 About one minute. You're alive. You're alive now? Let me go into the public view. Hi world. My health is good. I'm going to attempt to stream an HDM. Should I be here for that or should I be here? If you want to be in the live stream, you should be over here. Can you move the podium? It's fine. We're in our seats. I don't know what more you want from us. I just thought you were out of the frame. Working for you? It's showing up on my... It's like a five second delay. It's kind of freaking me out. Good? Yeah, I think we're golden. Go ahead and start us. Thank you so much for joining us here today for our roundtable presentation about the great debate and our work that we're doing at Chico and as it's also manifested in several community colleges. My name is Zach Justice and I'm the coordinator of the Chico Great Debate at the Chico campus. We're going to go down the line where everybody can introduce themselves real quickly before we get started. My name is Deb McCabe and I'm a lecturer at Cal State Chico. I'm April Kelly and I'm a lecturer at both View College and Cal State Chico. I'm Tori Shim and I'm a lecturer at View College and Shasta College. I'm Ryan Guy and I lecture both at Chico State and View College. We are online in person or viewing this in the future in which case I hope the future is super awesome. We welcome you to our presentation today. How this will work is that I'm going to real quickly go through an outline of what the Chico Great Debate is and then we are simply going to open it up to reflections and commentary from our panel about how it's worked to expand the event at Chico and how it's worked to export it to different campuses. We're going to flip through a few visuals here. The Chico Great Debate is a sponsor through the first year experience program and the communication studies program at CSU Chico. This particular panel is actually brought to you by another important program at Chico and that's the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. Thank you so much for funding this presentation, part of our travel and we hope that we're doing you proud. So, and community colleges and at the University in general we're faced with a set of problems and principle among those problems to the oral communication courses and a variety of other courses. Our particular event this semester is on the 11th of April and we invite you to come see us. If you come see us we will make you feel special, we'll take you around to some debates and experience what we think makes a big difference for the students. There are over 2,000 people that participate over the course of this semester. Part of Chasta, but it's really students that do the lion's share of the work. So if you're thinking about starting a program like this and think, oh my god, I don't want to work another 100 hours a week, the truth is students do most of the work and they're really in the classroom and the broader community. And I have all these assessment results in both narrative form and think about themselves as community leaders. If you're interested in building a program like this at your community college, at your university, anywhere that you're at come see us and talk to us. We have resources, part of what we're doing right now, the sort of model that we're on board for is outreach where we see how this can be built up from a small number. We started with 180 people, now we're at 2,000 people. These programs almost always start small and then grow rapidly. And how it's modelable on a community college campus or virtually any other campus. Well, I'll go ahead and state when the great demand started teaching of the students and participants in both the argumentation of participating in Chico State. That said, since we've done it, it's been largely successful in achieving my classes with a larger sense of efficacy, so I'm talking more about how to manage. And I was also, like Ryan said, a little concerned about the logistical issues, but the students have handled that really well for the most part. Some of the things that I probably could have anticipated but have found to be, because we're in the process of expanding the program, so I took three sections last semester and you took two, yeah, and this coming semester there will be a total of 12 sections, so a lot more in spring. And some of the things that we kind of intuitively knew were gonna be issues, maybe turned out to be larger issues, were generating enthusiasm for the event and also students' communication apprehensions. So students were a little bit reluctant at first to participate. They saw the event, especially when you're talking about it on day one, as a hoop they have to jump through to complete at school, just another assignment. So I spend a lot of time in my class explaining to them what they're gonna get out of it so that they feel really excited by it. My reflections, my data, my assessment would actually suggest that they have a really positive outcome. I had two students out of the 75 students last semester who did not enjoy the experience, which means 73 students found it to be worthwhile and meaningful, which is huge and amazing. So a lot of encouragement in terms of the enthusiasm, and I spent a lot of time telling them what they're gonna get out of it so that they want to participate and trying to get them excited about the topic. And also their communication anxiety tends to be higher at a community college. So more practice in class than maybe I would do at the university even more and a lot of one-on-one and just a lot of trying to build their confidence because they are nervous to even show up at the event and interact with people. It makes them even more nervous to get on stage and talk in front of 50 to 100 people. So I send students who are ready to the speaking events like super confident and then everyone else, I spent a lot of time encouraging their confidence and they do seem to, for the most part, come back with a sense of confidence as well. They're also really worried, this is something that surprised me, some of them, not all of them about standing out somehow, they're afraid that they're gonna like, people are gonna notice because our students are going to an event with university students that somehow their speeches won't be as good as the students from the university or somehow someone will be like, you, you're from community college and that obviously doesn't happen and their speeches sometimes are even better. So those students who speak, they're like, our class, our speeches were just as good, if not better. So they get a huge boost in their confidence for it which is why we're actually looking at the persistence rates in the transfer rate. Yeah, April and I are working together right now. We're able to gather a lot of the data that we have through institutional research at Chico, but as we're working on incorporating new college students, one of the things, and I mean, it was a long process to even figure out who it is that we should talk to at her and viewed as an institution. But we eventually track that person now and we have a meeting on Thursday to try and basically label those students in the system so that we can track how many of them transfer at what rate, what's, you know, like, do you see an uptake in grades? Maybe they have the worst experience in the world and we don't know, but figuring out that and from an assessment perspective is key, but it's a hurdle too to even figure out who to talk to sometimes. Yeah, it was, and we are lucky that our department, right Ryan, has been doing assessment about communication apprehensive, at least it's one of the components and so we have an opportunity to compare the students who were going to the great debate versus all the other students and however many sections which we're lucky that we already had a place so it'll be a nice thing to look out for us too. Briefly to fall up on one thing April said, I heard some of the same fears especially from my debate students when I told them that like, okay well a few of you are going to have to debate Chico State students fearing that, going in and doing it and coming back and then in our debrief having those students say like, oh well that wasn't that bad at all and some students even being like, well maybe I should transfer to Chico State after all because if I can do this I surely can do that as well so you hear that kind of feedback. I definitely had students come to me and say they feel more confident I mean that's them self reporting that they feel more confident and more ready to transfer and they're less nervous about transferring as a result directly of that interaction with those students so I think it's pretty powerful and it's going to be on my assessment for spring so I know how they feel about it. I should intervene real quickly to say that we run our program as part of our program Shasta runs their own sort of standalone program as actually does Chivau College, Christine Werta headed that up out there, started on her own got a little bit of support and made that happen so there are really a couple of different models for how this would work but before we get too far in I was hoping that we could hear from Deb a little bit because she was the person that was sort of in the middle of it when we went from having 180 students to having 2,000 students was in all of those faculty meetings with the 132 instructors heard and voiced some of those same concerns and has helped me the event better as we have improved it but at the same time she's seen things fall down too and not work well and I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that experience. Sure I wanted to, because I don't have as much of the community college connection when I've taught at BUIT it was before they became involved with the great debate so my perspective is purely on the home campus of where it came from and I was in on it from the very beginning although I wasn't the person who was coordinating the program and we've played around also with trying to tap into the reactions there's been some built in assessments, there's been a survey there's been a reflection piece those are programmatic so those are coming out of the first year experience folks who are running it but there's also always been this sense that in our classroom we should also be doing some kind of follow-up, some kind of debrief or data collection or reflection or something so it wasn't just we went over there, we spoke and now we're moving on so those are some of just the logistical practical things that have come up over this learning curve the second, what was the second thing I'll move on to the third thing because I'm blanking on the second thing the third thing is really another comment that Zach made early on for me this is the most important one he talked about the challenge of integrating a program like The Great Debate into has a curriculum that's already at least on the small group communication side it's a really packed curriculum very, very packed class and here we come with this other event and it's related small group communications civil dialogue civic action, civic engagement, collaboration all that, they're related and it's not smooth yet and I've been doing a lot of thinking about this over the last six years, you do, you get involved with something like this and you do a lot of thinking and you do a lot of talking about it and your significant other is just tired listening to that drive the structure is much more effective if we broaden it and look at, it's been years to get there to get to that realization it's a different lens it's just a shifting of the lens they're doing something about a real world issue and then also speaking about what they're doing hurdle that we've had the learning curve about and I think hopefully we can meld them a little I teach up at Shasta and one of the sort of difficulties that they face is where Butte is near enough to Chico that they can bring students over and sort of collaborate on that about 70 miles away from Chico so focusing about a program like this is, you know, a lot of the pushes for increased civic engagement student engagement, academic engagement take the form of service learning and we all know what some of the obstacles to mass at service learning are as you just saturate your community and everybody's fatigued and it's really hard to do it on a grand scale and so I think that this is a way to build in small moments of inclusive engagement with the community without overburdening that community because in Chico as an institution we have a huge push on service learning and community engagement and so our community tends to get fatigued pretty fast but this is a way to still get them in there experiencing that level of engagement at the ground level, at the first year level without burdening the community even further That's a really good point our assessment results consistently indicate that when the students see somebody there that they don't recognize as another student and I mean most of the people at the event are students but at the same time the Republicans and Democrats are there registering voters and talking to students about issues we always are inviting in different interest groups every semester the Great Debate has a different theme so like last semester the theme was mental health and so we invited in different people that had a stake in mental health the semester before that it was water and agriculture so the Farm Bureau had a booth at our exposition at the new environmental council so the students then see somebody there that they don't recognize that they think oh this is a community member so this matters this is different than my normal life and then that clearly seems to mean something to them regardless of what institution they're from but the thing is Deb's right the university is not only physically embedded but it's sort of grafted into every part of the community but this is a one day deal we show up we sort of invade the city plaza and the city council chambers for one day and then we're done so nobody even has other than us really has a chance to get exhausted because they're there for a couple hours they see that they're the sun shining they talk to a hundred even a couple hundred students get some motors get some people signed up for some volunteer work everybody goes home as far as the community goes it's a sort of quick hit high impact practice it's really a lot of us to build a lot of connections with the community you know what Jason Ames just chimed in on the live stream from Chabot he says it's Jason Ames hi everyone one of the issues we've had at Chabot was some apprehension from the community about the word debate did anyone else experience this and how was it rectified I know that there was some concern with that at Shasta as well right? so like I said sometimes the debate format was just hard to implement at Shasta they've only done it two semesters there at this point and the first semester they tried to have the debate format and part of that was difficult due to the they only offer one section of argumentation and debate and they don't have a forensics team at this time which for Chico State and Butte we often draw from those sections of classes and those students and so for the last semester when they did it they didn't have the debate style but more of a panel discussion where they had different people come in and present and there wasn't necessarily the specific resolution but the general theme on which they were speaking well and part of the problem was a little bit of misunderstanding between the Chico State students that went to help out and what was going on there we had a couple of our open members of our debate team go to Shasta to debate students that were in their introduction to argumentation of the debate class and you can kind of imagine a little bit about how that debate might have looked like and so I think as a result from that there's no little apprehension at the Shasta great debate to like keep the evening debate going for those of you that didn't quite understand part of the way that the great debate event works is that throughout the day there tends to be a variety of key things happening right and Zach spoke a little bit to this but there are students from the public speaking classes giving speeches and Chico a big outdoor amphitheater students from the small group communication classes are giving group presentations about the topic students from the debate classes the argumentation debate classes are having many debates against each other and then there's also civic expo presentations that students from the small group classes that are that happen at that time as well as kind of like center focus group type discussions about the topic in the evening there's a main event and we try to get community members to partake in that specifically people that are stakeholders in whatever issue they are so for example when we did the Occupy Wall Street debate we had a member of one of the local OWS chapters and we also had a couple tea party type people on the other side paired up with students from the debate team and we have this big evening event where we clash these ideas together and we work with the community members beforehand that said Zach could probably speak just a little bit more there have been times where the community members have been a little concerned about what really is meant by that debate idea especially since they're more kind of I think that at Chabot one of the things they're thinking about doing is actually renaming their event to help direct it by that the event took off real quickly for us to the point where people started to know about it and then we didn't have to deal with that nearly as much but it's just one of the ways that what we're trying to do is modular and it can be adapted differently like Tori said it works very differently at Chasta than it does here the same principles are the same civility, course integration, giving students out of the classroom to do something interesting but the actual form is really flexible we had a question from our online audience I'm not sure if we'll have more or not but do we have questions and comments from our in-person audience too like a logistic question how do you choose students who might be doing the presentations or debate is it everybody and then in terms of how does that work with grading if it's a few people that are picked and then other students that are watching that's a great question do you want to talk about how the small group class works first at the beginning it was everybody I think it was part of the part of the program but as it grew and then we didn't really have the time for everybody to be presenting over there it became by invitation and so if you're teaching the small group class where that's not some small group classes their output is in the Civic Expo which is a big display in the plaza where they do trifold science project display boards and they put information on there that they came out of the research and so some sections are designated to participate in that the remaining ones are designated as participating via presentations but the instructors at the very beginning this is one of the logistical coordination things whoever's on the small group coordinating side has to count of how many sections of small group do we have and figure out at first invitation how many groups from your class as an instructor can you invite and you typically just invite the best presentations and you tell the students early on those who give the best presentations are going to be invited they don't have to come we give them an opt out because some students are so apprehensive about it that they would rather not or they're so busy and then if there's as those slots start to fill up you get an eye for how many are left and you can open it up more and tell people first come first serve you can start inviting some other people from your section but to try to keep it fair each section at first is entitled to invite one that keeping it fair part has been one of the hurdles I was trying to figure out you know how do we get equally distributed opportunity for all these students and then the motivational piece has always has been a hurdle to like how do we incentivize them to want to come and present and so that opens the the Hornets nest of extra credit you know and how much and how if only the presenting groups get extra credit does that mean that there should be an opportunity to earn the same amount of extra credit points in some other avenue in some of the other sections so that's that's been a serious learning curve too we haven't we the extra credit thing we haven't to be honest I think we've done slightly differently several different times and we kind of there's a bunch of us teaching small group at Chico State so we try to come to a collective understanding of the beginning of the semester about what that's going to be so that at least it's the same for all the sections but the community college I do it slightly differently so far the small group I've taken small group and public speaking classes so I personally and it could just be my experience found it much easier with the public speaking students I just invite the students who are the best speakers I think last semester I invited eleven people and eight of them spoke they were all gave strong speeches they were and a couple of people just weren't even interested in getting up there they didn't really need the extra credit I did give them extra credit for it and so that made it really easy with the public speaking with small group it's a little more difficult especially at the community college I had one semester where I didn't ask a single group from one class because the presentations were not up to what I thought the standards should be that was an issue that I had with that specific class that permeated the whole semester the next semester I had two classes and I asked like four groups and I think two of them presented and they were great because they had the one thing that you will find out about the audience participation we've talked about what students are doing there but we also have all of those students go and just participate and be audience members or be walking around the expo booths interacting with the people who are hosting those exhibits and in the early days that was also motivated by extra credit like you can go if you want to earn extra credit and we just have tried to dampen down that part of it because it gets out of control really quickly with the points and it starts to skew things and the more the more integrated and sedimented the great debate became in our curriculum eventually the agreement was that participation at the event even if you're just attending as an audience member is a required component of the class so we removed extra credit for that and now there's certain like they have to go and see one presentation or they have to go and spend a certain amount of minutes at the expo as part of the requirement for the course that's what in part raised the whole tracking attendance issue because to fulfill the requirements you have to know who was there and what we want to know. The attendance part is treated like its own assignment as part of the great debate assignment and then if they speak there is an agreement about the extra credit depending on the semester. So just to clarify because I know this is a lot to deal with in each of the classes that participates in the great debate there is a specific world type presentation assignment that is linked into the event typically in the past it's gone back and forth but for the public speaking class originally it was an informative speech later on we experimented with having the persuasive speech to be the event that takes place originally in the small group communication class it was a stakeholder speech where the students presented on an organization or a stakeholder related to the event and last semester we tried problem analysis speeches from those with varying amounts of failure and success but those assignments and those presentations are given in the classroom first so if the topic as it was a couple of semesters ago was immigration reform and a student was given an informative speech on the type of technology that they want to use to build a border fence that student would give that presentation in their public speaking class either at U college or at Chico State and then at that point after the speech had been given and graded there would then be different mechanisms to decide if they go to the great debate public speaking we've done tryouts in the past at Chico State where students have come in panels and we've had our forensic students and other TAs volunteers go in and rank the panels to decide who makes the cut and who doesn't inside there and then obviously as April spoke about there was the the process of instruct yourself selecting the best panels out of their small group classes the key thing to understand is that the points for the presentation the grade is based on what happens in class in the non extra credit model where it's a participation model we allocate roughly I'd say a thousand point class 20 points towards participation over the course of the day that's fluctuated up to 50 and back and forth and all students are required to participate some students would just give their presentations and other students would watch presentations and so we have debated amongst ourselves as to whether that is fair whether the students have to prepare to speak in front of a group deserve something extra or if you know to give a presentation instead of watch a presentation is reward enough in itself that's a debate that's ongoing and I think that as you try this at your own institutions that's something that you could experiment and we could hopefully come back in the future and discuss those types of things as we work the details of that. Other comments, questions? How do you guys pick your themes and do you have any since basically it's a requirement of all sections of these classes which I'm also assuming are required classes so far do you have any resistance from students who come in and realize that this is part of what they're going to have to teach for this semester? Well I'll speak briefly to the selection process but then these folks are better equipped than I am to talk about how that works at their ground floor so we actually select we have a topic selection meeting towards the end of every semester and we actually have representatives from the city there usually from the city manager's office or members of the city council that are there and they oftentimes provide great input for us about what's next in city politics and we had students say that's the most boring idea I've ever heard of about it right now so then we figure out something else but generally we build consensus and then we find a broad theme with lots of access points so like this semester it's diversity and discrimination so that'll last students to talk about a wide variety of things we haven't always done a good job with that like one of the things I was the most excited about was water and agriculture because we're right in the middle of this huge agricultural region in North California I was like oh it's going to be awesome farming families and we're going to this community the students hated it and so we don't always get that right I mean the public works messy and that's I guess the blessing and the curse but these folks can talk about it on the ground the topics are the important point is the breadth the topic has to be broad enough that students can come at it from some point of their own interest and the water topic I thought it was going to be deadly I was and I had some of the coolest civic expo they don't just present things they also have some sort of activity or something that people can come around and get involved with I had people doing little kind of sciency displays about fluoride in the water I had them put these eggs in different cups of water with different amounts of fluoride and you touch the egg and the egg shell gets all soft and squishy in a certain kind of water so it had the gross factor in it too that was really beautiful and got people really interested and then the taxation I thought the taxation was going to be a dog too great presentations because they could tie this where does the money come from and where does it go to whatever piece of life they are most interested in I mean that covers just about everything and I would say definitely having something that is big enough like you said and some of it just comes down to how do you explain it in class I mean the semester we were and I was even at the meeting when we decided government spending and taxation and when we talked about it like this makes sense but I knew in the classroom I was going to have to make this sound super exciting so the way I talked about it in my class it was like I know taxes doesn't sound really exciting right I tell you all the different things you can do because it's really broad and here's how it affects you you're a student are you upset about your tuition do you want to be able to because it was during the Prop 30 fight and I was like do you want to be able to go to school next year like do you want to pay twice as much in tuition so I made it about them and I just got excited about it that's how I I mean there's still going to be some people like I felt like with the water there was more it was almost that people got a little bored with the topic I felt like by the end whereas mental health I think I heard one person say they were they weren't interested at all every other person was like this is really interesting and especially once you start talking about one one out of four people has a mental health issue so all of a sudden you can like really identify with it and I think we're also making an effort to pick topics that will work for the community college level too yeah it's it's also an opportunity to start a campus-wide conversation about an issue this semester we chose diversity and discrimination because it's a conversation that our campus needs to have and we sort of get started and then roll back and then make some progress and then there's a personnel change and and so we thought hey let's let's get our first year students talking about this in their first year and then maybe by the time they're seniors they will have this conversation a lot and things they'll think about this differently on campus they'll be prepared to have different conversations so it really does give us a chance sometimes to sort of shape a broader conversation one of the one of the things that all that I'll say is that some of the topics are going to be more difficult for instructors to frame than other topics like when we were talking about government spending it's pretty clear like what the ground is inside of that inside of that debate right size of government spending towards programs versus like more free market solutions and it's easier to frame that in the semesters where we've done what I would say are the more controversial topics such as immigration reform and this semester with diversity and discrimination I see my students struggle more with like wait what's the debate about on these types of things I've already had students this semester with discrimination and I don't understand how we debate this isn't discrimination bad are we going to argue that discrimination is good do I have to debate that and it's about moving into that role of instructor be like well no but we're talking about like what are the solution steps to these types of things should we have affirmative action programs or should we not what are the solvency steps so you have to be careful as an instructor early on particularly with the more hot question but issues frame what the ground is for students so they won't struggle that said I still had students on the immigration topic that were having highly problematic pieces of rhetoric where they talked about gathering people up in vans and shipping them off to different places and that and so you do deal with that you deal with strong you know kind of probably are you problematic value assumptions in the path of our students but the key thing is to not be afraid of that and to think of that as places people that can really play with that narrative about how intimidating it is you know and and at the same time really highlight communication studies the role of communication and democracy you know play going all the way from that really intimidated first year freshmen to I don't know the president of the United States giving speech I think that be an awesome tool to add to your arsenal of making this successful and it seems like it would be helpful tool for all your instructors. That's a great suggestion. A big struggle that we all have is explaining the event and what it what will mean what will look like to the students during the course of the semester because they think things like oh it's a speech and then you know the same thing I'm going to do in class I'll just go and do it some other classroom and then no that's not the case they're going to do it in the city Plaza and there are going to be 300 people there watching and you know transients coming by and you know community members and it's going to be messy and dynamic and public and all of those cool things and so I think having a student perspective piece would be like you said a great addition that maybe we could show our students early on something we'll talk to visual not just verbal but visual so they actually see and they can see themselves I'm sorry I have a I think that's an awesome idea and there's another instructor Kelly Frederick's who's at Duke College is an English professor and she was involved in this last year and her students did sort of a small scale version of that so she she has they started putting that kind of stuff together they were students that were in my class and her class so she's a smaller version of that but we haven't done like how can we make how can we actually make that happen because I think it would be a great tool for us and at the end of every semester we look at them and we're like these are really interesting and then we kind of like put it away you know so that's a really great thing one of the things that might work well with that which also gives us Kevin Segway something else that we do that's useful for other programs that are considering this is it might be a good thing for one of the other upper division comm classes to dive into and help facilitate that and work with the students maybe students that have did it as freshmen now could come back as sophomores or juniors and help it but one of the things I didn't want to speak on in this is that we use the students that we have throughout our program to help with the great debate so for example one of the things that I helped with the great debate is moderate facilitate breakout discussion groups so we get students together and what has been great over the last years a couple years we've had students from our upper division classes come in and help be moderators in that and get training so we have an advanced interviewing class which is like a 300 level class and we've had those students come in and help with that and it's been great because it allows students to kind of see it at multiple levels the other thing that's been really critical to making this event happen has been involvement by our forensics program and our view college our student chief of state our forensic suit Peterson has consistently like brought students from her program in to help and watch speeches when we're evaluating them moderate discussions inside that so there's a lot of resources that can be available to your program by drawing on different aspects inside of that and using those individuals and they get pretty into it and I would not be surprised if we asked a few of the forensic students to make videos of the great debate that they would be all over or something like that well and I would just say I would really encourage that the thing that I think a video like this could get away from is you are all enmeshed in communication studies and you've participated in speech giving at a high level as have the forensic students I think what the focus what the 484 group could do is a great focus group with students that have participated to get their kind of narratives about what they were feeling and collect some of that reassessment data but really collect a narrative that comes from that true novice it's so hard for us to shed our experiences and really look at this from that first year student who is not us reaction been with community members like do you have a lot of community members that are audience or you know because again we're talking about this public sphere that doesn't necessarily exist in the wild as it were so to make it happen and so I just want to share your experience about community reactions well on the whole it's been overwhelmingly positive but I mean the theme that I always try and come back to with this sort of work is that it's messy but rewarding because that's what being in the public is and I think it's our obligation as instructors to get our students involved and exposed to that early on because that regardless of what they do next that's their work and our experience though I mean there have been a couple episodes with a handful of community members that have been really difficult and trying one of our first semesters there was somebody that we invited to be part of our evening debate event and did not like the formatants and so and we told them we're not going to modify what we do because you would like to do something else this is sort of what we're doing and so he took to his personal blog which impressed that we're doing this with the students because at least in our town there's a kind of a tension between the students and the rest of the community not so much the community college students but the university students and so there's some myths about the students and people that I talked to are like impressed that we're out there doing this with the students so if they think it's a great idea it's definitely more positive than negative I did once we moved a portion of it out into the city Plaza which in Chico the city Plaza does have a lot of trans-incident throughout the day some of my students expressed concern about that and so I ended up starting to incorporate into the build up to this some training and how to deal with difficult situations it's not so much about civil dialogue it's about dialogue that's kind of a little off you know and you don't quite know how to handle it so I started giving them some advice on what to do if somebody approaches and at what point do you feel that it's a safety issue or at what point do you feel that you can just distract and deflect to move the person on because there is that potential but it's not in public which means that you have to deal with the public that's what it is but one of our issues I think one of the struggles from my perspective of this program is it is supposed to be this big public sphere and it's on a Friday during the day and much of the public is at work so it's mostly students and then we have some politicos and we have university personnel and the occasional group organization it does feel a little weird billing it to students as a big public event when really mostly it's in public with some public stakeholders but a lot of the people are not there because they're at their jobs I would love to get more people there and in some ways I feel like we should be hitting up organizations that have a high level of retired folks or whatever people who might be available during the day it might be interested in these kinds of issues and interested in talking about them just to get a little bit more actual foot traffic from the actual members of the public so that the students get the most bang out of that experience talking to people they don't already know not even just personally know but I know kind of who you are because you're a student like me that's a different thing than whoa who's this? I mean it does explain why the tea party ladies are always there at every event they're unreliable one of the things I didn't want to speak on in relation to that in addition to getting community involvement which is great one of the most important things to make this successful and to make this really link into public sphere of pedagogy is the partnerships that you build with the community leaders we would not be able to do anything near what we do if we didn't have good working relationships with the Chico City Council and City Manager and those types of things so I think that fostering those relationships and finding ways to make those connections are key and maybe exactly you could just speak on how that relationship has evolved and some suggestions for new programs and doing that as we wrap on. Yeah the community building those community connections is absolutely right it is not just important it's essential it doesn't fly without it because they have access to resources and identification of problems and ideas that we just don't and so I think a key way to identify community members is almost always to start with those personal connections like for instance with the Chibo program when it is started they reached out to City Council members of Hayward that are also connected to the candidates and then from there they know other people that are also affiliated with City politics and then it moves from there. One of the things that we've really identified as a possible growth area is advocacy groups they want to make their voices heard right like that's what they're looking for is a platform so when I'm looking for people that are evening debates they're the first people that I call I look up to see who's on what side of an issue where their offices in Sacramento and I pick up the phone and if they can they come after the event and those partnerships actually build over time with a guy that came out a couple of years ago I needed a contact and the hierarchy of the Republican Party for California so there was a guy that participated in our evening event a couple years ago and so I just called him he remembered who I was and then that relationship built from there but identifying those people that you already know through personal professional networks maintaining those and then building on those is essential to the success of the event also essential to the success is acknowledging all the different people and moving parts that make it possible I coordinate the event and often times end up as the face of the event but it's really these folks that are here with me that provide the lion's share of the work in the classroom as former TAs as current adjunct faculty that are making this work across different campuses on top of all these other responsibilities community members and students that make this possible and I want to thank a couple of people that have had a special role in making this possible I already mentioned the center for excellence in learning and teaching students is too important to keep locked in the classroom so get it outside you're watching online we're going to post contact information for this guy at the bottom of this so that you can find more about it thank you thanks Jason basically asked the question yeah so clear I move this now Ryan give me one second it was given to you at Corpse right now it was out of the issues at the beginning but I felt like it came back on after 5 minutes yeah we actually ran a webinar late in the fall that was all about how to start a public sphere program on your own campus including that as a tool kit like spreadsheets and promotional materials and all that stuff so thank you for having me too