Relationship-Rich Education with Isis Artze-Vega

I am very excited to share a conversation with Isis Artze-Vega on this week's Intentional Teaching podcast. Isis Artze-Vega is college provost and vice president for academic affairs at Valencia College, a public college in Florida with over 40,000 students. Isis is also the co-author of a book on relationship-rich education, which was the topic of her closing plenary session at the 2024 POD Network conference in November. That plenary was fantastic and before it was even over, I made plans to invite Isis on the podcast to talk about the value of relationships in learning.

Isis is the co-author of Connections Are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education, which she wrote with Peter Felten, Leo Lambert, and Oscar Miranda Tapia. You might also know her as a co-author, along with Flower Darby, Bryan Dewsbury, and Mays Imad, of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. In our conversation, Isis and I talk about the two books and her involvement in them, the value of trusting relationships in the learning context, ways that instructors can help students cultivate relationships in college, and how online learning and generative AI might actually be used to foster relationships.

​You can listen to my conversation with Isis Artze-Vega here (or read the transcript!), or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app. And if you join the Intentional Teaching Patreon, you'll get to hear a couple of bonus clips from my interview with Isis on my Patreon-only podcast feed. (I share bonus clips from most of my podcast interview on Patreon.)

Intentional Tech Slow Read Week 1

The 2024 slow read of my book Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching starts this Monday, January 22nd! You're invited to read along one chapter per week as we revisit my 2019 book in light of what we've learned about educational technology in the last few years.

Here's the overall reading schedule:

• Week of January 22nd - Chapter 1: Times for Telling
• Week of January 29th - Chapter 2: Practice & Feedback
• Week of February 5th - Chapter 3: Thin Slices of Learning
• Week of February 12th - Chapter 4: Knowledge Organizations
• Week of February 19th - Chapter 5: Multimodal Assignments
• Week of February 26th - Chapter 6: Learning Communities
• Week of March 4th - Chapter 7: Authentic Audiences

Each week I'll share some discussion questions for that week's chapter, and invite slow readers to discuss those questions wherever they'd like, but especially on the Intentional Teaching Patreon. I'll also share some new teaching resources over on Patreon, including audio interviews with some colleagues and mini teaching guides on a few topics. Becoming a Patreon support is just $3 US per month, and it helps defray costs for the Intentional Teaching podcast and newsletter.

Here are the discussion questions for next week's chapter on creating "times for telling":

Principle: Giving students a hard problem or challenging experience can help them get ready for learning.

1. How have you seen "times for telling" created in college classes, either your own or those you've observed, with or without technology?
2. What are some common student misconceptions in the areas you teach that you might build a "time for telling" around?
3. I once wrote an essay about teaching with classroom response systems called "Multiple-Choice Questions You Wouldn't Put on a Test." What are some ways other than creating "times for telling" that one might use a multiple-choice question in a synchronous class session to foster learning?
4. Given your experience with games (analog or digital), what kinds of potential do you think games have for generating learning?
5. What strikes you as impractical or challenging about using technology to create "times for telling" in your text contexts?

​You're invited to join the discussion on Patreon!​

Of course, a slow read of a book implies you can actually read the book. There are lots of ways to read Intentional Tech. You can order a paperback copy through Amazon and other retailers, you might have electronic access through your institutional library, and my Patreon supporters can get a code for 20% off the book when ordering through my publisher West Virginia University Press.

Thanks for reading!

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