[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 397 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, Audrey Watters is back to talk about Teaching Machines.

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

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[00:00:21] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives, and be even more present for our students.

Audrey Watters describes herself on her website as an education writer, an independent scholar, a serial dropout, a rabble-rouser, and ed-tech’s Cassandra. She continues and describes about herself I love science fiction, tattoos, and some days computer technologies. I loathe mushy foods and romantic comedies, I’m not ashamed to admit I like ABBA and dislike Tolkien. I’m sometimes ashamed to admit, I have not finished Ulysses, and I’ve never even started Infinite Jest.

I prefer cake to pie unless we’re talking pastry projectiles. I pick fights on the internet, although I’m not sure if she does that as much anymore. [laughs] She’s been maybe putting that in the backseat. Who knows, who knows. I’m a high school dropout and a PhD dropout. I have a master’s degree in Folklore and was once considered the academic expert on political pie-throwing. I was, I am a widow. I was I am a mom, I have a hard stare that I like to imagine is much like Paddington Bears and a smirk much like the Cheshire cats. I am not afraid. Audrey Watters, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:10] Audrey Watters: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on your show.

[00:02:13] Bonni: I know it’s such an expression but it has been a minute since the last time we talked. One thing that has happened of many, and I’m sure we’re going to get back into a lot of that, but I follow your work and one thing I know that happened was you had a new dog come into your life. I thought we’d start with Poppy. Could you tell us about Poppy?

[00:02:34] Audrey: It’s so funny. So many people, I think have adopted dogs during the pandemic. It was perfect. Before the pandemic, Ken and I, we couldn’t have, we traveled all the time but we’re home. We’re home all the time now. We did what many people do, we turned to a rescue and we got a dog. It’s actually was for time there quite challenging to get a dog. Everybody was doing it. Yes, we ended up with Poppy, who’s a Rottweiler German Shepherd mix, and she’s great.

It was hilarious to actually be putting the final touches on the book, which has a lot to do with behaviorism. I’m working with my dog using Skinner’s tactics of operant conditioning in order to reinforce her positive behavior and train her. Here we are at really this tension between my professional and my personal life, playing out in this wonderful dog that we adopted.

[00:03:39] Bonni: We had dogs all the time growing up. It’s one of those things that as a family, you don’t really realize it’s unusual until you get a little bit of perspective. Each one of us had our own dogs, so four dogs in the house. Five cats in the house, most of the time growing up. People say they’re members of your family, and then they don’t believe you. I talk to my mom a lot because my mom and my dog, they still train their dogs today and they do it for search and rescue.

Scent dogs, whether it’s area search or scent specific, smell this sweater and go find this lost person. We talk a lot about what’s changed about dog training. Because when we were little there was a lot of, we did obedience training, when I was little, I can vividly remember this and you would yank the dog to get them to heel by your side.

One time my dog, she had been trained properly, but she got a sticker or a bur into her inner ear. We of course didn’t know that at the time, but she behaved in an unusual way. Which is to say if she left the competition ring. It’s blocked off she goes and she jumps up into a stranger’s lap and lays down and the judge got so mad at me and is chastising me and chastising my mom saying, “You haven’t trained this dog right. You haven’t trained this dog right.”

Of course when you find out later, anyway, so there’s so much to unpack here, as far as, I want to know from you. Did you have that experience? Not just Skinner, but also positive reinforcement, but also negative reinforcement, did stuff change for you with Poppy?

[00:05:16] Audrey: It was so interesting. We had a dog trainer. There were so many elements that were interesting to me. One of them, I think, was this idea of, you can learn anything online now, of course. This is this promise we always hear, and that there’s tons of free dog training content on the internet, why on earth would you pay for a trainer? We heard that a lot from neighbors, from people in our apartment building, they were like, ironically, one of them actually works for an online education company that does … training.

He was like, “I would never pay for a dog trainer.” I’m like, “Well, your dog is kind of a jerk, maybe you should.” It was really interesting to talk with our dog trainer about this and her belief in positive versus aversive training. For me, to this idea of having a dog that people see as a Rottweiler, and there’s a lot I think of cultural assessment, cultural judgment around the Rottweiler breed. I live in Oakland. A lot of people are pretty … of Rottweilers. I think, not just in Oakland, but elsewhere. There’s an association I think of the breed with gangs, for example, or with violence.

I wanted Poppy to have good behavior. This idea of should you use aversive training, as well, there’s debates among some of the other dog owners in our building who, Poppy wears a prong collar, for example, and they’re like, “Oh, that just seems so mean.” They had this idea of like, “Should it only be positive? Should Poppy only get rewards or does she need some more aversive training as well?”

There’s just so many elements of working with a dog, and thinking about how people respond to training their dog or not training their dog, as the case may be, that really, I think, shed an interesting light on the kinds of things that we think we know, about teaching and learning, and what we think we know about teaching and learning with technology, as well. I was always having these aha moments. Then really deeply reflecting on what it meant for my relationship with my dog.

[00:07:32] Bonni: Yes, so many parallels to our teaching and then to student and all of that. Well, Poppy is not the only animal we’re going to be talking about today. What can you tell us about how pigeons have been involved in your life?

[00:07:45] Audrey: [chuckles] I love pigeons. They are a bird I think that people, particularly in America, not everywhere, but particularly in the US I think that there’s a real negative connotation with pigeons. They’re seen as dirty, they’re associated with disease, even though they are not. They don’t carry diseases. I think that that’s the idea that a lot of people have, and they’re seen as being a pest. Pigeons are fascinating, I think because they are actually a feral, domesticated bird.

The pigeons that we have in North America aren’t wild pigeons. They were brought over in the 18th century by French, for the same reasons that people raised pigeons and doves in Europe, which was for food, for messaging, and for fuel, for pigeon poop, and they went feral, and that’s what fills our cities today. Pigeons live in rocks and cliffs and so they love cities. They are perfectly designed for cities, but they’re fascinating, of course, because they are eminently trainable, B. F. Skinner found and I think pigeons are so closely associated with Skinner and Skinner’s work on developing operant conditioning.

I love the idea of this wild, feral domesticated creature coming face to face with the technology of psychology, the technology of education, and resisting or complying with and what that looks like in terms of the history of science.

[00:09:25] Bonni: How were pigeons involved then in some of the early work trying to come up with what are called teaching machines?

[00:09:35] Audrey: Skinner first worked with rats initially, and I think that it’s funny the history of education, technology, and the history of animal behavior are very deeply intertwined. The history of education psychology, a lot of early educational psychologists worked on animal behavior. Edward Thorndike, who was a professor at Columbia University, he worked with mice and rats. He would time how long it took them to navigate their way out of a maze and that he would graph that and that became the learning curve.

A lot of the things that we talk about rather casually in terms of how we assess, how we monitor and judge people’s learning actually come from this longer history of animal, not so much human behavior. Skinner initially worked with rats as well. When he was a graduate student he built a device, his colleagues dubbed the Skinner box in which he would train the animal with rewards in order to do certain tasks.

With the pigeons he liked working with pigeons eventually. He would train them to do things like play ping pong, or they there was even a time in World War II when they were working on pigeons as a way to guide missiles in order to peck at a at a target in order to guide a missile on track. We never actually fully developed the pigeon guided missile, but the US military was interested in it for some time.

Skinner was really working on this idea of operant conditioning. This idea that you can give rewards, time based rewards in order to manipulate behavior and for Skinner behavior was you learning. You could judge whether or not someone learned by their behavior, not just physically we think about this in terms of physically when we think about pigeons but he actually meant intellectually as well for Skinner. You couldn’t see inside the mind, all you could see was behavior.

Really his early ideas of how he would assess learning and how he would train people, how we would teach and train people were through the same mechanisms that he had developed for birds, for pigeons, and that was then mapped onto how we would of course train children.

[00:11:57] Bonni: We know of your fondness for animals or if we didn’t before this conversation we’re starting to get a sense of that. I know from reading so much of your work just your love of people that are special to you in your life. There is one type of a person or maybe an aspect of people that you don’t love that does bring out some healthy questioning on your part. That is people that try to act like they’ve just invented something new.

It cracks me up because my personality I’m the opposite. I never think I come up with anything unique all of this. I want to just invite you to share, there’s a specific example that you give early in the book from Sal Khan and I just went and looked this morning. We’re talking today January the 12th at 1:36 PM. As of us coming on, this video from him at Ted talk in March of 2011 was when it first came out has been watched 5,000,965 times.

Sorry I didn’t say that very well but you say in the book I just love this. There’s at least one problem with the way Khan tells it. The history is all wrong and I know if I just asked you the question what did he get wrong, we would be done three months from now but just what are some aspects of what he gets wrong in this talk and what is that emblematic of?

[00:13:20] Audrey: I think he is just one example of a lot of people and a lot of really powerful people. Let’s just say secretaries of education in the United States also pedal these narratives about school, about the history of school. For example that schools haven’t changed in 100 years. My argument is that schools change all the time. There have been policy changes, practical changes, demographic changes the way in which we teach has changed, the way in which schools are built has changed, who’s in the classroom but subjects have changed.

Khan and others like to argue that nothing has changed in 100 of years. We’re still doing things the way that we did back when Horace Mann went to Prussia and took from the Prussians this idea of public education, nothing changed until they came along and invented this idea of personalized learning that comes with computer based education.

It’s not even correct in terms of this idea that computer based education is recent. We can trace computer based education back to the first computers. One of the sites in which computing was developed, was at the university. Universities have been working with how do we use these devices for teaching and learning since we first had computing but even longer than that, and that’s what the book really talks about is we’ve had this idea that machines could be used to personalize teaching, personalize learning for at least 100 years.

This notion that all of a sudden Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley executives all of a sudden came up with this brilliant idea that no one had ever thought about before. Really irks me to know and I get a lot of attention for it.

[00:15:20] Bonni: The first order that things came in is we had children and they started to go to school. I remember speaking of things changing, I remember just how vastly different teaching was for them than it was for me. What I can remember, what little I can remember but then even also just I thought these teachers are incredible and I would hear a little bit because my background’s not in K through 12 so I’d hear a little bit, I’d hear personalized learning, and even now as they’ve continued on, those words get used to mean very different things. The idea that these teachers can come and they’re able to help students.

It’s really pretty marvelous the rare occasion I’ve gotten to watch it. It’s just really incredible. I think at first when I heard you and others criticizing personalized learning, maybe a tiny bit got my haunches up of like, “Wait, but this seems like a really good thing.” I’d love to have you share a little bit more like, you’re not criticizing teachers who are able to use both art and science to do this but, like you have a specific aspect of what we call personalized learning that is not actually personalized at all. Could you distinguish for us how these phrase gets used differently.

[00:16:39] Audrey: I think that’s so key. I would say that particularly as Americans we are big into personalization. The whole idea of individualism is so deeply intertwined with what we believe fundamentally as Americans. It is about me. Me, me, me, me, me.

In some ways that makes an institution like public schooling really run counter because public schooling is an institution for the masses and we have this again it’s part of this narrative, that Sal Khan and others pedal that schooling is this mass education and that everybody learns the same thing at the same time and we’re moved through without any choice, without any say in what, or how, or when we learn things.

There’s a certain amount of truth to some of that. We don’t as individual fourth graders for example get to decide what the curriculum looks like. People in each individual state have decided what the curriculum looks like. The idea of personalization I think does really appeal to us. This idea that schools should really speak to me. I shouldn’t have to do the same thing that other people do because I have different skills. I have different interests, and so I do think that it really sounds like a great idea.

I don’t think that what gets talked about in terms of personalization is necessarily the idea that, because I’m again we’ll say fourth grade. I’m a fourth grader who’s really into I’ll pick up a different bird, penguins. If you’re a fourth grader that’s really into penguins. It’s not like personalized learning helps you down the path to become an ornithologist or an expert on even climate change on how the global climate warming is changing what the Penguin’s environment looks like. That’s not what personalized learning is even though that’s what maybe I think some people think it is. It really is an algorithmic way of presenting information to Students based on an incredible amount of data collection about what students are doing and data analysis. It’s really just an algorithmic way of presenting the curriculum that’s already in place to students. It’s not as though it says, “Hey, you seem to be interested in penguins and you seem to be interested in the cello, and we’re going to really personalize your experience through K through 12 to enhance that curiosity.” It’s actually, “We’re going to schedule you to do X, Y, or Z, worksheet today because according to the score you got on a worksheet yesterday, we think you have a 76% mastery of your four times tables and we’d like you to be on an 88% mastery before we move you on to the five times tables.” That’s personalized learning.

[00:19:31] Bonni: Would you just help us a little bit describe so what this an early teaching machine looked like in terms of what they called and still today called then the personalization, how many pages like how did it work from a mechanistic way to deliver these algorithms?

[00:19:47] Audrey: I will say this is a dangerous rabbit hole that I don’t actually recommend anyone going down, but on eBay you can find all sorts of old devices. When I was working on the book, I decided that I needed to get my hands on a teaching machine. I wanted to actually have some experience going through what they called at the time programmed instruction and see what it was like so that I could really understand the kinds of experiences in a way in which it worked– … like instructional technologist 101. How exactly did it work.

According to Skinner’s ideas in particular, what you want to do and this is going to sound so familiar to people today, you want to break things down into the smallest possible content modules. You want to break it down into the smallest possible idea and present a student with an idea and then if you’re working from Skinner’s model, you want to present them in a way that they only get positive reinforcement. You want to make it so that they only get answers right when they’re quizzed about things because you don’t want any adverse stuff.

You want to really make things as small as possible to incrementally move someone through the content, move someone through the ideas. I got a device that was made by a company called TMI which is Teaching Machines Incorporated. They had a plastic machine that actually was sold door-to-door. It came with encyclopedias. Encyclopedia salesmen would go door-to-door. If you buy a certain encyclopedia, they’d throw in the teaching machine for free.

I bought an intro to electricity module and it is I think about 400 pages, each page probably 10, 20 questions on it, multiple-choice or fill in blank questions that move you very, very, very slowly through an introduction to electricity. 20 questions on what is a proton and then 20 more on what is a neutron just to make sure that you always get it correct as you move through. I did not make it very far in the intro to electricity course module because it was so boring.

I think that that’s also an experience that really resonated with me. It was so familiar to the kinds of things that my niece and nephew talk about with some of the personalized learning software that they use in school today. I think it’s exciting and students in the 1950s who would use these teaching machines said the same thing. They’re exciting to be on the cutting edge, you have new devices. For a short amount of time you’re very cool to have the new technology and then very quickly you recognize that the new technology is often built on the old technology and what you’re doing is a worksheet.

My niece, for example, is very aware that when she is doing assignments from Khan Academy, for example, that they really are just a digital version of a kind of paper-based worksheet. It was exciting for a little while. She lives in Maine and Maine have had one-to-one laptop programs for a very long time. It was exciting for a little while to work with the technology but you quickly recognize that this is … this is busy work and it’s certainly not personalized. I think that that’s the experience.

The stuff then from the 1950s, the teaching machines from the 1950s looked a lot like worksheets. There weren’t actually the bells and whistles and flashy animation that there are now but I think the experience is very much still today this is a worksheet. This is a worksheet that gives me my feedback immediately whether I got it right or wrong but it’s a worksheet.

[00:23:41] Bonni: Yes, and kids of course are able to see through even when the bells and whistles are there. [laughs] They’re generally, “I watch what resonates and what doesn’t.” Obviously, I have a sample size of two to go off of but it is fascinating to get some perspective on them because we can dress it up but as you’ve said, often still driving from those early ideas about what an education is and what learning is.

Speaking of learning and then trying to automate that and mechanize that and drill it down to algorithms, there’s also some concerns around grading and people trying to decide what grading means and what it is and all of that. I’m going to read from your book, “If the teacher is to take advantage of recent advances and the study of learning, she must have the help of mechanical devices,” then forward a little bit.

“Marking a set of papers and arithmetic, yes nine and six are 15, no, nine and seven are not 18 is beneath the dignity of any intelligent person,” Skinner asserted. Pressey also thought this type of work was beneath people. That’s the aspect that you say Pressey doesn’t get as much press ironically as the name Skinner does but they’re in the same realm of what does grading mean and is it beneath teachers? What could you tell us about what they thought about teachers’ role in all of this?

[00:25:02] Audrey: It’s interesting to me. I think that the profession of teaching is feminized and it has been feminized for quite some time. Dana Goldstein has a very interesting book called The Teacher Wars about the history of the teaching profession in the US. You can see the ways in which a lot of the assumptions that we make about what the classroom should look like and what the teacher should be doing is very gendered.

Interestingly, the invention of the multiple-choice test came about in the early 1900s because the inventor was concerned that female teachers were too emotional when grading their student’s work. We had to come up with a way that was objective so that teachers would not respond emotionally to their students’ work but rather be able to have a more scientific, objective way of saying, “Yes, right, or wrong,” as opposed to, “Well, I know you tried.” [laughs]

This idea by the time that Pressey and Skinner were working I think is really interesting. They still would argue that even if we could automate grading, that a teacher’s responsibility was still going to have the emotional support for students, again a very gendered idea of what we think teachers should do.

The other side of that that I always think is really interesting and it comes back to what we were just talking about earlier with this … work that we expect students to do that we call personalized learning is that we want to automate these tasks that are dull for teachers to grade but we don’t often talk about what it means that we’re still expecting students to do these kinds of tasks. If they’re too boring and not significant, important enough for teachers to look at, why the heck are we asking students to do this work?

This is something that’s been really on my mind a lot during the pandemic particularly as I’ve seen schools turn to the kinds of surveillance technologies around proctoring and really adopt a whole suite of tools that are interested in automating the assessment and then automating the surveillance of students to prevent cheating. Why aren’t we thinking more about the kinds of work that we’re asking students to do? Why aren’t students doing meaningful work? Why do we think that it’s okay to have the kind of tasks that a computer could assess?

If it’s something that a computer can assess, that means it’s not very sophisticated. I know that there are a lot of claims about what AI can do but really if it’s a kind of task that a computer can assess, it’s probably a task that a computer can do. It’s not something necessarily that we really should be spending a lot of time worrying about humans doing. We want to help students be able to do things that machines can’t do. It’s that double entendre I think in the phrase teaching machine.

Teaching machine is about automating assessment but it’s also this way of thinking about students that also turn their work into this mechanized … automated work as well rather than engaging with them and that human capacity to do interesting work. I think all students are capable of that.

[00:28:33] Bonni: I mentioned to you I think what’s been really good healthy wrestling for me around personalized learning. It’s been really fun to engage with you on a one way mostly. [laughs] I like to wrestle with you in my imagination. It helps me learn better about the things that you are advocating for but also able to hear you speak. You’re on a panel with Jessie … by the way who’s been really instrumental in my life having me think about if I’m ever going to grumble about grading. Perhaps I could think about what it is I’m assigning and that’s been transformative to me.

I get such a delight. I have more fund grading these days. [laughs] … assign meaningful things, it’s amazing how fun it is to see the things that people will come up with.

One other area of wrestling, I’m not even willing to admit that I used to listen to this talk show host who at the time, I felt like spoke some wisdom into my life. I’m not even willing to mention her name. I don’t even know if she’s still on the radio or even if radio still exists. Anyway, she used to have this whole theory that in certain times of my life has been helpful to me. There’s a lot of garbage she shared but there is one thing that’s been helpful and it has to do with behaviorism.

The way that she would share it at the time would be an example like someone would be getting so mad that their spouse would leave the laundry on the ground. You could spend all your time being angry that your spouse left it on the ground or you could just put it in the receptacle or wherever it goes and get over yourself so a behaviorism just back up and get over it. Another similar approach was, if you don’t believe that you love a person anymore, act like you love a person. If you behave in a loving way, that loving feelings can come. At certain parts of my life, I don’t think we should put this in a dualistic way, but at certain parts of my life, I think you know what? Behaviorism has been helpful. If I don’t feel like going for a walk but I go for a walk anyway, I literally have never been, “Dang, why did you go for that walk?” [laughs]

Back to I guess, our dog training things, how much do we want to separate ourselves as learners and as human beings for what drives us? I don’t think we want to go “Never use behaviorism.” There certainly are some cautionary notes we should take away from treating all of humans like we’re just going to punch in the right code, so I don’t know if any of this resonates with you and if you’d like to talk to us about love or laundry. [laughs]

[00:30:57] Audrey: I think that one of the things that’s important to recognize, too, is that I think that we often act as though some of these ideas like behaviorism are only in the past and we’ve moved on from that. We don’t do behaviorism anymore. We do cognitive science, but I think that behaviorism is really powerful and behaviorism is I think, in so many ways, still at the predominant way in which we think about teaching and learning.

I am not sure we would admit it. I think that probably educational psychologist would be like, “No way. No way at all. We are beyond that.” I do think it is incredibly powerful, and it’s powerful in some ways because it does work. Asterisk in some cases under certain circumstances.

I think that this idea of a positive behavioral reinforcement was a powerful insight that Skinner made, and I think that there are reasons why that is how we train our dogs. Now, I think that that’s really how we train a dog, how we train a pigeon is a very different question philosophically, scientifically, politically, socially, culturally, et cetera, and what we want for children.

Skinner, I think, particularly towards the end of his life was really famous for his arguments that there was no such idea as freedom. He really argued that if we would just hand over the shaping of society to engineers, to social engineers, but technologically, he was very interested in the technology of psychology. If we could hand over the world to engineers, we would be in a much better place. I think people pushed back, and rightly so.

I think we hear that today. You hear that from a lot of these Silicon Valley types who are convinced that the key to making the world a better place is through the kinds of benevolent engineering that they have in mind. Bless his heart, I think that this is really Mark Zuckerberg’s vision. He sees himself as being a person who just the obvious evidence to the contrary, he sees himself, he sees his work at Facebook, he sees his investments as the way in which we can better engineer the world.

I do think that behaviorism is incredibly powerful. I think that we just have to recognize that because it’s powerful, we do have to pay attention to power. We do have to pay attention to the people who are claiming that they’re going to engineer this future for us and ask a lot of questions about how exactly do they recognize agency because if someone is planning on engineering things for you, they have a certain way that they plan for you to move quite literally, physically, through the world, and so these are deeply political questions that I hope that we can always ask about.

Certainly, when it comes to education technology, if we have a group of people, tech entrepreneurs who are claiming that they’re going to be able to engineer software that assures that students graduate, that assures that students perform at a certain level, XYZ, fill in the blank, we have to ask questions about what does that mean for agency? What does that look like politically? What does that look like culturally? I think really dial into what their plans are. What are they talking about with their vision for this engineer mechanized future?

[00:34:29] Bonni: You end the book in what I described in my chicken scratch notes as hope and despair, and I don’t know if you meant to be funny, but I interpreted it as funny. I’m just going to read to you and then you [laughs] can just let me know if there was any snark that was in there that I didn’t just put in myself.

You talk about the importance of education as a civic responsibility, and you write [laughs] a little bit of humorous hope, at least to me. Very serious in the first part, sorry. “Education is a civic responsibility, and even when certain actors seem powerful in their desire to build their machinery of education, they are, as this book has hopefully shown as likely to Bumble their visions as capitalized on them.”

Did you mean to be snarky funny to me, and did you mean to leave us with some hope there?

[00:35:23] Audrey: No. I think that hope is so important to me, this idea of hope, and I think it is actually tied into this idea that I talk about in the book, and I draw a lot from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark book here, this idea that when people tell you a history or when people try to erase history, they do that to foreclose hope. I think that if we have a better understanding of the history of educational technology, there’s hope, because the technologists, as I think I show in the book, they are not the sort of geniuses in terms of both the science, the technology, and also in terms of their ability to make these things work as a business. They are deeply flawed individuals.

I think that there is hope against this notion that the future is inevitably technological. I just don’t think that’s true, and history has shown us again, and again and again that that’s not the case. I know this is also not to Gramsci who talks about I’m a pessimist because of reality but I am an optimist, because of will. This idea that I think politically, we do have to believe in building a better future, and I think that that is possible.

I don’t think that the future is already written. I don’t think that it’s inevitable, even in the face of the pandemic, even in the face of the ways in which technology has further encroached into our lives, into our schools, into our personal lives, literally into our homes. I don’t think it’s inevitable that things move in a direction that are increasingly exploitative, that are increasingly extractive. I think we can resist. I think people do resist. People always have resisted. We should know that.

We should embrace that and know that this future that people try to sell us on, that is necessarily more technological, that is not the future. We should have hope, and we should know that it is possible. It’s necessary that we resist.

[00:37:28] Bonni: Before we get to the recommendation segment, I just wanted to take a moment and thank today’s sponsor, and that is TextExpander. If you’ve been listening to this show for a while, you already know that TextExpander is one of the first things that I install on a new computer because it saves me so much time, and all I do is I can program what are called snippets, little easy to remember text segments like TIHE and that expands out to Teaching in Higher Ed.

It’s really easy to set those up, and it’s helpful for things that I might forget, like my work phone number or for longer types of texts, like writing a letter of recommendation where the key information I need to include goes in there automatically, and then I can invest the time with the rich, customized writing that I want to do or that type of a thing. I’d like to thank TextExpander once again for being the longest sponsor of Teaching in Higher Ed, and if you head on over to textexpander.com/podcast, you can find out about a special offer to try it out and to receive a discount on your subscription. Thanks once again to TextExpander for sponsoring today’s episode.

This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations, and probably to no one listening surprise, I’d like to recommend your book. I’ve only been able to just skim the surface, and I’m so honored that you would come and join me for today’s conversation, and to the part that we were just talking about that I just couldn’t even do justice to, it is absolutely a delight to read through all of the– I had no idea, Audrey.

I’ve read your columns and stuff, but you really do such a deep look at these things just all the times when they’re trying to go back and forth with the contracts and trying to get it sold and trying to get it made. There’s a lot of bumbling that made for such a delightful read. It’s very accessible. It’s very approachable. Candidly, Audrey, did I want to read a book about educational history technology? Is that where–

I love being in the future. It’s both my strength and a weakness, and I loved every page. It was not a laborious thing. It’s a generous, approachable, even I found it funny. I don’t think you were trying always to be funny, but it’s just funny to watch the bumbling and the ways that you uncovered stuff, I wish we had had more time today to talk about your work with the archives because I’m sure you have tons of stories that only got touched on in the acknowledgments. I didn’t even know about eBay thing either. [laughs]

I really recommend your book and also I want to recommend on another end of things, and then I’ll pass it over to you after this. Audrey wrote a wonderful post called This year, she blogs. If you don’t subscribe to her blog I really highly suggest that. She begins the post by quoting the mountain goats of a musical group. They say, sing, “I’m going to make it through this year if it kills me.” I’m just going to read a few sentences.

She says, “This was a big year. I turned 50.” Which, by the way, I turned 50 last year, too so I thought we shared that. I didn’t know we shared a birthday year. “My book, Teaching machines, was finally published. I celebrated both events, sort of, but not really and that’s fine because the pandemic raged on, and Ken and I mostly stayed home. Everything has changed.”

I go from reading Teaching machines, which as I said, is a very accessible read but it’s very well researched. I’m hearing from the researcher. I’m hearing more from the cognitive side of you in that book because that’s the type of book that it is. This post is just so generous, and I wept with you. I’m not going to go into all the things that you share, but I’m just going to really recommend that people go and read that post. I’m going to recommend you read the book but also that you read the post and read Audrey’s work. You’re so willing to be vulnerable and share about the devastation that’s happened in your life.

Just this last week I sent out a post to colleagues with– The name of a poem is called Blessing For People Who Are Exhausted. I’ve heard from more people who just said, “I needed to read that, thank you.” I feel like so many of us need to read your post and read your work and see that more vulnerable side of you whose heart is breaking and broken but is also full of hope. Thank you, again, for both of these pieces of work that are just part of what you generously give to the world. Thank you for that. It’s your turn now. [laughs]

[00:41:59] Audrey: This was a really tough question for me. I was actually talking with Ken about this before I got on because on one hand it’s easy to– I’ve read a lot of science fiction lately. I’ve been working my way through reading all of the winners of Hugo Awards that were written asterisk by women. I’ve read a ton of great science fiction lately. Just pick a book and recommend a book and be done with it but the way my brain works, and I just go down with this rabbit hole of ideas.

I have been thinking a lot lately about posts that you talked about, that you referenced talks about this. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the technologies of wellness. That’s actually connected to Ed-Tech in the way that it is this weird pseudoscience, but not really. Pseudoscience and lots of ideas about the ways in which we’re told by technologists in order to be a healthy person, so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that lately. I think it connects a lot to social-emotional learning in education. Another one of these buzz phrases that we hear about.

My recommendation is really to eat breakfast. I’ve been thinking about how breakfast is such an interesting cultural practice. I’ve been thinking a lot about the history of the breakfast cereal which is tied up in religion and morality, and judgment about the body in weird kinds of ways like Kellogg …Sanitarium that Post was a patient. Post created Grape-Nuts in 1898, Kellogg came out with cornflakes in 1906. The Quaker Oats first appeared after the World’s Fair in 1904. We have these technologies around cereal and practices around cereal that are so caught up in these weird ideas.

… live in Oakland, the home of the Black Panthers. The free breakfast program was a cornerstone practice that the Panthers created in order to make sure that the children in the community were fed because the federal programs for feeding school lunches were not adequate. This idea of breakfast has such rich ideas. I just want to encourage people to think about those kinds of practices but to eat breakfast. I’m, again, fascinated by– See, I told you rabbit hole.

[00:44:27] Bonni: [laughs]

[00:44:27] Audrey: This idea that technologists are now spouting about intermittent fasting, which is this whole celebrity idea of not eating. You can only eat for 16 hours a day and then you fast for eight so it’s really just a fancy way of saying I don’t eat breakfast, but I think you should eat breakfast. I think you should think about breakfast and think about the cultural history, the practices of breakfast and why it matters. That’s my recommendation. Eat a good breakfast.

[00:44:57] Bonni: I not only love this recommendation but also getting a glimpse inside your mind, in addition to all the other times I get to do that.

[00:45:04] Audrey: …

[00:45:05] Bonni: You mentioned recently that you’re going to be doing– Actually, I guess you probably mentioned it in the post that I already recommended, but you were talking about wanting to be healing and gentle with yourself in terms of the types of work that you’re going to be doing and writing. You said you were going to be doing some research on, I don’t know if its bells in general or specifically school bells, it sounded like.

[00:45:25] Audrey: Yes, school bells. It’s another one of those narratives. I think it’s actually part of Sal Khan story that he often tells. That the reason that schools look a certain way because it’s all about training students to be factory workers. The students are taught to move via the bell because, somehow, that’s how factory workers were.

Anyway, it’s part of this larger narrative that people tell that schools are about compliance and conformity because of this technology, the school bell. I just wanted to talk a little bit about the history of the school bell, which is not the history of training students to be factory workers. That should be coming out in a week or two.

[00:46:06] Bonni: Oh, wow, I didn’t know it’s going to be so soon. Maybe even as they’re hearing this, I’ll go back and add the link in if there’s something for people to access. I’ll go do that after the fact. Oh, that’s wonderful. Audrey Watters, thank you so much for joining me for today’s conversation. Again, I just feel this has been ongoing. I’m so glad to have been introduced to your work.

[crosstalk].

[00:46:23] Audrey: This was great. Please have me back again so we can chat more. I love this.

[00:46:26] Bonni: Oh, I’m so glad. Then I’ll feel more comfortable because I waited a long time. I felt like I had to save it up but no I definitely will. Thank you so much.

[00:46:34] Audrey: Thank you.

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[00:46:38] Bonni: Thank you once again to Audrey Watters for joining me for today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. If you’d like to see the show notes for today’s episode you can head on over to teachinginhighered.com/397. If you prefer to receive those in your inbox every week you can head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. That will sign you up for the weekly newsletter and you will receive an update from me with the show notes from the most recent episodes, some other resources that don’t show up in the recommendations, quotable words, and other resources for you.

Head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks once again for being a part of the Teaching in Higher Ed community. I’ll see you next time.

[music]

[00:47:40] [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.