In episode 8 of Social Learning Amplified, Eric Mazur invites Cassandra Volpe Horii and Martin Springborg to talk about their newest book, What Teaching Looks Like: Higher Education through Photographs. Eric, Cassandra, and Martin discuss what photographs of different learning environments can teach us. 

Eric Mazur:

Welcome to the Social Learning Amplified podcast, the podcast that brings us candid conversations with educators. We're finding new ways to engage and motivate their students inside and outside the classroom. Each episode of Social Learning Amplified will give you real life examples and practical strategies you can put into practice in your own courses. Let's meet today's guests.

Welcome to Social Learning Amplified. I'm your host Eric Mazur, and our guests on the episode today are Cassandra Volpe Horii and Martin Springborg. Cassandra is Associate Vice Provost for Education and Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Stanford University. She's former president of the POD Network and founder of Educational Development Centers at Caltech and Career College. Her passion is educational and systemic change in higher education. She recently co-authored a book with Martin entitled, What Teaching Looks Like: Higher Education through Photographs, a a book about education that is unlike any other book I've seen before. And we'll talk about extensively about the book in this podcast. Martin is interim Dean of Liberal Arts in STEM at Dakota County Technical College. He's also served as Director of Teaching and Learning at both DCTC and Inver Hills Community College, as well as faculty in the Minnesota State System. His writing and photographs relative to teaching and learning in higher education have been published in a number of books. He also co-authored a book on a topic near and dear to my heart, Meaningful Grading: a Guide for Faculty in the Arts published by West Virginia University Press. Thank you both for joining me today.

Now coming back to the book, What Teaching Looks Like, as I said, it's sort of a unique book. First, what gave you, what was the impetus to the book and what makes it so special from your perspectives?

Martin Springborg:

So the impetus for the project was basically me being a little bored with my teaching in the first, you know, my first three, four years of teaching. I was seeing that all of my work, my own personal work was, you know, falling by the wayside, as I put all my attention to my students, which is, which happens right when we start teaching. So I decided to make a project with my students that we could both work on together, you know, the classroom, this is in beginning photography. And that project was documentary focus and we're, as we're learning about documentary photography, I asked my students if they would make documentary work that represented their own experience in higher education as students. And if they did that, I would also, you know, contribute to the project by photographing my own experience as a faculty member.

and we learned a lot from each other in that, in that project about how we work for one on just in photography and about our different sides and contributions to the classroom and outside of classroom in education. From there, I liked the project and work that we were producing, that I was producing and I decided that it could be useful potentially to my colleagues and started working with them and just asking them if I could go into their classrooms and make photographs. It was a little weird at first. You know, it is not something we get asked a lot. Can I come into your class and just take pictures of you as you teach? But I had great colleagues and they all were very excited to have me in. And especially after when we started having conversations about teaching and learning through those photographs, eventually I brought that body of work to a conference and presented it, said, "Hey, I'm working on this project". And Cassandra was in one of those sessions. And that's where the project really took off after Cassandra got it. And I on it. <laugh>.

Cassandra Volpe Horii:

Yeah. So around that time, I mean, Martin and I were interacting and collaborating through a national organization, the POD network in higher education. So I had lots of opportunities to to kind of sidebar with Martin after seeing some of these images that were emerging from his interaction with colleagues in Minnesota. And I honestly, I had just, they stopped me in my tracks seeing these photographs. I, you know, Eric, you and I worked a long time ago back at Harvard University when I was there. I've been working in this area of really trying to advance and support change in teaching and learning and also how we value and understand the learning process in higher education. And I've had this chance, right, to see lots and lots of teaching across disciplines in all kinds of different classrooms, huge classes, small classes.

I've talked with, you know, educators, faculty, teaching assistants over the years, but I had never seen the kind of moments of learning and the passion that educators bring to HigherEd teaching spaces. I had never seen that captured in a way that could be shared easily. And so that just fascinated me. And at the time, I had just moved to Caltech to start up a Center for Teaching and Learning and outreach there, and got to thinking with Martin about the potential for these photographs to help with that process. I was kinda stuck trying to explain what we were doing to people. So we'd have these great conversations and then they would sort of revert to this like, oh, okay, so teaching is like standing in front of a chalkboard, right? But once we had these very authentic images of what was actually happening, it just became much easier to martial interest to kind of advance the, just shared like ethos and understanding and collective interest in the endeavor of teaching. So yeah, we then started to collaborate and as Martin said put together like a way to consult with faculty about teaching based on the photographs. We saw really deep reflection and change. And as Martin visited more campuses, I mean, eventually you had so many photographs, Martin, and we had talked about the themes that were emerging. So it was like, well, how about a book? Right? <laugh>. And then that's how, that's how things got launched.

Eric Mazur:

I assumed that, you know, doing the research for the book, going around campus, photographing other people's classes in a sense, was also a discovery process where, you know, you, you saw things that you could not have imagined before. What were some of the unexpected findings of that, that research?

Martin Springborg:

Well, one thing I was surprised at when we first started writing about the project, it wasn't for the book. It was, it was actually for a couple of articles and the discovery that there was so little visual media out there on teaching and learning especially in higher education. It was just, it was astounding how little we had as a visual record of that. Which I guess is, was not, you know, if you think about it isn't such a big surprise because teaching is a rather private thing. I mean, you, you don't, you aren't inviting your colleagues in your class all the time. You're, it's you and your students most of the time, right.

Eric Mazur:

- You are, you are inviting your students to your class, so -

Martin Springborg:

That's right.

Eric Mazur:

- It's not that private. But I know what you mean.

Martin Springborg:

Yeah. Yeah. So, but if you think about, like, we constantly have new faculty entering the fields. Like we have new faculty coming on board for their first teaching and they have no really, outside of their own discipline, they have no idea what teaching looks like. So that was astounding to me that we found so little to compare to.

Cassandra Volpe Horii:

Yeah. Yeah. Something that really stood out to me was the visceralness of emotion in the classroom. And in particular the fact that in prior images of higher education which sometimes can be a little bit constructed or staged for, of course, marketing purposes, we get kind of one emotional tone, right? We get happy, we get engaged. But when we think about what actually happens in learning, especially transformative learning, especially learning that challenges preconceptions that has students kind of undoing what they think they know and really recreating knowledge. It's not always like happy fluffy rainbows and sunshine. There are moments of real struggle, of intensity, of like depth of struggle sometimes. And that aspect because those, all of those emotions, so there's, there's some photographs in the book once stands out to me where I think both the faculty member and the student are have this like "yes!" expression, their hands are up in the air.

And it is one of those moments of like, very happy, the insight has occurred just now, and we recognize that. But there are many more that capture that kind of the part before that. And that's the part that in many ways, we as educators, we need to tolerate that. We need to understand the importance of it. And I think often faculty, you know, need to see that rewarded, like that's a good thing. And so communicating the range and breadth of emotions that are involved in really deep and meaningful learning was a just a delightful outcome and also a surprise to be able to see that finally.

Eric Mazur:

You know, so as you know, I've been a you know, a, a a pretty long advocate for active learning, and it's still the case that when you go around campus, no matter where on the planet, most of the classes are still completely focused on the faculty member and are not any form of active learning. I saw quite a bit of active learning in your book, I presume, in part, because those are from a photographic point of view, the most exciting one. But as you went around, how did, what did you find out about the balance between active learning and more traditional lecture-based learning?

Martin Springborg:

I was really taken by some of the spaces in the what we refer to as more traditional, you know, learning spaces. I was just talking to somebody about this last week in a similar, you know, podcast situation. The spaces in those large lectures where students have made their immediate surroundings personalized so they, the spaces that they create for themselves within those large, seemingly anonymous spaces, right? So we talk a lot in this book about the environment, the teaching environment, and, you know, in several chapters and I think needs to be, you know, called out too, is the learning environments that students create for themselves within those learning environments. That was surprising to me. So it's not always the exciting, you know, moments that Cassandra's mentioning where the, you have these aha moments that are obviously visually stunning. It's those, it's also those quiet moments, those quiet spaces that happen in the learning process. One of my favorite photographs from this project is one where it's a faculty member working with a student in an office hour. It's very quiet. So, and it's part, it's one of those moments where the student is obviously struggling. So there are a lot of moments like that too, those necessary moments that happen in learning.

Cassandra Volpe Horii:

It's hard to get a sense truly of the balance between active learning and traditional lecture from this project, because we didn't necessarily sample randomly. What I will say is there's a lot of both that you see in the photographs. Sometimes those passive lecture photographs do focus in on those students as Martin's talking about, and sort of that micro environment that they have created. One thing stepping back from the work in our engagement with the, actually the editing process and with institutions about it, is how much institutions really wanted to identify with the active learning spaces and thought, well, all those lecture halls must be somewhere else. So it speaks to me about a kind of moment of change where the practice hasn't caught up with the aspiration. And it is one of the reasons why, you know, we don't necessarily identify specific institutions among other things in the photographs themselves.

But we do identify kinds of institutions, and it is absolutely true that both are happening across many different sizes of institutions, foci of institutions and kinds of disciplines. So there's just such a mix going on. One of the resources that's online with, with the book is a close reading set of exercises, close reading and observation. And in one of those, we've picked photographs that highlight the changing role of the instructor, particularly in active learning environment. So that's a series that people could pick up and really reflect on what it takes to facilitate active learning and how that role of the instructor really changes in that environment.

Eric Mazur:

That's great to hear. So, I, you know, in the past 10 years or so, I've become more and more aware of the importance of the, you know, learning space. And I think the pandemic has pushed it even further and has made me realize that, you know, the walls of the classroom were very artificial and no longer strictly needed. So your chapter number four, the, the physical and technological environment really fascinated me. And I was struck, for example, by this sociology class that took place outdoors when, you know, was people sitting in a, in a courtyard on chairs. Even though by just looking at the picture, it still looked very much like the faculty member was the focal center of the attention of all of the students. But are there some lessons you could share from that section of the book in terms of where we're heading in terms of designing our learning spaces?

Cassandra Volpe Horii:

So, it was a very interesting thing to put those photographs together, Eric, and really think about what they were, what story they were telling, right? What narrative they were telling. And on the surface, we kind of see this story about the space in a way, telling us how it should be used. So there are signals and you know, how the rows are set up, if it's fixed seating, if it's got a front, if it doesn't have a front, if it's really built for people facing each other. So there's, that's one layer, right? But what we found when we kind of went a layer deeper to really look at the actions of the instructors and the students was a lot of kind of breaching of those expectations. So breaking with the expectations of the space, often beginning, and you might have had this experience as you were developing peer instruction, right?

Working around the constraints. That process sometimes really facilitates kind of commitment to the idea of interaction, because there is something to overcome, not that we wanna design spaces to have to overcome them, right? But in addition, Martin photographed in some spaces that had no structure, that were really like blank slates. And to see what emerged from those blank canvases to really meet the needs of the learners, and for them to be able to say construct and display work over time and interact with that in different forms spatially. I think for me, a big lesson that comes out of that, and I think that translates to online spaces as well, is that educators, faculty, instructors, teaching assistants, all of us could be a little more intentional when we come into a space about how we wanna use it, right? To know it's great if it's set up for exactly what we wanna do.

And we have decisions to make no matter what about even where we place ourselves, how we interact with students, where we travel, what technologies we're trying to use, what we leverage in the classroom. And the more we can kinda take the reins on some of those choices, the more we can align them with the kind of learning that we hope happens. And that moment of choice is a moment of reflection, which is what we collectively understand is really at the heart of very good teaching, right? Is being very intentional, clear, and always revising what we do.

Martin Springborg:

And I can add just a little bit about, you know, the those spaces that don't have, you know, four walls around them. You know, the pandemic that we all lived through created some obvious challenges for us. And I was fortunate enough to be able to photograph some of that teaching that was happening during that time. That teaching was mostly taking place out outside in improvised spaces. And those photographs are really interesting how the dynamic shifts with the, like as Cassandra mentioned, the absence of a front of a room where the instructor places themselves and how the focus of attention becomes not only the instructor, but your classmates or the fellow students and the space around you.

Eric Mazur:

Yeah. I've become more and more convinced that the more we can reflect the real world, and it comes, that, that, that comes back to what you said, Cassandra, you know, the intention, the intentionality of the designing of the learning space. The more it can sort of reflect the world in which the students are going to operate later, the better the learning will be. So I think in a sense, the learning environment should reflect the professional environment, and except for theaters and performance and cinemas, we never have the old-fashioned type of auditorium space as a, as a learning space. So it's wonderful to see in your book a lot of a lot of innovative spaces, and also to see in, yeah, I think it's chapter five, the one that follows the learning space, sort of learning beyond the campus. I saw, you know, the culinary school I think it was pictures. And as somebody who loves cooking, I'm just jealous of that setting and I've tried very hard in my own class to design an environment to learn physics. That's very much like a physics lab, even for a class of, you know, 140 students. But I'd like to ask you both as sort of, you know, proponents of or activists, I should almost say, of change in higher education. If there's one advice you would give to our listeners in terms of, you know, changing higher education, what would that be?

Cassandra Volpe Horii:

Well, the lesson coming out of this project for me is to take the moment to pause and connect to the why. We have more and more great information about how to change and what to move toward when we're changing higher education and instruction. I think we don't have enough that gets at people's kind of deeper commitment to why, why we are doing this, why are we doing higher education? Why do we wanna have this, these transformations possible for students, for ourselves? And that commitment, I think is what a photograph can help us pause to realize, because images such as Martin's really frees the moment and give us that chance to pause and connect to the meaning behind what we're doing. So I think this work, to me, it's really complimentary to very structured and almost scientific in, in many instances, change efforts because it makes that human connection and gives us a reason to stay committed to what can be a really hard endeavor to make change happen.

Martin Springborg:

I can't say it better. And one thing that that's the thing that's come out of this project for me, is the importance of reflection. It's vital to improving yourself as an educator. It's vital to changing an institution or an institution's culture reflection is at the center.

Eric Mazur:

Absolutely. It's vital to learning itself too. So for the students reflection is at least as important. I would add, well, if you are listening and you're curious about the book, What Teaching Looks Like, it's available in an open access digital format as well as in print through the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University. All you really have to do, if you can't wait, is to go to Google and enter the words, What Teaching Looks Like, and you'll have a, a beautiful PDF copy of the book. Thank you for listening. And thank you to both of our guests, Cassandra and Martin. You can find our podcast and more on perusall.com/SocialLearningAmplified. Subscribe to join us on our next episode. And thank you again to both of you.

Social Learning Amplified is sponsored by Perusall, the social learning platform that motivates students by increasing engagement, driving, collaboration, and building community through your favorite course content. To learn more, join us at one of our introductory webinars. Visit perusall.com to learn more and register.