Experiential Learning and the Art of Working Together

Maggie Grady: 0:03

Welcome to the Teaching Table, a monthly podcast where we'll engage in insightful conversations about the dynamic world of teaching, learning and technology within higher education. Brought to you by the University at Buffalo, Office of Curriculum Assessment and Teaching Transformation, and made possible by the generous support of the Genteels' Excellence in Teaching Fund. This podcast aims to shed light on the pathways to educational excellence. I'm your host, Maggie Grady, a Learning Designer in CATT. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. David Emmanuel Gray, Associate Teaching Professor of Philosophy, as we delve into incorporating experiential learning and community engagement into their courses. Welcome, David, and thank you for joining me.

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 0:46

Hi Maggie, thank you for having me here on your podcast. I love talking about this stuff, so, yes, this is going to be a great conversation.

Maggie Grady: 0:53

Good, welcome. In conjunction with National Honesty Day and UB's Office of Academic Integrity, you were recognized as one of the five individuals who promoted a culture of integrity at UB during the 2022 and 2023 academic year. You were also one of three UB faculty recognized by UB's Career Design Center as a 2023 career champion. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about those accomplishments?

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 3:25

I'm originally from Montana. I am very embarrassed to talk about good things that have happened to me, but I will do my best. With the academic integrity recognition, what they had told me in their little write-up when I received the award is that they really appreciated what I was doing. You know, I'm a philosopher. I care about ethics, I care about values. These are what I teach my students, and so I see academic integrity as an extension of that, as something that you know, It's just not an add-on or the last page of the syllabus. It's something I need to be very reflective and conscious of how I'm bringing it into my classes. So, for instance, I have an academic integrity code that the students are expected to read and sign at the beginning of the semester. Every time they turn an assignment who was it? Just write down their name and thank them at the end. I try to treat this as academic integrity should be natural in my profession. We cite our sources, we write thank yous to the please who helped us. There's nothing shameful or wrong about that. So I just try to be open about academic integrity. It's real, it's something we all do, and I do other things in my classes, I provide what I call philosopher's stones to the students. This allows them to turn in assignments late or use makeup for missed work, things like that, that try to take the pressure off them so they don't feel like they have to resort to other things. Being the career design champion, that was pretty cool, because I've been working with a colleague of mine I know you know her Maggie, Jessica Kruger. We've been both very conscious in trying to integrate core career competencies into our classes. Jessica has talked a lot about this in another work and we chat a lot about it too. The idea of the career core competencies in our courses is just we're trying to show students about how they're doing in the class is actually giving them the skills they need for having a job in the real world out there. I'm a philosophy professor. Students are like well, I'm not going to use this, I'm not going to read Plato when I'm working as an investment banker or whatever. And I'm like, okay. You know, so I try to emphasize that. True, but like when students are, I have students who do lots of group work in the class so, while they're like paired up and about a paper or something else that they've read, I will often pause and remind them hey look, you guys are talking to each other, that's teamwork, that's something you need to be really good at. When you're out working on a job, or when I'm grading papers, when I return them, I like to say things like well, look, writing. This is what employers want. Right now. We live in a world where writing is so important. If you are a good writer, you will be way better, way more persuasive, way more compelling, way more employable if you know how to write for yourself and write in a very well fashion, from email to reports, memos, etcetera. So that was why we were being recognized. Because, yeah, me and Jessica, we've both been working very closely with the Career Design Center to do this in a very intentional way of bringing career competencies to our students.

Maggie Grady: 4:29

Right. So I'd love to learn about different learning styles and teaching approaches, and I'm sure our listeners do as well, and so thank you for sharing that. When I reached out to you and asked you if you would join me as a guest on the Teaching Table podcast, you did not hesitate, and again thank you for that. My preparation for recording the podcast entails finding dynamic educators who are exploring innovative teaching practices and initiatives, so I naturally thought of Dr. David Emmanuel Gray, and I see that you're interested in incorporating experiential learning and community engagement into your courses. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about that initiative?

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 5:08

I've always, from early on, tried to incorporate experiential learning into my courses, but understood very broadly as meaning like I just want students to be learning not just from me but first and foremost, at the beginning, from each other and through discussions that they have in their classes. Because I teach philosophy, I teach, like, say, courses on political philosophy. Oh wow, we have students with lots of different views about that in our classrooms and it's really important to me that I don't want to be teaching the Professor Gray view of politics or whatever. Right. I want them to know, look, I'm offering perspectives, different ones, sure, but they have to look at these and then talk with each other about what they mean, because they are going to have their own views and own life experiences, and it can, I won't go into details. The conversations can get rather wild at times, but I tell them, you know, because sometimes things do get heated, not often, but now and then they do and I just pause and say, look, hey, we all have, we all have different perspectives here, but that's the experience of dealing with other people and we have to learn how to navigate these differences with each other, because this is like the core principle. If I have a core principle of learning, especially when it comes to philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, it's that we don't live alone in this world. We are not hermits, we don't live in isolation, and so I think the primary ethical task of our lives is to figure out how to secure the legitimate cooperation of each other so we can work together to accomplish goals. If we don't have that, everything just falls apart. So, anyway, that's a lot of what I say, but I want to introduce myself to the experience of philosophy, the experience of ethics, the experiences of these things, and that begins in the classroom, with them just talking to each other. Now we can broaden out to the way that UB likes to do it. It's like also, we want them taking the things they're learning in our classrooms and start applying them outside of that classroom. That can be scary at first. So what I usually do in my courses if they're maybe not quite ready to go out on their own and do this stuff I like to invite out guest speakers to come into the classroom. So when I teach business ethics, I love to get people who do corporate social responsibility, who you know this is their job to make positive social impact on behalf of their companies and organizations, and I haven't come in to speak about problems they face and how they overcome those problems as part of their job. The students love it and I've had several students who are now pursuing careers in corporate social responsibility. But that's the first step. You bring these people in and now we can go a step deeper. Now I've brought these very gifted professionals into my classroom. I then will always pull them aside either before or after they speak and say hey, you know, I have some really interested students here and what you're doing over there. Would you maybe be able to set up an internship for them? Now, you don't have to pay them. Now they're happy, they're listening. Now you do not have to pay these students. They will take a class from me, and that class will be just them sending me a couple updates now and then about the internship, and then you get to mentor and help the student. Just send me a report at the end to make sure that everything went as planned. But the students love it. They get an internship, they get course credit for it, helps them graduate. The business gets gifted students who are working for free. So that's the next stage is now trying to find opportunities for my students to go in to these different places, and a lot of this culminates when I teach this. I'm a faculty member for the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program. That's the PPE program that we have here at UB. It's a brand new major and so I now teach the capstone course for that, that all the majors and minors have to take now, and this is a strictly project-based course. Here's the time now where I literally they have one assignment all semester with milestones that just help them along the way, and they're one task. It's very simple, the instructions. Take a moment to read. It says make the world better.

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 8:46

That is their semester-long project, each team. I put them on teams because they got to learn teamwork again. I put them on teams and I say you can do whatever you want, interpret this however you want, and each team gets a thousand dollar budget that will then, if they have expenses they can pay for. Fun fact, most of the teams don't even use the money, because let me tell you what we have found in these projects and my students when they go out into the communities trying to make Buffalo better, they just say the magic phrase we are UB students, how can we help you? And, oh my gosh, doors open. People just give them stuff. I mean, I had a student do a book drive. Her team did a book drive. She asked people for books. She got thousands of books for the Buffalo City Mission.

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 9:24

It was amazing. She helped build a library there for them. They could put the books in to cut games. Anyway, my point is that's kind of, I think, a very culminating fact for undergraduate students. This is what makes our PPE program very unique. We have this capstone course that teaches them how to really take what they've learned in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and put those skills to use. And, man, I bet you that makes them look good as future employees or whatever, right. And so now you're going to start to see. Also in these tasks there's our community engagement. Not only are the students learning through actual experience in the real world out there, they are engaging and making the community better.

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 10:04

That is the task they are given and I think they realize a lot of these students finally have. They didn't even know they had a passion for doing this kind of stuff, of really helping. I mean, my secret goal is really that I want them to stay in Buffalo, stay in Western New York and continue to get jobs here, work for the government here, work at non-profits, whatever, wherever your passion takes you, but with this eye to making Buffalo a better place. I love Buffalo. I haven't lived here long but I love it very much and I think this is the least I can do to give back to this city of good neighbors. They've treated me so well. I love it here.

Maggie Grady: 10:32

We've hooked you, huh, we've hooked you into Buffalo.

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 10:35

I drink the water. So that's at the undergrad. I'll just briefly mention I also do this at the graduate level I am. The College of Arts and Sciences is now working with the School of Public Health, the School of Management and the School of Social Work, of course. So it's these four colleges.

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 10:51

At UB we're all working together on what is known as the Social Impact Fellows Program. We take in about 30 graduate students across those three colleges, or four colleges. They work together on a team over the summer for 10 weeks. They get assigned to a partner organization, mostly nonprofits. So we've had places like Goodwill Industries is a good partner of ours, Legal Aid of Western New York, lots of local impactful organizations.

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 11:17

The job of these social impact fellows is to go in and work with these organizations, meet with the stakeholders that these organizations are supposed to help in Buffalo and then really think about ways to help that organization solve the problems they are facing in delivering the services and goods that they're trying to do for us. And they give a big, big presentation at the end of the summer. The president of the university is there and the response has been phenomenal. The students learn so much. I can talk endlessly about how we're really gosh helping those kiddos out. And the organizations love it as well. They get so much help with all the things they're trying to do and again, a lot of these turn into jobs.

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 11:54

I'll tell one quick story and then I'll, I swear. So for instance, there was a philosophy student who did the social impact fellows last year. She was partnered with a local hospital. It's a philosophy PhD student, but she impressed the folks. The steering committee at the hospital saw what she and her partners were doing over the summer and were so impressed. And so her mentor at the hospital said would you like to come back next summer and do some research on your PhD with us?

Maggie Grady: 12:22

Oh, wow.

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 12:23

And when I read that so it was in a comment on the feedback thing and I read that and I was like, oh my gosh. First of all, this is great. She's made real impact and she's impressed people, and so I worked with my department to secure funding for this graduate student. So she will be going back in a few weeks back to the hospital to do some real substantive work on her dissertation at the hospital, and it's this thing that's going to open doors for her. She's got a great future ahead of her and I'm so proud of her.

Maggie Grady: 12:50

That's awesome. What a great feeling. Oh, yeah, I think that's what you said about the organizations that they're taking those young minds and their ideas and exploring more of that, so I love that. Thank you, that's great. Yeah, thank you. I know that you also have interesting approaches to teaching, such as flashy websites that double as your course syllabi and specification grading or specs grading. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about, let's focus on the specs grading.

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 13:18

Yeah, I'll say the flashy websites I don't do. It takes too much of my time. Specs grading though specs grading is really cool, I think this is I don't use it in all my classes. I think for lower level classes it might be a little too demanding for our students, but for my 300 level and higher classes I'm transitioning them all over to specs grading. Specs grading is cool, so what you do is the idea is, I only assign a course grade once, the whole semester. The end of the semester I assign a course grade because that's what UB wants me to do, but during the semester I assign a course grade because that's what UB wants me to do, but during the semester their work does not get a letter grade on it. Their work doesn't earn points, which then they think is with the letter grades.

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 13:57

No, every assignment in my class is graded, accepted or incomplete. It is like pass fail, yes, but it's a little more demanding. I won't say how demanding in case there's students listening. I don't want to know all my secrets. But yeah, so if something's accepted, it's up to spec, they're done. If it's incomplete, however, they have the opportunity to redo the work. I have some constraints in there about how often they can redo. But they do absolutely get the opportunity to redo incomplete work. But how I help them is they get a list of specifications like has a title. You get the easy ones first, spelling correct, whatever.

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 14:35

But then it gets more advanced identifies the premise of the argument. Identifies the conclusion of the argument. These are yes, no questions, and they have to. It's either satisfied or not satisfied. If they satisfy everything, then the assignment is accepted. I know they got the skill down and I can tell anyone who asks they got the skill. But if they mess up one thing, that one thing is marked not accepted and the paper is marked, or the assignment is marked incomplete. But they know now. They know exactly what they need to do to change it. I leave comments whenever something's not accepted. I let them know exactly where the problem was. Now they have the opportunity to redo it, and some students redo it a lot and it's okay. I'm pretty quick at it now. It's pretty amazing. But once it's accepted, I know they got it. But then I use the number of accepted assignments. Then we'll ultimately get translated to a letter grade at the end.

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 15:27

And I'll just like one last thing. The number of A's I've given under this system actually went up because I was stunned that our students are willing to rise to the challenge. I think a lot of professors underestimate their students, think they're lazy and whiny, and I'm sure those people are out there. But these students that I've been teaching aren't like that. They just want advice. They want to know what they need to do to do better and you give them very clear instructions. You give them very. If that's not accepted, you give them very clear explanation for where to begin to improve and then give them the chance to do it. They will do it.

Maggie Grady: 16:00

So I think I need to schedule a part two so we can continue our conversation about raising the bar on innovative teaching, learning and keeping reinventing yourself. I hope this conversation encourages others to step outside of their comfort zone, try new teaching approaches in an effort to engage students learning and thank you for taking the time for meeting with me today. And do you have any final thoughts?

Dr. David Emmanuel Gray: 16:24

My only final thought is for anyone. Well one start incorporating more experiential learning into your courses. Just do baby steps. You don't have invite one guest speaker at the end, come talk. You'll see a difference. You'll start networking, changes will happen, and then from there, more baby steps and you'll look back and you'll be amazed at what you've done with your students.

Maggie Grady: 16:45

So thank you for joining us today at The Teaching Table. Today we discussed innovative teaching approaches with philosophy professor David Gray. Be sure to connect with us online at buffalo. edu/catt. That's C-A-T-T, or email us at ubcatt@buffalo. edu.