[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 279 of the Teaching in Higher ED podcast, Brian LeDuca shares about applied creativity for transformation.

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[00:00:12] Speaker 2: Produced by Innovate learning, maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:22] Bonni: Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher ED, I’m Bonni Stachowiak. 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.

Joining me for today’s episode is Brian LeDuca. He is the co-founder of the Institute of Applied Creativity for Transformation at the Universality of Dayton which launched the only undergraduate certificate in applied creativity in the nation. A national leader in curricular change has approached a vocation center design for social innovation, has been a new model for common good impact across all schools of study.

Brian, welcome to Teaching in Higher ED.

[00:01:22] Brian DeLuca: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.

[00:01:25] Bonni: You are an expert at a topic that I suspect is really overused and very misunderstood. [chuckles] Tell us a little bit about just entering in the world of creativity and then how it changes a little bit when we start talking about applied creativity.

[00:01:42] Brian: Thank you for the compliment on expert, I think that’s a tricky word, I’m knowledgeable and don’t know anything as well. I think when we talk about applied creativity I think it came out of the idea that we were starting to see a generation of students who were starting to be more connected with the concepts of creativity and the ideas of what it is to be a creative thinker, but was also trying to find a way to separate it from art-making.

This concept of art making. The same way that we kind of have these dichotomies of innovation equals engineering and entrepreneurship equals business, I think this concept of creativity equals arts was really not finding a home anymore in the millennial Gen Z model of teaching and learning. What we were starting to recognize was, how do you take the concept of novel new knowledge and those aha moments and give them purpose?

Our students are filtering out so much new information and new ideas in a 24-hour period we can’t even imagine, how do we give them a scaffolding to begin to animate those ideas of creative ideas into a way that becomes applied into specifically their field of study, but also perhaps even their lived experience. Really trying to understand, if you take creativity and simply call it a new idea, wonderful. But if we can start to find an application to that creative moment, you now start to have purpose behind the sense of creativity.

It removes it from just kind of a moment of cool art or cool things and really starts to give it some kind of thrust that actually can kind of really create a new way of projecting and animating things in disciplines that typically don’t get that same action, say in an English department or even in an accounting department.

That’s where it came from, is leaning into our students’ possible ability to kind of create ideas on the fly even though they don’t [unintelligible 00:03:41] and really building an applied scaffolding around it so that they can feel as empowered in their new idea making as say an artist does regularly.

[00:03:51] Bonni: Some of the tensions here have to do with, how do we grade creativity? Is creativity even something that you could measure? Then also is creativity something that you either have or don’t or an actual skill set? You mentioned a process, I know we’re going to talk about that a little bit later on.

In what ways does a student’s prior experience in education possibly hold them back? Let’s include ourselves too as teachers in a concept of higher education. In what ways have our own experiences held us back from really being able to tap into our capacity for creativity?

[00:04:29] Brian: Right. I love that you went– Bonni both went with the student but also us. That’s really key, because we have to recognize as any kind of educator, whether I’m a parent or I’m a teacher in the classroom. we’ve got to recognize that we find little babies and toddlers and three or five-year olds so novel because they’re fearless. The concept around what they know and what they don’t know is holistically blurred.

We spend time in those spaces, and we love it, we’re free, and yet we walk out the door and we start owning, “What do I know, and anything I don’t know I’m afraid of.” But really the whole crux of the concept of creativity is to actually lean into that variable of unknown stuff.

As adults that tension you just mentioned becomes [unintelligible 00:05:18] in that space of, I don’t know something which means I’m not going to raise my hand. If I don’t raise my hand then I look like I’m unknown or if I don’t know it, I’m wrong. What ends up happening is that we’re so fearful of the unknown or what we would call–I’m going to talk about it soon, the ambiguity that we kind of strip ourselves down to just knowledge.

I’m going to raise my hand when I know something, and as a teacher I’m going to call on you because I know you know something. You get the right answer, as a teacher I feel good. If I feel good and you feel good, those turn into good data points, and data points equals dollars in the public-school system. It all kind of revolves around this idea that to know something is good data and to not know something might be not good data, yet the creativity point and the tipping point is to actually empower the dichotomy between content and ambiguity in the same way.

Therefore, that whole concept of–We hear this a lot, fail forward or fail fast or fail fast or fail forwards, it’s all built on that ability to stay creative in the spaces of the unknown. The unknown as adults and as students have been kind of schooled out of us, because the unknown doesn’t answer tests on a standard test, it doesn’t do that. I think that’s the issue.

We got to get back–By no means am I saying we’re playing a [unintelligible 00:06:34] and Plato all the time in our classes, because that’s I think what people think when [inaudible 00:06:39] creativity in the classroom as, “Let’s do all these hands-on making.” I think this really becomes more about a state of the art thinking and really trying to get the brain back to where we were once in that kind of empathetic, innocent spot of unknown. That’s the hardest part about it I think is really trying to empower that creative space of grey.

[00:06:59] Bonni: You’re bringing up two contrasting memories for me. The first is, when I first starting in a business context, I hadn’t majored in business. This was sort of an accidental career I fell into for lack of a better way of describing it concisely. I hadn’t ever been trained that you shouldn’t ask, so if someone brought up a word I didn’t know I would say, “I’m not familiar with that. What does that mean?”

I had never had that conditioned out of me, and then fast forward into when I was earning my doctorate and getting ready to do that final defense. The guy who had taught our statistics class had said–Because it was a quantitative dissertation so, “You need to know every single number. If they go to column three and it’s [inaudible 00:07:45] –“You need to know where did that number come from, what does it mean?”

I took his advice very seriously, but what he was preparing me for or trying to–It worked, I have a doctorate today, was not to ever say, “I don’t know,” in that context. Then we get into our disciplines and it’s like you present your research in front of a conference, you need to wear the armor of, “I know everything.”

From the very beginning of this conversation I can tell that you’ve managed to unlearn some of these things we’ve been conditioned, and you were reminding me–It’s the last bit then I’ll actually get back to interviewing you because that’s why you’re here.

[00:08:25] Brian: No, it’s great.

[00:08:26] Bonni: [laughs] I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Dunning-Kruger Theory, this is the guy that says that the more–In his research, the more that we know about something, the more we realize we know nothing about it. It’s the, if you learn a little bit about something you might actually be overconfident in your knowledge about a given area, then you start to learn more and you go,”This thing is so vast. I know nothing.”

[00:08:50] Brian: Right. First of I think this goes back to when you said, “Expert,”in the very beginning, because that like assumes that I know a bunch of stuff and I’m good at that. I think for the longest time I sought that out. I’m a first-gen college kid from the south side of Chicago, so going to school to the University of Illinois was like–My family had no clue what that meant, I didn’t know what that meant.

You show up at college and–I’m going in as a graphic design major and really majored in fraternity life and really didn’t have any clue what’s going on. I stumbled into theatre because I wanted to get into film because I had a fraternity brother who never went to class, not because it was theatre but it’s because he didn’t go to class, but he told me about theatre.

I’m running in all these systems of trying to figure out who I am and what I want to do but have no vocabulary in the late 90s for this kind of stuff. I think now what it was, and I was so not confident about it back then was that I had no clue what I wanted to do between ages of 18 and 35. I’m 42 right now, so it’s not that long ago I didn’t know what it was.

What shakes up those embers for me. We all have that crucible moment that shifts the dynamic for us. Then all of a sudden you go, “Oh my gosh.” My ego goes out of the door. I don’t know anything about anything. For me, it was the birth of my twins. My twin boys are born and I literally realized, and at that time, I was a very, very successful theatre producer in Chicago. I produced theatre professionally. I was an educator at the University of Chicago. In Chicago, those are all great marks. Deep down, lost, no purpose.

I think that’s what ends up happening because we’re trained for years in the four years of college is a job and that’s what’s supposed to happen, but the times are changing. All of a sudden, you go to school for one job, four years later, that job doesn’t even exist anymore, so what are we teaching you? I’m looking at my twins in August of 2011 and I’m going, “It’s all crap.” Can I say crap on this show? I don’t know if I can.

It’s all that. I don’t know and I don’t know anything. I have no purpose. I have no possibilities. My passion is all over the place. I’m looking at my twins and I’m going, “I’m not ready to give up all myself to them but I don’t know what I want for me.” It took my wife to finally say to me, she knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to be a mom. I said, “Well then, we need to figure out a way for you to stay home and take care and be a mom, and I can figure out what it–

That’s what it takes. You have to have this crucible moment in order to get through because you’re right. This imposter syndrome of knowledge for years on end is something that I don’t want any generation of students to have to feel ever again because to not know who you are at 19 is exactly what you’re supposed to be at 19. That’s exactly what you’re probably supposed to be in your 20s.

You should go out and wreck shop and find out things and have good ethics about it. Let’s get out there and explore, play with things, touch things. Figure out what are the applications because you know what’s happening two years later, that stuff is going to be gone and a whole new bandwidth of stuff’s going to show up. We’ve got to be able to empower that somehow. Someway, the universities as a whole can’t pivot that fast. We’ve got to find a way to find these micro campuses on the campuses to create pivots.

I think that’s what we sought out to do was trying to find that runway for our students who are lacking and that want to find purpose, passion, and possibility in the work they do and not really like knowing that that’s a lifetime of work, not just four or five years of college.

[00:12:30] Bonni: I am so pleased that you just made my job so easy to transition to this next thing.

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[00:12:36] Bonni: Purpose, passion possibility, we really do put some arbitrary things around that. It’s so much pressure that it has to happen within whatever the time frame is. Is it four years or–You also can guide us now into– Well, we do the same thing with creativity. We either have it or we don’t or it’s within this context, but it doesn’t work. If I’m painting [laughs], that’s creativity or I’m doing a show, that’s creativity. If I am looking at a spreadsheet doing some analysis, “Oh, no, that’s not creativity. That has the right or wrong answers. You do or you don’t. Not true.”

Tell us about the three-step process that we can begin to use in order to break some of these habits of thinking around creativity, some of the myths that we subscribe to.

[00:13:23] Brian: Absolutely. The structure that you alluded to that’s what we call ideation, disruption, and animation. It’s a three-step process. Oddly enough, it’s modeled after the Greek plotlines of the hero’s journey or even let’s bring it back to Earth even closer, it’s modeled off a contemporary 30-minute Television sitcom. When you think about it, we call ideation what would be equivalent to the first 10 minutes of every modern sitcom.

Let’s just use Friends, for instance, I noticed that is now spanning generations thanks to Netflix. You always enter Friends with three very key moments and you can use this at any kind of curriculum that you’re doing, whether it’s history or math or whatever. If we open an episode of Friends, and the show is at the coffee shop or at an apartment, that content that we know. That’s the content we’re familiar with. That’s our knowledge. We’re very comfortable with that. We know Friends is starting off somewhere we know. Those characters are there, boom. That’s what we know.

Now, if for some reason, that episode doesn’t start off in one of those two places, we probably have a very special episode and our content is a little bit off, which is great. Somehow, someway, we have to allow us as our students or as our teachers to allow us to get that content off our chest. We have to clear the mechanism because what happens is in a problem-solving process and this is what you do when you think about these three steps, ideation, disruption, animation, you have to think it through an experiential lens.

You have to start thinking about it in a way that can apply to the work in our lives, even in the most banal way. If I know something or I know what [unintelligible 00:15:02] all next to me, give them the opportunity for 10 to 15 seconds or five minutes to get that off their chest. That’s their content. That’s great. That establishes the boundaries and the guidelines to our work.

The key part is the next step. Just like in a Television sitcom, somebody tells a character something they didn’t know. Boom. That character goes, “Oh, my God, “Ross, really you lost the monkey?” or something like that. I don’t even know. Then all of a sudden, the rest of the characters go, “I don’t know, and I don’t know,” and we empower our sitcoms to live in the unknown until the first commercial. Our students should be empowered to be in those spaces as well because it’s the ambiguity that’s the lock and key to the content.

The resulting action is a tension. That tension is what we would call an emotional aha moment before we move on to the pathway of disrupting this problem. You can take all of these components and look at that first structure of ideation and it really takes a large concept or a plotline, and shrink, sit down and filters it down into some manageable moments of action.

That’s really trying to get our students to really think, “Yes, you have a ton of information. You are nonlinear by process. Let’s help you recognize that these are nonlinear things and pull what you know, plus, minus what you don’t know in order to get us to what you want to know. Okay?” You get to that tension spot. Tension as adults makes us cautious and a lot of times, we’ll pivot right off that tension because it makes us nervous. We don’t have scaffolding for it.

Then we go into disruption. For us, disruption is an empathetic collaborative model. It really means you have a tension spot, I have a tension spot, we’re both going after the same journey, just like two characters after the commercial in Friends. They’re on their way. At some point in time, one character learns something new about somebody else’s character and puts themselves in their shoes and they go, “Oh my gosh. I had no idea. Was that about you? Let’s work together and find out this stuff together.”

If you can find an active empathy sprint, or some kind of activity that allows those individuals to take their tensions and work through them at the intersections of open-ended questions, values, needs, very human elements, the collaboration moves beyond just simply human interaction, it starts to interact the tools that you need to kind of solve this experiential problem.

The resulting response of an empathy and collaboration turns into animation because right there, that resulting aha moment after the empathy and collaboration, typically people go, “Those are awesome.” We’ve got an idea and then we stop or put it in and post it. We do it again, and we just brainstorm but instead, the act of taking that aha moment and filter it through an animation process, giving it human action.

It moves it back to the content and the ambiguity that ideation, that kind of cycle of knowledge allows our students not to be in a space of solution, but keeps us in a space of process-oriented thought and allows us to say, “Hey, the right and wrong answer isn’t nearly as important as your ability to both filter down ideas, work together ideas and move ideas back into the system again.

In a long game of that, you do find off-ramps where you got to make those things happen in reality, but what it does is it empower students from the creative confidence space is to say, “Oh, my job isn’t to solve something here. My job is to accelerate thought around these ideas.” That creates freedom for both the extrovert and the introvert thinker so that they can both feel that they’re not going to be judged on right or wrong deliverable, but more judged and supported in the process of rethinking a problem from a bunch of different empathetic angles.

That’s really the framework you’re talking about now. Really, that’s just simply the hero’s journey of any traditional plotline. I have an issue, I have an obstacle, I have rising action, I have a solution and I have a denouement and that just kind of iteration is really important. When you start thinking about a story and connecting that with our student’s purposes, no matter what major they are, they have a story and they have purpose. That really begins to fulfill that cross-disciplinary aesthetic that makes what our work does.

The applied process is so powerful because engineers are now talking to English majors who are talking art majors. We’re now talking to business majors at the intersections of their purposes, and their stories. I think that’s when real novel new ideas and social impact occur.

[00:19:28] Bonni: I want to test out a couple of ideas to make sure I’m understanding this well.

[00:19:33] Brian: Please.

[00:19:34] Bonni: These are two downfalls that I have often seen groups of faculty have in attempting to do this creativity and the kinds of problems that we try to solve together as faculty. The first one is around,– I guess I would best describe it as really not being able to stay in the place where there’s so much unknown because we want to jump straight to the fixing, and I want to jump straight to the solutions, because then it just seems to be I’ve noticed a real discomfort there.

Then secondly is the opposite of that. I don’t know if I’ve done enough analysis to say if this is one type of group versus another type of group. That’s how I’m imagining it. Now, the second kind of group would be that we don’t ever get to the solutions. We’re just idea, but nothing coming down to action that might actually then have these ideas make any difference at all.

[00:20:35] Bonni: You’re absolutely right. I think that I can tell you right now, the cycle of iteration without impact or valuable deliverable impact is one of our biggest issues and fears with this. Especially when you start to teach the model because this concept is like an exercise. It’s like going to the gym, you’re working your brain out. I can’t just show up and help you do that and then walk away and think in one day, man, they’re going to nail this. They know it’s a practice. It’s a pace which works in perpendicular to our current lifestyle, everything is so immediate.

The time is not precious, but the problem is if you let time go forever, then you lose value, then you’re devalued. That is our key. One of the things you’ve got to be able to start doing is this idea that the iteration at some point in time, the animation of a concept has to at least be tested, at least has to move into a space of tangibility.

For our work, I think the cope is that at some point in time, a professor, a teacher, a parent, needs to encourage them to stop and put it out there and try it and give some either if you’re the stakeholder or if you’re doing this for other stakeholders, to put it in their work. What’s going to happen again, is somebody’s going to turn around and say, “This is really great, but what if we tried this to it too.”

At least I know now that I have a process in which to not be offended by the critical analysis of it, but I have a scaffolding where it allows me to go, “Wow, I thought I was done or I was close.” You want to do something else that I can go back into the system and try it again and get excited.

Again, one of the questions I would always ask them, Bonnie maybe ask you too is this is, when is done? What is done? I hate to get all like metaphysical, ethical, whatever. But this seems, what is done to you? When would you think—again that’s the question.

[00:22:20] Brian: I see there’s a parallel for me and what you’re saying. One is that those of us that really treasure movement, and I would be one of those, that we don’t ever want to forget that it’s never done. Then for those that treasure, we are never moving forward. We feel more comfortable before a decision gets made, and there’s that.

For both of these types of personality traits, we want to recognize the weakness and our paradigm, that for me if I’m like, “Let’s get this done, let’s move it forward,” that I will sometimes forget that there could be an emerging idea that I missed because I was so ready to get to my artificial done. That’s not really done.

[00:22:59] Bonni: If you think about it though, that’s the handshake or the hug between the convergent thinker and the divergent thinker. Applied creativity inevitably has to be applied to something. It cannot live in its own ether, that is very ego. It needs to find a way into some space. If I’m applying to a mechanical engineer, my hope is that trait of conversions, that skill set that that engineer hopefully may have is going to be the kind of yin to the yang to this divergent process.

There’s no way, because you’re right. If we don’t, then it’s going to be unicorns, rainbows and lollipops for a very long time. I would prefer to put some rubber to the road with that. You’re absolutely right.

It also goes, those convergent thinkers are the ones that we have to try to make safe and warm the pool that we’re asking them to jump into. That is still always more of a personal and professional kind of relationship. Do you have the ability to put them in a space full of trust and vice versa that allows them to break through?

Again, that also takes time from observation, from deliverable, from data, that allows those who are afraid to go into this kind of very ambiguous space to at least try to play in the ambiguous space. There’s no silver bullet to this. I hate to say it, but it’s very much human and that we have to try and learn from those mistakes and those successes to continue to build broader and longer relationships around this kind of nimble mindset.

[00:24:25] Brian: Before we get to the recommendation segment, I just have one final question. It’s an easy one, so you should have no problem. [chuckles] You’re you’re talking to your fellow teachers, people who just treasure that. As we think about our own capacity for creativity in rethinking some of our classes or teaching approaches, et cetera. What’s the one piece of advice you have for us in terms of unlearning some of our habits that we’ve gotten into that aren’t helping us tap into our ability to apply creativity?

[00:24:57] Bonni: That is an awesome question. I would ask anybody, even if from kindergarten to a PhD, if you’re looking to break the mold a little bit and try some, meet and ask. Meet the student where they are, and what they do and how they think. You’ll find that a second grader is going to tell you, “Well, I had this problem and I did this.” You’re going in your head with your skill sets, “Wait a second, I can adapt that to the work I do. I can find a way to use that in my-.”

To and to bring that back with your expertise as an educator, but through the lens of an empowered radical second grade process for problem solving, makes not only that student empowered but the entire student population go, “Wait a second, teacher didn’t know something and we taught the teacher.”

If we can create a fairly 360-degree flat hierarchical approach to our educational system, and listen to the student and lean into that student wherever they are from a space. The awareness of being able to pull from their knowledge and their problem-solving capabilities and adapt it in the work that we’ve spent years doing, really creates new approaches and really bolsters the creative confidence both in the student and the teacher. That is probably the one piece of advice is just, meet them, listen, and then see if you can work, and innovate with them.

[00:26:22] Brian: This is the point in the show where we each get to give our recommendations and I have two. Today, I would like to recommend a wonderful project put out by the New York Times, it’s called the 1619 Project. I know some of you listening might be thinking, that came out a really long time ago. Just work with me here. If someone hasn’t heard of it yet, they absolutely should go check it out and again, will be linking to it in the show notes.

I’m going to read their description of the 1619 Project because they do it far better than I ever could, I’m quoting here. “In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon near point comfort, a coastal port and the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.”

I’m talking about two different recommendations here. One is, I recommend that you go click the link to read this project in full. This was from the New York Times Magazine, it is brilliant reading, brilliant design, the images just tell the story in a very distinct and powerful way.

The second recommendation is to recognize that they also put out a series of podcasts around the 1619. I’m going to save some of the future episodes for future recommendations. I’m going to recommend today just one of them and that is Episode 3 of the 1619 podcast.

Episode 3, I actually listened to first because if you’ve been listening to the show for any length of time, you know that I’m a big music fan and Episode 3 is all around American music and how the vast majority of it was stolen from black music. I found these amazing connections that I didn’t realize were there around some popular music from when I was growing up.

It’s just a brilliant audio piece. If you love music, you’re going to just be wishing that they play the entire songs, like I got to go find out if there’s a Spotify or an Apple music playlist that actually has every song that was in the podcast episode because it is just brilliant podcasting, brilliant storytelling. I’ll save some of the future episodes that I’m going to recommend from the 1619 project for future recommendation segments, because I don’t want us to miss out on Brian’s because Brian has a lot to share with us today. Brian, I’m going to pass it over to you for your recommendations.

[00:28:59] Brian: Thank you so much. I have five recommendations that I’m wrapping my head around right now, the first being a kind of older piece, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, which is a book by Mitch Albom. I read this book back in 2003 when I met my wife, and I was moved by the authentic love to pick it. Even 16 years later, now, I think about the milliseconds that can change your life.

I’ve been really trying to look, how do you take these moments of aha that sometimes are resulting in negative scenarios and tragic decisions, and turning them into positive moments in teaching? I’m really looking forward to trying to adapt this into some of my ideation, disruption, animation processes.

The next book I’ve been reading is a book by David Epstein called Range. I’m in this book right now, I’m taking some time with it. I’ve had friends from Nike all the way down to here at University of Dayton telling me that the correlation with how progressive workforce designs and the study of the work we’re doing are really important because this idea that the expert is moving out and the individuals who are now really good at a lot of things is where our students are finding themselves right now and being told not to do are actually what we’re looking for right now.

The Range by David Epstein is this. There are three things that are more commercial. I got real late at a party on Parks and Rec. I really have gotten late to the party, but I just can’t kick it over the blend of humanity and humor and absurdity that is in this and if anybody hasn’t got a chance to binge it, I would highly recommend it because I love the 30 minute TV binge.

Chance the Rapper’s new album, The Big Day, which is I’m a huge hip hop guy, a big Chicago guy, the CD’s one part mess, one part brilliance, but for a first studio album, Chance talks about marriage and this idea of how it feels to be in love and to find a passion and stuff, which is very alternative in today’s hip hop and I think it’s fascinating. Then the last piece is just, I’ve become a big Funko Pop collector.

For those who may not know, Funkos are a rage right now. Some of you will say they are the new Beanie Babies, but what I love about them is that they are depicting pieces of my 20s and 30s such as their ’90s collection of *nsync and the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears that I now can put on my shelves and in my office here at UD and have students asked me, “Who are these people?” I have great stories of for them, so there you go.

[00:31:17] Bonni: While you’re saying that, I have to go check out. I didn’t click on the link. These are physical things I hold in my hand?

[00:31:24] Brian: They’re like the next evolution of a bobblehead, but some bobble, some do, but the evolution– Right now there’s a Tupac Shakur that goes for $750 on the market right now because they vault. They put them in a vault and stop making them after two-year windows, but they are now pumping out a whole series of ’90s ones. The original Friends cast ones are very expensive and hard to find. They are just fun. My son, one of my twins, he’s an avid collector and has about 55 Marvel ones. He’s a big Marvel Cinematic Universe person. It’s cool to collect with my children right now as well.

[00:31:59] Bonni: It is so fun to have Things like that in your office that create more opportunities for conversation and also opportunities for a connection where you find this thing from our childhood, our growing up years, whether it’s music or movies or books or whatever, where there are those avenues for connection with younger people and as well as older people too. That sounds like so much fun.

I actually went to the Instructure Conference, they are the makers of the Canvas Learning Management System. I caught a little hula dancer. It’s also like a bobblehead, but I think it’s supposed to dance on your dashboard.

[00:32:31] Brian: Yes, your dashboard, absolutely.

[00:32:33] Bonni: I’m not putting it there, but it is sitting in my office waiting to dance. [laughs] It creates a lot of conversation.

[00:32:40] Brian: I always consider that I always say it’s like Keyser Soze. It’s like that moment in Usual Suspects where people walk around. I want people to Keyser Soze my office. I want them to see if they can draw up and figure out what my story is by the stuff I put in my office. Everything in my office is very intentional.

[00:32:54] Bonni: Now I have this whole question because I don’t do this very often, if ever. I think we have to add the Usual Suspects to our recommendation list, so it’s either going on yours Brian, or it’s going on mine because if they haven’t seen that movie, they’ve got to watch that movie. Can I put it in yours?

[00:33:09] Brian: Absolutely. Please, put it on. It’s one of those classic moments of aha– [unintelligible 00:33:15] “aha” is the end of a movie, right? It goes into history of aha moments.

[00:33:18] Bonni: If you did not just get his reference about Kaiser Soze [laughs] your office-

[00:33:23] Brian: Don’t look it up. Just watch the movie. [laughs]

[00:33:27] Bonni: Thank you for remembering to tell people that Spoken like a true teacher, “Do not google, just go to wherever you can [laughs] You will ruin it. Yes, it will never be the same.” Brian, it is such a delight to be connected with you. I feel so much more energized coming off this time with you than I did when we started out. Of course, I didn’t tell you that. I try to keep some of these things behind the scenes, but it started out a little slow today and you have just brighten my day and I’m just so glad to have your expertise, even though it’s not expertise, but I’m going to say its expertise on today’s episode.

[00:33:59] Brian: Thank you, Bonni so much. Really, it’s a pleasure and an honor and congrats in everything you’ve done so far and continue to do with the work you do. It’s super important to bring us all together at the table to share our knowledge and I’m just blessed to be a part of it, so thank you again.

[00:34:11] Bonni: Well, it is absolutely a joy. It’s part of why I feel so energized ending because you just feel like you’re just such an integral part to a story that’s been told for five years now and that I’m not planning on stopping anytime soon. Thank you for being a part of the story.

[00:34:24] Brian: Absolutely. Keep it up.

[00:34:25] Bonni: Thank you so much.

[00:34:27] Brian: My pleasure. Thank you.

[music]

[00:34:31] Bonni: Brian LeDuca it has been such a privilege having you on the show and to be connected with you now. Thanks so much for being a guest on today’s episode. Thanks to all of you for listening. It makes a big difference that you listen and that you tell friends about the show and also that you can stay connected using our weekly update. If you’d like to subscribe to the weekly update, you can go to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe and what you’ll receive is the most recent episodes show notes along with an article written about teaching or productivity written by me.

You also get a productivity and educational technology guide with some tools to help you in both of those areas. I suggest that you subscribe today or get connected in some other way. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll see you next time.

[music]

[00:35:25] [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.