Connections Are Everything for Student Success
This story-full conversation is an ideal morsel to convey the larger study in the full book, Connections Are Everything. Co-authors Isis Artze-Vega and Oscar Miranda Tapia are simultaneously realistic and optimistic about the challenges students can face when navigating college, and their exchange will leave you with plenty of ideas for relationship-rich practices in your own academic sphere. It might put a smile on your face, too.
“The job of teaching can be so consuming… for all the best reasons. Right? We love our disciplines. We love our students. We wanna do right by them. We wanna design our courses, refine them, give feedback, practice, etc. And, we can forget that their college experience exists in this broader context with so many other players. And I hope that that faculty take a little piece from that – that they realize, ‘oh my goodness, it’s not all me.’”
“So many of the students that we spoke to had either an implicit or an explicit fear of faculty or an intimidation factor, or ‘I don’t wanna bother them. They’re so busy when they’re in their office hours.’ And one of the bits of guidance that we share with students is to say, you don’t have to go by yourself. You can go visit your professors, office hours, student hours with a friend, with someone from class, and that might kind of lower that that fear factor a bit” - Isis Artze-Vega