Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 544 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, preparing students to engage in equitable community partnerships with Cory Sprinkel and Haley Madden.Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.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 so pleased today to be joined by Cory Sprinkel and Haley Madden to talk about preparing students to engage in equitable community partnerships. Cory Sprinkel is the assistant director of community engaged scholarship at the University of Wisconsin Madison’s Morgridge Center For Public Service. He is a passionate advocate, as you’ll hear in the interview, of the public purposes of higher education as well as the, quote, Wisconsin Idea.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:25]:

His work has especially focused on students’ civic identity development and strengthening community based learning experiences for students and community partners. He is the co-author of the book Preparing Students to Engage in Equitable Community Partnerships. Haley Madden received her PhD in mass communications in 2017 from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she researched health communication and health inequities using a community based research approach. She worked at the Morgridge Center For Public Service from 2014 to 2024, starting as a graduate assistant and ultimately finishing her time there as the assistant director of community engaged scholarship. While at the Morgridge Center, she focused on building the community engaged scholarship portfolio, developing programs, events, funding opportunities, and partnerships to support community university partnerships that involve research and teaching. Additionally, she served as a resource for many individual consultations with students, instructors, faculty members, and community partners to assist them in building excellent engaged scholarship courses and projects that focused on justice and equity. Currently, she is supporting undergraduates interested in social innovation and social entrepreneurship through civic society and community studies coursework. Outside of academia, she works as a horse training and riding instructor.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:03:06]:

Cory Sprinkel and Haley Madden, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Cory Sprinkel [00:03:11]:

Thank you for having us. Thank you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:03:13]:

I’m excited to have this conversation. And one of the things that I kept thinking about as I explored your work and your co author’s work was to be filled with hope and inspiration and what it can look like when we work in solidarity with others. So I will start though on a more depressing note. So before we get to the and there’s so much to be hopeful for. Tell us what it looks like when we don’t effectively prepare students to engage in this kind of equitable community partnerships. What are some of the dangers or some of the risks?

Cory Sprinkel [00:03:49]:

Yeah. Thanks for this question, Bonni, and and thanks for, again, having us. I think community engaged teaching and learning is can be such a powerful thing. And I think for a long time in the history or in the field of this approach to teaching, there’s just been this kind of unchecked assumption that just having students out in community means that things are gonna be great. The community partners will benefit, students will learn, and the instructor will have a good time. And that’s just not always the case. In fact, you know, ample research and and studies have shown that often unprepared students going on to communities, students who haven’t engaged kind of in in diverse situations or environments, there’s a lot of, opportunity for harm. There’s a lot of balance, a a misbalance of power kind of in how students might be showing up without any proper training or orientation to the community.

Cory Sprinkel [00:04:40]:

And then instructors haven’t always taken on that role. And so I think that’s that’s a couple of things to name. Curious if Hailey has things to contribute to.

Haley Madden [00:04:48]:

Yeah. And this is such a a great question because we, as community engagement professionals, were seeing the effects of students being ill prepared, hearing about it from our community partners, from instructors, and sometimes even frustrations from students. And that’s what led us to develop this work. I think this work, like, the the field or the, like, growing field of community engagement preparation for students started at least at our university, University of Wisconsin Madison back in 2006 with one of the first studies of community partner experiences and community engagement that resulted in the book, The Unheard Voices, being published, which was, yeah, really a novel approach at that time. And that’s where we first started to hear about community partners being unhappy with students. We did a follow-up to that work in 2016 with another community based research project and the UW Madison Civic Action Plan, which was we put together a large large committee put together at the request of campus compact to learn about what does UW Madison need to do better in community in the community engagement field. And both of those projects showed that we needed to prepare students better. So this was feedback we were hearing from our partners, from our students, from our instructors.

Haley Madden [00:06:04]:

And, unfortunately, like, we also got feedback from instructors who said, I can’t use a community based learning approach anymore. My community partners won’t work with me. And so we had this issue of students showing up with these really good intentions. They were enthusiastic. They wanted to do good work in the world, and instructors who wanted to support them, and they didn’t quite know how. And they were running into kind of the same issues over and over again, which were a lack of, like, intellectual and cultural humility among students, the inability to engage across, like, racial and ethnic and cultural differences, not understanding community context and understanding how nonprofits worked or how community organizations worked. And so from that feedback, we were able like, from all of this evidence that, oh, there’s there’s something needed here. We were able to start to develop this work.

Haley Madden [00:06:54]:

And I think, Cory, your position your initial position as community engagement preparation specialist, I think that is maybe the first such position in the country. And now there’s more more interest in that, but it’s, yeah, really led us to, I think, make some positive change on our campus.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:07:10]:

I’ve been revisiting Stephen Brookfield’s book. It’s called on becoming a critically reflective teacher, and it’s come with some collaboration I’ve been doing with Alexis Pierce Caudill. One of the things we’ve been discussing in different presentations that we’ve been giving together in workshops is his grouping of assumptions that we can make. And I think this will you’ll probably be able to relate to one of them as, like, the perfect ten myth. My first job out of college, I was rated on a scale of 1 to 10 almost every day of my job, so I could really relate to sometimes those kinds of feelings bubbling up in me even all these decades later. But one of the assumptions that comes up that re very much relates to what you just said, Haley, is this myth that we both can be in control of everything that happens within our classroom, and even that we ought to be in control of everything that happens. So you’re both describing very real concerns, and especially when some of people listening might have gone and really spent their careers building these relationships and then how scary it can feel. And, hopefully, it’s coming from a place of humility where it’s like, I don’t know that I could do enough to get us to where we would need to be in order to produce the kind of benefits we’d wanna see.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:08:31]:

So we’re gonna go from a place of despair and fear, and we’re gonna very quickly move into a space of hope and inspiration. I just love to have each of you share why take the risks then. I mean, because even no matter how much we might use the strategies that you describe, there’s still gonna be those risks. We just wanna mitigate them in the ways that we can, but there still is that risk. So I I am gonna invite first, Corey, why don’t you share with us a a little bit about an example of a powerful community engagement experience that you’ve witnessed just to kind of show us why it’s gonna be worth it for us to think about doing some of these strategies that you described.

Cory Sprinkel [00:09:11]:

Yeah. Definitely. And I think I’ll I’ll set a little context to just for listeners who who might not be familiar with centers like ours that are focused on community engagement. I do some teaching, but a lot of my work is is in some ways considered administrative and and doing a lot of facilitating of connections and stuff. So I do a lot of course supports and have maybe some less, fewer hands on experiences with students in community settings. But one thing that does come up for me is, like, a really impactful story. Couple years ago, a psychology professor who I’ve worked with a few times, her name’s Patti Coffey. She teaches a course on, issues in prisoner reentry.

Cory Sprinkel [00:09:47]:

And so students in this course are working with a community organization that focuses on that transition from prison back into society and working in resources and materials that can kind of help support those who are experiencing that transition. I was able to go and guest speak to that course a couple of years ago after we had definitely solidified that preparation curriculum. And I received an email from that instructor, at the end of the semester with a reflection from a student who had said that they were a 5th year senior. And in their 5 years, they had never really had an instructor or a guest speaker talk about what it means to be a good human being. And, I mean, that’s one of those things you would wanna, like, frame out. It’s in a special email folder for me. It’s, you know, you wanna frame it and put it up. But it’s also mind blowing that so few of our students are maybe being having the opportunity to engage in these conversations and think about now that you have this academic knowledge, like, what do you do with it in the world that is impactful, and how can you use it to improve the lives of others? We’re fortunate in some ways to be at the University of Wisconsin Madison, which has its history of this concept called the Wisconsin Idea, which is in essence that the benefits of the university should reach the boundaries of the state.

Cory Sprinkel [00:10:59]:

And of course, as the university has grown over the years, reaching further to to really think about what is public education and and how should that show up in the lives of of our students and in in the communities that are impacted by our institutions.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:11:12]:

Oh, thank you so much. That is an email where you just, that’s gonna get that’s gonna go in the frame or the box or whatever metaphor, the treasure box that we wanna use. So, Haley, what’s coming to mind for you?

Haley Madden [00:11:24]:

Cory, I actually thought of that quote from that student because I think about it a lot in relationship to this curriculum, and I think that’s some of the power of this curriculum. A story that you know, we’re talking a lot about some of the the harm students can do and trying to be very careful as we’re sending students into community, and I think we tread we tread this line of wanting to do the best we can on the academic side when we’re going into community spaces. And, like, I know too that when we do community engagement well, it can be really transformative, impactful for everybody involved and hopefully making our community stronger. So a story I have was from probably about 10 years ago when I first started as a graduate assistant at the Morgridge Center. I got a call from a community partner who was actually a parent who I knew from my days of being an elementary school student at, elementary school who now needed some support with their school garden. So I went back to my old elementary school, talked with this this community member who I’ve known since I was a kid, and learned about their interest in getting more support for their school garden. And I was able to go back to campus, talk with a colleague and a friend in the planning department who was doing a lot of work on school gardens and make that match, and it fit perfectly. Like, the the school got what they needed, students got the opportunity, UW students got the opportunity to learn in community, and everybody, you know, was flourishing in this partnership, which is part of a larger network of school garden work across the city of Madison.

Haley Madden [00:13:01]:

And so for me, that was really just such a nice example of what things can look like when community engagement is done well, and that this is really something of value that we should keep working on. And that instructor is still teaching at UW Madison and has, you know, worked with the Morgridge Center for for many years. And I think his mindset is so powerful in working with students because he’s always try he’s been doing community work his whole career. He’s always trying to learn how to do this better, how to enter community spaces in a more humble way, how to learn from community and cocreate knowledge together. And I think just that approach and that mindset is going to to really go such a long way.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:13:44]:

I know that you have approached this work in both a I think about often as in terms of an art and a science, so there’s research around it. But then there’s also the the treasures that you get, like that email that you mentioned. So it’s so emblematic of both of those dynamics. Talk a little bit more about feedback from students overall, whether, you know, this is research that you’ve conducted or any anecdotal feedback that you’d like to share.

Cory Sprinkel [00:14:11]:

Yeah. I think we don’t we haven’t really published anything on the assessments that we’ve done of the curriculum, but I’ve done some internal evaluation of and feedback from students who go through these these modules on their kind of self reported, takeaways. And it really is a lot of drawing that connection and and just thinking outside of the campus bubble that that campuses are really good at building. And and in all these ways, you know, you see students who, maybe are taking the modules after they’ve already learned a little bit more about the community and the court and the context of the class. And they students will say things like, I didn’t even know this existed in Madison. Just this ability to, like, broaden their lens, to see them be able to connect things to their other courses, and I think in that really practical and applied way. And then just that that personal piece of whether it’s giving them career insight and how they wanna work with others or or what an impactful working environment is that they participate in that might inform what they’re looking for in the future, all those sorts of things, and their ability to to think about their own citizenship and commitments to communities that they care about that might not even be tied to the course, but how those lessons are transferable. I think it’s just so huge.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:15:19]:

Is anything coming to mind for you, Haley?

Haley Madden [00:15:22]:

Yeah. Cory said a lot. I’ll just add that the curriculum has gotten really positive feedback. And I think even if instructors are just using, like, one concept or one module, they have found it to be really helpful. And the feedback from students has been really good as well. Like as Cory said, I think students are learning how to be better people, and they’re getting skills that that they’re maybe just not getting in their other classes that will really be helpful for them as they’re learning how to be citizens in whatever community they’re going into and in our global, global community. But it’s students really do want to continue working on these skills and how to how to work across difference, how to have more self awareness. And so I think it’s been really a good a good push forward to keep keep things going knowing that it is having a a positive impact on our campus.

Cory Sprinkel [00:16:13]:

And, yeah, I’ll just add. I haven’t figured out a good way to better frame this word that that isn’t so immediately biased, but like soft skills. This is really what we’re teaching. And I, again, I don’t love love that term, but student reflections on on the importance of empathy or just listening. I mean, we don’t teach listening as a scholarly discipline, unless you’re really, you know, deep in the teaching and learning curriculum or or other disciplines. But I mean, many we’ve all been in situations currently as adults in full time careers where we know we’re not being listened to. And we know that folks don’t have, We encounter folks who don’t have those skills. And if we’re not building up students who know how to listen to others before just trying to take the knowledge that they think they have and and kind of force it onto someone else, then we’re really doing a disservice to students and our communities.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:17:00]:

I as you were sharing that, it just is making me think of so many varied perspectives on artificial intelligence. I I don’t think I’ve met anyone who doesn’t agree with this point that that cultivating empathy and cultivating the ability to show up in the fullness of our ourselves and and to facilitate others being able to do so, particularly through deep, curious listening. I haven’t heard anyone who’s saying, nope, but that’s not gonna become more and more important, I mean, as if it isn’t extremely vital now. So one thing that I I we were talking earlier just about some of the downsides of what happens when we don’t equip students in this way and some of the challenges in order to do that. I was particularly interest I’m always interested in in anything having to do with failure because so often we might look at work like yours, and we only see the what it looks like when it’s finished, but we don’t see the underside. I always think about a tapestry. If you turn around and look at the back, all the knots and, you know, some of the ways we might cover up, you know, some of our mistakes, that kind of a thing. But you have a lot more of a transparency in terms of what that failure might look like, and I sorry, I’m I’m gonna I’m promised I’m getting to a question here, but I also think about so much of the research that looks at why don’t people try some of these strategies, and it’s often that fear of failure, and it’s so so relatable.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:18:35]:

So what advice do you have, and do you draw from the collaborators that you had on this project of what we might learn from failure and asking ourselves why didn’t that work?

Cory Sprinkel [00:18:46]:

Well, I’ll I’ll give some answers then, and then I might pass to Haley for a specific answer, because I think you’ll know more on this on this example that I’m gonna share than than I will. But, one, I think I really think about framing learning from failure, both thinking about students and how they encounter failure. So we often emphasize, the importance to orienting towards a lifelong learning orientation, recognizing that failure is just it’s gonna happen, especially when we’re working with others. Conflict will arise. Things will have to be flexible and change because that is the nature of our world. And and how do we ensure that students are able to handle change and and and reflect and still learn from failure and and take something useful out of it? And then for, for researchers and faculty, yes. As in the same vein, there will be failures and lessons learned at any point in any project. And I think it’s to really be open to your collaborators, to community partners, and in those feedback loops and cycles to understand what is it gonna take to sustain this relationship and maintain a a healthy dynamic moving forward.

Cory Sprinkel [00:19:51]:

Those things are always a negotiation and flux. The specific example that I wanted to pass to Haley is thinking about our friends over in the Center For Healthy Minds and Mike Koenigs, who reflect frequently on a grant proposal that they submitted, where community was not centered in their research, and they got some feedback that I think really changed their whole approach.

Haley Madden [00:20:12]:

Yeah. That’s thanks, Cory. And I think there was some feedback they actually got from the Morgridge Center, and there’s feedback they got from other they were some from other funding agencies. And I’ll talk a little bit about they applied this is a group of researchers who is focusing focusing really on racial justice and especially racial racial justice in incarceration and for folks who have been involved in the criminal justice system. And they applied for yeah. Yeah, they applied for a grant from us to do some research that was to support the black community in Madison. If you’re familiar with the the context of Dane County, Dane County has some pretty significant racial disparities as does, I think, Wisconsin generally. And these researchers, really well intentioned, wanted to improve relationships between the black community in Madison and, like, criminal justice generally, but I think police specifically.

Haley Madden [00:21:09]:

And so their idea to support the black community was to train police officers in mindfulness meditation. As we know, like, meditation and mindfulness techniques are really powerful and can be really helpful. And their focus was on the black community in Madison who was not consulted as part of this work. And if we would ask folks in that community, mindfulness training for police might not be the first thing that they would think of to create a more just community in Madison. And so they got that feedback from us, and they got, I think, additional feedback from community partners and started to really think more critically about their community engagement work, started to do that really important work, important work, as Cory has said about listening, listening to their community partners, showing up without preconceived ideas and assumptions, and started to build their research and teaching, portfolio around what the community was interested in. So they had the humility, the awareness, the care, and the empathy to to shift what they were doing in a really cool way. And now they have a variety of partnerships that are doing really good things. So and they the other thing and then, you know, we’re speaking about this on a podcast.

Haley Madden [00:22:23]:

They tell this story in conferences. They tell the story of their partnership really openly because they want others to learn from it. And I think that’s an academic flaw. We don’t talk about failure. We’re not publishing very frequently about failures. So there’s this this really big bias that we have in our culture that they’re trying to change. And Cory is exactly right. Like, as we’re supporting folks and instructors in doing this community engagement preparation work and engaging in difficult I mean, possibly difficult conversations or activities with students, failure is gonna be part of it.

Haley Madden [00:22:55]:

We’re gonna mess up. We’re gonna make mistakes. That’s part of life, and that’s okay. We do the best we can with what we have and what we know. And when we know better, we can do better. I know there are parts of our curriculum in the community engagement preparation curriculum when we first developed them. They’re pretty outdated now. We had students one activity that we did with students many years ago was a privilege walk that ended up with students of more privilege at the front of the room, students of less privilege at at the back of the room, and then we could all look at each other and really see racial socioeconomic divides in the students.

Haley Madden [00:23:29]:

Nobody felt great about it, and it was it’s actually a more harmful activity. As we learned more, we updated our curriculum. And I’m sure that this curriculum and this area of study will continue to be updated as we know more. But if we don’t try, we’re not gonna get anywhere. And we can also try our best to be accountable and responsible in what we’re doing and put our relationships with each other first and learn from the mistakes we make so that we can go make better mistakes when we try new things. But this work feels so critical right now in particular. Like, we have to learn how to work and talk across difference. In a lot of ways, I think if we’re going, yeah, to keep moving forward as community and as society.

Haley Madden [00:24:10]:

So just trying to normalize that failure will be a part of it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:14]:

Thank you both so much for those powerful reflections. I, yeah, kept being reminded of so many past guests who have said failure is data. Failure is data. And but as you said, Haley, it can be so hard because it doesn’t it it gets pretty hidden. If you’re not particularly curious about it, it can be very hard to see, and then it just feels like you’re the only one who’s experiencing it when in fact it is a part of being human. One thing that I left in in preparing for today’s conversation, being challenged by and inspired by was the work that you did. And I feel like I haven’t even maybe quite skimmed the surface here, so I’m gonna ask a unfair question as we wrap up this part of the episode together. How on earth or or or or what advice do you have for people to realize that learning doesn’t happen within individual class sessions and neat and tidy packages within a class itself that that it’s it’s happening, but but then at the same time, we just can’t wait and be patient and, you know, oh, okay.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:25:24]:

Well, that doesn’t happen. Learning to listen, Corry, doesn’t happen until year 4, so we’ll see you back in year 4. And and I think particularly as you might wanna reflect a little bit more on the curriculum that you developed, and, by the way, it is available to people too. Correct? Am I I’m remembering that correctly. I was making sure. So we should tell people first maybe how to get their hands on the curriculum, and then also let’s share a little bit about what kinds of insights did you glean by by thinking about designing this in a way that could be flexible and adaptable enough to go beyond the time space continuum. How’s that for a for an introduction? Who would like to go first on this one? Any thoughts here?

Cory Sprinkel [00:26:07]:

I’ll I’ll at least start with how to access the material, and then I’ll try to unpack that larger that larger question. Yeah. So the, the material from the book preparing students to engage in, in equitable community partnerships exists on Canvas comments. So if folks are Canvas users, you can search community engagement preparation series, and you can find the those online modules available and to be imported into other classes. The caveat is it is pretty Madison focused. And often this this sort of material should be context based to your specific location or communities that you’re working with. But it is there as a good kind of model or something to look at. And then there should be also be materials available through our publisher, Temple University.

Cory Sprinkel [00:26:50]:

I think it’s called Temple Scholar Share is their online resource deposit that you can look for our materials in as well?

Haley Madden [00:26:58]:

Yeah. So as we’ve been talking about community engagement preparation over the years, we, of course, is that, oh, wouldn’t it be nice if students could take a semester long class just about this or even a year long class that would be like a prerequisite before they go and do any community engaged work. Well, we’re a big campus getting bigger every day. Everyone’s doing their own thing, and it looks real different every little little corner of campus. So that’s not necessarily realistic. So we are a big believer in, like, do what you can with what you have and just start wherever you’re at. And because of the way this curriculum is set up, instructors can request a workshop. You know, they can request to to work with someone personally or virtually in their classroom.

Haley Madden [00:27:41]:

They can import one little piece of the Canvas module. They can use all of it. So there’s so many different flexible ways that it can be used. And we are of the mindset, I think, that every little bit is helpful. And, hopefully, you know, if more folks are thinking about this in the community engagement realm, students

Bonni Stachowiak [00:28:01]:

will

Haley Madden [00:28:01]:

get a little bit of exposure here and there to these concepts and be able to build on that knowledge to scaffold their learning so that at the end of their 4 or 5 years, as undergrads, they have been hearing enough about these concepts and been be have been able to engage with them that they’ll have a new understanding. And I think really too, as Cory said earlier, have the mindset of being a lifelong learner and being interested in their own self development, interested in the world around them to be a good community member and a good neighbor and friend and all the other, hats they’re gonna wear, and be committed to making the world a more socially just and equitable place, which is really like our goal for everybody. So yeah. I know I, right now, am in a teaching role and we’re not doing any community engagement work as part of this class. But I am using little bits of this curriculum, fitting it in where it makes sense because I think these topics are so universal that they definitely can be sprinkled in throughout our curriculum. And, yeah, every little bit should help.

Cory Sprinkel [00:29:04]:

Yeah. And I’ll just add a couple of things. Yeah. If even if community engagement doesn’t feel like a a thing that’s accessible to you now in your in your career, where you’re at, or or what context you’re in, As Haley just said, a lot of the material is is gonna fit well in a lot of courses. I think, you know, we talk about course norms, just as I heard a guest recently on the podcast mention as well. Those things are useful in so many classroom contexts. Contentious conversations are gonna happen in a number of different environments in classrooms, and we also talk about those things and strategies for for engaging there. So I’ll say that.

Cory Sprinkel [00:29:38]:

And then to get back to to to the question, I think, yeah, as as Haley was saying, thinking I think about this in terms of, yeah, the the student career to student path. So thinking about it’s useful to think about it in your classroom and what specifically is working and and what are those opportunities to integrate. A recent guest was talking about critical reflection. And so you can’t just tell students to reflect. You actually need to give some clear guidance, think about feedback, model reflection, and vulnerability, and how you talk about your own learning, especially around personal interpersonal relationships. Right? Looks looks very different. Talk about that learning than book learning. But then, also, you know, if you are in department meetings and have the opportunity to think about this in the scope of of a major or or or the curriculum, What how can you maybe scaffold some of this in through different pieces so that if students are seniors and taking a capstone, that they have some good project management skills, the ability to listen, think about relationships, mapping power, and and positionality in that project.

Cory Sprinkel [00:30:42]:

But if they’re a 1st year, maybe it is just how to understand community context and think about community as its own curricular piece, looking at local news or or bringing in local perspectives or, looking at the work of different organizations. So it doesn’t all have to be at one time and in one perfect stellar class. I think as Haley said, and as a as a colleague of ours often shares, just let, plant a 1000000 seeds, let a 1000000 flowers bloom, and and see what works. And we think this I feel confident that this work is is really rooted in cultivating healthy, diverse, and and, transformative classroom environments. And so whatever you can bring in, I think, will will have an impact.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:24]:

Well, I’m loving that plant a 1000000 seeds. Let a 1000000 flowers bloom. That is much better than my time space continuum analogy. So thank you for for helping us finish this part of that conversation with such a beautiful analogy, and thanks to your colleague for that as well. My recommendation is that we celebrate 85th birthdays. So this comes for me out of the work of Stephen Covey. I am once again teaching a class. It’s an elective, a management elective, called personal leadership and productivity.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:54]:

We We used to read the book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and then a book called Getting Things Done, but I, against my better judgment, decided to burn the class to the ground once again this semester, so I’m barely keeping 2 weeks ahead of the students, but I’m so grateful. And one of the exercises, if you’ve ever read 7 Habits, is he offers that we might celebrate our 85th birthday in advance or to or and or to write our own eulogy, and they both are very powerful reflections. This is an entirely online class, and it is taught with our somewhat unique HyFlex model where students can come to Zoom on Monday afternoons if they would like, or they can take it entirely asynchronously. And I have a very large percentage of athletes in the class this time as compared to when I’ve taught it previously. And so I I’m having them I’m having them go through the class, and one of the things was to build this collage and then write a reflection on their 85th birthday and then to record themselves talking about it. And then because we’re about to switch over to the more practical parts of the class, email management, calendar management. That’s some technical types of things. I’m having them do a couple things simultaneously.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:33:18]:

So sign up to celebrate your 85th birthday. So you just planned it, but now I want you to sign up for a time to celebrate it. And there were a few times this week that they could either come to the Zoom or they could come on campus because many of them are on campus. And so the the athletes were able to do that as were the others that that don’t normally come to the Zoom sessions. And so a young woman from our softball team signed up. She was the only one to sign up for this one time. So rather than meet in the centralized place we had agreed with, my friend and I, who was helping me celebrate, we just walked over to the softball field, and it was the funniest thing because we ended up bumping into a couple of the other players on our way over and they’re like, what are you doing? They they don’t know us, you know, that we’re pulling this big wagon with birthday balloons. Well, we’re here to celebrate her birthday.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:06]:

And they’re like, her birthday is not until May. What are you talking about? Well, this is actually her 85th birthday, and we had so much fun. And she was so excited. She ends up walking down. The whole team is cheering for her. And we all ended up singing her happy birthday. By the way, my friend got it on video. So it’ll be like one of those treasures like the email, Cory, that you talked about earlier.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:28]:

And I’m doing all the assignments along with them, so I also celebrated my 85th birthday. And what a wonderful opportunity, regardless of how old we are, to reflect on our sense of meaning, our sense of purpose, and be able to do that in a shared way. And and before I pass it over for each of you to recommend things, Cory, you were kinda reminding me a little bit of this earlier. I I sometimes get saddened, and I sometimes get angry. Just how are we gonna do this with as divided as we are and with these different perspectives where I think, how can we not even agree on this one thing? I will tell you there is a lot of agreement if you get out as far as 85th birthdays as a society and the value of humanity, the just the value of humans. And so I can’t recommend it enough, even if you just celebrate your own 85th birthday or you wanna get a group of friends to celebrate an 85th birthday, and to let yourself just be silly and ridiculous. By the way, some of the other birthdays was, we we did one in the provost office. I just love I know he’s he could be silly right along with me.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:34]:

We both have these giant ridiculous birthday hats on, sing ins to them and everything, so I just can’t recommend it enough. I’m gonna say celebrate 85th birthdays, and I’m gonna pass it over to Hailey forever whatever you would like to recommend today.

Haley Madden [00:35:49]:

I don’t know that I can follow that up with anything, that will remotely add as much value. That is such a lovely story. Thank you for sharing. And such a great exercise. I’m like, how can I integrate that into my class or maybe my life or maybe I need to schedule 85th birthday parties for all

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:05]:

of my

Haley Madden [00:36:05]:

loved ones now? That’s so great. I’m going to recommend a book I just recently read, which maybe many other folks have read too. But if not, go read it. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. She’s a fantastic writer. She’s just a a really, really great writer. It’s a large book, and I flew through it in a few days. She writes about Appalachia and lives in Appalachia.

Haley Madden [00:36:30]:

And I think, again, given our political moment, given what’s happened, you know, the time of that we’re talking together, with hurricane Helene causing so much devastation in that region. Yeah. A really, really transformative read. So, yeah, that’s my recommendation.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:49]:

Thank you so much. I haven’t read any of her books, I think, maybe in decades. I but I’m I’m gonna have to go back and look and see which one it is. But as soon as you said it, I thought, I’m kinda looking for a book that I could just get absorbed in. I think I just know what got added to my list.

Haley Madden [00:37:05]:

Good. Excellent.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:37:06]:

Thank you so much. And, Corey, what do you have to recommend today?

Cory Sprinkel [00:37:10]:

No. These are both such good recommendations. I try to pick something completely removed from the academics or our our current climate, but I’m gonna do a last minute switch. I’ve been watching there’s a lot of media hype around the show, Heartstopper, which I had not watched. And it’s basically like a, coming of age, coming out tale of these high school boys who who have a, you know, become dating and have crushes on each other. And it it is taking me back to high school in in really nice ways, though, not in all the the toxic ways. And it’s been a little like, I’ve had a couple teary eyed moments and and whatnot watching, and it’s very, very cute and really well done. And it just got a great cast, and I’ve been I’ve been really taken a lot out of that show.

Cory Sprinkel [00:37:53]:

So that’s a very fun recommendation. Heartstopper on Netflix.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:37:56]:

Oh, thank you both so much for these recommendations. Some people mentioned to me how hard it is to come up with a recommendation for the show that especially if they’ve been on before. They that’s the first thing that they get nervous about. You know? Oh my gosh. What am I gonna recommend? And I think, well, you get nervous about recommending. I get nervous to hear them all because all I wanna do is just, sorry, fellow coworkers, just quit my job and just start working through the recommendations list and never stop because so much good stuff gets recommended. What an absolute joy it has been to get connected with you both. I’m leaving this conversation filled with hope and challenge in the best ways possible, and thank you for the invitation that you’ve made to all of us to do the same.

Haley Madden [00:38:36]:

Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk with you and share a little bit about the work we’ve been really lucky to be able to do.

Cory Sprinkel [00:38:44]:

Yeah. Thank you so much, Bonni.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:48]:

Thank you so much to Cory Sprinkel and Haley Madden for joining me for today’s episode. 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 amazing Sierra Priest. Thanks so much to each one of you for listening. If you’ve yet to sign up for the weekly updates from Teaching in Higher Ed, head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You’ll receive the most recent episodes show notes as well as some other resources that don’t show up in the regular feed. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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