Burn It Down: Accessible Learning or Academic Surveillance? (Part 2)

Hmm Welcome back to nothing never happens a radical pedagogy Podcast. I'm Lucia hole setter here with my co host, Tina Pippin and our December 2022 Guest Sarah Silverman. This is the second part of a two part interview with Sarah. In this segment, we continue our conversation about practices and theories of universal design, access, and feminist pedagogy. We also discuss the ambivalent histories and ambivalent presence of centers for teaching and learning on college and university campuses. We also discuss our utopian feminist visions for education, and we share some of our top recommendations for listeners. Welcome back to Sarah Silverman, and to all of you tuning in to nothing never happens. This is amazing. And so helpful to me to hear right now, this semester, I tried a bunch of different sort of more experimental, like, we're going places, we're doing community collaborations, like sort of changing the structure of the classroom even more than I already had. And some of it was just complete faceplant. And so this, you know, penultimate week of the semester. And before that, there have been moments in my classes where students are just like, what were you thinking when you decided to do this or that? It would help us to understand what was in your mind as you did this. And I felt a little I mean, I felt very grateful that they were inviting me into conversation. And then like I was being lit on fire. So they, and I, it will, it will shape my pedagogy from here on out. And so anyway, thank you. That's, that's wonderful. I'm trying to think about where to go. Next, I want to make sure that we talk about Ed Tech and surveillance. Yeah, I think with the, you know, lighting on fire moment, a lot of what I think you've written and have talked about a little bit already here about what these forms of technological surveillance are designed to do is keep students from, you know, going outside of a very narrow path. And you know, heaven forbid, like, stand up, rebel, push back on the pedagogy. And so, I wonder if you could maybe just sort of paint a picture of like, the landscape of Ed Tech surveillance, what you're really worried about, and how you might advise some of us who are a wash in the sea of learning management systems and like remote proctoring life to to navigate this?

Yeah. Okay, so I wanted, you know, give, give credit to for, like, as I'm starting because I'm going to introduce this term academic surveillance technology, I want to give credit to the person who I think seems to have coined it, but then like, also comrades and teachers in in this fight. So Ian Linkletter I think coined this term academic surveillance technology. And he has also been in a legal fight with the company Proctorio for a really long time now multiple years. And today, as we're recording this, he's actually having one of his appeals heard in court in British Columbia, but um, he shared a couple of YouTube videos that kind of explained how Proctorio works, it's a remote proctoring service, it uses artificial intelligence to flag certain behaviors and actions that students might might do while they're taking an exam like in their own home online, as cheating as suspicious. And he you know, in in all his, in his wisdom and good intentions, wanted to tell tell people, Hey, this is what this product is doing. It's what it's watching students, and it's flagging, really behaviors that have nothing to do with teaching necessarily as potentially suspicious, and he was hit with a big lawsuit by that company, and they have not backed down. It's been really financially difficult, emotionally difficult for him. And so I just want I just want to, you know, raise awareness of this story. It's not just that these products harm students and target students like freedom and learning and try to box faculty into believing that they need to watch their students while they do their work. It's that the companies also want to limit free speech and free discussion about what these technologies do. And yes, that's a scam with within. And I also just, you know, want to want to mention that, you know, everything I know about this topic has been informed by people who have been really on the on the forefront of the discussion. So I mentioned in and I also want to mention my colleague autumn canes who I work with directly at UMD airborne but has also been really a great activist in this space. As well as a hold on I have written down that I want to, I want to mention, Charles Logan, because Gilliard che swogger, Lydia Brown, and my hillbilly also, who was a former guest on this podcast. And those are just those are just a few people. But a few of the people who have done a lot of work to, you know, raise awareness about remote proctoring these companies existed, these products existed before the pandemic. But I think that there was a real turning point during the pandemic in North American universities with their implementation at scale. So you know, there are definitely a lot of online programs that were using things like Proctorio, and another product called proctor you, it was a little bit more marginal. At the time, it was sort of like, okay, you're part of an online program, and you know, going in, that there's going to be exams, you can take them at home, or you can take them out of proctoring center, but just know, if you take them at home, there's going to be this little product installed on your computer, it's going to watch us just to make sure you're not cheating, okay. It's bad. It's bad enough, but it was not used at at the widest scale possible. When everybody transitions to emergency remote teaching, again, I'm thinking in the North American context here. There is this, like mass panic, and we were all in it, I think about, well, what's going to happen for exams, you know, if you're the teach the kind of class you teach in the kind of school where people file into that big auditorium and sit down with their Scantron sheet or something, you know, there's somebody there who's, who's watching you. So how's this going to work when when students go home, and have to do all this at home? This is when I think, and I'm working on trying to learn more specifics, I think that remote proctoring was implemented, like at the largest scale that we've seen. And the Cares Act, you know, which was this massive bill out bill, that a lot of money went to higher ed, through the Cares Act contained a provision that you were allowed to spend the money on services and products that support distance instruction, um, that, you know, and I guess the intention was that they wanted education to continue, right. So say, for example, you needed a zoom license, you know, we all needed zoom to teach or to deliver content or whatever it was, okay, so you could use some of your Cares Act, grant money to buy zoom licenses for everybody so that you can continue you know, having discussions and doing lectures and things like that, that money could also be used for remote proctoring contracts. And that it can be used for really anything that someone can make the argument that it supports, distance education and the continuity of instruction basically. And so you know, some really well meaning people like at my school, used it to do faculty development and to bring in speakers and get resources to help people adjust to teaching online when they weren't familiar with it before. In other situations, you can buy a product that is designed to spy on your students and report on their behaviors to their instructors. And I mean this is literally how Proctorio works make a suspicion flag and a suspicion level for different things that they do you know, one of the so one of the things that kind of came to light at this mass implementation of remote proctoring tools is number one that there but they tend to be biased and I'm, I'm going to be really careful because of logistics companies can be so I'm not gonna say any names I'm just gonna say the remote proctoring products in general, they can be really biased. facial recognition technology, which is used in some of these products is known to be very bad at recognizing certain people's faces, especially if you have darker skin. You wear anything on your face like a job or any other kind of religious headgear. It also is really bad in such situations where there's not adequate lighting. And, you know, these, these products, the way they work is that a lot of times, they can't verify your identity, verify your identity, right, they can't pick a picture of your face that satisfies the software, they can't match it with your ID or whatever, they lock you out of what comes next. Right. So this is a sort of like policing of the students even ability to do the work that's being assigned, assigned to them. And then the next thing is, the vision of integrity. The vision of, you know, upright academic behavior that is presented by these products is that there can't be any noise, there can't be any other people, they need to be able to see around the room where you are. So you need to pick up your computer and let the camera like zoom around your room to see the inside of your private bedroom, at your home, and all of these things, you know, are really invasions of privacy, but also prevent most many students from even meeting the basic requirements, to take some sort of assessment without being marked as suspicious, because you know what, when a lot of students go back to their homes, there are other people there, there are parents, there are children, there are their family members and friends. As another really basic example, if somebody is disabled, they might have a home health attendant, they might have other people who aren't caring for them, you might be caring for other people. The the idea that you're going to be in your private home, and you're going to be able to literally like kind of literally sanitize this way of all other relations and connections is the vision of academic integrity and upgrade academic behavior that is supposed by these products. And that is that is really incredibly harmful. Moving on to other harms that I believe these products cause is that, you know, think about the feeling of having a computer watch you when he when you walk through a store, or God forbid, walk down the street, and you realize that you're being watched, either by a computer or by a person. It's really distressing, you understand that your freedom is being is being limited. And in some way. If you understand how, specifically the product factorial works, you also might know that there's an actual recording being taken of you that's going to appear on your professor's computer later on. And this is I mean, I have a whole paper you can look up where I detail with my colleague, Adam Keynes, all of the harms, but I'll just add in one one more harm one more harm, which is, you know, not everybody even has the device or the place to do to do this. You know, digital redlining, which I believe was introduced by Chris Hillier does it term means that not everybody even has like the correct bandwidth to run these programs on their computer or Wi Fi access at all. Like, I'm pretty sure you can't take your remote proctored exam if you're in the McDonald's parking lot using their Wi Fi, so you don't have any at home. And you might not even have the correct kind of computer that runs this program. And so all of all of these things are just like I, the term I used before boxing students in like, almost no student can fit in this box. But the vision of what it means to be a good student offered by these products is yeah, you got to be in that box, no distractions, you got perfect Wi Fi, your computer works perfectly. Your body behaves in the way that we behave, we believe a normal body behaves. And only after you've satisfied all those conditions, can you take this exam without being flagged as suspicious. And that's, that's kind of what we're, that's kind of what we're looking at. There has been, I think, some positive movement on trying to get this stuff off campuses. I hesitate to ever say I'm proud of the institution of higher education. I am proud of the people at my institution who have made the move to more or less banned all remote proctoring from our campus. And the thing about banning a harmful educational technology is it's not a one time thing. Even though we theoretically have a ban, one of the one of the ways that this can creep back into your education No ecosystem is by having a side deal with a product that you use. So I don't know if any of you have ever assigned a textbook through McGraw Hill? Probably not. A lot of people do this, you know that they signed textbook through McGraw Hill. And then you can do readings and quizzes are little assignments through the this portal, it turns out that you can now watch your students on Proctorio through McGraw Hill. They made a deal together. And so the way that this impacts students is that, okay, so you have a well meaning person such as me, trying not to be co opted trying to protect students from surveillance technology. And so you know, we've informed higher ups don't make a deal with Proctorio. Don't bring this technology onto our campus. Here are all the harms. And they say, okay, yeah, I agree. Thanks for watching. Thanks for that information. And we agree with you. So no deals with no, we're not buying any of that stuff. We'll just come up with alternatives for our students. Okay, no, but we have what seems to be somewhat innocent. I mean, textbook companies are never innocent, right? But seems to be this other educational technology where students are just doing their readings, maybe submitting some assignments, reading, reading responses, doing quizzes. What's the problem with that? You know, the, the proctoring company makes a deal with them where through that portal, they can be exposed to the to the surveillance, and no one at the university actually even knows about it, necessarily, until we start hearing those stories of students saying, hey, like, my professor said, I can't do this unless they use Proctorio. Or maybe it got turned on by accident. I'm not saying that university oversight is like the best thing in the world, it can be really, really bad. There could be bad actors who think that they're helping students that are really harming. But in this case, it's it's like one example of how you think you've banned something and it comes back. It's like, what it's like Whack a Mole. But um, yeah, so overall, we have a number of institutions in North America that are starting to say, Okay, we don't allow this sort of technology, or maybe we don't allow algorithmic prep proctoring, meaning that there's no human involved, and you just have some software, if I can find students, I'm concerned that the discussion about this is starting to die down in a way that will just settle at an equilibrium of like, okay, we're not using it at scale anymore, but it's still a routine component of attending any kind of university. And I think like, the more students are taking classes online, because we will, we are reaching and we'll reach a new equilibrium where more classes then before the pandemic are being delivered online, where it becomes a sort of like, tolerated part of the experience. And there have just been like certain steps. Again, the CTL now has a page that says, oh, proctoring isn't really so great, even though we offer it through our school, here are some alternatives you could consider, you know, and, or maybe even the CTL now offers a workshop. That's like, best practices for equity when using remote proctoring tool or something like that. And this is, you know, and so this is where I would come in and say, unfortunately, we need to just say blanket no to this, you know, we have to say this, this cannot exist on our campus, because this is the kind of creep of, of the administrative priorities of the concessions to the various forces that want us to surveil our students is that, you know, this isn't happening at my school, but it's happened to my colleagues where someone comes into their office, they're an instructional designer, or a faculty developer of some kind, and they say, like, Look, we're not going to be able to completely dispense with remote proctoring. There are too many faculty that see it as completely integral to what they do. They're not going to offer online courses which we need, which our students need anymore, they're not going to offer them anymore unless we provide them this concession that they can do remote proctoring what I need you to do, employee of the CTL, or the Ed Tech Center, whatever it is, I need you to figure out a way to constrain how much harm can be done with these things. I need you to provide a web page and our resource and all of this material to make sure we kind of cover our butts and tell them hey, by the way, this isn't great. This is not good for your students they make the program makes a lot of mistakes. You could you know you might be fighting people for things that you know They didn't do it wrong, but the program will flag them as suspicious for some reason. And this is this is ultimately what I'm concerned about, like, I've written before about the approach of using some sort of harm reduction in educational technology. But I think that's only appropriate in situations where there is pedagogical value, right to the tool that we're using. And it has potential harms. And we want to make sure people are aware of those harms, you know, like Google Docs, right? Like, clearly pedagogical value there. It's good for sharing information, it's accessible, multiple people can work on it at the same time, you can drop it in the Zoom chat and instantly get, you know, students a file that they need or information that they need. Students can work on things to get it fine. Okay, is there potential harm of being involved in the whole Google ecosystem? And the way that they use that data? Yeah, so we should be aware of that. The thing with remote proctoring. And the reason I refuse to call it an educational technology is it has no educational value or pedagogical value whatsoever. It's not an educational technology. It's an academic surveillance technology. And so, you know, these are, these are the areas where I think we need to really just refuse to engage with these things at all. And this gets into another thing that has to do with CTS. CTS, in general, though, I mentioned it here is, you know, we're not tenured those of us who work in CTLs. But by and large, right, it's really hard to just say no to something. It's really hard. When you're making pretty bad salary, you're not tenured don't have any sort of job security, to when somebody comes into your office and says, I need you to make this page on the website, I need you to run this workshop, I need you to deliver this information to the faculty to say like, Hey, no, I'm like, I'm not doing that I'm not touching this. And, you know, I think that's why we need to work on collective action. On this, part of what I've tried to do is put out information through kind of like, official enough channels, like peer reviewed journals, and whatever about how harmful these technologies are, and how you can totally get by without them no problem. So that's like, one form of trying to support folks out there who like, they don't want to risk losing their job, but just saying no to to their boss, they need something to rely on. I think, like a major criticism I also have is that we have professional organizations of people who do educational technology and faculty development. And this isn't what we're talking about, unfortunately. And like some of the big tech conferences, allow Proctorio as a sponsor at their events, you know, so that this is what what I really think we need to continue continue doing is like coming, coming together to resist these things, making the arguments that will be effective to students, to faculty to to administrators, I personally, am willing to risk risk a lot more for this just because like, I just can't see, I couldn't sleep at night, if I was like the one who, like, was facilitating anything about remote proctoring. But I think that there's there's different there's different ways of addressing it. And I think we just need to keep the conversation going so that it doesn't go under the radar so much that it can kind of creep back in. Sorry, that was long winded, but

that's great. We need to hear this. A lot of us don't know that we're a part of it. And what's happening in our colleges and universities with this proctoring Well, you mentioned centers for teaching and learning. So I want to go into that a bit because they can be resistor co you know, co resistors co conspirators but more likely, more likely they can be carrying out the administration's work in a in a university. So how do you see an ideal Center for Teaching and Learning sort of in terms of feminist revolutionary dreams? What would that look like if it had that kind of center to support the work and the critical work that you're talking about?

Yeah. Okay, so I don't, I don't totally know what, what the ideal version is. So maybe maybe we can kind of move there by naming some of the issues. And I wanted to share a little bit of my own story of getting into this work because I think I think it helps, which is I was really turned on to this work like from, from a place of, I don't know, where I'm going, I don't know where I'm going in this profession. And I can see that so many of my fellow grad students, like when I was in grad school, also don't know where they're going, they don't know how to teach nobody, nobody teaches us how to teach for the, for the most part. And in various academic departments, at least the ones I was involved with, there's not a lot of community, there's not a lot of mutual support. And I found this amazing community through the Teaching and Learning Center where I was a grad student. And there was mentorship, there was really authentic, sharing and understanding of everyone's experience in the academy and life experience. And then there was, there was a job for someone who would, who would pay you it's very difficult to make extra money as a grad student. And, you know, so I was part of as part of this group that offered sort of like teaching support to other to other grad students, and we would meet with other grad students, one on one, we would do workshops and hold events. And it was really something that got me through grad school was where I like met a lot of the people I would actually call friends. And, yeah, and that was, that was really beautiful. And I so so I decided, because I wasn't all that interested in continuing in the field of research that I got my PhD and like, Okay, I'm gonna go and try to get a job doing this. And I realized, like, how much that particular program and group I had been involved with was kind of in but not of the university, to quote the under comments. And that's not always how. And but, you know, by the time I got to my first job, that job was in graduate student development. So I was a staff, as a staff member of the University, and I was responsible for this program that was called a future faculty program, right? So it's no longer are we just supporting grad students in the actual labor that they do for the university, which is, you know, teaching and research. But oh, it's a professional development program. It's about your future, your future as a faculty member. And as we all know, a vanishingly small number of those graduate students will ever obtain the tenure track faculty position. And so I felt like I was asked to become a salesperson basically have this professional development vision, which is, okay, if you go to enough workshops, and you work on your statement of teaching philosophy long enough, and you put together this portfolio, and you learn how to do the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and you learn all of these skills, that is going to make it more likely that you will get a job. And I could just tell, I could just tell like, first of all, that's not true. Many of my students in that program to not get jobs, obviously, they were highly qualified, dedicated teachers. But that's not what gets you the job all the time. First, you know, there's, it's a real roll of the dice. And then there's a lot of biases that come into the process of the hire, the hiring process, and academia as well. And the second thing is, it's, you know, introducing even more Credentialism into the, you know, graduate student and postdoc experience. It really just perpetuates, it perpetuates this myth that, like, you're just, you're acquiring tokens. And that is really how the, I mean, this program was actually like, organized in terms of like, these building blocks up to the up to the certificate, and it was so difficult to ever engage really deeply with, like, what the university is what it does. And I tried to I tried to teach against this kind of ideology that was being presented by the program and a lot of ways that it didn't always work. And, you know, is at that time that I started trying to understand more about this Teaching and Learning Center concept, like, what do we all have on our campus on our campuses now, nowadays? Where did where did this all come from? What is faculty development all about? And one of the things I started considering this relates to a former guest on the podcast, Brad Ferguson as well, is that I, it seems from from everything I can tell is a lot of faculty development came out of student protest right? of like the 60s and 70s people demanding an ethnic studies curriculum demanding that professors teach different stuff. Like when I come to this university, I want to learn about the experiences and studied texts and of people who are not just the people the professors are already familiar with, basically. And so it seems to me part of the background of Faculty Development was an attempt, very constrained and like filtered through the administration, but still an attempt to respond to what's what students were asking for. And to help faculty change their practices to, to meet some student demands. I see nowadays that the concept of the Teaching and Learning Center has is not exclusively become but it's very susceptible to administrative, co opting. And I wrote about this in in the piece that I think you're referencing, but so you know, there's this Twitter personality, it's totally anonymous, I have no idea who it is called at s DNS, and they're supposed to be an Associate Dean. It's a, it's a parody account. And I followed them for a while. They're very funny, you know, they have all sorts of like, funny commentary on academic life. But I started seeing that they keep talking about their Center for Teaching Excellence, as they call it Center for Teaching Excellence. And yeah, I'll just read you a couple of the of the tweets that made me think about this. So Associate Dean says, the students are complaining that the production values in your online course or low quality, can you fix your home students, your home studio, sorry, to make it more appealing, the Center for Teaching Excellence can help with suggestions. Okay, so that like, that's one example. Here's another one, please record and send the link to your zoom class meetings to the Center for Teaching Excellence. They want to help make your class better. So like, this parody? This person who's like a comedian, basically, is introducing the idea that like, okay, what are we here for? Number one, we're here to create like annoying onerous requirements for you, like fix up your home studio, like the students don't think and right, of course, blaming the students. Students don't think it looks good enough. And then like, also this surveillance function, like okay, yeah, everything you're doing, send it to them, they're gonna look it over, and then they're gonna report to us, you know, what, what you're doing, and whether it's good enough. And when I first saw this, like, line of comedy, basically, I was annoyed, because I was like, so earnest, and I was like, I'm trying to help, okay, like, I'm, I'm really putting my best foot forward to, like, help everyone through this pandemic thing. So it could if we stop attacking what we're doing, but I eventually got over that, and it was like, there's really an element of truth to this critique, which is, you know, who, who had to be the happy face of keep teaching continuity of instruction, when everyone was sent home for the pandemic, that was us, we are the ones who had to, I don't want to say force, but like, drag through continuing these courses, when like, a lot of really difficult stuff was going on for everybody in any given university community. So much so that, like, I worked for this graduates at the time, I worked for this, like, small Graduate Student Development Program. And it turns out that the Provost who controlled our whole like overarching unit or whatever, it was able to totally reallocate my time away from that, to just do like continue construction stuff. And, you know, that was like, one of my first hints at like, oh, this can be totally co opted for whatever purpose, the administrate the administration wants. Another kind of example of, of CO opting, that I want, I want to bring up and this is, this is something I don't think a lot of people who work in CTL is like to talk about, so that we have a professional kind of code of ethics that you can look up on pod, which is our kind of organizational sort of association. You know, it's kind of like an academic Association. And I believe it says on there, and if it doesn't say it explicitly, it was something I was taught, you know, when I was being brought up in this CTL work, is that it's like, it's got to be anonymous. It's got to be non evaluative, right? When you work with an ins with an instructor, anonymous in the sense that like, you're not really supposed to report it back to their boss. It's like, sorry, not anonymous. Confidential is what I mean, is supposed to be confidential. and not evaluative. So like if somebody makes a meeting with you and says, Okay, I'm having this problem in my class, like a student, and I are not really getting along, or I can't provide what the student needs, like, can you help me, and you're not supposed to go report back to their boss. And you're also not supposed to, like definitively tell them like, this is good, this is bad what you're doing, it's supposed to be more of like a platform for like reflection and exploration. And this is what I was taught when I was a grad student. And I was, like, becoming a teaching and teaching consultant. I bet you that everybody who has like really done this job has been in the filing situation, I have been a lot, a lot of times, you get an email from a chair, right. And it says, we've got an instructor here, oftentimes, the person has some sort of fringe marginal identity, oftentimes, they're an adjunct, or a grad student, or they are a person of color, or they have disability, or whatever it is, this is just my experience. But I think a lot of other people have had this, and they say, their student reviews are bad. And they essentially tell you that they've been flagged for being fined in some way. And the ask is, can you remediate this situation, can you help them get better, and there's an implied threat to you know, which is that like, if you don't, they're gonna be fired. And so you're in this impossible situation where what you're trained to do, what you're expected to do, and what are like actual code things as to do is like, this is a confidential, non evaluative relationship. And you're basically that it's been forced on you that like, you're responsible for whether this person keeps or loses their job. And then sometimes you're asked to report back to the chair, what did you talk about with them, you know, did they admit their wrongs, more or less all this stuff. And this is the kind of this is the kind of being co opted idea that that I'm talking about, which is, you know, when we are brought into these, these kinds of decisions, these kinds of forms of marginalization and harm, that the university brings down on people and we're asked to participate in, in a certain way. And, you know, I've had a lot of really, really bad experiences that have really turned me off to the idea of a Center for Teaching Learning, because even if it says in your mission statement, like we're just about helping instructors, everybody's always looking for somewhere to send the people who are not behaving right, everyone's looking for some kind of disciplinary or police kind of space or person. So I want to get that person off their, off their hands and feel like it's being dealt with or whatever. And I hate when we are asked to play that has to play that role. And, you know, another going back to inclusion and inclusive teaching, like it happens so frequently, that you're called into a department, you get an email or call someone comes into the office and says, Can you do an inclusive teaching workshop for our department, please? And you say, okay, and you obviously have something ready to go, you've done it a million times. And then you just say, like, Hey, by the way, sir, any precipitating event, you know, that made you make this call or send that email or whatever? You say, actually, yeah, we had a major incident, you know, involving racism, or sexism or major conflict between students or between conflict and instructors? And like, their solution is to call us up and say, Can you come to an inclusive teaching workshop where you say, Hey, have you considered learning your students names and learning how to pronounce their names? Or have you considered having flexible deadlines or offering things in multiple formats, and it's like, I obviously believe that those are good things to do the good basic practices that you could do as an instructor, but that's, you know, that's often the position that we're putting in is that we're we can somehow address really deep forms of harm and conflict there and go going on with you know, a workshop, something like that. So, you know, those are those are, I think, are the really big problems that are facing us. If, if I was to design something, something different and better. think one of the top things that I would want to include in the mission and in the active That is, is that the Teaching and Learning Center would need to have as an explicit goal, advocacy and activism and movement towards improving the conditions of all students and all faculty. And that includes, like, material conditions and basic needs. And as well as the educational conditions. Because I think that that's like so much of what we're covering up and what we're being asked to cover it up with our work. You know, this is one of my, this is like one of my phrases, I say, a lot like pedagogy can't solve everything. And what I mean by that it's it can't solve homelessness, it can't solve hunger, it can't solve debt, they can't solve the amount of tuition that students are asked of hey, and take on in debt. And, you know, there, there was actually a review article, quote in one of my writings that literally says, this is the really saying the quiet part out loud, oh, why do we need to improve teaching and have a Teaching Learning Center and educate people about pedagogy is because we have to make this, this worth it, students are paying so much, and we got to make it worth it for them. And so that, and that's what I think we that's what I think needs to be undone. It's like, what we need to learn about in terms of our pedagogy is not how to cover those things up, but how to teach about them, uncover them. And, and, and work towards fixing them. I know that sounds like very lofty, but that's got to be a part of the pedagogy. And, you know, I think that it would necessarily include solidarity with all of the striking workers like it's hard for me to not think right now about 45,000 academic employees on strike in the University of California right now. And the fact that only about 300 of the Senate faculty have signed on for the work stoppage. It was just

I'm so glad that those 300 have signed on. And it's a lot better we would have been, we would have gotten that, like, Yale, for example. I'm also voting in their Union Election today, and they're gonna win. I hope, you know, or be it for me to express optimism about something, but I'm very hopeful. But like, yeah, 300 if you're from California, and you're on the faculty, and you're listening to this right now, what the hell, or thank you so much for signing on. That's what you should be doing. We'll give you everything anyway. Yeah.

Donald, Donald strong from the Psychology Department at UC Davis, I was looking through that list saying, like, you won't I learned with on this list, one person, I never took a class with him, but he was around. And, you know, it's just, it's just really disappointing. And so, you know, this is, this is something that I think I'm not saying, We're gonna bring the union fight directly into the CTO or like, we're gonna be directly involved in that. But you know, there's a whole fields called critical University says that's largely what this podcast has addressed. And so in some ways, and I just think it's really it's really hard to teach well and build classroom community if you're not understanding what we're up, like what we're up against. And I know that there are a lot of people who already who do this work, but it's so it's so under the radar and like, when, if and when you go to the pod Conference, which is the conference for people who work at teaching and learning centers, you know, some of the presentations are like, here's a rubric that you can use to evaluate how well you're teaching learning centers. I'm just like, what, you know, what are we doing here? We claim to be about student learning, we claim to be about access, we have a lot of other issues to cover, other than our rubric to assess ourselves that we can send up the change to the provost, you know, there's, there's real work to be doing to be done here. And we're not doing it. And so, you know, it's, it's hard, it's hard to talk about this stuff and hope to continue to work in the field. I'm not 100% sure that I, I There may come a point where I may not be able to anymore. But you know, it was it was sad. For me. It's like the first pod conference I went to was quite inspiring, in the sense that I actually remember who it was to give keynotes Randy Bass who was at Georgetown at the time not sure if he's still there. When he you know when he's he said, like, look like what goes on in the classroom is a topic of moral urgency. We need to really care about that. The pedagogy in our undergraduate classrooms because it affects people's lives. Whether we do it well or not as well affects whether people continue in school We'll and whether they feel like they belong and all these things that are true in a sense. But that work, it does get co opted. And that's kind of the conclusion that I've started to come to, there may there may be like some path forward where it's like, you know, if you want to do this work, if you want to be a person who's supporting instructors in their work in their job, like, maybe you don't work in a Teaching and Learning Center, maybe but we break that structure down, then back to just burning, burning up again. And, and tried to go back to like a peer to peer model. There's a lot of problems with that also. And, you know, the other thing I just want to flag about this question of like, being co opted and burning something down is his unfortunate reality is a lot of us who do this work would be adjuncts otherwise, right? Like, people don't, I think it was dirty mom on the podcast, who said, you know, all administrators are bastards, or we need some version of that some people think she did. And I, first of all, I laughed, and I loved it. And I was like, Yeah, I kind of agree. But then I thought to myself, oh, people think I am one of those people. And like, what's important to understand is, I'm a staff member, I don't make as much as a faculty, I don't have tenure. And I would probably be adjunct doing otherwise, like, this is the most stable employment that I can find, at this time. And so like, that's, that's a lot of the balance a lot, a lot. A lot of people who work in this field are partially doing it because it's the most stable thing that they could find. And I think everyone everyone cares about it, but it's, it's pink collar labor. First of all, it's because a lot of white women but also a lot of women of color. And it's it's not these people who have climbed the ladder, it's not often these people who have climbed the ladder, so to speak up the administrative ladder, tried to get out of teaching it into administration. And that's, that's what painful in a way, like, I do think it kind of needs to be dismantled and totally, totally rethought. And then, you know, there's all the people I know that like, that's how they're feeding their families. And if we go back to one of these, like peer to peer faculty development models, well, maybe that just makes us all want our jobs, you know. So that's something that I think that as well.

I think, right, like, yeah, what how do we even define administration? Maybe it's a, it's a B, all management. A B, A, B, all bosses? Um, yeah. I was looking I was, I saw, I think the other day, I think it was on social media. There was some career fair. That was career development centers, another whole conversation we could have about their role on campuses, there's some career development thing where there was a there was a table for people recruiting for for recruiting police. And another some other group some other recruitment group movement, student activist group put up a sign that said, Ace a cab, alternative careers are better. Um, which, yeah, it was something about there's something for for Centers for teaching and learning, we could play with that acronym. Yeah.

Are we ready to get our last question? I don't want to cut this off. But we could talk forever, Sarah, I know what you're given us.

Yeah. I just thought I'll close up we can move on to the next question. I just want to close with something I found yesterday that I want to share, like the the phrase I've been using, like, given all of these union fights that have been unfolding over the past few weeks about this, like Teaching Learning Center concept context as well is you know, which side are you on from the Pete Seeger center? Saw on sorry? And, you know, that's like, really my question is like, are we on the side of the admin or outside the students and teachers, and I was reading the Brown University Sheridan Center, which is their Teaching and Learning Center's strategic plan. As part of my research on this topic, and I'll just read you go one further five year goals from 2016 to 2021. You're ready for this, then we can just close this question with a goal one, responsiveness to institutional priorities, align shared and center programs to support key institutional initiatives established in the campus wide strategic plan. Okay, sometimes you just say it outright that Whose side are you on? You're on the side of the administration and I think that's what we you know, we need to move away from that. That's kind of what I'm thinking. That's Wow.

Um, yeah. There it is. That's it. That's it. Right. And that's how they got their funding probably. Right? I think so. Um, okay. We could talk forever. This has been amazing. And thank you for being so generous with your time, Sarah. I, so why don't we just we can combine. You know, we talked a little bit earlier about sort of the growing edges and things around questions of inclusion. If there's anything else that any of us want to say about that. Let's roll it into the last question, which is, what are you listening to reading, thinking about consuming? Eating? What am I watching watching? That you might want to recommend to our, to those who are listening? today? We'll give you the floor first, Sarah?

Yeah. Um, I guess. So on the topic of it's almost on the topic of inclusion, it certainly has to do with disability. I just got the book, health communism, which was written by two hosts of a podcast called Deaf panel. And I think a lot of your listeners, if they don't already listen to the Deaf panel, they might be interested in it. But what what the book is about mostly is what would go beyond Medicare for all. And I know this doesn't have as much to do with with higher ed, but like, the idea of what, what what a healthcare system that generally provided not just like for the needs, but for like, all of the pursuits, all of the care that is needed for, for everybody has definitely been making me reflect on higher ed over the past couple of years. And the sort of connections between the pandemic and higher ed, and the way that like, we keep trying to force everything back to normal at the expense of people's health and well being and their care needs. And in all of this stuff, I haven't finished the book yet. I really, but I really like it so far. I'm gonna recommend health communism and death panel for kind of critical takes on on health in the state. And well, maybe isn't the first thing that comes to mind about higher ed, I have had a lot of like insights and thought about higher ed while listening to that panel and reading health, communism. So definitely want to offer that. And, you know, what I've, in terms of my like regular research and activism, I spent a lot of time this week reading the pages on inclusive teaching at universities, because it's something I've been trying to look into, like, where did this come from? And I don't know like maybe what I'll suggest to everybody is to go look, if you're if you're at a higher ed institution, go look, if you're teaching learning center, someone else has a page on inclusive teaching and look at look at what it says and who does it quote, anybody have the definitions? And what does it offer about inclusive teaching? And to just like, kind of consider what's being left out or, or what's being covered up in some way? I think it's a definitely a good exercise for the those of us who are involved in teaching and pedagogy, to consider what our institution is offering as inclusion and what might be beyond that.

Thank you so much, Tina.

Well, on the more serious side, I've been studying outsource companies that are taking over my college, including just the other part, our tech division, really, really terrible, downward spiral into the private for profit, institutional, educational, industrial complex. So there's that and trying to create some action activism around that with our living wage campaign. But on the other hand, on a lighter note, celebrating and watching katie le Deki, who is an Olympic swimmer who has just surpassed Michael Phelps record as Female Athlete of the Year, and I'm a master swimmer. So I like watching her and thinking that that's like, beyond human what she does. So watching swimming, because you know, is something different than watching my the apocalypse at my college occur, so, so Lucia What have you been consuming watching listening to

The other day in class, I've been doing a lot of World Cup watching, which is unconscionable and unjustifiable. And the other day in class. We were talking about the cyborg manifesto. Speaking of Donna Haraway cyborg manifesto. Speaking of superhuman, not humanoid, whatever swimming of body modification, and we are in our very cramped classroom, and there were two students who said, we were both on the baseball team, we're sitting in the, in the corner of the classroom with their laptops open. And I'm like, you know, I am not a teacher who feels insecure about people using technologies and glasses. I'm like, they're probably watching the soccer game in class. And I support that, because that's what I would like to be doing right now. And I'm at one point, I were like, what's a cyborg? Like, how do we describe they read the whole cyborg manifesto? And one of them, I think the US scored those the US Iran game. And one of them's in class, and I was like, Hey, are y'all watching the game? And they were like, No. And I was like, I believe you were watching the game. Let's put it up on the big screen. And we went into the small groups, and everybody got to watch the game while drawing designing their a cyborg for us on the board. And we went around and took pictures of their amazing artistic creations while watching soccer and thinking about thinking about the way that embodiment and ideas about strength and sort of humanism, post humanism, we're working in the, in the World Cup context. So I've been watching a lot of World Cup, including in my class. And shout out props to the students who, you know, brought us to a moment of fun the other day.

Well, thank you, Sarah, for being with us.

Thanks to both of you. Thank you so much.

You've been listening to the nothing never happens interview with Sarah Silverman. Our audio engineer is Alia Harris. Our intro music and interstitial music is performed by lanterra. Coggan along with Aviva and the flying penguins. Our outro music is by a crisis. It's called sundowner, and it's from their CD, children singing in hell. It's available on bandcamp.com. We really appreciate all our listeners. And after nearly six years of running the radical pedagogy podcast as a mostly self funded operation, we've decided to open up opportunities for our listeners to support our work. Your donations will help cover the cost for maintaining our website and streaming services, as well as the pay for our amazing audio editors and student interns. Thank you in advance for your encouragement and support. As we've taken this journey together. We especially appreciate all the wonderful scholars and teachers who agreed to converse with us on this podcast. We are learning so much as we hope you are. So look for us on patreon.com

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