A Dramatic October
The one with all the links.
Welcome to Newsletter Twenty-One of Once More, With Feeling.
A particularly challenging launch to the new academic year at home and at work means that I’ve been neglecting this newsletter. It also means that I have so much to share with you! Thus this edition will be a more link-style whirlwind of all the excellent scholarship and public thinking I’ve encountered in the last few months than a narrative.
BE THE SPARK - Thoughts on Teaching and Learning
It has been a busy time in the world of teaching and learning.
An Inclusive Teaching MOOC. The SEAS program (Science Education and Society) and HHMI Biointeractive, led by Bryan Dewsbury and Kayon Murray-Johnson, have released a wonderful open MOOC course on inclusive teaching with video interviews of leaders in equity-minded education, a reflective journal, and other templates, worksheets, and activities. In Bryan’s words:
“More than anything, this course asks us amidst the haste to slow down, pause and reflect on what being human-centered in teaching looks like. We brought together visual art, music, education theory, spoken word and storytelling in ways that we trust support a deep and safe reflection process. Take at your own pace or consider forming a community of allies. Built for 9th grade to higher education teachers, but in reality, it's for anyone who seeks to think more deeply about how our shared humanity is fundamental to education.”
Karen Costa, writing up a storm. Educational leader Karen Costa has been writing up a storm, as usual thinking a few steps ahead of all of us. Here she is in The Chronicle sharing some thoughts on the climate action work I reported on in the last newsletter, there she is in Inside Higher Ed asking us to think about menopause in the academy, and over on Bluesky (it’s lovely! join us!) we chat/spicy-take about whether all the AI fervor in highered right now could be thought of as #TheGreatDistraction.
A new(ish) book series on teaching and learning in higher ed. You might have missed this in all the tumultuous news coming out of West Virginia University, but the powerhouse editorial team of James Lang, Michelle Miller, and Derek Krissoff wrapped up the teaching and learning in higher ed series at WVUP. Good news for fans of concise, evidence-based, friendly-to-read books about teaching and learning, they’ve announced a new series at University of Oklahoma Press called Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Education. I’m grateful to be part of the advisory board. Learn more here, and consider submitting a proposal!
The Chronicle article everyone is talking about. In all the new academic year hustle, I missed the initial launch of this article by Beth McMurtrie in The Chronicle of Higher Education, but bookmarked it several times because everyone I knew was posting it with effusive praise. It deserves it. McMurtrie address the profound disconnect between how much we know quality teaching matters for student success and the entire enterprise of higher education, how much colleges say they value it and prioritize it, and then how much they actually don’t when it comes to how they make decisions, spend money, and strategize. It is worth your read.
A great conference keynote in New England. Here in New England where the days are getting delightfully colder and more orange, educational developers are getting ready to welcome keynoter Lindsay Masland to the New England Faculty Development Consortium (NEFDC) fall conference, where she’ll be talking to us about pedagogical disobedience. Imma bring my bullhorn.
OUR MONSTERS, OURSELVES - Uncertainty, Challenges, Mental Health
A fascinating survey indicates students expect a fair degree of help from professors regarding their mental health. Inside Higher Ed teamed up with Student Voice to release two informative offerings: one, the results of a survey asking the question, “What do students expect from their colleges and universities in terms of mental health support?” (spoiler: quite a lot, and they’re invested enough in the answer to ask the question on college tours) and two, a webinar sharing the results and some larger thinking on the topic. Both were eye-opening.
A new youth mental health paradigm, from Nature. A fascinating new article by a powerhouse team of researchers argues that we know that most major mental disorders onset in youth with predictable underlying brain development patterns (see below), that treatment research indicates that early intervention and prevention holds the most promise, AND that access to mental health care in youth is dire. Given this knowledge, we need to rethink mental health disorders as youth mental health disorders and launch a comprehensive early intervention campaign targeting these circuits (e.g., anxiety interventions should come early, as the threat system develops earlier - interventions for reward system dysfunction like substance misuse could come later). Let’s do it.
EMOTION & MOTIVATION - Feeling and Striving
Anxious brains, math-ing. Over on her own SubStack, psychologist and educational developer Michelle Miller reports on a new study examining the interconnections between high math anxiety, attentional networks, and performance. “The results illustrate how the emotional experience of anxiety places extra demands on cognitive resources that are needed to carry out academic work,” she writes, “resulting in less efficient and effective cognitive processing.”
The saddest line I ever read in a meta-analysis. A huge meta-analysis of well-being studies across the lifespan reports on lifetime trends, and includes the saddest line I’ve ever read in an abstract: “Positive affect declined from age 9 for almost the entire time until age 94.” On the plus side, life satisfaction increased a bit from age 16 to age 70, and negative affect went down from age 22 to age 60?
Still bad news for those of us who count ourselves big fans of positive affect and who are more advanced in age than nine years old.
The future of affective science. The Journal of Affective Science released a special issue on “The Future of Affective Science.” Some of the articles are indeed futuristic—covering generative AI, robotics, and physiological wearables for data collection—but other articles are just fantastic updates on the current state of knowledge regarding various topics affective. All worth a read for folks interested in the science of emotion.
I have a conversation with OneHE about the science of motivation applied to the classroom. To complement my open-source course on motivation science, Niya Bond and I have a great brief (10m) conversation on the science of motivation and teaching. They en-giffed us!
HIVEMIND - Our Synchronous Selves
We really do communicate via smell. One of my favorite units to teach in my Motivation & Emotion class is the one on communication of emotion via chemosignals. The essential idea is that one way that human beings sync up with each other is through the emission and detection of chemical signals we release into the air when we’re feeling intense emotions. Every year I do a quick lit search with bated breath, fearing that the research has crashed and burned in the replication crisis. There are several flaws with the theory—principle among them that “chemosignals” is intentionally a vague word. What sort of chemicals, how released, how detected? These crucial parts of the theory have yet to be precisely understood.
But wasn’t I delighted to see a review of the literature on chemosignals in human communication released in one of psychology’s flagship journals, Perspectives on Psychological Science. Guess my students and I will be talking about chemosignals in a few weeks.
INCIDENTALLY - Drama, Spooky Drama
Spooky season has launched! That means that I’m busy helping put on the fall play production for my daughter’s high school, getting ready for the POD network conference (PODsters come see me, Josh Eyler, Michele Lemons, and Lindsay Wheeler share an update on our TUnE-Bio network happenings on Friday late afternoon), and planning a Halloween party with my best friend/alt spouse Julie A. Sargent. This year’s theme is Dracula’s Castle, so lots of candles.
Speaking of spooky dramatic things, one rainy Monday evening this fall I joined lead singer of horror band Ice Nine Kills Spencer Charnas for a live podcast taping of Matt Whyte’s podcast Sing for Science (which pairs famous singers with scientists on particular topics). Our topic was: Why Do People Enjoy Horror Movies? We launched by playing of one of Ice Nine Kills’ horror-fied music videos, styled to the theme of American Psycho, and then had a rousing conversation with the Matt and the audience about recreational fear, our favorite horror movies, and some of the audience’s nightmares. It was so much fun. You can listen in on your favorite podcast app or here.
Happy Spooky Season to all who enjoy it. Those who plan on dressing up, share your costume in the comments!