Where’s the professor? Unfortunately, this is not an unfamiliar question on the first day of class when a young-looking instructor is at the helm. In this episode, Reba Wissner joins us to discuss ways of shifting student perceptions in order to get to the real work of learning. Reba is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Schwob School of Music of Columbus State University. She is also the author of a chapter in the Picture a Professor collection, 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.
- Brian Eno Oblique Strategies
Transcript
John: Where’s the professor? Unfortunately, this is not an unfamiliar question on the first day of class when a young-looking instructor is at the helm. In this episode we discuss ways of shifting student perceptions in order to get to the real work of 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 Reba Wissner. Reba is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Schwob School of Music of Columbus State University. She is also the author of a chapter in the Picture a Professor collection, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus. Welcome, Reba.
Reba: Hi, thanks, nice to be here.
Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Reba, you drinking tea?
Reba: Kind of, I’m drinking a caffeinated seltzer, the Fuji apple and white tea.
Rebecca: Okay, I think this is a first, John.
John: I’ve had that actually. I got it at a Whole Foods in Durham, North Carolina. It’s very good. It’s one of my favorite iced teas.
Rebecca: How about you, John?.
John: And I am drinking a ginger tea now.
Rebecca: I have a jasmine black today, the new one that I’m trying.
John: So, we’ve invited you here to discuss the chapter you contributed to the Picture a Professor project. The title of your chapter is, “Where’s the professor? First-day active learning for navigating student’s perceptions of young professors.” Before we discuss this chapter, could you tell us a little bit about some of your initial first class day experiences as a new professor?
Reba: I remember the very first day that I started teaching. I was a second-year graduate student, and I was in an unusual position because when I was a graduate student at Brandeis, at the time, every department had to give a grad student to teach a writing section of a course. And so you were basically the instructor of record, and you’ve never taught anything, you’ve never TA’d, you just go in head first into shallow water, it can hurt real bad. But I remember the first day I was about 22 at the time, and I walk in, and I’m confronted with a bunch of college freshmen. And they are looking around and saying hello and talking to them. But they’re not really thinking much of it. And then I heard one student go, “Hey, look at the time, where’s the professor? Is she late?” And that’s when I realized, “Oh, they don’t realize that I’m the professor.” And so that’s when I had to take a step back and be like, “Hi, I am the professor.” And I thought it was a fluke. And it kept happening to me, which was really funny. And I remember the most recent time that it happened to me was about three or four years ago when I was teaching a graduate class. And one of the students in the graduate classes had had me as an undergrad, so they knew me, but the other graduate students didn’t know me. And we were sitting around the seminar table and the same thing happened.” The students just like “Where’s the professor?” and then the student who did know me started laughing. And I’m like, “Hi, I’m right here.” And [LAUGHTER] that’s where the the name of the chapter came from, where so many students just thought that I look too young to be a professor. They come in, especially as freshmen with this perception that the old guy with a white hair and the elbow pads and all of that other stuff, and maybe the pipe hanging out of their tweed jacket, and they don’t expect somebody who is in their 20s or 30s to be in front of them as the professor. And so for me, one of the things that I really had to start thinking about as it kept happening to me almost every semester for about a decade was how do I get the students to buy in? How do I get them to take me seriously? In the first semester that I taught I was 22 and they were like 18 year olds that were in front of me, and so not much of a big age difference. And like, how do I get them to realize that I’m in a position of power? …not in a bad way, but I am only about four or five years removed from you and I am the person who’s going to be teaching you and giving you grades. And I only at that point had a bachelor’s myself. And so it was a little bit of an awkward position. So that’s what got me started into thinking about what I have to do to get buy-in from my students.
John: In some ways that was similar to my own experience, you wouldn’t be able to tell that from looking at me now. But when I started teaching back in 1980, I did seem relatively young. And I was thrown into this with about maybe two weeks notice when a professor left suddenly, and I had never taught or been a TA before. And it was a bit of a shock for me and also probably for them, besides them not recognizing me as a professor at first, I was not at all prepared for this, I prepared a whole set of notes of what we were going to discuss that day. And I went through them at a speed that was just incredibly rapid with far less interaction than there should have been. But I settled in eventually. But my second time teaching was a master’s program, where I was the youngest person in the room by at least four or five years. And it was, again, a similar type of experience where they were very surprised that I was the professor.
Reba: And for me that particular first class was kind of interesting, because my degree is in music history. And the class that I was teaching was a writing section for a psychology class. I had never taken a psychology class before. And I only had about two weeks of training on writing pedagogy. And so that just made it worse in getting them to believe that I was somebody who could teach them. I had to kind of wing it, in some cases fake it, until I became more confident with that. So it just kind of compounded the situation.
Rebecca: Yeah, it’s funny how many people really relate to these scenarios, being young faculty. I’ve been teaching for almost 20 years now and people will look at me and say, that’s not even possible, were you teaching when you were in kindergarten? {LAUGHTER}… I indeed have been, so I certainly relate, and I know many of our listeners do as well.
Reba: Yeah, I’ve been instructor of record for 16 years now. And I still get asked for my student ID, which is really kind of flattering, but also kind of amusing, {LAUGHTER}
Rebecca: Are some of these challenges greater for female faculty or faculty from minoritized groups, or faculty that just appear relatively young?
Reba: Absolutely, And we know from research that there’s a lot of biases that play into student perceptions of faculty. And we see this even in course evaluations, where male faculty don’t have the same comments that female faculty have, they are not ranked lower on certain things. Women are described using certain vocabulary that male faculty are not described using. And so I think getting students to take you seriously can be an issue. I think, also, and dare I say this, depending on the part of the country you’re in, it might be far, far more difficult, especially if you are faculty of color, if you are teaching, say, in the south, or somewhere in the really rural Midwest, getting someone to take you seriously. And it’s even more so if you are a female of color. Or if you are someone who doesn’t look in a particular way. So for instance, if you are non-binary, if you’re not as female presenting as your name might indicate, that might also be a barrier that students face in terms of taking you seriously. In talking with some of my colleagues who have started teaching roughly around the same age that I did, none of them had ever had a student comment on how young they look, which is really kind of interesting. So again, this notion that if you’re not playing into those expectations of what a professor should look like, that creates a little bit of an extra challenge, when you’re trying to set up expectations for an entire semester.
John: The title of your chapter mentions active learning exercises for the first day, what types of active learning exercises do you use on the first day of class?
Reba: So it depends on the particular course, the one that I discuss in the chapter is a petting zoo activity, which is a term I got from some friends of mine who do something very similar. One of the classes that I teach, and I’ve been teaching for a very long time, is the what we call Music History I, which is music history from the beginning of time. Where I am now it goes up to Mozart, when I was teaching it other places it was various different time periods, but it always included Medieval or Renaissance music. And this was also a barrier, it still is a barrier. Music History I tends to be the class that music students don’t want to take. Because they’re just like, “Why do I need to know about chant? Why do I need to know about church music? Why do I need to know about music that I don’t play? It’s just a class that I have to take, and I’m not really going to care about it.” And so that’s another level of buy-in that I have to get them to understand the importance of it. Even if you are a saxophone player, you need to know about the roots of music, and you need to know about musical style. And so usually that first class, what I do is I ask students, “Why do you need to take music history, other than the fact that you have to be here? …and I get some glazed over looks sometimes. And then some of the students are like, “Well, I need to know about issues of performance, practice, and style and things like that, but I don’t know why I need to know early music.” And so that gives me an opportunity to tell the students “Okay, we’re going to take a look at some of the objects that we’re going to look at and discuss this semester.” And so I use a really great worksheet that I think it’s the Library of Congress has provided on material objects. And I spread lots of things around the room, I have early musical instruments, I have chant books that use non-western notations. I use vellum, I use gut strings, which are not used on really any instrument now except for like harp, and lots of different objects that they probably have never seen before in their lives. And I put them around the room. And I put the students in small groups, and I say, “Okay, you’re gonna fill out one of these sheets for each of these objects. You’ve got about two to three minutes with your group to look at this object. Tell me what it is. What do you think it’s used for? How do you think it’s used? And what era do you think it was from? Give me a decade or half century or something like that.” And they go around in their groups, and you can see the amazement and the wonder in their eyes, especially when we see something that they’ve never saw before. Like they might look at an instrument that looks like a violin and they were a violinist, but they’ve never seen it before and they don’t realize that that is essentially the predecessor to their instrument and where their instrument came from. And so the best thing that happens in that is the students get very confused. And I love when they get confused because when they get confused, they start to think out of the box. And so it sets them up for the kind of out of the box thinking that I’m going to ask them to do throughout that semester. So that once the students have gone through the petting zoo, and I tell them, I encourage you to touch, feel, smell, don’t taste… probably a bad idea. [LAUGHTER] I do warn students of the materials that are made from animal products, in case there are students who are vegan who do not want to touch them, I will tell them to objects in that corner I made from animals. If you are a vegan or an animal rights activist, or just don’t feel comfortable touching animal products, you don’t have to touch it. But I want to give you the courtesy to let you know that that’s what that is. And that’s also another thing too for students is they like knowing that I care. And that even something as innocuous as “that’s made from animal skin, if you don’t want to touch it, you don’t have to” sets them up for knowing that. Once they’ve done all of that and filled out their sheets, we come back together and I ask them, “Okay, what did you all think of this object?”…and we go one by one, and we discuss what the object is. So that one, the subsequent classes, when we do active learning, they know that active learning is a part of the class. And it’s not just something I did for this fun little first day activity; two, it allows me to introduce the first day of the semester, the material that we’re working on so they get used to something that’s very, very unfamiliar; and three, it allows me to come back to those objects throughout the semester and say, remember, on the first day we looked at this chant book. So now we’re going to talk a little bit about this chant book, or remember, on the first day, we looked at this object, okay, yeah, now think about this object. This is something that is a predecessor of something else. And so it’s kind of a three-fold thing. But it also gets the students to take me seriously, because nothing says someone who knows what they’re doing, or in my case, nothing says nerd better than lots of old dusty objects.{LAUGHTER}
John: And you’re activating student curiosity and getting them engaged right from the beginning, and it sounds like a wonderful activity.
Rebecca: …even sounds like a little bit of prediction going on there as well.
Reba: …which is great for them, because then it gets them to think about what they know about music. And one of the things that really confuses them the most are the books, because they’re used to reading Western notation. They may have seen chant notation if they go to church, but chances are they’ve never seen Ethiopian Orthodox chant notation or Western Orthodox chant notation, or notation used for Indian Summer Vedas. And to get them to realize that there was notation on that page is something that is really wonderful. And then we can talk about things like why does notation work the way it works? It’s not the standard thing that everyone knows, it has different functions, depending on the music. And so I love getting them to think about where the notes might actually be, when to them, it might just seem like nothing but squiggles.
Rebecca: It also sounds like it stimulates a lot of curiosity for a class that maybe they started off thinking like, “I have no interest in this nonsense.” And then all the sudden they’re like, “But what is this thing? What does it do? How did it work? What does this say? What does this mean?”
Reba: But also the other thing too, is that it dispels a misconception. When we talk about music history classes, especially early music, the first thing that students think of is “Oh, my God, church music.” And so it gets them to think, “Yeah, we are talking a little bit about church music, but we’re not just confining to Western music. We’re looking at stuff outside of the Western art music canon, we’re looking at Jewish cantillation, we’re looking at all of these different musical styles that they might not otherwise learn about. And so they see from the very first day to that one, some of them are going to be represented in the curriculum, and two, it’s not just old, dead white men, or it’s not just the standard church history. It’s lots of different things. And I bring in lots of non-western examples throughout the semester, and on the first day, they get to see that it’s not just that, it’s a curriculum that is going to be diverse, and may pique their interest in a way that they didn’t think would. I remember one of the first times I actually did this exercise, I heard my students talking as they were walking out of the room, and one of the students said, “You know, this might actually just be an interesting class.” And I was just like “mission accomplished.”
Rebecca: …one, you win, you’re winning, winning,…
Reba: Yeah.
Rebecca: …so much winning. [LAUGHTER]
John: So now that you’ve won on this first day, how do you continue this? What other types of active learning activities do you do to keep that level of engagement and interest?
Reba: Oh, there are so many. One thing that I know I’ve learned from many years of teaching is that there are two things that college students love and those are colored pencils and Legos. [LAUGHTER] And I incorporate both into my classes. So we have for instance, there’s a type of Music called a isorhythmic motet that’s constructed in a very specific way. And I hand out the sheet music for a particular piece of music, and I put them in groups and I give them colored pencils. And I tell them, you are going to identify these three different components of the music using colored pencils. Or when I’m teaching something like Renaissance notation… and I always say that the best teaching ideas are ones that are stolen… this is something that I stole from colleagues in the K to 12 classroom who’ve started teaching western music note values using Legos, and using the number of dots on top of the Lego as the number of beats. In that particular note, I adapted that for Renaissance notation, because the hardest part of Renaissance notation is actually the rhythms, not the pitches, because by the time we get to the Renaissance, we have our five-line staff so that you know where you are, it’s just the rhythms. And so I have the students create a… what I call a piece of rhythmic polyphony… where I give them a standard flat Lego plate. And then I’ve taken a Sharpie and wrote the note values on the Legos. And I tell them, “You’re going to give me a two-part, three-part, four-part piece of rhythm, you’re going to figure out how it goes together.” and Legos are great for this because it’s immutable, and so if it doesn’t fit, right, they know it. And then they have to perform the rhythm for the class. So these are the kinds of things that I get students to do. I’m very interested in having the practical applications of music in music history, I always say that music, as long as it’s on a page is not alive. If you’re making it, it lives. And so getting the students to then apply their knowledge through things like music making is really, really important to me. And then they also get a sense of ownership, and it helps with retention. I can say whatever I want about Renaissance note values, but as soon as they’re trying to futz around with Legos and move and put it in various ways, and then actually have to perform it for the class, it gives it a whole new meaning, and then they understand.
Rebecca: I can imagine that in a class like music history, it’d be similar to maybe a class like art history or some other arts where students come with the expectation that lecture’s how we’re going to do this thing. This is how I’m going to have the Professor dump this information in my brain, I’m going to learn it the best if they are really charismatic and tell us great stories about history. And it doesn’t involve doing something with our bodies, or physically moving around. So do you come up against students who had hoped to perhaps be very passive listeners as opposed to actively engaged in the material? And then how do you get them to understand the research and understanding that active learning is the best way to learn some of this information.
Reba: That’s the challenge for me, is getting them to realize that they don’t learn as much as they think they learn when somebody’s speaking at them. And sometimes what I do is I use this in my chapter and I again stole this from someone “hiding the broccoli,” they don’t know what’s good for them, if you hide it, they don’t know it’s there, but it’s there, and so sometimes what I do is, I’d like to try and create a tiered system in my teaching, which I call: listen, see, act. So I tell you a little bit about the material. Now you’re going to watch some sort of a demonstration, or you’re gonna watch a video or something like that. And then the act is the actual active learning. So going back to the Lego example, I talked to them about the beginnings of music printing, and how the music note became the way they were. I show them a video of the printing and how it actually looks on the page and how the notation works. And then the act is actually doing it. And so sometimes what I’ll do is after the “listen” part, I will do something like a Kahoot!, where I’ll ask them questions and get their answers, and then I’ll do the same one after the active learning part. And then they realize that they actually performed better after doing the active learning part than they have after just listening. Do that a few times, point that out to them, and then they’re like, “Oh, yeah, this is kind of cool. This works. It’s not just her like not wanting to do her job. It’s actually helping me learn and retain information better.”
John: And the more of us who do that in our classes, the more likely that it is that students will buy into that, because that is a bit of a problem quite often in convincing students of the benefits of active learning approaches.
Rebecca: And really, that doing the active learning is our job to like set those things up in those activities. And in that design of that work, or that activity is the job of the instructor, rather than talking at students. [LAUGHTER]
Reba: When I finished my PhD and I was teaching the early music class, I make my students learn medieval notation, too. And that’s always kind of like, “Ew,” and I’m like, “You know what, it looks harder than it is. It has four lines instead of five. The hardest part is getting your brain to not put a fifth line there. Other than that, it’s easy,” and they’re kind of like “Uh…I don;t even want to know this.” So I had one student who was really balking about it and he came back for the second semester. And he came up to me and he’s like, “Doctor Wissner,” and he’s a clarinetist. He’s like, “I never thought I would ever need to know chant. But I went to a youth church music retreat. And the priest who was running it asked if anyone knew how to read chant notation, and I told them I did. And I wound up teaching everyone else how to do it. And I never thought I’d use it as a clarinetist. And I used it. And I’m still in shock.” [LAUGHTER] And I’m like, “See…” So getting them to also realize, you may never use this again in your life, but you might, and you might use it at unexpected moments, and having the experience of actually doing it, rather than having me talk at you makes a world of difference if you’re the one that’s actually going to be eventually using it.
John: you may want to get a video recording of that student to share with future generations, because that may not happen every semester.
Reba: Yeah, it actually hasn’t happened since but it’s something that I will always remember. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: That is now the opening moment of every class.[LAUGHTER]
John: Are there any strategies that you use when you come up with new active learning exercises?
Reba: I think one of the most important things about active learning activities is that you have to make them unexpected. A lot of my most successful active learning activities were using conventional objects in unconventional ways. So, for instance, I like to use picture postcards in my classes to get students to think about things like performance of gender in music, or ethnocentrism in music, or I have a game of music theory Jenga, which I used with my students, where I asked them playing a regular game of Jenga, that what is different about this is that there’s a music theory question on each block. And they have to be able to answer that to get the points. And so the added layer was “okay, now you’re going to find a piece of music that uses this device,” and it got them thinking about the music that they know, and how the music works. And so not just saying, “Okay, we’re going to use this thing, and we’re going to use it in the way that you expect, we’re going to do something different with it.” And it also gives them the idea that not everything has one function. And so this is something that really comes into play, too when I have my students in the second semester bringing their instruments. We do an entire class on chant music. And so I have them use musical dice to create a piece of music, or I have them improvise using… Brian Eno, who probably many of you know, created a set of cards called Oblique Strategy cards. And it was, fun fact, a set of cards that David Bowie used when he was writing the Heroes album, and it has all of these very random things, I kind of liken it to fortunes that you find in fortune cookies that sometimes make absolutely no sense. So it will say “operate in reverse,” or the one that I absolutely adore, because it makes zero sense, especially in any context is “if peas increased virility, pour them down your pants,” like what do you do with that? But I have them select three cards from the deck and write a piece of music using what’s on those cards. And again, if I give you something that says, “Don’t do what you usually do,” and you have to use that, to write a piece of music, like what do you do with that or “use reverse operations?”…what do you do? And it gets them thinking about the process of writing music and then performing it. And students have always said to me after that class that they got to perform on their instruments in a way that’s not really acceptable in their ensembles or their studios. And they got to play around with their instruments and make music in a way that they typically don’t get a chance to. And so even just their instruments themselves, there was one student who, with one of those cards… it said something like “use something in an abnormal way,” and he was a trombonist, and he took that to just put the mouthpiece on his trombone slide and play it. And it’s like, I would have never otherwise thought to do that, until I started thinking about what this actually means.
Rebecca: I wonder if some faculty who might be listening, think, “Hmm, these sound really interesting and exciting, but I couldn’t possibly come up with one of these ideas myself.” [LAUGHTER] Do you have advice for how to design some of these unexpected active learning exercises or activities that you’ve been describing?
Reba: For many of these, believe it or not, they are complete accidents. It might be just me sitting in my office staring into space at the wall because my brain is so tired, and I come across something. That actually happened last semester, I keep a shelf of children’s books about underrepresented composers in my office, so that when I’m teaching students about that composer, I’ll bring in the children’s book so that the music ed students can see “Okay, there’s a book about this, maybe I might want to read it to my students.” I was teaching graduate bibliography and I was teaching my students about coming up with an argument for research. And my eye went over to that shelf and I’m like, “What if I took these books, and had students read them, and come up with an argument based on what that book is doing?” And so I experimented with it, it was a great class because I only had three students. And so I did a lot of experimenting in that class in ways that I might not be able to. But the students loved it. And they said, “You know, I thought that this was going to be easy, but it was actually really hard. “And I found that using children’s books for coming up with theses and argumentation and things like that, using something like a children’s book, which is easy to absorb, doesn’t take long to read, doesn’t have a lot of heavy vocabulary, works really, really well. And so a lot of the things that I’ve done over the years have come from just impulsive thoughts, like, what if I did this? What if I use that for that? So a lot of people would be surprised to know that most of my teaching techniques are not planned very far in advance. But I find that they work and I just keep using them.
Rebecca: And it sounds like you’re not afraid to experiment and try something. And I’m sure, like all of us, we’ve tried things and they’ve failed, [LAUGHTER] and you just try something else. And you don’t keep it next time.
Reba: Exactly. And I think that one of the, if I daresay advantages, of spending nine years as an adjunct is that I knew I had no job security. And so having a fear of experimenting, like if I try it and it fails, and they don’t renew me, cool. Now that I’m on the tenure track, and I’m still untenured, but having that fear dispelled that trying new things is not a bad thing, and if it flops it flops, has been really, really valuable for me. And the other thing, too, that was really helpful is that I had a lot of the same classes at multiple universities in the same semester. And so getting to try the activity on different populations of students was also really helpful because having a student at NYU is not like a student at Ramapo College or Seton Hall or Westminster Choir College or Montclair State University. And I was teaching the same class at all of those places at once. And so seeing how I might have to adapt it for different populations of students was also really helpful for me, too.
Rebecca: You should read an article about that.
Reba: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] I actually presented a paper on that a few years ago, at the teaching music history conference, It was called “One course, four ways.” [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting opportunity to really look at how our audiences really do impact how we need to teach or share or just adapt generally, I love that.
John: And you’re focusing on the students in the room, rather than this generic ideal student that you might have envisioned otherwise…
Rebecca: Exactly…
John: …It sounds like a great topic for a paper…
Reba: …Yeah
John: …or a podcast
Reba: Mm hmm, yeah [LAUGHTER].
Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking what’s next?
Reba: I’m working on a few SOTLl studies, one I’m actually excited about, I’m excited about all of my SOTL work, but this particular one I’m really excited about, because I’m collaborating with two colleagues in STEM, so one in physics and one in computer science, because we all have probably a very similar problem in our disciplines is that there tends to be a particular demographic that we have trouble retaining, for whatever reason. And so we are looking at how can we better retain students of color and female students in both science and music classes? And for me, in the spring, I’m actually teaching a course on music encoding, which is basically like music computer programming notation, which I’m looking at for my students… kind of look at the students who are in the class and see… because coding scares people… and so what can we do in terms of support and scaffolding assignments that can help retain students of color and female students. So that I’m really excited about and kind of bridging the science/arts divide kind of STEAM, if you will. And another thing that I’ve been doing a lot of work on too, is supporting first-generation students. And so I’m looking at how we can continue to do that in the classroom, especially when students don’t disclose that they’re first gen because they don’t think it matters or it’s relevant, but giving them the proper support. So that’s just a couple of the things that I’m working on right now.
Rebecca: Sounds like exciting and important work, Reba.
Reba: Thank you.
John: And they sound like fascinating classes. I wish I could take one of your classes.
Rebecca: Yeah, Sign me up. [LAUGHTER] Well, thank you so much for joining us.
Reba: Thank you for having me.
John: It’s been a great conversation and we’re looking forward to sharing this with our listeners.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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