MTP 49: Janet Reed, Part 2 on Teaching Controversial Topics While Staying True to Your Faith 🤔

In this episode of Meet The Prof, Shane Hartley continues his conversation with Dr. Janet Reed, Professor of Nursing at Kent State University. Janet shares how she navigates teaching topics that could conflict with her faith, her research on generative AI and virtual reality in healthcare, and how faith underpins her academic work. She also provides practical advice for professors managing heavy workloads, mentoring students, and making a spiritual impact on campus.

Read more about Janet Reed: https://meettheprof.com/view/professors/entry/janet-reed/

Email Dr. Janet Reed: jreed56@kent.edu

Main Takeaways

• Christian professors can teach controversial topics while maintaining their faith by collaborating with colleagues and seeking mentorship.
• Generative AI and virtual reality have practical applications in healthcare, such as improving well-being among older adults.
• Faith can guide research and teaching by focusing on benefiting individuals and society.
• Setting boundaries with workload and practicing daily “closing” rituals can help prevent burnout.
• Professors can make a spiritual impact by starting with relationships in their immediate circles and being intentional about prayer.
• Online instructors should prioritize instructor presence through video content and personalized feedback.
• Mentoring students requires compassion, prayer, and maintaining healthy boundaries.
• College students should seek mentors, stay the course despite challenges, and take care of their mental and emotional health.

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Transcript

0:01

I'm a junior here at UNC Wilmington. I'm studying management, business development, and entrepreneurship. My question to you is have you ever had to teach something that conflicted your faith. Welcome to Meet the Prof. Hey there, my name is Shane Hartley. if this is your first time joining us, welcome. We're so glad you are here, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on a podcast app. our goal in this is to encourage Christ-centered conversations on the college campus. And the way we do that is taking questions from college students and then asking them to Christian professors. So we are gonna hear part two of the interview I did with Janet Reed now. Janet is a Professor of Nursing at Kent State University. I'm excited for you to hear just some of the ways that she's living out her faith on campus. So before we jump in, if you'd please remember to click on subscribe or like or follow wherever you're listening or watching this. let's jump in now then. Here's part two of my interview with Dr. Janet Reed. one of the things we love doing, you know, is getting questions directly from the college students who get the opportunity to ask any question they want to Christian professors. So take a listen to this question. I'm a junior here at UNC Wilmington. I'm studying management, business development, and entrepreneurship. My question to you is have you ever had to teach something that conflicted your faith. Thank you so much for that is a really good question. And I will say there are some topics in healthcare that do border conflicting with faith. I think about some sexual health topics that or reproductive health issues that are controversial in our society right now. And so I have never had to teach anything that conflicts with my faith, but I had the potential to teach things that could have conflicted with my faith. one thing that's been really helpful for me in dealing with that is I team teach, so I have other faculty who teach with me. And so we bounce ideas off of each other. to make sure that we're covering the topics that need to be covered. We're providing students with different viewpoints and being open-minded to students who may feel differently about these issues in the classroom. we also, sometimes we have a textbook that may go in a direction that we don't necessarily agree with. So we've been able to manage that between the team teaching in order to not, that I haven't really had to. had to teach anything that's conflicting with my faith. So it's a good question. It is something I think faculty have to deal with. But we also know we have academic freedom and we have rights. So I think it's important when you have those situations to go to mentors and go to supportive administrators who you can talk to about that. That's surely helpful, and I'm sure a lot of students encounter subjects and things that teachers, or teaching that are conflicting their own faiths. Yeah, yeah. Well, so in your research, I'm already interested in your research and things you're teaching your students because it involves technology, virtual reality, things like that. So I was wondering if you could double click on that more to talk about the research you're doing and any ways that you've seen your faith intersect with your research, especially in educational technology. Mm hmm. Yeah. So I'm doing a lot right now with generative AI. And so the project I mentioned at the nursing home that was using generative AI images, we were having older adults reminisce on their life, their best life moments. And then we were creating images using technology and putting them in a photo book for them and reviewing them with them and seeing how it impacted their, their levels of anxiety, hope, social isolation, and well-being. So that's One of the projects I'm doing, I also do a lot with simulation. like I said, I'm using virtual reality simulation right now. We're looking at student anxiety and how it impacts what they notice as a nurse within the simulation. So this has been really good and interesting and I don't have the results yet. I'm still collecting data, finalizing my data collection. yeah, I mean, faith always underpins all of my research. I tend to... as a nurse and as a Christian, look at things that have some kind of practical benefit in helping people and helping society. I like helping individual people, and I like helping society as a whole. So I try to pick topics that are gonna do both of those things to bless the world through my work. And I love working with other people. I collaborate with a lot of different disciplines and learn from other people in my research too, so that's always fun. One thing I love about that is on a lot of the episodes we have asked professors, how is it you've seen you can glorify God in your field? Because we can tend to think and students can tend to think when they're looking at careers, like the only ones that can really glorify God or the best ones would be if they're a missionary or a pastor. And you're talking about a ministry of helping people even in your research. So that's pretty exciting. Yeah, yeah, I have a good colleague friend Bob Robinson who has made his like whole life's work and his research about integrating faith with vocation. So I think that that has influenced me a lot. And I just love that idea that you can be a minister in whatever job God has placed you. And that actually that that he wants you to be in that position in order to do that. So yeah. So one thing that we've just recently been exploring in our interviews are potential opportunities for collaboration, how Christian faculty around the world, even from different fields, might be able to collaborate some in their research and work. what is something you can imagine in your field, you being able to collaborate with another believing faculty in. Well, the cool thing about virtual simulations is you can do it virtually, right? You can do it from all over the world. I love, like for future research, I love the idea of doing a multidisciplinary, multi-patient, multi-person simulation where we could have different disciplines all working together, learning from each other in a virtual environment. So the... Product I'm using right now uses natural language processing and AI to communicate. The virtual patient will talk right back to you. He'll answer your questions. So I'm thinking like, OK, this would be a great collaboration with psychology or counseling. And how do you talk to people that are dealing with different mental issues, which we know are huge problem. We've got a huge mental health crisis in our country. that's a potential. Yeah, so. I guess, does that answer the question? Hopefully. It does. does. Yeah. Derek Crews, who we just interviewed a couple of weeks ago, shared the same thing about the psychology field. So what about someone in accounting or marketing? Can you foresee any way or in art collaboration there? yeah. Cause a lot of my, a lot of my work has been with image generators, so generative AI images, which are like, and there's all kinds of AI tools now you can use to generate marketing materials. Very easy with like, you know, a click of a pen or a mouse, click of a mouse. but yeah. And then I actually, I'm collaborating with an art therapist right now and with the project that we did at the nursing home. we're like going to do an art show. with the generative AI images we made from older adults and we're gonna like showcase their art and like all of the wonderful, most meaningful things in life. And I think it's great for younger people to look at this, be like, okay, when I'm 90 and in a nursing home, these were the most important things in my life that I wanted to remember. These are the moments, right? So that it just, it's helpful and it's meaningful. So yeah, there's definitely a lot of opportunities for collaboration, especially in like public health is another. place I collaborate with a in education. yeah. It would be exciting to see some of that come together. thanks. Yeah, I hope so. All right, so Janet, now I want to ask you a bunch of lightning round questions, because we make these lightning round because we don't have time to go into everything we want to, so we try to squeeze some in right at the end. So the first lightning round question I have for you is, what advice would you give other faculty who are struggling with a heavy workload? Which seems like it's almost all of them. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer that because I struggle with that. But one thing that I was at a women's Bible study with Beck, she, a woman in the group said that the most important things do not often have a measuring stick. And that really stuck with me because here I'm busy with this heavy workload. And sometimes the most important things for me are showing up for people. showing up for students, investing in relationships, being able to stop what I'm doing and be there for someone. And those things are not measured, especially with the tenure process. But that's important to who I am. So I'm trying to prioritize those things. One thing I do with the heavy workload that has been helpful for me is I'm trying to do a closing each day because The to-do list is never ending. So at the end of each day, like when I'm like, okay, I'm done, like I can't do anymore. I've got to recognize that, lean into my limitations and then make a list of what I'm going to do the next day and close it out and be done. Like, and don't go back to it because sometimes as a faculty, yeah, you could be working all night, right? You could just keep doing it all night. So like I'm trying to have a closing, like a 10 minute closing process to my day where I wrap it up. say what I didn't get done. put it on the to-do list for tomorrow and move on so I can go relax and enjoy my family. Janet, how do you personally know that you've reached your capacity for the day and it's time for closing? That is a really good question. I feel like when I start getting really aggravated, that's how I know. I'm not finding joy in my work anymore. I'm just starting to get overloaded and aggravated. Then I'm like, okay, it's time to close it up and go do something else. It's part of self care. an aggravation light on the dashboard is blinking for you. That's good. Okay, another question is, what advice would you give to other Christian faculty who are looking for ways to make an influence spiritually on campus? Mm. I think starting with just the people who you already have in your life. You know, you've got students, you've got colleagues, people who are naturally around you. You don't have to go seek out anything outside of what God's already placed in your life. So just praying and starting with those people and just praying for opportunities, being wise in the way you act towards outsiders. I think it's in Colossians. So those are some of the things I would advise them to do. Of course, you always want to start with If you want, if you're wanting to make an impact on people, start with prayer and time with the Lord so that he can empower you to do that. Well, what about advice you give for professors who are mainly teaching online? What advice would you give them for being able to really connect significantly with their students? I do teach one fully online class and it's a challenge because students don't see you. So it's like all the more important to have instructor presence in the course and you can do that in different ways. Some things I do to help with that is I try to make videos of myself that I post on the course. So even though it's asynchronous, they can at least see my face, see me interacting with them. try to give personalized feedback on their assignments because we connect that way. I frequently remind them that even they can reach out to me and we can meet online or we can meet in person if they're on campus. But just trying to be warm and approachable with students and just trying to offer those connections in the online environment is going to be helpful. This question relates in a way. What advice would you give to Christian faculty who want to have a mentoring relationship with students or former students of theirs in some way? yeah, I actually got a great book called Mentoring One Another, which I think is a maybe Campus Crusade book. So this is a great topic and mentoring is really important for me. And I, I enjoy being mentored and I enjoy mentoring others. So, it's, it's sometimes hard, like, because I, as a very caring, compassionate person, like sometimes I, there are problems I take them on myself and worry about them too much. So that can be a challenge with just making sure you're maintaining appropriate boundaries. But it's important to me, not only like with my students to be a mentor, to offer mentorship and counseling to them for whatever personal problems they're going with. Because I mean, I have students that show up in my office because they failed an exam. And then I talked to them and then I find out, you know, their parent died last semester or they're having all kinds of stress because of whatever's going on their life with their boyfriend or et cetera. So like we do offer therapeutic communication to our students and compassion and support. And I often tell students that I will pray for them and I do pray for them. So yeah, it's an important thing. If you want to mentor others, there's certainly tons of opportunities to do so. That's great. So finally, I have a two-part question of what advice would you give to college students and to their parents? To college students and their parents. I am a parent of a college student right now. So, okay, what advice would I give to myself about being a... I think it's important for parents of college students to provide loving support to them while they're in college, check in on them, but also give them some space. That's what I'm trying to do with my daughter. I don't want to smother her. She's on her own for the first time. It's very exciting. I just want to be there for her and like I do think about her a lot, but I try not to call her every time I want to. But she reaches out to me, which is great. And that's really rewarding as a parent. So just finding that new balance when your kid goes away to college. And then to college students, you know, I know college students right now feel just totally overwhelmed. There is so much going on in the world. There's so much going on in school and sometimes it's they're having mental health challenges and trying to make new friends and there's social issues. So I guess. just telling them to stay strong, keep the course. some of the things you're worried about now in college, in a few years, it's not gonna matter as much. Find good mentors to help you work through these things and give you support and just keep doing what you need to do to take care of yourself, that's important. Meaningful advice. Janet, is there anything else that you would like to talk about? Any other thoughts you have or things you'd want to share? No, I'm just really grateful to be here and to connect with you. It's great and hopefully it can be a blessing to whoever's listening. I hope that interview with Janet Reed was encouraging to you and helpful to you, whether you're a Christian professor who is looking for how you can live missionally on campus, or if you're a college student, wondering if there are Christian professors out there, or you're a parent, or anyone who loves the college campus. It is such a privilege to have you part of the podcast. So thanks for listening or watching. if you'd please remember to click on subscribe or follow wherever you're listening. if you are interested in giving financially to this ministry, you can give online at give.cru.org, that's CRU.org, forward slash 042-4344. So until next time, we hope this encourages you to have a Christ-centered conversation on your college campus.