David Arendale: Well, greetings, everyone.
This is David Arendale and I'm sharing
with you a recording of a webinar
which I conducted with
the New York College Learning
Skills Association in April.
What I want to try to share with you is what
it is that I've been learning about race,
the intersection with learning assistants,
and what are some lessons that might be useful.
One of the things I want to emphasize to you is
that I created a website in order
to be able to share a lot more resources
than I have time to do during our session today.
You see that located here,
that website is still going to
be active for the foreseeable future.
I highly encourage you to take a look at that website.
Frankly, half the value out of
the webinar is through things I
don't even have time to be able to share,
so I hope you consider checking that out then.
It's important to acknowledge,
where did I learn all of
these things that I have to share with you?
Well, first grew up up there
were people who taught me a lot and that
was my students who served as
my students in my global history course,
my undergraduate, my graduate teaching assistants,
they're located up there.
Also, we'll see a shout-out to
some of the NYCLA members who I'll have
an opportunity to share some of
the things that they wanted to
have about how they're already
implementing ideas that are inside of this webinar.
There's one group here,
I think it's really important to mention,
and that's this colleagues of color for social justice.
We'll see the website address for them coming up again.
If you end up going to the website,
as I showed you on the previous slide,
there's a link to that.
This is a group of more than 50 colleagues
of color from across
the United States who have been working with
me and giving me the opportunity to learn from them.
Also for us to collaborate together on
a number of really important publications,
and we're going to talk about those
coming up here in just a moment.
It's important to recognize
all the expertise inside of NYCLA and it's already
obvious from the conversations
I've had monitoring what was going
on during the chat room that
they have a lot of information to share.
This is a group that shared comments with me in
a really simple survey of how are
you already implementing in some way diversity,
equity, and inclusion in
your developmental level courses, your learning centers,
your tutoring programs, your small group,
study group programs like
supplemental instruction and such.
Well, these individuals had
some really valuable insights and
we're going to see them mentioned
as we go through this webinar.
There's also some other additional resources
that each one of the campuses inside of
New York have already implemented in order to help
the faculty and staff members to implement DEI.
This is just simply one website here from one of
the schools within the Syracuse University system.
That link to this website,
this link is in
that general resource web page
that I talked about on the very first slide.
In case we went by that all too quickly,
just make sure to either scroll
back to that first slide or
really be attentive to
the very last slide in the presentation webinar,
because I'll also have
that same link to all of these other resources.
Well, what we have here is what it is
that we're going to be trying to work on for today.
That is, we're going to be
looking at language a great deal.
You can see up there, we're going to start
off with DEI definitions,
so we have a working vocabulary.
Then we'll end up looking at a statement and it's
something that most campuses
probably already have done, but maybe not.
Maybe there'll be something new to learn from there.
Then we're going to take a look at
campus culture and find out what
is it that has an influence and
one of the things that I'll have to share with you,
the biggest threat to campus culture is racism,
so we'll end up talking about that coming up.
Then we'll end up taking a look at some more definitions.
This time we'll be focusing
on anti-racism, which would be,
what are actions that you
can take in order to battle racism?
Then we'll end up taking a look at some examples of
anti-racist behaviors and policies and
practices for you can
implement with your tutoring programs,
your small group learning programs,
the classroom or the learning center itself.
Then we'll finally finish up by looking
at what are some additional resources that you
might find helpful as you continue
to implement DEI inside of your program.
Obviously, there'll be a lot of conversation today
about how race intersects with our topic.
This is just simply a word cloud
and where's this come from?
Well, this one word cloud comes from a glossary of
anti-racism definitions that I'm
going to note here in just a second.
One of the things I thought was important as I
was thinking about this webinar was,
what is the work that's already been going on inside of
our learning assistance and
developmental education programs?
As you'll notice, I'll not end up reading all the words
on PowerPoint slides in case
I roll along a little too quickly,
hit the pause button.
But the things that I was thinking about was,
what programs that we manage?
Then I thought about, who are the students who were
serving who have little to no social capital?
I know what that's like.
I'm a first generation college student.
I had well intentioned parents,
but they really didn't know how to be able
to help me. I was really fortunate.
I was able to find resources
when I went to my undergraduate college.
But you think about how many students
don't have those kinds of
resources and
then that final bullet point down there at the bottom,
even though there's been some
really good work has been going on,
we all have an opportunity to
learn more in order to get better at what we're doing.
Let's go ahead and take a look at
the first element of our webinar,
which are DEI definitions.
Many of these and as I said,
this particular document here,
it's the color for social justice,
anti-racism, glossary for education and life.
The link is found there at that final website page.
You see this curious little icon here.
Whenever you see this on a page,
realize there's a web link to
this resource on that web page
that I was talking to you about.
Once again, I'm not going to take a look
at and read all the words,
but just simply wanted to focus on
three words and that was diversity.
What are we talking about? Well, we're talking about
the different personal and
group characteristics and there's
lots of those for a diverse population.
Then you see some of the examples here.
We've moved much beyond just simply
talking about the first element of race,
gender, and age,
but also the less obvious ones
and you can see a list of them that are all up here.
That is part of the richness,
which brings our campus
to a more rich learning environment.
But we got to have a space to where
students feel comfortable to be able to talk.
Also we have a learning environment
that's going to be conducive for them.
Equity. Well, it is really focused on equal outcomes.
That's the biggest move,
I think, in the language here.
It used to be a lot of emphasis talking about equality,
which means that the group or individuals have
the same resources or opportunities at the beginning.
Whenever you talk about equity
or looking at the outcomes,
what's happening at the far end?
I think about institutions over in Great Britain,
they actually measure whether
the diversity of the incoming class of students
is fairly well representative of
the students who are graduating and if it's not,
and if it's primarily
the dominant population are the ones that are graduating,
well, then the funding for
the institution can be reduced.
They really have taken this much
more seriously than here in the states.
Then the word inclusion.
Well, it's this word here talking about
a climate that fosters belonging,
respect, and value for everyone.
We're going to be talking about
particularly this word here belonging coming
up in just a moment because if
students don't have a sense of belonging,
then they're probably not going to do as well
in school and there's a higher likelihood
that they're going to switch majors to something
else or they're going to withdraw out of the institution.
Now let's go ahead and take a look at a DEI statement.
One of the things that I did is I
got really curious because it
seems like everyone is talking
about what is their DEI statement,
and you'll also notice
other words are being added to that as well.
But just for this webinar,
I'm just going to focus on DEI.
Well, what are the elements that go into them?
Well, they tend to have some of
a headline title that grabs your attention.
Something that's more than just simply the DEI statement,
it's like, what's the headline? What's the main point?
There's some vision statement inside of there.
There's some benchmarks.
The idea is that you got to keep it short.
You could end up taking
a look at your vision and your benchmarks,
well, that could end up being
many pages, which is not a bad thing.
That's part of a strategic plan
that is important to give guidance,
but you need to be able to
have something that is short in
length and also is very short on jargon.
Let me just give you an example of one here.
We are better together.
Where does this statement come from?
Well, it actually comes from
a variation of a statement that I was
drafting up for another group that I'm working
with in terms of some documents.
What I did is I tried to take
the elements from the title,
the vision statement, the benchmarks
and keeping it relatively short.
Well, this is what we came up with.
Our mission is to help students excel in learning,
embracing DEI is a necessary part of the culture.
The collective sum of our individual differences,
I thought that was really an important phrase there,
of our individual differences makes us stronger through
eliminating barriers and implementing
evidence-based best learning practices.
It's an ongoing process to enact a culture of
DEI within our schools that
identifies the barriers based on bias,
racism, organizational structures that support the same.
We foster a learning environment that
celebrates social justice and
inclusive learning which leads to
higher student achievement and personal success.
My question for you is,
how are you using those statements
inside of your learning center
or tutoring program or such?
Well, here's an example
from State University of New York at Plattsburgh.
This is what Karin is doing.
She ends up emphasizing this statement.
It isn't something that just appears
a single time in the annual report,
they talk about it on a monthly basis and they continue
to talk about their commitment to
DEI and anti-racist work.
It's more than just simply avoiding racism,
it is being anti-racist, which means,
are we creating a learning environment that is
conducive for no matter what your racial background is?
That's a really important statement.
My suggestion for you is to consider homework.
The deal is lots of us have DEI statements,
but where does it appear at?
Is it appearing on the wall of your learning center?
Is it in your syllabus?
Do you have it on bookmarks that you hand out?
How is it that you're making this
visible to your students?
Here is the second question,
and that is, who should be
involved in writing and revising it?
I don't have an answer for you on that,
that's a thought question.
Once again, two thought questions for you to consider.
Well, now let's go ahead and
take a look at campus culture.
We've looked at the words,
now we start looking at
the culture in which the students are learning or not.
What is it that we already know about campus culture?
Well, the student has an enormous number of
influencers and this is just a small example of that.
Actually, one of the best studies out there
was done by Alexander Aston,
what happens in college?
It actually dates back to research studies back in
the 1980s and 1990s and the national studies,
these involved hundreds of thousands
of students and they were
looking at hundreds of variables
that had an impact upon students.
Here are just a few. I just simply wanted to emphasize,
well, peer assisted learning and
tutoring programs can have such a big impact.
But also you see that
obviously the instructors have an impact.
But you think about all the other of these,
and this is just a small list because Alexander Aston
talked about how many variables
had an impact upon students in college.
It was 100 plus variables.
I just simply wanted to emphasize
this as we're talking about campus culture.
Campus culture, well, what is it?
Well, it is another way of talking about
a campus culture is what they call a moment of truth.
This actually goes back to some literature that came
out of the 1980s and 1990s about customer service.
This is the classic book and
I highly recommend it for you and think about
how you could apply this to
your learning center tutoring program
or inside of your classroom.
What they said was that customers,
because that's what their focus was.
This was a commercial application.
I'm just simply saying that we can make
an educational application of this.
A moment of truth is a specific event in
time whenever the student comes into
contact with some element of the college experience,
whether that be their experience
during a tutoring session,
what happened in a single class period,
what happened to them whenever
they were going through the bookstore,
what was their experience inside
of the residence halls, all of these.
Every single time that the student comes
into contact with one of these moments of truth,
they evaluate whether the price that they're paying,
either time or money equals or
exceeds the value of what they've been promised.
What's the result? Well,
if the negative experience is there,
they're going to be diminished
in their ability to learn as well,
and they're going to think about leaving the institution.
That's the reason why these moments of truth and the
issue about their moments and
it's accumulation of these moments
that has such a big impact upon students.
That's the reason why we'll see coming up here in
a couple of minutes the definition for microaggressions.
Well, it's the accumulation
of these microaggressions that can
lead students to basically see the institution,
the campus culture is racist.
One relationship can make the difference
for students about their connection
to the campus culture.
The thing that was really fascinating from
this research comes from the Noel Levitz people,
and that is that
it doesn't really make a difference who it is.
They could be their roommate,
they could be a classmate,
they could be an instructor, an advisor,
someone who works in the food service or somewhere else.
That's the reason why the campus culture
is impacted with so many variables on
the student and all of those things has
a pretty complex soup for
students to be immersed inside of.
It helps to explain part of the reason why
some students don't stay at
the institution because for them,
the cumulation of those moments of
truth are too negative to stay for.
Now, most of us probably have
seen or read things by Vincent Tinto,
or at least you've seen him cited in articles.
It's probably one of the most influential researchers
for helping to explain,
why do students drop out of college?
This is a real classic PowerPoint slide
that I have been using for decades and decades.
I used to do lots of presentations about
the supplemental instruction program,
and I shared with people who were listening about,
why was it that supplemental instruction was helpful?
There's lots of other programs that are
also helpful too, by the way.
But I oftentimes tended to focus up here at the top with
these about students are
having difficulty levels inside of their courses,
or what they see in the textbook,
what the professor is saying in the classroom,
and what they're understanding,
they don't end up relating to each other.
That's called incongruence.
If you have a lot of incongruence,
you may end up giving up.
That's the reason why Tinto
said for most students who are going to drop out,
they drop out within the first six weeks of
the academic semester of
their very first year in college.
They're making decisions, those moments of truth.
They're deciding whether or not this
is a good place for them to be at.
One of the things that I think that I overlooked too
much were these bottom three down here.
Difficulty making an adjustment to the campus culture.
They were being socially isolated,
they're really not interacting with others.
They're just staying inside of
their apartments or their residence hall rooms,
they're not really interacting
with other people on campus.
They're not being very involved
with other campus activities.
They're really isolated.
Also, they hang out with
a social group that really doesn't
have a priority for getting higher grades in classes.
Well, what I better understand is,
I need to think about all six of these themes up
here and understanding why it is
that students stay or they drop out.
Well, what is it that binds us together?
What's in the middle of this
here whenever you're talking about belonging?
During the webinar, I asked people to talk
about inside of a discussion group,
how is it that they developed a sense
of belonging for students and staff?
They talked about orientation programs,
they talked about coming into the school
two or three days early participating in activities.
It was interesting.
They said while there was lots of
activities for the students,
there weren't as many activities
for the faculty members,
and there was actually
no activities for the staff members.
They were just hired in and
they were just supposed to somehow meet
and to immerse themselves
in the campus culture and just treat it like a job,
and that would be sufficient.
What they pointed out was that
the faculty, the students, and the staff all need
to develop a sense of belonging.
They had a chance to talk
about that in their small group.
I talked about Vincent Tinto in a previous slide.
Well, here's a summary of what he's
been doing in the past two decades.
After spending the first part of his career
identifying the problem of students dropping out,
he started talking about solutions.
What he found was that if people don't see themselves as
members of a supportive community filled with students,
faculty, and staff and they don't value them,
well, they're not going to stay at the institution.
There's daily interactions that are going on.
There's a positive campus environment.
They perceive the college as
a welcoming and has a culture of inclusion.
Learning takes place in communities,
that's the reason why he talked
about it was so important to
have learning communities embedded in to courses,
particularly in the first two years of college and
also that the curriculum was relevant for them.
What we have found out from looking at
the research is that the biggest threat to belonging
is racism and that can either
be experienced with a single moment of truth.
All it takes is one statement by
the professor or one statement by another student.
That can be enough to lead students to
feel like they don't belong at the institution.
It's more than just the absence of racism,
it is something to where we are
creating an anti-racist environment that is
supportive of all students regardless of their
racial, cultural, diverse backgrounds.
The reason why I think this topic is so important is
because of the people
who are probably watching this video,
you probably run developmental level courses,
tutoring programs, peers study
group programs, or learning centers.
We're on the front lines of establishing
a positive and inviting campus culture.
Where the first contact points
were probably conversations are
taking place because there's
too many students who go into classrooms,
silently sit, take notes or not,
and then leave and never have
a conversation with anybody else.
That's the reason why that is
such a threat for students of not having a positive,
supportive environment or the way that
the teachers are teaching the course is not supportive.
There is a really important article which I'd
highly recommend for you to get and it's this one,
incentives and barriers to participation
in the PLTL learning working spaces,
and exploration of underrepresented student experiences.
This particular article found that when looking at
students of color who are
participating in a study group program,
they found out there was lots of
examples of it not being a helpful environment.
It was detrimental for these students.
While they were thankful that
the institution took the time to provide the resource,
it could have been better and it identifies
24 different practices that could be done
in order to make
that learning environment more supportive.
I highly recommend it.
It may cost you $35 to
download this if you can't get the article through
your inner library loan or
your library doesn't have
an electronic subscription to the journal,
but I highly recommend this for you.
Well, we've been talking about campus culture.
Now let's take a little deeper dive
into these anti-racism definitions,
and then we're going to be getting up in
the next point then is,
well, what's the solution?
How should we be behaving?
As I said for you,
two resources that are available through the website.
One of them is
anti-racist activities and policies
for student-led study groups.
It's about 35 pages long.
I had the privilege of working with
about a dozen colleagues of
color on developing this particular document,
and it's a practical way of looking at what
behaviors and policies should
guide a study group program.
Another thing that I'd highly
recommend that you maybe take a look at,
and that is the glossary itself and
it has 48 definitions.
The thing that I think is a little
unique about the contribution from
this group is that not
only do you have the definitions. There's lots.
If you do a quick Google search,
there's many anti-racism glossaries that are available.
The thing that is unique about this one is
that it provides examples and
some of them are really painful examples
that the co-authors of the glossary,
all of which were people and colleagues of color,
share about their own personal experience.
It was a painful document for
many of the co-authors to work on.
But I think it is really
helpful and I hope that you might take a look at that.
Well, as I said, there's 48 definitions.
I'm going to end up focusing on a couple of them.
One is anti-racism.
It's where you actively oppose racism by
advocating and taking action to change the education,
political, economic, or social life.
We're going to start talking about here now is,
what are some ways that we could actually
do something to make a difference?
Climate, structural racism.
But I'm going to have us take a look at
this definition here and that's microaggression.
Microaggressions, according to our group,
colleagues of color for social justice,
we looked at the professional literature and
we identified there's really
actually at least three manifestations
of microaggressions. Microassault is an explicit
racial derogative by verbal or nonverbal attack
meant to hurt, cursing another person,
using derogatory terms.
Then there's microinsults and
these are communications that are
rude and are insensitive and
demean a person's racial heritage or identity.
These are a little more subtle,
but they're still as painful
as negative and contribute to
a negative campus culture and
really leads to students
deciding whether or not to stay or not.
Microinvalidations, well, these are communications
that exclude, negate or nullify
the psychological thoughts,
feelings, or experiential reality of a person of color.
For an example, for here,
it's using so called jokes.
Well, they're not really jokes,
they really are racist statements.
But if the other person expresses it in
a sense of humor or with some laughter and say,
well, I was just joking.
Well, no, it's not.
The thing about microaggressions is
that they are cumulative.
Now, a single one is deadly,
but the accumulation of these over a lifetime.
I think that this is part of what I've been learning as
a white male is that
I don't experience microaggressions.
I either am not attentive enough to
what other people say to me or two,
it doesn't have the impact on
me because it's not something that's been cumulative.
I've not been living,
this is not a lived experience.
There's no way that I can know what it's like
to be a Black person in America.
I can read, I can listen.
I've learned a great deal from my colleagues.
I can read books,
watch movies, watch documentaries.
I can learn a lot more,
but I never can really know what it
means to have to deal with microaggressions.
That's the reason why I thought that was
an important concept I wanted to get
across in the webinar for people to think about,
well, what are examples of
microaggressions that you have witnessed?
Boy the discussion was really rich,
they talked about statements that were made,
attitudes of being demeaning towards other people,
being condescending towards other people.
Those things are deadly poisons
inside of the education environment.
Here in America, we're making progress,
but we have so much more to go through.
Once again, this was really
a rich discussion that occurred
amongst the members of NYCLA.
Well, now we've been talking about definitions.
Well, now we're finally up to,
okay, what is it
that we ought to be thinking about and doing?
Once again, another document that's available for you.
I have a 100 page document
that's available for you through the website.
This is a document that has embedded best practices of
anti-racist practices and policies into
an overall guide for what we
call course-based learning assistance.
It's a generic term for
small group discussion study group programs
like peer led team learning,
like structured learning assistants,
like supplemental instruction,
or you name your study group program.
These could be really helpful.
The thing that's important is that while
I may have served as editor of this thing,
it was 50 plus people,
colleagues across the United States who run
their own peer learning programs
contributed the practices that
are inside of this document.
I highly recommend that you check it out, and as I said,
we've inserted into this document
new anti-racist practices and policies.
Just to make sure that if you
take a look at this document,
it's not meant to judge existing programs.
It's to provide some guidance.
No one has enough time, money,
resources, you name it in order to implement everything.
So many people in our profession do more
than just run a tutoring program.
Chances are you're a good person,
you are a good program manager,
and you get rewarded at
your institution by being given more work to do.
It's the oddest thing we reward
people who are doing well by giving them
more without necessarily big increase in salary and
also not giving them more people
in time in order to be able to do it all.
Well, that's a webinar for another discussion.
But I just simply wanted to make sure
if you take a look at this document,
the expectation is that not
anyone would implement every single thing.
Consider it a menu book
and select menu items that makes sense for you.
Now, whenever I talk about examples,
I'm going to be drawing out of
this peer study group document,
and you'll see the words leader
and facilitator used often.
Well, this talk is intended
for all four of these groups down here.
Please just realize substitute other words
whenever you see some of the examples.
Well, it's important to have a mission and goals.
Well, the question is,
in the stated mission and goals for your program,
do you explicitly say that your goal is to equal
or exceed the institutional diversity in your program?
Also, are you talking with students of
various racial backgrounds to get
feedback from them and their concerns?
Then also, how are you integrating issues of race,
gender identity, sexual identity,
and all the rest inside?
This is just simply we're trying to get at,
are you making this a priority in your program?
Now, well, first of all,
let's give the example here from
Ulster County Community College.
They talk about how it's very explicit that
their academic support is
for all diverse student needs and challenges.
One of the things that I notice with
many of the people inside of NYCLA,
they talk about this diversity
here in terms of first generation,
neurolinguistic diversity, more than
just simply racial and gender and the rest.
It's expanding our vision of,
what does the word diverse really mean?
Now, after you end up setting all of these priorities for
serving a more diverse population, and in fact,
your goal is to service at
least if not exceed the diversity of your institution,
then you have to go and have to assess it.
That is, well, who's participating in
your program or in your class?
Are you measuring that by
gender identity and by race then?
We need to find out,
are we actually meeting
our objective that was off the previous one, then?
Then also, we're looking at
the immediate student outcomes.
Are we looking at
the students who participate in our programs?
Do you separate out the data by
gender identity and by race,
and are you seeing equal outcomes?
That's whenever you start talking about
equity because it's more than
just simply equality that
you offer a service for students.
The question is, is equity?
Are the different types
or categories or descriptions of students,
are they all achieving higher outcomes?
If we don't have them being served
and if their outcomes are not
equal to or maybe even
exceed that of the white population,
then that's a place for you to think.
Something is a mess.
There's much more inside of that 100 page document.
My goal here is I'm just simply trying
to give us some examples.
One of the questions was, not only,
how are you measuring diversity of students
served with whatever program that you're offering?
But the second question is
almost as important as the first one.
Well, who is it that sees this diversity report?
Who should see this?
Whenever I worked at
the University of Missouri, Kansas City,
I was responsible for a lot of
things other than supplemental instruction.
We had a really robust,
comprehensive learning center and each year,
we had an annual report.
That annual report went to the Vice Chancellor
of Academic Affairs, student affairs.
We also made that available to
the deans of the academic colleges that we served.
In addition to all of that,
we also had our own advisory board.
They would end up seeing that.
Now that's a way to help make yourself responsible to
a larger group that also gives you
the opportunity to go back to
these people and ask for resources.
Because you can't ask a program to
achieve some level of
outcome if you don't have the resources.
How is it that we're going to communicate
what it is that we're doing if
we're not making this information on
an annual basis available
to the big policymakers on campus?
Something else for you to consider.
In terms of the learning environment,
the questions are, and once again,
some of these are coming right out of
that research study that looked at the students of
color involved in that study group program,
the PLTL program which could have had been
a SI program or an SLA program or whatever.
I'm not picking on the PLTL people,
I'm just thankful that someone did
a really hard nosed qualitative research study
that asked students what was their experience.
Frankly, that's whenever you get to really some of
the best information about what's going on with students,
rather than always just simply looking
at it as a quantitative study that
looks at the average grades
received by different racial groups.
Well, what's actually get in there and ask
the students what their experience is.
Let me just give you some examples up here.
Leaders avoid, once again,
these are the study group leaders,
avoid words and behaviors that demonstrate
their own academic prowess and social capital.
It's really tempting for
these study group leaders to talk
about how smart they are.
They're in degree programs.
They all plan to be engineers,
doctors, scientists, and all the rest.
They talk about how they have a 4.0 GPA.
School is pretty easy for them.
Well, those things may all be true,
I have no doubt.
But the problem is,
whenever you end up talking about that,
you set up a real dichotomy between you as
the leader and the students who are
in your study group program who are struggling.
Because they start to think that there's something
wrong with them as students because they struggle.
Another one is,
what learning activities do you have
going on during your study group sessions?
The question is, is how do you handle
competitive learning activities which tend to be one
of the most popular things that goes on
during small group, study groups?
Is that there's competitions for solving
problems and then quickly going
on to the next problem and solving that,
and then somehow recognizing
people who get the correct answers the fastest.
You may even give them treats or something or other.
That happened at my institution.
We're not the only ones that would
hand out inexpensive candy to
people for their performance during study group sessions.
You can say, well, David,
you're being awful harsh on this.
The question comes down to,
what are we communicating to the students who
are struggling inside of the study group session?
Maybe they've struggled their whole time in life.
Now all of a sudden I've been thrown
into a place to where I'm
publicly shamed because I'm not
the one solving the problems the fastest.
How can we have competitions?
Well, we can have anonymous competitive activities.
What students told me was
they end up using something that was called Jamboard,
which is a free app and it
allows you to be able to have competitions,
but do so anonymously then.
Leaders are careful not to
send the message that the issues,
readings, materials, they're easy.
Well, that's going to be really
tough on students who find it difficult.
Remember one of the issues that Tinto talked about,
he talked about incongruence.
If I get some misspelled words,
please give me some grace on that.
That's part of what goes on with
incongruence because material is hard.
A plus students find it easy,
particularly for the introductory courses.
That's good for them.
But if you communicate
that message to everybody else inside the session,
you're trying to ram them through
with competitive activities,
you're telling them how smart you are up here.
We are communicating.
These are easy materials.
One of the very best things that you can
do as a study group leader, a tutor,
or an instructor is to
share your own challenges that you've had,
and also how you have struggled with course material.
The messy process that it takes to solve a problem.
I did this in my introductory global history course.
I would share with the students that my grades weren't so
hot coming out of high school and very well,
I might not have been admitted to
the University of Minnesota.
For me, I found it funny that I got into a place that
maybe wouldn't admit me as a student but
hired me as a professor.
Well, a lot happened
between coming out of high school and then
funny whenever I was selected to
come up here to the university.
But the issue is,
I'm talking to him about how I struggle.
The students love that whenever I talked about that.
I would talk about how I didn't know if I
really belonged in higher education or not.
A lot of our students have
that feeling that they don't belong,
that there's a sense that I'm waiting for disaster
to come as a student because I
really didn't know whether I really belonged here or not.
It's negative stereotyping of myself.
I am isolating myself from others
because I'm afraid to disclose what I don't know.
For an instructor who's willing to
be able to do these things,
you make your class much more accessible,
and the same thing can be done by our tutors.
Kathleen from State University in New York,
Genessee talked about how
she wanted to make her class more accessible.
After coming out of the
pandemic where it forced everyone to have Zoom,
she was going to add and continue to keep Zoom as
a resource that students
could join the class either in-person or through Zoom.
That's making a class more accessible for
students regardless of why
it is that they're choosing to make that.
I did the same thing in my history course,
I recorded all of
my class lectures and put them all up on the web.
In fact, if you wanted to see my class,
you can actually go to my website,
irndale.org and do a search for global history.
There's search boxes located everywhere and you can
actually see what my lectures look like.
I actually turned them into modules.
I found that students found it
more helpful if they could make a choice
on whether they were coming to
class or they were watching
it on video or whenever they had to miss class,
that they didn't simply have to
try to borrow someone else's lecture notes,
but rather they could, in a sense,
share the same experience,
even though they missed out on
the interactions with other students.
Well, they would be able to actually hear
me and see what it was that I was sharing.
Karin here talked about how we're
going to continue to work on
our blind spots and our respective privilege.
I think about that.
I finally understand what
white privilege is about better,
but we're all in,
as she talked about at her institution as the same goes.
At Nassau, David talked about
how he changed his curriculum to
make it more relevant and he
had more time to talk about issues of race,
gender, cultural poetics, cultural materialism,
disability studies to
the interpretation of literary text.
That's whenever you start
talking about something that is much
more about the diversity of students,
the way they think and that they interact them.
One of the discussion questions that I had, one was,
how can you make your class
more or make your study group sessions?
How can you provide for anonymous competitions?
There's also this question here and that is,
how can you display
academic humility during a class session,
whether it be tutoring,
small group discussion or an
actual classroom taught by an instructor?
How can you display humility?
As we have these discussion questions
as we go through this recording,
think about just hitting the Stop button and
thinking about that question
before you move on to the next one.
Well, this one is one
that really gets to the nitty gritty and that is,
what specific actions are you taking while
planning a session or during a session to combat racism?
Boy, I hope you'll hit the Pause button
and think about that because one of
the challenges is for
white faculty members or white study group or
tutors and particularly if they're
white males to think about this question here.
Now, if you are a student of color,
this one is a lot easier to deal with
because this is part of their lived experience.
But think about this on
basis of what we've talked about thus far.
Take a look at that glossary,
the anti-racism glossary for education and life,
and I think that that'll help give you more specifics
about what are the things that you need
to combat regarding racism,
about voice, about pacing of the class,
about your choice of words,
your choice of learning activities,
about how you handle students who may
make microaggressions inside of the class session.
Do you just let it slide or do you find a way to
intervene at that moment and say that was not acceptable?
That takes some real gumption for you as
the faculty member to not let the thing slide.
Well, once again, we're talking about
how do you interact inside of your class sessions,
study group sessions or whatever.
How is it that you move the group forward after
all students successfully solve the problem?
This was one of the biggest problems that I
found with supplemental instruction programs
because they were so tempted to get into
this competition and the leaders thought,
well, if they can experience as many problems
as possible within a 60 minute period,
that would be good for them.
Well, actually more is not better.
Actually less is better because we make sure that
everyone is going to solve the problem,
not only that you solve the problem,
but also you understand the process to solve.
I mean, this issue about finding the correct answer,
is so difficult because
it's so tempting for students to think,
that's what's supposed to be
happening during these tutoring sessions
and study group programs or you name the environment.
They think that finding lots of
right answers is the best thing. It's not.
It's really important to make sure that
everyone is working together.
Waiting requires that the leader has got to
read verbally and nonverbally what's
going on with the students inside the class.
But also, you don't want to embarrass students.
That's the reason why cutting down on
the number of problems that are being solved,
making sure that students are working
in small groups and that you rotate
those small groups because cliques can form inside of
study group programs where the same students
study together and they want to work together.
Well, you can't let them do that.
You got to rotate the groups up,
or else you're going to find
the students who are getting the B pluses and
As are working together in
smaller groups and then everybody else is struggling.
Well, we just can't allow them to do that.
Also, making sure that one or small group
of students dominate the conversation.
That's the reason why it's critical that the leader of
those groups rotates the voices,
put different students up at the marker board,
have them work in small groups.
If the same student wants to give
an answer the next
time that you have the discussion, say,
well, thanks, Ahmed or Frank or Linda,
you got to share last time.
Let's have someone else new this time share.
You just simply need to find a way to get
more voices and how is it you're
going to have more comfort inside of the sessions?
Well, you actually are going to need to have them working
in groups of two or three so
they can rehearse themselves before they're ever going to
feel comfortable in talking in front of a big group then.
Because nobody who is a struggling student wants to
publicly document that they get wrong answers.
We've got to make an environment that is safe and
supportive so that any student can participate them.
Once again, we had another discussion period
inside of the webinar.
How do we make sure everyone understands before you move
forward and also how do you
manage talkative participants then?
Make sure you have some answers for those before you go
to unpause your video in order to look at the next one.
What are we doing in terms of
the professional development of the leaders?
Well, there's lots of things up here.
We're doing probably a lot
more about cultural competence.
We can also talk about
discussions about race during the sessions.
We can end up doing lots of in-services.
One of the best things that I
would share with you is something we did
with our prayer learning program at
the University of Minnesota was reflection time.
Having all of our study group leaders
having blog postings that they had, these were private.
These were private blog postings that only I as the head
of the program would be able to
see and for me to respond to.
I would give them questions for them to reflect about.
One of those would be in terms of,
what's going on with students
who are struggling inside of your class?
What are you inside of your session?
What are you doing? What have you noticed about issues
of students interacting among
different racial groups inside of your group?
Getting the students to actually take time to
write is so important.
In fact, I learned that
finally inside of my history course,
I finally started converting some of
my more traditional ways of
assessing students and putting more writing in.
Students liked it.
But the key is,
if you're going to have reflections,
then whoever is reading
those have got to respond to them.
One of the worst things is for students
to think they have busy work and
they're just responding to a blog posting
and nobody ever gives them any reaction.
One of the things that I was able to do finally in
my last couple of years of teaching my history classes,
I moved to more reflection was that the
more that I gave them
feedback and the students told me said,
we haven't had the same experience
in some of our other classes and we like this.
We like getting more feedback because
we just don't know how we're doing.
This is an example of
professional development that's going on.
Chelsea is talking about
power dynamics inside of tutoring sessions.
I don't know all the detail
of what she means by power dynamics,
whether she's talking about
differences of race or is it gender identity?
I don't know, but what I do know is that she's taking
her training with her tutors to a much higher level.
Then Karin here was talking
about how important it was for her to take
everything that she's learning
inside of all of these diversity,
cultural competence, professional development sessions.
She's conceptualizing, how is
it that we're taking that and
then how am I infusing that
into my peer tutoring program?
In terms of the leadership of the program,
whether it'd be the tutoring program
or the study group program,
the question comes down to,
who picks the leaders
of the tutoring and the study groups?
That is the program administrator has got to make
the final decision, not faculty members.
Now, faculty can recommend
students and we're going to see a couple of slides here.
This is probably some of the more uncomfortable material
inside of this because it's making
a basic challenge that
faculty members are not always the best judges
for who ought to be tutors
and we'll see why here coming up in a second.
We've got to make sure that
the program administrator is
making those final decisions.
Faculty, they can nominate and they can recommend.
But you just can't let them make the final selections.
A discussion question was,
what are the desirable traits that you want to
look for whenever you're hiring
a new study group facilitator or tutor?
Just stop for a moment if you
like before we go to the next couple of slides.
Once again, here's a slide with a lot of words on it.
I'm not going to read all of those here.
But it's talking about,
what are some of the things that you'd like to see in
an ideal tutor or small group discussion leader?
Well, this is the stuff that
we started training people at
the National Training Center
in Kansas City for supplemental instruction.
We said it isn't always an A student,
it can be a B level student.
Oftentimes we want students that have had to face
challenges and has patience
to help other students be successful.
Then you see all the other items that are here.
It is not that they are miniature professors,
they're not teaching assistants.
But you can see some of the other things,
it's also important down here that the facilitators need
to reflect or exceed
the demographics of the student body.
It's too easy for
instructors to always select
the A or the A plus students.
They tend to select students who
sit on the front row of the classroom,
they tend to pick people who they've had
conversations with and these A or A plus students,
they tend to be the ones that go down and see
the professor and talk before,
during, and after,
and they also show up at their instructor office hours.
Often they share the exact same demographic background.
There's nothing wrong with these students,
please make sure that you understand what I'm saying.
But there's other issues that I think are
more important for creating
a positive learning environment for
all students inside of the class,
regardless of their racial background,
regardless of their level of academic preparation.
Once again, I could have used
this slide here by Chelsea in another place,
but I was just really thinking about this one is on
how widely she sees the issue of diversity.
I thought that that was really
a growth area that I think
the field has moved in a great deal.
That's been really good.
I just thought that I would just place that one there.
In terms of there's
a whole section inside of
the guide that talks about ethics,
opportunity, diversity, and inclusion.
Basically, what I was trying to get across,
and this is what the team was trying to build is that,
what is it that we're
doing in order to make sure that we're
portraying diversity and
all the materials that we're using?
We're also asking for our facilitators to also
learn a little bit of information
about their students in the class.
That could be a survey that you hand
out on the very first day of class.
Maybe the questions could be,
are you the first generation in
your family to go to college?
Or what are your sports background?
What are your college interests?
It's somehow trying to help set up a bridge between
you as the instructor
or the study group leader or the tutor,
how are we developing a bridge
between you and the students?
That was part. Once again,
this guide is 100 plus pages.
We're talking about
well over probably 150-200 suggestions
of things that you could do with your program.
At Niagara, a Sharon talked
about how she did
something that moved even further along.
Not only was she making sure that
her writing course materials at authors of
color and also that she
prompted thoughtful discussions about race in class.
That's whenever you really have embraced DEI and
you are really trying to
make a more inclusive classroom environment.
It's not enough just to pick stuff that's by authors,
but also what is the substance
of your conversation inside the class?
Then that finally gets us to our last point up here,
which are, what are some resources that are out there?
Let me just give you a couple of
thoughts and I'm going to identify
a place for you to find some more resources.
I have a number of social media channels, davidmedia.org.
I got podcasts, YouTube channels.
You're probably watching this on
a YouTube channel, no doubt.
There are a couple of podcasts.
I think one of them you would
find really helpful if you work with
tutoring programs and with
small group discussion programs like
supplemental instruction or PLTL
or any of the other ones that are out there.
These are 10 minute interviews with study group leaders.
I have five or six generic questions that I ask,
and then I just sit back and listen to
these really smart study group leaders
say how they process the material,
what challenges they found with the course,
what is it that they're doing
specifically during their sessions to
make the sessions more accessible for all the students?
They also share, what is it that they are
learning personally from this experience?
Then they finish up with a suggestion for
study group leaders and for
program managers based on their experience.
I think I find it a lot of
fun to interview these really sharp people,
they are from Australia,
Canada, and the United States.
Eventually, when I finally get done,
we'll finally be up to 20 colleges.
We're talking about a lot of episodes,
and I know of one program that
actually assigns individual episodes,
a couple of them, not all of them,
but a couple of them as
homework for her study group program,
and then ask the students to reflect about
that interview and a blog posting.
That's a way to in a meaningful way integrate
something like this into her training program
because she thought that particular discussion
or that particular interview with
that student revealed some really good material
and good suggestions for her tutors then.
One of my favorite little quotations here,
two of them from Yoda, from Star Wars.
I really think they're actually pretty profound
and that is making a commitment to change.
It isn't that we're trying to,
but we do and we aren't going to do it all.
That's the reason why you have
that second one down there at the bottom.
The greatest teacher is,
failure is, and that's true.
I think about all of the failures of myself,
all of the things that I think about,
how I could have done things differently in
study group management programs,
about how I top my own history course.
At some point, you think about what is it that happened
and then deal with the failure or deal with the fail.
Because a fail is not the same thing as a failure.
I'm working on a reflective publication on that.
I'm told that college students,
this is a really big issue about
whenever things don't turn out
the way that they want them to,
they get a bad grade,
they have a bad experience.
They see this as evidence that they're a failure.
It's a characteristic about who they are rather
than just simply an event and a fail,
and we can learn from
that and then not fail in the future.
Well, I'm just reflecting a little bit on my own here,
I guess for you.
As we are finishing up here on the video,
what are two things that you might
do differently based off of today's material.
I would highly encourage you to go to the website,
which is this one right here,
www.arendale.org/2022-NYCLSA
and there is
a treasure trove of material by other people.
It's not me, it's the resources of others.
There's my own personal website if you want to
see all of my resources for peer study group programs.
Well, there's the website for that.
I'm serious whenever I give you
my email and that's my cell phone number here.
I get calls from insurance companies,
you name it, salespeople throughout the day.
They're all trying to do
their job and they're out cold calling.
Well, I'd much rather talk with
you and see what I could learn
from you and your lived experience on this topic.
I have so much more to learn.
I'm always nervous about doing these talks,
but I hope that it
fosters you to think about it more deeply
and I would love to read
about and hear about what you're doing.
Thank you for listening to
the video today and let's keep up the conversation.
Take good care. Bye-bye.