__and a Learner with Megan Nocek

Hello! For our final installment of season six, Gina and Kelly get behind the mics with Assistant Professor of Psychology, Megan Nocek. In this episode, “__and a Learner” Megan shares with us about how students can sometimes take for granted the things they know and do well and also why it’s important to help them learn that while research can be imperfect, it is really important to know why and how it’s done. Please be sure to subscribe to, rate, and review the podcast and follow us on Facebook and Instagram @pedagogyagogo. 

https://linktr.ee/pedagogyagogo

Transcript

Transcript

00:00:00 Gina Turner

One, two, three, 4.

00:00:03 Gina Turner

Pedagogy A Go Go. Pedagogy Go Go.

00:00:14 Gina Turner

Hello and welcome to Pedagogy A Go Go, a podcast about how we engage with learning and why. This is season 6, episode 6, and a learner, and we are your hosts, Kelly Allen and Gina Turner.

00:00:28 Gina Turner

Hello, Kelly.

00:00:29 Kelly Allen

And hello, Gina. It's so good to see you again.

00:00:32 Gina Turner

It's a delight to see you as well.

00:00:34 Kelly Allen

It's like we're getting close to the end of the semester.

00:00:38 Gina Turner

We really are. Yep.

00:00:44 Gina Turner

Smell the barn.

00:00:45 Kelly Allen

Yeah, I smell the barn.

00:00:47 Gina Turner

Yeah, you've never heard that?

00:00:48 Kelly Allen

Oh no, please share.

00:00:49 Gina Turner

Like horses, horses will speed up because they know they're almost home. So it's because they smell the barn.

00:00:54 Kelly Allen

Oh, I have heard that before.

00:00:56 Gina Turner

Okay, I said another idiom today and everyone looked at me like, what? Which is chalk and cheese. Have you ever heard that

00:01:04 Kelly Allen

expression? No, it sounds disgusting.

00:01:06 Gina Turner

Well, you don't eat it.

00:01:07 Kelly Allen

Okay, thank goodness.

00:01:09 Gina Turner

But it's you say if something is chalk and cheese when it looks kind of super superficially similar, but it's wildly different. So it's like, that's like chalk and cheese, right? Isn't that a cool expression?

00:01:21 Kelly Allen

I love it. And I'm going to abuse the hell.

00:01:25 Gina Turner

Yay.

00:01:26 Kelly Allen

That is awesome. Yay, abuse.

00:01:30 Gina Turner

It's all right to abuse an idiom. Yes. All right, we do not condone abuse in any form on this podcast.

00:01:42 Gina Turner

Especially when we're welcoming A psychologist.

00:01:44 Kelly Allen

I know that's what I was just. Oh Lord, here we go again. But yes, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Megan Nosek, will be joining us today.

00:01:57 Gina Turner

We're very excited.

00:01:58 Kelly Allen

Yes, we are very excited. Yes.

00:02:00 Kelly Allen

I got to stop.

00:02:04 Kelly Allen

Especially. Okay.

00:02:07 Kelly Allen

But so, and this is going to be perhaps the last episode for season six, unless we can cook something up.

00:02:20 Kelly Allen

with gatekeeper stuff, but I get ahead of myself. We'll talk more about that during the outro, but yes, today is Megan's day. I'm so looking forward to chatting with her.

00:02:28 Gina Turner

Yes, she is an esteemed colleague, and I'm sure we will have a very fun conversation.

00:02:36 Kelly Allen

Absolutely.

00:02:38 Gina Turner

If you had just one word to describe yourself as a teacher, what would it be?

00:02:48 Gina Turner

I know, I will say.

00:02:50 Kelly Allen

It's the end of the semester, man. It's been a couple weeks. Yeah.

00:02:53 Gina Turner

It is the end of the semester. Thank goodness.

00:02:56 Kelly Allen

I heard you 2 talking about, like, you were saying that you kind of, you're like, hey guys, we got 5 weeks left and here's our things, you know, boom, boom, boom. Like, how's that going?

00:03:08 Megan Nocek

It's going, I like to do the check-in because I feel like after spring break is over, the train is just chugging down the tracks and that's, it's not stopping, right? And so I feel like students don't necessarily realize how many new demands there are after spring break, in a number of their classes. And I mean, in my classes, I always kind of structure like my big assignments at the end of the semester. So I spread them out across the semester, but I know not a lot of instructors

00:03:38 Megan Nocek

where not all instructors do that. So it's sort of like, I just try to give them that little anchor of like, hey, this is where we are and you should probably figure out where you are in your other classes too.

00:03:49 Kelly Allen

Yeah, spring break is weird. Like, it's a necessary break. I know that, but I also feel that it's,

00:03:59 Kelly Allen

It's also kind of got like this Bermuda Triangle effect on some students. Like, so you're talking about like the train chugging along. And I feel like sometimes students don't like get back on the train after spring break. And it's just, it sucks. Because like, I feel like I spend like the first like week or two saying, hey, school started again. Like, where are you? Let's get this going. And it's totally not on them, but

00:04:28 Kelly Allen

I don't know, it's just, it's hard.

00:04:29 Gina Turner

Well, it feels almost antiquated a little bit, if you think about it, because our students, I feel like whenever I have an in-person class, as long as I've taught here, and I ask, oh, what are you doing for spring break? They're like,

00:04:45 Gina Turner

working, catching up on my schoolwork, which I guess is good because it gives you that little space to catch up. But I'm not sure how useful, honestly, it's useful for our faculty members because the faculty will run off and do things and take a break. But I wonder how relevant spring break really is for our

00:05:06 Gina Turner

community college students and all that entails.

00:05:09 Kelly Allen

I feel like we need to cut this part from the section because we're going to get in big trouble. I'm jeopardizing spring break now, but I agree, like with our students, so here at a community college, since so many of them are local, they use this as an opportunity to get more hours in at work, to make some more money or kind of get caught up on things. But I know that

00:05:36 Kelly Allen

when I was an undergrad, there was always at least like 2 professors that were like, hey, so you got spring break coming up. So like, you're going to have some extra time on your hands. So like, we're going to add a couple extra like 100 pages. And I'm like, dude, that's terrible. And I realized that like, if I ever

00:05:57 Kelly Allen

become a faculty member. I'm never doing that to my students. But the lesson that I have not learned is that I have not been able to keep from doing it to myself. So I'll be like, yeah, just turn on your big assignment right before spring break starts. So I'll spend the whole break reading your stuff. And I got to get away from that.

00:06:18 Gina Turner

I have totally fallen into that trap as well. I feel like we're getting into all the nitty-gritty already, and we haven't even asked you. So, Megan, what do you teach?

00:06:30 Kelly Allen

Oh, yeah.

00:06:30 Megan Nocek

First, thanks for having me.

00:06:33 Megan Nocek

I'm really excited to be here.

00:06:34 Gina Turner

Yay.

00:06:35 Megan Nocek

So I teach psychology and I have been teaching psychology here at Northampton Community College since 2010. So this year is my 15th anniversary here.

00:06:46 Gina Turner

Wow. Congratulations. Thank you.

00:06:48 Megan Nocek

Thank you. So

00:06:50 Megan Nocek

I did start off, I did start off my teaching career here, though I, and I can get to this in a bit, but I didn't always, I don't think I was born to be a teacher necessarily. I think it was something that, kind of became a pathway in my life.

00:07:06 Megan Nocek

But I started fresh out of grad school. I mean, didn't have a lick of teaching experience at all. And came in here and just sort of ran with it. And then I spent a little bit of time teaching as an adjunct at LCCC, also taught psychology there. And yeah, I went full time. I guess it's been about

00:07:31 Megan Nocek

Wow.

00:07:33 Gina Turner

Oh my gosh, yeah. Time does fly. Well, I want to get more into that idea of straight from grad school in a classroom. Hi, I'm teaching a class. But can you talk a little bit more about the specific classes that you teach most of the time?

00:07:49 Megan Nocek

Sure, yeah. So it's changed over the years. When I first started teaching as an adjunct, I primarily taught Introduction to Psychology, but I also taught

00:08:00 Megan Nocek

normal psychology. And I did that for many years, and that really coincided with the work that I did outside of the college, which was behavioral health, rehabilitative services. So I had a lot of first-person experience in that realm. And then over time, it sort of evolved. So I think, Gina, you may have even been part of that group that approached me.

00:08:24 Megan Nocek

It's probably been close to seven or eight years ago now, where I got recruited to teach research methods. Yes, yeah, so that was a new challenge, and that's one thing about me. I think that I've always...

00:08:40 Megan Nocek

I've always done and I've always been pulled toward our challenges. And that's what really motivated me to seek out the teaching position with no experience, right? And I just got lucky. But the challenge of teaching research methods, because I think that subject for a lot of people here research and you're like, oh my gosh, you know, like this is heavy. But that's really become a big, you know, part of

00:09:04 Megan Nocek

the work that I do and I love teaching it. So I do now I do intro to psychology, I do research methods, I do developmental psychology and health psychology, which you also pulled me in on and I love teaching that too.

00:09:16 Gina Turner

So that's great.

00:09:17 Megan Nocek

Those are my primary ones.

00:09:18 Gina Turner

I also love that you mentioned that you were doing that other work, that behavioral health work and rehabilitation work, because I was just at an event yesterday and I ran into a couple of alumni from

00:09:34 Gina Turner

NCC from here. And they were both raving about how cool it was that the people that they took classes from, they were both in architecture. They both worked for an architecture firm now. How the people that taught them worked in architecture. And I always say that's one of the most special things about a community college is that the faculty you get are people that have worked in their area or continue to work in their area because, you know, a lot of our classes are taught by adjuncts. So this is sort of

00:10:03 Gina Turner

something we were talking about with our last guest too, with Vivi.

00:10:07 Megan Nocek

Yeah.

00:10:08 Kelly Allen

Is that called like a professor of practice?

00:10:11 Gina Turner

I think at the university level, right? They'll...

00:10:16 Kelly Allen

Yeah, so one of our past guests from quite a few years ago, Dr. Karen Beck-Pooley, she's a professor of practice. And I just read this great article about her.

00:10:28 Kelly Allen

in the brown and white about this small cities initiative that she's doing and just like all the work that she's doing with students. But yeah, like I could see, like, with Megan, and the work that you do, just like how valuable it is where like you have that real world experience that you could share that with your students. That's cool.

00:10:48 Megan Nocek

And I was able to use stories, stories where I de-identified my clients and the families I worked with, but really just to help the students just sort of get an idea of what they're learning about in a textbook looks like out in the real world, in the context of a home or in the context of a school or something like that. And so

00:11:13 Megan Nocek

And I had to be careful in how I presented it because that work is so challenging. And finding a way to be candid about that work, but then also encouraging them to take on that challenge and helping them to identify the reward in that difficult work.

00:11:33 Gina Turner

Yeah. Do you feel like you're able to use examples from your work

00:11:38 Gina Turner

in research methods to kind of make it a little more accessible to students. I mean, I know that's different than teaching, the abnormal or psychopathology class, but because I do try to do that to a certain extent, but also try to get them to think about research in the real world. So I mean,

00:11:59 Gina Turner

We should probably have a side conversation. no, I know what we're doing these days in terms of making it accessible.

00:12:06 Kelly Allen

Well, what is research in the real world? Well, like, who gets to do that?

00:12:12 Gina Turner

These are very good questions, right?

00:12:14 Kelly Allen

Awesome! I love asking good questions.

00:12:17 Megan Nocek

I mean, anybody can do research, right? But...

00:12:21 Megan Nocek

depending on what's going to happen with that research, then there's other, important safeguards that need to be put in place, right? Like there needs to be an IRB, an institutional review board that needs to do the vetting of, you know, the methodology of the study. And, you know, you need to pre-register your hypothesis so that you're not like kind of cheating by getting your data and then,

00:12:45 Gina Turner

Right, yeah. And I'm

00:12:52 Kelly Allen

certainly like being totally mindful that I do not derail this entire recording here with what I'm about to say. But so like some of the things that Gina and I have been talking about with past guests, and I think this maybe really started about two episodes ago, was about like

00:13:15 Kelly Allen

kind of how there's this kind of gatekeeper element to our disciplines. So like in my field in writing, so like what is like standard writing? Is it something that has been kind of established by like these

00:13:38 Kelly Allen

wealthy landowning white guys like hundreds of years ago. And then that's the kind of model that we need to kind of follow throughout academia. Or are we doing something that is kind of more democratic, more inclusive? Like, you know, so what does writing from our communities look like? And in what ways can we like value and validate that type of work within

00:14:03 Kelly Allen

the academic world. So like when I'm asking about like the research methods, so like I'm sure that there's like a lot of folks living in our community who like have not taken research methods or perhaps have not attended a college course, but they are doing research. They have figured that out. So in what ways, like in what ways are those, so you're, we were talking earlier about like, you know, so Megan, like you're bringing your experiences

00:14:33 Kelly Allen

from the field into the classroom, but then also I'm wondering like in what ways are students able to bring their experiences of like research and what have you into the class?

00:14:44 Gina Turner

I mean, it raises a great question, Kelly, because I would say that for our class, what we are doing is we're teaching very much, this is the box of, let's unpack this box of the tools that we use in psychology to collect data and then use math to see if, you know, these different topics or different concepts are related to each other in some way. But I mean, one thing I do

00:15:14 Gina Turner

do is I talk about the qualitative type of research where I was looking at how people use language or talking about, I guess this is what I had in my head when I was thinking, what things do we bring to connect, you know, this scary research word with the real world is you can, anything can be a research question. You know, anything you observe in the world

00:15:42 Gina Turner

Any question you raise is a hypothesis. Any prediction you make is a hypothesis about things that are happening in the world. And you're making me think I want to kind of set the box aside a little bit more. But I don't know. What do you think about...

00:16:00 Megan Nocek

Yeah, I mean, I think...

00:16:03 Megan Nocek

a lot of things. So the one thing I think is that, in being a research gatekeeper, Kelly, as you have said,

00:16:09 Kelly Allen

I'm not calling you a gatekeeper.

00:16:11 Megan Nocek

No, but like you said, we are in some senses gatekeepers for our disciplines. And so I think the things that I really want students to understand about research

00:16:25 Megan Nocek

are that it's really important, but it's also imperfect. And so we spend a lot of time talking about weird samples, right? Those samples that don't very well represent our diverse population and how so much of the research that we have right now is not only based on weird samples, but has also been conducted by people

00:16:48 Megan Nocek

who are not very diverse, who do not represent minority groups and their own biases are involved in the interpretation of that data. We spend a lot of time talking about

00:17:01 Megan Nocek

like the bell curve and other, I actually have an assignment called bad research studies where we look at these different studies that have been conducted in the past like the Willowbrook hepatitis study and Alice Goffman's on the run study and MK Ultra and the students go through and they look at what happened in these studies, what was the purpose of these studies

00:17:23 Megan Nocek

how are these studies unethical? And if we wanted to study this same topic today, how could we do it? That's great. You know, and then I think it also helps them to understand how, like, just because we want to know about something doesn't mean that we can subject people to harm in order to know that stuff, right? Sometimes we just have to rely on things that unfortunately naturally happen in the real world. And we use that information to collect data. So I think I

00:17:50 Megan Nocek

do my best to link it to real-world scenarios in that way.

00:17:53 Gina Turner

That's great. And you make that really important point, too, about WEIRD. WEIRD is actually an acronym for the vast majority of psychological research that is in our textbooks. And it stands for, you're going to have to help me out, Western, Educated,

00:18:09 Megan Nocek

Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.

00:18:12 Gina Turner

And democratic societies. So those have been the traditional subjects or participants in the research that we read about.

00:18:20 Gina Turner

about really up until, until people really started to think about the importance of culture related to a lot of psychological theories and constructs. So yeah, that's great.

00:18:34 Kelly Allen

Before we get too far, you said MK Ultra. And as soon as you did that, I was like, is that like a hip hop artist, like MF Doom or something? Or is it like a new?

00:18:43 Kelly Allen

like thing for Michelob. What's MK Ultra?

00:18:48 Megan Nocek

MK Ultra was a study about mind control and how the government actually used hallucinogenics to do these different experiments on mind control.

00:19:01 Gina Turner

Yeah. Is the movie The Men Who, what is it? Men Who

00:19:06 Gina Turner

I did something with goats. Does this ring a bell? Yeah, it's a George Clooney movie.

00:19:11 Megan Nocek

Yeah, And isn't like Brad Pitt in it or something?

00:19:14 Gina Turner

I think so. Yeah.

00:19:15 Megan Nocek

I can't.

00:19:16 Kelly Allen

I think I know what you're talking about. Yes.

00:19:20 Gina Turner

Medustaric goats. I think that's what it was called.

00:19:24 Megan Nocek

That sounds right.

00:19:26 Gina Turner

Yeah.

00:19:26 Kelly Allen

I remember seeing previews for that, but I don't get to watch many movies at home. I'm so sad about that. Anyways.

00:19:34 Kelly Allen

But no, that's fascinating. So another thing that you said that kind of like, look at me just taking stuff over. I'm so sorry. But another thing that you said that like has got me kind of thinking over here, and I'm listening while I'm thinking, but is like you'd mentioned that like you went to college and you didn't think that like that you're going to be a teacher. I think that you said I wasn't born to be a teacher.

00:20:03 Kelly Allen

Thanks, Doc.

00:20:08 Gina Turner

Kelly was talking to Jeff.

00:20:09 Gina Turner

He was not talking to me or myself.

00:20:12 Kelly Allen

So for all of our listeners at home, Jeff will randomly give us a time check.

00:20:19 Kelly Allen

And so today's dog for thank you dog is the one and only Jeff.

00:20:25 Kelly Allen

But anyway, so.

00:20:27 Megan Nocek

But sometimes it's me too.

00:20:28 Kelly Allen

Oh yeah, totally.

00:20:29 Kelly Allen

To the stranger at the coffee line.

00:20:34 Kelly Allen

You're not Megan, but anywho, oh man, what an episode.

00:20:37 Kelly Allen

Okay, so I always find that fascinating when people like are going to school to be like one thing and it's like, you know, so being an educator just was not even in their mind and then they like just go and do it and then

00:20:54 Kelly Allen

and then in your case, you're really good at it.

00:20:57 Kelly Allen

So I'm just really curious, how the hell does that happen?

00:21:03 Kelly Allen

Because so for me, I knew that I wanted to be an educator in some form or fashion since I was in high school.

00:21:11 Kelly Allen

I think it was like the summer's off thing, whatever.

00:21:13 Kelly Allen

But I always thought that teaching is,

00:21:17 Kelly Allen

That's where it's at for me, because I just love, as you can tell, I love talking, talking about big ideas.

00:21:23 Kelly Allen

So I knew that was for me.

00:21:24 Kelly Allen

And I was always paying attention to it, whether I realized it or not, to the craft of teaching and learning.

00:21:34 Kelly Allen

So in your case, and we've come across this a couple of times where it's like, you know what, I'm going to teach today.

00:21:42 Kelly Allen

And then like.

00:21:44 Gina Turner

Hey, I like this.

00:21:45 Kelly Allen

It's like you like it and you're good at it.

00:21:47 Kelly Allen

So like I'm curious, like where are you drawing?

00:21:51 Kelly Allen

Like what inspirations are you drawing on for like what kind of teacher that you want to be?

00:21:56 Kelly Allen

Like was there a teacher that you had in the past that you found was really inspirational or was there a moment as a student that you found to be inspirational?

00:22:07 Megan Nocek

I think that my answer to that is sort of like twofold.

00:22:10 Megan Nocek

So

00:22:12 Megan Nocek

I guess I'll start with like why I came into psychology and education.

00:22:18 Megan Nocek

And then I'll talk a little bit more about my experience as a younger student and how that shaped my approach as a teacher.

00:22:24 Megan Nocek

So I started off in community college going to school for criminal justice because I thought I was going to be a state police officer and that was my goal.

00:22:34 Megan Nocek

And I really loved learning about the criminal justice system.

00:22:39 Megan Nocek

I had wonderful professors there.

00:22:42 Megan Nocek

But as I got, just started learning more about the topic, I was just getting the sense that like this system is not built for rehabilitation.

00:22:52 Megan Nocek

It just feels like, okay, you've committed a crime, you've been incarcerated, and now it's kind of the end of the road.

00:22:58 Megan Nocek

Like, yeah, you get released, but this is always, you know, on your record.

00:23:02 Megan Nocek

This is always sort of hanging over your head.

00:23:04 Megan Nocek

And I've always been kind of like, I'm sure as a child, I was like that kid who asked why 1000 times, And so I've always kind of been curious about the why, right?

00:23:16 Megan Nocek

Like, why do people commit crimes?

00:23:20 Megan Nocek

Why do we respond to, you know, criminals the way that we do?

00:23:24 Megan Nocek

Why do people go back to jail after being in jail if it's supposed to be rehabilitative, you know?

00:23:30 Megan Nocek

So

00:23:32 Megan Nocek

I found that when I was transferring, psychology just seemed to be a bit of a better fit.

00:23:37 Megan Nocek

And while my initial interest was in really understanding the whys within the criminal justice system, I didn't end up going into like forensic psychology or go to John Jay or anything like that because I think it opened up a whole new door of just general whys, right?

00:23:52 Megan Nocek

Understanding just more about people in general.

00:23:55 Megan Nocek

And I feel like having that understanding has changed my life in so many important ways.

00:24:01 Megan Nocek

And I think that that's a piece that I really want to give to students is just like the curiosity and how the knowing makes so much of a difference, like searching for the truth, in a time where truth can be really hard to find, right?

00:24:14 Megan Nocek

And so that's where those critical thinking skills come into play.

00:24:18 Megan Nocek

But the other part of my answer was really like, what influences my sort of approach as a teacher?

00:24:26 Megan Nocek

And

00:24:27 Megan Nocek

I would have to say that I don't think I was a good student as a child.

00:24:32 Megan Nocek

I was smart.

00:24:34 Megan Nocek

I always did well.

00:24:35 Megan Nocek

I didn't really have to study, but I was bored.

00:24:37 Megan Nocek

And so I misbehaved and I got into trouble a lot in elementary, middle, even in high school.

00:24:43 Megan Nocek

Like I was definitely, I was in AP English, but I was a troublemaker.

00:24:48 Megan Nocek

And I think that what that's taught me as an adult who has a child who is a smart troublemaker in school is that there is no real profile of the good student, right, or the bad student.

00:24:59 Megan Nocek

Like you might see someone getting great grades.

00:25:02 Megan Nocek

Doesn't mean that, you know, everything else is balanced in their life.

00:25:06 Megan Nocek

You might see a student struggling.

00:25:07 Megan Nocek

It doesn't mean that it's their fault that they're struggling and they're not trying hard enough.

00:25:11 Megan Nocek

So I think having that experience myself and now going through that experience with my child has helped me to understand that,

00:25:18 Megan Nocek

every student is an individual and has individual, circumstances.

00:25:22 Megan Nocek

And yeah.

00:25:25 Gina Turner

That background is so interesting because it seems like we get a lot of people who end up at the community college as well who were like, I wasn't really a school person.

00:25:35 Gina Turner

And then suddenly something kind of grabbed and made them passionate about something, right?

00:25:41 Gina Turner

I mean, I put myself in that category too, as I've talked about.

00:25:44 Gina Turner

But

00:25:46 Gina Turner

But I kind of want to, so I want to kind of combine two questions together, which is, yeah, no, watch me do it.

00:25:55 Gina Turner

Is if you're thinking about yourself in the classroom, what is the word that you would use to describe yourself?

00:26:00 Gina Turner

But you're also really kind of illustrating how you are seeing the students as very different people.

00:26:07 Gina Turner

So how do you change as you interact with different students or as you get to know them?

00:26:12 Gina Turner

Does that word change or does that word morph in some way?

00:26:16 Megan Nocek

Yeah.

00:26:17 Megan Nocek

I would say that as a teacher, if I had to add something into my role, it would also be and a learner, because I feel like I'm always learning.

00:26:26 Megan Nocek

The more that I, the more that I'm involved in my discipline and the more that I interact with students, I'm always learning from them.

00:26:34 Megan Nocek

And so I think that my adaptations,

00:26:38 Megan Nocek

yes, are sometimes relationship-based from semester to semester with students.

00:26:43 Megan Nocek

But I also try to do things a little bit more broadly and sort of learn as I go over time and accumulate this individual knowledge and kind of put it all together and be like, okay, I think this is something that's going to probably work well for everybody.

00:26:58 Megan Nocek

Because I mean, we have so many students.

00:26:59 Megan Nocek

This semester, I have 150 students.

00:27:02 Megan Nocek

And so between online and in person, I mean, so it's really hard to tailor, individually to these students.

00:27:10 Megan Nocek

and I have some courses like health psychology where I have a lot of different majors.

00:27:15 Megan Nocek

most of my courses that I teach in person, like research methods, are all psych students.

00:27:19 Megan Nocek

So, they're all kind of, they all have similar goals and it's easy to sort of teach to them as a blanket group.

00:27:25 Megan Nocek

But when I teach health psychology,

00:27:28 Megan Nocek

I have a lot of health science majors, I have people from other disciplines who are taking it as an elective, and I have psychology majors.

00:27:34 Megan Nocek

So I really love that because it challenges me to make it applicable to different disciplines and also give the students an opportunity to kind of highlight their knowledge and their...

00:27:47 Megan Nocek

in their program, because there's some things that I don't have the answers to.

00:27:50 Megan Nocek

I mean, like I tell them, this is health psychology.

00:27:53 Megan Nocek

It's about the psychological aspects of health and wellness.

00:27:57 Megan Nocek

I don't know everything about red blood cells and all of these different disorders and things like that.

00:28:03 Megan Nocek

So those of you who, you know, have more medical backgrounds, please feel free to expand on that and share that information.

00:28:09 Gina Turner

Yeah.

00:28:10 Megan Nocek

You know, so I like being able to highlight, you know, their expertise and let them,

00:28:17 Megan Nocek

sort of help out in teaching the class sometimes.

00:28:19 Gina Turner

That's great.

00:28:20 Gina Turner

That's great.

00:28:21 Gina Turner

I mean, I always brag about psychology is that everything is psychology, right?

00:28:25 Gina Turner

And so a class like health psychology,

00:28:29 Gina Turner

health, I mean, who does that not relate to?

00:28:32 Gina Turner

Every single one of us, and every single one of us is going to deal with some major health issue, whether it's our own, whether it's a close family member, whether it's someone in our life.

00:28:43 Gina Turner

So it's so, that's one reason I absolutely love teaching that class too.

00:28:48 Gina Turner

And to get that different background of people in it is really fun.

00:28:53 Megan Nocek

We just took a walk down to the East 40 yesterday, or sorry, Tuesday, because it was so beautiful out.

00:28:58 Megan Nocek

And

00:28:59 Megan Nocek

I had plans to teach, and I was like, what?

00:29:01 Megan Nocek

Let's do something different.

00:29:03 Megan Nocek

And so we were focusing on chronic health disorders and quality of life.

00:29:08 Megan Nocek

And so I came up with some discussion prompts for them to focus on as we walked.

00:29:12 Megan Nocek

And so every like 5 or 6 minutes, I would read them a different prompt to have them reflect on the experience.

00:29:17 Megan Nocek

Like, how is being outside impacting your mood right now?

00:29:21 Megan Nocek

And then, you know, a couple minutes later, one might have been,

00:29:24 Megan Nocek

pay attention to your breathing and your energy and, you're just, again, your general mood and what might this experience be like if you had limitations from a chronic health disorder or something.

00:29:34 Megan Nocek

And then we came back today and, they processed it while we were there.

00:29:38 Megan Nocek

And then we came back today and we talked about it.

00:29:41 Megan Nocek

But it was so funny and kind of like cute and heartwarming because I had a student who,

00:29:47 Megan Nocek

got closer to me as we were walking, we were doing the hike because we walked through the trails and whatnot.

00:29:52 Megan Nocek

And he's like, I was giving them a little bit of information about birds and, plants and stuff like that.

00:29:58 Megan Nocek

And he's like, how do you know all this stuff?

00:29:59 Megan Nocek

I said, I don't know, probably just, he's like, did you grow up in the woods?

00:30:02 Megan Nocek

I said, yeah, but I mean, it's probably a combination of that and like being interested in things.

00:30:07 Megan Nocek

He's like,

00:30:08 Megan Nocek

I said, but I don't know everything.

00:30:09 Megan Nocek

He said, enough that this feels like a completely different class.

00:30:12 Megan Nocek

I was like, oh, that's really cool.

00:30:14 Megan Nocek

Yeah.

00:30:15 Megan Nocek

So I was glad to be able to share some of my hobbies and interests at the same time as teaching class.

00:30:21 Gina Turner

Oh, that's awesome.

00:30:23 Gina Turner

That's awesome.

00:30:24 Gina Turner

I love that.

00:30:25 Kelly Allen

Yeah, and that's cool how your student is recognizing that trait in you.

00:30:32 Kelly Allen

Like, so I'm assuming that like they realize, okay, wait a minute, this is not something that you learned in your psychology classes when you were a student, but this is valuable knowledge that you are bringing to this class and it is

00:30:48 Kelly Allen

having this positive change.

00:30:51 Kelly Allen

And I'm hoping that students can then see that in themselves, that like their experiences outside of the classroom can also have a similar kind of influence or impact on that.

00:31:04 Megan Nocek

Yeah, and they can be relevant.

00:31:05 Kelly Allen

Yeah, totally.

00:31:07 Kelly Allen

Totally.

00:31:07 Kelly Allen

Yeah, that's the, that's kind of like that, critical, like pedagogical, like

00:31:15 Kelly Allen

structure that Freer had talked about in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where like we're going to use, and bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress, where we're going to be kind of like using the materials and the cultural and historical knowledge of the community that we're in as a foundation for learning.

00:31:39 Kelly Allen

So that's cool.

00:31:41 Gina Turner

It's also great that, and probably great for you too, because we tend to take for granted what we know well, and students the same way.

00:31:51 Gina Turner

so when I, it just makes me think quickly of cognitive, where I do an exercise where we talk about music cognition and the musicians in the class get to kind of show off their music knowledge, but they're so like, wait, to point out to them that like you actually understand this better than

00:32:11 Gina Turner

I do, so please share your knowledge, but because it's because they're so comfortable in their own knowledge, there's less value placed on it, and so to be able to model that you've got this other knowledge that can be used in this other setting is really, I think that's really valuable.

00:32:29 Megan Nocek

I had a mentor when I was at NYU studying for my master's in applied psychology.

00:32:35 Megan Nocek

And I'll never forget, she said to me, I was working on my thesis and it was just very involved, as you know, and I was feeling a little bit stuck.

00:32:45 Megan Nocek

And she said to me, you know more than you think you know.

00:32:48 Megan Nocek

And just that simple saying is something that I've really carried with me, but also tried to share with other people.

00:32:56 Megan Nocek

you do, more than you think and you don't always realize how relevant your experiences are to, that crossover.

00:33:07 Gina Turner

Exactly, And I think especially for our students at the community college who are afraid of this setting, how crucial it is for those students to recognize the values of their own experiences and their own knowledge because

00:33:26 Gina Turner

back to, you were making reference to the gatekeeping, right?

00:33:30 Gina Turner

The ways in which we have gatekeeped around academia is really, can be really damaging.

00:33:37 Gina Turner

And, part of the reason why I think higher ed is under attack is because it's seen as this sort of esoteric, well, don't get me started.

00:33:48 Gina Turner

Oh, no, please.

00:33:50 Gina Turner

Well, light it up.

00:33:51 Gina Turner

I'm going to segue instead.

00:33:55 Gina Turner

That's what I'm going to do.

00:33:57 Gina Turner

I'm going to keep my blood pressure down.

00:34:00 Kelly Allen

Jazz.

00:34:02 Gina Turner

So I love the idea.

00:34:05 Gina Turner

of the walking discussion in the eSporty.

00:34:08 Gina Turner

What's another assignment that you really enjoy doing with your students in any of your classes?

00:34:15 Megan Nocek

So there's one that I really enjoy and they really enjoy.

00:34:19 Megan Nocek

I'm just still trying to figure out a way to land it.

00:34:21 Megan Nocek

And I teach it in Intro to Psychology, so I haven't taught that in person in a while.

00:34:25 Megan Nocek

So I've been having some time to think about it.

00:34:27 Megan Nocek

But it's

00:34:29 Megan Nocek

Monopoly with adapted rules.

00:34:31 Megan Nocek

And so it is basically the game redesigned to help people understand power and privilege and how that relates to land ownership and wealth.

00:34:46 Megan Nocek

And so we have this Monopoly board game and we've got, instead of having individual students

00:34:55 Megan Nocek

take on these different sort of directions.

00:34:58 Megan Nocek

I do it in groups because it seems like if they have a partner, they can do it a little bit better.

00:35:03 Megan Nocek

But they get a list of rules and some just play by the basic monopoly rules, but then other ones like you don't collect any money when you pass go, or you can only buy these types of properties, or if you land on this property, you have to pay triple rent.

00:35:16 Megan Nocek

So they have all of these different types of rules and it's been designed to, and I didn't design it, but I've adapted it from somebody else's

00:35:25 Megan Nocek

idea.

00:35:26 Megan Nocek

But the whole premise is to understand that even when the playing field gets equalized, because in the middle of the game, everybody just plays by the same rules.

00:35:38 Megan Nocek

So they have to follow these adapted rules for the first half and then the second-half, everybody plays by the same rules.

00:35:44 Megan Nocek

Even when the playing field gets equalized, there's still disparities, based on like how things started out.

00:35:51 Gina Turner

Oh my gosh, this is amazing.

00:35:54 Megan Nocek

It's fit into like

00:35:55 Megan Nocek

so many great discussions and I just feel like it has so much value, but it's really hard because you have to spend a lot of time preparing students for it because Monopoly is a complicated game.

00:36:05 Megan Nocek

It is.

00:36:05 Megan Nocek

Most of our students have not played Monopoly.

00:36:08 Megan Nocek

I mean, I ask them and they're like, I've never played Monopoly before.

00:36:11 Megan Nocek

So you almost have to spend an entire class explaining Monopoly to them.

00:36:15 Megan Nocek

And, you know, if I have a big class, I can't be the banker for every group.

00:36:21 Megan Nocek

So it's been a little bit tedious figuring out how to implement it, but I can't let that assignment go.

00:36:27 Megan Nocek

I just really love it.

00:36:29 Kelly Allen

So I want to hear more about this, but I just want to throw this out that so Aaron Riley.

00:36:35 Kelly Allen

who teaches social work, sociology, anthropology.

00:36:38 Kelly Allen

I walked by her class and they were all playing Monopoly.

00:36:41 Kelly Allen

No way.

00:36:43 Kelly Allen

And she was using it as a way to talk about the effects of capitalism or like so they can learn what capitalism is.

00:36:52 Kelly Allen

So I don't know, I see like this really cool kind of like team teaching thing going on, but that also sounds like work.

00:36:58 Kelly Allen

So never mind.

00:37:00 Kelly Allen

So where did this come from?

00:37:02 Kelly Allen

Because this is

00:37:03 Kelly Allen

Fascinating as hell.

00:37:05 Megan Nocek

I know.

00:37:05 Megan Nocek

I actually have to Google it because I found the idea like probably close to 10 years ago.

00:37:10 Megan Nocek

And I've just adapted it over time with my own rules ever since.

00:37:15 Megan Nocek

And this was well before ChatGPT.

00:37:16 Megan Nocek

So I probably found it on a website somewhere.

00:37:20 Gina Turner

Yeah.

00:37:20 Kelly Allen

Well, if you find it, can you share that with us?

00:37:23 Kelly Allen

And then Jeff, you put on the Sighty site.

00:37:27 Megan Nocek

Yeah.

00:37:28 Kelly Allen

You're so cool.

00:37:29 Kelly Allen

Thanks.

00:37:30 Gina Turner

I love the idea of an intro psych class that has that arc of something, you know, because you are saying it takes a lot of time and a lot of setup and a lot of, curricular development on your part.

00:37:45 Gina Turner

But because that can apply to so many things in the psychology class.

00:37:52 Gina Turner

I remember just briefly when I was teaching an honors class, an honors intro to psychology class,

00:37:58 Gina Turner

And for a few years, the main text that we used was a short story because I had read this short story and I was like, my gosh, social psychology, developmental psychology, again, everything is psychology to me.

00:38:15 Gina Turner

But we read that story and then continued to go back and revisit the story as we looked at the different

00:38:21 Gina Turner

So it seems like it's such a great way to go deep in a survey class, right?

00:38:30 Megan Nocek

And maybe even that's something like you're making me think now that you're saying that maybe that's even something that we could do at the beginning of the semester as an icebreaker and then kind of use that as an anchor as we talk to the rest of the semester about these different issues that link back to the experience of the Monopoly game.

00:38:46 Megan Nocek

There you go.

00:38:47 Megan Nocek

You solved my problem.

00:38:48 Megan Nocek

Perfect.

00:38:50 Megan Nocek

First week icebreaker.

00:38:52 Gina Turner

This is the beauty of chatting when, we're normally just alone in our classrooms by ourselves, and it's so good to chat with other people.

00:39:00 Kelly Allen

I am overwhelmed by what's going on right now.

00:39:04 Kelly Allen

This is awesome.

00:39:04 Megan Nocek

So if you hear students walking around complaining about playing this archaic game the first week of the all semester.

00:39:11 Kelly Allen

Like, this is awesome.

00:39:13 Kelly Allen

And like, I haven't been able to piece it together in my mind yet, but have the two of you heard of a book?

00:39:20 Kelly Allen

I was just introduced to it by a friend of mine called Dear Data.

00:39:24 Megan Nocek

I feel like I should have.

00:39:25 Gina Turner

I feel like someone brought it.

00:39:27 Gina Turner

Maybe it was you.

00:39:27 Kelly Allen

No, it wasn't because I just learned about it.

00:39:31 Kelly Allen

And as soon as I learned about it, I was thinking of like sending a text to you and Jeff, you know, because it's like, this is so cool.

00:39:38 Kelly Allen

But it's where you create like essentially a key of like these like little

00:39:48 Kelly Allen

graphic markers that represents like something that you want to study.

00:39:54 Kelly Allen

So this friend of mine, he's teaching, he's a philosopher over at Lafayette, and he's teaching a class called The Meaning of Life.

00:40:03 Kelly Allen

And they, the students get to decide like, okay, so what is the thing that you find meaningful?

00:40:11 Kelly Allen

or maybe not meaningful in your life.

00:40:13 Kelly Allen

Like what is that thing?

00:40:15 Kelly Allen

And I want you to track that over a week.

00:40:19 Kelly Allen

And then how is that, how does that thing manifest itself throughout that week?

00:40:25 Kelly Allen

And then you need to come up with these like little visual markers for it.

00:40:29 Kelly Allen

And then what they essentially do is they create these like these gorgeous graphic images where when you look at it, it's just like, well, wow, this is like

00:40:38 Kelly Allen

art.

00:40:39 Kelly Allen

But then when you look at the key that they've created, you can see how that art actually means something else.

00:40:45 Kelly Allen

So one student, forget exactly what they're trying to track, but the main part on the key was a duck.

00:40:57 Kelly Allen

And then if they, on this particular day, if they're feeling kind of sad, the duck would have its head underneath its wing.

00:41:08 Kelly Allen

If they were feeling maybe a little hungover or something, the duck would be having sunglasses on or something like that.

00:41:14 Kelly Allen

But you look at it and you see all these ducks in a row, but they're all kind of different.

00:41:19 Kelly Allen

But when you looked at the data key, you could see how that represents kind of this meaningful experience over the course of a week.

00:41:26 Gina Turner

So you asked us the question of what is research?

00:41:30 Gina Turner

That's research.

00:41:31 Gina Turner

That is 100% research, right?

00:41:34 Gina Turner

And how

00:41:36 Gina Turner

experiential and phenomenological that is, and I think that's much more, I think there is more recognition.

00:41:43 Gina Turner

I haven't been to the APA, the American Psychological Association conference in years now, but I feel like even the last time I went 10 years ago, there was a lot more of that idea of

00:41:55 Gina Turner

Qualitative.

00:41:57 Gina Turner

Qualitative.

00:41:58 Gina Turner

Yeah.

00:41:59 Gina Turner

That sounds really, that would be fun for health psychology.

00:42:02 Gina Turner

That'd be awesome.

00:42:03 Megan Nocek

And also a way to just help sort of with the issue that we're dealing with AI, you know, and some of the academic dishonesty.

00:42:13 Megan Nocek

problems that we're facing, having someone graphically represent and experience that, and then talk about it, right?

00:42:21 Megan Nocek

Like record a video and talk about their ducks in a row.

00:42:25 Gina Turner

I think I have just rewritten the end of my research methods class this semester.

00:42:30 Gina Turner

I think I'm just now going to adapt what you just described as their final project.

00:42:35 Kelly Allen

And our listeners are hearing us kind of like,

00:42:39 Kelly Allen

figure out in real time.

00:42:40 Kelly Allen

And Jeff is putting down the time stamp for my S-bomb.

00:42:46 Kelly Allen

But anywho, but no, I was just kind of thinking about that with this Monopoly project that you're doing with the students.

00:42:52 Kelly Allen

So like in what way are they tracking what they are experiencing while playing this game?

00:42:58 Kelly Allen

And then is it something that they can be tracking over time?

00:43:03 Kelly Allen

And then

00:43:05 Kelly Allen

Like I'm all about public-facing work being generated in class.

00:43:11 Kelly Allen

And so I'm just thinking about myself here.

00:43:13 Kelly Allen

So I'm going to have a selfish moment here.

00:43:15 Kelly Allen

I'm going to be totally, I think it's saltsistic, is that the word?

00:43:19 Kelly Allen

that'd be cool to just like run this kind of series of games over the course of a semester, have them create those representations.

00:43:28 Kelly Allen

And then their final project is that you're going to have a gallery showing where you just post these things on the wall in a public space on campus.

00:43:36 Kelly Allen

And then students can go and kind of observe them with the key.

00:43:41 Gina Turner

Yeah.

00:43:41 Gina Turner

Well, and Megan already does that.

00:43:43 Gina Turner

She has a research

00:43:45 Gina Turner

symposium, basically, for students in her research methods class to present.

00:43:50 Gina Turner

How fun would it be to have these really vivid graphical, oh my gosh, I'm so excited now.

00:43:57 Megan Nocek

And we have the academic conference, you know, that students can submit individually, they can submit as a class, you know, so it could even be like a class-wide project.

00:44:05 Megan Nocek

But I think that what you're talking about is really important in us as educators sort of making the shift to these

00:44:13 Megan Nocek

out-of-the-box types of assignments, because I think that something that I've been sort of wrestling with over the past five to 10 years is just sort of seeing how, my initial experience with education is that I'm a first generation college student.

00:44:32 Megan Nocek

my parents did like trade schools, but, they didn't graduate with associates or bachelor's degrees or anything.

00:44:38 Megan Nocek

So

00:44:40 Megan Nocek

for me, college really was framed as this opportunity, right?

00:44:44 Megan Nocek

Like you go to college and then you just have all of these different options of things that you can do with your life.

00:44:50 Megan Nocek

And, my parents said, if you don't go to college, which really wasn't an option anyway, but if you don't go to college or you drop out of college, you're not going to have as many options.

00:44:59 Megan Nocek

So it was this, you know, this golden opportunity, which I'm still paying for, by the way, but hopefully will be done soon.

00:45:06 Megan Nocek

But, you know, anyway,

00:45:09 Megan Nocek

I'm starting to get the sense, and this is not all students by any means, but I'm starting to get the sense that some students, and really there's this like changing social conception of education as an obstacle rather than an opportunity.

00:45:24 Megan Nocek

And I don't know if that's just because it's more accessible now than it was in the past, so that novelty has sort of worn off.

00:45:32 Megan Nocek

And I think accessibility is critical.

00:45:34 Megan Nocek

I love that it's accessible.

00:45:37 Megan Nocek

But I'm starting to see some of that novelty wear off, where you're hearing students say things like, my gosh, I can't believe I have to do this work, or, I don't want to have to read that, or this project, And I think that it's a struggle, but a necessary one to find a balance between

00:45:56 Megan Nocek

how we're assessing their work, what type of instruments we're using, and how that's relevant to real life, and also making them feel like this is an opportunity for me to learn this isn't just some busy work, you know, that my instructor is giving me.

00:46:09 Megan Nocek

And I think that is something that I really love about my job is the challenge and the creativity of doing things like that.

00:46:17 Megan Nocek

And it's almost like the sky's the limit, right?

00:46:19 Megan Nocek

Like Kelly, what you were just talking about, I mean, you can't almost go in any direction with it, which I think is really,

00:46:25 Megan Nocek

Really interesting.

00:46:27 Kelly Allen

It's the joy of learning.

00:46:28 Gina Turner

It really is.

00:46:29 Gina Turner

It really is.

00:46:31 Gina Turner

You know, and the idea that it's that college isn't special anymore.

00:46:36 Gina Turner

That's such a that's such a great point, right?

00:46:38 Gina Turner

It's not seen as this, you know, this lofty goal in the way that it is.

00:46:43 Gina Turner

And again, for very, very good, valuable reasons of accessibility.

00:46:49 Gina Turner

But how do we kind of remind people that it is still really a special opportunity for those who do engage in it?

00:46:57 Gina Turner

And it does kind of lead me to the question of, so if you were to change something about our current higher ed system, what would you change if you could?

00:47:11 Gina Turner

Where do you get started?

00:47:12 Megan Nocek

Oh my gosh, yeah.

00:47:13 Megan Nocek

I mean, I don't,

00:47:15 Megan Nocek

I don't have a ton of criticisms of the higher ed system.

00:47:20 Megan Nocek

I would say that we definitely need to do a bit of a better job bridging that gap between high school or whatever came before college.

00:47:31 Megan Nocek

But I also think that maybe we don't have as good of an understanding of how students are arriving to us as we should, you know, and if there was some way, some data-based way to understand that a little bit better.

00:47:43 Megan Nocek

I think that would be really, that would be really useful.

00:47:46 Megan Nocek

The other concern is, education is really moving to a more virtual platform.

00:47:52 Megan Nocek

And so how are we connecting with students in a way and assigning work in a way that is still relevant to real life and meaningful to them?

00:48:03 Megan Nocek

And, again, like I look forward to those challenges, but they're not, they're not easy.

00:48:10 Megan Nocek

So what would I like to see change about higher ed?

00:48:14 Megan Nocek

I would say of my colleagues, maybe just a little bit more open-mindedness of the dynamic nature of education and being a little bit more willing maybe to be flexible about, you know, just trying new things and not always doing the sort of standard, all right, you're gonna have your midterm and you're gonna have your final, cram for it, cram for it, you know, read page to page every single, you know,

00:48:39 Megan Nocek

page in this chapter.

00:48:41 Megan Nocek

And because I think that, students have a lot of demands.

00:48:44 Megan Nocek

I mean, most of our students are taking more than one course, and so if we're just overloading them with work constantly just for assessment purposes, AKA busy work, how is that helping them?

00:48:55 Megan Nocek

How is that helping them to learn and be their best selves in any of their classes or even outside of class, right?

00:49:01 Megan Nocek

In the roles, the multiple roles that they're like likely juggling, right?

00:49:05 Megan Nocek

You know, like the educational experience needs to be supportive of like life.

00:49:10 Megan Nocek

right.

00:49:12 Gina Turner

And something you said that really struck me, which is that we're teaching them to learn.

00:49:18 Gina Turner

And that should almost be the priority.

00:49:21 Gina Turner

I mean, obviously, we're also teaching them so that they can learn a skill and develop a career or a trade or whatever it is.

00:49:30 Gina Turner

But teaching, and it ties back in with what you were saying about K through 12, right?

00:49:36 Gina Turner

How much are we teaching people, and again, how much are we teaching people to look at learning as a special thing that they can engage in that is going to help them in every single situation they're going to be in?

00:49:50 Gina Turner

Because as human beings, that's what we do.

00:49:52 Gina Turner

We learn, like we have to.

00:49:54 Gina Turner

We encounter a new situation, we have to figure out what to do in that new situation.

00:49:58 Gina Turner

You know, it's just that, it's

00:50:00 Gina Turner

It's sort of just that simple, right?

00:50:01 Gina Turner

Yeah.

00:50:03 Megan Nocek

And maybe breaking away from this like very historic but outdated rote memorization approach to learning, right?

00:50:11 Megan Nocek

Like memorize these definitions.

00:50:12 Megan Nocek

I mean, that was like my childhood, right, of learning.

00:50:15 Megan Nocek

And even if you think about it now, you know, that's kind of the track that it's in when we talk about standardized testing and whatnot.

00:50:21 Megan Nocek

And, you know, as someone who has worked in psychological testing, you know, I definitely have an appreciation for it.

00:50:28 Megan Nocek

But when we kind of pack education and learning into a box, I mean, we're very limited then in what we're teaching, unfortunately.

00:50:38 Megan Nocek

So I don't have any like perfect plan or answers for how to do that, but that's what I'd like to explore moving forward, right?

00:50:46 Megan Nocek

Is how can we like reinvigorate that appreciation for learning?

00:50:51 Gina Turner

And it comes back to this idea of, you know, I'm going to say the dreaded,

00:50:56 Gina Turner

The acronym DEI, but what that actually means is what you were saying, Megan, about accessibility and the ability to be in a learning situation where you have all the resources that you need to be able to succeed.

00:51:11 Gina Turner

And what you're saying about all of these really fun, unusual ways of learning, like playing Monopoly or walking through the forest, right?

00:51:20 Gina Turner

To use those as the jumping off points for our peers, our fellow faculty members, to think about how they can do it differently to a purpose, right?

00:51:34 Gina Turner

To meet the students that we get now where they are, as opposed to this assumption

00:51:40 Gina Turner

that they've learned all the multiplication, or what I mean, whether that they are sort of, that the whole, are they prepped for college?

00:51:50 Gina Turner

Well, what do we even mean by prepped for college?

00:51:52 Gina Turner

And I don't mean to discount the fact that, well, yeah, they do need to have basic writing skills and basic, right?

00:51:58 Gina Turner

But there's got to be some way in which we're thinking about how do we change our pedagogy to meet our students in a place where we can, you know,

00:52:11 Gina Turner

That feeling of valuing education.

00:52:14 Megan Nocek

And I think it's easy to get sort of locked into a pattern, right?

00:52:17 Megan Nocek

I mean, life is about patterns.

00:52:19 Megan Nocek

It's about repeated behaviors.

00:52:21 Megan Nocek

And, you know, I don't think it's uncommon at all to teach the way that you were taught, right?

00:52:26 Megan Nocek

And to sort of fall back on that.

00:52:29 Megan Nocek

but I think also recognizing that the world is changing and the demands that are present in the world for when our students graduate are different than when we graduated and our parents graduated and whatnot.

00:52:42 Megan Nocek

And so

00:52:43 Megan Nocek

I just think that flexibility is going to make such a huge difference.

00:52:48 Megan Nocek

And how people enjoy their job more.

00:52:51 Megan Nocek

I think, I mean, for me, like I said, I wasn't born a teacher, but I was definitely born like a maker and a creator.

00:52:56 Megan Nocek

I come from a family where people are very interested in creating things and artistic.

00:53:00 Megan Nocek

And so like, I feel like that's where I can really meet that need in this job is having that aspect of creativity, whether that's like

00:53:08 Megan Nocek

course shell design or, just designing my own curriculum?

00:53:14 Gina Turner

Yeah, that's great.

00:53:16 Gina Turner

Oh my gosh.

00:53:17 Gina Turner

Well, I feel like I missed the last time check.

00:53:20 Gina Turner

But are we, I think we might be getting to the end of this time, but this has been so great.

00:53:26 Gina Turner

So I'm sadly moving to our last question, which is the non-guilty, guilty pleasure that you'd like to share with us.

00:53:34 Megan Nocek

This was a tough one.

00:53:35 Megan Nocek

I would say, though, that it is probably fantasizing about the next pet that I'm going to buy.

00:53:44 Kelly Allen

Love it.

00:53:45 Megan Nocek

I grew up in a home where we always had pets, but we had a limited number at any given time.

00:53:51 Megan Nocek

And my dream was always to have 4 pets.

00:53:54 Megan Nocek

for dogs specifically.

00:53:56 Megan Nocek

And so I feel like in my marriage, I'm like able to get a little bit closer to that, even if it's just like 3.

00:54:04 Megan Nocek

So I keep inching my way closer to like, all right, I think it's time to get another dog now.

00:54:08 Megan Nocek

So that's my guilty pleasure is like planning about how I'm going to add a new pet to the family.

00:54:13 Gina Turner

Well, I have had the pleasure of seeing the pictures of your newest addition to your family, Grub.

00:54:19 Gina Turner

Grub.

00:54:19 Gina Turner

Oh my goodness, this dog is so cute.

00:54:24 Megan Nocek

He's a French bulldog.

00:54:25 Megan Nocek

And he was, I've always wanted a French bulldog for as long as I can remember.

00:54:31 Megan Nocek

I grew up with labs and then I had like American bullies, pit bulls for my adult life.

00:54:37 Megan Nocek

And I've just always wanted a Frenchie so much.

00:54:40 Megan Nocek

And I decided for my 40th birthday that I was going to buy one for myself.

00:54:43 Megan Nocek

So I did.

00:54:45 Megan Nocek

And he's certainly everything I expected he would be and more.

00:54:48 Gina Turner

He's like a little potato.

00:54:50 Gina Turner

He is.

00:54:52 Megan Nocek

He truly is.

00:54:53 Megan Nocek

We call him the loaded potato.

00:54:56 Gina Turner

Yeah.

00:54:56 Gina Turner

I want to smush him.

00:54:58 Megan Nocek

He's very smushable.

00:54:59 Megan Nocek

Yeah.

00:54:59 Megan Nocek

Oh, man.

00:54:59 Gina Turner

That's great.

00:55:01 Gina Turner

That's great.

00:55:03 Kelly Allen

Well, Megan, thank you so much for spending part of your afternoon with us.

00:55:10 Kelly Allen

Thanks for having me.

00:55:10 Megan Nocek

This was great.

00:55:11 Gina Turner

This was really great.

00:55:12 Megan Nocek

Lots of fun.

00:55:13 Kelly Allen

Especially, you know, so in

00:55:16 Kelly Allen

An overwhelming majority of the guests that we have on this podcast are colleagues of ours from Northampton Community College.

00:55:23 Kelly Allen

And like for me personally, I think that's cool because I get to learn so much more about you that like I really don't get to kind of glean from our conversations in the hallway.

00:55:33 Kelly Allen

So just thank you so much for kind of like sharing your afternoon and sharing yourself with us here today.

00:55:39 Kelly Allen

I appreciate it.

00:55:40 Megan Nocek

Yeah, so glad to be here.

00:55:41 Gina Turner

Yeah, and a million great ideas.

00:55:45 Megan Nocek

Thank you for helping me brainstorm them.

00:55:47 Gina Turner

Yeah.

00:55:49 Gina Turner

Pedagogy, go, go.

00:55:53 Gina Turner

Pedagogy, go, go, go.

00:55:57 Kelly Allen

So Gina, I have no idea what to do with my mind after that episode.

00:56:04 Gina Turner

That was a really, that was one of our more freewheeling

00:56:08 Gina Turner

throw away the questions episodes, I would say, because it was just so fun to dig into all the new ideas that Megan, Megan is so passionate about.

00:56:22 Gina Turner

Like, how do I want to put it?

00:56:24 Gina Turner

Maybe you can, maybe you can help me out here, because it's not so much that she's coming up with these ideas just out of boredom or out of, but that they're so connected to what she cares about, like the why.

00:56:35 Gina Turner

You know, she's always driven by the why.

00:56:38 Gina Turner

So.

00:56:39 Kelly Allen

I don't know.

00:56:42 Kelly Allen

So like, damn it.

00:56:44 Kelly Allen

And this happens every time where it's like our guest leaves and then I come up with like this new question that I would actually like answered immediately, please.

00:56:52 Kelly Allen

But so she was talking earlier about how like neither of her parents went to college, but in fact, they went to trade schools.

00:57:03 Kelly Allen

And I don't know, like when I think about

00:57:07 Kelly Allen

folks who come from the trades, like the first thing that comes to my mind is like, they are problem solvers.

00:57:13 Kelly Allen

Because no two projects are ever the same and you need to just think creatively to find new ways to adapt to the situation that you're in.

00:57:23 Kelly Allen

Now I'm just curious like how much of growing up in that environment has influenced Megan's approach to teaching?

00:57:30 Kelly Allen

Because it really feels like she does that with her students.

00:57:35 Kelly Allen

But yeah, this episode, like

00:57:38 Kelly Allen

Holy Christmas.

00:57:40 Kelly Allen

Like, I know that our listeners can't see this, but I keep notes as we go through.

00:57:49 Kelly Allen

And like this one is like my papers just filled because like I've got all these like, okay, well, here's a thing that I need to look up.

00:57:55 Kelly Allen

Here's a thing that I need to read.

00:57:57 Kelly Allen

Here's something that I need to think about.

00:57:58 Kelly Allen

Yeah.

00:57:59 Kelly Allen

Like it was just like,

00:58:01 Kelly Allen

That was jam-packed.

00:58:02 Gina Turner

Yeah.

00:58:02 Gina Turner

Well, and I love the connection you've made with her parents, being problem solvers, right?

00:58:09 Gina Turner

Being people who are doing things that presumably, are physical jobs, meaning you're working with your hands, you're creating things in the world.

00:58:21 Gina Turner

And she also mentioned being sparked by an interest in criminal justice, which also feels like that is a problem that I am interested in solving, I'm interested in understanding, and I'm frustrated that there are no solutions, right?

00:58:38 Gina Turner

I mean, I think that was a piece of it for her too, is like, wait, they call it rehabilitation, but the recidivism rate shows that is definitely not the case, right?

00:58:49 Gina Turner

So

00:58:50 Gina Turner

I think that is a really good, we could have pitched her the term problem solver as her word to describe herself maybe.

00:58:59 Kelly Allen

Yeah, because I'm glad that you brought up that part about like, because I think that she said that she wanted to be like a, I don't know if it was like a trooper or.

00:59:07 Kelly Allen

A state trooper.

00:59:08 Kelly Allen

A state trooper.

00:59:11 Kelly Allen

So my brother, he's a police officer over on the western side of the state.

00:59:18 Kelly Allen

And

00:59:21 Kelly Allen

when he and I, have those rare moments where we can sit down and talk about stuff, just ask him about like how the job's going.

00:59:28 Gina Turner

Yeah.

00:59:28 Kelly Allen

Like he calls his job Lawn.

00:59:31 Kelly Allen

So L-A-W-I-N.

00:59:34 Kelly Allen

I like it.

00:59:36 Kelly Allen

Yeah, just Lawn.

00:59:38 Kelly Allen

But

00:59:40 Kelly Allen

what's interesting about the way that he talks about that job is like what's important to him is to have like a level of empathy.

00:59:48 Kelly Allen

So because like that's something that's valuable, I believe, well, amongst other things, like when he's in the moment, but like I got to go and call him up afterwards because there isn't much of the like, well, what happens afterwards?

01:00:02 Kelly Allen

So like he's kind of like on that front line, but then like what happens to these individuals after they've

01:00:11 Kelly Allen

experienced him.

01:00:13 Gina Turner

Experience the law and the good law and if he's actually trying to use empathy in his work.

01:00:19 Gina Turner

I mean, that is.

01:00:21 Kelly Allen

I'm proud of what he's doing.

01:00:23 Kelly Allen

But anyways, go ahead.

01:00:24 Gina Turner

That's great.

01:00:24 Gina Turner

No, that's really, that's really.

01:00:26 Kelly Allen

It's weird because also like growing up like myself and I don't think that this is any surprise to anybody like me and like any form of authority did not did not go well together.

01:00:39 Kelly Allen

I was like, you're going to be a cop, really?

01:00:40 Kelly Allen

Okay.

01:00:40 Gina Turner

When I was in undergrad, my first go-around, I took a philosophy class, and the TA for that class used to refer to himself as a former peace officer.

01:00:50 Gina Turner

So that was the first time I had ever heard, right?

01:00:53 Gina Turner

That was the first time I had ever heard that term used for a law enforcement officer.

01:00:57 Gina Turner

And I've since heard it, but, and he said, I think there was a similarity between that guy, whose name I don't remember, and Megan, in that he really started to question the why

01:01:09 Gina Turner

of what he was doing when he was out on patrol, when he was acting as a law enforcement officer.

01:01:16 Gina Turner

So he was now a philosophy graduate student.

01:01:21 Gina Turner

So I mean.

01:01:24 Kelly Allen

That's so cool.

01:01:24 Gina Turner

Yeah, it's a lot of our students in psychology are also really interested in criminal justice and forensic psychology.

01:01:35 Gina Turner

I think because it is a major societal problem

01:01:39 Gina Turner

And maybe, again, we were talking with Megan, that everyone's touched by health.

01:01:44 Gina Turner

Everyone's touched by the law, right?

01:01:47 Gina Turner

I mean, I've certainly had relatives who were incarcerated.

01:01:50 Gina Turner

I know we had a previous guest who worked in the prison system, right?

01:01:55 Gina Turner

So that is a problem that is not solved or easily solvable.

01:02:04 Kelly Allen

Yeah, I don't know.

01:02:05 Kelly Allen

Like you're talking about this now, and I, and I, by the way, I feel like we're kind of venturing away from kind of like our celebration of this, amazing episode with Megan, but like I'll just say that I don't feel that we really kind of talk about that part of our of the United States kind of like culture enough,

01:02:28 Kelly Allen

And I'm just wondering like, is the reason why is because we're just so often distracted by like these other things?

01:02:36 Gina Turner

I think that's, I think that's fair to say.

01:02:38 Gina Turner

I think also, yeah, it totally sucks.

01:02:41 Gina Turner

It's also so intractable and then.

01:02:44 Gina Turner

what Megan is doing with her Monopoly game, right?

01:02:48 Gina Turner

Pointing out that people do not start out with the same rules, right?

01:02:55 Gina Turner

They don't start out, and that this is what she's illustrating for her students.

01:02:59 Gina Turner

And that feels very related to our criminal justice system and the huge disparities in who gets policed, who gets incarcerated.

01:03:08 Gina Turner

So, I mean, it kind of comes back to what you just said, which is this conversation was so fantastic because it

01:03:14 Gina Turner

There's so many follow-up threads to follow after talking to Megan, and I can't wait to pigeonhole her again in the CTLT and compare notes on our assignments now that we've come up with ways to tweak them.

01:03:30 Kelly Allen

Yeah, and I don't know.

01:03:32 Kelly Allen

I'm also thinking that we need to kind of bring Dustin Briggs, Dr.

01:03:35 Kelly Allen

Dustin Briggs back into this conversation as well, because he does a lot of gamifying of things.

01:03:42 Kelly Allen

so as Megan was talking about this Monopoly game, it's like, wow, okay, you're talking about redlining here.

01:03:49 Kelly Allen

Now you're also talking about generational wealth.

01:03:52 Kelly Allen

And these are like very kind of like, I think, abstract ideas for students in 2026.

01:04:03 Kelly Allen

Even though these things of like generational wealth, well, we're still in it, and redlining, like,

01:04:11 Kelly Allen

it being as explicit as it had been, wasn't all that long ago.

01:04:15 Kelly Allen

Right.

01:04:17 Kelly Allen

But I'm thinking like what that monopoly activity would look like and kind of almost in a reverse order where students read materials on this stuff and then it's like, okay, so you just learned about like what's going on here now.

01:04:37 Kelly Allen

how would you like, how would that shape the rules for this game?

01:04:41 Kelly Allen

So where the students then make up the rules for how to play the game?

01:04:46 Gina Turner

That's a really cool twist.

01:04:49 Kelly Allen

They're like putting their knowledge into action and then they can play it through.

01:04:53 Gina Turner

Yeah.

01:04:55 Gina Turner

Oh my gosh, teaching is so fun.

01:04:57 Kelly Allen

It is.

01:04:58 Kelly Allen

It is.

01:04:58 Gina Turner

It's so fun to come up with assignments.

01:05:01 Kelly Allen

Yeah, and I don't know if like you have this same experience, but as soon as I go home,

01:05:05 Kelly Allen

So then my wife is like, so how'd the recording go?

01:05:08 Kelly Allen

It's like, my goodness gracious.

01:05:09 Kelly Allen

And then we start talking about stuff.

01:05:10 Kelly Allen

And then next thing we know, we're like, we're late for dinner.

01:05:15 Kelly Allen

But yeah, it's a lot of fun.

01:05:16 Gina Turner

It is.

01:05:17 Gina Turner

It is.

01:05:17 Kelly Allen

So Gina, it was great having fun with you again.

01:05:23 Kelly Allen

And you too, Jeff, the silent one over there.

01:05:27 Gina Turner

Jesk.

01:05:28 Kelly Allen

Jesk.

01:05:28 Kelly Allen

Jersk.

01:05:31 Kelly Allen

Voice silently judging us.

01:05:34 Kelly Allen

But anyway, so, oh yeah, so one thing that I did want to share with our listeners is that I am going to be on sabbatical next year.

01:05:43 Kelly Allen

So we are going to try to squeeze in maybe one more episode before I change my outgoing message.

01:05:52 Kelly Allen

So we may have one more episode for season six, and it's going to be kind of like a special episode if we can

01:06:00 Kelly Allen

pull it off, but then we're going to go radio silent for a year, which I think is a good thing because it'll give our, listeners a chance to kind of like re-listen to all the episodes and, really kind of like, oh, Jeff, stop it.

01:06:17 Kelly Allen

And for those of you who can't see what I see, he's making pouty faces and little tears.

01:06:23 Kelly Allen

And now he's making me sad.

01:06:24 Gina Turner

Well, we're going to be rooting for you, Kelly, but we're going to miss you.

01:06:31 Kelly Allen

Thank you, but I am so excited.

01:06:33 Gina Turner

You should be excited.

01:06:35 Kelly Allen

I'm finally going to get to put in the time and energy to finish this dissertation that I've been working on for a while.

01:06:43 Kelly Allen

So when I come back, I'll be sure to share that with everybody.

01:06:48 Kelly Allen

Excellent.

01:06:48 Gina Turner

Maybe you'll be our first guest.

01:06:52 Kelly Allen

Oh, mercy.

01:06:53 Kelly Allen

Okay.

01:06:54 Kelly Allen

But yeah, we'll see how it goes.

01:06:55 Kelly Allen

But yeah, hopefully we can get this special episode

01:06:59 Kelly Allen

in before I go on sabbatical, but if not, to the two of you and also to all of our fabulous listeners, love you, bye.

01:07:20 Kelly Allen

Thank you for listening to Pedagogy A-Go-Go, recorded in the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

01:07:28 Kelly Allen

Our producer in all things technology is Jeff Armstrong.

01:07:31 Kelly Allen

If you've got any questions, please send them to pedagogyagogo at gmail.com.

01:07:36 Kelly Allen

And be sure to follow us on social media at pedagogyagogo and click into our bio for copies of podcast transcripts, guest assignments, and other useful tidbits.

01:07:46 Kelly Allen

Until next time, this is Gina and Kelly saying we hope your day is filled with wonderful learning experiences.