Episode 5 - Imaginative Teaching, Embracing Discomfort, and Leading with Play – A Conversation with Dr. Delores Phillips

Welcome back to the CFI Faculty Lounge Podcast, where we explore the experiences, challenges, and strategies of dedicated educators. In this episode, host Eric Magrum speaks with Dr. Delores Phillips, Director of the African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Center at JMU, about her journey through higher education and her bold, creative approach to teaching and leadership. 

In this episode, Dr. Phillips shares:  
 

-How her path began as a teaching assistant at the University of Maryland. 
-The value of imagination and play in creating meaningful learning environments. 
-Why she encourages students to demonstrate knowledge through more than just traditional essays. 
-How discomfort, especially in conversations about race, can lead to deeper understanding. 
-The ongoing challenge of balancing personal well-being with professional responsibilities. 
-The role gaming and community play in her self-care. 
-The advice she’d give her younger self: Love yourself. Face the challenge. Ask for help. 

Dr. Phillips offers a compelling look at how joy, challenge, and transformation can coexist in education. Tune in for a reflective and energizing conversation about teaching, equity, and care. 

DISCLAIMER: 
 
Dr. Phillips uses the phrase “heavy guns” as a metaphor to describe the powerful, creative, and courageous contributions her students bring to class discussions. 

Transcript

Productive play can produce incredibly deep insights, especially among students. If you get them excited and tell them, you know, this is a space in which you're able to take risks that don't necessarily have any punitive results behind them.

Welcome to the CFI Faculty Lounge Podcast, an outlet created for continuous learning and actionable insights for faculty. I'm your host, Eric Magrum, inviting you to join us in conversation with dedicated educators who share their experiences, challenges, and effective solutions. Today, I'm excited to welcome Dr. Dolores Phillips, the Director of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Center here at JMU.

Welcome, Dolores, and thank you for being with us today.

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

So, can you take us through your journey as an educator, how it began, and what brought you where you are today?

My journey began, I think, as a lot of our journeys do. I was a teaching assistant at the University of Maryland as a master student, and I was teaching composition. My area is English, so I was teaching composition, and later got the opportunity to teach literature classes.

But I never really thought about becoming a professor until it happened to me.

Really?

Really.

Can you say more about that?

Sure. There was a moment where I thought that talking about such venal affairs, such as the job market and how terrible it is, was something that was outside the scope of the rarefied atmosphere through which I moved. So I had a kind of immature snobbery when it came to the job market.

So I didn't really think much about it until I was rather deep into my dissertation process, and then began really understanding what my dissertation was setting me up for. And my dissertation director even asked me, what kind of dissertation do you even want to write? And when she asked me that very excellent question, that was when I started saying, this is the life I want.

The life of an academic.

Yes, the life of an academic, an educator, a teacher, thinker, scholar. I was really interested in that.

Wonderful. So in your view, what does it mean to excel in your role?

I have been thinking about this question for quite some time. For me, the way that I think about it is, how will I have excelled in my role? I will have excelled if I engage imaginative solutions to the kinds of issues and problems and challenges that my center faces.

If I have excellently served the students under my care, and the faculty that look to the center for community and for resources. If I have served those kinds of constituencies, then I will have excelled. If I have engaged our community partners.

So really, the center at this point has been a lot of my focus, but because I am also somebody who teaches, I have never lost sight of our students and our commitment to them.

I'm going to come back to a statement. You said excellent service or provide excellent service.

Yes.

Can you elaborate on, if I was a fly on the wall, how would I know excellence? You've done, for lack of a better term, excellent service.

So, by having excellently served the students, I have, oh gosh, that is actually really a question. Let me think a little bit about that.

Take a second.

Okay, I'm going to take a second, because I think about, I think that service is the style of leadership that I bring. I try to be a leader who is in service to those that she is both leading, as well as the people that actually, that I look up to, that have put me in the place of being a leader here. I see myself in service of my communities.

I see myself in service of my students. That we work together to have created the kind of intellectual atmosphere that allows us all to thrive. So that's really how I think about service.

I think about what have I created that I can gift to the various people who are either, that lead me or are led by me, to include my students.

So it's, I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but impact.

It is impact. It is very much impact. It is, I don't want to say it's results driven, but it certainly is driven by what good have I done as I have parted company with you.

Yeah.

How did you leave them? Did you leave them better than you found them?

Exactly. And have they left me better than I found myself? So it becomes a kind of mutuality in terms of building things together.

You know, I think that's one of the things about leadership or service or servant leadership is that both the leader and the person being led end up better than they started.

I think that's actually the essence of it. If you haven't left the scene better than when you found it, then I see myself as having failed if that happens. If I have left things worse or messier or left people confused or I'm not somebody who pursues happiness, but I definitely pursue how we created a productive, energizing space together that serves our needs.

And if our needs aren't being served, how can we get as close as we can to serving our mutual needs? And that said, I do believe that the measure of a great compromise is how displeased both parties are with it. But I am someone who very much believes in we can come together to figure out a solution.

So that is how I engage my teaching. It's how I engage with the service that I do as the center director. And it's actually also how I try to engage my research.

I want to come back to another thing you said.

Sure.

You don't pursue happiness. It seemed like there was a lot of thought behind that.

Right.

Can you speak to that a little bit?

So making people happy is a fine and laudable ambition. But I think that given the kind of discourses that I've been trained in, that courting discomfort can be far more productive. So instead of seeking to create a kind of everybody's happy, everyone is overjoyed, everyone is pleased, everyone is comfortable, I find that making people uncomfortable can sometimes be, it can sometimes yield some really interesting and really engaging results.

For example, I think about this a lot in my own understanding of how race relations works. Race relations makes people deeply, deeply uncomfortable. And yet, that discomfort can create solid accompliceship relationships.

It can also yield deep insights into how we got here, what's going on, what do we do about it. So the solutions are not comfortable, the conversations are not comfortable, but they are necessary conversations.

I love that, courting discomfort, especially as somebody who focuses on teaching and challenging ideas, and being willing to identify something that maybe does make you uncomfortable, whether it's an idea or a facet, whatever it happens to be.

An idea, a new skill that you haven't mastered. I find myself diving into things that I don't understand quite often that previously may have made me uncomfortable, and trying to figure it out, trying to actually engage this thing that I've said, oh my goodness, this is really daunting, this is really, ugh. And when you call in your allies, when you call in your accomplices, when you call in your friends, when you call in your support structure, they can really be helpful, especially if we all understand that we're working together for a common goal.

And I think almost the impetus behind education is discomfort, is to have self-enlightenment, if you will, and that requires some discomfort.

Oh, it does, definitely. In the Gay Science, Nietzsche, I think that's where he lays out the parable of the tree, where he talks about if an argument or if a knowledge formation can withstand slings and arrows and be buffeted by winds, then it deserves to stand. So he uses a very uncomfortable, very endangering metaphor to think about how knowledge is supposed to work, which is you subject it to all these different kinds of pressures, and the knowledge that withstands those pressures is the knowledge that deserves to exist.

Very well said.

Well, I wish I could claim credit, but I cannot.

Okay, moving to our next question. What unique qualities or perspectives do you bring to your role as an educator?

What do I bring? I bring a spirit of play. And it comes from having been a Derridian-trained post-structuralist.

So I was very much a Derrida, a Jacques Derrida fan. And he's a 20th century French philosopher who really thought about the play of language, how language is a form of play. So consequently, I bring a spirit of play into almost everything I do.

I try to be playful when in my leadership in the center, because we've actually bought a whole bunch of games. We're looking forward to creating a game night for our students. We're looking, I really want the spirit of the center to be a joyous one.

And I, but I really bring a spirit of play to my research, and I bring a huge spirit of play to the classroom. I think that the interplay of ideas, and I use that word equivocably, the interplay of ideas is where the classroom comes alive. So I had all these grand plans when I started teaching this past semester.

It was my first master's class here at JMU, but not my first graduate class. So I brought in all these plans and all these thoughts of what I was going to do. And then the students opened their mouths, and all of that went out the window for 15 weeks.

Like it just went completely, I jettisoned all of it, because they brought such heavy guns with them into the classroom with their theoretical sophistication, with how deep their reading was, that I didn't feel the need to prop up the classroom with artificially energized activities. Instead, I let them play with the ideas and the texts that we worked with together. And it was a really productive class.

It sounds, it sounds that way. It sounds that that's, that's sort of the deepest form of learning in my estimation. Particularly, I think about my own education and the things that I was able to as to use your term, play with, wrestle around with or to almost like you have Play-Doh.

Yes. And you're just throwing it around, you're taking parts of it and you're mashing it up and then you're saying, I don't like that and you're, you're, you're doing it again. And then you're saying, what do you think about what I've just done with this Play-Doh?

Exactly. And I think I've been dabbling in game scholarship. I'm a cultural, I'm a trained post-colonialist and a cultural studies practitioner by my training.

And I've found that play has been incredibly instrumental for me in terms of the research that I do, the way that I write, the way that I teach. It's, it's really fundamentally about, and I don't want it to be unserious. It's, it's, it's, you know, serious business seems to be the way that we think about our scholarship and our teaching.

And it has to be super serious. And I'm thinking absolutely not that sometimes productive play can produce incredibly deep insights, especially among students. If you get them excited and tell them, you know, this is a space in which you're able to take risks that don't necessarily have any punitive results behind them.

If you convince students that they are in a space in which they can experiment with their own ideas in a playful, generous way with themselves and with each other, they come up with some amazing ideas and they build enormous confidence. And I like to enjoin students take risks in their assignments. What I've been doing lately is, and it's all in the spirit of play, is I have been leaving students to their own devices in terms of proving what they know.

I have said, okay, so you can do a podcast, you can do an art piece, you can do music. And we're in English classroom, so the standard, you know, the Boggs standard essay is where a lot of them have lived for a long time. And so I tell them, now is your time to break bad.

You get to cut loose and do whatever it is your heart desires. As long as I get an expository essay that tells me how this course and the readings in it from this selected span have informed the choices that you have made. And I have gotten some wild stuff.

I have an oil painting in my office right now that one of my students created. And so I've used this approach ever since the pandemic started, really to kind of allow students to get out of their comfort zone when it comes to making knowledge, but also to give them a sense that an essay is not the only way that we produce and share knowledge in the discipline, that we produce and share knowledge every time you're writing fanfic, every time you're creating a web page, every time you're doing something with music, every time you're doing something with painting or with art, we are all creating something communal, we're creating something discursive. So as long as this thing that you're creating is in dialogue with the material that we've been covering, you're fine.

Just explain those choices to me so I understand them and I don't have to guess, and ground them in the, that ends up becoming a little bit more of a bog standard essay because you have to do the normal citation conventions, you have to be well organized, you have to use the language adeptly, those kinds of the things that result in, here's a grade I can assign for this assignment. But allowing the students to say, okay, I want to actually do a podcast, but it wasn't terribly successful, and I don't know that I can turn this in, and I'm going to turn it in and then just explain why you did what you did, and explain what didn't work well and what does work well. So what I do is I try to drain some of the risk out of the production of knowledge in the classroom, so they can focus on the knowledge and not on presentation as much, but also so they can really experiment wildly and come up with some really interesting things.

That would absolutely underpin a very unique quality. I don't know that I've ever, I'm pretty playful in the classroom. I am not as playful, particularly with assignments.

Now this is an undergrad, you're talking about a graduate class, yes?

I'm talking about both classes. I've done this at all levels.

Really?

All levels, it has always worked. Because what I've also asked them to do is a self-reflection. So they have to answer six, maybe five to six self-reflective questions about, what was the major question you brought to this course?

What did you hope to learn here? How does this assignment fit into your plans for what you intend to learn? Because in undergraduate classes, I have them plot out what they're going to be doing, so it's not just weird random stuff.

They're deciding at 11.30 at night before this thing is due. You know how students are, yes. So instead of having them wheel and deal on the fly, I have them commit to various forms early in the semester, although they can change their minds.

So after they have done the work of, here is this object I have created, here is this explanation for what's happened in the course that has enabled me to create this object, they then have to do a self-reflection, where what worked well, what would I do differently, had I the opportunity to do this over again, what did I learn by doing this, how well did this answer the questions that I brought with me to the course, all these kinds of, and I tell them to be honest, that I'm not going to be penalizing you for whatever it is that you tell me about your experience with this assignment.

And because we have this relatively low risk, these were low risk opportunities to really share meaningful things with each other, I find that those assignments are incredibly enlivening, even when they aren't as successful as they might be had the student had more time, better equipment, sometimes greater skill. I'm thinking about my painters and my other kinds of artists who always bemoan not being able to draw, even though they produce really interesting things, because their choices are really what matters.

That's where the learning ends up being exposed, is in why did you make those choices? So when I create my assignments, even as I'm responding to students, I try to infuse it with a bit of joy. Now, there is some seriousness, especially when you meet upon a problem where you have to give bad news, uncomfortable, unpleasant news, but I try to use those as opportunities to say, okay, well, not all is lost.

You have this and this and this remaining, and so this gives us an opportunity to retrench. Please come see me before you plot your next assignment so I can make sure that you're on the right path and that you're comfortable with what you actually will end up submitting. So the sense of diminishment of risk while also retaining rigor is really one of the major qualities that I try to bring to my teaching.

I'm going to do my very best to try to capture just maybe 5% of the play that you have in some of your assignments because I think that would enhance my teaching, to be very honest.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

So switching gears a little bit, to this point in your career, what are you most proud of?

Oh gosh. I am most proud of the vulgarity in my research. I have written some very disgusting things and they are the most joyous pieces of my scholarship, are some of the grossest things that I've ever written.

I like the, I'm really proud of the bravery that I have brought to my classroom. I'm very proud of the bravery that I brought to my other forms of leadership. I'm very proud of, but really it's my scholarship that I'm most proud of because it is incredibly deeply playful.

It informs my teaching. It's something that I hope to leave as the mark upon the world would be these grotesque little pieces of the tie, these play, you know, this play with Derrida, this work with digital play with, in really gross spaces doing gross things. I'm really, I really am proud of the fact that I have not shied away from anything.

That I have cultivated brave conversations with my work, that I have dared to go where most scholars probably should not go, and courted conversations that have been deeply uncomfortable. So that's really what I'm most proud of.

And I can sense that. I can sense your bravery, and I appreciate that.

Thank you.

So what drives you to continue growing and thriving in your role?

What drives me, more than 50% of my role right now is tending to the center. And so what drives me is the center's mission, and how it is energetically shared by everyone who's supported it. I'm thinking about all the faculty whose energy and time make the center successful.

I'm thinking about the students who engage the center and who take the minor, and who are involved in our internship programs. I think about all the different campus constituencies that have come together, all of our community partners. That's really what drives me to thrive in this role, is thinking about those incredibly productive engagements with all these different people, meeting new people.

I love that I've met so many new people, and that they all have these really elegant, interesting, fantastic ideas for various things that they want to do. I end up being more of a yes and person than perhaps is wise. I want to do all the things, but of course, one does not have all the time and energy in the world to do all the things, so I've got to be a bit more protective of my time and of certain forms of energy and also the resources that we have, but that's really what drives me, is all of these interconnecting interests and priorities that have shaped a really vibrant community around the center, and that's what I really hope to protect.

So talking about protecting and particularly protecting time, do you have boundaries, do you have balance between personal life and your faculty responsibilities, and how might you strike that balance?

I wish I did, I do not. I cannot fake the funk and lie and say that I have a balanced life. The center obsesses me, my teaching obsesses me.

I find myself in my downtime noodling and chewing and grinding on problems and challenges and meditating on successes. I find myself constantly thinking and problem solving. It's something that I'm really, really working hard on, is figuring out, like really what I've been doing lately is I've been establishing, okay, so on Saturday, my brain begins to boot down at about 5.30 in the afternoon on Fridays, and then on Saturdays and Sundays, I try to protect those days as days for being useless to the world, for being ornamental in the universe, for not having anything weighing on me or preying on me.

And so protecting my weekends has been really priority for me. I got in the habit starting in my dissertation phase, where I would spend my weeks doing all my work, and then on the weekends, I would take off. So, I think that that's actually introduced some kind of balance.

My challenge is going to be during the weekdays establishing balance and boundaries, where I'm not constantly cogitating. That is not a good answer.

No, it doesn't need to be. It's your answer.

It's definitely my answer.

That's why it's important. It's your answer.

I am working on balance. It is a task in progress, especially because JMU prizes balance as a major value. So that's something that I'm endeavoring to live up to, is the expectation and the hope for work-life balance.

I think all of us have something to learn for work-life balance.

I think we all do, but me especially. Oh, I'm definitely a work in progress.

So speaking of some of those, you talked about how you differentiate your weeks and your weekends. I do not do that good of a job of that. I need to get better at that.

But on those weekends, do you have hobbies or personal interests that help bring fresh energy into your role as a teacher, as a scholar, as a leader?

I'm a gamer.

A gamer?

I'm a gamer. I'm a PC gamer. I don't do consoles because I found that they're a little bit too rich for my blood.

But I really, and often a lot of console games get ported over to PC anyway, so I just have to be patient and wait. But I am a PC gamer, and building on and fiddling with my PC is something I like doing. I enjoy replacing parts in it.

I did a complete rebuild about a year and a half ago as one of my pandemic, well, actually, this is a little bit longer than that, as one of my pandemic passion projects, was I pretty much rebuilt the entire thing from scratch because I had to take it apart in order to do some major overhauls. But I also, I do play MMOs, so I find that the teamwork, oh, these are massive multi-player online games is really what I play.

Could you give an example? I have zero idea.

World of Warcraft, Destiny, Warframe. I dabbled in Warframe and Destiny and hated both of them. I know, I know, I know.

But I am a Warcraft player because of raiding, and this is really where I get a lot of my energy from. I don't care as much about loot. I don't care about character improvement.

I really don't care about any of those things. I care about the teamwork that we bring to beating bosses. I care about the teamwork that we bring to overcoming challenges.

That's really where my heart lives is with that kind of endeavor. And I have a lot of online friends. And lately, I've been working my way through the Yakuza franchise, which has been lots and lots of fun because I've been spinning off into a lot of the films and series that have surrounded that franchise.

So, I've been really digging on that sort of thing. But again, it goes back to the spirit of play. It goes back to using play as an approach to very difficult problems and solving them as a community.

I love that idea.

I just love games too. I love games. I love the rules.

I love stretching the rules. I love pressing against the boundaries of what games can do. My husband loves to mod games.

He's right now playing through Baldur's Gate 3 for the 15th time because he keeps playing with the mods. He's somebody that also gives me a lot of inspiration because he likes to use modification to stretch what games can do. He challenges me to stretch what play can do, to bring it into spheres where it doesn't belong, but where it absolutely is useful and absolutely is required.

So when I think about my hobbies, there's a small part of me that thinks, well, I'm a little bit up there in age, but so shouldn't I outgrow this kind of play? Should I not be a bit more mature in my pursuits? Like, shouldn't I go into gardening or knitting or patchwork quilting?

And I'm thinking absolutely not. This is a space of enormous creativity. It's a huge industry.

There's a lot to learn from it. And now I've started writing about it.

There you go. So, final question.

Yes.

If you could go back in time and meet yourself before your first day at JMU, what advice would you give yourself and why?

Oh my goodness. That's a great question. I would tell myself to love myself.

You are going to do some amazing things. You're going to do some challenging things. And it's going to feel hard at times, but it is always worth it.

So, I would tell myself to get out there and conquer, which is what I tell myself most mornings. I try to say every morning, get out there and conquer the world, girl, because it's right there for you. So, I think I would give myself that advice before my first day.

I think I would also tell myself to slow down before my first day here. Things take time. And I am not a patient person all the time.

And so, I need to cultivate more patience. So, I think I would tell myself that. I would think I would tell myself that this community that we have at JMU is enormously helpful, is very engaged in teamwork, is very supportive of all the things that you want to do.

So, don't be afraid to ask for help.

Wonderful. Today, we've been speaking with Dr. Delores Phillips. Thank you very much.