Designed for Learning

In higher education’s current landscape, many thinkers in teaching and learning are arguing that we need to emphasize that college is more than just the acquisition of knowledge and skills.
We want students to recognize the value of learning in community, listening and speaking to the people around them. We want them to feel like they belong, that they have a place in our courses and on our campuses. We want them to develop confidence in their voices, to feel comfortable sharing their unique perspectives with the world.
Philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein has written a new book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, which offers insights into who we are as humans that point to another goal we should hold for a college education: helping students believe that they matter.
So what does it mean to matter generally, and to matter in a classroom more specifically? And what can college teachers do to instill that sense of mattering in their courses?
Key Topics Discussed:
Why Rebecca says “mattering” has to do with our relationships with ourselves and the complications this presents as we navigate the world as humans
A map of the four personas she says people assume in seeking to matter: the socializer, heroic striver, competitor, and transcender
The challenges these different personas present to teachers trying to reach students who have different ideas about what the concept of mattering ultimately means to them
Not assuming that your way of mattering, as an authority in your subject and the classroom, can or should be universally applied to your students
Respecting students’ different ways of mattering while modeling for them that this is something that can evolve and change
The importance of having charity toward others and seeing our mutual humanity and vulnerability
Guest Bio: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an award-winning philosopher, writer, and public intellectual. She is the author of more than 10 books of acclaimed fiction and nonfiction, most recently The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has been supported in her work by a MacArthur Fellowship (aka the “Genius Grant”), among numerous other honors, and has taught at Yale, Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, and Harvard. In 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.
Resources Mentioned:
Rebecca’s Book: The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us (Liveright)
Episode Transcript
Designed for Learning is hosted by Jim Lang, a professor of the practice in Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence and the author of several influential books on teaching. The podcast is produced by Notre Dame Learning’s Office of Digital Learning. For more, visit learning.nd.edu/podcast. You can also follow Notre Dame Learning on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter.

The words and metaphors we choose to describe our interactions with artificial intelligence are telling.
Do we view it as a stochastic parrot? A thought partner? A form of co-intelligence? A sycophantic assistant? Each of these phrases reflects a different set of beliefs and attitudes and likely shapes our engagement with AI.
How instructors talk about the technology’s relationship to their teaching goals can be just as revealing. To say we want students to develop AI fluency, for example, means we expect sustained engagement with it. Labelling a course or an assignment as AI-resistant suggests a different orientation.
But what do we lose when the conversation becomes a strict either/or proposition?
Annette Vee is one of the authors of The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, a new book that presents another way to frame our relationship with AI as educators. She talks with us about all things AI and college teaching and why she believes the concept of AI awareness can make space for a wide spectrum of views and practices.
Key Topics Discussed:
The origins of The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching and its focus on leading with pedagogy rather than starting from a position that is either AI-engaged or AI-resistant
How widespread concerns about AI have actually benefited the conversation around teaching by making it more prominent and mainstream
The importance of considering all manner of perspectives about AI, from faculty and students alike, and why that led Annette and her coauthors to choose the term “AI-aware”
Areas where she sees students potentially benefitting from using AI—and why it’s NOT at the brainstorming stage
Two of Annette’s favorite AI-aware teaching practices from the book, including an assignment that asks students to “do something impossible with AI”
Why tending to student motivation for learning may be more important than ever
Guest Bio: Annette Vee is an associate professor of English and faculty liaison for AI enablement at the University of Pittsburgh, where in addition to facilitating research and faculty development on AI, she teaches courses in writing, pedagogy, digital composition, AI, and literacy. Outside of Pitt, she gives keynotes and workshops related to AI. She is the coauthor of The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching with Marc Watkins and Derek Bruff.
Resources Mentioned:
Book: The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching (W. W. Norton & Company)
Annette’s Substacks: Computation & Writing and AI & How We Teach
Designed for Learning episode with Derek Bruff: Teaching Students When (Not) to Use AI
Article: What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom (Piers Gelly, University of Virginia)
Assignment: Do Something Impossible with AI (Kiera Allison, University of Virginia)
Episode Transcript
Designed for Learning is hosted by Jim Lang, a professor of the practice in Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence and the author of several influential books on teaching. The podcast is produced by Notre Dame Learning’s Office of Digital Learning. For more, visit learning.nd.edu/podcast. You can also follow Notre Dame Learning on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter.

For better or worse, much of the talk about AI’s impact on the purposes and processes of an education continues to focus on cheating: Are students outsourcing their work, and their learning, to tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini? Some high-profile stories have gone so far as to suggest cheating is so rampant that the whole college system is basically collapsing around us.
This month, we’re revisiting our most popular episode to date, a conversation with Tricia Bertram Gallant, coauthor of the 2025 book The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI.
Tricia helps us put the cheating claims into context, providing insights into the deeper questions that we should be asking about academic dishonesty and integrity and sharing pedagogical strategies for adapting to AI’s widespread availability. 
Key Topics Discussed:
Why students cheat (spoiler: the reasons aren’t new)
The role of “neutralizing,” or moral justifications, in allowing people to view cheating as bad in the abstract but not in their current situation
Not putting the burden to intuit the purpose of an assignment on students
How AI has changed cheating, but not why students do it
Experimenting with AI tools so you can create guardrails for students—and why doing so doesn’t mean you think less of them as people
Strategies for communicating effectively with students about generative AI
Rethinking when, why, and how writing is assigned, including the benefits of having students complete some of that work in the classroom
The potential of pairing written exams with oral assessments—which it turns out students often appreciate
How Tricia suggests instructors react when suspecting a student has cheated
Guest Bio: Tricia Bertram Gallant is the director of the Academic Integrity Office and Triton Testing Center at the University of California San Diego. President emeritus of the International Center for Academic Integrity, she has more than 20 years of experience as an academic integrity researcher, author, teacher, and practitioner.

Her fifth book, The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI, which she co-authored with David Rettinger, was published in 2025. It is part of the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed Series at the University of Oklahoma Press edited by Designed for Learning host Jim Lang and Michelle Miller.
Resources Mentioned:
Book: The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI (University of Oklahoma Press)
Tricia’s Podcast and Contact Info: theoppositeofcheating.com
Notre Dame Learning’s Lab for AI in Teaching and Learning (LAITL)
Related Designed for Learning Episode: Navigating AI’s Evolving Role in Teaching and Learning
Notre Dame’s Undergraduate Academic Code of Honor
Episode Transcript
*Note: This episode was originally released in July 2025.
Designed for Learning is hosted by Jim Lang, a professor of the practice in Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence and the author of several influential books on teaching. The podcast is produced by Notre Dame Learning’s Office of Digital Learning. For more, visit learning.nd.edu/podcast. You can also follow Notre Dame Learning on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter.

It’s something that sounds so basic it’s easy to overlook how daunting it can be:
Learning and remembering student names.
This month, we’re going back to our very first episode (and one of our most popular ones), a conversation with cognitive psychologist and author Michelle D. Miller about why mastering names isn’t simply a memory exercise—it’s a step toward creating a welcoming, inclusive classroom environment.
Key Topics Discussed:
The science behind why names are uniquely difficult to remember
The importance of knowing students’ names for fostering connection and inclusivity
Michelle’s four-step strategy to improve name recall: Attend, Say, Associate, Retrieve
The role of attention and retrieval in reinforcing memory
Practical tips for large and small classes, including the use of name tents and group activities
How learning names enhances engagement and classroom participation
Guest Bio: Michelle D. Miller is a professor of psychological sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Originally trained in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience, she now focuses mainly on using the findings of these fields to help faculty choose and use educational technology and design engaging, effective college courses. Her latest book, A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Student Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can, offers practical, research-backed strategies for educators looking to build a sense of connection with their students.

Resources Mentioned:
Book: A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Student Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can (University of Oklahoma Press)
Michelle’s R3 Substack Newsletter
Michelle’s LinkedIn
Episode Transcript
*Note: This episode was originally released in January 2025.
Designed for Learning is hosted by Jim Lang, a professor of the practice in Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence and the author of several influential books on teaching. The podcast is produced by Notre Dame Learning’s Office of Digital Learning. For more, visit learning.nd.edu/podcast. You can also follow Notre Dame Learning on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter.

For better or worse, the educational theory that seems to have permeated American education more than any other has been the notion of learning styles. Although the definition can vary, the most popular version of the idea argues that people can be categorized as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners.
From its earliest origins, though, critics have underscored the very thin and tangled research line that supported the learning styles framework, and in recent years cognitive psychologists have tried to toll the death knell of this approach—without much success. Something about the broader idea of learning styles seems so appealing or persuasive that it continues to shape the thinking of many classroom teachers and parents as well as our own self-descriptions.
Thomas Fallace of William Paterson University has written a book titled You Are Not a Kinesthetic Learner: The Troubled History of the Learning Style Idea, tracing the theory from its early origins through a half-century of teaching and thinking about education.
He talks with us about whether learning styles actually exist, whether the concept has helped or harmed students, and—if learning styles don’t exist—whether we should just abandon the idea once and for all.
Key Topics Discussed:
Cold War psychologist Herman Witkin’s experiments to test whether people could tell they were seated upright in a tilted room and the unlikely link between those studies and the idea of learning styles
The problematic application of the learning styles idea over time, often emerging out of the efforts of well-intentioned people trying to improve educational outcomes—and in fact succeeding in some cases
The vagaries of the “kinesthetic learner” label and how it’s been applied disproportionately to Black and Hispanic students, those with special needs, and English-language learners
Why the idea of learning styles has been so popular and persistent
Why the danger comes from labelling students as one kind of learner or another, not from varying the modalities in which they engage with course content
Drawing on the history of research on learning styles as we think about the role of AI-assisted learning
Guest Bio: Thomas Fallace is a professor of education and director of the master’s in secondary education program at William Paterson University. His research focuses largely on curriculum history and the history of ideas in schools, and he is the author of five books, most recently You Are Not a Kinesthetic Learner: The Troubled History of the Learning Style Idea.
Resources Mentioned:
Thomas’s Book: You Are Not a Kinesthetic Learner: The Troubled History of the Learning Style Idea (The University of Chicago Press)
Episode Transcript
Designed for Learning is hosted by Jim Lang, a professor of the practice in Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence and the author of several influential books on teaching. The podcast is produced by Notre Dame Learning’s Office of Digital Learning. For more, visit learning.nd.edu/podcast. You can also follow Notre Dame Learning on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter.