>> So this is Facilitating Challenging Conversations in the Classroom. Thank you for coming. My name is Shed, like thing in your backyard. I go by she or they pronouns, either is fine. I'm an Instructional Consultant at the Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning where I focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, also known as DEIJ.

And I'm gonna let my co-facilitator introduce himself.
>> Hello, everyone. My name is Johnathan Baker, great seeing some of you. I'm with the Drake Institute for the last few years. First, as a faculty fellow and then now as Associate Director. And I still hold an appointment in the Department of Statistics which is where I teach a class, fall, winter or fall or spring semesters.

Thank you, Shed, for this conversation.
>> Thank you. So we're gonna get started. I wanna start with a quick note that these materials I'm just gonna take this slideshow and drop it in the chat at the end of the session. The slideshow is also available on the Boomset platform.

And you can also just email me for it. And that Drake consultants are available and we're here to help you. So if you wanna continue this conversation, folks like me and Jonathan at the Drake are here specifically to talk to you about those questions. So I wanna start with a question for you all, and I asked you all to share your thoughts in the chat.

What are some of those issues that are on our minds right now, that could come up in our classrooms? So these big issues, I kind of gave a big one away with the image I used here. But I love to hear what are some of these issues that are on our minds that could become challenging conversations in our classes?

I love that one. Yeah, trans bathroom access. Definitely policing. Hey Amanda, COVID vaccinations. Yeah, I just got fully vaccinated. And it's, I mean, I'm so privileged to have access to it through OSU. Yeah, health disparities, social determinants of health. Absolutely, Angela. Yeah, let's get a couple more. Panel, yeah, someone asked can we post to panelists and attendees?

Not just panelists. Hi, inequities that emerged from language difference, affordable housing. Yes, we don't have enough bipoc students in our classrooms from to feel comfortable. Absolutely, a lack of demographic diversity students dealing with food insecurity, housing insecurity. Yeah, is systemic racism present in your field? That's an excellent question.

Yeah, internet, right? There's a sort of right assumption that if we're all going remote that we'll all have access to this technology that we need, but we don't. It's actually based around and a great deal around class. So, class is a big barrier to using technology in order to engage in the remote education and remote work that a lot of us we have to do right now.

Yeah, implicit biases. These are excellent. Thank you for sharing these. So we've got all of these on our minds right now, right? We've always got issues that are challenging to bring to the classroom but during COVID I think a lot of them are even more escalated or brought to the surface in a way that they may not have been for us before.

Yeah, absolutely access and student resistance to DEIJ discussions. So, this is a question. I mean, if you're here, you probably are already thinking about an answer to this question, but it's not a trap. It's not a trick question. Why should we address these issues in class? So we may feel scared to address them and we're gonna talk about that fear in this presentation.

But let's just start with why should we address these issues in class? I think we already know some good reasons why. Yeah, I like how you put that Lydia because they're real to our students. Yeah, and it can absolutely be linked with student success to have these issues addressed.

Yeah, it impacts them. Even if you don't think it impacts you. I love that Amanda. It still does. And nothing can change without us addressing it. Yeah, I love that Dan. Helping students develop empathy is a really beautiful way to frame it, to create a sense of inclusion.

And because to Christopher's point, not addressing it can actually be a part of the problem itself, which I think is a really great segue here. Thank you, Chris. Chris, I love this GIF. I always forget I put it in here. When you see students using strategies, you talk them out.

I feel so good. Why address it in class? Well, to model behavior to your students, all these came up in the chat. Remember, we're not just teaching content. We are teaching students to be community members. We're teaching them to be members of a global community, part of this world that we're living in.

So our behavior models that we expect them to engage with others in society. Also to offer a protected space to explore challenging topics. So creating a space where students can talk about these issues in a generative way. And this may be, our classes may be one of the few places if the only place where students can investigate these issues in a critical way using disciplinary tools, speaking on that college level of insightful discussions and other places with their family, with their friends online, they might feel like it becomes a fight, right?

Or so dichotomies. Our class is gonna be like a place where they can learn to examine this issue in critical way. Of course to connect with our students as people as plenty of folks in the chat which is so great, because our students are dealing with these things, even if we aren't.

Or we're dealing them even if our students aren't and it's being honest about the faculty that we are whole people, all of us. Our students are whole people. So this connects to the framework that I want us to use today. Our pedagogical framework is going to be intersectionality, have you people heard of intersectionality before?

Anyone kind of familiar with intersectionality? I forgot I can't see you all. So let me know in the chat if you, yes, awesome. I got some yeah, people saying yes. Okay, if you're not, that's all good. We're gonna learn about it. Here's a little quick and dirty little sort of refresher on intersectionality.

If you give me time, I will go on and on about it. But just to put it to a couple of slides, intersectionality is a strategy to understand identity and oppression. And the idea is that individual identity factors overlap to produce experience. So everyone has a race, a gender, a class, a sexual orientation, a disability status, a citizenship, an education status, etc.

And they all come together to make you who you are. So, instead of us saying you're a woman, right? Or you are White. That's just one part of your identity. Intersectionality says let's look at all of these different qualities you have together. Because your experience, if maybe your gender was different, it would change the whole sort of experiences that you're having.

So I've linked here, this is a piece that I co-wrote with one of my colleagues about Intersectional Approaches to Teaching about Privileges if you wanna learn more about Intersectional pedagogies for teaching about identity. So, here's sort of like my little map, right? I imagine these qualities like gears.

They're all working together, your race and your gender, your class, your socio economic status, so many qualities, we all have them, and they're all kind of functioning together. And if you remove one, the entire map changes, right? It stops functioning. So I gave a sort of example of what my map might look like with a couple different qualities.

So. Excuse me, I'm female. But that's not the same as my gender. My gender is more along the lines as a woman or femme. I'm upper middle class, that's my socioeconomic status, it's a huge privilege for me, I'm a US citizen, that's a global privilege, and I'm mixed race but I'm white passing, a lot of folks see me as white.

So all of these things right, if one thing was different, the whole results would be different. If I was male, right? The whole map like might look different. For example, my brother and I share so many of these qualities, but he has such a different life experience because he presents as an Arab man, whereas I pass for most people as a white woman.

So that makes our experiences incredibly different despite a lot of. Overlap in our maps. So, thank you, Amanda for linking that piece. Yeah, Kimberly Crenshaw is the one who gave it the name intersectionality. And these pieces that she wrote in the early 90s, one in the late 80s, one in the early 90s.

Mapping the margin. She's really famous for writing this piece about it. But a lot of great recent scholarship talks about how intersectionality as a survival strategy has also existed for centuries, especially for women of color. All right, so what does this have to do with teaching and then you'll see here that I put that one of those gears to kind of show you.

Right, you're not a complete person without each of these qualities. So each of us is hold people each have these maps, and we bring our whole selves to the classroom. We don't get to leave. Part of this map at the door. We don't get to pluck one gear out and say I'm just going to be a woman today.

I'm just going to be a man today, right? I don't have a race. I don't have a class. I don't have a sex. We bring our whole selves to the classroom and students deserve to be taught to their whole selves. There's a sort of traditional concept of education as a neutral A political space, where people learn about things from this sort of objective perspective.

But that is a very privileged perspective. Because being able to say I can go into the classroom and let go of politics is being in a position of privilege, because the educational system itself is structured around privilege. So being able to go into a classroom and say, well, I'm just going to let go of all the feelings I have about the election or police brutality or the epic or the pandemic.

That is privilege. And so I wanna keep in mind that education and politics also reflect one another, and they're intertwined. We can't say education is separate from identity and politics. An example I wanna give Is the movement around Brianna Taylor. So I'm, we probably know a little bit about Breonna Taylor.

If not just give you a really short description Brianna Taylor was actually in her home in her bed, when she was shot by police and killed. And there was like a basically a lack of conviction around those actions on the part of the police officers. And so Breonna Taylor has become, one of the faces of the Black lives matter movement in the say her name movement which is specifically about protecting black women from violence.

So can we, let us see in the chat. Can we try and express; why do we think it is that Breonna has become the face of this movement? Why is she such a prominent figure? In this story about ending police brutality. I like how you put that Katie, yeah her case clearly lays out the systematic issues of policing in our country.

She was a helper yeah, she was an Technician the emergency room technician actually, she was never made out as a bad person right shouldn't do anything. And to Alexis is point because you're not even safe at home, absolutely, an innocent person in her home laying in bed, right?

So perhaps even sleeping, there's a lot of disagreement among reports about what she was doing. But yeah, that's beautifully put, she exemplifies how the vulnerable are being hurt. And so Breonna has become the face of this movement, right? At the same time, how is this expressed in our school system?

Well, there's this great report from the African at will by great I mean really upsetting report from the African American policy forum. That's called Black girls matter. To the our most recent point in the chat from Leon yeah, now kids aren't even safe in their own schools. Absolutely.

So it's this. These issues live inside our schools to nationally black girls are suspended at six times the rate of white girls. While black boys are suspended at three times the rate of white boys, so that's a funding from the department of education. I encourage you to read this black girls matter report.

It's really insightful though the information is really devastating. But I think it's something we all need to know. Pushed out over policed and under protected. There is a direct sort of connection that we see between what happened to Breonna and then the way that our school system works.

Thank you for sharing that link, Jane. I would also encourage you to learn about the school to prison pipeline, the way that our school system pushes people into the prison system. And I encourage folks to, yeah. I apologize if I miss or raised hand. I will keep an eye out.

But if you do have a question, please go ahead, drop it in the chat. I'm very happy to answer either now or when we have time at the end of the session. So, keeping this in mind so I've just told you right, I've just asked you to think about how we have a responsibility to address these challenging topics in class, because our students are whole people who need to be validated for their experiences but that doesn't mitigate.

It doesn't mean we don't have concern still. So I'd love to hear in the chat. What are some concerns that you do have about addressing these topics in class? Yeah, that you might offend someone absolutely that it can be counterproductive if the teacher is poorly prepared, right? We've all watched class discussion or most we probably witnessed a class discussion that just goes whoa.

Way out of where we expected right and we're not sure how to pull it back. Yeah. I'm concerned about getting through the material if they're not relevant, right. If it doesn't feel relevant to the course will students pay attention? Will I be able to get them to process that fear of not being taken seriously because you don't feel, it doesn't feel like your experience overlaps with the content, right because of white privilege.

Are being misconstrued. Maybe not all of our students are actually ready to talk about it. Yeah, maybe you have a couple of minority students who feel like they you don't want to put the burden on them to speak up. This is how to respond to students who might say something, guys offensive to myself or other students in class.

Absolutely. Yeah, students with opposing viewpoints might make. Yeah, my credit sort of create a division in the classroom. Yeah, Jay, thank you for pointing that out an article in The Chronicle about harassment that instructors have received for speaking up. Yeah, it's not sometimes it's not even safe for instructors as well.

I want to throw out there that it's good to know your teaching environments. If you feel nervous about whether you are safe in your teaching environment to say what you want to say or to leave discussion, it would be good to learn about what kind of support network you have in your department, in your programme in your unit, what support you might have higher up if you have sort of a line of communication in administration who will support you or will say, okay, here's the kind of content that yes, like go ahead, have these conversations with students and to sort of create a Safety Network for yourself.

In wherever you teach, so that you have instructors who can tell you, I tried this and it worked or I tried this and it was not and our supervisor told me not to do it. To learn from others and to have other tools stick with you. Yeah, and there's a lot of responsibility for us in this.

So I wanna address these are all very reasonable concerns. These all make a lot of sense. I wanna give us a sort of way to think about these concerns. I want to tell you, you can address these issues. Absolutely you can and here's how I would encourage, Framing it for students emphasizing curiosity, exploration, listening, reflection, dialogue, understanding and respect.

Rather than agreement or expertise there can be disciplinary expertise. But my point here is that it is not about getting everyone on the same page. And that's probably not your goal either. But students will often get into a mindset where they say I just have to please the teacher.

I just need to make the teacher happy. I don't want to get in trouble. Instead telling students this is not about everyone agreeing it's not about everyone coming to the same understanding or the same point. You don't have to leave this class mimicking each other's beliefs. The point is to explore.

It's to listen to your peers. It's to respect them. It's to practice respectful discourse with each other. And framing this through disciplinary skills can be really helpful by every discipline. Emphasizes these skills in some way. Listening dialogue, understanding respect, so anchoring it in disciplinary skill shows your students.

This is connected to your disciplinary scholarship. Being a good scholar means Exercising these skills. These are scholarly qualities. And again, emphasizing understanding rather than resolution. When I'm trying to get come to an agreement or trying to understand one another. Encourage your students to occupy multiple perspectives on the same issue.

So we are trying to just understand why someone would be on this side why someone will be on this side. Can we understand we don't have to agree but do we understand? And then of course, if we are not sure where to draw the line on conversations, but I would say, thanks, Michael, his conversations should be generative or productive.

It should be going somewhere. Something should be produced. Understanding should be happening, when it stops being generative. It's no longer an appropriate conversation for class. So if you're not sure quite where to put the parameters on it, you can speak to students and say, it should be generative, it should be productive, we should be understanding one another.

When we begin harming one another or hurting one another. It's no longer productive. And focusing on empathy can be a really powerful tool. So if we're talking about empathy, want to bring up Rene Brown, and he fans of Rene Brown? Give me a shout in the chat. Rene Brown says the power of empathy.

I'm in it with you. Yeah, Renee, I totally recommend checking out her stuff if you haven't. I'm in it with you. I'm not here to fix you. I'm here to feel with you and let you know you're not alone. So it's gonna be a really important skill. I mean for anyone, but especially for our students to say we're working on cultivating empathy.

We're not relying on sympathy where we look at someone we go wow that Sucks that seems terrible. I would hate to be in that position, but instead saying I'm sorry to hear that. It sounds like you're going through something really challenging. I'm here with you, what can I do for you or not even what can I do for you?

Maybe just sort of like I feel you, I'm with you. I'm here for you. So encouraging students to practice this with one another empathy. Why did that person commit that violence? Okay, what do you think was going through their head even if we think it's terrible, right even if we know it's.

It's terrible. Why did they do that? Okay, what does it feel like to be on the receiving end of that violence? What could that feel like? So exploring that everyone involved is a human so I want to share some strategies for engagement. And I'm actually going to start with some basic guidelines.

And then I'm going to ask Dr. Baker to share some of his experience, but I want to give you the these little reminders because I know that can be really anxiety provoking to dive into these conversations with students. So no matter the conversation, I am going to ask you to assess whether students and you are open to the conversation.

So are they ready? Are you ready? Are you okay? Do they need something before you have it? It's okay. Maybe you want to have this really productive conversation you create this beautiful lesson plan and then you start class and you can just tell that they're not having it that it's just not the right day.

And that's okay to say let's have it another day or you're not feeling it right. If you're not in the place to facilitate it can only be more harmful. Call for you to engage or even for the students. So, see if they're ready. See if you were ready and you can find it just by asking them.

You wanna have this conversation today, let them take an anonymous poll or do like a thumbs up, thumbs down. That's a great way to just let them have a little bit of agency over where the conversation goes. Be transparent about the goals of the discussion. So students might think now we're having this conversation about this challenging topic.

So I can say the exact right thing and get an A, there's a hidden thing the instructor wants me to say I'm gonna find out what it is. Instead you say to your students, this is not about the right answer. This is about hearing one another. It's about using disciplinary tools.

It's about being vulnerable. Whatever it is, you show them how they can participate positively so that they're not searching for that secret right answer that you want to hear. Like you'll say You know, they're like, I'll say police brutality is wrong, and that'll be the right answer. It's not really what I'm looking for.

I'm just gonna lower the stakes by letting you know exactly what I want from you. And maybe I'll say I just want you to emotionally process what's going on. Or I just want you to reflect on how you're feeling. I don't want you to deliver to me some sort of.

Deep analysis, when that's not really what this conversation's about. Anyone ever made community guidelines or discussion guidelines, or a classroom contract with their class, where you create an agreement with the students? Yeah, if you haven't tried it before, I recommend giving it a shot. And what you do is you say to the students, what do you think should be the guidelines of our classroom, our community, our discussions?

And they will tell you, students know what they want. They know what respectful conduct looks like, they know what disrespectful conduct looks like. And you can ask students to sort of, you all put together this big list, and you agree on it. You say, okay, we all agree that if you disagree with someone, you speak to their opinion, but not who they are as a person.

So then you can kinda hold students to that, you can to remind them of it before a challenging conversation. Keep it on Carmen or in your syllabus where everyone can see it. You update your syllabus if you want to, and remind students, we have community guidelines that we need to follow to be respectful.

Call in instead of call out, so I do a whole workshop on calling in. If you want to learn more about it, I'm very happy to share the materials with you, or let you know the next time I'm running it. It's a huge issue, is what I'm saying, the topic of calling in.

The basic idea is that we tend to call, we might call people out when they behave in a way that seems problematic to us. We shame them publicly, essentially, or we point them out in front of everyone and say, that's wrong. Calling in is instead when you try to create grace for them, and you assume they have positive intentions and that maybe it's coming from a place of a lack of education, a lack of experience.

And you say, look, I'm gonna give you a chance, right, to correct, to redirect your behavior. So a student says this thing and you say, what do you mean by that? Or you say, can you tell me more? Or actually, I think the respectful terminology is blank, that's calling in.

Calling in doesn't always work, because some folks are not interested in correcting their behavior, so you might have to call them out, ultimately. But calling in is a good practice of just investigating and trying to understand what the person's intention is, before putting them on the spot publicly.

And then don't talk around the issue, so I always talk about this. So here's how a lot of us have been trained to speak about challenging topics. That here's the point, and here's our way of speaking better. Something happened, it's a challenging time for all of us. People are upset about things, instead of, what would be better is to say, police brutality is a problem in the US right now.

People are scared about the pandemic, right? So speaking directly to the issue, using the language to describe it. Not that you have to align yourself with a political perspective on it, but rather to speak to the issue and not around it. Instead of, this can do a disservice to your students, where it makes it sound like what they're going through is unspeakable, it's inappropriate for class.

Instead of just saying, right, we're dealing with racism in our education system, or dealing with vaccine hesitancy, and how do we speak to that? So I'm gonna invite Dr. Baker to do some sharing now about how he has been transformed. So I'm gonna start with your first bullet point, Dr. Baker, and we'll go from there.


>> All right, excellent, thank you very much, Shad, for providing the overview. And I think for me personally, over the years, I've been that faculty member that wanted to have relevant topics, relevant ideas for my students, relevant data sets. So back in the old days, I would have my students bring in their cell phone bills, and look at how many, wait for it, peak minutes they used that month, right?

So that was what we did back in the old days. Nowadays, I kinda talk about the monthly bill. I talk about some culturally relevant issues, so as Gloria Ladson-Billings talked about, things that are relevant to the students, so the big football game that's going on. I've learned over the years to not mention the Brady Bunch.

That's kind of black and white television in their mind, so don't bring that up, that's not gonna work. But in all seriousness, I have talked about current events, some that are not as comfortable as others. I've talked about the 2016 election, and the way different counties voted compared to urban versus rural counties.

I remember very specifically talking to my students about the attack on North Campus that happened about several years ago, about five years ago, I guess it was. And it occurred in one of the buildings, and we were in the actual next building when it happened. So we talked about that, how's everyone doing?

So I've always been that Professor to kind of say, let's be relevant here, right? So I wasn't just away, just doing mathematics. And so I've also learned the process, to have some civility. So even teaching remotely, there's been this idea, let's have some guidelines, let's have some expectations, let's have some parameters.

So, and then, so how was I transformed? I've learned to kind of keep it 1000. Now, some of you might hear, okay, well, what does keep it 1000 mean? Well, keeping it at 100 is one idea, but I've learned to keep it 1000. I've told my students that at Ohio State, keeping it at 100, being authentic, I guess you can say, is that I may be the only African-American instructor that you have at Ohio State.

And I have to kind of balance between being myself and not being stereotypical. I remember very, very clearly once, when I told someone that I worked at Ohio State, and they assumed I was a coach. And not a math coach, right, but just an athletics coach. And I say, how have I been transformed?

I think by keeping it at 1000, I have learned to add an extra level of emotion during the pandemic. So I brought, as Shad just talked about, my whole self and my whole person, being empathetic. The end of May, I did say, is a very tough week for me.

And I did share some things with people, or my students, how I appreciated those who protested. And if they have questions, I felt supportive, or they have questions. In my class, we even took a moment of silence. So as far as the issue of how much time to take or not take, I tended to just, may take a few minutes, if you will, for my courses.

But also, by having the conversation, students knew that it kinda opened the door. And I'll put a little comment here in the chat as well, if you're wondering about that. I do recall, by bringing and sharing my whole self, this is back in the spring semester, about a year ago.

Yeah, about a year ago, that one of my students, students started coming to me with their microaggressions that they had experienced. So I remember a student very clearly telling me, hey, Dr. Baker, someone told me to go back to my country. And I said, looked at him kinda funny.

And he goes, yeah, I'm from Dublin, Ohio, and just the hurt That my students felt. No one's ever told me that per se, but I just thought that that's not cool, right? Just having like some kind of word to say I'm here with you, I hurt with you.

We will not tolerate that. And so I think adding that emotional component helped endear me to my students. And so, yeah, I think, historically, I was never really, I'd always be like, let me not talk about that side. Let me just kind of stay in the corner if you will.

And so I never quite did that. I just did that. I felt more like I was the, I've heard of imposter syndrome. But I had more of like an intruder syndrome like, hey, I'm not supposed to be here. But I'm here in this math class, so let me go are in this department.

I go ahead and teach you and and work with my colleagues. Okay, but now I'm learning to bring my whole self into the department. And then I decided to bring in during a pandemic so called anti racist pedagogy. And I think before I was always supportive of students who may have needed additional support one way or another, right?

So we have students who are overseas, students who were sent home. And I think the old self of me would have been saying, okay, look at the lectures online. You won't get penalized. And the more I thought about it the more I thought like that's almost being kind of pacifying them if you will.

Like, okay, yeah, this is sorry that you're inconveniencing here like, right so, but I started thinking about it. Some of these students were uprooted, sent home, uncertain of their return. And my TA has told me they felt stranded that they couldn't go home and quarantine for two weeks and come back and quarantine for two weeks later stated in Columbus.

And so it's tough and so if you're on this like 12 hour time change thing. It's like you have email from US and from your family and like you never sleep. And so you think about share talking about honoring student's lived experiences. They're not just a name that number or an ID number, right?

And so how is I transformed I learned to be take on an anti racist perspective of how can I be inconvenienced, right? So my students could still look at my videos online. But then I got up at 6:30 in the morning, which is 6:30pm for them and had an extra lecture for my students, where they could still talk with me in live in real time.

And the cool thing about it, I could see their, but you can kind of see what's in the background of my office. I could see their Buckeye Banners, I could see more about their personality. I could see like their roommates or parents walking in the background. They'd give me COVID updates like what's going on in China?

And you know what's funny is like, many of them has some Air Jordans. I'm from Chicago, right? I'm from Chicago. I didn't have Air Jordan since I was like my 20s. They own all kind of Air Jordans, right? But we bonded and I wrote letters of recommendation for them.

And I think it added an extra level to our relationship. And then if you think about it, where's all that come down to? Being human and being transparent, if you look at all those top of those bullets there, the remote learning and the pandemic for many of us, it kind of.

We may have had different perspectives on when we want to jump into remote learning, right online learning. But the pandemic has forced us to change the, wait for it math term, the slope of that trajectory, and it's gonna be forever altered, right? You mentioned the word Zoom. All of a sudden Cooper like people like booms and I know Zoom talking about.

And I think in many ways, the social injustice and social justice movement of 2020 has impacted our trajectory for how we deal with social issues in our classrooms. They were kind of more flat, but now it's gonna change the slope there, right? So a generation ago, names like Johnnie Cochran and Rodney King Marcia Clark became part of the lexicon today, concept's like nine minutes, right?

Andre Hill, George Floyd, that's gonna impact our arc as well. It's opened the door for conversation with our students to bond with them. And it's up to us to use the resources, to take a step. And then lastly, I wanna share real quick, share before I transition. Some of you know my kids or whatever but I appreciate that.

But it has one picture I wanna share about with them about them. If you look at the background, you'll see, well, that's my three girls. They're all teenagers. But you'll see on one side, the mural, like from the streets of Columbus. And the beauty, right, of the 2020 and all the things that we learned from it.

On the other side right next to it, you'll see like a boarded up window. So for me, it's like a reminder of the pain that we endured during 2020, right? The violence, the uncertainty, so as we go forward into this decade, we're gonna have the beauty, but we're also had the pain there.

And I think we can learn from both to go forward and help our students.
>> That's awesome. Thank you Dr. Baker because he gave me a preview of what he's gonna be talking about. But then he swept me up in what he shared, so thank you. Thank you for being so vulnerable and honest with us and for sharing, I really appreciate it.

Yeah, so I'm going to share some strategies for us to follow Dr. Baker's suggestion. How can we bring these to class, how can we acknowledge our students as human beings? How can we keep it 1000? So, here's our spectrum of engagement. I want to offer you that no matter what class you're teaching, there is a way to bring these topics to your class.

And sometimes it might be the best thing to do is, even if it feels distant from class content, your students need to process it or you need to process it with them, because it's affecting everyone. So what I've done here is create a sort of spectrum. And so whether it's distant or someone or directly related.

So if it's very distant from your course, something that you can do is acknowledge the issue. Acknowledge a range of reactions and help students connect and clarify. So rather than it being about using any sort of particular lens or framework or trying to look at a specific item or cultural artifact.

It might just be about processing and creating that space for students to share and hear one another and clarify the way that they're communicating. Look, what do you mean by this? Why are you having this feeling about it? Can you tell us more about your perspective? It could be somewhat related to class content sort of between these two polls, where you can invite students to understand different perspectives.

Or can be directly related to class content, which is when you use disciplinary framework. So you take the tools that you've been using through class, and you'll ask students to apply it to this experience, this material. So it really depends on how you see the topic connecting but the topic will always be connected in some way because everything is political.

I've also include this little spectrum of potential activities. I'm just gonna give you a minute to look at these activities as they range from anonymous to identifying. But you don't have to include commentary to identifying with commentary where you identify yourself and you share your thoughts. So give you just a minute.

Go ahead and let me know when you're ready to keep going. Yeah, I'm gonna explain a couple. Thanks, Larry. So give us another 10 seconds. So I want to explain this idea of the right and toss is I think it's probably the more mystifying one. On here, the right hand toss is where students, so this is how you do it in a physical class.

Students write down what they're feeling anonymously. Crumple it up, throw it in the center of the room. Everyone takes presumably someone else's, but we wouldn't know if you would take in your own. And then you go in a circle and everyone reads theirs out loud. The idea is everyone's ideas, get out there anonymously, which can then just kind of released sort of those initial feelings.

Or it can take down that wall of not wanting to share, because now all the ideas are out there. You can do a version of this online using a tool like a Google doc or something like Mentimeter or a Jam board. I would encourage you to check those out.

It's a great activity for emotional processing, when you can feel that there's some nervousness among the students to share. So, yeah, so I've put a couple other ones here. The other two I wanna explain the first is placing cells on spectrums or quadrants. So I will say okay the classroom is you can do this on like a document on the line.

And let students sort of post on it is, you create a line you say all the way over here is agree all the way over here is disagree. And then, you say, I believe and then students align themselves on the line or you can even do quadrants if you want.

You ask them if you if they feel comfortable to explain why did you pick this point online? Or why'd you pick this point online? And then identifying with commentary, I put debate in quotes because debate gets real tricky. Debate can really easily devolve into animosity and a lot of negative effect a lot of negative feelings.

But also students can end up debating issues which impacts them directly. So I want us to be careful about using debate when it comes to really any issue but especially these really personal topics. A couple reminders or yeah reminders before we look at some case studies or some examples.

The first is that you don't need to be an expert. This is the most common feedback I get is instructors say I want to correct my students. Or I wanna have these conversations, but I don't have that experience. So how do I correct them if I'm not an expert?

And the answer is you don't need to be an expert. The first thing that you can do is that you can invite students to respect the lived experience, so you can say, I'm not trans. But if we listen to what trans folks have been telling us for decades, if not centuries, we know that, that is disrespectful language.

Trans folks have asked since folks cisgender folks to not use that language. The other thing that you can do is that you can use empathy and you can say. I'm not trans but I think if I was, I would be very hurt by that statement. So just a reminder, right?

I don't know what it's like to be every different experience, but I listened to what others tell me about their experiences. And I trust what they're telling me take their lived experience seriously and I try to exercise empathy towards them. So that is how you can intervene even if you don't feel like an expert.

Incentivize rather than require engagements we can't make anyone do anything least of all our students, so we can invite them to participate. I was at a great panel earlier, the 11 o'clock, one of the 11 o'clock ones earlier, where they were talking about not making students turn on their cameras.

That's really important as an inclusion measure. It's important not to require students to turn their cameras. What you can do is incentivize them. Invite them, reward them for engaging in the way that you want them to. Like I said honoring lived experience, I always say do not rely on trauma for learning.

I know we get frustrated. And we might say I just want them to understand what it means to be, suffocated, right? I want them to understand what it means to have to cross the border as an immigrant person. So I'm gonna show them this thing that's very traumatic.

Trauma interrupts learning it doesn't facilitate it. And usually trauma leads us away from analyzing something we run from trauma. We don't usually look it right in the face and critically analyze it. So I would discourage you from using trauma as a learning tool. And then of course consider who we are conditioned to see as objective or reactive.

Or society has taught us that some people are more inherently rational. We tend to assign objectivity, neutrality rationality, with whiteness,masculinity ability, certain range of age. Whereas, historically you may why do we get upset when someone calls a woman hysterical. Because historically women have been labeled emotional and hysteria was actually a diagnosis for women medically for a long time.

That folks of color have long been considered overly emotional. Not rational that folks with disabilities are often considered irrational to emotional that they can't make choices for themselves. So the idea is question our own biases and ask, who am I programmed to see as objective? Who am I without even realizing it?

Be thinking of as reactive and who might I be framing as objective without really thinking about it? So I wanna provide a couple examples here. And let's just do one example. And I did have a sort of mentimeter, but I'm gonna just ask us to share our responses in the chat.

And I'm gonna do this one I know it's a little more challenging. But your classes men discussion when one student checks their phone and makes an announcement. The student updates the class on the verge of a high profile court case. The case pertains to the killing of a black woman at the hands of the police.

The police on trial are found not guilty of abuse of force. The rest of the class immediately expresses a range of reactions to this news. So, I've left for you to share in the chat. How might you respond? Whether some first thoughts that come to mind. So this is right, this is maybe the toughest.

This is the one I know. Instructors tend to express to me they're most scared of which is I didn't even prepare. I didn't even know it was gonna happen, but it happened in class. Yeah, objective versus reactive. Excellent.
>> Thanks.
>> Others.
>> So you're in the middle of your class about, let's say something totally unrelated.

Let's say you're not talking about inequity in any way. My life that net call in students from either reaction range. Yeah, maybe be prepared anyway I love that Primrose because if you have a concept that may be that issue might be announced during your class or on that day of your class.

It might be good to have some ideas ready. Maybe a write in toss would be good. Yeah. Let's talk about what's happening. Yeah, maybe ask you a poll. I love that. Larry, if you wanna discuss it now, are you are you down now? Yeah, can't happen to you during a break.

Yeah. So maybe asking them where they are what they need, maybe in an anonymous way, like a poll.
>> These are all great, right?
>> Yeah, these are awesome.
>> What you're doing here is because you've established a great rapport with your students, right? They're going to feel a little more comfortable to have this kind of conversation and one thing I was saying as, technology has evolved over the years is that students will have their phones at their hips or on their watches or something like that, so that so when the news drops, right, like, you know, you want to be the first one with, like the sports centre update or whatever the case is, you know, data that data.

So there's like everyone sees it, right? I was like, my gosh, and so What are you gonna do as an instructor? Are you gonna dodge it? I think this is the time for us not to be tone deaf right, so.
>> If I can correct you, if I can call you Jonathan.


>> Yes.
>> Maybe not tone deaf.
>> Sorry.
>> But aware of tone.
>> Unaware, okay, got you.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you, I love Cher for that, excellent.
>> I love what you said Jonathan about right not dodging it facing up to it. I love this James shared, get them to process silently at first.

So maybe just like, let's just take a second, right and then gather your thoughts. I'm gonna give you a minute to just like or let's do a big breath, and then maybe we'll do Then I'll say, do you wanna talk about it, right? Or if we are going to talk about it, let's set a couple rules, even if it's like three rules.

If we're going to talk about it, let's set three rules for ourselves, you know, be respectful in this way. So these are all awesome suggestions. I really love them. I'm keeping an eye on our time. I apologise. We didn't get two more examples, but they're in the PowerPoint.

And so I want to end with a little note about reflection and sharing before you start these discussions or even if you know they might be on the horizon. These are some questions you might want to ask yourself as an instructor. What's my investment in the issue? What do I want students to take away from engaging this issue?

And this is really important to know before a student finds this limit, is for you to know your limits. One of my limits on how students can behave, what's the minimum I ask, what's the maximum I allow? And then make that clear to them, and show them how to perform in that range for you.

So a little wrap up here. That's a really good question, Cindy. But let me just get to. Since we're right at the end, there's a slide here about resources. And I want to say thank you and I want to shout out I want to say thank you to Karen and, Who is doing our live captioning for us today?

So thank you so much for doing that Karen and for helping us be an accessible presentation and to their innovate staff for helping make this really accessible event in a bunch of different ways. Do I have time to answer a question? Is that okay? I'll go for it.

Okay, so Cindy asked what are some ideas for beginning the conversations? It's a great yeah. When students are unaware or don't care because privileges that they grew up with. So maybe trying to ask them to find the connection that they might have to the topic, or to ask them to empathize with those who do have a connection to the topic.

When we talk about when I talk to my students about performing race, they often think of folks of color as performing race and they don't think of whiteness as a performance, so I might show them a video. Like a funny BuzzFeed sort of video of someone who's performing whiteness making kind of a joke out of it.

So is there a way to sort of flip it on them and say, if you were in this position, right or what does your position look like to others? Or when I do intersectional mapping with my students, I ask them to take apart their identities and think about those different gears and then to say okay, like Maybe I don't ever think about it, but I do have these qualities.

So sort of asking students to try and make that personal connection and if they can't to try and exercise it let's see. Dr. Baker, what are your thoughts on getting students thinking when maybe they've never thought about these issues before?
>> Let's see here with the few seconds left.

I tried to maybe connect them to another event, I guess you could say when Mike Mason is more relevant to them, whether a big decision for them. But I will say this though in closing as we wrap up, not that I have a sign off or anything like that.

But I will say that one thing has helped me through the years and more recently with the pandemic and so forth is reading the news and reading the room. You kind of there's some hot topic going on in the news. Your students are aware of it, but yet you kinda read the room to see if it's the space or the time to have the conversation.

So, that's all I gotta say.
>> I like that. I think you can even say to your students why do you feel connected to this? Why or why not and sort of dive into it with them there and acknowledged. How awkward they might feel if they don't feel any connection.

Thanks, Primrose. Thank you. I just dropped the PowerPoint in there. I hope that helps answer some of your questions and you It's such a good question and I know we're Right at time, so I'm gonna I think let everyone go. I want to say thank you again to my co presenter, Dr. Baker who's amazing as always, and I hope you all enjoy the rest of your day and with the conference, the keynote