Mind Over Monsters, with Sarah Rose Cavanagh

[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 465 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast. Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge, with Sarah Rose Cavanagh.

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[00:00:20] Bonni: 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.

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[00:00:47] Bonni: It is such a joy today to be inviting back to the show, Sarah Rose Cavanagh. She’s a psychologist, professor, and Senior Associate Director for Teaching and Learning at Simmons University, where she teaches classes on effective science and mental health, researches the intersections of emotion, motivation and learning, and provides educational development for faculty.

Sarah gives keynote addresses and workshops at a variety of colleges, and national and international conferences, blogs for Psychology Today, and writes essays for venues like LitHub and the Chronicle of Higher Education. In her free time, she enjoys devouring fiction, spending time by the sea with her canine and human daughters, and cooking up pescatarian meals for good friends. Sarah Rose Cavanagh, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:44] Sarah Rose Cavanagh: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:46] Bonni: It always feels like, when we don’t talk for a little bit, so much has happened, and certainly, that is the case these days.

[laughter]

[00:01:55] Sarah: Very true.

[00:01:56] Bonni: Yes. I want to first begin talking about monsters. This is not the first time that that analogy has been made in these conversations, and in people’s books and work. I want to speak specifically about why this analogy resonates so much with you in your work as well. Tell us about these monsters.

[00:02:15] Sarah: Sure. Well, when I think about monsters, and when I think about mental health, I really mean two types of monsters, right? I think that we have internal monsters, and we have to face that our bodies are pretty messy and unpredictable. They betray us at times. We also have these monsters in our mind, these ways that we talk to ourselves that are discouraging, that set us up for failure, or that impact our emotions in really negative ways.

We have these internal monsters that we’re grappling with, and some of us more than others. I think about my own struggles with panic disorder my whole life, as a monster that afflicts me sometimes. Then, of course, we’re walking through this world that has some real external monsters, and there are so many monsters we could list here, right? There’s racism, poverty, climate change, a global pandemic.

Even when we don’t think about recent challenges, there are all the monsters. We walk through life, and we lose people. Terrible things happen, no matter what time period we’re living through. It’s a real difficult challenge, the human condition, right? Walking through this world full of monsters, when our own bodies and minds can be monstrous. I, in the book, dive into monster theory, which I didn’t even realize was a thing.

I love to do this, as you know, in my books. I jump into other disciplines that are not my own, and probably wreak havoc. [chuckles] Through humanities and literature, a lot of people have examined the idea of monsters, and how that relates to, again, the human condition and our psychology.

[00:04:08] Bonni: Whenever I talk about that, I’m going to have the honor of interviewing you again, my husband will always ask, “Is she going to talk about these again?”

[laughter]

[00:04:16] Bonni: That’s why I really do appreciate how you incorporate such fascinating looks in your work at these topics-

[00:04:24] Sarah: Well, thanks.

[00:04:24] Bonni: -that most of us wouldn’t have done any reading or study on, and that you can make it so engaging for us. I definitely appreciate that about the way that you can do it. One of the things that you stress in your work is a vital combination of two things, and that is compassion and challenge. Why is that combination of those two things so important to us?

[00:04:50] Sarah: Right. Well, when we go back to what we were saying earlier about the challenges of being a human being, another challenge is how do we go out? How do we get up every day, and go out into this world that is so challenging, with these bodies that are also challenging, and how do we thrive within that world? It can be terrifying.

I look at a whole body of work on recreational fear, and people’s love of horror movies as one way that people may train themselves in safe settings to deal with the heightened arousal, the beating heart, the sweaty palms, and the idea that we can be threatened by violence, that we can be threatened by loss of our loved ones in a safe setting that prepares us. For people who like that sort of thing, lots of people don’t, [chuckles] I think that it can be like a little training ground.

I think that a lot of life, ideally, is like that. We have a safe setting, where we are technically safe. We have people who love us. We have sandboxes to play in, in which we can experiment, and yet, we have to take on challenges. When we think about the classroom, or when I think about the classroom, and in particular, for those students who are traditionally-aged undergraduates, college is usually that sandbox time.

They’re coming into adulthood, and that in itself is terrifying. I view a lot of the literature on transition to college and emerging adulthood, and how difficult that is on a biological, psychological, and social level. We need to develop these safe settings, where they can develop skills, and so there is both the compassion and the challenge. I think that we need to bring that into our classrooms.

[00:06:44] Bonni: Would you talk about the elements of empathy in that compassion?

[00:06:49] Sarah: Yes, absolutely. I think compassion comes first, not just in the term, but that is the grounding that we need to develop first. I think I have such empathy for developing human beings, and of course, I’m a mother of an adolescent, and I have a lot of adolescents in my life. Then, I teach college students, some of whom are not traditionally-aged, but many of whom are.

They’re in this period of life where all of their routines, all of their coping strategies are undergoing massive disruption. Whether they’re living on physical campuses, or they’re transitioning to independence and learning online, this is a time of life when their coping strategies are blown out of the water. I think having empathy for that and how difficult that is, is the responsibility of anyone working in higher education. I absolutely agree that empathy is a huge part of the compassion piece.

[00:07:52] Bonni: I’m fortunate to have good friends who are in the discipline of psychology. I mean, Sarah, my undergrad was in psychology. It has been a minute since I [laughter] would have read these things. I was surprised recently to learn about the efficacy of exposure theory. I would have thought that we would have long ago decided that, that didn’t actually work, but you just alluded to it earlier, [chuckles] and the fact that it is one of those things that shows to work.

Now, I want to expose maybe a little bit else of my misunderstanding. I am curious about behaviorism, and specifically, what I mean by that is, can we behave our way into having greater empathy for other people? I think about it as, it’s harder for us to have empathy if it’s something we have no concept for what that’s like.

I talk about sometimes, not probably, of course, but not just not having enough empathy early in my teaching for what it is like when people pass away in other people’s families versus how my family might have navigated that, culturally speaking, and so I needed to behave my way. I did not verbalize how [chuckles] I felt when someone was going to be gone for two weeks to another state to commemorate this grandparent’s death.

I just didn’t have capacity for the empathy, but thank goodness, I don’t verbalize every thought that I have in front of the students. I’m curious, in terms of that, and maybe I’m misusing behaviorism there, but in terms of that idea, can we behave our way, can we act our way into having greater empathy for students?

[00:09:27] Sarah: I’d like to pull apart two threads there, if that’s okay, and answer one, and-

[00:09:32] Bonni: Yes.

[00:09:33] Sarah: -then answer the other. I think the exposure therapy, I just wanted to address a little bit. There are those forms of exposure therapy that you’re thinking of, I think, in intro psych textbook, where things like flooding, and someone’s scared of snakes, and you dump a bucket of snakes over their head. That is not what a lot of people think about your, what is being practiced in contemporary psychotherapy offices.

In the book, I interview a couple of clinical counseling psychologist, because I am an academic psychologist, and I wanted to be sure to get the clinical perspective. One of them works primarily with adolescents with a range of anxiety disorders, but particularly, obsessive compulsive disorder, and he does primarily exposure therapy. The stories he tells me are so beautiful, and they’re such examples of compassionate challenge.

He has these students who have a fear of school refusal, and he sits with them. He drives to their house, he sits with them outside, while they watch the bus go by and don’t get on it, while they’re doing deep breathing techniques, while they’re discussing, while they’re rating where they are, reflecting on their experience. Then, finally, one day they get on the bus step-by-step-by step until they’re sitting outside the classroom, until the student is in the classroom.

When we talk about empathy, the empathy of that individualized care-focused, relationship-focused treatment and therapy, and relationalness, I think is so beautiful, and so empathetic. He has some criticisms, his name’s Ryan Glode, he practices in Rhode Island. He has some criticisms of the kind of counseling that’s done in a lot of college campuses, as band-aid venting sorts of therapy, that they’re not individualized, that they’re– Because they don’t have the time, and they’re so overtasked, and they don’t have the resources.

He’s a huge advocate for exposure therapy to treat, especially, anxiety. I have a couple other clinical psychologist friends who do a lot of similar therapy with people, exposing them to germ fears, things like that. We’ve come a long way from the bucket of snakes, and as Ryan says quite beautifully in my interview of him in the book, he says, “Living is exposure therapy.” We talk about those monsters, just going through life, and facing these things that we’re a little bit afraid of, again, ideally, with friends, and safety, and belongingness, is the practice of living.

[00:12:11] Bonni: What are some of the practical ways that we can then show compassion for students?

[00:12:15] Sarah: I love the idea. I’ve been quoting everywhere. Robert Talbert has a blog post about taking the semester that, if you’re on a 15-week term, which not everyone is, and dedicating the 12 weeks to content, but then spending the first week building community, doing onboarding, showing students examples of any assignments that you’re going to have them do, so that they have transparency, what things look like, answering questions, getting people excited for the topic, and really digging in that first week or two at the beginning.

Then, saving the end for students catching up on missed assignments, if you’re doing some ungrading or another type of alternative assessment. Having students revise work, doing high level, “What did we do this semester?” As a way to be compassionate, both to the students and also the faculty member or the instructor, and I think also prioritizes that first step.

I think it’s really critical in every course to first have that grounding of safety, of belongingness, of relationships, of inclusion, and developing that first, before you have– Do I need to ask students to step outside their comfort zone, and I think that those are some practical ways that we can do that in the classroom. Yes.

[00:13:41] Bonni: I know we’re going to be talking about this later in the conversation, but something that I took away from that blog post for myself was, looking at it from the– You just said this, but [chuckles] from the professor’s standpoint, I just wouldn’t in the past, and I still struggle with it now, thinking about, yes, think about the flow of your course from a student’s perspective, I have done halfway decent at that, but I forget about that when you do assignments where people do get to iterate on their work, and have opportunities to fail, we know how important failure can be in the learning.

I’ll forget to be kind to myself, and remember that I have to leave some margin in there, in order to get that kind of a turnaround, and so many people are teaching such large classes, that can be such an important act of self-kindness, that I still need to continue to explore and grow in, because ultimately, that comes back to, I’m not going to really realistically be able to be compassionate to students, if I don’t start with what the time it’s going to take to provide that rich feedback that can be so helpful.

[00:14:48] Sarah: Absolutely.

[00:14:49] Bonni: What about the challenge piece? I think so many times when people start learning about this, and maybe setting this case for why compassion and challenge, but then practically speaking, what does that look like? We may start returning to some former ways of, maybe how we were taught or not taught, as the case may be. [chuckles] What are some practical ideas for how to add in that challenge piece that’s aligned with it being combined with compassion?

[00:15:17] Sarah: Yes. Well, I think that working with students to scaffold them to something that they didn’t know that they were capable of, and having them, I backpedal a little bit, but I am really interested in motivation, and I just finished writing a textbook, a fourth edition of a textbook that used to be emotion, but I joined in this fourth edition, and I introduced motivation content.

I love setting goals with students in class. I love the whole goal-setting literature. I know there’s some controversies there in certain circles, but I love goal-setting, and so working with students to set goals about, where are your skills in this given domain, and where can we stretch it? We know from goal-setting literature that, the most effective goals are specific, and they’re difficult.

If you set goals that are not difficult enough, you dry up your motivation. Working with students to set individualized goals that are a bit of a stretch for them, I think is a powerful way to demonstrate challenge. I think that having good structure is also a way to demonstrate challenge. I think so many students, a lot of what we get out of college, a lot of what I got out of college, because the scaffolding of time management, and having those guardrails around work.

I like that metaphor for deadlines, that they’re not blocks that are set in stone, but they’re nice guardrails that keep us all on track over the semester, I think is a great way to demonstrate challenge. Also, I spend a big part of the end of the book in chapter 8 in one of my interviews. I interview Kelly Leonard at Second City, who trains people in improv, is looking to the world of play as a way to think about challenge, and I think play is so fascinating because it’s the nexus of compassionate challenge.

Animals, including humans do not play, if they feel threatened, if they feel unsafe. You can only truly play in an atmosphere, where you know that things are low stakes, that you know that you’re safe, that someone has your back, but then play involves vulnerability. It often involves discomfort, doing things that you haven’t done before, taking risks. I think if we can introduce that sense of play, that again, we’re in a sandbox, we’re safe and we’re just experimenting.

We might fail, as you said, the power of failure, but it’s not dire, it’s not critical. We’re just playing here, I think can be really powerful. One of the elements of the book is, I interviewed with a couple of collaborators, 35 undergraduates from very different types of institutions about their best and worst learning experiences, and so often, the students told us about compassionate challenge.

They told us about it, their best learning experiences, being at times quite difficult, and really having to do things that they were uncomfortable with. There was one student, I call her Hannah in the book, who was a psychology major in HBCU, and she told us the story about a presentation she was giving, when she got so anxious, she kept turning toward her slides more and more, and then, suddenly, realized that she had her full back to the class, and just froze and stopped, and was just filled with terror.

Her instructor didn’t tell her to sit down, she just talked her through, and the rest of the presentation, and she finished that presentation, and what she told us is that, now as a junior, that was her first year, now as a junior, she was regularly the first person to participate in class. That she attributed it to this early experience, and she even told us that it helped her in social situations, that she used to go to basketball games, and just like hide on her phone because she didn’t want to make eye contact with anyone, but that now she felt more comfortable.

I think that’s what I think about compassionate challenge, are these settings that are safe, where– That are relational, but that help you do things that you never knew you could do, and that then that impacts the rest of your life.

[00:19:31] Bonni: I’d like to go back a little bit too, when you talked about guardrails. That is such a powerful analogy, and we’re seeing so much emerging about really helpful practices, because going too much in one direction of no deadlines isn’t particularly helpful. Having really rigid ones, we know isn’t. Would you talk through a practical example of what those guardrails might look like in a particular class?

[00:19:55] Sarah: Sure. I’ll give you an example that’s not mine. [chuckles] It is– Belongs to a biology instructor that I interviewed for another research project, looking at undergrad bio education. When we were asking her about her assessment practices, and flexibility in particular, one thing that she did, she was teaching intro bio, and she felt that, that was a discipline that students would be in a lot of trouble, if they didn’t pass in assignments, and for the first third of the semester, and then all of a sudden they would get to the middle, and not have the knowledge and the skills they would need on those mid-semester assignments.

She was also very empathetic and compassionate to her students, and especially, in intro bio, many of them are first-semester, first-year students. What she had done is, she split the semester into modules. I think this went along with another innovative approach that she was taking. She wasn’t going chapter-by-chapter using the intro book, but going by theme.

What is life, and then I’m not a biologist. [chuckles] I only study them, et cetera. Evolution, probably, was another one.

Then, she would have a lot of flexibility with deadlines within the module. She would have best-by dates for various assessments and assignments within the module, but you had to submit them by the end of that module. It allowed students some breathing room, and allowed them to do a little more juggling, but there were guardrails. They wouldn’t end up on the final exam, not knowing what a cell was, or they wouldn’t let the work pile up into a big tsunami of work. I really liked that model.

[00:21:31] Bonni: Oh, my gosh, I like that too. It’s so much when we hear these ideas, and then we get inspired, and try to put them into practice. I can tell you something that doesn’t work, so it’s not what you just described. [laughter] I’ve had more latitude, and a lot of our learning management systems will allow you to have it begin to reduce points and then you can set a maximum amount of points that are reduced.

What I’ll do, I don’t really like the high-stakes thing, where it has to be by a certain time. I’ll say, if it’s within two, three days, I get really used to going up and removing that, so it removes the label of late, it also removes that penalty, even if it’s just something psychological, a percent doesn’t really matter, but it does. I’ll let them know that. I make sure and communicate that a lot, but I haven’t done that, turn it in within this particular theme of the class, although the class is themed, so I could easily implement what you just described.

What ends up happening is, I think on the positive note, and it doesn’t feel super positive, but I do want to say it, I think I’m going to experience far less D’s and F’s in the class, but on a negative note, even more than I think might otherwise happen, then it becomes the end of the semester. It really does feel super transactional on the student side, and then also on mine.

What a wonderful inspiration we can draw from her and her teaching. I do think so often how we’re told by people like you, to make sure that what it is we’re measuring is in alignment, and that can be really helpful, so she’s thought through that scaffolding there. Before we get to think a little bit about how we might draw inspiration from your research around caring for ourselves and our mental health, I did want to ask one more question about the goal-setting.

Speaking of mistakes that I have seen people make, I think sometimes people get inspired by the idea of bringing students in, and having them set goals for the class, but they don’t know enough about the class, and it ends up seeming really artificial, and not particularly helpful. What would your advice be for meaningful goal-setting in those cases, which I would imagine would be almost all of them, where you have to know a little bit about the material before you could actually set goals around it?

[00:23:49] Sarah: Right. True. I think we could take a modular approach here too. Students may need, as you say, some understanding of both the content of the course, and then the skills that we’re working on together. It may be not a beginning of the semester goal-setting, but giving them that grounding, and then when you start a new module, having them set goals.

I think it can also look like autonomy and choice, in terms of type of assignments. I think that it can be very helpful to give examples, a couple of different examples, and then talk with students about, say you’re working on communication of ideas. Is it important to you to verbally communicate ideas, to communicate ideas in the written word, to communicate ideas artistically? Have them opt into different assignments based on their own values, because when I was thinking about critiques of goal-setting, I was thinking more of some of the backlash I’ve seen about capitalistic approaches to like, we should be optimized and maximized at every moment, and all of that in wellness culture, and things like that.

I think when goals are relevant to values, and when they are important to us, that is where they have real power. I think helping students think through, “Okay, what are the skills that are most important to you within this domain, in this content that we’re looking at, in this specific discipline, and how can your work in this course shape those skills?” I think can be a way to tap into more intrinsic motivation, and address some of those ways that students might choose greater challenges for themselves, than we would choose for them.

[00:25:40] Bonni: You’re reminding me of my friend who teaches computer science, and when he was teaching a class about how to develop apps, it just turned out, every app was a dating app, and he wanted to align his values and beliefs, and put the criteria on there that it really needed to benefit the world in some way. To be clear, he does not say, and nor am I trying to imply, “Oh, students today, that’s just what they’ll do.”

What he is trying to imply, and I would try to echo is, you just invite people to think about it with that lens, and many times our imaginations just aren’t expansive enough to consider the ways that this new knowledge, these new skills that we’re gaining, may actually benefit the world in some way. Part of it is expanding our imagination to get that curiosity going, such that we may start to think, “Oh, how could an app that–,” and just might not be something that they’ve pondered before, but the output really got markedly different, and something to really celebrate, and then with the students thinking about their learning that way.

All right, before we get to the recommendation segment, would love to hear you talk about some of the research that you did for the book that you found personally to be particularly helpful for fostering your own mental health.

[00:27:01] Sarah: I think two things. One, the book is, in part a memoir about my own discovery, self-discovery, and dealing with pretty significant anxiety. It was really through a compassionate challenge that I was able to grow. I think I could have had a pretty boxed-in life if I had fed withdrawal and avoidance, that was very tempting at times. There’s a lot there.

I think all of this is, and compassionate challenge is about being a human being, not necessarily a student. Even though it has this higher education frame, I think that there’s a lot there that I have learned from anyway. Certainly, having the conversations with those 35 students, and then with the experts that I interviewed from so many different disciplines, I learned so much from all of them, the experts and the students, who are experts in being a student.

That would be one answer. Also, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this topic of supporting both faculty and student mental health, because I think that, so many campuses are struggling with how can we shore up student mental health. I really think that you can’t get away from the fact that the main way you’re going to do that, is by shoring up faculty and staff mental health.

I love Karen Ray Costa’s writing on Mutualism, and the idea she looks at the biological world for relationships, where two parties don’t feed on each other’s resources, but instead expand and support each other. I really think that faculty’s success is student success, and student success is faculty success. I think nourishing our teachers and our support staff with the same things that nourish everyone, time, money, resources, is really where a lot of it is, a lot of the answers are going to be.

I have a piece coming out in The Chronicle soon about joy, and I think that recovering a sense of joy in teaching and learning, is also going to be part of the answer. The tricky thing is, I think the grounding for joy is going to be those time resources, and so we’ve got to find that somehow.

[00:29:24] Bonni: I love your use of the word “grounding” there.

[00:29:28] Sarah: Thank you.

[00:29:28] Bonni: I’ve been doing some writing with Maha Bali and we just wrote the conclusion [chuckles] to our chapter the other day, and it involves seeds and planting and propagation.

[00:29:39] Sarah: Oh, perfect.

[00:29:40] Bonni: Yes, she taught me about, in Arabic that the word, I’m probably going to get this wrong, but the word “seed” is connected with the word “intention”, the root of those words. Yes, and I just thought that was such a beautiful thing. It’s so fun when you’re writing with someone else. It’s not something I’ve done a lot, and so I feel like a child in a playful way, getting to learn from her, and experience this. It’s really fun. [chuckles] I love it when your analogy comes together. The monsters for you and the bees. I can’t wait to see what’s next with all of that.

I can’t wait to read your Chronicle article too. I’m going to be setting my watch for the day that comes up. I always enjoy that.

Before Sarah and I get to the recommendations segment, I wanted to take a minute and give thanks to a newly formed partnership. That is with the Lilly Conference Series. I typically go to the Lilly Conference in San Diego most years, and got to talking with Todd Zakrajsek and for the podcast, he’s been on many times before. We decided we should for the next year, spend some time sharing with our respective communities about the opportunities that the other entity provides.

He’s going to be sharing about teaching in higher ed at the Lilly Conferences, and I wanted to share about the Lilly Conferences here on the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast. You could visit Austin, San Diego, Asheville, Traverse City, and have a wonderful opportunity to present, to participate, to learn about the scholarship of teaching and learning. The Lilly Conferences invite administrators, graduate students, and faculty to join them at a Lilly event, to exchange ideas, and build a repertoire of skills that can be put to immediate use.

Thanks to Todd Zakrajsek and the Lilly Conferences, the evidence-based teaching and learning for this newly formed partnership. I’m looking forward to sharing about the Lilly Conference in future episodes as well.

All right. I have two things to recommend today for the recommendations segment. The first one is a little bit of an extension of things I have recommended in the past, as I have been mentioning on a number of shows, I am becoming a person who stretches. [chuckles]

[00:32:00] Sarah: Oh, lovely.

[00:32:01] Bonni: I am becoming that person. For people who have been following this journey a little bit, have recently had some real progression with my shoulder issues. I got to show off how far up on the door, what’s that called? The outside of a door? The door frame. How far up I can now reach. It’s very exciting to when you can start to see, I am actually progressing for something that’s taking more than a year to heal.

I would like to recommend another yoga video. This is from the channel, Yoga With Adriene. I love her stuff. She had a Quick Restorative Yin that I enjoyed practicing the other day. Then on a completely, totally unrelated note, if any of you have watched the television show Succession, and this is only if you’ve watched that show, I think you would enjoy this parody of it.

It’s called When You Watch Too Much Succession. Again, you will only get the jokes. Don’t click the link on the recommendations, if you’ve not watched Succession. If you have, you should quickly go and click that link and enjoy the video, but not around people who, it would not be appropriate to have a lot of very colorful language with. If you’ve watched the show, you already know there’s a lot of colorful language.

When they do the parody, they’re going to echo the language that you may not wish to play in certain contexts. Anyways, super fun. The acting is so funny. If you’ve seen the show, just a good chuckle for sure. All right, Sarah, I get to pass it over to you for whatever you’d like to recommend today.

[00:33:31] Sarah: All right. Can I tell you a Succession story really quickly, though? First?

[00:33:34] Bonni: Oh, my gosh. Please. [laughter] Please, please, please.

[00:33:39] Sarah: I have a 16-year-old and she goes for a nightly walk. My husband and I were watching Succession and she was out on her walk, and then she came in, and I usually pause it, but it seemed like a safe scene, and she’s 16, but she saw a little bit of the show, while she was taking off her sneakers.

Later on, we were talking to my family and I was like, “Ah, Noelle heard a part of Succession. I think she was a little traumatized by it.” She said, “Oh, no, I thought I was fine. I just thought it was really weird you were watching it in front of the dog.”

[00:34:11] Bonni: [laughter] I love that so much.

[00:34:13] Sarah: Like the dog was going to be horrified by the lingo.

[00:34:16] Bonni: I love that so much. I love also that the story that you just told is good for so many reasons, that I think when we’re so quick to protect is, it actually goes back to the whole thing you’ve been saying and writing about, if we think that it’s all about compassion, and that compassion translates to protecting young people, old people, ourselves from challenge.

I’ve been trying with our kids. There’s a song that I recommended before on the episode that has a lot of an S word in it, and the kids are like, “Oh, we shouldn’t be listening to this.” I try to take them back to say, I try not to call words bad words, good words. I call them imprecise words.

[00:35:03] Sarah: Oh, nice.

[00:35:03] Bonni: Words that may not be the best to use in certain context. I try to talk about context, and then the preciseness of our language. Sometimes the S word is so precise, like in that song that I recommended before. [laughter] It’s like, I can’t think of a better word. That’s what makes it so much fun for me to listen to.

I love that about your daughter, that you didn’t just instantly, because so many times what I hear is, the important thing is the conversations that we get to have after those. Our son is really into chess right now. There’s a show that came out, he heard about. I’ve heard about it to The Queen’s Gambit.

[00:35:43] Sarah: Oh, yes.

[00:35:43] Bonni: I looked it up on Common Sense Media, which I always do. It was one of those things where I thought, like, he’s right at the age where maybe, yes, maybe, no, but so much of it would be that, “Okay, if I would sit and watch it with him, [chuckles] then we’d have conversations about,” I think it’s a show that features alcohol and drug use.

I think the main character may struggle with that. What an opportunity to talk about those things in a way that, and to continue his interest in chess. Oh, my gosh, I love that you told this to me. [laughter] All right, now it’s your turn, Sarah, what would you like to recommend?

[00:36:18] Sarah: Two very different things as well. I think first green spaces, time and green spaces. One of the chapters is on embodied mental health, and how embodied mental health is, and how giving your body, nourishing your body can nourish your mind, and dove in a little bit into the literature on green spaces. Things like gardening, forest bathing.

My first recommendation is to find some time, especially, if you’re in a climate that is a little warmer this summer, to get out there, and have some time in green spaces. It’s good for broadening of attention, relaxation, creativity. Then, my second recommendation, because it has this thread throughout the book of recreational horror, and fear, and exposing ourselves to some of these fears.

Couple horror recommendations if you’re looking for a movie. I particularly do not like violence or gore, but I really like being spooked. Two gentle horror movies are, It Follows and also Nope, which is a little more recent. Then a TV show, The Haunting of Bly Manor, which is as it sounds haunting and a little bit spooky, but lacks all the violence and gore. It’s also heartbreaking, not to be spoilery, but those are my gentle horror recommendations.

[00:37:41] Bonni: [chuckles] That is a phrase I may have never heard before. “Gentle horror recommendations.” I have heard about forest bathing and I’m so curious about it, but it’s something that I don’t know a lot about, but someone has recommended it on the podcast before. I get curious about that. We don’t have tons of forests. I guess we do.

We have forests near us that aren’t what I would call forests. [laughter] As they’re not quite as wooded. There’s not quite as wooded as what I think of as forests, and they’re not quite as, I was going to say the word “moist”, but that is, first of all, [laughter] a terrible word to ever use.

[00:38:17] Sarah: That is a very controversial word.

[00:38:18] Bonni: [laughs] It’s a very controversial word. I was trying to think of the thing, I can’t think of describing it.

[00:38:23] Sarah: There is some evidence, the whole idea of green spaces that the greenness is important, but I think vastness and naturalness is also great. Canyons, ocean, doesn’t have to be a forest, I think.

[00:38:38] Bonni: Absolutely. The vastness. Our faculty gathering in August is all about wonder and awe, and so we should definitely take inspiration from this example you’ve given us, as people go off. Some people for the summer season will be off contract, as they say, and going on all sorts of adventures. [chuckles]

It’ll be so fun to have them come back and have us think about the green spaces that we’ve been able to, and that’s expanses that we’ve been able to expand in our minds and nourish ourselves in the way that you said. Well, thank you so much for coming back once again. I feel confident that you’ll be back soon.

Maybe it’ll be to talk about your Chronicle piece or something else, [laughter] but I love that we’ve had an opportunity to meet and have private conversations and wins for the public and everything in between. I just love how much I’ve been able to learn from you for all these years. Thank you so much for-

[00:39:32] Sarah: Oh, same. Is a delight.

[00:39:33] Bonni: -your generosity.

[00:39:34] Sarah: Thank you.

[music]

[00:39:38] Bonni: Thanks once again to Sarah Rose Cavanagh for coming on Teaching in Higher Ed. Thanks to each of you for listening. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonnie Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroeger, and the podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Smith.

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[00:40:37] [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.