and stay and graduate and donate when they’re finished. These are called Super Zips. And if you look at Ivy League schools, they are pulling 85-90% of their students from a certain isolated group of zip codes. And that’s based very much around the idea that instead of changing how we teach so that we could draw students from a broader area, we want to superzoom man and target just students who fit the prototype of a student who can be successful here. So, it’s very little change, actually. It’s funny because the popular media likes to construct professors and universities as radical places, and in so many ways, they’re the most conservative places in terms of changing. I guess I didn’t really answer your question. I talked more about where I see some eugenic forces working in higher education now, and I think there’s lots of other places to look for that. But, I think a simple way to talk about the history is to say the land grant university mission, at the same time as universities were being built, so we’re institutions and asylums, and one was the place where, very intentionally, the highest classes were supposed to get together, meet one another, marry, and procreate. And the other was a place where people were being sterilized and isolated, and basically imprisoned. And when you look at the influence that prominent eugenicists had over higher education in the United States, these were university presidents. And so, so much of it is very intentional. It’s uncanny to go back through some of the history of higher ed and see those links. But you can still see those sorts of things built into the structure of higher ed nowadays.

John: Going back just a little bit, you mentioned how in the States, at least, public universities argue that they want to increase retention, a cynical interpretation of that may be that they’ve discovered that it is cheaper to retain a student than it is to recruit new ones. But, in general, many administrators really do want to see more students be successful. But that doesn’t always leak down to the faculty level. Many faculty and many departments have the attitude that their job is to sort out students between those who are successful and those who need to be weeded out and sent out of the institution. So, that message hasn’t made it all the way down from the top to all departments. Many departments are very committed to student success, but it’s not as general, perhaps, as we might like it to be.

Jay: Yeah, and I think there are alumni forces as well. And it’s this kind of Stockholm Syndrome or something. It’s like if it was difficult for me, I need to make it difficult for other people. But also what is the value of a degree? The value of a degree, for some strange reason, seems to be hinged to how difficult it was. And I don’t just mean a difficult in terms of the intellectual tasks that are being asked to do but just like a kind of war of attrition. If I made it through, even in a kind of mental health sense, through all of the stress, the unneeded, unnecessary, stress of so many of the rituals of higher education, then that somehow prepares me to be successful. It’s interesting, University of Waterloo where I work, we have a lot of that… we have a lot of stress. And we’ve had a mental health crisis on campus. But it’s this disjunction that I’m hoping people on campus can begin to see because we also have co-op, almost all of our students go and work co-op jobs. And so the skills and the traits that they develop as students in terms of being able to compete with one another, being able to work on their own in an isolated way, and handle stress on their own without asking for help… The help-seeking behavior of students across North America is going down, not up. No employer wants that. No employer wants somebody who can’t work with other people and won’t ask for help when they need it. And yet, this is a value that we’re seeing in NSSE surveys across North America. Those ideas of not asking for help, because that’s seen as a weakness and not working with other people. So there’s a big problem. That’s something that’s broken. Even the members of the board of governors who are all the industry, people, they should want that to change too. So I’m hopeful that we can make arguments to have some of that culture change. And some of it is simple stuff. There’s really no reason for so much investment in timed tests and exams. That’s certainly my soapbox issue, because it does not increase student learning in any way. There’s no research out there at all that shows that students study harder or retain more information, or perform better by having a timed test or exam. And yet, universities are run around the scheduling of these type tests and exams. It’ll be interesting given what’s happening with COVID, and us moving online in ways more than we’re used to, in any case, and the stresses on students will be higher than we’ve seen before. It will be interesting to see whether something like timed tests and exams become almost all that we do and these surveillance technology companies step in. And online courses really just become testing mechanisms. Or if we can find another way to do that. That I think is going to be a real challenge. Because sometimes when you boil things down, that becomes the only thing that a course is there to do, which is to test things. And there’s not a whole lot of learning that can come out of that. And I hope that students know that they shouldn’t be paying $40,000 in tuition, just to take a bunch of tests. They could just do Facebook quizzes for a year, if that’s what they’re looking for.

John: One positive sign is we’re trained in grad school, through this weeding out process, through this elite structure, and we’re trying not to ask for help. But one thing, and we talked about this in a podcast a little while back with Jessmyn Neuhaus, is that we’ve seen people coming in asking for help with the sudden transition to online teaching in ways that they never have before. We saw over twice as many people attend our workshops this year, and some of them I’ve been at this now. institution for 30 years, I’ve never actually seen them at a workshop or ask for help before, and there’s a lot more of that. And one of the things we’re hearing, from at least the people who are attending workshops in teaching centers, are getting the message that perhaps proctored exams and surveillance technologies may not be the most effective way of assessing student learning, especially in an online format. So there’s at least some hope there. But we also have a lot of people demanding better proctoring systems that will monitor everything that students do and their eye movements and everything else.

Jay: But as you were saying that first part, I was really nodding and my eyes were wide, because I agree, I hadn’t really thought of it that way. But, you’re right. I’m seeing many more of my colleagues saying, I don’t know how to do this. And to me, that’s a great modality for any educator, let me get this straight. I don’t want my colleagues to be experiencing as much stress as they’re experiencing right now. That’s horrible. And the amount of stress that faculty are feeling right now is unprecedented, and we haven’t even reached late August… classes have not even begun yet. It’s terrible. It’s really going to become an issue. But if there’s a way to be more, and I do have a suggestion about this, too… I know that myself as an educator, I only became good as a teacher when I stopped teaching the ways that I learned. And I stopped just thinking my job as a teacher is to tell people things I know, or to do all the things I’m already good at. Because those things work for me, necessarily means they’re not going to work for a broad cross section of people. Other learners are not going to be like me, I give this analogy a lot. But if you’ve ever lived with somebody else who’s writing towards a deadline… you know, has a big project that they’re working on, and you watch the way that they work… It’s so frustrating, right? You just want them to do it exactly the way that you would do it. And they’re not doing it that way. And you’re having to live with it and watch it and then they succeed, and it gets done. And you’re like, “oh, okay,” that’s an instructive experience, right? And in a classroom of 20 students… 25…40.. you’ve got a really wide variety of ways of getting to that goal and it’s unlikely that your way is going to work for the majority of students, it’s better to pool all the different ways and learn from them all than it is to expect students to do it exactly the way that you do. So if we’re all approaching this fall with an attitude of, “Oh, this is different, I’ve got different new things I need to learn,” I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that university administrators are acting like fall’s going to be normal. They’re in fact, promising students an exceptional experience… my own university President is and we can’t deliver that this fall. There could be so much stress alleviated if administrators could just say “Fall is going to be different. We’re not going to be able to do all the things that we’re usually able to do.” Once we get students back on campus and we can begin doing some of the things that we do around building community and a sense of belonging for students, then we can deliver that experience again. But, it doesn’t help anybody, incoming students, their families, instructors, staff, it doesn’t help anybody to act like we can deliver an excellent experience in the fall? And it would actually really help everybody if there was some kind of a statement that said, “Listen, it’s gonna be tough this fall. There’s so many things we can’t do that we do really well. We’re all going to be learning as we go.” So many instructors, this will be their first time being able to teach this way. And if we had that kind of a statement, at least this is my opinion, I think it would alleviate a lot of the stress the faculty and staff are feeling. And I think that students will, in the end, be happier. What I fear is going to happen is that students are paying full tuition in the fall, they’re going to come, they’re going to believe that they’re going to get something exceptional, and they’re going to be very disappointed and upset, and they will take that out on instructors and they’ll be upset, they’ll be asking for their money back. So a lot of it is about the message that we can send around the fall. I also think it’s okay to say, it’s in fact ethically required as educators, that we tell students that some of them shouldn’t come this fall. Some students should not be there. If you had a tough time with finishing high school online, don’t come to university in the fall, I think it’s completely okay to say that. If that was difficult for you, then delay, defer. A lot of universities are offering the students the ability to do that; that could be a good option for you. Parents should know that, students should know that, that that’s not a failure in any way, and it could be a good decision for you. I’m hopeful that we’re going to be able to support any students who decide to enroll in the fall, but it is going to be different. And the key is a lot of those supports that we have around counseling, around supporting students who are first-generation students, those things are not going to be there. And we build those things into our campuses… not enough of them… but we build them there. And there’s not a lot of foresight around how those things are going to be replicated online.

Rebecca: Yeah, the extreme amount of unknowns make everyone more anxious: faculty, students, and what have you. And I think, historically on campuses, there’s a tendency to keep both mental health and disability as things to keep close, and it’s an individual burden that we don’t share with others. People are sharing their stress. But if that stress is really becoming a mental health concern, people are being more quiet about that or keeping that inside. And it’s not a community discussion. But, I think that historically has happened to faculty, students, and staff in our institutions, because we don’t embrace the difference. We don’t embrace disability at all. So, how do you think this is impacting not just right now in this moment, but in general.

Jay: So, I’ll say a couple things about that. And I’ve had the opportunity to visit campuses and see some practices that really work. And this is really just talking about the accommodation model, which I’ve already said is necessary, but it’s just the beginning. Because it really is just accommodating each individual student, but the universities that do the accommodation model really well, they reach out to students very early. They give students the opportunity to understand what resources there are for them, and they give students the opportunity to begin setting up their accommodations, begin talking to people at Disability Services very early, like now. Lots of excellent universities. Give students the opportunity to visit campus and visit the disability services office now, instead of waiting until the classes begin, and the other practice that a lot of offices have is that they’re very liberal around documentation. If you don’t have a diagnosis now that’s okay. If you’re an undocumented student, and it’s difficult for you to get a diagnosis, that’s okay. We’d rather you have the accommodation. We don’t believe that anybody would go through all these hoops to fake it, not in the environment of higher education where admitting to having a disability is highly stigmatized. And that’s only logical. But, I fear some of those things will be more difficult to do. It will be more fraught and stigmatizing to disclose a disability when there’s not an office, when the contact that you have with instructors is minimal, and you can’t feel them out and understand where they’re coming from. Neal Fitzgerald has done this excellent research at the University of Wisconsin around how students negotiate disclosure and don’t disclose and students need the right to have a safe environment in which to sometimes not disclose, and a lot of those cues and the decisions and choices students make around that, they won’t be able to make. The research shows us the vast majority of students who get accommodations wait until their third or fourth year of university. They wait as long as they can. They wait until they reach a point of crisis. And that’s really unfortunate. And that’s why we lose a lot of students before they even seek help. We already said this is a generation of students for whom self-help seeking behaviors is lower year over year. And then around documentation… I think this is a bigger issue for everybody. Because Coronavirus is leading people to need to disclose illness and disability in new ways. And what it’s revealing is how poor the processes were for disclosing safely and protecting people’s privacy. The idea that a faculty member should disclose an illness to their chair or their Dean, those people are not capable of protecting privacy. But also those are the people who determine your career. They determine whether you’re going to get tenure. They determine your teaching schedule. They determine whether you’re going to get a course the next year if you’re a contingent faculty member. So if a policy is “Talk to your chair…” it’s not a policy. It doesn’t protect privacy. Often an accommodation will have to come out of the department budget. And so then you’re a cost, you’re automatically constructed as a cost. And there’s almost zero likelihood that you won’t experience discrimination, though, then people do not disclose. There’s another excellent study by Price and Kerschbaum. It’s a multi-authored study, but it interviews faculty members about their experiences. All administrators should read this study, because it’s the faculty members talking about how they negotiate getting the accommodations they need for a wide range of different disabilities. And what you realize is it’s a real minefield. The truth is the pandemic is leading universities to have to use those same policies around COVID. And so it’s going to impact a greater number of people. And the problem is the infrastructure was never there to protect people with those disclosures and with those policies. So, I hope that it leads to, in a kind of more universal, uniform way, having a proper system for doing that, especially for staff and faculty. Most universities have a pretty good system because it’s been tested by the law around student accommodations. But very few of those same institutions have anything really that’s very good for graduate students, or that’s very good for staff, that could do anything at all for contingent faculty. And that that’s not there for faculty members themselves either.

Rebecca: One of the interesting things about disclosures that are happening around COVID is disclosing about disability and mental health and things of family members and children and it extends beyond just the individual too.

Jay: Yeah, the truth is, every place needs a disability policy. And we need a caregiving policy. If we can push for those two things and if we can realize that those two things actually go together a lot of the time, that I think that that would go a long way to changing the culture around disability on campus. Because I think that we need to have policies for both and we don’t and this is going to expose the ways that we don’t. So, what happened instead is that we lose huge contributions from our community. And that’s how I always want to frame it. It’s not just inequity. It’s this huge loss of intellectual value and potential. Any money we spend on education is seen as an investment, except when we talk about disability, and then somehow it’s a cost. And it’s a cost we wish we didn’t have to bend. But everything we do is expensive… carpets and chairs… a university buys chairs for like $500 each, and they’re crappy chairs that are not even accessible chairs, and we spend 500 bucks each on them, right? [LAUGHTER] So, it’s not a cost, it’s an investment. And it’s a very small investment for a huge group of people that occupy all kinds of different roles in our academic communities. And we’re losing these folks simply because we haven’t created policies, we haven’t created protections that speak to the reality of life, which is we’ll all become disabled at some point in our lives. We’re all going to care for and love disabled people, whether we do now or in the future. That’s a reality, but academia acts like that can’t happen, and that it won’t happen. And it doesn’t match up with life.

Rebecca: We’ve talked a little bit about ways that decision making in higher ed right now is kind of impacting people with disabilities, specifically around accommodation issues, disclosure, and even just general mental health issues. Are there other ways that some of the ableism that’s built into these institutions is impacting people with disabilities that we haven’t talked about?

Jay: Sure. Research productivity, I think. This is the other thing. Who’s productive right now? Who’s able to continue their research agenda? There’s a kind of inverse relationship right now between the people who are able to continue producing research right now and the kind of research we need right now. We need to hear from disabled people for the reasons that we were just talking about. They already understand how issues of disclosure and changes in health over the course of a lifetime work in nuanced ways. They understand the problems in our healthcare system really well, from a critical position. They understand how we can use legal precedent to make changes that impact equity and diversity. Those are the biggest things in the news right now, those are really important things that disabled people should be involved in. And that, in general, the groups that have been discriminated against, we are realizing, are the groups who need to be in the room making the big decisions. But again, a kind of generalization, those are the folks right now with the largest load, emotionally… in terms of care. I run a journal. I’ve had very few submissions over the last four months from any female-identified researchers. Dudes are killing it. There’s been no slowdown, and you know what that looks like?

Rebecca: I’m experiencing it right now. I’m on sabbatical.

Jay: …a sabbatical probably where you had real plans around catching up or getting ahead on research. June, July, August…. I’m generalizing again, but for folks who have family responsibilities or caregiving responsibilities, that’s your time to get a little bit ahead. Or, more generally, for people who have a really heavy teaching load… contingent faculty who might be teaching 7, 8, 10, 12 classes a year… this is your time to try and get work done. Well, you’ve lost an entire year of research productivity from people, and universities are going to act like nothing’s changed. My own university is saying “No, faculty performance review will proceed just as it did, in the future” And so the system, the meritocracy, will keep on clicking, without any acknowledgement of the fact that people’s ability to take part in that has changed, and maybe has changed for a while. We don’t know how long this is going to change. But again, universities are the slowest to catch up. You look at the…. I know this because I have a colleague who brought me all this data,… the big 10 accounting firms in North America, they changed their performance review way back in March for female employees, because they already knew this is not going to be the year where it’s going to be fair. So, they built these mechanisms and they built an architecture for being able to acknowledge that this year is out the window and there are more important things then pushing that manuscript through right now. But, what supports can we put in place so that we get those contributions? Because it’s not enough to just say, “Okay, well, you won’t be hurt on your performance review.” As a bigger community, we’re going to lose the valuable insight and input of people who are not going to be able to have the space to have their research be part of the conversation moving forward. So, there should be granting, funding that targets that very issue, and we should be talking about it. That’s the other big thing for me is let’s talk about it. Let’s have leaders talk about the fact that the labor is not evenly distributed right now. And let’s talk about the fact that a lack of childcare, that employers should have some responsibility in understanding and extending what they do to childcare or to eldercare. Back to what I said earlier, we have to have policies around caregiving, too.

John: One thing we should note is that many institutions have at least introduced a pause in their review process, which delays people’s progression towards tenure, and so forth, but at least it partly equalizes this. It doesn’t provide resources, which is something that would be really helpful, but at least it mitigates the damage a little bit of the event. Now, how long that continues, though, is open to question.

Jay: Yeah. And a pause to somebody getting tenure is in an institution’s best interest. Let’s not kid about that. But I definitely think that that, especially the fact that a lot of universities were so quick to do that, should make us a little suspect. But I definitely think that a lot of people experienced that as at least a bit of an olive branch. It was a sense of like, “Okay, that’s good. At least I’m not coming up for review now.” But that extension is going to have its own impact. And some people will take that extension and other people won’t. And then the people who don’t take it, it’s possible, will be constructed as somehow lesser because they weren’t able to just power through this time. That’s the other thing, is we don’t have very equitable ways of implementing policies. And when the policy comes from admin, instead of consulting with the people who it affects, they often really miss, and so those pauses, I think some places people will be very hesitant to take them for fear that it marks them as lesser researchers or lesser producers than colleagues who don’t have to take them. So, I wouldn’t want to be an administrator right now. But, I just wish that the response was to expand the circle rather than to close it. And I’m not seeing that. From campus to campus, I’m not seeing that. I’ve had so many generalizations, but people who become leaders in higher ed, they don’t do that to deal with COVID. They were not prepared for this. They do it for other reasons, things that they’re very good at, that right now don’t matter as much. But the impulse then should be: “This is not why I got this job. I don’t have expertise in this. Who can I bring in? Who’s being most negatively impacted by this? How can I diversify the conversation? To diversify the group of people and the expertise around making these decisions?” It’s time for shared governance. We talk about that all the time. The institution and the kind of architecture we have for shared governance, it’s at least there… it’s been hollowed out a little bit… but now’s the time. The lack of foresight around what fall could actually look like is shocking to me. I give the example of my own university and my own university will be all online in the fall. But for quite a long time, the university was holding on to the idea that we’d have face-to-face classes. I believe they were holding on to it until the commitment date passed. So they could make it seem to students as though we would be on campus even though we might not be, so that students would choose the University of Waterloo and then we could share the news, which in itself is irresponsible. But, there was never any planning. So, the idea of face-to-face teaching was always out there. There was no plan to buy protective equipment. There was no plan around sterilization or sanitation. There were these strange plans where they asked people to like map out what a classroom would look like, and a regular lecture hall could fit like 12 students, and that didn’t matter because how are the students getting into and out of the classroom? How are they using elevators? How are they moving through stairways, where’s the extra staff? At a certain point I reached out to our staff association, they hadn’t even been contacted about hiring further people to work in the fall. So, the idealism of leaders is a problem right now. [LAUGHTER] Because what we need is realism, what we need is stress testing. What we need to hear from are the people who are going to be most negatively impacted, and those people aren’t at the table. So, that was my point, really, was expand the circle, get more expertise, don’t narrow things. And this is kind of a personal aside, but everything I’m seeing coming from universities is coming from presidents where they put their names on it, and it’s all about them and building their resumes and their image. And I actually think that that’s a real problem in higher education right now, that we know the faces and the personalities of university presidents far too much… that there becomes a way of marketing a university through its leaders that is unhealthy and takes away so much from the ways that we’re contingent on the labor and the risk of teaching that’s distributed really disproportionately.

John: At our institution, I became involved in this only after decisions about fall teaching had been made. And I was asked at a meeting, “How can we design a classroom so that it will work for a subset of students in the classroom and a subset of students at home and we can still use good teaching practices.” My suggestion was, “We make sure everyone has a computer, headphones, some sound isolation around them, so they can engage in active learning activities online with other students in the same classroom because they’re not going to be able to do many of them with physical distancing.” And basically, the question is, if we have to isolate students so that they can only interact over computer media with other students, why do we need to put people at risk in the classroom, the students and faculty and staff?

Jay: Yeah, most of the things that are worth doing in person are the things we can’t do. I wish we could. Don’t get me wrong, I really do wish we could. And I love teaching in fall. I love teaching first year students in fall, it’s my favorite thing to do. And I always love to teach the writing classes in fall that they don’t want to take. I’m a romantic about that. But the truth is all the things that I’m really quite good at, and the things that I would want to do with students in person, I can’t do. So, I have to find another way. And I do have some suggestions. I think I have some simple things to think about in fall. The one main thing for me is, and there are many good reasons why online teaching needs to be largely asynchronous. We need to know that students can’t all necessarily meet at the same time with us. And that’s tough because it’s really nice to have that connection. But to me, I’m pulling back on things like group discussions and lectures so that I can have one-on-one meetings with students. And I have the luxury of an open enough schedule that I feel like I can schedule enough one-on-one meetings with students that I should be able to meet with each student, if not every week, every other week, and everything else… all the other labor that I put in, I’m throwing out the window because I know how much time it’s gonna take to do that. But, I believe it’s really important, not just for learning in my class, but for the fact that these are first-year students in their first small classroom, all their other classes in Fall will be 300 student online classes. The other big thing for me is just repetition… …redundancy. One of the main principles of universal design is what they call positive redundancy. So having a discussion with a student is so great because they can generate captions and actually see what I’ve said. They can also record our conversation and go back and watch it later. When I’m delivering some content. I can have captions, I can have a transcript, I can have students in a Google doc, or a shared drive, taking shared notes. So what you end up having is like four or five different versions of one thing that can be accessed at a variety of different times, and based on the ways you want to access it. You can turn your video discussion into a podcast and they can listen to it when they go for a walk. So, that idea of just doing it more than once, doing it multiple times… which sounds laborious, but it’s not really… I think that’s one of the best things we can do in the fall. I think that personal connection is really important when we can find a way to do it. And then the final thing I think we should be thinking about is tone. So, to me, tone is going to matter so much in the fall, how we communicate with students, the time and care we put into making sure our messages are not overwhelming. They’re the right size, and that they understand that we’re trying to be friendly. So, I think a lot of the times when we communicate with one another, we’re taking out the things that make a message a sympathetic one. We don’t even know we’re doing it… and the sense of overwhelm…the way that I would put it to people is “How do you feel when you open up your email these days? And there’s four or five new emails in there? How do you feel when you open one of those emails and you realize you’re gonna have to scroll down, because it’s that long? How do you feel when the tone of that email, from the beginning, seems not understanding of how difficult it is going to be for you to do the things that you’re being asked to do in that email?” Everything piles up and the mental load that we take when we’re given new tasks right now… that demand avoidance that we have… is so much higher because we have so many more mental and true physical demands on our time and on our thinking. Yeah, I think those three things… So, that trying to prioritize, not as an extra, but as something where we’re willing to pull back on some other things to have a little bit more one-on-one time in contact with students. It gets back to what I was saying earlier about giving students the opportunity to let us know where they’re coming from in a safe way. If we don’t build in that contact, there’s no safe way to do that. We can’t assume that there is. The second piece is just repeating ourselves… redundancy… giving students the message many different ways through many different channels. Then also tone… so not overwhelming students with demands, I think is really important. And then I think the final thing for me is thinking about participation in a broader way. It’s not a classroom where students can put their hands up. And to be honest, I don’t really like that modality of participation anyway, because there’s only so many students who can speak. And students will find other ways to participate valuably if we open it up to them. So attendance is not going to be something we can grade and mark. Participation shouldn’t just be attendance, we can be more open about how we do that. And what I do is I have students determine and tell me all the different ways they’ve participated. And so they come up with some pretty interesting stuff, by putting that responsibility back onto them. So those are the kind of universally designed kind of tips for the fall. But, I’m sure listeners will have some of their own ideas. And I’m hoping that we have a different conversation moving into fall in part because we are, a lot of us, doing something we’ve not been asked to do before. And we do need to look for help from one another in ways we haven’t had to do that before. I hope that that becomes a kind of shared value moving forward. That’s something worth holding on to.

Rebecca: I think the opportunity of being a novice, although stressful, provides a lot of empathy. But also I think it’s bringing people together in a way that maybe we can sustain in the future, and it’s not just in this moment of crisis.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely.

John: We’re creatures of habit. One way we reduce our cognitive load is by doing things in the same way over and over again. COVID has forced us to change the way we’re doing things, and it’s making people a lot more open to considering new ways, perhaps improved ways, of doing things. So, I hate to talk about the silver lining of all this, but it does make us more open to exploring new ways of teaching that can make us more effective in teaching, not just now, but also once we get through this pandemic.

Rebecca: I was gonna recommend Jays wiki on universal design strategies, and also the PDF that’s included with the Universal Design: Places to Start essay because there’s a lot of great ideas that will work online in those resources.

Jay: Yeah, again, I don’t want people to feel overwhelmed, but it’s called “Places to Start,” because that’s the idea. This is a time to try out some new things that we then keep… that are worth keeping, and a lot of the universal design things, I think, we don’t realize until we use them, how valuable they are. It’s like a gateway drug. And then you want more. That’s a bad metaphor, but [LAUGHTER] you’re willing to try more once you see how effective it is to expand the different ways that students can take part in what we’re doing.

John: Tom Tobin was on the podcast recently, and he suggests that faculty start using a plus one strategy for introducing one new technique, one new way of engagement, and so forth. I think many faculty this fall are thinking more about a plus five or plus six approach, [LAUGHTER] which can be a little bit overwhelming.

Jay: It can be and I think it’s really important to find that balance. There’s no magical solution. But, the one thing that I do believe about universal design, as dangerous as the argument is, is that it is better teaching. It removes a barrier not just for students, but also for us, and can sometimes clarify what the real goal was behind what we’re doing. The goal wasn’t to make students struggle with an experience more stress, for example. The goal was to enrich the conversation by having everybody take part. I’ll give an example. I started teaching when online teaching was new. Like, I’ve been teaching for a long time, when it just had started to become popular to have message boards and to expand the classroom conversation then onto a message board. And a lot of people will remember that. But, I think for a lot of people, what they realized was the student who was kind of like surly and bad body language sitting in the back corner of the room, they actually had a fair amount to say on the message board, things that were valuable and important. And in the classroom, that wasn’t gonna happen. So good, then you stop relying on all the conversation to happen in the classroom, you realize some students need six or seven hours to think about what they want to say. And that just makes you a better teacher, it gets you to the goal, which is for everybody to be able to take part. And so maybe there will be some of that plus one that we see and that we retain coming out of this fall. And at the same time we want to fight so that administrators can’t say you’re online all the time, because we still do value and know the importance of in-person instruction as well… once it’s safe to do so.

Rebecca: I think of the other things you mentioned, Jay, without maybe realizing you mentioned it, was in some of your examples of what you’re planning to do for the fall, you’ve kind of invited students in, to participate in the construction of what that learning looks like by having them talk about participation. This is a really great time to invite folks to the table who haven’t been invited to the table to have those conversations. [LAUGHTER] If our classrooms are a complete land of experimentation this fall, we might as well just invite the students to have the conversation and be willing to be flexible. [LAUGHTER]

Jay: Yeah, right now I’m working with eight co-op students at Waterloo and their job is to help us prepare for teaching in the fall. Waterloo hired something like 300 co-op students who just couldn’t get jobs elsewhere. Waterloo stepped up and said, “We’ll hire you.” There’s a federal program that paid for part of it. So it wasn’t entirely the university paying for it. But the thing is, the students are really good at it. Let’s be okay with that. That, if we give students a little more responsibility and the ability to lead, they’ll probably have better ways to figure out how to structure something like a classroom conversation then like boring messageboard questions. So, I think, Rebecca, that’s going to be part of my approach is like “you show me what’s a good way for you all to collaborate together on something, or do peer review, or share your research or whatever.” Let them take the lead and then put it into the grading structure so that they get rewarded for being innovative and bringing to the table things that they’ve already developed that I haven’t. That’s not my expertise. That generation has skills in that area that I don’t have.

Rebecca: I think that’s a good place to wrap up. So, we always end by asking, what’s next? Dare I even ask? [LAUGHTER]

Jay: I’ll be honest, what’s next right now for me, in a literal way, is going back to fighting for getting more people at the table. I work with our Faculty Association. We’re going to have an issue with being able to staff and teach these classes in the fall, and we’re going to have issues with people being able to get through the 12 weeks of teaching. I know in the states that’s 16 weeks or longer. What supports needs to be there so that the pressure and the stress that’s being felt right now is just one piece of what’s going to be happening in September. And so, those of us who have roles where we can pressure the administration to begin thinking about what’s actually going to happen, that’s what I think is next. I’d like to have more time to prepare my own teaching too, but I am concerned about the stress that faculty are feeling. I think we’ve been careful throughout the discussion today to underline that, that that is what’s lying beneath a lot of this. And I don’t want the feeling to be that, in this podcast, we’re telling you have to learn 15 new ways of doing something, I hope that they’re experienced and understood as ways that can lessen some of the load and some of the stress. And I guess that would be my final thing. The things that I’m asking, or that I would suggest, should allow you to subtract some of the other things that are really laborious and stressful. It’s not about an additive approach where we have to do more and more and more, there have to be things that we’re able to pull back on too, and we have to be able to set realistic expectations about what fall is going to look like. I think that would be best for everybody.

Rebecca: A very healthy way of thinking about the fall. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you. We really enjoyed talking to you, and we’re really looking forward to sharing this with our listeners.

Jay: Me too.

Rebecca: Thank you so much.

Jay: Yeah, thanks. Enjoy your day and we’ll be in touch again.

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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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144. Pedagogies of Care: Evidence Based Practices

Posted in active learning, attention, backward design, edtech, engagement, evidence-based practices, feedback, higher education, learning, pedagogy, professional development, retrieval practice, spaced practice, teaching, universal design
July 15, 2020

This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, Dr. Michelle Miller joins us to discuss how the use of evidence-based teaching practices can be an effective way of demonstrating that you care about your students and their success.

Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Miller’s academic background is in cognitive psychology research interests include memory, attention, and student success in the early college career. Michelle is the author of Mind’s Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, and has written about evidence-based pedagogy in scholarly as well as general interest publications. She’s currently working on her newest book, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: What the Science of Memory Tells Us about Teaching, Learning, and Thriving in a Wired World, scheduled as part of the West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning, edited by Jim Lang. The tentative release date is 2021. She is also a contributor to the Pedagogies of Care project created by authors in this series.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, we discuss how the use of evidence-based teaching practices can be an effective way of demonstrating that you care about your students and their success.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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John: Our guest today is Dr. Michelle Miller. Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Miller’s academic background is in cognitive psychology research interests include memory, attention, and student success in the early college career. Michelle is the author of Mind’s Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, and has written about evidence-based pedagogy in scholarly as well as general interest publications. She’s currently working on her newest book, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: What the Science of Memory Tells Us about Teaching, Learning, and Thriving in a Wired World, scheduled as part of the West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning, edited by Jim Lang. The tentative release date is 2021. She is also a contributor to the Pedagogies of Care project created by authors in this series. Welcome back, Michelle.

Michelle: Hi. It’s great to be here.

Rebecca: Great to have you back. Today’s teas are:

Michelle: I am drinking fresh mint and hot water, which I think is my favorite summer tea of all when the mint is thriving all around here at the house.

Rebecca: Sounds nice and refreshing. How about you, John?

John: I’m drinking Tea Forte black currant tea.

Rebecca: And I’m drinking Scottish Afternoon. I haven’t quite run out of that yet.

John: We’ve invited you here to talk about your contribution to the Pedagogies of Care project and your forthcoming book. Could you start by talking about your contribution to the Pedagogies of Care project?

Michelle: Right towards the end of the spring semester for many of us, as you know, we in the teaching and learning community and professional development and scholarship of teaching and learning space, were in just vibrant discussion with one another, just talking each other through the experiences that we were having as part of the pivot to emergency remote instruction, which I think for most of us in higher education, that was a big part of what we did in March all the way through May of 2020. So we’d been talking about these and there’s this very vibrant group of authors that have come together under the West Virginia University Press’s project, as you mentioned, edited by Jim Lang. And so we had this group, which was already exchanging very rich sets of advice and ideas about where we were going and really talking about how to help. And so under the leadership of Tori Mondelli, who conceived of this whole project, and also Tom Tobin, who has also been a real leader as part of this group, we talked about how can we put together some resources that grow out of the work that we’re doing, that capitalize on some of the rich conversation and collaboration that’s already happening, and whatever format that takes, put that out there into the world, so that people can use that and there’s all different ways that it could be utilized. We’re not prescribing that but we really had envisioned something that was open, that was helpful, and that was really contextualized within this moment of real upheaval and crisis and new directions that many of us are involved in.

John: We’ve gotten some really good feedback. I shared that with the faculty at our campus just a few days ago and I got about a dozen responses within a couple of hours saying “These resources are really useful. Thanks for sharing.” We’ll include a link to that in the show notes. So, we went through this traumatic switch that was a bit of a struggle for everyone, students and faculty, what can we do now to better prepare for the fall?

Michelle: At the time that we’re recording this, we are, for me, about midway through the summer. So, it really is starting to get real, for many of us, what we are going to do in the fall. And we’re seeing more and more institutions who are firming up and starting to commit to real plans for what the format of instruction is going to be like, what enrollments are going to be like, and all those kind of locally specific pieces of information that are so important for determining what we’re going to be able to do. So, what can we do differently to better prepare for the fall semester? First of all, let’s honor that what the vast majority of faculty that I’ve talked to, what we accomplished in such a short space of time in spring, providing instructional continuity. This was amazing. I mean, we really enabled students who, in some cases, they were set to graduate, they were earning their degree in maybe a month or two, and we made it possible for them to get to that finish line through a tremendous amount of ingenuity and hard work on everybody’s part. So, let’s not sell ourselves short. That said, we are headed into a very different environment. And so what I’ve really suggested in some other things that I’ve written about and definitely in my Pedagogies of Care project is a focus on what does quality really look like? And for me, being a cognitive psychologist, social scientist, totally acknowledging that that’s my perspective… forr me that comes down to aligning with the best of what learning science has to offer. And the neat thing is that we are in an era right now when number one, we really have converged on a set of principles that are fairly non controversial, and if not always easy to implement, it’s fairly clear what we can be doing. And we have technologies, in some cases, that map onto them very well. They don’t do the work for us. But they can really help implement things and make things concrete that we’ve known in theory for a long time were very, very important. So, that’s one of the things that I think that we can focus on. So, there is that. I’ve also really emphasized the reevaluation that we won’t be able to simply do what we’ve always done. I think those of us who work in this space are always quite adamant that teaching, say online or teaching a hybrid course, is not a matter of just sort of capturing a lecture. If that were the case, this would be very, very straightforward. We should just lecture all summer, record it and post it, but that’s not what it’s really about. So, what I think that we can focus on as we do reevaluate, in our teaching, what are we trying to accomplish? We can step back and say, “Well, what do students want to get out of this?” And that I think can help us winnow down from all the things that we could potentially do. It will help us let go of some things that we will not be able to do. And help us find, if not an easy path forward, a more clear one that will allow us to serve our students and also take good care of ourselves during this time.

Rebecca: I think anything that helps us figure out what our priority can be, in terms of content or goals that we have for students, but then also methodologies that we’ll use and why, I think is key because I think we all need to scale back and be reasonable with ourselves because there is so much to accomplish if we want to do it perfectly. But we just don’t have that kind of time. You just said it was halfway through the summer and I almost had a panic attack.

Michelle: Right. Not that I’m counting but it is actually just about the midway through the summer. And you, know, when I started reflecting even more on this Pedagogies of Care concept, which is the kind of overarching ideal that we eventually rallied under as a group, it’s occurring to me that that applies to faculty as well. I mean, self care is a kind of a term that’s very cliched, and it gets kicked around, but I think that we also really do at this time need to be recognizing that, again, what we did, what we accomplished as faculty in the spring was tremendous, that it did require people working weeks and weeks and weeks, sometimes months without a break. And although summers are not really traditionally a break,or vacation for faculty in any conventional sense of the word, they are a time to recharge and for many of us were also taking care of research obligations and other things that went completely by the wayside for a while out of necessity. So we really do have to balance that too. What’s the degree of faculty burnout at this point? What’s the degree of faculty receptivity to brand new things. So, the things that we are looking at also need to be kind to ourselves. We need really good communication and collaboration more than ever before, I think, in university communities. I think that’s really also the thing that’s going to make this fall successful, is being able to recognize what faculty have been through and work with that. So yeah, I think that we should recognize this effort. And with that, I also think that evidence-based teaching, incorporating learning science and those principles… that ideally shouldn’t be yet another thing on the to-do list. I think that if that’s the way it’s coming across, then we’re going about it the wrong way. I mean, to me, frameworks are always a way to simplify. Again, we have this infinite landscape of things that we could do in any given class, all these different decisions to make and choices. We do have a framework for whether it’s learning principles or another framework… that should help and simplify. So I think it kind of fits in that big landscape of possibilities as well. That’s how I see it. It should help; it shouldn’t add to what’s becoming a pretty serious burden for faculty.

John: One of the things I’ve really liked in your discussion, as an economist, is you sounded at times, like an economist, when you were describing that, in terms of this is the most efficient way of helping students reach their goals… that if we use evidence-based methods of teaching, we can let students learn skills more efficiently without wasting as much time and getting closer to that point, making it a form of caring, I think, as you referred to it. That one way of demonstrating your care for students is by using techniques that are more efficient, that provide the largest return on students’ time… there’s the economics part coming in. So I really appreciated that. And I thought it was a really good argument that we tried to emphasize ourselves in our workshops.

Michelle: Oh, thank you. And you said it better than I possibly could have as a non-economist, but that’s exactly the core of that idea, that it is kind to students and perhaps it’s kind to faculty as well. We can pre-select some of these avenues and techniques that, if you’ve got an hour to study (and for many of our students, that hour of study might be fractured and jammed in among all kinds of caregiving tasks) that you’re going to get more from that. If, as a faculty member, you’ve got four hours that you can devote today to preparing for the fall… and as well, that’s going to be divided up among other tasks among your caregiving responsibilities… how can we cut to the chase for faculty so that they can make those choices? So I’m glad that that comes across.

Rebecca: I think it’s important when we are planning for the fall that we are getting down to those essential elements. Can you talk us through some of the steps that faculty might take to focus in on those essential items and the evidence-based practices so they can have a good framework moving forward, not just for the fall when they might be teaching remotely, and that’s what they’re not familiar with, but all the time?

Michelle: Coming down to essentials, and here too, I think, that that has really resonated with many faculty and also with instructional designers and others tasked with making all of this work. That’s what’s really resonated, like what are some of the essentials, and I’ll never claim to be able to I Identify the complete and exhaustive list of exactly what to do. But here’s what comes to my mind. I think that perhaps returning even to those learning objectives, which we may have put in a syllabus long ago, and they can be sometimes kind of abstract, but coming back to those and saying, alright, what does it really look like when students have achieved these? Are there any that need to be perhaps modified, or dropped altogether? So if we are going to have a semester of really focusing on essentials, this might be a good time to do that. Naturally, we will want to think about the content. And oftentimes we talk about in pedagogy and developing pedagogy, we talk about re-focusing away from just coverage of content, that’s something that a lot of us get behind. And it’s okay to be thinking about well what content is going to be in the course. But then really pivoting to look at what’s the engagement with that content? How are the students going to engage with the content and how are they going to engage with you? So that’s a piece of it, asking yourself that question. And I think then, starting to bring in those really concrete logistics. Now, again, typically those of us who talk about pedagogy a lot, we kind of discourage people from talking about very specific tools or technologies, until they’re really, really clear on some of those high-flown ideals of what they and their students want to get out of the course. But I think in this case, we probably want to hold off on th.t, we are going to have to say, “Well, are you going to be expected to teach online but synchronously? And if you want an example of that, the Zoom meetings, which we’re all pretty familiar with, at this point, where we’re in at the same time, but maybe you’re in a different place? So is that going to be a part of what you do with students? Because that is pretty new to many of us. And if so, there’s certain considerations you’re gonna have to have in mind say, ‘Well, how is that going to work?’” Especially, if you’re expected to also be teaching say, a face-to-face course at the same exact time, which I think is going to present challenges. And I think for many of us, it’s going to depend on your local institutional context, but I think you can’t go wrong right now with setting up a robust online component to your course. I think that with the level of uncertainty we have, or even with individual students… if they’re going to need to say quarantine or take care of an ill relative or something like that… having some asynchronous, so different time activities and materials online, is going to be essential. So I think taking those concerns and saying, “Alright, what is this physically going to look like?” I wouldn’t typically push that as much but I think that that’s important now. And I think in the preparation for this, too, another kind of bare essential point that I talk about in my resource for our project is media creation. So in some cases, people are going to want to create, say, a set of videos, or let’s say they’re demonstrating a process. Let’s say they’re teaching studio art. They might want to have some pretty involved videos or other kinds of demonstrations, or perhaps there’s not good written material out there that might replace a series of face-to-face lectures. Maybe they’re going to be wanting to write a fair amount of content or maybe record, even, podcast-style materials. That stuff eats up a lot of time. So I think really being real about what you absolutely need to do in that department and getting started now, that’s sort of the wisdom of experience that I would share with folks as well.

Rebecca: I think that’s really good advice, Michelle. As I’m thinking towards the fall, I made a list of “this is absolutely essential… if I don’t have this content made, we’re screwed if we’re online,” versus like, “this stuff does exist out there that I could use…if maybe isn’t my favorite.” And then there’s well established stuff that’s fine or whatever. Because it does take a lot of time to write, produce and plan some of that stuff… even if you’re using methods that aren’t burdensome, where you’re not worried about production quality and those kinds of details. It still takes time. You need quiet space. There’s a lot of constraints, especially if you’re like me and you have kids at home. [LAUGHTER] You got to find the quiet time to record the thing. [LAUGHTER] So I appreciate the balance there… really thinking logistically a little bit. Because if you have a finite amount of time, then you have to prioritize what can get done ahead of time.

Michelle: Right. And you know, it may not be the way to go. And I though I’d share with you an experience that I had, well, right in the thick of the great pivot, the transition to remote instruction. I was talking to a faculty member who does happen to teach studio art. They teach drawing and painting in a small-class atmosphere, a very intimate atmosphere that’s very hands on… and not somebody who works at my institution. I happen to know them. And she called me up partway through the great pivot week and was distraught. She was really on the verge of tears. And she was saying, “Well, this goes live next week, I need to somehow carry my course forward, my studio art course. And I just learned that my colleague, the guy down the hall, what he’s doing is he’s got these videos that come down from the ceiling, and then we have these close ups on drawing and these techniques and he’s doing all this. I can’t do this. I’m a single parent. I’m at home. I’m overwhelmed. I don’t know what to do.” And I said “Alright, it doesn’t have to look like that. Your colleague may be doing that. It doesn’t have to look like that.” And I said alright, what is working in your course? That’s another thing you can use to kind of cut to those essentials. So what is the strongest thing? What do your students need right now?” She said “Well, they’re absolutely overwhelmed and I think they need a lot of support.” And “Well, is there any kind of social peer-to-peer support?” And she said “Oh, well, we have since the beginning of the semester, I put them into these pods of three. And so they’ve been developing these social structures where they consult with each other every week. And so they have ways of communicating with each other in these pre-existing social groups. Do you think that could be useful? And I said “Yes, go with that.” So what your course is accomplishing really well right now is setting an atmosphere where students are talking to each other and I said, “Well, maybe you can kind of divide and conquer. You can hand off this project to where students are critiquing each other’s work in these groups. So, definitely kind of double down on that arrangement that you’ve already put into place. Your colleague down the hall, maybe multimedia is his thing and this is easy for him. But he may be struggling to say how do we get students to socially support each other form connections and feel connected to the class, even though it’s now in a remote format.” To me, that’s something to really capitalize on. So I took away a lot from that and I’ll be reflecting a lot on that as well. Your “solution” to the challenges we face is going to look different and it really should go with whatever is strongest for you. I think as academics, we kind of say, “Well, if it’s easy, that must be the wrong way to go about things.” But sometimes the path of least resistance maps well and aligns well onto what your strengths happened to be and what your students needs are.

John: Going back to that point, though, about creating media. If you create materials for an online format, you can always use that to support face-to-face if by some miracle things return to some sense of normalcy, it’s probably not going to, but that material will still be there and will be useful. So, a focus on that, I think, is really helpful. And that’s what we’ve been strongly advocating for our faculty as well.

Rebecca: Just as long as you don’t have specific deadlines… don’t put deadlines, dates or anything like that in them.

Michelle: Right? See, that’s just a practice that is so important to create reusable media. And it’s a seemingly small thing, but until you really get into this and get practice, you don’t realize how important that is… that yeah, if you are going to sink the time into that, make it reusable. And that’s an important point for reusability.

John: And going back there, I’d like to once again, we’ve done this many times, recommend Karen Costa’s book on 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Videos. It’s a really nice resource. And it does focus on keeping it simple. Don’t do the fancy transitions. Don’t do something where a half an hour video is going to take you 30 hours of production time. Keep it so that it’s easy for you so that you can keep doing it without imposing a burden that’s going to make you stop doing this.

Michelle: Absolutely. And I’m so glad for that recommendation. I went out and got the book myself. I think I’m on Tip Number 80 as of this morning, so I’m almost there and I’m finding these wonderful… everything from very specific guidelines to much more conceptual things about why you want video in a course to begin with. So yeah, I’m with you on that. It’s definitely worth a read and definitely this summer. But maybe also, to kind of put this into a different focus as well with the focus on creating media and doing so purposefully in a way that is sustainable, let’s not lose sight of the active learning component. So that’s something that I’ve really kind of watched with some concern and definitely some interest as this conversation evolves. So active learning at this point, I mean, people sometimes perceive it as a buzzword, but it is such a robust concept. And I think it’s easy, at a point where we are kind of saying, “Well, how can we make all this work in some different formats” to lose sight of that. And so we may be creating wonderful videos, instructional videos, or all kinds of things and just merrily perking along with that, but we do need to remember how are students interacting with it, which is why a beautiful film of somebody demonstrating a drawing technique might, in some context, not even be as valuable as somebody who’s having students talk to each other because of that engagement. So I think that too, this is going to be so critical as we see more schools pushing for things like recordings of lectures, or even synchronously bringing students in during a live session you’re having with other students, I think that we do need to remind people who are in charge of these things, that education is just never something you watch, it is something that you do. So it is really tempting to say, let’s record everything we can, that’ll be equivalent, but active learning is not a luxury that we can just put on hold for a while. It really isn’t. And so I’m hoping that we don’t see that happen. I think there’s a very similar story that’s going on with Universal Design for Learning. Another concept I know you’ve engaged with so much on this podcast and is so important. And I think you’re too, it’s easy to say, “Well, you know, given all this going on, maybe we won’t have multiple ways of engaging with these great media that we’re creating, or maybe we’re going to kind of shut down this avenue over here for a little while.” And I really hope that doesn’t happen. So that’s another aspect of this balance between the quality and ambitiousness of what we’re doing and the feasibility and protecting ourselves as we face another very challenging semester.

Rebecca: I think that’s a really good reminder about focusing on the learning as the essential element as opposed to the teaching. It’s really about setting up the framework and the possibilities for students to learn, and designing those activities and making sure that we’re spending the time on that, rather than all the time on just delivering something.

John: But having those videos can free up time so that if you do meet synchronously, you can engage in more active learning activities rather than just lecturing to students online, which is probably one of the worst ways of structuring synchronous meetings. And if you really want to do a little bit more work, you could use something like PlayPosit where you embed questions in the middle of a video that could be somewhat open ended and that you could even grade. If you happen to have an institutional license you can embed it directly in your LMS. So the videos themselves can be made, with a bit of work, a little more interactive, and they can serve as a replacement for lecture that allows for more active learning, I think.

Michelle: Absolutely, and I too. I’ve seen some wonderful examples in practice of that technology, and there’s a couple of different ways to do this. So there’s multiple tools that allow you to put a retrieval practice or comprehension questions somewhere in the midst of this online lecture, presentation or video and what better way to help ensure that students are attentive to them, to give yourself some opportunities on the other end to say what’s the actual level of comprehension that’s going on out there. And for students to really solidify and practice the material. That’s all bedrock learning science stuff, right? Retrieval, active practice, and so on. And it just takes a little bit of ingenuity to take that one extra step to say, alright, what’s the level of interactivity here. And that’s something that I hear too, from faculty, it’s quite reasonable. They have taught purely face-to-face and don’t have that level of first-hand experience with something like online teaching. It’s just like, “Well, how do I know what’s going on out there?” And, again, there’s not a technology that’s going to just magically replace the experience of looking at the sea of faces that we experience in a face-to-face class. But think about it. That’s one way to do it. Having something like an online gamified quiz, like Kahoot!, which is currently my favorite quizzing app that’s out there. I ran this just the other day quite successfully in a remote synchronous environment. So, there are two that could help give you that information right away about what concepts are they struggling with. And having other ways of reaching out to students, if not talking to them individually in something like a meeting, a phone call, or even a text chat, having some other ways to kind of figure out on the ground what’s the mood level of the course? How are we feeling about things and are there individual students who are struggling for one reason or another who we can reach out to?

John: One way in which I saw interactive videos being used was several years ago, I took a MOOC on behavioral economics that Dan Ariely had put together and he’d often discuss experiments, but he set up the experiment and describe what the experiment did. But then the video pauses, and you’re asked to predict what the outcome would be. And that type of prediction is a really useful evidence-based technique that you can even do with videos if you can embed the questions in the middle of them. And I thought that was really useful. And it’s something I’m going to be trying to do a bit this fall. But in terms of evidence-based learning, could you talk a little bit about some of the main principles that people should be using to design their fall classes? What should people be focusing on?

Michelle: So, when I talk about bringing down just a vast literature of learning science and I’m going to necessarily boil this down to what I think are my favorites and the most applicable… So, of course, retrieval practice,I think if there’s one success story that our field has had, I mean it goes back even over 20 years that we got the data, determined how this principle works and started flowing it out to practitioners in the field, it’s this one. So that is, of course, the principle that when we actively pull something out of memory, it increases our ability to remember it in the future. And of course, we’d naturally think of tests, exams, and assessments as the avenue for this, but there’s lots of other ways that it can take place. So I always love to direct people to the website retrievalpractice.org. I’m not affiliated with it, but I think they have a wonderful compendium of ideas for how to bring this into classrooms at all different levels, all different disciplines, and so on. So if you don’t have retrieval practice, quizzing, students actively talking about what they remember, great time to bring that in. So you can’t go wrong with retrieval practice. Then, of course, the principle of what’s the timing of your study. So, spaced study, and pretty much by any measure, when we spread out student engagement with material… again, whether it’s through quizzing or solving problems, you name it, you’re going to get more out of that… efficiency… when it is spread over time. And I think that this is one of the real unsung benefits of online and technology assisted learning, even among people who are saying, “Oh, I’m just using the basic learning management shell to organize some materials and students turn their stuff in online. I mean, let’s not sell that short for how powerful that is, for being able to stagger deadlines, change the timing of when we are getting students to be working on different aspects of the course and so on. So while we don’t necessarily always want to bombard students with deadline after deadline, we do have to be mindful and help them kind of organize multiple deadlines. This is something that we could definitely build in as a design principle. So just to be very blunt about it, we always discourage people from the two midterms and a final course design. That’s something that a lot of us have experienced. It could work of course, like that can be fine. But from a memory and learning standpoint, that’s really not ideal. We want students engaging quite frequently. And then the practice… so the practice of this skill. So that advice, bring that up again, about it’s not all about content coverage. It’s about practicing the application of the content knowledge that they’re getting. We can almost always stand to build in more of these, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a course where I’ve said, “You know, you really need to present more content to the students. Don’t have them solving problems so often…” I have never seen that in practice, I will just go on the record and say that. So, if we want students to be doing X,Y, and Z. And again, go back to the front page of your syllabus and remind yourself what you’re hoping they’d be able to do at the end of the course. We want them to do that, what are the opportunities for them to actually try, and try in small bites? In my contribution to the Pedagogies of Care project, I give a very brief example of this in my own courses. So one of the things you have to do… bread and butter skills as a psychologist… is you have to be able to look at a psychology research study and kind of break down the structure of it. So no matter what’s being studied, there’s probably… we call them independent variables and dependent variables. So, things that are being manipulated, things that are being measured, and students have to develop that as a thinking skill and it’s really not easy. So I will oftentimes have them in, say a research methods course, very frequently, as part of whatever we happen to be doing, I’ll say, “Okay, here’s a really short description of a study. Maybe it’s an abstract or just a description, you pull out from me, before we talk about anything else about this study, you tell me, what are the independent variables? What are the dependent variables?” So it’s something that traditionally we’d always put on an exam. But, we didn’t always have students repeatedly practicing. So knowing that students absolutely had to master this before they got out of my research methods course. That’s what I did. So practice, and that kind of segues back into that active learning principle, which…yeah, you cannot go wrong with students getting involved. Once again, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a course where I said “You, the professor, need to get out there front and center, don’t emphasize the students so much.” So, they need to be doing the thinking, the practicing, and quite frankly, the work. That’s where the benefits come from. So with those: the retrieval practice, spaced study, practice of higher-order thinking skills, and a real active learning orientation, I think that that’s something you can take to the bank as a faculty member. You could build on that, but if you start with those, you’re probably going down the right path.

John: And I remember reading this really good book that talked about how using computer mediated instruction or using the tools within the LMS allows you to provide students with lots of feedback and lots of retrieval practice without necessarily increasing the burden on you, as the instructor. I think that book was called Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah. I feel like I might know that author, I’m not sure.

Michelle: Yes. [LAUGHTER] And thank you very much. That’s what I was trying to go for. So, thank you. It is wonderful that people are finding many of those points really relevant right now. So, yes, thank you so much for pointing that out. I think it’s great. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I think one thing that I’ve been thinking about in terms of having more remote time then maybe in-person time is that I often provide a lot of structured activities around retrieval practice and spaced practice in my face-to-face class and if students are working more independently when they’re working remotely, I’m not there to [LAUGHTER] facilitate it synchronously, that structure needs to really be in place, maybe even more so than when you’re in face-to-face class, that they have that structure and that they know they should be doing those things on a regular basis. Of course, we should be reminding them to do these things on their own as well. But, I think focusing a little bit more on having that structure or those reminders in our courses, when they might be remote is actually really, really imperative,

Michelle: Right? And those are learning skills and abilities and principles that are going to serve our students well, no matter what they study or what they may do after they leave a course. And it’s kind of neat. There’s some indication from the research literature that particularly for students who come in who are not from advantaged backgrounds, that when they’re exposed to courses, which as you say, they remind them, “Okay, do this kind of practice. Here’s what you should be doing. Here’s why you should be doing that” …that benefit really does extend not just into that course, but into future ones because students can pick these things up on their own. So, if we do really want to be thinking about how can we set our students up for success no matter what the future holds, I think that’s a pretty high ideal that we can work towards. So yet another reason to incorporate these powerful practices and perhaps, yeah, to talk about how students can adopt them, no matter what.

John: For those faculty who are struggling to prepare their courses, what are some heuristics they could be using in terms of focusing their time where it would give the most benefit.

Michelle: This is something that has definitely been on my mind, both for my own preparation and to share with others. So heuristics, shortcuts, and helpful hints and approaches. So, I talked earlier about looking at what you consider to be your strongest points as an instructor and kind of the highlights of the course… the things that you know, are memorable, that advance learning that you feel really strong and competent with, with the caveat that, yeah, we do want to make sure that those do align with student learning. I think that that’s a great place to start. Say: “Okay, what’s the great parts of my course? Forget about what anybody else is doing. What do I really want to use?” And putting those front and center. If you have a short activity that’s working great, maybe that’s something that could be done every week, or somehow extend it. But the flip side of that is this, and this is another that I didn’t invent this… This is something you’ll see repeated time and again, in teaching advice, which is the pinchpoint heuristic, flipping it around and saying, “Oh my gosh, if there is one thing that students are struggling with conceptually, or it’s something that I know they should be doing, and they don’t do it to the level that they need to,” that you focus your efforts, kind of train your sights on that piece of it. Especially in the discipline. I teach, psychology. I mean, there’s so many fun things we could talk about with psychology, and it’s easy to kind of spend a whole lot of time and effort shooting the videos or setting up the learning activities online and making a quiz that’s about something that’s just cool to learn about. But that can’t squeeze out “Oh my gosh, everybody gets unconditioned stimulus and conditioned stimulus wrong and they do it every single year, and I know it’s going to happen.” So I need to be pulling out those things. You know what, if I’m going to spend the hours on a video or an extra module or creating an interactive quiz with multimedia, spend the time on the places where students are struggling. People who work with UDL, also talk about, “Well, here’s where you want to be especially conscientious to ensure that you do have the multiple means of representation and expression is around these areas that are really, really tough for students.” So what’s working great, where’s the point where you just say, if I could wave a wand and make one thing happen, that’s what I would do. So really looking at those two tracks. So that’s one heuristic. I think, as well, I’ll share with you something that I’m working on for my own courses… big caveat, that this is my courses. I will probably not be teaching a very large set of classes just because of the vagaries of course assignments. So I know I have that a little bit easier. But, here’s what I’m going to do as a framework. I’m kind of thinking of splitting it up so each week, students have a set of kind of general categories that they have to meet, they have to do some type of work or meet some kind of expectations in that area. So, I might, for example, have a column that corresponds to engaging with classmates about the topics for the week, and then a set of options for that week. So maybe you came to a face-to-face class, maybe you participated in an online discussion. And maybe there’s even a third option that I haven’t thought about yet. So just to really simplify things, I say, “Okay, check off in that area, what’s another column or category that you have to participate in, you have to do some type of demonstrating mastery of material” or I’m not quite sure what I’ll call it yet, but that could correspond to taking a quiz or maybe playing a Kahoot! in class or playing a Kahoot! remotely online. And I’ll probably also have a column that constitutes working towards whatever the term project is, and I’ll give them a set of choices again of what that term project can be like. But I am a very big believer in if you’re going to have a big project that there’s lots and lots of formative steps to that. So I tend to take that to extremes. And every week or so, students are doing something to show that they are moving towards and making progress in that area. So it is still a little bit general around the edges. But, to me, that really helped me feel like I had a handle on how am I going to manage choices? How am I going to manage multiple formats, and manage uncertainty with that focus on the purpose? Why do we have this do this week? Well, because it falls into these different categories, all of which are important for your learning in this class. So, those are a couple of the shortcuts that I would share.

John: One of the other things you talked about in your contribution to the Pedagogies of Care is the importance of getting help when you need it or where you need it. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Michelle: So this whole idea of getting help, I mean, it’s very simple on the face of it. I’m a faculty member, I want to do this thing in my class. I don’t know how… I call somebody… magic happens. And in reality, in higher education, what I’ve seen over and over at different institutions is that that is not a direct path at all between support, assistance, and collaboration, and the faculty member and the time and place when they need that. And so I think that this is going to be an issue that, if it’s not on people’s minds now, in leadership and pedagogy circles, if it’s not on their minds, now, it will be in six months to a year, I think that this is going to be one of the differences between institutions that make it through this fall in good shape and those that really struggle is what are those processes? So for faculty members, I’m really encouraging them to say, “Alright, where are the points, in this process, where you could get some kind of assistance that either you invest some time and you get the capacity to do something very efficiently in the future, say, like a workshop on how to do sustainable videos, or how do you actually find somebody to share the load? …actually delegate some of the work? For faculty, they should be reflecting on that, but at that point, that’s where things are going to get complicated depending on what the systems are in place at their institutions. So first of all, I think that institutions don’t always, and faculty ourselves, we don’t always make that distinction. When I say I want help, do I mean, I want you to point me to a great website or a book I can read? Do you want me to spend half a week coming to a workshop series? Or are you going to get in there and say, “Okay, you have the content, I can build these quizzes, you have a script for what you want to do for a complex video, I can shoot that for you, caption it, and put it online.” So what kind of help are we talking about here? And then figuring out how do you approach your institution to do that? So I’ve just really been continually surprised as I do visit different institutions. I mean, almost universally there are these amazing instructional designers and other people who just devote their professional lives to teaching and learning. They’re up on all the new technology. They know what was the great new video editing software that just came out last week? You know, they’re the ones who have that. And oftentimes there’s a disconnect there. People don’t know how, they feel inhibited, or maybe they’ve been actively inhibited. Some institutions, they say, “Well, there’s a process, and we’re going to put a lot of strings on how we’re going to divvy up these resources.” Others actually discourage instructional design and similar staff from even talking to faculty. And there’s a little kind of social piece to it as well, I think, just because we haven’t yet fully incorporated this into what we do… that it’s almost like, well, who makes the first move? If I’m an instructional designer and I know, here’s these courses over here that I could be helpful with, you know, just email people out of the blue… and likewise, faculty, they say, well, should I call the support line for this more complex project that I need help with or not? So I think that institutions will hopefully be sorting that out, but presuming that there isn’t a giant revolution in how we have collaboration between instructional designers and faculty, being aware of that and at least having something very clear in your mind for what you’re asking for, the worst that can happen usually is that somebody says no, but to have any chance you at least have to know what specifically do you want.

Rebecca: I think knowing that’s really helpful too. Because if you start talking to faculty, for example, in other disciplines, they might have a similar goal or they need similar structure in place, you could actually work with those faculty to put the structure in place and share the structure, swap out the content or whatever too. Sometimes we don’t think about those kinds of collaboration.

Michelle: Right, and what you’re describing, that’s something that is kind of non-traditional and new. We come into this with a very strong tradition of “my class is my class” and a kind of an ethos as academics that you do things the hard way, and you do them by yourself. But maybe this can be an impetus for us to really be getting creative with swapping, even things like a syllabus. You say, “Well, you know, maybe the way that I’ve gone about this, you can actually springboard this even if it is, as you said, in a different discipline.” Maybe we’ll even see faculty putting together some more unconventional team teaching arrangements. Traditionally, we know a team teaching is we’ve we’re experts in the same subject. And we’re going to create this class that sort of articulates, or we’re going to pass it back and forth. But maybe I should be collaborating with somebody from another area of psychology. Do they have to be in my sub discipline to just come in and say, help me with discussion forums, if I’m not very good at that, and then I can come into their class and help them with synchronous video, if they need help with that. Maybe if we have to, we will do it that way. So if that comes out of all of this, I think that would be a great benefit. And I want to say I have been really hesitant and cautious about engaging in this narrative of the silver linings and “Oh, isn’t this a wonderful experience? We’ll learn all these new methodologies of teaching will come out of this and we’ll all love online teaching and be fluent with it.” I don’t think that that’s an appropriate message for faculty right now. I think we do need to recognize that this has been somewhere between disruptive and catastrophic for most of us career wise, and not imply that we should all just constantly be thrilled to be learning new things. There are so many new things that we could be learning right now. But fall is coming. And we only have so much time. So I do want to put that out there, and that’s something that I think is an important thread that needs to be, and I hope it will be, talked about more as the dialogue unfolds. But even without saying, “Hey, this is a great time to do new things,” we can recognize that there will be innovation that happens, and it’s already happened. We’ve seen it happen.

John: And while this may not be a silver lining, I know in our teaching center, we’ve seen a lot of faculty who I didn’t even know existed on our campus, because as Jessamyn Neuhaus has talked about, people have broken down some of those barriers where they think they have to do everything themselves, and they’re more willing to request help when they desperately need help in ways that they weren’t willing to do before.

Michelle: Absolutely. I think that Jessamyn Neuhaus has been such a clear and fresh voice on some of these development issues. She’s absolutely right. She talks about it in her own style, which is totally unique to her, but it really gets it across, that we’re Professor SmartyPants, and we are not used to collaborating, working together, or just saying, “I don’t know.” So I guess we can also say, even if we don’t formally work in a teaching and learning center, if there’s something that you know, that your colleague does not, and you can help with, get out there, volunteer it, and let’s all really do this in perhaps a new spirit, where it’s not all just about, “Well, here’s what I know and you don’t know it, and I’m gonna feel uncomfortable coming in,” let’s have a real reset in terms of really open sharing. It’s not about playing the game of who knows more, or who figured out the latest thing. It’s really about serving the students and doing so in a way that we can sustain what promises to be a pretty challenging semester.

Rebecca: These have all been really great tips and things to think about as we move towards the fall, as the fall moves towards us… maybe that’s a better way of thinking about it. [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: I think that’s a frighteningly accurate turn of phrase there. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I want to make sure that we get to talk a little bit about your new book, though, can you share a little sneak preview?

Michelle: Oh, sure. And this book, of course, well predates the era that we’re in. But it’s been something that I’ve wanted to write about for a very long time. And then when I was able to make the connection to James Lang and to his series, I think it was really meant to be. So, it is about memory and technology. So, much has been written in the popular press, and a little bit in the scholarly press as well, about cognitive processes and how those change or not in the presence of technology and with a frame for teachers, of course, so those of us who want to make up even just very specific policies, like should I allow note taking in class on laptops or not, to people who are really interested in this broader sense of teaching and learning in our contemporary era. So what I’ll be talking about in the book are issues such as well, first of all, what do we need to know about how memory works in the first place as a teacher or a person who is really into learning. So what do we now know about how memory works and how it can be improved? I also talk about why anybody should even care about memory, because that’s one of the angles of technology as well… this question of “Well, do you really need to know anything in the age of Google?” And there are people on both ends of that spectrum… probably no surprise that I come in somewhere in the middle of saying, on the one hand, it’s really important to be able to find information when you need it. And yes, we absolutely should be de-emphasizing memorization for its own sake. However, we also know from current research that memory in a subject area helps us think in that area. So there’ll be something for everybody in that section of the book as well. And then we will talk about what is the effect of having something like a smartphone, always at our fingertips? Does that create any kind of global change in memory? Does it change our memory for specific things that we might be doing or thinking about what we’re using that technology? And how, again, can we turn this to our advantage as lifelong learners ourselves and also for our students. Now, of course, you can’t talk about any of this without talking about attention itself. And so while it’s not a book about attention and distraction, per se, we’ll talk about “Alright, well, what’s the flip side of that?” And so how, basically, can we take all the advantages that technology has to offer for building memory and de-emphasize all the things that it does to offset and degrade our memories, and come out of this with the best of both worlds? I will get into a little bit at the end of the book as well into some of these bigger questions of how is memory itself changed when we live in a technological era when so much of our lives are recorded? And what does that say about things like generational differences, or what memory might look like decades from now? So I’m absolutely loving exploring all those themes, and I think they’ll be interesting for anybody who’s in the arena of teaching and learning but also with a lot of practical tips about again, how we can reap all the benefits that technology can offer for memory and for learning.

Rebecca: You’ll have a lot of disappointed listeners to know that that doesn’t come out until 2021. Right?

Michelle: Good things take time. And yes, we will see. It is a work in progress. And although we definitely have all the themes and all the ideas nailed down, it’s something I’m working on as we speak. So that’s part of why I’m so excited about the project. But yes, I got to finish it first.

Rebecca: We’re definitely excited for it to come. We always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Michelle: I am, as many of your listeners probably are, when this comes out, absolutely in the thick of redesigning my own courses for fall. Without getting into too many of the specifics, my institution has kind of laid out a set of parameters that they want us to meet. And so I’ll be re-envisioning my courses and to practice what I preach. I’m going to try to flow that out as much as possible to my colleagues, both locally in my own department, my own college, at my institution, and also nationally. So I’m kind of looking at some different ways that I can continue to engage people in this and share out what I’m learning as we go along. And I’m also pretty excited to be preparing some even more in-depth materials for some institutions who are looking for help in exactly this type of thing, how to get faculty interested in this whole topic of flexible teaching, some specific techniques that are useful for what I’ll call flexible teaching, key resources, things to do and not to do, and so on. So I’m excited to be coming back at it on all cylinders in the fall, and looking forward to engaging students in all the different formats that we now have and seeing where it takes us. So that’s what’s next for me.

John: Well, thank you. This has been wonderful talking to you again. We’ve always enjoyed these conversations, and our listeners have very much appreciated them.

Michelle: Oh, thank you.

Rebecca: It’s always really helpful to know too, that you’re not alone. We’re all going through the same kinds of contemplations, and so thanks for sharing some of your own stories about developing and planning for the fall too.

Michelle: Thank you as well.

[MUSIC]

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

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

[MUSIC]

50. Diversity and inclusion

Posted in bias, diversity, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, pedagogy, teaching, universal design
October 10, 2018

As faculty, we want our classrooms to provide all of our students with a comfortable and productive learning environment. Stereotype threats, implicit biases, and microaggressions can have an adverse effect on classroom climate and on student learning. In this episode, Dr. Rodmon King, the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at SUNY-Oswego, joins is to discuss what we can do to nurture an inclusive and productive environment for all of our students.

Show Notes

  • Kirwan Institute
  • SUNY-Oswego Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching
  • Sue, D. W. (2016). Race talk and the conspiracy of silence: Understanding and facilitating difficult dialogues on race. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of personality and social psychology, 69(5), 797.
  • Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American psychologist, 52(6), 613.
  • Steele, C. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (Issues of Our Time). W. W. Norton & Company
  • Project Implicit
  • Bonilla-Silva, E. (2017). Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Rowman & Littlefield
  • Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk, Project Gutenberg. – Du Bois discusses double consciousness in this work.
  • Dweck, C. S. (2008). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House Digital, Inc..

Transcript

John: As faculty, we want our classrooms to provide all of our students with a comfortable and productive learning environment. Stereotype threats, implicit biases, and microaggressions can have an adverse effect on classroom climate and on student learning. In this episode, we investigate what we can do to nurture an inclusive and productive learning environment for all of our students.

[Music]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[Music]

John: Our guest today is Dr. Rodmon King, the Chief Diversity and Inclusion officer at the State University of New York at Oswego. Welcome, Rodmon.

Rodmon: Great to be here. Thank you for having me.

John: Today’s teas are:

Rodmon: I’m not drinking tea. I have not joined you.

[LAUGHTER]
I am still drinking the one cup of coffee… I have now reduced myself down to one cup of coffee a day. I usually have tea in the evening after dinner, I like to have tea.

Rebecca: So, next time we’ll have to make sure we record in the evening so we can have tea.

Rodmon: I think everything’s better in the evening. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I have Estate Darjeeling.

John: … and I have ginger peach black tea.

Rebecca: … again.

John: … again. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Issues related to diversity and inclusion are on the minds of many faculty at our institution and many other places, too. We invited you here today to help us lay the groundwork to talk about these issues and also to help faculty think about how to have these difficult conversations in their classrooms. Many faculty indicate that they want to be more inclusive but don’t know where to start, or feel inadequate or unprepared and don’t know where to start. So maybe the best place to start is “Where should we start?”

Rodmon: Yeah, well, it’s not surprising that faculty members in our community will feel unprepared or inadequate when thinking about things like inclusive pedagogy or making a classroom environment a place that is inclusive, challenging, yet safe. And the reasons that it’s not surprising is that, for many of us, we don’t get training in these things in our graduate programs, even for folks who’ve been in the professoriate for a while, may not have had it as part of their faculty education or ongoing faculty training. And some of the work that I’m looking to do with members of the community is to look at some of the processes, especially new faculty orientation and ongoing sort of things—opportunities like this, exactly, where we can help educate people, equip them with tools, not only for faculty success but for the success of our community. To give credit, we’re not starting from nowhere. The first thing is to realize that you actually need help or that there’s a problem or there’s something that you need help with, and so it’s good to know that members of our faculty are there and understand that. A good starting place—and there’s multiple starting places; it’s not just like one place that you can start, but it’s a multi-modal, multi-level kind of way that we have to dive into diversity equity and inclusion work with respect to faculty. Know what the resources are. CELT is a good resource. I’m more than willing to sit down and meet with departments. I’ve done some of that… meet with individual faculty to talk about everything from syllabi to things that are going on in a classroom or a topic that’s upcoming that someone wants to think through how to make sure that this is a really positive educational experience for the individuals in the classroom. There are our colleagues that, some of them, their research is in this area, so engaging with colleagues. We have other resources. Kirwan Institute has publications and information about things like implicit bias and stereotype threat, it’s a good resource. CELT’s running the reading group for Dr. Derald Wing Sue’s book. That’s another great resource. Another thing I would add is a good starting place generally is to take ownership of the things over which we have the most direct control, and part of that is our own identity. As educators or professionals working in education, thinking about your intersectional identity, thinking about your life experience, sort of a self-reflection there, and thinking about what kind of perspectives or insights your identity provides you and your life experience provides you and what kind of experiences it doesn’t. What kind of blind spots or limitations that you may have because of the way your identities situates you in communities and in contexts. Think about syllabi or lesson plans for courses; those are things that faculty have direct influence over. Hopefully, as this conversation goes on, talk some about the ways in which a faculty member or members of a faculty department can use syllabi or activities in class to help address some issues related to diversity and inclusion. Also, I’m a big fan of using some of the existing structures as our way to use faculty meetings or things like that to jumpstart conversations or keep conversations going over time. One thing that I want to make sure that I emphasize also is it’s important for us to develop our empathetic capacity, to develop our ability to understand other ways of experiencing and being in the world, to be fully aware of and not just an intellectual sense but a full sense that our walk and the way we navigate this community is not gonna be these default or universal way. Often times so that other people have other experiences and those experiences are very often shaped by their identity, their robust intersectional identity. And the last thing I would maybe add to that is that a word, if not caution, but something to be mindful of is that when we talk about identity we’re not talking about sort of granite blocks, these monoliths. Identities, even as we think about dimensions of diversity, are these sort of really dynamic and robust things that evolve over time as a person of color who identifies as black. Blackness is not one sort of thing; it is actually very, very rich our understandings of what it is to be a black person, especially a black person in America are constantly evolving and blackness as a deep and rich concept and identity links into, intersects with other identities that informs it, so my black identity is connected to and shaped by in certain ways other facets of my identity being cisgendered, being heterosexual, various other sorts of things that are part of who I am. All of those things I bring into classroom settings or to other settings with me, those things give me awareness of some issues that give me power and certain kinds of contexts, but they also can limit my vision and understanding in other ways too.

Rebecca: Thanks. That’s a lot to start to think about.

John: Yeah, it is. [LAUGHTER]

Rodmon: Yeah, I know. It might be “oh my gosh” that’s a lot, but here’s the beauty of this is that people think, well, you know, I don’t know what to do, well, i n some ways we’re actually living this. Diversity and inclusion is part of our day-to-day lives inside of the professional world and outside of it, so it doesn’t have to be a mysterious sort of thing; there’s a way to connect into it and in very open and common-sense ways.

Rebecca: I really wanted to touch back on issues of power that you mentioned as you were laying the groundwork for things. When we’re in the classroom we’re certainly in power, more power than students, perhaps, although not all of us have the same amount of power or students don’t perceive us to have the same amount of power. A young female may have a different amount of power than an older white male, for example. Can you talk a little bit about things that we need to be aware of as people who have power in that position when we’re trying to deal with difficult issues or difficult conversations in the classroom?

Rodmon: Early in my faculty career there was a point at which I really needed to emphasize to the members of my department that I was not just a tan version of them, that being a person of color in the classroom changed the ways that I needed to function as an instructor. For some of my students this is the first time that a person of color would have some power to vet their work and there was some stuff under the surface about that and sometimes explicit things where people were not comfortable with that. As a cisgender person I come into a classroom setting with that privilege and there’s ways in which that allows me to navigate and do things, whereas other people’s identities may position them differently, and so one of the things that I think is important for both an individual faculty member and a department to understand is the ways in which that can play out over time. In classroom settings and things like that there are ways to be aware of the sort of larger discourse and the biases that are out in the society and the ways that may inform what happens in a classroom. The way that students may react to an instructor, the ways that students may react to other students or engage with other students. We live in a country and at a time where certain ways of being, certain ways of knowing things are privileged over other ways, and so that can actually work its way into our classroom. This is one of the reasons why it’s important to think about these kinds of things. Classrooms are not sort of a by default; these marketplaces of ideas. These are things that we have to actively construct. I’ve had a course, one of the, I think the last few courses I taught before I became an administrator and transitioned away from being a faculty member and it was a senior capstone on race and social justice—philosophy majors. So I’m in a room as the only person of color talking about racism, talking about other things like that. And so knowing that there was going to be part of that dynamic that students may not feel comfortable expressing all of their opinions to a person of color who’s going to give them grades and maybe decide whether or not they graduate. I use that as an opportunity to open up the discourse and say, look, here’s where we are. These are some of the barriers to us maybe having discourse here. I’m a person of color; we’re gonna be talking about racism. You here are white and the discourse is gonna be difficult, here’s what we need to open that up. And so faculty should be—I would hope thinking about these things both in the moment and beforehand, and that’s where things like syllabus design and thinking about the ways to start off of a course. You can signal to students the ways in which as an instructor and as an educator you’ll engage with them and maybe intervene if there’s bias present or other things like that. You can set the context for discourse as well, but being aware of who is gonna be in the classroom, what potential identities are there, what your identity is and then what power dynamics flow from that is gonna be crucial to creating a place where things like these buzzwords, inclusive pedagogy and all these kinds of things of transformational education can actually occur.

John: You mentioned syllabus a couple times. What can we do in our syllabus to make the course more inclusive or to help set the stage for that?

Rodmon: Well, you can do signaling. In syllabi, and this is something that I think across the nation a lot of institutions have encouraged or required not just because it’s legally required but also because it is good practice for people to talk about accommodations and accessibility and have a statement like that in the syllabus. You can set community expectations in other ways. You can set terms of discourse, you can actually as a faculty member talk about how the class is gonna be managed as a community, and then outside of statements from the syllabus the sort of first day or first week activities, you can actually set the tone. One of the things I did in one of my classes was say, look, we’re gonna be dealing with some really tough issues and we’re people of a variety of life experiences and identities and things like this. One of the things that I am gonna do as an educator in this room if something happens where is potentially traumatizing for a member of the classroom, where the discourse could have the effect of marginalizing, if bias is coming to the fore, I’m actually gonna directly confront that. I’m gonna engage with that, and I’ll do it in a way where I’m gonna still respect people’s agency and humanity and understand them, but we’re gonna have to call these things out and confront them. We can do those things in a way that is educative.

John: Couple weeks ago when we were starting our race talk discussion, the book we’re talking about is “Race Talk” by Derald Wing Sue. The first couple meetings we didn’t really start with that sort of discussion but you suggested actually that we should start with setting the ground rules for discussion, and we did that and it opened up a much more active discussion. When people were reacting to things before they were very polite in our earlier meetings and we didn’t really notice a problem, but the politeness hid a lot of things where people just wanted to avoid those discussions and once we set the ground rules where people talked about the need to be open with these things it really opened up the discussion quite a bit and we saw a much more productive dialogue. So that type of priming that you talked about could be really effective, perhaps especially among faculty.

Rodmon: Yeah, most definitely. And again, the key bit I want to pull out of what you said. You might be thinking, well, geez, it’s great that this podcast happened—why didn’t we have it a few weeks ago when I was starting my class? Well it’s never too late, really. You can still set the terms of discourse, you can still have those moments in classrooms that are for classes that are currently running. It’s always good practice to revisit these things. Over the weeks of a term you may want to have moments where you remind people about the agreements and standards of discourse, especially as you approach really fraught topics or topics that people have a variety of feelings or opinions or can be impacted by the discourse.

John: One of the issues that we’ll be addressing and we’ve done past workshops on is implicit bias. Could you talk a little bit about what implicit bias is for the people who haven’t been exposed to it and the difference between implicit and explicit bias?

Rebecca: Especially because you hinted towards it in your groundwork by saying blind spots.

Rodmon: Yeah, and so let’s go with the clearest kind. There’s a lot of literature on it. Kirwan Institute has this, like I said, Derald Wing Sue. A lot of people, Claude Steele has written about a bunch of different things. A lot on stereotype threat. A lot about other stuff that connected with this. It is what it sounds like. An explicit bias is something that, it could be a stereotype that’s informing it. There’s a way in which people consciously hold a view, and that could be a positive affinity, like, people from Buffalo are just better people. You can have that bias towards them. A lot of times in the world, though, what we see are explicit forms of bias that hook into things like structural racism, sexism, heterosexism and things like that. Someone saying that they do not like racial or ethnic minorities or they do not want undocumented populations in this country, those are explicit bias; the person holds the belief, they know they hold the belief, they’re acting on an active knowledge of that belief, they’re articulating it in words, action, thought, and maybe even constructing environments where that is explicit. Implicit is a bit harder. It is sort of a subconscious way in which stereotypes or things like that become wired into us and affect our decision-making on an unconscious level. The hard part about implicit biases, whether those are positive or negative associations is often times they stand in stark contrast to our conscious beliefs. I’ve spent a good part of my life thinking about diversity and equity, I’ve taught it when I was in the classroom. I’m here as a CDIO, I’m working in this field and I still have biases that I have to combat. One of the things over time and taking some of the implicit association task tests, I realize that what I have is a skin tone bias. Now if you were to ask me, “What are your beliefs? What do you think about colorism?” I think colorism is horrible. I think it’s another way in which people are oppressed and marginalized and traumatized. I do not want to be part of communities that reinforce that I am my own actions and decision-making definitely want to be inclusive and open to all kinds of people. I don’t want to be a person who judges people on skin tone and everything else, but it’s there, and so having that bias does not make me a bad person; it’s part of the human condition that we have these implicit associations. Being aware that I have those things and doing nothing to educate myself about them and nothing to try and unseat them or challenge them, that makes me accountable and perhaps blameworthy.

John: We’ll share a link to the implicit association test. And I’ve actually used them in my classes for the last I think three years now, and their online classes, and the reactions have been interesting. Some students are very shocked by the results and it forces them to reflect on these. Others who get very strong results often tend to just believe the tests themselves or bias so they react against it, but at least it’s forcing them to consider the possibility.

Rodmon: In general, when I did that when I was teaching the first response is emails. Like, you know, I took this test and then I googled something and there’s the evidence that this does not work, and that’s evidence that the self-concept, right, so I think of myself as this person and I have this evidence that says I’m not that person and so it’s unsettling. For some people, as you said, they look at those results and are like wow, I had some idea that I might but now this really shows me evidence of the work that I have to do. More often than not in my experience when people get these results, especially as you do more of the tests, people are like, wow, there’s got to be something wrong with it—they want to externalize it—something wrong with the test, or there’s something wrong with something else and I’m not that person. Well, to a degree, all of us are in this common mode as human beings where we’re going to have these positive and negative associations. And really talking about power, the reason that this becomes so important is that some of us are in positions of power. Whether that’s in the classroom or in our communities or in departments and things like that, and when we intersect with processes and structures that we have influence over and that we shape and participate in, if we’re not careful our biases then become really blown up by those circumstances. So imagine me as a diversity and inclusion officer not challenging my skin tone bias and I’m going about my work. Now that skin tone bias that I have can get pushed into processes that I’m part of. Working into conversations and interactions and engagements that I have in our community, and really doing a lot of both structural and individual experiential damage. So for both the well-being of people and their experiences and for the type of community we’re constructing and maintaining, we need to really focus attention on those things. So yeah, implicit bias is a really, really, really big challenge, and whether or not we want to talk about it, it exists and it’s gonna be present where human beings are present.

Rebecca: I found it really useful to share with students that it’s like, I too, have implicit bias and to tell them what some of my results were on some of the tests and some of the checks and balances I put in place for myself to help make sure that I’m not reinforcing that bias in the things that I design or do. So one of the things I share with students often is that there is a stark contrast sometimes between an emotional response for something and that’s often the implicit bias that’s coming out, like judging or something that starts to happen and you catch yourself and say, wait a second, I shouldn’t be doing that; I don’t believe in that, that’s not what I wanna do. And I think that that helps students just recognize that there are things that we can do to improve how we relate to other people and how we improve the society that we live in by changing ourselves or improving ourselves.

Rodmon: Reflecting back on my comment on blind spots, some of it can be a self-check, but some of it we’re not always aware of our blind spots, and so it’s hard to figure these things out sometimes, so as a person of a certain age, socioeconomic class, racial identity that I embrace, being cisgendered, being heterosexual, all of these things affect how I navigate the world and what I see and what I don’t see, and so as I become more in-tune to myself, as I take more empathetic journeys where I’m actually trying to see the world through other lenses and experience the world as other people experience them and take their concerns on as concerns that I should share, I can become better attuned to the things that I am not just automatically conditioned to see. Some of that, though, we may need help with, right, and so this is where really having connections in with people that you can sort of like well, you know, I want to make sure that I’m doing the right thing, and whether that’s planning ahead for something that you’re going to do as an activity in class or if there’s something and you just want to reflect on it. And there’s resources. There’s, again, the same sort of resources we have are available out there for people to do that kind of reflection. We won’t always catch it in the moment, especially when it deals with ourselves. We might have a conversation or have an interaction and then later be like, I’m not sure I feel good about the way that I was present and active in that context. But maybe, and you can create opportunities to go back and revisit that and make it right. That’s the thing that I think is really important. It’s great to get it in the moment, and I think over time if we are vigilant in thinking about these things, practicing, doing the kind of proactive work, we’ll be better in those moments, but we also should be ready to and equipped to do that sort of restorative transformative work that can happen when we don’t catch it. Even at our very best we’ll miss things.

John: But you first have to be aware of the possibility so you can reflect on it and then work to do that.

Rodmon: Absolutely.

Rebecca: I think that reflects a lot of things that have bubbled up in some of our reading group discussions about the guilt that you might have after a moment of realizing you didn’t handle something the way that maybe you would have liked to have handled it and you rehearse it over and over in your head but if you keep rehearsing it over and over in your head you’re not actually making any change, you’re not doing anything, so having that community to help rehearse that so that you can then reflect on it and then do something I think is key, so thanks for that reminder.

John: Going back to my class example; they’re very reluctant to discuss issues of race. But one issue that students were much more willing to discuss, particularly female students, was the implicit association test between gender and careers. And women in particular were very surprised to see that here they are in college working towards a career, but they still had this sort of bias between being female and home type activities, male and careers, and that brings us perhaps to the concept of stereotype threat. Maybe we could talk a little bit about that in general?

Rodmon: Yeah, this is a bit more complicated. Claude Steele has done a lot of work; his book “Whistling Vivaldi” is really good. He’s done a lot of publications and research, I think, in the hundreds in terms of things that he’s done on stereotype threat. The basic idea, and I’ll try to demystify this to make it as clear as possible, the idea is that people can be in circumstances or situations where they either are concerned about or they have evidence that they actually are confirming some generalized or stereotype characteristic about their group that they participate in, and that can be along racial or ethnic lines, gender lines, sexual orientation, various other sorts of things. Those things take a different set of skills to disrupt and to address whether in a classroom setting or not, so what happens is, and you know, look at some of the research. Women when told that some sort of a valued mechanism, be it a test or something else, was gonna have a component about gender, or that the test historically women don’t do well on it, score lower—score lower than when those kind of statements are absent. And so one of the things to be mindful of in practice is sometimes very well-meaning folks will hook into deficit ways of approaching and engaging students. You see it a lot with first-generation students. “I know you’re first-generation, you may need a lot of things,” and you just—it’s almost like stereotype confirmations. While we want to be aware of and sensitive to and open to the needs of different populations, we have to be aware of the fact that it’s not just deficits that they bring into our community; there’s strengths and resilience and things like this. Derald Wing Sue has some work on this in terms of the recommendations that he has. One of the ways to approach this instead of saying, here’s some tests or thing like this that people don’t do well on, and I can think of my own faculty career. I used to say things and like one of my classes was like, yeah, you know, historically in this class everybody does bad on the first paper, and guess what? [LAUGHTER]

John: You’re priming them to think that way.

Rodmon: Yeah, you know, and so that can get into stereotypes of people not thinking that they’re good writers, not having a facility with English; those kind of stereotypes that are placed upon communities. When you say things like, “I want to make sure everyone in this class is maximally successful on this paper and that there’s ways in which everyone can be successful, I’m invested in your success; I believe in your ability to complete this, let’s talk about ways to set up success.” You’re into a different place. Very, very subtle the way that stereotype threat can function, and some of it, some of the literature it has to do with sort of a Du Boisian and sort of double consciousness—people are aware of the ways in which society views the affinity group that they’re part of, and so they’re stuck in this space negotiating their own identity on their terms and knowing that society is actively trying to put them into a box, and so you worry about confirming that stereotype and it gets into the forms of self-questioning that undermine performance. Being aware that people can be experiencing that in a classroom, whether that’s during an exercise, during a class activity, during a test or as a part of a paper or something else like that, and during those sort of positive measures can make a difference, so micro affirmations is a term that’s come up.

John: So the opposite of micro aggression?

Rodmon: Exactly, yeah. And those can be both explicit statements, but sort of cues that can be like, yeah, yeah, I think that’s really good to think about or things like that. It takes practice to get those things right. The line between a micro affirmation for one population and a microaggression for another population can be very, very subtle. And so I’m a big believer in preparing just like you would for other things. I’m a—what you call –I’m a weekend warrior discount musician kind of thing; I love music, I love playing music, and I’m better when I have practiced and done those things so that when I’m playing I can be in the moment and do those kinds of things. We need to do the same sort of things. And thinking about diversity equity inclusion we’re now in the context where we can provide opportunities for members of our community to actually think about, practice some of these skills, so that when they’re in the situation they’re optimally prepared to function.

Rebecca: Can I ask a follow-up question on that?

Rodmon: Sure.

Rebecca: I really like the idea of the micro affirmations, so if you’re noticing, I don’t know, like a trend in class, the students are struggling with X and you want to address that. Is there a way to handle that that’s not like, hey, I noticed that most people in this class are having this particular problem that might make someone feel like they’re in a box?

Rodmon: So let’s look at the heart of that. There’s maybe as part of an analysis or some part of the course that people are struggling with, and a way to come around that, instead of saying like, here’s the way in which everybody’s kind of turf’n, you know, crashing and burning on this, say, look, there’s an important aspect that I want us to think about: I want us to think about this because it’s an important part of the linkage of this course, and so some of the stuff that I did in philosophy was about thinking about arguments or thinking about ways to closely attend to textual material, close reading, things like that. And those are skills that people don’t always come to the table with, and so thinking about it in that way and saying instead of here’s a deficit you have, here’s this thing that I want to make sure that we build up as a skill area, and you can be successful. This is something that you’re capable of doing and I want to help make sure that we actualize that set of skills, and so it goes more from a, here’s the things that you’re doing wrong and the things that you need to correct to, here’s the things that I know and believe in you that are positive steps that can be taken, right, and it doesn’t have to target anyone like that. Philosophers have their own technical language; it’s a strange little fantastic world, philosophy. But one of the things that can be a barrier is the formal ways that sometimes arguments have to be presented in philosophy and students may struggle with that and coming at it from a point of appreciative inquiry. Here are the things that you’re already doing that are great, and then building from that is a different entry point of here’s the ways that you’re messing up the premises and the argument and not seeing the logical entailments.

John: What you’re just discussing here is very much what Carol Dweck is suggesting with a growth mindset, so we should focus on reminding students that they’re capable of doing this and working on building that sort of mindset.

Rodmon: Yeah. I want to be careful that we don’t give individual rated readings of this. We want to empower individual faculty members and members of our community to address these things. I think proactively about these things, but we as a community need to be thinking structurally, how do we create contexts where people can learn, have the skills needed to be successful to combat things like implicit bias and stereotype threat. We can’t leave it on the shoulders of individual members of the faculty or individual members in any constituency of our community.

John: One other topic that I think was mentioned a couple of times was microaggressions. What would be some examples of microaggressions that happen in academic settings?

Rodmon: Yeah, unfortunately, there’s a lot of them. Some of the ones that are very common are things like microinvalidations. There’s ways in which faculty will make fun of a student name that is not a very common sort of name or a difficult name to pronounce, they’ll nickname people, they’ll do other things. Those kind of things can be invalidating for people are ways of othering folks. There’s ways that people can fall into gendered language that can affect different populations and it’s just by default. There was a move years ago, and I mean many, many years ago, and I’m kind of coming back to my home discipline of philosophy; a lot of the examples and four-cross fields of philosophy of people who had either bad epistemic practice or everything else were gendered female. And so people became aware of that are like, we need to stop doing that because it really can affect people in a lot of ways. Other things that happen, and a lot of times in my experience, jokes, whether it’s a faculty member making a joke or something like that, those kind of things people retreat behind and say, well, it’s a joke, but the content of that joke actually marginalizes people and there’s a subtle—well maybe it’s not a subtle point—I think it’s an important point. When we’re talking about diversity and inclusion, when we’re talking about microaggressions, these kinds of things, they’re not just matters of etiquette, right, it’s not like chewing with your mouth open or not covering your face when you sneeze; these are deeper. The way the cumulative effects—there’s been research that these things can have on individuals and the way they feel or do not feel connected to a community; it can have a really huge impact. So it’s not a matter of etiquette or these kinds of things, it’s about respecting the rights of individuals and respecting their right to be in the world in ways that are different than to be in the world in ways that are different than the dominant population or myself or someone else as an individual. So there’s those. More specifically, there have been a really unfortunate incidents with faculty members trying to make a point about Immigration and Naturalization and having people who are not U.S. citizens stand up in class or disclose their status; those things are really traumatizing. And some of these are with the best of intentions. Faculty may ask students to represent some part of their identity and say, please give us the female perspective or please give us the other sort of perspective. Those kinds of things. There’s other ways to elicit that or present that material without placing students in the position of having to speak for their race or gender or other dimension of their identity. The last one I would mention, and I think this is one that unfortunately over my career had many of these is people invalidating someone’s identity because of assumptions they have about that way of being. So you have students who identify and are people of color by their history and so forth who are denied that, who a faculty members says, well you’re not positioned to speak on this, and specifically this was a student who was white passing who was a Latin-ex and a professor said, “you’re not on standing to speak for that,” and the student in that circumstance has to defend their identity. And so that’s a tougher one. Is it a general good practice for people to speak only from their experience and so forth? Yes, but the assumptions we make about who has the standing to do that can feed into stereotypes and end up setting the context for microaggressions.

Rebecca: What should faculty members do if students are making micro aggressions against one another, or if a student confronts a faculty member about their own microaggressions that the faculty member is doing something but a student has confronted them.

Rodmon: Yeah, that’s a microaggression. So let’s deal with the student-to-student first. Here’s some of the things that are a challenge. As an educator you will not hear everything that goes on in your class. Last academic year had an incident where very horrifically traumatizing thing happened: the instructor was unaware of it until it hit social media after the class had ended in the evening that explodes. In those circumstances the instructor had no knowledge, you know, the professor, that something had happened in the class, but again, that doesn’t mean that we don’t address it right away. And one of the good things for this instructor is that in the syllabus were community standards and things were clear there were reminders of that and so there’s a natural way to enter into that discourse, both by an email message to the class and some signaling about this is what we’re gonna address when we get into class tomorrow and the offer to meet with students in the interim to deal with that. A person also came to me immediately for help, so this is going on, it’s 9 o’clock at night and instructor is getting signals that there is something going on in social media and of course he emails me right away and says, “I’m really going to need help with this; can we meet in the morning?” I’m like, no, let’s have the conversation now. Talk about a strategy now and then let’s follow it up in the morning and let’s really stay close together so we make sure we’re helping the overall community and the students in this class process and understand what happens. In immediate circumstances where you’re aware, as the instructor I think it’s important to have developed the skills to call that out and say, wait a second, we need to take a pause here because there’s something going on that we have to address. Sometimes it can be something that a student says is a comment, sometimes it’s part of a presentation. I’ve had a class once where a student was making a presentation and saying, well, the blacks are and it was like, whoa, let’s stop right there. Ok, you have to understand that saying that the blacks as a terms of pejorative, those kind of things. And then the next step that is crucial, whether it’s coming back afterwards or something else, is unpacking what actually the microaggression is and why it can be traumatic and damaging. Even things that are sort of microaggressions that are disguised compliments, or are you a credit to your race, or you really speak so well; those kinds of things can be disguised microaggressions. We have to be aware to call those out as well and unpack those. Although it seems really positive, it fits into and reinforces stereotypes about different kinds of people. So acting in the moment can be terrifying, and this is why I think really the thing about getting practice and understanding how to do that, and it’s not like you’re gonna hit the ground running; it’s something that we have to work on constantly and get help with and use the resources available to help with. Even if you address it in the moment there is still most likely gonna need to be the need for follow-up in continuing dialogue around that. The one piece that I think is the question that I haven’t addressed yet is, what if someone calls you out? And one of the first initial reactions could be defensive, like wait a second, what do you mean I’m doing a microaggression or that’s a microaggression. That’s another moment to pause and stop and say, ok, I want to explore this and understand. Those kind of things can be tougher to parse out because you’re situated internal to it, and so some of my engagement over my career with faculty is to help them like, you know, what if you have this moment, well, to be open, right, to be open and not immediately go to default denials of responsibility; no, no, no, you’re taking this too seriously or other kinds of things like this you want to actually say, ok, I want to understand what I need to own here. Had a situation where an instructor—a student came up after class and said to them, I’m really hurt and traumatized by what’s going on class; you won’t call on me, and I think it’s because of my race. And that is a form of microaggression; ignoring someone because of their identity. It’s something that can happen. And the professor was really struck and said, I think some of the right things in terms of approaching the other person first and saying, I am really, really, really—and not just sad—but I’m really sorry that you had this type of experience in this classroom and I want to understand what I need to learn about it, and I want you to have a positive experiences from now on. What that person is experiencing is valid, the work of how to unpack that, what ownership the instructor needs to take is work that can happen. Part of the things that I can help faculty with is to negotiate those spaces. Approach those kinds of things, meeting with a faculty member and the student, things like that, those kinds of things. But I think the initial reactions to it have to be really important. Do not deny it, do not go into defense mode. If someone feels that way you can validate the feeling, then explore the value of the experience and explore what has to be helped.

Rebecca: Thank you. I think that’s a good reminder for faculty, and I think like there’s always a fear that something like that’s gonna happen, so rehearsing in your mind what you would do in a situation like that is important. One of the things that we talked about leading up to this conversation today were a lot of the terms that we’ve talked about today, like implicit bias, microaggressions, et cetera, but one that you had introduced me to that I wasn’t familiar with was lateral animosity, so can you explain what that is and share a little bit about that?

Rodmon: Yeah. So at least in my ways of thinking about where people are and where communities are, there is some discourse. In academia and outside academia about microaggressions and stereotype, and there’s increasing because of things that have happened in the world and the way community discourse is happening, stuff about stereotype threat and things like this. Lateral animosity or lateral violence is one of those things that is a bit subtler. In essence, what happens is you have, let’s say a group of individuals and in that group you have individuals who are marginalized populations, and what happens is instead of pressing a case or reacting to or having, not that you want animosity in the community, but animosity towards the dominant group. You have animosity to equally or other marginalized populations, and some examples of this are for people of color, especially African Americans, who sometimes react and say, well, you know, things like marriage equality, things like LGBTQ rights, well, you know, that’s not really what civil rights is about. The same sort of things we see the microinvalidations, the things like that can happen within communities and infinity groups and across them, right. Some unfortunate things in my career that I’ve had to work with populations is in particular some African American students saying clearly to other students of color and international students that their needs were not legitimate, that their oppression was not real and their marginalization. And so that sort of invalidation can be really damaging. Sometimes for people, and they make this natural assumption if you’re part of a marginalized community that you wouldn’t have a blind spot when it comes to another community, but sometimes we do. You can find it in other dimensions of diversity, you have people who are racial and ethnic minority populations talking in ways where accessibility and other forms of diversity are not things that we really should be thinking about or invalidating people’s identities, things like that. Those sort of things are very, very difficult, can be very, very painful, but the same sort of techniques that we use to address these sort of things need to be used in those contexts too. Internal to populations you have some tough experiences where domestic African American populations say to other students of African descent, whether they’re African Diaspora or they’re African international students, but they don’t qualify as—they cannot claim blackness, they cannot claim to be people of color, that their needs are somehow secondary or not as pressing as those of domestic African-American populations, and I think my sort of semi-sarcastic way of saying this is like, look, we’re not in an oppression Olympics where we need to battle one another to try and prove who is most oppressed.

John: There’s plenty of oppression to go around.

Rodmon: Unfortunately, plenty of oppression to go around, and in building community it’s gonna be important that we actually understand and appreciate and validate the needs of other constituencies within our community, so yeah, that is an emerging problem—it’s an emerging problem in higher ed as the demographics shift. Unfortunately, what you can see is when you have a minority population that becomes large enough that they have more structural power than other marginalized groups… So what we see in sometimes marginalized communities when they have enough either presence in terms of large enough numbers or enough structural power within the community; they reinscribe all the oppression that they’ve suffered and themselves and do it either internally or to other marginalized populations and it’s really, really, really very, very sad and damaging to communities. We need to have an awareness of that—this is again something that is a hard point of discourse and dialogue for folks—coming to a person who’s experienced marginalization and saying that you are not only the oppressed, but in certain contexts, you are the oppressor. Again, people get defensive, the walls go up—no, no, no, no, you’re miss reading this, no, that’s not it or whatever else, but taking ownership of that is important.

Rebecca: One of the things that’s come up in some of the reading group discussions is knowing the need to address issues like this, and I think you kind of commented about the oppression Olympics is maybe like one way to kind of go down that road, but faculty have indicated a tentativeness towards it because they’re not familiar with the histories or the details to fully unpack a particular thing that’s happening. What are your recommendations in those situations where you know that’s not right, you know kind of what’s happening, you can probably identify as maybe lateral animosity, but can’t really unpack the details of what exactly is going on and why?

Rodmon: Well, so, if it’s in the moment, I mean, I think you still call it out in the moment, but this is where—is in moments like this that really creative and dynamic people kind of act the opposite. It’s like I don’t know anything, I don’t know anybody, there’s no one who can help me. Again, we have people with expertise, so if it is about the history of African and African American populations, we’ve got people who teach and do research in those areas, right. If it’s about other dimensions of identity, we have people, both professionals who work here, fellow faculty colleagues that can help understand that history, ok. One of the things over time that I had to become much more knowledgeable about very quickly as I started doing diversity equity and inclusion work was the history of both oppressor marginalization of transgender populations, right. Had an understanding of some of it but really needed a much deeper understanding of that and reached out to people who do scholarship in those areas, reached out to individuals really looking to understand and learn. A lot of times negotiating these spaces is not something that we have to do alone—get help, bring the help in, use the resources that are available to you to help unpack that. And so there’s this way in which we can be like, well, you know, in the classroom I’m supposed to be the expert; that’s like yeah, that in some ways you are co-explorers. Simultaneously you have a letter of expertise and knowledge that students may not have, but you should develop enough comfort to say, this is wrong, and here’s the mechanics of it and what we are gonna do is actually get the resources to understand why saying things like, you know, this lateral animosity or violence kind of stuff, whether it’s through act or action, those things are not things that we need in our community. We also need to be aware that sometimes we’ve talked, you know, in very sort of human agency kind of ways, but structurally communities can reinforce implicit biases and things like that. You know, one of the ways that, you know, you can make someone feel welcome or unwelcome or things like that just by the very structure of the community around you and things that people have to deal with and counter. We are in the midst of this community really needing to do work on gender-neutral bathrooms throughout our community, and it’s a challenge and it’s one of those things that confronts people in ways, depending on your identity it may be well, yeah, we need those things, those are good, but it’s not something that on a daily basis you navigate spaces where the very spaces themselves are telling you that you are not valued as much as others as a part of the community.

John: So we always end our podcast by asking our guests “what’s next.” What are you going to do next?

Rodmon: All of it. [LAUGHTER] But not to be silly or whatever else, but to say this: there’s multiple levels of activity that need to continue. To say this: there are multiple levels of activity that need to continue. My door is not just sort of metaphorically open; I’m available to meet with faculty wherever that people have a need to do that dialogue about how to be successful, how to implement inclusive pedagogy, to work on things. I want to do work and started doing some work with departments on issues of diversity and inclusion. The thing that I really want to get us as a community further down the road on, we have these large institutional statements of value and mission, we have a diversity plan, there’s goals in there; there’s all these other types of things. I want to make sure that those larger things that are out there connect in real ways to the world that faculty live in and experience on a day-to-day basis, that’s something that I really want to make sure that as a community we’re doing that. And not just for faculty but for staff, for students, for all members of our community that these things aren’t just banner fodder—you put them on banners, they look nice, they’re on websites—but are part and wired into. People can see themselves connected to these goals and priorities.

Rebecca: Well thanks so much, Rodmon, for joining us today, and we’re so thankful to have you on campus now, right, like we’re glad that these conversations are really are happening and that the community is coming together to start addressing some of these issues.

Rodmon: I’m thankful for you as well; this is great. I’m glad to have the opportunity for the podcast. I think the podcasts have been great thus far and it covered a lot of different things; it’s a valuable way of engaging our community and communities within our community, so thank you for doing this.

John: Well thank you, and we’ll have you back soon.

Rodmon: Most definitely, love to. Thanks.

John: Thank you.

Rebecca: Thanks.

[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. Theme music by Michael Gary Brewer.