– Hi everyone. I’m Niya Bond, the Faculty Developer here at OneHE, and I’m so excited to be joined today by Michelle Pacansky-Brock, welcome Michelle.

– Thank you, Niya. Thanks for inviting me.

– Today we are going to talk about the Liquid Syllabus. So Michelle, I’m hoping you can tell our community a little bit about what that is, and how you came to be a part of that project.

– Yeah, I’d be happy to. I was doing a little bit of mental preparation just for our conversation and thinking back to when I first used that term. And believe it or not, it was 11 years ago, which is pretty bizarre. But I wrote a blog post 11 years ago, titled something like “The Liquid Syllabus: Are You Ready?” And it was at this time when I was really being mindful about this shift to digital, the digital learning and thinking about how that opens new opportunities. I’ve always tried to frame technology in a, you know, an asset-based framework, just like thinking about students in an assets-based framework. And it just started to occur to me how, you know, What we think about how important faculty thinks a syllabus is, and how when we use tools that are designed for print, like, you know, Microsoft Word or something that’s gonna generate a PDF, it limits what we can do. And when we move to a digital tool that’s actually intended to be received and experienced digitally, it starts to change how we can create an experience out of that resource.

So, I don’t know if that makes sense, but thinking about the way it looks, and first of all, trying to use colors and images in a way that would create a more engaging space. But then also if we think about a syllabus as a website, you know, using a website tool instead of print-based tool, then it also allows for us to have a human presence in there through recording a brief video. And that to me, I think was one of the real game changers. So I started thinking about, gosh, if we could really find a way to humanize this syllabus in a way that it is actually something that helps students get to know who we are, and helps students feel the way we want students to feel even before they walk into class. If it is a synchronous face-to-face or even synchronous online, you know, that before time, there’s a lot of opportunity there because we know that the human brain forms impressions like within seconds. So that was kind of some of my formative thinking about it. And then over the years it got more formally tied into a grant project that I worked on for the past five years around humanizing online STEM classes. And it became one of these elements that became embedded in this humanizing framework that we were developing and integrating in colleges and universities in California.

– Well, that’s wonderful. And I really love the intention you put into making that connection, as you said, maybe even before a learning experience officially starts because that is such a magical moment that I think maybe hasn’t historically been taken advantage of, right? There’s a start date and there’s traditional ways of doing even the traditional syllabus that, as you noted, maybe isn’t promoting all that belonging and inclusivity that you can do when you kind of make it more innovative.

– Yeah, and I think that like before context comes out of my world, so much of the work that I have done and continue to do is deeply invested in asynchronous online learning. And again, you know, thinking about that as an opportunity and you know, like if we could tear down those boundaries and not be restricted to, like, it starts here and it ends there, but, you know, asynchronicity is different and in a lot of ways it creates challenges, but it’s also really beautiful. And so yeah, we try to get faculty and the work that we’ve been doing more recently to think about week zero and one as high opportunity zones for humanizing. And that is where the Liquid Syllabus comes in. Particularly if we think about not teaching content, teaching students and who our students are, and as they come into a class, right, getting ready for class, getting ready for that first week, there are so many uncertainties. And having that Liquid Syllabus be designed in a way that eliminates those uncertainties and warms up their experience, you know, with the verbal and the nonverbal cues that the human brain seeks out when it’s kind of in this place of psychological uncertainty or threat is certainly part of the conversation too.

– Yeah, so can you talk a little bit about, I don’t wanna say a traditional syllabus is bad because it’s an important document. It contains a lot of information that educators and learners need, but there is some deficit driven practices behind the syllabus and even embedded in the language of maybe a traditional syllabus. So can you talk a little bit more about that asset-based framework and why the Liquid Syllabus allows for that?

– So when thinking about a Liquid Syllabus, what we try to get faculty to do is have this self-awareness about where they’re at and take some time to really think through, okay, who am I, and how do I experience this syllabus, and how might someone else experience this syllabus? So there’s a lot of power dynamics in the classroom. So that sense of self-awareness and identity is a big part of this. And a lot of times what happens is faculty start to recognize that the syllabus that they present to students is quite punitive and is written like this contract, right? That has a list of things that students are not supposed to do. And so if we kinda shift our mindset and frame it as, and look at it as an asset based resource and start thinking positively about what are the wonderful, beautiful, brilliant things that students are bringing into our classroom, and how can we design a syllabus that is going to recognize those as assets, right? So how can we frame diversity as an asset in the language that we’re using in the syllabus, but we also have faculty who take this concept of a Liquid Syllabus and you know, do something different with it. And I think that’s really cool and it’s actually evolved in the way that even I encourage folks to use it.

We used to kind of say, yeah, let’s take your whole syllabus and reformat it in this, but then it becomes this really big long website, right? And you know, we’ve thought intentionally about what we can do with a web page and you know, now what we encourage faculty to do is think about, well, just what is it that students should know before they log into your class for the first time or before they walk into your class for the first time? And that’s really what we’re trying to get faculty to think about. So oftentimes what faculty say to me is, but I have to include this language in my syllabus. And so then it’s like, well, you’ve got choices to make. Maybe your Liquid Syllabus is gonna be more like your welcome package and you’re gonna have a traditional document somewhere else that’s gonna have all the, that stuff in it. Or maybe you have your public webpage that you call the welcome package or Liquid Syllabus or whatever you wanna call it. And the first page is the only page that’s visible before the class starts. And so when you send it out to students the week before, you know, they’re just seeing that, but that same link can then provide access to additional pages after the class starts. You know, so that’s an example of how the digital tool can create new opportunities. Whereas if you had a document, right, you can’t do that kind of unlocking of more content, then you’ve got these multiple versions of it living out there. That gets much more complex.

– Yeah, I love that, that there’s meaning in the modality right? Yeah, that’s wonderful.

– [Michelle] I like that too. Yes.

– So I know it’s not exclusive to STEM learners or courses, but I know you’ve done a lot of work in that area with the Liquid Syllabus. Can you talk a little bit about why it’s had such an impact in that discipline area?

– Yeah, it’s had an impact in I think lots of disciplines and our grant work has been focused on STEM because that’s where what the funding was focused on. But when we went into the work with humanizing in STEM, online STEM classes, me and my project team, my co-PIs, you know, we were kinda scratching our heads and thinking, is this gonna fly? Like, are STEM professors gonna want this? And we had no problem getting plenty of folks. We had over 330 people complete in our project, the professional development piece and the Liquid Syllabus was part of it. And I can share some really specific examples of the impact. And these came through emails, people coming back to me sharing things with me. But I had one professor who finished our Humanizing Academy and was finishing the academy just as her quarter was starting. And she was a math faculty and she said, “I shared my Liquid Syllabus, I don’t even think it’s polished yet, but I put it out there, I sent it to my students,” and then they have a getting to know you survey that they have students complete in the first week of the class. And she wrote to me and she said, “I for the first time feel like I know who my students are as people, I know what I need to do to support them.” And then her last sentence was, “I feel alive.” And like, that’s the part of it that I don’t think any of us really recognized from the beginning was how impactful it was gonna be on the wellbeing of professors. And the fact that we were going through this kind of through COVID was especially powerful.

Another specific example is of another professor who captured an email from a student and shared it with me. And the student wrote to the professor and said, “I’ve tried to take this class so many times, and I was prepared to take it again and not do well. And I’m a single mom, I’ve got,” you know, she listed her obligations. And she said, “I watched your video and now I understand your struggle, what you’ve been through, and you’ve given me hope and I just wanna say thank you and I’m so excited to get started.” So seeing, you know, not just the impact of the verbal, the nonverbal, but we know that like sharing struggle is one of those things that really starts to breed human connection, that vulnerability and reduce things like stereotype threat is one of those strategies for developing the growth mindset and so forth. So getting faculty to understand that is tough because I think particularly in STEM, there is often this kind of culture, like the standoffish, the professional distance that professors are supposed to keep from students. So helping faculty to negotiate, certainly boundaries are important, but maybe you, you know, you can loosen up a little bit and share a little bit about who you are. And having them see really beautiful, exciting impacts so quickly has been really wonderful.

– That is wonderful. And I imagine our community listening or watching this interview will wanna experience some of those beautiful impacts too. So tell us how someone can get started. I know you’ve written about this, it’s available, you know, publicly, but where should someone start? And especially someone who maybe isn’t as tech savvy but is really interested in this, what can they do?

– Well, the first thing I would say is don’t start with the technology, honestly. The first thing I would say is think about how you want your students to feel, the first time they log into your class, the first time they step into your classroom, and what can you do before that even to start to set them up for that, ’cause feeling is a big part of learning. That’s like what humanizing is grounded in. And so that’s the first thing. But with regards to tools, if you’re thinking, I can’t use a website, I’m not a web developer, we’ve got you. Like, you don’t have to be that these days. The tool that we actually recommend folks to use, and it doesn’t have to be this, but the one we recommend is Google Sites Because it is free. They’ve done a lot of work making the interface be accessible, but you still have to have a understanding of how to create accessible content. So yeah, that’s a tool you could start dabbling with. But we’ve got lots of examples out there. A website from our grant project is humanizeol.org, and under the resources area, you’ll have access to all of the showcases of the 330 faculty who have completed our program. And every one of those showcases will have a link to a Liquid Syllabus. I think it’s important to see lots of examples. Because, you know, sometimes you just see one or two and they’re like kind of intimidating, right? And so if you see a variation, you’re more likely to see someone who looks like you, someone who sounds like you, something that is more relatable to you. And that’s really important. And then on my, site brocansky.com. I also have some resources there about the Liquid Syllabus, including a open Canvas course that folks could check out and learn more from.

– Amazing, well, I know the community’s gonna be so excited to have you talking with us about this amazing asset and also just how it fits into the larger project of humanizing online ed and all education. So I really appreciate your time today.