[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 298 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, David Peña-Guzmán joins me to discuss restoring the love of reading.

[music]

[00:00:13] Recording: Produced by Innovate Learning maximizing human potential.

[music]

[00:00:23] Bonni: Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in higher ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak. 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.

David M. Peña-Guzmán is an Assistant Professor in Humanities and liberal studies at San Francisco State University. Dr. Peña-Guzmán received his BA in philosophy and women’s studies from the University of Nevada, Reno and his MA and PhD in philosophy from Emory University. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Evolutionary Ecology and ethical conservation at Lorentien University and at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at John Hopkins University.

At San Francisco State University, he regularly teaches courses in philosophy, the History and Philosophy of Science and animal studies. His research has appeared in many journals. He’s also the co-author ofChimpanzee Rights: the Philosophers’ Brief. As an educator, he is interested in innovative pedagogies that challenge that traditional student-teacher dynamic as you’ll definitely hear in this interview. David, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:55] David M. Peña-Guzmán: Well, thank you for having me.

[00:01:57] Bonni: You wrote to me such a long time ago, and I was excited about your work and told you that your idea went wandered into my ideas list and somehow all these years later it’s now emerged. Isn’t that funny where things from our past can come right into our present time. I’m so glad you could spend some time with me today. This is an idea and these are approaches that have been happening for quite some time for you. I love your approach and the way that you think about teaching. Tell me about when you first started to discover your students really lacked that joy of reading.

[00:02:32] David: Well, to be honest it all began with a realization that it was not really just my students but also me who were struggling with reading. I’m in my early 30s. I am border line Millennial and I grew up with a lot of technology. At some point, a couple of years ago, I began to think about my own reading habits and I began to notice the extent to which my own reliance on technology was getting in the way of my reading. Here I am, a college professor, realizing that I am doing the very same things that sometimes I get frustrated when I find out that my students do.

What are those things? Constantly checking your phone when reading, checking Facebook, checking Twitter, going online, and constantly having a sea of distractions that interrupt your experience of a book, of an article, of a newspaper and then walking away at the end of that experience not really being able to retain as much as you think you should. When I realized that this was a problem for me, I thought to myself, “There’s got to be a shared experience of frustration and maybe there could be a class that targets the source of the problem”. That’s how I came up with this idea of creating a class that would focus on the rediscovery of reading.

[00:04:05] Bonni: I’ve had such similar experiences to you and I realized that the story I’m about to tell is quite anecdotal. This is not part of some formal research program but I had a hard time at the end of 2019 reaching my what I consider to be a modest goal of reading 24 books in 2019. I had to really rush at the end in order to finish that goal. It made me really think a lot about, as you said, I tend to read a lot of RSS feeds so lots of headlines from lots of different places and I picture my brain gets really, really active and very energized but I’m not going deep on any of those things.

By the way, I think those things are valuable I just don’t think if that’s the only kind of reading we’re doing we’re necessarily expanding our minds as much as we might. I experimented in the month of January 2020 with instilling a habit. Instead of thinking as much about my goal of reading, I thought about changing my habits. I said that four times a week, I was going to take my Kindle to bed to read instead of my iPad.

You spoke about all those distractions that are there. Just one tap away and all of a sudden, there’s a world of all these things happening and instead– In January 2020, I read 11 books. I tracked my reading on good reads and it’s going, “What are you doing here? You’re so close to achieving your goal for the entire year”. It really can make a difference when we change our habits. You’ve gone a step further, David. Instead of trying to create a new habit for yourself, to create an in a new habit for your students would you talk a little bit about how the early, early iterations started for you? Where did you begin?

[00:05:47] David: You’re right that there are different kinds of reading. For example, when I’m doing research for a publication, I read a lot of online articles and

I need to move through that information very quickly, lots of headlines lots of abstracts, and lots of perusing very quickly through files. There is a value in that multitasking rapid approach to information processing but that only gets you certain things. One of the things that I realized that I was missing was that in-depth sustained engagement with a text especially a book that you can only get when you change the material conditions under which you briefed.

The earliest iteration of the class took the form of me bringing a number of students into a classroom and asking them to engage in this experimental approach to higher ed that zoomed in on trying to create an environment that was conducive to that long protracted act of reading. For example, the first day that we met in the class that I taught exactly a year ago in the Spring of 2019, I told my students, “We’re doing something that I haven’t done before with a class, and we’re going to see how it goes. The first day what we’re going to do is we’re just going to read a book for about three hours without talking to one another, without breaking away from our desks and let’s see what happens”.

That’s what we did. Over the course of the semester, I got feedback from the students about what worked, about what didn’t work, and so, we ended up making some structural adjustments to the class. By the end of the semester, we settled on a slightly different format that was much more conducive to the experience that I wanted to cultivate in the classroom. It really began with a very conscious effort to minimize the effect of technology during the act of reading.

[00:07:56] Bonni: In your case, were they holding physical books in their hands and that helped them to step away from the technology a bit?

[00:08:04] David: Yes. I asked my students to have physical copies of the readings that I assigned but I also told them that if any of them needed to use a computer or some form of screen, a phone to read that’s also okay as long as they turn off the Wi-Fi to create that disconnect from social media. There were a couple of students who, for a variety of reasons, chose to use a screen to read the materials that I assigned and that’s perfectly fine with me.

What we realized is that what makes the difference in the experience of reading is not necessarily whether you’re reading with a physical book or on a screen but whether you’re disconnecting from those sources of distraction that very slowly but systematically encroach upon you if you’re connected to your email, to your Facebook et cetera.

[00:09:03] Bonni: This last semester I was talking not about reading but about the ways in which notifications in our phones and other devices can really distract us from being fully present. I was really struck by one of the young men. By the way, on things like this, I don’t pretend that I have all the right answers on these things, but I was making a note of how my own biases about how easy it is for us to disconnect these choices that we make. With this young man’s story talking about his grandmother had once been taken advantage of. Someone had tried to phone her house, and they tried to get your information from your social security number and all that stuff.

He said, “I could just never disconnect in the way that you’re describing. I could never not get these notifications because–” He was really describing a relationship with his family

[00:10:00] Bonni: that I realized that wasn’t really taken into consideration when I was having them explore what this idea might look like. Did you find any of that in terms of asking the students to disconnect for these three hours that there were any concerns that they had around things like that, that they brought up with you?

[00:10:16] David: As a professor, I think it’s important to be very mindful of the fact that my students’ lives are infinitely more complex than I can ever imagine. They have multiple jobs, they have competing demands on their attention. They have things they have to do for other professors, for me, for endless other actors in their lives. I always give my students as much autonomy as they possibly can in my classroom. Although I very strongly encourage students to disconnect for a period of time in order to read, at no point that I police that actively.

If a student, for example, was going through a difficult time and this did happen with one of my students who had a family member in the hospital, she spoke to me and said, I cannot disconnect, I will do my best to do the reading but it may be that I have to leave in the middle of class for 10, 20, maybe 20 minutes, maybe two hours. That’s that.

To me, I think students are interested in exploring new ways to learn, new ways to read but it is also the case that it’s very difficult to force a specific model as if it’s a universal cure for a very widespread phenomenon. I did have students who had difficulty disconnecting at certain times for personal reasons, but I never had a student who had difficulties disconnecting at all in the first place, if that makes sense.

In fact, one of the things that I found most interesting and revealing about this experience was how excited the students themselves were to have this experience because, for many of them, their relationship to technology is a problem on their own terms. Many of them are struggling with this onslaught of notifications and emails and social media pings that they don’t really know how to navigate through very well. The vast majority of my students really welcomed actually, this opportunity for disengagement.

[00:12:38] Bonni: What you’re describing here is such a reflection of your teaching philosophy. You talk about challenging the traditional student-teacher dynamic. This wasn’t you trying to force a group of students to do something they didn’t want to do, you really enveloped them in a vision for how reading could be different for them. Talk about the beginning of your class. This is one that you’ve now taught more than once at this point since the Spring of 2019 and have you done it again?

[00:13:08] David: I was hoping to teach it in the Spring of 2020, which is right now but I ended up being on sabbatical leave for research purposes. I’m hoping to teach it next year for the second time. As of now, there is only the pilot class.

[00:13:23] Bonni: Tell us about the beginning then, how did you envelop them in this vision for how reading could be different for them?

[00:13:31] David: The first thing that I did in the class and this happened also on the first day is that I was extremely candid with them about the fact that my relationship to reading has recently become a problem for just like I assume, maybe it was a problem for them. I wanted to establish a personal connection, and it really put us on a horizontal playing field. Where I’m not the teacher that’s going to walk in with answers to questions that I’ve been studying for a long time. I’m rather one of a number of people who is walking into a room, sitting on a chair and trying to read a book for an extended period of time, and seeing how that feels.

By establishing that personal connection with them, and saying, “Look, I’m doing this with you, I’m going to go through the same experience as you and I’m going to be reading the same texts that you’ll be reading,” it really turned what is typically a vertical dynamic into a horizontal dynamic.

The second thing that we did as a group is in order to create an environment that was conducive to reading and here I’m thinking about the term enveloping that you used. One of the ways in which we created a space for reading is by literally creating an acoustic setting that brought us together.

We used a noise-canceling machine in the room that we would turn on at the beginning of the class to cancel out all ambient noise and for the next four and a half hours, we would sit in this room that had a very specific acoustic signature, that typical noise-canceling sound of [hums] and after a few minutes, it blends into the background and you literally get enveloped in this environment and you lose yourself in a book before you realize it.

[00:15:39] Bonni: When I went through my experiment in January that I was talking about, I did really find myself in the beginning resisting really, very much. It was hard to retrain my brain back to that reading. Then I just felt like I turned a corner and that all of a sudden, I became so immersed in what I was reading and it just captured my imagination in ways that it hadn’t in a long time. I have read articles, I will say, I’ve not studied immensely on this topic, but just how that really is possible in a relatively quick manner for our brains to readjust to different forms of reading.

I would picture it as just being able to get over that hump. Did you find that for yourself and did your students also experience that initial resistance, and then freeing up to being “better at this form of reading”?

[00:16:30] David: Yes. I think when you think about it, we have been reading most of us for a very long time. It’s a deeply, deeply ingrained habit. It’s not something that we just picked up last month or last year, we’ve been reading, presumably since we were children. It’s a habit that is part of who we are and it’s a habit that changes depending on the conditions that you create for its expression. When you change the material conditions under which you read, the habit expresses itself differently.

I think I can speak for myself, but I can also speak for some students who talk to me about this, we experience that original little hump of being nervous about, just being confronted with nothing but the book for a few hours but by the end of the very first day, I can say, the majority of us had sensed that feeling of getting lost in a book, and losing track of time, so that by the time the first class came to an end, a couple of my students said, “I don’t think I’ve read it uninterrupted like that in a very long time.”

All that it took was just something as simple as creating a space with a noise-canceling machine in which the internet was not allowed. That’s all that it. We felt it but we did get over it in the matter, I don’t know over the course of, say 30, 40 minutes, and suddenly we were cruising.

[00:18:12] Bonni: Silence also has played a big role in your pedagogical approach here. Would you speak about how silence came to be important in this process?

[00:18:22] David: The class began and the way in which it was presented to the students was as an exercise in mindful attentive reading. In order for reading to be mindful and attentive, of course, you need to cancel out other sources of distraction. This class was unique and it stands alone really, in all the classes that I’ve ever taught as a college professor, in that the vast majority of the time that I spent with my students was spent in silence and just think about how radical that is when compared to the classical model of education, in which a professor stands in the front of the classroom and sort of regurgitates information or dates or gives a lecture to a room of students who do nothing but listen.

Typically, education is understood to be an act of listening on the part of the students, and an act of speaking on the part of the professor. In this class, that model really gets turned around in so far as everybody occupies a position of silence. There is something very intimate about that. It’s hard to describe the experience of reading silently for four and a half hours with a group of other people, especially when those other people are your students because normally, the only time that students read, of course, is when they’re doing homework and that happens away from the classroom but here, it almost felt like a group of friends who get together to read a book in somebody’s living room.

The silence that was the bedrock for this experience was not just conducive to reading, but it was also conducive to a very different kind of teacher-student relationship. To be honest, I’m not sure that I have the language to describe what that felt like because it was very different and very new but the best way that I can describe it is that it really fostered a kind of intimacy, almost intellectual friendship with my students that I’ve only ever experienced in the past, with colleagues or friends from back in graduate school, where a group of graduate students would get together and read in somebody’s living room. This replicated an experienced that I’ve never actually had inside a classroom, certainly not with a professor.

[00:21:04] Bonni: I’m thinking back to, I’ve shared on a previous episode about attending a workshop for becoming a Hispanic serving institution. I got a certification, and one of the many, many exercises they had us do was to do a gallery walk, which many people will have heard of before with things hanging up on the wall, different things we had created or shared and they asked us to do that at one point in silence, to just walk around and see what we observed. Then we came back to our tables and they asked us to share what that was like. I thought for me, wonderful because it was nice to not have the social pressure to need to have something to put into words about everything I was seeing.

I found it refreshing but I was really surprised to see how many people found it terrifying and we probably were silent for, at the most four minutes and I don’t even think it felt that long but just to see the kind of anxiety, and as you were sharing your story, David, I think you’re absolutely right in terms of this being radical, I think of most of the time we might have students in silence, it would be because we’re giving them a test. Then being mindful of how much anxiety can be created for some of our students as they’re taking tests.

I could envision that there would have to be a sense of unlearning for some of your students to be able to experience that mindful attention without also experiencing the anxiety. Did you observe that in yourself or in any of your students, just the the need to unlearn and to have that silence feel safer to them?

[00:22:38] David: Yes, and I think the concept of anxiety really hits the nail on the head. I noticed two kinds of anxiety. One was the anxiety about silence, just about being in a room and worrying about whether you have the mental intellectual cognitive strength that maybe you think would be required for this exercise, I think and to say that we all experienced that at the beginning, including me. The first day for the first hour, I think most of us were on edge because we couldn’t quite focused on the book, constantly looking at other people, seeing how far the neighbor has advanced in the book in comparison to me, worrying about not making noise that could distract other people.

When I noticed this dynamic that was anxious, and you could sense the anxiety in the air, I broke the silence and I brought our attention to it and we processed it together in the moment, and I clarified to the students, “Look, this is not a race, this is not a competition. If you read 10 pages, wonderful, if you read 150, wonderful, my goal is just the experience.” And then after that, that anxiety about how much do I need to read really got taken out of the room by letting the students know that it is okay to go at their own pace.

I think that this does have to do with the trauma that our education system produces in students through testing mechanisms. I think you’re exactly right that most of the time students encounter this kind of environment, students in a classroom in silence, it’s very high stakes. One of the things that I tried to do early on was change the narrative about what it is that we’re doing.

The second source of anxiety that I noticed, and this really was an eye-opening thing for me, I didn’t realize how much trauma students have about reading. Students have memories that I never had but I suspect a lot of students had for very different reasons of falling a little bit behind maybe in elementary school in learning how to read, and then suddenly finding themselves falling farther and farther behind.

Students who were told maybe by a teacher at some point, that they weren’t good enough for reading or that they weren’t understanding enough or that they weren’t clever enough to interpret a text, those things leave an imprint and what I realized over the course of this semester, is just how many students are walking around with those imprints on their shoulders?

It sort of made me have a knot in my throat when I realized that for many students, the mere act of grabbing a book when they’re at home, triggers anxieties, from childhood, from there teenage years and so there is a lot of undoing that we have to do both in terms of what a silence space can mean, but also what students relationship to written text is. I don’t think that I, in any way succeeded at undoing those long histories of trauma with my students, but hopefully, I began a dialogue that can lead to the reworking of some of those tensions, especially the first day there was, you could cut that tension with a knife.

[00:26:41] Bonni: I appreciate your humility that you use to share that. Just thinking about instead of thinking the work has to be finished right in this arbitrary length of a class, instead that you opened up this pathway into, yes, it’s a thicket but you opened it up to them to be able to see where that path might take them in the future. I really appreciate the way in which you describe that process.

[00:27:03] David: Well, and I think especially– There is an image of a stoic professor that is just a genius and super talented about reading and about writing and about research and one of the things that students never stopped to consider for good reasons is that many of us in front of the classroom have some of the same anxieties that they have. I’m here thinking about the fact that in my own case, so I’ll speak for myself, I’m an ESL immigrant, English is not my first language, and I struggle with reading and with writing in a foreign language.

By now I’ve lived in the US for long enough that my relationship to my native tongue is also suddenly in question so I no longer know whether I feel more at home in one or the other, I just know that I feel a little bit off in both. When I read, I’ve always told my colleagues, I sometimes genuinely feel bad that I can’t read faster because of my relationship to English.

Sometimes I worry about not being a clear writer because I’m operating this language, and so I, as a professor, never share that with my class. but those are things that we might have in common in that when students learn that professors also have this sort of caring relationship with language with reading, with writing, it demystifies the process, and it gets rid of this myth that there are some people who are just naturally good at it, and some people who aren’t and so I think there’s a lot of work that us professors, us educators, us people in higher ed have to do to demystify our own activity, our own work, our own professions.

[00:29:06] Bonni: Did I hear you correctly to say that you don’t share this with your students? I’m surprised by that if I did hear correctly.

[00:29:13] David: I hadn’t before this class. This class changed a lot of things for me, one of which was how I think about what is appropriate and not appropriate to share in a classroom setting. I’m here talking about the challenges of learning and I think that there’s a lot of value in sharing those experiences that we professors also have when we don’t get the reading done, when we don’t quite understand a text, when we run out of time because those are the things that create a bond between a professor and a student that goes beyond just the transfer of information or the transfer of knowledge. Yes, I didn’t share those sorts of things with my classroom before, but I began with this class, and I have continued to do it since.

[00:30:10] Bonni: I’m considering the value of whatever any of us might have to share in terms of knowledge with our students versus the ability to see myself in another person and to see that that person struggles with some of the same things that I struggle and the value of providing that perspective to the students. It’s just unparalleled to think the ripple effect that you might have had just by sharing that about yourself. That’s a wonderful way for us to close this part of our conversation.

Before I get to the recommendations segment, I just wanted to thank today’s sponsor and that is Care/of. Care/of is a wellness brand that makes it easy for us to maintain our health goals with a customized vitamin plan. This is one of those things I would not have thought would have been as helpful to me as it has been. I have a confession to make. Before Care/of, I used to carry around my vitamins and a Kleenex, take them from the bathroom, the little drawer where they’re kept, put them in the Kleenex, take them with me.

Let me just say that if I forgot to take them for some reason, doesn’t really go through the washer and the dryer as well as one might hope, but in the case of Care/of, they sent out these individualized eco-friendly packs that are made of compostable films. They’re each so cute. They’re each adorable because they come personalized for me and I can just take that little pack with me and it’s a lot more transportable than the Kleenex method.

In order to figure out what should go in that pack, I needed a recommendation and so I took a short online quiz and you can too, and I answered some of the questions about my diet, my health goals, and my lifestyle, and they made some recommendations. What I like about it is you can take their recommendations, but you also can customize it for exactly what you need.

They ask questions on the online quiz about your sleep, about how much we work out, about do we follow any specialized diets or are we concerned about hair, skin and nail health, et cetera? They give a great set of recommendations that are very customizable, and it’s just an easy way to maintain the health goals that I have. I want to thank them for their sponsorship. If you’d like to take advantage of 50% off your first Care/of order, you can go over to takecareof.com and enter the code T-I-H-E, as in teaching in higher ed, T-I-H-E 50. Again, go over to takecareof.com and enter the code T-I-H-E 50.

Now that we’ve shared that part of the story, we get to get to the rather eclectic part of the show, and that is the recommendations segment and I have a couple of books that I’d like to share. I did mention reading quite a bit in January 2020. I have got some. Somehow, I’ve been doling them out because otherwise, I’d have to have a very long recommendation segment and someone like you would be like, “Wait a minute, didn’t you want to interview me for the show?”

[00:33:11] David: Oh, no, it’s fine if you have lots of recommendations.

[00:33:14] Bonni: Just today, I’ve got two. The first one, I’d seen it show up in so many places, Barack Obama recommended this book, as did Bill Gates. I just kept seeing it and seeing it. It’s called, Factfulness, and it’s by Hans Rosling. It’s not normally a book that I would read. It’s interesting that, David, as you were sharing your story, it’s probably a book that I would have thought, intellectually, I maybe wasn’t quite equipped for just in how it was described.

It turned out to be quite accessible, and really a real page-turner. The book, I’ll share actually first what Barack Obama said about it. “Factfulness, by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases. Bill Gates said, “One of the most important books I’ve ever read. An indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.”

I’ll give you one example. The book is co-authored too with two of his children. He showed a chart of the difference between men and women and their math scores. It’s staggering to look at, depressing to look at and think, “Oh, haven’t we come further than this?” He says, “Oh, no. This is a problem of perspective. If we actually zoom this chart out, he shows a second chart with a different scale. Then you can see that the differences are completely inconsequential, not statistically significant.

He uses a number of lenses like that to help us rid ourselves of our biases when we look at information and ask research questions. It’s a really beautifully written book, very easy read and it is a hopeful book too. He says that we’re in a better state than we might think today and has lots of evidence to back that up. I’d really encourage that.

The second one is in a completely different direction. Not a kind of book that I read very often, but I really did enjoy it. That is a book by Sophie Kinsella. I’ve never read her books before but she’s written quite a few of them. It’s called, My Not So Perfect Life. The description is part love story, part workplace drama. The witty critique of the false judgments we make in a social media-obsessed world. This is New York Times bestselling author Sophie Kinsella’s most timely and sharply observed novel yet.

Again, I had not read any of her books, I really enjoyed this one. It was fun to contemplate some of the social media questions and also the way that we misunderstand people when we don’t have a richer context with which to experience their communication. I just really enjoyed it. It’s a fun read, and I got through it really quick. David, I’m going to pass it over to you for your recommendations.

[00:36:12] David: Well, I have two recommendations. One is the last novel that I read, which is by a French Moroccan writer, Leila Slimani. The book was originally written in French since she’s a Francophone author, and it won the 2016 Goncourt prize, which is one of the oldest awards, I believe, in France for literature. It was translated into English as, The Perfect Nanny. It’s a book that tells the story of a nanny who works in the house of a relatively well to do middle-class family and burrows her way into the life of this family. At some point, something in the relationship breaks and she ends up killing both of the children in the family.

Now, I’m not giving anything away because the book begins by describing this event. Then it works itself backwards to tell the story of how we get there, and so it has a really interesting temporality where you begin in the first two pages with the ending and build the suspense to something that you already know. It has a similar structure to, I forget how it’s translated into English, but Chronicle of a Foretold Death by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, where you just begin with the event, and then the book proceeds backwards.

One of the things that’s really interesting from a sociological perspective, is that this book was based on a true story. There was a nanny here, I’m currently in Paris, and I believe it happened here in Paris, that murdered the children she was taking care of. She was a woman of color. Leila Slimani turns the racial dynamic around and tells the story of a White nanny who does the same, loosely following the details of the real-life case. There’s something interesting in that reversal because throughout the book, you actually identify with the White nanny, and so it’s this commentary about, who do we identify with and why?

How does that identification work in cases where the character that we identify with does something unthinkable? Anyway, it’s also a very well written book in the sense that it has a very beautifully simple approach to language. For people who are only mediocre in their French capacities like myself, you can still read it in French and get a lot out of it. I read it in French even though I’m not a fluent speaker, and I thought it was really, really powerful.

The second book that I will mention is a book that I taught last semester. I taught a class on mind, brain, and culture. I assigned the book by Bessel van der Kolk, and it’s called The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. It’s a really accessible book for a general audience. One of the things that Van der Kolk does really well is, offer an account of trauma that really lifts trauma away from its life in the mind. Trauma is not something that you think about or that you process mentally. It’s something that you inhabit in the body, and your body itself remembers this source of it’s own trauma and processes it in a way that sometimes your own mind cannot quite understand.

So the book is very beautifully written as well. It talks about how trauma propagates, how it moves from person to person, from family to family, from community to community. It concludes by looking at new innovative ways of dealing with trauma. It’s a science book and so it synthesizes a lot of new scientific research about the power of things like theater or yoga or certain forms of rapid eye movement therapy for helping us process trauma. So for people who are interested in the way in which trauma works and in new approaches to processing it, I think it’s a wonderful read. The body keeps the score.

[00:40:59] Bonni: David, both of these sound absolutely wonderful and I’m glad that I’ve now freed myself up to do more reading so I can tackle this, add them to the list. Well, I’m so grateful to you for being a part of Teaching In Higher Ed and sharing these experiences that you have with teaching. You’ve really challenged my thinking today and also in preparing for the interview. I’m sure that you will so many of our listeners, so thank you so much for your time and for sharing your reflections.

[00:41:25] David: Thank you so much for having me.

[music]

[00:41:30] Bonni: Thanks once again to David Peña-Guzmán for joining me on today’s episode and giving us so much to think about in restoring the love of reading for ourselves and for our students. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you’ve been listening for a while and don’t get the show notes on your email every week, you’re welcomed to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe to get those weekly updates with the show notes and also an article about teaching or productivity written by me.

My new book is now out, The Productive Online and Offline Professor. So if you have yet to check that out, I’d highly suggest it. Of course, I am biased since I wrote it but I found that so many people say that the techniques presented in the book have been helpful to them and I hope they’ll be helpful to you as well. If you go to teachinginhighered.com the information about the book is there on the homepage. See you next time on Teaching In Higher Ed.

[00:42:24] [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.