Michigan State University is fortunate to have passionate educators who are committed to enhancing the experience of their students and who help to provide the best education possible.

The Graduate School is featuring some of these educators – graduate and postdoc educators – every month to share their unique stories and perspectives on what it means to be a dedicated educator, how they’ve overcome educational challenges, and the ways they have grown through their experiences.

For July 2023, we are featuring Harlow Loch, a doctoral candidate in Accounting and Information Systems. Harlow details the unique journey between educators and adult learners and shares how she gained additional perspective through, of all things, a concussion.

What does it mean to be an educator at a university? 

My first instructional experience was teaching second graders. At seven, every lesson is novel. Enticed by the newness, my first students were eager to sample whatever learning I offered. By the time former second graders make their way to undergraduate classrooms, the giddiness of childhood has given way to purpose. Adult learners arrive with their own goals, curiosities, and passions. This direction and drive naturally invert the teacher-student hierarchy pervasive in elementary classrooms. University students chart a learning journey through the topics and fields of study that interest them. To be an educator at a university is to be invited to walk alongside students in pursuit of their passions and dreams.  

What challenges have you experienced and how have you grown from these? 

Some students enroll in graduate school despite their struggles in undergraduate classrooms. The rest of us are here because, through a combination of privilege and chance, we succeeded academically again and again. My membership in this second group blinds me to many of the hurdles that my peers faced and that my students continue to face. In 2022, I applied to the Colleges’ Online Learning Academy (COLA) to better understand the perspectives and experiences of learners whose backgrounds, means, and abilities differ from my own. 

All through June that year, the first month of my COLA fellowship, I revised and drafted lesson plans, course websites, and syllabi, intent on leveraging COLA resources to improve the accessibility of my future courses. The materials I developed delivered content redundantly in multiple modalities – textbook chapters, chapter summaries and outlines, slide decks, captioned videos, interactive spreadsheets, links to related online resources, and charts. Accessibility, I thought, required inundating students with as many tools, options, and resources as possible. More than once I worried that this intensive teaching preparation was becoming unsustainable but reassured myself that I would gain efficiency with experience. 

Halfway through my COLA fellowship, a concussion afforded me clarity at the expense of some executive function. In July, I found myself unable to navigate the “accessible" course website I had designed in June, unable to locate course files in the online drive I had created to store them, and lost in the verbiage of a syllabus that had become unintelligible. My concussion allowed me to see the course I was designing through unfamiliar eyes. I experienced each additional website, reading, program, and platform my syllabus introduced as a cognitive, temporal, and sometimes even financial burden. Most of the teaching artifacts I created in June found their way to the scrap pile. Instead, the visual and organizational simplicity, routine, and structure that guided my recovery emerged as the guiding principles of my new approach to teaching. 

A brain injury is not a panacea for all egocentrism and bias, but mine helped me accept that my teaching will always be limited by my own experience of the world. These days, I find myself increasingly beholden to neighbors, friends, and students whose advice and feedback on my teaching reveal perspectives otherwise inaccessible to me. 

What value do you see in Teaching Professional Development?

Following an altruistic impulse, I attended my first teaching professional development session at MSU to better serve my future students. I attended the second, third, and fourth, though, for more selfish reasons: Learning to teach was teaching me to learn, to think, and to think about learning--my students’ and my own. The demands of graduate school tend to push metacognition and reflection to the wayside. Teaching professional development sessions are a precious opportunity to mindfully examine and nurture our own learning identities as a means of becoming better guides to other learners. 

What is one piece of advice you would give other graduate educators?  

Professor, instructor, and teaching assistant are counterproductive titles. As much as you can, avoid them. I invite you, graduate student educator, to be a host to your students and, eventually, a friend. Gift a psychologically safe, engaging, and congenial atmosphere to the guests listed on the class roster. As your students find friendship in one another's company and comfort in the learning space you create, they will naturally develop passions for topics of conversation inspired by the syllabus. Your students collectively know more than you do, perhaps even about the content of the course you have been assigned to teach. Create opportunities for each one of your students to direct the conversation, to speak, to teach, and to lead; and while your students blossom, model listening, learning, and following. 

What do you enjoy in your free time? 

If you are reading this anywhere in Michigan, step outside and look down. Chances are remnants of marine life from hundreds of millions of years ago-- Petoskey stones, crinoids, and stromatoporoids--lie only a few feet from your own feet. The best fossils are up north by the Great Lakes, but many pretty good ones make their way to Michigan's cities as landscaping rocks. I have been scanning the ground for trilobite fossils ever since I saw my first one at age five in a museum, but I didn't have any luck until I moved to East Lansing. Last fall, I found a large trilobite sticking out of the gravel scattered around a dog run ten minutes from MSU's main campus. Dried dog urine aside, the find was one of the most exciting moments of my life. Fossil hunting has become one of my favorite pastimes. Looking down and catching a glimpse into the Paleozoic Era is as magical now as it was when I saw my first Michigan fossil--a honeycomb coral--four years ago.