Teaching Race and Politics with Brielle Harbin

I recently saw that Brielle Harbin received the 2023 Distinguished Teaching Award from the American Political Science Association. Brielle was a graduate teaching fellow at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching from 2014 to 2016, which is how I know her. She was actively involved in our learning communities on the theme of teaching, difference, and power, work which resulted in two co-authored publications, including the award-winning article “Teaching Race and Racial Justice: Developing Students’ Cognitive and Affective Understanding of Race” in the journal Teaching & Learning Inquiry.

Brielle is now an assistant professor of political science at the United States Naval Academy, where she has taught courses on politics, race, and media, and has led workshops for her peers on inclusive and anti-racist teaching. Thanks to this and other work, Brielle is now the first pre-tenure faculty member to win the Distinguished Teaching Award from the APSA! 

I reached out to Brielle to invite her on the podcast, and we had a wonderful conversation about her teaching philosophy and practices and how she continues to develop herself as a teacher over time. 

Episode Resources

Brielle Harbin’s website, https://www.mbharbin.com/

APSA Distinguish Teaching Award announcement, https://politicalsciencenow.com/brielle-harbin-receives-the-2023-apsa-distinguished-teaching-award/

Brielle's teaching publications, https://www.mbharbin.com/teaching.html

State of Nature game, https://sites.google.com/site/howtodosimulationgames/examples-of-simulations/political-studies/state-of-nature 

Please note that in this interview, Brielle Harbin speaks as an individual and not on behalf of her organization.

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Transcript

Derek Bruff 0:07

Welcome to the Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I’m your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time.

One of the things I loved about working at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching was working with our graduate teaching fellows. We had four or five fellows each year, and they came from a variety of disciplines around campus. As important as it was to our work to have stability among our senior staff, it was great to have fresh ideas and perspectives flowing through our center every year thanks to our grad fellows. And even though I’ve left Vanderbilt, thanks to social media I can keep up with some of our former fellows and learn about the great things they’re doing in their careers these days.

On that note, I recently saw that Brielle Harbin received the 2023 Distinguished Teaching Award from the American Political Science Association. Brielle was a graduate teaching fellow at the Center for Teaching from 2014 to 2016, which is how I know her. She was actively involved in our learning communities on the theme of teaching, difference, and power, work which resulted in two co-authored publications, including the award-winning article “Teaching Race and Racial Justice: Developing Students’ Cognitive and Affective Understanding of Race” in the journal Teaching & Learning Inquiry. She’s now an assistant professor of political science at the United States Naval Academy, where she has contributed a new course on race, gender, class, and sexuality in U.S. politics and led workshops for her peers on inclusive and anti-racist teaching. Thanks to this and other work, Brielle is now the first pre-tenure faculty member to win the Distinguished Teaching Award from the APSA!

I reached out to Brielle to invite her on the podcast, and we had a wonderful conversation about her teaching philosophy and practices and how she continues to develop herself as a teacher over time. 

Brielle, thanks for coming on the podcast. I'm excited to talk to you today. 

Brielle Harbin 2:14
Thank you. I'm really excited to be here and able to reconnect with someone that I knew in the before times. 

Derek Bruff 2:21
That's right. That's right. That's right. Speaking of earlier times, I'm going to ask you my my standard opening question. Can you tell us about a time that you realized you wanted to be an educator? 

Brielle Harbin 2:34
Yes. So there's not a single moment that sticks out in my mind. I think perhaps it's because I think about making this choice every single day, because I feel like I'm continually evolving in my pedagogy and having to adapt to whatever curveball is being thrown. So most recently, of course, you know, thinking about the pandemic, but just being fairly early career, I'm still shaping who I am in the classroom. But I will say that I'm in general, like whether it is in the classroom or I've had a lot of different teaching experiences in my travel abroad. I just really love that moment when you see somebody light up and get it.

And so I really enjoy being able to to simplify things, to make somebody see something that they couldn't before. And that could be in my field, political science. It could be something like understanding yoga or any range of topics. But I really love that idea of being able to make ideas more accessible to people. And so I can recognize that desire even as early as college. But now that I'm in the role that I am, I do love having those interactions with students and and having those moments. 

Derek Bruff 3:51
Yeah, I can totally relate to that. It's a very good feeling when you sit and start to make connections they hadn't made before.

You and I have both taught at Vanderbilt. I have never taught at a U.S. military academy. You have and I suspect there are some elements of that teaching context that would feel familiar to folks who have taught in other contexts and maybe some some elements that are surprising. What might surprise our listeners about teaching at a U.S. military academy? 

Brielle Harbin 4:29
So starting with the harder part first, maybe I'll just warm myself up to think about it by starting with the similarities. I think probably the most translatable experience is the fact that I have very small class sizes, so no more than for the most part, 18 people in a class. So everything that you might envision with thinking about having a small group learning environment is what I experience. 

What someone might be surprised by. Hmm, maybe. I'm not sure. Surprise. But one thing that I didn't really fully appreciate before going to the military academy is just like how much range of experience comes with literally having students from every congressional district? And so when it comes to like coming into a classroom, you just don't know what you're going to get. So I've had everything from students who are from Manhattan to from a small town that doesn't even have a stoplight. And so when you imagine that and I teach an intro course that is required for every first year student to take. You just can't anticipate like what, for example, somebody's prior an American government class look like. Did you what grade did you take it in? What what did you learn? And so there's a lot of a conversation that I have just around talking to students about. So how have you been taught this? Like, what do you know about this? And it's been super interesting to just have people bring in their prior experiences, and in both myself and other people are like, Oh, wow, I didn't realize that that was a thing because usually people are just from where they're from and you don't have an environment where you're literally getting to interact with people from every single state. 

Derek Bruff 6:24
Yeah. Now you said every congressional district. And is that like, why did you phrase it that way? 

Brielle Harbin 6:32
Oh, I guess I was thinking about it because so I mean, of course, a lot of what happens in our life is shaped by Congress, right? So one of the I won't say the most because I'm not sure, but one of the paths to get to the Naval Academy is students have to get a congressional nomination. And so you have to get a nomination from your member of Congress and so that is kind of what comes to mind when I think about congressional districts and students having to go through that process of an interview. Of course, there are also lines for people who are prior enlisted, too. So I have a mix of students who might be coming from high school, some who have gone maybe through ROTC program and transferred in or people who are prior enlisted. So there are multiple ways to get to the Naval Academy. 

Derek Bruff 7:21
Gotcha. Okay. But the congressional district is one kind of entry point. Okay. 

Brielle Harbin 7:26
Yes, I think that's probably the one that most people know about. But maybe that's just me assuming that people know more about the behind the curtain than they do. 

Derek Bruff 7:33
So you teach about politics and social identities and media. 

That sounds like a challenging set of topics. Maybe the most challenging. Let's talk about your goals first. What are your and we might talk about specific courses or more generally, what are your goals in teaching? When you're teaching on these challenging topics and their intersections? 

Brielle Harbin 7:59
Yeah, I think whether I'm in the civilian context or in the military context, it's the same because a lot of times people will come to political science in general with their own well-formed priors on what they think politics is about, what they think, you know, different buzzwords are about. And so my hope and my goal is to get them to understand that there's a language of the study of all of this and to get them to move beyond what we know to be like gut level reactions, to actually have an informed opinion, to use the terminology in precise ways, and to kind of be more critical consumers of information. And so I think that would be the same whether I was at a military institute or not. But I think what's different in a military institute is that you have people who are coming from so many different places that the range of people's belief systems is probably a bit more broad than in my prior experience. But when I think about being, for example, a grad student, being a T.A. at Brown, I remember thinking, this is a incredibly liberal place and I'm having to, you know, give voice to a perspective that's something other than liberal. I think Vandy had more of a mixture of of people there. But I think whatever your context, you're just having to think about like what are people bringing to the classroom and then how can I get them to see that they are bringing something to the classroom and then get them to kind of buy into, okay, let me do the work to think about this in a different way. 

Derek Bruff 9:34
Now, you mentioned that like the use of terms. Can you give an example of a term that might have a particular definition in political science that students might use and in a variety of ways? 

Brielle Harbin 9:47
Yeah. So this is not specific to political science, but when I think about my social identity class, as it's called, the politics of difference, that class I do talk about privilege as a orienting topic to kind of help them think about what are the range of identities and the fact that you can have some identities that are more privileged in others. And then in the world of politics, I also talk about intersectionality, and that's probably one of the most politicized terms. And so getting them to understand, like what was the academic origin of this term and then how has it become a political term and how those are not necessarily the same thing. 

Derek Bruff 10:34
Yeah, Yeah, that makes sense, right? That's that term has been used by a lot of different people in a lot of different contexts, but not always in a consistent manner as it's as it's entered into political speech. 

Brielle Harbin 10:45
Yeah. Yeah. It makes it easier to teach it because I can just, you know, I can have the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, and here's what she said she meant. Here's the origin of it. And then here's how we're talking about it in the media context. Do they sound similar? Like that's just an easy way to set that up. So. 

Derek Bruff 11:03
Yeah, yeah. So what do you find challenging about teaching these topics and how do you how do you try to mitigate those challenges? 

Brielle Harbin 11:11
Oh, I mean, it's just challenging when you are in such a highly politicized context the last several years, like whether whatever institution I was going to be at, it was just really hard to be a political scientist. And I think it's just ... There's an incredible amount of emotional labor that goes into teaching what I teach, especially given the fact that I am a black woman. And so I think that about it. So it can be hard to teach the topics because you're trying to overcome so much in terms of people's prior understanding and then whatever forms of resistance might come up. But then you also, if you're affected by the same systems that you're teaching about like that work has a an additional layer to it. 

So for me personally, I have just gotten better at being... taking care of it, taking care of myself outside of the class. So having practices for whether that be a yoga practice, which is like, you know, I think everybody could use some good yoga to keep yourself in balance. But also just realizing to the importance of having a teaching reflection practice because so much of this, whether you're talking about or teaching about hard topics, you're going to make mistakes, you're going to not get it right. And so I think having a practice of every semester writing down what went well, what I want to change, and then reflecting on that journey. And then I actually shared that with my chair and we have conversations about it. It's been really, really helpful to just think about this as a journey and not a single moment in time. 

Derek Bruff 13:00
Okay. Okay. And you mentioned your chair. I was wondering if you had colleagues that you reflected with. Are there communities of teachers that you connect with to help you with that reflection? 

Brielle Harbin 13:11
Yes. So I so our we both share former colleague Joe Bandy. We co-authored together on some of these topics that I'm teaching about. And so he is someone who has not only started off, I guess as a in a supervisor role when I was a graduate teaching fellow at Vanderbilt and then became a co-author and we have over the years just become friends. So he is someone who I can always kind of talk to and think through issues. I I'm in a really supportive department and so people might not always have the answers for how to how to approach what I teach or how to approach it from my own position. But I feel incredibly supported and from that perspective in my department. 

Derek Bruff 13:59
Hmm. You mentioned your identities. How do you talk about your own identity in these classes? 

Brielle Harbin 14:08
This is something that you asked this because I was having such an interesting conversation with my students last week about the idea of whether or not professors or teachers instructors should talk openly about their ideology from the outset, like what their position is. And so I, for the most part come in and I just tell them, like the first day I tell them how I became a political scientist, that I actually wanted to be a lawyer and then realized that I wasn't a lawyer. And I just tell my like my story of how I got there. So I'm very transparent in that sense. But then I do... I don't tell them, I guess, about myself as being Democrat or Republican or liberal conservative, and I tell them it doesn't really matter from my perspective, you know, what my personal beliefs are, what I'm teaching you, and it doesn't matter to me what yours are. What does matter is how well you are engaging with the reading and actually formulating reasonable arguments. And so you're not making a sound argument, then you're just never going to be that successful in my class because it's, you know, you have to be consistent and you have to be engaging with the material. 

Derek Bruff 15:24
And I would also expect them if you just tell them that you don't care what their political ideology is, that they might not believe you at first. 

Brielle Harbin 15:31
Yeah, well, that's why in the day to day I give examples and I'm very intentional about if I'm going to... So for example, in my American gov class, I talk about democratic norms because, you know, that's a really important thing to think about, not just what's in the Constitution, but like what are some rules of engagement that we just all agreed on for our democratic system? And so there have been examples of leaders from both sides who have violated democratic norms. So if I'm going to talk about those violations, then I need to be giving an example from a Republican and a Democrat. And I do do that. And if I if I see in the room, I actually have these discussion role cards that I use where I literally just assign somebody to be the contrarian. And nobody, if nobody's doing it, that I have to do it myself. Like, okay, I think we're having a groupthink here. There's somebody who would voice a different opinion, and we need to think about that because we can't we're not going to be an echo chamber here. So but at the end of the day, even when I do those things, like that's me doing my part, it it requires trust. And sometimes that trust, no matter how hard you try, is not earned. And so I have to learn from that too. So and I have learned from that too. 

Derek Bruff 16:53
Now you mention these role cards. Can you say more about that? 

Brielle Harbin 16:58
Yeah. So I developed the... so I have an active learning style. Our teaching style teaching and learning expectations. And so one thing that I realized so I was so focused, especially in the early years of my career, on how can I be more prepared, like asking good questions, all the things that you can control as the instructor. And then once I felt pretty confident in that part of it and it didn't consistently have results, it's like, Oh, okay, it's not just me that needs to be prepared. I need to give them right now what they need to do, very clear as well. And so especially depending on the topics, I use those discussion role cards early in the semester when I'm really focused on the community building aspect of it, because so many students who come to the classroom are afraid of say the wrong thing or offending people. And so when I assign somebody to be the diverger, which I think is the role that I what I call the contrarian, is like, this is literally what you were supposed to be doing. So you might have the thought in your head, but now you can just say, I'm the diverger. And then if you have that role when you can't, you don't agree with whatever the divergent opinion is, the class discussion is... the quality of it is lesser because you're not doing your job. So we need that diverger perspective. And so I have found that it's just easier to think about giving them a role. And my students are, because they're in the military, they're used to kind of like taking orders. So when you give them a mission, the mission is the mission. And so it's it's worked really, really well. 

Derek Bruff 18:41
What are the roles? 

Brielle Harbin 18:43
Yeah, so there's, so there's the summarizer, so that's the person who's just like, okay, this is checking in, what we have talked about thus far. There's the conversation starter. So they are the person who starts off the discussion. There's a prober. Sothat's a person who just ask a question that's asking someone to clarify something that they've said. And then the diverger and, and then, oh, and then there's a role. I can't remember what it's called, but you, oh, the equity manager, the equity manager's the person who is noticing somebody's voice has not been heard. And so you're just when you stop the discussion and draw attention to the fact that there are some voices that are louder than others, and let's hear from somebody who hasn't been talking. 

Derek Bruff 19:33
Yeah. So I'm really curious. I feel like that's a nice way to teach students how to do discussion better. Do you do you see that? Do you see them becoming better at the kinds of class discussions that you'd like to have? 

Brielle Harbin 19:47
I need a bit more data to feel like it's successful. I do think that it makes them feel more empowered and more clear about what their roles are. But do I necessarily feel more satisfied with the discussion? Not yet. And I and I'm not sure why that is yet. I kind of have to think of think about it, or at least not consistently.

I think sometimes and this is something that I have been thinking about just even before teaching classes in my current contexts. Is that so much of how we think about good discussion is based on people contributing. But I actually have some of the most thoughtful students who are super introverted. And so I think one of the things that I'm still trying to negotiate and I have figured out some solution to it is how to bring some of the ideas that my super introverted students have that I think are conversation changing, but getting them in the discussion.

And so what I use now, I call it the QCR portal: question, comment, reflection,  where students have... it has to be submitted within 24 hours of the class meeting. But just saying something that you didn't get to say in class or maybe you didn't fully have the thought formed in your mind, but it's something that still you're mulling and so I have students, if they have to be absent, who contribute that way and and just those who are more quiet. And I've had some people who have put submissions in there, I just e-mailed them and ask their permission, Can I just bring this to class? And I can do it anonymously, or I can say who said it. But I think this is really important.

The first time the first semester I used it, I actually created a whole new class based on a question that somebody had, you know, put there. Just from my perspective, I'm so deeply immersed in all these conversations. It just didn't occur to me from the perspective of a new learner. And yeah, so that is that has been really helpful. But I don't know. I don't know if this is your experience. I kind of feel like there's nothing that works consistently all the time. Right?

Derek Bruff 22:03
[Laughs] Yeah, Yeah. 

Brielle Harbin 22:04
So it depends semester to semester, class to class. 

Derek Bruff 22:08
Different groups of students. Yeah. 

Brielle Harbin 22:10
So I'm trying my best, but I, I don't think I don't feel like I have reached, like the, the ability to, like, know that this conversation is going to knock it out of the park yet. But I do think the fact that I'm doing these things improves the odds a lot. 

Derek Bruff 22:25
Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any favorite class activities that you find work really well? It sounds like you like not every class session in your course will look the same, but are there any particular activities that you'd like to share? 

Brielle Harbin 22:42
I love in my... So it's different depending on the class that the course that I'm teaching. But I will say what I'm teaching the American American government class. I teach about political philosophy Hobbes and Locke are the two political philosophies that I go over in the idea of the state of nature. And I just love the fact that every single time I start with this game that I that I read about in one of the political science education journals called the State of Nature, and you just give the students an Uno card and you tell them the object is survival. And the only rules here are that like if somebody challenges you, you have to meet them in the challenge. But you don't have to challenge anyone. And to me, even though we like, they've read about state of nature. We talked about it and we I start my class. We're talking about human nature. This big question of are we inherently good? Are we inherently bad students?

There's always there's always at least one person who's like, but we don't have to play. We could all survive if we just don't play. Then and then then other people are just like, Yeah, but give me your card. And it's just so it's so fun to watch them and then to debrief that activity as they will like. The impulse part of it gets wants them to or gets them out of their seat to kind of play. But when they sit and reflect on it, I love when they start putting the connections together of, Oh, we did just talk about human nature. Oh, I guess I could have just sat down and then I have just a conversation with them where I say like, Do you think that this is something that would happen at a civilian institution too? Are we just like super competitive people here? Like what do you think? And to have that conversation with them is always a lot of fun because it always goes the same way. And hopefully none of my students will listen to this and be the person who's able to persuade everyone to not play. But it hasn't happened yet. 

Derek Bruff 24:42
Right. But that would be interesting too, right, like like to see that, to see that happen and what, what arguments resonate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and to have that shared experience together, to then debrief as a class I think is pretty powerful. 

Brielle Harbin 24:58
Yeah. 

Derek Bruff 24:59
No. So I know one of the things that you talk with other faculty about is anti-racist teaching. 

What do you mean by anti-racist teaching? And, and, and, and what does that look like in practice? 

Brielle Harbin 25:15
Yeah. So usually when I talk to people about anti-racism, I'm always putting it side by side with other teaching strategies that are in that same conversation. So the idea of being inclusive, of being social justice education or anti-racist. And so the way that I think about anti-racism is a much more explicit way of thinking about how ideas about race, how the system of race has impacted not just, you know, how we think about what knowledge is, but also just how we have constructed institutions of knowledge. And so to be to take an anti-racist approach is to be actively thinking about those and interrogate them in your in your work. Whereas if you're just doing like inclusive teaching, then you're just thinking about like who is represented in this room, whose voice is there, you can be doing one and not the other for sure.

But I see anti-racism as a really a really difficult hurdle for a lot of people to overcome because there are some ways that ideas about race are ingrained in us that we don't even realize, and we're continually unpacking them in ways that... I consider anti-racism, especially in your teaching practice, a journey and not just like a one off like workshop you attend. 

Derek Bruff 26:45
So I'm curious because I had a conversation on the podcast recently with Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan, who wrote a book Inclusive Teaching. And one of my questions for them was, How do you talk to your students about your own inclusive teaching practices and do you do that? 

And so I'm curious, do you talk to your students about... do you use phrases like inclusive teaching? Do you say things like anti-racist teaching? How how explicit are you with your own students about these practices in your teaching? 

Brielle Harbin 27:20
Yeah, So I don't I definitely don't use technical jargon just because I think they're more like transactional, just trying to understand, okay, what are your expectations and are not as interested in the philosophical side of it, But I do talk to them a lot about how I think about equity and in the way that that shows up is how I like, I talk about my own commitment to democratizing information teaching transparently. I also talk about how I... so I don't use any textbooks making the idea that making education accessible is really important to me. I don't do a deep dive into why, aside from I just think that it's an important value for me personally that everybody has the same opportunity to succeed and everybody has the same information.

And so when I talk about something like, you know, coming to office hours, like I know you had a recently you talked about the Privileged Poor book, which I just finished reading for the second time. I just love that book. You know, the idea that people have different levels of knowledge about what it means to use office hours or just the ability to talk to faculty, that it's very important for me as somebody who's the first person in my family to graduate from an elite college, to have a degree from an Ivy League college, to not make this a cat and mouse game, like you do the work, you can get the grade. But I also have to be transparent about it. So, I mean, I think that those both of those things align with thinking about anti-racism or equity, but I don't use that language mainly because that I just I don't want that to be. It's just like a larger conversation than I think they could understand at that point. 

Derek Bruff 29:23
Yeah, Yeah. Well, and you've already said, you know, you're already trying to help them understand the language of political science and use it more precisely and more constructively. So to layer on a bunch of educational terminology on top of that might be a bit much. 

So I'm going to change the subject here a little bit, but I saw that you posted that you are modifying a research experience in your American government course as at least in part a response to generative AI. And I'm curious if you can tell us about that. 

Brielle Harbin 29:57
Yes. So I have created a scaffolded research experience for my students who were in my American government class. So as part of this intro American class, everybody has to do a research paper and have a library day. There's expectation that this is what might be considered the equivalent in the civilian institution, like a writing intensive course. And so for me, like we like other institutions, are thinking about AI. And so at least for me, I think that there is a role to, you know, I'm not afraid or scared about AI technology, students using it necessarily. And what I am afraid of is people not having critical thinking skills. Or the inability to be able to detect information or to think about what it means to have sourced information.

And so I don't actually introduce the research experience with AI is the background to it. I just say to them, Look, I think it's really important for you all as citizens, informed citizens, to know where ideas come from, to be able to source them, to be thinking through credibility issues, to ask questions of everything that you are encountering. And so toward that goal, I have these 11 different assignments you're going to have to do that are all like bite sized ways to think about specific aspects of it. So, for example, one of them is just about Chicago's citation style. So I do talk to them about like how plagiarism that is going to be something that you are concerned with right, now that we have a high technology. You want to demonstrate that you are documenting where you got information from that this wasn't just generated by someone. So you should know Chicago style citations. So let's just have one activity where I teach you how to do Chicago style citations, look at the facts of it, and create a space for you to learn about it. And then I ask you to do it and I give you feedback about it before I ask you to write the research paper.

I think absent the conversation of AI technology, I do think that there's a lot of different skills that are required to do research that we don't teach individually, like we assume that it's learned somewhere else. And so as I have had this same assignment, or a version, different version of this assignment over the years. It's like, I just don't want to assume that people know things or don't know things. And so I bring it back to the basics in maybe in an elective class, you can use AI to create an outline, which that sounds perfectly reasonable to me, but as a first year in college, you should be able to show me that you understand how to structure a paragraph, because I think knowing what a topic sentence is really important. 

Derek Bruff 32:57
Yeah. And yeah, I had the same experience every time I, I taught my first year writing seminar. I would realize that there was some other element of the writing and research process that I was assuming that students had learned somewhere in their past. But some of my students had not, right? And so I love that strategy of actually scaffolding that right building in the structures, in the assignments to teach those skills and not to just hope that they show up at some point magically during the semester. 

Brielle Harbin 33:24
Yeah, I'm probably. So once I fine tune it and work out all the kinks that that could come up with this assignment, I'll probably just write it up and publish it because it was an incredible amount of work that went into it and I don't think, you know, everybody can't do that. I was only able to do it after. I think I'm teaching this class for the fifth time or the sixth time. So a lot of the course content is already like it is what it is. And now I can just be making something a lot better. But it took a lot of time to to think it through. And then I actually am using Perusall because it's still not perfect, where I just  give students space to... I put the assignment prompt on Perusall and ask the questions that you have because I don't know. It's really hard to anticipate what their questions are. 

Derek Bruff 34:18
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. But what a great way to let students say, oh, I don't get this part right here. Yeah. What are your expectations? 

Brielle Harbin 34:25
I think everybody should do it. I don't know why I didn't think about it before. And especially if you say something like, I'll give you a little bit of extra credit, which it doesn't really matter. Like it's it's a couple of points. If it's really going to help you not have 5000 emails about the same question, right? 

Derek Bruff 34:40
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I know a lot of faculty who will put their syllabus up on Perusall or Hypothesis or one of these places for, for student annotation. I hadn't, I hadn't thought of putting assignment descriptions. I mean, but that makes perfect sense.

So you mentioned writing stuff up and this was one thing I was I was going to ask you if we had time. You have published multiple peer review articles on teaching, both on your own and with colleagues. What motivates you to do that and how do you find the time? 

Brielle Harbin 35:12
How do I find the time is probably the million dollar question that everybody is asking. 

So the reason that I do it, it feels gratifying to me to think about my teaching are things that I might encounter that are difficulties as opportunities to problem solve. And so if I find something that works like I'm going to write it down for myself anyway, and usually if I'm talking about it, somebody is going to ask me about it. And so I think just is part of being a good citizen from my perspective, is being able to share some of my ideas and I don't think everybody should have to learn from scratch.

And so, yeah, the way that I find time to do it is I'm super intense and that would have to be a whole separate podcast about like time blocking and time management and things like that. But I have found it easier to write in my primary field, so in political science, when I have a balance of different types of writing that I'm doing. So whether that be, you know, personal journaling or, you know, writing in the teaching world and then thinking in the political science world, because to me, the habit of writing just requires you to get into the seat every day. And so if I'm having a day where, like, no matter what, if the political science is not political science-ing, then I can go to something else but still be in that practice of coming to the computer and writing.

Creating a writing habit requires repetition. And so absolutely. And I will say it's hard for me to be working on like multiple political science papers at the same time. But I can work on for whatever reason, I'm not sure I can work on a political science paper and a teaching and pedagogy piece, and then maybe something that's written more in a public scholarship way, and that's fine. But doing deep level thinking on multiple projects within any one of those buckets, it's hard. 

Derek Bruff 37:16
Yeah, well, speaking of time, we are at the end of our time, so thank you so much, Brielle, for sharing your experiences, your perspectives. I know you enjoy sharing this with other teachers and I know our listeners will benefit from hearing, hearing about your world and how you navigate it. So thank you for coming on the podcast. 

Brielle Harbin 37:34
Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me and I look forward to hearing more episodes. I've listened to several of them and I just love that you're doing it and I love the title too. So I look forward to hearing and learning from other people who join you in future. 

Derek Bruff 37:53
That was Brielle Harbin, assistant professor of political science at the United State Naval Academy and the 2023 recipient of the American Political Science Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Thanks to Brielle for a great conversation! I love how Brielle treats her teaching as a continuing cycle of inquiry, experimentation, and reflection, and that she’s so eager to share what she’s learning in her the classroom with other instructors. To learn more about Brielle’s work or to read some of her teaching publications, see the show notes for links. 

Thanks again to Brielle for taking the time to come on the podcast. I’m quite proud that the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching could play a small part in her development as a faculty member.

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to the UPCEA website, where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities, and professional development offerings.

This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the Intentional Teaching newsletter, and my Patreon, where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you’ve found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot.

As always, thanks for listening.