– [Jim] All right, thank you, Dasha and Olivia. I see, actually, a lot of familiar names here in the participant list, so I’m glad to see some folks I’ve met in my travels around the United States, and so that’s great to see. Lots of new folks as well. So welcome to this webinar. We’re gonna focus here on student voices, and I’ll give you a little sense of like where that idea comes from, where the emphasis of the webinar comes from, and then we’ll dig into some ideas about how we can cultivate student voices in our courses in higher education. Cultivating student voices is our task today. I am Jim Lang. I’m professor of the practice at the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in the United States. I’m also the co-director of the University Seminar Program. That’s a new appointment for me, actually, in June. The seminar program has students in their first year at Notre Dame take a course, which is a faculty member specialty, but it’s designed to help them, introduce them to academic writing and research and thinking, and it’s just a largely writing-driven course. And so it’s been great opportunity for me, and my background is in English literature, to get back to being involved with a program like that. So it’s been a great couple months learning about this program and be working on it for the next three years.

Okay, so the topic of today’s session is cultivating student voices. And I know we’re all kind of, I think, and generally, sort of concerned about this right now, especially because of AI and the fact that AI might be silencing or sort of reshaping some of our student voices in our courses in ways that maybe we wanna be careful about. I’m not an anti-AI person, but I am somebody sort of cautious about it and wanna make sure that we are using AI for the right purposes. And then being aware of the importance of higher education as a place where people can find their own voices and bring those voices out into the world. So where that voice is coming in the classroom itself through their assessments, and then prepare them to be confident and prepared to use their own voices in their careers and in the world more generally as citizens, whatever it might be. So this to me is a big value for me, making sure that students have some confidence and ability to use their voices in higher education. So when I think about this, the challenge that we face, it’s not just AI-driven. I think that we’ve noticed, since the pandemic, has been not only the mental health challenge that many students face, but also this notion of students stepping away from class engagement, whether that’s just not speaking up in class or missing classes. And those things I think are a real loss for us because I think one of our core values is that we get together as a community, we think together, we come up with new ideas together, and we expand our possibilities the more voices there are in the room. And so I think it’s really important for us to think about how do we help students really, you know, be part of that process.

So when I think about how we can support student voices, I think about all three of these areas, brainstorming, ideation, developing an idea, you know, taking it a little bit further, getting responses to it, and then again, continue to think about the best way to put that idea in practice. Writing is obviously a big one that many of us who teach in disciplines which have students write. We’re certainly concerned about this right now, especially about the basic offloading of student voices, where they bring in AI-created text and substitute that for their own writing. And finally, speaking in class. So I have made only five slides each in these areas, a couple slides of context and then some ideas. Some of these ideas are ones I’ve spoken about before in other contexts. Some of them are, I think, are pretty, you know, standard fare in active learning and higher education. And a couple new ones that I’ve been developing recently as a result of my own learning about AI. So let’s start with brainstorming. And I wanna just say, there’s a premise for this whole talk, and that premise comes from an article I wrote last year for The Chronicle of Higher Education, came out in December of 2025. And the article was called “If You Care About It, Do It In Class.” And I continue to feel like this is a more and more important thing for us to think about as we go forward in higher education. Things that we most care about students doing, we wanna make time and space for those things to happen in class.

So, you know, traditionally, in higher education, students would, you know, be in class, they would be discussing, lecturing, you know, and then we send them off to do the work outside of class. And I think the context has changed for us, obviously, and the things that we wanna make sure that they can do with their own brains or in collaboration with other people, we have to create space for that. And so the skills we want them to develop, the knowledge we want them to acquire, we have to create time for that in class. And this is just a quick little, you know, these are three bullet points in the article. Whatever you care about students learning in your course, spend time doing it in class. If you don’t use class time for skill practice, start doing so now. If you already do it, do a little bit more. And so you’ll see my recommendations here are essentially gonna kinda draw from this notion of almost the sacredness of class time. I’ve really come to believe that class time itself has become so important even than it was 10, 15, 20 years ago. And so, if you care about it, do it in class, and that’s essentially underlying a lot of the techniques I’m gonna talk about here in the next 20 minutes or so.

Let’s start by brainstorming. I think, well, you know, for me, this one has been, I put this one first in part because, I think, when people talk about the use of AI in higher education, and oftentimes, when students will talk about, the first thing that they’ll often mention is using AI as a brainstorming tool. And I have real concerns about that. Those concerns are shared by the authors of a great new book about AI teaching called “The Norton Guide for AI-Aware Teaching.” Fantastic resource, just came out in print, but it’s been out in digital format for a little while. But a fantastic book which, as you know, helps people think about teaching with AI, without AI, or some mix of both, and here’s what they argue about brainstorming, and I completely agree with this. You probably heard that AI is great for generating ideas, and it’s certainly one of students’ top uses of AI. But, you know, as they say here, it’s sometimes difficult for students to start on a project when they don’t know what direction to go. But once they get the ideas, a list, for example, you know, give me five ideas, and then they sort of just choose one and go from there, it’s hard for them to see other alternatives or listen to their own voices. And I think, you know, there’s this kind of terror of the blank page when it comes to developing a new idea, and I totally get that.

Anyone who’s ever written anything knows that terror of the blank page. And I think students are going to this outlet because they’re not getting enough help understanding that brainstorming ideation is a skill you can develop. And that, actually, class time and class activities can help students develop the skills and the strategies they can use to develop their own ideas and bring their ideas out to the world with their own voices. So, you know, there’s a great example in the book. They point to a research study by an instructor who asked his students, you know, come use, they gave, essentially, an open-ended prompt to say to the students, “Develop an idea about, you know, for a paper on AI.” And so the students did this all separately. They were like, I can’t remember there were 15 or 20 students in the class. And the students then just brought the ideas that AI had given them to class, and they all read them out loud. And the students were kind of stunned to realize how similar the ideas were. And they were sort of saddened by this ’cause they thought, “Oh, this is a good idea. I had chatting with AI, and I came up with a really good idea.” What they didn’t realize was AI was essentially prompting them toward the same direction and even the same kind of language. And so this kind of flattening process, to me, is something we have to be aware of, and first of all, educate them about, but then also explain to them, “Listen, you have the ability to do this kind of work on your own, but let’s help each other develop the skills of brainstorming and feel confidence in our ability to create new ideas for ourselves for our projects.” So you can find this study referenced in “The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching,” by the way.

Okay, so here’s, you know, these are just like simple things, but again, making time for this in class is the important part of this. So, you know, these are real simple ideas, for example. And again, I teach, for most of my career, I taught literature and writing classes. And before students would have to write a paper, you know, I would set a time in class for any or all of these ideas. You know, free writing, I’ll talk about in just a second, but a free writing exercise is students kind of sit down for five or 10 minutes and just write. Here’s a core of an idea, or I don’t even know what an idea could look like, and they have to just write for five or 10 minutes without stopping. And most people who do this activity realize the act of putting words on the page generates new words, and those new words develop new ideas. And so I’ll come back to this one in just a second. You know, again, small group discussions, easy thing to do in class all the time, but I love a whiteboard brainstorm and pairing these two ideas together. So, you know, students come into class, it’s been three or four weeks in the semester, a big project is coming up. And so I invite them to, “Okay, get together in pairs or small groups, share any possible ideas you might have with each other, help each other develop them a little bit further, and then let’s put all of them on the board. Let’s get 20 ideas on the board. And then from there, choose one, and again, go a little bit further and maybe free write on that.” And so this process of, you know, having a kernel of an idea or even no idea at all, be in conversation with a few folks, then opening up to the whole room, and then going back and developing further for yourself, this can be a process that students can learn to use for themselves.

I love the idea of also what I call idea speed dating. So, you know, students might have, you know, two or three different ideas for a project, potential ideas for a project, and then they have to pair up with other students and say, “Okay, what’s your idea? Here’s my idea, how can we combine them? How could my idea benefit from your idea? Could I like bring some of that into my idea?” And like have multiple rounds of that, and so students can sort of develop their ideas in conversation with multiple people in the room. So all of these things are processes that you can help students with. And as you do these processes, you help students understand creativity is not some like magical skill. It’s not something that only, you know, creative people have. We can work together with the material, with your own brain, with other people in the room, yes, sometimes maybe I further along in the process, to ultimately create an idea that you feel like you owned, that you created, that you’re proud of, and that could be developed further through your writing and speaking class. Just wanna show you one quote about free writing, just ’cause, you know, this is very common.

Anyone in this room, in this webinar, who’s coming from literature and writing backgrounds knows about free writing, but not a lot of people in other disciplines do. This comes from, you know, one of the most core books in writing pedagogy, Peter Elbow, you know, longtime writer and teacher of writing. And he describes free writing like this, just to sit down with pen, paper, or even a laptop, a tablet, whatever it might be, and just write for 10 minutes and don’t stop, and just don’t edit, don’t cross things out, don’t go, “Yeah, wait, I wanna start again.” You just keep going, and even when you get stuck, you can even say, “I can’t think what to say, I can’t think what to say.” And every time I’ve done this, I do it sometimes just for myself, when I’m writing on a project myself, it always leads somewhere. It doesn’t always like solve my problem, but it always leads somewhere. I’ve probably done this activity with student groups and faculty groups, and people always end up somewhere different than where they’ve started. So this is a very simple activity. And again, it can be an easy way to start a process, a brainstorming process, in a class. Okay, brainstorming, helping students feel like they have their own ideas, different ways or processes of brainstorming, and helping them feel like they can take ownership of their good ideas.

Writing, okay, so obviously, you know, many of us who teach writing or writing-focused courses or course in which students write, this is a real concern of ours right now. And so, let’s think about some possibilities here. So, for sure, I mean, you know, I don’t wanna like say, you know, we should have, you know, I can’t promise ways that you can have students, assign an essay to students out of class, and students come in not having used an AI. There’s no guarantee that, there’s no like 100% foolproof way of, you know, an assignment that is out of class, especially like a longer research paper kind of assignment, without AI, there’s no AI proofing of that. So for me, it’s more about ensuring that students have a chance to use, to develop their voices, and again, feel confidence in their writing voices in some kind of varied activities in class. And so, one of the things I’m really seeing from folks, which I really like, is learning reflection journals. And those might not be like formal writing, but, you know, learning reflection journals can be an opportunity for students to speak, to write on a regular basis in class. This could be five or 10 minutes at the end of class or the start of class. But having students get in the habit of spending a few minutes every class, or even on a weekly basis, to think about their own learning processes or make connections to things outside of the class period. So, you know, if you have students either like have a digital notebook or an actual notebook, I’m seeing more and more faculty members actually having, buying notebooks or, you know, giving out little notebooks to students at the start of the semester, and the students come into class every day with those things in hand. It can also be done online, though. No reason not to do that as well. But asking these kinds of questions. So, make a connection between today’s course material and experiences outside of class or something you’ve learned in other class. Document an insight you had about class today, some new insight you had in class today.

I love this one, comes from a peer of mine at Notre Dame, Nathaniel Myers. He sometimes has students do a shout-out of something they’ve heard from a classmate in a discussion. So tell me something you’ve heard from some other classmate that was an insight that you were able to obtain, apply to your own learning, or you just wanna say something, “Yes, this was a great point someone made in class today.” A little bit of community-building there as well. Describe where you feel like you’re not quite there yet and what do you need to improve or make a plan for what you’re gonna do between this class period and the next period or for an upcoming assignment. So, you know, the prompts can be varied. They can be, you know, some of them content-focused, sometimes learning-focused, sometimes just reflective prompts, lots of opportunities here. But I really believe in the kind of brief, regular activity with writing that can help students, again, feel, you know, that sense of their own voices coming through in writing. And writing is just like anything else. If you wanna get better at it, you do it a lot. And the research on learning shows us that have multiple attempts at something over and over again in different contexts is the best way to improve in any skill. And so want students to improve their writing, and again, feel confident in their own voices, this is a great option.

Again, as I mentioned earlier, I’m not, you know, not an anti-AI person. I’m cautious, but I definitely see some possible uses here. This one comes from a writer named Mason Curry. He has a Substack blog called Subtle Maneuvers, and he wrote this essay earlier this year, maybe in January, and it made me think about this possibility. So have students, you know, in class do this brainstorm ideas, right? So develop their initial ideas in class. Then you, as the instructor, create AI prompts, or a Gem or some kind of program that helps students work through ideas further, posing arguments, counterarguments, other possibilities, et cetera, et cetera. And then, this is where Mason Curry has a really interesting idea. Then come to class without the transcript and start from scratch. And it gets this idea from some writers, some creative writers who did this. One of them is Lauren Groff. And so here’s how it describes what she does. She writes it out on longhand, like a novel. She completes the draft, then puts it away, and then starts over again without looking at it. And, you know, I’ve done a version of this myself, and it is like, okay, it kind of funnels you down to the most important part, the stuff that the chaff kind of falls away, and it kind of makes you, you get the good ideas that maybe you develop through the AI conversation, but then you’re able to kind of like, okay, rethink about it and then put in your own words, in like new words that kind of force you to rethink it again. So I like this idea as a possibility for, and especially for like humanities-based disciplines.

Okay, and finally, you know, I’ve been working with a philosopher named Lily Abadal. She’s done this thing called Slow Writing Pedagogy, and she asked her students to actually write an entire research paper in class over the course of the entire semester. And so, you know, 30, 45 minutes of a class period once a week, students are actually working through a research paper. Now, they do work outside of class as well, but they bring the materials into class, and in class itself, they do the actual drafting of the paper. And so it’s kind of very slow process, but essentially, the class is a slow development of an idea, and the drafting of it, through these different prompts that she has. So this is in a little workbook which is called “Drafted.” If you look her name up, you’ll be able to get to “Drafted,” and it’s available for people to download. I can’t remember how much it costs, but it’s available to download and can be adapted to your own courses. Lily’s actually writing a book now for a book series I edit, and so the larger version of it will be coming out at some point in the next year or two. So again, some different ideas here to help students ensure they have their own voices, not only in the brainstorming process, but also in the drafting, the creating of their own words. And so writing voices are important. And finally, speaking in class. And I think that, of course, many of us know students who are reluctant to speak in class, who are silent in class, and there’s different ways people can participate in class. But I do believe, and everyone won’t agree with me, that helping students feel comfortable speaking out in class is a skill that’ll help them develop the confidence in their abilities and to speak for themselves for the remainder of those lives. And so to me, soliciting voices is important. So, and you know, I come back to this quote from Sarah Cavanagh regularly. She wrote an article for Chronicle of Higher Education, and she mentions the fact that, you know, when she first came to college, she did not speak at all in class, but she had courses, and one of her minors was gender studies, and her women’s studies professors essentially sort of said to her, “You need to speak because this is part of what we do here.” And so, you know, they pushed her to speak, and as she discovered in that process, she regained her voice. She’d been so quiet and silent in class, and part of that was just anxiety and the sense of like, you know, maybe I’m not good enough to speak in class, but being pushed helped her find her own voice. So this is why I’m willing to sort of push students a little bit on this issue, to say, “I wanna help you find that voice. That includes speaking in class.”

I love this book by Carlo Rotella. It’s essentially like a biography of a single general education course at Boston College where he teaches. And he has this idea, again, for him also, speaking in class is a core value. He tells his students this. “After you’ve spoken for the first time in class, you will become a student who speaks in class.” I know it seems like a little semantic trick there, but I think it’s not, it’s actually not. I think it’s important. The first time a student speaks in class, they become a student who speaks in class. I think that’s essential to help students understand this. Like, once you can cross that threshold, you become a person who can share their voice with other people and share their ideas with people. So this is a kind of mindset shift, a mindset shift that you might have to, you know, see whether that fits with you and how you would explain that to your students. But I just love this notion of inviting students at the start of a semester, or start of class, to say, “Let’s start together, we’re all gonna speak.” And then, you’ve opened up this pathway for you to start to speak further.

So, my last three slides here are simple examples of what this might look like. I love this activity of opening statements. Normally works in smaller classes, but I like to have students, you know, when they’ve done some reading, come to class, and everyone knows right from the start of class, we’ll do opening statements today. And, you know, and I’ll ask everyone, “Just walk, move around the room, and everyone has to respond to the reading, the homework problem, whatever it might be, with one of these options.” You know, and some days, it’ll just be one word, some days, a sentence, some days, 30 seconds, whatever it might be. You can set the parameters on this. But the students who are maybe less likely to speak in class in general, students say, “Okay, this is coming. I only have to say one word. That’s very doable for people.” And then once they’ve done that, they become that person who speaks in class. And so I’m a big believer in opening statements. So that’s my first simple idea here. I will say also, you know, again, coming back to writing, you know, if you’re having students speak in class, always having students the opportunity to do a little bit of writing beforehand can sort of, again, lower the threshold of anxiety and reluctance to speak in class.

And so for almost all my students, every class I’ve ever taught, actually, we have writing exercises at the start of class. At least once a week, students will be asked to sort of write a one-paragraph response to the reading in some way or another. And then the discussion is based on that. The discussion starts with that, their answers to this question. So I won’t always ask everyone to share, but everyone has something written down, which means, so once I’ve done that, and I feel comfortable with the next, the final slide here, which is what I call invitational participation. Sometimes, well, people call this cold calling. I don’t like the idea of cold calling ’cause it’s almost like an aggressive way to think about what we’re doing here. But once students have something written down, we can invite them to participate. And so here’s how I describe this to my students. You know, I run a student-centered class, and so, largely in-class activities. And this is the most important thing about this statement and my syllabus is your unique perspective and ideas are valuable and might bring something to this conversation that nobody else has considered, including me. And so as a result, you know, I’m gonna invite you to speak and I’m gonna invite everybody to speak. And it might be the case that, you know, you didn’t volunteer, but that’s okay. You can say no. And so the invitational participation for me is the way I can sort of pair some of these things together, the writing exercises with the speaking. Okay, so that’s it. I know we have maybe five minutes left here or so, five or 10 minutes left, so I’m happy to answer questions now, so I’m gonna stop sharing, and I’m looking forward to hear what folks’ thoughts are.

– [Host] Okay, thank you, Jim. That was great. I have a question. Is it like writing with pen and paper, or could it be typing?

– Absolutely, typing is, none of these things distinguish between writing or typing, actually. Some people have a real strong feeling about this. I don’t, actually. I know that, you know, people have different modalities that they prefer for their writing. I write by hand in my journal, and I type my books, so like, you know, they’re both equal to me.

– [Host] Right, thank you. We do have a question in the Q&A. So we’ve got a question from Jessica who says, “As Jim has been talking, I’ve been thinking about how many of those strategies can be successfully adapted in online classes,” but they would like to hear from you, Jim, about some ideas of how to elevate student voices in online learning.

– I think, I mean, depending upon synchronous or asynchronous, right? So the synchronous strategies, for most of these things, synchronous will essentially, essentially, will still work, right? Opening statements can be done in a synchronous environment. You know, so a lot of the ideas I think would translate pretty easily. You can’t necessarily oversee students writing in a notebook when you’re online, but I think you would still have them do that. Pause for five minutes, have students use the chat, for example, as an easy way to have that not happen in a synchronous environment. Asynchronous, you know, requires some adaptation. So like an asynchronous environment, you might think about the opening statement bit. Again, just coming back to that one, you know, the discussion prompt or the response to some activity could be a one-word response. And sometimes constraints can help people, force people to become creative, right? If I have to write like five words in response to something, well, I’m not gonna have AI necessarily do that work for me because I can do five-word, right? And so it emphasizes low stakes, only the first five words that come to your mind, right? And so like, let’s get a compilation of all those words together, and then we’ll, you know, see what kind of emerges from that process. So going back to the, you know, other strategies we talked about here, I have to look back at them quickly, remind myself what we talked about here, but the different possibilities here. You know, again, the AI conversation transcript thing and, you know, some of that stuff you might necessarily, you might have to just recommend and guide students through or like create the Gem or the prompt that students can use to develop that kind of conversation than writing from your own memory of the conversation. So, you know, that could be, that stuff can be prompted, but, again, adaptations are probably gonna be needed here. But asynchronous, I think, synchronous I think is easy enough to adopt for most of these ideas.

– [Host] Great, thank you. The next question is, how do you handle students who feel more comfortable speaking and tend to dominate the conversation?

– Yeah, so opening, again, I go back to these same strategies are essentially designed to address that problem as well. Like opening statements, everyone speaks. It’s like no one gets to dominate that conversation. Invitational participation as well, if I have the ability to sort of invite students, and I’ve created an atmosphere of trust, in which they trust me to like not put them on the spot and be aggressive in my cross-screening of them, that means I can draw in the students who are not speaking. And so the students who are sort of reluctant to, who might not be, who are willing to speak, who wanna speak, actually, the chance for me to say, “You know, I’ve heard a lot from this person today, so I’m gonna draw a few other folks into the room.” And so, and I can start, you know, pointing different parts of the room or different kinds of people and say, “You know, let me hear what you have to think as well.” And I just saw this, I observed a class, I observe a lot of classes at Notre Dame as part of my work in the Kaneb Center. I was just in a class, and the student, there was one student, and the students were essentially going around and doing like a serial activity in which they were all sharing something. And they had opportunity, students had an opportunity then to respond to what they heard from their peers. There was one student who wanted to respond 16 times. For every student that spoke, he wanted to stop and respond. And the instructor had to kinda like, be like, “Okay, let’s hear it.” He was good about it, “So that’s great, I’m glad you wanna speak. I’ll invite some other folks to respond as well.” And so, but pairing all things together, all three ideas together, the opening statements, the writing activities, invitational participation, is another way to address that problem as well.

– [Host] Great, thank you. Well, we’ve got a question in the chat, which is sort of related to this speaking. So how do you encourage students who are afraid of saying something that unintentionally offends others? So I often hear students say that that’s why they’re afraid to speak in class.

– So I mean there, I think, you know, the common thing is community guidelines and thinking about, you know, I like the, I’ve seen community guidelines in which sort of folks are addressing this problem by saying, you know, “We sort of assume goodwill. And we find we have strategies for acknowledging when things like have been said that might feel uncomfortable for other people.” I think community guidelines around engagement are good ways to handle that. There’s plenty available on, like if you just sort of search for community discussion guidelines in higher education, there’s lots of opportunities to have that conversation, especially at the start of the semester. I mean, we’re, you know, a few weeks in now, but there might be an opportunity to do that again.

– [Host] Yeah, and I guess inviting students to co-create those guidelines at the start-

– Exactly, yeah.

– [Host] Might reduce the anxiety. We have one last question in the Q&A, if that’s okay.

– Yeah.

– So I work with STEM faculty, teaching subjects like welding, electronic writing, engineering, et cetera. How can I help them help their students who are often reluctant to write and speak up?

– Yeah, I mean, obviously, part of that is just traditions in those disciplines. Like what does a class normally look like in some of disciplines where it’s maybe a little bit more content-heavy, and as a result, more lecture-heavy? And so, I guess I would encourage, especially around speaking stuff, you know, start small and think about the possibilities of even like think-pair-shares, and just, you know, think-pair-shares oftentimes are like more normally the province of humanities instructors. They sort of gravitate toward that more easily. But like, think-pair-shares can be easily done like in STEM courses when they’re, you know, my colleague, Kristi Rudenga, at the Kaneb Center has students, for example, like, “Okay, here’s a problem. I’m gonna walk you halfway through it. Then I’ll have you pair with someone to identify the next step. And then I’ll hear some examples of what you came up with,” or, “Here’s two possibilities. Choose one and discuss it with your partner.” There’s another example I have from, again, a colleague in Notre Dame who teaches biochemistry. She has students do what she calls two-stage exams. Every exam in her course, the students take individually first. They take 15 minutes to take the exam. They turn the exam in, they come back and take the exam again. I’m sorry, they get a second copy of the exam, which they take with a partner. The same exam, the students will have to have, they have to talk about it and like discuss where they were not sure, help each other in the second round of that student two-stage exam. And it’s a way to kind of just elevate conversation in class and make them feel more like, okay, again, I’ve got my ideas or my ideas of how this, what the content is like. Then I partner up with someone and realize, okay, I can expand my ideas or grow as a learner from these conversations. I’ll actually put her name in chat. Her name is Rachel Branco. If you look up her name, you will find some resources at the Kaneb Center website. And you’ll find, actually, a full resource guide for doing two-stage exams. Really well-developed set of strategies.