In today’s episode, we say a bittersweet goodbye to our wonderful podcast host, Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) Executive Director Catherine Ross, as she will be retiring from Columbia in June. Catherine sits down with Amanda Irvin, Senior Director of Faculty Programs and Services here at the Columbia CTL, who will be taking the helm as our next podcast host, starting in the fall 2024 season. Catherine and Amanda reflect on their “favorite” dead ideas and episodes, as well as dead ideas that have yet to be discussed, and how this podcast has impacted our Center’s work internally.

We’d like to thank Catherine for her passion and leadership as our podcast host over the past four years, and for her unfailing dedication to changing higher education teaching!

This will be the last episode of Season 8 of Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning. We will be back in fall 2024 with Season 9. Thank you for listening!

In today’s episode we examine the systemic issues and dead ideas that underlie the hiring and supporting of contingent faculty. We speak with Kerry O’Grady, Director for Teaching Excellence at the Samberg Institute for Teaching Excellence at Columbia Business School. Dr. O’Grady discusses some of the “normalized” practices that often leave adjunct instructors with a lack of resources and support for their teaching. She then provides research-based recommendations that can help adjunct faculty feel more valued and empowered, as noted in her letter to the editor in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in response to an article titled, “Adjunct Professors Face a ‘Constant Struggle to Not Give Up,’ Report Says,” (October 26, 2023).

Resources

• “Adjunct Professors Face a ‘Constant Struggle to Not Give Up,’ Report Says” (October 26, 2023, The Chronicle of Higher Education) by Amita Chatterjee
• “How to Help Adjuncts Not Want to Give Up” (November 29, 2023, The Chronicle of

Higher Education) by Kerry O’Grady

In this episode of 4 mini-interviews, we ask Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) staff John Foo, Jamie Kim, Rebecca Petitti, and Corey Ptak what’s been on their minds as they go about their work as educational developers. What dead ideas in teaching and learning are they encountering in their day-to-day work with instructors, in their reading and research? What are the underlying systemic issues perpetuating these dead ideas? And how are these developers addressing these challenges? Listen in to hear their responses.

Resources

• Columbia Science of Learning Research Initiative (SOLER)
• Columbia Office of the Provost’s Teaching and Learning Grants
• "The Tyranny of Content: ‘Content Coverage’ as a Barrier to Evidence-Based Teaching Approaches and Ways to Overcome It" (Petersen et al., 2020) in CBE—Life Sciences Education
• “Facilitating Change in Undergraduate STEM Instructional Practices: An Analytic Review of the Literature” Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2011) in Journal of Research in Science Teaching
• “Four Categories of Change Strategies for Undergraduate STEM” (Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2011) in Accelerating Systemic Change in STEM Higher Education
• “Chemistry and Racism: A Special Topics Course for Students Taking General Chemistry at Barnard College in Fall 2020” (Babb & Austin, 2022) in Journal of Chemical Education
• CTL Teaching Transformations Reflection from Rachel Narehood Austin