## Timestamped Outline **00:00** - How Brenna Discovered a Passion for Teaching **02:10** - Information Transfer vs. Real Learning: The Relational Core **05:30** - Why Active Learning Faces Resistance in Traditional Systems **08:20** - The Compliance Trap: Measuring What's Easy Instead of Learning **11:15** - Universal Design for Learning: Multiple Ways to Know and Show **15:45** - The Content Overload Problem: Less Information, More Learning **18:30** - The Pandemic's Missed Opportunity to Redesign Education **21:30** - Signals of Value: How Grading Shapes What Students Actually Learn **24:35** - Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation: The Learning Paradox **30:10** - Boredom as Fuel: How Her Son Discovered a Lifelong Love of Mythology **37:00** - Home Culture, Books, and Why Tech Matters Less Than We Think **41:20** - Intentional Boundaries: How Her Family Uses Technology --- ## 00:00 - How Brenna Discovered a Passion for Teaching **Ela Richmond:** Welcome back to the Open Ed podcast. I'm your host Ela Richmond, and today I'm joined by Brenna Clarke Gray, an educator, researcher, and podcast host. Can you tell us how you got fascinated by education? **Brenna Clarke Gray:** I started being interested in teaching when I was an undergraduate at Carleton University in Ottawa. Carleton was a leader in supplemental education—these workshops that run alongside courses where students might otherwise fail or withdraw. The model was entirely peer-led. A student who'd done well in the course would run workshops, modeling the skills for success. I loved it immediately. I loved the environment and the philosophy behind it. The Centre for Initiatives in Education did a lot of in-service training for facilitators, teaching us about learning and active learning in particular. The big revelation was that so much of what we do at the post-secondary level is really great for information transfer, but it isn't actually about learning. From there, I decided I was going to be a professor. I did a PhD in English and became a college instructor outside Vancouver for nine years. I was always more interested in the hows and whys of what was happening in the classroom than in my subject material itself. I did all the expected things—publishing articles on Canadian literature and comic books—but what I really enjoyed was talking through rich pedagogical problems with colleagues. I became interested in faculty support. Most of us in post-secondary come with no teaching experience whatsoever. We're subject matter experts, but we're lucky if we've had teaching assistantships or real conversations about teaching and learning. We run into problems in the classroom and have no strategies to deal with them. I was also particularly interested in technology and how it mediates education. A tenure-track job in faculty support became available at Thompson Rivers University, and I took it. Now I'm in the research stream, studying how universities procure technology and why that matters. --- ## 02:10 - Information Transfer vs. Real Learning: The Relational Core **Ela:** To bring it to a basic level, parents ask the same questions tech companies do: What do I actually need? What's actually useful? **Brenna:** Exactly. **Ela:** I want to step back to when you were teaching struggling students. What are the basics of good teaching? You mentioned the difference between information transfer and learning. **Brenna:** At its core, teaching and learning is relational work. If you don't have a relationship with the person teaching you—if they don't care about your progress through the material—it becomes pure knowledge transfer. You might as well watch a video lecture because there's no relationality, no connection. --- ## 05:30 - Why Active Learning Faces Resistance in Traditional Systems **Brenna:** I've always been really interested in how hard it is to convince people that active learning works. Whether it's project-based learning, gamification, or any method where students engage with material instead of just doing rote work—we know we learn better when actively engaging. But education systems aren't actually conducive to it. If you're lecturing to 400 students, it's nearly impossible to get everybody up and working on a group project. And even in traditional schools, methods are based on compliance. We measure what's easy to measure: attendance, participation, exercises turned in. We haven't typically thought of especially post-secondary education as something that needs to be relational or active. --- ## 08:20 - The Compliance Trap: Measuring What's Easy Instead of Learning **Brenna:** Measuring learning is incredibly hard. Measuring compliance is easy. Because of austerity, funding, precarity, and staffing constraints—and just time—we often end up in a situation where we find ourselves looking for what we can measure rather than where the learning is actually taking place. I think we'd all be better off if we acknowledged how hard it is to measure whether somebody has actually learned something. **Ela:** Before you get into teaching, accepting that is something really important. Learning is going to matter much more than these compliance things, and it's going to be hard to measure over time. In my own experience, science class was hands-on and group-based, but I still struggled. When do you know if a student has gaps? **Brenna:** Learning is experimental. You try something, observe what doesn't click, and try to figure it out. Some gaps are foundational—maybe you didn't memorize key things and then couldn't build on them in group projects. Part of this is how we signal value to learners. The content test is weighted most heavily, so students study to the test, not the discipline. Active activities become the "nice to haves," weighted lightly. Learners are smart. They prioritize their time based on what they think matters most. I always told my students: my class might not be your major priority in life, and that's okay. But you're making decisions based on what you think is weighted most heavily. --- ## 11:15 - Universal Design for Learning: Multiple Ways to Know and Show **Brenna:** I love Universal Design for Learning as a framework. It's often thought of as an accessibility strategy, but it benefits everyone. It's about multiple ways of sharing information and multiple ways of demonstrating knowledge. I won't just stand and lecture at you. I'll also send you on research exercises where you find information yourself and bring it back to class to discuss. Or I'll show you a video, or maybe a VR walkthrough of a situation. Similarly, I offer lots of different opportunities to show what you've learned. Some learners do best with essays—I'm one of them. I love sharing everything on the page with footnotes for extra details. But it's not for everybody. Many classes assume essay writing ability without actually teaching it within that discipline. Maybe some students learn best in dialogue and relationship. Maybe they should do a group project. Maybe some students hate being on screen—they'd rather die than make a video. So maybe they propose their own project. Maybe testing works for some students. The more different ways I invite learners to share their learning with me, the less likely I am evaluating for things I don't actually care about—like their essay writing ability unless it's an essay writing class, or their video editing skills unless that's the point. Multiple assessment methods also mean students can't just learn to a test. It's not "I need these facts memorized" but "I need to show how I implement and work with these facts." That's hard because it demands multiple ways of sharing information and offering multiple opportunities to demonstrate knowledge. It puts enormous demand on instructors. But even in small ways, if we can offer different units and different modalities so students can shine in different ways connected to their capacities and interests, that helps multiple kinds of learners. --- ## 15:45 - The Content Overload Problem: Less Information, More Learning **Ela:** How much time would you recommend spending on a lesson? Teachers have constraints—many students, required curriculum, time limits. How do you decide what to do? **Brenna:** Very few teachers actually get to decide. We work within systems. Even homeschooling works within a 24-hour day. Constraints are always part of teaching. I often think we try to do too much information transfer. We have curriculum standards—often state or provincial—which are hard to challenge. Passionate teachers stack amazing, cool content on top of required material. But we often don't articulate what's core versus what's added. So first, I think most of us should scale back content to have time for students to actually work with material. It's great to say, "I have all this information to share," but if students aren't retaining anything because we're drowning them, did we gain anything? That's a huge piece, and a difficult piece, because we're up against standards and externally mandated facts. **Ela:** If they walk away with one or two pieces as a solid foundation, that's good enough. What would you rather—them knowing those things, or grasping at ten extras? I had a philosophy class recently that was so much content so fast. If I hadn't studied philosophy before, I would have walked away with nothing. If they'd stripped it to bare fundamentals, that would have made sense. **Brenna:** You learn to the test, not for the discipline itself. As teachers, we joke about students asking, "Will this be on the test?" But that joke belies bad signposting. A lost, overwhelmed student asks that question, not one who's kept up. Managing learner overwhelm is huge for learning success. I'm guilty of this. Teaching British survey literature, I'd dump all the historical context before reading Wordsworth. That was too much. But you don't need two hours on the Industrial Revolution to understand that Romantics felt something was lost in England's transformation and wrote nostalgic poetry. We all know that feeling—going back to a place from childhood and finding it's now a Costco. That's Tintern Abbey's vibe. Once you have that, if British history becomes your thing, a whole world opens up. You didn't need drowning information in a survey class. --- ## 18:30 - The Pandemic's Missed Opportunity to Redesign Education **Brenna:** The pandemic offered an opportunity. We said: students can't get through this at home alone, or they might miss two weeks. How do we rethink our course material? Scale back. Offer less. Let them do more with it. I hoped we'd recognize that students actually learn more when offered less information. But we just went back to normal. --- ## 21:30 - Signals of Value: How Grading Shapes What Students Actually Learn **Ela:** That's fascinating. It comes back to relationship and humanity, right? History matters because the story matters, not because of all the facts. People in the moment didn't know all the facts—they knew the story. **Brenna:** Exactly. Part of the problem with multiple-choice testing as the main assessment method is that the narrative arc gets lost. You focus on high-detail facts, making it hard to assess understanding of the semester's arc or the discipline when drilling down to details. --- ## 24:35 - Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation: The Learning Paradox **Ela:** Have you studied motivation? Most teachers get frustrated because the student has to decide they're willing to learn. No matter your teaching style or lesson, if they've decided they're not learning, they won't. **Brenna:** Motivation is a huge frustration. Ways we try to influence it—grades, candy—are extrinsic motivations. We've known for generations that intrinsic motivation is more valuable. When you want to learn something for yourself, you're more motivated. I'm an obsessive Formula One fan. Nobody tests me, but I have a vast catalog of details because it helps me understand races better, making them more fun. That's intrinsic motivation. You can't achieve that in every course for every student because there's a baseline interest level needed. We're in tension: how much do we rely on extrinsic motivation versus how much is that actually killing desire for intrinsic motivation? If I only learn for marks, focusing on details, I may destroy my own intrinsic motivation for the subject. Many students think they dislike subjects in high school, then love them in university or later. Learning to tests, rote exercises, overwhelming content—all of that kills intrinsic motivation. I don't have an answer because it's so difficult to figure out what helps any individual learner, especially early in their journey, develop intrinsic motivation. What I know is that learning to tests, rote exercises, and overwhelming content destroy it. But we're trapped in systems making it hard to resist. I have state-mandated tests. I don't have a choice. Or we're pressured to approach learning a particular way. When I first started teaching, I took attendance because I thought I had to—everyone else did. I hated it and was terrible at it. After five years, I read the attendance policy and realized we could opt not to activate it. I had no idea. What mattered to me was engagement, not whether their body was in the seat. We're sometimes trapped in systems, sometimes just thinking we are. These structures aren't designed for intrinsic motivation. I think knowing the issue and helping students see the bigger picture of the discipline matters. When students make personal connections, that helps. Something might not click now. A student might hate my essay class, then five years later thank me because they used everything in grad school. Motivation and learning don't follow a school-year rhythm. A connection at age 14 might become something they pursue for life. We just don't know. We plant seeds and hope we're not crushing them with education's other structures. --- ## 30:10 - Boredom as Fuel: How Her Son Discovered a Lifelong Love of Mythology **Ela:** If we had a single answer, we'd be very wealthy. I'm curious about your take on helping kids become lifelong learners. You have children—how do you instill that internal drive early? **Brenna:** I have an eight-year-old and a one-year-old. Boredom is incredibly important to learning. My eight-year-old loves mythology from anywhere in the world. Stacks of books, mythology podcasts, facts about mythology. Often I'm like, is that true? We're beyond my understanding of basic Greek and Roman mythology, so I just take it on faith. That came from boredom, particularly during pandemic closure. He was three or four, just starting to read. He had time to figure stuff out. Many new interests emerged that became lifelong, like the ancient world. He was reading about ancient Egypt just recently. That didn't come from me—I have no inherent interest in it. But other interests emerged too, like encyclopedic Pokemon knowledge. Do I care about Pokemon? No. Has every fact been against my will? Yes. But by letting kids be bored and find interests, they'll find some you love and some you don't. Giving kids space for boredom is a real strength of homeschooling. This year we've added martial arts and flute, so less boredom time, less searching random facts. I see benefits of commitment—strong discipline, willingness to improve. But there's a trade-off: less time for mythology books and library trips. I've also noticed my kid doesn't want to do school projects about mythology just because he loves it. Nothing kills intrinsic motivation like assigning grades to it. Everybody who's good at a craft, then opens an Etsy store and hates that craft. As soon as you impose external standards on something you loved for its own sake, that kills motivation for a lot of us. Hard for education systems though—do a project on this thing you love, now you hate it and I killed it. --- ## 37:00 - Home Culture, Books, and Why Tech Matters Less Than We Think **Ela:** It's that difference between doing something for yourself versus for others. I've talked with Substack writers who love writing until they start writing for what others want to hear. It changes quality and care. **Brenna:** Exactly. **Ela:** I'm curious about the culture of your home. I'm fascinated by subtle things you can do building your home. I've been learning about interior design, and something fascinating is building a space that serves your purposes—making it subconsciously easier to do things you want. I want to read, so I have reading spaces throughout. I read a lot growing up because my parents had books everywhere. When bored, I'd pull a book. What's the learning culture in your home, and how does your family use technology? **Brenna:** I grew up similarly with books everywhere. We had TV, but it wasn't wall-sized. A small black and white TV in one room, one with a VCR in another. TV was there—I watched The Simpsons live—but wasn't the focal point. I've tried doing that in my home. My husband is a big TV guy, but our TV is in the basement. It's our only TV. I noticed when we moved from small apartments with TV in the living room to a townhouse with TV in the basement, the TV never comes on. I don't go down because my husband's office is there and I won't bring a noisy baby to that space. That's exactly what you're saying about home architecture. We're a techy home—I'm an educational technologist with gadgets and devices. But for my kids, my eldest has an iPad primarily for connecting with family across the country via FaceTime. Very useful in the pandemic. But in my house, you see books before tech. I want my kids to understand the world and not feel out of step with times—that's hard on kids. But we read every day. Reading is family life. And podcasts. We listen to so many podcasts. When my kid was babysat and offered TV shows, he asked for his podcast instead. I don't know how that happens except I grew up in a CBC household—Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, always news and information. My brother joked there was a nail through the radio dial. For me, podcasts took that place. I'm comforted by human voices. The culture is lots of talking, listening to people talk, very verbal. --- ## 41:20 - Intentional Boundaries: How Her Family Uses Technology **Ela:** You're taking in information, connecting dots. He probably asks questions about podcasts constantly. That makes it easier for mythology to become a default interest. How do you decide what limits to set on tech? What do you intentionally bring in? **Brenna:** It's a hard conversation. Weekdays are easier—time is limited. My eldest gets 20 minutes of screen time after school while eating snacks, unwinding, changing clothes. Largely unsupervised, they have an iPad with Netflix, Disney Plus, Apple Arcade games. I like Apple Arcade—no ads or microtransactions. I feel comfortable giving full access because it's a walled garden. No YouTube unsupervised—that worries me with political radicalization in those spaces. As a family, we watch TV Friday nights with dinner. That's when YouTube comes out, watched together. I've seen tedious Pokemon videos I'd never watch alone, but we do it together because I'm not comfortable with unsecured YouTube. They play video games—Nintendo Switch. My kid loves Pokemon, Animal Crossing, games at that level. He's never been big on peril, so war games and violent content haven't appealed. Lately, with Magic the Gathering passion, he plays World of Warcraft only with his dad. It's not tech-free, but I limit ecosystems we engage with. We don't have smart speakers anymore—I'm concerned about data harvesting. I feel responsible for how much of my children's data escapes into the world. They're not on social media. We don't use their names online. We're careful about how much of their presence exists on the internet before they can meaningfully consent. Sometimes complicated with school, which uses Google ecosystem. We have conversations with teachers about what goes where. I'm resolutely anti-AI. I find generative AI deeply troubling from intellectual property, environmental, and labor rights perspectives. --- ## Guest Resources **Website:** https://brennaclarkegray.ca/ **Community of Praxis Podcast:** https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Scholarly-Podcasts/Community-of-Praxis Brenna Clarke Gray is a critical educational technologist, practitioner/researcher, and theorist working on ethical, accessible, and care-informed use of digital tools in education. -