[ Music ]
[ Applause ]
>> Dr. Lauren Rendon: I want to start by thanking Dean Gonzales and of course President Castro
and Vice President Lamus, and everyone else
for the very kind invitation to share my work on student success.
A big shout out to two of my former students when I was chair at Iowa State
that you have recruited here, Susanna Nacho and their baby, Nielle.
[ Applause ]
And thank you to the college of Sequoia folks that are here.
Top administrators, I see, so thank you for being here and to all of you.
Let me begin by telling you how I enter this work.
That photo that you see there is my former home in Laredo,
Texas where I spent a lot of time growing up, 517 Galveston.
And as you can see, we didn't have very much.
That home is still there.
Every time I go to Laredo to visit my family I drive by there just to remember the old times, so to speak.
But we didn't have very much, but we had hopes and we had dreams.
And one of my hopes was that I would get a college education, but that was not a tradition in my family.
My parents separated when I was about three or four years old,
and my mother worked really hard to help the family survive.
She had a job that -- well, she had several jobs, but her last one was being a waitress
at the best restaurant in Laredo called the Western Grill, and she worked from 10:00 :00 at night
to 6:00 o'clock in the morning every day $12 a week.
And so that's kind of what we survived with, and a little bit of money that my dad would chip in.
But we, again didn't have very much, and so how does a kid like me who grew
up in these circumstances now have the privilege and the honor of speaking to audiences like yourselves
at distinguished colleges and universities throughout the nation?
How did I do it, I'm often asked.
How did you do it?
And I know that there are many in here who share a similar story.
And I want you to think about how you did it, because that's been the question that I've had.
And this is why I want to share some of the research that I've done to indicate that students
like me succeeded, oftentimes with strengths, with assets, with things that keep us going
that are not acknowledged by most faculty and staff and administrators in higher education.
I want to eliminate those strengths, because they are key to what helps students like me succeed.
2044, how old will you be in 2044?
[Foreign language] Will you be around is the key.
I don't know that I'll be around.
I'm kind of old now, but some of you will, and it's going to be a great year, because that is the year
that people of color would become the majority in the United States.
[ Applause ]
It's going to be a very interesting sight to see in many ways, economically, politically.
And I'm looking forward to that.
I hope that I'm around to see it.
But at the same time many of these students that are growing up right now and that are in the first grade
and the second grade and they're coming to Fresno and other places,
they're not necessarily the ones that are best prepared for higher ed.
They don't go to the best schools.
They don't have the best libraries.
They don't have the most, you know, well educated and credentialed teachers.
I mean they're students like me, I went to Martin High School in Laredo,
Texas where hardly anyone went to college at the time.
No one really encouraged me to go on and make something of myself
and we weren't expected to really become very much.
But we've got to turn that around because many of the students that are coming to colleges
and universities have these kinds of experiences and they want to succeed.
They want to make something of themselves.
So one of the first things that we have to realize is that we have to move away
from what is often called a deficit based paradigm.
Oftentimes when faculty and staff and, you know, other folks that work in colleges and universities begin
to discuss the issues of low income first generation students were among the first to go to college like me.
The narrative begins with, "Oh, we can't do very much with these students.
They're culturally deprived.
They are at risk.
It's too overwhelming to work with these students.
Their parents don't care."
It is a narrative that is based on deficit thinking.
It's as if these students had nothing but problems to bring to higher education.
And I'm going to tell you that this needs to stop.
We need to now operate with what I call an acid based framework, because this deficit based perspective
that views these students as very limited, unable to learn, unable to succeed is really holding us back
in terms of working on student success.
Can you imagine if Berkeley thought about its students that way.
Can you imagine if Princeton thought about students with this deficit based paradigm.
Can you imagine if Yale thought about these students in this deficit based paradigm.
So why is it that the default narrative for discussing low income students is all about deficits?
We have to change that narrative.
I want to tell you a little bit about a study that we conducted at the University of Texas in San Antonio,
which is my home base, and this is a study that we were looking at Latino students in particular
where nature [inaudible] Hispanic serving institutions.
And we wanted to find out a couple of things.
One was what are the positive and negative aspects of the college experience were Latino students.
And secondly what were the assets that these students employed to become survivors
and to move past the obstacles that they confronted.
How do they do it?
How did they do it?
And so we interviewed 47 students in focus groups and then from there we took out six students
that we interviewed one on one and we videotaped those.
So let me begin with what we learned about the college experience for Latino students at UTSA,
which is very similar to the experience of many students at different colleges and universities.
Two things.
There's an upside to going to college and there's a downside to going to college.
Oftentimes we think about the upside.
And certainly these students talked about the upside.
They were excited about being in college.
They were excited about, you know, meeting new friends.
They were excited about the perspectives and the new things that they were learning.
And that really made them feel good.
They had really positive things to say about UTSA.
They were excited about meeting with diverse students.
You know, that's part of the transition to college.
It includes an upside and a downside.
All transitions include that up and downside to it.
When we get a new job, we're like, oh my God, this is a great thing.
I'm being paid exactly what I wanted, then six months later we're like, oh,
they didn't tell me I was going to do that.
You know, I don't know I mean that guy is making more than I.
I been here 10 more years.
And, you know, it's an upside and downside.
Right. I mean when we find a new partner it's like, oh my God, you know, this is the best person, you know,
and I'm going to marry him and all that.
Get married.
Six or eight months down the road, well, you know,
[laughs] I didn't know he snored, you know, all this kind of stuff.
[ Laughs ]
So you get it.
[laughs] Are you following me?
There's an upside and a down, college is no different.
Okay. So this is the upside.
Now let's talk about the downside.
The downside includes what [inaudible] feminist theorist calls [foreign language] a cultural collision.
It's a clash of two cultures.
These students are coming from worlds that are very distinct from the world of college.
The world of the family.
The world of their peers.
The world of their communities.
The world of work.
And all of a sudden they get thrust into Fresno State or UCLA or the University of Texas,
and that world of college is very different from their home reality.
And so they experience that culture clash, [foreign language].
That clash is marked by a number of things.
One is luminality, which is a fancy word for, you know, being in between.
Neither here nor there.
[Foreign language] you got one foot in the home world and another foot in the world of college.
You know, and so, you know, students are caught between these two worlds being right there
in that middle space, that luminal space.
Another aspect of the downside to college is separation anxiety.
Many students are the key person in the family
after the father left taking care of their brothers and sisters.
And they talked to us about, you know, I feel bad because I can't be there anymore to help my mom.
And it just made me remember when I was in college and, you know, my mom would tell --
I would tell my mom, "Oh, I have a lot to study," and she would say [foreign language].
You know, just come home, get away from all that.
She didn't understand what I was going through.
But I had that guilt, because my mother expected me to work after I graduated
from high school, because she was tired.
And so when I told her that I was going to college, she was like, what, you know.
And so I made sure that when I was in college that I always sent money home.
To this day I send money home, to this day.
So separation anxiety is another problematic aspect about that transition to college.
Another one is dislocation and relocation.
These students are dislocating from their home realities to relocate in the world of college.
But they don't dislocate completely.
They still have these connections with their peers.
They still have these connections with their families.
And so they're moving back and forth.
Okay. And they're doing this, they're going through this tough transition with very little help,
because most folks do not recognize the problematic aspects
of the transition to college for low income students.
Another other aspect has to do with experiencing what the literature calls micro aggressions.
Micro aggressions.
These small jabs that hurt, like you speak with an accent.
What's that music that you're playing on the radio?
Why are you speaking Spanish?
Are you really good at math?
What are you doing in this classroom?
You know. And this continues through our life.
Yeah. I remember I was at the University of Michigan, all right, working on my doctorate,
and this student came up to me and she said, "You know, Laura, you're pretty smart.
I have to tell you that when I first met you I thought you were kind of dumb."
Okay. Micro aggression.
Faculty member at Michigan.
Again, doctoral program, submitted a paper.
He tells me, "Did you really write this paper I mean it's really good.
Do you write this way all the time?"
I said, "Yes, I write that way all the time."
Micro aggression.
So these are things that students go through that are very painful.
They are very painful, and they have very little help in working
through the tensions associated with the transition to college.
So here is a chart that basically depicts what I'm talking about.
At this end you see the worlds of the student, the family world, the world of their native country,
because sometimes they would go back to Bolivia or Mexico or Puerto Rico, wherever the world
or their barrio or community, their spiritual world the world of work, world of their friends.
And then they're moving on to the world of college and meeting up with these challenges of luminality
and experiencing micro aggressions and separation anxiety, et cetera.
So that's one thing that we learned about the college experience.
It has this upside and the downside.
The second thing we learn has to do with the strengths that students used to survive
that are often unacknowledged, and we call them in the report that we did [foreign language] or assets
or [foreign language] funds of knowledge.
We worked with a theoretical perspective that Tara Yosel that's now in Michigan developed.
She's calling it the community cultural wealth model.
And in her theory she states that students have strengths.
For example, familiar, familial capital, social capital, navigational capital, resistant capital,
linguistic capital, and aspirational capital.
And all of those capitals combined constitutes the students community cultural wealth.
A wealth that they bring to college and that they use to succeed in college.
So we wanted to find out are these students talking about these strengths, these forms of capital.
And indeed they did.
The students had high aspirations.
I remember interviewing this young man, his name is Judiel and he and his young brother would talk
about her some day they would become like the Castro brothers in San Antonio,
Aquin and Julian, very well-known political figures.
And they wanted to be the same way.
You know, they had these aspirations of not only becoming these well-known politicians,
but bringing something back to their communities.
Language, some employed two or more languages and they were able
to operate with different modes of expression.
One way to talk with your family and another way to talk in college.
Family, a model of strength and determination and they benefited from the example that was set
by their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles.
I know I benefited from the example of my mother who worked really, really hard for very little to make sure
that we had something to eat every day.
And those tough examples really are the kinds of things that made me stronger,
and to say to myself that's not going to happen to me.
I am not going to repeat this history.
I'm going to shatter the history of my family.
I'm going to become somebody.
Social, very important asset.
They form study groups.
One student formed the table tennis club and that is where students would come and get a hug.
And, you know, eat together and, you know, they studied together.
It was just there was a lot of interactions and that peer interaction is extremely important.
Navigational, tremendous asset.
Remember that they're operating in luminal spaces, neither here nor there.
Okay. And they were able to navigate themselves, figure things out.
Again, often with very little assistance from anyone.
That's kind of how I did it.
No one asked me, hey, you know, you need help.
I kind of figured it out.
Okay. Navigational is another form of capital.
Resistant.
They were able to overcome these micro aggressions that I talked about.
They were able to overcome their poverty circumstances.
We discovered some new forms of wealth.
One that we call [foreign language] or determination or perseverance.
They really were determined to succeed.
You know, I am going to do this.
I'm going to make sure that I finish.
The other one is giving back.
This is I find like a spiritual nobility of these students who wanted to earn a degree,
not just to hang it on the wall, but because they wanted to put something back into their community.
I'm doing this because I want to help others.
I want to be a doctor, because I saw my mom suffer from cancer, and I want to find a cure for that.
It was all about giving back, and to me that is a phenomenal strength that students had.
Spirituality and faith.
Another very big asset.
Many of the students came to the interviews with crosses and religious bracelets,
and they turned to God when things got tough.
And they also had a sense of meaning and purpose to their lives.
And finally an asset that we called the reversal, which is about holding multiple
and competing systems of meaning intention.
I was undocumented and now I'm documented.
I'm Mexican and I'm American.
I can speak this way with my family and I can speak this way with my professors.
This ability to hold two things that are very different, put them together and make it into a whole.
[Inaudible].
So these are the assets that we found in the students that we interviewed in San Antonio.
I'm working on a new book right now that hopefully should come out in the fall.
It's called The Latino Students Guide to STEM Careers.
And we're presently analyzing some essays that students wrote about their journey.
They all have completed their journey.
There's now, you know, in the STEM fields and we wanted to know how did they do it.
And sure enough, here are the assets very similar to the ones that we found at UTSA.
But, you know, at the top I put some assets that I find particularly interesting about STEM students
that we didn't find in the UTSA cohort.
This sense of wonder and curiosity.
From a very early age they wanted to figure out how things worked.
You know, they would ask why, why, why?
Why do these things figure like that?
They wanted to know the answers.
They had this sense of discovery.
They wanted to know how do things work.
They also want to give back.
They have this sense of altruism.
They want to be like an Engineers Without Borders and Doctors Without Borders.
I mean this is a very, very strong asset.
They're justice minded.
They want to make things right in America.
They want to make things right in their STEM fields.
And there's a study that was done in 2013 with African-Americans, and sure enough,
the same assets came out for African-American students.
And so it is these assets that again need to be very well understood, because we not only need to know
that these students have strengths, we need to work with those strengths.
For example, take the asset of giving back.
How would you incorporate that in your learning assignments?
Perhaps through service learning, perhaps through learning communities.
We need to leverage the assets that these students have.
And don't just say, oh well they have them.
No, no, no, leverage them.
Figure out a way to use them in the teaching and learning environment
as well as in academic and student affairs.
Let me give you an example of a community college transfer student.
Her name is Sylvia, and this is her profile.
She is a transfer student that came to UTSA to finish her degree.
She's a generation 1.5 student.
That means she did some of her schooling in Mexico and the other part of her schooling
in the U.S. Born in Juarez, previously undocumented.
Married, no children, first generation, low-Income.
No one in her family, no one had gone to college.
Now oftentimes if you show this profile to college administrators and faculty and staff,
they'll say, oh, she's not going to make it.
Look at that, she can't speak English.
You know, she didn't go to get all her education here.
She's got all kinds of issues.
She's not going to make it.
But look here, Sylvia was now a fourth year student at University of Texas in San Antonio.
She graduated in the top 10 percent of her high school graduate class.
She had attended two community colleges before coming to UTSA.
She had an associate of arts with an emphasis in math and physics.
She was now majoring in mechanical engineering, and she was planning graduate work in chemical engineering.
So this student who many people would say, you know, I think we can't work with her.
Look at her.
Look at what she's been able to do despite the obstacles, despite her circumstances,
despite not having a lot of encouragement at home to finish a college degree.
So here's Sylvia's journey on a map.
You see here, number one.
She begins her schooling in Juarez, Mexico grades K through 7.
Comes to San Antonio and graduates in the top 10 percent of her class.
Number three, she goes to my alma mater, San Antonio College for one year.
She comes all the way back to California
and goes to Solano Community College and gets an A in math and physics.
And then number five, she comes back to Texas and was majoring in mechanical engineering and chemistry.
Look at all of the dislocation and relocation that this student did.
Okay. Look at all of the different contexts that she needed to navigate.
Look at all of the different, you know, policies and practices in Mexico and Texas
and California that she had to figure out.
Look at her navigational assets.
Her ability to do this with very little help.
She's a superstar as far as I'm concerned.
She's a superstar.
You know, this is a tremendously intelligent person, very intelligent.
So I've got a couple of videos of Sylvia, so that you can hear a little bit about her experiences.
Here she is about talking about living in multiple worlds.
>> Sylvia: College is different, very different.
I see it as I have my college life and I have my personal life.
Is when I'm at school I'm like in school motion.
I know how to speak to people about horses and how to do projects and what I plan to do for the future.
I want to go to graduate school.
I want to do this and that.
When I'm with my parents there's no school talk other than how you doing
and how long it's going to take for you to graduate.
I don't think they fully understand what I actually do at school.
All they see is that I'm going to school and I've been married, I don't have any kids.
How long is that going to take.
That's pretty much what I'm getting from my parents.
And I just think they just don't know.
So it's like two different worlds.
I live in multiple worlds.
[laughs] Dr. Lauren Rendon: And here's an example of giving back.
Putting something back to society.
>> Sylvia: Scared.
Because that means if I'm one of the first, I'm pretty much the one setting up the path for the ones
that are coming behind me and that means that whatever decisions I make or whatever path I shoot to take,
it's not only going to affect me, but it's going to affect everyone from behind me.
Whether it's my sister, my neighbor or just any female or Latina that's, you know, the next generation
and that's pretty scary, because it's not just me anymore.
Dr. Lauren Rendon: Let me move on now from discussing the strengths of these students
and help them move forward to another very important aspect of helping students to succeed.
And that's what happens in the classroom.
It's like how many of you are faculty here?
Okay. Good.
What happens in the classroom is as critical as what happens outside of class,
and what we hear today is the importance of what are called high impact practices,
things that the research has shown really work with students, like applied learning and,
in fact, these students talked about that.
They wanted to learn the theory and the content, but how do you use this in real life?
Is what they said.
Deep learning experiences in and out of class.
I hear this again and again.
We need deep learning experiences.
But what does that mean?
What are deep learning experiences?
I'm going to give you some examples of that.
Validating experiences, affirming students as being capable of doing college level work.
Study groups.
I talked about the importance of that and having students work together.
Learning communities, very important pedagogic strategy.
Capstone courses, these experiences that, you know, really result in a project.
And research with a faculty member.
That's very big in the STEM fields, very important.
So let me talk to you about a relatively new teaching and learning approach
that is called contemplative education, which is a deep learning experience,
but it's called contemplative education.
What is it?
Contemplative education is a blend of what I call [foreign language]
or to think and [foreign language] to feel.
It's about the whole issue that we are whole human beings, intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual.
And that a deep learning experience needs to tap into all of that as much as possible.
So I'll be on the [inaudible] University next week and their whole mission is contemplative education.
And I'm going to talk in [inaudible] about the blending of contemplative education with social justice issues.
But that's a whole new keynote.
Okay. So contemplative education is going to blend rigorous academics.
Don't think I'm talking against academics because I'm not.
Okay. We're going to take the rigorous academics and blend it with what are called contemplative practices
such as meditation, yoga, mindfulness, poetry, music and you don't do all of that in one shot.
You know, you're going to select, which is really the best way
to blend the contemplative practice with the rigorous academics.
So let me give you a couple of examples.
One of them is Dr. Alberto Pulido, who teaches at the University of San Diego,
and he has a project that he has in his sociology and ethnic studies courses.
He calls it the Cajita Project.
I love the guy, hate the project.
I used it with my graduate students in student affairs.
And basically a Cajita is a box and what he has his students create a box and they have carte blanche
as to what that box is going to look like and to put artifacts in there that represents who they are,
the culture, the meaningful people in their lives et cetera.
And here's Dr. Pulido talking about the Cajita Project.
>> Dr. Pulido: So this box here was done by a student named Valerie Potter.
And the title you can see on the top sheet.
I usually ask students to write like a narrative, which the students here today did a great job in
and it's called My Life is a [inaudible] Valerie Potter.
And the little that I know about it are the discussions that we had about it was
that she considers herself part [inaudible] and part Apache.
And so when you look at the imagery in terms of the symbols, you see some of the traditional symbols
that you would see in terms of being an [inaudible] and Chicana and the whole process.
Then you see some of the Native American.
And she does she did all these kind of different symbols.
Around here you can see, you know, Christian symbols and American symbols.
On the top which you can't get access to there's an actual field of agricultural feel.
There's an eagle that's been carved in.
There's a horse.
There's some Native Americans symbols as well.
And I think it just captures what the students were talking about in terms
of those dualities and living in those multiple worlds.
Dr. Lauren Rendon: What he has done in this classroom, and that's just one example he does many other things.
But take, for example, if you want if you were teaching a course in political science or history
or ethnic studies that you would take a social justice issue.
For example, assisting students to find a deeper sense of meaning, purpose, identity, and self-worth
or connecting students to their communities.
And you would blend that issue to address that issue with intellectual, rigorous academics,
conducting research about the history and struggles of ethnic racial groups, interviewing community leaders,
doing research papers, et cetera, and many of us just stop there because we don't know how to do that.
But what Dr. Pulido does is he goes further,
one step further to include contemplative engagement tools, such as the Cajita Project.
There can be many examples of arts based projects that could be employed or reflective tours to sites
where social justice themes are highlighted.
Some faculty take students to a murals, to the Holocaust Museum, to the Civil Rights Museum,
to the U.S.-Mexico border where students get hands on reflective experiences
about a topic that they're studying in class.
This is an example now of deep learning using contemplative education.
Let me give you another example.
Oh, before I -- all right, let me show you some Cajitas.
This is a student of mine.
He's now a professor at Vermont.
His name is Veejay.
And when I first gave this assignment he didn't know what to do or what his Cajita was going to look like.
And one day he saw his mother with this old suitcase and he said, "I'm going to throw this away."
And she ran after him and said, "No, no, no, don't throw that away".
He said, "Why not.
It's all torn and dusty?"
She said, "You don't understand Veejay.
This suitcase is the suitcase that carried all of our belongings.
When we moved from India to the United States," and that became his Cajita.
You'll see the little sweater he was wearing
when his grandfather passed away and the grandfather was holding him.
Books that had made an impact on his life et cetera.
And I have many pictures of what students have constructed as Cajitas.
Again they're going to vary.
This young lady, her Cajita is this wrap and she selected this in memory of her deceased grandmother
who had experienced the civil war in Liberia in the '90s.
Ad she tells the story of how soldiers would invade villages and the women had
to carry their most prized possessions with them and they had to leave at a moment's notice.
And they would wrap them around this wrap, and so in memory of her grandmother that wrap is her Cajita.
And here is an example.
This just happened last year in my Foundation of Student Affairs course.
This young lady worked in the fields when she was just a child.
And that is the hat that she used to wear when she worked in the field.
I'm telling you that when you do this project and, you know, I have a whole PowerPoint on just this project,
and it's just so deep and so meaningful that in essence these students keep their Cajitas in their offices.
Veejay has his Cajita in Vermont now.
He's a professor there.
Another example, this is Dr. Jay Herman Blake.
He's retired now.
He's an African-American studies professor and Herman is one of my mentors.
I love him.
He's a powerful speaker and thinker.
And some of the tools that he has employed in his African-American Studies course are audio narratives.
He has students listen to tapes.
Photos, he has students look at photos and you'll see when you see his video and music.
He wants students to learn content, but he also wants them to reflect about what they're learning.
It's one thing to say, okay, let me look at the facts
of what happened during the whole civil rights movement.
And it's another thing to get really engaged with what happened.
And here's what Dr. Blake does.
>> Dr. Jay Herman Blake: I use in the class some of my own material, my own research.
I have them listen to, for example, when I talk about slavery I have them listen to an interview done
in 1968 was a woman whose mother was a breeder.
And it was her mother's job to have babies.
And this woman talks, she was the 15th child of this woman born just after [inaudible] that she birthed.
She was I think 94, 98, something like this.
And I have a picture of her which I show on the transcript.
I want to tell you you can't hear that and walk away without thinking.
When I get talking about terrorism and violence I use about six or seven slides from that book
"Without Sanctuary," and I raise two questions.
Why do they lynch people?
And then I show the pictures of the crowds who came to enjoy the spectacle, including young children.
And one student wrote an essay saying this course is not only about the learning.
This course it's about thinking and you think all the time.
I use music because the music was used by the people to illustrate these points.
So when they hear this woman whose mother was a breeder I play for them the spiritual "Lord, how come me here?
I wish I never was born."
When they see those slides about how people have been misused and mistreated I have them listen
to Nina Simone singing "Strange Fruit."
I just gave a lecture on the Civil Rights Movement and at the beginning of the 20th century I had them listen
to a spiritual, "Lord, I couldn't hear nobody praying."
Talking about the loneliness -- Dr. Lauren Rendon: So to break it down in a history class
or a political science class or, you know, whatever class you would identify what you want to cover.
In this case I put social justice issue.
What kinds of things are you going to do to engage students intellectually?
Intellectual engagement.
And then to go even deeper, what kinds of tools are you going to use for reflection.
And in his case he uses photos, films, and music that capture the experiences of oppressed people.
Now you got to think about your teaching and learning assignments, because this now is going to get you
to work on a deeper learning experience for students.
So here's what I call an ecology of contemplative practices for social justice,
all the way from autobiographical essays, contemplative photography, journal writing, meditative experiences,
slam poetry, ethnomusicology, dance, drumming, guided imagery, art space projects, service learning.
I mean these are just some examples of what can be done.
Here's an example of contemplative education in STEM fields.
Let's say that you wanted to examine the impact of the California drought on low income communities.
The academic project would be to examine the rising price of water or the quality of water.
You could then design a service learning contemplative project that includes visits and interviews
in low income communities and involve students in journaling and reflections about their feelings
as they engage with their communities.
And you might involve students in developing arts based projects to share with class, perhaps a documentary
on what they learned or some poetry or music that they develop as a result of the experience.
There is training, if you're going to do this, and I talk about this in my book, Sentipensante Pedagogy.
One of the key things is having our own contemplative practice, whether it be yoga or journaling or poetry
or meditation, whatever it is we're going to ask students to reflect then we need to do that as well.
A social justice orientation.
An awareness of diverse student backgrounds.
A deep understanding of contemplative pedagogy and professional development.
[Music] So when I talked about deep learning and how contemplative education gets us
to deep learning, and I wanted to call it something.
And so the faculty that I interviewed and you saw Dr. Blake there and Dr. Pulido.
I asked them what do you call this pedagogy?
And they didn't have a name for it.
And a student from UCLA came to my office when I was in Long Beach and she said,
"You need to read Eduardo Galliano's book.
It's called The Book of Embraces."
And she said, "I think you'll find the name there."
And I opened this part of the book that's called the celebration of the marriage of heart and mind.
Why does one right if not to put one's pieces together.
From the time that we enter school or church education chops us into pieces.
It teaches us to divorce soul from body and mind from heart.
The fishermen of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality,
for they invented the word sentipensante.
Sentipensante.
Sensing, thinking, to define a language that speaks the truth.
[ Music ]
And so this is what I call the pedagogy sentipensante pedagogy.
It's really created not by me, but by the fishermen of the Colombian Coast who learned to work with the sea
to fish using their brains and their hearts, their intuition.
They kind of figured out the currents in the time of the day without having gone to school
or anything they kind of figured it out.
And they said it's almost sentipensantes, we are sentipensantes and I love that word.
So that's what the book is called, Sentipensante Pedagogy.
So here is Sentipensante Pedagogy.
You've got to focus on the thinking, the [inaudible] the intellectual development.
The feeling, the [foreign language] and all of that is activated by contemplative practices
by leveraging student assets and by focusing on the education of the whole person.
This I believe is the pedagogy that has the most potential to help students stay in college.
They want to find an exciting teaching and learning environment.
They want to learn the content, but they also want to feel it.
They want to experience it.
They want to get deeper.
And so we're going to need training to do this kind of work,
which has not been provided to most faculty and staff.
This isn't just for rich kids, and believe me they're getting this education at rich colleges.
This is for every college and university in the nation.
Deep learning experiences.
And so I end by sharing with you that I always get inspired by these students that I interview.
They lift me up because I know that I was one of those kids that could be flipping hamburgers in Laredo Texas.
But here I am today to share this work with you.
It's my honor and my privilege to have shared this work and I hope it helps you, at least in a small way.
[Foreign language].
Thank you so much.
It's been a privilege.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Thank you.
[Applause].