Public Pedagogy

Dr. Diamond Morgan made her research process something other people could watch. Her dissertation brought Black and Brown creatives into recorded conversations about podcasting, creativity, and higher education.Diamond joins us to talk about making that project: recruiting through social media, working with participants on a public form of research, and building a committee that could support the work while asking difficult questions. She describes finding confidence through the people around her and sharing the process so someone else can see a way forward.In our closing conversation, we return to what becomes visible when research happens on camera. Matthew remembers asking Diamond to explain a methodological choice again for the people listening. That exchange gives future researchers something a finished methods chapter can struggle to show: how the choices are worked through, and how people check that they understand one another.We also talk about the language scholars get used to using. Sean's own dissertation keeps putting that problem in front of him. An idea can be familiar to the person writing it and still leave everyone else wondering what just happened. Diamond's work brings that audience into the process.Links:https://www.pexelab.orghttps://seanisdwelling.substack.comhttps://matthewkr.substack.comDiamond's dissertation — https://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/all_capstones/66The Dissertation Podcast - https://www.youtube.com/@DynamicandOverlyCreative?app=desktop&ra=mDiamond's Instagram - @Dr.QueenAziliAlmaz

Someone tells you a story you know you will never publish. Do you keep listening?Investigative journalist Dyan Neary does. Her work covers public health, child welfare, and incarceration, and she brings the difficult decisions inside that work into her journalism classrooms at West Chester University. She's also the host of The Preventionist, from Serial Productions and The New York Times.We talk about what sits behind a reported story: the documents that support an interview, the sentence-by-sentence fact-checking, and the judgment involved when someone shares more than they realize. Dyan describes teaching students to interview each other and a storytelling class where incarcerated students and university students write and learn together at Chester County Prison.The conversation keeps returning to what journalism asks of a person. How do you hear difficult stories without losing your humanity? How do students learn the difference between reporting and commentary? And what gives a working investigative journalist hope?Afterward, we sit with what her answers ask of us as researchers and teachers, including the tension between listening openly and deciding what can responsibly become public.Links:https://www.pexelab.orghttps://seanisdwelling.substack.comhttps://matthewkr.substack.comDyan Neary at WCU — https://www.wcupa.edu/arts-humanities/english/dneary.aspxThe Preventionist — https://open.spotify.com/show/66znSHlm37F2kYl9MgfnGKBlindsided by Breast Cancer — https://www.thecut.com/article/breast-cancer-mammograms-early-detection-screenings.htmlThe Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program — https://www.insideoutcenter.org/Prison Journalism Project — https://prisonjournalismproject.org/Amy Collini, In Which I Imagine a Different Ending for Uncle Jimmy — https://dsc.duq.edu/creativenonfiction-sunday-short-reads/157/

What if the way teachers talk to themselves is the thing that drives them out of the profession?Dr. Dave Barry spent ten years teaching kindergarten in Boston Public Schools before earning his PhD at UT Austin, where he studied under Kristen Neff — the researcher who brought self-compassion into Western social science. Now an associate professor of early childhood education at West Chester University, Dave has built his academic career around a question most teacher preparation programs skip: what happens when we teach teachers to be kind to themselves?His answer is a letter-writing intervention. Over three semesters of student teaching, pre-service teachers wrote letters to themselves the way they would write to someone they love — about the hardest moments in their classrooms. Self-compassion scores went up, burnout went down, job satisfaction increased. The work is becoming a book with Teachers College Press.In this episode, Dave walks hosts Sean Legnini and Matthew Kruger-Ross through the same two-list exercise he uses with his students. Both hosts feel the gap between how they talk to themselves and how they would talk to someone they love about the same experience. The conversation moves from research to lived practice to a pointed question: what would it mean for a university to measure not how many teachers it graduates, but how many stay in the field five years later?Dave also shares his podcast I Still Believe in School and his research on podcasts as wellbeing resources for pre-service teachers.You can find Dave @istillbelieveinschool and at www.llbelieveinschool.comFind Sean & Matthew:https://www.pexelab.orghttps://seanisdwelling.substack.comhttps://matthewkr.substack.com

Give a room of elite music students a genuine creative choice — no right answer, no rubric — and a lot of them freeze. Dr. Sarah Gulish has spent her career asking why, and what to do about it.Sarah is an assistant professor of music education at West Chester University, where every course she teaches centers on creativity: improvisation, student-centered learning, progressive methods. Before that she spent sixteen years teaching in public schools, including a high school course called Creativity and Collaboration that she co-taught with an art teacher. She's a working songwriter and performer, a card-carrying devotee of The Moth, and the founder and CEO of F-flat Books.In the academic half, Sarah traces her big questions — student agency and autonomy — back to the students she couldn't serve, and walks us through her current research on improvisation and confidence. Two findings stand out: students' creative self-efficacy grew dramatically over a semester and they credited the environment for it, and their own sense of how creative their playing was didn't match an outside judge's — but their confidence still gave them real pride in the making. She also talks honestly about being a qualitative researcher doing a quantitative study on purpose, because numbers are the language administrators speak.Then the turn. In 2015, Sarah got her first academic book contract and was stunned by the terms — 2% royalties, no marketing, and the loss of rights to her own work — and more stunned that everyone told her this was normal. So she built something else. F-flat Books turns seven this week, with more than 200 resources, over 80 creators, and hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to authors who keep their rights. Her hardest-won lesson: the people who resonated weren't other academics, they were classroom teachers doing the work. Her question for anyone sitting on research is the one that gave this episode its title — if the people you want to reach aren't reading journals, where are they, and how do you get there?Plus: why creativity isn't just an arts problem, what happens when a university partnership rescues master's projects from a shared drive, and the case for public funding of arts research made to actual policymakers in DC.Links:https://www.pexelab.orghttps://seanisdwelling.substack.comhttps://matthewkr.substack.comSarah Gulish — https://www.sarahgulish.comThoughts with Sarah Gulish — https://sarahgulish.substack.comF-flat Books — https://fflat-books.com