Interview Transcript

Interviewer: Parker Banas

In your opinion, what’s the point of the competencies at Champlain? 

I think they’re very important in the ways they provide an overarching framework for all classes, regardless of whether you’re teaching general education or a specific program. This unifying, universal, overarching framework is important to instill and also install common language and vocabulary across campus.

These are important skills—sometimes people understand them as soft skills, but they’re actually interwoven and grounded in specific professional skills. They provide each and every class a pathway to meta-thinking, rather than just understanding what tools I’m using right now to complete a task. I often use these competencies as ways to open up more conversation: How do you think you’re able to use a specific tool in different contexts? That’s a transferable skill, and I think that’s a very important pedagogical goal for the competencies.

How do you hope students will view the competencies?

Great question. I think I’ll still go back to the meta-thinking part of it. It’s really helpful for students to be able to see beyond their immediate task and understand and put the task in perspective—put their tasks in the context of a larger economy. Therefore, say you’re a cybersecurity student. It’s important to know that cybersecurity is not just working with computers. The crimes or policies that affect everyday life are also grounded in real places.

Even though global cultural understanding seems to emphasize culture, culture isn’t just tokens or festivals. Culture can be a work culture; it can be the culture of policymaking. So say if I’m based in Burlington, but then I work for a multinational company—a fishery company or a game company, whatever company or hospital—I want to ensure that I provide a cybersecurity package for my client that is eligible for their local work environment and local politics. That’s the kind of scale that needs to be emphasized in global cultural understanding.

In that way, I don’t want students to see it as a hard versus soft skill division. That way, you actually alienate the competencies from your professional career. Rather, you should integrate them. These competencies, if you really do well in them, help you not just get a job but sustain your career, because careers are changing so fast and industries are changing so fast. Without these more integrated skill sets, at some point, you won’t be able to continue to navigate your career.

What are some ways that you integrate the competencies into your classroom?

Currently I’m teaching a class on digital methods. Craig Pepin is also teaching a version of it. In this class, the theme is resisting 24/7 digital enclosure and infrastructure. We talk about how we are compelled—all of us, professionals or any living being—to be productive at all hours. Last night, I worked until 2 a.m. So I have this assignment for my students in this class to analyze their screen time—a combined screen time between their phone or multiple devices: their phone and laptop mostly, but if they use other devices such as iPads or headphones. How many hours combined do these devices show? You can check yours.

Parker Banas: I’m not sure if I want to see that. But I guess that’s the point—it’s making us think about it more. It’d be bad. It’d be really bad.

Weiling Deng: Right. On one hand, we rely on these devices to produce anything, to know that we’re professionals. And we also do doom scrolling all the time. So it’s an assignment to have students analyze and be critical of the relationship between human beings and the electronic and digital infrastructure that we rely on. We even use the pyramid of basic human needs—the battery and Wi-Fi got added to the bottom of it.  So what does that mean to think about being human in this digital world? This assignment—I looked at my screen time from last Thursday or Friday. I got the number from my Thursday’s work. It turned out that between my phone and my computer, my combined screen time was 29 hours, 59 minutes. That’s impossible for a day with 24 hours. Even though I didn’t turn off my computer, something might be running in the back. That means something is still being produced that got logged—there’s a digital footprint, even though I was not actively working. My computer logged full hours every hour, and then the additional hours were from my phone. So that was a very interesting data point. That’s an example for this core class, digital methods—technological literacy is number one. I think it’s put at level three in the competency book. But I think it’s important to understand tech literacy is not just being able to use tech. You have these meta-thinking skills to understand what 24/7 means beyond there being 24 hours a day and seven days a week. What kind of work ethic is this, and how compelling and brutal is it on all of us? The way that we develop stress and insomnia is all constructed. That’s the connection between the tech part and then the human part. That makes a holistic tech literacy. I think that’s something I want students to learn and also to apply to their everyday life, rather than think that competency is something that they only do for professional performance. Beyond that, we’re also living human beings, and these competencies really help us to understand and to actually be sensitive to the kind of built environment we’re in and how the environment shapes us—shapes our perception and cognition. I think that’s the part I want students to really grapple with for sure. Also, seeing that even beyond level three—if say level three is the maximum required for classes—you can keep going beyond. Tech literacy, global cultural understanding, or even DEI, with all the political theater wrapped around DEI—there’s a lot of things going on at the same time. I try to encourage students to think that, okay, here’s level three, but you can also go beyond. Here’s the starting point to keep moving forward.

How have students responded so far to these assignments, projects, and learning activities? 

I remember when I announced this assignment, which is very basic—it also includes your estimation of how many pings you get every day. My email, my Gmail, can ping me. I silenced it, but if I didn’t, it would ping me maybe 50 times a day or somewhere between 20 and 50. Also for students, there’s Discord. And if you don’t mute your notification from all the social media, it’s going to pop up. I think it’s over a hundred a day, probably for most. And if we actually record, we can get creative about that. We can record all the pings, and you have different sounds for the pings for different apps. Then you can make a sound recording and remix it into a song. I think students have a range of reactions. First, they say, “Crap, I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to face my reality.” But then they would get over it because they have to do the assignment and think about their relationship with technology. I often try to encourage them to have loose threads in the class or in the assignments, and then I’ll bring them together to create something either collectively or individually to sort of re-humanize this kind of relationship with digital technology, instead of just—I don’t want anyone to judge themselves or to feel judged by others. “I spend 15 hours a day on my phone. I feel really bad.” Yesterday we did a silent book club experiment—just read in class in total silence for 15 minutes. Then we traced and drew our attention tree. That’s another part of our class activity about tech literacy. I was really honest with them, but I couldn’t really focus entirely on reading because I have these other responsibilities in class to make sure the class would go as planned or I can deal with other emergencies. At the same time, I didn’t touch my phone, but for students who read on their computers or on their phones, they receive messages and notifications. That’s when it’s naturally going to distract them. We get distracted. But again, I ensure that there’s no judgment, and we each drew our attention tree. It’s really different shapes. It’s quite beautiful. I guess I never want to moralize tech literacy—what the pros and cons are. That’s not how I understand tech literacy, but to actually be reflective, to see our position and how our cognition and perception are shaped or conditioned and also manipulated by this very intimate and sometimes creepy contact with these big tech corporations. We watched The Truman Show and other media products to help us understand. Okay, these big tech companies—they’re not just super powerful and influential, but they’re also creepy.

Parker Banas: I’m in a digital marketing class right now. We know everything about you as digital marketers. Even if you’re turning off those personalized ads and things, there are still so many loopholes that I’m now learning about—how they do it and how that’s legal. It’s quite something. Tom Funk is teaching that. He’s a great teacher.

Weiling Deng: Great. So that’s also a part of it. Maybe in this iteration for my digital methods, I’m not really emphasizing it, but in the previous three or four iterations, we talked about surveillance capitalism. Do you know that concept?

Parker Banas: That ties into what Tom Funk is teaching us. In order to make money, you have to know what people are going to buy. You have to really—is that what you’re getting at? I’m coming at it from a marketing standpoint.

Weiling Deng: Right. That’s exactly the marketing standpoint. You want to get to a point that’s more than anticipating what your potential or current clients or customers want. You want to shape—you want to lure them into what you want to sell them. Your focus is not just on the present or even the data that represents the past. You want the data to instrumentalize your future. I say, “Hey, Parker, I want to sell you this tea, but you might not want this tea right now, but I make sure I deliver enough advertisements or components or information to make sure that you’re aware of this.” So when you actually—and then you start to think, “Oh, maybe I need that. I might want that.”

Parker Banas: That happened to me today. Instagram was giving me ads for this protein shake. And wouldn’t you know, it’s in the campus store, and I go buy it. And I didn’t think about it because it was a week ago I got these ads, and $5 later…

Weiling Deng: Right. So from an education perspective, this kind of surveillance capitalism really maximizes the way people learn. We learn not by just going to class once and hearing about a thing once. Then we forget about that. Everybody does that unless you’re a genius. But for the majority of human beings, we learn from repetition. And sometimes things repeat around us without our consciousness, without us consciously noticing things. But our brain logs these pieces of information multiple times. And then we start to think, “Oh, maybe we desire something.” So they’re able to construct desire. And I think digital methods and tech literacy—sorry, tech literacy is one of my favorite competencies. I think they’re all—this is another thing going back to what kind of lessons I want students to take: to see these competencies not as singular components or singular units, but really see they’re interdependent. They’re in a conversation. So tech literacy can be related to information literacy, to analysis and integration, to DEI, to global cultural understanding. So I try to reference all of these. I call them out in class. I have students—so they might not carry these particular terms with them after they leave the class. These are just terms, but then they would grow. I think from competencies—from these quantifiable or partially quantifiable terminologies and assessment—beyond that, that’s a means to a bigger end. You want students to internalize them as their own skill. However they want to articulate or name it, it’s with them.

How have you used the competencies knowingly or unknowingly to get to where you are today, and which ones have been the most important in your teaching?

If I want to focus on one particular one—tech literacy—I can trace it back to when I was writing my dissertation in grad school. My dissertation was about Chinese feminist activism and queer activism. So I did some research on something called digital ethnography—using ethnographic methods such as observation, participation, and interviews as qualitative methods to observe and interpret the internet-mediated activism among these activists, young scholars and activists, and to see how global or international relations or global trends of social unrest would inform these kinds of regional or domestic activism among particular demographics. Then I brought that into Champlain before the Davis grant. So I didn’t really have a particular term to name the skill I’m teaching—it’s mostly just content. “Let’s learn about what the Chinese or Bulgarian movements were doing in the early 2000s. They were using Twitter, now called X.” So I guess what I try to emphasize here is the transition from content-centered teaching or pedagogy to competency, which is more method-driven, or to have other ends to allow students to exploit—to take advantage of my knowledge, to make use of my knowledge in their field. I think that’s a pretty interesting and meaningful transition to have competency installed in the classroom. So I fully support the competency in a way to make faculty members and instructors aware that we’re not just delivering contents, but to transition or transform contents into something more agentive, more generative.

Now I’m using the word “generative” not to pay tribute to AI—generative AI—but I think generative is fundamentally human intelligence. So I see my classes as contact points where I give students something and then give them space to apply that to campus, analyzing campus, and analyzing their industry. So I do think that competencies have this power and agency to allow me to turn content into something more generative.