Bonni [00:00:00] Today on episode number 258 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast Sara Goldrick-Rab shares about Paying the Price and more.

Production Credit [00:00:10] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni [00:00:20] Hello and 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.

Bonni [00:00:48] I’m thrilled to be welcome into the show today Sara Goldrick-Rab. She’s a Professor of Higher Education Policy and Sociology at Temple University and founder of the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice in Philadelphia as well as the Wisconsin Hope Lab. She is best known for her innovative research on food and housing insecurity in higher education having led the three largest national studies on the subject and for her work on making public higher education free. She is the recipient of the William T. Grant Foundation’s Faculty Scholars Award and the American Educational Research Association’s Early Career Award. And in 2016, Politico Magazine named her one of the top 50 People Shaping American Politics. Her latest book, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream is an Amazon bestseller and has been featured on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. The Chronicle of Higher Education calls her “a defender of impoverished students and a scholar of their struggles.” She is ranked seventh in the nation among education scholars according to Education Week and in April 2018 the Carnegie Corporation awarded her the Carnegie Fellowship.

Bonni [00:02:07] Sara, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Sara [00:02:10] Thanks for having me.

Bonni [00:02:11] It is such an honor to get to talk to you I’ve been following your work for so long and I’m just both so excited about what you do and then also I get angry on your behalf. I’m sure that you probably have some similar feelings.

Sara [00:02:24] I appreciate that.

Bonni [00:02:26] One of the things I love that you really put forward about your work shows up in your Twitter profile you say “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” And I would love it if you would start with us from the very beginning of the first day a student told you she was hungry.

Sara [00:02:46] Oh. Well that quote is from Angela Davis in full disclosure. And I came to it over time. It definitely relates to this story though. It was actually in a course of a research study that this happened. Although now it seems to happen more regularly than I would like it to. We were at the Wisconsin Hope Lab; we were working on a study about financial aid and going out to do qualitative interviews to find out how students were living. These were very unstructured interviews where we were just kind of exploring what might be going on for them. And my research assistants, including my graduate students, were told to just kind of ask people how they are and go from there.

Sara [00:03:28] And one of my graduate students came back to me and was in tears and said  “you didn’t prepare me.” And I said “What happened? Did you get hurt?” Like what could this be? And she said “well I was ready for students who didn’t have a laptop.” She said “this woman hasn’t eaten in two days.” And I looked at her and she looked at me and I just thought what? Like how can- what is that? How can that be?

Sara [00:03:54] And the team talked about it. And we kept asking- Well we weren’t prompting on those questions before. But then we started to ask ourselves maybe we should kind of prompt and ask on those questions. And we added them to our surveys. And it turns out that it was fairly widespread in our sample that was very evident food insecurity.

Sara [00:04:13] And once I knew, this was a problem I couldn’t unsee. This wasn’t a problem that I could just say “oh well there’s a lot of stuff out there to work on and this is not what I do.” Although I wasn’t a researcher of food insecurity by any stretch of the time. And honestly like a couple of years went by before I really kind of said “OK we have to really lean hard into this.” But that’s because the numbers just kept popping up and we kept seeing OK. They’re homeless OK. They’re housing insecure. They’re food insecure. And yet the national conversation is making it sound like the whole issue was that they weren’t well prepared from high school.

Sara [00:04:51] So we started to do more. And now my students at Wisconsin started to tell me what was happening to them. My students here at Temple, stuff is happening to them all the time. And there is a part of me that says look the students have the courage to tell us, students had the courage to put this on the table. What kind of researchers would we be if we said “oh ok, that’s a data point,” and put it in an article and didn’t do anything about it?

Bonni [00:05:20] One of the things I hear come up often in talking with people that research in this area is this- and I mean I do this too so I am going to sound like I’m talking about other people but I know I have failed at this on a regular basis- But we take our context, how we experienced college and then we try to push it. And I suppose that’s how humans learn, that you have to bring in your prior knowledge. But in this case, it holds us back. And a lot of it seems to have to do with Top Ramen. And I wonder if you could talk a bit about Top Ramen as they like cultural badge of honor versus Top Ramen as a survival mode.

Sara [00:05:56] Yeah. I mean this is a funny thing. It is. You’re right that in some ways it’s human nature to approach a question by filtering it through your own personal experience. But I do think it’s a little bit funny that those of us with advanced degrees, who’ve been taught in our programs all the sort of critical thinking skills, can’t manage to realize that yes well we went to college and we experienced certain things, maybe our tips ran short one week from waiting tables and we had to eat Top Ramen that maybe we might not still have the whole picture of what’s happening in higher ed. And there is a way of normalizing hunger. There’s also a way of dismissing things as not hunger and therefore not important.

Sara [00:06:42] The term food insecurity is actually meant to capture the fact that there is an implication for your physiological well-being. It’s beyond just whether or not you say you’re hungry right. Being malnourished, not getting enough to eat on a regular basis because of poverty is not merely about hunger. You might even get used to it. Those of us that skip breakfast all the time because we’re just too busy know that it’s not that we’re food insecure but I might say I’m hungry. So yes, unfortunately those little packets of crappy Top Ramen have convinced a whole lot of well-educated people and otherwise I think well-meaning people that food insecurity in college is not really a thing.

Sara [00:07:27] That’s endlessly frustrating to me. I’m getting not so good at hiding it frankly because I just can’t quite get how a person can be a researcher, a teacher, be thoughtful in their lives, and not get that the world is shifting rapidly. And that when we experience it in college, we experience it in a college in a couple of classrooms with a couple of people. And there are more than 4000 colleges and tens and hundreds of millions of students. How is it that we could be so presumptuous?

Bonni [00:08:13] I’m going to ask you a question. It’ll be one of my longer ones. I promise it relates to you and your work. So back just after the dinosaurs roamed the earth, I used to have as part of my job, I worked in the franchise industry, and I was responsible for a really big culture change from taking people that had sold training really transactionally to helping them be more consultative. And I remember that’s one page in our workbook really well and it reminds me of your work and that’s why I’m asking.

Bonni [00:08:41] So it started out with just where we’re teaching people how to ask better questions and to lead people from saying like “I kind of have a problem,” to like identifying just how big it is through asking effective questions. And then I just remember this graphic would just get huge on one slide like “AH! We have a serious problem here!” And I’m wondering- I think about your book, I think about the reports, and I’ve been following- and I will be linking to so many of these in the show notes so people can access this- and I just sense this just fight in you and this continual just trying to get this message out while at the same time trying to advocate for policies that will make this better.

Bonni [00:09:19] Where do you see us now? You’ve put out the book in 2016, the reports have been coming out. Where are we on this continuum of like people recognizing there’s a tiny problem to like “AH! We’ve got to do something.”

Sara [00:09:32] I honestly think we’ve made a ton of progress and I think that’s because there have been so many people all over the country working on this. And the best part of this work for my team has been that there’s this wonderful group of people out there who might not have seen it in a survey but saw it in their college or saw it in their classroom. And since 2015, that group of people have been getting together annually and sometimes more than that to work on these issues. And we have moved in a concerted way together along shared goals and shared measurement processes around specific actions to get these things on the agenda.

Sara [00:10:17] So the folks at the University of California system and the Cal State system and the folks in Amarillo, Texas and the folks in New York, we’re all part of the same network now. We all are considered part of the real college family. And I think the fact that the New York Times just sent out a national blast about the most recent story when we released our report is a signal that this is getting somewhere.

Sara [00:10:41] I also think probably just as importantly the fact that in a given week now me and many others are being contacted by multiple legislators from the US Congress who want to advance legislation on these issues is another sign.

Sara [00:10:57] Now on the flip side, it’s funny, it’s like now that we actually have put it on the table and there’s enough numbers out there that say there’s a problem, now we have to have this reactionary group. Partly right wing but partly not that wants to say it’s really not that big a problem. These are just bad scientists. And I’m reminded of the fact that people did that around immigration. They’ve done it around climate change. They did it- I mean how many years did it take before we realized we had an obesity epidemic? Because we had to get the numbers right. I’m finding the latest outcry about our report which is really only from three sources to actually be evidence that somebody feels threatened because we’re making progress.

Sara [00:11:45] And while it’s under the guise of: “Oh – well you should just get your numbers right. This is a scientific discussion.” We know it’s not because if it were, then you’d be bringing up the 27 other studies that all agree with our study. So it’s kind of a fascinating moment to see in some ways very traditional higher ed, but also people who’ve never paid any attention to college students pretend like all of a sudden they really need to know if the true number is 20 percent or 30 percent. And my question to them is like “what’s your right number there?” Because I think you’re right number in your head is “this is not a problem, it doesn’t exist,” so that we don’t have to do anything about it. We can go back to chastising college students for staging protests against speakers when the truth is they weren’t even at these protest because they were busy working. There’s clearly an agenda.

Bonni [00:12:38] How does that connect with your discussions around the betrayal of the American dream? And because I don’t know if I’m extending it too much but I see sort of that threat may be emerging there as well.

Sara [00:12:50] Yeah I mean it definitely is. I think some people think that I was being overly, I don’t know, emotional. And they’ll probably be the word for a strong woman, right?

Bonni [00:12:59] Always.

Sara [00:12:59] The word betrayal is in there because that’s the word the students use. They feel betrayed. And I I do think there’s a sense in which in some ways they’ve been unintentionally betrayed. I don’t think that those of us who worked for years to ensure that you didn’t have to be wealthy to go to college intended to betray people by putting them into a system that wasn’t well financed. I don’t really think that was all intentional.

Sara [00:13:25] But I do think there’s a moment now where progress to fix the problem is being undermined and that is a conscious betrayal of these folks. To say, “Oh no. The student debt crisis isn’t really a crisis. Oh we wouldn’t want to solve that problem, it would be a giveaway. We wouldn’t want to make college free because nobody would value it.” That’s a betrayal of the experiences of all of these students who are killing themselves trying to get a college degree. And that betrayal and betrayal of the public sector in that way and particularly public education and the nation’s community colleges, that’s not a scientific maneuver, that’s a political maneuver.

Bonni [00:14:05] I saw an article with an interview with you in streetroots.org. And so I’ve read a little bit about your thoughts about Elizabeth Warren’s proposal around higher ed. And I was heartened – wait is heartened the right word? Is that a positive word? I was excited when there were so many people who said “well what if people have their loans forgiven but you had already paid yours off? How would you feel about that?” And it’s I don’t have the exact number in front of me but a lot of people the majority of people said “that would be ok.” So at least there’s some people out there that are willing to say “let’s fix it even if it was harder for me.” And as you said, the problems also compounding.

Sara [00:14:45] Yeah I mean I think some of the loudest voices said like “how dare you? How dare you get rid of somebody debt when I paid it off?” My husband said something to me, he said “my goodness. If that’s the majority, then we can’t have progress.” Don’t end slavery, we were slaves. Can you imagine? Don’t give women the right to vote because we didn’t the right. What?! All progress is about doing better for the people who come after you. It’s not though to say that that isn’t hard. We do need to acknowledge there’s been a lot of harm done here. A lot of people with really bad feelings towards higher education, towards colleges, towards the very idea of college because of jow brutalized they were in the process of paying for it. But it’s just divisive to suggest that how dare we do anything especially going forward like make it free.

Sara [00:15:42] I think I said in that article I’ve heard a lot of discussion of striking debt in the past. And I have not really gotten behind it because I’ve said I want to be very careful that we don’t spend money striking debt that could be used to fix this problem. Now I like the fact that Senator Warren because she’s brilliant has come up with an approach for paying for both. She’s saying fine, we can strike some debt, not all of it. We can strike some debt and still afford to make college free. I’m for it. OK. And she’s being smart because politically if we don’t deal with the people with debt, they’re not going to support free college.

Sara [00:16:19] I just do want to be clear though that a dollar is a dollar and if it were up to me, I would always take care of my children before I took care of myself. And my number one goal right now is to make sure that my daughters classmates who do not have mommy for a professor and don’t get free tuition at Temple do not decide they can’t go to college because of the price. Right. And I got a 9 year old so we got a certain amount of time here, less than a decade at this point. So giddy up.

Bonni [00:16:54] Yeah. The people who listen to this show are really varied. Everyone’s got a passion for teaching or they wouldn’t listen. But some of them are in positions to advocate for very systemic solutions, I mean at least within their own institutions, and some are really looking at the class level. I wonder if you would share a few pieces of advice of what are some of the- I don’t know low hanging fruit is the right word- or the biggest leverage we can do more at the university wide level? And then within our own classes, what are some of the small or seemingly small things that we can do that can have a big impact?

Sara [00:17:26] Look I think it’s incredibly important that teachers and leaders of institutions recognize the important role that our students are going to play in voting. I really mean this. If you don’t like what college costs, vote. And help them. I think there are so many classes where you can in a completely non-partisan way talk about these debates whether it’s a math class, whether it’s a sociology class, whether it’s an English class, you name it, you can integrate into it discussions and debates over how people want to address these problems.

Sara [00:18:04] And the main point here is they need to get into their heads that they are the ones to make this decision. I said to my class towards the end of our semester, Warren’s plan had just been announced, and I said “look I’m not telling you to vote for Warren. I’m telling you though that you’ve been telling me all semester how stressed out you are by your debt and somebody just proposed to get rid of your debt. Are you going to do anything about it?” This is my question. And universities all feel like they’re not getting enough money and teachers feel like that too, help them to learn about these things. Give them space and time in the classroom or in their assignments to read these things. Help them parse charts. We have a quantitative literacy problem. They can’t read the diagrams and they can’t figure out whether this is a good deal or bad deal. I really think that is -and that’s not just about the presidential election. That’s about all of these elections. We’ve got to understand. We’re supposed to be doing education for democracy.

Bonni [00:19:08] Talk about students roles also in being part of the solution at that local level for meeting students needs.

Sara [00:19:15] Yeah. The number of students who can themselves either create solutions or eventually run for office. I’m impressed that we have more people in Congress now who do not come from privilege and who went to more institutions that are usually underrepresented in Congress. We need students to begin to think about how to take those leadership roles. They also- I love it when students are involved in trying to make college affordable. What usually happens is that they have not gotten the kind of background they need to make nuanced or smart recommendations frankly. They tend to say things like “let’s freeze tuition.” And if you’re freezing tuition at Harvard, go for it because there’s plenty of other money to subsidize your education. If you’re freezing tuition at your local community college, guess what you’re going to have even fewer advisers next year. Again we don’t teach them policy courses typically and ways to think through these problems. So I would certainly like to see more investments made in helping student journalists and in helping students to be engaged in debate and argumentation courses and stuff like that so that they can play a bigger role in the democratic process here.

Bonni [00:20:28] I have a friend who is engaged in the fight against human trafficking and I’ve known her for more than a decade now and sometimes it’ll come up that there will be, she runs our Global Center for Women and Justice, so there will be people that will contact her and ask “can you advocate on behalf of this issue or that issue.” And we talk about it. And much of the time my advice is “does it fit in with kind of your core purpose why you think you were put on this earth?” And if it doesn’t, I guess I feel silly saying this to you Sara, but it’s kind of like I tell her maybe that gets left for someone else because she’s so focused?

Bonni [00:21:02] I’m curious, for you, when you think about the political end of your work, do you find yourself having you really care about this issue but gosh if you spend your precious presence out there it might dilute the real reason that you were put on the planet?

Sara [00:21:17] This is a constant struggle. I think it’s a constant struggle for anybody who’s remotely awake right now. How can I not get involved in climate change? How can I not get involved in black lives matter? But I got to tell you this is definitely going a growth thing over the last several years. I have had to ask myself “is this what I am uniquely adding value to?” If so my goal here is to create a real college movement that moves without me. I don’t want to lead this thing forever. I would love. I mean oh my goodness gracious. If in five years I don’t have to lead this and it’s really moving. That would be a huge success. So I had to ask myself sort of is this in scope or not?

Sara [00:21:55] And then I think that we all realized that you know activists like to be activists on lots of things. I don’t go to protests and such like I used to in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin it was direct assaults on our livelihood to be honest. We couldn’t not protest over tenure and such like that and over our kids school teachers. But I also am starting to understand what my grandfather has taught me. I can’t remember who this comes from but he says “if you are not for yourself, who will be for you?” And I’m not good at the whole self care thing. It even sounds a little funny to me. But I need to make sure on the weekend that I’m not like out there at a million charitable events and protesting and such because I almost never have a day off work completely. And I hit every Monday running as hard and fast as I can at 12 to 13 hour days. It’s hard though because it makes you feel like you’re not in solidarity with other folks. But gosh I mean if somebody could make a longer week, I would really appreciate it.

Bonni [00:23:00] You’re talking at this point just to someone who they’re just talking about their one class. And we know that it’s likely that we would have students in that room who are experiencing food and or housing insecurity, but we don’t recognize that, we can’t see it. How can we attempt on this individual level to try to meet needs that we won’t always know are there?

Sara [00:23:22] Yeah. This is an area that I’m increasingly interested in questions about like universal design. I’m trying to think about how to make my class a place where ok somebody is going through something, how do I make sure that they’re not going to be completely excluded? This is the first semester that I stopped grading for undergraduates. I tried ungrading for grad students first and now I am doing it for the undergrads. And ok so they didn’t take their exam on the one day I wanted them to. How much do I care? OK. Well I guess I could care a lot if I felt like the only way to assess what you know is to grade you on this day and you must take it. But I wrote a smarter exam with my TAs that I don’t care if they’ve even seen it in advance for Pete’s sake. And we gave them the rubric in advance. They need to be conscientious about what they do but I don’t care if they do it that day or four days later.  I think just thinking that stuff through in and asking yourself what is your bottom line here? I want to see growth in each of the students over the term. What else do I care about?

Sara [00:24:28] The other thing is just to stop making so many assumptions all the time. So I always try in my classroom now- It is hard. I get it. Those students that nod off. Those men who sit in the back and kind of look at each other and look at you. I’m kind of wondering like are you looking at pictures of me on the Internet? Like what are you doing? But I catch myself and I go I have no idea what they’re doing. It could be totally legit. It might not be. Let me go wander back there, take a look at their laptop. But just stopping and pausing and realizing that I am there to teach them. I’m doing my best. I’m not God’s gift to lecturing and it’s up to them. They’re adults. I think really stopping and saying “they’re adults. They’re humans. They’re going to do what they’re gonna do. I’m going to do the best I can do.” And leaving it there. It’s a healthier way to teach. I mean I can tell you that. That is definitely one space that has gotten less stressful and less agonizing as a stripped down to what it needs to be.

Bonni [00:25:32] That stripping down process really resonated with me and I have been challenged by ungrading movement too and thinking about stripping down my syllabus. I know one thing that you advocate we add to our syllabi is a basic needs statement. Would you talk about that?

Sara [00:25:46] Yeah. So this is something that was a total happenstance thing. I was getting ready to teach here at Temple in my first semester and I was pasting on all the policies. I didn’t even really remember having to put those policies on at my prior institution, but here I was struck by like oh my gosh there’s so many. I started looking at them and I’m like there’s nothing in here that says like, “If you’re not okay, what are you supposed to do?” And it seemed kind of weird to teach a class on basic needs and security and not address this topic. So I just wrote a couple sentences. I don’t think they’re perfect, but they said something like: “If you’re having trouble finding enough to eat or having a safe place to live please contact the dean of students. Here’s her name. Here’s her number. She has some supports.” And if you’re willing to disclose this to me, I would like to know so I can be a better teacher to you.

Sara [00:26:35] I happened to be at a conference where I mentioned it and somebody said to me: “Oh my goodness what a great idea. You should tweet that.” So I blogged it and tweeted it. And last night actually, because we’re going to write something about this at the Hope Center, I was looking through the results of the survey that we did. We asked people who read my blog to then blog on the survey what they plan to do. And the vast majority probably more than three and four of them said they were either adopting it now or adopting it soon, which is hundreds and hundreds of professors. And I think I’m struck by a couple of things. One, it seemed obvious to people this is a way to convey information to the student. But the thing it really does is it actually tells the professor where they should go. And then the number of them who said “well the reason I’m not doing this is I have no idea what those services are.” Or “the reason I’m not doing this is I don’t know the dean of students and I don’t trust them.” That is diagnosing a much bigger problem. That has helped me to understand that I need to do like a “hey faculty, meet the staff session” on some of these campuses. You don’t know each other.

[00:27:39] And then the other thing is I was reading the comments last night. I said if you’re not adopting this, why not? One group says they have no control over their syllabus. Ok. That is a whole separate problem. The other group though says: “This is not my job. I’m not their mom and dad. I’ve got more than enough going on. I don’t have enough to eat by myself. Who do you think you are?” Let me just suggest that you’re not in the healthiest space to teach. That’s what I’d say. Right. And that if that’s the attitude, that’s the attitude that makes people talk badly about faculty. And for us, it’s a losing approach, especially when it comes to our union negotiations or anything else. So I get it. And we are looking at the fragility and precariously facing adjuncts. We are starting to turn that direction. I’m going to totally say yes, that’s right. But I think that the statement itself is stirring the pot on sort of rubber hits the road. What are we going to do with our students in the classroom to at least make them aware of where they can get supports?

Bonni [00:28:43] I’m embarrassed to say that as you were sharing that story I was of course thinking of my own context and trying to think how on earth someone would say that. But then of course yes with our adjuncts – –  they really are in challenging [situations]… But you would hope that they could see then more empathy for people experiencing similar things.

Sara [00:28:59] I don’t know that empathy is where everybody starts. I really don’t. I think that a lot of folks became teachers in higher ed because that puts them in charge. One of them said, “If this is what I wanted to be doing I would have taught high school.” Well folks, first of all there is good research that elementary and high school teachers make a bigger difference in these students lives than we do because they get to them sooner. And the second thing is like really we’re all teachers. I really feel strongly about this. I’m actually kind of loathe to call myself a professor out in the real world. I’m a teacher and I teach 13th grade. And that’s not putting higher ed down it’s just talking about how things work in this country.  I mean ask any fourth grader after fourth comes fifth. And after 12th comes college and that’s 13th. Done.

Bonni [00:29:50] I used to think that there was such a greater distance. I’m not sure where my mind was at. It’s like well there’s a couple months, that’s it. There’s a couple months and what a wonderful fortunate thing it is to get to work with many of our young people in that area.

Bonni [00:30:03] Is there anything else you want to share? I know we’ve talked a little bit about the recent reports that had come out. Anything you want to share before we get to the recommendations segment that I haven’t asked you about?

Sara [00:30:12]  Just that we really really do want to get to the conversation that starts with. Ok, we have a problem. Now what? I really appreciate that coming from the legislators. I think we’re there. I don’t think I need to convince hardly any college presidents outside of the most elite anymore that we’ve got a problem.

Sara [00:30:31] But I do think there’s sort of a general public problem here. And I do think there’s some resistance within the faculty. And I think that the only way to address that is to keep having these conversations. And it reminds me of course of the fight for gay rights. Until you know somebody. So if you’ve had a food insecure student if you’ve had a student who’s been homeless, you need to talk about that. I don’t mean divulge their private, intimate secrets. I mean have a Friday night pizza party conversation when you’re talking to your neighbor about what work is really like and how that happens because the next time they won’t say “oh there’s no homeless college students.” They’ll say “oh well she was just telling me about that the other night. I couldn’t believe it. My goodness.” And that’s gonna be the real change. We need people to kind of wake up to what college has become and to say that’s not OK and then to fight for better.

Bonni [00:31:26] There’s so many great conversations as you just described also happening on social media. I’m thinking about your basic needs and do you recall the exact timeframe that you first wrote those couple of sentences?

Sara [00:31:37] It was August of 2017.

Bonni [00:31:39] That’s so remarkable just to think back- I mean it seems like so long ago to me just because of how fast that spread. And I will be doing a ton of show links in the show notes and including that hashtag #RealCollege so people can get exposed to these stories. And if you’re not on Twitter, you don’t even have to be on Twitter to go look at things that are happening there and hearing these stories.

Sara [00:32:00] Yeah and if you’re on Facebook we certainly have the hope center. And so both the Hope Center’s Facebook page and Hope 4 College. And also my professional Facebook page, I fill both of those every day with content about this stuff. So pick your favorite platform, we’re on Instagram, we’re on LinkedIn.

Bonni [00:32:21] Yeah that’s wonderful. I will link to as many as I can grab. Thank you so much.

Bonni [00:32:25] This is the time in the show where we each get to give recommendations and I have a couple of them. The first one is an article that was written by Sara Rose Cavanagh, The Best (and Worst) Ways to Respond to Student Anxiety. I actually get that question a lot of how do we handle this with a student who needs to give a presentation as part of a grade? It’s a presentations class or it’s an essential part and universal design for learning doesn’t really fit here because that’s so essential to the class. At any rate, it’s such a beautifully written article because she shares about her own struggles with anxiety. It’s written very searing, very raw. I was instantly captivated by it and yet she didn’t at the end, not that I would have expected her to, but she didn’t just say “oh well anxiety exists so there is nothing we should change,” because ultimately- I don’t want to spoil the whole thing- but ultimately she’s really advocating that we still challenge our students but just not challenging them so dramatically that there’s no way that they can grow, it’s a beautifully written piece.

Bonni [00:33:27] And then the second one, there’s a librarian who I know I’ve just through Twitter, Jessamyn West. And she gave a talk about social justice roles for libraries and librarians. And I’m completely captivated by anybody who writes about social justice being infused into their discipline. And of course libraries I would not expect to be any different. But first of all it’s a great example of when we give talks how to have so many great links for people and then she’s gotten her annotated PDF off of her presentation, it is really a beautifully laid out talk but all of the resources that are on the main page I’ll be linking to our phenomenal not just for librarians but for all of us to infuse more social justice into our work.

Bonni [00:34:11] Those are my two recommendations and I’ll pass it over to you Sara for whatever you’d like to recommend.

Sara [00:34:15] That was super interesting. The librarian conversation is one that we’re just really starting to get into because they’re really good at finding resources. And that may make them especially good at talking to students about where things even for their basic needs are. So yeah that’s fascinating.

Sara [00:34:30] I guess I was going to point people in a couple of different directions. I mean I’m pretty obsessed with all things Jesse Stommel right now who’s @Jessifer on Twitter. My discussion of ungrading really is informed by Jesse and he’s got a set of peers who work on something called the Digital Pedagogy Lab and they all write beautiful things about teaching and about rethinking how we teach. And they run a summer time Institute. Jesse and I are gonna co-teach a course this year on how do we think about these basic needs issues when we’re in the classroom? Which I’m just constantly challenged by him.

Sara [00:35:07] I’m also really into reading a guy named Matt Reed who writes for Inside Higher Ed, he writes a column called Dean Dad. And I don’t know how many of your listeners regularly reads someone who is a community college. But Matt is writing as a community college administrator, from his vantage point.

Bonni [00:35:28] I’m cracking up because I have read a number of his columns but I didn’t know his name was Matt Reed.

Sara [00:35:32] His real name is Matt Reed.

Bonni [00:35:34] He has a real name? [laughing]

Sara [00:35:36] It’s his name and I think he’s pretty special. I think we need to hear more from community college leaders at every chance that we can get. I have a massive number of books I’ve got to read this summer. I can’t begin to tell you. I’m reading a lot about the middle class and the loss of the middle class. And there’s a book called Squeezed by Alissa Quart. And one called Maid by Stephanie Land that’s a story about falling from grace and ending up cleaning toilets. I look at these things because again these are the families of our students entering our classrooms and these are also our students themselves and why they’re coming to college. So if you’re interested in sort of the broader economic picture and looking beyond the claims that we have low unemployment, this really helps people to understand what economic precarity looks like.

Bonni [00:36:34] Oh that’s phenomenal and I love that this episode is going to air at the perfect time because I suspect lots of people will be looking for things to read over the summer. So they need to read your book. They need to read the reports that have come out. And then maybe they need to read Squeezed and the column, there’s so much you’ve just given us. Thank you so much.

Sara [00:36:50] No problem.

Bonni [00:36:50] Sara, it has been such an honor to get to talk to you. I’ve really looked forward to this both first in my imagination and then when I was actually brave enough to invite you to come on the show. And I just appreciate your time today. It’s really an honor.

Sara [00:37:03] No problem. Thanks for having me. Send me a link when it appears.

Bonni [00:37:06] I absolutely will.

Bonni [00:37:09] What an honor it’s been to have this opportunity to talk to Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Thanks to all of you for listening. I so appreciate being in community with you and all the work that we collectively do in solidarity with one another to improve our teaching.

Bonni [00:37:27] If you have yet to subscribe to the weekly update from Teaching in Higher Ed, this is how you get all the great links that I shared and that Sara shared and not have to remember to go see them in the show notes, you can subscribe at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. It is just a single email most weeks, sometimes it skips a week or two but most weeks. And that’ll come into your inbox and help you be able to explore even further the things that are explored on the show. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you next time.

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