363. Autonomy Supportive Teaching

Posted in classroom community, engagement, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, pedagogy, teaching
October 16, 2024

Faculty have reported a decline in student engagement during the last few years. In this episode, Jed Locquiao joins us to discuss how the use of autonomy-supportive teaching can increase student motivation and engagement. Jed is an Assistant Professor in the Curriculum and Instruction Department here at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Faculty have reported a decline in student engagement during the last few years. In this episode, we discuss how the use of autonomy-supportive teaching can increase student motivation and engagement.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Jed Locquiao. Jed is an Assistant Professor in the Curriculum and Instruction Department here at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Jed.

Jed: Hi, thanks for having me.

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

Jed: I am. I’ve got a classic, blueberry green tea.

Rebecca: It smells good because we’re actually all recording together in person, which we don’t get to do very often, which is really nice.

John: And I have a spring cherry green tea.

Rebecca: Always a good choice, for some… little known fact, I hate cherry tea.

John: But I have a lot of her old cherry tea now in the office.

Jed: A win.

Rebecca: A win for John, a win for me. [LAUGHTER] I have a good old fashioned Scottish afternoon tea.

John: Very good.

Rebecca: An old favorite, on a day when things [LAUGHTER] aren’t going right, you got to go back to the basics.

Jed: And here a pocket of ignorance on my part. What would that be? A Scottish….

Rebecca: Just, it’s called a Scottish afternoon tea.

Jed: Oh, okay.

Rebecca: a strong tea. [LAUGHTER]

Jed: Okay.

John: We’ve invited you here today to talk about how you have incorporated autonomy-supportive instruction into your classes. First, though, could you define what is meant by autonomy-supportive instruction?

Jed: Thanks for inviting me, John. But yeah, let’s talk operating terms first. So autonomy supportive instruction, it’s behaviors that are often done by a person in authority, in this case, a teacher, where they take on the perspective of someone under their charge, their supervision, in this case, the student, and reduces the extent of demands, of coercion of “you must do” prompts on that particular someone as they go about doing tasks to the maximum extent possible. Autonomy-supportive teaching, then, refers to instructional moves that are student focused from a position of curiosity rather than judgment, and are responsive to students as they engage in those learning tasks just in time. So as they see that students are flatlining, they do something about it. As students have questions, they do something about it. As students seem to be kind of trailing off, not necessarily engaged, they do something about it. It’s being responsive to the students as they are.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what research says about the benefits resulting from autonomy-supportive teaching?

Jed: That’s a great question. So, with our best empirical evidence, the research points to three major things at the student level, consequences for students and for instructors themselves. For students, autonomy-supportive instruction increases raw achievement. They found that there’s correlative studies that, surprisingly enough, students who feel like they have more choice, more control, more sense of ownership, which are all facets of this thing called autonomy, they tend to do better in schools. Now you might be wondering, what’s the mechanism underneath this, and I think we’ll talk about it later, but it’s motivation. We tend to start and stick with things more when we feel that there’s some sort of personal significance attached to it, when we assign meaning to it, or when it’s just fun, which are both elements of this thing called intrinsic motivation. So at the student level, broad treatment, we also have evidence that speaks to this idea that autonomy increases teacher-student rapport. Students above and beyond say that, hey, this class where the teacher gives me a little bit more choice, a little bit more opportunity to assign meaning, they tend to respond favorably to those teachers. They tend to see them as belonging more in their camp, rather than this us-versus-them sort of relationship. At a teacher level, self efficacy. A lot of teachers who engage in more of these autonomy-supportive instruction feel more competent. They feel that they’re more ready, more prepared to anticipate students, to plan and also to interact and react to students as they are as well. And they also just feel more positive about their teaching craft. Rather than going in and feeling like there’s a cudgel, this sort of pressure bearing down on them, they feel actually a little bit more positive, more ready to take on the day and from one faculty member to another, you know, it’s that sort of switch between, “Oh, I have to go back to work,” versus “Oh, I get to go back to work.” And we have studies that speak to that as well.

John: So you mentioned that this can improve student motivation, and tied that to intrinsic motivation. Could you talk a little bit more about how intrinsic motivation comes into play when you’re engaged in this type of instruction?

Jed: So this autonomy supportive instruction is by and large influenced by this framework called self-determination theory, by Ryan and Deci way back when. And there’s a bunch of mini-theories around it, but the big one was they were trying to figure out, why do some people start and stick with things without clear cut instrumental reward or benefit? Why do people pursue hobbies? Why do people stick with activities where they fail time and time again? I’m gonna draw from my own experience. Why do you keep skiing when you fall face first? What is the mechanism that explains that? There’s no clear cut reward. So they found out over the course of decades of research that, oh, there’s this thing called intrinsic motivation, and what it is is when you’re doing things out of pure fun, interest, and a sense of mastery, that satisfaction of doing things for the sake of doing it. They also found out that there’s other types of motivation called extrinsic, and I don’t want to get all technical here, but extrinsic motivation is on a continuum as well. And on one end, you’re doing things because you’re going to get something. You’re either going to get a grade, you’re either going to get approval from your teacher. And on the other end, you’re doing it because it’s important. It’s a part of who you are. I study because I am a studious sort of student, or I’m the person who will stay up late because I’m the person who won’t let my friends, my groupmates, down, that kind of thing. And what we found is those, and it’s called autonomously regulated motivations, intrinsic and something called identified, those types of motivations, above and beyond, predict robust, optimal, enduring activities. That also translates to learning as well. The students who have somehow managed to get it sooner than later that if I assign personal meaning to this task, if it’s inherently interesting to me, if it’s important to me, or the students who say this is just fun, they tend to do really well, whatever the task is, in work, in life, in leisure, in studying and learning as well. So the reason why we care about the relationship here between autonomy and intrinsic motivation is this, autonomy is one of the nutrients, one of their major claims with this theory is autonomy is one of three major psychological nutrients that are the conditions to those more autonomous motivations. And it would be autonomy, a sense of competency, and connection with others. And of the three, they found that autonomy has the most outsized influence above and beyond.

Rebecca: So, one of the things that I think is often really interesting when we’re interviewing our colleagues is to find out, if we were to go into your classroom, Jed, what would it look like when you are acting in this way, when you’re really incorporating these techniques into your teaching? What does it look like?

Jed: I think we can look at autonomy-supportive instructional practice, or ASI from a planning level and a very moment of instruction level. So at the planning level, I, as much as possible, try to embed choice. If there’s one takeaway, if there’s one major practice or instructional move that you can embed in your practice, it’s choice, choice, choice, choice, choice. And what does that look like? Well, at the planning stage, we have several projects. One of them is a weekly assignment. I think everyone here does a weekly sort of assignment, a check in, an exit ticket, an exit slip. For this exit ticket, what I have is the students can work by themselves, with a partner in groups. They can choose one of 10 different options, modalities, to submit it. It could be your classic exit ticket. It could be a Venn diagram, a graphic organizer. It could be a report. It could be a recording. And then even at the end of all that, they have the option to just tell me if none of those fit, and they can make their own option going forth. So I try to embed choice, or I strive to embed choice at the planning stage, where they have many different means and options to submit assignments. And a big part of our work is also grading assignments on time. I’ve embedded choice in my classes, where they have 24 hours near the end of the semester to submit outstanding items. Now I recognize that poses a lot of [LAUGHTER] risk for me as the instructor, but what I find is, if you give students flexibility for time, they make good on it and they treasure that, they don’t abuse it. At least that’s what I found, knock on wood, so far. So there’s that. At the planning stage asking yourself, “How many opportunities can you embed choice> a sense of ownership?” Oh, yeah. And the prompts themselves and the assignments, I have a list of criteria for the students to address, but after that, it’s really up to them to make sense and to translate those criteria. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, one of the assignments that I have in my class is that they talk about a student and their characteristics and what that means for their instructional practices. That’s it. That’s the criteria. And they can choose any form. They can choose any sort of approach to that. It could be a case study, it could be a mock midterm test. It could be a whole host of different things to speak to that particular prompt. Now, in terms of in-class instruction, I think one of the major moves, instructional moves, that was mentioned by these folks who have researched this, is to verbalize to explain your rationale for why you’re doing things. A big chunk of autonomy is making it meaningful to yourself. And I think we presume that our students know why things are important to begin with. It would help for them to hear an expert other explain why they’re doing a skill, why they’re reviewing a session in the PowerPoint, or why they’re submitting a certain assignment over another. So over the course of my lectures, if you were to stand there as a fly, or whatever a fly does in a class, you’d see me explaining my thinking out loud, verbalizing it. I find myself like, “Am I over talking, or am I over explaining?” But no, no, no, I need to remind myself that us, as a professor, we know a lot more than they do, and it would help for them to hear an expert’s take. We’re going from this topic to this topic because we need to get a handle on this before we proceed any further. Those sort of language statements or, “Hey, you might be wondering where we are at right now. Why are we talking about this? Let me explain to you why this is important.” So the first one major instructional move is to engage in those explanatory rationales. And another major principle that is also shared among scholars, among researchers in this is to use Invitational language, and that could mean stuff like, “I get that this is confusing, and I know why it might be confusing, and let’s talk about that right now.” Or “I totally understand.” Or, “Hey, if this is at all boring to you, or if this doesn’t seem important to you, please share it.” It’s this idea of engaging in Invitational language as well, because the goal is to support internalization, where a student is probably paying attention to the lecture because they must, they have to, and engaging in the sort of language to push that from consequence to “hey, I think there’s something more important to this particular unit, this discussion point,” but yeah, so we can see, at least in my classes, you can see autonomy, supportive instruction at the planning stage a nd at the very moment of instruction stage, embedding choice and inviting the students to take ownership when it’s confusing for them, when they would want more clarification, or when it just seems like it’s not at all important.

John: When I was reading about autonomy-supportive instruction, much of it struck me as things that are talked about in other areas, such as inclusive teaching, the transparency and learning and teaching approach of Mary-Ann Winkelmes, as well as the UDL approach. But what I found distinctive about that was a focus is entirely on giving the student that motivation and the other things are brought in as support. Is that what’s most important about this approach, that sort of focus?

Jed: That’s a great connection, John. Well, let’s take UDL. UDL is about anticipating and designing instruction to the maximum extent possible so it fits everyone. I think we forget in our discussions of UDL, of this crucial piece of motivation. You could set everything up for success for a student, but if they come into that learning activity without any sort of push compulsion to even start it, then there’s no point in like the scaffolding. All the scaffolding in the world is there, but they won’t necessarily enter the space of using it. Motivation is a key piece of that. Because I think if you were to ask any instructor right now, just do a random sample, what’s the biggest issue? It’s disengagement, which is a major issue of motivation. So yeah, absolutely, there’s a connection here. UDL talks about meeting everyone where they’re at. Motivation, saying, all right, you got to meet people at that spark. And crucially, it’s not just a spark, it’s how do you maintain it? How do you keep them engaged? How do you keep them going on despite setback, and the research on motivation helps fill in that gap, I think.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what research indicates about whether or not participating in professional development on autonomy-supportive instruction has persistent, long-term effects on instruction?

Jed: Like with any teaching skill, it can be learned, but it requires serious self reflection on our part, and a serious commitment to it. And why do I say that? Because a lot of us, when we start out new at this teaching craft of ours, we teach how we learned, and a good chunk of how we learned was through something called the controlling style of teaching, and where, rather than Invitational language, rather than giving choice, rather than the whole set of seven principles associated with this thing called ASI, we tend to try to present coercion, or we try to use demands. We try to tell a person that this is the way that this must be thought and said, and this is the only way of doing things, “my way or the highway” sort of instruction. So it’s hard to break habit. That’s what I’m trying to get at, because we do teach the way we were taught, but thankfully, we have research that speaks to this idea that when you try to change one thing in your practice, even just one thing, something where you say, I’m going to try to give the students more choice in this way, in this assignment… it’s a low-stakes assignment, I’m going to give them choice. We find that once you start that small practice, it tends to go into your other practices. It’s doable. Autonomy-supportive instruction is a skill that we can pick up. I initially taught the way I learned, which was through that controlling style, but I realized that, okay, I want to try relinquishing. So I started out giving options for those exit tickets, low-stakes stuff, and then I started applying it to the bigger stakes assignments as well. And then I started messing around with the assignment expectations, the submission expectations, too. Maybe they don’t have to submit everything week by week. Maybe I can give them two freebies. And I’ve told the students that they can use those freebies strategically, giving them more choice, in recognition that sometimes life happens. Life will happen a lot, and maybe they’re going to be busy during midterm weeks as well. Maybe save it for them. You have choice. You have choice. It was once a little trickle of trying to embed more opportunities, using more Invitational language, giving students more authority of what to do with their time. I’ve actually been telling the students, “Hey, all the readings and artifacts are speaking to the same Idea for that week. You choose your mileage. You choose… make it make sense for you. And I find that the students have responded to that. They seem to be more engaged. Of course, I don’t have hard data on that, but the course eval seem to suggest otherwise. The exit tickets that they speak to seem to suggest so too. But long story short, it’s doable, and I can only point to myself and to the evidence here that other people have said it seems to be malleable, that when you change one thing of your practice to be more autonomy supporting it tends to trickle.

John: I was impressed by the research that suggested that when people did attend professional development on it, that they tended to persist in the practice, which doesn’t always happen, because quite often people will try something. It may work well, but then it will gradually fade out and people revert to their past practice. So it sounds as if this approach is something that the instructors themselves tend to value in terms of being a more enjoyable teaching experience.

Jed: Thanks for bringing that up, John. I want to believe, I want to say, that if you were to walk into our classrooms, or the classrooms that I’ve had the privilege of teaching the past couple years, that they’re loud, that the students are looking at each other eye to eye, that they’re asking questions, raising their hand and asking for follow up over the course of a lecture. Now I can’t guarantee their reading necessarily, but they seem to be coming to class a little bit more engaged than not, and to me, that’s a win. But yeah, I think I can only speak to my own experience here, where, if it weren’t for this, I think I still would be engaging in a very controlling style. I’m so grateful that I just bumped into this particular framework, because when I was starting out, my first teaching assignment was online classes. It was COVID and I was racking my head. How do you reach students? And consistently, the empirical evidence said, you gotta spark their motivation. You gotta attend to motivation. It doesn’t matter if you have the best content. It doesn’t matter if you have the best exercises. They need to get their foot in the door and stay. They need to close the door after them. And motivation was it, especially the work of Ryan and Deci.

Rebecca: So what advice would you give someone who wants to take their first steps in this direction and implement autonomy-supportive teaching?

Jed: Start small, start really small here, and choose one principle at a time for a semester to work on. The practices won’t go away anywhere, because as a faculty member, you have to be everywhere and be everything, but the practices will always be there. So choose one. Choose one. Start small. And I’d encourage you to look at choice, choice, choice, choice at the assignment stage, choice in what I need to do, to show that I’ve done the work and to demonstrate learning. Choice in that way. Choice in submitting that assignment as well, choice and engaging in class. Does a person have to raise their hand? Does the person have to respond by themselves? Could they respond in a group? Could they defer for a later time, like, if they don’t respond this time around, could they be compelled to answer the next time around? That kind of stuff. Do they have to respond in this particular session? That kind of stuff is just giving the students more choice, and then as you do that, the levels of choice, they can get bigger. Like, the stakes could be bigger. Like, do we want to cover this topic right now? The choice could start to trickle and take on different levels of trust between you and the student. You’re asking them to take ownership of their learning. And that oftentimes means saying, ‘Hey, did this make sense? Did our entire last week make sense? Do we want to go back and review it?” It’s increasing the levels of choice for our students, and it starts with that. Just maybe we can give them more options here at this level.

John: Is it possible to go a little too far and give students too much choice? Is it important to maintain some type of structure, because if you just leave it completely up to the students, might things break down and you might lose some of the effect of your expertise, perhaps.

Jed: Oh yeah, what a great, valid question. [LAUGHTER] We’re speaking of this idea of laissez-faire teaching. I don’t think we need to draw too far deep into our memories of a terrible teaching moment where we felt that the instructor was checked out, and if you were to say, “Hey, I need this,” they’d just keep doing on the same thing. I think that’s a major distinction to make. Giving folks more choice is not the same as not paying attention, not responding just in time and going as is. That idea of laissez-faire teaching is just moving on and keeping on. There is an element of seeking more knowledge about the student and responding to this just in time. That’s the first major definition of autonomy-supportive instruction, being present, doing something about it. Now, in terms of professional expertise as the instructor, yeah, we’re there. We have to have guardrails, absolutely but I think the ask is this, are some of our guardrails arbitrary, like submitting things at a certain date? How much of that is crucial to the discipline, the subject? Do we have to use this particular mode, which speaks to UDL? Does our content depend on a midterm exam? Does the sanctity of our subject depend on a five-page essay. That’s what this is saying. Like, can we tether between the extreme of “it must be this way forever” versus “Yeah, sure, whatever. I don’t care.” I think that’s the ask here. With autonomy-supportive instruction is to thread the needle between both extremes and say, “I think we can give you a bit more options for accountability, for ownership, and just really to make this your own.” And how can we embed more of this? It’s asking the students to relate it back to their lives. If you’re a fly in a classroom that embeds this, it’s embedding it and making it more personally relevant for the students and professionally relevant, because you’re trying to support this thing called internalization, assigning significance and importance. But yeah, there is always going to be a place and an expectation for the professional to say, “Yep, here is the limits.” And we got to have some limits here. Absolutely. They ask us how much of those limits are arbitrary.

Rebecca: Structure is really important when there’s choice.

Jed: And as a special education teacher, you gotta have structure. Yeah.

John: It reminds me of something that Kevin Gannon has said in the past about the difference between logistical rigor and cognitive rigor, that we want classes to be challenging, but challenges in terms of the cognitive effort of learning the material, not in terms of arbitrary rules and procedures that do not add to the learning.

Jed: That’s the connection. Yeah. It’s asking yourselves, alright, is this 100% absolutely necessary?

Rebecca: How have students responded?

Jed: Yeah. So in class at the very moment I just came from a class that, and that’s this, their eyes were, I’m looking for all the tells of engagement when I’d ask a question, first time told they respond first time told. When I say “Hey, I want you to take the next few moments to review this artifact in the middle of class,” I see them whip open their books and start clicking and clacking their keys. So the tells seem to suggest that these practices work. One of the exit tickets, I’ll just share this with you. In the first week, they’re asked what’s working for you? What’s not working? And one student said this, “Wow, I have never had so many options before. I am really grateful to have options, and I cannot believe that this is the first class I’ve had where I’ve had these many options.” And it’s not one of those things where it’s like, yeah, sure, pat yourself on the back. But I think it’s one of those things where, alright, here’s a student for whom this seems to resonate for them, and it seems to be a fit for them. And a lot of students, over the course of several sections, seem to be saying the same thing. So straight from the students, straight from the source, it seems to resonate for them, this thing called autonomy-supportive instruction in terms of their achievement, because at the end of the day, this is what we’re about. We want the students to do well. We want them to flourish. I’ve found that no matter what the form, no matter what the approach, the students attend to those rubric criteria. They address them with diligence. They address them with care. And I found that, knock on wood, I haven’t had a serious situation yet in my course sections where you give students choice, they take it. They don’t abuse it. Yet. Keywords as well for student reactions, I had in my notes: shock, relief, and appreciation, and I get minimal-end-of semester grading issues so far. But I have to say, though, the stuff like the 24-hours revise and resubmit, that can get really, really unwieldy too, but rare.

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

Jed: Sure, Bev’s ice cream, chocolate, vanilla, medium, I’m thinking, it’s a hot day [LAUGHTER] and it’s a beautiful day, so I’m thinking ice cream.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you again, and we’ll talk to you again in the future. I’m sure.

Jed: It’s a privilege. Thank you so much.

Rebecca: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

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

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

[MUSIC]

362. Teaching Digital Storytelling

Posted in active learning, authentic learning, collaborative learning, critical thinking, engagement, equity, higher education, inclusion, information literacy, international collaboration, learning, metaliteracy, online learning, open pedagogy, pedagogy, storytelling, teaching
October 9, 2024

Digital storytelling provides students the opportunity to bring their lived experiences into the classroom as creators rather than consumers of knowledge. In this episode, Tom Mackey and Sheila Aird join us to discuss ways digital storytelling can be used to increase student information literacy, critical thinking skills, and to support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Tom is a Professor of Arts and Media and Program Coordinator for the BA and BS degrees in Digital Media Arts at SUNY Empire State University. He is the recipient of a 2022 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities and the recipient of several other awards for his teaching and mentoring work. Tom is also the co-author of several books and two MOOCs that focus on metaliteracy. Sheila is an Associate Professor and European Director of International Programs at SUNY’s Empire State University in Prague, in the Czech Republic. Her work broadly focuses on cultural history and public scholarship with a particular focus on  public history, pop culture, children of colonial enslavement, and issues of race in the African Diaspora community. Sheila has presented her work in many domestic and international venues and has co-authored two papers with Tom. Sheila and Tom are the co-editors of the new book, Teaching Digital Storytelling: Inspiring Voices through Online Narratives, published in 2024 by Rowman and Littlefield. They also co-authored the framing chapter for this volume based on their collaborative development and teaching of Digital Storytelling as a virtual exchange between SUNY Empire students studying in Prague and the United States.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Digital storytelling provides students the opportunity to bring their lived experiences into the classroom as creators rather than consumers of knowledge. In this episode, we discuss ways digital storytelling can be used to increase student information literacy, critical thinking skills, and to support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Tom Mackey and Sheila Aird. Tom is a Professor of Arts and Media and Program Coordinator for the BA and BS degrees in Digital Media Arts at SUNY Empire State University. He is the recipient of a 2022 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities and the recipient of several other awards for his teaching and mentoring work. Tom is also the co-author of several books and two MOOCs that focus on metaliteracy. Sheila is an Associate Professor and European Director of International Programs at SUNY’s Empire State University in Prague, in the Czech Republic. Her work broadly focuses on cultural history and public scholarship with a particular focus on public history, pop culture, children of colonial enslavement, and issues of race in the African Diaspora community. Sheila has presented her work in many domestic and international venues and has co-authored two papers with Tom. Sheila and Tom are the co-editors of the new book, Teaching Digital Storytelling: Inspiring Voices through Online Narratives, published in 2024 by Rowman and Littlefield. They also co-authored the framing chapter for this volume based on their collaborative development and teaching of Digital Storytelling as a virtual exchange between SUNY Empire students studying in Prague and the United States. Welcome Sheila, and welcome back, Tom.

Sheila: Thank you.

Tom: Thanks so much. So happy to be here. Appreciate the interest in our new book.

Sheila: Absolutely.

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

Tom: I sure am. So, I’m drinking Celestial Seasonings Tangerine Orange, Zinger.

Rebecca: Nice. And how about you, Sheila?

Sheila: I am drinking hibiscus tea in a Starbucks cup, but that’s okay.

John: And I am drinking lady gray tea in a SUNY- Oswego School of Education mug, which was given to us when we moved into this new recording space by the dean of the school.

Sheila: Nice.

Tom: Great.

Rebecca: We’re enjoying our nice space here, for sure, and I have a nice cup of Hunan jig, which I brewed this morning.

Sheila: Great.

Tom: That’s great.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss your new book. But first, could you talk a little bit about what a digital story is? How would you define this?

Tom: Well, the idea of a digital story is that anyone with access to digital resources can really write, plan and produce their own personal narratives. So this is an idea that’s been around now for, I would say, a few decades, and there’s been a lot of interest in this, but it really is about being able to tell your story using digital technologies. And the idea, too, is that you don’t have to have the most expensive tools to do that, these could be freely available tools that are online, and, again, really empower people to tell their story.

Sheila: Absolutely, and as Tom said, today, since we’re so technologically connected, anyone with a cell phone, and we know that through some of the things that are coming through social media and people creating narratives and developing narratives, but in this particular instance, this is about teaching students how to not only use their cell phones, but introducing them to free and different editing software and going through steps in order to come out with a finished product.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how your book, Teaching Digital Storytelling, came to be?

Sheila: The back story is Tom and I both were teaching digital storytelling in our own sections. While in Europe, we came up with the idea to bring the students that were in Europe into the learning environment with the students that were in the U.S. So that was how he and I started working together and creating an environment for the students to work together, which we thought was brilliant, because we just think that… you’re an academic, you just think like, “oh, that’s a brilliant idea.” [LAUGHTER] And so we worked it through both with the Executive Director of International Programs, Francesca Cichello, and she was very happy about our ideas. So Tom and I worked feverishly to create the course. And while doing the course, we were also writing some articles. And then one day, Tom really came up with the idea and said it would be good for us to put together scholars from all over the world in this book. And it was particularly perfect since we were working with students in Europe as well as the US, it made sense to have an international perspective. Tom can go a little further on how that worked, but that’s the initial way that we started the conversation to create the book.

Tom: And that’s perfectly stated. That’s really how it happened. And it is interesting that this idea of a collaboration between the two of us then really launched the idea of the book, which was also really supporting collaboration, focused on teaching digital storytelling. So this course we’ve both been excited about as Sheila mentioned. We’ve both taught it individually. It’s really a legacy course that’s been a part of the online program for many years at Empire State University. And I think having that experience of teaching it together and thinking about how to revise the course, or this virtual exchange between Prague and the United States, had a lot to do with how the ideas developed. It’s interesting that when we got together and we decided to do this, again, virtually, a fully online course, we really took a close look at it, and I know we’ll be talking about metaliteracy later on, probably, but I do want to point out that we really did a really full revision of the course for this particular exchange, so that the core of it is still there. But even though I’ve been doing all this work with metaliteracy. Sheila said, we really need to build more of those metaliteracy ideas into it. And the idea of a metaliteracy is that students are reflective. They see themselves as producers of information. So that alignment between metaliteracy and the course really worked out perfectly. So we revised several of the core assignments in the course to build more of the metaliteracy components in it so that students could, not only participate in this virtual exchange between Europe and the US, but they also were able to think about themselves as metaliterate learners through this experience. So that was a key point too in the book is that when we decided to do the book, it was building this collaboration. We were hoping really to get interest from authors from around the world, which is what we ended up with, which we’ll talk about too. So we’re very excited that it has that international component, which was key to our experience. But we also asked all of the authors to really look at their experience teaching digital storytelling from around the world through the lens of metaliteracy. So some of them may have already been familiar with meta literacy if they were not. This provided them with an opportunity to look at their own teaching through that particular perspective, which I think also contributes to really what we have here with this book, Teaching Digital Storytelling.

John: We’ve discussed metaliteracy on an earlier podcast with Tom and Trudi Jacobson, and we will share a link to that in the show notes. But could you redefine for those listeners who don’t remember that episode or missed that episode, what metaliteracy is?

Tom: Sure, so I’ve been developing this idea of metaliteracy. And as you noted, this was really a full collaboration between me and Trudi Jacobson from the University of Albany, and we had been working together, really, for decades. And the idea originally started as this idea of reframing information literacy, so thinking about information literacy in a new way, and trying to move beyond just skills development, that is finding, locating, using information, which was an older definition, to really thinking about a meta literacy that’s more of a holistic, overarching, comprehensive framework that really encourages students to think about themselves as knowledge producers, specifically in the kinds of new environments that we’re in. When we first advanced the idea, it was thinking about social media, in particular, online communities that’s now evolved to the kinds of AI environments that we’re in, and specifically generative AI, and thinking about how Gen AI impacts the production experience. So no matter what environment a student is in, the idea is that they develop a metaliteracy mindset that prepares them for that information environment. That’s really important, because we know that these environments are always changing. And the AI experience, of course, is a really, kind of a revolutionary change in how we understand the production, distribution of information. AI is having an impact on all aspects of our life right now. So the idea, then, is that students think about themselves as producers of digital content, both individually and in collaboration with their peers. So that works perfectly for a course about digital storytelling where that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Rebecca: So the publication is part of the series of books on innovations and information literacy by series editor Trudi Jacobson, who we just mentioned. Can you talk a little bit about how the digital storytelling assignments helped to develop the student information literacy and metaliteracy skills that you’ve been talking about?

Tom: Sure, well, let me first say I really appreciate you mentioning that this is part of the larger series. And when we first brought the idea to Trudi Jacobsen, who I’ve been working with all these years, she loved the idea, so we really had her support, and then she was able to support us as we proposed this to Rowman and Littlefield. I also had this great opportunity to work with Charles Harmon, who I had worked with on several of my edited books with Trudi earlier in my career, so it’s really exciting to have that collaboration and to have Trudi’s support for this idea and how we revised it to include metaliteracy components.

Sheila: The course is staggered and in a structured way, to take students from step one, step two, to get through the process. Now with meta literacy, we found it because I love the whole idea of it, because I think that it puts students in a position to think about who they are in terms of not only a production, but even their learning ability. Are they more upfront? Are they more behind the scenes? How do they work within these different environments? So some of the things in meta literacy, like, do you prefer to work singularly? Do you want to work in a group? Are you more of a leader type? And so it makes the students delve into who they are in terms of a learner. And I think that is extremely important, because I think that part of teaching students who they are is oftentimes skipped in the educational and the learning environment, so to bring them in slowly, because, as we know students think, “Oh, digital storytelling, this is going to be a walk in the park.[LAUGHTER] I’m just going to do a little thing.” And that is so not what this course is about. So the first thing we have them do is a selfie, and in that selfie they can do it any way they want. And we got some really great stuff, because some students did anime, s ome students just sat in front of the camera. They were more comfortable with that. Other students did voice overs, and so it gave them an opportunity to create a hello to everyone in the course in any way they wanted to. So that’s an interesting thing, because usually, sometimes, students want to be told exactly what to do, and that’s not the case here. There are certain requirements, but you kind of have free reign to develop these narratives and stories however you wish. And believe me, we’ve had some interesting stories. So the selfies begin to connect them to the meta literacy framework. And Tom and I talked about this, wanted it in the very beginning of the course, because then that would inform how they went forward.

Tom: Absolutely, it’s really a great way to talk about that. And I really like the way, too, you mentioned that it’s making students aware of themselves as a learner, sort of that broader perspective. So we get them to do that right from the very beginning. The idea of a selfie too is everyone is familiar with the idea of taking a selfie picture. So the idea of a selfie video, I think it places them in a situation that they’re a little bit more comfortable with, that they kind of get what that is. They know what that is. So that means sure that they have to be on camera. But if they want to use an avatar, because some students don’t want to appear in front of the camera, that’s okay, they can start with the avatar. That first assignment is important too, because it’s an introduction to the course. They introduce who they are, where they’re from, whether they’re from Prague or the US. And the other thing we ask them to do. With metaliteracy, there’s a visual model that kind of simplifies and explains what this is. So it shows that the core four domains of learning, including metacognitive, affective, behavioral, cognitive then it shows as a central ring that shows the characteristics of the metaliterate learners, such as being productive, civic minded, things like that. But then the outer ring is focused on the roles of the meta literate learner, such as being a producer, a researcher, a communicator. So with that first assignment, that visual model, we present the model to the students, and it really had a big impact, I think, on the assignment itself, because we asked them to do more than just introduce themselves. We also asked them to select one of the metaliterate learner roles that they identify with the most. So it’s interesting. Some students will say, “Yeah, I see myself as a producer.” Others say, “I see myself as a communicator or researcher,” and that allows them, too, to say a little bit more about themselves. So maybe at work they’re an effective communicator, or maybe in their own time, working with social media, that they’ve already produced video or images or things like that. So it really allows for an excellent introduction to the course, while they’re also starting to investigate this metaliteracy model. So we really bring them into the conversation. It’s not just applying a model to our teaching, it’s really inviting students to think about the model themselves and to start grappling with what meta literacy is. Also, Sheila, I think you’ve really made a great point in terms of how we envision this as a kind of scaffolding. Throughout the course of the assignments, we go from the selfie video to then an assignment about mobile learning, so that we ask students to produce a digital story with their mobile device, because so much of what we do today is with our cell phones, and that’s really fascinating, and that gets them out in their community. So it gets them beyond just working with their laptop. They really think about what they can do as a digital storyteller with that cell phone that they always have in their pocket. Then the next assignment, again, kind of scaffolding, goes to a theme of empowerment, which is core to metaliteracy, because the whole idea, if you become aware of yourself as a metaliterate learner, then you are empowered, because you can make decisions about your learning. So it’s not just gaining insights about who you are, that’s a key part of it, but it’s then being able to identify, perhaps, where you need to improve. And that is empowering for students, and that, I think, is probably one of my favorite parts of the course. Sheila, I don’t know what you think of that, but when they really talk about empowerment, of their own empowerment, people in their lives who have empowered them, your parents or friends, or maybe even celebrities that they look up to, or authors, musicians, things like that, that, to me, is a real turning point in the class where they’re producing really sophisticated work, and they’re working with one of the key themes of meta literacy, which is empowerment.

Sheila: Absolutely. With that empowerment piece, it gives them freedom to bring forward what empowerment means to them, and they take different routes, like nothing is the same. And as Tom noted, some of them might do personal things. It might be a family member or whatever. Others might talk about a movement, others talk about a moment in time when they felt empowered. And I think that this is the beginning of them opening up and feeling some sort of autonomy in what they will create moving forward and realizing that, this course, you have to work. You have to actually do the work. This is not about memorization. This is not about a test in terms of you must answer these questions properly or you fail. This is practical and giving them experience that they can use moving forward, whether it is to document an older family member’s stories, whether it’s to document your community, whether to look at what’s happening outside, in terms of the world around us, and what are those things that make you feel that you are empowered? So it’s a great exercise that puts them in place for what is yet to come.

Tom: And I just want to jump in too with one other point, because as you were talking about that, it made me realize too that here’s another key aspect of our teaching digital storytelling, that also influenced the book, because this idea of students introducing themselves through the selfie and then also the empowerment piece is also key to another core theme to the book, which is diversity, equity, and inclusion. We really see this course as opening up conversations about students, their identity, who they are, and that was something else that when we put the call out to all the authors, we were hoping for international perspectives, which we certainly gained. We were also hoping for a discussion about metaliteracy. But the other core part of this book is really every chapter author focuses how digital storytelling really promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Sheila: Exactly. Very important point, yes.

John: Certainly, by having students tell their own stories, it automatically brings their lived experiences into their course. So I could see how that would be very useful. How might digital storytelling connect to campus DEI initiatives?

Tom: I think that the idea of digital storytelling, it’s a course, but what we do in this course could certainly be utilized in courses that are not about digital storytelling, which is, I think what we have in the book. There’s some authors who utilize digital storytelling techniques to support these ideas. So I would think that, in terms of campus initiatives, this idea of getting students to really utilize these digital tools, which continue to change, and now with certainly the generative AI revolution, this would be a great way for students to think about the production of their stories. Sheila, what do you think about that?

Sheila: I would say that, how does it connect to campus initiatives? I think by creating a safe environment for students to create a story and to share, because sometimes it’s very personal, and so for them to feel comfortable and safe in this environment and to produce it and edit it, can definitely connect to campus DEI issues, because this is another approach. This is not just, “Oh, we’re going to read this.” This is what DEI is, we’re going to try and do these initiatives. Students are living those DEI experiences in real time. And as we saw, like, particularly around the COVID era, students were sharing what that was like for them, depending on who they were, where their cultural place is in society. And I think that this, as Tom said, is definitely as connected. And I think it would be very useful for students to be involved in these sort of narratives across campuses. I think it would weave a fantastic story on how DEI is useful, how it has impacted them, what their experiences are, and I think that puts them more in the conversation, other than, “Oh, this acronym, DEI, I don’t know, it doesn’t really affect me,” or “I don’t know about it,” but when you give people a camera, a pen, and a piece of paper, it shifts the paradigm, and it shifts kind of like in public history. So public history is a bottom-up approach, not a top- down approach. And connecting digital storytelling to this is that you’re empowering your students. You’re empowering the people that now, the way we use technology, are able to share their story across different venues and take different approaches to do that. So, yes, I think it can be connected very much so.

Tom: Yeah, I think it’s interesting too, because it allows students, as Sheila said, to really utilize these digital tools that they all have access to, and in many ways, to reclaim that space, because there’s so much misinformation out there. There’s so much disinformation, especially sort of where we are right now, and it allows students to be reflective, to be ethical producers of information, telling their authentic story. At the end of the day, that’s really what we’re doing in this course, and it’s what we’re trying to advance and encourage with our authors, and they just did an amazing work in that area. So again, it’s also kind of a democratization of technology, because we’re saying, as Sheila pointed out, we’ll give some parameters, we give some suggested ideas for digital tools. But we also like it when they find tools that are easily accessible to them. They don’t have to buy a very expensive product to produce digital stories. So I think making them aware of that environment, that they are really the ones doing this kind of research to find interesting tools and then to use those in a productive and ethical way to tell their authentic story. I mean, that’s what the course is all about, and that’s really what the book is about.

Rebecca: I think it’s really important to underscore that storytelling is such a powerful way to communicate, and data is a powerful way to communicate, but the literature just really describes this power, and that literature is really extensive. Can you talk a little bit about why storytelling is so powerful as a form of communication?

Sheila: Well, storytelling, as we know, is ancient history. No pun intended, right? But it is something that’s been going on for years and years and years, and I think that because, prior to this technology, there were people in control of whose story they told, how they told the story, what they wanted to tell in their story, who would be excluded from the story, who would be included in the story. And so digital storytelling is an absolutely powerful tool in that regular everyday folks can take back that power and inform and properly display and write and direct and do this script and this story board and create and weave a story that is important to them, important to their community, and it puts them, so to speak, in the game. It’s no longer the idea of, “Well, I can’t buy a $10,000 camera, I can’t even buy a $1,000 camera. I don’t have the editing tool.” That is now passe. All you need, is a cell phone. On the flip side, if you want to do a non visual, all you need is a recorder. You can do an audio podcast. So I think, and I know Tom and I agree with this, storytelling is powerful and in the hands of the right people, it can evolve and include many more people than it would without digital storytelling, because then they have to go the traditional way, and that was very difficult at one time, it’s no longer as difficult, which means that the market gets flooded with good, bad, and ugly and indifferent things. But teaching in the environment that we teach, we’re coming from an angle where ethics is extremely important, using the proper materials are important, and we teach that all the way along. And then you do you, you create your story using what you’ve learned thus far, and you can share it just with the class. You can share it if you have a YouTube, Instagram, whatever. And then there’s something we can talk about after. And we have a museum that we’re further developing. And the idea of the museum, which started years ago, was to have an environment to put students’ work, because I always felt that sometimes students do some really great project, and then what? Where is it? They put in all this work all semester, and in that moment when they present, okay, this is great, But then, where is it? Well, ask permission for students who wish to have their work put in the museum, then it becomes a living space. So if they want to connect their family to the museum, their friends. If they’re going for a job in marketing or whatever, and they say, let me show you a little something I did while I was in school. They can connect, and it’ll be there, hopefully forever and ever, and demonstrates the work that they do. And that is another way of empowering students and letting them know that their work is important, and we put it in this environment, and it’ll be there till whenever, because we’ve had some great submissions with the students’ permission to put in the museum, which we hope to further develop. Well, we will. I don’t even hope to, we shall further develop it. I don’t believe in “Well, we tried.” No, we’re going to do it. We’re going to develop it further, and invite others to put their students’ work in the museum as well. It has a lot of good reasons for having it and what we’re doing.

Tom: That’s a really great point. And this was really Sheila’s idea, because it was based on a virtual museum that we’re using in digital storytelling was based on Sheila’s experience in public history. And so she had a virtual public history museum, which we’ve since adapted to this particular course. And it is important to this idea of narrative, because students, again, with their permission, they get to share their stories, and we get to see this over a period of time, and we’re really gaining quite a collection of student work that is, in many ways, instructive. So a key aspect of metaliteracy, one of the roles is teacher. So that learner as teacher. And in many ways, they’re doing that through their collaborative work. And we make them aware of that in the course. But I think they’re also doing it through the sharing of their stories that they’ve produced. It allows others to see the kind of work that can be done. And again, it gets to this point of how important narrative is. And students, I think, as producers of digital stories, I think they become much more discerning of the kinds of narratives they see on a daily basis, which is really important. So it allows them to be more analytical. It allows them to be more of a critical thinker in terms of the content they are receiving on a daily basis, because there are all kinds of digital stories. An advertisement could be a digital story. The kinds of political ads we’re seeing now, those are narratives, and we want students to be really discerning and as they access and review that information, one way we do it, too, I just thought of is, in addition to having them as producers, we also share with them and ask them to analyze digital stories that are about personal narratives. So there’s some great resources out there, StoryCorps, StoryCenter, Animation Block, which is really focused on animation in particular. So we’ve done some curation of really effective digital stories that we ask students to analyze as part of the online discussions and as part of their engagement with the readings that we provide as well. And I think that also contributes to their ability to analyze the kinds of narratives they see on a daily basis, and also being able to produce in an effective, ethical way, their own personal narratives, which are important. And one last thing I’ll say about this too, is that in the course, the writing really is a key part of this. So digital tools are important, but Sheila mentioned the script. So script writing, we spend quite a bit of time on just the words and having students really think about what they’re going to say, how they’re going to map this out as a professional script. They also have to do a visual storyboard, which is another key part of planning. So before they even jump into the digital tools, we really want them to reflect on what they’re writing, what it’s going to look like visually, and how all the pieces really come together through the digital story.

John: One aspect of what you both mentioned is that when students create this work, it’s very different than the type of work they do in many of their classes, where they write something up, they submit it to the learning management system, and then at the end of the term, it goes away and they never see it again. David Wiley refers to that as a disposable assignment…

Tom: Yes.

John: …and having something that lasts beyond the term, that they can share with people, that they can put on their LinkedIn profiles or share with their friends, their family, and so forth, is a really valuable experience. One of the other things, though, you’ve been talking about, is that you mentioned the course that you’ve taught together, and also that’s the basis for the first chapter of this. Could you tell us a little bit more about how the class is structured and how students interact between the two countries.

Sheila: The course, from the very beginning, attempts to bring them in together in the selfie, in the introduction, tell us a little bit about yourself type of thing, which they do in the selfie video. And throughout the course, it’s broken down into different steps, we have discussions. And so with the discussions, a student is required to make a comment based on the topic and readings of the week. They then have to respond to minimally two or more students on their posting. And by that, we don’t mean, and we specifically say like that doesn’t mean, “Thumbs up. Great post, looking good. Thanks a lot.” We explain to them that it’s a conversation and your comment is a continuation of the initial comment, so you want to come in like, “Oh, whatever, like, I didn’t know that. Now I understand. But according to this reading, this is what happened.” Or according to this video I saw this. Or the video that the original poster might have used, a student will say, “You know what? I went back and looked at that, and that was really interesting,” or, “that was really different.” So from the very beginning of the course, we bring them together, because we talk about this all the time, community. We say our course is a community. We’re in this together, and so it’s interesting. When it comes time to give feedback, students are very cautious when they have to reply, very cautious. And they tend to want to say everything nice, which is great, but also we want them to be respectful and comment in a way that makes the original poster either rethink or think about what they may not have seen, what they may have said, and how it’s being interpreted by others. So Tom, you can further expound, but I think that’s it in a nutshell.

Tom: Yeah, I agree completely that the kind of cultural exchange happens from that very first assignment, because as students are talking about themselves and which of the metaliteracy roles they identify with, they’re sharing something about themselves and their place and where they are, where they live. And I think that that really opens up the eyes of the students in Europe and the United States. The mobile story too, I’ve noticed, again, because a lot of students will take their cell phone, they’ll go out and they’ll show themselves in Prague and walk around Prague. So I think that’s really enlightening for the students in the US to see that. And keep in mind, these are Empire State University students who are studying in Prague through a partnership program. They don’t always have a lot of interaction with the US students, and that was one of the problems we were trying to solve. And Sheila really wanted to initiate this, it was how can we get the Prague students and the U.S. students, who are all earning degrees from Empire State University together? So this virtual exchange really allows that to happen, because otherwise it’s not a traditional international exchange program. Students studying in Prague are earning our degree, and so this really brings them together. So that’s really where I think the cultural exchange starts to happen. The other piece I want to build on with the discussions that for every digital story that’s produced, there’s also a peer review that’s a part of that assignment. So students really have to look at the rubric that we use for evaluating and they’re supposed to use that to really evaluate the work of peers. And as Sheila noted, sometimes they might be a little shy in those kinds of conversations, but because they’re working with the criteria, that really helps them to do that. So that’s also a kind of exchange of ideas. Then I think the culminating project, the closing project, while these are all individual stories, that does have interaction through peer review, the final collaborative project, students work together as a team to explore a social cause. So it could be climate change, for instance, a lot of students are very interested in that, which is encouraging, and they’ll do research on climate change, and then they’ll work together as an international team. And we make sure that we definitely when we put the teams together, we make sure there’s always enough of that kind of exchange to happen, so that as they’re working together they learn about each other, they learn about who they are, they learn about where they live, their culture, which is really important. And of course, some of that, they have to face some challenges. Sometimes they’ll complain a little bit about the fact that there’s a time difference, a six-hour time difference, and we say, “Well, we would like you to work in teams for some of this. So that means you have to try and coordinate some time to do that. But also a lot of this can happen asynchronously.” But I think even working through those challenges, is really productive for them, because that’s the real world. If you’re going to have virtual collaboration around the world, that’s what you’re going to have to deal with. And they ultimately work through it really well. And I think, in many ways, those final projects are probably some of the best projects in the class, and it’s just so inspiring to see the kinds of social causes they take on and that they address in a rational research-based way, and then how creative they are. It’s also that key metaliteracy piece that I mentioned earlier, of learner as teacher. That’s one of the key roles you play in these kinds of environments. And they’re doing that. A student who might be highly skilled with the digital tool is explaining to other students how that works, or maybe a student who’s a very strong writer is kind of sharing that work as a writer, and they’re really helping each other out. It’s very much a teacher/learner, mentor/learner, I would even say, kind of experience which brings it all together to why the focus on metaliteracy is really key to this digital storytelling course.

Sheila: The other piece is that with the metaliteracy framework, when we break the students into groups, so there might be four to five in a group, and they are responsible for choosing what their position will be. So who’s going to be the editor, who’s going to do the filming, who’s going to do the narration, if they’re going to use music, how’s that going to work? And so everyone in that group is supposed to take on a job and then do their piece and bring their pieces together to work on a final project. As Tom mentioned a moment ago, sometimes there’s perceived issues. “Oh well, I’m in Prague, six-hour difference, or I’m in New York, I don’t know, I can‘t. I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” And I always come back with “this is real world stuff that you’re doing. And so what would you do if the CEO of your company is on one continent and you’re on another, and you have work to do and you have to present. How are you going to do that? So this is a mini prep for you to learn how to adapt to different environments, because the traditional environment is slowly going away.” And so we have people working remotely all over the world, with people from different time zones, different regions. And so what do you say when there’s a 12-hour difference? Do you say, “Well, I’m sorry I’m sleeping or I don’t have time?” No, you’re going to find a way to work through it. So this is a mini exercise. This is your boot camp in learning how to adjust and work with eople that are not physically in front of you, that are not physically in your time zone, and are a part of your project. So there’s a lot of practical experience for them in this course as well. And as you noted, it’s not your traditional course. And students come in at first thinking, “Oh, I could do this in my sleep,” until they see, “uh oh, I actually have really do some things in here.” And that’s when it becomes interesting. And I love watching the changeover as they go through it. And they start learning, and they feel a little more safer in the course, and they start taking chances, and they’re creating different projects and different narratives is absolutely wonderful. And as Tom also mentioned, with that final project, it has to be on a social issue. So whether it be homelessness, mental health, drugs, climate change, they get in, and you can see the passion for the topic by the very final product they produce together. It’s absolutely wonderful. I love this course. I absolutely love it. I love working with Tom on this and this museum idea was thought of and developed many years ago. And a colleague of mine at Empire, Lisa Rappel, she was initially involved with me to get it done, and then life got in the way. So it was kind of just sitting there. And when Tom and I got together with this course, and I was so excited, I thought, “oh my god, we can use the museum,” and Tom and I got busy and started working with it. So we’re hoping to kick it up a notch, and you have to stay up on technology and so you never get a break, because soon as you learn something, it’s like, “oh, okay, great. Well, that’s passe.” Now we’ve got a new thing, so we’re going to work on making that museum even better than what it is right now, and it’s pretty good right now, but we want to kick it up a notch, and particularly with all this AI that’s going on, and this AI is developing as we speak, it’s important for us to create this environment that uses technology in a very responsible way, while teaching the students as well.

Rebecca: So you’ve both mentioned many aspects of ethics and AI, so maybe you can share a little bit about how you’ve incorporated that into your course.

Tom: When this openAI initiative brought so much attention to AI, the very first thing we did, in addition to the digital stories, there’s an assignment early in the course where they have to write about the ethics of digital storytelling. So that’s the assignment we first revised because we really wanted students to reflect on the ethics of AI, and there’s so much creative potential as well. So you can see how that’s also wrapped into this course, but that’s really the assignment we first revised, and we changed the questions and changed the resources, and really asked students to really think about what are the ethical implications of generative AI for producing digital stories. One of the resources for that assignment is something from StoryCenter. It’s the Digital Storytelling Bill of Rights. [LAUGHTER] So students get to think about the Bill of Rights of a digital storyteller and also the subject of digital stories. But I think revising that assignment was really important because they really have a chance to think about those ethical aspects which are so key. The other thing about this course is that we promote, in addition to freely available digital tools, it already had a very strong component about the use of materials that are openly licensed through Creative Commons. So we don’t want students using resources just by downloading things from the web. They have to be either public domain or Creative Commons. Now AI opens up much more potential. I think in our next revision, there’s more we actually want to do with the course, to really give them permission to use Dall-E, for instance, to create images. And also, of course, there’s now new generators for creating video, and that’s something we’re going to embrace and build into the course. Instead of telling students “don’t do it,” we’re going to ask them, “How can you do it in an ethical and responsible way?”

Sheila: Exactly, exactly, because it’s with us, it’s not going anywhere. So, we’ve got to figure out a way to incorporate it in a responsible way and make them ask the question, instead of being the sage on the stage, that’s not what we do with this course, we want to invoke their critical thinking and for them to think about what is happening around them in a way that makes sense, as opposed to us telling them, “ Oh, this is not good, you don’t need to do that.” Because they don’t listen anyway. So it’s better to let them learn how to discern and how to critically analyze and think on their own. I think that’s what we want from all our citizens.

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

Sheila: Well, I think what’s next is… well, there’s several things the sky’s the limit, right? But I think that another revision to the course for next spring, as Tom said, to really input AI and figure out how we want to do that, and to hopefully get some grant money… anybody listening… to help us upgrade the museum, because we believe it’s a wonderful space for students, and I think that walking the road of life and seeing what narratives I could think about and get involved with, and more co-teaching with Tom, because I thoroughly enjoy it. We love it. We absolutely love it.

Tom: Yeah, we really do. You can tell. Sheila and I have known each other so long, and we just love working together in the teaching and the research. And I agree completely. I think that the revision to include more AI components is definitely what we want to do this year. I think continued research presentations, talking about the book. We’re really excited about the book. I’m really interested too… I think we both are… in continuing to engage with some of the book authors who contributed to this book. We were so excited that three of the authors or author teams are from South Africa. So when we put the call for hoping for these global perspectives that we’re able to reach that. The book itself covers, in addition to our perspectives, just looking at the table of contents, we have authors who write about meta-theater as digital storytelling, the metaliteracy of memes, digital book making as a form of digital storytelling, local history, story maps. There’s so many creative ideas out there that if we could continue to promote this idea of digital storytelling building it into the curriculum, helping campuses to advance their DEI initiatives, that would be amazing. So I think that’s what we’re really hoping for, and that’s the idea of the book too is that this gets the conversation going. It’s our experience, but then it’s also building on our experience to bring in other scholars and teachers and students.

Sheila: And this all evolved out of our engagement with students in the course, so they’re at the core of everything that Is transpired after that as a result of the course.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your book and all of your stories.

Sheila: [LAUGHTER] Thank you.

Tom: Thank you. We enjoyed it. [LAUGHTER]

Sheila: Absolutely. And may digital storytelling just keep on going and going and going. Thank you so much. This is wonderful.

[MUSIC]

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

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

[MUSIC]

361. Becoming a SoTL Scholar

Posted in evidence-based practices, higher education, scholarship of teaching and learning, SOTL, teaching
October 2, 2024

A growing number of faculty members participate in the scholarship of teaching and learning, or SoTL. In this episode, Janice Miller-Young and Nancy Chick join us to discuss a new open educational resource designed to assist faculty interested in pursuing SoTL research.

Janice is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a past Academic Director at the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Alberta. Nancy Chick is the director of the Endeavor Foundation Center for Faculty Development at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Nancy had also served as a Professor of English within the University of Wisconsin System, where she codirected the Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program for all of the system’s 26 campuses. Janice and Nancy have both published extensively on the scholarship of teaching and learning and have each co-authored influential books on SoTL methodologies and signature pedagogies.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: A growing number of faculty members participate in the scholarship of teaching and learning, or SoTL. In this episode, we discuss a new open educational resource designed to assist faculty interested in pursuing SoTL research.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are: Janice Miller-Young and Nancy Chick. Janice is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a past Academic Director at the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Alberta. Nancy Chick is the director of the Endeavor Foundation Center for Faculty Development at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Nancy had also served as a Professor of English within the University of Wisconsin System, where she codirected the Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program for all of the system’s 26 campuses. Janice and Nancy have both published extensively on the scholarship of teaching and learning and have each co-authored influential books on SoTL methodologies and signature pedagogies. Welcome Janice and welcome back, Nancy.

Janice: Thank you.

Nancy: Welcome. Thank you.

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

Janice: I am. It’s my favorite flavor by Stash. It’s called licorice spice.

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: I think that might be the debut on the podcast. I don’t think we’ve had that one yet.

John: I have had it, but I haven’t had it on the podcast.

Rebecca: I think so.

John: It’s very nice. And Nancy, are you drinking tea?

Nancy: I am drinking some iced tea. I’m in Florida, so there’s no way I’m going to be drinking hot tea. So some good southern sweet tea.

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: I just have some awake tea this afternoon, John.

John: …and I have an oolong tea today.

Rebecca: We have invited here today to discuss Becoming a SoTL Scholar, your most recent co-edited book on the scholarship of teaching and learning research, which was released this summer as an open educational resource in the open access book series in Elon University Center for Engaged learning. Before we discuss the book, though, could you tell us a little bit about how you became interested in SoTL research?

Janice: So I started my post-secondary career at a teaching-focused institution, Mount Royal University, in Calgary, Canada, and I was teaching engineering courses, because I’m an engineer, and some of them were very physics based. And it so happened that at the time I started, there was already a lot of disciplinary based educational research happening in both physics and engineering. So naturally, I started reading it as I was starting to teach, and I got started presenting about my teaching shortly after that. It was, as I said, a teaching-focused institution, so that was considered quite a normal thing to do. I didn’t do any formal inquiry into my teaching and learning until a few years later, when Mount Royal started supporting the SoTL Scholars Program.

Nancy: I got started in SoTL back in the 90s, when I was a graduate student. I was at the University of Georgia, shout out Bulldogs, and I was part of a graduate student organization of Teaching Award winners. There were, I think, 30 of us from across campus, none from the same departments, and we would gather, I think it was monthly, to talk about teaching and to read about teaching. And that program really got me through graduate school and whetted my appetite for what I wanted to do as a faculty member, what I wanted to focus on. Later, when I became a faculty member in Wisconsin, I found out that what we were talking about was SoTL, and so when I was on the tenure track in Wisconsin, I tried to take every faculty development program, every SoTL program, I tried to read everything, and I just knew that that’s the research and that’s the community that I wanted to be a part of. And I’ve never left. They can’t get rid of me.

John: That’s a wonderful experience, but I don’t think that’s typical of the past that most graduate students have. Most graduate programs focus on training students to do research and not to prepare for a career in teaching, even though most faculty end up at institutions where teaching is a primary responsibility. Why don’t graduate programs provide more preparation for research related to the scholarship of teaching and learning?

Janice: That’s a tough question. [LAUGHTER] I could make a stab at it. I don’t think that’s true of all programs. I know that the program we have at the University of Alberta does touch on the scholarship of teaching and learning a little bit towards the end of the program that we have for training graduate students related to teaching and learning, I think it’s a lot to ask of a graduate student to learn all of those different things. They’re learning to be a researcher in their discipline. Hopefully they’re learning about teaching and learning a little bit, at least, through either having some teaching assistant experiences or a formal program that a university might have. I think if they’re at least exposed to the idea of scholarship of teaching and learning, that would be a great start. And I know that some are, but again, I think it’s a lot to expect of a graduate student, to learn all those different things. I don’t know. What do you think, Nancy?

Nancy: Yeah, I think historically, certainly, the focus of graduate education was on doing your disciplinary research, like you said, partially, if they’re lucky, learning more about teaching and learning, but thinking of SoTL as an area of research, as an actual field… that I think is more emerging, and so I’m not sure that it would occur to graduate programs that this is an area of research that people could do, maybe that people could read, but not necessarily that they could do. However, I will say, in our book, we’re seeing that that may be shifting gradually and in very small ways. But we have one author, for example, who started out her career, actually, as an undergraduate student, knowing that this is what she wanted to do. She got a Master’s, she just defended her dissertation, and is now in a position, I think, at the University of Rhode Island. So gradually, I think that might be opening up, especially now that we have at least one example in the US, and I suspect, more and more in other countries.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how your book came to be and maybe how you selected some of the contributors to the project?

Janice: I guess, selfishly, it was the topic that I was very interested in. I would call myself a mid-career SoTL scholar, I suppose. I have enough experience now that I feel like I can be the senior person on a project and mentor others into the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. It took me a long time to get to that place, I have to say. But now that I’m here, I was interested in literature about the next stage of a SoTL career, specifically, and I didn’t really see very much in the literature about that. And so I wanted to pull together the literature that I already knew existed about the identity of SoTL scholars, and also contribute to that topic by putting out a call for others to contribute to the book.

Nancy: And I have the good fortune of being in a position where wonderful people occasionally call on me to come along for the ride. And Janice and I have worked together some in the past, and she just asked if I wanted to come play with her on this project. So I was happy to do so, but it really was Janice’s idea, a real sense of curiosity of what this would look like in different careers and career stages. So really, hat tip to Janice for the project. Janice, how did you pick the authors?

Janice: Well, we put out a call through several listservs and through our networks for people to make proposals for the book. And I think we accepted everybody that we thought fit within the vision of the book, and that was very broad. We did get some applications that we didn’t accept, and not because they weren’t good applications, it’s just they weren’t really about becoming a SoTL scholar in any way. They were maybe about supporting SoTL scholars, for example, and so anything that fit within that broad vision, we accepted and then put together the sections of the book as a result of what we received.

Nancy: And I think an interesting part that ended up playing out really well was how the proposals that really matched this vision did align with different phases of a career. We could have gotten all kind of mid- career folks, or all early folks, or all very experienced folks, and we got people all along the spectrum. I know we were hoping for more contributions from other countries, from around the world, that we kind of acknowledge in the introduction as a bit of a gap, but it’s what we had to work with. So perhaps someone else will follow up and add a more international perspective.

Rebecca: Yeah, that would be nice to see.

John: So in that introductory chapter that the two of you authored, you described the growth of SoTL work over a little more than 30 years or so since Boyer suggested the need for this type of research, and you address some of the controversies associated with that, and one of the issues that came up is the diversity of approaches that are being used in SoTL. Could you talk a little bit about the diversity, and also to what extent different disciplines have standardized on a particular methodology, and to what extent is there more diversity in some academic disciplines.

Nancy: I’d say one of the conversations, sometimes debates and controversies, in SoTL, from the very beginning, has been the nature of disciplines within the multidisciplinary field of SoTL. We don’t often work with people in other disciplines in our regular work. So when So TL brings together people from the arts, from the sciences, from the social sciences, from the humanities, from the professions, students, inevitably, there’s going to be some disagreement about what this thing is supposed to look like. Sometimes that disagreement resolves in the sense of, “Ah, it’s a diverse field,” and sometimes it ends up with some voices saying, “No, no, good SoTL, good research, looks like x, y and z, and inevitably, that kind of list excludes some of the many approaches that are in the field. Just one example, on a recent thread on a very popular listserv here in the US, there’s a conversation about the gold standard for SoTL being multiple institutions, because that’s the only way you can create generalizable findings. Now that’s a very disciplinary approach that doesn’t apply across all disciplines, and so to say that that’s a gold standard for So TL immediately knocks some of us out of the conversation. So I think there’s a constant effort to remind that in this field, there are diverse approaches. There are many approaches. Even within some of those singular approaches, there may not be consensus on what it’s supposed to look like. And importantly, in So TL, that’s not a bad thing, that diversity means we’re asking a bunch of different questions, drawing on a bunch of different kinds of evidence, artifacts, data, using many approaches to generate knowledge, but it’s a constant tending to that diversity.

Janice: Yeah, sometimes I get frustrated that we’re still having this conversation. I’m sure Nancy would agree with that. If this is a practice that is done by faculty and instructors from across higher education, then SoTL, by definition, has to be inclusive of their different ways of doing research or scholarship, whichever word you choose to use. There is a recent paper in teaching and learning inquiry by Jennifer Löfgreen, and she makes the argument that we really need to start thinking in terms of paradigms of approaches to inquiry, and move away from talking about disciplinary approaches, because for fields that are so diverse, paradigms are one way that we can communicate to each other what are our basic assumptions about the thing that we are researching, and I really like that paper.

Rebecca: So we start digging into your book a little bit. The sequence of chapters in the book is organized by career trajectory. Can you talk a little bit about each of these sections?

Janice: Well, as Nancy said earlier, we organized the book according to the trajectory of careers. So our first section is really meant to speak to both students and early career faculty who are interested in starting to pursue a SoTL career. Our next section is directed more towards people who have experience in academia, maybe have been teaching for quite a while, but they’re wanting to shift their career towards a SoTL agenda. And our third section is about starting to maintain that engagement once one has started in the field, so ways to continue or even enhance participation or one’s own scholarship. And then our final section is just a couple of chapters, and it’s exploring how we’re never really quite there. We’re always still becoming a SoTL scholar. We’re still in the process of exploring our identity and changing our identity as we do this work and learning new things.

Nancy: Well, it dovetails with a project that I was part of a little later in the book project, this was led by Sarah Bonnell, who’s now at Elon, but she led a project of a group of us thinking about SoTL generations. And in the resulting article, we break it down into… oh gosh, I forget, three or four generations, but starting with the people early on who were kind of well- established faculty members, and then turned to SoTL. But over time, people have entered SoTL earlier and earlier in their careers, and so now we’re at a stage where there are multiple generations, and where, even in this moment, people across those generations are coming to SoTL for the first time. So that idea of the trajectory of the career phase and the particular moment when we enter, I think, will always be relevant, because for many it’s not where we start. And so that idea of coming early, coming mid- course, coming later, I think, will always be relevant, which is one of the strengths, I think, of the structure of the book.

John: In addition to the sequential structure over the course of a career, you also provide alternative organization schemas to allow readers to choose different ways of navigating the book. Could you briefly describe these alternative classification schemes?

Janice: Those came about through… it was sort of my idea, but also prompted by Jesse Moore, who suggested that we could kind of make this book into a choose your own adventure, in a way, because it does speak to people across different stages of a career trajectory. And so, I guess that got me thinking in terms of the diversity of types of scholarship of teaching and learning that exist, and how that can also be confusing for folks who are new to the field. And so I wanted a way to communicate that. And I think because of my own sort of positivistic disciplinary background, I like to categorize things, so I thought that might be useful for others as well. And so we came up with three broad categories in which we label each of the chapters. So we label them by what they’re about. Some are specifically a SoTL inquiry, but some are more definitions of the field and that sort of thing, so that was one of the categories. We labeled them according to the context that they are about. Some are written about universities, and some are about polytechnics, for example, and some are about scholars from different disciplines. So that’s the second category. And the third category, which I like the most, actually, is different genres of SoTL. And again, the first genre would be a report on a research project, but that was one of six different categories that we came up with, actually. We had conceptual articles, scholarly essays, reflective essays, narrative essays, and one graphical essay…

Nancy: ….which was one of your chapters.

Janice: Yes.

Nancy: …very visual, kind of getting us a glimpse into how you think about SoTL, but represented visually, a real innovative chapter. Recently, someone reached out to me because he’s going to be leading a faculty book group using Becoming a SoTL Scholar, and acknowledged that maybe some of the faculty didn’t have time to read the whole book, and so was just looking for a little guidance on what we might say to a faculty member who wants to talk about the book but just really only has time to read a handful or so of chapters. What might that guidance look like? And so I just suggested, and this is just one way to think about it, I suggested maybe pick a couple of chapters that resonate with you because they’re from your disciplinary identity, or your career stage, or a familiar genre, and then pick a couple that seem very unfamiliar for the same reasons, and that kind of takes us back to that earlier point about the diversity of the field. The sooner we can get folks to engage with that diversity and recognize it and see across it, I think the stronger the field will come. So I’m hoping that that book group follows that idea and circles back to see how it went.

Janice: That’s a great suggestion. I like that.

Rebecca: One of the things that often comes up in conversations about the scholarship of teaching and learning is that it’s not necessarily always valued across all institutions or even within all departments inside of the same institution. So what advice would you give to faculty who are interested in starting a SoTL career, but trying to navigate these differences within their own institution, or as they’re maybe thinking about pursuing a career and finding an institution to land at?

Janice: I think I would have two pieces of advice. And one would be, start small, try a small project to begin with, get your feet wet. There’s always something you didn’t expect when you’re collecting and analyzing data. I know that’s one particular approach to SoTL inquiry. I sound very researchy when I say that, and I don’t want to exclude other disciplines where maybe collecting data isn’t really quite the right term, but anyhow, I think start small. Do a small project, you’d have to start reading the literature as a result of doing a project, because if you’re going to disseminate, you want to place your findings within an existing scholarly conversation. My second piece of advice would be to also think about kinds of research questions that would have an impact beyond your own practice. I think if you want to do this kind of work as a scholarly career, then investigating questions within your own practice is certainly important for improving your own teaching. But there are other questions that might be beyond your own practice that could result in a greater impact on your colleagues, for example, or even on the field itself. And so thinking in terms of where you want to make an impact and how is also important.

Nancy: And I think that piece of advice also connects with one way to think about the value of doing SoTL and the safety of doing SoTL, depending on where you are in your career. If there are particular initiatives or issues that your institution is wrestling with or promoting, prioritizing, that might be one way to get a little more support on your campus if you’re connecting with something that’s important to your institution. The piece of advice that I would give, in addition to Janice’s points, is to find someone to connect with beyond your institution. I got involved with this work originally because of the people I was interacting with, and how that enriched me and made me a better everything. And I think for those who want to get involved with SoTL and are at institutions that may not value it, or may not know enough about it, may not know how to count it towards tenure and promotion, connecting with someone who’s been doing this work for a while can help enormously. Because, as you mentioned, this conversation has always been happening because it’s not disciplinary research. So we’re always trying to figure out how to help SoTL scholars convey what the work is, what its value is, why it should be counted, and there are so many of us out here who love to connect with newer scholars. I was going to say younger, but that’s not true, because it could be any part of the career. But there are lots of people out here who have been through it, or who have helped others go through it, connecting with the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. That’s the professional organization devoted to this kind of work. And members, board members, committee members, interest group members, lots of people within that organization can offer help.

John: Pretty much all academic disciplines have some people who are working in the scholarship of teaching and learning, and most national meetings or international meetings will have some sessions on that which might be a good place. And then, as you mentioned, all these interdisciplinary groups or conferences could also work quite nicely in forming those connections as well as listservs. So yeah, that could be helpful in providing this sort of support network, which might not always be available on the campus.

Nancy: And just to agree, SoTL is indeed a field. SoTL is indeed a practice. SoTL is also a community, or communities, so kind of keeping that in mind and tapping into the one or ones that are most accessible to you or interesting or you already have a connection, definitely.

Rebecca: So we talked a little bit about where we can make connections if we’re interested in doing SoTL, especially beyond our campus, in terms of conferences, etc. And we talked a little bit about navigating some of those things and maybe building a little bit of administrative support for some SoTL research, but maybe we can push on that just a little bit further. You talked about picking up on some topics that are already being discussed on campus as potential topics to do some sort of research on. Are there other strategies that we might be able to encourage our colleagues to use to build administrative support for SoTL research on our campuses, if it’s not something that there’s a culture of already on our campus,

Nancy: One thing that comes to mind for me is a 2013 article by Dan Bernstein in the inaugural issue of Teaching and Learning Inquiry. I forget the full name, but I think it’s something like SoTL active faculty as institutional assets. And his whole argument in that article is that many faculty on their campuses are focused on the campus. They’re teaching what he calls local topics, whereas SoTL-active faculty are connected to their classes, their campuses, but as Janice alluded to earlier, t hey’re also connected to the literature on teaching and learning and to broader communities, and so they can act as conduits or liaisons between the evidence-based research, between what’s happening at other institutions and their own campuses. So that kind of asset can be helpful, but that’s just, I think, one kind of example.

John: In many disciplines, for centuries, faculty were teaching in pretty much the same way, without really much regard to what we’ve learned about teaching and learning. But during the pandemic, those things stopped being feasible, and faculty were suddenly exposed to evidence-based teaching practices that came out of SoTL research. I know there’s been some backsliding since we’ve moved out of the pandemic, into moving back to some of those old practices, but do you think faculty are more willing to take into account SoTL research, and perhaps, might that lead to more recognition of the value of that research on campuses?

Janice: That’s an Interesting question. I know in my discipline, faculty tend to listen to or be influenced by educational research that’s happening in their own context, like in their own discipline. So certainly there is an awareness of that research, and, like I said, a willingness to listen to it, if it is from a similar context. And I guess that’s another important reason why we need the diversity of the scholarship of teaching and learning. I don’t know if you could say that about all disciplines, but certainly in engineering, that’s the case.

Nancy: And I think after the pandemic, and of course, we always have to qualify after… [LAUGHTER] When will we be able to stop having to qualify after the pandemic? In the wake of the pandemic, I think faculty everywhere have been shaken by what they learned about students, what they learned about teaching, what they learned about technology, everything, and I think that sense of everything familiar is no longer familiar, and students, especially the generation or generations coming out of the pandemic, are so dramatically different in important ways, that I think many faculty are grasping for help for: “What do I do? How do I teach these students that are so different from the students that I had before the pandemic?” Now, those faculty will reach to different places, their teaching and learning centers, their colleagues, nowhere. Some will reach out to the SoTL literature, or colleagues who know SoTL, because they’ll make that connection to how much they value research-based knowledge. It’s always going to be a challenge, but I do think right now, there’s so much grasping for “what do I do? How do I do this better? How do I do this?” …that it’s a real, I don’t want to say opportunity, but it’s a real moment where I think SoTL is having a more recognized value among faculty who otherwise would never consider even looking to any of those kinds of publications.

Rebecca: Feels like a really good tee up to the question we always wrap up with, which is: “What’s next?”

Janice: Well, one thing is, I’m interested in understanding the Canadian context a little bit, so I’ve been proposing, with a couple of colleagues, a project looking at the different institutions and the kinds of support they have for SoTL across Canada. You said, for example, that most graduate programs don’t have SoTL built into them. I don’t know if that’s entirely true anymore or not. I’d like to get some evidence of that. I’m interested in the transformation that occurs when someone starts to do and continues to do the scholarship of teaching and learning. I’m interested in what is the process of learning, what is effectively another discipline, or learning to do research in a new field. As I said, I think there’s been a lot of literature about getting started in SoTL, and not as much on the more experienced faculty members. So I’m hoping to do some research in that area as well.

Rebecca: Sounds exciting.

Nancy: And what’s next for me? Yes, I have to go shortly have dinner with our President. But one thing I’ve been talking about a lot, and then I’m deeply interested in, and that I just want to put out there so that if anyone else is interested, they connect with me. I’m very interested in how, again, in the wake of the pandemic, the struggle, the difficulty, the challenges of learning that are necessary to learning may have become pathologized in some ways that make it even harder for faculty to teach difficulty, to encourage and support students to stick with the struggles, the challenges of learning and doing hard things in classes. I’m hearing a lot of faculty talk about this phenomenon, and I think we need to figure out what to do about it, because we know that that kind of struggle, that kind of this doesn’t feel good, or this is frustrating, is a necessary part of learning that we don’t want written out or smoothed out. So that’s where I’m going next.

Janice: Interesting.

John: Those are things we hear about all the time from faculty here, too, and I just came from a class where I had that sort of conversation with students about learning is work, and there are shortcuts you can use, but they’re not going to be very helpful for you once you get past the end of the term. And it was a productive conversation, but we’ll see what sort of impact it has. But that’s a good topic for some SoTL research. Thank you very much for joining us, and thank you for providing this wonderful resource, and we’ll include links to this and anything you mentioned in the show notes as well.

Nancy: Wonderful. Thank you for having us.

Janice: Thank you.

Nancy: It’s good to see you.

Janice: It’s good to see you, too.

Rebecca: Thank you so much.

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

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

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360. Change Leadership

Posted in change, community of practice, higher education, leadership, professional development
September 25, 2024

Higher educational institutions tend to adapt slowly in response to changing cultural, economic, and  technological environments. In this episode,  Kim Scalzo and Jennifer Miller join us to discuss strategies that can be used to help lead productive change initiatives.

Kim is the Interim Senior Associate Provost for Digital Innovation and Academic Services, the former Executive Director of Open SUNY and SUNY Online. Jennifer is the Assistant Vice Chancellor of Community College Support at the State University of New York and Executive Director of the New York State Success Center. Kim and Jennifer co-teach a professional development course at the SUNY Center for Professional Development on Leading Change in Higher Education.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Higher educational institutions tend to adapt slowly in response to changing cultural, economic, and technological environments. In this episode, we discuss strategies that can be used to help lead productive change initiatives.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and

Rebecca: Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Kim Scalzo and

Jennifer: Miller. Kim is the Interim Senior Associate Provost for Digital Innovation and Academic Services, the former Executive Director of Open SUNY and SUNY Online.

Jennifer: is the Assistant Vice Chancellor of Community College Support at the State University of New York and Executive Director of the New York State Success Center. Kim and

Jennifer: co-teach a professional development course at the SUNY Center for Professional Development on Leading Change in Higher Education. Welcome Kim and

Jennifer:.

Kim: Thank you. Great to be here.

Jennifer:: Thanks for having us.

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

Kim: I am. I have my Tea Forte black pomegranate.

Rebecca:: Yum. How about you,

Jennifer:?

Jennifer:: Well, I am an iced tea drinker, so I’m drinking Pure Leaf lemon tea.

Rebecca:: How about you, John?

John: …and I have an Earl Grey from Tea Forte.

Rebecca:: That’s a different choice for you today.

John: I know. I don’t have as many teas in this room as I do in our office.

Rebecca:: I know. Yeah, we’re in our recording studio. We have a limited supply here right now.

John: And mine is this because I ordered some of the black currant Tea Forte tea during COVID, and I got two boxes of the Earl Grey, and I’m gradually getting rid of the last of it. [LAUGHTER] So it’s elderly Earl Grey. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca:: And I have some Awake tea this morning.

John: Very good.

Rebecca:: …that I can be nice and alert.

Kim: Awesome.

John: We’ve invited you both here today to discuss change leadership. After what seemed like centuries of relatively slow change in higher education, the pace of change seems to have accelerated quite a bit in the last few decades. You’ve both been involved in leading change in the SUNY system in a variety of roles for quite a while now. What are some ways in which change leadership in higher education differs from change leadership in other organizations?

Kim: Academia has its own culture. I grew up in this culture, and so it’s very familiar to me. I’m very comfortable in the culture of academia, but oftentimes folks come into our campuses, or for

Jennifer: and I here at the system office, not from academia, and it’s very clear that their expectations of how things happen and how decisions get made and how change occurs is very different. So I’ll just say a couple of things about what I think that academic culture includes. And the first is that we have shared governance. That doesn’t exist in places like industry or even sometimes in government. We have a very strong faculty culture here in New York, our faculty are unionized. So we have to take all of those factors into account when we are leading change initiatives, and we have to make sure that critical stakeholders are engaged, not just in the decisions about what we’re going to change, how we’re going to change, but also in what it’s going to look like beyond the initial change so that it can be sustainable. In my space, which is the technology space, it’s also important to understand that the role of technology plays a supporting or enabling role to things like student success, and technology is not the driver. So how you think about that is also important. And then the final thing I’ll say is that many changes involve faculty, where affecting that change actually means that individual faculty have to change what they’re doing in their classes, and they have a great deal of autonomy, as you both know, in how they teach their courses and help students achieve the learning outcomes. So it involves a lot of engagement. It involves a lot of case making, oftentimes training and professional development, and it doesn’t happen immediately, so we have to have the long view in mind. So that’s what I would say. Jen?

Jennifer:: So I agree with everything that Kim just mentioned, and it’s a really great question, because I think a lot of the work that’s gone on in change leadership, as you mentioned, has been done in business and government sectors and not as much in the higher education sector. Yet, now we see the driving forces of needing to change in departments and classrooms and all organizational structures. So Kim and I have both been working on large-scale, multi-college change for a decade now, probably, between the two of us. And higher education professionals. In addition, not just coming in from outside of higher ed, you’re also focused on students. You’re teaching students. Folks are focused on student supports, and not project management leads or folks who have done leading types of change projects. So what we understand and know about higher ed is there’s more of a need, as Kim was talking about, that professional development, that support, and we particularly think that this can very much help the success rate of some of these change projects that are taking place in higher education, where in business and industry and government, there’s, I think, a more already existing knowledge base. And I think we need to make sure that we have supports for folks who are leading these change projects. The other thing is, I think, and Kim mentioned this very specifically, is that the number of different power and authority and structures in higher education that differ from other places and the values that can compete in higher education are very different in business and industry and other sectors. So we need some additional thoughts on how to support that change.

Rebecca:: Can you elaborate a little bit on what some of those values are that are different?

Jennifer:: Sure, I think some of the values that we see are the desire to change to support student success. One of our ideas is, how do you make sure that students are being retained? And that often has some very big value laden opinions and ideas with it, and those can often be competing. There’s also competing values of financial resources. There’s competing values of, as Kim mentioned, shared governance and who has the authority to make what decisions. So oftentimes in business and industry, those things are very clear. In higher education, they’re a little more complex and navigating that’s really important in any change project that we see moving forward, either at the campus level or the system level.

Kim: I would just add the really strong value on faculty and the particular expertise, whether it’s technical expertise in your discipline or expertise around teaching and learning, very strong value on that. And as I mentioned earlier, faculty are pretty autonomous in the way that they carry out their responsibilities, and so that’s a really big difference that we have to account for. By the way, I happen to think it’s a great thing… faculty are what distinguish our institutions of higher education from each other. And so in my work, I’ve always had a really strong value on faculty and on that culture.

Rebecca:: One of the things that I heard you say, and I think I hear faculty say on our campus, and I hear in a lot of the conversations that we’ve had on our podcast, is there’s desire for change, but also humongous frustration [LAUGHTER] about lack of change, or that speed of change, usually from professional development folks that we might interview, but also from faculty. Do you have any nuggets of advice for folks that really feel that frustration to their core, before we get into some of the nuts and bolts about how change happens.

Kim: One of the reasons why Jen and I talk about “change leadership” as opposed to “change management” is because we feel like there’s a role that everybody has to play and can play in being a leader in the change and feeling empowered to both help yourself as well as other constituents, to not feel like the change is being done to you, but that change is happening, and you can play a leadership role. And I think that when you can have that mindset shift, you can actually drive the change, or lead the change, or support the change in a way that can be less frustrating. That doesn’t mean that you control everything, but your mindset and your view on your role in it can be pretty empowering.

Jennifer:: I would only add that we also talk about leading change from where you are and what your sphere of influence is, and how you can do certain things and maybe not everything you want to do, so really looking at it from the holistic perspective of what you want to change, and then looking at a lot of things we’re going to talk about today, which is the institutional culture and the context around change, the moves you can make from where you sit about that change, and then the collective or shared group of people you need to bring in to work with you. Because I think what we do know is change doesn’t happen for one person alone, but we can see the value when folks start talking together and start looking at it more as change of ways you can make moves, you can use levers, and you can understand the context to make that change happen. So in some ways, it’s also learning about how does change happen in other places, especially the change that you want, and how to use external resources, and we can talk a little bit more about that, to also support maybe the change you aren’t seeing as quickly or as much as you want on your own campus.

John: One of the areas in which most campuses are working right now is trying to reduce some of the equity gaps in student success by introducing more active learning and inclusive teaching practices and more support for students on campus in general. Part of your course’s focus is on Kotter’s Eight Steps for Leading Change. Could you take this topic and provide an overview of how this approach might be able to address institutional change in this area?

Kim: So Kotter has identified eight stages in a change leadership process that I learned about many years ago, probably over a decade ago, and as I have been involved in various change initiatives, it just resonates with me as a nice set of steps to think about and go through to ensure, or help ensure, the success of the change initiative. So I’ll just walk through those very quickly and talk about how that might apply in the scenario that you outlined, John. So the first step is establishing a sense of urgency. This is really all about the why of the change, and when you can rally around why a change needs to be made, when everybody can get clear on that, it’s easier. So you have to create that sense of urgency. When it comes to student success, what does that look like? Oftentimes, there is data to show where are students not being successful, or where are there challenges that they’re coming up against. And so data can be your friend, we say, and sometimes, when it comes to issues around equity, you have to think about disaggregating that data so you can look at different demographic groups and look at where exactly students may be not achieving the outcomes that we’d like them to see. You can also use students to tell the story, to help create that sense of urgency, oftentimes hearing their voice directly is really powerful. And so thinking about the ways to bring forward the why of your change, so that people aren’t questioning why you have to do something. It then becomes more about the what and how we’re going to do it. So that sense of urgency is important. The next stage is forming a powerful guiding coalition. This is a really important part of the process for me, because, as

Jennifer: stated previously, no one can affect a change like this alone. This can’t be one person’s job or one person’s responsibility. So you have to think about who are the key stakeholders in this case? It’s faculty, faculty leadership. It might be chief academic officers, it might be advising and learning center directors. Who are those key stakeholders, and you bring them together to form your guiding coalition who will help outline what your strategies are going to be for getting to the change. The next thing is creating a vision for change, and this is really about outlining that compelling statement that everybody can rally around and get behind. So that statement might be, or that vision might be, “We’re going to improve student learning outcomes for a particular demographic of students in a particular set of courses.” That gives you a way to target, oftentimes, we talk about gateway courses for students. And so when you can create that vision for change, and everybody can rally around that, then again, it’s going to be harder for people to not engage or want to be part of that change. The next step is communicating the vision. And what I think is one of the most important pieces here is your vision has to be clear. We have to have everybody know what that vision is, so that everybody who is communicating it is communicating it. And multiple channels are really important here. So communication through the academic channels with faculty and individual departments, with maybe it’s campus newsletters, maybe it’s a webinar series. What are the ways in which you can get to those key stakeholders so they know what is happening and when, and keep them engaged throughout the change process. I think that’s a really important piece of it. Next is empowering others to act on the vision. So this is where then you take those key stakeholder groups and now you’re building teams of people who may be working on the various strategies that you’ve outlined. In this case, maybe there is a team that’s working on professional development for faculty. Maybe there’s a data team that’s looking at how you’re looking at the data and how you’re going to track progress over time. Maybe again, those advising center and learning center directors are working together on what they’re going to do to support students. So you’re looking at how you are taking your guiding coalition and empowering a broader group of people to act. Generating short term wins is the next one. This is one of my favorites, because along the way, you’re going to see those early successes, and this is time to celebrate them and to really help keep people motivated to see that the change is starting to work. You’re starting to have some successes. And maybe in this scenario, this looks like faculty talking about something they did that had a short-term impact in their classroom on students. Maybe it is students talking about, “Oh, this made so much more sense to me. I really get this now.” So how do you celebrate those and then, based on that, the next stage is consolidating gains and producing more change. You use that momentum to then accelerate the change. And let’s say, take a practice that work in one or two faculty’s classroom and use that as the basis for professional development to the rest of the faculty. So you’re getting it now across the whole audience that you want to try to serve, and then finally anchoring new approaches in the culture. This is where things like policy changes might be important, where allocation of resources might come into play. How are you going to sustain this and make this part of the culture? Does it become part of regular faculty engagement, part of regular faculty development, whatever makes sense for the scenario, maybe it changes the way that the learning and advising centers work. So it’s about anchoring those new practices, those new initiatives, that show that they produce the outcomes that you’re going for. And the last thing that I’ll say about these eight stages is we talk about them sequentially, but the reality is that you can go back and forth between them. Sometimes you might go through one of them really quickly and then think, “Oh, I gotta go back and do more of that communicating, or more of that engaging, or I’ve gotta expand that stakeholder group.” So there’s very much a learning process that goes on, and you can work through the stages, sometimes out of order, or going back. So I know that was very quick, but I love that set of stages, because I feel like I can apply it in a lot of different scenarios.

Jennifer:: So one of the things that we have done in the course is look at two different change models, but they’re really related. Kim’s talking about Kotter, and that’s foundational for a lot of business and a lot of organizations. But Adrianna Kezar, in her work as a researcher has specifically looked at some of these types of changes in the higher ed context. So she adds to Kotter’s work when she talks about context that happens within the higher ed sector. So we have institutional type being different, leadership and governance, as we’ve mentioned, culture, I think, is a really important part of politics here, human capital and capacity resources and external impact and the external forces that work on higher education. So there’s that context piece, in addition to the Kotter steps, the other thing she adds, and her co-authors, Susan Elrod and others, in a Change Leadership Toolkit for Higher Ed, talk about leader moves. So very similarly to Kotter, there are eight leader moves in higher ed that this toolkit also addresses. So things like, very similar to the list Kim just gave, but vision, strategy, diversity, equity, and inclusion and fostering that, people in teams engaging those stakeholders, advocacy and communication, sense making, and learning. So how do the organizations really engage in these activities of understanding the change and then also preparing for the long term. So very similar to Kotter, there that in the Kezar and other researchers model. But the other piece that they also add that would be a little different than Kotter, is the levers or opportunities for change within higher ed are a little different. So we use both models because they’re very important, but it adds some of the higher ed context we’ve been talking about to the change process.

Rebecca:: One of the things you both mentioned earlier is leading change from where you are. That brings in the idea of both top-down and grassroots models depending on [LAUGHTER] where you’re situated in an institution. So can you talk a little bit about the different kinds of strategies you might use depending on where you sit in the hierarchy, and maybe the role of shared governance depending on where you’re sitting in that hierarchy.

Kim: Yeah. So I think when Jen and I talk about this, what we say is that we’re all somewhere in the middle. Depending on who you are, there are people to whom you report, and there are constituent groups that you work with, or people who report to you. And so if you’re a president, you have a board of trustees. If you are a dean, you have the provost, and then you have faculty. For us, we’re part of the system administration structure, and so we have people that we report to, and we have teams that we lead, and then we have all the campuses. So I think it’s important to just think about where you are and who are the stakeholders that you can influence, who are the stakeholders that you support. I often think about who is impacted by the change, and whose input is critical to the success of the change. And so in terms of some strategies, Jen talked about Adrianna Kezar, she talks about shared leadership and leadership in a collective process. And so the idea that we share ownership, we share responsibility for the change, and by working together collaboratively we can accomplish the change. And in SUNY, that is just so much a part of our process. And what I will say about that is some people fight it. Some people are frustrated by the fact that we have to engage all these people. If you can embrace that, and you can recognize that those people are your volunteer army, so to speak, you can have more reach, more impact, and again, that sustainability is a piece of it. And the other thing I’ll say about that is communication is critical. When you have the concept of shared ownership, or collective ownership of change, if people aren’t all in the know about where you are and how things are going when you’re having successes, when you’re not how you’re addressing those challenges, then you can lose people, and people can get frustrated or feel like they don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. We haven’t said this yet, but many people resist change, not because they don’t want to change, but out of fear of not being able to do what they do well. People know how to do what they’re doing today well, and when we ask them to change, sometimes that resistance is fear that I won’t be able to do it well. Things like communication and engagement help people have confidence in their ability to continue to do things well.

Jennifer:: I would also say top down, bottom up. These terms are things that we’ve labeled in the change effort. So if the change is coming from senior leadership, that’s top down, and it’s coming from bottom up, from one faculty member’s idea of what they want to do. I mean, it’s very siloed. So in change, where we see the change that becomes successful as Kim mentioned, is this shared leadership. There has to be a willingness and a mindset to do that kind of work in an organization. Sometimes you find yourself in an organization or a college that may not have that aptitude. So really understanding the context that you’re working in and where you want to go with this change, especially if it’s a bottom-up change. If you’re a senior leader, how do you want to engage the people that are affected by the change, as Kim mentioned. I also think in some of the research that I’ve done in my own work, so I did a literature review that was published in the Journal of Post-Secondary Student Success on change. And Kim mentioned this, but it’s really out there in the literature, which is the context of the change matters to folks, the awareness, whether they are understanding the change and the motivation behind it, that’s really important, because we are people, and we have our own motivations plus institutional motivation, and then process and all these things at any given time can really impact the change that is happening. So really understanding that and being able to first of all acknowledge it, and then look at ways in which you can build that group of people to help with whatever, if it’s top down or bottom up, change, but really thinking about, as Kim mentioned, the communication, the engaging of stakeholders, and then reflecting: Is this working? Are you evaluating the change? Are there things we need to do differently? Are there different people we need to engage? And Adrianna Kezar talks a lot about this, is sometimes we start in a direction and we have to stop and say, “Okay, if this isn’t working, why is this not working, and how do we better understand it? Is it supposed to be something that should be an easy change, technical change, something that should be easy to do, or is it adaptive, where the cultures and the norms and things are underlying.” So I think all of that, it is very complex, but I think the key is also understanding these things are going on, acknowledging them, and then planning for them.

Rebecca:: I think a good example of this is in our faculty accessibility fellows that we’ve had at SUNY Oswego, we’ve had some really interesting examples of faculty leveraging some of the influence that they have with their colleagues, for example, in their department or their students in their class, and helping the folks around them recognize some of the easy changes that they can make in digital accessibility by sharing some technical skills, for example, with their colleagues or even with their students, and having their sphere of influence make changes in the culture in their kind of immediate sphere of influence change, and you can kind of see that start to blossom out from where they’re situated. And so that’s an example of someone not recognizing immediately that they have this kind of influence, but that happens.

Jennifer:: We see that often with the work we do, where you have change leaders doing change work, and then they have to find other change leaders, because it’s often hard and complex work, and it’s time consuming, and there’s often a real desire to make these changes, as you mentioned, and then finding others who are at that same mindset, both on your campus and your department, but also within other colleges and other external factors. I know that some of the change that we are seeing in the system and in colleges, is coming from external factors, and that might be a positive thing, especially if that helps the change happen that people want to have happen. They can also be a challenge in that if it’s working against the culture of the institution and what folks think should happen, Kezar talks about this a lot, is the ethics around change, and we talked about values, but there’s ethical considerations that even in a change project, that folks may come at it a little bit differently, and that also breeds resistance that we know is a barrier to some of the change. But not all resistance is bad resistance, some of the resistance tells us that there needs to be a different way of looking at things, or a different movement that needs to happen to support that change. So it’s not all resistance to change isn’t necessarily bad, and I think the research does call that out as well.

John: If we go back to that example of trying to spread inclusive teaching techniques on a campus, we do see some different values from faculty in different departments. Some faculty and some departments see themselves as being gatekeepers who maintain the quality of higher ed by failing as many students as they can to try to keep limiting the number of people who pass through those gates. How can we bring those people into discussions when they believe strongly that what they’re doing is the best way of doing this, and that everyone else is perhaps going in a wrong direction?

Kim: So, I’ll just say I think one of the really important things to do is bring them in as part of your guiding coalition. We need that voice to be at the table as we’re talking about the why of change, and if there is something about the way they’re viewing it and the way they’re experiencing it, quality in education is a really important factor. We often talk at SUNY about providing affordable access to high quality education. They believe they’re bringing that perspective of I’m keeping this high quality. And so when you can start to talk about what that means and how we measure quality, and how their practices may be contributing to or not contributing to that, I think that’s a way to understand both where they’re coming from and what’s important to them, and have that be part of the change initiative. And so it’s about meeting people where they are and engaging them, as opposed to oftentimes we say we’re just not going to invite them to the party. We’re going to go around them, and if they don’t come along, so what? And that’s a decision that you have to make about your team and what change you’re trying to affect. How significant is that perspective and how important is it to really understand it and address it? I’m the kind of person who when I hear those really strong perspectives, my gut reaction is to pull them in, and let’s talk about that. Let’s hear about that, and let’s think about how that factors into the design of whatever change we’re going to do.

Jennifer:: In some of the work we’ve done at the system level with faculty, especially in developmental education redesign, we’ve had some of these similar conversations that is this the right thing for students? Should we keep a really high quality education? It means these things and this kind of math courses that they need to take. And I think what we found as well, just as Kim said, is bringing people to the table to talk about it, discuss it, understand it. It may not be that their view is the view of the change effort going forward, but it does add or change how that might be interpreted or made better based on those viewpoints. So that kind of inclusiveness of a diversity of thought on the change project is part of the process. And then in some cases, there’ll be people who are just against change because of it. There’s a lot of resistance that’s personal resistance to change, or has something that isn’t uncoverable through a conversation. And then you have to make some decisions about if this change is going forward, how do you engage as many people as possible, but not everyone, and that is a challenge, especially in teaching, especially in the idea of what are we doing to support our students in an inclusive way? But at some point, if we just let all of the people who don’t want the change their voice to be the strongest, then the value to students is compromised. But it’s also important to make sure that all voices come to the table and are able to discuss it in a way that’s civil discourse that we can understand and that can make the change project better.

Rebecca:: You addressed this a little bit already, but context clearly matters, and higher ed is not uniform at all. Even within our system, it’s quite diverse. So how is it important, or in what ways is it important to work within a singular institution and adopt strategies or adjust strategies to really take into account the culture of the place, where it is in this moment when the change is initiating, and how might it evolve over time as the culture of the place changes over time.

Jennifer:: I would say for that, in particular, the research that Kezar and her colleagues have done on context is really important because culture is one of the many contextual elements that we’re talking about. And I think adapting the culture to the context, especially in the variety of higher education institutions we have, it’s really an important part of the process for a successful change project, if we want to call it that, mobilizing and implementing and then codifying that change in an environment changes the culture often. So understanding it really helps with missteps. So if the institution has unique rules or values or processes that might impact how that leader, whether it’s someone in the middle of the organization, the upper part of the organization, or a real grassroots makes a misstep, is about not understanding or identifying the culture and other contextual elements, and then they’ll use different levers, so whether it’s a strategic planning process or an evaluation process for faculty to really understand how that’s going to work within that contextual culture. You mentioned it, it’s institution type, it’s governance structures, it’s politics, it’s human capital, it’s resources, and then it’s the external factors that are really impacting either departments, divisions and whole colleges. So I think that acknowledgement, that there is that happening and going on, and then what does that, as Kim mentioned with all the other eight steps of Kotter, how do we actually plan for it? How do we think about that before we launch into whatever change project we’re going to take on? And I think that’s one thing we’ve seen a lot are there are toolkits and models out there to help support that, that folks don’t have to do this work alone or without some forethought about how to approach it in their culture.

Rebecca:: And that that culture can change over time.

Jennifer:: Oh yes,

Rebecca:: The organization 20 years ago is not this organization today.

Jennifer:: Well, and it’s also that, with the change project, if it’s organizational culture that you’re trying to change, I would work a lot with community colleges and their desire to change some of their structures to better support student, not just access, but student success and retention, moving students and really understanding what their needs are to move forward in their community college structure, that’s big change, and that has a lot of moving factors involved in it, and a lot of contextual factors involved, and sometimes takes a long time. And so it is, I think, ultimately trying to move the culture towards this culture of student success that it’s going to change the culture with the change project. But yes, the institutions of 20 years ago are not where we are today, and our students aren’t the same. So some of this change is important because students change, and we need to be understanding of what the environment is and what is surrounding them and what we’re dealing with today versus 20 or 30 years ago.

Kim: If I could just add one comment to this on a very practical level, because the change projects that Jen and I are involved in, we sit at system office and oftentimes where this is about change that has to happen at the campus level. And to your point,

Rebecca:, about how different every campus is in the culture and the context of every campus is different. One of the strategies that has worked, well, I think, in our projects, is that we have a lead person at the campus, a champion, somebody who is kind of a liaison to us to be able to talk about and communicate what the current context and culture is of the campus. What are their current pain points? What are they trying to do? How can they leverage what we’re trying to do to accomplish their own changes? And so, having that structure of a champion in the organization who can be the conduit to those of us who are leading the wider scale change has been really, really helpful to making sure that that local context and culture can be accounted for. The other benefit, and Jen talked about this, is it creates a community of all of those campus leads who can support and help each other. And that structure and that approach works for us at the system level with campuses. But if you’re on a campus level and you’re trying to affect a change across all the faculty, you have different colleges, you have different departments, so you could think about applying that structure at the campus level, or whatever organizational level, the change is occurring. And I think that bringing people together, to go back to Kotter a little bit, it’s about creating that guiding coalition and then enlisting the volunteer army. So those are some of the really key ways that you account for the different context and culture of individual campuses.

Rebecca:: One of the things that you brought up earlier, and I think might be helpful for folks is to dig a little bit into the role of shared governance, which sometimes I think it’s there, but sometimes folks don’t fully know how to use that lever. You kind of hinted at the role of shared governance throughout the entire eight steps, that shared governance is actually involved in all eight steps, but, could you talk through that a little bit?

Kim: Sure. Yeah. So for me, and this is kind of a lesson that you learn over time, that’s part of SUNY’s culture is shared governance is very strong and very highly valued. And so when I’m thinking about a change project, one of the first questions is, where and how do I engage them? And it’s usually early, and it’s always often. So for us at the system level, we have the presidents of the University Faculty Senate and the President of the Faculty Council of Community Colleges. And so there’s two groups, and those presidents are very involved. So whatever the initial group or committee is that is thinking about the change or articulating the vision, we engage them in helping to create that. I’m going back to my eight steps as we are creating that sense of urgency. Does it resonate with them? What are their perspectives on that? As we’re forming the guiding coalition, they’re part of it. Always ask for a rep from both groups to be on our core team, committee, governance structure, whatever we’re forming. I always want them to be involved in it. As we’re creating the vision for change, they are able to weigh in on that and to provide the perspective of how’s this going to resonate with faculty. A lot of times when we’re talking about the work that we do, there’s this question of, what is individual faculty call versus what is an institution’s decision versus what can we decide at the system level? Those are very different, and so they provide good perspectives on that that help us throughout the stage. They’re a big part of communicating the vision. They’re a big part of bringing in others to act on that vision, creating that volunteer army. When we have wins to celebrate, I’m always sending them things, saying, “Can you send this out to your constituents?” And so that word is getting out. They invite me to their plenaries. So whenever I go to their plenary sessions, and I think Jen goes to some of them as well, we get to talk about what we’re doing, so that all the delegates here, and so they’re just a part of it all throughout because it is such a strong part of the ethos of what we do here in SUNY. And if we didn’t engage them, they would be kind of out there on the side, always wondering, questioning, challenging, and rightfully so, in my opinion.

Jennifer:: I would just add that on the campus level, I think you both probably know even better than we do about the need for the different voices involved in shared governance for projects that are going to really impact big groups of people on a campus, and how do you bring them into the process and make sure that there’s appropriate places. And some of the research I’ve done, not just here in New York State, but in other parts of the country, a really big piece of what matters in this particularly organizational change is communication, of course, we’ve talked about, but in reflection on the process, but engaging the right stakeholders. And that’s a shared governance piece, because it’s often faculty, but also in our environments, in New York, it’s collective bargaining units and other things. So your governance is a bigger group, often than just faculty’s voice, but an important thing that I think leaders who are undertaking this kind of work really need to make sure fit into whatever change model, like Kim said, whether it’s Kotter or Kezar’s Change Toolkit, or whatever model of change you’re looking at, because that’s part of the engaging stakeholders and the shared leadership of a change project that’s going to be more successful than just a small group of people making decisions, and that happens often, unfortunately. But I think the idea is, the more engagement and understanding people have of different shared leadership, the more that they’ll use that as part of a change project that’s affecting the whole campus, in some cases, or if it’s a department, it affects all the people in that department, or a division, or a college. So I think it’s an intentional thing that needs to be done, both at the campus level and the system level, to make sure shared governance is a part of the process, and sometimes that really works well. And we see those projects where that’s working really well, and then we see the projects that it isn’t working well, and sometimes we step in and say, “Have you thought about engaging in shared governance processes? Have you followed [LAUGHTER] your shared governance processes on the campus?” So you often, sometimes have to stop, reflect, and see if that’s actually happening. But it’s a great point, because I think the most successful projects in higher ed have that really embedded intention of shared governance. There’s no single one way to do all of this. Each campus is going to approach it a little different, but there are tools out there to support change leadership for colleges and system folks in higher education. So we’re also looking to make sure that we bring some of that to the table. And many of these are free resources or books that are available. And I think that’s important, because I think sometimes we launch into change projects, there’s a timeliness or an urgency sometimes, and yeah, as urgent as something might be and important to student success or student retention or the institution’s well being, some planning that goes into it often saves a lot of challenges or resistance or barriers as you move through the process. With like any project, with a little planning, you can sort of overcome some of those things before they become issues. So I think this understanding and knowledge and bringing this to higher education is really important. But there’s not one way to do all this work, and that’s what makes it so challenging and complex, is there are multiple models. There are multiple ways in which context is going to matter to institutions and systems. But the more simple we can make it, and the more easy it is for people to identify what this is, that really will help, I think, overall, mitigate some of the issues with the needed change that has to happen with our institutions for our students.

Kim: I’ll just add that this is something you can learn. One of the reasons that Jen and I started the course that we’re teaching is because it is something that you can learn. It’s something that we’ve learned. And so to be able to provide the opportunity for people who want to learn and understand what can we do to help improve the effectiveness of change initiatives is something that you can learn. A lot of it is intuitive, but some of it is just codifying what you think of as good, intuitive practices and following a process and a methodology and to the tools that Jen mentioned, we end our course with providing folks with a template to outline what you would do in a change plan following Kotter’s eight steps, and so to be able to take what they’ve learned throughout the course and outline a project that they want to do, or are thinking about, or maybe have done, and say, “What would that look like if we ran through Kotter’s eight steps?” It’s just a real easy tool that they can use to apply that, when they finish the course, they feel like they’ve got a language, they’ve got some tools, they’ve got a network of people that they can reach out to. And so that’s really what our goal is in teaching the course is to help more people to be able to do this.

Rebecca:: It really seems like the key features are some intentionality, some structure, some interaction, some collaboration, and not a lot of just reporting out. The interactive component seems really important.

Jennifer:: And I think that your outline there is very succinct, and I think it’s excellent, but within that, there’s so much embedded for organizations. So I think we are really trying to support people and understanding that sometimes just thinking those things through a little bit ahead of time is going to save a lot of time for a project that needs to get done fairly quickly, because many change projects are time sensitive. Although the organizational change projects, often the research tells us, takes a really long time, but the idea is that we need to do things quickly. And I think sometimes that can be really problematic. And if we just take the list that you just had and just kind of say, “Okay, let’s look at these things ahead of time, it saves a lot of issues, because both Kotter and Kezar talk about 70% of change projects fail. So people are launching into change projects trying to get them done, and the intent that they had is not happening. So we have to think about a little bit of a better way to support, through research and through practice, the things that do work and that can work in an organization, in college.

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?” …which is certainly an important question to ask involving change management.

Jennifer:: So as we mentioned, we have a course currently through the Center for Professional Development here at SUNY, and we are actually just in the process of extending that to a second course to create a leading change in higher education certificate through the Center for Professional Development for faculty and staff. We have faculty and staff within our SUNY system, but we’ve had folks from outside the state come and take the course, which has been really great, because leading change in higher education isn’t just a thing that we’re doing here. That’s a national effort, and there’s many national organizations that have taken on some of this work, so we really wanted to be able to support the work that’s going on in our state, but also really bring these principles wherever we can to support higher education change efforts. So that’s what’s next for us, and we look to, in the future, to be able to support the leadership work in that way. Kim, did you want to add anything to that?

Kim: Yeah, so another part of what’s next has to do with our community of practice. So we formed a community of practice across SUNY for Change Leadership, which started out to support the implementation of the SUNY Digital Learning Environment (the DLE), which was our Brightspace implementation and required a significant amount of change at the campus level. So we created this community because, back to where the change really needs to happen, we wanted to empower campus leaders to not see it as something that was being done to them, but instead try to empower them to take a more proactive role in leading the change so they could accomplish their own objectives for their campus. And so based on the success of that, we’ve expanded that out to anyone at the campus level who is leading change initiatives, and we’ve brought in someone to facilitate that community of practice. And starting with this fall, there have been regular monthly webinars. And what we’re looking to for the next academic year is more campuses sharing, because now the Community of Practice has grown, and so rather than us leading the discussions and facilitating those, more campus leadership, campus engagement to share what’s happening at the campus level and to hope to continue to grow that and expand it as we try to do what we initially set out to do, which is build the capacity for change leadership at the campus level at SUNY.

John: Well, thank you. This was a really interesting discussion, and I think it’s an area where many people need to work on their skills in doing this if we are to adapt to this rapidly changing environment.

Rebecca:: Yeah, thanks for joining us.

Jennifer:: Thank you.

Kim: Thanks for having us. This was a lot of fun.

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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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359. Privacy Booths

Posted in authentic learning, edtech, educational technology, higher education, learning spaces, mental health, open pedagogy, privacy, student podcasts, teaching
September 18, 2024

There are few private quiet spaces on most college campuses where students can record podcasts or converse online with counselors or health care providers. In this episode, Michael Revenaugh and Forrest Warner join us to discuss how Hamilton College addressed this by providing students with privacy booths and soundproof recording spaces

Michael is an instructional designer who specializes in video and audio production at Hamilton College. Forrest Warner is also an instructional designer with a focus on 3D modeling, graphic design, visualization, spatial analysis, and video and audio production, also at Hamilton College.

Transcript

John: There are few private quiet spaces on most college campuses where students can record podcasts or converse online with counselors or health care providers. In this episode, we examine how one campus addressed this by providing students with privacy booths and soundproof recording spaces.

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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 Michael Revenaugh and Forrest Warner. Michael is an instructional designer who specializes in video and audio production at Hamilton College. Forrest Warner is also an instructional designer with a focus on 3D modeling, graphic design, visualization, spatial analysis, and video and audio production, also at Hamilton College. At Educause last year, Michael and Forrest presented on the use of privacy booths at their institution. Welcome Michael and Forrest.

Forrest: Hey, thanks for having us.

Michael: Yeah, thanks.

Forrest: We’re super excited to be here.

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

Michael: I do not currently have tea, I apologize, but my go to is a Celestial Seasonings mint magic.

John: Very good.

Forrest: I’m rolling with chamomile this morning. I like to keep it calm, keep it smooth in the mornings. This is nice.

Rebecca: That sounds good.

Forrest: What are you all drinking?

Rebecca: I have Hunan Noir.

John: …and I have spring cherry green tea.

Forrest: Very nice.

Rebecca: We invite you here today to discuss the use of privacy booths on your campus. Can you talk a little bit about how this initiative started?

Forrest: So Mike actually joined us kind of just after we had started this initiative. And actually I started just after they had actually even come up with the idea. Nhora Serrano, our director, and I believe is was also Brett Olsen, were working on expanding podcasting on campus. And what we were running into, and I think I talked to you about this while we were at EDUCAUSE, was we have spaces on campus that can do those kinds of things, but they’re department specific, so you have to be taking courses in that department in order to have access to those spaces. So if you ever wanted to use any kind of recording equipment or anything like that, it just wasn’t available to you, unless you happen to be taking a video course, an audio course, whatever. So they were looking to expand in the library to give them better access. And the idea they had come up with at the time was to get a couple of free standing audio booths. We had ended up finding a model that we liked. Studio Bricks was the company that we had, the plus one model, which was kind of meant for like one and a half people. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know how you fit a half person there, but whatever.

Michael: I think our record was four at one time, [LAUGHTER] students decided that they could get in there. It was evocative of phone booth stuffing. [LAUGHTER]

Forrest: Yeah, and I mean, the booths were great. We had them for a year. It was kind of leading up to the renovation that we ended up doing that following summer. So that would have been the fall of ‘22 is when we got them. They worked really well for what they were. They were kind of like a phone booth style booth. It had audio proofing, and they had a dedicated computer, audio equipment. We had Shure microphones in there as well. It was a nice little space, and really just kind of like, “Hey, let’s see if this is something the students are interested in.” And right off the bat, we had a lot of action from that. And then, leading into the renovation, we decided to go all in, and we built four of the audio booths, one of which we’re in right now, which are much larger, and then we can talk about it more detail a little bit. But great spaces… get used a lot. The data is like off the charts. We’re getting a lot of information, a lot of people using the spaces. So yeah, very cool.

Michael: Yeah. We had a bit of a unique opportunity to transition, because the first floor of the Burke library here at Hamilton underwent a gut renovation in the summer of ‘23 so we could remap the entire floor plan, and we did, and we moved some things around, and were able to allocate space specifically for these four booths. So it wasn’t found space, we could build them specifically to our needs, which was great.

John: And the booths that you’re referring to and that you’re sitting in right now seats two comfortably. How many people could fit inside of one of those?

Forrest: The rooms are like eight by eight…

Michael: Yeah, eight foot by eight foot. So we have two dedicated microphones so people can do interviews or projects, like we are doing currently, but we also have some more video applications. As you can see, but our listeners can’t, behind us we have pull-down green screens. We have three point lighting installed in them too. And we also have ceiling microphones that we can switch to. So if people want to do any sort of smaller video project, newscast, what have you, they can use those things as well, but we did primarily design them with podcasting in mind. So as far as fitting people in here, I think the most I’ve done is 10, and that’s usually like new student orientation or Parents Weekend or faculty instruction. Like, here’s the things that we have, come on, like, let’s all get into this one so I can point out all the cool stuff and then shoving them in that way, but I think typical student usage maxes out around four or five, and they seem to be able to do that with no problem.

Rebecca: How soundproof are these studios?

Forrest: Fairly, fairly soundproof. They’re nice because they do have some paneling. Actually, the gray paneling you can kind of see right now, that’s all sound paneling. And also the door itself has soundproofing capabilities as well, so it does stay very quiet in here.

Michael: Yeah, I unfortunately don’t have a number on it, but walking outside, I’m unable to hear conversations that happen. And I’m sure if screaming started, then it would get through, but for any mid-range conversation, you can’t hear anything from the outside.

Forrest: Which is obviously ideal.

Michael: Yeah.

John: Between the smaller privacy booths and these larger rooms, how many of these do you have on campus, and how do students access them? Are they just open all the time, or must they be reserved in advance?

Michael: That’s a great question. We actually have four currently: the two modular ones that we used, we have shifted out of the library, we’ve repurposed them, and currently [LAUGHTER] they’re trying to figure out what to do with them. We were demonstrating a need for this student privacy, and it’s just kind of figuring out where on campus they would best go, as far as like existing blueprints and footprints, and where the students would be able to find and access them. In terms of scheduling for our four permanent booths, they are open whenever the library is open, but they must be scheduled. We currently use the 25 live scheduler, which is the system that the campus uses, so students are limited. They can book up to three hours a day in the production booths, and then the next day they can get three more. But we try to limit it that way and encourage students, as much as possible, to make reservations, especially towards the end of the semester, when they are getting very crowded, and also just for our use in data collection. One of the frustrating things that we run into is we have the statistics that we’re able to collect, but because the booths are open all the time, we know that they’re being used a lot more than the recorded data reflects, because students are seeing that there’s an open door, I’m just going to pop in there and not fill out a form online, because why would I? I’m right here.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how you’re seeing the spaces used? What kinds of projects students are doing in them?

Michael: Sure, in our data collection, we basically ask to avoid any infringing privacy. We ask if they’re using them for an academic purpose or other. And other encompasses a wide…

Forrest: …everything

Michael: … range of things, either someone’s personal podcast project, we’re seeing a lot of telehealth and therapy sessions going on, we’ve partnered with the Wellness Center on campus, so students that partake in online therapy are frequently looking for some place to go, that they don’t have two or three roommates hovering around all the time. So they’re pointing them in our direction to let them know that these resources are available. Job interviews are another big one for students looking for internships or opportunities after they graduate.

Forrest: Yeah, the big thing to note about Hamilton in particular is that it’s an entirely residential campus, so every student lives on campus, and finding the time and space just to gain a little bit of privacy is actually really difficult. And like Mike said, it’s difficult if you’re in your room trying to do a counseling session, and then your roommate and three of their best friends bust into the room while you’re doing that. It’s like, oof, really hard to do that, it can probably be really annoying in general. But these spaces, again, right from the beginning, we didn’t mention that we partnered with the health center, and they’ve been a great partner, and they’ve been directing students to these spaces. So if they want to do their telehealth in some place private, this is available to them. And these have been really great for those purposes, on top of the academic uses. It’s kind of like the added bonus for finding that people are probably using these spaces more for those uses than academic at certain points. So the data has been really great, and even just the amount of reservations has been really great. A little bit of data is actually really telling. So the students have been really helpful with that.

Michael: Yeah, also completely separate from the technological aspect, I believe they’re popular just for quiet study spaces as well. So sometimes I’ll come in in the morning and all of the keyboards and mouse and everything will just be pushed completely out of the way. The students just set up their own computer, and we don’t know what they’re doing, [LAUGHTER] so it could just be studying or small group work, but they’re available, and as long as they’re not stepping on each other’s toes as far as the schedule is concerned, it’s up to them what they want to do.

Forrest: Yeah, so far, so good.

Rebecca: I think what’s nice is that it’s in the library, so there’s no stigma to maybe what the space is being used for; whereas, if a space is in a particular location, like if the space was in a health center, or if the space is in career services, or if the space is in a particular location, then there’s an assumption of what someone’s maybe doing in that space. But because that’s in the library, that’s a multi-use space, and there is less stigma attached to maybe why someone’s using this space. So there’s less judgment or less concern about why someone’s using this space, and I really like that about this particular project.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. There’s less stigma if you’re setting up a therapy appointment and you don’t want people to know, say “Oh, I’m just going to the library,” and it’s completely fine. It’s also a universal space on campus for everyone, which allows it to be more welcoming. We talked about the other booths that are in the studio arts building. And if you are a government major who’s never stepped foot in that building, then there’s kind of a territorialism about it. It’s like, “Oh, I have to go to this science building, but I’m not a science major. Are they going to know that I’m not a science major and chase me away?” It’s like, no, the library is for everyone, so everyone is welcome to come in and use these spaces. And we think that has really been reflected in the numbers.

John: How have faculty responded? Have they increased the number of digital storytelling or podcast projects in response to the availability of these booths?

Michael: Well, that is another role that we as instructional designers have on campus, is that we offer course support. So I primarily take the lead in podcast assignments, so I make myself available to courses that express interest in it. So we see that ebbs and flows. There tends to be more in the fall than in the spring, but faculty are adding more podcasts in terms of final projects to their courses. Some other language faculty will take advantage of the technology for pronunciation and recording that way… small group discussion for a less like fully produced final project.

Forrest: I mean, it’s really kind of from all over the place, and it’s interesting, and actually, this is probably a good time for me to kind of walk through those numbers, just to kind of give you an idea of the general response over time. We introduced the freestanding booths in the fall of ‘22. We got a total of 76 reserved hours, which was primarily aimed at the academic which was like, “Yeah, that seems like a pretty good number.” We were pretty excited about it. And then in the spring of ‘23 we ended up with 181 reserved hours, which is a huge jump. And we’re like, “Hey, yeah, man, these are catching on. This is awesome.” We’re feeling good about going into the fall with the new booth. Fall ‘23 after the renovation had happened, we went from 181 to 934 reserved hours. So again, that was like, “holy moly.” And actually, that’s, I believe when we talked, that’s what you saw. We also have some additional data from this past semester. We went from 934 to 1496 reserved hours. So another 60% jump in usage. And really exciting. Again, it just kind of shows you like, they want this. And I think we had about 300 unique users to the space, potentially, students that would have never spent time in the library, to students that tend to spend time here, but just they’re like, “Oh, this is a really great resource.” So yeah, we were really excited to see how much these are actively getting used. And this is primarily student usage.

Michael: Yeah, there are some faculty that use it for research. They conduct interviews. Actually, one of our college archivists has started doing oral histories. So he’ll bring in community members and use the production booths to record oral histories of departments or initiatives that the college has done over the years, and then back those up in the college archives. So we’re just seeing a really wide range of use in them. And it really speaks to there has been a need for spaces like this.

Forrest: I think leaving it open has always been kind of the way to do it. It’s not creating this wall like we said, it’s like giving people as much access as they can get and just see what they do with it. And I think if you gatekeep or whatever, you’re just holding yourself back. So this has been a really great experiment. I think it’s been very successful for us.

Rebecca: Is there so much demand now that you need more booths?

Forrest: It’s a good question.

Michael: That is a good question. I don’t think we’ve maxed out, again, we’re kind of hamstrung with our data from the people that actually reserve the booths, versus just going and use it. In my personal experience, if I’ve ever run into a conflict, like, oh, I have this booth reserved, and I come down and someone’s sitting there working on something. I’m an adult, so they tend not to give me any pushback. And I say, “Excuse me, I have this booth reserved,” and they leave immediately. But we also have our digital media tutors who are in the library, and then, just conversationally, we haven’t really heard of any conflicts.

Forrest: Even, like, sometimes there’s even open booths available. So if for some reason, somebody was in your space, you could go over and just reserve it real quick, because we keep reservation QR codes right on the doors. So if anybody walks up at any time is like, “Hey, I want to pop in the booth, they can reserve right then.”And we do get lots of walk ins. The data we gave you is only a percentage [LAUGHTER] of who’s actually using the space.

Michael: Again, as is perhaps predictable, towards the end of the semester, around finals week, once those podcast projects are coming due, we do see a big spike in the usage, and then they’re pretty much booked as long as the library is open. But the library also adds extra hours then too. So I don’t think we’ve yet maxed them out, [LAUGHTER] but there’s an additional building that’s being built behind the library and has potential for additional spaces in this vein.

Forrest: Yeah, it’s essentially a Center for Digital innovation, and it’s supposed to help us expand into things like we built the new Makerspace with the new renovation. This will hopefully be more of some spaces dedicated, some probably a little bit more, I don’t want to say intense, but getting into things like robotics or metalworking,

Michael: Yeah…more purpose built, as Forrest mentioned, as part of the renovation, we’ve made a makerspace which houses our 3D printing and virtual reality, and unity and video game development, but we were a little bit hamstrung by we were renovating a space and things that require access to ventilation, like soldering or circuitry or things like that, unfortunately, we weren’t able to fit into that particular makerspace.

Forrest: The new building will have more of those capabilities, again, allowing folks to expand the capabilities and what they’re able to do safely. That’s always the concern with any of these spaces, just making sure everybody knows what they’re doing, and obviously not sitting there breathing in toxic fumes is always a good thing.

Michael: And Hamilton’s slogan, “Know thyself,” and it’s an open curriculum, so the entire college really encourages student exploration and trying new stuff. So all of the things that we’ve been doing here at the Library really fit that mission.

John: You mentioned that towards the end of the semester, there were a lot of student podcast projects coming due. Could you give us a feel for the types of classes in which podcast projects are used, or some examples of the types of podcast assignments that have been assigned there?

Michael: I’m working with one class right now that is in the Classics Department. It’s a mythology course, and it’s going to be a modern retelling of classic myths. And so are going to be working with scripting those out. I think one of the more successful ones that Forrest and I both worked on was in the art department, which was a course on architecture and politics.

Forrest: …art history.

Michael: …art history, yes. So it was a course focused on the intersection of politics and political environment, and how that influenced the type of buildings that were being built and vice versa. And that was pretty fascinating.

Forrest: Yeah, and that was partnered with a WordPress workshop. So the students were doing some web design as well, and they were able to incorporate their podcasts into their web pages that they were creating as part of a course website. And obviously we’re able to add a lot more media and other things to it. So it was really a cool, really multimedia project, and the students really did a lot of work.

Michael: Yeah, some examples from that were: one student did like the new Buffalo Bills stadium and how taxpayer money is used for certain private building projects. There were a couple that were very Hamilton-centric. One building in Hamilton has a very historic wallpaper to it. However, it is also problematic, and it’s just like, “what is the tension between preserving this very famous printmaker piece of history, but how do you properly present that when it does have its flaws? So they’re really well produced and well thought out. And then with course help, again, with the supplemental materials available on their WordPress websites, they were really well presented as well.

Forrest: I mean, you probably get a couple different courses that are like, some are like, they want more of a production value. And then some are like, a little bit…

Michael: I’d say most of the ones we work with are kind of the NPR-style journalistic reporting, but I also worked with a professor in the creative writing department who wanted to give students experience reading their own work. So they would record themselves reading short stories, and then added a little production element, like some spooky music beds or sound effect underlay to emphasize parts of that. And then there are some people that are just like, I want four students to read this article and have a discussion about it on microphone, and then don’t need that edit at all. Just 20 minutes. Hit record, hit stop, turn it in.

John: Sounds like a nice mix of projects.

Rebecca: What role does the library play in preserving some of this work and archiving it?

Forrest: Our primary role is support. We work with the faculty to help them design these assignments, figure out when we’re going to come by and work with the students, give them general support after the fact, and we help them with things like they’re looking to clean up everything. We’ll work with them on that. And then if they want to actively put that out into the world, sometimes, like, especially with things like websites and things, faculties want to make sure everybody can see what the students are making, what they’re doing, which I think is really exciting. Those will continue to exist in that form. Sometimes faculty members don’t want that stuff out in the world too, and they want the students to feel that they can do these assignments discuss in a way that they want to still keep their opinions relatively private, so they might not put those out into the world, and depending on the project, I think sometimes those end up in the archive, but I think that comes from the faculty end more than anything, not necessarily that we do that automatically. So I think if it’s going to be part of the long-term archival process at the college, I think they can just actually work with our on-campus archivist and make it available.

Michael: Yeah, I think they primarily land as student projects, and we make them aware that if you want to share this, either some things that you need to be more mindful of. Music rights is one. But if professors just want their students to go nuts, have fun, this is only for in class, then sure your intro can be Beyonce, but if you want to then share this out in the world or put it in a portfolio to bring with you to a job interview, then you might not want to do that. But, in general, once they’re student projects, they belong to the students. We’ll sometimes have a copy of them, like on Blackboard, if they host them that way. And then it’s as far as archiving, it’s basically like, do we archive student papers? Not particularly. So even the WordPress sites, once they get up, we make it clear to the professors, like, yeah, we built this website for your class, and it’s your responsibility. Like, how long do you want to keep maintaining it? Or make sure, like, the links don’t age out, or you end up, like, with a broken page that people can get to in four years time. It’s relatively new, so we are still negotiating that as we get new projects coming in.

Rebecca: For folks that might want to get started in creating media booth or privacy booths on their campus, what advice might you have in kind of those initial steps to get started or starting a conversation about that on their campuses.

Forrest: I got a feeling most campuses actively could use the privacy spaces. I mean, even just seeing what we’ve gone through, I’m sure there’s lots of ways to apply that to any college at any size. Again, we’re a unique size. We have about 1800, 1900 students. Again, they’re all residential, so it’s easy to kind of like focus them. For us, we were lucky enough to be able to have the resources to afford to purchase things like the freestanding booths. They aren’t cheap. I wouldn’t say everybody could just go out and do that, but you could easily change a space that maybe isn’t getting used very much into a podcasting space. Again, just to kind of prove the point, see if it’s necessary, you know, soundproof it how you can, get the equipment that you can, and then advertise it as an open space. The students actively respond. They definitely love the access, particularly if you’re running into the same issues that we’re running into with departmentally kind of blocked off spaces… things like that.

Michael: I’d say, location, location, location. And it’s a tough choice, because space is at a premium, and we understand that there’s a lot of things that need to happen, but if you can find a space in a building that is open to the entire campus that students feel comfortable in, that students naturally pass, or that is on their way to somewhere else, like centrally located, and that would be good. But again, it’s a delicate balancing act, because you want them to be as soundproof as possible, but you also want there to be a lot of people around.

Forrest: Just hiding these in the basement somewhere, I think, is probably not, even though that always seems like it would make sense. It’s like, if they don’t see them, they’re just not going to use them.

Michael: Yeah, out of sight, out of mind. Just put them somewhere that the students would go anyway.

Rebecca: Do you think partnering with the health center or wellness center was actually really important in the initial steps of your project?

Michael: Absolutely. I’d say yes, very much so, as far as publicizing them to the students and making sure that we had the right setup, making sure that the right equipment was here, making sure that students knew about them and felt comfortable. This Wellness Center also donates fidget toys. So we have in each thing, we have baskets of toys and things that people can manipulate with their hands when they’re doing therapy, just that sort of somatic processing. So invaluable resource to connect over there and just make sure that the students know about it. Because again, communicating with students, I don’t think we’ve really fully figured it out. You can blast them with emails all you want, but if they see, oh, library, delete. Like getting students to internalize the information is an ongoing challenge, so I guess the more angles you can get them with communication from the Wellness Center, communication from the library, communication from their faculty, just to get feet in the door.

John: In terms of the rooms that are set up for podcasting, what type of software do you use, and do you provide any training or instructions for students on how to record?

Michael: Yes, hardware wise, we have our Shure SM7Bs. We also have a Vocaster 2…

Forrest: …audio interface. The audio interface, very simple to use, just relatively compared to some of the more complicated things out there, especially for first-time users.

Michael: And for our audio processing and editing, we use Audacity primarily. It’s free, it’s open source. It gets the job done, an equity issue. Students have been paying enough for tuition and books to be like, “Oh, okay. And for your final project, you need to buy Adobe.” Yeah. [LAUGHTER] We do offer support for like GarageBand and Audition and a few other things that if students want to use it, then, yeah, we can help them out with it. But in course support, I default to Audacity. I encourage them. It’s free, platform agnostic. Download it right now. Typically for core support, I will do two workshops. I will do a pre-production and things to keep in mind, and then I’ll do a post-production where I do an intro to audacity in class for those ones. But also our digital media tutors are trained up on Audacity and can at least do the basics. So if you have a question and when you’re in the booth, flag them down. I h ave office hours, and I’m always happy to walk through things or troubleshoot any problems that students have.

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

Michael: Coming up next? We are learning how to best utilize our green screens right now. They’re really easy to use with like Zoom backgrounds, but finding a good video processing software that is more intuitive or easy for the students to take advantage of. So there’s a little tweaks here and there across the board.

Forrest: And now we’re prepping for the new building, one of the things we’re actually doing more of too, because again, we built the maker space last summer. We got through a year with it, and we’re like, okay, we survived. Everything seems to be working and helping bring people into the space. I know we’re working with our students, our DMTs, who were primarily just tutors in the past. We want to get the space a little bit more active and a little bit more engaging for them and the students on campus. So we had been doing some what we called lovingly Makerspace Mondays, and those were staff led in the past. Those are events that would take place on Monday evenings, where we would need some sort of workshop that was more meant for fun. Those were great. Staff have a hard time doing them the whole semester, so we’ve opened it up to our DMTs, who are actually going to help us provide programming throughout the semester and hopefully bring in a lot more students in general, just to see what’s available. They don’t have to necessarily follow, kind of like, Hey, we’re doing 3D printing VR or whatever, the students, the DMTs, can explore areas that they’re particularly interested in. It could be crafty. It could be computer based. You can do stuff about ChatGPT. You can do stuff about air dry clay. So there’s all these different options. And again, we’re just trying to open it up. so people feel like, “oh, I can do a lot more here than I thought.” So again, just trying to get the word out and yeah, usually that’s through word of mouth, which, honestly, even with the production booth, I think was part of what made it successful was actually more about word of mouth than direct advertisement. So if you make a good interesting space, the students will find it,

John: And those numbers you reported certainly attest to the importance of that word of mouth in spreading the word about the availability of these resources. It sounds like a really nice arrangement.

Rebecca: Sounds like a lot of fun.

Michael: Yeah, definitely.

Forrest: It is that too. Yeah. When things succeed, you always feel good, and then you just have to, if things aren’t going as smoothly as you want, you just tweak it up and make some changes and keep pushing forward, right? So I feel like we’re been super successful here. And there’s other areas I’m sure we could do a little better in, and we’re just going to keep pushing forward.

Rebecca: Well, it’s nice to hear some updates from my hometown.

Forrest: Clintonian?

Michael: Nice, that’s awesome.

Forrest: I’m from Sandy Pond, so both my parents graduated from Oswego, which is where both of you are at, right?

Rebecca: Yes.

Michael: Both of my parents graduated from Oswego as well, teachers all day, right? [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Some hometown exchanges. [LAUGHTER]

Michael: That’s right, [LAUGHTER] my wife is a native Clintonian

Rebecca: Small world. Thanks for joining us.

Michael: This was great.

Forrest: All right, yeah. Thank you for having us.

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

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

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358. Essentials of the New Science of Learning

Posted in attention, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, equity, first-generation, first-year classes, higher education, interleaved practice, learning, metacognition, neuromyths, pedagogy, reflective practice, retrieval practice, spaced practice, stereotype threat, teaching
September 11, 2024

Most freshman students enter college with little knowledge of evidence-based strategies for successfully navigating the college experience. In this episode, Todd Zakrajsek joins us to discuss a variety of approaches that students can use to more efficiently achieve their learning goals. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the Director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published six books (so far) in the past five years. His most recent book is Essentials of the New Science of Learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Most freshman students enter college with little knowledge of evidence-based strategies for successfully navigating the college experience. In this episode, we explore a variety of approaches that students can use to more efficiently achieve their learning goals.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Todd Zakrajsek. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the Director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published six books (so far) in the past five years. His most recent book is Essentials of the New Science of Learning. Welcome back, Todd.

Todd: Well, thank you. It’s great to be back.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: Todd, what do you got today?

Todd: Oh, today I have a white ginger pear.

Rebecca: Nice.

John: Very nice. And I am drinking something similar, a ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: Nice. I’ve got Cardamon Cinnamon.

John: Nice.

John: We were just talking to you a few months ago about your last most recent book, but we’ve invited you here today to discuss your newest most recent book of the year. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin story of The Essentials of the New Science of Learning: The Power of Learning in Harmony with Your Brain.

Todd: When I worked on The New Science of Learning: Learning in Harmony with Your Brain, that book, its third edition has gotten up to be about 265 pages, and the book was actually written for students. It is still for students, but when it started, the whole concept of this book is it would be used as kind of an ancillary text in a class. And a friend of mine out in California used it in a community college in a developmental math class, and they found, actually, when they used the book in the class, that the attrition rate went down. And for developmental math, that’s a very important concept. In fact, the students who did pass for the next semester, the students who had learned about the science of learning, that attrition rate was even further down. So it’s helped out a lot. The problem is, once it gets up to 265 pages, you can’t use it as kind of an ancillary book. You know, “Read this chapter, it’ll take you 10 minutes.” The New Science of Learning is built more to be like a primary book for a first-year seminar course. So this book, being The Essentials, allowed me to come back and add some new things about AI and a few other things. Is kind of a streamlined version of that that can be used in a class, so that you could say to your students, for instance, “Hey, on Wednesday, make sure you read the chapter on sleep,” and then you talk about the content. When Wednesday comes along, you spend five minutes talking about sleep, what did you learn? And then you move on with the content. And that’s how you can infuse it in the class.

Rebecca: Why isn’t this material taught to students earlier in their education process.

Todd: Aaaah… this is a question that we’ve talked about before with other kinds of science of learning things. It’s frustrating. I take the breath because it’s frustrating. It’s funny, across country, if you ask students two questions: “do you like to learn?” and “do you like school?” you tend to find that the students will say yes to both those questions until they hit right about third grade. In third grade, we start picking up some of the testing and really focusing more on content, and at that point, we start telling students, you need to learn these things, but we don’t tell them how. There just is this assumption that because people are learners, that they can learn it. But learning out of a book is very artificial in terms of how we evolved. So the concept is students should be taught that, and I really believe they should be taught that starting in about third grade. And could you imagine a student that comes into college that has spent eight or nine years learning how to learn along with the content that they have? I think it would be amazing, but typically not done, so it should really be done as soon as they get to college and as quickly as possible. And it doesn’t matter who I talk to. I have talked to students from all kinds of disciplines. I’ve talked to students in medical schools, nursing programs, a lot of the health professions, they do a ton of content really fast. I’ve talked to students in philosophy and history and psychology, and almost invariably, people will come up afterwards and say, “Why doesn’t anybody teach us this stuff?” And so the students see value in it too. We get focused on content, and we don’t tend to do it.

Rebecca: It’s interesting, Todd, that you’re saying that there’s a wide range of people that are hungry for this information because before we were recording, I was doing graduate student orientation. I was talking to a couple of MBA students who had been out in the field, into their career 10 years, coming back to school, and I had embedded some of this kind of information in their online orientation. They said, “Oh yeah, I watched this TED talk that you had included [LAUGHTER] about the science of learning, and it was really great. It was so interesting.” And I had included that study from Michelle Miller.

Todd: Oh, yeah.

Rebecca: And he had read it, and it was fascinating. He’s like, “I was so surprised that I didn’t know some of this stuff.” So we’re talking about it at lunch today, and they were all talking about, “Yeah, that was really interesting. I’m so glad you included that.” But it just goes to show that it doesn’t really matter who our learners are. They’re really hungry for this information, and it’s really valuable to them.

Todd: Yeah, I will say quickly, in terms of the book that a lot of this is drawn from, which is The New Science of Learning, the full version of it that I have at the end is, if you find this valuable, or if you’d like to just ask other questions, I put my email address in there and just send me an email. And I got an email like, three weeks ago from a student who’s going into a health professions field, and he’s going in as a post grad. I mean, he’s going in as a master’s student, and they’re all required to read that book coming into the class, so it’s at any level. In fact, faculty find a lot of the stuff new and interesting to them, so we should teach it to everybody. Somebody should write a book about it.

Rebecca: Huh.

John: And fortunately, you have.

Todd: Hey, [LAUGHTER] me and a couple other people have too.[LAUGHTER]

John: So you mostly focus on effective learning strategies and how students can use the time more efficiently in learning. You also provide a lot of other advice to students about challenges that might arise for different students or students in different categories. Could you talk a little bit about some of the other advice you provide in addition to those directly related to learning?

Todd: Yeah, there’s a lot of other things that I think are really important. There’s a chapter on how we learn and a chapter on how we remember things, which learning and memory are separate, and those talk about the structures and the way we do that, but there’s so many other things that come into play, and a lot of things from social psychology. Everybody talks about cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology, but if a person understands exactly how to learn. If you’re really, really frustrated at the time you’re trying to learn, it doesn’t matter the actual cognitive structures, because the social part of it just wipes that out. And so things like microaggressions, how we perceive other people and how we interact with other people, has a huge impact on learning. Stereotype threat, whenever we get in a situation, if we’ve got a person who is a minority within a class. So it could be a male in a nursing program with mostly women. It could be in some discipline that has mostly men with a woman. It could be a student from an underrepresented group. When there’s an individual there that doesn’t typically come into the play, they’re under this pressure all the time that if they do poorly, then it reflects on “Well, maybe men can’t do nursing,” and so there’s extra pressure on them, and they tend to struggle with that. And things like imposter syndrome, almost everybody I’ve talked to at some point or another says that I don’t feel like I really belong, or I don’t feel like I know as much as other people think I know. And so those types of things, along with goal setting and dealing with or helping people who are working. I mean, what happens when you’re trying to work? Huge proportion of our students now work part time, but there’s a large portion also that work full time in addition to being full-time students. So a lot of those things can be drawn into this whole concept, and all those things are in the book.

Rebecca: One of the topics that you discuss is managing cognitive load. Can you talk about some of the recommendations you make related to this?

Todd: Yeah, cognitive load is one of the foundational things. And if you’re a listener and do not understand what cognitive load is, one of the best things you can do is get up to speed on that a little bit. A place to start, I always say, is Wikipedia. And if there was a motto that I would throw in there, it would be Wikipedia, great place to start, and a hideous place to finish. And I just want to point that out there, because there’s some stuff you can get pretty quickly. But here’s the thing with cognitive load, is it basically boils down to there’s only so much information your brain can process at any given time. And if you try to do too much, then it pretty much shuts down enough in one area so that it can process a different area. Be a little bit like if you’re putting together an IKEA bookshelf for the very first time, and your significant other comes into the room and says, “Hey, where do you want to have lunch?” And you may very well say, “Not right now,” and your brain’s just full with all of these parts and how things are supposed to fit together. Once you put 10, 15 IKEA bookcases together, you could carry on a conversation with somebody else while you’re doing it. And that’s an all cognitive load issue. The first time you do something, it is taxing, and it takes extra energy for your brain to sort out all the pieces. But the more you do something, the easier it becomes. And this is why, as an expert, you have to be careful. Because as an expert, I might say to my students, read this article, this 10-page article, and I might read that 10-page article very, very quickly, because I’ve read this kind of stuff over and over and over again, but the novice is going to take way more time because it’s their first time doing it. So we can talk to students about the fact that this is going to be hard when you start, and then as you do it, more and more, it’ll be easier, and that’s a cognitive load issue. As you actually work on things as combinations, as things come together, you build what are called schemas, and those are like scripts that all come together, and as you activate a whole schema, then that’s just there. If I go golfing, I don’t have to think about every little piece of that. Or if I’m driving, I don’t have to think about how hard I turn the wheel and turning on a turn signal and everything else. I have a schema for being in a car and the types of things you do. So as we practice and go through these things, that’s the cognitive load issue. There’s going to be heavy cognitive load, which we have to be cognizant of, and then, as we do it, it becomes easier. And then there’s another piece to this. Is if there’s things in your environment that don’t help you to learn, but they take up cognitive energy, so a conversation by people on the other side of the room, pretty much everybody in here listening this has probably, at some point been reading something, and people are talking, and you either say, “Excuse me, could you quit talking?” Or you pack up and go someplace else. If you’re reading a hard article, that will happen. If you’re reading something like a novel, people can be all over the room talking, and you don’t care. That’s a cognitive load issue. Hard article, high cognitive load, an easy thing, lower cognitive load. This is one I will jump in there and say, too, this is an area that AI has me very concerned. Because as you start anything, you start at the foundational level, and it’s challenging, but as you work with it over and over again, it becomes less and less challenging, then you can move up to more complex things. If AI is doing the simple foundational stuff for us, then we don’t develop that base that allows us to kind of automatically process something, so that we can move to a higher, more complicated thing and then practice that and go to a higher, more complicated thing. If AI is doing a chunk of it, we don’t ever develop the base of it. And so I’m concerned with respect to cognitive load development and how AI might come into play with that, but that’s the two-minute version of a topic that we spend two or three class periods on [LAUGHTER] in a course in psychology.

John: One of the many other topics you address in this book is metacognition. Why is developing metacognition so important? And what are some strategies that students can use to increase their metacognition?

Todd: Yeah, cognitive load is huge. Metacognition is right in there next to it. And metacognition basically boils down to knowing how much you know, knowing how much you’re thinking about something. It’s the process of thinking about the process, and we often don’t do that. It’s actually kind of fascinating when you chat with people, is they’ll engage in a behavior and not think anything about what they’re doing. So we fall into patterns. And so I’ve had students for years that will come in and say, “You know, Dr Z, I’ve read the chapter like four times and I’m still struggling.” And I’ll say, “Well, why did you read it four times?” It’s like, “Well, I need to to learn it.” “Isn’t there any other way you could learn it?” And as I’m asking these questions, I’m trying to bring up a metacognitive concept of let’s reflect on your learning process. If you’re struggling with the material when you read it, it may very well be that two, or three, four more times… In fact, research has shown that you’re probably not going to learn anymore, because if you’re not paying attention to your cognitive functioning, you may very well be reading while you’re daydreaming about something else. And the reason I mention that is that that is not being aware of your processing of information. So again, something that all of us have done, you finish reading a chapter of a book, or you finish reading an article, and just as you get to the end of it, it’s like, “Oh, my word,the entire time I was thinking about bacon or lunch of some kind.” And if that’s the case, you’ve just wasted that time. So for metacognition, it’s kind of thinking about how you’re studying, evaluating it, to what extent are you successful When you sit down and study for an hour, and if you quiz yourself, do you know more or don’t you? So practicing with that, thinking about while you’re studying, what’s going well and what’s not going well. If you’re frustrated in your surroundings and you’re having trouble processing, then you can make changes. If you don’t think about it, you can’t and then also thinking back. So after I take a test or after I study, I can think what went well and what didn’t go well. And that’s all kind of metacognitive things that, because of the way we live, we just don’t tend to do them. And so you know people who will repeat the same pattern over and over and over again, and we use phrases like, “You’ve done this four times, it’s always failed. What were you thinking?” And when we say “What were you thinking?” we’re actually asking a person, to what extent are you engaging in metacognition. But quite frankly, the “What were you thinking?” it’s such an automatic statement that it really doesn’t pertain to thinking.

Rebecca: Feel like a next interesting leap might be to talk about the myth of learning styles, which is something that people often cycle through and say often as well, like, “I’m a visual learner, and this isn’t in a visual style, so I can’t possibly learn it.” And this is something that you address in your book as well.

Todd: Yeah, I think foundationally, first of all, for anybody listening, I’m pretty sure you probably know about learning styles, but if you don’t, there’s a whole concept out there by Neil Fleming came up with this in terms of the learning styles index. And essentially, you take 13,14 quiz questions and you answer these questions, and based on how you answer them, you’re categorized as typically, either a visual learner, an auditory learner, or a kinesthetic learner. A couple of foundational things. Number one, anytime there’s some kind of a test that you can take on Facebook or online or in a quiz book or someplace or even somebody reading 13 items to you, and that’s supposed to tell you how you function as a human being. We’re way more complex than that. Psychologists will ask hundreds of questions to come up with a response that says based on the hundreds of questions that we have, all these validated questions, we believe you will tend to do this. Now, think about that for a second. That’s after a whole battery of tests. They’re saying we think you tend to do this, which has got a lot of hedging in it, which is different than 13 items, “Oh, you’re a visual learner.” So keep in mind that it doesn’t work that way. Number two is that there’s nobody who scores like every item is all on visual or every item is on kinesthetic. If you tend to answer, let’s just say 40% of your answers are on visual learning, and 30% are on auditory learning and 30% are on kinesthetic learning, you’d get categorized as a visual learner because that had the highest percentage. But really it’s a 40-30-30. Why wouldn’t you be categorized as all three? But boxes are easier to deal with, so the learning styles has lots of concepts behind it. Research will also indicate or show you pretty quickly if you read through this stuff, it’s just not how learning works. I would just love to say this, because I don’t want to just say learning styles isn’t good. Here’s the concept Is basically the best way to learn is to practice with the material in a way in which you want to retrieve it. If you want to actually dance, the best way to learn is kinesthetically, by dancing. You might get some auditory or visual information of here’s what the pose looks like, but by and large, you’re going to want to dance. If you’re going to want to be able to recognize certain kind of prints from Monet versus Manet or somebody else in painting, then probably the best thing to do is look at a lot of paintings. Visual would make sense there. Semantic learning, if you want to remember something, you’re probably going to want to read it or hear about it, and so you want to practice it in the way you’re going to retrieve it. The reason people love this concept of learning styles is people love to take quizzes that put them into boxes. I don’t get this, but people take quizzes all the time. Here’s 10 ways to determine what kind of a spouse you are, or five things you can do to figure out what kind of parent you are. We love to do those. And the problem is that learning styles comes along and people think that’s how I learn. And based on what you said at the beginning, Rebecca, when a student says, “You don’t use many images and I’m a visual learner, therefore I can’t learn from you,” they won’t learn from you. But they won’t learn from you because they’re a visual learner, they won’t learn from you because in their head they’re thinking, I can’t learn from you. And when your brain is processing, “I can’t learn this. I can’t learn this. I can’t learn this.” there is so much cognitive load dealing with the fact you can’t learn it there’s no room for learning. So if you think of yourself as a visual learner, I would say, just think about it in terms of you like to use visual things to help you to learn, but there’s a lot of other ways that you can learn as well.

John: Going back to an earlier location in your book, one of the things you talk about as a suggestion for students is that they avoid dichotomous thinking, and you also add in a discussion in the essentials book of generative AI. So this is kind of a mashup of those two concepts. But will the use of generative AI be helpful or harmful for student learning?

Todd: Yes, [LAUGHTER] yeah, the dichotomous thinking, I will say, just to address that very quickly, is that whole concept is that it’s the weakest kind of thinking. It’s basically you put somebody in a box and you don’t have to deal with them anymore, because this is them. That person’s a very aggressive individual. Everything gets interpreted as aggressive because that’s who they are. We don’t stop and think about on a given day, maybe a lot of bad things have happened; on a different day, maybe good things happen. So maybe they tend to be more aggressive, but they’re not just yes/no, you are/you’re not. So AI… people have asked multiple times, is this terrible or is this good? I tell you, everything has nuances. So the bad side, I do think AI is going to be really tricky for us, because humans, in fact, all organisms, will take the easiest route we can. In many respects, we should. If we are going to work and it’s five miles away and there’s a car in the driveway, taking the car makes a lot of sense. So I should take the easy way. However, there’s going to be times when I’m going to want to be physiologically in good shape. I might need to run. I might want to walk up a flight of stairs. I might just want to live for a while, in which case I should work on helping my heart to be better. And the human body is fantastic, and the more you push something, the more it will develop. And so I love to ask students, for instance, I’ll say, “Anybody in here run or jog?” And a whole bunch of hands will go up, and I’ll say, “Why? You got cars. You should just take a car.” And somebody will say, “Well, yeah, but I want to be healthier.” I’ll say, “Perfect. Let’s talk AI for a minute.” For AI, if we let the AI do all the things for us, then we don’t develop those things. And so if I’m taking a poetry class and I just keep having AI write the poems, write the poems, write the poems. It can do it. I can edit them, but I’m not going to learn how to write and how to express myself. And so the issue we’re going to have is, if we don’t learn how to do those things, especially at the beginning level, kind of the cognitive load thing, we’re not going to be able to do them when it’s more complicated. So I think we have to be very careful of that. And for faculty, I think we have to be very careful about focusing on things like academic misconduct. Yes, there are students who will use AI to cheat, but students didn’t start cheating because AI came along. Based on the culture in your classroom, the rapport you have with your students will make a huge difference in the extent to which students will engage in academically honest behaviors. So anyway, those types of things, we’ll watch out for. The good side, there are so many things that this is going to be able to use for good. For instance, we know from study after study after study that the more you practice at something, the better you become. And we have said, I have said for years too, the best way to learn anything is to teach it to somebody else, if you don’t have a family member or a roommate, that you can teach it to, then teach it to a dog, teach it to a sofa, just teach it. And the concept there is, the more you explain something, the better you get at it. AI is beautiful for this, because it can work with you. Actually, I tried something recently I thought was so much fun. I told AI, and the scenario in my head was, I’m a student in a psychology class, and I just learned the routes of persuasion by Cialdini, and now I have to remember how this persuasion all works. Well, one of the best ways to do that is to practice with it. And so I fired up ChatGPT and the prompt I gave it was, “Hey, how about if we do a role play? I’m going to be a car salesman, and you’re going to be in the market to buy a car. You do have enough money, you could buy today, but you want to be a little cautious, because you want to get input from your family, and you want to make sure you get a good value and get the kind of car you want. So overall, if I really can sell you, you’ll buy, but otherwise you’re going to wait. What do you think?” And then ChatGPT typed out, “This sounds like fun. Can you show me some vans?” And so then I said, “This is a van,” and I started to sell it. Now, the reason I’m mentioning this is that I could use all my different persuasion techniques that I learned, and ChatGPT kept asking me questions back. So I’d say this van has something about scarcity. Here’s a good one for scarcity. It’s one of the principles to persuade people. I said, “Whis is the last van on the lot. And so ChatGPT said, “Oh, that’s unfortunate, because I’m really interested in the van. Is there a possibility of getting another one if this one sells before I actually sign the paper?” And now what ChatGPT has just done is to see if they could reduce that concept of basically a quantity issue of scarcity. If this is the only van, a human would basically say, “Oh no, it’s the only van. I better get it before somebody else does,” so with ChaGPT, it says, “Can you get another one from a different lot?” And if I said, “Yep”, then the scarcity goes down a little bit. So then I have to think, “Oh, how can I bring scarcity back in a different way? It’s on sale, but the sale is going to end at the end of this week, so we’re going to have to make a decision fast… that scarcity in a sense of we don’t have much time. And so the point is that I role played with ChatGPT for about 20 minutes on these principles of persuasion. We’ll be able to do that. We’ll be able to do simulations. We’ll be able to do repetition. I can say to ChatGPT, and I’ve done this one. “Give me 10 multiple choice questions about metacognition for a student in a second-year college course, and the course is on the basics of cognition.” The better prompts you lay out there, the better it will do. It asked me multiple choice questions. And the last one I’ll mention for this, because there’s so many different ways you could do it, I actually gave it a definition of metacognition. I wrote out kind of what it is, and then I just put it in ChatGPT, and I said, if I answered a question of “What is metacognition?” with this response, and I was a senior in a cognitive psych course, because it’s different from being a first-year student, but it’s going to give you feedback: “If I’m a senior in a cognitive psych course, what grade would I get?” And I purposely made it bad, and it said you would get an “F” on this. And then I said, “Why?” And it explained a couple reasons why. And then I rewrote it, one of the best responses I could possibly dream up. And then ChatGPT said, “this is a good solid A minus.” And I said, “Why is this an A minus?” And it pointed out that I hadn’t done very much on the reflective component. And I thought, “hmm, alright, I did miss that piece.” And so when I can practice quiz questions like that, I can have it ask me multiple choice questions. And much like Khan Academy, when Sal Khan came up with Khan Academy, he said, one of the things that students love about this is you can go and watch the same video four or five times, and it doesn’t get frustrated with you. ChatGPT, you can struggle with learning a concept, it’s never going to get frustrated with you because you’re struggling. Whereas a human might say, in their head, it’s like, “Oh my word. You should have gotten this by now.” So I know that was a very long answer. It’s a huge, huge issue in education right now, but we can’t be focused on the academic misconduct side of it. We really need to be focusing on how can we use it to instill deeper learning?

Rebecca: That’s a nice transition to one of the other topics that you have in your book, which is maybe something that faculty might be interested in knowing is in your book, [LAUGHTER] which is that you advise students to spend two hours outside of class for every hour they spent in class, which is definitely an expectation, I think, that many faculty have, but it’s not always conveyed to students. I know I mention it to students, [LAUGHTER] but can you talk a little bit about that?

Todd: Yeah, so I put it in there, and it was funny because it was a section I put in the book, and one of the reviewers looked at it and said, “Why did you put this in here? And then it was funny because the editor was reading the book and said, “I love the fact that you put the breakdown in there about how much you should study and how much time you should commit, because people don’t normally know this stuff.” And so I put it in there because I think people struggle with this, and for students to understand, if it’s a course that requires extra work and things, if it’s a three-credit hour course, you’re expected to do two hours outside for every hour inside. This is the way the system was built up. So a three-credit hour class is going to take you about nine hours a week. The three hours in class, then the two-to-one ratio will give you six hours outside of class. This is why, if you take 12 to 13 credit hours, or 13 to 14 credit hours, it’s considered full time, because 13 credit hours would put you up around 39 hours total, when you put all the hours together, and that’s a full-time deal. And by the way, just so I don’t forget this, or I put it off to the side, if it’s an activity course, something you wouldn’t do anything outside, that’s why a one-credit hour class might meet for three hours, like a jogging class or something, racquetball class, because there’s not outside work. The two-to-one ratio kind of thing, all of that’s done in class. So that kind of gives you a sense of how much you should be studying. Here’s the tricky spot, nobody does it. I shouldn’t say nobody, very few people do it. The reason is that a lot of students can get by with studying less than two hours outside for every hour inside class. And when students will say they don’t need to, or faculty will say they don’t do it, and people focus on the fact that, “Well, you know, students don’t really have to spend that much time.” I love to respond with, oh, so they all are getting 100% on their quizzes and tests and perfect papers, right? And to that, we say, “Well, not really.” System’s set up that you expect a lot of B’s and C’s and D’s. Well, what if you spent two hours outside for every hour inside? It would be a very different thing. But the problem again, is, “Whew, if students are not spending the two hours outside for every hour inside, and then you are, then it seemed like you’re taking more time, and you feel like, why am I spending all this time when they’re not?” And so we look to other people, and unfortunately, we don’t do that. But I can tell you, for students, if you do actually sit down and study for two hours outside of class, for every hour inside class, and do it before the class period. When you walk in, you already know material there. You understand the foundation of it. And if the instructor is doing a good job, they’re pushing you and showing you connections and everything, you can process that because you have the material. If you walk into class after skimming a Chapter, you don’t have the foundational material to make the classroom more effective for a learning situation.

John: I was really happy to see that advice there, because I tell students the same thing, and they always seem really, really surprised. Or in an online class if you tell them they should expect to spend nine hours there, there’s often an even larger surprise, because they think it’ll take as much time as what they spend in high school, which is often zero outside of class and with an online class, zero doesn’t work very well, especially. So I’m glad you included that. But one of the other things you include in your book in terms of advice to students is you talk about various fallacies, and one of those is a sunk cost fallacy, which is something that we talk about quite a bit in economics, especially behavioral economists. So could you talk a little bit about this fallacy and how it might affect students?

Todd: Yeah, sunk cost is something that I always covered in psychology, because I love the concept, psychological concept. It’s really important a sunk cost basically just simply means, how much energy or resources have you put into a course of action. That’s basically it. How much have you sunk into this thing? The problem is for humans, is we overestimate the value of that. If you’ve worked on a paper for six hours and it turns out you’re heading in the wrong direction, best thing you can do is pitch the paper and just start over. But people say, “Well, wait a minute, I’ve put six hours in on this. I must be able to salvage something of it.” And I watched a woman on television years ago, and I think it was Ukrainian eggs. It was when they hollow out the eggs, you get the insides out, and you cut half of it away, so you’re dealing with, like a little half of a shell. And they do these beautiful, intricate things inside the shell. And she pointed out, she said, “If you ever drop one of those, the best thing you can do is stomp on it,” because if you drop it and it cracks, you try to fix it, and you spend so much time trying to fix it, because the sunk cost is, “I’ve already put hours into this,” then you waste a lot of time trying to fix it, your better bet is just to throw it away and start over.” And that’s why she said stomp on it, so you’re not tempted to do that. So in your work, we’ll do this all the time. We try things, and we get all this investment… we might be in a class that’s just we’re flunking the class, and this is always hard, and you always want to always talk to an advisor if any students are listening, or tell your students always talk to an advisor before you ever drop a class, because it can have ramifications, especially if it drops you down to part-time status. But if you are going to flunk class, the best thing you can do is just stop working in that class. Take the F if you’re past the drop period, and just focus your energy somewhere else. And students will often say, “but yeah, but I’ve already put so much time in this.” And when I was teaching intro psychology, this is a particular one is students would come in with like, 50% average and come into the final, and I’d say, it doesn’t matter, you’d need a 98% to get a passing grade. You’re going to get an F. And the students say, “Well, yeah, but I put so much energy this I’m going to try” and I’ll say “If you’ve averaged 50, you’re not going to score above an A plus. It’s just not going to work. Take your time and study for your other classes and then come back and take this class next semester.” So we do this a lot. We have people who will stay in relationships because they’ve been in relationships for a while. So it’s like, I’m gonna hang in there when, you know, maybe it’s the end of the relationship. We’ll have people that put so much money into a car they’re gonna keep driving it. It might come to a point you just need to get rid of the car. So sometimes we’ll chase a course of action because we put so much money into it. The one thing I do want to point out, though, that’s important, is that sometimes sunk cost is very helpful. So if we’re in a job, for instance, that we’ve been in for five years, and we run into a really rough spot, we might say, “Well, I’ve been working pretty hard. I’m working my way up in this. I’ve got a lot invested. I’m going to stick this out.” A relationship’s another good example. Relationships do have rough times. And if you have been dating someone or married to somebody for a period of time, then it’s like, “I’m going to get through this because I have so much invested.” So a sunk cost can help you if down the road, it’s a good thing to stay in, but you’d be tempted to leave. College is a good example. I mean, junior year, a lot of people would quit, but it’s like, “I’ve already got three years in, I’m going to finish.” But at other times, we’ve got so much in, and it’s time to cut it loose. And this is the part where I love to tell people, when I was an undergraduate, I was a criminal justice major at first, and then I switched over and double majored with psychology, and then I ended up with a psych major and a criminal justice minor and a sociology minor, and I am one class short of having a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. And every time I tell that, there are people in the group that says “You should just take that class,” and I’d say, “Why?” And they say, “Well, because you’re one class short, you’ve got all that invested.” And to that, I get to say, “At my age, I’m getting close to retirement age. I’m never going to work as a police officer. I don’t even think those credits would count. But even so, what I did is I got to a point where I thought, is it worth it for me to spend a semester to finish this when I don’t believe it’s anything I will ever do. I worked with a police department for a short period of time. At the end, decided I just didn’t want to go that route. There’s no reason to finish that.” But even listening today, if I tell you, in an entire bachelor’s degree, I just need one more three-credit hour class, the inclinations to say, “Well, you should take it.” That’s a sunk cost.

Rebecca: As I’ve been listening to you talk today and thinking about the things in your book, and I was also thinking about a lot of the things that some of our faculty panelists said at our graduate orientation, I was very happy that a lot of those things aligned. That’s always good. And one of the things that came up actually at orientation was the recommendation from one of our panelists to really think about some wellness things like sleep and exercise. And that’s something that came up and eating well, which is something that is in your book. Can you talk a little bit about some of the benefits of having adequate sleep and engaging in exercise that you talk about in your book?

Todd: Yeah, it’s funny, because when I’m talking to students, especially, if there’s quite a bit of material, there’s invariably somebody will say: “So if there’s just one thing I should really work on, we’ve talked about the testing effect, practicing over and over and quizzing yourself. We’ve talked about things like interleaving, where you mix materials together, or spaced learning, where you space it out. And for memories, is to practice over and over types of things, and to say, “Which one should I really focus on?” I said “sleep.” The best thing you can do to be better at learning is to make sure you have a good chunk of sleep. Not only as a restful person, do you process information faster, but while you’re sleeping, you actually consolidate memories. You could study all day long, all through the night. Take a quiz, and you’ve all done this at some point, do okay on the quiz, because that’s right during the learning period, come back a week later, or final exam, for sure, and it’s like none of it’s there. Well, it’s because after you learned it, you never slept, which allows your brain to consolidate it. We actually now know that different stages of sleep will consolidate certain semantic like meaningful things. A different stage of sleep will solidify and consolidate repetition, like movement, so the kinesthetic things. So the physiology of what your brain does is really important. By the way. I was just reading something the other day too. I can’t cite it here, because I didn’t know I’d be talking about it, but it talked about the correlation between low levels of sleep and later cognitive decline, because while you sleep, the brain kind of flushes out all of the toxins, so to speak, and all the stuff it doesn’t need. It consolidates the stuff that’s important. It gets rid of the rest. And if you don’t sleep, a lot of that becomes muddled across time. And so sleep, physiologically, is just an amazing thing for you. And so that’s a really, really important thing. Exercise is another one. Regular aerobic exercise is just good for the learning process. I had a student that told me one time… it was funny, we were chatting about this… and said he does the best learning during basketball season when they’re exercising all the time. Coach makes them sleep an adequate amount, because it impacts your play, of course, and if it impacts your play. It probably impacts your learning too, right? So the concept there is that he said he always did better during basketball season because he was sleeping better and exercising better. Eating is the same thing. We know that simple sugars are not as good as complex carbohydrates. There’s actually ways that we can process this in terms of memory, and it doesn’t take very much liquid at all. If you get dehydrated, a little bit of dehydration, you have cognitive decline. In fact, it’s funny, because if you talk to somebody who is a health professional and you say, late in the day, “Man, I’m just confused and really having trouble processing things,” one of the first things that will ask you is, “How much did you drink today?” So it does have an impact on that. So, adequate hydration, not too much, but the right amount there, good nutrition, sleeping and exercise, those are four ways right there that you can actually impact your learning of material in classes… oh, and your health. I’d like to point out too that it’s one of those things that’s got the best side effect there is: it’s really good for learning and it’s also good for living.

Rebecca: One of the key tips that came up from our students and our faculty was to actually schedule some of those to make sure you’re doing those things.

Todd: Oh, totally. Yeah, eating too, I have to admit for myself, especially when it’s hot out. I didn’t understand this when I was younger, but I can eat breakfast and work outside in the yard, come in, drink a little bit, go back out, sit down and read a book and do some stuff, and realize at eight o’clock at night’s like, “Oh my word. I didn’t eat today,” and so I’m suddenly hungry, but then it’s late, so you’re eating at eight, nine o’clock, which is not ideal. But if you schedule it while you’re busy, and stick to it. If you’ve got it scheduled, you’re gonna eat at one o’clock or noon, and the bell rings summarize where you’re at, go eat, and then come back and then pick it up from there. Because if you think “I’ll just finish this section and then I’ll eat,” there’s been lots of study through the years that says that’s not as good as stopping, noting where you are and then coming back for most people.

John: And one of the things you talk about in your book is scheduling. And you also suggest there that you include a little bit of slack, because things don’t always take the amount of time that you anticipate. Could you talk just a little bit about that?

Todd: Yeah, I kind of laugh about this one, because, yeah, people are hideous at estimates. Almost everybody is. But I will tell you, folks with ADHD are particularly bad at it. And part of the issue you run into with ADHD is it’s not just that you’re distracted, is that you’re thinking to yourself, I will do this task, it will take like, 40 minutes, and then I’ll go do this other task. When I got tested for ADHD, after three questions, like, we’re good, we know exactly where we’re at. Anybody who knows me says you don’t need any kind of test. We’ve known that for years. I wish somebody had told me 10 years ago. But the reason I mentioned this is that I’m working really hard at some metacognitive kind of process of estimating how long it’s going to take me to do something. I set off the block of time. When the timer goes off, then I think about: “What did I do? What worked well? What didn’t work well?” That process takes seconds to do, by the way, it’s like, okay, “did it work or didn’t work?” And then if it does work, I think about what I did to kind of set that up. And if it doesn’t, I think about that. But I will tell you that I will often start out with a to do list of 10 items, and I’m sure that I’ll be done by noon, and so by 6pm I’ve gotten through three of them, and I still have seven to go. So I put those seven on my to do list for the next day, and then, because I am a super genius… I always use that phrase whenever I follow it with something that’s not super geniusy… but I’ll take those seven items and I’ll just put them on the to do list with another 10 items, and then I got 17 items that I’m going to do tomorrow, because that’s going to be easy to get through them. I’ll just do them really fast, and then I get through like five things. As you practice at that, you can actually practice at estimating how long things will take you, put it into a schedule. I did this was an intro psych class. It was one of the most impactful things I’ve done. Is the teacher had us keep track of one week in one-hour blocks. Like, if you sleep for eight hours, you block off and say, I slept. But then if you read, you put a block in for reading, and while you’re awake during the day, he had us doing metacognitive exercises too. You estimate how much do you think you’ll get done? How well did you do? And then you just put a grade in the block. So if it’s going to be I’m going to read the to read this chapter in this two hours, and I get through half of the chapter in the two hours. And I’ve done this other stuff, I get like, a D. And what I found was that I’m very effective in the morning, from about 6 am until about 10 am I can cram through… oh, it’s just so good. And then I find out that from about 2 to 4 pm I’m just awful. I have enough extrovertness in me that if I’m talking to somebody, it’s fine, but if I sit down to read something or work at something, it doesn’t work. So I schedule these things in. So I’m kind of coming back to the schedule, but I schedule these things in, but also try to make estimates of how long things will take. I will finish with this, tell your students, or ask your students, I guess, at the beginning of the semester to keep track of, as they read the first couple pages in every book, jot down, after five pages, how long did it take you, and figure out the average amount of time it takes you per page. Because students don’t understand this, and they’re not good at estimating their time. And I’ve had students before who are going to tell me, for the final exam, they’re going to reread all the chapters. And I say, how long is that going to take you? And they’ll say, “I don’t know.” And I’ll say, “The exam’s tomorrow. What do you think it’s going to be?” And students will tell me that they thought they could read a chapter in an hour, or the whole book in like six hours. And then they find out that their average is eight minutes a page, and say, “Alright, well, at eight minutes a page, you’re not going to read a chapter of 35 to 40 pages in an hour.” But the point is, it may be that you have a novel in English class that you average one minute a page. You might have a physics book where you average 20 minutes per page, and you might have a philosophy book where you average five minutes a page. If you know that, you can make some estimates. And so talk to your students about making those estimates. But rolling that all together, kind of figuring out estimates on how long things are going to take, and keep working at it, and then using metacognitive strategies to think about when it’s going well and not going well. And I’m still working at how to do this.

John: And that issue of cascading to do lists, one of the things I found is that there’s a lot of to do apps that you can put on your smartphone, and when the list gets too long, just start another one.

Rebecca: That’s what I do. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Well, there’s a great strategy that I really do like. You list the really important things as A’s and then B’s and then C’s. And the one strategy I read one time was great. It says, Put all your things on the list, put down your A’s, your B’s, and your C’s, and then delete all your C’s. [LAUGHTER] And so it’s that same kind of a thing as at the end of the day, they’re not going to get done, just pitch them. But yeah, we put too many things on the list. I’m trying right now. Actually, I’ve reframed it in my head, and I’m desperately trying to put down the amount of stuff that I think that I can get done by noon, and I still block off eight until 6pm but I put my to do list thinking this can get done at noon. If I get done at noon, you know what? I’m only gonna work a half a day. And when I’m better at it, I’ll probably put more items on the list. But for right now, yesterday, I still was working till 8 pm on my stuff that should have been done by noon. An another little tip I’ll give you… I’m getting better at some of these… I always make up my to do list now just before I go to bed, when I’m as tired as I can be during the day, because if you make a to do list in the morning when you’re feeling really full of energy, then you’re very optimistic. If you do it when you’re exhausted, it’s a little closer. [LAUGHTER]

John: I believe that behavioral economists refer to this phenomenon of underestimating the amount of time required for a task as the planning fallacy, and I believe that I’ve heard that the people who are most productive underestimate the amount of time required by more than other people tend to, otherwise they’d never undertake many of the tasks that they engage in. There was a Freakonomics episode on it that I just listened to recently.

Rebecca: In my design class, I have students keep time sheets for their projects and things, and that helps them become more aware of how long it takes them to do different parts of projects, so that if they were to take on freelance work or whatever, they have more of an idea of how long it actually takes them to do things, so that they could more adequately charge for work if they were to do that.

Todd: Rebecca, that’s a really, really important skill to teach them, because you could make up your mind you want to have a design company or a landscaping company, whatever it is, and if you’re hideous at estimating time, you’ll be out of business very quickly. When you explain to somebody, “Yeah, I’ll cut your loan on every week, and I’ll only charge you $20 because I think it’s going to take 10 minutes,” and then it turns out it takes two hours. You can’t stay in business like that. So I think that’s a great skill. See, we started out with the why don’t we teach these cognitive things early? This is one of those that you are doing, which is great. Teach them how to think about time.

Rebecca: Well, we could talk about really important things we could teach students all day long, but we do need to pay attention to our time, which we are not always good at doing. [LAUGHTER] So we always wrap up by asking: “what’s next?”

Todd: Probably just the last items on my to do list is next, [LAUGHTER] but right after that, I’m working on a couple things. So one of them is a book on lecturing and active learning. The research does not say that the active learning is more effective than lecturing. The research is very clear that says, when you combine the two, lecturing with active learning, it’s more effective than lecturing alone. So I’m working on a book that’s balancing the two. And then the other one is, I’ve really become pretty passionate lately about people that are not built for the way the educational system’s built. I love to use the phrase that education is kind of built for fast-talking, risk-taking extroverts. I’ve got that in the book, and actually in a couple of the book. And the idea is in class when the teacher says, “Could somebody tell me…” there’s hands going up before you actually get to the end of this question even from some people, individuals who think really fast, who are okay if they’re wrong, they’re taking a shot at it, and they’re extroverted in that they like to really have the energy to be around people. If you’re not one of those individuals, you’re actually at a disadvantage all the way through the educational system whenever something’s run like that. And so the other thing I’m working on right now is, how do we help the individuals who are shy, who are on the autism spectrum, who maybe have depressive episodes, individuals with food insecurity, housing insecurity, all these types of individuals who walk into a classroom and when they do really well, it’s because they’re doing so much more work. I should be careful. I don’t want to discount the people who are working hard in the classroom, but there’s individuals who are working way harder than other individuals, and there’s got to be a way to balance that a little bit. That’s what I’m working on now too.

Rebecca: Sound like really important, interesting projects.

John: And will those both be ready this year, or [LAUGHTER] will it take a little bit longer for those?

Todd: Probably Tuesday, I think… maybe Thursday. It’s interesting. I will say that I really love writing. It’s obvious, I’ve got several books out now. But I work with an editor. I have my own editor that I’ve hired now, and the reason I did that is because I’m not an editor. And what I used to do on books is I would write something and I would spend more time trying to edit it and get it to sound right than I was actually writing. And so the reason that I’m kind of cranking books out right now is I write it, I send it off to my editor, my editor reads it, comes back to me and says,” I like what you did here, but you might want to change that.” And then I just zip into the next thing. So it takes me about four months to write a book now. And so I would suspect that we will see one of those heading off… well, it won’t be too long.

Rebecca: Must be there on the early part of that list, that stuff before noon.

Todd: When I mentioned that keeping track of the day, it’s a really, really important thing. It’s because, yup, that’s exactly what it is. My writing time tends to be between 7am and 10am and then all my committee meetings are in the afternoons.

Rebecca: Prioritize.

Todd: Yeah, it’s like recording this show. Huh, look at this, 3:46 pm… Ha! Right, between two and four.

Rebecca: I did notice that. I was making that note,

Todd: Uh huh, I knew you were. Boy, we should do this sometime at 10 am You wouldn’t believe how fired up I am the.

Rebecca: Alright, but that’s when I prioritize my writing and doing stuff too.

John: We always enjoy talking to you, and we’re very much looking forward to talking to you about those next books as those approach,

Todd: I always love coming to this program. I get to sip my tea, which is always good, and chat with two of my favorite pod people.

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us, Todd.

Todd: Thanks for inviting 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.

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357. Inclusive Socratic Teaching

Posted in classroom community, collaborative learning, diversity, equity, gender bias, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, race, social justice, support network, teaching
September 4, 2024

Socratic teaching is a primary pedagogical technique in American law school education. In this episode, Jamie Abrams joins us to discuss barriers this method can impose and strategies for a more inclusive approach to Socratic teaching.

Jamie is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Legal Rhetoric Program at the American University Washington College of Law.  She has published numerous books, chapters, and articles, including several on legal education pedagogy. Jamie is the recipient of teaching awards from Blackboard, the University of Louisville, and the American University Washington College of Law. She also co-founded the Brandeis Human Rights Advocacy Program at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law which works to advance the human rights of immigrants, refugees, and noncitizens.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Socratic teaching is a primary pedagogical technique in American law school education. In this episode, we discuss barriers this method can impose and strategies for a more inclusive approach to Socratic teaching.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Jamie Abrams. Jamie is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Legal Rhetoric Program at the American University Washington College of Law. She has published numerous books, chapters, and articles, including several on legal education pedagogy. Jamie is the recipient of teaching awards from Blackboard, the University of Louisville, and the American University Washington College of Law. She also co-founded the Brandeis Human Rights Advocacy Program at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law which works to advance the human rights of immigrants, refugees, and noncitizens. Welcome, Jamie.

Jamie: Hello.

John: Our teas today are:… Jamie, are you drinking any tea?

Jamie: I am. I have a very simple green tea, but it’s in a special mug that one of my research assistants gave me that has a picture of the cover of a book I wrote and my research assistant worked on. So my tea is pretty basic, but my mug is pretty special.

John: And it’s on theme, because we will be talking about that book very shortly,

Rebecca: I have Scottish afternoon tea, despite the fact that we’re recording this in the morning. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have Lady Grey tea today.

Rebecca: That’s a good choice, John. We invited you here today, Jamie, to talk about your most recent book, the one that’s on the mug, Inclusive Socratic Teaching: Why Law Schools Need It and How to Achieve It. Socratic teaching has long been a hallmark of legal education. Why has there been such a high level of curricular conformity in legal education?

Jamie: Yeah, it’s really kind of shocking, right? If we think for a second about what lawyers do. We hire lawyers to be innovators, problem solvers, creative thinkers, storytellers. So the idea that we educate in such a lockstep way is really kind of befuddling to me. You would think that schools, especially in a competitive market packed in fighting for these students, would find ways to differentiate. So I think personally, the US News and the larger than life role that the rankings processes have played over the years is one piece of the story. I also think it’s a lot of mimicry. So I became a law professor, and I started teaching how my law professors taught me, who were teaching how their law professors taught them. And also, I think there’s very little incentive to innovate. You have to sort of cross a certain threshold and be a quality and strong teacher, but at the end of the day, most of the incentives in academia generally, are skewed toward publication and other things, and there’s not a lot of incentive within our institutions. There’s no one to tell that you’ve innovated. There’s no one celebrating it or putting it on the website, but they’ll put your book on the website, and they’ll put your publications on the website. But I do think it’s ironic that the Socratic method was innovative at one point, that it was revolutionary to legal education, and now 100 years later, I’m not sure we can call it revolutionary anymore.

John: What is some of the harm done by this focus on Socratic teaching?

Jamie: Yeah.So first, let me just define Socratic teaching, just to make sure. So folks might define it different ways, but it’s typically a large lecture hall full of students, one professor situated at the front, and that Professor holds all of the power and engages in sort of serial Q and A with one student, than another, than another. So it might last the whole class with one student, some professors might do cold calls, where everyone in the room is sitting there scared, waiting to be on call, or others might take volunteers. And so this method of teaching is very distinct to legal education, and it has wielded the exact same criticisms, frankly, for 50 years, criticism that it marginalizes some voices and magnifies others. If you think about a classroom design, that’s literally true, like certain voices just carry dominantly on those microphones in our classrooms, others are harder to pick up, harder to hear. There are quantitative studies going all the way back to the 90s that male students, and white male students particularly, are much more comfortable engaging in this sort of intellectual sparring with the professor and other students might find that culturally dissonant to the way they would engage with the professor. It can be very abstract, sort of talking in the air about what the law is, which can cause students to sort of leave their identities at the door. We sort of pretend that the law is neutral, and while people in the room have been harmed by some of the legal rules that we’re teaching, and we don’t often acknowledge that, or we leave those students to raise the critiques directly. So those are some of the most concrete harms. But the other thing I would just briefly mention, those are the harms that I think are sourced to the Socratic method of teaching, this abstract perspectivelessness, sort of marginalizing hierarchy. But the thing that I’ve wrestled with in my work is: what are we protecting here? Are the rest of the students just thriving and loving this method of teaching? And that’s where I think it’s important to note that we have a real wellness crisis, in general, in legal education and the practice of law, with one in 10 students reporting self harm, one in six students with clinically diagnosed depression, one in four students with alcohol dependence. And so I sort of look at that data and like, “What are we protecting here? Why are we so afraid to innovate or try something new?”

Rebecca: Law school student bodies have also become more diverse. Has legal education evolved to support these more diverse student populations? It’s sounding like it’s not.

Jamie: It really is not, or the way that I describe it is we’re innovating around the curricular core. So it’s like we’ve bought a house and we’re doing beautiful renovations to closets and third floors and guest rooms, but we’re leaving the kitchen and the living room, where people spend the bulk of their time, untouched, and so we have beautifully more diverse student bodies, faculties, and our communities. But honestly, most of the reforms that have happened along with the diversification of who’s studying law have been more structural and less curricular. So we’ve popped up all of these support mechanisms, mentoring programs, pipeline programs, scholarships, affinity organizations, academic success programming, named chairs and all of these things are helpful. They provide structural support, but again, those are really incremental supports that risk giving the message to students that students are the problem, not the pedagogy. It’s saying, “Well, if any students are not thriving in this pedagogy, we’ll hire all these people to help support you through it,” instead of maybe reflecting that maybe the pedagogy isn’t working for everybody. So those kinds of support systems are helpful, but they’re sort of more harm reduction than transformation, and so our curriculums have not changed dramatically, other than seminars and ad hoc things like that.

John: Going back to the pedagogy a bit, one of the things that has been emphasized quite a bit in terms of inclusive teaching more broadly, is the importance of low-stakes formative assessments. But it sounds as if that has not been the norm in at least the core curriculum in law schools. Could you talk a little bit about how assessment takes place and what type of feedback students get in their core courses?

Jamie: Yeah, and one of the reasons I’m so excited to be on your podcast is legal education is so far behind other fields in pedagogical transformations. And so just about 10 years ago, we moved to outcomes-based assessment, frankly, pretty begrudgingly and reluctantly, but the accreditation bodies moved us in that direction, and most folks did it kind of superficially. We’ve added some learning outcomes to our course, and that was about it. So a typical law school course marches through 14 weeks of these sort of high anxiety, intellectual sparring with your professor, and then it historically culminated in a one time only three- or four-hour exam where you sit and that’s it, and you may not ever get that exam back. You’ll get your grade, you will move on, and from that professor, you’re unlikely to be able to get too much feedback, maybe a sample answer, or maybe a little bit of a summary of what your professor was looking for. But along the way, this outcomes-based education comes along, and frankly, most law faculty adapted very simply by just moving that summative exam that was so stressful and opaque and anxiety producing from the end and then plopped a midterm in October or March that does the exact same thing. It’s just as opaque, it’s just as stressful, it’s just worth less. But we’ve not really adapted in very thoughtful ways to do more no-stakes, low-stakes assessment, or to really help students see an arc, like a course of development of how the Socratic method fits into any of this. Is this a form of assessment, or is it just a method of teaching? I don’t think we’re clear for ourselves what the heck we’re doing with this method of teaching.

Rebecca: So as you brought in more diverse students, and the pedagogy hasn’t changed, and you have these supports here,[LAUGHTER] and that you’ve talked about some things kind of changing along the margins. Has the curriculum changed around the margins? Is that where some of the change has happened?

Jamie: So there’s a lot more dynamic programming. We have many more seminars and interesting named chairs and folks in our institutions who are institutional experts. But that being said, like a typical course in contracts or tort law or civil procedure still looks pretty much the same. The book I use, for example, is on it’s like 15th edition. It’s been around for 80 something years, and so how has it adapted? It shoves some more notes in to offer some more diverse perspectives, maybe eliminating some of the masculinized language or the racialized language in a practice problem or a hypothetical students are wrestling with. So I would say that, generally speaking, our teaching has become less problematic. But that’s not the same as becoming inclusive or excellent.

John: And in your book, you also talk a little bit of how the curriculum reflects the dominant culture, which doesn’t bring in a lot of voices, just by the nature of the curriculum with existing case law. What perhaps should be done to bring in more voices so that the curriculum better connects to the more diverse student body?

Jamie: Yeah. So I think reimagining a Socratic classroom around clients, around skills, and around communities could go a long way. So the one thing that Socratic classrooms offer that is beneficial is repetition, which is very helpful for students learning a new skill. And every class, every time they walk in, they’re going to start with one case, then a second case, then a third case, and they’re going to do that in all of their classes. So there actually is a lot of repetition happening. So what if instead we transformed that repetition into beginning with a client who called a lawyer. Why did they call a lawyer? What did they want? What had happened to that person? What did the law say when the lawyer first researched the law and did that answer the client’s problem, or did it not? And in most of our cases, it didn’t, and so they had to go to court. So there’s just so much more we could do to pull the exact same materials, the exact same law that we’re studying, and pull it down into communities. Like, how is this actually affecting people? And if you think about it, we’re packing classrooms. I have 88 people in my class that starts next week. There’s so many perspectives in that class. There’s going to be international students, students from rural America, from urban America, students from every geography in the country, like there’s so many great moments to just hear from that. But so this serial, I’m going to talk to student one, then student two, then student three, we’re missing all of the great opportunity to bring in. So there’s this famous movie, The Paper Chase. And in this movie, the professor is a legendary Socratic professor, and he says, “You came to me with a brain full of mush, and then I’m going to turn you into a lawyer.” And I think that that mentality, certainly less toxic today, but there’s still this idea that we need to eliminate, eradicate, this idea that our students come with a, quote, “brain full of mush,” and every year we have a room of 88 people from all over who’ve lived different experiences, who are going to read this exact same material and think about it differently, and our classrooms could be so much more engaging and different every semester, and more student centered if we start to embrace that instead of sticking with this serial case participation.

John: And I do have to say, as I was reading your book, I kept seeing John Houseman, both in the movie [LAUGHTER] and in the TV series. A brilliant actor.

Jamie: I think he won an Oscar for it,

John: I believe so, yeah.

Jamie: I have mad respect for anyone role playing a law professor who could win an Oscar. That’s impressive.

John: But I think that series did reflect some of the stress and anxiety that that method of teaching created for the students.

Jamie: Absolutely, there’s this famous scene. I can’t remember where it falls in the movie, but a group of these all white male students get a hotel room, and they lock themselves in, and they take the TV out, and they’re just spiraling into madness as they’re studying for the exam, and they’re talking about murder on the inside, such that the housekeeping staff ultimately gets suspicious of what’s going on in there. But it depicts everything of the toxicity. It certainly doesn’t look nothing like that anymore. But that the same idea of just this brain full of mush and then this frenzied push to an all in exam is certainly still there.

Rebecca: I think, whether you’re in a traditional kind of law faculty or in a different kind of department that still embraces traditional practices, no matter your discipline, introducing more inclusive practices can be daunting, can be hard. What do you see as some of the first steps to make some change? Is it something that you do as an individual? Is it something that you start to do and try to make a departmental change? How did the seeds of change happen, do you think?

Jamie: Yeah, one of the things that I think is a first problem to be addressed is we actually don’t have a community of teachers who teach in this way. And that’s actually kind of surprising. At least in legal education, there are robust communities of folks who teach legal writing, for example, that’s one of my areas of expertise. And we have conferences, we have newsletters, we have our own journals about pedagogy. We have idea banks, we have listservs where we share ideas. And that happens in clinical education. And so here, this is sort of like a rogue industry of Socratic teachers, sort of working as independent contractors, doing their own thing. You walk into a law clinic, whether it’s serving veterans in a private school, in a rural setting, or whether it’s doing housing cases in Manhattan, there’s a certain pedagogy and there’s a certain set of values that drive the work that these clinical classrooms are engaging in. And so I think one huge part of this is we need to build some community for those folks. There are 1000s of law professors, and more than that. My daughter is in AP gov and did a Socratic seminar as part of her coursework as well. And we’re exporting it around the world. A lot of law schools are trying to design themselves in an American tradition. And so I think one huge step is community building and figuring out how we can share ideas and have a sense of identity among Socratic teachers. So I think that’s a big part. Second, I think we also have a huge problem in academia generally, where we bifurcate staff and faculty roles, and so we have staff in our institutions who are working daily with students struggling through our classes, struggling through the bar, struggling through job placement, and then we have faculty just marching on doing their thing, and there’s very little information sharing about what kind of shared experiences, because it can depersonalize it. It’s not my classroom that’s a problem. But if we could hear our students in general are struggling with cold calling, with too much reading, with general anxiety, and we could start to be thinking much more as a community. And then finally, I think one of the big issues is this Socratic classroom props up the entire structure of time management for faculty, specifically. So I’m coming off my summer. I get back to teaching next week. And if I’m being honest, I probably spent 90% of my summer working on scholarship, and 10% working on teaching. And even the teaching, I wouldn’t really say, is working on teaching, it’s working on just rebooting the administrative components of it, updating my syllabus, getting my course learning management site up. It’s not teaching. I’m not transforming, I’m not redesigning, I’m not innovating, I’m marching forward. And I use my summers to do scholarship. And so I think for folks who are interested in innovating, we have to make some space for it so that others can follow.

John: There’s been a variety of critical approaches critiquing legal education. Have they had much of an impact?

Jamie: We have 50 years of scholars across a robust group of adjacent fields of scholarship, from feminist legal theory to critical race theory to LatCrit to queer theory. All of these critical perspectives have different methodologies, different agendas, and the one thing they all align on is naming the critiques of the Socratic method. And so I think, if I’m being reflective, these scholarly communities have had huge effects in building out that seminar programming, making more diverse hiring, and in the law itself, like how we think about what the law should be and scholarship, but at the end of the day, inside of the curriculum, I think the change has been a little bit more incremental, a little bit more add on. And so that’s kind of stressful for students too, to just shove in some extra readings here and there, but it’s not integrated in the book, and it sort of feels tangential or ad hoc. So I don’t think we’ve done a lot. Again, we’ve kind of done it around the core, and there’s great things happening. But I personally think that every person about to enter the legal profession should be thinking about it in more inclusive ways, of how the law affects communities. And just bluntly, every law is an expression of power, and somebody is going to benefit from that law, and someone is going to be harmed by it. And so it should be a part of training lawyers, not just seminar enrollment with your electives.

Rebecca: It’s really powerful just to just even think about that. I’m thinking about what you were saying about needing to shift from a 90/10 to a different kind of percentage, and how you start to make that shift if you also need to start forming community when a community doesn’t actually currently exist, because some of that time would need to be allocated to the community too. So it’s not as clean as a 90/10.

Jamie: That’s exactly right. And so, for example, I’m really excited since this book came out, I’ve done a couple of talks with faculty. Teaching is so vulnerable. Reading course evaluations, you have to be in the right mental space to open those. It’s hard, it’s searing, it’s vulnerable, just like our students’ experience when they open our feedback on their essays and their exams. And so I think here, if it feels like an attack and someone saying your teaching is outdated or your teaching is too traditional, it shuts people down. But if instead, we could bring in a speaker and look at a script of a typical Socratic dialog: what were the facts of the case, what was the holding of the case, what was the issue in the case, and critique it. That’s pretty darn abstract. It actually is abstract. How could we reframe this? And then the legal writing faculty in the room and the clinical faculty might say, “Why don’t you ask who hired a lawyer and why? Because those are the people who walk into our clinic.” And then the legal writing, people might say, “Why don’t you ask what legal sources that lawyer found when they researched on behalf of their client?” And so I think there are just cool ways within our faculty where we can all be learning from each other, but it does, I think, have to be a bit community based, otherwise it just feels too personal. And so one of the things I talk about in the book is this kind of paradoxical opportunity that COVID created, because the very idea that 180 something law schools and all of these faculties, in a flip of a switch, changed how they taught, and it wasn’t right, it was frenzied and it was flawed, but it was necessary, and we did it. And so, similarly, I think here, if it feels less personal, and it feels like we have to do this for our students, because one in 10 of our students is engaging in self harm, and one in four has alcohol dependence, like we can make some changes. I think we feel like we’re doing something together, instead of feeling like we’re attacked by someone critiquing our teaching.

John: You advocate inclusive Socratic teaching, so you’re not suggesting that Socratic teaching be eliminated. What aspects of Socratic teaching would be kept? What are the benefits of it that you’d like to see persisting?

Jamie: Yeah, and first I should say advocating might be a strong word for keeping Socratic method. I think I just approach it from sheer pragmatism… that change, you can’t bludgeon change. Change is hard. Faculties are not the most change oriented groups of people. The critiques are fair, and I think people actually agree with those critiques, but I do not think that the critical mass is there ready to upend the Socratic classroom and reimagine legal education. And so I sort of start from that premise and then say, “Okay, well, what could we do within this?” And so I kind of pitch my thinking on this as we should keep blowing the roof off of legal education, reimagining how we think about teaching. But while we’re doing that, which takes some time, we have to raise the floor and just raise our standards. So the things that I suggest are that we come up with a set of shared pedagogies that shape a Socratic classroom, and I propose that those frame Socratic teaching around techniques that are student centered, skill centered, client centered and community centered. And so my thinking with that is changing books is hard, changing testing techniques is hard, changing your teaching notes is hard, but if we could just reframe our existing dialogs using our existing materials, I think we could go a long way to diffusing that power role that the professor plays at the front. And frankly, it’s kind of liberating to hand a lot of power to the students. It takes pressure off the professor. It’s not this intellectual sparring, it’s a community of soon to be lawyers working together to talk about cases and what happened. And so I think it’s just a much more achievable method of reform. But in bulk, given how much of the time our students spend in these courses, I think the results could be transformative.

Rebecca: It seems like one of the key things that you’re promoting is the idea of the connectedness, that it’s not abstract, and that it’s connected to each individual, and that there’s a way for them to see how it would impact their lives, or the lives of their individual communities, or the communities that they’re a part of.

Jamie: Yeah. And I think the wealth of scholars who are writing about wellness in the profession are really great on this topic, which is, if we were to try to source where is this depression coming from… what’s happening? Law students enter legal education with similar levels of happiness and healthiness to their similarly situated peers, and then something’s happening in that first year. And I think that’s exactly what it is. It is the loss of community. Students are afraid to come into office hours, that someone else might hear their questions. And it varies at different schools how competitive and how individualistic the pursuit is, but when I think about my time practicing law, it was not individualistic at all. It’s sitting in a conference room hashing out ideas, throwing out ideas, brainstorming what to do, coming up with a plan B and a Plan C and a Plan D, and teams of lawyers thinking things through and the study of law is a lot of holeing yourself up in the library and just grinding it out, and maybe you might look to the people to your right and left as your competition. Certainly we need to do a lot more to help see that these are your future collaborators and colleagues, and you’re joining a profession that is a community, and you’ll rely on them much more in your practice than law school gives the impression of.

John: So shifting to more teamwork and collaborative work would be part of this revision. What other changes would you like to see in terms of how classrooms are functioning in a more inclusive approach?

Jamie: I would say, first, we need to be transparent with our students. If we’re using the Socratic method, why? What is happening, and it’s very opaque. So for example, if I were to propose one change to the most cynical or incrementalist of teachers who’s sort of skeptically considering this. Very simply, just tell your students what you’re doing with the Socratic method. Why are you using it? How does it prepare you for the exam? How does it prepare you for lawyering or the bar exam? What is it doing? And that can just be helpful. That’s a first step. Second. I think it’s helpful to start to think about pulling out of our Socratic methods. More clients, community, and skills. And then third, I think we have to tether this to a repackaging of our exam strategies as well. So what we’re doing in the classroom should be a form of no-stakes, low-stakes readiness for what you’re going to ask students to do on the exam. And so similarly, if we can start to ground our exams in more purposeful. So many of our exams are very abstract. You’ll give students a bunch of things that happen. I teach tort law with like personal injuries. So there’s a car accident, and then someone on those college campus scooters leaves it, and someone trips on it, and all sorts of sort of parade of horribles happening. And then we say: analyze. But who’s our client? Who’s paying us? What’s our mission? What was our community? Where did this happen? We could just do more to align what we’re doing in the classroom with these exams. And I think a lot of that aligns with where legal education is heading anyway, which is toward more professional identity formation, more development of cultural competencies. And so I think this, it can fulfill a lot of pedagogical objectives.

Rebecca: I hinted towards this a little bit earlier, about there’s individual things you can do to start to form community around you, or to connect with people who might be interested [LAUGHTER] in pursuing some of these things as well. Those individuals may not be your colleagues within your department. They may be other folks that you’ve met at conferences. How do you start nudging the people around you, maybe, who need the nudging? [LAUGHTER]

Jamie: Yeah, absolutely, I think it’s important to note that Socratic teaching in its traditional form is really hard on teachers too. We’ve talked about how it’s hard on students, but I look back on my early years of teaching, and it is a constant debilitating fear that your students are going to catch you in something you don’t know, or a mistake you made, and that’s just an unrealistic set of expectations. I practiced law. I was a talented lawyer. I’m a talented professor, but I still know only a fraction of the material that I’m teaching. There’s still room to learn. There’s still cases I never had and areas I never practiced in. And so it’s a very stress inducing experience for the professor, too, and particularly the new professor. And so over time, it becomes very sustainable, but at the beginning, it’s actually debilitatingly terrifying,[LAUGHTER] and especially it’s because of that intellectual sparring vibe. You can picture the student who’s like, mission in life is to outspar their professor, and so, that’s just a terrible approach to learning in general. And so I think a little bit of this, more experience sharing of how teaching can be more engaging, right? I teach the same courses every single year, but if we’re teaching in more student-centered, community-centered ways, our students are changing dramatically, how they think about the world, how they think about learning, our communities are changing dramatically, and our communities are, frankly, more polarized and divisive than ever. And so what are we going to do about that? So for tort law, for example, we’re going to go to a jury. Which kind of jury in COVID Are you going to get? The jury that COVID is not serious, or the jury where COVID has the whole community on lockdown? It’s a totally different set of values and norms driving a community. And so I think that it can just be such a more engaging way to teach if we open up the idea that our students are going to engage with the material in different ways every year, and it also takes the professor out of it, like I try to teach in inclusive Socratic techniques, and one of the things that I think is the biggest benefit of what I try to do is I don’t have a line out my door at exam time of panicked students. I do review sessions, and people come to office hours throughout, but if you’re more transparent with your students about what you expect of them and if they know how you’re going to test them at the end, and if every class is a chance to practice that over and over, it also takes a little bit of this tension out of the grades that I give and the conversations that you have with students around exam time, they can start to support themselves. You can start to transfer. They can study in groups and take practice problems together. And so in some respects, I think it’s less fatiguing and it feels less high stakes, because I can’t have all the answers. I have my lived experience. But when someone else engages on a topic in the class, the other folks in the class might have a dramatically better answer than I ever could have thought of. So I think just being a little bit more vulnerable and raw in like talking to each other about what Socratic teaching is actually like, especially in these first years, and I should mention especially for women professors and professors of color, because we have this image and this bias in our head of what a law professor looks like. And so if you stand there with a quieter voice, a smaller frame, if your voice doesn’t carry in the same way across the classroom, if you’re a person of color, there’s great series of talking about presumptions of competence, and how students on bulk don’t give a presumption of competence to their professors of color. And then you imagine that intellectual sparring and what that’s like when you have someone who looks like what you thought your law professor would look like, and someone who doesn’t. It’s a dramatically different experience. And so that was a very long answer, but building community and more honesty about what teaching in this tradition feels like.

Rebecca: So I feel like you might have some folks who might just say, “but Jamie, I’ve got my habits and I’m tired [LAUGHTER]…

Jamie: Yes, yes. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: …and I don’t wanna,” but I feel like those same folks might buy in if you say it’s really important for the new people, or for the diversification of the field, to make a little bit of room for these new folks and to establish some of these other kinds of patterns so they don’t get the pushback, and that they don’t have some of this stress. A lot of times, I think some of our seasoned faculty actually are really willing to budge a little bit so that some of the people that they really want to see succeed can, if they understand why those people can’t succeed. Sometimes you have to be really explicit about why they can’t succeed though, they just don’t get it.

Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I think is important too, is, despite everything we’ve talked about in our time together, about the critiques and the harms, course evals are great for these professors, right? Like these are beloved professors. They’re revered, people aspire to be in their classrooms. There is tremendous peer pressure in teaching to conform. So one of the things I talk about in the book is, at a minimum, we just need to stop putting Socratic teaching on a pedestal and making it immune from accountability, even if you don’t want to change. Just stop pretending that your classroom is the default, and just make space that there could be other classrooms. And because what’s happening is anyone who wants to try to innovate or approach it in a different way is going to be evaluated by folks teaching in that traditional perspective. So there’s some room for academic deans to give some structure to what are we doing when we do peer evaluations, it’s not mimicry and conformity, like we should have some objective criteria that could be fulfilled in any number of teaching techniques, but there’s a lot of just this conformity. And so I think making some space to liberate peer evaluations, to rethink the questions we ask on our course evaluations, like the dominant questions on a law school course: “Was your professor knowledgeable? Was your professor available? Did your professor handle difficult topics well?” It’s all Professor centered, instead of, “Did you feel welcome in the classroom? Did you have the tools you needed to succeed?” Even our questions could be more student centered to start to measure things from the student perspective instead of let’s just assess whether you thought your professor was smart enough, which is an incredibly narrow and subjective and infused with bias way to approach it.

Rebecca: You mean like a question, like, “Did you receive feedback throughout the semester?”

Jamie: [LAUGHTER] That’s a great question. That would be a great question. One quick anecdote I would love to mention. As I was working on this book, I had the chance to present… every year, there is a new law professors conference that takes place in Washington, DC, run by the American Association of Law Schools. And so, I don’t know, maybe 150, 200 people come. These are the new hires. They’re entering. They’re going into academia all over the country. First of all, as a slight aside, everyone calls it the baby law profs, which already tells you that we are not embracing the idea that new people come in with new ideas. But anyway, putting that aside, I got the chance to do a session on the Socratic method there, and I would describe it as pretty raw, because in that room are people who want to change, like they’re at that moment, and they’re actually at a conference that’s doing some of the assimilation, and saying, “Let me teach you how to teach in the Socratic method,” like, “let me teach you how to handle exam writing.” And so that kind of tells you that there’s just this assimilation process, and on the topic of the Socratic method, it was quite raw, because many of those faculty, they’ve been in practice, and they see the flaws of it, they see the limitations of it, and they’re excited to innovate. And then slowly, we kind of dull that instinct and start to channel toward conformity in a way that I think is really problematic. That’s a great place where we could start. And let’s open it up, let’s hear from innovators. Who’s not teaching in a Socratic method? Let’s get them in front of these students and these new law professors, and let’s get a more diverse panel of what other techniques folks are using, what’s working, what’s not.

John: Following up with that issue of diversity, in your book, and you alluded to this just a few minutes ago, there seem to be some pretty substantial gender inequities in terms of legal instruction. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. And I honestly would love to talk about it a little bit more from the perspective of personal narrative, because I think that will tell the story quite representatively. So I’ve been in teaching for 17 years. I have two children, and I’ve had zero maternity leaves. One I was lucky enough to have in June, and so it worked out. The second was born in September… didn’t work out… and I kept teaching through that semester. I was a term faculty member, as many women faculty are, so I was not full time, not eligible for FMLA, and I hadn’t been there for a year. And I remember talking to my academic dean. I remember coming home and being like, “he’s gonna let me teach.” And I was so grateful that I was gonna be allowed to come in after giving birth and keep teaching. And I look back on that, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, there are so many layers of problems with that….” that I actually sincerely felt that, and that I was so grateful to just have a job through that. And so anyways, so I was in legal writing, which is dominated by women, as is clinical faculty, and really limited in its opportunities for tenure-track positions. And so I ultimately went on the tenure track, and you have to be geographically mobile often to do that. And so that landed me in the middle of Kentucky, in Louisville, Kentucky, from Manhattan, and my spouse was a financial services guy working in Manhattan, and somehow did not seem as excited about Louisville, Kentucky’s financial services market as I was, and so we ended up living there 10 years, and seven of them he commuted. Seven years of solo parenting. And like when you start to add that up, schools get out at three o’clock. You get the kids on the bus, you get to school. How many conferences is that? How many more papers could you have published? How many more networking dinners and Bar Association events or award if I were able to be a full time… I was a full-time professor, but solo parenting, just to have a job, not to rise in the job or thrive in the job, but just to call myself a professor. Quite candidly, it nearly destroyed our family. Seven years of commuting is financially taxing, it’s emotionally taxing, it’s very hard on relationships, and that experience is so typical. I could name dozens and dozens. We are not great at spousal hiring. We’re not great at childcare. We’ve got lots of issues and just lots of stunted opportunities. And then the last thing I’ll say is all those things we talked about, the mentoring, the support programs, the affinity groups, those are often led by women and professors of color. And so there’s a piece of legal scholarship that I really like that says the women professors do the housekeeping at home and the housekeeping institutionally. And so women faculty and faculty of color doing disproportionate amounts of service, particularly the kind of service that isn’t really counted very well. Certain kinds of service are quite well distinguished and coveted, but mentoring students can kind of fall off the grid, and being the person that people just come to for support is not really tracked, but that’s time lost. So those are some of my personal experiences with it. I think the most raw example of it is I will never forget the day I found out I was awarded tenure. We had multiple days of the meetings, and so I didn’t know which day would be the day my package would be considered, but the day we found out my spouse was out of town, and there’s a tradition of a champagne toast at the end for folks who were just awarded tenure. And I couldn’t be there for the champagne toast because I had to go home, and then I went home to solo parenting, and I just remember I was very upset about it, and I just remember feeling like that’s the stuff, that community and that I was there and I was thriving, but I was not able to engage in the ways that we would want our faculty to under those circumstances. That was a raw, dark note to end on.

Rebecca: Those are the realities, I think, of a lot of complexities of higher ed that we’re still trying to untangle.

Jamie: And I think the thing that excited me so much about you inviting me to join the podcast is we don’t talk very much across schools. We don’t talk across fields. And legal education is pretty darn far behind. We have a lot to learn from peers, if we’re open to it. And so I think that these struggles are not unique to legal education, and other fields and areas are much more ahead of us. And so if we could just open our minds to more learning,= 360 from those around us.

John: And your book should help contribute to that, at least in the legal profession.

Jamie: I hope so. My favorite thing to do with the book is do faculty presentations that are conversations where, similarly, where I begin with the presentation, and then I’m out of it, right? Just like I’m describing we should be doing in our classrooms, where, what’s happening at your school, what could you be doing? And it’s a really rewarding feeling to see faculty talking among themselves about pedagogy and not being talked at.

Rebecca: …sounds like a great place to get to our last question, which is: we always end by asking, what’s next?

Jamie: Well, I think if I were talking to colleagues listening who are teaching in the Socratic tradition, I would say, start with something. We often set such high goals for ourselves that it feels like too much. Just pick a couple of things, the transparency, try a different method of assessment, or talk to your colleagues about what methods of assessment might be more helpful to give feedback to students. My first message would be to start with just a couple of things and just see how it feels. We don’t need to rewrite our books or rewrite our syllabi, but I also think there’s a lot of institutional work that needs to be done. I think this grassroots and this coalition of the willing is one strategy. But also, I would love to see more leadership at the top of academic deans and institutional structures, just doing a little bit more. Like, what if we promoted in our marketing some of our great teachers? What if we could do some spotlighting on students talking about what they love about their great teachers. I think there’s a little more we could be doing to create a culture that values innovation in teaching. Lots of our teaching awards are kind of popularity contests. What if we had awards for innovation, where we start to incentivize in that direction? And so I think institutionally, there’s a lot of work we could do to start to set the tone at the top that this is something that actually matters, and we can actually differentiate in the kind of pedagogy we’re delivering.

Rebecca: Well, I hope your book sparks some great change in the spaces that you want the change to happen.

Jamie: Thank you so much. Conversation about teaching, I think, is the answer to the beginning of all of this. So I’m so grateful to be on this podcast and to see the work you all are doing in bringing folks together from various fields and traditions, and it’s really inspiring.

John: Well, thank you. I really enjoyed reading your book. It’s an area that we had not really talked about before, and it sounds like it’s an area where there could be some very productive changes made.

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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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356. Teaching Creativity

Posted in creative thinking, engagement, higher education, learning, professional development, teaching
August 28, 2024

When thinking about creativity, many students (and faculty) believe that they are either creative or not. In this episode, Susan Keller-Mathers joins us to discuss how the study of creativity can help us get past this false dichotomy in order to develop our creative thinking skills. Sue is an Associate Professor at the Center for Applied Imagination at Buffalo State University.  She teaches graduate courses in creativity and has published over 30 articles, chapters, and books on creativity, creative behavior, and the use of deliberate methods to facilitate creative learning. Sue has worked with multiple departments on her campus and with colleagues in over a dozen countries to help infuse creative learning into teaching and learning practices.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: When thinking about creativity, many students (and faculty) believe that they are either creative or not. In this episode, we discuss how the study of creativity can help us get past this false dichotomy in order to develop our creative thinking skills.

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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 Susan Keller-Mathers. She is an Associate Professor at the Center for Applied Imagination at Buffalo State University. Sue teaches graduate courses in creativity and has published over 30 articles, chapters, and books on creativity, creative behavior, and the use of deliberate methods to facilitate creative learning. She has worked with multiple departments on her campus and with colleagues in over a dozen countries to help infuse creative learning into teaching and learning practices. Welcome, Sue.

Sue: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Rebecca: We’re glad to have you. Today’s teas are:… Sue, are you drinking any tea today?

Sue: I am, as a matter of fact, I have a blended tea, oolong, jasmine, and green tea, and it’s delicious.

Rebecca: That sounds lovely.

John: Very nice. Because this is the first time I’m recording in our recording space in about two and a half months. I wasn’t sure if I had the tea kettle back here, and it turns out I didn’t. So I bought some iced tea, which I will be drinking today. So I have some peach iced tea. It’s still summer here.

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s good. I have a Hunan noir today.

John: Very good.

Sue: Wow. That one sounds interesting.

Rebecca: It’s a really nice black tea, but the leaves are dried and curled. It’s very fancy. I felt fancy this morning. [LAUGHTER]

John: Could you tell us more about the Center for Applied Imagination and the Creativity and Change Leadership department at Buffalo State University? I don’t think there’s too many such programs in the country, and it was really nice to learn a little bit more about this.

Sue: Yeah, there isn’t many, especially in higher education academic programs, because we are a distinct program. We are not part of any other discipline. We are in the discipline of creativity. So in 1949 some creative thinking courses were introduced at the University of Buffalo by Alex Osborne, who was an advertising agent in BBD and O, and wanted to bring more creativity to education. So it developed from there. And in 67 we started our first graduate courses. Of course, we have a Masters of Science in Creativity and Change Leadership, as well as certificates and undergraduate minors in creativity. So we study the discipline of creativity. There’s been some other programs in creativity, but I have to always look close. We divide them up between those that have the word creative or creativity, but really don’t focus on the discipline, and those that actually have the content of creativity. So we are the first and part of those foundational programs.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about who might benefit in studying Creativity and Change Leadership, and what folks who study that end up doing.

Sue: Yeah, I love that question, actually. When you’re on a plane and somebody says, “What do you do?” if I want a long conversation, I’ll tell them that I teach in a master’s of science and Creativity and Change Leadership. If I want a short one, I’ll try and get away with saying I’m a teacher, because people understand that [LAUGHTER] and hope that they don’t say more. So part of it is how people perceive creativity. And there are disciplines where teachers, for example, K through higher ed, adult learning, will say, “Yeah, I want my students to be creative.” Well, we want you to be creative too, so you first. So that’s an easy one. So we have some teachers, then designers, people in the arts. Well, this is a Masters of Science, not in the arts, however, we do have artists that come, particularly designers who are interested in the science of creativity to add to their professional work. So we say to people: “Do you want to enhance your professional practices? Do you want to go beyond where you are now, learn new skills, being able to put into practice new thinking?” So engineering law, we have clergy, coaches, artists. I even had a course this summer where I had seven dietitians, and I’m like, “Why are you in this course on creative teaching and learning?” They said “We have to communicate to our clients, and we have to problem solve.” …Business, armed forces… actually, I’ve had Marines and special forces, government officials, medical personnel, doctors, psychiatrists, you name it. So the whole idea is, do you want to enhance your professional and your personal self through the development of your creative potential?

John: In preschools and in early elementary education, there’s a lot of focus on giving students creative expression in various forms, but that seems to die out a lot by the time students reach middle school and move into high school, and in fact, it sometimes seems to be a little bit suppressed. Should there be more emphasis on creativity throughout the educational system?

Sue: Well, obviously the short answer is yes, and interesting, because I come from a background of elementary education and gifted education. In the schools and working with young children, you develop those practices. Well, we use those same practices at the university level, because what do we want to do with our pedagogy? We want to have students learn in a way that ignites their motivation, that takes them to think deeper. That’s what creativity is about. So for example, some of the skills like sensing gaps and tolerating ambiguity, and all the skills that are involved in problem solving, who doesn’t need that, right? So it really does belong in all disciplines. Some disciplines are harder to help understand, like I’ve worked with engineers, it’s not my area. My brother’s an engineer. They think different. So can we bring creativity to engineering? Well, of course. If you think of any professional practices, if you think of those people who are top in their field, they’ve brought innovation, they’ve brought change to their field. And so I think that part of helping people understand that it’s important in their discipline is understanding the characteristics, the practices, the processes, the skills people have who do the extraordinary things in their discipline, and then say, what does that mean for us for every day? How might we promote that?

Rebecca: A lot of students say things like, “I’m not a math person. I’m not a creative person.” [LAUGHTER] A lot of faculty and staff say that too.[LAUGHTER]

Sue: A lot.

Rebecca: Yeah. How do we encourage students and our colleagues to get past this sort of a fixed mindset in terms of creativity?

Sue: Well, just a short story. I think the hardest group to work with is my faculty, but we have such a reputation on this campus and a reputation internationally that people go, “I’m not sure what they do, but they’re really good.” [LAUGHTER] And so there’s the start. Pique the interest, right? We want a growth mindset. Let me give you another example. The “I’m not good at math” is interesting because one of the founders of our program, Ruth Noller, was the second woman computer programmer in the country. She worked on the Mark I sequence control calculator at Harvard during World War Two as part of the Navy WAVES. So when people say to me, “Well, I’m a math person, not a creativity person,” I’ll say, “Well, let me tell you about creativity people in math,” but the whole idea that “I’m not creative” is something that we start with in every course and every time that we do a workshop for anyone, because if you’re not open to it, you will not promote your creativity. So, for example, people will say the creative people are those who I put on a platform, they’re the highest, the rest of us, we don’t have creativity. It’s something magical. I don’t know, poof, how they do it. But when we study people in our field, and we begin to see how the struggles they had, first of all, and the way that they’re creative, then we begin to understand a bit more how we might be alike. And we always start with in classes, “How are you creative?” Not “Are you creative?” So once we shift that mindset to a growth mindset and ask the question, “how are you creative?” And then we introduce them to this content of creativity, which we could put simply into a framework. We have lots of frameworks, but let’s put in a framework of creativity and people, creative processes, creative environment, how we set the environment up for any learning experience and then products. So there’s a lot that we do with regard to helping people’s attitude toward knowledge, imagination and evaluation. And so what I just shared with you is Ruth Noller, who, again, was the second woman computer programmer, fell in love with the field of creativity. She was challenged to write a definition of creativity in a mathematical formula. So she said, “Creativity is knowledge, imagination, and evaluation with a subscript of attitude.” And so that helps bust some myths, because now we’re saying knowledge is essential, evaluation is essential, imagination is essential, and that’s what makes up creativity.

John: So based on what you’ve said, it seems like creativity is pretty much important everywhere. Are there any academic disciplines where the development of creativity is not important?

Sue: The short answer, again is no. However, there are disciplines that many people don’t recognize what creativity looks like in their discipline. For instance, I don’t want my bank teller to be creative when they’re giving me my money back. I want precision, accuracy, redundancy. I want all those things. But is there room for creativity in banking? First of all, people would say, “Oh, I know what you’re saying, you know? Yeah, those people are in jail,” like there are ethical and unethical uses of creativity. And if we want to flourish as an economy, especially economists, if you think of economists, there’s a lot of room for creativity there and in all disciplines, but there’s a story I want to tell you. My doctoral dissertation was a qualitative study of extraordinary women of creative accomplishment, so I sent out and asked for nominations from top people in the field. And I had a nomination of a woman who was a historian, who the nominator felt that this person was very creative, and she declined my invitation because she said, as a historian, she didn’t want to be seen as creative. So you can see that what’s going on there is she’s afraid of her credibility, because people will equate creativity with making things up. Where, if we were to unpack that for historians… and I love history, by the way… when I teach the history of creativity, what am I doing? I am bringing the most accurate information in a way that tells a story, that helps people understand it better. So from a pedagogical standpoint, I’m looking at delivering that information in a way that helps people not only grasp it, but get excited about it. And so that was, I think, a good example that I don’t want to bring creativity into my profession. Again to unpack that, where do we need the knowledge? How do we bring imagination in, and how do we use our evaluation effectively?

Rebecca: And that’s not to say that there isn’t room for imagination or any of those things, in maybe the ways that we represent or tell the story of history. [LAUGHTER]

Sue: Yeah. I mean, really, who are the great historians? Not only did they discover, they sensed gaps, they saw things that we didn’t know, and they were able to seek it out. And so not only the storytelling, but the actual acquisition of our history and our story as people.

Rebecca: Yeah, thinking about some of the best exhibits that I’ve seen in museums, that historians are highly involved in the development of some of those exhibitions, but the ways that those are delivered or told or developed to be interactive are highly creative and highly interesting.

Sue: Yeah, and if you think about it now, it’s not the lone historian sitting there and then the designer putting things together. It’s collaboration, and that’s what we teach in creativity, especially because we have a whole strand in creative problem solving, creative process, and so teaming and coming up with ideas or reforming problems or putting things to action and working together, and how important that is. So one of the outcomes in my master’s project was an impact study, and I looked at the impact of a course on creative problem solving. People felt more empowered. They felt they could solve problems better. They were utilizing techniques to get ideas better and to evaluate ideas and to put them into action. So those things are just really important in all areas.

John: As Rebecca was suggesting, if you wanted to describe history, you have to do it in a way that makes sense to people, and you have to make connections, otherwise you just have a series of unrelated facts. And the connections that are being made is really, I think, that form of creative expression there. Is that how you would interpret that?

Sue: Absolutely. And what we teach is specific skills, for example. So the skill you’re describing is based on the research of E. Paul Torrance, 50 year longitudinal study. Put it into context. If you think about the importance of context, that is a creativity skill.

John: And it’s one that I think is common to pretty much all disciplines. They have to make sense of a complex world by simplifying it into stories that are understandable by others, which involves that skill.

Sue: Absolutely.

Rebecca: Which is a nice segue to our next question. [LAUGHTER] What are some of your favorite classroom activities for fostering the development of creativity?

Sue: Oh, I have so many. Well, let me go back to the history first, and that is, I teach a course on pretty much the foundations of the field, and the scholars, the models, the theories. And what people find is that what people were talking about in the 50s and the 60s and the research that was happening, we’re still talking about today. They’re still very current in their thinking, and they’re always surprised. So we put the whole field of creativity into a timeline. And when I do it in person, we do a visual, and the whole room is set up pre-40s, the 50s, the 60s, 70s, and we walk it and we talk it and there’s color, but the skill we use is “put it into context.” What was happening in the 1950s? What was the result of Sputnik, and how did creativity then flourish, the field of creativity? Scientific creativity, there was lots of money being poured into it after Sputnik, because we felt we were losing the space race. And so therefore the field of creativity, a lot of research, a lot of scholars, came about. So we put the whole thing into context. And it’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun to do that course. And the other thing with that course, I’ll stay with that one for a minute, and I do this in many ways, but I have a model based on E. Paul Torrance’s work called the Torrance Incubation Model. And like any good teaching model, there’s a warming up, there’s a digging deeper, and there’s an extending or something that happens to connect it to your learning. And what’s powerful about this is the strategies embedded in the heightening anticipation or the pre- at the beginning, and the deepening expectation strategies and the extending the learning strategies, which alone is powerful. However, the big piece about this is, this is a creativity model. It weaves a piece of creativity into the learning. So for the course that I teach, the foundations, visualizing it rich and colorfully is woven into the entire course. And so I’m teaching for creativity while I’m teaching a content. Now my content happens to be creativity, but I can teach anything, and when I work with other educators to give me an instructional plan that you do in your Business 101 class, it’s pretty good, but you feel like it could be improved. And let’s redesign it using this model called TIM. And let’s integrate a creativity skill so that we’re teaching for creativity while we’re teaching for content. Which brings me to the first thing I introduce people to, and that, again, is built on E. Paul Torrance’s longitudinal research, what’s helped individuals grow up to actualize their creative potential. And he introduced 18 creativity skills based on his research, and it’s quite extensive research that Torrance had done. My colleague, Cyndi Burnett, creativity and education, modernized it and used many of his skills and brought some of those that are more recent in the field and being talked about more… mindfulness, for example. And she put together a set of 20 skills that help define the skill set that we can build because we can become more creative. We can either draw it out more, or we can learn it, however you want to look at it. And so one of the activities I do in the creative teaching and learning course, which is an elective in our masters, is I do 20 skills in 20 days. So they have a journal, and their job is, first thing in the morning on Brightspace, they get an announcement: today is tolerate ambiguity, gives a definition, it gives a link to Cyndi’s website, where there’s videos, and they’re also reading her weaving book, and so there’s no expectations as to what you do with it. Keep it top of mind. Maybe use it yourself. Maybe share it with others. And it’s very interesting to see what they come back with and which skills, no matter which skills they find that they are drawn to more. The idea is they now have a set of 20 skills that they understand help promote creativity and that they can utilize. And so that one has been very successful. I’m very happy with that activity as well.

Rebecca: If instructors would like to learn more about introducing creative skills into their classes, what are some resources in addition to the book that you just mentioned, would be helpful?

Sue: There’s a lot out there now. I love all the videos that are out. Our YouTube channel has alumni profiles and videos. I’ve been working on bringing forward some of the history of Ruth Noller, because I didn’t feel like she was prominent out there, and so I’ve done some videos about her mentoring work. She, for example, talked about a mentee before anyone was using that word. And so now we have these foundations and 12 skills of mentoring, which really helps promote creativity. I’ve done a video on that as well. My colleague, Roger Firestein, another person I’ve taught with, has done a lot. We talk a lot, my colleagues and I talk a lot. And I say, “Give me free stuff. Will you put free stuff up?” Because I don’t want them to have to buy expensive books. So he has a Create in a Flash, which teaches people about creative problem solving, and he’s put videos up for free. He put worksheets up for free. And I’m like, “Thank you,” because then I can head people to things like that. Now my colleague Gerard Puccio has a great course on creativity. So for those people who like the great course. But you can find a lot of things out there, Prufrock Press had some good creativity books as well. They’re still around, but they’re under another publisher. So they often have some good stuff. And what I need to tell higher ed people is, if you find something for younger grades, don’t dismiss it. Take a look at it, because I think that we need to bring that joy into the higher ed classroom, and that doesn’t mean being silly. You have to go with what’s comfortable for you, but if you are going to bring it to your classroom, you’re going to need to model it. So you got to figure out what it means to you and how you operate, and then bring that motivation and joy to your classroom. Who wants to be a dull classroom? We don’t remember things. They might be able to take the test and pass it, but meet them on the street three years later and ask them one of those questions. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Are you suggesting we should have fun? [LAUGHTER]

Sue: I know, I know. It’s silly, isn’t it? And I try hard, try warm ups, I try to put the content into interesting ways to do it, like for our current issues and creativity, my colleagues… and I’ve taught the course as well… but they developed big question paper. You know, what’s your burning question? What is it? So one of the topics that’s really coming forward is polarity, and so creativity and polarities and what does that mean? Or design thinking. How does that relate to some of the foundational processes? So if we can get our students involved in things that are meaningful for them, and they make connections to their future. And my students, like I said, come from all disciplines, and my background is education and my doctorates in curriculum and instruction, I have a psychologist. I had a performer, a dancer who became interested in creativity. I had an architect who’s one of our faculty members. So it’s been inspiring to be with people in all different disciplines who are devoted to understanding and use of creative behavior.

Rebecca: You know, a lot of our listeners, and John and I, go to a lot of meetings. How do we sneak more creativity into these places that we go to all the time. Please help.

Sue: Oh, I love the idea of meetings. Oh, when I used to be in the elementary ed just, just awful. When you’re in a school system, you have to sit there and …… nothing happened, it’s just you’re there. So it’s different here, and I’ll tell you why it’s different, because we frame everything in creative process, and we figure out what’s most important and how to do it. And so we do it. When we need conversations, we have conversations, but they’re managed, they’re facilitated. We are all facilitators. So first of all, how many meetings do we need? Can we do less than we do? Yes, of course, and we can do less if they’re more productive. So we did some vision setting for the university. The session was just to get ideas from faculty. That’s all it was. Was just an idea generating. And so we had our facilitators come. So there’s 150 people in the room, and it’s a framework. It’s described. They do it, they make some decisions, and I could hear people as they leave saying, “Some of the most productive meetings I’ve been to in a long time.” I’m like, “That’s what we do. That’s what we do.” And along those lines, in the field of creativity, I can go out and say, “Listen, I can bring facilitators, and we can facilitate your meeting,” and they’ll go, “Okay, great. Alright.” They have no idea what that means. It’s often not till they see it that they go, “Why weren’t we doing this?” And so a little bit at a time is what I would say to people. Bring a facilitator in if you can, but even if you can’t learn a bit about the facilitation of creative problem solving and know when to identify concerns, lots of times you go right to ideas. Well, I got this idea. I got this… Well, wait a minute, we haven’t even defined the concern yet. We don’t even know what the challenge is. And who was it, Einstein, who said a problem well stated is half solved. So stop trying to solve a problem when you don’t even know what the problem is. And so some of the pre-work before a meeting doesn’t need to be at the meeting, is another thing to consider. So I don’t mind our meetings anymore. 32 years in public education, and I’ve been here for a very long time, and we come to meetings, I won’t say joyful, but a lot of times we have cake, that helps.

Rebecca: Cake always helps.

Sue: …but we’re productive. Well, it’s part of that celebration, let’s celebrate that we are productive, that we work together, that it’s the beginning of the semester, that we like our colleagues.

John: Anything that could make meetings more productive and joyful, I think is worth exploring.

Rebecca: Any gathering.

John: …including our classes.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: We’ve talked quite a bit about creativity. How did you become interested in this topic?

Sue: Well, I was trained here in Buffalo as an elementary educator, and I was hired by the New Orleans public schools. I was working in a creative arts magnet school in the French Quarter. Loved it. So, dabbling in different universities, looking for a master’s. I was at Tulane University taking the course in gifted ed, and we were sent to Baton Rouge to a conference. And the keynote speaker was Don Treffinger from Buffalo, and he talked about creativity, that was his field. And I went, instantly, you know how the aha happens? I’m like, “This is what I need to bring to students. This is the missing piece. This is what I want a master’s in.” So I eventually picked up, came back to Buffalo for a master’s in creativity, went back into the schools, and for a while, I was teaching creativity and creative problem solving to K to 6 and teaching university students, which was the best. And it was exhausting. [LAUGHTER] It was exhausting. So there’s nothing like bringing fourth grade facilitators into a class where they explain to the undergraduates how they facilitated first graders. Then after that, the undergraduates cannot whine about not being ready.

Rebecca: That’s amazing.

Sue: Well, it was one of my friends that asked me, she was teaching the class. She said, “They’re all complaining they’re not ready. They can’t do it.” I said, you know, I’ve got fourth graders that are really articulate, and they were part of a research project we did to show that kids as young as five can solve problems using creative problem solving. So I brought the two of them in. They’re like, “Well, first we did this, and then….” it was just priceless. Sometimes you have just this essence of something that makes things so clear. And I’m kind of lazy, I don’t capture them often, because I’ll remember them… and you don’t. So a tip for everyone is to make sure that you capture the essence of those qualities or those stories that just really help define something well.

Rebecca: Well, that sounds like such a priceless moment.

Sue: It was great. And I see those kids every once in a while, and that was, I can’t tell you how many years ago. I mean, they’re in their 30s, and they don’t forget. And here’s another thing, and I didn’t mention this, but I used to teach undergraduates. I’ve been doing graduate courses for the last 10 or 15 years, but when I taught undergraduates, our first course, we asked people to invent something. Now, after doing it for a couple years, you see the look on their face the first day. They’re reading the syllabus, and I say to them, “Do not drop this class because of the invention. You will be able to do it. I will help you.” So we teach them through creative process how to sense the gaps, find the need and then create something. And the most interesting thing happened to me years later in an ice cream shop, this woman’s behind me, she goes, “Do you remember me? I invented the…” it’s like that helped define that I am creative. And that’s happened more than once to me, is they’ll say, “Do you remember I invented the …” and I was always curious about that. But for some reason, just I guess, we think of inventors as being creative, and when we think of ourselves as an inventor, then we think of ourselves as creative.

Rebecca: That’s incredible. My daughter is attending a STEAM camp this summer, and they’re doing all kinds of creative thinking activities, and every day she’s coming home telling me about the inventions or the experiments that she’s been conducting in very elaborate one-hour debriefs. [LAUGHTER]

Sue: Isn’t that funny when they come back? And I love that it’s STEAM, because that’s what it should be. There’s a wonderful video The Adaptable Mind that talks about STEAM, and it’s just an amazing video about problem solving around the Ebola crisis. The other thing I would recommend to people and I just was thinking about it, it’s a classic that always is entertaining and thought provoking is Ken Robinson’s, Do Schools Kill Creativity? And whether you’re in higher ed or K-12, I think it’s very relevant to thinking about the importance of creativity in education.

John: Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you. We always end, though with the question: “What’s next?”

Sue: [LAUGHTER] What’s next? Well, I always have my hands in a lot of pots, because that’s what we like to do. And I had mentioned that I’ve been working on really bringing forward the work of Ruth Noller and the incredible career she had, but we have an innovation suite that is being designed, and so we’ll have a mentoring space, which will be really cool. Also at SUNY, you may or may not know this, under review at SUNY is a doctorate in professional practices in Creativity and Change Leadership. So we would be the first doctorate at Buffalo State University going forward. So we’re pretty excited about that as well. And I want to share this… one of my colleagues, Molly Hollinger, just had her article on creativity and wellbeing, “Measuring Self-Beliefs of Creativity and Well-Being” published in the Creativity and Thinking Skills Journal. And she started off with a quote from Csikszentmihalyi, who is one of the leaders in the field, and I think it speaks to creative potential and fulfillment. We all want to be fulfilled. Well, if you begin to equate recognizing and nurturing your creative potential with being more fulfilled as a person and more wellbeing, I think that that would resonate with people and Csikszentmihaly says, “The reason creativity is so fascinating is that when we are involved in it, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life.” And I thought that was just a great quote, because that’s what it’s about, right?

Rebecca: It’s good note to end on for sure. Well, thanks for such a fun conversation. Sue. We appreciate you joining us today.

Sue: I love it. I love it. I talk about creativity all day. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So could I. [LAUGHTER]

Sue: Yeah. Yeah. Good. Good. [LAUGHTER]

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

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

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355. Class Dismissed

Posted in access, diversity, engagement, equity, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, income inequality, learning, race, racism, social justice, support network, teaching
August 21, 2024

Institutional racism in the form of redlining and unequal access to educational and housing opportunities have left generations of students without equitable access to higher education. In this episode, Anthony Abraham Jack joins us to discuss the challenges that first-gen students face and what colleges and faculty can do to reduce these inequities.

Tony is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Boston University Newbury Center and Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Boston University. Tony’s research has appeared in numerous scholarly publications and he is the recipient of numerous awards from the American Sociological Association, American Educational Studies Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He is the author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students and Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Institutional racism in the form of redlining and unequal access to educational and housing opportunities have left generations of students without equitable access to higher education. In this episode, we examine the challenges that first-gen students face and what colleges and faculty can do to reduce these inequities.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Anthony Abraham Jack. He is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Boston University Newbury Center and Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Boston University. Tony’s research has appeared in numerous scholarly publications and he is the recipient of numerous awards from the American Sociological Association, American Educational Studies Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He is the author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. His new book, Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price is scheduled for release in August. Welcome Tony.

Tony: Hi. Thank you all for having me.

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

Tony: I’m actually drinking water, but I was actually thinking about going to get the Bengal spice tea that’s in my cabinet right now.

Rebecca: That sounds yummy, maybe afterwards, huh?

Tony: Indeed.

Rebecca: I have a new tea John that I got when I was in Scotland. So this is a 1903 blend from Pekoe Tea Edinburgh.

John: Wow. Yeah, I saw some of the photos from your world tour there while I’ve been in the classroom here, so just rub it in a little bit.

Rebecca: I’m trying. [LAUGHTER]

John: …and I am drinking an Irish Breakfast tea..

Rebecca: that’s on theme

John: …from Wegmans [LAUGHTER] here in Durham, North Carolina.

Rebecca: So, Tony, we invited you here today to discuss your forthcoming book, Class Dismissed. But first, maybe it’d be helpful if you tell us a little bit about your own educational journey.

Tony: There are two things that I always share about getting to this spot of being an educator and being an academic is: I’m a head start kid and I’m a first generation college student. Those two things are central to who I am and the work that I do. If it were not for Head Start, I would have a very different educational trajectory. Head Start put me in a school across the tracks, literally, in Miami. I went to a school that I wasn’t zoned for, because that dividing line that was McDonald’s Street. I was supposed to go to that dividing line of McDonald’s separated West Grove from Coconut Grove, where the Bahamian settlers were who cleaned up behind the white, wealthier families that live on the other side, and the schools were night and day in many respects, from the resources that they had, even class sizes were a little bit different. It was just a very different place. And what’s interesting is, if you were to come to my office right now, I actually have a map of Coconut Grove, and it literally says Coconut Grove Negro district, and on this official city map, you actually see the line that was drawn by city officials to say where black people could and could not live. That was fundamental. Head Start, it didn’t remove me from that history, but it didn’t make me travel the same path that that history would force me to any other way. And I’m a first-generation college student. I’m the son of a security guard. My mom actually helped segregate her middle school that she then worked at for 31 years as a school monitor, and my brother is a janitor who actually works at my old elementary school. No one in my family extended learning beyond college, but they made it possible through everything that life could throw at us, that made it possible for me to go to college, and those two things fundamentally shape who I am. As a Head Start kid, I can’t help but think about being from Coconut Grove. Every city in America has their Del Mar divide, that street that separates the richest and the poorest. Thinking about like it is in St Louis, I live very close to ours, and my education trajectory looks very different from everybody else who I went to school with. So many people who I live next to had a very different trajectory. So those two things really speak. And I was very fortunate to end up at Amherst College for undergrad, and then I came over to Harvard University to pursue my PhD. And to be honest with you, I haven’t left school yet. Since the moment I entered through Head Start, I have not left school. It’s been a lifelong dream to be a forever student, and I’m living it.

Rebecca: I’m living that lifelong student trajectory as well. [LAUGHTER]

John: Me too. The history of redlining and dividing districts and federal funding and loan availability in terms of those redlined districts, which weren’t always labeled that way, but they were still treated that way in terms of the availability of FHA loans and so forth…

Tony: Exactly.

John: …for a remarkably Long time, led to some horrible inequalities in terms of school financing.

Tony: Yeah, how the United States did policy for transportation. When you think about I-95 they literally drove highways through neighborhoods and say, “Okay, black people live over here, white people can live over here”. Even, how we handled the GI Bill, even though it was supposed to be one of the most universal policies. One, it wasn’t universal because so many women were not available for it, and then yet, the racialization of it was also a major aspect. So yeah, between redlining and blockbusting. So actions that real estate agents would say they would purposely introduce a black family in a neighborhood selling a house at like 125% of its value. But then when those whites who did not want to have a black neighbor, they were quick to sell and leave, and neighborhoods began going from all white to all black in that very short period of time. And you think about the resources that left because of income differences and segregation, weighed down by racism with income, I was removed from some of that, because Head Start placed me at Coconut Grove Elementary, and the principal there, Don Beebe, said he gets to stay. Not everybody had that opportunity.

John: And you talked about some of this in The Privileged Poor, where you talked about some of the inequities in colleges based on the amount of privilege that students had. Could you talk a little bit about the thesis of that to help set the stage for your more recent book?

Tony: Yeah, The Privileged Poor came about because of two things, and very much personal experience, but in two ways, experiential personal experience, how I experienced as a student, but it also what I had to grapple with as a graduate student, because as a student, I was trying to figure out what was going on when I got to Amherst, because so many people had gone to boarding school like Andover and Exeter and Saint Paul, or these really, really ritzy prep schools like Hackaday and Sidwell Friends and Nightingale I had graduated from a prep school in Miami, but from Head Start to 11th grade, I was a public school student. I had a football coach who liked athlete students but didn’t like student athletes, and so I transferred schools my senior year because I didn’t want to be under that kind of regime. And then Amherst called that football coach and said, “Hey, do you got a student who can pass our test?” He said, “Yeah, we got a kid this year,” and the rest was kind of history. The reason why I tell that story is because when I got to Amherst, I discovered that my individual detour through a private school was actually a well established on-ramp to elite colleges because of programs like Prep for Prep, A Better Chance, the Wight Foundation (W, I, G, H, T), and all these other programs that place lower income and sometimes lower income students of color into boarding day and preparatory high schools. So I’m like, “Okay, this is different.” This is people come from all over the place. It’s not just the rich people who are coming from these ritz y places. But then I got to graduate school, and as a sociologist, I’m reading about these inequalities and cultural inequality and race and all that stuff, but no one who’s writing about education is speaking about these students. They kept speaking about students as a monolithic group, really like they were painting with one brush stroke, and I was like, “Well, they got half the story right.” A lot of the people who I knew did struggle with isolation and difference and culture shock, but the other half of students, roughly, did not, like I had friends who studied abroad in high school for a year. I had friends who had flown on private jets. I had friends who had experiences that I only saw on movies and TV shows, like Gossip Girl. And so I put my experience as an undergrad in conversation with what I was learning as a graduate student and say, “Hey, something’s going on here.” And what I learned is colleges were hedging their bets. They were getting their new diversity from old sources. They were increasing the number of lower income students, but they were not saying was that they were going to private schools to get those students. And my research show that one half of lower income black students at elite colleges like Amherst and Harvard are actually the alumni of those boarding, day, and preparatory high schools. And so when I was dealing with all of that, that’s what came up with the privileged poor. Privileged poor is an oxymoron. It’s about somebody having little economic capital but having high stocks of cultural capital. They had been to elite places before. They had traveled to Tulum, they had traveled to Martha’s Vineyard, they had traveled to Nantucket, all of these very, very ritzy places. And when they got to college, they were in their fifth year of boarding school, really, and I contrast their experiences to the doubly disadvantaged, those lower income students who don’t have that same experience. And the reason why it was important to me to draw out this distinction was because any program that we created to help students in college, especially lower income and first year in college students, it would miss the mark, because if we had these two modal groups, these two people who are on different sides of the coin, if we try to navigate right down the middle, we will miss out on so many students. And so I use the privilege poor and the doubly disadvantaged, kind of like the miners’ canary, I’m able to show when and how class matters in college, both symbolically through cultural capital, those taken for granted ways of being that are valued by colleges and universities, but then also economic capital. I’ll give you just two quick examples. One, who knows what office hours are? Who’s comfortable using them? And who knows how valuable they can be, not just for your present but also your future? Usually, the literature and other people say, it’s usually the wealthier students, people whose fam went to college, I show that it wasn’t just those from money who felt comfortable, but those who had experience that only money could buy, the privileged poor and the middle class were more comfortable, the doubly disadvantaged were not. They got access to the letters recommendation. They got access to institutional resources at a higher rate than their lower income peers. But when campus closed during spring breaks, and it was about how much money you had in your pocket, now how much cultural capital you have in your mind, it didn’t matter whether you were privileged poor or doubly disadvantaged, you went hungry. And so I was able to show how students’ trajectories to college shape their pathways through college in a new and novel way. And so The Privileged Poor allowed me to engage with policy as well as academics and reducing some of the inequalities on campus.

John: The Privileged Poor was written before the pandemic, but then the pandemic hit and you started working on this new book. Could you talk a little bit about what you observed there and how that led to Class Dismissed?

Tony: Yes. So The Privileged Poor was published in 2019 and I was very fortunate that in the years in between now and 2019 I got to visit a lot of college and universities that have begun working with them to change their policies, and to date, over 80 universities have changed their dining hall policies to account for food insecurity on their campuses, both from small liberal arts colleges to large public institutions and every institution in between. And so I was having this good rapport. And The Privileged Poor also focuses on life on campus. It tries to understand how class shapes students’ engagement with their peers, professors, and the policies that govern campus life. And one thing that kept gnawing at me was that a question that The Privileged Poor cannot answer head on because of what wanted to focus on then was about students’ lives off campus, especially their families in their neighborhoods, and how that continues to shape how they move through campus. Class Dismissed came about because I was asked to do a project about how black students were experiencing inequalities on campus, especially during the pandemic, and I said I like the premise, but to fully understand how inequality shapes how students move through campus, I want to expand who I’m speaking to and the questions that I’m asking with a particular focus: how does the inequalities off campus shape daily life on campus? And that’s how this project began. I was invited to do this study by William Julius Wilson, a preeminent sociologist, and I interviewed 125 Asian, Black, Latino, Native, white and mixed students to understand truly how COVID exacerbated the very inequalities that universities were ignoring, especially how structural inequalities like poverty, segregation, the lasting legacy of redlining and blockbusting, which we already talked about at the beginning of this conversation, continues to shape how students move through campus, and I was very excited and intentional about including more groups to study, because I want to show you just how different their experiences are, especially by inclusion of Native students, who are sadly one of the most overlooked groups of college students that we have, to be able to show not just the lasting legacy of redlining and blockbusting, but the lasting legacy of land theft and disenfranchisement, deepens our understanding of what universities need to do to prepare for these students. I know we probably want to get into it, but there’s something about understanding where students come from that really shapes our understanding of where they return to and when COVID shut down campus, even if the policies for these closures were correct, we show just how ill prepared we were to help students navigate that transition. And again, and I say this in the book, this book is not a COVID book. This book is not about COVID. This book is about the inequalities that existed before that were worsened by campus closures and the pandemic. Because I really wanted us to understand where students come from and how that continues to shape their life, both as a springboard into more opportunity, because in the book, I talk about students who were able to take on unpaid internships during the pandemic. Even as the pandemic shut most of the world down, crippled some countries to the brink of bankruptcy and collapse, there were students who were taking on unpaid internships at venture capital firms, compared to then being able to show well, yeah, lower income students also took on unpaid labor, but it took on a very different form, and yet new is I’m actually going beyond just saying that both groups of students took on unpaid internships or unpaid labor, I actually show that the skill sets that are used by lower income students to carry out the work that are thrust upon them often requires a higher level skill set than those used by those in unpaid internships who complained about the grunt work and the busy work that they were able to do. But here’s the rub, whose CV is going to say what? Whose CV is going to have the right title? Whose CV is going to have the right employer? Whose CV is going to have the right detailed job description? And whose CV is going to remain silent about all the extra work that they did in addition to classes, in addition to other familiar responsibilities? So that’s why I said, to me, I hope people take away from the book that yes, COVID had a different effect on students. But I really want us to pay concrete attention to the way in which so much of what I talk about existed before March 2020, before campus closed, and these processes were continued for generations because that black box of unpaid labor that happens for lower income students, that wasn’t created four years ago, that has already existed. But then I try to also offer concrete things that we can do to begin to understand this. Because I don’t know if you all remember, in the early 2000s the Common Application introduced the familiar responsibility question to understand why students are, for example, not part of Glee Club and key society and playing a sport. And some people like, “well, I work,” or “I take care of my grandparents, “and they saw this familiar responsibility question really changed the way in which admissions officers were able to get a texture of students’ life. I asked a simple but a fundamental question in the book, Why do we have this at the end of high school, beginning of college, to help students get into college, but we have nothing like it on the way out? What are employers missing by not understanding the unpaid labor that all students do, and not just those who go to familiar places, by venture capital firms or a senator’s office or some of the other things, knowing that the work they do is mostly grunt work that doesn’t give them any kind of true experience.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that all of these inequities have existed forever, and COVID did make things more visible, but that doesn’t mean that a lot of change has occurred. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways that colleges continue to fall short?

Tony: Yeah, one of the things that I highlight in my work is, oftentimes, I don’t want to say the actions, but the happenings of the most overlooked offices on campus. And I’ll talk about like, you know, the Dean of Students Office and other places like that. And to give you an example, I talk a lot about academic leave policies in the book, and the reason why is because it often shows both the class biases and the, quite frankly, ignorance that colleges have about where students come from, and I talk a lot about where students come from, because we’re talking about universities that are reaching out and saying, “We want you. We want a student from every state and every type of community, like we want to diversify our campuses along all of these lines.” But are you ready for it? If you want it, you get credit for recruiting it. But are you ready? Do you actually know what students need? The reason why I talk about leave policies is because I exposed in the book the very class and paternalistic approach that we take to it. When a student wants to take a year off and do an internship or just take a year off just to travel, the only thing they have to do is email that Dean and say, “Hey, I’m not coming back next semester.” They fill out something, but it’s usually very light work. If a student is asked to take the time off, and a lot of people will say, “Well, it’s probably because they cheated, or that something like that,” it’s often not because of the work. It’s because they are struggling to manage the expectations of home and the reality of college. When universities tell students that they need to leave campus for academic leave, they almost act like parole officers and put a whole bunch of responsibilities on students, new responsibilities on students as they are going home. So even though a student is at their most vulnerable, many universities require students to work a full-time job and take class at a local university while they are away from campus. There are some universities that require letters of recommendation from that employer. Now to middle-class America, that may not sound so outrageous, but what if you come from a community where 50% population have jobs and the other half do not? What if you come from a community where you’re not only the first person in your family to go to college, you one of a few people in the entire community to go to college. Who is comfortable and familiar with writing the types of letter of recommendation to assess your mental ability when you are fighting to get a job at the local fast food joint or Walgreens or CVS or Duane Reade, because that’s all the jobs that you could possibly apply for in your area. If we don’t understand the geography of inequality, especially as it pertains to access to employment, access to schools, access to mental health counselors or individuals who can assess that, are we truly helping students when we’re giving them a task that can’t be done, not while they’re home? There are some students who had to leave home after they have left college to go to a place to be able to fulfill that because they live on the reservation and finding work in that way was impossible? What about our students who come from more rural communities where jobs aren’t as available as the apples on trees? There are so many things, and so I use students’ experiences to not only show how different those who come from privilege and those who do not, how different their college times are. But I also relate that to policies that we could actually change on the college campus to address the inequalities. It’s heartening that the University of Rochester, for example, has a program that they’ve had for years called the Take Five program, because they know that lower income students disproportionately have more disruptive life events that undercut their academic experience. They were like, you are admitted under this take five program, because we know that this time that you are investing in higher education is often going to be punctured with moments that leave you so broken and bruised you might take a week or two slower. And so I try to highlight those other things. And the reason why I talk about policy here is because, as I was doing this book, I was inspired by the work in The Privileged Poor, where I was able to get universities, for example, to change their dining hall policy. And so I sent out a theme for the book. I said, “Well, now that we know what we know, what are we going to do about it? What’s the point in just writing about inequality if we’re not going to address it? If students’ stories give the general scaffolding of policies that can be adopted, why not listen to them? Why not let that inform the universities that govern campus life?” I just want to bring attention to that because the fact of the matter is, as our communities become ever more diverse, by geography, by race, by class, we must pay attention to those sending communities in the same way how any immigration scholar will tell you country of origin matters because US policy differs, differs because of their relationship with each country. The same thing applies. Harvard and BU and Amherst have real nice diplomatic relations with Greenwich Village, with the Upper West Side, with Palo Alto, very great diplomatic relationships; from Coconut Grove, from Detroit, from parts of Brooklyn, from parts of Cleveland, St Louis, not so much. We don’t understand, and because we don’t have an understanding of that inequality, it’s hard for us to adopt policy that is receptive to it, because, again, to ask a student to take on a full- time job when they come from a community where jobs have been gone for a generation, is giving them a task that they cannot complete. The sad part about it is those requirements were not always relaxed during COVID19, some universities still required students to work during it. One student told me that she had to petition to get two part-time jobs to count because that was all she was able to find during the pandemic. And because what she come from, there weren’t a lot of jobs, and then she had to take on these two part time. Now, this is the same person who lived in a house with a family member who was on dialysis. This is the same person who lived with immunocompromised people, and she had to petition yet again and say, “Hey, I am afraid, deathly afraid, to go out to work. Please don’t make me because I’m fearful of hurting my family member.” She had to petition for it, because universities weren’t flexible enough to actually realize the consequences of it, or they were so rigid in their policy. And this book is not a book that is organized by, “Oh, this is policy, let me see the effect, right?” No, the book is organized by understanding how students dealt with the inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic in their families, finances, in the fault lines along race on campus. And when you look at the family dynamics and the consequences of it., you just see how it’s important to understand that students, especially lower income and first-gen college students, they’re not running away from home. They’re trying to get away from the things that make home hard. That’s why so many first gens are driven. It’s not because they don’t like home, it’s that they don’t like aspects of home that make life hell, whether that means having to do, as I talk about myself, whether that means having to do homework by candlelight because the power was out more often than not, whether it was not having your own bed or your own space to be, or enough to eat, those are very real thing. But I also want to highlight the ways in which university policies make coming from those spaces even harder, and to some students, they almost felt intentional.

John: So far, we’ve mostly been talking about institutional policies. But what role do individual faculty members play in this?

Tony: Individual faculty and staff are also important players in this, So, I’ll give you an example from the book. In the book, I show how universities have a segregated on-campus labor market where students are almost divided by social class in what jobs they go after and what jobs they get. What I show is that middle class students, or rather, students who are comfortable engaging with faculty were more likely to get research, teaching, and course assistantships. They were more likely to be in quote, unquote, those like life of the mind positions, the academic kind of heavy lifting work of the University. Students from lower income backgrounds who were not comfortable engaging with adults were more likely to be in manual labor positions like barista, grounds keeping, janitorial. That was happening long before the pandemic hit, and then when campus closed, and what I’m able to show in the book, is that lower income students who weren’t comfortable lost their jobs, those who were comfortable with faculty kept their jobs, and even increased their hours. I talk about this being directly about what faculty can and cannot do because so often assistantship jobs, whether it’s course, teaching, or research, those jobs aren’t even posted. Those jobs are doled out in office hours. Those jobs are people who are tapped for those positions. But if you are not in those spaces, even if you’re the best qualified because you know the material, you don’t get that job. In the end, what I show is the students who needed more were given less. The students who needed to earn more money to support themselves and their family were given fewer hours, less resources, and less support. The students who needed less, at least financially, were given more: more hours, more money, more support. It increased the disparity that what these jobs can do, and importantly, let’s then move beyond the pandemic. If you have a job when you have high faculty interactions, you not only get paid today, but you get a letter recommendation tomorrow. But if you have a transactional job where it’s pay for services rendered, that’s all you really get, is the pay today, there aren’t readily available opportunities for you to use your job to fully access institutional resources. Yet, if you work for me or any faculty member, there’s a greater likelihood that you will be able to access something from our networks, whether it’s, “Oh, I’m going to be meeting with the Director of HUD,” or “I’m meeting with this Director of a movie, they’re giving me three extra tickets. why don’t you come with me?” All of a sudden, you’re meeting people in different kind of ways. Or I. can put you on to say,”Hey, this person’s hiring next year. You should think about interning there.” These are just like very, very real opportunities that students who are connected to faculty members who are in the know or who can connect them with it, do more. They get more and so that’s why I want to challenge faculty. And faculty have great autonomy and greater access. One chemistry professor, for example, can hire as many students as an entire office like a dean of students. Some chemistry professors’ labs are 20 or 30 people strong, and half of them are undergraduates. So we have power within ourselves. I was doing a professional development program this weekend, and I met a Dean, and he said that he just changed the rule that if a faculty member does not list the job on the university’s website, they will not be eligible for a benefit that the college gives for hiring undergraduates. And I applauded them for that, because that is a step in the direction that I think we all should go. Because, as I also show in the book, when you make explicit the hiring process, lower income students from all backgrounds, whether it’s public or public school or private school, or their familiarity with elite environments, they’re more likely to apply or feel that it’s an opportunity that is available to them.

Rebecca: I think in this example and the previous example, you’re really highlighting the relational aspects that are really important for students to be successful in various ways, both on campus and in the next steps after campus. And you’ve really highlighted the idea of both in the example of the petitioning, and even knowing that petitioning is an option or building relationships with faculty, and even knowing that’s an option to get opportunities and highlighting the idea of making things more explicit. Is that the direction that institutions need to go in is developing policies that really highlight transparency, or are there other suggestions that you have for institutions?

Tony: I mean, transparency is huge, but it’s not just transparency. I think it’s also translation, because the more we leave to random connections, random conversations, or random moments of, “Hey, you look familiar,” or “Hey, do you take my class?” …the more we will see these class processes to continue, because students who are comfortable will avail themselves to more resources because they know how the college works, students who are not especially lower-income students think that hiring, grades, internships, fellowships, should be about the work, and yet, sometimes doing the best is not what gets noticed. It’s being present. It’s being in the room. I always tell the story of, when you apply for the Rhode to go to Oxford for study, you need eight letters of recommendation, eight. Who knows eight people, and not just know them, but who knows eight people who know them well enough to write true letters of recommendation for them, to endorse them for one of the most prestigious, if not the most prestigious, undergraduate award you can receive? You can be a 4.0 student, but if you’re a 4.0 student who has never been to office hours, who has never attended a faculty and student-faculty dinner, that has never worked for someone in their lab, do you have an advocate on campus for you who can say anything else, other than they were the top performer? But if you were a student who got like a 3.85, not quite 4.0, but still A range person, but you went to office hours because you didn’t do as well on your first exam, and you started going, and you develop a rapport with a faculty member, and you begin to work with that faculty member on their project. And then when that faculty member goes away for a week, sometimes you babysit their dog, or you become a member of their lab and their family, that letter is going to reflect that connection. But we leave so much in that black box of the hidden curriculum about how you should navigate college, and we almost never talk about employment. As a matter of fact, as I argue in the book, university takes a very hands-off approach to on-campus employment. We were like, “Just use this website or attend this job fair.” Job fairs are not neutral ground. We say “wear business casual.” What does that mean? As one student told me, “I don’t know what business casual was.” Some people may hear us talk in this conversation and be “Well, like, this is duh, like, it’s business casual. Get some loafers, get a jacket. Of course, you’re going to go and talk to a faculty member.” If anyone is having that thought right now, I would want them to ask themselves three questions: “What’s the highest level of education of the person who raised me? What job do they have? and how similar or different was my high school to the college that I went?” We have to remember, people with PhDs are 12 to 25 times more likely to have a PhD parent. Faculty members are like doctors, dentists, and the vets. It’s a hereditary position. So many faculty members have not only family members who have PhDs, but who are the children of PhDs. Again, through studying students’ experiences, through their families, finances, and the fault lines along race on campus, I was able to expose the way in which students move through campus on uneven and unequal grounds, long before the pandemic, and was able to chart how much rockier it got.

John: So, we’ve talked quite a bit about institutional issues and institutional policies, as well as some things specific to faculty. One of the things that happened with the pandemic, though, is faculty, often for the first time, recognized the extent of some of the inequities that their students were facing when they were seeing students who had trouble accessing wireless networks, or accessing Zoom, and struggling to share a computer, or being busy taking care of sick relatives or other issues, and there was at least a bit of recognition of some of these inequities. But I’m wondering if maybe faculty are backing a little bit away from that now as we’ve moved a bit further from the pandemic. A lot of people were a little bit more relaxed about deadlines and other policies and were a little more aware of the role of the hidden curriculum and so forth, but I’m not sure that that’s continued at the same level we’d like.

Tony: And that’s one of the reasons why I hope that this book doesn’t take us back to COVID, but it resurfaces the lessons that we learned through it, with some new ones, of course, because for me, I don’t want us to have this “get back to normal,” this post-pandemic normal, this new normal. The new normal is too easy. It will all too easy become a replication of what we had before if we don’t take these inequalities into consideration. If we don’t understand the way in which class shapes how students move through campus, and how race often exacerbates those differences, we just go back to what we had. We need to strive for something more like an equitable campus. We haven’t seen that.

Rebecca: Moving towards an equitable campus requires some hard work and change, and sometimes that’s something that people are really afraid of.

Tony: Yeah, I was thinking about something I said, it was like: “Simply following the impulse to get back to normal will only be a setback. If we return to normal, we will return to what was. We will once again be held hostage to the inequities that plague higher education and society alike. We will once again hold ourselves and our institutions back from being what we could be, what we should be. Let us not yearn for normalcy. I don’t want to be normal in the sense of the normal operating procedure. We need things to disrupt the normal operating procedure, unless our intention is to harm the very students who we are paying millions to recruit, retain, and graduate. If your intention is to do that harm, then you can go back with the new normal that’s basically going to be what we had part two. But that is not your intention, then you need to rethink and reframe many policies.”

John: In addition to the need for institutional change, are there some specific things that faculty can do in their classes to help reduce some of the effects of the inequities that our students face?

Tony: I’m a sociologist, and I already get in trouble for being as prescriptive as I am in the sense that “you’re too applied,” I’m like, “Well, again, now that we know, we know what we’re going to do about it,” but I don’t want to be so prescriptive that I limit the imagination of faculty. I’ll give you an example: in reading The Privileged Poor. I talk about the fact that we always say when office hours are. We almost never say what they are. And my work on office hours has spurred hundreds of faculty to begin to define office hours on their syllabi and on the first day of class. I want them to be similarly inspired. And here’s where it gets fun. Some people were in class 10 minutes early, and walked the class to their office to show people where they are. I never said to do that. I want to put people on the path to understanding the nature of America and how it comes to campus. We all don’t have the same streets to walk down. Some people gladly take a walk at night and stretch their legs. Other people know that that is a luxury that could cost them their life. And I say America, not saying that we are not global institutions, but we also know the larger context of the recruitment of lower-income students, especially in no-loan financial aid policies that are at nearly 80 no-loan schools in America. The vast majority of them only have no-loan policies for U.S. students. For me, that’s why I say America. And so I don’t want to be so prescriptive and tell fabrics what they need to do, but I do wish more people knew about redlining and blockbusting. I do wish more people knew about land theft and settler colonialism, and not just in the historical context, because we love to say that happened a long time ago, like Jim Crow laws were a long time ago. I’m like, “No, they weren’t.” I wish we understood the present-day manifestations of those inherently disenfranchising practices, because if we did, I think we would come to understand the reality that the greatest determining factor of an individual’s life chances in this country is a zip code in which you are born. In the land of the free, home of the brave, the place of unbound opportunity, if I know your zip code, I can predict how old you are going to be when you die, if you go to school, if you will graduate from high school, what college you would go to. Neighborhood isn’t destiny, but it almost feels sometimes that those who make it out took a detour that was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. There was a moment, there was a broken light that said, “turn here” instead of keep going and getting stuck into a different path. And so I just hope that this book spurs conversations on campus, not only to revisit some of the most invisible policies that have rather large impacts on student life, but also thinking about how we move through campus.

Rebecca: I hope a lot of faculty and administrators and other folks involved with our institutions read your book and really come together with creativity and have some interesting solutions or experiments to make change happen. We always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Tony: What’s next? That is a great question. I told you I’m first-gen. I never got to do a college tour when I was in high school. I didn’t know what a college tour was when I went to the prep school, you know, I was around a whole bunch of rich people, and they were like, “Oh, well, we’re gonna take a week through the California schools and a week through the New England Schools.” And I was like, “whatever I can’t see online when I’m at school on a computer because I don’t have internet at home, it won’t be seen.” And so I always say that when I go and share the work with people, as I’m invited to campus. This is my college tour. And so one thing that I look forward to about what’s next is visiting campuses to share the book. And also I am knitting another baby blanket for my graduate advisee, who just welcomed his first child into the world with his wife. And so that’s what’s next for me, is the book tour and a baby blanket. I actually just went and got the yarn this weekend, and I chose a pattern.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting, a nice balance.

Tony: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: And we do appreciate your book tours. In fact, we very much appreciated when you visited Oswego after your previous book. And I know shortly after that visit, a lot of people stopped calling office hours, office hours, and started using other names and moved them to other places to make them a little bit more welcoming. So I know that was a fairly immediate effect of one of those college tour visits.

Tony: Actually, Oswego was my last in-person visit before campus closed.

John: Yeah, we closed just a week or two after that. I think. I remember that, yeah,

Tony: I think I came up on March, 7th or 8th, I believe, and campus closed on March 10. [LAUGHTER] It was my last visit. I got off the plane, I was like, “Yeah, this is a different world we are living in.

John: Well, we were glad you made it before everything shut down.

Tony: I am too

Rebecca: …extra memorable. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you. We really enjoyed talking to you, and we’re looking forward to sharing this episode and to reading the book, which should be arriving shortly, my pre-order went in a couple months ago.

Tony: Awesome. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us.

Tony: Thank you all so much.

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

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

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354. International College Students

Posted in diversity, equity, higher education, inclusion, international education, international students, learning, study abroad, support network
August 14, 2024

International college students face cultural and financial challenges in addition to those all new college students face. In this episode, Peter Ghazarian and Hayley Weiner join us to discuss strategies institutions might use to support international students.  Peter is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego. He has worked in international education in the US, UK, Germany, and Korea. Peter’s work focuses on higher education, leadership, public policy, multiculturalism, and human migration. Hayley is a graduate student in the Higher Education Leadership program at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

Transcript

John:International college students face cultural and financial challenges in addition to those all new college students face. In this episode, we discuss strategies institutions might use to support international students.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Peter Ghazarian and Hayley Weiner. Peter is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego. Peter has worked in international education in the US, UK, Germany, and Korea. His work focuses on higher education, leadership, public policy, multiculturalism, and human migration. Hayley is a graduate student in the Higher Education Leadership program at SUNY Oswego. Welcome Peter and Haley.

Peter: Hi.

Hayley: Hi.

John:Our teas today are: … Peter, are you drinking any tea?

Peter: I actually am currently drinking some tea. For the summer, I would say my go to is unsweetened black tea, and that’s what I have right now. It’s hard to get away from it.

Rebecca: It’s perfect.

John:And Haley?

Hayley: I’m drinking chai today.

Rebecca: Nice.

John: …and Rebecca?

Rebecca: I am drinking a Scottish afternoon in anticipation of my upcoming trip in two days.

Peter: That’s exciting.

John:And I am drinking an Irish Breakfast tea, which is in the same general neighborhood.

Rebecca: I’m going there too. We invited you here today to discuss your research on the experience of international students in US education. Can you start by helping us understand the current landscape of international students studying abroad in the United States? Like, who are the students? Are they from particular regions, levels of affluence, et cetera?

Peter: Yeah. So I’d say there’s been kind of a sea change in the international student population in the United States since COVID. Prior to COVID, I would say it was predominantly dominated by middle- and upper-class students from China. But then with the trade war, and then with the COVID outbreak and the zero-COVID policy in mainland China, it led to a lot of diversification of international students coming to the United States after COVID. And so we are starting to see a lot more students from India in particular, and also from Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in Nigeria. A lot of students coming to the United States from Nigeria.

John:And could you talk a little bit about the research project that you’ve both been working on?

Hayley: Yes, so Peter and I were intrigued by this idea of why international students come to the United States and what their experiences are in terms of seeking employment. A lot of international students express this notion of wanting to gain either internship experiences or post-graduation employment, normally in the form of CPT or OPT and Peter and I are very intrigued, as these students often express positive and negative experiences that are unique compared to what their domestic peers may experience when trying to gain employment of that kind.

Peter: And we’re also kind of interested in these competing personal versus professional elements or aspects to their experience, where they have kind of this imagined experience that they’re going to have as international students. And then there’s this reality and these economic demands that come upon them that they might not have anticipated. And so there’s almost a direct kind of butting of heads there between those two aspects of their time abroad.

John:You mentioned OPT and CPT. Could you define those terms for our listeners?

Hayley: Yeah, so CPT stands for Curricular Practical Training, and this is a work authorization for international students while they’re maintaining their student status, so they can only participate in CPT for employment that is directly related to their major, and while they are in a current student status. OPT, on the other hand, stands for optional practical training, and this is specifically for students after they graduate. And traditionally, students will go for a full-time job, but students can do either part time or full time or even internship. But OPT is specifically for their post-graduation employment.

Peter: And so for a lot of students, that becomes this period where the clock is ticking down if they want to find visa sponsorship through an employer. And so many students see this almost as kind of this grace period after they finish their program to try out with an employer or employers, and hopefully be able to win their support to stay in the United States as a full-time employee there.

Hayley: Yeah, and to add on to what Peter said with this idea of a clock, specifically with OPT, with students finding their post-graduation employment, there’s a lot of federal rules. For example, the latest date that they can start their OPT is 60 days after their graduation date. And as we know, navigating the job market in the current way it is, it’s very difficult for domestic students, international students, or any student in general, to find a job within a specific, constrained timeframe. And international students don’t get the privilege of looking for jobs outside of their major or maybe just taking a job that can earn them a little bit of money while they seek something that is more up to what they’re looking for in the long run. So keeping in mind that there are these federal regulations about the days and there’s this constant pressure sitting on them to find the jobs, even while they’re a student and post graduation.

Peter: Once students become aware of that, it’s almost like the specter that’s haunting them in all of their experiences, whether or not they’re in class or whether they’re building personal relationships with their peers, there’s this creeping dread of this clock ticking down and this need to find some security in life.

Rebecca: Those federal regulations impact the front end of the experience as well. Can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges international students face in even coming to the United States to study?

Peter: So international students… I would say the biggest struggle is to get that student visa on the front end. So past work that I’ve done related to destination choice among international students has primarily focused on country image and how that influences individual students’ choices. And what I’ve found in the past is that actually much more important than individual perceptions of a destination are the country-level relationships between a student’s home country and the destination, and so they’re much more likely to choose a place that has a good, constructive, positive relationship with wherever it is they’re trying to go. That plays more of a dominant role in deciding whether they go or don’t go to a particular destination. But then there are also other issues that they consider, such as financial barriers and regulations that can get in the way of them easily being able to access higher education within a particular destination. And for the United States, the big barrier, I would say, is demonstrating the ability to financially pay for the study in the United States. It’s for those who’ve had the experience, it’s a bit like applying for a mortgage, but instead of being asked to show that you can pay for it in the future, that you can already pay for the entire house before. [LAUGHTER] And so there’s a lot of financial gymnastics that people go through to try and demonstrate that, even though it is a big ask for them and it can be very difficult for them.

Hayley: Yeah, to jump onto what Peter was mentioning about the financial aspect, I currently work as a DSO in SUNY Oswego’s international student office, and a DSO is a designated school official. So I help students when they’re preparing for their visa interviews or when they’re getting their initial documents, such as a form I-20 to apply for their visa interview. And a very common occurrence is international students needing additional time or having struggles in terms of demonstrating the financial ability, and specifically, international students don’t get the privilege of applying for FAFSA or other United States federal aid programs that their domestic counterparts may get the opportunity to apply for. And so as a result, they have a larger sum of money that they may need to come up with up front, like Peter mentioned. And sometimes, even if they don’t receive the visa on its own, they still needed to come up with that money just to get the visa interview appointment.

Rebecca: And then my understanding is that, depending on where you’re coming from, getting a visa appointment is also a challenge …just scheduling it and making it happen in a time frame that makes sense to start school.

Peter: I’ve had many applicants, for example, from Ghana, who are really struggling with that. It’s just booked out so far in advance, it’s so difficult for them to get an appointment, and the students feel as though they’re very unlikely to be awarded a visa unless they’ve been given some form of scholarship or some sort of financial assistance with the offer. And so students are pretty desperate in that situation.

Hayley: A lot of preparation goes into it as well. Peter mentioned Ghana. I know India is a country where sometimes students are waiting one year or more. I’ve seen students wait years …plural… just to get their visa interview booked. And sometimes students are more eager and they want to have it sooner. And this does result in a different perception of whether they decide to come to the United States specifically to pursue their degrees, or maybe what degree they’re going to pursue, because they’re looking for that longer benefit in terms of financial benefits.

John:Implicit in this discussion is the notion, I think, that most of the students who are coming from abroad are interested in staying here after it, or at least staying long enough to get some training. What proportion of students are coming with the intention of staying in the U.S. after they complete their schooling, and what proportion are planning to return to their countries?

Peter: I don’t have hard numbers for that, but the sense that I get is that a lot of students are pretty fluid in their view of whether they stay in the United States. A lot of students are also willing to go to other third destinations that are English speaking, for example, like Singapore or Hong Kong, or places where English is the lingua franca, and they feel like they’d still be competitive in the job market, but they would be making what we might call a global middle-class wage, although some of the students we spoke to were interested in going back home after getting a bit of experience here, believing it would allow them to move into kind of an elite position back in their home country. In particular, I believe one student was interested in moving for a global energy company that was active within their home country. They believed if they had some energy industry experience in the United States, it would be pretty easy for them to transition into that type of position back in their home country, which is a position for an elite individual there.

John:Given the additional financial requirements for students coming from abroad, it would seem like most of the students who come in would be coming in from above average incomes in many of the countries of origin, which means we’re mostly providing some additional benefits to those who are already relatively privileged in their countries. Is that accurate?

Peter: And that is absolutely accurate. I have actually done a study that looked at whether or not international higher education exacerbates income inequality. In any case, it depends on the host or the sending destination. In some places, it is something that is seen for the elite, and it is almost something that’s required for them to return back to their home and get a position within a large corporation or within the government. It’s seen as kind of a stamp of approval having that international qualification. But in other places, what we’ve started to see is that when we do have people who are from a lower income background who participate in international higher education, it does contribute to intergenerational mobility, and that tends to be an improvement in their social class as a result of their participation. And it just depends on the place. And so in a lot of East Asians countries that are sending students, it is contributing to the inequality, whereas in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, that’s where it’s having more of a positive impact and contributing to economic mobility there.

John:So you’re working on the study of international students in the US. Where’s the sample drawn from?

Hayley: We focus on a phenomenological study where we focused on the shared lived experiences of international students. And just due to our resources, we did use a population of SUNY Oswego students specifically, and these students were a mix of both current students and recent graduated students. And to my knowledge, all of our students were a undergraduate degree level or recent undergraduate alumni.

Peter: There were students from India, Malaysia, Nepal, Bahamas, and Senegal. We did reach out to other institutions in central New York, to their offices of international students and scholars, to ask them to kind of spread the word and help to recruit but we got only a few responses to those initial entreaties, and then when we tried to schedule interviews with those folks, there was no response.

Rebecca: What are some of the challenges that international students face while studying in the US and adapting to the US educational system?

Hayley: I think a big overlooked challenge that international students face, that maybe others may not acknowledge, is they’re kind of starting over in a brand new setting. They not only have to get adjusted to the culture, but there’s some things that maybe people who live in the United States for their whole lives take kind of for granted. So, for example, international students, they’re permitted to have an on-campus job, but they don’t have a social security number. They have to go through the process of applying for a social security number. International Students don’t have bank accounts in the United States, and they can’t even pay for food their first couple days here because they don’t have maybe a card or anything to use at, like the grocery store, or they don’t have a SIM card for their phones to call their families back home. And I think there’s a lot of cultural adjustment that takes place, and students are kind of rushed into being acquainted with United States higher education settings, because not only do they have to deal with all of these cultural adjustments, but they have their schoolwork that piles up almost immediately after they arrive.

Peter: Yeah, and in terms of what we learned just in speaking to participants in the research study, what was kind of surprising or jumped out to us was that they are going through a lot of the same identity development phases that domestic students or local students go through but there’s these additional layers on top of those experiences that they’re having with having to navigate a new cultural environment and dealing with some of this economic pressure that they have on them. For some folks, they’re able to navigate that successfully, and they’re alright, even though it is very stressful. But for others, it is very difficult. For them. There’s always something to worry about, and it makes it very difficult for them to just relax and enjoy the moment, because there’s always some issue or concern that’s kind of lingering in the back of their minds.

John:In terms of cultural differences that they have to navigate, one of those, I think, would be differences in the way in which instruction takes place in US classrooms. Could you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that students face in adjusting to a college environment in the U.S.

Peter: I would say, from our participants, we heard mostly positive things. So the students themselves, coming from a younger generation, felt happy and excited for maybe more of a student-focused approach to instruction and more active learning in the classroom. They appreciated the opportunity to be able to interact with their peers, and felt that it really strengthened their communicative abilities. And so it seemed to be a very positive thing for the vast majority of students. They did mention that it was strange at first and a little difficult to adjust to it, but that overall, it’s something they enjoyed. It’s something they saw valuable as part of this attractiveness of US higher education in general.

Rebecca: Some of the conversations that I had with some international students recently in terms of the kind of classroom setting was the expectation of scaffolding, or the steps to complete assignments that maybe they had an experience in their home country, and not understanding that those things were required, or that those were different kinds of expectations that we have here. So it’s made me as an instructor much more aware of being explicit about what some of those differences might be. Are there other ways that instructors can support this transition into the US system?

Peter: I would say, looking at it almost from kind of this universal design for learning perspective, would be the best way to think about it is that the more explicit and clear you are in general about your expectations, it’s going to benefit not just international students, it’s going to benefit all of the students that are in your course. So making sure that you’re communicating your expectations about assignments in multiple ways, so that the most people can get it or can understand it is going to be really key here in just improving instruction for everyone. And international students will, of course, also benefit from this, but I think everyone can benefit.

Rebecca: So in addition to adjusting to the classroom and some of the adjustments to the U.S., what are some other changes that international students describe?

Peter: So, one of the big things that we heard about was personal change. So students weren’t just adapting to a new cultural environment, it was also having an impact on how they saw themselves and their idea of themselves. And so a few of the students talked about internalizing ways of thinking that they had originally felt were foreign or different or that they were uncomfortable with, but now they saw it as part of who they were, and that they had this interesting experience of moving between selves. So there was their home country culture self, and then there was their US culture self, and depending on the context, they had to be a little bit fluid in their identity and how they behaved and the way that they thought, but that that was an important part of adapting and excelling within a cultural environment is having that flexibility to be able to reinterpret yourself according to the rules of a different game you might be playing according to which culture you’re operating in.

Hayley: And it seemed like when the students kind of described this personal change or transition, like Peter mentioned, it wasn’t really a superficial change that they were describing. They were describing more of like a deeper engagement with the new culture that they were experiencing, and how this deeper engagement worked to reshape their thought processes and their perspectives, and how it was very transformative within their cultural immersion into US higher education institutions,

Peter: There were times when they were able to achieve that imagined or idealized experience of studying abroad that they originally had before they came to the United States. So I think one participant in particular talked about walking home late at night from a part-time job that they held on campus, and how they would never be able to do that in their home country, because it would have been unsafe for them to be walking alone by themselves, and just how they felt so free and they felt so independent that they started crying on the walk home, because they felt like they had achieved what they had dreamed or hoped for by coming to the United States.

Hayley: And that kind of ties on to this, like aspirational kind of rationale that Peter and I focused on on our research as well, where both personal and professional international students have this motivation to come to the United States because there’s dreams that they have. And like Peter mentioned, there was that student who just felt this sense of relief, or just a sense of satisfaction of being where they were at that point, being in the United States, and they felt like they were living what they were dreaming of when they were a child. And then we have the professional side, where they’re international students. I remember one student describing to us how she was thinking of being a doctor, and how in her home country, she knew that being a doctor and being a female doctor didn’t have as much room or level for success. And then another student from the same country mentioned wanting to be a geologist and how, in her home country, geology is not a very popular science, and that more engineering and doctors are from that home country, and how coming to the United States allowed them to have this diversified curriculum that allowed them to fit into these dream roles that they imagined when they were younger.

Peter: And so what we were trying to make sense of these different rationales for studying abroad. We weren’t just doing this like on our own or pulling this out of the thin air. We came into this with a theoretical framework that we adapted from a researcher called Fakunle, who’s based in the United Kingdom at the University of Edinburgh and Fakunle has put together a model for the different types of rationales that international students have for studying abroad. And it’s something that she put together speaking primarily to international students in Europe. And we wanted to see how well it held up while we were speaking to international students here in the United States. And we found that the model applied very well. And those four rationales are an aspirational rationale, an educational rationale, an economic rationale, and then an experiential rationale.

Rebecca: That transitions nicely into thinking about international students for an F1 visa and that OPT or that optional practical training that we talked a little bit about earlier in trying to find a job in their field or discipline immediately following graduation. What is the experience like for students trying to find these opportunities? I know from my own conversations with international students, it can be a struggle. Can you share what some of those barriers are that they might face in this job hunt?

Hayley: I think a very major barrier is that sometimes employers don’t comprehend or understand what it means to be an international student, and believe it or not, with OPT, if a student plans to use their one year of OPT, or in STEM students’ case, they get an additional 24 months of OPT, an employer does not need to provide sponsorship of any kind, and the student is eligible to work for that given employer, so long as that employment is directly related to their major. And sometimes employers get scared or worried about the idea of hiring an international student, either just they don’t have the resources to know what it means, or they’ve never done it before, and that acts as a significant hinder for international students. Now I know when we were interviewing students, there were a few students who mentioned that they were able to easily acquire a job, and it took a few tries, but they were able to get one before they graduated. And we’ve had other students who mentioned that it was much more difficult to get post-graduation employment, and after graduating, it became their full-time job to apply for a job, but keeping in mind that they only had that limited number of days to seek that employment added this extra stress that was very troublesome for the students.

Peter: Yeah, and I would say that it’s not just the employers that are ignorant of the rules that surround OPT, there’s also a concern that support services on campus beyond the international student office, aren’t always aware of these regulations or how they impact a student’s employability, and so students felt like they had to take anything that they heard from Career Services or an internship opportunity that they heard about with a grain of salt, because those are almost always developed or they’re communicated in a way that’s targeted towards local students, and it might not play out the same way for an international student. That opportunity might not exist for them. And they also talked a lot about how they avoided medium or smaller companies as a result of those companies’ lack of awareness or knowledge of OPD or CPT, and the belief that they would just kind of not even consider them seriously because they weren’t aware of how OPT or CPT worked. And so this was a source of pressure for a lot of students. They felt like they were supposed to be the expert of these policies, but they’re very complicated, and for somebody, for example, who’s communicating in a foreign language, trying to express this in a way that calms the nerves of a potential employer is not something that’s easy to do.

John:Might part of that be due to concern that when many new employees are taken on, particularly in technical fields, there’s a lot of on-the-job training that’s provided, which is costly to the firm. And might there be concern on the firm’s part that they might invest in workers who will not be able to get a change in visa status?

Peter: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely a legitimate concern on the part of a company. Interestingly though, it seems like those technical positions are the ones where the students tend to have more success in applying for the positions. And so students, for example, who are going into mining or into IT roles, those are the students who often have the most success in their applications for OPT even though those tend to be the positions that have a lot of on-the-job training that they are going to receive. And I wonder whether or not that’s because those are industries that are traditionally more open to recruiting from abroad, and so perhaps they feel more comfortable with working with these students who might need some sort of sponsorship in the future,

John:And also the fact that there are not that many students in the U.S. majoring in those fields, so that a very large share of employees in those areas are coming from overseas … fortunately, or we’d be in much worse trouble in our country.

Rebecca: It might also be tied to the potential three years of OPT rather than one that is often tied with those particular fields which are STEM designated

Hayley: Based on our interviews with students, as well as just my work in general, I noticed that students who are in STEM designated majors, even for their first year of OPT, before their STEM extension is even granted, they have a much easier time just getting their foot in the door or getting an interview, compared to students who are maybe in the field of like business or communications, and I think that longer extension of OPT could possibly have an impact on an employer making the initial investment into an international student as a first-time employee.

Peter: Right, because one year isn’t really enough time to know for sure whether or not you would want to keep somebody on, but three years, you know then, you know for sure whether or not this is somebody you want to sponsor or not. And so, actually one of our participants made a comment like, “I just don’t think a year is enough for me to prove myself to an employer. And so I don’t think I’ll be able to stay. I’m glad that I have the opportunity to gain that experience here.” But, that person, in particular, really regretted not being in a field that offered the longer OPT because she felt like that would have given her a better chance to be able to stay in the United States in the future. An interesting sort of side effect of that that I’ve seen, is that a lot of institutions are coming up with ways to get their programs designated as being in the STEM fields, in order to make it more attractive for international students. So I I’ve seen, for example, like a business analytics program, that they really focused heavily on data visualization and those types of things in order to promote it and get it approved as a STEM field degree program. But is it actually a STEM field degree program? I don’t know.

Hayley: It is actually, yeah, business analytics was recently added to the list of STEM designated degrees.

Rebecca: What could institutions do or advocate for to minimize some of the challenges for students as they pursue work opportunities?

Hayley: I think, while it may not be the sole solution, a really great solution could be showing international students how to market themselves. I noticed a lot of international students worry that maybe because of their international background, they may not line up with a domestic peer who studied in the United States their entire lives. But that’s not always the case. International students have specific traits such as being able to easily adapt to new cultural settings, or a lot of times they speak even multiple languages, and this is something that their domestic counterparts who are applying for the same jobs, they don’t often have that same trait. And so by being able to market themselves in the current or modern workplace or in the job market itself, I think that would be one way to minimize some of the challenges. I don’t see that as being one of the ways to get rid of all challenges, but it could allow international students to have an upper hand.

Peter: And I think a lot of student support services that are available on campuses now are in this sort of one-size-fits-all approach to supporting students, and that that can be to the detriment of students who are coming from non-traditional backgrounds who are participating in higher education here in the United States. So international students, for example, suffer from this. Non-traditional students might suffer from this. First-generation students might suffer from maybe an older approach to providing support services to students that in the past did serve well, but now maybe we need to be thinking a little bit more carefully about how do we individualize these services that we’re providing, so that we are at least aware of the different types of support that different students are going to need if they’re going to be successful transitioning from higher education into the workplace, and so international students would absolutely benefit from this. And I think that, in order to make this work, there needs to be a little bit more communication across offices on university campuses, because now a lot of these things are very siloed off from one another, and so it prevents, for example, an understanding of students who are receiving accessibility support in their work: searching for a job, for example, or students who are international, who are looking for a job, might have specific needs that they would benefit from if those offices were aware of what one another were doing and they were sharing information a little bit more openly with one another.

John:A while back, we did an interview with someone from the University of Miami who was talking about a program they had there to help prepare students from China for American classrooms in terms of the difference in structure and the difference in expectations, in terms of active participation and discussion. Is that something that perhaps more colleges could do to ease some of the transitions?>

Peter: So there was kind of a boom in those types of programs, in those gateway programs, they were often called, and they met with mixed success. In some cases, they were really helpful, and it helped students to adapt by giving them a soft transition period when they could adapt to the expectations of the U.S. university, before they went into a more high-stakes environment where they were getting graded for their actual content area coursework. However, some people were critical of this. They saw it almost as a money grab by the institutions who were asking these students to complete maybe 24 credits of coursework that wasn’t really going to apply towards a degree, and a lot of the times it was a conditional part of their acceptance into that institution. And so they got kind of a bad rap by especially international students who saw it as just paying for two more semesters but not really receiving a tangible benefit.

John:That particular program was a very short course, just more of an orientation to the differences in the culture of American college education. It was just a short program to reduce some of the shock and to help prepare people for the difference so they could hit the ground running without getting a bit behind in their work.

Peter: Yeah, I think that approach is absolutely positive and something that would be of great benefit to the international students, but again, if it has no credits, and then the funding for that type of program becomes very difficult, because it’s not sustainable in the long run, a lot of the time,

Rebecca: Is there a role that institutions could… should… play in establishing relationships with potential employers or regional companies that might make it easier for students to find placements after graduation.

Hayley: Working in an international office, it’s not traditional for international advisors to maybe reach out to employers on behalf of students, but if an employer were to ask a student a question related to their visa status, or maybe related to OPT or CPT, that would be somewhere where an immigration advisor on a campus can step in. Something recently that the SUNY Oswego International Office did, was we actually heard about students receiving lots of questions from their employers about what it means to be an employer of somebody who is working under CPT authorization or OPT authorization. And so our office actually took the initiative to make a specific web page for those employers for these basic kind of Q&A, frequently asked questions, that we do receive, and it’s actually had a very positive impact. And we’ve received a few compliments from some employers about how this did assist them, and they learned some new information about really what it meant to be a student on OPT or a student on CPT from the perspective of an employer.

Peter: And that more broadly, with all of these workforce development initiatives that we’re seeing take root across the United States, I would say that there’s an increasing expectation that higher education institutions are more directly involved in the transition of their graduates into the workforce, and that they are playing a role in making sure that students, regardless of what major they’re choosing, are being prepared for some sort of future within the economy. And I think that there is some resistance to that, because it challenges some of the foundational ideas about what higher education is about, or the purpose of a higher education institution. But I don’t think it’s something that higher education institutions are going to be able to escape. With the huge amount of money that people are investing in a degree there is an expectation that there’s going to be a return on the money that students put into that and higher education institutions are going to be held accountable if students are not able to be successful after pursuing their degree.

John:Are there any other things that you’d like to share about your study with our listeners?

Peter: The thing that really jumped out to me is as someone in the past who has done primarily quantitative research focused on international students, it was nice and refreshing to focus more on the individual lived experiences. And what really stood out to me was how similar the experiences were between international students and what is recorded in the theory about local domestic students in the United States, and so they’re having these same sort of identity development phases, or they’re going through a lot of these same sort of experiences. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s layered with these other things that are going on that really add a little bit of depth and complexity to the types of things that are happening to the international students here in the United States.

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

Peter: I would say this study focused on Central New York in particular and so the next logical step would be expanding it out further to other regions of New York State, or to other regions of the United States in general, to make sure that my model holds up according to other experiences in other regions of the country and in private and public and even parochial higher education institutions within the United States. So grasping at the diversity of experiences that exist within U.S. higher education, and making sure that that’s captured in the work, and then moving beyond just defining the problems and the experiences towards highlighting or spotlighting solutions to these issues or concerns that we’re learning about as we’re studying the experiences of international students here.

Hayley: Yeah, and to kind of add on to what Peter was saying, by bringing to light or highlighting or making awareness of the shared experiences of international students, because I think it’s very important to acknowledge that international students still touch just about every office on the campus the same way that domestic counterpart students would. And so this is not just something that maybe international student advisors or individuals who work with international students on a daily basis should focus on, this is something that kind of has stakeholders on all ends of a campus. And so by spreading the awareness or making others known of these challenges that international students face, I think solutions would become more prominent.

Rebecca: Well, thank you both for getting us to think a little bit more about our international student population.

Peter: Oh, thank you so much for having us, and we really appreciate the opportunity.

Hayley: Yeah, thank you so much.

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

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

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