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.