Friday Fragments, September 3rd
More on "indoctrinating" students, a college that narrowly escaped closing, and a study showing it's people, not bots, who are best at creating relationships with students.
I’m fairly sure few of us are successfully indoctrinating our students into espousing any particular political views, given the plethora of “read the syllabus” memes and even coffee mugs available.
In Professors Indoctrinating Students, Brian Broome, author of Punch Me Up To the Gods, remarks on the futility of trying to indoctrinate students - or (more to the point) to prevent their intellectual explorations.
Far from being indoctrinated, most are just opening their eyes. Note to parents: When you send your kids away from home, many of their suspicions about your beliefs are confirmed. They become even more curious about the lives of people who are not like themselves despite your efforts to mold them into younger versions of yourselves. They are merely doing what young people have always done.
If you’re at all interested in following college mergers and closings, Beyond the Defense podcast’s most recent episode presents a study of Sweet Briar College’s brush with closure by Lili Leonard. Listen to the podcast here and read an interview with Sweet Briar’s president, Meredith Woo, here.
College Transition Program Study Stresses Importance of Validation: researchers looking at a multi-campus program designed to support low-income students found that "proactive advising” and “tailoring services to students' complex individual needs” were the keys to improving students’ sense of self-efficacy and belonging.
We found that students in our study succeeded because they were able to create a meaningful and trusting relationship with another human being on campus…And that person was able to connect them to a variety of supports to help build their confidence in ways that technology does not. A lot of what we found was more human than data. We’ve come to over-rely on tech and data as the solution in the student success movement to support students who traditionally have not done well in higher education
The article notes that these findings are in contrast to trends in student support services, which are increasingly relying on tech-mediated relationships, like bots that run online chats or auto-generated check-in texts.
Happy Reading!
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