Transcript edited by Alyssa Carbutti with support from the DAC team.
Brenda Brueggemann: All right, so we have captions running, and we appreciate you taking the time to talk with us here, and maybe we will introduce ourselves first. And we will tell you just a tiny bit about the blog and what we’re doing, and then we will launch into questions for you.
Erin Scanlon: Sounds good.
Brenda Brueggemann: We have never met in person, right? But we have been in several Zoom events. And I’m Brenda Brueggemann, and I’m a faculty member in the English department and WGSS and American studies. And I’m going to bounce it to Ally.
Ally Carbutti: Hi, I’m Ally. I’m the one that emailed you originally. I’m a junior, and I’m an English major, and I’m also really interested in disability studies, and I have been working with Brenda for a year and a half now.
Brenda Brueggemann: Okay, and after you introduce yourself, bounce it to somebody else, and that way I don’t have to turn on my mute and unmute. And now I will go to Ashten, who is in the middle of my screen.
Ashten Carter: Hi, my name is Ashten, I’m also a junior, and I’m a psychology and human rights double major, and super interested in the field of disability studies. And I’m glad you’re here today and nice to meet you. And I will pass it to Elisa.
Elisa Shaholli: Hi professor Scanlon, my name is Elisa and I’m a senior, a double major in English and economics and I have worked with Brenda since my freshman year. And it’s awesome you have agreed to this interview and we’re looking forward to it, so thank you. And I’m passing it to Madison.
Madison Bigelow: Hi, I’m Madison, I’m also a junior, an English major and sociology minor, and also interested in disability studies like everyone else. And like everyone else said, super excited to be here today, and super excited to talk to you about your fellowship.
Brenda Brueggemann: All right, I think that’s it. There’s one more person on our team, but they are in class, her name is Hannah. This blog started because I was part of Disability Studies Quarterly and I asked if we could have a blog alongside the journal. And I felt like we needed a space to put stuff that was not necessarily academically peer-reviewed and there’s a lot of it out there in disability culture and communities, and not a lot of places to put that material. Unfortunately, SDS did not have the funds to support such a thing in a way that was needed, so I turned back to Kate Capshaw. And I said, is this something you guys can support for a couple of years and let’s see if we can get it up and running and I’ll look for funds in other places? But in order to get funds from other places, you need to show what you’re going to do. And she was really happy to do that. So I have funding for two years to build the blog, and this is the first team of builders, and we do have a behind the scenes thing built. And we hope — we think we’re going to launch it right after spring break. It’s called the Disability Access Collective, DAC, Disability Access Collective Blog. But it’s intended to capture a lot of things like events, conversations, events and probably book and media reviews, regular blog-posts, reflections on matters. And you guys help me out, what are the other categories we have?
Ally Carbutti: We have reflections, reviews, just like a creative tab — we were bouncing between calling it storytelling versus creative works, and I think we’re still figuring that out right now. Yeah, we just want to reach lots of people, and we were hoping that we can get people from all over the world to submit.
Erin Scanlon: That sounds awesome.
Brenda Brueggemann: Activism is one of the categories, of the seven or eight. So, we’re interviewing you and Kimberly Bergendahl, and we think this will be one of the first things we will post up on the blog when we open it up. And we are thinking that, at least for the rest of this year and next year, we will keep it UConn-focused to build it. And I’ll have something to share and we can find other funds and begin to grow it out more, and still have UConn as a hub and center and team. And you’re one of our guinea pigs and we’re happy to have you here with the project. Do you have any questions at the outset for that?
Erin Scanlon: I just have one. Are you going to also talk with Holly Fitch? She’s the third Accessibility Fellow.
Brenda Brueggemann: I didn’t know.
Erin Scanlon: There’s three of us.
Brenda Brueggemann: Oh, excellent. I didn’t know. We will get her on the schedule. So, thank you, I see Madison writing that in. To start with, can you just kind of walk us through a synopsis of your project as UConn CLAS Accessibility Fellow? What are your plans and events?
Erin Scanlon: Sure, I would be happy to. So, we — each of us kind of picked — okay, I have to start over again, I am a little nervous. At the beginning of the application process, they asked us what we were interested in looking at. A lot of my research and work recently has been focused on supporting faculty to implement inclusive teaching strategies into courses. And for me it felt natural to extend on that work I have been doing. Previously, I think last semester, I hosted a faculty learning community which encompassed presentations and workshops for faculty to look at how they can be more inclusive in their work. And I ran that at Avery Point for STEM — science technology, engineering and math — as a fellow, and I’m opening that up to all of CLAS faculty. And that faculty learning community, we had our second meeting this morning and we had a panel of students with disabilities come and speak to us. That’s the majority of the work that I have been doing for the faculty learning community — I’m sorry, for the Accessibility Fellows.
Brenda Brueggemann: Great. I think Elisa has the next question. But I’m going to insert, first introduce yourself in general! What other things at UConn, right? We launched right into the project and forgot about you!
Erin Scanlon: That’s okay, no problem. My name is Erin Scanlon. I use she/her pronouns and I’m an assistant Professor-in-Residence at the Avery Point campus. And that means you focus a lot on teaching, and less so on research — that would be more like a tenure or tenure track position — and I teach three classes every semester at Avery Point. In the field of physics, I do education research. So I look at how we can teach physics better, how students learn physics, and how we can implement equitable and just practices in the physics community, writ large. Under the umbrella of physics education research, I look at disability and how the physics community can change to be more inclusive in the things that we do. So, I look at things from classroom practices, to website design, to looking at the views held by practicing physicists about disability, to the workforce — helping folks get from college to the workforce. One of the nice things — it’s not nice, but one of the facts of what it looks like right now in STEM, there’s not a lot of research about disability. So that’s not great, but I get to do anything that comes to mind because that research doesn’t exist. So I get to research a lot of different areas. This is my third year at UConn as a faculty member, but I taught in a couple of other universities before joining UConn. I think that’s about me. Any other questions you want to know about me?
Brenda Brueggemann: Excellent. Well, no. There probably are. I just know I would love to clone you and sprinkle you across every campus in the country. I found out what you do, and I have been talking the same things for fifteen years and nobody listens. You keep saying the same things over. And to find somebody else having the same conversation, as a faculty member, has been really joyful for me. I was trying to think of what adjective to use.
Erin Scanlon: Me too! I feel like when I first came to UConn, I tried to search out like-minded people and find them. And I feel like I’ve found a good community of folks at UConn, and I have a few external collaborators I work with as well.
Brenda Brueggemann: Elisa, do go, but if anybody else has a question about her, about her work in general? Okay?
Elisa Shaholli: You had mentioned — sorry Brenda — you mentioned the faculty learning community. And I was wondering, what is a faculty learning community, in your view?
Erin Scanlon: Yeah, so, I would say that a faculty learning community has a couple of key points. The first one is that it is a group of faculty getting together and focusing on a particular topic. In my case it’s focused on disability and accessibility in teaching. But a faculty learning community, also, the second feature is that it’s got an extended time for people to be working together. So our faculty learning community will run for ten weeks, where we will meet once a week, and our goal is to create a community of people who have gone through this training that can go back to their departments and share information about accessibility practices in their teaching. So it’s people getting together focusing on a topic for an extended period of time. Our faculty learning community includes both workshops where the participants will be involved in examining their curricular materials and looking at universal design for learning and thinking about how they can implement reducing the barriers that are inherent in their teaching; and we have presentations from a variety of people. And that includes, today we had the panel of students with disabilities. We’ve had people from CSD coming in, folks from NEAG, the school of education, folks from ITS, that’s the IT support staff. So we have people from a wide range of spaces. I think because disability has to do with all of these variable places and hearing from the different avenues of support that are available is important for faculty. That’s how I would describe it. We use faculty learning communities a lot to focus on instructional practice and this is instructional practice related to disability.
Ally Carbutti: I have a question. So, it seems like it’s not going to be — it’s going to be more generalized and not very specific to STEM. So, are you going to have a general training or is it going to be more specific to each curriculum? I think the way that you teach science is very different from the way that you teach English and so on.
Erin Scanlon: That is totally true. And I think, there are definitely disciplinary differences in the things that instructors do in their teaching. But I think there’s also practices that span disciplines. For example, like, there are certain accessibility things that you do when you are lecturing, and different accessibility things you do when you teach a lab or doing a group discussion. And we focus on the more general transcendent practices, and I hope the community will be flexible enough to focus on the things that are relevant for them. We have experts from many different disciplines focusing on creating a faculty learning community so we can stay true to the disciplines and what are the best practices there. But yeah, I think that it would be really cool if we can focus this on focused trainings for each department. But this is for a wide range of people. I think we have fifteen different disciplines represented in the faculty learning community right now, and we kind of have a lot of people engaged, which is really great.
Ally Carbutti: That’s super cool. Another question that I have is: will it only be training? Or eventually, do you hope that the professors involved in the training will have like a requirement to implement some sort of universal education model? Or takeaway from the training? Is there going to be some sort of application requirement from the professors?
Erin Scanlon: Yes, definitely. I didn’t write it out like an assignment for students, but the goal of the faculty learning community is by the end of the ten weeks the instructors will have something. That could be one assignment, or a practice they are going to implement in their classes, or maybe they are overhauling the digital accessibility. That’s one of the things that we have not figured out yet. Next week in the faculty learning community, the faculty are going to use a tool that my colleagues and I developed to identify barriers to access and participation. And because each class is different, they will likely have different barriers to focus on. So we are in the workshops helping them identify barriers, learn about tools to dismantle the barriers, and we focus on how to sustainably implement the changes within their practice, and it’s very much focused on them taking something away from the faculty learning community they can directly implement into their classes.
Ally Carbutti: That’s awesome. Thank you.
Erin Scanlon: You’re welcome.
Ally Carbutti: I think we can move onto our next question that we had written out for you. So, we want to just know, how did you get involved with disability studies? And what led you to that sort of involvement?
Erin Scanlon: Going back to high school, my family has a really close family that we’re friends with, and one of their sons is autistic. And I was a personal care attendant for him for a really long time, and I really enjoyed working with him and being his friend. It was really meaningful to me. And I was just like, I had that experience, cool, I’m going to go to college and get my physics degree and become a physicist. Eventually, I decided going more to the education route was where I was interested, and my Ph.D. is in education instead of in physics. And I did a post-doc, which is after you get your Ph.D., you can work on a research project more focused, and that’s really common in the STEM disciplines. So I did a post-doc in a lab over at the University of Central Florida, and they were doing disability research, and it was a really good fit, because I do education research in physics and I’m interested in disability. It worked out really well. And then, to be honest with you, I did a whole research study that eventually got published. I went to another university to present it, and the people were just really tearing down all the work that I was doing and critiquing it. And they were not being mean, but they had a lot of questions about the viability of this kind of research. And that really pissed me off. I was, like, really upset that people in my own community were unaccepting of the work that I did. And for me, that kind of situation was motivating to continue doing this kind of work. I, myself — well, it’s a little bit complicated, and if you were to ask my doctors, they would say I have a disability. Particularly my migraines, and I have depression and I have anxiety. And if you were to ask them, they would say I have a disability. I, myself, I don’t know the language that I would like to use for me. But somewhere, under that disability umbrella, I fall in there. And that work is helpful for me and I feel a lot of responsibility to make things better for future generations and for the people around me. So, yeah, this work is now very near and dear to my heart. And I don’t get paid to do research from the university, but I think it’s worth it. I only have a certain amount of time in this world to do something, and I feel like I have the skills to make a change in this space, and now I do that kind of work. Wow, that was a really long journey.
Ally Carbutti: No, that was awesome. We really like hearing your personal connection to it.
Ashten Carter: That was so cool.
Brenda Brueggemann: It probably seemed long to you. It usually does when you’re talking about yourself and having to say those things, but it wasn’t long. And the value of modeling, like claiming those things, I think is such a great value in educational spaces these days. Who is next? I think it’s — Madison, you’re up next.
Erin Scanlon: Sorry to interrupt you, and I have one other thing to say. And sometimes — and I know this was not your intention — sometimes when people ask me that question, they are like, why are you here? And they look at me and don’t see somebody who has a disability. And they are asking, like, ‘why would you want to care about things like this?’ And I always expect a personal connection, which I think is wild. I know that is not what you said because of the way you worded the question, but I think that people should care about this work, regardless of if they know somebody with a disability. And just like, we can care about antiracist or antifeminist work without being a woman or other gender minority. Like, why wouldn’t you care about this work? It’s important.
Ally Carbutti: Thank you for saying that, that is a big part of our mission with the blog.
Brenda Brueggemann: Very true, that’s very much with disability. The question lingers, you know, ‘why are you interested in that?’ It’s interesting. But, I find that more and more, people are just saying that. I was telling them, over the summer there were at least eighteen people who couldn’t get into the Disability in American Culture and Literature class that I teach. And I know, because they wrote to me, and I got emails from them. And every one of them had a story about why they wanted to be there. And it was really powerful. And I didn’t used to get emails like that, so I like thinking about that, what shifted in the culture, and in our educational spaces. Great. Actually, we have questions, but the conversation is even better.
Erin Scanlon: I’m sorry, I’m going to do it again. One additional follow up. I was interviewed by a physics journal, and the journalist was asking the question of why has there been a shift in the culture recently toward more disability research, and the work being done. And they posited that it was because of the Black Lives Matter movement and the work related to social justice and the equity that we’re doing — which could be true. I think there’s a rise in normalizing neuro-diversity and neuro-divergent identities in spaces. And that, I’m excited. In the physics discipline, we have papers being published on this topic, and sessions at professional conferences, and workshops and learning communities about disability. So, I think this overall change in higher education is reflected in my own discipline, which is — I take that as a triumph. Not personally, but I think it’s cool.
Brenda Brueggemann: Yes, and it’s kind of connected to Madison’s question. I have to tell – because something happened yesterday in my class that has never happened. And I have taught many times about Mabel Bell, who is deaf; and Alexander Graham Bell, a deaf educator, her teacher. And many times I have taught and no one ever asked or raised the question: Was AG Bell neuro-divergent? And yesterday, somebody asked, ‘and what about him, what was going on with him? Mabel is deaf, but like’? Anyway. Madison, go ahead and ask your question now.
Madison Bigelow: Okay. You sort of touched on this before with your interest in education. But what led you to specifically focusing on faculty for your CLAS fellowship as opposed to any other group or demographic?
Erin Scanlon: That’s a great question. So, as a faculty member myself, and as somebody who does education research, I feel like I’m in a position to speak directly to faculty. Unfortunately, sometimes faculty members don’t listen to staff or students, or people from professional organizations. And while I really don’t like that, and I try to push back against that in the work that I do, I also need to meet people where they are at, right? And focus on ways in which that I can make an impact. And that happens to be with faculty. I’m very thankful in that Holly and Kim, the other two Accessibility Fellows, have focused on other aspects of disability. And I think that doing this work is not just about faculty. It’s not just about students. It’s not just about administration. It’s about everywhere. Accessibility and being inclusive is a multifaceted multilevel problem that everybody should be involved with. And I talk to faculty a lot, and a lot of my previous research was focused on faculty and that feels like a natural home for me, and a place where my position can contribute to that work that’s being done.
Ashten Carter: Thank you so much for that. I had another question. How do you think that this faculty learning community can impact students? Like, I know right now the conversations, they are happening within faculty. But what are your hopes for how this will reach students eventually?
Erin Scanlon: So, I think — I have two goals. One is, immediately after the faculty learning community instructors should have something to implement in their courses, some new inclusive teaching practice. And hopefully that practice will support the broad range of learners in the courses regardless of needs. It’s our job to support that variability in learners. And I hope these practices will better support students in classes. I think there’s another aspect to it as well, and this came out in the students with disabilities panel we had today. There’s a culture shift that needs to happen. In addition to putting forth practices, people need to be better educated about disability and accessibility, and people need to have a better understanding of the legal frameworks and policies related to accessibility. And we need to lower the stigma around using accommodations or requesting to have access needs met or other things like that. And I’m hopeful that the people that go through that learning community will have that attitude and belief shift and bring it back to their departments. And I cannot think of a better analogy than change agents, to make the changes across departments. And we’re working on a frequently asked questions about accommodations that we will share through a couple of different mechanisms at the university. And I hope they will reach a broader range of faculty and understand and value the role that accommodations and teaching practices can have in their own spaces. One other thing is, I was just so delighted to have our panelists with us today, who identify as students at UConn. And they shared with me, they felt like it was really an opportunity for them to share about their own experiences, and it felt cathartic to talk to faculty and say, ‘you need to do these things to support me’, ‘you’re not doing this, please make this happen’. So I felt very honored to be able to provide them that mechanism to share about their own experiences.
Ally Carbutti: I love that. I have another question. I know that because there is so much stigma in society, a lot of people with disabilities that are typically invisible — like anxiety or depression that might not go diagnosed or they have it and don’t seek the help — are you going to emphasize that universal education can help the students too that are not necessarily registered with the Center For Disability Studies?
Erin Scanlon: Definitely. I’m sorry — my husband just walked by behind the camera and waved at me, sorry. Yes, definitely. I’m so sorry, Ally. I got really distracted. Can you repeat the question one more time for me?
Ally Carbutti: That’s okay. I know there’s a lot of students that have invisible disabilities that don’t recognize it themselves. Or if they do, they are so high functioning that they don’t register with the Center For Disability Studies. And are you going to make a point of emphasizing that to the professors in the learning community? And I know that — a lot of students that are technically disabled don’t qualify themselves as much, but those kinds of learning tactics in the classroom that are beneficial and they may not know they need them until they are implemented?
Erin Scanlon: Totally, and I have two ideas about that. The first time, I use the term disability quickly to get people on the same general page of what I’m talking about. But in fact, all of my research is framed using this idea that everybody, regardless of if you have a disability diagnosis of not, has a variety of needs and abilities and interests. And it’s our job to support that variability in learners. And our next meeting is going to focus on identifying the ways that people can typically vary, and using that as a way to predict the kinds of students they should expect in their classes and broaden that expectation to include a wider range of people. So, a hundred percent yes. I definitely agree with that. And secondly, there is this idea in universal design, that it’s going to — if you implement UDL, they should help a wider range of students. And I think that’s great, right? Accessible and inclusive practices can support a wider range of people, and it’s necessary for some and helpful for others. If I may critique universal design a little bit, sometimes it feels a little like interest-convergence-y a little bit, which is you only do it if it also helps an able-bodied student, or ‘I’m only going to do it if it also helps able-bodied students rather than focusing on students with disability’. And that’s problematic. Ableism is endemic in our society and we have an obligation to dismantle those systems of oppression for their own sake. And yes, it can be helpful for a wider range of students, and that’s why we should do it; and we should do it just because it’s going to help disabled people too!
Ally Carbutti: Thank you, that was great. And I agree with you, and I think that professors don’t specify the needs of students enough, regardless of if they have a disability or not, using that term loosely. But sorry, I’m trying to remember my train of thought. I think it’s great, too, if professors ask students what was working and what is not working through the tactics they use. And when you first start out, you may not get the results you’re intending to have, because you’re still new at it and still learning the techniques that you’re implementing. And to put a scenario forward, if you hope for the learning community to continue — I would hate for there to be incentive to join the learning community, but say there was incentive for professors to join it. Do you hope to build a set of requirements where they have to track the progress of the techniques they are implementing?
Erin Scanlon: Two things. First of all, there are incentives for faculty to engage. Each faculty member that participates in the ten weeks gets a five hundred dollar stipend to participate. And part of that is because so often diversity and equity and inclusion and social justice work is undervalued by the university and the people in power. So, I think that people should be compensated for the work they are doing. And unfortunately, the way the university evaluates and hires faculty, they don’t value this kind of work. So by making them pay people, we are sending the message that this work is valuable, and this is something that the university believes is important for people to do. In addition, there’s systemic inequities in how faculty members are compensated for the work they do. If we look at adjuncts, they are paid very little money, and professional development is not built into the work they do. And I felt strongly we needed to compensate people for this work, not only to send the message that this is valuable, but also to help compensate for part of those inequities in the pay that people get. So, we do compensate them. In terms of requirements, the formal requirements are that they engage with the faculty learning community. And the work that I do in the classroom and out of the classroom, I try to go more the carrot route. And I say, “No, no, this is something cool you can implement in your classes and you should care about it”, instead of saying, “If you don’t meet X, Y, Z criteria, you’re not going to get the incentive along with it.” My goal is to keep these people connected to one another in the longer term, so people have others to bounce ideas off of, and keep each other accountable for the work we are doing moving forward.
Ally Carbutti: That’s great, and I was going to say I agree with that wholeheartedly. And I think there’s irony to it too, and the way that you’re approaching the faculty learning community is a universal loosely-termed design. And I think it’s interesting, compared to the student faculty learning communities on campus, and they are so poignantly, ‘you need to hit these requirements’ and do all these things, and you’re not getting any money. So I think there’s just such an irony in that.
Erin Scanlon: Agreed, and I — I’m sorry, Brenda. I tried to do this in a lot of my spaces. My personal goal for myself this year is to adopt a harm reduction framework in all of the work that I’m doing. And I feel like I have a role to play in dismantling the harmful systems. And in other spaces, I need to work within that system. And one thing I feel is causing harm is undervaluing diversity equity and inclusion and justice work. And by making the university pay people, I push back against that idea.
Brenda Brueggemann: Excellent. And the follow up, to me, that’s why I wanted money to pay students for real labor in building a blog. There could have been independent study credit hours and money-related things, but no, I wanted the money laid down in the budget. And I know you started into it — but it seems like it can be valuable to you — if you think this model can also be used with staff at UConn? Because staff are often an unseen bridge at times between faculty and students, and between students, and between faculty themselves, and we are undervaluing diversity. And I think about how often staff are left out, and I think there’s more of them than faculty. There’s more staff at UConn than faculty.
Erin Scanlon: I totally agree. And I think the way that professional development for staff is set up is different than for faculty. And we didn’t invite them to this learning community because we needed to cap it for this population. And I agree, that would be really excellent to expand this to have a staff version or student leader version. And we want to record the sessions so people can asynchronously engage. Not everyone has the same comfort and fluency in working in an online community, so that’s somewhere that we’re going.
Elisa Shaholli: Thank you so much. And some of the closing questions we had left are: What would you like to be asked further? Are there any questions that we have not asked, that you wish that we did ask? If there are, we will ask them to you.
Erin Scanlon: Yeah. I think, maybe there’s just one other topic that I have not touched on, that I think is important. And I don’t know how I would frame it as a question. But I’m going to give you the answer, if that’s okay. I think there’s a fundamental lack of infrastructure related to access and disability at UConn. We have CSD, who are very much student-facing, and they provide a little bit of professional development for faculty and staff. But their primary function is to be student-facing, and I think that’s great, and really important to have it. But we need to have more support for faculty and staff. We need to have more policy related to accessibility. And we need to have more enforcement. Right, so, like, there are legal protections falling under the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act that are not being followed by university staff and employees, and that’s unacceptable. I’m just waiting for the university to have an OCR, Office of Civil Rights, complaint against it. There’s many practices that are violating federal law, and I feel like we as a university should prioritize accessibility. It doesn’t click to me. People are making decisions woefully uninformed; or informed and making the wrong decisions. And I have been talking with the deans of CLAS, and they have talked with the provost about setting up a centralized disability accessibility office in the university that would provide a wider range of supports to campus. And who knows if that happens, but if I look five to ten years in the future — maybe towards the five end — we need that as a university and we need to be better prepared and have better support and infrastructure related to disability.
Brenda Brueggemann: I laughed over in the chat. You give us the answer, and we will make up the question. And the question would be: Why are things so dispersed? What was the word we used? Decentralized, dispersed. Like, you will find disability over here, and here, but no one is talking altogether about it. Decentralized, to use bureaucratic language. Why is it so decentralized?
Erin Scanlon: Yeah, and I mean, obviously —
Brenda Brueggemann: It’s the little and the big things.
Erin Scanlon: And obviously, I don’t have a lot of power as an in-residence faculty member that doesn’t have a multiyear contract at a regional university. But I feel like I have a certain amount of power I should use to try to make things better. And this is one area that I think requires larger powers to make it happen. I think one of the roles that the Accessibility Fellows have had is we have the ear of some people in power, and we’re trying hard to put the right things out and put forward ideas that are not only going to be beneficial for the university, writ large, and also meet the current needs and constraints that the university has, specifically related to budget and staff hours, and things like that.
Brenda Brueggemann: And I’m watching Ashten especially nod. And I know, having worked with Ashten in class before and listened to him, we can get caught on the idea that ‘I don’t have any power, and what can I do’. And that’s part of what keeps the system rolling right along, so stepping in, wherever you can.
Erin Scanlon: I know. One time, I said to a student, I was like, “Yeah, I don’t really have power in this space.” And they were like, “You’re a faculty member! What are you talking about? You have so much more power than students or people outside of academia!” And it was eye-opening to me, like, ‘Oh, shit, yeah, of course I do! Why am I not using it to make things better? And what am I doing here, if I’m not doing that?’
Brenda Brueggemann: Another part of it is you start to feel really grumpy, sometimes. You have to keep pointing things out, and that can be wearing on your soul, that you have to be the one to raise your hand and say, ‘wait a minute’.
Erin Scanlon: Thankfully, I’m a contrarian by nature, so that worked out well for me.
Brenda Brueggemann: Great. So I think that’s — and if there’s anything you want to ask us, too, that’s a question falling on this. Or the rest of the team out there, is there still something bubbling up for you? Okay.
Erin Scanlon: One other thing I will do, in case you don’t have my email — Ally, I know you reached out to me — and others if you don’t, I put my email in this chat. And you can reach out. And we now know each other a little bit, and if I can support you in the blog or you have other questions, feel free to reach out!
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