Andrea's Story

The end of the fall term brings success stories, the fuel that keeps educators going. In the last two weeks, it has been a joy to see students meeting their goals by passing a class in their program, earning a High School credential, combining that credential with the poverty informed magic of Credit for Prior Learning, or any other goal they have put in front of themselves. Our approach to poverty informed practice believes we should acknowledge and celebrate success at ever opportunity. We know we need to build the self-efficacy of people who have received a different message about their worth for most of their life. Which brings us to Andrea... I've watched Andrea move her way through our classes for the last two years, although I found out she actually started earlier with us while incarcerated. It's been fun to watch her carry herself differently as she worked with her teachers to rediscover her dreams and find her place in the world. Poverty Informed practice is about knocking down barriers and creating a sense of belonging for students. Our students teach us everything and this week, Andrea was kind enough to sit with me and share some of her story. It's about 8 minutes long and she is amazing, I hope you will watch.

Andrea (on the left) and 2 of her biggest supporters

"No matter what, you have a chance." That's what Andrea said near the end of her visit with me. How remarkable is her optimism? Aren't we obligated to support her determination? Andrea was homeless and a recovering addict when she found Western. Our version of poverty informed means she signaled she was ready by the courage to walk in the door. She was fortunate to connect with great instructors and our exceptionally poverty informed Project PROVEN (More about PROVEN), but we were just as fortunate to be allowed to be in her life. One of our guiding principles is when we figure out how to successfully help students with the greatest barriers, we figure out how to help just about everyone. Andrea's success is teaching us about success for so many. Her message to other women is powerful, and I can't wait to see what her future becomes. Thank you Andrea, for letting us be part of your journey.

Love

This week I thought I'd write about love. Just typing that makes my Midwestern, Scandinavian soul a little uneasy, because it seems a little out there. But, there it is. I hear the folks at Amarillo talk about "loving the students you have" and it is powerful. I hear Dr. Lowery-Hart and his team talk about "loving them (students) to success", and it encapsulates what works. In my own evolution toward becoming more poverty informed, I've called that love lots of different things: engagement (when I'm feeling academic), giving a s^*t (when I'm less academic), and lots of other code words, but at the end of the day we are talking about love. A few months ago I compared our "plowing the road" (read about it here) to what those of us who are parents do for our children when we can. Our students aren't children, but that behavior comes from love. So today, I want to talk about what loving the people we serve means to me.

Sarah and Chad

Love means you become partners in people's dreams. That's my friend Sarah (to the right) and getting to know her in a real way this last couple years has been transforming. Loving your students means you acknowledge they have rich full lives and all the complications that come with them. I've learned Sarah had a deep, complicated story before she came to us (Sarah's story), but more importantly I've learned she has a huge heart and is one of the most generous people I know. Sarah works endlessly to help people who are homeless, and she has become my ambassador to the helping community around that issue. Without unconditional love (and yes it still feels weird typing that, but I'm committed), I'm not sure I ever take the time to see all her gifts. And maybe, the connections she has made on that level with Western staff are part of what propels her forward as she pursues a degree in Human Services.

Loving the students you have means you are going to suffer a little. I have written pretty extensively about Emmie (Emmie's story), a student I met through "The Bowl", our hospitality snacks in our

Emmie and Chad

lobby. And because our poverty informed practice tells us students need to be loved to success, I have become a friend and partner in her pursuit of her dreams. It would certainly be easier to stay at a distance and not know, but if we are truly going to love the students we have, we need to dig in and see how we can help. We must deal with the pain that Emmie has had to fight to protect her possessions, like her laptop, while she has been living on the street and going to school. We must deal with knowing her personal challenges and being relegated to only being able to offer safe space and comfort some days. And we must deal with the fact that success is rarely linear and even though she is doing well today, Emmie remains in a precarious situation. That knowledge makes us vulnerable and being vulnerable and human is part of loving students to success.

This evolution we are going through is catching on internally. If you've been reading a while (and thank you if you have), you remember John (John's story). He's our student who was a commercial fisherman among other things and graduated with his High School Diploma, 6 college credits, and admission to our Precision Machining program. Unfortunately, machining hasn't been the best fit for John's skill set, and he struggled with parts of it (and excelled in others). In another time, in another version of Western, that would have been the end of the story, but things are different now. To be honest, if you go back toward the beginning of my career, John probably doesn't even make it to a program, but things are different now. In a Poverty Informed Western, John has been surrounded by support instructors from my division, and program instructors from Integrated Technologies (the division that his program resides in), and they love John. He's a pretty amazing guy.
So, his instructors pulled together a meeting with all of them, and with John, and instead of doing a postmortem of what he couldn't do, they looked for the things he could do. And all these people who love John and want him to find his dreams, helped him find welding, and they will love him through welding starting next term.

So being Poverty Informed is a lot of things, but one of them is love. When you love the students you have, you become a partner in their dreams. When you become a partner in their dreams, you see the barriers that must be removed. And when you start that work, you give up the comfortable distance and privilege that keeps you "safe." When you love the students you have, you decide that "readiness" is signified by the audaciously courageous act of coming to us and telling us you want to go to school. If someone you loved told you they wanted that, how would you react? If you decide to love your students, shouldn't you react the same way? My own discomfort with the concept made me want to write a humorous title this week like "Love the one you're with" or "All you need is love", but I fought my own instincts and wanted to be direct. Our evolution has lots of pieces, but it must include LOVING #RealCollege students for our shared dreams to come true.

First Things First

I've been in education for most of my adult life, and for the most part we educators mean well, we really do. However, we tend to be thinkers and idea people, and perhaps that causes us to unnecessarily complicate things or as an old coaching friend of mine used to say "make the routine look impossible." As my team and I go further down this road of Poverty Informed Practice, it seems more and more clear to me the solutions we are seeking are not complicated, they are just hard. I had another topic in mind in mind this week, but a late Friday afternoon planning meeting put me in this mindset, so I'd like to talk more about putting first things first.

Last week, on Friday, I was part of a team working on what our Resource Development (aka grants) department calls Compression Planning. It's a nifty little method for putting together successful grants in a relatively short time and like many planning processes, it involves generating ideas and using an affinity process, and we love to put sticky dots on post-its to identify priorities (just the way everyone spends a Friday, right?). I admit up front, I'm not awesome in planning meetings that move fast (I like to think my ideas are deep, but maybe they are just basic, or maybe I'm just old and grumpy:)), but I have been in numerous meetings like this over the years, and it is remarkable how often my dots go on post-it's no one else chooses. I was trying hard to stay open-minded during the discussion Friday, but I'm struggling with discussions of "systems change vs band aids", and incremental processes. I even caught myself creating a "Triangle of Poverty Informed Practice" that might have been cool and borrowed liberally from Bloom's Domains of Learning, but I just kept coming back to how much does any of it matter when people can't get enough to eat or a secure place to sleep?

A Twitter friend shared a slide from a presentation by Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab recently(hence my
amateur screen shot photo), and it stopped me in my tracks. Half our students who are failing are food and/or housing insecure...Half! I think it would be hard to find anything else that 50% of our failing students have in common. To me it screams for action, not deliberation. It kind of renders irrelevant the idea of whether we address systemic issues or individuals first, the answer is obviously neither can wait! I've often heard Dr. Goldrick-Rab say we can't food pantry our way out of this issue, but she acknowledges a pantry is a start. The danger is if we think we are done and pat ourselves on the back... I'll note it again, 50% of failing students are struggling with housing and/or food. By the way that number isn't much different for our students overall.

 

Occasionally when I go to write this over the weekend, a little gift pops up to make my point better than I can. This morning my television brought the leader of the #RealCollege movement to my television set. Her video is above, and she makes the case so effectively that we need to start with basic needs or at the very least acknowledge that any student success effort that doesn't address basic needs puts 50% of the people you are trying to help at a serious disadvantage. Our vision of Poverty Informed practice doesn't have much time for lengthy debates about things like the importance and prioritization of appropriate rigor vs great teaching (that really happened by the way). All those topics are important, but we think you start with a foundation of basic needs. When we talk about removing barriers (every one we can), those have to get priority. But, we also have to have the courage to walk and chew gum, meaning we address basic needs as a default, but we never stop there. Our vision of Poverty Informed practice says you must build experiences and systems that acknowledge students' strengths, suspend judgment, and look forward relentlessly. And lastly, we believe that respect for students means we take every opportunity accelerate their path to success and stability. They have waited long enough.

I want to leave with another story that happened Friday. A student I met while doing some connecting with the homeless community near campus, reached out to me through another student to ask for help. He has cancer... he's afraid to go to the doctor alone and the people he thought of going with him were me or my Associate Dean because he doesn't really have other support. I'm calling him tomorrow to make the appointment, and we will go together. So in one day, I saw the macro and micro of what we are doing. It all matters but if we don't start with first things first, we will not succeed, and we must succeed.