Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 556 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Socially Just Open Education with Jasmine Roberts-Crews.

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 glad today to be welcoming to the show Jasmine Roberts-Crews. She’s a lecturer in the School of Communication at The Ohio State University, where she teaches public relations, writing, digital activism, and campaign strategy. She’s also a doctoral student in the College of Education and Human Ecology at the Ohio State University, where she is studying social justice education and racial battle fatigue.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:19]:

Along with her communication expertise, Professor Roberts-Crew is also a renowned open education leader as you’ll hear about a lot in today’s episode and through other aspects of her work. She’s delivered numerous keynote presentations across the country on the topics of social justice and open education and has a TEDx talk titled, I’m tired of talking about race. She has provided consulting to several open education organizations on how to dynamically embody social justice and equity in practice. In her spare time, she loves to connect with her wife, fur babies, two dogs, and green babies, 40 plants total. Jasmine Roberts-Crew welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:02:06]:

I’m very excited for this conversation, Bonni.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:08]:

To begin with, we need to go back to your bio and these green babies. And I realize this is a not a softball question. It’s the opposite of a softball question. How do you keep green babies alive? Because I don’t I don’t seem to be able to do that.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:02:25]:

That is that is such a great question, Bonni. I get that a lot, to be honest with you. I think it sounds cliche, but if you talk to your green babies, they will talk back to you. I mean, they they are living. Right? And so I, you know, name most of my plants and I greet them when I see them in the morning. And I know that sounds kind of hokey pokey, but I think just really being engaged with your green babies and not just looking at them as decorations per se is very helpful. And also taking care of my plants is very, very essential to my mental health and just overall wellness. It’s just something about being in connection with nature, whether that’s, of course, I prefer to be outside, but obviously indoors, it’s just amazing to be able to connect with nature in that capacity.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:03:17]:

So it doesn’t oftentimes feel like a chore. It’s more so they okay. Let me carve out this time to take care of the plants, and the plants take care of me in return. I will say my wife and I, during the pandemic, like everyone else, we kind of went a little overboard with the plants. So at the time we had, oh, gosh, I want to say like 55, close to 60 plants, like six zero. And once we started to society started to go back outside more and transitioning back into the office, it was obviously a lot more difficult to take care of all those plants. So we have had casualties, y’all. I do not want to present myself as if I’m all knowing.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:04:03]:

So now we’re down to about 40 ish plants, and I have put myself on a, I guess you can say no buying new plants. I guess you can say, boundary, if you will. So I’m not allowed to buy any new plants until the summer. So we will see if I actually follow my own guidelines and boundaries that I put in place for myself. But yes. Yes. That’s kinda how we take care of them.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:04:31]:

There’s so much in what you shared too. Just I I kept instantly thinking of systems thinking and just that that them engaging with you and you engaging with them. And I was reminded of someone gave me a beautiful flowering plant, and I I wanted to get it right so much. And I’m reading the directions and making sure I find the perfect spot for it. And then it just really ended up not doing well. And what turned out had happened, I only find out, of course, after the fact when it didn’t make it, that my daughter also loved this plant so much, and that she had remembered me reading the tag and how important it is to water plants. She didn’t realize you could actually overwater plants. And so, I mean, I I didn’t realize she was watering it too.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:05:14]:

So, like, this poor plant just drowned today.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:05:17]:

Yeah. There is a thing called overwatering your plants. And it’s again, I think that also comes from a source of, like like you were saying, Bonni, I I have to get this right. Like, I I wanna make sure that I’m really taking care of this plant, but there are some plants that don’t need a lot of water. You only need to water every, you know, once every couple of weeks. So I’m not surprised, you know, that is that is a thing that that happens. That has happened to me, to be very frank with you. So Oh.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:05:44]:

Alright. So we’re gonna go back a little bit in time, and it’s from a clip that I actually did some travel recently to Louisiana State University, two different campuses there. And this was a clip that really resonated with people of my generation and older, and it’s from a movie called the princess bride. And I’m not gonna even try to, like I’m not even gonna try to do it with the voice and everything. And it but it just goes a little something like this. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. And to take us in to your work and specifically an article we’ll be touching on so much today, this happens a lot with the word feminism.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:06:25]:

So let’s start with what does it mean to be a black feminist?

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:06:30]:

Yes. So I I I actually that’s an amazing question. I wanna go back just to the term feminist. I think feminist is a very weighty term, and I don’t know if it honestly has to be. I mean, I I I think it’s kind of similar with the term activist as well. And I and I get it. Like, language matters. You know, there’s a particular image that comes to mind when people say so and so is a feminist or even when you call yourself a feminist, whether that be this person is militant or even difficult, brazen or radical or political.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:07:05]:

You know, they’re so serious all the time and, you know, there’s not wanting to be, I guess you can say, the party pooper. Although if patriarchy is the party, I don’t know if I want it nor do I want to be invited. And, you know, I know a lot of people who believe in feminism of all genders. Right? So we’re not just talking about cisgender women, all kinds of people who believe in feminism, you know, the interrogation of systems through the lens of gender, gender equality, gender equity. They believe in all that, and they might even engage in feminist practices, but they don’t necessarily call themselves feminists. And I think some of that comes from, I don’t know, a place of not knowing if you’ve done all the things that grant you access to the feminist club. Right? And I don’t know if you can kind of relate to that yourself, Moni. I just you know, and while I do think there there are some key values and practices people should have if they wanna call themselves a feminist.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:08:08]:

I I do believe that. I also think, however, there is a situation where policing the term can go too far. That can be really off putting to those who want to engage in the struggle that feminists take up. But they’re also learning. They’re trying to figure out where do I where do I fit in this cause? Right. And I think that’s okay. I think people should have the space to kind of figure out what feminism means to me instead of trying to fit themselves in this kind of, archetype of what we mean by a feminist. And I think when it comes to women of color, Black women in particular, I do want to make sure this is clear.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:08:47]:

Sometimes I will use the term women of color, but that’s not necessarily always synonymous with Black women. But here I’m focusing on Black women in particular because there is a history among some Black women with rejecting the term feminism because there is this idea that feminism, that’s for white women, right? Because feminism was so co opted co opted, excuse me, that white feminism essentially became the default for feminism. Right? But, of course, some of us know that black women have a deeply feminist history even when white women didn’t want them to be organizing alongside with them. So, of course, I think of my idol, Ida B. Wells, who was, you know, told by white women, suffragettes in the nineteen twenties that she and other black women who participated in the women’s rights march in the nineteen twenties from Chicago, that they had to get in the back of the parade line because they didn’t wanna be seen with black women. And, of course, Ida being the woman that she was, she didn’t comply. She went right to the front actually of the parade line. And, you know, and I also think of Susan B Anthony.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:09:52]:

You know, she’s lauded as a women’s rights activist, but she also had a very questionable history with racism and did not really advocate for the rights of all women. And we see this legacy of white feminism being the default or the face of feminism today because oftentimes how and I will say women of color in this context experience these issues of gender and other issues like, for example, police brutality, housing discrimination, food insecurity, education, all of that, how women of color experience this differently than white women. And that’s not always considered in many feminist movements. And I think that’s where black feminism enters and speaks to these issues. And so I think here is where I kind of want to try to define black feminism. But even when I try to do that, black feminism for me is a feeling. I don’t I don’t know. It’s really hard to articulate.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:10:44]:

Of course, I can go through the academic, like, definition where black feminism is really stemming from a politic that seeks to understand how, you know, gender and race and class and sexuality and disability status are not only in relation to one another, but also how do they come together and create certain advantages for other people and disadvantages for other groups and oftentimes sometimes both for for people. And I think black feminists are asking people to not only look at broader systems of white supremacy and how we are all kind of forced to, in some way, to interact with these systems. But what can we learn from the critical work of black women through their lived experiences, through black feminists who not only interrogate these broader systems, but also provide really rich ideas for liberation. And so I think for me, at its core, being a black feminist is looking at all these various different systems and how they, you know, affect certain lived experiences and outcomes for people. And then also, it really has an agenda to humanize black women in particular in a world that is so hell bent on dehumanizing, black women and really taking away from our lived experiences. So, again, I could go into the academic definitions of black feminist, but like I said, it’s it’s just it is it really is a feeling. It is a politic. And it is it’s it’s situating this this experience that black women have that they navigate both their racialized and gendered realities in a society that is both deeply anti black and also anti woman.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:12:30]:

But with all of that said, black feminists are also very adamant about joy and using joy and communal care. And more recently, we’re we’re seeing a lot of conversations about rest as resistance, as a resistance practice for Black women. So what does it mean, for example, for Black women to take care of ourselves as a community instead of always being the ones to be on the front line of said political movement? Because, I mean, the burnout amongst Black women is is extraordinarily high. And so there also is a level of using joy and rest and some of these alternatives to some of the more laborious ways of engaging in struggle. There’s also returning to, like, joy as well. So I know that was meaty.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:13:19]:

Oh, what a rich, rich definition, and I always hesitate to even talk about terms because sometimes they can be flattened by some of the academic literature, and you you have done the quite the opposite with that here. And and so I think this will be maybe the last definition I’m gonna ask you to give, and it’s another really loaded weighty one. Tell us about socially just open education. That’s just a little softball question for you here as we get started.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:13:46]:

I know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Socially just, education. And I think it actually it does tie into black feminism as well, and I’ll I’ll kinda talk about that perhaps later on. So if we take a step back when we’re talking about open education, I think many of us come into the conversation about open education through OERs, Open Educational Resources.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:14:09]:

Right? Because the way in which OERs have been situated in the conversation in higher ed at least is that OERs are these low cost, you know, to free course materials. There’s a lot of like economic, justice opportunities when we’re incorporating OERs into the curriculum. Of course, we want to save our students money on textbooks because that has a lot of promise when it comes to to access, if you will. However, I think a socially just open education does more than just provide students with free textbooks because if we are essentially, when we’re talking about the content of a textbook, if we’re essentially reinforcing the same types of stories that are traditionally told in those textbooks, if we’re centering the same types of experiences, but just putting an open license on it. I don’t know if that’s justice oriented. You know what I mean? Open education, nor do I think that’s liberatory for students. And so kind of drawing from, you know, and I’m I’m still thinking about her work, Sarah Lambert from Australia, she created this really, really practical yet helpful framework as we think about open education through a social justice lens. And she argues that there are three principles of social justice as it relates to open ed.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:15:28]:

We have recognitive justice I’m sorry, redistributive justice, then recognitive and representational justice. And so the redistributive justice is where a lot of us come into this conversation about open education when we’re talking about, yes, we want to be able to provide access to course materials through low cost and cost savings. But Lambert argues that we have to go a step further and we have to ask again whose histories are being reflected in the curriculum when we’re talking about OERs. And more importantly, if we’re looking at structures and systems, who have who who have the who has the power to participate in the creation of OERs, whether that be because of funding, the time, the other resources that it takes to actually create an open educational resource that is all not just happenstance. All of that is trickled through a system that we’re operating through. And so for me, social justice education is incorporating all of those Lambert principles, if you will, and looking at how do we how do we interrogate or how do we ask the question, I should say, whose knowledge is valuable? Right? Whose knowledge is centered in the text of the OER? And, again, who has that opportunity to participate in OERs and the way in which we’re defining it in this context. So, yeah, social justice education helps to make sure that when we’re talking about participation in OERs, when we’re talking about what is actually reflected in the text, how do we make sure that those barriers that kind of reproduce those white Western ways of knowing, essentially, that we are dismantling those barriers, if that that makes any sense? I feel like I kind of went on a very academic explanation

Bonni Stachowiak [00:17:19]:

there. You put some real course down there, and I know that the example we’re about to explore is just one of many ways to view our pedagogy through a justice lens justice, social justice lens. I’ve always been intrigued by renewable assignments ever since I first heard about them. Those who are listening may not even be familiar with them, though. So if you could explain what they are and then give us some examples of ones that you’ve been inspired by or involved with in some way.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:17:51]:

Yeah. So my my understanding of renewable resources and assignments, and the reason why I say my understanding is because the term is squishy. Just like the term open pedagogy, which is the idea that we invite students into the content creation process through this kind of openly licensed environment. And so my understanding of the way in which we’re thinking about renewable science in the open education community is that we’re kind of going away or rejecting this idea that assignments are transactional or what is called, I think David Wiley kind of coined this term disposable assignments. So those are your traditional academic assignments like quizzes, exams, term papers, things of that sort, where the student isn’t really challenged to think about the utility of this assignment outside of the classroom. They’re just writing it for the professor. And as soon as they get the a, all of a sudden the knowledge that they acquired for this assignment kind of goes out the window and they’re not thinking about how they’re contributing to this wider ecosystem, if you will, of knowledge. So my understanding of renewable assignments is that you’re taking this opportunity through an open license and you’re really encouraging students to think about how could, for example, editing a Wikipedia page be beneficial to the wider community.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:19:16]:

So that is one example in which I’ve seen educators use this notion of a renewable assignment. They’ll edit a Wikipedia page so that either it’s more accurate or representational, things of that sort. And I think it’s a really cool opportunity for students to bring their own lived experience, right, and their own knowledge into the content creation process. And to be honest with you, students are actually a lot more engaged when they know that their audience, at the end of the day, is not just a professor. They know other people are going to see this work. And so, again, they’re typically a little bit more engaged than what you find in, like, a term paper or an exam, things of that sort. Another example that I want to give is, from my my own classroom as something I used to do, It’s not quite as dynamic as some of the other examples that I’ve seen. But I, you know, years ago I wrote in an open textbook for my writing for strategic communication students.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:20:13]:

And after a while, you know, one of the challenges about OERs is just making sure that the information that you’re including in the text is up to date. And so I thought to myself, what does it mean for my students to actually contribute to this textbook? Right. And so to help me with the curation of the text book after some time. And so what I used to do is I used to just simply ask students who were interested that they could essentially write up a two paragraph, you know, essay or paper very, very short explaining in their own words, using their own example of a class concept that we discussed. Right? And they would receive extra credit for it. But I said, you know, I asked the students, actually, I said, not only will you receive extra credit if you openly license this work, I’ll put it in the textbook for the class. Now I want to be clear. They still have received extra credit regardless if they openly license their work because I want to make sure that agency is centered as well.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:21:15]:

But, yes, I can’t I can’t tell you, Bonni, how many students were really excited at the opportunity to contribute to a textbook because, again, they knew other people were going to see it, and they they took it more seriously because they knew other people were going to see it. So basically, it’s a more dynamic way of engaging with students because they are able to see the value in doing this assignment outside of the four walls of your classroom. And not only that, there’s a level of like building upon other students work. Right? And so students from one semester have a reference for how students from another semester have engaged with the textbook, for example. And I do cite the students work as well in the textbook, and you’ll see that in in the textbook that I wrote. So that’s just kind of one example of renewable assignment as opposed to, again, those transactional assignments.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:07]:

I this is a whole area, not only assignments, but also the feedback that we give that I have to tell you, I just continue to wrestle with. And some of the things that you were sharing took me back to a conversation actually, multiple conversations with Robin DeRosa. I’ll put links to some of these episodes. They are from long ago, but are classics in my mind. And because she talked about in early in her explorations of open education. I don’t wanna misspeak, but but my memory has her of saying she was a little bit more emphatic about, hey. Down with the LMS, and let’s only let’s only exist out in the open. And then as she started to revisit that, you brought up agency, you know, wanting wanting to you know, there are some reasons why a student may wish to engage with the material not out there in the open, and so she comes to my mind a lot.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:23:01]:

Another thing that comes to my mind a lot, which I’ve brought up before, but it’s been so many years. I’m I’m trying to get more digital in my life. I’m already pretty digital, but I have one pretty big file cabinet where I still have notes and papers, physical printed papers from my college experience. And I wrote something so incredibly vulnerable that I will I can’t imagine a scenario in which I share it on the on the podcast. But Right. And then what this professor it was literally just one or two sentences. And when I read it all these decades later, I just started weeping because I thought

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:23:36]:

Oh, wow. Okay.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:23:37]:

How he must have spoke to me as a young woman and what those words meant to me then, but also what they’re what they mean to me now as somebody who does this work, but also someone who has children that will eventually go on to college. You’re just so so so special. But I think about anything that I might write or share with a student, it feels so wasteful in the sense that it goes in the learning management system and then is essentially gonna disappear forever, you know, for these students, and they don’t

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:24:07]:

have the Opportunity to engage with it further.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:11]:

Yeah. So it’s just something that’s floating around in my head. But but

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:24:15]:

Yeah. Well, Vonda, you bring something up about, you know, just this notion that there are reasons, right, that a student or anyone for that matter might not want to openly license their work. Or if they do want to engage in open, they don’t want their work to have, for example, a CC BY license, which is the more liberal or open, no pun intended, of the Creative Commons licenses. Whereas one of the more, I guess you can say, restrictive licenses from Creative Commons, CC BY NC, non commercial and non derivative or no derivative, meaning you can’t remix it, you can’t adapt it to your, you know, context or whatever. And there I remember there was a lot of debate in the open education community as to whether or not a text that has a CC BYND license, is that considered open? And I think going back to your previous question about what is a socially just open education, what does that mean? Agency, autonomy, that’s at the center of it. And so I’m also thinking of the work of Shanna Hollich, I believe. And in some of her work, she talks about how there are reasons, especially if you’re coming from a marginalized background, there are really good reasons why you might not want your work to be adapted or remixed because there are issues of appropriation that could happen. There are issues of maybe one’s cultural context being taken out of that cultural context.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:25:53]:

There are issues of epistemic injustice. Right. And so going back to the conversation about what it means to have a socially just open education, we have to make sure that in our pursuit for open, that we’re also not reasserting these, I guess you can say neoliberal projects about what it means to engage in justice, if that makes any sense. So we can’t say, all right, well, since you don’t want to put a CC BY NC license or CC BY you know, license on it. It it’s it’s not open. I mean, there we have to kind of slow down and ask ourselves, what are the reasons? And whatever those reasons are, they’re valid, especially if they’re coming from a person from a marginalized community or from the global South, etcetera, etcetera.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:43]:

Something else that you’re reminding me in that wonderful example is how we change our minds too. I’ve seen people who were vehement about having that most liberal of licenses out there who today have a copyright, which would be the exact opposite of that. And rather than judge, I was curious. Not not I mean, I suppose judge is an interesting word here, but but I was curious to go, wow. That’s a pretty big change. That’s a pretty big change. And some of that has to do with and you you mentioned cultural appropriation. Some of that’s just appropriation of of, you know, people scrape scraping the web, republishing their exact same words on other websites for profit, etcetera.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:28]:

And then now I could only imagine having a conversation with some of these people today since November 2022, the continued emergence of artificial intelligence for all and how that is changing our minds about how we see our own work and how we might wish to share it. So all of this actually does take us to the part of our conversation about decentering. Talk to us about why decentering is important, and then what are some of the ways that this can be done specifically in an educational context?

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:28:02]:

Yeah. I I think that’s a fabulous question. There are a lot of examples that come to mind for me. I don’t know why the term intersectionality is coming up for me because I think in people’s attempt to engage in intersectionality, going back to our conversation about black feminism, there is a level of not decentering and wanting to center your experience in a in a, framework that was really created to understand the lived experiences of black women and how they navigate through multiple sites of oppression. And maybe I can unpack that in a bit. But I think in general, decentering for me has become almost a lost art in the academy. And what I mean by that is decentering means being curious about other humans. It really just makes me sad how so many scholars have, again, using the word art, have lost the art of curiosity.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:29:00]:

So the example I give oftentimes is when I tell people, read the work of black women. Right? Don’t just read the scholars that you were told to read in your field. You know, obviously, that’s a very narrow way of engaging in the academy. And the the common response I get is like, oh, well, I didn’t know that. For example, a lot of people online in my social media ecosystem are talking about Octavia Butler and how and the parable of a sawyer and how she basically thirty years ago predicted what we’re seeing now in terms of climate change and racial injustices and even, you know, political taglines that we’re seeing make America great again. Like she talked about that in the book that was published thirty years ago. And, you know, some people were like, well, I just I just didn’t know Octavia Butler existed. Her work existed at least.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:29:50]:

And then I always ask them, well, ask yourself the question, why? Why do you think you didn’t know about Octavia Butler’s work? Why is it that she was decentered when it comes to literary works in the academy? And so I think, again, decentering means for me just being curious, asking yourself these questions. And the more that you ask questions, the more that you’ll get to the little kernel, if you will, that’ll kind of take you on another path of realizing that there’s just an amazing world out there that we we need to learn more about outside of the five scholars that we’re told to cite in our work. I think practically what that means is getting uncomfortable with not being the expert all the time. Right. I think as scholars, we have a difficult time letting that go and being super okay with being the student at all times. So I’m not sure if that quite answered the question completely. But yeah, I really do think decentering can be something as simple as staying curious and asking a lot of questions about procedures and policies and and and and works that you know and then works that you don’t know as well.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:11]:

One of the things we haven’t touched on super explicitly has to do with then black feminist pedagogy.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:31:18]:

Yes.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:19]:

I would love to have you paint a picture for us. What would it look like to center black feminist pedagogy in higher education? Would you take us there, paint the picture for us?

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:31:30]:

Yeah. That is that’s also a really good question. So well, first, I do kinda wanna define black feminist pedagogy, if that’s okay. And it’s it’s really just this this critical pedagogy where we’re interrogating education systems that, of course, center white Western ways of knowing. And and what black feminist pedagogy is attempting to do, at least, is center black women’s experiences in the curriculum. And by examining black women’s experiences in the curriculum, how can we then gain a deeper understanding of the broader systems that we all are navigating through? Right? And so I’m remembering the work from Annette Henry. She she has this whole article, I think even a book, but I could be wrong about that, where she talks about black feminist pedagogy. And she says that this type of pedagogy has three broad, I guess you can say, principles and that education systems from a black feminist standpoint are patriarchal and they’re there to benefit, like, I guess you say, men and and the white elite.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:32:30]:

She also argues that white feminist pedagogy ignores intersectionality as relates to race and class, and that even we’re looking at Black educational thought, it still centers the experiences of Black men and ignores how, again, black women and girls are navigating both racialized and gendered realities. And so I think for me, in terms of a curriculum, it means centering the works of Octavia Butler. It means, for example, in my classroom, it really is interesting how many students do not know about Ida B. Wells, which is just really amazing to me because Ida B. Wells, for those who don’t know, the listeners who don’t know, she was a prolific investigative journalist and activist. She actually created or helped to create the NAACP, even though she was written out of the history of the NAACP. But I use black feminist pedagogy in my classroom when I talk about Ida B. Wells, specifically when I’m teaching about journalism, because Ida had a very particular way of engaging in investigative journalism in a way that helped people to ask broader questions about systems and those systems as relates to the newsroom, for example.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:33:49]:

So in journalism, the we we have this this this value of being objective and being impartial. But Ida B Wells, through her investigative reporting show that that that idea of objectivity is not is not actually true in the newsroom because objectivity has historically been defined through a white Western lens. And so I challenge my students to really just again, maybe I don’t want to say reject this notion of neutrality and objectivity, but really interrogate who gets to determine that. Right? Who has the power to say, okay, so because you are coming from this lens, it’s no longer objective in the newsroom. So going back to black feminist pedagogy, that is how I use in my classroom using the experience of a black woman to reveal certain contradictions, right, about systems and how do we teach that to our system or to our students, excuse me, more specifically. So, yeah, those are kind of like little things that I try to do in the classroom. And most of the time they’re successful and sometimes they’re uncomfortable, to be honest with you, because I don’t know if we even as educators, we we are socialized to not want to take risk, right? Because when my students come to the class room, especially those students who have had, like, previous journalism training, many of them have been taught, no, I I can be objective as a journalist. You know, I I’m telling both sides of the story, but I love what another black feminist, you know, by the name of Nikole Hannah Jones.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:35:23]:

I love what she says about journalism. And that is it’s not stenography. It’s not just this person said this. That person said that. It’s pursuing the truth with context. Right? And so, again, who gets to determine what is true and who gets to determine neutrality in the newsroom? And so all of that to say, there is a level of being as an educator being uncomfortable with there are there might be some students in your classroom who for the first time they’re encountering this black feminist pedagogy and it completely I don’t say completely that’s kind of dramatic, but it it unearths them a little bit. It’s a little disorienting because their entire most of their educational career, they’ve been taught one way. And so when you introduce this other critical pedagogy, it can it can be difficult, but I think it’s my job as an educator to take risks and to push my students to think about the alternatives as well.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:18]:

As you’re sharing this, we are having this conversation toward the start of a semester, and I’m already feeling just weighted down. You talked about this unearthing. And without getting too much into specifics, especially as we’re we’re rounding down this part of the episode, it feels heavy sometimes, and so it feels sometimes just kind of impossible. We don’t wanna stick with that mindset for very long, and I have long, treasured the words from Adrienne Maree Brown, small is all. And so I ask you this very easy question, I say sarcastically, but how can we shrink this down? What’s one small change educators could make tomorrow to bring more justice centered approaches into their classrooms and their teaching?

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:37:01]:

Well, I paused because I almost feel like this is what I’m going to say is maybe too small, but it’s actually very impactful. We have to look at our students as human beings, y’all. We just do. We just do. And I think one way that we can do that is by looking at ourselves as human beings and centering our humanity in the classroom. And the reason why that I say that that is one small approach to justice in the classroom, because injustices, inequities, systems of oppression, one of the outcomes of those variables, those factors, if you will, is dehumanization. Right? And so one of the things that I do very often in my classroom is humanize myself and I humanize my students. I tell them they can take mental health days with with no documentation.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:37:52]:

They don’t need to have documentation from a psychiatrist or a therapist. Like, I make that very clear. I talk about my own mental health journey as someone who has struggle with generalized anxiety disorder, and I’m perfectly fine with saying that on on the podcast because there is just so much power in centering your humanity in the classroom. And as a result, it gives students the permission to just be. And so while that doesn’t have anything to do with, you know, curriculum and all all those things that I mentioned previously, I do think and I have seen actually in my work as an educator, so many students who were not I mean, how do I say this? They learned a lot in my classroom, but they learn mostly from how I treated them and how to advocate for their humanity in the classroom because the way in which I talked about my humanity and how I showed up in the classroom, I get more feedback about that from my students than anything else related to curriculum. I get that feedback a lot, too. But all in all, I can’t tell you, Bonnie, how many students have reached out to me and said, I know that you care and not a lot of my professors make me feel that way. And that makes me sad.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:39:14]:

I don’t wanna have the award of, you know, this professor cares like every every educator should. You know, I know there’s emotional labor and fatigue to that. And I want to I want to acknowledge that, too. This is not necessarily easy for everyone. And depending upon your identity, especially if you are a black woman like myself, sending your humanity through humanity in the classroom can be seen in a very threatening way. You can encounter backlash and being that vulnerable. But I think for me, what I have found that’s been very powerful from a justice oriented standpoint is just making sure that I am creating a human centered approach in my classroom, and that has been probably the most impactful thing I can do as an educator.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:57]:

This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. About a year ago, I got a message on my website from someone named Leon Paul from France. Uh-huh. And Leon Paul has been giving me this gift for almost a year now and doesn’t even know it. He he wrote to me. He said, Leon Paul here, writing from France. I just wanted to recommend two great EdTech tools I’ve been using. And I’m only gonna mention one because I got I had so much fun with experimenting with one that I’m saving the other one up on my someday maybe list to to explore more.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:40:33]:

But it is called qwiqr, And it is a freemium service, meaning you can use it for free, but you could add in some paid features that are very inexpensive too, I might add. And it has a very unique spelling because it has to do with QR codes. So it is qwiqr, and I’ll have that link in the recommendations and in the show notes. And what it does is it solves a problem that I think of a lot of us don’t even realize that we have. I mean, maybe we realize, but we don’t realize there’s a solution out there. So in his case, I’m gonna I’m gonna share what he wrote, but then I’m gonna say that that didn’t fit my context and then how I gave it a try. So he says, quicker, this is the easiest tool to give audio feedback, especially when you get a lot of handwritten assignments like I do in high school. Mhmm.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:27]:

He’s a high school teacher. My students are not great with emails. I find it cumbersome to record something and then find a way to send 35 different files to each of my students. Quicker solves this. I print a page of QR code stickers. When I grade, I stick one of the QR codes on the paper, scan it. It takes me to a web app offering to record audio feedback. No messing with files, links, and emails, and it’s free.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:56]:

So I don’t teach high school. I don’t teach math. I don’t accept assignments on paper, so you might be thinking, how did this ever happen? Well, what I do enjoy doing is writing notes, but I have poor penmanship combined with my hand gets really sore if I write handwrite things too much. So I’ll just write a little note to someone, and I keep a bunch of little cutout of these QR codes from from this service, and I can just tape it on there, do little stickers around the edge to kinda make and say, here’s a video message for you. What it lets you do, essentially, is create an entire page full of unique QR codes that you could use for whatever purpose you want. Did you wanna send them to a website? Did you want to record a video real quick? Did you want to record an audio message really quick? But every QR code that you print out is unique. And then when you scan it is when you tell it, here’s the URL to send them to, or here’s the text I want put there on this page. It’s just a very fast way of mixing the analog with the digital.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:05]:

And I have been having so much fun. It’s it’s really funny because you know how you like, the sort of rules, the etiquette, like, you send someone a thank you note. They’re not supposed to thank you back. Like, we don’t need to keep this chain going. I will literally get handwritten cards back from people because they’ll be like, oh my gosh. Your message meant so much to me. Something about just the richness of the communication channel. It really seems to touch people, and I find I’m able to provide a gift of encouragement to others Oh, good.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:35]:

But be able to do it in a way in which I’m not in pain after after I finish doing it in terms of my hand and my wrist issues. So that’s my recommendation for today. And, Jasmine, I’m gonna pass it over to you for whatever you’d like to share.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:43:49]:

Yeah. So I my recommendation is gonna sound like a big old whooping contradiction because I don’t know. I guess my recommendation is this show I’ve been watching. I think it’s off the air now, but it’s called A Million Little Things. And it’s the show about a group of friends who come together after a big tragedy. I’m not gonna give it away. And just kind of taking them through their their lives and how they grow as a friend group, the challenges, the the wins, all of that. The reason why I say it sounds like a contradiction is because I’m actually hate watching the show.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:44:36]:

And and hear me out. Hear me out. I I don’t know for for the listeners. I I am into the horoscopes, and I am a cancer. And us cancer people, allegedly, we just are all in our feelings. And I I do reinforce that stereotype. My point being is that A Million Little Things is very similar to oh, gosh. What’s the other show that’s very also, quote, unquote, emotional? I think it was on NBC at one point in time.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:45:05]:

I can’t remember. Oh, goodness. Anyways, it’s it’s a very, like, emotionally charged show, not just, like, negative emotions, just all around. And it it takes you on a roller coaster for sure. And the reason why I hate watching it is because a lot of the scenes are highly unrealistic, and I’m like, this could not happen in a friend group, not a friend group that’s been a friend group for this long, but I’m still watching it. But it does a great job, I will say this, of addressing so many issues, whether that be LGBTQ issues, issues related to pregnancy, women’s rights, black lives matter. Let’s see, disability justice. I mean, it really touches on a lot of, like, adoption, like all of that.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:45:50]:

It touches on so many different issues through this friend group. But but some of the scenes, I’m like, oh, y’all. You’re you’re really, really cranking up the emotional meter here. So I’m gonna recommend it and then see what y’all think for those who are kind of into shows

Bonni Stachowiak [00:46:09]:

that. Oh, I’m so intrigued by the show, but also by your description. You’re reminding me a little bit. We just wrapped up watching the latest Star Wars thing that’s called Skeleton Crew. And I will Yes. Yeah. I will not be recommending it. And part of the reason why I won’t be recommending it is because it’s so unrealistic.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:46:25]:

But I sort of hesitated a little bit. Sometimes when shows bring you together in in in your little groups of people, then it’s kinda like it brought it really brought our family to we don’t watch a lot of television together. It’s pretty rare for all four of us to sit down and watch a show from beginning to end. So in that case, it was fun. And and we did have a lot of fun making fun of just exactly how unrealistic it was. And, also, I try to, with the kids, I try to say, like, when there’s a show where there’s so clear good guys and bad guys, like Yeah. The world is way more complicated. Human beings are way more complicated than that way of thinking.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:47:03]:

But some good conversation, some good laughter around how unrealistic it was. But we we all sat there and hate watched it together. So that was that’s

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:47:12]:

exactly. Exactly. Like, hate watching is a thing. I know there are some people like that’s a that’s a weird thing to participate in, but, I mean hey.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:47:21]:

Well, no judgment over here. I’m looking forward to seeing if it’s something that I wanna hate watch. It sounds very intriguing. And speaking of intriguing, I’ve so enjoyed getting to know you through your social media. That’s how I feel like I know you the most. Yeah. Yeah. It’s that parasocial sort of relationship that I have for you.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:47:36]:

I know. I love parasocial relationships. I mean, they’re they’re relationships to me. I don’t care what anyone else says.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:47:42]:

Yes. Yes. So I’m gonna encourage people, go to the show notes, follow you on social media, read the Oh, thank you. Journal article that we’ve been talking a lot about today, and, go follow the show links because there’s so much goodness to go explore to learn even more. So thank you so much for today’s conversation, Jasmine.

Jasmine Roberts Crews [00:47:58]:

Thank you, Bonni. I truly enjoyed it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:48:03]:

Thanks once again to Jasmine Roberts crew for joining me on Teaching in Higher Ed. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. If you’ve been listening for a while and have yet to sign up for our weekly emails, it’s easy to do. Head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You’ll receive the most recent episodes show notes, and 556 is gonna be a good one. And you’ll also receive other resources that don’t show up in the show notes.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:48:43]:

Thank you 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.