Instructional Ecology: Recent Episodes
Instructional Ecology
A community college is such a complex and living ecosystem. This podcast picks up the webs that should be connecting us and tends to the ecology of our college that binds us in our shared mission of teaching the community. What do you teach? How do you teach it? How could we learn from each other? Created by the Center for Teaching Excellence, Instructional Ecology is created about and for the teaching community at Midlands Technical College in Columbia, South Carolina but can be relevant to and inspiring to anyone teaching in any community.
Hello and farewell, my community.
This is the last episode of Season 5 and of the show, Instructional Ecology (for now). Your host considers the arc of the show, the many stories we've heard, and considers the kind of perspective an ending can bring.
We touch on learning, failure, growth, uncertainty and new beginnings. I tell a story of how the podcast was part of my recovery and learning to live with vocal paralysis. I consider the wealth of teaching I've been privileged to witness and hear about at the college. Join us for a short episode to say goodbye to the project, for now.
More soon, my community. I hope we meet each other again and again.
We offer a bookend to the first epsiode of the season. We began with Hameen Shabazz the day he was offered a new position at the college: Student Success Coach. He was joined by three other hires to form the first SSC team the college has had.
I talk with Hameen, Sierra Oliphant, Grace Alger and Kristofer McCoy about their beginnings, how they grew in their roles and as a team. And we talk about what it means to no longer be a beginner. What is it like to be at the end of the beginning? What's next?
Listen to hear about all of these questions and answers, to hear some stories of joy and disappointment and the many ways that "student success" can look.
As we near the end of this season and our show, we talk with another newer member of our teaching and learning community: Dr. Lamar White. Dr. White joined us earlier this year as the Vice President of Student Affairs. He has a vision that depends on great interest in and respect for students beginning their college journey with us.
We talk about his beginnings as a first-generation college student, making the leap of faith from Compton to Atlanta. We talk about his career path in higher education. And we uncover an incredible treasure trove of a lifetime of active and benevolent mentors..
Join us to set one foot in a world where every time a hand reaches out for help, another hand is there to catch and hold and help.
In our second episode with the Building Construction program in the School of Advanced Manufacturing and Skilled Trades, I talk with Professor Ethan Reynolds. Ethan graduated the program and was immediately hired as a professor because of his natural teaching talent and excellent command of the skills he had learned.
Ethan talks about going from student to professor at nineteen years old and what his first year of teaching was like. We explore the uncertainty of taking up authority in the classroom and the importance of self-reflection not only as a beginner but also as a teacher at any stage of a career.
In the first of two episodes in our Building Construction program, we talk with Robbie Sharpe, the program director. Robbie talks about how he brings everybody in his complex classes on board, getting buy-in from the start.
Robbie is the definition of a lifelong learner and uses many techniques to help his students learn and therefore succeed. Many of these are based on relational learning, creating connection between himself and between learners. We talk about Robbie’s own learning practice and how he offers his students many opportunities to achieve deep learning of crucial knowledge and skills.
We talk house construction, mistakes, math, and knitting!
This story episode follows a professor who changed the foundation of her lifestyle: she moved to plant-based living.
In my conversation with Political Science professor Heather Hawn, we talk about the fear of loss that often accompanies plans for change. As a professor, she often sees this fear in her students and we talk about how starting this journey in her personal life has brought her great wisdom in the classroom.
In this episode, we talk with Geography professor and education abroad program leader Brian Grabbatin.
Brian's discipline offers students new information and perspective on the world around them: in the natural world around the college, in the study of human and physical geography in the classroom and abroad as he takes them overseas to countries they've never visited before.
We talk about firsts and the stress and excitement of travel in the mind and the body. What is it like for students to begin to explore our world through his classes and as tourists? What does he do to help them succeed in these explorations? We talk about his own experience as a first-generation college student as a young man and what that brings to his teaching.
Join us for a rich conversation about teaching practice that helps build the "messy networks" of interconnected knowledge that students slowly construct as they progress in one of his Geography courses.
In this edition of our story series, we meet and talk with English professor and Pathway Coordinator Kathleen Dunley.
Kathleen is a PhD in English but recently was a raw beginner in her study of German. This conversation has a very close connection between learning and teaching. Kathleen describes how she pulls out all the learning skills she's gathered over the years to succeed in her German studies and that includes facing the hardest and most discouraging moments in learning.
In this episode, we get into the nuance of the difference of being a beginner and beginning something new. We talk with Benjamin Gaston, the college’s Dean of the School of STEM; someone who has a complex brief that includes oversight of multiple departments and many employees, both faculty and staff. Benjamin is an engineer by training and trade and taught for the college before moving into administration, first as Chair of Engineering and now as dean.
We talk about being a true beginner at a hobby (he recently learned to ride a motorcycle from the CCE part of the college) and beginning new projects as an expert. What’s it like to oversee complex and far-reaching projects at the college? We talk about the Mav in Space program that Benjamin organized that sent MTC student research to the International Space Station and an important new partnership with Scout Motors.
We continue with our story series with English professor Sylvia Hayes. Sylvia talks to us about beginning a small market farm with her husband: Love and Honey Farms.
We hear about aquaponics and raising ducks, turkeys, lots of chickens, and goats. Hear the story of the first time Sylvia midwifed the birth of twin goats!
We explore the benefits she sees of helping new students build a supporting community and manage their time, two things that Sylvia herself learned the hard way, through need. She talks about her college struggle with cancer and homelessness, the lessons of which she offers to her students to ease their journeys.
Spend some time on a farm and in an English classroom as we hear another story of beginnings.
In the summer of 2024, the college gained a new president: Dr. Gregory Little. At the time of this conversation, Dr. Little was in a moment of great beginnings: beginning his first college presidency and his time at a new institution and being in the process of meeting many new people and work partners.
We talk about what drew him to this new part of his career and what his first weeks were like. We also delve into the skills that make him a flexible and effective leader who tackles new issues constantly. We further enrich our skill set of being a practiced beginner.
Join us to get to know our president better and get a glimpse of this crucial beginning phase in the life of our college.
We begin our story series for this season: I Am Beginning. As we shine the spotlight on beginning, this story series showcases some of the beginnings that are happening at the college right under our noses but that might not be visible. This story series features people from all around the college telling the story of something new they’ve recently begun, something at which they were a compete beginner.
Our first storyteller is the program director of our Pharmacy Technician program, Channon Watkins. She tells her story of having a weekend to prepare to become a mother to a toddler.
Join us to hear how she went from auntie to parent in the blink of an eye, what she learned in that steep curve and what lessons she’s taken into her teaching from this incredible experience.
Sandra Jackson is the Chair of the MTC Commission, the college's highest governing body, whose members are appointed by the governor of South Carolina. She also began her higher education journey here at the college.
She joins us to tell her personal origin story when, at 17, she was denied the career she wanted because her widowed mother could not afford to send her out of a state to the program she wanted to join. Crushed, she turned to MTC for an alternate path.
It was here that her hurt feelings revived and she became alive to the possibilities that higher education can bring to someone just starting out. She talks about the necessity of change and has words from the wisdom of experience and perspective for our students just starting out who become discouraged and uncertain as they navigate a college education.
Join us to hear her words to students, faculty and staff about the courage to begin and begin again and to build the life and communities of our dreams. These beginnings are our mission.
We're so back.
Our first episode opens the new season by following the flow from a season on failure and a season on the skills of learning to learn. Failures usually force new beginnings. And being a "good beginner" is definitely a distinct and important set of skills in a learning journey. What if we made these truths more visible in our instruction? This episode begins an extended inquiry into and exploration of these possibilities.
In that spirit of linking and flow, we talk with one of our failure storytellers from Season 4: Hameen Shabazz. Hameen will talk about how he sees people beginning their college educations with us and also beginning again in their lives and careers.
Hameen also talks about a beginning he is embarking on: he's moving from Advising into the new role of Student Success Coach. This is a completely new position at the college so it's a big beginning for Hameen, the students he serves, and the college ecosystem as we work to incorporate these new services and possibilities.
We also introduce the new story series for the season: I Am Beginning. We'll hear stories from people all around the college who have recently begun something entirely new in their lives and talk about how it's going and what it's brought to their lives.
Join us as we begin a new semester and a new season and look closely at what it means to be a beginner.
You can hear Hameen's full story from Season 4 Here: https://sites.google.com/view/iepod/s4-episode-5
Hello, again! Season 5 is about to begin! Listen in to find our the topic and some of the guests we'll be talking to in our new season. Join us for new voices and stories and explorations into teaching and learning.
Josh Vincent, Art professor and guest in episode 13, asked several of his classes to think about the meaning and experience of failure. He created a dropbox in his classes so that students could anonymously submit their ideas.
In this bonus episode, Josh reads his students' thoughts, jokes, and meditations on how they experience failure in Art classes. We consider their ideas, respond, and think about ways forward in facing failure in higher education and life.
Join us to hear some student perspective on failure as our season ends.
In our season finale for Season 4: Facing Failure, we have a conversation with Art professor Josh Vincent about the inevitability of failure in ceramics classes and the joy the intertwining of success and failure can bring.
We’re at the stage of a journey through the underworld where we have returned to hearth and home. We sit back among our family and friends and tell our stories of suffering and adventure. We tell stories to give our lives meaning and Josh talks about his experience teaching in a number of higher education institutions and what he’s learned about the importance of creating a learning environment and tearing down barriers students experience.
We also add up some of what we’ve learned this season about failure in higher education as we look back on our journey. And also tease a bonus episode with student perspective on failure that will follow in two weeks’ time! Join us for our final conversation of the season.
We begin to think about return from the underworld. In myths of journeys to the underworld, the protagonists must always figure out how to return alive. So, what’s the trick to allow you return safely and bring whatever treasure or knowledge back with you to use in life on the surface, in the sunlight?
Today, we spend time with a part of the college that depends on constantly engaging attempt and failure and revision and new heights: our college writing classes.
Our guest is Michael Kennedy, new hire in the English Department, and an instructor who is deeply invested in teaching students where they are. Michael talks about writing as a chance for learners to "fall in love with their own mind" because through writing (and writing again and again) we come to better understand our own ideas and thoughts about complex subjects. If students are willing to explore the darkness of uncertainty through writing without fear that they’ll be judged or given a failing grade for trying, what might become possible?
We also explore another guide for our season in the underworld: the scholar bell hooks. Her ideas about ethical relationship to one another could be another way to face failure in the classroom and turn it into resilience.
Instead of a story of failure, today’s episode is a story of grief. It is a literal story, a work of fiction, based on an actual event.
I’m in conversation with English professor Andrea West because when I was asking anyone who came within earshot of me about whether there was a place for loss and grief in higher education, she said something unusual. She said, well, I think there’s a story we could ask about that.
Andrea and I talk about a very short story by the Indian American novelist Bharahti Mukherjee called, The Management of Grief. begins in the aftermath of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985. The flight was traveling from Montreal to Delhi and Bombay by way of London. It exploded off of the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people on board. This podcast will not go into the further details of the incident but there are some resources on the web page that you can explore if you’d like to know more.
This story is many things but relevant to our concerns, it asks questions that we ask at the college: if we have official processes to follow, what happens when a person’s emotions and life circumstances don’t fit inside of what we expect?
This episode was tricky to make and perhaps it fails to convey what we hoped. Your host meditates on the constant risk of failure and the worth of completing a project even if it is an imperfect thing.
Hello, my community. Your host will be out on medical leave for a few weeks, so the Failure season will experience a short delay. Listen in for details.
This episode is another chance for us to consider the emotion around failure, which most of our instructional community acknowledges is something that higher education would really rather avoid dealing with. The guiding question is: what is the place for loss and grief in higher education?
We return to three voices about failure: Professor Elena Martinez-Vidal, counselor Cyntrell Legette and, from our first Failure episode last season, Professor TK Kimel.
With our guests, we'll explore in more detail what students lose when they leave an institution of higher education because it's much more than just a career option. We also examine the connections between loss and grief and get much further into our thinking about what educational grief could be.
Finally, we begin some early thinking on how better understanding of student loss and grief might change the ways in which we respond to failure. In keeping with our season of new conversations and ideas, we make a beginning of new possibilities when we look at student failure through the lens of loss and grief.
This is our final stand-alone failure story of the season. We added this story series to this particular season because we found that a number of faculty and staff are quietly telling students their own stories of failure. We want to amplify and encourage this thoughtful practice. With this episode, we’re going straight to the top of our college to our current college president, Dr. Ronald Rhames.
We hear the story of a college freshman, here at MTC, who is taking the required English writing course, as many of our students do. And when he received his first marked essay back, the grade was absolutely not what he expected or hoped for. In today’s story, we’ll hear about how the young Dr. Rhames, faced with a failing grade, was at a decision point right at the start of his college career. We’ll hear him narrate his choices and the choices of those teaching him. Dr. Rhames announced this past Fall that he will be retiring in the Summer of 2024 so we’re again speaking to someone looking back at an almost-complete career.
The end of the episode also features information about support the CTE offers our community to tell our failure stories to better support our students.
The next FSL Common Read Zoom is January 26th and we'll be talking about Chapter 4: Expectations Matter! Here, the authors define what they mean by establishing and effectively communicating high expectations and we look at a few of the questions our community can take up from the book. These questions may guide our conversation on the 26th so this is a jump start! Text from pages 47, 48 and 58.
Happy new year, my community.
Today’s episode is the first of a pair that brings our questions of this podcast season to administrative leadership. I wondered – what does failure look like from that vantage point? Instead of looking at student success on an individual level, on a class level or even a program level? What if we looked at it from a holistic, institution-wide context from the administrative purview?
Our guest today is Diane Carr, former Vice Provost and Chief Academic Officer who retired in 2023. We spoke just as she was about to leave her position for retirement so we’re getting a very deep perspective from a lifetime of work in higher education and years in administration here at the college. By understanding the kind of perspective one gains when one moves up in a hierarchy, and by asking questions of someone with that bird’s eye view, we gain new vistas into how failure is accounted for in the overall work of our mission as a college.
Join us, as Diane Carr, former Vice Provost and Chief Academic Officer, talks about failure from an institutional viewpoint.
Episode page: https://sites.google.com/view/iepod/s4-episode-8?authuser=0
In our third story of failure for the season, on the shortest day of the year, we spend the core of the year with someone who is at the core of this season. William Golston is an advisor for the School of STEM and has been thinking about our questions since last season when he and Professor TJ Kimel shared with us how they talk about their own failures with students.
In this story episode, we hear more detail about William's failure story and how he shares it with students. We consider the weight of expectation in student's experience of failure. Also, we think about what it means when students fail in a path that they aren't committed to. Is that different from failing at a cherished dream? And we also talk about shame in higher education and its pervasive presence.
William is ready to talk about creating a literal "place for failure" and we start having a conversation that we hope might bring some very new and interesting ideas to support our students and our teaching community.
As we enter Persephone Days here in Columbia, when we drop below 10 hours of daylight in 24, we again try to sit in that pause when things have gone wrong and we're unsure what to do next. We talk with Tinesha Croom who is both an advisor and a faculty member at the college. Her perspective in both of these positions offers important perspective on student response to failure and how we as faculty and staff can change our responses in kind. We talk together about having hard conversations when students and faculty can both be uncertain what should happen next.
What can these conversations look like? What has she found is important when they happen? How could we find new ways of having these conversations? Join us to get a little farther into our explorations and to pay tribute to another season guide whose influence helped inform this podcast project.
Welcome to the second in our series of failure storytelling this season. And it’s got some incredible scope to it. Today’s storyteller not only tells his failure stories as needed, he has a published a short autobiography that unflinchingly describes the very difficult first half of his life.
Hameen Shabazz, in our Academic and Career Advising unit, endured a turbulent and violent childhood. The public school system taught him little in the way of reading, writing and arithmetic and his failures in school gave way to great success selling illegal drugs. But that success was finite, when he was arrested, convicted and served thirteen years in the South Carolina correctional system. After that time, in the hard years of trying to make a fresh start, he found his way to MTC and those early academic failures began to change thanks to all that he learned in prison. Not just basic literacy but also the skills of resilience, dignity and patience.
So instead of a capsule failure story, today we’re going to talk about the academic failures of a lifetime. And you’ll understand that to hear these stories is never to dwell in failure but to always return a deep well of determination and self-reflection and recovery. For our guest today, there is no final failure, only delay. There is no loss that cannot be answered in time, with patience and the support of others and the willingness to try again and to try another way. Today, we talk with a failure practitioner who has clearly transformed those failures into a meaningful and successful life.
We're back in Chapter 2: Learning Matters of our FSL Common Read book! Here we connect the text to a very cool project happening at MTC: this semester's rollout of a series of seven video PSAs about learning principles in our MTC community! Listen in to hear about Theater professor Ilene Fins' creative way to get learning best practices to our community in new ways. Don't learn alone!
Watch the videos at: https://sites.google.com/view/iepod/sustainable-connections?authuser=0
In this episode, we engage one of the issues that higher education has never solved: what to do when students' academic failure is rooted in their life circumstances outside of the classroom. As an open enrollment college with neither dorms nor on-campus food service, we don't provide a baseline of basic needs support that residential colleges do. Also, we serve a broad sampling of the community so our students have a broad range of financial and social stability.
Here, we talk with Muffy Allison, a licensed social worker and member of Counseling Services here at the college. Muffy serves on the Strategic Planning Committee for Students' Basic Needs. Her committee looked into the actual data about students' basic needs at the college in order to better serve that need. Muffy and I talk about what that data and her experience in Counseling Services tells us about our students' needs and how those needs are connected to failure at the college.
Join us to talk about Chapter 2: Learning Matters! We talk about the tension between discouraging trends and optimism for what's possible when we focus in new ways on learning in our institutions.
Welcome to our first of the failure stories this season. We're offering the chance to faculty and staff to tell their experiences with failure in higher education to make visible the experience and after-effects of failure. When students hear stories about those who are successful and understand that success is far more complex than it appears, they have the chance to gain perspective when they face failure.
Our first story is told by Public Speaking professor Elena Martinez-Vidal. She tells the story of a presentation she gave that fell far, far short of her own expectations of herself. And it was witnessed not only by the general attendance of the conference but by her advisor...and his PhD advisor.
In this story, we'll do some thinking about the experience of failure in the moment and what it means to have failure witnessed by significant teachers in one's life. We'll also push forward and see what Elena made of this experience and how she thinks of it now, decades later.
We also begin to appreciate the ethical ramifications of failure storytelling in our community.
Episode webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/iepod/s4-episode-3?authuser=0
We're in the dark now and we begin with an element of failure that makes it radioactive in higher education: its emotion. The feeling of failure is intense and those in an educational community often have little guidance about best practices when a student is in failure and feeling strongly.
So our guide this episode is someone who sits with student emotion all day: Cyntrelle Legette, one of our therapists at Counseling Services.
Cyntrelle speaks to the confusion and pain of failure. Together, we work our way through the emotional experience of failure. We also begin to get a glimpse of grief in higher education. It's much more common than most of us ever realize and failure is at its root.
Join us to stand in the emotional aura of failure and begin to better understand what is happening and how we might better respond to student emotion and our own.
Welcome to Season 4 of Instructional Ecology!
In this first episode of the new season, we stand at the gates of the underworld of higher education: failure. We kick off the season with our guiding questions and our intentions for this season.
We'll be once again moving around the college to better understand the place of failure in higher education and how we might better respond to students experiencing it. We'll have a look at the plan for the season with both topical interviews and storytelling from the lives of faculty and staff at the college.
Our guest is Mary Helen Hendrix, Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence, and a learning expert. She'll ground us in her hopes for our season growing out of her perspective on how excellence, success, and failure are all intertwined.
Join us as we once again ask our instructional community to tell its stories and reveal the work going on all around us as we explore deeper into the web of our college.
The FSL Common Read is back this month! Let's get ready with a glimpse into chapter 1 at the very beginning where the authors situate us in the world as they see it. In this episode, we see the authors suggest that we can flourish amsit the challenges and uncertainty of the moment we live in.
Our next full season of Instructional Ecology drops in September! Listen in for details of the topics and who we're in conversation with in our community.
The Fall semester is about to begin! Ease into our new FSL Common Read book, The Undergraduate Experience, with a quick look into the Introduction. The authors have particular hopes about how communities like ours will use this book. Our first FSL Common Read event is next month so get here's a chance to get a sense of the conversation ahead!
We announce our book for the upcoming 2023-2024 FSL Common Read beginning again in August!
Our season finale is here in our time together about learning to learn. The "dense, dark star" we began with has proven to be a constellation of many centers of light and gravity. In this episode, we spend time considering all we've uncovered this season, across the college as well as within the seven skills or states of being we explored.
We'll have a quick check-in with Christine Witkowski, professor of Sociology and chair of the Strategic Planning Committee for Excellent Instruction. She was part of the impetus for this season and with her, we begin to think about visible interdependence at an institute of higher learning.
Our main conversation is with Melissa Ellington, professor of English. We explore her background in Developmental Reading and how she's brought those fundamental skills into the teaching of College Writing. We engage with some huge questions and concepts including one from quantum physics: entanglement. What if we applied that concept to our lives of work at the college?
Join us to wrap up the season but also to launch yourself into fresh consideration of your own teaching and work in your instructional ecosystem. Our episode webpage has resources to help you along the way as we ask ourselves: what is possible if we begin to teach in connection with each other?
Thanks for joining us for another great season of moving towards interconnection.
In Episode 8, Connection, we talked with Angela Griffin, an MTC Psychology professor. In our original recording of that conversation, she told a harrowing and rich story of failure in her higher education life.
We've turned that story into its own short bonus episode so that we can give it due attention.
Join us to hear Angela's story and think through how you would have handled the situation as Angela or as another person in this story. Perhaps there are a number of failures in this story and not all were the storyteller's. By hearing our colleagues' stories, we can better know them and ourselves. And we can pass along our hard-earned wisdom and perspective to students are who ready to receive it.
We began our season with the dense, dark star of the skills of learning to learn. By today’s episode, late in our season, we see that single star has been revealed to be an intricate constellation of disparate points of light and gravity. Our conversation in this episode is about creating constellations of meaning and support through the skills and experience of connection.
Our guests have come to see their work at the college as hinging on connection. We talk first with Brad Kauffman, program director at the William Jerry Wood Life Skills Center in the Academic Success Center. Brad works with students on essential skills like time management. As he works with them, he often discovers that other college services could have a direct impact on their academic success, so he regularly connects students to financial aid, counseling and disability services.
Angela Griffin, our second guest, is a professor of Psychology in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. As her career has progressed, she's come to several revelations about the place of connection in academic success: both slow revelations and sudden. We walk alongside her to understand how she's changed her classes over the years and how much benefit this has brought her students.
What does it mean to study in higher education? Many, many students who arrive at our doors don't have concrete answers because they have not been taught methods for higher education.
This episode digs into the skill of studying and ways of teaching those skills in the classroom and in tutoring. We turn to the Academic Success Center's experts to get these answers. We talk with ASC Director, Troy Mothkovich, about supporting student study and learning skills at an open enrollment college. And we'll hear specific details about teaching study skills from Biology adjunct professor and long-time ASC tutor Mike Mills.
Studying is a set of skills that are quantifiable and teachable so we offer many resources from this episode that can be adapted as appropriate to a wide range of courses. Join us to hear more about integrating study skills into classes and about integrating study support into teaching and learning.
https://sites.google.com/view/iepod/s3-episode-7
We're at the end of our FSL Common Read year together and on June 9th, we'll have our final Zoom event! We'll discuss the "Postscript in a Pandemic" that the authors added in Spring of 2020 to close out their book. In this episode, we look at the Postscript to think about how the pandemic was so challenging for higher education relationships and how MTC responded.
In this episode, we arrive at an inevitable part of the process of learning: failure. But do students understand that failure is inevitable at some, or many, points?
This episode is a three-way conversation between your host, STEM advisor William Golston, and professor of Political Science TJ Kimmel. Together, we compare experience with failure in education and our two guests talk about how they engage with student failure by talking about their own.
We'll ask a lot of questions and explore possibilities that working in higher education both opens up and closes down. What does it mean that failure is inevitable? What can we offer students who are currently failing or that have failed in the past? How can we understand each other's work and biography better to help each other and students? Join us to begin the kind of conversation we think could open up some important possibilities in teaching students to learn how to learn.
https://sites.google.com/view/iepod/s3-episode-6
Play!
Over the course of the 20th century, research brought to light what now seems obvious: that playing is how children learn first and best about the world and their lives in it. But in our culture, adults usually are not supposed to be seen to play. Does this mean that we're sacrificing a source of learning possibility? Is there a place for play as learning in higher education? Our two guests this week say, yes!
Stan Frost directs our Mechatronics program in the School of AMST and he is adamant that the time students spend "playing" deliberately on the training machines is the most fruitful learning time of his classes. And Ilene Fins, our Theater professor, literally teaches the art of (the) play. Both will talk about how they work to create a classroom environment that allows and encourages play and what it offers students for learning and growth.
https://sites.google.com/view/iepod/s3-episode-5
This episode’s aspect of learning to learn involves a skill that can become a lifetime’s habit of mind: self-reflection. Intertwined with agency, reflection is the skill that differentiates between having experience and learning from experience. It's quite possible to refuse to learn and change based on experience: it's reflection that leads to action that gives learning traction.
In this episode, we'll compare two "flavors" of the teaching of reflection at the college.
As you may recall from episode 1 of this season, "flavor" is Mary Helen Hendrix's word for the customization of common learning topics we teach at the college yet are taught and practiced is quite different ways depending on what is being taught. This episode will be the first to allow you to compare “flavors” of the same skill at the college.
Matt Stilwell, Public Speaking Professor in the School of Humanities, will talk about the cadence of reflection in his classes. Cayce Hendrix, Respiratory Therapy Professor and COL Lead for the School of Healthcare, will talk about the value of reflection in the practice of medicine professionally and as a student and will explore how she embeds it in her classes. Both professors also talk about their own reflective practice, which is what lead both of them to their fulfilling and meaningful careers at MTC.
It's time for the April FSL Common Read Zoom! We'll be discussing Chapters 5 and 6 of our book. In this micro-episode, we consider two brief examples of how colleges have changed a few basic practices to enact relationship-rich principles to great effect. We at MTC won't be able to replicate these practices exactly - but we CAN transform them to fit our circumstances and the way our students need us. Listen in and see what you think!
Moving on from our conversation about tools students can use in learning, we come to a state of mind or state of being: frustration. In this episode, we explore a highly ambiguous part of the learning process. For some, frustration is a spur, a sign that learning is picking up steam and that they just have to keep working because they're getting closer than ever to their goals. But for many students at our open enrollment college, frustration can feel like a sign that they are not any good at what they're trying to do and that they never will be good at it. Frustration can set off a chain reaction that leads to withdrawal. Our two guests will explore how frustration looks in their classes and how they help students respond to it.
First, Jeremy Gilliam, professor of Machine Tool Technology in our School of Advanced Manufacturing and Skilled Trades, talks about frustration students encounter as they learn their new trade. He builds frustration management into his courses as a skill for a lifetime of work.
Then, Ashley Bennett joins us. Ashley teaches dance in our community and has returned to school in our CCE Clinical Massage Therapy program. She'll talk with us from the perspective as a teacher AND a learner and how once again mindset is a crucial part of learning. In this case, mindset can help a learner manage inevitable frustration and persist despite the challenges.
Listen in and see how you experience frustration - your own and your students - aligns with their ideas about how to encounter and engage with it.
Where do we begin with what I've called a dense, dark star of connected skills and habits? In our first foray into our college's teaching of Learning to Learn, we'll begin with agency, something we know is fundamental to student success. When students feel they are active agents in their lives and education, their potential soars. And we'll get there by looking at mindset. Our guest is Tom McKenna, a Math Professor and COL lead for the School of STEM. For Tom, "mindset is everything." Tom, a former Naval pilot, talks about how he's learned to build essential skills and growth mindset into his teaching from the first day of class. Listen in for Tom's perspective on the vitality a growth mindset for students, and for professors, can bring to our instructional community.
Ahead of our April Zoom about our FSL Common Read book, this episode begins Chapter 4: Creating Relationship-Rich Classrooms. We hear the story of Imad Mays at Pima Community College. Faced with a choice between curriculum and connection, she chose relational connection. What is your choice in these moments?
Welcome to Season 3 of Instructional Ecology. It's spring here in South Carolina, midway through our full semester. And we're kicking off an exploration of our topic for this season: Learning to Learn. Learning to learn is a complex, intertwined set of skills and crucial to success at our open enrollment college. We'll look into this set of skills and at the road of the season ahead with the help of Center for Teaching Excellence Director Mary Helen Hendrix. Find out about some of the topics and guests we'll have on the show this season and explore with us further into the web of our community.
We've wrapped up Chapter 3 for the FSL Common Read so we'll take a little break before we begin Chapter 4. Listen in to hear about the new season of Instructional Ecology that's currently in production! We'll reveal our season topic and tease a few stories you'll hear from professors and staff around the college.
We wrap up Chapter 3 of Relationship Rich Education by Peter Felton and Leo Lambert by looking at two of the most challenging components to change at any institution: climate and culture. What do the authors say about these two elements of institution mission and what can we learn from them? Listen in for where this part of the book arrives.
We continue with Chapter 3: Making Relationships a Cultural Priority and touch on a topic we didn't get to in our in-person discussion. The authors find that in order to fully support students, institutions must invest in high quality teaching practices. Let's explore how the college is working to do this now and in the future.
Let's begin Chapter 3 of Relationship-Rich Education, our FSL Common Read book. We'll greet the midpoint of the book and the program by a refreshment of purpose. Then we'll begin with the chapter epigraph and finally begin to turn to how to address change at higher ed institutions.
Don't forget - all MTC faculty, staff and leadership are invited to our bi-monthly zoom Friday, January 20th at 11am! We hope to see you there and hear your perspective.
Happy new year, my community! For our first episode of 2023, we close out Chapter 2 of our FSL Common Read book, Relationship-Rich Education. We'll look at how the chapter ends on a crucial meditation: that the work is already happening and that we need more ways of making it visible in our teaching culture. How could that look at MTC? Let's think together about possibilities.
This story begins with an act of service.
This episode is about another absolutely vital part of our college and instructional ecology: our MTC network of administrative specialists.
This episode is going to take you all over the college. It will take you to London. To a little town in West Virginia. It will take you to a part of the campus that can feel a bit like a doctor’s waiting room. To another place on campus that has to refrigerate its students and professors. You’ll be in the guts of a printer and you’ll travel back in time to the Covid lockdown. You’ll get to see our college through the eyes of a very specific network. It's a very administrative specialist experience. We talk to four administrative specialists and the director of the program at MTC who teaches our students the skills our admins use all day.
Finally, we wrap up Season Two with some thinking about what we've found by looking at our instructional community as an ecosystem.
We continue with Chapter Two of Relationship-Rich Education by Peter Felton and Leo M. Lambert, called "Why Is This So Hard?" Today, we take a look at a few seemingly small issues that students encounter when they enter a higher education institution that can grow into serious barriers to their success and well-being. Even small, common institutional bits of jargon like "office hours" can become an issue.
This is the last Sustainable Connections episode of the year but we'll return in January with more peeks into the FSL Common Read book.
Today we begin a look at Chapter Two of Relationship-Rich Education by Peter Felton and Leo M. Lambert, called "Why Is This So Hard?" We'll kick off with the focus for the chapter, the seemingly baked-in negative emotions and higher education practices that drive students to isolation. And not just students; faculty and staff can also become isolated by similar circumstances. I'll share a few words of insight from a staff and a faculty member at our November Zoom session in order to better ground us in persistent issues and see them with fresh eyes.
This story begins with a paradigm shift.
In 2019, the college moved from department-based advising to centralized Advising. This shift removed formal advising as a faculty duty and placed it in the hands of dedicated advisors. Further, these advisers would be imbedded in each School of the college, learning as much as they can about those pathways so they can be as helpful to students as possible. This was a massive shift in process for the college and, in some places, remains hazy and unclear. True to our study of the ecology of instruction here at the college, we delve into this biome.
This episode begins at the roots of the project in 2019 and then follows it up through it growth and out into two of branches: the School of Advanced Manufacturing and Skilled Trades and the School of Health Care. We travel to the fruit of those branches: students. And we end with the newest growth: the new director of Academic and Career Advising who will help us look ahead together from her perspective.
Listen for a chance to uncover the working of this extensive and extending set of connections at the college.
This is our last look at Chapter One of Relationship-Rich Education by Peter Felton and Leo M. Lambert. This week's Sustainable Connection looks closely at a topic we haven't discussed together: questions of meaning and purpose. The authors have found that faculty and staff regularly offering students opportunities to think and talk about the meaning of their studies and their purposes as they change over time offer "potentially transformative" possibilities in their education. Join us to explore these questions and think about how you're already asking them or might ask them differently.
Further into Chapter 1 of Relationship-Rich Education by Peter Felton and Leo M. Lambert, this week's Sustainable Connection looks closely at a central feature of the book: the webs of student relationships the authors have observed that college culture needs to nurture for greater student success. Who makes up these webs of relationship at the college? What do these multi-point webs offer students? How could our particular college could help students form those webs? The possibilities can be intriguing and wonderful for students and for the college.
Hello, my community. Here is a little subseries of our podcast for you that will run every week except for when an episode of Instructional Ecology posts. These are weekly micro-episodes about five minutes each that connect to our college-wide Faculty, Staff & Leadership Common Read book.
Our book this academic year is Relationship Rich Education by Peter Felton and Leo M. Lambert. You’re invited to meet every other month to talk about the book so these episodes will bridge the time in between. I’ll use these ultra-short moments to look at a sentence or two in the book and prime your thinking about it. Maybe it will get you thinking differently about how we’re doing things at the college right now and how we might do things in the future. Tuck these ideas into your mind, let them sift down into the rich soil of your thoughts, where new ideas and ways of being begin to take root.
This week, from Chapter One, we look at twin concepts the book espouses: "relentless welcome" and "inescapable relationships."
Welcome to Sustainable Connections.
This is a story that begins in the community.
We begin with an issue that effects everyone living in the state, even the nation, personally: a critical shortage of emergency medical professionals (EMTs and paramedics). The state needs excellently trained EMT and paramedic workers in large numbers to fill the empty positions. Our communities need excellent local emergency medical professionals to preserve our lives. And emergency medical workers need jobs with good pay and paths for advancement. And the answer to all of these demands, in part, is here at MTC.
Listen to hear the story about the roots of this crisis and how MTC's Corporate and Continuing Education division created a ladder for people wanting to begin careers in emergency medicine or to improve their skills and certification or explore the possibilities in emergency medical support. Keep listening for some thinking about how our college ecosystem interconnects through diverse loyalties and through asking, listening and responding.
This is a story about innovation at the college.
We begin with a professor who is increasingly concerned with a big barrier to student success: the cost of textbooks. He decides to do something with his own classes to address that issue and ends up drawing in the rest of his department and connecting with staff and administration in other places of the college who all share his interest in the solution. Join us to follow the flow of these ideas and people into a confluence of purpose and action all to support our students' success.
This is a story about innovation at the college.
We begin with a professor who is increasingly concerned with a big barrier to student success: the cost of textbooks. He decides to do something with his own classes to address that issue and ends up drawing in the rest of his department and connecting with staff and administration in other places of the college who all share his interest in the solution. Join us to follow the flow of these ideas and people into a confluence of purpose and action all to support our students' success.
We created this podcast to find new ways of connecting our teaching community. The CTE is also a part of community of instruction so it seemed the thing to do to end with the creators of the podcast and those of us who both teach and support the teaching community. The CTE grew fourfold in 2020, right before the pandemic began and in the haze and haste of the last few years of survival, we wonder about what our community knows about what we do and who we are.
In this final episode of our first season, I consider what the first season brought us and share a bit about how the CTE sees itself in the ecosystem of our teaching community. We always hope to be of use in our teaching community and larger communities outside of the college.
Come spend some time with the Center for Teaching Excellence.
Christine Witkoski teaches Sociology and Geography in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Our conversation is intensely connected to the metaphor of ecology and interdependence. Her teaching is thoroughly integrated into her life and her values and her imagination. All of these pieces of her identity touch each other. She did me the honor, as others have, of considering my questions carefully and answering honestly and thoughtfully. We talk about how important it is to have the trust in each other to make this kind of exchange possible.
How liberating it is to have a trustworthy environment to think and speak and share. Christine thinks so much about creating classroom communities that open up space for discovery and learning. The care that professors put into creating their classroom community can provide liberation: liberation of mind, of speech, of curiosity, and possibility. Christine and I think together about the revolutionary act of care in education—for students AND for faculty.
Come spend some time with Sociology.
Andrea West has been teaching composition and English courses at MTC for two decades. She's explored and developed many creative, effective methods to help her students with core skills that they'll use in many aspects of their education and careers. She sees great value in the versatile and fundamental skills the School of English and Humanities provides to students. Regardless of their goals, the ability to critically analyze information and to communicate effectively in speech and writing will help students in their professional and personal lives. These are skills that further connection between people and their communities.
Getting to know your fellow instructors in other parts of the college can be a great boon to our sense of community. If you'd like to have a conversation about writing in your classes with Andrea or with other instructors about teaching across the college, reach out to the CTE. As English majors love to say, "only connect."
At MTC, we look into the college and our teaching and we look outward into the community to align our classes with who our students are and what they need. Janie Kronk, who teaches Architectural Engineering, lives in this doubleness, often moving back and forth across the college’s threshold. Janie is an architect who only recently joined our teaching community. That freshness of perspective is an important part of our community. In my conversation with her, I see her very much at the threshold between the teaching community and the external community. She looks inward at the skills she’s teaching her students and then outward at the community projects she connects students with.
This flow with our larger community is something that's happening in many ways all over the college. It can
be more subtle in some departments, but I see Janie constantly stitching teaching with non-teaching praxis. In our conversation, here is yet another unique and important perspective on our flow with the larger community.
Come spend some time with Architectural Engineering.
Robert Marchi, another community professional who left his practice to become an educator, teaches in the School of Healthcare.
He sees our college as a vital component of healthcare in our state. MTC confers certifications that gets people directly into the workforce at many levels. Being a part of sending good healthcare workers into our communities is a source of joy and satisfaction for Robert.
He also feels the stakes of his instruction: without a good foundation, students won't go on to succeed and be compassionate and competent caregivers. So he sweats the details. His attention to broad issues and unit details make him a conscientious instructor. On the episode webpage, you'll find some fun examples of his creative teaching: multilinguistic "words" he and his students have cobbled together to engage their mastery of medical roots, stems, and suffixes. You'll also find some information about how he frames emotionally difficult topics, which abound in medicine.
Come spend some time with Healthcare.
Kari Beaty, child of and grandchild of teachers, swore she would never teach. Her teaching career has now spanned 47 years.
In the second of our conversations with life-long instructors, Kari charts the way she discovered teaching and how it's stayed alive for her over the years. Kari teaches Math in the School of STEM. She also teaches those learning to be K-12 Math teachers. The creativity and art of teaching is something she's given a great deal of thought to.
She also talks about the emotional investment teaching requires and how much wisdom a professor needs--and how that wisdom can be very hard won and sometimes come much later than we would wish.
Come spend some time with Math.
Drew Casper is another trained expert, a psychologist, who left his practice to go into teaching the community. In my conversation with Drew, you can hear the myriad subtle and deliberate ways he's observing his classes and individual students and responding to needs as they arise. The humanist base of Drew's teaching philosophy is crystal clear: the humanity of his students comes first - and his own humanity is present with theirs. As we talk, you'll hear how his habits of reflection and inquiry allow him to better reach his students. He's also willing to talk about handling mistakes in the classroom and handling student crises, which college instructors are often witness to. His years in the classroom have lead to big changes in his teaching methods as he's discovered who he wants to be as an instructor and how he finds his students learn best.
Come spend some time with Psychology.
Greg Colley, originally a professional engineer, teaches Math in the School of STEM. He approaches teaching with an engineer's eye for design and solutions. When I talk with Greg about his teaching and his students, I hear him consistently asking, what is needed? What's the best way to get there? In my conversation with him, I heard the value of this patient, persistent evaluation and search for solutions that will help his students and the workforce of our state. Another benefit of consistent inquiry and improvement is keeping himself engaged in his teaching. Burnout is always a risk as teaching careers unfold and Greg's consistent exploration helps keep his teaching life vital.
Come spend some time with Math.
Leah Norris Teaches Economics in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. She has a particular talent and determination to show her students how the theories she teaches are not just abstractions; those theories are describing and predicting patterns that we participate in and are touched by every day. Our conversation reminded me that in most instruction, one of our first jobs to to encounter student misconceptions and continually connect them to the reality of what we’re teaching.
Come spend some time with Economics.
This is a short excerpt from my original conversation with Errol Alger. In it, Errol offers close reading and interpretation of two paintings: The Red Studio by Matisse and Starry Night by Van Gogh. Through them, he explains how he connects this kind of learning to the important skill of critical thinking.
This is a short excerpt from my original conversation with Errol Alger. In it, Errol offers close reading and interpretation of two paintings: The Red Studio by Matisse and Starry Night by Van Gogh. Through them, he explains how he connects this kind of learning to the important skill of critical thinking.
Errol Alger teaches Art in the School of English and Humanities. He has an expansive sense of time when it comes to his part of an education. While he’s teaching his class with its learning outcomes, he’s also aiming to alter the very way his students perceive the world around them for the rest of their lives. During my conversation with him, I realized that we constantly returned to what he, as their instructor, was bringing to his students every single class. So that’s my question for this episode: what do we bring to our students? There’s a unique answer to this in every classroom and here is Errol’s perspective.
Come spend some time with Art.
Errol Alger teaches Art in the School of English and Humanities. He has an expansive sense of time when it comes to his part of an education. While he’s teaching his class with its learning outcomes, he’s also aiming to alter the very way his students perceive the world around them for the rest of their lives. During my conversation with him, I realized that we constantly returned to what he, as their instructor, was bringing to his students every single class. So that’s my question for this episode: what do we bring to our students? There’s a unique answer to this in every classroom and here is Errol’s perspective.
Come spend some time with Art.
Errol Alger teaches Art in the School of English and Humanities. He has an expansive sense of time when it comes to his part of an education. While he’s teaching his class with its learning outcomes, he’s also aiming to alter the very way his students perceive the world around them for the rest of their lives. During my conversation with him, I realized that we constantly returned to what he, as their instructor, was bringing to his students every single class. So that’s my question for this episode: what do we bring to our students? There’s a unique answer to this in every classroom and here is Errol’s perspective.
Come spend some time with Art.