Bonus Episode: Caroline Levander: Embracing Creativity in Education

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Time.
Hi, I'm Tony Mantur. Welcome to Why Not Me? Embracing
Autism and Mental Health Worldwide. Joining us today is Carolyn Lavander,
who is a distinguished scholar and educator at Rice University.
She has a background blending rigorous research, forward looking vision
who consistently seeks to bridge gaps between disciplines and empower
learners to imagine new possibilities. Her newest work, invent Ed,
invice readers on a compelling journey through the evolving educational landscape,
challenging traditional models spotlighting emergent technology and mythologies, and urging educators, students,
and policymakers alike to rethink what it means to teach, learn,
and create in the twenty first century. Whether you're a
teacher striving to invigorate your classroom in administrative plotting, institutional transformation,
or simply someone passionate about the future of learning, in
vite Ed offers a timely, imaginative, and hopeful guide. We've
got a great conversation coming, So before we dive into
our episode, we'll be back with an uninterrupted show right
after a word from our sponsors. Thanks for coming on.
Oh yeah, no, no, I'm happy to do it. Thanks
for thanks for saying yes to this conversation.
Oh it's my pleasure if you would give us a
little background on what you're doing.
Yeah.
So, I'm a professor and a vice president at Rice
University in Houston, Texas.
And Rice University is, you know.
Very selective private university that has undergraduates, graduate students, and
of course major research program.
Now, you have worked with a lot of different types
of people, You've written books, several actually you touch upon
situations that will deal in mental health issues. How have
you found that writing these books or that book have
changed your perspective in the way that you look at
the thing now.
For me, writing is it's a process of learning and discovering.
It's been very important for me in this most recent
project to invent ed how an American tradition of innovation
can transform college today, to bring the past into the
present to help students today have better futures. And so
my field of research is actually pre twentieth century American culture,
so from the seventeen hundreds actually into World War One
and World War II a little bit, and there's a
rich history there. There's very dynamic set of stories from
which we can learn help our universities deliver better education today.
And I think one of the realities of universities mine included,
is that in an understandable effort to create the best
education possible, we all in our leadership roles, tend to
look to the present and the future. We don't tend
to look to history to guide us in decision making today.
And so one of the real contributions of the project
is looking backward in order to look forward, and that,
to me is a very wonderful convergence of the academic
work I do, work I do as a scholar and
a writer, and the administrative leadership that I do in
guiding the university and higher education towards productive change.
The fact that you use history in helping people move forward,
first of all, I think that's a great way of
looking at things. By looking at our history, we should
be learning everything we can from it. This way, we
don't duplicate our mistakes. What have you found in your
research going backwards in order to help people going forward?
You know, it's such a wonderful and rich set of
examples of how, you know, our country developed an inventive
method that was.
Playful, that was not risk averse, that was driven.
By curiosity and not confined to formal education, that was
not great conscious, that was not worried about getting a
right answer. And this goes back, you know, to the
founding fathers. In fact, it was Benjamin Franklin who invented
this method of education and invention. We can see throughout
the course of the young nation becoming successful, a real
story of individuals solving problems that were in many ways
unique to the new country. They were trying to create
a country that was a vast territory that did not
have an established network of communication, roots of travel routs,
and certainly not of educational infrastructure.
So this is a group of people, broadly.
Dispersed, trying to create coherence and organization out of you know,
a pretty raw material. And so they clearly had to
develop problem solving techniques that were very unorthodox and very intuitive.
And that is cause for great hope for us today.
Hope is always good. Now, back then, the pace of
life was much slower. Stress levels might have been very
stressful to them at that point in time. Today's world
might completely overwhelm them. Yet they did find a way
to cope. How do you look at the stress levels
of yesteryear to the stress levels of today's society, especially
at the collegiate level, where there are so many things
coming at them from so many different directions. If they
do not have a clear pathway in their mind, this
could lead to mental struggles that could defeat what they
are trying to accomplish.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, hindsight is so interesting
because you know, at the time, if you had asked
the founding bothers, you know, is this experiment going to work?
You know, on a good day, they might have said
a hope, so right, but it was.
Not preordained that this you know, United States project was
going to be successful.
Well in fact, right, the world of.
The particularly the European world watching saw us all as
a bunch of disorderly rogues, you know, committed to a
foolhardy mission. And so I think the stakes were high,
and I'm sure they were stressed, right, I'm sure you know,
there's a lot to stress people. You know, how do
we source food, how do we create shelters? So I mean,
in some ways we could argue there what we might
call stress.
Level was probably pretty high.
That said, I think what we can see in the
historical record is that there was a commitment to curiosity
driven problem solving and that was a source of great
advancement and endurance for our first generations and through that
process building all kinds of solutions that we still rely
on today. So you know, we can think about, for example,
Samuel Morse, who was a painter. He was actually an artist,
and it was only you know, as his art career
was not flourishing.
That he put his mind to things like you know,
the code and the telegraph.
He didn't stop and say, oh, my gosh, I don't
have any engineering or science training.
He didn't worry about that.
He saw an interesting problem and he just felt he
could figure it out with what he knew, but also
what he could discover along the way.
And so it's very interesting.
He actually used his canvas frame in his art studio
as the mock up space for the telegraph.
He had art.
Students in his studio, he had scientists seeing his work,
and he didn't let just like Franklin, didn't let lack
of education lack of knowledge stop him from exploring new.
Ideas and learning along the way.
And I think I mentioned this because today's students.
Are much more risk averse. They are much more worried.
About failing at the beginning of the journey. And I
think that source of worry than has a real impact
on mental health and wellness. Because if you come into
college or any kind of education classroom first and foremost
worried about failure as opposed to curious about new ideas,
you're introducing a level of stress into your experience that
is debilitating.
How do you use what you've learned to help them
through this stress? As we know, stress can affect the
body in so many different ways. Of course, we must
also consider those with autism, ADHD, PTSD or any other
mental health conditions. Stress like this can cause a tremendous overload,
and it's all because of the surrounding elements that seem
to be crashing in all at the same time. Then
you add the environment of AI and all the different
things that are happening at the collegiate level, what do
you give them for advice so they can find a
pathway to have the confidence that they can do this.
Yeah, and I think that's the where real education happens
because I think you know, the K twelve system with
the focus on teaching for the tests and has really
in effect reduced the amount of time given to creative expression.
So students get to college with very limited comfort with
the unknown. They're used to a learning environment where there's
a right answer, and the faster they can get to
the right answer, the better they're going to do.
And so the first thing.
To do is to step back and say that approach
is not going to serve you well. Right, got to
relearn how we learn. We have to build more of
a growth mindset in students. So as opposed to you
see a lot of kids coming to school and they
only want to take courses in subjects where they know
they are good. So they say, oh, I'm just I'm
not good at writing. I'm not good at it, and
so I'm not going to do it. I'll take you know,
math instead, for example, or vice versa. And that's a
fixed mindset. That's the mindset that says, you know, like
the color of your eyes and your height, they're determined
at burst there's nothing you can really do about it.
It kind of is what it is.
It's a fatalistic view that is not one that actually
helps people succeed in life. I mean, whether in the
classroom or not in the classroom, a fixed mindset is
a bad mindset for mental health.
Yeah, I definitely agree there. How do you change that?
So the first thing to do right is to say, Okay,
here's how you're thinking about education. Let's try and shift
to a growth mindset, right, the mindset where hey, I'm
not good at math, I want to take math. I
know I'm going to be bad at it first, but
this classroom is a classroom that will allow me to
fail safely and to learn over time.
And so the first thing.
To do is encourage students to take some of those chances,
maybe just little ones.
Right, Maybe it's not old. Math is terrifying to me.
There's no way I could learn it.
But maybe a smaller step a class man, I'm not
sure I could do. But simultaneously, it's really important for
faculty members to encourage a growth mindset in our classrooms. Look,
I'm a professor. I think I speak for the vast
majority of us. We're in this profession because we want
people to learn, right. We this is a mission to
educate as many people as effectively as possible, And a
lot of us don't even know that we are inadvertently
perpetuating more of a fixed mindset in our classes, even
in classes like art or creative writing that you would
assume would be more creative, or classes that have, like
you know, smaller, more conversational Socratic method you know, and
I teach those classes. And I tell you what, we're
all guilty as faculty of knowing, Okay, that student's gonna
have the smart answer, that student's going to struggle, and
our own impatience and keep sometimes from doing the real
work of flowing down and taking an answer that may
not be right out of the starting gate and asking Okay,
what are the why do you think that? What are
the thought processes that got you to say that? And
then working that through as a group, and I think
those are the healing moments. Those are the moments of
confidence building, not just for that student, but for all
the other students in the classroom.
Yeah, that's a great point. Now, when I went to college,
we had professors that would stand up on stage if
they said some of the things today that they said
back then, there would be all kinds of problems all
over the place. How do we change that mindset so
they have less mental stress yet they still can learn.
How do we change the mindset of the collegiate level,
the faculty, those that work in the administration. We need change,
but we don't need change just to change. It has
to make an impactful difference.
Sure, now, Tony, that's a great question.
And you mentioned AI earlier as a source of stress
for students. You know, we are at a moment where
AI and new technologies are transforming the workplace and that
is one reason that students are stressed. They come into
university worried about that, worried about the cost worried about failure.
So that's the environment now, in that environment with AI.
Increasingly taking on much of the what we would call
domain expertise. So the more you can get AI to
answer questions and solve problems that it used to be
someone who majors in X would provide, right, that would
be the value add when you graduate from colleges, I'm
an expert in this. The more that AI replaces the
domain expert early in the.
Career, the more important it is for students to emerge
from college with an ability to be creative in their
problem solving in the workplace.
And so a big message of invent Ed of this
book is this is the moment for universities to commit
not just to domain expertise at the undergraduate level, but
building a creative capability. And universities have to commit to
both of those things equally if we want our students
to contribute to society and actually not just enter the
workforce as they find it on graduation, but discover new
things that will build new industries and create new economic
opportunities for all of us. And I think that message,
I think us higher education is ready for that message.
Okay, I can't disagree. We are in a society now
where there are just so many things that people have
to worry about. Are they going to offend this person
or are they going to offend that person? Unfortunately, sometimes
politics has its way of working into the system. How
can we get people to learn about what they're truly
passionate about in learning do what they want to do,
not having to worry about failing quite as much? The
mindset here in the US, and it's still maybe the same,
I'm not sure. I know it always has been that
people are just afraid to fail. If you look at
people like Sam Walton and other people that have become
multi millionaires or even billionaires, the one thing that they
all have in common they failed multiple times. When they
did fail, they learned from their failures so that they
did not duplicate that again. Not everyone can do that. Again,
it's a challenge, it's a mindset. It can be an
overwhelming stress. How do we take and work with people
so they can learn that ability of not being afraid
to fail so much because they need to be doing
what they truly want to do. It's just like you
commented earlier that you weren't writing this book to make money.
You was doing this to help people. We have to
have that mindset that people can help others so they're
not questioned on what they're doing in helping them. So
all these things, combined or individually are very stressful. So
how do we get past this?
Yeah?
No, I mean, let you raise a number of really
important points. In my book, I clearly indicate that all
of the political.
Debates should we teach this?
Should we?
You know, all of that is a big red hearing, right,
that is just a distraction from the real work of
universities and the work of our government to support universities
in the task of building creative potential in all of
our students and teaching domain expertise. And by domain expertise,
I mean, if you're taking a history course, you need
to emerge competent in history. You need to know, you
need to be able to have formed discussion about your
field with ron public and similarly for all the stem
fields and really any major. And you also need to
be able to think very creatively across disciplines. We know
the definition of creativity is the ability to put existing
components into new combinations. It's not to dream something up,
you know, without any tools that are currently in existence.
It's the ability to take you know, this tool over
in this side of the university world and put it
into collaboration with this so you know, to be in
a math class and a literature class and to see
the connections between the two. And our greatest mathematicians, in
fact talk about the poetry of mathematics, and our greatest
literary writers talk about the science of language. And so
if we could get to that deep connectivity that exists
under neath the surface of these different disciplines, that's where
creativity live.
Yes, I totally agree. Now the big question how do
you get the mindset to focus on the creativity so
they can move forward with what they're trying to do.
So I think a lot of the discussion about universities
and what you teach and how it's political and all
of this is just that's noise. You need to find
the signal, and the signal is just ignore that. That
is not where education learning happens. You've got to go
deep into the noise of it. And that's tough because
we have so many different departments. Now you know, there's
specialties and sub specialties. That is also a fertile environment
for all of this tool propagation.
There's more tools now to put into new combinations than
ever before, and that's exciting.
Universities, you know, schools, these are the places for creativity
because there's so many ideas jam packed into one little place.
So it's a big opportunity. It's an exciting opportunity, and
we just need to remember that. And again, you know,
winning the game is not making all a's.
It really isn't. It really really isn't.
And it's unfortunate that college admissions doesn't send that signal
more clearly, it's unfortunate that our K twelve education system.
Again understandably, right, you're trying to get a bunch of
students through some basic education skills acquisition.
I get it.
But at the time that you get to college, success
is not having a four point zero GPA. In fact, look,
I've hired a lot of people. I don't look at
their GPA. I look at are they can I count
on them? Are they smart? Can they problem solve? Are
they going to be a good thought partner? That's what
people want.
Yeah, I wish well colleges would think that way. I
remember I sat down with a college one time my
major was going to be music. I was talking to
the administrator. I was not going to have my first
course on music until I hit my second year of college.
As I was talking with him, he told me flat out,
you can be the next Beethoven. It would not matter.
He then proceeded to tell me the courses I would have,
and it was pretty much non negotiable. And I told them, yeah,
but I'm coming here for music. Didn't matter. They had
certain numbers they had to hit, and everything else didn't matter. Luckily,
I didn't go there and it kind of worked out. Now,
for some people, that is just another level of stress
that is not needed. It can be so damaging to
them that they got turned down. This can create a
mental level of stress for them. How do we get
the administrators the colleges to look at this almost like
they would a vocational school. They may not be a
Rhodes scholar, but they certainly can compete and learn on
everything that we could teach them. Then when he graduates
from that school or college, he contributes to society in
a very big way.
So I would also I would flip it a bit tony.
I'll answer that question, but I actually think I think
students and their parents and their families are terribly complicit
in this, right, you know, I would put the responsibility
on those applying to college to look at colleges differently,
not to ask what's the hardest one to get into
or what's the one I kind of emotionally want to
go to, but to say, people spend all this time
and money and effort doing these campus tours, and that's
very important, no doubt.
They spend no time at all looking at the vital
organs of the institution itself.
Right, it's all about, oh, you know, is it a
pretty campus that that? And you know, well, I'm a
friend's there and that's great. That's part of mental health
and wellness. You have to enjoy, you know. That said
you also need and this book actually one of the things,
you know, I said that I wanted to have impact.
One of the things it does is it provides very
very simple achieve Well, here's what to do. Parents, here's
what you do students during the senior year or whenever
you're applying to college. In addition to that application form,
you need to do this, this, and this, and once
you pick the school or it picks you, or you
figure that all out.
People think, Okay, then it's all done. No, it is
just begun.
Yes, I totally agree. Can you expand on that sum?
In the months before you show up, you have homework
to do, and invent Ed gives you that homework, and
it's homework that sets you up for success before you
get to campus. And I think those six months, those
are the lost six months after you put the admissions
forms in. You know, in the classic scenario, you're a
senior high school and now you've seen your itis and
you're not doing anything. But what you really should be
doing is preparing yourself for a very important formative four years.
And you can come in so much more confident and relaxed.
I mean, this is the thing.
If you're a person who tends to stress, who tends
to you know a lot of the behaviors we're talking about,
use those six months and do exactly what I say
in the final section of the book, and you will
come in more confident. You will feel already that you're
set up to win, and that reduces your stress. It
helps you make more friends more quickly because you know
stuff that people are interested in. They haven't done their
homework they've been fooling around not doing anything. So there's
so much you can do. Now you ask the question
about how can universities become less kind of assessment oriented
in their admissions criteria, and I think that we are
entering an area where the good news is universities.
Will have to us.
I'm talking about US universities and they will have to
because the student demand we all know is going down,
not up because of student age demographs.
So this is a great moment.
If in the next ten years you are a plan
to apply to college, I think you can be more
who you are in the application process and hope and
expect that you will get more of a full and
fair Look.
That's really great news. Now, how do people find more
about what you were doing in writing? Give us the
contact information that you think is important for them to see.
Okay, yeah, sure, so Look you can Caroline LeVander c
A R O l I N E L E V
A N d E r at Rice dot e du
you go there. There's information on my book. There's a
hyperlink to buying the book I'm talking about invent ed.
There's also other speaking engagements that I've done. There's a
button you can click if you want to invite me
to a speaking event, whether it's.
In your school system or teacher training.
I'm very open to that kind of engagement, and also
just to helping people.
I mean, I'm at the point in my career where.
I don't have any more promotions than I you know,
I entered this career to give back. I think most
of us in the field do. I'm now the wh
where I could just really give back. You know, I
don't have any more in my career I need to accomplish.
So I want this book to be an invitation. I
want it to be an open inviti Have you very
much inviting that?
Okay?
I think that's great. With everything that you have done
since you first started, you took the career path, your
journey led you to many different phases of your life
to where you are now, this is allowed, as you say,
to be able to give back. How have you evolved?
If you had the opportunity to speak with your younger self,
what would you see and what would you tell her?
That's a great question, Tony.
So when I look back at my you know, teenage self,
I was pathologically shy, So, oh my gosh, I had
stage right, and I was really really shy, and I
was very self conscious, you know, And that's just kind
of a painful place to be, right, Being young is
a painful place to be. We have all of these
habits of mind and these anxieties and uncertainties, and we
have no real lived experience to calm them. Right. And
so what I say, see over the many decades from
that little Carol and the Carolin of today.
Is just, you know, through sheer.
Sort of persistence, I've grown and I've evolved. I used
to be so scared to give lectures, you know, to students.
I would just have these panic attacks before class, right,
So it's not always students with panic attacks. It's all
of us, right, you know.
But through doing things more and more, through repetition, you
get comfort because you learn, You learn what works and
what doesn't work. And the more you can learn, like
what work, you know, maybe I'll do it differently next time.
You can just stay in the game.
If you can just keep doing it, don't get discouraged
too much.
The biggest secret lives you just have to show up.
You don't have to be excellent, really like excellence comes
if you could show consistently day over day, week over week.
It is really a distance game.
It is. I totally agree. So in closing, let's give
you a book one last push. Tell us again what
you're hoping people will get from this.
So I really want this book be a user's guide
for people who don't know anything about college.
It's meant for a really full audience.
So it's meant for people who are within universities like myself.
It's meant for people who know nothing about universities and
are skeptical about them. It is for people on both
sides of the aisle. This is not a book that
is about taking sides purposefully, so it is a book
about how we can all come together.
I mean, we have this remarkable industry. US higher education
is the globally dominant industry within the US. We don't
really understand that, but it's true in my work I
see it. So if we could just all come together
to make it the strongest it can be for our
country and for our citizens, I think we all are
kind of on the same team on that.
Yeah, I totally agree. Well, this has been great, great information,
great conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to
join us today.
Yeah, thank you, great questions, great chatting, and thanks so much.
Oh it's been my pleasure. Thanks again. Thanks for taking
time out of your busy schedule to listen to our
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