Episode 3: Emily Slusser
Dr. Emily Slusser, Professor and Chair of Child and Adolescent Development in the College of Education at SJSU, is an expert in early childhood education, developmental psychology, and cognitive science. In this episode, she discusses ways in which children learn early on in their lives and how she's applied that work to policy conversations and to the future of learning in higher education.
Episode Transcript
(upbeat music)
Vincent Del Casino: Hi there and welcome to The Accidental Geographer.My name is Vincent Del Casino and
I am the Accidental Geographer as well as the Provost and Senior Vice President for
Academic Affairs here at San José State University. Today I'm really excited to have
a conversation with Dr. Emily Slusser, Professor and Chair of Child and Adolescent
Development here in the College of Education. Dr. Slusser is an expert in early childhood
education, developmental psychology, and cognitive science. She's gonna talk about
all the ways in which children learn early on in their lives and how she's applied
that work to policy conversations as well as the future of learning in higher education.
So come along for the ride. This is gonna be a really great conversation.
(upbeat music)
Vincent Del Casino: All right, well great. Well thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation.
Emily Slusser: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Vincent Del Casino: So I always love to start in on sort of how you got to where you are and you have this background in psychology and cognitive science. So what got you interested in cognitive science, and really even for the audience, what is cognitive science? 'Cause we don't have a department of it, some places do. How did it become your interest area?
Emily Slusser: Oh yeah, fun. So I'll go all the way back to thinking about what degree I wanted to seek out when I was an undergrad. I was thinking about a lot of the different majors that you don't get a lot of access to in high school. So psychology being one of them and the field of education being another just really interesting areas that I could explore both on the practitioner level but also just theoretically. So psychology was my jam in undergrad. We had two different colleges with two different psychology programs, both called psychology but one was under the College of Social Ecology and one was under the College of Social Sciences. The one in social ecology was like counseling and clinical psychology and that was interesting but I found myself in the social sciences and studying cognitive development and cognitive science. So really how does the brain work and then how does that manifest in thinking? And I found myself modeling a lot of children's learning and kind of thinking about how children learn and how we can influence their learning environments and then also just how we can predict what they can learn from those environments using conceptual modeling.
Vincent Del Casino: Yeah, so that question, so you studied that all the way through and you're actually at Irvine?
Emily Slusser: Yes, the whole way through, yes.
Vincent Del Casino: So are you from Southern California?
Emily Slusser: No, I'm from here actually. So I came around full circle. When I went out to college I was really ready to kind of hit the road. I went out to Southern California, had a great time. I went into psychology, like I said, I minored in education and when I got done with my four year degree there was a question mark, what am I gonna do next? I was really interested in young children. I thought I could see myself as a preschool teacher and I told my parents that and they said, "No." (laughing) We didn't pay for your education or support you through these four years for you to go into a job that I wasn't really sure what they were referring to but it wasn't what they pictured for their daughter nor was it what they felt comfortable with as far as earning pay, the living wage moving forward. And they were absolutely right about that. So I took that desire to continue working with kids. I spent two years working in an educational outreach program, working with college students to pair them up with young children in the community, working on language and literacy skills. And in doing that I started kind of continuing to pursue the question of why. Why are we doing what we're doing? We have this curriculum, this standard curriculum that we're all implementing, it's great but why is it in place and how can we continue to revise it to make sure it's relevant to the communities we're serving today? So that then was the impetus for my graduate career in cognitive science. Again, thinking about how children learn but then how do we translate that to environments where we can be conducive to learning?
Vincent Del Casino: Yeah, no that's really interesting 'cause I see eventually in your trajectory as well is not just the cognitive science of children's learning but the policy implications of that as well that I wanna talk about in a little bit but I could almost map that trajectory onto that early experience then of working in this outreach environment and going what is going to work within the educational spaces, right?
Emily Slusser: Absolutely.
Vincent Del Casino: Yeah, so you get into children and you start focusing and this is my favorite word in all your papers, numerosities, 'cause I had never heard that word before.
Emily Slusser: Yeah, spell check always.
Vincent Del Casino: Yeah, I double check, but in that you're talking about and I actually read from your paper on the emergence of children's natural number concept. This notion that there's a bunch of research trying to understand individual number words from students but we often isolate numerosity at the quantitative dimension of interest but you're talking about the ways in which there's more complication than just all of a sudden they turn on a switch and they understand what numbers are.
Emily Slusser: Yes.
Vincent Del Casino: I think that's the gist, did I get that right?
Emily Slusser: Absolutely, there's so much going on as children are going through those first five or six years of life and kind of not only figuring out what the number word system is and what it does but they're actually creating a new conceptual resource when that non-human animal species don't have. We only get it through the cultural transmission of knowledge and we only do that through language. And so it's really kind of piecing apart what children understand about number and counting is a big part of it, but beyond just counting, do they know how counting works to represent number and even do they know what those individual number words in the count list mean? So what we find is that children will demonstrate what we think to be pretty impressive knowledge about the count system as early as 18 months, two years old, we can ask them how many is that and they will count for you pretty comprehensively. They've heard the count list before, they've seen it, they've sung it, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And so you think you're very impressed, my two year old knows this, they've got it down, but you might ask them a follow up question like how many are there? And their answer might be one, two, three, four, five, six, or it might be something like 15 or it might be something like three, but not necessarily indicating that they are using the count list and that routine to figure out how many number words or how many items are in that set. So that takes another two years or so. So as they go through that process, they're learning a lot of intermediate things along the way like one means one, it doesn't mean two. And one can only be referred to sets of one, it's not the size of the item that counts, it's the number of the items in the set that counts. So we're teasing all of that apart and kind of building a developmental trajectory within those two years that's far more nuanced than we would otherwise understand using typical assessments of children's knowledge.
Vincent Del Casino: Well, what's amazing about that, there's so many things that I wanna unpack here. The first is that numbers is a representational practice that demands language. That's the first interesting moment. Math is not pure in that sense from a learning perspective. But that second moment, and if you've had kids, you all see this, it's like, look how smart my kid is, they're so advanced. And what most studies have shown by six, seven years old, they've all caught up to each other because what you maybe, and this is now a question, what I perceive to be the advancement is actually more an ability to mimic sort of processes without the real depth of comprehension of what quantification means, for example.
Emily Slusser: Oh yeah, absolutely. So being able to demonstrate or perform is different than being able to demonstrate what you understand conceptually, yeah. So a lot of what we're trying to do is pull apart the performance demands from what we're hoping to understand underneath. But it's very difficult because the two worlds are as conflated as you just said. Math is not its own pure form or domain, but the two are actually inherently interlinked.
Vincent Del Casino: And what is that, that's so interesting, that question of that cognitive switch that starts to come on where they have to one, figure out that it's a representational system, and then two, what it represents and then process. That's a really complicated set of activities going on, right?
Emily Slusser: Yeah, and yet they're doing it all the time, right? And not always accurately, but they're learning through those trials and errors as well. And they just have so much input coming in through the language. One of the studies we did was just looking through transcripts of young children's language and just looking at how often they're exposed to number words and in what context. And you can see they're getting the input they need to make these inferences, but it certainly takes a while.
Vincent Del Casino: Did you find in any of your work sort of differentially in various contexts that children are exposed to these processes in different ways, maybe in families and communities and other places, and that has an impact on when they pick up this representational knowledge?
Emily Slusser: Yeah, I think the field is really picking up on that question. A lot of this work, early number knowledge, comes out of the Harvard and Yale labs. And initially they were surveying and testing a lot of the communities that were in that area. So we built a knowledge base on this sample, on this population. It's in recent years where we're trying to expand that population to get a sense of the variability across the continent, across the world, across different cultures and languages that they speak, because that can also influence their developmental trajectories. Where I find myself in all of that, I too am very interested in kind of the cross-cultural comparisons, but I also want to find myself in a position of facilitating, but not necessarily trying to expedite. So a lot of people will say, well, how do I speed these processes up? And I think more along the lines of how can we make experiences richer so that they have firmly grounded conceptual roots to build on when they get into school. So I hate to say it, because Piaget, we also want to move beyond some of these names that serve as fundamental in our area, but one of the things he did say is, to the American question, you want to speed up development, why would you want to? Why would you want to? So much is happening during this time, we want to understand development. It's not necessarily the end goal to speed it up.
Vincent Del Casino: Well, in fact, there are a lot of different parts of the world, Northern Europe,
other places where they, exactly that, and it pivots to probably some of your questions
around physical activity and play that I want to get to in a little bit. But I want
to segue off for just a second and try to understand this as well. So you ended up
in a child and adolescent development department, you're a trained psychologist. Was
that, I know your work is around education and children, but it was, being in a college
of education, what you kind of expected for yourself, or is that what you wanted,
or were you really looking like, why am I, should I be in a psychology program, like
I was at Irvine? So I'm kind of curious about that as well. Was it the work that attracted
you, or the more, the ways in which that might impact where you go as a professional?
Emily Slusser: That's a great question. And I knew you were going to ask it, the accidental geographer, and you found my kink in my trajectory, 'cause it was very psychology, cognitive science, at the same institution, for goodness sake. I was on a very specific track. And my post-doc was also in psychology as well. I came into the department of education in the child and adolescent development department. I just feel so lucky to have had the opportunity. Child and adolescent development, I think, is kind of where my home is because it bridges those two worlds. Many of us come from a psychology background, but it's the applied nature of the work that kind of brings us into the college of education, and into our department in particular. So not only in educational and formal educational context, obviously my world is a little bit in the early childhood, or very much in the early childhood area, and that then blends into early home experiences as well. So it's the context of education broadly defined, but that applied piece of it is where I find my home in child and adolescent development.
Vincent Del Casino: Yeah, and do you enjoy that? I imagine it's a pretty interdisciplinary environment because while you do tend to get people from psychology, I'm sure you get people from other fields, right, that join you in those conversations.
Emily Slusser: So neat, and I have to say coming in as a recent post-doc and really wanting to hit the ground running here, it was very humbling to work with my colleagues and listen to what they had built their careers around. They have so much knowledge to relay in a field that I wasn't studying. So it really felt like I was continuing to be challenged as a lifelong learner, and I love that, and I continue to love that. So I'm very happy I ended in the College of Education, but it's not necessarily where I thought myself to be.
Vincent Del Casino: Yeah, well, I mean, that is it. And I didn't even intend to pull on that thread that way, but it struck me as really interesting as I was digging back in about that experience, because what we tend to think that there are these clear trajectories, and then the questions that drive us may put us in different spaces. So following on that, it's clear as well that you have a real interest in the policy implications. There's a lot of debate out there right now on early childhood education, what role it played, California is sort of doubling down on it. Maybe it is a career that you could actually get paid in at some point where we would invest in the value that comes from that. How are you taking that kind of early work that you built out of your graduate and postdoc in your early career, and then started to think about the engaged work that would inform policy, or at least start to talk to policy makers? 'Cause it's clear you've been collecting data on how policy makers and others think about education.
Emily Slusser: Yeah, great question. I feel like that being in the College of Education has allowed me to kind of grow and thrive in these areas, and I finally feel ready. Like I said, when I first came here about 12 years ago, it was really interesting for me to put myself, even as a fly on the wall in some of these conversations, and learn how much expertise is already out there, not necessarily in academia, but among the practitioners who are at the table and advocating for the profession. Really early on, I learned how to convey that message to our students. I would love to relay the passion that I had for this line of work to our students, and get them excited about pursuing similar lines of work, but at the same time, I really needed to keep in mind that these students are gonna be graduating with a degree that's lining them up for potentially a minimum wage job. So the conversation turned to advocacy, of course, but also advocacy for yourself, for yourself in your role in the profession. And so I find that that's where I get really excited about this line of work and intersections with policy, because I do feel as though early childhood education is so incredibly important to our society. It seems like it's all happy bubble rainbow time, but like you said, it's very contentious. And it was interesting, my sister said, "How can it be contentious? "It's early childhood, everybody loves kids." But the fact is, there's a lot of questions about who should be paying for early childhood care and education, what it should look like, who should be regulating that space, and whether it should be regulated to that level. Because when we're doing that, we're increasing the educational requirements of the students who are then gonna be serving as practitioners in the field, but we don't have a safety net for them on the other end, we're not increasing their wages on the other end. So until we fix that problem, I feel like we all have a lot of effort in front of us.
Vincent Del Casino: Yeah, it seems to me that there's a legislative, hey, this is important, we know it. There's research out there now that shows us that actually all these complicated processes are going on. Wouldn't it be great to structure environments where children can be more intentional about that learning and then parents can be brought in? So it's an easy win to say we're gonna do it, but it's a much harder win to then make the actual economic investment that makes that a reality.
Emily Slusser: Absolutely, so I'm trying to help our students understand what some other opportunities are in that space, or if they start as a preschool teacher, what their opportunities for growth on that career ladder can look like. Because you can make a very strong impact in the field, but it can be hard to see beyond the teacher role in a career pipeline. But I think that there's a lot of promise and with interest, there's more funding, it's just hopefully they'll put the funding in the right spot to make sustainable change for these individuals.
Vincent Del Casino: And out of all this work, is this where the institute idea came from?
Emily Slusser: Absolutely, yeah. So about 2017, we were looking into early educator career pipelines, looking to bridge connections with our community college, supporting students while they're here, and then also as they graduate and go into graduate school or into the career of their choice. We got some funding from the Packard Foundation and it brought together some new faculty in our college. We hadn't really met before, we hadn't been working together, but we had a shared interest in early childhood. And a few of us just kept working together, generating new grants, and then ultimately a proposal for the Organized Research and Training Unit, our ORTU, which is now a CCS, center institute. It's an institute here at San Jose State. And three of us comprise kind of the leadership team, but the idea is to bring in a broader network of all of us who are interested in early childhood but from different perspectives and with different disciplines. So it's been a really amazing, fruitful, just inspiring kind of adventure to go on with my colleagues, and the interdisciplinary nature of that effort, I think is what makes it work so well. We all have kind of our areas of expertise, we lean on each other for that disciplinary expertise. And then we also have kind of our own strengths and work personalities, so it's a good team, and I think we're doing good things, and we're starting to get our name out there in a way that we feel like can be impactful at the state level and potentially broader.
Vincent Del Casino: That's awesome, and I notice, I mean, your work is very collaborative, you co-author a lot of work. How important is that to you, you know, to make sure that you're engaging with this diverse group of thinkers as you go about even developing the questions you wanna ask or the research agendas you wanna look at or even the policy questions you wanna be thinking about?
Emily Slusser: Oh yeah, the collaborative nature of the work, I think, is what keeps me going all the time, and whether it's with students or other faculty that I'm working with, the idea of bringing them into the process, I feel there's no doubt in my mind that it just makes it better. I remember as a graduate student feeling like I was on my own, I would write a draft, give it to my advisor, she'd give some comments, and then I'd have to rewrite. Ultimately, when it came down to co-authoring with her, we started to kind of work together in the same document, and that made me realize just how much power that kind of co-authorship can have. It wasn't just a me review and give you critiques and feedback, but we were both in that document, and I think that it's a kind of creating knowledge in real time, and I think that I've tried to carry that over with the students I work with, the EDD students, and their dissertation projects. We work very collaboratively on, I wanna make sure that it isn't just a passing back and forth of information,but we're in there together.
Vincent Del Casino: Yeah, when I first, we all do that, right? We were put in a box and say, figure it out, and do your thing, and it's anxiety-provoking, and it was really hard to figure out, and I think that's the best part of it, 'cause I was so nervous about it, and I was nervous about it, and I think that's the best part.
Emily Slusser: I think it's a lot of work to do, but I was nervous about it, and I think I had to do my half after my dissertation, 'cause my whole body was like, I couldn't even, you know, I was just turned upside down. My best work, personally, that I ever think I did, was all collaborative work, and the best piece is, I don't even know who wrote what, by the time it's done, it's just so exciting to see, I'm pretty sure.
Vincent Del Casino: Oh, I really, I picked up on that coming here. In our department, specifically and broadly, collaboration was key, and we built it into our RTB guidelines, like order of authorship and things like that. No rigid requirements, because we do want to celebrate our students as first authors, or we want to give new faculty the opportunities, so yeah, I absolutely agree, and here on campus, it's so productive. The collaborations keep you on track, as well.
Emily Slusser: Yeah, absolutely, you feel socially obligated.
Vincent Del Casino: You are obligated. You all of a sudden have kind of deadlines that you're working towards, so I think that's been really helpful.
Emily Slusser: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the, so you, I think you've organized some conferences and workshops out of the institute, and you also recently did a little paper, what, a little, I shouldn't say that, a paper on physical activity. Like, you're stretching yourselves in different ways, but what's interesting is, in that paper, you talk about some of the tensions around early childhood, and whether or not it's doing what is expected. There was a study out of Tennessee, apparently, that sort of demonstrated, well, it didn't do anything. - Right, the Tennessee study.
Vincent Del Casino: Right, so what should, and your argument is sort of, what should we do that's better such that it would work? So what should we do better so that it would work? I mean, I'm generally interested in that question.
Emily Slusser: Yeah, well, going back to the question you had before about kind of the tension in the field right now, there's new investments in early childhood education, and infant/toddler care, in fact, as well, and that's really, really important. We also have new investments in what the state is calling universal preschool, which is really the transitional kindergarten grade level kind of being added to the K-12 system, and that's interesting. It's a good solution to a problem that we had in place, which was before TK was only serving half of our four-year-old population. So obviously, it's a good idea to make sure that all of our four-year-olds are included in that population that can be served through transitional kindergarten. But what that is doing is taking the four-year-olds who would otherwise be served in a preschool or early childhood setting into the K-8, K-12 setting. So how do we make transitional kindergarten classrooms developmentally appropriate? How do we bring what we know is empirically sound best practice in early childhood, and make sure it's being implemented in the TK space? So this is kind of early phases of some of that project. I'll go back just a second to say and express my appreciation for the university. This is all part of a level-up project that we had funding from you all, and intramurally to kind of bring together a group of scholars, again, with that aligned interest in early childhood, but with different disciplinary expertise. So we have colleagues in sociology, math and statistics, special education, and in kinesiology. So obviously, with the kinesiologists involved, the idea of really focusing on physical activity in these spaces and starting to make a basis for comparison between what does it look like in an early childhood space and center, which we know tends to have more flexible schedules and learning environments, versus the TK setting, which tends to adopt from a kindergarten setting, which then is modeled off of the first grade setting. So how are those two environments different? At the same time, kind of digging into the literature, learning more about how physical activity has been demonstrated to be important for learning, and then modeling that in our practices. Well, and the whole debate even around play. So I became a teacher in the early 90s, you know, and then I moved into higher education, and, you know, Bush got an office, and No Child Was Left Behind, and, you know, the politics of knowledge acquisition and the core skills and reading and writing. But physical activity and the overlap also with play, because going back to your work on numbers, it is a playful space of trying -- when you're trying to figure something out, you need to play with it, you need to fail, you need to like learn, and how does that intersect, that question of play and downtime, are those kind of things within this larger debate? Yeah, in many ways we call play-based learning developmentally appropriate, and there's certainly a spectrum when it becomes, as children transition into a formal school environment, for example. But in the early years, play-based learning is exactly how they're learning best, because they are constructing the knowledge from the environments they're exposed to. So the idea is you give them an inherently rich environment to explore, and they will then follow their own instincts as they start to learn about their world. So making sure that the world is rich of not physical resources, but also social emotional resources, linguistic resources, cultural resources, having exposure is really what's going to make sure that the kids have what they need to build that knowledge base off of.
Vincent Del Casino: Well, it's really interesting. I have a colleague at Michigan who talks about gameful learning, and it's not fun, gameful. It's gameful in purpose of how one thinks about how you – and he does it, actually, with higher education students, and creating gameful environments, and how that works. I wish I had that as a child. Maybe I wouldn't have spent all my time sitting under the telephone in front of the principal's office, because I was kicked out of class constantly.
Emily Slusser: It's a huge problem. I mean, really, it's a funny story, but a lot of our kids are --early childhood suspension and expulsion rates are through the roof. We don't track them in the same way that we do in K-12, but kids are being displaced all the time, because they're not meeting those kinds of expectations that are not developmentally appropriate. So, yeah. So, we'll see how that then kind of relays into the K-12 system with TK as well. It's something to be concerned about. With physical activity in particular, the kids' motor drive is gonna be in play all during the school day. So, having expectations for them to sit longer than 20 minutes is gonna be challenging for a lot of kids. When I first got into teaching, I had a position. I was a student teacher in a first grade class, and realized we had to teach them kickball. And I realized, not only do they not know the rules, they don't know the motor functions really of how to move your leg to kick. Like, everything that I would have thought, because, you know, I played kickball through. You think you knew it from the beginning. All of that is learning. It's spatial reasoning. It's all this stuff going on. We don't -- I still don't know. And I would love your thoughts on this. Do we really have the research that shows how effective that kind of learning is to spatial reasoning, these other kinds of things that go on in early childhood development, or is this still nascent in some ways? I want to say it's still nascent, but it could be my own. I'm still digging into the literature a little bit more. So, it's been -- the literature that I'm drawing off of, in my contribution to this line of work, it really comes from the idea of embodied cognition, which is, if you move through those actions, and it can go back to the number of conversations we were having before, you're encoding that information in a different way, but it makes it more accessible because you've got it kind of encoded in many different ways. So, going back to the number of conversations, physically engaging with manipulatives, we know is very helpful, not only because you've got that physical activity involved, but also the visual representation. But we also -- with the number lines, for example, having students walk their way through a number line gives them a different sense of how they're evenly spaced across that distance, versus just seeing the representation in front of themselves. So, in my contribution to that line of work, I'm kind of building off of the embodied cognition, but there's also, of course, the idea that if you're given the opportunity to engage in physical activity, then you have an outlet for that kind of energy as well. So, then our colleagues in special education and kinesiology come in with their lines of work and kind of flesh out the whole story.
Vincent Del Casino: That's awesome. So, I could probably -- I would dig in this for hours, but I want to touch on your work also now in higher education because you've become part of our doctorate in education program. You've been engaging with that and you've done some work on understanding college students expectations. It seems like that's a pretty big leap professionally, like to go all of a sudden because it's a very different -- but in one of your papers through a more discerning led -- you write teaching is relational, right? And a classroom environment where students perceive their individual performance matters to the instructor and one in which they feel comfortable voicing their questions, opinions may serve as a protective factor. So, what got you into that work and what did you start to find from that experience? Does it parallel any of the work you've done in early childhood and how does that play into your work as a cognitive scientist?
Emily Slusser: Oh, yeah. Isn't that -- it's just so great everything comes together, right? Because I feel like my work started at the individual child level and then I've kind of rubber banded to go up to the systems level and through and through, you've got the students who are preparing to become the early childhood caregivers or the developmental scientists, the next generation of them. And so, that means that my work can cut through all of those different areas. And I'm happy to hear you say that it seems like a big shift because it was to focus on the college student versus the young children that they're serving. And it wasn't as obvious, I think, as a shift as a lot of people will come to think and, like, well, you're a professor, you're going to study your own students, especially in the college of education. But it was definitely a different line of work to pursue. I will give credit to my colleague who had the idea to look at this. And we were also looking at the role of peer educators in these contexts. And in that paper, just looking at the large course context, she and I, as instructors, both really enjoyed those large courses because there's an energy when students are present that is hard to mimic in the smaller course context. But we really wanted to make sure we were highlighting what was being effective in those contexts so that we can make it a mechanism for teaching that works for for more people. We should give a shout out to your colleague, which college Sylvia Branca, Sylvia Branca, who's in our department, also teaches in psychology.
Vincent Del Casino: Yeah, no, it's awesome. I think, again, that collaborative experience. But yeah, the higher education is a field. It is a whole field to study. It is very different. It has a different literature, different theories. But I love that you've taken the opportunity to be in this college of education to explore that, particularly with higher education students.
Emily Slusser: Right. Because I think it's a growth space. And again, I don't think we've we talk about our students a lot, but I don't think we've studied enough of really what all that learning is. And I love that this paper dug in a bit about actually also the opportunity and value of large lecture. It wasn't a they don't work. It was they can work. But there are things you have to really think about when you do this. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. I really appreciate you're reading it. Sometimes you feel like you're writing to to nobody. But in this case, we having the students that we worked with as a potential audience is also really a driving factor. So being involved in the process, contributing data and then understanding what's coming out of it at the other end. Sometimes these processes take so long that you don't always get to close the loop with your participants. But when you're working with them in these contexts, it's it's great to be able to put it back out there. And as chair of the department, that's one of the things I really enjoy doing is kind of pulling on the research our faculty are doing and letting our students know just how active they are in the field.
Vincent Del Casino: Yeah, no, it's fantastic. I could probably do this for another hour. I'm so much enjoyed reading your work. I appreciate your contributions. I love the ways in which you weave together that those theoretical questions of what they really mean, not just for the children that you're studying, but even for the professionals you're developing. So the contributions to the campus and to everyone is just amazing. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for letting me talk about what I love. I really appreciate it. And I really appreciate this whole initiative. Bringing faculty in to showcase their work is really important. So thank you. Yeah. Thanks so much. Yeah.
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