Self-Awareness(SA) ~ Level 3
Knowledge & Understanding(K&U) ~ Level 3
In my role as a learning community coordinator I served as a student resource for freshmen interested in careers based out of the College of Science, Engineering, and Technology. I helped guide roughly 20 students through their first year at MSU. This position exposed me to students from a wide range of backgrounds and required me to interact in a way that they felt supported to the best of my abilities. Before this experience, I felt confident in my ability to mentor and lead groups of peers in a personable way. I was challenged by the variety of students to whom I needed to relate. Students in my learning community struggle with homesickness, adjusting to a smaller/larger community, independence from family, more liberal/conservative peer ideologies, and many other challenges faced by first-year students. I struggled to connect with students who faced different struggles than I had.
My upbringing in a family where independence and responsibility were expected from an early age led me to expect many first-year college students to have an established sense of independence and self-confidence in allowing themselves to be successful. In my family's culture we were expected to develop these skills between middle school and high school to help on the farm. For some of my students, this was not the case (SA Level 3). Some students came from more urban areas, single-parent homes, or families where the parents were actively organizing their student's daily life. My own culture valued and expected independence of young adults and a sense of responsibility whereas many of my students had not been expected to display this trait in their own lives. My interactions with students had to bridge this gap of cultural expectations to better support them.
As the semester progressed, I was able to create personal connections with many of the students in the learning community which allowed me to ask deeper questions regarding their transitions and experiences. I was privileged to information regarding why they may hold more conservative versus liberal views or how they interacted with professors based on their biases and their own upbringings. In one-on-one interviews that I held with the students throughout the semester, I had the opportunity to ask many "why" questions regarding their experiences and perspectives (K&U Level 3). Why they may hold certain beliefs. Why they may value others' input or make decisions independently, etc. At times students would not know or prefer not to answer , but there were many times that we ended a conversation with each party having new knowledge regarding another group of their peers.
Below is a journal from my first semester with one of my students.
One-On-One Journal ~ Student 1
Knowledge & Understanding(K&U) ~ Level 3
In my role as a learning community coordinator I served as a student resource for freshmen interested in careers based out of the College of Science, Engineering, and Technology. I helped guide roughly 20 students through their first year at MSU. This position exposed me to students from a wide range of backgrounds and required me to interact in a way that they felt supported to the best of my abilities. Before this experience, I felt confident in my ability to mentor and lead groups of peers in a personable way. I was challenged by the variety of students to whom I needed to relate. Students in my learning community struggle with homesickness, adjusting to a smaller/larger community, independence from family, more liberal/conservative peer ideologies, and many other challenges faced by first-year students. I struggled to connect with students who faced different struggles than I had.
My upbringing in a family where independence and responsibility were expected from an early age led me to expect many first-year college students to have an established sense of independence and self-confidence in allowing themselves to be successful. In my family's culture we were expected to develop these skills between middle school and high school to help on the farm. For some of my students, this was not the case (SA Level 3). Some students came from more urban areas, single-parent homes, or families where the parents were actively organizing their student's daily life. My own culture valued and expected independence of young adults and a sense of responsibility whereas many of my students had not been expected to display this trait in their own lives. My interactions with students had to bridge this gap of cultural expectations to better support them.
As the semester progressed, I was able to create personal connections with many of the students in the learning community which allowed me to ask deeper questions regarding their transitions and experiences. I was privileged to information regarding why they may hold more conservative versus liberal views or how they interacted with professors based on their biases and their own upbringings. In one-on-one interviews that I held with the students throughout the semester, I had the opportunity to ask many "why" questions regarding their experiences and perspectives (K&U Level 3). Why they may hold certain beliefs. Why they may value others' input or make decisions independently, etc. At times students would not know or prefer not to answer , but there were many times that we ended a conversation with each party having new knowledge regarding another group of their peers.
Below is a journal from my first semester with one of my students.
One-On-One Journal ~ Student 1