Ep. 73 - A conversation w/ Dr. David Marshall

In Episode 73 of the CSUSB Advising Podcast, Matt Markin chats with Dr. David Marshall, professor and director of the University Honors Program at Cal State San Bernardino! 

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Transcript

Matt Markin  
Hey there, Yoties. This is Matt Markin, an academic advisor here at Cal State San Bernardino, and welcome back to the CSUSB Advising Podcast. This is episode 73 and today we're sharing an interview from another podcast, because the guest was Dr. David Marshall, Professor and Director of the Honors Program here at CSUSB. Dr. Marshall shares a lot of his background as a student navigating his way through his career in teaching, and talks about the honors program at Cal State San Bernardino. There's a lot of insight too, which for you as a CSUSB student, can gain more of an understanding of faculty at CSUSB and learning more about them. David, welcome. 

Dr. David Marshall  
Thank you, Matt, it's good to be here.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, I'm glad that you're here. And you know, we were talking before we started recording that this is, you know, having you on here, I've been wanting to interview for a while, and I think a lot of listeners will be able to learn a lot from your background, what you do within the University Honors Program, and hearing your stories. And I don't know if you know, like, I was researching a little bit of like, what questions to ask David and at UC Santa Barbara, there's actually a date, Dr. David Marshall, who's also professor of England?

Dr. David Marshall  
Yes, I discovered that when I came to Cal State San Bernardino got confused and started getting emails for him.

Matt Markin  
So, like wrong one. And talk to us about your journey, your path in higher ed. 

Dr. David Marshall  
I have kind of an odd beginning to my path. I went to a small liberal arts college in New England. It was Jesuit school called College of the Holy Cross, about 2700 students, and I actually got kicked out partway through my second semester because I was partying too much and my grades were okay, but, but for them, I was an insurance liability, and so that they they removed me. My class Dean at the college had been someone that I knew and had conversations with, and he said, but if you straighten yourself out, we might readmit you. And so I went home and straightened myself out and contacted my dean. I said, this is what I've done. This is how I'm thinking. And he let me back in. So I got to go back the following fall, and from then on, my experience was wildly different from what my first semester and a half had been. I didn't party at all. I actually kind of discovered that I had kind of been self medicating with alcohol, because I struggle with anxiety and ADHD and OCD, and so my college experience was a little odd. It was spending a lot of time trying to figure out myself and trying to sort of navigate my own experience of the world while I was trying to be a full time student. So I didn't have the best GPA. It was kind of B range, but it wasn't tremendous. I was an English major. I did a lot of theater as well, and then graduated in 1993 with my BA in English. And I didn't know what I was doing. I had plans to go to the Massachusetts State firefighting Academy, and had been talking to them, and they were going to put me on an officer track, but literally, two hours after I graduated, I was standing in my dorm room to clean it out, still in my robe, holding my diploma, the phone rang, and it was a small school in high school in rural Pennsylvania asking me to come teach for them. So I went and did that for a year, and didn't like it, so went and became a bartender back on the East Coast for a couple of years. And while I was there, I thought, this is boring, and so I started taking classes just in local college, and really enjoyed it. Decided that I was going to apply to grad school, and, you know, I wanted to study medieval studies. And I thought, if I'm going to do that, maybe I should go someplace that actually had the Middle Ages. So I applied to a bunch of schools in England, and ended up getting into them and picked the University of York in the city of York in northern England, and spent about a year and a half there working on my master's degree and writing a master's thesis. And while I was there, I kind of realized I really liked that. I liked learning, I liked doing research, I liked it all, and I thought like how to get a doctorate, and I didn't know what I was going to do with it. And so, you know, I talked to my professors in England, and they said, Well, if you have any plans to go back to the states to teach, you need to get a PhD in the states instead of a D Phil in England, because they don't know what to do with that. And so I did. I went to Indiana University, and took kind of a longer time than usual to get my PhD. You know, a lot of PhDs finish it in, you know, five, six years. It took me nine, in part because I took more classes than I needed to. And. And I took positions that allowed me to gain professional experience along the way. I also edited and published a collection of essays while I was working on my PhD. So I had myself doing a lot of things. Yeah, and as I was wrapping up my dissertation, I was in my last semester Cal State San Bernardino interviewed me and decided they wanted me, and so I, I, I joined CSUSB, and I have had no regrets. I love the place. It's absolutely fantastic. So, so that's kind of my. My journey a little odd, but, but mine.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, for sure, I find that fascinating. And it's like, I've known you for so many years, and I did not know any of this. So I always love starting with this question, because I'm like, I find out so many new things about people that I've known for years. And yeah, and it's your specific journey, and it's a fascinating one, I think, and where the interests come in with, like, medieval literature. 

Dr. David Marshall  
So my parents would tell you that that started when they took me to see Disney's Robin Hood, and from then on, it was like the Middle Ages were my thing, and I was a tiny kid, but as long as I can remember, you know, I've loved Robin Hood and those stories. I have loved King Arthur, Knights that are on table, anything having to do with that I was passionate about just my whole life. You know, when I got into high school and my senior year, we got to read some medieval literature. I was in heaven, and I don't know it like spoke to me somehow. And so when I went to college, I decided I was really going to try to learn as much as I could about medieval literature and and and luckily, we had a couple of medieval literature professors at College of the Holy Cross, and they were willing to work with me, and so I took their classes, but they also did independent studies with me, so that I could study things that weren't in the curriculum. And it was just really exciting to get to see the sort of the real stories, as opposed to, you know, what I grew up imagining, and so it was a lot of fun, and that fascination just never ended. So, you know, when I went to England, I got to immerse myself in in medieval stuff, and like, where the program was, my master's program was in a 14th century Abbott's Palace right outside a medieval stone gate into the central city, and there were Abbey ruins just on the other side of the wall in this beautiful garden on the river, right. It was incredible, right? I'm just walking. I mean, living in working in this medieval space was thrilling. And while I was there, I met another grad student who was working on a dissertation that was looking at how the Vikings have been used in popular culture. And I got really curious about that. I started playing around with those kinds of things myself, and then kind of set it aside when I went to get my my PhD for a little bit, but I found myself really eager to explore that, and so I started organizing conference sessions at conferences about the Middle Ages, and the conference sessions were about how the Middle Ages gets used in our own popular culture. And while lots of people were looking at how, you know, like medieval movies, I was more interested in just the scope of it all, because there's movies, video games, TV shows, books, role playing games, board games, comic books. I mean, it's all music, right? Bar and core is a good example. And so that ended up turning into the essay collection I talked about, which is all about the way the Middle Ages gets used in pop culture. And I've just never let that go. And that's really been my, my kind of happy place in terms of research. And, you know, I had to set it aside for a while because my my career path took me into higher education reform initiatives and and then I started directing the honors program. But in the last couple of years, I started a new project, and you know, it's looking at the way that board games use Vikings as a theme, and sort of looking at the social and ideological implications of that. So I've sort of going back to what I really love in my latest research. So, yeah, so it's really just childhood fascination. And, you know, having never really grown out of being a child, I'm still fascinated by it.

Matt Markin  
I got a couple friends in higher ed that I think would love to listen to this interview and chat with you, like in person, like one of them has written articles about like Sondheim and Sweeney Todd and higher education, and another friend does a lot of conference presentations on how pop culture and higher ed and even academic advising are incorporated together. So that's very fascinating stuff. Yeah, I would love to have those conversations. Yeah, for sure. And one of the many things that you do is you're also the director of the University Honors Program at CSUSB. Can you talk about the history of the honors program we were talking prior to recording? You know, we're, you know, sharing how, like when I first started here, the Honors Program was in what particular place, but how much it's grown since then?

Dr. David Marshall  
Yeah, that's a great question. And to be honest, the origins of the Honors Program are kind of shrouded in mystery. I have a document, an official document, that is dated 1989 so fall of 1989 is when it was founded. But there's nobody really around anymore who remembers it in the 90s and so it, we're not really sure what it was doing. I was asked to take it over in 2015 and in the years leading up to that, you know, I think that I was, you know, preceded by some great people, you know, I don't know if you remember Alan butt, oh yeah, but, you know, Alan had directed it, and he was really working to try to grow it and establish it firmly. And then it was led by Carol damgen from the theater department, who, you know, who was trying to keep it going as well. But there were some real challenges to it, right? They had just the tiniest little space. It was like one little room and on the second floor of the library, it seems to be just like a partner program with the student mentoring program, which was really nice for synergy, but not for establishing a really strong identity for honors program students. And it didn't it just it didn't exist as a budget line anywhere on the university's budgets. It just it lived off of anything that what was at the time, undergraduate studies provided. That being said, undergraduate studies has always looked out for the Honors Program and tried to do what it can to make sure it's thriving. But when I took over the program, it had about 120 students in it, the biggest cohort in the program's history came in as I was taking over. It was 40 students. And so we had 40 freshmen, and then we had, you know, about 80 or so sophomore through through senior, super senior. And I was kind of tasked with rebuilding it. And so I sort of made this list of things that I thought had to be taken care of in order to establish the honors program that the Cal State, San Bernardino students deserve. And started, you know, trying to check things off of that list. So, you know, one of the things that was helpful is that we converted to semesters, and the Honors Programs curriculum really needed to be redesigned because we only had one upper division class, which meant that we didn't have an upper division experience and couldn't, in good conscience, bring transfer students in. And that seemed like a real shortcoming for a university that has a lot of transfer students. And so we transformed the curriculum and created a first year experience in honors. We're still in the process of developing the second year part of that, but we established a solid junior level curriculum and workshops that help students as well to sort of develop research projects. The other thing we really worked on doing was establishing a kind of strong sense of community in the Honors Program. When I took over. You know, the student leaders in the Honors Program asked to meet with me within a week. And, you know, my first thought was, oh, my God, I've already done something to screw this, but they just wanted to sit down with me and explain that in the Honors Program, everybody was family, and, you know, so everybody had everybody else's back, and that's really continued to define how we think of the Honors Program, right? It's a family. It's a much bigger family now, but it's a family, and everybody's looking out for each other. And so, you know, if I've got a student that's struggling in anatomy and physiology, you know, with pre nursing, which is the the most, it's the most represented major in our first year classes. Every year, I can send an email out to the honors list serve and say, Hey, we have a student who's struggling with AMP. Can somebody help them out? And within a few hours, I probably got 10 or 12 people saying, Yeah, I'd love to that actually resulted in our establishing anatomy and physiology study groups that occur every week within the honors program for our pre Nursing majors, you know? And so it's that family idea that we're trying to develop with, with the sort of expanding community, you know, that being said, though, that there are some really radical changes that have made that challenging, right? You know, one that you're well aware of, Matt, is that we've grown the program over the last eight years. We started off with 120 125 something like that. This year we have 715 honor students. It's our biggest number ever. We're sort of striving to reach a number of about 800 Nine, that would be 200 per cohort. And so we're getting to that. And but that poses challenges, right? Because it's hard to feel like you're in an intimate program with 714 other people. And so we start troubleshooting, creating new programs within the within honors to deal with that. So we piloted something that we called winterist groups, right? Because they met winter intersession and there were groups that would meet around a shared interest, and we had some success with that. And so we're trying to launch interest groups throughout the year so that students have ways to connect with one another. We had a couple of students for their their senior thesis, build the beginnings of a social networking website for the Honors Program. And once we get that done, because we have honors students work on it every year, we'll launch it, and that's a way to start connecting with people around shared interests, right? So, so we're really working hard to do that. The other big change is that we moved from University Hall, which is where we were located the first year I took over, and where you and I saw each other all the time, over to a facility that was designed for us in the new residence hall, Coyote village, you know, having five offices and two study rooms, two classrooms, a lounge, a computer lab. It really makes us a kind of self contained unit, and so that's enabled us to do sort of programming on site in ways that we couldn't before. And it also allows us to have our first year classes in the honor space, which is new as well, and it goes a long way to sort of helping with the community thing. So yeah, it's really growing, and it's also evolving as it does, to sort of add new elements, you know, to sort of try out new things, right? I sort of said, say that the Honors Program is a test kitchen, and so if people want to come and try something out, let's try it. And if it works in honors, then we can try to think about how we scale it up for the rest of the campus. Our junior level curriculum is sort of like that. It's kind of odd, right? You take two classes in the same semester, taught by faculty from wildly different disciplines. This semester, I'm teaching with Laura woodney, who's an astronomer, and students tackle big questions from multiple disciplinary standpoints, right? So it's, you know, it's something we thought we'd try, and it's kind of worked pretty well. And so we keep it going. And college of social behavioral sciences saw it, and so they developed something similar to it. So it's sort of doing what we wanted to do, you know, and the last part of it is really that, that we're trying to develop community minded people, and not just community, as in community of honors, but also the university and the larger community. And so, you know, we're always looking for kind of ways to engage with with the larger community and sort of give back to the communities that support us again, whether it's the university or the Inland Empire. So yeah, that would sort of be, what is probably my long answer. I don't know if I missed anything that you're thinking of.

Matt Markin  
Oh, but you know you were mentioning, like, having to, like, change the curriculum was, was that pretty easy to do or difficult to do from what it was and then, so I'm sure, with some of those, the classes you had to go to, go to, like, faculty senate for.

Dr. David Marshall  
Yeah, yeah. We had to go through that, that kind of stuff. You know, any change to curriculum goes through a variety of committees for approval. And, you know, we took the strategy that the faculty senate has an honors committee that I'm a sort of ex officio chair for, and they're sort of like, they provide guidance, they you know that they help troubleshoot things. And so what we decided was that they were going to function as our Departmental Curriculum Committee, because every department has to go through a Departmental Curriculum Committee and then a college curriculum committee, and then maybe the university curriculum committee. And that turned out to be a really smart move, right? Because we had some oversight, and I recruited four faculty from the four undergraduate colleges. At the time, College of Ed had no undergraduate anything, so we didn't pull them in, and we started looking at what we wanted students to get out of the Honors Program. And so we started playing around with it. And, you know, we sort of took the approach of, like, let's just imagine the coolest thing we can and then we'll see if we can pull it off. And you know, I'm not sure we got quite everything that we were trying to build into the program, but we we did quite a bit. And so it was a really good experience. And, you know, we thought about how it's transforming the Honors Program. And as you know, Matt, the idea of transforming a department, transforming curriculum, was a sort of theme as we were making that conversion on campus. And so that, you know, we didn't get interrogated, you know, because people were looking at our curriculum saying, wait a minute. How does this work? You know, who let this through? And it was always the junior level curriculum that they were scratching their heads over, you know, but, but in the end, people said, Well, that sounds really interesting. Let's see how it works. And, yeah, so it's been a positive experience for the most part. 

Matt Markin  
Now from a student perspective, like, let's say, a first year student that starts out in the Honors Program, there's like, specific classes that they they'll take during certain semesters. Can you talk about, like, what a student would like walk through, what a student would would be doing in the Honors Program?

Dr. David Marshall  
Absolutely. You know, we've got a lot of students that are like, trying to figure this out. Now, we built a freshman experience that has four classes attached to it, two in each semester, and in each semester, there's one course that is mandated, which means that you can't exempt out of it. In the fall semester, that's honors 1000 it's our foundation seminar. And we take an approach that sort of builds on the idea of cultural capital, and recognizing that, you know, as Terry yosso argues, what has typically been meant by cultural capital. It's kind of a code for white, middle class culture, and we devalue cultures of, you know, other other ethnic groups. And so we actually have our students read her article where she makes that argument and where she outlines the kinds of cultural capital underrepresented groups often bring with them. And so we have them read that so that they get a sense of, sort of the unique set of gifts and strengths they're bringing into college with them. And then we engage them in sort of a role playing game that's centered around Athens Greece in 403 BC, where they kind of play out the struggles to re establish democracy as a way of seeing how they can bring their strengths to bear on a learning experience and a social experience, right? Because they're playing that out as a game. And so it's a really, really interesting and engaging class. The other class they take in the fall is our critical thinking class. And you know, you know that they're both GE classes, so students are knocking out GE requirements by taking them, but you can exempt out of critical thinking if you have dual enrollment, credit for it. And then in the spring, they take honors 1100 which is our first year writing course. That's the other mandated class. And we've mandated honors 1000 and honors 1100 because what we're trying to do is establish a kind of cohort experience where all the students are taking the same classes in the same semester, because it does build a sense of community. And, you know, honors 1000 the foundation seminar, it gets students thinking about the strengths they have. And we don't want students to miss out on that. And it's a really good community builder, because that role playing game, and then honors 1100 is, you know the writing class, and Writing is essential. And you know that the argument we make to our students is that you know whether you're applying for grad school, an internship, a fellowship like the Fulbright, or, you know, a job upon graduation, the first way anybody is going to know you is through your writing. And so we want them to be the best damn writers out there. And so we don't want students to miss any of our writing classes. And all of our classes are designated as writing intensive, to really drive that home. And so yeah, honors 1100 in the spring is the other mandated class, and then they take honors 1300 which is our oral communication class, which, you know, has looked pretty much like the other oral comm classes on campus. But we're going to change that this year and start developing it as kind of a combination of personal communication debates and argumentation and public speaking to sort of give a more complex experience that being said. You know, one of the things you asked from a student's perspective, one of the things that a lot of students really worry about when they start looking at honors, and this is students that applied to honors and then start to get cold feet, is they've been told by high school teachers over and over again, college is going to be really hard. You're going to have to be independent. Your professors aren't going to really care about you. It's hard. And I think our students think, Oh, well, honors is going to be that much harder because AP was tough, and it'll be like BP. It's not right. There's a lot of research in honors that suggests that while we want rigor, you know, making it harder by piling on work or increasing the length of assignments is counterproductive, because that punishes good students for being good students. And so instead, the ethos is to sort of like, just give students a different kind of learning experience, right? Which is why the foundation seminar, they're doing a role playing game and why? In the junior level curriculum, they're sort of, kind of messing around with these big questions and just exploring how different disciplines can answer them. And so it's not harder, it's just different. And that's a point that we really, you know, try to help. Students understand. So, you know, students hopefully are going through our first year curriculum and benefiting in, you know, the development of a strong community through the cohort system and through that role playing game experience, they're also developing core faculties that that we want them to be using, you know, kind of the critical thinking component and writing and public speaking. But as we add sort of argumentation and debate to it, being able to articulate arguments about things, and these are things that that we want to leverage as they move forward. And so the first year experience really becomes instrumental in helping honor students, sort of establish a foundation for everything else we do.

Matt Markin  
And then with, let's say, students that are part of the honors program and they might also live on campus, are they also kind of connected to, like, physically, location wise, to where the honors program is?

Dr. David Marshall  
Yeah. So we have a Living Learning Community. We call it the residential honors scholars. And they actually our first year groups, live on the second floor of cajon Hall, which is where honors is on the ground floor. And then we have continuing students, sophomore through senior in a building in arrowhead village with Ras that are that are also in the Honors Program. And so our students are really proximate to the the honors space. And you know, our freshmen just come downstairs and go to the honor space for their classes. And, you know, it's not uncommon to see some walking in and slippers and pajamas. You know, as long as they're there, that's totally cool. And so it's really kind of convenient for them, and gives them this sort of, like, I don't know, kind of self enclosed space that is theirs, right, that they can be comfortable in and thrive in and we're doing additional programming for students in those living learning communities to kind of enhance their experience, so that they can get more out of what we're doing.

Matt Markin  
Now, do you think there's any misconceptions people might have when they like hear the term honor student or high achieving student?

Dr. David Marshall  
Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna give you what is probably gonna be a longer answer than you okay? I'm gonna disrupt the idea of a high achieving student. High achieving students are certainly there, right? And we're a program that that that serves a lot of high achieving students, right? And high achieving students are typically defined as students that have stellar GPAs and are involved in all the activities on campus, and that's great. We want to serve those students, but I do think there's some serious misconceptions about them, and I think it has to do a lot with the experience that high achieving students have in K 12. And there's research with K 12 populations that suggests that high achieving students should be designated a special needs group. And it's not because they are somehow developmentally challenged or anything like that. It's that socially and emotionally they struggle, you know, because being out ahead of their peers, they can feel different or like they're weird, and that can really pose challenges. There's also the way in which high achieving students often are putting immense pressure on themselves to succeed, and so many of them are struggling with anxiety and depression, and so, you know, we're aware of that, and we're really trying to be proactive, to support high achieving students as they come into the program, and to begin neutralizing those anxieties. You know, we have been very lucky in the past few years to have sort of trained counselors in the program. And you know, they do some academic advising in support of what what your team does, but they're also there to help students manage the pressure, the stress, the anxiety that they create for themselves as they're pursuing perfection, which so many of them are. And so that becomes a really key reason why I think, you know, a lot of high achievement students would benefit from being in the Honors Program, though many choose not to be, and that's fine, but we think we could help them. The other part of the answer I'm going to give you to destabilize high achieving students with honors students is to note that we're actually stepping away from the language of high achieving students as we conceptualize the honors program. Now we know that high achieving students are going to be in the honors program that's granted for us, and so we're trying to become more intentional about recruiting highly motivated, highly engaged students. And that grows from this sort of understanding that the Inland Empire is a space for a lot of students who are very high potential may not look like high achievers on paper, who may not have honors classes under their belts, and often it's due to no fault of their own right that they may have a family that's, you know, didn't have the benefits of formal education, and so they don't have a family culture that understands what can be done or, you know. They're taking care of siblings while parents work two and three jobs. And we also know that there's a lot of students like that that are really invested in their educations, because we see it all the time, I'm sure you see it all the time, and they're really motivated and really want to be a part of things. And so those are the students we want to bring in, and we're really striving to bring those students in recognizing that, you know, some of them may be under prepared in some areas, but we can help with that. And we can support students by, you know, by putting all kinds of resources around them so that they find the kinds of success that the high achieving students are finding, right and so that that's really kind of a key shift that we're trying to make.

Matt Markin  
 And I guess kind of related says, like, how do you get the word out there? Like, let's say you have, you know, we just a couple months ago, we had a lot of our first year freshmen attending orientation. Of course, you have, like, the resource fair, they have so many different presentations, all this information given in one day. And, you know, let's say they they hear or see in their handbook, like Honors Program. You know, how do you help to ensure that, like they that students are understanding like that? Okay, we're not just saying this is high achieving students. This is a different program that may have high achieving students, but we want a mixture of everyone in the sense of this?

Dr. David Marshall  
That's a great question, and it's something that we're still working on. The last couple of years, I did presentations at orientation so that we could kind of pull in students that maybe didn't think the Honors Program was was a program for them. And you know, this year, orientation changed in shape, and so we didn't have that opportunity. But what we've been able to do over the last couple of years is sort of try it out, right? So we've brought in small groups of students that that don't typically meet the kinds of requirements that are associated with honors programs, but, you know, try putting that support around them, taking them through our curriculum, and it's working, right? They're succeeding. So we've got a plan, though, and we're teaming up with some folks in recruitment, in the admissions office, and we're trying to build partnerships with area high schools, and, you know, connecting with not just AP course coordinators, honors class teachers, but also avid coordinators and counseling offices that may know the students that may not look like honor students, but are certainly honors caliber students, and we're going to try to initiate that this year. We'll see how that goes. But this is really kind of a work in progress that we've kind of been quietly piloting and experimenting with over the last two years.

Matt Markin  
Now, you read somewhere that with the Honors Program. You've also sponsored, like, a three week summer program for graduate like a graduate school boot camp?

Dr. David Marshall  
Yeah, that's something we piloted this year, and we ended up reducing it to two weeks. It's one week in May, and in that week, what we did is work with students to understand what the application process looks like to understand what graduate programs do and how they function, to help students understand standardized tests that may be associated with applications, to talk about personal statements and the shape of applications, and we gave them all test prep books for whatever test they were going to have to take, Whether it was GRE or LSAT or MCAT. Then We sent them off for the summer to draft personal statements, to do test prep with their books, and to research the graduate programs that they were interested in applying to, and to start looking at them in terms of, do they provide funding? You know, what? What does the application look like? What's the curriculum like? Who are the people in that grad program so that that can shape personal statements and also help them to make an informed choice about where they might want to go? And then in August, you know, we had a week where we brought them back in to do peer review on personal statements in their sort of discipline groups, right? So if all the folks wanted to go to law school together, med school together, and then we sort of divvied up other people into related academic disciplines to sort of talk about the programs that they found and what they liked about some what they didn't like about others, talk about applications timelines, and then we help them begin to create a timeline that goes from now until like March 1, and start logging what needs to be done by when on that timeline, so they're organized and can go into a busy semester ready to sort of get Those applications in. And so that's sort of the pilot. We're going to be following up with kind of support sessions over zoom throughout the fall semester and spring semester. So it's kind of a 12 month program in some ways, but again, it's just a pilot. Again, Test Kitchen idea, right? We're going to see how it works. We're going to see what acceptance rates are like. Right? Yeah, and we'll go from there. We'll tinker with it, or, I don't know, we'll figure it out. 

Matt Markin  
Now, kind of moving on from the Honors Program and maybe your role in with teaching and being faculty. Has there been a favorite class that you've taught at CSUSB?

Dr. David Marshall  
That's hard. There's a way in which whatever class I happen to be teaching is my favorite class because I get really energized and excited when I'm teaching. Yeah, it's, you know, I can teach myself into a good mood if I've had a bad day. It's a really fun experience for me, you know? But if I had to pick one, I think that it would be, well, there's two that compete. One is a class I taught two years ago about the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And we began the semester by looking at the movie The Green Knight, which came out recently, which is really, really good, but it is weird and trippy. And so the idea was, how do we make sense of this really bizarre movie. And so the first step was, well, let's read sir going into Green Knight and see if that helps us. And the problem is, circling the Green Knight is kind of a trippy poem. And so then we said, Okay, well, what kind of medieval literature could we read, And what scholarship could we read that will help us understand the poem so that we can understand the movie. And once we had gone through the scholarship and other medieval literature, we re read sir going in the green night, and became having much more informed conversations about it. And then we re watched the green night, and again, we're able to have really informed conversations. So it kind of replicated a research process. And what made it super fun for me, and this is what I'm trying to do with all my classes now, is that I didn't teach a class about something I knew a lot about, right? I know the poem pretty well, but that movie just confused me, and I wanted to understand the movie, so I built a class where a bunch of students could help me figure out what the hell that movie was doing, and it made it really fun for me. And the students had a good time. And if some of the students said that, what was really cool was that, you know, I wasn't asking them to guess the answers that I already had right, that we were all collaborating to try to figure this stuff out. And so that was really exciting. The other class that's been really exciting to me was a study in literary adaptation that I taught years ago. And in that I approached it really weirdly. And again, it was sort of like, I want to see if we can pull this off. And so I taught this book called The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. I don't know if you know it, but the Susan Orlean, just like, went to cover a case of a guy that was poaching orchids illegally out of it, Everglades, and she ended up discovering this whole world of like, orchid enthusiasts while there's this like crime thing happening, and they made an adaptation of it, called adaptation that stars Nicholas Cage as a screenwriter who's trying to adapt the book The Orchid thief into a film, while his twin brother is like, decided he's going to be a screenwriter, and he's just like, running Hollywood schlock, Right? And so my thought was, this is weird. Can we begin to sort of deduce a theory of adaptation by looking at what's happening with this book in this movie? And it was the same kind of like, Nobody's really sure what's going on here, but we're going to collaborate and try to come up with an answer, and we did right and and that was exciting, because we could then use that answer to analyze all the other stuff we looked at the rest of the semester. And so that it was just, I don't know, I think that what I really like in classes is when I'm confused by the subject matter and my basic idea. Now as a teacher, and you know now I've been teaching for 25 years, is that I don't need to know the content better than my students, necessarily. I typically do, right? Because I'm I've read it and I'm introducing them to it. What I bring to the table is I know how to ask good questions, I know the sort of research methodologies and thinking strategies to answer good questions and to develop complex answers that don't reduce things to their simplest form. And what I want to do is model that for students. And so if I create an organic situation where I'm having to go through those steps for myself to understand, then I'm modeling it at the same time that students are participating in it. And I don't know, I just find that thrilling. So yeah, it's what I'm trying to do in all my classes.

Matt Markin  
So based off how you just answer that, and I think you know how you've talked. About the Honors Program and had the goals of that. And you know how building that community with students, it connects to this, rate my professors comment about you, and I know rate my professors, people have their own opinions about it. Well, so this one student, I think it really sums it up. And this is from a English 5160 course, professional pathways for English majors. The student put for you is that Dr Marshall is very professional, but kind and wants to see students succeed. He's down to earth and makes a deliberate effort to learn everyone's name the first week of class. Likes group work discussion and is very helpful as someone who and from the students perspective, the student doesn't like group work, but, you know, was able to, I guess, hopefully, like it with you teaching it. And said the class generally helped this student prepare for the future. That's awesome. That's really good. Yeah, cool. And so yeah, as you're answering the question. I was like, this all fits in with exactly what the student just said. Let's say you have, there's a new professor that's starting at CSUSB or another institution. Do you have, you know, from your 25 year plus career in higher ed with teaching? Do you have any advice for new professors?

Dr. David Marshall  
That's a tough one. I'm always reluctant to give advice because I feel like I just don't have enough wisdom to share any despite all the gray and white. You know, I think that I would have to give advice in a couple of pieces, right? One is learn about your institution where its students are coming from, in terms of location, culture, socioeconomic class, I think is, in some ways the biggest one. I think ethnicity is really important, and understand the priorities that your institution is you institution is, is kind of proclaiming as their goals, and try to work within those. Because when you do, you find all kinds of support, right? So that'd be the first piece. The other piece would be, don't be afraid to experiment and try things you know, especially if what you want to experiment with and try with is lodged under those priorities of your institution, right? In effect, what you're saying is, I see this priority, I love this priority. I want to find a way to get to that priority. Let's experiment and give it a try. And you know, it doesn't have to be some massive overhaul of something. It can be. I'm going to change the way I approach my class. Like, I mean, you could totally do what I did, right? And it's like, I don't understand this. I want students to help me understand it, right? That started as just an experiment, and it really works. So it doesn't have to be huge. It can be I want to try a different approach to assignments, but play around with things and experiment and try things out, because I think that's where kind of joy and excitement is in teaching. I think that the teachers I've seen over my career, who create a class and then teach that class over and over and over again and don't change it up. They don't seem to really enjoy teaching, and maybe they don't mix it up because they don't enjoy teaching. Maybe that's the precursor to it all, but I have this hunch, it's also because they've stopped challenging themselves to try something that would be interesting for them, right? And I get the reason for that, right? It's about reducing workload, because there's a lot of work to be done, you know, both teaching service, but you've also got research to do. I get it right. But again, I think that's where, if you do small experiments, you enliven it, right? And you keep that interesting for yourself. So that would be my two part advice. I don't know if it's worth anything.

Matt Markin  
I think it's, I mean, honestly, I think that's great life advice for anyone in any type of career position. So I really appreciate how you answer that. And I think I could chat with you for another few hours, but want to be mindful of your time. But David, I think there's a lot of useful information. Great to hear about your background, lot of new things that I learned about you in this interview. So I really appreciate you taking the time to be part of this. I know with the fall semester coming up. You're very busy, so I appreciate you being on the podcast. 

Dr. David Marshall  
Well, thank you for having me, Matt. It's really been a joy talking to you about these things, because I I'm really passionate about the Honors Program, about teaching medieval literature, and so any opportunity to talk about it is a good opportunity for me.