Teaching in Higher Ed
Teaching in Higher Ed
Bonni Stachowiak
Metaphors, Free Speech, and How We Learn with Barbara Oakley
49 minutes Posted Oct 16, 2025 at 12:00 pm.
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Show notes

Barbara Oakley shares about her course, Speak Freely, Think Critically, and gives practical advice about teaching on episode 592 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

Learning is hard. Your job as a professor, as a teacher, is to help make it understandable, to help make it easier.

If you look at free speech from a historical and neuroscientific perspective, you can get a much better sense of people’s motivations and the continuing patterns that we see through history of people being really pro free speech until it affects them.

-Barbara Oakley

Really intelligent people find it very hard to be flexible, to change their mind.

-Barbara Oakley

Learning is hard. Your job as a professor, as a teacher, is to help make it understandable, to help make it easier.

-Barbara Oakley