Whitney Clay: Welcome to the West Valley College TEACH Center podcast.
Michelle Francis: TEACH stands for training educators advocating change.
Whitney Clay: I'm Whitney Clay, Instructional designer.
Michelle Francis And I'm Michelle Francis, Professional Development Coordinator and Instructor in Child Studies.
Whitney Clay: At the TEACH Center, we support faculty as they cultivate excellence in teaching and learning and welcome their students with engaging pedagogies.
Michelle Francis: In this podcast, we discuss hot topics in teaching and learning. We interview educators about what they are doing in their fields, and we talk to learners about what inspires them.
Whitney Clay: Welcome to the second in our series of four episodes with our guest, motivation and performance researcher Dr. Omid Fotuhi. In this episode, as we continue our conversation about imagination in play. You may be surprised when you learn what you should and should not do in order to help your students feel they belong.
Whitney Clay: I can absolutely see how play in particular would help students to be able to access that ability to make connections. Because play at its heart, you don't know what you're going to find, and you kind of let go. At the same time, in a college classroom, perhaps some of that chatter is going to be telling students, well, this is not the place where you play and you're not behaving as you're supposed to be. So I'm wondering, how do we make students comfortable or feel like, yes, play is a valuable thing to be doing in this particular environment?
Omid Fotuhi: So here's where it gets really tricky. Being a parent, I don't know if you've ever tried to get your kids to eat something when they ought to.
Whitney Clay: Of course.
Omid Fotuhi: And having been a child myself, I remember the days where my mother was literally forcing food into my mouth. And even if I wanted to eat that thing, that she’s offering me, the fact that she was offering it to me made me not want to eat it, leaving me hungry and wondering, why did I not take this offering? But there's something about our fundamental need for feeling like we have a sense of autonomy and agency and adequacy that often can be in contention with well-intended systems and faculty and contexts. And what I mean by that is sort of a leaning on the work that we've been doing with some of my colleagues at Stanford and elsewhere on the concept of belonging. We all know, for instance, that our sense of belonging is a pretty adaptive thing, because if you think about the origins of that core need to belong, it stems from the era where we needed to band together within a clan to survive. And it was critically important to know who was friend and who was foe because there are competing clans trying to attack, trying to invade. And so it was critically important to know whether you were part of this group or not. Over millions of years, our brain has become incredibly attuned to even the subtle signals that conveys that our belonging is put into question. And so we're highly vigilant for these signs when it comes to how it is, fast forward to today, and how it is that we're trying to create contexts of belonging within the workforce, within higher ed. I think especially in this current era and age, we know again that belonging is something that also matters in the classroom, also matters in the workplace. And so well-intended practitioners are trying to create contexts where belonging happens. Now, the irony is that when you tell someone that you want them to belong, that has the same effect of trying to force someone to eat something because now it's putting the carrot at the forefront of what they ought to be feeling. And interestingly enough, here's a paradigm that I keep coming back to whenever I get engaged with an organization asking to see if there is a structural change or a programmatic change that they can employ that will ultimately benefit their students or their employees. And when they come to me and they have a number of projects that they'd like me to look at and review, at the top of my mind is always a question of, where is the onus of change? Which is to say, who is going to bear the responsibility for demonstrating the outcome that you hope to show? So for this notion of belonging, when you sort of create a context where you feel students ought to belong, it's convenient at times to then say, hey, listen, I've done my part. I've created this context. I put some Skittles out. There's a couch. Now it's on the student to demonstrate that they do belong and appreciate that I've done this. The onus comes upon them. You know, a couple of really vivid examples of really how things can go quite awry with these efforts, given, again, this recognition that belonging matters. I have seen billboards of schools where students, upon driving onto the campus, are seeing a massive sign saying belong, exclamation mark. It's as explicit and as clear as possible where the institution is saying you need to belong. We've done our part. Now it's on you to fit in to demonstrate that you're okay.
Whitney Clay: That is, that's so much.
Omid Fotuhi: Yeah.
Whitney Clay: I mean, wow, when you're driving up and you're already sort of scared and wondering if you…. Wow. I never thought of it that way before.
Omid Fotuhi: And to connect it to your question around play, I think there's a similar paradigm here that we might want to be mindful about when we create environments where we expect people to play. What are we also doing in that double entendre? Like what are we conveying to them by saying, hey, here's a place where we want you to play. But by saying that you're actually undermining the very outcome you're trying to nourish, which is to allow people to play. Some of the optimal psychological factor, states of really optimal engagement, is one in which the noise is quiet. And so if you want a place where people can play, it's sometimes harmful to say that that's what you expect them to do, or that's what you expect to observe as the outcome. Now I'm presenting these challenges, recognizing that that really does frustrate our ability as well intended context creators, administrators, teachers to do just what you're saying. How do you really nourish that intrinsic need to play? But there are strategies that are relevant to all of these topics, right? I think an awareness of the unintended effects that we have when we communicate these higher order goals of creating belonging, creating psychological safety, creating a place where imagination in play can roam freely. And so that's definitely one of the challenges. And just like anything else, I think parenting is a great example of, of the fact that the work is hard. And I don't know that there's any other way to do the work well, but that's exactly at the heart of how you do the work well, as if you are truly committed to a deep understanding of what is the individual on the other side going through and feeling and thinking, and then really investing and positioning yourself in a place of interested inquiry. So the best way that you can convey to someone that you belong, that you matter, that this is a safe place is not by telling them that, but by demonstrating through an authentic position of care and inquiry that you do care, that they are valued, they are seen, and that their creative freedoms are appreciated. And I think that's how we are able to encourage these outcomes, not by saying or explicitly portraying them as meaningful observations, but instead by positioning ourselves in that interested inquiry stance where people can come to do these things organically. Now all of these things I also mentioned are sort of the fundamental, almost natural dispositions that we all have. They're core needs that we have, a need to feel fulfilled, to feel like we belong, to feel like we're autonomous, to feel like we are cared for, and that we can be creative. And so being able to allow these needs to feel nourished again comes from that position of just creating a space where there is caring and the weight is reduced in terms of the expectations. The last thing I'll say, and this is one of the things I often get as a criticism is, you know, in hearing me talk. Sometimes there's sort of an understanding that what I'm suggesting is that the best thing to do is just to reduce expectations and lower standards. But that is not one of the interpretations. I think you can have high expectations in the standards for individuals with a recognition that they have truly the potential to reach those outcomes, but in a way that also is student centered and individually driven, which is to say that if you focus and invest in the time to make that connection with the individual, to demonstrate to them that you care unconditionally, then they're able to demonstrate these core natural needs automatically.
Whitney Clay: Next, join us for episode three is our conversation with Dr. Fotuhi turns to the relational aspect of learning and the role of faculty.