[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 439 of The Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, Education for Love and Wisdom with Dr. Jeff Hittenberger.

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[00:00:15] 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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[00:00:42] Bonni: My guest today is a friend and colleague. His name is Jeff Hittenberger. He teaches in the graduate education program at Vanguard University in his role as professor of education. As he shares in our forthcoming interview, he previously served as chief academic officer at the Orange County Department of Education, and as provost vice president for academic affairs at Vanguard University. He’s taught and led in K-12 and higher education for more than 30 years and has participated in international education projects in Cameroon, Mali, Morocco, Haiti, Togo, and South Africa. Jeff, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:28] Jeff Hittenberger: Great to be with you, Bonni, always.

[00:01:30] Bonni: Last time you were here, it was episode 400 and you helped me celebrate that big milestone. Now we’re at 439, so it’s been a little bit of a minute. Today we’re going to be talking about a topic that I know is near and dear to you, and it’s education for love and wisdom. I’m interested in hearing you talk a little bit about why is this something that’s been reverberating in and through you in recent years.

[00:01:58] Jeff: Thanks so much for inviting me, Bonni, and thanks for asking that question. Over the past eight years, I served as chief academic officer at a county office of education in California. During that time, I was very involved in board meetings among many other responsibilities. What I observed over the past eight years was an increasing level of tension within school board meetings. Your listeners will probably have seen some examples of this on news reports during the pandemic of disruption and upheaval of people who came feeling tremendous anxiety and fear about COVID or about the strategies the districts were using to try and mitigate the effects of COVID.

I would sometimes be in a board meeting for seven or eight hours with literally hundreds of community members doing public comments. Sometimes those comments were given in a thoughtful and measured way, but oftentimes, those public comments were full of fear and anger, and sometimes to the extent that the meetings themselves were disrupted and we weren’t even able to continue to have a public conversation about the issues on the table.

It was an example of something that has been seen, I think, more broadly in our society and in our education environments about a growing sense of fear and anger driving our conversations and making it difficult to have civil conversations about challenging issues, that in turn makes it difficult to find ways forward to respond to challenges and to come up with solutions that take into account the variety of perspectives within our communities, and then allow us to offer supports and services to students that will better meet their needs and keep them moving forward in their education.

As I sat in those meetings, and mind you, I value tremendously the democracy work in education that allows for that kind of public comment, that environment where people have a stake in the education system. There are of course many countries in the world where nobody in power cares what you think. I’m not suggesting it would be better if we didn’t have people participating democratically in our education systems. What I’m pointing to though is what happens when the basic civil competencies of engaging in civic life and educational conversation in thoughtful and open ways breaks down, then what you end up with essentially is a yelling match.

Yelling matches rarely produce workable [laughs] solutions to challenges. Often sitting there in the meetings, I would think, “I know this is coming from a sincere place, I know this is an issue that matters deeply to you, but I wish we were better as a society, as a civic community in learning the competencies of openness to each other, essentially of the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, so that we would honor each other in our conversations even with intense disagreements in such a way that we could see ourselves as part of a common community with different perspectives seeking answers that ultimately will benefit everybody, especially our students.”

[00:06:15] Bonni: You led us through for a semester at our university. I don’t think I mentioned that we work at the same place. You led us through a how to engage in civic life with love and wisdom faculty learning community. It was really fun for me, very rewarding, edifying to hear colleagues talk in such a candid way. It felt like, I realize it’s a cliché, but a very safe place for people to share about things. One thing that I think somewhat surprised me, but probably shouldn’t have, was the extent to which so many people went back to their families.

I grew up in a family that still to this day but all the time growing up where one member of the household felt very strongly on one side of the political spectrum, I mean a lot, and the other in a complete polar opposite way. How these two individuals have learned to still be married all these decades later– Have already celebrated I think 50th anniversary if I’m doing the math year right. Yes, that was in recent years. How do you stay married to a person who really, we’re talking about complete and utter polar opposites, you don’t talk about it?

For me, I didn’t really grow up learning how to have these kinds of conversations where you see things so differently enough to realize that so many times, actually, I have just found since then, when you are in a relationship where you can just go, “Let’s really talk about that–” Dave, who I’m married to now, of course, Jeff, you know Dave well, when we disagree about things politically, and by the way, it’s easier when you’re on [chuckles] the same page most of the time, but whenever we get ready to vote, sometimes one of us might have more time to take a look at some of the things that are being put before us or some of the candidates and so we’ll share. Then sometimes we see things differently.

When you see things the same so much of the time, it’s easy to go, “That’s interesting. Tell me more about why you see it that way.” Generally speaking, on those kinds of an issue, they’re not hugely heated controversial things. It’s just an issue we don’t know that much about so that would open up space for us to view them so differently. I did not grow up with how to have conversations with someone who totally [chuckles] believes so differently.

Today’s conversation, we’re going to be exploring together is– We’re going to be looking at of course at an educational context, but I think out of our faculty learning community, we really saw it does go down to the roots, the origins of oftentimes what we saw modeled for us, healthy and unhealthy ways of having or not having these kinds of conversations. Let’s begin. Jeff, would you share about, in an educational context, what does it look like to have education taking place without love?

[00:09:11] Jeff: Unfortunately, part of traditional education systems has been based on a sorting idea of education that is education for weeding out students and see who is– In pre-K-12 we talk about, or historically they’ve talked about college material versus not college material. There’s so many horror stories about kids being told by their school counselors, some other adult at their school, “You’re not college material.”

This idea that the bell curve and so on would allow us to sort students into groups and the group that is not college material obviously is destined for less bright future. Your listeners may have had experiences of teachers or other adults in their experience dismissing them, not valuing them because they did not live up to a certain academic standard or some other standard that was being held over their heads.

The change that’s happened in education in recent years, I believe, is there’s a much stronger commitment to the student and to that student with their range of attributes and qualities and assets that might be different from other students, and may not include the same academic preparation background or specific skills in logical-mathematical or particular valued competencies and focusing rather on what this student loves, what their passions are, what they care about, what they’re good at, what assets they bring, and how they can prepare themselves and we can support them in their preparation for a flourishing life.

Education without love is really an education that doesn’t focus on the learner but really focuses on some external standard to which the learner is held. If they can’t meet the standard, then sorry. We can’t change the system for you. Either you suck it up and hit the standard or you are going to have to go find another way with your life. What that causes students to feel is a lack of value and so many students.

I’ve had students say to me, for example, high school students who take a standardized test and get a relatively low score because they’re an English learner, “I can’t go to college. I’m not smart enough,” because even the way the testing system has been set up, it’s communicating back to the student something about their own value and potential that has to be challenged. Part of our role as educators is to assure that our students feel the value that we have for them. As one of my colleagues likes to say that we say to our students, “What matters to you matters and I’m going to take it seriously and do everything in my power to help you achieve it.”

[00:12:28] Bonni: We both promise that the latter half of this episode is going to get a lot more cheerful. Before it does, let’s look at what does it look like to have education without wisdom.

[00:12:42] Jeff: Yes, it’s such a good question, Bonni. I think where we have to exercise our wisdom in education is really focusing our best efforts and our best thinking along with our students on the strategies and on the feedback and on the coaching that will help them to thrive and grow and accomplish the things necessary for them to thrive and flourish in life.

It’s not enough to say I care about you and then not actually invest in their growth in such a way that they will have the opportunity to thrive and achieve the things that they want to achieve. We have to exercise our wisdom in partnership with our love and care for our students so as to provide them with the kind of support and opportunity and help them discover those things that will allow them to flourish and reach their goals.

[00:13:45] Bonni: I know for me one of the things that it’s looked like when I have participated in education without wisdom is to go back to the roots I shared about earlier where it’s either trying to speed up when something happens in a classroom that I think could really get out of control. Therefore, for me, that could translate into really going lot faster than I think is possible. Then even after fast-forwarding more than would be appropriate, to not realize that when we do those things, we can actually go back and revisit them. I think about times when students have said things in class that I considered to be overt racism at play.

One time this happened and there was a two-minute video that played. It was supposed to be This Week In Business News that played right at the end of a class. In the video, students created This Week In Business video. I’m not going to repeat it here because it’s not going to be particularly edifying to pass on to the world, but I remember going, “Oh my gosh, were classes over?” Then feeling like I didn’t handle in the moment what was said about a particular group of people. Then, if you fail, guess what? They’re going to come back in the class. You can still say, “I’d like to revisit what happened in the prior class.”

As I think back to that memory from almost 20 years ago in teaching, it still haunts me today so I want to be teaching with love and wisdom and I want to slow myself down. I focus on breath when I do that because that is a behavior versus pausing isn’t necessarily a behavior, but taking a breath is a behavior so let’s slow ourselves down. Then the other thing that I’ll try to do is to remember that you can trust people more than you think you can. That trust looks like you can trust the person who maybe just said that thing that I may consider to be outrageous. I like to err on the side of assuming that they’re confused. I really don’t think I’ve ever met a student who I would consider to be an evil person. [chuckles]

Do I think that they’re confused? Do I think that they have a lot of biases? Yes, those things, but I don’t give up on any of them in my mind, if that makes sense. I’d like to trust that this is a good person at their fundamental roots who is confused. That’s a helpful paradigm for me. The other thing still to this day I’d like to be able to do better is trust the other people in the room. To be able to slow down, take that breath, and then ask a question perhaps back to the person who just said that thing, but also perhaps back to the rest of the room and say, “What does some of the rest of you think about this? Do you share this view?”

By the way, I’d like to just ask one question and stop talking. See how I’m not doing it well [chuckles] even in this interview. Both of these things, to me, I think back at my own decades of teaching and I think, yes, sometimes I did teach without love, and then sometimes I did teach without wisdom. This is maybe when we get to the point where we could talk about the promise that there is hope on the other end of this once we recognize we’re challenged by some of these things.

[00:17:03] Jeff: Yes. I think what you’re describing in a way is the wisdom of a coach. It’s the wisdom of coaching. A coach doesn’t simply say, “I care about you and I value you.” A coach is a person who helps that athlete or that performer achieve the things that they really want to achieve. To do that, you have to be able to give clear and meaningful input and engage in the kind of conversations that allow self-reflection on the part of that athlete or that performer so that they can get better.

We as teachers or faculty members have toolboxes. These are learned competencies, whether it be the toolbox related to growth mindset or the toolbox related to cultural intelligence or the toolbox related to emotional intelligence, or a toolbox related to specific disciplines within the field that students are supposed to be learning. We could continue down that list. We are helping students acquire the tools of various kinds that are going to allow them to achieve the things they want to achieve.

As we unpack that toolbox, they begin to learn how to use those tools because of the nature of the activities, the conversations, the environment that we’re creating in the class where they feel safe to try things out even if they’re not sure they can do them well. It is in that dynamic process in the classroom that starts really with a place of students understanding and believing that they are valued, that they’re welcome, and that we are committed to their growth and their flourishing, that all that other stuff is possible.

[00:19:00] Bonni: Yes. So important. The importance of the transparency in that, I used to just think you could assume that that would come through. No. You have to be very intentional about repeatedly throughout any class doing that. I recently had the opportunity to interview Kathy Davidson and so I was going back through it. Sometimes when I write up my weekly newsletter, I’ll go back and look at the other episodes that someone has been on to recommend that people listen to those too. I saw a mention of her advice to us to create a class constitution.

You’re talking about at the individual level, let’s be inviting people to let them know that we do believe in them and we’re going to help introduce them to tools that will help them flourish, et cetera. Having that commitment as a group can root us in something that goes beyond our individual contributions and can open up those spaces to then hold ourselves accountable.

This very much includes me as the person facilitating, hopefully, this learning to what should I be committed to and held accountable to and opening up those opportunities to give me feedback on how well I’m succeeding at doing that, but then we have something to go back and revisit. This is what you have said is important to you as a learner. This is what we have said is important to us as a learning community.

[00:20:22] Jeff: I love that. This notion of a learning community, communities of care, especially given the, frankly, mental health crisis that we face as a society, how many of our students have experienced trauma, are experiencing trauma, high levels of anxiety, especially amplified by COVID in recent years. Our students are coming into our classes carrying heavy weights. Those weights make it difficult to learn and grow to their real capacity. To create that learning community, that community of care that understands we are all coming with challenges.

Something that I do a lot with my classes is circle time at the beginning of class. You can do it in a variety of ways, but it’s a chance for people really to connect and to talk about what’s going on and to break out into table groups and share something with the people at their table about their week. To be able to have a sense that before anything else, I’m welcomed here as a person with all of the things that I’m carrying, and other people are carrying things too, I’m not by myself, that circle time has become a very common practice in pre-K-12 education as well because our younger students, of course, are carrying tremendous amounts of stress and anxiety, and trauma as well.

Our awareness of that has led us toward a much greater focus on social and emotional learning because it is when we address the affective domain and give students ways of sharing and growing in that area that they’re really cognitively better able to achieve their goals and achieve educational success, and ultimately career success.

[00:22:29] Bonni: When you first started talking about circle time, I wasn’t familiar with it phrased that way. My brain got confused and I thought you were talking about tummy time, which is something they do with little babies so that they can build up I think their strength in their neck.

[00:22:41] Jeff: [laughs]

[00:22:41] Bonni: I think that’s what they do. I was thinking, “No, that’s not tummy time. Circle time.”

[00:22:46] Jeff: I have not tried tummy time in class.

[00:22:48] Bonni: I would think that’s probably not-

[00:22:49] Jeff: [laughs]

[00:22:50] Bonni: -where you want to go, but I do a process that sounds very similar to you. It’s a process called examine. It’s a old Ignatius prayer where you ask two questions. Since the last time we gathered as a community, what is something that brought you life, and what is something that took life away? We do this in our marriage, we do it in our family, and then it works.

You can also do it by yourself in terms of joy, but how important that is just to recognize that we are embodied human beings coming into a space and we are bringing with us all that just came in our drive-in or time if the people are living in the dormitories or whatever, and that those things are coming with us. There is not this artificial just because the class has started– I find this very helpful for me when I remember to do it, and I have enough discipline to do things like this as well.

[00:23:43] Jeff: Absolutely. Let me connect that back to the comment you made earlier about the faculty learning communities that we did last semester around education and civic life for love and wisdom. That was a group of about 19 faculty from nine different departments, many, many different perspectives educationally and politically. You would start us off with that examine activity, which is, as you pointed out, a circle time. It helped bring us together in our humanity so that the conversations we had, even with all our differences in perspective, began from a place of acknowledging and appreciating the humanity of the people with us in that faculty learning community. It was very, very powerful.

[00:24:29] Bonni: I find that when we allow ourselves to be in relationship in those more vulnerable ways, I think about for students who I have had some students who have very differing political views for me where I think, “How on earth?” In those cases, it’s actually very easy for me to think because so many of them have shared their stories of the ways in which their families have influenced them and the ways in which the types of media that they’re exposed to have influenced them, that it’s easy to think, “Of course, this is very prideful what I’m about to say, but this person’s really confused.” [chuckles]

I just had a conversation like that after class. This was not during class. I would not do something like this that wasn’t germane to the class topic, but this is a student I’ve come to know. I go, “I’m confused because this is what you say about you and it doesn’t match with this viewpoint you just shared with me.” When we can do that where we’ve entered into spaces where we’re opening up the things that we have in common.

For the last part of this portion of the episode, I’d love to hear you share a little bit about the theory and the practice. We’ve been looking a lot about some of the theories around what it looks like to have an education with love and wisdom. How do we match the theory with practice? What are some other ideas you may have for us before we go to the recommendation segment?

[00:25:50] Jeff: I think we’ve talked about the toolkits. From a practical standpoint, there is lots of material out there for teachers and faculty to tap into about social-emotional learning and about growth mindset and about cultural humility, and cultural intelligence. I would really encourage people to tap into all of those things. For me, where I tend to start my classes, especially my focus is on preparing teacher candidates, the next generation of teachers, and I usually start with a really deep reflection on the mission, vision, and values.

I start with the enduring understanding that your influence as a teacher is going to be most profound based on who you are as a person. That is skills are really, really important, but it’s who we are and who we’re becoming as people that will have the greatest impact on our students. When you think back to teachers who had a profound impact on your life, chances are it had a lot to do with who that person was and what they had cultivated in terms of their own sense of purpose in life. We use a book by Lori Beth Jones. It’s called The Path: Creating Your Mission Statement for Life and Work. There are a series of exercises in that book. It’s not a new book, but we’ve used it for a long time.

I use it in my family. My wife and I use it to articulate our sense of mission, to articulate our core values, and to describe our vision of the future as we want it and intend for it to be. I have my students go through those exercises as a part of laying the groundwork for pursuing a career in teaching because it’s going to be ultimately about who they are. I think actually those are the foundational pieces, and then all the skill pieces that come out of those other domains that we’ve talked about layer on top of that.

Then of course what then can really take off is the disciplinary skills of teaching because there are a lot of things you’re going to need to learn how to do to be an effective teacher, or whatever your discipline is. Whether it’s business or whether it’s kinesiology or music or what have you, there are all kinds of disciplinary skills that are going to make you successful, but those set within and are built upon all those personal and interpersonal qualities that you are growing in to flourish as a person so as to be able to be effective at doing this particular work at this particular calling.

[00:28:40] Bonni: This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. I wanted to share a broad recommendation and then a specific quote related to it. First off, I want to recommend that we show up. This has been a theme of a lot of what we’ve talked about, whether it’s the mission, vision, values, exercises, and being really rooted in who we are and how we want to show up. I think a lot of times, in every context I think of just how vital being vulnerable enough to show up in the fullness of who we are and how important that is.

One quote that has just stayed with me since– I think, my gosh, my mom probably introduced me to this book when I was even under 20. I should look and see if I could make an estimate to when I first read it. This is a quote from Anne Lamott that relates to showing up. Anne Lamott writes, “I have these secret pings of shame about being single like I wasn’t good enough to get a husband. Rita reminded me of something I’d told her once about the Five Rules of the World as arrived at by this Catholic priest named Tom Weston. The first rule, he says, is that you must not have anything wrong with you or anything different.”

“The second one is that if you do have something wrong with you, you must get over it as soon as possible. The third rule is that if you can’t get over it, you must pretend that you have. The fourth rule is that if you can’t even pretend that you have, you shouldn’t show up, you should just stay home because it’s hard for everyone else to have you around. The fifth rule is that if you’re going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to feel ashamed. Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.” That was Anne Lamott in Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. Jeff, I’d like to hand it over to you for whatever you would like to recommend.

[00:30:45] Jeff: First of all, I love Ann Lamont, so thank you for sharing that. I would like to encourage your listeners to go back to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s beloved community idea. Let me read a quote from Dr. King. “Our goal is to create a beloved community, and this will require a qualitative change in our souls. Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites. Hate tears down and destroys. The aftermath of a fight fire with fire method is bitterness and chaos. The aftermath of the love method is reconciliation and creation of the beloved community. Yes, love, which means understanding creative, redemptive goodwill, even for one’s enemies is the solution.”

Nobody for me embodies that ethic of education for love and wisdom better than Dr. King and I’d really encourage people– You can find tons of stuff by googling Dr. King’s beloved community.

[00:31:52] Bonni: I know that there is actually something that you and I have left out. I wasn’t going to talk about this, Jeff, but I feel like I was just speaking of showing up and being vulnerable. This is actually the second time we’ve had this conversation because the first time, apparently I either forgot to press the red button or pressed the wrong red button. Here we sit, Jeff. One of the things that you said when I apologized to you for us having to rerecord today’s interview was that it would actually be great timing because this amazing resource now is out into the world. Would you share a little bit about if people would like to explore this topic more, the Education for Love and Wisdom Podcast?

[00:32:35] Jeff: We are really excited about this podcast that Bonni played a critical role in helping us launch at Vanguard University. Education for Love and Wisdom acknowledges that much of the conversation about education in recent years has been driven by fear and anger, but the reality we embrace is that, in fact, millions of people, students, teachers, faculty, other educators, families, community members, have continued to engage in education and civic life with love and wisdom through very, very difficult times. Those are the stories that we want to tell. You’ll be able to find those episodes and those stories on Education for Love and Wisdom Podcast.

[00:33:28] Bonni: I know that there’s a couple of stories that you explored that were also explored on a different podcast, but stories about the law, stories about communities, and different times in history that I feel like are just brought anew. You had a chance to interview people that actually lived through those times and transformational change both here locally for us in Orange County, California, but really that transformed the nation, and I think you could even say echoes across the world today.

[00:33:58] Jeff: Absolutely, there’s a lot of really rich stuff there.

[00:34:01] Bonni: Yes. Jeff, thank you for coming back for part two, but no one will hear part one-

[laughter]

[00:34:07] Bonni: -of this conversion.

[00:34:08] Jeff: It’s always fun to talk.

[00:34:10] Bonni: I look forward to the next time you come back. That time, I’ll press the right red button the first time. Thank you so much, Jeff.

[00:34:15] Jeff: Thanks so much, Bonni.

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[00:34:19] Bonni: Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroger and production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Smith. Thanks to each one of you for listening. If you’ve yet to sign up for the email list from Teaching in Higher Ed, you’ll get an update once a week from us with the most recent episode’s show notes, and also some resources that don’t show up within the podcast pages and recordings. Head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe to get signed up. Thanks so much for being a part of the Teaching in Higher Ed community. I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.