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The Education Department on Thursday urged colleges to use Higher Education Emergency Relief Funds (HEERF) on mental health services on campus. The announcement provides college administrators with a clarification that HEERF funds can be used for needed mental health service improvements, which were originally not included in HEERF legislation.

"Mental health is overwhelmingly the top concern we hear from presidents," said Jonathan Fansmith, the assistant vice president of government relations for the American Council on Education. "It's a very challenging environment for institutions, and these things are expensive to do. So the ability to use some of these higher education relief funds that the federal government provided for those purposes is hugely helpful."

HEERF provided $14 billion to colleges across the nation as part of the CARES Act to address urgent student needs during the pandemic. This guidance from the department not only signals to college administrators that the funding can be spent on mental health services but also provides examples of programs, resources and services colleges can implement to address rising rates of mental health struggles on college campuses from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

College students have increasingly struggled with anxiety and depression as a result of the pandemic, and college leaders have indicated that mental health is a top priority. Seventy-five percent of college presidents indicated mental health was a top concern according to a 2021 survey, and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 75 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds indicated they have experienced a mental health symptom in June 2020.

HEERF Funding and Mental Health

The department provided a detailed outline of how HEERF money can be used to address mental health needs on campuses, which includes examples of how colleges across the nation have used HEERF so far to change and expand their mental health support systems.

The Biden administration made the following recommendations:

Expand and strengthen in-person and remote mental health services, such as telehealth, to increase student, faculty and staff access to counselors and mental health professionals.

Establish new resources to connect students to needed care through innovative methods like 24-hour hotlines and mental health prevention and intervention trainings.

Create programs that will expand mental health awareness and resources on campuses long term.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona spoke Thursday at the University of California, Riverside, which he stated was a model for mental health services for other institutions of higher education to follow. Multiple student leaders from UC Riverside described what campus mental health services they have seen be successful in addressing mental health concerns and where they believe the university can improve.

"The pandemic has exposed students from all ages to trauma, from the loss of loved ones to financial hardships to social isolation and learning disruptions," said Cardona. "In discussions with students across the country, they've been honest with me: they need better mental health resources on campus."

The UC Riverside student leaders stressed that college students need a variety of mental health resources to choose from that can address a range of needs. These could include peer groups, private counseling and therapy, and increased financial support to connect students with mental health therapists. The students said that services like on-campus counseling without a co-pay and free transportation to mental health appointments have been successful at UC Riverside.

Telemedicine, noted as one resource colleges could cover with HEERF, has been found to expand access to mental health care. TimelyMD, a telehealth provider serving over one million students across 200 college campuses, found that, since the pandemic, 70 percent of visits were for mental health, compared to 10 percent pre-pandemic. Additionally, 40 percent of mental health visits were after regular office hours.

A central theme of the conversation was increasing the diversity of mental health staff to reflect the student population's diversity and ensuring universities make students aware of the resources that are available.

"I think it has to come back to having these conversations with culture, and it's OK for a community to have these conversations," said Mario Mendoza, a graduate peer health educator at UC Riverside.

The students at UC Riverside came from a range of both university and student-led organizations that promote the mental and physical well-being of students. They noted that although UC Riverside is a model for mental health care, there is still more work that could be done, and the HEERF money could help to address this.

Yuritza Escalante, an undergraduate at UC Riverside who works for a peer mentorship and mental health awareness organization called Active Minds, said that it is important to increase funding for adequate mental health training for all students, not just student leaders like herself. "Training is so limited-there are certain types of training that cost more money than others," she said.

Increased access to training, according to Escalante, would help more students be prepared to address mental health needs on their own and on campus at large.

In addition to direct mental health services, the students noted that it is important for universities to provide resources that address the basic needs of students, such as safe housing and food.

Lastly, the students stated that it is important for universities to invest in mental health services long term.

"The next step in funding is to make sure that all schools that are not talking about mental health are able to buy those resources, implement those resources, implement those programs that are needed to adequately address these needs that students are now expressing more than ever," said Escalante.

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Colleges urged to use HEERF on mental health

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The Education Department on Thursday urged colleges to use Higher Education Emergency Relief Funds (HEERF) on mental health services on campus. The announcement provides college administrators with a clarification that HEERF funds can be used for needed mental health service improvements, which were originally not included in HEERF legislation.

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Hang, Sarah Sullivan's  (3CSN, Mission College) student, reflects on the importance of care for her learning journey

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Hang, Sarah Sullivan's  (3CSN, Mission College) student, reflects on the importance of care for her learning journey

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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Choose one of the questions below to respond to for this reflection. "Add comment" and type in your response.   

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Choose one of the questions below to respond to for this reflection. "Add comment" and type in your response.   

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Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade's talk "All Together Now: Academic Rigor & Culturally Responsive Pedagogy" for Teach for America

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Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade's talk "All Together Now: Academic Rigor & Culturally Responsive Pedagogy" for Teach for America

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All together now: Academic Rigor and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

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"What Teachers Can Learn from YouTubers about Engaging Students Online"

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"What Teachers Can Learn from YouTubers about Engaging Students Online"

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Engage Students Online: Off-Camera Options

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I am concerned about how this growing narrative of loss will affect our students, emotionally and academically.

Our kids have lost so much-family members, connections to friends and teachers, emotional well-being, and for many, financial stability at home. And, of course, they've lost some of their academic progress. The pressure to measure-and remediate-this "learning loss" is intense; many advocates for educational equity are rightly focused on getting students back on track. But I am concerned about how this growing narrative of loss will affect our students, emotionally and academically. Research shows a direct connection between a student's mindset and academic success.

The Biden administration recently announced that this spring, states must move forward with federally mandated standardized tests, summative exams that measure how much students have learned during the current school year. In addition, many districts will likely choose to add in the fall a range of assessments to uncover student weaknesses. These plans sound sensible, and the intention is good. But they come with some dangers. States and districts typically use annual and interim test results in high-stakes ways, to judge and rank students, teachers, and schools.
Erika Christakis: School wasn't so great before COVID, either
Using the results in the same way after this pandemic year would not just be unfair; it could do real harm. If districts focus too much on remediating "learning loss"-holding kids back a grade, categorizing students according to their deficits, and centering lesson plans on catch-up work-the students who have experienced the most trauma and disconnection during the pandemic may be assigned to the lowest level and most stigmatized groups. They will be viewed as deficient, and the inequities in place before and during the pandemic will be further amplified. Children, having been told that they are behind, will internalize the story of their loss.

But our kids are not broken. To foster students' growth, districts should think beyond traditional ways of grading and teaching. Instead of federal and district test results becoming labels, handed down as if from on high, districts should use them diagnostically, as guides only, and encourage teachers to collaborate with students in understanding their skill profiles so that the kids feel empowered in their own development. Schools should also recognize their students' resilience over this past year, support their healing and emotional growth, and honor them with meaningful and challenging academic work, not with remedial classes. That's how we'll get our children back on track.

Districts face a hard reality, though: Many children lost a great deal of academic growth last year; some kids didn't attend school at all. Districts need to know which students need extra support, including tutoring in and outside the classroom. But educators need to assess students' abilities in a way that motivates them to grow.

I was a public-school teacher in a rural community in Massachusetts for 25 years, and I have worked with public schools nationally for another 20. I have seen how some test results can be used to label students in ways that reduce teachers' expectations of them and demoralize their personal aspirations. High schools are full of students who have gotten so many C's or D's that they have begun to tune out academic instruction. A student may feel like the "dumb kid" in class, or be relegated to a whole class of kids who feel this way, and whose teachers treat them as such.
Tess Wilkinson-Ryan: Willpower is not going to be enough
As a teacher, I took inspiration from the way children succeed in nonacademic settings, such as in sports and drama. Kids on a soccer team or in the cast of a play are always considering their own strengths and weaknesses. They receive constant feedback from peers and their coaches or directors about how to notice opportunities for passes or how to use their body onstage. They don't leave practice with a grade of a C or a D, but they do leave with specific knowledge about what they need to do better. They are motivated to improve because they are not just collaborating with others in exercises and practices; they are preparing to perform in front of their friends and family. Often, the higher the team's expectations, the more potential for growth.

I implemented a collaborative form of assessment with my sixth-grade students. They regularly tracked and reflected on their academic growth with others. They presented portfolios of their work to their families and to guest educators, and in the late spring they formally presented their p ortfolios to a panel of school-board members, educators, and community members-our game day, so to speak-showing evidence of their skill levels and reflecting on their strengths, challenges, and goals related to academics and personal character. My students' portfolios contained traditional measurements such as test scores, grades, and written essays, as well as samples of what they felt was their best work in all disciplines and their own assessments of how they were doing. When students collaborated in their own growth, they continually sought critique and knew what they needed to improve.

I work with an educational nonprofit, EL Education, that partners with public schools and districts nationally, supporting high achievement using this same approach. Students in all grades lead their own family conferences. They have a clear awareness of their fitness across disciplines. And these students feel ownership of their academic success and are committed to improving their skills.

Once students understand what they need to change, how can districts and schools help them improve? Scientific research shows that learning is impeded if students do not feel safe, seen, and valued. All parents and teachers know that if a child does not feel that she belongs within her school culture because of her identity-whether it's race or gender identity, income level, culture, body type, learning profile-she likely will not thrive academically.

Educators can support the social and emotional health and identities of students at the same time they assign work that is meaningful and-most important-challenging, even above students' current level. Addressing concerns about learning loss by raising difficulty level may seem counterintuitive, but with strong relationships and support, this approach can be surprisingly effective.

Philip Uri Treisman, a mathematician, spent his career researching why so few Black and Latino students received higher degrees in mathematics. At UC Berkeley, and then at the University of Texas at Austin, he took a novel approach to this problem that has shifted thinking nationally. His research revealed that when students interested in pursuing mathematics were assigned remedial work, it was essentially a dead end for those students' future in math. In his calculus classes, he intensified learning by creating study groups of students who worked together on problems that were much harder than the standard curriculum. When those students learned from one another, they filled in some of their skill gaps as they took on harder problems. They took pride in overcoming worthy mathematical challenges, and their self-image as mathematicians was transformed. When Treisman first arrived at the University of Texas, half a dozen minority students were math majors; after his program took hold, that number soon grew to more than 150, and some of those students went on to earn a doctorate.

A few years ago, I was discussing education with my running group, the Coffee Cake Club, during a Sunday run. One of my buddies, who is Black, twisted his head back and said, "Well, there's only one thing that matters about a teacher." I was taken aback. "Really? Just one thing?" He shrugged as if it were obvious and responded: "That they believe in you. I was a lousy student when I was young. Because of my racial background and family, my teachers basically viewed me as broken. They didn't give me challenging work; they didn't push me. In all of my years in school, there were only two teachers who saw something in me and pushed me and believed in me. I could easily have dropped out, but because of those two teachers, I'm getting my Ph.D. next year."

If students know that teachers value and believe in them, no matter what they have gone through over the past year, educators can create a classroom environment where high expectations are the norm. When students feel empowered, they care more and work harder. Next time you hear the phrase learning loss, think about whether we really want to define our students by their deficits instead of their potential.

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I am concerned about how this growing narrative of loss will affect our students, emotionally and academically. Our kids have lost so much-family members, connections to friends and teachers, emotional well-being, and for many, financial stability at home. And, of course, they've lost some of their academic progress.

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Useful introduction to Appreciative Inquiry with many examples 

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Useful introduction to Appreciative Inquiry with many examples 

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In an unpredictable global business environment, it's tempting to approach strategy with specific goals already in mind.

More often than not, these are problem-focused and aimed at mitigating threats.

Businesses commonly focus on what's not working and adopt 'root cause' mindsets, only to find themselves facing a set of different, but related questions down the line.

Questions like " How can we fix our lack of engagement?" " What do we do about low motivation?" " Or, why are people just not on board? "

The Appreciative Inquiry Model is one of the key positive organizational approaches to development and collective learning. Here, we look at how it has blossomed into one of the most influential movements for positive organizational development in recent decades.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Strengths Exercises for free. These detailed, science-based exercises will help your clients realize their unique potential and create a life that feels energizing and authentic.

What is Appreciative Inquiry?

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a collaborative, strengths-based approach to change in organizations and other human systems. The term 'Appreciative Inquiry' is thus used to refer to both:

The AI paradigm - in itself, this relates to the principles and theory behind a strengths-based change approach; and

AI methodology and initiatives - which are the specific techniques and operational steps that are used to bring about positive change in a system (Davidcooperrider.com, 2019).

Or take our own definition:

Key Concepts in AI

The fundamental idea behind AI is that over time, it has become increasingly common for organizations to approach change and growth from a problem-solving perspective. As firms aim to improve efficiency, survive, perform better, and boost competitiveness, AI proponents argue that there has come to be an unhealthy over-emphasis on "fixing what's wrong"-a deficit-based approach.

AI arose as a challenge to these ingrained assumptions and proposed that organizations can benefit instead from what is called a strengths-based or affirmative approach (Hammond, 2013). This affirmative approach, in turn, assumes that each human system has a positive core of strengths.

This positive core is not vastly different from the way we view organizational strengths in conventional management literature. In essence (and loosely paraphrased from the authors), they can be seen to encompass (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005):

The values, beliefs, and capabilities of our organization when it's 'at its best'; and

Collective understandings around what makes up the best of us.

As a concept in positive organizational psychology, AI is probably best understood by looking at its evolution over time.

A Brief History

It helps to know a bit about scientific management and 'Taylorism' to see how and why AI came to be.

Scientific Management

Most organizational leaders and managers will already know about scientific management, but for those who aren't familiar, this was a school of thought that rose to prominence in the late 19th Century. The goal of Scientific Management was boosting the efficiency of workflows by looking at them analytically and eliminating waste.

At that time, Frederick Taylor, an American engineer, was inspired to apply rigorous scientific techniques to break down and improve how people worked. Broadly, this was through timing, simplifying and standardizing tasks.

The resulting approaches have been criticized heavily for promoting the view of firms as machines, rather than entities of people. Another nice parallel is that it placed emphasis quite squarely on the resources, rather than the human part of human resources. A direct quote from the man himself gives an example:

"In our scheme, we do not ask the initiative of our men. We do not want any initiative. All we want of them is to obey the orders we give them, do what we say, and do it quick."

(Taylor, 1919)

Fixing Broken Machines

Scientific Management in its original form has not been popular for close to a century. However, AI proponents point to lots of evidence that 'deficit-centered' thinking has remained heavily embedded in managerial and organizational practice (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987).

Changing organizations, in this sense, was about identifying, establishing, and fixing things that weren't working-summarized neatly as 'inquiry into deficit experiences' by Bushe (2013), an AI expert.

Commonly cited examples include organizational needs analyses, problem definition, root cause analyses, and similar.

Toward a Strengths-Based Approach

In reaction to this perceived overemphasis, AI has emerged as an alternative approach to organizational change and development; an affirmative approach that focuses inquiry on what's right, what's working, and how to work toward a desired vision (Davidcooperrider.com, 2019).

The Appreciative Inquiry Model is, as noted, based on the principle that positive organizational futures can be reached through collective involvement and methods that "affirm, compel, and accelerate anticipatory learning" (Cooperrider et al., 2008).

A far cry from dissecting past mistakes and defining a corrective path forward. A little further on, I'll look closer at the model and theory in more detail.

Relevant: 18 Appreciative Inquiry Workshops, Training, and Courses

A Look at David Cooperrider

David Cooperrider is often considered the pioneer of the Appreciative Inquiry Model. However, the paradigm itself was developed during the '80s by both Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, his then mentor.

The Power of Questions

Cooperrider describes his "Ah-Ha!" moment as having occurred when he and a colleague were doing action research (see our post on appreciative inquiry research) for an organizational development project (Bushe, 2013). Specifically, the team found themselves in an increasingly hostile and negative atmosphere and decided to change their approach.

Rather than inquiring into what wasn't working, Cooperrider and his colleague decided to ask about what was working-albeit for a different company (Barrett & Cooperrider, 1990). The brainwave here was that inquiry itself can powerfully shape the way we view and develop human systems. That led to Cooperrider's Ph.D. on AI in 1986.

From Research to Interviews to Organizational Development

What Cooperrider actually had at this point was a potentially transformative insight into how qualitative social science research could be improved.

The paradigm shift for organizational change, that is, didn't happen instantly. Bushe (2013), who covers the history of AI in much more detail, describes how the inquiry approach was first taught to employees so that they could interview other staff in turn with the new methods. It was received positively as the benefit for ideas generation quickly became apparent.

David Cooperrider then began working with others to explore how this 'social constructionism' might be applied to organizational change, amongst other things. By 1997, the '4D model' he had laid the groundwork for, had become the Appreciative Inquiry Model we know today.

The Model and Theory

Any organizational development practitioner will know that frameworks abound in the field. The 4D model generally refers to a visual representation of the four steps of an AI initiative:

You will, however, commonly see a fifth step added, for Define, this relates simply to what David Cooperrider describes as selecting an affirmative topic. An affirmative topic, in turn, is the focus of your intervention-there may be one or there may be multiple foci. Examples may include greater customer satisfaction, safer work environments, or more efficient value delivery (Kessler, 2013).

Below is an example of the AI Model with Define left out.

Steps in the 4D Model

The Define step is an important part of determining how the following steps will flow. Kessler (2013) emphasizes the importance of using inspiring language to frame the focus of your intervention. So, greater customer satisfaction might become what he describes as " inspiring fanatically loyal customers ".

Affirmative topics now established, here are the phases (Ludema et al., 2006):

1. Discover

The focus during this phase is searching for and identifying what gives the organization life. Past successes can be discussed and explored, and in each instance, the goal is to hone in on what has enabled them.

This is all about active inquiry, and internal stakeholders can ask each other questions to discover what Ludema and colleagues call "the best of what is". While this is focused on uncovering strengths, it's also a useful way to shift current mindsets and vocabulary away from deficit-focused thinking.

2. Dream

The Dream phase is about imagining potential positive futures for the organization. Because a wide range of participants has ideally been engaged in the AI process, these will represent multiple perspectives, opinions, and understandings.

The unconditional positive questions that have been developed will ideally unlock creative, constructive visions and possibilities. Through positive language and imagery, participants co-create futures and positive outcomes.

3. Design

Co-creation continues through this phase, but the focus shifts to debating and discussing the possibilities already generated.

The goal is to reach a shared vision or value that the team or participants see as having real, positive potential. Individual aspirations thus become shared, in what is ideally an inclusive, safe, and supportive environment where everybody feels heard.

4. Destiny

The goal of this final phase (formerly called Delivery) is to construct futures "through innovation and action" (Ludema et al., 2006: 158). The vision, system, or structures that have been designed are committed to as possible means of achieving them are further refined through individual commitment.

It's worth mentioning that the Destiny phase of the 4D model is not strictly defined in terms of how it should proceed. Individual practitioners and theorists, Kessler argues, will vary in their encouragement of structure or improvisation around this phase (Kessler, 2013).

Basic Principles of Appreciative Inquiry

As AI has come to be more widely practiced, we've also seen many contrasting and conflicting practices that supposedly fall under the AI umbrella. This is something Bushe (2013) attributes to an initial lack of formal methodology-Professor Cooperrider was hesitant at first to publish any. But toward the earlier part of last decade, he and Dr. Diana Whitney from the Taos Institute developed 5 principles for AI practice.

1. The Constructionist Principle

This posits that our subjective beliefs about what is true, determine our actions, thoughts, and behaviors. The language that we use daily is pivotal in how we co-construct our organizations, and this includes the language we use for inquiry.

Inquiry, in itself, is about generating and inspiring new ideas, visions, and stories that can potentially lead to action (Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999).

2. The Simultaneity Principle

This suggests that our inquiries into human systems can cause them to change. The first questions we ask can shape how people think about and discuss things; this, in turn, affects how they learn things and discover.

There is no such thing as a neutral question, in the sense that passionate and persistent inquiries in specific directions will lead to change in those directions (Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999; Whitney & Trosten-Bloom, 2003).

3. The Poetic Principle

The third principle holds that we can choose-or not-to study organizational life to make a difference. Life in human systems, such as organizations and teams, is co-authored and told in stories.

Our choice of vocabulary can trigger feelings, images, concepts, and understandings, and AI is about using inquiry to create positive, optimistic visions of the future to inspire and awaken 'the best in people' (Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999; Kessler, 2013).

4. The Anticipatory Principle

The Anticipatory Principle suggests that our current actions and behaviors are shaped by our visions for the future.

Through AI, we can create positive images and visions of our or an organization's future that will impact what we do in the present (Goleman, 1987; Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999).

5. The Positive Principle

This posits that to encourage momentum, we must ask positive questions which emphasize the positive core of an organization. Lasting change relies on social connections and positive affect among people. Positive emotions such as enthusiasm, togetherness, hope, and happiness encourage creative ideas and openness to innovative ideas (Barrett & Fry, 2005; Stavros & Torres, 2005).

These 5 AI principles are the most commonly cited and have now become well-established. As Appreciative Inquiry practice becomes increasingly more popular, however, we are seeing emergent principles being proposed. Among these are principles such as wholeness, enactment, awareness, free choice, narrative, and synchronicity (Whitney & Trosten-Bloom, 2003; Stratton-Berkeessel & Myers, 2019).

Examples of the Approach

In this section, we'll look in-depth at one example of applied AI for organizational change, and you'll also find some further helpful links to more case studies on the topic.

Global Relief and Development Organization

Global Relief and Development Organization (GRDO), as introduced by Ludema and colleagues in their Handbook of Action Research (2006), is a US and Candian NGO that was involved with over a hundred other organizations worldwide.

The Context:

GRDO approached the authors with what it perceived to be a problem with the current organizational capacity evaluation system for its partners. In describing the situation to their consultants, they mentioned lack of (internal and external) stakeholder engagement with the system; people didn't support it and they viewed it as a tedious imposition.

Already implicit in their description of the system, was deficit-based vocabulary and suggestions of blaming-both between stakeholder organizations and GRDO itself. Also, the authors note, GRDO was not able to view itself as an equal partner in what was inherently supposed to be a capacity building process and was not being seen as such.

Affirmative Topic:

The first step, as such, was to reframe the perceived problem positively and define an affirmative topic. To this end (or beginning), the consultants asked questions aimed at uncovering GRDO's 'deeper yearning'. According to Johnson and colleagues, the first key questions were:
"What do you really want from this process? When you explore your boldest hopes and highest aspirations, what is it that you ultimately want?"
The Define step thus led to several topics; GRDO wanted many positive things, which came down to (Ludema et al., 2006):

Learning from each other about how they could build vibrant, healthy, strong NGOs; and

Discovering new ways of collaborating with their partners as equals.

Discovery:

A global team was formed which was made up of stakeholders from GRDO's different regions across the world, and large-group retreats were organized so that both GRDO and its stakeholders could get familiar with AI. They came up with slightly different versions of the AI Interview Protocol shown below.

Appreciative Interview Protocol

1. Think of a time in your entire experience with your organization when you have felt most excited, most engaged, and most alive. What were the forces and factors that made it a great experience? What was it about you, others, and your organization that made it a peak experience for you?

2. What do you value most about yourself, your work, and your organization?

3. What are your organization's best practices (ways you manage, approaches, traditions)?

4. What are the unique aspects of your culture that most positively affect the spirit, vitality, and effectiveness of your organization and its work?

5. What is the core factor that "give life" to your organization?

6. What are the three most important hopes you have to heighten the health and vitality of your organization for the future?

Source: Ludema et al. (2006)

With their unconditional positive questions to guide the inquiry, the different partner NGOs returned to the country they worked in to carry out 'listening tours' (Ludema et al., 2006). These involved participatory inquiry with community members that the NGOs were working with, to include as many voices as possible while discovering the positive core strengths of GRDO and its partners.

Thousands of participants were involved in this stage, which took place over the course of a year.

Dream:

GRDO and its NGO partners met again at large-group retreats to share the strengths and stories from their inquiries. This helped them voice their visions of what a positive organizational future might look like, and start generating ideas for a new strategic approach. Ludema and colleagues describe this stage as the start of the redesign (Ludema et al., 2006: 162):

"A virtual explosion of positive stories were being shared and the way GRDO and its partners talked about themselves, each other, and their joint work was beginning to shift from a conversation of deficit to a conversation of possibility."

Design:

In collaboration with its partners, GRDO began to systematically explore what social structures might bring these visions to life. This took place on a global scale, with hundreds of meetings conducted. During these, participants created regionally responsive architectures-"provocative propositions"-that could link the discovered strengths with the ideal possible futures, or what 'might be'.

Through further collaboration, these developed into potential new capacity-building systems that were fundamentally different from the previous approach GRDO and its partners had been using. Broadly, these were more participative and devolved responsibility so local NGOs would create more relevant solutions in different countries.

The authors describe the beginnings of a shift toward more partnership-focused mindsets. The desired equality was, they recall, beginning to show itself as vocabulary changed to become more like that of partners.

Destiny:

The third and final year of GRDO and the NGOs journey saw initiatives shared and energy growing around them. Joint activities were rolled out in different regions after the final round of retreats, such as the launching of new local fundraising projects and organizational redesign to a new, less hierarchical structure.

More detail on this global AI initiative can be found in Johnson and Ludema's (1997) book, Partnering to build and measure organizational capacity: Lessons from NGOs around the world.

More Appreciative Inquiry Examples

If you're looking for more examples of AI in practice, try these:

Criticisms of the Method: Pros and Cons of the Framework

So, what are the advantages and disadvantages of the Appreciative Inquiry Model as a whole? Luckily, others before us have reviewed the literature, so we can draw our own conclusions (Drew & Wallis, 2014). Let's look at the pro's first.

Potential Pros of AI:

First, AI focuses on strengths, which arguably provides organizations with energy for positive change and innovation (Ludema et al., 2006; Bright, 2009);

Utilizing strengths also allows employees to enhance their proficiency (Linley et al., 2010);

It encourages a learning culture through collective inquiry and equips people with the skills to discover for themselves (Conklin & Hartman, 2014);

As such it encourages creative thinking, ideation, and potentially fosters innovative approaches (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987; Cooperrider et al., 2008);

These, in turn, facilitate organizational adaptability - a critical competitive advantage in dynamic business environments (Basadur, 2004);

A learning culture also encourages sustainable change (Boyce, 2003);

By design, it aims to encourage stakeholder participation (Drew & Wallis, 2014);

Through participation, it seeks to foster commitment rather than resistance (Lines, 2004; Drew & Wallis, 2014); and

The 4D framework, through its structure, allows people to gain insight into actions (Bright, 2009).

There is a consistent theme through the vast majority of these potential advantages; this is that Appreciative Inquiry addresses change at a cultural level, rather than presenting an analytical approach to 'fixing' specific problems. Indeed, AI encourages a holistic systems approach, its fundamental premise being neither 'top-down' or 'bottom-up' (Davidcooperrider.com, 2019).

In that vein, let's look at the potential disadvantages of Appreciative Inquiry.

Potential Cons of AI:

AI takes considerable time-it's not a quick fix by any stretch of the imagination (Drew & Wallis, 2014);

Large-scale organizational change through AI can be resource-intensive, especially if participants are geographically dispersed, as with the case study above;

It relies heavily on the extent to which a positive, supportive, and open environment for sharing can be created (Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999; Ludema et al., 2003);

Not all stakeholders can always realistically be involved (Schooley, 2012); and

If all stakeholders can't be involved, this raises questions around the ethical morality of strategizing with what is not, essentially, a democratic consensus (Schooley, 2012).

To sum up the weaknesses, therefore, Drew and Wallis (2014) argue that careful planning becomes important when we consider using AI in specific contexts. Schooley (2012) would emphasize that governmental and public sector applications of AI may be particularly problematic.

What is SOAR?

In short, SOAR is a strategic framework based on AI principles. The simplest parallel with a more commonly known model would be SWOT. Both link internal firm factors with potential externalities and futures to allow an analytical approach to strategy.

A SOAR Framework

SOAR stands for (Stavros et al., 2003):

Strengths - Similar to SWOT strengths, these relate to the existing internal factors. They can be internal resources, dynamics, or even facets of organizational structure that can be strategically leveraged for competitive advantage;

Opportunities - These are external factors existing in the firm's macroeconomic, industry, or market environment;

Aspirations - Aspirations are positive potential futures for the firm, including how a company can create value. These could ideally be strongly related to a firm's strategic vision, and ideally, collective commitment can be encouraged around this vision; and

Results - These can be seen as deliverables, and allow for implementation and evaluation of a company's progress as it moves toward its goals.

Below is an adapted version of Stavros et al.'s (2003) example application of SOAR. Here, it's possible to see how Internal Factors and External Factors (from SWOT) are replaced as strategic planning categories by Strategic Inquiry and Appreciative Intent in SOAR.

Strengths
What are our greatest assets?

Opportunities
What are the best possible market opportunities?

Appreciative Intent
Aspirations
What is our preferred future?

Results
What are the measurable results?

Source: Adapted from Stavros et al. (2003: 11; 12)

SOAR vs. SWOT

As we'd expect from an AI framework, the SOAR model begins with inquiry. This is the first of four stages that participants can go through as a group (Stavros et al., 2003):

1. Inquiry: Positive questions are asked to uncover the organization's strengths and aspirations, and it's a good chance for open, positive discussion about shared (or not) understandings of values and visions (Stavros et al., 2003). Where do we want to be? What strengths have helped us reach where we are now? How, and why?

2. Imagination: Participants come up with potential futures. Vision, values, and mission are co-created, and iteration can be a useful means of clarifying or re-affirming the firm's strategic direction. The focus of the imagination phase is long-term goals for a preferred future, rather than proactive risk management with threats or weaknesses in mind.

3. Innovation: Long-term strategic goals are broken down into short-term objectives and methods for achieving them. For a specific project, this might involve developing deliverables and timeframes; in a more general sense, it is about putting systems in place to facilitate implementation.

4. Inspire: Stavros and colleagues introduce Inspire as a replacement for what is traditionally seen as control systems (i.e. in the cultural web, or in Total Quality Management). In conventional strategizing, these may refer to KPIs and incentives; in SOAR, inspire encompasses systems that encourage authentic recognition and reward.

Applying SOAR

Of course, understanding a framework isn't the same as putting it into action. To that end, Stavros and Hinrichs (2009) outline several steps for applying the SOAR framework in their Thin Book of Soar. Their 9 steps are as follows:

1. Identify stakeholders - Establish who will be taking part in the exercise and decide on how you will be meeting. In line with the holistic, collaborative aim of AI, participants should be internal stakeholders that represent different areas of the company.

2. Design your AI interview - Plan out questions that you intend to use; these will, of course, be aimed at developing better insight into the organization's positive core. Understanding its strengths, successes, and aspirations is the key motivation, so your questions should reflect these aims.

3. Engage stakeholders - These will always involve internal stakeholders, and may also include external stakeholders such as partners, customers, or suppliers if it's deemed appropriate. Use your questions to uncover positive potential futures and possibilities.

4. Reframe problems - Problems will invariably arise for discussion; SOAR inquiry is about a positive focus, so reshape conversations to look at desired outcomes rather than avoiding or mitigating threats.

5. Summarize - This is about clarifying and affirming the organization's strengths-its positive core.

6. Establish aspirations and identify results - This is a key part of defining or redefining the organization's future vision, which will ideally leverage the strengths you have collectively identified. How will these look? What will they be like?

7. Assess opportunities - Look at the opportunities that have been generated. Which are the most desirable? Which are new, innovative, and full of potential?

8. Craft goals - Goals should stem from the opportunities identified in the previous phase. These can be linked with results so progress can be monitored and evaluated. Use goal statements for more clarity.

9. Create action plans - How will we work towards these goals? Action plans should enable implementation and there may be a specific plan for each goal.

Implemented properly with an engaged group of stakeholders, the SOAR framework ideally aims to encourage collective commitment to the shared vision that emerges (Stavros & Hinrichs, 2009).

The Appreciative Inquiry Summit

You'll have noticed from the Appreciative Inquiry example above that large-scale meetings (or retreats, or similar) were mentioned pretty frequently. The described 'large-scale retreats' were Appreciative Inquiry Summits (AI Summits), which typically last a few days and bring together all relevant participants for the 4D initiative. In other words:

"a large group planning, designing, or implementation meeting that brings a whole system of internal and external stakeholder together in a concentrated way to work on a task of strategic, and especially creative, value."

(Cooperrider, 2019)

Ludema and Mohr's (2003) book of the same name covers the methodology in greater detail; the five parts look respectively at:

1. Understanding the methodology, essential conditions, and what to expect from beginning to end;

2. Sponsoring, planning, and creating an AI Summit;

3. The 4-Ds during the Summit, and information for facilitators;

4. Follow-up and a look at appreciative organizations; and

5. An appendix with notes and a sample workbook.

You can get The Appreciative Inquiry Summit: A Practitioner's Guide at Amazon.

75 PowerPoints on Appreciative Inquiry (PPT)

Here are some downloadable resources that could be useful if you are hoping to introduce the Appreciative Inquiry Model in your company.

1. Appreciative Inquiry - Here is an Appreciative Inquiry PPT from the David L. Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry. It explains the evolutionary history of the approach and gives helpful comparisons with traditional problem-solving practices, then outlines the theoretical principles and some case studies.

2. Building Our Most Desired Future: Appreciative Inquiry in the Workplace - This presentation comes from the University of Wisconsin and explains both AI theory and its practical applications, along with an overview of the 4D cycle of AI.

3. World Appreciative Inquiry Conference 2012 Powerpoints - This is an entire collection of 72 presentations from WAIC 2012, and it is full of case studies about AI, how its practice can be promoted, and more.

6 TEDTalk and YouTube Videos

If you're after a summary or discussion in video format, try one of these.

1. Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry and the Cooperrider Center at Champlain College SD

A quick background and discussion of the 'why' of AI, its benefits, and how it differs from conventional problem-focused approaches, by the Center's Academic director Dr. Lindsay Godwin.

2. How to Do An Appreciative Inquiry Interview

Another video by Dr. Godwin that looks at how to start AI conversations.

3. Playful inquiry - Try this anywhere: Robyn Stratton-Berkessel at TEDxNavesink

Consultant and speaker Robyn Stratton-Berkessel talks about the creativity and engagement benefits of AI.

4. Appreciative Inquiry

If you prefer a good explainer video, this one gives a concise overview of 'why we start with what's already working'.

5. David Cooperrider Speaking on Appreciative Inquiry

David Cooperrider gives a little background on how AI started as he recounts his conversation with the late Peter Drucker.

6. Appreciative Inquiry - John Hayes

Management Professor John Hayes talks about the background of AI and gives examples of how it impacts engagement and motivation.

9 Quotes

We live in worlds our questions create.

David Cooperrider

The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.

David Whyte

Appreciative Inquiry is based on a deceptively simple premise: organizations grow in the direction of what they repeatedly ask questions about and focus their attention on.

Gervase Bushe

Our worlds are formed by the questions we ask.

David Cooperrider

Problem talk creates problems - solution talk creates solutions.

Steve De Shazer

Studies of organizational excellence have shown that the art and science of asking powerful positive questions is much more important than looking for the gaps, weaknesses, and limitations in a system.

Anne Radford

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

Naguib Mahfouz

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Albert Einstein

A Take-Home Message

Appreciative Inquiry can pretty much be seen as a nexus of positive psychology and OD-both super-stimulating and rewarding areas for practitioners in either. If you find yourself nodding sagely along every time you hear "culture eats strategy for breakfast", you'll probably love the promise of AI.

In that case, I hope the resources in this article are helpful. I would love to hear your experiences of AI in practice, so please do share any of your thoughts with me in the comments.

If you're interested to read more, be sure to check our other articles on Appreciative Inquiry or the following books on appreciative inquiry.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don't forget to download our three Strengths Exercises for free.

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What Is Appreciative Inquiry? (Definition, Examples & Model)

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The Appreciative Inquiry Model is a key positive organizational approach to development and collective learning, which we will explain here.

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"A Changing World, Again.  How Appreciative Inquiry Can Guide our Growth"

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"A Changing World, Again.  How Appreciative Inquiry Can Guide our Growth"

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A Changing Wold, again. How Appreciative Inquiry can guide our growth.pdf

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Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability

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This article is co-authored by Isabelle Anguelovski, Esteve Corbera, Jordi Honey-Rosés and Isabel Ruiz-Mallén. If you wish to expand the views and ideas expressed in the article by adding your name as additional signatory, please do so here. With your name and contributions, we may work towards a Global Manifesto on Academic Praxis during and after Covid-19.
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Covid-19 is having dramatic consequences for millions of people's work-life balance, and academics are no exception. These are transformative times for everyone, and we do not say this glibly. We are living through a global pandemic of unprecedented scope, scale and impact. Unprecedented is the speed at which it has travelled across the globe, the number of people affected and the anticipated long-term consequences on work, life, social relations, the economy and the environment. No industry, or economic sector will go unscathed, and each of us will need to learn new ways to operate, function, and communicate.

We are not artists, singers, poets, or youtubers, and thus have little entertainment value to offer to ease the burden of the lockdown we are living. However, in writing this opinion article we hope to encourage thinking about how academics may transform our work ethos now and in the future. This disruptive time can become an opportunity to foster a culture of care, refocus on what is most important, change expectations about the meaning of quality teaching and research, and in doing so make academic practice more respectful and sustainable.

Below we develop this argument aware of our privileged life and job. We are in good health and our families are well. We are confined with our children in the flats of densely populated Barcelona. Although we do not have a garden, we have windows and balconies from which we can breathe cleaner air and admire the emptiness and quietness of our streets. We can fairly assume that our jobs are not at stake, while, in contrast, many friends and relatives have either lost their jobs (temporarily or not) or are struggling to keep afloat. Furthermore, our role as academics provides us with the chance to reflect on what the Covid-19 crisis means for us and how it could affect academia more generally.

Embrace an ethics of care

The pandemic has arrived amidst a growing call for engaged scholars to resist the neoliberalization of universities and advocating for a "feminist" academia. ¹⁻³ We have been persuaded by the argument that academic praxis should value wellbeing and care over performance and productivity together with solidarity and pluralism over individualism and imposed norms and practices. Our passion as scientists and teachers often make us ignore the high costs of pursuing "excellence", ⁴ or at least the excellence defined by our evaluators and funders.

Our confinement has led us to think about our ethics of care. This crisis has made it clear that we must deepen our care for others, becoming more attentive to the emotions and life experiences of our students, PhD candidates, co-authors, and colleagues. Everyone is feeling great uncertainty, and they may be sick or have a relative infected by Covid-19 or loved ones who have passed away. Now more than ever, we need to be understanding with our colleagues and flexible with our professional commitments.

Therefore, some of us are already setting on-line group-based or supervision meetings while confinement lasts, to design the best strategies to ensure a healthy and effective work-life balance. These digital encounters may be used to modify our research and writing projects accordingly, but this should not be their main priority. In our view, it is not the time for a productivity-focused discourse. For those without children or relatives to care for, confinement may be an opportunity to focus with fewer distractions. However, to assume that the latter is the case for most people would be contrary to the ethics of care that we need.

We see inherent inequities in confinement. It would be wrong to assume that all researchers have a suitable and supportive home-working environment. For example, students and PhD candidates often live in small or shared houses and may need to re-define schedules and work-spaces. How can we expect quality reflection or analysis from a student or junior scholar who is confined in a single bedroom? And what can we expect from students who are currently losing their jobs and finding themselves in precarious financial conditions?

Even senior researchers are juggling. How can those with young children be expected to teach online, write creatively, supervise and continue to perform administrative tasks while homeschooling and performing all other household chores? Even if the household conditions were more "favorable", could someone be expected to conduct business-as-usual in the wake of a global pandemic and maintain the same pace of productivity and engagement with our job duties? We think this may be difficult, if not impossible, and it may be counter-productive to maintain these expectations.

Prioritize importance over urgency

Confinement can thus help us to re-organize our priorities. It is a time to focus on what matters most to us, given the limited high-quality time that may be available. We can use confinement time to make progress on the one or two projects we care most about or to reflect about what our core contribution might be in a post-Covid world to our field and to society. In this regard, we welcome ongoing efforts to slow down the pace of academia. Some journal boards, such as Antipode's or IJURR, have stopped processing and peer-reviewing new article submissions, and some universities have extended tenure calls or staff evaluation. Many funders have extended open research calls and principal investigators have canceled or postponed meetings until further notice.

Aligned with those kinds of decisions, we advocate for focusing on the important over the urgent, which in turn involves prioritizing collective rather than individual goals, whilst remaining accountable to our universities and scientifically responsive. This means devoting energy to the key tasks that lie at the ethos of academic work, namely, teaching, mentoring and supporting students; redesigning research objectives with our teams and project partners in ways that do not result in more stress and which may be equally or more rewarding, and contributing to institutional initiatives aimed at fostering collegiality and collective support. In this regard, we can reach out to our "forgotten" colleagues, administrative staff to ask them how they feel; we can leave brief WhatsApps or Telegram audio messages to our closest colleagues. It is also the time to have virtual coffee breaks with our professional communities to create a stronger sense of institutional and emotional belonging. It is also time to recognize that online and virtual meetings have to be properly scheduled, managed, and numbered to not create new burdens on others. From an intellectual standpoint, when and if mental and physical space allows, we can contribute to public debates about Covid-19 from our own disciplinary perspective. Such contributions may not necessarily take the form of academic articles but be made through our teaching or public outreach (e.g. blogs, TV and radio appearances, student-led debates, etc.).

We have not chosen confinement, but we can choose how to adapt and respond. Inevitably, there will be items on our to-do list that will not get done. We should not feel guilty about this. Some projects may involve a time investment that we currently do not have, or they may potentially have unbearable consequences for others. For example, it may not make sense to hold online meetings to start up new research or departmental initiatives, involving other people and institutions as if things were operating normally. This may be unnecessarily stressful, since we cannot know a priori if some of the invitees may face difficult circumstances as a result of Covid-19 but may not feel empowered to disclose such circumstances.

These reflections about what should be considered important, and what should be advanced further or put on hold during confinement, also involve becoming aware of power relations in academia. Academics who hold more power than others, and regardless of whether such power emanates from their institutional or relational positions, should make a careful "use" of it. For example, senior academics should ensure that any suggestion of improvement made to students, members of their research groups, or fellow colleagues is taken as constructively as possible, whilst being open to suggestions on how to better support tasks and collegiality. It is unlikely that uneven power relations in academia will change substantially during the pandemic, but it is essential that we remain aware of how this power is wielded and that its misuse may be more damaging and more reprehensible than ever before, given the increased fragility and uncertainty that surrounds us.

The leadership and institutional context in which we work can make a huge difference in facilitating the work culture that we will need during confinement and in a post-Covid-19 world. We work at different universities and are supported by different funders, allowing us to contrast how these different institutions are confronting the crisis. Career and evaluation expectations must change. Covid-19 can and should lead us to prioritize those areas and tasks where we can really make a difference, which may involve writing less but better, and engaging more seriously with knowledge transfer and policy change activities.

Weigh the role and values of online teaching

Many academics have been asked to adjust to online teaching in a matter of days. Based on what we have seen here in Spain, this is being done rather satisfactorily, with students being grateful, responsive and participatory. We are aware that online education is a mainstream practice in open universities which can result in very positive, knowledge-sharing experiences. However, we hope that the "discovery" of online teaching by mainstream universities as a result of the pandemic does not become an excuse to eliminate long-term teaching positions and to replace classroom teachers with virtual teaching tools for hundreds of students.

Furthermore, in this rush towards online teaching, we should not forget that, as highlighted earlier, students also have families and friends who may be falling sick or struggling with their jobs and lives. It is thus important to make sure that participants in online classes have the chance to express their thoughts about the crisis and urge those who are struggling to contact their lecturers in private in order to find more flexible ways to learn and engage with the syllabus. It may also be useful to make our teaching content relevant to the current crisis, and to ask students reflect on existing connections between Covid-19 and the studied issue at hand, as some researchers have already done in blogs and other media outlets. 5,6 We also need to ensure we reach out to students who do not have stable internet connections at home for logistical or financial reasons. One of the most acute risks of online teaching would be to deepen inequities in educational opportunities and social inequalities more broadly.

Our research practice will also need adjustment. By not being able to conduct fieldwork or access labs, we may need to re-schedule activities under a great degree of uncertainty. In our case, we supervise research projects where most data collection takes place in countries where the impact of the virus on the population and the social and political responses to Covid-19 are still unknown. We cannot thus yet envision when we will be able to start or continue with data collection, which in turn might have, say, an impact on the development of PhD dissertations and the research collaborations in place. In some projects, such uncertainty could be turned into an opportunity to re-think the research goals and turn to secondary data collection and analysis strategies or to identifying unexploited primary datasets that can be shared between colleagues to help Masters or PhD students. Though this is far from being a best scenario, it is one that might be worth exploring and which may also result in novel knowledge.

We know of course that re-adjusting research questions and methodological focus is probably not the most challenging issue we face. From a human perspective, the key is and will be to encourage a collective movement that persuades funders about the need to be flexible with project completion windows and budgetary justifications. For example, if data collection has been or will be delayed as a result of Covid-19, we cannot ask our research teams to deliver outputs faster in the future; we should avoid inflicting psychological harm and stress to ourselves and our research teams when catching up with pending work after confinement ends. ⁷

Rethink academia after Covid-19
Disclaimer
To conclude, this ongoing global pandemic has reminded us of the often-forgotten co-evolution of humans and (the rest of) nature, and the harm that the latter can also inflict on us, beyond the more common geographically or temporarily circumscribed health crises and the recurrent extreme climatic events that also kill thousands of lives every year. Everyone will be affected by Covid-19 in a rather short period of time, directly or indirectly, and it may change all of us.
References
Our confinement has led us to reflect on the directions that academic practice could take during this unusual time, so as to avoid embracing the trap of neoliberal scholarship, and how it would be desirable to act after the pandemic. We may like to shift expectations about our work, the way we communicate with each other, and re-think what it means to be an engaged scholar, including the social-psychological, political, and environmental implications of academic activities and our value systems. When the Covid-19 crisis fades away, which it will, we have a chance to make academia a more ethical, empathetic, and thus rewarding profession.

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The views expressed above are the authors' own, who are grateful to Ana Cañizares for insightful edits. Photo: An empty street in Barcelona, 29 th March 2020. Copyright Esteve Corbera.

1. Berg, M., Seeber, B., 2016. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, University of Toronto Press.

2. Cardel et al., 2020. Turning Chutes into Ladders for Women Faculty: A Review and Roadmap for Equity in Academia, Journal of Women's Health, ahead of print, https://doi.org/10.1089/jwh.2019.8027

3. Caretta, M.A, Faria, C.V., 2020. Time and Care in the "Lab" and the "Field": Slow Mentoring and Feminist Research in Geography, Geographical Review, 110:1-2, 172-182, https://doi.org/10.1111/gere.12369

4. Lashuel, H.A., 2020. The busy lives of academics have hidden costs - and universities must take better care of their faculty members, Nature, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00661-w

5. Adams, B., 2020. COVID-19 and Conservation, https://thinkinglikeahuman.com/2020/03/16/covid-19-and-conservation/

6. Wong, E., 2020. TB, HIV and COVID-19: urgent questions as three epidemics collide, https://theconversation.com/tb-hiv-and-covid-19-urgent-questions-as-three-epidemics-collide-134554

7. Corbera, E., 2020, COVID-19: Confined thoughts, http://estevecorbera.com/covid-19-confined-thoughts/

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Academia in the Time of Covid-19: Our Chance to Develop an Ethics of Care

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This article is co-authored by Isabelle Anguelovski, Esteve Corbera, Jordi Honey-Rosés and Isabel Ruiz-Mallén. If you wish to expand the views and ideas expressed in the article by adding your name as additional signatory, please do so here. With your name and contributions, we may work towards a Global Manifesto on Academic Praxis during and after Covid-19.

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Fabiola Torres, "Pedagogy of Love: Teaching for Humanity"

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Fabiola Torres, "Pedagogy of Love: Teaching for Humanity"

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Pedagogy of Love: Teaching for Humanity - Online Network of Educators

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Pedagogy of Love: Teaching for Humanity Love is Essential Valentine’s Day celebrates love. Whether it’s romantic, fraternal, familial or personal, many recognize the power of love. No matter how you […]

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Too Much focus on 'Learning Loss' Will Be a Historic Mistake

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Too Much focus on 'Learning Loss' Will Be a Historic Mistake

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Despite the understandable skepticism-and all the adjustments and sacrifices we've grown accustomed to-a sort of miracle is materializing in the distance. Published reports from the Centers for Disease Control suggest that the vaccines are doing their slow, steady work, and just a few days ago the state of California announced that they expect to be "fully back to business by June 15." The siege appears to be lifting, and this time a full return to schools across the nation, while perhaps months away, is almost certainly not a mirage.

Large-scale disruptions like the one that's ending now are always a hardship, sometimes a tragedy, and often an opportunity. Frequently they're all three, points out Ron Berger, a former teacher of 25 years, the author of eight books on education, and a senior adviser at EL Education, in his recent piece Our Kids Are Not Broken, published in The Atlantic

"Our kids have lost so much-family members, connections to friends and teachers, emotional well-being, and for many, financial stability at home," the article begins, sifting through a now-familiar inventory of devastation, before turning to a problem of a different order. "And of course, they've lost some of their academic progress."

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Too Much Focus on 'Learning Loss' Will Be a Historic Mistake

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Learning loss is real and needs to be addressed, but how we go about it should be commensurate with the size of the moment.

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Michelle Pacansky-Brock on Cultivating Care Online

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Michelle Pacansky-Brock on Cultivating Care Online

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The Anatomy of Learning: Cultivating Care from the Very First Click

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Mathematical Mindset Practices Rubric - YouCubed

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Mathematical Mindset Practices Rubric - YouCubed

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Many teachers ask what a growth mindset looks like in the classroom, and how it may be measured. We have developed a rubric that you can use to help students understand the importance of developing a growth mindset toward mathematics. The rubric is shown below and you can download it here or using the button at the bottom of the page- we hope you find it useful and invite you to share your experiences with us!

Many teachers ask what a growth mindset looks like in the classroom, and how it may be measured. We have developed a rubric that you can use to help students understand the importance of developing a growth mindset toward mathematics. The rubric is shown below and you can download it here or using the button at the bottom of the page- we hope you find it useful and invite you to share your experiences with us!

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Mathematical Mindset Practices Rubric - YouCubed

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Many teachers ask what a growth mindset looks like in the classroom, and how it may be measured. We have developed a rubric that you can use to help students understand the importance of developing a growth mindset toward mathematics. The rubric is shown below and you can download it here or using the button [...]

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Message from AC President Russell Lowery-Hart about COVID-19

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Message from AC President Russell Lowery-Hart about COVID-19

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Message from AC President Russell Lowery-Hart about COVID-19

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"Humanizing Online Teaching to Equitize Higher Education" - Pacansky-Brock, Smedshammer, Vincent-Layton

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"Humanizing Online Teaching to Equitize Higher Education" - Pacansky-Brock, Smedshammer, Vincent-Layton

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View of Humanizing Online Teaching to Equitize Higher Education

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Return to Article Details Humanizing Online Teaching to Equitize Higher Education

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Interview with Laura Rendon on her new book Sentipensante Pedagogy

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Sentipensante Pedagogy was formally introduced with the publication of Rendón's book, Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice and Liberation (Stylus Press, 2009). The term, Sentipensante, originated from the research of Columbian sociologist and developer of participatory action research, Orlando Fals Borda. Eduardo Galeano, employs the term in The Book of Embraces. In a YouTube video, Fals Borda discusses his work with the fishermen of the Columbian coast and how they referred to themselves as sentipensantes, people able to master simultaneous use of two forms of intelligence: sensory and intellectual knowing.

Sentipensante pedagogy is a culturally-validating, deep learning experience that addresses the harmonic balance between intellectual, social, emotional and inner-life skill development. The pedagogy also connects the learning experience to issues of equity and justice. To foster deep learning, illuminative learning tools/prácticas de conocimiento are employed to open the senses. Examples include: Periods of silence, music, poetry, arts-based projects, testimonios, socially-driven art and photography, ritual, and cultural immersions, among others.

Please click on the titles below to explore:

ALSO NOTE THAT THERE ARE A NUMBER OF YOUTUBE VIDEOS FEATURING MY WORK:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=laura+rendon

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Sentipensante Pedagogy was formally introduced with the publication of Rendón's book, Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice and Liberation (Stylus Press, 2009). The term, Sentipensante, originated from the research of Columbian sociologist and developer of participatory action research, Orlando Fals Borda. Eduardo Galeano, employs the term in The Book of Embraces.

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TEDxManhattanBeach - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang - Embodied Brains, Social Minds

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Steven Mintz, "Social-Emotional Learning Can Help College Students Navigate the Pandemic's Disruptions"

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Steven Mintz, "Social-Emotional Learning Can Help College Students Navigate the Pandemic's Disruptions"

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Mohandas Gandhi was once asked, "What do you think of Western civilization?" His reply: "I think it would be a good idea."

That's precisely what I think about social-emotional learning.

Social-emotional learning is all the rage. Its goal: to enhance students' self-awareness, social awareness and relationship skills; to help them work effectively in teams; and to strengthen their self-regulatory skills and capacity for responsible decision making.

It seeks to boost students' emotional intelligence and empathy; strengthen grit, determination and persistence; nurture a growth mind-set; and cultivate an ability to self-manage emotions.

Sounds good to me.

But social-emotional learning has, not surprisingly, become yet another front in the culture wars.

At first glance, that seems odd, since the purpose of social-emotional learning sounds eminently conventional and totally uncontroversial: to promote students' social, emotional and character development.

But everything is fair game in today's Kulturkampf, as a Parents' Bill of Rights pressed by Indiana's attorney general Todd Rokita makes clear. "SEL programs," he wrote, "represent a fundamental shift in the role of teachers from educators to therapists and expand the reach of government into domains of the family."

I wholeheartedly disagree. The pandemic has inflicted a heavy emotional toll on students and faculty alike, exacerbating anxiety, grief, loss and stress; reducing social interactions; and contributing to feelings of disconnection, depression and despair. Social and emotional learning offers one way to support respond to the pandemic's toll.

But if we at the college level are truly serious about social-emotional learning, wouldn't it make sense to treat emotions in a rigorously academic manner?

In K-12 schools, the goals of social-emotional learning tend to be narrowly instrumental.

To help students understand the impact of emotions on their behavior.

To teach students how to regulate and control emotions.

To help students recognize and name emotions, both their own and those of others.

All good. All helpful.

But in college, shouldn't the purpose be much more ambitious? After all, we live in the golden age of the study of emotions.

The study of emotions is fast becoming integral to the study of the humanities and social sciences. Here are some ways that those disciplines are already engaging with the emotions:

The history of emotions: Major topics in the history of emotions include how affective feelings and emotional expression and language have changed over time, how various historical eras have shaped the definition and expression of particular emotions, how certain emotional experiences have changed over the centuries, and how collective emotions have influenced historical events.

The anthropology of emotions: Among the topics studied by anthropologists of emotions are how the language of emotions and the meanings, affective resonances, experience, and expression of emotions vary cross-culturally.

The philosophy of emotions: Key questions addressed by the philosophy of emotion include the extent to which emotions are social constructions or products of conscious or unconscious judgments or appraisals, the relationship between reason and various emotions, and whether morality is based on emotions or reason.

The sociology of emotions: This subfield looks at the influence of socio-cultural contexts on emotions and their expression, including the social and cultural constraints on the expression of such emotions as anger, fear, grief, indignation or joy.

The psychology and neuroscience of emotions: Important topics in the scientific study of emotions include emotions' biological, evolutionary and hormonal roots; emotion's functions; emotions' somatic, affective and cognitive impact; and the impact of feedback upon emotions.

The literary and artistic study of emotions: Central issues include how authors, artists and composers convey emotions, the variety of emotions expressed in these works, and the audience's emotional and aesthetic experience of a particular work and the role of emotion in appraising art, music and literature.

A new book by the theoretical physicist and science writer Leonard Mlodinow, Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, offers an absorbing introduction to the scholarly battle over the origins and nature of emotions, the relationship between thinking and emotions, and whether emotions are productive or counterproductive.

Although you won't learn the full range of human emotions-for that, try literature-you will learn a great deal about how psychologists characterize emotions, for example, in terms of:

automaticity (whether an emotional reaction occurs with or without conscious prompting)

persistence (whether the emotion quickly subsides or lingers)

scalability and emotional valence (an emotion's intensity of an emotion from pleasant to unpleasant, attractive to aversive, or irked to livid)

generalizability (the links between an emotion and particular triggers or responses)

If I were to list my students' basic needs, somewhere on that register I'd include their emotional needs:

To find words to describe and communicate their emotions, to make the emotions more legible.

To become more self-conscious about the triggers for certain of their emotional responses.

The need for strategies to master and influence their own emotions.

If you are a humanist or social scientist, why not integrate the study of emotions into your courses, even as you do more to make your classes more emotionally supportive, by bonding with your students, nurturing a sense of belonging and helping them develop the social-emotional skills of empathy, resilience and collaboration.

Want a shortcut? Go to the Emotions Lab, where you can learn a great deal about the history of such emotional concepts as anxiety, nostalgia, compassion and loneliness and take part in serious games, including one that involves matching emotions to historical images. And read a fascinating essay by the Brooklyn-based writer Meghan Racklin on the failed attempts to taxonomize human emotions.

A college may be a bastion of reason, but shouldn't it also be a place for feeling, sentiment, compassion and, yes, emotion?
Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Social-Emotional Learning Can Help College Students Navigate the Pandemic's Disruptions | Higher Ed Gamma

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Mohandas Gandhi was once asked, "What do you think of Western civilization?" His reply: "I think it would be a good idea." That's precisely what I think about social-emotional learning. Social-emotional learning is all the rage.

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The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board released its preliminary headcount for Texas schools in fall 2021, revealing an 11% loss of enrollment at Texas's community colleges since 2019.

"Sadly, the pandemic has had a disparate impact on community colleges, and it's hit everyone," said Jacob Fraire, president of the Texas Association of Community Colleges (TACC). "When we look at reductions in enrollment, there's no pattern between urban and rural. Everyone saw reductions."

However, the state distributes funding biennially, using a formula that does take enrollment into consideration. Schools that saw an enrollment reduction in fall 2020, the year funding was distributed, received less than their previous allocation of state funds. Twenty-one colleges were negatively impacted.

As the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) timelines come to their close, the extra federal funding that may have cleared up short-term financial worries will disappear. During its 87thlegislature held at the beginning of this year, the Texas government created the Commission on Community College Finance which will investigate the needs of community college funding across the state and make recommendations for the funding formula to be presented at the 88th legislature in December 2022. The commission meets for the first time next week. But until the committee has completed its recommendations, community college funding will continue to be based on COVID-era enrollment.

Dr. Thomas Brock, director of the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at the Teachers College at Columbia University, said that because community colleges across the U.S. are mostly funded based on enrollment, a sort of downward spiral could begin for institutions that are losing students.

"Fewer students mean cuts in services and programs, and we could see a bigger drop. That's the worst-case scenario," said Brock. "These enrollment struggles underscore the need for community colleges to make critical reforms to make sure students get support, structure, programs, classes, and advising they need."

The largest demographic enrollment drop in Texas came from Black and Latinx students. While Black student enrollments have continued to decrease, there has been some bounce back for Latinx students, but "nowhere near fall 2019 enrollment numbers," said Fraire.

The greatest impact to Texas's community college enrollment came from first time enrolling students, those who enroll immediately after graduating high school. Texas was already a bit behind the nation in first time enrollment, lagging nationally by 15 percentage points before the pandemic, said Fraire.

Since 2019, "we saw a 20% drop in Texas [for first time enrolling students]," said Fraire. "That's huge. National data tells us the students who are delaying enrollment in any college are substantially less likely to get any credential during their lifetime."

Amarillo College is fighting those odds. Serving 34 school districts and 26 counties in and around Texas's panhandle, their enrollment numbers have jumped back and forth during the COVID years. But overall, they have seen their first time enrollment numbers increase. Dr. Russell Lowery-Hart, Amarillo College president, credits this countertrend to his institution's local college promise program.

"It's for anyone from our local Amarillo independent school district that just graduated from high school," said Lowery-Hart, about the initiative. "It's a last dollar program that covers books, tuition and fees. If you graduate from Amarillo in good standing, you can come to Amarillo College for free."

Four local community organizations, Amarillo College, Amarillo Independent School Districts, Amarillo Area Foundation, and Amarillo Economic Development Corporation came together to create the promise program as an experiment.

In spite of bucking the trend in new student enrollment and an overall growth in their fall 2021 numbers, because enrollment was down in fall 2020, Amarillo College received $2 million less in state funding they received for their fall 2018 enrollment.

"Now our focus is really on retaining the students we have," Lowery-Hart continued. "The culture of caring we're known for is deepening. Now every student goes through assessments on financial health and wellness, and we're trying to make sure no life barrier gets in the way. We have a real sense of where our students are struggling."

Lone Star College, which serves the mostly urban area around Houston, was one of the few institutions that did not see a sizable drop in its fall 2020 enrollment. As a result, they received more in state funding than they had in years before, taking home the second highest appropriation in the state, according to Chancellor Dr. Steve Head.

"We're the anomaly," said Head. "Most of the Houston metropolitan area community colleges have been minus 10 [percentage points] or so."

Head cites two reasons for his institution's success, the first being Lone Star's pre-pandemic mission to increase retention and completion, particularly for Black and Latinx students. The second change Head made was to increase funding to his marketing department. The school increased television, radio, and billboard advertising.

"I realize that's old school," said Head, "But the parents are the ones usually making the decisions in COVID," and he felt that those types of advertisements were the best way to reach them. Potential students, said Head, were already connecting with Lone Star on social media.

Every percentage point in enrollment, said Head, is equivalent to about 800 full-time students, or $1.2 million in funding for the school.

"That's counting state money," he said. "So, it's important that we spend the money to make sure students and parents know what we're doing. It's a continuous effort of marketing, communication, and perceptions."

Creative thinking will be necessary for community colleges to protect themselves from enrollment-related revenue drops, said Dr. Karen Stout, president of Achieving the Dream, a nonprofit organization focused on student success at community colleges. Community college leaders, Stout said, need to think differently about how to demonstrate their value to funders.

"It's easy to say, we have more students, therefore we need more money," said Stout. "But I think we need to be thinking about how what we do creates a vibrant community."

If community colleges can convince local players to support their mission, then, said Stout, enrollment won't matter as much as the impact education has on its community.
Liann Herder can be reached at lherder@diverseeducation.com.

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Texas's Community Colleges Find Creative Ways Around Decreased Funding in Response to Low Enrollment

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The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board released its preliminary headcount for Texas schools in fall 2021, revealing an 11% loss of enrollment at Texas's community colleges since 2019. "Sadly, the pandemic has had a disparate impact on community colleges, and it's hit everyone," said Jacob Fraire, president of the Texas Association of Community Colleges (TACC).

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"An ethic of care? Academic administration and pandemic policy"

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"An ethic of care? Academic administration and pandemic policy"

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Easily create surveys and polls to collect customer feedback, measure employee satisfaction, and organize team events.

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Social Policy & the Ethics of Care by Olena Hankivsky

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Social Policy & the Ethics of Care by Olena Hankivsky

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Olena Hankivsky is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science, and adjunct professor in the Department of Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University.

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 First-Generation Care Theorists and Liberal Assessments of Care

2 Second-Generation Care Theorists and the Moral Principles of Care

3 The Interpretation of Equality: A Study of Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

4 Therapeutic Jurisprudence: A Care-Informed Approach for Compensating Victims of Institutional Abuse

5 Economic Costing in Social Policy: The Ethics of Quantifying Intangible Losses

6 Caregiving: Reconceptualizing the Public/Private Divide Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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Social Policy and the Ethic of Care, By Olena Hankivsky

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Social Policy and the Ethic of Care; Over the last twenty years, the feminist ethic of care has had a significant impact on the study of ethics and political philosophy. Hankivsky develops the concept of a publicly viable ethic of care, and applies it to several Canadian social policy issues.

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1.  How do you show care/provide a sense of belonging to others (students to faculty/classified professionals/administrators as well as to fellow students; faculty/classified professionals/ administrators to colleagues & students) at your college?

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1.  How do you show care/provide a sense of belonging to others (students to faculty/classified professionals/administrators as well as to fellow students; faculty/classified professionals/ administrators to colleagues & students) at your college?

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2.  How can exercising/exhibiting care in and outside of the classroom help students stay engaged and persist?

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2.  How can exercising/exhibiting care in and outside of the classroom help students stay engaged and persist?

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Trauma-Informed Practices

While teachers are not social workers, just saying the right things to a student suffering from trauma can make a big difference.

Our students are carrying a lot with them as they enter our classrooms each day-always, but especially right now. As educators, we lead with love, and we often see ourselves as (and we often are) primary sources of support for students not only in academics, but in all areas of students' lives.

Providing that holistic care and support is often what distinguishes a good educator from a transformational educator and what drives strong relationships with students, along with a sense of fulfillment and purpose to our work.

While this is all true, it is also all in tension with another truth: that providing holistic care and support to each individual student, to the extent that they need and deserve, is exhausting. It requires heavy emotional labor that's never captured in an educator's job description and is not covered in teaching certification courses.

When students are experiencing trauma and learning how to safely process challenging emotions, we often don't know what to say or what to do to help. We want to fix the problem, but we are limited in our capacities to actually do so. This limitation causes us to feel powerless, to feel as though we aren't doing enough and that we will never be able to do enough-even though we are already giving as much of ourselves as we can possibly give.

An Educator's Influence

As an educator, you have more power than you think, but that power might look a little different from what you're expecting of yourself. You don't need an additional degree or to have all the answers to gain that power. You already have that power because you are human, and you have the opportunity to interact with your students every day.

By being intentional about the ways in which you show up in these interactions-even the smallest, routine ones-you can provide each of your students with tremendous support, despite never being able to take away any of the external stressors in their lives.

Traumatic experiences cause our students to feel powerless, unseen, and unheard. This powerlessness leads to the difficult emotions we see students experiencing in our classrooms, often communicated through what have traditionally been labeled as "challenging behaviors."

While we cannot solve problems in a student's life, we can give them back their power and ensure that they consistently feel seen and heard within the walls of our classroom in order to give them space to process and communicate their emotions in safer, more productive ways.

Consistently returning power to your students and ensuring that they know you are there to acknowledge and listen to them can be transformational: Research shows that the adverse effects of trauma can be mitigated by the presence of even just one empowering and empathetic presence in a student's life.

Empowering Language

But what does this actually look like in the classroom?

One of the easiest and most powerful tools that you have to make a student feel seen and heard is your language. By doing something as slight as changing the words that you use with students, both in times of stress and in small, everyday interactions, you can make a greater impact than you might expect.

When we know that a student is struggling, we often feel as though we don't know the right thing to say, but what our students need to hear is often a lot more straightforward than we think.

The right words can help our students know they are seen, they are heard, and they are safe:

"I hear you. I see you. I believe you."

"You are important. Your voice is important. I want to hear from you."

"I can't change what happens outside of this classroom, but you are safe here."

"I am sorry for what you are experiencing. I see the pain that it's causing you, and I can't imagine how heavy it feels."

"I can't change your experiences, but I am here to listen to you and help you in whatever ways I can. What would be helpful from me at this moment?"

"As a teacher, I don't have the training or time in my workday to give you the support that you deserve, but I know that our school counselor and social worker do. Our school has them for students who are experiencing challenges because we care about you and want to support you in all the ways that we can. How do you feel about us reaching out to them together?"

Those words might still not feel like they are enough. No words can take away the pain and hurt that many of our students carry. While that's true, I encourage you to be curious the next time you find yourself in a situation in which you yourself feel powerless or at a loss for what to say. Pause, take a breath, and calmly try out one of these phrases or questions. Watch for how your student responds-how their emotions may shift, how their demeanor may change, how their walls might start to fall when they are given a greater sense of safety, power, and control.

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How Teachers Can Empower Students Who Are Experiencing Trauma

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Trauma-Informed Practices While teachers are not social workers, just saying the right things to a student suffering from trauma can make a big difference. Our students are carrying a lot with them as they enter our classrooms each day-always, but especially right now.

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Student reflections from Kelan's first-year writing courses 

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Student reflections from Kelan's first-year writing courses 

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Most importantly, being in this class has felt like a safe environment for me. I hope you also get to enjoy the support and guidance Professor Koning has enforced in this classroom. You will have the opportunity to work with your peers as well as a

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Check out this Facebook Cover designed by Kelan Koning.

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Loree Erickson, Thinking About and With Collective Care

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Loree Erickson, Thinking About and With Collective Care

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I want us to use this website as a space to extend community conversations that enliven radical frameworks for navigating marginalization, neglect, and the inequitable distribution of life and death chances (Puar 2017), as well as community vitality, resilience, and flourishing. This post shares some of my current thinking about and with collective care. If you are interested in a more practical, hands-on introduction to this website please take a look at this introductory post.

Disability Justice is a movement, a framework, and a practice led by disabled people of colour and queer/trans disabled people working towards dismantling interlocking systems of oppression and a world that recognizes and embraces the " embodied humanity of disabled people" (Sins Invalid 2020, n.p.). " Disability Justice is Simply Another Term for Love," a Keynote shared on her phenomenal blog, Leaving Evidence, Mia Mingus writes about the interrelated relationship between love, liberatory access, and disability justice. She encourages us to work to transform the world, leaving legacies and stories detailing how we "practice transformative love together in the face of fear, isolation and heartbreak. And I know that there's a lot of heartbreak"(Mingus 2018, n.p.). She continues, "this is how we practice interdependence. This is how we practice trust and belonging and hope. This is how we practice disability justice in its most powerful and magnificent potential" (Mingus 2018, n.p). So much heartbreak. So much magnificence. I truly believe in marginalized communities' wit, wisdom, and resourcefulness and that the transformative work that we do together is revolutionary and necessary.

Before I get too far into this post, I just want to acknowledge that I understand the multiple complexities surrounding care. Care is complicated, contextual, and relational. Care is a feeling, a concept, a practice, a form of labour (both paid and unpaid). Care can connect us. Care can harm us. Care is political and operates within the flow of power. Care work is gendered and racialized. Care is connected to historical legacies and current enactments of both state and interpersonal violence, control, and containment. Care is also at the very heart (pun intended) of historical legacies and current enactments of resistance and community building. While this post is focused on care collectives, care is a critical concept and component of collective care. In what follows you can trace some of my thinking around care, which exceeds this blog post. I have opened a forum on this website called Care Conversation Corner so we can discuss this foundational and complex topic.

Why We Need Collective Care

"Cultures of undesirability" is a concept I began using around 2010 to articulate the multitude of ways marginalized communities are systemically situated as 'undesirable others' (Erickson 2013; 2016). Marginalized people are subject to an ever-quickening cycle of poverty, violence, isolation, criminalization, and medicalization. I wanted a term that drew attention to the impacts of this social process of designating and rendering people marked as different from the norm as both "less than" and "too much." Designations that are connected to both historical and contemporary manifestations of eugenic legacies and impacts on all of our lives. I wanted a framework that spoke to this connection, linking together multiple communities' experiences with specific systems of oppression (like white supremacy, disableism, cishetero-patriarchy, and colonization). After all, sex workers, disabled people, incarcerated people, indigenous people, immigrants, queer and trans people, racialized people and many others all bore the designation "undesirable others" under eugenic policies and practices (Withers 2012). I wanted language that was inherently intersectional and interdependent. How we determine who is valued and who is even granted status of personhood is always determined by and through a complex, interlocking system.

Isolation, individualism, and exclusion are key tools of the ways that cultures of undesirability operate in order to depoliticize struggles and fragment communities in efforts to undermine collective worth and resistance. Marginalized people are further harmed by neoliberal cuts to services and practices of privatization, which increase carceral state interventions. For example, rising austerity means that there is often inadequate state funding for providing care support that allows disabled people to stay in their homes, despite the fact that it actually costs the government less money to fund homecare than institutionalized care. However, as people are forced to turn to institutionalization/incarceration in private for-profit care facilities to get their access needs met, they are transformed into commodities. Control utilizing the guise of care is used to profit corporations and companies. These interventions are presented by states as inevitable, rational solutions after necessary social services are gutted. In the past several years, more and more people are reaching out to me as their decreasing access to social services means that people are not getting the type of support from the government they need to survive and thrive.

Learning from Indigenous Activism as Caretaking

Where there is destruction there is also creation. Heartbreak AND magnificence. As part of her work decolonizing settler notions of kinship, sexuality, and science, Kim Tallbear describes the activism and organizing of women-led Indigenous water and land protectors as caretaking kin (TallBear 2016). Tallbear's framework extends and expands what "care" and "care politics" looks like, feels like, and entails. Her work prompted me to think of community organizing and activism as forms of care work. After all, organizing is mostly about making change so that people can get their needs met and thrive.

The multitude of ways that marginalized communities enact complex exchanges of limitation and possibility remind us that we do not only suffer and navigate oppression. We also live with, draw on, and create legacies and daily practices of resilience, survival, and transformation. Thinking about this interdependent dance lead me to explore various moments, both historically and contemporaneously, when marginalized communities come together to take care of each other in the face of structural inequality, government neglect, and so much discrimination and violence (Wilson et al. 2016).

Learning from How We Care for Each Other

I recognize these caregiving networks, expansive practices of care and interdependence, in queer chosen family and other non-normative family and kinship structures (Cohen 1997; Halberstam 2005; Weston 1997; Clarke and Haraway 2018) which provide emotional, financial, and practical familial support. As I shared in my last post, my care collective started with my queer chosen family and closest friends. Together we recognized the glaring inadequacies of institutional, state-funded care and built an alternative. We awkwardly practised how to take care of each other in a way that works from a principle of mutual aid, access intimacy, and care that embraces every person's whole messy complex self. I also love the stories shared by Morgan M. Page on her podcast, One from the Vaults, about the work of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) started in the early 1970s. STAR under the leadership of Marcia P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera was concerned with the multiple intersecting issues impacting their community of street involved, sex working, BIPOC, trans youth. STAR was participating in a long history of marginalized queer and trans people coming together to share resources and skills. In Page's podcast, she shares how older folks in the group would hustle and do sex work so the younger community members didn't have to. They lived together in trailers and apartments without electricity and shared whatever food and money they had. They survived together. STAR also shared and cultivated community skills for keeping themselves safe on the streets "against bashers and police" (Nothing 2011,n.p.). As their very existence and their work were criminalized, the police were a major source of violence and oppression, therefore the community came together to keep each other safe. They also agitated for systemic change within the assimilationist gay liberation movement and beyond (Nothing 2011).

As these and many other stories illustrate, marginalized communities turn to community-based collectivized strategies, like care collectives and community accountability. These strategies seek to transform oppressive systems and create liberatory practices and community generated resources and frameworks for keeping community members safe and accountable for any harm they may cause ( Generation 5 and Incite!). This work, termed Transformative Justice (TJ), creates non-carceral community-based alternatives to the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) and NonProfit Industrial Complex (NPIC). Transformative Justice, originating from groups like Critical Resistance, Incite! And generationFIVE, "seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or State or systemic violence, including incarceration and policing"( 2007, 5). TJ comes from Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour communities who experience long-standing and continuing practices of state and medical violence "administer[ing] death, disease and injury", while simultaneously excluding the same communities from care, resources and services (Durazo 2016, 181). Transformative Justice work is about imagining abolitionist futures. Futures without cages and carceral logics. Futures where communities work together to ensure the survival and flourishing of all.

I recognize collective care as part of this transformative justice work. Collective care puts into visceral practice queercrip strategies that change the way we think about care, embodied difference, intimacy, and social organization. Collective care also makes practical interventions, building new practices to disrupt the disposability, commodification, and individualism that shape violent forms of state-based approaches to care and cultures of undesirability.

References:

Clarke, Adele, and Donna Haraway, eds. 2018. Making Kin Not Population. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Cohen, Cathy J. 1997. "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (4): 437-65. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3-4-437.

Durazo, Ana Clarissa Rojas. 2016. "Medical Violence Against People of Color and the Medicalization of Domestic Violence." In Color of Violence, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, 179-88. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373445-022.

Erickson, Loree. 2013. "Out of Line: The Sexy Femmegimp Politics of Flaunting It!." In The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, edited by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young, 320-26. New York: The Feminist Press at City University.

Erickson, Loree. 2016. "Transforming Cultures of (Un) Desirability: Creating Cultures of Resistance." Graduate Journal of Social Science 12 (1).

generationFIVE. 2007. "Toward Transformative Justice." http://www.generationfive.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/G5_Toward_Transformative_Justice-Document.pdf.

Halberstam, J. Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. Vol. 3. New York: NYU press.

Mingus, Mia. 2018. "'Disability Justice' Is Simply Another Term for Love." Leaving Evidence (blog). November 3, 2018. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2018/11/03/disability-justice-is-simply-another-term-for-love/.

Nothing, Ehn. 2011. "Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries." Untorelli Press. https://untorellipress.noblogs.org/files/2011/12/STAR.pdf.

Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sins Invalid. 2020. "Sins Invalid Statement on Police Violence." Sins Invalid. June 8, 2020. https://www.sinsinvalid.org/news-1/2020/6/8/sins-invalid-statement-on-police-violence.

TallBear, Kim. 2016. "Badass (Indigenous) Women Caretake Relations: , #IdleNoMore , #BlackLivesMatter ." Hotspots, Fieldsights, December 22, 2016.

Weston, Kath. 1997. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wilson, Ciann L, Sarah Flicker, Jean-Paul Restoule, and Ellis Furman. 2016. "Narratives of Resistance: (Re) Telling the Story of the HIV/AIDS Movement - Because the Lives and Legacies of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour Communities Depend on It." Psychology Faculty Publications, no. 56: 36.

Withers, A. J. 2012. Disability Politics and Theory. Black Point: Fernwood.

I want us to use this website as a space to extend community conversations that enliven radical frameworks for navigating marginalization, neglect, and the inequitable distribution of life and death chances (Puar 2017), as well as community vitality, resilience, and flourishing. This post shares some of my current thinking about and with collective care. If you are interested in a more practical, hands-on introduction to this website please take a look at this introductory post.

Disability Justice is a movement, a framework, and a practice led by disabled people of colour and queer/trans disabled people working towards dismantling interlocking systems of oppression and a world that recognizes and embraces the " embodied humanity of disabled people" (Sins Invalid 2020, n.p.). " Disability Justice is Simply Another Term for Love," a Keynote shared on her phenomenal blog, Leaving Evidence, Mia Mingus writes about the interrelated relationship between love, liberatory access, and disability justice. She encourages us to work to transform the world, leaving legacies and stories detailing how we "practice transformative love together in the face of fear, isolation and heartbreak. And I know that there's a lot of heartbreak"(Mingus 2018, n.p.). She continues, "this is how we practice interdependence. This is how we practice trust and belonging and hope. This is how we practice disability justice in its most powerful and magnificent potential" (Mingus 2018, n.p). So much heartbreak. So much magnificence. I truly believe in marginalized communities' wit, wisdom, and resourcefulness and that the transformative work that we do together is revolutionary and necessary.

Before I get too far into this post, I just want to acknowledge that I understand the multiple complexities surrounding care. Care is complicated, contextual, and relational. Care is a feeling, a concept, a practice, a form of labour (both paid and unpaid). Care can connect us. Care can harm us. Care is political and operates within the flow of power. Care work is gendered and racialized. Care is connected to historical legacies and current enactments of both state and interpersonal violence, control, and containment. Care is also at the very heart (pun intended) of historical legacies and current enactments of resistance and community building. While this post is focused on care collectives, care is a critical concept and component of collective care. In what follows you can trace some of my thinking around care, which exceeds this blog post. I have opened a forum on this website called Care Conversation Corner so we can discuss this foundational and complex topic.

Why We Need Collective Care

"Cultures of undesirability" is a concept I began using around 2010 to articulate the multitude of ways marginalized communities are systemically situated as 'undesirable others' (Erickson 2013; 2016). Marginalized people are subject to an ever-quickening cycle of poverty, violence, isolation, criminalization, and medicalization. I wanted a term that drew attention to the impacts of this social process of designating and rendering people marked as different from the norm as both "less than" and "too much." Designations that are connected to both historical and contemporary manifestations of eugenic legacies and impacts on all of our lives. I wanted a framework that spoke to this connection, linking together multiple communities' experiences with specific systems of oppression (like white supremacy, disableism, cishetero-patriarchy, and colonization). After all, sex workers, disabled people, incarcerated people, indigenous people, immigrants, queer and trans people, racialized people and many others all bore the designation "undesirable others" under eugenic policies and practices (Withers 2012). I wanted language that was inherently intersectional and interdependent. How we determine who is valued and who is even granted status of personhood is always determined by and through a complex, interlocking system.

Isolation, individualism, and exclusion are key tools of the ways that cultures of undesirability operate in order to depoliticize struggles and fragment communities in efforts to undermine collective worth and resistance. Marginalized people are further harmed by neoliberal cuts to services and practices of privatization, which increase carceral state interventions. For example, rising austerity means that there is often inadequate state funding for providing care support that allows disabled people to stay in their homes, despite the fact that it actually costs the government less money to fund homecare than institutionalized care. However, as people are forced to turn to institutionalization/incarceration in private for-profit care facilities to get their access needs met, they are transformed into commodities. Control utilizing the guise of care is used to profit corporations and companies. These interventions are presented by states as inevitable, rational solutions after necessary social services are gutted. In the past several years, more and more people are reaching out to me as their decreasing access to social services means that people are not getting the type of support from the government they need to survive and thrive.

Learning from Indigenous Activism as Caretaking

Where there is destruction there is also creation. Heartbreak AND magnificence. As part of her work decolonizing settler notions of kinship, sexuality, and science, Kim Tallbear describes the activism and organizing of women-led Indigenous water and land protectors as caretaking kin (TallBear 2016). Tallbear's framework extends and expands what "care" and "care politics" looks like, feels like, and entails. Her work prompted me to think of community organizing and activism as forms of care work. After all, organizing is mostly about making change so that people can get their needs met and thrive.

The multitude of ways that marginalized communities enact complex exchanges of limitation and possibility remind us that we do not only suffer and navigate oppression. We also live with, draw on, and create legacies and daily practices of resilience, survival, and transformation. Thinking about this interdependent dance lead me to explore various moments, both historically and contemporaneously, when marginalized communities come together to take care of each other in the face of structural inequality, government neglect, and so much discrimination and violence (Wilson et al. 2016).

Learning from How We Care for Each Other

I recognize these caregiving networks, expansive practices of care and interdependence, in queer chosen family and other non-normative family and kinship structures (Cohen 1997; Halberstam 2005; Weston 1997; Clarke and Haraway 2018) which provide emotional, financial, and practical familial support. As I shared in my last post, my care collective started with my queer chosen family and closest friends. Together we recognized the glaring inadequacies of institutional, state-funded care and built an alternative. We awkwardly practised how to take care of each other in a way that works from a principle of mutual aid, access intimacy, and care that embraces every person's whole messy complex self. I also love the stories shared by Morgan M. Page on her podcast, One from the Vaults, about the work of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) started in the early 1970s. STAR under the leadership of Marcia P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera was concerned with the multiple intersecting issues impacting their community of street involved, sex working, BIPOC, trans youth. STAR was participating in a long history of marginalized queer and trans people coming together to share resources and skills. In Page's podcast, she shares how older folks in the group would hustle and do sex work so the younger community members didn't have to. They lived together in trailers and apartments without electricity and shared whatever food and money they had. They survived together. STAR also shared and cultivated community skills for keeping themselves safe on the streets "against bashers and police" (Nothing 2011,n.p.). As their very existence and their work were criminalized, the police were a major source of violence and oppression, therefore the community came together to keep each other safe. They also agitated for systemic change within the assimilationist gay liberation movement and beyond (Nothing 2011).

As these and many other stories illustrate, marginalized communities turn to community-based collectivized strategies, like care collectives and community accountability. These strategies seek to transform oppressive systems and create liberatory practices and community generated resources and frameworks for keeping community members safe and accountable for any harm they may cause ( Generation 5 and Incite!). This work, termed Transformative Justice (TJ), creates non-carceral community-based alternatives to the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) and NonProfit Industrial Complex (NPIC). Transformative Justice, originating from groups like Critical Resistance, Incite! And generationFIVE, "seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or State or systemic violence, including incarceration and policing"( 2007, 5). TJ comes from Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour communities who experience long-standing and continuing practices of state and medical violence "administer[ing] death, disease and injury", while simultaneously excluding the same communities from care, resources and services (Durazo 2016, 181). Transformative Justice work is about imagining abolitionist futures. Futures without cages and carceral logics. Futures where communities work together to ensure the survival and flourishing of all.

I recognize collective care as part of this transformative justice work. Collective care puts into visceral practice queercrip strategies that change the way we think about care, embodied difference, intimacy, and social organization. Collective care also makes practical interventions, building new practices to disrupt the disposability, commodification, and individualism that shape violent forms of state-based approaches to care and cultures of undesirability.

References:

Clarke, Adele, and Donna Haraway, eds. 2018. Making Kin Not Population. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Cohen, Cathy J. 1997. "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (4): 437-65. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3-4-437.

Durazo, Ana Clarissa Rojas. 2016. "Medical Violence Against People of Color and the Medicalization of Domestic Violence." In Color of Violence, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, 179-88. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373445-022.

Erickson, Loree. 2013. "Out of Line: The Sexy Femmegimp Politics of Flaunting It!." In The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, edited by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young, 320-26. New York: The Feminist Press at City University.

Erickson, Loree. 2016. "Transforming Cultures of (Un) Desirability: Creating Cultures of Resistance." Graduate Journal of Social Science 12 (1).

generationFIVE. 2007. "Toward Transformative Justice." http://www.generationfive.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/G5_Toward_Transformative_Justice-Document.pdf.

Halberstam, J. Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. Vol. 3. New York: NYU press.

Mingus, Mia. 2018. "'Disability Justice' Is Simply Another Term for Love." Leaving Evidence (blog). November 3, 2018. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2018/11/03/disability-justice-is-simply-another-term-for-love/.

Nothing, Ehn. 2011. "Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries." Untorelli Press. https://untorellipress.noblogs.org/files/2011/12/STAR.pdf.

Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sins Invalid. 2020. "Sins Invalid Statement on Police Violence." Sins Invalid. June 8, 2020. https://www.sinsinvalid.org/news-1/2020/6/8/sins-invalid-statement-on-police-violence.

TallBear, Kim. 2016. "Badass (Indigenous) Women Caretake Relations: , #IdleNoMore , #BlackLivesMatter ." Hotspots, Fieldsights, December 22, 2016.

Weston, Kath. 1997. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wilson, Ciann L, Sarah Flicker, Jean-Paul Restoule, and Ellis Furman. 2016. "Narratives of Resistance: (Re) Telling the Story of the HIV/AIDS Movement - Because the Lives and Legacies of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour Communities Depend on It." Psychology Faculty Publications, no. 56: 36.

Withers, A. J. 2012. Disability Politics and Theory. Black Point: Fernwood.

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Thinking about and with Collective Care.

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I want us to use this website as a space to extend community conversations that enliven radical frameworks for navigating marginalization, neglect, and the inequitable distribution of life and death chances (Puar 2017), as well as community vitality, resilience, and flourishing. This post shares some of my current thinking about and with collective care.

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Great resource for how to make graphics and communications accessible

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Great resource for how to make graphics and communications accessible

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Welcome to Accessible Social, a free resource and education hub that shares best practices for creating accessible and inclusive social media content.

Short on time and looking for the "too long, didn't read" version of the site? Check out the Accessible Social Quick Guide! Any information found on Accessible Social may be freely shared, cited, or referenced on other websites or publications.

To avoid confusion, Accessible Social will continue to call the platform now known as X by its previous name (Twitter) and use the iconic bird branding until the new brand is more established and widely recognized.

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Learn how to create social media content that is accessible for people with disabilities.

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Culturally Responsive Teaching - Equity Pedagogy Application Examples from Sarah Sullivan's (3CSN, Mission College) Classes Spring 2022

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Culturally Responsive Teaching - Equity Pedagogy Application Examples from Sarah Sullivan's (3CSN, Mission College) Classes Spring 2022

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Culturally Responsive Teaching - Equity Pedagogy Application Examples from Sarah's Classes Fall 2022

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Kelan's Spring 2022 Liquid Syllabus with Care Resources (inspired by Michelle Pacansky-Brock's amazing work)

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Kelan's Spring 2022 Liquid Syllabus with Care Resources (inspired by Michelle Pacansky-Brock's amazing work)

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Provides examples of how California Community Colleges are showing care through forgiving student debt

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Provides examples of how California Community Colleges are showing care through forgiving student debt

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Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox
In the spring of 2021, $600 stood between Endele Wilson and his dream of achieving a teaching credential from Long Beach City College.

Wilson, 47, started taking courses in 2019, a few months before the pandemic hit and just before he lost his job as an elementary school music teacher. He took on multiple jobs as a musician, and an overnight shift at a gas station, to support his eight children.

When he was about 18 units away from completion, he got the bill that stopped him in his tracks. He didn't qualify for financial aid, he said, because of low grades years ago at another community college. He was confronting $600 in unpaid enrollment fees - and couldn't register for classes until he settled the balance.

The college would, effectively, force him to drop out.

"I didn't know what to do," Wilson recalled. "Even working two jobs, I don't make enough money to do anything but survive."

"Too many students are struggling with hardships that make even modest debts a barrier to enrollment in community colleges."
Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor, California Community Colleges

Enrollment at California Community Colleges has plummeted nearly 20% during the pandemic to about 1.3 million students from fall 2019 to fall of 2021, according to state data, leaving campuses worried about their future and potential students with fewer of the opportunities offered by higher education. Pandemic-related hardships have propelled many students to choose jobs over education and online classes have been barriers for low-income students without digital resources.

But new research suggests colleges' own policies around unpaid balances may also be contributing to the decline while creating lasting financial harm for the institutions and students.

A report published Thursday by the Student Borrower Protection Center, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on student debt, attempts to quantify the scope of this problem. Using data from three California Community College districts and student demographic information, researchers estimate that, from July 2020 to June 2021, some 321,000 community college students accrued a collective $107 million in debt to their campuses.

Researchers projected estimates for the system based on the percentage of students affected in Compton, Lake Tahoe and Peralta Community College Districts. The report was provided jointly to The Hechinger Report and the Los Angeles Times.

In addition, The Hechinger Report obtained data from seven community college districts, representing 19 of the 116 community colleges in the California system. Though there is variation in what each district tracks, the data shows tens of thousands of students in debt to their community colleges, roughly in line with the researchers' estimate.

The records obtained by The Hechinger Report include data on a range of institutional debts from colleges and districts including Evergreen Valley College in San Jose, the three-campus Contra Costa College District, the nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District and the three campuses of the Coast Community College District in Orange County.

The pain from these debts is not felt evenly, researchers said.

"They impact low-income students at a much higher rate," said Charlie Eaton, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California-Merced and co-author of the report. "These debts are widening inequalities in who gets a degree and it inflicts financial turmoil."
Related: Public colleges shock students by sending them to costly debt collection agencies
When students owe money to their colleges - even small amounts - they can be barred from re-enrolling. Schools can refer students to state tax collectors to have their tax refund garnished or send them to debt collection companies, which often charge high fees. Colleges often don't recoup much money and former students can have their credit destroyed.

Students accrue the debt for a number of reasons, according to experts and college officials. Sometimes, they enter into a payment plan for tuition and can't keep up. Other times, they've paid tuition in full, but owe money for overdue parking, library or housing fees. Sometimes students owe a fine after failing to return a computer or calculator on time.

The number of students in this situation likely grew during the pandemic, Eaton said, although it's difficult to know by how much. It's not known how many students wanted to re-enroll but were prevented from doing so because of their debt. The California Community College Chancellor's Office does not track this information. Nor does it keep tabs on what happens to a student in debt. It also doesn't regulate how colleges handle unpaid fees.

Researchers estimate that, from July 2020 to June 2021, some 321,000 community college students accrued a collective $107 million in debt to their campuses.

Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley acknowledged the problem.

"Too many students are struggling with hardships that make even modest debts a barrier to enrollment in community colleges," he said, adding that he encourages colleges to use their federal relief money to clear student debt.

Oakley said that community college students who needed financial assistance during the pandemic are some of the "most deserving recipients" of federal relief.

"Helping community college students, many of whom are trained to be frontline pandemic fighters, continue their educations is a great investment for America," Oakley said. "We also know that for every dollar taxpayers invest in community college students, they see a significant return on that investment over the life of the students."

Community college tuition can be free for students in good academic standing who qualify for state and federal grants through the federal financial aid application called FAFSA. The California Promise Program waives enrollment fees, as does a Los Angeles-specific program.

But Eaton and his fellow researchers uncovered ways in which students can get tangled in financial aid bureaucracy. Some colleges allow students to enroll in classes before their financial aid has been approved and disbursed, they found. If they fill out the paperwork incorrectly, they can receive less money than expected and can't bridge the gap.
Related: Federal relief money boosted community colleges, but now it's going away
Or, when students withdraw part way through the semester, schools must return their federal financial aid to the Department of Education and the students must repay their school, even if they only attended classes for a few weeks. The Department of Education currently offers waivers for this process, if a college can prove that a student dropped out for a pandemic-related reason, but available data show that many students haven't gotten relief.

Some 2,100 students in the Los Angeles Community College District who withdrew between fall 2019 and summer 2021 owed federal aid reimbursement money to their school, according to data from district officials. In total, students owe the district $10 million for all debts.

Compton College decided to clear 2,702 students' debt during the pandemic, to keep them enrolled, said President Keith Curry.

The median debt forgiven was just $41.

"If you owe $41 and you're not coming back to school because you owe $41, that's problematic," Curry said.

The problem of these institutional debts is particularly high at community colleges, but extends to four-year campuses, as well. The UC researchers estimate that 44,000 students from the University of California and California State University systems have accrued $78 million in debt since the start of the pandemic.

When Daisy Lopez began at UC Riverside in the fall of 2020, she and her family had just been evicted and were homeless.

Lopez, a first-generation college student, had on-campus housing, but spent a lot of time shuttling back and forth between Riverside and L.A., she said, because her family was having to move from motel to motel. She struggled with online learning and began to face severe health issues. She was hospitalized several times and missed classes. Her GPA dropped and she lost her financial aid. When she tried to register in the fall of 2021, it turned out there was a hold on her account for $5,654 - in unpaid housing costs.

The report said that at one UC campus, which it did not name, the share of undergraduates withdrawing with debt doubled from 2019-2020 to 2020-2021 and the amount of debt owed tripled. Additional information obtained by The Hechinger Report show similar pandemic-era growth in student debt at several other UC, CSU and community college campuses.

"If you owe $41 and you're not coming back to school because you owe $41, that's problematic."
Keith Curry, president, Compton College

At Diablo Valley College, in Contra Costa County, for instance, the number of students with outstanding balances grew by 50 percent between 2019-20 and 2020-21, from fewer than 4,700 to more than 7,000. The median debt climbed from $21 to $138 in that time.
Related: Colleges are withholding transcripts and degrees from millions over unpaid bills
California has been at the forefront of policies to ease student debt burdens. In 2019, it became the first state in the nation to ban transcript withholding for unpaid balances - a policy passed or under consideration in at least nine states and advocated for by Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. But the policy is of little help for students who want to continue their education at the school where they began or who cannot come up with the money to avoid being sent to a debt collector.

California's public colleges and universities have wide discretion in how to handle student debt collection, and practices vary. Some try on their own to collect the debt. by contacting students. Others use private debt collection agencies. Some forward the debt to the state Franchise Tax Board to garnish tax refunds.

Although some schools paused the use of debt collectors during the pandemic, that practice can have "lasting effects on your ability to rent an apartment, to get a car loan, to get a credit card and to fully participate in the economy," Eaton said.

Meanwhile, the Chancellor's Office has continued running its tax-offset program. Participating schools send the office names of students with past due balances and the information is sent to the state Franchise Tax Board. Students can then have their state tax refund and any lottery winning garnished. According to the Chancellor's Office, 21 districts, involving about 96,000 students currently participate in the program. Seven others are in the approval process.

Officials at Rio Hondo Community College in Whittier decided to pause participation in the tax-offset program for current students before the start of the pandemic and will not restart for at least three more years, said Stephen Kibui, vice president of finance and business. The campus typically gets back about 40 percent of what it's owed after allowing for a 25 percent administrative fee, he said.

The college also previously worked with a debt collector, but scrapped that when the 33 percent fee was too high and students' credit was being damaged.

For now, Rio Hondo is using federal relief money to waive current student debt, which Kibui says benefits both students and the college. The campus has lost more than 8,000 students since 2018-2019, with enrollment dropping from 33,500 to 25,000.

"The college is in dire need of students," Kibui said. "We are not adding any financial hardships to any of our students."

Several other community colleges and universities across the state have used their federal relief funds to forgive student debt, in hopes that students will stay enrolled or dropouts will return.

Long Beach City College, for example, has forgiven $2.1 million in debt for 7,990 students from spring 2020 to summer 2021, according to the interim executive vice president of student service, Dr. Nohel Corral. Individual debts forgiven ranged from $100 to $5,000.

The decision meant thousands were able to continue with their education. Endele Wilson was one.

For him, the timing was critical. If his debt were not forgiven, "I would have had to stop school," he said. "It's my hypothesis that if people stop for two semesters it's not as easy to get started again - I could have easily been fully sidetracked."

The UC researchers' report recommends that the state should require - and financially support - all colleges and universities to forgive these debts, arguing that it could have an enormous impact. When Lake Tahoe Community College District canceled pandemic debts for 457 students last year, it found that 152 of them immediately re-enrolled to resume their studies.

"If Lake Tahoe's success was replicated statewide, tens of thousands of students would be re-enrolled," the report concludes.

Some advocates say that schools should use this moment to rethink how they handle student debts, as federal relief money is about to dry up.

"See if you can come up with a more mutually beneficial solution than just saying, 'This is a public debt, I'm sending it to collections,'" Jessica Thompson, vice president at The Institute for College Access and Success said. "Nobody wins and the person whose name the debt is in gets into a spiral that has repercussions that benefit nobody."

She pointed to Detroit's Wayne State University, which has seen success with its program that allows students with debts to re-enroll and forgives those balances after they complete a semester. Such a program benefits colleges as well, by helping them boost enrollment and, ultimately, bring in more money from the former dropouts.

"It turns into a self-sustaining way of dealing with this debt," Thompson said.

Dr. Curry, who led the effort to forgive debts to Compton College, worries that the program cannot continue without pandemic-related funds.

"We never had the opportunity to pay off students' debt" before the pandemic, said Dr. Curry. "The question will be, can you sustain it? And also, what policy changes will you have over the next two or three years to ensure that this doesn't happen to other people?"
This story about college fees was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.
For now, forgiveness has brought back many students who see completing college as one of their few options to advance.

Lopez, the UC Riverside student, had her debt lifted through federal funding. Her mom is dealing with homelessness and her own health isn't perfect, but she is managing.

"I was struggling, honestly, and without it, if I still had the debt, I wouldn't be in school," she said. "I need college. Without it I would feel like I have nothing left for me, and no option to build for the life that I want."

Sarah Butrymowicz oversees and contributes to The Hechinger Report's investigative and data work covering all levels of education, from early childhood to K-12 to higher education. She has worked at... More by Sarah Butrymowicz

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Overdue bills, some minor, keep hundreds of thousands of California college students from enrolling in classes

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Enrollment at California Community Colleges fell nearly 20% during the pandemic, leaving campuses worried about their future and students shut out of higher education opportunities. But new research suggests that colleges' own policies around unpaid balances may be contributing to the decline, while creating lasting financial harm for the institutions and students.

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Personalized Texts Support Student Persistence 

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Personalized Texts Support Student Persistence 

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A new study from Georgia State University found that community college students receiving targeted, personal text messages from an artificial intelligence chat bot were more likely to complete tasks critical to staying enrolled.

The randomized controlled trial, conducted during the 2020-21 academic year, included about 11,000 students attending Georgia Perimeter College, a community college that is part of Georgia State University. Students received personalized text messages-complete with emojis-on their phones reminding them of important deadlines in their academic schedules, telling them how to pay outstanding balances or apply for financial aid, and directing them to campus services. The chat bot also responded to questions from students about campus services and supports, financial aid, and other topics, drawing on thousands of built-in answers to commonly asked questions.

Administrators say the findings reveal valuable lessons about when and how to deliver effective nudges, a student engagement tactic that's been both embraced and hotly debated on campuses across the country. The hope is the research will help fine-tune the ways colleges use this technology to keep students on track, especially low-income and first-generation students, as the use of chat bots spreads.

If used sparingly and strategically, "the chat bot can cut through the communication clutter," said Timothy Renick, executive director of the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State. He believes academia turning its back on nudging, rather than testing "what works and what doesn't," would be a "serious mistake."

The research on the chat bot trial was conducted by postdoctoral research associate Katharine Meyer and Lindsay Page, the Annenberg Associate Professor of Education Policy at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which focuses on education research and reform. Meyer is presenting the findings this morning at the Association for Education Finance and Policy annual conference.

The scholars found that timely reminders to students to finish specific tasks were most effective. For example, students receiving messages in the fall were 16 percent more likely than their peers to file their applications for financial aid by January. Students receiving early registration reminders were 4.6 percent more likely to register early for their spring 2021 courses. Messages suggesting students attend a "Comeback Camp," an academic support program for students with low GPAs in fall 2020, significantly boosted attendance. About 40 percent of students who received the texts participated, compared to 24 percent of students who did not.

The study also found that chat bot reminders successfully encouraged students to seek out help to resolve problems that could hinder their enrollment. Messages that nudged students with unpaid balances to meet with an academic adviser upped visits to advisers by at least 13 percent over the course of a semester. Students who received messages about unpaid balances were 36 percent less likely than their peers to be dropped from the rolls because of outstanding debts to the college.

"When ... we're messaging to students about sort of well-defined tasks where they understand the consequences of not handling that task, that's where we see the most benefit," Page said.

Renick noted that getting students to overcome these hurdles can be especially impactful at a college like Georgia Perimeter, a predominantly Black institution where about 70 percent of students are eligible for the federal Pell Grant and about 85 percent are working while in college.

At a campus with "mostly low-income students, mostly first-generation students, getting them through the bureaucracy is literally half the battle," he said. "You can really move graduation rates in significant ways."

Mitchell Stevens, professor of education and co-director of the Pathways Lab at Stanford University, noted that this kind of research is badly needed, as campuses increasingly use products and services from education-technology firms, like chat bots, in their classrooms.

He described the ed-tech industry as a "promise-heavy and information-thin domain" when it comes to student success outcomes.

"This is a world that's full of lots of firms providing lots of services about which they are making lots of promises," he said.

Stevens believes more robust scientific research in collaboration with these firms can help demonstrate the value of these products and improve them.

Georgia State began experimenting with chat bots and tracking results in 2016 in response to staggering rates of summer melt -19 percent of students who confirmed they were attending the university didn't show up to classes in fall 2015. Despite emails and calls to students and events for students and parents, "We were losing hundreds and hundreds of students," Renick said.

Since then, the university has extended a more generalized chat bot to all bachelor's-degree students on its Atlanta campus. Researchers at Brown also conducted another study in fall 2021 where half of a 500-person Georgia State government course, known for low grades and withdrawals, received specialized chat bot messages and half did not. Students who got messages-reminding them about assignments and exams, and sometimes offering sample test questions, based on their progress in the class-were 16 percent more likely to earn a B or higher. First-generation students receiving the texts passed at higher rates and earned grades about 11 points higher than similar students not interacting with the bot. Students with low grades in high school who got texts also sought out academic help at higher rates and were more likely to earn a B or higher in the class than their peers.

"If you can lessen the bureaucracy a little bit, not only does it help students graduate or help students retain or help students get better grades in their class, it really helps the students who are low income, first generation, minoritized ... and we've seen that across the board," Renick said.

Lindsey Fifield, director of student success communication at Georgia State, said the chat bot is designed to be user-friendly. Messages address students by name and direct them toward one specific action item based on their personal circumstances. Students receive only up to three messages per week. The language the chat bot uses is "much more casual" than messaging from universities tends to be, avoiding bureaucratic terms such as "FAFSA verification" or "satisfactory academic progress."

"Those, right out of the gate, are scarier words," she said. "They're big. Students don't always understand what they mean. And even if they do understand what they mean, it's an intimidating ask."

Meyer said the key is "coordination within the institution" to make sure that "we hit that sweet spot of sending them the information that they need but not overwhelming them at any given point so they can actually take action on the tasks at hand."

Given the outcomes of the research, Georgia State plans to include chat bots in more courses, especially STEM classes, and extend chat bot use to all Georgia Perimeter students next year.

Using chat bots in academia can be controversial. Nudging as a practice has been criticized in recent years after some studies found it had lackluster outcomes in certain contexts. For example, a study by economists at five universities, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2019, found that nudges from state-level and national organizations to incoming and current college students to submit the FAFSA didn't budge enrollment or financial aid application rates.

Jinann Bitar, director of higher education research and data analytics at the Education Trust, said research on chat bot interventions is "pretty mixed." She worries that chat bots built with incomplete data could create more confusion for students and even exacerbate inequities, and some colleges might lack the resources to build carefully designed nudging programs at scale and sustain them.

"A lot of these community colleges that might be best served with this kind of technology are going to have the least capacity for these kinds of interventions," she said. But she believes the Georgia State research makes a compelling case that chat bots, "if leveraged well," can help students and free up time for staff members to focus on students with the most need.

Iris Palmer, deputy director for community colleges at New America, a liberal think tank, said chat bots could be especially "powerful tools" for stretched-thin staff members fielding admissions questions at community colleges. The chat bots can also serve students who may be hesitant or uncomfortable about sharing personal information about family hardships or money problems one-on-one with college officials.

"I think we've learned a lot about what doesn't work in nudging," she said. "Just reminding somebody in a way that's not customized to them, is not timely and is not from somebody they know and trust, does not work." But "creating that trusted relationship, even if it's an automated relationship with a character from the school, does seem to make a difference."

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New study explores how to use chat bots to retain students

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A new study from Georgia State University found that community college students receiving targeted, personal text messages from an artificial intelligence chat bot were more likely to complete tasks critical to staying enrolled. The randomized controlled trial, conducted during the 2020-21 academic year, included about 11,000 students attending Georgia Perimeter College, a community college that is part of Georgia State University.

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Reading Apprenticeship Approach & Framework

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Reading Apprenticeship Approach & Framework

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Today's secondary and college students need strong literacy skills, subject-area knowledge, self-direction, and curiosity to succeed. Reading Apprenticeship opens opportunities for all students, giving them new ways of reading, writing, thinking, talking, and reasoning in supportive classroom environments.

What it is, why it's different

Teachers using the Reading Apprenticeship approach learn to model discipline-specific literacy skills and establish routines for discussion and collaboration that tap students' own experiences.

The Reading Apprenticeship approach is based on a unique framework of four interacting dimensions of learning that support both academic and s ocial-emotional learning: social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge-building.

These four dimensions are integrated into subject-area teaching and developed through metacognitive conversation that explores students' thinking processes. Students think and talk about how they learn as well as what they learn. This collaborative work takes place within the context of extensive reading - increased in-class opportunities for students to practice reading in more skillful ways.
Read more about how Reading Apprenticeship supports social-emotional learning

Teaching students to understand their own thinking processes enables them to take control of their learning and build academic identities as problem solvers who persevere.

Extensive Reading

Surrounding the dimensions of classroom life is reading itself. Reading Apprenticeship classrooms feature many kinds of text, digital and print, and an increased amount of reading.

Social Dimension

Builds Collaboration

Create a supportive learning environment

Share reading processes, problems, and solutions

Explore the relationship between literacy and collaboration

Personal Dimension

Builds Academic Identity

Develop identity as a reader

Increase reader fluency, stamina, and range

Foster confidence and persistence

Cognitive Dimension

Builds Self-Monitoring Comprehension

Develop problem-solving strategies

Build big-picture understanding

Learn to break down text

Set and adjust reading goals

Knowledge Dimension

Builds Disciplinary Knowledge

Surface, build, and refine schema

Build knowledge of texts and language

Develop understanding of disciplinary discourse/practice

Metacognitive Conversation

Conversation and Thinking About Thinking

Unites the four dimensions

Develops awareness of the reading process

Makes comprehension strategies visible

Provides crucial support for English learners

Download detailed framework (PDF)

Get Started

"Reading Apprenticeship has proven to be an inspiration to faculty and students alike. They have learned together to view themselves as readers in transformative ways."

- Steve Hanson, President, Renton Technical College
Explore our Success Stories

See how Reading Apprenticeship works in a Dixon High School Honors U.S. History classroom

What funding sources can help pay for Reading Apprenticeship?

Secondary. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) recognizes four levels of evidence. The top three levels require findings of a statistically significant effect on improving student outcomes or other relevant outcomes. Based on the law's definition, Reading Apprenticeship qualifies as a "strong" evidenced-based professional development model that states, districts and schools can utilize to advance their specific adolescent literacy initiatives. To support these efforts, state and local leaders can look to braid federal funding streams such as Title I, Title II-Part A and B, and Title III.

Some schools may also have access to School Improvement Grant (SIG) funds.

District personnel are encouraged to contact their area Field Services Consultant to discuss plans and funding in greater detail since this person is usually the first to approve such funding proposals.

Districts may also divert some of their own professional development funds to high-need schools when no other external resources can be found.

Community College.  Colleges that have federal grants, such as Title V or Title III, find that these are a good source of support for Reading Apprenticeship professional development.

In California, the statewide Reading Apprenticeship Project, funded by the California Community College Success Network (3CSN), provides scholarships for community college teams that want to build a campus Reading Apprenticeship community. In other states, sometimes a statewide entity such as the Michigan Community College Association (MCCA) or Washington's Workforce Development Councils can offer support.

At an institutional level, because Reading Apprenticeship can be used to help colleges develop initiatives related to supplemental instruction, first-year experience, embedded remediation, or acceleration, funding can be found within a college's own professional development budget. Likewise, Reading Apprenticeship is a strong support for colleges working to meet accreditation criteria, and a good investment in a successful process.

How does Reading Apprenticeship transform teacher practice?

Reading Apprenticeship professional learning supports teachers in learning how to recognize and model for students their own expert subject area reading strategies and engage students in understanding their own thinking processes. The Reading Apprenticeship approach fosters learning dispositions of persistence, problem-solving, and collaboration. As students develop more academic independence and agency, instructors are able to step away from "delivering content" to focusing on building and sustaining a supportive classroom culture based on inquiry and deeper learning.

Do I have to buy curriculum? Does Reading Apprenticeship offer teaching materials?

The Reading Apprenticeship approach works with existing curriculum for all subject areas. Instructors can use the materials that provide the strongest content match for their students. The Reading Apprenticeship approach helps you integrate literacy and disciplinary learning, with whatever materials you choose. We do have one 9th grade Academic Literacy course, and we do have free units for History and Science that include Open Resource texts, digital materials and teacher guides. Contact us to learn more or visit our resource library.

Where has Reading Apprenticeship worked and what are some examples of successful implementation? How can I arrange a visit to a school for firsthand observation?

Reading Apprenticeship has been successfully implemented across a wide range of demographics and educational settings nationwide, from rural and suburban schools to large urban districts and diverse college settings. Please see our Implementation Examples chart to gain insight into a variety of school, district, and statewide case studies.

Visiting a school for firsthand observation can be a useful first step in implementation. Please contact us for more information about how you can see Reading Apprenticeship in action.

Do English learners benefit from Reading Apprenticeship?

Students who are English learners encounter the English language from a problem-solving stance  by necessity. Reading Apprenticeship also approaches the English language from a problem-solving stance,  by design. This means that Reading Apprenticeship gives English learners exactly the kind of literacy support they need most.

In two randomized controlled studies of Reading Apprenticeship, English learners or students who speak languages other than English at home had robust, statistically significant gains on standardized achievement tests in reading comprehension, English language arts, and biology.

English learners make these kinds of gains because Reading Apprenticeship emphasizes student collaboration and safe, respectful classroom cultures. Teachers are primed to build from students' strengths, to encourage collaboration and community, and to "normalize" the struggle that comes with effortful reading-for all students. Because of our emphasis on metacognition, students have windows into their teachers' and peers' thinking and vocabulary as they talk about how they read and make sense of texts and this is especially helpful when mastering a new language.

Why do subject-area teachers need to participate in Reading Apprenticeship - isn't it for ELA teachers?

Now more than ever, students need an understanding of how to read, write, and reason within each discipline. Historians, scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, health professionals, and literary critics all use texts in different ways - Reading Apprenticeship helps teachers make discipline-specific approaches to comprehension visible and explicit, and thus they have new ways to make their subject area thinking more accessible to students. Teachers of all subjects benefit from Reading Apprenticeship professional learning. That's why we recommend a schoolwide approach to Reading Apprenticeship. At both the secondary and college levels, some of our biggest fans are STEM teachers.

Can instructors implement Reading Apprenticeship on their own?

Yes - individual instructors can participate in professional learning on their own. However, teachers, just like students, learn better in a community and with thought partners, so we strongly encourage teachers to participate in teams. A good way to get started is to grab a few colleagues and participate in Essentials I. If you have a good experience, you can then send another team or call us to set up a training for your school or district.

Another easy place to begin is with our book Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms. The book's clear explanation of the Reading Apprenticeship framework and its many classroom close-ups and instructional tools can get you started thinking about and trying out key Reading Apprenticeship routines on your own.

The book also makes an excellent choice for a professional book group or learning community, if you find yourself wanting company.

For what types of students, classrooms and schools does Reading Apprenticeship work?

Reading Apprenticeship professional learning is proven to support teaching and learning across a wide range of demographics and educational settings, from rural and suburban schools to large urban districts and diverse college settings. Our focus is on middle school, high school, and college.

The Reading Apprenticeship approach is inherently flexible, equity-driven, and proven to support academic success for all students, from at-risk to AP level to English learners.

How does Reading Apprenticeship support social-emotional learning?

The Reading Apprenticeship framework shows how social-emotional learning (SEL) is integrated into classroom life - the social and personal dimensions overlap with the cognitive and knowledge building dimensions, and thus are part of everyday teaching in every content area. Teachers in our professional learning will practice specific routines to build students' self awareness and support their ability to solve problems even when they are frustrated. Teachers also learn new ways to establish positive social and personal connections that lead to a safe and engaged classroom culture. Visit our SEL resources for more information.

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Today's secondary and college students need strong literacy skills, subject-area knowledge, self-direction, and curiosity to succeed. Reading Apprenticeship opens opportunities for all students, giving them new ways of reading, writing, thinking, talking, and reasoning in supportive classroom environments. Teachers using the Reading Apprenticeship approach learn to model discipline-specific literacy skills and establish routines for discussion and collaboration that tap students' own experiences.

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Zaretta Hammond's Ready for Rigor Framework

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Zaretta Hammond's Ready for Rigor Framework

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Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students
by Zaretta Hammond, 192 pages, Corwin, November 2014

This article contains Amazon Affiliate links. If you click these and make a purchase from Amazon, I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

For eight years, I taught students who would likely be labeled "at risk." Not all of my kids fit that description, but at least half belonged to the groups we talk about when we talk about the opportunity* gap: Students whose race, culture, home language, or socioeconomic status are not necessarily a match with what many schools teach and value. I did my best to meet their needs, to challenge them and set them up for success in life, but when I look back with the knowledge I have gained over the last few years, I know I did a crappy job.

I think about Dion, one of my seventh graders, who sat listlessly through most of my classes, whose assignments were always half-finished, who always scored low on tests, who used his cute, slow smile as a cover any time I tried to push him to get his work done. I'd keep him in at lunch and after school, let him do piles of make-up work to try to bring his grade from an F to a D, and talk to him about how he needed to change his habits. But none of it worked. All of us, his other teachers and myself, met with Dion and his mom more than once to try and figure out how to get Dion to improve.

The discussion often went like this:

"What do you think is the problem here?" from one of my colleagues.

Dion shrugged. "I'm not doing my work."

From another teacher: "And what do you need to do differently?"

Another shrug. "Start doing my work, I guess."

Nothing changed. Dion managed to keep his grades up just enough to move on to eighth grade. His skills never improved, his habits stayed about the same, and he went on with his life, like hundreds of others moving through that same school system every year.

If we had read Zaretta Hammond's book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain , things could have been completely different for us, for Dion, and for so many other students in our school. This practical, insightful, and absolutely necessary book will help teachers do a better job of teaching a more diverse group of students.

A Brain-based Blueprint for Reaching Diverse Students

Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain is not just a "bag of tricks" teachers can pull from to help students from more diverse backgrounds do better. It is a thoughtful, holistic, brain-based approach to teaching the whole child.

By looking through the lens of neuroscience, Hammond shows us how the brain responds to various teaching approaches and learning environments, and helps us understand why, despite our best efforts, many students simply haven't responded to the kinds of interventions many schools put in place for them. "The problem of the achievement gap won't be solved by simply trying to motivate students of color to become more engaged learners," she writes. "We have to create school environments that welcome their natural ways of learning and shape content so that they see its connection to their lives and funds of knowledge."

The book is built around the Ready for Rigor Framework, four separate practice areas that, if used together, give us the tools for culturally responsive teaching. The practice areas are:

Awareness. Before teachers can truly meet the needs of diverse learners, we must develop the right mindset. This requires us to understand what "culture" really means, fully explore our own cultural beliefs and biases, and study how the brain learns.

Learning Partnerships. To succeed in school, diverse learners need to feel as if they are in partnership with their teachers. To create these relationships, we need to build trust with students, help them develop positive mindsets, and give them the language to talk about their learning.

Information Processing. Teachers need to understand how to expand students' intellective capacity so they can engage in deeper, more complex learning. This requires teachers to learn brain-based information processing strategies common to oral cultures like metaphors, rhythmic mnemonics, and "story-ifying" the content.

Community Building. Culturally responsive teachers work to create supportive, welcoming environments, places that feel socially and emotionally safe, so that students are comfortable enough taking the risks required to stretch their brains.

Apart from being incredibly useful and clear, what's great about this book is that it won't make teachers defensive. Rather than attacking teachers for taking the wrong approach, Hammond simply shows us why some methods are ineffective, then explains why a different approach works better. This lack of judgment is likely to give her message a bigger reach, and to help far more teachers develop the skills they need for this important work.

We Can Do Better

Maya Angelou said, "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." I believe most teachers are doing the best they can to serve all of their students. They just don't have enough tools. This book is without question a way to know better. I urge anyone who works with culturally diverse students, second-language students, or students who have grown up in poverty to read Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain . There's no way for me to reach Dion now, but there are millions of others just like him. Now we have the tools to really change their academic paths.

Now we know better. We just have to do it. ♦

Zaretta Hammond is a former English teacher who has been doing instructional design, school coaching, and professional development around the issues of equity, literacy, and culturally responsive teaching for the past 18 years. To read more of her work, visit her blog, Ready for Rigor, or follow her on Twitter at @Ready4Rigor.
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*Author's note, June 2018: This post has been revised slightly since its original publication in 2015, when I used the term "achievement gap" throughout. At the time, I was not aware of the way this term perpetuates deficit thinking about some of our students. My revisions are an attempt to use language that better represents our need to reach all children in a way that works for them.

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A Must-Have Guide to Culturally Responsive Teaching

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This practical, insightful, and absolutely necessary book is a guide for teachers who want to help culturally and linguistically diverse students not just survive, but thrive.

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Last May, I published a post with this title: " Can we stop telling the 'corona kids' how little they are learning?"

Written by Rachael Gabriel, associate professor of literacy education at the University of Connecticut, it made the case that students were actually learning when schools closed last spring as the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States - just not all of the things they would have learned in class:

Students are learning how to reset the rhythms and structures of their days. They are learning different patterns and modes of communication. They may be taking on different roles in their homes and learning how to complete new tasks, engage in new games and develop or sustain new and different activities.

Some are learning from the outdoor world on walks that go slower and last longer than before. Others are watching nature change day-by-day out their window, in their gardens, and along trails and bodies of water. Some are spending more time in their imaginations because it's the only place to go, but this is not unimportant work.

Students cannot help but learn about themselves, others and the world around them in this time when solitude has steadily increased alongside disconnection and uncertainty. Even those who are too young to verbalize their understandings understand their world has changed, and are changing right along with it.

Gabriel is back with a new look at "learning loss" and what it really means.

Gabriel has written or edited five books for literacy teachers, leaders and education researchers, as well as numerous articles, and teaches courses for educators and doctoral students pursuing specialization in literacy.

By Rachael Gabriel

There is no such thing as learning loss.

When it comes to K-12 schooling, the truth is that some of us are more used to interruptions than others. Those of us who have to move around a lot, are living between two countries, or who have experienced a major injury, illness or are chronically ill, and even those who just changed schools once know what loss feels like.

But it is not a loss of learning.

It is loss of a previously imagined trajectory leading to a previously imagined future. Learning is never lost, though it may not always be "found" on pre-written tests of pre-specified knowledge or preexisting measures of pre-coronavirus notions of achievement.

The legacy of the standards movement of the 1990s, and the high-stakes testing it inspired in the early 2000s, is a version of education that is assumed not to exist or matter unless or until it is predicted and measured. The pandemic has illustrated with searing definition how wrong that assumption is. We have all learned, every day, unconditionally.

Students continue to learn about themselves and school when we tell them that their efforts to engage with school this year were simply not enough. They learn about inequality when they see some districts open in person and others not, some people vaccinated and others not. They learn that the world still assumes all children live with their parents, and that it is safe to do so.

They learned to take gym class on YouTube, that people you have never met can be your greatest teachers, that the ability to go outside and play during the day makes every day brighter, and that their safety depends on the decisions of others.

They learned that, contrary to the messages in some schools, learning does not require feet on the floor, hands on their desks, and eyes tracking the speaker. They learned what taking breaks does for them as learners, and what conversation and companionship means for them as individuals.

Teachers learned too - that their already lean curriculum could be even leaner and more focused. That practice and application could and should look different at home, and that family members, friends and neighbors are a resource not only for supporting what happens in school, but for extending and elaborating on it in ways we cannot predict.

The knowledge of adults from different generations may be different from what we're teaching now - another indicator that knowledge isn't a finite commodity to be bought, sold and learned in linear order - but it adds depth and context nonetheless. This has all been part of our "covid curriculum."

The truth is that we are all in the process of learning and unlearning; of being schooled and unschooled. Our imagined trajectories were disrupted, and this particular disruption with its layers of grief and edges of uncertainty cannot be overestimated in scope or impact. This is precisely the reason we must stop telling the Corona Kids that they fell behind and have to catch up. Anything other than acknowledging unconditional learning is a lie that sustains fear-fueled systems of inequity.

As Rachel Cargle, curator of " The Great Unlearn, " reminds us: sometimes you have to unlearn things in order to get them right.

Where this is the case, then the academic version of so-called "covid loss" should be considered humanity's gain. Some of us unlearned taken-for-granted assumptions about our neighbors, ourselves and our history. Some of us unlearned our relative contempt for teachers when we saw how hard it was to teach our own children at home.

Now, it is time to unlearn our trust in companies that stimulate fear of low achievement to sell tests and remediation programs. It is time to relearn what learning really looks like.

According to Yvette Jackson, a scholar at the National Urban Alliance, learning often looks a lot like what we call enrichment: with opportunities to collaborate, make choices, diverge from an original plan, be creative, and with varied ways to demonstrate what you learned.

For some students, summer is a time for enrichment. For others, well-intentioned summer reading programs construct the opposite experience: with assigned texts and tasks, and requirements to track minutes and pages read, because, it doesn't matter unless it is predicted and measured.

The idea of summer learning loss, particularly summer reading loss, has become so well known that it is a forgone conclusion rather than a possibility in some communities. We may need to unlearn this.

Recently, Deborah Reed of the University of Iowa and her colleagues reported that whether or not data from U.S. schoolchildren show any "summer slide" in reading achievement depends on the methodology used to measure it. Some approaches show no loss at all, and sometimes even gain across all student demographic categories.

This is not the only study that has suggestion assumptions about the inevitability of summer slide may need to be revisited. A small choir of studies suggest minimal or no loss across demographic groups, with patterns that look more like stagnation than slide, and a handful of others point toward nonacademic interventions, like Sesame Street, or book distribution programs, that are associated with literacy development while more prescriptive programs like summer school are not.

A few years ago, sociologists studying school as a potential social equalizer reported that African-American students in their sample were more likely to lose ground during the year and gain it over the summer. This finding was likely drowned out among the many infographics and white papers published by companies that sell reading tests and support programs.

The finding that some students learn more in the summer and less during the year is only counterintuitive if you assume that learning always happens in school settings, and all our best teachers are in school instead of at home, or out in the community.

If school is not a time for creativity, empowerment, choice and engagement, it is not likely to be a time of growth either. Why have we held on so tightly to the idea that students must lose ground over the summer if it isn't necessarily true?

Because it reifies a narrative of white exceptionalism that says rich White parents can provide for their children's education over the summer, but poor parents and parents of color cannot - all they can do is rely on public school. This must be unlearned because it is a lie. The truth is that families and communities of all varieties provide opportunities to learn, without exception.

It isn't a lie that families rely on schools as an access point for things like books, daytime supervision of children, nutrition, therapeutic services, and sometimes health care. But it is certainly a myth that families must rely on school for learning to occur. Learning can and has always occurred outside school, even and especially in communities that depend on school for specific services.

That is why research shows that book distribution programs that target laundromats and barber shops have a positive impact even when summer school and summer reading interventions, often, help students maintain but not grow.

Fear of summer slide has led to campaigns to get students to track and prove their reading by logging pages, minutes and numbers of books. These campaigns limit what counts as reading to what can be measured: pages of books, and frame students reading experiences as a race against loss rather than an opportunity to grow.

When summer reading is about increasing access to texts, but not requiring students prove they read, it looks much more like the kinds of reading experiences reserved for those we assume will grow over the summer.

As Jackson reminds has demonstrated, providing pedagogies most often reserved for the gifted and talented to those who are not identified supports achievement more than remediation designed for those considered to be low, slow or unlikely to learn.

Children will learn most and best where adults around them believe in their ability to learn, create reasons for learning and provide opportunities for meaningful practice. Catch-up is an impoverished reason for learning and remedial experiences are rarely contexts for meaningful practice.

What if instead of assuming summer is a time to fear even greater loss, we imagined it as an opportunity to fuel up on imagination, purpose, and connection that can drive the engine of formal education in the Fall.

What if we thought that, like muscles, minds need time off to rest if they are to build back stronger.

What if we thought that, like a child's physical development, growth comes in unpredictable fits and starts, not steadily over 9 months of the year only to come to a screeching halt?

What if instead of buying into the fear of what might be lost if we don't schoolify summer, we followed existing research about summer school, summer tutoring and summer reading loss? This is the evidence that has accumulated:

Free voluntary reading has a larger positive impact on reading achievement than summer school if students have access to text they can and want to read.

Students can develop reading skills with short-term tutoring provided by minimally trained volunteers, and those who struggle with reading can accelerate progress if tutoring is 1:1 with an expert teacher.

Overprescribing academics is expensive, ineffective, and usually only foisted upon those we assume will struggle to learn.

What if we imagined the "corona kids" had learned more than previous cohorts.

What if we assumed they were more resilient, well-rounded, creative, and had even more potential than previous cohorts because of what they have lived through and lived without?

What if we assumed that instead of behind, they were advanced in ways matter beyond measure?

What would summer programming look like? What would next fall be like?

If we narrow what counts as school to the aspects of school that can be counted and compared, we will certainly lose opportunities to engage students in formal schooling, but students will still learn. They always do.

If educators and policymakers want to be part of guiding that learning, they need to honor it where it exists, and fuel it where it thrives.

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Perspective | What 'learning loss' really means

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Last May, I published a post with this title: " Can we stop telling the 'corona kids' how little they are learning?"

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Tom has been involved in research and professional development focused on creating a Culture of Care in schools based on restorative justice principles and practices, as well as culturally appropriate interactions and relationships, for over 20 years. He is privileged to work with scholars and practitioners throughout the world. As Program Director of RJEd, Tom oversees research and professional development to advance the efficacy and success of Restorative Justice Education. Along with operations, Tom creates online and face-to-face training curriculum and facilitates professional development training. Tom enjoys his work with Restorative Justice Education, as well as his role as a professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, and at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.
You will meet Tom Cavanagh (0:54), hear a quick check-in (5:36) and how he got started in this work (9:11). He speaks about his restorative justice research (20:05), proportionality (22:11) and a culture of care (28:45). He envisions liberation (42:08), his organization (50:53) and a slip up moment (55:14). Finally, Tom answers his closing questions (1:01:49).
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36. a culture of care in education spaces w/ tom cavanagh

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‎This Restorative Justice Life: 36. A Culture of Care in Education Spaces w/ Tom Cavanagh on Apple Podcasts

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Tom has been involved in research and professional development focused on creating a Culture of Care in schools based on restorative justice principles and practices, as well as culturally appropriate interactions and relationships, for over 20 years. He is privileged to work with scholars and pract...

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As vice president of student affairs and campus diversity at San Diego State University (SDSU) and distinguished professor of education, Dr. Luke Wood challenges the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats.

"What we've often found is that as overall success of a campus has gone up, gaps in equity have increased," says Dr. Wood. "A rising tide does not lift all boats because not all boats are in the water due to systemic oppression, racism, and other '-isms' that affect our students. If you truly want to improve student success and be student-centered, you start by looking at those areas of disproportionate impact. Who are those students?" His approach: Start with the students most impacted - then listen to them.

Dr. Wood, with the support of President Adela de la Torre, has been a guiding figure through incredibly challenging times for students, from the COVID-19 pandemic to racial injustices that exacerbated long-standing inequities.
Establishing Check-ins and Cultural Centers for Students
Following the tragic murder of George Floyd, faculty, staff, and students called Black students at SDSU to hear how they could best provide support. Many Black students conveyed that the murder and the news cycle surrounding it was hitting them hard as they tried to keep up with school, work, and other personal and family obligations, all during a pandemic. It quickly became clear how critical it was to proactively check in with more students who may be struggling.

Since then, Dr. Wood and his colleagues have looked at persistence and graduation data to spot equity gaps and identify disproportionately impacted groups of students who are experiencing lower outcomes. Now SDSU reaches out to those students every week through a phone call or text message.

Alexia Oduro, a student who serves as a board member for SDSU's Associated Students, says, "It really is life-changing being a minority on a campus and having someone in this very high position be so open to listening and so open to hearing our ideas and then going one step farther and saying, 'Let's put your idea into action. Let's do this together as a collaboration.'"

Eventually, Dr. Wood translated those efforts to reach students into ongoing institutional supports, and based on student requests, he and his team led efforts to implement nine different cultural centers on campus, including the Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Resource Center, Black Resource Center, Latinx Resource Center, Native Resource Center, Pride Center, Women's Resource Center, Undocumented Resource Center, Center for Intercultural Relations that serves as an intersectional and cross-cultural space, and Center for Transformative Justice for students who were formerly incarcerated. Each of those centers offers embedded counseling, academic advising, tutoring, and retention programs so students have access to the resources they need to be successful.

"The Black Resource Center has completely changed my life and helped me come into my identity as a Black woman. They've empowered me, supported me," says Oduro.

Now in her senior year, Oduro is excited by the opportunity to pay it forward as an academic mentor to second-year students through the Black Resource Center.

Photo credit: San Diego State University, February 2020
Opening Access to College for Transfer Students
Another way Dr. Wood and his SDSU colleagues have focused on increasing equity is by creating greater access to SDSU for community college students. He dubbed this effort a combined "bring them to us" and "we go to them" strategy.

After talking with local partners and community college leaders, who spoke highly of retention programs and how they prepare students for success, Dr. Wood and his colleagues established a to give special admissions consideration to community college students who participate in programs such as CalWORKS, Extended Opportunity Programs & Services, Puente Project, Umoja, and Hermanos Unidos (Brothers United). They recognize that students involved in those programs are well positioned to succeed at SDSU given their experience with taking up new services, knowledge and skills, and supporting other students. Dr. Wood calls this special admissions consideration to transfer to SDSU a game changer for the university. "We look at that as an asset that they're bringing into our community," says Dr. Wood.

Dr. Wood and his colleagues have also flipped the traditional model of students having to figure out how to physically get to a four-year university and instead set up SDSU microsites at local community colleges. Microsites offer SDSU online courses, student support services, and an advisor who reaches out to each student every week to make sure they have everything they need. These sites help busy students bypass challenges with transportation and living a long distance from SDSU, enabling more students to gain a degree all on their own schedule.
Building a Diverse Faculty Team and Hiring Process
Under the leadership of President Adela de la Torre, Dr. Wood and his colleagues recognize that faculty diversity - in addition to a diverse student body - is crucial to ensuring students feel represented and supported.

They have implemented a multipronged approach to diversify faculty and transform the school's approach to hiring. They now offer implicit bias and microaggression training for all faculty search committees. In addition, they certify application pools, ensuring that pools of applicants are representative of the diversity of potential candidates in a labor market to fill that role. Dr. Wood and his team also place inclusion representatives on each search committee to help guide conversations and avoid bias.

In addition, when they consider candidates, they look for a commitment to supporting underrepresented populations through research, teaching, or service. That is what they call the Building on Inclusive Excellence (BIE) process, developed by Joanna Brooks, associate vice president for faculty advancement and student success at SDSU. Last but not least, they have begun to do cluster hiring - hiring multiple people who demonstrate a focus on supporting specific student populations, such as Black students or Indigenous students, to promote a more inclusive, culturally competent faculty and staff that will better support the diverse students and communities served by SDSU.

These tactics have worked. Since 2017, SDSU has increased its faculty hiring pools from 17% to over 50% of candidates coming from underrepresented backgrounds.

Throughout these efforts, Dr. Wood shares that it has been vital to have support and understanding from staff, campus leaders in the faculty Senate, and President Dr. Adela de La Torre. Most of the changes at SDSU have gone through a shared governance process. "We've done this together as a team, as a campus," says Dr. Wood.

On collaborating with Dr. Wood and his division, Oduro says, "It's really changed my entire perspective. I feel like I can change the things that I want to change. When people ask me what they want to do, I'm like, 'I want to change the world.' I feel like I have a road map to get there now. He's really modeled for me what I want to be in a leader."
Watch our interview with Dr. Luke Wood here. Through College Futures Foundation's Leaders Driving Change recognition series , we're lifting up leaders, institutions, and organizations committed to equitable, student-centered support and a culture of continuous improvement. We're focusing on individuals and teams who are easing student transitions, providing holistic student supports, and prioritizing equity and inclusivity.

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Leaders Driving Change: Dr. Luke Wood, San Diego State University

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As vice president of student affairs and campus diversity at San Diego State University (SDSU) and distinguished professor of education, Dr. Luke Wood challenges the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. "What we've often found is that as overall success of a campus has gone up, gaps in equity have increased," says Dr. Wood.

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Changing how people perceive problems | Stanford News

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Drawing on an extensive body of research, Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton lays out a roadmap to positively influence the way people think about themselves and the world around them. These changes could improve society, too.