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Rewriting the Stories That Hold Students Back · Higher Listenings

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I emphasize in the text is to the students is to help them overcome their own negative mindset.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that starts with the assumption that every single person who walks on a campus is complete and whole as they are.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: If a student can start with believing that they are whole and complete as they are, walking on a campus, and a professor can do the same thing, great, we're out of that deficit mindset.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_03: Every student brings invisible baggage to the classroom.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_03: Stories about what they're good at, what they're not, who they're supposed to be.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_03: But what if those stories are wrong or just incomplete?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: In this episode, we speak with Dr.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_03: Jeffrey Klossman, educator and author of Composing a College Career.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_03: Together we dig into how we can help students rewrite their internal narratives, moving from self-doubt to self-authorship.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_03: Because the stories students tell themselves don't just shape their success in higher education, but the impact they'll have far beyond it.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to Higher Listenings.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_03: So I want to give you a scenario.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_03: A student comes by your office for office hours, say, and they've been struggling, and they say, just not cut out for college.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think this is right for me.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: What's your gut response to something like that?
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_03: What story would you offer to them in return?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, I'm amazed they came to my office.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Students don't do office hours like they used to.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I've been becoming the students really struggling, right?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's why they showed up.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: So that's doubly unbly.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's the struggling ones who are struggling basically because you know they're not really connected.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I have had a student come in and say, I don't think I'm really cut out for this.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: I had a student who came in and he was very interested in sports therapy.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he's looking at the program, he knew it was going to take a bachelor's and a master's.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I just don't think I can sit in class that many hours.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: I go crazy sitting in class.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so he did something else.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: He got a job at HVAC and was really good, got promoted, started going to conferences and things and getting other credentials and that kind of thing.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he loves his career.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't that he wasn't cut out for college, but whatever college was offering at the time didn't fit who he was and what he needed.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I would just turn that around a little bit because that's kind of the deficit mindset thing we're talking about.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not cut out for college, suggests that there's something wrong with me.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't think so.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think actually maybe we're a little too narrow, or we just haven't found the fit because nothing wrong with going to an HVAC program at a tech college.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to do that and you find it's exciting to do, I think what we're talking about is how do we help people flourish?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: I I love that answer, Jeff.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking about my own experience.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: I was locked into a fast-tracked medical school six-year bed program.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it was really under the pressure of my family that I was there.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I knew very early in my first semester that I was on the wrong path, right?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it took years to break, to break through that dynamic with my parents.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: And when I did and ended up at a different institution studying what I wanted to study and pursuing philosophy as a path, I did flourish, right?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you can get them to that point of seeing that they should expect to flourish, and then deciding whether or not that's doable within the university environment or a different university environment or non-university, right?
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: So the advising, the coaching, the mentoring all starts to come in as really important components of an institution that cares for its students, and that students should be advised early to expect to flourish, and then they have to advocate for the resources, which is a very difficult thing for a 17 or 18-year-old to Yeah.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: One of the stories in the text struck me, was very similar to yours.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: I was a young woman, her parents were immigrants, but she started college and she was in a STEM field, and she chose it because she was convinced that her because her parents had worked so hard to get her there, she had to choose a career that would pay off and just did not do well, was not enjoying it, was struggling.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: She was in classes and she was saying, everybody seems to get this.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't get this, there's something wrong with me.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: But she took a course that kind of turned her on, it might have been cultural anthropology.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And she thought she remembered thinking, ah, I love this.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: If I could get my parents support, I would love to make this shift.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: They said, Study that.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: We don't care what you study, we just want you to, we just want you to have a wonderful life.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: And she remembers thinking that she said, if I just had my parents' support, I'd be able to do something.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: It turns out I did, she said.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And she switched her majors and just took off.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: But those family expectations, they really weigh on you.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And kind of what we're talking about already is just this power of story, whether it's the larger cultural story of college as economic remuneration, economic return, I guess, or it's our family stories about what we're supposed to do because of, et cetera, et cetera.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Or the kind of stories we get for through elementary school, middle school, high school.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: You're not good at math, or you're kind you're a jock, or you're et cetera, et cetera.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: You get these kinds of stories that are messages we've been told all of these years, and they add up.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And as I mentioned in the text, there, those stories are waiting for us before we even walk into the classroom.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: So the number of stories that are out there that are surround a person before they make a decision, and they're 18 years old, of course, they're not even aware that their stories are there.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Just so powerful here.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so one of the things I think you might say, I think Eric, you mentioned a commitment we could have is to help people become aware of the stories that are informing their decisions.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And once they become aware, agency automatically happens, I think.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: You can start to say, uh, maybe I'll try something else here.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think one thing universities have really gotten right in the last decade plus is really turning an eye towards systematically trying to help students to adapt and you know, kind of get into the community and the culture of higher ed more quickly.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: It started as a quick orientation, maybe a half day or full day orientation, get your IDE, find out where you eat, that kind of thing.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: But it's turned into a year-long programming and in first-year experience of one sort or another.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And your book is a vital part of that story for many campuses.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: Why is developing a community, developing a sense of belonging so critical to student success?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think there's two questions there embedded.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: First, why is belonging so critical?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think the research has shown that belonging is directly correlated with persistence and success, especially persistence when a person runs into a challenge, which they will, they'll run into some kind of a challenge.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: They feel they belong there, and belonging is a few components we can talk about here.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: They feel they belong there, they're going to get through that.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Without it, they're going to fall away.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: You got some kind of research project, you don't really know how to do it.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Do you go to the librarian and ask the question?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you feel like you belong on campus, yeah, you do.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: If you feel like you don't belong on campus, nah, I'll just tough it out.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: You walk onto the library and it's again a gigantic building, everybody's buzzing around, nobody wants to talk to you.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Do you push yourself out there to ask that tough question?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you feel like you don't belong on campus, no, you go tough it out yourself.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, the consequences are not as good.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it now such a long thing?
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think the shift in how higher education or college is measured.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: What does success mean for a college?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think in the last 20 years have become much more aware of the data on success rates, persistence rates, et cetera.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And administrators and faculty, everybody has at their fingertips very, very specific numbers for individual kind of groups of students.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: So if I wanted to know, for example, how many first generation students were successful in a STEM class in the evening, I could find out that number pretty quickly.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And with the call for greater accountability at colleges, we are trying to have greater success rates across the board, but especially for those demographics that have not been successful in the past.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we now know where we are missing.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: So on my campus, for example, Hispanic students have about a 68% lower success rate across the board than non-Hispanic students.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: We got to fix that somehow.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's, I think, where these first-year experience emphases come from.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: We want to make sure that we don't just cater to those traditional students who are going to be successful probably anyway.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: We got to get the ones we've been losing here.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: We do know that we've had a lot of these support systems in place for a lot of years, but they haven't been used by the people who needed them.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so, how can we get that, make that connection work?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that's part of that as well.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_03: What story do you think higher ed is telling itself about incoming students these days?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: I know you've described some of that as deficit thinking.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: That's higher ed's sort of response to that.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_03: So maybe you could unpack that term for us and give us some guidance on how we can actually recognize that as faculty when we've slipped into deficit thinking ourselves.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: At broader level, the deficit mindset's built in everywhere.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: That it's in grading.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's an A, and then there's everything else below it.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And everything else is less than.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And we have a hierarchy of degrees.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Engineering is up there, computer science is up there.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's in our placement processes.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: When students come on a campus, I was just on a campus, a big R1 just recently, and the students still had to take some kind of English placement test in which they were placed into beginning basic writing kind of class based on standard edited American English.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I visited one of the classes, and this guy had a 4.0 in high school and he was in a basic writing class.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's deficit thinking there.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Just because he didn't do well on this test at this one day, in this one way, puts him a couple of classes behind his cohort.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's everywhere.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: I've encountered faculty occasionally in my career who really seem to have that deeply ingrained.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: Bring me better students, right?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Any student failing is an indication of a lack, right?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: They're insufficiently prepared.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: So recognizing that this is everywhere and it's even built into some of the framework of university life, what do we replace that with?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: So suppose I recognize I'm listening to this podcast, I hear you speaking, I think, yes, I need to really rid myself of a deficit mindset and really come to my students differently.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: What's the replacement?
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I emphasize in the text is the students, is to help them overcome their own negative mindset.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that starts with the assumption that every single person who walks on a campus is as complete and whole as they are.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: We used to have remedial education, and we called it remedial education, a remedy for some kind of an illness.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: We've gotten rid of that term.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure we've gotten rid of the attitude that comes from the person you're talking about.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Send me better students.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's something wrong with them.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: So start with that belief that each person is complete and whole as they are.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Find out their strengths and build on their strengths.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: That takes a lot of time.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not sure it's possible necessarily with the large classes and the pressure that people are under, but that is the remedy for it.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I am going to use the word remedy here because I do think it's a, I think, I do think it's an illness to measure people by what they aren't, especially when they're students.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: I remember David Bartholomew, a writing professor all those years ago, saying something to say that they are unable to do something is simply to say that that's their they are our students.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: They can't do something because they're our students.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: They need to learn how to do it.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's what our job is.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: So if a student can start with believing that they are whole and complete as they are, walking on a campus, and a professor can do the same thing, great, we're out of that deficit mindset.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: But that's really difficult because students walk in with that belief as well.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they walk in with the belief that I'm not good at math.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not, you know, I don't I don't like to write, I'm not good at it, et cetera, et cetera.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: They walk, they get these stories with them, and they walk in with a deficit mindset themselves.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_03: So if I'm a faculty member and I want to help my student rewrite their internal narrative, how would you guide me on where to begin?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: What are the right sorts of questions that I should be thinking about or asking my students to help them reframe their experience and their approach to higher education?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: I knew this question was coming, and I think about this, and I imagine the professor that I talked with at one of the top head engage conferences, and he was teaching a class with 300 students a semester.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was a pre-med class.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, okay, if I had to answer that question for him, how does he do it with 300 students?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: I would say if he can find three minutes at the beginning of the semester to tell his story, how did he get there?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: How did he get there into the front of that classroom teaching that class?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: That story I think would be illuminating for a lot of people sitting in that classroom who don't feel they belong here.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: They realize, oh, that guy was not just born brilliant with a PhD hanging around his neck.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: He came through this kind of stuff and he ran into these kinds of problems and he got here.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: If he could take three minutes to tell that story, and maybe one of his gratitude could tell the same kind of thing about when they felt really unsure.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: How do they figure out how do they navigate this thing?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Ideally, they would then have the students talk to each other about it.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Where did you come from?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: What how are you feeling about this?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: How confident are you?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: How what's in your background?
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: What do your parents do?
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: What do your parents think about you taking these classes?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: If they can spend some time doing that, then it humanizes that situation.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: But if they instead walk in, sit down, start talking high-level chemistry or something, everybody's on alert.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: When you're on alert, you're not going to learn very much here.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: So if they can build that in, I know it takes a few minutes, but boy, I don't know.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: I would have appreciated that as a student going in.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is a theme Eric and I have heard from many of our guests that if you can have the courage to show some vulnerability to your students, just a little bit of that kind of story of your own struggle does so much good.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: I remember early in my career, I used to teach a section of my course was on animal rights and animal welfare, the morality of eating meat and so on.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: I had a student once ask me in class, did I eat meat?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I answered very honestly about my own struggle, that it's so connected to my family, that the food I was eating at the time were family recipes, but reminded me of my mother, time I spent in the kitchen.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's not easy to give all of that up because you've arrived at a moral judgment that it's the wrong thing to do.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: And just sharing that struggle in the way that I did it, I just saw a transformation in the classroom, just in terms of the way that they were situating themselves in this conversation.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: They were suddenly much more open to entertaining a struggle of their own, right?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think showing that sort of thing has surprising benefits without being inappropriately confessional.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: But as you say, there's always the tyranny of content is always guiding us away from those sorts of practices because we have material to cover.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: So why is this such an important thing to carve out five minutes for?
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: And what do you gain for that small sacrifice in content?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, I would want to follow up with something else.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's a wonderful story at Wired magazine a couple of years ago.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was about a black woman physicist at the University of Chicago.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: She was the only black woman of all the two undergrad students.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: And talk about a sense of not belonging.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: You walk into that, and every conference she's the only one.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Wonderful Wired story about her finding a mentor.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that turned out to be the person who had graduated University of Chicago in physics 20 years before.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: The first black woman to get a PhD in physics in future Chicago.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a magazine article that could be shared.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the kind of article that I would think people would want to read.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: So if you could follow up with that, some stories of real people in your field that might get the groups of students who we're talking about here.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: The second half is why is this so important?
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because we're trying to reach those students who don't feel like they belong.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're the ones who have traditionally fallen through the cracks or been excluded.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so telling our story is one thing, but having stories from diverse groups is even better.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where I want to extend it.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Another article, there's a black woman astrophysicist who talked about her challenges, and then she was told by a white professor that maybe this isn't in your field, and she believed him because she had doubts about herself.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: She did go back to school.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: She did go back and get her PhD in astrophysics.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: And she says in that article, she says it was a very different story.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: I sought out members, I sought out a community, and I sought out the resources of the campus.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I was very successful this time around.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: So why is it so important?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because without that, the parts of the population that we're trying to reach are not going to be reached.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: Those stories benefit all students too, because I think obviously you have certain some students who feel even more of a sense of imposter syndrome or they don't really belong there.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_03: But I would argue that most students, even in for in first year in particular, are finding their way.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_03: They're not comfortable, they don't have that sense of belonging.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: The first part of the text is, as I said, it's got 14 stories there.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: I interviewed about 16 people, talked to them about an hour or so, and created the story of the individual, how they went through school.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Every single person had a really interesting story about the challenges they faced and how they overcame them.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: In looking through them all, I was really surprised to find three themes that came up over and over again.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: That is, each person developed some mentor.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: It might have been a professor, it might have been the head of the math tutoring center, it might have been an uncle or an aunt of somebody, but just somebody who was there who could answer their questions.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Just talk to them without judgment, just like you can do that.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, give it a try.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Second thing is they found a sense of engagement.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: There was some little group on campus, someplace on campus where they went just once a week for an hour, even, like it was a badminton club, or it was uh student government, or it was working at the mass center, something.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: When they went in there, hey, how are you doing?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: And they chat and stuff, it's like they were home for a little bit here.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the third thing all of them found was a sense of purpose.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: At some point in their career, they realized I'm doing this for something more than just get this class.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: So a real clear example was a young woman from Sri Lanka.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: She had come to the States, was studying, she was young, didn't really know what she was studying.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: She was studying for just whatever reason.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then she took some environmental science class and something clicked for her.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: She said, I want to take this home.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: I want to make the lives of women in agriculture in Sri Lanka better than they are now.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because the women in Sri Lanka and agriculture have a tough time.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so she went off to a pretty high-level college and she went through some imposter syndrome there because she had come from like a two-year college.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: She transferred to might have been Sarah Lawrence or something like that.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: And she's sitting in class and suddenly she's got these 20, 30 page papers to write, and these other kids seem like they really know what they're doing, and she does not.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: And she remembered, I'm doing it for them.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing it for the women back home.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I would have pushed through this when I felt like quitting.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: So that sense of purpose, and I they're all the stories had a sense of purpose at some point.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: So purpose, mentors, and engagement, those three things create a sense of belonging.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_03: I love the purpose, that North Star, because I think what you're talking about is things are going to go off the rails, you're going to be in the trough of disillusionment at some point, all the work is going to hit, and you're going to wonder how am I going to get all this done?
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_03: And then to be able to take a step back and think, well, this is really why I'm here at the end of the day.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_03: I think that can get you through a lot of that hardship.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_03: So what are some of the questions?
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_03: Now, like I'm in your class, Jeffrey, and I've got my imposter syndrome.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not feeling that sense of belonging.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: So, what what questions would you put to me as a student to help me start to think differently about my internal narrative as a student?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: I used to do a workshop for faculty on belonging, and I'd ask people to tell their family history of higher of education.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't have to go back very far to find a generation which our grandparents, great-grandparents didn't finish elementary school.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: We don't go very far back for that.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it's pretty interesting how that reverberates because the next generation are encouraged to do something more, and then something more generally.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: I remember Carl Jung said something like this that the biggest influence on a child are the unlived lives of its parents.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: And boy, am I guilty of that.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: So for undergraduates who are only even aware of that, I would ask them, Where do you come from?
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Who are your people?
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: What are they telling you about this?
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: Tell one of the little stories.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: This was early in my career.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: I was teaching first-year writing class, and I had a student who sat in the very back of the room.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: We had two doors in the classroom, and she sat near one of the doors.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was clear she was ready to bolt.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: She was not a kid, she was her late 20s, early 30s, something like that.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I just made a point of walking around class and asking her name and stuff and kind of making sure she didn't run out of the classroom.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And after talking to her for a while over the next couple of weeks, it turns out she had not finished high school, had come back and gotten her high school equivalency, and this was her first college class, and she was scared to death.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: She had made six figures the year before as a commercial real estate agent.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: She was very successful, but she she felt uh incomplete.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: She wanted to try college.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: Her family dissuaded her.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was very clear they were on the uh that side of the cultural wars, which saw colleges as the elite and the enemy.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: And she told me that her decision to go back to college, to go to college was a betrayal of her family values.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Betrayal.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: And she had family members who didn't want to talk to her.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's an extreme.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: But an example of the kind of influence that our family's stories have on our on our students.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the first thing I'd ask students is where do you come from?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And how are those how are those family stories influencing you right now?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: So I get stressed out and anxious about something, I've got a presentation to do, or some kind of deliverable, and that negative self-talk comes into play that says, somehow you're gonna whiff on this, or it's not gonna work out, or you're gonna embarrass yourself.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_03: I'm wondering if there's anything else in terms of working with students to get them to think a little bit differently about correcting some of that self-talk that they have when they're struggling or muddling through those first weeks of attending a university.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Are you teeing this up for me, Eric?
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Did you do that on purpose?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm teeing it up a little bit, yeah.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Just by coincidence, the opening of every chapter of the textbook starts with some kind of a scenario which asks them to reflect upon an experience they've had, which demonstrates a strength they've had, some kind of experience they've had in which they've had some degree of success, and using that as a springboard to success in this new kind of experience here.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: That is if we talk about one of the terms I use to frame this whole thing is strength to strength.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: What strengths do you have?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: How do you translate these strengths to the new area?
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: So this is transfer of knowledge kind of stuff here.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: But strength to strength, what strengths do you have that will lend themselves to this?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then make those connections explicit because we know that we get a little bit anxious, a little bit fearful, the brain stops working, and we walk in feeling unmoored, maybe without a base.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: And okay, let's try.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's like jumping out of an airplane.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it doesn't be jumping out of an airplane, it's stepping from one stone to another stone.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, what is that stone you're stepping off of here?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: So start with what strengths do you already have and how can they translate to this other area?
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: But taking a moment to reflect upon that in a safe setting would be a good thing to do.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: So, as a faculty member, I don't have to be a practicing therapist.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: Your curiosity here really, as much as anything, and trying to encourage students toward a curiosity of their own and about themselves.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: What are you good at?
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: Surely you haven't made it this far by failing in every dimension of your life.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: You've got strengths.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: So let's think about those, right?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's not requiring a degree in psychology for me to ask that kind of question of a student, right?
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: To get them to find something as a strength that they can leverage to be successful in this course.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: This strikes me as just a dimension of being a caring instructor.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: If you care about your students, if you value their success, you could carve out a few minutes in class and back that up with some literature, some stories of students whose struggle might guide students to persevere, try to get to know them or invite them to get to know each other if you have too many to get to know personally, so that they have somebody who will see them and that they'll be forced to entertain the kinds of questions, the development of the narrative that you consult in the book as an important component of how they scaffold a successful college career, right?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Is to write this story of purpose, to find their community, to find their home away from home, right?
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: To be really deliberate about those sorts of things is a recipe for success for students.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: And as a faculty member, it's enough perhaps for me just to send them in that direction.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_03: But I want to pick up on something that's sort of the whole point of your book, I think, is creating self-awareness.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_03: Because a lot of times students probably, myself included, even in my day-to-day life, you just kind of roll into things, you're carried along by your emotion, you're not actually creating space to self-assess and to take a step back and actually think about how am I actually feeling right now?
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_03: What could I change about that?
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_03: Is there something that I could do to improve my situation?
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_03: It's all about agency at the end of the day.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_03: But if you don't, if you don't have that space to create that self-awareness, then we're just on the ride of experience.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_03: Whatever that happens to manifest in terms of how we're feeling or that sort of thing.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Athletes are told, keep the game in front of you.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, keep the game in front of you because once it's here, you're just reacting.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: You're not you're just reacting, you're not responding, you're reacting.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's just happening too fast.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, that little space, having it carved out for reflection.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think who said that?
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: Dewey said, We don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Again, the textbook's got some activities at the end of each chapter.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: And well, first of all, you know, make sure you understand the ideas that we've kicked around here.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: Then do some discovery.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: Go out and follow some other ideas that intrigue you, go learn something.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the last one is always what's your story?
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: What's your story?
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: When you think about this, etc., what did you believe in the past and what do you believe now?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: That kind of moment, just a reflection.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's no right answer to that, obviously.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: But that gives you a little space for some agency.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: You get to decide what you're going to do now.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to be written by the story, you get to write the story.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_03: Well, Jeff, thanks so much for being on Higher Listenings.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_03: It was a great conversation.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: Eric, Brad, it's just been a lot of fun.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: Hope we get to do this again sometime.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: Jeff, it was great to see you again.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: I really enjoyed our time at Engage and uh happy we had this chance to reconnect.
• 28:16
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