Finding Joy and Curiosity in the Questions, with Liz Norell

[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 453 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, finding joy and curiosity in the questions with Liz Norell.

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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.

Liz Norell is a political scientist professor, yoga teacher, and life coach. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Texas, Dallas, and master’s degree in library science and journalism. Liz considers herself a political psychologist and is most interested in how and why extreme political attitudes take root and how to soften them.

Her training and occasional work as a yoga teacher and life coach, complement her academic work well and have contributed to her interest in pedagogy, SoTL, which is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and faculty development. When she’s not puzzling out how to make her classes more engaging, she’s probably sitting in a comfy chair with a book, with her dogs sleeping nearby, and also, planning her next road trip. Liz Norell, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:42] Liz Norell: Thank you for having me.

[00:01:43] Bonni: I love the way your bio reads because I just want to like up next to the dogs. [laughs] It just feeling very peaceful to me right now. I know you’re going to take us on many journeys together today. Would you take us back to an early memory of you learning about politics?

[00:02:01] Liz: Yes, I’m not totally sure that what I’m about to tell you did actually happen. It feels apocryphal in my own life. My father would probably dispute it. We used to get– I grew up in Northern Arkansas, and my parents still get a daily newspaper delivered to their house, and the local paper used to be I get that paper. It would have the Parade Magazine insert on Saturday.

There was a How Liberal or Conservative are you Quiz in one of these Parade Magazine issues when I was very young. I took it and I took the quiz. In my memory, the results were so horrifying that my father would never talk to me about politics ever again. I just remember, as a child, I was hell-bent on saving the Earth.

There was a book at the library called 101 Ways you can Save the Earth and I probably checked it out 20 times. I confess that I was obnoxious as a child, I would yell at people if they threw an aluminum can in the garbage. I would lecture them about why they were killing the earth. These are my early memories of engagement with bigger, social, and political issues.

[00:03:24] Bonni: I think so often about politics and about values and I recognize that– can we say everyone? You have to be so careful when you say everyone, but doesn’t everyone experience when you are part of facilitating a learning community some kind of a difference between what you believe and what the people there? These are so tightly rooted with our sense of identity.

I just loved again, going back to your bio, how to soften them. Tell us a little bit more about how you think about softening them because I think so many times we use violent imagery to fight against ideas we disagree with, and I don’t hear very often how to soften.

[00:04:13] Liz: It’s definitely the motivation behind most of the disciplinary teaching that I do. For a very long time, I’ve been concerned about how poorly we actually communicate in the political sphere. I think I’ve just always been curious and like an anthropological mindset, sort of way of like, “How did you come to believe that?” Not in a judgy way, just like, “That’s not my experience, and I would really like to understand how you got there.”

I think that curiosity translates really nicely into efforts to try to bridge gaps across political differences. The way I teach my American government class is very much centered on civil political dialogue. We start the semester by reading a chapter from Brene Brown’s book, Braving the Wilderness, the name of the chapter is People Are Hard to Hate Close Up. Move In. I just love this image of like, “Get closer to people.” Because when you know someone, it’s much harder to demonize them.

In my class, we talk a lot about getting authentically curious about how other people see and experience the world so that you do start to soften because now you’re cultivating empathy for someone else’s lived experience, and not just hearing their hateful take on a group that they don’t like.

[00:05:47] Bonni: Yes, I love that. I’ve read that book, and it rings so true that once you know, the deeper and the softer parts of people, that they really are hard to hate. I know that my mind, like so many human minds likes to sort, we sort things and that sorting can sometimes be helpful and can sometimes be extremely harmful. I thought, “Well, you leave your politics out of the classroom.”

Then it really wasn’t, I don’t think it was until I started the podcast and started to being connected with people where they’re like, “No, you don’t leave your politics behind, [laughs] because your politics are part of you.” You couldn’t possibly, even if you tried, you couldn’t leave them behind.

I know that you have a similar belief about what your role is. Maybe you can help me talk through what that looks like because I doubt you leave your politics behind. I know that you don’t also want just a billboard of them, would you talk through your approaches and your thought process there?

[00:06:57] Liz: In the world that we live in today, my perception at least is that the second someone knows whether you lean left or right, they make a whole set of assumptions about you. They either think everything you say is handed down from the mountain with the tablets, or you’re Hitler. I don’t ever want to be in a position where my students feel some pressure to copy or pretend to copy my beliefs out of some desire to get a grade or curry favor. I don’t share my political beliefs with my students.

Sometimes I even argue the other side. If I have a sense that everyone– and students assume that I’m liberal because I’m a college professor. I will be really conscientious about making sure I talk about conservative viewpoints in the same way that I talk about liberal viewpoints. I don’t leave my politics, and as much as they influence how I interact with people at the door. Honestly, I started life as a journalism major, because I’m pretty good at understanding different perspectives. It’s because of that sort of innate curiosity, I have to try to understand them, that I can understand them.

I’m not deeply attached in the way that I think a lot of people are to my specific political commitments because I can understand how someone might have a different perspective. The way I think that my politics comes into the classroom is really in just the orientation I have towards students, which Cate Denial talks about pedagogy of care. I think about and I was just thinking when we were talking about that chapter from Brene Brown’s book, this idea that people are hard to hate close up, that’s how I think about my students too. If I get closer to them, and they get closer to me then what we think politically doesn’t matter as much, because now we’re just humans with a connection.

[00:09:12] Bonni: You told us about the newspaper being delivered and the quiz that you took all those years ago. Thank you for helping us see that glimpse of your life. Would you share a glimpse of your teaching and tell us about what it’s like to take your American government class?

[00:09:32] Liz: I had this experience a few semesters ago, where two students came up to me at the end of class, and one of them said, and I’m going to over exaggerate the tone here, but one of them said, “I never know what we’re going to do in class. Can you please just tell me?” The other one said, “I love this class because I never know what we’re going to do.” I think that that’s kind of what happens. I do try to give students, I’m always scaffolding, “Here’s what we did last time. Here’s what we’re going to do today. Next time, be prepared for this.” I don’t want to do the same thing in a class every single time we get together. Part of that is that I think so much about how when I was a kid, I would go out into the woods behind my parent’s house, and I would just explore.

I had so many questions, and I was so curious about the world. I think all children are. Then something happens when we step into classrooms, and we start putting desks in rows, and be quiet and ask for permission to go to the bathroom and don’t stand up and don’t talk and don’t chew gum. It just takes all the joy out of this thing we call learning.

If you want a glimpse into what it’s like to take a class with me, it’s how can we find the joy and the curiosity and the questions that really animate us to try to find the answers. That’s what we’re doing every single time. I’ve been teaching long enough now that I don’t come in with a specific plan. I have enough experience that if we run out of things to do, I got something I can pull it out.

I want to show up and get a feel for what’s happening in the room and go with that. If something happened in the news, two weeks ago or a week ago, when I had my first meeting with my night class students, I wanted to talk about that whole speaker of the house situation, and what was happening there.

We’ve haven’t seen this in a very, very long time. Life is always presenting opportunities to ask questions that spark curiosity with students in a way that they’re not really prepared for because when we think about studying American government today, we think about people yelling at each other. I think students expect our class to be a debate zone where we’re all just really angry at the end of every class, and it is the exact opposite.

[00:12:09] Bonni: I say so often that if we don’t start with coming to some shared definitions, we go right away to where there is disagreement. You miss huge opportunities for learning. You have to see that as well, correct?

[00:12:24] Liz: Yes, absolutely. I guess I tell my students that I’m not interested in debate because I’m conflict-averse anyway. In my mind, debate is just waiting for someone else to stop talking so I can tell them why they’re stupid. That’s just not productive. We know, the backfire effect tells us that’s going to make it even worse. I’m not interested in that.

We don’t often talk about partisanship at all except in the unit where we talk about what it is and where it came from. We’re not talking about points of disagreement. We’re talking about Dan Rather’s book, What Unites Us the things that we all have in common.

[00:13:04] Bonni: I was very intrigued by the welcome video that you have on your course website. By the way, we will be linking to that on the show notes if people want to go explore this interactive syllabus on American government. Would you talk about how you approach creating a welcome video and what are some of the things that come into your mind? It sounded and looked to me as if this is something you do fresh every time.

[00:13:28] Liz: Yes, I do. I usually do it the night before my Course Shell is going to open to students. It’s often very off the cuff and it’s imperfect and that’s by design. I don’t edit it. I literally turn on my camera and hit record, and try to talk for less than five minutes. Sometimes they do it and sometimes they don’t.

The key thing that I want to convey is that I’m human. I’m not scary. I care that they’re successful and that I’m available to them in whatever way they feel comfortable. About a year and a half ago, some colleagues and I decided to do this experiment where we scheduled a 15-minute one-on-one with every student in one section of our classes. I have just continued to invite students to do that.

I load up my Calendly with lots of time, and especially in an asynchronous online course, I really push that and say, I know that it can be really easy to feel disconnected in this class and I don’t want that. Just find 15 minutes and let’s have a conversation because I want you to know that I actually am a human who cares about you and I want to know something about you.

[00:14:40] Bonni: If someone comes to you and says, “How do I be human, how do I be not scary,” what should they be thinking about and then what should they be trying to avoid?

[00:14:49] Liz: I think when you authentically care about your students, you don’t have to try to be human. I think that there are a lot of things that get in the way of allowing that authentic care to come through. It’s things like maybe having some imposter phenomenon going on, or some fear of your students taking advantage of you or thinking that you’re not that smart, especially younger faculty, I think feel a lot of insecurity in front of the classroom.

Let’s just say authentic care, plus a little confidence. That really seems to take down the level of fear that students have in the classroom, but it’s also just not giving them a reason to be afraid. I think every teacher I’ve talked to has a story about a student who sent a picture from the ER or texted after they got in a car wreck on the way to class, or there was a tweet that went viral some time ago about someone.

It was the Colby College professor whose student was trapped in their dorm room, because there was a very large bug between them and the door, and she couldn’t get out. She was worried. We all have those stories and those are sent because students are afraid of the consequences that we’re going to think less of them, their grades are going to suffer. As early and as often as I can, I try to let students know that we’re all human. We all have things come up. I’m not going to be a jerk about that because it happens to me too.

[00:16:29] Bonni: Something that comes up so often particularly for faculty with less experience, you talked about struggles with insecurity. Boy, I think about you use the word confident to counter that. We certainly can have too much confidence. How do we find that sweet spot? One common thing that comes up questions is or the fear, I try to be curious like you’re talking about, let’s talk more about where that fear is coming from.

A lot of times it comes down to not knowing the answers. What if they asked me a question I don’t know the answer to? I’d love to hear if you’ve had any sort of a journey in that. Was that ever a fear of yours or if it wasn’t, do you think that there’s something that might be useful and how you were able to avoid that fear and other people haven’t been successful at that? What are your thoughts around a student asks you a question, you don’t know the answer to? What did your thoughts maybe used to be and what are they today?

[00:17:26] Liz: It wasn’t my first teaching experience but one of my very early teaching experiences. I think it was the first time I was teaching a political science course. We were in a very large lecture hall and I had 25 students. Just the setting was daunting. I remember being so afraid that they would ask me a question that I did not have the answer to because here’s the thing, I wasn’t a political science major as an undergrad. I never took an American government class, but I was teaching it.

It’s been 90% of what I’ve taught in my teaching career. The way I handled it is just talk as fast as possible, every single second of the class, so that no one has a chance to ask a question and if they do, it’ll be privately. Yes, I definitely had that fear. I think that what I’ve learned over the years is that there are two ways to think about teaching and I’m not going to use the tired metaphors. One, is the person in charge, and the other is the coach.

I think that a coaching mindset around teaching is so much more fun, and joyful for everyone. It means that you don’t have to know all the answers, because the coach is there to help you learn how to get answers, not to answer them for you. For me, that looks like assigning readings to students. In some of my honors classes, I change the readings every semester that I teach an honors class, and I put things on the syllabus that I haven’t read so that we’re reading them together and discovering them together.

I read them at the same time as my students and I tell them that. I want to be learning with you, not just facilitating your learning. That’s a very different mindset than we are often experiencing as students. Having never seen it modeled, we may not know that that’s an opportunity when we walk into the classroom early in our teaching career. It’s been the best part of the evolution of my teaching is being able to let go of that need to be in control all the time, and being able to learn with my students.

I want to share this one little vignette from a class because it was the great moment of a student asking a question that I didn’t know the answer to. It was a rabbit hole that I never would have gone down. I like to start by having a group read of the Constitution because lots of Americans think they know what it says, but nobody actually reads it.

We read it lightly, we skim it, and talk about it. When we got to the Three-Fifths Compromise, one of my students a few years ago said, “Why three-fifths? Why wasn’t it three-fourths or two-thirds or seven-eights or whatever?” I said, “No one has ever asked me that question before and I have no idea, but it’s a great question. Let me see if I can find out.”

I went searching and the best I could find was that it was a ratio that had been discussed in some completely different topic years before in some document back in England. It was just like what they thought of and said, “Okay, well that sounds pretty good.” There’s no good reason for it. I never would have even thought to question that had a student not said it. I will never forget that.

I’m sure the student will never forget it either because we had a whole discussion. We’ve read the piece that I found. I brought it into the next class and said, “Here’s the primary source, let’s look at it.” I appreciate those moments and I do think that being able to say that is a really great question that I’ve never thought of before.

It’s a great acknowledgment of student thinking that we interpret as a critique of our own understanding. If we are truly focused on the students and their learning, to me, that is a compliment that we don’t know the answer, not a failing on our part.

[00:21:38] Bonni: Then the response that you had, you reinforced the igniting of curiosity that you’re wrapping your pedagogy around. They got to see that in a real, authentic in-the-moment experience where you go, “Then what is it like to not know, be embarrassed or be curious?” And then go on that journey together. Oh, what a fun one.

Some of this stuff always reminds me a little bit of the Dunning–Kruger effect, which if people aren’t familiar, these are two researchers who– Boy, maybe, Liz, you could maybe do it better than me. The more that we know, the less we realize we know. [laughs] I think you mentioned not being in political science as an undergrad. I wasn’t a business degree. I studied social sciences, although, my advanced degrees aren’t in business either. They’re organizational leadership, so lots of different places where those things show up

I do remember teaching introduction to business just feeling, “Oh, my gosh, what if I get a question?” Today, it just feels so different because how could you possibly expect a human being to know everything someone might be curious about? What if we all just tried to get a little bit more curious and go on some adventures together? What would that look like?

Talk to me because you’re really emphasizing joy. You’re describing I’m in your class and I don’t know what we’re doing today. Sometimes that brings delight and sometimes that maybe feel scary to let go of that kind of control and predictability. When I go and look at your resources, and I sure hope people will go and look and just– speaking of rabbit trails, Liz, Oh, my eternal gratitude for you because you’ve taken me on the grandest of rabbit trails with your material and I’m sending them to all my friends and everything. We’ve had so much fun-

[00:23:30] Liz: Thank you.

[00:23:31] Bonni: -but they’re very structured. You would kind of see the joy and the human– I shouldn’t say kind of. You absolutely see it. The welcome video is right there on the main page and everything, but if I look at the navigation on the left, it feels very, very clear where I would need to go next and what kind of information I would find where, and you’re reminding me of when I used to work for the University of California Irvine a long time ago. They taught us how to do card sorting exercises, which if people aren’t familiar to website design, it was like, where would you think you would find this information on a website?

That’s how you test that you’ve organized something in a clear way. I’m realizing now I’m sitting here telling you about card sorting and you have a degree in library science. I suspect library scientists people also do some version of card sorting activities. [laughs] How have you done that to help it– It’s so clear. I could literally predict what I would find, but yet be utterly delighted and find such joy as I went down each of these fun places.

[00:24:41] Liz: Here’s my confession. Before I got my PhD, I had gotten the undergraduate degree in journalism and I worked for about six years as a web communicator. I wasn’t a designer and I wasn’t a programmer, but I was what today you would call the usability person.

I didn’t do what you described with cards, I did it with people and websites. I managed the website at Texas Women’s University before I went to grad school and I would bring five students into a computer lab and give them a list of things to look for. I would just watch and see where they clicked. Then I would make sure that what they were looking for was where they clicked.

My orientation has always been around how to organize things in ways that make sense and hopefully not just to me, but I’m glad you found it to be well organized. The more freedom you give students, the more structure you have to have. If I want students to identify and chase some curiosities, which I do, then I need to be very clear about what the expectations are.

Even with the liquid syllabus that I have, I still spend a lot of time at the beginning of the semester, so right now, answering questions where students will text me or email me and say, “Okay, I think what you’re saying is I need to do these things. Is that right?” I’ll say, “Yes.” They’ll say, “Okay. By when?” and I’ll say, “Well, ideally, you’re going to spread it out over the semester, but if you have a deadline in another class and you need to shift this forward or back, that’s fine. I don’t have any late penalties.”

I try to provide a really clear set of, “This is what I’m looking for now. Go find something that interests you. If that feels overwhelming, here are some things you can do this week that are related to our topic. If you don’t want to choose, I’ve chosen for you. Here are three things, but if you want to do something else, then here’s a whole set of them. Please go find something.”

[00:26:48] Bonni: It’s been a while since I had Michelle Pacansky-Brock on the show and she spoke about a liquid syllabus that may be unfamiliar to some of our listeners. Would you describe what one is and maybe where, I can link to it, but where you would suggest people might go to get inspiration or to get more information?

[00:27:07] Liz: I used to do just your standard Word document syllabus and then maybe four or five years ago I thought, “Let’s make this a little more fun.” I made a graphic design syllabus, and I’m not a graphic designer, but Canva makes it very easy to do that. I made a really pretty syllabus. To make it accessible, I would also do a text-only version of that. I did that for years. Then I was getting frustrated with the limitations of our learning management system and I decided to make a Google website that is the syllabus.

I make a new one every semester by making a copy of the old one and going in and changing the dates and updating anything I need to, but a liquid syllabus is just that, it’s just a website syllabus. Instead of printing it out, you can access it anytime you need it.

A Google site is much more accessible, it’s much more mobile-friendly, it’s easy to update, it’s free. I don’t pay for a domain, it’s just sites.google.– It’s just whatever. I love it because I can embed videos, I can embed documents. It’s really easy to link. If something happens and our LMS goes down or our single sign-on goes down, as always seems to happen right before the end of the semester or on Sunday at four o’clock, those are the times that that happens, students can hopefully still get to the syllabus and get to the tools they need in order to complete the work that they need to.

I have really loved having the web-based or liquid syllabus. It also means that, because I don’t expect students are printing it out, if I find that the language is less than clear, I can go in and change it on the website and now it’s just changed. If I changed it on a Word document syllabus, no one would ever see it because they’re not going to download it again. I love it. I love it.

[00:29:09] Bonni: Another big benefit that you have is, I see in the upper right-hand corner, a search function. Many LMSs do not have search functions that would go across your entire course. I would love to have you share a little bit about the thought process that you might suggest we go through to– Yes, search is a good affordance, but not enough.

We also need browse ability or, I suppose sometimes this is called discoverability. You’re giving us both. What do you think about advice for us in terms of how we might set up either a liquid syllabus or really anything that you want to take advantage of search, but also people sometimes don’t know what they’re looking for?

[00:29:55] Liz: What I would say is link profusely. I have that liquid syllabus outside the LMS, but inside the LMS, which you can’t see, I’m linking to pages on the liquid syllabus all the time. Anywhere in the LMS that there’s something about grading or assignments, it links out to that and vice versa.

I can’t link to within the LMS, but I’ll say, “Go to this section in the course to find how to send me a text message or how to make an appointment.” Linking a lot is helpful, but then also try to use the language that your students would use. If you don’t know that, then ask them. A lot of us are talking about office hours, and this doesn’t make sense to students. They don’t know what that means.

Ask your students if you’re not sure, what would they call that? Is it appointment times? Is it student hours? Is it drop in hours or whatever? Your students are there, and the more you ask them to help you, the more they see themselves as partners in learning and not the recipients of learning.

[00:31:11] Bonni: There’s one other thing I just discovered right now accidentally. Isn’t that fun when we get to learn accidentally? I was just moving my mouse around, as I sometimes do, and I hovered over one of your headings. It happens in this case to be a heading that is on your home page, and it says, “My commitment to you.” I didn’t know that Google Sites does this.

I can copy that heading link for people who are listening, who don’t realize Liz told us to link profusely and most people will tend to think about linking to pages, but it would appear that Google Sites not only lets us link to a page, but to a specific anchor point on that page, meaning, it would scroll down for you so you don’t have to say, “Scroll down, and it’s the fifth one from the bottom or whatever.” I can go directly to where I need.

Again, that’s not something that I’ve been able to see happening in learning management system so you really have a lot of affordances to get me directly to where I could find that information. I think we should link voraciously not just to pages, but also to locations on pages.

This is fabulous. Anything you want to add as far as that goes?

[00:32:23] Liz: The one thing I will say is that if you want that, you have to code those as headings and not body text. That’s also important for accessibility reasons. A screen reader for a vision impaired person, they can click between those headings really easily using screen readers. It’s just good accessibility practice anyway. Then that will allow you to do what you just said, which is also really awesome.

[00:32:48] Bonni: Oh, that’s such a good thing to have people do, because it’s easy to do, but not if you don’t know what you’re looking for, so don’t try to make it bold.

[00:32:57] Liz: The same thing is true over in Word. Word has headings versus body text, and if you have an accessible syllabus template from your college, it will have those headings marked as headings so that they’re more accessible to students.

[00:33:10] Bonni: Before we get to the recommendations segment, I just want to take a moment to thank today’s sponsor, and that is TextExpander. Whenever I get a new computing device, one of the first things I install is TextExpander. I can’t even really imagine using the computer without it.

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I use it all the time, and if I forget the characters that I have set up, which can happen, it’s really easy to go and search for them. Sometimes I forget that there’s a link to get to a guest form and I may have forgot what the naming convention I used is. I simply click in my menu bar and I type in and it finds it for me super easy and I hit enter.

That’s another way of doing it, so you can learn as you go. It’s really easy to set up and then you can really take advantage of lots of different features. They also have Teams for TextExpander where you can have those shared text snippets, and they also have repositories of a community of people that share commonly used text in different industries and professions.

Head on over to textexpander.com/podcast. Show listeners get a 20% off of their first year and let them know that you heard about TextExpander through Teaching in Higher Ed. Thanks once again to TextExpander for sponsoring today’s episode.

This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. I really enjoy reading Substack newsletters, and one of them I enjoy is Roxanne Gay, and she will often have guest authors who post on her Substack. She has a woman who works as an editor for her. Her name is Megan Pillow. I was not familiar with Megan’s work prior to seeing this recent essay.

Megan wrote an essay called The Art of Losing and I would like to recommend that each of us go and read it and soak in it. I will read just a portion of it now and encourage you to go visit the link that will be in the show notes to soak it all in. Megan Pillow writes, “A brief list of things I’ve lost since my divorce in 2019, one house, which now belongs to my ex husband. One rental property, which my sister asked me to move out of. Dozens of friends. Every cap to every tube of toothpaste. My job as a university teaching assistant and my health insurance. The indentation in my finger where my wedding ring used to rest. All retirement and savings. Two sets of keys. A ruby ring my mother gave me. Half of my marital property. The wolf spider who made a habit of camping out above my bedside lamp. One partner who told me he’d spend the rest of his life with me. £30. My therapist. Five unmatched socks. Hours and hours of sleep. In November 2020, days after my former partner broke up with me, I sat in the middle of the bed in the room I’d moved back into at my parents house and I wrote this list. I watched the leaves fall from the trees. I curled up in the bed and hugged my knees to my chest and I cried. Outside, there was a pandemic. Inside, there was no one I could trust to comfort me. For a while, I believe I’d lost nearly everything.”

The second thing I would like to recommend is by Roxanne Gay, you can tell I was catching up, Liz, right? [laughs] I was reading a lot of her. I had been a minute since I read her Substack, so I was getting caught up and enjoying it. She actually did a recap of some of her top posts of the last year.

I had recommended the new Top Gun movie on an episode when it had come out, or what have you, and I am going to say rather lightly, that I don’t think Roxanne Gay is going to be recommending the second movie of Top Gun any time soon. I had so much fun just reading her, just take that movie to town in all of its flaws and I laughed with her and I laughed at myself and went, “Yes. Yes, she’s got me there.”

If you didn’t like the movie, or even if you did, and you maybe want to laugh at yourself like I laughed at myself a little bit, she has a lovely critique of Top Gun Too, which she spells T-O-O as in too much. It’s just a delightfully written piece. She’s just so, so exquisitely good. Those are my two recommendations. Liz, I am passing it over to you for yours.

[00:38:19] Liz: I have three recommendations. I want to recommend Chris Emdin’s work. E-M-D-I-N. I don’t know if anyone on this podcast has recommended his work before. It’s primarily geared towards high school teachers. We had Chris Emdin come to our campus, where I was teaching many years ago for a start of the school year convocation. The room caught on fire, half in a really positive way and half in a pretty angry way because I’m in the south but his most recent book, Ratchetdemic, is really good. His earlier book is also good For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too.

I just want to recommend those as really good things to read to think about equity and inclusion from a different perspective, but one that I think is really useful. The second thing I want to recommend are all of the books in the West Virginia University Press, because they’re all good.

The last thing I want to mention, over Christmas break, my stepdaughter, who is 15, I think, maybe didn’t convince me to, but implicitly convinced me to start playing around with Duolingo. I’m now on a 28 day streak learning Swedish because my family, Norell is a Swedish name. My dad’s family is from Sweden. I am learning Swedish and it is bringing me so much joy and I just love it. Those are my recommendations.

[00:39:48] Bonni: Oh, thank you so much. I’m so excited because I’m just going to link to all the books now, all of them, or all of them in the higher education series or just all of them?

[00:39:59] Liz: I’m thinking about the Teaching and Learning in Higher Ed series that Jim Lang edits. They’re all fabulous. The most recent ones have just been, I just think they’re doing really great work.

[00:40:09] Bonni: Is there anything that you would like to share about you have a connection there and you already told me you’re coming back?

[laughter]

[00:40:15] Liz: Yes, it’s a little self-serving, isn’t it? To recommend all the books in the series. I will be sometime in the next year or so, I will have a book in that series that is tentatively titled The Present Professor and it’s about how to do the work of becoming more present in the classroom. We know that instructor presence really matters but people tell us that but they don’t really tell us, how do you do that?

This book is a book of tools on how to get to know yourself better so that you can be more authentic in the classroom with all the caveats that depending on your positionality, it may be easier or harder to be more or less authentic. We can all benefit from doing some of this reflective work. It’s a book that kind of helps you do that work.

[00:41:02] Bonni: Oh, well, I don’t think it’s self-serving because it’s other serving to me and I’m so looking forward to reading it. I feel like we got– I feel like today’s conversation, we got little glimpses of some of the kinds of things that you might be writing about and I’m just so looking forward to reading it and to having you back when the time is right for that conversation where when the book comes out, so excited.

[00:41:23] Liz: I’m excited too.

[00:41:24] Bonni: Thank you so much, Liz. Thank you for accepting the invitation to come on the show. I did get such a delight. You had posted something on Twitter about the thing and then like I said, it felt like six hours later but I don’t think it was quite that long, but I was texting friends, emailing, going down all the thing and I got to recommend a musical thing on the Constitutional Amendments. That was fun just to get to share. It didn’t sound like it was new to you but just to say like you we might want share this with your students. Such a delight to get to talk to you today. Thank you so much.

[00:41:53] Liz: I really enjoyed it Bonni, thank you for all the work you do and for this time. I really enjoyed it.

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[00:42:00] Bonni: Liz Norell, what a joy it is to be connected with you. Thanks for coming on Teaching in Higher Ed. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Smith. If you have yet to sign up for the weekly email from Teaching in Higher Ed, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

You’ll get the show notes and these show notes are going to be– these some fun ones for me to type up. You’ll get the show notes from the most recent episode and you will also get some goodies that don’t show up in the show notes. Head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.

[music]

[00:42:59] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning.

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.