Farhad Dastur 1

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal (Unpublished)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/04

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’ve known each other for a very long time and you’ve mentioned me on and off for a very long time and I wanted to touch on a few topics. One was teaching, the next would be mentoring, and the third would be more recent for you which is fathering. When you engage an indoors classroom for teaching, what mindset are you taking into account?

Farhad Dastur: Great question! I think for me at this point in my life where I’ve been teaching for a good 20 years, I am much more interested in getting out of the way of the students and their journey of learning. What I mean by that is creating the conditions by which they will encounter ideas, challenging theories each other whatever the subject is, in whatever way we can experience different subjects; whether it’s experiential or intellectual or emotional. In doing so, creating many powerful opportunities by which that happens with me playing more of a sort of theatrical role behind the scenes like setting up the stage and the lighting, that kind of thing and letting the actors perform. There is a script, they all know what the story is but there’s also a large degree of improvisation involved and that’s a lot more fun for me as well. It’s a lot more interesting for me because students bring to every single situation history. They bring their personality, they’re bring their evolving understanding, their confusions, their anxieties, their brilliance, and their insights. 

When you have a very structured lesson plan that is being funneled through some techno medium like PowerPoint or whatever style of presentation you have, you don’t allow for that. There’s no breathing room because you’ve got your agenda, you’ve got your talking points, and you might say are there any questions or let’s have a 5-minute discussion or this kind of thing but that’s an impoverished way of tapping into the richness that is in every social educational context. So, in terms of my teaching and how I engage students, I think it’s very much about allowing freedom for thought to come into a safe space where people can have difficult discussions. There’s not going to be any violence; that’s what I mean by safe. You can talk about complex difficult issues; you may not have the best language or vocabulary or theoretical context to do so but that’s okay. Even Einstein said the most complex ideas in principle can be expressed in simple language. And then you sort of step back and you let that magic happen. So, that’s where I’m at right now. 

Jacobsen: If you take a difficult student, by which I mean a student who does not get a particular concept; how do you bridge that gap for them in that context, in a live context?

Dastur: That’s interesting. I mean I guess you have to you have to do a quick forensic analysis that’s where your experience as an educator comes in there. You see, when I say you step aside from that performative stage, I don’t mean that teaching is irrelevant and that students could just do online learning and self-directed; there’s a place for that, for sure.  I mean something more subtle and more sophisticated than that and that is to enhance their opportunities for encountering difficult ideas. So, the first analytical step when a student is showing you that they’re not getting something is to deconstruct what they’re not getting. Is it because they’ve encountered the difficult proposition idea or theory whatever, in a way that was confusing to them? Or they didn’t understand the language, they didn’t have enough preparation background context, etc. That’s when you might need to step in and provide that context and say this is what we mean, here’s some previous elements that are going to make sense of this. Then you would do some work on that or it could be that their lived experience is creating some kind of barrier to even meeting you halfway there because there’s emotional trauma and there’s ideological kind of uncertainty.  Let me give you an example, if someone is deeply profoundly religious, it’s going to be difficult talking about logical problems with the existence of an omniscient all loving God because they’re not ready to deconstruct your propositions yet in in terms of the logical discussion. They’re upset that you’re even challenging the notion that this can be done. And so how do you throw them into that deep water with the sharks? So, once you’ve understood what that individual’s barriers are then you have to kind of arrange for them to come to that place in a way that is more unique to their needs and understandings.

Jacobsen: What have you found to be the most difficult topic to teach or one of the topics?

Dastur: I think there’s probably categories of difficulty, these are different species. So, there’s difficulty in the sense of intellectually this is just a complicated thing to communicate and understand and wrap your head around. Other things are technically difficult. I’ve taught stats before and teaching things like the central limit theorem or what is standard deviation actually mean there’s a challenge there because again, you’ve got a lot of math phobia. So, you’ve got this baggage to even getting to that place and then you’ve got some technical language and a maybe they haven’t had good education up to that point in the tools needed to now deal with these types of concepts. So, I would say that it depends what course we’re talking about, what set of ideas we’re talking about. Probably the hardest thing to teach in general across all disciplines, and I hope this doesn’t sound too cliché, would be critical thinking because critical thinking isn’t one thing. It is an orientation, it is a set of attitudes, it’s probably a personality disposition and it’s a set of learned tools and a framework for thinking about ideas that most students have not encountered or they’ve encountered in an incredibly fragmented way. So, they don’t understand its power and its value and how to wield this intellectual weapon known as critical thinking. So, I would say that’s the difficult persistent problem for me as an educator.  

Jacobsen: Also, you have a background in evolutionary psychology. This also involves biological and evolutionary knowledge. How do you manage the transition of a student from a creationist, even a young earth creationist perspective, to an up-to-date modern evolutionary perspective?

Dastur: Wow! That’s one of the hardest because you’re talking about what Freud called challenges, different world views. You probably cannot challenge a person at that level and why would you want to anyway? So, it’s almost like you have to acknowledge that I’m not here to threaten the way you see the world but I would like you to suspend your disbelief, your animosity, whatever issues you have around even talking about this issue and just come into the water sort of wasty and meet me halfway there. Even if it’s so that you can sharpen your own arguments against this radical motion; by all means do so, but you may discover in that process that there have been some unquestioned assumptions in your world view that will force you to think more deeply about the cherished ideas that you have held. That’s not a bad thing. Even if you come away from this discussion with a deeper conviction about what you believed which ironically or paradoxically is often what happens when two people have a conversation coming from diametrically different world views. they come away with reified notions or beliefs in their original starting points. 

There’s a hardening of the categories but I think that’s often because we come at it confrontationally. So, there’s an agenda to change your opinion to show you you’re wrong through logical inconsistency, through the reductio ad absurdum type arguments of let’s follow your chain of reasoning to its extreme and this doesn’t change people’s opinion. It does the opposite and they try just as hard in sort of some kind of counteracting force to change you. So, we really need very different conversations where we start by saying look, I’m not here to change your mind but I’m curious about where there might be areas of overlap for, we might both agree on something. If we talk about evolution for example; can we agree that it appears that pretty much everything in nature has a purpose and that nothing’s random? A creationist would say, but that’s what I’ve been saying all along. But you’re the problem, you’re the one who’s saying everything’s random and then the evolutionist might say I’ve never said any everything’s random, I’ve always said things have a design. What I’ve said is where does design come from. Then the creationist will say well you say it comes from random genetic mutation and the evolutionist will say well I don’t say it only comes in there, I say that’s the starting point but then there’s selection and it’s a natural process, not a supernatural process.

So, I believe in purpose, I believe in design but I don’t believe it’s motivated by a single creative entity although I will agree that it could be. I just don’t believe it. I believe you can explain the creations that we see around us without resorting to that hypothesis as Pascal once said. And now you’re having a really interesting conversation where both sides realize they’re not 100% diametrically opposed to each other on every issue but there might be some fundamental disagreements about how we got there for those kinds of issues.

Jacobsen: There are online sites that have mixed possible outcomes or results in terms of this the interactions of students and professors. For instance, ratemyprofessor.com; do you think these are net benefit or net negative?

Dastur: I’m not going to be a politician and not answer your question by changing the subject but I would say that the inspiration for that type of evaluation which is very democratic in the sense that students can directly rate their professors without the administration of a university sanctioned evaluation system is very good. Why not, right? If that can provide useful feedback to future students as well as the instructor then that’s great. The problem is that very often doesn’t provide useful feedback. It becomes a place to vent there are errors, students will rate you for a course you’ve never taught before, they get the name wrong, the course wrong, and the range of evaluative components is very restrictive there. As far as I know, there been no reliability or validity sort of analyses of these sites where they’re asking questions that are capturing something real. They tend to be very simplistic in global ratings.

What I would like to see is a ratemyprofessor 2.0 which had the input of people with psychometric knowledge of faculty. What are the kinds of questions that if students were to rate you, would be meaningful to you? And how can we avoid the problem that the extreme ends of the distribution are the ones that are over represented? So, the people who love you and have this sort of unconditional regard for who you are and the way you teach and then the opposite of that; who can’t stand anything you’ve done and hate the class because of the subject or because of your hairstyle or something like that. And those are the ones that get over representative, is my sense, and the vast majority of the middle don’t. So, we need a better way of doing this but doing it we should.

Jacobsen: I want to transition a little bit into mentoring. So, you teach as well as mentor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University that is a local University in four locations; Surrey, Richmond, Langley and Cloverdale in British Columbia, Canada. If I take into account my own experience in mentoring with you, you go to great lengths to meet the person where they’re at. What is the importance of finding where that person’s coming from and building that bridge, meeting them where they’re at so to speak, to mentor them? 

Dastur: Well, this is the deepest kind of education and its historical model of the master and the apprentice. And I’m not a master as such but in that mentoring relationship, someone knows something more than someone on a specific topic. Otherwise, why are they talking to each other? But it’s much bigger than that. There is the content knowledge and methodological knowledge that you want to communicate in a very powerful and personal way that mentoring allows that other forms of education don’t allow but there’s a lot of kind of hidden or secret knowledge that is also communicated about the politics of science or academia or other social forces that also gets communicated how to solve problems; not in a strict problem solving sort of pathway but in a more nuanced psychologically, politically, sensitive way. That kind of stuff is golden. It accelerates the apprentices’ understanding of how disciplines work or domains of work. 

So, as an example, I was having a conversation with a faculty member from journalism and I’m in Psychology. She’s a newer faculty member and wanted to propose a degree change in her program and asked me what I thought about that and my sense was that the way universities operate is that they’re not motivated by good ideas primarily. You’d think that’s the way they would be but the but they are medieval structures with governance models that haven’t changed fundamentally in a thousand years. The Catholic church is a little bit older than University and for all their talk about innovation and student-centered learning and openness in terms of governance and the power structures and the disciplinary model that universities are based on, it’s exactly the opposite. So, my discussion with this faculty member was you should sit on certain key committees so that you understand how this place actually works, and it’s not just Kwantlen, it’s everywhere. So, when you propose this “good idea” you will understand the reasons why people are criticizing it or obstructing it. You will understand the quiet forms that the institution has developed to kill good ideas by sending them to further committee work for example or the sort of anti-aircraft gun flak that every good notion encounters such as budgetary constraints or doesn’t fit in with the mission or that’s not our disciplinary area, there’s a whole range of these types of attacks. 

So, you need to be more sophisticated and take the big picture and you don’t know that unless you have a mentor. This was taught to me at a quite early stage because I taught at an American University where on day one, they assigned me a mentor. Now, presumably they were doing it just so I had someone to talk to about where I could find the photocopy machine and that kind of thing but in our conversations, I also learned a lot about the politics of the department. That was very useful information in terms of thinking about would I like to work at this place? Should I apply here? Who are the rising stars? Who are the dying stars? Where was the department going broadly speaking, in terms of the institutional direction? and those types of things that you’re not going to find in any website, it’s not going to be in the library, there’s no memo, there’s no email sent out but that knowledge exists in the hallways. How do you get access to it?

Jacobsen: In a research setting, how do you guide a student from very little statistical and methodological knowledge to more?

Dastur: Well, this the fastest way to do that, is for them to take a good stats course and a good research methods course with an educator who knows how to communicate those technically difficult ideas in a powerful way. In our department we have some very good people who do that. I don’t take on that burden because that’s an entirely different path but what I do is I say so you now have taken this course, you’re familiar with these techniques and these the pros and cons of different research methodologies; what’s the power of a correlational study in relation to a quasi-experimental study or a case study? And which one are we going to use in our study and why? And could we do better than that? If we could do better than that, why aren’t we doing better? Is it some limitation of ethics, of finance, of time of equipment, of access to the population? 

So, the conversation I want to have and this is typically happened between me and my honor students, is you come up with the best research design which involves not only the methodology we’re going to use but the statistics and all of the other associated issues. Think about the research ethics, think about the constraints of your own program, of the amount of time you and I have together, of the funding we need, of where this is going, and how does this help the field, how does it help your career. Put all of that together and coming up with the best research design because if you don’t, I guarantee you there will be tears, there will be broken dreams, there will be gnashing of teeth down the road. You want to frontload those conversations and again that’s where mentorship helps because you can quickly guide the student to what are the problems with a certain approach. I mean if you want to find out if cell phones cause brain cancer because you’re holding the device to your ear, we could do a full experimental study but are we going to get approval to do that? No. So, you’re going to spend several months designing that study, putting forward a research ethics application it’s going to get shot down. So, what did you learn? Was there an easier way to learn that, that would have happened?

So, that’s the value of having the mentorship model in the context of a student who doesn’t have a lot of knowledge about stats research methods and also the broader social structures that are involved in getting research done.

Jacobsen: Given the broader social structures that are involved in Academia as well as the funding channels that are given to it within Canada, what do you think of the limitations of Academia?

Dastur: I think Academia is one of the most exciting things you can do with your life if that’s your vent, if that’s your passion, and if you understand what are the sacrifices you’re going to have to make and what are the constraints. If you if you get most of that, then by all means go all the way. I think a lot of students don’t have those conversations and so they do an undergraduate degree or maybe they do an honors program and then they decide to go to grad school because they’re excited about a subject and they want to study this and they’re going to research it and they’ve seen their professor and they’re like “Oh I’d like to teach these cool courses and have a lab and go to these conferences” Yes, that is part of what faculty do but there’s a lot of hidden things they do that you don’t see. There’s a lot of service committee work, there’s politics you’re dealing with, there’s the quiet preparation, the struggles that you are encountering in terms of your own ego in terms of your own struggle to be a better educator, a better researcher, finding your place within the hierarchy of the university and securing those funds, position, power, prestige, and all of that. That stuff doesn’t get communicated to students and that stuff is challenging stuff that may not fit with your personality and your goals.

No one ever tells you this stuff. A mentor might, which again coming back to the value of mentorship. So, the students see the good stuff but they don’t see the difficult and the long stuff. They don’t understand what does it mean to have completed 5 years of an undergraduate, maybe 6 or 7 years even these days with people who work, of an undergraduate degree and then do one or two years of a master’s and then seven years of a PhD and then maybe a postdoc. I know people who’ve done two postdocs and then you’re faced with precarious employment in terms of contract work, there’s not a lot of positions for full-time faculty members. Are you willing to move to get that sweet position? And then you’re playing the publish or perish game and that’s a lot to consider. You don’t want to be in your fourth year of a PhD program to go “I’m not sure this is the right path for me” So, there is real value in the faculty letting students know what is involved in this life; both good and bad.

Jacobsen: I want to move into the third topic mentioned at the outset which was fathering, as noted it’s a more recent topic for you. This is interesting because this is the day before your child is entering second grade. So, what has the experience been like in general?

Dastur: In general, it has been amazing. It has been transformative. It has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Now, the specifics also are consistent with that. I definitely recommend it for every man. I did it late, I was in my 40s and he’s an adopted son. He was three and a half when I first encountered him. He’s now seven, so he has spent literally half his life with me and he does have a biological father. I call him the genetic father and I’m the epigenetic father because the nurturing and the social context and all of the support that I provide him will influence his genes but also more than that, in terms of his development. That’s an awesome responsibility to know that this child is dependent on you in a very literal, biological, social way. He is dependent on you for food and shelter and protection but also in terms of love and affection, playtime, teaching them how the world works and teaching them good from bad, how to be polite and how to solve problems, how to deal with frustration and anxiety, and to role model that as well as giving them simple pathways by which they can achieve that and be successful and realize that they have efficacy in the world even as a little person. Also, how to get what they want in productive ways and that in fact sometimes you can’t get what you want or you can’t get what you want exactly when you want it.

Jacobsen: As a great philosopher said, “You can’t always GET what you want.”

Dastur: That too. So, I’ve learned more of about psychology in the last few years raising him than I learned in all of graduate school and it’s the most important deepest kind of psychology. It’s the psychology of encountering this other being that is simultaneously very deeply integrated with you in your life and dependent on you but is also their own little being. It’s a question of the tension between dependency and independency, I guess interdependency. It’s the tension between freedom and constraint. It’s the tension between letting them explore the world; both biological and social as well as their own internal world and providing guidance and constraints and limits for their own protection given where they are in their developmental journey. There’s no there’s no playbook for this other than the one that you encountered from your father or fathers in my case because I have a father and a stepfather or in some people’s cases maybe they had no father or maybe they had just a single mother or two mothers or all the different combinations and permutations. 

We do know what fatherhood feels like from our experience of being father and then from our observation of other friends who are at the same place in our lives or a little bit ahead perhaps but I find that fathers of older kids are a great resource for me because they might be a little bit simplistic sometimes because they will say well this is how your son is going to behave when he gets this age but what they’re really saying is this is what my experience was with my son or my daughter and this is how I handled it but nonetheless you look for those gems within the noise. So, in terms of where I am in my life, fatherhood is the perfect thing for me. It is testing me and drawing deep on all of my skills of patience and calmness and love and teaching and mentorship. All of that comes out in a very specific condensed intense process.

Jacobsen: You mentioned patience, calm, love, teaching, and mentorship. The first two which made me chuckle were the ones you mentioned first; patience and calmness. Can you give an example of a difficult situation that came up?

Dastur: Well, the example was yesterday. So, he’d had a great experience in the weekend with his cousins and I went to pick him up from his grandparents’ house. It’s a hot day, it’s evening time and I said we’re going to go to the beach in White Rock and we’re going to play on the sand and make sand castles and he had a little boat he just got and I said we can put it in the water and see what happens when the waves hit. He’s totally into tsunamis right now for some reason, he’s learning about them on National Geographic Kids and he’s fascinated with the destructive power of nature. So, I said, “Well, we can create a little tsunami and see what happens to the boat.” And normally, he’d be overjoyed with this prospect and yesterday he wasn’t. He said “No, I just want to go home.” So, you have to kind of do a quick analysis. It’s kind of like that earlier question what happens when you got the student who’s not getting something and it’s like okay, do you not want to go because you’re hungry? Do you not want to go because you’re too hot or too tired? Or because you’ve had a lot of change already and you just want something more stable and something known? Or you’re just being a little punk and you’re just saying no? Or you think it’s fun and it’s a game or there’s something you’d like to do first but then you would want to do that?

There’s a lot of reasons why a child says no to even good things. So, you got to do an assessment and you back down and say fine we’ll do whatever you want or you probe further. So, I said “Why not?” And he said, “ We always go to the beach” I said “Yeah, that’s right but you always have a good time when we go to the beach.” He got more belligerent and was like no, just very adamant that he didn’t want to go to the beach but couldn’t give me a reason why.  So, then you enter into a negotiation phase and I said, “Well, how about we just go for half an hour and if you don’t like it at the end of half an hour, we can come right back but I think you’re probably going to like it because there’s going to be some things you haven’t seen this time, like you’re going to look for some starfish” He was kind of grumpy about it, had to sort of pull him out of the car with a little bit of a crowbar and within 2 minutes on the beach he didn’t want to leave. Each parent understands the operating system of their own child and needs to know how far do you push something and when do you back down. When do you lose the battle because it’s okay to lose it because something else bigger or more important is going on and it’s a fascinating thing.

Jacobsen: For newer dads, what’s a tip for them? Something to expect and that they can prepare for it with this heuristic.

Dastur: Wow, I feel like I could probably write a book on this at this point. There are so many different ways to answer that question. I’d come back to the point that you got a chuckle out of which is to remain calm when you’re interacting with your child or any child and that’s because children are primarily experiencing the world and express themselves in emotional terms. Their volume switch may not be nuanced, so it could be fully on full loudness or nothing and if you’re not aware of your own buttons and your own ability to self-regulate, they can push you to an emotional space very quickly that you didn’t want to go and they can create a very bad interaction. So, if a child is having a meltdown, it is of no help for you then to have a meltdown. It doesn’t help the, it doesn’t help you and it’s embarrassing for everyone watching. 

So, that calmness does a number of things; it allows you to assess the situation and find multiple solutions in real time that will not be accessible to you if you’re losing it and that may not have occurred to you. This was a lesson I learned from martial artists who repeatedly say regardless of the school of martial arts, that if you’re in a critical encounter an aggressive incident with someone the most important thing is to remain focused, calm, breathe deeply, and assess the situation. Sometimes that means engaging in an aggressive way in a defensive way, sometimes it means walking away, and sometimes it means talking to yourself out of it but at least you have multiple options. When you’re in a rage situation, you have no options other than aggression or some kind of traumatic breakdown. So, this calmness will give you that flexibility of behavioral options but it will also role model to the child that you’re the adult and that there is a way to calmly talk about issues that you have. You don’t necessarily teach them that in the moment because they not prepared to learn that lesson but later you can go over what happened and say “What happened there? Why did you have that reaction? Is there a better way of getting what you want next time without having to do what you did?”

Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Farhad.

Dastur: Absolute pleasure.

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