[00:00:00] Bonni: Today on episode number 383 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, Dr. Jennifer Imazeki joins me to talk about implicit bias in our teaching.

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

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[00:00:21] 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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Dr. Jennifer Imazeki is a Senate Distinguished Professor and Professor of Economics at San Diego State University, currently serving as the associate chief diversity officer for faculty and staff. Her research focuses on the economics of K-12 education, including work on school finance reform, adequacy, and teacher labor markets. In addition to academic publications, Jennifer’s work on education policy has included analysis for multiple court cases related to educational equity and adequacy and most recently contributed to the Getting Down to Facts II project, an in-depth look at California’s pre-K-12 education landscape.

Since joining San Diego State University faculty in 2000, Dr. Imazeki has taught a range of economics courses from a 500 seat section of Principles of Microeconomics to a writing-intensive course for economics majors and an economics for teachers course for students working toward their single subject teaching credential in social science. In her previous role as Center for Teaching and Learning Director, Dr. Imazeki initiated multiple programs to promote inclusive teaching practices and to engage faculty in scholarly evaluation of their teaching.

Dr. Imazeki was introduced to me or I should say re-introduced to me through my partnership through the Association of College and University Educators or ACUE. ACUE’s certificate programs equip educators with evidence-based teaching practices demonstrated to improve student outcomes and create inclusive, equitable learning environments. For more than five years, ACUE has connected me with top experts, faculty developers, and credentialed faculty who are featured in ACUE’s courses to share their work and insights as guests on Teaching in Higher Ed. Jennifer, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:54] Jennifer Imazeki: Hello, thank you for having me.

[00:02:56] Bonni: I feel like I already know you. I had the great privilege of hearing you speak at the Lilly Conference in February of 2020. I’m going to invite you to bring us back in time. I’d love for you to conduct an audible version of your in-person experience that you gave to us around asking questions of us, your listeners, about students falling asleep.

[00:03:21] Jennifer: Sure. I think this is something that a lot of instructors probably have actually experienced. Imagine that you are in the middle of a class and you notice that a student has apparently fallen asleep at their desk. You see them with their eyes closed. They’re just sitting there. Once you, too, imagine that and think about, what is your reaction, what is the most typical reaction you’re likely to have?

One possibility is that you feel a bit of anxiety. You think, “I must be boring them” and feeling stressed out. You could get angry, “How rude?” and you could be concerned. “I wonder if something’s wrong with them. Are they sick?” It could be disdain or being dismissive like, “No wonder they’re doing so badly in my class,” or you could be maybe indifferent, “Whatever. I’m just going to do what I do, and they can do what they do.” Where do you fall on that spectrum?

[00:04:16] Bonni: I remember going through this activity with you, and you had us do it on one of those polling software, and all of these emotions that you had came out. I also can remember for myself, early on in my teaching, having some of these same feelings, having both ones that are inwardly focused, you mentioned a feeling of anxiety, not being good enough. “There must be something wrong with me.”

Then you mentioned ones where we ascribe intent or ascribe– I don’t know what other adjective to use, but we’re ascribing things to other people that may or may not be true about them that then are causing feelings of us, of that you’re being rude, that this is somehow personally related to my individual humanity. What I took away from the exercise that I’d love to hear more from you about is that both of those things aren’t maybe the best mental exercises.

Although I think it’s important for us to recognize it’s a natural feeling but if I’m only looking at myself and how this is somehow a gauge of my own worth, either at this present moment or in general as an educator or if I’m only ascribing attributes to students that are untested, my hypotheses are untested at that point, that there’s more we could do with these feelings. There’s more, we can break this down a little bit. How do you encourage us then to move on from some of these initial reactions and feelings we might have?

[00:05:48] Jennifer: Sure. If I recall the follow-up to that exercise was whatever your response might be, whatever your thoughts might be going through your own head is to then think about how that reaction is going to impact your interaction with that student. If your reaction is to get angry or to put something on the student and to think that there’s something “wrong” with the student, then your next interaction with the student is likely to be really different than if you’re thinking, “Well, maybe they’re sick. Maybe something’s going on with them.”

How you then walk up to the student at the end of class and say something to them, what comes out of your mouth at that point? It’s likely to be very, very different, depending on what that internal conversation was that you had in your head. This is something that I think is really key for thinking about not just what our own reactions and assumptions are but how those implicit assumptions and thoughts impact what we outwardly then do, what we say to the students, how we behave with the students.

That’s why I think being more aware of that reaction, as I always put it, I do a lot of workshops on implicit bias and things like that, it’s not about changing the bias, it’s not about stopping the bias, it’s about getting in between your internal reaction and your external reaction. It’s getting in between those thoughts that start out in your head and then how that impacts what comes out of your mouth or how you then interact with your students.

[00:07:26] Bonni: Over time, of course, it can be great. First of all, it’s not great to think we’re ever going to stop all of our biases because that’s never going to happen. Over time, it can be hopeful to think about reshaping it. I do feel good about the fact that when you went through that exercise with us, I had moved past the– if we’re going to say it’s a continuum and I’m not sure that it’s exactly a continuum but that I had a little bit more sophisticated thoughts in my head [laughs] about why someone might have fallen asleep than I did early in my teaching.

Before we get there, you’re talking about something shorter because that takes a lot of self-awareness, it takes a lot of learning over time, versus you’re describing getting between my initial reaction and then how I choose to respond to that initial feeling. What would you advise for us early on? By the way, let’s not just think about students falling asleep, let’s think about other things, students not having their cameras on. Let’s think about students arriving late to class. What are some other ones that come up in your list where bias is really going to be present for some of us as educators?

[00:08:38] Jennifer: Actually, at that Lilly Conference, I had some colleagues from San Diego State who were there with me, and what they suggested I use the next time is students using their cell phones in class because that’s something that can be triggering for a lot of faculty. I think you’re right, we evolve over time as teachers. I know that when I was younger and a new instructor, I would have been much more likely to take all those kinds of things personally.

Then over time, you learn not to take them personally. Things like cell phones, that’s a newer thing for all of us. We all are still trying to figure that out and haven’t had as much experience with why someone might use a cell phone in class. That is more benign. Now, how people act on Zoom, whether they have their videos on or off, whether their audio is on or off, whether they seem to be paying attention or not, these are all new things that we are all trying to figure out, and we haven’t had much experience with. We’re even more likely to jump to conclusions because we’re basing our evaluation of why someone is doing something on very little information.

[00:09:52] Bonni: I so appreciate that you circled it back there at the end as far as the cell phones and the videos on or off because, as you you were saying those things, I thought when we massively all switched to being online, and I actually had already done a lot of online teaching, but there’s a difference between doing online teaching in a program that is designed as a hybrid program that has some residency and has some Zoom, and that’s a very different thing from my first pandemic.

I don’t know about you if this is your first time as well doing this en masse and the collective grief, the collective anxiety, the collective trauma, and then also they’re exposed to a lot of people who it’s all new to them, too. I don’t mean to, it’s nobody’s fault that they hadn’t taught online before, but that was a very different feeling. Some of the things that you just brought up, I remember thinking like, “Oh gosh, I just want to reach them so much.”

There’s an expression for people listening who may not be familiar with these expressions of cold-calling on students. I try to never cold-call on students because I find it that doesn’t really work, but I do some warm calling on students. I was better at doing warm calling on students in person than I was not in a program designed to be online but in the non-designed-to-be-online program.

Now I just felt, just having started out my new class, I thought, “Wow, I’m better at this than I was the last time. I’m gaining my confidence that I can read the signals a tiny bit better but also recognize we really can’t read the signals. How do I get new signals to go in the place of my biases, around why someone might have their camera off or why there might be a really long pause? Are they listening? Are they paying attention, all those things?”

I feel like I’m getting my sea legs. I’m not sure if that’s the right expression, but it’s starting to feel a little bit more, and that’s what you said we want to interrupt that. We want to interrupt the thought patterns and then interrupted the reaction. More broadly speaking, before we talk about mechanisms for interrupting, which are essentially a whole category of different biases, would you talk a little bit about bias in general and specifically, implicit bias?

[00:12:17] Jennifer: Sure. Implicit bias when people use that term, especially these days, they’re generally referring to these unconscious assumptions and expectations that we have usually around about other people. You often associate it with the social identities of those groups when we talk about– As you mentioned, there’s lots of different kinds of cognitive bias, but that term, in particular, “implicit bias” is usually referred to talk about things associated with social identities.

We see a person who looks a certain way, whether it’s their race, their gender, even the clothes they’re wearing, it could be right, but something visible about them triggers essentially a stereotype in our head that we have certain assumptions about who that person is, how they’re going to act. We know something about them even if we don’t know anything else about them, other than what we are seeing in terms of their social identity.

The thing about bias, and this is true for all kinds of cognitive bias, it’s automatic in our head. It just happens. We don’t cause it to happen, and we can’t really stop it from happening. These are the things that develop in our mental pathways, over a lifetime of interactions with other people. The way I always put it is that having implicit bias doesn’t make you a bad person, it makes you a person who has grown up in a world with other people.

We see media images, we have conversations with family and friends and neighbors and teachers and classmates. Every time we have those interactions, biases form and are solidified and reinforced in ways that just evolve over our lifetimes. There are studies that show babies who aren’t verbal yet pick up on nonverbal cues of people around them. Really, it’s not even the things people say, it’s how they act, it’s the space that you put between yourself and someone else.

I see you do that, and it makes me think there’s something about that person that’s causing you to put space between you and them. I see that over and over and over again, and it starts to make me want to put space between myself and people who look like that, so that’s bias.

[00:14:45] Bonni: Bias is something that we’re always going to have with us. How might we have a more healthy relationship with our biases because I think if I’m understanding what you’re asserting, we’re never going to be rid of them altogether? In fact, would that even be entirely desirable to be rid of all of one’s biases? Perhaps some of them are helpful to us, but how do we begin to evolve our relationship, or is that even possible to evolve our relationship with our biases?

[00:15:12] Jennifer: Yes, I think that’s a good point. Biases serve a certain purpose. Mental shortcuts serve a certain purpose, and I often will talk to folks about this in terms of System 1 versus System 2 thinking, and I’m blanking on the name of the guy who talks about this the most, which is terrible, right? It’s terrible. It’ll come to me.

[00:15:32] Bonni: Oh my gosh. It will to me, too, probably as soon as we hang up.

[00:15:41] Jennifer: System 1 thinking is that it’s the automatic thinking, and it often will get triggered by things like lack of information, your brain fills in the gaps or lack of time. You just need to react without having time to think about stuff, versus System 2 thinking, which is much more deliberate and conscious. If we were deliberate and conscious in our thoughts all of the time, we couldn’t really function.

In that regard, yes, biases, they have a role to play. I think what is key is in terms of getting between your bias and how that bias impacts our behaviors. First of all, it’s awareness, and this is one reason why I think it’s really important not to think about bias as a terrible thing that you want to deny you have. There’s a lot of negative connotations simply around the word bias, especially I think in academia, who are not supposed to be biased, we’re supposed to be objective and scientific.

That thinking, that desire to deny bias can be problematic because if we deny we have something, then we can’t address the impacts of having it. I do think the first step is acknowledging that we have bias, and that’s okay because that acknowledgment helps us start to be more aware and self-aware, and self-reflective about it.

[00:17:14] Bonni: Daniel Kahneman is his name.

[00:17:17] Jennifer: Thank you.

[00:17:17] Bonni: I could only think of it because I wasn’t the one having to talk. You know how that is when you’re talking, you can’t, at least I can’t think at the same time. I’m even thinking about, some of our shortcuts are helping us be able to connect with other people, but the ones we really want to disconnect, especially in our teaching, are the ones that don’t help. I used to have a lot of bias around funerals.

I did not understand the cultural differences between the way I grew up and how my family has historically treated funerals and other cultures treating their funerals. That’s a really good bias for me to really be able to continue to understand because I was making a lot of value judgments around students’ involvements in funerals that were not helpful to my teaching and not helpful for me being able to really fulfill my mission of wanting to be a caring, competent facilitator of learning.

Those are the things like you said, am I ever fully going to understand those differences to the extent as if I was completely fluent in them? Probably not, I don’t expect that my family’s culture will change that dramatically when it comes to funerals and the traditions when someone were to pass away, I’ll never fully understand them, but expanding my imagination for where those differences might lie can really help me interrupt some of that.

[00:18:45] Jennifer: I like that you just used the word “imagination” because I use that a lot when I’m talking to faculty like, “Imagine this.” Part of bias is that we are imagining something, right? What we’re imagining is based on our lived experience and what we’ve seen happen many times, but it can be helpful to imagine alternatives to that. Again, going back to the example of the student falling asleep in class, whatever you might first ascribe to their motivations, when I start listing out all the reasons why a student might fall asleep in class, you can imagine those.

It’s just that some people will say, “Yes, well, sure, maybe they didn’t get sleep last night because they were working at a job all night,” but that’s not the first thing that comes to their mind. Once you raise it to them, they can be like, “Oh, yes. Sure, that’s possible.’ I think that that’s one of the ways that we do start breaking down our biases is recognizing that our bias is telling us this is the motivation or this is what’s happening, but then imagining all the other reasons why what’s happening might be happening.

[00:20:00] Bonni: I have found that to be incredibly helpful for me, too, and then to stop, you mentioned this before, you talked about interrupting the bias. Here’s what happened and then here’s what I’m going to choose to do about it. Can I slow those things down whenever possible? Can I give myself– This is something that I don’t think necessarily relates as much to teaching.

I have found it in terms of reading about productivity in the broader productivity literature and specifically about teaching us to say no better before we commit to something, saying, “I’m going to need to think about it, can I get back to you?” Boy, that would be helpful. I’m trying to think of a parallel in our teaching, I guess the only parallel, yes, would be recognizing that when things happen in our classrooms, one lesson for me has been I don’t have to have solved this or addressed it perfectly.

I get a passing or a failing grade on this one, five minutes of my class, we can bring these things back up, we are going to meet again. We can come back and say, “Last week when we met this happened, I’d like to talk about it more.” I suppose that’s giving our self a little bit of permission to separate what happened from what we choose to do about it and then in some cases, we actually get to redo parts of it. We have not utterly failed at our capacity for interrupting our own biases and also hopefully helping other people do that as well.

[00:21:28] Jennifer: I think that part of it is practice, honestly. I will say for me personally, a lot of this has developed over time with thinking about why I’m personally feeling angry or annoyed with something that someone has done, and to be totally honest, this started with driving. I’m a Southern California driver, [chuckles] and there’s actually a presentation I gave in Economics Conference a while ago.

I think if you Google or YouTube it, you can find it. I started by asking people to imagine a different scenario that you’re driving down the freeway and there’s a car you can see in your rearview mirror just being a maniac, zooming along and cutting people off and zipping in and out, and a lot of us would react to that, respond to that by getting really annoyed. I know that when someone tailgates me, I want to swing around and tailgate them or get too close.

The scenario I asked people to imagine is when the car gets closer, you look over and you see that there’s a woman in the passenger seat, which is reclined, who’s in labor. [chuckles] Then suddenly the reason why that car is driving so crazy totally switches. The driver stops being a jerk and instead is a really concerned husband who’s trying to get his wife to the hospital, and my own reaction shifts dramatically.

I go from being super annoyed and angry to “Oh my God, I hope they’re okay.” I started thinking about this when I realized how often I was getting annoyed with people cutting me off in traffic and then realizing once in a while, I would be the one cutting other people off, but every time I did it, there was a reason. [chuckles] Every time I did it, it was because, “Oh, I just didn’t realize my exit was coming out so soon. I’m so sorry, but I’m going to cut you off.”

I just tried to get into the practice of noticing when I was getting tense and getting upset and recognizing that I’m in my car by myself, there’s no way I could know why that person is driving the way that they’re driving. Once you start realizing how often your own reactions are based on information you’re just making up in your head, I started realizing how often I do that in other scenarios as well. The classroom is definitely one of them. There’s so much going on with our students that we can’t possibly know, yet we think we know, we ascribe motivation to.

[00:24:22] Bonni: One thing that comes up a lot for people, Jennifer, that I see us struggling with sometimes is, and I don’t want to make this dichotomous choice, but sometimes it seems like people are trying to make it this way. It’s like sometimes they are being rude. Sometimes it is intentional.

[00:24:39] Jennifer: Oh, yes.

[laughter]

Well, one of the situations where for me I draw a direct parallel to the way I respond to bad driving, early on in my career, I was probably in my second year of teaching, I had a student plagiarize, and it was blatant. He plagiarized from the textbook. The textbook I had, I said, “You got to do something using material from these chapters.” I remember realizing, “He’s cut and pasted from the textbook. How stupid does he think I am?”

I distinctly remember having that thought. “He thinks I’m stupid, he thinks I’m not going to notice.” When I talked to the student, he didn’t understand what I was talking about. He was like, “You told us we had to cite material, we had to use the textbook,” I can’t remember exactly … but in his mind, he was doing what I asked them to do. He didn’t understand what plagiarism is, he didn’t understand how to paraphrase, how to take this material and put it into your own words.

For me, it was a really eye-opening look into what my students know and don’t know and how things that I take for granted as an instructor, that students will even know what plagiarism is, need more transparency, need to be explained and talked about and that I shouldn’t make those assumptions about what my students know or don’t know. I think that’s a really common one about what students know or don’t know about how to write or plagiarize, but then how do we react?

Yes, some students do plagiarize, and some students are trying to get away with something, but some aren’t. Yes, some students fall asleep because they think you’re boring, but some fall asleep because they just didn’t get any sleep last night because they were up with a crying baby or had an all-night shift at their job. I guess that’s when people say, “Sometimes the assumptions I’m making in my head are true.”

Yes, that’s where those assumptions come from. We develop biases and stereotypes in our head because there’s often a kernel of truth to them, or we’ve seen it happen many times, so the problem is that our brain starts to just assume that it’s always happening when it’s not always. It’s sometimes, sure, but sometimes not.

[00:27:15] Bonni: Yes. If our responses are ways that really shut down people’s ability to learn and grow, if I’m going to err on one side or the other, I’m going to pick the side that is going to assume the best of others, assume that they are going to college or in a doctorate program or whatever because they want to learn, because they want to grow, because they want to expand and assume that even if they don’t, that what if I could be some small part of instilling a tiny kernel inside of them, of getting them reinvigorated about what education is all about but I lost the opportunity because I allowed myself to lose my temper?

[00:27:55] Jennifer: If you’re going to make assumptions anyway, why not make good ones? Why not make ones that build connections or allow for the opportunity and possibility of connections? It, also, I think is better for our own mental health. You can make an assumption that’s going to get you all mad and anxious and stressed out, or you can make an assumption that allows you to be a kind, caring, compassionate human being, which of those feels better?

[00:28:22] Bonni: Also, I think designing our assignments such that they’re able to bring their own curiosity, their own context, their own things that they get interested and excited about into them. Then for some of those things when we do it well, either it’s going to be impossible to cheat, or there’s just not going to be a motivation to do it, and then yes, occasionally, that will still happen, so what?

I imagine all the hundreds of times that it doesn’t happen and you actually got someone excited about whatever it is you’re trying to hopefully get them curious about. Before we started recording, you were talking about your discipline and economics and that they’re being– Actually, just share a little bit about some of the ways, specifically in economics, you see us going a little bit off-base as far as the possibilities that good teaching might bring to a discipline that sometimes is historically thought of as pretty darn and interesting.

[00:29:23] Jennifer: I will say one of my favorite definitions of a professor is someone who thinks the world would just be better off if everyone knew a little bit more about their discipline, and that’s how I feel about economics, I love economics. I’m an economist just through and through, and it’s always so disappointing to me when I tell people that, and they’re like, “Oh, I took one econ class in college and hated it,” or they get that look on their face that it was clearly not their favorite subject because I just think it’s fascinating.

I know that a lot of economists don’t teach econ classes in a way that’s particularly engaging. That, too, confuses me because there’s so much about economics that I think makes it easy to teach in an engaging way. There’s so much about it that is relevant for students and so many examples out in the world that you could use to help students see how these concepts apply in their own lives. Those economists who do a lot of work in teaching, in economics, there’s all kinds of resources for how to use TV shows and movies and podcasts and songs and social media to exemplify five different economic concepts and to help students see how it’s playing out in everything they do.

The other thing that I will say, I don’t remember if I did this in the Lilly presentation that you attended, but I often talk to people about using economics going back to build empathy and to think about– Part of what we try to teach or I try to teach my students is cost-benefit analysis. People make decisions by weighing costs and benefits. Basically, the economic way of thinking is to assume that people choose something where the benefits outweigh the costs.

If benefits are higher than the costs, you do it; if the costs outweigh the benefits, you don’t do it. One way of analyzing behavior and ascribing motivations to people’s behavior is to ask, what are the things that give them benefit about that? Why might they be doing what they’re doing? What do they have to see as the benefits and costs in order to do what they’re doing?

I actually use that exercise in my econ class to get students to think about the fact that costs and benefits are different for different people. Even if you’re talking about the same decision that’s being made, people take different things into account and ascribe different weights and priority to different things. Their calculus of costs and benefits will be different. See, this is interesting. This is econ, that’s what [crosstalk]

[00:32:10] Bonni: Oh, it really is. I’m applying what you’re saying, just even back to– I think you were already starting to do this in terms of different times of what we perceive as academic integrity issues. If we dig a little bit deeper, even the people that we have caught, who technically we’d say were plagiarizing or technically would say were cheating and were doing it intentionally, knew what they were doing. If we can have the patience to keep going deeper, there often is a mismatch of an appreciation for the benefits and the costs.

One that comes up, you talked about with regard to writing, I also think with regard to reading where they just– and I see it more in doctoral work, maybe it’s just because of the kinds of classes I teach undergrad, but they just aren’t understanding what they’re reading at all. They’re being asked to write in a way that they don’t understand. They’re taking something they never understood, to begin with, and then having to write about it in a way that they still don’t understand and somehow are getting passes along the way and until someone actually is going to have the real conversation of–

That can be a real breaking point for some people like, “Oh, see? I knew I didn’t belong here. I know I can’t do this.” It’s like then I’ve tried to get people to then “We have to deconstruct it over here before you ever try to write about it,” getting them to just even read an abstract of an article and then just talk to me about it. What is it conversationally because then we can go conversationally over here and then I can encode it in a way that might fit the needs of whatever writing style it is I’m being required to do?

It’s sad to me how little sometimes I see us inviting people into that messy part of admitting like, “I don’t even know how I got this far. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I haven’t known what I’m doing for a long time now. Now you’re the one that’s finding me out.” I know it’s so hard, but what an invitation, though, to really engage with another person like they were a real person who’s really having a tough time with these costs and benefits? Yes, I like that. Anything else you want to share about implicit bias before we go over to the recommendation segment?

[00:34:30] Jennifer: No, I think that I work with a lot of faculty, who really do care about their students and care about creating an inclusive classroom for all of their students. I just think that starting with our own assumptions, our own expectations is just so important. If we aren’t even aware of that, how do we respond when a student is struggling? Do we think there’s something wrong with them, or do we think there’s something wrong with us? What can we do?

In my mind, for every instructor, that should be the first question that people should ask themselves when they start teaching. “What teacher am I going to be? Am I going to be the teacher who when a student is struggling thinks there’s something wrong with the student or thinks there’s maybe something wrong with me or what that I could be doing differently?”

If you’ve never thought about it, some instructors never think about it. I’m guessing anyone who listens to your podcast has thought about it. This is also one challenge as a faculty developer. It’s reaching the people who haven’t thought about these things who aren’t already bought in. When I do work with faculty who are new to being faculty, new to the classroom, who haven’t had a lot of training in teaching, it is one of the most important questions to start with is, “What do you think about students?

“What do you think about your role as an instructor? What does the ideal student look like to you? What are your expectations?” and to really get them to uncover those implicit assumptions and biases so that then they can think about how all of that’s going to impact their teaching.

[00:36:16] Bonni: That’s so true. What do you think about students? What do you think of the role of a teacher, as those are two really important conversations I don’t think we ever stop having? They really can provide a real foundation for us. I think we have to revisit it all the time. We start to get off base, otherwise, if we’re not doing that kind of reflection, especially with all the context-shifting we’ve been doing.

Before Jennifer and I get to the recommendation segment, I’d like to take a moment to thank today’s sponsor, and that is SaneBox. We all get so much email. Most of it doesn’t need to be read right away, let alone interrupt our days. SaneBox’s AI make sure that only important certain emails stay in our inbox, and the rest of it gets tucked away in their smart folders, such as SaneLater or Sane Newsletters, according to your preferences.

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Thanks once again to SaneBox. If you head on over to sanebox.com/tihe, as in Teaching in Higher Ed, you can find out about getting a free 14-day trial and also a $25 credit toward a SaneBox subscription. Thanks once again to SaneBox for sponsoring today’s episode. A lot of us have been– When articles or advertisements come up about masks, they catch our attention, so I’m going to share an article by Kristi Verbeke, and she’s from Wake Forest University.

After some of us have been teaching with masks for a while, she’s recommending some advice for us, and I’d suggest that people read it, about how to avoid vocal strain but speaking a little bit louder, speaking slower, just some advice for us to take care of that, and then some recommendations on masks that I started clicking on right away. I’m going to share that even though I know many of us have been teaching in these contexts for a while now.

Then to that end, I actually wanted to specifically recommend a voice amplifier, in general, and then I’ll share the one that we’ve bought at our institution because it worked well for us, but there’s a ton of them. You can find them at different electronic providers. They’ll generally be somewhere between $30 and $50-ish. I used one for the first time, and it was amazing because I could hear myself, then I didn’t feel like I needed to speak louder with the mask.

It just really helped with vocal strain for me and I think helped the ability– I shouldn’t say I think, they reported to me that they could hear me better. It was clearer. I really liked that. People have asked a lot about, “Well, what model should I buy?” Again, I’ve seen a lot of them out there, but also I’ll link to the one that we found that was helpful for us. Just in general, what you want to search for is “voice amplifier.” That might be helpful to some people out there. Jennifer, I’m going to pass it over to you for your recommendations.

[00:39:31] Jennifer: Well, I was thinking about this, and I am going to go back to our conversation about implicit bias because my number one recommendation for folks, if you haven’t explored your own implicit biases very much, is to go to the Project Implicit site, which is a website that some folks at Harvard have put together that allows you to take what they call Implicit Association Tests.

There’s lots of controversy and research about the validity of these things. I don’t necessarily think that you should take the results there as gospel or anything. Basically, what it does is it shows you images and words and times your reactions to determine which direction your bias goes. There are tests related to gender and race and ethnicity but also nationality and things like that. I just think it’s a really wonderful tool for provoking thought and to really help you be self-reflective.

I do think if you go back and take the test at points in time, you’re going to get different results, and that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the test, it just means that probably you’re thinking and maybe beginning to see your own biases and how they’re impacting how things turn out.

[00:40:54] Bonni: Yes. Well, thank you so much. I have visited that site before and had students do it as well. I’m also a little tiny bit familiar with the controversy. I think the way that you’re proposing it to us today is not as a means of a pass or fail grade or any kind of a grade but it’s self-awareness that we can be thinking about these things. If we were going to take it, we might just be looking at it from that point, which is hard to do, by the way.

Well, thank you so much for joining me for today’s episode, Jennifer. I love getting to have this conversation with you today as a follow-up to meeting you a couple of years back at the– not meeting you but getting to feel like I met you a couple of years back at the Lilly Conference.

[00:41:34] Jennifer: Thank you. This has been fun.

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[00:41:39] Bonni: Thanks once again to Dr. Jennifer Imazeki for joining me for today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed number 383. Thanks also to all of you for listening. If you’ve been listening for a while and would like to be kept up just once a week with the most recent episodes’ show notes along with some quotable words and other recommendations that don’t show up on the show, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to the Teaching in Higher Ed update. You can head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe and enter your email and get ready to get those emails once a week in your inbox. Thanks again for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

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[00:42:41] [END OF AUDIO]

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.