Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 599 of Taching in Higher Ed, how better teaching can make college more equitable with David Gooblar. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:20]:

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. My guest today is David Gooblar, Associate Professor of English and Director of General Education Literature at the University of Iowa. He’s the author of the new book One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable from Harvard University Press and previously wrote a wonderful book called The Missing Course. Before Iowa, David served as Associate Director of Temple University’s center for the Advancement of Teaching and wrote a long running Pedagogy Unbound column for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Today we explore David’s core claim that equity work in higher education isn’t solely about access or policy. It lives in the daily choices we make in our teaching.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:34]:

And these small teaching moves can open up a door to belonging and thriving for more of our students. David Gooblar, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

David Gooblar [00:01:47]:

Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here, so happy to chat with you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:50]:

I’m happy to have this conversation. And I want us to begin with the idea of scars. I first want to ask you a weirdly specific, odd question, but do you have any, do you have any scars that have big stories behind them?

David Gooblar [00:02:04]:

Oh, that’s a good question. I do. I have a mark sort of right, right on the top of my forehead that comes from a sort of high spirited night in a grad school dormitory where some friend was chasing me through the halls and I jumped and I hit my head on the top of a doorframe. And for me this is always a kind of meaningful scar because it’s right where my hairline used to be and my hair has receded quite a bit past that by now. And so it’s a sort of bittersweet memory of youth in a number of different ways. But it’s something that it’s pretty faint. I don’t know that a lot of people notice it, but I certainly notice it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:42]:

I’ve got this scar that for me, I must have been around six or seven years old and we lived on a hill at the time and I was riding on a skateboard on my knees down the Rather steep hill toppled off and fell directly onto one of those decorative brick borders that’s kind of got the curvature toward it. And so brick met right at the center of my, of my lip. And then as I grew, it moved over to the left side. So it was weird to have a scar that moves.

David Gooblar [00:03:17]:

You know, it’s a scar. Yeah.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:03:19]:

Obviously it had to go one way or the other. I guess it couldn’t just stay right there in the middle. You were mentioning yours and thinking about how it kind of draws us back to our youth, to these pivotal moments. In that case, taking a risk that I was unaware was a risk. You use this metaphor of a scar to talk about our students and some of the scars that they bring with them into the classroom. What are some. As you did this research for this book, but also of course, you’re teaching yourself, what comes to mind for you as to why, why scars as imagery and the extent to which we can ever be aware of what those scars are?

David Gooblar [00:04:00]:

Yeah, I mean, that’s crucial to the idea I think for me is that most of our scars are hidden. I think most of the time people don’t see the scars that we carry. It’s a kind of remnant of a wound that happened elsewhere, elsewhere in time or elsewhere in time and space. And I’m always aware of this when I’m teaching that we get such a small window into our students lives. We see them for maybe an hour and a half at a time, two or three times a week. And even a semester, which I’m talking to you now at the end of October, feels endless, is, you know, is only 15 or 16 weeks. They’ve got four or five, six other classes, they’ve got lives before they went to college. They’ve got lots of, lots of life lived at, you know, just during the days when they’re in college, outside of what I can see or influence.

David Gooblar [00:04:48]:

And so even before getting into issues of equity, I think this is something that all teachers need to reckon with is how little we know about our students, how insufficient often the things that they share about themselves in class are to getting across the fullness of their lives. And in particular when thinking about inequities, I was really drawn to thinking about all the ways that our students are harmed by inequality in our society that we wouldn’t necessarily be aware of when they’re in our classroom. Right. Most professors are well aware of racism, are well aware of sexism, are well aware of ableism, etc. But they don’t necessarily see the effects of that on the students that come into their classroom. But if we are aware of these things, we know that all of our students are dealing with these forces. So I wanted to get a sort of image across to instructors that this is something that you can’t see, but that you have to know is there. And so it became kind of central to thinking about how to conceptualize for me what the task is for instructors who want to achieve more equitable outcomes for their students.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:06:11]:

You also talk about this metaphor of imaginary students. And I know that’s something that has resonated with so many people. What are our imaginary students? And why should we be aware of them lurking there in the background?

David Gooblar [00:06:24]:

So, I mean, I think this is one of the upshots from not seeing our students scars is that because we don’t know exactly who they are. And it’s impossible maybe to know exactly who our students are, we sort of assume that they are certain students, certain kinds of people, certain with certain capacities. And our assumptions are generally based on our experience of previous students or our cultural ideas of who college students are or what we were like when we were college students. And the thing about those conceptualizations of students is that they tend to not be accurate. They tend to not match up with our students today. And I spent a lot of time in the book sort of explaining why this is the case. One, I think, really obvious reason, obvious to me once I’ve done this research, is that the sort of diversification of American higher education is a kind of surprisingly recent phenomenon. As late as 1990, eight out of every 10 college students were white.

David Gooblar [00:07:24]:

Right now, it’s 55% white. And so the sort of idea of the college student in the American imaginary is of a privilege to student. And that’s just not the case when we talk about American college students today. You can also look at sort of the hierarchical nature of higher education institutions. Most, almost all instructors with PhDs teach at an institution that is sort of lower ranked than where they were trained. And so they end up teaching students who are less privileged than the students that they were trained on teaching. And so there’s a number of these sort of explanations on why our sense of who our students are. It tends to be a much more privileged version of the college students than our actual students.

David Gooblar [00:08:10]:

And this mismatch, I think, really has significant effects on how our students see the way that we see them. They feel like we don’t understand all their scars, all the things that they go through, all the things that keep them from being the students we Imagine they think that we don’t see those things, and the evidence suggests that we don’t. So I really want instructors to sort of interrogate their assumptions about who their students are and what their students can do. And one of the best ways to do that is to ask your students.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:08:46]:

That brings me to one of the concerns is it’s this tension I see in my own experience, and I’m continually becoming and failing and trying again at who I see might be the best version of what I could be as a teacher. The tension between learning more about these scars in holistic ways. You can see certain patterns I have shared before on the show about when I went to college that my mom would come up and she loved to read. She still loves to read. And so come to the bookstore with me. And there were the required books. And so I can vividly remember stacking those up. And then she, oh, well, here’s a recommended book.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:29]:

Let’s go ahead and put that on the stack too. And then there was never any question as to you pay tuition and you pay for the books and all the things. And so that’s been really helpful for me to realize over all these decades in higher education that that is not the financial reality. The other tension, though, is that we could inevitably start to stereotype students in ways that are less helpful. So how do you think about grappling with the. The more patterns, trends that. That we may want to interrupt some of the biases that are baked into our teaching approaches. And that’s helpful to where it becomes less helpful because we forget about the student as the individual that they are.

David Gooblar [00:10:11]:

Yeah, it’s a tricky thing, for sure, and it’s something that is like a consistent push and pull. I think the way you talked about it was absolutely right that we need an awareness of these big forces, but we need to balance that out with further awareness that no individual is the product of a single force in a predictable way. All of our students are products of absolutely unique circumstances, and we can better understand them by assuming that they’re going to be affected by some of the forces that we know about. But we can’t let that assumption sort of stop. We can’t stop there. I’m really intrigued and convinced by a lot of research into the value of having students sort of broaden their selves within the classroom domain. And by that I mean a lot of what we know about stereotype threat, which is one of the sort of most supported by research forces that hold our marginalized students back from success in college, really applies to their academic selves. College is a domain that is heavy on stereotypes for a lot of people.

David Gooblar [00:11:25]:

And so when students see themselves as only a college student, or they see that we see them as only a college student, they’re really at the mercy of stereotype threat. And so if we can broaden that sense of self, if we can get them to feel like they’re seen not just as a student, but also as a sibling, also as a soccer player, also as someone who’s into Dungeons and Dragons, you know, all the various things. These don’t need to be heavy aspects of their identity. They just need to be real aspects of their identity. And when students feel like they can be themselves in a sort of broader sense within our classrooms, they’re less at risk to stereotypes, to any one aspect of that self. So that idea of sort of trying to bring in a broader base of identity with more kind of like, texture of their individuality, I think is one way through that tension that you’re talking about, where we don’t want to fall risk to sort of flip side of understanding the forces of systems of oppression, which is sort of. Which is sort of falling into stereotypes. And so I think really trying to.

David Gooblar [00:12:32]:

Even if you’re not having. You don’t know every aspect of your student’s identity. Some people have lots and lots of students, and they don’t have time to find out every little thing about their students. I understand at least having space in your class for students to share that either with you or with their classmates, shows them that it’s a safe place for them to be themselves.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:52]:

You have a wonderful tradition or a norm that you start out your classes with that if you ever miss it for a day, it goes quite missed by your students. Would you tell us about that start to your class?

David Gooblar [00:13:04]:

Yeah. This is something called question roll, which I got from a good friend of mine, a colleague of mine named Ben Hasman. And it’s actually something that I know a lot of professors do. It’s not really that innovative, But I start every class period by asking a question that if my class is small enough, every student in the class has to answer. When I have a class of, say, more than 25 students, I typically write 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or up to 6 on the board, and I take volunteers. And the question has to be absolutely no stakes. It has to be the easiest thing to answer. And typically for me, it has nothing to do with what we’re going to talk about in class.

David Gooblar [00:13:43]:

So I’ll ask students what’s the best fruit. Yesterday, of course, I asked what’s the best Halloween candy? There’s a lot of, I ask a lot of food questions. What’s the first thing you wanted to be when you grew up? Where’s the furthest you’ve traveled from home? These things, which are really innocuous and kind of icebreaker questions, the regularity of them really kind of brings home their value. I think they give students an opportunity to talk in class with very, very little cost, very little risk of. There’s no risk of being wrong. There’s no risk of seeming dumb. So I like that idea. I like that there’s always a sort of informal part of class.

David Gooblar [00:14:23]:

The students can feel comfortable. And I do think that sort of little by little, in a subtle way, it helps with that broadening of self that I was talking about. It’s a sort of very quick, low cost way to have students bring in parts of themselves that maybe they’re not used to bringing into class. And they inevitably say things that I would never have known had I not asked about what they wanted to be when they were a kid. So I love doing it. And as I, as I mentioned in the book, students are often a little resistant at first to this or they think it’s silly or they don’t want to talk about whatever it is I’m asking about. But by about week nine, I do notice that they, they like, don’t want to start class without it. They depend on it and they are up in arms.

David Gooblar [00:15:09]:

If I ever forget to do it, I never really forget to do it, but sometimes I’ll test it out, how they’ll, how they’ll react. And they’re almost always really, really offended that I might try to start class without question rule.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:15:20]:

I’m glad that you mentioned that part about resistance. It’s something so often where, because I’ve been a part of so many of these conversations, people may take an idea and then try it out and consider themselves having failed at it and move on to something else. And for a lot of things, really what you’re talking about here is building a culture. One of the things that had, I, I think the first time I read those words from you, I thought, I don’t know if it’s not related to the class, I don’t know if I would do it. You know, that, that kind of a thing. And then you kind of. I warmed up to the idea of what that does for you, the things that you teach, the kinds of skills and the relationships that are necessary to be Able to build those kinds of skills, the kind of trust that’s needed for someone to receive feedback from you. I mean, I saw it as media social, so closely tied to the class.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:16:13]:

But I also was glad that you mentioned the part about resistance because it’s like you try something like this out, you’re just going to get it because you don’t have that culture established. There isn’t the trust. What there is is you are an amalgamation of every teacher that they’ve ever had. You know, in many ways you’re having to fight against that resistance, those disappointments, those scars that have been built up across such a long time. And it’s so much harder than, than I think people would perhaps if just looking and observing it. You know, on week I come into your class on week nine and it looks like, wow, how did he do this? And then I tried on week one and it doesn’t go as successfully for me.

David Gooblar [00:16:53]:

That’s right. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I, that I talk about in conjunction with imaginary students is our, is imaginary classrooms, is the idea of, the idea of what our classrooms are, who we are to our students when they come into our classes. And I do think for many of our students, maybe most of our marginalized students, school sucks. School is not like, not a fun place, not a good place, not a place where they feel affirmed, not a place that they look forward to going to. And again, without stereotyping, obviously some students really like school and really get a lot out of it. A lot of students have had a very bad experience in school. And so I do think that we need to go into our courses with the idea that we need to work to earn their trust, to convince our students that we’re working for them, that our job is to help them and help them develop, help them learn, help them grow.

David Gooblar [00:17:53]:

Not to sort them out, not to discover who’s an imposter, not to nail them for being stupid, which is, I think, what a lot of students come into class assuming their professors want to do. So I do think to your point, both being ready for resistance is important for instructors, but also seeing the task as, at least in part as overcoming student resistance. Well earned student resistance to professors and instructors.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:18:26]:

I’m glad that you also added that caveat of well earned. And I’m thinking about the stages of team formation, trying to remember the name of the researcher. Tolman, I believe it is. I will put it in the show notes, but the storming, forming, norming, performing and adjourning. Or you could Say it with a New York accent adjoining and then you can have them all go together. But that if you read about the stages of team formation and the research therein, that storming part isn’t just you gotta tolerate it, but it’s actually essential to the team being able to become a high performing team. And to me that resistance, we can resist the resistance. But a.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:19:08]:

You mentioned it as well earned. And then I would argue to create the kinds of fertile soil is in fact necessary to be able to have cause. Otherwise it’s just, okay, I’ll go along with this and sometimes might even bring out in us the worst of ourselves. Where then it’s just about charisma that you, you know, you manage to get that energy going and extroversion going. And you, you sold everybody on that moment. But boy, by the time you get to week nine, you’re going to really know what you’ve actually accomplished. And our charisma, that’s just not going to save us from ourselves. Yeah, some real problems there.

David Gooblar [00:19:47]:

Yeah, I think, I think that what I hear you suggesting, which and which I agree with, which is that the, the task of overcoming student resistance forces instructors into justifying their teaching practices. And I think that’s a really healthy thing for all of us to be doing is thinking about why do we do what we do, how is it helping our students reach our goals? Is there a better way to do it? And that’s just something that I think that we all should be sort of doing all the time and doing it openly, transparently in front of our students too.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:18]:

I treasure that so many of these conversations, they weave the most beautiful fabric across all these episodes. And about six months ago I had a conversation with Bryan Dewsbury and he said a name that I wasn’t familiar with and then he said a phrase I wasn’t familiar with either. And then I kind of, I picked up the book. The book is called 10 to 25 and I’m still about halfway through it, maybe three quarters of the way through it. But it’ll be a official recommendation in future episodes for sure. But it’s this idea of wise feedback. And you also write about this as well. I want to just frame it first that it’s so easy to say, hey, all these things that people are talking about here, they’re just trying to make it easier for students.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:06]:

And it, you know, it’s not my problem if they have to have this many jobs or all these things. My thing is I’m a part of certifying that they have met these learning objectives. And that’s what I’m supposed to do. I’m not supposed to address these scars that you speak of. And it’s kind of this false dichotomy that says, oh, if I’m actually going to be more equitable, then that means I’m not going to have what is often called rigor, or I’m not going to challenge students in ways that can help them live out their best selves. I find a lot of hope in wise feedback. Would you talk about what it is and what it’s meant for you in your research and in your teaching?

David Gooblar [00:21:43]:

Yeah. Wise feedback comes out of research led by Geoffery Cohen, who’s a kind of a really big figure in educational psychological research. And it’s research that came out of studies of looking at how I think, particularly in particular students of color did when receiving feedback from white instructors. And these researchers found that a certain sort of kind of feedback on written work was more likely to prompt in students, particularly in marginalized students, a sort of constructive response. They would revise their work. They would learn better in the weeks after receiving this feedback. And so the feedback that really helped is a kind of three part structure. This is particularly in giving feedback to written work.

David Gooblar [00:22:33]:

But I think it can be applied to a lot of different aspects of teaching. You first invoke high standards. You basically say, I see a lot of promise in your work, and that promise makes me have really high standards for it. I think you can. I think you can do really. I think you can do really well. I think you can learn a lot here. And then the second step is showing the student, telling the student all the ways that they have as of yet failed to meet those standards, which is almost inevitable in student work.

David Gooblar [00:23:02]:

And then finally, and this is of course important, you lay out steps that the student can take to get closer to those high standards. So the reason why I think it works so well is that one, it’s a sort of version of something we’ve all heard, which is a kind of compliment sandwich where you sort of couch critical feedback with praise. But I think more than that, it’s this idea of it provides a justification. It fills the vacuum that critical feedback often leaves in the heads of our marginalized students. So just to continue on this thread, when our marginalized students get critical feedback from an authority figure in an educational setting, generally a professor, there’s a part of their brain that always wonders, am I getting this critical feedback because the professor is stereotyped against me, is discriminated against me doesn’t think a black kid can succeed, et cetera. Right. Even if 96% of their rational brain thinks, yeah, I deserve this feedback, there’s a part of them that thinks, am I getting this kind of attention because of who I am? Right. And so what the invoking of the high standards does is it says, this is why I’m giving you critical feedback.

David Gooblar [00:24:19]:

It sort of answers that question right away. Obviously, you cannot completely erase the specter of stereotypes in the heads of our marginalized students. But you can do a lot by providing a justification before, beforehand, and when that justification is high standards. It kind of explains in a really encouraging way why you’re being critical. I think in the best possible way. It’s immediately formative and constructive. It immediately points to how a student can grow. Even if you’re giving tons of attention to all the mistakes they made.

David Gooblar [00:24:51]:

It’s within the context of this is a growth, mindset, community and atmosphere where you’re here to learn and how to grow. And so everything I’m telling you is for that purpose. And then crucially, you can’t leave it there. You actually have to sort of say, and here’s how, here’s what I think you need to do. I do think that that last bit is very often neglected by instructors. I’m thinking about instructors leaving comments on papers. It is super easy to see the task of giving feedback is just justifying a grade, which of course is important. Students want to know how they did and they want to know why they got a C.

David Gooblar [00:25:29]:

But when we just leave comments that are about all the shortcomings of a paper and don’t say anything about how students can build on it, students aren’t going to think that they can learn something from the feedback. They’re just going to say, well, I guess I’m not that good at writing, or what a jerk, or I’ll turn to AI next time. And so I love this sort of three, part, three part wise feedback structure. And I think it, for me, it’s kind of helpful in a way to communicate all sorts of things to students. Not just feedback on written work, but also responding to student comments in class. I might think about starting off by saying, that’s a really interesting comment, but it’s not. I think you can probably. I think you can get the.

David Gooblar [00:26:13]:

Really get the hang of it. You’re not quite getting there, or you’ve been really perceptive with the last story we read. Do you think you can do that kind of work with this story? And so really trying to Think about how to always be holding our students to a high standard and looking to see how we can help them get there.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:30]:

I really keep challenging myself as I continue to read the 10 to 25 book, which mentions this research a lot and came out in your work, and as I mentioned, the conversation with Bryan Dewsbury as well. One of the things that I want to celebrate that’s worked so well for me is not to have all of my feedback be evaluative in nature.

David Gooblar [00:26:51]:

Yes.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:52]:

I think especially when we are wanting people to know that there’s someone on the other side of this screen, in this case, grading. It’s kind of nice when you just notice something instead of like, how good or bad or were you meeting or not meeting? It’s just like sometimes there’s just something worth commenting on that is. That is neither a. I like this. I don’t like this. It’s. It’s something. Another form of feedback.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:17]:

And I know that there’s lots of a whole body of research about the types of feedback we can give. This is just a certain itch I haven’t been able to quite scratch, you know, in terms of just. And especially with the continued emergence of large language models and. And professors using either their likeness to generate some sort of bot or something to give feedback to students or that sort of thing. And I’m just wanting there to be like, there’s a human here who’s actually delighted by. And I do go so often back to Jesse Stone from Gosh, probably a decade ago now, who would say, if you are miserable grading, you can be mad at your students, or perhaps you could look at yourself. Who assigned something that was that uninteresting to you to grade. Maybe you could create something that might be more interesting for you to grade, and guess what? That might then be more interesting and spark more curiosity and a sense of wonder in the students themselves who are gonna do that work, so.

David Gooblar [00:28:12]:

That’s right. Yeah.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:28:14]:

Well, before we get to the recommendations segment, I would love to have you share if this is somewhat new to people or it’s just feeling overwhelming right now. I mentioned artificial intelligence. I mean, our worlds are feeling really overwhelmed. What’s one small step that we could take that in all of the research that you did for this book, seems like a fulcrum, something that makes a difference that’s pretty small and manageable for all of us.

David Gooblar [00:28:38]:

Hmm. Let’s see. One of the things that I thought was really interesting was research on the performance of economically insecure students, particularly with assessments. I’m forgetting the author’s name. Author’s names now. But I’ll just tell you about a study that that was done. It looked at a big introductory psychology class that had I think 80 plus percent of their grade concentrated in, I think it was four exams over the semester, something like 21, 22% of the grade in each of them. And they decided to try breaking up the content of those exams instead into weekly quizzes.

David Gooblar [00:29:21]:

So same exact content, in fact, a lot of the same questions. But instead of having students study for big exams every four or five weeks, they had students study for small quizzes every week. Same amount of points just broken up into 14 quizzes or 15 instead of four. And they found that this really helped the performance, particularly of economically insecure students. And one of the things that I take from this, well, I should say one of the things that the researchers took from this is that economically insecure students aren’t as good at studying as wealthier students. And that could be true. I’m less convinced by that, that there’s a sort of study skill gap. There are of course, great educational inequalities in our country in terms of K through 12 quality.

David Gooblar [00:30:06]:

And so I can believe that there are differences in terms of how well our poorer students can study. But I really think a lot of the benefit of more frequent assessments comes down to the experience of living in a near poverty. For most of our students who live in or near poverty, planning out long term goals is really, really hard. There’s a lack of stability, a lack of money, a lack of space, a lack of sometimes food. It’s a life where pressing matters are really pressing. And so it’s, you always have to, when living in a circumstance like that, prioritize, what do I need to get done today? Because there’s a lot of really pressing concerns. So the idea of an exam that’s four or five weeks away, it’s just not on my radar. It’s just not something that I can prioritize today.

David Gooblar [00:30:56]:

I need to work, I need to go to work, I need to catch the bus, I need to take care of my little sister. I need to go to seven classes because I’m trying to graduate in three years. There’s always more pressing concerns. And so the idea of having instead a weekly quiz one makes it more of a priority because it’s a short term concern. But also students that are living in and near poverty are good at focusing on short term goals. They have to be. There’s a lot of short term pressing emergency needs that they need to focus on. And so I really think that this kind of also, besides making it easier for them to focus on something, the idea that long term goals are more difficult for students, I think it also kind of takes advantage of a strength which is that they can really focus when they need to.

David Gooblar [00:31:45]:

So I just think, yes, if you have exams, try to break it up. That’s the sort of immediate lesson. But also be thinking about how can you be breaking up your tasks, your assessments, the things that you’re teaching students into smaller bites? How can you make things more predictable? How can you make your assessments more transparent so that students know exactly why you’re asking them things, what they need to do at each point? I think there’s a lot to think about from a study like that. And I think that just even sort of like thinking about studies like that or thinking about the lives of your students is a good starting point for thinking about how you can make these sort of tweaks in your courses to make them more equitable.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:32:26]:

We’ve talked about this on another episode and I’ll link to it, but about the marshmallow study, which I gotta tell you, David, I fell for that hook, line and sinker when I used to shoot show the video in my classes and be like, see, this is the ideal, that you could just resist the marshmallow. But the way that I heard you say today, and also in the book, it’s, we really can be very judgmental in terms of how we evaluate that, when, in fact, what really has helped them survive and be able to thrive in their unique context is that ability to focus on the here and the now and the needs that are emerging right in the moment. And yeah, maybe, maybe some of us like me, took that marshmallow study a little bit too far with how it fit perfectly the narrative of how I understood, you know, my life and, and the world to be at that time. So, yeah, no, you’re not.

David Gooblar [00:33:16]:

You’re not. You’re not alone in that, for sure.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:33:18]:

Yep. All right, so this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. And I’ll be so curious to know how our podcast editor, Andrew, handles this, because the title of this episode has a word in it that is a curse word, but maybe if you sandwich it together and in a name of something. We’ll see, Andrew. We’ll see. So the title of this, it’s a episode of a podcast called Decoder, and the title is How Silicon Valley enshittified the Internet. And it is the word inshidified or insidification comes from Cory Doctorow. Cory Doctorow, yes.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:00]:

And he coined that phrase. And I actually, in the interview, he talks about how he just used it once and then used it in a blog post and then it kind of took off and he was. And now he has a new book out, which is why there’s many, many podcast interviews of him describing this. But I found it to be so helpful. We were sort of almost touching on that. There’s kind of this idea of our feedback and sometimes professors wanting to. I can understand the overwhelm and I’m sure it’s one of those things where I can’t understand those scars completely because I have not been expected to teach 400 students times, however many. And you know, with cuts on TAs and that sort of thing.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:40]:

But I just think if we just. First of all, there’s so many reasons why I think this would be good for people to listen to. I think his book. I would like to read it. I think it would be a great book for people to look at as well. But just to hear and understand a lot about artificial intelligence in there and a lot about how. In fact, just not to make this podcast too time based, but the company that makes Canva just recently acquired a graphics program called Affinity. And hey, they’re giving it away for free, everybody.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:12]:

And I’m thinking, nothing in life is free. This is all part of trying to destroy the business model for a Adobe, et cetera, et cetera. So lots of good stuff in this interview. I found myself fascinated through and through. And I think it’s a wonderful supplement to the other things that we’re reading and learning about technology, companies in general, and specifically artificial intelligence. In fact, I clipped. I found it so powerful him saying that he’s questioning the valuation of these AI companies and just how unsustainable that is. And it was literally just 45 seconds of like.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:47]:

I haven’t heard anyone that concisely say this. Yeah. And I will put a link actually in the show notes too, if people want to listen to that 45 seconds that I just mentioned, I’ll put that so people could take a listen to that too.

David Gooblar [00:36:01]:

That’s great. I really like Dr. O’s work. I think that for all that it’s a sort of clickbait like name for things. There’s a reason why the concept of insertification has taken off. It’s a really help. It’s actually a really helpful explanatory concept for our moment. For the particular brand of tech capitalism that’s sort of dominating our lives whether we like it or not.

David Gooblar [00:36:25]:

And so I’ll listen to that episode. That sounds great. Yeah.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:28]:

And I actually didn’t explain it very well. Do you want to give them a brief explanation of the term?

David Gooblar [00:36:32]:

Well, I mean, the reason why he uses the term insidification is that it came out of a sort of growing awareness on Doctorow’s part that I think a lot of us have, that the Internet was getting worse, that there was a sort of a lot of the websites were getting worse for consumers, for users. And he sort of lays out a theory of why things have gotten so bad. Why Google search doesn’t turn up good results anymore, why Amazon search doesn’t turn up good results anymore. Why the sort of user experience of websites has suffered so much. And it’s a kind of, it’s an economic argument, but basically websites are launched online. Businesses are launched first to serve their customers and then they sell their customers data to advertisers and then they sacrifice both advertisers and customers to stockholders. And so this is a kind of inexorable cycle that leads to the experience of using any of these websites or any of these products. And it just sort of inevitably getting worse because the point is no longer to deliver a good service to us.

David Gooblar [00:37:41]:

The point is to deliver value to stockholders.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:37:43]:

He doesn’t talk about this in this interview, but I know it’s in his work. You’re reminding me too of those of us who do make use of large language models for various reasons. Guess what, it’s all coming in there too. Like if you think that advertising hasn’t already permeated, certainly tech billionaires have already infiltrated those models. They’re not as, quote unquote clean at predicting as they claim to be. But yeah, that same same process happening there too. In terms of advertising. We’ve been using a paid replacement for Google called Kaji and in our family.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:19]:

And so I literally almost just forget like what it is like to use Google. And yeah, I was realizing with one of our children the other day, they were frustrated by, you know, because they don’t know what it is. It’s just like why can’t it, why can’t it work the way it works over here? And I really want to sit down and have a closer discuss. Cause I’m like, you don’t realize what we’re giving up from the quote unquote convenience of Google. But I need to find out more what was going on there. Cause we weren’t In a place where I could sit down and be like, show me what you think you’re missing and let’s talk about this. I’m sure that’d be a very entertaining conversation to have with your mom. So I’m sure that’s gonna be right front and center stage for us in the coming weeks of conversation.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:58]:

All right, so this is your chance to share anything that you would like to recommend.

David Gooblar [00:39:02]:

Sure. I wanna recommend a book. It’s. It’s called Teenagers in Their Bedrooms by Adrienne Salinger. It’s a sort of coffee table book. It’s a. Adrienne Salinger is a photographer and this is a book she made actually in the 90s that has been recently reissued and it is literally a photo book of teenagers in their bedrooms. Throughout the 80s and early 90s, she traveled all over the states and took wonderful portraits of teenagers in their bedrooms.

David Gooblar [00:39:33]:

And so they’re these huge full page photos of teenagers in their environment. It’s like that. Each picture is like I can spend 15 minutes just, you know, sort of staring and looking at all the details. The posters on the wall, the fashion, the way the, the bedspread looks, they’re, they’re very much posed pictures. They’re not, they’re not trying to be candid. Salinger spent all day with each of the, each of the teenagers and talked with them. And opposite each photograph is a sort of excerpt of their, of the transcript of their conversation. And it’s just so fascinating partly because of just simple nostalgia.

David Gooblar [00:40:14]:

For me, seeing all the fashions and the posters from the 80s and 90s appeals to me. Who’s that? That’s the country that I’m from. But also just this, you know, so much. There’s, it’s a whole world to see a teenager’s bedroom. There’s something so essential about, about our personalities at that, at that time in our lives. The bedroom is, for many of us are our only space that is our own. Right. And so I just, I got this book at the beginning of this month and I’ve just, I’ve been dipping in and it’s been my little treat for myself to spend, spend a little time with each of these photos.

David Gooblar [00:40:49]:

I think it’s a wonderful work of art.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:40:51]:

That sounds wonderful. It sounds like an amazing book. I’m so glad.

David Gooblar [00:40:55]:

It’s great.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:40:56]:

And speaking of amazing books, people should of course pick up One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable. We will have a link to the book in the show notes. I was joking with David, at the start of our conversation today that I highlighted so much of my digital copy that I pretty much just highlighted the entire book and I really want to encourage people to read it, pick it up. It’s very practical. While being so rooted in the research, I found the studies so fabulous, fascinating. Some I was familiar with, but most I were new to me and they’re just grouped and written about in such an accessible and practical way. So thank you so much for this book and for your last one and can’t wait for whatever comes next.

David Gooblar [00:41:37]:

Well, thank you for saying all that and thank you for reading and spending time with it. I really appreciate it. It’s something that I’m pretty proud of. It took me a long, long time to write and I’m happy whenever it reaches readers, so I hope that it’ll reach more. And such a great always a great time to talk with you and wonderful to talk about such important issues.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:56]:

Thank you so much. Thanks once again to David Gooblar for joining me on episode 599, how better teaching can make college more equitable. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever text talented Andrew Kroeger podcast. Production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. It’s time, if you haven’t done it already, to sign up for the weekly Teaching in Higher Ed update. Head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You’ll receive all the most recent episodes, show notes, as well as some other resources that go above and beyond.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:42:40]:

Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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.