Bonni: [00:00:00] On episode number 236 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Hakan Ozcelik speaks about arts-based studio pedagogy.

Production Credit: [00:00:12] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:21] Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:49] Today’s guest, Dr. Hakan Ozcelik is a Professor of Management in the College of Business Administration at Sacramento State University. He received his PHD in Organizational Behavior from the University of British Columbia Canada. He holds a Double Major Degree in Management and Political Science and an MBA from Bosphorus University Turkey. His research focuses on the role of emotions in organizational life including such topics as discrete emotions in organizations, including loneliness and anger, surface acting emotions in leadership, emotional climate, emotions and decision making, and emotional awareness in cross-cultural business communication. He also leads, as you’ll hear about in a bit, the annual CBA Film Festival and the interdisciplinary CBA Organizational Wisdom Studio Project.

Bonni: [00:01:53] Hakan, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Hakan: [00:01:55] Thank you, Bonni. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Bonni: [00:01:58] You are one of those people who the instant I started reading about your work and your teaching, I was completely enthralled. But the other thing that I know at least from having done this podcast as many years as I have, is that there’s always more to the story. If we just catch you now where you are running this film festival about your discipline, which is not film. If we just catch these glimpses of the magnificent work you’re doing now, what we miss is that all of us have a far greater capacity in our teaching than we might even realize. So I wonder if we could start with the before picture. Would you share about your teaching before you started some of these more innovative practices and just some of the indicators that you had that things weren’t quite going the way you wanted them to as a teacher?

Hakan: [00:02:54] Yes I mean first of all I strongly believe that you always grow as a professor. And you have to grow as a professor because not only does the context change, but also students change, times change, you change. And I think you should constantly be aware of that. And I don’t see that as intimidating. I see that as being fun. I’d rather be like 30 years from now be someone who is still trying to do something better than a bored professor who has been doing the same thing again and again for 20 years. So I think this is important.

Hakan: [00:03:29] So going back to your specific question, I’m a Professor of Organizational Behavior and I teach business communications and leadership and emotional intelligence courses. And all the courses that I teach require a lot of focus on building interpersonal skills. I’d also go beyond that and start thinking about interpersonal dynamics so people can actually start thinking differently about how they can relate with one another in organizational environments.

Hakan: [00:03:59] You’ve got a huge stream line of research and theories around these topics, you’ve got our textbooks. You’ve got our research. And yet, once all those materials make these printed published materials, they start losing some of the vibe – the juice – of some of the topics. And one of these topics is emotion because there’s a huge nonverbal component of emotional experiences with the facial expressions, the body gestures, howuse people pauses in their speeches, they start cutting each other off in their conversations and so forth.

Hakan: [00:04:37] This is a wide range of elements that play a huge role in how we relate in our work environments. The challenge is that if you are teaching emotions and if you are not really tapping into those domains, you are being too cognitive in teaching emotional topics, which is fine to a certain extent because then that makes you more intelligent aware at the cognitive level. But still when it comes to the intuitive level or even the interaction level, you really need to get your hands more dirty.

Hakan: [00:05:07] So when I was teaching, for instance, those leadership theories way back, I always felt the need to put out something there that shows that more like a juicy, dirty relational intuitive / counterintuitive aspects of that specific theory. So I used to show some movie clips, I would do some interactive exercises. Since the beginning of my career, I’ve always been interactive in my courses. So that’s not innovative to me. It’s been my practice.

Hakan: [00:05:38] But I realized that this is not enough. So I really need to get my students going to use different tools to start exploring those non-verbal elemtns. Which led me to the idea of having my students, in addition to writing a paper and designing some workshops, these are senior level H.R. students, what if these students actually produce a film project where they can capture not only the verbal but also the non-verbal elements to literally reverse engineer a leadership theory. And by reverse engineering I mean unpacking a theory to show in a quote on quote “real life organizational setting.”.

Hakan: [00:06:22] So they are given a theory or a theoretical problem and then they get training in their acting and movie editing and then they get their tests on the leadership theories and then they get some training on comedy because the films have to be comedy projects for a reason because you just get sharper. I think it’s more creative and also it’s lighter. Also it helps to push the boundaries and get out of the box to create the humor out of the situation. And also for our film festival purposes, it’s more fun for the audience to think about the topics.

Hakan: [00:06:58] So they get all these trainings and then they write a script literally unpacking a theory that they’re assigned to such as transformational leadership. So they have to go to that theory, really read it with a different lens almost like an executive producer does. If I were to create a movie out of this theoru, what would I do? Not only that, if I were to tie that to emotional intelligence how can I do that?

Hakan: [00:07:22] So then they start writing their script and then they start meeting and then that’s the most fun part because then I start learning also. So I give them a lot of feedback on how the dynamics might be improved between the characters. If there are enough characters in the story. Whether maybe there are too many characters. How about the flow? How about the plot? So did all that. Now they are in a different realm, we are in the film domain and yet we are still exploring organizational behavior materials which makes everybody really engaged and quite fresh in a way, everybody is fresh in their thinking while doing all that.

Bonni: [00:08:00] I want to go back to a couple things that you said. And then after that I actually want to start getting tangible about how does a person do this because would it be possible for someone who didn’t have a technical background in these kinds of things to reach out and do these sorts of experimentation?

Bonni: [00:08:17] So one thing that you said is that you want your students to experience it. That was the phrase that you used. And then what was implied in what else you said is that you want others to experience it. The very nature of that it is a film that they are producing and that you have a film festival that you put on with the students, that changes the dynamic. We’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast of just first of all the motivation right off the charts because I’m not just doing this for Hakan, I’m doing this for a much broader audience.

Hakan: [00:08:57] Exactly.

Bonni: [00:08:57] But Then also it does help reduce the any sort of temptation for plagiarism, academic integrity issues and like you said it’s also fun.

Hakan: [00:09:09] It is fun and there’s also this backstage process. As much as the festival that is really fun and we all enjoy and all my student are now like it’s kind of a nice closure to them. The back end story is a lot of the times full of anxiety and stress.

Bonni: [00:09:27] Yeah.

Hakan: [00:09:28] I didn’t expect until I started this being this project and I’m doing it for eight years, it’s been almost a decade now. But the first few years I was just assuming that students would get just excited as much as I am because I ignored the fact that they don’t have the background that I have, personally. I’m not a professional trained actor, but I’ve done some acting when I was an undergrad and I had my theater group at UBC, Universal British Columbia, as a grad student to perform their productions. I’ve always been interested in emotions.

Hakan: [00:10:01] Then I realized my students are just senior level undergrad students and some of them might have no training at all in any of these. So even if I provide the training that of course I was very careful about, I wasn’t really aware of the emotional processes. And then I realized that I need to do a lot of emotion management in that process for my students, acknowledging their anxiety and then addressing that and making them feel like this is normal. And also showing them the light at the end of the tunnel of how things will be in the film festival. Because to our audience’s surprise and not to mine because anybody who’s in an artistic process is usually freaking out until they put out their work to the world.

Hakan: [00:10:44] So my students are always very scared all the way to the film festival event because they don’t know what kind of response they will get from from the world. I think this is part of the process because then that really pushes them to go beyond duties, my students spent a lot more time in these projects than they are required to. They could just make a project and submit it. They go to the extremes to make it more refined, more creative. They’re putting in a lot of effort to put up something that they feel proud about. And I think this is important because these are not like small kids who are just learning basic knowledge. These are university students who in a few years will become our next generation adults and managers in the industry. And so they have a say. They are intelligent, mature people who should be able to bring their voice to the world with the types of works they’re doing.

Hakan: [00:11:48] And a lot of the times their work is just graded and put it in a box or in a shelf and get dusted there until they get shredded so the only people that read their work is their professor and maybe their family member and that is it. But these film projects are becoming an event right now. I’m sitting on about 48 different film projects and some of these film projects have been presented around the world. In Copenhagen, Studio Design: The World Summit, I was invited there. In Vancouver, Canada at the Academy of Management. I visited Sorbonne in Paris and the ESOP universities, I presented the films there. And the films are going to be presented online and some of these films are used regularly in my other classes when I teach leadership topics, which my students love.

Hakan: [00:12:38] So these products are becoming artistic/scientific permanent materials that’s going out to the world that can be utilized by anybody. Actually colleagues at the academy from around the world are asking me so when are these materials going to be fully available so that we can actually also use that in our classes or even in our research. So I think it really brings in a lot of creativity, determination, and also opportunity for our students and for our for ourselves as academics for our schools. Also you’re in a great vibrant environment where you can create conversations around these projects.

Bonni: [00:13:17] I want to ask just a few quick questions. How many people in an average class of this type?

Hakan: [00:13:23] This is a Special Topics Class the class sizes are 30.

Bonni: [00:13:27] OK.

Hakan: [00:13:28] So I would say somewhere between 25 to 30.

Bonni: [00:13:30] And then how many groups in a class of 25 to 30?

Hakan: [00:13:35] Four. And It has to be four. So depending on how many students drop. Some semesters students gets really ok. What is this? So they drop. Which I understand and I make it very clear in the very first day of class, I make my students aware of the fact that this is not a typical course. So I read the syllabus to the detail and I explain what the expectations are and I also encourage them and I tell them you know what this is an opportunity for you to explore but do not expect that mainstream course experience. There’s a lot to explore in this class. Some semesters maybe it’s a contagious effect. Students get excited so people stay and in some semesters some students drop so sometimes we are like know 23 to 24 students but all this four teams because of the nature of the whole thing is structured because of emotional intelligence dimensions and also the film festival demands. We cannot have too many films and also the teams should be large enough so there are enough resources in them for different acting, technical skills, and so forth. So all this four teams and students solve everything. I would say like 23, 25 to 30.

Bonni: [00:14:44] And what is the requirement for the group members in terms of are there things that you do to set up that there is some greater likelihood everybody makes a significant contribution? And what do those contributions have to look like? Do they have to be in front of the camera? Or can they be behind the scenes? That type of thing.

Hakan: [00:15:01] Well this is one of the three projects that they do. So they’re constantly working in different- it’s a very intense course because it’s a special topics course on dealing with emotional intelligence. Also it’s a HR course, Human Resource Management course.

Hakan: [00:15:15] So first of all, we cover all the basic leadership theories at a quite a high level and then we move to the emotional intelligence book, [00:15:25] Mayer and Salovey’s [0.4] emotional intelligence book so they learn that book also. And then they design a workshop to improve each other’s emotional intelligence skills. And in the meantime they start researching two different emotions, one positive and one negative and then they do some psychology research. And then they bring that into human resource management domain. What are the implications of love and loneliness for instance for employees? And how can leaders employees move from loneliness to love through their behavior?

Hakan: [00:15:57] So they do a lot of thinking and they get their midterm. They write a paper on it. So they do all those things so that the film festival is almost like an add on to all these different processes. So the teams are already there and they write a contract stating each other’s expectations and then they evaluate each other’s performance. So their grade depends not on what they get from their projects, but also how they evaluated one another. Simply because of that system, very rarely I see the problems of free riding. All students are usually fully engaged.

Hakan: [00:16:32] My challenge is students sometimes get overly engaged which in itself becomes a problem too because then there is this competition that you need to manage, there’s a trophy kind of a quote on quote trophy. I think students make a big deal out of it earlier in the process, in the previous years so I’m making it very clear now this is just part of the show. It’s kind of an Oscar touch in the film festival demand so it’s not like they want the film that wins. And yet I still keep it there though. So there is still kind of the sweet deal of competition and also the engagement level.

Hakan: [00:17:04] This is what I heard from one of my colleagues a few years ago actually at the academy in Vancouver and he said that he realized you know that this project is truly a team project because in a lot of the other courses, we think that we are giving team projects to our students but actually these are group projects simply because what happens is that students just get together and then they divide the work and they do it so they don’t really put out their special skills. They do not create a lot of interdependency, so they just get the job done.

Hakan: [00:17:36] In the film project, everybody has a specific role and it’s not really that they cannot exchange roles, especially once they get started with the project. At the minimum, their roles in the film projects are are like they cannot exchange them. So they have to really build in their own specialty to the project and I think for that reason, the team dynamics really are in place.

Hakan: [00:17:59] And one of the challenges of the team dynamics is the competition. So that you have an overly driven team and you’ve got more of those. So all of this sudden you got these students really striving for perfectionism. So one challenge that I still have for instance is people start getting perfectionists, they are less likely to start getting feedback from others. So I got used to it now. My students would never ever show me their film projects until they saw minutes, they are very sensitive and I give feedback to them on a scene that they’ve already produced. Even on the script level, now I think they are better at that now that I tell them that they are going to really go inside out of the script because I know you’ll get a lot more sense of the value when I put it out there.

Hakan: [00:18:47] So they are very very sensitive to feedback and I’m overcoming this challenge right now as a professor trying out different ways. But I think it is this artistic tendency also that makes them overly sensitive, overly team driven group of students who are really getting engaged with their projects because of the public nature of the of the whole thing. Because it is a festival event that brings us to the studio components which we will probably be talking about later. But they feel like there’s something that’s quite different. But also it’s quite important.

Bonni: [00:19:22] Before we do talk more about the studio component, do you get support from other people on the campus as far as if students need help with video? How do they video it? What technology do they use?

Hakan: [00:19:33] Oh definitely. I mean I couldn’t get this project done without the habitat that I have at the Sacramento State University with my colleagues and collaborators. It’s more than a few dozen people on a continual basis. Some of them play a very important role technically and some of them simply by attending the festival events- also because they love it, it’s not out of obligation. But some of my partners, I need them. So if you build all these relationships. So for instance, my sons get their film editing training in our academic information resource center. ARC. Corrin Mattos, I just want to say thank you to her from here. My former student. She’s been in this project since they’ve started and there’s been some organizational changes in that office and yet whatever happens you make sure that we adjust ourselves to get it going so that my students get proper training with film editing.

Hakan: [00:20:29] The acting component, so I’m collaborating with the best actress in town, Ms. Elisabeth Nuziato from the B Street Theater and AK media. So she every year comes and trains my students on acting and I also do an acting session about comedy acting. So this is one componet.

Hakan: [00:20:44] And I periodically work with film students or film graduates, graduates of film school who come and teach about different camera techniques. These days I’m out sourcing some of these because there are a lot of now also video tutorials. So I’m creating kind of a little list of these resources for my students which are publicly available. So these are some of the external resources that I get.

Hakan: [00:21:07] The event organization in itself is another thing. So Ms. Angela Park Girouard, our administrative person who takes care of a lot of things. I had that last year because we invite about a hundred and ninety five people to campus on and off campus, business executives, professors, artists, people from other universities. We usually have a guest speaker coming in and so we do some catering. We try to reserve the largest auditorium on campus. The parking arrangements. A lot of people are involved. And then the recording components. And then the post-production components. We just kind of on the slower end because once we are done with the film festival project, there’s always something else but now I try to do a better job at managing my priorities at time so that these projects will be publicly available very soon to the world.

Bonni: [00:22:01] I can’t wait. And so before we get to the recommendations segment, what do you have to share about the studio aspect of all of this?

Hakan: [00:22:10] So the studio design is an emerging trend in education in general and even beyond that, in managment education. And the idea of studio design is you are literally utilizing your classroom as a studio environment where you bring in people which are your students and even maybe some experts who come in and come and go to train your students about certain things. Like an artist studio, like what does an artist have in a studio? It’s their corner where they create. Eventually though, it doesn’t stop there. Studios is a studio only when you have an exhibit so that people outside the studio come in and they start observing your work.

Hakan: [00:22:53] So I was invited to the Studio’s Summit organized by the Copenhagen Business School at the Academy of Arts management’s as a special participant at the summit. It was a summit, people all around the world. They do different things in different fields. So they got together and actually our film project was one of the projects that we analyzed in a group which helped me a lot to make sense of what I’m doing from a studio pedagogy design perspective.

Hakan: [00:23:17] So whatever a studio design is that you are bringing in a lot of resources and create a minimum structure which brings in the art space component where students have to define a lot of the structure by themselves. And yet it’s not just anything goes environment either. So they are given some strict purposes, not even goals but purposes. And then they are let known that it’s okay to make some errors. But what we want from you is that be in touch with the external world and make those connections that’s there is something there. Maybe it’s not perfect, but it’s brilliant. Because if it’s perfect, you’ve got to get all the answers right on the midterm.

Hakan: [00:24:00] In this project, that’s not the case. Actually it’s quite interesting because that helps my students to push the boundaries. So when they produce their film projects, their projects actually a lot of the times not only explore a given theory but they build propositions about this theory because of the stories that they create. And most of the times they are not aware of this because they’re not experts in the field. But my colleagues who are experts in the field then debut these film they say wow I never thought about this part of the theory before and there it is. Here’s a story now. So I get a lot of research question ideas myself.

Hakan: [00:24:36] So going back to the studio discussion though, that studio idea that opens literally the boundaries of your classroom to the world. So get our festival events we are expanding our boundaries and then we are inviting people. You’ve got regulars, people come in every year to our film festival event. So they come in and then we present the films the first time all of them there with a live live judge panel. We’ve got about 10 to 15 judge panel including professors, business executives, artists, filmmakers, literally viewing and judging the films right there. And then we tell the scores in the panel discussion. I got this winner with the trophy, the Oscar.

Hakan: [00:25:16] So we do all that, but while doing all that you create an environment that’s quite unique. It’s real. It’s beyond the classroom. It is during our class time, but it is something that’s I think that one of very few schools in the world doing this in a business school. And this is what we call studio because then the live discussion that happens right there and then with a large group of quite interested and surprised people- because we have a live panel session. They create a lot of ideas right at that event which I find every year very fascinating and rewarding.

Bonni: [00:25:52] Sounds amazing. I am so pleased to hear and I know we’ve only skimmed the surface of all of their work and just how you’re able to take what can often be an apathetic thing “just get me through this class. I want to check the box.” And really ignite people’s imagination and help them stretch themselves.

Bonni: [00:26:10] I love that also the part that you shared too about how the stress is there and you could try to get rid of the stress but if you get rid of the stress you sometimes get rather learning and learning can be hard and can be stressful. But you’re there as a support and also they are experiencing these very emotions that you’re sharing about. So it’s all very meta.

Hakan: [00:26:31] I love the word imagination and I think that’s something that we should all take a lot more careful especially in these days to bring more deliberately into our curriculum. I mean Einstein once stated decades ago that imagination is a lot more important than knowledge. Because with the imagination, you start putting out alternate realities that feed that eventually make it reality, some of them.

Hakan: [00:26:56] But the imagination is so important for human beings. That’s to me like the basis of education. Because computers do, information technology does a lot of the knowledge component of what we do anyways. I’m in an age where we are now contemplating should we have robots do some of these works, I think our competency gradually is getting more and more on the imaginative side now until the time when we can then people produce machines that can actually imagine.

Hakan: [00:27:23] But this is whether we like it or not, our sole competence right now in competition with technological worlds. So you have to really help our students to start using their imaginations in methodology matters. Imagination is not just you are born with it, that people admire you for. No. Imagination is something that we should all in a very disciplined fashion start building, developing, and also teaching and utilizing in our educational practices.

Bonni: [00:27:53] That’s the only way to do that is to remove some of the structure as you said and that can be very scary. We’re going into a messy part of teaching but an exhilarating part of teaching too.

Bonni: [00:28:04] So this is the point in the show where we each get to share our recommendations and I have two that I’d like to share. I want to say thank you to Marco [?]. I apologize Marco if I am saying here your name wrong. But he said that he’s become a fan of the podcast. And on a recent episode I had said how much I enjoyed this song but that I wished I had researched who originally sang the song and he says that- this is on Twitter, a tweet from him- I’ll upload a link in the show notes. “I’m also a big fan of Brazilian music. Aguas de Marco is the original version of the song you shared and was written by Tom Jobim. So I’m going to play a little bit of Aguas de Marco.

Hakan: [00:28:46] Yeah great.

Bonni: [00:28:47] Yeah.

Aguas de Marco: [00:28:47] *”Aguas de Marco”- 1974 plays*

Bonni: [00:29:12] I have the benefit of seeing the video on my screen. And that was 1974. We’re looking at Elis Regina and Tom Jobim and I was born in 1971. And so I know cause now that he shared the song I think my dad must must’ve played this when I was little too, although I don’t know if he did it in Portuguese but I think it’s so much more beautiful in Portuguese so I would recommend people go and listen.

Bonni: [00:29:38] And the other recommendation I have comes from not a great happy story. Back on episode number 230, if you have been listening since then then you will know I had a chance to talk to Peter Kaufman. And you will know that in the second half of that episode he shared about his terminal cancer diagnosis. And sadly I saw yesterday in the comments, thank you to Alex who shared a link to the post from New Paltz EDU and it’s a post about College mourns the passing of Peter Kaufman, professor of sociology. It is with sadness that we share the news of the passing of Professor of Sociology Peter Kaufman on November 19th. He was 51. He joined the faculty in 1999 after earning his PHD in Sociology from Stony Brook University. He received continuing appointment in 2006 and was promoted to professor in 2014. And I encourage those of you who heard that episode and who have had your life touched by Peter to go look at the link over to New Platz and see the celebration of his life. There are some amazing pictures of him and his colleagues. There is a wonderful video of a conversation on death and dying. There is the post that we spoke about in that conversation, A Sociology of my Death. And Peter Kaufman’s Twitter feed. And also the episode that I was able to share with him on November 8th, the Teaching in Higher Ed episodes. I am so sad and I know so many of you who he has touched your life are so sad about his passing as well. And I’m just so glad to have gotten to know him a little bit and to go see all the ways in which his work will continue to make all of us just be better educators. And so as raw and hard as it is to navigate through that, it’s worth it I think because he has so much still that he can teach us even though he is no longer with us. So rest in peace, Peter. And we are sad and we will miss you and Hakan, I warned you in advance. I said I don’t think I can do it and I couldn’t.

Hakan: [00:32:05] And as you mentioned, I think that’s one of the best things about being an educator in that you leave so many pieces to the world even after you are gone with the people that you educate. So I think you’ve got this privilege and responsibility that we are more likely to be remembered than many other people in other professions simply because you make a difference in someone’s life, they don’t forget it. They keep remembering you. I’m sure he’ll be remembered from his students and with his colleagues and the people that he met and influenced.

Bonni: [00:32:36] Absolutely. Do you have to recommend for us today?

Hakan: [00:32:40] So I would like to recommend two websites that are reflective of what’s happening in our domain, just to bring in more imagination. But before that, I would like to on a broader level recommend a book. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude. That’s my most favorite book. And I read it- being a researcher on lonliness, I find this fascinating. All the imagination and the social analysis of an era that kind of crosses the boundaries between reality and unreality about deeply getting into the human psychology. So that’s one thing that I would recommend people read.

Hakan: [00:33:21] I would like to also mention those two projects that we have been working on. And one of them is the film festival that you just mentioned. So there’s a website for it’s called www.csus.edu/CBA/FilmFestival. And this is where you provide some of the basic information about the film festival project they’ve been doing in the last eight years and some links for some of the sample film projects and most importantly this year, we had to postpone our Iraq because of the fires and low air quality and which created a lot of challenges to finding a room. So we kind of pushed the boundaries for us. So wearing my innovative hat, I took some courageous actions and also with the luck, we are collaborating with our university creative services studio, so we are heading an event for a smaller audience because you feel like you’re being in studio. But on the bright side it will be a professionally recorded event, more like a Donahue show. You’ll be moderating. There’s going to be a lot of discussion about the film projects. And also you will be posting all these useful projects to that website. So those of you who are interested to learn more about leadership, and especially this year our focus is on a long illness, how we can help employees overcome their workplace lonliness and leaders can help them. I think it’s a great opportunity. You might even create a domain where people can start providing their own insights and so forth.

Hakan: [00:34:54] The second project, which is kind of an extension of our film project, is an interdisciplinary platform that you create among academics, artists, executives, and students together explore, generate, and communicate wisdom for organizations. So how can we create wiser organizations and organizational practices? This has been a project I’ve been working on for about 3 or 4 years now and in 2017 we did our debut event where we explored anger and how we actually utilize anger in work relationships so that it can help us. And how can we experience anger in a wise [way] so it will not become a problem in our relationships and it wouldn’t damage us.

Hakan: [00:35:36] So our first event was a studio event thanks to Steve McKay and his team, it was fully recorded. We are still working on this but he did a website right now where you would see, you get a glimpse about the events that run. The full website, it’ll probably also posted there about this event brought together two business professors, two executives, one actress, and one music professor to explore how we can aesthetically experience anger.

Hakan: [00:36:06] Just as a quick example, our music professor helped us understand why you love listening Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which is one of the angriest pieces in music history. And yet you don’t even want to come close to someone who is angry and then you listen some segments from that symphony and also the Queen of the Night Aria sounded like Mozart’s Magic Flute. So while listening to those,with the help of our music professor and other people on stage and audience, they’ve discovered that there’s a lot of repetition and intonation and variation pacing in those musical pieces, which means our executives helped us making that formation, then to get angry as an executive. Maybe you should just find a way to create more aesthetics around it by pacing it instead of outbursting in our anger, maybe expressing that anger in different times, in different variations so people get more receptive to it but also if they start listening to us just like they are listening to a piece of music.

Hakan: [00:37:08] And then we mapped then onto Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech. We listen to a little segment from there. So that there’s a lot of repetition at the same time variation in that speech. So these sorts of social things. It’s very avant garde. You learn a lot. And as our next event, we are working on our next event probably in the spring semester. If everything goes well, it will be something along the lines of a studentship, what it means to be a student. And also along the lines of loneliness because we know loneliness is becoming a big problem also for students. So I can explore loneliness from a different lens.

Hakan: [00:37:46] So all that are available in our website. www.csus.edu/CBA/orgwise. So if they could just visit those websites. And more importantly, if they can just reach out to us because we are actually very much excited about creating possible collaborations with those people around the world given the virtual nature of the projects that we are doing, create a virtual platform and you can even meet in person in different amounts anywhere in the world. But you just want to create those conversations and get them going in an era where everything is getting really, I would say like, temperament based and so fast and so shocking and there’s so much surprises and just a little room just to sit and reflect on how we are experiencing life and I think there is more wisdom in that sense in our education environments also.

Bonni: [00:38:42] It has been so wonderful to be inspired by your work today and I congratulate you on the award, the Teaching and Innovation award you won from CSU and I can see why. Although, I could tell why right when I before I spoke to you. But it’s so great to have the honor of talking with you today. And thank you so much for being a part of Teaching in Higher Ed.

Hakan: [00:39:02] Thank you very much, Bonni.

Bonni: [00:39:06] I’m so honored to have had this opportunity to talk to Hakan Ozcelik. Thank you so much for coming on the show. If you’d like to look at the show notes for today’s episode, they’ll be at teachinginhighered.com/236. Hakan had mentioned a couple of resources you might wanna go, actually you should, don’t not might, you should go over and really check out the film festival website and the organizational wisdom studio project. There are lots of links to some of the video that they do and as said more is to come. So definitely worth checking that out.

Bonni: [00:39:40] And if you don’t want to have to remember to go look up the links, I’ll have a link to the wonderful Brazilian version of the song that I had recommended a few episodes and the tribute to Peter Kaufman. If you want to get that right in your inbox, just go over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. See you next time. Have a great week.

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