Gina Riley: Welcome to Faculty Innovations in Teaching, a podcast by ACERT, the Academic Center for Excellence in Research and Teaching at Hunter College. I’m Gina Riley, ACERT senior faculty fellow, and this season’s host of Faculty Innovations in Teaching!
During this first season, we’ll hear from full and part time Hunter College faculty who during the Spring 2023 semester participated in our ACERT podcast club. Members of the Transformative Listening Podcast Club, created thanks to the support of the CUNY Transformative Learning in the Humanities initiative and the Provost’s Office at Hunter, listened to podcast episodes spanning the areas of engagement, classroom culture, and assessment. Based on their listening, they created innovative teaching practices which were utilized in their actual classrooms. In this podcast, members of the Club will share their learnings and their insights on transformative teaching! We hope you enjoy!
[music]
Gina: Hi, welcome. So, tell us about yourself, tell me what you love to do when you’re not at Hunter.
Ingrid Lundeen: So, I just finished my first year of teaching in the Anthropology department here [at Hunter]. I do primate evolution, human evolution, human anatomy. I kind of toe the line between Anthropology and Paleontology. I love to talk about fossils and bones and all that, I love to collect fossils. And when I’m not at all engaged in any of that academic world, I do a lot of running and spending time out in the woods. I’m a very nature oriented person.
Gina: After this, I’m going to show you a picture of a skull that I found while hiking and I think I know what it is. But you’re going to confirm with me.
Ingrid: That’s my favorite genre of question.
Gina: Awesome! All right, I’ve got the picture for you. I love that. So we were so excited to have you on the Podcast Club. And so what we did at the end is we asked everyone to create a lightning talk on a teaching transformation that they created, inspired by their listening in the Club. So, can you tell us about your teaching innovation?
Ingrid: Absolutely, my teaching innovation this semester was implementing ungrading in my teaching. And so I have a human anatomy class that I teach and I was really struggling with the way that students were engaging with the material. It’s so frustrating when students ask you what’s going to be on the exam and especially something like anthropology broadly. But then human anatomy in particular, there’s so many ways that you engage with that on a day to day. And I wanted to figure out a way to kind of get students thinking more about how the course content was connecting to the world around them. And so I decided to change the grading scheme in the class so that students could do different types of assignments to earn points over the course of the semester. I basically did a gamified grading system where they could earn points in different ways, exams were optional, but you would earn a lot of points if you did them, or if you did them and did well on them, I should say, but [students] were never penalized for trying an assignment. Maybe you’d get partial credit on it. But it was really just trying to get students to engage with the material in different ways. I think it was pretty successful. There’s a lot of updates I want to make for next semester. But it was really good, it was awesome.
Gina: Yeah, that’s so fun. We talk a lot in education about choice boards and totally tens where you can get 10 points however you want. And that reminds me of that.
Ingrid: Yeah, exactly. I was especially excited about implementing that kind of grading system because I was a horrible student until I discovered how I like to learn. And I feel like a lot of students stress about learning and they stress about their grades, but a lot of times they haven’t been given the choice in how they want to earn that grade. And so I was hoping that was something that I could give these students this semester.
Gina: Yeah, I love that. Your students are so lucky.
Ingrid: They’re all awesome too, they’re amazing. And also just the feedback that I was getting from them. And I’m really big on assessments. And so at the end of each section of the course, I had them do self assessments where they could assess how they were learning and whether they like these assignments and give me feedback on stuff I could improve. It was a great kind of feedback system.
Gina: It’s so good, I love it. All right, so if there was an unlimited budget, which there is not, what would be on your teaching wish list in terms of innovative pedagogy or the tools and things that you’d love to have?
Ingrid: Oh my gosh. Well, I don’t know for this human anatomy class in particular, there’s so many kinds of different ways of engaging with anatomy. And if I could do this, if I had the time for this, it’s mostly budget that I’m thinking of, is taking students over to the Natural History museum and into the collections and [them] seeing, hands on, all of these different materials. But the problem with human anatomy is, there’s so much content. It’s a whole human body. People spend their entire lives studying it. And so even just going through the material that we have to go through over the course of the semester is just so much content. I’m trying to figure out a way for students to get everything they need out of the course, but then also having them engage with it in these more interesting ways. Right now we have 3D plastic models that we’ll use in the class and those are awesome. I would love it if every student could have their own. We definitely don’t have the budget for that. But there’s enough that it’s a few students per model.
Gina: Yeah, it’s like the kinesthetic part of it, right? To see and to touch and to be able to just explore on your own when you’re not in class.
Ingrid: Yeah, exactly and there’s all these amazing digital innovations for learning anatomy. There’s these digital dissection tables, these big very expensive tables, where you can do a digital dissection and pull back different fascia and look at the muscles, and that would be really cool to have too. I don’t engage with the digital side of it as much. But I know that especially coming out of the pandemic, I feel like students got really good at using those resources. And so it would be nice to figure out a way to kind of incorporate that a little bit more fully. But it felt like during the pandemic, it was mitigation teaching where you’re just doing what you need to do. And so now there’s a push back to the way that it was, but there are elements of that that I want to keep in my own teaching, I think.
Gina: Yeah, because the pandemic was like emergency COVID teaching and then real online education has so much depth and breadth to it, there are definitely things that we have learned and that we have all just integrated into our classes.
Ingrid: Yeah, it did kind of force you to make that leap for yourself and all these students were very good at it anyway.
Gina: So you are a new professor.
Ingrid: I am.
Gina: What’s one piece of advice you would give to a new professor at Hunter?
Ingrid: Oh, my goodness. I feel like I’m still learning myself. I want to say don’t overcommit yourself, but at the same time I’m so happy that I did this Podcast Club and engaging in all of the ACERT meetings. And I would say do that, that’s what I would encourage people to do, is to just get involved in the ACERT community in particular, because it just made me feel like this was such a supportive environment for faculty who wanted to innovate in their teaching and such a wonderful place for me to establish myself as an educator. I very much feel that.
Gina: Yeah, I love faculty development. I’ve loved meeting you, I’ve learned from you and the whole group learns from each other which is so great.
Ingrid: It’s been wonderful, truly.
Gina: Do you listen to podcasts?
Ingrid: I listen to some podcasts. I’m not very good at listening to every single word.
Gina: Neither am I [laughter].
Ingrid: I gravitate towards podcast where the hosts are so, so engaged in the material. And probably my favorite podcast is Ologies. It’s this podcast with this host who’s a comedian, writer, science communicator. And she just brings on these amazing guests who are experts in something and it’s all sciences. It’s all, you know, paleontology or volcanologies. She’ll often just make up words, but she’ll have them on and they’ll talk for an hour about something that they’re absolutely passionate about. There was one episode on how jumping spiders dance and it’s just these amazing little snippets of information and you walk away from it thinking, oh my god, jumping spiders are the coolest things in the world. Podcasts I love for the sake of just listening to somebody talk about something you can tell they’re so passionate about it, and I’m very susceptible to the enthusiasm of others. I get so excited about different topics that way. But it’s so fun to just learn about these random things. I don’t listen to a ton of podcasts, but the ones I do listen to I’m very devoted to.
Gina: I love listening to people do what they love and talk about what they love, right? And there was this mycology person, that’s the study of mushrooms, and now I’m obsessed. I love that stuff….thank you. You’ve been wonderful to talk to. It has been so fun.
Ingrid: Thank you so much for having me and thank you so much for supporting this whole process. This has been lovely, I didn’t realize we were going to do a podcast after this, so I’m very happy.
Gina: It is so fun and we’ll have different episodes and it’ll be super. Oh, well, thank you so much. You’re such a gem. We’re so lucky to have you. Thank you.
Ingrid: We’re very lucky to have you, too.
[music]
