Ted Hadzi-Antich: Learning Via the Great Questions

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This was made by humans. [00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome to Austin Community Conversations, a podcast featuring discussions about the interests, backgrounds and projects animating the members of a vibrant college community. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts and opinions of Austin Community College. The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only. The Austin Community College. Community college name and all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product or service. [00:01:09] Speaker C: Welcome to the conversation. [00:01:10] Speaker A: I'm Tonio Ramirez. [00:01:12] Speaker C: One hallmark of a well educated mind is a honed sense of curiosity. To discover curiosity, to inspire it, to know how to let it guide us, and to know how to satisfy it. All of these sit at the very core of an educational mission. Austin Community College is home to an [00:01:29] Speaker A: innovative program born of the idea that [00:01:31] Speaker C: the surest path to great curiosity is through great questions. My guest today is Ted Hajiantich, a government professor and one of the founders of the Great Questions seminar at acc. Here you'll learn about how the seminar focuses on the fundamental elements of close readings of source texts, open ended discussion and classroom community. [00:01:51] Speaker A: By the end, I think you'll find [00:01:53] Speaker C: it easy to see why this pedagogy has captured the attention of media outlets ranging from the New York Times to the Chronicle of Higher Education, along with major four year universities who have been surprised and inspired by what our faculty [00:02:06] Speaker A: and students achieve together. [00:02:08] Speaker C: Let's dive in. [00:02:13] Speaker A: Ted Hatiantich, welcome to the office. [00:02:15] Speaker D: Thank you. Glad to be here. [00:02:17] Speaker A: So you have been at ACC for how many years now? [00:02:20] Speaker D: Oh, gosh. So I started here in 2007. [00:02:24] Speaker A: Okay. [00:02:25] Speaker D: So I've been here for a bit. [00:02:26] Speaker A: Nearly 20 years. My goodness. Yeah, I know. That's a minute. I was. [00:02:30] Speaker D: I was kind of. I was a baby when I. When I got to acknowledge. [00:02:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. My first teaching assignment, it was. It was similar. I remember it. It not being infrequent that people would confuse me for a student. [00:02:42] Speaker D: Yes. No, I definitely remember that. I was also playing in a lot of bands at the time. [00:02:48] Speaker A: Okay. [00:02:48] Speaker D: So I would. I would. I would see people out and about. [00:02:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember those days too. Yeah. Yeah. I'm. [00:02:57] Speaker D: I'm. [00:02:57] Speaker A: I. I guess it's a little more comfortable that that doesn't happen to me as much anymore. [00:03:02] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:03:02] Speaker A: But when I started to notice that I was increasingly longer, plausibly confused for a student. [00:03:07] Speaker D: I know. [00:03:08] Speaker A: That's when I knew, like. Okay. [00:03:11] Speaker D: It's actually like. I think that it's easier to Teach when you're, when it's very clear that you're not a student in some ways, you know what I mean? There's kind of like you want to be like friendly with your students, you know, you want your students to be like, oh, this is someone I can trust. But you don't necessarily want your students to think this is someone that I can hang with. [00:03:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:03:30] Speaker D: You know what I mean? Maybe after. Maybe you can. I mean, they're definitely students that I've known over the years that I do hang with. Like, they, they've become friends. But yes, the sort of like classroom dynamic though, it's like, I think it's important to have like a professor students, you know. Yeah, there's a. You're not necessarily going out for beers, you know. [00:03:50] Speaker A: Sure. I wonder if you had this experience. So there was this really awkward transitional period where when I, when I first started teaching, I was 27 years old. So, you know, was many, was the same age as many of my students. And so the, the, the colloquialisms and the slang and everything was similar enough that I could, I could speak in the language of the youth in a way that would like, allow me to connect in a more immediate way. [00:04:21] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:04:22] Speaker A: Now it's this fun thing I can do where I can, I can use words like, you know, I could say like, you know, low key. That was pretty mid. And it's so obviously cringe worthy. Like, I'm not even going to say cringe because that's a word that I'm not allowed to use either. But it's so cringe worthy that it becomes a joke. But there was this awkward in the middle period where it wasn't clear if I were to like evoke language like that, whether it was an old man, like, you know, ironically using the language of the youth or just like somebody who thought they were trying to be cool and young and not pulling it off. [00:04:59] Speaker D: See, I mean, I guess when I think back at like those very first years teaching, when I was Also in my 20s, you know, I tried really hard to not use cool lingo. I tried to like, because I wanted, wanted to distinguish myself as like, I am professor, academics, you know. [00:05:15] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:05:15] Speaker D: And so I've tried to be, you know, very formal. I would dress differently than I usually dress. I feel like now I can just be more myself and like just being myself. Like also, I don't know, it might be like an age day. It could just be like a level of, a level of comfort and confidence in the classroom too, because like, you know, your first class classroom you're teaching. It's so tough. [00:05:36] Speaker A: Yes. [00:05:36] Speaker D: I mean, I remember the very first class I taught was a Texas politics class. [00:05:40] Speaker A: Okay. [00:05:40] Speaker D: Because government is my home department, political science, and I knew nothing about Texas policy. I just moved here from Boston, like, the furthest place from Texas. [00:05:49] Speaker A: Okay. [00:05:49] Speaker D: You could get. [00:05:50] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:05:51] Speaker D: And, you know, I was, you know, a chapter ahead of my students in the textbook, but everyone in the government department, you got to teach at Texas Policy School. And that was. Become one of my favorite classes. It's really. There's a lot of interesting things you could do with. I mean, we're two blocks from the state capitol here, you know, and I taught these classes primarily on this downtown Austin, Rio Grande campus. [00:06:07] Speaker A: Okay. [00:06:08] Speaker D: But, you know, you're just trying to, like. I think that when you first starting, you're trying to, like, not get called out, that you're such an imposter, because, like, you are. But. And I think, like, you kind of go through this arc of, like, I don't want people to know that I'm imposter. And then you're like, I don't know all this stuff. It's impossible for anybody to, like, actually have. And then there's a kind of, like, comfortableness that you get to. With just not knowing. [00:06:34] Speaker A: And. [00:06:35] Speaker D: And I think that being able to project that to students, like, as an authentic thing, you know, not like trying to project ignorance, but, like. But really. But just living that and being very open to questions and investigating with students, like, then it's just so fun. [00:06:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:06:50] Speaker D: Because it's like you're. You're. You're learning. You're learning with your students, and you're providing your students a model for what learning looks like. [00:06:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:06:57] Speaker D: And it's like that relationship, like, that's. That's almost like you can have like a friendly. We were talking about, like, being friends with your students, too. Like, that's a kind of friendship, you know, that's. It's. It's a closeness. It's openness. There's a free exchange. You're not holding things back. But it's like, it's not a. It's not like a casual friendship. It's like, it's a very. It's very personal. It's. It's different. It's a really unique relationship. Yeah. It has. [00:07:25] Speaker A: It has qualities of like, what Aristotle would call a friendship of the good. [00:07:29] Speaker D: Yes. [00:07:29] Speaker A: Like, more like totally. Beer drinking buddies isn't quite the same thing. Is. Right. And those are great. [00:07:33] Speaker D: Yeah. Yeah. [00:07:34] Speaker A: No, knock on it. [00:07:35] Speaker D: But it's. But it's not. But it's not. It's not. It's not what develops in. In a classroom, in an academic space, you know? Yeah. [00:07:41] Speaker A: So, yeah, this is interesting because I think that. I think a lot of students might not have the opportunity to think about the experience of a new instructor. And that sense of anxiety that's really peaked there, you know, and that's in some ways maybe because students often have their own anxiety about being in a new space and all of this. And I think it's worth just like, having conversations about that. So you talk about this phenomenon of feeling like an imposter. And it's interesting because I agree with you in a certain respect. You are an imposter as a new instructor. But I think that the sense in which you're an imposter as a new instructor, you remain an imposter throughout your whole career. Totally. So if you think that what you're supposed to be doing is the expert who knows all these things and is imparting that along to the next generation. Yeah. You're always going to be a bit of an imposter in that way. [00:08:35] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:08:36] Speaker A: But as you described. Right. And I know this is very central to your teaching style. We'll talk through this as your own understanding of what your role is there. Like, you're not an imposter even from day one. Right. Because what you're doing there, as you say, is you're learning, too. You're having that conversation along with the students. And it can be really hard to. To take. Take on that understanding of what you're doing, I think, in your first gig. You know, I like to think that's a transition that all faculty kind of go through. I don't know that that actually happens, [00:09:08] Speaker D: but I think it. I mean, I think you have to have the conditions to allow it to happen. Yeah. Because if you. You can exist in a really rigid administrative or departmental context where kind of failing or experimentation or trying, you know, trying out interesting, weird things in the. Is just not encouraged. [00:09:29] Speaker A: Right. [00:09:29] Speaker D: And so you might. I mean, there are. There are professors, right? To, like, sure, I know everything. Take my test, write down what I say. That's how you pass my class. And so if what you see as examples, like if you're a young professor and what you see as examples is that sort of, you know, pedagogy, then you're going to emulate it because you might not know that there's something else out there, so. [00:09:53] Speaker A: That's right. [00:09:53] Speaker D: I mean, I don't necessarily. I don't think it's like an inevitable arc, but there needs to be, like. I think you have to see other examples. I mean, I definitely, like, I had professors in when I was an undergraduate that exhibited that kind of like, openness and wonder and explored things creatively in the classroom. But then I also had colleagues that I. That I saw that were doing stuff like that too, in a different way perhaps, than like, what I ended up doing. Like, I didn't have, like, a lot of people that were just like, radical discussion based pedagogy. Yeah. And not that. And it's just so weird that saying that. That's radical because it's like, I remember when we first started to do like, great question stuff. It was people like, whoa, this is really innovative, groundbreaking. Like, dude, this is just reading books with students and caring about it. This is a pretty old human thing. Yes. [00:10:47] Speaker A: Yeah. But like, in this building, in this space, maybe women unassociated. Yeah. So maybe getting to that, I gathered that a lot of your approach to developing the Great Questions seminar, which we'll talk about in a second, is probably grounded in your own undergraduate experience in a great books program. So that's maybe not something that everybody is familiar with. Maybe you might talk about what that is and what your experience was there. [00:11:15] Speaker D: Sure. Yeah. So I went to St. John's College. There's two campuses. One in Santa Fe, New Mexico. One in Annapolis, Maryland. I went to the Annapolis one. And it's a very unique curriculum in that. Well, one, there are. Everyone has the same major and you get the same degree. And it's a bachelor's. It's a double major in the history of math and science and philosophy. And everything is based on, you know, great books. But this means, like, a lot of different things at St. John's year. So it's sort of like what you would. If you say great books, be like, you know, Delia, you know. Yeah, we read that. But we also read like, ancient mathematical texts and biological texts and we study, like, the origins of calculus and we do experiments. I mean, like, a large chunk of this is really, you know, studying the history of math and science, which is really exciting. Okay. And all the classes are in a discussion, in a seminar format. So people are sitting around a table and our professors, we call tutors rather than professors. Kind of like this Oxford model. And they go pretty hard in the Oxford model. Like, there are Don Rags. Okay. So, you know, instead of. We get grades, but you're encouraged to never look at your Grades. I think that this has changed from what I've. From what I've heard that because. But you have to go to graduate school, right? So there's always like this kind of awkward moment where you're a senior and you're like, what graduate school can I get into? And you go to the registrar's office and you open it like, here, here are your grades for the last four years. You had no clue, you know, if you did it in like the right way. [00:12:54] Speaker A: Yeah, actually, turns out my undergrad school had a similar program. We did narrative evaluations. [00:12:58] Speaker D: Okay, cool. [00:12:58] Speaker A: Grades were an option, but like. Yeah, I remember this. This whole thing. Yeah. [00:13:03] Speaker D: It's kind of stressful though, you know, to see like, oh, geez. Okay. [00:13:07] Speaker A: Yeah. But I remember my narrative evaluations way more than I remember any of my letter quotes. Grades. Oh, me too. Me too. [00:13:13] Speaker D: Yeah, me too. Well, the way that they did the evaluations is you sit in a room and all of your faculty members are sitting in the room too, and then they have a conversation about you as if you weren't in the room. [00:13:27] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Okay. [00:13:28] Speaker D: And so. And everyone's first name, so It'd be like Mr. Hajantage, Mr. Mares, you know, so there'd be all. All surnames would be like, well, Mr. Hajantich, he doing well in this area. But gosh, his Greek is terrible. And it was. I was very. We had to study ancient Greek. Was a terrible Ancient Greek student. [00:13:45] Speaker A: Okay, but you got to sit in the room while an expert says your Greek is terrible. [00:13:49] Speaker D: Yes. Okay. And then. And then it's like all of a sudden you magically appear and you're like, do you have anything to say? Yeah. So that was pretty nerve wracking. But. But great. Like you really. You got feedback and this usually, usually things that you could. That you could. Usually helpful feedback that you could take to improve your understanding and understand that so much. Understand just like a lot of it's about creating a good classroom environment for discussion. And some students contribute to that more than others. And sometimes that contribution is in not talking so much. So I think that just developing that seminar space of deciding, like, when it's important for you to contribute and when it's not. Like being able to have this back and forth in a conversation about Kant or Lavoisier or whomever, you know, that's definitely something that I really valued about St. John's about really thinking about conversation as instruction and as investigation. And it wasn't about trying to make your point. It was about trying to discover something together and to see like what, like what, what you came to as a result of the conversation. And you might have different opinions about like what those things were at the end of the conversation, but you sort of built something together. And you know, I think that like, you know, just kind of connecting this to acc. I mean in a really great discussion based classroom, it feels like you're playing music. I know you're a musician. You know, I am too. And like there's that unspoken back and forth of like, you know, when you. When should I not play? Is just as important as when should I play? You know, and realizing like what are the other sort of instruments in the room which are like the personalities and the, you know, the just the kind [00:15:49] Speaker A: of characters of the tension we create and the alignment that we come to. Like, yeah, all that stuff is part of what we're creating. [00:15:56] Speaker D: And you got to get to know the other people in the room before you can sort of make that expression happen. And I think that, you know, it's, it. The conversation is not, I mean the conversation is kind of different than. Okay, so you know, I was, I was talking to. We're involved in. I promise this is connected. [00:16:16] Speaker A: That's all right. [00:16:17] Speaker D: No, that's good. So at acc, we have this Education for Character initiative and we're sort of in the ground, groundwork of trying to figure out what character education at a community college should look like. And one exciting thing about that is that there's actually no research about that. So it turns out that we're the first people really thinking about this in a, in a sort of. We're the first people kind of conducting this research as far as we know. And maybe I'm wrong. If I am, let me know. But so one person, we did these guided conversations with faculty. We're talking this one faculty from the art, who's in the arts. In the arts here. At Accident I said we were Chatham House rules. So I don't want to identify this person. And this person said the artistic process is very similar to the scientific process. You begin in not knowing and then you move closer to knowing. And I thought that that was just so beautifully said and so accurate. And I think that that describes what happens in a good conversation classroom too. It's kind of this blend of art and science where you start out and people have their own perspectives on what it is you've prepared for the reading for that day, but everybody really doesn't know. And so long as you kind of come into that space being like we all don't know. And then from these different contributions, things become a little less hazy in some respects, hazier in areas where you thought they were more perhaps clearly defined. And it turns out that now they weren't. Right. And you're sort of building something together. And what that thing is, is not really something you can put your hands around, but it's something that you're kind of. That your mind can enter into. [00:18:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:18:01] Speaker D: You know, and that's really. That's really beautiful and exciting. I mean, and to like, just to have to. You know, you got students around the table that, like the first time they're sort of experiencing that. And it is an experience. I mean, it's something that I think is just so uniquely human. You know, this. What other creatures can do that? You know, that's, it's, it's, it's really wonderful. And it's, it's just, it's just a shame that that is not. We have to fight so much to kind of convince people that that's real education. [00:18:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:18:42] Speaker D: You know, that it's not that the end of it is not passing a multiple choice examination. That the end of it is that experience. Yeah, that's the point of it doing that. That's what we're trying to do. [00:18:54] Speaker A: Good. So this is gonna be a good segue into thinking about. About how you came to participate in creating the Great Question Seminar. So you may disagree with me about this, but the broad approach to teaching and learning that you're describing here, which is one that I'm very much on board with, it wouldn't surprise me to discover that if you went to more or less any institution of higher learning anywhere, you're going to find one or two people who kind of are naturally inclined to approach it in that way. If you're a student who happens to be lucky enough to wander into that particular instructor's particular section, that's the experience that you're going to have. Those sorts of things can happen. But when you're talking about convincing people that this is a viable model, we're talking about institutionally embedding this into a way where students can expect and faculty participants can expect that this is the way that it is going to be done here. And yeah, that is a tougher sell. And so maybe we could, maybe we could just talk a little bit about what the Great Questions seminar is. [00:19:59] Speaker D: Sure. [00:20:00] Speaker A: And then maybe that'll allow us to maybe dig into a little bit about what some of the reservations about it might be for people who are unfamiliar and how the program actually addresses some of those apparent challenges. [00:20:12] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. So great questions. Started as a response to a administrative requirement at ACC that everyone take a student success class. [00:20:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:20:25] Speaker D: And we kind of came up with an alternative curriculum. You know, we being like me and kind of a small group of people in the humanities. Right. You know, and we came up with an alternative curriculum to what was on offer that, you know, focused on transformative texts, discussion based pedagogy and I'm sorry, [00:20:46] Speaker A: maybe not to, not to interrupt, but maybe even just to clarify what a student's success class is and what the prior options were because I think, I think it's really interesting to see how, how different this alternative is, at least at first glance. [00:21:01] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:21:01] Speaker A: So a student success class. Success class, yes, broadly would be what here? [00:21:07] Speaker D: Well, it's a, it's a course that is the way that it's. I don't currently teach the prevailing student. It's called Educ 1300. I'm just going to give my perspective on it. [00:21:20] Speaker A: Yeah, that's fine. [00:21:22] Speaker D: It's a class that's grounded in educational psychology and learning theory where students kind of learn about the psychology of how they think, how does their mind work? This is interesting, important stuff to know. And they get skill. There's a skills based component to it too where, you know, how do you navigate a syllabus? What, what's the value of going to office hours? I believe there's personal reflection components to the classes. To the class as well. But it's a class that every first year student who's got fewer than 18 successful college credits needs to take. [00:21:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:59] Speaker D: And the goal is to set you up for success in college. And currently our student success course is called Effective Learning. [00:22:05] Speaker A: Yes. So you can see like on the outset, like if I, if I'm new to the idea of thinking about structuring a college, you know, curriculum or something. And it seems to me that like, yeah, it would be a good idea for people who are new to college, especially maybe people who don't have personal support systems, maybe the first person in their family or what have you to attend college. It seems like a great idea to have a course that teaches them how to do college. Right. How to, how to think about their courses, their syllabi and things like this. And I imagine that naturally, if I recognize that as a good thing to do, then what I'm probably going to, at least at first glance think is that the right way to do this is to have a class where we very explicitly talk about syllabi and the psychology of learning and things like this. You can see how this might emerge as a way of doing this. That is an option that students have at acc. But now comes the Great Questions seminar, which is attempting to achieve those same outcomes in terms of helping students to be successful at college achieves the same outcomes. [00:23:12] Speaker D: We've demonstrated that over the last seven years. [00:23:14] Speaker A: Yeah. So I don't mean to imply at all that this is merely achieving. But in terms of pitching the thing first, we're going to achieve those same outcomes, but in a rather different way. I'm talking about through transformative texts and discussion. Sorry. Just to give that back. [00:23:29] Speaker D: Yeah. Well, it kind of goes back to, like, well, what's the point of completing your general education? What's the point of coming to college, period? And if the point is you need to check this box called college so that you can then start to live your life. [00:23:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:23:53] Speaker D: In a way which is financially secure, where you have a career that you can be proud of and live the kind of life you want to live in. This college box is a thing you have to check. Just like you got to go to the DMV to get your driver's license before you can get in the car and drive. It's like one of these administrative functions that you got to do. That's not what college is supposed to be. That's not what I think college is supposed to be. [00:24:21] Speaker A: Yeah. Nor I. [00:24:22] Speaker D: Right. So if your vision of what college is, is like, we got to get people ready to check these. To check the little boxes so that after all the little boxes have been checked, college. You got it. Get in the car. [00:24:35] Speaker A: Agree. Yeah. [00:24:36] Speaker D: There you go. Okay. So I think higher education is about transformation. It's about discovering who you are. It's about realizing that the way that you think about the world, it's kind of been formed by all these different ideas and thinkers and thoughts and history that, like, you might not even be aware of. I mean, it's like. It's almost troubling the extent to which, you know, our kind of, like, what we think of our, like, personal inner lives are just so defined by the personal inner lives of all these people that have come before us that, you know, we're so much the children of philosophers and thinkers and, you know, and just, like, realizing that and that enables you to actually have some agency over your own life. [00:25:17] Speaker A: Precisely. [00:25:18] Speaker D: But before you know that, then you're sort of. No, it's the whole allegory of the cave from Plato. You know, the allegory of the cave is explicitly meant to be an image of our education. Education is about freedom. That's what I think education should be about. So if you've got a student success class that's preparing you for what I think is real education, that success class should be preparing you for freedom. And how do you do that? Well, one by valuing the students agency and treating them as free people from day one, which is this is a class where it's not going to be a download of content. We're not going to throw a whole bunch of information at you that you need to remember. We're not going to present the professor as the expert in the room and that you are the passive recipients of their great wisdom. We're going to sit in a circle and we're going to read texts throughout our history from many different cultures and times and places and from different disciplines too. We study mathematics in this as well. Right. That get us to think about what it means to be a human being. The tagline on our website is that we help students. We help inspire a respect for truth that like hey, there's something out there that's worth. There might be something out there to know and we might have the capacity to know. It's. And you're a part of this conversation the beginning of the syllabus and we say like there's this, we're laying out this banquet for you and you have a seat at the table and you're welcome to this discussion. You belong here. And not in like a hokey, like you belong here, you know, but like, like you really, you belong not just here, but you belong as a part of this conversation through the ages that your voice really matters and what you have to contribute to it not doesn't just affect your life, but it affects people's lives, perhaps who you'll never meet. And we kind of present the class with that kind of gravity and importance because it is. And what we do along the way is what students get from this along the way is this kind of acculturation to higher education which as a part of it's like welcome to the, to the life of the mind. You know, let's. Let's think about. This is a place where you can think about not just what kind of career you want, but what kind of life you want. And we're going to center what, what the, what your vision of the good life is before we start thinking about what kind of career fits into that vision. [00:27:50] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:50] Speaker D: Because it's almost like we kind of do things Backwards people. Like, what do you want to be when you grow up? Meaning, like, what career do you want to have when you grow up? Yes, but we don't really ask who do you want to be when you grow up? Who do you want to be? I think the great questions is centering that question too. What are the different competing perspectives on what the good life is? And which of those seems the most attractive to me. And maybe even this vision of the good life is really attractive to me, but I don't like that. I'm attracted to that too. We're just sort of open to these sorts of things. But then because the class is really centering student agency, students are learning how to keep up with their assignments. They're learning the kind of practical how to college skills. We have one on one meetings with the professor twice over the course of a semester. So the professor ends up developing relationships with each of their students in a kind of mentoring capacity that's super helpful to achieving kind of these broader student success. Success goals. [00:28:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:28:58] Speaker D: But that grows out of the conversation. [00:29:00] Speaker A: Yeah. So maybe, maybe to offer just kind of like, maybe some kind of silly examples to illustrate some really important themes you've raised here. So first off, this idea of agency and cultivating a certain kind of freedom. I won't belabor the allegory of the cave here, but maybe a more contemporary experience that I had. I went into a Whole Foods, the one downtown one time because I was thirsty, and I asked where I could find some, like, iced tea. And an employee very helpfully referred me to this wall. And I went, and there were hundreds of iced tea choices. And I started to wither inside and I realized, like, I cannot choose. And it occurred to me in that moment, like, there's a sense in which I'm given many options and quite a bit of freedom, but it is not the kind that I want right now. Right. And I think that it. Sometimes being confronted with a big course catalog with hundreds of courses, it can feel daunting in that way. Because, yes, I have options, but they're not couched in terms of the kind of agency and freedom that I think you're talking about, which is being able to, for example, recognize that, let's say I have a requirement for a program that I'm invested in to take an elective, and I have several, dozens, maybe 100 options to fulfill that elective. That if I find myself making that selection simply based on the convenience of time or proximity, that I might not be aware that that's what I'm doing that I'm making this decision on the basis of convenience and time and proximity. And that's a thing I can do. But I also have a freedom to think about this in terms of what interests me or why or how it might change me to take a culinary arts course rather than, let's say a class that happens to be conveniently located at 5:00pm that, that step of like recognizing, as you've said, that the way I'm approaching this interaction, this college experience is going to be shaped by pressures and institutional expectations and marketing that's been sold to me perhaps for a long time that as you break out of that it is transformative, you become a participant in a way that you might not have done otherwise. I wonder, is there a sense in which do you think initial response to the idea you're pitching of a discussion based, source text based, seminar style conversational course as a way of being an initial starting point to college success that whether that seems like a good idea or not is kind of a litmus test for what people think college is supposed to be. [00:31:51] Speaker D: Yeah. And I also think it's a litmus test for who they think college is supposed to be for. [00:31:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:57] Speaker D: Because so often at community colleges, you know, there's this, we got to get our students career ready and I think this is coming from a well meaning place of, you know, many of our students are, I mean we're open access, we've got very affordable tuition. We have free tuition right now, which is wonderful. Right. And so you know, we're not trying to enroll the elite that have, you know, money to go to large universities, expensive ones, although they're very welcome here. [00:32:31] Speaker A: And it's odd means worth noting surprisingly. Sometimes we do though. [00:32:34] Speaker D: Right. [00:32:34] Speaker A: And sometimes you encounter those students in our class. [00:32:36] Speaker D: But I think that there's, because of who we serve, there's this 10 tendency to be like, we got to focus on the practical career stuff. [00:32:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:43] Speaker D: This person, they, they're, they're coming here and they're expecting us to deliver on a, on a, on a return on investment for their time and for, for, for, for, for, for their money. [00:32:54] Speaker A: Right. [00:32:54] Speaker D: In taking, taking our classes, we got to give them a credential that turns into a job. [00:32:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:59] Speaker D: Right. I think that's coming from a really well meaning place. But I don't think that it's valuing the full humanity of that student that comes to us because that student wants to live a good life. [00:33:12] Speaker A: Right. [00:33:13] Speaker D: That student, that student doesn't just, doesn't just want a career Nobody just wants a career. Yeah. I mean, that's sort of a categorical statement, but I think it's true. Right. I mean, we don't simply want a career. We want a life that. That means something to. To us. And that can look like a lot of different things for a lot of different people. [00:33:31] Speaker A: And even if somebody did just want a career, surely there is a reason in virtue of which they want that career. It's not just some, like, fetishized object. You want the career because of something that you value. [00:33:41] Speaker D: Yes. [00:33:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:33:42] Speaker D: Yeah. I think that we need to be educating the entire person and not just the part of them that works because you don't separate those things. We're a whole. We also have a mission as a public institution that takes taxpayer money to not just be training for local workforce. [00:34:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:34:07] Speaker D: So much emphasis on what is the. What are the market needs in our community? And let's line up our programs to the market needs in the community. I don't think this is a bad thing, but I don't think that this should be the focus of a public educational institution that relies on taxpayer dollars, that contributes to the community, but it contributes to. It contributes to the community as understood through the lens of the private. Of private equity industry. What are we doing to educate ours, to educate students as citizens, as individuals, as people who will be members of families, as all these different ways of being a part of our community, not just as members of the workforce. I think that there's this kind of. There's a way which people conceive of community colleges speaking primarily this workforce development. And one, I think that we owe it to the community that supports us to be more than that. And two, it's also not primarily what students are actually doing at community college. I was curious about just kind of the numbers on this, and I was wondering. We have these gen ed classes that meet core curriculum requirements that if you're going to get an associate's degree, you need to complete the general education core curriculum requirements. [00:35:38] Speaker A: You find this everywhere. Yeah. [00:35:40] Speaker D: What percentage of our unduplicated enrollments are in those classes like English, government, philosophy, humanities? And it's over 80%. Over 80% of the students that are coming here are in each semester on duplicated enrollments. Right. Taking these gen Ed classes. Now in those gen ed classes, they're not learning how to weld. Okay. What are they learning? Right. I mean, what's the meaning of, like. So this is where they're spending the bulk of their time here in our general education classes, but there's so little attention to what's actually happening in those general education classes. There's all this attention on the. The specific career classes. I would like to see more of that attention. Put it there. I'm not saying take it away from the career classes, but like the focus on the career classes, I think that we could be a little bit more equitable with the focus on the content of the gen ed classes. And there's so much interesting and exciting pedagogy happening in general education classes at community colleges, in part because community college professors are solely focused on teaching. [00:36:50] Speaker A: You know, that's right. That's something that I think a lot of people don't understand, that the actual work obligations of community college faculty differs from, let's say, other higher ed faculty in precisely that way that we teach. That is what we do. Yeah. I hear, as you're describing here, I hear some of your own disciplinary background coming into the conversation here. Because as a matter of fact, your disciplinary background is not like in Ovid. Right. [00:37:20] Speaker D: You. [00:37:21] Speaker A: You teach government primarily. Right. So you might think, like, well, it's surprising that this guy who teaches government is the one who's starting the Great Questions seminar. But it's not hard to start to see the connections between the two as you begin talking about the community college as an important vehicle for civic engagement and for community development beyond just local workforce. Yeah. So how do you find or do you find your background in government informing the ways that you approach developing a program like this? [00:37:56] Speaker D: Well, we live in a representative democracy, and people need to be able to talk to each other and they need to be able to hear opinions that they don't share. And to be. To able to learn from them either. To learn that they are just as important as they thought they were, and here's why. Or that. Or to integrate these new ideas. Our system of government is designed to be collaboratory. It's designed. There's sort of a prerequisite, is that people can talk across differences, that people can read things carefully and critically, that we can. We have some kind of, like, ability to sniff out bullshit and that, you know, these are important skills for members of our community. And so you learn these things in liberal arts seminars. [00:38:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:38:53] Speaker D: And you don't learn. But, you know, going back to your point about like the here are the objectives of the student success class. Right. You don't learn them in that way. Okay. There's not this, like, I forget, there's like, here's how to build. We're talking about fixing cars before we we got on. Right. [00:39:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:39:12] Speaker D: And you go through a checklist of how to like do car repair. Right. And it's really kind of important that things be done in that order. In order to maintain the system. Oil pan, you got to take it off and the screws need to be put in this pattern. If you don't do it in that pattern, the oil pan is going to fall off. But education is not like that. You know, it's organic, it's personal, and the things don't fit together in this nice sequence. And sometimes it's rather mysterious about how they all got together. The sort of sequential order is not the thing that we should prioritize. It's not like you need to. In order to read the Odyssey. You don't approach that by, first I got to do A, then I got to do B, and then I got to do C, and then I will have understood the Aussie. That's not how the Odyssey works. It's. You got to open the book and you got to start reading and you got to talk to people about it. [00:40:08] Speaker A: Yeah. In more than one sense, that's not how the Odyssey works. [00:40:11] Speaker D: Yeah, well, because the Odyssey itself is this very non. Linear. Yeah, exactly. That's good. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. So I guess it's a bit of a tangent, but you were asking about civic education and. Yeah, civic education doesn't work that way either. It's not like we don't just learn our rights and responsibilities of citizens and then now we have that knowledge and we go forth and execute it. We have to practice that. And you practice that in a seminar discussion at a community college. You can practice that very, very well. Because our institution reflects diversity just in race and ethnicity and in gender. In any other way that we typically measure diversity. It's in age. Right. You don't. We get a kind of diversity of community colleges that you just simply don't see at other higher. Higher education institutions. The political perspective. [00:41:08] Speaker A: Absolutely, yes. [00:41:09] Speaker D: My goodness. I mean, I. Every semester I have students from all different parts of the political spectrum. You're not gonna. Tony, I. I don't want to say, but like, you know, I got some students. Occasionally there's political paraphernalia that are worn in classrooms that I would say there would be no way that you would see such a thing at some elite [00:41:32] Speaker A: institutions, which are the institutions that you tend to. When people think about higher ed as presented, let's say, in major media, that's what they have in mind. They're thinking of elite institutions where you might have kind of stereotypes that would be exemplified there. That is not this place. [00:41:48] Speaker D: It's not this place. And, and because it's not this place, that really means that it's not most of higher ed. Yeah, there's a, there's a really low opinion that a lot of folks have about higher ed because it focuses on, I think, certain, like small examples from really elite institutions. And there's this kind of assumption that like, that's what higher ed looks like. [00:42:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:42:11] Speaker D: One that's not most of higher ed. That's probably not most of what's happening at elite institutions too. But at community colleges. We're over 40% of undergraduates at community colleges. So this is like a large chunk of higher ed. What you are usually seeing in the classroom is a great deal of political diversity, a great deal of diversity of opinion about politics, about religion. I mean, we've got so many different religious perspectives that are offered in the classroom. And then also just kind of wildness of thought too. Like students, like, especially like students that kind of can get the filter off and just tell you what they think. You'll hear things you've just never heard before. Just absolutely never heard before. Like never even considered that. I've told this story before, but there was this one guy who's really making a pitch for like, the earth does not go around the sun. I mean, he's like really going for it. And he was making this argument that was based on evidence. Like, he was like, my eyes are telling me this. I look up at the sky and the students in the class were really having to like wrestle with this kind of earnest conviction. And he was like thinking scientifically. Right? Because he was like, well, my evidence is. And the other people were like NASA geniuses said, yeah, no, but you're being [00:43:41] Speaker A: confronted with having to take seriously something that you might disagree with, but not actually understand why you disagree with it beyond the testimony of some person who told you so. [00:43:52] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, but I mean all of this back to kind of like the non linear nature of education for citizenship, for, you know, community membership and a representative democracy that's more or less democratic. [00:44:07] Speaker A: All of which are public goods, by the way, in addition to, you know, workforce public goods. [00:44:13] Speaker D: And also, Tanya, I mean like a part of the mission of the institution and a part of like why the government of Texas gives us money. Everyone has to take a US Government and Texas politics class. That's not because the legislature wants us to memorize facts about like what year the revolution happened. All time. The they do, but that's not the primary reason. Right. We need to. I wonder though, I mean, I wonder if you polled them today, what do you think they should learn in a, in an American government class in Texas? Let's not. [00:44:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I try not to speculate. [00:44:49] Speaker D: Let's not. But at least, you know, like, like the learning objectives for American government class, they're very broad and they're things that I think that everybody, regardless of your political perspective, we should know about the history of the U.S. constitution. What's a political thought that kind of inspired that? What does that kind of government look like? What's its place in the sort of history of political thought? We need to know about the different functions of the branches of government. We need to know about how voting works and why that's important and what are the other ways that we can participate than just through the electoral process and understand about the media and about the interest groups and all the different players in politics. I mean, these are things that. How you approach that is another question. But these are kind of like general good things. But those classes, the government classes that I teach, they're all discussion based. They're all in a circle talking about texts. And I'll include projects in those classes. Like Texas government class. My students are during a legislative session. Well, I'm not teaching text politics this semester. It is a legislative session. But when I do, they become amateur lobbyists. They have to find a bill that was filed that they either like or they don't like. And they have to learn everything about it. And they actually have to meet with a member of the office of the legislation. And that meeting could be a phone call or it could be an email exchange or I encourage them to walk over there. All my Texas government students have to get to the Capitol at some point. I mean, if they're out of town, we make exceptions for exceptional circumstances. But yeah, the discussion based learning doesn't necessarily need to look like. I hope I have Plato open and around a table. It can also look like working on a project in a group on a piece of legislation and reading that carefully and thinking about how, like how that might engage their life. To be able to see something kind of in complex legalese and to be able to decipher the impact of that on you and people in your community. Like, that's a really important skill. Sure. And I also think that skill is not something that's best taught in this, like A, then B, then C. Breaking it down that way is not a way. I find this to be very effective to be like, here's a bill. Let's read it together and try to figure it out. You know, what does that mean? Well, I don't know. Let's figure it out. [00:47:31] Speaker A: Well, let me ask this. [00:47:32] Speaker D: So [00:47:34] Speaker A: in terms of thinking about resistance, that something like the. The pedagogical model you're describing is based, you know, to give a fair shake to that kind of resistance, I don't imagine all of it's going to be, you know, disingenuous, you know, thinking that it's, you know, it's not the real point of getting degrees in people's hands. I can imagine folks having, you know, reservations about whether that approach is effective across all disciplinary endeavors. Sure. And so I can imagine somebody saying, well, it doesn't seem so outlandish that you would engage in a government class in that way, because, after all, you're working with words. I can see why you would do that in a philosophy class or across the liberal arts because, again, you're working with literature and words, and that's not too far removed from how I think you would do that. But the Great Questions program has expanded beyond just liberal arts applications. You have endorsed looking at, maybe even invoking or importing this kind of pedagogy into teaching natural sciences, for example, how does that work? [00:48:41] Speaker D: Work? Well, it works differently. Right. So it's not typically sitting around in a circle with books. [00:48:48] Speaker A: Right. [00:48:49] Speaker D: It's more about connecting the work of the natural, connecting what you're learning in the natural sciences to larger human questions. I was talking with a group of biologists at acc. Excuse me. Before the semester began, and we're thinking about, like, well, you're teaching your students about biology, how the example of CRISPR came up. CRISPR is this. I don't know a whole lot about this, but it's a way of editing genes that can be inherited down. And this is kind of a. The biologists were kind of debating in this meeting, like, is this a qualitatively new advancement that's like a whole different ball game, or is this just a better skill of doing what we've always been doing with breeding plants and animals to get outcomes that we hope to have? Taking a step back, so that kind of conversation in a biology classroom, allowing space for that to happen. So not just learning about the Punnett Square. Am I gonna. You got me there. About. About the heritable traits and the mechanisms of that. But why are human beings doing these things? Should we be doing these things? If we should, are there cases where it's a little Questionable are there advancements in types. So there's the ethics of biology to engage in this way, but then also just the classroom environment itself, where you have students who are working in labs, they're working together in groups. Look, I think with Great questions biology, putting a lot of thought into what that group dynamic looks like. How do you get each member of that group to participate equally to make sure that each of their voices is valued in whatever that experiment looks like? That sort of practice of engagement across difference that I was talking about in a government class, you can get that thing. You can get a very similar practice, too, in a biology experiment, having the instructor be able to point that out to students in the context of the class. Not just, hey, you did this experiment well, but in this experiment, you've grown in these other ways and to see the skills that are being learned from working collaboratively on an experiment as applicable to areas outside of experimental biology. So, I mean, think that the great. These kind of two things. One, just thinking about what's the meaning of what I'm learning other than achieving competencies in the learning objectives. Right. And then what are the pedagogical practices, like, what am I getting from the pedagogical practices themselves that are applicable in areas outside of this classroom? I mean, one thing that we do in Great Questions Humanities Student Success Seminar is this writing assignment that happens three times called the Study Question Essay, where a student has to take a discussion question. They have to find a quotation from the text that helps answer it, paraphrase it, and then explain how the quoted material helps answer the question. Argument based on evidence. Emphasize this is valuable to you. In every single class that you take, all of your professors are going to ask you make arguments based on evidence. Does not matter the discipline, even in the creative arts. Right. I mean, I think that we should stage this production in this way. Why? Because argument based on evidence. [00:52:38] Speaker A: Yeah. And distinguishing arguments based on legitimate evidence versus mere rhetoric and things like this. [00:52:44] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:52:44] Speaker A: It serves you well. So the program, the Great Questions program, has expanded quite a bit beyond the initial idea of this humanity class. And it's achieved some recognition that you might not have expected it to have when you first started it. Maybe you might just say a little bit about that. So what. Where. Where is that work right now? [00:53:05] Speaker D: So, you know, Tonio, it's, in a way, it's in, like, a really amazing place, but it's also just. Just, like, surprisingly precarious, you know? So currently at Austin Community College, we've had over 4000 students that have completed humanities, 1301 great questions. And we've had over 4000 students that have completed some version of a Great Questions Journey class, which are classes in government, big philosophy too, but also in communication. There were drama classes, sociology classes, composition, literature. I mean lots of disciplines. There's even a math class. We're upwards of 8,000 students that have completed some version of these Great Questions classes. We have been inspiring other community colleges to do this as well. Houston Community College is working on a Tiegel funded initiative to do this work. The work that we've done with discussion based pedagogy in the Great Question has received a great deal of national attention. I've published articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education in the Point. There have been people have written about our program in the New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal. We were on PBS NewsHour in the fall. So there's been a lot of national attention on the discussion based work that's happening. As a matter of fact, the that the Teagle foundation brought the cornerstone convening of grantees to Austin Community College this past October, which were all of the project directors in their Cornerstone Grant initiative. And this is spanning institutions from coast to coast. There were heavy hitters. 150 faculty members flew here, most of them from big four year institutions. This convening, the, the first convening they did was on the campus of Purdue. The second was at Stanford, the third was here at Austin Community College. Next year it's going to be at Vanderbilt. So in terms of liberal education, the Great Questions at ACC has definitely put ACC on the map as a center for really serious liberal learning. And we've, we mean faculty members at ACC as well as faculty members at other institutions put together a non profit called the Great Questions Foundation. And we're working to promote liberal education, discussion based study, a variety of it at other community colleges across the nation. And we work with online workshops with faculty fellowships with an American political and social thought initiative that is in person on different campuses. One of these institutes is going to be at Hostos Community College in the Bronx this spring. We've worked with faculty members at, I think at this point almost 70 different institutions impacting thousands of students across the country on classes that we helped redesign to focus discussion based education. Our faculty fellowship program received a grant from the Mellon foundation to get our faculty fellowship program off the ground. It was an extremely generous, I mean we're doing amazing work. Our fellows, we have 21 faculty fellows all the way from Los Angeles Community College, West Los Angeles Community College to Miami Dade Community College up into Queens. I mean everywhere in between there's just like all of this really exciting energy amongst faculty at community colleges for discussion based learning, while at the same time fighting in our own institution to preserve funding for a basic component of the great questions, which is the training model. So it's disorienting in a way because there's. [00:57:12] Speaker A: Well, so maybe there's a couple things that come to mind here. One is, is that it's really important to emphasize that the idea behind this program, the labor behind the program, the development behind it, the efforts to secure funding behind it, these have been faculty driven entirely. Right. So you have the people who are doing the instruction, the people who are developing the pedagogy. It's your expertise, I our expertise that is kind of driving the development of this program. So it's very much, you might say, like a bottom up way of developing an initiative and a way of doing something on a large scale. ACC is a big institution and yeah, it does seem like there's, there's always this kind of funky effort that has to happen to get that in alignment with the other components of an institution, you know, like, you know, as big as ours. And yeah, I think that as the value of what is happening through a program like this becomes increasingly obvious and as the community begins to learn a little bit more about what a program like this is doing and the value of it becomes obvious, it becomes hopefully easier from a broader institutional perspective to see this not as a boutique program, but as a fundamental part of what we do. And I'm very excited about that prospect moving forward and happen to think that [00:58:49] Speaker D: as [00:58:51] Speaker A: administration, at the level of something like a dean like myself, where inhabiting both spaces of instruction and administration is able to participate in advocating for that and participating in it at the same time, I think it bodes well for what the future looks like. [00:59:09] Speaker D: I hope so. [00:59:10] Speaker A: Fingers crossed. [00:59:11] Speaker D: I hope so. You know, there's always been an almost irresponsible optimism about great questions. Right. I mean, just like throwing. Just going for it, you know, And I think all of us great questions, people are going to continue to do that. But the sort of. It's an uphill battle. It still is. [00:59:36] Speaker A: Yeah, but I imagine that, I mean, I imagine that innovation by its very nature often works that way. Right. Transformation in the sense of personal transformation that you describe in something like the courses that happen themselves, that can often feel like an uphill battle within us. [00:59:57] Speaker D: Right. [00:59:58] Speaker A: It's coming up against what prior versions of yourself expected. Things to be like. Right. [01:00:04] Speaker D: That's a good point. [01:00:05] Speaker A: And maybe in some ways there's something like that that gets modeled at the institutional level, but it's possible when it happens, and it's beautiful when it does. [01:00:14] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:00:14] Speaker A: So I very much value the the time and explanation you're giving here about the program and hope that the conversation you leaves folks who've heard it with a better sense of what it is you all are doing. [01:00:26] Speaker D: Thanks. [01:00:26] Speaker A: Thanks.