librarypunk - 033 - Queer Psychology and Open Education

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

We are joined by Kat Klement who presented at the OpenEd21 conference on their course Queer Psychology, which they built using free and openly licensed materials (including OER). We talk about finding resources, modifying courses, how does one queer psychology, and, of course, the TV show Chopped. #OpenEd21: OER as a Tool to Decenter Whiteness: A Q… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e11vGa9zRs  https://twitter.com/krklement

Can I tell you about the worst thing that happened to me this week? Last night I watched this episode of Chopped. And the theme was the year 3000. And the theme wasn't even the worst part of the episode. So, like, they're cooking with things like sustainable squash and ants. And it's like these are things that require less water or, like, self-sustaining and, like, pea protein. milk and things like that. So like the first round, like, so like the contestants introduced themselves and there's like two guys and one of them's like, I'm here because my kids made me do it.

And other guy's like, I only need one more tattoo. Chopped champion. And it's like some indiscernible accent, like a real Tommy Wizzo kind of situation. And then there's like the last two contestants. And there's like this woman with kind of like no neck and like the slot of tattoos that you expect like from like a rough rough and tumble kind of chef i would have been doing rocky horror callbacks the whole time he's like hey i'm a i'm a i'm a i'm a recovering addict and you know i've been through a lot i'm a former junkie but i uh you know i'm from south and i love cajun food and i want to bring that to new york city and i want to open a food truck of uh of like uh do crawfish boiling and things like that i'm just like wow compelling story like i think she's going to win it

And then the last guy comes on. He's like, hi, if I win everything, I'm going to give it all to my wife. Okay, so that's the intro. Hardcore wife guy, right? And so you're like, all right, what's going to happen? So like the first round, they get their ingredients like, okay, this is weird. And like they're cooking and like there's some standard drama. Like they're going through their stories.

And like, this guy keeps talking about it. wife and then this other guy like can't cook the recent like he's trying to make a risotto in 20 minutes for an appetizer like what the hell and then you know the standard drama and so like the risotto guy gets chopped who was like the guy who wants to get the tattoo of chopped which wasn't going to happen not compelling not compelling enough so like the entree round comes around and it's like the guy who's doing it because of his kids, the wife guy, and like the recovering drug addict who wants to open the food truck. And so you're like, okay, like, this is interesting now. And so they have to do sunflowers and some ostrich and something else. Jesus. Or some sort

of like for, for, for, phonio, which is like a some sort of like low, easy to cook grain, which is like a cream of wheat style thing. Anyway. So wife. Guy is like, oh yeah, sunflowers. My wife is from Ohio and these are everywhere. It's like, okay, wife guy. And the food truck is obviously very important to like this recovering substance user. And so she's just like, you know, I'm going to cook this Cajun style because that's like, that is my roots. That's what I'm going to do. And that's what I'm here to show everyone that I know how to do. And like she's given it her all. And then there's like the. other guy who's whatever. They're not really focusing on him. And so they go into the judging and they're

like, what's motivating you? And so we get like the drug, we get the drug addiction story. And like, the judges are very compelled by that. And Mark Murphy even says like, oh, wow, like Cajun food in New York City. No one's doing that. Like, that's really great. Like they're into it. And then wife guy goes and they're like, hey, like, where do you cook? And he goes, well, I used to cook at yada, yada, yada. Like, all these like places in New York and stuff, I guess. Like I don't really know food. I don't actually care that much about food. This is why I watch Chopped is for things like this because it's so fucked up.

Yeah. Yeah. Barcade. Whatever was an American Psycho. He's like, but then, you know, eight months ago every, my whole world turned upside down. My wife was diagnosed with stage for brain cancer. And so me and my family packed up and moved to North Carolina so we could like take care of her and her health and make sure that like she has everything she needs. It's all for her right now.

Like bomb dropped, right? And so as they're cutting to commercial, the Cajun food truck recovering drug addict says, and I really know I shouldn't be defining her that way. but that's how she keeps defining herself on the show as well, says, I'm not getting chopped. I know I'm not getting chopped so confidently. So they come back from commercial break. Guess who gets chopped?

Our Cajun friend. Who gave it her all? And so like the dessert round happens. And despite some sloppy plating, wife guy wins at all. But it doesn't end there. as they are cutting to the credits before it totally wraps up you see an in loving memory title dot dot dot and it like says a name and like some dates and like it doesn't really register with me and then it shows the picture and it's it's the cajian food truck person who was the contestant on the show who got chopped in the entree round What?

And not wife guy's wife. Not wife guy's wife. What a twist. What? This is like Rupal's drag race. I know. I was like season 50 episode three. It's coming for you.

Wow. Damn. That's nuts. Is wife guy's wife okay? I have no idea. Because they don't care. No one gives his shit. Jesus.

Poor went out for our Cajun friends. Yeah, that's for you, Taylor. Yeah, Taylor. This episode goes out to Taylor. I didn't know the contestant's name until that title card either. I was like, who the fuck is Taylor? Oh, God. The host of Chop looks like Jason Isaacs. Ted Allen?

If he, like, lived in the suburbs. Formerly one of the original fab five of the first queer eye. Yeah, he looks like the guy who played Lucius Malfoy. Oh. But like if he lived in the suburbs. Yeah, Jason Isaacs. He's been in other things, but yeah. Yeah, he's a British actor.

Yeah, he's really good. Cat appearance. Cat, cat time. This is Prax. Cat and cat. Where's Maude? Fuck if I know. She's doing her own thing, being an independent woman.

Yeah, she's still fucked up from that chopped episode too. What's your cat's name? This is Prax. I also have Amis running around somewhere. I don't know where he is. is. Is that short for Paxis? Yeah.

It's good. It's actually short for Prakit K. She's named after Prakity K. Meng and Amos is named after Amos Burton, who are characters in The Expans, which I highly recommend both the book and the TV show. I mean, I trust anyone who's got like a dressing screen. It's so good.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good dressing screen. Yeah, it's pretty good. Justin looks so done. So that wraps up our episode. episode of Carrie's Chopped Recap. Yeah, thanks for coming on. We should do an episode about food in libraries. That'd be fun.

Oh, that actually would. I have a story about that, about some placards. We do tons of food-related stuff, and we do Pizzola contest every year. We got Dea de Mertos going on. I bring Tupperware to work. I'm Justin. I'm a scholar communications library. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work as a cisadmin at a public library. My pronouns are she and they. I'm Jay. I'm an academic metadata librarian and my pronouns are he-him. I'm Carrie. I'm a health sciences librarian and my pronouns are she-her. I have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself?

I certainly would. I'm Kat. I am, my pronouns are they, them. I'm a professor at Bemidji State University in the psychology department and I mostly teach courses related to sex and gender and research methods. And I'm also the co-founder and co-director of the Northwoods queer outreach. Thanks for coming on. I saw your presentation at the Open Education Conference. And I think I add you on Twitter while it was still going on. And I was like, I'm just going to ask them on the podcast because this is pretty cool.

So, yeah, we're going to talk about open education and your specific course that you built, which is called Queer Psychology, which I thought was very neat as someone who went to a community college where everyone thought they were going to be a psych major because everyone just really liked the psych professor. So his courses were like always really full because he was just a good teacher and like really entertaining. So yeah, I took a bunch of actually advanced psych stuff in community college.

So I took like abnormal psych and human sexuality. It was like 16. I'm like, I'm not sure how like works because like what they show in that class legally. But you know, dual enrollment, education. Yeah, I actually teach a human sexuality class at BSU and then the last month or so learned that I have some PSEO students and have had through my five years teaching that course. So I had a moment of horror when I realized I've probably shown porn to 17 year olds in my class, which I wasn't jazzed about. But it helped me to remember that, first of all, the content that I teach in human sexuality is, I think, necessary for everybody to know, but maybe in more age-appropriate ways. So I've never had an angry parent phone call.

So I think I'll just take that as a sign that I squeaked under and be more intentional maybe about showing naked people in class going forward. I mean, they're not going to tell their parents because they want to keep their support. supply coming. You know, they want to have the cool professor who teaches human sexuality showing them born in class. Way to watch those, you've probably seen these where they show sexual positions with dressed in like black suits. And they were like explaining.

It's an old video. Lindsay Doe in Sex Explanations has videos like that. I think Lindsay Doe is amazing. She's my hero. But I actually do a cop out for sexual positions and show Wikimedia. illustrations. I did my first semester teaching. I did use some really what I thought were quaint porn scenes from like the 90s when porn had like plots back in the day. It was like an actual production. And in the reflection feedback I got from the students, they really got hung up on

why everybody was wearing birthday hats. So I realized that that was distracting a little bit from what I wanted them to be focusing on, which was, of course, like, increasing porn literacy, although I've gotten much better at teaching that, but also sneaking in some queer porn and, like, gauging, how do you feel watching two dudes having sex? So, you know, that's the kind of provocation that I enjoy in my classes sometimes. Sweet. So, no segment this week. We're just going to jump into it, because I have been just off Twitter because politics was happening. So I just like don't, everyone's just being an annoying lib and I'm sick of it.

So once they're back to posting normally, I'll maybe see something from Skitschon that annoyed me, but nothing this week. It's did my job, went to work. We haven't done an open education episode before, which is kind of weird because it's a big part of my job. Yeah, I've done a lot of open education stuff too. And I can't believe we've never talked about it either. We did do a porn episode, though.

Yeah, and we've done open access, but ne'er the twain shall meet. Yeah. Open access porn? Yeah. I believe Carrie said, like, to open her access. It's a quote from an old... I need to go make a drop out of that. Wait, hold on.

I can do it. All right, hang on. Oh, God. You want to open my access. There's the episode preview. All right. Drop made. You just witnessed a drop.

Congrats. Sook a blot. I lost patron of thought. What is open education? Chew, chew. We make drops. Anyway, so yeah, open education are practices that have to do with openly licensed materials and are combined with open pedagogical practices like non-disposable assignments

or doing things on. Wikimedia, publishing, collaborating, creating materials for the course as you're doing it. There's a lot of different ways you can do open education and open pedagogy. And I'm excited to do more of it at work now that we have a little more capacity and have some more people and have more interest. I would love to do a project like this. I saw some people who seemed very well funded with like armies of student workers to do cool stuff, which I don't think is what you did.

Must be nice. Yeah, yeah. What? How does that work? But what got you interested in open education in general? At first, I didn't know what it was. So I think a lot of, so I did my PhD in social psychology and I was, I think trained as a generous term. But I was trained to go into undergraduate education, probably graduate education to teach my own grad students. that didn't work out because of the market, but also, I don't know, I don't think I was very competitive when I was at fresh out of grad school. So I got a teaching focus job, which I did not anticipate enjoying so much. And I think it was the first year. I was at BSU. I went to a presentation on cutting costs for students. A lot of our students are low income. There are people who are already working full-time jobs who have parents, well, have parents, but also have kids who are parents themselves. The psychology program has a fully online program as well as a residential program. So we really have such a range of students.

And I'm really invested in lowering costs for them. And as librarians, I'm sure you're aware that traditional textbook publishing is ridiculous when it comes to costs. And while the like the quizzing platforms that the publishers have are better in some regards than just the plain textbook, they add more. money to the bill. So I went to that presentation and it just kind of hovered in the back of my mind. I could do this in our university system. It's called the zero G. Now I have no idea why it's zero G. Anyways, like this goal that we get to zero cost. Really, why is it G? It doesn't matter. So the idea is that we as faculty try to reduce as much external costs that students have to pay. Awesome. that's hovering in the back of my mind. And as I'm one of the downsides of being really obsessive

about always having, like always improving, my coursework is that I continually reprep my courses. So I change textbooks too often. And with human sexuality, I really was looking for a good fit of accessible language. So it's not too, it's a 2000 level class. So I get first and second years, you know, occasionally juniors and seniors, but it's mostly first and second years. years who are fresh out of high school. So I don't want a lot of research citations, like to read like a research article. So it has to be accessible language. I want it to reflect human diversity. So much of our textbooks in general are written for a cisgender heterosexual white audience, abled audience, middle class audience. So I was really looking for a textbook that would

have the language that I want, low amounts of pathologization. of queer and trans identities. Also, and this is something that I've not found at all, like low pathologization of intersex identities and conditions, that is a high priority for me, and that is something I continually look for. But I wasn't finding it. Like, there was no traditional textbook out there

that I could find that was good enough on language now. And, of course, traditional published textbooks, like take years to update. Like, you know, you're going to wait a year for the next edition to come out, which is going to be more expensive, but it's going to be outdated by the time you get it in front of your students. And especially around queer and trans identities, language changes so fast. I mean, I am terminally online, and I am even surprised by the new language coming up in the new ways that specifically trans folks, but queer folks, trans folks find of expressing themselves and

identifying themselves and their experiences. So an opportunity, I saw FAC staff email and an opportunity at the system level for an OER learning circle, a program for faculty to have, have a credit of time to be in community with other faculty across other men state institutions to explore redesigning a course with OER open educational resources or create supplementary resources for an existing OER textbook. And so I did that the summer of 2020. I planned for it, you know, at the beginning of the spring semester of 2020. And then something happened. So I didn't really anticipate like everything exploding in 2020. But here I am in the midst of this learning circle, trying to figure out how am I going to reprep human sexuality. I had just a few weeks where I was convinced that I could just write an open access.

textbook for human sexuality over the summer. I don't know what I was thinking. But one of the great things about regular meetings with other faculty, they were like, don't do that. What are you doing? So that's where I really got on board with the concept of OER and the point that you find stuff that's already there. You don't have to create it. So my human sexuality course is the first one that I redesigned with OER. And then as I was planning for the next year of courses, queer psychology was also on my schedule. So I thought, well, similarly, there's no queer psychology textbook at all. So I figured, well, this is a perfect, perfect spot for me to deploy some OER as well. Yeah. I would say that's a pretty typical journey of getting involved in OER and realizing being the kind of. faculty member who's always tinkering with your course, I feel like, are also the faculty members who get really involved in OER? Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's been my experience, too. And especially, like, yeah, people who are a little, like, fresher and have the energy, too. Like, it takes some

energy, but, like, that's, that's the good energy, too. So in an environment where a lot of universities are moving more towards online or have had, you know, online programs, a thing that we're dealing with at my institution is sort of like how do you conduct labs in like an online environment, especially one of the things we're trying to impress on professors. I'm on one of the committees that like helps approve and develop our like gin ed program, but it's like the discovery programmer, you know, one of those things. And one of the things we're trying to get across to professors is like you can't assume that students have anything, like maybe not even like a dish and clean water because, like, students might be homeless or just, like, not have access to a kitchen

or something. And I'm assuming some lab work maybe happens in psychology or something. I have never taken a psychology class before. But I was wondering how if you had to, if you had an experience with, like, OER and, like, those kinds of situations where maybe something that seems like it should only happen in person has had to move online and how OER is played into that. And, like, how can libraries support those kinds of environments and situations. I don't do that kind of work. We don't have that kind of labs, those kind of labs. We do do research, but it's all human subject research.

I do have a colleague who does EEG research, and that is in person. We don't have the technology right now that you could do that remotely. But I do, yeah, I have no idea. I'm not in STEM. So we, like the kind of, labs that we do for me, like I teach a social psychology course that isn't fully OER, but I do have an open access textbook. So I'm getting there. But that's one of the, that's one of the courses that I'm still like, I still have the training wheels on because I'm still afraid to fully let go of

the traditional textbook. And the same with my research methods class, partly also because I love the textbook that I have so much. I'm like such a fan person for the office. author. But I do try to be creative in how can they collect data. So observations, things that they're already engaging with and on a daily basis, asking people around them. So, I mean, that's not like, okay, combine these chemicals and tell us what the reaction is. I don't have any idea how you could do that. That would definitely be creativity. But so I support the desire to support that kind of work. And sometimes embracing OER and open education absolutely requires creativity and rethinking and rethinking the way things are done, which I think is a good thing.

But I have no answer. I'm not a STEM person either. I just had a meeting and we talked about it today. I was like, oh, hey, that sounds relevant. Yeah. Normally, you just do things in the household and explain theoretically like what's going on. Like, this is a detergent, what's happening in this reaction, stuff like that. So it's usually something extremely simple, but then you just have to explain it on a college level relative to the course.

So it can just be any kind of chemical reaction or something. Biology is really tough, though. But people have done it. So you built the queer psychology course specifically. using OER, but maybe people would want to know what encompasses queer psychology. What does it mean to queer psychology? Is that the idea of the title? Or is it psychology about queer people or the queering of queer people in psychology? Well, to lean on queer theory, I'm just going to say yes. Nailed it. It's all of those things. Absolutely. So I like queer psychology instead of like

like LGBTQ plus or 2S LGBTQ or LGBT even, because it also seems limiting. And it's also within psychology, the way that things are done, specifically with folks who have non-normative gender and sexual identities is very comparison-based. How are gay people different from straight people? Are their relationships as good? What kind of sex are they having? What are trans people's bodies? Like, how are they different from cis people's bodies?

Like the differences. Instead of how does homophobia operate at a systemic level that oppresses everyone, particularly queer people, things like that. So part of the queer psychology was the history of the word bringing in queer theory, I'm queer. My psychology is queer. So, like, if I'm involved, it's going to be super queer. And so, yeah, just really bleeding out, like feathering the boundaries around what is psychology even and how do we question it. My course is really built on queer theory as well as intersectional theory and liberation psychology. And that liberation psychology is also a really important aspect to the queer part because of queer liberation.

That's one of my stated goals for the course. So it's one of the funnest classes I've ever created, I think, because it's so elastic. And we, you know, I assign research articles and we talk about like regular boring psychology research stuff. But also it's an exploration of how destructural oppression impact queer and trans folks. How has psychology perceived and treated trans and queer identities? what is the status quo? What's cis normativity and heteronormativity? And also, how do we resist that? How do we challenge it? And the last module of the course is to end on a high note because the second to last is all about the oppression. The last module is all about, okay, so what is queer liberation? How do we work toward that? How can we change things where we are, our own location, to make things better for queer and trans people? So I see queer society. psychology as like it's topical because it focuses on the experiences and centers the voices of queer and trans people, particularly queer and trans folks of color, but also how does that

bleed into other areas of psychology? How do we throw out of all the categories? Yeah. So could you talk more about like the process of assembling, especially, you know, I guess this is probably of more germany to the library folk here is how did you go through your process of assembling your resources? Because I looked at it and I was like, this is comprehensive. Because like, I mean, obviously you definitely probably knew about some stuff, but how did you pool together your syllabus and your resources? Yeah, it's an excellent question. And because I had already developed human sexuality. I had a little bit of a head start. I have a whole module in that class about gender and sexual identity. So it's only one module in the whole class. So even though I have sprinkles of, you know,

queer and trans inclusive content across that human sexuality class, there was a lot of stuff that I just couldn't use because it was too much. So I already had sort of a head start and using that. And then thinking about broadly, what are the major things that I want people to know? want people to take away. I did look up a lot of other folks syllabi around this topic. So there are folks who are doing LGBTQ psychology or psychology of gays and lesbians and things like that. And there were a couple syllabi by people who are like explicitly queer themselves. And it may or may not surprise you to learn those are the folks I took the most inspiration from. I am out on my campus. I'm out as queer and as trans. So I also didn't want to hide that or how my identities

impact the way that I design the course, my motivation for the course. And so that's true both on the faculty staff side as well as the student side. It's not a secret. So it really came down to, what do I have time for? What are the major takeaways I want? So when I design a course, regardless of what it is, I really try to make sure I'm aligned in my course objectives, my assessments, and then the support through the instructional materials. So, yeah, that's, it kind of sounds just sort of, like it magically happens, but there's a lot of searching on the internet, on, you know, academic search engines, trying to figure out exactly which articles are the best, what have other people used who cited a lot, what's accessible to the students. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah,

the accessibility component is huge, you know, and there's also other ways like, you know, to go through that too, because this is, this is your official library plug. I've actually, like, done, like, you can actually get full text access for course purposes, FYI, because I've done that for faculty before a semester. So if you have articles that you want to get that you can't get, let us know. Well, and I will also give a shout out to my own library staff. I have amazing folks, amazing faculty librarians who are super supportive, both of our psychology department as well as our individual faculty. I have, yeah, I just, our librarians are amazing. Much love to them. on article finder network.

Hamhorn for last week's episode. That's true. You can do that. Yeah, you can get shit for your students dirty. It's fine. All cops are bastards and that includes librarians. Basically. I mean, and in all, in all honesty, that is also part of my pedagogy that, like, no cop shit. No, like, all my deadlines are soft.

Yes. Yes, no cop shit as pedagogy. I'm not here to audit people's lives, show up when you can, and you got the spoons. Like, I'm not, like, live your life. Yeah. I just started a new class, and it started with, like, a lecture, but not like the informative kind. It was just kind of like, I am doctor, hard ass. And, you know, all my stuff is copyrighted. And then when you download them, it just has big copyright thing all over the top and the bottom.

And I was like, what? Why? that's like the kind of professor that like brags about like people failing their course a lot I met a professor who failed people for pirating textbooks I had a professor like that and he's pretty much the entire reason why I don't actually have my degree it's because I got so tired of his shit that I just stopped taking his classes and he was the only one who offered networking classes at the college I was going to so yeah it's It's always wonderful to hear from teachers like you who recognize that their, you know, students have lives that don't involve textbooks.

Yeah. I mean, my biggest barrier around traditionally published textbooks is remembering that I shouldn't be the one to pirate for my students. Like, there are lines that I as a professor, like, shouldn't be engaged, you know, at just, exactly. Yeah. Low level of crimes, trying to minimize the crimes. you can just be like, don't definitely go to these places to get it, wink. Do what I do and put up a big poster and then the students write all the websites on the poster. But you don't have to say anything. Wink. One of my coworkers and I have a joke at work.

Like if a faculty member asks us about SIHUB, we just go, SyHub's illegal. Wink. Yeah, that's just like our line. Me and the Science Librarian. It's like how libraries have to like, if you, you know, there's always like a sign by like the copier. It's like, now don't use this to copy the whole thing. But we're not monitoring that.

We don't give a shit. We just have put that there because if someone does do it and get caught, we can't be sued. But we're not going to be like, you know, looking at you being like, how did you do a certain percentage of that text? Oh, no. It's just like, don't do it. Yeah, it's usually what copiers are outside the line. of sight, the line of sight of the desk. I saw some of the stuff from your presentation on what you were using. So you weren't just using traditional models. And you've mentioned like

open access materials and research articles, but you're also using things like medium posts and YouTube videos and stuff like that. Could you go into like how you're doing? Absolutely. So part of my motivation for incorporating different types of media into the course was also centering the voices of queer and trans people, particularly queer and trans folks of color. And one new thing, this course prep, I, you know, OER is wonderful because you are able to sub in things and switch out things and update the course in little bitty pieces instead of just one fell swoop of a textbook. But one thing that I'm doing different this semester that I didn't do last semester was incorporating more poetry and more literature style.

content, so much more interdisciplinary. But absolutely, YouTube videos that speak to people's lived experiences, slam poetry, I'm a huge fan of that, and particularly to speak to the experiences of queer and trans folks of color in such a visceral way, a really emotionally engaging way. I have a variety of YouTube videos that range from, you know, the slam poetry to Lil Nas'x, of course, to, you know, vice documentaries and other, like, this semester in class, we watch the Golden Girls episode 72 hours to talk about media covering the HIV-AIDS epidemic as it was happening. What does, what messages does this episode say about what it was like to live through the epidemic?

At that point in time, the episode aired, it was early 1990, so it had been going for a while, but there was still so much misinformation about what it was. So I really do try to be interdisciplinary, and one of the major projects of the course is a media analysis paper, where I want them to track how much queer media are you consuming, and what are the stereotypes or where are the tropes that you're seeing? Is it good representation? We talk about the difference between presence and representation,

so is it just that, you know, LaFou ends up dancing with some random dudes, at the end of Beauty and the Beast, oh, you're super gay? Or is it like meaningful representation where queer people are fully human characters? So I do try to, I mean, I have a lot of research studies and we talk about research and psychology, but I also want to, that's part of the queering for me, I want to incorporate that lived experience piece. I want to design the course both for cis-hets students for whom this is their first real exposure to the experiences of queer and trans folks, but also for my queer and trans students to see their own lived experiences reflected back. And then is there anything you're doing to, like as you're building the course,

I'm sure you're having to put in explanations and things like that, are you building towards something that's going to be shareable for other people who want to teach queer psychology? I can. I often, I, uh, often, pretty one day at a time right now. So I'm not really thinking that far out, but I am, like folks have emailed me after that Open Ed conference presentation, contacted me about talking about my course, which I'm so excited about. And I'm happy to share all my materials. I'm just, I just want to give everything away so that everybody can, can do their own version or, you know, take bits and pieces, whatever. Yeah. So I,

I would love for other people to duplicate or to expand what I'm doing into whatever domain they're doing. And it doesn't have to be queer psychology. I mean, queers are for everyone. So it could be queer sociology, but also it could be like queer physics. I'm sure if I thought hard enough, maybe not. But I could talk to somebody who knew physics. I'm sure I could help with making a physics course queer. Yeah, same polar magnets trying to stay apart from each other, pretty suss.

Queer as fuck. Very homoerotic. Don't even get me started on neutrinos. Intricate rituals. I had a question about, like, do you have ways for staying current on, I guess, literature or other materials that you would use to update, not just queer psychology, but also? your human sexuality course as well. Yes. So usually it's student-driven.

So the questions that I get from my students, the questions that I get from other people, like a faculty at one of the North Dakota schools emailed me earlier this semester and asked if I had any materials for trans men going through pregnancy. And I didn't, but that spurred me to look into it and I found something that I could send to that faculty, but also, guess what got added to my course? So questions that I get today in human sexuality, we were talking about sexual intercourse,

and I also have, I talk about the full menu, so it's not just PIV, but today we talked about sounding and muffing. And so I also wanted to find additional resources about how to do that. So for my human sexuality course, it's like an educational course of course. Of course, Jesus. Of course. But also, like, of course. Of course. Of course. But also, it's also a skills course. Like, I want them to develop communication skills. I want them to develop self-advocacy skills, self-awareness, understanding them, what do they want? Where are their boundaries? So in addition to this is what STIs are, this is how you can protect yourself from pregnancy. I also want them to develop the skills to be able to, be fully realized sexual people. So a lot of the resources that I seek out for that course relate to skill building knowledge around that. But again, it really has to do with what questions do my students have. I get lots of ideas from the students who are in my class, especially my queer and trans students. I'm the co-advisor for our BSU Phoenix group, which is our 2S-LGBQ plus student group. So lots of ideas from

those folks. I'm on Twitter way too much. So I'm also like plugged into the trans discourse, uh, on Twitter. So like updating language and, and being aware of things that develop there. And the Sopranos. Naturally. Uh, we're all into the Sopranos right now. Fuck the many saints of Newark. Man, fuck the many saints of Newark. Like, I want money for having watched that. I'm so mad about that. Trans Twitter is just the Sopranos and then shitposts and that's

it. It's great. Basically. Yeah. And fall out New Vegas. I guess I'm not in that part of Trans Twitter. Also vintage firearms, fortress building

in the late medieval period. Ooh, yeah. And Edith Piaf. Yeah, mine is a lot of like early modernist trans masks. It's pretty good. The fancy lads. The fancy lads, yeah. Yeah.

You've got a brand. You said your administration was pretty supportive. Was there any other hurdles in terms of creating the course itself? I would say COVID was the biggest hurdle. The first semester I offered it, I had planned to have one on campus and one online section, but then COVID messed that up, so they were both online remote. So this semester, again, COVID, I wanted to accommodate folks who might need to be out because of quarantine or exposure or they have COVID. But also, I had a fair number of online only folks who wanted to take it who didn't have the chance to take or weren't able to take it last semester.

So this semester I'm teaching one section, but it's a simultaneous online and on campus experience because I had all the materials basically together. I just had to record like lecture videos instead of having the recordings from the synchronous Zoom sessions last semester. Yeah, making sure that folks had the opportunity to engage with each other. That's the biggest hurdle also for online classes in general. Are people going to respond to discussion posts? I use mastery-based grading. So that's always a hurdle for me because I don't grade discussion posts because I only grade summative assessments. So I just have to like encourage them and bug them to talk to each other.

But my administration has been really supportive. My department is amazing. I'm really lucky to be in a position where my department is really devoted to and wanting to live values of multiculturalism and equity and inclusion. So I bring to the table this queer trans piece of that. And I'm happy to hold down this corner of the tent, as it were. But, yeah, I really didn't expect to be so, I don't want to, I don't know what comfortable is the right word, but at least like able to be out in authentic at a, you know, a regional, rural public university and, you know, beyond the wall. But here I am.

Yeah, I think sometimes the public nature of those schools can be a lot more helpful, having been at like a, a. private rural institution previously. Like that was less helpful for folks I knew who were in similar positions. I know they could be out on certain levels, but there were other levels that like they couldn't be as out. But I think the public aspect of that tends to help, at least from what I've witnessed at other institutions. I mean, I'm a CIS head person.

So I don't have anything to risk. but just from my friends who were in similar positions. Yeah. I mean, lucky too that I'm in Minnesota, which has some pretty good sexual and gender identity protections at the state level. And I was a state employee. So I get that protection.

Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The state employee protections are super beneficial, especially in Minnesota. There's great benefits there. Yeah,

I couldn't remember. Yeah, Bimidji's in Minnesota. One thing listening to you. has made me think is, especially when you talked about how you were approached, like, oh, hey, do you have resources for, like, transmen and transmasculine people going through pregnancy, and you hadn't, and so you looked, and then you ended up that it even changed your courses. So I was wondering if, through the process of developing OER resources and designing courses around that, has that changed how you search for information and how you use

libraries and even how you teach your students how to search for information. Like, how do you navigate sources and information differently now that you do this? I would say yes. One of the main ways is that I've just found some excellent, like big resources, like scarletine, cannot say enough good things about scarleteen, especially for my human sexuality class, just A plus content. Healthline has also been. a surprising gem for me. They have some really great, they have a really good article on sounding. Did not expect that, but here we are. Yeah, so I have found sources that I go back to for specific content, Planned Parenthood, of course, excellent for, you know, reproductive justice-related

information. Some, yeah, so some places I go back to. Information literacy is something that I would like to also incorporate more into my courses. I talk about it a little bit in methods, but one idea I have for further developing my human sexuality class is that, again, not wanting to do cop shit, I have assessments that they have to complete that I use the quiz tool for, but they're not multiple choice. There's a lot of matching. They're all application driven. So I describe people match their identity or here are some symptoms, what STI might. they have or your cis male partner says that he's been tested for every STI. What STI has he definitely not been tested for? Because they don't have tests. So like really application focused and like life

skills building. But they're able to use their notes. It's open. But like they could do whatever they want, work together. I don't care. They are just like I'm testing them on their mastery. And however they show that mastery is up to them. So one idea I have. for expanding that is then having a follow-up question when they're done with the assessment, what sources did you use? And if you Googled something, like evaluate the goodness of that source, like, was it Scarleteen? Or was it this Reddit thread you found? Like, how do you evaluate what good information? And I occasionally share memes from, you know, screencaps from Twitter, or Facebook or Instagram or something where usually it's somebody who just doesn't understand how

bodies work or that women are supposed to orgasm. And I, you know, make fun of it and challenge it. But one thing that I want to be able to help them build through this course is evaluating information like that. Like when you see stuff on social media or Google search returns, I don't think anybody actually uses Bing. How do you evaluate the information and it's rigorousness. I don't know. Like, it's good, goodness is not the right word. Yeah.

But like how do you, how do you exercise, I always say like, how do you exercise your judgment in this situation? Yes. That's like how I, I'm the information literacy person in this group. Hi. Or as I call it information shitteracy. But like, how do you exercise your judgment that you've built up? Yes.

Yeah. Our library liaison, Colleen Deal, who is wonderful, created some materials for like searching, using psych info and psych articles and evaluating sources and things like that for my research methods course. But I do, I would love to be able to incorporate more library resources or have a sort of a bidirectional relationship. At this point, the limitation for me is time. I don't say no enough to committees or things. So I'm pretty jam-packed on my schedule. But yeah, building literacy, that's, I think, a lacking skill for our students coming up, really focused on regurgitating the content for standardized tests, but not so much on understanding what's the message being given here.

Like, what's the subtext of this message that I'm getting? literally something we were talking about in like our team's chat at work today was like from for like people transitioning from high school to college and like actually one of my co-workers and I who we deal with a lot of graduate students we see this a lot in graduate students that like even across the board they were asking us like what do you see most of your students struggle with coming in from like high school to college like as transitionary problem or like you know, what are the areas that, like, you see as, like, college readiness issues? And, like, both Anna and I, who are, who work with a lot of graduate students, where it's like, well, across the board, we see a lot of students struggling with this, which is, like, focusing your topics and things like that. And, like, a lot of people say, like, similar things are things that you'll see across the board, regardless of how far advanced someone is. So I'm a metadata librarian. Like, I'm one of the people that, like, make sure that the catalog works.

and everything. But one of the sort of non-medadata areas of interest that I have that I studied a little bit from my thesis is information seeking behavior. So when someone like, and even like question information, so like when someone has a question, how is that like

actually made in their brain? And then how is that translated to like asking it? And then how does that asking happen? Are they going to a search engine? Are they finding a librarian? Where are they looking? And so it's fascinating because so often in academia, professors will kind of have like a kind of laissez-faire. Like, I don't care as long

as you cite it. It's consistent. And it's, you know, a good source or you'll have the like, if you don't have this article from this person, you obviously didn't do your research, right? And so it's really refreshing to hear you be like, you know, this is open notes basically, but also like, tell me your information-seeking process. What did you look at? What did you search in Google? Because I feel like in, at least when I went to library school and I was in grad school 2015 through 2017, we learned like Google techniques and like our reference courses and stuff to teach people. I'm older and I went in 2010 and they told us no Google in your reference class. Right. Yeah. Like I went I went to libraries. during the Google Bad period. Yeah. And I think we've swung back around to Google Bad because they really don't do bullying anymore and all the algorithms just bring up right-wing stuff because it ranks on

engagement now than necessarily anything else. Yeah. The algorithms and stuff are pretty fat-fakta. Fucked. Dr. Sophia Noble, shout out. Yeah. And there's still like a split in librarianship. And Carrie, I saw you tweeting about this, like, the other day or last week or something, I've been ill about, like, there's still librarians, like, the sort of like, is Wikipedia useful? Like, you know, like, do as librarians, do we teach people how to use Wikipedia as researchers, as students? Right. Or do we not, I'm very pro Wikipedia as like a really great resource. Oh, yeah. Oh, there was, actually it was one of the local colleges up.

here in Milwaukee. Oh, was it? Yeah. They did the meme wrong, which was like the car turning off the interstate. And it's like, go talk to your librarian instead of using Wikipedia. And it's like, no, Wikipedia is fine. Like, you can literally, like, they have articles at the end. Yeah.

Yeah. And so like. There are literally research articles at the end of Wikipedia. It's like the credit. Yes. And so like with the sort of like, open educational resource framework, sort of teaching students, not just, okay, here's how you go find the articles and here's where you look in the textbook, but actually engaging with these other

open resources on the internet and encouraging them to find them on their own and evaluate them and not just rely on you to do it for them. Oh, my ass is so chapped right now. I got this, I got this professor who's like, you got to go find a. book on your topic, an academic book. And someone's like, I'm writing, my professor approved my topic. It's jumping beans. So I get this email. Oh, it's a cat. Yeah, it's a mod. It's a mod. Say hi, maud. So I get this email today. It's like, hey, my professor proved my topic. It's jumping beans. And I need an academic book about it. And I'm like, what the fuck? And so my boss sends me this giff of a bean jumping trying to get an apple. It was funny, but I am brilliant. And I said, well, you know, jumping beans actually have larvae and then side them.

It's moth larvae that make them jump. And so I was like, well, here's some books that have information about the, the moth in them, but you might want to research, like, the ecological landscape around them that make the moth burrow into the bean. There you go. And you might be able to find a book on that. So I'm meeting with a student on Friday. Anyway, but that's like, don't give me those fucking bullshit assignments.

That's fucking cop shit. And also with students, like, in a, these might be older research studies, but, like, like, A lot of like info seeking behavior studies, especially of undergraduates, have sort of found that if it's too difficult to get to, they're just not going to do it. Like it's more a matter of like I, as part of my job, I help manage our discovery layer. And I don't know how much non, like, I don't know how much professors know about that. But like the catalog where it also shows the articles and stuff like that's where it brings in things external to the catalog. It's usually like the place where there's a search bar and you type in what you need and it brings you a book review first. Yeah, exactly that. So I manage that and a conflict I have all the time is the reference librarians want this to be like imagine me doing like a rainbow. A tool for information.

Do you know what? I hate discovery layers. I don't use them. I tell people not to use them. Like they can be useful. No, just go to your data. base. Go to psych info. Yeah, it's much better. Go to your happy place. Go to psych info. But like a student, like I care more about like the student trying to do their paper at 3 a.m.

Like eating pizza. Yeah. Then I do about the, the librarian wanting to make sure they have the skills. Because like students just just want to get their homework done. Exactly. Right? They want like the path of least resistance. And so I, with OER, is that providing a path of least resistance or does sometimes that create more resistance because you have to go to a certain place to get the resources like do you have to go to this link in canvas or noodle or whatever you're using just to get to the thing your professor's telling you to get to and so i do really like your approach of being like well where did you go to get this and how um just because i weirdly don't see a lot of people doing that yeah i like that's how i designed assignments too like show your process that's that's how you look at you look at you learn. Yeah. Well, and that's what they're going to be doing out in the wild anyway, right? Like, they leave the classroom. They'd be like, oh, man, I remember this one sex thing or this one queer thing that I, we were talking about, what was that? And then they Google or, yeah, they just Google. What was that porn we watched in class? Exactly. And I want them to be able to. With the party house. I want to be able to figure out for themselves. is like a good resource.

It's kind of funny how often that crosses over with technology because like STEM, you're like, oh yeah, you just know where to go for it. It's like two-thirds of my job is just knowing what sites to click on and what sites not to click on in a Google search. Like if I have a problem and I'm troubleshooting something, that's pretty much how I do it. So like click on docks.com over something that ends in XYZ or something like that, you know. So it's actually really really. funny that I said that because I was telling my friends about how to search for porn on archive.org the other day.

Incredible. They're like, well, how do you find it? I was like, well, you don't type in porn. You have to type in the stuff you like. Like, you would search for porn. It's called information seeking behavior. Like, I was talking about porn as an information, like, finding porn as an information seeking behavior to my friends the other day. Like, I was just like, and they were just like totally called me.

I was like, isn't this the nerdyest fucking, they're like, nerdy's fucking shit you've ever heard right here. There's got to be a good research article or something about information seeking behavior on porn hub. I mean, that's a Bree Watson article waiting to happen. Yeah, I can't think of any sites off the top of my head, but I know that porn sites, especially the ones that have subscription models, have some of the best, like, taxonomy. Oh, yeah, they have great data. are paying for it, they better be able to find what they want and find it right now. And so like porn sites for like tagging and folksonomy and categorization and taxonomy, that's kind of where you want to go to study that kind of stuff because it's like kind of

the top notch in the industry because they want their customers to be happy and keep paying them. So that's just a fun fact. There's high competition. Is there fasted porn searching? I can put like a delimiter on like time and be like 81 to 85. for ages I think so I mean if you're into age fetishes

I think you can go specific There's not like a good taxonomy for like pubic hair I don't have to type in gilth if I'm looking for Especially for men anyway Sorry we're getting deep into like porn search behaviors I don't know that

like the free sites have good faceted searching for at least from like the last time I used one but anyway But like Pornhub, they have, I think they've like made their data public for researchers. So like you could research, you could research that as a potential intersection of things. I mean, all the titles on there are just metadata slurry now. Well, it's also probably too much bot behavior. It's probably used most of the time.

That is actually probably true. There's probably a lot of bot behavior. But anyway, we try to end on an action. behavior. That's the good share right there. Yeah, it is. I was going to say we try to end on action-oriented questions, and mine was, you know, how can people do what you did?

And I asked you earlier if you had any plans for sharing out your course design, and when he said, you know, you haven't thought about it yet. This is a big problem. So this is going to be like my call to librarians is you have to facilitate that process. It's the same thing as putting stuff into. a repository. You can't just tell people this is where the repository is,

put it there. You have to offer mediated access or else your repository won't grow. So you need to go to faculty members who are doing OER and then tell them, we will put this all on like OER Commons for you. And then usually the professor will be like, okay, well, I want to fix it up.

I want to make it pretty first. And then they never get back to you. But at least the offer is there. And that's the only way it's going to get done. But also librarians keep bothering your faculty. Like, actually do that. Be a pain in their ass. Yeah, if it works.

I mean, otherwise, there's some people I just don't want to talk to. Kat, do you have anything coming up? Any upcoming research or any presentations that you'd like to plug? Would you like to plug your Twitter? Or do you want people to leave you alone? Oh, that's the eternal question. I am in a perpetual state of working on. something. So I don't have anything like obviously coming up, but Twitter is always fine,

you know, both the joy and anxiety of having a Twitter notification. Like, oh, somebody engaged. Oh, no, somebody engaged. So, but I do love talking about course design and pedagogy and and also like just queering the hell out of that. So I'm happy to chat with other folks who are also interested in that. And I really also want to stress that this doesn't have to be queer psychology. It could be queer whatever you want. I'm sure that there is possibility for queering whatever discipline you are working in. Queer physics. Arthur agrees. Absolutely. Do it. You'll figure it out. I'm sure someone has talked about it. I'm sure someone has something on. I saw a drag queen talking about like quantum physics as like a queer thing. it's it's definitely out there but this is the problem with stem people is they think like their subjects have absolutely no overlap with a society and they're really fucking wrong i select for the sciences for this reason is why i volunteered to be the science selector just so wrong you're so wrong science sometimes you're wrong guess what science you're wrong you're wrong i spend most of my time whenever i can spend money getting like indigenous environmental history stuff like that oh yeah that That shit rips. Yeah.

Luckily, our collection development librarian is already pretty good about that. So I didn't really need to be the one to do it. They've already usually bought whatever I was looking at. But I do just try and find, like, things that otherwise aren't going to get picked up. But it's hard because library collection development is kind of strict on some things. So I really like the freedom you have when you're building a course and you can just be like, oh, I'm going to put a medium article in here. I'm going to put a blog in here.

I'm going to put something just weird in here that, like, You wouldn't normally catalog. The library wouldn't usually be involved. But also, Jay, the thing you were talking about earlier about finding things easier, course guides are really good for that. Yes. Especially for introductory courses. I'm trying to teach our instruction librarians how to make them.

And make them look good and not be linked dumps. Yep. Not be everything. It's got to be specific to the course. So you take the syllabus and you'd be like, okay, you've got an assignment that wants you do biography. Here's the biography database. Go there, use that.

But then, you know, eventually you're going to have to teach students. Like, you know, you're going to be out in the world one day and you're not going to have a course guide. So, yeah. Both approaches are important. One other challenge that I was thinking about as the conversation was going was, for me, letting go of those vestiges of authority. You know, it's so easy to fall back on the textbook. What does the textbook say? I mean, and of course, textbooks are written by people.

they don't lie out of nowhere. But letting go of that and acknowledging that we learn through a variety of different ways and those aren't less valid just because they're not packaged in this glossy $100, if you're lucky, traditionally published book. So that can be scary the first time you do that, especially for me, I mean, I don't even have tenure. And I'm a few years out of grad school. I Who am I, right? Like, who am I to say, this is what the course is? But, I mean, people are doing that all the time, right? So there's not, I don't see a lot of difference between learning like, you know, like the, just like being out in the world and absorbing information and having a more structured, sure there's assessment of that learning in the classroom, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other equally valid ways to learn and absorb the material. Yeah, well said. Cat. Is that the other cat?

No, it's still Prax. Okay. I don't know. Amos is on the, he's on another cat tree. He's already taking a nap. He looks exactly like. Amos and Prax look identical except Prax's long hair and Amos are short hair. Thanks for coming on.

If there's anything else that you have upcoming, I'll definitely retweet it to the account in the future. Free Retweets for Life. That's the library punk promise because we're here to make friends on the internet. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for reaching out, and I had a great time and love talking about this shit. Yeah, that was awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on.

I was really thrilled about what you've done because putting that together is no small feat. And putting it into the way you teach as well and not just the resources that you use that. Yeah, making it the whole. Oh, there's another cat. It's cat time, baby. Oh, and mods down here. We're having a cat party. It's cat party.

You hear that Arthur? You're going to have some friends, Bub? He was rubbing his teeth on the corner of my laptop. Oh, it's muddy murder mitts. Arthur's a friend. What a great way to close out the pod. Say bye, Arthur. Cats for cat.

Awesome. I planned it this way. Good night.