Spring 2021 Newsletter

Editor’s Note: Seeds of Transformation

David Scobey
Director, Bringing Theory to Practice

It’s been a year of change for Bringing Theory to Practice and a year of crisis in higher education. BT2P moved to a new home at Elon University, and we launched the new website you are reading now. We responded to the larger turmoil in higher ed with an initiative called The Way Forward, creating both a grant program and a podcast aimed at catalyzing positive educational change in the face of the pandemic, the economic crisis, and the harms of systemic racism. The time seemed right to re-imagine the BT2P Newsletter as well, and to focus this issue on ways educators are meeting the moment of crisis.

We are extremely proud of the Newsletter, past and present. Since 2008, under the editorial leadership of Jennifer O’Brien and then Caitlin Salins, it has been a significant voice of reportage and reflection about purposeful change in undergraduate education, lifting up not only BT2P’s programs, publications, and convenings, but also projects, provocations, and commentary from our larger community. All back issues of the Newsletter are available as pdfs on our website; we hope you will return to them.

This issue, however, marks a change. The Newsletter has gone digital, leaving behind the old world of hardcopy layouts, printing costs, and bulk mailing. Along with saving money and trees, the new format will allow you to search and access individual articles and allow us to integrate visuals, media, and links to other resources. We will continue to publish the Newsletter three times a year and continue to engage the core themes of BT2P’s mission, but we are excited to explore new modes of storytelling and outreach. We welcome your feedback, suggestions, and pitches.

The theme of this issue—Seeds of Transformation—speaks to the larger context of turmoil in the academy. We share the conviction of many that the crises of 2020 have brought long-simmering problems in higher education to a boil. Higher ed is at an inflection-point in which big change—whether for good or ill—has grown more necessary and more possible. Much of BT2P’s current work aims to discern the positive way forward.

But (in contrast to some other voices) we also believe that higher education contains often untapped reservoirs of creativity and innovation with which to meet the moment. Even as BT2P works to catalyze new thinking and action for change, we want to lift up the change that is already happening. This issue of the Newsletter features such seeds of transformation. It presents an array of projects, pedagogies, and communities of practice that offer generative responses to and through the crisis.

Amiko Matsuo (South Seattle College) powerfully reflects on teaching ceramics in the pandemic and her students’ exploration of the theme of belonging under quarantine. (Warm thanks to students Quan Wang and Cassandra Haddon, whose journal reflections and beautiful work are included in the essay.)
Tia Brown McNair (Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Student Success, Association of American Colleges and Universities) reports on AAC&U’s important Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers initiative, a network of academic institutions bringing the national TRHT movement into higher education.
Susan Browne (Rowan University) recounts the growth of faculty organizing for diversity, equity, and inclusion in Rowan’s College of Education, both before and during the racial reckonings of the past year.
Amy Gatto (Active Minds) describes Your Voice Is Your Power, her organization’s initiative aimed at confronting the harms of systemic racism on the mental health of BIPOC students.
Mary Balkun and Marta Deyrup (Seton Hall University) document a multi-institutional partnership with Ramapo College to introduce digital humanities practices to their disciplinary colleagues—and how the project evolved and deepened during the pandemic.

These articles present and interweave a variety of themes and approaches. Tia Brown McNair, Susan Browne, and Amy Gatto focus on efforts for racial justice and equity; Amiko Matsui and Mary Balkun and Marty Deyrup describe innovative responses to the challenge of teaching and learning in the pandemic. Browne, Balkun, and Deyrup tell us stories of faculty change-work; Gatto and Matsui, of holistic support for students under stress. And the scale of the work ranges from an individual course (Matsui) to college-wide organizing (Browne) to multi-institutional partnerships (Balkun and Deyrup) to national initiatives (Gatto and McNair).

Yet all the work presented here brings to this moment of crisis a shared commitment to holistic, inclusive, transformative education. Together they weave a hopeful glimpse of the possibilities for positive change.

The Shoes We Walk In: Teaching Art on a Path to Belonging

Amiko Matsuo
South Seattle College

South Seattle College

A colleague asks me, “What’s the one thing you want students to take with them after they complete your course?”

I pause.

It’s always hard to wrap up and reduce the richness into “the one thing.” And in Fall 2020 especially, demonstrations, the elections, and the pandemic have challenged worldviews and upended teaching and learning and all of our lives. As a ceramic artist and teacher, I’m used to thinking about flux and transformation, but how do I approach a ceramics class that is online and asynchronous? How can significant learning happen with no access to studio space and no firing of ceramic works, and where the logistical issues layer with the emotional taxation and the anxieties of the times? And yet, I can’t suppress the sense that now is a time for rethinking beyond survival course adaptations. In the midst of change born of necessity, maybe my students and I can find better paths than the ones we’re used to.

Earlier in the pandemic, I had started asking questions about what it means to be making ceramic objects at this time. An invitational show that I was preparing for was cancelled, and there were many reasons why it felt difficult, perhaps even misguided, to spend uninterrupted time in the studio making objects in clay. I started to ask fundamental questions about my situatedness, my own social location, and what I could do. I leaned into my role as an educator and tried to imagine how I could practice care by asking questions about what it might mean for my students and me to work at making something beyond the traditional artifact of a fired ceramic work.

My context encourages expansive thinking in a time that can feel constraining. South Seattle College is in the process of institutionalizing anti-racist pedagogy, and for the first time in my teaching career I feel supported as a BIPOC faculty member. And I am committed to rethinking and reshaping studio art ceramics classes with equity, diversity, and inclusion at the fore. For me, this means reassessing widespread assumptions about the history of ceramic art, including gendered and appropriative narratives of “Asian masters.” At the same time, the studio’s inaccessibility due to Covid might provide ways to respond to how students of color often perceive the whiteness typical of many studio cultures that stem, of course, from the privileging of European and Anglo-American ceramic histories. As a trans-migratory person and translator, I understand what it means to be an outsider perplexed by the randomness of disciplinary gatekeeping that often seems bent on misunderstanding, silencing, or simply overlooking “others” of all sorts. Throughout my career, I’ve found myself exhausted from resisting the privileging of European and Anglo-American studio ceramics history. And so now, as I think about how to create for students of color a certainty of belonging within the physical and conceptual spaces of my discipline, I wonder how this quest might relate to the additional emotional and situational challenges we face as educators during a pandemic.

Signature Assignment: The Shoes We Walk In

Reflective Questions

What are our stories of conflict and stress in the time of COVID-19?
What feeds our connections, our resilience, our transformations?
What media and practices can support and augment our work with clay?

Activities

1) Journal and sketch. Each day, document and examine conflict in your life during the pandemic.

Student Journal Entry: Quan Wang.
Last Sunday, I managed to squeeze half a day going to Seattle Japanese Garden to visit the glow of autumn once again. Unfortunately, I could not enter because of the new policy that required all the visitors to make reservations online in advance due to pandemic capacity control. I was frustrated looking at the opened gate. Instead, I had to stroll in the neighboring Arboretum Park. When seeing visitors wearing face masks, I felt sad since all those masks reminded me that it was an unusual, tough time. I passed by a strange tree with its boughs stretching out horizontally very close to the ground and rising up in the end. These boughs are anchored by their roots. How interesting. I stopped and sketched it on my book as one of the marks in Seattle.

Quan Wang journal sketch

Drawing can make me feel calm and I like listening to music as I make a sketch. Regarding a site or a place, I’m trying to incorporate Seattle and Kyoto as two sites in my project in order to reflect the cultural backgrounds and those differences I’m always interested in.

2) Meditative handwork. Create a trompe l’oeil ceramic shoe based on your own shoes, thinking about how ceramic artist Sylvia Hyman describes her trompe l’oeil ceramic sculptures as “time capsules of the present.”

3) Document your unfired work with photos and sketches for an online exhibition and critique where we encounter each other’s artworks, stories, and situatedness.
This assignment animates the empathetic notion of “walking in someone else’s shoes” by asking students to see themselves and others as storytellers.

Figure 1 Sylvia Hyman, Bookmobile, 2008.

Path

I tell students that the most important superpower of an artist is to ask questions. In the classroom, discussions can become spaces in which to practice our ability to see and to critique artworks. It is often a challenge, always worth doing, to shift from focusing on the methods of material construction toward recognizing the artworks as social productions that are embedded and coded with cultural complexities. As students of art, we must retrain our eyes to see the histories that are part of our material cultures, to self-discover and rediscover our relationships with others, and to strengthen our relationship with our environment.

Our project encourages us to build from personal moments of reflection toward a community of understanding and support, and the artists we discuss as models create spaces for dynamic empathy and dialogue. We think together about works of art that have ‘diary-like’ qualities. I note how as a mother of a small child, I resonate with the work of conceptual artist Mary Kelley and her meticulous recordings of the first six years of her son’s life in the Post-Partum Document.

Students reflect on what it means to journal during COVID-19 by seeing the works of Renee Cox and Asako Narahashi and the journals and sketches of artist Annie Pootoogook. We discuss the Western contexts of trompe l’oeil ceramics by looking at the works of Sylvia Hyman and Marilyn Levine. We view Taiwanese artist Ah Leon’s work and consider the problems of translating Chinese mimetic traditions such as Yixing wares and xiangsheng and the co-opting of such traditions into Western trompe l’oeil contexts.

Figure 2 Ah Leon, Memories of Elementary School, 2011. Daum Muesum

The collection of examples allows us to practice reflection and listening as foundations for our creative work. We also give attention to the metaphors we are building.

Footprint

In certain Japanese Buddhist and Shinto contexts, zori sandals or waraji, are symbols of humility because of their connection to ascetics and monks. I remember my grandfather teaching me how to make them as a lesson in handwork when I was a child. I had trouble understanding why they were not for wearing but only for display until I learned that they represent Buddhist teachings. The artist and scholar Ayelet Zohar writes about walking as the embodiment of being and moving, of passing through this world. In the Buddhist context, the footprint and footwear/waraji has been a crucial signifier of being and passing and has also been a strong visual reference for artists expressing such ideas (Zohar 692).

Figure 3 Footprints at Kiyomizu Temple, Kyoto. Photo by Izu Matsuo

In a way, our clay shoes crafted by the repetitive movements of our fingertips impressing and molding the clay also serve as indexes, or stand-ins, for our bodies. We begin to see that our acts are an ephemeral performance that counters the narrative in traditional ceramics classes about the permanence of the firing process. We begin to turn from Western-centered notions of aesthetic value and look for our own path toward a pedagogy and practice of belonging.

Sustenance

shoe sculpture in garden

As an option, students may embed their artwork with milkweed seeds. Since the objects are unfired, the shoe sculptures will sprout in the spring with the one species needed to sustain migratory monarch butterflies, an emblem of transformation.

We look at artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez’s interdisciplinary work, which uses the monarch butterfly to symbolize the right that living beings have to freely move, and “to uplift the resiliency, courage, and determination of migrants who come in search of their dreams.”

The pairing of clay and its connection to geology with the planting of milkweed expands our human care to non-humans and native plants. The ephemeral object that grew from personal journaling about conflict and care and that helped to communicate those personal situations to others can now extend to ecological systems of interdependence.

Student Journal: Cassandra Haddon “A Horse Named Cold Air” At the beginning of quarantine, my life didn’t change that much. I was just out of high school and I had no idea where my future was heading, I didn’t know if I wanted to go to school or back to work. I felt completely lost. I wasn’t doing anything productive. I would sit in my childhood bedroom and watch my friends and family go through their lives with a purpose that was a mystery to me. When the shutdown came through it felt like everyone in the world winded down to my level. People stopped going out, as I had, they stopped working, as I had, and they saw only uncertainty in the future, as I did. It was entirely peculiar to feel the whole world on pause, as I was on pause. There were different options that I considered for the Trompe-l'œil shoe project. First I considered a heeled shoe, for ease of construction, and then I considered a croc as it has become my quarantine uniform. However I think part of me always knew that I would have to make my first pair of Doc Martens boots. On my 15th birthday my mom purchased me my first pair of boots. They were cherry red with a black polish. I wore those boots nearly everyday since, it was like they were a part of me. As per their design, as I broke in the shoes the black polish wore off to reveal the red leather. The unique pattern was tailored to my step, the boots were an extension of myself. But now they’re in my closet, idle. The only time I leave the house is to walk my dog and I won’t be bothered to use lace-up shoes. I look forward to a time when I have a place to go and can put my person back together. I use clay to slow down and utilize control. I have complete control over my projects, I know how to manipulate my medium to create the form I want. I know how to avoid complications and I can fix them should they arise. I feel time slow as my mind centralizes on a singular purpose. Other thoughts are peacefully kept at bay until I invite them in. I can also create something out of emotion. Not aesthetics or function but feeling, I can pour it into a shabby form for a cathartic experience. For a long time I assumed I was just a lazy person not capable of completing schoolwork or having motivation. I embraced this identity for years and leaned into underperforming and scraping by. When I enrolled in South Seattle I decided to turn over a new leaf and mind over matter this shit. Powering through and applying my skills, my grades maintained a 4.0 and I felt as though the shadows of my past were behind me. A month into the quarter I fell into a depressive state. It was like night and day, I felt like I was right back in high school that week. I was unable to complete my assignments and watched the due dates pass me by. This defeat piled on and churned out anger and sadness. I found myself cowering in my room feeling completely powerless. I was listening to music in an effort to create distraction and A Horse Named Cold Air by Mitski started playing. “A lake with no fish Is the heart of a horse Named Cold Air Who, when young Would run like a storm They would say, ooh I thought I'd traveled a long way But I had circled The same old sin” I was the horse who had traveled so far only to be back where I started. I pulled clay out the drawer and started forming this self-portrait. The Horse Named Cold Air sits on my desk and watches me. It is made of clay and anger and despair and sadness. It helps me remember that I falter sometimes but by naming and acknowledging it I can get back up a little faster.

Story

As participants in a studio art ceramics class during a time that denies us our accustomed tools and our assumptions about how and what we make, we focus on seeing ourselves as artists and as storytellers. We’ve heard our own voices trying to convince ourselves that our stories matter. In the telling and the hearing, we’ve grown more accepting of the ephemeral in our art, in the world around us, and in ourselves. Transformation, we tell each other, is inevitable, a process of setting foot on a path whose end we can’t see. Learning is like this.

When we are unable to create, fire, and display our ceramic objects in the ways that we did before, it is time to create new stories. And we do this in a way that celebrates and engages each other’s differences and creates a sense of belonging. The ephemeral objects we make help us tell stories about who we – students, teachers, butterflies, clay – are today as we pass through this time together. They seek our shared humanity and our shared materiality.

Finally, to answer the question from my colleague about the one thing I want my students to take away – it’s that art is how we can imagine a more just inclusiveness to reshape spaces of belonging in this short time we have together.

Figure 4 Student Cassandra Haddon, The Horse Named Cold Air, unfired clay, 2020

shoe sculpture

Works Cited

Ah Leon: Memories of Elementary School. Daum Museum of Contemporary Art. https://www.daummuseum.org/event/ah-leon/.

Sylvia Hyman. Smithsonian American Art Museum. https://americanart.si.edu/artist/sylvia-hyman-27682.

Tate. 'In the House of My Father', Donald Rodney, 1996–7. Tate. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rodney-in-the-house-of-my-father-p78529.

Zohar, A. (2020). Tathagata, Trace and Indexicality: Foot and Hand Prints in Japan. In the Footprints of Masters: Footprints, Feet and Shoes as Objects of Veneration in Asian, Islamic and Mediterranean Art. Studies in Asian Art and Culture, SAAC. Volume 7. Hubert & Co., Gottingen.

Imagining our Possibilities: Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation

Dr. Tia Brown McNair
Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Student Success and Executive Director for TRHT Campus Centers

Recently, as I was wrapping up a podcast on my new book From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: Expanding Practitioner Knowledge for Racial Justice in Higher Education (co-authored with Estela Mara Bensimon and Lindsey Malcom-Piqueux), the facilitator asked, “What is the one thing that keeps you up at night?” It took me only a few seconds to identify my response: I am a mother of a Black, teenage son. I don’t think I need to say more. This fear for his safety and the belief in the possibility of change are what drive me in our work at the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ (AAC&U) for Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT).

What will our communities look like, feel like, and be like when the belief in a racial hierarchy no longer exists? That is the visionary question that every host institution of a TRHT Campus Center answers, as part of their efforts to dismantle the false belief in the hierarchy of human value that fuels racism and racist policies, structures, and practices within our communities. Our TRHT Campus Centers[1] are committed to not only imagining this possibility, but also achieving it.

Over the past three years, AAC&U has been working with institutions of higher education from across the country to develop self-sustaining, community-integrated TRHT Campus Centers. The Centers seek to prepare the next generation of leaders to build just and equitable communities, drawing on the five pillars of the TRHT framework: creating narrative change, fostering racial healing and relationship building, addressing legacies of segregation, reforming law, and overcoming economic inequalities. As Dr. Gail Christopher states in “The Time for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Is Now” (Christopher 2016), “Our nation has experienced a prolonged period marked by abusive police and civilian actions that have taken the lives of people of color and, at times, unleashed an equally revolting backlash against law enforcement officers. Young people around the country are spurring a drive for change, emerging as strident catalysts for activism that is aimed squarely at the hierarchy of human value and the legacy of racism in America.”[2]

AAC&U’s long-term goal is to partner with at least 150 higher education institutions to host TRHT Campus Centers, each designed to identify and to examine the current realities of race relations in their communities and the local histories that have led to these realities, and to take action steps toward achieving racial equity. That effort is well underway, as illustrated in the publication We Hold These Truths: Dismantling Racial Hierarchies, Building Equitable Communities (2020), a collection of essays by campus leaders from the first round of AAC&U’s Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation efforts. They are supported by national evaluators from Estrategia Group (https://estrategiagroup.com).

It is important to note that the TRHT effort does not replace diversity, equity, and inclusion work already occurring on campuses. It complements these efforts with a primary focus on racial healing and relationship building as core components for addressing systemic and structural racism on our campuses and within our communities. The Rx Racial Healing Circleä methodology stresses active listening, truth-telling, connecting across our commonalities, and being open to the perspectives and experiences of others.[3] Thus, TRHT intentionally acknowledges and addresses the trauma and harm caused by racism as a foundational component for transformation on our journey to support and to develop racial trauma-informed leaders.

If you are interested in learning more about hosting a TRHT Campus Center at your institution, please contact me at [email protected].

[1] AAC&U (Association of American Colleges and Universities). 2020. Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers

[2] Christopher, G. (2016). “The Time for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Is Now”

[3] AAC&U (Association of American Colleges and Universities) 2020. Rx Racial Healing Circles™

References

AAC&U (Association of American Colleges and Universities). 2020. Rx Racial Healing Circles™. https://www.aacu.org/trht-institute-rx-racial-healing-circles. (Accessed 2020)

AAC&U (Association of American Colleges and Universities). 2020. Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers. https://www.aacu.org/trht-campus-centers. (Accessed 2020)

Christopher, G. (2016). The Time for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Is Now. AAC&U Liberal Education Journal. https://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/2016/fall/christopher (Accessed 2020).

K. Kellogg Foundation. (2017). Restoring to Wholeness: Racial Healing for Ourselves, Our Relationships and Our Communities. Retrieved 12/9/2020, from https://healourcommunities.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/WKKTH_18004_7X9_Brochure.pdf

Rowan Profs Engaging in Advocacy and Praxis

Susan Browne, Ed.D.
Associate Professor, Rowan University

It was two years ago when borough police stopped a vehicle occupied by two Black males who were both Rowan University students. The students were ordered from the vehicle at gunpoint, searched, forced to kneel, and then handcuffed. The young men were physically unharmed and let go in what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. However, time will determine the emotional trauma of being male and Black in the face of white police holding guns. Students and the community posted video and comments about this incident on social media, and there was a palpable sense of urgency to address it across the campus. Silence in such a time felt as volatile as anti-Black aggression, as the campus community connected this event to other incidents of abusive policing down the road in Camden, across the bridge in Philadelphia, and around the nation.

In response, faculty members from Rowan’s College of Education Diversity Committee began to organize. They began by drafting a statement to the campus community:

As a College of Education Diversity Committee, we believe the University needs to ensure that:

Blackness is not linked with criminality, but rather understood and treated as a vital part of the university community.
The voices of affected students are centered in this process of valuing differences on campus.
Law enforcement – both university police and the county police department – are actively participating in ongoing race bias awareness training and reviewing existing protocol.
As a College of Education committed to social justice, we actively incorporate these discussions in classrooms, learnings spaces, and communities, as we work toward access, success, and equity.

The statement was crafted and approved speedily by the Diversity Committee, but getting it filtered and approved by the college administration proved more complicated. Regrettably, the Diversity Committee’s words were never disseminated within the university community. This troubling moment of voicelessness galvanized a commitment to action.

During this time as well, the College of Education was ignited by a dean with a fervent commitment to social justice; our work was framed by the tag line Access, Success, and Equity…Turning Research into Practice. As we considered these commitments, several questions emerged: What is the efficacy of our curricular and field experiences in preparing teachers to embrace and effectively support p-12 student diversity? How are we looking closely at our students at program entry and exit?

Guided by the college mission to ensure that candidates develop knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to foster academic achievement, social responsibility, personal responsibility, and social justice so that they can, in turn, facilitate high achievement in P-16 learners, the Diversity Committee adapted the Multicultural Teaching Competency Scale (MTCS) (Spanierman et al., 2010) to assess student knowledge, skills, and dispositions related to diversity at admission and completion of all programs. We also surveyed the faculty on perceptions of cultural inclusion, collegial trust around expressing opinions, decision making processes, and support for teaching, research, and service. The committee implemented book clubs on culturally sustaining pedagogy and a Kaleidoscope Connections blog for posting current research articles related to issues of equity and social justice. We established the Students for Diversity and Social Equity Club and a hiring resource for circulating faculty searches to more diverse outlets. The work devoted to issues of diversity was finding deeper meaning beyond an early emphasis framed primarily by accreditation guidelines.

Strengthened by a new university division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), headed by our former dean, Diversity in Action (DIA) emerged as a dynamic, action-oriented committee focused on social justice and equity within the College of Education and the larger community and replaced the former Diversity Committee. Collectively, the committee represents faculty from departments across the college and draws on years of experience and commitment to social justice work. This work spans international contexts with research in countries such as Guatemala, Honduras, and Spain. Faculty are equally engaged in work that supports English language learners, students, and faculty in urban settings and includes allyship with LGBTQ+ populations and addressing issues related to text book affordability and food insecurities.

Believing that the existence of racial unrest across the nation and the impact of a global pandemic are unavoidable topics in the university classroom, DIA has most recently established monthly college wide events called Coffee, Critical Conversations, and Community. Faculty have facilitated conversations on topics such as immigration, wellness, inclusion, and antiracist pedagogy. DIA has also surveyed faculty on what they would like to discuss in EDU-CHATs focused on Social Justice Growth in the Time of COVID-19/Online Learning. Led by a new dean as equally devoted to this work as the previous one, DIA is moving forward in efforts to support the college vision to “be a leading force in preparing and supporting reflective practitioners who use education to transform our global society.”

Our current dean has provided DIA with space in our building where we can provide resources to students and faculty. The most recent statement DIA crafted expressed solidarity with Asian/Asian American and Pacific Islander students, faculty, and staff in recognition of the tragic deaths of eight people, including six women of Asian descent who were murdered in Atlanta. The statement was disseminated to the college without delay—a welcome indication of progress. DIA is now initiating an online presence where students can have conversations on topics such as race and policing in response to crises such as the recent murder of Daunte Wright at the hands of police that took place several miles south of where Derek Chauvin is on trial for the murder of George Floyd. The university division of DEI is launching a Law Enforcement and Community Collaborative effort focused on professional development that includes a certificate program and enhancing what happens at the Police Academy. The hope is that DIA members will be invited to have a voice in this DEI work and looking ahead, DIA will continue to advocate for equitable educational change and praxis to promote social justice.

Poster representing who we aspire to be as educators.

Your Voice is Your Power: Advocating for BIPOC Mental Health on Your Campus

Amy Gatto, MPH
Senior Campus Program Manager at Active Minds

Your Voice is Your Power Mental health issues have been consistently increasing in prevalence and severity among college students and young adults. An estimated 20% of all adult mental health diagnoses occur in those between 18 and 24 years old (Hunt & Eisenberg, 2010; National Institute of Mental Health, 2017). National data sources document a rising prevalence of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicidality on campus across the past decade, with approximately one in three students showing a clinically significant mental health concern (American College Health Association, 2020; Healthy Minds Network, 2020). As a result, students’ academic performance, and subsequent retention and persistence, are negatively affected.

COVID-19 has worsened this problem. One in five college students reported that their mental health has significantly worsened during COVID-19 (Active Minds, 2020), and sixty percent of students indicated it has been more difficult to access mental health services (Healthy Minds Network & American College Health Association, 2020). For BIPOC students in particular, mental health concerns are on the rise. The Healthy Minds Study has seen increases in anxiety and depression among students of color (Healthy Minds Network, 2020). Relative to their white peers, Black and multiracial university students are less likely to receive mental health treatment. This is exacerbated by high levels of stigma for seeking mental health diagnoses and treatment (Pedersen & Paves, 2014; Vogel et al., 2017; Vogel, Wade, & Haake, 2006) among BIPOC students (Lipson et al., 2018).

Active Minds, the nation’s leading nonprofit organization for mental health awareness and education for young adults, has called on students across the country to advocate for change and establish a campus culture that supports the mental and emotional well-being of BIPOC students. In fall 2020 Active Minds implemented the Your Voice is Your Power campaign to provide young adults and institutions of higher education with strategies to improve mental health for BIPOC students in the counseling center, in the classroom, in conversation, and in the institution’s strategic plan.

In the Counseling Center. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced students to experiment with technology to support their mental health. Institutions of higher education have begun to meet students where they are by investing in telehealth, drop-in
In the classroom. Faculty members are often key mental health first responders, especially within hybrid or remote learning models, and key facilitators to BIPOC students’ sense of belonging on campus. Students can advocate to have faculty demonstrate their commitment to students’ wellbeing by sharing mental health resources on course syllabi, in discussion, in their signature lines, and/or on their course web platforms.
In conversation. It is important for faculty and staff to build everyday relationships and trust with students with diverse racial and ethnic identities. In order to support students and reduce the risk for misunderstandings, microaggressions, and bias, schools can offer cultural competency training for faculty and staff.
In the strategic plan. Including equity and mental health in an institution’s strategic plan demonstrates its commitment to the campus community’s mental health and provides accountability for prioritizing the wellbeing of BIPOC students. Building a healthy campus community requires a comprehensive, strategic approach that ties mental health and equity and inclusion with the mission and values of the institution. Students can advocate to include mental health and equity and inclusion language in their institutions’ strategic plans.

Our goal is to make Your Voice is Your Power a seed of transformation in confronting the long-term harm of systemic racism for the mental health of BIPOC young adults. It provides students with the tools to advocate for policy changes that prioritize the mental health needs of BIPOC students, in addition to creating an equitable and inclusive campus community. Active Minds is committed to the continued work of becoming a more anti-racist and inclusive organization, and Your Voice is Your Power is one part of this journey.

References

Active Minds. (2020). COVID-19 impact on college student mental health. Retrieved from https://www.activeminds.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Student-Survey-Infographic.pdf

American College Health Association. (2020). American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment III: Reference Group Executive Summary Fall 2019. Retrieved from Silver Spring, MD: https://www.acha.org/NCHA/ACHA-NCHA_Data/Publications_and_Reports/NCHA/Data/Reports_ACHA-NCHAIII.aspx

Healthy Minds Network. (2020). Healthy Minds Data. Retrieved from https://healthymindsnetwork.org/research/data-for-researchers/

Healthy Minds Network, & American College Health Association. (2020). The impact of COVID-19 on college student well-being. Retrieved from https://www.acha.org/documents/ncha/Healthy_Minds_NCHA_COVID_Survey_Report_FINAL.pdf

Hunt, J., & Eisenberg, D. (2010). Mental health problems and help-seeking behavior among college students. Journal of Adolescent Health, 46(1), 3-10. doi:10.1016/j.jadohealth.2009.08.008

Lipson, S. K., Kern, A., Eisenberg, D., & Breland-Noble, A. M. (2018). Mental Health Disparities Among College Students of Color. Journal of Adolescent Health, 63(3), 348-356. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2018.04.014

National Institute of Mental Health. (2017). Any mental illness (AMI) among U.S. adults. Retrieved from https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness.shtml#part_154785

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Integrating Digital Humanities into Undergraduate Education: Lessons Learned from a BT2P Grant Project

Mary Balkun and Marta Deyrup
Seton Hall University

Along with Susan Hangen and Cathy Hajo from Ramapo College, we were recipients of a 2019 Multi-Institution Innovation Grant (MIG) from Bringing Theory to Practice to introduce liberal arts faculty to discipline-specific digital tools that they could integrate into their classes and teaching. Although Ramapo College of New Jersey is a public liberal arts institution, and Seton Hall University a private Catholic institution, both schools have diverse student bodies of first-generation college students, a dedication to faculty-student engagement in small classes, and a commitment to finding ways to use technology to enhance teaching and learning.

There are significant differences in technology access and support at the two schools; Seton Hall has been a leader in technology for teaching and learning since the mid-1990s, while Ramapo College was a later adopter and has a less fully developed technological infrastructure. The two schools joined forces through their participation in the New Jersey Digital Humanities Consortium, which we organized in 2016 to bring together faculty, librarians, and IT personnel in order to encourage collaboration and information sharing among colleges and universities across the state. Faculty at both schools have been experimenting with digital projects. However, these initiatives were primarily coming out of the technology division as opposed to being driven by the discipline-specific needs and interests of the faculty. Our BT2P grant aimed to enhance digital tools for disciplinary learning in the humanities.

As a result of the grant, ten faculty members were selected to develop plans for digital humanities (DH) projects that would support teaching and learning in a specific course. Our goal was to help faculty become proficient in digital tools that they could then integrate into their classes in history, psychology, language, literature, and business writing. We held a monthly series of workshops and discussions where faculty gained technical skills and created digital assignments that exposed students to new digital possibilities and encouraged new ways of learning. In addition, we organized the participants into small working groups based on common project goals—such as text annotation, mapping, data visualization, and so on—which allowed them to share ideas, strategies, and challenges in a focused way.

The responses of participants made it apparent that the project helped those concerned see even more clearly the place of digital skills in the undergraduate curriculum, especially if they are worked in holistically. In addition to the curricular rewards, however, the digital approach is providing other benefits in terms of sharing ideas and materials: faculty with limited travel budgets can still participate in various scholarly events; collaboration can happen more easily, despite time and distance, which also leads to greater inclusion, whether that means guest speakers, students, and others who can supplement the work of the larger group.

Midway through the grant, the COVID-19 pandemic erupted. While we initially were unsure about how this cross-institutional partnership would be affected, we were gratified to see that the digital skills the faculty had been acquiring actually helped mitigate the disruption to their classes. Of course, participants were already thinking about their teaching in terms of the digital, and we had established a virtual component for both the large and small meetings in order to accommodate scheduling and commuting challenges. Much of our communication was done by email, chat or Zoom, especially during the winter. As a result, the shift to all-remote or HyFlex teaching was not nearly as disruptive as it might have been for many of the instructors involved in the project.

One of our grant participants, Greg Iannarella, a writing instructor, noted that students quickly got more comfortable navigating digital spaces. He uses digital sandboxes and projects in his classes, which he believes help with a major higher education problem: convincing students that their education is relevant to their future professional lives. Another writing instructor, Rachael Warmington, observed that because many digital tools are free and open access, they are accessible to everyone, regardless of income. This kind of availability also eased the shift to remote or HyFlex instruction, especially with students who no longer had access to their institutions and those resources. Susan Nolan, a psychology professor, was excited by the ways digital approaches to teaching actually helped bring people together. One way she saw this was by using peer review of student work. This enabled students, even though they were not together in the classroom, to see one another’s work and get feedback from one another.

Besides being unexpectedly prepared for the sudden changes in course modality brought about by the pandemic, the larger aim of our project – to ensure that humanities graduates gain digital presentation and analysis skills – became even more important in the current environment in which work and education have become almost entirely digital. Susan Hangen, Dean of the School of Humanities and Global Studies at Ramapo College, pointed out that it is now more important than ever to show how humanities majors are connected to career skills, since recent events may prompt further public movement away from the humanities and towards education that is more narrowly vocational. The project, occurring when it did, also led those involved to recognize the broader impact such a model might have: Hangen observed that while “all institutions are facing financial crises as a result of COVID, our project is a great example of sharing resources across institutions.” And, as Susan Nolan noted, “digital tools can facilitate cooperative work across regions of the world.” These were things we certainly knew in theory pre-pandemic, but they have now become a day-to-day reality.

It is quite obvious to all concerned that higher education will never be the same. While it was already in the process of morphing into something else prior to the pandemic, the grant from BT2P positioned those of us involved in the project to take advantage of a pivotal moment and to help our faculty colleagues do so as well. Some of the participants have given demonstrations and workshops at their home institutions to show how digital tools and skills can be integrated into the curriculum. We anticipate that the shifts we have seen will continue and even intensify now that so many faculty members have been exposed to the possibilities of the digital. This does not mean everyone will or should teach remotely or in hybrid form, but what we found is that even the most traditional course can benefit from the kind of work enabled by our BT2P grant. We’ve seen new and exciting forms of course assignments emerge—podcasting, virtual galleries, and large-scale annotation projects—and we’ve seen faculty who were nervous at the start of the project become much more comfortable using not only the tools they set out to learn but additional ones as well. While teaching digitally is slowly but surely becoming more common, we believe the pandemic accelerated change and forced instructors to adopt tools and techniques they might have waited years to try. But now that they’ve done so, they—and we—are excited to see what new understandings and DH practices will continue to emerge.

Spring 2021 Newsletter

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Spring 2021 Newsletter

In This Issue

Editor's Note

The Shoes We Walk In: Teaching Art on a Path to Belonging

Imagining our Possibilities: Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation

Rowan Profs Engaging in Advocacy and Praxis

Your Voice is Your Power: Advocating for BIPOC Mental Health on Your Campus

Integrating Digital Humanities into Undergraduate Education: Lessons Learned from a BT2P Grant Project

Editor’s Note: Seeds of Transformation

The Shoes We Walk In: Teaching Art on a Path to Belonging

Imagining our Possibilities: Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation

Rowan Profs Engaging in Advocacy and Praxis

Your Voice is Your Power: Advocating for BIPOC Mental Health on Your Campus

Integrating Digital Humanities into Undergraduate Education: Lessons Learned from a BT2P Grant Project