Beauty and the Liberal Arts, with Margarita Mooney Suarez

[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 436 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, beauty and the liberal arts with Margarita Mooney Suarez.

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[00:00:16] 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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[00:00:43] Bonni: Margarita Mooney Suarez is currently an associate professor in the Department of practical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, where she teaches courses on philosophy of social science, Christianity and the liberal arts tradition, aesthetics, research methods for congregational leaders, and sociology of religion. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Yale University, and her M.A. and PhD in sociology from Princeton University. She’s also been on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Yale University, Princeton University, and Pepperdine University.

Margarita founded Scala foundation in 2016, and continues to serve as Scala’s Executive Director. Scala’s mission is to infuse meaning and purpose into American education by restoring a classical liberal arts education. Her most recent books with Cluny Media, The Wounds of Beauty, Seven Dialogues on Art and Education, and The Love of Learning. Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts grew out of her decades of experience as a teacher and scholar. She’s also the author of Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora, and the co author of Taming the River, negotiating the academic, financial and social currents in selective colleges and universities.

She has written for publications such as RealClearPolicy, Scientific American, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Miami Herald, America Magazine, Redgehog Review, Public Discourse, and the National Catholic Register. Margarita, Welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:39] Margarita Mooney Suarez: Great to be here, Bonni.

[00:02:41] Bonni: I have a first for today’s podcast interview. I’ve been doing this since June of 2014, so I don’t have too many firsts anymore, but I not only read one of your books to prepare for today’s interview, but I read both. I’ve been so looking forward to this conversation, so thank you so much for being here today.

[00:03:01] Margarita: Thank you. That’s a great honor.

[00:03:03] Bonni: Well, I’d like to begin at the end and the conclusion of one of your two books that I read to prepare for today, the one about liberal arts. In that conclusion, you so beautifully talk about the human mind, and how it grows by being exposed to different forms of learning. I’m reading from your work now, that includes the scientific method, but also literature, music, grammar, rhetoric and logic. Would you talk about these different forms of learning, and how they can complement one another?

[00:03:39] Margarita: Absolutely. I’ve been a professor in higher education now for a couple of decades. I became really interested in studying different modes of learning because I was trying to understand how students were looking to connect debates in my field originally of sociology between facts and values, right, or experience and objective truth. I discovered the liberal arts approach to education because it’s a philosophy of the human person, and ultimately a philosophy of knowledge that tells us that there are different ways to access the truth, but that ultimately all truth is unified.

What I’ve learned is that we learn about the world through observation, which is the scientific method, but the observation of the scientific method in and of itself calls for an interpretive framework. It was really eye-opening to me to read people like John Henry Newman, or later, Jacques Maritain, who talked about the human person as having a capacity to know the truth through our senses, all of our senses, not just our analytical part where we put something under a microscope, but all of our senses, and also through our intuition. That our intuition is leading us somewhere. Now, our intuition, our observation, and all of our senses, including our bodies, need to come together to be able to look, and to observe, and to discern the truth. Because ultimately, I think, what I’ve learned is that the truth is not something we create, it’s something we receive and discover.

[00:05:27] Bonni: One of the things you suggest in the book that really lit up my imagination, because it’s something I think a lot about and wrestle a lot about has to do with where you say education should start. You tell us that it should start with wonder, and curiosity.

[00:05:44] Margarita: Absolutely, because, the reason I say that is that I think a lot of students think that education is about acquiring skills, or mastering a technique, or passing a test. The real seat of education, the real end of education is the formation of a holistic human person who can see the truth and act rightly in accordance with that, right The reason education has to begin with all in contemplation is because we have to put ourselves back in a place of receptivity and wonder. Because no matter how much we learn, or how much we know, we never reach full certainty.

Now, I’m not saying we’re always on quicksand, we do reach certainties. But our human mind is made to always be reaching to something else. We have to stand with certainty where we are, but be able to take risks that might turn out not to be true, or not to work, but a position of awe and wonder puts us in a position of observing, but with an openness to let the truth in us, and then the operations of the mind, and the intellect, and the heart, and the body. But we have to constantly begin again in education to put ourselves back into what some of my interlocutors or from the Benedictine tradition is called the elementary mode of being. Right? That listening.

[00:07:15] Bonni: Yes, it’s very hard for me to do. I’m not sure about you if it’s hard to. [laughs] I think, oftentimes, the images that come up for me, and things I’ve read, and people I’ve listened to is that slowing down in order to be able to move into that elementary mode, and, again, at least for me, that’s very difficult for me to do. I think sometimes we can just presume that other people ought to be able to flip a switch as they enter into the spaces where perhaps we’re the ones influencing what happens in there, such as when we teach a class.

I know one of the questions you pose to us is you ask us, after you share about how education begins with wonder and curiosity. You ask us the question, when have you felt so totally engrossed in learning something that time seemed to stop? I want to ask you that same question. When have you felt totally engrossed in learning that time seemed to stop for you?

[00:08:13] Margarita: Well, could I say this morning, as I was preparing for my class where we talked about music, and happiness, and worship. Now, I had read this text before, I was rereading my own book, The Wounds of Beauty: Seven Dialogues on Art and Education, but the very question of the mathematical basis of music, the relationship of music to the cosmos, and how my personal subjective emotional reactions to music might actually be a window to understanding something about the universe, that concept just fascinated me. I get swept up in it and realize I actually have to get up from my desk and go to my class to teach this because I’m so drawn to these questions.

I will say, in the two books that you read, The Love of Learning and The Wounds of Beauty, there’s only one person I interviewed twice for both of those books. It was George Horn on music. Because in all the presentations I’ve given on my book, people really want to talk more about music, and the relationship of music to truth, and order, and mathematics. There’s a lot to be said, my class didn’t cover it all, we’re not going to cover it in this podcast, but this experience of being swept up, it’s just a curiosity to know more. I really hope that at the end of my class today and all my classes, students both feel like they’ve learned new things, but more than anything, that they’re more curious than ever about the questions we were talking about. To keep learning about them after class.

[00:09:51] Bonni: That’s definitely a theme that has come up since this show first began, and that is focusing more on questions than we focus on answers, and I think we can stifle curiosity when we start with a definitive as opposed to those things that might invite people to wonder. I also think too that when we model ourselves as people who are still asking questions, and seeking additional insights, and learning, and beauty, how powerful that can be for students to see that modeled in us. I’m going to pose another one of your questions. You can tell that I really got a lot out of the questions you pose. I’d like you to recall one of your favorite teachers, and something that you learned from that person.

[00:10:34] Margarita: Well, let me tell you about my eighth grade teacher, Bernadette Emerson. The reason I recall her was that she taught her subject, English literature, but also speech and debate with passion. She had done the same thing in a small K to eight Catholic school in Frederick, Maryland. She did the same thing for decades, but she loved it, and she taught each of us as if we were our own person, then with me, I think she particularly mentored me in public speaking, and right now what I’m doing with you, of course, with teaching as a form of public speaking.

So, as a young woman who had struggled with a stutter, I had been in speech therapy for stuttering, and I’m still what they call a covert stutterer, but sometimes I have mechanical difficulties with my speech, but the fact that in spite of the fact that I was a stutterer then, she put me forward for speech and debate, and I competed, and it built my confidence. So, I loved that she loved her subject, that she helped me work through a speech disability, and still do something well enough to win.

I didn’t win all the way, but I was able to perform, and that gave me the confidence, that in spite of my limitations, what matters is that I find a good mentor, love what I’m doing, and if this is what I’m being called to do, I’m going to do it, even if there’s a piece of me that simply cannot do what I know other people can do and do better.

[00:12:15] Bonni: What I love about your story is that I think sometimes and so much of our conversation, my preparation for today is really trying to go past the dichotomies that we put in front of ourselves, and far too many areas, and so I think when it comes to encouraging and trying to build up students, we’ll think of it as a dichotomy between you, “You better make it or break it. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, then the more feeling oriented potentially kinds of encouragement. But what time and time again, and it comes out in your story is it isn’t just about the encouragement, although certainly that does seem to be an important thing.

We’re encouraging students by our passion, and by trying to ignite that in them with curiosity and wonder, but there’s also giving learners opportunities to demonstrate skills, and build them, and grow so that that confidence comes from within, not from some external person that may be giving pats on the head. Thank you for sharing that story. I love being able to hear about that mentor, and the way in which she both encouraged, but also gave you opportunities to be challenged, and to demonstrate those skills and grow them, that’s powerful.

Well, you frame a lot of your work around interviews, and I’d love to hear you share a bit about what happens when we seek to gain knowledge, wisdom, and beauty by interviewing versus other forms of research we might do.

[00:13:41] Margarita: Well, so my PhD is in sociology, and I studied sociology in graduate school because, I was interested in the intersection of people, and communities, and previously I had studied psychology, which has wonderful insights, but it’s often about the individual, or maybe small groups. I was interested in community formation and international development in these bigger picture questions. Sociology embraces a variety of methods, that’s why I went to school and everything from census data, to survey data, to ethnographic observations, to interviews, and an interview is an art and it’s a science, there’s a craft to it.

There’s a set of skills. I’ve read lots of sociology books on how to conduct interviews. I share that with my students, but at the end of the day, an interview is a prepared form of what we do all the time, which is have conversations. We have conversations with living people, when we’re reading a book, we’re entering into a scholarly conversation if it’s a scholarly book, and the end of research is to further scholar conversations. What I did in my previous projects with immigrants from Haiti, as well as with young adults who had experienced trauma, I asked them their life stories, and people love to tell their life stories ,but I was prepared. I had a set of concepts that I was working with across the different interviews that I was trying to elucidate.

I brought my questions to the interview, and then I let their life’s stories help me further the kind of knowledge I was seeking, but I think we do this in our everyday conversations, maybe not in the same prepared way I did with an interview guide, and concepts, and theories, but there is a method. I learned in the process of doing interviews that often, the most important parts are the unexpected, are the nonverbal cues. The look in somebody’s eyes, the bodily pulling back, or leaning in, and so, there’s an art to it, because as human beings, sometimes we treat text even between humans as if it’s disembodied, but we’re always embodied creatures, and we react to eyes, and body and all that.

I would write notes about how a certain question sparked a certain facial expression, or a bodily, and that’s a cue to me as an interviewer to stop, or maybe to go deeper, or to rephrase the question. Then, I found that if I did that well, I was in some ways helping the person tell their story in a way that felt more complete, because most of us don’t sit down and get to tell our stories on a personal level. We don’t all have experience and vocabulary of how to tell a great story, but I found that the more of the craft I did, the more people just enjoyed it, and the interviews would go from one hour, to two hours, to longer, because there’s something about us as human beings that craves storytelling, and a well-told story about our own lives actually teaches us about ourselves, because we’re making conscious things that we don’t always get to express.

That’s how I learned the art and science of interviewing. I’ve done hundreds of interviews with people very different from me, but with whom I’ve set the stage like, “Look, I’m here today to talk to you about this project I’m working on. I’m really interested in X, Y, Z. I’d love your help in sharing your insights and your story. Thank you for your time. If it ever feels uncomfortable, we can always stop, but please know that what you share with me, I’ll keep confidential, but I will use it to try to further this project that I’m working on that I think matters for this reason.”

Usually people say yes. As often as I can in my classes, I have students conduct an interview with somebody who is doing the work that our knowledge is preparing us to do. Why? Because knowledge from the classroom applied in any setting, it’s always more complex, and students love doing the interviews, and they realize it’s extremely difficult to summarize somebody else’s story in an interview, and that all the concepts that we’re talking about, when you put them in the real world, they’re intersecting with everything else that’s going on.

There’s a way in which the classroom, rightly so, gives us a place to step back, and conceptualize, and analyze knowledge, but then using that knowledge, again, whether it’s engineering, or mathematics, or physics, or sociology, or humanities, using that knowledge, you’re using it in the world where everything’s interacting with everything, and it’s through the art of being human that we’re reading all of these cues all the time to constantly adjust our knowledge and our way of being in the world to the response that we’re getting.

[00:18:45] Bonni: What are some common mistakes that we tend to make when we’re interviewing others, and am I making any of them right now? [laughs]

[00:18:55] Margarita: No, you’re a great interviewer.

[00:18:57] Bonni: Of course, I am.

[00:19:00] Margarita: You are well prepared, and I would say, a common mistake, because I would get my interviews transcribed, and I just have to say what I just told you about being open to cues, sometimes I realize that I had a question in my head that I was trying to get answered, and the person revealed some information that was actually more interesting, and I didn’t pick up on it, and I kept going because I already had a narrative in my head.

That actually led me to go back and do a second round of interviews, and as well, in the two books, which you mentioned, which are the results of interviews, they’re very heavily edited, and for the parts where I thought the person made a point, and we didn’t go deep enough, or maybe I turned the conversation a different direction, we edited them, and I said, “Can you please add some more information here? This was an important point.” So, it’s difficult to actually hear everything somebody says to you. We think we hear everything, and I’m pretty persuaded that we really only can process a certain amount of information.

That’s one mistake. Now, you can counteract that by going slower, by breathing, pausing. There’s ways to deal with that. That’s one mistake. I would say another mistake when interviewing is really not knowing how to ask your questions. What order. People tend to relax if you give them a few questions that are really close at hand. When you’re talking about people’s life stories, it’s often easier to ask people to recall an event than to describe a feeling, right? “Can you tell me the kinds of things you and your mother used to do?” Is an easier question than, “How did you feel about your mother when you were 12?” Right? It’s harder to recall that.

But from those events, we can then elicit the emotions, and the feelings, and the story, right? If somebody does have a strong emotion about, someone said to me in an interview, “I was pretty angry with my mother when I was 13.” Bam. That was a cue. I said, “What led to that?” It turns out there was sexual abuse in the home, right? If someone reveals a really strong feeling, they usually attach an event or two to that. Those were the kinds of questions that I was interested in learning about, but as I mentioned, people love to tell their stories, so it’s usually easier to ask people about events.

[00:21:46] Bonni: These are such great pieces of advice that I’m definitely going to enjoy reflecting on a little bit more, something that I enjoyed in reading both of your books was how much you come out in it. I was being very careful in noting, and I probably didn’t even need to do this, but I still was cautious about making sure that in my highlights, I noted if it was you who had said something, or if it was the person that you had interviewed, I had to code that for myself in my preparation. Just, I love that you came out, and I feel like I know your values, and I know a lot about who you are, and some of your past experiences and stories too, and I enjoy that.

The reason I bring that up is that people have different things that they’re looking for in an interviewer. I try to avoid thinking I’m supposed to meet everybody’s different kinds of needs, so I get complimented. Some one time somebody said, “Oh, you interview like this person, the host of the on being podcast, Krista Tippett.” That literally was like the best comp. I’m like, “I will go to my grave with like, that’s maybe one of the nicest things anyone has ever said,” but I love your stressing that it is an art, and it is a science. I think in that art, we need to be whole in taking ourselves and who we are, and be willing to be vulnerable in that.

Because if we’re trying to be something that we are not, that more logical way, the science of approaching the interview isn’t going to really be particularly helpful to us. I think we’ll lose some of our power we might otherwise have. All that to say both of your pieces of advice, I think would fit my style of interviewing very well, and can help strengthen my work. Thank you for those two gifts. All right.

[00:23:28] Margarita: I would just react to that and say, listen, I think what you’re doing is so important because, teaching is a great conversation, and the classroom should feel like a great conversation, right? I think what I see in your style and the material that you’re creating, you’re encouraging this deeply intellectual and personal journey of discovery, which is the heart of all learning. That’s what inspires people. It makes the more taxing parts of the analytical scientific as important as they are, it makes it as exciting again when it’s a conversation.

[00:24:10] Bonni: Thank you for that. In both of your books, you explore both the usual, you spoke about earlier the idea of music, and math, and some usual things about beauty and meaning. You also explore some unusual, at least unusual to me, sources for beauty and meaning. I’d love to hear you share a bit about one of them, the beauty and meaning from cheese.

[00:24:40] Margarita: Well, about nine years ago, somebody asked me if I knew the cheese nun, and I said, “No, I didn’t, but I’d love to meet her.” One day I hopped in a van with students when I was teaching at Yale in Connecticut, and we drove to a Benedictine monastery, and met a woman, sister Noella Marcina, who’s in my book, The Wounds of Beauty, who is a college dropout, and then went back to the University of Connecticut as a nun and got a BA and a PhD in microbiology. She and her sisters make cheese in caves in Connecticut, and in labs.

What I learned about beauty from cheese, I really have to give credit to Sister Noah, she said that part of the reason the monastery makes cheese is not just to have lovely, artisanal cheese, but also because the process of cheese making is analogous to human life. There’s birth, and there’s death, and there’s growth actually through fungi. Part of what makes cheese taste good and taste different is actually the fungi, and the kind of decay. What makes that beautiful? Well, beauty is often identified with something that’s pleasing in appearance or in taste.

I do want to say that beauty is supposed to further human happiness and the human good, but not everything that’s part of human experience always is pleasing, right? Beauty is about pointing us towards truth and order. Cheese, and in fact, not just cheese, but guess what? Everything in nature has a cycle of death. Nothing is immortal in nature, but I think beauty helps us to smell, and to feel, and to taste that even in the struggles of life, that there is a hope that goes beyond the appearance. That’s been a very important insight for me that I’ve written about in a variety of ways regarding the death of a young student, or an earthquake, the terrible earthquake in Haiti.

How as human beings we’re called to have hope even when faced with decay, and suffering, and death. Cheese tells us about beauty because it helps us understand what our eternal destiny is, and gives us what Sister Noella calls an elementary form to enter into the mystery of being.

[00:27:15] Bonni: That’s beautiful. Thank you. As we wrap up this portion of the interview, I’d like to ask you about something you wrote about avoiding burnout. You share just about the weight of the reality that students needs can so often far exceed those things that we’re actually able to do for them. You draw that then to often being a cause for burnout. I’m quoting you here. “What keeps me sane is a good dose of humility. The recognition that I’m an instrument for God in the world, and that I have to make an effort, but the results of my efforts are not something I control.” Would you share a little bit about those tensions between wishing we could fix those things? Wishing we could offer more than we truly sometimes can?

[00:28:06] Margarita: Well, most people go into teaching because they love their subject, and they want to communicate knowledge and reach other people. It’s precisely in service oriented professions or roles, right, that one can achieve a lot. At the same time, begin to feel frustrated, because you’re encountering institutions which are slow, and sometimes not supportive. You’re encountering people who aren’t always doing their best in the classroom, and you’re encountering your own weaknesses. Sometimes when our ideals don’t translate into reality, we can get frustrated, and feel this sense of resentment.

If that’s not checked, then those resentments can lead to an elevated sense of just burnout, anger, stress that then makes it much harder to deal with the present moment, and to deal with the human being right in front of us right now. Burnout, especially for those of us teaching in higher ED, I did a session on this with Heterodox Academy, the expectations on teachers in higher ED with all of the student advising, and the administrative load, and creating new classes, and reviewing papers for journals, publications, it’s a lot of different hats.

It’s not just teach in the classroom and we’ll evaluate you for how you teach in the classroom. It’s all of these other things that are much harder to to predict. I got worried about teacher burnout, but also student burnout, because I was working with students who were, in some ways high functioning, meaning getting good grades at elite schools. But inside of themselves, they didn’t really have a sense of why they were doing this, or a sense of that this work was actually something they were being called to do, or something that was fulfilling. Instead, it was just one more task, and at some point, they can’t fit another thought into their head.

It’s like, they just can’t enjoy what they’re doing, and at some point, they just can’t do it anymore. I was surprised to see that people could go from high functioning to almost not being able to function. I think the evidence for that is pretty clear in the rates of students taking time off from college, dealing with mental illness, all of which may be very legitimate, but we do have to ask, why is it so prevalent?

Why is it so prevalent? This is pre-COVID, it’s been exacerbated since then. Then teacher burnout during COVID. Suddenly, everything gets switched to online. That’s new to a lot of people. There’s not face-to-face communication. People are tired, and they’re wondering, “Why?” But the burnout isn’t only because the circumstances are hard. I think the burnout is because people don’t know why they were doing this, and they don’t actually have an integrated balanced life. There’s only so long that you can have this achievement rat-in-the-mill mentality. We’re so focused on effectiveness and productivity that we think that that’s all that there is. That’s what I mean by burnout.

You can be highly effective and burned out, because you don’t know why you’re doing it. Then guess what? You look at the other people around you, and you start to say, “Well, she’s not doing what I’m doing, and he’s not doing what I’m doing. I’m the martyr here.” When you take on this martyr mentality, even maybe without knowing it, it can start to inhibit love. Love is what communicates truth, and love is what changes hearts. That anger, that resentment, that burnout can create fear, and fear squashes love.

[00:32:10] Bonni: Thank you so much for those reflections. This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. Today, I have two things that don’t seem like they’re a part of beauty, but I’m going to try to make them work that way. A lot of times people I know get into painting, and art, or maybe it’s knitting, or crocheting, and my form of art is often building slide decks. I know that doesn’t sound– speaking of that feeling of flow, I can really get into a feeling of flow building a nice slide deck, and I’ve mentioned on prior episodes about really enjoying the tool that’s called Canva, that’s C-A-N-V-A, and they do have some really nice ability to build some nice slide decks up there and present them.

I just wanted to share seven Canva presentation shortcuts, a link to an article that will talk about that. I know this is silly. There wouldn’t be a lot of uses for this, but every once in a while you may want to have confetti show up on your slide deck, and they have the ability for confetti to literally come into your slide deck, and there’s a keyboard shortcut for it, but there’s other more practical ones as well. Speaking of something that wouldn’t also seem related to beauty, but maybe sometimes to me, I have an article I’d like to share with you called the Most logical Date Format for Notes.

I will tell you here today, it is a beautiful thing to go in and have your notes organized in a chronological way if they’re minutes, or notes, or something that would lend itself to that, and not to have any characters in there that are going to get messed up if you save it on the cloud. These are things of beauty which normally might not be recognized as beauty, but I wanted to tie it into our discussions today. Margarita, now, I’m going to pass it over to you for whatever you would like to recommend today.

[00:33:58] Margarita: Well, I would recommend, when people ask me how to have more beauty in their lives. The first thing I recommend, Bonni, is silence. Find a time of day where you can have silence. It’s hard. It’s hard to find the time, and it’s hard to have exterior and interior silence. That can be at home praying. For some people, it’s going on a walk, but listen, listen to the birds, listen to the wind, and the second step of silence is that you actually learn that silence is a form of attentiveness. You’re slowing down in order to receive. If you’re practicing silence regularly, the second question is, what are you receiving during that? You could receive from nature.

Your silence could be following a prayerful reading of scripture, but you’re filling yourself with something. Then, when you move into other activities that are more auditory, listening to music, gardening with your hands, cooking, I think that silence is going to enrich the presence and the attention to the manual embodied sensory ways of being. My number one recommendation is to use all of your senses, and to prepare yourself to do that by silencing the mind, but not silencing the senses. Another recommendation that I have is fasting. The bodily equivalent of silence. Can you find a time when you fast completely let’s say from alcohol for 30 days? What about fasting during one or another holy season?

In the Christian tradition was typically fasting from meat during lent, or fasting from meat on Fridays. In the Jewish tradition, fasting is there. Why? Because we’re saying no to our bodies, we’re still nourishing the bodies. I’m not saying to diet. I’m not recommending a diet here. I’m recommending a fast, and by saying no to that, again, it primes our senses, and it primes our body to desire the things that are really nourishing it, because all of our senses are prone to misuse. The whole point of fasting, now some people, you can take it to a technology. Some people do a technology fast. Take something that stimulates your senses, the body, the mind, the eyes, whatever it is, and fast from it.

Then see how you engage with it differently when you’ve stopped fasting. I would say for me when I did this, I’ve reduced the amount of hamburgers and fries that I eat. I still eat them, but I’m more thoughtful about it, and I’ve drastically reduced the amount of alcohol that I drink because it has an effect on the rest of my senses. I don’t even really desire it anymore. I haven’t quite gotten there with coffee. If anyone has any recommendations about coffee, let me know, but I have switched to one cup of caffeinated coffee followed by decaf. I’m trying to limit my body’s appetite for caffeine, which can be disordered.

[00:37:19] Bonni: Boy, these are such powerful recommendations, and when we’re done here today, I have it to go and go for a walk. I think rather than doing my normal, normal, which is to listen to a podcast or call someone, I think I’m gonna go for that walk in silence. Thank you for that gift, and both of these things really remind me of allowing us to pay more attention to things. Thank you for these gifts that you’ve given us, and I just so appreciate you getting in touch. It was actually a colleague of mine who heard you speak, so thank you to Norland for introducing me to you, and for reaching back out when he suggested this conversation. I really appreciate your time today, and thanks for being a part of the podcast.

[00:37:59] Margarita: It was wonderful to meet you. Thank you so much, Bonni.

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[00:38:04] Bonni: Thanks once again to Margarita Mooney Suarez for being a guest on today’s Teaching in Higher Ed. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak, and was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroger, podcast production support was provided by Sierra Smith, and thank you each for listening to today’s episode. If it has been a while since you started listening and you’ve yet to subscribe to the weekly update, I encourage you to do that today. You can head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. When you do that, you’ll get an email each week with the most recent episodes, show notes, as well as some other resources that don’t show up on the podcast. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time on teaching in higher ed.

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.

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