Guerrilla Scholarship: Breaking Academic Boundaries with Dr. Sheldon Greaves

What happens when passionate curiosity meets unconventional research methods? Dr. Sheldon Greaves reveals the power of "guerrilla scholarship," which is a creative approach to intellectual work that flourishes outside traditional academic walls.

For instructional designers, educators, or anyone seeking to pursue intellectual work without institutional backing, this episode provides both practical guidance and inspiring possibilities. Dr. Greaves reminds us that meaningful learning thrives in community, where diverse perspectives come together to explore questions academia might overlook.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Dr. Sheldon Greaves
• 11:04 Academic Journey and Teaching Spies
• 13:36 Creative Learning on a Shoestring
• 23:02 Guerrilla Scholarship Explained
• 29:55 14-Year-Old Scholar Takes Down Professor
• 38:31 Independent Scholars and Their Impact
• 39:39 The State of Modern Education

Transcript

Jackie Pelegrin: 0:01

Hello and welcome to the Designing with Love podcast. I am your host, Jackie Pelegrin, where my goal is to bring you information, tips, and tricks as an instructional designer. Hello instructional designers and educators, welcome to episode 68 of the Designing with Love podcast. I'm thrilled to have Dr Sheldon Greaves, an author and educator, with me today. Welcome, Sheldon.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 0:25

Hi, Jackie, it's a pleasure to have Dr Sheldon Greaves, an author and educator, with me today. Welcome, Sheldon. Hi, Jackie, it's a pleasure to be here.

Jackie Pelegrin: 0:27

Yes, thank you so much. I'm glad we got connected on PodMatch and had an opportunity to do this interview today. I'm excited. I'm looking forward to us getting into the deep dive of everything, so it'll be great. I'm looking forward to it. To start, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and share what inspired you to focus on the education field?

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 0:46

Well, I have always been very passionate about learning, mostly. Well, I guess it's trendy to blame your parents for a lot of things, and I guess I can do that in this case.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 0:58

There you go. My parents were both college graduates, my mother in particular. She graduated with a degree in English. She had a fairly wide view of the world. My father had traveled fairly extensively in Europe and the Middle East before he settled down, so there was a great deal of awareness that there's a big, beautiful world out there world out there. My mother also was a huge fan of the public library, which served both as kind of a ersatz educator and occasional daycare where she would drop me at the public library, and she also made a point of ensuring that there were lots of books in the house, and that's a habit that kind of stuck with me. I can't get enough of books. My wife is the same way. It's not entirely true that I married her for her library, and so I have always been kind of passionate about it, and so I have always been kind of passionate about it.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 2:25

Going through school, I finally finished with a doctorate in Near Eastern Studies from UC Berkeley, and while I kind of soured on the whole academic scene and there weren't any jobs anyway, but I still was very passionate about learning and education, and so I found other ways to exercise that passion working in the nonprofit sector, in citizen science, and I also, by a very strange chain of events, found myself as a co-founder of Henley Putnam University, which was the first private university that was designed from the ground up to offer programs to the intelligence, counterterrorism and executive protection industries. So I was basically training spies for a few years, which turned out to be just an incredible experience and a real lesson in how the university system works. You learn a lot about a university by building one.

Jackie Pelegrin: 3:34

Right, exactly, you learn the inner workings of it. Yeah, it's more than an educational system, it's a business that has to operate. Yeah, those inner workings of it, yeah, and then you kind of see the all the different elements that go into it, of the financial side of it, and then the government side of it, you know, especially for undergraduate students, and Pell grants and scholarships and loans, all that good stuff, yeah.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 4:02

And privacy and policies and all the stuff that you've got to come up with to make sure that you prove that you know how to run a university. Well, I also had to do my doctorate rather on a shoestring, because while I was doing my doctorate, my wife was doing hers at Stanford in classics, and so we were effectively a young married couple putting two kids through college namely each other and so we had to get creative, and one of the things we did, for example, was that after her scholarship ran out I didn't get one, because she's smarter than I am we would take turns, I would go to school and she would work full time, and then I would take a financial leave of absence, get a job, she would go to school and we'd just trade off and we eventually made it. I mean, we eventually did both finish and we're still married. So I guess that says something about how that works.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 5:08

But when I wasn't in school formally, I still had to keep up with what I was doing and I still had stuff I wanted to research. And that's where you kind of had to get creative because I didn't always have access to the usual things that I would have had had I been a student. And that continued after I graduated and I still wanted to do stuff but didn't have access to a university.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 5:35

So that formed the basis of my latest book, which is about how to do interesting and useful intellectual work when you don't have access to the tools of academia.

Jackie Pelegrin: 5:49

Wow, that's great. I love the story of you and your wife, how you both were able to work that out and really really come to an agreement right, and say, okay, you do it for this period and then I'll take a break. And you figured out a way to make it work, and make it work in different ways, so that you both probably wouldn't burn out, right, if you're both going at the same time and then trying to care for your family and your children and everything that wouldn't have worked.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 6:15

Well, we didn't have kids, but we did have cats.

Jackie Pelegrin: 6:18

So Okay, well, that's yeah, and they, they have their own needs, right they?

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 6:22

have their needs and they will let you know when you don't meet them Exactly.

Jackie Pelegrin: 6:27

They can be, they're independent, but they still need care.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 6:31

They need help. Yeah, they need care.

Jackie Pelegrin: 6:34

Absolutely. Yeah, that's great. Well, I love that. I love that your parents had that. Like your mom and your dad had that travel bug in them and they loved to explore and everything, because that sounds like my grandparents. They loved to travel too and they kind of put that in me. So I love learning. I don't know different languages, but I love to read too. So I have that affinity for reading books. So I would read mystery books when I was growing up, so I can relate to that. I would read Nancy Drew Hardy Boys when I was growing up, so I can relate to that. I would read Nancy Drew Hardy Boys when I was growing up in the summertime. So my friend and I would trade books and we would. She would read one and I would read one, and then we'd trade and we'd talk, read each other's and then talk about it afterwards.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 7:16

So it was pretty neat, so you had a book exchange.

Jackie Pelegrin: 7:18

Yeah, exactly.

Jackie Pelegrin: 7:19

So I would collect the Nancy Drew, she would collect the Hardy Boys. So we each didn't have to buy books and we saved on that. So it was fun. Yeah, it was a neat, neat idea, Definitely. So it's nice when you can be creative like that and and do those things. That's great. Wow, I love that. So, yeah, that's, that's a great way to open up. You know about what you were talking about with your book. So you talk about in your book about guerrilla scholarship. So can you kind of talk a little bit about that? Maybe give us an example of that?

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 7:48

Yeah, that's. Guerrilla scholarship is my designation, something I coined many years ago. That is basically doing intellectual work by using creative and unconventional approaches to finding and working with information. That's one half of it. It tends to ignore disciplinary boundaries and it allows people to look at areas of study and inquiry that are often ignored by academics. Not because academia is wrong or bad, it's simply they only get to look at what they can find funding for Right and that creates kind of a small pocket where all the research gets done and there's a whole bunch of stuff that just doesn't get touched.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 8:40

Side of guerrilla scholarship is a deep appreciation and concern for doing so in a way that benefits the community. You form learning communities, you get people together and you have salons and seminars and teach-ins, or just get a few people together at the coffee shop and you talk about stuff and the idea is that, like the guerrilla combatant, that kind of guerrilla can only succeed if they have the support of the surrounding community Right Right From time to time. Well, in numerous cases, the founding fathers repeatedly emphasized the importance of education in the citizenry, and I always turn to Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address. This is the one where he gave us the phrase military-industrial complex. That's what everybody remembers. But he also said that the industrial military complex can only be held in check by quote an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, and so that's another reason why I'm kind of well a little exercised about this.

Jackie Pelegrin: 10:20

That's neat, yeah, I like that. So we don't do it in isolation. That's neat, yeah, I like that. So we don't do it in isolation. We do it surrounded with other like-minded individuals or people that we may not know much about their area of expertise and we can draw upon their experiences and then we can learn from each other.

Jackie Pelegrin: 10:36

So it's a community approach to being able to learn and grow no-transcript ideas and methods and things like that and talk about it and then just do it over lunch. So that way we weren't. I mean, it was taking time away from their lunch hour, but we were like, bring your brown bag lunch and just come in. You know, if you want to learn while you're at lunch, instead of just sitting in the cafeteria or sitting in the break room, come on, come in. And so it was nice.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 11:30

Yeah, that's a wonderful example of how, of how this can be done.

Jackie Pelegrin: 12:12

That's great. Yeah, do you have any examples of where you've seen it uh, that guerrilla scholarship really effective in what you've been working on, maybe in the past or maybe what you're working on now?

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 12:23

Well, there's an example that I like to point to just as an example of being creative and unconventional, and this is the example of a 14-year-old eighth grader named Rebecca Freed. Eighth grader named Rebecca Freed whose father would print off I guess he worked at an office, a law office, and he would occasionally print off articles that he thought his kids would find interesting and bring them home. One of the articles that he printed was about a paper that had been published by a scholar by the name of Richard Jensen, and the paper claimed that the idea in Irish immigration that there were all these signs and ads that said no Irish need apply, that it was a myth, that this didn't really happen. Well, he brought this home and Rebecca read the article and she thought that seemed a little weird. So she jumped onto Google Google Images and she started searching and she immediately started finding these old period photographs of shop fronts with signs that said no Irish need apply, and this kind of piqued her interest.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 13:45

So she continued to dig and eventually she got a hold of another gentleman by the name of Kirby Miller. He was a retired professor who specialized in immigration issues, and he happened to disagree with Jensen's thesis, and she went to him and she says have I got something here? And Miller goes yeah, absolutely, you've got. This is great stuff. So what he did was he helped her assemble what she had done and fill in the gaps and turn her little scattered body of research into a real rigorous paper, which was then submitted for peer review and published in exactly in the very journal that Jensen had published his original paper in. And, you know, it just completely knocked the pins out from under this guy's thesis, which I guess is not something I mean. No scholar likes to have his thesis toppled, let alone by an eighth grader.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 14:50

Right curiosity flow, but also hooking up with people who have the skills to take what you've done and show you how to turn it into real-life scholarship. I mean, if she had just posted these things on social media, it wouldn't have made any difference at all. But as it happens, she ended up making a significant contribution to the field of immigration studies.

Jackie Pelegrin: 15:24

Wow, that's amazing, and at 14 years old she was able to take that, yeah, and really, because I would imagine a 14 year old wouldn't be able to probably have that, maybe not that capacity to be able to follow that through right, Because I know when I was that age I didn't want to. I, I, there were things I wanted to do but I didn't necessarily follow through with them because then something else would pique my interest and move on. Yeah, so that's hard.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 15:51

Well, when I, when I was 14, I I had no idea what peer review was. I had no idea what an academic journal was. You know, I mean the, the most, uh, advanced thing that I would read would be, like you know, of that sort would be, you know, news magazines like you know, time or, or newsweek, or that sort of stuff.

Jackie Pelegrin: 16:10

I mean, I think that that was it, but yeah yeah more of a casual reading type of things that you could do on a sunday morning or something, yeah, exactly, wow, that's a great example. I love that. And so it shows that age and talent is no barrier, because you can, like you said, hook up with someone that has that capability and that experience to be able to take it to the next level and bring it to maybe, or maybe bring it to the finish line. You know, if you've got something, you know it's not quite ready, you can have someone kind of help you with that.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 16:42

Yeah, and you know this also points out something else, and that is that there are an awful lot of people out there who used to be in academia. They're not anymore. Maybe they got disillusioned, maybe they retired, maybe they decided they wanted to do something else, but there's this huge I believe untapped reservoir out there of intellectual talent and expertise that I think in many cases, is just kind of waiting or looking for an opportunity to do something with their stuff, or would love to dust something off and see what happens. And I'm kind of hoping that what this book will do is that it will inspire some of these people to kind of come out of the woodwork and and, uh, you know, see what they can see, see what they can do with what they've got. Uh, you know, in 2025 or 2026.

Jackie Pelegrin: 17:36

That's great. Yeah, I've got your book on my list of books to get because I think that's, yeah, I think it's really great because, yeah, I mean, for a long time I've I've thought about writing a book myself and but I thought that's just too too far out there. I well and it's funny too because I thought I couldn't teach college courses. I thought, nah, that's, I'm not, that, I'm not a teacher. And here I am four years and it's just, you know, past that four year mark of teaching college courses. So I thought, if I can do that right.

Jackie Pelegrin: 18:05

You know then then and so now. The book is that it's around 220 pages now. And so yeah yeah, so in a week's time I was around. It's about yeah, I was about a week and a half. I was able to take all the different content from the podcast episodes the solo ones that form the basis of the book.

Jackie Pelegrin: 18:25

And so yeah, so it was existing content that was already there. It was just putting it into a different format, adding different things to it to give them some reflection, and so it's a combination of academics, so it's like that academic side of it models, theories, but then also the practical application. So that way it's and you know there's so many great books out there that have some of that in there. But hopefully this will provide a unique lens from that and people will be able to use it that are thinking of going into the field or want, you know, to, even just generally in education, if they're not sure if they want to go into education. I think it's a great way to be able to do that, because these models and theories aren't just for instructional design, they're across different sectors within education just in general. And I think it's a great way to be able to do that, because these models and theories aren't just for instructional design, they're across different sectors within education just in general. So hopefully it'll be a good resource.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 19:20

That sounds great. I look forward to seeing it.

Jackie Pelegrin: 19:23

Yeah, me too, and I even have a proposal that I put together and crafted that. So if I want to go with a hybrid know like a hybrid publisher or something like that, then at least I've got. It's about 10 pages, so it's not too long.

Jackie Pelegrin: 19:35

It's got a sample chapter and it's got some you know the author biography in there and market research. I, you know, did some research to see what, what does the industry look like and and where's that at, so that you know publishers could see that it's a good return on investment. Cause you know how that goes. You, you have to be able to pitch your book and it's a it's a whole marketing plan that you have to show that you have that. And I was like, okay, I better show I have that social presence and that ecosystem that I can build around it and and market it. So you know, I mean publishers will help you do that, but at the same time, the author needs to kind of do some of that legwork too. So that's important. That's great, yeah, so, as we know, there's been many changes in education over the last several years, probably even because of just AI, but different other things have impacted that. How would you describe the state of education today generally?

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 20:32

have impacted that? How would you describe the state of education today generally? Well, that's a really interesting question because for the last couple of years I've been working as a substitute and a personal care assistant and an educational assistant at the school district here in Albany, oregon, and I've seen a lot of things and I have, you know, all grades K through 12, wherever they needed me. That's where they stuck me. Also, a lot with behavior support and special ed. I am in absolute awe of what school teachers do with what they have. It's just amazing to me. I feel like, quite honestly, the way teachers generally are regarded in this country is a national disgrace. I don't think they are paid nearly enough. Let's look frankly. Until we start paying school teachers a six-figure salary, let's not even pretend that we're serious about education Schools. They are crowded.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 21:43

There was one guy that I was helping out. He was a kindergarten teacher. He had 32 kindergartners in his class, at least two or three of them with some fairly significant learning issues, and you know, I don't know, I don't know how he managed to do it, but then we had a strike here locally. Teachers got most of what they wanted and the next time I went to his class. It was half as big as what it was before and things were under control. So you know, that was that kind of tells you a little bit about what's needed.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 22:20

I'm also of mixed opinion when it comes to the use of computers in class, especially these kindergartners. One of the things when I was helping out with this gentleman when his class had 32 kids in it, they're all trying to get these kindergartners logged in on their iPads into the network. And look, I'm sorry, asking 32 kindergartners to log into a network is like asking a starfish to do brain surgery. Yes, it's just not. You know, it took 45 minutes just to get them all logged in. And it wasn't just the kids, you know there were. Some of the computers were glitchy, some of the software wasn't working right, and every time something like that happens it adds another five minutes of delay.

Jackie Pelegrin: 23:13

Exactly. They're taking away from the actual learning process.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 23:17

Right, they really are. So I'm kind of I'm kind of dubious about how computers are being used. I think there's a place for them, but I think it needs to be more carefully and more deliberately thought through.

Jackie Pelegrin: 23:32

Right, especially at that young age. Yeah, yeah, definitely at that young age. Oh, my gosh, five years old, I'm thinking back to when. I was in kindergarten. Yeah, we definitely didn't use computers. They were more concerned about getting us to learn shapes, numbers, colors, things like that, the basics, and instead of trying to navigate an iPad.

Jackie Pelegrin: 23:54

Yeah, that's true, and I have a friend. Her little boy is going to be nine in January but when he was two he had a tablet that he I was like two, she would give him a tablet and, yeah, now he loves it for everything and I'm like I don't know.

Jackie Pelegrin: 24:12

I'd agree with you. I have my opinions on that too. I'm like there has to be a balance somewhere and limits, and I don't know. It's just that's kind of young to expose them to technology when they don't fully understand different things yet. To understand the implications of technology and what it can do, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 24:30

Now, funny story when I was in first grade I was having some trouble with math. This was in the early 60s, so that kind of dates me. But my parents went to talk to the teacher who was in charge of the math teaching the math in our classroom and they were concerned. And the teacher said oh, don't worry, by the time he's an adult, everyone will have their own computer and it won't matter. Well, she was half right. Yeah, she was. Yeah, she had the first part right yeah.

Jackie Pelegrin: 25:06

Just not the second part.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 25:08

Yeah.

Jackie Pelegrin: 25:08

That's funny, yeah, and I wonder what you know what you mentioned about just the challenges of K through 12 education, if that's why so many students that I get in my classes are in K through 12 education. I would say 80% of them are getting the master's in instructional design because they want to come out of the classroom and it's so sad to hear that that they want to, that they're burned out.

Jackie Pelegrin: 25:31

You know, like you said, that they don't get enough pay. And for what they do? I agree. And sometimes even in higher education too. You know, I work, I work as an adjunct faculty and I love what I do. And they say you don't go into education for the money, that's for sure. But I agree it's. There needs to be that compensation for what they're putting into it. And so, yeah, so it's. It's tough. And I read some of the discussion questions and the things that they are going through and they face and it's like, oh, my goodness, they're still. They're still dealing with the effects of COVID, even almost six years later.

Jackie Pelegrin: 26:07

And so it's. It's had a lasting impact on learning and and behavior and all those different aspects.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 26:14

So you've probably seen that too, and just the ripple effects of it teachers, which I find astonishing given that we have literal, empirical proof that there are teachers out there who are literally willing to take a bullet for their kids. That's just heinous. It's unacceptable.

Jackie Pelegrin: 26:44

Yeah, absolutely yeah. Let's hope that we can improve education and make it so that you know, because it's you know it's interesting because administrators and schools they focus so much on test scores, right, and outcomes and everything else and that's important. But if there isn't something the research behind that, to see why are test scores so low. Because you know, I read articles too, you know about the state of education and then it's like what's going on? Why is there such a disconnect? So it's very interesting. Yeah, hopefully they can get test scores to go up, because then when you see other countries like China and North Korea, and they, their students, are so much higher in math and science, and it's like, oh, that's, oh, that's a little scary. We need to improve that and get them to a higher level so that they can be ready for college, if that's what they want to do, or go to a trade school or something like that. So yeah, it's interesting.

Jackie Pelegrin: 27:45

Wow, yeah, so what kind of prompted you to develop your particular approach to learning in the life of the mind, like when you wrote your book, or just in general?

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 27:55

Yeah, well, there were a couple of things. One was necessity, like I mentioned before. But there was another book that I encountered early in my doctoral program. It was written by Ronald Gross. It was called the Independent Scholar's Handbook and it was first published in 1982. And he people who were scholars but who were not part of academia. So an example, he gives several examples. One was Buckminster Fuller, the engineer who invented the geodesic dome and God knows how many other incredible inventions. He basically worked independently. It wasn't until very later, much later in his life, that he got any kind of professorship or anything. There was the historian Barbara Tuckman, who wrote some marvelous historical books A Distant Mirror, about the 13th century, I think. It was one called Fire and Sword, about Palestine, about the Zimmerman Telegram, about the Guns of August, which was this classic study of how World War I broke out, classic study of how World War I broke out, which, incidentally, john F Kennedy had just finished reading about the time the Cuban Missile Crisis came about.

Jackie Pelegrin: 29:40

Oh, wow.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 29:40

And this kind of influenced him. He understood from her book how easily certain things that are designed to prevent things from spinning out of control could actually have the opposite effect. In the book she talks about how all these alliances were designed to keep wars from happening, but then, at the end of the day, they actually caused it to happen, and so. Another example was an American philosopher named Eric Hoffer who wrote a book called the True Believer, which is still considered a standard work for anyone who's studying the nature of mass movements and political science. He was a dock worker in San Francisco.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 30:30

But he, that's amazing he read very widely and he came up with this amazing stuff. Well, in many cases there's still a lot of truth to that, and I would kind of like to see more of that happen. I'd like to see more of it recognized and maybe kickstarted a little. Right, there's some very interesting things going on that a lot of people aren't aware of, that I think are, frankly, kind of inspiring, if nothing else.

Jackie Pelegrin: 31:02

Right, exactly, and can help inspire the next writer, the next researcher. Yeah, exactly, writer, the next researcher, you know? Yeah, yeah, exactly, because we don't want certain industries to to to die away and to just go off into the distance. You know we still need all these different areas, so yeah, being able to have that. That's important.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 31:25

And we need fresh ideas. We need places where people can can kick around ideas that no one else is thinking about.

Jackie Pelegrin: 31:33

That's true, yeah, and to come together and form those ideas, yeah, that's important, because we're meant to be in a community and not meant to be in isolation. So that's important. Yes, yeah, absolutely. I love that to a field, whether it's in education or instructional design. Or maybe they're just starting out in the field of education or instructional design in particular.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 32:04

I would say a couple of things. One is to read widely about what's been going on in education, not just currently, but in its history, find out how we got here. Now, I am by no means any kind of authority when it comes to instructional design. When I was working on Henley Putnam University, I was designing courses, but it was pretty much by the seat of my pants and I was talking to people and saying subject matter, please help me. And I became intimately familiar with Bloom's taxonomy and stuff like that. But much of what I learned I kind of learned the hard way. Who are actually on the line, on the firing line, as it were. Ask them what works, ask them what works, ask them what they love, ask them what they hate, and shape what you're doing accordingly, because I'm afraid that so much of the material that I see looks kind of like it was designed in isolation from the classroom. Not all of it, but enough of it to kind of make me wince a little.

Jackie Pelegrin: 33:27

Yes, I would agree.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 33:28

Yeah, so you know for what it's worth. That's the best I can give you at this point.

Jackie Pelegrin: 33:35

I love that, yeah, and having that novice approach to the subject, because for me my experience is in business and then education in the sense of the instructional design and e-learning, things like that. But I work on programs and courses in counseling, social work, psychology. I have a little bit of that psychology background because of the business and the marketing, because we learn about the psychology behind why people make decisions the way they do and fire behavior, things like that. So I have a little bit of that psychology background, but not to the extent that these people do that, our subject matter experts and our faculty. So I love that you brought that up, that don't create that content in isolation and collaborate with people and find out, like you said, once you implement it, go back to it and evaluate it and see what's working whether it's formative or summative evaluation and see what's effective, what's not. Do we need to make adjustments? Because refinement is always important to do.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 34:39

Yeah, it's an ongoing process. A curriculum is a living thing.

Jackie Pelegrin: 34:44

Right, absolutely. So, true, yeah, so I always like to take that novice approach and not feel like I know so much about the content that I lose that curiosity and that sense of asking questions, because then if I think I know the answer, I'm not going to ask the question, right, yeah? So being able to have that sense of always wanting to learn more, even though I may know some of the terminology I don't know to the depth that they do because they're in the field, they're working and they're teaching every day, and so it would be like someone trying to teach my class on instructional design, and not everybody can do that. So we all have our talents and our skills that we're able to bring to the table. So it's really great to have that.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 35:32

Exactly yeah.

Jackie Pelegrin: 35:34

And being able to recognize that we all work together, so it's a team effort.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 35:39

Yeah, it's wonderful. It is a communal effort, no doubt about it.

Jackie Pelegrin: 35:43

Right, exactly, yeah, no-transcript need to have.

Jackie Pelegrin: 36:09

And then I take that and I put that raw data into our closed system AI tool and I'll ask it can you come up with some of the key themes and key information from that? And it'll give me a document and then I present that in the kickoff meeting and I say, based on the raw data which you can view and I can show you that, but here's a high level overview of that, so that way I'm not overwhelming them with a bunch of raw data, because a lot of them don't like that.

Jackie Pelegrin: 36:38

They just want to know what's the gist of it, and then from there we just kind of move along, and I utilize that to inform different aspects of it and to make sure we're on track, and so it's really neat. So we had a meeting today and we went over the domains and competencies, finalized those and we worked those out, and all the drafts were based on AI, and so I said you know, it's only going to be as good as what I ask it to do and what my knowledge is, but you guys are the experts. You know what's needed and what is going to work for the students. So we tweaked all you know some of the things, we rearranged things and I'm like that's what this is all about. This is what true collaboration is about, and I need your expertise.

Jackie Pelegrin: 37:21

Yeah, so it was a. It's a great experience when you can take that and you can utilize everyone's knowledge and skills and their expertise and really make it the best curriculum it can be for the students. I always like to imagine them as a, with their graduation cap on, and so that was something my my coworker did. He drew it on the board and he's like we're here, let's imagine them as a graduate. So it's always that, that nice picture of being able to imagine them walking down that you know that aisle and getting getting their cap and gown, you know.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 37:53

Yeah, it's a great feeling.

Jackie Pelegrin: 37:55

Yeah, absolutely yeah, that's great. Well, I enjoyed this conversation. This is wonderful, sheldon, thank you so much for sharing your insights today. Your experiences, tips and expertise are sure to inspire my listeners, so.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 38:07

I appreciate that. Well, thank you, jackie, it was a pleasure.

Jackie Pelegrin: 38:10

Great Thank you. I look forward to having you back again on the show, because whenever I have someone on my show, it seems like we want to do another episode and continue the conversation, so I welcome that opportunity again.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 38:23

I look forward to it.

Jackie Pelegrin: 38:25

Thank you so much, appreciate it. Thank you for taking some time to listen to this podcast episode today. Your support means the world to me. If you'd like to help keep the podcast going, you can share it with a friend or colleague, leave a heartfelt review or offer a monetary contribution. Every act of support, big or small, makes a difference and I'm truly thankful for you.