#scholarly knowledge

One of the major components to the Curriculum Nights in the Spring semester within Scholars to College, is the curriculum itself *cues audience moans of an obvious answer*. We have begun to develop a speaker series within the Spring to help assist our students to navigate the post-secondary realms that they will begin to traverse in the following months after graduation in May. It’s been our goal to have representatives from various offices within institutions throughout the triangle to speak to our students and highlight successful resources and important concepts to be aware of as they begin their journey. Though, this curriculum itself has left a lot to be desired from by both students and staff alike. In the previous year, our implementation of the speaker series concept was similar to throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. From the student perspective, it has been hard for us to implement a complete Spring curriculum when they are still struggling to navigate financial aid processes and enrollment decision-making. However, despite these implementation struggles, I went into this semester with a new mindset. With starting graduate school, and being exposed to many new ways of thinking, I knew we could do something different with the curriculum. This thought began my first intentional usage of scholarly knowledge within my work at EKC.

Prior to starting the speaker series, I wanted to intertwine various learning constructs alongside exposing our students to helpful resources and offices. Instead of applying a curriculum in a “let’s just see what sticks with our students” fashion, I wanted us to use this as an opportunity to think deeper. After consulting with the director of another program that is operated through EKC, Mr. Dwayne, we discussed the potential to interweave Schlossberg's Transition Theory to the application of these resources. In Schlossberg’s theory, she offers a framework to examine multiple transition variables; Self, Strategies, Support, and Situation. These variables are described as coping resources and focuses on the meaning systems constructed by the individual experiencing transition (Schlossberg, Lynch & Chickering, 1989). As our speaker series has been created with the intention of helping our students transition to college, we have not been intentional about how that is done. By adding the framework of Schlossberg’s transition theory as a foundation to the spring curriculum, I hoped to provide more substance for our students in understanding how the exposure to these resources and offices can help facilitate their own transition in these next steps.

However, there was one additional step I wanted to take in alignment with many scholarly studies and articles that have indicated an important step for critical thinking: self-reflection. This step, in my opinion, is one that we have not been able to implement fully with our students because of the same reasons mentioned above for our curriculum implementation. Self-reflection has played a large part in my own personal and professional growth recently and I wanted to give our students the same opportunity to genuinely take time to think and write about the information they are hearing We gathered fresh spiral notebooks for all of the students and, on the first Curriculum Night Speaker Series, we began the journey of a thousand thoughts.

First, I began to set the stage to the transition theory. I wanted the students to understand why we are doing this, and how this framework can help assist them in these next steps to college enrollment. I asked them to use these notebooks to take various notes during the speaker presentations throughout the semester, but to also use these as intentional spaces to record their thoughts. Throughout the semester, after every speaker is done, we have tried to take 10-15 minutes to allow the students the space to think through how the resource/office they just heard from can aid in their transition to college. We have asked them to reflect on how the resource/office can aid in the 4 transition variables, and how they can utilize the resource/office when they are at college.

These extra levels of intentionality, with the help of scholarship, have played a tremendous role in propelling our curriculum and allowing the students an opportunity to process it even further. As the Spring semester begins to wind down, we’ve still experienced some struggles in regards to timing, attendance, individual student struggles through other enrollment processes that have limited being present within the speaker series, and commitments to genuine self-reflection, but for some of our students, it has added extra depth to these topics. As some students groan when it’s time for self-reflection, some have taken every second to record their thoughts and think critically about what they just learned. This has been something phenomenal for me to see.

I’ve reflected on myself to see the privilege and responsibility I have to help cultivate these experiences for my students. Not even including intentional conversations about research surrounding first-generation college students, sense of belonging, and activism on college campuses, I have felt a huge sense of growth in my own abilities to serve my students. Being in graduate school and the exposure I have received to scholarship has been transformational for who I am as a person and a professional. My hope is that I can continue to be intentional about cultivating growth for my students in whatever way that looks like for them. I hope to support them through their next steps with frameworks and tools so that they can grasp all of the scholarly knowledge, including their own scholarship, that awaits them with this next journey in life.