Episode 9
Beyond the Exclusive-Inclusive Paradigm: Who do you want your students to be? with Bryan Dewsbury
[MUSIC PLAYING] STEVEN ROBINOW: This is Teaching for Student Success. I'm Steven Robinow. In this episode, I will have a conversation with Dr. Bryan Dewsbury about an approach to inclusive instruction that goes beneath the mechanics of your courses. We won't talk about what your syllabus looks like, how you engage students in your learning environment, or how you assess students. Instead, we will discuss an approach to inclusive instruction that first and foremost focuses on the criticality of developing an enriched and enhanced understanding of your students.
The ideas we will discuss in this episode have the power to change your relationship with your students, allowing you to develop an inclusive classroom that enriches the personal development of all of your students. In this episode, we will not discuss what your students need to learn. We won't discuss what your students need to be able to do. We will talk about issues that address the question, what do you want your students to become? I'm very excited to introduce Dr. Bryan Dewsbury to Teaching for Student Success. Welcome, Bryan. Thank you so much for joining us.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Thanks for having me.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Dr. Dewsbury is an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. Dr. Dewsbury serves as the associate director of the Division for Transformative Education. Dr. Dewsbury is also the principal investigator of the Science Education and Society Research Program, which focuses on the social context of teaching and learning in a variety of education contexts. Dr. Dewsbury has published widely on issues of equity, inclusive teaching, assessment, and student success.
Today we will focus mostly on a pair of 2019 papers, the first entitled simply “Inclusive Teaching” by Dewsbury and Brame in CBE—Life Sciences Education. The second, authored by Bryan Dewsbury, is entitled “Deep Teaching, a Conceptual Model for Inclusive Approaches to Higher Education STEM Pedagogy,” published in Cultural Studies of Science Education. We are going to talk a lot about the ideas of inclusive teaching and an inclusive classroom.
The notion of inclusive teaching and inclusive classrooms suggests, of course, that there is something we might term exclusive teaching and the exclusive classroom. In fact, you use these terms in your papers. Perhaps you could begin by talking about these terms and your major concerns.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: It's a much more philosophically deep question than maybe many listeners might even consider. The reason why I say that is because, a lot of times, when that question is asked, the first things people might go to are, here are the things professors do that are bad. Here are the things they do that make students resist wanting to stay in the classroom or stay in this particular subject.
And I ask people to really perhaps take a couple of steps back and think about how most professors are trained to identify themselves professionally. And as somebody who went through grad school, you are raised to be a subject matter expert, which is not something I'm absconding. I do believe you need to have some kind of expertise. But you are raised to believe that that's the only thing or the most important thing that constitutes who you are as a faculty member. Right?
STEVEN ROBINOW: Right.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: It's important, I think, to have that if you have a research program, you want to keep contributing to the field, you want to discover new things, you want to write grants, papers.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Mm-hmm.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: The problem, however, is that, since that was labeled as the only thing that you needed, the other parts of your profession as a faculty member—namely, teaching, namely, things like advising, even things like running a lab and managing people—somehow the whole system assumes you just do that on the fly. Because you knew everything there was to know about frogs, it meant you can walk into a classroom and teach a class about frogs.
This, quite frankly, disrespect of the skill and the scholarship of teaching I think is what has led us to this point where exclusive classrooms just became the status quo. So you think about something as simple as you give an exam or a quiz or something, and a student gets a bad grade. The automatic thinking is that it's something that student didn't do correctly. Right?
There was never any culture of, maybe I didn't write the questions as reliably as I thought. Maybe I didn't actually explain this as reliably as I thought. Maybe I don't understand what it means to have—to motivate students to engage in this discipline. Maybe students don't see themselves in this discipline and thus aren't motivated. All these things are very well-studied constructs, but virtually none of it is included in graduate training.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Right.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: So it is thus no surprise that, when most people leave with a PhD and get a faculty position—and oh, by the way, here's a class for you to teach—
STEVEN ROBINOW: Mm-hmm.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: —that their default behavior is centered around, I'm the person coming in here with all the wiseness—I know that's not a word, but deal with it—with all the wisdom, and therefore, it's your job to absorb this. I daresay, even through the progression of active learning, which I support, and I love, and I do—but I think there was still this focus, this hyperfocus on, but we must talk about this. We must cover. We must cover, cover, cover—
STEVEN ROBINOW: Mm-hmm.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: —without really thinking about, well, first of all, why—why the obsession of coverage. And who was dictating this volume of coverage that was needed? But also, to me, what was a little bit more obvious—if you have one semester with a student, or even four years, maybe even six years with a student on your campus, in any given discipline, it is mathematically impossible to tell them or to expose them to all the information in that subject area.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Sure.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Let me be clear, Steve. I am not arguing for content-free classrooms, but there's also a need to understand the sociopsychology of what it means to be in a classroom space, in a discipline, enrolled as a student, depending on how you identify, your—different ways you are motivated, understanding that as a skill, and applying those skills to your pedagogy. So it's less the original question of what exclusive is. It's are we actually teaching people how to teach?
STEVEN ROBINOW: I think we know. And as you said, we clearly are never teaching people how to teach—at least in the past—rarely, in the sciences. Exactly as you said, we get our degrees, and we move on, and we move into a classroom, and we just start teaching. We take it on. And we do what everybody does. We do to our students what was done to us as a student, because that's all we know, because we—in the past, we've never been taught.
The good news is that is changing in the US. There is effort to train incoming faculty to provide them with some—it's not universal, but at least we're seeing it in a number of places. So that's great. The other thing, of course, that—in an exclusive classroom is that there are students who are not engaged in these classrooms. In terms of student success, we have students who are failing to progress in the system. And the students that fail to progress are predominantly the historically excluded, and marginalized, and minoritized students. We know that as well.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Mm-hmm.
STEVEN ROBINOW: It's a critical problem. People often say, oh, we need more students in STEM. Well, we don't really need more students in STEM. We need to stop failing the students we have. Right? Your classes are full. The intro classes are full. There's plenty of students coming in. The problem is there's not plenty of students going out, and the diversity of the students going out does not reflect the diversity of the students coming in.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: That sort of ties back to the original problem. The lens is, if anything goes wrong in this experience, then it's some—it's because of something you did. It's you, not me kind of speech. Then that blinds you, whether you're an instructor, or chair, a dean—that blinds you from doing any kind of forensic analysis on your own behavior, your own curriculum design, your own classroom culture, your own campus culture.
You are right that a lot of that is changing. I would say not fast enough. I would say not deeply enough. I would say we still [INAUDIBLE] at a point where we are trying to solve this problem on the back end by having workshops and podcasts—I'm sure everybody would listen to this, but—and I think these things are great, and should—no, I think these things should happen. I'm not critiquing it. I'm saying this is part of what the—a more comprehensive solution would be. I would start looking a bit more seriously at that pathway to faculty.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Yes.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: And to me, if you think about it compared to other professions, it's kind of laughable actually, what we do, because if you wanted to become a doctor, you would become a—you would be a STEM major. You go to med school. You would do a fellowship—lawyer same thing. Most professions, you basically understand that, if this person's going to do a thing for the next two, three, four decades, it is in everybody’s best interest that they get some real good training at a preparatory level before they actually start getting a full salary.
Somehow, in academia, we think it's OK to just send a frog expert with no training—teacher training at all and say, so some of these disaggregate statistics of students of color not getting through gateway classes as much. It's sad, but you also can be surprised, because when you go to the default, what happens is that your classroom just simply replicates all the inequities that exist in wider society, because the teacher is not an intervention. It's just really just passing the inequity along.
So you come in underprepared or you come in from under-resourced communities or under-resourced schools. You come in having not known a Black scientist in your entire life. You come in not having known female physicists. If nothing is intentionally done, particularly at the gateway level, the results are out there. People leave not just because of poor performance, but also because they look around and say, this is not for me. This doesn't speak to my values. You have no interest in people like me becoming a scientist.
And what really hit me, Steve, was when I was a grad student, well, we had a speaker series, et cetera, [INAUDIBLE] some scientists from around the country to talk about their life and their career. And at the end of it, we interviewed students about what the impact of the series was on them. And in that focus group, one of the things that was coming out was we're in a mostly Hispanic school, and most of the faculty members in this department are white.
What that says to me is that people like me don't become professors. They've seen doctors who look like them. They've seen—or at least understand the appeal of those careers from a financial perspective, but representation does matter. And it's not representation, but at least how we highlight and lift the voices of the marginalized in the context of the classroom. All of that matters. It's not a squishy thing. It's a reality thing, and a life thing, and a love thing.
STEVEN ROBINOW: I think what you said earlier really resonated with me, the notion that the things we've been doing for the last decade, 20 years, something like that, have been started to approach this in a—I'm going to say superficial. I don't really mean that, but it's like, what's going on in the classroom, and how are we going to [? prove it-- ?] so active learning, so using scientific teaching, bringing the—how we do science into the classroom and apply it.
And people are studying it, doing education research, and we're talking about how we change the classroom. But what you're proposing and where I want to go is a much deeper dive into an individual faculty psyche, to look deeply at yourself, understand who you are, how you got there, and then to think about the challenges that your students have faced in their academic career or their whole career.
And one more thing—of course, you also talked about the lack of training in higher ed. Of course, we don't do that in K through 12. The K through 12 teachers have training. So it's clear that higher education never valued teaching. We never valued teaching. Historically, that's been true, because—
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Mm-hmm.
STEVEN ROBINOW: And that's just proven by what we do. [? In R1's ?] you hire faculty for what they do. They come in, they do their research, and that's how you are successful. And that's how the institution has set up the paradigm to succeed. Success is through grants.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Right.
STEVEN ROBINOW: I don't want to go down that road right now. Let's come back to your stuff. Let's get back to what you now propose. Go ahead, anywhere you want to go.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Well, before we get to what I propose—and I promise you, we won't go too far down that road, but I do want to make the point—which I think is what you are making—is that it is very difficult to talk about the transformation of teaching quality, and how we train teachers, and all of that. We can disentangle that from the problems of the wider system. So everything you said about how teaching is incentivized, how it's rewarded, how it's—how we hire, how we grant tenure, all of that stuff, that has to be put on the table at the same time we are talking about this, because the problem is we can talk here for three hours on this podcast about how we need to train professors before they come to the classroom, but you're going to come to the classroom, and it's not going to be valued on an annual review.
If you come to the classroom, and they're going to be valued for something else when they go for promotion, then that training actually really doesn't matter because the institution has communicated that, in terms of your presence here, your professional identity here, this is what we care about.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Right.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: And I think, for too long, the conversation got stuck on it's us who need to change, it's the professors who need to—that's not untrue, but the professors are part of a system, whether we like it or not. I would recommend the book Amateur Hour by Jonathan Zimmerman. I'm sure there might be others out there. I just haven't seen them. But it's probably one of the best books I've read that gives essentially a history of college teaching.
And you will find, when you read it, that what you just said is exactly true. There was literally no history of it being valued. You go back decades, and this idea of teaching professors to teach, there was a thing—at one time, they were considering people from normal schools, schools that would train teachers, to train professors. And the academics shut that down immediately. Even at liberal arts schools and schools where you would—that don't really have large research programs, there still is debate on what is a really clear and reliable way to assess good teaching.
But I would say, if I want to take a glass-half-full approach to this, this to me is a challenge for the academy. This to me can be something we just put our heads in the sand and say, oh, this is the way it is. It's so sad. Maybe this is partly why I do what I do. I see the beauty of what it could be. I don't set my class up to be so much inclusive, in the sense that—inclusive is a type of teaching.
I set up my class to be a good teacher. And to teach is to assume that everybody in that space, no matter what they look like, what they think like, what their backgrounds are, whether I agree with them or not, that they feel included, welcome, and respected in that space. So that way, everything that I'm doing in that classroom is not designed to be a form of protest. It's designed to teach you how beautiful and magical this world could be, and where you can put your own place in it.
When I was an undergrad at Morehouse College, we got the look to the left, look to the right speech, and I remember thinking, as a 19-year-old, why would you want half your school to not be here next year? like what kind of financial model is—it was just head-scratching stuff. But it is what it is. I had a great time at Morehouse, and did well in some classes, struggled in some. But I will say that the classes that I remember the most, and I dare say I learned from the most, were professors who—it wasn't so much about active learning, and being busy, and—it was that they cared about what I had to say.
They brought in problems to the class and they said, your opinion matters in solving this. Yes, we will show you the basics of this chemical equation or how ecosystems work, et cetera, et cetera, but here's why understanding that matters. If you are presented with this challenge, what would you do? And so you felt, whether it was the intention or not—but you felt like you had agency, you had power to actually have an opinion—and not just have an opinion in that moment, but going forward, it was giving you formative experience in what it means to find your voice.
There's a sense in which that kind of mentality—and this is my belief—this, to me, is what you should be having when you go make a purchase, when you choose a credit card, when you vote, when you turn on cable news. Just because somebody's standing there in a shirt and a tie and makeup on on TV doesn't mean that what it's saying is right. To me, college is that place where you teach what Paulo Freire calls the critical consciousness of the world.
You don't wallow in conspiracy theories all day, but at the same time, you don't just consume everything you're told just because a source likes to make itself sound credible. And I think that kind of skill set can be taught in any class. That's agnostic to discipline. And that is the more pure model of the classroom that I'm looking for.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Right. So your model is very discipline-agnostic. The things we're going to talk about now—and let's get to them—really have nothing to do with content. It's really about self-discovery, and then empathy for your students, and applying. So let's talk about that. Let's describe your model and let's walk through it a little bit.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: My argument is that we are asking students to go beyond the recall, and the surface, and the labeling of the material, and really become deep learners, and deep thinkers, and critical, conscientious people. And in the same way, we have to approach our teaching in the same way. It can't just be deliver a curriculum, assign a grade, and then we move on.
So the model essentially offers a path to do that. And maybe where my model might depart from some of the conversations about inclusive practices is that there's a relatively intense focus on self, understanding who you are, why you do what you do, what inspires you to teach, reflecting on the biases you might bring to the classroom to relationships, to your relationships with your students in particular—and then also getting to know your students, not just on an I know your name kind of thing, but understanding where they come from, their history—if your classroom is fed, say, from a particular community, understanding the history of that community, because all of these things then connect to potential—underline potential—sociopsychological contingencies that might impact how they navigate your classroom.
I'm not saying these things are definite, but I'm saying they're possible. And so if we are going to be prepared to design curricula around that, then we need to understand what they are. And this is part of the scholarship that I'm making the case that should be taught prior to getting there.
At the time I wrote it, I think there was a little bit of an appetite in the field for best practices. People would just ask me, can you tell us what are the five things I should do in one day. And while I appreciate that, ultimately, you do want something specific that you can do, and then test and measure, and—I was concerned that people were not willing—willing is harsh, because I know bandwidth in faculty life is not much.
There wasn't an environment that encouraged people to really take steps back and learn—almost relearn American history, the history of education, the history of how navigational capital operates between people of different identities before you start getting into how many clickers I should use, or should groups be four, or five, or—that kind of stuff. And I was also trying to recentralize some names in literature that, quite frankly, I felt were being ignored in many discussions about inclusive classrooms.
Like you said earlier, from the K 12 world, where Steven, we've been discussing this for a century. We were sitting up here in higher ed and acting like this is groundbreaking. I didn't say anything new in that paper. This has been talked about. We just need to pay a bit more attention to this part before we start to get into the mechanics. The mechanics do matter. If education is, in effect, a dialogue and a building of relationships, well, there are things that go into that you have to pay attention to. And that was the key behind that.
STEVEN ROBINOW: And it's really the building of relationships there that's key to this whole thing. You start with this section on self-awareness. So the first piece is really becoming aware of yourself, and your background, and as you said, your biases and motivations. Let's talk a little bit about empathy.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: It's a relatively broadly construed version of empathy. I think a lot of people, when they think about empathy, you might—I could be wrong about this, but a lot of times, when it is brought up to me in conversation, it's with an individual and their situation. I'm making the case here that there's actually a couple of different levels to it. Maybe the best way I can explain this is to use my experience teaching as an example.
I enjoyed seven wonderful years at the University of Rhode Island, which is located in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. A lot of my students came from Providence, Rhode Island, which is only 35 minutes away, but in terms of the degree to which people actually moved around this very small state, it might as well have been in Canada. And I remember, when I got there in 2014, a lot of my students of color would tell me that, when they got to URI's campus, that was the most white people they saw in one space in their entire life. I'm talking about literally 35 minutes away.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Wow.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: So once you get over the shock of that statement, given the distance, then you start asking why. If you understand how people's movements are—so if your neighborhood school is four blocks away and your neighborhood is ethnically monolithic, if there aren't resources to travel far and wide for vacation or other purposes, and your life is mostly school and then the services that are provided in that ZIP code, then you can see that, technically, for many there's no reason to leave.
And if there's no reason to leave, what opportunities are there going to be that you will see at least visible diversity, other than what you might see in your neighborhood? And then, if you understand the historical impact of redlining, and restrictive covenants, and the building of the federal highway system, you will understand why many of these communities were and remained, ethnically and income-wise, monolithic.
So just to pause for a second, if I don't know that history, students might come into your class and performance might be what it is. If you don't understand that history, then your lens can quickly go to, well, it's just because you didn't prepare yourself well. But if you understand that somebody coming from a particular environment walking into your classroom may start feeling a reduced sense of belonging, may start making calculations of about who belongs in this space or not, may start looking at your body language, and your speech, and things in your syllabus, and ways in which you call on students, or the way—ways in which you give feedback in the class, those things might trigger fixed mindsets about who gets to do this in ways that you don't even realize, because you don't want to understand that.
So the empathy I mean in this case is the willingness to plant yourself in that, history to understand that, to do that reading. That's a macro level. Then, on a micro level, what are you doing to get to know them beyond just their student ID number? And I think the micro level is important for a couple reasons. Number one, we still have a relatively dangerous habit in STEM ed research, and perhaps wider society—is to keep reporting things along these ridiculous census categories.
I understand why that's done. I have done it myself at times, so I get it. But we have to be careful because what happens is you start grouping people and all of their nuances into the same bin as if they're all the same, as if all your Black students will navigate your class the same way, as if all your white students will navigate your class the same way, as if all your Hispanic or Native American—and don't get me started on Asian, whatever the hell that means.
So in getting to know them beyond that ID number gets at some of that nuance in ways that you won't if all you're getting is that five-category disaggregated spreadsheet. So I've asked them to add reflection assignments. I want to get to know who they are. Speaking of podcasts, I use “This I Believe,” from NPR. I use that prompt. And they start looking in their soul and talking about being first generation, talking about coming from West Africa, talking about being multiracial, talking about being children of divorcees.
What they write is so beautiful that, after that point, you can't go back to seeing this as just a random class of—grouping of students. It doesn't necessarily mean I have to get into that back and forth about each essay. They just share it. That's actually enough to get the empathy going because you're seeing things about their humanity that you can't with a class roster.
STEVEN ROBINOW: So you're seeing their humanity. I like that. Learning to care about the students and see them as individuals, and recognize that everybody isn't the same, everybody is an individual and unique. So let's talk about classroom climate. So there's three other pillars of this model: classroom climate, pedagogy, and network leverage. Let's walk through those a little bit.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: The way the model's constructed, the self and empathy—so understanding yourself and developing empathy, the key elements—put together, they really constitute how you build relationships with the students, with whoever's in your classroom. The nature of those relationships is what determines what I do to create classroom climate, to make specific pedagogical strategic decisions, and the ways in which I leverage other parts of the campus to enhance the inclusive outcomes of the class. And the reason why it's structured that way is because, even though now I've taught that class for seven years, it's never been the same class—
STEVEN ROBINOW: Mm-hmm.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: —because they've been different students.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Mm-hmm.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: The eCampus [INAUDIBLE], but there are 155 different individuals. And so while there has been relatively significant overlap on what I've done during the semester, every semester I do look at each essay, I do look through the roster, I do look at names, I look at where they've come from, I look at all of those things. On top of that, getting to know them in that first week, week and a half, that is what drives certain decisions that are made during the classroom time, and that is not necessarily going to be the same.
And that's important because I don't want people to feel like it's a sort of a plug-and-play thing. No matter what, here's the 15 things I'm going to do. So sometimes people would say, hey, Bryan, I want to stop by a class to see how it is. I say, well, we have an open-door policy, so come by any time.
We leave one seat [? for you, ?] and that's it. But just know that, depending on what day you come, we could be doing one of 100 things. So climate is a very intangible thing, and I think it's something perhaps a lot of professors are uncomfortable with because it doesn't fit itself very neatly in a regression model or an Excel spreadsheet. But I am heavily influenced by colleagues in theater and the arts who have actually worked with me on being able to read a room, to look at nonverbals, to understand body language—but also orally, the kinds of things—I think [INAUDIBLE] [? series ?] and talk about instructor talk—just all those little things, paying attention to all those little things that can either confirm a fixed mindset or disabuse it.
So there is almost an overintentionality of how each class is thought of. Every 10 minutes is accounted for. That we were discussing something in class and you anticipate an answer may not be correct, I have in my mind prepared what I'm going to say, knowing that what I'm going to say—I'm going to say it in a way that doesn't deflate that individual.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Mm-hmm.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: I don't want to call myself an orator, but the way in which I describe things or explain things, bring people in—I think there is value in working on speech and being exuded in that passion about the subject matter. There's value in creating structure and rules, but still keeping it relaxed and open so that people understand that there's structure to what's happening, but they feel that they are fully engaged.
I don't do things like penalize students for having cell phones out, because here's the thing, Steve. I've been at talks—and I'm sure you have been too—where about 10 minutes in, all right, let me see what's up in ESPN. I think we're done—I'm not saying it's OK for them to do that. I want to actually challenge myself that, during this 15 minutes, you don't want to go on your phone.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Exactly.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: You don't want to do that because we've created an experience that you want to be a part of. And that's what I mean by climate. And so it's hard to go through the 15 things in this one hour, but I just hope your listeners get that—what I mean by it—doesn't mean you have to be an entertainer. It's not about that. It's not about the circus. But it's about understanding that atmosphere matters.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Right.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: You go to any good live play—you'll understand what that means.
STEVEN ROBINOW: That's right. When students are on their phone or they're distracted doing something else, the answer is it's because you're not providing them with they need at that moment at that time. They've disengaged. Or the other thing that happens, of course, is students have a family member that's sick, and they're checking on them. I've had that happen as—a student actually told me, hey, I'm going to be on my phone during class because my dad's in the hospital.
So there's lots of things going on there. Yeah, that's fascinating. Your proposal is novel to me anyway, spending so much time on yourself and your empathy. We've been spending time on active learning and what you do in the classroom.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Mm-hmm.
STEVEN ROBINOW: We've been spending time on those—as you said, those 12 things you do in the classroom—or 15—to keep students engaged, but you're adding a depth to that—
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Right.
STEVEN ROBINOW: —that is really important. So I actually think deep learning is a really nice title for that. Yeah.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Yeah. Go on. Go on, Steve.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Well, you also have this nice statement about changing what we want students to be able to do or know to who do we want students to be? That made me reflect, that comment. Who do we want students to be? Not what do you want them to do, not what you want them to know—
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Right.
STEVEN ROBINOW: You want to talk about that?
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Elizabeth Moje is a researcher at, I think, University of Michigan, and she had a paper called “I teach students, not subjects.” I was really moved by just the—it's a wonderful people. It's an ethnography. It's a wonderful paper. But just even the title made me perhaps reflect in the same way you just mentioned my statement.
And I think that transition from want them to know to want them to do to want to how you want them to be, that's the step that takes this experience away from an experience focused on developing experts—subject matter experts—to an experience that develops civically engaged individuals. And I think, at the beginning of this conversation, Steve, we were—I mentioned about this classroom where you shut the noise out and you try to imagine what's possible.
And in the faculty development world, we use it to backward design a lot, which is this idea that you have goals and learning outcomes, and then you figure out what you need to do to meet that. I would like to apply that phrase to society. In 30, 40 years from now, do you still want to be talking about gaps in STEM performance? Do you want to be talking about we need to be more inclusive? So if we are, we have a problem if we're still doing that 40 years from now.
So then the question becomes, what's the imaginary? If we fix this, what does the classroom look like? What do they say? What are the students doing? What are they feeling in a classroom where everyone, statistically, or for the most part, has a relatively equal chance to be successful or to become this better version of themselves? I don't mean that in a pejorative way, but I think you get what I'm saying.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: And the reason why that phrasing is important is because, a lot of time, I think—times, I think the intentions are noble, but these conversations get focused on how do we deal with the marginalized? How do we help these poor kids, these Black kids, Hispanic kids? And I think that's limiting, maybe a little bit dangerous actually, because it perpetuates this sort of deficit thinking about them.
But I'm actually thinking about the nonmarginalized as well. If you don't get a chance to engage difference in a classroom, I'm actually denying you a really important opportunity to understand the world from a different perspective than your own. So this idea of putting students together and engaging in these tough, critical kinds of conversations and creating belonging—I am actually not just referring to historically marginalized students. I'm saying that everybody stands to benefit from that.
In saying that, I am in no way being dismissive of the need to close gaps. I'm saying that both can be achieved. That's where I think the who you want to be part comes. When I look around and I hear the kind of discourse in our political spaces, when I look at the CRT debate, when I hear people say things that it's just critically obvious what they don't know about their own history, I'm not even mad at those individuals. I'm actually sad for our education system, that we haven't created the kinds of classrooms where that doesn't happen.
That's the kind of battle I'm interested in, to create that classroom that does that. So 20 years from now, my students are not—may not remember that the [? base pay ?] [INAUDIBLE] are complementary. Right? They can google that up on their finger in 2065 maybe by then, right? But they'll remember that person who showed them a different America than the one they lived in. That's what they'll remember.
STEVEN ROBINOW: That's interesting.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: And that's actually what I want the classroom to create.
STEVEN ROBINOW: So that's a super interesting idea, that the classroom itself is a—what term do I want to use here—that the classroom itself is not a rich environment. What do I want to say? It's an impoverished environment. The classrooms we have are sort of impoverished themselves because they don't see people for who they are.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Right.
STEVEN ROBINOW: And so it's not just the brown or Black students that—or the marginalized students that are struggling, potentially. You've got the students that are succeeding, but only in a very superficial way. That's what I want to say, that the students that are succeeding in the course—you're proposing that even those students are not having an enriched environment.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Exactly.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Those students are succeeding—
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Exactly.
STEVEN ROBINOW: —by evidence of the grade, whatever that means.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Right.
STEVEN ROBINOW: But even those students are having a limited—very limited experience in the classroom that doesn't really empower them or help them grow in a more personal way—
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Right.
STEVEN ROBINOW: —and that the classroom you're talking about is a classroom that all students can grow—have personal growth.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: It has to be. It has to be. And I think that's perfectly said. So the obvious follow-up from that point, Steve, then is, well, what does that classroom look like, and what are the kinds of skills that an instructor needs to have in order to create that kind of classroom? And that, just to circle back to perhaps how we started this conversation, obviously has to go beyond, I'm a good chemist. It obviously does.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Right. Wow. OK. That's been an enlightening moment for me. That's really interesting. It's really interesting to think about this in a much broader context than in just the disciplinary issues. And in all this, you're not saying that we don't need disciplinary expertise. We still need to move students from novice to expert along their academic path.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.
STEVEN ROBINOW: So I don't want people to hear the wrong thing here. I don't want them to hear, oh, we're going to change the classroom, we're going to do—but we're going to give up content. The answer's no, you're not going to give up content. You might be more thoughtful about the content—
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Right, right.
STEVEN ROBINOW: —instead of just teaching everything in the textbook, instead of, here's Campbell. Open wide and swallow.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Open real wide if it's Campbell.
STEVEN ROBINOW: I think that's fantastic. And maybe this is a good point to end this part of the talk. I just think that's a fascinating point that people need to think about and read. I want to include on the website a bunch of the readings we've talked about. So there's some that you've mentioned. I mentioned one that I think I want to put on the website as well, additional readings that I think would be super useful for people, and informative—and also to note that the deep thinking paper and the CBE paper are sort of companion papers really.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Right, right.
STEVEN ROBINOW: The CBE paper really has a pathway, and lots of links, and lots of websites--
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Right.
STEVEN ROBINOW: —and papers to read to help you individually take this journey. You can really—
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Right.
STEVEN ROBINOW: —do a lot of self-reflection and reading about empathy and learning from what you—the resources you provide.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: I enjoyed writing that with Dr. Cynthia Brame from Vanderbilt. It's a wonderful collaborator on that.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Thanks for mentioning her. I appreciate that you called her out there. I guess I'd like to end with just a few stories, although I think you've already told us some transformational stories. One I'd like to ask about is what was transformational, but you've already talked about some of your personal stories along the way.
So I guess, at this point, maybe I'll just ask, are there any other favorite stories you have about teaching or in the classroom that you'd like to—that are just personal, away from this whole thing that you like to talk about?
BRYAN DEWSBURY: I guess I'll tell you a story of failure that I had, because maybe I—it is my feeling—whatever little skills or goodness I bring to the classroom is because of when I wasn't good at it or things that weren't correct. And I remember one semester a few years ago, this young lady just looked disengaged from day one. A lot of moving parts—at that time we still had a textbook in the class. It was the online textbook.
And so there's just a lot of logistics in getting people access codes and all of that, on the LMS as well. And most people were doing it and in there, but she wasn't. And you would send your reminder emails—no response. And then I saw her in class. And again, you say, looking at those nonverbals—the sunken eyes, dropped shoulders, and all of that stuff. And I calmly went to her and said, you come and see me. I just want to make sure everything's OK.
And she would say yes that she would come, but then she won't come. And this happened two or three times. She would say yes and then she wouldn’t come. I'd try to encourage—I'm here until after 6:00 or whatever. You could come—doesn't matter—after class is done.
So I think, by the end of week 2, we get into a point now where [INAUDIBLE] missed quizzes and things, and this could really be impactful. So URI has—I highly recommend this for your school if you don't have it—an early alert system, which was an office that basically dealt with these sort of extraordinary cases. And as I talk about network leverage, it's good to have a relationship with some of these other parts of the campus network, so it's not just a really bad customer service system, where you're just sending people to doors with no direction and no understanding of what's going to happen there.
So I was actually friends with the people who ran that office. And it took them a couple of tries, but they reached out to her. They eventually talked to her, and one of the people who worked in the office called me and said, Bryan, I obviously can't tell you specifically what happened, but one of the reasons she wouldn't come see you is because you kept mentioning you'd be there late.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Oh.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: And she's in a situation where she's afraid to see men after a certain time. I really had to stop and reflect on how much it literally hadn't crossed my mind—
STEVEN ROBINOW: Sure.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: —just not even for half a second. I had prided myself on open-door policy and—I guess my point here is this is how biases work. Your lens is what it is. I'm not saying I'm a bad person. I'm not saying I'm a great person. I'm saying that my lens in life means that when I go into certain situations, especially when those decisions have to be quick, I can make decisions based on a bias I didn't even recognize that I have.
And so when, unfortunately, situations arise, it behooves me to take a step back and then start thinking about how I might—well, how I may have done something similar in other situations that are similar to that. But also, going forward, how do I make sure I account for people who don't have the privilege to be around even nonthreatening-looking males any time of the day, or how those things are construed? So just it, to me, is symptomatic or representative of what I love, but also I'm careful of with education.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: They're a bunch of humans. They're students, yes, but they actually are humans first. And so understanding how that humanity plays out in this new environment and thinking that each of them has their own unique history, some of which I don't know, means that I have to tend to my relationship with them—
STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: —with some real care. And that care is ultimately [INAUDIBLE] and ultimately, to me, is what teaching is. The technical part, I think, is actually easy. The caring is what we have to work on a bit more.
STEVEN ROBINOW: I totally agree. So a follow-up question to that story—once you knew that general information about that student, were you able to meet with her eventually and have a discussion?
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Yes. So what happened was she met with that office for a while, and through that office, I designed sort of a plan for her to get back into the course. She didn't meet with me until late in the semester. I didn't try to [INAUDIBLE] oh, no, I'm sorry. You can come meet with me now. I wanted to let her develop a comfort level on her own.
But she would come to class, though, and she would come to class, and she would engage, and she would—it was actually kind of fascinating. And she ended up passing. She didn't blow it out the water, but it was a nice turnaround. And I was actually happy to know that like it didn't involve me, just from the standpoint of—I think true empathy is this is not about Bryan. It's not about you, the instructor. It's about them and them finding their success [? and go. ?]
So that pathway to their success may not necessarily be through you, particularly when you make a mistake. So I was glad that the outcome was good for her. And we had that office that was able to shepherd that process. That's how that went.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Right. So you helped her get there, and then from there she was able to get the resources she need—needed to engage in your class and succeed—a lot of mental energy there. So it's reminding me of a book called Connected Teaching by Harriet Schwartz—who will also be on this podcast—on relational cultural theory, and again, all about generating relationships with your students. It's a great story.
Maybe the last question—how has this journey in equity and inclusivity in the classroom and in academia impacted your interaction with the world outside of academia? How has that impacted you of that? So I guess we haven't said this. I'm going to say this, because people can't see you. We're on the radio. You're from the Caribbean, but of African descent. And you're Black.
And you now live in the US. So people can't have seen that, so that plays into my question, I think, because, of course, you bring with it a very different perspective or very different life experience than many of us have had.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: So you're asking, how has it impacted my nonacademic life?
STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: It's a little hard to answer it because I—this is just my personality. I don't draw very thick lines between my academic and my nonacademic life, from the standpoint of—the Bryan you know in the classroom is the Bryan you'll see in the salsa clubs, Bryan you'll see on the volleyball court, is the Bryan you'll see [INAUDIBLE]. I don't shapeshift into different things. And I particularly don't do that when I feel that's what's expected.
But having said that, I will say that the fact that a lot of what I research, and teach, and talk about [INAUDIBLE] about is on equity and inclusion in higher ed—it is something that I am just interested in in life.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Right.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: It's a conversation that I feel and find that's—is evolving. You say that I'm from the Caribbean and I'm of African descent, and this is true, and that means that—I'll tell your audience. When I got to Morehouse College, I felt like an outsider. I felt like an insider in some respect, but I didn't identify with the Black American experience.
And I'll tell you a little secret. I used to actually go across town to Emory University, if you know Atlanta well, because they had a large international student population, and it just—it felt more my speed. At least initially, it felt more my speed. I guess, both in my professional life and in my nonprofessional life, I am looking forward to this equity and race conversation to evolve beyond these groups. I find myself shuddering a little bit every time I read the word Black or white, because I feel kind of force-fed into a category that I know—I get why I'm there.
I get the boxes I check, but it's not that simple. And sometimes the space isn't being given to voices for whom it's not that simple. As a father of two boys who are half-Jewish and half-Trinidadian, it's even less simple. My life is a life where it's a question to be answered in some way as we go forward. And I think, as I pursue these questions professionally, I'm also kind of answering questions maybe in my own evolution as a mutt of various identities—all of which I'm proud of. [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah, yeah.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: —complain. That’s just what it is. Thanks for that.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah—no, very interesting. And then that answers the earlier question I had about a seat at the table for Elijah. I wanted to know where that came from, but now I know.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Now you know.
STEVEN ROBINOW: Now I know. I didn't know how many people would catch that reference. I did. The question was about the lens of equity and inclusivity that you've developed professionally, and how that has influenced your life. It's interesting how our professional—what we do professionally, right?
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Mm-hmm.
STEVEN ROBINOW: And you go out on the street or you take your kids to the park, and it has an impact. You take it with you. Like you said, you are who you are.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN ROBINOW: And I wouldn't want anybody to be anything but that. I think we covered all my questions. I am going to thank you, Bryan, so much for your time that you spent with me today. I look forward to your future work on equity, inclusivity, and empathy, and how we're going to change things in the near future. These are issues—like you said, in 20 years, this needs to be different.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Right.
STEVEN ROBINOW: We need to not be having these conversations, and the only way to not have those conversations is to make changes now. That's, I think, the huge challenge. We didn't talk about how universities are going to do this, how we're going to—how that's really going to happen. I think we're going to have to have that—
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Look out for part 2.
STEVEN ROBINOW: I will look out for part 2. We're going to have to have you back to talk about that because we really need to talk about how universities refocus and dedicate themselves to undergraduate student success so that we can be in a different place in 10 and 20 years. Planning for 2040 isn't enough if we don't do something now to get there. Yeah, this has been a great conversation, Bryan—really appreciate your time. Thank you.
BRYAN DEWSBURY: Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
STEVEN ROBINOW: For more information about Bryan Dewsbury, his research, and recommended readings, please go to our website, teachingforstudentsuccess.org. On this website we will post information about a number of resources mentioned during the podcast, including links to Amateur Hour by Jonathan Zimmerman, The Sum of Us by McGhee, links to the NPR “This I Believe” prompt, references for backward design, and a link to a paper by Elizabeth Moje entitled "I teach students, not subjects."
Thank you for spending time with us today. I hope you have found this discussion interesting and helpful. Please share our podcast and website with your friends. We are very interested in increasing our listenership. Please spread the word. Those of us at Teaching for Student Success would love your feedback. Please contact us through our website at teachingforstudentsuccess.org.
Teaching for Student Success is a production of Teaching for Student Success Media, an educational nonprofit organization. Let's end this podcast with some music by JuliusH. Some of Julius's music can be found on Pixabay.
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