How does a student learn best when she feels like a stranger at the college where she longs to thrive and to make her mark?
How does a professor cope with a sense that he, too, is a stranger at the college where he teaches—and how can he help his students succeed?
I come from a poor family in a rural town. Unlike most of my childhood friends, many of whom died in Vietnam or struggled with chronic unemployment, I was lucky enough to go to college and beyond. Yet despite my accomplishments as a student first, then as a “distinguished professor,” I have never fully reconciled my sense of alienation from the educational institutions where I learned and worked.
To deal with this alienation, I have engaged with communities and organizations like those I encountered while growing up. For instance, as a graduate student and medical student, I helped my neighbors in Boston organize successfully to block the expansion of teaching hospitals that aimed to destroy their housing. During my medical residency, I worked with unions of hospital workers who were seeking better pay, benefits, and working conditions.
Despite these coping strategies and despite close relationships with several professors who mentored me, I never felt able to bridge the gap that separated me from my colleagues, stemming from our very different life experiences. And as a teacher, I continue to feel a special kinship with my many students whose origins mirror my own. Influenced by the book Strangers in Paradise: Academics From the Working Class (1984), by Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey, I developed a philosophy that guides my work as an educator, and methods I’ve used as a mentor, to help students who also experience a sense of alienation from their wealthier peers and from the culture and relative luxury of their surroundings.
Six key principles guide my efforts:
Offering safety. A successful educational training program for students from deprived backgrounds must provide them with a sense of emotional and intellectual safety and supportive mentoring that recognizes any emotional legacy of discrimination and trauma. Students must feel confident that they can express their deepest and most private experiences, ideas, and aspirations, and that they will receive support and constructive feedback in return, rather than criticism or ridicule.
To help provide my students with that sense of safety, and at the encouragement of several junior faculty colleagues from American Indian and Hispanic backgrounds, I helped develop (with Joel Yager, a psychiatrist) the New Mexico Mentorship and Education Program. Aided by money from the National Institute of Mental Health, it became a national program focusing on minority junior faculty members and graduate students. With the help of prominent researchers—many themselves from minority or underprivileged backgrounds—we helped our mentees advance in their careers.
The principle of safety, however, provided more help in facilitating fruitful careers than any technical knowledge imparted through formal training or mentoring sessions. Particularly helpful were the program’s confidential “talking circles,” facilitated by a Navajo psychologist and medicine man, in which students felt free to discuss their cultural traditions and to help one another strengthen their ties with their families and communities while pursuing their academic careers. Most of our graduates achieved prestigious positions in academe, and thanks largely to the consistent emotional support they received during their training, many were among the first from their ethnic and racial backgrounds to do so in their fields.
Connecting students’ learning to their passions. When discussing a course of study with a student, I often ask, “How is that connected to what you’re passionate about?” I try to guide my students along a path determined by passion rather than opportunity.
In 2006, I worked this principle into my university’s curriculum after administrators asked me to teach the first seminar for incoming freshmen who had been accepted into medical school as part of a new B.A.-M.D. program. The program attracted a diverse array of students, many from remote and poverty-stricken areas. I encouraged the students to retain their cultural and social ties by doing research projects on problems in the areas where they grew up. By working on challenges faced by their home communities, and sometimes even by their own families, my students felt emotionally connected to their work, and grew passionate about becoming doctors. Through their work, the students also created perhaps the most comprehensive body of knowledge yet produced about New Mexico residents’ health problems.
Fostering students’ voices and visions. Help your students identify and articulate, as early in their college educations as possible, their visions for their future lives and careers. Doing so can help them progress faster and avoid wasting too much time soul-searching.
In a recent example, two gifted graduate students, both from minority backgrounds, asked me to help develop their reading lists for Ph.D. comprehensive exams. I told them that in order to make any worthwhile suggestions, I first needed them to each write a draft letter to the (imaginary) chairperson recommending them for tenure at their (imaginary) first academic position. I encouraged them to really think through how they would pursue their visions in research, teaching, and service while cultivating their unique voices. Then, working backward, they would realize what they needed to do in their initial years as a faculty member; and before that, during their postdoctoral fellowship, their Ph.D. dissertation, and, ultimately, for the readings in the comprehensive exams.
Instead of identifying readings unrelated to their visions, the students came to see the comprehensive exam as one step along a long path. The exercise led to a new sense of empowerment as they realized they had developed a workable, though flexible, long-term plan toward reaching their academic and personal goals.
Pushing the boundaries of customary expectations. To demonstrate my faith in their abilities and to encourage new ways of thinking, I continually seek to raise the bar for my students’ performance by asking them to move them beyond the basics of their academic disciplines.
For example, in 2006, I introduced a B.A.-M.D. seminar with unconventional approaches to health services. The first three sessions of the course included instruction by practitioners of Latin American folk healing, or curanderismo; American Indian healing; and alternative medicine. Experience with “non-Western” healing practices set a context and broadened students’ perspectives for later readings, presentations, and field trips that focused on a spectrum of hospital- and community-based services, as well as the proposed solutions for challenging problems that plague our health-care system.
Facilitating hands-on creative experiences in local communities. I often ask my students to immerse themselves in real-life challenges through community-based projects and field experiences. I’ve asked them to apply for Medicaid, make arrangements for prenatal care, and try to obtain care for diabetes both with and without insurance. Those exercises prove eye-opening for students as they learn firsthand about the complexities of our health-care system that many patients must navigate.
Another approach to hands-on involvement involves engaging my first-year B.A.-M.D. students in “problem-based learning” about actual patients in community settings. Working in small groups, first-year students role-play as doctors and consider the best course of action for a Pueblo man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in the military. In planning treatment for that patient, the students considered collaborating with a Native medicine person. In another case, they worked with a Spanish-speaking patient whose abdominal pain suggests appendicitis and who needs an interpreter. Through those case summaries, students acquainted themselves with some of the problems they will likely confront as doctors in community settings.
Learning from learners. Teaching is a tremendous privilege and creates an opportunity to learn from learners. One of my B.A.-M.D. students, for example, recently conducted some illuminating interviews with college students that might clarify a way to curb drunk driving among college students. The student found that the most effective approach to preventing drunk driving involves not elaborate educational efforts, nor legal deterrents like sobriety checkpoints, but simply inexpensive, readily available transportation home. This practical finding can enhance our efforts to develop suitable policies to eliminate drunk driving—a terrible public-health problem on campus and beyond.
I developed these six principles slowly, through experience. While I do not argue that all students necessarily benefit from these approaches, the principles clearly have assisted many learners in pursuing their paths in academe, health services, and communities. I have tried to apply the principles especially to students from backgrounds causing them to feel, at least some of the time, like strangers within educational institutions that, with some guidance, can deeply benefit their learning and their lives.
