No 6, 2016
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Intro to College First-year courses smooth the freshman transition n
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One
by Chris Lazzarino
Photographs by Steve Puppe
From Day
A revamped First-Year Experience guides new students toward their ultimate KU success
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t is early on a warm summer morning and already Woodruff Auditorium is nearly full. Unlike many other events in this cavernous Kansas Union space—or anywhere else on campus, for that matter—attendees arrive early, find seats in the crowded auditorium in an orderly fashion and immediately fall stone silent the moment the event begins. Hour One, Day One, of the KU experience for these pre-freshmen and their families, and all are on their best behavior as Katie Treadwell, associate director of KU’s Office of First-Year Experience, steps onto Woodruff ’s deep stage. “Good morning!” she exclaims. “It is 8:32. You’ve been here for all of two minutes and it is time for your first assignment as a Jayhawk. Are you ready? I am going to say ‘Rock Chalk,’ and you are going to say ‘Jayhawk.’ Can we do this?” “Yes!” “Great. Rock Chalk!”
The first KU Orientation event of the day, “Discover KU,” is officially underway. When the 450 attendees respond with a less-than-spinetingling “Jayhawk,” Treadwell says, “When we say ‘Rock Chalk, Jayhawk,’ we are excited about it. And I think you all could be more excited about it. It was a good first attempt, but we are going to try it one more time. “Rock Chalk!” “Jayhawk!” OK, so all Jayhawks have experienced that sort of “Rock Chalk, Jayhawk” call-response/we can do better/CALLRESPONSE! episode. And those of us who are alumni, have children attending KU, or both, have also all experienced KU Orientation, and, as likely as not, it began with a Rock Chalk or two. Unlike our beloved chant, though, orientation, like everything to follow from Hour One of Day One through the entire freshman year, is nothing like we knew before.
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“This is a really exciting moment to think big,” Sarah Crawford-Parker, assistant vice provost and director of the Office of First-Year Experience, tells the incoming students. “What are your dreams? What are your passions?” Within the fleetingly fast 30 minutes of “Discover KU,” students and their families hear some of the best college advice imaginable, and they’ll hear variations on the themes throughout the rest of their orientation day and the opening chapters of their first freshman semesters. Crawford-Parker, g’97, PhD’06, explains that KU Core, required of all undergraduates, includes six areas of emphasis: • critical thinking and quantitative literacy • communication • breadth of knowledge • culture and diversity • social responsibility and ethics • and integration and creativity. She also emphasizes that freshmen should enroll in 15 to 17 credit hours in their first semester—a full course load provides structure that helps new students succeed, Crawford-Parker says—and complete 30 credits after spring semester
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in order to advance to sophomore status. “Investing in yourself fully from the start is a really good thing,” she later explains. “That does not mean we want you to join eight clubs and organizations, but make sure you have a small course, make sure you have a course you’re really passionate about, make sure you join one organization, make sure you explore one campus office. Those are some achievable and important goals.” When Howard Graham, the Office of First-Year Experience’s associate director for academic programs, bounds onto the stage, he good-naturedly chastises students for lackluster responses to questions posed by Treadwell and Crawford-Parker: How many of you are from towns smaller than Lawrence? How many are from big cities? Who wants a job? “I know you’re not being forthcoming,” Graham says. “You need to be from this moment forward.” Graham, g’09, offers a telling anecdote about the first time he left his small hometown in upstate New York and traveled to an Outward Bound course in Oregon. He had been successful in high school, participating in sports, theatre,
clubs and government, yet still he harbored a fear: “Does it matter when I move outside of here? Does it matter when I go to a bigger place?” He assured incoming small-town freshmen—surely far more than the five or so who raised their hands when first asked to do so by Treadwell—that what he discovered in his wilderness school, surrounded by students from big cities, will translate to their own experiences on Mount Oread. “What I realized really quickly was that none of us were doing things we’d ever done before,” Graham says. “We were all being asked to do new things, right? What that gave me the freedom to do, and I think gave all of us the freedom to do, was to begin to share openly about who we are, where we are from and what we did well, and we tackled new tasks together. “I hope it underscores for you that it’s vitally important that you be willing to share who you are, where you are from, the experiences that you’ve had, because they matter. Because they do count outside of where you’re from. They do count in this room. They do count at the University of Kansas.”
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ay One of Semester One. As with orientation, students arrive promptly, settle in, and are ready to begin. It is room 4033 Wescoe, where Graham is ready to begin his third semester teaching “University 101: Sport, University & You.” The two-credit-hour course is part of a network of small, discussion-based classes created by the professional schools, University Honors Program and the Office of First-Year Experience, all designed to connect students with faculty and peers in their first semester. (See sidebar, p. 27) As with the other first-year seminars and UNIV 101 learning communities, enrollment in Sport, University & You is capped at 19. Graham introduces himself then promptly announces that the students have 30 seconds to pair off. “Everybody take a visual image of what the room looks like right now and let’s try to make it look like that before we leave today,” he says. “Now, let’s destroy it. Move things. Move around.” They do as told, and Graham tells them to introduce themselves to their partner and then discuss the course’s first questions: When was the first intercollegiate sporting contest and what sport was it? “You have two minutes.” After precisely two minutes of shy, barely audible discussion, Graham asks for responses. He tells students to introduce themselves to the class—although in most cases he beats them to it, announcing their names even as he calls on them, proving he’d already memorized the roster—and then share their answers, which tend to be wildly inaccurate but offer good insight into how much they have yet to learn about a topic for which they presumably have a passion. Graham offers a hint. “This is something to know: College sports have been commercial from day one,” he says, explaining that the first intercollegiate sporting event was organized by a railroad magnate hoping to deliver athletes and alumni from Harvard and Yale to a vacation destination he was eager to promote. It was rowing, Graham reveals after further discussion, at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, in 1852. And then,
Howard Graham (l-r), Sarah Crawford-Parker and Katie Treadwell say researched and tested strategies can help freshmen and transfer students succeed, including encouraging enrollment in one small class; making peer mentors available; giving young students opportunities to learn and practice basic skills such as how to share their work with classmates; and setting high expectations.
delightfully, comes collegiate sports’ context in American history: The few early American universities were generally socially conservative spaces led by dictatorial faculty and administrators. But as teenagers whose families fought in the American Revolution began entering U.S. colleges in the early 19th century, they brought with them a spirit of rebellion and love for freedom. They began to organize activities reflecting their own interests—literary clubs, student government, fraternities, even class fights. “Those activities begin to develop into collegiate sports,” Graham says, “which begin to get their legs in the 1850s and begin to mature after the Civil War. By the 1880s, tens of thousands of people are showing up at the Polo Grounds in New York City to watch Princeton and Yale or Harvard and Yale play a football game on Thanksgiving Day.” The semester is seven minutes old. Graham tells the freshmen to find new discussion partners and talk about the roles sport has played in their lives. Now the discussion is louder and more animated. The room swells with energy. After
two minutes of one-on-one discussion, the students begin to share the benefits of sports. Family bonding. Leadership. Respect. Perseverance. Life skills. Dedication. Patience. Therapeutic exercise. Coaches as father figures for a young man reared by a single mother. Question No. 3 challenges students to discuss what they learned about teamwork by playing or watching sports, and again the responses are revealing. Sacrifice. Responsibility. Communication. “Forget sports for a second,” Graham says as the class session nears its conclusion. “The goal is that each one of you is going to find what you want here and get on that pathway toward a degree and an education.” He reminds them that they heard at orientation about how a degree is the University’s official recognition of completed studies in a specific field, while education is broader than classrooms. “We want both for you, but for you to get those things you’re going to have to communicate, you’re going to have to persevere, you’re going to have to build relationships. You’re going to have to do I SS U E 6 , 2 016 |
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everything that we talked about today. Socialize. Lead. You’re going to have to have respect, you’re going to have to play. And maybe sports is going to play a role in your lives here.”
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ook One: KU Common Book. KU launched its Office of First-Year Experience in 2012, reorganizing and expanding a longtime office called New Student Orientation. As outlined by Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little and the University’s Bold Aspirations plan, KU needed to improve graduation rates and freshman-to-sophomore retention, and it created the Office of First-Year Experience to help reach those goals. The new office chose as its mission motto, “To help students discover, engage and belong,” which had been suggested by a KU Medical Center faculty member. “He said it’s almost like an evolutionary pathway,” Crawford-Parker says. “If we can do more to drive that passion, that intellectual curiosity, that connection to faculty, and do all of that early, then we know that students will engage at higher levels and we’ll know that they’ll feel a sense of belonging. We are deeply commited to that work.” One of the Office of First-Year Experience’s first splashy debuts was KU Common Book, designed to connect freshmen and others in the campus community through shared reading and discussion of a single book. For 2016, the KU Common Book committee chose Ta-Nehisi Coates’ National Book Award-
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winning Between the World and Me, a passionate examination of race in the United States. The book is difficult and challenging. It can open up new perspectives to old issues and, for many, illuminate aspects of the black experience few white Americans had ever considered. Nothing about Between the World and Me is easy reading, and, for freshmen entering in fall 2016, it is the first book of their KU careers. They each received a copy at orientation and were told to read it before returning in August. “You’re going to read the book not only because it’s going to prepare you to be part of our community, to join the conversation we are having on campus about how we have become a more equitable and inclusive space,” Graham says at orientation, “but also because it’s going to help prepare you for classes. There are more than 150 sections of classes that will use the book in some capacity in the fall.” Campus enthusiasm for KU Common Book is almost certainly the most visible public aspect of new expectations for first-year experiences. Katie Treadwell, for instance, notes that not only does it introduce students to college-level critical thinking and intellectual development, but the shared reading experience also opens doors to conversation. “When you go to a class for the first time or you show up in your residence hall and you don’t know anyone, it can be very awkward to know how to start a conversation,” she says. “So I’ve seen students start with a simple ‘Did you read that book we
Howard Graham and peer mentor Alex Barbour (center, l-r) welcomed freshmen to Sports, University & You on the first day of fall classes, Aug. 22 in Wescoe Hall.
got at orientation?’ and build from there.” In his book, written as a letter to his 15-year-old son after a grand jury declined to indict the Ferguson, Missouri, police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, Coates describes the epiphany of his years at Howard University, especially the unofficial social and intellectual interactions that he called The Mecca. “Notice that the university, much as he admires it, is not itself The Mecca,” David Roediger, Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History, writes in the KU Common Book readers’ guide. “Instead the relationships built by those there—supporting, loving, and challenging each other—engage his imagination and define how The Mecca works. “What are the challenges of building a mecca here without relying entirely on the university to do it for us?” KU Common Book, as with the rest of the Office of First-Year Experience’s programming and philosophy, is, in a word, intentional. No longer is it good enough to presume that 18-year-olds in the first steps of adulthood can navigate their own ways through a big, complicated, confusing place like KU. We need to recognize their strengths and weaknesses, their dreams and desires.
To those who recoil at the idea of early career planning, for instance, CrawfordParker suggests they stop thinking about it as job training unworthy of a great university, where learning should happen for learning’s sake, and instead see it as acknowledgement of students’ most basic desires: good jobs and happy families. “If they’re thinking about it when they come in and we don’t talk about it until they’re a junior,” Crawford-Parker says, “we’re going to lose them.” At her presentation during provost interviews, then-dean of business Neeli Bendapudi, PhD’95, now provost and executive vice chancellor, said that if freshman retention rates improved from 80 to 90 percent, many of KU’s budget shortfalls would evaporate immediately. Not only are early departures a drain on the University’s resources, but they also destroy personal finances, leaving students deeply in debt with nothing to show for it, their dreams shattered and personal momentum halted. Yes, the money is important, but so are the people. “We see the difference that KU makes in
the lives of students. It can be amazing,” Crawford-Parker says. “It is heartbreaking to see students come here and not thrive. We are really driven by this idea of how transformative KU can be. What can we
Small classes, big results
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or fall 2016, there are 29 “first-year seminars” taught by faculty experts across a variety of academic disciplines, including African & African-American studies, anthropology, business, visual art, economics, classics, geology, German, art history, journalism, sociology and linguistics. The first-year seminars are three credit hours and count toward two KU Core requirements as well as the general education requirement. University 101 courses, which are two credit hours and count toward elective
requirements, are seminars intended to introduce students to KU with discussions in academic and career planning, information literacy, financial and personal wellness, time management, academic support services and KU Common Book. Within the UNIV 101 structure are “learning communities,” including both residential and nonresidential options. Howard Graham’s Sport, University & You is one of seven residential courses, each offered only to freshman residents of specific residence
do to make sure as many of our students as possible have that experience?” First-year experience to last-year success. It all starts on Day One, and it’s not an accident. It is intentional.
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UNIV 101 halls. Students in Graham’s section live in Oliver Hall; others include “Life Through a Lens,” a photography course for Hashinger Hall residents; a women’s health program, “Breathe Easy,” for Corbin women; and “Be the Change,” a civic and social responsibility course for Ellsworth students. Nonresidential learning communities, open to all freshmen, combine two 100-level courses from different disciplines— journalism and anthropology, for example, or history with film and media studies—and
are worth a combined six credit hours and count toward KU Core and other graduation requirements. “Specific to University 101, I always tell my students that the goal is not to be successful in that class, but to use that class to be successful in college,” Katie Treadwell says. “It’s hard to make friends in a new environment. Not that it can’t happen in one of the Budig lecture halls, but it’s hard. I’ve seen my students get to know each other; they may not be best friends, but they really connect.” —C.L.
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