Season 2 Episode 2 - Dr. David Asai | A look back
Welcome to knowledge unbound, everybody. My name is Brian Duesbury, associate professor of biology at Florida International University. All I do is just make space for stories. That's that's my job. I have one job.
Speaker 1:You know, I'm not you know, this is not about me. It's about the guests, including the guests who reappear in my studio, damn it, after the interview is over. Okay. I I know. I I invited you.
Speaker 1:I invited you. So, technically, that's on me. Today, we're talking to an old friend, David Asai. Yeah. I I think David's complicated.
Speaker 1:I don't mean that in a bad way, he knows what I mean when I say that. But and I I think I could say that because when you listen to this episode, you'll see why I said that. Right? And, you know, when you do these conversations, Alice, you you talk to people, as I know you will do in your podcast coming up, you talk to people and you you're trying to draw things out, maybe draw things out that they hadn't realized needed to be drawn out. And this was one episode where we kinda went there.
Speaker 1:Right? I don't wanna give it away to you, but we talk a lot about his journey as an as an individual living the American experience of of Japanese descent during a time when that was problematic for some. I want to introduce my studio guests who are gracious enough to join us again. Alice, Alice is going to be a podcast hero in about one month. Tell them who you are.
Speaker 2:Sure. So hi, everyone. My name is Alice Postalakos. I'm a computer science student here at FIU. As Brian said, I'm currently in the phase of creating my own podcast.
Speaker 2:Me and my partner here, we record here. It's called STEM Files, it will be releasing very, very soon. So yeah I'm just here to learn more about like podcasting and also just to hear Brian's like amazing way with words you know.
Speaker 1:I don't know about that. First of all when she said partner it's not the person next to her.
Speaker 2:No no no. My partner's not in
Speaker 3:the room.
Speaker 1:Your partner's
Speaker 2:not in the She's on vacation.
Speaker 1:Not to be confused with Yes. I'm hard at work. Magdalawit Derive. Yes.
Speaker 4:Hi, Brian. Thanks again for having me. I know.
Speaker 1:If you wanna and I had a awesome conversation last season. I believe it was episode three. It it actually is I don't know if you noticed. That was actually the most downloaded episode
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Of that season.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I know. Yeah. Yeah. Still Thanks
Speaker 2:a lot.
Speaker 1:Just she's graced us with her presence now that she's world famous. I think you will have a good time listening to David and I. I I hope you well, okay. You know, do what you want. Right?
Speaker 1:A lot of people wanna do podcasting on a treadmill. They go for a run. This is one where I almost kinda hope at some point you're seated. Right? Because there's there's things I want in this conversation to sit with you.
Speaker 1:So I hope you enjoy it. David's a wonderful human to talk to. There's a lot to talk about. I'll see you at the end. Enjoy the show.
Speaker 1:You you have a long story. And in fact, let me I don't wanna tell this story for you, but I remember when I met you. I was still a grad student. And you had given a lunchtime seminar. I think it was a diversity luncheon at the Ecology Ecological Society of America.
Speaker 1:I think Teresa Morata invited you. And at that point, I was just sort of starting my own journey in education. I hadn't even really quite frankly thought about education research as a thing yet. I was just interested in classrooms that were transformative. And maybe to put it in a different way, was still finding words to describe what I really wanted.
Speaker 1:Right. And I remember the speech you gave on you talking about your journey, not just your professional journey, but your personal journey and how it came to influence the ideas that you ended up having. I want to use that as a way of introduction. Could you tell us a little bit about without perhaps retelling the whole speech, but tell us a little bit about your life's path and how it took you to different spaces where you try to do things to help transform science education.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, the goal of transforming science education is, of course, what we care about. But I wouldn't at all claim that I know how it connects with my past. So I'll just tell you a little bit about where I'm from. And this, of course, informs me as to what I think is important.
Speaker 3:Well, so let me just start with saying that my grandparents immigrated from Japan. And they were not able to become naturalized citizens in The United States. They were not able to own land. They were not able to marry outside of their race because of the laws at the time. And by the time they could become naturalized, 1952, 'fifty three, they were all gone.
Speaker 3:My grandparents were all gone. So they never had that opportunity. My parents, and I'll talk especially about my father, they were born in The United States so they were US citizens. My father was what we would call today sort of a non traditional student because he finally finished his degree at UC Berkeley but he was older, he was a transfer student, he started in a JC, a junior college, Compton JC, and he was a first generation, first in his family to go to college. So he graduates in 1939.
Speaker 3:He has a bachelor's degree in business, and there's no work for him at all. There's no work not only because of the economy at the time, but because of his race. And so he couldn't use his degree, so he he worked as a gardener for a while. World War two happened, and all of the Japanese Americans on the West Coast were evacuated. And that included my father and his mother and his sister, as well as the person who would become my mother.
Speaker 3:But, of course, they didn't know each other then, but they met in the internment camp. Mhmm. So he's in the internment camp in Poston, Arizona. And at some point he decides, you know, this business thing isn't working. Right?
Speaker 3:So I've gotta think about something else. He's 30 years old by then. And so he decides, because he was influenced by some of the Christian missionaries that were in the camps with them, he decided to try to become a Christian minister. Now he had been raised as a Buddhist, so this was like, okay. So he eventually, long story, he eventually gets to seminary
Speaker 1:and Real quick before you continue, what was he hoping to do with the business degree?
Speaker 3:I'm not sure.
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 3:you know, his family was in the they ran a dry goods store, you know, very, very not terribly well off folks at all. Maybe that's what you do if you don't quite know what you're gonna do. Yeah, so finally he had a purpose. And in fact, I was just reading his little memoir last night and he says, you know, for the first time I realized this is what I wanna do, so that's a great question. I wanna do something.
Speaker 3:And he sort of had this vague idea about being a Christian minister. Now becoming a Christian minister, at least in those days, you had to go to seminary, you had to go to school to get a degree in divinity, and a lot of places wouldn't take him because of his race. So
Speaker 1:ended The Christians wouldn't take him.
Speaker 3:So he ended up at a place called Andover Newton Seminary, which was outside of Boston, and he eventually graduated. And therefore he joined essentially because of his schooling, he became a congregational minister. So the congregational denomination,
Speaker 1:which is
Speaker 3:a New England kind of phenomenon. And he was first ordained in 'forty eight, so he was 34 years old. And he served in really small churches in New England. Often he was serving two or three churches at the same time. So in fact he writes about having to if he had back to back services, he'd have to cut the first one short, give a short sermon because then he has to drive three miles to the next church and give another, right, and so he
Speaker 1:couldn't know that my dad, he passed away now, but he was a minister and he was in a Methodist church, right, so similar kind of Protestant.
Speaker 3:But Methodists are much more organized.
Speaker 1:He also did three he also did three in a Sunday. Right? He didn't have to cut anything short. So to be fair, they they got they got the planning better. Right?
Speaker 1:But it was a similar thing. Let me ask you a question, though, about the Christian missionaries in the camp because and I'm asking because I'm assuming maybe he discussed it in the memoir you just mentioned. You know, when you have missionaries in that situation, I assume the missionaries' goal, plural, is to convert people to Christianity. But he sort of he seemed to have seen that and said, oh, I want to that, the thing you're doing. I want to do that.
Speaker 1:Which seems like a step. Right? So it wasn't just about he changed his beliefs, but he also wanted to do the thing that they were doing. Did he talk about why doing that matter?
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's a great question. So he was influenced by the Baptist denomination even before the war. And so he started sort of hanging out with some of these Baptists. And then when he went into the camp, think it wasn't so much that he wanted to be converted or anything.
Speaker 3:In fact, in his whole career he was never really about saving people. He was all about serving people. Big difference, right? You've got to do this because you're going to go to heaven. That's saving people.
Speaker 3:Right. You've got to do this because you've got to help other people. To me, that's serving people. And that was his whole thing. And for as long as I knew him in his profession, that's what he stood for.
Speaker 3:And I suspect some of that had to do with it. So he became a congregational minister, which as we just discussed is less organized than a Methodist. And so congregational just means that the congregation gets to decide, Right? They they get to hire. Right?
Speaker 3:There's no hierarchy here. Mhmm. And so he ended up in really small churches because he was all they could afford. Mhmm. If if they had more money, they would not have gotten him.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:Clearly. I mean, the very first church, I have the notes from the search committee and they say, We went out, we wanted to find a minister, and all the good ones, they cost too much. But we found this one guy. He just came out of seminary, just graduated. But I gotta tell you, he's Japanese American and his wife is Japanese American.
Speaker 3:And they sort of thought about it and they said, okay. Well, we're supposed to be inclusive. We're supposed to be right? We're we're supposed to help people. So let's give them a shot.
Speaker 3:And so that's how he got started. So I joined the family in Vermont. We were the only non whites in the town. Then we moved to Kansas, a little town in Kansas. That's where I started school.
Speaker 3:And there were like nine to 13 kids in my class, pretty small.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 3:I remember some of the older kids now this is a really small place. There was 200 people in this town. But some of the older kids in the school would would sort of pick on me and bully me. And I remember my mother telling me that
Speaker 1:What what year is this?
Speaker 3:So I started school so 'fifty nine was first grade maybe. Yeah, 1959. And we were there until my sixth grade. So we moved in 'sixty four. So somewhere in there.
Speaker 3:World War II hadn't been that long ago. Was twenty years ago. So there were a lot of kids whose parents and fathers fought in the war, all this kind of stuff. So my mother sat me down one day and she said, You cannot fight back. Because if you do that, you will dishonor your family and you will dishonor your race.
Speaker 3:And further, your father is the only minister and the only church in this little town and he might lose his job. So in the sixth grade we moved to Maui, which was huge compared to right, Little Partridge, Kansas. Right. So Partridge was 200 people. At the time, there were nine nine kids in my class, two boys, me and Jim and then whatever, seven girls.
Speaker 3:And I moved we moved to Maui and Kahului, the town where we lived, had like 4,500 or so. So it was a huge population, right? Small, but huge for me. And my class now had maybe 30 kids and all but one looked like me. And I don't think I really realized it at the time, but I certainly do now.
Speaker 3:That was my first experience of racial privilege. Privilege is not something that's added extra you get. It's something that you don't have. So it was really for the first time in my life, I didn't have to worry about what I looked like and who my family was. I didn't have to worry about all that stuff.
Speaker 3:I think that was very profound for me.
Speaker 1:Was the move to Maui intentional?
Speaker 3:Yeah, my father wanted to I have a younger brother, we were both adopted. And so my brother Paul and I, I was in the sixth grade, he was in the fourth grade. And I think my father, at least part of his reason, was that he wanted to raise his kids in a place where there were more than just us who Asian American. We didn't use that term then, but Asian American. And so that was a huge experience.
Speaker 3:I mean, we're talking about transforming education well. That was my lens on the world that began to get better. And that was really important. And ever since then, I think I've it's always good for me to I'm I'm glad you asked me about my my family because it's good for me to remember where I came from, where I come from, and and and where my my father came from, and whatever got him to wherever he was. The last thing I'll say about that, and then I'll stop, is I mentioned this earlier that for my father, it was all about social action.
Speaker 3:At the time, they called it social action. We call it social justice now, but about social action. And so he would spend, like he he would during during the summertime, he would get, like, a month vacation from the for having not to preach. And so he would go to the Mainland by himself, get one of those Greyhound bus tickets. You go anywhere you want in the country, and he would just travel.
Speaker 3:And he would go see family, but he would also go and see places in the country that were struggling more overtly with some of the racism in this country. So he he was very interested in the American Indian movement And he in in in Lone Pine. And I have that wrong. Anyway, the American Indian movement. He was very interested in in understanding more about the the migrant workers in this in the Southwest.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. He was interested in the Deep South. He was very influenced by
Speaker 1:Did he go?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. He would he would go, and he would just hang out.
Speaker 1:Did did he share any of his experiences with you in the memoir about what he saw and experienced when he went?
Speaker 3:That's why I was reading that memoir last night because I wanted to know did he really go to these places because I remember him telling us that. But he didn't write it down. His memoir, which is certainly just a personal essay, he's very transactional in his remembering. He doesn't talk a lot about what he learned or about how he felt about things. So it sort of comes through in the things he did as opposed to what he experienced.
Speaker 3:Why he did it, doesn't really tell us. But he was very moved by Martin Luther King. He was very interested in a woman he grew up with in LA, Yuri Kochiyama, was in Harlem and she a confidant of Malcolm X. And so he knew this. So he sort of thought about these things and he would preach about it.
Speaker 3:He tell people about it in Kansas and then in Hawaii. People probably didn't really want to hear all that stuff. Why would they care about these things?
Speaker 1:That's actually the question that has bubbled up in my head, right? Because you know, I'm thinking about this setting being a church. Right. And thinking about the book upon which this institution is based and what you what's technically expected of the people there. You know, if anybody is to show empathy towards the disenfranchised, right, it would be this group.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious as he brings these things up, particularly in, you know, wherever, right, whether it's Connecticut or Vermont or Kansas, how are people internalizing this? And I'll add one piece to this question. My recollection of and I think this came out in the book, These Truths.
Speaker 3:Joel Lapourre.
Speaker 1:Joel Lapourre. Yes. And just talking about the role that the the the televising of the Pedagos Bridge beating
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, did to the American conscience because now people are, like, physically seeing it as opposed to like, you know, you might hear it from somebody. There's some ways in which the way you're telling this that your dad could have acted played the role of, hey, I've gone and seen these things. This is not an abstract thing. These are real people. So I'm just curious, and you may not know the answer, right?
Speaker 1:But I'm curious as to how that landed in his congregations.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I know he was very popular with his congregation because I think they appreciated his he was very humble. He was he was a very he wasn't he wasn't the best of anything.
Speaker 3:He just wanted to do do what he could for people. So I think he was he was loved by his folks. Tended in his sermons, he tended to be very academic. When Martin Luther King was in the Birmingham Jail, he wrote a letter to preachers, right? Letters from the Birmingham Jail.
Speaker 3:And my father used that in one of his sermons, or maybe several of his sermons, parts of it and then relating it to the book that you're talking about and what it means to be a Christian and everything. I think people appreciated that. I think they sort of maybe got it. Much of this was happening on Maui because that was the era when we were there. And in those days, folks who were on Maui, there were very few folks who had actually traveled, had actually been to the Mainland.
Speaker 3:A lot of times they hadn't even been off island. They hadn't even been to Honolulu. And so this was like a different world. And you think about being an American, and you understand that these are Americans as well. But I think that I'm not quite sure how well it penetrated.
Speaker 3:Because race in Hawaii, we're very conscious of race and ethnicity. We have a lot of stereotypes about different persons from different ethnic groups. So it's very racially mindful culture. I don't know how empathetic were as folks in Hawaii. That is, I don't know how much we were able to transfer our understanding of race to what was going on, say, in Selma, as you were talking about.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know. And of course, can't ask.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. But it's useful to speculate. Another thing you you said that I wanna maybe kinda spend some time on and and that will be a little bit of the bridge to talking about your higher ed days. You said when you you moved to Maui, there was essentially a flip. Right?
Speaker 1:That was the first time you sort of felt like you belonged. There was mostly looked like you. But at the age that you moved, you may not have been able to identify or articulated that at that particular time, you realize that later on in life. Right? And that for me, you know, encapsulates one of the beautiful things, the potentially beautiful things about education and that, you know, as you evolve, as you get kind of technically more proficient, as you're willing to reflect and explore, you'll find language for past experiences or you get better understandings of things, you know, and I certainly went through that process throughout, even up until grad school.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious as to when you found language for it. Like when did that sort of hit you in its real authentic self? And then how it impacted your approach to academia? And and when did that, you know, when did that approach change or shift?
Speaker 3:I mean, I'm still I I don't think I've I've reached enlightenment yet. Well, we're still looking at it. No. I'll tell you. You're absolutely correct.
Speaker 3:When when when I walked into the sixth grade class, it was sort of early in the quarter or semester, whatever it was, but it was not the first day of school. So these kids all knew each other. And so I was different. And even though I looked like them, I didn't feel like them. You know what I mean?
Speaker 3:I spoke differently. Didn't use the same
Speaker 1:That's like me going to Morehouse, by the way. Exactly. We all look the same, but Right.
Speaker 3:And so I think that took time. I think when I began to understand what it meant was after I went to college. So in I went I went to the main. I went to Stanford for my undergraduate. And there, again, you know, we we talked about so called minorities.
Speaker 3:Right? We start with right? I mean, the whole racial differences were made much more clear. And I was in a theme house in a dorm my freshman year, an Asian American theme house, where there were courses. We brought in speakers and stuff to talk about the culture of Asian Americans.
Speaker 3:Folks from San Francisco State, especially people like Edison Uno. And that was profoundly important for me because this is very complicated. We don't have enough time. But I told you that on Maui, we didn't think of ourselves as Asian American. I thought of people as, well, that's a Chinese person, that's a Filipino,
Speaker 1:that's a Japanese,
Speaker 3:that's a Haole, that's a Hawaiian, Polynesian Hawaiian. And those are very distinct and we had stereotypes and everything. You get to the Mainland, people don't give a shit.
Speaker 1:Right. Right. Right. Yes.
Speaker 3:You're all Asian Americans. And your history is rich because, yes, the Filipino experience was different than the Chinese. But people don't care. So you all better figure out how this relates and how people are viewing you and how you can survive in this world. That was really important.
Speaker 3:So you learn the history, learn some of the history, learn all these kinds of things. You hear speakers, you listen to music, you see art. And and that was I think that was profound. The thing that happened at Stanford in my senior year was, something called Students for Equity. So Charles Ogletree was my classmate there.
Speaker 3:Ogletree went on to a distinguished career at you know, he's he's a civil rights lawyer at Harvard and, recently passed away. And so in the senior year, Stanford had decided that they were gonna change the formula for financial aid and that it was they they had given enough extra financial aid, gift aid, to the black students. And they figured we don't need to do this anymore. We have enough or we we've we've whatever. So we're gonna just treat them the same as everybody else.
Speaker 3:And what was really just I think probably probably the best thing that happened to me at Stanford was in that spring of my senior year we came together and we being what we called ourselves the students for equity. And it was the black students and the Latino students and the Asian American students and the white students and it was some of the faculty. It didn't matter because we all had to stand together and protest and object to this. And this was the year that Stanford brought Daniel Patrick Moynihan as our commencement speaker, who was famous for talking about benign neglect for black Americans. And so Charles Ogletree organized a walkout during the speech.
Speaker 3:So before Moynihan gets up there to speak, a bunch of us stood up and we silently walked out. It was folks from all backgrounds. Right? Charles used to talk about the big, Rich Kelly, who was a basketball player. He was like seven foot two or something.
Speaker 3:So when he stood up, you knew he stood up, right? But we just went out and we just protested in that way. And the reason that that was so important to me, I don't think this was new to me, but I think it sort of helped cement the idea that when we talk about, inclusion and we talk about equity, it's not for special people. It's everybody has to care about this stuff. It's not that everybody should be treated the same, but everybody should care about what's going on.
Speaker 3:And we wanna sure everybody is treated fairly. And of course that becomes a very personal thing because when the students for fair admissions bring suit against Harvard and Carolina, which resulted in the Supreme Court decision last year, those were some Asian Americans who were the plaintiffs in that case. I would argue they were misguided and misinformed, but nevertheless, those were Asian Americans who bringing that. And I just find that so cynical. It's so sad that we were being used as a wedge to sort of divide.
Speaker 3:Right? Because it was all about the Asian Americans getting they wanted more admission. They wanted and they shouldn't the Harvard shouldn't be bringing in too many black and brown students, for example. It it was it was just this awful just this awful feeling. And scholars who have thought about this much better than I, you know, they point out that that's a cynical move on the part of Edward Blum to use the stereotypes that folks have about Asian Americans as about being the model minority, the folks who are always at the top of the class, who are always be you know?
Speaker 3:And to make them victims of those evil dark skinned persons who were being taken away their seats at Harvard or North Carolina. I take that personally. I take that personally because I feel that folks with whom I try to identify in terms of my ethnicity, I feel that they are being used, as I said, to divide us. And that's just Yeah. That's just so bad.
Speaker 1:Let let me go back to something you said just a few minutes ago about the thing about inclusion and equity is that we should all care.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's an argument I agree with, but also an argument that I realize it's actually more challenging to articulate than it might seem because I think for some people when they hear that, especially people who also do equity and social justice work, it gets into our all lives matter space and all lives do matter. Like, know, as a kind of the literal meaning of that phrase. Yes, they do. But of course, the phrase itself lacks nuance. Right?
Speaker 1:And so the key then is how do you have that conversation where you can lay out the evidence about the history of the country, the history of the city you're in, history of the social experience and see how mistakes were made such that certain groups were impacted in a much more negative way than others. Yes. And that to right those wrongs or to to to have correctives, right? No corrective is gonna be perfect. But the corrective is not just to sort of reverse the war.
Speaker 1:Right? But it's actually in fact to make the collective of the country a better space for people to thrive. That those last two sentences has been a challenge because I think there are some people who sort of get stuck in the we just need to help the marginalize space. And I see why, but I also see the problem getting stuck in that. And then there are some people who get stuck in the ALM space, right?
Speaker 1:Where, know, then any sort of argument about the corrective sounds like revenge. So I'm just wondering in your experience, and I know you've had this conversation in several different ways, right? As a program officer, as a faculty member, as a chair. How has it been to navigate that?
Speaker 3:Well, don't have any real wisdom there. I would say that you and I are having a conversation on November 7, which is two days after the election. And I'm reflecting back on what happened in 2016 and the same sort of thoughts that I've been having. When we talk about inclusion in the classroom, I really mean it because that is the best way to learn, to feel like you belong there. And I also fully agree with you it isn't that everybody has the same background or the same perspective, and that we have to be incredibly mindful of that.
Speaker 3:All of us need to be mindful of that so that if we really care about equity, that is equity. We're trying to work with folk from where they are and where they come from. And of course, yes, and as you say, there are groups that have historically been terribly excluded. And there are groups that have been privileged. And so you have to think about that.
Speaker 3:But I think at the same time and this is the difficulty and this is why I really can't answer your good question. This is something that I think we should all grapple with, anybody who's listening to this. We have to grapple with this because I believe that the outcome of both the twenty sixteen election and now the twenty twenty four election were largely being driven by folks who felt that they were being left out. And we're going have to blame somebody. And so let's blame the immigrants.
Speaker 3:Let's blame folks who identify as transgender. Let's blame somebody who's different
Speaker 1:than me. The elites.
Speaker 3:The elites. Let's go after the Ivy League. Let's accuse them of antisemitic behavior and let's get the presidents fired. That's a strategy that unfortunately works in this country where you find a problem, you get people angry about it, and then you tell them who's at fault. And I think happening that's in the country today.
Speaker 3:And I think we have to figure out how to do that. So when I would teach I taught at Purdue for a long time. I taught a large introductory course in biology at Purdue. There's about four fifty people in the room. And this is not about race.
Speaker 3:Now this is just because most of them are white. Why
Speaker 1:would we assume that?
Speaker 3:I'm sure for some of them, I was the first person who looks like me who could actually speak English that they could understand. I would teach to the 50 or so kids up in the front. And those are the ones that I encourage to come and work in my research lab. They're the ones that I really I wanted them to step up and really, really achieve. And the truth is that I should have been a lot more inclusive.
Speaker 3:Not that all those folks in the back of the room were necessarily going to be my friend. They didn't necessarily have to like me. But we shouldn't piss them off. And I think if I had the opportunity to do it again, would figure out how to really walk the talk of inclusion. It's not that all lives matter.
Speaker 3:I hope that's not what I'm saying. But I do think that it's something that we should be thinking about as this country continues to fracture. Yeah. And it's gonna it's gonna con I I'm worried that it's just gonna get worse and worse.
Speaker 1:You know, one of the you you know me well enough to know that I don't really like lists. Like, people sometimes when I give talks or workshops, people ask me, what's your favorite inclusive practice? Having said that, there is one thing I do that I really love and I've been doing it for the entire time I've been teaching, which is have the students write a reflection as essay as your first assignment of the course. And it's copy pasted from NPR this, I believe. Right?
Speaker 1:If you go to this, I believe that org forward slash guidelines, you'll see the prompt and it's a beautiful prompt and I use that exact prompt. And every year, I'm just blown away by the depth of the reflection. Think some people, some faculty always ask, well, do they just sort of mail it in or just write whatever just to get the credit half point? It's like, no, no, they reflect. And so I bring this up to say there was one year I wanna say was 2021.
Speaker 1:So it was like right after the Black Lives Matter movement formed. Had one student, and then just for those who don't know the prompt, it's in summary, it says, describe the values that shape your deepest passions. Right. And so it really kind of gets you into looking what and what is your sense of why. And so this student talks about the having sympathy for BLM.
Speaker 1:And it was a white student who identified as white. But her father was a policeman. And she talked to that SA about how she struggled. Because she was basically saying, well, I see the problem. It's hard to come home to somebody who you love more than anything else in the world and feel like the whole country or this whole part of this country views him as the enemy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Now obviously everything in there has nuance, has context and all of that stuff. Right? A, I guess I bring that up to make a few points. One is A, please believe in the power of our students to to engage in meaningful reflection if you give them a chance.
Speaker 1:Please, please, I encourage it. Number two, these issues aren't black and white. And then number three, you know, she's sort of part of the other 400. Right? Like, you know, in terms of her identity and and and, you know, other variables, she probably wouldn't land into a category called marginalized.
Speaker 1:But when I walk into that classroom, I want all of them on my side. Yes. Right? And that's and that's where the the the trickiness of the nuance comes in. You know?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, in in I think especially in STEM, in in the stuff that you and I I used to teach and that you teach, I think we very much too often ask our students to just tell us what they know as opposed to what they think. And the exercise that you just described for your opening day is similar to what you had me do today, right, which is to reflect on my history.
Speaker 1:How did
Speaker 3:I get here? Not because we're going to come up with the answer but because it really helps. As you know, there's many studies that have shown that a brief reflection like that where'd you come from, how'd you get here does wonders in terms of a student's persistence in class and all that sort of stuff. So I think that what you're saying better than I am is that it's really important for us if we really care about inclusion to ask every student questions like what you asked them to reflect on. Because they're going much deeper than just what do you know?
Speaker 3:Tell me whatever you memorized about whatever.
Speaker 1:Because the what do you know is almost like I mean, they do they do need to know things. I'm not absconding that. But if that's if that's just it, if that's the only sort of kind of engagement, then just a reinforcement of a part. Because I will just tell you what I think you think I should know. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then the tricky thing is when do you let that happen? And this woman is talking about the complexity of folks finding passionate people, right? People who believe that black lives truly matter. People that believe that generally the society has allowed for brutality against black and brown people.
Speaker 3:But then to personalize that and to say, but my father, he's not evil. And so that's really important for her to think about and to continue to reflect on. And I think our challenge as people who are supposed to be the instructors is to prompt that sort of thinking perhaps more than once. We're not there to tell her how to think. We're not there to I don't think.
Speaker 3:We're there to resolve the depth of this emotional thing that she's thinking about. Because the fact that she's having those thoughts, and it is deep, and she recognizes some of the complexity is huge. That's what should be in any science well, probably any course, but that should certainly be more in any science course because we don't do that
Speaker 1:So let's get into that because, and that's a perfect segue because one of the challenges, as you know, in science instruction is the traditional belief that we're here for coverage, right? We're here to, we have these things, especially at the intro level where it tends to be a bit of a fire hose of content. We're here to get through all of this, right? So I can see even the slight squirming of somebody listening to our conversation and say, where in my discussion of population genetics and impulse transmission is there a space to talk about black lives? You know, have them reflect on your values.
Speaker 1:And I get the struggle. I'm not even critical of people who might feel a little uncomfortable with this conversation. And so I take it almost as a responsibility for people like you and I who think we see the value, think we have evidence to this effect, to be very articulate about why it needs to happen, where it happens, and how does it sort of change the whole tenor of what science instruction should look like. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's very clear that many of us are guilty of trying to cover everything that we think is important. You look at our textbooks. If you're in biology, for example, the introductory textbook has, what, thirty, forty chapters, probably thousands of pages. It weighs 10 pounds.
Speaker 3:It's beautiful. It's a beautiful encyclopedia, but it's not a syllabus. I have this idea that I've been sort of kicking around and talking with people about. Believe we really that care about being inclusive and if we really care about persons who have been historically excluded because of their identity, if we care about people who are not quite sure if they belong here in the first place because they've been told that, I think we need to overhaul what we call the introductory experience in STEM, in science. I think we should do away with the disciplinary silos.
Speaker 3:I think it shouldn't be first you take biology and then you take a chemistry course and then you take a math course and whatever. That instructors have to come together, put in the time to figure out what do students really need to know to come away with from this course? What are the competencies that we want them to have? And how then do we teach it in a way that breaks down these silos so that the student doesn't think, well, that's chemistry. I don't have to care about that.
Speaker 3:I want to be a biologist. Or a student who gets her first C in a chemistry quiz and figures, well, now I can't be a doctor because if I don't get a great grade in chemistry, then how am I going to whatever? That's hard. But I think that we should be smart enough to be able to do that. So the real question is just what do you really want our students to be able to do at the end of that semester?
Speaker 3:And I think further I would extend it to students regardless of what they want to major in. I would do it for non majors as well as majors. What are the concepts that you want them to have sort of discovered? And I would argue that there aren't a lot and that the joy and also the challenge is to figure out how you build a semester around these different concepts in a way that crosses traditional disciplines and also is not about, well, today we're going to talk about evolution and tomorrow we're going to talk about genetics. But it's rather, this is life, right?
Speaker 3:If we're biologists, this is how living systems work. If we can't do I'm not saying we can't do that. We must consider trying to do that because the real value I think especially at the introductory level is not so much to prepare the student for the advanced courses in ecology or biology or chemistry. The real value is to help them figure out how they can make decisions and how they can think about the world. And making decisions from evidence.
Speaker 3:And that means knowing evidence that makes sense and evidence that doesn't make sense. That means being able to debate the evidence and question, how do you know that? Why do you say like you say, if you spend the time doing all that, then you're not going to be able to cover everything that's in some but that's okay because the data because the the reality is that the students won't remember it anyway.
Speaker 1:Right. And and plus, if they do get those skills you just described Yes. They can self navigate a lot of that minutiae.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You get on this device called your phone, and you can look up any of these facts and any of this stuff. It's easy for me to say that. I know it's hard. And I would argue that the best thing that a university or a department or whatever administrator can do is to give interested instructors the time to play around with these things
Speaker 1:and
Speaker 3:to come up with, well, what would this course really look like?
Speaker 1:But here's the thing, David. Like, you're saying these things and I agree with you and you know I agree with you. But even in that, what, four minutes or whatever, you just explained that you're touching on so many infrastructural things. Yeah. That would be, that would need to get overhauled.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because, okay, that last statement about giving instructors the time and space to tinker. All right. That means we need to think about salary structures. We need to think about just time, time as a resource, right?
Speaker 1:So if you're teaching three, four, four loads, right? Where is the time to actually sit on a reflect about course design? Many institutions, you know, hire instructors the weekend before class, you know, because the contract structure. So all these systemic challenges, even even your earlier point about the disciplinary silos. Right.
Speaker 1:You know, the model of the most, you know, 99% of the college curricula is that you register for three credits for this and register for three credits for that. Right? And so just that layout by itself without anybody actually even saying something to you, communicates to you as a student is that's over there. This is over there. Right?
Speaker 1:So there's all of these these, relatively high level things that would need to get maybe even kind of blown up a little bit and just completely reconfigure what are you communicating.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. And it's not the students that have to confront all of this as well. It is also the instructors, the faculty. Because I'm uncomfortable thinking about some other discipline. I don't really know the math.
Speaker 3:I don't really know the chemistry or whatever it is. If I'm not comfortable doing that, why the hell then am I asking my students to say as a prerequisite to come into my course you have to have taken this chemistry course or this math That's beside the point. So I think the way to approach this in terms of practical things is obviously you have to start small. You have to start with an experiment at a place or a few places that have the bandwidth to be able to put a half a dozen instructors into a group that would just work on these things, sort of brainstorm for a semester or for a year. I don't think you can roll it out for everybody all at once.
Speaker 3:I think you have to pilot it. I suspect that there are places that have that kind of bandwidth and then there are places that probably don't have that bandwidth. I think that's an opportunity for funders and philanthropies to be thinking about if they want to invest in inclusive education, science education, this is what they need to be able to do. They need to be able to provide resources so that that place, that school, can actually pull a half a dozen instructors, people who care about these things, to just give them the time to actually play around with this and to pilot it and to not worry so much about, a specific timeline or a specific this or that. As you know, biology has what's called vision and change.
Speaker 3:So the vision and change movements was about fifteen years ago now, where the community came up with five core concepts in biology. And every biology student should know these things. Well, is not rocket science, It was very obvious as to what they should be.
Speaker 1:Came Did a committee feel that way? Well, so we came
Speaker 3:up these things. And so a few years ago before COVID, six of us sat down and we worked together as a group for about almost a year asking ourselves what would an introductory course look like? Now this is not trying to bring in all these other disciplines. This is just biology. What would an introductory course look like for majors and for non majors with no prerequisites except algebra that would cover all five of these core concepts in one semester?
Speaker 3:Not four years, even two semesters. It's all five core concepts and how would we do that. And that was a really fun exercise because the first thing we had to do was to acknowledge that our favorite topics and all the things that we would you can't cover all that stuff. One
Speaker 1:of my former administrators at my previous institution used to call it TYD, teacher dissertation. So everybody had their you know, I remember I taught one of the four sections of intro bio and my buddy who's a developmental biologist spent like two weeks on blastocoel. So I'm like, you can't. Like, you can't do that. But you just thought everybody should love it.
Speaker 1:Right? So
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. And yes. Yes. And I think that if we are going to tackle this this issue that I'm that it isn't just about science.
Speaker 3:And so as we build this introductory course, these courses, whatever, this suite of things that a student would have in their first two, three semesters, It needs to include the humanities and the social sciences. It needs to include history. And it needs to be blended in in a way that really makes sense. And when you're talking about genetics in terms of biology, you should also be talking about the sociology of genetics and how genetics was used by scientists to declare genetic essentialism where different so called races are of different genetic, different species. And therefore, then you can make a hierarchy.
Speaker 3:And therefore, then you can begin to think about how we would keep certain races down or prevent them from reproducing or whatever. And so this is a fascinating sad story which continues today, right, because we have a lot of cultural indifference and racism that goes on in the way we think about the world and the way we treat persons. And so there's such an opportunity to really make this relevant, interesting, and also incredibly rigorous because
Speaker 1:you're getting the students to
Speaker 3:think as opposed to just memorize what's in chapter three.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah. I mean, sometimes that's kind of a battle. So much a battle, but it does come up from time to time where people kind of assume once they hear the e word equity, it means just making it easier for people who have a hard time to pass. I was like, this is a very difficult course.
Speaker 1:Right? But we make sure the supports are in place so that you can be your best self. Right? Put on your program officer hat for a second, and maybe I'll take a kind of a glass half full view of it. In your experience, can you give maybe a couple examples of places where you've been excited about what they've been trying and seen some sort of results from being very innovative and thinking outside the box?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's really cool to learn what grantees are doing. So there are some examples that maybe I can share. But I don't want to pretend that necessarily they were all that successful in the sense that everybody did it and it became an institutionalized thing. But I admire people who try these things.
Speaker 3:So some folks at
Speaker 1:Tufts
Speaker 3:I'm blanking. I'm not sure if I know the institution. But they began these are physicists they began a listening exercise. And so they would help the faculty learn how to listen to their students. And the students would then tell them stories.
Speaker 3:And the faculty's job and they have to learn how to be listeners they were able to begin to actually listen to understand and to listen to where the students were coming from as opposed to what they should know about whatever the topic was. I think that was it seems kind of obvious that that's not a bad thing to do. But the grant I'm assuming gave them a little bit of ability to actually encourage the faculty to engage in this kind of exercise.
Speaker 1:See, I don't know if I would agree with you that it seems obvious. I think that that's actually the challenge, right? That again, when we talk about this sort of paradigm of teaching, I dare call it humanism, Like kind of having that individual front and center. One of the things we have to recognize is not just the message teaching in a humanist way. They're all the skills that are involved in doing that.
Speaker 1:None of which we can assume that people have because I mean, maybe you tell me a little bit about your graduate training, but I could reflect on my experience, Masters and PhD where that stuff was almost beaten out of you. Right? You're you're a encouraged not to teach, first of all. And then b, you know, you you it may not have been said explicitly, but anytime you brought in any concept of like emotion and Yeah. You know, it it it just ran counter to what the culture of science was around.
Speaker 1:That made its way into science teaching. So there's like, listen, listen to you for what? Like, why? But I'm I'm the one with a PhD. Why would so I I understand why.
Speaker 1:I don't know if it was tough in fact, but I understand why they say like, no, no, no. We we need to actually sit and talk about what it is. There's a term in restorative justice called apophatic listening, active listening. Right? It's a thing.
Speaker 1:The thing. I have to practice it.
Speaker 3:Yes. Yeah. I'd like to remember the the very first time I I participated in one of these lengthy workshops on the topic of race. This was back twenty four years ago now when I was at Purdue. And it was a two and a half day forum that was facilitated by folks.
Speaker 3:It was really a transformative experience for me because of this listening that you're talking about. So we spent most of the time talking about race, which is something that most Americans don't really know how to do, but just practicing that. But also listening to people, just listening exercises. And at the end of the two and a half days, what the facilitators did was they brought in a half dozen or so of our alumni. Persons from marginalized, minoritized groups who sat in the middle with a facilitator and we did a fishbowl thing.
Speaker 3:And so in theory we had been practicing for two days as to how to listen.
Speaker 1:I'm afraid I know where this is going.
Speaker 3:No, was incredibly emotional and really, as I said, very transformative for me and I think for many of the people around that outside. Because we weren't there to tell these young people what the answer is. They were there to tell us how it felt. Not what they learned, not what their thesis was or whatever, but it was about how it felt to be in our classroom, how it felt to be in our labs. Because we had sort of been prepared to learn how to practice our listening skills, to me that was a really important moment.
Speaker 3:And it's something that I've worked with that group for many times since then. And every time I've learned more about myself. And it's also been interesting to see how it affects my colleagues who
Speaker 1:who have been
Speaker 3:in these kinds of of workshops.
Speaker 1:I I think, honestly, man, I I think it's even beyond that. You know, several years ago, I attended a workshop that did an active listening exercise. That's actually where I learned the tomb. And that I've since co opted and used in workshops that I run. And it essentially is just giving a light summary here is you have a person with a partner and you have some prompt questions like two or three.
Speaker 1:And one person is a speaker and the other is a listener. And the speaker answers the prompt questions. Is it your name where you're from? But then some other kind of provoking question describe a life changing experience you had or something like that. Right?
Speaker 1:And the job of the listener is to stay completely quiet for five minutes. And then they get two minutes to ask clarifying questions. You have to ask clarifying questions. You can't just then say, yeah, I remember when I went to the Grand Canyon too. Right.
Speaker 1:And I am amazed at how much faculty struggle with that exercise. Yes. Struggle. That's struggle. Right?
Speaker 1:And it becomes a Yeah. You know, we didn't finish the thing. I was like, part of it, and I'll finish the point here real quick is I think back to my own graduate training and essentially from day one, you're encouraged to be the brightest person in the room, you know, speak up, like have an opinion on that people in lab meeting, like ask a question at seminar, When you in class, you you need to be the expert. Like we're training in you to be the sort of the most important person in this ecosystem at all times. Right?
Speaker 1:And that doesn't lend itself to shutting your brain off and listening to what's coming at you. And to some extent, and maybe this is what the tough people realize is like, you can't just ask people to just have this skill. You almost have to kind of program. You have to reprogram what it means to be in in a true dialogue because all you've been used to to this point is like, it's my voice that matters.
Speaker 3:Yes. You know, the exercise that I was describing is very similar to what you said, except they called it passive listening. So it wasn't active listening. It was passive listening. Again, the speaker speaks, says whatever they're going to say.
Speaker 3:The listener's job is just to shut up and just listen, really listen, not to think about what am I going say next, to argue about it. And if the speaker's done, then you just sit there quietly. That's really hard. So I have also facilitated that with other groups. And I'm not terribly expert at this, but what I like to do at the end is to ask the folks, so how did it feel to be the speaker?
Speaker 3:Get some answers. How did it feel to be the listener in this kind of exercise? And often folks will talk about how difficult it is to not respond, not react at all and just to try to just really just listen. And that when the speaker is done, it's silence. You don't have to fill in the silence.
Speaker 3:And so this is not an exercise in how much did you retain, how much did you remember whatever the person said, but rather how did you feel. How did it feel to be actually listened to, not how did it feel to be heard so that you would tell me whatever you want to tell me about this and whatever I said is less important than whatever you want to say. It's a huge difference.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I mean, I don't want to get too fatalistic here, and this may sound like a digression, but it's not. One of the reasons why that exercise is important to me and not just with faculty, but even in, in class, the way I teach, the way we organize group work, we talk about one of our guideposts for the class. Read this list of guideposts at the beginning of class. One of them is respect silence.
Speaker 1:We actually talk about what that means. Everything you just said we do with intro bio students. And part of why that pedagogy is so important to me is I see the world they're in now that is populated by notifications, by TV programmes where complex issues are dissected in three minutes and profound opinions are given with no context. Right? Where just just a bandwidth to sit and just have a moment with stuff and be able to ask questions and sit with your thoughts and have opinions over a period of time is just less and less available.
Speaker 1:Right? You know, there's this comedian. I'm laughing because he's funny. But he he said, you know what word I never had when I was growing up? Mindfulness.
Speaker 1:Because you were mindful only to you didn't right? Like, you just you're on a bus. You're on a bus. Right? You went to a mall to meet a friend.
Speaker 1:You waited until they got there. There was nothing. No, like, whole computer in your hand. And I don't I don't wanna sound like an old Luddite or whatever. But I I do think I would like to preserve in this age of beautiful technical technological progress and all of that stuff.
Speaker 1:I think there's both critical thinking value. I think there's social value in developing this skill of being in social spaces where you have a real ability to listen. So that's not just even a faculty thing, but it's also a student thing as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I agree. And I don't know if it's been a Luddite or not.
Speaker 3:I'm not sure. Yeah, guess technology has a lot to do with it in terms of the speed with which you're being given information. But it's what we were talking about earlier in this conversation, this need to have the time to just think about something. You talked about a reflection that you do on the very first day of class. You ask the students to reflect on what's important to them, they care about, And in my view, in my experience, reflection is not something that we do a lot.
Speaker 3:Perhaps we do less of it now than we used to before. But also it takes time even when you are good at it. If you really want to reflect. So this conversation has helped me reflect on things. And, you know, it's you know, I don't get I don't get to do this every day.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 1:I I appreciate that. I mean, again, like, I just love telling stories with people. I wanna ask you one more question. I'll get you out of here on this one. I know we didn't get into too much in the specifics of each of these stage of your career.
Speaker 1:Right? But, you know, I'm remembering your story about belonging and, you know, the different places you've lived, the experience with your dad, but then eventually you enter academia, faculty member. I think you were chair at some point at Purdue, senior director of program officer at HHMI. So I think you've been in science ed in some form or fashion for a long time, seen a lot of things, some good, some not so good. And perhaps most importantly, where we need to go next.
Speaker 1:And I guess that's my question. Like when you when you kind of look at the landscape right now, I think we would both agree there's some good things being tried. A lot of good people with good ideas that are trying to keep this transformation going. What do you see as the next big step that needs to be taken?
Speaker 3:This may be obvious and maybe I'm out of tune with reality right now but I believe that many of us have not yet gone past the collector stage, what Martisela Martinez Cola talked about, collectors, night lights, and allies, that we're still just thinking about representation when we think about who's classroom. We just need more of those, more of them, and we've somehow achieved something. I think the hard thing is to take well meaning instructors, staff persons, persons who are in this business. And I think most of us are well meaning. And it comes back to this time thing.
Speaker 3:But to give us the time and the facilitation of the leadership to think about how we can change our structures and our behavior. So that's the culture. So it isn't only about just bringing more persons into a system which is terribly antagonistic towards them, But rather changing the system so that when anybody comes in, they feel a little bit more like, yeah, I can actually be successful here. So that's easy for me to say. There are obviously many, many different ways of doing that.
Speaker 3:I would argue that many ideas and this is what you just said Brian, that over the last three, four decades we've had lots of good ideas being tried. We know some of the things that work. We know that research experiences for undergraduates works. We know that good mentoring works. And we know that financial support for students works because it gives them time to do things.
Speaker 3:So these are things that we already know. So it's not like we have to go out and find the The fourth thing that question is how do we make sure that happens in my school, in my place? And if it's because we have too many other things they have to know, too many other prerequisites, too many other things on the syllabus, if the textbook doesn't, then maybe we are using the wrong textbook. Maybe we're using the wrong syllabus. Maybe we're thinking about this differently.
Speaker 3:As I said, faith I that most of us care about it and if given the opportunity, the time, It's okay to try things and it doesn't work. If we have that kind of an environment that we can begin to actually take that next step that you're talking about, of how we transform education. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I agree. I'm cautiously optimistic because I'm an optimist by nature. But we'll see. I just want people to know before we sign off, I did tell David, and it was my bad, that this was gonna be videotaped. So David came here dressed very nicely, and I feel like it's a shame we all do not have seen that.
Speaker 1:You need to know that he's wearing a nice shirt and a khakis. David, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3:I wore long pants. I wore a collared shirt. And today in DC, it's a warm day. So had I known differently, would have been in my shorts and a t shirt.
Speaker 1:Kind of guy that told you it video tape. But that's okay. That's okay. Thanks so much, man.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you. What And you're doing is really important because I think it'll I hope it helps people reflect. I hope so too.
Speaker 1:Knowledge Unbound is brought to you by the RIOS Institute for Racially Just Inclusive Open STEM Education. We are generously funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, our producer as always. Mister Segev Amazai, thanks for being here, brother. Thanks for all that you do. Today's episode was was interesting.
Speaker 1:You know, as I'm saying this, I'm realizing, not for the first time, I'm in a room full of immigrants. And so some of the things that David is talking about navigating the American experience is maybe not necessarily unique to us, right, but but is is something we could kind of connect to. And the one thing I wanna ask you both about is a lot of the conversation was him trying to recount what his father's experience was. Right? So it it it was less I mean, some of it was him, but a lot of it was his dad, and his dad was interned in internment camp and then converted to Christianity with a Christian minister for a while and navigated racism in the East Coast, West Coast, then Hawaii where he was a majority.
Speaker 1:And I guess I just wanna ask both of you, Magdi, know your parents are still in Ethiopia, but to the extent that there's something to learn about being an immigrant from the eyes of what your parents have seen of this country or of the immigration story in general, do you have any thoughts on any of that? I wanna leave it as broad as possible. Either of you could take.
Speaker 4:I can't necessarily talk about the topic in that sense but I I can definitely talk about how my parents experience shaped me. Yeah. Especially my mother.
Speaker 1:Well well just before we go to Alice just talk about her just two minutes. Most
Speaker 4:of who I am, how I am is mostly because of my mother. Yeah. Her life, her thinking.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And so, yeah, she's not an immigrant here. So it's not her life in that sense that shaped how I am and what I think but for sure I can see how a person's another person's experience can inform your life because my life is highly highly influenced by my mother's.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Alex?
Speaker 2:100%. I mean, the same thing. My I was raised with as, like, a my mom was a single mother for many years. And when we first came here Mhmm. Before she married my father, who's American, you know, I was with her and my brother, and it was the three of us.
Speaker 2:And, like, my mother, she's experienced a lot of, like, historical events in real life. Like, was there when the Berlin Wall fell.
Speaker 3:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:She Bulgaria was under the Soviet block. And then when it fell, she experienced a complete, like, economic complete 01/1980 of, like Yeah. You know? And I won't go into too many details about that.
Speaker 1:See that for the podcast. Yeah. I don't just say it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But all that to say that like yeah I think her tenacity and like her willingness to like you know go for opportunities when it's there. Like she really instilled that in me. And it's also just like it's given me an appreciation for like a history that I feel like is not super well known here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Owen, you know, my big takeaway, I guess, maybe, like, like the my parents still lived in Trinidad or at the one who's alive still lives there. And so I I I don't have that lens per se, but the lens that really kind of stuck with me is the broader lens of what we learn from having been raised by our parents. And I think there's a sense in which neither of you articulated and I think most of us won't until we are older.
Speaker 1:In that, that learning, we're only kind of able to give language to that learning much later in life. Right? In in in, you know, some silly podcast, somebody's interviewing you about it. Right? Then you can do it.
Speaker 1:And and so to hear him kinda talk through that, and maybe that's my last word for you from today's episode is to, you know, I I I'm not in a position to know what your relationship with your parents was like or how that impacted your worldview, good, bad, or in between. But I think the important takeaway is that there was an impact in one way or the other. And it's up to us to maybe give ourselves the space to reflect on that and to ask the right questions on how it might be impacting us to this day in ways that we haven't fully articulated yet. Remember that as you bring yourself to your classroom wherever that may be. I wish you the best week, and be excellent teachers.
Speaker 3:When we talk about inclusion and we talk about equity, it's not for special people. Everybody has to care about this stuff. It's not that everybody should be treated the same, but everybody should care about what's going on. We want to make sure everybody is treated fairly. I believe that if we really care about being inclusive, and if we really care about persons who are who have been historically excluded because of their identity, if we care about people who are not quite sure if they belong here in the first place because they've been told that, right, I think we need to overhaul what we call the introductory experience in STEP in science.