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Season 4 Episode 9

It’s Okay to Look Like a Potato on Zoom

In response to the recent presidential election and the significant changes it signals, we’ve decided to re-release our very first episode, “It’s Okay to Look Like a Potato on Zoom.” This inaugural episode, originally recorded during the early days of the pandemic, explores themes of adapting to change, fostering connection, and embracing imperfection—ideas that feel just as relevant today as they did then.

When we first released this episode, we were navigating the abrupt transition to online teaching, striving to balance academic rigor with care and compassion for our students and ourselves. Now, as we face another moment of transition, this conversation offers an opportunity to revisit those lessons and reflect on how we can carry them forward.

This episode is more than a reflection on teaching; it’s a reminder of the strength we find in community. It highlights the importance of staying connected to our values and identities, even when circumstances challenge us to rethink familiar practices. It speaks to the ways we can provide structure and stability—not just for our students, but for ourselves—in times of uncertainty.

Releasing this episode again feels like coming full circle. The core ideas—offering reassurance, finding moments of levity, and leaning into our humanity—resonate not only in classrooms but in life. Whether you’re a long-time listener revisiting these ideas or someone discovering this episode for the first time, we hope it provides encouragement, perspective, and maybe even a sense of comfort.

We’re honored to share this moment with you again. Thank you for being part of our community. Let’s continue to learn and grow together

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The episode is available on Apple Podcasts

The episode is available on Spotify

Season 4 Episode 9 Transcript

It’s Okay to Look Like a Potato on Zoom

Steven: [00:00:00] In response to the recent presidential election and the significant changes it signals, we’ve decided to re release our very first episode, It’s Okay to Look Like a Potato on Zoom. This inaugural episode, originally recorded during the early days of the pandemic, explores themes of adapting to change, fostering connection, and embracing imperfection.

Ideas that feel just as relevant today as they did then. When we first released this episode, we were navigating the abrupt transition to online teaching, striving to balance academic rigor with care and compassion for our students and ourselves. Now, as we face another moment of transition, this conversation offers an opportunity to revisit those lessons, and reflect on how we can carry them forward.

This episode is more than a reflection on teaching, it’s a reminder of the strength we find in community. It highlights the importance of staying connected to our values and identities, even when circumstances challenge us to rethink familiar practices. It speaks to the ways we [00:01:00] can provide structure and stability, not just for our students, but for ourselves in times of uncertainty.

Releasing this episode again feels like coming full circle. The core ideas, offering reassurance, finding moments of levity, and leaning into our humanity, resonate not only in our classrooms, but in life. Whether you’re a long term listener revisiting these ideas, or someone discovering this episode for the first time, we hope it provides encouragement, perspective, and maybe even a sense of comfort.

We’re honored to share this moment with you again. Thank you for being part of our community. Let’s continue to learn and grow together.

Anne: It’s great to be here with you on this inaugural podcast. The thing that you and I’ve been talking about since we transitioned to online instruction, what feels like Four or five months ago, but what I think is about a week and a half ago is what our students need and how we can help them and how do we even figure that out?

So I’m wondering what you’ve been noticing as we’ve been [00:02:00] talking to faculty members in terms of what students need and what, what resources faculty need to help students learn what they need to learn.

Steven: That’s been preeminent in my mind since I’ve been, you know, sequestered at home and then really just talking to faculty.

Faculty about what they’re trying to juggle does that does that resonate for you?

Anne: Yeah, well, I mean as you know, this call was delayed because a fuse got blown in our house because we’ve turned unused room in the attic into A space where the kids can go and be, so we’re not always, you know, in the same spaces all the time, but turning the space heater on an attic meant that when someone else went to microwave lunch, we lost all power in the house briefly.

So, you know, there’s a lot going on. And, um. It’s challenging, but the thing that was really interesting to me is that my this morning was the first day that my class [00:03:00] met, and I had really intended to use the regular meeting time of class for a quick check in. And what I found was that 18 of my 19 students were there on zoom.

And they wanted to hear me talk and they, I said, would it help you to, to, for me to just kind of go over the texts we’re reading for the rest of the semester. And they really just wanted me to kind of talk at them in a way that I would never do in the classroom. I mean, I talked for a longer time than I would, but I think just that reassurance of seeing that weird Gallery of all their faces while listening to my voice calmly describe the contents of the next few texts for the course Was a kind of good regrounding for them So that really took me by surprise because it was a pretty it struck me as pretty bad pedagogy But I think it was actually [00:04:00] pretty good care for each other because it felt like a good check in You know, it felt like, Oh, that’s right.

We are having class and we do know stuff about the material of this class. And that still can be something that brings us back together.

Steven: Yeah, I mean, I think the point about being brought back together, right? So these are existing relationships, right? So it’s not, it’s not like we’re forced to get to know each other.

You know, never having interacted before, so we kind of do have a social bond that we’re trying to reconnect rather than initiate. And I think sometimes we forget as teachers how important we are to the students.

Anne: Yes. It’s

Steven: our very presence. They can find comforting

Anne: and it was funny to me in class today that two of the students who always sit next to each other and kind of, um, giggle with each other.

We’re busting each [00:05:00] other up while I was talking and that was. Immensely reassuring like, you know, one of them was just kind of wiggling and it made the other one crack up and then, you know, a third kid changed her background a couple times in the middle. It was super distracting, but also it was just so reassuring.

That they’re just as naughty and full baloney as they were before, uh, the virus came in and changed everything. So that was interesting to me is that they have as little respect for me.

Steven: So, I mean, I, I think you’re, you’re hitting on a real tension that I’ve noticed conversations with faculty around our social and emotional imperatives.

And how do we measure up against covering the content and what our outcome expectations are and how do we, you know, how do we approach [00:06:00] weighing that when we’re thinking about,

Anne: Right. And that was one of the things that my expectations were really low for class today because as I think you know, um, on Thursday, which was our first day online when my class met, I had no audio for my call.

So it was a complete disaster. And that had been such a total failure that all I really wanted was to be able for them to see and hear me on this. Check in. And when we got past that pretty quickly and they all seemed ready to work and they’d done some of the fairly simple homework that I had assigned them, but they’d done it in a substantive way, then I did say, okay, here’s what we’re going to do now.

We’re going to go into breakout rooms. And here are the two questions I want you to discuss in your small group. And I want you to come back able to tell us the conclusion that you came to. You have five minutes. And I was as Okay. firm and rigorous as I would have been normally in [00:07:00] class, but that only happened kind of 50 minutes into a 75 minute session.

Right? And then they did it. And, and we had a fairly substantive discussion for the last 15 minutes. And so now I feel like I can begin to plan something that’s a little bit more like, I mean, I don’t even know what to call it because it’s a very strange. but a little bit more rigorous going forward because I’m assured that they have the technology and the capacity to participate in this medium.

And when I screen shared with them and showed them some of the other tools that are available to them for online learning, the tools were unfamiliar to them and they were not interested in trying them out. Which was interesting to me, so, you know, we’ll just see. I mean, I’m giving them more time to think through what they want, but I know part of what they want from their professors is [00:08:00] kind of a consultation, but ultimately that the professor makes a decision.

Right? And there’s a kind of moment where there’s too much consultation, too much. Hey, guys, what do you think? Hey, what do you well, we could do it however you want. That in itself is destabilizing in a very unstable time.

Steven: I think what you’re saying is we need to provide some kind of structure and order.

So I know that when I log in and my professor is there. There’s rules, there’s procedures, and I know who I am in this space. Right. Because everything else can seem like kind of chaotic. Maybe what we’re saying is that we can reinterpret structure and rigor as comforting to them. Clear expectations of what we’re going to do and what our roles are.

Maybe they need some kind of order communicated to them that we haven’t abandoned your learning, right? We’re still committed to that project, we’re just going to do it in a different way.

Anne: Absolutely. I [00:09:00] think that’s really, really important. One of the things that you and I have been talking about a lot as we think about going forward with classes, you know, in this kind of semester that’s got a real before and after to it, right?

We’re about halfway through a semester that’s started. in a face to face learning environment and that’s ending in an almost entirely online environment is thinking about course goals. Can you talk a little bit about backwards design and how that can help us think about the extent to which course goals need to be revised, perhaps, and the extent to which course goals might be able to stay the same going forward?

Steven: I think in this current situation, the important thing to bear in mind is the student learning objective. Not the mechanism by which we get there. What I’m trying to say is that, let’s say that I have this activity that I do, I really enjoy doing it, I’ve had great success with it, the students seem to [00:10:00] like it, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to do it online.

Right. So really the project here in our current situation is to think about, well, Is there another way to get there? So think about you’re in the car on a family trip and you’re, you know, you’re headed to your destination and oh, there’s traffic on the expressway. Well, is there another way to go? So I’m not committed to the expressway.

I just want to get there.

Anne: Right.

Steven: So part of it is to try to think creatively about how do I reach this learning goal? What’s another way to get there? We’re not going to be able to do. Maybe this role play or this presentation, maybe we can, but in order to do it in an online environment, it might be technologically demanding.

And the time it takes to make that activity possible may use up other time that would impact other learning objectives that my hoped for activity wouldn’t cover. So it’s like a trade off. So part of the work, I think, is to like redirect our [00:11:00] thinking from the content. and the activity to the learning outcome.

I think also this ties into what you were saying before about providing a sense of continuity for the students. That we don’t want to suddenly reconceptualize what the course was going to be because that’ll sort of make them feel kind of a sense of loss, right? Like, well, I thought I was going to learn these things, and now you’re telling me I’m not learning them anymore.

Anne: Right.

Steven: Can I really learn a new instructional methodology and adopt Master a whole new way of thinking about teaching and learning in the next four weeks.

Anne: Well, I, I know that I can’t. I mean, I know that I can’t. And I’ve been playing around with some things. And one of the things that’s been most kind of reassuring to me is thinking about all the extant ways that we’re already communicating with our students online.

And thinking about how to profit more [00:12:00] deeply or extend or expand our use of those things. So almost all of us are communicating with our students over e mail already. Okay, so that’s one way that we can certainly keep doing e mail in this moment, right? And so then I’m thinking if I add one new tool. To the couple ways that I’m working with my students online, that seems like something I might be able to do on some days, but on some days I just feel totally exhausted.

I mean, I find meeting with people on a zoom call much more tiring than being in people’s presence and I get off a zoom call and I have less energy than I did. When I, when it began. And so I’m trying to be really patient with myself around those things. And so, and one of the challenges I faced in redesigning my freshman and sophomore level course right now is that I had done this incredibly experimental thing that I really love, which is that the midterm assignment is [00:13:00] design your own syllabus for the rest of the semester.

And so the rest of the semester was blank. And my students all. Written their design syllabus and the day we were gonna bring those designs together into a collaborative mutually designed class was the first day that we went online. And so I went into spring break with a completely blank slate. But, you know, we’ve been working on Google Docs together, and my students, um, I put up a blank slate on Google Docs, and I kind of threw in some of the suggestions that they had individually given me, and asked them for their notes, and Read through their notes and was able to come up with something that I feel I can do going forward and that that honors the interest that they [00:14:00] expressed in terms of what they want to learn for the second half of the semester, but felt like a heavy lift.

And it felt like I had really given myself like an extra degree of difficulty.

Steven: There’s something I that I wanted to ask you earlier about just this kind of being in your home. Right. In your personal space. Right. Interacting with students synchronously, seeing them, they’re seeing you, you know, there’s your office or your living room, there’s your cat.

Right, your child in the background. How does that feel in terms of like boundaries and

Anne: well, I’m lucky to have a study with the door that closes that’s huge. And that’s partly because I make my children share a bedroom because, uh, My career is really important to me, and I have been thinking a lot about those boundaries.

And Zoom allows you to make a virtual [00:15:00] background, which is really fun. And I love that as a way of masking exactly where you are if you don’t want people to see the laundry basket behind you. But, um, my laptop is old enough that it’s not supported on my laptop. So, these problems are really, um,

Steven: So, if you have a laundry basket in your office, that’s like a work life balance thing you may want to, you know, think about.

Anne: I don’t have a laundry basket in my office, but I’m, I’m badly backlit. And, um, that’s a source of, of, of some embarrassment. I, uh, follow, uh, uh, Chanel Miller, the writer, uh, uh, memoirist on Instagram. And she has really wonderful cartoons about stress and anxiety and resilience. And the other day there was just a single panel cartoon of And it just said it’s okay to look like a potato on zoom [00:16:00] and i’m going to adopt that as my mantra

Steven: Maybe that should be the name of our podcast

At least that’s that’s going to be our I think the first episode It’s good. It’s okay to look like a potato on zoom.

Anne: Totally. The first episode. I think that’s exactly right. My

Steven: no, we’re trying to move toward understanding by design and like learning objectives, but we really do keep coming back to this human component and how do we get ourselves and our students to a state of readiness?

I think one of the things that I’m picking up on from faculty I’ve been working with is You know, they were expert, right? Right. Three weeks ago, expert, in their field, in their classroom, interacting with and advising their students and colleagues. They were expert. And now, suddenly, they feel a sense of, you know, incompetence, [00:17:00] technologically, certainly.

And that loss of confidence strikes at the heart, I think, in some ways. Of their identity. I see myself as a teacher, and if I can’t do that effectively, if I can’t serve my students in a way that I feel proud of and deeply connected to, that’s a real loss.

Anne: Yeah, and I think that, you know, many of us remember that.

Charming, hilarious video of the young journalist scholar in Korea who was doing an online interview on, you know, a video interview when his toddler burst into. His room and he had to kind of bat the child aside. And then the wife came in. There was another baby and a walker coming in. And what was mortifying to him was hilarious to the viewers and very humanizing.

And my nephew is a sophomore at the University of [00:18:00] Washington. In Seattle, and they’ve been online for a couple weeks longer than we have, and he’s seen people’s cats and people’s children in the background, and he loves it. He’s so interested and relieved to have his professors be humanized. But for us as faculty members, I think it feels really vulnerable, and it’s good to know that a generous student feels happy and reassured to see us in the context of our own home, but it doesn’t make it, uh, super easy to share that with our students.

Um, and it doesn’t make it super easy to, uh, feel vulnerable. And that loss of a sense of control and expertise is really acute. I mean, I really felt it when my class didn’t go, was impossible to conduct the other day. It was really hard. And so, you know, these, these kind of conversations about, [00:19:00] Compassion have been incredibly, compassion for ourselves have been incredibly sustaining to me as we make this transition.

And then I think the makes me think we should pivot to the question of thinking about our most vulnerable students. You know, I was very struck by how the resilience of the students I saw. But there are some students, and we’ve been talking about this in the town halls, for whom this may mean the end of their ability to access college.

And as we think about moving online and continuing to deliver the kind of education that our students deserve, we also have to be thinking at the same time on a slightly different track about How we’re reaching out to those students who are not able to continue [00:20:00] or the students who are facing struggles that make simply doing the reading hard.

Steven: You know, there’s something we sort of touched on earlier about we have an idea of who our students are. And that idea may not, may not really map on to the lived reality of, of many of the students that we, that attend our classes. We may have certain assumptions in our planning, in the, the tools that we’re selecting.

The way that we’re making our course and ourselves available that are unrealistic for, for some portion of our students and so it’s really hard to balance a live interaction online can, can most closely replicate in my mind perhaps what being in the classroom is and if you can’t attend, you know, here’s this sort of plan B and I don’t know how to solve that, you know, how to solve that problem, how to be equitable and Take into account the varying accessibility issues of the various [00:21:00] students that are in my courses.

I think a good place to start, though, is to think about them. And I guess, my wife is a kindergarten teacher, and kindergarteners have no prior knowledge, right? So, it’s like teaching a room full of Frosty the Snowman, if you know this reference. Right. It’s like they totally have no context. You have to build a set of shared experiences that you can use to reflect upon and talk about and mull over to activate their thinking.

But you also have to share with them why you’re doing what you’re doing because they don’t know. Right. If you don’t do that, then you’re just ordering them around, right? They’re not learning. They’re just following orders. I guess if I were making recommendations, I would say, let the students look behind the curtain.

This is what I’m doing. This is why I’m doing it. This is what I hope you’ll get out of it. This is my intention. And to kind of talk collaboratively about, well, what are your expectations for, [00:22:00] you know, how do I perform well, professor, in a Zoom session? Like, what does that, what does that mean? I’m here.

What’s a good job? I think we all need some sense of what’s a shared vision of competence both as a teacher and as a learner in this new space because I knew before in my classroom or I thought I did, but I’m not so sure what that is now.

Anne: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that’s right. That makes a lot of sense to me.

The other thing that I’m thinking about, and maybe we can, um, kind of close, I’d love to hear your reflection on this Um, idea, but I’ve been reading and thinking about, um, the work of Jim Lang, who’s the director of the Teaching and Learning Center up at, um, Teaching and Learning Center at Assumption College up in Worcester, and he has that book, Small Teaching, and I just got his book, Small Teaching, online, and he has a new [00:23:00] book coming out on attention and distraction, and he’s really thinking about the fact that, We are all really distracted right now, and our attention is pulled in many different directions.

And this is before the pandemic, right? Just thinking about people’s phones. And when I talked to him about it, he was going to be our third speaker in the reimagining series this spring. And when I talked to him about what he wanted to talk to us about, He was saying that he doesn’t want to ban laptops and phones from the classroom, but he wants to find ways of capturing people’s attention and find ways of getting into that kind of mode of working where we’re in a kind of flow where we don’t, um, check our phones for a few minutes.

And now it strikes me that that we need that more than ever, right? As we can’t live this time when we’re [00:24:00] confined to basically to our homes with occasional jaunts to the grocery store in a state of constant anxiety. We have to keep going and we have to keep learning and growing and trying. And how do we design activities for ourselves and our students that capture enough of our attention that.

Um, we’re still learning and that we’re still in community with each other. So I’m wondering what you think about that and if you have ideas of good ways of doing that kind of work when we’re meeting

Steven: online. I think for me, what I do is to try to think of myself as a teacher, which is a little different.

First experience teaching is, is, you know, I was a high school teacher for about 10 years. And I think it’s, it’s different in some ways. I don’t know if faculty think of themselves as teachers so much as philosophers or medievalists or [00:25:00] chemists in a way.

Anne: Right.

Steven: That’s a little different from how we experience it in K 12.

One of my favorite movies is, uh, it’s a film of A Man for All Seasons. Have you seen it with Paul Schofield?

Anne: Oh, not for a million years.

Steven: And there’s this part of the film where Richard Rich, who’s played by William Hurt, he wants Paul Schofield, Paul Schofield’s character, to get him a job, court, and he says to him, you know, be a teacher, and you’d be a great teacher.

And Richard Rich says to him, he’s playing Thomas More, so Richard Rich says to Thomas More, well, who would know? And Thomas More says, you, your students, And God, that’s not a bad audience. So, I think it’s, it’s, uh, for me, in my own practice, I, I try to think about The themes that we’re touching on in, in this, you know, our, our first talk, which is coming from a place [00:26:00] of, of caring for the students, right?

Right. Especially at, at, you know, at a Jesuit university like our own and trying to, to understand that, you know, academic rigor in our learning objectives, those are part of that care to hold, to help them reach a standard that we’ve, you know, I’ve communicated and that they understand and is measurable and realistic.

But, but it’s part of kind of a, a, you know, a suite of services that we offer them.

Anne: I love what you’re saying and I love what you’re saying about being a teacher because I found that for me, too, being a teacher is a huge part of my identity and it’s been very liberating because when I’m out in my non boredom life and I meet people in my town, And they ask me what I do.

I tell them I teach. And I [00:27:00] don’t tell them I’m a professor. Because if I say I’m a professor, they expect me to lecture at them. And if I say I teach, they imagine that I’m a kind person. And I’d so much rather Lead with that kindness, then with that sense that I’m suddenly judging them, which is the perception that a lot of people who aren’t in the university day to day today have of what that word professor means.

And so then when I think about being a teacher, and I, and think about what it means in this moment of crisis, I think it’s helpful to think about that suite of services, right? Part of it is learning a lot about Virginia Woolf. Part of it is asking people if they’re okay. And part of it is, Being willing to send them a picture of my dog as I did the other day just to kind of because it was funny and I wanted them to have a moment of [00:28:00] just lightness or remembering that I’m a human, um, while they think about how we’re going to get through this next, you know, month and a little bit together.

Steven: So we should probably move into like a how do we wrap this up?

Anne: I think that’s okay for our first episode.

Steven: It’s not bad.

Twice over Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud and Spotify. New episodes update intermittently. We aim for once a week, but sometimes we just can’t get it done. You can also find us on our blog twice over podcast.com. Thanks so much for listening.

Season 4 Episode 8

In this episode Humility and Confidence, we engage in a rich and thought-provoking conversation with acclaimed theater director, writer, and educator Karin Coonrod. Known for her innovative adaptations of classic works and her commitment to reimagining traditional spaces, Karin shares insights into her creative journey and philosophy on leadership, collaboration, and the power of storytelling.

A Creative Journey

Karin begins by recounting her unconventional path to becoming a director. Although she was not raised in a theater-centric family, her early love for literature, music, painting, and dance set the stage for her creative endeavors. A pivotal moment at the ancient Greek theater in Epidaurus, where she felt a profound call to pursue directing, ultimately changed her career trajectory. Karin describes how her first directing experiences at a boys’ school, with productions like Fiddler on the Roof and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, shaped her approach to leadership and her belief in taking creative risks.

Transforming Spaces into Theaters

Throughout the conversation, Karin reflects on her passion for transforming everyday spaces into immersive theatrical environments. She shares stories of staging productions in unexpected locations, from medieval Italian streets to basketball courts, always aiming to shift the audience’s perspective and foster deeper engagement. For example, she vividly describes her production of the medieval mystery plays in Orvieto, Italy, where she turned city streets and cathedral courtyards into stages, blending English, Italian, and Latin to create a powerful and inclusive theatrical experience.

Balancing Humility and Confidence in Leadership

Karin also shares her leadership philosophy, emphasizing the importance of balancing humility and confidence. She believes that effective leadership in creative settings requires vision, but also a willingness to listen, collaborate, and adapt. Karin values the input of her collaborators and encourages actors and designers to bring their ideas to the table, though she remains deeply committed to the essence of what the project “wants to be.” She explains how her directorial approach is rooted in a profound respect for her team, clear communication, and a recognition of each individual’s strengths.

The Ephemeral and Eternal Nature of Theater

One of the central themes of the episode is the ephemeral yet eternal nature of theater. Karin explains that live performance, much like the Sabbath described by theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, occupies a sacred space in time, allowing for moments of profound connection and reflection. This concept drives her pursuit of what she calls “radical presence”—a state in which actors and audiences alike are fully immersed in the shared experience of storytelling.

Teaching and Directing: Two Sides of Leadership

The conversation also explores the parallels between teaching and directing. Karin acknowledges that both roles require a form of performance and a deep sense of authenticity. She likens directing to guiding actors inward, helping them explore their characters with intellectual and emotional depth. Similarly, teachers must balance their roles as performers with the responsibility of creating meaningful connections with students. Steve and Anne reflect on the shared challenge of keeping audiences—or students—leaning forward, engaged, and participatory.

A Mentor’s Lasting Influence

Toward the end of the episode, Karin pays tribute to her mentor, Liviu Ciulei, whose poetic vision and mentorship profoundly shaped her as a director. She recalls assisting him at the Guthrie Theater and describes their close bond as one of mutual respect and inspiration. Karin’s story illustrates the lasting impact of a mentor who sees and nurtures an individual’s potential.

Final Reflections

This episode offers listeners a captivating exploration of creativity, leadership, and resilience. Karin’s reflections on the transformative power of theater and her thoughtful approach to collaboration provide valuable lessons for anyone in a leadership role. Whether you are a theater enthusiast, a teacher, or simply someone who appreciates the power of storytelling, this conversation is sure to resonate.

You can access the transcript and the captioned episode on YouTube:

The episode is also streaming on SoundCloud:

Apple Podcasts:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/humility-and-confidence/id1651979285?i=1000684132906

Spotify

Season 4 Episode 8 Transcript

Humility and Confidence

Steven D’Agustino: [00:00:00] Hello, my name is Steve D’Agustino and my cohost Anne Fernald and I welcome you to the Twice Over Podcast because to teach is to learn twice over. In this episode, Humility and Confidence, we are joined by Karin Coonrod, theater director, writer, and teacher at Yale School of Drama, who shares her thoughts about creativity, learning, and leading.

Anne Fernald: Welcome back to the Twice Over podcast. It’s really wonderful to have you all here. And we are delighted, just super delighted that today’s podcast brings us our guest Karin Coonrod. She is a director, a writer, the founder of two different theater companies. She also teaches at the Yale school of drama.

Anne: And this season we’ve been talking a lot about leadership and I got so curious to ask a [00:01:00] director about questions of leadership and higher education from the perspective of someone who works in the theater. So Karin, thank you so much for being willing to talk to us today and welcome. Pleasure. Thank you.

Anne: Great to be here. So can you tell us a little bit about your path to becoming a director? Did you always imagine that being the way that you’d participate in theater?

Karin Coonrod: No, I didn’t know. I was not in a theater family whatsoever. My mother was Italian. And my father, American, and I studied literature, but everything that I did as a child was painting, dance, music.

Karin: I played the piano and the flute. I was thinking about going into piano. And so all these things, and I, a writer, lots of writing, actually journalism. And then it wasn’t until after college that it all swirled together into, you know, visions of directing. And it was in Epidaurus, I think how you say [00:02:00] it in Greek, but Epidaurus, I, I did teach in a boys ‘school for a few years.

Karin: And I was there in Epidaurus and the theater known as the Theatron, the place of scene, the scene place. And yet it was the hearing. I was just astonished and I felt the call to go in and you

Anne: really had a good food or you really had a revelation. Didn’t you? Yeah.

Karin: Yes, for sure. This is it. And I had seen, I was teaching in this boy’s school.

Karin: teaching English and AP literature and all that. And I was thinking about going into theater. I was directing the, the musicals and directing the plays there. In fact, when I got the job, he said, “do you want to, would you take over the theater? And without, Any training?” I just said, “yes, I’ll take it over.”

Karin: And we started doing all kinds of things. [00:03:00] Shenandoah, my fair lady in a boy’s school, uh, fiddler on the roof. It was great. And then the last show that I did, there was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. And it was, I set it in the gymnasium because it was a, because all boys, and I went to see a couple of basketball games and I thought that place in the where those tall boys jumped for the ball.

Karin: Ball. I said, I’m going to start the play right there. And that’s where the narrator is going to open the play. And we were all seated in stadium seating in the round around that spot so that it would resonate always not just a basketball, but also a theater.

Anne: Wow. So you gave them a new way of thinking about that space, but you also Infuse the production with all the drama of a jump ball at the opening, at the opening whistle of a ball game.

Anne: So it was, that’s a real, that’s a real stroke of genius. That’s something that’s [00:04:00] characterized your career, right? Is changing settings and moving that. Can you talk a little bit about why that interests you and how you get your. brainstorms to say I’m going to do the Merchant of Venice in the Jewish ghetto.

Anne: I’m going to do this in the basketball court. Can you talk a little bit about how you do that?

Karin: Yeah, I, I, I guess it’s just taking that idea of the seeing place and shifting the angle of the view and So that we can keep ahead of an audience. The worst thing is the audience is so bored when they’re sitting back.

Karin: I remember George Wolf used to talk about that. He said, either you lean forward and you’re really into it or you’re leaning. You’re saying, Oh yeah, okay. Got it. And we all know what that’s like. So no, shifting the angle, shifting the viewing. And for instance, yes, going to Orvieto, Italy and doing the medieval mystery plays.

Karin: Right across the city in an itinerant fashion was really a joy. The plays, [00:05:00] who knows exactly, they say they were on carts, they were on whatever, they could be stationary, whatever. But for me, it felt it. And that was in 2004 and that was the start of my second company, Colombari, which is still in existence.

Karin: Were just celebrated 20 years this year. But 2004 on June 10th, we. greeted our audience in the street and it was free and they were the English from the English cycles of the medieval mystery plays but translated into Italian so that they could be greeted for the Italians could and then we sang all the songs in English or in Latin or in Hebrew so the songs were not in Italian but Because it was really like Fra Angelico, the iconography of Italy, meeting the pulse of America.

Karin: So these two, like Fra Angelico and Mahalia Jackson coming together.

Anne: That’s wonderful. Wow. I wish I could have seen that. That’s [00:06:00] incredible.

Karin: There’s some amazing, I mean, it was astonishing. We did it three years and we started in a little street. We then went to the Duomo, this incredible Duomo in Orvieto where Trazana Beverly one year, she won the Tony award for colored girls in the late seventies.

Karin: Yeah, and then she played God. He was a di o donna. They loved her because she did, actually, a James Weldon Johnson piece in English. That was in English, because I didn’t want to translate it. I thought the pulse of that was so strong. And it’s the, from the God’s trombones, the creation, and I, and God stepped out on space and said, I’m lonely.

Karin: I’ll make me a man. So it was so powerful, so powerful. And from there, we went to a parking lot where we cleared the most radical thing we did was just clear spaces of cars and just fill them with people. So that’s [00:07:00] very radical in the, in the old idea of that word, which is it’s. goes to the root of filling the spaces with people rather than other things, when roots being a culture that is full of really towards radical presence.

Karin: That’s what really what I’m working on in the theater, especially with all these distractions and all these things going on and all these rumors and lies and who knows what goes on. What is spoken and that we’re not. So greeting our people and moving with them and finding the crowd growing

Karin: to cross the traverse, this whole city of, or little city of Orvieto, it’s a very little city, but go to these iconic places.

Karin: And then, and at the cliff was just phenomenal. It was just phenomenal. And we. threw flower petals over all the audience, little flowers. And it was very special. People grew, had grown and grown. And then [00:08:00] everybody was there, all kinds of folks. And we did that 2004, 2005, 2006. We’re trying to revisit it in some fashion and who knows so many things.

Karin: Yeah. So in terms of other places like the Jewish ghetto, I was, invited into that. And by the time word gets out in the, okay, so she likes Shakespeare and she’s half Italian and she works in Italy and she likes outdoor spaces. So how about doing the, The Merchant of Venice. In this conjunction of anniversaries of the 500th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish ghetto, the first ghetto in the whole world, with the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and it was David Kastan who wrote to me when I was with Visiting family in Hawaii and I got this letter in January of 2014, this email, and I said, Oh my God, that sounds, [00:09:00] yes, that sounds fantastic.

Karin: And I was a little, I was, Certainly, I found it’s an incendiary play, as we know, and of course, uh, my husband’s Jewish, and I’m, I call myself Judeo Christian, but I’m not Jewish, but, so, America, coming to the ghetto, not Jewish girl, so I had to think this through, how to strategize and make this, because Americans, Coming to, and that was in 2016.

Karin: And I thought, and thought we, it all worked out beautifully, but we had five shylocks. I did not wanna have a star to have Al Pacino reprise it. He probably wouldn’t have had time anyway. But I was not interested in that. I idea. I was interested in the five scenes of Shylock and the 500 years and the five books of the Torah and the 5 5 5, which I didn’t.

Karin: [00:10:00] know and think about logically from the get go, but it was just the five scenes. I thought, let’s make this Jewish and universal so that the great victim, the great call for humanity from this person that is being framed in this really greedy culture. It’s a super greedy culture, which I think we could say pretty safely about the West and about.

Karin: That time, Shakespeare’s time, the time of the marketplace in Venice, that our country now, my gosh, it never goes away, right? Founded on that, continues with that, it never stops. Greed and that framing of the play so that, We’re not talking about Shakespeare is anti Semitic, but and in fact, a framing of what he’s showing and what the culture is doing to this character in their five fold, and they were never there all together they were in each scene and then there [00:11:00] were.

Karin: Two times that they were together once in a howl moment. And then at the very end, Wow, that sounds

Anne: so powerful. And one of the things that I’m hearing as you describe it, it was so interesting to watch you describe it because your initial response was yes, absolutely yes. The same as your initial response when you were asked, will you do the high school play for these little boys, right?

Anne: These young men. So the initial response is yes. And then it’s. Oh, my goodness, this is complex. I need to really be thoughtful about this. I need to talk to some people and I need to consider all the implications of who I am coming into this particular context at this particular moment with this particular play.

Anne: And so, I love the idea of the initial yes before, right? It’s not like I need to think about whether or not I can take this on. This is a challenge. I’m taking it on. Yes. [00:12:00] That means I need to think about, right? James Weldon Johnson is an amazing poet. It’s not going to be the same in Italian at all, right?

Anne: There are some things that the power of the rhythm of that African American language that he’s writing in

Karin: is

Anne: in

Karin: English. That’s the power. Right. That’s right. The musicality, that pulse and having Trazana speak, it was just glorious. And somebody, I remember people also said that everyone was very worried.

Karin: They thought she should have a microphone. And I said, Trezana, do you think you need a mic? And she said, no, I said, please friends. Remember that this place was built in 13, early 1300s. And the Pope didn’t have a mic when he spoke there. He didn’t have a mic and Trazana is an actor and she did not. It was so powerful.

Karin: [00:13:00] And it was amazing because the facade, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. I have a picture I can send you. The facade is so astonishing, but usually people go there. And stare at it. And now it was brought to life in this interchange inter, interweaving between the actress and the facade so that it was brought to life.

Karin: It was really striking. So exciting.

Steven: I’m not an actor, but I’m a teacher and we all have that in common. And sometimes I think when I’m teaching, I’m playing this character, his version of myself, Professor D’Agustino. But at the same time, I want to be authentic in my practice as a teacher. So I’m wondering, as both an actor and a teacher, is there some intersection there that’s That they mutually inform one another.

Steven: Is there stuff from acting that maybe makes you be a better teacher and stuff from teaching that helps your acting practice?

Karin: There’s [00:14:00] so many things as a teacher that one tests, right? It’s like one, one speaks aloud with, one thinks aloud, I want to say, with, great passion and things tumble out. And, and so with the acting and the moving, teaching actors and teaching directors to work with actors, there’s, it’s really all about going inside as far as they can.

Karin: I always say, I want to go in this. It’s going to sound really funny, weird, maybe, but I like those actors that we go inside their heads and swim around. One could say inside their whole bodies, just go for that. But we go inside them and because we want to be, it’s like, I’m, I want to know how you’re thinking.

Karin: And those are the smart actors. Those are the really, you just. When they have secrets [00:15:00] that they’re not sharing everything, they’re not sharing everything. There’s so much more in there, but they’re speaking and they’re not emoting. It’s not so it’s like that. That is what I find the most compelling. So yeah, I suppose theater, it’s performance and as teachers, we perform and we have a confidence in that.

Karin: It’s a very deep gift, right? It’s a gift to be able to speak and, and with people, connecting with people and to try to bring out. that are secrets inside, I don’t know, to, that are lasting, that, that, I do think that the theater is is something that is ephemeral, but it’s also eternal. And I think that when one has done all one’s preparation for the encounter with an audience, that I [00:16:00] think an eternal chord is struck and that, that, so that those two E’s ephemeral, yes, it all goes away.

Karin: Did this happen? Did that play happen in the basketball court?

Steven: Is this part of like your desire to take theater out of the theater and move it into. Inhabited spaces like Where people aren’t expecting theater. So I guess what I’m thinking is like the passive to the active that you were modeling before about your audience leaning forward, I couldn’t help but think of my students like that, right?

Steven: I want them to lean forward and not consume the classes that they’re just watching it, but to actively engage. I’m wondering if I should just take my lecture notes and stand in the public square and just give my lecture and see how that goes. Yeah. So question.

Karin: Yeah, sure. I think shaking things up is a good thing.

Karin: And Socrates did that, didn’t he? I think shaking things up is really great. And I love the theater [00:17:00] and I love being outside the theater. I love, I think any space is a theater. And any place is a theater. is a place to teach. Any place is a place for spectacle. And it is, um, I, we took our Walt Whitman piece, for instance, all around various places in New York for free.

Karin: So it was more or less I am, and we did it for instance, yes, at Joe’s Pub, but we also did it at Grant’s Tomb, and we did it at Barge Music. in Brooklyn, and we did it in the Wadley School up in Harlem, and we did it at the World Trade Center, where those steps, everyone, all the audience sat on steps, and the performers were in that little platform with more steps going down.

Karin: They were there. We’ve done it. in so many places and I just think and people can be affected and have a life changed or we, as long as we come to [00:18:00] it prepared and then throwing it all out the window and saying, okay, I’m ready. I’ve got everything I need. I’m ready. But when I think about another little book that I really love, which I always have my students read in the beginning of Shakespeare, is the Architecture of Time.

Karin: It’s the prologue of Abraham Joshua Heschel in his little tiny book called The Sabbath. And Heschel was one of the, he was the rabbi that walked with Martin Luther King, King remarkable man and I, I started reading him when I was 19 in, in theology classes and so forth, and was just smitten by the poetic theology.

Karin: But in this architecture of time, he talks about how we occupy space, but we share time. And just for a minute, I think it’s important to privilege time over [00:19:00] space, of course space, in the theater we need space and time, but the time is very festive. And he goes on to talk about Sabbath and how that time is a time of rest and a festive time and it’s very beautiful, but I think theater is also like that.

Karin: Theater is, we’ve prepped and then it’s like, what is going to happen? And that’s what I’m looking for, a radical presence of being totally prepared with, by the actors having worked very hard, but also honoring each other and knowing each other so well. This really, I have to say that we just did King Lear at La Mama in July, and we’re going to do it again next year in January 26, and I was so thrilled with it.

Karin: It was 10 people playing Lear at the top of the, At the top of the play, know that we have divided in three, our kingdom and tis our fast intent. So it just, and they’re all wearing very tall [00:20:00] paper crowns. The design was all inspired by Anselm Kiefer and costume designers, Juana, uh, Botez. And it was just, it was a very special preparing this for years and years.

Karin: Actually, the first time I did it was at Fordham. I did it in 2000. Yes. When Gore lost, I’ll never forget. Soraya and it was 10 actors. So first time I did it at Fordham in that space, you go in in the Lincoln center and you turn right and there’s that gymnasium or whatever with a stage at the end. And we, and I had amazing designers.

Karin: I had Ricardo Hernandez. who did the set. He’s now doing everything on Broadway and everything. But, and I think Chad, who still teaches there, I think, was the lighting designer. P. K. Wish did the costumes. But anyway, it was very special. These 10 kids, 10 undergrads, and we did a [00:21:00] special piece of work. It was I always thank them in all the programs.

Karin: I think the Fordham kids, that’s when we first did it. And then I did it ART with those kids. And then I started doing workshop, little workshops and readings and keeping developing that. Now we’ve got it. Now we’re doing it. And we did it with, I don’t know if you know these names, but Michael Potts and Tom Nellis and Tony Torn and.

Karin: Joe may anyway, a whole bunch of people at both spectrum, like very seasoned actors and new on the block. That’s so

Anne: thrilling. Yeah. I have so many different questions that are sprouting off of what you’ve just shared, but let me just ask you one at a time. Okay. So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to a theater director is that we’re thinking about leadership and teachers are leaders in a way, right?

Anne: We’re in charge of our classroom. And as a [00:22:00] director, I, My hypothesis is that perhaps you have special challenges in leadership because the people that you’re working with are creative and they all come with you, to you, with very distinct ideas about how to do it. And I imagine that there’s, A little more pressure that you experience from your actors about, I had this idea, Karin, and excuse me, but my vision for my part, my vision for myself is this.

Anne: And so I’m wondering if my hypothesis bears any water and if it does, how do you think about leading other people who are also creative?

Karin: Yeah. Okay. A couple of things come to mind because, true, there are places, the, so there’s a vision, the, you, I’m visionary, definitely, people know that about me, I have a very strong [00:23:00] vision, I bring that into the room, I do lots and lots of work on the piece by myself first, and then start working talking with the creative team and dreaming and thinking about things and what about sitting in the space if we’re going to be in a particular space and just dreaming there and imagining stuff going to make sketches if like in the Jewish ghetto I sat and sketched and sketched and imagined use the use of the roof and the balcony the windows as well as the space because we played right on the stones and sometimes The vision is strong and when, and so people get excited about it, people get excited.

Karin: So that’s one thing. And then if sometimes there’s an idea that I hadn’t thought about and the vision can encompass that because it’s like, yeah, that’s great. That’s marvelous. Yes, indeed. There that’s I, yes. And it, it is. Um, I know I’ve had a [00:24:00] lot of talks with John Conklin, my very close friend who has, is known for making the set designs at the Metropolitan and Glimmerglass and different places.

Karin: But we always think about what the project wants to be and not imposing on the project, but what the project is, because there’s this moment, the vision, and then it’s, Oh, that’s where it’s going. That’s what it wants to be. Right. Right. And. My collaborators, of course, are all people that, that I’m, I’m very close to, and they’re new people.

Karin: Like I had a wonderful lighting designer that I worked with, with King Lear, and I was very interested. I could, he was a poet. wonderful, could feel a space, and was only frustrated by lack of equipment sometimes. And of course, those things upset us, but then, okay, what’s the next step? What do we do? How do we make it?

Karin: How do we make it despite that? And, because there’s always a way, there’s always something. And that [00:25:00] was, you know, So wonderful to work with him because I have worked with some fabulous lighting designers, just the, and composers too. Frank London, my goodness, who in a fury when he was also wrestling with his own mortality, he’s okay.

Karin: He’s doing okay, but it’s always going to be this thing that’s with him. But he, uh, I just saw him last evening, but he did the music for King Lear and in a fury. And we worked really within, in shorthand almost about the movements and so forth. Anyway. So yes, there’s listening to what the thing wants to be from the collaborators.

Karin: And then also sometimes I notice when, so actors that actors are usually really jazzed. I was so thrilled by King Lear. Every single one of those actors was so confident in. And I [00:26:00] love that. I love working with people that are deeply confident. And so we had a great time. And I didn’t have to build up anyone’s, I didn’t have to go overboard.

Karin: There are these things. Right, not a

Anne: lot of pep talks and oh honey, you can do it, you’re fine.

Karin: It was, there’s been a lot of, there’s a lot of that sometimes and you have to, there are other ways that the thing comes out and you realize, Oh my God, I was just so blessed with King Lear, beyond blessed. And, and, but I noticed that sometimes we need to communicate very clearly because misunderstandings can happen because I assume maybe that you understand something.

Karin: And so the task to be crystal clear In the way that is engaging and entertaining, and not impatient, because I can, I can feel these little things in me sometimes. And so it’s like just being clear sometimes for people, especially when they don’t [00:27:00] know me. Or don’t know all the things I’ve been through and gone through in terms of the vision or whatever it is.

Karin: So

Steven: when I’m, I’m listening to you talk about leadership and it’s really interesting because you say we a lot, right? You don’t really say I did this and I did that. It’s always we and praise and acknowledge the people that you worked with, right? Even so far as giving us their names, right? There was this person in this person.

Steven: So as a leader in your work, is it, do you have a theory of leadership? If you were, Imagine you’re on a podcast about leadership and people interested in leadership were listening to you. What would you say to leaders current and future? What is some advice that you might give? based on your experience?

Karin: Yeah, I would say humility and confidence. So I would say truly, truly humility is important. It’s to be on the earth and to [00:28:00] remember that we are all human and nobody, what is to be worshipped is what is larger than all of us, not each other we honor. And we, we should, Just as the scriptures say, actually outdo each other in giving honor to each other and calling each other.

Karin: But I would say humility is really very important. And I sometimes see, and that, that can excise the anger. That can excise. There’s a lot of anger these days. It’s really, sometimes I am very sensitive to it. I just, it’s a lot out there. There’s a lot

Anne: of anger. It’s a lot of anger. And it’s interesting that you talk about humility, humility and confidence and balancing those things.

Anne: I don’t have a question, but I want to hear you talk more about excising the anger. I think that phrase is so beautiful. Can you say a little bit more about. What you mean [00:29:00] by creating that atmosphere that kind of, it’s almost like defusing a bomb.

Karin: Yeah. Yeah. It’s hard because there are people walking around with lots of it and, and it’s hard and recognizing it.

Karin: We all, we all have anger. We all have anger and we have to learn to harness it. The harnessing of the anger so that there’s energy that it, that we don’t waste time, but okay, I’m going to put my. anger about injustice or about being misunderstood or about these things and put it into, there’s no time to waste.

Karin: And God knows I’ve wasted a lot of time with these things too, with lamenting and that sort of thing and looping and that sort of thing. But just saying, no, now look what, Look where we are in this situation right now in this. We started [00:30:00] talking about this, doing this interview before the election. Now it’s after the election and, and of course we live in a city where everyone opines openly, endlessly.

Karin: And just trying, I, another thing I would say is humor. I, and again, humor, hummus, humility, humor. There’s a sense of humor that’s needed. And I find that lacking sometimes I find it’s on, it’s like laughing at oneself, laughing at being able to open up to find the laughter of joy.

Anne: The theater is so beautiful for that, because I think about anger.

Anne: There’s plenty of anger in and there’s Leers There’s a lot of impotent rage and a lot of misdirected rage and a lot of pretty powerful rage. The rage of Goneril and Regan has real effect on the outcomes for that kingdom and Cordelia’s life. And, but [00:31:00] displacing the anger that we feel in our current situation by going to theater and having that catharsis of watching it unfold again for us and saying, Goneril and Regan don’t come out on top in this story and maybe we should rethink our acting just on impulse.

Karin: Yeah, I think with Lear, yes, with Lear, it’s such a deep, I believe that play was sculpted out of silence and then goes back to the ineffable, back to silence. So it’s like these words that are contained and surrounded by silence. When the mystery of that begins to be penetrated, then we start to catch the words and we start to See the grief and without going endlessly into therapeutic discussions about, but seeing the, the three sisters, the oldest, the middle and the [00:32:00] youngest, there, there’s pretty much a psychology that fits right across the board, right across time, right into now.

Karin: Who’s the oldest, who’s the youngest, who’s the middle, blah, blah, blah. And what goes on there and the competitions.

Steven: Yeah. So as the middle child in my family, I found myself lacking in sympathy for Cordelia, I have to say.

Karin: That’s right. That’s right. It’s like Cordelia. No. Yes. Again

Steven: with the Cordelia. Enough.

Steven: Enough already with Cordelia. Please.

Karin: She says, what’s so funny is that our, I really tapped into, I feel in the, there’s It’s so, the measurement of love at the beginning of that play is so false. That is not, that is, no, that is not what you do. That is a bad question, Lear. That is a bad question.

Steven: So I know we’re running out of time, but I’m [00:33:00] wondering if there is an actor or maybe a performance, even, that you would recommend to someone.

Steven: Who really wanted to see something special, maybe in a film. So it’s accessible to our audience.

Karin: Gosh,

Steven: there’s a lot of them. I imagine.

Karin: There’s so many people, something that just comes to mind is, which is actually just a kind of a, a recitation, but Judi Dench in the owl and the pussycat, and it is, Unbelievable.

Karin: It’s very short. She’s just unbelievable. She takes my breath away. Anything she’s in just kills me. She’s the

Anne: best. She’s the best. And you may, you made my day because one of our most faithful listeners is my mom and one of my mom’s very favorite people in the world is Judy Dench. This is going to make the final cut for sure.

Anne: That’s fantastic. And the owl and the pussycat. Oh, Edward Lear is hilarious.

Karin: You [00:34:00] have to see that it’s very short. It’s unbelievable. She’s just in a, being interviewed or something. And then she starts in.

Anne: That’s what I’ve noticed when I see her being interviewed and she’ll, someone will say something about poetry or Shakespeare to her.

Anne: And it’s, you flip a switch. And she has access to her performance self. Yes. And it’s right there. And I don’t even know how you live that close. You think about people who are like, I need to prepare and they turn their back and they shake their hair and they have to go into some zone. And she just is, it’s instantaneous with her.

Anne: It’s, it really does feel like a miracle when you watch. I feel like I’ve learned a ton. And we’re coming to the end of our time, but always the last question that we ask is not really a question, but an invitation for you to tell us about a teacher that’s mattered to you. So that’s my invitation to you.

Anne: So would you share with us the story of a teacher that’s been important in [00:35:00] your life?

Karin: Sure. I, my teacher mentor was, uh, Liviu Ciulei, who taught for one year. I think it was only at Columbia when I went there to, after I was in the boy’s school, I went to Columbia to study directing and got the MFA. And he, my second year, he walked into the classroom and it was like, Oh.

Karin: He, this, wow, I just, he started talking. He reminded me a little bit of my grandfather. In a moment, he’s Romanian. My grandfather was Italian, my maternal grandparents and so forth. So there’s something, and he assists, he’s We connected. He saw the poetry inside of me and he told that to me and he asked me to assist him.

Karin: So I assisted him on the Bacchae in the, at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. For nine weeks, it was [00:36:00] amazing. And I would, he was teaching me Romanian. And I was just learning so much from him. And I wrote everything down. And then I would go home and have dinner with him and with Helga, his wife. Every night, I was almost like their daughter or something.

Karin: It was beautiful. We were always together and I sat by his side and he would turn to me and say some funny things and then go back. And I brought, I feel like I brought this younger energy too because there was, he had the chorus and at one point he did something with, which I really loved. It was like, yes, and I was rocking.

Karin: I said, yeah, that’s, and he said, so is the, so you would do something like this, wouldn’t you? And I said, yes, it was just, he was so elegant. He died in 2011 when I was doing Love’s Labors Lost at the public theater. And I remember. His passing and the [00:37:00] older ones in the crowd in the company knew him like Reggie Cathy and Francis Jew and Stephen Skybell.

Karin: They all knew, but he’s, yeah, he was very special to me and recognized and pulled it out and always, you know, saw that. And so we connected.

Anne: Yeah. That’s beautiful. And how wonderful to be seen by someone for whom you have so much respect and feel such a connection. That’s a great gift to have an amazing teacher and to have that teacher think that you’re great.

Anne: And yeah, that’s pretty cool.

Karin: It was such a gift. And I visited him in Bucharest and Yeah. And I’ve actually directed in Romania, but in the Hungarian section of Romania, which whole other thing, but yeah, very special human being.

Anne: Karen, it’s been just absolutely a delight and a treat. And I asked my colleague, George Drance, whom should we invite on the podcast?

Anne: And he [00:38:00] gave me one name and he said, I just know that you’re going to love Karen Coonrod. And I do. And so I’m, call me a convert. Thank you so much for your time.

Karin: Thank you. This is really lovely.

Steven: Thank you very much. It was lovely having you.

Karin: Yeah. Lovely to meet you too.

Steven: Twice Over Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Spotify. New episodes update intermittently. We aim for once a week, but sometimes we just can’t get it done. You can also find us on our blog, twiceoverpodcast.com. Thanks so much for listening.

Season 4 Episode 7

How do we bring curiosity, creativity, and empathy into our teaching and learning practices? In this episode of the Twice Over Podcast, we are joined by Kim Arin—artist, personal coach, and instructor at Montclair State University—to explore these transformative ideas.

The Joy of Lifelong Learning

Kim shares her journey from a self-proclaimed “theater kid” to an unexpected half-marathon runner, illustrating how curiosity can lead to profound personal growth. Her reflections challenge us to embrace the mindset of a learner, both in and out of the classroom. Kim reminds educators that the most powerful teaching moments come not from having all the answers but from asking the right questions.

Creativity as a Process

This episode explores Kim’s course on creativity, where she uses a spiraled curriculum to inspire students to build on their ideas in meaningful ways. From archetypes to dreamscapes to ekphrastic art, Kim’s assignments are designed to spark curiosity and encourage experimentation. Her message is clear: creativity is not about perfection; it’s about showing up and creating.

The Power of Empathy in the Classroom

A highlight of the discussion is the focus on creating classroom environments rooted in empathy. Kim and the hosts discuss how fostering trust and encouraging risk-taking can unlock new levels of student engagement. Drawing on Brene Brown’s distinction between compassion and empathy, Kim explains how educators can “stand with” their students, helping them navigate challenges with support and understanding. As Kim noted, “It’s not magic. Creativity is a choice you can make every day.”

Access the episode on :

Soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/user-753677217/operating-with-empathy

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/show/2nD8ooIgGFAEM2898xShti

Apple Podcasts:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/twiceoverpodcast/id1651979285

Season 4 Episode 7 Transcript

Operating with Empathy

Steve D’Agustino: [00:00:00] Hello, my name is Steve D’Agustino and my co host Anne Fernald and I welcome you to the Twice Over podcast, because to teach is to learn twice over. In this episode, Operating with Empathy, Anne and I are joined by Kim Aaron, artist, personal coach and instructor at Montclair State University.

Anne Fernald: Welcome back to the twice over podcast. I’m so happy to have you all here. And I’m really excited that this has given me an opportunity to introduce you all to my very good and beloved friend, Kim Arin, who is the founder of Kim Arin coaching. And Kim is teaching a course this semester at Montclair State University on creativity, which is totally up Steve and my alley.

Anne: So we want to talk to you about that. We want to talk to you about leadership, but I wanted to get started by [00:01:00] asking you a little bit about how you got here. And I know you because we met. Maybe surprisingly to our listeners in a running club, which is like a totally weird thing for me to have joined.

Anne: And I understand it’s a weird thing for you to have joined too. That’s where we became friends. So can you talk a little bit about that running club and what it means in your career

Kim: story? Yeah, I’d love to. And Steve and thank you so much for inviting me into the conversation today. I’m really psyched to be here.

Kim: Yeah. Running club was a completely bizarro thing for me to decide to do. And I like to chalk it up to midlife crisis. I was a theater kid. I was the kid who hid in the bathroom when it was time for gym class. And I would not only hide in the bathroom, but I would sing the entire. Book of rent while waiting for all my classmates to be done with gym class.

Kim: So for me to voluntarily [00:02:00] sign up to run half marathons was an insane thing to happen in my life. But I think what happened was I became a little bit stuck. I became a little bored. I became a little stale and was thinking about What is something that would pique my curiosity? What’s something new that I could learn?

Kim: And what I found through the running club was a couple of things. One, I learned a ton about my body and about what is possible if you just decide to run. To get up and do the thing that you have to do in order to reach that goal. So that was like a really new experience for me to be in my body in that way, and to learn about my body in that way.

Kim: And then the other thing that happened as a result is I made such great friends. Not only did I meet you, Ann, but I became really close with a group of women in [00:03:00] that club that I might not have otherwise connected with. So it was this amazing social opportunity where I was also having this. Personal gratification and really exciting new experience for myself.

Anne: So that’s great. I’m interested in two things about that. And the one is the something new I could learn because you worked in education your whole career. And so can you talk to me about how you think about learning? And the importance of learning for educators, because often I think we think of ourselves as when we think of ourselves as teachers, as educators, as coaches, we think of ourselves as transmitting or fostering learning.

Anne: And so how do you, what made you know that it was time for you to be the learner, rather than the teacher?

Kim: Yeah, I have always thought of myself as a lifelong learner. I think something I feel really [00:04:00] lucky to have learned early on in my career is, or I would say early in my life is how little I know that there is just like a vast amount of information that one could pursue with depth and with discovery.

Kim: So I always look at myself as being pretty dumb in a lot of ways to just use like the colloquial term. Like I really don’t know what I’m talking about. I would say 97 percent of the time. And I love that. I love that there’s always something new to learn or to be learned. Part of what I think has served me really well in education, whether I’m working with higher ed students or I’m working with K 12 students or even teaching adult learners in the workplace, which is a lot of what I do now, is to actually not take that expert position.

Kim: To ask these questions of discovery to really open up [00:05:00] the room to possibility and say, here’s an idea. What do we think about it? How can we improve this idea? How can we take this concept that someone who’s very brilliant has studied and explored and presented to the world? And how can we make it different or better or more interesting?

Kim: So, When I think about running in this way, I was like, there’s no way I’m going to be good at this. And I’m still not good at it. But the process of becoming a runner, the process of learning how to move my body so that I could run a half marathon was actually what the like interesting learning was for me.

Kim: It was not to become the expert.

Steve: That is just so interesting. Two big things that jump out to me are You know, experts just know good questions in, in your domain of expertise, what are good [00:06:00] questions that we can ask and whatever we feel like we know about sets the bounds of the questions we feel comfortable asking.

Steve: And something you said about your stance in the classroom or with your learners is getting them to accept that you don’t know. Anna and I have been thinking a lot, especially. Because of the emergence of generative AI is focusing on the process rather than the outcome that the outcome ultimately.

Steve: That’s not the point. I think even as a teacher, we want the students to dwell in uncertainty for as long as they can tolerate it. Just feel what feels like right now to understand all that you could know,

Anne: which I

Steve: think is really an inversion of where we are now in teaching and learning where we’re focused on the grade, the answer.

Steve: Sure. The score, that kind of [00:07:00] stuff. Does any of this make sense to you? I heard all of that in your answer, but I don’t know if I’m interpreting it in, in my own interest.

Kim: Yeah, I, I hope that you’re interpreting it in your own interest. And yes, we have, and I don’t know if you all have found this in your teaching of late, but there is this focus on tell me what to do so I can get the good grade.

Kim: Basically, what I have said to my students this year is you all have a good grade. So now let’s have some fun with this. Let’s make some discoveries. Like sure, I can give you the rules, I can tell you what to plug into AI, And actually I gave them an assignment this semester that was like, I would say at least 75 percent of my students used AI for it and was terrible.

Kim: It lacked that depth that I think we all as [00:08:00] educators have. The reason we got into this is the pursuit of. Curiosity. It’s that spark within us that’s, I just want to know more about this because it’s cool. It’s interesting. Yeah, I think that I think a lot about process and what you were saying about Being freed up by the fact that you’re actually not the Smee in this situation.

Kim: Like you are What’s a Smee?

Steve: A subject matter

Kim: expert. Oh my god! Isn’t that such a fun phrase? Doesn’t it make you think of Captain Hook’s little friend?

Anne: Yeah, it’s totally like a minion or like some little gremlin. A Smee. A Smee. I know. Subject matter expert. Okay. Learning has occurred already. So we can fold up our tent.

Anne: That’s amazing. Wow. Okay. So when you’re not the Smee, when you’re not the

Kim: [00:09:00] Smee. Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. Because I think a lot of times students come thinking they know I want them to come. I want them to leave thinking they don’t know.

Kim: Yes.

Steve: Because they come with all this kind of presuppositional knowledge about whatever it is you’re going to do.

Steve: I hate chemistry. Chemistry is boring. They think they know this. This is a belief that we have to struggle against to get them to feel like, Oh yeah, I guess maybe I don’t. I didn’t know. I didn’t know about this.

Steve: I mentioned this a lot and I apologize. My wife is a kindergarten teacher. And I love talking about teaching and learning with her because of like, how to me, what she does is like pure teaching. It’s just teaching people how to learn what you would do when you want to know something. And then just that excitement around knowing just for the sake of knowing, what is that? And then they learn all about this thing and they get really excited. And I, I [00:10:00] think part of the focus on outcomes, we lose that joy of discovery.

Steve: And I think also it makes it hard for us as the teachers to communicate our joy in whatever it is we’re hoping to talk about, because it comes flattened and useful or practical. When sometimes, I don’t know if I’m ever going to use something, I don’t really know what that means ultimately. Or I don’t use a song, I don’t use music.

Steve: a painting or a performance. I just, I receive it and it has some effect on me, but I’m not sure those effects are, are going to get me a better job or something. Sometimes it’s just good to know things.

Kim: And it’s such a hard balance, especially when we’re confronted with students who, in my situation, many of my students are working while they’re in school, are [00:11:00] responsible for way more at home than I was responsible for.

Kim: have sort of commitments to being able to survive on their own once they graduate. And here I am talking to them about Mondrian’s line. Like, why does that matter? Why does it matter? But, I, my belief is, it actually does matter, that is, oh, there’s a cultural literacy, and this is, I’m really going to try very hard without, to not sound erudite about this, but there is a cultural literacy.

Kim: that connects us all. There is a way in which art and creation and words on a page and paintings and poems and sculpture actually connect us in ways that knowing how to apply for a job on [00:12:00] a website and having a resume that can be read by an algorithm just can’t reproduce. Yes, one will get us. Money so that we can pay for our rent so that we can pay for our food so that we can help our families live at a sort of like sustainable level.

Kim: But the other stuff, the creative thought, the making of things, the have, being impacted by beautiful things, like that’s actually what makes our society okay to live in. And when we feel like that, we’re like losing it, and I’m really scared of losing it.

Steve: Art shouldn’t be for the affluent.

Kim: Absolutely. So

Steve: there’s so much hoarding happening.

Steve: We don’t need like the hoarding of art and culture in that way. And this, the arguments that you’re making, I [00:13:00] appreciate them. There are certain core competencies one must need to thrive in our society, but we, we do want to work towards some kind of act, self actualization where people can experience joy.

Steve: And some of those joys require a certain level of understanding about what this particular piece of art is trying to accomplish. What are its terms? But I think that there are returns on those kinds of investments that go beyond a good job application. I don’t want to be, I feel like we’re getting, I don’t know.

Steve: I worry about these kinds of conversations. They become classist in a way, but

Anne: I don’t think that what we’re saying is classist because I think we’re talking about values that are extra economic, and I think it’s really important not to seed the field of value. just to money. And I think that everyone can appreciate that.

Anne: And I think that the economic stress [00:14:00] that we’re all living under to varying degrees and the degree to which billionaires are controlling our world is worth resisting. And I think that reminding students and creating that space in the classroom that acknowledges, yes, you’re going to have to pay your rent, But also let’s have 75 minutes together or an hour together this week where we’re not worrying about rent and we’re thinking about what matters to us.

Anne: I think that really is important and that already anyone who’s pursuing higher education is, has marked themselves off as Interested in something more than simple sustenance, interested in something better. And I think it’s helpful when they express that interest to suggest that interest is not [00:15:00] just money, that the thing that might make their life better isn’t the difference between earning a hundred thousand dollars and earning 200, 000.

Kim: It’s so funny. I was pushing my students the other day to have opinions. So I presented some thoughts in class and was met with silence. And I was like, how do you feel about that? What do you think about that silence? And I was like, it actually matters what you think, even if you’re not getting graded on it.

Kim: Like, it, it matters. Form opinions. Decide what you like. Decide what you don’t like. And I think, again, it goes back to process. So they might get a bit of information about an artist in my class with me that they never use. They may or may not go to the Met and see that piece [00:16:00] hanging. And that’s okay. But what I’m more curious about is, do you like it?

Kim: Do you think it’s interesting? What about it is interesting? If you don’t like it, what is it that you don’t like? Because that is what is going to serve them in the immediate.

Anne: When something happened in class yesterday that I felt like was a complete triumph where a student raised her hand and said, this is a half form thought, but it seems to me that, and she ventured something and we were able to toss it around.

Anne: And I realized it’s November, we’ve been together since the beginning of September, that she finally had the confidence that, yes, this was a place. And I had another student say, is there a right answer? I asked a question. She said, is there a right answer? I said, there’s not. And she said, okay then. And she offered her try.

Anne: And that [00:17:00] was, those two moments yesterday were so lovely because. When there’s silence, we can’t build on our ideas. So we venture something as one voice, and then someone says something that refines it, or pivots it 15 degrees, and you look at it from a slightly different angle, and that’s what allows the next person to come in, and all of a sudden the conversation is growing.

Anne: If the only voice is my voice, it falls flat really fast.

Kim: It’s that collaborative build that’s, that I find to be actually a creative practice. Right.

Anne: So can you talk to us a little bit about your teaching class on creativity? That’s bananas, right? It’s so huge. There’s no way to begin. There’s [00:18:00] no obvious thing to include or leave out.

Anne: So how did you think about designing it and what are you going to do differently next time? Oh my gosh. So many things.

Kim: So many things. So it is a class that’s being taught through the Department of Theater and Dance. At Montclair State University, which gave me, it’s a general studies course. So I get students from across the curriculum who take this class.

Kim: I have education students. I have sociology students. I have. Film and media students. So really very varied experiences in the classroom. So my approach in designing the course was maybe this is cross curricular. Maybe we take a look at creative thought in each of the disciplines and that is actually served me really well.

Kim: And so we started, we started the [00:19:00] semester with talk of the concept of creativity and creation. I pulled from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and also from Twyla Tharp’s body of work around creativity. And so we were able to look at process and look at creative thought from a different lens. I then We then talked about symbolism and archetypes and dreams.

Kim: And that was where there was a ton of unlock for my students. We talked a lot about the subconscious and for some reason that really just resonated with them. And what I found was the more I was able to spiral the curriculum, the more each assignment and thought piece spiraled on top of the last.

Anne: Can you talk about what you mean by spiraling?

Anne: That’s a really attractive metaphor, but I’m not sure I understand what you mean.

Kim: Yeah. [00:20:00] So a spiraled curriculum is one that sort of takes a concept and like a helix. continues to build on itself. So we started with, let me think about this. We started with Jung and we started with the archetypes. And so I taught them about archetypes.

Kim: We looked at some classic film and they identified the archetypes in that film. Then I had them get into their favorite book or, or film that They could then go further on archetypes. And then we talked about dream symbolism. And from there, I had them create a dreamscape. So they went home, and they created a dreamscape using a recent dream.

Kim: And so they were drawing something

Anne: or making a collage or

Kim: collage, whatever spoke to them. And then we came in and [00:21:00] did a gallery walk. And when we were doing that gallery walk, I had them leave feedback for one another on their pieces. And then the lesson in class that day was ekphrastic art and how to steal like an artist.

Kim: And so I had them create a piece of ekphrastic work based on one of the dreamscapes that they Can you

Anne: remind people what ekphrastic art is?

Kim: Yeah. Ekphrastic art is essentially art that is inspired by other art. So one of the most commonly referenced pieces of ekphrastic art is Ode on a Grecian Urn, which was a poem written about a Greek Urn.

Kim: So I had my students write an ekphrastic piece based on one of the dreamscapes they saw in class. So that’s how the curriculum spiraled on top of itself. We created from [00:22:00] what we created. And that’s something

Anne: And you’re constantly reinforcing the archetypal ideas that you have. Taught from the beginning so that they keep thinking about that.

Anne: So I’m teaching this class, this Taylor Swift class right now, that’s on the tortured poet. And so fun, but the tortured poet trope is it seems like inadvertently I’ve created a spiraled curriculum because the trope of the tortured poet is controlling the class and we keep building on it, making it more complex, revisiting it, uh, Adding elements to it.

Anne: So now, as my students are moving into their final assignments, they’re doing a group project. We have a slide that has teen characteristics of the trope of the tortured poet. It’s way too many, but it’s this real feeling of abundance. And so when we open the course with the death of Chatterton, that Henry Wallace painting from [00:23:00] the.

Anne: uh, 19th century, that’s the classic idea of the tortured poet dead in a garret with a geranium on the windowsill. That feels like just one of many options for being tortured right now.

Kim: They’ve got a whole range of torture in there. Oh my gosh, I love it. What I love about your class is Listening to Taylor Swift is such a pedestrian thing to do, and we can do it so passively, and I certainly do it so passively, but now each of your students is going to understand the depth at which Taylor Swift was working when she was creating her music, which is pumped into our daily lives.

Kim: And so that’s like my hope for every single one of my students to see an ad on the subway and be like, Oh, that’s a reference to something else. And I now know what that is.

Anne: Because we’re teaching them about care, [00:24:00] right? What’s the level of care. What’s the level of thought that goes in to creating something that feels ordinary or that’s pedestrian.

Anne: No, that’s just, as you say, It happens to be on in stop and chop when I’m picking up. Paper towels.

Kim: Exactly. So there’s that, and then the other thing I want them to get out of the class is to know that it’s also not magic. That they are creators if they so choose to be. Like that’s a, that’s big for me. I, one of my personal missions, and this is true for all of the creative work that I do with adult learners is you can do this too.

Kim: The difference between you and me is that I just did it, but like you can wake up and decide to go run a half marathon. You can wake up and decide to pick up a paintbrush and paint a canvas. You can decide to sit down and write for 10 minutes. [00:25:00] This isn’t magic. This is a difference between making decisions to create something or not.

Kim: So that, I think that’s been a powerful unlock for a number of my students. In, in the work that I’ve done with them this year, and many of them started the class with a survey saying, one of my hopes for this class is that I get back into a creative practice that I lost in high school. Like there’s a way in which high school programs you to take an art class.

Kim: It’s a requirement. When you get to university, you may not opt to do that and then you completely lose it, but you don’t have to. It’s a choice. And I think it’s just reminding them about that continuous choice.

Steve: I think that’s what you’re saying about having the students understand the effects that this practice has on them as really [00:26:00] mattering in, in, in important ways.

Kim: It’s almost more important than what the thing looks like in the end, in some ways. Yeah, it’s amazing when you walk away and you’ve created something that you’re really proud of and that it looks the way it looked in your head and you, and that doesn’t happen all the time.

Steve: The closest I experienced to this is like when I cook, I love to cook, but I noticed when I cook these meals, I’m just like, I’m there, but I’m not ego involved.

Steve: I’m like so present, but it’s not me that’s present. I’m just, I’m present in a very different way.

Kim: Yeah.

Steve: And I think we, those transcendent, if that’s the right word, kinds of experiences are really important.

Kim: Oh my gosh, yes, yeah. I am, I’m a painter. That’s one of the things that I do. And I hooked up with a gallery who [00:27:00] is taking five pieces of mine to Art Basel in a couple weeks.

Kim: And. I have been having a mental breakdown about it and it’s seriously not a thing. I paint all the time. I paint for the joy of it. If I’m not teaching or coaching, I’m painting. I love it so much. It’s such a pure activity. And once I started being like, it has to look a certain way and it has to be a certain thing and this is art puzzle and everything I made looked terrible.

Kim: It wasn’t coming from the place where I actually make good art, which is not caring about the outcome.

Steve: You can’t lose your happy thoughts.

Kim: Yeah. Like the minute you start to think about your audience, the minute that you’ve stopped actually doing the thing that is desirous of, [00:28:00] that other people want. The minute you get into ego, like you were saying, like it’s, it, your cooking is not an ego driven thing.

Kim: It’s. A pure expression of like love, you want to bring others into it. You want to give to others. You want to nourish others. That’s what good creation does.

Steve: My stepdaughter is going to be at Art Basel. She’s in public relations. So I’ll have her look for your art.

Kim: Yeah. Tell her to look for my booth.

Kim: That’s awesome. That’s so exciting. Yeah. And honestly, this is like a fluke thing. This is not a gallery that. typically represents me. This is just, I raised my hand, they said yes, and I’ll have five pieces of paper in a bin with many other artists. So this isn’t like a big exhibit, but still my brain was on overdrive about it has to be perfect.

Kim: This is my only shot. My only shot at what? [00:29:00] I can still make art tomorrow. This actually means nothing.

Steve: Great. You’re an art basil, but right now you’re on the twice over podcast. So I

Kim: mean,

Steve: Literally, tens of listeners are out there waiting to

Kim: there might be 12 once I’m done with it.

Steve: So I’m wondering just from just to zoom out a little bit. How do you create an environment where your students are comfortable taking those kinds of risks and disclosing or being vulnerable in that way. Because I think risk taking is really integral to any kind of creative endeavor, I would imagine.

Kim: Yeah. We started out the year by setting some norms, and I found it to be really helpful.

Kim: The day one, I told them, this is a workshop model, so everything I teach you, you’re going to be trying. And in order to try things that you might really suck at, You’re going to [00:30:00] have to be willing to suck and let’s take this learner’s mindset of this is about the process. It’s never going to be about the product.

Kim: I’m never evaluating your product. And that’s true even for their final projects. They have to create something, but the evaluation is on their presentation of it and the paper they write about the process of getting there. It’s not about the thing. So we agreed to some norms and one of the things they came up with is take risks.

Kim: try new things, do things we’ve never done before. And so I just keep reminding them of that. I’ve also tried to keep it really fun and a little bit messy. I don’t give them a lot of technical instruction on how to do anything I’m asking them to do. So like we, we were studying Andy Goldsworthy, who’s a naturalist.

Kim: So essentially, he takes whatever he [00:31:00] finds in nature and creates these amazing, beautiful sculptures that are supposed to self destruct. So the art is in the making of it, and then the capturing the image of it, because Nature will wash it away, essentially. And so as a part of their workshop, I took my students outside, had them forage, and then we printed with the materials they foraged.

Steve: I’m grinning because my wife does this foraged art. There’s a book we found. We were just at a farmer’s market on foraged art, and she does it

Steve: with her kindergarteners, and they make these beautiful patterns and three dimensional pieces out of whatever they find. Twigs and acorns and rocks and they arrange them and they take pictures and she displays them and they talk about it and she uses this to teach her children about the difference between a question and a comment and so she filmed it and so this five year old would be like I have a question and [00:32:00] a comment and then they like do this thing and it’s so cool.

Kim: That’s so  cool. Wow, I might actually change my curriculum to do exactly that for next semester. That’s so cool.

Steve: So they spend all this time thinking about the difference between a question and a comment.

Kim: And that’s actually the skill that they need to be successful grown ups. Right? To know how to ask great questions of other people.

Kim: To know how to give someone feedback. I’m teaching 40 year olds how to do that in the business context. Yeah, learn it when you’re five. You’ll be really well equipped for the workforce. I love it. And I would say even with my students, I took them outside, we printed with these materials, and I didn’t even look at what they made.

Kim: But my last question to them was like, what was it like to create something outside? And they were all like, it [00:33:00] was relaxing. And I was like, great. You’ve learned something new today. It is relaxing to be in nature and to create things like maybe choose to do your homework outside. If that’s all they walk away from my class, knowing I feel like I’ve done some service to those young people.

Kim: That’s great.

Steve: I’ve told this story a few times, cause I’ve been in a lot of interviews this year. about being the first one in my family to go to college. And one of the first courses I took was by this poet, Marie Ponsot. And I’d never met such a person before. And I’m in this class, I guess it was 1982, just watching this person read this Emily Dickinson poem, the soul has bandaged moments.

Steve: And I’d never had such an experience. And I think part of what college [00:34:00] provides or your class provides is access to a person like you that the typical person may never encounter in any deep and meaningful way. What is, what are artists like? What do they do? When they’re making art, what, where does, what is that?

Steve: So part of it is really modeling, but to circle back to your comments about running, it’s also your embodiment, your presence in that space, just being an artist and letting them see what it’s like to be in the presence of such a person, which I think is really impactful in a lot of ways that maybe we don’t even realize or can even measure.

Steve: Does that make sense to you?

Kim: It makes total sense to me and I’m, I know that the same is true for you both and for your students, like your expertise in your [00:35:00] particular area gives them a model for, oh, maybe I could do that one day. Oh, maybe I could be like ’em. Maybe I can write a book. Maybe I can edit podcasts.

Kim: That seems like a really cool thing to do. I know that’s not all day.

Steve: It’s not that cool. Despite how cool it seems, it’s really not that cool.

Kim: But yeah, and it could be.

Steve: I want parts of this, right?

Steve: There’s something here for me. I’m going to try this on and see what this feels like because I think You know, part of what I love about being in teaching and learning spaces is the idea that I can be different.

Steve: I don’t have to be who I am right now, that there’s maybe a future version of me along certain dimensions that I’ve identified that I can change. You mentioned this before, as your body is like metaphor for these kinds of transformations that maybe we can help people understand. That this is within their [00:36:00] ability to do, because I think they’ve taken the first step, as Anne was saying, just by being in school is an indicator that I want to be different in some way.

Steve: What are the ways that I can be different? And you’re offering them a way, and that way may be one they’ve never really thought about before.

Kim: Yeah, it, you’re making me think about an activity that I did with my students. We did the wheel of life and I don’t know if you all have ever done it, but it’s a life coaching technique where essentially you create a pie which has different slices and each slice is an area of life.

Kim: So one is your work, one is your relationships, one is your finances, one is fun, and so on. And I had them sort of rate where they were on different quadrants and different high slices of their life. Like how would they rate themselves? And so we took a look at the health slice. [00:37:00] And I said, health is an interesting one for me.

Kim: I would rate myself pretty high right now. I’m, I take really good care of myself. I try not to eat too much sugar. I exercise. I have taken care of my mental health, my physical health. But when I was in college, man, I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. I was eating donuts. I was partying. And you could feel the energy in the Me too.

Kim: Oh, you were like me. You are doing all the things that I’m doing right now and you’re okay now. I think there’s a way that people who are typically undergrad, that 18 to 21, the idea of future casting And seeing yourself in the future, imagining being a 45 year old woman, what is that horrible destiny fate?

Kim: You can’t imagine being older than 25 and even that feels old. [00:38:00] So I think there’s a way in which what you’re saying about this, like seeing yourself in your professor, seeing yourself in the grownups who are around you, is this sort of passive but really powerful thing. Where we are modeling, in many ways, this is what it’s like to be a curious adult who is committed to a life of learning and teaching and education.

Kim: Like that, particularly right now in our society, given where we are right now as a country, AI coming in as being like this very scary force that’s going to take over the world or political discourse, all of it. For people to still be showing up in classrooms across the country as thoughtful, curious, questioning grown ups, that’s really important.

Kim: So what you’re saying is really hitting me. And it’s [00:39:00] just a really good reminder that even just the act of showing up as a teacher really matters right now.

Anne: Yeah. You’ve taught and coached in so many different contexts, and can you tell us just a little bit about them and what you’ve noticed is continuous across these contexts and any differences that you’ve seen?

Anne: Like, I know that you run a group that I’ve participated in for writers that’s. That’s a very simple, incredibly powerful zoom where we meet and we’re just accountability partners on zoom and just sit for two hours and work on our writing and then check in at the end of two hours and say, well, that was a bust.

Anne: I played my past seven levels of candy crush. I kept trying to get myself back to the page. I didn’t do it, but I’ll see you next week. And so you do that, you coach adults, you’ve worked in higher ed. And now you’re teaching in, at the, in the [00:40:00] college classroom. So can you talk a little bit about continuities and differences, whether it’s one on one or by age?

Kim: I would say similarly across all levels. People tell themselves stories about why they can’t do X, Y, or Z. It doesn’t matter how old you are. Everyone has self sabotaging thoughts. And ideas about themselves and con preconceived notions about what is possible for you. And it doesn’t matter if I’m working with the CEO of a startup, or if I’m working with a seventh grade ELA student, like everyone is like, Oh, I can’t do that because so that’s universal.

Kim: What I find so. I think beautiful and impactful about coaching work, regardless of the context that I’m working in, whether it’s my writing right [00:41:00] on group, whether it’s at the university, whether it’s doing that executive coaching in a space, be standing with individuals when they discover something new about themselves.

Kim: Or a story that I’ve heard over and over again being told by them changes. Or they have a moment where they’re like, I’m sick of hearing this. I don’t want to say this about myself anymore. I want to do something different. Like that, those moments of choice, I just find, To be completely inspiring and powerful and beautiful and they happen all over the place.

Kim: I think what it takes is what we were talking about, like teaching other people how to stand with people. How to ask a question or how to make a comment. That’s That’s [00:42:00] how we connect with one another. That’s how we impact one another.

Anne: To say I just got chills. That’s really beautiful because it’s not just about what you’re doing.

Anne: I like what we were saying before about what a teacher is as a model. But even more, if we can teach our students to be that for each other, that’s incredible. If they can comment on each other’s projects in ways that Make the hearer, the creator who’s being critiqued, feel inspired to keep going instead of feel broken or devastated or I’m not good enough, but rather, yeah, I totally get where you’re going.

Anne: And if you just pushed a little harder here, next time, do it a little more. Then you’re like, yeah, that’s what I’m going to do next time. And that to keep that hunger alive is so thrilling.

Steve: Yeah. I think part of it is really understanding the creator’s [00:43:00] intention and how difficult it is to train, to translate a visual art into words.

Steve: Because if you could do that, you wouldn’t need the visual, like the visual art is doing something that the, you know, an oral expression or written expression just cannot do. And, but I think it’s helpful to make that effort at greater connection and understanding. But I think you’re right, Anne, I think it’s about, again, coming back to kindergarten, what do good listeners do?

Steve: Those kinds of, that kind of teaching is all about intention and definition. What does this mean? What does it mean to you? What does it mean to us? What does it mean in this context? And, and a lot of the work of teaching is consensus. And one of the hardest things about, I think, discussion in higher ed [00:44:00] is students who come believing that this is like a debate.

Steve: They’re under, they’re entering into the space thinking there’s a right and a wrong and we’re going to, it’s a sort of, it’s a contest in a way to get as close as I can to rightness when really it’s not, that’s not what it is. And it’s more about. a shared understanding. Because any conclusion is just so transient.

Steve: We don’t even know, I think at this moment right now, I think this is something, I think this is an idea, and we can make this idea into something. So to have those moments in a classroom are really valuable. But it takes so much to get to that.

Kim: Yeah, yes. And I think what I’m, hearing you say is we need to build communities of trust in order to be able to get to that higher order collaboration.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. I always feel like [00:45:00] the, when the class, the semester is almost over now. And I feel like we’re just going to be at a point of readiness to really start doing something and the class is over

Kim: and we’re done and we’re done. Oh, absolutely. One, and you asked me what I might change next time. And one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is like, how do I get my students quickly to the place where they are operating with.

Kim: Where they are standing next to one another saying, I know that was really hard for you to answer, and I want to celebrate you trying and putting yourself out there. And I heard what you were saying and I want to build on it. So Brene Brown is the Person I always turn to the expert I always turn to when I want to really think about how do you build empathic community?

Kim: and how do you [00:46:00] build A lexicon for how we talk to one another And so she has this great video on empathy actually where she illustrates the difference between being empathic and being compassionate Right? So there’s a way in which you can be like compathic, compassionate, and you can be kind and be like, Oh, that’s too bad.

Kim: You okay, honey? How you doing? Okay, let’s move on. Whereas empathy is the process of like actually getting in there with someone, getting down into the hole that they’re in and standing right next to them and saying, take your time. You got this. I’m right here for ya. This does seem hard and I’m here as opposed to being like, Oh, you’re going to be fine.

Kim: Let’s draw a silver lining around it. So I want to spend more time building out with my students. that understanding [00:47:00] so that we can continue to build these really meaningful, rich conversations with one another.

Anne: I love that. I love that. I did a tiny thing towards that in my class where I often have exit tickets.

Anne: It’s a anonymous Google form. And what do you want to take forward from class today? What’s the muddiest point? And recently I asked students in one of my classes, Is there someone whose comments in class you look forward to hearing? Someone whom you typically, who, whose contributions to the class community you admire?

Anne: And some people just put a name, but some people said, So and so always makes me feel smarter. So and so makes complicated ideas easier for me to understand. And it was so moving. And I was able to give everyone who got named a participation point, but then I also put the comments, if they had a [00:48:00] substantive comment, they don’t know who it is, but I put that in the remarks in their black, in the, in the form.

Anne: And so that my students got just a little anonymous cheer. From a classmate about why it matters that they take the time to raise their hand in the room. And I’m just hoping that pays forward for the rest of their college career and for their life when they’re in a meeting that they know that actually when I speak up in a meeting and try and summarize what I’ve heard so far, I may not know it, but someone in that space is grateful that I said, wait a minute, what I heard you say is this.

Anne: And I’m wondering if I got it right. We like those people. And we can aspire to be those people. And we can tell them, Hey, thanks a lot for speaking up because I was super confused. So Kim, this has been incredible. It’s been so [00:49:00] fun to talk to you. I always love talking to you, but this was great. I knew this was going to be great, but it’s great.

Anne: And always the last thing we ask people is to tell us about a teacher that’s mattered to them in their lives. I invite you to share a story of someone that has had an impact on you.

Kim: So I am one of the very, very fortunate people that have had quite literally dozens of incredible teachers. So I feel really truly blessed by that.

Kim: So I say all of that to say I’m picking this one story because I could probably pick a hundred, but I had a, I had an English teacher in high school, Mr. Orsini. Who was just this, like, awesome guy. He had a great mustache and was really passionate about literature. And we read great things in his class and we were reading poetry.

Kim: We were in our poetry unit and he assigned me a poem. He assigned each of us a poem to read out loud. And he assigned me a poem by Sylvia [00:50:00] Plath. And I’m forgetting which poem it was. And I read it and I tanked. I was, it, I just did not do a good read and he pulled me aside and was like, I gave you that poem for a reason.

Kim: Like you’re an actress and you gave me nothing. So we’re going to meet after class and you’re going to read it to me because I don’t think you get it. And then you’re going to read it again in class. And he was totally right. I did not get it. I just like poetry still to this day. It just takes me a lot to get in there.

Kim: I just don’t naturally get poetry and we read it together and I got it and I was like, Oh, now I even understand why you gave this to me. This makes total sense. Yes, I am that angsty person who has daddy issues. Like I should read [00:51:00] this in class. And then I came back the next day and I read it and he was like, that’s.

Kim: It’s nailed it. Like

Anne: amazing. So

Kim: yeah, just do the extra, like 10 minutes with you. It matters.

Steve: Sometimes they see something in us that we don’t see.

Anne: That’s it. But he didn’t. Humiliate you. He encouraged you even though you weren’t there yet. That’s incredibly powerful because it’s not saying, Oh Kim, you’re terrific.

Anne: It’s that was not good enough.

Kim: I had a vision for you and you didn’t meet that vision. So now we’re going to, you’re going to do it until you meet my vision. I didn’t even know that vision existed, but we got there. We got there.

Anne: Kim, this has been so fun. Thank you so much for being our [00:52:00] guest. Thank you.

Kim: Thank you for having me. And thank you for having these like fantastic conversations.

Steve: Thank you so much. This is really wonderful. Thank you.

Kim: I appreciate it.

Steve: Twice Over Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Spotify. New episodes update intermittently. We aim for once a week, but sometimes we just can’t get it done. You can also find us on our blog, twiceoverpodcast. com. Thanks so much for listening.

Season 4 Episode 6 Transcript

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Podcast Introduction

My name is Steve D’Agustino and my cohost Anne Fernald and I welcome you to the Twice Over podcast. Because to teach is to learn twice over. In this episode, The Stories We Tell Ourselves,  we are joined by Monique Vogelsang, founder of Humanizing History who share her thoughts about social identity, teaching, learning and justice.

Anne Fernald: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the twice over podcast. And thank you so much for being here. I’m so thrilled that we have Monique Vogelsang here with us today. Monique Vogelsang is the founder of humanizing history, which is a nonprofit. She’s done incredible work around anti racist teaching and curriculum development all over the country and really cool.

Anne: Curriculum that she passed in Washington, D. C., which I hope we’ll get to talk about in addition to lots of other work. Monique, thank you so much for being our guest. Aw, thank you. Thank you for that. That was a great intro. Monique, can you tell us a little bit about Humanizing History? What is it and what is your work?

Monique Vogelsang: Can we start actually from my childhood, is that? … That’s where I like to begin. Let’s go back to the very beginning. Humanizing History is a new project, but it comes from over my 40 years of life experience, and identifies multiracial, My dad is a white American from the United States. My mother is an immigrant. She’s from a country that’s in [00:01:00] Central America that’s on the coast of the Caribbean, where English is actually the dominant language. Do you know what country that is?

Anne: Man, maybe. I don’t know.

Steven: I know, I don’t know. I’m a lifelong New Yorker. I have a sense of geography.

Monique: It’s right next to Guatemala.

Anne: I, British…I was gonna say British

Monique: Yeah, it used to be called British Honduras. It’s Belize. It’s been Belize since 1981. That’s when it became an independent country.

Anne: Oh, 1981.

Monique: Yeah. 40 years only 1981. And sorry, my mother moved to Los Angeles. Sorry. It’s okay. It’s, this is part of the work. Telling stories, I think and hearing about each other. So I grew up multiracial. My mom was one of 11 kids, and everybody in her family married people of different racial or ethnic backgrounds. So growing up, my first cousins, who I’m genetically related to, which is important for this story would check off different U.S. census boxes. So I have first cousins that would be considered white, Black, Latino, or Hispanic, South Asian. So growing up, I had this sense [00:02:00] that Anybody could be my family, literally anybody on the street, a stranger. So I saw the familiar in strangers and I became extremely curious from a really young age.

Monique: And I can give you the resume after this, but the story of humanizing history and why and how we see ourselves in each other is really the root of everything that I do.

Anne: So many of my students who are white, and I’ve got a pretty multiracial classroom right now, have trouble imagining. Because if you come from an all white family, most of the people in your family have the same skin tone. But when you come from a multiracial family, Or a family that’s comprised of people of color. You’re more accustomed to thinking, just because your skin isn’t the same color as mine, I can see that you look like me. I can see that you could be related to me. [00:03:00] And so just knowing that from before you had words for it or before you recognized that was an unusual family must’ve been, I can see how formative that.

Monique: Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t recognize it until I left my home and started going to school. And then when I went to school In my family, no one ever asked, what are you? But in school, classmates, teachers, I got the, what are you question before I got my people ask my name. So I, so it was definitely, I’m like, Hey, this is really interesting to people.

Monique: What is this? What is this all about? What about me is sticking out to other people? What is this story? And I wouldn’t call it sociological lens, but I started to develop an interest in things that I would later call identity or social identity or race, ethnicity, culture. So when I went to college, I went to UC Santa Barbara, I I couldn’t afford to go to orientation over the summer, so I was one of the last people to [00:04:00] register for my freshman year classes and what was available was like an econ 101 type class and a few others. When I was going down the list I saw black studies, and my sister actually went to the same school as me and I’m like, wow, you can study this in college. And so my first year of college, I took a black studies course, and that, that actually, I’m going to say literally changed my life. And so for the first time ever, I’m studying things that I didn’t learn in my grades K to 12. I’m learning names, the hidden histories, the framing, and it’s being done in a way that exposes the dehumanization so that we can also then actively rehumanize ourselves. And so that was the next big step on my journey. Should I keep going or? Yeah. Okay. And then I graduate and I’m a first generation college grad. I, I have student debt. I’m pretty concerned about all that. [00:05:00] And I come across Teach for America and Teach for America was a really great opportunity for me because it provided some teacher training, the ability to get a master’s degree. And I moved from California To New York. I had been to New York once before that. It wasn’t a kid. I got to travel. It’s a huge change from Santa Barbara. And I grew up in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. I grew up seeing sand and tumbleweed literally when I was a kid and there was less people living there in the 80s, I would see tumbleweed going down the street. Sunsets, purple mountains, a caricature of the

Anne: West, right?

Monique: Yes this stereotype. So moving to New York was a really big change that, that I embraced. And then I entered New York City public schools and I was a teacher. and a middle school, and then I was a teacher at an elementary school in Harlem. And then along the way, I worked at various nonprofits. I worked at an independent school in the Upper East [00:06:00] Side. And I started developing curricula. And from there, I started working with schools. And at this point, I’ve worked with over a hundred schools and thousands of teachers across the country. Really, I would say, focusing on how do we tell humanizing stories? And so Where did human, this is a long answer. So where did humanizing begin? It’s a great answer. It’s so

Anne: interesting.

Monique: Yeah, it begins there. And so now that’s, this is what I’m working on now.

Anne: So you think about little Monique in her class, who’s being asked these dehumanizing questions, what are you?

Monique: So it’s a what? Yeah. Yeah.

Anne: And now you’re writing these curricula that, that humanize these stories.

Monique: Yeah.

Anne: So one of the questions that I’m really curious about is how do you balance history as a discipline with child development, right? One of the things that I think gets people really agitated is people who are [00:07:00] skeptical of anti racist pedagogy, which is not me by any stretch, right? But, when you see on the news, people are like, I don’t want my children to feel bad about themselves, right? But there are real developmental challenges to teaching stories about people like Martin Luther King, who was assassinated, right? And, Maybe we don’t want to talk about assassination in kindergarten, but how do you figure out like the child development story as it maps on to the history that we need to convey so that we are titrating out the harm.

Monique: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of stories that circulate on what anti racist education is. is or can be or what its potential can be. And so I don’t think everybody approaches it the same way. I have a particular way that’s grounded in what I think is sound pedagogy that I do. And I’m really clear that what I’m recommending are recommendations. It’s not the only way. So I’m extremely open to being a lifelong [00:08:00] learner. So I just want to say that in general, the way that history enters the classroom is it’s really social studies when kids are younger. So nursery, pre K, kindergarten, first, second grade. That’s a lot of who am I, who are we. Who’s a part of my family, who’s a part of my neighborhood, the larger community. We, as a whole, don’t really get into history as, I’m saying like as a whole practice, right? Not every teacher is the same, not every classroom is the same, but you typically don’t start to see history until about third grade, I would say second grade, the youngest. And then when you start to teach them history, I do have some frameworks that I prefer, and one with really young kids is not to go into graphic levels of violence. So I think their introduction should be something where we’re learning people’s names, we’re learning things that they did, we’re learning that they overcame obstacles [00:09:00] and unfairness. And I think that’s where you start this conversation of what’s fair and what’s unfair. You can start tethering that to some laws were passed that were unfair. People work together. There are multiracial alliances. There were a lot of Black Americans that we can name and other people who work to literally expand. What we consider democracy in this country to learn their names and to, I don’t think you sugarcoat it, but I think everything should be rooted in facts with driving questions. And I could really take 30 minutes to answer this question. I could take 10 hours to answer this question.

Anne: I grew up in Seattle and I was in the second class to be voluntarily bused. In Seattle and Seattle was really at the time in the 70s, really doing a very intentional and good job of trying anti racist education or whatever they would have called it desegregation, we would have called it then And what I remember from being in the early years of [00:10:00] elementary school is that every year in music class, we watched the same movie, and I looked forward to it every year. You could say this is terrible because kindergarten, first and second grade, you’re watching the same movie, but I loved it, and we would make Little finger pianos. We’d make those little finger pianos and we would watch a documentary about Ghana, Mali and Songhai and the drums of West Africa and talking drums. And that was a huge part of the music curriculum every year. So it wasn’t. The big anthropological lesson, but it was a narrow disciplinary one about music was like music comes from Africa. And this is what’s important about music. And I love that lesson and then I talked to people and I realized that was an incredibly unusual unit to have in a first grade curriculum in 1970s.

Anne: Yes.

Monique: Yeah, the longest part of human history is in Africa, and people continue to live in Africa, obviously, and it’s the home of the greatest genetic [00:11:00] diversity and linguistic diversity on the planet. And yet, for a lot of kids, when they, the first time they ever learn about Africa in the United States is through the lens of slavery. I think that’s what I’m looking for is to create a pretty big paradigm shift on when do kids learn about Africa? When do they learn about race? Is it done in a way that’s affirming to them? Is it done in a way as they get older that is rooted in truth? Align with the mission of the schools or school districts or wherever they’re going to school. And done so in a way that actually encourages us to recognize similarities and celebrate differences. I, to me, to go back to that little girl, like this is what I grew up with and I think it’s possible to others. They may think this is extremely idealistic.

Steven: Anne used to do sessions on decolonizing the syllabus, ? You’re talking about anti racist pedagogy. I’m thinking a lot about [00:12:00] epistemological questions, like, how do you know when you know? If  you want to know, what do you do? Do you Google it? Do you pray? Do you consult the spirits of your ancestors? Do you ask your grandmother? Do you Google it? Do you ask artificial intelligence? And there are knowledges, ? And we would do different things based on the kind of thing we want to know. And school looks at one sort of narrow and specific domain of knowing and ways to provide evidence for knowing, assessment and evaluation, say. And I’m wondering if in your work, how you’ve thought about demonstrations of knowledge and these different ways that certain kinds of knowledges are privileged or legitimated over others. Does that make sense?

Monique: Oh, a hundred percent. What enters the canon of [00:13:00] American history, U. S. history, what enters the canon of particular literatures, right? What enters the canon of what makes it to the U. S. history textbook is something that I’m actually quite fixated on. And the publishing companies and how, the state of Texas will get different books in the state of California, for instance, right? I think teaching is knowing my expertise is very much with younger kids. That’s my home. That’s where I enjoy spending a lot of time. And I think it’s not just knowing for that age, but elementary, but I think it’s also feeling. And I think it’s doing. And in this work there’s a lot of consideration on how does this information or knowledge land. And if it’s landing in a way that’s extremely negative, Are there other sets of knowledge that we can bring in and circling back to what I said earlier, because I don’t think I completely finished my [00:14:00] thought, I think starting with something like the human story begins in Africa is a great paradigm shift for children to realize that the whole system of slavery is actually quite absurd.

Monique: Otherwise, we continue to dehumanize people of color or Black Americans if we don’t question that whole system to begin with, right? So by humanizing our story, and the human story begins in Africa, then we create that thread for kids to, when they see things that are rooted in bias or racism or unfairness, they start to question that as absurd. So I think that’s a combination of knowing and feeling and doing and really cultivating your own critical thinking skills. which are so important now and for the future.

Anne: That’s great. So I’m really interested in what you said about loving working with little children. I love working with little children as well, but my spend my life working with traditional college age children, [00:15:00] women adults, traditional college age students. Yeah. And I’m wondering, I see so many parallels. In our society, when people talk about teaching, there is an assumption that there’s a gigantic difference between teaching college and teaching kindergarten, first grade, and leading a workshop of other adults. And one of the things that Steve and I have talked about all the time is, you know what, everybody likes to color, Everybody likes, everybody likes you to know their name. So I’m wondering what your reflections are on the similarities and differences between teaching teachers, which is, I imagine is a lot of what you do to members of the community and then talking to people who are seven.

Monique: Yeah. I wonder if that’s changing now in the post COVID world. I’ve heard a lot of changes in education in the post COVID world, but of there being big differences that people notice. They might be noticing a lot of similarities [00:16:00] right now, too, right? When our physiological needs aren’t being met we have similar reactions, right? Children and adults. I think good teaching is good teaching. And there’s content. And then there’s the culture and community that you create in a classroom, and I think by training elementary school teachers are very focused on all of that, obviously and I think it would behoove us to all be concentrated on that, that there’s content we’re trying to deliver, to use Stephen’s words, knowing and knowledge and information But then again, what are my students seeing, hearing, feeling, I think is an important consideration, and I think that’s what allows me to be really successful when I work with adults is because I don’t have a hierarchy around learning and around the age that I’m working with, and I think every individual is an individual, and, we all want the same thing at the end of [00:17:00] the day, which is You know, our brains are wired for social connection and social protection.

Monique: And if we’re not feeling social connection, then we’re not learning. And that goes for a five year old or, an 85 year old. We want to feel connected and then our brains will allow us to actually learn and process.

Steven: My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and we talk about teaching all the time, and it’s really informative what she does with, five year olds that, to me, seems like the essential form of teaching. It’s like learning how to learn.  What’s a good question? She spends a lot of time in the beginning of the year talking about the difference between a question or a comment. And then students will present, and someone will raise their hand and say, I have a question and a comment. So it’s like teaching from no prior knowledge. I think that’s really [00:18:00] important to not make assumptions about people’s prior lives and experiences. You should know this. Why don’t they know this? that kind of thinking. The other thing I would say, too, would be the value of play, of imaginative play. And I think that’s, I would make the argument that’s what college students are doing. They’re engaged in imaginative play.  So when I’m in Professor Fernald’s Virginia Woolf class, I am inhabiting the role of scholar.

Monique: Yes. Yeah.

Steven: She’s modeling what a scholar, like what does a person like the professor do? What does she see when she looks at the world? How does she choose to express that? And then I’m going to inhabit that role to the best of my ability. We don’t really understand that’s what they’re asking them to do. But I think maybe if we did, that would like lower the stakes. [00:19:00] try this on, right? Inhabit this role and see how that feels for you. Because I think that builds empathy, it’s perspective taking, which I think is really important. And I think it’s just, we have to accept that. Sometimes it’s just good to know it, it doesn’t have to have any utility other than that.And I think that’s, what’s so exciting when, Bettina comes home and talks about her day, how excited they were to learn this thing.  And they just take such joy in demystifying their surroundings, which, they’re all like Frosty the Snowman, right? They just woke up and they’re here. .

Monique: I get emotional when I think about kindergarten classrooms and I’m lucky enough to be able to still participate in them somehow, sometimes. 50 years, they forget that magic, but people who teach younger kids conjure up magic every day. It’s sensational to, to see that, to watch that.[00:20:00]

Monique: They teach kids how to read. They teach kids how to be a part of a community. What numbers are, right? Who are you? They ask extremely big questions.

Anne: Can you talk a little bit more personally about how that affects your work, the clients that you take on, the districts you’re invited to and what the conversations are like when there’s a pressure against the project.

Monique: Yeah. It’s a great question. I find myself drinking water and adjusting my hair as you ask me that question. I’ll start with the more obvious part, which is in my work, I actually don’t bring in partisan speak. And that’s extremely intentional. One, the framers when, framing the United States really encouraged that this country not do bipartisan politics. Because they can be so polarizing so I actually don’t bring in that language when I do this work and I can keep talking about reasons why a lot of, I’ll say one example, a lot of [00:21:00] policies that we would consider racist, for instance, were passed by Democrats and Republicans, right? I do, and it’s the fastest way, I think, to get people, crossing their arms and wanting to leave the room. And when I enter a space, I’m very well aware that this is a diverse space, whichever group I’m in, right? No group is a monolith. If I’m working at a school in New York City, Connecticut, Texas, Florida, California, this is not a monolith. Not everybody is agreeing on 100 percent of everything. And I show up and I work with individuals. As individuals, and I’m pretty confident that I can find common ground. I’m pretty confident that you and I will have something that we agree on something. And if I’m in the room with a bunch of educators. I can start listing a few of those things that I think we have in common. I use a lot of bad humor, but I’m not that funny.  [00:22:00] I do a lot of silly jokes to open. I usually, if I’m meeting a community for the first time, like I did with you all today, I share pictures of my family. I find that it humanizes myself very quickly to people. I think storytelling, modeling a little bit about who I am and what matters to me helps bridge that bridge those boundaries. Create those bridges between me and somebody that’s in a chair that I haven’t talked to yet. And if I’m at a smaller table, I like for everybody to share so that we can all get a sense of, who’s in the room. I think that’s really important. I don’t think the work I do is partisan. I think the work I do is communal and extremely humanizing. And so everything’s rooted in facts, like I said earlier, driving questions. And it’s really for kids to support. Their critical thinking skills. I don’t expect everyone to in common but like I said, we’re not going to agree on everything.

Anne: That’s great. That’s really beautiful and seems right to me. And [00:23:00] I spend a lot of time not being partisan in my classroom, but also talking about, compassion and empathy, right? And things that I think, if we’re in the shared project of being in a room together to learn, yeah, we have to care about these things.

Monique: Historically, the work has been done by people. I know people work in the government, but I think it would be a shame if we said things like, patriotism and democracy belong to one partisan group. I think it’d be a shame, the same way, even if, when it gets challenging, I’m not gonna lie and say this is easy for me to hold on to, these ideas, but the same way, No group is a monolith, right? If I’m going to say that there’s diversity in what we call a black community, there’s going to be diversity in what we call a white community. There’s going to be diversity in what we say are Republicans or Democrats. There’s going to be diversity in the state of Texas, right? And so when people see those electoral maps, there’s [00:24:00] this tendency to write off an entire state. But I’ve worked in many of these states, and I will tell you, I’ve had really wonderful and challenging experiences in all of these states. And so I have to really hold myself to that belief system that everyone’s an individual. It’s like you just said, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and about other people, and that We can find something we have in common, especially if I’m working with educators. For me, that’s very easy to find something that I have in common with an educator.

Anne: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Can you talk to me a little, talk to us a little bit about the impact you see when you’ve worked with a district or a school on changing their curriculum? What’s the,

Monique: What difference does it make? I was literally just working with a teacher yesterday. [00:25:00] Who has done a lot of work on her curriculum. She’s a world language teacher. She teaches Spanish and I won’t name her though. I want to I don’t name names of teachers or schools and things like that. This is a practice I have. But anyway, she’s an incredible teacher, and she started to bring in she already had a curriculum. So to act I’m not really deleting things, we’re just enhancing things, or we’re expanding things. And or shifting our focus a little bit. And so she really wanted the students to learn more about Mesoamerican history. And she mapped out. Different lessons that she was going to do around the innovation around corn, around potatoes, around chocolate, and her chocolate unit was sensational, and the kids did so much research, and they did, they learned so much Spanish in the process, and she used, and she actually brought in cacao. And a mortar for them to, I forgot the actual word for it in Spanish where [00:26:00] they grind the actual cacao beans and they create a chocolate. So they went through, it took her weeks and weeks to plan this. So there’s a lot of work that’s involved in this. But it the photos that I saw and when she invited parents and families to come in that celebration, and she said a few words that really stuck with me and she said them again and again, it was connection and transformation and that unit in particular had so much connection for the kids that for kids that didn’t identify as Latino or Latina or Mexican or whatever. They made intercultural connection, and for kids that do identify like that they made. Deeper connection and transformation and her just describing their use of hands and how now part of that story is a part of them and their experience. I think that’s, I think that’s the transformation. Yeah. It’s

Anne: So beautiful. And it’s so funny because my older [00:27:00] daughter went to a bilingual Spanish and English pre K in kindergarten. And I remember so clearly that episode of Dora, where she was teaching people how to make chocolate. Mate, chocolate mate, chocolate. Yeah. I remember. Talking about that with her and her correcting my Spanish. My Spanish pronunciation is much less good than hers because she was learning it at age three, yeah.

Monique: But if I could add one more thing, I think that’s what makes this anti racist if we’re going to use that language is that when you look at the canon of what they’ll call, Latinx history, most textbooks include, there was a study by Johns Hopkins. Four to five sentences of history under that umbrella. And so when you have erasure, just like massive erasure and kids don’t learn about it and native Americans aren’t talked about in present tense, there’s a lot of there’s just so much that we’re missing. And so she also, even though she teaches Spanish, got to highlight scientific innovation. The [00:28:00] scientific innovation around the development of corn is, that’s what our newsletter was this week in humanizing history, the development of corn. And how that took thousands of years of innovation. So I think that’s what I mean by anti racist is that I’m, I don’t want a human hierarchy of intelligence.

Monique: I want us to recognize that all of us are capable of incredible technological, cultural innovation, and we just haven’t learned vast majority of it.

Anne: . The last question we ask, and Monique, I could talk to you forever. So this is great. I would love that. Let’s talk again. See Let’s talk again. I really appreciate your wisdom and your compassion. So thank you so much. The last question we always ask is an, is really not a question, but an invitation for you to tell us about a teacher that mattered in your life.

Monique: Wow. Okay. I’m going to do this without crying, but I might cry.  Cause he passed away recently. Oh, he asked me hard for me. [00:29:00] His name was Dr. Reginald Daniel. He taught at UC Santa Barbara. And he was I’m going to say the pioneer or the premier voice of multiracial identity. And it was, this is the power representation. It was one of the first times I had an educator who identified as multiracial. Obviously I saw myself in him, but The way he approached the world I borrowed a lot from him and earlier I meant to quote him and I didn’t do that because I feel like I was talking fast and trying to get to my question. But every lecture he ended two undergrads that phrase recognize similarities and celebrate differences. And so that comes from him. And it’s something that has guided my over 20 year education journey. I think about him probably every day.

Anne: Oh, that’s so beautiful. Thank you. Wow. Professor Reginald Daniel. Yes. Yes. What a great thing. Oh, that was beautiful. I love it. Thank you. so much,

Steven: Monique, for joining us today.

Monique: Thank you. This [00:30:00] was, this went by so fast.

Outro

Twice Over podcast is available on Soundcloud Apple Podcasts and Spotify with new episodes appearing each week. For host and guest bios and show notes, please visit our website twice over podcast .com

You can email us at twiceoverpodcast@gmail.com

Thanks so much for listening!

Season 4 Episode 6

In this episode of Twice Over, The Stories We Tell Ourselves, we have a thought-provoking conversation with Monique Vogelsang, founder of Humanizing History. They explore how the narratives we create shape identities and communities, as Monique shares her journey from a multiracial upbringing to her impactful work in anti-racist education and curriculum design. The conversation examines teaching complex histories, fostering critical thinking, and building connections through humanizing stories. Filled with powerful anecdotes and actionable insights, this episode invites listeners to rethink how the stories we tell can transform education and empathy.

You can learn more about Monique Vogelsang’s work on her website.

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Season 4 Episode 5 Transcript

The Twice Over Podcast

Season 4 Episode 5: Consent Regimes

Podcast Intro

Hello! My name is Steve D’Agustino and my co-host Anne Fernald and I welcome you to the Twice Over Podcast. Because to teach it to learn twice over. In this episode, Consent Regimes, Anne and I are joined by Florence Chee, Associate Professor in the School of Communication,  Director of Center for Digital Ethics and Policy; and She is also Founding Director of the Social & Interactive Media Lab Chicago Loyola University Chicago.

Anne Fernald: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the twice over podcast. I’m really happy that Steve and I are joined today by Florence Chi from Loyola university of Chicago. She’s an associate professor in the school of communications there.

And she’s also the director of their Center for Digital Ethics and the founding director of SimLab, which is the social and interactive media lab. Professor Chi is the author of Digital Game Culture in Korea, as well as many other articles and book chapters. And she’s a specialist in artificial intelligence, games, and social media.

Florence, thanks so much for being a guest on the twice over podcast and welcome.

Florence Chee: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be chatting with you too.

Anne Fernald: So can you tell us a little bit about how you got interested in looking at games and social media? Let’s start there before we move into AI.

Florence Chee: Yeah. So as someone who has researched social interactions in various forms of communication media. I look at the meaning making practices. I’m a trained ethnographer and I look at pretty much the social world, the cultural world of how people engage with various technologies.

And coming from places where I’ve worked with technologists and engineers, computer scientists it’s often fell to me to look at the social side of things. And that’s how I broadly got into looking at what makes game communities compelling. And that had me going to various places in the world and talking to gamers themselves about what they get out of participating in these communities to lend a more human story to What might otherwise be dismissed as problematic usage of new [00:02:00] media, because typically games have been villainized in the media, they’ve been political talking points often when there’s been a school shooter as, is often in the U.S. news, especially the first thing that they tend to bring up is that this person was a gamer. And so that got me into looking at some explanations from the social side of things to delve deeper into the life worlds and what people really find meaningful about engaging with technology.

Anne Fernald: There are different kinds of games, [00:03:00] right?

There’s tabletop games that you play with other people who are in the room. There are video games that you play with a friend. In the same room. There are video games that you play like Minecraft or something where you’re online with other people who are not in the room with you. And then, there’s the kind of idle games like Solitaire or Candy Crush that you might not even play with anyone at all, right?

That’s a rough taxonomy, but can you talk about how the social aspect of gaming changes depending on the context?

Florence Chee: Absolutely. There’s definitely a truth to what Marshall McLuhan a founding father of communication noted as the medium is the message. And so we tailor our behaviors, our interactions accordingly, of course.

But this is to say that a lot of digital games end up having analog counterparts. They are part of our entire life world. At least this is what I’ve argued in my own work. Is that virtual worlds are extensions of our meatspace world. Are real, tangible, embodied worlds. And so you can see this in some of the works that I’ve referred to.

Studies of what housewives get out of reading romance novels. So that is done in a solitary way. Radway’s Reading the Romance is a key text.

Anne Fernald: I love that book. That book is [00:04:00] amazing.

Florence Chee: So she talks about, how this activity is an act of resistance rather than escapism. And so these are some analogs with the game world or various communities that participating in fan cultures or games and gender.

And so I’m trying to show that the digital world is an extension as a whole of our everyday life. Okay, you’re just slowing

Anne Fernald: My mind. I want to slow you down for a second because my mind is completely blown because you’re showing me something that I think is, Really brilliant. I’m super excited by what you’re saying because you’re talking about the ways in which things that are private, that feel completely solitary, are part of community and can be part of community building, [00:05:00] right?

Whether it’s reading a romance novel or watching a TV show, playing an idle game on our phone, that it’s an act of resistance, that it’s an act of protest, that it’s an act of something, of participation, right? So can you keep going with that? Because I’m like, I’m so excited.

Florence Chee: This is the beauty of audio.

It’s not, it’s a drawback actually, because I wish the listeners could see this physical interaction of minds being blown and smiles and, that’s to say that, yeah, when we’re online we’re really talking about our embodied selves. Like we do not stop being.

Our embodied selves. And this is where the discussion of technology tends to separate our social and cultural lives. And part of what I argue by adding a qualitative standpoint methodology to this discussion is that we cannot [00:06:00] just think in terms of binary. real life, virtual life, or fake life, second life, it’s all one.

And this tracks with how our insights, our data driven insights tend to be signal and relatively binary, right? So silences. get left off the table. I want to talk about how, how the technologies are being deployed in our everyday lives, in our work, in our play. With our awareness or without our awareness and consent and this has been happening in the games world.

My form of socializing or escapism, even escapism, or just participation in communities gets tracked and surveilled. And this is how I really got into looking at ethics and games. [00:07:00] And now, as a consequence of looking at data through games, a lot of that discussion has rolled into AI, of course.

Steven: This is just so fascinating. There’s so much there that just isn’t, so I play games and I never thought of them as an act of resistance. Cause I play alone. And as you’re speaking I’m realizing I am doing this because I am wasting time. Like purposely I’m producing nothing.

The other thing you said that was so fascinating is this idea of embodiment, because when I first started working in online learning, and in Second Life particular everybody was like a mermaid or a dragon.

The idea was that there would be this space where we could be disembodied. I would come to you as a mind or a personality and leave the burdens of embodiment behind. But you’re [00:08:00] so right in that we’re embodied, right? We, it’s, we can’t do that. As much as we might want to

Florence Chee: right. And there’s been perennial research that has tried to understand this separation between online and offline identity.

Whether or not that’s the case is not exactly what these researchers take up. It’s how does online identity manifest in the form of an avatar. What kinds of representations do you choose? Do you choose something that looks like you exactly when given the chance? And so that talks about representation, or do you choose something completely off the wall, right?

That doesn’t look like you at all. And how does this reflect actually what chances for alternative? lifestyles or roles or leadership opportunities you might have. So in my research when I looked at [00:09:00] MMORPGs, which are like massively multiplayer online role playing games I talked to people who worked dead end jobs, who ended up partaking in these communities.

And saying how this participation in community allowed me to wean myself off antidepressants, for example. And it was so emancipatory in this narrative that to dismiss these games as something like, an addictive substance or, what was the scratch that was being itched here?

And this was what blew my mind. When I was doing this research was the interpersonal nature, the social aspect. And so how these games are actually lifelines to the social rather than anti-social as gamers tend to get typecast as. [00:10:00]

Steven: That’s so fascinating. I follow this streamer on TikTok.

She’s a young woman and her TikTok is really dedicated to all of the harassment she gets as a female gamer playing these kind of first person team based shooter games. And so I think there’s some tension there between finding community and kind of the values around which some of those communities might be built.

Florence Chee: 100%. They’re very much like what I say about AI. I have said about games for a couple decades now, which is these media technologies that emerge are extensions of everyday life. And the same challenges we face in everyday life are also [00:11:00] brought to bear in these sexism, Tale as old as time, still a challenge when we’re playing games and forming community, ironically, right?

Racism census data, how we deal with Entrenched racism, systemic bias, all these things that preceded AI are now even more they’re exacerbated because The data that we’re using to train models now are using, those historical manifestations of data, right?

So this is why AI is important. Or should be regarded as important to everything from history to philosophy to math to computer science and beyond. Because it is interdisciplinary in [00:12:00] nature. We’re relying on data that we’ve collected from 16th century peasants in France to inform women’s health.

What we can determine about that in, in decision making in the present, which is, from my standpoint, nuts, but this is what we’re doing in the sciences. So what do we make of that? And that’s one

Anne Fernald: Of my, one of my big worries about AI, right? Is that We can look as individual human researchers at an article from 1960 and discount the entrenched sexism in the article and extract what may be valuable to us.

But when we input that whole text into a large language learning model, it has the same value as a 2024 text and a 16th [00:13:00] century text. Is there a way to train the algorithm to see that? Is anyone working on that? Is that something we should be talking about with our students? I don’t think that anyone’s thought this through very carefully.

Florence Chee: I… given what I’m seeing, there are pockets, of course. I’m not alone in these critiques of AI, to be sure. But. We definitely need more widespread awareness. I advocate for education in technology and ethics from K to 12 and beyond, and that’s certainly something that we don’t have the critical AI literacies and a conversation that keeps going, right?

So a lot of our practices, even if we are educating publics, educating various segments. various stakeholders, it’s not sustained. And this is an issue with technological literacy as well, is it’s not like [00:14:00] one laptop per child and you’re done. You have to introduce the whole system and sustain the system.

And what that entails is a lot harder. It’s not a one-time investment. And this is the, a challenge the, we are currently looking at.

Anne Fernald: So when you think about. ethics and AI right now. Is there an intervention or two or three that you think this would be because it feels to me so overwhelming, what would be the kind of biggest bang for the buck thing?

Is it legislation? Is it regulation? Is it education? Where do you think we should be putting our time and energy in terms of ensuring that AI Is helpful to us and not replicating harms.

Florence Chee: The opportunity here is that we all have something to bring. In terms of contribution to ameliorating this overwhelming [00:15:00] state that we’re in as an educator at a Jesuit institution, especially my go to of course is education.

And that’s something that can do, and it’s incumbent upon me to do which is to educate. Anyone who comes and so this is a unique privilege of mine really to go to where people are next week I’m speaking to a international delegation to the U S through state gov and telling them about what some challenges in the ethical tech space.

The tendency has been to delegate decision making to these machines and I would definitely caution against that. And never mind the fact that we have costs. Cost is a real thing. And I’ve tended to advocate for full cost. Economics [00:16:00] perspectives where you don’t just look at how much something costs internally to a firm.

For example, you’re looking at the social and environmental costs. In terms of what is actually sustainable, are we looking at environmental costs? Of what it takes and how much water does it take?

Steven: Yeah, how many glasses of water is this question to ChatGPT going to use really?

Florence Chee: Do we really need that?

But we need to ask ourselves even more as, AI is a really nebulous concept at the end of the day. It’s regarded as magic, but it’s actually like fancy statistics at the end of the day, right? It’s looking at how data can be mined, how data can be can predict, right? How we can ask data to predict certain things.

And now using that same capabilities to a larger extent, To generate, [00:17:00] given a set of data, , that we also regard as imperfect. What’s scary to me is where these machines are getting their training, right? Where and the power that we give very easily to. What machines assert about us as humans.

Example I like to use is of aliens, because that’s relatable in, if we’re looking at humans versus aliens, if aliens were to come and try to learn about us, And these machines are able to talk about the corpus of human endeavor. They’ve learned from Wikipedia.

They’ve learned from Reddit, right? So if we’re teaching aliens about what humanity is, what we’ve stood for throughout time, and [00:18:00] we have trained machines on a diet of Wikipedia, which in itself has issues, Regarding, oh, not just expertise, but who is an expert, who speaks English, right? We’re already limiting who is learned about, right?

Who is regarded as an expert, as an enemy and any historian will tell you this, right? History is written by the winners. So we have that kind of signal to contend with

Steven: Is it possible to make something ethical post hoc, when its appearance, in the world was unethical,

Florence Chee: This is a real challenge, especially given current state and the current state of affairs in technology and technological adoption worldwide. You just need to see how people regard and use cookies. Okay. Cookies were brought about as a way [00:19:00] to manage data. In Europe. And now we’re encountering all this these different consent regimes that ask for our permission.

They demand literacy in terms of what is this? The data being collected about me. I don’t know. Terms of services and user license agreements that we wholesale agree to just in the course of the every day. We are entering into legal. agreements technically all the time, but in terms of what is ethical, like what we should do, we absolutely can and should intervene at any point and at every point all the time, right?

So this is like consent, right? If you talk about consent, And if you’re on a date with someone, how consent can be given and [00:20:00] also ideally revoked at any point, right? And if you believe that, which, I do that is a standpoint that I apply also to technology, right? Discussions of consent and use just in order to be an ethical agent.

Where this comes in to play in big tech, however, that is, also a challenge that is way beyond any of us as individuals, right? If you’re looking at Silicon Valley, if you’re looking at California law, if you’re looking at Illinois law, already you can see how data Is is collected differently, regarded differently, handled differently.

And so you do rely upon ethics, policy, and law being in conversation with one another, constantly revised. This is why I find it really interesting now working with various facets of the UN, the Freedom Online Coalition. They all have things to say and to recommend and to guide with guidelines the ethics of AI, calls to action.

These are all attempts at these are all non-legal attempts to manage our behavior. This is why I’m also giving talks at management schools. So this is part and parcel with management of technology engineering policy analysis, technology policy management. Agendas and how we educate folks in these areas.

This is not going away. We have to be in conversation constantly and whether or not a principle or a guideline makes it into a situation or jurisdiction where it actually can be [00:22:00] enforced with teeth. is also a challenge that we face. Like in the U. S. in particular if we’re looking federally, we’re dealing with constitution, constitutional law, right?

And that organizes our government, that organizes how we see certain rights and freedoms. And if you are looking at the U. N. Charter of Rights, then you have privacy. Regarded as a human right. And we know how privacy is one of the first things to be compromised when we talk about surveillance data and.

And the technology is in our midst right now. So we act first and then apologize later, but we are like democracy, these things don’t go away. It’s a consistent challenge and something we fight for every day. So that’s our charge as educators as well.

Anne Fernald: You’re talking to people who are in school to be [00:23:00] managers or to become better managers. You’re talking to students and you’re talking to technologists and you’re talking to policymakers. Can you, have you noticed? Differences among those groups in terms of what their misconceptions about AI are. Can you give me a little more texture about what do you want students to know that they don’t seem to be understanding versus what the Silicon Valley folks are missing?

Florence Chee: So on the student front, I really feel for the students always, because they are at the forefront of any kinds of policies or global economic challenges that they have to be responsive to in their program of study. I teach an upper level digital media ethics course where we talk about ethics and AI.

We talk about cyber bullying and things that they might not have [00:24:00] Thought about with especially metadata when they take pictures with their iPhone, why is the file so big and they are very sobered at the conclusion of those lessons. And so just creating awareness in that population is important.

It’s. It’s what we ask of 17-year-olds when they enter university. Everything you learned, you might have a second thought about that. It’s a process of unlearning as well. So when we’re teaching, we learn twice over. But when we’re also learning, we might unlearn.

In that process, right? So right. I have students saying to me things like what’s the point? It’s all happening to us anyway, right? We have to deal with it. And they don’t sound all that different from some of the older folks [00:25:00] who are also in, in positions of power, relatively of greater power, but at the same time, When these technologies are foisted upon us, and then we are also in positions where we haven’t necessarily been trained or onboarded properly, or we too are in positions where our consent is not there, but

Anne Fernald: you’re describing a real passivity that I recognize in myself.

And I think it’s so antithetical to, the best practices and education and to Jesuit education, which is always about this, reflection and practice and implementation and, and then discussion and then more reflection. And isn’t it striking that we have this [00:26:00] incredibly powerful new phenomenon in our world, in our digital world of artificial intelligence. And so many of us are so overwhelmed by the strength of it that we just feel like, huh, I guess there’s nothing I can do when in fact, supposedly we’re reflective people who can, practice and be critical and think.

So I really appreciate you trying to think …help students regain some agency, even in the face of this big change? Do you, when you go to talk to technologists, do you find that passivity as well? Or do you find something different?

Florence Chee: Oh, gee, it, where I encounter a sort of disempowerment with the students and some of the the more powerful actors in the higher education context. In the [00:27:00] tech context it’s more of a, how do we get even more powerful? This is a, we can, and let’s keep doing it and let’s see what the market says, right?

Often the market is also vaguely invoked as a, just a carte blanche for folks to just pursue their projects unfettered by any sort of regulatory oversight. And so this is the discourse as well, where in terms of the prevailing U. S. Strategy or approach for regulation is that, companies should self regulate and interference, whether it’s to gesture vaguely at ethics or to restrict or to ask for [00:28:00] consent like cookies, it’s regarded as an inconvenience.

Steven: And so you mentioned earlier about the social, political, environmental consequences of that kind of perpetual I guess for lack of a better word innovation. Does that make sense to you?

Florence Chee: Yeah, Kate Crawford, whose book is called the Atlas of AI has been very prominent in regarding these practices as extractive.

And it, to look at how we extract from the environment, Raw resources, for example. There is no end to that, but if we’re looking at sustainable practices, then we might want to think twice about how we approach e-waste. Or if we’re looking at water usage for AI models, like what are we actually, what are we doing and what are we doing it for?

And can we [00:29:00] keep going? What about innovation? And so my response to that was, we can innovate in many ways. We can take leadership in many ways. And it doesn’t all end with us continuing to proceed at an unsustainable pace.

Taking leadership also means saying no at times, right? It’s a harder leadership. To engage in often is we actually don’t need to do this right now, but here’s what we should do, right? This win, right? So how do we innovate and be ethical?

Anne Fernald: That’s great before I ask my last question, I have another question one more question for you.

So two questions but I’m really curious to know we’ve talked a lot about what you’re speaking about But I’m wondering if you have a research project that you’re working on now Where are you? What are you [00:30:00] what questions are driving your research agenda right at the moment?

Florence Chee: So this is bringing it back to ethics and games and ultimately trying to get back to that place of play that got me into gaming in the first place.

But dealing with the current world, it’s also about risk mitigation and safety, which is also where I find myself speaking and advising on matters of AI and ethics. My main project is looking at how to what I call pasteurized play and trying to do what pasteurization did for food to AI and games and play.

Because a lot of our play and games practice has been tainted with toxicity with predatory and extractive practices that can [00:31:00] we find ways to pasteurize these processes, how we handle data, how we, extract data, how we feed signal back, right? All these different ways that everyday folks are engaging.

And we’re looking in the home environment where, minors have access to all these surveillance technologies and they’re having their eyeballs scanned, they’re having their voices. And their voice data collected, what do we have to account for that? And this is absolutely a safety and risk mitigation question, which a number of other folks are working on right now.

So it comes full circle to gauging what the state of the art practices are in making like AI usage. Safer, whether, however [00:32:00] that is defined. And that’s part of my work right now is to define the places and spaces where that happens. And to advocate fundamentally for helping to make our play spaces a little safer. And more consensual, more ethical.

Anne Fernald: Our last question is about a teacher that inspired you or that mattered to you. So I imagine there are many, but can you tell us about someone who’s been a teacher to you formally or informally in your past that you want to give a shout out to?

Florence Chee: I would like to give a shout out to my pre-calculus teacher in, in university. I started as a computer science major and we had to take a lot of. Math starting with pre-calculus, and coding classes. Måns

Landvig Hansen, he taught me that you don’t have to [00:33:00] really check if students are cheating if you write the exam in a certain way. What he did was say, okay, you’re not allowed calculators in class. But the, you can just write the exam with what you know, and I will, from my end, write the exam in a way that you don’t need a calculator to demonstrate that you understand the concept and have a mastery of it.

And that really stuck with me for the work that he did as. a teacher and that’s, I take a little bit of that and I apply it or try to apply it in my everyday teaching practice as well.

Anne Fernald: Wow, that’s great. Florence, this has been just terrific. The hour flew by. I’m blown away by what you’re doing and so grateful [00:34:00] to get the chance to talk to you a little bit.

It was just wonderful. So thanks so much for being our guest.

Florence Chee: Thank you for having me.

Steven: Thank you. That was really something. Thank you so much.

Host and Guest Information

Dr. Anne Fernald is the former Special Advisor to the Provost for Faculty Development and co-chair of the university council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Fordham University. She collaborates closely with the Chief Diversity Officer and his team, and, in spring 2019 she spearheaded the Provost’s Office Initiative on Inclusive Pedagogy and Student Engagement which continues in 2019-2020. At Fordham since 2004, she facilitated the Arts and Sciences Faculty Pedagogy Seminar from 2016-2019. A scholar of modernism with a special focus on Virginia Woolf, she is the editor of the Cambridge University Press Mrs. Dalloway (2014), and one of the editors of The Norton Reader, a widely-used anthology of essays. Born and raised in Seattle Washington, she lives with her family in New Jersey. She occasionally updates her blog, Fernham, and can be found on twitter @fernham.

Dr. Steve D’Agustino is the Senior Director for Online Programs at Fordham University, where he supports the development of distance learning programs. A lifelong educator, he began his career as a public high school teacher and has served as a school district administrator, clinical supervisor of student teachers and as the founding director of a community learning center in the Bronx, that provided access to learning technologies for at-risk high school students and their families. He shares his research and thoughts about effective practices in online teaching through a number of publications and his blog Learning at a Distance.

Dr. Florence Chee is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Program Director of the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy (CDEP) at Loyola University Chicago. She is also Founding Director of the Social & Interactive Media Lab Chicago (SIMLab), devoted to the in-depth study of social phenomena at the intersection of society and technology.

Her research examines the social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of emergent digital lifestyles with a particular focus on the examination of artificial intelligence, games, social media, mobile platforms, and translating insights about their lived contexts across industrial, governmental, and academic sectors.

She serves as an External Consultee to the Freedom Online Coalition’s (FOC) Taskforce on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights (T-FAIR) and is a Key Constituent of the United Nations 3C Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence.

She has designed and taught graduate/undergraduate courses in Digital Media including Game Studies, where students engage with debates surrounding diversity, intersectionality and media production through social justice frameworks.

Follow her on Twitter @cheeflo

Mentioned in this episode:

Marshall McLuhan

Radway, J. A. (1984). Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and      popular literature. University of North Carolina Press.

Crawford, K. (2021). The atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs          of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press.

Season 4 Episode 5

In the latest episode, Consent Regimes, Anne and Steve are joined by Dr. Florence Chee, an Associate Professor at Loyola University Chicago, where she leads the Center for Digital Ethics and the Social and Interactive Media Lab (SimLab). Dr. Chee shares her background as an ethnographer researching digital game culture and explores the powerful ways people connect through technology. She challenges the stereotype of gaming as anti-social by highlighting how it serves as a crucial social outlet for many, fostering communities and potentially supporting mental health.

Dr. Chee also discusses AI’s ethical challenges, stressing the need for a sustained approach to digital literacy that goes beyond one-off interventions. She advocates for critical tech education from K-12 onward to empower individuals in an age of pervasive digital surveillance. As a strong proponent for ethical practices in tech, she emphasizes the potential of education, policy, and thoughtful innovation to ensure AI and technology serve humanity rather than harm it.

This episode highlights “pasteurizing play,” Dr. Chee’s vision of creating safe, consent-driven, and ethical digital spaces, especially for young people navigating online environments. Her emphasis on consent is especially timely, calling for a broader, ongoing conversation about data control and how we engage with technology. By advocating for ethical frameworks that prioritize consent, she encourages listeners to rethink how we interact with digital tools—and how these tools shape our lives in ways we might not immediately realize. Whether you’re an educator, policymaker, or simply tech-curious, this conversation will inspire a more intentional, reflective approach to technology.

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