Joseph M. Murphy is the director of the Center for Innovative Pedagogy. He came to Kenyon in 2001 as a librarian and technology consultant, and served as the director of information resources in Library and Information Services from 2006 to 2011.
He is a rockin’ DJ on the #ds106 radio station. Yes, that is a university class with a radio station. How many classes you know of with their own student run radio stations?
Becca
I’m so glad the university has people who can think about this 24/7.
That sentence led to an epiphany for Joe Murphy. As the Director of the Center for Innovative Pedagogy, Joe helps faculty members identify the networks of support that help students, and an early career faculty member shared the observation above.
Faculty members are not trained for helping the whole student–if a student comes into our class panicked about their kid’s childcare situation, faculty members can offer empathy, but can’t really problem solve. Thankfully, universities have many folks who can offer help. (At UWB, for example, we have emergency grants that can help in situations like the childcare one. I detail more of our academic and personal support systems in my syllabus.) Joe asked the question “How do we knit the social connections to point students to support?”
Joe’s obvious care for students reminds me of Nel Noddings’ ethics of care. We explored what care and emphasis on relationship mean in college. That reminded me of Cooper et al.’s (2017) paper showing that in a large lecture hall, even the perception of an instructor knowing students’ names (even if the instructor is actually reading the names from a list) helps build relationship, as well as Tanner and colleague’s work on instructor talk–the things we tell students that aren’t related to content (Seidel et al. 2015, Harrison et al. 2019, Ovid et al. 2021). Just yesterday I was reading an extension of this work that looked at the instructor talk delivered through the learning management system (Murray and Osterhage 2024). I was inspired to ask Joe how I can add comments that reflect an ethics of care when I’m grading–the way my grading scheme is set up, I spend more time offering comments to students who may want to resubmit their work. But that means the students who are already meeting or exceeding expectations get short shrift. Joe offered the lovely idea of giving students “performance reviews” at a couple of points during the quarter. This could be a time for more holistic reflection on how they’re doing in the course. I’m gonna try it!
Joe means it when he talks about his ethics of care. Here’s a video of his reflections leading up to and participating in a rebuild event in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina.
Todd
Two things from the conversation with Joe have rumbled through my thoughts these last couple days.
1 The idea of a Center for Creative Pedagogy is interesting. We need one.
2 Networks of Care – how do we create these? Who’s job is to try to create a culture of care?
I know there are grant funded centers for creative pedagogy, and some are just a fancy name for the universities TLC. I love the idea and wish the word creative were more often used in TLC visions and descriptions. “Creative” sounds better to me than the oft used “research-based” this or that. I don’t think the notion of creativity excludes the research, it just moves a step beyond it into the world of exploration. Maybe it is like a version of “creativity is more important than knowledge” but applied to the practices of teaching. Anyway, I tend to see teaching more like the art of pottery than most.
Networks of Care. Yes to that one. Even if it is a very small network, it makes a difference. In our constant desire “to scale” stuff, I think we have nearly completely lost the values of care beyond emojis in emails and sugary language form administrators.
This little group here, our teaching and learning on the open web community is a good example, or has been, of care. I think most of us show up for each other, not some specific content or mandate.
So I will say that I only know Joe from the #ds106 community and not a lot about his work there in Kenyon. But I’ll add here that he is a creative. And for this meeting it was fun to note that Chelsea, Chris, and Joe were all contributors to the great 106 Songs About School Playlist. That was an epic event.
Here is the playlist.
One item that Joe noted was that he sees how much of the course content is focused on the middle, yet the focus is often on the high achievers and low performers. I know from working for years with struggling students, if you don’t meet each one where they are, all is lost. And as a parent of pretty “high performing” daughters, finding a space that was both caring and pushed them was really hard. They both attended a small Christian school where I am pretty sure the small class size allowed them to move forward at a pace that suited them.
