Bonus Episode: Caroline Levander: Embracing Creativity in Education

Welcome to Why Not Me, embracing autism and mental health worldwide. Hosted by Tony Mietour. Broadcasting from the heart of Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join us as our guest share their raw, howlful stories. Son, who's far clasped, others will move you to tears. These real life journeys inspire, connect, and remind you that you're never alone. We're igniting a global movement to empower everyone to make a lasting difference by fostering deep awareness, unwavering acceptance, and profound understanding of autism and mental health. Tune in, be inspired, and join us in transforming the world one story at a time. Hi, I'm Tony Mietour. Welcome to Why Not Me, embracing autism and mental health worldwide. Joining us today is Carolyn LeVander, 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, invites readers on a compelling journey through the evolving educational landscape, challenging traditional models, spotlighting emerging technology and mythologies, and urging educators, students, and policymakers alike to rethink what it means to teach, learn, and create in the 21st century. Whether you're a teacher, striving to invigorate your classroom, and administrative plotting institutional transformation, or simply someone passionate about the future of learning. Invent 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 splotters. 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, a very selective, private university that has undergraduate students and, of course, major research program. Now you have worked with a lot of different types of people. We'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 things 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, 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-20th century American culture. So from the 1700s, actually into World War I 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 to 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 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 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. It 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 individual solving problems that were in many ways you need 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 routes, of travel routes, 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 yesterday 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 fathers, you know, is this experiment going to work? You know, on a good day, they might have said, I hope so, right? But it was not pre-ordained that this, you know, United States project was going to be successful. In fact, right, the world, 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 shelter? So, I mean, in some ways, we could argue that what we might call stress level was probably pretty high. But 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're much more worried about failing at the beginning of the journey. And I think that source of worry then 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. Just 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. I think that's where real education happens. Because I think the K-12 system with the focus on teaching for the test 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 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. 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 math instead, for example, or vice versa. And that's a fixed mindset. That's the mindset that says, like the color of your eyes and your height, they're determined at birth. There's nothing you can really do about it. It 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? 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 classmate, 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? 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 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 students are going to have the smart answer, that student is going to struggle, and our own impatience can keep us 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, why do you think that? What are the thought processes that got you to say that? And then working that through was 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, no, that's a Tony, that's a great question. And you mentioned AI earlier as a source of stress for students. The art in the 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. That would be the value ad 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 an event ad 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. All these things combined or individually are very stressful. How do we get past this? No, I mean, you left the 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, all of that is a big red hearing. 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, creating, potential in all of our students, and teaching domain expertise. 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 an informed discussion about your field with a broad 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 without any tools that are currently in existence. It's the ability to take this tool over in this side of the university world and put it into collaboration with this. So, 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 can get to that deep connectivity that exists underneath the surface of these different disciplines, that's where creativity lives. 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 us tool propagation. There's more tools now to put into new combinations than ever before and that's exciting. Universities, schools, these are the places for creativity because there's so many ideas jam-packed into one little place. Oh, it's a big opportunity. It's an exciting opportunity and we just need to remember that. And again, 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-12 education system, again, understandably, right? You're trying to get a bunch of students through some basic education skills acquisition again it. But at the time that you get to college, success is not having a four-point on 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 more 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. Yeah. And 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 him, yeah, but I'm coming here from 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 flip it a bit, Tony. I'll answer that question, but I actually think students and their parents and their families are terribly complicit in this. 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. And no time at all looking at the vital organs of the institution itself. It's all about, oh, is it a pre-campus? And you know, well, my friends there, and that's great. That's part of mental health and wellness. You have to enjoy that said. You also need, and this book actually, one of the things I wanted to have impact, one of the things it does is it provides very, very simple, achievable. Here's what to do. Parents, here's what to 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 has 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 in vent 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 last six months, the after you put the admissions forms in, you know, in the classic scenario you're a senior in high school and now you've seen youritis 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 a 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, you know, fooling around, not doing anything. So there's so much you can do. Now, you asked the question about how can universities become less kind of assessment oriented in their admissions criteria? And I think that we are entering an era where the good news is universities will have to US and talk about US universities and they will have to because the student demand we all know is going down not up because of student age. So this is a great moment. If in the next 10 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 are doing and writing? Give us the contact information that you think is important for them to see. Okay. Yeah. Sure. So look, you can Terrellan Levant or C-A-R-O-L-I-N-E-L-E-V-A-N-D-E-R at rice.edu. If you go there, there's information on my book, there's a hyperlink to buying the book I'm talking about and then add. 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 that I, you know, I entered this career to give back. I think most of us in the field do. I'm now, before I could just really get 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 invitation. I'm 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 fright and I was really, really shy and I was very self conscious. 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 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 doing this 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 works, 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 in life is 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. In the US, we don't really understand that, but it's true in my work. I see it. So if we can 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 show today. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. If you know someone who has a story to share, tell them to contact us at whynotme.world. One last thing, spread the word about why not me. Our conversations are inspiring guests that show you are not alone in this world.