Authors revisit their living-learning community model and wish practitioners would quit being so hard on themselves.
Interview by Keeyana Talley
W
hen Karen Kurotsuchi Inkelas began her stint in 2018 as the lead faculty member of a residential learning community at the University of Virginia, she did so with a certain level of confidence. After all, she had served as the principal investigator for the National Study of Living-Learning Programs and, along with her colleagues Mimi Benjamin and Jody Jessup-Anger, quite literally had written the book (not to mention several articles) on living-learning communities. Today, though, she admits that when theory ran into practice, things didn’t go quite as she thought they would.
That experience, as well as additional feedback they received, was the impetus for these professors (Kurotsuchi Inkelas, the University of Virginia; Benjamin, Indiana University of Pennsylvania; and Jessup-Anger, Marquette University) to revisit the best practices model they created in their book Living-Learning Communities That Work. Those results are now being published in a new book, Living-Learning Communities in Practice, which not only offers an updated model but also illustrates the concepts with real-world examples, explores the effect of a global pandemic, and offers typologies that help campuses explore where their efforts have been and could be.
“The first model really forefronted programming, and the second model really forefronts people,” Kurotsuchi Inkelas explains. “This model is more about the people who make up the communities and the way in which they choose to co-create what that community means.” The model also focuses on how an institutional climate will shape how a living-learning community (LLC) may perform. “By forefronting the people, it really digs into climate and ensuring that the climate is healthy and conducive to social and academic integration,” says Jessup-Anger, while Kurosutchi Inkelas adds, “That is an empirical finding. We didn't make that up. Study after study shows the climate must be healthy in order for all the good things to happen.”
Talking Stick asked Keeyana Talley, the assistant director for academic initiatives and experiential learning at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, to review the book and speak with the three authors over Zoom. The result was a lively and free-flowing conversation that touched on the importance of communication, the value of understanding roles, and the changing face of engagement.
The following interview was edited for clarity and length.
Thank you so much for your research and your contribution to this work. I read your first book, and reading the second one just made me more excited to do the work I get to do every single day. So I just wanted to say thank you for that. But I'll kick off with the first question. Can you share what motivated you to revise the living-learning communities' best practices?
Karen Kurotsuchi Inkelas: We published the best practices model, the first version, in 2018. After that, all three of us were asked to speak at various places and work with LLC practitioners around the country, and we engaged with a lot of really thoughtful folks, faculty and staff, about their own living-learning communities. Many of them questioned some parts of the model, saying it didn’t really ring true with how they do things. Some of them, frankly, even pushed back a little and said, “Are you sure that's something that needs to be your best practice because we don't necessarily find that to be the case.”
This got us to thinking that maybe we should revisit some of the assumptions we made in the first model to represent some of those great conversations that we had. We wanted to revisit and revise the model to make it more accurate and relevant for the actual portrayal of living-learning communities. So we got the band back together, and we started thinking and writing.
Mimi Benjamin: Well, Karen, another interesting factor is that you were a faculty member in a learning community at the time. So you yourself had the opportunity to put the original best practices model to work, right?
Kurotsuchi Inkelas: Yes, that's true. From trying to run an LLC, a residential college, I found out that a lot of what we were talking about at the time when we started rewriting the model were not things that we were capable of doing. It didn’t make sense in our context. So that was a real wake-up call that it was time to revisit the model.
Can you share the importance of climate when building and maintaining an LLC? That was one of my favorite parts of the reading. In my current role, we have sunset some of our LLCs so that we can re-evaluate whether they were actually doing what we wanted them to.
Jody Jessup-Anger: This is one of my favorite parts of the book, too, and we all think it's one of the most important revisions of the model. One of the things we found in talking with folks when we started to really dig into what practitioners were using in the model and what they were experiencing on their campuses was that if there wasn't an academically or socially supportive climate, then folks weren't showing up for programming.
Ensuring that the climate is there, that students are engaged academically, and that they're connected socially is a precursor to pretty much any other aspect of the model. That's why we situated the climate where we did. Fundamental things need to be in place, and everybody needs to have goals and objectives and be pulling in the same direction or at least understanding each other. But then, once that is in place, a supportive climate is really important.
As far as the academic, social, and institutional climate, you can imagine a continuum where an LLC might be more academically engaging for students, but that may come at the expense of social integration. So it really needs to be a balance where there's an academically oriented climate, but it's one that's collaborative. The students are able to engage with each other, and they’re able to support each other both in their academics and in the rest of their lives because we know that students are living and learning together. It’s a 24/7 endeavor.
It's interesting to think that the living-learning community can be a place that contributes to the institution, but it can also protect students from the institution. If students are in an environment where the system outside of the living-learning community is a difficult place for them to be – if they're minoritized in some way or if they're feeling an environmental pressure that's negative or toxic – then the living-learning community can serve as a cocoon for them. It can be protective, and certainly students are able to grow and thrive in that environment. That protective factor can serve them so that they can be successful in the rest of the institution.
At the same time, an institution can really be supportive, and the living-learning community can be part of that. If we have robust and thriving living-learning communities all over campus, then students are probably more engaged generally and are able to bring that engagement out into the rest of the university.
Was engagement a top question you got in 2020, and maybe even now, after the height of the pandemic? People were starting to re-evaluate whether they should continue with LLCs. Did you get a lot of people reaching out to you about how to help students get engaged or continue engagement in their LLCs?
Benjamin: I think so. One of the things that we were involved in was something called the National Learning Community Collaborative, a group of learning community researchers and professionals who are looking at learning communities broadly. That group was talking about the impact of COVID and how it brought the importance of that engagement and that community element of learning communities even more into perspective. We co-authored two pieces for another collaborative that we're in, the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. We talked about the importance of learning communities for connecting students to their institutions and to each other, how they contribute to a sense of belonging, and how they communicate the support available at the institution.
In the second of those pieces, the group offered a number of case studies, some of which were living-learning communities, that conveyed the fact that these programs were still possible and maybe even essential during that time. So, yeah, that engagement piece is an important component we are trying to figure out because I think all of residence life was trying to figure out how to maintain community. That’s whether we have students on campus but they aren't allowed to be near each other or students are remote and we are utilizing staff to keep connected with them and connect them to each other.
Truthfully, we started the book before the pandemic, but we were not far into it when COVID hit. I think that certainly impacted the way we were thinking about all the different elements, but especially the engagement piece.
Kurotsuchi Inkelas: As you mentioned, I was a principal of a residential college during the pandemic. I learned a lot of really valuable lessons, especially about the word engagement. I think I, myself, always thought of engagement as programming based. How do we engage students in a formal way during a program or in an informal way during students’ interaction with each other? But during the pandemic, when you're forced not to interact with each other, what does engagement then mean?
Frankly, we were the only ones there at the time. Most of the UVA students were not living on the grounds. They were living at home. So the only ones left living in the residence halls, for the most part, were international students who got caught in the United States because they weren’t able to return to their home countries. They had nowhere to go except to stay in the residence halls.
All their needs were no longer based around programs or special banquets or things like that. It was all the way down to the first level of Maslow. How do I get food without contaminating others or myself? How can I be sure the air I am breathing is safe? These are questions that we normally never had to ask and took for granted. But now it became about how to create a caring community under these circumstances.
What I found was that it is kind of like our model. That's why climate is second in the layers. If you can create that, then the other pieces fall into place much more easily. If people feel safe, comfortable, and that this is a community where they can trust others, then they can take more risks in getting involved in those things.
It was a real wake-up call for many of us who were still living on campus at the time to strip down the understanding of what engagement actually means at its most basic level and ask, “How do you create that environment?” And then we realized that when you do that, all the other good things flow.
I think there was a paradigm shift in what we think about engagement or a sense of belonging. It was like you said, we took it for granted and maybe never even thought this could change, but it helped us to think about other ways we can engage because these are not the same students that we had prior to this pandemic. The students that we had then are very different than the ones we're seeing now.
Jessup-Anger: I also think that engagement is about connecting points, and I do think that the pandemic illustrated the importance of connecting points within residence life and housing and also within academics.
Housing personnel got put into a really tricky position because they were asked to break community, instead of making community. They were the folks who were charged with enforcing mask mandates. They were charged with ensuring that students were maintaining a safe distance from each other. Having both residence life and housing and also the academic element provided different connecting points for students.
For better or for worse, some of the folks who were charged with the academic elements of a living-learning community weren't doing that enforcement, though they were still able to make that connection with students in a meaningful way. So having this balance of academic connection with students and also the residential life connection with them was really important to maintain their connection and engagement – to each other, but also to something bigger. It was a connection to their academics, to their institution, and to a greater sense of purpose in some ways during a time when a lot of folks were not finding that greater sense of purpose because they were concerned with the primary layer of safety.
Kurotsuchi Inkelas: I guess the silver lining in thinking about all of this and looking backward is that there may have been questions before the pandemic about why we even need a residential education anymore. If everything is going to be delivered with technology and there’s no need to live on campus, what is the point? Until it got taken away. When it was taken away, everyone thought, “No, no, no. I want it back.” They finally understood what was so wonderful about that experience and what makes that kind of learning environment so unique and so special.
Benjamin: I also think that in some ways, for good or for bad, it was a reset. If something wasn't working or wasn’t pleasing people, it was easy to move on to new things. To Karen’s point, I also think it reaffirmed that students wanted to have that community. They wanted to be together, and this allowed people to – I don't want to say go back to some things – in some ways rethink what they wanted the communities to look like and what those activities were. To some degree, there were things that students were used to. Now it is like, “Oh, you know, this is great because we haven’t been able to do this in a while.” I think there may have been some additional energy around the community building even in 2021 and 2022. People were still trying to respond to the mask mandates and distancing and all of that kind of stuff, but they were also trying to find ways to reconnect. Living-learning communities provided a structure for that. Students didn't have to figure out how they were going to do it because the structure that's in place helped give them that without them having to think about that in addition to thinking, “Am I six feet away from this person?”
The community was a common entry point to have a conversation. We are in the same class, or we have the same area of interest, or we live next door. It just helps students to have that common entry point for community and connection.
My next question is about high-impact practices. At my home institution, we have been talking about whether our high-impact practices are still high impact in a post-COVID world. I appreciate what you said in your book about how learning communities are high-impact practices, but not every living-learning community is. Can you share a little bit more about that and, in your opinion, how to distinguish the two? What would you recommend for those who are starting a new LLC or are in the revision process of changing things in their current LLC?
Kurotsuchi Inkelas: I am so glad you asked that question. I've been on my soapbox about this for years. I think one of the greatest things that ever happened to higher education literature is high-impact practices. Now that all colleges and universities know about them, they want to create those experiences for their students if for no other reason than that all their peers are doing the same thing, and they need to keep up. But I think the worst thing that happened about high-impact practices is exactly that. Everyone is scrambling to create them on their campuses, but they're not really thinking about what makes them effective.
So, sure, you can have undergraduate research experiences, but as we know, not all of them are the same. Some professors involve students, soup to nuts, in the research process. They have them collecting data and introduce them to the theory. That's a really good example. There are probably professors on the very same campus who have the students just make copies and go fetch whatever needs to be fetched. They’re just involved in doing some of the grunt work. Well, that's not a high-impact practice.
The same is true for living-learning communities. What all of us have found in our prior research is that certain LLCs do produce all the wonderful outcomes that are thought to be related to the students’ participation, but there are other LLCs that don't. Frankly, that's why we got started on the best practices model to begin with. We recognized that we wanted to at least put into writing what we found to be important components of living-learning communities that were necessary to facilitate things like student growth and development, retention, and all the other good things that are supposedly related to participation in these communities.
That's where the first model came from, and it was exciting for us to think about. But at the same time, we also worried that folks would take that model a little too much to heart and say, “Okay, now we have to have this and that and the other thing. If we don't have all those pieces, the whole thing is going to fall apart like blocks in a pyramid.” We needed to be more thoughtful, and I think we've done this in the second book by talking about how all best practices models like this are aspirational.
No living-learning community can possibly be perfect in every way. I learned that lesson the hard way when I tried to run one myself. My residential college was not perfect. It didn't even have all the elements of the best practices model that I helped to create. So, yes, it's absolutely not possible to have a perfect living-learning community, and it's always going to be the case that your programs have some things that are better and others that could be worked on a little bit more.
That's part of the reason we wanted to work on the revision: to be much more thoughtful and clear about that for folks who are either starting or trying to maintain their programming. That's also why we introduced the typologies. We wanted folks to understand that there are different ways to operate a living-learning community, and none of them are wrong, per se; they're just different levels. You could be at a certain level because you're new or because you have limited resources or because there are just certain impediments in your way.
We wanted to help folks both set their sights on what could be an aspirational goal and to be confident in where they are and understand that there's still another place they could go. This way, the topologies suggest how living-learning communities can advance their efforts no matter where they are – at the beginning, in the middle, or at the very apex – or that you could be very strong in one place but not so strong in the other, and that's perfectly natural.
Benjamin: Speaking of the typologies, it's one of the reasons why we labeled the different levels the way we did. It is not “bad,” “good,” “great,” or “best,” or anything. We use the terms “foundational,” “intermediate,” and “advanced.” And, you know, foundational is okay. That's a great starting point. And, in some cases, given the circumstances in which you're working, there are some elements of the model where maybe foundational is all you're ever going to be able to do. And that's okay. That's not a problem. When and where circumstances change, there's a place to go.
Jessup-Anger: Yeah. I see them as conversation starters on campuses and a way to facilitate conversation about what might be in a way that is nonthreatening and nonjudgmental. If an institution is foundational in one area and there are a lot of barriers to moving to the next level, being able to point to the typology and say, “Next level, indicates this. What would it take for us to get there?” helps clarify the situation. And if the answer is a shut door, then maybe focusing on another dimension of the typology would be important.
I also think that they can help institutions and faculty and staff work together to imagine what might be. Some of what we heard when we were interviewing folks is that sometimes that ideation or that imagination doesn't happen because folks don't speak each other's languages. So we're hopeful that the typologies will give folks across campus a common language and a common vision to strive for.
Benjamin: We've tried to give some really specific ideas of things that campuses can do. Some of the examples that people gave blew me away. I thought it was so cool. I never would have thought about that. So it was helpful to be able to give really specific examples of things: examples of traditions, examples of branding, examples of all these kinds of things, like peer mentoring programs, that are in place in living-learning community programs that are reflected in the typologies.
I love the typologies that you added here. I was geeking out over them. From my experiences, I have been at institutions that were in each level. As a younger professional, I started at a very advanced place, so I thought everything had to be in place for it to be considered successful. I did not realize, as you stated, that if you are not able to make the renovations to add space or whatever, it is okay to be in that foundational area.
I also thought about my own institution and how, if we want to be advanced, we need to create a plan to get there. Because, as Karen mentioned, even in creating a plan, how often do we say, “Okay, this is the model. And if we do everything correctly in this model, it will look like X.” But you can’t expedite the process. I just love this and the questions that you added to the end of each chapter to go along with the typology for reflection.
Benjamin: I will say I was really excited about the typologies as we got into that. I kept saying to Jody and Karen, “I think this book is really going to be usable, like really useful.” You made a nice point, Keeyana, in terms of how to recognize that you might be at a different point in the typology: not only in the different levels of the best practices model but the different elements of that level.
You might decide to say, “Here's where we want to put our energy this year.” We don't have to do everything, but here are a couple of examples of what we could do. We can do something that might seem small or fairly minor, but it could have a really important impact. And it doesn't mean that we have to do everything in every typology. I think it really gives us a reasonable opportunity to reflect and make some decisions.
James Baumann (Talking Stick editor): Sorry to interject, but as I was reading this part of the book, I thought about a lot of smaller colleges I’ve talked to. They may have limited space, limited staff, and limited budgets, or whatever is the case, but this gives them permission in some way to go out, make that effort, and still feel good about the work that they're doing. I hear from them that they are at a conference and see a presentation from a larger school and think that it’s a great idea, but it would take four of their campuses to pull it off. I also like this idea of being able to look at those levels and not view them as judgmental terms in the way they are classified.
Jessup-Anger: James, honestly, in talking with some of the practitioners, my biggest a-ha! moments were with the smaller institutions and how they were creative with such things as space. I remember I was talking with one of the practitioners, who was saying, “As our communities grow or shrink, we reassign their space.” And I responded, “What? You reassign them all the way across campus?” And she said, “Yeah, because students move on, move off, so we can re-imagine them as we go.”
To hear them being so purposeful about assignments every year based on size and understanding that they knew they were limited in space and that they didn't have money for renovation just blew me away and really made me think more deeply about the role of the practitioner and the thoughtfulness with which folks are planning and acting in their communities.
Benjamin: It's probably important for us since we're talking about the typology, to also acknowledge that it is not our original idea. Again, we were engaged with the National Learning Community Collaborative, and the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment was something that [research scientist] Jillian Kinzie had been talking about. We were all looking at the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis engaged-learning taxonomies. That was kind of the a-ha! moment for us. We want to give a shout-out to those folks because we didn't make this up. Their information was really helpful in terms of thinking about this differently and in a very utilitarian way.
Kurotsuchi Inkelas: Yeah, we borrowed the idea. They focused on learning outcomes, and we focused on living-learning communities. But, yeah, the idea of graduated levels came from them, so we owe them a great debt for that.
This conversation actually takes me back to talking about high-impact practices. What I often saw happen, especially when the high-impact practice became really popular, was that people would do exactly as James said. They would go to some presentation, they'd hear what was being done and think, “Okay, we're just going to take that idea and bring it back to our campus and do it.” But it doesn’t work because the context is not the same.
That's part of why we're thinking of not only explaining how this is an aspirational model, but also about using the typologies as a way for campuses to recognize their own assets in their own places where they have some spots they have to work on. In knowing what they are, they can create something, as Jody was talking about, that fits into their unique context instead of just taking a package from one campus and trying to implement it. It’s important to think much more strategically and creatively about what you have and what you don't have and where you can go from there.
Benjamin: I don't remember if Karen or Jody said it, but I think the typologies are a nice element in terms of providing a shared language for academic affairs and student affairs folks. That collaboration piece is obviously a really important component of the model, and it gives people something to work from where they're all looking at the same thing. When you think about the pyramid, we have one on each side, but they know what’s in their lane. I hope readers find that the typologies reflect both of those areas of expertise.
Kurotsuchi Inkelas: I would love to say it was me, but that was Jody.
I am very grateful you talked about the importance of the administration for both residence life and academic affairs being in good communication and having clear expectations. Was there anything that stood out to you from your interviews with both parties that maybe we should be more cognizant of?
Jessup-Anger: I think one of the things that surprised me, in a good way, was how much communication there was across academic and student affairs throughout our interviews. I tell this story a lot. My first understanding of a living-learning community was as a hall director, and I was in an engineering hall. There was very little connection between the engineering department or college and the residence hall. In my initial understanding of living-learning communities, I didn't understand what I was missing, and as I did research on them and certainly on those that were effective, my first a-ha! moment was that constant communication between academic and student affairs is important to realize the potential of LLCs. When we were interviewing folks, one of the things that I paid a lot of attention to was how this communication happened.
I think it was on a continuum. In one interview I conducted with somebody from academic affairs and somebody from residence life, they insisted, “You have to interview us together because we work in tandem with one another, and I want to make sure that you're capturing the full experience.” And, truly, that interview had folks finishing each other’s sentences and clearly valuing each other's perspectives and what each was bringing to the living-learning community.
So that's on the very advanced end of the continuum, where there's a mutual value, there's a mutual understanding, there's a shared language. In the middle were folks who understood each other's domains but were a little bit more separate. Circling back to your question, I think that the most surprising thing to me, long term, was the importance of communication and how it gets enacted. Folks need to have regular opportunities to converse with one another across academic and student affairs. Sometimes, because of the way that our institutions work, folks aren't necessarily in the same room together by happenstance, and so the living-learning community can be a place that brings those in academic and student affairs together in an intentional way. Then creating a shared language is important in order to make that conversation a productive one.
Benjamin: There are probably two things in that area (and I don't know if they surprised me) that I thought a lot about. One is this idea of parallel partnerships (Karen, I think that's your work originally) that actually work fine. Sometimes, the belief is that in order for it to work, we have to be totally enmeshed in each other's work. But we found great examples where these parallel partnerships involve the assumption that “I am doing my thing, I trust you're doing your thing, and we communicate.” But the trust element was a really important component of that: believing that good things are happening where I am not involved.
The other thing for me was thinking about the different ways that communication can happen: everything from “We do some general communication now and then” to the idea of a shared calendar for the community where I know what's going on in the res life side if I am the academic person involved. I also know what's going on generally in the hall so that when we're trying to do things, we're not bumping into each other or having competing things going on.
For example, on one campus, the faculty who work with the living-learning community create a syllabus that gets shared with residence life. It is not just a course syllabus. It’s a general plan for the living-learning community that is shared with residence life so that everybody knows what everybody's goals are. It was fascinating to me to see how different campuses have figured out ways to make sure that everybody stays in the know.
Kurotsuchi Inkelas: I do want to add a caveat to the parallel partnership. Both sides need to know what each other's roles and functions are. If they don't, then they will inadvertently bump up against each other and not realize that the left hand is doing what the right hand should be doing and vice versa.
In general, one thing that is important in talking about this relationship between academic and student affairs is that they know what each other's roles and responsibilities are and have a healthy respect for why those things are important for the community. I am going to be honest and say usually it's more often the academic side that knows less about the student affairs side than the other way around. That being said, I say this freely, too: I started as a residential college principal and had been studying living-learning communities for a long time, and arrogantly I thought, “Well, if anybody can run one of these things, it's me.” And when I got in there, I realized, “Oh, there's a whole bunch of stuff I don't understand that is unique and distinctive to my campus” (idiosyncratically, the way my campus wants things). But I didn't know them. I was no better off – in fact, I was probably worse off – because I arrogantly thought that I did know better than your typical faculty member.
I had to go back and learn a whole bunch of stuff that was really important in my job about how to handle disciplinary issues or know who I should go to when there's a crisis. These are questions that I didn't know the answer to. Once I learned that, I had a much healthier respect for what everyone does inside the community as well as how I can work with them.
So taking the crisis situation and turning it into something positive for our community is something you can do only if you understand what everybody's role is. Our student affairs colleagues probably get frustrated with us faculty who don't know this from that, but the other thing to remember is that we're not trained in these roles. Most of us came up through the academic side. I know a lot about higher education as a discipline, but not so much in practice. Most professors are even worse than me. They're physicists. They're German language professors. So they don't know anything about the world of student affairs. Give them a little break and help them learn because I think you'll find that they actually do want to learn because they want to do their jobs well.
Benjamin: One of the things that strikes me is that we, as a trio, represent all levels of involvement in living-learning communities. Jody, you were a hall director, for one. My involvement with living-learning communities really happened when I was at the assistant director level. So I was working with the hall directors, but I was also working on our campus’s learning community advisory committee from a campus-wide perspective. Karen was a live-in faculty member running one of these programs. We have both academic and student affairs experience amongst the three of us, which gives an interesting perspective because I know that in our conversations we all added something that reflected the context that we each have in terms of our experience with LLCs.
This is awesome. And to Karen's point, I just had a meeting with the dean of chemistry, and it was just so lovely to hear their interests. He admitted, “Hey, I don't know anything about this, but I am willing to learn what we can do and how we can best serve the students in our college.” That just meant the world for us, and now we know where the foundation is and where we can start and then build. Is there anything else that you all wanted to share?
Kurotsuchi Inkelas: We haven't talked a lot about our students. They are really a central piece in all of this, and we can never forget to communicate with the students directly. I think so often we just assume that they share our goals and objectives and that they share our ideas for programs. That's not necessarily the case. They come with their own goals and objectives, too, and we need to be cognizant of what they are and how they fold into the community at large. Not doing that will probably have pretty severe consequences down the line in terms of how we enact our goals if they're not aligned with students’ goals.
Benjamin: There was a great example of that when one of the learning community directors talked about how they have committees, and the committees change based on students’ interests. If we get stuck in a “We always need to have this committee or this program or whatever” mode, and students aren't that interested, then it becomes a difficulty that's unnecessary. I thought a lot about that in terms of how, as interest comes and goes, so do particular committees. I think that speaks to what Karen was talking about.
Kurotsuchi Inkelas: Especially to bring it back to COVID: What students want now is not what students wanted before the pandemic. We need to be thoughtful about that as we put together ideas for our communities.
To add to that, I wrote down in my notes something that you all said that really stood out to me. When it came to engagement, one of the priority pieces was peer-to-peer engagement. I think sometimes that gets lost. We're so concerned about student-to-staff engagement or student-to-faculty engagement that we often lose out on that peer-to-peer engagement, which is probably one of the most significant experiences of their college career.
Benjamin: We assume that's going to happen. We assume they'll figure that piece out. Other things that I've been working on recently highlight that we can't necessarily just leave that up to the students, especially as you think about living-learning communities. They're so often focused on first-year students who are just overwhelmed. They've got so many things on their minds, and certainly one of those top priorities is “Who are my friends going to be?” “Who are going to be my people here?”
We need to offer them those structured opportunities, in the same way Jody was saying about team building and student affairs and academic affairs working together. You would think that if anybody is going to know naturally how to connect, it would be these folks who have had that kind of experience much longer than our students have. We structure that. Why wouldn't we structure it for our students, too, especially for those who aren't naturally inclined to reach out? It reminds me of being in kindergarten: “Hi, do you want to be my friend?” How do you do that in college? It can be helpful if somebody provides that opportunity.
Kurotsuchi Inkelas: For utilitarian purposes alone, the greatest lesson I learned as a principal is that the most singular recruitment or marketing effort you can get is students telling other students to participate. I could put out a million social media messages, a thousand emails, and posters up and down the hallway, but nothing is more effective than when one student tells another, “You really should go to that. I'll go with you.” That changes the whole ball game.
Jessup-Anger: Yeah, I agree with that. And, thinking about where we are in terms of post-COVID, some of the students’ social skills might be a little bit delayed. Their joining, which I think in some ways is a skill, was disrupted as well. So, especially in this time and space, I think that living-learning communities and being intentional about bringing peers together and helping them connect with one another have never been more important.
Keeyana Talley is the assistant director for academic initiatives and experiential learning at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Talley is also the 2024 chair of the ACUHO-I Academic Initiatives Conference. Cover photo of the UNCG Esports and Gaming Living Learning Community and header photo of UNCG "House Calls" event courtesy of Sean Norona, senior director of image services.
