My original dream job wasn't academic administration, shocking as that may be. From the time I was ten years old, I had a love affair with the game of basketball. In truth, my 5'8" frame and slow feet made it more of a love/hate affair, but it was always there.
I'm grateful I went to a very small high school, so my lack of physical gifts didn't prevent my participation even though my dad (a very successful high school coach) told me my greatest athletic asset was my... brain. I think he meant it as a compliment. But I loved the game a lot and after heading off to college to study psychology, I quickly changed to education in part for the opportunity to give back through athletics. And in the last 30 years, I've coached at the youth level, high school level, and small college level until stepping away this last year to be Vice President. My career record won't put me in anyone's Hall of Fame, but I've learned some very important lessons. I learned relationships are the real reason most of us love athletics, and I learned my own strengths and limitations (I'm a hellacious recruiter, but not a great practice planner for example). But what I learned more than anything is my coaching was always trumped by talent. If players couldn't play, my contribution was really in the margins in terms of winning and losing. And the ability to play always came down to the ability to dribble, pass, shoot, and defend. These are the fundamental skills of basketball, and without them, it's hard to even get started. So, when my teams struggled, we always went back to basics, to fundamentals.
What does this have to do with poverty informed practice? Well for those who have endured my sports related tangent and are still reading, I'm guessing you see the parallels. This idea of dealing with poverty first is rooted in the idea of working from the fundamentals, the basic building blocks. Without certain fundamentals in place, moving people ahead through school is very hard to impossible. This has been more apparent than ever since the Great Evacuation in March. The student stories I heard weren't about difficulty with course materials or complaints about the quality of instruction. Even in courses never intended to be delivered at a distance, students were kind, patient, and hard-working. What I heard getting in the way of their success was job loss, overwhelming childcare needs, and concern about rent and food. And of course, many were just scared of what was happening as we all were. These were not intellectually complicated issues; these were threats to the fundamental needs of human beings, and they interfered with the ability to progress. As we scrambled to figure out how to help, we had to get back to fundamentals as best we could. In this case, fundamentals meant basic needs like food, technology access, and emergency funds.
If I can drift back into my lessons learned in the gym, I think of my friend Jeff. He hired me to work summer basketball camps for many years in my 20's, and we became close. We spent hours and hours watching young women try to make themselves into basketball players, and one of his favorite lines when we would see a young player working through their learning curve was to say they were "making the routine look impossible." It was a fun play on words, but it is so reminiscent of what we do in higher education over and over again. In my cynical moments it seems there is no problem we can't make more complicated. Perhaps we will form a committee to bring recommendations to another committee, or we assume the problem in front of us is never the "root cause," and we choose not to act because it's "just treating a symptom." Higher education has made an art form of making the routine look impossible. My hero Dr. Russell Lowery-Hart and his team at Amarillo College phrase it a different way. When they are trying to move to action and things slow down, they say "let's not 'higher ed' this to death." It's kind of brilliant really. How often do we analyze when we need to act? I remember two years ago when I started providing grab and go food through The Bowl, someone called me to explore the idea and asked if we had any data to support the idea. I was a little incredulous. Only in higher education could someone wonder about the efficacy of eating... There is copious evidence by the way that eating well and learning well go together, but it's not real surprising is it?
I don't know anyone in my industry who isn't bone-weary and profoundly exhausted.
Good, caring people are having to do scenario planning for scenarios we have never faced before. And the choices aren't binary. It is not as simple as go online or don't for a college like mine. Our community college is already pretty darn good at online education and moving many courses to that format is a relatively simple choice. I say relative because for a poverty informed college, we know the challenges this poses for some of our students in terms of tech access, and safe learning environments. But those concerns aside, things get really complicated for a college that also has a technical mission and trains truck drivers, welders, bicycle builders, cosmetologists, mechanics, radiographers and several other professions which pay a living wage but require you to do work in person at some point, no matter how creative you are. All of this planning and adjusting has caused stress and the level of exhaustion I mentioned earlier. And that is for those of us who remain employed and often work remotely some or all of the time. Our students must be even more overwhelmed. All of which cries out to me for a need to simplify and return to fundamentals. And the fundamentals of my poverty informed triangle start with meeting basic needs and creating a sense being wanted for students. The third part of the triangle has to do with acceleration, and just in time support.These three pieces are more important than ever in our current circumstances. The triangle identifies the fundamentals.
So, let's not higher ed this to death and make the routine look impossible. If you run a college like mine, you know your goal is to keep campus safe and accessible for students who need to be there. We also know until there is a treatment or vaccine for Covid19 more distance education and words like HyFlex will be part of our lives. So much of this is driven by the progress of the virus and the public health, things we don't have much control over. When I had basketball teams that were at a disadvantage physically or talent wise, we talked about focusing on the things we could control, which was always the fundamentals. So, let's control what we control and spend what is left of our summer making sure our basic need resources are as robust and accessible as possible. Let's get our pantry stocked and make sure students know it's available. Let's understand how you access SNAP where you live and promote it at every opportunity. Let's build our emergency funds and reduce barriers to accessing it to as little as possible. I was on a Hope Center webinar this week and it affirmed once again that emergency funds are key in a crisis, and we must make sure people don't have to perform their poverty to get them. These circumstances are stealing mental bandwidth from all of us, so let's help students reclaim some bandwidth by taking the mantra that has guided my work for 3 years seriously.Every Barrier That Can Be Removed, Should Be Removed.In fact, maybe nothing is more fundamental. In a world of stress and uncertainty, maybe this is the simple statement to point the way forward. Removing barriers is the fundamental action we must return to time and again.