Heather Shea:

Hello, and welcome to student affairs. Now I am your host, Heather Shea. My pronouns are she, her and hers. And I am broadcasting from East Lansing, Michigan, the ancestral homelands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast, weekly web show and online learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs student affairs now is hosted by Drs. Keith Edwards, Glenn DeGuzman, Susana Munoz, and me. We intend this podcast to make a contribution to the field while being restorative to the profession. We release new episodes each week on Wednesdays at 1:00 PM Eastern time. Find us online at StudentAffairsNOW.com or on Twitter. This episode is a conversation with the authors of a new book, The Curricular Approach: A Revolutionary Shift for Learning Beyond the Classroom.

Heather Shea:

I have a copy of it right here. I met with the five individuals and recorded this episode earlier this summer, and we’re bringing it to today as part of our intent to highlight those who are meaningfully contributing as practitioner scholars to the field of student affairs. In a moment, I’ll introduce you to the five authors joining me today, but first, let me give you a little bit of background on the book as you’re, as you will learn. When you read the book and hear from the authors in a moment, the curricular approach is at its core about alignment and organization. This approach aims to align the mission goals, outcomes, and practices of a student affairs division with those of the institution. And it’s about organizing intentional and developmentally sequenced strategies to facilitate student learning on today’s webcast. We’re going to hear directly about this approach from the authors, as they explain how all campus units focused on students can implement a curricular approach for educating students beyond the classroom.

Heather Shea:

I’d like to welcome the five authors dr. Kathleen Kerr is associate vice president of student life at the University of Delaware. Dr. Keith Edwards is a speaker consultant and coach. Dr. Jim Tweedy is director of residence life and housing also at the University of Delaware. Dr. Hillary Lichterman is the associate director of residence life at the University of South Carolina. And Dr. Amanda Knerr is executive director of residence, life and housing at Indiana State University Terre Haute. To begin today, I’d like to have each of you introduce yourself and give a bit of back story about how you became to be a champion of the curricular approach. Kathleen Kerr, let’s start with you,

Kathleen Kerr:

Hello everyone, my name is Kathleen Kerr. I’m associate vice president for student life at the University of Delaware. I use pronouns, she, her hers. My role as a champion of the curricular approach started at the University of Delaware when we began this approach and has continued as I’ve watched this approach in action help us here articulate our value of the student experience as we contribute to learning. So I’ll just leave it at that. And I think you’ll learn more about about me and our approach as we talk.

Heather Shea:

Great. Thank you.

Keith Edwards:

Hi everyone. My name’s Keith Edwards, I’m a speaker, consultant, and coach. You can find out more about me at KeithEdwards.com. My pronouns are he, him, his. I first learned about this approach going to the first Institute that Jim and Kathleen and their colleagues hosted the University of Delaware, where I was cynical and dubious and snide and full of myself. I’ve grown a lot since then and sat at the end of that Institute, feeling like this was revolutionary, and that would change how I would think about my work going forward. And indeed, I’ve never looked back since then. So that’s how I became involved in been involved with the Institute, the curricular approach for 13 years since.

Heather Shea:

Great. Jim.

Jim Tweedy:

Hi everyone. My name is Jim Tweedy and I go by the pronouns – I use the pronouns, he, him and his, I have been at the University of Delaware for 22, 23 years or so, but in terms of my approach to being a champion of the curricular approach, it’s also I’m a champion of the idea that we’re educators. I have been a lifelong and plan to be a lifelong Res Lifer. In fact, I grew up in a small little Nebraska household with 14 siblings. So this whole idea of high packed, high density, community living and the capacity to learn from that. So it’s always been a fascination to me. And as I went through my own academic program and even my own doctorate program, I became more and more convinced and committed that while we’ve always seen gains out of things like residence hall and residential campuses and things like that, that there’s so much more we can do. And that idea that while at times I’m administrator, while at times I’m a manager, my core identities out of an educator, and that means I need to take student learning and education seriously. And that’s where my career long aspirations to, you know, work on how our students learn outside the classroom or beyond the classroom is something I’m deeply committed to.

Heather Shea:

Great. Thanks. Hillary.

Hilary Lichterman:

Hey everyone. I’m Hillary Lichterman. I use she, her, hers pronouns. I serve as the associate director of residence life at the University of South Carolina. This approach just seems natural to me. I like many of my colleagues here started as a resident assistant have navigated different models and approaches to learning. And I think fundamentally this has been such a highlight and signature approach in my work as a professional in my studies and my doctoral program and dissertation work. And just with colleagues on campus in my department or in far and at the Institute and has really been enriching and feels just right as we think about what our students deserve.

Heather Shea:

Excellent, Amanda,

Amanda Knerr:

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Amanda Knerr and I’m the executive director for residential life at Indiana State University. And I use pronouns she, her, hers. When I was at Penn State – Erie The Behrend College I had a live-in coordinator who was doing her master’s degree in curriculum and instruction, and she brought a book to my office on curriculum mapping, and we sat there and poured over how that could be applied to our work in residential life. Just a few months later, we were able to send her to University of Delaware to see the work that they were doing. And she came back completely on fire and it changed the complete direction of how we were doing our work. And then I had the pleasure two years later, a couple years later going to Macalester College. And I can remember sitting in that room and thinking, this is it. This is how we’re going to make real difference. A real learning happened in our residence halls. And since that day, I’ve just continued to move forward and get more and more excited about what I’m seeing happen with our students with this approach.

Heather Shea:

Excellent. Tell me a little bit about how this curricular approach emerged and what it is in general. We gave it a brief recap, but what is it, Kathleen?

Kathleen Kerr:

Yeah, I’ll talk about how it emerged. And I think that Amanda offered me a really excellent segue. So at the University of Delaware in probably the early two thousands, we were looking a lot at how the residence halls and specifically the experience in the residence halls, how that experience was contributing to the educational aims of the institution. University of Delaware, like many institutions, we had general education, objectives and goals. We wanted as a residential program to be providing our students with opportunities to learn things that help them achieve those general education objectives. We had thousands of touch points with students. We had high satisfaction numbers. We had data points that showed us that our students were attending hundreds of programs, thousands of hours a year.

Kathleen Kerr:

When we try to assess that learning, we showed little impact, we showed little learning. So again, it was early two thousands. The Student Learning Imperative had been published in 1996, Learning Reconsidered was published in 2004, and 2006, we read Elizabeth Whitt’s article Are All Your Educators Educating. So to Jim’s point, we viewed ourselves as educators. We were using what many colleges used in residence life and housing programs, a programming model, RAs go out and do an ethics program, do a diversity program. It wasn’t working students weren’t learning. So we decided to throw that out and start over again. We were attending institutes on student learning. Lee Ward was a speaker of one of those institutes citing an article that I believe he had read by Bloland and Stamatakos. He said, why don’t people in student affairs in student life use a curriculum?

Kathleen Kerr:

Why don’t they create a curriculum for learning like our colleagues in academic affairs, do they map out the intended learning and then map those strategies to achieve that learning. And Jim and I were in the audience with some other colleagues in the University of Delaware, I’m struggling with how to have an impact on our students in the halls. We went back to Delaware and we started playing with these ideas. There was a lot in the literature about good assessment, about how to write learning outcomes about how to do pedagogy. We had not connected those dots. So we began to connect all of those pieces together and to put in place an approach that would allow us to use the resources that were given to us to facilitate learning. That was important to our institution that led ultimately after a lot of years and revisions and assessment to the curricular approach. So I think that’s, that’s the briefest summary I can give to how it emerged. And I’ll let Jim describe in more detail about what a curriculum approach is.

Jim Tweedy:

Thank you, Kathleen. And part of it, I want to put forward that this is you know Keith referenced revolutionary. It’s also pretty straightforward. And it’s not something we’ve invented. We didn’t invent any term curriculum. The academic programs, I don’t know if we’re going to be talking K-12 or if you’re talking higher ed follow a curricular approach in which you frankly take a broad construct and you find a way to narrow it down. Well, actually the type of learning and the learning,

Jim Tweedy:

approach and what students learn as a result. So I’ve always considered this to be a major focusing approach. And one of the pieces that, you know, we, we hear a lot, or we get a lot of requests of, you know, could you share your curriculum? Could we pass it around? And we certainly see that at the Institute quite often these all have to be an invention at the home institution. That’s not transferable around normal, more than a curriculum for say, a psychology student would just be cut and paste it into another university. These have to be created with your home institutional context in mind. The specific goals that your institution has for undergraduate learning and that we then are helping represent our institution for doing them. So we’ve technically, we’ve typically first, you know, ask people to examine and kind of study their own institutional context, their own institutional artifacts, and really get a sense and a flavor about, you know, when we say that a person has a undergraduate degree from Delaware, Minnesota, South Carolina, or wherever it may be that there is particular things about that, that we want to really try to make sure that we are connecting with enhancing and furthering within the, beyond the classroom context of our learning domain in our environment, we do it very differently frankly than a classroom, but we follow the same sort of a curricular approach in terms of you know, initially a broadly stated what we would call it educational priority that we develop.

Jim Tweedy:

And it sounds fairly simple, but it takes quite a of dialogue conversation examination of your own kind of framework about what you believe to be true about student learning, what you believe to be a value for your own educational context. You know, and then frankly, from there, it’s a matter of taking that more broad educational priority and moving that into the particular categories that you want to explore. I can go back to kind of an academic program at this point. You know, let’s say I was, you know, a Dean of a business college. You know, we may broadly state that, you know, we want students to have X, Y, and Z components out of our broad based learning, but then every one of the departments would end up having their own interpretation and articulation. And then they would put that together in terms of what happens with each of the class.

Jim Tweedy:

And then it’s an expressed in its final form on the classroom syllabus in terms of what the learning outcomes fare. So each of these pieces has to be taken from a broad construct and narrow down until we get to that point of our intersection with our students. And one of the important factors for us is, you know, when you take your educational priority in and determine, what sectors of that, and many, many schools will have a broadly stated framework around citizenship. You know, we see that quite often with a number of schools, and I think that’s a very appropriate kind of domain. Even though I’m not trying to push any recommendation toward a certain category, but even within that we have to make some decisions about what areas are we exploring if we decided that we were focusing on this idea of citizenship and, you know, are we looking at activism?

Jim Tweedy:

Are we looking at, in that to a degree of efficacy, are we looking at voter types of things civic engagement to a certain degree. I mean, all those decisions have to be made by your team and within your institutional context. And then they have to be described and defined because every one of us as human beings and as educators, we’ll look at the same terminology and maybe come to some different conclusions, but it’s important for your team to have an understanding that when you put out the terms or you put out the categories of what we’re trying to do, because that then moves over into developing your more formal learning outcomes. And ultimately it’s that, that drives your educational strategy. Very often we start with educational strategy and attempt to put outcomes with it. And that’s certainly something we would say, please, please, please, don’t your curriculum model.

Jim Tweedy:

And what we’re trying to recommend through our practices is that you do all your due diligence kind of your self-study your self-examination, and that you’re able to fully describe what you’re asking your students to learn. And frankly, if you can’t fully describe what you’re asking your students to learn, then you likely aren’t necessarily able to help provide teaching for them to provide educational strategies for that. So the language is really important for you to get through and you certainly will never be able to assess it if you can’t describe it. So in terms of being able to improve that whole piece, but I think ultimately when we look at the design and the model of this in our presentations and publications and within this book, which certainly described, you know, kind of a 10 essential elements of how we do this in core areas with a step by step guide about how you take on each of the components and you know, we would ask, you know folks who are following this, you know, take a serious look at each one of those components because they’re, you know, very important in and of themselves leading you to, you know, getting your ultimate goal of being able to provide quality education for your students in our arena.

Jim Tweedy:

And to be able to model that in our highly unique places of learning, there’s some things that we can do out beyond the classroom that really can’t be done in a classroom. So we also recommend trying to replicate those kinds of pieces. And the other piece that I’d like to put forward is that there’s no such thing as a perfect curriculum model. There’s no such thing like that at K-12, there’s no such thing like that in our college classrooms environments, or within our academic programs, this is a constantly evolving process. And so as people enter this arena, you know, I say, go for it with some enthusiasm that you’re going to have some walls, you are going to have some barriers. You are going to have some things that look really good on paper. It just never worked out. And that’s all wonderful I’m at this needs to constantly evolve, be constantly looked at and constantly examined.

Jim Tweedy:

So that, you know, we’re in a, we’re in a co-creation space with our students and our staff every year on these processes. And one of the pieces that I put forward is that it’s been really valuable for us to, you know, it’s one of our essential elements that we’ve had an external review process and that we have the capacity to annually express what we’re trying to do for student learning. And to have that challenge by folks who don’t speak our language necessary necessarily, and don’t fully kind of understand where we’re coming from. And that helps clarify all of our areas at the same time helps build more campus partners. So there’s an awful lot to be said about this and, you know, as folks may have observed, but yeah, I do tend to talk too much, but I would encourage folks to really look at each of our essential elements and look for a stronger narrative on that front.

Jim Tweedy:

So thank you for the question on that arena. And, you know, certainly this is one of those pieces that we referenced here that we’ve, you know started it at the University of Delaware and we’ve been able to have, you know, terrific traction in that arena. However, it’s evolved in so many different ways and it’s been taken on so many different fronts and has certainly taken a life of its own through there. And I think Keith was going to speak a little bit about some of the evolution that we’ve seen, you know, based from our initial foundation of the model.

Heather Shea:

Great. Can you talk a little bit about that? How has the model of the book, the idea of evolved over time and why did you all decide to publish this book right now, at this time?

Keith Edwards:

Yeah, thanks Heather. I think you know, as we mentioned, I went to the first Institute hosted by the University of Delaware in January of 2007, I think there were 47 of us there for that. And it really was an Institute for folks to learn what the folks at the University of Delaware were doing, how they were thinking about their work differently, how they might pull what they were doing and apply it on their own campuses. And I really went, Jim and Kathleen asked me to go, cause I had worked with them previously and I was reluctant and went very, very cynical. And but I remember sitting at the end thinking this is revolutionary, and this is obvious that I would never think about my work the same way again. But once you make that paradigm shift, which is really difficult because that’s that involves unlearning and letting go of a lot of our student affairs, dogma, that’s really hard as Jim mentioned, this is, this is very simple.

Keith Edwards:

It’s not more complicated. It’s very simple. It’s very straightforward. In many ways, the big benefit is a curricular approach clarifies your thinking about what’s important. What’s not important, what’s less important. So that was my experience. This is revolutionary and obvious. The Institute continued to evolve as the residential curriculum Institute. I think we’re in New Hampshire in 2008 and more schools were sharing what they were doing, but we realized we weren’t really, we’re kind of all sharing what we were doing, but we weren’t really communicating what a curricular approach is and what it isn’t. And so some of us who were faculty for that, including Kathleen Kerr and I, and others sat in a hotel room and wrote down on a piece of notepad paper the 10 essential elements, which have changed in how we talk about them, but have essentially stayed the same since that time.

Keith Edwards:

And those 10 essential elements were really kind of became the cornerstones would be shared at that Institute. Since then we want to provide a really good beginning to the Institute for folks who came. So Kathleen Gardner and I have done a plenary to begin that sharing the, tend to this rationale that Jim and Kathleen talked about, these 10 essential elements, the components that Jim talked about kind of laying the foundation for that. And that has continued on the Residential Curriculum Institute really evolved to the Institute on the Curricular Approach. We saw so many more folks who weren’t doing this just in residence life, but doing this as student affairs divisions and reflecting back the reason why we called it, the Residential Curriculum Institute is for no good reason. The only reason why was those of us who are doing this and thinking about it happened to work in residence life.

Keith Edwards:

And so that’s what our context was. The curricular approach works well in residence life. It works great and multicultural affairs and diversity and equity work, as we’ve talked about the progression of learning in that realm, career centers, health promotions, conduct, orientation folks, who’ve been doing a curricular approach for decades without calling it that, but really what do we want to sequence and how do we want to build this? So we switched to calling it the Institute on the Curricular Approach, as we recognize our broader way of engagement and that Institute now 13 years after that, first one is the University of Delaware. Last time we had it last October and Anaheim had a 32 faculty who co-create that curriculum for a beginner track and a returning track, two keynote speakers and opening plenary lots of interactive engagement. It’s really a wonderful opportunity to help people understand what a curricular approach is, how you do it.

Keith Edwards:

And then for people who’ve been doing it for a number of years to rethink and rethink and rethink, which is the key part of this approach along the way. How this book got to be written is the five of us and others have been talking about writing a book for about five years, and we’ve not been very good at writing it. And about two years ago, we got really, really serious about forcing ourselves to do it. We’ve done some other things in About Campus, but really wanting to get this out as a resource for folks who attend the Institute and folks who are not able to. So that’s how it came to be. The five of us got to, to author this. But we we’ve always built our learning and our colleagues from the faculty at the curricular Institute. And it’s been a really exciting thing to shape our thinking and change our thinking, see how things emerge and how things are innovating. So, so why now is one, we finally got our act together and talked about this project we’ve been doing for a long time, which if you’ve ever written your book, you know, that’s how it works.

Keith Edwards:

But in now I’m thinking about it now – we didnt plan this, but now here we are in a global pandemic schools are switching to virtual learning or hybrid learning if they’re optimistic. And we’re here in the midst. I live in Minneapolis in the midst of massive social upheaval and protesting and arguing for racial justice and social change. And so many of us are feeling that so poignantly and experiencing. And so that, and so I think two things that I think this, this approach really helps

Keith Edwards:

Just the focus on what is important to us and then letting that drive all the other decisions is so critical. As we see changes in resources eliminating of on campus housing, how do you, how do you help students have that on campus living experience when they’re not living on campus and not going to the dining room? And how do you navigate that? But if the learning is what we’re focused on, then everything else is just a strategy. And often we get so tied up in our strategy of community meetings or workshops or conduct things, but really being able to redo this. And it allows us to bring lenses that are now more important than ever how many students are gonna need a trauma informed lens when they come back. For all sorts of reasons, how many students are gonna be demanding us, that the justice lenses that we’ve always have are no longer good enough, and we need to have even better justice lenses.

Keith Edwards:

How do we bring specifically anti-racist lenses to our education, which may be two years ago was maybe inappropriate for us to do in public institutions. That whole landscape has completely shifted. And so that we have a whole chapter on pedagogy beyond the classroom, which really can help people folks think through this. And then many of us are recreating things on the fly. You know, here we sit in July who knows what you’re going to do in the fall. None of you do, we’re going to have to make it up as we go. So the curricular approach is so structured and organized that it helps you be very nimble and very flexible because you know exactly what you plan. So it helps you adapt really quickly. And this ability to be purposeful and then practice essentialism and really what matters and what doesn’t matter is really important as we think about the leadership that that folks are gonna need going this unknown of the fall of 20, 20 and further unlikely years to come.

Heather Shea:

So you both, all of you have mentioned that there are people who have been using this idea for a while. And this book might also be presenting to many folks, completely new ideas that they’ve never heard about. Hillary, can you talk a little bit about how this book supports both those who are new and those who have lots of experience and what about those who have already begun using a curricular approach and, and how would this help them with their continued learning?

Hilary Lichterman:

Yeah, thank you, Heather. We think that will be very refreshing, whether you’re new to this approach or refining, whatever the case might be. As we wrote this, we have the vision that this will be useful for undergraduate students who just know like I did as a junior, this is my chosen path. This is what I’m doing. I may not know all the ins and outs, but this is where I’m going, or a vice president of student affairs or a president to understand that learning within and beyond the classroom and that coherence.

Hilary Lichterman:

So that will be useful to span across a team and a campus and levels and roles we are excited about that. But whether you’ve come to the Institute or not, this is a great piece for context, providing some clarification we’re exciting. And we’re verbal, excited and verbally expressing that today on the call around this chat. But the book provides some good context, a little bit about the why, and it’s structured in a way that is also very practical and can be used in an experiential fashion where you can literally have the book out in front of you, set it to the side, get to work, come back to it. There are activities about how to create an educational priority statement. What does a data dig, dig really look like? Where do I begin thinking? And some frameworks, skeletal bones, if you will, that will help you fill in the gaps that apply to your campus.

Hilary Lichterman:

A great piece to have a common read, to have those stakeholders to influence, to educate, to just spark dialogue. And as many of my colleagues have said to provide clarity, the ideas in the context, bring clarity and a shared approach, which is better for our students thinking about capacity building and the cultural pieces of this. This approach lends so beautifully to understanding leadership and understanding when their staff turnover and change and unexpected components of life and organizations that this creates a framework that provides consistency, provides a narrative and provides that talking point if you will. So those are a few ideas.

Heather Shea:

Great. so we’ve talked about the interesting context that we find ourselves in right now with a global pandemic. And I do think that a curricular protests applicability, Amanda, can you talk a little bit about how this book will be a resource for student affairs leaders who right now are, but maybe in the future, we’ll be facing tough decisions in challenging times?

Heather Shea:

Oh, you’re on mute.

Amanda Knerr:

Absolutely. as I’ve been thinking the last four months have probably been the most difficult months in my professional career as a leader our entire, the way we do higher education on all of our campus has been turned upside down the way in which student affairs thinks about their work and has always been gathering people together in a common space and having learning, and excitement and activities. And all of a sudden we’re sending all of our students away. We’re sending our teams to homes to do learning and to do work via a computer, through a screen and Zoom calls. And it’s completely changed everything we’ve done, but as I’ve gone through the last four months, I’ve been so grateful of this curricular approach and this background, because it’s helped me to lead more effectively. It’s helped my team to make the adjustment that has happened with COVID-19 and this pandemic so much smoother and to be more effective in what they’re doing.

Amanda Knerr:

And I think part of that is because of a essentialism – when you’re, when you have to make a decision being able to focus on what your priorities are and when everything gets turned upside down, to be able to go back to our priority is to teach students this particular learning goal, how do we do this and the new context in which we’re faced and allows us to get rid of all the extra noise and all the extra clutter, and really focus in on a team to what really matters most. And this approach allows us to do that allows us to remember what’s our goal, what’s our outcome? What are we moving towards? And then how do we get back on track to really focus on that despite the noise that’s happening around us? I think for our team, it’s allowed us to be more nimble. The curricular approach is so different than what many of us had been doing before, where you would gather everybody in the lounge for pizza and wings and watch the super bowl game, or get everybody together in the rec center for a huge large scale event, and then send everybody home.

Amanda Knerr:

We can’t do that now. And I think where my team has benefited is that we weren’t only using just those large scale one and done approaches. We had developed a plan of learning and that had a variety of strategies that invited lots of different people to the table, so that when we were able, when we had to move to online learning that community didn’t end, they were able to very quickly, very nimbly adjust to what can we deliver in an online environment? What videos can we do in social media platforms? Can we use, how do we keep this learning going when we can’t gather into the lounge at nine o’clock on a Sunday evening when we can’t get together and a classroom space or with a club and organization face to face. And the other thing that I think about is that our team also is able to not only be nimble and flexible, but they have over and over again, we’ve worked about having that beginner’s mindset of being able to be innovative, about being able to forget about we’ve always done it this way and been able to think outside the box.

Amanda Knerr:

And so with everything going on in our world and thing being turned upside down, it didn’t frighten them that, Oh, gosh, how are we going to do this? This is all brand new. They were already thinking differently all the time. They were used to being able to adjust and to pivot, and I think about things differently. And so this approach allows you, then it frees you, right? It allows you to let go of everything that you felt was the only way to do this and come up with new ideas that are going to target students and get them excited about their learning. And so our team has been able to adjust quickly to try new things, to be okay, taking risks, to unlearn everything that they’ve always thought about student affairs work or residential life work, and just completely turn it upside down. And so our, the book, particularly when I talk about pedagogy and our leadership really focuses on how to really focus on developing what those priorities are to think outside the box on learning and learning, to try something new to scaffold that learning in a variety of different ways.

Amanda Knerr:

And so I think now is a really great time to do that. And then as Keith talked about earlier with the social change that’s happening right now with the black lives matter movement, there’s a real opportunity that the curricular approach allows for us to inspect our work differently, to build that intentionality and think about who’s not sitting around the table and how do we make sure those voices are being heard? How do we work to to look at an equity and to systematically change that? And how do we build that skillset over time with our students so that they can really go out and change the world? It’s a great opportunity right now to be able to focus in on and redevelop intentionality around how we do that work.

Heather Shea:

Great. So I think we just have a few more minutes left, but I’d love to hear each of you share kind of, what’s the main takeaway that you want folks who are watching this webcast today to leave with and thinking a little bit about not only the current context, but going into the future you know, why this book now, and then what are the kind of primary things that you want them to know? Amanda, I’m going to go back to you first if that’s okay, and then we’ll go the opposite direction.

Amanda Knerr:

Sure. as I said, I think it’s a great opportunity in this moment to disrupt the status quo, to do things differently. And this book is all about that, doing things differently than what we’ve traditionally done in student affairs. And the other piece for me is very rarely have I found a book, whereas if a VP or a director, you can read it and take so much out of how you do your work and yet a graduate student, or even an undergraduate student can read it and take just as much information to be able to apply it to the work that they do every day.

Amanda Knerr:

This book really allows us to take it as a 30,000 foot level, but also how do I have that one on one engagement with a student? What does it mean in the day to day work that I do? So that’s, I guess what I would leave you with.

Heather Shea:

Great. Thanks Hillary. What’s your final thought?

Hilary Lichterman:

Yeah. I would say that this approach, this book really lends to clarity and that’s, what’s so exciting for me. We can use our assessment data and creative ways we share. We can and should be talking with our students, but the ways in which we can provide clarity for our students and help our staff who passionate about the work that they’re doing have a framework and utilize their experience and their education is so important. So I think staying connected, paying attention, keeping the vibrancy of this approach in mind is something that we addressed in the book. And I hope that our readers will take from that.

Heather Shea:

Great. Jim, tell us your final thoughts.

Jim Tweedy:

Final thoughts are always tough for me. I got too many, but I really want to speak to really all of my student affairs colleagues, that if you thought you had a challenge with making your argument about resources in the past, and if you thought that you had challenges with having to demonstrate return on investment, having to demonstrate what we produce, what we contribute to our students beyond head counts, beyond what we’ve exposed students to. I’m saying you ain’t seen nothing yet. In terms of the financial pressures and in terms of the additional accountability pressures we’re seeing that have been emerging every year, their urgency is going to absolutely escalate in every front – if you’re not already facing it. Now, trust me, you will face it all the next few years, because if it’s not the financial devastation from COVID-19 on the higher ed landscape is going to be with us for a long time. And frankly we’re all part of the educational construct. And I think our value has to be demonstrated with how we contribute to student learning, how we do that in our own area. And when you’re making your value proposition to your institutional leaders my belief is that it should be predicated on that. And then my hope is that we’ve been able to offer some resources and a guide post about how to effectively do that.

Heather Shea:

Excellent. Thanks, Keith.

Keith Edwards:

That was, that was a good one Jim Tweedy, I think I would add to that. I think people who aren’t familiar with the curricular approach misunderstand it as this very restrictive externally imposed thing. I’m not sure curricular approaches for us. I’m not sure this is going to work for us. And the curricular approach is not a new programming model. It’s not a new set of rules. It’s not, it’s not restrictive. I heard Amanda say it helps us be free to be in service of students. And the curricular approaches this lens, this framework, it is a tool. I think of it as sort of like the scaffold of a building and that’s necessary, but what we put on that building and what it looks like and what it’s going to do and how it’s going to serve people and who their folks are, it’s completely different campus by campus. So I think this notion is, as Jim was saying, this curricular approach can help you demonstrate your service, the importance, your role in education.

Keith Edwards:

I think we need to think about it as less something externally imposed or restriction, but our curricular approaches are going to help you be more effective in your decision, making your focus, what you’re going to stop doing, what you’re going to let go of what really matters. And it’s just a tool to help you do that and how they do to Delaware and how they do it at Maclaster College and how they’re doing at University of South Carolina and how they do it at San Jose State is completely different, but they’re all using a curricular approach to help them make good decisions.

Heather Shea:

Excellent. Kathleen, the final word.

Kathleen Kerr:

Yeah, that’s a challenge. I can’t just say ditto. You know, I think that the, the joy for me is that I currently serve as an associate vice president and I oversee seven units within the division of student life at the University of Delaware, residence, life and housing being one of those. And so I’ve had the privilege and the opportunity to try to help other units apply this approach to their work. So not residence life and housing. And I think that all of what everyone has said has come to fruition. The sense of clarity, the sense of not just chasing after the shiny penny, the sense of how do I articulate a case for the resources that I know that I need so that I can best serve my students in the way that I know that I need to.

Kathleen Kerr:

I think that over time, what I realized is that, and I don’t know if it’s an approach or if it’s a model or if it’s what it is though, it’s a way to do your work, but it’s also a way to think about your work and it is absolutely a mindset. And so I think that what I am most proud of in this book that I hope you will all read is that it not only gives you some practical tools, how to do that work better and how to serve our students better and how to really be engaged in the learning that occurs on our campuses. But it also provides you with a mindset how to lead this work, how to lead your department or your division how to attend to the diversity of our student population is really good pedagogy. I think that it is universal

Kathleen Kerr:

For years and years in student affairs, we’ve talked about this bifurcation between student affairs and academic affairs. That becomes nonexistent when you are pure ensure that you are committing to learning. And so it becomes an irrelevant conversation when you know that you were doing your best and utilizing the resources in the best way to contribute to that learning, which your institution has stated is the educational aim of your institution. And so I’m excited about this book. I’m excited that it will help others do good work on their campuses and appreciate that we’ve had the time to talk to you today.

Heather Shea:

Yeah, yeah. I just have to say I was aware and I know one of our departments on our campus at Michigan State University is already using a curriculum, but when I began working in the division of student affairs, I saw instantly a need for some type of structure.

Heather Shea:

And so I was really excited when I got the opportunity to have this conversation with you all today that this might be something I can take back as a contribution to the division of state affairs at Michigan State. So I am so grateful to all of you for joining me and this short webcast about the book. Again, the book is available now from Stylist publishing. I am so grateful for everybody’s time today, listening and also participating as guests on Student Affairs NOW. 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, share on social or leave a five star review. It really helps conversations like this, reach more folks and build a community so we can continue to make this free for you again, I’m Heather Shea, thanks again to the fabulous panelists today and everyone who is watching or listening, make it a great week.