Outside of teaching, for personal development, and to engage and activate my soul, I am a diligent listener to all Brene Brown's Podcasts, and Krista Tippet's On Being Podcasts and Poetry Unbound | The On Being Project series, too.  Feel free to check out some of my favorite On Being episodes below.

Discourse I listen to is not random. Some of these discourses found me, and for some, I found them. I started listening to Brene Brown in graduate school, along with Krista Tippet, when I would commute to Sac State. I enjoyed the 45-minute drive listening to Tippet and Brown, switching off periodically depending on my personal interests. It's weird because I believe I discovered their podcasts in the nick of time, a lonely desperate time, when I felt like I did not have enough language or vocabulary to describe all I was witnessing and experiencing both as an academic and a human. Brown and Tippet were my positive affirmations, that I was not crazy, and all the conversations happening in my head were not illegitimate. 

Brene Brown

Brown's voice, her history of engaging in qualitative research, conducting interviews and talking to people about how culture influences our human behavior in the workforce, and beyond, was interesting to me because her qualitative research about peoples' lived experiences illustrated what toxic communication can do to our communities if we do not get our emotions in check, and communicate clearly what we mean, or what we think we mean. Her work does more than this, I write more about Brown's most recent text, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of the Human Experience in my personal blog, which I will share soon.

Krista Tippet

Tippet, I love her voice, its soothing to my ears, she is intuitive to the human condition. Tippet artfully bridges academia with the soulful humanities, meshing both the artist and the scientist in ourselves--in my opinion, this is what is lacking in academia, and it is the precise reason I love listening to Tippet--she gives me hope that academia will learn to embrace the arts as a legitimate way of knowing and being. 

The Pedagogy of Writing

Below, you will also find podcast episodes from The Writing Remix, a great educational resource for faculty who teach writing in college.  If you are someone like me, who is always looking to be inspired by other faculty, feel free to check out a couple episodes below that have challenged me to re-consider how I design assignments for students. Specifically, I am always looking to personalize students' writing and research topics, while at the same time I try to make sure students learn something about themselves as they evolve as writers and thinkers of the 21st century. 

And of course, I could not, not include the brave, and daring voices of Anand Giridharadas, husband to one of my favorite people, Priya Parker.  

What About Louise Dunlap?

Let me tell a short story of how I was introduced to Louise Dunlap, or how Louise Dunlap found me on the fourth floor of the Sac State Library. 

It was the fall of 2018, I was enrolled in a graduate seminar, Teaching College Composition. My professor encouraged us grad students to create our own curriculum using the pedagogical frameworks we discussed in our class. Desperate to find a text that aligned with my values as a human being, and teacher practioner, I strolled up and down the stuffy library hallways searching for inspiration, it was the title that stood out to me, Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing. I slid the text out, and sat there on the floor in the library, crammed between books that were neatly shelved. In my hands, I opened the text and began to skim through, suddenly I realized that this text perfectly fit with the teaching frameworks my professor was encouraging us to consider. More importantly, though, this text gave me the confidence to teach with conviction, to embody what it means to turn writing into action, this text helped me orient myself and my students, it helped set the stage to not give into self-doubt, and fear when using writing as a tool to communicate our needs--that sometimes when your speaking voice is not valued, or your presence is not acknowledged, you literally have to write your way in. I also appreciated how Dunlap poses questions to engage her readers, and audience, and this is something I too have adopted to engage my students and lead them in with curiosity, curiosity about the world, and themselves. 

To me, Lousie Dunlap is a daring, brave leader, writer, orator, and committed activist, confronting the issues everyone else closes their eyes to, or pretends is not happening. Most recently, she writes about how her ancestors were among the first Europeans to claim ownership of traditional lands of the Wappo people in what is known today as Napa, California, during a period of genocide. "As settlers, her ancestors lived the dream of Manifest Destiny, their consciousness changing only gradually over the generations" (as cited in Inherited Silence (nyupress.org). Self-reckoning, self-actualization about one's imperfections, about one's participation in oppression begins with looking inward. These are the writers I lean on to keep me in check, to keep me grounded and focused on my purpose; otherwise, I would lose hope in people's humanity, and my teaching would be a lost cause. (most times my teaching feels like a lost cause). Stubbornness has served me well. To learn more about this text and what prompted Dunlap to dig into her family legacy's past, consider watching the YouTube video below, or go here: Inherited Silence (nyupress.org) To be continued....