Inclusive Teaching, Dark Copers, & Emotional Cookbooks
Inclusive Teaching, Dark Copers, & Emotional Cookbooks
Newsletter #12
Welcome to Week Twelve of Once More, With Feeling.
BE THE SPARK - Thoughts on Teaching and Learning
It has been quite a month for inclusive teaching.
For those new to the term, inclusive teaching refers to both a philosophical orientation prioritizing the inclusion of all students in the conversation of the classroom and a set of practices to make such this ideal a reality. The literature on inclusive teaching indicates that you need both—it is not enough to be broadly open and welcoming to all students participating. You need to engage in the work of creating opportunities for it to happen. In the words of two thinkers at the forefront of this movement, Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan write, “Teaching inclusively means embracing student diversity in all forms — race, ethnicity, gender, disability, socioeconomic background, ideology, even personality traits like introversion — as an asset. It means designing and teaching courses in ways that foster talent in all students, but especially those who come from groups traditionally excluded in higher education.”
These same writers announced the pre-order availability of their new book Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom. Nestled in James Lang and Michelle Miller’s series on teaching and learning in higher education at West Virginia University Press, it is a marvelous guide to implementing inclusive teaching practices and sure to be a favorite in teaching center book clubs for years to come. It lands in mailboxes and shelves in August.
But that’s not all! This month another leading light in the inclusive teaching movement Tracie Marcella Addy released an Inclusive Teaching Visualization Project. The resource offers video vignettes of inclusive teaching practices filmed with trained actors for use in educational development or workshops with faculty. I look forward to using this in programming with our faculty at Simmons.
One promising avenue for crafting teaching practices to be more inclusive is making improvements aimed at better equity in the realm of assessment, feedback, and grading. This month I also had the deep honor of convening a network of scholars aimed at doing just that in undergraduate biology education in particular (thank you, National Science Foundation, and thank you to my marvelous co-Principal Investigator Michele Lemons). Early in June we met in a blended in-person and virtual format to develop relationships, digest some of the data from the survey I’ve been pestering you about (more soon on that), and dream big about next steps.
Stay tuned (ha) for more.
HIVEMIND - On Social Neuroscience & Our Synchronous Selves
While we’re on the theme of inclusive teaching practices, how do we encourage buy-in for the idea that dreaded activities like icebreakers can improve student learning? In this marvelous set of slides, educational developer, author, and all-around-amazing person Jessamyn Neuhaus offers a rationale and guide for the skeptic: How to People: Classroom Community Building Strategies for Introverts and Intellectuals.
If you like her thoughts here, be sure to also check out Jessamyn’s new edited essay collection, also out this month, called Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Improving Student Learning.
OUR MONSTERS, OURSELVES - Uncertainty, Challenges, Mental Health
In my upcoming book Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge I argue that anxiety and motivation both prepare the body for action, and that taking some lessons from the scientific study of play and the performing arts can encourage improvisational learning. In the motivation sections of the book, I lean heavily on the lifetime work in motivation of Ayelet Fishbach, and in the improvisational play chapter I have the honor of interviewing improv great Kelly Leonard.
So wasn’t I delighted when I stumbled upon a preprint of a new research study by Fishbach and her colleague Kaitlyn Woolley, conducted with the help of Kelly Leonard. Forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, Woolley and Fishbach find evidence that encouraging students to reappraise psychological discomfort as part of the process of self-growth helped them lean into improv—both taking more risks and holding the spotlight of attention for longer.
I look forward to seeing this work extended to learning in different disciplines.
EMOTION & MOTIVATION - Feeling and Striving
While we’re on the topic of comfort with discomfort, another intersection of these concepts that I include in my new book is the emerging study of recreational fear. As the old saying goes, research is me-search, and I have a long fascination with matters morbid and macabre.
In this Twitter thread a scholar in the field of recreational fear breaks down some misconceptions about horror fans, answering my dear cousin’s question: “What is wrong with you, Sarah?”
Now I can respond: “Oh, I’m just a Dark Coper.”
(alt text for below - movie theater audience all wearing screen masks; click through for the full Twitter thread).
INCIDENTALLY - EMOTIONAL COOKBOOKS
When my daughter was small I completed a research study that pinged my phone and asked how happy I was at various moments, as well as what I was doing and where I was. It gave me a “happiness report” at the end of it. The report indicated that I was most happy when cooking dinner, my then-toddler playing quietly at my feet, music playing and a glass of wine on hand.
I’m a messy, distracted cook, singing and dancing and sometimes reading fiction while I chop and stir. (Fwiw, Deborah Madison’s beet risotto is great when you just can’t put your book down and need a recipe requiring a lot of stirring). Some of my favorite childhood quotes from my daughter involve these shared distracted-cooking moments. One was:“Hey, want to dance while that sizzles?” Probably the best one was when she interrupted my cooking to hand me a dish towel and said, “Take this and dance, because I’m gonna make some music.”
The messy-cook thing seems to travel in the blood—one of my aunt’s poems refers to my grandmother’s “pudding-stained pages” and just look at my brother’s recipe for wicked awesome toasted sesame noodles:
I love how certain recipes cooked over and over become so much more than just a set of ingredients and instructions—part of family lore, heralds of the changing seasons, and marked moments of heightened happenings. I know it is fall when I have to bring a dessert somewhere and suddenly this marbled pumpkin gingerbread cheesecake feels like just the thing. Or that it is late summer when I start craving heirloom tomato tortilla soup with queso fresco.
I’ve actually given up any attempt at keeping my cookbooks pristine and have taken to making notes in the margins, embracing the connections and emotions. A recipe for a family-favorite gingerbread spice dutch baby is accompanied by a quote from my then-six-year-old: “Actually good, not like most things momma makes.” A leek and spinach frittata bears a note that I first made it for a bimonthly dinner swap with friends the night my mom called to say her biopsy came back malignant (thankfully, she is in full remission now). And here is the smashed avocado flatbreads with scallion salsa I made for the first dinner party we held after the initial coronavirus lockdown (outside, with separate tables set six feet apart—remember those days?), dogs running in gleeful circles:
All of these meandering cooking thoughts were inspired by the release/announcements of two new cookbooks that are sure to become splattered and be-noted and woven into my future: Andy Baraghani’s The Cook You Want to Be (out now), and Smitten Kitchen’s newest, called Smitten Kitchen Keepers (pre-order now, out November).
What are your favorite cookbooks?