ABC's of Academe: Recent Episodes
Aaron Bush, Carlina Duan, Chris Kingsland, & Bailey Flannery
Ever wondered about what scholars actually do, and why? Who they are? And how the heck all this might relate to the average person's life? In this podcast, four young scholars (Aaron Bush, Carlina Duan, Chris Kingsland, and Bailey Flannery) conduct interviews to illuminate these questions and, just maybe, bring the academy and the public a little closer together.
Failure. Failure’s been on all of our minds a lot in the past few years, whether it’s failing to meet a deadline, feeling like a failure, students failing classes, the failure of the US justice system, or the systemic failure of the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In my podcast episode of the ABCs of Academe, I speak with teacher educator and social justice advocate Naitnaphit Limlamai about what it means to fail. Aptly titled “Teaching Failure,” the two of us discuss failure. Failure is slippery. At once it is both personal and attached to bodies, especially in schooling settings. But second, it is nebulous, located in the relationship between ideological and institutional ideas of “success” and how they are enacted by individual people. These ideas of success and failure are not neutral, and neither are the evaluations of people. Naitnaphit and I think through the thorny opportunities of recognizing our aims as educators as potentially being different from the educational institutions we serve and how those differences may impact preservice and inservice teachers. How do we help them to disentangle what it means to be a “good” teacher, especially when they and their students are under constant surveillance? The podcast acts as a model of open and vulnerable communication about the struggles of teaching, connecting these struggles to the lay and research-based theories of failure that we develop in school and throughout our lives. Through talking about failure and telling stories about failures, we can start the work of unpacking, for us and for our students, how to be more equitable and just as educators.
Transcript
After speaking with Dr. Christine Modey, Aaron Bush began to think about writing centers and student-athlete-specific organizations in terms of their communal impact on minority, ESL, and underrepresented populations. When considering how these centers might be able to answer questions of community, accountability, and even representation, he was tempted to turn his focus to hypothetical growth: What could writing centers be if they deliberately and explicitly absorbed some of those effective community-building strategies from student-athlete organizations and teams, in addition to cultural centers?
He explores this possibility, among several others, through conversations with writing center experts.
Poetry! Pedagogy! Process! Curious? Let’s dive in. For this episode, Carlina Duan speaks with two local Ann Arbor-based community arts educators, Molly Raynor (Staying Power) and Jeff Kass (AAPS), about their experiences teaching and creating in conversation with their local communities, how they view the power of youth poets in 2021, and what dreams they have for poetry’s pedagogical future for Southeast Michigan. Together, they explore questions around expanding community-engaged models of teaching through poetry.
Transcript
In this episode, Bailey Flannery, a junior medieval literature scholar in the University of Michigan's English doctoral program, interviews Dr. Andrea Schutz, Professor of English at St. Thomas University, about the simultaneous timelessness and timeliness of medieval literature, unpacking why the heck folks from today should care or be curious about this kind of storytelling.