Teaching in an Election Year with Bethany Morrison

Listeners in the United States might have noticed that there’s a presidential election coming up, and we know that can make for a challenging teaching environment. Fortunately, I have an interview to share that addresses just this moment. Bethany Morrison is a political scientist and an assistant director at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan, and she has been working with colleagues at Michigan to support faculty teaching in this election year. 

In the interview, Bethany shares ideas for making connections between course material and the election, managing high-stakes discussions and hot moments in the classroom, and encouraging voting and civic engagement skills among our students. 

Episode Resources

·       Bethany Morrison on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethanynmorrisonphd/ 

·       “Preparing to Teach During the 2024 Election” on the CRLT blog, https://crlt.umich.edu/blog/preparing-teach-during-2024-election 

·       Promoting Democracy Teaching Series, https://ginsberg.umich.edu/teach-democracy

·       “In the Eye of the Storm: Students’ Perceptions of Helpful Faculty Actions Following a Collective Tragedy,” Therese Huston & Michele DiPietro, https://podnetwork.org/content/uploads/In_the_Eye.pdf 

Podcast Links:

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Chapters

• 1:42 Meet the Educator
• 4:54 Promoting Democracy Teaching Series
• 10:02 Making Course Connections
• 18:37 Learning Goals and the Election
• 22:56 Teaching Strategies
• 27:46 Election Week
• 32:47 Structures for Engagement
• 37:52 Outro

Transcript

Derek Bruff (00:05):
Welcome to 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. Hey, look at that. I made it to episode 50. I had no idea how long this podcast would last when I started it back in the fall of 2022, and I'm glad to know that it has some staying power. I love using the podcast as an excuse to connect with colleagues who are doing fascinating work, and I love sharing those conversations with my podcast audience. I don't have time for more celebration, however, since there is a presidential election coming up in the United States and that can make for a challenging teaching environment, fortunately I have an interview to share that addresses just that moment.

(00:54):
Bethany Morrison is a political scientist and an assistant director at the Center for Research on Learning and teaching at the University of Michigan, and she has been working with colleagues at Michigan to support faculty teaching in this election year. In the interview, Bethany shares ideas for making connections between course material and the election for managing high stakes discussions and hot moments in the classroom and encouraging voting and civic engagement skills among our students. One more thing before I share the interview. If you're not already subscribed to intentional Teaching in whatever podcast app you use, would you consider subscribing? That will mean that you'll get the latest episodes no matter when I post them, even when I'm off schedule like this week. And if you're not using a podcast app of some kind, send me a message and I can recommend one or two to start using. Hi Bethany, thanks for coming on the podcast. I'm excited to talk to you today about teaching in an election season. Thank you so much for sharing some time with us today.

Bethany Morrison (01:52):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Derek Bruff (01:55):
So before we talk about this election season, I will ask my usual opening question, which is can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator?

Bethany Morrison (02:06):
Sure. I found it a little bit intimidating, but I appreciated that you asked just a time. I think for me, there are lots of little moments that kind of build up. The first thing I thought of was how transformative my undergraduate education was. I know that's not true for everybody, but I had a very much an about face on a lot of things. There's this memoir that came out a few years ago about Derek Black called Rising Out of Hatred, and it was about Derek Black was the godson of David Duke and his college experience was really transformative and it was a journey and obviously not, obviously my background wasn't that, but it resonated a lot with me and lots of parts of it really spoke to me. And it took patient engaged, committed teachers to help guide me through the process of learning that the things I assumed were just fact and common knowledge and the way things were.

(03:04):
They actually were assumptions and not everyone shared those assumptions and they were value preferences and people valued other things. So it was a very transformative undergraduate education that made me already, that was the moment when I thought about being an instructor in higher education. And then the next thing I thought of then was the first time I was teaching comparative politics in graduate school. Intro to comparative politics isn't like an introductory freshmen, often freshmen level class, and people often think about it as like, oh, I'm going to go win. I'm going to learn how other countries work. But the thing that's most satisfying is very similar to the thing that happened to me when I was an undergrad, which was people start to realize that they have these unstated, they're not just unstated, but you haven't thought about them yet about the institutions, institution's, the us and generally you could kind of characterize those as the US' way of doing democracy is the best way to do democracy, or even that it's the only way to do democracy.

(04:05):
And I think if you surfaced it, you'd probably be like, oh no, that's not true. But you often, when you're 18, you haven't thought about it. And so when you teach about, well, there are presidential systems and there are parliamentary systems and there are trade-offs to those systems rather than the presidential systems the best, it can be really helpful. Or thinking about the trade-offs that come with using a first pass, the post electoral system versus a proportional system. I think that those moments, you actually comparative politics taught a lot of American students about their own system. And that was the real takeaway I think the story I wanted to highlight for me, thinking about the thread of what undergraduate education can do.

Derek Bruff (04:44):
Oh yeah, yeah. I'm thinking about my own moments when I had those experiences. And so let's talk about this promoting democracy teaching series that you're at the University of Michigan. Where did this come from? And I know you're partnering between the Teaching Center and the Ginsburg Center, so maybe you can tell us a little bit about the Ginsburg Center as well.

Bethany Morrison (05:09):
Sure. So for me, it started in May of 2023. I was helping facilitate a meeting between some coalition partners coming together to form more formally we call UMich votes at Michigan. So it's several different organizations on campus working to get out the vote, share correct information about the vote. And from those conversations, I started to work with some of our faculty in the Art and Design school, just consulting on assessing their work. And their main project is design work around our, we have a on-campus voting location. They have an installation there that can help you understand your ballot and understand your options. And it, it's a whole multilayered get out the vote project. And as I was talking to them about assessing their project, I started thinking about, well, how would this look in faculty development? Especially as they talked about the kinds of initiatives they had with student orgs.

(06:05):
I was like, well, what would be the equivalent steps on the faculty side who want? So then I started looking back at what CRLT that's my center did in 2020, and I saw that we had done a lot around high stakes discussions and preparing for hot moments or unexpected moments of tension or big emotion or controversy. And I saw some blog pieces that we had done with the Ginsburg Center in October of 2020, which led me to reach out to my colleague at the Ginsburg Center who we briefly overlapped during the pandemic at CLT. And then she took this position at Ginsburg, and that's kind of where the collaboration start. Ginsburg Center is our Center for Community and Civic Engagement. It's actually under the Office of Student Life, but it does a lot more than that. And Kate Livingston, my partner there, she's the associate director for teaching research and academic partnerships, does faculty development on community engaged teaching.

(07:07):
So we started talking and I started thinking about, well, how can we level up what we did in 2020? And some of the gaps I saw were that we could have gotten started earlier. We were sending out blog posts in October about teaching during the election. And then I also thought about how could we do something that is more, that's for an audience that wants to do a little bit more, how do we think about this? There's different levels of faculty interest in engagement, and I think that there are some folks who want to engage more. And so the course retreat, the course planning retreat was an option that was in my mind from the beginning. And then the other thing that I really wanted to think about was when I looked at our work in 2020, it was in a time when we were really afraid and when we talked about the election, if you did a discourse analysis, you would just see challenge, difficult, fraught words like this.

(08:04):
And that's truth's true even in 2024. That is still true. But I'm coming from this background in political science where I think about people, faculty members who really want to contribute to democracy, not just as human beings, as part of our institutional mission. It's not just challenges and fraught this, it's also this opportunity to make a difference in the classroom. And for me, I'm just, again, I'm like a political scientist to be learnt out about voting. And so for me, I wanted the balance to be more there. I wanted it to be this is a really exciting opportunity for people who want to make a difference and support democracy. And on top of that, it is going to be, there are going to be high stakes conditions that we need to prepare for and navigate. So that's how I thought about how our team could level up.

(08:53):
So Kate and Meg, who is a colleague at CRLT, who works with big foundational courses and has some experience in her own teaching, doing this kind of work in the humanities and technical communication, that was our team. And we started meeting regularly, just kind of focused in on this retreat. We're thinking about offering a stipend. We were thinking we wanted to have an instructional artifact so we could see some product that came out of this. And for us, it was also really important that we had a wide range of disciplines and schools and colleges because we really wanted to hit on the idea that this is not just for political scientists, this is not just for sociologists. Every person has an investment in this and their disciplines intersect with that.

Derek Bruff (09:36):
Just to make sure I'm following, you, were anticipating some faculty who wanted to dig a little deeper than a one-off workshop, spend a little more time, and then also to do this before the semester starts so that you could actually kind of build some of these ideas into your course plan as opposed to getting a useful idea in October to have more lead time to be able to implement something more substantial.

Bethany Morrison (10:00):
Yes, that's exactly right.

Derek Bruff (10:03):
So how did the retreat go? What emerged during those meetings and conversations?

Bethany Morrison (10:10):
We had faculty from 12 schools and colleges. We had folks from the engineering school, we had folks from the School of Information. We had a faculty from our school of musical theater and dance music. Well, it's called SMTD, school of Music Theater and Dance. There we go. We had faculty from the art school and then we had a lot of faculty from our traditional college of arts and sciences. So that was a huge exciting win and felt really good. We're just starting to see the artifacts come in and it's really fun. Had a faculty member who came into the retreat, really not sure about where the connections were going to be. They taught in technical communication in the college of engineering with students who are industrial and operations engineers. And we had some time dedicated for one-on-one consultations and work time. And when I was talking to them, then we could start to see the wheels turn.

(11:12):
And when I got to see the artifact that just came in, they had decided that they were going to spend a 50 minute class period thinking about this imaginary hypothetical where their classroom has become a voting location on campus. And so the assignment in the activity in class involves thinking about the flow of people, which is a big part of industrial and operations engineering. How would you set this up so the flow would be effective, and then how would you communicate it over a visualization? I imagine it's a blueprint. I'm not an engineer, so it's a really clever creative way to take one class period and connect it to the election.

Derek Bruff (11:49):
So you've talked a little bit about connecting a course that one might be teaching this fall to the election, and maybe we'll use that engineering example to start with. Why connect that? What is the teaching and learning goal for making that connection in a course like that?

Bethany Morrison (12:14):
So there are a number of advantages to making these connections as a starting point. When we're talking about high stakes discussions and preparing for those and planning to have those, we always start with finding a way to identify the connection between this topic area and your course learning goals. And I think that's really important in terms of if you're concerned about high stakes and hot moments, we found that connecting it to your discipline and your course really helps provide you confidence that you can talk about this topic because not everybody has a PhD in political science. So even though we want to believe that PhDs are really competent in everything they do, it can be intimidating. And so to put,

Derek Bruff (12:59):
We're highly specialized people. Yes,

Bethany Morrison (13:01):
Exactly. We're highly specialized. So by being able to put it into the thing where faculty feel like they're experts, the epistemologies that they know and the methods that they know, it can help them feel more prepared and more confident to have those conversations. And similarly, if we're thinking about high stakes conversations, it can help students by putting some parameters around the discussion. So it keeps it from becoming this heated free for all and puts it in this framework that has some ground rules just based in the norms of the discipline and the class. So that's one reason is it actually is a really great tool if you're concerned about high stakes conversation. But then there's also these learning purposes. So we're thinking about wanting students to feel like they have the confidence to vote, feeling like they have enough information about the issue so that they can vote, that can come out of drawing these connections.

(13:54):
I think the voter identity can come out of that too, because when you're in a nursing, when you think my identity is starting to become a nurse, I'm a burgeoning soon to be nurse and seeing that nurses are involved in policy conversations, they have opinions about policy conversations, they have pacs seeing that can help you borrow from this identity as a nurse into like, okay, well this identity as a voter and as someone who's civically engaged. So that's another great reason to do it. Another reason that we talk about with instructors is that it allows you sometimes, depending on what you do, to continue to make progress on your course learning goals while making these connections. So especially if you're in a discipline that has very, very strict curriculum, it's an opportunity to talk about something related to election and make these contributions while staying on track for your course learning goals,

Derek Bruff (14:52):
Like looking at the flow of people through a venue of some sort. Right.

Bethany Morrison (14:57):
And we had very tied

Derek Bruff (14:59):
To an operations set of course goals,

Bethany Morrison (15:02):
And we had a faculty member in School of information, which had a lot of coding and data science, and they decided they were going to, and it's very strict curriculum, but they were going to just think about replacing the existing data sets where folks were manipulating and practicing skills with an A NES dataset. The faculty member is going to use the American National Election Studies dataset, A NES to help them practice skills that they were already going to practice in terms of data manipulation and data visualization.

Derek Bruff (15:32):
So having taught a statistics course in the fall of 2016, which was a presidential year, I think that's the use, that's the kind of connection that resonated most with my experience, which is I'm going to be teaching statistics this fall. So why not talk about polling and how polling works and what are some other examples of connections that come to mind that faculty have made?

Bethany Morrison (15:57):
So some of the ones that we've talked about? Well, I want to tell you another statistics one that I saw in the Project Par, these database where the faculty member was having the final project was related to estimating outcomes and elections based on different ways of allocating seats that were proposed by the founders. So what would've happened in 2020, or sorry, 2000, they were talking about 2000.

Derek Bruff (16:21):
What

Bethany Morrison (16:21):
Would've happened in 2000 if this founder's vision for how we'd allocate seats had been in play? Oh,

Derek Bruff (16:28):
Wow.

Bethany Morrison (16:28):
So that's another really cool example.

Derek Bruff (16:31):
I love a good counterfactual. That's awesome.

Bethany Morrison (16:35):
We were thinking about sharing in an art class about the ways in which art was used in the 1980s to communicate political speech around the AIDS epidemic and communicate protest around the AIDS epidemic. And then kind of expanding the conversation to think about as a working future artist, how is the medium doing that today? What does it look like today? What kind of avenues as showing up? What kind of topics? So taking something that happened in the past and then having some direct application to their future profession. We looked at Keith Haring's art then around the AIDS epidemic. And then we also talked about some of the things that are happening happen in Michigan, politics around conflicts between the local government and the state government about allowing farmers to rent out their space to renewable energy because the local government doesn't like that because ugly, but the state government wants it trying to become climate neutral one day. And so thinking about how a life sciences class a STEM might want to talk about that topic or talking about energy, we have a nuclear energy policy issue going on in Michigan and connecting that. Just similar examples.

Derek Bruff (17:56):
Yeah. Well, and this may get a little bit into the kind of hot moments and heated discussions part, difficult dialogues, whatever you want to call it. But I've also, because just as you went back to four years ago to see what your center had been doing, I was reminded that we had back in, I think it was 2016 when I was at Vanderbilt, we had our junior faculty teaching fellows. We had an event where we got them together and talked about how are you teaching this fall? What's hard? What's easy? What are your strategies? And one of the things that came out of that was learning goals around helping students engage with difference, to have constructive conversations, to look at things that maybe people have lots of opinions on, but look at it through a particular disciplinary lens and use a set of tools. And so I'm assuming you're seeing faculty who are thinking about those types of learning goals as well, right? Yeah. The thing that have come through sometimes some pretty hard dialogue.

Bethany Morrison (19:05):
I think we were dividing up the goals into three categories, your goals for making these connections or doing something different this term. And one of them was these direct democratic engagement goals, having students feel more confident, more prepared, more likely to vote. And then there was another set of goals that brought a lot of people in the door around, I want to be prepared if things get heated, if things are unexpected, things happen. How do I create a positive environment for the impacts of the election and election rhetoric? And then our third category, which is in our long-term vision, it's really thinking about civic engagement skills and civic education skills. And these are broader skills like the kinds that you just mentioned, and our ability to evaluate different forms of evidence, our ability to make decisions with people who disagree with us. So these civic engagement, civic education skills that really in my dream world are just part of an undergraduate education curriculum, and they're not just a 2024 election season. Me.

Derek Bruff (20:06):
Yeah. And so you started with the summer institute, but it's turned into more things, right? You've got some workshops, you've got other resources. How are you exploring these topics with your faculty at this point in the semester?

Bethany Morrison (20:22):
Yeah, so I think that we had decided as we were working on the retreat, I think we were thinking about, first of all, how do we get the most bang for our buck? We're making stuff we think we're really excited about. We think it's good. We think it's a value added to civic education, faculty development. So how do we get more out of it and how it reach more people? The workshops were a natural place for us to go because we already had the infrastructure to do that, and it does reach faculty in the moment, just in time. And we were able to take bite sides pieces of what we were doing in the retreat and try to plan it in the semester where it would make sense. So that's the main thing we're doing this fall. We're also trying to make some of the resources publicly facing. So I think that you may be reached out to me because CLT wrote a blog that really, I tried to really integrate our retreat resources into the blog so that they could hopefully standalone and be used by others. So that's on our mind right now.

(21:24):
Resources that are standalone that don't necessarily mean talking to us on our website, on our blog, there's a promoting democracy teaching series webpage. Eventually we'd like to get those resources up there too. And then I think the last thing that we're thinking about is how do we keep this up? I think originally it was a one-off. I was thinking about this one retreat and how do we get this one retreat up and running? And now we've built some infrastructure and we're really engaged in the work. And there are these topics that I want to do around understanding political difference, having conversations where you can try to understand someone else's position at these civic engagement skills and think, okay, what can we do while we have this momentum in the winter term? Because University of Michigan is in the year of democracy, so there's a lot of momentum to do more work on this.

Derek Bruff (22:12):
Yeah. Well, and like you say, I think a heated presidential election brings a certain set of challenges that show up kind of in surprising places and expected places in terms of having discussions with and among students. But if your goals are more around civic engagement more broadly, that doesn't end after election day. And in fact, ideally it doesn't start six weeks before election day. So that would make a lot of sense. So we are recording this on September 18th, and so this is the closest thing I'm going to come to an emergency podcast. I think most of my podcast episodes are meant to be somewhat timeless, but thinking about the next six or seven weeks in the US teaching context, what are some teaching practices that you think are helpful to lean into whether we have a kind of pre-planned connection to the election this fall, or things just kind of come up and enter our classroom conversations?

Bethany Morrison (23:18):
So I thought of three. I think there's definitely more than three, but three that I want to highlight. The first is to establish and regularly return to and emphasize your discussion guidelines or your community norms or your class ground rules, whichever makes sense in your context. I want to highlight that even though this is September 18th, and maybe it's October 1st or second or fifth before you listen to this, it's not too late, too late, you can frame it as things are heating up in this political climate. I know that these topics are going to emerge. And so I think it's a good time for us to set aside some time to talk about our ground rules, so it's not too late. If you didn't do it in your syllabus, that's okay. I think it's really important that even if you've done it in your syllabus, that you return to it when the stakes are not high yet.

(24:05):
Remind students that they exist when things aren't hot so that you have those in place where if they do get hot, you don't want them to be a surprise, you want to be able to call back to them. You want students to be able to call back to them when you're like, oh, this is kind of, what do our discussion guidelines say about what just happened? So that's the first thing. The second thing I want to say is that it's always really valuable to structure interactions between students. At CRLT, we have these five elements of equity focused teaching and structured interactions is one of those five. I think it's even more important right now. So structuring your activities, your classrooms discussions so that one students have time to think and reflect on what they're going to say that can help preempt some comments that may not be the kind of comments that are on track for the tone you're setting.

(24:59):
Structured interactions really help to provide space for a range of voices and perspectives. And then lastly, providing a lot of structure around your discussion or your activity, again, puts parameters around the activity, which can really help in terms of hopefully avoiding some of the hot moments that could emerge if it's an unmoderated space. Just one more thing about structures is to think about thinking about being much more thoughtful this semester about how you form groups and how much checking in on groups you do. I think that it's one of those times where you want to have a more involved hand to check in on the functioning of the group because you can't see what's happening. You're not hearing those conversations. And so having check-in surveys, having time for groups to work in class, some of, and having randomly assigned groups can all be structures that help make sure that we're creating an environment that's a positive experience.

(26:04):
So that's one other thing I'd want to say on structures, establishing and emphasizing your ground rules, increased use of structure in your activities. And the third one I want to say is you can prepare for unexpected moments of tension and emotion, even though they're unexpected and you don't know what the topic's going to be and you don't know what will be said, you can still prepare. And if you share the blog, there's a resource on the blog about facilitation strategies for hot moments. And I think it's one of the coolest things. I didn't make it, my colleagues made it.

(26:39):
That helps you think about specific language that you can use in a hot moment. And I know that sounds kind of silly to have a script, but when your heart is racing because something just happened, having scripts can be really helpful scripts that will help you acknowledge what happened, but take a pause or script that helped you return us to the ground rules or scripts that help you think about, okay, how am I going to ask students to unpack what just happened? So I think that's the other thing is that even though it's unexpected, you can prepare for it. And I want to highlight with all three of these that this is important to do in an election year. Even if you're not in the social sciences, I know that you're going to have folks who think that my class won't talk about this, but your students exist in the world. And so even if you think that's not going to happen, it might happen just as you walk into class. It might happen in sections as people are in groups working on their group projects. And so even if you think it won't happen, your discipline is immune to such things. I would say right now they're not.

Derek Bruff (27:40):
Your students never talk about things that are off topic when they're in your class. That never happens. Oh gosh. Well, and I remember the day after the election in 2016, there was an emotional resonance with many of my students processing the results of that presidential election that they were not in a moment to do heavy statistics that day. Right. I could tell that. And I'm thinking about the election week itself, the day before, the day of the day after. What advice would you have for faculty who are trying to navigate those particular days, which may be more intense than others?

Bethany Morrison (28:23):
What did you do in 2016 in your first statistics class after the election? How did you spend the time?

Derek Bruff (28:31):
I felt like I didn't want to add a lot of work to my students' plates because they were processing a lot of things in our country and in their personal lives and emotionally. So we didn't really do any new content, new material. I wasn't giving them a new problem set that day, as I recall. I took a few minutes to kind of talk about, wow, it's been a 24 hours. I think I circled back to the polls. I circled back to some of the questions we had already raised about polling and how they work, because there were some results in that election that seemed surprising given some of the polling. And so it seemed an opportunity to talk about error and accuracy and how we deal with variants. And so I tried to bring, again, I'm a math instructor. I'm going to bring it back to the mathematics if I can, but in a way where this was something that came out of some of the research done after September 11th and the terrorist attacks that Michaela Pietro and colleagues did that. Students really appreciated it when faculty acknowledged that something really hard had happened, even if that's kind of all you do, students appreciated that. So I wanted to have a moment to kind of acknowledge it. And then in my case, we had already kind of set up some ways to connect it to our course materials, and so I kind leaned into that, and then we picked up our progression through introductory statistics, the next class period.

Bethany Morrison (30:03):
Yeah, so you said all my talking points, even the article that I was going to reference.

Derek Bruff (30:08):
Okay.

Bethany Morrison (30:09):
My number one thing I wanted to say, if you do nothing at all, acknowledge what's happening in the world around us, acknowledge that the real world's out there and that it's happening, even if it's just two minutes, that does a lot. That's what the 2007 piece illustrated through that work. The other thing I was going to say, which is from the 2007 piece that we talk about in our workshops around teaching tumultuous times has to do with the idea that stressful events add a lot to our cognitive load. And so it may be the case that you want to consider adding some grace around your deadlines or a little bit more understanding when you get requests for extensions or absences. I also want to highlight that the impact and the implications of an election result may be higher for some groups of students over others. And so while it might seem like, oh, my students are fine, keep in mind that not all the stakes are not the same for all our students.

(31:10):
And then the last thing is, I was going to say is plan ahead. We know it's going to be a tough week, and this might be the day to plan an integration between your course and your discipline and the election. So you hit all my talking points. You're like champ. The one other thing I wanted to say is a lot of this is coming from the things that have been said in higher ed and teaching centers around teaching at tumultuous times, but I want to highlight that one thing that makes us a little different is that no matter the outcome of this election, some of your students will be upset about it. So it's a difference than a national tragedy is that we're all on the same page. This is tragic. You have to remember that there are students in your class, and they may not be the most vocal or visible students who are upset about the outcome no matter what happens. So

Derek Bruff (31:59):
Just

Bethany Morrison (31:59):
Keep that in mind.

Derek Bruff (32:00):
Or super excited about it. Right. You're going to have both in your class undoubtedly.

Bethany Morrison (32:06):
Yeah. That's the one caveat to that really helpful literature.

Derek Bruff (32:10):
Yeah. Yeah. Gosh. Yeah. I mean, I had class the day after September 11th, 2001. I was a graduate student teaching calculus, so I didn't know much, but looking back, I did not. My thought was some of my students want normality today, so we're just going to do our normal stuff. And I think there's some value in that. But looking back, I wish I had done more to acknowledge the tragedy and the crisis and leaned into some flexibility around deadlines and the march through the calculus content. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about structures. You mentioned that as a useful teaching practice. And so if you are planning to engage your students around these topics, however they might be connected to your course, what are some structures that you would recommend or that you've seen play out in useful ways?

Bethany Morrison (33:06):
So I'm thinking about the CRLT's second blog on teaching during the election right now. And the plan right now, it's still in its baby steps, is around selecting structures based on your discussion goals. So if your goal is, I want students to be able to support their ideas and be able to challenge others' ideas respectfully, the kinds of activities that you might choose would be maybe use a fishbowl discussion or maybe you would use a round table discussion where students have roles and maybe you would do some sort of moderated debate, but that wouldn't be the appropriate structure if what you wanted is for students to engage in some deep listening with folks who have different perspectives and experiences and opinions about things. Like you would maybe think about structuring the activity as a round where everyone has a chance to speak

(34:04):
Before we talk more, or maybe you would have some sort of peer interviewing as the structure for that. So that's one thing that's on my mind is when I say structure, thinking about well specific activity structures and matching that and aligning it. And then the other thing we're thinking about with structures is a much more micro sense of structure. So the kinds of small teaching moves that you can do to encourage students to think before they speak. So for example, the small move of, I've asked you this tough question, I put it up in my slide. I want everyone saying aloud. I want everyone to take 30 seconds and jot down their thoughts. That's going to give folks time to think. I'm one of those people who would've jumped in right away, and I'm actually going to have a better thing to say if I had 30 seconds to think.

(34:49):
It's also going to help folks who take a little bit more time to think to get their hand up and engage too. So that's small. Another small move to kind of highlight the range voices in the room is to just say, I'm going to take a cue. I'll call on someone once I see five hands, or let's see if we can get someone from the back two rows about someone who's in the right corner. Something that kind of adds some structure that kind of keeps us from having the situation where you get the same four people in the front saying their opinion or their thoughts or the correct answer loudly.

Derek Bruff (35:27):
Yeah, I'm fond of the, let's hear from someone who hasn't spoken yet today. And that's a little easier to do if you've done some of those ground rules. Right, exactly. If you've already established that as we value everyone's opinion, then it's easier to say, let's hear from some folks in the back of the class who haven't spoken yet today. Yeah. What about those hot moments when a student says something offensive or off top? I mean, there's different kinds of hot moments, right?

Bethany Morrison (35:56):
They're right. Yeah.

Derek Bruff (35:57):
How do you think about navigating those situations?

Bethany Morrison (36:00):
There's some specific scenarios that you can expect and thinking about what kind of tool you want to put there in the moment. And I think that if you are kind of stressed about this, the one thing to think about is what could you do and what could you say in the moment to give yourself time to think? And if you just do one thing, practice your script for like, this is a really important point, or that take is something that I really want to come back to. And so providing yourself a script so that you acknowledge something happened, particularly if the thing is a controversial statement or microaggression, acknowledge that it happens because not saying anything, communicate something and then use that moment to just provide yourself some space to think and then come back to the next class session or use a canvas announcement to collect your thoughts about what you want to say. So you do just one strategy. That's the one I would think about.

Derek Bruff (36:51):
Yeah. Yeah. I've heard recommended in that moment where you need time to collect your thoughts and figure out how you want to respond is to have a writing activity planned. Let's all take two minutes and write down some thoughts about why this is hard to talk about. Right. Something almost generic that allows everyone in the room a chance to kind of process a little bit, recognize their own emotions a little bit, and gives you two minutes to kind of scramble and think about,

Bethany Morrison (37:20):
Now

Derek Bruff (37:21):
What am I going to do in class?

Bethany Morrison (37:22):
And that one is so transferable that again, it could be one of those things you have in your back pocket. It'll help you and have a lot of usability when you don't know exactly what's going to come up. So it's a great one.

Derek Bruff (37:36):
Well, thank you, Bethany. This has just been really helpful and practical, and I hope empowering to folks out there who are maybe a little trepidatious about entering their classrooms this particular season. So thanks for coming on and sharing.

Bethany Morrison (37:49):
Thank you so much for having me.

Derek Bruff (37:54):
That was Bethany Morrison, assistant director at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan. Thanks to Bethany for taking the time to talk with me about teaching in this election year. This is the closest I've come to an emergency podcast episode here on Intentional Teaching. Most of my episodes are meant to be fairly evergreen, but this one needed to happen right now, and I really appreciate Bethany's eagerness to jump in to her first ever podcast interview. See the show notes for a link to the blog post that Bethany mentioned and to the overall promoting Democracy Teaching Series webpage. You'll also find a link to that 2007 paper that we mentioned, the one by Therese Huston and Michele DiPietro about faculty actions following a collective tragedy. 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 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.