Episode 68 Life Long Learning Together Susan & Lynn Thackeray
*Music* Marissa: Welcome to the USU career studio podcast that helps you navigate your career path if you enjoyed this episode make sure to tell your friends and family all about it subscribe to our podcast on apple Spotify YouTube or anywhere else you listen to get access to our newest content thanks for joining us for our Friday face-to-face episode I'm Marissa Armstead your host and I'm really looking forward to our conversation with Susan and Lynn Thackery today welcome Thackery's Susan: thank you currently susan is an assistant professor of technology management at utah valley university she earned her bachelor's degree in digital media from UVU master of education in instructional technology from USU and doctor of education specializing in curriculum teaching learning and leadership from northeastern university Lynn is currently a computer science lecturer for UVU he earned his bachelor's degree in design engineering and computer graphics technology from BYU his master of education specializing in technology web technologies and learning science he also went on to earn his doctor of education specializing in technical curriculum development teaching learning and leadership from northeastern university so i have to start off by asking how your guys's paths cross you have such a fun career path that you've kind of built together but talk to me about where it all began Susan uh let's start with you Susan: so how far back do you want me to go where it all began yep very busy lot I've known Lynn for a long time in fact i was like 13 and so we were high school sweethearts and we just hit it off we would talk about nerdy things like all those years ago and i was attracted that he thought it was fun to talk back to me that way so here we are Marissa: wow okay so Lynn is she leaving anything important out there Lynn: well we we married uh quite young my wife was 18 and i was uh 21 and so we have been together many many years as Susan mentioned and you know we've enjoyed all of at least i have Susan: i have too yeah I'm not tired of him yet yeah we still have a lot of fun together Marissa: great well so one of the questions that came to my mind as i was thinking about you two is you both decided to pursue some pretty intensive programs you know you both pursued master's and doctorate degrees so i'm curious is that something that you had kind of set as a goal early on or is that something that just developed over time i'd love to hear about how you kind of created these professional and educational goals together so Lynn let's start with you Lynn: well i always had i don't know if i would determine it as a goal i didn't have an ending outcome identified i was always a learner and i tried to be an ongoing learner and so just a natural process and that was to acquire degrees as i went along i did know uh you know i came from a uh very rural background my family were cattle ranchers and farmers going back five generations it was a little bit different striking out in my education I'm a first generation college student but i i did feel the desire at least to get that bachelor's degree you know i knew from my advisors in high school that a degree does open all sorts of doors for you that's something that i i push with my students you have to finish you have to finish that degree yeah and just as a process of a lifelong learner and my wife is a lifelong learner also I'll let her speak we decided to uh a little bit later in life we decided to take that journey together okay Susan I'd love to hear from you any other Susan: yeah you know this is this is interesting so building on you know how we met i was just sitting here thinking that one of the first times i really even noticed Lynn in high school was i could always find him in the same spot in our high school library sitting on the floor reading books and i was so intrigued by that so yeah together we've always valued education we've always valued learning of every aspect and through our journey together it is really common for both of us if we don't know how to do something we learn how to do it and we buy all the equipment and we have the fun and we enjoy that type of a journey so once we were married after our first daughter was born and again we were young that was the first thing that Lynn wanted to do was to make sure that he finished that degree and it was hard because you know we were young parents we had no money and it took a long time but Lynn didn't give up i worked finally towards the end i worked full time so that he could concentrate on school because that's before online learning and he actually had to show up to class right at 10 in the morning so it was kind of hard to have a job so we really didn't have the support of parents who paid for everything and we did it we and that's i think of his first his degree as my degree too so it was years later after our four children were wrong that i went to school for the first time i went to college for the first time Marissa: great well oh go ahead go ahead Lynn Lynn: I'm just going to mention uh and it's what i i think we both instill in our students is that a degree will change the trajectory of your life change it for the better Susan: it does it changes the way you think right you you think you feel things differently Lynn: It certainly does Marissa: yeah absolutely well and i love this idea of working on it together and i love Susan that you shared that his degree was also your degree that that was a team effort i just i really appreciate that sentiment as a follow-up question that i I'm guessing the answer is probably no but i have to ask your degrees are similar in a sense of what you were interested in and so i have to ask was there ever any competition as you earned these degrees Susan: yes with me Lynn i don't know were you competitive with me i was off but here's the problem for me it's really hard to compete with Lynn like he he is really good at anything he does anything he sets out to do so the bar for me is always high and i just think if i can get somewhere close then I'm in I'm in the ballpark and he's really nice to like help you know help me along and say you can do this and things like that but um yeah i feel like I'm in his shadow Lynn: oh a we were def- the whole is definitely better than the sum of the parts i think we help each other out yeah Susan: yes Lynn: and and it's fun if we hadn't pursued an actual uh graduate degrees we would have still been learning we would you know we've always been learning Susan: that that is true and there really was a time in our life that we jointly decided that we wanted to go for those graduate degrees because we knew that this was a great way to give back to our communities by by becoming professors and we knew that we needed you know if you want to be an educator you have to be educated and so we knew that we needed at least a master's to doctorate level so we did talk about that and that did make our so i of course got my bachelor way after him but we did our masters together and our doctorate together and there were friendly competitions along the lines of hey did you get that assignment done oh i did you know it was kind of things like that but yeah Lynn: well and Utah state had a ropes course that they put all of the new master students through and i think there's a little competition there when up there on those scary ladders Susan: there totally was my husband i got on first before my husband i wasn't the first adopter and it was really scary because there were three groups of people there were the people that would do it right away just jump up there and i know if you've ever done a ropes course but it's scary and I'm we find out and that's why they had us do it we found out that i am the type that's the early adopter I'm the first one and the first group makes mistakes right that you don't do it perfectly and then the second group will stand and watch the first group make mistakes and improve on it and then there's the last group that just kind of doesn't want to do it at all and then there's still another group that didn't even show up that day they were so sorry but but we found out through that experience that I'm the kind of person that will jump right in and make the mistakes and and learn by making the mistakes and we learned that we we found out that Lynn is the kind that will learn through others mistakes and he'll hold back and then he'll do it really well because he learns Marissa: well i love this and i love this idea of finding a companion in life who is complementary to us not necessarily the same but they work together really well with you and i feel the same way about my husband but this is a perfect lead-in i because i really wanted to learn more about your master's programs at USU Lindsay who is the one who brought you both onto the show and asked me if i would ask you because you're wonderful she said that you both actually traveled to Africa as a part of your culminating education experiences so I'd love to hear from both of you what that project entailed and how you both found yourself together in Africa working on a master's project so maybe Lynn let's hear from you first Lynn: well it as mentioned it was part of our master's degree experience at UVU and at the time Susan had the history with Utah valley and a professor that she was close to was putting together a group to work with the Namibian polytechnic and they were working on asset management as you know in Africa had been devastated by the aids pandemic and so big swaths of middle age people were dying of aids and it's very much a oral culture there so the traditions are passed on from the generations through this oral tradition well the people that passed those traditions on were dying off and the government was worried that these traditions would be lost and they had no infrastructure there it's a very poor country and they wanted to put together a system that could capture this information you know written audio video and so forth and so Susan actually suggested that we could with our technical backgrounds we could assist in this project and so that's what we did we went down i spent quite a bit of time with the professors and the students of the polytechnic it was a very positive experience and there was learning done on both sides i know i came back enriched and my uh horizons were significantly broadened by the experience Marissa: and Susan for you from that experience I'd love to hear from your perspective what it was like what you learned maybe what you learned about each other in that experience Susan: yeah as one mentioned on my backgrounds in digital media and so some of these were some of my former colleagues at Utah valley university and so they were generous enough to let us as Utah state university graduate students to come and set up some things that was going to be a five-year project so we were supposed to set up a structure of how we would organize these assets so we got permission to go and the thing that i learned about Lynn when i was down there and it was for me it was extremely profound in addition to just the learning that took place of being in another culture and at the time i was real strong in web development and at the time my knowledge base was about three years ahead of what was happening down in Namibia so it was almost like seeing the future and you know you could share with them how that industry would go and teach them skills that they could make some really good money at anyway what i learned about Lynn was there was a particular day when we had to organize a whole database and what how we were going to structure this five-year project i was busy with some research and so Lynn took the lead on that and i watched his presentation and i was so impressed how he was able to just organize a long-term project so quickly so i really i learned and he got that basically from you know being in industry he had way more experience than i did it at that time and so i recognized he could teach me a lot and he has Marissa: and again opening it up i guess to both of you I'd love to just hear maybe one thing that you learn in that experience that you feel like maybe you couldn't have learned anywhere else was there anything that stood out to you being in a different culture that you learned Susan: yeah Lynn: students want to learn and no matter where they're from no matter what culture they're in and they'll use you know obviously where all products of that culture were raised and then we use the resources there well in Namibia the resources were very scarce we went out to what was called an informal settlement which in America that would be called maybe a shanty town of the 1930s and no electricity or limited electricity no plumbing and yet they had a school set up and they were trying to teach their students they were sharing pencils and paper and they had really no resources but these students who oftentimes didn't have enough to eat would be going to this school this was a primary school and i saw the same thing in the students at the polytechnic oftentimes we found out that they would walk to school miles every day just to get to school they did want to learn once you got past that they were like students anywhere they were funny they were uh you used critical thinking skills and wanted to improve their lives through education Susan: i i totally agree and i also had the benefit when i was there i don't know if you i don't think you went with me Lynn but i actually went out and visited some junior highs and a middle school and then of course we worked with the polytechnic college level students and then we saw a lady that started a nursery school one of the things that i thought was unique is their traditional culture was the faculty the teacher was the sage on the stage that they were the all-knowing in the front of the classroom and the students quietly listened and took notes in there it's very i thought very little interaction at all at all levels so one of the things that we did when we came down and we taught a few of the classes is we shook it up a little bit and we did hands-on learning because that's how i teach right you know you let them try it and give them the equipment they need to to let them try the concepts that you're teaching and they were a little nervous at first but then they adopted it really quickly and so that was exciting to just watch the students learn with a different approach Marissa: absolutely well and that makes me think even to my own education experience just how you said different professors have different ways of sharing information and i love that you tried multiple approaches to reach students who maybe did need a learning style that was different than what they had grown up in so i love that you're able to provide a new perspective in that way Lynn one follow-up question that i wanted to chat with you about is about your dissertation which was about women in computer science and you really looked at what contributes to women's selection and persistence in computer science as an academic major so i'd love to hear what piqued your interest in this topic Lynn: well that topic my background in industry informed that topic i was in the computer science sector the software development sector for 25 years prior to moving into academia and this is both in California and in Utah and the experience was that diversity matters it matters greatly in a very creative field actually matters greatly anyway but if you're in a creative field a situation you want input from different people that come from different backgrounds and it was hard to do that as i progressed in my career became a manager and a vp and i would try to hire for diversity and particularly in Utah that was a hurdle i was at one company and went through 200 resumes and i would say maybe three percent of the those resumes were from women and so that was something that i wanted to pursue get to the bottom of that find out what the situation is because the few women that i did work with are exemplary very good and and so there needed to be in my mind some way to lower the bridge in getting women and young junior high girls interested in science in technology in math Marissa: absolutely yeah i love that so Susan kind of on a similar vein i would say you had a research interest in underrepresented populations in science technology engineering and math so same question to you what led to your interest in that Susan: so being an underrepresented woman in my field i found myself always maybe being the only one or maybe one of two something along those lines in my classes and i also felt i felt different right like i felt like sometimes that i didn't belong and my history actually goes way back to high school when lived in a rural community and there was one math teacher and you have the same guy every year and he just didn't believe that women had any business in that math class and so he i feel like he held me back in a sense because by the time i graduated i just didn't feel like it was an avenue even though that's where my interest was so when it came time to do my research i wanted to know if other people had experienced similar things that they had received subtle messaging and being told young women and and even people in minorities the statistics are very similar that they don't belong in these careers and they don't have what it takes and what that's called is self-advocacy there's some point in their life that that they don't see themselves in that i can't tell you how many older women women that have dropped out of stem fields and they all have a story on what happened on somebody told them you know not to continue or you know somebody told them it was too hard for them and so i wanted to know there's a lot of research around why women quit or fail out but there's very little research on what makes them stay and so um i researched women in Utah where there is a culture of that women should stay home and raise children and not pursue certainly a stem degree but maybe even a degree in general and i wanted to know where that message was coming from and why the women that did go through a program a stem and get a stem degree what kept them there and it was a fascinating research they don't they don't recognize themselves the outcome is that they don't recognize themselves as trailblazers they do work harder and they recognize that they feel like they're you know isolated and they're the only ones and there's a unique sense that women disapprove of them and then disapprove of them because they're going against the cultural norms and they but they don't recognize their power that they can lend to the diversity of the industry like Lynn was saying you know they could help change they also have a tendency to not bring other women along they fight their way in through this degree and they and then they just carry on they don't i guess they don't recognize their power and uh so it was a fascinating and my participant sample were universities across the state of Utah Marissa: such interesting research and it sounds like you both have a similar goal of really understanding why underrepresented populations aren't entering this field that you both are so passionate about which i think is really cool and it made me think of an interview i actually just did not too long ago with a female engineer who is recent to the field and we talked about some of these things and i am really hopeful especially after that conversation with her i'm really hopeful that we are starting to see some changes in this stigma that has been in Utah but but i would say worldwide i think we are starting to see changes in that because of the work that you and so many others are doing so really appreciate you sharing those and your work in the field one thing i also wanted to move into as well so now you both work for Utah valley university Susan you're an assistant professor of technology and management and then you're lecturing in computer science so i would love to hear from each of you just to learn a little bit more about what your positions look like pre-coded and then what they look like currently so Lynn let's start with you Lynn: well pre-covid all of my classes were taught on campus in a traditional classroom and prior to coming to UVU i did teach at another university that was primarily online so you know have experienced teaching online but at UVU it was all in class so you had a personal relationship with most of the students you knew they were if not by name at least by sight and the communication was asynchronous and synchronous both they could ask questions you in the classroom they could email you afterwards they could walk into your office and so had a very hands-on relationship and you know you can catch issues early if someone's struggling you often can uh see that early in the classroom and i would have in-class assignments where i would observe very short-term assignments that were completed during the class period and got really good feedback that way of how my uh teaching was going what i needed to focus on and things like that you know going totally online after uh the covid pandemic has started you lose some of that and at UVU we have two types of online we have a what we call streaming where it is distance delivered but uh the normal times that you would spend in the classroom two or three times a week you actually had a meeting through zoom or teams to where everybody would gather and discuss that's streaming and then of course we have the fully online where it's all asynchronous you know you can post videos and perhaps have an online chat but you don't have that communal meeting time so you know you have to modify your teaching when you're teaching online and actually uh contrary to some popular belief teaching online is more challenging and more work than teaching on campus you can't be that sage on the stage and just stand up and talk because you don't have a stage anymore you actually have to design your course to be relevant and provide good teaching material Marissa: absolutely and Susan same question to you I'd love to learn a little bit more about what your position looked like pre and during covid Susan: so mine's similar to Lynn and both of us have backgrounds in delivering distance technical courses so we've been at this for a while and we have expertise i also teach adjunct to northeastern in the summer and so that's all distance delivered to doctorate level students and then the first semester of covid i had a live stream graduate class actually through the school of business I'm in the college of engineering and technology and technology management and we have a degree at UVU that has it's a master in business with a technology management focus and so um i taught the first tech management course and it was live stream and it worked out fine that you know students are used to it one of the hallmarks of my online classes that i get a lot of pushback on i still do group projects i just feel like that's super important that students are working together but when in an asynchronous class you can't insist that students meet at the same time because that's not what they signed up for and so i feel like that mirrors the industry right now you may be in a different time zone and they those students need to figure out how to work in a group and with different schedules and different time zones how will they keep communicating you know how will they complete a project and i do get a lot of pushback but usually at the end of the semester the students begin to see the value i was going to mention too i know that Lynn does a really good job he does really excellent videos that he posts to his online courses and so that students can you know review and and i think in his discipline that's really critical of computer science is a thing that you know you need to hear several times if you want to talk about that Lynn: my teaching is informed by my industry experience so everything that i do is geared towards getting the students prepared to hit the ground running when they graduate and so my assignments my assessments are all focused on that and rather than have just a 10 or 12 week long programming assignments I'll put together a semester-long problem for them to solve and there will be several phases to that and that mimics what they would normally see in industry a large project where they'd have release one released to release three and as Susan mentioned teamwork is very important in all disciplines but particularly in computer science because the technology is advanced to uh such a degree that there's no individual contributors anymore coming up with a killer concept all software is created by teams and so what was once a soft skills you know communication and writing and working together as teams those are actually skills that are interviewed for they're not soft anymore you need those skills and so some of my focus i know some students focus is on developing those skills Marissa: and something that I'm kind of hearing from both of you is we need to be developing technical skills whether we think of them as technical or not uh whether it's communicating via email or zoom or whatever it may be where technology is becoming more and more integrated into our everyday lives and especially the workplace so and i didn't prepare you for this question but I'd love to hear if you had to hypothesize where do you see education moving forward do you see more and more technology integrated into the classroom do you see more teaching maybe from a distance what do you think the future looks like Susan: so i am actually working on an initiative that's in Utah right now credit for prior learning and prior learning assessment i think some of the future is that universities are going to do better at assessing and giving credit to experiences and learning that takes place outside the traditional classroom and that's a little bit difficult to assess that fairly so that your accreditation stands strong within a university and so faculty and universities need to learn how to do that better there's some talk about competency-based education same thing that's that's difficult to assess and competency-based education is different than credit for prior learning two different concepts but i see this gravitating more towards that i do think that when we keep talking about return to normal i think we have learned some new things through the covet experience that we're finding out that distance delivered courses sometimes are really good with people that maybe have learning challenges there's people that are in the workforce it's tailored to their schedules so i think we're going to see some changes in the university to reach out to adult learners and learners who have needs like we talked about earlier when Lynn Lynn went to school you had to be in the classroom in a seat at 10 in the morning on a Tuesday and i think we're going to see a little more flexibility so people can complete degrees while they work Lynn: education has been evolving quite heavily for the last 20 years the student body is becoming older when i went to school as Susan mentioned you showed up at 10 in the morning and if you had a job you better go to that job after you go to school and so if you had not completed your degree by 21 20-23 pretty much over for you well the the lifelong learners that didn't fit that model didn't fit very well and so there's been an evolution students are actually becoming older they're becoming lifelong learners and even prior to the pandemic i would have students in my class that were older than me uh my age or so forth maybe some of them had a degree and were coming back to go into a different field in fact we've just in the computer science department have released a programming degree for older students that have a degree already but want to move into programming and this is well underway and i i certainly supported that and so you don't have to be the young 20 year old to get a degree you can be a retired person you can be person that's worked for 10 years in industry you want to go back now what the pandemic has done it has fundamentally changed how least at UVU and and other universities that i I'm aware of how the mindset of the professors the mindset of the staff at the university and i think this will after the pandemic is over education is going to come out of this much change there'll be much more offerings in asynchronous and online and that's more opportunities for people who are challenged in ways particularly uh with their schedule you know they might have small children at home they might be working a full-time job and they can't drive into campus find a parking place and spend all day but yet they can continue their education through some of the technologies that are emerging and will become more pronounced going forward zoom and other voice over ip technologies and cloud sharing that's all going to impact for the better i think our education going forward Susan: podcasts are a great example Lynn: podcasts yes Marissa: yes absolutely well and i love that you tied it back into how this might help some of these underrepresented populations you're talking about and opening up access for students while online doesn't remove all academic barriers obviously i think you're right that it will open up a lot of doors for less traditional students if you will Lynn one thing i also wanted to follow up about your work so when we're looking at women's persistence in computer science I'm really curious what were some of the top indicators that women showcased when they were able to persist and graduate within a degree so what were some of those top indicators that they were going to continue Lynn: and that's very good question that there's been a lot of research on why women are not more represented in the technologies my research was on computer science and on the women that did persist and were successful what were the common indicators there and by and large it was they had a mentor they had a female mentor that helped them that they could look up to and those are few and far between in computer science i mean it's getting better now but those are few and far between additionally i had several research students that i did the research on that had come from a military background they joined the army in the and the navy and in there they were given a choice of two or three specialties and they were given aptitude tests and they scored real high in technology and to them that was just that was news to them they hadn't really pursued it in high school or anything and so they were moved into these technical specifications programming in i.t and they excelled at it they excelled at it and so they were able to overcome some of this inertia that said no you want to pursue other paths this is a male dominated occupation and so they were able to overcome that the other students you know they had some female mentors and there are still hurdles they're coming down they're coming down quite a bit but just generally being as my wife mentioned the only female in a class of 30 that can be kind of intimidating and you know it's kind of sad in a way because if you look at the history of computer science some of the great pivotal moments came from women the first female programmer ever was a female Augusta Lovelace and then in the 40s and 50s some of the pioneers were female Grace Hooper for example so it's just our society our western society that i think has put up some roadblocks if you look at some of the other societies even societies that don't have the greatest record for women's rights in the Mideast you over there and their classes are much more evenly dispersed male female and so we have some catching up to do in this country Marissa: well i think you bring up a great point i love this idea of female mentors that's something that's come up in other conversations i had Susan Madsen on on our show not too long ago and that's something that she and i have talked about the importance of female role models but also i love that you pointed out that they took these aptitude tests that reassured them of skill sets that they had and i think that is so critical that we're not only providing mentors but we're also seeing you do have the skills you do have this capacity or this ability to pursue this type of field so i think that's a really interesting insight Susan did you have anything you wanted to add on Susan: that's exactly right that's what my research showed i spent a lot of time on the self-advocacy thing and the first group of females that we lose is right around junior high age from 12 to about 14 and that's exactly the time for a good intervention is to have projects for them they already show an interest and they want to participate but if you can show them and do projects that they have what it takes that's exactly you're exactly right that's what's needed one of the things that's interesting in my research compared to Lynn's as mine showed that it was men who helped the women build this sense of self-efficacy that it was the male voices and a lot of times people think that young female should be taught alone just female groups and really the research shows that it's good for male and female to be together at that age and so that the males can see that the female do have efficacy and it allows the males to learn how to support women in these roles and make room for them and move them through a system where they're underrepresented a strong male voice at the table convincing other males that these women does change a culture is what i identified but yes we need to see it to be it we female walls are good however right now there's not a lot of them so what my research showed by the women that were succeeding is they recognized that they might not find that female role model and they had to be it or they had to find male role models that were willing to move them forward Marissa: this is so interesting and you know i was it made me reflect on my own experiences because I've had I've been fortunate and had both female and male role models in my field in career services and both were instrumental in in different ways but i agree that both were helpful as I've built my career and continue to so i love that perspective of needing mentors from all sides well Thackeray's we are just about out of time here but i do want to close with one final question and I'll have each of you respond Susan I'll have you go first if you could give one piece of advice to our listeners about developing a mindset of lifelong learning what would it be Susan: just one is hard but i think my number one would be except that sometimes trying new things may feel uncomfortable you may feel different you may not even feel very good at it and that a lifelong learner you you just keep learning right it's okay to sit with that feeling of you know maybe you are the only female in a class or maybe you didn't do it so well so back i guess back to that ropes course experience jump right in and try something new and you'll get better with practice you'll get better Marissa: love that and Lynn same question to you what advice would you give for building a mindset of lifelong learning Lynn: well and as Susan mentioned that's a hard question because the only competition that we as students have are with ourselves and as student as Susan mentioned it doesn't matter your velocity just keep moving forward keep learning and as you gain knowledge and experience it's because we also learn through our experiences we enrich our lives and in turn we enrich others around us Marissa: love that well i have to say i feel privileged to have had such a power couple on the show today I've learned so much i wish we had another three or four hours to continue this conversation but i really really appreciate you sharing your career paths and experience with us today Susan: thank you this has been fun Lynn: yes thank you for the opportunity Marissa: if you're interested in learning more about the need for diversity in the Utah stem workforce please check out the link in this episode's bio below thanks for joining us here at the career studio today remember to join us next week as we begin to discuss our new monthly theme of turning failures into bright futures *Music*
2021-03-30 02:29
