Building Service into Community Engagement
In many ways, I think about community engagement like professional networking. The first step of engagement resembles an initial exchange of business cards. College representatives assess prospective students’ needs and demonstrate what they have to offer in hopes of fostering a mutually beneficial relationship. Like professional networking, successful community engagement requires much more than this initial contact. For a relationship to be worthwhile, authenticity, trustworthiness, and likeability are just as important as shared priorities.
A sustainable enrollment strategy requires colleges to play the long game. Students’ willingness to invest in a college is proportionate to the college’s demonstrated investment in…
Fostering community in online classrooms
When I enrolled in an online graduate program, I was met with several raised eyebrows and questions about whether my degree would be respected by potential employers. This kind of skepticism has been prevalent since the earliest days of online learning. Attitudes towards online education are changing, though. Demand for online programs has been growing among graduate students and adult learners for several years, and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend. Undergraduate students are starting to follow suit as well.
During the height of the pandemic, 39% of incoming freshman said they would prefer to take all of their…
Implications for traumatized children
Honoring the Healing Power of Children
It is widely recognized that mental health can profoundly impact learning and academic success. The impact of trauma on mental health and academic performance is often framed in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Through this framework, we recognize that traumatized children may have unmet basic needs that directly impact their learning experiences.
A couple of misconceptions regarding the hierarchy of needs should be addressed here as well:
- Traumatized people cannot engage in higher-order thinking while their trauma is unresolved.
- Children are not yet capable of grappling with themes related to self-actualization or interpersonal belonging.
Why would you choose to run when you don’t have to? How is that fun?
I’ve been asked this question more times than I can count. Most runners have. Of course, it’s not for everyone. Some people don’t experience a runner’s high and benefit more from other types of activity. I’ve always adopted a “to each their own” attitude. I’m not interested in convincing people that they should love running. I am interested in addressing some common misconceptions about why people run, though. I’m also interested in encouraging new and prospective runners! I would urge anyone who’s remotely interested to…
Reflections from a professor who has been labeled both
We’re all at the mercy of our brain’s heuristics: the shortcuts that allow us to make sense of vast amounts of information. We ascribe labels to people as a short-hand way of understanding them. The trouble with labels isn’t always the labels themselves. It’s our inability to interrogate our own understanding of those labels. Here, I reflect on two common labels ascribed to students, labels that I intimately relate to, the “achiever” and the “troubled teen.”
The Achiever
For most of my secondary school life, I was a near caricature version of the “achiever.” I absolutely loved school. I took honors and…
Students face pressure to determine what they should do at the expense of exploring who they are.
The other night, I was reminiscing about college with my husband when he recalled (in much kinder words) my utter cluelessness about what to do after graduation. I had passions, a whole lot of them, but I had a limited sense of what I wanted to do with them. Someone recommended that I apply for a graduate program in clinical psychology. I had no idea whether I wanted to be a therapist, but I was accepted to the program and had no other plan, so I went.
The uncertainty and frustration I felt are far from unique. In my case…
