This article is more than 5 years old.

Opening Session and Keynote Address – Saturday, February 16^th 2008

I am very excited to have this opportunity to attend the First-Year Experience (FYE) conference, as a member of the Freshman Orientation Committee at WFU, and as the manager of the Technology@WFU, I know I will hear some new ideas for engaging first year students in the college experience. The conference was opened by M. Stuart Hunter, the Assistant Vice Provost and Executive Director of the Natural Resource Center for the First-Year Experience. She began by expressing all our concern for those involved in the recent University tragedies at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University as well as at other schools since the last conference in early 2007 and ended by announcing that almost 2000 people will be attending this 27^th FYE conference and introducing leaders from the institutions co-hosting the event.

Robert Corrigan, president of San Francisco State University and Robert Cooper, Associate Vice President of Undergraduate Studies at San Jose State University both welcomed us the conference. Robert Corrigan mentioned some of the things they were doing at San Francisco State to deal with so many freshmen on campus. Freshmen on campus is unusual and unexpected for SF state. The California university master plan in the 1970’s expected universities to be fed by the community college syste, but in recent years there has been a shift and this year, more students started at SF state than transferred. Robert Cooper stated that his school, like all schools, was trying to address the diverse needs of students in this day and age. Cooper also commented how no one model of FYE was right for every student and multiple formats were needed ranging from a first year seminar focus to group models that help students develop a support structure.

M. Stuart Hunter took the stage again and mentioned this is a very sharing and friendly conference. She made us all stop, turn around and meet someone we didn’t know. I met Quentin James from Furman U. who knows Connie Carson who just left WFU to work at Furman. Next, she introduced John N. Gardner, the Executive Director of the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. He announced if we were there looking for epiphanies about engaging students, we were in the right place!

The keynote speaker, Parker J. Palmer, founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal spoke on “How Meeting the Needs of First-Year Students Can Make Higher Education More Life-Giving For All.” After a glowing introduction by John Gardner, Palmer started by telling us his father’s aphorisms he would tell his children to start the day. One was that “the only difference between a rut and a grave is width;” another was “Today’s peacock is tomorrow’s feather duster.” He began discussing how the first-year experience is a time filled with the potential for success and calamity. We as staff, faculty and administrators need to be aware of the vulnerability of these students. He described them as canaries in the coal mine, saying that if we help the canaries we help everyone. He described our mission as one of “knowing, teaching and learning.” He then offered the word “hospitality” as the focus of his talk, not the standard idea of hospitality, but something deeper that would make students’ entry into college better a better experience. The first type of hospitality involves engaging students who feel intimidated and tuck away part of themselves. He went on to describe how they live in a parallel reality to the reality of faculty, staff and administrators, their social world where students feel more at ease. Palmer gave an example of going to where the students are. He described a VP for student life who put a “Lucy booth” (the doctor is in, from the Peanuts cartoon) in the student union. It took a while, but students started stopping by and discussing problems and offering suggestions to transform the University. He used the booth for over 15 years and found it a great way to hear the needs of students. Palmer believes people need permission to do what they want to do especially when it is awkward in nature. It is up to us to create environments that engage them and encourage them, it is not enough to just say it is hard and ignore it.

As an example of how to be hospitable and engage students Palmer told the story of Uri Treisman a math professor at Berkeley in the late 1970’s. He observed phenomenon that Asian Americans were learning math more rapidly that other students. He became an anthropologist among his students to find the root cause, and learned that if you got a snapshot of learning as they all left the classroom, everyone was about equal, but after they left, the Asian Americans students were engage in collaborative learning outside of class. He got funding to create hospitable spaces for all students to engage in collaborative learning outside of class. Here is a link to the article.

Next he described hospitality in terms of encouraging it in our students. He called it hospitality to otherness, saying that deepening people’s capacity to take seriously ideas that shake our reality is the key. We think of rigor coming from confrontation and competition, not hospitality. What constitutes rigor in a classroom setting? Concrete behaviors that question the content. Student don’t ask questions unless invited to. Honest questions make you vulnerable, but most questions are playing academic “hard ball,” showing the professor what you know. Learning to accept and hear diverse viewpoints, needs to be encouraged. Tony Bright and Barbara Schneider Carnegie Foundation did study of 1990s school reform in Chicago public schools. They found an unexpected variable called “relational trust.” If the school had high relational trust at beginning of 1990s it had a 5 in 7 chance of performing well. That differential around relational trust was there no matter how much money the school had. The hardest place to get relational trust was faculty to faculty. Palmer said we need a more hospitable way to accept a range of teaching techniques, methods, approaches and should avoid the “method dujour” approach that can create an inhospitable environment.

It was an interesting and thought provoking keynote address. I can’t wait to see what’s in store today!