Higher Listenings
A lively look at the trends and people shaping the future of higher education, featuring thought leaders from across the industry. Brought to you by Top Hat.
Higher Listenings
The Zen of Embracing Our Authenticity
Let’s be real: teaching can feel like performance art. But what if your most powerful teaching tool is you—fully present, emotionally honest, and yes, a little messy?
In this episode, we talk with Liz Norell, author of The Present Professor, about what it really means to bring your whole self to the classroom—without oversharing, or overperforming. Authenticity, she reminds us, isn’t about disclosure—it’s about alignment. When your values shape how you relate to students, the classroom becomes something more than just content delivery. It becomes human. And maybe even joyful.
Guest Bio
Dr. Liz Norell teaches political science at Chattanooga State and leads with heart—as an author, educator, and advocate for authentic, relationship-rich teaching. With more than two decades of college-level experience—including political science, journalism, statistics, and writing—she now supports faculty through SoTL, assessment, and professional learning focused on disability and neurodivergence. Her research interests include public opinion and the Supreme Court. Liz is the author of The Present Professor and is passionate about helping mid-career educators reconnect with joy, purpose, and presence.
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Trust and relationships are the things that power really transformational learning and teaching. And the way that we come into a classroom will really impact the extent to which those relationships can be healing or can further exacerbate the burnout and disconnection.
SPEAKER_00:We're told to be professional, to perform, to be the authority no matter what's happening in our lives. But what if that performance is cutting us off from joy, from purpose, and from the kind of connection that makes teaching worth doing? In this episode, we talk with Liz Norrell, author of The Present Professor, about the power of presence, the myth of leaving it at the door, and how showing up more fully, head, heart, and body can transform the classroom. Welcome to Higher Listenings. I think most of us can appreciate that teaching is deeply meaningful on the one hand, but if we're being honest, it can also be deeply exhausting. In the present professor, you invite us to ask deeper questions, like what actually gets in the way of teaching. So let's start there. What do you think most often derails our ability to teach with clarity, connection, or even joy?
SPEAKER_01:There are a lot of things that can get in the way. And I just want to acknowledge that we're having this conversation in the midst of a fall semester that feels unusually challenging to me and to many of my colleagues. But as I'm thinking about it right now, it kind of boils down to a lack of psychological safety. And a lot of that has to do with us bringing a version of ourselves into the classroom that perhaps is not grounded in who we are outside of the classroom. I really worry about how it feels like the classroom is an opportunity for us to see one another as human and to connect with each other on a human level. And so much about the way higher education is structured in our histories, make it difficult to be that kind of very human presence with our students in learning spaces.
SPEAKER_00:And I know we're going to dig into some of those, I guess, systemic issues that pose that challenge to us. But how like we talked about burnout. We've talked about burnout a number of times on this podcast because that's a real concern. There's sort of inner turmoil, there's the stress that we carry with us. So how does that ripple into the classroom and shape the learning environment itself?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think there's this idea that to be a professional and authoritative teacher, that we need to set aside all of those things that are happening in our lives and just sort of show up and perform the role of teaching. And a lot of times that means ignoring things that are really weighing heavily on us or pretending like the student scrolling the Instagram in the front row isn't bothering us when it actually is. These little moments of disconnection, I think, add to our burnout because we're asking ourselves to kind of ignore things that are very human and very real and very understandable. In the same way, when we come into the classroom and we feel like we have to hide big portions of ourselves, students can perceive that, right? We know when someone is pretending to be something that they're not. And that leads students to distrust us as well. And so when I think about burnout and stress and other things that we're dealing with, I think about how they can fracture the building of trust and relationships in learning spaces. And I think that trust and relationships are the things that power really transformational learning and teaching. And the way that we come into a classroom will really impact the extent to which those relationships can be healing or can further exacerbate the burnout and disconnection.
SPEAKER_02:I want to pick up on your opening remark. I think you were gently referring to a climate right now that is really, I don't know, harkens back to McCarthyism era. For any of us who have a memory of that, it just seems such a difficult moment. And what you're talking about here is really stepping into a kind of vulnerability and building trust with students at a time where students are recording professors to, you know, the recent case of professors being dismissed for speaking truth in an academic environment. What do you have to say to faculty who maybe are really concerned about stepping into that vulnerability in this particularly fraught moment?
SPEAKER_01:My advice to faculty is to think really carefully and intentionally about what's the goal of creating that space in terms of its impact on learning? And are there ways based on whatever you're teaching, based on your identity and the context in which you're teaching, are there ways that you can open up lines of communication or at least invite lines of communication that are in service of the objectives of your course and all the other things? I'm teaching a research class right now. It's mostly juniors and seniors. And when we engage in social research, research on humans, we're asking them to share something with us that may be quite vulnerable and personal. And so talking about the reluctance of people to be honest about how they're doing in a particular moment serves the kind of learning goals of the course, but also then gives us an opportunity to talk about, maybe not even talk about how you're feeling, but talk about why it's hard to talk about what you're feeling in this context.
SPEAKER_02:Your work reminds me a great deal of the courage to teach and this idea of bringing your authentic self into the classroom in a way that actually is necessary to optimize learning for your students. So asking you to think about what sparked the present professor. Was there a moment or maybe an accumulation of experiences in your own teaching practice that really led you to determine this is something that's missing from the conversation or that maybe we've lost since the Course of Teaching, it's time to bring it back.
SPEAKER_01:I think the spark for this book, before I even knew what it would become or if it would become a book, was sitting with the duality of how Brad and Eric, as you said at the beginning, we get into this because it's meaningful work. But when we gather together with other educators, often talk about the myriad ways that we feel disappointed by students. And so it's this weird contradiction to me that we do it because we we say it's meaningful and we love it, but then we also are constantly grousing about what students aren't doing or what they are doing that's frustrating. And so I wanted to write something that talked about how do we see one another as humans and how do we bring some of that humanity back into the enterprise. So for me, the present professor, the presence of the title is really about trying to appreciate the complexity of the lives of the people that we're teaching in our own lives and trying to see each other on that level, as opposed to a more kind of deficit mindset of all the ways that we're failing each other, looking at celebrating all the ways that we're succeeding. And so that's where the book came from, I think.
SPEAKER_02:One of the things that is, I think, an undercurrent in your work is the desire for all teachers to experience the joy of teaching. I know when I left teaching full-time, I knew I was leaving behind these experiences that were really quite inspired. You know, I would leave classrooms that went well just floating on a cloud. Every teacher's had that, right? So why is joy something to really be mindful about pursuing? And how does that play into the work in the book?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. When we're joyful, it's infectious, right? When we're enthusiastic about our topic, that gets students engaged, but then helping them find their own joy and find their own curiosity, then it becomes a positive feedback loop, right? And that's all centered on curiosity and discovery. So I love to think about the classroom as a space of collective joy and collective enthusiasm for learning. And I think that can really help faculty who are feeling overwhelmed, who are feeling burned out, recommit to the work that they're doing. I also just want to say that joy isn't always possible. I never want somebody to feel like they're failing somehow because they are not currently experiencing joy in any given moment or any given semester, because that's the reality of being human in this world. But it's something that we can strive for and look for opportunities to cultivate.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I was gonna say too, it's sometimes if you set that as a goal, it's like if you're pursuing happiness, it's a lot harder to find it. Rather than can you create conditions that are likely to lead to happiness or to joy in the classroom, then it's gonna happen. Maybe not when you predict it, but the likelihood of you finding that is that much greater. So you use the word presence. Obviously, it's in the title of your book. How do you actually define that? Why does that presence matter so much in the context of transformational teaching?
SPEAKER_01:So the way I talk about presence in the book and in my own work is just being very attentive to what's unfolding in this moment. And I think of presence in the same way, and and Eric, I know you'll you're familiar with this sensation of like meditation, right? Just kind of observing what's happening right now. And to have that focus on the present requires us to detach from some of the judgments that naturally arise and some of the anxieties that our more primitive brain are constantly turning on. So for me, the practice of presence is trying to as much as we can, and it's imperfect and it's a practice, but as much as we can stay grounded in exactly what's happening in this moment.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. You talked too about embodiment, and I think this is another interesting part of the book. And you describe that as the information our bodies are giving us. Can you unpack that a little bit? What does that mean to teach from a place of embodiment?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So when we're trying to make a decision or when we're making a judgment, the kind of instinctive part of our body forms that more quickly than our cognitive system does. So it's often the case, for example, when we're trying to make a decision that we'll have an instinctive reaction, and then our brain tries to rationalize why that's the right decision. And so that means that there's an awful lot of information in the body itself. The body is making decisions, and then the brain kind of catches up. When I think about embodiment in teaching, it's really trying to pay attention to those often subconscious or just out of our conscious awareness cues. So let me give you an example. I recently read Dr. Sunita Sa's book, Defy, and she talks about how when we're in a scenario that is challenging our values, we'll often start just by getting a little inkling of dread or discomfort. And we often ignore that. But if we pay attention to it, that's our body signaling to us that we're moving into a situation that is contradictory to our values. Okay, so embodiment for me in teaching is looking out for those internal cues that something good or maybe something unproductive is unfolding so that we can be attentive to that and try to redirect. Embodiment is also helpful because we often mimic the body language of other people around us. And so one of the ways that we generate empathy, and this is mentioned in the book and some of the research that I looked at, is we'll mirror the body language of someone else, and then we unconsciously react to the emotion that arises from that body language state, and that generates empathy for us. If we can be attentive to how we're mirroring the body language of someone else, that allows us to pay closer attention to their body language and to connect on a deeper level. And when we think about embodiment work in our own teaching or just lives, it's becoming equally attentive to those micro body movements for ourselves.
SPEAKER_00:It's interesting too, because you mentioned meditation. I've been meditating not as consistently as I would like, but for a good portion of my life. And a lot of it really is about how do you train yourself so that you can create that space, that gap to actually notice, rather than getting carried along with a judging thought or a physical reaction rather than thinking, why am I actually feeling that way right now? Oh, okay, it's this thing. Now I have an option in terms of how I'm gonna react to that sensation or that that interplay.
SPEAKER_01:Our brains naturally categorize and judge constantly. That's how we keep ourselves safe. But I remember I was giving a presentation at this conference, and in the session immediately prior to mine, the presenters were encouraging attendees to think about the learning styles of their students. And this is like a major red flag for me. Like I get irrationally frustrated when people start talking about visual and kinesthetic and auditory learners. So I'm like, this has been debunked. Stop perpetuating this. And I was just like getting more and more angry. And before I started speaking, as I was setting up my presentation and everything, I just asked myself that very question, Eric. It's why is this upsetting me so much? I still don't know the answer to it. But that is a much more productive line of thought than I'm so angry that they're saying this thing.
SPEAKER_02:I'm so with you on that, on that trigger.
SPEAKER_00:I was just gonna say, Brad, I was worried there for a second, Liz, that you're a proponent of learning styles. And I was just waiting for Brad's body language to change substantially. So it was a bit of a relief to hear that you you're both on the same page with the view over, right?
SPEAKER_02:Cancel a more fundamental appreciation I have for your guiding us sort of in body teaching to really thinking about the body, and that's that we in academia too often ignore the body. Like this is all about cognitive development and nothing else, not emotional and certainly not physical, unless it's a physical skill. And so I really appreciate on this fundamental level, you're trying to move us toward thinking about the full human being that we are and that we are with in the classroom in that way. And I think cultivating presence is this aim to unite these parts of ourselves, right? The head, the heart, and the body. And this is something that may require some guidance for folks. So, are there some concrete practices that educators can try out that can bring more self-awareness and help them show up more authentically in their teaching?
SPEAKER_01:So there's some great work in Susan Rock's book, Minding Bodies, about how if you pair a physical movement with a particular concept, and this is especially good for the anatomy and physiology. If you try to make the shape of the body part you're talking about, or even point to it on your body, that that can help students form a stronger memory because we're tying a concept to a thing, right? And I know you've had Michelle Miller on the podcast, and she talks a lot about tricks for remembering things. And this is part of it, right? So those are small ways that we can start with it. But I think maybe even just, you know, we all have those moments in class. I had one last night where you ask a question and nobody answers. And it's very easy to just try to hurry up and answer it yourself. But if you can force yourself to sit in that for a moment and ask yourself, what about this is feeling uncomfortable for me? Right? Am I uncomfortable because I'm afraid students weren't paying attention and they didn't hear the question? Am I uncomfortable because I've asked a bad question and now I'm realizing that no one understands it? Even just that pause for a couple of seconds to think about why I am uncomfortable right now can be a helpful, tiny little toe in the door of paying attention to our embodied experience.
SPEAKER_02:I'm thinking though about Eric's mentioning of in meditating this pursuit of detachment. And so you're getting us to develop a habit of asking the question in the moment, why is this happening or why am I feeling this way? That's a really easy practice to pursue, right? When you do that in your own practice, what is your hoped for result?
SPEAKER_01:I think the reason that that is a useful practice is that it shuts down judgment and opens curiosity. So opening this line of inquiry softens some of that judgment, which other people can then pick up on. And that creates a more productive environment for moving forward from this moment of disconnection.
SPEAKER_00:Showing up authentically sounds good in practice, but there is a tension between our private lives, obviously, our personal lives and professional context. There's the fact that students have certain biases. How do you navigate this in a way that serves us as instructors as well as our students?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I want to start with a very, again, another very strong statement that no one should be reading the subtitle of my book, Authenticity and Transformational Teaching, as a demand that you bring your fully authentic self into the classroom. In fact, I would strongly encourage you not to do that because the classroom is not the place where you're being most yourself. That happens with your friends and people and where it's situationally appropriate. So authenticity for me in the classroom means not pretending to be something that you're not. And this is, by the way, why I can never tell another person how to teach because they need to teach in a way that's aligned with who they are. I respect the fact that not everyone has the same degree of psychological or workplace safety and being their authentic self in the classroom. We have to figure out like what parts of me that are authentic to me would serve students' learning in this context. I don't have a lot of walls. I'll tell most people pretty much anything they want to know, but that doesn't mean that I come into class and tell my students everything that's happened to me in the last week. But it does mean that I will try to relate to them in ways that feel in service to their learning and that create an environment that's grounded in trust.
SPEAKER_02:When you and I spoke earlier in preparation for this conversation, I was really a bit confounded by the work because I always took myself to be occupying a role. I was stepping into the classroom as a teacher. That was my role. But it was a role that I brought a lot of authenticity to, but it was nonetheless a role. But I think you are helping me at least really understand this notion of authenticity and the compatibility with the fact that this isn't all of you and it's not deprivate you necessarily, right? So I think it's a nuance, but I think it's helpful because we've had a lot of conversations with experts like you who are talking about bringing more authenticity, building trust, being vulnerable. And so I think anything we can do to help that concept move forward with some safety, psychological safety for the instructor is all to the good, especially our more vulnerable instructors.
SPEAKER_01:I would never give this book to a person before their first class teaching ever, because they've got too many other things to worry about. But once you've got a handle on what it means to be an educator, then thinking about what kind of educator do I want to be and how is that aligned with who I am in the rest of my life. That's what I mean by authenticity, letting your values inform how you're relating to students and how you're engaging them in learning.
SPEAKER_00:You talked a bit about the notion of playing big. So to pursue questions or projects that feel bigger than ourselves. For me, it's sort of getting out of our own heads a little bit, perhaps. So why is that so important for educators to make space for that kind of work?
SPEAKER_01:It's really about not letting the inner critic keep you from pursuing things that you really want to do. And the inner critic is really just there to try to keep us safe, to prevent us from failing. But that often means that we're we're living smaller lives than we could. So writing this book was like the biggest playing pick that I've ever done. It's it was a huge leap and it still feels a little surreal. But the the idea here is that, first of all, you know, we are we all have the capacity to play bigger than we do in our everyday lives, especially when we're feeling under threat, as so many of us are. The temptation is to become very small and to not attract attention to ourselves, which is rational. And I would never critique anyone for following that instinct. But if we're trying to persuade our students to engage in the challenging and potentially life-changing work of learning deeply, then us chasing things that are bigger than what we do every day is a way for us to relate to them on that level, to demonstrate that we are willing to take risks just as we're asking them to, and that we know that we might fail just as we know that they fear they will, right? And you don't have to talk about this all the time in class, but just having that mindset and recognizing the fear that can arise when you try to take this bigger step can help us then have empathy for our students who may be struggling and turning to generative AI because that feels safer than taking a risk with something that I've actually created, right?
SPEAKER_02:I I love this space. A lot of my work has been in fostering and supporting innovation at an institutional scale. And so I've often managed large portfolios of projects. And I would tell my staff if we don't have a significant number of failures in this portfolio, our appetite is not large enough. There's so much value in that. But failure is a hard thing for us to talk about and to showcase. So I love your suggestion here that playing big doesn't have to be public.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I want to just give a really concrete example of how I do this regularly. And it's something that I have started asking my students to do too at the start of the semester. So, one way that we can play bigger that is low stakes, even though it feels really high stakes, and that can help us exercise this muscle is sending emails to people that we don't know but whose work we admire. And just like trying to engage them in a conversation. There was a time when this was really intimidating to me, but now I do it all the time. And I'll just email someone and say, like, I think you're amazing and I would love to talk sometime. And this is really intimidating for a lot of people. But as I tell my students and I tell my colleagues, they're already not talking to you. So if they don't respond, nothing has changed, right? The stakes are quite low here. But if they do respond, then something good might happen from that. And so I now ask my students at the start of the semester to identify someone who has a job that they think they might like to have someday and just message them. And we brainstorm what could you say and what might this look like, and how could you get in touch with them? And then we all do it together, including me. And then every week or so we just check back in and say, Did anyone hear from them? Right. Last semester we did this and none of my students got a response. And that's okay because everyone didn't get a response. So it's not you, right? It's not something that you did. It's just hard, right? People are busy and their inboxes are full. But by the end of the semester, one of my students had a job offer from the person that he contacted in the second week of the semester, which is amazing, right? So these don't have to be big things. And sometimes those little choices that we make can yield really important and impactful outcomes.
SPEAKER_02:And there's also clearly playfulness in this. There's play involved, right? So you're one of those practices I think you can intentionally invest in to try to build some joy and authenticity in the experience.
SPEAKER_00:So these are challenging times in higher education. What's giving you life or hope as an educator?
SPEAKER_01:I'm gonna give you a glib and silly answer, and then I'm gonna give you a real answer. What's giving me life right now, glibly, is that I'm going on a writing retreat next week and I'm planning to ignore the world. So that's giving me a lot of hope right now because I really do just need kind of a break from this daily deluge of chaos. But in all seriousness, what gives me life is always working with and talking to students. And it's seeing the hope and the dreams and the passion that they have. I wrote a letter for a former student earlier this week who's applying to a pharmacy doctoral program, a pharmacy program, and talking about how she wants to learn more about pharmacy because her parents have always been very ill and she wants to try to help other people. When you're around people who are younger and who are articulating these dreams of contributing to the world in meaningful ways, I think it's really hard to live in a state of despair. And so I always feel better after I teach a class. That's that's what gives me life.
SPEAKER_02:Well, Liz, one of the things that gives me life is having conversations with experts like you who are bringing such important insights and orientation toward the practice of teaching. So I just want to say thank you so much for joining us for this conversation.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's been a real joy, and I've had a rough couple of weeks. So this conversation has given me life too. Thank you both for the work you're doing.
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