Kristen Renn:
I started thinking like, what if instead of the book on college students, United States, what if we, we started with who are not yet college students in the next day, right. And then ask, why is that like, what, what are we constructed that keeps it out? Or like, if we started from indigenous epistemologies to come seriously, what if we framed policy and curriculum through them instead of those beings. So like who are not, and then why is, why have we created a system that makes that, so yeah, we do my syllabus now.

Raechele Pope:
Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs Now. The online learning community for student affairs educators, I’m your host, Raechele Pope. Student Affairs Now is the premier podcast and learning community for south dozens of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education in student affairs. We hope you’ll find these conversations make a contribution to the sealed and are restorative to the profession. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays and find us at studentaffairsnow.com on YouTube or anywhere that you listen to podcasts.

Raechele Pope:
Today’s episode is sponsored by Everfi. How will your institution rise to reach today’s socially conscious generation? These students rate commitments to safety, well-being, and inclusion as important as academics and extracurriculars. It’s time to reimagine the work of student affairs as an
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Raechele Pope:
Stylus is proud to be a sponsor for the Student Affairs NOW podcast. Browse their Student Affairs, Diversity, and Professional Development titles at styluspub.com. Use promo code SANOW for 30% off all books, plus free shipping. You can also find Stylus on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter at @Styluspub.

Raechele Pope:
As I mentioned, I’m your host, Raechele Pope. My pronouns are she her hers and I’m broadcasting from Williamsville New York, near the campus of the University of Buffalo, where I serve as the associate Dean of faculty and student affairs and the unit diversity officer for the graduate school of education. I’m also an associate professor in the higher education and student affairs program. UB, is situated on the unseated ancestral Homeland of the Haud and the Shawnee people today. I am thrilled to have Kris Renn and Robert Reason as my guest today. Both Kris and Bob are consummate scholars and long time student affairs leaders and mentors. Kris Bob, thank you for joining me today for this episode of student affairs live and welcome to the podcast. Hey, can you get by telling us a bit about you, your current role on campus, a bit about your professional pathways, maybe a brief version of your student affairs, origin stories and the work you currently do.

Kristen Renn:
Sure. I’ll go ahead and get started. My name is Kristen Renn my pronouns. Are she and her? I usually go by Kris. Welcome to call me that I joined you today from the lands of the Ottawa peoples. So I began my career in student affairs, like so many people I know after having a great undergraduate experience at Mount Holyoke college, in my case, which was a small formal historically women’s college now, a gender diverse women’s college in Western Massachusetts, which is sort of my, my home place of new England. I left that and became a professional in student activities, student affairs at Brown University doing sort of generalist work decided I wanted to be the vice president student affairs at a small liberal arts college, preferably my Alma mater.

Kristen Renn:
And I would need a PhD to do that. So in the course of getting my PhD at Boston college, I realized there was this other world of doing research and teaching and being a faculty person in higher education. And so I thought I should give that a try if it doesn’t work out, I can always go back and be an administrator, which seemed to be something I loved being at the time. But at around the year 2000, I sort of took this track over towards faculty life. And it’s been really a joy. I love doing it. In 2013, my then provost at Michigan State University where I’ve been a professor asked me to return partly to administration and in a role of supporting student success for undergraduate students at Michigan University, Michigan State University is much larger and very different from the undergraduate institution I attended.

Kristen Renn:
I, my common joke is that my entire graduating class is smaller than the Michigan State University marching band. So doing student success at scale was a really exciting challenge for me. And I did that 75% time for awhile. And then now for the past few years, I’ve been doing that 25% back in my department as a faculty member. So really working at that connection of administration, student success, student development, research, and teaching. So it’s a really very satisfying kind of place. So that’s kind of what brings me to thinking about college students, the United States and my work with them.

Raechele Pope:
Thanks Kris. Bob, why don’t you introduce yourself?

Robert Reason:
Thank You. I will, Kris. I, I knew your background, but I didn’t realize how much we, we really do overlap in our experiences in our, in our share a little bit about me. My name is Bob Reason. He, him are my pronouns and I’m at Iowa state university, which is located on the ancestral lands and territory of the Iowa nation. The United States obtained the land from the Meskwaki and SOC nations in the treaty of 1842. And I recognize my obligations to the land and to the people who took care of it, as well as the 17,000 native people who live in Iowa today. Again, I’m Iowa State. I’ve been here since 2011. This time. I do have my doctoral degree from Iowa state as well from back in 2001. But like Kris, I went to a small private liberal arts college got involved with student activities.

Robert Reason:
Primarily I was kind of a student government person at the time and a little bit of Res-life and then went to Mankato state university for my master’s degree and spent most of my professional career as a res-lifer I, I tell people if my family would let me, I’d still live in today. I loved ResLife. I think I think it is some of the best and most important work I’ve ever done. But also along the way, I worked at small private colleges, excuse me, as well. So I always had a, an auxiliary assignment. So I did some career services for awhile. I did some academic advising for awhile. I did digital affairs for awhile advised the community service and volunteer center at co college while I was living in as well. So I worked primarily in, went to small private liberal arts colleges, and then went to the University of Northern Iowa as far as life. And the joke I make there is my entire undergraduate campus could have fit into one of the two towers that I was working in at the time. And so it was quite a change in certainly now here at Iowa State. And before this had Penn State as a faculty member certainly a very different experience for me. So yeah, excited to be here. Thank you very much.

Raechele Pope:
I’m so glad you’re here. It is very interesting how these origin stories. We each have a piece of each other. I never went to a small liberal arts college, but certainly the experiences of working in a variety of different areas in student affairs and not really knowing that it existed, but once I did, I was hooked for life hooked for life. So I worked in residence halls a lot like you, Bob, but I can tell you, I wouldn’t live in again, learn so much and loved it the entire time I was doing it. And I believe it’s probably the best place to begin your student affairs career, because when you meet so many different kinds of students two, you have professional opportunities in so many different areas. You do conduct, you do programming, you do advising, you did personal advising. I mean, academic things. It’s so it’s amazing.

Robert Reason:
And for me like Kris, I, I started out thinking someday I’d be a vice president at a small private liberal arts college. So the idea of being a generalist made tons of sense professionally. And so you, you are a generalist when you’re living in a residence hall and you’re, you’re dealing with plumbing issues and student crises all in the same hour, right?

Raechele Pope:
Exactly. All in the same hour. So I’m gonna just switch gears here because I’m so excited to talk to you both about college students, but before we even get to what, you know, what we’ve learned, talk to me about how you two came together to write this book on college students in the U S

Kristen Renn:
We were talking about this a few minutes ago before we started the recording, and I’m a little fuzzy on the exact who started it, who asked who on the first date in this case. But it goes something like this. John Schuh mentor and colleague of both of ours was sort of looking around a field to see what books needed to be written that were not kind of out there in the field. And he said something like, you know, there’s not like a really great textbook for the courses that are sometimes called the American college students. And maybe Bob remembers better than I do, but I can’t remember if John came to me and suggested Bob, or I thought Bob, or maybe John came to Bob and he thought of me, but somehow we found ourselves at an ACPA conference sitting at a table talking through this wild idea, like, would this be the project that finally brought me involved to do something together? That’s my recollection, Bob, can you fill in pieces? It is,

Robert Reason:
It is my recollection. My recollection is the same way. I can’t remember as if we were in Philadelphia or Boston at ACPA and what year it was, but I, yeah, I remember sitting in that Marriott, having that conversation about, are we really going to do this? And then that same conversation just a couple of years ago, are we really gonna do it again,

Raechele Pope:
Happens with the second edition of us. Again, we are so glad those of us in the profession, those of us who teach that course, those of us who want to know more about students are so glad that you did make this a reality for us. So let’s begin with that most obvious question. I think you two are the exact right people to ask. What do we know about college students in the U S who are they, what are their characteristics and experience and how are they similar and different from previous generations?

Robert Reason:
Let me, let me start because as we were sharing Kris and I wrote the book in chunks and I, and I love the demography, I love the, the who’s coming to college and how they’re getting there and how they’re transitioning in part of, so the first part of the book but like Kris was saying, we we started the conversation at the ACPA conference and I think John Schuh actually said, would you write a book for the American college student course? And we, we agreed. But then the first thing we did, and we write about this in the preface to both to say, we’re not going to call it that. And I think in response to your question, we decided not to call it that because there is not an American college student and in some ways there probably never has been, although there has been a prototype of a way we think about American college students.

Robert Reason:
We ended up with college students in the United States, which allowed us to even in the first book, but even more so in this, in the second edition, talk about the diversity of both people who are coming up, the experiences they’re bringing with them and the experiences that they’re having in colleges and universities. And honestly, we get into the diversity of colleges and universities and the importance of two-year colleges the kinds of four-year colleges, public, private, the best range of experiences. And that I say is the biggest the most important message from the book is that there is not an American college student. There, there are students in the United States who are, who are experiencing college right now. And that’s, that’s who we’re working with. The other thing, and the other quotation, I really liked, sorry is we started the first book with a quotation by Debar that said you know, the current generation was the most racially and ethnically diverse in the nation’s history. And we kept that in the second edition, but replaced it with, with a quotation by Frye and Parker from 2018, that said the current generation of college students is on track to be the most diverse and best educated generation yet. And so in some ways they’re very similar. The two populations we’ve talked about, the two generations we’ve talked about, but in lots of ways, they become more and more diverse as, as, as the years go on.

Raechele Pope:
You know, I think if any of my former students are watching, I think they going to say, see, next day, one question she ever asked us at the beginning of the American college students, I would say, there is no the American college student. And if you learn nothing else in this class, that’s the thing to learn. And so to hear that that was the key driver for yours, but tell us a little about, about those demographics. How diverse are they? Who are they?

Robert Reason:
So we know we it’s, maybe one of those times you have to do some editing. So we know that the vast majority of college students are in a four year institutions and do come in kind of from right front, right out of high school in the, in the undergraduate institutions. And in some ways, in that sense, they are very traditional, but in other ways, especially when we look at race and ethnicity, looking at international status we look at the way they enroll in college and we spend an entire first part of the book talking about those demographic characteristics as well as the the non perhaps non-visible identity, characteristics, and identity identity statuses students bring with us. And that’s the part that for me, is really interesting. I mean, we look at socioeconomic status and first-generation status where we might engage with students who we may not know that right when we talk with them and right, when we get to know them mental health issues, and particularly in their coming off of the pandemic, hopefully out of the pandemic and back to a pre pandemic kind of experience in the fall we are going to be working with students who have, are bringing with them mental health issues and concerns that we’ve not seen before.

Robert Reason:
And I think that’s important to recognize as well. So that is the, the range of students who are coming. We’re talking about you know, 16 to 18 million students in higher education right now heading towards a cliff where that’s gonna fall down in, in 2025, which we can talk a little bit more about. But that is a very, a vast array of, of students who are in our higher education institutions.

Raechele Pope:
Yeah. Kris, would you add to that?

Kristen Renn:
I’d say one of the things that when I talked to my family about this book and my mom is delighted always to, to get an announcement of new books, send me the copy. Right. so one of the things that’s surprising to my family and my family itself has a range of patterns of my siblings, two of us finished college, two didn’t. So we, and I, I’ve got sort of the next generation below that some who did someone didn’t, so it’s kind of a mix in our family itself. And what, the surprising thing when I talk to a family is that not that many students, I think it’s, I’m in Bob may know the numbers head, but it’s somewhere around 30 to 40% of students are the ones who start at one place, go through accumulate all their credits at the same place, and then complete at the same place.

Kristen Renn:
Right? Most students are doing the dipping and swirling and picking up some classes here and there. And when I talk with my family and my nieces and nephews who are in their twenties they in their friends, or I got a sphere of another set, like they’re actually living that experience as well, right? Like they take a semester at the community college because maybe their grades weren’t so good or they couldn’t afford it. Or, you know, the niece who worked 40 hours a week waitressing so that she could get through in four years with no debt was her commitment to herself. Right. So thinking about these kinds of experiences that are not what I think most people think of as that happy-go-lucky off to college, you know, maybe you work 10 hours a week in a work study job on campus. That was my experience.

Kristen Renn:
I was, I was, I recently told a friend who said something about you know something about Pell. And I was like, well, you know, I was pelled before it was called Pell. And they were like, that’s serious credit. I was like, well, it was called the basic educational opportunity grant. And my family hadn’t expected family contribution that was quite low and I got to be EOG and that would call them Pell grants. So I think that people, but even then when in the eighties, when I was in school, you could do that and still work 10 hours a week, the same economic kind of profile of a student. Now they can’t work just 10 hours a week. They are working 40 hours a week, you know, as waitresses or other kinds of kind of work. So thinking about that experience, the dipping, the swirling, the stopping and starting whether it’s economic or academic that I think aside from the pandemic interruptions, I think is much more common.

Kristen Renn:
And that’s the surprising fact to people they’re like really most people don’t just kind of like start and finish at Michigan State or Iowa State or Mount Holyoke, like, well, actually, no people are in and out and that’s okay. And what we need to do in the higher ed side is figuring out how to do that and not assume that my student’s going to start as a first year student, we have on campus, as we require, get involved with student government, make their way through, you know, maybe I need to create some on-ramps and off-ramps right, so that you can reconnect to service learning, experiential ed leadership opportunities as you come and go from my institution. When you take that semester off to skill up in something at the community college. How do I make sure you’ve got an easy track back? How am I working academic advising on both sides of that to make sure you get what you need. So I think that’s something really different about who college students are today. That hasn’t been as much, I think in the higher ed side of thinking, like we just sort thinking, well, we’re at our institution and whoever comes in the door, we’ll deal with them when they get here, but not thinking about the poorest newness of our boundary for students. So reinforced, I’m sorry,

Robert Reason:
I’m just going to reinforce what Kris said. I actually was just reading a chapter today by a gentleman Lee who’s a younger faculty member who had done a study in looking at students and particularly students at four year public institutions with a prototype of, of American higher education institutions. And she found in a survey response to that about a third each said that they had either stopped out transferred or were duly enrolled in, in two institutions or more at once. Obviously there’s overlap there. So, but our students are not having that traditional linear experience that we used to think of as the traditional college, which actually was my experience as well as at a small private liberal arts college. But that’s not the experience of most of our studies.

Raechele Pope:
Right? You said about the third in this it’s fascinating. I’m sorry.

Robert Reason:
A third each a third head stopped out about a third head had dropped out. I’m sorry, I had transferred. And about a third were duly enrolled.

Raechele Pope:
I find that fascinating because we know that we have that data. We’ve had it for a while and it’s as if the institutions that we work at, that we teach at that we can solve that don’t know it. And yet we have the data on our own campuses that this is happening. And so we haven’t adjusted our services. We haven’t adjusted our talk to our faculty about who these students are and how that’s different. We haven’t talked to advisors about how that’s different and we somehow still operate with a deficit model of the student who does this as opposed to it’s just different. So it makes me think these are some of the ways in which we’re falling short and I wonder what should we be doing? How could we respond? I know that you got to a bit of this, Kris, maybe you can pick it up again a little, but how could we respond differently to this 90% of our students that are doing it differently?

Kristen Renn:
So I think some of it is to understand our own institutions and to use resources. We have to figure out, okay, it’s not that hard to figure out, okay, who’s transferring to us. That should be relatively easy to figure out, learning more about where our students go when they leave us, because they may be coming back right. And making relationships there. So if I know that so at Michigan State, many large public universities with nursing programs, we over admit students who want to be in the nursing program. There comes some point in their academic career when we make a cut and some get to stay and be nurses in our school. And some have to make a choice. Am I going to stay at my university? Or I’m going to transfer out to be a nurse where I program I can get into, and I’m not picking on nursing specifically, but it is one of these selective admissions and pretty commonly.

Kristen Renn:
So, right. And the experience I described at Michigan State, our mascot is the Spartan. And so there’s this moment in a student’s career where they, they have to decide, am I going to be a nurse or I’m going to be a Spartan, cause I’m being told I’m not going to get to be a Spartan nurse. Right. So what does it mean for that student? When we think about have we done a good job in kind of parallel advising through that first year? Let’s say this decision happens at the end of the year, have done a good job of parallel advising to help that student understand what their options are. If they don’t become a nurse and this isn’t counseling them out, this is being realistic. So like, well, what was it about being a nurse that was exciting? Was it the science part?

Kristen Renn:
Was it the part? Was it, you know, which piece do you like, right. Maybe you go into a social work program or you go into a nutrition program or med lab sciences or kinesiology. Right. So thinking about how do we help you get to that place? And if you’re going to leave my university to go do that somewhere else, how do I make sure that that is a smooth experience for you and that you leave feeling good about what you’ve accomplished and not like you have a hole in your heart and don’t get to do what you want to do. So that’s a piece of it. And then thinking about if we know where to go how do we use our data? We have all these data students who go and come back. Like if I know that a lot of our students who leave my campus go to take a certain set of courses and other places, how am I what kind of good transfer agreements, right?

Kristen Renn:
Articulation agreements, have I established how do I make this easy for students? If I, if I know a student’s going to be taking time out, one of our area, community colleges, like I can figure out which one of those math classes is going to count for what class back here, like let’s help the students do that. We started a program at Michigan State called envision green with one of our community colleges where, you know, it’s a much closer articulation program. So that students begin thinking of themselves as Spartans on their way in. We’ve done better advising. So thinking about helping students in and out much more flexibly, I think is a huge piece of what we could be doing, but that’s on the advising side. I want to think I’m like a quote, unquote, traditional student life, side, housing activities, leadership development.

Kristen Renn:
It shouldn’t just be that you get to be a student leader because you started here as a first-year student and stayed for three or four years. Right? Like how do I create on-ramps? And off-ramps in that experience as well. How do I help students translate that to leadership and engagement other places? And then how do I help a student transfers into their junior year connect with student government or other experiences? I think that’s a place we have coming out of student activities professionally. I’m not sure we were ever very good at that. It was much easier to think about like a leadership development from like, we’ll cultivate you from your first year up until you become president and then sort of move you on. Right. I’d like us to think more creatively about pathways on-ramps, and off-ramps not a pipeline that you fall out of and can’t get back into. Right? So some of those ideas, I think in student affairs, we could be doing better. So,

Robert Reason:
Kris, one of the things I really liked about your response there was when we think about the kind of different enrollment patterns of students we’re in, especially in the literature, when we’re thinking about it from a research standpoint, we’re than thinking about the, the effects of those enrollment patterns that swirling that double-dipping on retention to graduation, which is extremely important, but you took it a step further. And this was one of the things I think we need to do as a profession we need to do in higher ed more broadly. What are the effects of that enrollment on student learning and student development? And we, yes, we can keep them here. We know, we know the effects, it’s complicated, but we know the effects of those kinds of enrollment patterns on whether or not they persist to graduation. But I don’t know that we have a very good understanding of how that coming in and out and moving in and out of our, of our various systems in our various institutions affects their learning outcomes, affects their developmental outcomes and affects the kind of joy and sense of belonging that we want students to have in higher ed.

Raechele Pope:
Broader than, than the individual functional areas of student affairs, but how students learn J that’s what we say, that we are experts on how they learn, develop, grow, and all of these. Yes. And I think we need to think about it there, but that doesn’t excuse us from also thinking about it. Those individual functional areas it’s as if we believe our students are first year students or seniors, and we forget that there’s all this in-between and they come at us in very different ways. So it would seem to me that a really interesting program for each functional area would be to just stop and say, how do we create opportunities for these 90% of the students that are, do it, doing it differently? And then how do we then ensure in each of those functional areas, we are attending to how they learn and how to be how to facilitate that learning and how to facilitate that development.

Raechele Pope:
That’s just fascinating. Now I would think that that, that that’s our new direction. So to speak that we also in student affairs though, we are expert, let me say, add who the student is. I will tell the administration in a mint in a, in a, in a second, you want to talk to student affairs folks, but if you want to know who your students are, I think we’ve gotten to learn them in deeper and more complex ways and not just in terms of only their demographics or only their characteristics, but all of these other areas that we’re talking about here, these students are coming to us differently and they’re looking to us for, to meet their needs. And I think we can do that. I think we just have to start thinking differently. And so this might be the kickoff for that.

Raechele Pope:
Let me switch back to your book for a second, because I am just thrilled with this book. I, you know, I, I don’t even teach our American college student class at the master’s level anymore. I think I’m going to start teaching one at the doctoral level, the advanced one. But I was thrilled about this book because I’d always wanted someplace where I can have a lot of this stuff to learn. He told us a bit about your origin story. So the next question I sort of have for you is tell me about this new addition once you made the decision. Yeah. We’re going to do it again. What were you looking to do differently? What were you hoping knew that you just had to add and knew that you had to discuss?

Robert Reason:
So, I’m going to defer to Kris on this one because I was lucky enough. I just needed to update numbers from editing and make more up to date. Kris had the heavy lift here

Kristen Renn:
To people who’ve been using the book. They, the original edition had the two, I think middle chapters were sort of like a short, super concentrated course on student development theory. It was like we took a hit parade of student development theories and just smashed em tight in there, not super deep, but enough to feel as people who thought about city development. Okay. About it. And when we talked to how people use the book, they’re like, well, we’re a little, but really I also need either the you know, college student development theory book the Lori Patton Davis at Al book, or potentially the new critical students theories, the Susan Jones, Lisa Davis version, you know, I’m, I’m supplementing with something big and important anyway. So yeah, not really using those chapters, you’re like, okay. So we decided we didn’t really, we weren’t doing as good a job there as we could be doing because the depth level, but what was totally missing was like anything about student learning.

Kristen Renn:
And when I thought about the way we teach a college student’s course and in my doc program, it’s a, it’s a higher ed doc program, not a student affairs, higher ed program. We have people in there who are like students, students. Yup. I guess we’ve got them. Okay. Students you know, like they are a research administrator or something else, but they don’t, they don’t approach higher ed through working with students, which is great. I was like, okay, what am I really want them to think about? I really want them thinking about student learning and there’s no other place in many curriculums where learning as a piece of it. So we swapped out some straight up students own theory and put in lots of contemporary, interesting information about how students are believed to learn. So as we think about creating learning environments, whether those are digital environments place-based environments curricular contexts some of these are of neuroscience of learning.

Kristen Renn:
We put that in there and that’s new. I haven’t heard as much talk about that in the field, but of course that’s the important stuff. That’s why they’re here in many respects. So that I think was a big a pretty exciting piece. I got to learn a whole bunch of stuff I had not read deeply in before. And especially I think the parts around the digital spaces and this isn’t just because we were finishing this during the pandemic, but I feel like the field has gotten ourselves through that. Some of us will remember the panic in about 2008, 2010 of, oh my gosh. We as student affairs needs to monitor social media and police student conduct was one tonic and another digital panic was oh my gosh, people aren’t going to develop real identities because they’re only going to have their digital identities as though that was not their identity.

Kristen Renn:
There was that panic. There have been several tech panics. I feel like we’re through most of that what a brief resigned ourselves to it or something, or just gotten more comfortable. But taking seriously the ways that digital life is a learning space for people. So that is kind of fun. I think in the book, we’ve got some newer populations that in the first edition were like, we should be paying attention because I think maybe this is going to become an important thing. So, so we’ve got some of that in a book and some new ways of sort of thinking about measuring, learning outcomes, some, you know, big data Bob, maybe you can talk some about the real strong turn we took into explicitly naming student success kind of concepts

Robert Reason:
And, and kind of throughout the entire book is this enrollment management concept as well. So yeah, Kris, actually I was thinking about we, when we talk about our history together, I think the first thing we did together was the write quibble over learning and development. And one of the reasons which is a paper we never published, and we should probably get around to doing that sometime. But it was so much fun to write and think about the way student affairs folks us have thought about learning and have thought about development and where they overlap and where they come into conflict, those definitions. And then our friends and Kris and I both are in ins have both been in institutions where higher ed and student affairs are kind of different departments in different programs. For sure. I’m in a higher ed program now that has a good student affairs history.

Robert Reason:
Penn State was very different. And so people talked about learning and they talked about development and never the two shall meet. And so as we start talking about learning in that section of the new section of the book from a student affairs lens, but also pulling in what we know from our learning centered colleagues, our Lisa and folks that we value and, and learn from. Every time we interact with them, that’s, that was fun. And in those chapter, that chapters is one of my favorites in the book. And it also frames the way we think about student success broadly. Right. We I’ll often share when I talk to talk to people I worked with a colleague who said you know, retention is a necessary, but insufficient condition for learning to occur, right? So when we think about student success as just, you know, getting to graduation, we don’t know whether that is a, that is a form of success, but it’s fairly you know, unidimensional single dimension understanding of what success is. And we think more broadly about learning and outcomes related to development and kind of framing success bigger. Right. Which I think is what we were trying to do as we move throughout the book. And particularly into the outcome section of the book, when we’re really thinking about what are the outcomes of, of higher education in the United States?

Raechele Pope:
I think that’s such an important point that you both brought up this whole focus on student learning and how we have and how students learn, and the fact that we need to know more about that. It doesn’t at all say that development is important. Development is very important. But we’re willing to almost go out on a limb about student development being important, but we forget about our role in student learning. And I keep thinking, I keep wanting to say to my students and do say to my students that if you’re only focused, if you don’t recognize yourself in the learning industry, then there’s a problem with your training, you know, and we have failed you because this is all about how students learn and develop. And so I’m so glad that that’s an important component of your of your book and that you’re reminding us and reminding our students that this is really important.

Raechele Pope:
And reminding us that those of us who do this work either in the classroom or in in practitioner roles. So I want to ask you about this other thing that, that I believe. And I think, you know, that I believe this, that, that our work, no matter what we’re doing in student affairs in higher education, that we really need to center justice and equity in those conversations all the time, they need to be a part of it. And so given all of these discussions, especially the most recent discussions through the pandemic to the summer in all of these campuses now are saying that they want to be anti-racist. And they’re saying it really loudly. They’re not doing a thing differently in so many places than they were, where they were saying they wanted a diverse campus, but they recognize that something is different than you do something. That’s why I applaud that. What I’m wondering is how given these kind of conversations about being a different kind of campus and infusing equity, diversity, justice, and inclusion into our curriculum. I’m wondering if you might have some thoughts on that for these kinds of courses, the courses that would use your books and just our field in general.

Kristen Renn:
I’ll start. I teach this class. I also teach our foundations class, which is history and sociology kinds of stuff. And I feel like in order to really transform our curriculum in a lot of ways, and I’ve learned a lot of this from reading what my friends are writing online, I’ll see a great tweet about a new syllabus or something, and I’ll go, you know, find that. And there’s you know, smart, smart, smart people all over the place, doing great work and I’m learning so much from them. So not fully original ideas, I will not claim them, but I do feel like not starting the places to bring usually start. So de-centering the quote, traditional college students. They’re like, we don’t describe Joe college and then talk about, well, by the way, that’s not true anymore. Or we don’t say well, let’s start in 1636 at the founding of the college and the master’ bay colony.

Kristen Renn:
It, oh, look where we’ve come since then. Right? Like let’s not start at that place. I think about our colleague and higher ed history and Hutchison who his book is called a people’s history of American higher ed, something to that effect. And he uses the term colonize in colleges instead of colonial and what a mind shift that was, right. Like instead of those seven little colleges, which were the first ones for the first 200 years of higher ed on this continent. What if we don’t think about them as the foundation program that came after, what do we think about them as colonizers? What if we started studying both Iowa State, Michigan State or land grant universities, what did we start instead of studying them at, you know, the moral act and everything just moral did for us, what we start with the land that was taken.

Kristen Renn:
Right. And if we go to the land, grab u website, a landgrabu.org. I believe it’s the website, go there and look where the land, the exact lands match to your institution. Right? So there’s really exciting ways of de-centering the norm, the typical you know, let’s not start with the quote cannon and then teach the quote alternatives to it. Let’s start from it from the non center and work our way towards that. I feel like that is a way to do it. So by starting with colleges in the United States, we, we don’t start with the typical amend said all the ways that are different, right. We present all the kinds of words around it. So I think that’s a piece of this puzzle.

Robert Reason:
I love that answer and maybe respond in, in a slightly different way to the, to the question and kind of go off what we were just talking about in terms of learning as, as an outcome, learning and development is outcomes of college, I think, and we know both of those learning and development occur in relationship, and it includes they occur when people are in engaged with other people and other artifacts, books, papers, research. We can’t do that if we’re excluding people. And so we need to think about learning and development as, as the, the outcome of bringing people in. And so making sure that we are, de-centering kind of the traditional were de-centering whiteness or decentralize the centering that the colonizing institutions as a way of bringing people into community in a way of bringing people into relationship so that we can together learn. Hmm.

Kristen Renn:
I was just one last thought on that just as you were talking about, I started thinking like, what if instead of the book on college students, United States, what if we, we started with who are not yet college students in the next day, right. And then ask, why is that like, what, what are we constructed that keeps it out? Or like, if we started from indigenous epistemologies to come seriously, what if we framed policy and curriculum through them instead of those beings. So like who are not, and then why is, why have we created a system that makes that, so yeah, we do my syllabus now.

Raechele Pope:
See, now, if we tell a joke, now we’ve got the the origins of the next book we could keep going. And I easily could. I love sitting down with you all and talking, we add a few more friends in a cup of coffee between us. We could have a really great thing and can go on forever, but it is, you know, all good things come to an end, unfortunately, at least a temporary end. And so I just wanted to give you an opportunity to, if you had any final thoughts, something that you’d like folks to walk out of here and remember, and it could be related to what we were just talking about or related to something we talked about at the very beginning or something we never got to. How about if we start with you on this Bob?

Robert Reason:
So I think I would, I would leave my final thought with that, with what I just said is that all of this good stuff that we want to do, the purpose we’re here happens in relationship. And if we can’t, if we aren’t in community, if we aren’t in relationship, we’re not going to be able to see succeed at what we’re, what we’re here to do. And most of us enter this profession because we want to be positive influence on other people’s lives in the community, within which we live. And so as I think about again, decentering the, that, which has been centered in the past it’s, it’s gotta be about bringing bringing folks in and building community and relationship.

Raechele Pope:
Thank you, Kris. Anything that you’d add?

Kristen Renn:
Yeah. So I’ve said this elsewhere, but I’ll, I’ll say it here. You know, people who are starting their careers in higher ed now will probably work until about the year 2060. And if we still have anything that looks like higher ed now in the year 2060, the people who start their higher ed careers, then in 2060, we’ll probably work until the year 2110, something like that. So thinking about the kinds of things we think about as higher education people, scholars, faculty, practitioners, policymakers, what we do today, plants the seeds for people who will be living and working and contributing in the year 2110. And so that’s a long time. I don’t think our book is designed to get people to that point, but I hope that the way that we think and talk about college students and learners there are some enduring ideas what’s important. What’s important to know who is important to be, what kinds of relationships do we want to have? Can those be the kinds of guiding questions as educators that help us create these environments that will see people forward in their own careers to the year 2110? So I think that’s kind of what we’re trying to get at.

Raechele Pope:
I have to tell you right now, I have a headache and I used to get a headache because what happens is my brain gets full and it was always the market for me of a good class. If I walked out of a class with a headache and I had to think really hard. So I’ve just developed a headache. And I thank you both. I am so grateful for our time together today, Kris and Bob, thank you so much to the audience, you can receive reminders about this and other episodes by subscribing to the Student affairs now, newsletter or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com. Please subscribe to the podcast, invite others to subscribe to the podcast, share social, or leave a five star review. It really helps conversations like this. Reach more folks and build a learning community. Again, I’m Michelle Pope. Thanks again to the amazing Kris Renn and Bob reason today. And thank you to everyone who is watching and listening. Thanks

Websites: 

Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges

The #RealCollege movement

Council for the Study of Community Colleges

Land-Grab Universities

Books

College Students in the United States: Characteristics, Experiences, and Outcomes