Tag: podcast

Hope Circuits: Jessica Ridell

The latest NetVUE podcast episode features Jessica Riddell, a professor and researcher advocating for transformative change in higher education. In her book “Hope Circuits,” she explores fostering hope, equity, and creativity within universities. Riddell emphasizes renovating existing systems rather than destroying them, aiming for integrity and human flourishing.

Jessica Riddell

The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features Jessica Riddell, a speaker, professor, and researcher who focuses on systems change in higher education. Jessica’s recent book, Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities and Other Systems for Human Flourishing, and her previous co-authored book, Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning, cover various facets of educating and leading across the university. Jessica is a professor of early modern literature at Bishop’s University in Quebec, Canada, where she also holds the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence. She is the founder of the think tank Hope Circuits Institute and sits on the board of directors for the American Association of Colleges and Universities. In all these roles, she participates in a wide range of conversations at national and international levels about how universities fulfill the social contract to our broader society.

Committed to cultivating hope in higher education, Jessica wrote Hope Circuits to challenge educators to reconsider the assumptions with which we operate. In it, she offers innovative tools that emerge out of the stories of luminaries she gathered for the project and helps us come to a clearer understanding of systems of governance, leadership, and institutional culture so that everyone in the university can flourish. But such flourishing isn’t limited to higher education, which she argues plays an important role in fostering creativity and democracy across sectors. “Higher education,” she says, “is the place where we keep democracy and ourselves alive and awake. And my goodness, we need to stay alive and awake at this moment.”

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The Craft of Teaching (and Learning): Carlo Rotella

The latest episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features Carlo Rotella, a writer and professor at Boston College. His book, What Can I Get Out of This?, explores teaching undergraduates and emphasizes meaningful engagement in the classroom. Rotella advocates for seeing education as a practice requiring persistence and presence, underscoring its relevance beyond mere career preparation.

Carlo Rotella

NetVUE’s podcast Callings has released a new episode, which features an interview with Carlo Rotella, an award-winning writer and professor of American Studies, English, and journalism at Boston College. His most recent book, What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics gets at the heart of what it means to teach and to learn together with undergraduate students today. Carlo has been a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine since 2007. His work has appeared in collections like The Best American Essays, as well as The New Yorker, Harper’s, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Slate, and various scholarly periodicals. Recurring subjects in his writing are cities and city life, boxing, music, crime, basketball, neighborhoods, and how people get good at things. He is co-editor and founder of the University of Chicago Press’s Chicago Visions and Revisions book series.

As his career and his most recent book illustrates, Carlo is interested in the nuts and bolts of teaching—what he considers its craft and the ways we can build classroom experiences that help our students make meaning. The book follows the experience of a single cohort of students in a required introductory literature course, most of whom are not English majors. In it, Rotella tells the story of what happens when students practice discussing ideas and readings with each other over a semester and then follows up with them a few years later, revealing that the course’s impact yielded an impactful return on investment in one’s education and life. As he describes it, one of the things it explores is “how to be a student, how to do college,” helping educators better understand how our students experience and live out their vocations as students.

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Attention and Contradiction: Willie James Jennings

Willie James Jennings, an esteemed theologian at Yale Divinity School, emphasizes the importance of belonging in education through his insights shared on NetVUE’s podcast. He advocates for educators to engage with students as fellow learners and highlights the need to confront racial injustices within education systems while committing to challenging antisemitism and advocating for Palestinians.

Willie James Jennings

The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features an interview with Willie James Jennings. Willie is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School. A highly sought-after speaker, Willie teaches and writes in areas that include theological anthropology, liberation theologies, cultural identities and race theory, and environmental studies. He is the author of numerous articles and several award-winning books. He is also an ordained Baptist minister, and before completing a Master of Divinity from Fuller Seminary and a PhD from Duke University, he received his undergraduate education from Calvin University, a NetVUE member institution. Willie was also the keynote speaker for the NetVUE Unconference in March of 2021.

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Cultivating Character: Michael Lamb

In the second episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings, hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton interview Michael Lamb, a faculty leader at Wake Forest University. He discusses ethics and the importance of virtues in public life, encouraging listeners to connect passions with community needs and to cultivate virtues in discovering personal callings.

Michael Lamb

In the second episode of this season of NetVUE’s podcast Callings, hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton interview Michael Lamb, the senior executive director of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. An associate professor of interdisciplinary humanities and the F.M. Kirby Foundation Chair of Leadership and Character at Wake Forest, Michael also serves as an associate fellow of the Oxford Character Project at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, a project which helps graduate students in various fields, including government, law, medicine, business, and academia, think about the role of ethics in their professions. Michael’s research and teaching focuses on the ethics of citizenship and the role of virtues in public life, all of which offers many connections to the exploration of vocation.

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