261. Social Justice Assessments

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

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

Show Notes

Transcript

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

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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

Meghanne: Thank you.

Katelyn: Thank you.

Judie: Thank you.

John: Today’s teas are:

Judie: …I have Lady Grey.

Rebecca: That’s a good one…

Judie: …In my DTL mug.

John: …a nice Desire to Learn mug.

Meghanne: I have iced green.

Rebecca: And Katelyn, how about you?

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

Rebecca: Sounds nice and calming.

Rebecca: I have hot cinnamon spice tea.

John: And I have black raspberry green tea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katelyn: I’m so glad you said that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katelyn: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: Change is hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judie: Nice.

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

Rebecca: Meghanne, do you want to add anything?

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

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

Katelyn: Thank you.

Judie: Thank you for having us.

Meghanne: Yeah, thank you.

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

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

Katelyn: Likewise.

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

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

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260. Antiracist Pedagogy

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

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

Show Notes

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

Transcript

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

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

Gabriela: Thank you for having me.

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

Gabriela: Yes, I’m drinking ginger tea.

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

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

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

John: You ate at the fort?

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

Gabriela: What does that have?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: It’s been a lot of fun.

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

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

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

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259. Experiential Learning

Course content and instructors are often forgotten once a  semester concludes. In this episode, Breanna Boppre joins us to discuss how experiential learning can humanize course content and provide meaningful and rich experiences that stick with learners for many years. Bree is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University’s Department of Victim Studies. She is also the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Course content and instructors are often forgotten once a semester concludes. In this episode, we discuss how experiential learning provides meaningful and rich experiences that stick with learners for many years.

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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 Breanna Boppre. Bree is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University’s Department of Victim Studies. She is also the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by our friend, Jessamyn Neuhaus. Welcome, Bree.

Bree: Thanks for having me.

John: We’re very happy you can join us.

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

Bree: I sure am. I am drinking a tea given to me by my close friend and department chair, Shelley Clevenger. She gifted me this tea. It says, “you’re magic” on the front. And one of the ingredients is “luster dust.” So the tea is actually blue with glitter.

John: That is a first, I believe.

Bree: It’s very unique, and it’s herbal tea. It tastes great.

Rebecca: Does it taste sparkly?

Bree: Mmmm, if sparkly had a taste, this would be it. [LAUGHTER]

John: So, we’re having a sparkle party.

Bree: Yes, definitely a sparkle party. [LAUGHTER]

John: I’m drinking a black raspberry green tea.

Bree: Ooh, yum.

Rebecca: And I have a jasmine black today.

Bree: Nice. That sounds good too. Not quite as sparkly as mine, but… [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Definitely not, and not as blue, either. [LAUGHTER]

John: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your chapter in Picture a Professor. Before we discuss your chapter, could you tell us a little bit about your department and the classes that you teach? Because we have not run across a Department of Victim Studies before, and I think it would be helpful to learn a little bit more about that.

Bree: Yes, I would love to talk about our department. It’s actually the first and only Victim Studies Department in the nation, and so this is really unique for us to have this opportunity. We’re housed in the College of Criminal Justice. So we’re a subset of criminal justice but we like to think of ourselves as different, both in what we study and teach about, but also the way that we do things. So we are very much community engaged. We emphasize caring and kind pedagogy, and we emphasize things that engage with the community to help survivors. And so, we have a lot of campus events. We have a lot of events dedicated to building awareness, but also donations and things for organizations in our community that helps survivors. And so, it’s really a great opportunity. I’m really excited to be here in the Department of Victim Studies. I’ve been here just over a year now. And the classes that I teach… violence against women, and I teach it more as gendered victimization. So we talk a lot about how gender and stereotypes shape victimization and harm. I also teach a brand new class that I created called “transformative justice,” which is a survivor-led movement aimed to address harm and violence without relying on systems that cause additional harm and trauma. And so, preventing harm and crime in the community before people end up in prisons and involved in the system. So that’s a really cool class that I’ve enjoyed teaching. I also teach family violence, and I teach research methods at the grad level, and that’s what I was prepping right before the podcast. So those are the classes I teach. I’m really excited about them. It’s heavy content, for sure, but I enjoy it.

Rebecca: I can imagine that teaching such topics really often includes students who are also victims and there’s some challenges in that arena as well. Can you talk a little bit about some strategies that your department uses to support survivors who are in your classes?

Bree: Yeah, so I can talk about what I do personally. So I’ve done a lot of research beyond teaching about the impacts of trauma, and I actually have a background in cognitive behavioral therapy and counseling techniques. And so, I interned as a grad student with community corrections and would engage in these counseling type classes for men who are on probation and parole. And one thing that I noticed was that the amount of trauma that these individuals have experienced, you can’t treat someone separate of that trauma. And so, that’s very much how I teach in the classroom as well. I’ve relied a lot on other scholars, like Karen Costa, who’s done a lot on trauma-aware teaching, who I know was a guest on the podcast multiple times, and others who, instead of teaching business as usual, we have to center the experiences of survivors and recognize that the vast majority of students have survived something traumatic at some point in their lives, whether it’s victimization, sexual assault, things like that, but even the adversity that they’ve encountered throughout their lives. That has has an impact on their experience in our classrooms. And so, I have used Nicole Bedera’s method of survivor-centered teaching, she has an amazing article in Teaching Sociology that really centers survivors in how we teach. And so, oftentimes, and even myself, when I first started teaching, and a student would disclose to me something related to victimization, because a lot of students feel close to me, they see me as that caring empathetic person. And so, I have had a lot of disclosures throughout my teaching. And at first, I wasn’t exactly sure how to handle it, because we know Title IX, we know that we are mandatory reporters of certain victimization and of certain things that we’re told, but not everything. And so my role as a professor, I’m very aware that I am not a licensed counselor, and I take that very seriously in referring out, as Karen Costa says. And so, I’ve done a lot of work to understand the role of Title IX and my role as a mandatory reporter, and that has really helped me know effective boundaries to myself and my teaching while also supporting students. And so, Nicole Bedera recommends really understanding each institution’s Title IX office requirements, because they can differ across institution. So one of the first things I did when I came to Sam Houston State was reach out to the Title IX office, and really try to understand what I am mandated to report. And now in every victimization related class, I have a module about survivor-centered teaching and self care. And so, in that module, I explain to students what they disclose to me, how that could potentially trigger a report, because I want them to be empowered and informed. I want them to know that if they disclose specifics, that if it occurs on campus, or a campus event, that’s something that I have to report, and if they don’t want me to report, they can disclose those things in a different way. And so, that takes more of the ownership on students and the power and agency to them, rather than to me, and it’s made me a lot more comfortable when students do disclose because I have a lot of assignments where they reflect, and that’s where the experiential learning background comes in. I’m very much about reflection, and so a lot of the students, I prompt them to reflect on the material and that prompts them to often disclose that they have survived something in their life that’s similar. And so, being empowered and informed, both as the students and me as the professor, having those survivor-centered and trauma-aware tools have made me a lot better able to address it in a supportive and empathetic way.

John: That transparency should make students feel much more comfortable and as you said, empowers them to make decisions that are best for them, which I think provides a much better relationship.

Rebecca: So it’s worth mentioning, if you’re interested in Nicole Bedera’s work, she was on episode 201, “Beyond Trigger Warnings.”

Bree: Highly recommend her article. Seriously, this changed my teaching for the better in many ways, and I’m a huge fan of her work.

John: We’ll include a link to that in the show notes. So the title of your chapter is “Using Experiential Learning to Humanize Course Content and Connect with Students,” and you’ve already addressed a little bit about how you use experiential learning. Could you expand on that just a little bit in terms of how you do this in your classes?

Bree: Yeah, so I actually started engaging with experiential learning as a doctoral student. Our PhD program is actually unique in that it had a required teaching and pedagogy class, which is shockingly rare for academic PhD programs, especially in criminology and criminal justice. So I was really fortunate to have that experience where we learned about teaching and pedagogy before we even entered the classroom. And so, we had to explore different approaches and write up what we envision our teaching approach to be, and one of those approaches that always stood out to me was experiential learning, and part of that interest in experiential learning was my own experience as an undergrad student. When I think back to my classes, one of the most vivid memories I have is in a corrections class, we toured a local prison, and I can still remember the weather that day, how it felt being in that prison. It was very dank and dark, which is similar to most prisons. [LAUGHTER] And so, that feeling of being there, I can close my eyes and still envision that day of touring that prison that really stuck with me. And the power of experiential learning to have that impact, to engage with multiple senses, your sight, your hearing, your smelling, you’re feeling the temperature, all of that has an impact, and I especially think it’s important for criminal justice in teaching classes related to prisons, which is what I taught for many years at Wichita State before coming to Sam Houston State, and those experiences are really what stand out with students and have that high impact. So that’s part of why I decided to focus on experiential learning for my pedagogy, especially early on, and we would do things like go on prison tours, or we would go on tours of local domestic violence shelters. I would take the students to these locations, and as I’ll talk about later on, when we discuss experiential learning online, there’s potential issues related to accessibility there. But if the students are able, it really is an immersive experience, and it’s really beneficial for them to go to these sites with the support of their instructor to gain that experience… that hands-on, what would a job in this area be like… but also to connect with people who work in the field. Because often my students have gained internships or jobs from going on these tours, the agencies also view it as a potential hiring or recruitment opportunity. So it’s really beneficial for me as the instructor, but also for the students and for the agencies in the field to connect directly with often juniors and seniors who I teach, and they’re going to be graduating soon and want to do something with that degree. So that’s really the “why” for me. It’s also very humanizing, and I talk about it in the chapter as a method of inclusive teaching. Because for me, I was never one of those people who wanted to be the sage on the stage, I’m much more into collaborative learning, and being more of the guide on the side. And so, I found with experiential learning, it really helped us build community and experiences together. Every time, I swear, when we would go visit the prison, something would happen. So one time we went and it was chow time, which is food time, and they offered to let us try the food. So that was a big experience for many students that we still talked about after and that’s, again, a big part of experiential learning is the reflection piece. So we would reflect on that experience together in class, we would talk about it, but also students would reflect on it on their own through reflection papers. And so, as I’ve evolved these approaches, one of my favorite parts of experiential learning is service learning. And so, service learning is really taking experiential learning to a next level, where we’re incorporating real-world experience, learning and applying concepts to helping actual agencies or a community of need that is identified by the students in the class and using that volunteer work to help and engage in civic engagement.

Rebecca: Those shared experiences are really powerful. We’ve seen these in many different situations, whether it’s service learning, or field trips, or study-abroad opportunities where groups of students are together, and they have this shared moment. It helps them connect, but also it’s a place to relate content back to that they all know, because they were all there, which has a lot of power. So you hinted at this already, Bree, but we know that you’re teaching entirely online now. So how do you go from visiting prisons to your current circumstance of teaching online and how do you bring these experiential components in that modality?

Bree: Yes, so I’m not gonna lie. In spring 2020, when the pandemic hit and we were told, “You’re going remote for two weeks,” and then that two weeks turned into the rest of the semester, I freaked out a little because I relied so heavily on the in-person, and the experiential learning is a big part of that. I did freak out. And so, I had never really taught online before. I taught one summer class online previously, it was a, quote, “canned class” that I couldn’t really change or adapt from. And so, I freaked out a bit. And then I remember the last class before we went online, I got a text from my colleagues saying, “the provost is about to announce, we’re going online.” I was like, alright, we’re going to stop what we’re doing: “What has worked for you as students online and what has not worked?” and we workshopped together, what the rest of the term was going to look like. And so, a lot of them mentioned, “we love these aspects of the in person, that community building, the humanization.” And so, I really had to think carefully and critically about, okay, how do I accomplish that online? And so, like I mentioned, the way I teach, I don’t like lecturing. I will lecture for like 10 minutes at a time, but you will never see a class where I’m just lecturing for an hour, that’s not enjoyable for me. And so, I tried to think about how to translate that to the online platform. Because often, I would pepper in my lecturing with other videos, with activities, we would do Kahoots, we would do group breakouts, we would do all these things,“oh, my gosh, how do I do this online?” So I came up with this approach, in our activities, where I would really think through how we did this in person, and try to modify it for online. So even though we can’t be in the classroom physically, at the same place, the same time together, how can we still achieve this community remotely. And so, I would do things like the Kahoots, the quizzes, the community sorts of activities to try and accomplish that, and with experiential learning, I’ve taken a lot of aspects of experiential learning, especially the reflection piece that has become very important to my pedagogy. And so, it may not be the traditional experiential learning anymore for me online. There’s parts that I incorporate, but I’ve really have had to adapt. And so, some of that includes being more creative about these big project-based assignments that I have. So I read Susan Blum’s, edited book, Ungrading, which is awesome. And so, inspired by that, I started assigning eportfolios, where students will experientially go through these modules, and they have reflection questions guiding them, and they write up kind of like this blog-style summary of the content, like they’re explaining it to someone who has no background in criminal justice victim studies, they have no idea what any of this is, and they’re explaining it to someone else. So it is very much like a blog. But then the second piece of those module reflections are reflecting on their learning, and that’s where they really think about their experience during the module, even though it’s online, even though they may be sitting watching TV or they may be having childcare during while they’re trying to learn. A lot of my students are single moms or in caretaking roles, they have a lot of other things going on. And so, they’re reflecting on that learning experience, despite all the other things that are going on in their lives. And so, that has been really key for me, that reflecting not just on the content, but their learning experience. So that’s been a way that I’ve adapted experiential learning. I still incorporate service learning as much as I can. So there’s four main types of service learning and direct service learning is the one that we often think of, when students go to a physical location and volunteer. Now, during the pandemic, that was not possible. So a lot of the agencies that I worked with, especially prisons, they shut down access, students were not allowed to come there. So I had to think differently about creating opportunities for civic engagement and advocacy. And so, some of the things that I’ve done are infographics and public service announcements to build awareness about social issues and taking that a step further to create those specifically for campus organizations. Or even now I’m partnering with local agencies, nonprofits, who may not have the resources to devote to social media and branding, and my students are actually helping with that by creating social media campaigns and things like that. And so, I’ve just tried to be creative. We have unlimited technology, we have so much available to us that is web based, or internet based, that students have access to, like Canva. Oh, my gosh, Canva is the best tool that I’ve incorporated, and they make these data visuals and public service announcements through Canva and they can even do it on their mobile phone. So it makes it really accessible for them, and it gives them a way to make an impact, even though we can’t have that direct service learning experience.

John: Could you tell us a little bit more about some of the service learning activities that your students have been engaged in?

Bree: Yes. So, I again, teach research methods, which often is not the favorite class, both from students and instructors. It’s often seen as a more boring content area, which is fair. There’s a lot of jargon, there’s a lot of complex concepts for students to learn. But I have found that experiential learning is even more important for teaching research methods. And the way that I do it is through research-based service learning. Well, because of the pandemic and because of agencies shutting down and not having direct access, I’ve been focused more on helping our campus community because that is an organization that I have access to and that I’m directly involved with. And so, some of the things that we’ve done in the past is we had students and I create surveys together for their fellow students in the university to fill out and then students, they create the survey questions. They think through research questions, how to create measures and concepts related to those questions. I facilitate this process, but they’re doing a lot of it firsthand, and then we distribute the survey online to students across the campus, they see how many students respond to the survey, which is often 10 to 20%, and they see the implications of that, and then they work through the data themselves. I’ll compile it in an Excel file for them, and then they create data visuals. They interpret the results, and then together, we compile a report that we give to university stakeholders. And so, that has been a really rewarding, and accessible version of service learning for me… is that research-based service learning, and it’s also beneficial for me. As pre-tenure, 40% of my position is research, 40% is teaching, and then the 20% is service. So I find that research-based service learning really combines all aspects of my scholarship together, and it makes it this really rewarding aspect of my teaching that has been successful both in person and online. And so, that has been a really cool avenue that I also have gone on to publish the results, and that has led to peer-reviewed articles and things that are important towards my tenure. So I wanted to bring that up, because I know a lot of fellow instructors, they see service learning or experiential learning and are like, “Oh, that all sounds great, but the amount of time that goes into it is a lot, especially when you’re working with external agencies.” And so, I really promote research-based service learning as this accessible alternative that can also benefit those faculty and instructors that are expected to do research as well.

Rebecca: Finding those connections between service, teaching, and research can always be really challenging. But when you can find those connections, definitely a worthwhile endeavor. I know that I’ve had similar experiences. Can you talk a little bit about students’ response to service learning, as well as your community partner? And I guess in this case, it would be your campus stakeholders?

Bree: Yeah. So I’ll back up a little. When I taught in person, one of the first service- learning projects I did was for the local drug court. And so, the drug court manager would actually come to our class, and we presented the results to her. And so, that experience of being live, us handing her the results, talking about the results together as a class, that made it really rewarding for both me and the students. And so, as a result of that drug court partnership, one of my students actually got an internship at drug court, which was super cool. That may not have happened organically otherwise. And so, students’ responses have been very positive to both service learning and experiential learning broadly. I think that both teaching and learning online can be very isolating. That was my fear of teaching online, was losing that connection, and that connection from what I’ve learned from Michelle Pacansky-Brock and Fabiola Torres on Twitter, I’ve taken trainings with them on humanizing course content. They are amazing. What I’ve learned from them and doing trainings about online teaching is that really the connection matters, and there are still ways that we can get that connection through humanization. And so, I think building those connections for students’ research shows, especially for underserved students, first-generation college students like myself… I was a first-gen student… those sorts of efforts to build that community and build that connection between student and instructor but also among students is really key towards their success and retention. So I have noticed, just taking the extra effort to send out personal check ins to students to get to know them as human beings, has greatly increased my student evaluations, but also my fulfillment and enjoyment as an instructor, because I read Kevin Gannon’s work, Radical Hope, it’s on my bookshelf over here, and he mentions this tension, often between this authoritative type of instruction where often instructors are seen as adversaries, and instead, there’s things that we can do to connect with students. So we go into this role of being allies to students, and that’s really where I see my role as empowering and supporting students rather than enforcing rules and teaching during the pandemic really, really brought that to light for me, that often these rules, especially around late work, and imposing late penalties, and strict rules around that, that’s not sustainable. And so, it’s also not inclusive, especially for our students, who many of them, again, are mothers, they’re in caretaking roles, they’re parents, they have full-time jobs already outside of their class that they’re taking with me. I think that instructors maybe forget that students have these full lives outside of this one class that they’re taking with you, and I try to be really mindful of that. And so, students’ responses to experiential learning have been great. My response has been great. The stakeholders have also really appreciated being able to connect with students. When we sent out the report to stakeholders for the campus survey, one of the interesting findings was there’s this care center on campus that offers free mental health referrals and academic assistance to students in crisis, and based on our survey with criminal justice students, only 25% even knew that the care team existed. And so, I shared this with the care team. I’m like, “Look, I know the amazing work you do. I’ve referred various students to you but largely, students don’t know you exist, which might be impacting self referral.” And so, students in that class gave recommendations for how to build awareness of the care team, and the following semester that I taught this class, we partnered with care team and created a social media campaign to build student awareness about who the care team is and what they do. And so, that was a really cool way of legacy teaching where we built upon what one class did in a semester, which was Spring 2020, where everything was wild, and it took a lot to get done in one semester, with the beginning of a pandemic, we built upon that in a second semester, to really create actionable things that the care team could use to build awareness about what they do for the campus.

John: You mentioned a focus on inclusive teaching, could you talk a little bit more about some strategies that you use to create an inclusive environment in your classes? You’ve talked about some of these, but do you have any other suggestions? Because I think everyone’s trying to make their classes more inclusive now and any tips you could provide would be helpful.

Bree: Yeah. So I think for me, a big part of it has been educating myself. I’ve taken a lot of trainings, I’ve had trainings specifically on Universal Design for Learning, inclusive teaching. So some of those trainings that I took actually had us listen to interviews from students about their experiences as first-generation students, as students who English is not their first language, as students who are full time working and caretakers. Listening to their stories really helped me design my classes in a way that is more accessible. I design my classes being very empathetic and mindful of the students who enter our class. So SHSU is a Hispanic-serving Institution, more than 50% of my students are first-generation college students, so I automatically design my classes for that population, and in turn, like we see from Universal Design for Learning, that has benefits for everybody. So if you design a building with a ramp for individuals who can’t walk, that ultimately can benefit other individuals. The ramp makes it easier for them to get to the building to get inside. So I really embrace that approach in my teaching, and I try to be inclusive from the start. Again, educating yourself is a big part. I’ve done a lot of work on anti-racist pedagogy and just in everyday life, so that has been really helpful for me as well. And then I’m not perfect by any means. I try really hard, and there have been times where things have come up and students have felt safe enough to bring it up to me that there was potentially issue with how something was presented or delivered in the class, and I think my biggest advice is, when that happens, take a step back, take a pause, and really use empathy to listen. This student took time out of their everyday life to come to you and explain how this content or how the delivery made them feel. So I know that the first instinct might be to be defensive. But I think it’s really important to take a step back and try to really understand where the student is coming from. And actually I have this situation in the fall and it ended up turning out to be a really informative and transformative experience for me, but also for the student and now the student still keeps in touch with me and emails me often about updates in her life. And so, I think that’s a really big part of teaching in a way that’s empowering and supportive, rather than being authoritative and the sage on the stage when you share that power, and that’s important for me teaching in victim studies, because I teach in our victim services management program, which is the master’s degree. The students who come into this program are rock stars, they have worked in the field for years, they are running nonprofits, they are doing all this amazing work already. And so by sharing the power, and by me recognizing I have this degree, and I have some experience, but their experience is just as valuable and important as mine. I think that is really setting the stage for inclusive teaching and that’s what I embrace.

John: You mentioned a collaborative environment in your classes. What role do students play in creating content for your classes?

Bree: Yeah, so that’s actually my ultimate goal for students. In a lot of the effective online teaching trainings I’ve took, a lot of what we give to students is stuck on the learning management system. If you give a student an assignment or a quiz, they submit it, and they may never have access again. So a lot of the assignments I give them are getting off the learning management system and giving them tools and things that they can have beyond the semester. And so, some examples of that are, again, creating eportfolios. So they create these eportfolios that they use throughout the class, they create their intro background page where they talk about themselves, as much as they want to share or not, they can keep it anonymous if they want to. But they create this front page, which is personalized to them. And then they have different sections where they have module reflections. They have a course glossary, where they define key terms for each module and put the term and the definition there. And so, I started this approach… again, after reading Ungrading. But also, when I think back to classes, I had this really cool class about serial killers. And we created a portfolio with case studies about each serial killer, and I hung onto that thing for like a decade. I even gave it to my grandma who was super into crime shows and she wanted to read it. And so, I was like, this is something that is missing when we teach on the learning management system, and it’s something that I want to facilitate for students. Online, I think the eportfolio fits best rather than a paper portfolio. And so, it’s something that they can take with them and,it was funny, I was at a campus event, it was a campus ally training, and there was a staff member there who said, “Oh, you’re Dr. Boppre, one of our student workers is taking your class and she showed me her eportfolio that she made in your class and was so proud of it, and it looks so cool.” I’m like “That is gold. If that is what happens as a result of my teaching, I have achieved what I wanted to.” I want students to end my classes with some creative item that they develop throughout the class, and that they’re so proud of and so excited about that they’re sharing it with others. And so, the eportfolios, I definitely love those. I also assign infographics, which I think I mentioned earlier. So students create these visually appealing flyers with information about controversial issues in our field. So for victimization related classes, they’ll talk about intimate partner violence, violence against women, and they’ll summarize the research. They will do what they would typically do for a research paper, but in this visually appealing, accessible format. Honestly, I can’t tell you that I’ve ever shared a paper from class with anybody from undergrad, but I would share an infographic. I would show someone and say, “Look at what I’ve done,” and that’s what students tell me, they’re really proud of that infographic that they’ve created. And so, that has been really rewarding for me is to help facilitate these students’ creations. I’m not gonna lie, it does take a lot of tutorials and working through students to develop these skills, but I tell them, I’m very purposeful about the technology that I choose for classes and I’ve honestly had to ditch some approaches for some that are more useful and relevant to their future careers. But I really focus on the tools and technology that I think will best serve them in their future careers no matter what they do. And so, that’s why I emphasize these eportfolios, because you’re developing a website, and I have a personal website for all my scholarship, but I’ve used Google Sites to create community exhibits, I’ve used them to present research presentations. I’ve used these web design skills for so many other things that I can envision for other students and the same with the infographics and getting used to using Canva. We live in an ever growing society that wants information quickly and visually, especially like TikTok, Instagram… that is the reality that we live in today. And so, these approaches really fit with where we’re going in our society. And so, learning Canva, you might make an infographic for class, but then you have those skills to make a flyer for an event at work, or you have those skills to create an infographic for something else related to your class or for your career. And so, that’s really what I emphasize, these creative, project-based finales is what I call them, because they help students create something and cultivate skills that will benefit them far beyond the end of the semester.

John: David wildly refers to those assignments that end up in the LMS and disappear at the end of the semester as “disposable assignments.” And the type of thing you’re describing are the non-disposable, open pedagogy type things that students often find much more engaging, because they have much more meaning to them, and I think you’ve described that quite nicely. So we always end with a question, what’s next?

Bree: So I’m entering my fifth year on the tenure track. So, I’m still very much focused on research. But this upcoming semester, I’m actually putting all of the trauma awareness and the survivor centered teaching into my research-based service-learning project with students. And so, we are actually going to ask students about survivor-centered teaching and trauma-aware teaching and we’re going to do a survey and focus group with students. So I’m really excited to test students’ reactions to these approaches and the need. That’s ultimately what I want to demonstrate, the need for these approaches from an empirical standpoint, and involving students in that process. I think that’s going to be really powerful. One of my students in my summer class actually inspired me to do this because we were having a zoom session, and we talked about survivor-centered teaching, and she’s just like, this is the first time I’ve ever felt empowered to tell my story, because in every other class, I have felt silenced by these Title IX and mandatory reporting warnings, I just have not felt comfortable or able to share. And so that is a big part of my future in what’s next, is continuing to empower students to tell their stories and to view students as the whole student, and how these life experiences shaped their interactions in the classroom and the eportfolios is a way that I get to do that. They do get to share their stories and reflect on it. But I’m always looking for what more we can do, and that’s really what I want to focus on. Because these life experiences, even my own life experiences. Both my parents were incarcerated throughout my life, I grew up visiting my dad in prisons for 15 plus years. Every weekend, I was at the prison. To say that experience has no impact on my teaching or learning would just be ridiculous to say. That had a huge impact on who I am, how I learned, how I teach. And so, I’m very upfront about that with students, and I also want to empower them to have their own stories and reflect on how it impacts their experiences, because education truly can be transformative. It was for me as a first-generation college student, as someone with those life experiences in my childhood. Being able to go to college transformed my life, and if I can play a small role in that for my students, that’s my ultimate life goal and that’s why I’m here.

Rebecca: Thank you so much Bree for sharing your really great techniques and providing us with a lot of things to think about as more of us are teaching online and thinking about experiential learning and service learning in those contexts.

John: And we noted on your website, you have a word cloud that lists some words that students have used to describe your teaching, and the most frequent words were fun and creative. But right behind those were unique, amazing, informative, thorough, and awesome. And that would be a nice aspirational goal for many of us, to see those types of responses for students, because I suspect that those wouldn’t be the most common words that students generally use for most of their classes. So thank you for joining us, and I hope you’ll be back again in the near future.

Bree: Yes, I was so excited to come. A lot of my pedagogical heroes have been on this show. So I’m very honored to be here and thanks so much for having me.

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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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257. PsycLearn

Adaptive learning platforms provide each student with a customized learning path based on the student’s individual learning needs. In this episode, Anna Yocom, Linda Goldberg, and Alan Strathman join us to discuss how the American Psychological Association has developed adaptive learning packages for core psychology courses.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Adaptive learning platforms provide each student with a customized learning path based on the student’s individual learning needs. In this episode, we examine how one professional association has developed adaptive learning packages for core courses in their discipline.

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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 all involved with a psych learning project, which we’ll be talking about throughout the podcast. Let’s have each guest introduce themselves.

Anna: Hi, I am Anna Yocom. I am a senior lecturer at The Ohio State University in psychology and I am also a Content Manager for PsycLearn.

Linda: And I’m Linda Goldberg. And my role with the PsycLearn project is that of product evangelist.

Alan: Hi, this is Alan Strathman. I’m a content manager for PsycLearn and was a professor of psychology for a long time at the University of Missouri.

John: Welcome, everyone. We’re really happy to talk to you about PsycLearn. I first heard about this when I was working on a project at SUNY dealing with adaptive learning solutions. And we had seen some write ups of PsycLearn so we want to find out a little bit more.

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

Alan: I’m drinking coffee.

Rebecca: Oh, a coffee drinker.

Alan: Sorry.

Rebecca: I see how it is. [LAUGHTER]

Alan: I had tea this morning this morning.

Rebecca: Oh, that’s good. That’s good.

Rebecca:: How about you, Linda?

Linda: I’m having an iced tea this afternoon. It’s hot and muggy outside, so something citrusy and decaf.

Rebecca: …and perfectly refreshing. [LAUGHTER]

Linda: That’s right. And sweetened.

Rebecca: Awesome. Anna?

Anna: I had tea earlier, but I have switched to water.

John: And I’m drinking spring cherry green tea.

Rebecca: Nice. I have some Scottish breakfast. Still in my pot today.

John: We’ve invited all of you here today to discuss the PsycLearn adaptive learning platform developed by the American Psychological Association. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of this project?

Linda: Okay, I’m going to start with that. And there are a couple of overlapping facets to the origin story, so to speak. One is really a desire to expand APA’s publishing program. APA has a very rich publishing program, which includes publishing of over 90 academic journals, a very robust books publishing program, where many of those books are aimed at clinical practice, as well as books that might support the professional researcher, books that might support self help, and so on. And we found that there was an opening for us to make a contribution to undergraduate academic instruction and contribute to that portion of the path toward the profession. We also were recognizing as we contemplated this new project that there was a tremendous amount of disruption in the higher educational publishing landscape, a lot of cost pushback, a lot of desire among publishers to leverage technology. And we thought that perhaps not simply for delivery of content, but to improve the learning experience and to improve efficacy that we saw there might be some opportunity there.

Alan: Yeah, also, let me jump in. I think the developers also saw this as an opportunity to work toward some of the goals that APA has for the field of psychology, including, for example, utilizing psychology to make an impact on social issues.

Linda: And the field of cognitive psychology is one that tells us a lot about how we learn. So we felt like we could draw from our very own field in development of our final product,

John: Which courses have been developed for this platform.

Linda: So we started with a course for research methods and psychology and added a PsycLearn statistics for the behavioral sciences to that. These two courses are typically required for all majors in the discipline. And they also represent the most challenging content for many students. So we thought that seemed like a good place to start.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how this material was developed?

Alan: Sure, we use a backwards design process where we start by identifying what we want students to learn in each module and a module is similar to what would be a chapter in a regular textbook. These outcomes that we have in mind become Learning Objectives, and they really guide the content development. Learning Objectives are developed through collaboration, a conversation, maybe a hashing out between the subject matter experts and the content managers, and are influenced by a variety of factors, including how well the learning objectives address APAs guidelines for undergraduate education. And then there is a rigorous review process where other experts in the field provide feedback and often suggest additional learning objectives

John: Was there much of a challenge getting agreement on learning objectives. I know in many disciplines, there’s a lot of discussion of what should be in the core material in the discipline? Has psychology been able to overcome that a bit by agreeing on these standards?

Alan: Well, I think it is a challenge in every case, because everybody has a sense of what they think should be taught and what is essential for students to learn. Like I said, I think it’s hashing out. It’s sometimes a little bit of trial and error, where we identify a learning objective, and then start writing about it. And then at some point, we may decide that’s not the right objective to have. But I think in the end, the subject matter experts and the content managers do a really good job of coming to some consensus on what we want to teach.

John: Was the content in the courses, the actual readings and other materials, developed by the people who created the package?

Alan: Absolutely. We are a digital first product, with original content developed by experts in various sub disciplines in psychology. And this really gives us a big advantage I think over print textbooks. So starting from scratch, in an entirely digital environment, we can develop a seamless presentation, where we start with learning objectives, we present content, we design activities and interactive exercises, and then have assessments. And we can be sure that all those things are aligned with learning objectives. And we don’t have to try and retrofit learning objectives into existing content. And then just hope that assessments that we have address the new learning objectives. So I think being able to work in a digital environment allows us to have this really seamless presentation where we start with learning objectives and we go all the way through assessment, and all those things match.

Rebecca: You’ve hinted a little bit about maintaining the content, given that it’s in a digital platform. But can you talk a little bit more about how you maintain that or what that review processes is or how that gets updated on a regular basis?

Alan: Well, that’s a good question. One issue for us is that we’re still so new, that we haven’t had semesters and semesters of feedback from students that we can use to make revisions. But what is really exciting is that whenever we decide that we want to make a change, we can do it in real time. Think about a print textbook, whenever they decide that they want something to be different, they might wait three to five years for the opportunity to make those changes. With us, since it’s digital first, we decide something needs to be changed or updated or revised and we can make those changes in a really timely fashion. And I think it really helps to keep our content current.

John: And if you find that students are not achieving the learning objectives, you have the ability, at least, to make some changes, either redefining the objectives if perhaps the objectives didn’t work too well. Or if the learning materials weren’t quite aligning with that. How often is that type of change done?

Alan: Well, so far, we’re still into the development process, that we’re making those changes just all the time. As the products get older and more mature, I think we’ll need to do that less. But again, we’ll still have the opportunity to do it as often as we’d like to.

Rebecca: John mentioned at the beginning of the episode about his interest in this project related to adaptive learning. Can you talk a little bit about the adaptive learning component of this project and the platform that you use.

Anna: The platform that we use is CogBooks, it is a platform, I think, is really unique compared to other textbooks, because it allows students to engage in their learning, and really direct their own learning pathway. And that’s based on their understanding of the content. So instead of going through a whole chapter, and then maybe quizzing yourself or testing yourself, after each content page, they get some formative questions and they get to make their own assessment. They get to say, “Okay, did I understand that? Was I not too sure? How did I do on those questions?” And then they can choose whether they want to get that support material or not, which we think of as like, “Would you follow up and ask your instructor a question.” That’s how we think of this support material. So if a student is very confident with the material, they’re essentially going to get a different path than a student who might need help in a couple of different areas or a student who might need help in a lot of areas. There’s just more examples or more practice. So it can look a little bit different for each student, which is pretty cool.

John: Linda mentioned earlier that psychologists have done a lot of research and cognitive scientists have done a lot of research on how people learn, how have some of those principles of how we learn been built into this platform?

Alan: Well, Linda is certainly right. There is a lot of research on learning science. And because we are psychologists, we’re familiar with the research, and use that knowledge to help students learn throughout the product. I think the centerpiece of our efforts to use learning science is the inclusion of metacognition, that is helping students evaluate their own learning, helping them identify what they know and what they don’t know. And when they identify what they don’t know, then they could spend a little more time learning that particular topic. Often students get to the exam, and they haven’t really done a good job of testing themselves, identifying what they know, and what they don’t know. And the first time they realize they don’t know something is when they get to the exam. And that’s obviously not the right time to get there. And so we’re able to identify ways that we can help them evaluate their own learning. We help them in this process by incorporating those learning strategies that we know are supported by research. We present concrete examples throughout. We have frequent activities and assessments. Students get practice retrieving content from memory. And these opportunities are spaced just as the research suggests they should be. They have interactive exercises. They get practice in the elaboration, or explaining content to themselves in their own words. And really the process of taking material and from the jargon in which it’s presented to explaining things in their own words, is a really useful process for students to engage in. And we could have a whole podcast just on principles of learning science that PsycLearn incorporates.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what the student experience is like for students that are using the platform? So Anna, you hinted a little bit at this with some of the adaptive learning components. But what does it look like from: I entered this space from the beginning, and now I’m interacting with this over time.

Anna: So students really, I think, approach PsycLearn differently than a printed textbook, again, not only just the fact that they would go through a printed textbook, and then maybe ask themselves some questions, probably skip over a lot of reading, because maybe it’s not very engaging or easy to get distracted with print textbooks as well. But one of the really interesting things is that they’re engaged with the content pages within them. So they’re not just engaged outside of content, like “Oh, refer to this video,” or “you can reference this activity” or “try some completely different platform to help with your reading….” but within the content pages, they get activities in which they’re asked to reflect on the course material. How does this connect to things you already know? So they get to respond to those things within the content pages. They get practice formative questions, formative meaning that it’s not just did I get this right? Yes or no. But they get feedback. So they would find out what a suggested answer was to a short answer question. They can compare that to their own. With a multiple choice question, they get follow up on why that is the correct answer, not just “Well, if I’ve missed this a couple of times, and they get multiple chances to respond, but they get some explanation about why that was the correct answer.” And so we have video questions, we have matching exercises, we have short answer, we have multiple choice questions, different drag and drop. So we’ve tried to just vary the kinds of interactions that students would have, the ways that they can practice answering questions. And this variety really helps maintain interest throughout. So they get to engage it in lots of different ways. It’s not just a rote memorization, but they’re actually applying the material as they go through each module.

John: So you mentioned formative questions. Are there are some assessment tools built in to evaluate students’ learning for grading purposes, for example?

Anna: There are. Yeah, so there are summative questions. And we try to have them associated with those learning objectives that Alan had talked about earlier. And so after maybe one, two, or a small group of those learning objectives are covered, there is a short sample, maybe 5…10 multiple choice questions where students have a few attempts, and we want them to get to about an 80% accuracy. And one of the nice things is if they don’t on their first attempt, they can actually go access those support pages then. So maybe they skipped over them earlier. And they thought, “Okay, I got this, it’s fine. I understood this page.” And then they get to these questions later on, these mastering the content and they’re like, “Well, wait a minute, I was missing some of this.” So they get another chance to go back to those support questions, and try it again. So then hopefully, they can get those right after three attempts. We don’t want them to be punitive. We want them to get engaged with the material and get to that mastery.

Rebecca: So now that you’ve talked a little bit about the student experience, can you talk a little bit about how this supports instructors? What kind of feedback is provided to instructors and maybe how instructors are using this in their teaching.

Anna: One of the things I really like, we all know, anytime that we can even maybe think back to our own experiences in classrooms, it’s a struggle getting students to read. But a lot of these classes, I mean, really all of our classes, if we’re assigning some sort of book, some reading material, we want them to read it. So how do we get them to engage? Well, that’s where the accountability comes in. So we’re giving them this tool, and then their instructor can see, “Okay, they’ve made it through this material, they engage with this.” So the instructor could choose to then reiterate that material in class, or they could choose to maybe take an active learning approach in class. And okay, now that you’ve had this background, everybody made it through, we’re going to apply it. And maybe not everybody got to 100% on every question, but maybe we got to about over 90% completion, which is what I would typically see in my classes. So you would have students who, even after a few attempts, would sometimes miss some of those mastering questions, but generally, it was pretty high. And so I could see that before I went into class. Okay, so students, as a whole, on average have got this. So I can take it a step further, where I can go back to those questions that were really challenging. So you get to track progress through each module, you can also dive a little deeper with individual students. So a student comes to you and says, “I’m really struggling,” the instructor can go in there, they can look at their pathway. Were they accessing the support material? Did they take those quizzes a few times? Where were they spending their time? Or if the instructor wanted them to cover it on let’s say, Tuesday night, were they doing it all Tuesday at 9pm? Right? Like you could actually see all of that. So you can kind of work with them like, “Well, I see you started this that night, let’s think about how we could maybe back that up. Like maybe we should pace this out at least a few days ahead of time, which is a really nice way to work with students.” And it also syncs with the LMS, the learning management system, so it really takes that burden off of instructors as well. So it’s talking to the platform that we get there. So we get this easy back and forth, which is really nice. So we can nudge students along with that, I would often encourage students to visit those support pages if they were struggling, like, “Look, I know this is really challenging,” or, “Hey, there’s more practice, if you just want a little bit more practice, you can go to some of those support pages to get that.” And the other nice thing is students can actually email right from there, which I think is pretty unique. So if a student emails me, I could see okay, they were having problems in statistics with variability and standard deviation. And it will take me as the instructor right to that page. And so then I can see that and I can say, “Oh, well, why don’t you try these examples here,” which was really nice. Instead of just a student saying, “I don’t know, I don’t get this,” they can let you know exactly where they’re struggling. So it provides a lot of options for instructors.

John: And do instructors get aggregate statistics on what areas students are struggling in addition to data on individual students?

Anna: Absolutely. So you can see that on the dashboard. You can see if there were chunks of mastering questions, for example, or a specific question that students struggled with. So you could choose to review that and maybe even go over some of those in class or go over specific topics in more detail.

John: How are instructors combining this with other face-to-face learning activities, for example, in face-to-face classes. As I understand it, most people use this as a textbook replacement, except a much more powerful replacement to a textbook. What other things will people often do to provide more of a sense of community or a social component to the learning?

Anna: Yeah, so, I think a lot of instructors are using it, just as you said, as a textbook replacement. And that’s how I have used it for statistics in particular. So it was taking the place of my other textbook, which actually was a print textbook that was online. And so I don’t feel like there were any losses. But we were gaining the ability to say, “Okay, we’re all on the same page. I know that everybody’s at least had some exposure to this. So now let’s talk about it. I can see where you were struggling. So I know we’re going to need more examples here. I know we’re going to need more follow up here.” Or “why was this question challenging? Why was this hard?” So I think drawing on those parts are how we can maintain those social ties and the social interactions we want whether it’s online, whether it’s face to face, or in any capacity.

Linda: I’ll just go ahead and point out as well that part of the content package that we’re making available to instructors who adopt, PsycLearn course material is a set of student activities that sort of exist outside of the platform itself and are available for instructors to assign or to bring to the class. They’re typically designed again to align with specific learning objectives and to give the instructor options for an in- class activity or an additional assignment activity. And that’s accessible to the instructor when they’re using the dashboard.

Rebecca: Sounds like some really great support materials. Can you talk a little bit about how this platform has affected equity gaps that we might be seeing?

Alan: Sure, I think there are two ways that PsycLearn is addressing issues of equity. First, we are designing PsycLearn to be culturally inclusive, that is we work to make sure that through examples, images, photos, figures, every student can see themselves in the product. Plus, our goal is to include the research of diverse psychologists and psychologists of color. And then I think the second way that we strive to be equitable is to design for universal access. We want the product to be accessible to all students, and so we make great efforts to do so. We use typography that’s particularly accessible. We incorporate transcripts and closed captioning, we have text-based alternatives for non text elements. And our efforts are well beyond what the minimum guidelines would be, well beyond what typical expectations would be, and I want to say that this is because we value this process so highly. We are keenly interested in making an accessible, inclusive product, and I think we’re really working hard to do that.

John: Have there been any studies of the overall efficacy of this program compared to alternatives?

Linda: Well, we have conducted some impact surveys, surveys of student users to gauge their impressions of the impact of PsycLearn on certain important aspects of their experience. Through surveying students, we looked at the impact on their knowledge gains, on their confidence in their ability to use that knowledge, and on motivation to complete assigned activities. And on the questions that we asked, to sort of tease out each of these thematic areas, we did receive very positive response. Now, these are, albeit, impressions of students. That’s sort of the first line of study available to us. And we feel pretty motivated ourselves by what we’re learning, by what we’re hearing from students. These surveys did also include some open text entry questions. And very interestingly, some of the criticisms that we heard were often this is a lot of time, this is a lot of work. But by the same token, we’ll hear in the very same response, but it’s very worth my time, and it really helps. And I feel confident when I go into the class, and I already know what my instructor is going to talk about, I feel more relaxed, I feel more able to pay attention. That kind of response has been very rewarding to receive from these student surveys.

John: With some other platforms, there have been studies that have looked at the impact on equity gaps, and they relate very much to what you just said, that basically, students come into our classes with very different backgrounds. Some come in with a very rich and strong background from prior courses, others come in with a somewhat weaker background. But to make it through an adaptive learning platform, the students who come in with less background can acquire mastery, but it takes a bit more time and effort. And the students who come in with a stronger background can race through a little bit more quickly. But much of the research does suggest that those equity gaps tend to be reduced. But it is at the cost of additional effort by those students who come in with a little bit less prior knowledge or prior experience with some of the material. And so I think that’s one of those real strengths of adaptive learning platforms compared to other formats like textbooks and lectures and so forth, where everyone is expected to move at the same pace. But as Chuck Dziuban, on a previous podcast has said, in a traditional course, everyone spends the same amount of time with the material, but they learn different amounts, when they’re working with adaptive learning platforms, they have to spend different amounts of time, but they all can achieve the same learning outcomes, they can all reach the same outcomes. But it may take more time to do so.

Linda: That’s certainly our hope, and some of what motivates the work that we’re doing. I feel like having respect for the time that our students need to spend is top of mind. We need to make sure that what we’re asking them to do is a good use of their time. And therefore this mode of delivery and the kind of content that we make available through the multiple activities and so on that Anna was describing. We’re giving our students opportunities to do that self testing that reiterative process and not simply trying to digest a narrative.

Anna: I always think back to a student I actually had in class a number of years ago, and this student went through the same class multiple times. And it was a class that was needed to get to other upper-level classes and was very frustrated, of course. And then we came to find out that this student in the multiple times of taking the class, the book was listed as required, but with either a digital or print textbook, you really don’t have any way to monitor that. You don’t know if the student’s using the book even if they have it. But this student had never got the book, just never occurred to them that, okay, this could be a really valuable tool. And so that’s really a benefit. I see. Like you were talking about equity, let’s give them this tool. But let’s make it something that’s valuable, that can really help them and if they need that added support, they’ll get it. But kind of level the playing field a little bit.

Rebecca: How do you see this platform evolving over time.

Linda: So we are able to work fairly closely with our platform partner, CogBooks. We’re able to contribute to their roadmap planning to some degree. We’ve collected feedback through a variety of channels, also, not only the student surveys that I’ve mentioned, but we also, in the past year, conducted a qualitative study that included student interviews and observations of students who were assigned to use PsycLearn. And this exercise gave us really valuable insight into how and where students focus their time and attention. And so for instance, through that process, we were able to get some real good insight into how they approach the summary of each module. And as a result, we’ll be able to give some greater attention, we’ve got some plans to enrich and make more accessible, the content that we placed there, because we were able to learn that they highly value that for later test preparation. So that’s just an example. We’re hoping to be able to continue to do those observational and interview studies.

Rebecca: So I’m really curious for each of you to answer this question. But what makes you really excited about PsycLearn?

Anna: I’m happy to go first, because I am a very energetic instructor. I will be at the front of the room, and I bring a lot of energy. And what makes me excited about PsycLearn is just the ability of students to be active consumers of their learning. I would love for them to take away something that is memorable, that feels unique. And so PsycLearn frees me up as an instructor, that I don’t have to go through every bit of background information in the way I use it in class, I can assume they’ve had things. Let’s spend time on things that are interesting. Let’s dive deeper into things. Let’s do more exercises for things that are challenging. And so the students get to think about and apply new ways of learning and engaging the material from the very first moment that they encounter the content.

Alan: Yeah, for me, it’s really about the inclusion of metacognition, I think it’s really helpful to have students be able to evaluate their own learning. I think this makes them do better on exams, and I think it makes them more successful in their entire college career. It’s also an important part of my own teaching. I have a lot of activities in class where students can answer and identify how well they know what they’re supposed to know. And what I often find is that students study, but they don’t know how much to study, they don’t know: “Do I know it as well as I need to know it.” And this product gives them a lot of feedback, really helps them understand if they understand the material as well as they need to. And PsycLearn really can do that in ways that regular textbooks cannot.

Linda: I would say that my excitement really comes from the big picture, the opportunity for us to deliver on these experiences that Anna and Alan are describing. But we’re going to be able to do that across the foundational courses in the curriculum. And so that larger picture future horizon is pretty exciting.

John: Well, you’ve already addressed some of this, at least in terms of PsycLearn, but we always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Linda: Well, we have sort of talked a little bit about future and what’s next and our opportunity to be iterative. The digital platform allows us to be continually rethinking what is the best activity to offer to reinforce or bolster certain concepts. And so that’s certainly something that is ongoing. We can take feedback from students on how well they feel various content is supporting them. We’ll be looking at what we can do to encourage a greater level and engagement with that support material, so that students aren’t feeling like, “Oh, that’s extra, I don’t really need to go there.” Indeed, it’s extra. But it’s really vital, especially for students who might sort of marginally understand. And so the opportunity for us to deliver a reframe of a concept can make all the difference at that tipping point.

Anna: Yeah, and I think what Linda had said about using the support material is really important to us. So we’re really interested in applying these learning science principles that Alan had talked about to say, “Okay, what is the best way to get students to engage with this.” We want them to see that cool stuff we’re putting on those pages, if they feel like they could benefit of it. So we want to reach the students that need that support. So I think just diving in a little deeper and figuring out the best ways to reach them, to get them to say, “Okay, yeah, I could use a little practice.” Or “I could use another example,” snd really assess that learning of their own. It’s a challenge. It’s a challenge we have constantly, especially when students are new at something, they tend to think, “Oh, yeah, I got this. I know it all.” And so getting better at that metacognition, I think, is really exciting to us.

Alan: Yeah, and I think for us, it has a lot to do with making a better and better product. I think about what it was like the first time I taught a course. And I equate that to the first iteration of a PsycLearn product. And then I think about what was it like the fifth time I taught that course or the 10th time I taught it, and how richer and deeper it was. And I think the same thing will happen with PsycLearn. We’re going to keep on creating a product that gets richer, more inclusive, and more likely to help students succeed.

John: I was really excited to hear about PsycLearn, and everything you’ve talked about makes me even more excited about the opportunity for this and I hope that other disciplines will start working on similar materials for their basic courses, because the benefits from this have been well established in terms of improving student learning and reducing some of the equity gaps. Thank you.

Linda: Thank you.

Alan: Thank you.

Anna: Thank you.

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

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

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256. Sharing Our Stories

Students do not always recognize the expertise of faculty who do not match their cultural stereotype of what a professor looks like. In this episode, Sarah Mayes-Tang joins us to discuss how she has used personal narratives to address these student biases. Sarah is an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at the St. George Campus of the University of Toronto. She is also the author of a chapter in the Picture a Professor project, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

Show Notes

  • Neuhaus, Jessamyn (forthcoming, 2022). Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. West Virginia University Press.
  • Peterson, D. A., Biederman, L. A., Andersen, D., Ditonto, T. M., & Roe, K. (2019). Mitigating gender bias in student evaluations of teaching. PloS one, 14(5), e0216241. (A study that suggests that reminding students of bias in course evaluations may reduce bias.)
  • Perusall
  • Ogawa, Y. (2009). The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel. Picador.
  • Borges, J. L. (1998). The library of Babel. Collect

Transcript

John: Students do not always recognize the expertise of faculty who do not match their cultural stereotype of what a professor looks like. In this episode, we examine one professor’s strategies to address these student biases.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Sarah Mayes-Tang. Sarah is an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at the St. George Campus of the University of Toronto. She is also the author of a chapter in the Picture a Professor project, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.
Welcome, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be here and to see both of you. [LAUGHTER]

John: Thanks for joining us. Our teas today are… Are you drinking tea?

Sarah: I am drinking tea. I have a…

Rebecca: Yay!

Sarah: …I wouldn’t miss it. …it’s a chocolate mint black tea by Sloane tea. They’re a Toronto tea company.

Rebecca: Awesome.

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: I have a very standard [LAUGHTER] English breakfast today.

John: And I have a Prince of Wales tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, I haven’t had that in a while. John. We’ve invited you here today to discuss your chapter in Picture a Professor. Your chapter’s entitled “Sharing Our Stories to Build Community, Highlight Bias, and Address Challenges to Authority.” Can you tell us a little bit about this chapter?

Sarah: Yeah, sure. I think that my chapter might be the most obvious kind of strategy in this book. So a lot of the authors are sharing really inventive, or new strategies that I hadn’t thought of. Mine is all about just talking to other people about the challenges that we face when we don’t look like other professors in the academy, or at least what students might picture as their idea of a professor, what might you picture when you Google a professor? So my strategy is all about talking to people. First of all, starting by talking to colleagues, in particular, colleagues that might face similar challenges. So first of all, I should say, I’m a white woman, so I can’t speak to the full challenges that, for example, people of color might face, but I’m a math professor, and I present pretty feminine, and I teach mathematics in I guess, like a pretty serious math department. And so I certainly don’t look like what students expect when they come into a big math class. So for me, and I think for a lot of other people that I work with, it really came as a huge shock, when students started to question even my basic mathematical ability, 18 year olds dealing with probably their own insecurities about mathematics, but it was coming out as like, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. And then the reaction from my superiors who are mainly white men, would be to act more authoritative, basically act ways that were more like them. And the way that I felt was just like, there was something very, very wrong with me. I felt very ashamed. And even though I sensed that it had something to do with my identity, I knew they wouldn’t question me in the same way, if I was a typical looking professor, I also thought I did have to change something about myself. And there’s such tremendous shame in that. And it wasn’t until I, at the end of the year, whispered a little bit about it. And then another colleague said this exact same thing happened to me, the exact same thing. And the whole year, we were going through parallel experiences. And knowing that changed my life, it changed my profession. I would have left the academy if it hadn’t been for that. And then over time developing a group of cheerleaders who I could go to, and then kind of gain more confidence. My chapter also addresses being able to speak to colleagues and being able to speak to our students, because it’s important that they understand the challenges that we face, because we don’t just have white men who we teach, we teach a variety of students. And I think if we can talk about our personal challenges, and they can see that we also have faced challenges that they might be facing, then that can really be very transformative. So that’s kind of a brief summary of some of the things that I talk about.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how that unfolds in a classroom when you’re having those kinds of conversations with students in a math class?

Sarah: Yeah, so sometimes it unfolds very naturally, by some prompt that might happen. Yeah, there might be an extreme example. This past semester, I had another professor, he came in, and it was like, clear gender issue. And so I used that, in the next day actually, it took me a little while to react to it. And then the next day, we had a very deep conversation about gender in the classroom. But it might be before student evaluations, that has taken me a long time to come to, but how do you address the research about what students do in evaluations? Sometimes I assign reading about mathematicians’ experiences, I try to assign readings of biographies of diverse mathematicians, and then we relate it to their own experiences. And then if it’s appropriate, I don’t want to be all about me. But if it’s appropriate, I sometimes talk about what I’ve experienced. So those are some of the ways that it comes out. But I try to make my classrooms not just about the mathematics, because that’s really where the transformative stuff happens.

John: In terms of the teaching evaluations, have you addressed that issue specifically with students in terms of gender bias on evaluations before the evaluations? And has that helped? …because there is some research that making students aware of biases tends to reduce the amount of bias that shows up in the actual evaluations.

Sarah: It’s really hard for me to say if it helps.

John: …there’s no control group.

Sarah: Exactly. So even though I teach gigantic classes, you’d think that I’d be able to do some sort of like statistical thing, I have no idea if it really helps. I do get comments, after, if I do address it. I know that some students will say, “I’m not just saying this because she’s a woman.” So there is some backlash in that. So it’s unclear. I try not to do it right before the student evaluations, but like a few weeks before. I also do evaluations throughout the semester. And yes, it’s difficult to see if it impacts the evaluations or not. However, what is meaningful to me is not whether it impacts my evaluations, I think, but again, reaching the students who might not fall into those majority groups and helping them see that some bias stuff may be going on and it’s not all in my head and that is impacting my experience, and there’s actual research behind that.

Rebecca: I can imagine that students in a math class don’t expect to talk about identity. Can you talk a little bit about the student response to some of these conversations that you’ve had with students.

Sarah: It varies. I find that students are more and more open to it. I’ve taught a lot of first-year classes. So as they go through first year, they’re more open to it. Because at first, they’re like, “I just need all the math and they find a big change between high school and university in terms of the contact hours. So like you’re wasting our time talking about this stuff. But by upper-year classes, they find it such a refreshing change, because they’ve been in so many math classes, where it’s just all content, content, content. A lot of lectures. And so I really didn’t react to any of that backlash. And it’s almost like a breath of fresh air. And another aspect of identity that I think has been meaningful, like, has maybe come very naturally, the idea of like, “Are you a math person?” …because that’s another type of identity that’s really common in our society. And even that, it certainly linked gender and race, but it’s something that isn’t directly gender or race. And so talking about how that fits into their identity has also been a key to unlocking more personal conversation and getting them to really reflect on themselves in a mathematics classroom. Yeah, and I think one of the keys is like having them watch a mathematician talk about their work and how their identity is linked to their work. And then they comment, for example, Perusall or something where they can annotate the text, and then they start to get involved in some conversations, I can bring those comments into class and then we can have some pretty dynamic conversations.

Rebecca: I can imagine teaching first-year students in math with a societal “I’m not a math person” problem. I know, I teach in art and design, so we have a lot of students that claim that identity, “I’m not a math person, I don’t do math,” and are afraid. Can you talk about some of the ways that you have reduced the fear, allowed people to see themselves as being math people, even though they’ve never seen themselves in that way? I know you’ve had some really interesting things that you’ve done.

Sarah: Yeah, I love reaching those people. And it’s a lot more difficult now in my job at a big university than it was when I was teaching at a liberal arts school, where all students are required to take a math course. So maybe I’ll talk a little bit about my experiences at the liberal arts school to start. So I was at Quest University Canada, a small school, about 500 to 700 students. It kind of started as an experiment. And so we are encouraged to do all sorts of things. And we had a lot of students who were so afraid, just as you describe, of their mathematics course. And they were putting it off, putting it off, putting it off. And I think one of the things that really traps them is the idea that everything has to build on the thing before and a lot of them got lost somewhere in early elementary school and they never recovered. And it was some sort of threat to their identity, probably some like quick quiz or something. Someone said something, and they were lost, forever. So it’s trying to show them that well, there’s actually parts of mathematics that math majors don’t see until their fourth year that you can do right now. And that’s usually how I try to approach it. So I think one of the things is just addressing that head on, talking about their experiences in mathematics and telling them we’re going to do something different. You’re not going to see numbers, you’re not going to see arithmetic even, this is going to be about shapes and space and ideas, and maybe even accessing points of connection with individual students. So I can give examples of particular projects if you’d like or particular courses.

Rebecca: I’d love to hear an example of a project.

Sarah: Sure. I’m a firm believer that the things that you think are going to be total train wrecks can either turn out to be the best things you’ve ever done or they could be trainwrecks. But definitely my best things have been the wild ideas. So I was teaching a course on mathematical creativity. And it was going to attract a lot of students that were totally afraid of math because they had to take it as part of a series of courses on creativity. So they got to take a social science course on creativity and a chemistry course on creativity. But they also had to take this, in their minds, terrible math course on creativity. So I was really excited to teach it. But how would you describe the feeling of creating something new in mathematics. And for me, and for most mathematicians, if you hear like these quotes about mathematics, they’re like mathematicians will say “math is like poetry. Math is like…” …they give all these analogies with very creative analogies. But most students don’t access that until graduate school, because there’s not this freedom of exploration. So I spend a lot of time just wondering, how do I feel creative? How do students feel creative? And it was really only on research that I felt really creative? So, how can I model research for students? So what I ultimately did was, I asked them, first of all, I didn’t tell them where we were going, cause there’s going to be a two-stage project centerpiece of this course. And first stage is you have to define something from geometry, but it can’t be like anything you’ve ever defined before. So one group defined, they called it like an ice cream cone shape. So it was a triangle with like a circle in it. And then we really worked on making their definition mathematically. So how does the triangle touch the circle, another group to defined a caterpillar shape in a precise way. And then the second part of the project, after they have their definition they couldn’t change was to discover as much about that object as they could. And they were only graded on how, on their journals, how much time they spent thinking about it, and how much they talk to other people. And I’m telling you, the ideas that these students had, and the level of mathematics that these totally math-phobic students did, was incredible. It was what I would expect from fourth-year students. And they were starting to use the word theorems and proofs. I said, you don’t have to prove anything, I just want you to like discover things, but they were coming to it naturally. And it was amazing. I could just gush about all the things that they did forever, like all of the discoveries that they made for themselves. And I still hear from these students about the impact that this project had from them, I don’t know, six or seven years ago now. So yeah, that’s one of my favorites. But at the time, I thought, Oh, this might go really poorly.

Rebecca: It’s amazing how the freedom to explore and discover can really open up the freedom to see yourself in a new way, or to be a researcher in a different way. As you were talking, I’m remembering an opportunity I had as an early faculty member workshop. And it was a multi-day workshop with mathematicians, and I was the non-mathematician, to help develop curriculum. And I had never hung out with math folks that much before. But it was really interesting. And we had really interesting conversations about creativity and the overlaps of our work that neither of us had recognized before. So it’s really interesting how those opportunities to have those conversations, whether with students or with colleagues can open up so many possibilities.

Sarah: Yeah, there’s so much and I’ve learned so much from my first year-students who are interested in some very diverse things, and they brought a lot to, like I was gonna say, my teaching, but like, also, just me personally, [LAUGHTER] I think they really enrich my life.

John: And you have taught some interesting classes, including a first-year seminar course in math and literature and poetry. And another one was women’s mathematics. Could you tell us a little bit about each of those classes and how you’ve used that to get students more engaged with math?

Sarah: Sure. So both of them are at the University of Toronto, I will probably do it as U of T at some point, which is not University of Texas for American listeners. And in part they were written to try to attract students who might not traditionally sign up for a math course, all of our first-year courses are massive at U of T, except for these first-year seminars, which are capped at, I think, 25. So really, students’ opportunity for a small class experience. So the math of literature and poetry, I think some of the seeds were planted, actually, by one of the students in that math creativity class. She was a poet, and she identified herself as a poet as a first-year student, and she was also very afraid of math, but she kept finding linkages. And she said, “You know, I think this can help me with my poetry.” And I am totally not a poetry person at all, or I certainly wasn’t, I’m maybe more now. And so that started to get me thinking about like, maybe if I combine math with like a poetry course, I could engage some other students. And she’s one of those students that I still talk to you and she just got her MFA in poetry and still using her math. So I talked to her actually, in developing this course. She helped me a little bit on the poetry side, also a key part in the math and literature and poetry is I had a TA from English because, again, I’m not a specialist. So I needed someone to help me and she was wonderful, a PhD student in literature. So I think another source of inspiration that was also integrated into it was that I had taught novels previously and seen how novels helped students relate to mathematicians or see themselves as mathematicians. I was just amazed at like how much empathy they had for the characters. So we read novels like about mathematicians, like the Housekeeper and the Professor, a really great Japanese novel in translation. And then there was mathematics from novels. So for example, one of our key novels, or a story, of the Library of Babel by Borges and you can actually ask, what is the shape of this library? What could the topology of it be in mathematical language? So then that was a key for investigating topology.

John: Was a library closed or open?

Sarah: Yeah, [LAUGHTER], exactly, that sort of question. We can start to narrow it down. So that was the math in literature and poetry course, in terms of content. The woman’s mathematics course is still kind of growing in my mind. It’s been in the works for a really long time. I just like us to center it almost like an experiential learning course, where the object of study was the university or like the mathematics in our university itself. And so as a result of both history and modern mathematics, and all sorts of things, I decided one of our units was going to be on data visualization, which is a little bit more number focus than I often have in first-year seminars, but people are often surprised that like Florence Nightingale was not just a friendly nurse, she was [LAUGHTER] an amazing data scientist. And she was really one of the first people to bring some of these amazing data visualizations, and she’s an amazing statistician, all these things. And there’s also a lot of women in this space currently. So their project was like, well take some data about the math department, maybe, or students in the math department and find an appropriate visualization for it. And they generated stuff that we really haven’t seen, like, what does it look like in our departments to have 13% woman faculty. You can say it all you want, but to actually see it with like the people, it is actually pretty startling to me. And then another project with that course, was we worked with a university archivist, and went into the university archives. So our university has a long and storied history, we hold ourselves up as a great research university. So we have many illustrious women in the past who have studied here, but people don’t know about them. And since I would say, we have a pretty bad situation with women in our department now, people kind of assume, after this archives project, I would go around and I would ask people, “When do you think the first woman president of the math student union was?” and people would say, “Oh, there’s never been a woman president. Like, are you kidding?” Because that’s the way it looks like now. But the answer is actually 1910 or something. And there were strong women, like way back when. And so students went to the University Archives, they looked at student records, they looked at faculty records, they looked at photos, and they told some stories from that. So that’s a project that’s gonna continue for a future class.

Rebecca: Sounds really interesting, and a great way to get students engaged with many different mathematical ideas, but also really engaged with this idea of identity related to disciplines.

Sarah: Yeah. And another thing that it did is it also helped them see themselves as part of the university because it was the first semester of the academic year, they were first-year students, and so it helped them see themselves as part of the community.

Rebecca: We don’t, in our curricula, look at the history of our university as part of what’s informing our work or informing the students. And so I can imagine that that’s a really unique kind of experience that could happen in any discipline, that would be a really interesting opportunity for students to just better understand their traditions that they’re coming out of.

Sarah: And I think our university archivist wants to work with classes, like they’re so excited to see, especially first year classes, get us to coming there and being part of that aspect of the university. I’m always a big fan of all of our librarians and I know that you guys are too,

Rebecca: You should see my notepad right now. It actually says “go see our archivist” because him and I had a conversation about a project we could do with my class. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Yeah, they’re wonderful.

John: Often, archivists are working in rooms all alone by themselves. And in fact, ours do work in the basement. And the opportunity to engage with students is good for them, as well as for students. That sounds like a really engaging project.

Rebecca: I’m ready to sign up for all of these classes. So I hope you have room.

Sarah: You are welcome to come and even speak and spread your wisdom, I would love that. [LAUGHTER]

John: Speaking of room… you also have taught some introductory calculus classes with up to 3000 students in them and you transformed them into an online environment along with a colleague during COVID. Could you tell us a little bit about how that course was structured and how it changed when you went to remote teaching?

Rebecca: It sounds so daunting.

Sarah: Oh, okay. So COVID for everyone has been really, really tough. And especially that I always have to go back and think what year was that? 2020 to 21 academic year…, everyone had it really, really tough. So we all like deserve, like hero badges or something, and I’m ready for a break. So I think we all need to catch up on our rest still from that. But I was fortunate because before the pandemic was on anyone’s radar, we had already arranged kind of a transition point in my job where I was going to be going from coordinating this gigantic introductory calculus class to not coordinating it. And the new coordinator, my colleague, Bernardo Galvao-Sousa, he was going to take over it. We were going to have a one year overlap, so he could kind of see how I did it and just like everything was gonna go normal and then he was gonna take over. So that overlap year was to be the 2020 to 21 academic year. So it was fortunate that we were both able to work on it, I don’t know how it would have happened otherwise. I had already been in a period of transforming this class, it had been basically the same from no one really knows, like, as far as anyone could remember, it had been the same. And I was basically brought on and hired at University of Toronto, to bring it to the 21st-century. So over the past three years before that, I had been changing it completely. And then, of course, we went online, which required it to be rethought because you can’t teach a course for 1000s of students the same way. So what was the course like before? Well, we have a lot of rules in our university for first-year courses, in that they have to have a midterm, they have to have a final exam worth a certain weight, there were three one-hour lectures a week, one one-hour tutorial, kind of the whole structure was pretty traditional. But I had been introducing some innovative projects, we were shaking things up in how we did them in tutorials. And the whole curriculum was really modernized. So I’ll give an example of one aspect of the course, the applied communication task, and how we transformed that aspect of the course, to put it online and still give students hopefully as good of an experiences as they could online. So applied communication tasks were this word project. So first semester, they were three separate projects, second semester it was one project, they were applied, and they were about mathematical communication. And I’m a big believer that I don’t really invent many new ideas, I just kind of like look at the needs of my students in my place and try to adapt things from elsewhere. So I had talked to every department that took my students after so this was like a calculus course for science students. And so they were going, the majority to life sciences, but they were also going to chemistry, they were going to physics, some are going to earth sciences. And then some are going to psychology and some at some other smaller departments, not smaller departments, but smaller portions are going to other departments. I guess economics was another big one. And I talked to them about like, what skills don’t students have that they should have from calculus? And one of the big themes was that students were afraid, they were just afraid to approach math in new context. So they could solve all the problems that were traditional, but they couldn’t if they saw a scientific paper, and there’s math, they were like, “I’m not familiar with this math, what do I do?” So I really took that as inspiration like, well, we should have students do that very thing. So as an aside, I put questions like that in exams, like, you know, take problems from scientific papers, give them information and put them on exams. But then also, in the second semester, have them find a scientific paper that has a mathematical model. And ultimately, the goal is to communicate something about that scientific model. Now, what form should that communication be in? Well, one common form that scientists use is a scientific poster. And the advantage of that is that it could be kind of an event, it can be kind of a grand finale for the course in tutorials. So we had a bunch of mini-poster sessions with about 100 students each. And so each of the posters presented models. They got into groups, kind of halfway through the semester, they combined some of their papers, but that took them through the experience of talking to a librarian and having to deal with databases. It got them through finding what’s important and what’s not. Well, I don’t understand… really this is way over my head in terms of math… what can I say from this model, and so all those skills like that, and then also the kind of communication. And it also combined oral communication where they have to talk about their poster and written communication, they had to write about their poster and they really worked on different drafts of different parts of their poster, and they have to read. First semester, the projects prepare them for that. They had a project that was focused on written communication, that was writing a proposal to their city council based on population projections from their hometown. They had a reading task and that’s changed a little bit over the years. So that’s what it was. What we did online is we basically kept the same projects, except instead of having the sprinkled in the tutorial, like every second or third tutorial was about the project, now we knew that they’re at home, they do not have any resources, any people around, we really need to make these be focused tutorial and make the structure very, very, very clear. Because otherwise, this really complex project is just gonna get completely confusing. We structured the first semester in that the first three tutorials were focused on writing. And the second three tutorials were focused on reading. And the third three tutorials were focused on oral communication. And then within that, the first tutorial had the same structure, the second tutorial had the same structure. And the third tutorial had the same structure. So they kind of had something much more predictable. And there was like a lot more evenness, and we didn’t try to give them as many skills as we did in the in-person, we cut down the expectations, we trimmed as much as possible. And then something similar in the second semester, we trimmed a lot, we focused a lot, we didn’t aim as high on the exams, in terms of all of those questions from scientific papers. We didn’t have exams, instead of exams, we had three different types of quizzes, the fun type was reflection quizzes, which had them reflect on their learning sometimes, or maybe conduct some sort of experiment at home, and then use that and make a model or something to like, go on a walk, this was in the deep COVID In the fall of 2020. And so like go on a walk, if you can’t go on a walk outside, go on a walk around your house and find something to model. So some people are modeling bird chirps or whatever. And then you create your own scientific models. And if you have two to three thousand students spread around the world, obviously, cheating is a huge concern. So we tried as much as possible to make it interesting. And for me, like, yes, academic integrity is big, but it was the perception of academic integrity amongst the students. Like we really wanted to keep them engaged.

John: So how did you assess and evaluate all those quizzes? Did you have a large team of TAs?

Sarah: We had very limited TA hours actually. So I think that’s another part of big course stuff that we don’t talk about a lot. It’s actually something I’ve been writing about, I’m just not sure where to send it because we don’t talk about it. It’s like management, like how do you manage a large organization? So we have about 50 people. How do you distribute your resources, and we have very limited resources. So we wanted to do these quizzes, we want to them very well, we have very few TAs and we still wanted TAs to teach tutorials. What are we gonna do? So what we ended up doing is redistributed our instructor resources. And normally students would be in classes of 200 in person. And we had them in classes of 400 online, because we figured the difference between an online class of 200 and an online class of 400 was not going to make a big difference. And technology, I can go into all the technological challenges. Now, the technology is all there. But August 2020, breakout rooms for this large of groups, impossible. So we had to do all these Zoom, and it’s crazy stuff. That’s how we managed is we had instructors who were like just in charge of quizzes. And that’s how we did it. And then every third quiz was kind of the automatically graded kind.

Rebecca: I think it’s important to bring up some of these logistics or project management skills the faculty have to have, especially when coordinating such big courses. And I appreciate that you’re sharing some of those things, because you’re right, we don’t talk about it. Just like we don’t talk about those same experiences that we have as young female faculty in the classroom or whatever kind of identities that impact our experiences.

Sarah: Exactly. Yeah. And both of these are the things that really keep me awake at night. It’s not the actual teaching, it’s the “How am I going to possibly grade?” [LAUGHTER] Or like, “How can I negotiate with my chair for more hours per students?” Or “What are you going to do with that one TA who’s behaving inappropriately with students?” It’s all of these extra things. Very, very, very different if you’re doing even a class to 500 versus a class of a few 1000 is quite different because you can’t see it all.

Rebecca: Yeah, managing an equitable experience is a really different kind of thing. It just keeps scaling up. So finding that equity piece is a challenge.

John: But it is impressive that you did those reflection quizzes at that scale, because that’s something I’ve wanted to do, but have been a little reluctant to do in a class of 400 that I teach in the fall. And now this is suggesting maybe I should do some of that. [LAUGHTER] Providing the feedback is the main concern that I have.

Sarah: Yeah, well, I think for gigantic classes. I don’t know however, we defined gigantic, like I guess gigantic versus the thing that you want to do. It’s often like what’s really the priority here and then what can you sacrifice, like, there’s always going to have to be a sacrifice. So I can’t provide the same feedback on a quiz to a group of 2,000 students as I can for a group of 20 students, or the classes that I had this year were in the low hundreds. And I can’t provide them the level of feedback that I had like on everything. But using peer feedback can be helpful, or just explaining to them, I can’t provide you feedback on this. If you want more feedback, you’re going to have to seek it, which is hard I know and not ideal. However, these are the things that we face, or just like deciding that the grading scale is going to be really generous and loose. I experimented this last semester in class of like 300-ish students with not ungrading, but more this [LAUGHTER] direction, letting them determine a lot more of their achievement levels, trusting them to say, “Oh, yes, I have mastered this actually.”

Rebecca: Well, now you’ve piqued our interest and we need to know more about it.

Sarah: Yeah, like, I’m still kind of thinking about how to describe it or characterize it because I started off with a structure. And then I really let the semester go on and adjusted as I saw my students change and as I changed myself. So I don’t have a lot of eloquent ways to discuss it. This is a upper-year course for group theory. And I wanted to do a lot of things that I just didn’t have the resources for. So I had to make a lot of tough decisions. And also, we are in a super grade-intensive university. And by the time they’re in like, third year, this is so ingrained in their mind. And this particular course has a very high percentage of international students, probably over 80% international students. And in my university, I think that they tend to be more concerned about grades because they have to be and somehow, just like not giving them grades on anything. [LAUGHTER] Like saying, “Okay, you’ve either mastered this, or you’re excellent on this, or you’re not there yet” was really difficult at first, a lot of them dropped the course immediately, because they didn’t understand it. They were like, “what percentage is this?” And I’m like, “Well, there is no percent.” “Well, is it 100?” I think they did not understand the concept of it at all. So I wanted to focus on oral skills, and oral skills are so hard to assess. But I want to give them the opportunity to develop their oral skills, I didn’t really want to assess them as much as I wanted to make sure that they were speaking about math and they were talking about math to other people. They could reattempt any assignment they wanted. So, they did a test, they could show me that they had actually learned the material on the test. But they had to talk to other people about it, they had to demonstrate they had spoken to other people, a lot of the main things like videos, and one group organized a mini conference on the topics for the weekend. They did a lot of amazing thing as a result of this. And the TAs provided very targeted feedback. So we’ve provided feedback on the skills that we knew students needed feedback on. So, they needed feedback on particular cognitive skills that they were not able to assess, like research has shown that they are not able to assess their own proofs, or students are not able to provide that same feedback. That’s what we assess. But we didn’t bother assessing things we didn’t care about.

Rebecca: It’s an interesting way of thinking about it. I know that I also was experimenting a little bit with ungrading this past semester, and also found that international students are the most like, “I don’t know what this means.”

Sarah: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, you have to just admit, sometimes, you don’t really understand it. Also a good opportunity for discussion for students, and talking about what that means when we don’t really understand.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think it’s good to model that.

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

Sarah: Well, I just submitted my tenure file two days ago.

Rebecca: YAY!

Sarah: So I need to catch up on a couple of things, but then rest. I have not had a good opportunity since the beginning [LAUGHTER] of the pandemic, so I think that that’s going to be my answer. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: That sounds like a wonderful plan. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: And great advice for everybody listening. [LAUGHTER] We can all use a little rest.

Sarah: We all need that reminder.

John: And we should note that this is the first time that Rebecca and I have recorded in the same room since March of 2020. So this is sort of a return to normalcy for us.

Rebecca: Yeah. So it was nice to share this experience with you, Sarah.

Sarah: Yeah, it was so nice to talk to both of you and to see you together. [LAUGHTER] So, I know that listeners can’t see you, but I have enjoyed seeing you and speaking with you.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you

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

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

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255. Thriving Through Behavioral Science

Many students pursue learning strategies that are not aligned with their long-term objectives. In this episode, Erik Simmons joins us to discuss how principles of social and behavioral sciences can be used to help students achieve their objectives. Erik is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Boston College School of Social Work. He is the author of a chapter in the Picture a Professor project edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

Show Notes

  • Neuhaus, Jessamyn (forthcoming, 2022). Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. West Virginia University Press.
  • Research Program on Children and Adversity – Boston College School of Social Work
  • Michie, S., Van Stralen, M. M., & West, R. (2011). The behaviour change wheel: a new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions. Implementation science, 6(1), 1-12.
  • Michie, S., Hyder, N., Walia, A., & West, R. (2011). Development of a taxonomy of behaviour change techniques used in individual behavioural support for smoking cessation. Addictive behaviors, 36(4), 315-319.
  • Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.

Transcript

John: Many students pursue learning strategies that are not aligned with their long-term objectives. In this episode, we discuss how principles of social and behavioral sciences can be used to help students achieve their objectives.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Erik Simmons. Erik is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Boston College School of Social Work. He is the author of a chapter in the Picture a Professor project edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus. Welcome, Erik!

Erik: Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, John, for having me.

John: We’re very happy to have you here. Today’s teas are:… Erik, are you drinking tea?

Erik: I am drinking tea. I have a Tower of London house blend. It’s a black tea with a little honey infusion. And it has been keeping me going. So I just finished the full pack today. So this is very timely to be asking what I’m drinking. I’m gonna have to remember this one.

Rebecca: Awesome. Finally, a tea drinker, John. [LAUGHTER] We get a lot of coffee drinkers around here.

Erik: Do people usually slot in their coffee selection?

Rebecca: Sometimes? Yeah, sometimes… or the water. There’s a lot of water.

Erik: Okay, well, it’s good for you.

John: And Diet Coke.

Erik: Diet Coke also can keep you going.

Rebecca: I have a Scottish afternoon tea today.

John: And I have a wild blueberry black tea.

Erik: Oh, wow, that sounds delicious.

John: It really is.

Erik: Quite tasty.

Rebecca: Before we discuss your chapter in the Picture a Professor project, can you tell us a little bit about your dissertation research on behavioral change in low resource coastal communities that rely on marine ecosystems in Indonesia and the Philippines.

Erik: I’d love to talk about that, because it’s a project that’s very near and dear to my heart. And I found it very innovative in that we were taking our lab-based research on psychological and behavioral sciences and taking them to the field to help improve the lives and well being of families and children in Southeast Asia. And really what we had identified was one core facet that undercuts almost every wicked problem that we experience that implicates human behavior. And that’s the need for behavioral sciences. So we saw in these projects that, if we could take evidence-based programs, adapt them to the problem at hand to make sure they’re culturally sensitive, and make sure they’re acceptable by the communities, you can change a whole range of different problems and different behaviors that can help improve wellbeing and, in this case, improve the environmental sustainability of these communities as well, who are very reliant on their aquaculture and on the natural resources around them. What we were seeing in that project especially, was that, hey, if you take a whole bunch of people, and if you can provide them with programs that are meant to engage with their behaviors, their social systems and beyond, you can improve not only their lives, their health and wellbeing, their family functioning, but also things like the environment. So that’s where we were going for. And it was not only an exciting process, it was fun. But it puts us on the front line of working with people, which is something that I’ve always had a passion for.

John: Now, this is a little bit aside from the general focus of the podcast, but what type of behavioral interventions did you work with there?

Erik: What we tend to do in my work and the work of the many seminal, prestigious, esteemed professors I’ve worked with in the past is we take these blended complex interventions that target a couple of different pillars within your life. So we’ll have a little bit from an intervention that focus specifically on your parenting capabilities, per se. We’ll have a little bit on the ability or psychosocial capabilities or capacities for you to self regulate and to goal set. We’ll have a little bit on your emotional regulation. We’ll have a little bit on your social behaviors to help recalibrate social norms within your communities, there’s social dynamics, and we throw all those together, we workshop them with the communities, it’s always a co-building process in the work that I do. And what you end up with is something that can target internal factors, external factors, social norms, and social dynamics within their communities. And of course, as we were working there, certain environmental modifications around behaviors such as recycling, engagement with fishing behaviors. So we take these homunculus type of behavioral interventions that all have evidence bases, but we cut them up, we chop them a little bit, we combine them with each other to get a fit for purpose intervention, because we never go with a one size fits all.

John: You’re currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Research Program on Children and Adversity. Could you tell us a little bit about that program?

Erik: Yes, absolutely. It’s another global project, as you guys will get a sense for here, I really like going about helping communities all around the world. And what we’re currently working on is a home visiting intervention. And all that means is you essentially have an active coach who’s an interventionist, they’re a lay worker within the community, currently, I’m working in Rwanda, and they will go to a home and help a family with young children. And now these are the families, John and Rebecca, here that are the most vulnerable in Rwanda, families that really need a lot of assistance. And they have someone who will flexibly schedule with them, come to their home, help them with the initial years, I believe it’s zero to 36 months, or the first three years, assessing similarly once again, parenting capabilities, family dynamics, and then interactions with your child in those first three years, because what we know is that the lifespan development trajectory has a wide range of potential, but as we grow the range of this trajectory slowly, slowly shrinks. So starting early is really important to making sure that individuals have the highest promising potential for their lifespan development. And that’s what we’re really aiming for. So we have active coaches coming into homes to help families with the early years for their children. And we focus on everything from, once again, parenting capabilities to anthropometrics like child growth, to make sure their children are getting a lot of cognitive development, physical stimulation to help them grow appropriately, language interaction, and a lot of play. Plays a big part of the intervention. So that’s currently what we’re working on in Rwanda. We also work in Sierra Leone, we’re currently trying to work with Afghan families who are seeking refuge in America right now.

Rebecca: You’ve talked a little bit about wanting to work directly with people and, of course, teaching is always [LAUGHTER] working directly with people.

Erik: Absolutely.

Rebecca: So your chapter in Picture a Professor is entitled: “Black Man in a Strange Land: Using Principles of Psychology and Behavior Science to Thrive in the Classroom.” Can you tell us a little bit about how you’re using principles of psychology and behavior science to thrive in the classroom?

Erik: Yeah, I sure can. I’d love to open this up for a conversation as well. And you guys can kind of tell me how crazy I am here. When I saw this call for proposals, I thought this was perfect, because to my knowledge, at least to my social and collegial circles, I had never met anyone who was a young black American man teaching in an Australian classroom. And I thought immediately, I have to share my experience because it was just so unique, at least to me, and I don’t know, maybe there are others out there. And if they are, you know, please feel free to reach out to me, I’m sure we can have some great conversations about being in a different country looking different than a traditional… or let’s not say traditional I don’t think that’s quite the right phrasing here… but maybe just what might be considered stereotypical or typical is a common sense of an educator, and trying to connect with students. And the one thing that was really helping carry me through a lot of my experiences, and helping me connect with my students, was my expertise in social and behavioral sciences. Because I knew if we could take some of the principles of evidence-based behavior change techniques, social norms, social identity, and social dynamics, as well as being able to build an empathetic space where we were using humanistic psychology frames or frameworks to understand each other, we could get a lot done together. And the big premise, or the big proposition of the chapter, I’m not going to remove all the intrigue for me to say is that if we treat people like people, and if we take a very humanistic, very compassionate, and very understanding approach to connecting with our students, our pedagogy is going to improve, student outcomes are going to improve all across the board. So the main proposition, the main premise, of what I’m trying to say is, despite maybe not having a lot of similar ground, or similar background, historical context with your students, if you can find certain areas to connect on a psychological or behavioral basis to them, you can improve the experience not only for the students, but also for yourself as an educator.

John: What are some specific techniques that you’ve implemented that rely on behavioral science.

Erik: So, one of my favorites immediately is having a sense of, and it’s a strange word here, but it comes from social identity theory and social identity leadership, that’s called we-ness. And it’s WE hyphenated to N-E-S-S. And it’s the idea of using social identity theory to immediately set group norms and social dynamics that reflect you as being a member of the group and you being able to associate yourself in some way with your students. I think oftentimes, in educational spaces, we almost feel, as educators, we need to separate ourselves, we need to be different, we need to be in charge, we need to be the leaders who can take a distinct role in that classroom, whereas social identity theory says no, you should go in their first day, and you should say, “Well look at all the ways that we’re more alike than different.” And that’s a strong way, not only to make connections with your students, but to open up the floor for your students to be more comfortable coming to you and your students being more comfortable with expressing their needs. And as I mentioned, in my initial work, having that conversation of co-design space, and then being able to identify you as not only a competent leader, but also someone who is going to defend their process and their progress. So that’s absolutely one of my favorite techniques to use right off the bat when you’re starting a semester to say, “Hey, we’re all more alike, we’re all in the same classroom together, we’re all going to be probably very similar in at least our interests. So there’s more things here that connect us than separate us.” I think it’s a powerful lesson for education as a whole.

Rebecca: Do you usually apply this concept as an activity? as a conversation? What does it actually look like in the classroom?

Erik: So there’s a few ways that you can do it and depending on size, I think those massive lecture halls… this can be a little bit difficult, but I think in the small capstone classrooms where you have 20 to 30 students, absolutely, going around and just having a conversation or putting up slides or having an activity where you’re drawing certain topics out of a hat and you have themes of saying “Okay, we’re gonna go talk to three of your classmates for a little while, and educator included, about your family for a little bit or maybe about a certain activity you like and you can use this to start to develop and design a little hierarchy or infrastructure. You’re going to come up with similar themes in almost every classroom, I’d be surprised if these few topics didn’t come up. People have passions and activities outside of the classroom, people have friends and family that they like talking about. And sometimes just having a couple of prompt questions that you can talk about together with your class, if time allows it and if classrooms are small enough to help you have those discussions. It’s just an extremely powerful tool, asking the questions and opening up for your students to share, whether that be slides, whether that be a list of things that you might want to talk about, whether it be asking students what they’d like to learn about and seeing, you know, where you guys kind of connect on that front are things I do first semester. I always give all of myself in that first little lecture of saying, here’s who I am as a person, now, who are you? I like to know who you are too, and whatever students are comfortable with sharing, that’s what you go with. I do those activities as a start always before I get into any topic matter, a sharing not only what I do, but who I am. And then we go from there as developing that sense of we-ness and shared culture right away.

John: Do you encourage students to use commitment devices to help meet their learning objectives for the course?

Erik: Absolutely. So the work of Susan Michie has been very seminal on me. One thing she developed a little while ago, she does a lot of work with trying to codify, categorize, and help us define the different types of behavior change that we can use to help people reach their goals, to help people change their behavior. One thing she developed is called the behavior change technique taxonomy. And I love this thing, because it’s just a list of 83 different devices that you can use to help people develop versions of themselves. And that’s what I’d start with is saying everything I try to do, I try to encourage students to… if they’re not self defining it, at least it has to be halfway have them bring their commitment to the table, because one thing we know about the difference between early childhood development and early child learning and adult learning is the self-directed nature of it and if you’re not taking that self-directed approach, then you’re bound to purge whatever changes or information you’ve just acquired throughout a semester across coursework. So things like social commitment devices and social commitment tools are incredibly useful in helping students help reach their goals. Now, I would provide a caveat here in who they’re making the social commitment to makes a huge difference. And we call this referent groups in social psychology here. And it’s important to know for social identity, it’s important to know for different social norms, if we can talk about a little bit as well, and it’s important to know for social commitment, is who are you making a referent group to, and who you’re making that commitment to? So making the commitment to me, making the commitment to the person you’ve just met, might not actually be the best way to go about it. But saying, hey, for your first assignment, why don’t you go make the social commitment to your best friend, close family member, your partner, and then trying your best to stick to that, is really important. And there are lots of tools you can use with other people externally, to help students reach their goals. And I think the social commitment is a big one. And there’s lots that we can look at into the science of goal setting to help students achieve things and keep themselves on track. Because temporally, it’s really hard. We’re captivated by so many things, currently, especially students, from technology, social media, the race for attention has never been as breakneck as it is now. So thinking about how you can use commitment devices, goal-setting devices, and different types of activities along that front help students stay on track with their goals is crucial to the process of helping students achieve and get to where they want to be. Because at the end of the day, it’s what it’s all about. It’s not about what we need them to get out of lesson plans, it’s about them being able to attain what they’re looking at getting out of their education.

Rebecca: Can you share an example of how you’ve helped students goal set and meet their goals using some of these devices?

Erik: Absolutely. So I think even setting aside time, whether it be assignment time or in-class time, and some of these things seems so simple, but they’re so powerful. I’m sure you’ve heard of things like the SMART goals, or the different types of things. And listen, there’s a whole lot of goal setting typologies and frameworks out there, they all have very similar underlying principles, they’ve just been designed by different people at different stages. And that is their attainable, they’re measurable, they have some degree of specificity intheir time constraints to that regard. The SMART one is the one I tend to use. Now I use two different types of advices. You guys gonna have to bear with me here because it’s actually very powerful in the goal setting space. Now, lots of times we think when we’re setting a goal is visualize, visualize where you want to be in a year and a couple of months and 10 years, what have you. And what the research kind of tells us is those big nebulous goals or the goals that are really far off, they’re really, really great at starting us down a path. So they might be really helpful in helping us choose a major or choose a direction. But one thing they’re not great at is motivating us in the interim, so day to day. So one thing I tend to do with students and I never pushed them on this problem for goal setting, especially… especially across the semester, is actually visualizing what it looks like if we don’t do the day-to-day activity to reach our goal is way more powerful than saying “Okay, well what do I need to do to get to that goal?” And I’ll give you an example here. So sometimes when my students come in I’ll say, “Let’s take five minutes, I’m just gonna give you a quick reflection activity.” Sometimes it’s writing, sometimes it’s just, “I want you to think about it.” And I’ll say, “Let’s think for a little bit what it looks like, if I don’t do what I need to do today to reach my goal, what does my life look like if I don’t take the steps to attain where I want to go?” And I say, “You don’t need to think of absolute doom and gloom or tragedy if you don’t reach here, but using almost a kernel of ‘Oh, no, I really do want that, I do want to do this today because I do want to achieve my goals…’” is a powerful, short term motivator than saying, “Just think of where you want to be in a couple of years, and do you want to do this thing today?” and I was a coach for a long time. I still am, I guess it’s a part of my personality, my identity. And one thing that was always really hard for me is going to practice. And that was kind of like going to class, kind of like showing up to class. And one thing I noticed was when I thought of, “Oh well, you know, if I don’t go to the gym, today, my coach will be disappointed, I’ll miss out on seeing my friends, I might not do as well, later on in my career as an athlete or whatever,” was a lot more motivating for me to go to class every day, or to go and get in that extra workout than me saying, “Oh, I want to be the best in the world at some stage in my life.” So beyond the initial setting of the goals, using any given SMART framework or a couple of step, couple thread framework, having students do very short term, small reflections on things that might help them keep going or maintain without absolutely inducing a sense of dread in them, I find to be really helpful for students. And I haven’t had anyone completely lose it on me yet and say, “You gave me anxiety this semester, having to think about all these things so frequently.” So that’s been helpful.

John: What are some other specific techniques that you’ve used in your classes that are based on behavioral science?

Erik: Oh, there’s a wealth of women, I can go on and on. But some of my favorites have to do with metacognition, and thinking about the higher-order cognitive processes necessary for students to find the justifications they need for motivation. So motivation has always been a really big part of my research, and motivation comes from a lot of different things. So when we’re thinking about reward systems within your brain, I don’t want to say we all know, because I’m sure we’re talking to a very diverse audience. There’s specific reward systems in your brain that offer you certain neural correlates or hormonal biomarkers that are going to reward certain things and start to… we’re not going to say punished for that, I think it’s a weird word. I don’t know why psychology use that… but diminish the activity of other activities. And by reward, it just means it’s reinforcing that behavior so you’re going to do it a little bit more. And so one thing I always like doing is helping students use a metacognitive infrastructure to help self regulate, which sits within the goal setting literature as well, to say, “Well, what do we need to help reward you further in your progression?” For some students, it is strictly grades. But I find that to be a very poor long-term motivator, and you end up the students just kind of being very anxious and very set on just scoring well, which to me never set right as the purpose of learning, of the purpose of turning up to the classroom. So thinking about what positive reinforcement will be necessary for a student to continue going, and you’re never going to be able to define that for a student. But one thing I like to tell everyone who is unfamiliar with the psychological and behavioral sciences is that the carrot is always a way more powerful tool than the stick. The stick is just always more readily available, it’s the easiest to get to, but the carrot is easily the best. If you can find it, it’s a lot more powerful than going to that stick. So I think putting the work in initially is saying, hey, if let’s take the most simple of example of… this probably hasn’t worked on anyone since year two, or year three, but saying, if it takes a pizza party for you guys to really want to be here, if that’s the extrinsic reinforcement I can provide you, I’ll absolutely do it. And for students as they grow older, it usually isn’t that, it has to be something necessarily useful. But finding whatever metacognitive unlocking we need to do for students to think about their own thinking and say, “Why am I here? What is it that I actually want out of this?” And then we can retrofit that and create a little engineering process for each student in or at least small groups of students to say, “Okay, well, maybe it’s not scores this semester, maybe we’ll judge you based on your progress on this particular metric and evaluation,” which I think shifts as well to more… and this is this private bias speaking here…, but psychometrically informed evaluation of students progress than just saying retention of information, knowledge, or learning.

John: How do you encourage students to engage in this metacognitive reflection?

Erik: So there’s an ample amount of literature here from cognitive behavioral techniques and what started as cognitive behavioral therapy not too long ago, but I especially like give a shout out to my former advisor, Professor Matthew Sanders, who said, “Why are we only using cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT for neuroses or things that are going wrong in us? Why can’t we use this to make our lives better and enhance positive outcomes just as much.” So there’s lots of different things we can use, such as reframing of cognition that can help us to unlock or take that next step into the metacognitive space. So let me give you an example that I think will resonate for all of us here, is lots of times people get really nervous about presenting. Presenting is a big one for cognitive restructuring that a lot of people have, because they have a lot of apprehensions or anxieties about presenting. Being able to think about presenting on two fronts here can drastically improve not only your experience with presenting, but your own ability to reflect and improve on how you approach presenting and that’s saying, the anxiety you feel before presentation is the same energy, it’s the same physiological system of excitement for an activity you might have doing something else. So when you can get students to take different perspectives, cognitively, of how they approach things, how they feel when they do certain things, and then have slight cognitive reframes, you are bound or you’re at least on the first step of the path to also behavioral reframing and behavioral restructuring. So perspective shifting, having activities that allow students… it’s something that you gain very early on in your life… but to habit or perspective shift. Allow them to start to play with these cognitive different realms and to start to interrogate their own cognitive biases, their own cognitive perspectives, some of which have been held for, I’m sure, all years of their lives, their whole existence, but being able to exercise that cognitive muscle and perspective taking, cognitive reframing, cognitive restructuring, is the first step to the metacognitive level, where you’re always stopping and saying, “Wait a second, I need to introspect on this a little bit. Am I here because my parents want me to be here, am I here because I want to be here? How does this align with my identity, values.” And in my particular space, we try not to get too reductionistic as to, we don’t need to get specifically to certain brain areas. But being able to have that introspective process of self and how it interacts with the social ecology around you and your historical past is, in my first step you need for metacognitive capability.

John: So specifically, though, do you have them do blogging? Do you have them write journals, or something similar to engage in that? Because left to themselves, students may not always engage in that metacognitive reflection.

Erik: You cannot, [LAUGHTER] absolutely, just leave students, not only students, educators, all of us to our own devices, a big area of my study is on executive functions, which kind of allow us to interact with these metacognitive skills here. And one thing we know about executive functions is it’s the tasks, skills and activities you do in the day to day that really improve them, rather than just saying,” if you think really hard every day, it’ll eventually get there, you’ll break through that ceiling and you’ll be at the highest level of really interacting with your thoughts as you possibly can.” So there’s multiple ways you can do that. One thing I think has been missing… of course, as we know, in the classroom, we do a lot of reading and writing… but even just very simple, and I mean, simple in that, I mean engaging, engaging in fun problem solving within the classroom of coming in and saying, “Hey, this is a difficult thing going on in the world right now or maybe this is a simple thing going on in the world right now… here’s a problem, how would you go about solving it and being able to exercise sub skills of executive functioning, your planning, your monitoring ability, your cognitive temperance, or your ability to restrain or engage based on your own desires and your own will, having activities that help you practice this is really the way to develop your metacognitive ability.” So I think you’re right there, John, in that having students blog regularly, writing is such a powerful tool, and having students just have the conversations, having students trying to inhabit a different experience, it’s kind of seems almost like a mediated pathway to get to higher metacognitive skill. But it’s the only pathway, because there is no direct “Hey, if you just do this task a lot. It’s not quite like coding or like anything else that has a very technical basis, where if you just do the practicing, you’ll get there.” And these are what we call developing expertise by the work of Daniel Kahneman. And so these are softer or a little bit harsher learning environments rather than the very strict ones where if you just go and practice you will eventually improve. So yes, you need a range of different activities that may seem a bit creatively informed to get you to your main goal or your main outcome. But yeah, this is what you can definitely do with students to improve their metacognition. And the metacognition as well as the executive functions tend to be generalizable to other things they’ll do in their lives. So it’s not just what they’re going to be learning in your class, but it will be learning in other classes and then beyond.

Rebecca: One of the things that we talk a lot about on Tea for Teaching is how many faculty aren’t actually prepared in their programs to become teachers. They might not have training as teachers, and then they’re teaching. So if you were to think about this population who maybe doesn’t have a background in behavioral science, in addition to what you’ve already talked about, what are the couple of things that you think all faculty should know about so that they can better support their students and thrive in the classroom.

Erik: This is something that once again really inspired me when I saw this call for proposals is, I completely agree, and I know there’s a lot of demand on us as faculty. There’s so many responsibilities from these days to project management to admin to well beyond just your teaching, but it hurts my soul a little bit here that we end up in these spaces where we’re throwing first-time teachers into the deep end with very minimal assistance of knowing how students learn, how certain underlying principles might be the things that are really driving the retention of knowledge or the acquisition of skills. And what do we know? One of the biggest things I’ve always relied back on when I’ve talked to people about developing skills, especially in the space of teaching and pedagogy is that you’re likely just to role model whatever you imagine initially as being an adequate or maybe above average teacher. So it’s the same thing we see with parents and children, it’s the same thing we see in our social networks, is that we model after the things that we like, that we desire. So I think having a lot of exposure is the first thing we need to know as faculty, to different pedagogical practices and teaching styles because that’s going to give us the most to pick and choose from, and to be able to develop the most evidence-based practices in teaching. Now, the second thing I think I say here always is understanding of fundamental attribution error for your students is a must have across everything. And the fundamental attribution error… sorry, for anyone who is unfamiliar, is your insight, or your cognitive process to look at someone external to you and say, “they are that way, because a personal quality or the way they are, a character disposition,” and say “You’re behaving in a certain way and it might be due to your environmental factors.” And the best way this is described in many literature is, is anyone who’s driving in a car has had that moment where someone cuts them off, or someone does something that looks a little bit silly, and they say: “That person is a terrible driver, I can’t believe they’re doing that.”….where we have no idea where that person was going, we have no idea what state that person might be in, but it’s always a terrible driver. But if we’re to make the same mistake, it’s “I didn’t get enough coffee this morning, I’m just a little bit tired. It was my mistake. But this isn’t reflective of me.” And the same goes for students. When we look at our cohort of students every year, I think this is importantly true in the pandemic, is being able to say there is always a confluence of multiple factors that are cascading and colliding at one time to give you that student in a classroom every day. And you need to take that student as they are rather than expect things that are unrealistic, or are going to be unreliable in the long run, because we demand a lot of our students. So understanding our students where they are and where they’re at on any given day is an important thing we can take from psychological and behavioral sciences. It’s going to improve our experiences and improve our students, rather than demanding or expecting a perfect student out there. And noting that our students operate many different roles, they are pluralities of many different things. So knowing that about our students, I think, is really important in your expectations with how you design your coursework, you go about your class, I think that fundamental attribution error is really important. And then I close out with a third thing here that I think is absolutely crucial. And I think that is shared charter, shared mission, and shared values, which kind of ties us back to our social identity theory here a little bit in saying initially, it’s really important to start a shared charter, shared mission with your students and saying, once again, co-designing and participatory approaches of what do we need out of this? Not what do I need, not what do you need, but having that dialogue with your students is an important part of behavioral design that can help us improve the way we go about our teaching pedagogy. And it’s a really helpful way too if we feel like we don’t have a good understanding of human learning, a good understanding of human behavior. It’s asking students what they want, it’s a great place to start, maybe they don’t know either, but at least we’re getting that feedback from them. And then there’s that investment into the shared mission together. So I think it’s important for a lot of faculty to know who just feel as if they’ve been thrown into open water, and you have this group of people look back at you and relying on you, but you’re not quite sure what’s going to be best for them for the retention of their knowledge and the progression of their careers in education.

John: Would you suggest doing that right at the beginning of the term, and perhaps even jointly shaping the syllabus for the course if that’s possible in your institution?

Erik: It’s a lot of work. That’s a lot of work. But yes, absolutely. And not only that, but I think the monitoring reflection, it’s an important part of all behavioral and psychological sciences, and especially behavioral change is having at least whatever the increment might be. Sometimes it might be pre- to post- to the semester, sometimes it might be every week, but having instances where you touch back in and say, “Hey, is this still working for us?” …and if it’s not, having the ability to make amendments, and being able to encourage new strategies that students can use to help them reorient or re-navigate towards the new goal, because one thing we know we do really, really poorly is make projections about what we want, what we need, in our personal space. So one of my favorite psychological exercises, we ask people, “How different are you going to be in 10 years?” And they go, “Oh, well, I won’t be that different. How much can I change? I know who I am.” But then you ask them, “Are you the same person you were 10 years ago?” and they say, “Oh, no I’m an entirely different person”. And somehow those two things never seem to align. So in that sense, it’s really important that we at least have little markers or flagpoles there that we can stop at and say, “Hey, is this still what we want? I know, we said this in the beginning, but it’s always alright, to make a change, it’s only too late to make a change once the semester is over.” So having the small incremental things, good, but having the baseline start and doing that initially, that’s where the bulk of the legwork should do. And if you can co-create a syllabus, please co-create a syllabus,

Rebecca: I think co-creation is such a wonderful way of existing, but also our institutions are often set up in a way that does not encourage such behavior by requesting syllabi ahead of time, sharing it out, because we want students to know what to expect. There’s all these things that are in place, also with students in mind, but often deters the behavior of co-creation. And some folks may not be at the liberty or feel like they have the ability to do that co-creation work. But I think there’s sometimes ways that we can do this in smaller ways than just a syllabus.

Erik: Smaller ways, absolutely. But Rebecca, you bring up an incredibly crucial point. And I really would like to touch on this because it does underpin and drive it. It’s almost the engine to all the work that I do. We’ve been talking a lot about individual change strategies and things we can encourage students to do. And I have a list of those that is nearly inexhaustible. But the one thing that I think comes to be missing in a lot of this is our focus on systems and the institutional things that sit around us, the foundations that sit around us, that sometimes provide barriers to us as you were saying, Rebecca, being able to make these changes in the way we like to approach our classes. And that’s one thing that in a lot of my work now and in the future I’d like to bring into this space of making changes is: lots of times when it comes to systems change, it’s really about removing obstacles for educators and for students rather than providing new solutions, or “Hey, add this to your syllabus or add that in and it will make your life easier.” Sometimes it’s just about removing the obstacles that make things really difficult for you to make specific changes. And that goes for students and educators alike, when you’re looking at co-creating a syllabi, or being able to engage your students more in the process. I think a lot of times the institutional perspective, or the institutional opinion, is that students, they’re not ready for that, they’re not able to do that. And you’re right, Rebecca, you know, they need to know what to expect. And I think students are way more capable and adept at these things than we think they are, as are faculty, and just saying, “Hey, let’s think about how we can look at the institutional rules that govern and reinforce or impede on certain behaviors, and how might we change these…” because that’s always going to be the best way you can catalyze change, is making changes to your institutional rules, your systems that exists at the higher level or higher order that might be, than actually looking at individuals within that system. Because sometimes you can say, “Hey, we really want this, we really want that.” But if your institutional rules are going to, once again, provide obstacles there, you’re not going to see a lot of changes. And I’ve seen this in everything from my environmental work to helping families out is, without the actual adjustment to the system as you’re trying to make adjustments to households, the classrooms, you’re just not going to see it happen. So these things have to be done in tandem. And I’m so happy you brought up that point.

John: One of our guests on a past podcast, and I’m not sure which one… I can think of three or four who might have said this… [LAUGHTER] is that they do have the official syllabus which is shared with the department, administration, and so forth. But then there’s the actual syllabus which is shared with the students and updated as they go. And that might be a good compromise, where there’s a core of content or a core of learning objectives and so forth that are in the official syllabus. But then you may have something that’s a bit more flexible and adaptable to the students that are actually in your class.

Rebecca: I mean, I submitted a syllabus that reflects a moment in time, it’s got a date on it, and then it’s a Google doc, a living document. Things change. Disasters happen. We get confused about something we need more time on it.

Erik: Sure. And I think having that space to make those changes and saying it doesn’t have to be a perfect syllabus is ideal. And one thing I talk a lot about in my work is behavioral inertia, where we’re going is kind of how the ball continues to roll. And it’s always really hard to knock us off of that behavioral inertia of what we’re currently doing. And we have stuff like this in our life. Maybe we have a certain policy or a plan or something and we see a better policy and a better plan, but we’ve had this policy and plan for 10 years. How much work would it be to actually change it? How much will it actually save me? And the same goes for our syllabi or our students in that we can get stuck in our ways. But as you’re both saying here, having the small compromises and just making incremental change, you don’t have to go scorched earth every time and say, let’s throw out every syllabus and just start from scratch every semester. But hey, this has been working okay. And having that living document you can make small adjustments to, this works for a semester three years ago, but it’s not working now. So let’s make a change to this particular section, for this particular activity and changes stuff. So just having those little things where our goals feel attainable, and we’re taking them in small enough… it’s called goal slicing… small enough slices that we can actually achieve them rather than trying to make it feel like a monumental have to move the heavens to get this done. I think it’s really, really important. So I’m glad you both brought that up, kind of looking for the solutions here that I think are really important and incredibly vital for us slowly making progress toward where we want to go.

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

Erik: Yeah, what’s next? I think this is a great question, I see a field where I say there’s so much to be done. I have always been absolutely engrossed by an understanding of pedagogy. I’ve always really desired to know how I can improve performance as an educator. And the one thing I think that’s really important right now is looking at how we can infuse different practices for mentorship and coaching sciences into our ability for faculty and teaching professionals here. And so that’s where I see us going next. I always like having focus on students because students are why we do what we do. But I think to improve the students, once again, we’re going to talk about a little bit of a mediated pathway here, is going from a focus on what do the students need to do to what do we need to do as teaching professionals and faculty to make sure we’re adequately and sufficiently prepared to enter that classroom. So what I’d really like to improve on is use the same mechanisms of social psychological behavioral sciences to help improve your pedagogical ability, teaching professionals, and this is kind of what I’ve said in a lot of the parenting work I’ve worked on in the past is if we want better outcomes for the kids, we probably shouldn’t be going to the kids directly, because they don’t have a lot of control over what’s happening, especially when they’re really little. We really need to be going to the parents and improving the parents. And same thing goes here, as we can use evidence-based behavior change principles, techniques, and tactics, complex interventions, to help improve our ability as faculty members and teaching professionals. So we’re not just throwing educators off the deep end and say, “Hey, you’ve never taught before, but here you go.” So that’s what I see as being the next step in evolution to improving pedagogy as us in education as a whole.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us, Erik, and sharing some science with us today, as well as some nice teases for your chapter in Picture a Professor.

Erik: Thank you both. That was a lot of fun.

John: Thank you.

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

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

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254. Teaching Up

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

Show Notes

Transcript

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

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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

Celeste: Thank you.

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

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

Rebecca: Wow, that sounds fancy.

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

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

John: And I have ginger tea today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: Audience matters, for sure.

Celeste: Oh, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: That sounds awesome.

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

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

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

Celeste: Thank you

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

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

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253. Designing for Trauma

 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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252. Thriving in Academia

Graduate programs focus on preparing students to become researchers and practitioners in their disciplines, but generally offer little support for those choosing to pursue teaching careers. In this episode, Pamela Ansburg, Mark Basham, and Regan Gurung join us to discuss some strategies that new faculty can use to support a transition to a career at a teaching-focused institution.

Pamela is a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Mark is a behavioral neuroscientist at Regis University, and Regan is the Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director for the Center for Teaching and Learning and a Professor of Psychological Science at Oregon State University. They are the co-authors of Thriving in Academia: Building a Career at a Teaching-Focused Institution, which was published earlier this year by the American Psychological Association.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Graduate programs focus on preparing students to become researchers and practitioners in their disciplines, but generally offer little support for those choosing to pursue teaching careers. In this episode, we discuss some strategies that new faculty can use to support a transition to a career at a teaching-focused institution.

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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 Pamela Ansburg, Mark Basham, and Regan Gurung. Pamela is a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Mark is a behavioral neuroscientist at Regis University, and Regan is the Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director for the Center for Teaching and Learning and a Professor of Psychological Science at Oregon State University. They are the co-authors of Thriving in Academia: Building a Career at a Teaching-Focused Institution, which was published earlier this year by the American Psychological Association. Welcome, Pamela and Mark, and welcome back. Regan.

Mark: It’s great to be here.

Regan: Thank you, John and Rebecca.

Pam: Thank you.

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

Pam: Earl Grey, because I like a classic.[LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: How about you, Mark?

Mark: Well, we’re in Colorado, which is home of Celestial Seasonings. So when I’m drinking tea, I’m always drinking a Celestial Seasonings tea, usually Sleepy Time, even during the day.

Regan: Are they sponsoring this podcast or something, Mark?[LAUGHTER]…

Rebecca: …Right. Yeah…

MARK’: …I’m in the Pacific Northwest, hours behind all of you. So I’m actually still on my morning cup of coffee.

Rebecca: Alright, that’s fair.

John: And I am drinking ginger tea.

Rebecca: Nice. I have some Jasmine green tea now.

John: Oh, very nice…

Mark: Nice.

Rebecca: And for John’s benefit, It’s been like an evolution over the day of what kind of tea I’m having. [LAUGHTER]

John: Rebecca is at home. I’m sitting in this control room for this old recording studio. So I’ve got this tea… and this tea…. And this tea.

Rebecca: He had to pack them all this morning [LAUGHTER]…

John: …and this tea. And, two of them were insulated, so they’re still warm. [LAUGHTER] We’ve invited you here today to discuss Thriving in Academia. PhD programs generally provide fairly solid training for grad students planning for a research-focused career, but most PhD students don’t end up in research institutions, they end up in teaching-focused institutions, and your book is designed to ease this transition. How did this book project come about?

Pam: It came about from a conference presentation. We were at a conference, the three of us met up and started catching up and talking with one another, and thinking about where our careers had led us. Regan and I have been friends and colleagues for, I don’t know, 25 years or so. And even though we were never in the same physical location, we had a long history. Mark, and I are married, and so when we all got together, we’re kind of talking about where the time had taken us and what we wanted to do, and what are the things that we were learning about, and basically, our interactions with our junior colleagues and the questions that they were asking. And we started to realize that we had some knowledge that we thought would be helpful for people going on this career path.

Mark: One of the things I think we all talked about that first dinner was we were all in positions where we were mentoring younger faculty or newer faculty, and we were seeing them have the same challenges and make some of the same mistakes that we had made, that we had seen early career faculty make over and over and over again. And we thought, well, there should be some resource. There needs to be a book. Certainly, there must be a book out there. And it turns out there wasn’t. And so then we were like, well, we should write it, a guide to having the career out a teaching-focused institution, instead of how to do research.

Regan: Yeah. And I think just an important thing for me to add is, picking up on what Pam said about we met at a conference, it was a teaching conference. And I think that’s important. It was a teaching conference, and it really made us realize how often it was only at teaching conferences that people felt like they could out themselves as being passionate teachers. And I think all three of us have had the occasion of being at a non- teaching conference, a conference in our field and going to a session that was on teaching. And then especially having grad students come up and say, “Oh, I’m so glad I can talk about teaching here, because I can’t do that at my research institution, or with my mentor or anywhere else.” And I think that really fueled our fire to say, we need to sort of unpack that hidden agenda about how it is at a teaching-focused institution where service and research is still important, but the fact is teaching is primary, and what does that do to your psyche, by things like that. So that’s why it’s sort of neat that it happened at a teaching conference, because we looked around at all these people who really didn’t have another home to really talk about teaching and share what the additional challenges of teaching does when you’re in higher education.

John: We were so impressed by the book here that our Provost is buying copies of the book for all of our new faculty and we’re going to have a reading group this fall with them working through it through the semester…

Pam: …Oh, thank you,…

John: …we were very pleased by this…

Pam: …we really appreciate it. And, we hope it will be very useful. I think it will be.

Rebecca: You’ve talked about this already a little bit. But can you talk about who the primary audience for the book is? And is it while they’re in school? Is it right when they’re looking for a job? Like, when’s the best time to engage with this book?

Mark: We really tried to write it for all of those audiences. So certainly, the book starts with just a finding: what is a teaching-focused institution, how do you know one when you see one? How do you find one? We talk about how do you find the jobs that are there? How do you prepare yourself for those jobs? But we also talk a lot about what does that job look like? As John said, during the intro, most PhD programs don’t train you to teach, certainly, and they definitely don’t teach you about advising. They don’t teach you about how to be a good committee member, how to do mentoring, all of those sorts of things.

Pam: And you also don’t have those role models. When you’re in a PhD program, your advisors are researchers. And so that’s who you get to model yourself after. So that was another reason why we thought this book was useful.

Mark: And then as we started writing it we started to realize, well, what about people that are in the middle of their career? There are some unique challenges to that at a teaching-focused institution. So then we said, well, we should include that. So that’s another potential audience. There’s a whole chapter on mid and late career, how do you stay invigorated? How do you handle a transition into being a chair or a dean or a provost? How do you handle potentially switching institutions? So we really think the audience is anybody who is in a teaching-focused career or contemplating a teaching-focused career.

Regan: And I think one particular fun part is by virtue of the fact that we’re all and maybe I should put my co authors on the spot here. What are you guys? Are you mid career? [LAUGHTER] What do you call yourself? Yeah, don’t let the gray hair or lack thereof fool you. I mean, the reality is, all of us have been around for some time. And the neat thing of that is we not only reflected on folks where we are, and a few years ahead of us, but… and this is the part of the book I loved in particular… was it’s packed with our stories of different points in our career. So we’ve got stories in there from when we were grad students, from when we were junior assistant faculty and associate faculty. And so in that way, I think you can really see yourself no matter where you are in your career. And there are three of us, we all read each other’s chapters, that was one of the most fun parts for me was to read Mark’s and Pam’s stories, because each chapter ends with a personal story. And each of us took turns writing that and it was a lot of fun to get the first look at Pam’s story or Mark’s story. Because there were things that even though we’ve known each other for some time we haven’t talked about, but it immediately, I think, invites the reader into the different stages of careers.

Pam: And I think depending on where you’re at in your career, parts of the book will resonate differently with you. So when you’re just beginning, if you’re in graduate school, you really are just trying to understand what the job is, once you take on the decision to become a professor at a teaching-focused institution, then it gets real. And you really have to figure out what do I need to do here. And then, even if you’ve been in the role for a little while, we have some, I think, neat tips about efficiencies and ways to take and model your career and make choices to help you really feel fulfilled as you go through.

Regan: I just want to add one more thing, I think educators or especially grad students, but even educators in general, forget often that there are close to 4300 colleges and universities in the US itself… 4300. Yet, when we’re in grad school, so many of us are so often just thinking about that small number of research schools. And what’s neat about this was it was the recognition of the fact that there are so many varieties of institutions…. 4300 out there… that’s a lot of variants. And I think all three of us have realized in our careers, in the work that we do, that the absolute bulk of faculty and instructors at those 4300 institutions never get the chance to talk about teaching or talk to peers about the challenges of being at a teaching-focused institution. And I think that’s the eyes in which we set out to write this book is to say, if you’ve never had the chance to be to a teaching conference, or to have that support structure or have your teaching champion, join us and read this book, and it’s really written with that voice. And I mean, it’s not your dry book, the three of us let ourselves and the publishers let us, be more conversational in places, which I think really invites you into that conversation.

John: The faculty that grad students are working with see the reputation of their institution being partly reflected by how many of their grad students end up in top universities within their discipline. And there’s generally not a lot of discussion of other options or, if there is, it’s often a discouragement of that, that maybe people should apply at teaching colleges as a backup rather than as their primary market. Yet, that’s not why all grad students chose to go to grad school, many people would like a career in a teaching-focused institution. What advice do you provide in the book for students who are looking at alternatives, who are trying to choose between a research-focused institution or a teaching-focused institutions? What sort of guidance do you suggest? What factors should they consider?

Mark: Before I actually answer your question, or let one of my co-authors answer your question, I think you hit upon one of the real driving forces about this book, which is that as a grad student, as Pam mentioned, your mentors are researchers typically, but the whole incentive structure… You’re right, at a big research university, the things that are prioritized, that are incentivized are doing research, and then making sure that your students do research and contribute. And so once you go to a teaching-focused institution, even though you’re still going to do research, you’re still gonna do scholarship, you’’re still gonna do all the parts, but the incentive structure is much different. And that’s a big change from being a grad student. But as far as the advice, it seems sort of obvious, but one of our main pieces of advice is get experience teaching. The more experience you can get, the better. And we have a lot of sort of suggestions about how to go beyond just being a TA as a grad student, but how do you connect with maybe community colleges or teaching-focused institutions that are nearby so that you can become an instructor of record for a course or two, because really, that’s the only way to know which way you want to go. You’re trying to research, you’re doing that, as a grad student, you really need to try your hand at the teaching part and see how that feels.

Pam: And I would also add that reaching out to find somebody who is at a teaching-focused institution in your field and, send an email and just explain who you are… you’re a graduate student, you’re exploring this as a potential career path… and would they be willing to give you 15 minutes of time just to explain what their daily life is like? Because I think as a graduate student in a PhD program, you don’t really have a good window on what the daily activities of a professor at a teaching-focused institution is. And so just hearing somebody talk about what do they do on a daily basis and what are the challenges and what are the advantages and why they made the decision to go into a teaching-focused track is another strategy.

Regan: Yeah, this is why I love having two co-authors because we all come at things from such different directions. When I heard your question, John, I immediately thought of the importance of mentoring. And we had a really good time writing about mentoring: both how to find a good mentor, but then also how it’s important to be a good mentor. And that’s where I first went to, which is many times our mentors are very well meaning and looking out for us and looking out for the best, but it’s often the best according to them. And I think I was very fortunate that I had some mentors who, even though they were really training me to be Research I University people, when I said I really wanted to teach, they said, “Okay, I respect that and let me help you.” And I know that’s not the case with many mentors who you may even shudder to mention the fact that you are looking at a small liberal arts college, or that’s where you’d like to go. Full disclosure, Mark and I both went to Carleton College, a small liberal arts college where teaching was a big deal. And the faculty were passionate about teaching. And I know I took that with me through my grad schools. And I was a postdoc at UCLA. I was in grad school at the University of Washington, both big Research I schools, but thankfully, my exposure to a liberal arts school where faculty loved to teach, I knew it was possible. I knew it was possible. I always hung on to that. And I always think about those grad students who didn’t have that kind of exposure to passionate teachers who only have a Research I exposure but who still want to teach, how do we let them know that teaching is an option and that’s where I think Pam’s advice is so good. Find somebody who is passionate about teaching, either at one of those teaching schools, or I will add, elsewhere in your discipline, but find your champion who is willing to say I will support you in going to a teaching-focused institution.

John: One other thing I think that is becoming much more common is, even in research institutions, there are more people hired as professors of the practice or some similar name, where there are some people who specialize in effective teaching. So there may be people in more and more departments now who could serve in that mentoring role without even having to leave the institution. That was very uncommon when I was a grad student, but it is becoming a bit more common now.

Rebecca: Thanks for sharing your story, Regan. One of the things that you made me think about is how lucky I was to have some of the mentors I had in graduate school because I got to teach a special topics class as a graduate student and write my own class and try it out my last semester. And it was a really great experience for me. And I also wanted to just note here, we’ve been talking a lot about PhD programs, but the same thing also happens in programs like MFA programs that are also terminal degrees, but might have a slightly different context. But there are those that are really focused on the creative practice and being in a research institution versus teaching as well. So that does kind of span across those kinds of programs as well.

Mark: Regan, I think is more tenacious than I am. I remember sitting in that Carleton classroom, looking at my professors and thinking, hey, this is what I want to do. But then I also know that as I went on, and got a master’s degree and PhD program, and then as a postdoctoral researcher, I kind of forgot that, I forgot that dream. It was easy to get indoctrinated into the “I’m going to be a researcher, I’m going to strive for the Nobel Prize, I’m going to do this.” And it wasn’t until I almost accidentally ended up teaching my first class, which I did only because my first child was born and I needed the extra money. And I sort of surreptitiously, without my PI and my postdoc knowing, signed up to teach a class. And then when I got in front of a classroom full of students, it sparked that memory of like, “Oh, I remember why I started this journey, I started this journey, because I wanted to be like those passionate professors that I had as an undergrad.” And I had forgotten that along the way. And then I’m one of those people who had to sort of do a pivot without a lot of support, where I had conversations… I adore my advisors and the PIs I’ve had over the years, and they were wonderful mentors in many ways, but they were lukewarm at best in supporting that transition to a teaching-focused institution. So I’m one of those people who had to sort of swim upstream to get to where I am.

Regan: I love that story, Mark, because my undergrad experience actually was the opposite. And when I sat in class as an undergrad, although I respected the passion, teaching was the last thing I thought I would do, I had absolutely no idea. I was brought up in the classic Indian tradition of, “Hey, go be a doctor, go be a lawyer.” And I’m grateful to my parents to saying: “Psychology, sure, give it a shot.” But I was completely PhD research. That was all I could think about. And I mention this, because there will be many people listening or reading, who likewise may have come to teaching out of the blue. Through my grad program, we didn’t have to teach. So Rebecca, when you said you got a chance to teach, wow, that’s great. There are many folks out there who never get the chance to teach because it’s not part of the plan. In grad school, I did not have a chance to teach. But a friend invited me to do a guest lecture in their class. And that one hour changed the trajectory of my life, because the highs that I got from that 50 minutes, of the reactions, of the feedback of what it felt like, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do. But, and this is what I was gonna say Rebecca, in response to your story, but then it was hard work. People be prepared. If you want teaching experience, sometimes you’re gonna have to work very hard to do it. And that’s why, I think, Mark, you mentioned going and looking at if there’s a course at a community college that you can teach, that’s what I had to do at a postdoc. I was a postdoc at UCLA, fully funded, and I wanted to teach. So I went and taught at a college an hour away, because that was the only place that had an opening for a course. So, be prepared to really fuel that teaching passion. It may take time and effort as part of the whole deal.

Pam: I’ll just tag on to Regan. I had the same experience as Regan, I was research all the way, no interest in teaching whatsoever. In fact, when I got into my PhD program, I was really upset because there was no research assistant positions, and I had to have a TA position. And I fought, I went to see the chair and I said, “I really don’t want this. I really want to be a researcher.” And he said, “Well, do you want money? Do you want the TA? and I thought, “Okay, I guess I’ll be a TA” and I just was like, “This is gonna be horrible. I’m gonna hate it, but I’ll do it for the money, fine.” And the same experience, Regan, I had to run review sessions for an introductory psychology class. I walked into the class with the worst attitude you could have ever imagined, and within two minutes, I was in love. A total turnaround. It was a really amazing experience. And so I would say like, sometimes you don’t know where you’re headed, and the advice I give to my students is: “Be open.” I wasn’t particularly open. I got forced into a situation and then it changed my whole life.

John: Which comes back to that advice that you talked about earlier of trying to teach your class just to see what it’s like, because it would be very easy for many people to go through grad school without realizing that that’s something that they really do have a passion for, or that may be something that they just never want to do. So,[LAUGHTER] having that experience is really essential. I was in a position where I was planning on going into research until one of the professors left very suddenly. And with a couple of days, notice, I was teaching a course. And I decided from that point, that’s what I wanted to do. I was on a fellowship, I didn’t have to do any teaching. But once I did, it pretty much determined the path of my career.

Mark: It was one of the fun things about writing this book was, we would write two thirds of the chapter, and then we would read it and we would email each other and say, “Man, we’re making the sound like a terrible job. We’re making this sound like it’s really hard.” And then we would say we need to add in, what’s the reward? Why do we do that? And I think the final product does a good job both sort of addressing how difficult it is, how much time it’s going to take, what is this job really like? But then also, why do we do it? Because it’s not for the money. We all do it for the joy you get from doing all of these things. And even not just the teaching. But we talked about the satisfaction of service done well, the satisfaction of involving students, particularly undergraduate students, in your scholarship and your research. And so I think, as Regan was saying earlier, it’s a very accessible book, because it does talk about the difficulties, but it also talks about the joys and rewards from doing this job..

Rebecca: It’s funny, Mark, that you mentioned that you had initially taught for the money. So did I. I didn’t do it, because I wanted to teach, necessarily, but then we stay because of other things.[LAUGHTER] So one of the things that you talked about is thinking about some of the challenges and surprises and maybe positive things of working at a teaching institution. What are some of the things that are different at a teaching institution than at a research institution that people should think about?

Mark: There’s so much. [LAUGHTER]

Regan: I have actually a number because when we first talked about this book, talked about it, even the idea for it, I was at one institution, which is a very teaching-focused institution, and then very recently moved to a Research I institution. Now, that said, I sit in the Center for Teaching and Learning, so I am surrounding myself with teaching and learning. But it really opened my eyes to some of those really big differences that I do see out there. And I think the biggest difference, is in the fabric of a teaching-focused institution, our constant conversations about teaching, where I know that next to every day, I would get coffee with a colleague at my teaching-focused institution, the University of Wisconsin Green Bay, and we talk about teaching, or we’d pop out of our office, and we’d talk about teaching, or we’d walk to somebody else’s office and we’d say, “Hey, I’m playing with this assignment. What do you think about teaching?” …and that doesn’t happen with the same frequency at Research I schools. I think, what does happen though, here and this goes back to Pam’s comment that I’m going to take up a notch, Pam said, “Hey, find somebody at a teaching-focused institution.” I’m going to modify that a little bit to say, even at Research I schools, if you’re interested in teaching, find somebody who’s interested in teaching, because just a couple of weeks ago, I had lunch with a colleague here at Oregon State. And he said a very interesting thing to me at lunch, where he said, “I don’t get to talk about teaching a lot. But I wondered what you thought about this.” And it was this great conversation about student attendance and recording lectures or not, but the way he tentatively put it forward as the “I never get a chance to talk about this. But here, was what I want to talk about.” That was so neat and in stark contrast to when I was at a teaching-focused institution, we had chances to talk about it all the time. In fact, for me, at a teaching-focused institution, I needed to create opportunities to talk about research, because our default was to talk about teaching. So that was one big difference.

Pam: I would also add that service is a much bigger expectation at a teaching-focused institution than at a research-focused one. So not only are you balancing the demands of teaching, and having all the pleasure of talking about teaching and experimenting with teaching, and keeping your scholarship reasonably productive, you’re also really expected to contribute quite a bit to your institution or your department through service. And sometimes that can get a little bit out of control if you don’t make smart decisions about where you’re going to spend your time in terms of doing service. So I would say that that that is one of the things that is really never really explored very much, but really is a large part of the job at a teaching-focused institution, is service.

Mark: And since Regan and Pam talked about teaching and serving, I guess I could talk a little bit about advising, because I think that’s another big difference. When I was in grad school, when I was a postdoc, when I looked at the people that were at the research institutions, they never talked about advising. If they did, it was sort of obligatory, get it done as quickly as possible. Whereas at most teaching-focused institutions, although there are some that have professional advisors that are doing that, but oftentimes, it’s the faculty that are advising students and doing that academic advising, the career discernment advising, and I think that’s a big difference, too. And I think that’s one of those things that isn’t obvious at first, when people think about a teaching focused institution, they obviously think about teaching, they know that they’re probably going to do some scholarship. But many people, until they have the job, don’t realize how much time you’re going to spend, both formally and informally, advising students, …and especially that informal advising can take up a lot of time at a teaching-focused institution.

Pam: So to tie it back to the question about applying and being prepared for an academic position, these are things that would be helpful to be at least conversant in: “How would you approach your service commitments? Where do you see spending your time? Be able to speak about your advising philosophy as well as teaching and your research.” I think that would make a competitive applicant.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the advice that you offer related to balancing things like academic advising, teaching, research, and service, and all the other things that we didn’t even talk about? [LAUGHTER]

Mark: Well, this is the big challenge. We talk a lot in the book about trying to do two things at the same time. So can you integrate some of the research into the classroom? Can you combine those so that the research becomes part of the teaching? Can you involve your students in part of the research process, both as part of the research lab, but also as part of the classroom experience? We talk about being really intentional about service, not saying yes to everything. There’s great pressure, especially on early in the career faculty, to say yes to service requests, particularly when they come from a chair or a dean, how can you possibly say no? And we discuss in the book that you actually can say no, and sometimes you should say no. And how do you do that gracefully? How are you intentional about those service activities, so they don’t take over everything. And then I tell this story in the book about my early advising, I got no training in how to do academic advising. I was handed a sheet that had the degree requirements and told, “Hey, meet with these students.” And I memorized the sheet, and I got pretty good at getting students registered for classes. And I could get students in and out of an advising session in 20 minutes. And I was looking at all my colleagues who were spending an hour or more with every student, and I thought “You guys are crazy, get the student in, tell them what classes to take, get them out of your office, sign the form, so that I had time that I could do research.’ I didn’t want to be spending time advising them. it took me several years to realize I was actually missing the point, the point of academic advising at teaching-focused institutions, and particularly the institution I was at, was not just get the students registered for the next semester, it was to help them figure out career discernment, help them figure out how they were going to navigate the difficult courses, how they were going to balance the courses, to get to know them, so that I could write letters of recommendation for them. And with several years of experience then suddenly, I became one of those people that spending an hour or more with every student. But it takes a while to figure out that balance.

Regan: To add to that is the notion that how you balance is going to vary and what you balance is going to really vary at where you are in your career. And I think going back to your earlier question, Rebecca, was “Who’s this book for?” …and our very neat response, which is “everybody along the spectrum,” …something we really tried to address in all over the book is remember, this will be different for you depending on where you are. And so we have parts where we’re like, “Hey, if you’re a grad student, remember this, if you’re a tenured faculty member, remember this.” So I think that how to balance varies on where you are in your career. Now that said, that’s not answering your question on tips to balance, it’s just kicking the can down a little bit. So I will address how to balance. I think at the end of the day, there are just so many different productivity tips and tools. And I think our best suggestion is, remember that there’s no one planner or app that works for everybody. And in fact, I’ll go so far as to say for many of us, an app is not the way to go. Go old school. Something we did in our household yesterday is my spouse pulled out a sheet of paper, a ruler, and a felt pen, and drew out the month of July so we could write on what our two kids would be doing during the week so they could plan and balance their summer. And I think sometimes, in this world of apps and technology, we keep looking for an app to help us balance where sometimes it’s going old school and writing it out or drawing it out in a journal or a calendar and going that route. The key suggestion here is: find a way that’s good for you. Don’t stick with something that’s not working. I think that’s a really key part that we wanted to share over the years is… I don’t know about Pam and Mark, but I know I have tried different things and have settled on what works really well for me in terms of creating balance.

Mark: And one of the things I learned from writing the book with Regan, is this idea that sometimes you have to be creative about thinking about how you’re going to get scholarship done. I was in this mindset that I needed to be able to block off big chunks of time to research. And so I was constantly trying to find six hours on three consecutive days so that I can do this. And then in reading Regan’s, what he wrote for this book and talking to Regan, I had this realization that well, I can reconceptualize how I do that and maybe it is work on scholarship for just long enough until it loses efficiency, and then switch to something else. And do that until I lose efficiency, and then switch to a third thing, and then come back. And this sort of not trying to say, “Well, I have to have these huge blocks of time, but say I’m gonna do something as long as it’s productive. And as soon as that stopped being productive, I switch to the next thing,

Pam: Both Mark and Regan offered very practical, down-to-earth, advice and mine’s going to be a little bit more abstract, philosophical. It’s important for me to always know: What am I doing this for? Why am I doing whatever the thing is that I’m doing? And is it important to who I am as a professional? Does it match my goals? And my goals may be determined sometimes. If I’m not tenured yet, it may be determined by other people, but always sort of looking at it from a strategic holistic viewpoint so that you can make the decisions about what kind of research do you want to do? How do you want to integrate that with teaching? What about service? How can you come up with a coherent, connected professional life? And for me, that has always been really important, and it’s really helped me balance because I can have a sense of what I’m trying to do and who I’m trying to become as a professional. And then when opportunities are available, I can always match that against “Does this fit what I want to do and how I want to proceed as a professional?” Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do and things that don’t fit exactly. But for the most part, there’s so much to be done. You really do have a lot of control about what specific things you do. It’s just important to know who you are and where you want to be heading.

John: One of the things you address in the book is mentoring and finding support for your work. Many campuses, maybe most campuses, will provide formal mentors, but that doesn’t always work as well as institutions hope. Could you give some suggestions on how new faculty can develop mentoring support in their new positions?

Pam: I think one of the best things to do is to look around your institution and identify people that you admire. Who has the career that you’d like to have? Who is involved in the things that you’d like to be involved in? …and then reach out to them. So I think that’s a quick short answer. But you can do that relatively easily. Just being around in any university, you’ll start to notice people who are doing different things, and you’ll start to develop admiration, reach out to those people.

Mark: And I agree with that and the only thing I would add is it doesn’t have to be at your own institution. Look around, look at your professional societies. Look at the people that you’re collaborating with, find the people, like Pam said, who have the career you want. Reach out to those people. Most people are flattered to be approached and say “Hey, can you give me advice? Can you informally mentor me?” Most people are happy and eager to do that if they’re approached..

Regan: And something that relates to both of those, especially at your university, you will see some usual suspects, the people who are always showing up at the things that you’re showing up at, those are great people to grab some coffee with or another beverage with…

Rebecca: tea…

Regan: tea… exactly…

Rebecca: always tea. [LAUGHTER]

Regan: Kombucha. This is Oregon, go for some Kombucha… [LAUGHTER] and just chat some more. So be on the lookout for those people you see often because there is actually something to connecting with somebody in a different discipline at your university. There are many, many benefits to that and we talk about that a fair amount. But I’m going to take what Mark said and some folks may say “Oh, I’d never do that.” So here’s something that I would actually underscore. You’d be amazed at what you will hear if you reach out to somebody else and say “You know what, I’ve either read some of your work or I’ve seen you at conferences or whatever, would you mind touching base every so often?” And I say this because this happened to me, where somebody out of the blue, who I did not know just reached out and we’ve been meeting every month for close to a year now. And this was somebody out of the blue. And I think there are many of us out there who would be happy to do those kinds of things, especially if your discipline doesn’t have a built in mentoring connector kind of thing. And for all of you out there who are psychologists, the Society for the Teaching of Psychology has a mentoring site where you can find mentors for you. So not every discipline has that, but do not poopoo the possibility that just reaching out will get you a connection. Now mind you, just like anything else in higher education, reaching out may get you nothing, and the person may not even respond, but like I tell my students in this day and age of things going into your junk folder, don’t give up after one email, give up after three, because who knows where email messages go nowadays.

Rebecca: One of the things that you address in the book is about preparing for all different roles in all different stages of the career. And I know that when I was applying for jobs, I was peeking around the corner of what tenure might look like. And then after I was tenured, I was peeking my head around wondering what it’s like to be a full professor. And now I am peeking my head around wondering what’s next. [LAUGHTER] So what advice do you have, as folks are moving through their continuum of their career and peeking around corners? It’s often a mystery what happens next.

Pam: I think seeking a mentor who is at that next stage is a great way to get a better view of what that looks like. And maybe more than one because my experience is that as you progress in your career in academia, there are lots of different paths you can take, lots of different ways people can go. So I know that Regan’s definitely in the administration and of things, Mark is heading there, I’ve popped in and out of administrative roles, but I keep coming back to faculty roles. I think there’s a lot of ways you can design your career as you go, and so having multiple mentors and multiple models is a good way to get that look ahead.

Mark: My answer, Rebecca, to your question was: “Well, that’s the reason we wrote the book is so that you could get a better peek around those corners.” And I would add also to what Pam just alluded to, there’s a reason that this is a three-author book, that it’s not just a single person story. And sort of serendipitously, the three of us have had very sort of different careers within this umbrella of teaching-focused institutions, and so you get those multiple perspectives. And so peeking around the corner, looking at my transition from pre-tenure to post-tenure looks different than peeking around the corner and looking at how Pam did it or how Regan did it. But in our book, you get all three of those. And so you really do get more information that way.

Regan: Yeah, and Rebecca, going back to your situation, I’m going to say something I think somewhat controversial in that I don’t think everybody needs to go through the same rung of higher education and climb one rung after the other. We talked about balance a little earlier, let me say this bluntly, you may be able to get a lot more balance if you’re not a full professor. You may be able to get a lot more balanced just once you get tenure without needing to then push yourself to that next level. There’s more responsibility with more levels. And I think to get a little Pam and philosophical here, it’s a state of mind. What are you comfortable with? And I like to say: Are you being challenged? Do you look forward to going into school? Or do you look forward to your work? If it is, do you need that rank? Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s a whole separate story about the tenure track versus the fixed term. That’s a separate issue. But especially in the traditional tenure-track moves, and also in ranking more for fixed term. And really ask yourself, are you happy where you are? Are you happy with the challenges? And that’s when you look around the corners and look around different corners? Because as Pam alluded to, maybe you look around into the administrative corner and you go, “No, I don’t want to go that route.” But by the same token, you may look around that corner and go, “Wow, I love the challenges there.” But it’s totally okay, if you don’t. You’re not a lesser person if you decide not to go up for full, if you decide not to go into administration. And the last thing I’ll say that is a little pragmatic, is this is why volunteering for committees is wonderful, because then you get a taste for those different corners and whether you want to go those routes or not.

Mark: And one thing I would add, we’re talking a lot about tenure and, more and more, there are institutions that are not tenure institutions. In my institution right now we have two different types of faculty, some who are on a tenure-track tenure system and some who don’t have a tenure system. The title of the book is Thriving in Academia, and we do talk about: “Can you be thriving in academia as an affiliate faculty for your entire career?” I think that’s very possible. I know people who’ve done that, so it doesn’t have to be that traditional route of a tenure-track position and then tenure and then department chair. We really want people to thrive, whatever works for them. And if that means that you’re at an institution where you’re just on multi-year contracts for your whole career, that’s great. How do you make that work? If you are in a position where you want to be an affiliate faculty member and teach classes at multiple different institutions? Can you build a thriving career out of that? Yes, absolutely, certainly you can. All of that is part of the book.

Regan: Mark’s commenting about the different tenure-track versus fixed term and contracts… To push that a little further, I think the constitution of higher education and how it’s done is looking very different. Something that we didn’t touch on at all in the book, because it was written mostly prior to the pandemic was remote learning. There are things coming down the pike, how do you deal with different teaching modalities? How do you deal with remote work? These are two major ways that higher education is changing. And you’ve got to hope that folks at your institution are looking ahead and not just rushing to get back to normal, where normal wasn’t the best place to be.

John: So maybe another book on How to Continue to Thrive in Academia, when the world’s falling apart?

Regan: There you go. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I’ll look forward to reading that when you guys are done with that. I’ll be the first purchase. [LAUGHTER]

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

Mark: For me lunch, lunch is what’s next. [LAUGHTER]

Regan: With the message being: don’t forget about your physical needs to thrive in academia. [LAUGHTER]

Pam: Exactly, exactly. [LAUGHTER]

Regan: That was the subtle subtext over there.

Mark: ….self care, Regan.

Regan: Actually, I was mostly jesting, but I just finished a project writing about how to help students study. And the last chapter is self care. So, sleeping and eating and family time and social support, and we don’t talk about that enough. I think something I have seen over the last year is a lot more of us on social media and in these places, being more direct about “Look, people take time for yourself.” And I think, honestly, my big answer to the “what’s next?” is how do we give each other the permission to do that. And I don’t think we in higher education are very good at that yet.

Mark: I had a colleague one time that was from Europe. And he was just appalled at what happened at our institution, which was that everybody ate lunch in their office at their desk working. And he just thought this was crazy, that you wouldn’t stop working, go somewhere, have lunch as a separate event. And I often think about that when I’m sitting in my office having lunch and thinking this is ridiculous, I should be able to take the time that it takes for me to have lunch away from work, not trying to eat and answer emails, I should be able to go somewhere, have a mug of tea, have my lunch, and have that time. And that’s just a small example, I think, of what Regan’s talking about. We need to set up a system…

Rebecca: Well, you all had me at lunch….

Mark: At my university, I was instrumental a couple years ago in just getting a faculty lounge so that we had a place that faculty could go that wasn’t in their office, that wasn’t open to students, so that we could spend a little bit of time not doing the job for a moment.

John: There was recently a podcast sometime in the last month or so, I think it was Rough Translation, where they talked about someone who went from the US to France, and that person wanted to have lunch at her desk, but there was a tremendous amount of peer pressure to get her outside, to leave the office, even if it was raining or cold, there was pressure on her to get out of there. And it was a bit of a transition for her.

Mark: I think one of the next steps that I think we’re all interested in and hoping for is really just continuing to share this information. So the book is out there now. There are starting to be conferences that are in person. We are starting to do presentations at conferences about parts of the book. And I know, talking to Pam, we’re very excited about being able to go to conferences and talk about: How do you be intentional about your service? How do you deal with feeling burnt out as a mid-career faculty member. …These workshops and conferences and, as Regan alluded to very early on in this conversation, talking to each other, about teaching, about teaching-focused institutions. For me, that’s the thing I’m really looking forward to is getting back to where we can gather as a community and have those conversations and share each other’s knowledge.

Pam: And I think hearing feedback from readers also will be really helpful because, as Regan said, we conceived of the book before the pandemic, finished writing a little bit of it during the height of the pandemic, and we’d like to hear from readers about how things are different for them now and how we can address some of those challenges that they might be facing that we didn’t anticipate in the book?

Regan: Yeah. And I think, definitely striding into next steps, I can’t help but think how we… and I mean the three of us… can better leverage psychological science, because this book was about teaching and teaching-focused institutions and the three legs of the stool of teaching, research, and service. But especially when you try to address the bulk of the questions, whether it’s balancing, whether it’s productivity, the reality is the psychological knowledge out there that can help you do it better. And what I haven’t seen yet is how do you really explicitly leverage what we know about stress and coping and planning and judgment and decision making, and all these psychological topics to help the teaching enterprise. So if you were to say, “Hey, what’s a potential fun next project that builds on this?” That’s definitely something that comes to mind where we unabashedly say here’s how you can do these things. Because I think it’s the pragmatics of how to do things that are important. We have a lot of pragmatics in the book, but especially and I love the reader feedback element, Pam, especially with reader feedback. I know people go: “Give me an example. Give me another example. Give me another example.” So pragmatics and leveraging some of those theoretical things that we know about aS psychologists, I think, really good scope for that.

Pam: I think about maybe adding a workbook component to this sort of thing where there are really practice exercises and practical, even though I do like the philosophical. But, as teachers, we do know that people need concrete examples. They need to work through things. They need to try to problem solve, not in the situation where they’re doing the problem solving for real. And so adding some piece like that, I think, would be valuable. And some of that is figuring out how to do your balance. I’ll admit I’m not very good at that. I eat at my desk all the time.

Mark: I’m happy to say that I have become somewhat notorious on my campus for skateboarding during lunch. I do a little laps around the campus on my longboard and everybody laughs at the old guy trying to be cool, but at least gets me out of my office.

Regan: Mark, we need a Tik Tok of you skateboarding with the book. Viral… That’s gonna go viral.

John: …holding the book.

Regan: That will go viral. That’s gonna go viral.

Rebecca: I think so. Well, thank you all for joining us and sharing all your insights in this book. We’re happy to share the book and share this episode with our listeners.

Pam: Thank you and we’d love feedback from the book once you run your sessions. We’d love to hear what people have to say.

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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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