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Hello, and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast.
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I'm your host Rachel Yoho, and I'm very excited to be joined by two colleagues today from George Mason University's Korea campus.
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And I'll ask them to introduce themselves and we are going to have a great conversation about some of their work and some of the ways they engage their students.
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Hello.
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My name is Ajiboye Babalola.
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I am currently an Assistant Professor at the George Mason University Korea Campus.
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I've taught quite a number of courses.
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Primarily I've been teaching statistics since I got here, about three years ago.
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The two statistics courses that we teach are introductory statistics.
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The other courses I've taught are CDS 1 0 2.
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Basically just has a way of doing coding in R with basic elementary statistics.
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And then, recently I taught Business 310.
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Business 310 sort of has a way of connecting both statistics, the Statistics 250 and 350, it has a way of connecting with both of them.
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On the other hand, I also do research.
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My research is focused on statistical inference, but primarily, my interest is on stochastic processes and, recently I've been trying to see how I could bridge the relationship between stochastic processes and epidemiology.
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So I'm just around all of that.
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And occasionally I also jump into machine learning and graph theory, and all of this basically informs my teaching and helps my courses.
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And makes the course relevant to the recent trend for students, you know, the AI thing.
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So I pull all of that in to make my course rich.
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Hi, Rachel.
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It's good to be here.
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I'm Omario Kanji.
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I'm Associate Professor in the Law department here at Mason Korea, and I serve as the program coordinator as well for the LLM program.
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It's a Master's in US Law for Korean graduates of law, so they have to have a base degree in law already.
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And we teach various courses in the department, which are usually termed 1L courses in an American JD program.
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So I've taught Torts, Civil Procedure, International Law, as well as National Security Law, different courses that students will need, not just for the bar exam, but for their own legal careers.
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I am also starting to teach globalization and business this semester, which is Business 200.
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Very excited about that.
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There's a lot of globalization going on in business.
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And so it's good to be here.
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Thank you.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Thank you so much for joining us.
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So as we heard from your introductions and thank you so much for those, you each teach to two different audiences, you know, same campus, very different groups of students, if you will.
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So what do you, each feel brings you two together when you think about your disciplines and how you connect with your students?
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My discipline, statistics, and of course you can also call it computational science.
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His is law and we basically share the same fundamental principle.
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They promote critical thinking, ethical reasoning, practical skills in the society that we are in.
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Basically, you wanna do research, you wanna talk about certain things, you need data, and then you get into trouble.
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You need information to get yourself out of it.
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So you get Omario coming and gets, scoop, scoop you out and save the day, that kind of thing.
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So you can always have something like that.
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So both fields require us to connect theoretical concepts to real world application, helps students understand the significance of their knowledge beyond the classroom.
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Ultimately, what brings us together is our commitment to engaging students actively.
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Encouraging them to analyze complex issues and preparing them to navigate their respective fields with confidence and integrity.
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I like that.
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Ajiboye, I think I'd add to that and I was thinking about this morning, curiosity is something that I like to think about and feel and cultivate among everyone, right?
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Not just our students, but, for example, I love being here.
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It's still kind of a new job for me.
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And you know, I have colleagues like Ajiboye, like our own floor where we are in Mason Korea has about, I think seven, eight countries represented.
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And that's just the faculty.
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And when we come together, I think the curiosity that we have even about each other and we wanna translate that to our students in terms of, hey, we are in this world and we need to be curious about it to be happier in it.
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I think we need to be curious to survive in it.
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And we need to be curious to pass our classes.
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Um you know, like, what is this material?
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What am I supposed to do with it?
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How will it not just help me pass an exam?
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It's so perfunctory, but it's more so, what am I gonna do with this practice knowledge later?
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How is it?
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Gonna help me get a job, pay rent, pay my mortgage, but also ultimately satisfy my intellectual curiosity about this subject.
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And so I've been joking lately, Ajiboye doesn't know this, but he's probably heard it before when I read his faculty profile and what he teaches, I can't understand it, it's written in the English language, but it uses words that I'm like.
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Whatever, you know, um, and so it's that curiosity.
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What is that and what purpose does it serve?
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And I hope we convey that to our students too.
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And in terms of one more connection with Ajiboye and my family's from Africa, from the eastern part, and Professor Babalola is from Nigeria.
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And so I always like connecting with Africans.
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So there's another fun connection there too.
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Yeah.
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That's great.
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Thank you both so much.
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And I think that's one of the things that I personally really enjoy about some of these podcast episodes.
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When we get people from different disciplines, we have a great conversation and really think about what overlaps we have, not, not the content we may not understand, just like we were just talking about, we may not understand like the actual what is it that you do?
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What are those words like?
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Yeah, sure.
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Okay, cool.
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But the way we think about building relevance, I think here is really one of those key things.
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Building relevance, bridging that, just like we were talking about, that theory to practice or maybe theory to practical, you know, what that real world application is.
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Why are we doing these things?
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I mean, across disciplines, this is something that a lot of us not only want to do, need to do, but also struggle with in our teaching.
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So is there anything else that you want to share on some of the ways that you do that, that you bridge from that this is very theoretical to like, hey, this is actually really useful in real world, in my area.
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I think with law, I have a lot of client examples from the past.
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I practiced law in Hong Kong and Beijing for about 10 years.
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And it was practicing both in Mandarin as well as English, as well as a couple of other languages I know, depending on the client.
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And so what's super fun for me.
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Although it can be intimidating for a student, and it was for me at the time, was, oh, paragraph four of this contract says this.
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And it makes you think, Rachel, that, oh, you know, if you've detected a breach that Ajiboye had committed, it'll be just so easy to declare the breach and collect from him.
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And you'll have your piece of paper from a judge that said Rachel won.
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Ajiboye pays, and then I tell them that piece of paper, Ajiboye might not care.
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Saying, that's fine.
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That's adorable, Rachel.
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You have this little piece of paper that says you won and that says I should pay you and I'm not gonna, and then I ask the students, so what are you gonna do?
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Then you have this written document that you considered to be such a holy grail, and now what?
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And it's fun to tell them stories and so you have these stories and you kinda see the eyes light up, right?
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And so I want them to know that, look, I care about the theory for sure, and you should know the theory if you want to pass the exam, but don't necessarily expect this to work out that way in the real world.
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And I want them to know that I'm thinking about the real world for them.
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'Cause I know that they will go live in the real world after the halls of Mason, right?
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And, so I wanna encourage that connection as much as possible.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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For me, I've been in academics all my life, so I'm open to whatever comes in, but usually what I try to make sure I do is, right now we are at the age where you don't exactly have to memorize anything.
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Mm-hmm.
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Yeah.
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So, statistics itself is very flexible.
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I was talking about the fact that I've been trying to bridge the idea of stochastic processes, which exactly just involves probability modeling stuffs, so say, you don't know what's gonna happen.
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So how do you know what's gonna happen?
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I don't know.
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I can create an idea and put it into some mathematical functions and see how I could connect that to something else.
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So for epidemiology everybody was grounded in 2019 2020 Covid-19 happened, and then they're trying to solve the problem, but the problem wasn't solving because the virus kept mutating and mutating and mutating, and they're like, okay, so what do we do?
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Okay, the next thing you want to go talk about is, can I put this whole idea of virus mutating in a small box and see how I can modify it with some symbols, numbers and letters, and so if I can eventually put all of that in and study the way it behaves in real life, and I can actually put that into my equation, I can carefully follow that through and then say, okay, at certain point it would eventually mutate to this, mutate to that.
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So all that kind of stuff is basically what's the idea of stochastic processes is about.
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And then when you connect that back to statistics.
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You are basically trying to say not just mean, median, and mode this time.
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You're trying to say, I can tell when this virus would be less harmful if it's gone like eight mutations, of course, it'll eventually say, okay, I am done trying to change.
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And if it mutates again, less harmful, it's not gonna go back to the original that was really, really disastrous.
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So that kind of stuff is basically how statistics coming.
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Yeah, I think these are great examples because it really kind of comes back to that the real world's messy, right?
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Things are, things are very much not the neat theory that we have across different disciplines.
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I mean.
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If only
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if only, right, exactly.
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It's, it's so much messier.
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And I think showing those practical examples, thinking about what that means in different disciplines.
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That's a really fascinating, compelling example from epidemiology, but we were talking about statistics.
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So even crossing those two disciplines.
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I mean, just as an aside, I was teaching Global Public Health in Spring of 2020, which was a, just an interesting time.
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But yeah, I think that really gives that, that very practical flavor to compliment the very academic or the theoretical with a lot of the conversation that we do.
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So I think that's a great point.
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But I wanna come back to what we were just talking about a moment ago.
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Omario, I think you mentioned practicing law in several languages.
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So one of the things that we've talked about as a group is multilingualism.
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And so can you each tell us maybe a little bit more about how you educate in these kind of classes and with students who have experience across many languages?
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I think there's minutia in language and there are big ideas in language as there should be.
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And when I say minutia, I mean really banal things like subject verb agreements.
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Where's the subject?
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Where's the verb, where's the object?
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Some languages do it one way.
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Other languages do it another way.
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And I know we all know that.
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So when you're speaking English, you might want to use the grammar of another language, right, of the native language of your listener, even though you're phrasing it in English?
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So it's great to be here today and some people might understand it better if you say, today being here is great and it sounds a bit choppy maybe to native English speakers.
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You understand it, of course.
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But someone else is like, oh wow, okay.
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And you can sometimes see facial expressions change.
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And so that's the minutia, the grammar sentence, diagramming, if you're a nerd Montessori kid like I was.
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And then the big ideas, right?
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How are concepts explained in Italian versus Chinese versus French and of course English.
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And I've found over time, depending on the concept, and one language's grammatical structures better than another.
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The course I'm about to start with will have undergraduates, and I'm expecting 75% to be native Korean speakers, and then 25% is a hodgepodge.
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Right.
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And so we use English as the unifying language, but that doesn't mean that it'll be the best to convey everything, right.
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So to close, super quick, it's language speed.
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It's repeating things with different grammatical structures each time.
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And it's really asking for a lot of confirmation from the students.
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Like Ajiboye, how did that land with you?
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Are you getting this, Rachel, you look a bit troubled or do you need a few minutes?
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And it's a lot of surprise communication along the way.
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It might slow down the perfectionist progress I like to make every class period, but you know, we can account for that in other ways.
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But I think it's the patience, the communication, and it's the grammatical structures that can change as well as everything else, right?
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Body language, intonation, inflection, things like that.
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I'm Nigerian so if you look at Nigeria itself, Nigeria has about 300 and 70 tribes.
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And then over 500 languages, different languages.
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And then if you look at the geography of the country itself, it borders four countries and all four of them speak French.
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So if you're talking about multilingualism, I will say I am multilingualism because everything around me just surrounds me.
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You know, when you get into school for the first time.
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You step into, whether it's grade one, you call it, or elementary one or primary one.
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From that day they start to speak to you French.
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They tell you,"Bonjour," they tell you,"Bon soir.
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Comment tu t'appelles?" They tell you all of that from the first day, even though you have a little bit of English and you want to just get that on.
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And in between all of these tribes in Nigeria, you also realize that every of them have their own different dialect.
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So you may just speak Yoruba for instance.
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And of course the Yoruba you will speak here will be different from the one spoken somewhere else.
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I teach students that are of a younger age bracket, say between 17 and maybe 23.
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So, for me, they are pretty much very shy and they would naturally not come out and say, oh, I don't understand this, I don't understand that.
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I don't like your accent and all of that.
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So, so.
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But what I try to do is I go to class before class starts, and then I try to see if I could communicate with them one-on-one.
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I try to do that as much as possible because I notice that many of them come to class earlier than the normal time.
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They come like 10 minutes before if I see them.
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If I have five in class, I try to meet all five of them before class starts.
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That way I could interact with them, see where they're struggling at, and see where, how I could actually help them.
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Also when I taught CDs 1 0 2, one of my students always laughed at me.
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He would tell me, the way you write your codes are pretty much different from the way we should write code.
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I'm like, okay.
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Well, the way I write my code, I write them in a very simple way.
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I'm not super complicated.
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I don't like to use all those loops and all of that.
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I just wanna do the first one to the second one to the third one, and I cannot now generalize everything.
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That's what I do.
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But they want me to write the first line and then loop everything and give me everything.
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I cannot do that.
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So I give them an idea of you can actually write your codes in your own kind of way.
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And that really would help them, you know, how you think is how you write.
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So writing code is more like writing the story or doing an essay where somebody's idea would be different from yours, but we are both driving at the same point.
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So that kind of thing is what I actually collaborate in my classes.
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With the theme of languages, it's one of my just favorite things in the world to talk about and Ajiboye also mentioned dialects, and I think that's also really important.
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My time in China, there were a lot of dialects, and just even accents that I could pick up on.
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And I think this is valid for students too, clients and students, I treat them sometimes the same.
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I tell the students, not to get them too arrogant about their position, but they are clients.
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They indirectly pay us, and we are here to do a job.
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We are here to arm them and tool them for a very quickly changing world.
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One that, you know, we're also trying to adapt to as quickly as possible, and the language aspect helps.
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It helps them feel more comfortable.
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It helps them feel more familiar.
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Even if when you say you might speak one of their home languages or one of their native languages, I think they feel very welcome, very comfortable.
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And then hopefully Ajiboye and I are not as intimidating as maybe we are.
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I mean, I don't wanna be, but some people say I am and, and, and I honestly don't like that.
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It's not something I enjoy.
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Omar, seven languages.
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Actually, that's intimidating.
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That's intimidating.
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Anybody who wants to think about that.
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But I, and I want them to know that I've invested in their world, right?
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I've invested in their culture, I've invested in their language.
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I've taken time outta my life to get to know their lives more.
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It's so to speak.
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I mean, that's, it's very indirect analogy.
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But as long as they know that we are thinking about them and we care about them and their journey after they leave us.
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Yeah, I really like that because earlier we were discussing bridging theory and practice, but now we're even adding more nuance into what practice looks like.
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For different people.
00:18:16.827 --> 00:18:43.123
And I think that's really bringing in especially the richness of not only our Mason Korea campus and the different classes and different groups we're talking about there, but even some of our other mason campuses, you know, we have very diverse across many different languages and culture and some of those examples, some of those, bringing that sort of practical, you know, how you express yourself and how that comes into even like coding for instance.
00:18:43.123 --> 00:18:43.928
I really like that.
00:18:44.740 --> 00:18:54.711
I also would wanna say that, in terms of strategies for instructions, I oftentimes also create ideas that are very personal to the students.
00:18:54.790 --> 00:18:58.030
So I will give an example, if you wanna buy a car, for instance.
00:18:58.030 --> 00:18:59.711
So we talk about bootstrapping.
00:19:00.131 --> 00:19:09.070
You take a small sample from the population and then you keep putting it back in and taking that same sample, or taking a different sample and taking a different sample and all of that.
00:19:09.490 --> 00:19:10.480
So we do that.
00:19:10.840 --> 00:19:14.070
Now, some would always tell you, oh, that's not the amount they buy.
00:19:14.101 --> 00:19:16.830
This car will not go for this price, that car will not go for that price.
00:19:16.861 --> 00:19:17.611
They know all of that.
00:19:18.060 --> 00:19:21.570
So those actually put their interest in the assignment.
00:19:22.111 --> 00:19:24.090
So that's a way to engage them.
00:19:24.238 --> 00:19:32.759
So I am using examples that resonates with them or around them to pull their interest into what this is.
00:19:33.388 --> 00:19:38.374
Because, if you allow me say, when they come to stats classes, stats is difficult.
00:19:39.038 --> 00:19:51.239
Some of them will say STAT is more difficult than maths, even though that may be true, but you may wanna argue for or against, but when they have conversations like that, they start to feel, oh, it's not so bad.
00:19:51.568 --> 00:19:52.739
It's actually interesting.
00:19:53.038 --> 00:19:58.894
And one of my old student was telling one person on the corridor, I overheard them say, has he talked about the twinning capital?
00:20:00.003 --> 00:20:02.703
If you've talked about it, then you're getting to the end of the semester.
00:20:02.733 --> 00:20:04.534
He almost has no other story to tell you.
00:20:04.534 --> 00:20:05.479
I'm like, oh, oh.
00:20:08.064 --> 00:20:13.729
So those kind of things would actually get them, they know I do all of this most times, so they, so
00:20:14.058 --> 00:20:14.452
Yeah.
00:20:14.452 --> 00:20:15.202
Absolutely.
00:20:15.202 --> 00:20:15.682
That's great.
00:20:15.682 --> 00:20:20.784
Yeah, something I just thought about was AI is its own language now too.
00:20:21.173 --> 00:20:27.683
So when Ajiboye was talking about coding and looping, and I don't wanna loop and loop, I'm like, I have no idea what this, this means right loop.
00:20:27.683 --> 00:20:29.874
What, what, what, what does that mean in coding?
00:20:29.874 --> 00:20:31.794
My sister's been vibe coding lately.
00:20:32.074 --> 00:20:33.243
And I'm like, what's that?
00:20:33.243 --> 00:20:34.503
I honestly have no clue.
00:20:34.874 --> 00:20:36.403
And that better change soon.
00:20:36.733 --> 00:20:45.188
But, you know, in terms of, maybe instilling upon our students that, hey, it's fine if you thought French was too difficult, so you didn't learn it.
00:20:45.518 --> 00:20:48.428
It's fine if I say, dude, you gotta learn Mandarin.
00:20:48.817 --> 00:20:53.258
It's part of our future whether we like it or not, and you say, no, it's too hard.
00:20:53.617 --> 00:20:57.278
AI is not gonna be a language that you're going to be able to avoid.
00:20:58.252 --> 00:21:00.982
Either you come for it or it will come for you.
00:21:01.323 --> 00:21:03.153
And it's something that I think about too.
00:21:03.153 --> 00:21:08.282
It's not that I'm the expert, so now I'm saying, Hey, I'm amazing and AI's coming for you.
00:21:08.282 --> 00:21:09.482
If you don't be amazing like me.
00:21:09.482 --> 00:21:17.403
And so I was really thinking about these things that, how are we going to impress upon the students that, look, this is really necessary.
00:21:17.768 --> 00:21:19.877
You know, and to be excited about that too.
00:21:19.938 --> 00:21:20.357
Right?
00:21:20.778 --> 00:21:22.307
Some of us are a bit older here.
00:21:22.307 --> 00:21:27.198
I grew up without email, without mobile phones, et cetera, and we all adapted,
00:21:27.347 --> 00:21:27.928
And Google!
00:21:28.199 --> 00:21:30.657
Yeah, in Google, even this just didn't exist, right?
00:21:30.657 --> 00:21:35.428
We went to like this deep dungeon of the engineering department UCLA to check email.
00:21:35.688 --> 00:21:39.077
And so letting them know that it's here, guys.
00:21:39.398 --> 00:21:46.159
And we might as well be excited going into it so that it goes better for us and not be curmudgeons about it.
00:21:46.219 --> 00:21:48.038
Otherwise, it'll turn out differently.
00:21:48.954 --> 00:21:51.775
What you said actually resonated something else in me.
00:21:51.865 --> 00:22:00.888
When calculators came to stay, there was a huge protest in the sixties, teachers in high school, calcuholics, no calcuholics and all of that.
00:22:01.249 --> 00:22:03.781
But eventually teachers found a way around it.
00:22:04.214 --> 00:22:08.825
So AI actually is here to stay, and we have to find a way around it.
00:22:09.663 --> 00:22:18.962
Generally I would say that I believe that diversity in language, culture, experience is an asset in education, and especially statistics as I've explained.
00:22:19.383 --> 00:22:25.468
It thrives on innovation and problem solving because if you look at the idea of the twinning capital.
00:22:25.468 --> 00:22:33.087
I am committed to creating inclusive learning environment where students feel valued and empowered to contribute their insight.
00:22:33.688 --> 00:22:42.978
I see education itself as an individual learning and collective advancement for engaging in diverse backgrounds for students.
00:22:43.307 --> 00:22:47.285
So if they can actually grow on what they know.
00:22:47.438 --> 00:23:00.998
And I believe that whatever we teach students these days would always be to be innovative in whatever they have as knowledge because knowledge these days is becoming defined in a different way.
00:23:01.461 --> 00:23:02.662
Yeah, absolutely.
00:23:02.902 --> 00:23:04.372
I think these are such great points.
00:23:04.372 --> 00:23:14.751
I think here, you know, what really we're coming back to a lot I think is that our keystone concept is how we are building relevance in a rapidly changing world.
00:23:15.172 --> 00:23:25.432
I think a lot of that is coming back to some of our conversation around language, for instance, you know, like the investment and the time and how we communicate.
00:23:25.551 --> 00:23:34.261
And even just like when we're talking about what knowledge is, how we define knowledge, what we need to know, what we need to remember, and how we make that relevant.
00:23:34.561 --> 00:23:57.916
So whether we're talking about, you know, a random Tuesday in class or we're talking about the relevance of the course as a whole, or how the context even for many, many, many professions is so rapidly changing with the advances in AI just, you know, obviously in the last couple of years with mainstream use of artificial intelligence, I think here we're looking at still how we connect that relevance.
00:23:58.106 --> 00:24:08.876
We can look at the connections with the human side, the language, the culture, the people side, and the experiences as well as the examples, as well as the things we'll do in our profession.
00:24:09.146 --> 00:24:20.606
The way we invest in our students, the way we invest in some of, like the examples you've given that interest our students and bring them into the space or just captivate their interest and like, wow, could that happen?
00:24:20.967 --> 00:24:25.527
So I think these are such great examples and I'm very appreciative of both of your time.
00:24:25.557 --> 00:24:35.997
I think this was a really fascinating conversation, looking at some of the commonalities we have from two very different disciplines, but how we connect with our students and how we build that relevance.
00:24:36.346 --> 00:24:37.936
So thank you so much for your time.
00:24:38.395 --> 00:24:38.836
Thanks, Rachel.
00:24:38.846 --> 00:24:39.695
Great to be here.
00:24:39.766 --> 00:24:40.385
Thank you for inviting us.
00:24:40.990 --> 00:24:47.013
And to our listeners, please catch us every two weeks as we're posting in the fall and spring semesters.
00:24:47.203 --> 00:24:47.950
Thank you so much!
00:00:08.388 --> 00:00:12.048
Hello, and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast.
00:00:12.259 --> 00:00:20.178
I'm your host Rachel Yoho, and I'm very excited to be joined by two colleagues today from George Mason University's Korea campus.
00:00:20.943 --> 00:00:30.083
And I'll ask them to introduce themselves and we are going to have a great conversation about some of their work and some of the ways they engage their students.
00:00:31.082 --> 00:00:31.443
Hello.
00:00:31.443 --> 00:00:32.523
My name is Ajiboye Babalola.
00:00:33.662 --> 00:00:37.802
I am currently an Assistant Professor at the George Mason University Korea Campus.
00:00:37.945 --> 00:00:39.201
I've taught quite a number of courses.
00:00:39.981 --> 00:00:44.485
Primarily I've been teaching statistics since I got here, about three years ago.
00:00:45.036 --> 00:00:49.356
The two statistics courses that we teach are introductory statistics.
00:00:49.405 --> 00:00:52.835
The other courses I've taught are CDS 1 0 2.
00:00:53.012 --> 00:00:59.133
Basically just has a way of doing coding in R with basic elementary statistics.
00:00:59.703 --> 00:01:02.372
And then, recently I taught Business 310.
00:01:02.603 --> 00:01:11.957
Business 310 sort of has a way of connecting both statistics, the Statistics 250 and 350, it has a way of connecting with both of them.
00:01:12.138 --> 00:01:14.873
On the other hand, I also do research.
00:01:14.944 --> 00:01:29.003
My research is focused on statistical inference, but primarily, my interest is on stochastic processes and, recently I've been trying to see how I could bridge the relationship between stochastic processes and epidemiology.
00:01:29.003 --> 00:01:31.102
So I'm just around all of that.
00:01:31.162 --> 00:01:38.778
And occasionally I also jump into machine learning and graph theory, and all of this basically informs my teaching and helps my courses.
00:01:39.019 --> 00:01:43.870
And makes the course relevant to the recent trend for students, you know, the AI thing.
00:01:43.870 --> 00:01:46.881
So I pull all of that in to make my course rich.
00:01:47.495 --> 00:01:48.105
Hi, Rachel.
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It's good to be here.
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I'm Omario Kanji.
00:01:50.759 --> 00:01:59.140
I'm Associate Professor in the Law department here at Mason Korea, and I serve as the program coordinator as well for the LLM program.
00:01:59.268 --> 00:02:06.570
It's a Master's in US Law for Korean graduates of law, so they have to have a base degree in law already.
00:02:06.721 --> 00:02:13.707
And we teach various courses in the department, which are usually termed 1L courses in an American JD program.
00:02:13.707 --> 00:02:25.781
So I've taught Torts, Civil Procedure, International Law, as well as National Security Law, different courses that students will need, not just for the bar exam, but for their own legal careers.
00:02:25.966 --> 00:02:31.536
I am also starting to teach globalization and business this semester, which is Business 200.
00:02:31.955 --> 00:02:33.246
Very excited about that.
00:02:33.906 --> 00:02:37.346
There's a lot of globalization going on in business.
00:02:37.346 --> 00:02:38.635
And so it's good to be here.
00:02:38.635 --> 00:02:38.996
Thank you.
00:02:39.656 --> 00:02:40.556
Yeah, absolutely.
00:02:40.556 --> 00:02:42.415
Thank you so much for joining us.
00:02:42.475 --> 00:02:54.885
So as we heard from your introductions and thank you so much for those, you each teach to two different audiences, you know, same campus, very different groups of students, if you will.
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So what do you, each feel brings you two together when you think about your disciplines and how you connect with your students?
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My discipline, statistics, and of course you can also call it computational science.
00:03:08.871 --> 00:03:13.820
His is law and we basically share the same fundamental principle.
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They promote critical thinking, ethical reasoning, practical skills in the society that we are in.
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Basically, you wanna do research, you wanna talk about certain things, you need data, and then you get into trouble.
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You need information to get yourself out of it.
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So you get Omario coming and gets, scoop, scoop you out and save the day, that kind of thing.
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So you can always have something like that.
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So both fields require us to connect theoretical concepts to real world application, helps students understand the significance of their knowledge beyond the classroom.
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Ultimately, what brings us together is our commitment to engaging students actively.
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Encouraging them to analyze complex issues and preparing them to navigate their respective fields with confidence and integrity.
00:04:06.602 --> 00:04:07.292
I like that.
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Ajiboye, I think I'd add to that and I was thinking about this morning, curiosity is something that I like to think about and feel and cultivate among everyone, right?
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Not just our students, but, for example, I love being here.
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It's still kind of a new job for me.
00:04:25.581 --> 00:04:33.601
And you know, I have colleagues like Ajiboye, like our own floor where we are in Mason Korea has about, I think seven, eight countries represented.
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And that's just the faculty.
00:04:35.422 --> 00:04:50.221
And when we come together, I think the curiosity that we have even about each other and we wanna translate that to our students in terms of, hey, we are in this world and we need to be curious about it to be happier in it.
00:04:50.221 --> 00:04:53.432
I think we need to be curious to survive in it.
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And we need to be curious to pass our classes.
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Um you know, like, what is this material?
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What am I supposed to do with it?
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How will it not just help me pass an exam?
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It's so perfunctory, but it's more so, what am I gonna do with this practice knowledge later?
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How is it?
00:05:09.396 --> 00:05:17.047
Gonna help me get a job, pay rent, pay my mortgage, but also ultimately satisfy my intellectual curiosity about this subject.
00:05:17.507 --> 00:05:29.718
And so I've been joking lately, Ajiboye doesn't know this, but he's probably heard it before when I read his faculty profile and what he teaches, I can't understand it, it's written in the English language, but it uses words that I'm like.
00:05:29.963 --> 00:05:33.374
Whatever, you know, um, and so it's that curiosity.
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What is that and what purpose does it serve?
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And I hope we convey that to our students too.
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And in terms of one more connection with Ajiboye and my family's from Africa, from the eastern part, and Professor Babalola is from Nigeria.
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And so I always like connecting with Africans.
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So there's another fun connection there too.
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Yeah.
00:05:53.899 --> 00:05:54.528
That's great.
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Thank you both so much.
00:05:55.668 --> 00:06:02.269
And I think that's one of the things that I personally really enjoy about some of these podcast episodes.
00:06:02.269 --> 00:06:16.468
When we get people from different disciplines, we have a great conversation and really think about what overlaps we have, not, not the content we may not understand, just like we were just talking about, we may not understand like the actual what is it that you do?
00:06:16.468 --> 00:06:17.639
What are those words like?
00:06:18.149 --> 00:06:18.928
Yeah, sure.
00:06:18.959 --> 00:06:19.769
Okay, cool.
00:06:20.189 --> 00:06:25.351
But the way we think about building relevance, I think here is really one of those key things.
00:06:25.351 --> 00:06:34.682
Building relevance, bridging that, just like we were talking about, that theory to practice or maybe theory to practical, you know, what that real world application is.
00:06:34.682 --> 00:06:36.391
Why are we doing these things?
00:06:36.721 --> 00:06:44.172
I mean, across disciplines, this is something that a lot of us not only want to do, need to do, but also struggle with in our teaching.
00:06:44.411 --> 00:06:55.401
So is there anything else that you want to share on some of the ways that you do that, that you bridge from that this is very theoretical to like, hey, this is actually really useful in real world, in my area.
00:06:56.185 --> 00:07:00.326
I think with law, I have a lot of client examples from the past.
00:07:00.906 --> 00:07:05.358
I practiced law in Hong Kong and Beijing for about 10 years.
00:07:05.819 --> 00:07:12.608
And it was practicing both in Mandarin as well as English, as well as a couple of other languages I know, depending on the client.
00:07:13.028 --> 00:07:16.478
And so what's super fun for me.
00:07:16.829 --> 00:07:25.079
Although it can be intimidating for a student, and it was for me at the time, was, oh, paragraph four of this contract says this.
00:07:25.408 --> 00:07:35.889
And it makes you think, Rachel, that, oh, you know, if you've detected a breach that Ajiboye had committed, it'll be just so easy to declare the breach and collect from him.
00:07:35.889 --> 00:07:38.884
And you'll have your piece of paper from a judge that said Rachel won.
00:07:39.024 --> 00:07:43.841
Ajiboye pays, and then I tell them that piece of paper, Ajiboye might not care.
00:07:43.841 --> 00:07:44.651
Saying, that's fine.
00:07:44.951 --> 00:07:46.031
That's adorable, Rachel.
00:07:46.031 --> 00:07:54.071
You have this little piece of paper that says you won and that says I should pay you and I'm not gonna, and then I ask the students, so what are you gonna do?
00:07:54.071 --> 00:07:59.471
Then you have this written document that you considered to be such a holy grail, and now what?
00:07:59.810 --> 00:08:06.461
And it's fun to tell them stories and so you have these stories and you kinda see the eyes light up, right?
00:08:06.461 --> 00:08:18.781
And so I want them to know that, look, I care about the theory for sure, and you should know the theory if you want to pass the exam, but don't necessarily expect this to work out that way in the real world.
00:08:19.151 --> 00:08:21.971
And I want them to know that I'm thinking about the real world for them.
00:08:22.002 --> 00:08:26.771
'Cause I know that they will go live in the real world after the halls of Mason, right?
00:08:26.771 --> 00:08:30.286
And, so I wanna encourage that connection as much as possible.
00:08:30.600 --> 00:08:31.771
Yeah, absolutely.
00:08:31.836 --> 00:08:43.966
For me, I've been in academics all my life, so I'm open to whatever comes in, but usually what I try to make sure I do is, right now we are at the age where you don't exactly have to memorize anything.
00:08:43.991 --> 00:08:44.412
Mm-hmm.
00:08:44.721 --> 00:08:45.011
Yeah.
00:08:45.292 --> 00:08:48.841
So, statistics itself is very flexible.
00:08:49.111 --> 00:08:58.765
I was talking about the fact that I've been trying to bridge the idea of stochastic processes, which exactly just involves probability modeling stuffs, so say, you don't know what's gonna happen.
00:08:58.916 --> 00:09:00.655
So how do you know what's gonna happen?
00:09:00.716 --> 00:09:01.316
I don't know.
00:09:01.375 --> 00:09:08.995
I can create an idea and put it into some mathematical functions and see how I could connect that to something else.
00:09:09.505 --> 00:09:24.625
So for epidemiology everybody was grounded in 2019 2020 Covid-19 happened, and then they're trying to solve the problem, but the problem wasn't solving because the virus kept mutating and mutating and mutating, and they're like, okay, so what do we do?
00:09:25.166 --> 00:09:53.826
Okay, the next thing you want to go talk about is, can I put this whole idea of virus mutating in a small box and see how I can modify it with some symbols, numbers and letters, and so if I can eventually put all of that in and study the way it behaves in real life, and I can actually put that into my equation, I can carefully follow that through and then say, okay, at certain point it would eventually mutate to this, mutate to that.
00:09:53.826 --> 00:09:58.547
So all that kind of stuff is basically what's the idea of stochastic processes is about.
00:09:58.937 --> 00:10:01.277
And then when you connect that back to statistics.
00:10:01.591 --> 00:10:04.981
You are basically trying to say not just mean, median, and mode this time.
00:10:05.042 --> 00:10:15.653
You're trying to say, I can tell when this virus would be less harmful if it's gone like eight mutations, of course, it'll eventually say, okay, I am done trying to change.
00:10:15.903 --> 00:10:21.303
And if it mutates again, less harmful, it's not gonna go back to the original that was really, really disastrous.
00:10:21.933 --> 00:10:25.443
So that kind of stuff is basically how statistics coming.
00:10:25.594 --> 00:10:31.417
Yeah, I think these are great examples because it really kind of comes back to that the real world's messy, right?
00:10:31.417 --> 00:10:38.116
Things are, things are very much not the neat theory that we have across different disciplines.
00:10:38.116 --> 00:10:38.331
I mean.
00:10:38.557 --> 00:10:39.456
If only
00:10:40.086 --> 00:10:41.496
if only, right, exactly.
00:10:41.797 --> 00:10:43.746
It's, it's so much messier.
00:10:43.746 --> 00:10:50.596
And I think showing those practical examples, thinking about what that means in different disciplines.
00:10:50.596 --> 00:10:57.011
That's a really fascinating, compelling example from epidemiology, but we were talking about statistics.
00:10:57.011 --> 00:11:00.042
So even crossing those two disciplines.
00:11:00.351 --> 00:11:07.371
I mean, just as an aside, I was teaching Global Public Health in Spring of 2020, which was a, just an interesting time.
00:11:07.404 --> 00:11:17.245
But yeah, I think that really gives that, that very practical flavor to compliment the very academic or the theoretical with a lot of the conversation that we do.
00:11:17.485 --> 00:11:18.715
So I think that's a great point.
00:11:18.715 --> 00:11:22.164
But I wanna come back to what we were just talking about a moment ago.
00:11:22.625 --> 00:11:25.784
Omario, I think you mentioned practicing law in several languages.
00:11:26.820 --> 00:11:31.289
So one of the things that we've talked about as a group is multilingualism.
00:11:31.620 --> 00:11:41.700
And so can you each tell us maybe a little bit more about how you educate in these kind of classes and with students who have experience across many languages?
00:11:42.200 --> 00:11:46.730
I think there's minutia in language and there are big ideas in language as there should be.
00:11:47.299 --> 00:11:52.039
And when I say minutia, I mean really banal things like subject verb agreements.
00:11:52.460 --> 00:11:53.389
Where's the subject?
00:11:53.389 --> 00:11:55.039
Where's the verb, where's the object?
00:11:55.080 --> 00:11:56.429
Some languages do it one way.
00:11:56.429 --> 00:11:57.809
Other languages do it another way.
00:11:58.085 --> 00:11:59.284
And I know we all know that.
00:11:59.284 --> 00:12:10.325
So when you're speaking English, you might want to use the grammar of another language, right, of the native language of your listener, even though you're phrasing it in English?
00:12:10.784 --> 00:12:21.424
So it's great to be here today and some people might understand it better if you say, today being here is great and it sounds a bit choppy maybe to native English speakers.
00:12:21.424 --> 00:12:22.894
You understand it, of course.
00:12:22.894 --> 00:12:25.144
But someone else is like, oh wow, okay.
00:12:25.144 --> 00:12:28.414
And you can sometimes see facial expressions change.
00:12:28.865 --> 00:12:34.445
And so that's the minutia, the grammar sentence, diagramming, if you're a nerd Montessori kid like I was.
00:12:34.815 --> 00:12:36.315
And then the big ideas, right?
00:12:36.315 --> 00:12:43.325
How are concepts explained in Italian versus Chinese versus French and of course English.
00:12:43.634 --> 00:12:51.115
And I've found over time, depending on the concept, and one language's grammatical structures better than another.
00:12:51.534 --> 00:13:03.225
The course I'm about to start with will have undergraduates, and I'm expecting 75% to be native Korean speakers, and then 25% is a hodgepodge.
00:13:03.945 --> 00:13:04.215
Right.
00:13:04.215 --> 00:13:11.575
And so we use English as the unifying language, but that doesn't mean that it'll be the best to convey everything, right.
00:13:11.575 --> 00:13:14.335
So to close, super quick, it's language speed.
00:13:14.335 --> 00:13:18.534
It's repeating things with different grammatical structures each time.
00:13:18.815 --> 00:13:22.355
And it's really asking for a lot of confirmation from the students.
00:13:22.514 --> 00:13:24.494
Like Ajiboye, how did that land with you?
00:13:24.494 --> 00:13:29.110
Are you getting this, Rachel, you look a bit troubled or do you need a few minutes?
00:13:29.409 --> 00:13:32.860
And it's a lot of surprise communication along the way.
00:13:32.860 --> 00:13:41.009
It might slow down the perfectionist progress I like to make every class period, but you know, we can account for that in other ways.
00:13:41.009 --> 00:13:48.879
But I think it's the patience, the communication, and it's the grammatical structures that can change as well as everything else, right?
00:13:48.879 --> 00:13:52.078
Body language, intonation, inflection, things like that.
00:13:52.606 --> 00:13:59.017
I'm Nigerian so if you look at Nigeria itself, Nigeria has about 300 and 70 tribes.
00:13:59.403 --> 00:14:02.524
And then over 500 languages, different languages.
00:14:03.004 --> 00:14:09.933
And then if you look at the geography of the country itself, it borders four countries and all four of them speak French.
00:14:10.259 --> 00:14:17.496
So if you're talking about multilingualism, I will say I am multilingualism because everything around me just surrounds me.
00:14:17.826 --> 00:14:19.897
You know, when you get into school for the first time.
00:14:20.048 --> 00:14:25.058
You step into, whether it's grade one, you call it, or elementary one or primary one.
00:14:25.389 --> 00:14:27.538
From that day they start to speak to you French.
00:14:28.149 --> 00:14:30.658
They tell you,"Bonjour," they tell you,"Bon soir.
00:14:30.658 --> 00:14:38.075
Comment tu t'appelles?" They tell you all of that from the first day, even though you have a little bit of English and you want to just get that on.
00:14:38.475 --> 00:14:46.184
And in between all of these tribes in Nigeria, you also realize that every of them have their own different dialect.
00:14:46.519 --> 00:14:48.899
So you may just speak Yoruba for instance.
00:14:49.198 --> 00:14:53.339
And of course the Yoruba you will speak here will be different from the one spoken somewhere else.
00:14:53.948 --> 00:14:59.422
I teach students that are of a younger age bracket, say between 17 and maybe 23.
00:14:59.585 --> 00:15:07.538
So, for me, they are pretty much very shy and they would naturally not come out and say, oh, I don't understand this, I don't understand that.
00:15:07.599 --> 00:15:09.339
I don't like your accent and all of that.
00:15:09.339 --> 00:15:10.778
So, so.
00:15:11.303 --> 00:15:19.004
But what I try to do is I go to class before class starts, and then I try to see if I could communicate with them one-on-one.
00:15:19.173 --> 00:15:24.693
I try to do that as much as possible because I notice that many of them come to class earlier than the normal time.
00:15:24.693 --> 00:15:26.703
They come like 10 minutes before if I see them.
00:15:26.754 --> 00:15:29.964
If I have five in class, I try to meet all five of them before class starts.
00:15:30.384 --> 00:15:35.894
That way I could interact with them, see where they're struggling at, and see where, how I could actually help them.
00:15:36.203 --> 00:15:40.634
Also when I taught CDs 1 0 2, one of my students always laughed at me.
00:15:40.693 --> 00:15:44.323
He would tell me, the way you write your codes are pretty much different from the way we should write code.
00:15:44.323 --> 00:15:45.499
I'm like, okay.
00:15:46.110 --> 00:15:49.590
Well, the way I write my code, I write them in a very simple way.
00:15:49.590 --> 00:15:51.269
I'm not super complicated.
00:15:51.320 --> 00:15:53.629
I don't like to use all those loops and all of that.
00:15:53.629 --> 00:15:58.909
I just wanna do the first one to the second one to the third one, and I cannot now generalize everything.
00:15:59.690 --> 00:16:00.350
That's what I do.
00:16:00.799 --> 00:16:04.220
But they want me to write the first line and then loop everything and give me everything.
00:16:04.309 --> 00:16:05.330
I cannot do that.
00:16:05.899 --> 00:16:11.190
So I give them an idea of you can actually write your codes in your own kind of way.
00:16:11.624 --> 00:16:14.744
And that really would help them, you know, how you think is how you write.
00:16:15.313 --> 00:16:26.649
So writing code is more like writing the story or doing an essay where somebody's idea would be different from yours, but we are both driving at the same point.
00:16:26.846 --> 00:16:30.866
So that kind of thing is what I actually collaborate in my classes.
00:16:31.590 --> 00:16:41.732
With the theme of languages, it's one of my just favorite things in the world to talk about and Ajiboye also mentioned dialects, and I think that's also really important.
00:16:42.082 --> 00:16:47.663
My time in China, there were a lot of dialects, and just even accents that I could pick up on.
00:16:47.663 --> 00:16:51.832
And I think this is valid for students too, clients and students, I treat them sometimes the same.
00:16:51.832 --> 00:16:56.365
I tell the students, not to get them too arrogant about their position, but they are clients.
00:16:56.365 --> 00:16:59.154
They indirectly pay us, and we are here to do a job.
00:16:59.504 --> 00:17:04.845
We are here to arm them and tool them for a very quickly changing world.
00:17:05.174 --> 00:17:12.075
One that, you know, we're also trying to adapt to as quickly as possible, and the language aspect helps.
00:17:12.134 --> 00:17:13.964
It helps them feel more comfortable.
00:17:14.295 --> 00:17:16.359
It helps them feel more familiar.
00:17:17.500 --> 00:17:26.369
Even if when you say you might speak one of their home languages or one of their native languages, I think they feel very welcome, very comfortable.
00:17:26.420 --> 00:17:31.460
And then hopefully Ajiboye and I are not as intimidating as maybe we are.
00:17:31.460 --> 00:17:35.700
I mean, I don't wanna be, but some people say I am and, and, and I honestly don't like that.
00:17:35.700 --> 00:17:36.869
It's not something I enjoy.
00:17:37.508 --> 00:17:38.407
Omar, seven languages.
00:17:38.407 --> 00:17:39.498
Actually, that's intimidating.
00:17:40.607 --> 00:17:40.958
That's intimidating.
00:17:41.087 --> 00:17:41.988
Anybody who wants to think about that.
00:17:42.376 --> 00:17:46.923
But I, and I want them to know that I've invested in their world, right?
00:17:46.923 --> 00:17:49.623
I've invested in their culture, I've invested in their language.
00:17:49.623 --> 00:17:53.403
I've taken time outta my life to get to know their lives more.
00:17:53.403 --> 00:17:54.393
It's so to speak.
00:17:54.393 --> 00:17:56.242
I mean, that's, it's very indirect analogy.
00:17:56.272 --> 00:18:03.923
But as long as they know that we are thinking about them and we care about them and their journey after they leave us.
00:18:03.992 --> 00:18:14.522
Yeah, I really like that because earlier we were discussing bridging theory and practice, but now we're even adding more nuance into what practice looks like.
00:18:14.847 --> 00:18:16.587
For different people.
00:18:16.827 --> 00:18:43.123
And I think that's really bringing in especially the richness of not only our Mason Korea campus and the different classes and different groups we're talking about there, but even some of our other mason campuses, you know, we have very diverse across many different languages and culture and some of those examples, some of those, bringing that sort of practical, you know, how you express yourself and how that comes into even like coding for instance.
00:18:43.123 --> 00:18:43.928
I really like that.
00:18:44.740 --> 00:18:54.711
I also would wanna say that, in terms of strategies for instructions, I oftentimes also create ideas that are very personal to the students.
00:18:54.790 --> 00:18:58.030
So I will give an example, if you wanna buy a car, for instance.
00:18:58.030 --> 00:18:59.711
So we talk about bootstrapping.
00:19:00.131 --> 00:19:09.070
You take a small sample from the population and then you keep putting it back in and taking that same sample, or taking a different sample and taking a different sample and all of that.
00:19:09.490 --> 00:19:10.480
So we do that.
00:19:10.840 --> 00:19:14.070
Now, some would always tell you, oh, that's not the amount they buy.
00:19:14.101 --> 00:19:16.830
This car will not go for this price, that car will not go for that price.
00:19:16.861 --> 00:19:17.611
They know all of that.
00:19:18.060 --> 00:19:21.570
So those actually put their interest in the assignment.
00:19:22.111 --> 00:19:24.090
So that's a way to engage them.
00:19:24.238 --> 00:19:32.759
So I am using examples that resonates with them or around them to pull their interest into what this is.
00:19:33.388 --> 00:19:38.374
Because, if you allow me say, when they come to stats classes, stats is difficult.
00:19:39.038 --> 00:19:51.239
Some of them will say STAT is more difficult than maths, even though that may be true, but you may wanna argue for or against, but when they have conversations like that, they start to feel, oh, it's not so bad.
00:19:51.568 --> 00:19:52.739
It's actually interesting.
00:19:53.038 --> 00:19:58.894
And one of my old student was telling one person on the corridor, I overheard them say, has he talked about the twinning capital?
00:20:00.003 --> 00:20:02.703
If you've talked about it, then you're getting to the end of the semester.
00:20:02.733 --> 00:20:04.534
He almost has no other story to tell you.
00:20:04.534 --> 00:20:05.479
I'm like, oh, oh.
00:20:08.064 --> 00:20:13.729
So those kind of things would actually get them, they know I do all of this most times, so they, so
00:20:14.058 --> 00:20:14.452
Yeah.
00:20:14.452 --> 00:20:15.202
Absolutely.
00:20:15.202 --> 00:20:15.682
That's great.
00:20:15.682 --> 00:20:20.784
Yeah, something I just thought about was AI is its own language now too.
00:20:21.173 --> 00:20:27.683
So when Ajiboye was talking about coding and looping, and I don't wanna loop and loop, I'm like, I have no idea what this, this means right loop.
00:20:27.683 --> 00:20:29.874
What, what, what, what does that mean in coding?
00:20:29.874 --> 00:20:31.794
My sister's been vibe coding lately.
00:20:32.074 --> 00:20:33.243
And I'm like, what's that?
00:20:33.243 --> 00:20:34.503
I honestly have no clue.
00:20:34.874 --> 00:20:36.403
And that better change soon.
00:20:36.733 --> 00:20:45.188
But, you know, in terms of, maybe instilling upon our students that, hey, it's fine if you thought French was too difficult, so you didn't learn it.
00:20:45.518 --> 00:20:48.428
It's fine if I say, dude, you gotta learn Mandarin.
00:20:48.817 --> 00:20:53.258
It's part of our future whether we like it or not, and you say, no, it's too hard.
00:20:53.617 --> 00:20:57.278
AI is not gonna be a language that you're going to be able to avoid.
00:20:58.252 --> 00:21:00.982
Either you come for it or it will come for you.
00:21:01.323 --> 00:21:03.153
And it's something that I think about too.
00:21:03.153 --> 00:21:08.282
It's not that I'm the expert, so now I'm saying, Hey, I'm amazing and AI's coming for you.
00:21:08.282 --> 00:21:09.482
If you don't be amazing like me.
00:21:09.482 --> 00:21:17.403
And so I was really thinking about these things that, how are we going to impress upon the students that, look, this is really necessary.
00:21:17.768 --> 00:21:19.877
You know, and to be excited about that too.
00:21:19.938 --> 00:21:20.357
Right?
00:21:20.778 --> 00:21:22.307
Some of us are a bit older here.
00:21:22.307 --> 00:21:27.198
I grew up without email, without mobile phones, et cetera, and we all adapted,
00:21:27.347 --> 00:21:27.928
And Google!
00:21:28.199 --> 00:21:30.657
Yeah, in Google, even this just didn't exist, right?
00:21:30.657 --> 00:21:35.428
We went to like this deep dungeon of the engineering department UCLA to check email.
00:21:35.688 --> 00:21:39.077
And so letting them know that it's here, guys.
00:21:39.398 --> 00:21:46.159
And we might as well be excited going into it so that it goes better for us and not be curmudgeons about it.
00:21:46.219 --> 00:21:48.038
Otherwise, it'll turn out differently.
00:21:48.954 --> 00:21:51.775
What you said actually resonated something else in me.
00:21:51.865 --> 00:22:00.888
When calculators came to stay, there was a huge protest in the sixties, teachers in high school, calcuholics, no calcuholics and all of that.
00:22:01.249 --> 00:22:03.781
But eventually teachers found a way around it.
00:22:04.214 --> 00:22:08.825
So AI actually is here to stay, and we have to find a way around it.
00:22:09.663 --> 00:22:18.962
Generally I would say that I believe that diversity in language, culture, experience is an asset in education, and especially statistics as I've explained.
00:22:19.383 --> 00:22:25.468
It thrives on innovation and problem solving because if you look at the idea of the twinning capital.
00:22:25.468 --> 00:22:33.087
I am committed to creating inclusive learning environment where students feel valued and empowered to contribute their insight.
00:22:33.688 --> 00:22:42.978
I see education itself as an individual learning and collective advancement for engaging in diverse backgrounds for students.
00:22:43.307 --> 00:22:47.285
So if they can actually grow on what they know.
00:22:47.438 --> 00:23:00.998
And I believe that whatever we teach students these days would always be to be innovative in whatever they have as knowledge because knowledge these days is becoming defined in a different way.
00:23:01.461 --> 00:23:02.662
Yeah, absolutely.
00:23:02.902 --> 00:23:04.372
I think these are such great points.
00:23:04.372 --> 00:23:14.751
I think here, you know, what really we're coming back to a lot I think is that our keystone concept is how we are building relevance in a rapidly changing world.
00:23:15.172 --> 00:23:25.432
I think a lot of that is coming back to some of our conversation around language, for instance, you know, like the investment and the time and how we communicate.
00:23:25.551 --> 00:23:34.261
And even just like when we're talking about what knowledge is, how we define knowledge, what we need to know, what we need to remember, and how we make that relevant.
00:23:34.561 --> 00:23:57.916
So whether we're talking about, you know, a random Tuesday in class or we're talking about the relevance of the course as a whole, or how the context even for many, many, many professions is so rapidly changing with the advances in AI just, you know, obviously in the last couple of years with mainstream use of artificial intelligence, I think here we're looking at still how we connect that relevance.
00:23:58.106 --> 00:24:08.876
We can look at the connections with the human side, the language, the culture, the people side, and the experiences as well as the examples, as well as the things we'll do in our profession.
00:24:09.146 --> 00:24:20.606
The way we invest in our students, the way we invest in some of, like the examples you've given that interest our students and bring them into the space or just captivate their interest and like, wow, could that happen?
00:24:20.967 --> 00:24:25.527
So I think these are such great examples and I'm very appreciative of both of your time.
00:24:25.557 --> 00:24:35.997
I think this was a really fascinating conversation, looking at some of the commonalities we have from two very different disciplines, but how we connect with our students and how we build that relevance.
00:24:36.346 --> 00:24:37.936
So thank you so much for your time.
00:24:38.395 --> 00:24:38.836
Thanks, Rachel.
00:24:38.846 --> 00:24:39.695
Great to be here.
00:24:39.766 --> 00:24:40.385
Thank you for inviting us.
00:24:40.990 --> 00:24:47.013
And to our listeners, please catch us every two weeks as we're posting in the fall and spring semesters.
00:24:47.203 --> 00:24:47.950
Thank you so much!
