Trusting students the key to better teaching, says podcast host

A “lack of trust in students” has been one of the few constants in a decade that has seen universities otherwise subjected to massive upheavals, according to the host of a popular podcast that aims to inspire more effective teaching in higher education. 

Bonni Stachowiak started the weekly Teaching in Higher Ed podcast 10 years ago and has documented the impact of everything from Donald Trump’s election in 2016 to the pandemic and, more recently, the emergence of generative AI. 

She said the trend of not trusting students had, if anything, worsened during this time and, while there had always been an obsession with students cutting corners and cheating, this had been exacerbated by the rise of AI.

But Professor Stachowiak – who produces and hosts the podcast – said AI was just a “symptom” of deeper issues facing higher education and was used by institutions as well as students, which she said reflected a “mechanistic” way of teaching that prioritised “jamming” more students into classrooms.

“These solutions are short cuts made by people who don’t understand how people learn,” added Professor Stachowiak, who is also the dean of teaching and learning at Vanguard University in southern California.

Professor Stachowiak said that the pandemic changed both students’ attitudes to teaching and academics' views about students, but there was a risk that long-term lessons would not be learnt. “Students really yearn for a place to express themselves, but rely on anonymity more today than I think they did in years past,” she said. 

She attributed this to social media use and stressed that students “want to have a voice”. The changing attitudes of students who spent their formative years in lockdown should trigger a wider conversation about participation and engagement, Professor Stachowiak said. 

“The whole ‘[let’s] get back to normal’ can be so frustrating, because there are so many opportunities to have learned about how to not be ableist, how to think differently about what it means to attend and what it means to participate in a class. Is participation purely a test of one’s extroversion, or are there other ways to think about how one’s presence can contribute to a learning community?”

Professor Stachowiak said that universities consequently should have a greater focus on “the art” of teaching and how they engage with students who increasingly had conflicting priorities because they were having to take on more part-time work to fund higher living costs – something that she said she had seen shift significantly throughout the past 10 years. In a time of deep political polarisation and with a tense US election around the corner, opening up debate was vital, she said.

“When we think in dichotomous ways between research and teaching, that doesn’t help us out. Really cultivating teaching and learning seems so essential for us to be equipping future generations of thinkers, learners, writers, poets, musicians, scientists and all of that. We need to really double down on treating this as an essential priority at universities,” she said. 

“We would all be better off in the world if we were equipping ourselves and others to think in less dichotomous ways.”

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com