[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 464 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, The Transformative Power of Transversal Skills with Ciarán Dunne.

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[00:00:17] 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.

Ciarán Dunne is the first Transversal Skills director at Dublin City University, Ireland. This unique role is focused on empowering students to thrive in an increasingly unscripted world by helping them to develop and evidence a wide range of key transversal skills, such as creative thinking, futures literacy, leadership, personal agility, data literacy, entrepreneurship, and career visioning among others. He has a strong interest in understanding emerging trends in both higher education and industry so that students, graduates, employees, and organizations can be future-capable in the context of rapid change.

Following his undergraduate education in International Marketing and Languages, Ciarán worked in business development in Ireland and overseas before returning to University to undertake postgraduate and doctoral studies. From here, he became Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in DCU, delivering a variety of modules across multiple disciplines, including sociology, social entrepreneurship, creativity, futures thinking, intercultural studies, academic skills, and also Spanish language. His research interests span multiple areas and his work has been published in top-ranking international journals across a variety of disciplines including creativity, studies, the sociology of sport, intercultural studies, international education, and qualitative research methodology.

Ciarán is particularly passionate about creativity and is interested in how educational environments can foster this innate human capacity in both students and staff. His Credne podcast includes conversations with scholars from all around the world, exploring how we can foster creativity in higher education and beyond. Ciarán, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:03:02] Ciarán Dunne: Thank you very much for having me, Bonni. It’s so good to be on the show.

[00:03:05] Bonni: I am delighted to get to have this conversation, although I am chuckling a little bit because I try not to use this word, megatrends because it sounds like I should have one of those sportscasters or like those big trucks, “Megatrends,” so I’m going to be trying to be serious here for a moment because you do have something serious to tell us and that is what are some of the megatrends shaping higher education and some of the disruption that you’re seeing in higher education that can be coming in the next decade and beyond? Could you do it in a voice truck, not a truck voice but a truck newscaster voice? Do you know what kind of voice I’m talking about here?

[00:03:47] Ciarán: I’m not sure but I’ll try and channel that type of voice.

[00:03:49] Bonni: [chuckles] Okay, try. Try.

[00:03:51] Ciarán: If that’s what you want. If that’s what you really want.

[00:03:53] Bonni: It’s really what the listeners want, Ciarán. It’s what the listeners want.

[00:03:57] Ciarán: It is. Give the people what they want.

[00:03:59] Bonni: You should give them what they want.

[00:04:01] Ciarán: I think initially when we talk about the concept of disruptability and looking at what sectors might score high on the possibility of disruption in those sectors, I think higher education certainly scores high on that. While the criteria that underpins that might be a bit crude, it does offer a useful aperture or opening into a conversation. The idea that, for example, they say that sectors that score high on disrupt ability are sectors whereby the product, and I use that in the broadest sense of that term, so not a neoliberal sense but the product, the offering hasn’t changed dramatically over a period of time but it has become more expensive.

Of course, the price of higher education varies internationally, and Europe typically would be much cheaper than North America let’s say, or the States at least. Nonetheless, we can even talk about opportunity costs. There’s absolutely no doubt that higher education is set for high levels of disruption over the coming decade. What that disruption will look like, I suppose then is a factor of all these different megatrends if you want me to use that type of voice. These major trends that are underpinning the sector.

One of them, for example, would be diversification. What we mean by that essentially is that there are now organizations who are active in the higher education space that have absolutely no historical activity in that space. They’re typically coming from the tech side of things. They could be LinkedIn Learning, it could be Alphabet, Meta, it could be Udemy, Coursera, whatever the case is, that they have a huge amount of technological expertise, they have a lot of resources, and they have the ability to disrupt the industry if they really, really wanted to.

We could end up with a situation, for example, whereby an organization says, we don’t need you to have an undergraduate qualification, we want you to have G credits or something like that, and you get them from us. That’s one thing we need to bear in mind. It’s good because it prompts us as traditional, let’s say, universities, even though we’re, in my university, Dublin City University is a relatively new university. Nonetheless, we fall under that broad umbrella, traditional higher education. It prompts us to question what our fundamental telos is, what our reason for being, and our mission is.

Anyway, the second trend then, of course, is around digitalization, and COVID just accelerated that trend but it did it in a major way. That feeds in, of course, to just general levels of high-tech disruption where there’s automation AI. I was listening to a previous podcast you did when we were talking about ChatGPT, et cetera, and all that has the ability to majorly disrupt higher education and of course, transcend the geographical boundaries that historically defined universities. The idea that perhaps I could be doing a fully online program whereby I do one module from Sydney, one module from Buenos Aires, one module from Stockholm, whatever the case is and that can maybe be tracked through blockchain or for transparency or something like that.

Then another major trend is around personalization and customization of the student experience. The recognition that students are increasingly diverse, as in the student body is increasingly diverse, and they’re demanding a more customized personalized learning experience. I think historically, universities would recognize that there is diversity but they might necessarily offer their educational offerings mightn’t fully recognize that diversity, bur nowadays that is changing at a very significant level.

We have diversification of organizations who are active in the space. We’ve got the digitalization, automation, AI, and we have personalization. There’s a couple of other ones as well but they would be the main ones, and when you mix those three together, it really prompts us as people working in higher education to ask what are we about, and particularly I think the second one around digitalization.

After COVID, there was this global phenomenon. A lot of students just didn’t come back to campus. It’s a really useful question for us to say why would they come back to campus. What are we offering students when they come back to campus that they can’t get otherwise? Like I said, they are really useful prompts. They can be difficult but they’re very, very useful prompts for us.

[00:08:27] Bonni: You were talking, it’s not just the residential experience and what does that residential give that perhaps an online, but even in the online spaces, what is then unique about your online community and learning environment that would be any different than these other competitors that you mentioned like Udemy or Coursera. I just on a social media network just yesterday bookmarked, I can go take Introduction to Computer Science from Harvard. I can go take, you mentioned AI, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence from Harvard, so then what would be different?

Not just about what we might think of as a more traditional context for learning but even as we move into more lowering those geographic boundaries, even that, what is your telos, what is your reason for being, and if you’re a reason for being– I was going to say one last thing before we start into, I know what will be the center of our conversation today but you talked about personalization and I have tended to be pretty naive I think over my– I’ve always been relatively comfortable with technology, and so I can get swept into when some of these educational technology companies will have high promises for things.

Personalization is one of those things where I think they don’t mean what you think they mean. They’re saying personalization, that’s actually not their telos. They’re saying that on the brochure, but me or you, or anyone else listening, it’s oftentimes in my experience, I’ve been naive to think what is actually being achieved when we’re saying that you’re learning is “personalized.” This is where we’re on a audio podcast, so I have my air quotes up [laughs] that personalization is not always such.

Anyway, I don’t want to take us too far on a rabbit trail, but just wondering if you have any comments on– Well, and actually, you mentioned blockchain too, and of course, blockchain, I think so much of the tech space has been saying the sky is falling, the whole world is going to change. Blockchain is going to change everything, and so I wonder now if people aren’t paying quite as much attention to this radical emergence of different types of artificial intelligence and how quickly they’re changing. Because they go, well, you just said that, whether it was with blockchain or even further back from there when the new millennium hit, what the heck is that called?

[00:11:04] Ciarán: Y2K. Y2K, I believe.

[00:11:05] Bonni: Yes. Those of us that have been around for a while are used to all these. The sky is falling, or everything is going to change. You’ll never even recognize yourself tomorrow, and so wanting to know what might be unique about these things. Anyway, that’s not the main reason you’re here. I’m going to stop talking and let you comment, and then we’ll talk a little more about the main reason you’re here.

[00:11:27] Ciarán: No, but I completely agree with you, and I think it is that question around why would students come back to college, as in, physically come back onto campus, and where is the benefit around it? I think that links into another trend, which essentially is around the depreciation of the value of knowledge. The idea that now knowledge is not this form of highly valuable tradable equity it once was because we can access knowledge from our phones, from our laptops instantaneously. Universities, again, historically, they were set up so people could go there and access information, and knowledge, but now we say, okay, well, actually I can get that somewhere else.

That feeds into I think the idea that the half-life of knowledge and information which is reducing all the time as well, and that in turn feeds into the idea of lifelong learning. The narrative that a student finishes their undergraduate qualification, or perhaps their master’s, or whatever, and they’ll never study again. They know everything. That’s completely gone nowadays.

I think it’s about developing relationships with students, really meaningful relationships, and connections with them, that we can facilitate connections between them, and their peers, but also facilitate connections between students and the institution so that as they journey through their life, the institution represents a doyen of trust. Someone they can go to and know that the information and knowledge and skills they acquire there are of value.

I think certainly, in many countries, and I can’t speak, or I won’t speak around the States specifically, but let’s say in Europe, a lot of trust has collapsed in political systems in different ways, perhaps in organized religion in different ways, in the media in different ways. I think universities occupy this position that they should be these pillars of trust that society can go to, and rely upon in a world that’s defined by huge levels of uncertainty.

[00:13:30] Bonni: This is where I once again, for anyone who’s reading a transcript, need to make it perfectly clear that I’m being incredibly sarcastic as I say everything is peachy here in the United States. We have the highest level of trust as citizens that we have ever had historically, yes, in all of the things that you mentioned, [chuckles] so.

[00:13:51] Ciarán: Wonderful. I’m delighted to hear.

[laughter]

[00:13:53] Bonni: Yes. We’ve looked a little bit at some of the ways that higher education is both being disrupted but also has the potential for that to be exasperated as we go. You have a premise for what might be the types of skills that might contribute better to that lifelong learning, and to that value or even that telos of our institutions for higher learning, so talk some about transversal skills.

[00:14:24] Ciarán: Yes. I think I’m the only person in the world who has this job title, which is Transversal Skills Director for any given university. I’m Transversal Skills Director, the first one for Dublin City University in Ireland. That’s part of a huge project that we’re running, which essentially is the biggest innovation in teaching and learning in the history of the institution. We’re trying to reimagine undergraduate education for this unscripted future.

The question that drives me and my colleagues is really how can we help students to thrive in an increasingly unscripted world? While terms like thriving are subjective concepts, from my perspective, thriving means that someone has the ability to imagine, to pursue, and to realize a life that they have reason to value and that is of value to their society. That’s someone for me who’s thriving. It’s not for me to prescribe a career onto them, it’s really what are your values, how can you imagine this life that you want, and that’s contributing to broader society as well.

Transversal skills then is the idea– First of all, we can get bogged down in terminology. Some people call them transversal skills. They can be called transferrable skills, 21st-century skills, meta-skills, some people call them power skills and human skills and perhaps humans, they are fundamentally unique to humans. My job is to identify what these skills should be, what skills all students should have regardless of what program they’re doing. Then figure out, okay, how do we actually define and operationalize these skills.

Because my own background would be in humanities and social sciences, but I spent a lot of time in the STEM world, and there’s this realization as I went from humanities and social sciences over to STEM is that there’s really core concepts that people agree on in STEM. No one disagrees with the periodic table, let’s say, and no one disagrees that water’s made up of H2O, et cetera. Whereas in humanities and social sciences, we spend a lot of time discussing and parsing and unpacking, and debating core concepts like what is health. What is happiness? What is culture? What is creativity? Yet these things are fundamental to our existence.

A lot of these skills that I oversee, or that my job is to identify, for example, creative thinking, ethical decision-making, entrepreneurship, et cetera, they don’t lend themselves to one single universal definition. My remit has been to identify them, then figure out, okay, how can we actually define them, operationalize them in terms of competencies. How can we identify to what extent colleagues have already been doing these things for a long time?

Universities are all around critical thinking. It’ll be incredibly hubristic of me to show up and say, “I’m here to make sure everyone’s doing critical thinking.” We want to make sure that we surface, and acknowledge good practice in these areas heretofore so we can scale them, and then figure out, okay, if there’s gaps, how can we actually address those gaps in a consistent way?

I think the two really, really challenging ones are how you can assess these transversal skills. How do you assess someone’s creative thinking ability? For example, how do you assess someone’s personal agility, their leadership, their communicative competence? It certainly doesn’t lend itself to exams which I don’t know what your university experience was, but mine was based on exams. Then finally, how do we actually empower the students so that they can evidence these skills so they can demonstrate them to external stakeholders, be that potential employers or just different external stakeholders?

It’s quite a broad remit. I identified 17 transversal skills, which is a prime number that people aren’t too fond of. When I went to them I said, “Look, if you want me to get rid of one of them tell me which one you think I should get rid of,” and that’s a big challenge because they’re all important. They fall under areas such as ways of thinking, ways of working, tools for working, and tools for thriving. That’s why it goes from critical thinking, from futures literacy, down to entrepreneurship, intercultural competence, into digital and data literacy and project management, and includes career visioning, personal agility, and health literacy, so it’s a very broad church.

[00:18:53] Bonni: I’m hearing so much and you’re expanding my imagination. This is such a stimulating conversation. Let me start with the first thing that I heard was this tension between STEM fields, which we tend to think about as more concrete like you said, and then sometimes the humanities we think about just being more about theoretical and these amorphous things. Yet if you think about the ways that we might benefit if we were to take that theoretical and make it a bit more practical, and I know it makes people uncomfortable to talk about this opportunity cost that you mentioned earlier, and the reality is that to take out these kinds of loans in many of the countries around the world, and even if you don’t have to take loans because that’s part of a social program, you are giving up something in order to participate in the higher learning.

[00:19:44] Ciarán: Sure.

[00:19:46] Bonni: Then with the STEM, I think about so often I have a nephew who just got his PhD in chemistry, and he works on computational physics to hopefully someday find cures for cancers, and so you would want the STEM fields to be creative, to be expanding their imagining. It’s like if these two seemingly different types of disciplines were to come together, and I’m sure I’m not inventing this for the first time, but as you were talking to was making me think about the ways in which this interdisciplinary thinking really benefits us as a society.

Because you talked about earlier your goal, your telos to have it be, not just good for me as a student what that is going to mean, my own return on investment if you will, but also good for the world. I’d love to have you expand a little bit about any of those tensions you’re seeing between the more theoretical and seemingly practical, and where they benefit and sharpen one another.

[00:20:49] Ciarán: Absolutely, and I think that that word, interdisciplinarity, is absolutely key because we know, and one of the areas that I was lecturing in and I’m still very, very passionate about is creativity and creative thinking. We know that creativity sparks at the nexus, this point of intersection between different disciplines, between different knowledge sets, so it’s really important that we expose students to diverse knowledge sets. Now, the concern there is that are you going to cannibalize their core curriculum, their core discipline, by exposing them to multiple different knowledge sets. There is an equilibrium to be met there and we need to be mindful of that.

For example, we are certainly gravitating towards that with programs we’ve launched in the last couple of years are very much around it interdisciplinary. We’ve got, for example, physics with data analytics. We’ve chemistry with artificial intelligence, we have psychology with disruptive technology. They are acknowledging the value of occupying that space that exists at that inter-interface between different disciplines.

I think there’s huge value in that, and I think there’s is huge value in encouraging, and I don’t want to say forcing but getting people to commit to one agreed definition of something and that it’s transparent, that it has been exposed. I regularly use this term, the friction that polishes the diamond, that it has been exposed to friction that has enhanced the final output of this definition, or the competence statements that underpin it.

For example, if I say to you that I’m good at creative thinking, what does that mean, or I’m creative? Ultimately, you’re the one who will judge if I’m creative. It’s not really for me to say if I’m creative. Equally, if I say I’m a really good communicator, ultimately, you’ll be the one to judge if I’m a really good communicator. I might think I’m really good at ethos, pathos, and logos, whatever the case is, but I mightn’t be. Or I might think I’m a fantastic listener and I could be an egregious listener. These things are social in many ways and that needs to be recognized.

I think it is completely understandable that people who, let’s say, heretofore have been specialists and experts in specific STEM disciplines, let’s say astrophysics or whatever the case is, and we come to them and we say we really want your students to develop intercultural competence. They are what’s that about? Does that make sense within our program? Where does the expertise supposed to reside? Are you saying we should have physicists who are also experts in intercultural competence or how does that work? The same thing can be applied with sustainability literacy, entrepreneurship, ethical decision-making, all of these things. How do you do that in a consistent fashion across an institution?

You need to recognize there’s so much complexity to it because you need to recognize there are different disciplines and different domains, and different cultures within them. Yet we’re trying to ensure that all students are developing a level of a certain level of competence in these transversal skills. We have to have some flexibility but also we have to have transparency and consistency underpinning it. That has been a real genuine challenge that we’ve been working with. It’s important to recognize that as well. Not to say that these things are easy, these things are hard, but we’re doing them because they’re necessary, because the world in higher education is changing.

The one thing I would say and this might sound possibly a bit dramatic but if we look around the world and we have huge levels of expertise in many many many different disciplines, but if we look around the world, now the vast majority of problems that we’re facing in the world stem from a lack of transversal skills. A gap in ethical decision-making, a gap in critical thinking, a gap in creative thinking, a gap in sustainability literacy, a gap in futures literacy, a gap in teamwork and collaboration, a gap in compelling communication, and a gap in project management. Surely then it makes sense that we would want to foster these skills in our graduates, at a purely personal level, and for a societal level, and then also in terms of employability as well.

[00:25:00] Bonni: The second tension that I heard you speak about had to do with assessment and evidence. When it comes to assessment, one of the things that’s come up many times on this podcast before is, although I don’t think it comes up enough, is the idea that assessment, you can assess learning but you can also learn through assessment, so there’s that piece of it there, and then you talked a little bit about evidence. To me, those are similar to the tensions we just talked about where they’re different things but they benefit from each other as well. What has been your experience with this interplay between assessment and evidence around these transversal skills?

[00:25:43] Ciarán: That’s something we’re still very much working on I think. Some transversal skills lend themselves to assessment more so than others. Some of them will demand multiple stakeholders or informants in terms of the assessment, like let’s say communication for example, or even leadership. I think a big thing as well is giving students the language. Students may well be let’s say good critical thinkers or they could be good communicators but they might actually lack the language to speak to that, and that’s a big thing.

I think that evidencing piece, a lot of that will come down to how we can actually empower the students to own their own story. To articulate a narrative that is relevant to them, it’s authentic to themselves. They’re not all coming in saying I’m a fantastic– If you’ve got 15 applicants who are saying exactly the same thing, well then who do you believe? That’s where the transparency and assessment kicks in. That’s what we’re trying to do to ensure that our students, when they graduate, will have a personalized transversal skills profile that is transparent, and so the university stands over it and says yes, they’ve got, they have actually fulfilled these type of competencies.

The problem is if everyone says they’re a creative thinker, what does that actually look like? I think it goes back to the trust thing. I think universities and higher education institutions, we have to be almost like curators of these concepts. These concepts that are abstruse, they’re slippery, they’re nebulous but they’re so important. We need to articulate what we mean by that and stand over it, so that if someone, for example, if a graduate from DCU says I’m a creative thinker, we need to make sure that they know exactly what that means, and isn’t just coming up with new ideas.

Someone says I invented a glass hammer. Well, that’s not actually creative. It’s new but it’s not particularly useful or of value or perceived to be value, unless perhaps you’re a glass sculptor in which case it might be. There’s another level of subjectivity there and domain-specific applications. The assessment piece, again is a big shift, and to go back to the scholarship of teaching, and learning, and the dynamic between teaching and learning, and assessment. For example, lectures are a go-to historical modality for teaching. Lectures can be efficient for teaching, they might not necessarily be overly effective for learning, and then what assessment lends itself to that?

Let’s say we are very much trying to espouse the culture of immersive learning, experiential learning, active learning. We’re doing an awful lot of work on challenge-based learning, where students would be learning and assessed at the same time in that process, and that’s a big shift for any institution. These are big changes because the fact of the matter is people who end up as lecturers in higher education typically have worked well within that system. The system has suited them, the ability to consume large amounts of information, think critically about it, reproduce it, do some research, that has worked well but it doesn’t work well for everyone.

That again connects with that trend around personalization that we need to acknowledge that not every student is going to necessarily learn in the same way. It also raises questions I suppose about diverse approaches to assessment even within a module, and then the waters get very, very muddied indeed. It’s an ongoing challenge but it’s a rich challenge to focus on.

[00:29:28] Bonni: You’ve talked about so many of the challenges and I’m over here giggling a little bit thinking like you’re on a podcast so you probably can’t even be as open as– Because you bring that many people around to have these kinds of conversations in a good way, and I’m sure in some irritating ways, we’re going to really dust some things up for each other and to get to these shared definitions that you talked about and you talked about how important they are, so I’d love for us before we end this part of the conversation, to end on some hope and some imagination. As you’re having these conversations with colleagues and with students, what’s emerging for you today that you’re re-imagining, that you’re full of hope about for, I don’t know, the next few years?

[00:30:14] Ciarán: Well, one of the really interesting things about this role, because as it took me out of my faculty, so I would’ve been very familiar with colleagues within my faculty but there wouldn’t necessarily be huge amounts of interaction between colleagues with other faculties but now I’ve had a lot of that experience and one of my core values is this idea of collaboration.

If we want to bring in change because change is difficult, sometimes we talk about it’s like pushing honey up a hill. Change can be difficult and collaboration is absolutely central to successful change, so fostering cultures of collaboration, and that’s where the interdisciplinarity comes in, and that really healthy friction where I listen to you and you listen to me and there’s a dialectic as opposed to a debate where I’m not necessarily trying to convince you, we’re trying to co-create something together.

For example, with these transversal skills, we created a unique expert internal panel comprising staff from all across the university. I think we have about 135 staff involved. They were split into different groups for each transversal skill and we brought them together and they co-created definitions and they co-created competent statements for each of those definitions as well. That was an incredibly rich experience and it was a great opportunity for colleagues to get to know each other across different quasi-siloed areas.

There could be people involved in entrepreneurship in lots of different areas across the university who never knew each other, and I think that’s really one key thing in the future to try and maximize the affordances that exist within your institution to give people a voice, to empower them. I think that’s been a really, really positive aspect around it. I think as well when you’re trying to drive change, it’s really important you listen to people and you understand where they’re coming from and you respect them, and that they feel heard.

It’s a bit like when we do feedback with students, very often we’re asking the student like, what’s the lecture well prepared, was the assessment suitable, was it engaging? Again, a really important question I think is how did the lecture make you feel about you? Instead of asking how you feel about the lecture, how did the lecture make you feel about you? Did the lecture make you feel, listened to, empowered, respected, that you had a voice, that you had agency? Those things are really important and these big change management projects, and they’re going to happen more and more in the face of this disruption, I think your institutional values are key.

I talk a lot around the map is not the terrain, and so the map is the plan or the strategy, and then you’re trying to actually, as you start to navigate that terrain or if it’s radical innovation, as you push beyond the boundaries of the map and you find yourself in this uncharted terrain, well the map then essentially becomes redundant because you’ve gone beyond the boundaries of it, by definition. You can’t use it anymore, and so your values are your compass points.

If you and I disagree on something as we’re navigating this uncharted terrain, at least we can go back to our core values and say, we both agreed on this. We both agreed on this. Let’s figure out, we both agree on this, let’s figure out where we go from here. Those institutional values, and I think every institution should spend a huge amount of time teasing them out. Not saying like, we’re innovative. Who’s going to say we’re not innovative?

I was in hospital earlier on this evening and on the wall they had their values, and they were identical to any university values; innovation, collaboration, experimenting, et cetera, et cetera, but it’s what that actually means. Fleshing them out so that if there is divergence and disagreement and some friction, at least we have that we can return to and that’s our starting point because you need that common ground, that’s really, really important. It’s probably understandable I would say that because my background is very much in sociology and cultural studies and intercultural communication, et cetera, but I really strongly believe that those values are absolutely key as we’re trying to navigate this increasingly uncharted unscripted world.

[00:34:32] Bonni: A few months ago I recommended a song on the podcast and the title of the song is Don’t Lose Sight. I had to explain to listeners because if you listen to all the lyrics, it starts out with this, and it uses a euphemism for poop but it’s not a polite word. It says this poop’s never going to change, it’s never going to change, but I love the chorus of Don’t Lose Sight and that whole idea of you not losing sight about why you’re doing this. What you’re describing here, Ciarán, is this why are we doing it that will help us then be able to have these shaping conversations and rooting us in those values. That’s so powerful. Thank you for that.

This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. Mine is quick today. I wanted to recommend a piece which is entitled “Professors, we can—and should—prioritize compassion with our students,” and this is by Jessica Larsen for Science Magazine. I heard about this article from Josh Eyler who pointed out on social media how wonderful it is that an article about compassion is showing up in Science Magazine, and that goes, I think back to earlier in our conversation. I’m just going to read a little bit and then I have a second related recommendation about what I’m about to read.

This is toward the end of the article from Jessica Larsen, “Some of my colleagues perceive me as being ‘too close’ to the students and think my class is not rigorous enough. In the past, I worried such impressions would affect my chance for promotion and advancement, but I’ve learned to value my students’ growth and learning over others’ perceptions. A fellow professor recently asked me, ‘If this works so well, why didn’t you do it sooner?’ All I could say is that vulnerability is really hard. It involves sharing of yourself as fully as you are able, including admitting wrongdoing and acknowledging that you can’t always be your best self. Far from being a sign of weakness, it requires a ton of strength.”

It’s a beautiful piece written by Jessica. I just read you the last couple of paragraphs toward the end there, and a lot of people jumped on social media and were like, “Who’s this fellow professor that’s asking you if this works so well, why didn’t you do it sooner?” My final recommendation is don’t be that guy. [chuckles] This, why-didn’t-you-do-it-sooner, guy. We need to celebrate each other as our teaching evolves. As we both learn more about teaching and learning, we learn more about ourselves and we sometimes even get to places where we can be vulnerable like that, but not the thing to say, so we’re not going to be that guy.

[laughter]

[00:37:31] Ciarán: I understand. I think that compassion piece is really important. I’m very familiar with Kristin Neff’s work on compassion and the idea of also fierce self-compassion. Like standing up and articulating your opinion, not just this idea of softness and hiding, it’s never hiding away but the idea of very often, people think of compassion in very soft terms but it can be very strong as well. I think that as well feeds– There’s a quotation, I can’t remember the name of it. It might be from a book or Allan Poe perhaps, and it talks about, “You playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.”

I think that’s a really important message to get to people. We don’t want to encourage arrogance or hubris, but at the same time, we want to acknowledge each person’s individual talents and abilities and their uniqueness because when we want them to thrive, part of that thriving is to help them identify the Japanese concept of ikigai, that sweet spot, what they’re passionate about, what the world needs, what they can get paid for, and what they’re good at. Part of that is trying to empower them, to give them that language that they can articulate, this is what I’m about, this is what I care about and this is how I want to affect change in a positive way in my own life and the lives of others as well, so yes, the compassion thing is really important.

[00:39:04] Bonni: Oh, I love that so much. Her work has been recommended a number of times and I haven’t read it and I feel this is just perfect timing for you and I to be having this conversation. Because sometimes I feel like I need to be smaller and I feel right now like I needed to hear you tell me by quoting this poem that because I have had dear friends tell me that’s not the answer here, [laughs] but it’s very nourishing for your timing to be sharing that. Thank you so much and I’m going to pass it to you for whatever you’d like to recommend.

[00:39:35] Ciarán: Well, I love images and visuals because I love storytelling and very often, images and visuals and pictures offer you this aperture, this opportunity to enter into a story, and so there’s a photographer, sorry, he’s like a digital photographer/illusionist, a Swedish chap by the name of Erik Johansson, and I use his images a lot in my presentations. I tend to try and minimize text if I’m giving presentations and just speak to images, and he does the most incredible things.

I’m not on commission, by the way, but I would encourage people to check out his website. Erik Johansson is his name, E-R-I-K, and he does the most amazing stuff with digital imagery and these surreal situations. I think particularly as educators, you look at them and go, “Well, what does that speak to,” or, “How does that resonate with me?” Then all of a sudden, you find yourself sucked into these things.

There’s about three of them particularly of his that I’ve used a lot, and people who know me would say, oh, yes, they know the ones I’m talking about, but they’re just the most wonderful entry points into stories. I think when stories is a way of connecting with people, our human brain is hardwired for a story and there’s those relationships that develop with people through stories, so I would encourage people to check out the work of Erik Johansson and see if they can find some images in there that resonate and speak to them.

[00:41:03] Bonni: I cannot wait to go look at his images and so agree with you how you can use them so powerfully to invite people into stories to go on that journey with you. What a delight has been getting to know you a little bit through this experience. I just appreciate your generosity in your work. You have just left me so curious, though. I want to know so much more. I feel like if you’ll come back on the show and tell us how it’s going even a year from now. Because I imagine so much of it ends up changing as these groups of people you were mentioning working together. I had this feeling that you’re not anywhere near being done yet. I just really enjoyed … 

[00:41:40] Ciarán: No, we have a ways to go. Still, we’re navigating that uncharted terrain and it’s challenging at times. It’s like it all goes back to why are we doing this. One very valid point is we need to be very careful not to just use students as guinea pigs either, become the guineapig-ization of students, like let’s try this new modality, and look, if it doesn’t work, who cares. We care because we want the students to be having a positive experience.

We want to be innovative but we have to do it through an ethical lens as well, ensure that there is evidence to support what we’re doing. I think that’s really important. That goes back to what you were saying about compassion because there’s an increasingly large body of support practices around compassion and self-compassion. Those worlds, the abstruse, nebulous worlds that let’s say I might reside in sometimes, and then the worlds of STEM, they can merge in very rich and enriching ways. I think that’s important to remind ourselves about.

[00:42:45] Bonni: I’m so glad we kept talking because that is a really good reminder. You’re not done and you also won’t be done as fast as if we just relied on your expertise as faculty members, because there would be important people left out of that, and as you said, important emerging evidence, so. Thank you so much for this interview and this conversation. It could not have been better timed for me today as we’re having it. You’ve been a gift to me. Thank you so much.

[00:43:09] Ciarán: Bonni, thanks a million for having me. I really appreciate it.

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[00:43:14] Bonni: Thanks once again to Ciarán Dunne for joining me for today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, and thanks to all of you for listening. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by Sierra Smith. If you’ve yet to subscribe to the weekly emails from Teaching in Higher Ed, those weekly updates will provide the links and the show notes from the most recent episode, as well as some other things that you don’t get on the show notes, so head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.

[music]

[00:44:13] [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.