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94: Catalyzing the Ungrading Movement w/ Zoe Bee
45 Plays4 years ago
On today's podcast we are joined by Zoe Bee. Zoe is an English professor, poet, and content creator who produces content for YouTube and streams on Twitch. Some of her work includes "A Professor Explains", where Zoe dives into why Grammarly is a poor product or what makes a poem a "good" poem; or full overview of the themes of H.P. Lovecraft.
Zoe is a successful content creator despite being active for less than a year. We specifically learned about her after seeing her wildly successful video, "Grading is a Scam (and Motivation is a Myth)", which is nearing 500,000 views within 3 weeks. Her takedowns of PragerU, support of progressive education, and overall extensive, fact-checked videos show a growing interest, especially by younger viewers, in educational pedagogy and politics.
In this podcast, we sat down with Zoe to talk about her growth, practices as an educator, and content creation.
GUESTS
Zoe Bee, YouTuber, streamer, professor, and investigator of educational pedagogy, poetry, and English
RESOURCES
- Zoe Bee's YouTube
- Zoe Bee's Twitch
- Zoe Bee's Patreon
- Grading is a Scam (and Motivation is a Myth) | A Professor Explains
FURTHER LISTENING
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Hosts
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 94 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:00:10
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
00:00:14
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Tim Fox, Jennifer Mann, and Abigail French.
00:00:21
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:23
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Zoe B.'s Viral Video on Grading and Motivation
00:00:44
Speaker
On today's podcast, we're joined by Zoe B. Zoe is an English professor, poet, and content creator who produces content for YouTube and streams on Twitch.
00:00:52
Speaker
Some of her work includes A Professor Explains, which is a series where Zoe dives into why Grammarly is a poor product, or what makes a poem a good poem, or something like a full overview of the themes of H.P.
00:01:02
Speaker
Lovecraft.
00:01:03
Speaker
Zoe is a successful content creator despite only being active for less than a year.
00:01:07
Speaker
We specifically learn about her after seeing her wildly successful video, Grading as a Scam and Motivation as a Myth, which is nearing 500,000 views within three weeks.
00:01:17
Speaker
Her takedowns at PragerU, Support of Progressive Education, and overall extensive fact-check videos show a growing interest especially by younger viewers in educational pedagogy and politics.
Critique of Grading Systems
00:01:27
Speaker
In this podcast, we sat down with Zoe to talk about her growth, practices as an educator, and content creation.
00:01:32
Speaker
To start off, here's a short segment from Grading is a Scam.
00:01:38
Speaker
So teachers and administrators, and even parents to some extent,
00:01:42
Speaker
think that grades are these really helpful tools that measure our learning, communicate that measurement to us, and then work to motivate us to do the stuff we need to do to succeed in school.
00:01:53
Speaker
But, as I'm sure most of us can attest, it doesn't really feel that way to students.
00:01:59
Speaker
I mean, how well do grades actually meaningfully measure our learning?
00:02:04
Speaker
Imagine you've written a paper, and when you get it back, you see that it says A minus at the
00:02:09
Speaker
What does this communicate to you?
00:02:11
Speaker
Does it mean that you have successfully learned how to write a paper?
00:02:15
Speaker
If you received a C-, does that mean you didn't successfully learn how to write a paper?
00:02:20
Speaker
Or does it mean that you can do some things well, like organization, writing thesis statements, but you struggle with other things like topic sentences or comma splices?
00:02:30
Speaker
Or maybe it means you wrote a perfect paper, but you just turned it in a few days late.
00:02:35
Speaker
This is even the case for more objective subjects like math.
00:02:39
Speaker
If you've taken an algebra test and you see you have a B+, what does that mean?
00:02:44
Speaker
Does it mean you know all the concepts but just made a couple arithmetic errors?
00:02:48
Speaker
Does it mean you understand most of the concepts but it's just one type of question that really throws you off?
00:02:54
Speaker
Does it mean you actually understand everything but you didn't eat breakfast that morning, or you were distracted during the test because you had a headache, or you didn't get enough sleep last night because you had to stay up late to work on that English paper?
00:03:05
Speaker
And even if you had comments on your tests explaining exactly what you did well and what you needed to improve on,
00:03:12
Speaker
Research shows that if a paper has a comment and a grade, most students just skip the comments and focus only on the grade.
00:03:21
Speaker
When something is graded, feedback is ignored.
Systemic Issues in Education Impacting Marginalized Groups
00:03:25
Speaker
And even if we knew what grades meant... I was just saying before we started talking before the podcast that Nick introduced me to your YouTube channel because you had covered an in-depth look at
00:03:38
Speaker
at ungrading and motivation, even connections to like the modern workplace.
00:03:42
Speaker
It was super informative.
00:03:42
Speaker
I'll have it in the show notes.
00:03:44
Speaker
What kind of has brought you to covering these topics via YouTube and Twitch?
00:03:50
Speaker
And just why are you here today?
00:03:53
Speaker
So, I mean, there was never like, you know, a single kind of a light bulb moment where I was like, this is, you know, the thing that I want to dedicate my life to.
00:04:01
Speaker
But it's sort of...
00:04:03
Speaker
I think if I had to pinpoint a moment that it started, it was in a literacy class that I took in graduate school.
00:04:11
Speaker
This was my first semester of grad school.
00:04:14
Speaker
And we talked about like the history of literacy and, you know, how we developed like reading and writing systems and stuff like that.
00:04:23
Speaker
But
00:04:24
Speaker
We also talked about like what counts as literacy and, you know, how we define literacy, how we decide who gets to be literate, how people are allowed to kind of use and present their literacy in their reading and writing.
00:04:42
Speaker
When I was in this class and through all the readings and everything, I realized that we have these, you know, social structures and pressures that are telling us what the quote unquote correct way of speaking and writing are.
00:04:56
Speaker
And, you know, they tell us whose literacy really counts and who even gets the opportunities to speak.
00:05:02
Speaker
like learn all of these secret language rules.
00:05:06
Speaker
When I saw that and when I learned that, I realized that there are these whole like swaths of people who are being left behind.
00:05:14
Speaker
You know, people whose language is policed essentially.
00:05:18
Speaker
And that's like neurodivergent folks and poor people and people of color, second language users, and even like LGBTQ people.
00:05:29
Speaker
When I learned this,
00:05:31
Speaker
I also saw that schools were kind of part of the problem here, especially like reading and writing classrooms.
00:05:41
Speaker
I mean, think about like, you know, what's considered quote unquote academic English or proper grammar or like the correct way to like write a paper.
00:05:52
Speaker
Reading and writing classrooms are perpetuating these problems.
00:05:57
Speaker
And so when I realized that the space that I was coming into as an educator was part of the problem, I was not super happy.
00:06:06
Speaker
You know, I didn't want to be part of the problem.
00:06:08
Speaker
I wanted to fix the problem.
00:06:11
Speaker
But trying to fix the entire education system fresh out of grad school is kind of a tall order.
00:06:19
Speaker
So I'm still working on it.
00:06:21
Speaker
But yeah, I think it really was that class and realizing just how much the structures of our system are built to keep some people from experiencing education the way that
Changing Education Systems from Within
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Speaker
it could be.
00:06:35
Speaker
Did you find that when you took this class and you were still pursuing your degree and you realized that you would likely be teaching and being within the system that you maybe didn't want to continue or you question whether or not you wanted to get involved in a system that you know can harm others?
00:06:53
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I don't think that I was that disheartened right away.
00:07:00
Speaker
I think at the time, and to some degree, I still feel this way, that I can, you know, fix things from the inside, even if all other teachers or many other teachers are teaching in a way that perpetuates these issues.
00:07:12
Speaker
Like I can be
00:07:14
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one of the good ones and I can do things differently.
00:07:16
Speaker
But now, I mean, the more that I dive down this rabbit hole and read, you know, Alfie Cohn and all of these other sources, the more I realize that maybe it is something that's a little too baked in and not something that just one teacher can fix.
00:07:31
Speaker
And maybe we need to look a little bit broader for a solution.
00:07:37
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:07:38
Speaker
I ask because that's something that I personally deal with all the time.
00:07:43
Speaker
You constantly feel like you're entering the classroom knowing that, yes, I am making things better, which is definitely a benefit of being a progressive educator.
00:07:52
Speaker
You are making a humane environment.
00:07:53
Speaker
However, there are systems at place, for example, having to give a grade at the end of the year.
00:08:00
Speaker
You can circumvent that in ways.
00:08:02
Speaker
You can use portfolio-based grading.
00:08:04
Speaker
You can use a more humane assessment system.
00:08:06
Speaker
At the end of the day, there still is a rank-and-file system that exists.
00:08:10
Speaker
the exact same way there's discipline issues uh and who defines that discipline dress codes etc etc etc there's a there's a lot of um as you describe it like bad psychology and bad economics baked into the education system i want to talk more about just the content of your grading is a scam video
00:08:30
Speaker
I think, correct me if I'm wrong, is like one of the biggest ones on your channel and it's relatively new.
00:08:35
Speaker
So it seems like it's kind of taken the world by storm.
00:08:38
Speaker
Could you briefly describe some of the issues that you see with grading and why it's potentially a problem?
00:08:45
Speaker
I think that it really comes down to the issue of grades as motivators.
00:08:53
Speaker
And motivators is a very weighted word.
00:08:55
Speaker
It has a lot of baggage because when we think of motivating, really what we mean is manipulating.
00:09:02
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In most cases, that is what we mean.
00:09:05
Speaker
It's a really slippery slope to try to help children and kind of nudge them in the right direction and help them figure things out on their own.
00:09:17
Speaker
Going from that to basically just controlling their lives and using the
00:09:23
Speaker
grades or other rewards, whether it's, you know, gold stars or the little cards that you get for being good at the end of the week, using those to try to control students' behavior.
00:09:37
Speaker
So when it becomes a control issue, which I think is inevitably what it leads to,
00:09:44
Speaker
then you're not respecting students.
00:09:48
Speaker
I mean, this is, you know, the human restoration project, like the humanity of students is really important.
00:09:56
Speaker
And when you have a whole system that is dedicated to controlling them and manipulating them, then you're not treating them like human beings.
00:10:06
Speaker
You're treating them like dogs or pigeons or rats or any of the other animals that were used by behaviorists to study these things.
00:10:17
Speaker
And I do think that grades, like I said before, inevitably lead to this.
00:10:23
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I don't know that there is a way to have a grading system that doesn't use grades as manipulators.
00:10:32
Speaker
You know, obviously we can evaluate and evaluation is a good thing and that's the
00:10:36
Speaker
the thing that we're aiming for, but slapping a number or a letter on a student at the end of the day is, I think, just ultimately bad for
Conditional Motivation in Education vs. Workplace
00:10:46
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them.
00:10:46
Speaker
It's inherently competitive too, which it's one thing to feel like you're being evaluated, but there's a completely different sense of being evaluated versus others.
00:10:55
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Or I know that if I'm not doing well, then there must be something wrong with me or other people are better than me.
00:11:03
Speaker
It's just this constant.
00:11:04
Speaker
I mean, everyone remembers this.
00:11:06
Speaker
I'm sure back in middle school and high school, if you got a low grade on something, you would like hide your sheet of paper because you didn't want people to see the grade on it.
00:11:13
Speaker
And as a result, it completely defeats the purpose of education, which is to learn.
00:11:19
Speaker
This is really basic, but if you go in, in my case, entering into biology, which I was terrible at, the first time I took a test in that class, I think I got like a D or an F. And so I just never tried again because I was completely demotivated.
00:11:34
Speaker
And we know that from the research upon research upon research that once you get a low grade, you tend to not do too well.
00:11:41
Speaker
I also want to talk about something else that came up and we'll tie this all together in the second half of the conversation, which is the connection of grading to just motivation in general.
00:11:52
Speaker
So things like pay raises, lack of autonomy at the workplace, things that are used to control us through motivation that really were, I would argue, or we're almost trained to do via grades in school as being like an okay practice.
00:12:08
Speaker
Could you talk about really where we see this issue of conditional motivation past the classroom level?
00:12:16
Speaker
I mean, like you said, we are really conditioned to do this, you know, for the first 18 years of our lives and even more if we go on to college and grad school.
00:12:26
Speaker
We're conditioned to only do things if we're getting a reward to do it.
00:12:30
Speaker
like you said, we see this in the workplace with things like bonuses and even commission pay to some extent, you know, if you sell
00:12:39
Speaker
X number of things, you get a pay raise, et cetera.
00:12:42
Speaker
The place that it is most clear, at least at this current cultural moment, is the issue of unemployment in fast food restaurants.
00:12:55
Speaker
So we have all of these fast food restaurants that are putting up signs telling people that they'll get a sign-on bonus and...
00:13:02
Speaker
You know, they have signs on their doors like apologizing to customers because they don't have enough people working because according to them, it's just that people are lazy and nobody wants to work anymore.
00:13:14
Speaker
But in reality, this is just...
00:13:17
Speaker
a consequence of the way that our current economic model is set up.
00:13:21
Speaker
The reason that people aren't coming to work or the reason that people aren't working for these jobs isn't that people are lazy.
00:13:29
Speaker
It's that money is required to live.
00:13:32
Speaker
And if they're not making enough money to live, then that's, you know, not a good thing.
00:13:38
Speaker
And so these places are taking advantage of that and trying to
00:13:46
Speaker
manipulate people to come and work for them for wages that are not good.
00:13:51
Speaker
And so I think we are kind of seeing a potentially a cultural turning point where people are starting to realize that there are these cracks in this system and that rewards, things like money in a lot of cases are used to manipulate people.
Societal Ranking Structures and Education
00:14:05
Speaker
And so hopefully, you know, if people can see that this is the case with our economic system, maybe they can apply that same
00:14:13
Speaker
lens to the educational system and we can fix everything all at once.
00:14:18
Speaker
That would be ideal.
00:14:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, for sure.
00:14:23
Speaker
You said in your video that until we as a society understand the dangers of rewards on a wider level, things are not going to change.
00:14:31
Speaker
The cornerstone of this is recognizing that a neoliberal society is always going to structure itself so that we rank out the people at the top versus the people at the bottom.
00:14:41
Speaker
And we naturally fly into those two segments of the population.
00:14:46
Speaker
And when you're in school, you learn that from an incredibly young age.
00:14:52
Speaker
And sadly, if you're successful at said system and you're someone who achieves in said system and can make decisions, you are going to assume that that's the way that things should be done, that societally things are working out in your favor, so therefore it's okay.
00:15:05
Speaker
Hence why many teachers, not all, but many teachers are perfectly okay with ranking and filing students because they did well in school, hence why they're teachers.
00:15:15
Speaker
That
00:15:16
Speaker
kind of deprogramming from that mode of view can be difficult for many.
00:15:22
Speaker
What would people do to start thinking about changing reward structures in the classroom?
00:15:29
Speaker
There are a lot of different ways that people have tried this.
00:15:34
Speaker
And there are big steps and there are little steps.
00:15:37
Speaker
And the big steps I recognize are not possible for a lot of teachers because like you mentioned, you
00:15:43
Speaker
at the end of the year, we have to give students grades.
00:15:45
Speaker
Like our bosses tell us they have to have a grade and there's nothing we can do about that.
00:15:50
Speaker
So a lot of those things, like,
00:15:52
Speaker
You know, you can't just get rid of grades in one day and have that be the end of it.
00:15:57
Speaker
So we have to take these little steps.
00:15:59
Speaker
What I have been able to do, and I have to take the teeniest of steps because at my current position, my hands are sort of tied where I am literally forbidden from changing anything about the classes that I teach.
00:16:14
Speaker
But that's a whole other conversation is the treatment of adjuncts.
00:16:18
Speaker
But something that I do is emphasize
00:16:22
Speaker
evaluation over grades.
00:16:25
Speaker
So I like minimize grades as much as possible.
Emphasizing Feedback Over Grades
00:16:28
Speaker
And one way that I do that, people think that you have to get rid of grades from like a course level.
00:16:33
Speaker
But what I do is get rid of grades from an assignment level, because that's a little step that you can take.
00:16:38
Speaker
So for instance, when students turn in rough drafts of papers, I never grade those.
00:16:43
Speaker
Because, you know, why should students be judged on a work in progress?
00:16:48
Speaker
Like that is one thing that directly leads students to be afraid of
00:16:52
Speaker
mistakes and failure into play safe.
00:16:55
Speaker
That's not good because that stifles creativity and risk taking and all good things that we want our students to do.
00:17:02
Speaker
So I never grade drafts and I emphasize feedback.
00:17:05
Speaker
I give lots and lots of comments.
00:17:07
Speaker
One resource that I use for that and for how to give good feedback is Peter Elbow, who most of his work is in the field of composition, but he also talks a lot about pedagogy and he's one of the early, you know, gradeless adopters, especially in the composition field.
00:17:29
Speaker
And what he suggests is
00:17:32
Speaker
not writing on students' papers because that sort of perpetuates the power imbalance between students and teachers.
00:17:39
Speaker
And instead, what he would do is he would write letters to students, like a formal, like, dear so-and-so, and then multiple paragraphs describing his experience of reading their paper, what he felt worked, what he felt didn't work, suggestions, questions, stuff like that, and then would attach that to the paper.
00:18:02
Speaker
And I think that's really interesting because it brings up the, not just the power differential between students and teachers, but also the demoralization of any kind of feedback on student papers.
00:18:18
Speaker
Like even if you're just writing comments, students don't like to see writing all over their papers.
00:18:25
Speaker
It makes them feel like they've done something wrong, even if the comments are
00:18:28
Speaker
positive or constructive, writing them a letter, I think is a really, I mean, it sounds simple, but it feels really radical because it's, you know, you are treating your students like equals and you are treating them like adults and like real human beings.
00:18:43
Speaker
Those are some of the little steps that I take.
00:18:45
Speaker
It's just really emphasizing that feedback and evaluation, getting rid of grades on individual assignments as much as possible, even though you have to give a grade at the end of the semester in most cases.
00:18:58
Speaker
Do you find that when you switch from this model that it's difficult to have students comply?
00:19:06
Speaker
And I mean this in like a it sounds bad, but it's a true factor of teaching that part of the job is students have to complete a certain number of assignments, typically based off of the rules of the course that are not usually assigned by the teacher to begin with.
00:19:22
Speaker
So the grades typically serve as a coercion model.
00:19:26
Speaker
It's how we ensure that students complete all of the assignments.
00:19:29
Speaker
And if there aren't grades being given, then, well, why would I do them?
00:19:33
Speaker
When you're in your composition classroom and you have students, let's say, not do a draft, how do you then get around that struggle?
00:19:42
Speaker
This is one of those cases where teaching college, I think, gives me a lot more leeway than teaching grade school or high school because I just tell my students, you don't have to turn in a draft.
00:19:54
Speaker
It's not going to affect your grade at all.
00:19:57
Speaker
But the more that you give me to work with, the more I can help you.
00:20:03
Speaker
So it's like a help me help you kind of thing where if they turn in a draft, then they get feedback and then their final product is better.
00:20:11
Speaker
If they don't, then, you know, their final draft is what it is.
00:20:15
Speaker
And there was no opportunity for them to change it.
00:20:20
Speaker
Though I do offer like revision opportunities, but it's funny that you bring that up because in a class that I taught when I was at a different school,
00:20:31
Speaker
institution when I was at a university that offered me a lot more freedom with how I taught things.
00:20:36
Speaker
There was a class that I used a project-based structure for, and we can talk about that a little bit later if you want.
00:20:42
Speaker
As part of that, my students, I asked them to create their own rubrics, basically, for their projects.
00:20:51
Speaker
So like, what does a successful
00:20:54
Speaker
project of whatever kind they were doing look like to you?
00:20:57
Speaker
And how do you figure out, you know, what are like the elements that you need to judge to determine success?
00:21:04
Speaker
And like, what are the levels of that?
00:21:06
Speaker
They hated it.
00:21:08
Speaker
They were miserable.
00:21:12
Speaker
So at the end of the semester, when we were reflecting on the projects, and I was asking them
00:21:19
Speaker
like from a structural, like pedagogical point of view, like what worked, like what did you like about doing the projects?
00:21:26
Speaker
Pretty much almost universally, they were like, don't make us do the rubrics.
00:21:33
Speaker
Like if you teach this class in the future, don't make them write their own rubrics.
00:21:38
Speaker
I think it was an issue on my part or a miscommunication on my part where I didn't make it clear enough why I was asking them to do it.
00:21:47
Speaker
And they were still in this headspace of, you know, you're the teacher, you're going to be the one giving me the grade.
00:21:54
Speaker
You're the one who decides what a success is.
00:21:56
Speaker
Why don't you tell me what you want?
00:21:58
Speaker
And they didn't like that I didn't do that and I didn't give them that information.
00:22:03
Speaker
And so I think there is definitely a learning curve because, I mean, like I said before, you're, oh, what's the word?
00:22:10
Speaker
I don't want to say indoctrinated.
00:22:12
Speaker
You're used to courses being a certain way and grades being a certain way for the first 18 years of your life.
00:22:21
Speaker
And so then when you're suddenly presented with something new, it's often uncomfortable.
00:22:26
Speaker
Students are willing to give up that level of freedom because it's more comfortable to be told what to do, I think in a lot of cases.
00:22:35
Speaker
So I have definitely had some pushback on some things, but I don't know, it's tough.
00:22:43
Speaker
But I think the more teachers are,
00:22:47
Speaker
do this kind of thing and the more sort of if we can disrupt the way that students are conditioned to think about things, like the earlier we can change their thinking, then I think they will become way more comfortable with it and we won't face that pushback.
Progressive Education Methods and Challenges
00:23:06
Speaker
I mean, that's a powerful statement for a student to learn in this way and produce a strong evidence of learning.
00:23:16
Speaker
One of the things that drives me crazy about people that view either self-directed education or more progressive education as a negative is they believe that you're lowering the standards, quote unquote.
00:23:28
Speaker
And the fact of the matter is it's the exact opposite because now students have to kind of fend for themselves.
00:23:34
Speaker
Not like you're not there, but they aren't explicitly being told what to do every single step of the way and not everyone's producing the exact same thing at the end.
00:23:42
Speaker
So that means I have to think more creatively.
00:23:44
Speaker
I have to be able to manipulate and question the things that I'm doing.
00:23:47
Speaker
I have to fundamentally understand things at a more theoretical level than someone who's just regurgitating what was told to me.
00:23:55
Speaker
and as a result when you have a classroom that is using these techniques where it is a lot more student-centered it's going to feel a lot different both for the teacher and for the student and on the student's angle it's going to feel challenging because you're going to think for your own you're going to think for yourself so as a teacher what that's going to look like it's going to be a little bit louder it's going to be a little more confusing the students are going to be really confused a lot and they're going to ask a lot of questions
00:24:21
Speaker
But they're good questions, like engaging questions.
00:24:24
Speaker
Like they're not questions like, how do I answer question seven, where you just answer that exact same question about 40 times already.
00:24:32
Speaker
And you're like, okay, let's stop.
00:24:33
Speaker
Let's answer question seven.
00:24:35
Speaker
Instead, it's more like, how do I write in this way?
00:24:38
Speaker
Who would I look up to figure out more about this?
00:24:40
Speaker
Which is a deeply engaging inquiry-based question where you can dive into something and give someone resources.
00:24:46
Speaker
And as a result, final products will be
00:24:50
Speaker
Kind of all over the place.
00:24:51
Speaker
Like you'll have some things that are incredible and you'll have some that are just like, what in the world did you just do for the last two months?
00:24:58
Speaker
But at the end of the day, they were practicing soft skills, 21st centuries, whatever you want to call the skills, but I would just call like they're practicing learning.
00:25:06
Speaker
They're practicing learning on their own.
00:25:08
Speaker
It's a hard skill to quantify, but it's something that you're learning along the way.
00:25:12
Speaker
What lessons do you feel like you learned from going through that process in your composition classroom, your, your project?
00:25:19
Speaker
This project, like the project of doing project-based learning, I did it during my second year as a teacher.
00:25:28
Speaker
So I was still learning how to be a teacher, but that also meant that I, you know, wasn't set in my ways and I
00:25:34
Speaker
Felt free to explore and luckily I was given that opportunity at the institution that I was at.
00:25:40
Speaker
It's all about student choice and giving students freedom and space to decide what they want to do.
00:25:48
Speaker
And that's terrifying because you have no idea what they're going to do.
00:25:53
Speaker
And I'm the kind of person who likes to have a very clear plan, set out, you know, lesson planning and all that.
00:26:00
Speaker
I love that.
00:26:02
Speaker
So the first part of the semester was a little bit more traditionally set up because I wanted to have a good
00:26:10
Speaker
kind of foundation to build the project on.
00:26:13
Speaker
And so for my class, I started with the foundation of this problem.
00:26:20
Speaker
So the problem that I chose was the problem of cultural or societal wide anxiety.
00:26:28
Speaker
And I framed it using the frame of the Cold War
00:26:33
Speaker
era of like the 1950s and 60s, you know, anxieties about communism and communists coming over and taking over the country and nuclear war.
00:26:43
Speaker
And so then I had my students try to think, like translate that to today.
00:26:48
Speaker
Like, what are some things that people today
00:26:51
Speaker
are concerned about.
00:26:53
Speaker
So things like climate change and LGBTQ rights, also nuclear war to some extent.
00:27:00
Speaker
We started working on solutions.
00:27:04
Speaker
How do we not necessarily solve that problem that is causing that anxiety, but how do we solve those social society level anxieties?
00:27:12
Speaker
And there are two ways to do that.
00:27:14
Speaker
You can either actually fix the problem that's causing the anxiety, or you can convince people that it's not something worth
00:27:21
Speaker
being concerned with.
00:27:24
Speaker
An example of that would be something like, you know, marriage equality, like gay people getting married is not going to dissolve the like family unit.
00:27:31
Speaker
Like this is not, you know, that's not something you need to be concerned with.
00:27:35
Speaker
So with that foundation in place, the foundation of then I had my students choose a problem, like a modern anxiety problem,
00:27:45
Speaker
And then decide whose problem it was.
00:27:50
Speaker
So that would be like their audience.
00:27:52
Speaker
You know, who are the people who are concerned about whatever problem it is that you chose.
00:27:58
Speaker
So then we could ask, like, how do you reach this person?
00:28:01
Speaker
And that's how you can bring in some of those rhetorical skills.
00:28:05
Speaker
And then you can actually start creating the project by choosing what medium, like how are you going to reach these people?
00:28:12
Speaker
Like physically, how are you going to reach them?
00:28:14
Speaker
What does a successful product look like?
00:28:17
Speaker
And then, you know, doing the research and making the thing and sharing it with your classmates and revising it.
00:28:22
Speaker
And at the end of the semester, we had a basically like a party, essentially, where all of the groups shared their projects.
00:28:32
Speaker
And, you know, some people had made PSA style YouTube videos.
00:28:37
Speaker
Several had made posters and put them up across campus.
00:28:41
Speaker
There was one group who, they were so awesome.
00:28:45
Speaker
Their cultural issue that they decided to tackle was...
00:28:50
Speaker
young people not voting.
00:28:52
Speaker
And that was actually during a midterm election year, which, you know, has even lower turnout, especially among younger people.
00:28:59
Speaker
Their project was to set up a table in the university cafeteria with
00:29:08
Speaker
like laptops set up so students could take the, I don't think it was the political compass test.
00:29:13
Speaker
I think it was the like I side with test so that they could see which candidates they were most aligned with.
00:29:20
Speaker
And then they also had another laptop set up to help them get registered to vote.
00:29:25
Speaker
And so they like got people registered to vote on our campus.
00:29:29
Speaker
And like, it's super great.
00:29:32
Speaker
The final part of the project was to write a justification and reflection.
00:29:37
Speaker
And the justification is like, what are the choices you made to create this project?
00:29:43
Speaker
and why.
00:29:44
Speaker
And then the reflection is, how well do you think you did?
00:29:48
Speaker
You know, you set these goals for yourself.
00:29:51
Speaker
You created this rubric.
00:29:53
Speaker
Do you think you met it?
00:29:55
Speaker
And what grade do you think you deserve for this and why?
00:29:59
Speaker
So as you can see, like every single step of this is the student's choice.
00:30:05
Speaker
They got to decide the problem, the solution, the audience, the medium.
00:30:12
Speaker
Like I, there were so many rubrics, a different rubric for videos versus for posters versus for, you know, social media campaigns.
00:30:21
Speaker
And there were some that like I had not even thought of.
00:30:23
Speaker
Like one group did a, they made a music video.
00:30:27
Speaker
to support marriage equality.
00:30:30
Speaker
And it honestly, it made me cry.
00:30:32
Speaker
It was so wonderful.
00:30:33
Speaker
It was beautiful.
00:30:34
Speaker
But like, how do you grade that?
00:30:36
Speaker
Like, I couldn't have guessed that anyone would do something like that.
00:30:40
Speaker
And so while it is scary and uncomfortable and
00:30:45
Speaker
again, terrifying.
Real-World Impact of Student Projects
00:30:47
Speaker
It was also exciting because you see these young people, given some of them for the first time, the opportunity to really be creative and engaged and do something that they want and that they have come up with on their own
00:31:10
Speaker
And to see them get so passionate about it and do such a good job with it, that makes all of the scariness worth it, I think.
00:31:18
Speaker
The ability to see student final products after going through a period of typically very high stress, especially if you've never done this before, is I still remember, this was like, I think my third or fourth year teaching, like throwing out the gray book and doing something like this.
00:31:34
Speaker
And
00:31:35
Speaker
For the first, I don't know, two, maybe three or four months, I was petrified.
00:31:41
Speaker
I thought at any moment it was just going to end, someone was going to walk in, have it be shut it down.
00:31:45
Speaker
Because there were a decent number of students that I felt like weren't doing anything at all.
00:31:50
Speaker
And that freaked me out because I had come from Cinnamon Rose, control their movements.
00:31:55
Speaker
It was very traditional.
00:31:56
Speaker
So that was terrifying to me.
00:31:59
Speaker
And at the end of the day, when you see those final products, it's not only a sigh of relief.
00:32:02
Speaker
It's like, well, why wasn't I doing this for...
00:32:04
Speaker
The last 10 years, why like, why is this not the norm because the work is so authentic.
Educators Using New Media for Wider Reach
00:32:10
Speaker
One of the things that, especially the college level, but also K-12 is how often we expect students to practice before they actually get to do something that's real with what they're learning.
00:32:21
Speaker
And especially at a college level where, in theory, these are people that want to continue pursuing something that's specialized in them.
00:32:27
Speaker
These are supposed to be like our super academically focused kids.
00:32:31
Speaker
And they go to school and they write a bunch of papers that they won't ever open again.
00:32:37
Speaker
and that's it i i was looking at the other day my google drive still has all my papers on it from 2010. i don't even remember writing this and it's just it's like 10 15 pages long with i don't know 50 citations like it's like a pretty in-depth assignment and nothing ever came of it and i think about the hundreds of billions of these just sitting in
00:32:59
Speaker
perpetual like virtual world papers that exist that could be something that maybe got someone to vote or maybe convince someone to i don't know have a talk with their family about lgbtqia rights i don't know there's a bunch of different things it could be but it makes some kind of difference in the world that matters and that that really at the end of the day is what we should be aiming toward now and really to
00:33:23
Speaker
attach this to what you're doing on Twitch and on YouTube and newer media.
00:33:28
Speaker
Do you feel like educators should be embracing these spaces to spread the word?
00:33:33
Speaker
Because you're hitting a demographic that I think most are not.
00:33:38
Speaker
As far as I'm aware, I mean, political science has definitely taken a turn towards Twitch and YouTube, but I don't really think about professors and Twitch.
00:33:46
Speaker
It's not something that's not normal.
00:33:48
Speaker
What has your experience been like on there?
00:33:50
Speaker
Do you feel like that's a platform that more should be getting into?
00:33:54
Speaker
It's a very complicated question.
00:33:56
Speaker
What it comes down to is, so these issues that we've talked about, we've talked about how they are really like structural and systemic and just baked into...
00:34:07
Speaker
every part of everything in this country.
00:34:11
Speaker
And when an issue is that big, it's really hard to see it.
00:34:15
Speaker
It's really hard to see systemic issues when you are living within them.
00:34:20
Speaker
And especially when it's something that's gone on forever, like these, you know, quote unquote, traditional teaching methods and teachers who, like you said, grew up as students of these methods.
00:34:29
Speaker
And so they figure that's what they, like that's the way that they need to teach.
00:34:33
Speaker
So I think the first step in teaching
00:34:36
Speaker
tackling these big problems is to get people to ask questions.
00:34:43
Speaker
you know, you can't solve a problem this big if you don't even know that it exists.
00:34:47
Speaker
So you have to encourage people to think outside the system.
00:34:53
Speaker
And the only way you can do that is by getting them to ask questions.
00:34:56
Speaker
And I think that that question thing is a strength of this new media landscape.
00:35:04
Speaker
So if we think of the old media landscape, things like books,
00:35:07
Speaker
People see books as very, like they are the authority, you know, they offer answers to questions.
00:35:14
Speaker
And there's also an element of like gatekeeping to books, you know, who has access to the books, who is even interested in picking up the books, who can read the books, who has the money to buy the books.
00:35:28
Speaker
So this new media landscape, it is free and it's open and it's much more
00:35:36
Speaker
I don't know if democratized is the right word or egalitarian, but a lot more people have more access to it.
00:35:43
Speaker
But on the flip side, that also means that there's a lot more misinformation.
00:35:47
Speaker
So it's a tricky thing to balance.
00:35:51
Speaker
And one criticism that I get on a lot of my videos is that I don't offer enough answers.
00:35:59
Speaker
You know, I bring up that there are these systemic issues, but I don't tell people this is exactly what you need to do to fix it.
00:36:05
Speaker
Like I said, I get criticism for that, but I see that as a strength of this genre.
00:36:11
Speaker
You know, I'm not an expert.
00:36:13
Speaker
Like I said, I've been teaching for three years.
00:36:15
Speaker
Like I'm, you know, baby educator.
00:36:17
Speaker
Like I don't have the answers.
00:36:19
Speaker
So the best I can do is to read the experts, you know, read the Alfie Cohns and the Susan Blooms and the Peter Elbows and
00:36:28
Speaker
use them as a jumping off point to help illuminate these hidden structures and to start getting people to ask questions.
00:36:40
Speaker
So I think it really depends on if you're an answers person or a questions person.
00:36:44
Speaker
Like if you want to offer people answers,
00:36:47
Speaker
do the traditional thing, write a book, do like what Jesse Stommel does with giving presentations and things, do that and that's great and we need those people.
00:36:58
Speaker
But if you want to be more of a middle man or like a fulcrum point, like a threshold where you just sort of nudge someone in the right direction so that they can go find the answers from the answers people, then I think that YouTube is great.
00:37:15
Speaker
And podcasts are great.
Encouragement for Progressive Education
00:37:17
Speaker
And, you know, shouting into the void of the internet is, I think maybe that's for you if that's, if you are a questions person and not an answers person.
00:37:36
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Projects podcast.
00:37:39
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
00:37:43
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.