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What Relevant Teaching Means, How It Feels, Why It Matters, and What It Requires

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Jean Bartunek discusses what research relevance means in management teaching and highlights the insufficient attention that has been given to the meaningful and emotional aspects of relevance in classroom settings.

Image courtesy of interviewee. January 15, 2024

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This video video recounts a discussion about the motivations and insights behind a joint paper authored by the speaker and Isabelle Wr, a former doctoral student. The authors emphasize that curriculum reform is often narrowly focused on content delivery without considering the emotional and personal meanings that educational items may evoke for students. They argue that discussions surrounding topics such as diversity, equity, and inclusion can generate strong emotional reactions and shape student experiences in significant ways.

Through reflections on past studies and classroom experiences, particularly in management and organizational behavior courses, the authors highlight that instructors often overlook the importance of engaging with students' feelings and perspectives. They discuss various types of knowledge utilization, including instrumental, conceptual, and symbolic uses of research findings, which can influence student reactions and engagement.

One notable vignette involves Isabelle’s online class during COVID, where discussions of diversity led to rich emotional exchanges among students, contrasting with less engaging methods that delivered information without interaction. The authors stress the need for instructors to be attentive to student reactions, understanding that emotional engagement can enhance learning and meaning-making beyond simple content comprehension. Overall, they advocate for a more reflective teaching practice that considers students' experiences and feelings in relation to the curriculum.

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What motivated it was a few things.

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Actually. Let, let me say first of all

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that this is a joint paper with Isabelle Wr,

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who is a former student of mine, doctoral student of mine,

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who is now on the faculty at Montclair State University.

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And she was very much,

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a co-partner in this whole process.

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What motivated, it was several experiences

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that made us aware that when

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people talk about curriculum reform,

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they are completely missing the fact that any item

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that's in the curriculum may have some kind

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of particular meaning

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or evoke particular emotions for students.

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When people talk about curriculum form, they basically say,

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you have to teach this item,

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or you may not teach this item.

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Like one of the, conflicting issues

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that's going on in the United States these days is

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what should be done in terms of teaching diversity,

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equity, and inclusion.

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And some states are saying, don't do that,

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or, the only place you could do that is in the curriculum.

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So, so this was the starting point, the awareness

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that everybody's talking about curriculum when they talk

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about educational change.

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Nobody's talking about anything

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beyond just conveying the content.

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I'd been part of a study a few years

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before in which my co-authors

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and I had just asked students

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to comment on, to think about, to comment on,

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well, a number of things.

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But one of them was the, the finding in a number

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of studies that the more intelligent you are,

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the more likely you are to be a success at work.

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And what we had found in those studies was that

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a statement like that isn't just a factual statement.

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It evokes all kinds of reactions on the part of students.

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If, if, if I think I'm intelligent, then I say, well,

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of course, and let me give you six examples of

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how my intelligence showed through.

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If I know I don't do well at school, I know I, you know, I,

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i, don't have great grades, then my reaction is,

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well, that's stupid.

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And it's stupid because look at what good work I've done,

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even though I'm not intelligent.

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So we had become aware that,

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that a lot of, not, maybe not a lot,

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but a good deal of curriculum and organizational behavior

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and management courses is likely to touch

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On how students feel about themselves.

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And it's, and how they will respond to it will depend,

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will depend then, not just on what the topic is,

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but what it evokes in them.

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I don't have any particular critique of

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the curriculum itself,

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but the critique is of what professors think they're doing

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with the curriculum.

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Are they just, as my friend Jane McKenzie says,

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are they just deliverers of the curriculum?

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And that's the only thing they have to do.

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The the critique is based on the,

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on our experiences.

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Isabelle said, my experiences like in that study

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and a couple other things, that

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you can't just convey information

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and assume that it's all equal

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and that as long as students get something right on a test,

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everything as well.

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How's critique, as you mentioned, was published in 1978,

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and it was actually part of a chapter, which is

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not noticed anywhere near as much as it should be.

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But what he, what he was focusing on is what are uses

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of scholarly research?

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And he described three different uses.

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One of them is instrumental.

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So for example, I reach a conclusion, say that

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the high, more intelligent you are,

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the more successful you're going to be at work.

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So instrumental says something like,

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well, I'm not that smart, so I better not go into a job

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that requires high intelligence.

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I mean, I'm, I'm being a little facetious,

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but this is, it's simple, straightforward,

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does the research give you some specific clues

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and cues about what to do next?

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The second one is conceptual.

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And that has, the contribution has to do

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with helping you think more broadly about topics

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to understand them in more depth.

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And classes often are designed

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to help students get deeper insight

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into something that's going on.

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Um, so it, so it,

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it should be not just I teach you specific skills

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that you can use tomorrow,

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or I teach you things you should or shouldn't do.

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It's also, I help you understand in much more depth

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what something is about.

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And the third one is what he called symbolic, which is that

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I see a piece of information

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and great, it's what I'm planning on doing anyway.

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So, so I could use that very well

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as a justification for my brilliant decisions to do that.

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I first of all just like

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to mention a little bit about the second vignette, which had

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to do with Isabelle's experience teaching a class.

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So this, this article came out in 2022,

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and it was, the, the class Isabelle,

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the particular class Isabelle was teaching

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that we wrote about was one that was online

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because it was during COVID.

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And one of the things she often does

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in order to make academic material interesting

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and relevant for her students is take short

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research highlights of articles

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and assign them to students to read.

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So it's not a full 30 page article

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and the Academy of Management Review,

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which is unintelligible to most human beings,

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but it's short research highlights.

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So this was one class he was teaching on diversity,

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and she had chosen four possible

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articles on different aspects of diversity

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for students to read.

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And they had to pick one of those articles

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and comment on it in an

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asynchronous online discussion group.

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And the one most of them picked was an article

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that was adapted from, a very interesting paper

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in the Academy of Management Annals that

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basically said, with much more, with a great deal of

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scholarly finding research behind it that people

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who start out being very poor

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often have a more difficult time throughout their life

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in career progressions.

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I mean, it's obviously a much more sophisticated complex

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article and that, but,

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but the basic notion was, if you start out being poor

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with fewer opportunities, that's gonna last.

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So as I'm Montclair State has a,

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has students from a variety of economic backgrounds from it,

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and that probably makes a difference,

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and it's probably important.

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So this, this article evoked an enormous amount

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of emotional reaction when students had to discuss it

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had to say something about it online, a asynchronously,

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and then the,

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when Isabel taught the class online

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and the students could talk together about the article,

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it also evoked a lot of discussion.

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People say, yes, this is true. No, this is not true.

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Gee, this is true, and I feel terrible about it.

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Well, that's just the way things are. Who caress?

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Um, I'll, I'll, I'm, again, I'm

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summarizing this way too much,

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but the important issue is that it wasn't just,

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here is this fact presented to this driveway,

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just accept it is correct.

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It evoked all this feeling.

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So one of the things

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Isabel did make a good instructor was tried teaching the

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articles different ways, one, without discussion one,

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and, and that we didn't write about,

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but the one that nobody could discuss anything,

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they just said, okay, that's the finding.

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So what, let's move on. What's, what's gonna be on the test?

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So one of the things we became aware of

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from her exper from her reflected on experience, and,

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and this is a very important dimension of the whole thing,

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was that how instructors teach a particular topic

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matters a lot.

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And that it's possible

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to teach a topic in a way that's pretty meaningless.

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You know, like, okay, here's the fact who caress.

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It's also possible to teach a topic in a way

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that evokes students engagement in the topic,

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evokes their meaning making about the topic,

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evokes their feelings about the topic,

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and does this in a way that

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it involves a whole class.

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So it's not just me personally thinking this,

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it's me within a setting that, that

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I'm talking about it, other people agree with me,

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other people disagree with me,

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other people have radically different experiences.

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So the question then is, what does an instructor do

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if they want to get the material engaged

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with and meaningful?

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And how do you do that? So it's not destructive.

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And one of the ways, one of the ways, one of the ways

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to do that, for example, is to present a balanced position

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with regard to the first thing we talked about.

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That the, the findings are clear from this one study

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that the more intelligent you are,

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the more successful you're gonna be.

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There are other findings that say,

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who cares about how smart you are?

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The more emotionally intelligent you are,

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the better you're gonna be and something like that.

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So one is to present a balanced perspective

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that doesn't just say X leads to Y,

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but gives people the per the opportunity

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to reflect on different ways of thinking about

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what affects something.

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So that, that's one of the major things is

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how do you present something so it engages students,

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but isn't is

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conceptually stimulating for them?

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Does it make them think, my only option is this,

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my only instrumental option is this, but,

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but that, or it,

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or that isn't symbolic, so well, of course I already do

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that, so I i I do well from the system.

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So yeah, that's a great finding.

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Um, so, so a instructor should be aware

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of those potentials and of the importance of engagement

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and how to do it in a way that's helpful for students.

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Let me just say a little bit about the third vignette.

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Okay, because I, I was supposed to give a,

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a talk at a conference, about three or four years ago,

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and I, I wasn't sure exactly what to talk about.

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So I just, I just took three different classes

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that were introductory classes

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and handed out a piece of pa literally a piece of paper

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that students could literally write on, which is something

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that nobody ever does anymore.

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And this was a way to literally, to maintain anonymity

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because nobody would recognize their writing running

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and then just had them write out something

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that had been meaningful for them in their class

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and how they felt about it.

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And then looked at what were the topics that were meaningful

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and looked at the variety of feelings they had.

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So one of the reasons this is important for me,

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and I think it gets at your question a little, is that

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it says that even when instructors think they're just

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teaching facts, there is something going on

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in the class that's meaningful.

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Well, it might be meaningful because it's so unmeaningful

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because it's so remote from

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what anybody's thinking about it might be.

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And, and if, and if it's so remote from every,

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what everybody's thinking about, they might be bored.

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And that is a very important feeling.

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It's a nonactivated negative feeling.

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So it, in the case Isabel was talking about,

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there were a lot of negative feelings

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that were very activated, that it came with a lot of energy.

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And that is partly what was involved in the, the discussion

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that the students had.

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WW but at any topic that we teach, there is going

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to be some type of feeling

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and energy that we can, we can try to pay attention to.

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And so I guess one of the things I would say is a,

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is an implication for all this is for instructors

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to pay attention to student reactions in class

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in a way that takes into account more than just,

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does it look as if they understand the material?

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Does the material engage them?

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Does that engage them because of what kind of usefulness?

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Because they're excited,

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because they see something more deeply now

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because they're excited, as in the, some

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of the cases I mentioned in the third vignette,

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because now they see a path forward for their future,

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future, something that they could actually do.

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So I, I think guess that would be the,

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the most straightforward implication for all this,

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for the instructor, for any instructor to,

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to pay much more attention to what goes

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beyond the curriculum, to how it,

15:28.325 --> 15:33.225
how it makes students feel, how it makes students think,

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what is it in the discussion of the curriculum topic

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that matters, a whole bunch of things like that.

15:41.075 --> 15:43.805
But, but for that to happen,

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the instructors have to be pretty reflective

15:49.165 --> 15:51.275
about what's going on in their classes.

00:00 - What motivated it was a few things. Actually. Let, let me say first of all that this is a joint paper with Isabelle Wr, who is a former student of mine, doctoral student of mine, who is now on the faculty at Montclair State University. And she was very much,

00:16 - a co-partner in this whole process. What motivated, it was several experiences that made us aware that when people talk about curriculum reform, they are completely missing the fact that any item that's in the curriculum may have some kind of particular meaning or evoke particular emotions for students. When people talk about curriculum form, they basically say, you have to teach this item,

00:53 - or you may not teach this item. Like one of the, conflicting issues that's going on in the United States these days is what should be done in terms of teaching diversity, equity, and inclusion. And some states are saying, don't do that, or, the only place you could do that is in the curriculum. So, so this was the starting point, the awareness that everybody's talking about curriculum when they talk about educational change.

01:24 - Nobody's talking about anything beyond just conveying the content. I'd been part of a study a few years before in which my co-authors and I had just asked students to comment on, to think about, to comment on, well, a number of things. But one of them was the, the finding in a number of studies that the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to be a success at work.

02:01 - And what we had found in those studies was that a statement like that isn't just a factual statement. It evokes all kinds of reactions on the part of students. If, if, if I think I'm intelligent, then I say, well, of course, and let me give you six examples of how my intelligence showed through. If I know I don't do well at school, I know I, you know, I, i, don't have great grades, then my reaction is, well, that's stupid. And it's stupid because look at what good work I've done,

02:40 - even though I'm not intelligent. So we had become aware that, that a lot of, not, maybe not a lot, but a good deal of curriculum and organizational behavior and management courses is likely to touch On how students feel about themselves. And it's, and how they will respond to it will depend, will depend then, not just on what the topic is, but what it evokes in them. I don't have any particular critique of

03:15 - the curriculum itself, but the critique is of what professors think they're doing with the curriculum. Are they just, as my friend Jane McKenzie says, are they just deliverers of the curriculum? And that's the only thing they have to do. The the critique is based on the, on our experiences. Isabelle said, my experiences like in that study and a couple other things, that

03:46 - you can't just convey information and assume that it's all equal and that as long as students get something right on a test, everything as well. How's critique, as you mentioned, was published in 1978, and it was actually part of a chapter, which is not noticed anywhere near as much as it should be. But what he, what he was focusing on is what are uses of scholarly research? And he described three different uses.

04:20 - One of them is instrumental. So for example, I reach a conclusion, say that the high, more intelligent you are, the more successful you're going to be at work. So instrumental says something like, well, I'm not that smart, so I better not go into a job that requires high intelligence. I mean, I'm, I'm being a little facetious, but this is, it's simple, straightforward, does the research give you some specific clues

04:53 - and cues about what to do next? The second one is conceptual. And that has, the contribution has to do with helping you think more broadly about topics to understand them in more depth. And classes often are designed to help students get deeper insight into something that's going on. so it, so it, it should be not just I teach you specific skills

05:20 - that you can use tomorrow, or I teach you things you should or shouldn't do. It's also, I help you understand in much more depth what something is about. And the third one is what he called symbolic, which is that I see a piece of information and great, it's what I'm planning on doing anyway. So, so I could use that very well as a justification for my brilliant decisions to do that. I first of all just like

05:51 - to mention a little bit about the second vignette, which had to do with Isabelle's experience teaching a class. So this, this article came out in 2022, and it was, the, the class Isabelle, the particular class Isabelle was teaching that we wrote about was one that was online because it was during COVID. And one of the things she often does in order to make academic material interesting and relevant for her students is take short

06:24 - research highlights of articles and assign them to students to read. So it's not a full 30 page article and the Academy of Management Review, which is unintelligible to most human beings, but it's short research highlights. So this was one class he was teaching on diversity, and she had chosen four possible articles on different aspects of diversity for students to read.

06:50 - And they had to pick one of those articles and comment on it in an asynchronous online discussion group. And the one most of them picked was an article that was adapted from, a very interesting paper in the Academy of Management Annals that basically said, with much more, with a great deal of scholarly finding research behind it that people who start out being very poor often have a more difficult time throughout their life

07:29 - in career progressions. I mean, it's obviously a much more sophisticated complex article and that, but, but the basic notion was, if you start out being poor with fewer opportunities, that's gonna last. So as I'm Montclair State has a, has students from a variety of economic backgrounds from it, and that probably makes a difference, and it's probably important. So this, this article evoked an enormous amount

08:01 - of emotional reaction when students had to discuss it had to say something about it online, a asynchronously, and then the, when Isabel taught the class online and the students could talk together about the article, it also evoked a lot of discussion. People say, yes, this is true. No, this is not true. Gee, this is true, and I feel terrible about it. Well, that's just the way things are. Who caress? I'll, I'll, I'm, again, I'm

08:36 - summarizing this way too much, but the important issue is that it wasn't just, here is this fact presented to this driveway, just accept it is correct. It evoked all this feeling. So one of the things Isabel did make a good instructor was tried teaching the articles different ways, one, without discussion one, and, and that we didn't write about, but the one that nobody could discuss anything,

09:08 - they just said, okay, that's the finding. So what, let's move on. What's, what's gonna be on the test? So one of the things we became aware of from her exper from her reflected on experience, and, and this is a very important dimension of the whole thing, was that how instructors teach a particular topic matters a lot. And that it's possible to teach a topic in a way that's pretty meaningless. You know, like, okay, here's the fact who caress.

09:46 - It's also possible to teach a topic in a way that evokes students engagement in the topic, evokes their meaning making about the topic, evokes their feelings about the topic, and does this in a way that it involves a whole class. So it's not just me personally thinking this, it's me within a setting that, that I'm talking about it, other people agree with me, other people disagree with me,

10:24 - other people have radically different experiences. So the question then is, what does an instructor do if they want to get the material engaged with and meaningful? And how do you do that? So it's not destructive. And one of the ways, one of the ways, one of the ways to do that, for example, is to present a balanced position with regard to the first thing we talked about. That the, the findings are clear from this one study that the more intelligent you are,

11:01 - the more successful you're gonna be. There are other findings that say, who cares about how smart you are? The more emotionally intelligent you are, the better you're gonna be and something like that. So one is to present a balanced perspective that doesn't just say X leads to Y, but gives people the per the opportunity to reflect on different ways of thinking about what affects something.

11:29 - So that, that's one of the major things is how do you present something so it engages students, but isn't is conceptually stimulating for them? Does it make them think, my only option is this, my only instrumental option is this, but, but that, or it, or that isn't symbolic, so well, of course I already do that, so I i I do well from the system. So yeah, that's a great finding.

12:01 - so, so a instructor should be aware of those potentials and of the importance of engagement and how to do it in a way that's helpful for students. Let me just say a little bit about the third vignette. Okay, because I, I was supposed to give a, a talk at a conference, about three or four years ago, and I, I wasn't sure exactly what to talk about. So I just, I just took three different classes that were introductory classes and handed out a piece of pa literally a piece of paper

12:38 - that students could literally write on, which is something that nobody ever does anymore. And this was a way to literally, to maintain anonymity because nobody would recognize their writing running and then just had them write out something that had been meaningful for them in their class and how they felt about it. And then looked at what were the topics that were meaningful and looked at the variety of feelings they had. So one of the reasons this is important for me,

13:10 - and I think it gets at your question a little, is that it says that even when instructors think they're just teaching facts, there is something going on in the class that's meaningful. Well, it might be meaningful because it's so unmeaningful because it's so remote from what anybody's thinking about it might be. And, and if, and if it's so remote from every, what everybody's thinking about, they might be bored. And that is a very important feeling.

13:49 - It's a nonactivated negative feeling. So it, in the case Isabel was talking about, there were a lot of negative feelings that were very activated, that it came with a lot of energy. And that is partly what was involved in the, the discussion that the students had. WW but at any topic that we teach, there is going to be some type of feeling and energy that we can, we can try to pay attention to. And so I guess one of the things I would say is a,

14:31 - is an implication for all this is for instructors to pay attention to student reactions in class in a way that takes into account more than just, does it look as if they understand the material? Does the material engage them? Does that engage them because of what kind of usefulness? Because they're excited, because they see something more deeply now because they're excited, as in the, some of the cases I mentioned in the third vignette,

15:06 - because now they see a path forward for their future, future, something that they could actually do. So I, I think guess that would be the, the most straightforward implication for all this, for the instructor, for any instructor to, to pay much more attention to what goes beyond the curriculum, to how it, how it makes students feel, how it makes students think, what is it in the discussion of the curriculum topic that matters, a whole bunch of things like that.

15:41 - But, but for that to happen, the instructors have to be pretty reflective about what's going on in their classes.

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