Instructional Ecology

May 09 2024 6

Instructional Ecology Podcast artwork

A community college is such a complex and living ecosystem. This podcast picks up the webs that should be connecting us and tends to the ecology of our college that binds us in our shared mission of teaching the community. What do you teach? How do you teach it? How could we learn from each other? Created by the Center for Teaching Excellence, Instructional Ecology is created about and for the teaching community at Midlands Technical College in Columbia, South Carolina but can be relevant to and inspiring to anyone teaching in any community.

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Make It New

May 09 2024 70 mins

In our season finale for Season 4: Facing Failure, we have a conversation with Art professor Josh Vincent about the inevitability of failure in ceramics classes and the joy the intertwining of success and failure can bring. We’re at the stage of a journey through the underworld where we have returned to hearth and home. We sit back among our family and friends and tell our storie

Failure Growing Beautiful

Apr 25 2024 69 mins

We begin to think about return from the underworld. In myths of journeys to the underworld, the protagonists must always figure out how to return alive. So, what’s the trick to allow you return safely and bring whatever treasure or knowledge back with you to use in life on the surface, in the sunlight? Today, we spend time with a part of the college that depends on constantly eng

A Story of Grief

Apr 11 2024 62 mins

Instead of a story of failure, today’s episode is a story of grief. It is a literal story, a work of fiction, based on an actual event.I’m in conversation with English professor Andrea West because when I was asking anyone who came within earshot of me about whether there was a place for loss and grief in higher education, she said something unusual. She said, well, I think the

Brief Failure Season Hiatus

Feb 22 2024 6 mins

Hello, my community. Your host will be out on medical leave for a few weeks, so the Failure season will experience a short delay. Listen in for details.

Loss and Grief in Higher Education

Feb 08 2024 70 mins

This episode is another chance for us to consider the emotion around failure, which most of our instructional community acknowledges is something that higher education would really rather avoid dealing with. The guiding question is: what is the place for loss and grief in higher education? We return to three voices about failure: Professor Elena Martinez-Vidal, counselor Cyntrell L

A Story of Failure

Jan 25 2024 34 mins

This is our final stand-alone failure story of the season. We added this story series to this particular season because we found that a number of faculty and staff are quietly telling students their own stories of failure. We want to amplify and encourage this thoughtful practice. With this episode, we’re going straight to the top of our college to our current college president,

Sustainable Connections: Expectations matter

Jan 18 2024 5 mins

The next FSL Common Read Zoom is January 26th and we'll be talking about Chapter 4: Expectations Matter! Here, the authors define what they mean by establishing and effectively communicating high expectations and we look at a few of the questions our community can take up from the book. These questions may guide our conversation on the 26th so this is a jump start! Text from pages

Failure and the Institution

Jan 11 2024 63 mins

Happy new year, my community.Today’s episode is the first of a pair that brings our questions of this podcast season to administrative leadership. I wondered – what does failure look like from that vantage point? Instead of looking at student success on an individual level, on a class level or even a program level? What if we looked at it from a holistic, institution-wide conte

A Story of Failure

Dec 21 2023 41 mins

In our third story of failure for the season, on the shortest day of the year, we spend the core of the year with someone who is at the core of this season. William Golston is an advisor for the School of STEM and has been thinking about our questions since last season when he and Professor TJ Kimel shared with us how they talk about their own failures with students. In this story

Talking Through Failure

Dec 07 2023 49 mins

As we enter Persephone Days here in Columbia, when we drop below 10 hours of daylight in 24, we again try to sit in that pause when things have gone wrong and we're unsure what to do next. We talk with Tinesha Croom who is both an advisor and a faculty member at the college. Her perspective in both of these positions offers important perspective on student response to failure and h