Teaching Civic Engagement with Bridget Trogden, James Burns, Megan VanGorder, and Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem

The Civic Engagement & Voting Rights Teacher Scholars program serves as an avenue for faculty to work together to create classroom teaching materials – by faculty, for faculty – to support a thriving American democracy. The Teacher Scholars are recruited and supported from across the nation to work in cross-institutional, cross-disciplinary, humanities and arts-based faculty learning communities. The Teacher Scholars design, create, and disseminate openly licensed pedagogical materials for use in college courses nationwide.

Today's guests are the co-directors of the program, Bridget Trogden, dean of undergraduate education and academic student services and professor of education at American University, and James Burns, professor of history at Clemson University, as well as two program participants: Megan VanGorder, assistant professor of history at Illinois State University, and Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem, associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at Worcester State University.

We have a lively conversation about the importance of teaching civic engagement in the year 2026, the strategies that these faculty use to engage students in these challenging topics, and the value of a faculty development experience structured like this one. 

Episode Resources

Civic Engagement & Voting Rights Teacher Scholars Program

The program’s repository of open educational resources

Megan VanGorder’s resources for “Key Issues in State and Federal Constitutional Government”

Bridget Trogden’s faculty page

James Burns’ faculty page

Megan VanGorder’s website

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem’s website

Bethany Morrison’s Teaching Hub collection “Teaching for Democratic Engagement and Civic Learning”

Transcript

Intro

Megan VanGorder 0:04

You know, our current students are really grappling with the fragility of democracy in real time. And so guiding them to discover how people have always struggled to achieve justice and always struggled to achieve equality helps them to see their own civic power and hopefully kind of gives them the context to move forward.

Derek Bruff 0:24

Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff.

Derek Bruff 0:35

Back in 2024, I asked political scientist and faculty developer Bethany Morrison onto the show to share some strategies for teaching in a U.S. presidential election year. She had so many resources to share that I then invited her to curate a collection of resources for the University of Virginia's Teaching Hub on the topic of teaching for democratic engagement and civic learning. Once that collection was posted, a former Vanderbilt colleague and current English professor, Scott Hicks, reached out to suggest a new resource for the collection. A repository of openly licensed teaching materials from faculty participants, including Scott, in the Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Teacher Scholars program, hosted by Clemson University.

Derek Bruff 1:20

Bethany and I thought the repository was fantastic and we were happy to add it to the collection. Here's what Bethany had to say about it. " I love this repository's detailed, clearly formatted in-class activities and assignments. With these, you can hit the ground running with civic skills building in your classroom. These resources may be particularly generative for folks from fields not traditionally associated with civic learning." I was curious about the program that created this repository of open educational resources, so I reached out to the program directors, Bridget Trogden, Dean of Undergraduate Education and Academic Student Services, and Professor of Education at American University, and James Burns, Professor of History at Clemson University, and I invited them on the podcast.

Derek Bruff 2:05

Bridget and James were happy to talk about this faculty development program. Again, it's called the Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Teacher Scholars Program. Bridget and James also brought along two faculty participants from the program. Megan Van Gorder, Assistant Professor of History at Illinois State University and a member of the first cohort in the program. And Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University in Massachusetts. And a current cohort member. That's right, I have four guests on the podcast today. We have a lively conversation about the importance of teaching civic engagement in the year 2026, the strategies that these faculty use to engage students in these challenging topics, and the value of faculty development experiences structured like this one.

When did you realize you wanted to be an educator?

Derek Bruff 2:56

Well, welcome all of you, all four of you, to Intentional Teaching. I'm glad to have you on the podcast, and I'm excited to hear more about this project and about uh your teaching that's resulted from this project. And uh yeah, so thanks very much for being here. I'm gonna start with my usual question. Can you each uh tell us briefly about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator? And I will start with you, Bridget.

Bridget Trogden 3:23

This is always a good one. So I am a chemist, uh, and I went to graduate school because I was going to make drugs and cure diseases. And, you know, very, very lofty thing. I loved life on a molecular level. My second year of graduate school, I had a teaching assignment where I was uh leading a recitation section of organic chemistry. And so I would be in the lab all day, and then uh I would go and I would have these students that were my students, you know, like 20 or 25 students for uh twice a week. And I would spend all this extra time making the information accessible for them, you know, because it's just so much information. It's hard to know what is important, and I would kind of distill that down and I would make worksheets and I would make these annotated keys and I would I would uh scan them in and I would post them. And I found that I was really, really looking forward to that. And that's when I thought, this is it. This is it for me.

Derek Bruff 4:16

You found a new passion. That's great.

Bridget Trogden 4:19

I did. It was not what I'd expected, but I did.

James Burns 4:22

So I I had never I had never thought about this question before, so I was delighted to get it. Um, I have a really quick answer. Um, my college roommate when um 40 years ago, I was helping uh another kid. I was a business major and I was helping another kid with his history homework. And my college roommate turned to me and he said, you know, you're really good at that. And and I honestly think that's the first time anyone told me I was good at anything. And um he is still to this day uh my college roommate. He's still one of my very best friends. And he's told me last year, he said, you know, you're literally the only adult I know who enjoys going to work every day. So I I give him full credit for that.

Derek Bruff 5:02

That's awesome. I love that story. Uh and it's nice to have a job that we enjoy. Exactly. How about how about you, Megan?

Megan VanGorder 5:13

Uh yeah, so for me, uh my mom taught first grade in kindergarten. And so even when I was really young, when I wasn't like at my own school in the summers, I was often at school with her. And so from a really young age, I was exposed to the kind of invisible work of teaching, like this planning, the intention behind everything, working outside the classroom, you know, showing up for students and families. And that was really imprinted on me from the get-go and helped me to develop a see a sense, I think, for how teaching and community building were really intricately related. And it felt like a really noble profession for me. So I taught eighth grade before I became a historian. And um I I just am really enamored enamored with like the public school system and always have been. So that's kind of my journey.

Derek Bruff 6:04

You are not the first guest I've had who has a family history education. Yeah. Yeah. Nafisa, how about you?

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem 6:13

I also have a similar family history, like Megan. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s Bangladesh. My mom was a school teacher and she didn't have childcare available all the time. So I would end up with being in a classroom that my mom used to teach. And um, I think when I was like three or four years old, when someone asked me, What do you want to be? when you grow up, my go-to answer was, I want to be a teacher. Um, but I guess uh um I consciously decided to be a college professor. Um, when I was working in Canada with a nonprofit organization, and my um responsibilities included working with South Asian immigrants. But since we are working with a nonprofit organization, we had a lot of restrictions about what you can or cannot do with the funding. At one point, I really wanted to organize with South Asian undocumented workers, but then I was told that no, no, no, you can't do that because your funding comes from um the Canadian government. So you're not supposed to work with people who don't have their documents. So at that point, I realized that um, first of all, I couldn't see myself doing this work forever with so many restrictions. And I also felt like um as a college professor, I would get the chance to teach the next generation what's wrong with the system. Like uh what's wrong when we outsource the work of social justice organizing with the two nonprofit organizations that have to deal with a lot of restrictions imposed by the state. Um, I just felt like uh being in a classroom and being an educator would give me the chance to teach critical thinking to the next generation. And also um I thought um it would be it would be a kind of activism for me through which I can contribute to social transformation.

Derek Bruff 8:00

Wow. Wow. So definitely a sense of mission and calling and a way to make a difference. Um I

Why is teaching civic engagement important in the year 2026?

Derek Bruff 8:07

love that too.

Derek Bruff 8:07

Um we're here to talk about the Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Teacher Scholars Program, which is a bit of a mouthful. Um so let's uh let's uh let's use that kind of calling and sense of mission as a segue. Um why uh why is teaching civic engagement and voting rights important in the year 2026? And what makes it challenging? I'll throw that open to anyone who wants to start.

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem 8:34

Um I can try. Well, um, I think um we have been experiencing a crisis of democracy in the United States and around the world, right? We can go on and on. The executive overreach, the grid-locked hyperpartisan Congress that threatened judicial impartiality, um, and everything is disproportionately affecting people without privileges and specifically different minoritized and marginalized communities. And um, as a transnational and decolonial feminist scholar, I think it's high time to go beyond the conventional and institutionalized mood of doing service. Many people would call it service learning, civic engagement. But in many cases, many in many universities, people would just do civic engagement as a way to build resumes for students, um, just to provide some kind of professional experiences so that they can graduate and um get a good employment. But I think it's high time to go beyond that and teach students how it's not just about resume building, but also um learning about power, positionality, and accountability. It's about um learning how to work uh with communities as opposed to work for communities.

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem 9:52

And as an educator, I would say that in 2026, I have so many um first-gen students, working class students, immigrant students, trans and queer students who constantly feel like the stories are not being heard. They feel like the stories are being institutionally erased. And um, I would I would argue that as educators, we really need to meet our students where they are, and we need to teach them how not how not to be the model neoliberal citizens, um, how they can think critically, how they can ask difficult questions, and how they can challenge intersecting systems of oppression um in in whatever position they occupy in the future.

James Burns 10:39

I I would I would throw in to that that um you know, having having taught at this institution I'm at for a quarter of a century, um I I have never found our students so kind of feeling powerless and and um you know not really sure how they can get involved. They're extremely anxious about many of the things that Nafisa just just outlined, and yet I've never seen them so bewildered about what what can civic engagement and and and what you know what do voting rights even mean for them. So um I think it's I think more than ever our students just really need the resources to understand the power of civic engagement in in American and global history. Um I I you know also so many of the core disciplines that we've relied on for the last 25 years to teach things like the history of democracy in the United States, civic engagement in the United States, are being cut out of curriculum. So a program like this that allows us to embed it throughout the curriculum, I think is just invaluable.

Megan VanGorder 11:47

Yeah, I can go next. Um, you know, I think I don't have a whole lot more to add because I think that these themes are true across the country. Um, you know, our current students are really grappling with the fragility of democracy in real time. And um I think in my role as a historian and as a teacher educator of history teachers, um, I think that it's really important that they understand that this is not the first time that that citizens have been grappling with the fragility of democracy. Um, and so I see so many of them just deluged with news and they struggle to really detach themselves from doom scrolling, um, which is just sort of built into their algorithmic social lives and online lives. Um I've I have found in the last couple of years it's it's hard to motivate them when they express a lot of emotional fatigue as a result of this practice. Um, but I think that this program, the the sort of interdisciplinary nature, the ways that we can approach these problems from so many different angles with so much um, you know, pedagogical innovation, it really allows them to see that, you know, teaching, even from my perspective, like teaching voting rights from Americans, America's founding, is just this fascinating way to help them understand that there's this continued need for individual and collective advocacy to make change in our nation. Um, and so guiding them to discover how people have always struggled to achieve justice and always struggled to achieve equality helps them to see their own civic power and hopefully kind of gives them the context to move forward.

Bridget Trogden 13:26

So I I love that response, Megan. And it's it's positive and optimistic. And I think that's what we do with this project. And, you know, I talk about being a chemist, but I'm a liberal artist first. And even using the words liberal art sometimes makes people uh bristle because they, you know, it's about liberating the mind. It's not donkeys and elephants and red and blue and and all of those kinds of things. And I also love how Nafisa is talking about the public purpose of American higher education. And this is something I think we could talk about all day, you know, that that uh you cannot separate the two, that higher education and education in general in this country exists because we need an educated populace to uh run ourselves, you know, and and those pieces matter so much.

Bridget Trogden 14:13

And I really love the question of what makes it challenging. And uh part of that that that I see also in kind of the the broad role as a dean is faculty worry a lot about the conversations that happen in class and those conversations being taken outside of the classroom. Um so the faculty are worried about being canceled, they're worrying about grievances, and those do happen, those cross my desk all the time. Um the there are chilling effects sometimes in classes with discussion, um sometimes places where it may seem as though students who have certain knowledge and others don't are not always um, you know, entering into the classroom is a tr a safe, trusted place to fail, to use a wrong word that you didn't know you were using incorrectly. And so all of those things really come in with the challenges.

Bridget Trogden 15:03

And but I think the other part of that is why this is important. And, you know, for a long time I've keep thinking about this, that talking about things that politicians talk about doesn't mean you're getting political in the classroom. And these issues of civic engagement, voting rights, democratic education, they belong everywhere and in every discipline. And that's why it's important. And I I know we'll talk about this in a little bit, but part of the reason that we wrote this grant and started this project was looking at how students are engaging in democracy. And there are so many components of that, but part of it is just looking at voting. And there are these three pillars of voting: the voter registration, voter education, and voter turnout. And a lot of times people focus on the two because they're quantitative. You can you can measure how many people are registered to vote, what percentage, different demographics. You can do the same thing for voter turnout, but it's the middle part that is the magic. It is the voter education, and that is where higher education also has a great role to help students uh you know acquire information from places that are accurate and trustworthy and not clickbait. That's intrinsically connected in with what we do. It's critical thinking, information literacy, and those are the kinds of things that connect across all disciplines.

Derek Bruff 16:18

Lots of good reasons to be teaching this in 2026. Um and yeah, I'm reminded uh a colleague of mine, Lee Camp, will often say he's this is not his idea, but like politics is how communities organize themselves. Partisanship is something different, but politics is just how we would live together, right? How we figure that out. Um, and that that's that's an ongoing challenge.

How do you go about teaching civic engagement?

Derek Bruff 16:43

Um I want to talk a little bit concretely about teaching strategies before we zoom back out to look at the the the Teacher Scholars program. Um and I'll turn to Megan first. Um I know you I'm sure you do a lot to try to kind of teach these topics and and rise to these challenges. What what are one or two strategies that you found helpful for bringing this into your your your classrooms?

Megan VanGorder 17:06

Sure, thanks. Um so I I think this this builds directly off of what you were just talking about with communities, but one of the things that I do in my classroom, whether it's um in my regular history classes or in my teacher methods courses in in Social Studies Ed, um, is that I build in what I call good neighbor conversations throughout my course. Um, and neighborliness is one of the things that we really emphasize in my class because, you know, no matter where they go, whether they become teachers within a community or historians working in museums, they're going to encounter people that they don't agree with. And, you know, oftentimes within the classroom, they can find a lot of people who will who will always like piggyback on their ideas and really build them up in that way, but that's not always going to be the case. So in my class, just really practically, I have designated stop points in the semester where we have conversations about a current event. I allow students to vote on what that topic is. Um I it doesn't really matter what uh semester it's been. There's never been a dearth of topics to potentially talk about. Um and then we use our disciplinary tools to build a conversation. And so students are exposed to a lot of different discussion strategies that perhaps they might use in their future classrooms. Um, but it also gives them the opportunity to kind of just play around with how democratic dialogues work and conversation structures might function and how they approach controversial topics through an informed lens. And so just slowing down and having those conversations really, I think, scratches an itch for them because they want to talk about things that are happening. And oftentimes in history courses, we kind of can glaze over that kind of stuff because it's it's too present. It's, you know, it's this current moment. Um, but connecting the present to the past is part of what we have to do as well. Um so that's one thing.

Megan VanGorder 19:05

And then I think the second thing is that I do as much as I can to really localize history for my students. And so that's just a really practical thing that has been a part of my teaching philosophy from the get-go is that no matter what I'm teaching, I want to bring it home for students. And so, you know, I teach a lot of US history from an Illinois perspective because we, you know, I'm in central Illinois and my university. But no matter where I would be teaching, I would be doing the same thing because when students can start to see the connections between the places that they live and the broader national narratives, I think it can become this really powerful thing for them to understand again, just like their neighborliness, their stake in in local civic outcomes and in national civic outcomes as well.

Derek Bruff 19:51

Yeah. Well, and I've I've been told by political scientists, like the local voting is in a sense the most important voting. That's where your voice is stronger.

Megan VanGorder 19:59

And it's often what students know the least amount about. Uh so it is really powerful to kind of bring those those stories in.

Derek Bruff 20:07

One quick follow-up. When you're having these neighborly conversations, are you it sounds like you're giving them a kind of discussion structure they can use that might help them have more productive discussions. Are you also kind of having them step back a little bit and kind of think about not just what we talked about, but how we talked about it?

Megan VanGorder 20:27

Yeah, absolutely. And that especially comes to uh the front of the conversation when we're in a teaching methods course because we're often having this conversation about like how do we structure these learning experiences and make sure all voices are heard and we're inclusive. Um, so we use things like the structured academic controversy, which is just, you know, like it's a pretty well-known strategy. There's not a lot that I'm doing that's like new or innovative, but sometimes students just don't know how to have like whole class discussions uh in a productive way because you know some folks can kind of hide out in the back. Um and so really showing them um how we can have a fishbowl or how we can have these structured um controversy controversies and really work on deliberation. So yeah, we we definitely it's not just about the topic at hand, but they're they're doing preparation, they're thinking through the problem, and then they're using that as a way to um have a really measured conversation.

Derek Bruff 21:23

Yeah, I love that. We I think we often assume too much about the skills that our students bring to our classroom, whether it's discussion or reading or note-taking. Um, I think more attention to that is fantastic. Nafisa, what about you? What are some strategies you use? Um, you you you gave yourself quite the challenge of uh making the world a better place. What does that look like in practice?

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem 21:45

Well, um, one of the things that I try to do in all my courses is making students understand the importance of challenging the dichotomy between academia and activism. So whatever they'll learn. Learning in classroom, in terms of you know history, geography, politics, I try to make them understand that it's not necessarily disconnected from the outside world and there's policy relevance, there is um practical relevance to everything, every theory, every concept we are discussing in our in our classrooms. Um, for example, the course that I'm designing as part of the civic engagement and voting rights program is called From Ferguson to Gaza to Johannesburg, Transnational Struggles for Liberation. Um, and in this course, uh, we'll be specifically looking at um US, South Africa, and Palestine and thinking we will think about Black Liberation Movement in the US, anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa and Palestinian solidarity organizing, and think about how activists use different kinds of community-building strategies to mobilize within their communities and outside of the world. So students will learn about how those struggles and different geographical locations are not necessarily disconnected from each other. Activists were learning from each other, they're communicating it from each other, and there's just so much to learn from struggles and organizing in one location.

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem 23:17

Um, and and think about the connections. And in terms of the connection, Megan, you're talking about you know, teaching local and making connections. In my class, what I always try to do is um challenging um the idea of US exceptionalism because sometimes, you know, specifically when I teach in a primarily um white majority classrooms, students were like, okay, why do I have to care about you know uh what's happening with Bangladeshi government workers or what's happening in Palestine? So um I um sometimes like one of the one of the exercises that I do in my class is I ask them to check the tag of the t-shirt or the top that they're work wearing, and then look at where your clothes is made in. And they would give me names like Bangladesh, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Honduras, and that opens up the opportunity to talk about our connections with different places and the way we're making um choices about um who we vote for, whether we decide to criticize or not criticize the multinational corporations based in the US, or what you choose to buy actually determines lived and working conditions uh for workers in another part of the world. So I always try to make the connection between local and global.

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem 24:31

The other thing I try to do in my uh civic engagement focused classes is um try to understand, you try to try try to make them understand what they can do to make changes. And that might just mean uh joining a social justice focused student club. That might just mean you know volunteering for a local community organization or just keeping up with the news and just coming to the class and talking about, oh, this is what I think about the ice rates and this is how it's affecting our community. Um, it also might mean you know just researching the electoral candidates and thinking about which candidate will be prioritizing um what people want in your communities. So in my teaching, I try to kind of bridge the gap between academia and activism and um the gap between local and global and try to encourage students to think about how they can start to make differences from their own subject positions.

Derek Bruff 25:28

I love that. I love that. Well, and I think if you want students to think about systems, they have to have a way to kind of see the system. And when you're in the system, it's very hard to see the system. I know for me it was a study abroad experience in college where I realized, oh, there's just different ways to organize people together, right? And it's not worse or or better, it's just different. And that gave me so much insight into assumptions I had made about the system that I was living in in the US. And so I love that local global piece as a way to help students kind of look a little more broadly at what they're doing.

How does Civic Engagement Teaching Scholars program work?

Derek Bruff 26:03

Um, I do want to talk about this program. So um I'm gonna turn back to Bridget and James. What's the origin story of the Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Teaching Scholars program?

Bridget Trogden 26:14

I'm I'm really glad you asked. This is uh my favorite thing I work on out of everything that I do, and I love having James as a partner for this. And we we pre-gamed a little bit and and thought about how we were gonna answer this question. I would also go back to the three pillars that I was talking about a voter, uh, voter registration, voter and get education, and voter turnout. And there were a lot of nonprofits who are wonderful people. We partner with them all the time. Um, and they they work with people in higher ed of come do an infomercial in your classroom. You know, let us have a couple slides at the beginning. And yeah, faculty will do that sometimes if they've got the time, but the real learning comes from that stickiness and it comes from pedagogical infusion of civic democratic learning in the classroom, or things that might, like what you know, Megan and Nafisa were just talking about, might not explicitly seem civic, but of course they are. And so we were thinking about how to not just do these infomercial one-off kinds of things, uh, but really have assignments in classes and intentionality. And we also wanted this to be by faculty for faculty.

Bridget Trogden 27:22

And so we set up this program and you know, we're able to receive a little over a half a million dollars from the Mellon Foundation. Thank you, Mellon Foundation. They have been fantastic partners on all of this. And uh it supports faculty around the country who are by faculty for faculty, creating open education materials to infuse democracy, civic learning, voting rights. We don't give them a clear definition so they can kind of take what that means for them, but they're infusing these into their classes. And so they're looking at the own their own classes that they're teaching, but they're also publishing what they have open source so that other people can take them, use them, adapt them, um, whatever they want to do, they just can't sell it. We do have some Creative Commons licenses in there. And so that's really what we've set this up as. Um, and we have always make sure that at least half of the teacher scholars are from minority-serving institutions or two-year colleges because often there is just less support uh for faculty who to teach so many diverse students around the country. And um, and then we did some hustle.

Bridget Trogden 28:27

I mean, we've you know, we've been looking at the impacts. Uh, we've we're on now on our third cohort, our last, our last of the the three, and we've had 80 teacher scholars uh collectively. Always thought this was interesting. Our applicants teach over 63,000 students a year with an average of 196 students per instructor. So even if they're creating materials that they're only using in their classes for a couple years, that's still 600 students. But it's not just them, they're also publishing them that other people are using. And so we were able to work with the Clemson University Press, which is part of the Clemson Library. They are fantastic at this. It is a university library at a world-class R1 institution. And uh they make sure that these are all archivable, they're published quality, they're all peer-reviewed. And so the people who are part of this grant are teacher scholars because that is what they're doing. They're teaching and they're scholars. Um, the materials are peer-reviewed, which then helps with the annual evaluations often of the faculty. James and I provide a letter every year for the teacher scholars that then they can use for their own promotion processes and everything that they're doing. So that's what we how we designed it.

Bridget Trogden 29:37

And then what happened is we bring the teacher scholars together for two or three days in the summer in a summer institute to talk about teaching and learning. And that's where the magic happens. And they they they learn with and from each other, talking with people around the country who might teach different kinds of students but are dealing with some of the same challenges and opportunities. And every single teacher scholar has talked to each other and to James and I about how amazing that cohort opportunity is for them. And that was so much better than we would have thought. Um, and then they work together in faculty learning communities of six to eight over the next academic year. Megan has been in FLC, she was in uh cohort one, and then she was an FLC leader for cohort two. Um, and in the faculty learning communities, that's when they're continuing those conversations, but they're doing their work of creating their materials, they're peer reviewing, they're talking, they're discussing, they're um they're creating and supporting each other. And that is just one of the best things about this project. Uh, we've had other people reach out and want uh to create similar programs in um the arts. I'm I'm going to try to work on one for the sciences. And it I we've shared this information with anyone if they want to be able to create the model and adapt it in other places.

James Burns 31:00

And and the only thing I would add to that is I I think you can sense that you know Bridget is really the driving force and visionary behind this initiative. And I was at the time, she um she brought this opportunity to me. I was the director of the humanities center here at Clemson. So it was someone from the the STEM side of campus coming over and encouraging the humanities side to get involved in a humanities initiative. So I think that speaks speaks volumes about who Bridget is and where she comes from. I I will say that um I I would agree with so much about of what Bridget said.

James Burns 31:34

I would also add that, you know, Megan was in our first cohort. The temperature in this country changed so dramatically between the first and the third cohort. By that third group, I think Bridget and I felt like more than anything, we were just offering an opportunity for faculty to get together and share the challenges that had really snowballed in the interim. Um, Bridget and I have also had the advantage of working at relatively well-resourced institutions. And so the idea of our being able to not just connect with all of these 80 faculty, but then to have them create artifacts that are going to help stressed, overburdened faculty at two-year university, you know, at two-year colleges at at um, you know, really less resourced universities. Uh it's it's the payoff of that over the next several years is going to be incredibly rewarding to see how far these artifacts find find their way and who uses them and who finds value in them.

Derek Bruff 32:35

Yeah, absolutely. I love the the open ed uh educational resource angle of this. Um I think it yeah, it multiplies the impact downstream.

James Burns 32:46

Well, and and before we're done, at some point we need to talk about how fantastic some of them are because they are just an incredible collection of materials. And you know, Bridget and I were just talking before about um Megan's AI project that she did three years ago. When the first time I looked at it, I had a vague idea of what AI was, and I looked at it again this week, and I just thought this is a creative and invaluable teaching tool. So I do hope we get a chance to talk about some of the archives we've already seen produced.

What is it like as a faculty member in this program?

James Burns 33:17 Derek Bruff 33:18

Yeah, I I want to get to that. Let me ask first though, uh Megan and Nafisa, can you say a little bit more about kind of your experience in the program? What was it like and what what made it valuable for you?

Megan VanGorder 33:29

Nafisa, I'll go ahead. I'll go ahead and start. We'll go from year one to two and then we'll we'll end with Nafisa on year three. Um so I I got involved with this. I my first year as a higher ed faculty member had this opportunity to apply. Um, and I was just really eager to be a part of something that was collaborative and interdisciplinary. Um, coming from a K-12 space, I was really missing that in higher ed. Um, and so I I did PLCs when I was in, when I was teaching eighth grade professional learning communities. And so just the possibility to work in an FLC with other folks for the course of a year to really work on how to integrate this into my curriculum was just so attractive to me. And then I went to Clemson for the institute and I developed like really meaningful friendships. Even just hearing uh Bridget talk about it, I started getting really emotional because like I have created some really deep and meaningful friendships that um you know exist to this day with people who I would have never met otherwise. Um but then also just the opportunity to learn from English professors and interdisciplinary scholars and ethnic studies folks all across the countries in different all across the country in different contexts was just an incredibly powerful experience and just very formative.

Megan VanGorder 34:49

Um, and then I will just say like one of the things that I got to see from cohort one where I was a participant to cohort two where I was a facilitator, was the the kind of inner working of like the democratic process happening amongst professors to make decisions about how we wanted this process to unfold. And I think Bridget and James did just a really wonderful job of giving us a lot of autonomy to develop that um together as a group of faculty members. And so at the end of our second um, our second cohort, we decided to hold us like a little um symposium where all of the cohort two members were able to present kind of the best of their products to one another. And it just it it just cultivated this really beautiful and rich conversation about how folks were innovating in their own spaces. And so that was a lot of fun and um it just felt like really organic in the entire process, and and I learned a whole lot as a result.

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem 35:48

So um, well, in my case, I started uh teaching civic engagement focused classes uh but long before I joined this program. So when I got um the the the what the news that um this this program will begin, um I immediately wanted to apply. Um and since last year, I have been part of this vibrant group where I came across um educators from different institutions from different parts of the country, and I usually don't get to have that kind of exposure in the um small state school setting where I work. So it's been invaluable, it's been an invaluable experience for me to interact with different educators, think about different um teaching strategies that they're employing in the classrooms, and specifically going through the peer review process has been extremely useful because I'm not just talking to people who do women's gender sexuality studies, like people doing history and politics and geography. They are commenting on my work and it's it's offering me this really rich interdisciplinary perspective that can broaden the outlook of my students.

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem 37:00

Um, and I specifically appreciate the open source nature of this program because as someone who grew up in Bangladesh and attended her college education in Bangladesh, I would say that my college education was possible because open source materials existed. So it just doesn't have a local impact in terms of okay, we are just making materials accessible. It has a global impact. I have personally recommended this Clemson repository to my um colleagues in Bangladesh who don't necessarily have access to such rich repository because most of those materials are restricted by paywalls. And when you convert dollar into Bangladesh, I mean everything is inaccessible. So I really like politically speaking, I really value the idea of producing knowledge that's free and egalitarian and that can be accessible by anyone.

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem 37:52

And um, last but not least, I would say that, you know, James, you were talking about you know the political climate. And I would say that, you know, this program is building, um, is offering me a community um that's that's giving me not only peer review support, but also um a sense of collectiveness, um, a sense of um belongingness. I know that I am not handling with everything that's happening in this country all by myself. There are people who share my politics, who share my values, um, who want to make changes in this world, who want to be there with um their students, and specifically um during our Zoom sessions, we talk a lot about what's happening in our universities, and specifically as someone who teaches women's gender sexuality studies, you can imagine how difficult this task has become. So for me, it makes a world of difference to have a community of scholars and practitioners who share my values and we can exchange ideas. Um, and most importantly, each session has been just so therapeutical for me. Like I feel energized and more committed to the work that I'm doing because this community exists for me now.

Derek Bruff 39:03

Yeah, that's great.

What kinds of open-source teaching materials are in the repository?

Derek Bruff 39:04

Um I our time is is coming to a close, but I want to circle back to James's question because I think uh I know people will be listening and thinking, how can I get involved? And one way is to visit the repository and take advantage of what's already been built there and shared there. Um are there any other uh assignments or resources uh in the repository that you'd like to kind of tease for our listeners?

Bridget Trogden 39:30

They do all have keywords and you can go into the box and type in just about anything, you know, activity, syllabus, asynchronous, um, first year course, freedom, gender, imperialism, black lives matter, civic action, race. I mean, there are so many things that you can type in. And sometimes it's also the class prep. Um, I was teaching a class last spring where the students were watching the Baldwin Buckley debates uh from the 1960s, which actually very much resonated in Washington, DC in February 2025. So the students came into class and they wanted to talk about systemic racism. That was interesting. I didn't have to see that. They came in and wanted to talk about it. I looked on Canvas and their responses of how they wanted to prepare for class, and I knew that I didn't have a lot of time. I'm a dean, didn't have a lot of time, and I said, I know there are some materials in the repository. And so I pulled up some materials from Russ Wood from Southwest Virginia Community College, Sarah Hamblin from UMass Boston, um, and Bernadette Ludwig, who was at Wagner College, is now Western Carol uh Western Connecticut State. And uh they had some different examples, and I cobbled them together because I'm allowed to do that, and gave the students different assignments where they were looking at um poll taxes, uh, they were looking at literacy tests. They had no idea that literacy tests used to be a thing, but they weren't just back then. They also looked at two recent cases about gerrymandering from Georgia and from uh Wisconsin. I didn't have to go and Google all this myself. I went into the repository and pulled up the assignments and was able to use those in class. Um so I would say to anybody, if you if you are teaching anything, type in the keyword and you'll find something that you can use in your class.

Derek Bruff 41:13

That was a really good tease. Excellent job, Bridget. Um I do want to wrap this up. Any uh, but uh any other final words of wisdom for um maybe for faculty who are feeling the heat this year?

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem 41:27

I don't know. I mean, yes, I mean this is a really difficult time to talk about civic engagement um and social justice, but I would say that um we should try our best to teach about diversity, to teach about gender and sexuality, to teach about things like systemic racism and white privilege, because if we don't do it, who else would do it? And specifically, I do understand that not all of us have the same kind of privileges. Uh, there are contingent faculty members, there are uh BIPOC Alana faculty members who may not be able to talk about those things in the same way that US citizen tenured faculty members would be able to do. So I think it's really important for us to think about the privileges that we ourselves have and then think about what we can do to demonstrate intellectual humility and courage. Because given the current political climate, it's really important for us to try our best to create civic civic spaces that can host open and difficult dialogues and encourage students to think about how they can they can they can they can they themselves can be changemakers and how they can participate in social transformation, you know, in whatever way they can.

Megan VanGorder 42:44

Yeah, and I'll I'll just add on to that, like this is this is shared work. And I think if it if anything that this project has has really brought up in myself is that you know, we we often feel like, man, we are really working hard to do the best teaching that we can, but we're all doing that and we should be doing that. And maybe to the title of the podcast, just a little pandering here, but it's like that there should be some intentionality behind this work that is shared. And so these resources really build a lot of capacity for folks to not feel like they're doing this alone. And so I think we've got to teach the skills of civic discourse so students can navigate conflict based on democratic values. We have to lean on our community partners to root curriculum and local realities, and we have to continue to cultivate neighborliness so that students see themselves, you know, as part of a local fabric, as part of a community, so um that they feel that responsibility that we also feel as their teachers.

Derek Bruff 43:44

And it's a great place to leave it. Thank you so much, Megan and Bridget and Nafisa and James. I appreciate you coming on and sharing about the work and the network that you've built and the resources that you've provided. Um, this has been really, really helpful. Thank you so much for being here.

Megan VanGorder 43:58

I love these people. Me too. I miss you all. I'd love to come to The Shepherd again someday and have a beer with you.

James Burns 44:07

Thanks so much, Derek.

Outro

James Burns 44:09 Derek Bruff 44:10

That was Bridget Trogden, Dean of Undergraduate Education and Academic Student Services and Professor of Education at American University. James Burns, Professor of History at Clemson University, Megan Van Gorder, Assistant Professor of History at Illinois State University, and Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University. All are involved in the Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Teacher Scholars Program, hosted at Clemson University and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Thanks to all four for coming on the podcast and sharing their experiences with the program and with the very important task of teaching for civic engagement.

Derek Bruff 44:52

In the show notes, you'll find links to the program's website and, importantly, the repository of open educational resources developed by faculty in the program. Peer-reviewed teaching materials from the first two cohorts are available now, and resources from the third cohort will be available later this year. And if you're interested in organizing a similar program, please reach out to Bridget and James. They would be happy to talk with you about it. You can find their contact info in the show notes as well.

Derek Bruff 45:18

Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time.