Viji Sathy on Purpose, Values, and Inclusion

On this episode , I speak with Dr. Viji Sathy about purpose, values, and inclusion.

Transcript

Rebecca Pope-Ruark:

Hello listeners. Welcome to the agile academic, a podcast for women in and around higher education. This season, I talked with my special guests from all over academia about purpose, values, and what it means to be an advocate in higher ed for students, for labor, for kindness, and for balance and self-care. I'm your host, Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark. 

Well, thanks for joining us today, Viji. How are you? 

Viji Sathy:

Good. Thank you for having me. I'm I'm excited. We're about to go into a weekend, so that's always a good feeling. 

RPR:

Yes, it's good to have a week behind us and ready to go into the weekend. So why don't you just start out by telling the audience a little bit about yourself? 

VS:

Sure. I'm a professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And, um, I'm also the associate Dean for Evaluation and Assessment in our Office of Undergraduate Education. My background is in quantitative psychology, so I love all things measurement. And of course I have a passion for teaching and, and specifically inclusive teaching. So I do a lot of writing and speaking about that topic. 

RPR:

And we're gonna jump right into that. So what would you say is your purpose at higher education? 

VS:

Well, let's start with an easy question, right? 

RPR:

I know we're jumping right into the deep end. 

VS:

Yeah. I, I have to say, I think about this a lot. Um, it's sort of one of my, like north stars in terms of like, thinking about what projects I'd like to take on. Um, I'm in a great place in my career now where, um, I do feel like I and say no from time to time because I don't have the bandwidth for everything. Um, so this question of purpose, I think, is really helpful to sort of realign to what it is you want to accomplish. I think from a variety of experiences I've had and in my professional training, um, I really see my purpose as, as somebody who has had a lot of just has worked really hard in, um, the teaching space. Um, learning about teaching and now thinking about, um, educating and thinking about like faculty development in general, sort of married with my assessment expertise, really thinking about measurement and aspects of evaluation. 

Um, my another big hat I wear is I'm a program evaluator. So I'm always thinking about like systems and, um, not just measurement, but just sort of the infrastructure behind things. And so I think that intersection for me is really in the teaching practice in addition to assessment expertise, and then also thinking about academic leadership and sort of policy and, and places in which we can facilitate potentially better practices all around. That's where I love to be in that sort of space that, that is navigating all of those things, building tools, harnessing data. That's, that's really my jam. 

RPR:

That's such a, an interesting intersection of all those different kind of pieces of identity into something that's really uniquely yours. 

VS:

Yeah. I know. And, and all along in my career, I I've always felt like, do I need to focus on one? Like, do I have to give up, um, the assessment and focus only on teaching or, and I've just had such a, a privilege to be able to do all of them and they complement each other really well. So I, I like that. I, I can keep all of them going and, and that I'm every, every part of it informs another part that I'm working on. 

RPR:

Is there a favorite part of that work that you have, the, the thing that you most want to jump into in the morning? 

VS:

That's a great question. More recently, I have just loved the sort of systems-level thinking, really just the, the idea of say incentivizing good practices and, or building tools that help people reflect on their teaching, um, or help people assess how their teaching is going. I think those are the kinds of things that, that really excite me these days. They're, it's like a good creative space and I like that. 

RPR:

So I'm a qualitative researcher by training. So it's always interesting to think about how we look at teaching assessment program assessment from a quantitative perspective. So can you just tell us a little bit more about that? 

VS:

Sure. So yeah, so my training, as I mentioned, I'm a quantitative psychologist. However, one thing that I really appreciated about my training is that my, um, for my master's project, I was very curious about program evaluation. And I also wanted to learn about qualitative methods. So I did a series of interviews and I coded those interviews. So along the way, learning about qualitative methods and, uh, and eventually using mixed methods in my master's project. And I, I, I mean, I think it's just such a, it's a wonderful thing to be able to do both. And I understand that there's some areas that lend itself well to one or the other more, but I really appreciate when we can do both really well or when we can see the places where qualitative can enhance quantitative and quantitative can enhance qualitative. I could just paint the richer picture than I think one on its own can do, but I, I naturally gravitate towards some of the quantitative work, you know, I'll be honest, because I, I think in some ways it's a little bit easier than qualitative work can be. 

And I, I mean, I just, like I said, I have such an appreciation for it because I had to do it and thinking about the code it's in sort of the reliability around the coding. Like there's just so much in there that I, you know, for me like having a survey or, you know, like analyzing the quantitative results, that's pretty straightforward once you've identified what it is you want to measure. And especially if they're existing measures that are quite good at it. So I think in some ways I think it's a little bit of a cop out just because it can be very satisfying to, to get things done pretty quickly, but truly I, I like it when we can bring voices into the mix and also just have a really much richer picture of explaining how something is working and why it might be working. 

RPR:

Right. And I think that bringing voices in, as you said, is becoming more and more important in the work that we do. Um, especially around teaching and learning assessment, thinking about, we see it a lot in mental health space, right? Like bringing voices into that. So it's not, we're just not looking at statistics. We're looking at people and we're understanding where they're coming from and what their stories are and how they impact the work that we're doing so that we can do the best work for them. 

VS:

Yeah, absolutely. And this is something I always harp on with my students. When I talk about, you know, I teach an introductory statistics class and you know, their impression often is that like that their job is to produce a number. And I, and I always say, no, your job is to tell a story. And the number just supports the story. And, you know, I often tell them like, that's the, the number is just the spice potentially, but the, but the actual dish is the story that you're sharing. And sometimes the story is more compelling when there's a, a voice behind it. Sometimes it's more compelling when there's an image behind it. And so I just think of it as a tool and the toolkit to be able to work with numbers in that way. 

RPR: 

So I'm curious, we're jumping into a, something that's connected to your purpose, but I'm curious what professional or personal values are at play for you when you do the work that you do. 

VS:

I think a lot about inclusion broadly. I know that for some inclusion can be very specific to one, one particular aspect of identity, like race or gender. For me, I, I think of it as a variety of characteristics and even personality qualities that, that a person comes into a space with. Um, and I think for me, what I consider often is who's not in the room and why, and more, who's not speaking up or contributing and why, and, and how do we start to either invite people into spaces or understand a landscape a little bit better, always thinking in the back of my, my mind about who might not be part of the conversation and needs to be part of the conversation. So I think those are the kinds of things that I'm, I'm thinking about and trying to sort of build infrastructure around. 

RPR:

How do you bring other people into that work and into that the inclusion work as something that you do through teaching or assessment or other areas, how do you get other people excited about that?

VS:

Yeah, that's a good question. I think a lot of times you, it's easy to find the people who are excited and then they find you and then you can just be so happy together that you're excited about the same thing. The harder work is really to find the people who may be a little resistant to the ideas or who are critical of, of the work. I think that is very challenging. Um, recently I wrote an article with a colleague in our English and comparative literature area on the word rigor. And our take on that piece was basically that rigor is a, um, it's a form of exclusion and is often code for really thinking about keeping people out. You know, I've been talking about inclusive teaching for years now, and generally speaking, there's not a whole lot of critique of it at this rigor piece really brought a lot of people out into the conversation that I hadn't engaged with directly. 

And so I think it's, it's interesting to me that it depends on what you talk about sometimes how you might pull people into the conversation. I always hope it's a productive conversation. I always say like, it's okay if we don't agree. Like that's, that's no, my goal is to get you to agree with me or to think the way I think, but to just, let's all be thoughtful and mindful about how we do things and the consequences of the ways that we do things. And then if you decide in the end that you want to do what you want to do, that's, that's fine, but let's just examine it. And that's what I really want people to do. And in terms of the way I do that work, I often do my inclusive teaching work with Kelly Hogan, a colleague of mine in biology. And we, we say, we like to, we like to be those people who are just gentle nudgers that we're, we're the ones who will just say, what if you thought about this or have you considered this? 

And never really like, like in the same way that we think about our students, like we never want to blame them for anything that we might not see as a strength that they currently exhibit, right? We're, we're always thinking of them as developing and that we we're working with them in the same way. We think about our, about faculty in that way. We, we want to think about people as having, maybe not having had the chance to engage with some of these is and how we can help them a little bit more. And for us, a really easy way in has been to think about our personality characteristics. We're both introverts. And we, when we talk about inclusive teaching, we talk about how we came to this in our own personal experiences, realizing we don't always feel comfortable when somebody poses a question in a, a group and they say, okay, who's got ideas. 

You're not going to hear from us first. And it's not because we don't have good ideas. It's just not the best way for us to engage. And so we really try to think about a variety of ways. People can have an aha moment around that and then think, oh, well, for example, if I gave the questions in advance and people could about them, could we come to the meeting and now engage a little bit more deeply or differently with people. So just even some small tweaks that can help people think about being more inclusive in their approaches. And that's a really important thing for us is that we want people to feel this work is doable and that there's an entry point for everyone. And sometimes they're very small things like when you pose a question, just stop talking, just stop for a minute for 30 seconds. What feels like an eternity when you're asking the question, but just give people a chance to think and then, and solicit ideas to something big is like, you know, I need to redesign my course, because I realize I don't have enough assessments in there to help students understand where they, where they may need to improve. So I think there's something for everyone, but we really want there to feel, want, want people who interact with our materials to feel like they can have some small wins right away by adopting a few, few little practices. 

RPR:

We were in an exchange on Twitter recently where Josh Eyler said that he gives your Chronicle piece out like Christmas or like Halloween candy. Yeah. 

VS:

Yeah. Which is great. Cause I love Halloween and I love candy. So that's awesome. 

RPR:

Yeah. So what are some of the core themes that came out of that work, the, that you and Kelly share in that article, which we I'll make sure to post in the, that and the rigor, um, conversation in that show notes? Sure. 

VS:

You know, I think the key pieces here is that we, we really want people to think about sort of the design of their course as one aspect of really being in invitational to their students. And that can include like the number of assessments, the type of assessments type of readings that you're doing really thinking about almost all that sort of pre-work you do before the syllabus gets put together, how you're structuring your course, that's one way to convey your inclusive teaching approaches. Right? And then the other part of it is in the interaction. So it can be interactions you have with students in a classroom setting, it could be with the interactions that you have in office hours or in email or on your, um, running management system and even facilitating peer to peer interactions. The kinds of things that you're doing to support good constructive conversations among peers, and again, with the eye towards intentionality, really thinking through what will happen. 

And if I don't provide structure in the situation and the truth is if you don't provide structure, what happens is what we see in society. When there's no structure, it's the same, same inequities play out over and over again. So one of the things that we really enjoy is when we talk about this work, we say, it's really empowering to think about the fact that we can provide structure and the situation that might allow someone to feel like they can equitably participate or that they, you know, they feel that they're, they have opportunities to have their voice heard that they're, uh, they feel valued. You know, even as simple as saying, you know, we, we feel you belong, like just telling our students that and putting it on our syllabus. There's so many ways in which we really can do a lot of work to, I think in some ways undo some, some terrible damage that our students hear and experience in other settings. 

We, I, by and large, I think educators are some of the more hopeful people I've ever encountered. We do such good work for our students, but sometimes we hide it. We, we don't always come forward with why we've done the things we've done. So part of this is a little bit more of a, a like a educational campaign of like, this is why we've structured the course this way. This is the, the transparency we want to offer. So this students are saying, oh, I get why you have weekly quizzes. So now I don't have to cram before the exam because I feel like I'm kind of on top of it already. 

RPR:

I think that's really interesting. Cause I've actually seen in a few places where institutions are adding belonging to their DEI work as a title, really actually thinking about how our students feel like they're fitting in or finding, finding their groups or finding the things that they're passionate about so that they are, it's a student success measure too, to be able to understand that. So where does this passion that you have for inclusive teaching and student belonging? Where does that come from? 

VS:

I, I think about that actually a lot. Think a good part of it comes from my own experience as a feel excluded and really having difficulty navigating certain aspects of educational experiences because in many ways I'm, I'm a first generation college student. I did, my dad did get a college degree in India. So it's a little bit different. Neither, neither of my parents could offer some guidance to me about like, like how to do college when I got to college and ever since really any level of education, I've always felt like I'm kind of figuring things out and never really quite sure if I was doing it right. I don't know. I just think sometimes why is that, that way? Why have we not laid out more ways for people to understand what their options are, how they might explore their careers? You know, I'm, I'm helping our campus build what we call a university one oh one college thriving course. 

And I was just working with a team on a module about academic planning, career planning. And uh, we've had students watch videos about sort of how circuitous this process can be. That it's not necessarily a linear, like I have an idea I'm going to be this and then I'm going to go straight there and do that thing. You know, my own experience was that I, I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor. I sort of like told myself that all growing up when people would ask me, what do you want to be? What do you want to be like you, this narrative of like, that's my plan, because I've told it to a million people and everybody's like, that sounds great. Like, you know, it's a very, um, concrete thing, but the truth is like, it's only like one of about five professions. I sort of understood as a, as a young person and it seemed respected and it seemed like you had to work hard and study hard to do it, which I felt like I was capable of doing, but it wasn't until I got to college that I realized, you know, the courses that you have to take to be a, to be pre-med for example, aren't that enjoyable to me, there was just a lot of doubt in my mind about that process. 

And then I, when I realized, oh no, that's not at all. What I want to do. I, I had this real crisis of what is it that I do wanna do and how do you pick? And, and so I, I don't know, just thinking about planning this course with students, I think maybe the goal is to just help them understand that this isn't like a, a direct path and that it's okay to quit often and regularly what one wants to do. And that, you know, the, the more important question is what, what are your values and where do your strengths lie and perhaps what, what drives joy for you. But, but perhaps that's just having a good, comfortable job that allows you to do other things too. Right? So I think those are the kinds of things that I really enjoy thinking about out is helping, helping the next group, maybe have a little less of a struggle with some of these things, um, normalizing some of that exploration, but at all, at the same time, recognizing that there are people for whom that exploration has to be a very short path because they have to get to a career pretty quick, um, or they have to make money very quickly or something along those lines, um, that there is some privilege and sort of meandering to a career. 

And so, I don't know, there's just a lot, there's a lot wrapped up in that, in those thoughts. But I think in general, when I think about undergraduate education, I really want people to understand what it is we're trying, trying to accomplish in an undergraduate education degree, but also what kinds of behaviors and processes are perfectly normal during that time and worth sort of leaning into and exploring. 

RPR:

Right. And I think that that, that place to be able to have that questioning is, is often, it often is college and that there's a privilege there to be able to do that. I like how you mentioned value specifically, and even finding your joy, you know, that, that, like you said, that that ability to kind of explore those things can be a privilege, but it's also important to be able to think about those things and, and hinge what you're thinking about for your future or for the near future kind of really on those values. Do you talk to students about kind of identifying their values or how does that play into the work? 

VS:

Yeah, in fact, in this course, we actually have them go through an exercise where they list their values, that we, we really encourage them to, this is sort of the introduction of that framework. And then we ask them to combat often and, and revisit those ideas that they might evolve over time and to think about careers broadly. And, you know, I think it's a really exciting course to build out. And I, I was part of a committee about nine of us on a general education curriculum revision committee. And one of the outcomes of this new curriculum was to create eight, a course like this, a one credit hour class that was going to help students, not just navigate our university, the research university, the kind of experiences that they have access to at the university, but to, to do some of this sort of exploration and self-awareness kind of exercises, hopefully to be more attuned to what they would like to do and, and not to sort of bump into things accidentally, but, but to actually think more intentionally about how to create a path that makes sense for them and to understand the nuts and bolts like, yes, we want you to know what the libraries are and what you can do with the libraries. 

But we also want you to think about your personal values and how you might bring them in. There's no right or wrong here. It really is just a, a chance to carve out some time to, to give you some tools that you could visit over and over again and potentially over your time. I mean, I'm, I'm reviewing some of this material with a group of people and, and we each keep bouncing ideas off of each other about resources. And some of them, I, I think, gosh, I, I could have benefited from this resource just last week. So there's just so much here that, that we could get into. We don't have a ton of time with students in a one credit hour class, but it's a really, I think I hope it's, um, really impactful. We've got some early feedback from students in the course that we're piloting now that they really are resonating with a lot of the material and appreciative of it. 

Um, like one of the more recent units was a, a, a viral video that a, a student put together a couple years ago. You may remember it about being lonely at college. Mm. And just like how they expected to have friends and go to parties and all this stuff. And that really wasn't their, their reality. And so many students that I, I identify so much with that experience. And I thought I was gonna be like having a million friends in college and I'm, and my second semester, first year, and I still haven't found my people. So things like that, that I think it can be so helpful to name and to just be in a, a small group of people to talk about and say, oh yeah, that's my experience too. And, and not feel alone. And, and to your point to feel like they belong, because that is a fairly common experience. 

RPR:

I think sometimes too, that that's a valuable exercise for maybe seniors to do in capstone courses as well. I, to kind of revisit that and to think about pathways again, as they're about to make the next transitions really at any transition point that revisiting that information and that that practice is important, I think. 

VS:

Yeah. Yeah. And, and throughout our careers, right. There's so many times when we have options in front of us to go down a path, and I think it's really helpful to consider our, our values and, and our strengths and, you know, what gives, what might help re rejuvenate us. Like there are so many different things that are drivers at different times in our lives and just pay attention to those. 

RPR:

How do you think that those values that you have identified and the, the ones that you hold for inclusivity, how do those play out in the day to day work that you do? 

VS:

So they play out in almost every aspect of what I do. Um, it can be as simple as putting the learning management site materials together, um, making sure that it's very clear what they should be doing and when they should be doing it, not assuming that they know when they download a file where it's gonna go, for example, um, there's just a lot of like really trying to put myself in the learner's shoes about if this was my first time doing this, what might I get stuck on? And then asking questions often getting feedback about where are getting stuck and building resources around that too. So this constant feedback loop of revising materials, but then also in thinking about other work that I have. So I'm the director of this academic leadership program on our campus. And I work with a cohort of fellows who are in this yearlong program to learn about academic leader it, and in our weekly meetings, I think about how I facilitate in an inclusive way. 

I also try to model approaches that they could take with them to their meetings over their classrooms, thinking through embodying every aspect of what I do with inclusive teaching and every aspect of the writing that I do. And the me meetings that I hold. You know, just once you start to think in this way, I think it's really easy to start to see all of the places people get excluded because of a lack of structure or a lack of information. And that can be a summer swim meet, or it could be like a parent teacher. Like there's all these places where we just sort of assume people know how to do things and they don't. And when you make those assumptions, people make mistakes and they may not take advantage of, of it, or they may not understand the purpose of it. And that's really, that's sad, right? Like you carved out this time and energy. And now the purpose is just totally over everyone's heads because they got wrapped up in like being frustrated and not knowing how to do it, or focusing on something they shouldn't have focused on. 

RPR:

It's really powerful to really think about how we support everyone first generation. There's obviously diversity, equity and inclusion is huge on all of our campuses. We're all thinking about that. How do we make sure people are not excluded, that they feel belonged that their, their needs are met? So thinking about that, how has maybe the pandemic impacted some of that work? 

VS:

Oh, yeah, it has a lot. I mean, there's the practical pieces, like helping to guide faculty through online kinds of efforts, either teaching or, or technology that they're new to. But then of course in, I mean, I think the overwhelming aspect of this is that we've, we've all, we're all tired. This fatigue that's in is, is impacting everyone. And, and for some, you know, I like to say like that, you know, we're not all in the same boat when it comes to this pandemic. Like some people are on a yacht and some people are in a dingy. Like there's just all kinds of infrastructures that are unequal for people in this, in this time. And people are responding differently to the stressors that we have. Some people really can't take on extra work, and some people are taking on boatloads of extra work, but perhaps at, at a detriment in another area in their life. 

So I think a big part of this is understanding and having grace in a lot of such situations, really not jumping to any conclusions about why something might not get done or the intentions behind something is, is the way I like to operate. And then also just trying not to burden people with more work thinking about, I have a piece that I recently co-wrote with Kelly and another colleague, Nicole El se quest about grace, about this idea of grace and how do we do this in particularly at scale? So for large classes, how do we give flexibility to students without really saddling ourselves with too much extra work? Right. So for me, the work has been thinking about how do I ask people to espe some of these values and, and think about inclusion without putting a whole lot of extra in right now, because I understand that everybody's not got a lot of extra left in them. So I'm grateful for whatever anyone can do, but I mostly want to just try to help find solutions that are easy and that will accomplish the mission without giving, feeling like a ton of work, 

RPR:

As awful as the pandemic is, it's given us a window into mental health and into taking care of each other in ways that we haven't necessarily always done thinking about, you know, we're talking about grace and joy and flourishing words that might have been considered. Woo woo. Our new agey earlier on we're now actually bring you those into the conversations when we're talking about flexibility and inclusion and that's, I think that's really interesting. 

VS:

Yeah. I think it is too. And I, I think it's exciting to think about, I know that people aren't ready to, to move on yet and I get that, but I do think there are some things we've learned how to do pretty well in this time. I'll give you an example, the zoom, just zoom stuff, right? Like, and now it's just a tool in our toolkit. Like, oh, we can't meet on campus or we can't, I office hours after hours, I'll just hop on a zoom call with you and we'll talk it through, you know, that there's sort of these things that they were available before all of this, but people just didn't feel very comfortable using them and norm wasn't there. And now the norm is there. And now I have, like, I can have this meeting with these fellows in academic leadership program and somebody can say, I can't make it to the meeting. Can I zoom in? And we can say, absolutely you can zoom in. Right. So there's certain even accommodations that we're able to make much more seamlessly now because we have the experience and it's truly not a ton of extra work. And, and it means that we can be more inclusive. The, I can go to a, I can go to a meeting while picking up my kids from school, for example, because I can just listen in on the conversation and you know, every now and then if I need to say something, I'll stop and we'll talk about it. But for the most part, I don't have to feel like I've got to look at someone's notes afterwards to figure out what was discussed or, you know, there's there, it, it has opened up a lot of possibilities, I think. And I, and I like that being more inclusive might be one of the, the effects of that. 

RPR:

If you were going to give a professor some advice about how to move forward, being more inclusive in their courses, or even just their approach to, to their students, what are some things that you would tell them? 

VS: 

Well, the guide that, that, um, you met referenced earlier, the, uh, advice guide that we have, I think is a really good, concise, fairly concise summary of some of these things. We do have a book coming out on this topic. Um, it's going to be with the WVU press this summer. So that's a, a much more, uh, likely commitment in terms of learning about inclusive teaching. Um, but we really did think about sort of big and small changes throughout that book. And so, like the example I gave you of just stopped talking when you pose a question is one of the things that, that we could do to be more inclusive. The other examples are thinking about when you pose questions, which we do often in the classroom, is there a prompt available to students to read? So is it on a handout potentially? Or is it on the screen that they could read? 

Because when we say it once a classroom, there are a variety of people who, um, may miss it. They may miss it because they tuned out for a second or the people around them were chatting about something and they couldn't hear what you said, or, um, maybe they're a multilingual student and it just went fast for them. And they need to be able to read the prompt, to be able to digest the question. There's a variety of reasons why it's helpful to have a visual prompt in addition to the oral prompt. So thinking through things like that, and then what you learn is by doing that, you solve a variety of issues, right? Like it, it's not just one type of student who benefits from seeing that prompt and, and having some silent time after a question. So we really try to think about those tools that can give you sort of the biggest bang for your buck in terms of approaches that you may not even realize are helpful to other types of students. 

The only other thing I'll say about this is that it's really important to consider, especially with faculty development, work, that there isn't a one size fits all prescription. You can have two faculty members from very different backgrounds deliver exactly the same approaches and be perceived really differently from students. You know, something as simple as flexible deadlines. If you've got somebody who let's say is like, what your stereo, a type of a professor is this older white man it's very SIM it's. It would be very easy for students to say, oh, that's so cool that we have flexible deadlines in this class. And then if you've got somebody who maybe is a woman of color teaching, the course who has flexible deadlines, then it could be perceived as they don't know what they're doing. They don't even have a deadline on the calendar for this assignment, not to take it to the extreme, but just the notion that, that it is received in the same way. 

That's not something that we can expect. So I always say with a grain of salt, like always consider, or the re these are recommendations, and you have to think about your own positionality and how that might be perceived. And, um, and for some, these are not possibilities. And in other situations, we ask that if you are in a situation where you are able to do X, Y, and Z, that you maybe go by professors such and such, because other don't have that privilege and really just making it norm to do that. So all kinds of ways that we want to prod people to think about the idea that there's no one size fits all approach here 

RPR: 

So much to think about in terms of really, really step by step, right? You can do small things, not just the large approach, the large problem. I want to switch gears just a little bit. You've mentioned your professional partnership with Dr. Kelly Hogan several times. And I'm wondering why that relationship is important to you and how it impacts your work. 

VS: 

Yeah. Kelly and I met in a faculty learning community, one of the first ones on our campus through our teaching center. Um, and it was focused on teaching large classes and, and we were a group about, I think, of about eight to 10 of us. And one of the exercises we did early on in that group was formed groups of three. And we went to observe each other teach. And that was the first time in my experience that I had been observed for no other reason than to enhance my teaching. It was not for, uh, sort of renewal of my contract or, you know, some high stakes decision. It was simply just to see how I taught and give me some, some observations about that teaching and Kelly and I had the pleasure of being in each other's groups. And we just clicked immediately when I, she teaches biology and I teach statistics, but, but we noticed have very similar personalities in that. 

We're generally pretty quiet people. And, you know, and to us, like teaching was never about like being entertaining or telling stories. And in fact, we were sometimes given advice to do that. And we were like, that's not us. And it would feel awkward to like, I, I mean, I could show you a funny picture on my screen, but that's a ripped it as I can get it all, doing something funny. And then when we started to have conversations, we realized, we really thought the same way about what our role was as educators and, and that it wasn't to be entertaining. It was to help our students learn. And we didn't need to be a certain way to make that happen. It was more just about the way we designed our course and the kinds of activities we were asking our students to engage in. And then we had the opportunity. 

I don't even remember how the first workshop came about, but we were talking about a few things and, and we put in a proposal for a workshop somewhere and we loved doing it together and we got great feedback about it. And then it's just fun from there. We started to do more of them. We basically ha have set up a business that we shared between the two of us offering workshops and, and consulting around this. And we, we compliment each other very well. We are very good work partners. And, and one thing that I really appreciate about Kelly and, uh, is that we just like, it's almost like we share our brain sometimes. And now we think about responding to certain things, but also just saying like, no, we don't have the bandwidth for that. Or that's the crazy time of the semester for me. 

So let's not, we just, we really work well together. And, and if she's got a busy time, then I know I can take on a few more things and, and I'll get things moving along and, and vice versa. So it's been such a great working relationship and a friendship. And the fun part is that we have no idea what each other's talking about in the classroom. And like, we don't know any of each other's content. It's all about the teaching approaches. And that's how we have a shared conversation. And, and now a friendship that's, that's really just been such a rewarding aspect of my work at Carolina. 

RPR: 

Those relationships can be so powerful. And so, so encouraging. They're not always things that, that we can seek out, but I think we can be on the lookout for those people who are kind of kindred spirits and, and think about how we might collaborate more with different people to, to build that, not just interdisciplinarity, but those, those kind of those deep relationships that really help us grow as people and as professionals. 

VS: 

Yeah, absolutely. And I think teaching is something we share in common among a lot of our colleagues. So it's, it is a place where we can, you know, maybe not our research like that, that doesn't always make sense to people to talk about if they're not familiar with what you're doing, but, but teaching is something we can, we share a common bond, bond around. And so it's an easier avenue for that. And unfortunately, I don't think there's a lot of places. Like there are so many places where there isn't a teaching center, for example. And so it can be harder to foster those relationships, which is why we love doing our workshops. Because if we go into a place, we try to connect colleagues who are interested in the same thing. We say, you are the resource for each other, like, keep in touch, keep talking with each other, keep trying things out. 

That's the other thing that I really love about working with Kelly is we are always experimenting. We're retaining, we're saying, I'm trying this, what do you think we bounce ideas off of each other. We make it better. And I, and I have this expression that it's the first pancake. Whenever we try anything, like, it's never pretty, but it's gonna, it's gonna get eaten. So, you know, just, just recognizing like sometimes it just takes doing it one time and feeling more comfortable with it and, and then improving it. But it's so helpful to have a buddy to sort of bounce ideas off of, um, and the more, the better for sure. But I think it's, it's a really great thing to cultivate 

RPR: 

Yeah. To be on the lookout for those people and be open to those people. Sometimes we may not appear to be open to that, especially if we're maybe more introverted or things like that, but really trying to connect to our colleagues I think is important. And again, it's one of those things that I think the pandemic has enhanced that we we've gotten to know each other a little bit better in kind of the sense of humanity, not just in of, of our professional relationships as well. Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for being with us today. It was, it was great chatting with you. 

VS: 

Yeah. Thank you for inviting me. 

RPR: 

Thanks for listening to this episode of the agile academic podcast for women in higher ed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. To make sure you don't miss an episode, follow the show on Apple, Google, or Spotify podcasting apps and bookmark the show. You'll find each episode, a transcript and show notes at theagileacademic.buzzsprout.com. Take care and stay well.