[00: 00: 00] Bonni Stachowiak: On today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed number 271, David Gooblar shares about his new book, The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You about College Teaching.

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[00: 00: 23] Bonni: Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. David Gooblar, today’s guest, teaches. He teaches teachers to teach, he writes about teaching, he teaches about writing, and sometimes he even writes about writing.

He’s the associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Temple University. He’s the author of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught you About College Teaching and The Major Phases of Philip Roth, and the co-editor with Aimee Pozorski of Roth After Eighty: Philip Roth and the American Literary Imagination. Since 2013 he’s written a regular column on college teaching for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Side note, I am now not reading from his bio. It’s wonderful if you’ve not read it, you got to get on that right now.

Maybe listen to the rest of the episode, but definitely go to the show notes and get a link to his beautiful column in the Chronicle. He’s taught rhetoric and writing and American literature for many years, most recently at the University of Iowa where he was a lecturer in their rhetoric department for four years. He splits his time between Philadelphia and Iowa City. He likes to cook, write pop songs, and spend time with his family. He tweets too much at @dgooblar and I have to also add the side note that I don’t think he tweets too much, but I suppose I should let him speak for himself. It’s his bio, it’s his time. [chuckles] I’m so excited today to welcome David Gooblar to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00: 02: 20] David Gooblar: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here. I’m a big fan of the show.

[00: 02: 23] Bonni: This feels very weird for me [chuckles] because I do know you listen to the show and I read everything of yours I can get my hands on. I have this weird sense that we both really know each other, but I know that that’s also a false sense. It feels so good to talk to you.

[00: 02: 38] David: As well, although, of course, because I know you from your voice work, your work on the podcast, I feel like I rather have a better sense of you because you’ve been talking in my ears for a number of years now.

[00: 02: 49] Bonni: That’s true, and I didn’t know what your voice was going to sound like until we got on this call today.

[00: 02: 52] David: That’s true. It’s great to talk to you.

[00: 02: 55] Bonni: You have written a book called The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. Let’s start out by just the title of the book. What’s really missing? What is this missing course that we never received?

[00: 03: 12] David: What really struck me when I was thinking about making a book was the real disconnect between what I think of as the main purpose of a university and how we train academics. I have a PhD and I’ve been working at universities for my whole professional career. My main job has always been teaching. That is, again, if you look at the statistics, the huge majority of academics, their main job is teaching. I’ve seen pretty reputable statistics that suggest most full-time academics spend three times as much on their teaching than their research.

The job of the academic is teaching, and yet if you look at graduate programs, most people are lucky if they get one semester course on pedagogy or teaching of any sort. In my graduate program, I had a very good– I got my PhD from University College London, I had a wonderful experience. The sum total of the instruction I had on teaching was one sentence said to me by a senior professor as I was entering the classroom that he was leaving. He said to me, “David, no matter how little you know, they know less.” Which is good advice, but that’s all I got in terms of teaching and instruction in my graduate program, even as I was teaching, of course, throughout my graduate program.

I felt really unprepared for the career, even though I have this terminal degree that’s meant to prepare me for it. I thought there really is a missing– Maybe not just a missing course, but a whole missing chunk of education for universities and for the people who work for them.

[00: 05: 03] Bonni: Speaking of things that are missing, often in our conversation what’s missing is references to the students. You start right out in the beginning, the students are the material. What do you mean by that?

[00: 05: 17] David: Because I didn’t have any instruction and how to teach, of course, I just taught how my professors taught me. This is how we all do it. It’s not the worst system, but what that meant for me coming through, I majored in English and I did my PhD in English, is that my sense of what a professor did was to stand up at the front of the room and be brilliant, right? When I prepared my classes as a graduate student, and even after my PhD, what I did was I’d read these texts and try to come up with really brilliant interpretations of them, and I told the interpretations of them to the students, and that was teaching to me.

At no point did I think at all about what students be doing, what students would get out of it. I thought they would see me interpret books and maybe they’d figure out how to do it themselves, but I don’t even know if I would think that explicitly about students. I just thought this is what a professor does, stand up there and be smart. That’s ridiculous. That’s absolutely ridiculous for educators. The job of a teacher is to help students learn. What I slowly realized, and I really realized this through adjuncting and having to teach courses outside of my immediate discipline.

I had to teach a course at Augustana College in Illinois, a great little liberal arts college where I was an adjunct. I had to teach a course called rhetoric in the liberal arts, and it was really skills-based and not content-based, and I was at a loss. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing if I didn’t have novels to teach or a lot of text to teach. I was supposed to teach them how to write well, and how to be good students, and how to even be good citizens, perhaps how to critically think. That was a trial by fire, that semester. I remember that really well, how desperate I was to fill class periods. I didn’t know what I was doing at all.

What I eventually came up with is that the students were the material. The students were what I was teaching because that’s who I want, that’s what I wanted to work on was individual students, and help them develop. Even this phrase that you’ll hear me use a lot, probably in this very interview, this idea of student-centered teaching or centering our teaching on students, even that to me is insufficient. We need to think about teaching as we teach students. We don’t teach material, we teach human beings. That, to me, once it came to my head, it was the most obvious thing in the world, and yet, again, we’re just not taught how to do that. This very difficult thing of helping someone else change, or develop, or grow.

[00: 07: 58] Bonni: One of the ways that you talk about teaching students is through the process of doing what you call helping students revise themselves. How do we do that and how does that tie into this broader theme of active learning strategies?

[00: 08: 13] David: Yes, That idea of helping students revise themselves, that comes from me learning about cognitive science and how people learn. That’s, again, instead of this idea where we’re going to stand at the front of the room and tell students information, and it’ll go into their brain and then they’ll know it. We know now pretty convincingly that that’s not how students learn. The banking model of education is actually not how learning works. We learn by revising preconceptions about the world.

Every student in our classroom has ideas about our subjects, even if they’re ill-formed ideas, even if they’re totally vague, even if they’re complete misconceptions, there’s something there, they’re not blank pages. If that’s the truth, then our task is to encourage them to examine what they currently think, examine their preconceptions, find it lacking in some way, find that they have a gap, that they either misunderstand something or don’t understand all of something, and then create an environment where they can figure out how to fill that gap.

That’s really tricky, of course. One of the things that I think I learned through trying to focus on students in my teaching, and certainly learned from doing research in the scholarship of teaching and learning, is this weird paradox that learning is the work of students. Only students can learn, we can’t make them learn, but at the same time, that doesn’t mean that teachers are useless by any means, right? There’s still work for us to do. If we can’t make students learn, and if pouring information into students’ heads isn’t the way to do it, what do we do? I think what we need to do is, the way that I like to think about it is, we need to create conditions in which students can do the work of learning. We set up the stage, we set up the collaboration, we design activities that encourage students to hold their preconceptions up to the light and figure out that they need to change those ideas, that they need to do the work themselves.

Once we understand that they need to do the work themselves, that we can’t do it for them, the task becomes much different, I think, and to me, much more interesting. It’s much more interesting to think of, “How do I get this student, this human being to see the world differently?” That’s a really interesting challenge to me, rather than, “How do I impress the student that I know a lot about something?”

[00: 10: 53] Bonni: You have area of focus on building better courses. Before we even get into building better ones, would you talk just about if you’ve struggled with when is good enough? This whole tension of over-preparing for our classes or thinking we need to be perfect, thinking of it as not an iterative process. How did you come to even knowing what better courses look like before you can even give us advice on that?

[00: 11: 24] David: It’s very difficult, isn’t it? My experience of being a teacher is very similar to my experience of being a writer. It’s one of constant failure. If you care about your teaching, you are always noticing how far you’ve yet to go. Every semester I finished teaching and I think, “I had some wins, I did a good job, I did better than last semester,” usually, but there are always students that I think, “I really didn’t figure out how to help that student,” or, “This class didn’t really work for that student.” That hurts.

I don’t know that there’s an endpoint that I’m ever [chuckles] going to reach. I think that’s worth remembering too. The name of the chapter you’re referring to is Building a Better Course, and it’s not building a perfect course. I think that’s important to keep in mind. Teaching is really challenging work. Teachers are generally overworked and underpaid, and they generally care about their students. I do think it’s important to remember that you’re almost certainly going to fail if your goal is to help every student develop. That’s the right goal and it’s a goal that you’re probably necessarily going to fail at in some way. Does that answer your question? I think that’s important to keep in mind.

[00: 12: 40] Bonni: It really does. There are two things that I’m reminded of as you say that. One is just that I’ve gotten it wrong so many times whenever I allow assumptions to come in. In an episode a while back we were looking at an article from The Chronicle that just talked about making all these assumptions around something as simple as someone wearing earbuds in the class. Just [chuckles] all the things, it triggers images for me that are so often not accurate.

I am glad that at least I’ve learned enough not to act on them. I can think of in the last, I don’t know, four years or something, a young man having them. I didn’t name it, I didn’t say anything. I’m so glad that I didn’t, because I was able to be a better teacher for him than if I had decided that that was all about me. Which actually gets me to my second thing, it is not all about me, it’s not all about that class. Their lives are so much richer than that one [chuckles] experience, and those are the two things that have really helped me too in just this constant failure that you describe.

[00: 13: 37] David: One thing that I think of is that when I was a novice teacher, I used to believe this thing that– I think sometimes you hear teacher say a lot which is that you can basically get a sense of your students in the first few weeks and it’s usually right. You can make a first impression. You know who the good students are going to be, who the bad students are going to be, and it’s born out. What’s funny is that now I think the exact opposite.

The more I teach, the more I’m surprised by my students. I think that’s because as I’ve taught more, I’ve gotten more actually interested in them as people and more moving away from seeing myself as the center of the classroom. I’m less insecure about, “Did I perform well?” I’m more focused on what our students getting out of it. Once I’ve made students my focus, now I see, of course, that I’m usually wrong about them at first and the more I get to know them, the more they surprise me.

[00: 14: 32] Bonni: What do we get wrong about feedback and how can we get better at it?

[00: 14: 37] David: I know it may not be the way you meant it and it’s not the way feedback is usually used, but I think it’s important to think of feedback going in both directions. Generally, if we talk about feedback, we talk about giving feedback to students. I think it’s also important to think of how can we get feedback from students. I think any successful or near successful class needs to build in elements where you’re going to get reflected back to you information on how students are doing. Often, that’s as simple as asking them, but making sure that’s part of your process, I think, is really important.

It’s really important to me to figure out is this class working for students? Do they enjoy coming to class? Is it valuable to them? Are there things that I need to change? That’s important. Then, thinking as well about the feedback we give to them as not just assessment or at least not just summative assessment, that writing comments on papers, giving oral feedback on speeches or any kind of assignment, is not just a chance to tell students how they’ve done, although that’s of course important. It’s also just a chance to speak to them at a point when they’re definitely listening.

That’s what I like to tell the teachers I work with. Students are really paying attention when you tell them their grade. That’s an opportunity to do more than just tell them their grade. That’s an opportunity to teach, to think about not just, “How can I get across to them? How can I justify my grade?” But, “How can I help them see what they need to do next?” Like a lot of the things I talk about in the book, it’s less about a technique and more about your mindset that I think is important.

Once I started to think of the feedback I was giving my writing students on their papers, for example, once I started thinking of that as teaching and not just as the comments I had to put to explain why I gave the student a C, once I thought of it as teaching, that really helped me, I think, give much more helpful feedback. It made it easier too, instead of just doing a task, this grading papers, now I thought it was actually important to my overall goal of teaching these students.

[00: 16: 49] Bonni: I have a colleague who I have had fairly regular conversations with over the last couple of years. She cares so deeply about her students and she’s in a discipline that would fall under a more scientific kind of broad, broad field, and just feels like she has to correct every single thing on their papers, and that that’s the best service that she could ever give. [chuckles] I keep trying and trying, “You don’t have to do this.” I wonder if maybe you can take over for me, because I’m not getting anywhere. [laughs] What would you say to someone who is coming from a deep place of care? They feel like in this profession, you absolutely have to get these things right. Is she teaching?

[00: 17: 33] David: That’s, of course, very common. I used to do that as well. Writing instruction is very similar tendencies for a lot of writing teachers. They read a paper and they spend so much time correcting grammar and usage. It can be difficult to resist that, especially if you care about your students and you’re putting in more time. There’s pretty convincing research that suggests that students, when they see comments on papers or assignments, only remember two or three things. That makes sense to me, actually, in terms of thinking of how students pick up their work and look at their grades.

I could think we can probably feel lucky that they remember two things. You need to prioritize and you need to think about, “What’s the signal I want to send to them?” If I spend most of my space in the margins of a student’s paper, writing about grammar and usage, the student will think the grammar and usage is the most important part of writing. They may only remember that part. They might even only remember, “Well, I made a lot of mistakes.”

Actually, previous guest on your podcast, John Warner, has really helped me think about this as well. Thinking about higher-order concerns, thinking about rhetorical concerns like audience and purpose when you give feedback. Like, “What are the two or three most important things I want to student to work on?” I think that’s what you need to get across in your feedback. You have to have faith that if they care about– Again, my background is in writing, so I use writing as examples. If my student writers care about fulfilling their purpose with a specific audience, they’re going to eventually fix the grammar to achieve that purpose. I also don’t have enough time to fix every student’s grammar or to fix every student’s little mistakes, so I need to prioritize and think about what are the higher-order concerns to really hammer on.

[00: 19: 25] Bonni: You really emphasize the importance of process and this is so freeing for me [chuckles] and I think it’d be freeing for a lot of other people. How do we do that?

[00: 19: 37] David: Well, the easy way to do that is actually the grade process. If you’re going to grade, and I don’t know if we want to go into all the wonderful work being done on grading right now, which is really inspiring, but most teachers still grade, and certainly even if you’re not grading, if you’re going to give feedback, give feedback and give grades on the process, give feedback on drafts, give feedback on activities they do in class. We signal the students what we find important by what we make a critical component of the course.

If your syllabus says, “You get 30% of your grade and it’s on the final product,” and there’s nothing there about drafting or activities that give them skills to do the lab project, then they’re going to say, “Well, it doesn’t matter how I get there as long as I do it at the end. As long as I have a good final project, I’ll have learned.” That’s not really how learning works, right? I don’t necessarily want to reward the student for a wonderful product. I want to encourage and incentivize the student to adopt a process that they’ll be able to do successfully even when I’m not looking over their shoulder, even when they’ve left the classroom.

I’m much more concerned with trying to help students develop things that they can continue to do after they leave the class, rather than I am with helping them produce something, one thing great for the class and then not be able to do it again. How do we do that? Again, it’s that idea, I think, of giving it our attention. We tell students what’s important through what we give attention to, through what we emphasize with our grading practices, what we give time to in class.

I have students, my writing students, turn in drafts to me, and I give them much more feedback on their drafts than I do on their final product. Part of that is because that’s where they can still use my feedback, but part of that is just signaling to them that the draft isn’t the important part. The work is the important part. Having a process is the important part. If you come up with a great product, great, I will praise it, I will encourage you, I will show it to my other students as a great example of what to aim for, but what we’re really looking for is can you adopt a process that’ll allow you to keep doing it better and better the more you do it?

[00: 22: 00] Bonni: This is not a question coming from me, ’cause I’m fully brought in, but for those who are concerned that this process causes people to not care too much with that first draft, how do you respond to that?

[00: 22: 12] David: Well, you can grade it, right? You can grade the first draft. There’s also the thing of, I don’t mind if students don’t care too much about the first draft, as long as they’re trying. I want students to put in the work and I want to show them that the work is valuable. That’s my job. If students don’t see the work as valuable, I have failed in some way. I need to convince them that it’s valuable to put in the work to do a number of drafts. I tell my students with their writing drafts, your first draft or even your third draft for whatever your rough draft that you send to me, it’s supposed to be bad. The road to good writing is paved with tons of bad writing.

One thing I do in my writing classes is I show them my bad early drafts and they’re really bad, my drafts, because I’m a writer and that’s how I get to good drafts. That helps a little bit. I think it’s trying to take away the stigma of writing bad things and letting them know that it’s okay that it’s not going to be good at once, and that it doesn’t need to be perfect yet. What’s important is that you put in the time and give it a first shot, and then you’ve got me as a resource to get feedback, to get information on what’s the good stuff, what can I keep. Then you go back and you go back and you go back.

[00: 23: 30] Bonni: I imagine that some of that requires so much unlearning on their part, just because they may not have ever worked with someone in that capacity. What is it like to work with a great editor? I’m realizing more and more now I’m at a stage where I’m doing more writing, working with professional editors. Jeff Young at EdSurge edits any of my columns that I write for them. Then at Stylus, I’m coming out with a book soon, so working with a professional copywriter too. You start to go– Well, of course, as you’re sharing about how to keep them motivated, I’m thinking, well, because you’re not thinking about, “I have to do this draft.” Like checking the box, but there’s this ending point where I’m going to have a finished product and how valuable someone like you as a teacher can be. How do you help them do some of that unlearning?

[00: 24: 20] David: I try to give attention to their education. I spend, I wouldn’t say a lot of time, but certainly some time at the beginning of every class asking them about their experiences with previous teachers. Not to bash these previous teachers, but I want my students to be conscious of the way that they’ve learned what we’re going to talk about. Talking about writing, we do talk about, “Well, what are some writing rules that you’ve been taught?” We examine them, and I find that’s a great way to get introduced to any subject, actually.

You can do that with any discipline. Have students think about the rules. What are the rules that you’ve been taught? You’ll find, I think, I’ve found as a teacher that examining rules one by one is a really interesting way, one, just to debunk some myths about your field, but it’s kind of a side door into the field itself. It allows you to talk about what’s really important by talking about, “Well why are these rules in place? Why do you think your teacher said you can’t start a sentence with ‘because’?”

Getting students to think about how they’ve been taught, I think, is really valuable, because ultimately what we want is for them to learn how to teach themselves, learn how to self-correct, learn how to be metacognitive. Part of that is being aware that they’ve been educated by teachers with [chuckles] very different agendas. I want them to try to be aware of that. I don’t want to indoctrinate them only in my way either, I want them to be conscious and critical of my teaching methods as well.

[00: 25: 54] Bonni: I was thinking about that when you were talking earlier about the banking model versus your view of teaching that that really is something that is wonderful to release. That I’m going to be wrong about stuff, and also our fields, so many of them are– Can you think of any that’s not evolving [chuckles] in some ways? It just makes us perhaps more able to keep up with where things are emerging.

[00: 26: 19] David: Yes. I don’t need to be an expert. That was a really important realization for me in terms of entering the classroom. I don’t need to know everything, and in fact it can be very valuable to show students how much I don’t know. I think that’s an important thing for a teacher to realize, and sometimes even to show, is that we’re human beings and knowing everything is not a healthy goal. [laughs]

[00: 26: 44] Bonni: I’m going to have a couple of the students who were in my class last semester in my class this semester, and I’m just chuckling ’cause they invented games for the end of the semester to teach about business ethics. I played on one of the teams ’cause the team required teams of two and so there was an uneven number. Of course, I’m going to jump in and play. [chuckles] I completely lost a name that had come up like a gazillion times in the class that I totally know, and that they were just so surprised. “I can’t believe you didn’t know.” I’m still just embarrassed about it, but it was so valuable to have them see it. I don’t want to pretend it’s easy. We’ve all played that game Catchphrase where [chuckles] it comes to you and you can’t remember where that place is. It is a vulnerable feeling.

[00: 27: 34] David: What you did there, and you may not have done it on purpose, but what you did there for real is you opened the door for students to take ownership of the course. Whenever we can chip away at our own authority as the sole owner of the educational experience, we leave space for students to take ownership. I think that can only help them learn. People learn when they feel like they have autonomy, when they feel like they’re in charge of their situation, and when they feel like it’s valuable to them. I’m always looking for ways to receive a little, bit because my institutional authority is so great that I need to find ways to take away other parts of my authority.

[00: 28: 18] Bonni: I saved the easiest one for last. [chuckles]

[00: 28: 21] David: Good.

[00: 28: 22] Bonni: We have shootings, we have politicians lying, presidents lying [chuckles] on a daily minute by minute basis. We have vitriol, we have partisan divides, and on and on it goes. How do we teach in turbulent times?

[00: 28: 39] David: It’s very difficult. The first thing I think is important is to acknowledge that it’s very difficult. I think it’s also important to acknowledge, or for me to say, that we can’t abandon in the world and we can’t abandon topics that are difficult just because they’re difficult. The very reason that talking about politics, say, or touchy subjects, the reason that they’re difficult to talk about is precisely the reason why we can’t abandon them. That’s because they matter to people a whole lot, right? Professors in any subject, if you’re committed to helping your students, you need to help them deal with the world.

I think it’s an imperative that we not turn our backs to difficult subjects just because they’re difficult. I realize there are a lot of pitfalls and I realize that professors, instructors are not outside of that world either. We work in politicized institutions. Generally, most instructors are job insecure. I don’t want people to take risks that are going to get them fired or get them censured. I understand people’s worry about that. Me personally, I feel a responsibility to my students to talk about this stuff, and the subject of politics or of political issues is really big.

I guess the one thing that’s helped me think about how to approach touchy issues, or political issues, or just the world of politics is thinking about, “What am I afraid of? What do I not want to do?” What I did when I was thinking about this and writing about this for the book, is that I did some research in philosophy of education journals and books on the concept of indoctrination. Because to me, indoctrination is the real worry. That’s the accusation that’s always flung at left-wing professors, we’re indoctrinating our students. It’s not a good faith accusation, but it’s still, of course, that’s what we don’t want. We don’t want to talk about politics in a way that indoctrinates our students.

I wanted to find out what exactly is indoctrination and how do we avoid it? How do we make sure we can talk about these things without indoctrinating our students? What I found is that there’s pretty recent actually, but agreed-upon definition of indoctrination, which is that to indoctrinate is to use your authority to promote closed-minded belief in your students. There are two aspects. One that we’d use our authority. Of course, we have authority as the institutionally backed person in the room as the person that gives grades, the person who can fail a student if we use that authority to promote closed-minded belief, to try to change students’ beliefs in a closed-minded way. To me, it’s important to say we do try to influence our students beliefs. We do that all the time. We don’t want our students to believe that gravity does not apply to them, for instance. We don’t want them to believe that bad writing is good writing, right? We want them to believe in the truth. We want them to believe in whatever our disciplines’ truths are. We do want to influence their beliefs, but we don’t want to influence their beliefs in a closed-minded manner. We don’t want them to believe something just because we do or just to please us. That idea of a close-minded belief.

This is a long-winded way of saying to fight against indoctrination and still talk about these issues is to emphasize the opposite of indoctrination. That is to say to, like what I was talking about earlier, find ways to not use your authority, to seed your authority to students. The class isn’t about pleasing the professor, the class is about students learning something, students developing on their own. That’s the one part. The other part, of course, is encouraging open-mindedness. Open-mindedness as a value is the kind of kryptonite to indoctrination.

Anything you want to say– I think professors can be open about their political beliefs in class. I think there’s no problem with admitting to students that you have beliefs, that you feel strongly about things in the world. I think we should be human beings, but we also need to encourage open-mindedness in the classroom, which is to say the value of evaluating evidence before coming to a decision is much more important than any one decision.

I tell my students over and over and over again, and I often talk about very sensitive subjects. My rhetoric class for years has been on the subject of gender and feminism, and I always tell them, “How you think is 10 times more important to me than what you think. I’m never going to judge you on what you think. I will assess your writing, assess your speaking on how you get there, on the process you take.” It’s again about a process or a product, but really trying to focus on, and emphasize, and incentivize the value of open-mindedness, of using evidence to evaluate any kind of belief. That’s the way to protect against the third rail, I think, of indoctrination.

[00: 33: 53] Bonni: This is the time in the show where we each get to give our recommendations, and actually one of mine ties to what you just said, so I’m going to bring it up first, [chuckles] and then the other one has absolutely nothing to do with it, unless we find a way to have it. The first thing I wanted to mention is that Middlebury, they have their digital learning and inquiry D-link program. Within that, this year they did a digital detox, and this was a series of posts that you could do. In fact, I’m going to link to them so you can go back and go through the different posts that they sent out, and work through it if you’d like to challenge yourself.

One of the tools of many, every single post is just rich with wonderful ways to enhance our own digital literacy and also to help with others. One of the tools I was able to put into practice and teaching is, I don’t know if they call it a map or not, it’s a graphic that looks at different media. It divides it along the lines, like you might expect, of conservative versus liberal, but it also divides it along the lines from very fact-oriented at the very top, down to analysis, down to opinion, down to outright lies. They have mapped out these different media entities, both in terms of traditional news organizations all the way to television shows, et cetera, television networks.

This was really helpful to me, and I think it goes along with your advice in the sense of, “I didn’t make this document.” I certainly have opinions about it and I certainly [chuckles] have media that I would never waste my time consuming, but I didn’t instantly start out with that. Instead, it was like, “Well, let’s just look what is this telling us? What information is this attempting to convey?” We’re not even at this point talking about whether we agree with it or not.

I found us referring to it a number of times throughout the course, and I felt like I was able to maybe make some of them more open-minded and that they could have a better language for describing what it is that they consume and also may be challenging themselves to consume things a little differently than perhaps what they were accustomed to.

[00: 36: 00] David: That’s great. I think that what you’re describing there, making students’ information consumption visible to themselves is a huge important step to developing them as citizens. I think that’s really important.

[00: 36: 16] Bonni: The second recommendation, I know we spoke about before we started recording, [chuckles] I’m just going to go for it. [chuckles]

[00: 36: 21] David: Go for it.

[00: 36: 22] Bonni: It is a wonderful television series called Fleabag. I don’t even know how to describe it other than just a story of a person trying to become more of themselves. A story of a person dealing with immense grief and the loss of a friend. I know you’ve seen it too. How do we [chuckles] do this?

[00: 36: 43] David: I’m not going to help you out in describing it, you’re doing a great job.

[00: 36: 47] Bonni: I’m still living with these characters. I wish that there were more than– I think there was like six episodes or something. Of course, I’ll be linking to it in the show notes. I will say just as a warning that there is a lot of sexual content, so if that’s not something that you’re comfortable with, it’s not the show for you, but oh my goodness. The real raw issues that this woman deals with– It also is hysterical. I forgot to mention that. [chuckles] It sounds so serious, but every episode I would just be cracking up and wondering what was going to happen next, and just really rooting for her.

The main character, she meant a lot to me, I miss her now. I wish she was still around. I would highly recommend Fleabag. By the way, I hot saw that recommended by Robin Derosa on Twitter, so just another reason that Twitter’s fun for us [chuckles] to get up there and be connected and get lots of good recommendations. Speaking of which, you have some for us as well.

[00: 37: 38] David: I do, I came ready. I have three recommendations. The first is a novel. It’s a novel that I imagine many of your listeners have already read because it’s a very big novel for this summer. It’s, Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. I loved this book so much. It struck me like a book from a different age, maybe from the ’70s or ’80s, and that it’s a big page-turning family novel. It is a joy to read, but it’s also quite high-minded. It’s really, really smart. There’s lots of, I think, intellectually provocative ideas about marriage and child-rearing and divorce. I really have nothing bad to say, but I loved it. Fleishman Is In Trouble.

The second is a Podcast called You’re Wrong About, and it’s made by two journalists, Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes. On every episode– It’s like Mythbusters, but for things you didn’t even realize were myths. They take a pop cultural phenomenon and explain with the skill of investigative journalists how the popular idea of what it was even, was completely wrong. They’ve done in recent weeks– They just did an episode on Tonya Harding, which was great. Really made me see her in a different way, and the Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan episode.

They did one on the Challenger disaster, which was fantastic. They did one on the controversy over Ebonics at the school in Oakland. It’s just a really thought-provoking and always funny podcast, so I’ve been really enjoying that. The third recommendation is what I have started thinking of as the Bon Appétit extended universe. Bon Appétit magazine has begun making these videos. Some of them are just straight ahead cooking videos, but others have these wacky concepts, and it’s as if they realized that working for glossy food magazine is a lot of people’s dream job, or their idea what a dream job would be.

They also realized that their staff at the magazine were these incredibly charming personalities, so you have these series of videos, it’s on their YouTube channel, the Bon Appétit YouTube channel, of these hilarious people interacting. It’s an office of a kind. They work in a test kitchen and they’re cooking food, and they have the hallmarks of food videos where they’re telling us how a recipe is made often, but it kind of works like a reality show on the world’s most fun workplace. I’m just addicted to these videos.

[00: 40: 11] Bonni: As I suspected, all three of these, I want to go and drop everything– [laughs] I was telling you that I thought your recommendations might be similar to John Warner’s, where everything he recommends I also have to stop everything and know that I’ll be spending time. Thank you so much for those recommendations-

[00: 40: 29] David: My pleasure.

[00: 40: 29] Bonni: -and more broadly speaking, it is truly an honor to get to talk to you. It’s a delight. I hope this is just the beginning, I’d love to have you back because I feel like we just skimmed the surface here. You’ve written a wonderful book-

[00: 40: 40] David: Thanks so much.

[00: 40: 41] Bonni: -and you write so much other stuff that is such a benefit to us as well. Thank you for all of that.

[00: 40: 46] David: My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

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[00: 40: 51] Bonni: David Gooblar is the author of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. I encourage you to order it, read it, digest it, start talking about it and putting things into action. I’m so grateful for his writing, not just here, but his very popular column, Pedagogy Unbound in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I always look forward to everything I can get my hands on that he’s written. I’m thankful to all of you for listening today as well. It is such a joy to be in community with you and have us all continually working on better teaching, being more excellent at what we do and facilitating learning for our students. I look forward to future episodes and to seeing you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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[00: 41: 44] [END OF AUDIO]

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.