A new book is here to help. Connections Are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education is the student-facing follow-up to Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College. The first book’s authors, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert, have added two more for the second: Isis Artze-Vega and Oscar R. Miranda Tapia.
While steeped in research, Connections Are Everything is accessible. It’s a quick read, and its tone is friendly and practical — each chapter ends with a few reflection questions and a few concrete actions students can take to reach out to other people on campus. It has a helpful glossary of college terms and takes care not to assume lots of prior knowledge. Like Relationship-Rich Education before it, the book draws on a large body of student interviews, and it features stories from a diverse group of students attending all sorts of colleges.
And in another move toward accessibility, the book can be read free online because of support from the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education.
The book’s release feels timely: The pandemic has frayed students’ connections to campus in ways that colleges are still struggling to understand, much less repair.
After reading the book, I’m confident it could be enormously helpful to just about any student who reads it. But, I asked several of the authors in a recent interview, doesn’t the need for such a book suggest that colleges haven’t done a very good job of explaining themselves to their own students?
Many colleges do talk about connecting during orientation, Felten pointed out, and many professors do on the first day of class. “So it’s not like institutions don’t do anything around this,” he said.
But sometimes, Felten added, those messages get lost, especially in the initial, busy adjustment to college. “A faculty member might say, ‘I’m available, and I’m here to support you,’ and all this, but the student is still trying to figure out how the online platform works, or whatever it is. So sometimes we do a great job of orienting, without recognizing that these are humans we’re dealing with, and they’re really getting bombarded.”
Welcoming students at the beginning isn’t enough, Felten said. That welcome and expression of care need to be sustained.
Another challenge, Felten said: “Students don’t always recognize that this is the heart of college.”
Students might expect relationships they form in college to matter, but not see how those ties can support their learning. They are often teed up to see college as transactional, not relational, and professors as distant and unhelpful. Felten described how his son had been told in high school not to expect professors to care about him; Artze-Vega said her high-school-age kids had heard the same thing — and she pushes back on it. Those messages are much harder to counter for students who don’t have a parent working in higher ed and writing books about how it can best support them.
While the book emphasizes the many people on a campus who can help students, it also makes clear that a college education isn’t something that happens to you, but something you build.
For about a decade, Artze-Vega said, there’s been a lot of emphasis on how professors can better support their students in the classroom. The book, in contrast, “says it’s a shared responsibility.”
The book encourages students to “use their agency and to take initiative,” she said. That is something Artze-Vega thinks will appeal to professors, who, after all, are tired.
When students are empowered to take charge of their own education, the authors emphasized, not everything falls to faculty members. And besides, students who are empowered are simply more fun to teach.
The downsides of courseware
Bundled courseware tools promise to offer students extra practice and immediate feedback — and lighten the workload of overextended faculty members. But in a three-part series, our colleague Taylor Swaak dived into key critiques of those products: how they can be used to supplant, not just supplement, instruction; increase students’ financial burdens; and compromise their privacy. You can check out the full series here.
Office hours
Have you found a creative way to use office hours to support students’ learning? Do you have a good approach for getting to know students a bit better in that setting? How do you describe office hours to your students, and what (if anything) do you do to encourage them to visit? Has pandemic teaching — or something else — shifted your approach to office hours? I am working on a story about how professors can make the most of this time, and would love to hear from you. Email me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, or fill out this form. Thanks to those of you who already have! I’ve learned a lot from what you’ve shared.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
— Beckie
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