Podcasts
How are colleagues hired during the quarantine surviving?What is authority if you are younger than your adult students?What is scholarship when teaching is multi-modal, publishing is fragmented, and service requires many, many committee obligations?Who is the self who teaches during the first seasons of the teaching career?
How you enter a place, a job, a career is important. Processes of interviewing, hiring, onboarding inform concerning belonging or lack of belonging of the community. How does a faculty inform a newly hired colleague that they want them to succeed? What hospitality is offered? What resources are provided for early career people to manage their own interests, projects, and aspirations?
What does it mean when the messiness of our humanness and family relationships is precisely what makes us better teachers? The courage to be vulnerable and act as a learner with our students can be inspired by our own parenthood. What does it take to navigate the racial dynamics of diverse classrooms? What practices of wholeness will sustain the dedicated minorized teacher over the long-haul of a teaching career? How does being aware of the identity politics of the USA make you, potentially, a better teacher?
What happens when the teaching life is a grind? How does one manage the institutional pressures of academic life?Without mentoring how do I know if I might be a good administrator? What does it take to raise the morale of faculty?
What can be taught and what must be caught? What does it take to choreograph student discovery, detection, encounter, experience, stumbling upon, and notice of the unexpected?What practices allow teachers to be aware of students’ knowledges? What does it mean to measure and reflect upon teaching that takes into account the art of catching?
So often scholarship is mired in a narrative of guilt for women who choose the mother. Too often mothering is thought to be a squandering of time for those pursuing tenure or promotion. What does it mean to intellectual communities if motherhood were to be embraced? How is the scholarship of teaching enriched by those who are mothering? What is the detriment of living in a bifurcated identity that silos mothering away from career and vocation? How does motherhood impact the twenty-first century identity politics of scholarship?
Creating classrooms where learners have agency, trust, and are encouraged to bring their own knowledge to bear upon the conversation is challenging but possible.What does it mean to craft learning activities with more variety and intention than long lists of required readings? What if ah-hah! moments require cognitive dissonance?What if we attempted less volume of material and more depth of the material in our classrooms? Learning to teach better requires risking new practices.
New patterns of institutional power, new visions, and the capacity to make unpopular decisions still does not guarantee successful leaders.In this current wilderness experience, how are leaders trained – who trains? How are leaders identified, mentored and supported for success? Good leaderships have the dynamic capacity to set direction, can lead to new places, is not cohesive or cruel. Leadership skills are scholarly skills.
Play, with and for adult learners, recognizes embodied aesthetics, assists in meaning making, redefines productivity, and welcomes wisdom. Diversities of epistemologies through play pedagogies enhance adult learning. Learning to have fun together rejuvenates and transforms classrooms. What does it mean to maintain health and wellbeing through play? Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts (Chicago Theological Seminary).
Centering creativity in knowledge production and teaching. The best scholarship comes from animating our ideas, refusing to be policed, nurturing curiosity, and pursuing a spirit of play. We all need a no-judgement zone, a designated space where mistakes are encouraged, even rewarded. Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts Dr. Ralph Basui Watkins (Columbia Theological Seminary).