EP 32 - Pedagogy of Kindness: Fostering it Online with Cate Denial

In this episode, John and Jason talk with Cate Denial, author of “Pedagogy of Kindness” about kindness to self and students in the online classroom. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com

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Guest Bio:

Cate Denial is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Her new book, A Pedagogy of Kindness, is now available from the University of Oklahoma Press. Her historical research has examined the early nineteenth-century experience of pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing in Upper Midwestern Ojibwe and missionary cultures, research that grew from Cate’s previous book, Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country (2013). From July 2022 to December 2023, Cate was the PI on a $150,000 Mellon-funded grant bringing together thirty-six participants from across higher education in the United States to explore “Pedagogies, Communities, and Practices of Care in the Academy After COVID-19.” Cate consults on teaching in higher education with individuals, departments, and institutions in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia.

Connecting with Cate:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-denial-8869a115b/
• https://bsky.app/profile/cjdenial.bsky.social
• https://catherinedenial.org/

Links and Resources:

• Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection (free access)
• A Pedagogy of Kindness (book)
• Michelle Miller’s post on Same Side Pedagogy
• Rethinking Rigor (Kevin Gannon)
• Annotate Your Syllabus (Remi Kalir)
• Digital Pedagogy Lab 2025

Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Transcript

We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!

False Start

[00:00:00] Jason: good Well, thank you. Yeah, that was a great conversation

[00:00:02] Cate Denial: Yeah. Let me know, you know, if you need anything from me and otherwise I'll look forward to listening in when you get it all done.

[00:00:10] Jason: Okay, our our timeline is usually somewhere between two weeks and six months

[00:00:18] Cate Denial: Okay.

Start

[00:00:19] John Nash: I'm John nash here with Jason Johnston.

[00:00:22] Jason: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning, the second half, the Online Learning Podcast.

[00:00:28] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last two years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great and some of it is, but. A lot of it still isn't. So how are we going to get to the next stage?

[00:00:43] Jason: That's a great question. How about we do a podcast, John, and talk about it?

[00:00:48] John Nash: I think that's a perfect idea. What do you want to talk about today?

[00:00:51] Jason: Well, today we have a special guest with us. With us is Catherine Denial. Cate is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Welcome, Cate.

[00:01:07] Cate Denial: Thanks for having me.

[00:01:09] Jason: Can we call you Cate?

[00:01:10] Cate Denial: Of course.

[00:01:12] Jason: Sometimes I take that liberty when people have that on their little thing in the video screen.

I say, well, if it's there, then I guess we can call them that.

[00:01:20] Cate Denial: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:01:22] Jason: Yeah. Well, good. Well, it's so great to have you here. One of the reasons why we reached out to you is because of your book, which we'll get to. But even before that , in the spring of this last year, so I've got a digital critical pedagogy book club that we started in the spring.

So. There's a great anthology that you're part of that talks about the pedagogy of kindness as part of that anthology the Critical digital pedagogy anthology. We'll put the link in our notes. I got to know you're writing there and then of course connected through LinkedIn and Always great to see your posts.

I feel like they are kind of North Star-ish posts and I and I like following people who who helped to kind of bring me You bring me back and keep me pointed in the right direction with all of this because you can get really, really in the weeds and also caught up with all the new technologies and everything like that and what we're doing.

So anyways, that was kind of my background of connecting with you. And so thank you so much for coming on to the, into the show. I just really look forward to having this conversation and have been looking forward to it ever since we set it up.

We're going to get into your first chapter here in a second, but I would like to talk to you a little bit. We would like to talk to you a little bit about just kind of how you got to the place that you are today as as a professor and maybe a little bit about what, It kind of drew you to, to write this book and to kind of take this kind of trajectory, I think, in terms of, of your focus in this direction.

[00:03:06] Cate Denial: So it has been 30 years. I am from England originally. And so I showed up in America to go to graduate school and was put in front of a classroom. And I had graduated exactly 1 month before that because the British system goes longer into the year than the American system. was terrified. I didn't know what I was doing. So I projected Dana Scully every time I walked into the classroom from the X Files to try and make sure that I was someone who could actually command some kind of presence in that room. I was taught as a graduate instructor to think of students as antagonists, to suspect them of cheating, to watch out for their plagiarism, to think about the way that they would try and change their grades, to anticipate they wouldn't do the reading. People are very familiar with these sorts of things. And it quickly became clear to me that this wasn't working for me. And it wasn't working for my students either. Setting up that kind of antagonism in the classroom just put us all on edge. So little bit by little bit, I tried things to change. try and change that relationship. I was really flying blind for a great deal of time. I did not know there was such a thing as pedagogy scholarship. I had no idea about the scholarship of teaching and learning. I was just experimenting in my classroom. And then when I became a professor. I was a much better than I had been in 1994.

Thank goodness. And that trajectory continued and

To conduct myself in a classroom. I was trained in intergroup dialogue as of 2013 from the University of Michigan and intergroup dialogue is a really structured way of talking across big differences around issues like race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability. I have colleagues at Knott's College who were part of my journey alongside me, my colleague, Gabriel Raley Carlin, my colleagues, Hilary Lehrman and Deidre Doherty in particular. And then I went to the Digital Pedagogy Lab in 2017, and that was really where I had this aha moment where the people in charge of my stream asked us to look at our syllabus and to identify who we were writing it to, to literally describe them with a bunch of adjectives. And I realized, despite all the changes that I had made in my teaching, that syllabus communicated that I was a distant authoritarian figure just waiting for people to mess up. that was a shock to me. So I set about completely changing that, right? Going into the granular detail of my syllabus, changing the way that I expressed myself and the things that I asked students to do with the goal of making the self that I presented to them the same self that I am. Right. And so that was really how I got to distilling a pedagogy of kindness. It came very, very directly out of that digital pedagogy lab experience.

[00:06:13] John Nash: I'd like to build on that. Cate, I was I, I don't know where this is written somewhere, but it's about the, about the hook. And when you start a book or anything, it's like, you need to capture the reader in the first place. sentence or paragraph and yours did just that. I even texted Jason when I started reading your book saying, I'm on the Kindle version,

"I'm 4 percent in and I'm enthralled." And so

um,

Um, You

to get towards kindness. And it's what struck me was also, we talk a lot about, in this podcast with others, about building capacity amongst the ranks of our faculty colleagues to be better teachers the centers for teaching and learning that try to do this. it struck me that this, description you make, which I think is true is a challenge to those that are trying to do the capacity building towards kindness, good pedagogy, is that your take?

[00:07:30] Cate Denial: Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think that the culture of higher ed is sort of more than the sum of its parts, right? It's not just the distillation of everybody's individual values and goals. It sort of has a life of its own uh, a culture of its own. And I think that culture is very highly individualistic. I think that it is very, very competitive. I mean, for some of us, it's competitive from the moment we decide we want to go to college, right? and I think that it is antithetical to so many things that are so important for teachers, like community. Right? Like, knowing who you can count on and who's going to be able to assist you in moments where, I don't know, you've run out of chalk, or something terrible just happened in class, or you have too much homework to grade, like, all kinds of things, right?

But you need community, and I think that higher ed is actually really bad at building that community in general.

[00:08:34] John Nash: Your, your take also reminds me of someone we've spoken to here before Dr. Michelle Miller, cognitive psychologist at Northern Arizona University, who wrote a piece that resonated with us on this idea of same side pedagogy and getting away from this antagonistic approach

[00:08:51] Cate Denial: Mm hmm.

[00:08:52] John Nash: we not on the same side, students and teachers together to try to have a learning journey together. caught that in your, in your approach as well. Yeah.

[00:09:01] Jason: Yeah, and it lines up well with so many other things that I'm kind of reading and hearing at this. stage of, of trying to really understand the students as well. And this idea of transparency in the syllabus as well that we've got this perception of how we feel in our hearts towards the students. And then we have what's projected out there in front of them.

And they're coming at it from, from this power differential, right? Where they see things in a very different way than we see things as we are. In a sense looking at them. And so I, I love that kind of turn for you in terms of that kind of awareness, that aha moment with the, with the syllabus that came through your first chapter of your book if we can get into this is, is talking about kindness towards the self. And, as I mentioned here at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, we're doing this as part of our book club actually this semester and in our last meeting, one of the faculty members said that this was some of the best P. D., professional development, that she's ever done in a long time. And some of that, I think, I think was because people really resonated with this first chapter of this, this first chapter that kind of starts.

[00:10:32] Cate Denial: hmm.

[00:10:39] Jason: we are always taught to put the student first and to be student focused in all that we do.

And so to have a, a book that actually starts with an inward look this and having kindness towards yourself was almost cold water on the face for me in terms of this kind of like, "oh" moment. So could you talk a little bit about starting with that as a, as a chapter and, and how you came to that?

[00:11:08] Cate Denial: Yeah, in the original manuscript, I had written this as the last chapter of the

and it was in conversation with Jim Lang, who's the editor of the series, that it got moved up It was really that there were some things that needed to be said that were prerequisites to everything else that I was saying in the book, and he had a clearer view of that from sort of looking outside in than I had while I was, you know, typing away at making the manuscript. there There were things about, you know, what kind of pedagogical training have we had or not had in our lives.

[00:11:43] Jason: Mm hmm.

[00:11:44] Cate Denial: What is being asked of us when we are put in front of a classroom of students? How do we make sure if we're going to be pouring out of our cup all the time, how do we fill it up? How do we make sure that we are resourced and that we are taken care of? And so it made a lot of sense to me that this needed to be the very first chapter so that before it, got to here's some stuff you can do with syllabi and assignments and your classroom practices, which can just sometimes feel like a piling on of more responsibility that there was a real pause to say, okay, how are you going to take care of yourself before we even think about making all of that other stuff manageable?

[00:12:27] Jason: Yeah, that's so good and very insightful. And what a what a wonderful thing to have an editor, you know, somebody working with you on this to, to have that kind of insight as well from the outside because I think so much even in our professional development that we do It kind of gets tagged on at the end.

Oh, yeah, and by the way

[00:12:45] Cate Denial: Yes.

[00:12:46] Jason: I know that we have just given you a list of a thousand things that you some of you would like to do some of you feel like you should do or have to do or And, and now I've seen all these examples of these amazing teachers and transformed lives.

And I'm feeling this. Oh, and by the way, take care of yourself.

[00:13:05] John Nash: And you, you distinguish quite clearly that there is a difference between being kind or, well, and kindness and being nice. And I I've been through many academic units and other institutions where, well, Iowa nice is a classic notion that I lived through when I was in Iowa and, but it's, you distinguish from that. Talk to us a bit, if you could, about that difference.

[00:13:34] Cate Denial: I know Iowa nice too, because that's where I went to graduate school. So yes I think we could probably make it Midwest nice, right? That there's a certain Midwest niceness.

Niceness as I conceive of it in the way that it works in higher ed is that it lies to us. It's very conflict averse. Doesn't want to have the serious and needed conversations to clear the air to make progress. is focused on plastering over cracks. And so if we could just, you know, not actually deal with the elephant in the room, but instead just all agree to get along, that's what's prioritized instead of actually meaningful conversation. so I think niceness lies about a lot of different things. It lies about precarity.

It lies about how much time we're putting in, lies about exhaustion and burnout. It lies about what, sometimes get shoved under the concept of rigor or tradition. And I think that we deserve and need honest conversations about those things.

[00:14:38] John Nash: How does, how does this play out then as we move towards pedagogy and working with students? And you note here in early on in the book too, that a pedagogy of kindness begins with justice. And this is a thread throughout as well, that we should be just does that play out?

What do you think as we get in front of students?

[00:14:58] Cate Denial: So I think the impulse to be nice is that impulse to just get along, right? So it's the impulse to bend over backwards to make sure that every articulated student need is met. And sometimes we actually need to hold fast to some boundaries. We need to set some boundaries on our time. We need to set some boundaries on our effort. We need to be the person who provides some structure and some accountability. Those things are not alien concepts, right? And they're not antithetical to being kind to ourselves and our students. So a great example of this from my teaching is that in, I think it was 2012 I had two sections of the same class.

I had 50 students who were all going to be writing papers at around the same time. And I balked at the idea of trying to give meaningful feedback on eight to 10 page papers three times, right? With all these students. So I was like, you know what? You can turn in your paper anytime you want to this term, and I will give you feedback, and my intent was, oh, this will be great.

They'll just sort of dribble in across the term. It'll be sustainable. Of course, what happened was that every single student wrote, two papers the night before the last day of class, and I should have seen that coming. I should have seen that coming. I'm terrible when I don't have deadlines and accountability, so I don't know why I anticipated that everybody else would be different. And so what I didn't offer there was the structure, the boundaries, right, to keep everybody on task. They had a terrible time writing those papers. Those papers were not the greatest papers that they could have written, right? And that was very much something that I failed to give them because I was being nice and I was not actually thinking compassionately.

[00:16:50] John Nash: Nor, not a criticism on you, but I think about also critical thinking comes into this, doesn't it? Thinking about way in which, I mean, I've that situation has befallen me as well. And being thinking about second order consequences, third order consequences, it took me years to realize there was a direct correlation about between the amount of work I assigned and the amount of grading I would do.

[00:17:12] Cate Denial: Right,

[00:17:13] John Nash: I

was so excited

to have them engage in what I thought was such interesting activities and they could go through these and then, yeah, there's this pile to give feedback on.

[00:17:21] Cate Denial: Yes, exactly.

[00:17:23] Jason: In your chapter about kindness to yourself, the, you talk a little bit, and this kind of relates here is, is how more work does not necessarily make better work. And you, you have a few statements like this throughout the book that I think are very releasing in some ways. It's like little breaths of fresh air but as you're thinking about the whole load of taking on a class and these, rigorous assignments that John likes to do because he, he loves getting into it and he wants students to engage and he wants to challenge them.

And all these things are good things. How do we balance this, this kind of internal almost like a knee jerk, like, well, for good teachers, we need it to be rigorous, right?

[00:18:08] Cate Denial: Yeah,

[00:18:19] Jason: than it is even, I find then some Dean, you know, breathing down our, our, our necks or whatever like that.

Hmm.

[00:18:31] Cate Denial: I don't like the term rigor. Kevin Gannon makes a great distinction about types of rigor, right? That there are standards, and I love that terminology, right? There are standards, and we want our students to meet them. And that's absolutely what we should be doing, but that too often, rigor is stuff like, I won't accept your paper if it's 2 minutes late.

If you didn't stay put. I'm not going to accept your paper. If it's not in 12 point times Roman font, I'm not going to accept your paper. If you have any life event that prevents you from handing it in on the day that it's due, I'm not going to accept it. Those kinds of things, right? That are hoops that we make students jump through for. Not terribly good reasons. There are other ways to manage workload and to think critically about how to help students do their best work without these sort of draconian and often punitive reactions to. very common problems, like where do people have staplers these days,

right?

or you know, you broke up at midnight with your partner and suddenly all that finishing work you were going to do is just blown out of the water, right?

We need to be able to respond to those things. So I think that kindness is not at all antithetical to standards, I think it is antithetical to the sort of concept of rigor that is very brittle and unbending, right? That has no flexibility in it and can shatter at a moment's notice.

[00:20:01] John Nash: It's not reflective. That's what I think about. I think about instances that are happening presently in our contemporary classes of this semester with generative AI and its appearance on the scene in round student work and professors need your reaction to move to your definition of rigor when encountering that and not having a reflective conversation about how or why it has, that kind of work has been turned in, so...

[00:20:30] Cate Denial: Yeah, yeah.

[00:20:31] Jason:  Yeah, it's this shift away from this kind of enforcer mindset of we've got, we've got a bunch of rules and if we don't stick to the rules, then it's a slippery slope and all these kids are going to slide right down that slope into the pit of going nowhere in their education .

Um, Yeah.

[00:21:03] Cate Denial: I think that it is tempting to think that rules are about fairness. But actually our humanity makes us so multivarious that there are very few rules that can equally apply to every situation actually recognizing that multiplicity of experiences is part of what makes for a good teacher, I think.

[00:21:27] Jason: That's good. I like some of that language in terms of standards. What do you think about high expectations? Because sometimes I hear that and sometimes it may be veiled as rigor when you say high expectations. I think I probably do that with my own, my own children.

Right. Well that's not a, it's, you know, I just have high expectations for you where it may be that I'm just too locked into some of the rules especially as they're becoming young adults that I'm just kind of a little too locked in. Mm-Hmm

[00:21:58] Cate Denial: I think that language of I have high expectations for you can be delivered in a way that is actually supportive and kind, but it can easily, easily shift to become the language of disappointment and shame. Right? just, I have high expectations for you." Right? And your voice conveys that this person didn't meet them and what a disappointment they are, right? And nobody has ever, been shamed to doing better, right? That is not a long term strategy for improving anything. So I think that our delivery and our, the intent behind the words matters a lot.

[00:22:40] John Nash: And the, perhaps the, the actual operational definition of the high expectation written

so that one can know what they're supposed to meet. I mean, with the children, Jason's a fine father, I'll use myself, but I might say, "I have high expectations for you" and a tone of disappointment, but I've never explained to my kids what those were.

[00:23:01] Cate Denial: Yeah. That's

[00:23:03] Jason: Right. So it becomes this kind of nebulous, high expectation that you never actually reach for your teacher who always seems to be generally disappointed with you.

[00:23:14] Cate Denial: Yeah, yeah.

[00:23:17] Jason: As you know, our podcast, we focus on online learning And we talk a lot about online learning in the second half, get this idea that online learning has been around now for, you know, 25, almost probably going on 30 or 40 years now. And this kind of going into the second half of life. We know how to deliver content to people.

Now we've got all these tech tools. People are connecting in high speed. We've got all these affordances of of our online learning but as we move into the second half of life here of online learning. you know, what, where do we want to go? You know, what are our hopes and dreams for kind of moving it into a new level?

One of those places, and coming back to this first chapter again, in terms of a kindness towards the self, is that we have, we have a lot of teachers who are teaching online who are pretty isolated. And they they don't have people that are caring for them. They are probably working too hard because they have too many

[00:24:28] Cate Denial: Yeah.

[00:24:29] Jason: on the go, and they're working across multiple So, schools and so on in order to, you know, fulfill a full time kind of schedule in a sense.

Where do we go from here? , how do we move into this next season, which probably will expand, I think overall, we're, moving very quickly past the 50 percent point , of students online versus face to face in, the U. S. And we're going to keep on moving in that direction.

And I'm part of the problem in that way. You know, because of what we do, but I also believe in it, right? I believe that we're, we're creating more access for people and we're reaching people that we haven't before in education and people in different paths. So that's all that. Anyways, long kind of lead up to say, you know, what words would you have for teachers that are listening to this, that are teaching these online classes?

[00:25:25] Cate Denial: So I, I think there's two responses. One is the. structural response and one is the, okay, given that, what can you personally do? Right? I was the PI on a grant last year from the Mellon Foundation that had 36 of us from different kinds of higher ed institutions with different kinds of roles, faculty and staff, investigate what it would look like if we actually took care of faculty and staff. And we took as our precip the idea that we did a pretty good job of taking care of students during the acute phase of the pandemic, but we did not take care of our faculty and staff in that same moment. So what would that look like? I think that there has to be a commitment to care. from administrations.

I think it has to come from, you know, your provost's office and the people who are there who are ostensibly supposed to be supporting you, right? There has got to be a much more honest conversation about contingency in this country. 70 percent of instruction right now is done by contingent faculty, and those faculty are often very isolated and unsupported and unsupported, not just in the fact that they have a colleague down the corridor who they can, you know, run a situation by, but in the fact that they are providing their own office supplies, for example, right?

Everything is just sort of thrust back upon them. I think that we have to have some really serious conversations about the way in which we structure the business of higher ed, and it is increasingly being structured like a business. Right. That was not the way in which I made, I meant that, but it is being structured like a business. And you get nowhere by exhausting and burning out the people who are doing the great work upon which your entire industry is. Is based, right? So that has to happen. And I'm hopefully I'm helping with this grant and with other work that I'm involved in. There's a group of us that are really, you know, trying to push those conversations and make those conversations happen. what do you do in the meantime? Because those conversations are not going to solve the problem today. Right? So I think there is the question of boundaries again, right? Setting very hard and fast boundaries on, say, when you will and will not respond to email. especially tough if you're contingent and you are. bringing together multiple classes, because you are sometimes at the point where every hour of your reasonable working day is taken up by classes, and then you have to respond to students too, right? But I think that we have to take as a foundational that we have a diminishing returns when we don't take care of ourselves. And so there's got to be a time blocked off where you're like, this is absolutely not time where I will be dealing with my students. This is time when I will be doing any number of other things that are not to do with my job. So, it's about I have email hours, which are on my syllabus. My, they're very consistent.

My students know what to expect. I have I try to take. day off from email altogether. I don't have email notifications on my phone and that's a big one, right? Because you know, you're out doing the grocery shopping or whatever and ping, ping, ping, ping, right? They're just coming in all the time and your, your sense of stress and overwhelm just grows. So, not having that on my phone. So, I can choose to go look and see if stuff has come in, but I'm not being told that all the time. I think that, especially for people who are isolated and away from colleagues, that using social media is a wonderful way to find different kinds of community, and there's so many different types of social media now. There's some to avoid, And there's some that are really generative. I, did not find my teaching community in my locality, really, I found most of my teaching community online and had most of my profound, you know, the conversations that profoundly altered me online, Finding community, finding ways to be able to

honor your sense of and work, for example. So right now I am sitting in my living room and I have a corner of that living room that is my office space, right? I also spend my time here reading books and watching television and entertaining friends and all kinds of stuff. So I have a candle. that I light when I'm sitting down to work that is sort of like, okay, now it's the workspace. And when I blow that candle out, that's the end of it being the workspace, right? It's a tiny little ritual that works for me in terms of saying, this is not going to bleed over. And that computer gets shut down for the day, right? I think all kinds of, of tiny pieces of, of getting back some autonomy and some space are really, really crucial interventions.

[00:30:41] Jason: One of my rituals here, because my my office is also the laundry room is turning off the dryer when I'm working.

So I don't know if it's, that's really the same thing, but that's what I do.

If

[00:30:54] Cate Denial: it demarcates that space, then it's working

[00:30:58] Jason: Yeah, those are great. Guiding points there. And goes back to that transparency and kindness to the students can also be kindness to yourself as you are explaining what your boundaries are. I think that you are Helping students do the same things for themselves. I would like to believe that anyway.

So is that true? I just let myself off the hook or just is actually help students in the end.

[00:31:22] Cate Denial: I have had students articulate to me that, like, what I can not answer email, like I shouldn't, you know, shut that down and it doesn't have to be on my phone. I mean I'm modeling taking time away. I actually last trimester brought in blank sheets of paper with a monthly blank calendar on it, and blank weekly calendars, and did an exercise with my students where I was like, what's the time of day where you're at your sharpest, you do your best work, identify those, and when is it never going to happen? Morning, night, whatever. When is it never going to happen? You're not at your sharpest. when are you going to take that time for yourself? Block off an entire morning or an entire afternoon. And they had colored pencils and they, they blocked off that time for themselves. We spent most of a class period doing this and then transferring it to these monthly calendars and having a sense of what their time was like. And that came up so many times over the course of the term, in terms of the reflective work that they were doing, that it made a difference to be given permission, tacit permission to do that, and then to have the time to consider it so that it wasn't another piece of homework, but it was something we did together. That also mattered to them.

[00:32:39] John Nash: It seems to me part of it also is a lack of Perhaps it's kindness on the part of those in more positions of power. This, these are great tips and it's sort of putting this boundary work in this kindness, self kindness work at the feet of us, and we should, but we work with others who, send emails at any hour or

a a footnote in their email saying, just because I sent this when you're asleep, doesn't mean you have to answer it. I'm, I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it without saying, ah, maybe I could schedule this email to show up during their work hours or maybe it could

[00:33:17] Cate Denial: I think there are very few people in higher ed who are genuinely seeking to be unkind. Like whose reason to get up in the morning is to be unkind, right? I think that again, it's that culture that we're swimming in, right? And I think that for a lot of leadership, the same sort of aha moment that I had to have with my syllabus is the same aha moment they could stand to have with their communications coming out of their office. Right? The way that they're worded when they get sent. Please do not unload all of your stuff at 4 p. m. on a Friday, right? Like there is some self reflective work there and some work to sort of think about tone and language use and everything that spins out from there, right? That would be useful. I also think that there are, and some of these are in the book, I think that there are little things that could happen, like a space where the contingent faculty can either go to a place and borrow stuff that they need for their classes so that they're not constantly paying for things themselves, or have a certain amount that can be sent to people, right?

Or make things available to them online, right? There has to be that sense of community and community support, and it does not cost a lot of money to have a supply closet, right? Whether that's an online supply closet or an offline supply closet.

[00:34:58] Jason: Yeah, and it's a just a tangible way in which you feel that support then, and that people recognize that you're not in the, in the physical office. If you're working from home, that's good.

[00:35:11] Cate Denial: Yeah.

[00:35:13] Jason: I would like to, Before our time runs out here, talk a little bit more about some of the insights from the rest of the book. I think what I'd like to do maybe is ask kind of an overarching question, understanding where we're at and our listeners thinking about online learning, both administrating and teaching tend to be the instructional designers.

Those tend to be the people that listen to us. The rest of your chapters, you talk about kindness in the syllabus, assessment, and in the classroom. So what are some things that jump out to you as you think about the online space that we could do better in any of those areas?

[00:35:56] Cate Denial: I think one of the things that I think has made such a profound difference to me is rewriting the syllabus and then having the students annotate the syllabus. So that idea comes from Remy Killear and, people have varying degrees of autonomy when it comes to designing their syllabi, right, depending on the system that you're working within. Some people, like me, can have their students work with them to build the syllabus from scratch. And some people have a lot of boilerplate language or even a template where they're just filling in, you know, their name and their contact information and that kind of stuff. But no matter what, having the students then annotate that syllabus, speak back to it, right? And they're learning the skill of annotation, whether they are learning that online or not, right? It's easy to do in a very simple document where there's commenting enabled, but you can use things like Perusal or Hypothesis to do this too. it gives students some authority back, right? To talk

back and say, I love this policy, or why does it have to be this way? Why is this language on every syllabus I ever see, right? It gives them the opportunity to ask questions and get them answered. It gives them the opportunity to express points of view. And it just transforms this into, instead of a document that is top down, it becomes the co creation of what the course is going to be like. And I think co creation is perhaps the thing leaves out to me as, as joining those other three chapters of the book together, right? Believing in students as people who can co create their educational experience alongside you. So, making space for editing documents and making space for students to be able to tell. I have another concrete example, I have them fill in a self assessment sheet when they turn in a paper, for example. And one of the questions on that self assessment sheet is, how can I help you prepare for the next assignment? And, it's an opportunity for them to reflect on what sort of help they sought out in doing the first assignment they are perhaps realizing they need to do a little bit more work or polish a certain skill, to ask for it, right? To say, I'm going to need some more practice on this particular, whatever it is, equation, or piece of theory, whatever, right? So I think just opening up space where students get to say, I would love it if we could address this. I have thoughts about this. would like to edit this. I would, you know, anything that just helps them be the co creators of their experience.

[00:38:39] Jason: I like that as a thread a lot. And, you know, it threads through those kind of more concrete things, the syllabus assessment and classroom. But as, as you were talking, I thought, well, this really ties right back into being co creators in our lives together.

So here we are interacting in this class. We're going to have some level of effect on each other. How do we, how do we make the best lives for each other that we want to, while achieving this goal together this semester, you know, and I think that's where this kindness to self can come in as well.

[00:39:09] Cate Denial: And I think is crucial to remember that it is sometimes tempting to want to burn everything down, that is actually not a good strategy for our health and well being, right? That, this is about changing one thing at a time and seeing how it goes and then adapting it again and tweaking it.

And then, if I think about where I am in terms of the kind of feedback I give to my students, it's been a six or seven year journey to do what I'm doing now, right? Making one little adjustment at a time every time I taught a class. That is the way to make these changes. It can sometimes be overwhelming when you read a book like mine to go like, ah, that's so much work.

There's so much to do, right? But I'm very clear, like, pick one thing, pick one thing that you can change, and then you can check in with it later and see if it's working. And if it is working, great, accentuate it. And if it's not working, choose something else, right?

[00:40:07] Jason: Michelle Percansky-Brock talks about the liquid syllabus and how is annotating the syllabus the same or different than some of her ideas of coming at the beginning of the class really with a syllabus that instead of being in a, this kind of firm final position, it's, it's flexible.

[00:40:26] Cate Denial: I think they're really complimentary ideas, right? And I think depending on your particular situation, one might seem better than the other to you, right? Annotating the syllabus I found is really useful for people who have a lot of boilerplate language, who have a central office, or somebody who oversees the curriculum.

That is. providing most of the syllabus already written. it doesn't become an expression of who you are as a teacher. It's, it can tend to be very standoffish and distant and, and sort of phrased without any humanity in it, right? So, I think that is a great moment to be able to annotate the syllabus and have the students say, okay, well, we got it.

We can't change these policies, right? These policies are, are being handed to us, but we can certainly talk about how they make us feel, and we can talk about how we might mitigate something that seems too harsh, and how we can think generously about other places in this syllabus, right? So, I love the liquid syllabus idea.

I think it's just a question of picking the strategy that's going to work for your particular situation.

[00:41:35] Jason: Yeah. You have so many different kinds of colleges and expectations within those colleges and what might work for, for history, it would not necessarily work for social work that they're, you know, they're working towards some sort of external test on these nine different competencies and so on, and it might not work for somebody who's going to, who's going to be a surgeon, you know, and, and it might not work for somebody who is, you know is, is going to be an IT or whatever.

So I think it's nice to have some of that kind of flexibility and approach.

[00:42:06] Cate Denial: Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:42:27] John Nash: we think about, it sounds the similar thing, the one question you're wondering about, make that change and see if it made a difference and then do the next thing.

[00:42:36] Cate Denial: Yeah.

[00:42:36] John Nash: So I'm wondering as you do your faculty development work and you explain this, this framing have you noticed over time that there's a good first starting place? So I presume, let's say I've read the book. I'm excited. I don't want to burn it all down, although I have thoughts of it. So I'm willing to play the long game. What's your recommended first start?

[00:43:02] Cate Denial: I think the syllabus is where we start because it is such, it's a relational document and too often it's written like a legal document, right? This is not a legal relationship that we're setting up. It's not a contract. It is a meeting of people that happens. And I think that the way in which our students meet us and interpret us, especially if they see that syllabus before they ever see our face or hear our voice or get any feedback or anything from us, even if it's textual, right? that syllabus has to do a lot of heavy lifting on our behalf. And So I think looking for the places. where you can look at the language and say, who is the student I'm imagining as I write this? Which is the question I was asked at Digital Pedagogy Lab. I think that's a transformative question and it helps you see where language can shift and change to be more welcoming. You can think that you are being welcoming, as I once did, right? And actually have your syllabus terribly standoffish. And so sitting down and saying to yourself, "okay, this student, I'm going to write a list of adjectives that describe the student this is addressed to," can be so transformative and so illuminating. And then fixing it, right? And fixing it and making it who you really think your students are.

[00:44:28] John Nash: That's lovely because I think where my brain might have gone in a, in a question, if you were working with me, I would say, I would start to think which assignments am I going to change or which, but it's, it's firstly getting to this communicative place and

about later, maybe what you're doing inside that,

[00:44:48] Cate Denial: I agree. I think it's, you know, we talk a lot about belonging. Are we actually generating that? Does that first document that they see actually say, Hi, I'm glad you're here. Welcome to this class. Here's who I am, in terms that make them feel welcome.

[00:45:07] John Nash: That is great.

[00:45:09] Jason: " I don't want to, you know, give away spoil any endings for people, but this is really where you start as well. In the conclusion of your book, you say "We need to shift every part of what we do to prioritize care and not only for our students, but for ourselves. We deserve nothing short of transformation, a system of higher education in which we are each valued for the totality of who we are instead of only the products we are urged to create."

And I, and I love that and I would love to see us get there. What other, what other ways as a, as a higher ed culture can we, can we promote this? We've been talking about kind of more the classroom level. What other ways as a higher ed culture do you think that we can get there?

[00:45:59] Cate Denial: I think tackling the issue of competitiveness is an enormous part of it. I think that higher ed in general needs to slow down. We're accelerating and not in good ways, right? More demands upon people in order for them to get a job, right? More demands for them to produce to keep that job.

More money, more grants, more, whatever the metric is, right? It is increasing constantly. And I think that those of us who are in stable positions who have some authority over the way in which other people's working environment is, that we need to really do the work of slowing things down and opting out of this increased acceleration pausing, asking ourselves, like, do we, I, I can tell you anecdotally that, you know, the standard for getting a job has increased exponentially at my at my college in the time that I have been there. But what's the real hard data? Can you go back and look at what the job ads asked for in your department or your division for the last however many, how many, you know, cycles. Can you see this happening in real time? I think there has to be a commitment to making academia humane. And too much of it is cutthroat and too much of it is just competitive in ways that I don't think generate learning or knowledge in good ways, right, sustainable ways, that actually uses up and then discard us.

[00:47:39] Jason: Yeah, that's that is, that's good. That's a good word.

[00:47:42] John Nash: I concur. I think it's, valuable from a faculty perspective, but also from a chair and dean and provost perspective, trying to understand the kinds of environments and supports that we need to really let this kind of work be fostered.

[00:47:59] Cate Denial: Well, thank you so much, both of you.

[00:48:02] Jason: Well, what's the best way for people to get your book, Cate? Because I, I'm just going to say right here, everybody should be reading this book.

[00:48:13] Cate Denial: The best way to get it is from the University of Oklahoma Press because it supports an entire sort of infrastructure of more books like this, right? But you should get the book from the retailer that is most available to you.

[00:48:30] Jason: Okay. That's great Let me just say what a great book it is for. a book club that is also kind for people. And I'll give you my, my pitch on this. The fact that it has four pretty manageable chapters. And I'll just say the way that we've set up our book club, which is via Zoom, we just are going to meet four times and we're just going to meet on those four chapters and we have asynchronous chats that go on as well if people can't make it.

And I just think it's a wonderful way to both talk about it with your peers, but also

start to change some of the culture where you're at and also put yourself in a place of caring with each other. So we have connections with people that are, that are teaching, some of them are face to face, some of them are online and so on. And it's just a, it's a wonderful way to actually, do some of the things that the book is talking about, which is to put yourself in a space where we're just not taking, it's not just self care, but it's care for one another within these spaces.

So, so I'm going to say thank you again for the, for writing the book and for putting it out there in such a way that's manageable for, for us and for giving us a kind of a compulsion to, to move forward in this, because I think it's a, I think it's a good thing to do.

[00:49:47] Cate Denial: Well, thank you so much and I love the idea of this being suited to book clubs, because like you say, a little community of care is, is perhaps the best outcome that there could be.

[00:50:01] John Nash: Yeah, terrific. Thank you.

[00:50:03] Jason: And if anybody wants to connect with you, Cate, what's the best way to do it is LinkedIn okay?

[00:50:08] Cate Denial: LinkedIn is great. You can also find me on BlueSky at CJDenial and I have a website at catherinedenial. org.

[00:50:17] Jason: wonderful. And we'll put all of those links in our notes and you can find all of our episodes and our notes at onlinelearningpodcast. com. That's onlinelearningpodcast. com. That was my podcasty voice.

There's a lot of competition out there.

AI is coming for our podcasting jobs now.

[00:50:37] Cate Denial: Yeah.

[00:50:38] Jason: got to,

step up our, our game here of of friendly, supportive enthusiastic banter and podcasty voices. So we're going to be working on that.

[00:50:48] Cate Denial: Great.

[00:50:49] John Nash: you know, Cate, where we're learning our podcast voices? We're learning

[00:50:52] Cate Denial: I do not.

[00:50:54] John Nash: Google Notebook LM is helping us, uh,

[00:50:57] Cate Denial: right.

[00:50:58] John Nash: AI created overly gushy, loving-any-topic-that's-thrown-at-them voices.

[00:51:05] Cate Denial: I wish that the people listening to this could see my face right now, because that was a grimace. That was a big grimace.

[00:51:12] John Nash: Yes.

[00:51:14] Jason: Yes. Yeah, there's a lot of cringey moments in those, but it's a wild world we're living in right now. Well, thank you for the opportunity to. See you face to face here. We all have this conversation. Thank you for taking the time. We really appreciate you. All

[00:51:28] Cate Denial: Well, thank you for having me. This was wonderful.

[00:51:31] John Nash: Yeah.

[00:51:31] Jason: Thanks so much We'll see.

[00:51:33] Cate Denial: Bye.