[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 418 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast: The Self and Syllabus with Christopher Richmann.

[00:00:12] Production Credit: Produced by innovative 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.

Christopher Richmann PhD is Assistant Director for the Academy for Teaching and Learning and affiliate faculty in the Department of Religion. His research focuses on the Pentecostal charismatic tradition and Lutheran popular theology. Dr. Richmann is the author of Living in Bible Times: F. F. Bosworth and the Pentecostal Pursuit of the Supernatural and Called: Recovering Lutheran Principles for Ministry and Vocation.

His articles have appeared in Wesleyan Theological Journal, Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, and Lutheran Quarterly. In the areas of teaching and learning, Dr. Richmann has special interests in academic authority, teaching as a vocation, and how theories of human development influence teaching. He’s published research in International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Teaching in Higher Education, and the Wabash Center Journal on Teaching, and along with Lenore Wright, Dr. Richmann edited Called to Teach: Excellence, Commitment, and Community in Christian Higher Education. Christopher, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:06] Christopher Richmann: Thank you so much for having me on, Bonni.

[00:02:09] Bonni: The first moment that I heard about your study, one word stood out to me so much, and that is the word “congruence”. I’m guessing since you put it in the title of a journal article, it means something to you. Christopher, what does congruence evoke for you?

[00:02:25] Christopher: Oh, yes. This is such a huge issue in my head as I’m thinking about the teaching task. There’s growing, I think, interest in the issue of the self that we bring into the classroom, and our colleagues, especially who are informed by critical pedagogy will really help us re-remember that we are embodied selves, and we bring all of that self into the classroom, into the tasks of teaching, but it’s not just the embodied self.

It’s all the artifacts that go along with our teaching as well. There’s assignments that we ask students to do. There’s messages that we send them through our learning management system or via email. As we’ll probably talk about here in more detail, there’s the syllabus, and all of these things are– depending on your philosophy, they may be part of the self, or they may be a residue of the self, whatever language works there for you, but it’s certainly true that they’re reflecting the self in some way.

As we think more seriously as teachers about bringing that full self into the classroom for our students, I think it really behooves us to look more closely at all of the aspects of the self, all the artifacts of the self to see whether or not these things are conveying the same message about who we are.

[00:03:54] Bonni: Over the time that you have been teaching and also working with other faculty, what have been some meaningful practices that have helped you just get in touch with how you perceive yourself? Because before we ever assess whether or not our perception matches others, we first have to start with that self. What have been some good practices or perhaps even authors or other things that come to mind as you think about the work that we need to do on our own perception of self?

[00:04:25] Christopher: One of the things that we’ve done in several different venues at my institution with faculty and with graduate student instructors as well, is what we call micro-teaching, which is just a session where you deliver a mini-module of your course content for your peers. Sometimes we even record those. That becomes something that the instructor can refer back to, and whether or not we record them, we’re always giving feedback, written feedback, and then in discussion as well.

For some instructors, it can be a real eye-opener, how you are being perceived. Even just to very simple things like, “Man, I didn’t realize I was talking that fast,” or, “I can’t believe I’m always fiddling with my rings on my finger when I’m talking in front of people.” It could be a very basic presentation, stuff like that, but then it can also amount to, “Man, I didn’t realize how many jargon-laden terms I’m using with students. I know that that can be an obstacle when I’m teaching, say, a freshman-level course. That’s something that I can really start working on.”

[00:05:35] Bonni: Boy, that idea of whether it’s finding a mirror for ourselves, or in my case, very early on, I can remember being 22 years old and teaching some of my early computer classes, and just having an audio recording and listening back. I mean, it has been many decades since then and I can still hear myself. “Right now, we’re going to go ahead and go up to the File Menu. Right now–” the phrases that I would rely on and that I’m sure could have been distracting, but it is such an emotional journey to go on, to hold that mirror up to oneself or to listen to oneself.

It is definitely not for the faint of heart. I think sometimes it can be helpful to know that there is lots of hope and goodness on the other side of that incredibly hard work that it is, either to do that for ourselves or even, I guess, riskier in some cases, although maybe in other cases, it’s safer because we can be so hard on ourselves sometimes, but to allow other people to invite other people to do that for us.

[00:06:44] Christopher: In some– you used the word safer or less risky, we’ve also used more just self-reflective exercises. There’s one online called the Teaching Perspectives Inventory, and we’ve also used the Grasha scale, the Teaching Styles scale with faculty.

These are just descriptive. They’re not prescriptive at all. They’re just descriptive to help you find some categories and some language about what you actually care about or what you actually intend to do with students sometimes on a meta-level, but then how that may or may not actually be incarnated in your teaching practices.

[00:07:31] Bonni: Yes. Those self-awareness things can be so helpful. I think for me even, Christopher, they have helped to even sometimes just expand either my imagination or expand my evoked set for what is possible, not always able to initially recognize where I have incongruence because I’m just modeling off of what was taught to me or through explicit or implicit ways.

Sometimes that’s in the case of a syllabus, which I know we’re going to transition into here in a moment, in some cases, this syllabus could have been written many, many, many moons ago and by individuals or an individual that doesn’t match up with who I want to show up as, but I might not even know the words or the practices until I engage in some of these self-reflective activities as you’ve described here. Let’s look at this specific study though. Talk a little bit about what the goal was. What did you and your co-authors want to explore here and question?

[00:08:35] Christopher: First, let me give a shout-out to my co-authors Courtney Kurinec and Matt Millsap who helped me work on this study and this manuscript. We got this idea from a workshop that we hosted my at my Center for Teaching and Learning, we hosted in partnership with our libraries, and we’ve got a wonderful digital scholarship librarian by the name of Joshua Ben here who was looking at– he was helping another researcher look at the emotional associations of language in sermons as a historical kind of approach to– a data approach in the humanities.

It really just sparked something for me about– the same kind of tool could be used for not just any document, and that’s really exciting, but specifically in the teaching world, any of our teaching documents. What looms largest for most of us is the syllabus. I mean, looms largest both in a psychological way and in just the sheer mass of a volume of this document as well.

This was just the beginning of a really fruitful partnership to find the right tools and the right prior scholarship to build on, to get some handle on how we could do this. It is certainly not the only way one could do this, but it is a way to do this.

[00:10:03] Bonni: Thank you so much for that background. I’m chuckling to myself as I think about Joshua’s work. It sounds absolutely fascinating because in what other context would we most want our values to be aligned with the words we’re espousing than in a place of worship? That sounds absolutely fascinating and interesting to see some of the roots and how this all came about.

It’s also fun, Christopher, when we think about getting people with different disciplines which I know you did through the study. You’ve got people that you looked at syllabi from the STEM fields, from anthropology, I mean from all these different disciplines, and how when we can have conversations like that across disciplines, some of the riches that come about. What were your research questions that you wanted to explore having to do with the syllabus in this particular study?

[00:10:56] Christopher: Well, we really just wanted to answer– the most basic form of the question is, am I coming across on my syllabus? Do students meet me in my syllabus, or do they meet something else? Do they meet the institution primarily in my syllabus? Do they meet some kind of Frankenstein patchwork of institution and discipline and me in the syllabus? We kind of came at this with the assumption and we stated clearly the assumption that instructors would want to pursue congruence or alignment between their perspectives of themselves as teachers and their syllabus.

I will say as an aside though, in one instance, I had a faculty member who participated in our study here at our institution who specifically sent me an email and said, “I just want you to know that I intentionally play good cop and bad cop with my syllabus.” I thought that was a very interesting take. So, in other words, I believe what he was communicating to me is that I have a pretty hard line and strict language, especially around policies and protocols on my syllabus.

Then if students come to me, I’m a little softer. So there’s a whole set of conversations that we could probably be having on that, that we don’t have time for. In general, we’re going to assume that instructors want their students to meet them, some true version of themselves in the syllabus.

[00:12:38] Bonni: We’re looking at the ways in which there is congruence between the syllabus, and ideally, we want to have those positive outcomes for our students and how those things get informed by our self-perceptions and our teaching styles. That’s the overarching goal of your study. Now, we’re going to get to it, Christopher. How do we do that? How do we show up in our syllabi in ways that either are congruent or not with our self-perceptions and our teaching styles?

[00:13:13] Christopher: Well, it may sound like since I spent some time doing this study and I continue to work on this open access tool that we’ve got that I’m just taking the syllabus for granted or assuming the necessity of the syllabus, but really I’m not. I’m pretty sympathetic to arguments like Mano Singham and others who say, “Who told us we need a syllabus? Most of human history, people learned without a syllabus.” There’s something to be said for that too, and yet just recognizing that it is so common, and in many institutions, it’s required. It’s nearly ubiquitous to have this document.

Where the syllabus does exist, it’s going to communicate, it can’t help but communicate about the course and about the instructor. There’s been a fair amount of research into how the language of a syllabus might affect students in terms of their motivation or how they see the instructor being approachable or flexible and all of that. What we noticed when we were looking at that research is the researchers tended to just be relying on intuitions about what was friendly or unfriendly language, what was a warm or a cold tone, what was authoritarian, or what was not.

The question emerged for us, is there a way to inject this with some level of objectivity? When you’re dealing with language, it’s always really slippery. As soon as you feel like you’ve got it in your hands, it slips out, but what we landed on was this scale that goes back decades in psychological research from Albert Mehrabian. His theory was that human language basically communicates emotions on three dimensions; pleasure, arousal, and dominance, and we have never really liked those particular terms.

We’ve tended to discuss this in terms of valence, alertness, and control, which mean the exact same thing. Valence is how positive or negative the emotion is. Alertness is just as it says, is there a high energy and alertness here, or is there a dullness or a boringness to it? Then control is, “Do I feel like I’m in control in this situation, or do I feel like I’m being controlled in this situation?”

Again, with the help of Digital Scholarship Librarian and my colleagues, we created this way where you can run a syllabus through this algorithm, and you get a mean score on all three of those dimensions. The tool that we’ve got right now actually takes it one step further and gives you suggestions for changing words that might be particularly far in terms of your sense of self versus what your syllabus is scoring as.

[00:16:14] Bonni: The one that to me brings up a lot of questions having to do our teaching, I think we could have multiple episodes and just be getting started on, is the one around dominance and around control. That’s an area that, in my teaching, as I think about over the last couple of decades, that probably has changed the most, I tend throughout my time teaching to have felt pretty joyous while I’m doing it. If you asked me to fill out the scale I would probably show up as a pretty happy person feeling like I was meant to teach and getting a lot of joy from that.

I would probably be very energetic on most of the days until I get home, and then after dinner, that’s when it all comes– all the energy that’s been expended. On the control one, I would have thought that the more that you could control the room– but we all know who’s in the room. Today it’s far less about control and more about the joy that you can find in the unexpected, that, yes, having the structure there is very helpful so that you can have the unexpected things. That structure is there less about control and more as then inviting this interplay that can happen between teacher and learner.

To me, Christopher, the best thing that happens is when you can’t really recognize who’s the teacher and who’s the learner because we’re both doing so much of it in a beautiful context like that. I’m curious for you, but as an educator and also from the people that you’ve worked with all these years, has this changed for you, your own thought about control in a classroom, and are you noticing that showing up on the people that you work with?

[00:18:00] Christopher: I’ve been thinking about this and I’m doing some writing right now about a very near concept to this issue of control which is authority. My working hypothesis, not to over-psychologize here, but my working hypothesis is that most instructors’ concerns for control are bred out of insecurities. We want to get to that part that is an experience that’s it’s really Zen when you get to that place where you can say, “I don’t need to have control over this situation. The subject is alive, and it’s doing its will among us, and the students are going to look to me for some guardrails and for some assurance that what we’re doing is headed somewhere, but that’s going to be something that I don’t need to assert. That’s something that’s going to be already understood in the context of the relationships that I have with students.”

I try often to nudge faculty in this direction of, “What would it mean if you weren’t worried about looking like you were ignorant about something or if you didn’t always have a standard answer to some kind of protocol, all these control things that we have?” I’m not sure yet where every conversation that we have right now is in this shadow, I’ve started using this language of the long shadow of COVID. This is I think another issue, another aspect of our teaching that over the next couple of years, I think we’ll see whether or not something has changed in terms of how we think about authority and how we think about control because frankly a lot of us had to change the way that we approached that during the pandemic.

[00:19:55] Bonni: The other thing that you’re bringing to mind, Christopher, is back to self-perception. I might like to think of myself as not finding control to be particularly important to me, but I do believe in the research around practices such as high-structure classes or retrieval practice. All these things require good facilitation skills, which are going to require– I was mentioning my first computer classes, where I had a lot of fluff words, “Go to this,” and, “Right now we’re going to go ahead and do this,” and learning how to be more declarative when giving people instructions so that the really important things can come across and all of that.

I also have been teaching for decades and started out quite a bit different, I’m sure, in terms of appearances, and also quite a bit different in terms of my own confidence level. I can vividly remember, early on, how terrifying it was to get a question I didn’t know the answer to. That just felt, oh, just such a vulnerable thing. Today, to ever think that any of us knows anything about anything just makes me laugh. That Dunning-Kruger model comes to mind quite a bit, of once you know a little bit about something, you can become quite well aware you know nothing about it. [laughs]

I think the idea that we might get questions we didn’t know the answer to, back to your original hypothesis, that a lot of these feelings that we have around authority can be born out of a feeling of insecurity, and then what would it look like if you felt like you didn’t need to be insecure, all of this definitely comes to mind.

This came out a little bit actually in your research, the idea of can we– I’m sorry, I’m going to have to– What I’m about to say didn’t come out in your research, but it’s reminding me of something that did. That is the idea of, I’m thinking now, Christopher, if we’re talking to someone who is newer at this, who still feels in their stomach just that wretched feeling of, “Oh my gosh. What if I’m found out that I don’t know all of the answers to all of the questions that they have?” then, to me, can we behave our way a little bit until enough time has passed?

A common thing for me, Christopher, is not overly-apologizing. If you’re having technical problems, they don’t need to hear every single [laughs] step that you’re trying to take verbally. You could actually just be trying to, in behind the scenes, figure it out and then have another alternative plan rather than, a lot of times, those over-apologizing that came in. Something that came out in the research specifically was this connection between how I’m showing up for my teaching and then how I’m feeling. There was some interplay there. Could you talk a little bit about that interplay and what showed up in your research?

[00:22:54] Christopher: Yes. I don’t know if listeners will be familiar with Grasha’s teaching-style inventory, but we did find that in his more– He’s got these five teaching styles, and no one is only one. He’s very clear about– You’ll land in a cross-section or a cluster of these. It actually came out pretty intuitively that if your teaching style was expert, for instance, which in Grasha’s language means that you come in and you present yourself as the one who knows. This is a language I usually use, the one who knows.

To get back to our authority conversation, if that’s the place you are seating your authority, then it becomes pretty easy to make you insecure. All I have to do is ask you a question about something you don’t know, and then all of a sudden, you’re thrown off. What we found here is using the language of that teaching style’s inventory that, for instance, the expert also had a higher dominance reading. We found some things here that are fairly intuitive, and then we also found the personal model teaching style generally had a higher positive effect of their teaching. Some of these were pretty strong correlations.

Without knowing exactly which is the chicken and which is the egg, we can start to talk to faculty and say, “Well, for instance, if you feel like you don’t have as much joy in your teaching as you might want to or thought that you should at this stage in your career, let’s take a look at the language around the personal model style of teaching. Are there some practices that you can begin to use that you see in that, that are true to you, but that might also have the effect of just bringing you more enjoyment in your teaching?” That opens up so many opportunities for faculty development.

[00:25:02] Bonni: Before we get to the recommendation segment of the podcast, I did want to ask you to talk a little bit about what’s in the appendix of your journal article, the author’s sample syllabus comparison. I’m going to encourage people to go and read this for yourself because this one page, page nine, is a gold mine for us thinking about the kind of congruence we might want to have.

On the left side, you have the original and on the right you have the revised. Starts with what the– it used to sound like required books, and now it talks about what book you need. It used to talk about attendance and student decorum, and now it says, “How to be a part of this class.” Lots of beautiful language. The very first thing that’s on the side that’s the revision, “My invitation to you”. I’m walking into this document. I’m not even taking this class, and I feel invited to be a part of the conversation that’s coming about.

Very early on here, “What I think about teaching and learning. Teaching is a joy for me because I love the material, the ongoing process of discovery, and the experience of expanding the ranks of those who think and care about the material I love.” What are some other things that come to your mind, Christopher, as you look at this rewrite of a syllabus?

[00:26:32] Christopher: This rewrite is not contrived in any way. As I’m looking at this split screen here of the original syllabus language and the revised, this is a revision that I actually went through. I saw myself developing as an instructor, leaps and bounds, just by going through this exercise. Really, when I got my own scores on the survey and my original syllabus and saw some incongruences there, I thought, “Well, what can I do to change this?”

There’s really two levels, I think, that emerged. One is, “Let’s just change some words.” You mentioned the word “required”. So many of us have the word required somewhere in our syllabus. That’s a pretty low scoring when it comes to valence, or positive or negative. That’s a negative kind of word based on this tool that we’re using. What are other ways that I could communicate that same thing? The book that you need.

As scholars, we’re trained to try to be really concise. I’m going to just throw it out there that you might have to use more words, but you will get them across in ways that maybe better reflect yourself as an instructor. When you read from the original syllabus, that phrase attendance and student decorum, I just want to hide in a cave. I just want to bury my head in the sand. I can’t believe that I used that kind of language. It’s a very common kind of language.

We can just change some words, but then it also ought to make us think about, “What are the big messages that we’re sending to students? What are the ways that I’m inviting the students into this class, into this experience that we’re going to have?” I think it’s Ken Bain who– if he didn’t coin the word, he popularized the phrase “the promising syllabus”. “Am I setting out an actual intellectual invitation here for you?” Because that’s the way I think of my discipline.

Every time that I prepare for a course, or every time I embark on research in my discipline, it’s this wonderful invitation. It’s beckoning me to something, and I will learn something about myself along the way. I started thinking about creating paragraphs that really invited the student into the course. One of those was that invitation, literally, where I say, “My invitation to you,” but then a condensed form of my teaching philosophy as well. I know many instructors do this.

This is just a practice that I think should become more widespread is for your job searches and for your tenure promotion materials, you probably have some version of a teaching philosophy statement. How can you communicate that to students in one really tight paragraph that really brings you across? You’ve got some word-level treatments, but then you’ve also got these bigger things that you can start doing to communicate to students what you think about the course and material.

[00:29:53] Bonni: Before Christopher and I share our recommendations for today’s episode, I’d like to take a moment to thank today’s sponsor. It does have to do with text, although instead of analysis of text, it is the expansion of text and that is TextExpander. TextExpander is a key part of my daily life on a computer. What TextExpander lets me do is type in a couple of easy-to-setup and easy to remember, because I made them, what are called snippets, little short things that I type. If I type L-I-N-K as in link, T-I-H-E, you guessed it, the Teaching in Higher Ed website automatically shows up in whatever it is that I am typing.

I get a little email that tells me just how much time TextExpander is saving me, and do still tend to get blown away with all of the time saved so that I can invest that extra time that I then have, to pouring it into more of the actual important aspects of whatever narrative I may be writing. TextExpander is great for repetitive typing, little mistakes that you make all the time that you want to build your own little autocorrect that actually works better than the autocorrect because you made it, being able to search for answers to things like, “What is my work phone number,” because I never give it out and all that good stuff.

It’s really easy to use. I mentioned that those snippets are easy to remember, but if I ever forget, it’s just living right there for me to go to type in whatever it is I’m searching for in my little collection of my dictionary, if you will, of these snippets to be able to use one that maybe I forgot what that shortcut was and easily be able to incorporate it in, no matter where I am writing on my computer, Mac or Windows, on a smartphone device, such as an iPad or even an iPhone.

All of that is available with TextExpander. If you head on over to TextExpander.com/podcast, they will give you an option to get a free trial and redeem 20% off of your subscription, should you choose to, and please let them know that you heard about TextExpander from Teaching in Higher Ed. Again, that link is TextExpander.com/podcast. Thanks so much to TextExpander for sponsoring today’s episode.

This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. I think so much of– I didn’t plan this, Christopher, but so much of what I like about what I’m going to recommend is the next step. If we rethought our syllabus, what if we then rethought assessment? A woman named Karine Gressing, I’m not sure I’m pronouncing her name correctly, but I’ve got a link I’d love for you to go check out on Twitter.

It’s a tweet about her final projects in a course that she taught on the Holocaust, and she writes, “I gave my students the choice between a final project and a final exam. I feel weird about testing them on genocide. 11 chose the final project, 9 chose the exam. Here’s the breakdown of what my brilliant students did.” I’m just going to read a few of these. She shares one student composed and scored their own musical piece to try to capture the emotion of arriving at Auschwitz. Lyrics were a Hebrew translation of Psalms 1, which victims might say the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction, and she actually links to the song, so we could go listen to that song that the student wrote.

Another student organized a campus-wide event. They worked with the student government, got funding, researched some short videos around a few important themes, wrote discussion questions, and put together a moving night of remembrance in our art center for their project. One of my students made a lecture with a voiceover to connect some of the information from the course with the current events in Ukraine. You can see the final project here. All of us prepping Zoom lectures for two years could appreciate the work that must have been put in here. This threat keeps going and going and going. What a beautiful way of allowing people to express their learning in very authentic ways.

[00:34:28] Christopher: That’s beautiful. It’s so profound too, even though it’s so simple, that observation that it feels weird to write multiple choice questions about genocide. It’s a challenge to us as instructors to remember that not all knowledge can be assessed in the same way and not all knowledge ought to be expressed in the same way. There’s not neutrality about assessment. It’s very value-laden. The multiple choice questions give us this sense of ownership and control over the material that creating a work of art usually doesn’t, I think.

[00:35:09] Bonni: Absolutely. Christopher, what do you have to recommend for us today?

[00:35:13] Christopher: Well, I am a historian by training, so I’ve been trying to do some more reading in the historical perspectives of the things that I do now as a faculty developer. I came across this book, the 2020 book by Jonathan Zimmerman, The Amateur Hour. It is a history of college teaching. This is an area of scholarship that is starting to– I think beginning to blossom. We have so much to learn about what we do. We are not the first people to wonder why college teachers aren’t trained to teach, why they don’t seem to have the time, and in many cases, the inclination to develop as teachers.

The book does not offer many answers. If you’re the type of person who wants to read books for answers about how to fix the problem, it’s not really the book for you. I do have some qualms with the way Zimmerman ends on really just suggesting that great teaching is a bit ineffable. I’m not really in that camp, but it’s really, really enlightening to read throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the various complaints about college teaching and the quality of college teaching and attempts to assess it which mostly were not successful, probably only in the last 30 or 40 years really been successful. If you’re historically minded or really just want a broader perspective on what it means to encourage and work towards better teaching in college, I would highly recommend it.

[00:36:58] Bonni: I’ve never heard of it before. It sounds fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Did you want to share, Christopher, about your podcast? Because I know that might be of interest to listeners to check out after they listen to this episode. [chuckles]

[00:37:11] Christopher: Oh, well, that’s very generous of you. For almost two years now, we’ve done a podcast that is– Professors Talk Pedagogy is the name of it. I interview faculty at my own institution at Baylor University. What has been so inspiring and frankly, a little unexpected, is I still have a really long list of people I want to interview. I thought when I started it, “Oh my gosh, am I going to run out of people that are willing to do this or that have something different to say,” but that couldn’t be farther from the case.

We are a private university and we are faith-based. There’s some of that that may not apply to all listeners, but we really just talk about effective pedagogy from a lot of different angles.

[00:38:03] Bonni: I can’t remember what milestone– oh, no, I know what it was. I was sharing about the 400th episode and a relative of mine said something like, “How on earth could you possibly have come up with 400 topics?” They thought that that was the challenge. I’m thinking, “Oh, gosh, Christopher, if you’ve done this for any length of time, you literally– the challenge is not, how could you come up with 400, it’s how could you pick from the myriad of fascinating conversations that we have?”

Just off of today, Christopher, I want to talk to you again. I want to hear about your research [laughs] when you start doing more of the work around authority. I’m completely enthralled, and this is just one conversation, and I literally have branched off to about 50 other ones, just from today. Well, what an absolute joy it has been to get to know you and your work and the work of your co-authors and Joshua, the librarian. I have all these things I want to do with the information I now have because of you reaching out. Thank you so much for coming on the episode, and I hope this is the beginning of an ongoing relationship.

[00:39:03] Christopher: I really enjoyed talking to you, Bonni. Thanks for the invitation.

[00:39:09] Bonni: Another word of thanks to Christopher Richmann for being a guest on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak, and was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroger, production support was provided by Sierra Smith. These podcast episodes are just one of the Teaching in Higher Ed resources.

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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. 

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