Cindy: Well, when we talk about teaching in the academy, often we say, "There are three parts to your academic life. You have to demonstrate scholarly excellence, teaching excellence, and service excellence. But--and I think that encourages us to compartmentalize teaching in a way that is false and misleading. Teaching and research and scholarship for me are mutually informing, right? And so when I think of this as dimensional--I think of these dimensions as part and parcel of the same kind of thing. I like to think of DMAC that way. I like to think that DMAC--that's one of the reasons in DMAC that we have people read theory and we have people talk about teaching, and have people engaged in making, and we have people engaged in the reflection on this making, and we have people talking about technologies and embodied content, material context.

Scott: We have people talk about activism, stuff that they are--you know, there's definitely relationships between their activism and their work in the academy. But we're getting people to talk about that dimension of stepping off of campus, and what's happening in my life outside of campus? And how am I pulling on some of the work that I do in the academy and bringing that to the community. And vice versa. We're always talking about going out to the community--I always want to talk about bringing the community back to the academy.

Cindy: So how can we talk about teaching alone? You know, unless we talk about it as intellectually informing and informed, as physically or embodied action, as community action? How can we talk about teaching on one level without talking about it three-dimensionally?

Scott: Everytime we often have to engage in these conversations, where the university really does want us to break it down into those three categories, and I've never had a conversation with anybody when we're being forced to think of those three categories where somebody doesn't stop and say, "Now wait, is that teaching? Or is that serv--"

Cindy: Yeah. Right.

Scott: Or is that research? You know, it happens every single time that those categories are imposed, when we're trying to have these really rich conversations about the powerful work that people do, and the university says, "Well, you know, compartmentalize it." It always breaks down.

Cindy: It's the categories and the compartments that are impoverished, not the action, not the making, not the doing, not the thinking about it. And I love the fact that in DMAC we can bring those things together. And we can spend lots of time discussing how they fit together and what the complexities are and how we deal with the complexities.