Someone tells you a story you know you will never publish. Do you keep listening?

Investigative journalist Dyan Neary does. Her work covers public health, child welfare, and incarceration, and she brings the difficult decisions inside that work into her journalism classrooms at West Chester University. She's also the host of The Preventionist, from Serial Productions and The New York Times.

We talk about what sits behind a reported story: the documents that support an interview, the sentence-by-sentence fact-checking, and the judgment involved when someone shares more than they realize. Dyan describes teaching students to interview each other and a storytelling class where incarcerated students and university students write and learn together at Chester County Prison.

The conversation keeps returning to what journalism asks of a person. How do you hear difficult stories without losing your humanity? How do students learn the difference between reporting and commentary? And what gives a working investigative journalist hope?

Afterward, we sit with what her answers ask of us as researchers and teachers, including the tension between listening openly and deciding what can responsibly become public.

Links:

https://www.pexelab.org

https://seanisdwelling.substack.com

https://matthewkr.substack.com

Dyan Neary at WCU — https://www.wcupa.edu/arts-humanities/english/dneary.aspx

The Preventionist — https://open.spotify.com/show/66znSHlm37F2kYl9MgfnGK

Blindsided by Breast Cancer — https://www.thecut.com/article/breast-cancer-mammograms-early-detection-screenings.html

The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program — https://www.insideoutcenter.org/

Prison Journalism Project — https://prisonjournalismproject.org/

Amy Collini, In Which I Imagine a Different Ending for Uncle Jimmy — https://dsc.duq.edu/creativenonfiction-sunday-short-reads/157/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What if the way teachers talk to themselves is the thing that drives them out of the profession?

Dr. Dave Barry spent ten years teaching kindergarten in Boston Public Schools before earning his PhD at UT Austin, where he studied under Kristen Neff — the researcher who brought self-compassion into Western social science. Now an associate professor of early childhood education at West Chester University, Dave has built his academic career around a question most teacher preparation programs skip: what happens when we teach teachers to be kind to themselves?

His answer is a letter-writing intervention. Over three semesters of student teaching, pre-service teachers wrote letters to themselves the way they would write to someone they love — about the hardest moments in their classrooms. Self-compassion scores went up, burnout went down, job satisfaction increased. The work is becoming a book with Teachers College Press.

In this episode, Dave walks hosts Sean Legnini and Matthew Kruger-Ross through the same two-list exercise he uses with his students. Both hosts feel the gap between how they talk to themselves and how they would talk to someone they love about the same experience. The conversation moves from research to lived practice to a pointed question: what would it mean for a university to measure not how many teachers it graduates, but how many stay in the field five years later?

Dave also shares his podcast I Still Believe in School and his research on podcasts as wellbeing resources for pre-service teachers.

You can find Dave @istillbelieveinschool and at www.llbelieveinschool.com

Find Sean & Matthew:

https://www.pexelab.org

https://seanisdwelling.substack.com

https://matthewkr.substack.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Give a room of elite music students a genuine creative choice — no right answer, no rubric — and a lot of them freeze. Dr. Sarah Gulish has spent her career asking why, and what to do about it.

Sarah is an assistant professor of music education at West Chester University, where every course she teaches centers on creativity: improvisation, student-centered learning, progressive methods. Before that she spent sixteen years teaching in public schools, including a high school course called Creativity and Collaboration that she co-taught with an art teacher. She's a working songwriter and performer, a card-carrying devotee of The Moth, and the founder and CEO of F-flat Books.

In the academic half, Sarah traces her big questions — student agency and autonomy — back to the students she couldn't serve, and walks us through her current research on improvisation and confidence. Two findings stand out: students' creative self-efficacy grew dramatically over a semester and they credited the environment for it, and their own sense of how creative their playing was didn't match an outside judge's — but their confidence still gave them real pride in the making. She also talks honestly about being a qualitative researcher doing a quantitative study on purpose, because numbers are the language administrators speak.

Then the turn. In 2015, Sarah got her first academic book contract and was stunned by the terms — 2% royalties, no marketing, and the loss of rights to her own work — and more stunned that everyone told her this was normal. So she built something else. F-flat Books turns seven this week, with more than 200 resources, over 80 creators, and hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to authors who keep their rights. Her hardest-won lesson: the people who resonated weren't other academics, they were classroom teachers doing the work. Her question for anyone sitting on research is the one that gave this episode its title — if the people you want to reach aren't reading journals, where are they, and how do you get there?

Plus: why creativity isn't just an arts problem, what happens when a university partnership rescues master's projects from a shared drive, and the case for public funding of arts research made to actual policymakers in DC.

Links:

https://www.pexelab.org

https://seanisdwelling.substack.com

https://matthewkr.substack.com

Sarah Gulish — https://www.sarahgulish.com

Thoughts with Sarah Gulish — https://sarahgulish.substack.com

F-flat Books — https://fflat-books.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We believe the work happening inside universities should be a public good — not locked behind paywalls or buried in language no one wants to read. So we're sitting down with scholars to ask two questions: who are you in the academy, and how does your work show up in the world?

For episode one, we talk with Dr. Megan Fork, associate professor of biology at West Chester University and an ecosystem scientist who studies urban watersheds — and treats trash as data. Megan walks us through a massive study of single-use plastic bans across nine Pennsylvania watersheds: 18 months of sampling and nearly 16,000 individual pieces of trash. The surprising result? The bans show no measurable effect on the trash in local streams — and her explanation for why says as much about how communities are built as it does about plastic.

We get into what a watershed actually is (she scales it from the Delaware River all the way down to the roof of a house), why "urban ecology" is real science, and how a null result can be the most interesting finding of all. Then Megan makes the turn we're chasing on this show — from the academic self to the public one. For her, the public isn't only the person on the street; it's the borough councils, sustainability boards, and state legislators who turn research into policy. They also makes a pointed case that the guilt we're handed about personal recycling was manufactured by corporations to dodge their own responsibility.

If you've ever wondered whether your reusable bag is doing anything, why your groceries come wrapped in plastic no matter what you choose, or why a scientist would spend a career counting trash in a creek — this one's for you.

Links:

https://www.pexelab.org

https://seanisdwelling.substack.com

https://matthewkr.substack.com

The Aquatic Ecosystems Lab @ WCU

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.