Author: Mollie Ames

Learning Together at Florida Atlantic University

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Five years after the onset of the pandemic, concerns about the lasting impact of quarantine on the way students engage with each other and in the classroom linger. For some universities eager to intervene, one promising approach to boosting student interaction is peer-assisted learning.

At Florida Atlantic University (FAU), the Learning Assistant (LA) Program hires and trains undergraduates previously enrolled in a course to support students in subsequent semesters. Opening these new channels of engagement is improving not only the student experience but learning outcomes, too.

“In today’s day and age, students don’t talk to other students in the classroom. They go in, and they’re on their phone; they’re on their laptops,” said Jennifer Bebergal, FAU’s associate dean for academic support and student learning and leader of the LA Program. “This is an opportunity for them to build that connection.”

These connections form on multiple fronts: Beyond bringing in additional support staff, the LA program requires faculty members to redesign their course to prioritize student collaboration. In classes typically involving two-hour lectures, for example, the second half gets devoted to group work. 

In 2001, the University of Colorado Boulder developed the LA “model” in an effort to prepare students to become high school physics teachers, which the state was lacking. From one department at one university, the program has expanded to more than 120 across the country and globe.

FAU’s approach is distinct because the institution designates an administrative office to oversee and expand implementation. It gives stipends to faculty to compensate them for their redesign efforts and enforce cross-campus standards. At most schools, Bebergal said, academic centers or department heads are responsible for their own initiatives, primarily in STEM fields.

Across all institutions, though, three features of the LA Program stay the same: pedagogy, preparation, and practice. Pedagogy refers to training the LAs receive to support other students; preparation happens at weekly meetings between LAs and the professor to improve and tailor instruction; practice is what comes alive in the classroom.

LAs are not meant to teach course material but rather support the learning process. They don’t provide solutions to problems but coach students along the way.

“That’s something that we learn a lot about during our pedagogy sessions — to try to not just give them the answer but more lead them through the thinking and logically arriving at the answer,” said Sebastian Hernandez, a rising junior and repeat-LA. 

Tito Sempértegui, senior instructor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry, helps lead the LA Program with Bebergal. As a professor of courses with LAs, he said he appreciates the added support in the classroom but especially how LAs provide unique insight into students’ understanding of the material.

“There’s a barrier between the students and the faculty members that is overcome with the presence of the Learning Assistants,” Sempértegui said. “Students are more likely to talk to them, and they do.”

The relatability of LAs may also help students envision their own success. “They see students who look like them, whether it’s race, gender, ethnicity,” Bebergal said. Something as simple as sharing an interest or club with an LA could help students feel more comfortable and capable in class.

Deepened classroom engagement is often the by-product. When relationships become a defining feature of the classroom experience, peers notice each other’s absences. “It builds that sense that the students matter in their experience here, and we care that they’re in class, and we care that they’re learning the material,” Bebergal said.

Connecting with an LA in his first-year math class is what led Hernandez to want to become one himself. He had arrived at FAU hoping to pursue environmental engineering, but the prospect of taking calculus was daunting.

“I had a lot of self doubt that I was actually going to be able to do it because of the math,” he said. “Later I realized that it wasn’t really that I was bad at it or there’s something wrong with math specifically.”

The support of his LA was key. “She helped me a lot, and she made the concepts seem very easy, and she even made it look exciting to the point where I really got into calculus,” Hernandez said. “So I just wanted to do that for other people.”

“She helped me a lot, and she made the concepts seem very easy, and she even made it look exciting to the point where I really got into calculus. I wanted to do that for other people.”

While taking into account anecdotal affirmations, Bebergal and her team assess learning outcomes for students in classes with LAs. As of fall 2022, the DWF (drop, withdrawal, fail) rate in both Calculus I and II had dropped by about half since the introduction of LAs in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Meanwhile, the percentage of students earning As in the courses significantly increased.

Outside class time, LAs offer office hours for students who either can’t make it to the professor’s sessions or prefer the lower-stakes environment of meeting with a peer.

As a student in class with LAs, Hernandez said LA office hours could be even more useful than receiving in-class support. “At least me, I feel a little intimidated to go to my professor’s office hours. I think he’s busy and stuff like that,” he said. Conferring with another student, he said, felt “a lot more welcoming.”

Professors take different approaches to incentivizing visiting LA office hours. In his first semester as an LA, Hernandez said, students could earn extra credit by completing a worksheet and explaining the concepts to their LA outside of class. In another course, attending LA office hours was a requirement baked into students’ final grade.

In addition to the students in the classes, LAs themselves stand to gain from the program. First, it offers paid, on-campus employment for the FAU population, one-third of which is eligible for Federal Pell Grants for exceptional student financial need.

For LAs, teaching also presents its own confidence boost, Bebergal said. “Our new LAs come in really nervous. They have imposter syndrome: ‘Yeah, I got an A in this class, but I’m not going to be able to help others.’” Over the course of the semester and into their subsequent turns in the role, she said, “you just see them grow exponentially.”

LAs aren’t just benefitting from helping students, though. They have more time one-on-one with the professor and their LA peers, too.

Hernandez said he sees the payoff on at least two fronts: “It’s very rewarding to be able to help someone,” he said. “But also, it really solidifies my own learning because I think the final step in mastering a concept is being able to teach it to someone.”

“It’s like a win-win.”

Florida Atlantic University is a member of the LearningWell Coalition. To learn more about the program, please contact Dana Humphrey at dana@learningwell.org.

You can reach LearningWell reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

The Mindful Professor 

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Lindsay Baker tended to be uncomfortable with conflict, a trait that extended to her professional life as an instructor at the University of Rochester. So when she heard about the new Mindful Professor Training Program available to the school’s faculty members, she saw an opportunity to address her aversion to engaging in difficult conversations.    

“After Covid, I wanted to stay involved with learning and professional development, and this program offered the chance to focus on things related to mindfulness that I haven’t looked at in awhile,” said Baker, an instructor of opera and arts leadership. “So I started asking myself, ‘How can I be more present in a conversation that might be challenging? What’s my own stuff I can take care of and shed before tense situations, so I can be open to better conversations with students and colleagues?’”

Launched in 2023, the Mindful Professor Training Program is a semester-long initiative that guides faculty through the principles of mindful leadership, helping them not only tend to their own wellbeing but also shape healthier, more supportive classroom environments. According to a 2021 study from the Healthy Minds Network (HMS), 21 percent of faculty surveyed said supporting students in mental distress had taken a toll on their own mental health — and 61 percent believed it should be mandatory for faculty to receive basic training in how to respond to students in distress. The Mindful Professor Training Program comes out of more than just post-pandemic urgency: a deeper recognition that the mental state of those who teach affects those who learn, and vice versa. 

“If we want to support students, we have to support the faculty and staff with these tools,” said Rebecca Block, director of the program and the university’s health promotion specialist. “We’ve known that students benefit from mindfulness. But what about the faculty? They’re the ones setting the tone.”

“We’ve known that students benefit from mindfulness. But what about the faculty? They’re the ones setting the tone.”

The inspiration for the Mindful Professor program took root in the years surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty across higher education found themselves suddenly navigating Zoom classrooms and working with students in emotional crisis without training beyond empathy and instinct.

Research bore out what many were feeling intuitively. The 2021 HMS study showed that while 80 percent of faculty had spoken with students about mental health, only half felt equipped to identify emotional distress. “That was an eye-opener,” Block said. “We realized we needed a new kind of training as national data keeps on getting worse. We have to think differently because what we’re doing is not working.”

Block teamed up with consultant Lisa Critchley, whose background in mindful leadership in business settings brought a complementary expertise. Together, they created a curriculum that bridged personal mindfulness with leadership skills.

The result was a first-of-its-kind program in higher education: eight weekly workshops that combine meditation, discussion, applied classroom practices, and leadership skill-building. Critchley begins each session with a grounding meditation — breathwork, posture awareness, gratitude practices — before guiding faculty through exercises in mindful communication, self-regulation, and mentorly insight.

Lindsay Baker enrolled in the program in spring 2024 after spotting it in a faculty newsletter and joined a cohort of participants from a wide range of academic disciplines. 

“I used to have a really solid meditation practice, but it had fallen off,” she said. “I was curious whether this would help jumpstart it again and whether I could bring some of it into the classroom.”

She found that she could. From the earliest sessions, Baker was struck by the value of pausing — “arrival practices,” as she calls them. “I started incorporating little rituals into my acting classes: a breath before entering the studio, a moment of grounding before auditions. It’s simple, but it changes the space.”

Baker also found herself applying the lessons offstage. As she juggled multiple productions during a particularly intense semester, the program’s emphasis on resisting urgency helped her avoid spiraling into panic. Perhaps even more powerful was the community that the program fostered. Faculty came together across disciplines — from vocal coaches to mathematicians, from nursing faculty to researchers — that didn’t ordinarily have an opportunity to share substantive conversations.

“There was just this sense of acceptance that there is no one single way and we’re there to support each other,” Baker said. “Some people were hardcore meditators. Others said, ‘Hey, I remembered to breathe today — that’s a win.’”

Mindful Leadership, Not Just Mindfulness

What sets the Mindful Professor Training Program apart from traditional wellness offerings is its focus on leadership. While mindfulness courses for educators have existed for years, the University of Rochester’s program explicitly teaches participants how to show up for others — a skillset that can have tremendous impact on the tenor of a conversation and its outcome.

Mindful leadership equips faculty with emotional regulation skills that ripple outward. “How a teacher shows up in the classroom — whether calm or frazzled — actually influences students neurologically,” Block said, referencing the role of mirror neurons, which cause our brains to “match” the emotional state of those around us.

A teacher who brings a calm presence into a tense classroom doesn’t just feel better, Block said. They set a tone. They create an environment in which students feel more grounded, focused, and able to learn.

“Faculty who’ve gone through the program are better able to regulate their own emotions to be thoughtful when they speak, and they say it can impact the way the conversation goes,” Block said. “If you show up for a stressful conversation with a student in a calm way versus a stressful way, it’ll really affect the way the conversation goes and the way the student feels supported.”

Early results suggest the program is having an impact. Post-program surveys found 100 percent of participants incorporated mindfulness into their daily lives and teaching practices. The majority reported they’d experienced greater confidence in supporting student wellbeing and managing their own stress. And 85 percent said they were either “extremely” or “moderately” confident in their ability to use mindfulness strategies to support student wellbeing.

The program’s success has caught the attention of researchers and peers nationwide. Block and Critchley have presented their work at over a dozen national conferences and, last month, published a study in the peer-reviewed “Journal of American College Health” on the program’s measurable benefits.

To meet growing demand — and logistical challenges — the university is expanding its reach to make it easier for faculty to participate from different physical corners of the campus. This fall, a full cohort will be hosted at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Next spring, the team hopes to bring the program to the Eastman School of Music. A fully asynchronous version is also in development, aimed at increasing access for faculty with demanding schedules or at satellite campuses.

“Our goal is to meet people where they are. Sometimes the biggest barrier to participating in wellness work is just making it to the building,” Block said. “So we’re adapting.”

A Wider Movement Toward Educator Wellness

While the Mindful Professor Training Program is unique in its scope and integration of leadership training, it is part of a broader shift in higher education toward acknowledging the mental health needs of faculty.  

The University of Rochester’s broader “Well-being for Life and Learning” initiative offers an array of workshops focused on student wellness, and many faculty who complete the Mindful Professor program continue with follow-up coffee hours, self-care seminars, and classroom innovation labs.

With six cohorts completed and more than 60 graduates to date, the Mindful Professor program is gaining wider interest. Block receives regular inquiries from institutions looking to replicate the model, and when she speaks about it at conferences, she said she’s encouraged by the growing interest.

“We’re still growing,” she said. “But if our faculty feel more grounded, more connected, and more equipped to support students, that’s a win. They can really support not only student wellbeing, but their own teaching efficacy.” 

Inside the classroom, Baker is able to recognize that efficacy in the moment. “I’ve been able to identify and experience what we were talking about in the program in terms of that self-regulation and the ability to let some things go,” she said. “In those heightened moments of urgency or stress response, now I recognize what it feels like, and what I can do.”

You can reach LearningWell editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Deconstructing ‘Climate Anxiety’

Posted on by Mollie Ames

On April 8, 2025, the Trump Administration announced the end to $4 million in funding for research programs at Princeton University exploring risks associated with climate change. At the time, it was the latest instance in an ongoing wave of federal cuts to environmental initiatives. But this case sparked interest for another reason: According to the press release, at least one of the programs was eliminated because it was allegedly “contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.” 

Environmental experts were quick to denounce the idea that the solution to anxiety about climate change would come from avoiding research on the topic. But it’s not the first time the phrase “climate anxiety” has been summoned for political gain, on either side of the aisle. The truth is the term gets used to describe all variations of distress over the state of the Earth. Parsing out the possible interpretations is an important exercise for educators, practitioners, and students themselves. 

A 2024 study of “climate emotions” in 16- to 25-year-olds found that up to 85 percent are “worried” about climate change and its potential impact; and for around 38 percent, these worries negatively affect daily life. Concern over climate change has become so widespread among young people that it’s affecting how they vote, whom they choose to work for, what products they buy, even their decision to have children. But are young people’s responses to climate change a clinical issue to be treated? Or do they fall in line with those to most social problems, just with a catchier, more damning name?

The framing of “climate anxiety” presents something disordered in need of a cure, but from a clinical perspective, there is a distinction between an anxiety disorder and experiencing some sense of anxiety. After all, the vast majority of young people may feel worried about climate change; the majority don’t have an anxiety disorder.

“Anxiety or worry on its own isn’t necessarily a problem or something to be treated,” said Kaitlin Gallo, a Boston-based psychologist whose practice focuses on young adults and college students. She said she’s encountered a spectrum of concerns when it comes to climate change. Even among her patients who tend to have clinical-grade issues, their climate concerns do not necessarily map onto an anxiety disorder. “Oftentimes, the worry is occurring outside of the context of an anxiety disorder, and it’s just what I might call sort of a normal or understandable worry given the state of the world,” she said. 

“Anxiety or worry on its own isn’t necessarily a problem or something to be treated.”

It’s when the worry becomes “hard to control or to move on from” that it could begin to signal a deeper anxiety disorder demanding a more clinical response, Gallo said. Even then, the end goal may not be to try to get rid of the concerns.

“I think sometimes when worries are realistic, then there’s just a different way to deal with them,” she said. “Sometimes it might not be reasonable or helpful to change the thought, but rather to think about how you want to live your life in the face of that concern.”

People who experience an anxiety disorder are certainly susceptible to dark fears about a fiery end. For others, particularly young people who have more time on the earth, climate distress, even fear, may be an unavoidable part of living. 

Olivia Ferraro, a 25-year-old living in New York, said dismissals of climate change are what really makes her crazy.  

“To watch business as usual go on around you with very little recognition of how distressing the state of the planet is can be really confusing. Because you’re like, ‘Am I insane?’” she said. “This feels like a problem that we should be moving to solve with World War II urgency. Everything needs to be mobilized to prevent catastrophe.”

When she first started experiencing more acute distress about the state of the climate and its future, Ferraro was surprised at the lack of sympathy she met from family and friends, especially those she expected to understand. If anyone had asked them, she knew they would say they cared about the environment.

Realizing her regular network might not be able to give her support she needed, she started exploring other options. She was especially interested in talking to people her age, given climate change, she said, “is a threat felt uniquely the younger that you are.”

“I wanted to be with people who could share that experience of, ‘I’m freaked out because I don’t know if I’m going to have a child anymore,’ or ‘I will be my parents’ age when a lot of these predicted catastrophic shocks happen. How can I think about my life when I’m 50 where I can’t get water from the tap?’” Ferraro said.

“I wanted to be with people who could share that experience of, ‘I will be my parents’ age when a lot of these predicted catastrophic shocks happen.'”

The support group she ended up finding was one she had to help create. Eager for an in-person space in New York, she started hosting “climate cafes,” or listening circles that bring together people with environmental concerns to share how they’re feeling. 

A grassroots initiative, climate cafes have popped up with chapters nation-wide. Ferraro said they can offer relief from advocacy-related burnout or help someone who doesn’t even identify as an “environmentalist” learn about new ways to contribute to the cause. On the website for Climate Cafe NYC, the branch refers to itself as “the social home of NYC climate action.”

“A lot of it is holding hands with people as they kind of walk into that unknown, knowing that you’re doing it together and that there are other people who are experiencing this,” Ferraro said. 

Part of the purpose is helping each other avoid hopelessness. “We can be sad, but to be despaired is a totally other feeling. That’s when you’ve given up,” Ferraro said. “We want to help people avoid despair and avoid nihilism and really, even though it’s very hard work, stay openhearted and willing to connect with people and understand how we can work together.” 

The need for these kinds of outlets is evident in the many students who are bringing their climate-related concerns to school with them. Professor Sarah Jaquette Ray said the emergence of this distress in her classes pushed her down a path towards a new expertise: emotions and the environment. Now she’s chair of the environmental studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt.

As recently as a decade ago, Ray said environmentalists were trying to ramp up concerns about climate change, with what she calls the “scare-to-care” approach. Opening young people’s eyes to the devastation that could come, the thinking went, would inspire them to act, before it was too late.

The strategy may have worked, but too well. Ray said she saw students becoming more enthusiastic about climate-related issues, but they also seemed more despairing. “I was noticing my students were not coping very well with the material,” she said. “I didn’t think my teaching was changing, but something was changing about the students.”

Up to that point, Ray had felt like her students were taking the issues in stride, embracing problem solving. With time, she said, “It felt more like an existential crisis for them.” She decided part of the problem was that students were learning a lot about what was going wrong and a lot less about how to manage their own response to the problems. “They weren’t learning all that stuff alongside coping skills or emotional intelligence or any kind of cultural frame as to why these things might be getting worse,” she said.

She set out to fill the gap. Research into the spiritual and therapeutic tools activists have used in other social movements became the basis of an understanding about how to deal with climate concerns. This mental health-forward approach to environmental issues also appears in her book “A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet.”

Still, Ray continues to wait for the day when higher education institutions have integrated trauma-informed instruction and emotional intelligence into environmental education. That component “is just beginning to percolate on the edges of the tipping point,” she said. 

William Throop, professor emeritus and former provost at Green Mountain College, is also interested in activating a more personal dimension of environmental studies. For the philosopher-by-training, with a background teaching environmental ethics, it’s important to not only present possible climate change solutions to students but equip them with the life skills to enact them. This is an approach he views as part of “character education,” which he said prioritizes “the student as a person, not just as a collector of information.”

By learning what he calls “skillful habits,” Throop said, students stand to become “better critical thinkers, better ethical thinkers and actors.” In his book, “Flourishing in the Age of Climate Change,” he discusses a set of “hope skills” particularly helpful for confronting climate issues.

“Hope communication,” for example, is a skill Throop suggests could be particularly pertinent for tackling climate change. “How do you describe in a clear way the facts of a situation which are problematic and yet don’t turn people off?” he said. “How do you motivate people who address those facts in the way you communicate about them?”

Teaching hope, Throop said, might sound “like something a psychologist ought to do.” He thinks otherwise. “It’s something that should be embedded in curricula addressing these issues.”

As some faculty become more in tune with how students react to learning about climate change, students continue to turn towards each other to process the emotions they are experiencing. 

Eva Salmon, a rising junior at Barnard College, said she doesn’t usually struggle with anxiety in other facets of life; yet concerns about the climate are a constantly “simmering undertone” in the back of her mind. “In general, seeing everything happening in the world, it feels like my heart is constantly breaking, and I’m constantly experiencing a sense of betrayal.”

“Anytime it’s relevant, I can feel the grief. I can feel the anxiety. It really is there,” she said.

Compounding these emotions for students is the sense that their institutions are leaving them to lead the way alone. That’s the consensus among many members of Sunrise Columbia, the Columbia University branch of the Sunrise Movement, a national youth climate activism effort. 

Because it’s independent from the university, Sunrise Columbia can hold the administration’s feet to the fire in ways a club receiving school funding can’t. The student-run group conducts its own investigations into the university’s use of funds from fossil fuel companies to fund climate research. 

“Complicit Columbia” is the 53-page report the students published on their findings that the university accepted at least $43.7 million from fossil fuel companies between 2005 to 2024. More than a third of the funds benefitted the university’s research hub, the Center on Global Energy Policy.

Salmon, one of the student authors of the paper, said she takes issue with the fact that students, rather than university personnel, were the ones to take on this initiative. “The university needs to be more attuned and aware and doing its own research into these things. But for now, this is what we have,” she said.

The group of friends Salmon collaborates with has been key to keeping her motivated despite her frustrations. In general, she said she believes “a lot of the bad that’s happening in the world” is the result of “not prioritizing community” and disconnect among people. It’s a problem she feels grateful not to have. 

“To have found community and the space in the way that I have really has brought me a lot of peace and joy,” she said. The sense of support pushes her activism to the next level. “I think I would’ve done it regardless, but I don’t think I would’ve felt quite as empowered and impassioned.”

“At the end of the day, even if all this is happening around us, we have each other. And that feels like a very powerful, powerful thing,” she added.

Salmon’s overriding objective is to stay positive, to concentrate on the friends that are supporting her and the work they do together that bring her relief. “I really try and focus on recognizing the beauty in every step I take or recognizing things I like around me and just expressing gratitude for that,” she said. 

Olivia Ferraro, the climate cafe host, has adopted a similar outlook. While “climate anxiety” may be more apparent in her life than it was a few years ago, that discomfort has fed a deeper appreciation for the time she has left and a desire to make the most of it. It’s a guiding force that has changed her approach to relationships and decision-making.

“It’s been really freeing, honestly,” she said. “I like my life a lot more now than I ever did before.”

Global Connections

Posted on by Mollie Ames

As our plane rolled into the terminal, my seat neighbor asked if it was my first time in Egypt. I told him it was — my first in the country and second in the Middle East, although I hadn’t been back since before I started college and studying Arabic. He told me he was born and raised in Cairo and coming home after a few months coaching squash in Dallas. 

We turned out to have more in common than being about the same age on the same plane. When he heard I went to Harvard, his face lit up in recognition. He quickly listed off the names of squash players, friends of his, who had been students. Some were Egyptian, others French and Canadian. Several of them I knew. We had lived together in the same dorm for years.

Within seconds of landing somewhere new, I met someone familiar. At the time, we laughed about the world being small. Now I wonder if it isn’t just that Harvard is big, its international network as wide as its roots in Cambridge are deep. 

I thought about my chance encounter in Cairo after news broke of the Trump Administration’s order for Harvard to stop enrolling international students. Around a quarter of my classmates came from other countries. The concept of their absence is difficult to grasp and harder to swallow. What rare moments of connection would be missed? How many global touchpoints lost?

After four years studying the Middle East, I felt tied to the place upon arrival not because of the books I read or language I learned but because of the relationships I formed. This international education was a personal one, and it had lasted long after my Arabic began to fade. 

When I was a student, even academic interactions with international students were personal. There was the friend from Marseille who edited my emails in French when I needed to reach out to subjects in Paris for my senior thesis. There was another from Cairo who, sitting across from me in the dining hall, would look up from her own math homework to answer my questions about Arabic. There were countless who deepened my understanding of course material — a place, culture, or tradition — because they reflected on it in the context of their own upbringing.

My most important relationship with someone from outside the U.S. had nothing to do with the Middle East. She was my randomly assigned first-year roommate, now my best friend. 

On paper (and in reality), we’re different. She arrived in the U.S. from the other side of the world for the first time a week before move-in, while I drove the 25 minutes up I-90 from the Boston suburbs the day of. She worried about economics lectures delivered in English, which she was still mastering. I cried over essays assigned in the only language I’d ever really known or been asked to know. She spoke her mother tongue softly on the phone to her mom in the mornings when the time difference was manageable. I sometimes saw mine for lunch on a weekday.

That my house became both our closest home bonded us. We’ve stayed close for a million other reasons: a similar outlook on the value of family and friends; a common sense of humor and appreciation for art; the love of tennis we each inherited from our parents.

More than anything, I think we like listening to each other, chit-chatting. A lot of the time, our views on an idea, a social issue, a personal problem, align. When they don’t, I consider why we’re divided and often, how where each of us comes from has informed the way we think and operate now. That tendency to want to understand difference, I hope, has made me not just a better friend but a better person, maybe even a better writer.

We’re not friends because she’s from another place. But I recognize and admire all the ways her home and upbringing are inseparable from herself  — her braveness and boldness, intelligence, humor, and singular thoughtfulness towards me and the world.

Sometimes a friend from a different country teaches you about the world; other times they teach you about the person you want to be. 

Sometimes a friend from a different country teaches you about the world; other times they teach you about the person you want to be. 

I know other students have had similar experiences. In her Harvard commencement speech last month, master’s student Yurong “Luanna” Jiang opened with her own testament to the university’s global footprint: While completing a summer internship in Mongolia, she received a phone call from classmates in Tanzania who needed help translating the Chinese instructions for their washing machine. “There we were: an Indian and a Thai, calling me, a Chinese in Mongolia, to decipher a washer in Tanzania,” she said. “And we all studied together, here at Harvard.” The crowd erupted.

Those cheers, I’m convinced, signaled agreement as much as pride. I imagine every recent Harvard student and alum could point to an instance when the university shrunk the world down a size, made a strange place knowable. They wouldn’t have had to study the Middle East like me or international development like Jiang, either. These moments usually come down to something with more staying power than a shared class or major: friendship.

Colleges with Character

Posted on by Mollie Ames

This is the first in a series of stories on the Educating Character Initiative and the efforts of its member institutions.

Commencement season has come and gone and, with it, higher education’s annual homage to values such as good citizenship, service, and personal integrity. As in their mission statements and matriculation materials, colleges often summon these character virtues, but rarely do they teach students how to incorporate them into their lives. 

As higher education continues its self-reflection amidst an onslaught of external criticism, there is a growing movement to revive the idea of teaching character to college students, though questions abound. What would that look like in the modern university? Does “character” mean ethics? Civic engagement? Holistic learning? And how would the idea take root within a diverse array of institutions?   

The epicenter for this exploration is Wake Forest University’s Educating Character Initiative (ECI), a national network of colleges and universities committed to putting character at the center of higher education. The intra-institutional network is part of Wake Forest’s Program for Leadership and Character (PLC), an undergraduate and graduate-level research, teaching, and learning initiative with a mission to “inspire, educate, and empower leaders of character to serve humanity.” 

In 2023, the program received a $30.7 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to expand its work, $23 million of which allowed it to award grants to other institutions to create or strengthen character education on their campuses. In 2024, the ECI awarded nearly $18 million to colleges and universities in a number of categories, including teacher-scholar grants to individuals and capacity-building and institutional impact grants to institutions. This spring, another $2 million was awarded for teacher-scholar and capacity-building grants, and this summer, the ECI will award the 2025 institutional impact grants, which provide schools funding between $100,000 and $1 million.  

Among those eligible for the funding are public and private research universities, minority-serving institutions, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, military schools, and faith-based institutions. This growing number of grantees has formed the basis of a national learning community, led by staff at Wake Forest, that is a laboratory of sorts for the ways in which character education is interpreted, taught, and internalized in diverse environments. 

“The creation of the ECI has allowed us to catalyze a national movement around character,” said Michael Lamb, executive director of the PLC. “We are not just giving colleges and universities funding. We are giving them the tools and support to educate character in ways that work for them and their unique cultures.”  

Jennifer Rothschild is the director of the ECI and leads the high-touch process that keeps the network humming with what she calls “a parade of consultation.” Grantees, and would-be grantees, participate in webinars, conferences, site visits, and numerous phone calls with ECI staff. A philosopher by training, Rothschild relishes the process that goes into bringing character ideas to life, whether by helping to develop faculty training to incorporate character into courses or giving schools license to be creative and flexible about terms or scholarly definitions.  

“Some of our schools are far along in this work,” Rothschild said. “Others have a need and an idea. Our job is to find the thing that clicks for them. We ask lots of questions: ‘What do your students need? What do you want your students to be able to do and feel? Where are the obstacles to this work on your campus? What are your strengths and expertise?’” 

For Heather Keith, executive director of faculty development at Radford University, the ECI helped sharpen the focus of an existing program called Wicked Problems, where students consider ways to approach intractable issues like climate change and social injustice.  

“Students were learning a lot of discreet skills like problem solving and critical thinking,” Keith said. “But we wanted them to think about these problems in character terms like hope and moral courage.” The grant from the ECI funded a faculty workshop called Active Hope to help students understand how to be part of the solution in ways that, Keith said, “made them feel empowered, not just in despair.”  

Keith said the ECI has provided a community for people doing this work and the chance to be part of something bigger. “I developed a network at ECI that I never had before,” she said. “It feels like there is a revitalization of character in higher education, and ECI is at the forefront of it.” 

Character’s Comeback

To achieve the individualized character education Rothschild describes, the ECI uses what it calls a “contextually sensitive” approach. Avoiding being prescriptive about this work may be the key to reseeding it within higher education, which is both curious and cautious about the concept. 

Avoiding being prescriptive about this work may be the key to reseeding it within higher education, which is both curious and cautious about the concept. 

In an educational environment dominated by credentialling and return on investment, teaching college students to become good human beings may seem as dated as parietals. Character education has been in decline since the mid-century,  as higher education focused more on research and less on teaching and personal development. Campuses became a reflection of a more pluralistic, secular society, which made talking about virtues awkward, if not fraught. And while helping students develop traits like honesty and responsibility may seem universally acceptable, character education has become one more term caught in the crosshairs of higher education’s culture wars.  

“When I first said the words ‘character education’ at my previous public university, people immediately reacted poorly to it because they thought it was code for some kind of agenda,” said Aaron Cobb, the senior scholar of character at the ECI. He noted that the ECI welcomes grantees across the ideological spectrum. “I was like, ‘No, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the formation of the student as a whole person.’” 

Additionally, the notion of colleges stewarding personal growth may come off as coddling or indoctrination. Indeed, the lack of a common language around the concept feeds its vulnerability to misinterpretation and is something the ECI is working to address.

In the book “Cultivating Virtue in the University,” Michael Lamb, along with Jonathan Brant and Edward Brooks, helps clarify the meaning of character education: “The aim of character education is not to displace students’ reflective capacity to choose but to equip them to choose wisely and well. As such, character education in universities should not be taken to imply a didactic pedagogy or the undermining of student autonomy, but the opposite. Character education at the tertiary level should be critical and dialogical, with full recognition and encouragement of students’ own moral identity, judgement and responsibility and an emphasis on intellectual analysis and critical engagement.” 

In his work at the PLC, Lamb frequently communicates both the need for character education and the value of it. The Request for Proposal (RFP) for the ECI, which he co-wrote, includes references to a survey administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, which found that 85 percent of 20,000 faculty across 143 four-year institutions said they “agree” or “strongly agree” that it is important for faculty to develop students’ “moral character” and “help students develop personal values.” 

In its invitation to institutions, the ECI identifies several desired outcomes for institutions wanting to take this on: “Intentional efforts to educate character can support student wellbeing and flourishing, sustain academic excellence and integrity, promote equitable and inclusive communities, foster good leadership and citizenship, advance career preparation and vocational discernment, and encourage the responsible use of technology.” 

For many colleges and universities throughout the country, these outcomes are even more desirable amidst the youth mental health crisis, disengagement among students, employers’ disappointment in the lack of “well-roundedness” in young workers, and the myriad of practical and ethical issues surrounding the proliferation of generative AI. For others still, the most compelling reason for reviving character in higher education is to stem the erosion of character witnessed by countless examples in everyday life.  

In interviewing over 2,000 students for their book “The Real World of College,” Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner found that most students had a transactional view of college and a preoccupation with themselves. “In general, we found students to be preoccupied with themselves and their own problems, showing little concern for broader communities and societal challenges,” Fischman said.

Fischman believes character interventions can be effective ways of moving students from “I” to “we,” if the initiatives are well-understood and carefully assessed. “We are in need of these programs more than ever. By supporting and connecting them through a facilitated network like ECI, individuals and schools can learn from one another’s efforts, rather than reinvent the wheel. An essential piece of this work is assessment — to understand what’s working so that we can build on the effective approaches.”

Fischman and Gardner, who work for The Good Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, are part of a growing thought leadership community around character that includes, among others, the Jubilee Centre at the University of Birmingham, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, the Oxford Character Project, the Institute for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame, and now the ECI. National funders concerned about the state of character and ethics fuel this work, including the Kern Family Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation, both of which have given millions to Wake Forest and others.  

In issuing its substantial investment in the ECI, Lilly Endowment CEO N. Clay Robbins said, “We are living in a moment of deep cultural and political polarization and increasing distrust of leaders and institutions.” He described the aim of the award as “educating a new generation of morally and ethically grounded leaders to rebuild trust and enhance civic engagements.” 

Character in Action

Perhaps the strongest evidence of the current appetite for character education is the response to the ECI’s RFP. In 2024, its first grant year, the ECI received nearly 140 proposals from institutions across the country. Asked if she was surprised by the reaction, Rothschild said, “Yes, definitely. We hoped for 40 or so proposals, enough good ones to enable the awarding of the funds Lilly entrusted us for that year. What happened was we received an overwhelming number of proposals of exceptional quality.”  

To meet the unexpected response, Lilly awarded an additional $12.4 million in funds, primarily to supplement the 2024 awards. The money went to 18 minority serving institutions, two military academies, one community college, 23 faith-affiliated institutions, 24 public institutions, and five multi-institutional projects. 

The “point people” behind these numbers are a mix of faculty, administrators, teaching and learning professionals, and student affairs personnel. Aaron Cobb, who leads the programming the ECI schools participate in, said he is pleased that almost all of the initiatives are “all-campus” efforts. The eagerness of the grantees and prospective partners to understand and execute on the work translates into continuous contact with ECI staff. Since January, Cobb alone has held 159 total coaching/consultation/prospective partnership meetings, averaging about eight sessions a week. The work has proven fruitful for many, as some schools that received a capacity-building grant have returned with proposals for institutional impact grants this year. 

Rothschild said what she finds exciting about the growing learning community is the energy and ideas people new to the conversation are bringing in. “These are not only traditional character people who are reaching back to Aristotle, though of course we have and love those, too,” she said. “What unites these efforts is an understanding that character is a matter of concern for both the individual and the common good.”  

“What unites these efforts is an understanding that character is a matter of concern for both the individual and the common good.”

Cobb agreed, saying, “I’ve learned so much about character from people who may be doing it under a different name and are teaching me more about what it means.”

For faculty members Ted Hadzi-Antich and Arun John at Austin Community College, the prospect of an ECI grant meant pursuing their passion to bring liberal arts-like reflection to the community college experience through revisions to their general education program. 

“For our students, completing general education is likely to be the only opportunity for the kind of interdisciplinary study they get to reflect upon what it means to be a human being and what kind of human being they want to be,” Hadzi-Antich said.

Character education is just as necessary for the community college population, Hadzi-Antich believes, yet much less available. He noted that when he and John turned to existing research to complete their application, they found plenty of references to four-year institutions but nothing about character in community colleges.  

The capacity-building grant they received from the ECI has allowed them to bring faculty together across disciplines to create curriculum to identify, name, and cultivate character for students in all classes, including math and science. While there was some confusion at first about how to do the work, Hadzi-Antich said there were no concerns about it being well-received. 

“In the community college setting, we see character in terms of intellectual virtues like curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility, and there’s nothing controversial about that,” he said. 

Reflection is a big part of the program Austin Community College is running. “We encourage students to take a step back and ask questions like, ‘Why am I doing this? What am I trying to achieve here?’ We can now give these opportunities to community college students, who so deeply deserve it and are very, very open to it,” John said.

Anna Moreland, a humanities professor at Villanova University, had a very different motivation for joining the ECI. Already part of the character community, Villanova, which is an Augustinian Catholic institution, used the grant to form a year-long faculty and staff workshop to understand what was distinctive about educating Augustinian character. The effort was not without its challenges. 

“There were folks on our grant writing team that were worried that the Augustinian values were going to become a subset of the ECI values. And that’s where we had some very serious, very hard-hitting conversations,” Moreland said. 

She said working through this dissonance actually produced the opposite result in the development of five distinctive Augustinian virtues. “This laid the groundwork for the possibility of people at Villanova to contribute in a distinctive way to the educating character conversation, nationally and internationally.” 

The process of discovery may be as inspiring as the outcome. “The effort brought us together in a way that I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced at Villanova,” Moreland said. “It was a really profound experience.”

More about the ECI when our series continues. 

Without a Map

Posted on by Mollie Ames

In high school, guidance rarely reached me. The encouragement was well-meaning but abstract. I was full of potential, but no one translated that into actionable steps. No roadmap was provided.

I would have to chart my own course through systems structured by geography, class, and institutional habit and designed for students born into different expectations.

My journey through higher education followed no predictable path. It began with my basketball coach, who introduced me to St. Joseph’s College in Maine. Several players like me from Charlotte Amalie, US Virgin Islands, had enrolled there before, creating a tenuous bridge I could follow.

Dr. Rhoan Garnett

I arrived on campus filled with idealism, only to discover that my teammates and I comprised virtually the entire Black student population. For the first time, I had a white roommate, and I befriended people for whom I was the first Black person they had ever met. The cultural terrain matched no map I’d been given.

Then came financial reality. Unable to afford my expected family contribution, I stopped out with my transcript frozen due to unpaid balances. This began a fragmented, eight-year journey across multiple institutions. At the University of Southern Maine, I couldn’t qualify for aid without parental support — federal rules at the time required students to be 23. After a personal loan proved unsustainable, I enlisted in the Air Force. When medical issues intervened, I worked, re-enrolled at 23, and kept working until graduation.

What reads on a résumé as a non-linear path was, in truth, a masterclass in adaptation through systems offering little direction and even fewer second chances.

Seeing the System from Both Sides

My understanding transformed when, with my hard-won undergraduate degree in hand, I joined Bowdoin College’s admissions office. My recruitment trips revealed how significantly zip codes determine college access. At Chicago’s Hyde Park Academy, I found talented students with just one overwhelmed counselor for 1,800 predominantly Black students. Miles away at suburban New Trier, seven counselors served fewer students from far wealthier families. My role shifted from promoting Bowdoin to providing basic application instructions that affluent students took for granted.

The contrast was stark: brilliant minds with untapped potential, shaped by schools whose structures, not intellect, had narrowed their imagined futures.

Even as our team diversified Bowdoin’s student body, I recognized that admission alone wasn’t enough. Students who defied odds to enroll found themselves grappling with belonging and cultural translation, the very territories I had navigated years before.

This firsthand understanding later informed my dissertation research on “undermatch,” illuminating how talented students from historically marginalized backgrounds often enroll below their academic potential, not from lack of ability, but from systemic barriers to information, guidance, and belonging.

Not Grit, But Grace

The prevailing narrative celebrates individual grit while ignoring the systems we navigate. What distinguished my journey wasn’t exceptional perseverance but moments of grace when relationships created bridges across institutional gaps.

At Saint Joseph’s College, classroom discussions about poverty were framed through a white lens. As a low-income Black student among peers who shared my economic background but not my racial experience, I carried the invisible labor of translation, navigating coursework while bridging unacknowledged differences.

What made the difference wasn’t superhuman resilience but relational infrastructure. I pieced mine together slowly, while students in programs like Posse arrived already equipped with mentoring, cohort support, and cultural translation, structures mirroring what intergenerational college-goers receive naturally. When someone explained unwritten rules or affirmed the right to belong, seemingly insurmountable barriers became navigable challenges.

This reveals a deeper truth: educational environments often leave students unprepared for meaningful dialogue across difference. We raise students in segregated spaces, then expect authentic engagement without preparation. When institutions create environments where diverse students build networks and process belonging uncertainty together, they transform individual struggles into collective strength, benefiting everyone, regardless of background.

Designing Belonging

After years navigating systems not built for students like me, I began asking: What would higher education look like if belonging were deliberately designed, not left to chance?

Too often, access becomes the endpoint, and success stories become misleading proof that the system works — classic survivorship bias. Real equity requires shifting from celebrating those who overcome broken systems to designing ecosystems that recognize all students’ needs. This means partnerships between colleges, high schools, and communities, ensuring readiness extends beyond academics to navigational knowledge.

Real equity requires shifting from celebrating those who overcome broken systems to designing ecosystems that recognize all students’ needs.

One promising approach scales the relational infrastructure found in effective mentoring programs. My research shows information travels best through trust. Students act on guidance from people who understand their context. Systems embedding personalized support within human connection democratize opportunity.

These solutions aren’t just technical. They’re deeply personal. I’ve lived in systems that confuse potential with preparedness and mistake access for belonging.

As students, especially from low- and middle-income backgrounds, rightly question whether college is worth its rising cost, I offer no simplistic promise of prosperity. The debt crisis is a matter of justice.

Yet even as the system must change, I hold fast to what Baldwin called the “liberation of consciousness”: education that sharpens critical thinking, deepens empathy, and gives us language to name systems as they are and imagine how they could be.

In a world of rising disinformation and artificial shortcuts, real education helps us discern signal from noise — a clarity I once sought amid the quiet pressure to trade opportunity for survival. It is not only a path to making a living but also to making a life. As Mandela reminded us, it remains one of the most powerful tools for changing the world, not just for ourselves, but for each other.

Inside the System I Once Observed

Even in doctoral education, belonging isn’t automatic. My research on underrepresented students navigating mismatched systems became autobiography. Despite strong initial mentorship, structural supports faded. My focus on equity didn’t align with traditional research models, and I often lacked a peer cohort or institutional roadmap. I was simultaneously in the system and not of it.

Even at the highest levels, I drew my own map in the dark. Reimagining belonging must extend to doctoral spaces, where too many still arrive unsupported, underfunded, and alone. This requires not only mentorship and peer networks but institutional recognition of the financial and emotional labor required to navigate systems never designed for us.

For Those Still Searching

My journey has come full circle, from navigating unfamiliar terrain to charting pathways for others. In my work with postsecondary transitions, I see what statistics miss: for every student who makes it through broken systems, countless others with equal potential never find their way. When I listen to students at their own crossroads, I hear familiar echoes: brilliance without direction, presence without recognition.

What ultimately matters isn’t celebrating exceptional navigation of broken systems but transforming those systems themselves. My story isn’t a model — it’s evidence for why we must design education where belonging is a foundation, not an accident, and where no student must draw their own map in the dark.

Dr. Rhoan Garnett’s work bridges the personal and systemic, informed by his journey as a first-generation immigrant student who navigated educational systems without clear guidance. Through his research-practice consultancy WeBe Collab, he leads transformative initiatives, including postsecondary mindset and transition research for the Gates Foundation and AI-enhanced learning systems at College Unbound. His dissertation on undermatch, mismatch, and reverse transfer — recognized with the Gordon C. Lee Award — continues to inform equity-centered approaches to educational design.

Personal Politics

Posted on by Mollie Ames

The two most visible student political groups at the University of Texas at Austin are also the most opposed.

“There’s College Republicans, which is rah-rah Republicans, and there’s College Democrats, which is rah-rah Democrats,” soon-to-be senior Carson Domey said. He gravitated towards neither and wondered how an in-between space could be so hard to come by among more than 40,000 undergraduates.

The 21-year-old eventually arrived at a solution, the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life, a leadership development group that promotes “people instead of partisanship.” The “room for exchange of ideas” drew him in, Domey said, but the difficulty getting there explains his interest in a new insight from the Harvard Youth Poll, a semi-annual, national survey from the Institute of Politics (IOP) at the Harvard Kennedy School. This spring’s poll, released in April, offers a window into youth politics, including that only 34 percent of young people who identify as Independent or unaffiliated report a sense of belonging, compared to 51 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans. 

This latest iteration of the Harvard poll homes in on the impact of mental health in more ways than one. When it comes to today’s youngest — and most anxious and depressed — voters, the intersection of personal wellbeing and political formation is the object of growing concern. 

In 2000, the Harvard Youth Poll emerged after two undergraduates noticed a curious trend among their classmates: They seemed interested in public service but also appeared to prefer community service activities over more traditional political engagement. Was there something different, the students wondered, about their generation’s relationship with politics?  

Was there something different, the students wondered, about their generation’s relationship with politics?  

To find out, they approached John Della Volpe, then-president of an opinion research firm with ties to the IOP, to help design and conduct a survey of their peers’ political attitudes and activities.

Fifty polls later, the project has stayed true to its original mission, although the form changes every time. Della Volpe, now director of polling at the IOP, said the different questions season-to-season reflect “each cohort’s unique views” and how “they’re interested in understanding perspectives of their generation.”

While the poll’s founders delved into trends in political engagement, the students of 2025 probed more personal categories. In addition to views on federal leadership, DEI initiatives, and foreign policy, this spring’s survey inquires about social connections, financial stress, and life goals.

One of the resounding themes this time is, as Carson Domey pointed out, feelings of belonging. Among its major findings, the final report highlights that fewer than half of respondents say they feel a sense of community, and only 17 percent feel “deeply connected” to a community.

From there, the survey correlates sense of belonging and civic engagement. Forty percent of those who report feeling “deeply connected” to a community say they consider themselves politically engaged, compared to 14 percent of those without a strong sense of belonging.

To Domey, the struggle for belonging among young Independents seems to reflect the impact of polarization on Gen Z and the longing for community and the pressure to identify with a party as a result. Party affiliation, from his standpoint, may have as much to do with political theory as want of personal connection. 

Party affiliation may have as much to do with political theory as want of personal connection. 

The Covid-19 pandemic certainly didn’t help these feelings of disconnect. One in five respondents to the Harvard poll indicate they became more socially isolated during the 2020 lockdown, and these people are in turn more likely to be dealing with symptoms of depression now — five years later.

Those at major transition points, either starting high school or college, during the initial quarantine are most likely to report a lasting negative impact on their social lives. They are now 19 and 23 years old, respectively. 

John Della Volpe said he is wary of the over-attribution of certain political trends among Gen Z to their experience during the pandemic. Yet the way that the emergency disrupted their lives is important, and all the more for being just one of many crises they’ve encountered so far.

For Della Volpe, the real eye opening moment on the weight so many young people carry came before the term “Covid-19” existed. He was conducting a focus group, not long after the 2016 mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. that left 49 killed and 53 wounded. 

“The way you think about your taxes or your finances,” one student told him, “that’s the way we think about living and dying every time we walk into a classroom.” 

Within around two years, the same young people read about, or perhaps witnessed, the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. during which a car attack killed one and injured 35 others, including students from the University of Virginia; the mass shooting at a concert in Las Vegas, Nev. that killed 58; and the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla. that killed 17 staff and students.

“This generation’s not monolithic, and everyone’s experience is different,” said Rachel Janfaza, a youth politics expert. “But across the board, it would be hard to say that their politics is not at least somewhat interwoven with the fact that they have grown up amid crisis, and it is taking a toll on their mental health.”

Overfamiliarity with catastrophe does seem to dovetail with another major finding of the Harvard survey: widespread disapproval and distrust in the government. Only 15 percent say they think the country is “heading in the right direction,” and 19 percent say they trust the federal government to do the right thing most or all the time.

This discontent does not discriminate by party. While Donald Trump’s approval rating is about the same (31 percent) as in 2017, approval of Democrats in Congress dropped from 42 to 23 percent.

Janfaza imagines young people have become suspicious that “adults, elected officials pretend to know what they’re doing and have it all figured out.” Following the trials of the Covid-19 pandemic, she said, “the curtain has been peeled back.” 

“What I will definitely say is there is a mass feeling of uncertainty that’s on both sides of the aisle.” Domey said. 

Now that uncertainty seems to be affecting young people’s plans for the future. In what might be the most important finding for generations to come, less than half of the Harvard poll respondents rated having children as “important.”  

This trend may be the result of financial anxiety, with a quarter of respondents saying they are “barely getting by.” But Janfaza mentioned a conglomeration of factors: “Less stigmatization around not wanting to have kids, paired with rising cost of living, and fear about climate change, and just overall gloom and doom.”

Still, if frustrated, Gen Z-ers are not resigned. “They are showing up. They are saying they want to be involved,” Janfaza said. “Their lives are affected by these issues in their communities, and they are speaking up and out about it in a number of ways.”

To Domey, the Harvard poll feels like a call to help students cultivate new sources of much-needed certainty in their lives, whether through community or other senses of purpose.

“Like, how do we care for the whole person in college?” he said.

The Change-Makers

Posted on by Mollie Ames

To Angelina Rojas and her classmates at TechBoston Academy, gun violence isn’t an abstract policy issue. It’s a lived reality. 

Rojas and many other kids at the Dorchester middle and high school have friends and family members who have been injured or killed by guns. Three years ago, a teacher and a student were shot outside the school as they boarded a bus bound for the state basketball game. 

So when Rojas took the stage with seven of her peers last month to offer a solution to the gun violence epidemic, she spoke with passion and a sense of urgency.

“We’ve learned that people are uncomfortable, scared to have this conversation about gun violence,” she told a panel of judges. They would decide whether her group would get to present its solution on a much bigger stage: The Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual gathering of global leaders, funders and entrepreneurs. “It became our job — our job! — to become voices for victims, for survivors. 

“My cousin was shot. He is paralyzed,” Rojas said, her voice rising to a shout. “I’m here because of him!”

The presentation was part of the annual Aspen Challenge, a 10-week long program that invites teams of high schoolers to develop durable solutions to complex societal problems. Started in 2013 in Los Angeles, the challenge has spread to 11 other cities, spending two years in each location. It landed in Boston this year. 

For students like Rojas, the challenge is an opportunity to make concrete change in their own communities. For their schools, it’s a way to cultivate the human skills employers are demanding — skills like communication, collaboration, and problem-solving.

A 2022 evaluation of the program found that participants showed an increase in skills such as collaboration, resilience, leadership efficacy, and social perspective-taking.

The challenge may also be part of the answer to rising rates of disengagement in school, said Rebecca Winthrop, co-author of The Disengaged Teen. By enlisting teens in solving problems that affect them directly, the activity provides both relevance and agency — two key antidotes to disengagement, according to Winthrop.

“A lot of kids don’t see the point of school,” she said. “They don’t see how what they’re doing is connected to the real world.” 

In Boston, the work began in January, when teams from 17 of the city’s high schools gathered to hear local and national leaders present on five issues chosen by the students: affordable housing, community violence, access to green spaces, post-secondary pathways, and the role of social media in glamorizing substance abuse. Among the speakers was Manuel Oliver, whose son Joaquin was killed in a high school shooting in Parkland, Fl. in 2018. 

Oliver, whose organization, Change the Ref, seeks to empower young people to fight for stricter gun control laws, showed students videos and pictures of provocative protests and disturbing ad campaigns that his group has produced to get lawmakers’ attention.

He told the teens about the time he got arrested for scaling a construction crane near the White House to hang a banner about gun violence and urged the students to take risks — within limits.

“I don’t want you to get arrested,” he told them. “I just tell you that sometimes you want the attention, and you use the guerilla style to get it.”

Oliver’s challenge to the students — to produce a media campaign that would raise awareness around the gun violence epidemic and empower youth nationwide to take action in creating safer schools and communities — appealed to students at TechBoston Academy immediately.

“It’s heartbreaking to see article after article about gun violence,” said Brian Hodge, the TechBoston team captain, partway through the kickoff. 

But there were still three more issues to hear about before the group would pick one. 

The event drew representatives from Boston’s school board and district leadership, including assistant superintendent for strategic initiatives Anne Rogers Clark, who said the challenge aligns with the district’s goal of developing future leaders for Boston.

Clark said conversations with decision makers in other cities that have joined the challenge convinced those in Boston that “it changes the orientation of how students view themselves,” helping them “develop a sense of themselves as agents of change in the larger world.”

The district encouraged its high schools to identify “emerging leaders,” for the challenge, rather than established ones like the student body president. They wanted students with potential, students “who haven’t had the opportunity to show what they can do,” Clark said.   

Many of the students who participate in the challenge, in Boston and other cities, come from low-income communities of color that are often overlooked or underestimated by policymakers, said Katie Fitzgerald, director of the Aspen Challenge.

“The biggest untapped resource in our communities is young minds,” she said. “They have the answers. They just need us to get out of their way.”

“The biggest untapped resource in our communities is young minds.”

Studies show that student engagement drops precipitously between elementary and high school. In one recent survey by Winthrop and her colleagues, three quarters of third graders said they loved school, but only a quarter of tenth graders said the same.

While this problem isn’t exactly new, the consequences of disengagement are higher than they once were, according to Winthrop, who is director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. 

“Students can’t just coast along and develop the high-level skills they need to succeed in the workforce,” she said.

Jeri Robinson, the chair of the Boston School Committee, laid some of the blame for disengagement on what she sees as outdated methods of educating children. 

“Our way of doing schooling for the last 100 years has not taken advantage of the things students experience day-to-day,” Robinson said at the kickoff. “Kids are bored with school because we make it boring.”

“Our way of doing schooling for the last 100 years has not taken advantage of the things students experience day-to-day.”

The Aspen Challenge is one of numerous efforts being undertaken by districts, schools, and nonprofits to make learning more relevant and engaging for students. But such work remains at the margins of the education system, Winthrop said.

Following the kickoff, the teams had 10 days to choose an issue to tackle. Then they had to design a solution, develop a work plan, and craft a budget. Each team was given $500 in seed money by the Aspen Challenge, which is funded by the Bezos Family Foundation. 

At TechBoston Academy, students chose to focus on gun violence because they felt that the official response to the shooting at their school had been inadequate. They wanted their district and the city to do more to prevent gun violence and to help students recover from its trauma, according to Bruce Pontbriand, the civics and government teacher who served as the group’s leader. The project’s tentative theme was “broken promises, broken hope,” he said.

“Adults have been promising things and falling flat on those promises,” Pontbriand said. 

Still, the students wanted the documentary that they envisioned to end on a positive note, to uplift the school community and help it heal, he said.

Healing, Pontbriand said, is something that the teachers and staff at BostonTech need as much as the students. He still thinks about the fact that he could have been on the bus that was shot at if he hadn’t had a headache and decided to drive to the game. 

“To help them, we need to get over our own stuff,” he said. 

Halfway through the challenge, in late March, each of the teams received a visit from a member of the Aspen Challenge staff. At TechBoston, Arisaid Gonzalez Porras, operations coordinator, showed up with Japanese cheesecake and enormous blueberry muffins.  

The students, all of whom are 11th graders in Pontbriand’s AP Government class, told Gonzalez Porras how TechBoston has been scarred by the shooting and how it has negatively influenced others’ perceptions of their school.

“It paints us in a bad light,” said Aaron Curry. “I hear people talking about our school, and that’s not us.” 

The students said their documentary would be both educational and transformative. It would teach kids to make better choices, while also instilling hope and a sense of unity.

“We are all going to rise together with this video,” Rojas said. 

Five weeks into the 10-week challenge, the students had already reached out to district leaders, public officials, city councilmembers, and grassroots organizations and conducted several focus groups and one-on-one filmed interviews. 

Gonzalez Porras praised their progress and asked pointed questions about how the students would promote their video and measure its impact. She wanted to know what their call to action would be and encouraged them to consider how they might continue their work after the competition ends. 

“The judges like it when you’re thinking about scaling,” she said. 

Hodge, the team captain, was quick to respond.

“When we win the Aspen Challenge, we plan to use the money to start a nonprofit,” he said. 

Gonzalez Porras indulged his optimism. “When you’re in Aspen, make sure you call out to people in the audience” who might provide funding, she suggested.

Over the next few weeks, the students edited the video for their documentary and got 11 city council members to sign a pledge to provide more support for prevention and healing. 

Finally, in late April, it was time to pitch their solution.

Teams in the Aspen Challenge are evaluated based on a one-page written report, a six-minute on-stage presentation, and an exhibit. The judges want evidence that students worked well together and engaged in meaningful collaboration with members of their communities. They’re looking for big ideas that take a creative approach to a stubborn problem. And they want proof that a team’s solution has made a sustainable impact.

At the end of the day, three teams would be awarded the grand prize: an all-expenses paid trip to the Aspen Ideas Festival. Three others would take home prizes for originality, collaboration, and resiliency, and one would be chosen by their peers for a “People’s Choice” award.

The TechBoston team introduced members, their team name, Team Unity, and an updated, more inspirational, theme: “Keep Hope Alive!” They showed a two-minute snippet of their documentary that included news coverage of the shooting at their school and testimony from team members whose families have been affected by gun violence. They answered questions about the obstacles they’d encountered during their project and the themes that emerged from their focus groups. 

When, at the end of the day, they were bypassed for an award, it came as a big disappointment, Pontbriand said.

“We had to relive a lot of that [trauma] before we got to the solution piece,” he wrote in an e-mail. “After the announcement, the kids were a bit retraumatized.”

In a group interview a couple weeks later, Curry said students were “still working through the emotions” around the loss and “taking a hiatus to focus on school.”

But Team Unity hasn’t given up on its mission to change the way the district and city prevent and respond to gun violence. The students are working with Pontbriand to design a course that will allow them to continue their work next year. Pontbriand said that Snoop Dogg’s son, film producer Cordell Broadas, has offered to help the team finish its documentary and “take it to the next level.” 

The students are also collaborating with three city counselors to create more afterschool activities for high schoolers, after a survey showed that less than half of students at their school feel like they belong. They want their peers to find positive communities, so they don’t wind up in negative ones.

“The Aspen Challenge is over, but the work is not,” Pontbriand said in the interview.

Robinson, the school board chair, hopes that the challenge’s goal of engaging students in real-world problem solving won’t end here, either.

“It can’t be two months and done,” she said at the kickoff. “What will the district and the city learn from this?”

“I’m hoping it will create as much change in our adults as in our kids,” she said. 

Taking It to the States

Posted on by Mollie Ames

For 20 years, the Louisiana Center Addressing Substance Use (LaCASU) had been making strides in its work supporting state colleges and universities struggling with drug and alcohol prevention efforts. By all accounts, LaCASU’s research, training, and data collection made strong contributions to treatment and recovery at Louisiana State University and beyond. But gaining real traction, not to mention funding, required the power and gravitas of merging with an official state government body.

“My emails went over a little bit different coming from a board of regents email address,” Dr. Allison Smith, former associate director at LaCASU, half-joked to a crowd in Baltimore, Md. on April 23. She was participating in a panel discussion at the conference, “Building Resilience and Success: State and System-Level Mental Health Innovations,” hosted by SHEEO (State Higher Education Executive Officers Association) and The Jed Foundation.

In an age when federal funding is uncertain, campus leaders are looking for novel sources of state-based support for student mental health. The conference in Baltimore highlighted a number of ideas, options, and success stories. A new resource guide, “Engaging State Policymakers to Support College Student Mental Health,” presented by the American Council on Education (ACE), offers more to take home. 

“It was sort of like, well, in the current administration, where does it make sense to direct our energy?” said Hollie Chessman, director and principal program officer at ACE. “How do we continue to move the needle on mental health on our nation’s campuses?” The answer, she found, was rooted in pulling the right (state) policy levers.

“In the current administration, where does it make sense to direct our energy? How do we continue to move the needle on mental health on our nation’s campuses?”

While data suggests small improvements trending in some aspects of mental health in college students, anxiety and depression remain rampant. The 2024 Healthy Minds Study reported depression and anxiety symptoms had decreased three and two points, respectively, compared to the previous year. Yet 38 percent of students still reported struggling with depression, and 34 percent with anxiety.

The scale of the issue, which escalated year-over-year from 2007 to 2022, has drawn concern from both sides of the political aisle. Several bills promoting mental health interventions on college campuses, and at all education levels, have received bipartisan support in recent years. In 2022, the aptly titled Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, including initiatives targeting the reduction of gun violence, passed with $1 billion earmarked for school mental health services. In April, the Trump administration canceled this funding. 

Chessman and her colleagues at ACE had been worried about this kind of fallout for student mental health programs. In 2024, they were spearheading a $13.8 billion bill to back research, training, and other services at universities. This year, they refocused their attention on other projects, including a toolkit to illustrate a pragmatic route towards a solution. 

Coalescing with peers provided the path forward. Talks with a mental health coalition of leaders in the field, such as the American Psychological Association, Active Minds, and the Healthy Minds Network, revealed a gap ACE might fill: The experts were anticipating a pivot towards state-level advocacy, but needed direction on how to go about it. “From that conversation,” said Ngan Nguyen, ACE government relations associate, “we started to think about drafting a toolkit.” Nguyen and her co-associate Alexander Cassell became the lead authors.

The final guide features four main parts. First comes an emphasis on data collection to specify campus needs, with links to surveys for assessing mental health and a Return on Investment Calculator for College Mental Health Services and Programs. Then, the toolkit outlines a series of talking points. The first point covers the prevalence of mental health issues and their implications for college attrition and basic needs insecurity. Others home in on the interventions state funding in particular can promote, and the benefits of telehealth. The third and longest section delves into examples of work other institutions have done in partnership with states to advance mental health. The fourth lays out a final host of resources, including other organizations and assessment tools, to further university advocacy efforts. 

One of the main goals, and challenges, of designing the toolkit was ensuring relevance across states and for a range of professionals and institutions, Nguyen said. She thought about whether the strategies would be helpful for campuses in a variety of political climates; for those just launching advocacy efforts and others far along in the process; for university higher-ups, as well as general staff and students. The tools needed to be easy to customize.

 “The toolkit gives folks a really solid foundation, and then [they can do] whatever makes sense for them,” Chessman said. She added that not just the process but the end result might look different depending on the school or the state. “Maybe the climate in their state has the opportunity to ask for money. But it doesn’t have to be for money.”

Gathering data on return on investment for mental health initiatives struck Nguyen as one of the most crucial and broadly relevant recommendations. Tom Harnisch, vice president for government relations at SHEEO, agreed. (Harnisch also serves on the LearningWell editorial board.) “Investments in student mental health are important, but they’re going to be in a competitive environment, with a range of other items, vying for a limited pool of available state funding,” he said. “The focus on return on investment and student success is critical.”

Harnisch also highlighted the toolkit’s section listing examples of successful state mental health policymaking. “Policies to expand access to student mental health services. Growing the pipeline of mental health professionals. Boosting state funding. Addressing basic needs insecurity,” he recounted with enthusiasm. “There are so many ways that states can make a difference.”

Knitting in Class

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Mary Beatty was stressed about the upcoming presidential election. It was fall 2024, and Beatty, then a senior at the University of Richmond, was spending her final year of college classes mindlessly doom scrolling on her laptop. 

Her mom suggested she try knitting. One day, Beatty, a leadership studies major, brought a beginner’s crochet kit to her classes, which ranged from five to 25 people. The repetitive, small movements required to crochet a blue narwhal—an item the kit provided instructions on how to create—forced her off her laptop and drew her into the class. 

 “I’m able to absorb the information better if my hands are doing something tactile,” she said. 

Beatty is among a new crop of students who are turning to an old craft to help them focus and relieve stress. Knitting has emerged in classrooms across the country, at liberal arts colleges and state universities alike. Student knitters and educators tout knitting’s unique ability, backed by research, to reduce stress and enhance focus.

Annabel Xu knits throughout all five of her first-year courses at Harvard Law School and has the wardrobe to show for it. This spring semester, she knit a blue sweater, a purple top, and a pink cardigan, which she made for her mom for her birthday.

During class, Xu will occasionally place her needles and yarn aside to jot down notes on paper or answer a cold call—a term for the fear-inducing Socratic method in which a professor peppers a student with probing questions.  

Xu said she received permission from her professors to knit in their classes after explaining that knitting helps her concentrate. “I’m not slacking off,” she assured them. 

Xu, who learned to knit on YouTube during the coronavirus pandemic, uses the continental stitch, a repetitive, rhythmic movement that she said keeps her hands occupied without requiring much brain power. 

There is a misperception, she said, that students who knit in class are not paying attention.

“People will say things to me like, ‘It’s funny that you were knitting, but then when you got called on, you knew the answer.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, because I was paying attention.’”

“People will say things to me like, ‘It’s funny that you were knitting, but then when you got called on, you knew the answer.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, because I was paying attention.’”

Research supports anecdotal evidence that knitting promotes mindfulness and focus, according to Teresa May-Benson, a life-long knitter and occupational therapist who practices outside of Philadelphia. 

“Sensory and motor activities help regulate the brain,” Benson said. “Doing things with your hands, especially if it is something productive, is very organizing. It is common that students, especially those with ADHD and other attention issues, find it helpful.” 

Not everyone in the classroom benefits from knitting. Harvard Law School student Nikhil Chaudhry said peers knitting in his classes has interfered with his ability to concentrate on the professor.

In one of Chaudhry’s classes, a student knits directly behind him, which he said sends the noise of metal needles clinking into his ears. In another class, a different student knits directly in his line of sight to the professor. 

“Knitting looks so different from everything else that it’s really a visual distraction,” said Chaudhry, who is surprised that professors tolerate students knitting in their classes. 

“It is disrespectful,” he said. “You have an eminent legal scholar, who you’ve paid $80,000 a year to learn from—and you’re knitting.”

A Harvard Law School spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on the school’s policy regarding classroom knitting. 

Harvard Law School Professor Rebecca Tushnet said that while she would allow students to knit in her classes, other professors may find it “off putting,” especially if they expect students to take notes. 

“Anecdotally, students have knitted in classes for a long time. I’ve spoken to a number of lawyers who either did it or remember a classmate who did it,” she wrote in an email. “I would allow a student to knit because I know from personal experience that it can aid focus on the class, as long as the knitting is simple enough.”

Students and teachers have not always supported students knitting in class or engaging in other sensory activities.

Beatty, the University of Richmond student, said her public high school in Connecticut banned all types of fidget instruments, such as friendship bracelets and fidget spinners. 

“There was a belief that you couldn’t get away with that in the real world,” she said. “The mentality was, ‘This would not fly in college.’” 

Samuel Abrams, a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, suggested knitting may be more prevalent at schools that promote a progressive approach to education, compared to schools that “may expect more traditional behavior.” 

“I believe in a progressive education and progressive teaching,” he said. “The result of which is I want to be as accommodating and open to whatever learning styles suit my students in the best possible way.”

Abrams said, in total, he has had more than a dozen students—of different genders—knit in his classes. 

He said he allows students to knit because it is an evidence-based intervention to promote focus that has few drawbacks relative to other accommodations he has granted. Abrams said a student once brought a support animal to class that went loose and caused students to scream. (He declined to name the kind of animal to protect the student’s anonymity.) 

“As with most things, it’s about having the right tone and recognizing that we want to try to maximize everyone’s needs and set the right conditions in our classrooms to make it work for people,” Abrams said.

Knitting may be out of the ordinary and visually conspicuous. But it is far from the only behavior taking place in the classroom that could be viewed as distracting.

Mary Esposito, a junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said she has seen students use their computers during class to play video games, shop for clothes, and even watch porn.

“Students are going to do what they’re going to do,” the business major said. 

Esposito went viral on Instagram for a video following the TikTok trend “there’s always that one kid in class” and depicting her crocheting a pink scarf toward the back of a lecture hall.

The video garnered roughly five million likes and 15,000 comments. Esposito, who said she is diagnosed with autism, uploaded a series of follow-up posts responding to the comments and dispelling beliefs that she knits in class to bring attention to herself or because she is not serious about academics.

“As someone who is on the spectrum, this is really helpful for me to do in class because my hands need to be doing something,” she said. “It’s more of a tool for engagement—not distraction. That was the bigger dialogue that this video started aside from being just a silly, funny trend.”

After posting the video, Esposito said, people came forward telling her they also knit during class. “All the sudden, going viral, it proved there were actually other people like me.” 

Esposito said her grade point average is a testament to knitting’s educational benefits (she has made the dean’s list the last two semesters). She recommended anyone struggling to focus in class travel to their nearest arts and crafts store to purchase needles and yarn.