Durable Skills in the Humanities with Chelsea Brislin, Shawna Felkins, and Jennifer Osterhage

How can humanities courses and majors help students develop the kinds of durable skills--communication, collaboration, adaptability, and more--that employers want?

Today on the podcast, I talk to three University of Kentucky faculty about a program at UK called “Transdisciplinary Educational Approaches to Advance Kentucky,” or TEK for short. TEK helps faculty design courses that help students build those durable skills. One of those courses is called Humanities in Action, and one of the goals of the course is to help students see the ways that studying the humanities can build those durable skills—and help them get quality jobs, in or outside of the humanities.

Today’s guests are: Chelsea Brislin, course lead for Humanities in Action and associate director of the Gaines Center for the Humanities at UK. Shawna Feklins is a senior faculty consultant at the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CETL) at UK and community coordinator for the TEK Faculty Fellows program. And Jennifer Osterhage is director of TEK and associate professor of biology. 

Episode Resources

Chelsea Brislin's faculty page

Shawna Felkins on LinkedIn

Jennifer Osterhage's faculty page

Transdisciplinary Educational Approaches to Advance Kentucky (TEK)

"Fold in the cheese!"

Transcript

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SPEAKER_04 0:34

As a humanities scholar, right, and someone who is instructing students who are pursuing humanities degrees, I will never bulk at workforce readiness conversations. And I think it's our obligation to have those in a very clear, transparent way. There's nothing wrong with students wanting answers to those questions. And the more confidence we exude and the more research we do, the more we're able to meet them where they are.

Derek Bruff 1:04

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. You've probably heard something like the following more than once in your life. Person A says that they're majoring in a humanities discipline like history or English. Person B says, what are you gonna do with that? I've heard folks say that humanities majors aren't useful because they don't help students get jobs. I've also heard humanities faculty say that it's not their job to help students get jobs, that college is about a lot more than that. Today on the podcast, I talked to three University of Kentucky faculty who are happy to talk about the ways that humanities majors and courses can prepare students to get jobs. The faculty are part of a program at UK called Transdisciplinary Educational Approaches to Advanced Kentucky, or tech for short. Tech helps faculty design courses that help students build the durable skills that employers say they want. Skills like communication and collaboration and adaptability. One of those courses is called Humanities in Action. And one of the goals of the course is to help students see the ways that studying the humanities can build those durable skills and help them get quality jobs in or outside of the humanities. Today's guests are Chelsea Brislin, course lead for humanities in Action, and Associate Director of the Gaines Center for the Humanities at UK. Shauna Falkins is a senior faculty consultant at the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching at UK and community coordinator for the Tech Faculty Fellows Program. And Jennifer Osterhag is Director of Tech and Associate Professor of Biology. Jennifer and I overlapped at Vanderbilt University, where she was one of the first graduates of the teaching certificate program that I helped design at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching. Before I get into our conversation about durable skills and the humanities, however, I want to remind listeners to let me know what idea or example or question or quote from an intentional teaching podcast episode you keep thinking about. I'm working on the show's 100th episode, which is right around the corner. My plan is to share excerpts from past episodes featuring powerful insights and your comments about why those insights have stuck with you. Your deadline for this assignment is coming up fast. It's September 15th. You can email me uh with your suggestion for what to include in the 100th episode. You're also welcome to record a short voice memo and attach that to your email talking about why that episode stuck with you. Now, onto the conversation about humanities in action at the University of Kentucky. Chelsea, Jennifer, Shauna, thank you so much for being on Intentional Teaching today. I'm excited to talk to you and get to know more about your teaching and what you're doing there. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. So happy. And um I'll I'll I'll do my usual question that I start every episode with. Can each of you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator? Uh and Chelsea, maybe I'll start with you.

SPEAKER_04 4:16

Sure. Um, you know, I don't think there was like for me one like aha moment. Um, I think I knew I wanted to be in higher education just because my own experience in higher education was so transformative. And I love I don't know, I love the humility of higher education, of the idea that you're pursuing questions, thoughts of inquiry, always with an ear toward what you don't know. I think for a minute I like initially wanted to be a curator, as um did my undergrad and my master's in art history. And I said my biggest issue with that is art historians haven't learned how to laugh at themselves yet. And that was hard for me. Everything is very serious, and I just love the environment of working with students where there's just a little bit more um what's the word, self-deprecation, I guess. I liked the idea that you um can kind of ask those questions of why, why not? Um, and so I just started to realize that storytelling and being able to teach about the importance of storytelling and helping students make those connections, that was like what was really, really important to me. So I had a little bit of an unconventional path to teaching. Um, but at its core, that's what it was. It was being able to communicate the importance of stories.

Derek Bruff 5:44

Yeah, yeah, I love that. Not everyone in higher ed is full of humility, but it is an option in our not everybody, that's true, but I think a higher percentage than uh New York City art historians.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

I'll take your word on that. Jennifer, what about you?

SPEAKER_03 6:02

Uh yeah, it was definitely a few things going on in graduate school that really got me interested in education. Um, one was that I was a TA for the genetics course at Vanderbilt, and I just loved the instant gratification, I guess, of seeing students learn. You know, research, especially in genetics, can be very slow. You're not getting any results for, you know, maybe even years, but I could go and teach and see that those aha moments and see students learning kind of in real time. So that was that was part of it. Um, another part was being involved in the Center for Teaching that you were a part of, and that's when we met. Um, and seeing kind of the scholarly aspect of teaching that I had never been exposed to before, that you know, there is a lot of evidence about what works, and you can um, you know, research that evidence and research your own teaching. Um and I had never thought that way before about teaching, so that was very um powerful for me. Um, and then a third experience I had in graduate school was being part of a team that helped rethink the genetics course at Vanderbilt. So these were some um amazing scientists, but also people who really cared about education and teaching. Um, and that was very inspiring for me. And, you know, again, got me thinking about you know, what we do in the classroom really does matter. Um and there are some things that have more evidence to support them than other other teaching practices. So um I got hooked then and never looked back, I guess.

Derek Bruff 7:42

Yes, and I saw in your bio you you you state that you've taught over 6,000 students.

SPEAKER_03 7:48

Yeah, I'm up to 8,000 now. It's uh yeah, it is it's hard to actually find a physician or pharmacist that I have not taught in the state.

Derek Bruff 7:58

In the state of Kentucky. I love it. Yes, I love it. Oh wow, that's so good. That's so good. Um, well, I could walk down memory lane with you a little bit longer, but I'm gonna I'm gonna keep us on topic here for uh for now. Um, Shauna, what about you? When when did you uh realize you you might want to be an educator?

SPEAKER_02 8:15

So I sometimes think that I'm a bit of an odd duck. I went into my undergrad knowing and committed to being an English professor, like knowing that's what I wanted to be. Um from the very first time I went onto campus, I was like, I'm declaring this major and we're going full send on it. I didn't have any professors in my family. Um only one other person in my family had been to college, and so it was kind of um this thing where I was like, I'm committed to this path. Um, and in part that was because my dad uh was a teacher, he's retired, but he taught electrical construction at our vocational school in my hometown. And then I had this teacher in middle school for seventh and eighth grade language arts, uh, Miss Underwood, shout out. Um, she noticed this uh curiosity that I had for um her class specifically, and she really nurtured that. So she asked my parents if it would be okay if she would give me extra books to read that we could then discuss after class. Um we read Fahrenheit 451, we read Speak, um, all these books that I was just I fell in love with. And um I kind of you know went down a different road. Um after that, after the thinking about being an English professor, I ended up in faculty development because what I found was that I really loved teaching and I loved the kind of connections that you could build uh with students and with people and with the faculty to kind of you know reinvigorate sometimes. I think we get to see that a lot in faculty development. A lot of what we do is emotional labor, I would say, and just being a space for faculty to talk through those things. So throughout that kind of journey, I just had these moments of seeing my dad build these really deep connections with his students, seeing, you know, having that relationship with Miss Underwood that was really just about supporting this super weird, awkward, I think, girl that was very nerdy. And then having those moments to realize that like so much about teaching is building and deepening those connections and relationships.

Derek Bruff 10:25

I love it. I love it. You're not that odd. I I I I pretty much I think in week three of my undergraduate experience, I decided to be a college math professor. Okay, perfect. Um I I did not end up being a college math professor, but uh but similar to you, I I took a I realized the the as much as I like teaching math, I really liked teaching. Um, and that's where I found my passion. So um, well, um that's some great context for this humanities course that I want to talk with you all about. Um and I'll start with you, Chelsea. What made this humanities laboratory course this spring a different kind of humanities course?

SPEAKER_04 11:04

Yeah, so um I'll start by just giving kind of an overview of what the of who taught the course and what it looked like. So HMN 303, that's what it's called, Humanities 303, um, humanities in action is typically the subtitle we use, was co-taught by two faculty this semester. So it was an architecture professor, Darren Taylor, um, and an archivist, uh Ruth Bryan. So it is specifically a course in the applied humanities. Um that's that's kind of the idea. So taking what we usually teach as theoretical abstract concepts and having them sort of get their hands dirty. Um, so we wanted to draw a clear line from the skills that sort of one learns through a study of the humanities also to non-humanities career path. So it was an ambitious class. There was a lot we wanted to accomplish. Um, so specifically the tech project and why that was relevant. So I think what a lot of students, you know, I hear a lot of criticisms about humanities and specifically the study of humanities. And one of the things that I hear over and over again is like students aren't making the connection between what you learn as a history major in a non-humanities career path. So they understand that if I major in history and then I want to become a historian, then a history major is going to be really helpful. They don't or aren't understanding if they want to be a lawyer, why being a history major would be helpful to be, you know, for a law degree or for uh uh a job in in law. Um, so you know, furthermore, English majors, right, are really skilled in communication, in interpretation of complex information. Um, and that's why they're often successful in careers like marketing. But I think they think if I want to be a really successful marketing professional, I need to major in business and major in marketing. But actually, if they major in English, they could gain a lot of the skills that make really successful marketing professionals, right? So the tech project, concurrent with this actual exposure to archives and to architectural history, it was trying to involve them in this project that translated humanities majors to non-humanities career success. Um, so we had kind of a three-step process, and I developed this alongside the tech faculty fellowship program. So I was kind of learning how to do this while also teaching my faculty how to do this. Um, so one, the students had to determine what transferable skills one can gain from up to five humanities majors, and I let them pick which humanities majors they wanted to do this with. They ended up choosing history, English, gender and women's studies, sociology, and political science. Those were the five that they chose. Um, and then they had to, under each of those, come up with five transferable skills you can gain from those majors. So for something like political science, public speaking, you know, might be a transferable skill. Then they had to pull a number of professionals in non-humanities fields, so banking, business, law, engineering, AV, marketing, and ask them how frequently they use those skills. So they took the majors off, but they had, you know, five cents, 25 different skills and asking non-humanities careers, right? How often do you use persuasive writing? How often do you have to use public speaking? How often do you use, you know, project management? And then they went back and sort of reverse engineered and realized, oh my gosh, this lawyer used four out of the five, four out of the five skills associated with a history degree, they use on a daily basis. So for a lot of the students, it was kind of this like aha moment of like, wait, I want to go to law school. This person says this is what they have to do every day. Maybe it should be a history major. Like, I'm gonna learn all these skills that make a really effective lawyer. So we say this. I mean, I'm looking at like, you know, Shana, Jennifer, all these other faculty at UK, we say this all the time. You're gonna learn, you know, these really important skills from humanities majors, but we're always speaking in the abstract. This is always like a theoretical, almost like leap of faith for them. And trust us, this will be helpful. Trust us. And I think if anything, you know, if you were someone who is active in reading about higher education and its challenges today, you realize it's not cutting it. The trust us approach is not cutting it. There's too much at stake for them, and I totally understand it. There's so much riding on these degrees now, from financial costs to family obligations to you name it. So, this idea of like, you're you'll see, you know, in 10 years down the line, you'll see that's not good enough anymore. So the point of this class was to really take that sort of blurry dotted line and make it a solid line. Um, and the students were really shocked at how valuable these skills were. Like in some ways, we were kind of removing the middleman, right? Like we were taking ourselves out of it. Um, if you don't trust us, that's okay. Go see for yourself, right? And in some ways, I think it was more compelling, right? Don't tell them, show them. So that was why I think this course differed from a more traditional, I'm using air quotes, right? A more traditional humanities course. It was really the applied humanities. And again, the skills um were in the concurrent teaching of having these people who are actually doing humanities work every single day, sifting through these donated archival boxes and boxes of materials. Also, what do you do with these historic homes? You know, the architecture faculty was taking them through this house built in like the 1800s. How do you make this house and its architectural details relevant for a contemporary audience? But at the same time, looking at non-humanities fields and the value of a humanities major for those. So it was kind of a two-pronged approach and really, really successful. Um, and well, I know we'll talk about that later, but I'm excited to share the feedback from this course because that's kind of I think why we're on this podcast today, because this experimental approach worked really, really well.

Derek Bruff 17:48

That's great. That's great. So I want to come back to that two-pronged approach in a minute, but I want to turn to Shauna. What was your role in this course and and what what what do you see as some unique attributes of this course?

SPEAKER_02 18:02

So my role was as the community coordinator for the tech faculty fellows program, I was just really there to support Chelsea um in her vision of this course. And um through setting up meetings with other faculty fellows where there was the opportunity to kind of explore um how people in different disciplines might approach this concept of making durable or transferable skills visible for students and ways that we can do that. Um so Chelsea's idea for this course really already was to do that and aligned with our big goal uh for tech. So it was just about providing that support, uh, which is a lot of the things that we talk about with tech, with our approach. Um it's less about saying, you know, the kind of top-down, okay, you need to make sure that as faculty, you need to implement these skills and add them. Uh we are instead saying faculty are already teaching these skills, right? We already are doing in that exercise of saying, trust us, you are going to do these things. We know that we're teaching them. We know that faculty are teaching them. Um, so helping students to see where they are is part of the goal of that. And trusting faculty to bring in their specific disciplinary expertise to the teaching of those skills.

Derek Bruff 19:29

Okay. So we mentioned tech a couple of times. I think it's time to zoom out a little bit. Jennifer, can you tell us about tech and uh where it came from and what its goals are?

SPEAKER_03 19:39

Yeah. Um, so tech is the university's quality enhancement plan. So that came about you know a few years ago from all sorts of feedback from students, faculty, admin. So um a lot of people came together and tech was the result. So um tech has a couple of course and faculty development arms. One um is track two, which is what Chelsea is in, which is taking an existing course and kind of um redesigning it a little bit, or thinking about ways that tech learning outcomes can be part of the course. And these tech learning outcomes are kind of these transferable, durable, human-centered skills like communication, like considering multiple viewpoints, um, working in teams and reflecting on growth. So Chelsea took an existing course and integrated one or more of those outcomes. Another kind of track of tech is faculty from different disciplines working together to develop a new transdisciplinary course. So that's where the T comes in. So we have faculty working in teams from different disciplines, and they're incorporating community partners kind of from the get-go to help address some sort of Kentucky problem. So that's where the you know K comes in that where these faculty are working with organizations in the community to, and students are involved in helping these organizations solve a real world problem that they're having. So, you know, one example of this, we had a tech course looking at food insecurity in Lexington this past semester. So the students went to lots of different neighborhoods, for example, and and did some research on food deserts and um kind of came up with a plan to address that in that course. Um, there was another course that was math and music that was offered this semester. So that was an interesting one. The students kind of did lots of different projects. Um, and one of them I thought was really neat was that they um designed sonification of different um stock market trends. So, for example, if your stocks were doing, you know, you know, going up and down, there would be some sort of sonification that people could hear like that's a warming. Um, but other ones would be like, oh, you know, maybe that's a positive test right now based on these different curves that these stocks were doing. So that was just one specific project. But um, you know, that's really the courses are all over the place, which is great. Um, you know, faculty either come together with an idea already, or we try to facilitate those partnerships um to think about how these different disciplines can. Come together, work with the community to help solve a problem that affects Kentuckians. We also have a student-facing piece of it. We have tech ambassadors who are out trying to tell students about tech. But we also hold in collaboration with the Career Center resume workshops that are based on these skills. So as Chelsea said, you know, students might need a little help in articulating the skills that they're already getting from their courses and from their experiences. So the Career Center has been great at saying, you know, giving students prompts like here's a time where I've practiced teamwork. And these tech courses give these students these experiences, and we help them articulate that on their resume, which is another piece that I think is important is that student facing, like, let's make sure you can you've got these skills, but how can you talk about them to future employers and you know during a job interview or something like that?

Derek Bruff 23:29

Yeah. So how did a biologist like you get involved in a program like this?

unknown 23:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 23:35

So I was not involved from the get-go. Uh the first director um got a new position and I interviewed really because what I really loved about it actually is that it was a way for uh humanities and social sciences, how students to see the value in that. So yes, I am a natural scientist, um, but I have really come around to the really the importance of the skills you gain in humanities for a lot of reasons. One, um, my husband was a philosophy major, never took a science class in his life, but has been a practicing scientist uh since college. And that rational approach to problem solving, I just see that um from his philosophy degree has it has made him a great scientist because he can, you know, make a make an argument and communicate complex science to um non-scientists. And I have just seen that over many years in my own career, that those skills are really, really important for everybody. Um, so that's really why I was drawn to it, um, to help because it helped give students a shared language for talking about these skills that they're gaining. Um, you know, maybe in UK core, maybe in um courses that like Chelsea's, but give them a way to articulate those skills that they might not have thought about before.

unknown 25:05

Yeah.

Derek Bruff 25:05

Now, Chelsea, uh, Jennifer said that this course was maybe a uh it was an existing course in some capacity. Could you do you tell us a little bit kind of how you you landed in tech with this course?

SPEAKER_04 25:17

Yeah, so we first envisioned this course back when um the games director was Dr. Melinda Price, who has since uh left UK to head up uh the Center for Women at University of Michigan. Um but the idea was we very much felt like as the Humanities Center at UK, it was our responsibility to meet and respond to this criticism that the humanities aren't leading to job outcomes. So we had this idea for a humanities laboratory, but we weren't totally sure what that should or could look like yet. Um, and so we did our first iteration of HMN303 uh three years ago. So the tech course was the third iteration, actually. And the first one focused on three different faculty, um, one of which was circuits arts and the philosophy. So we highlighted to Jennifer's point, we highlighted how philosophy can make more successful performing artists, which was really cool. We also had a historic preservationist who took them to Camp Nelson, which is a local um sort of site of memorial here in Kentucky. And then we had a third faculty member who was actually a historian, he's in classics, who was advising a team at UK who were using computer engineering to unwrap Herculean scrolls that were discovered on the site of Pompeii.

SPEAKER_05 26:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 26:54

So we really that was the first iteration. So we we swung for the rafters the first time out of the bat, and it was really successful. And we knew for a pilot, you really have to put your best foot out there and find angles of interest for everybody. And we very much wanted this course to be accessible for the general population. So the Gain Center is known for a really prestigious fellowship, highly competitive. We had 97 applications this last year for 12 spots. Uh we value our fellowship incredibly. It is very much the heart and soul of the Gain Center, but we also felt like we need to be reaching out with humanities interventions broadly across campus. And so this course is open to anybody, not just to gains fellows. And in fact, there was only one Gains fellow who took the first iteration, but the rest were pulled from all across campus in every major. So that was really exciting.

Derek Bruff 27:51

So not even necessarily humanities majors. That's right. And we love Part of the reason for the course is to maybe entice some students into picking a humanities major.

SPEAKER_04 28:00

Exactly, exactly. Um, or even recognizing the value of one humanities course. You know, if you're a computer engineer and you can only take, you know, one elective, make it a humanities course. So many of these students, you know, I had a student in my office the other day, not a not a gains fellow, who's pre-med and was saying, you know, for languages, I think I should take Latin because Latin will help me with my pre-med. And for my humanities core, there's an animal science class, and I think I should take that because that'll help for pre-med. And I just said, or you could take Shakespeare. And you might be surprised at the ways that Shakespeare can also help you become a better physician, right? So I think that was the idea. Like, let's sort of cast a broad net. Um, and yeah, the the Herculean scrolls were a really cool addition to that first pilot because they were able to see the computer scientists could do anything you wanted to do with these scrolls. They could read the text underneath, they could do three-dimensional diagrams, they could do all of that. But if you asked one of them, so what? What does this mean? They were sort of like, I don't know. But if you want to see it upside down, I can do that. Um, so that's where Dr. Brasilius came in. He was our classics professor, and he was like, you can't have one without the other. The computer scientists are unwrapping the scrolls. I'm the one who can actually read the scrolls and interpret them, determine their validity. I can tell you if these are, you know, basically forgeries, I can tell you if these are real, I can tell you sort of the mythology behind them, what the values of that civilization were at the time that these scrolls were being written, why they were preserved. Um, and so I think they really were seeing, oh, that intersection, right? That interdisciplinary approach is absolutely critical for a holistic understanding of these things, these really cool things that are happening on campus. So that was kind of the first incubator, right? And it was wildly successful. And then we had another iteration, and this is the third iteration. Um, and so that's kind of how it got started.

Derek Bruff 30:12

Yeah. Let me, I want to circle back. You mentioned this two-pronged thing, and I do find that there it seems like there's two distinct goals, and I I'm curious how they maybe complemented each other because you were having students on the one hand think about the skills that humanities majors might develop and how those connect with people in the workforce. Um, you were also having them do this very applied humanities work in two specific fields. It didn't sound like the humanities majors that your students were analyzing were the ones that they were actually operating in in the applied experiential part of the course. And so I'm curious how those two threads of the course may have complemented each other.

SPEAKER_04 30:54

Yeah, this is a great question. And I think one of the questions we get a lot is how do you deal with the disconnect between this um really intense push for workforce readiness and the more abstract value of the humanities that are intended to make good citizens, to help you develop a moral code, right? An ethical direction. And I think our answer to that is like these aren't actually, we don't look at these as an opposition to each other. We look at them as very much complementary, and that's kind of how we organize the course. Like these are two things braided together. So for the humanities students who signed up for the course, here's sort of just a reiteration that there are people who are gainfully employed, okay, doing active humanities work every day. That is what they do. And I also always try to reinforce like, okay, so when I lived in New York, a new Broadway show would open and good luck getting a ticket for the first year. I mean, I would wait outside for lotteries, I would, you know, try to sign up for standing room or whatever. I was like, those are all humanities people, and not just the ones on the stage. There are people doing the lighting, there are people writing the script. There's a whole orchestra pit below the stage playing. There are theaters, right, in every major city across the United States. One of the highest viewerships for the Grammys, right, was this year. You have uh, you can barely get a ticket to get into the Whitney Biennial, right, this year. I mean, there is a true celebration of the humanities. And in some ways, people are embracing the humanities more than I've ever seen before, even things like book talk, right? And so I always try to differentiate, it's not the humanities that people are criticizing, it's the study of the humanities and the value of that, right? That is what I see. No one says to you, oh, what well, I mean, most people don't say to you, why would you spend money to see Hades Town? They say, Oh my gosh, you got to see Hades Town, you're so lucky, right? So it's not like there's this just general disdain for humanities initiatives writ large, right? It is more of do that in your spare time. That's a great hobby, but you should be studying biology or engineering or marketing or something that has a clear career path. So we're trying to sort of like fragment that. So here's people who are gainfully employed in the humanities, and also here are people who are gainfully employed outside the humanities, but are doing really well and advancing in their careers because of the majors they had while they were here. So that way, this sort of like dual approach impacts and reinforces, I guess reinforces is a better word, the decision for those who are majoring in the humanities that they haven't made this huge mistake. Um, but then at the same time, for those who aren't employed in the humanities, yeah, like the goal isn't necessarily change your major, but the goal is maybe you add an elective, maybe you try to find an intersection, right? Like we had a pre-med student who now is running a narrative medicine journal at UK med school because she realized medical memoirs are incredibly instructive for med school students. It helps you have a more sort of like holistic approach to patient care. And she learned that through her humanities class. You know, so I think we sort of like to tackle it both ways because of that and just show, like, as a humanities scholar, right? And someone who is instructing students who are pursuing humanities degrees, I will never bulk at workforce readiness conversations. And I think it's our obligation to have those in a very clear, transparent way. Because I mean, I know we all have faculty who are like, ugh, it's not about the job. Well, it is about the job. We have to meet students where they are, right? Like, there's nothing wrong with students wanting answers to those questions. And the more confidence we exude and the more research we do, the more we're able to meet them where they are.

SPEAKER_02 35:28

Um, in creating the kind of curriculum for the tech faculty fellows, um, I wanted to start with a couple of tenets of you know, backwards design, um, you drawing on the transparent assignment design framework, and then also really focusing on that student-centered experience of how we take the things that we know. So we have these specific goals for them to develop these skills. We know that this is how they're developing them in these courses. So then how do we translate that into language that students can understand? And how do we construct kind of scaffolded assignments that give students opportunities to um kind of discover on their own and articulate on their own through reflection, um, working on that communication, those skills and where they're showing up in their assignments, uh, which is very much, I think, what Chelsea had did you know throughout the course before she came to the tech program and then you know during as well.

Derek Bruff 36:33

Could you I want to get super concrete if you can, Chelsea? Like what were some of those scaffolding moves that you built in to get students ready for that thing that seemed maybe overwhelming?

SPEAKER_04 36:43

So I did like a um like a Google doc where I had literally like step one, step two, step three with really concrete examples. So I showed that, like again, it goes back to you don't tell them, show them. Um, and I teach honor students primarily, right? So I know how they can get really in their heads, like they want to see what an A-level work looks like. Um, so I was like, okay, step one, hypothetically, this is what it could look like, you know, and then I so I did I did the exercise with like one major and showed them, okay, so this is like one major step one. I want you to repeat this exercise five times with five different majors, you know. So it was sort of like here's a little bite-sized sample of what this should look like. It was also helpful because I was basically doing the project alongside, like I had to do the project first, and I could kind of see, ooh, where where was I unclear of what the next move would be? Um, and then like step two, here's what an in-person interview might look like if they want to go that direction. Here's what a survey might look like if you want to go this direction. If you're not sure how to phrase the survey questions, here's some resources that you all can research that help sort of articulate how to do non-leading survey questions, right? So it was a lot of like trying to give them agency, but also showing like, here's the different ways you can tackle this. Like, and then the third thing was like, how do you? So the first one was like identify the majors and the corresponding skills. The second one was survey non-humanities professionals or professionals in non-humanities fields. Here's all the different ways you can do that. And then the third one is, and this is gets to the part and parcel of my tech outcome, which was communicate ideas. How do you now communicate what you found out? So, you know, you're in the class with these students, they're hyped. I mean, they're like, oh my gosh, I have no idea that, you know, this A V person has to do so much public speaking. Well, of course they have to do public speaking, they have to pitch all the time, you know. So they're really excited. How do you carefully and clearly showcase what you've learned through this exercise in a way that can be digested for folks outside of higher education? Is it gonna be a graph? Is it gonna be a breakdown of information? You know, and these are questions that you know, Jennifer and Sean and I have to ask ourselves too. Like, how do I communicate to tech what a success this program was? Um, things like that. So I gave examples. If you wanted to do it in a graph breakdown, this is what that might look like. If you want to do, you know, like um a um presentation, right? Here are different resources you could do. Here's different audiences who might be interested in hearing it. I mean, think of it like a recipe. You know, like if you say it's like one of my favorite skits from a TV show, fold in the cheese to something.

Derek Bruff 39:54

Um if you all know, if you know, you know. Hi, this is Future Derek, jumping in with a bit of context. Fold in the cheese is a reference to a memorable scene in the television show Shits Creek, in which the family matriarch Moira attempts to make an old family recipe in the kitchen with her son David. It's clear that she has never actually made the recipe before, but she doesn't want her son to know that. When they get to the step in the recipe that asks them to fold in the cheese, there's a very funny scene where Moira keeps telling David to fold in the cheese, and David keeps protesting that he doesn't know what that means. Of course, Moira doesn't either. I'll put a link in the show notes to this scene, which is indeed very funny.

SPEAKER_04 40:36

Um, but if you don't know what that means, you need a video, right? Like, what does it mean? What does fold in the cheese mean? What does that mean, right? This is like a this is god, this is coded language, right? And and so sometimes you have to just actually show them the first step. And then from there on out, when they're told to fold in the cheese, now they know what it means. So that was kind of how I did it, right? Like, what does it mean to pull right community members? What does that mean? They haven't done that yet, so you have to kind of show them, right?

Derek Bruff 41:11

Yeah, yeah. Well, uh, Shauna, I appreciate your mention of the transparent design approach. Um, and I hadn't connected that approach to this kind of workforce readiness argument, but a lot of the transparent design approach is to say very clearly to students, here's what you're gonna get out of this assignment, um, here's the knowledge, here's the skills, here's why you should care, right? That's a that's a big piece of it, actually. So it's not busy work. And then uh Chelsea, I think what you're referring to is the transparency of uh uh process and expectations. Um so you're not just saying here's the endpoint, good luck, but here here's the resources you need, here's the steps that you should take in order to get to these outcomes that I think are valuable for you. Yeah. Shauna, do you have anything more you want to say about the transparent approach and how it's played out across the tech project?

SPEAKER_02 42:00

Um I think it's really developed over the three cohorts that we've had so far. So we'll be starting our fourth cohort in the fall. Um one of the things the I was thinking about one of the activities that we did this time where we were l working on that student-facing language, and um one of them was about taking kind of writing down what your goal would be for an assignment. And then we spent some time on a whiteboard kind of breaking down the individual words. So, like what Chelsea was saying about what does it mean to poll, what does it mean to interview? And um I think that that was a really good exercise of we can kind of get in this rhythm when we're writing, you know, student learning outcomes, or when we're trying to explain the purpose of that assignment in the transparent design framework for students of using those kind of words that they make sense to us, but we have that kind of expert bias often, right? Of well, we know what it means to write a paper or build an argument, but that's not always where our students are. So taking a little bit of extra time or fold the fold in the cheese. Fold in the cheese. That was so perfect. Um, right. So if you're asking them to do that for a grade and they've never had to fold in the cheese, then they might need a little bit uh extra support. Um, so I you know love the you know the idea of including those resources, right? Pointing students toward um extra help. And that was one of the things too that uh we talked about was thinking about places where you can put those in, right? If you um can anticipate, especially if you're teaching across disciplines, if you're teaching students at different levels, you know, if you have a freshman and a senior in the same class, they're not gonna have the same understanding. So kind of being able to anticipate that I mean that really speaks to universal design as well, uh, that you're kind of helping all students by making sure that things are as clear as possible and that they have the support that they need.

SPEAKER_00 44:09

That's great.

SPEAKER_03 44:10

And I I'd like to add too, one of my favorite things that Shauna does during these meetings is have uh faculty fellows take on the persona of a student. So they develop a persona, a student persona. You know, maybe it's so and so who's just in the class because they want to knock out UK core. But that faculty takes on that persona. Persona and then works with another faculty member to look at that assignment and say, you know, where are the roadblocks for me? What do I not understand? Do I, as in my student persona, do I understand the value of this assignment? Do I understand what I'm trying to get out of it? And I really love that because the faculty take their personas seriously and they give some feedback that they might not think about otherwise when they're not in that student persona.

Derek Bruff 44:57

I love it. I love some role-playing in faculty development. That's awesome. Um, we're we're we're running up on time, and I wanna um Chelsea, I want to circle back to uh something you mentioned earlier about the success uh from this past spring. Do you have a story or two about a student that you'd like to share?

SPEAKER_04 45:17

Yeah, I so I just to refresh myself before this podcast, I went and read back some of the students' um students' feedback, their comments after completing the course. And the the two words that just like keep hitting again and again and again was hands-on, hands-on, hands on. I love the hands-on, I love the hands-on. Um, some specific quotes that I think are definitely worth sharing. So this was from this last iteration. Um, one of the students wrote, um, I entered UK as a humanities and social science major, and then I changed it because I just felt like I couldn't find work. This class proved me wrong. So loved that. Um another one said, I think this is a very valuable course. Often I think our college coursers' courses become too much about the hypothetical future and not so much about what we can do right now to work toward a concrete future, and this course works against that tendency in the best way. Um, so those are a couple of examples. We did have five students from this last iteration who, because of this course, added a humanities minor, which is really, really cool, I think. So, I mean, that's a real tangible benefit. But like I said, it's one of those things where you know, we're kind of discussing the success of this course with our faculty of record who come from all different majors, right? All different backgrounds, all different disciplines. And someone said, I also think it's cool, even if they don't add a humanities major, that they opted into this course and might just embrace, like I said, like one humanities class, if that's what they have open to them. Overall, the testimonials are always reiterating the value of getting the students involved in actual hands-on humanities work. Like for the for the unit on memorial and preservation, one of the students remarked that just figuring out how the gravestones are cleaned at Camp Nelson was so eye-opening because that is a humanist. That is someone who has training in preservation, who is charged with determining how to go about that process, right? Like the memorial markers that you see around Lexington, whose job is it to approve those and erect them and make sure that, you know, if there's a typo, it's fixed, you know. That's Jim Sieber, who works for the Kentucky Historical Society. He taught one of the units, right? And he's an alum of the Gain Center, which is really cool. So I think for them, just again connecting those humanities interventions they see in the real world to real people who, again, are gainfully employed working in a humanities field. That's kind of what I heard again and again.

Derek Bruff 48:14

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, thank you so much for being on the show today and sharing about this really fascinating course and the work that you're doing at UK. Um, this has been really great. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_02 48:25

Thank you so much.

Derek Bruff 48:26

Thank you so much. That was Chelsea Brislin, Associate Director of the Gaines Center for the Humanities, an affiliate faculty with Appalachian Studies in the Lewis Honors College at the University of Kentucky. We also heard from Shauna Felkins, Senior Faculty Instructional Consultant at the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching at UK, and Jennifer Osterhag, Associate Professor of Biology and Director of UK's Transdisciplinary Educational Approaches to Advanced Kentucky or Tech. Thanks to Chelsea, Shauna, and Jennifer for coming on the show to share their experiences with tech. And thanks to Shauna's boss and director of UK's Teaching Center, Trey Kanatzer, for connecting me to this impressive program and these fascinating faculty. If you'd like to learn more about any of our guests or read more about tech and the courses that it supports, see the show notes for links. If you know of an example of a course or program that is helping humanities students develop durable skills and prepare for the workforce, please let me know. I'd love to hear about it. Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPSIA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPSIA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities, and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website and socials, and to the Intentional Teaching newsletter, which goes out most weeks on Thursday or Friday. If you found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.