 Well, I have the beginning of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome everyone. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's host, its creator, and your guide to the next hour of conversation. Let me just set the stage a little bit here. Starting in early 2020, we at the Forum started looking carefully at the COVID-19 pandemic. We hosted a series of sessions trying to understand what this might mean for higher education. And over the past two and a half years, we've continued that exploration. We've hosted technologists, we've hosted deans, we've hosted students and faculty, trying to figure out how this pandemic is transforming us and what it means for the future of higher education. Today, we're absolutely lucky to have Anya Kamanetz here as a guest. Her most, she has a whole series of books, all of which are delightful and really, really useful, which I commend to you. Her most recent book, The Stolen Year, is a deep dive into what the COVID experience did to kids in the K through 12 space. Now, you might say, Brian, this is a space for higher education. Well, that's a K through 12 is exactly where a lot of our students come from. So I think by talking with Anya, by reading her book, this will give us a vision into students who are starting to set foot in our campuses, so we can learn a lot more about them and anticipate them. But enough about me. Let me just right now bring Anya up because she is the guest of honor today. So let's see if we can hit the right button and say hello to Anya. Where are you today, Anya? Afternoon, everybody. I am in my home office in Brooklyn, North Brooklyn, to be exact. How was Brooklyn today? Very rainy. We had a huge cloud burst right when we were getting at the door to go to school. Very dramatic, very dramatic. Well, Anya, I'm so glad you could join us. This is absolute privilege. And we ask people to introduce themselves in a particular way, which is to say, what are you gonna be working on for the next year? What are the ideas, the topics, the projects that are gonna be taking up most of your mind in time? I'm so thrilled that you asked for this. And I know that we have this shared interest in common. It was announced this week that I'm going to be advising the Aspen Institute on a project to get more climate narratives into children's media. So there's gonna be a task for us. There's gonna be some research we're collecting. If you're interested in media creation, climate communication, nature, education, climate anxiety and climate psychology, these are all, we're gonna be pulling at a lot of different disciplines to get this work off the ground. So super excited. It's a little bit of a sidestep for my normal journalism work, although there's writing involved. Yeah. Wow. Well, congratulations. What a great accomplishment. And that's gonna do a lot of good in the world. That's awesome. Friends, I'm just gonna ask Anya a couple of basic questions to get the ball rolling, but then I wanna get out of the way and let you ask questions. And I guess the first one to ask you about the stolen year is if an 18 year old has lived through the past two years of the pandemic and they're just starting their first year at college or university, how did the pandemic change them into a different being than an 18 year old would have been in say 2019? That's a really great question. First we have to look at the chances that they're headed to college in the first place. I think one of the most dramatic impacts of the past two years, particularly in the United States has been the change in college enrollment, particularly first time college enrollment and particularly community college enrollment. So for our most successful institutions, this is a really big difference. And it is a little bit of a new animal because part of it has to do with the drop in unemployment, their rise in wages for entry level jobs, which tends to have a downward pressure on college enrollment. And part of it has to do with the educational and life dislocations in the past two years. So I wanna tell you about a kid in my book, I call Max. He's the oldest son of five of a teacher living in rural Oklahoma. They're members of the Cherokee Nation. And with a teacher as a parent, Max was really on his way to going to college. And that was his goal. When the pandemic hit, he was faced with a choice between remote learning. His mother really didn't want him to go to school. His school did reopen in the fall of 2020, but she had a lot of safety concerns, especially with five kids total. So he remained remote, but he started putting in more and more hours of Chick-fil-A and he got promoted to $8 an hour. And Chick-fil-A was really taking up a lot of his time. And that was the place he could go. That was a place out of his home where he was able to go, allow to go. And unfortunately, he really drifted out of the college path. And by the time that he was graduating as a senior, his mother had to break it to him that he had lost access to the Oklahoma's Promise College Scholarship. And with it, his free ride to a four-year institution in the state. So he is working right now, going and taking some classes part-time. And it's not really clear exactly where his path is gonna end up. Wow. So that's one key issue that just enrollment overall is down and COVID has helped break access to higher ed. For those who do come, I've heard faculty who are concerned that students will be more anxious or have other psychological stresses. I've heard faculty worried that students will be less academically well-prepared. And I've heard faculty worried that students are just gonna be less socially prepared than they've missed a few years in face-to-face socialization. Is all this true? Is that true? We expect all that. I think it's all supported by the data. This question of missed socialization is maybe not something we were used to hearing about when it came to typically developing young adults, right? Or children even, even children above. No, you start thinking about, you think about socializing your toddlers and your young children. You don't really think about the socialization that happens increasingly with peers, right? In different situations. And that's exactly what we're hearing now that there's behavior loss or there's social emotional loss along with the learning loss. So the question is how do we, how do institutions meet those challenges, right? I think that's, it's very supported by the evidence. We're hearing a lot from young people who say that they're plagued by these concerns. There's a total removal of stigma for talking about mental health in this generation, which I think is a positive in a lot of ways. The question is how do institutions respond? Do you think this means that institutions that teach traditional age undergraduates are going to have a lot more work to do in terms of their socialization vision? Yes, I think it requires thinking creatively about the role that you play within a young person's life and their journey. We really do place a lot of emphasis, especially in the United States on college as a rite of passage and a way that we, people go along the path to adulthood. From in my mind, part of the recovery from the pandemic involves recognizing the untraditional milestones that students may have achieved during this time. They may have seen loss and grief and confronted it in a way that other generations had not. They may have spent more time at home and be in intergenerational settings rather than with their peers. What are the strengths in that? And so how do colleges kind of situate themselves in their young person's journey, knowing that an 18 year old in 2022 might be really different from one in 2020 or any other year? Wow, unconventional milestones. Surviving a family member being ill or themselves getting COVID. Wow, that really does change the socialization. What else should colleges and universities do to better prepare for these students to support them? So, meeting students where they're at can sometimes involve rethinking the way that we do school by predictable levels of expectations. I mean, one thing that students experience when they were remote is control over their time and their space in a way that we don't always offer to college students. Some colleges are extremely flexible and really do it as you want. Other colleges have a lot of time and place and behavior expectations for students and that really varies a lot. So, kind of not taking any of that for granted and saying, well, faculty members learned how to do things totally differently during the pandemic and some of it worked well, some of it didn't. So, can we rethink of our procedures and our expectations that we're placing on students and kind of work with them to bring them up? Maybe you would say, maybe you're doing classes in a way that allow students to speak to each other more often. Maybe they have less in-person time that they're expected to be there just to listen to a lecture but they have more time that they're expected to be out in the community and working on projects together. So, how can that really serve the students' needs? I'm curious, over the past six and a half years, we've talked about how to teach well online in many, many ways. And one of the divides is should online education spend more time doing, we're doing now synchronous often video or more asynchronous, such as discussion boards, email, the LMS, that kind of thing. And that just, this is a big, big gross question. Sorry, just thinking about the COVID generation coming to campus, do you think they would benefit more from synchronous discussion work or more from asynchronous online work? I feel like that's kind of a tools question and what we really need to ask is, what is the strategy in the overall goal? And like in an ideal world, I'd like to see students enlisted in the kind of strategic thinking that takes place. So that they can kind of say, and I think for me, you know, for me as an adult now with control over my space and my time, I have the luxury of sitting back and saying, could this meeting be an email? Do I really need to show up to this Zoom? Or actually, do I need to come and talk to Brian in person to cement our relationship? Or is there something, some other activity that we ought to be doing that can bring our learning forward into a new direction, you know? And as a person in the world, I like literally ask those questions every day. Do I need to show up there? Is there a new experience I could be having that is so compelling that it has to be in person? If not, I would rather slack you, you know? And so- I can't really know that show, I think. So in other words, can students, can structural designers and students and professors think about what the goals are? And can you work backwards from the goals to the medium or the model? And then I think, you know, you're probably going to be asked to offer the same course in multiple modes, either simultaneously or sequentially anyway, because that's what students are conditioned to demand. Well, thank you. That's a great, great answer. And I love how it takes the students into a position of strategy and reflection and power. We have, let me stop interrogating you because I want to make sure that everybody gets a chance and friends, the forum is here for you. So again, please just reach down to the Q&A button. The question mark, about the type in your queue or hit the raised hand button if you want to join us on stage. I promise that we will be as kind as we possibly can be. And a couple of questions have already come up. One is a two-parter, and this is from our good friend, Nate Angel. So let me just read one part after another. So the first part is, I follow on you as we're pretty closely, but have rather stolen year yet. I see strong evidence that the way education was provided during the pandemic has not served learners well. But, and here's the second part. I also see evidence that pandemic was not handled well. It's a public health crisis. How could both of these issues have been handled better? So both education and the pandemic as a whole. Yeah, yeah. So we're really gonna, we're gonna go in the wayback machine here. I think there's a lot to be, so this was a once in a century, perhaps once in a millennium type of challenge. And nobody's gonna respond perfectly. Many countries took very different paths. And it didn't seem that the level of money that you have in your society or the level of scientific or technological sophistication in your society was a deciding factor in who was successful. There were factors of geography, factors of demography, certainly. But from the countries that quote unquote won the pandemic, South Korea, you can say Vietnam, New Zealand, right? These are countries, Japan, that had seemed to have a high degree of social trust. Some experience that was relevant. And then two of those in their islands. So a little bit of that is luck, but for America's response to the pandemic, we have to highlight the incredible battering that our social trust took, especially over the several years leading up to the pandemic. The attacks on institutions and sources of expertise. This is a thing of great relevance to people in the academy. And although we had incredible scientific and technological expertise that allowed us to get at a running sprint to a vaccine in a way that the world had never seen. And a lot of that is credited to America. We weren't able to do these other things that seemed so important. And honestly, a lot of those failures are failures of education. They're failures of public education. They're failures of communicating messages to people in a way that is trustworthy and simple and honest and is honest and clear about the fact that our knowledge of the virus is changing at the same time. And we seem to be having a very, very hard time keeping up with that knowledge. But I don't want to editorialize. That was a great question, Nate. And Anja, I bet is gonna keep whacking out that question for the rest of this hour at different points. The, we have a question that came in from a lot of strategic questions. And here's one from our friend, Tom Hames, who asks, if you can come back to your previous point, can you address the particular decline among college community colleges? Yeah, that's such a great question. And I want to bring, I don't know the context that everyone, well, I heard that most people who hear from the US, I was giving a presentation in Canada and it was astonished to realize that they have not experienced this decline that we have. And we have this very dramatic decline. And I think that's important when you think about community colleges because, you know, Canada has a very public heavy and affordable to the public system. And that is what our community colleges are meant to offer. So when we're thinking about community college enrollment decline, it is, you know, part of it has to do with the changes in the employment market, but those have been seen in Canada as well, a tighter employment market. Although, I mean, part of our tightening in the employment market has to do with, honestly, the people have died, right? There's a very high death rate in the United States. Most of the people weren't working age, but we still have people that are, you know, have died and people that also can't work because of long COVID. So there are people who say for the moment, I would rather work, but then I think we can't discount this point of dislocation in life course, right? And how people think about and plan their futures. And, you know, what I heard from so many people who were finishing up high school during the pandemic, which was the loss of those milestones and the loss of the ability to plan and to set goals. So I think it's a massive challenge. I mean, we already had a very large, some college, no degree and dropout, stopout population, adult learners. We're gonna have more, I mean, optimistically we're gonna have more of them and that's where the college going is going to increase from in the coming years. And I hope that happens with the Inflation Reduction Act and new green jobs being created. There's one other factor that I would mention and that would be the downturn in immigration during the pandemic, which probably is a big factor, especially in large cities. Well, and you nailed that with Tom because Tom lives in the Houston area. Yeah. Which is definitely a large city and definitely one for whom immigration plays a major role. Well, Tom, thank you for the really good question. And Anya, I appreciate your deep dive into that. We have more questions coming up and friends. Again, this is a place for you to ask your questions. And one comes from our good friend, Kiel Dooj. Kiel asks about the Loan Forgiveness Plan. What do you think about the Biden Loan Forgiveness Plan? It doesn't exist under my cost problems, which in his view are largely caused by higher risk credential monopoly. So what do you think about this? I think that the Student Loan Forgiveness Plan is best understood as an absolute triumph of organizing over many, many years by dedicated people who saw this as a area where they could change the meaning of student debt and the bargain that had been offered to generations of students. It serves as targeted, racially targeted and economically targeted correctly, relief for the middle class and working class in America. It represents something that Biden could do with the stroke of a pen to change material nature of people's lives in this country. It does not change the final level economics of higher education costs in this country. It is a one-time write-off, right? Might it put some caution into the higher education system that is the beneficiary of our debt financed tuition scheme in America? Maybe, maybe not. I mean, they have a lot of other pressures and a lot of other things to think about. We're gonna see state universities following Purdue to say, we're gonna hold tuition down because we are not sure if these loans are gonna be. I mean, colleges don't hurt from this loan forgiveness. This is just the education department, just the federal government. So in some ways, the signal, there's not a clear signal being set to the marketplace in the tuition realm. And so it's almost not even best seen as a higher education intervention as much as it is, like I said, welcome to the middle class. That's an interesting take on it. Keele, I know you have a lot of thoughts about this. If you'd like to say more either, if you want to join us on stage, if your camera or mic are up, but otherwise just give us another Q and A box entry. Thank you for that great question. And thank you for that really, really thoughtful answer. Well, you know, I've been thinking about this since 2006. So it's like, it was, it's wild to see. Because you have a great book called Generation Debt. And this is so important. Yeah. And I appreciate your celebrating new organizers. We have more questions that are just piling up now, which is great. And again, friends, if you haven't had a chance to grab this new book by any of the comments on the bottom left of your screen, there should be a kind of, oh, there it is. There's a visual aid right there. And you should have a link on the screen on the bottom left where you can just go and grab a copy. I'm gonna call it. Because it's an important book for our time. So here's another question coming from Lonnie Morrison. Should we be looking at this period as a permanent change in the educational paradigm? So that stone will be more in control. Sorry, students will be more in control of how and where they learn, i.e. the industrial technique for refugee revolution. Let me flash it from the screen again. That's a really good question. So is this a permanent change in education? I see it as an accelerant to changes underway and the kind of changes that Brian has been writing about and talking about and leading discussions about for a long time. Universities knew that they could do what they did in March, 2020. And many of them had a lot of reasons why they didn't want to. And then they all had to do it. So now that they've all done it, we know that they can do it. So are we gonna make them keep doing it? That's the question. And does emergency remote learning, what lessons does it offer and does it not offer to the transformation in educational offerings? I think there's a sense memory involved in having this experience. And people have positive and negative, but they know that ultimately being able to access a full college degree program anytime, anywhere is a huge boon. And so they're gonna have more demand for it, I think, in the future. I mean, in the chat, a few people have been saying this, that students will want this, that there's a convenience. Do you think universities and colleges will listen? We have a lot invested in face-to-face education. I think the process that's been happening is gonna keep happening, that there's gonna continue to be winners in online and winners in traditional. And there will also be people who do neither successfully. Ouch. Yes, yes, quite. Well, that's a great question, Lonnie, thank you very much. And one of the great things about hosting a journalist is the journalist can fly up with tons of great, great answers in a hurry and really give us a lot to think about, which is wonderful. We have another question that's kind of related to this on from Chelsea Glazum. And Chelsea asks, put this up on the stage, do you anticipate a movement in accessibility within the universal design framework as we move towards a more remote-centered workplace and online coursework? That's a great question. It is. I would say that awareness of disability and the benefits of accessibility has grown a lot during the pandemic because there was a certain leveling of the playing field in the move to remote work as well as remote school. And a broader conversation about inclusiveness and diversity in our society, in the fall, intensifying in 2020. So I think there's reason to hope for that and particularly because universal accessibility design principles are beneficial to everyone. That's the idea. Like I think the famous example is a curb cut which is great for people with rollers or walkers or kings or wheelchairs but also great for people with bicycles or just people walking. So hopefully, hopefully this will be a big click for UDL. Well, that's a great answer and Chelsea, thank you for a really, really good question on those lines. Anya, you are becoming, I think for people today, a kind of Oracle for higher education as a whole. These questions are coming from all directions. Here's the other one that covers it. This is from Rob Gibson. Hello, Rob. This is a question about Kansas. Based in Greece and events in Emporio State University and the firing of 33 tenure track faculty. Is tenure doomed? We're in a cycle of right wing culture war attacks on educational institutions and educational expertise which are multi-front attacks. They include attacks against content of learning in K-12 and higher ed, how professors and teachers conduct themselves out of the classroom as well as these budget-based attacks. Interestingly, we're in the current situation that we're in, oddly enough, we're seeing Republican governors raise teacher pay in K-12, which is a surprising thing that's happening in a couple of places, including in Florida. But I don't think that tenure per se is doomed. I think that the major, the major danger to how students are taught and how universities are staffed is the capital, is the increasing casualization of academic labor. So over a long period of time, yes, like adjunctification is here and it's not going anywhere and it's getting worse and worse in some ways. Is there a counterweight to that in unionization in, or is it going to be a victim of consolidation? I don't know what the ultimate outcome is gonna be, but I know that the end of tenure has been forecast for at least 50 years. That's true, it's true. And it has been declining as a proportion for roughly 30. It's a good question. Thank you, Rob. And, Andy, I'd buy your ability to pivot and turn to that question, because there's a lot going on there. We had a question from Keele and Keele has just followed up. He asks, please get Andy's view on alternative credentialing and skills-based hiring's potential to break the four-year degree monopoly and dramatically lower higher-ed costs. Alternative credentialing and skills-based hiring. I do wanna add on to what's been being said in the chat box. I think it's really important as well to note that there are innovative newer institutions that are changing the role of faculty, sometimes splitting up the role of faculty into success coaches and subject matter experts and kind of the blend of the student services office, along with faculty-based office to make sure that the ultimate goal here is that students succeed. They have someone who cares about them and wants their success that it seems to know them well. And so what if that's coaches, if it's someone in the enrollment, there's a lot of different people who can help that happen. It doesn't have to always be a 10-year track faculty members that does it. Often it's not. So, yeah. Well, first, thanks for going into the chat there. Along those lines, our dear friend, Sarah Sengregorio, says, if she has to answer one more email on the ambiguous now buzzword of students of student engagement, I'm going to scream. I think one of the better part of a quick move to online during COVID was that it was more about relationships than content. And that wasn't a question, but I thought that's a great comment. I just wanted to float that past you. Does that match your understanding of this? I saw the very same thing in K-12. There were online schools when they went remote that were successful because of their preexisting investment in student relationships. I feel her pain with the buzzword stuff, but I also know that there's intentional design of schools and even school support inside, outside school models that can foster that kind of relationship. When you make a person, a coach, a mentor or a teacher responsible for the success of a student and that's aligned with their professional goals. They're going to be recognized for that. They're going to be rewarded for that alongside or instead of other duties, then you are setting students up for success. So I seem to happen in a lot of different kinds of ways. So that takes resources and also the decision to support that? Yes, that's right. It takes deployment of resources. It doesn't necessarily take a bunch of new resources. It just depends on how you use them. No, that's a good point. So the question on alternative credentialing and skills-based hiring, I've been hearing about, well, first of all, there's a lot of alternative credentials out there. There are, and community colleges are a very great place to have them. There are technical certificates and they're constantly being updated all the time. In some ways to me, the proliferation of so many alternatives does less to challenge the good old four year BA than it would if there were fewer options because it's almost, it's like the seven dwarfs. Like there's, it's hard for them to add up to something that's as big and as easy to understand and as traditional as the four year BA. And that's nothing against dwarfs. Well, that's okay. I mean, I do look a bit like a classic dwarf here, at least in the mythical fantasy sense, but that's interesting. I mean, so it may be that that's a marginal or a niche function of hiring, but if, Keele, let me see if I can ventriloquize you a little bit here. Looking at the K through 12 side, I mean, is K through 12, generally speaking, still committed to getting a lot of students out the high school door into a baccalaureate degree? Or is there any appetite in K through 12 for getting students into some kind of alternative credential, be it a certificate or like a credential? As there is a lot of energy on the institutional level for moving students down the chain to the next institution, that is how college, that's how high schools are set up. And it's how they make their name, right? You make your name by the penance that are on the door of the counselor's office, whether you are a public school or a private school, that's kind of how it's done. So getting to the point where you can say, well, I had a student who started a business and I had a student who was a contestant in a reality show, I had a student who moved to Alaska and started homesteading, and we celebrate those paths as well, that takes a little bit of courage, a little bit of vision, and it takes a little bit more time to explain what that looks like. We don't have, and I actually completely agree that centralization and formalization, that's almost anathema to what we're talking about because we're talking about people having more choices and more paths, but it's harder. But the pressure, there is pressure coming from the student side because students do have access to see different kinds of life paths and helping them figure out how they can see those other paths and then they'll be pushing the schools to give them what they need to get there. I wonder if social media helps play a role in that just because it makes alternative life paths so much more visible, so much more accessible. I think it can. I was just talking with Abby Felix, she started the nonprofit Global Citizen Year as sort of an intentional way of promoting the gap year idea, which was seen as sort of a privileged thing, but there's no, there's also AmeriCorps and there's national service programs. The biggest thing the federal government could do would be to create a national service program to help us transition to green energy and to help these kids find a way into communal life again that they may have missed at anyone can take this idea, this history. It's not original either. But then you could say, well, are you going to college? No, are you going to the Army? No, I'm going in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Which I love. This is just a huge opportunity for that right now and I think we have precedence for American history and it wouldn't be that hard. I believe that it was an early demand of the sunrise movement in the Green New Deal. They being young people themselves saying, we'd love to be able to work in this direction. Yep, I haven't seen the yet, but maybe there's still time. We have more questions coming in and friends, you can tell that Anya is a dynamo answerer and so please bring up your questions. And if you wanna join us on stage, again, just hit the raise hand button and we'd like to talk. We have a question here from Rachel Gock. I hope I mispronounced it correctly and we bring that question up on the screen for us all, which is, how can elite or well-funded private institutions advocate or be good partners for their neighbor community colleges? Yeah, that is a really good question. I recall some minimal attempts to do this when I was at Yale between Yale and Gateway Community College, which is very close to us. I think that there's definitely opportunities to do knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer as long as you understand that it's not a one-way knowledge transfer. If that community colleges often have the edge when it comes to integrating with local workforce needs and institutions as well as the communities that they're embedded in. So how can that be a two-way knowledge transfer, a knowledge and culture transfer? And can it be something where there's hands-on learning involved or professors travel from one to the other or students are able to create their own collaborations? That would be great, that would be great. And that's not something that's blazingly new, that's something that we could do. And I think when it comes to climate change, this is one of the areas where we can have a lot of climate partnerships on those levels. Great question, Rachel, thank you. And friends, we have time for more of your questions and comments. And I'd like you to feel free to share yours. I'd like to put out one question based on your book directly on you. I'm wondering about how to support the mental health of these students who have gone through a wide range of traumas. And this is a generation that's going to be entering higher education for the next 10 years. And thinking about first graders, thinking about eighth graders who have gone through two plus years of sickness, injury, death, economic devastation, political chaos. And I'm thinking about colleges and universities and we're not always the most humane and I'm wondering what can we do to just better provide for the mental health of these students? Do we need to train our faculty to be able to do that? Should we just expand our psychologists on staff? Is there a technological solution? What do you think? I love this question and it's been something I've been giving a lot of presentations about. In the book, I sort of talk about a couple different paradigms. So first of all, I think it's really important to underline what you're saying, which is that this is not a next couple of years problem, this is the next decade and a half problem. There's a great documentary out called Katrina Babies about the generation and I write about this in the book that going through Katrina as a young reporter from New Orleans and seeing the impact on kids 10 years later and then now 15 years later, 17 years later. And they're kids and the people that grew up to have children and then those kids. So I honestly think that the best, I mean, yes, we need more mental health practitioners. Yes, there is a role for social emotional awareness. I would like to put in a plug for something I found about recently called mental health first aid, which is an eight hour training that anyone who deals with young people can take and it empowers you to be a first responder to someone in a various kinds of mental health crises. And it's supported by peer reviewed evidence. So check it out. So, but I honestly think that the disciplines and the scholarship that university professors work on can itself be of help because there is a need, young people who are moving past a difficulty in their lives really need a strengths-based approach. They need people who can see them as strong empowered people who got through something tough and are capable of learning and growing and having a new perspective on what they went through. That is who these kids are. And we get them there through whatever discipline it is that you love that they are then empowered to excel in by engaging with that discipline. I mean, I have a soft spot for the humanity. So I would say do it with poetry, do it with literature, do it with history, the history of incredible challenges that people have faced, but you can do it with biology, you can do it with ecology. And, you know, and connecting and inspiring people, that's the number one job, right? Being their therapist, being their counselor is not your number one job, but connecting with and inspiring them. That is the number one job for faculty members. Thank you, thank you. That's a really great answer. And I, yeah, this is gonna be a long-term thing. We have more questions coming in, which is great. And as usual, I should say on you, several people wrote in to say you have, that they're fans of yours. They've been reading you for a while. And here comes another one. We have Nate Angel who refers to your most recent experience. He asks, did you see any parallels to what you saw in education while you were in Ukraine, reporting there in the war, and what you saw in the pandemic in the US? Yeah, hi, Nate. It's also nice always nice to connect to you on Twitter and thanks for showing up here. Yes, definitely. I mean, concretely, Ukraine pivoted its children to remote learning immediately when the crisis happened. And I was able in, I believe April of, maybe March of 2022 to drop in on a Google Meet classroom that was meeting with the Ukrainian teacher who had come to Western Ukraine with her students who were in Poland and Germany and some of them back home under bombardment on their phones and they're having English lesson together, a group of six graders. So that's, you know, it's both, it's awe-inspiring, it's terrifying, it's very, very sad. The war has directly tapped educational infrastructure in the country, it's also displaced, I think two thirds of the nation's kids either inside or outside the country. So there's an incredible burden, incredible disbursement, diaspora of people who have educational needs, including wives and mothers who are displaced who need new education so they can work in their new contexts as well as a huge language learning need for the displaced populations. And then the need to kind of rebuild the country, eventually they come back in peace. So the disruption is, it's disruption on top of disruption, it's hard to compare because they had the COVID disruption and then they had the war disruption and they had some of the tools and practices were able to be repurposed from one to the other. But the overarching question is like, is this the new normal? Do we just try to accustom ourselves as a society to have an incredibly huge disruption for large numbers of every population every single year? What about if you, you know, university students in Pakistan, there's been a whole thing about university students dispersed from Syria. So yeah, Puerto Rico, absolutely, right. So and Puerto Rico school system received a huge shock with Maria that it really hasn't fully recovered from. And then part of that shock was a privatization shock similar to Katrina. So yeah, this is keeping happening. Online is important to have as an emergency measure and the kind of planning that we need to do in a society that is marked by this kind of instability boggles the mind. But when you think about the people that started the university system in medieval Europe without in the year 1000, I mean, they kind of had similar problems, but they didn't have the internet. So maybe we can take some inspiration. I think we can. And thank you, thank you. Good question. And friends, I want to bring up a very special video guest. This is Steve Gottlieb, who is the founder and leader of Schindig himself. And he has a question about Zoom pedagogy and how we've been doing video wrong versus how to do it right. So let me bring Steve up on stage. Hello, Sarah. Hi. Hi, Anya. Great to see you. Thanks for having me. So I was struck by your comments not so long ago on Michael Horne's podcast about the damage that followed Katrina. And in light of that, also the recent articles and the Times and the Wall Street Journal about the plummeting test scores based on the two new studies that came out that really condemned virtual school on Zoom for having produced very poor results. And I wanted to get your thoughts on both the why of that, why you think test scores so dramatically fell, which seems to be, you know, and also whether the wholesale embrace by academia off Zoom, which has a lot of technical limitations. You can't privately chat with fellow students. The teacher can't circulate easily around the class to give individualized attention all the things that Chindig does, if I could give a plug, but, you know, that that architecture of Zoom and its wholesale embrace is part of the cause for that the failure of pandemic classes and that the Academy really needs to rethink. It's, you know, it's kind of an embrace of a oversimplified classroom model that doesn't allow a lot of different class dynamics. That's a complex and multi-layered question. Thank you for that. I think that the main reasons that Zoom school failed in K-12 doesn't have much to do with Zoom. So there were a lot of problems on the other side of the screen. There was insufficient connectivity under connectivity, lack of devices, lack of a quiet room to be in, lack of an adult supervision. And mental health professionals who reached out to me early on in the pandemic just pointed out that there is just for children, you know, they progress through a very concrete, you know, tactile stage of learning. As a baby, they are putting everything in their mouth and then they're, you know, they're growing through stages of learning physically in a room and there are many, many benefits for young children all the way through grade school of having physical, you know, added on lesson plans, which you don't always take full advantage of, but we wanna have that there. And there's also this factor that we often take for granted or try to limit, which is children learning, being motivated to learn by being surrounded by their peers and that can have a positive and negative impact. It's quite complex, but they're motivated by their teachers and the relationship with their teachers and access to all of that was very limited during the pandemic. It was a very low number of kids who had the executive function, the internal motivation and or the adult Sherpa person with them all the time to keep them motivated into school. It was so, and another teacher said it to me the best that it was the end of compulsory schooling because now, you know, there are not that many kids, there are kids who will stand up and walk right out of your classroom. There's a percentage of kids that will do that. There will a percentage of kids who will passively resist everything you say, but in Zoom school, walking out of the classroom is clicking over to a tab where there's YouTube. So it's way, way easier. And given that removal of friction, you had a lot of kids who passively played true it, including many kids that I know for weeks on that, right? And so these are pretty tough problems for any staff for a platform to solve. That doesn't mean that we can't imagine there were kids that thrived and they thrived because of the removal of distractions in the classroom. They thrived because the classroom is a hostile place for them, you know, not a beneficial place. They thrived because of the control over their environment that they were encouraged or coached to use in a positive way. So, and then there are kids who, you know, there are a lot of kids who can't physically go to school or be physically in a whole school day, right? So can we make online learning work for some kids in K-12 with the right kind of design, pedagogical design, the right kind of instructional support? And I would agree with you, part of that successful, I think yes, and I would agree with you that that successful model might include a platform that allows for easier interaction and invites teachers to use more interactive classroom models. I wonder, you know, I appreciate that the question is very complex and does involve all those different modalities. But I do wonder why there is not more self-examination amongst academia about, you know, there used to be in my early, you know, years in dealing with online education, peer-to-peer education was a big, big buzzword pre-pandemic. Then, you know, Zoom class hit and peer-to-peer, you know, engagement was not, you know, everything had to be public and there is an erosion of the ability to create trust when and to be open to vulnerability to show weakness when everything has to be done in front of the entire class and there's no ability to get reassurance or counsel and help and all the rest that comes from both peer-to-peer, knowing that other people are similarly situated or teacher intervention. And I wonder why there isn't more soul searching amongst academia because now you hear them, you know, New York school system, you know, as others are continuing on with virtual Zoom classes as if there was no problem, as if there was no deficiency in the provision of online education that happened in the pandemic and it was just the best that could be done. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a very, it's hard because there wasn't a deliberative process leading up to the pivot, right? And so going back now and trying to, and now people might be comfortable with the path that they've chosen. So there's some path dependency to it as well. That's a good point. Thanks so much for your great work, really. Oh yeah, thank you so much. Well, thank you. And thank you, Steve, for Shindig as well as for being yourself. Thank you. Thank you. That's an example of the video question and we have another video question that's coming up and this is from Tom Hames, who is back in his famous blue room. And he's had a couple of questions and I just want to bring a lot of stage on you because his questions are always so deep. And here we go, Tom. Hi there. So just a quick comment on what Steve was saying though. You know, one of the common mistakes we make about the pandemic and how we reacted to remote teaching is to focus on the technology and that's not really the question here. It's a, and I wanted to get your response on a deeper question of, I feel like the pandemic broke communities in a lot of ways because communities of learning in particular and that this was a big underlying factor in how people were able to succeed or not in these environments. And people didn't think that this was the problem and we lost a lot of informal learning that we didn't recognize as being how important that was to that process. People just running into each other in the hall, sitting around in the library, cafeteria, whatever, talking about what was just talked about in class or studying together. And all those things evaporated in a lot of different ways. Also people were isolated physically from each other and that's a problem too. That's not Zoom's fault. That's not the platform's fault. I think that a lot of that has to do with people understanding how to use the technology. And I think you can use Zoom badly and I think you can use Zoom well. I mean, I do a lot of individual meetings with my students now that I didn't do in the same way because it's so, the frictionless ability to just pull up a Zoom window and meet with somebody. And so that was a big shift that I did when I went to remote teaching. I mean, I've already been trying to go to, I mean, I really focus on individualized instruction a lot and I wrote a book about my experience with that as well. But I wanted to get your feeling on this lack of community, especially among more vulnerable students. I think that more advanced learners are able to learn much more, although they definitely are helped with an active community. I think more advanced learners are able to learn more independently without, on their own, whereas more vulnerable students really need people to be around them, both peers and support personnel to help them through that process. And I wanted to know what your thoughts were on that. It's kind of relates back to my earlier question about community colleges because they tend to attract those more vulnerable learners. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's an important observation. I mean, I guess I might soften your observation a little bit to say that the pandemic tested communities and many communities found that they broke apart or they fell short or they found new divisions or things that were easier to smooth over face to face were very hard to resolve in other forms of communication. But I also found that both personally and professionally, for me, being very intentional about how I connected with people and connecting with them consistently in gatherings like this one, Brian, helped me feel like I had community and when the pandemic emerged and we could see each other in person again, I felt the strengths of those connections. I felt that they were real. And so what the pandemic challenges to do and certainly this is not the only event that's gonna make people feel divided or apart from each other, it challenges us to be really intentional about how we build community and with whom and who are we including, who are we not including? Absolutely. That was a welcome from New Orleans too, wasn't it? From Katrina? Yes, absolutely. And that was something I experienced for firsthand because while there was outside intervention of various kinds, there was also an incredible explosion of mutual aid and people developed muscles that was also based on a substrate. So there's mutual aid and pleasure clubs in New Orleans are part of the fabric of the city and they were started as burial societies and the second, the famous second lines are right. Those are people coming together, bringing a little money together so that they can bury their dad. And so people have that cultural memory that comes up and when they need each other they know how to find each other again. Yeah, and it also exploded that community. I mean, we saw the shrapnel from that in Houston. Our percentage of people who are connected to New Orleans in some way went up dramatically after Katrina. And I think that that's actually in some ways both a good and a bad by-product. I mean, it's a good by-product because it brings us communities closer together but it's a bad by-product from the New Orleans core because they lost a lot of people and scattered to the universe, yeah. That's the point is of an exile or a diaspora. That's exactly what the people in Ukraine are experiencing now. There's the feeling that the community experience in the faraway place, the memory of the home place, the people at home who lost and the people who are far away and miss their home. And so it's a big part of the human condition. Right. Of course, with COVID, we exploded it and didn't go anywhere. Yes. That's what's so totally, we were internal refugees to quote a little German historical term from the Nazi period. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Conrad Adenauer. Sorry, I just wanted to- Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, thank you, John. Thank you. Thank you. And stay safe there. Thank you. We had a time for one last observation and one quick question. The observation is from the splendid George station. And he reminds us that two years of the pandemic in Zoom made visible. It was already a deficiency of classroom teaching, which I thought was just an excellent way of putting this. Yeah. I guess I'll take the moderator's privilege to ask one last question of my own before we have to go. And that is what have we learned from this experience of COVID education that we can apply to the experience of education during the climate crisis? That's a great question. Well, we keep being re-shown until we learn that the structures of inequality in our society are going to determine the fates of people more so than any disaster to come because they're the underlying landscape, right? And so any attempts to recover from any disaster or to shore up our responses to the next one has to be informed by our understanding of the underlying inequities and our attempts to redress those. Yeah, yeah. And that's gonna be the first step in many ways if we do it right. Anya, we can only do it right with your help. Thank you so much for being a fantastic guest. It's wonderful to be with you. What's the best way to keep up with you in your work? Should we follow you on Twitter or should we? Yeah, yeah. I think that would be the easiest. I sent in a monthly newsletter as well which you can find linked at my bio on Twitter which is Anya Win Anya. Fantastic, fantastic. Well, in the meantime, good luck with this new media production of the climate crisis for kids. And congratulations once more on this newest book which is so, I think so vital for everything we're doing. And above all, thank you for being a great guest in the program. We're looking forward to hearing from you next time. It was a lot of fun. Thanks, Brian. Take care Anya. Thank you everybody for your great questions and for your great thoughts. I think we have a lot in our minds right now. If you'd like to keep talking about this, you just got Anya's Twitter account and you can also tweet at me, Brian Alexander, or at Shindig events, use the hashtag FTTE or you can head to my blog, BrianAlexander.org to learn still more. If you'd like to dive into the past into our previous sessions on COVID, we have quite a bit as well as course sessions on teaching and learning. So just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive to learn more. If you'd like to look at our future sessions where you have a whole bunch of topics coming up, just go to forum.futureofeducation.us. And if you have something that you'd like to share, that you'd like me to share with all of you, please drop me a note and I'd be glad to do that. Now, with all of that, thank you all for being with us this week. I really was on your statement about the importance of the online community really resonated with me here. It's been a pleasure to do this work with all of you. Please everybody take care, be safe and we'll see you next time online. Bye bye.