Culturally Responsive Teaching with Emily Affolter

Emily Affolter teaches in the PhD program in sustainability education at Prescott College in Arizona. Her students come from all different professions, some even already have PhDs. They’re in the program to pursue what Emily describes as “social and environmental justice as enacted in teaching, learning, and leading.” How do Emily and her colleagues meet these diverse students where they are and help them achieve their goals? That’s where culturally responsive teaching comes in, which Emily describes as reimagining a class with equity at the center.

Emily talks with me about what culturally responsive teaching looks like in her program at Prescott, how to build trust with one's students, the unique position an instructor has in fostering equity, how to work toward equity even in large lecture courses, and what it means to decolonize marine biology.

Episode Resources

·       Emily Affolter’s faculty page, https://prescott.edu/people/emily-affolter-ph-d/ 

·       Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice, Geneva Gay, https://www.tcpress.com/culturally-responsive-teaching-9780807758762 

·       Relationship-rich education with Isis Artze-Vega, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/14292897-relationship-rich-education-with-isis-artze-vega

·       Universal Design for Learning at scale with Thomas Tobin, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/14935277-universal-design-for-learning-at-scale-with-thomas-j-tobin 

·       “The Importance of Indigenous Knowledge in Curbing the Loss of Language and Biodiversity,” Wilder, O’Meara, Monti, & Nabhan, https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/6/499/2754233 

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Chapters

• 1:29 Meet the Educator
• 4:21 A Different Kind of PhD Program
• 6:35 Culturally Responsive Teaching
• 12:02 Trust in the Classroom
• 16:31 Dextrous and Curious
• 23:24 In the Large Lecture
• 30:19 Decolonizing Marine Biology
• 37:36 Outro

Transcript

Derek Bruff: 0:06

Today, I'm bringing you a conversation with Emily Affolter about culturally responsive teaching. Emily teaches in the Ph.D. program in Sustainability Education at Prescott College in Arizona. Her students come from all different professions. Some even already have Ph.D.s. They're in the program to pursue what Emily describes as social and environmental justice, as enacted in teaching, learning and leading. How do Emily and her colleagues meet these diverse students where they are and help them achieve their goals? That's where culturally responsive teaching comes out, which Emily describes as reimagining a class with equity at the center. Sometimes when I go to talks or workshops about equity focused teaching, I want to ask some awkward questions like, Yes, I get that disrupting hierarchies in the classroom is important, but at the end of the day, aren't you the instructor still the one in the room with the power? Or I can see how that works. In a small class full of well-motivated students. But how do you go about equity in a lecture hall with 200 students? Often when these questions are asked, I'm not entirely satisfied with the answers, but I really enjoyed my conversation with Emily about culturally responsive teaching because she had some good answers to these hard questions. She also helped me understand what it can mean to Decolonise marine biology, which is not something I expected to discuss when I invited Emily on the podcast. Emily, thank you so much for being on international teaching and really glad to have you on the podcast today and to get to know you and your work a little bit. Thanks for being here.

Emily Affolter: 1:37

Thank you. I'm delighted.

Derek Bruff: 1:38

And I will start with my usual opening question, which is can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator?

Emily Affolter: 1:47

Oh, maybe that time is sort of a longitudinal creep, you know, where you just I would just find myself in training in these spaces, even at a very young age. I went to a high school in Seattle where we were trained by a Black Panther former Black Panthers to engage in deep dialogue about anti-racism, police brutality, homophobia, sexism, sort of deep educational training in our young teenage years. And they shut the school down for about a week every year. And those of us who were trained um got to facilitate these conversations like age 14 with a bunch of our peers and sometimes those who were older. And I just I just loved being in a facilitative space. And it just kept creeping on me like different points in my life where I felt like I could carry the tools and the toolkit that I had been sort of acquiring over time to support and facilitate probing questions, deep dialogue, critical questions in different settings, whether it was like what we call cultural relations in high school, or I was a camp counselor forever and then became a trip like an international trip leader and a guide. But all of these things that I would do, I felt like I was drawing upon educational tool kits. You know, until I became a formal educator. And I think it was a slow creep, but it was also deep down like an intrinsic motivation to engage with others in sort of ongoing processes of inquiry learning and sort of collaborative growth.

Derek Bruff: 3:50

That's interesting. It sounds like a heavy load for a 14 year old. But also, you know, the parallels between facilitating hard conversations in a community and facilitating hard conversations in a classroom. There's a lot of overlap, both in terms of objectives, right? Helping people kind of see things from different perspectives and understand things that are sometimes hidden. But then also the facilitation skills that are required to do that with with care and attention. Well, talk to us about what you're doing now at Prescot. You direct, I believe, a Ph.D. program that is not like any that I've read about before. Can you tell us a little bit about that program and your role in it?

Emily Affolter: 4:35

Yeah. Yeah, it's yes, it's a Ph.D. program in sustainability education at Prescott College. So it is very different from what you or I experienced at maybe more of a traditional R1 type university that has a lot of the the norms associated with like the higher education doctoral journey. We have a very transdisciplinary cadre of students. So it's sustainability education and we call that sort of social and environmental justice as enacted in teaching, learning and leading. And so people from all sectors we have I'm just going to pull some examples like we have classical trained musicians, we have folks in who are neonatologists. We have folks, many folks with EdDs that come in and want a deeper dive. Folks who already have PhDs who felt like their Ph.Ds weren't serving them and needed something a little bit more radical. We have. So we have just the median age of our students is 47. And so they're doing incredible work in all sectors, folks coming in from K-12, folks who are in the business sector, you know, finance, lots of people who are sort of directing different nonprofits and just starting their own consulting businesses that support folks who want to do more work at the intersection of social environmental justice as they play out in the educational sector. So it's really fun because we get to it's it's just the community itself is so rich and so multifaceted that we get to say, let's put on this this lens and apply it through. How does neonatology apply to culturally responsive teaching?

Derek Bruff: 6:36

Let's talk about culturally responsive teaching. You mentioned that, and I know that that's an area of expertise for you. What does that mean? And and maybe what does it look like in in the context of the program you just described? We can talk about other context as well. But but what's what is culturally responsive teaching mean?

Emily Affolter: 6:57

Yes. Well, first, I have to give a shout out to my doctoral advisor, Dr. Geneva Gay, because she founded culturally responsive teaching. And so she's a faculty emerita at the University of Washington. And yeah, anyway, I have so much gratitude to her for mentoring me. So deeply for over a decade and something that she created Just phenomenal work. So. So culturally responsive Teaching is really about imagining who is in the room, in any classroom, what are the hierarchies and structures of power at play and how can we disrupt any hierarchies of power that would reinforce the hegemony and help not only neutralize the space, but actually lift up any populations who have been systemically minoritized. So how do you reimagine the class with an equity center that helps you think about what are the ways in which we've been doing things that have reinforced specific power differentials and patterns, and then let's disrupt those. So it's to me, culturally responsive teaching is just as much, if not more the how then the what, you know, it's how we do. What we do is everything that we do as educators in addition to what are we teaching, who is being represented, what are the outcomes of that? And all of the the details like assessment and and, you know, the granularity of our assignments and the mechanisms for group work. So it's very it's very much it's a constant practice, culturally responsive teaching is a practice where we're inventorying ourselves as educators, as well as our curricula in order to horizontalize and change the structures of power in the room.

Derek Bruff: 8:53

So what? What are some ways that plays out in the program there at Prescot?

Emily Affolter: 8:58

Will we see learning is experiential, so we want to make sure that whatever we do, there is an experience in ourselves and our students that connects to their funds of knowledge. Like what do they come in with? What's their schema and how can we make sure that there's an application piece that connects to what they know, what they care about, what's relevant to them? Another thing is that we really practice humility as educators. The humility is a big piece of what's responsive, because if we come in and we purport to know everything, not only does that reinforce a power differential, but it also showcases that there would be a there would be a person that knows everything and is a holder of knowledge, and that that would also reinforce the subordinate role that a student could play. We want to we want to challenge that and bring humility to everything. So I try to be we, my colleagues and I they're phenomenal try to come in super curious right. Like the humility is not only do we want to solicit feedback as frequently as possible as educators, but we have this mechanism for coming back to our students and indicating how that feedback has been implemented to honor their voices, their experiences not coming in with this purported, you know, knowing of how to do something that would support them, but rather how might we better support you? Let us know whether it's identifiable or anonymous, and we will keep coming back and reporting on how we have made adaptations to support our student needs. We always, always, always are recognizing our positionalities. So who am I in terms of my proximity to power, privilege, status, and how do I reckon with that publicly so that my students know that I know how I'm situated? You know, as a white settler or, you know, cis woman and parent, you know, with, you know, long COVID and all of these things that we hold, how do we put that into the space in some way? And for everyone, it's different. For some people, they're much more than that. They have different comfort levels with their how they want to show up with their positionality. But the bigger picture is educating is not neutral. We don't want to purport that it is, and how we are embodied in this world is going to inform our proximity to power privilege. We want our students to know that and how we reckon with that is going to show up with our accountability to how might I be colluding with systems of power and how might I interrogate that publicly so that we can work towards something more liberatory together.

Derek Bruff: 12:02

Let's talk about that kind of a naming and kind of unpacking your own personality in the classroom as as the instructor. What are some things that can happen with students when we do that? Because in some ways, certain aspects of my identity when I walk in the classroom are fairly obvious, right? You know, I present as a male, I'm Caucasian, right? I'm six feet tall. Like there's things that you can you can notice what happens when you start to kind of name that and and discuss that with your students that might not happen if you, as the facilitator are not quite so open with your own positionality.

Emily Affolter: 12:47

Yeah. One of my students is working on this right now. We were just talking about this who has indigenous identities and believes in this notion of especially if you are an instructor that has a lot of privileged identities. There is something imperative according to these conversations with a student, much of the literature in owning that and making it known that you know it in order to create sort of a graceful and humble space for other students, particularly students who have less proximity to power and privilege in the room to say, I am hyper aware of how my body informs my my privileges. And because of that, I've designed the course in such a way that holds myself accountable to understanding collusion and complicity. That also lets you all know that I am not claiming this is a neutral space. You know, I'm I'm recognizing that I have a role to play and poking holes in this mythology of neutrality in order to help everyone in the room recognize how they, from their different vantage points, can sit in that complexity and imagine their own accountability.

Derek Bruff: 14:14

I'm reminded I had on the podcast earlier this year, Isis Artze Vega from Valencia College, and she talks a lot about the role of trust in the classroom.

Emily Affolter: 14:25

Yes.

Derek Bruff: 14:25

And how so many students come in really deeply skeptical about the person at the front of the room.

Emily Affolter: 14:33

Yeah.

Derek Bruff: 14:35

Can I trust them? Do they have my best interest at heart? And Isis said that we there may have been educational context in the past where one might assume a certain level of trust, but that was probably not even there either. Right. That we actually as as the leaders of the classroom, as the instructors, we have to we have to be proactive in helping students know that they can trust us. And it sounds like this is this is a move one can make because our students come into the classroom aware of their own identities and their own positionality. Yeah, right. And, and, and if if we don't kind of bring that out to the table where we can talk about it, why would they trust us?

Emily Affolter: 15:19

Absolutely. Totally. I'm so glad you brought that up. Because for me, one of the goals of culturally responsive teaching is whole and just relationships. Trust and belonging are so closely linked and creating and co-creating communities of belonging to me is sort of at the center of everything culturally responsive. Because if we can't trust one another, we can't trust our instructor. Not only how is learning going to unfurl, but for whom is learning going to unfurl, and how might that replicate patterns that are incredibly harmful and destructive for individuals and for our societies? So I love that. And I think that is what you're saying is right. I mean, I think coming up as an instructor with humility and with ownership of, you know, it's not like you're saying this is my positionality it's so dialed. It's like I like, I think a messy positionality is actually very healing because it's really just saying, let's work on this together. Let's be humans together.

Derek Bruff: 16:31

It's something that I sometimes struggle with is when thinking about I'm going to try to say this word horizontal ized, I've never used that word that way. But I like that when I'm thinking about a horizontal ized classroom, and I use classroom loosely here, right? I'm not talking about the physical walls. I'm talking about a group of learners working together. I'm still the instructor, right? I have I have a unique role in that learning community.

Emily Affolter: 17:06

Yes.

Derek Bruff: 17:07

And I'm wondering how you balance the unique aspects of that role with the goals that you have, co-creation of knowledge and and kind of human development and flourishing.

Emily Affolter: 17:20

Yes, absolutely. I don't know where this came from. I wish I could cite it, but there's sort of like a a common belief in the responsive classroom that 50% of the content is is pre created. Like as an instructor you have 50% there set and then 50% is emergent based on who is in the room. Right. And what their needs are, what their interests are, what drives them. Like I said before, what are their funds of knowledge? So how can you it's not that as an instructor, you're not active very actively in a leadership role, but you're in a leadership role that's dexterous and curious about the needs, the skills, the desires, the purposes of the folks in the room. So how can you say and a lot of that comes from constant, solicitation of feedback, like, here's what I pre created for you to engage with, but where are the holes for you? And how can I find articles TEDTalks content that is actually going to be more reflective? We talk about windows and mirrors in curriculum. I'm sure you know, I see you smiling. You have a podcast on intentional teaching!

Derek Bruff: 18:32

I just I just love metaphors. So I'm curious to know where you're going to go with this.

Emily Affolter: 18:35

Well, windows and mirrors so so how can we have in our curricula mirrors that reflect our students and their lived experiences, their positionalities, you know, their interests and windows outside of themselves, things that they have never before considered. And how do we craft that in such a way that everyone feels belonging and at the same time, like talk about the zone of proximal development, everyone's outside of a place of familiarity as well. And so we toggle Yeah.

Derek Bruff: 19:10

And that's one of the that's one of the roles of the teacher is, is to, is to create those, those windows. I do like that metaphor right because it's not and I you know I've seen conversations around kind of course design with your students right like this and I've even heard arguments that it's somewhat presumptuous of us to walk in on the first day of class and think we know what our learning objectives are for our students. But what I'm hearing from you is that we will have some learning objectives.

Emily Affolter: 19:41

Yeah ,

Derek Bruff: 19:41

but we haven't mapped them all out and locked them down where the students don't have a role, that it's it's a more balanced approach.

Emily Affolter: 19:47

Right. We, we do like Higher Learning Commission. We have an accreditation sort of so a situation where we do we come in with our learning objectives. They're fixed. I can post them up, but they're they're broad enough too. So it's like one of our objectives might be to create a culturally responsive pedagogical model. That's that's an objective. It's fixed. But how that's created what that looks like, how what sources inform that is it presented in a video form? Is it a group project? Is it presented as a narrative document? Is it a letter to an institution? You know, it's like those are the things that we get really dexterous about. And so I think that's maybe that's sort of to answer some of your questions. We do have a very specific approach, but that approach within that approach, there is so much fluidity. And honestly, we're fluid about assessment. I mean, honest assessment is a big deal in culturally responsive teaching. And there can be, you all know, summative assessment like a test, a single piece of writing, you know, a quiz that's like a final product that one would assess. We're very much looking at how summative assessment can really stymie growth and stymie learning. And we're about learning. That's what we're doing. So what we've done, and in most of my classes, I have minimized summative assessment as much as I possibly can and emphasize formative. So formative assessment looks like all of the ways that people are showing up, engaging, bringing their whole selves to the learning, offering feedback to their peers. That's a big deal, soliciting feedback from many perspectives. Again, I've talked about it as an educator, but also to your to your peers receiving offering and so many of the things that are just in the doing as opposed to in these products. And so we we believe I believe that formative assessment is something we need to amplify further, to really emphasize what it means to be showing up and engaging as opposed to what someone's final product is going to look like as sort of a singular metric of their success. We when you think about what it means to offer a quantitative grade to someone for one thing, that they create, especially when there hasn't been really careful scaffolding to support them in succeeding along the way. That singular grade can really have an effect on that person's long term trajectory in the field and their sense of self-efficacy, their sense of potential. And we are all about imagining futures for all of us, for every student. Like we want people to see themselves in whatever field makes them curious. And when we have summative assessments that can dehumanise and not really appropriately pluralistically evaluate how students care, how they show up, that can really reinforce the stratification of who's in what field. Right? So we are we try to be careful.

Derek Bruff: 23:23

Yeah. So let me change the teaching context a little bit because I'm imagining some some pushback from certain faculty who may teach, you know, 200 students at a time in a big lecture hall in a chemistry or biology course, Right?

Emily Affolter: 23:40

Yeah.

Derek Bruff: 23:42

And, you know, some of the challenges in that teaching context are not... they're structural, right? Like, why are we putting 200 students in a room and teaching them, you know, material they're not interested in? Right? Like there's curricular challenges, there's logistical and facilities challenges in here. And, you know, faculty can play a role in changing those over time, perhaps. But there's also the choices that we make as individual teachers and in kind of the places we're stuck.

Emily Affolter: 24:10

Yeah.

Derek Bruff: 24:10

And so I'm wondering, how do you go about practicing culturally responsive teaching in in a kind of teaching environment that's kind of set up against that?

Emily Affolter: 24:20

Yeah, I think well, I do think it's I, I think the bigger the room is, sort of the more impediments one feels. That's true. I work with educators who are working with, you know, 2 to 500 students in a training capacity. So I think it's also still so positive in some of I mean, possible and some of the things that positive, hopefully positive you know, some of the things that I would say are, one, you know, how can you might not eliminate summative assessment? I'm not saying summative assessment is a problem. I'm I think summative assessment needs really careful scaffolding. So that's number one is just how if okay, if you're going to assess folks through a test, how are you going to ensure that the questions in that test are questions that the students have had many different methods and variety to engage with. So that's number one is just like how many ways in which have you addressed these things so that students who are coming from well, I'm just thinking about neurodivergent, but so many different ways of knowing how are we doing that? How are we sort of giving our students the benefit of the doubt so that we're not it's not pathologizing. It's really even even a test can come from a place of care and a pedagogy of of love, really, and a humanizing pedagogy. But how is everything that you doing, you do leading up to that? How might you have multiple right answers? You know, like really? Because one of the things that I think about a lot is that we reinforce binary thinking all the time in the way in which we have been acculturated in this world, right? There's a right, there's a wrong there's a singular answer. What happens when you create a test with the opportunity for more for multiple answers, you know, for for students to actually allow themselves to imagine without fear and then assess accordingly. I mean, also, there's so many ways they can work with their peers right? So there's a lot of ways you can do formative assessment in a large classroom. But I'm all about peer work. And when we do peer work, it's also very important to be the great Again scaffolder, because when we do culturally responsive, we try to be culturally responsive. What often happens is, you know, if you just put people in groups and say, you know, please create this product without any careful intentional scaffolding, then you know, these inequities can perpetuate themselves. So folks with more dominant identities might be the ones that speak out for the group or present on behalf of the group. Folks with more minoritized identities might be doing more of that invisible labor. Right. And so how do we scaffold really carefully to ensure that those roles are explicit and they're rotating and everyone's going to occupy each role? And you we talk about why you can talk about the data. You know, what do these patterns look like if we don't interrupt them? And then I think a lot of it, too, is how do you build in sort of a self reflexivity, even if you have 200 students, how do you build in this sort of culture of self reflexivity? So the students are reflecting on themselves and they're learning within an attitudinal or disposition to make changes based on this sort of personal accountability. And I think in all of our classes, you know, you can just that's formative assessment. You can ask students, you don't have to grade it, but you can you can grade for participation to build into a muscle of, you know, like, how is this working for me? But I think even in a 200 student room, one of the great things is, you know, a QR code up on the board that would just be every time you meet like did something not resonate? What could I do differently to better activate your learning and honor your needs? You know, and I think that's just that's just good practice that you come back into the room and you say ten people have feedback and this is that you might not say everything, but you might say these are the two things and these are the ways in which I responded and just that much to say, I, I added a reading that supported, you know, these student identities that weren't reflected or I added another mechanism for assessment because folks wanted to do a podcast instead of a, you know, a quiz. All of a sudden it just becomes, Oh, you're open to the pluralism that is all of us, all 200 of us in the room. And I feel like I belong and I matter because of that.

Derek Bruff: 29:18

And I had on the podcast recently Thomas Tobin, who who writes a lot about universal design for learning. Yeah. And he drew a distinction between universal design, which happens before you meet your students, right? How can you design this learning experience so that you know, as many students have as many options to thrive in that as you can? And then there's what happens after the students show up, right? Where then you need to get to know them as individuals and hopefully you already have a nice structure where students have some options to represent what they're learning or engage in different ways. But then also, I guess I worry, right, that if I come in with that idea that I have designed this perfect learning experience in advance, Once again, I'm kind of positioning myself as kind of knowing what's best for everyone in the room, right. And not actually seeking out student input and student feedback in a way that develops the trust that is really important.

Emily Affolter: 30:18

Absolutely.

Derek Bruff: 30:20

Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to circle back to something you mentioned in passing, but I'm just curious about because again, I think some of these contexts are really interesting. You said I think you referred to a project that involved Decolonising marine biology.

Emily Affolter: 30:37

Yeah, Yeah.

Derek Bruff: 30:39

And I don't think it's your project, but can you give us a sense of kind of what what that means?

Emily Affolter: 30:44

Yeah, well, so, so fresh. It was just two days ago in this project that a lot of our students work in the world of anticolonial and Decolonising pedagogy. And that really means, you know, how did settler colonialism inform the structures, mechanisms, knowledges systems that we're engaging in now and what not only genocidally, but in terms of what has that assimilation done to really hurt indigenous communities and all of us, and how can we relearn what what Indigenous knowledges have to to heal our whole society, like really looking at settler colonialism as this project that is enduring and continuing to harm and also to reinforce these false binaries of knowing. And so I was just in at our Kino Bay Center in Mexico. It's a field station for Prescott College, and they worked in close partnership with the Comcaac (Seri people) which are the indigenous peoples of the area. And they came a Comcaac elder came and and spoke with a presentation on basically gosh, I should put it up. But they had a whole discussion of what knowledges the Comcaac people had in terms of different classifications of molluscs and how many more molluscs the Seri people had identified than were identified by basically like these settler scientists, like what is what is believed to exist there. And so this is such an interesting I mean, they had this whole list and I should find I'll find the citation for you for later so people can look at it, but they have a whole table of basically how we have this perception that there is a fixed number of species or a fixed number of that we would have learned and has showed up in our textbooks and whatnot. And so to sit with the people that, you know, have been studying this for so much longer than the settlers who know so much more deeply their their ecosystems and how traditional ecological knowledges can can change the way we and, you know, in the sort of settler science realm understand place. Right. And so I think that it's just it's just so such an interesting example of that dismantling or busting up this notion of not only hegemonic thinking and how stuck we can become, but also what happens when we get curious and we allow the people who have been in a space to be the leaders of that space in the scientific domain as well. And how can that change the way that we not only see that place, but also imagine our own agency and inquiry, right? Like there is so much more. There's so much more. There's always more for us to imagine. Right? And so it's very exciting work. I can't wait to share the citation with you [cross talk] anyway. I think that's just a small example of how we can we can understand how settler colonialism reinforces the mythology of the binary and how that really harms all of us.

Derek Bruff: 34:20

Yeah, well, and I think I've been so I'm a I'm a birdwatcher. I'm a birder. That's that's my only connection to biology. But I'm also trained as a mathematician, not as a scientist.

Emily Affolter: 34:32

Yeah.

Derek Bruff: 34:32

So I actually did not have very good experiences with science classes in middle school. And so I tried to kind of avoid science education, formal science education. I work with a lot of science faculty, and so I've learned a lot more about science, epistemology and pedagogy over the years. Yeah, but but sometimes I'm reminded that I have these kind of naive understandings of science. Yeah. And as I've been getting into birding, I've realized it's this kind of binary fixed taxonomy, right? That that birds are not, that actually that there is an ongoing process of in birding they call it splits and lumps where they're they're looking at different species and realizing, oh, there's actually two species here, right? There are different characteristics here. Yeah, these two that we thought were different are actually very similar. Yeah. And it's not fixed. It's no. And there needs to be you have to have a bit of an openness.

Emily Affolter: 35:31

Yeah.

Derek Bruff: 35:31

To ambiguity and to, I'll use your word, humility to say we thought we had it figured out. But it's an ongoing process of figuring out this, this world. And I think there's a connection there to the idea that there are other ways of thinking and knowing about the natural world that have not been part of our fixed taxonomy in the past. Right. And that's okay.

Emily Affolter: 35:55

Yeah, exactly. And exactly. And stories are part of systems, right? So the stories that we tell and this includes what we perceive as scientific knowledge, is part of a system. And so how do we when we're doing culturally responsive teaching, how do we engage that concept at any level? We're teaching bird taxonomy? How do we open up the possibility of not only are these categories social constructs, but how might we allow ourselves to imagine beyond these constructs? You know, and I think that's such a freeing feeling, too, for our students, because when we when we give them finite understandings or finite sort of definitions of knowledge, it can be very top down. It can be very like Paulo Freire always wrote about, you know, filling the students as vessels, like filling these vessels. And I think about that even with something like, you know, teaching birding, How do you allow for a culture of sort of what we think of as conditional and plural inquiry? So like not closed ended, but very open ended imaginings, even when we're teaching something that we perceive to be fixed? And how can just unsettling that even the idea that it's fixed allowed for our students to become stronger?

Derek Bruff: 37:23

Well, thank you, Emily. This has just been delightful and inspirational, and I appreciate you taking time to to share with our podcast audience. It's been it's been good to talk with you today.

Emily Affolter: 37:32

Oh, thank you so much, Derek. I so enjoyed our conversation.

Derek Bruff: 37:37

That was Emily Affolter, PhD program faculty at Prescot College. I learned a lot in the interview, and I hope you did too. I really appreciated Emily acknowledging the unique role an instructor has, even in a highly equity minded learning environment. Here's something she said that stuck with me. You're in a leadership role that's dextrous and curious about the needs, the skills, the desires, the purposes of the folks in the room. Years ago I named my blog Agile Learning, and part of me wants to change the name to that entire quote. See the show notes for links to more information about Emily and her work, as well as to a couple of past podcast episodes I mentioned during our conversation. And you'll find a link to the paper in the journal Bioscience that dives into indigenous taxonomies of marine wildlife. I'd love to hear what you have to say about Decolonising marine biology and about culturally responsive teaching. In the show notes, you'll find a link to send me a text message with your thoughts, and you can always email me at derek@derekbruff. org.