Speaker 1 0:04 You're listening to CECI Connect, a podcast from the CECI undergraduate advising office for the College of Education and Community innovation at Grand Valley State University, whether you're a student, teacher, professional or friend, welcome to this episode. Speaker 2 0:27 So today I have Jen Torreano, who works with university libraries here at Grand Valley, to talk to us about learning new information and how to make it easier on ourselves and enjoy the process. Jen, do you mind walking our listeners through your journey of how you got to where you are professionally at university libraries? Yeah. So I'll actually start from when I was a student, because I was a student here at Grand Valley, my major was English literature with a minor in classics. And when I was a student, I got a job at the Writing Center. So I was a writing consultant here for three years, and in my last summer before my senior year, the designs for the current Mary Adam P library were being put together. And it was these large groups of library staff and folks on campus meeting with architects to dream and I did a student Summer Scholars project through the Office of Undergraduate Research. And my project focused on Writing Center Library collaboration in preparation for the knowledge market here in the library. So the knowledge market is a space where students can come in and get support in research, writing presentations and digital literacy. So the idea was that the knowledge market would be right across from the service desk, in a space that's really visible to students. So as they're walking through the library, they can think, oh my gosh, I have this presentation coming up. I should pop in and talk to a speech consultant. So I was doing this summer project, and at the time, the current dean wanted to put librarians into the space to provide support with research, and I interviewed her for my project, and it was only supposed to be like a 20 minute interview, and we ended up talking for a couple of hours. And by the end of it, she was interested in having peer research consultants. So when I graduated, the library hired me, and I did a couple other jobs in the library, while doing that a little bit at the time, but eventually that part of my job grew so big that it became my whole job. And so now I'm the director of the knowledge market, and I run that research service, as well as work with our partners, the speech lab and the Writing Center and the digital creator lab, to have all those services in a space that's useful for students. Yeah, thank you for sharing that Speaker 1 2:48 you know you and I know each other. We've worked together in the past, and so you know how important working at the Writing Center was for me and my professional pathway as well as my personal development. Can you talk to our listeners a little bit about what working in peer mentoring at the Writing Center did for you and your professional and personal development? Speaker 2 3:12 Yeah. So honestly, I think the most important thing that Job did for me was give me confidence, because I met so many different students working as a consultant, and I had so many opportunities. I think there are opportunities that every student at the University has, but not ones that everyone knows about or feels comfortable pursuing. So I had a mentor and the director of the Writing Center who encouraged me to do things like apply for a student Summer Scholars project, and offered to be my mentor for that project. And so Speaker 2 3:47 I think learning how to speak with people feeling comfortable asking a lot of questions and being curious about people's lives and what they're learning, and then feeling comfortable being curious more publicly myself by pursuing research and Speaker 2 4:06 frankly, getting out of my comfort zone and doing things like interviewing library deans and traveling to Kentucky to talk to their library Deans like that was so uncomfortable for me, but Doing it not only helped me develop as a person and a learner and as a professional, but it also led to this whole career path for me that would have never happened had I not taken that risk. So I think, I think working as a student here and working in the Writing Center helped me feel comfortable taking risks. Yes, I completely relate to that. I also think that my experience working at the Writing Center had a lot to do with developing confidence and bravery and learning how to take risks. But one of the things I think was particular about my experience was knowing that working with students was different every single time. Right? Speaker 1 5:00 Every single human being was their own individual, unique self, and it was my job to sit down with this stranger and help them figure out what they wanted to do. So it could have been helping them understand what their professor wanted from them, or it could have been helping them figure out how to accomplish an assignment, or it could have been helping them figure out how to express themselves authentically. I think I had to approach those situations with curiosity, because I couldn't predict who or what was going to be walking into the room. Unknown Speaker 5:33 Do you relate to that at all? Unknown Speaker 5:36 Yes, I think, Speaker 2 5:39 I think what you said about everyone being an individual and coming in with their own lived experience and their own way of perceiving those experiences means that we can't ever make assumptions about people, and so Speaker 2 5:54 people also really like When you ask them questions. People like to experience curiosity and other people being curious about them because it makes them feel seen and like someone is looking for that connection with them. And so I think before working at the Writing Center, I was always worried about prying or making people uncomfortable by asking them questions. I didn't want people to think I was being nosy, and instead, what I learned is people enjoy Speaker 1 6:29 someone being interested in them. Yeah, yeah. I can relate to that too. I ended up, I think, getting more comfortable asking people questions after I could feel like that warmth and excitement from the other person, sort of as if they were feeling special or noticed, and sort of the center of that moment, Speaker 1 6:50 one of the things I really wanted to pick your brain about today, aside from the fact that we both have this thing in common about us developing our confidence, bravery and curiosity when Working with students at the Writing Center in the library is the fact that you and I both like helping people learn new things when it's hard. Your expertise here in this thing called cognitive dissonance is something I find super fascinating and like truly helpful. So can you talk to us a little bit here about cognitive dissonance and its relationship to learning new information. Sure. So cognitive dissonance is psychological discomfort that results from inconsistency between a person's beliefs and new information. The term cognitive dissonance was coined by Leon Festinger in 1957 he wrote a book called a theory of cognitive dissonance. Speaker 2 7:42 I believe he was a psychologist who did a number of large academic studies that resulted in this theory. Speaker 2 7:51 So we experience cognitive dissonance all the time. Whenever you learn information that doesn't match what you thought was going to happen. That's cognitive dissonance. So scientists experience cognitive dissonance every time they make a hypothesis, and things don't work out exactly the way that they thought they would. But as people, we make hypotheses all the time. When I walked into the office this morning, I thought, Oh, I'll probably be the only person here, because it's fall break when we're recording this, and instead, half the office was here. So that was a moment of cognitive dissonance, right? So it can be really innocuous, or it can be things that are more complicated, that help, that contradict Speaker 1 8:36 things that we believe about the world, that make us feel uncertain about how we fit into the world, so they can range from small, little innocuous moments to things that are much more complicated and much more difficult to overcome, right? Okay, so yes, this is exactly why I wanted to talk with you. Because I think, you know, you mentioned we both work at a college, and you know, we're all learning things all the time, and I think I see learning as the experience of accumulating information you didn't have before, and understanding it comes from where you put that new information, whether it's in your head or your life or your psyche or framework of reality or whatever. Speaker 1 9:20 So integrating new information might involve some level of cognitive dissonance, Speaker 1 9:27 and as educators, we might have a more joyful embracing of discomfort when it comes to learning. But for others who are gaining new information, it might start out feeling uncomfortable, but then maybe it starts to feel harmful or threatening, not just challenging. Can you talk to us about the relationship between discomfort, challenge and threat when it comes to learning new stuff? Speaker 2 9:55 Okay, so there was this researcher named. Speaker 2 10:00 William Perry, and he had it sounds very intimidating, he wrote something called William Perry's scheme of intellectual and ethical development, which sounds very intimidating, but basically, William Perry studied how students change over time while they're in college, he studied how students understand the world around them as they grow through college. So what he found, and granted, this was in the 1950s at Harvard. It was all white men, right? So this is a very narrow group of people that can't You can't make broad generalizations from that, but subsequent researchers have studied the same thing in different kinds of groups of college students right over time. So Speaker 2 10:44 the basic idea is people start out by thinking of the world as a binary in black and white. So authority hear that with a capital A authority is absolute, and all other interpretations are wrong. So you know something to be true, anyone who believes differently from you is just wrong. Okay, I think I get it. Then as we grow, we get into this, I like to call it the, who's to say, moment of our lives where everyone has a right to their own opinions, and all opinions are equal. And then finally, we get to what he calls relativism. So it's the idea that some interpretations are better than others, and that value is determined by weighing evidence in context. So Speaker 2 11:31 people certainly have a right to their own opinions, but some of them are going to be better than others based on facts, based on the world in which we live, based on the context in which we're applying that information. So that's just how people grow over time. So the way that we move from everything is black and white to things matter in context is by experiencing cognitive dissonance. That's what pushes us along the scale, so experiencing moments of discomfort is necessary to expand your worldview. You can't do it unless you experience discomfort. Okay, now, that's brilliant. I don't know it. I mean, I have so many questions now, and you know, maybe we'll do a follow up conversation Unknown Speaker 12:23 to get to those. Speaker 1 12:25 But I think where I get stuck personally is that it has taken me a very long time in my life to know the difference between discomfort and harm, Speaker 1 12:37 and I think that you know, it's it's really easy for me to notice, like, like, I'm a I'm a pianist, and I've been playing piano since I was a little kid, and I can physically experience discomfort when I'm learning a new skill on the piano, like my fingers get tired, my brain feels twisted. I might get frustrated because I'm not picking up the skill as fast as I want to. So like, there's discomfort there, but I know it's not going to hurt me. It's just going to push me. Yeah, just like what you were saying with cognitive dissonance, pushing you through phases of development. Speaker 1 13:15 I was not always, I mean, and maybe I'm not even good now, I'm just better, but I was not always good at recognizing the difference between what feels uncomfortable to learn and what feels threatening to learn. Speaker 1 13:28 So can you talk to me and maybe people out there who are also struggling with this about what harm or threat might do when you're experiencing cognitive dissonance, or what it might do when you're learning new information. Speaker 2 13:45 Yeah, so I want to make a distinction here, because there is cognitive dissonance and then there is shame. And they are related concepts, but they are not the same. Brene Brown makes a distinction between guilt and shame, and cognitive dissonance is akin to guilt in this analogy. So guilt is I did something bad. Shame is I am bad. So when you're experiencing psychological discomfort, Speaker 2 14:12 knowing that it's something that is making you uncomfortable but that you're safe, that's cognitive dissonance, feeling so uncomfortable that you feel unsafe, that's shame, okay? So Speaker 2 14:25 the difference tends to be how close something feels to the core of your identity. So if you think of your identity like a web, something might feel innocuous like the example I like to give is Speaker 2 14:40 the belief that all students can pay for college with a minimum wage job, right? That feels innocuous, like a just a thought that someone has, but that connection, that belief is connected to your understanding of America. Speaker 2 15:00 America as a meritocracy. It's connected to your understanding of your family's place in society and whether they have earned it. It's connected to your understanding of your community's value in the world, so that that belief that may feel really distant from your self concept is actually very close to it. Unknown Speaker 15:25 And so Speaker 2 15:28 sometimes something that you might think could cause cognitive dissonance actually causes shame because of how people understand it. Speaker 2 15:37 Yeah, so I actually, I copied down a quote because I just, I think about this quote all the time. There is this scholar. His name is Parker Palmer, and he reads these absolutely beautiful books on teaching, and when he's talking about the vulnerability of being struck with a new thought, he says, We grab an old idea, a conceptual club we know how to use because we have swung it many times before, and we beat the surprise to death, or we run away before it can make a mark on our minds. That's what happens when we feel shame, right? When we're learning Speaker 1 16:11 that's very good. So then I think we can all acknowledge that at this time, there is this sort of heightened level of fear or hostility going on in rooms with American people in them, and I think this relates really well to something you're talking about, which is the ability to navigate between information making us feel to the core that We are wrong, versus being able to experience the sensation that the information we had before was wrong. And I think folks at all levels of cognitive development can feel this, but maybe that sense of shame or feeling scared to explore new information is just happening more now because of our information ecosystem and the social climate in which we live right now. Speaker 1 17:06 Can you share what you know about what Grand Valley is doing to help college students push through the perceived hostility or the possible sensations of fear when our students are learning new things? Speaker 1 17:19 What things are we doing here to help students feel safer doing that? Yeah, yeah. So Speaker 2 17:27 it's important to know that when you feel shame, it is impossible to learn. Speaker 2 17:33 So shame bypasses the neocortex, which is responsible for reasoning and learning, and it's processed in the limbic system, which is fight or flight. And that seems a little dramatic when you first hear it, but when you think about how essential connection is to our survival, it makes sense when you read Shakespeare and Romeo's punishment is that he's exiled. That feels dramatic, but when you understand that, that means that he is losing his ability to survive, because survival hinges on community, it makes sense. So with that in mind, we work actively in the knowledge market among our peer learning services to create an environment that is comfortable for students to learn new information. Unknown Speaker 18:27 So Speaker 2 18:29 when you're working with a peer and you're not being evaluated, no one's judging your work. It's not going to impact your grade. You don't have to tell your professor that you came in if you don't want to. You can have the kind of conversation where you can try something and you can fail, and you can learn together in conversation, and there's no punishment for failing. A lot of the time we have to fail in order to try something. When you're researching, odds are your search terms the first time aren't going to produce what you want, and you learn from what happened in those search results, and you modify based on that information. And so our peer learning services here create the kind of environment where you can be creative and try things Unknown Speaker 19:17 because you can't learn without risk. Yeah, Speaker 1 19:21 and I think that circles all the way back to what we were talking about before, when talking about our experiences working at the Writing Center when we were students, Speaker 1 19:31 what I hear in your story was your development of bravery, which I think is a skill you can only develop when you experience discomfort in learning. And we both talked about how that bravery seemed to develop alongside our development of curiosity as well. And I think bravery and curiosity were two skills that got us through learning new stuff for becoming new people. And I think one of the things I'd like to give you a chance to speak to. Speaker 1 20:00 As well is what relationship you see between bravery, curiosity and cognitive dissonance for college students who are maybe using the knowledge market or are on their own learning new stuff, you know, what would you like to say to that? So one thing we love to see in the library is when a student comes in with a research question and not an answer, Speaker 2 20:26 and I think it's really important to step outside yourself with genuine questions. In my own experience, that mindset really matters, because if I'm coming in with a preconceived notion for how something should be, I am going to be hit with cognitive dissonance, because the odds that I'm right, Speaker 2 20:47 without researching, without knowing what other people have learned on the topic, the odds are very low. And so if I come in Speaker 2 20:56 an open book Ready to learn something, Speaker 2 21:00 I'm going to have a very different experience, and I do think it takes courage to come in with that kind of mindset. Speaker 2 21:09 There is a little bit of grief that I think can happen as we grow as people, because it means letting go of old ways of thinking and the people that we used to be, and so Speaker 2 21:23 having the courage to be open minded anyway, and to ask real questions and genuinely want to know the answer, Speaker 2 21:35 that's brave, and it makes learning so much easier. It's really hard to do, but if you can do it, it will make your experience as a student much better, and you'll get a lot more out of it if you're not fighting it the whole way, which is our natural inclination, right? Like this isn't a personal failing. This is a psychological defense mechanism. There are all these different ways that people respond to cognitive dissonance and to shame, and it's all to try to get away from the feeling so it's normal, but if we can push through and try to be brave and open minded, things change rapidly. Unknown Speaker 22:18 I love that. Speaker 1 22:21 Okay, so this has been an amazing conversation. I feel like I want to do a part two at some point, Speaker 1 22:29 but before I let you go, I would love it if you were able to answer one more question for me, which is a question we ask all of our guests here on chechy, connect. Speaker 2 22:39 What does connection mean to you, to me. Connection is feeling seen. It's knowing that someone has taken a moment to see me as I really am, to understand this small piece of myself that I'm showing to them. Speaker 2 22:57 It's what community is built on and how we understand the world around us. There are many ways to view learning, and the one that I'm partial to is the idea that we learn together as social creatures. Speaker 2 23:14 So connection is what we need. We need community to do anything to feel that our lives make sense, because humans are social creatures, and you never know what small connection will lead to a strong community. So I advocate for seeking connections wherever you can Speaker 1 23:32 beautiful. Thank you so much for your time today, and I just appreciate your wisdom and your willingness to be vulnerable and bring sort of your experiences to this conversation today. Thanks for having me. Speaker 1 23:51 Thank you for listening. Our episode was hosted, written and engineered by Melanie Rabine Johnson, the academic resources and retention specialist for the chechy undergraduate advising office at Grand Valley State University. You. Transcribed by https://otter.ai