Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 542 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, how creativity may just save us all with Rob Morgan.Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:21]:

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. I’m excited today to be welcoming to the show Rob Morgan. He’s a multidisciplinary artist, designer, speaker, professor, and author of The Art of Scenic Design: A Practical Guide to the Creative Process. From designing everything from theme parks to stained glass, Rob has assimilated his experiences as a designer into being an instructor on and researcher of the topic of creativity. His creativity call has been presented nationally and internationally and serves as a Clarion Call for students and educators to elevate and celebrate creative intelligences in our students and at a time in history when those talents are more valuable than ever. Rob has designed professionally in the areas of theater, film, museum, and theme park venues.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:47]:

Avatar, the exhibition museum exhibit originally designed for experience music project in Seattle, toured in the US and Canada for 3 years. His scenic designs for theater have been seen on stage nationally at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, Asolo Repertory Theater, Sarasota, Florida, Indiana Repertory Theater Repertory Theater of Saint Louis. And, Rob, I’m realizing there are a lot of theaters that

Rob Morgan [00:02:18]:

There’s so many.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:19]:

Work on here, so I just have to welcome you to the show, or or I’m I’m too excited to talk to you. Rob Yeah. Welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Rob Morgan [00:02:28]:

It is an honor and a pleasure to to be with you. Thank you so much. I’ve been a fan of the podcast for a number of years now. So, yeah, it’s a treat to talk to

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:35]:

you. The first thing I wanted to ask you is as I was reading all of these amazing things that you’ve done as I mean, including, some of which ties back to my childhood, like the old Globe Theatre and Yes. Some of what you said about museums. I was thinking, is this normal that you would do I mean, this seems like a like a particularly eclectic, multidisciplinary adventure that you’ve had, or or is is it just that I’m not as educated about these spaces?

Rob Morgan [00:03:03]:

No. It’s actually a I would say it’s a product to the fact that I can never say no. But I I I believe and I profess to my own students that, design students specifically, that the design the design tree, you know, has its basis in collaboration and creativity and sketching and all the basic tools, but whatever branch you take, I’ve been very lucky in my career to have a number of different branches. You know, I had never done a museum exhibit of any kind until I got a call to to do the one on Avatar at, Experience Music Project. It’s now called the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. But but I’ve been very lucky to kind of have a really varied career, which keeps it from getting boring. I think I’d be a terrible widget maker. You know, doing the same thing every day would just gnaw at me.

Rob Morgan [00:03:50]:

But I love having really kind of a diverse set of opportunities and really, really talented people. The beauty of I believe the beauty of doing any kind of theatrical production or film work is that it’s a team of artists. It’s not just myself and a painting or canvas and my angst. It’s not myself in, in a studio. It’s, it’s a collaborative art form. And I got hooked in high school, and as many of us got bitten in high school, we I’ve kind of kept going with it, and I’ve never stopped really.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:04:22]:

So, Rob, you’ve taken a stand. You’ve made a call. It’s a call for creativity. Why make this call?

Rob Morgan [00:04:31]:

It’s a good question. So a little bit of background. I I have, for the last 9 years, taught what’s called the beyond boundaries course here at Washington University in Saint Louis where I teach, and I co teach that with a colleague in architecture. The basic recipe for a Beyond Boundaries course is it’s taught by 2 or more faculty across 2 or more divisions, undergraduate or graduate divisions at WashU. And we year, some years ago, I watched a documentary. I remember where I was. In fact, I watched a documentary on Frank Gehry, the famous architect, and it was a documentary done by Sydney Pollock. And the late Sydney Pollock said when Frank approached him about doing a documentary on him, Frank’s Sydney, excuse me, said, Frank, I don’t know anything about architecture.

Rob Morgan [00:05:18]:

And I don’t know anything about making documentaries. And Frank said, that’s why you’re perfect. So I watched that and I was amazed at the sort of parallels in my own work as a theater designer. And in this case, an internationally known architect and, but also the fears and the anxieties and the, the failures along the way, and the collaborative aspect of it. I thought, well, gosh, this is a lot, you know, if Frank Gehry can feel fear of the empty model box or the blank canvas, it’s okay for me to feel that way. And so that started a dialogue with my, my colleague, Bruce Lindsay in architecture and myself about teaching a 1st year course. All the Beyond Boundaries courses are 1st year only. And we said we should teach a class on creativity.

Rob Morgan [00:06:05]:

And that was 2015. And we’ve been teaching it now. It’s, this is where now in the midst of the 13th iteration of that class. And we’ve taught over a 1000 students cumulatively, we’ve taught over a 1000 students. So it’s regularly about 80 students with 4 undergraduate TAs, and we have entire sections on collaboration and failure and empathy and play and the importance of play. And so, I teach at an institution that has we have a lot of students who have a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure from parents, a lot of pressure from their professors to do well in STEM fields and otherwise. And I feel like this class gives the students an aspect or a mirror, you might say, to who how their creative talents that they didn’t know they had. We, we often harken back to the courage we had as kids, for example, and how, you know, there’s an exercise I do in class where I give the students one minute to draw the person sitting next to them.

Rob Morgan [00:07:05]:

And then I give them one minute to share. Usually when I’m listening to that sharing part, usually what I hear a lot is, I’m sorry, this doesn’t look at all like you. I’m so sorry. But I stress that if this were a 1st grade class, they’d be like, check this out, look at this artwork I have. And so it’s little exercises and, and sort of practical moments we have in class that I think give the students a window into their own innate creative abilities. And I’m, I’m one who believes to my core that everyone is creative. Everyone who wakes up and gets dressed in the morning is prototyping an outfit and modeling that for themselves and making changes. That’s a creative act.

Rob Morgan [00:07:47]:

And so that class for the, for the most part has taught me over the last 9 years that, that these skills, much like in the sort of vein of Ken Robinson, used to speak about how we educate our students out of creativity over the years, that I feel like this is a class that’s meant to sort of reconnect to that. And the more that we deal with artificial intelligence in our world, the more, I’ve done some study on what AI cannot replace. I’m most interested in that. What can AI not replace? It’s these skills. It’s it’s dexterity and collaboration and creativity that AI cannot replace. And therefore, I think that’s the call in a sense. I think that we need to elevate and celebrate, as I like to say, creative intelligences in our students. One thing I one mantra, 1st day of class, I think is so important, as I’m sure my colleagues would admit, the 1st day of class is sort of a wonderful way to sort of set the tone.

Rob Morgan [00:08:45]:

And I, I say that I put up on the screen, a simple question, how intelligent are you? And I say for years, just getting into this institution, you’ve been asked and measured on how intelligent are you, but it’s actually, how are you intelligent that’s important? How are how what do you bring to the table as a collaborator? What do you what do you bring in your diversity of skills and talents in your background? Maybe you you’re a musician. Well, that actually has a, a great bearing on math skills, for example. So I do try to make sure that they know that that class is about, it’s a bit different and intended to be designed differently than their other courses. And for years, students have told me that it’s their favorite class. It’s one where they get to, that incorporates all undergraduate divisions and some, in some cases, and I think this is a bit sad. It’s the only class that they take where they’re in the same room with art and architecture majors and business majors and engineering majors. It really gets them to sort of appreciate the other disciplines in in a great way.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:53]:

Yeah. I I love your use of the word elevating creativity because it posits that it’s there all along. Yeah. That it might be hampered or hindered, but that it is present for us. And I would love to have you share about what comes to your mind. What are a few examples or even maybe just one example where you think about what does it look like when we elevate creativity? Specifically, I get really interested in some ways in which so many people have said that the wicked problems of today are only going to be solved through creative, interdisciplinary thought and research and collaboration. But what comes to your mind when you think about what does it look like when we elevate creativity?

Rob Morgan [00:10:39]:

Yeah. I mean, I I for about 5 years, I was the founding director of, the Beyond Boundaries program. Now the program is different than the set of classes, the creativity class I teach, but it uses all the Beyond Boundaries classes. Some of them cover climate change or aging, but that program incorporates into the curriculum. Students have to take a Beyond Boundaries class in their 1st semester. And I feel like in simultaneously teaching the creativity course and also running this program that really stressed upon students that they take 1 year to what I call taste all the ice cream, that there’s the rest of our lives to really specialize in something. And we rarely give ourselves and maybe it’s because it feels self serving or somewhat luxurious to taste all the ice cream. But and of course, I mean that sort of in a kind of analogous to what we’re talking about kind of way, but in the sense of, like, I want them to really understand that there are plenty of opportunities to kind of dig on the vertical part of your T or T shaped person.

Rob Morgan [00:11:45]:

It is important to also develop as much as you can the horizontal part of your T. Look at Einstein. Einstein stole, I don’t know if you call it stole, he borrowed ideas from astronomy to feed into his own work. And so it’s someone who has that sort of intellectual curiosity and and isn’t afraid to fail, for example, that I think is a way to sort of elevate their creative, their creative intelligences. I feel like we, if we think of it, I try to I use a lot of analogies in class, but I use one where we are as people and they are as students, a conductor of multiple creative intelligences that they will, let’s say, if they’re at the gym, they’re more kinesthetically intelligent, we hope, or they’re going to fall over, then they would be sort of more analytical. So I feel like we tend to, societally, I think this is a product, and this is what, of course, Ken Robinson used to profess for years until his passing, that we tend to sort of put a lot of weight on the sort of enlightenment side and not the romantic side where that split occurred. We tend to sort of put a lot on the sort of what we can empirically and, deduce logically. We put a lot of stress on those things that we can see and touch and prove.

Rob Morgan [00:13:04]:

And yet so much of our brains is about in the shower, for example, or the one of my colleagues actually here, former colleagues here at Washington University, Marcus Raechel talked about the default mode network and how our brains are working on ideas while we don’t even know it, you know? And so those things, that kind of mystery of our own head, I feel needs to leverage our horizontal part of our tea. And so, I, I resist as best I can, although higher education is structured this way, this idea that there are so many divisions, I feel, I think that the true innovations happened in life, where you go across a division from where you are and pick out an idea that then feeds your own research and your own scholarship. I use an example in class a lot of the, Van Phillips, was the inventor of a leg, a prosthetic leg that actually looks nothing like a leg. And the assumption there is that a prosthetic limb has to look like a foot or a leg. And he was fascinated with the flexibility and the stability and the strength of a Chinese sword. And he had a very good reason to study this because he was missing a leg as well. And so he questioned this assumption in trying to solve his own challenges with, in his case, running that, why does a prosthetic limb have to look like a prosthetic limb? And so it’s those kinds of stories, I think, that I hope students take back with them and go, you know, it’s, it’s interesting. I feel, and I hear this a lot of students, that I have too many interests and it’s almost like it’s a negative, but it’s like, no, no, no, that’s a feature, not a bug.

Rob Morgan [00:14:46]:

That having that many interests means you’re a divergent thinker, that you’re picking out ideas from other way, other aspects of your life that feed into your own work, whatever you’re working on at the time.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:14:59]:

I can’t remember where I first heard this expression, but, stinking thinking is the and you’re supposed you can’t put the g’s on the end of the word, so it’s stinking with the, like, apostrophe, no g at the end, thinking Got it. Apostrophe, no g. So sometimes, myself very much included, we can get into this stinking thinking where we start to say, I don’t I’m not creative. I’m not an artist. I’m not. I’m not. I’m not. What are some, approaches that we can use to get out of our stinking thinking when we start to apply a fixed mindset to our own creative potential?

Rob Morgan [00:15:33]:

That’s a that’s a great question. I’ve for some years, I worked as what was called a, a teaching artist for the Center of Creative Arts here in St. Louis, actually not far from where I’m seated. And we would go to companies like, Wells Fargo and Anheuser Busch. And, you know, I live in St. Louis, so those are biggies here. And we would do workshops. Myself and an improv artist and a writer would do an all day 3 pronged workshop on creativity.

Rob Morgan [00:15:59]:

And I had an accountant one time just yell at me. She said, I’m not creative. I don’t know why you’re saying I’m creative. And people I believe that there’s this assumption that being creative means you can draw a tree or a horse or something like that. And we all and I steal this from Twyla Tharp, who was a famous choreographer. Obviously, my background is in dance and drama. So Twyla Tharp used to talk about a creativity scar. And that that is when, let’s say in 3rd grade, you drew an elephant and somebody laughed at you and said that looks nothing like an elephant.

Rob Morgan [00:16:32]:

And then if you get enough of those scars, then a callus develops and you begin to convince yourself that you are not creative. You convince yourself that that’s just some other mystical quality that someone else has that can draw an elephant accurately. So I feel like that’s part of the unlearning in a sense. That’s part of what we have to make sure people understand is that, that it is leveraging their creative talents and we all have them. In fact, we were all quite proud of them when we were 1st graders. And then over a period of time, we kind of lost that. We kind of believed the myth that we weren’t creative because of those scars that developed. There’s a wonderful study that was done about a divergent thinking test that was administered to NASA scientists, and this is back, I believe in the late sixties.

Rob Morgan [00:17:27]:

And the designers of this divergent thinking test had the foresight, because it was such a simple test to give it to 4 5 year olds. And then it was a longitudinal test. So they also gave it to 10, 11 year olds and then to 15, 16 year olds. And it, the creative genius level that they called it, amongst adults, amongst the NASA applicants, was like 2%. And amongst 1st graders, amongst basically even earlier than 1st graders, like 4 year olds, was 98%. And so there is this, there’s the, what Ken Robinson called that education educates us out of creativity instead of into it, that there is this structural assembly line industrial age kind of model to education that prioritizes and elevates certain intelligences and honestly sort of minimizes the value of, in in this case, creative intelligences that I think needs to change.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:18:32]:

I’m going to attempt to not phrase this as dichotomously as it is in my brain right now, but I’ve I’ve been curious for decades just about the extent to which we’re able to behave our ways out of certain beliefs or paradigms. And so I’m I’m curious what you would think about can I practice my way back into creativity? Are are there where I I do it even if I don’t feel particularly creative, would would you posit that that may be a way back into tapping into a part of me that has been hidden away even from me, let alone other people?

Rob Morgan [00:19:08]:

Sure. If I understand correctly, you mean, like, exercises that you could do?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:19:12]:

Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Morgan [00:19:14]:

There’s one I do in class that when I have done it in the past, I at least do it once a semester, but then I’ve had students say, you know, we should do that every Thursday, this particular exercise. And it’s a relatively simple one And it essentially is called an alternative uses exercise. And what you do for your students is you, you take a random object. It could be an umbrella or a chair or whatever is handy. And you take this random object and you make them come up with 30 uses for the object in 2 minutes. And the idea there is that that is the multiplicity of uses that’s the important thing. And you try to get as close as you can to 30, which is an insane number of uses for that one object in an insanely short amount of time, but that’s the point of the process. And then you ask them what their how many uses they got.

Rob Morgan [00:20:03]:

First of all, rarely do do students get up to 30, but, you know, some get up to 15, maybe 20. And they, you ask them, what was your first use? Let’s say the object is a chair. Their first use is sit on it, right? Because at least there’s one. There’s one list on my piece of paper and there’s one listed. And then maybe stand on it is my second one. But then I asked them, what is your last use that you put there? And they’re the easy, they’re enormously interesting, creative ways to think of using that chair, where it could be a fort or it could be a weapon. We usually get into weaponry. You know, I did it with an umbrella once and people were like, well, I envisioned the umbrella in a different scale, and I thought it could be an amazing parachute.

Rob Morgan [00:20:48]:

And so these kinds of exercises, I think, intentionally get you out of this get you out of your own head. As I hear a lot of my improv colleagues talk about acting and directing colleagues talk about getting out of your own head. The goal of that project is to get a student out of their own head and to get them out of editing and self judging themselves before they say a crazy idea. The whole, the whole point of the, of the process is to come up with a 30 crazy ideas. So I feel like we self edit too much and students are, they so are afraid of saying the wrong answer. And I think I was too, but I think even more so in this generation that I’m teaching is that they’re afraid to have the wrong the wrong answer. And as I often tell them, the wrong answer is the right answer to a different question, if you really think about it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:38]:

I I have had one of the most precious compliments that students have ever given me is they had they said I had a superpower for telling someone that they were wrong, but doing it in such a way that they didn’t feel embarrassed such that they could get to the right answer. I’m not explaining their compliment very well here, but I’ve I’ve really been fascinated. What you just said struck a chord in me, because I’m fascinated by when whenever I would do maybe a poll question for test to understanding, and and then somebody or somebody’s would get something wrong, to me, it was exactly what you said. Well, it isn’t necessarily wrong. I’m so curious. What was it? And I would always try to leave it open with, maybe that wasn’t your answer, but if it was your answer, let’s just assume. Let’s all assume we all answered this. Yeah.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:24]:

What would be some of the rationale behind it? And and it would it would really

Rob Morgan [00:22:29]:

Yes.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:29]:

Open up spaces for, oh, wow. You know, they’re I I I’m not a huge fan of multiple choice as, like, be all and all for assessing learning or what have you, but it really would open up just so many different paradigms that I would find fascinating. Sometimes they did need additional clarity, but a lot of times, I needed clarity of, like, oh, I didn’t even think that you could look at it that way. How fascinating to me. So, yeah,

Rob Morgan [00:22:53]:

that’s wonderful. Yes. Yeah. One of my sort of idols in life is a photographer named Norman Seeff. And you may not know his name, but you’ve definitely seen his photography. And he’s photographed some of the most amazing actors and artists and musicians and even scientists over the years. And there’s a remarkable authenticity to the photos. You can tell there’s like this genuine, beautiful, typically black and white sort of beautiful authenticity, authenticity to them.

Rob Morgan [00:23:20]:

Excuse me. And he talks about how he gets there. And he just enters a dialogue while he’s shooting photos with this artist, for example, and talks about how they’re creative, how they are creative in their field and the doubts and anxieties and fears and failures they’ve encountered. And it gets them to kind of lower their guard a little bit. And, he does this so, in my opinion, he does this so, so brilliantly. It’s so, it’s just this. Thankfully, he’s also had the foresight to record these interviews while he’s shooting pictures of let’s say, will. I.

Rob Morgan [00:23:55]:

Am. And he’s gotten to their core processes of how they, how they have cross disciplines of, certainly of any kind of artistic discipline, for sure. There are the very same, just like with Frank Gehry, the very same concerns about how, how we create art, who’s going to judge it, who, who picks, you know, what’s best in art. And yeah, I’ve, I feel like it’s just this kind of, I don’t know, it’s this kind of wonderful way to kind of show students again, as this sort of mirror to them about, you know, you just have to hurry up and and make what you think is important. Don’t worry about anybody else, and and the rest will follow. Really will.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:37]:

I love that so much. This I have not heard of Norman Seeff before, but

Rob Morgan [00:24:41]:

Lauren Norman Seeff. Oh, s e e f f.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:45]:

Let me type that one more time. S e e f. I was planning on asking after the episode, but now everybody else gets to benefit by hearing your answer. So Norman Seeff, I wanna look up his work.

Rob Morgan [00:24:56]:

I got to I got to meet him. Speaking of that Avatar exhibit I did, I got to meet him because they were doing another he was giving a talk at the same time that I was designing the Avatar exhibit, and I got to meet him. And I knew nothing about him before that, and then now I’ve I’ve just been

Bonni Stachowiak [00:25:10]:

a fan. I have a little bit of advice for anybody who who might feel like you’re not creative, and maybe could we behave our way into this? And that is when it comes to drawing specifically, just do it anyway. I don’t consider myself to be a particularly good drawer, whatever the heck I mean by that, but I have been fascinated by this idea of zooming in and zooming out of things. So I used to give a not so final final that would happen at the beginning of a course that was more of a foundations course or principles course. What what would be the thing that I would hope people would remember 5, 10 years after taking the class? And so I had drawn this very 7 year old like drawing of a stick figure with a T shirt and some tattoos and some different accessories. You know? There were some some things that that and then I then I so I would draw the whole thing. And then for a particular week, I would zoom in maybe just on the tattoos that were on, you know, the left shoulder or whatever, and then zoom back out and then zoom back in. So I was really intrigued by this idea, and I love that I didn’t I mean, I’m I’m not I didn’t take myself that seriously in the sense of, obviously, this is not a great drawing, so sometimes I’d be sarcastic, like, I hope you’re not too intimidated by my drawing.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:22]:

But it was so rewarding to hear a student tell me. She she’d sent me a text message. This is some some years ago, but she says, oh my gosh. I got the job, and during the interview, they were asking me about x, y, or z, and I could see the t shirt. And then I could see the thing, and I thought, what a gift we give other people when we get over ourselves and we do it anyway, and and that Yes. All of the goals. I didn’t have a goal to be you know, become the next Norman Seeff. I had a I had a goal to teach some things that I thought would be useful, but to make them memorable.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:54]:

And sometimes what we might consider to be, quote, unquote, bad art ends up being so bad that it’s so memorable that it’s actually good art. So I would just say to all of us, myself included, maybe we just do it anyway. Get over ourselves. Yeah. Because what really is gosh. What is the gift of the art that we’re seeking to attain? And if it is to be memorable, to have it be some part of learning, which it so often is, gosh, quote, unquote bad art could turn out to be just phenomenal.

Rob Morgan [00:27:23]:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think another hang up we have, and I was just talking to my students, it’s interesting you bring this up just yesterday in class, is that we often, and this might add to the aforementioned creativity scar that Twyla Tharp talks about, but we often look across the table at someone else’s art when we’re doing art. And we see that it’s better, at least in our eyes, and that we’ll never get there. But if we just more or less grade ourselves by our own metric, beginning of semester and end of semester, And if our drawing got better, only our drawing got better in that period of time, we could hopefully feel good about it. We could feel like, yeah, I got better. Now I’m perhaps in my own view, not as good as the person across the table, but I incrementally got a little better in the course of this one class. Yeah, we tend to judge ourselves by others.

Rob Morgan [00:28:17]:

IDEO, this company in Palo Alto, talks about setting a tone for a conference room table where you’re at a, let’s say you’re a part of a company that’s trying to innovate. That so often, even the structure of the table itself, which as a designer, is fascinating to me that we often think that the person at the end of the table has all the answers and that rarely do any of us want to stick our neck out and say, Hey, we could maybe try this crazy idea. We you have to set a climate in a company that invites people to stick their neck out a little bit and offer what they might perceive as a stupid idea or a crazy idea. But crazy ideas lead to innovations. There are so many examples in the world of those types of things. The post it notes, for example, were a result of 20% time that some people were working together about how can we make something sticky and not stick too much, you know, and put a note on it. And those kinds of things happen in some cases almost by accident. And yet they were because someone had the courage to throw out a crazy idea and see if it was worth following up on.

Rob Morgan [00:29:30]:

Or as in the example you used, this, this drawing might look to me, like, in the early days, something that’s not interesting, but even bad drawings are good drawings, if that makes any sense.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:29:42]:

Mhmm. Well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. And, normally, I have recommendations that are generated from me, but, Rob, you and I are both on something as of this recording called the Story Caravan. Although, sadly, by the time this recording airs, the story caravan will at least the first iteration of it will have concluded. Oh. But, one of the things that we’re doing along this story have a little bit

Rob Morgan [00:30:10]:

of silence story.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:30:11]:

I know. One of the things that we’ve asked for is for people who are participating to share what’s a recommendation that people who are part of the story caravan would like the rest of the teaching and higher ed community to learn about. And so I’m just gonna share a few of them. You may or may not have seen this, Rob, in there, but, one, I’m gonna so so Allysa B recommended on the story caravan. She and I’m I’m quoting from her here. Shifts, as in the shift key or shifting the work how work is done. Shifts is an illustrated history of the future of work by The Washington Post. I like the creative storytelling approach.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:30:53]:

So that was again from Alyssa b on the story caravan, And I decided because I like to cheat sometimes, Rob, on the recommendation. So instead of me recommending all of them, I felt like there was so much goodness here that I’m gonna recommend a specific one because then that means I can recommend other ones later on. And so I’m gonna just recommend the loneliness of a short distance driver, how a ride hailing driver thinks about his job. And so this is a comic book type of a story, and I’m gonna read just parts of it. This is by John Rigsby, a ride hailing driver. And so the comic goes, being a ride hailing driver sometimes feels like being a genie in a bottle. You pull out your phone, tap a few times, and I appear. As gig workers, we deliver your food.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:44]:

We build your furniture. We drive you to the airport. When people think about the gig economy, they think about the services offered, but not the people delivering them. I got divorced in 2016. At the time, my expenses with rent, child support, and alimony outstripped my income by about $1,000 a month. I was penny pinching pretty severely. I started seeing all these ads for ride hauling apps that said things like, be your own boss. I didn’t buy it, but the flexibility appealed to me.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:32:18]:

And I lived in Tallahassee, a college town, which meant plenty of work on nights and weekends. I saw the full rainbow of human behavior. I’m gonna stop reading because I could keep going and going, but it’s a wonderful, wonderful, story I would love for people to recommend. There’s a few other recommendations I wanna pass on from story caravan, the story caravan community. This is just a a sticker from another Bonni, vote like your democracy depends on it. And, Rob, we both know that when this airs in the United States and, of course, around the world world, but in the United States, the election will not have happened yet. And so to all of our fellow United States citizens or anyone else in the world about to experience a fundamental election, which is to say almost all of us, vote like your democracy depends on it. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:33:11]:

April recommended public art in the halls at school. And last night, I went to our 7th grader, so he is in what in the United States, we call middle school. He’s in middle school right now, and I just love that many of the at the open house, we went to the open house. Many of the teachers would start with some public art. Of course, there’s in many of their learning spaces, they might have in the classroom or in the hallways, and many of them would start out their presentations saying, look at what these children are producing already so early in their school year, so that’s really a great recommendation. And then the final recommendation comes from Judith Dutill, who’s been on the podcast before, and this is a service that I have used as well. So I would like to echo her recommendation. It’s called Scribe, and you go to scribe how.com to find out more, and it’s it’s a way of easily making documentation for how to do something.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:07]:

So, essentially, it follows along with you step by step on whatever it is that you’re doing. If you wanted to show someone, you know, here’s how you change the font over here or here’s how you set this up, and it follows along, and it’s grabbing screenshots. And even if you have to type something in, it’ll type text along with you. If you have to click on something, it’ll show you right where you click, and it’s a very fast way of creating, directions. I can’t think of anything faster. We subscribe to it at in our teaching and learning division and get a lot of good use out of scribe. So thank you so much to all of the Story Caravan community members for sharing these recommendations. And, Rob, now I get to pass it over to you for whatever you’d like to share.

Rob Morgan [00:34:50]:

Yeah. I that’s sort of two instances ago you mentioned about public art and and kids and artists. It reminds me of a Picasso quote that all children are born artists. It’s to remain an artist as we grow up. That is so challenging.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:03]:

But,

Rob Morgan [00:35:04]:

I so my recommendations are, and I believe Jeff Goldblum made this famous on a I believe, he was on a talk show, but it’s I felt like I had to give a nod to my sort of drama background here. And George Bernard Shaw, famous playwright, wrote a play I designed a number of years ago called Major Barbara, which is a bit of a all about the industrial military industrial complex, although written in 1905, which is amazing that it’s so prescient now. But there’s a quote I’d love to read if that’s okay, that he says, this is the true joy in life being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish, little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I’m of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community. As long as I live, it is my privilege to do it for what I can. It’s a sort of splendid torch, which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. I to me, that’s something I’ve been chewing on lately when it comes to my students, when it comes to their sort of priorities in life. Are they living out someone else’s, maybe their parents’ kind of dreams and hopes for them, or are they filling out a living out their own? Do they see themselves as someone that the whole community that they belong to that whole community and that they’re, they’re meant to sort of carry on that torch for as long as they can? So there’s that quote, there’s also this wonderful book by David Epstein, which might’ve been mentioned on your podcast prior called Range, How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

Rob Morgan [00:36:36]:

David Epstein does a lot of, he’s done a lot of research specifically on sports figures, people like Tiger Woods versus Roger Federer. Tiger Woods, for those of us remember, he was on talk shows playing golf at like age 2, but someone like Roger Federer played all kinds of sports before he ever touched a tennis racket. And so I would advocate that most of us are like Roger. We are generalists, and yet that gives us a leg up, on others that we can specialize later. But if we’re generalists, we can pull out of those different disciplines something that makes us better and the one we’d finally decide to go on to. I think Duke Ellington, for example, is brought up in this book as someone who I believe he got an art scholarship, a fine art scholarship to college, not music. It’s Duke freaking Ellington. So, you know, I think it’s a, it’s a fantastic book about how we see ourselves as human beings, as inherently generalists, and that it is our, it is that multidisciplinary nature of our, of our, our being that makes us, unique and special.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:37:41]:

Rob, it has been such a pleasure getting to interact with you today and also on the Story Caravan, and I am so grateful for your work. You have left me today, and no doubt anyone who listens to this episode feeling both challenged and inspired, challenged to want to think in terms of my contributions to a greater good. That’s really inspiring to me and makes me want to work toward that. And, also, just this rootedness in our inherent creative intelligences and wanting to find out for myself how to reconnect with parts of that and to help others do it as well. What a joy to be connected with you, and thank you so much for today’s conversation.

Rob Morgan [00:38:19]:

It’s been an absolute pleasure, Bonni. Thank you so, so much.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:25]:

Thanks once again to Rob Morgan for joining me on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the incredible Sierra Priest. If you’ve been listening for a while and have yet to sign up for the weekly update from Teaching in Higher Ed, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You’ll receive the most recent episodes, show notes, as well as some other resources that do not show up in said regular show notes. I look forward to the next episode, and thank you so much for listening to 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.