Category: Flourishing

When Kylie Martin was studying abroad in Gdansk, Poland, she visited the Stutthof concentration camp with classmates. They walked the paths where victims took their last steps, and somberly regarded the piles of shoes. But the quiet detail Martin found most arresting was one that few others even noticed: In the women’s housing, wooden support beams were covered with old graffiti, messages etched in languages she couldn’t read.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Here were these women experiencing genocide first-hand, yet something had moved them to carve messages on the columns. Was it an act of rebellion? A source of motivation to keep going? Or was it just a form of preservation, to nick up a beam with writing that could endure after death?” wrote Martin in the pages of her journal. As an aspiring journalist, she found herself naturally attuned to finding meaning in small details. “To me, that represented something so magnificently human — leaving behind something that’s proof to ourselves and the world, ‘I was here’.” 

When she returned for her senior year at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, she was invited to share her reflections as part of the school’s new Digital Storytelling Program. The program had been launched with a grant from the Coalition for Transformational Education, designed to encourage Dearborn students to craft personal narratives in a multimedia format. It also allocated funds to hire the students to become digital storytelling mentors to other students, in turn teaching them the skills they’d learned. 

Martin’s five-minute digital story included curated images of Stutthof, paired with the audio recording of her script. In its conclusion, she wondered if this was to be her role in the world — amplifying the voices of others unable to share their stories.

Using the storytelling format in an academic setting was new for her. “Digital storytelling was a method of portraying what you’ve learned that’s so much more meaningful than an academic paper. It says something very unique about the person who created it. You’re seeing a whole other side to them that you wouldn’t see if you were just reading a paper,” says Martin, who has since graduated and is working as an intern at the Detroit Free Press. “Storytelling might not come naturally or easily to some students, but it’s a strong way of getting across a message or experience. Creativity can be like a muscle — the more you work at it, the better it gets.”

The University of Michigan-Dearborn is one of a growing number of campuses recognizing the power of storytelling as a life skill worth teaching. This isn’t news for students in the arts, media, or communications, and the ability to build a compelling narrative has obvious applications and benefits across all kinds of industries — sales and marketing, law and politics, conservation and urban planning, and so on. This is what happened. This is what we need to solve. This is why it matters. In recent years, the job title “Chief Storyteller” has infiltrated the org chart in companies like Nike, Microsoft, and IBM, and narrative techniques are becoming more widely applied in STEM fields like engineering and medicine. Storytelling combines the “hard” skills of problem-solving with the “soft” skills of communication and empathy, bridging the personal and the professional. Little surprise then that campus leaders find storytelling a good tool to approach a range of important conversations including equity, career development, wellbeing, and more.

More Than a Single Story

Dr. Domenico Grasso, Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, was first intrigued by how storytelling might influence identity formation in students when he watched, and was deeply moved by, the “The Danger of a Single Story,” the TEDGlobal talk by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie. Adichie recalls arriving on campus in the U.S. and meeting her roommate, who was surprised to learn Nigerian people spoke English and listened to more than tribal music. In her talk, Adichie warns about the risk of widespread cultural misunderstanding that occurs when people make assumptions about a group of people, thinking one version of the way they live represents the narrative of an entire place.  

The message made an impact on Grasso, who saw the beneficial applications for breaking down cultural misperceptions on his suburban Detroit campus. “Storytelling is the act of considering the things we take as a given and articulating them, so that they’re out in the open,” he says. “When we put into words what we assume or presume, we put it on the table to be able to talk about it.”

Dr. Grasso worked with Dr. Maureen Linker, Associate Provost and Professor of Philosophy, to create a digital storytelling project that would solicit, hire, and train students in the art of multimedia technology. After two successful cohorts of the digital storytelling project, he had an idea: What if the skills of storytelling, and the benefits of learned empathy, could be harnessed in the service of more authentic Diversity, Equity And Inclusion (DEI) initiatives? 

Just last month, he revolutionized the school’s DEI process, and re-established it as the Office of Holistic Excellence. An important part of the new office’s outreach takes the form of learning about other people’s perspectives through storytelling, with a model that takes inspiration from NPR’s StoryCorps. 

“The initial concept of DEI was to bring onto campus people with diverse ideas and views and origin stories,” he said. “But in our traditional DEI approach, we never asked people to tell their stories. It was enough that they checked the box, which was African-American or Hispanic or LGBTQ or veteran, and so on. And then that was it. That was where the DEI ended. We have a very diverse and heterogeneous community, but we never asked them to enrich the campus by engaging with their stories.” 

In the initial digital storytelling project, as in as her philosophy classes, Linker worked with the students in the storytelling cohorts—which often began with overcoming their default mode of assuming their lives weren’t “storyworthy.”

“We have students who say, ‘Those aren’t my skills. I can’t do that.’ And we say, ‘Are you human? Then you’re a storyteller.’”

“They could look at philosophical writing from the lived experience of people on the margins, but still say their own life was not particularly interesting. And once they started working on assignments and had to share aspects of their lives, they were fascinating and complex and full of insight,” says Linker. “It has a lot to do with our demographics as a regional campus, a commuter campus. There are so many stories and perceptions of the Detroit metropolitan area. So I used Adichie’s work as a springboard for the digital storytelling project, and I was interested in having the students address and lean into the myths and stereotypes about the area and tell stories from their point of view.”

Storytelling is as old as humanity, traced back to our earliest ancestors’ campfires and cave paintings. Narratives have always been used to pass down knowledge, traditions, and culture; they make sense of the world, foster shared identities, and ensure survival. Evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould calls humans “primates who tell stories.”

And yet we aren’t born with the ability to tell a story; we have to acquire language to communicate, and function in social circles so we have others to communicate with. It’s a basic but critical life skill to live in community with others: persuasive storytelling compels others to partner with you, listen to your vision, and avoid the dangerous path, follow your plan. Storytelling as a genre is a broad umbrella, encompassing the skills of telling a story — the rollout and pacing of critical details, sometimes incorporating humor, culminating in a relatable larger message. But it can also mean knowing how to understand and tell your story, with the self-awareness of the personal narrative.

“We have students who say, ‘Those aren’t my skills. I can’t do that.’ And we say, ‘Are you human? Then you’re a storyteller,’” says Jonathan Adler, a psychology professor at Olin College of Engineering. Adler is also co-founder of The Story Lab at Olin, designing and coaching storytelling experiences grounded in literary practice, the performing arts, and psychological science. Beyond Olin, he also works with doctors in the Health Story Collaborative, a non-profit organization aimed at elevating personal stories in the healthcare ecosystem. 

Medicine, engineering, STEM — they all rely on stories, he stresses, as much as the so-called arts. “The narrative is sort of the default mode of human cognition. Even if you’re going to spend your life writing computer code, you’ve got to be able to explain what you’re doing and why you did it that way and why it matters to the people around you. ‘Well, my goal was X, so then I did Y.’ That’s a story,” he says. “Effective communication depends on narrative fluency. And there is no profession about which you don’t have to communicate the work you’re doing.” 

The narrative ecology we live in starts young. High schoolers need to tell their stories to get into college, and are asked in job interviews, Why do you want to work here? Why are you the best person for the job? Students might have spent their school years crafting persuasive academic essays. But the careers they’re entering require narrative powers of expression to put their goals in context. And sometimes they call for the self-awareness and insight to fit themselves into the story, making the case for their vision, and why they’re the person to make it happen. 

“Storytelling has the potential to do something much deeper and more transformational, which is to help people articulate why they care about the things that they care about, and what they’re trying to do with their lives,” he says. 

For Olin’s Story Lab, one of the key forums for students to perform their narratives is a story slam held during Candidates’ Weekend, when accepted undergraduates visit to decide whether this is the place they want to matriculate. It’s a bold move and an act of faith for the college to display these authentic voices at the same time the college admissions office is spinning its own persuasive narrative. In this context, student storytelling does more than entertain and inform with candor and empathy. It lets the listener in on the secret that it’s okay not to be perfect — to experience academic stress, social anxiety, identity confusion — which might just make Olin the perfect place to feel at home.

Adler recalls one impactful story — “a tell-without-telling story” — in which a student shares an episode of taking care of her little sister. In the course of the narrative, it becomes clear that the experience took place in the context of poverty, darker than expected, and that she was in fact only three years old trying to microwave a hot dog for a baby. 

“Working with students on their stories, we’ve developed a really good attunement for what’s the right amount of vulnerability to share in a story. When it became clear that we were dealing with trauma here, it took us all by surprise, and we decided, ‘Let’s just tell the story of making the hot dog in the microwave,’” recalls Adler. “Then the story can be infused with little moments where you as the listener are like, Oh, there’s more here, it goes a lot deeper, while keeping things on this subtler level in a way that was manageable, and resulted in a really captivating story. And partly what was captivating was that you knew there were layers beneath that you weren’t getting access to.”

In this way, he helps students master this technique of understatement, telling-without-telling, to help them process the story and keep it from becoming too raw. 

“And that’s what makes these experiences brilliant and beautiful. It’s a metaphoric way of thinking that I take for granted, because that’s the way I live in the world, but the students experience it for the first time as a superpower. Once they do that, it’s a skill that’s going to serve them for life, because they’re not going to need you sitting on their shoulder telling them where their metaphorical moments are like epiphanies.”​

Students who gain a well-developed sense of their own story benefit from the combined biological maturity and cognitive perspective to weave together the past, present, and future —and if they’re fortunate, with humor and grace. This is particularly true of young people who dealt with trauma, or shame. The act of processing the experience — and then sharing it and being received with support and understanding — helps them better appreciate variables that were beyond their control. 

“When we share our story with others, it reorganizes our experiences, makes them more categorized, and makes sense of it,” says Laura McKowen, founder of the recovery community The Luckiest Club dedicated to substance-use disorder. McKowen is a fan of storytelling because cognitively linking our life experiences — and seeing others identify with our experience — helps de-fang the otherness and humiliation. “We are meaning-making machines, and what we can’t put into a story and don’t have words for stays disorganized and festering and causes suffering and shame.”

Stories Are Pathways to Wellbeing

Will Schwalbe is a writer whose thoughtful insights into relationships characterized his 2012 memoir, The End of your Life Book Club. Last year he published a second memoir, We Should Not Be Friends, about an unlikely and lifelong relationship between him (gay theater kid) and Maxey (ebullient jock-Navy Seal) forged in a secret society at Yale in the early 1980s. This small society’s members, hand-selected for their vastly different paths in life, share awkward meals twice weekly until a capstone storytelling experience called the “audit.” Each member is given an entire evening to tell their life story — uninterrupted, for hour upon hour. 

“Each drew the group closer. Most of us admitted to suffering from imposter syndrome; there was relief in that admission. Inadequacy loves company,” he wrote. “It wasn’t the stories that bound us; it was the way we framed them for one another and the fact that we shared them in the first place.”

Advocates believe students who are making this cognitive leap in understanding their own stories are far better equipped to be making new connections with others — their peers, their professors, their coaches, their future bosses, and partners. They gain insight into which of their narratives land well — humility versus grandiosity. And they become far better listeners, better able to see the meaning behind the words and stories others share and respond in a way that means more than awkward small talk. The self-aware storyteller understands that the purpose of the story is connection, not painting himself as impressive.

“If you’ve got the floor in front of a group of people and go on about how great you are, or the greatest thing you did, you would really have to find some way to couch that to make it socially acceptable. For most people who have normal situational awareness, it’s going to tamp down the urge for self-aggrandizement or to boast, because it keeps you from connecting and getting anywhere,” says Matthew Dicks, a nine-time winner of The Moth GrandSLAM (the championship round of the country’s premier live storytelling competition) and author of Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling. “The need to show yourself like a perfectly curated story or Instagram post is dishonest, when you’d be better off telling a story that’s funny, with a certain amount of deprecation, or a small disaster that led to moments of realization. Better knowledge of storytelling encourages people not to share their glorified moments, because those aren’t the ones that are going to connect.”

The therapeutic value of storytelling, among emerging adults, remains one of the craft’s most important benefits. The chronic loneliness that exists for young adults today isn’t made any easier by time spent reading their phones instead of reading the room. “Storytelling forces you to make eye contact with another human being. And then they say things that make you remember things from your own life, and connect to that person,” says Dicks. “I think the value in that is enormous for people trapped on their screens all the time. It used to be pretty normal in the world for that to happen, but I think now it actually sort of has to be coached and encouraged.”

This time in late adolescence is when young adults are laying down the first version of what scientists call their narrative identity, Adler says. So for traditionally aged college students, the college experience is happening while they are in the process of laying down the first draft of their story. “And we know that draft is going to stick around and influence their wellbeing over the course of their lives.”

It is 8^th period at the Bronx Latin School and twenty or so sophomores are taking turns attempting to answer some of life’s biggest questions: “What is purpose?” “Is life about me or is it about others?” “Why does it take courage to be yourself?” As hands go up and down across the classroom, some common themes emerge: vulnerability, interconnectedness, and acceptance. There is not a phone in sight. 

These students are taking the QUESTion Class, an evidence-based course offered in public high schools in low-income neighborhoods that gives young people the opportunity for self-reflection and personal development. Now in 10 schools in New York City, the curriculum uses a method whereby a series of questions — categorized by theme and developmentally sequenced — help students explore and form their own identities and strengthen their sense of agency in school and life. With superlative outcomes, both formal and anecdotal, the QUESTion Class may be one answer to how to prepare children to become adults in a complex and challenging world. 

“I think the class allows students to realize they can be resilient and that they have these inner strengths to make it through difficult situations,” said Matthew DeLeo, the students’ teacher at the Bronx Latin School and a trained QUESTion Class instructor. “It helps them realize that they’re stronger and more capable than they might otherwise have thought.”

The class is part of a larger effort known as the QUESTion Project, an initiative of the Open Future Institute, a non-profit founded by Gerard Senehi and his wife Francesca Rusciani. The project is, in many ways, the result of the founders’ personal quest to provide better support for the emotional development of emerging adults, something he says “allows them to understand themselves and what they choose to do rather than simply follow a script.” The class was designed for students with less of life’s advantages but its ability to build character and confidence is widely applicable and, many would say, universally lacking. 

“I know from my own experience, there’s not enough support out there to figure out who you are as a person and how that influences your decisions in life,” said Senehi. 

Senehi is an academic and entrepreneur who, himself, has held a number of identities. An alumnus of Amherst College with a master’s degree in education, Senehi has been a social worker, a teacher, and a successful entertainer doing mystery shows to help off-set his non-profit work. His role as a mentalist has made him appreciate the process of discovery that students experience in taking the QUESTion Class.

“One of the things we learned early on was the importance of making room for the unknown,” he said. “Questions about purpose and identity are really profound and intangible and we need to let students know they don’t need to have an answer but to be true explorers.”

The questions themselves are designed to empower the agency of students by encouraging intrinsic thinking as opposed to skill-building.

The QUESTion Project includes the QUESTion Academy, in which teacher training, professional development, and coaching take place and the QUESTion Leadership Program where students take leadership roles including co-teaching the class. The curriculum took four years to develop and was originally co-created and piloted with college students at the Florida State University and Amherst College, as well as students from public schools in the South Bronx where word spread to other public high schools. All of them are “Title I” schools that receive federal assistance to provide quality education to children from low-income families. A portion of the schools are college prep, where principals often look for tools to support first generation students in their transition to college. 

“What principals tell us is that it helps students with motivation for college but also with the skills needed to stay in college, which is a big issue for public school students,” he said. 

Senehi says the program’s approach – and the questions themselves – are designed to empower the agency of students by encouraging intrinsic thinking as opposed to skill-building. An advocate of learner-centered pedagogy, he differentiates this work from other social and emotional programs that might recommend the right choices, versus connecting them with the agency to understand those choices for themselves. It is a dynamic that can be jarring, but ultimately transformative for students. 

“I remember in my first QUESTion class I was like ‘whoa, why am I speaking more than the teacher?’ ‘Why are other kids telling me how they feel?’” says Alexander, a graduate of the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics, now at SUNY Purchase studying acting. “In American education, we don’t really get to see students as the captains of their learning.” 

The QUESTion Class curriculum is 80 lessons, divided into five core units with different themes, topics and perspectives. They are Choice, Purpose, Fearlessness, Interconnectedness, and A Bigger Picture. In Choice, students might explore aspects of freedom and responsibility, and how the choices they make may affect others. Within the Fearlessness section, students begin to understand their fears within the context of others and explore the role of fearlessness in being true to themselves. Each curricular unit builds upon the others, and by the end of the course, students consider “a bigger picture” with a closing session in which they explore their place in a larger world. 

If there is a foundational pillar, it is purpose, or bringing meaning to your life in a way that is outside yourself, for which there is a well-documented connection to wellbeing. Purpose scholar William Damon, whose team from Stanford did a formal assessment of the program, wrote, “Alumni demonstrated that the QUESTion Class was effective in nurturing their sense of purpose and their feeling of being connected to others through their shared humanity. They learned to see purpose as a driving force now and throughout their lives.” Damon called the students he observed in the Bronx “as insightful, engaged, thoughtful, and articulate as any group of students I have ever seen.” 

The principal of the Bronx Latin school, Annette Fiorentino, said she had been searching for the QUESTion Project long before she knew what it was. Bronx Latin is a public high school in a low-income neighborhood of New York City with a large percentage of college-bound students. 100% of them are students of color, largely Latinx and Black. 

“When we share our opinions, we don’t divide ourselves.”

“Some of our top students, going to top universities, would come back to the Bronx in between terms and just seem so lost,” she said. “Some of them wanted to drop out of school. They weren’t sure who they were. They weren’t sure where they were going or what they wanted to study. I knew I needed a program to better prepare them emotionally for college and a principal friend of mine said, ‘Annette, you need the QUESTion Class.’” 

Fiorentino says the class gives students confidence in who they are and builds a resilience muscle to flex when things get tough. The process helps prepare students for the real world of college, particularly in PWI’s (Predominantly White Institutions) with cultures and norms that are unfamiliar to first generation college students whose families can’t tell them about the sudden discomfort they might experience. 

“I grew up with mostly Black and Brown people,” said Alexander. “The way we speak to each other is very different than the way I do now, now that I am in a PWI. There are certain things I need to be mindful about within this community and certain things I need to advocate for myself about. Taking the QUESTion Class gave me the fearlessness I need to be able to go up to someone who is different from me and be able to have those conversations that may be difficult or uncomfortable.” 

For Fiorentino, what started out as a college transition tool became so much more. She is particularly impressed by the value of the interconnectedness unit which was critical in addressing loneliness during the pandemic and helps students learn to see others through their shared humanity, not through their labels. 

“I think after they go through this program, they really understand that we’re more alike than we are different,” she said. Asked if she was familiar with other types of social and emotional learning programs, she said, “nothing as powerful as this.”

In a review of the program by Stanford’s Center for Adolescence, Senior Researcher Heather Malin wrote, “Students who participate in the QUESTion Class gain confidence in their ability to navigate a path forward through their choices, while becoming more comfortable with an uncertain future. As they engage with their most important questions with peers, their feelings of isolation start to dissipate. They connect with a sense of direction based on their own understanding of the meaning of life and the purpose they hope to fulfill. Most striking to us has been seeing their fears and concerns for the future replaced by a sense of joy, positivity and confidence about the possibilities ahead.”

Among the results of the report’s alumni survey, 89% of respondents said the class provided opportunities to think deeply about the future choices they were making, take responsibility for their choices, or explore the unlimited choices available to them; 78% said the class provided opportunities or greater capacity for being open to or accepting of perspectives of others, recognizing the humanity of others, and seeing connection with others despite our differences; 100% said it helped them improve their autonomy and agency. 

The report cites additional research on the value of purpose education among students, particularly those who’ve grown up in poverty and the added benefit this holds for others and for society. “Society benefits when individuals pursue a life of beyond-the-self purpose. Communities benefit from the prosocial activities of their members, and from being made up of individuals who are living lives of purpose.” 

Matthew DeLeo doesn’t need an assessment report to understand the impact the QUESTion Class has on his students, or on others. He sees it every day during 8^th period when they file in ready to get to work. Sometimes students who aren’t even in the class will ask to sit in. Now in his eighth year of teaching the course, Deleo said the class has been a learning process for him personally. “It was the students’ growth and development – and the way they express what the program has done for them – that has enabled me to learn and grow as their teacher.” 

One afternoon in March, Gerard Senehi visited DeLeo’s class to ask, “What has this class helped you with?” The first indication may have been the level of seriousness the students gave to Senehi’s question. The room was silent. All eyes were on the visitor. Slowly, the hands went up. Some students asked for clarification: “What do you mean by helped me?” Others jumped right in: “It makes you OK with who you are, who you were, and who you want to be.” Another student added, “It opens up more doors to get to know yourself.” 

Asked if the class is a little like therapy, some answered yes, in that it allows them to share thoughts they have inside that they can’t always speak with their families about. Hearing other students share similar thoughts lets them know they are not alone. Other links to mental health and wellbeing include comments such as “there is no judgment here” and “it is a place of comfort.” 

Senehi’s last question moves the conversation from the individual to the collective. “How is it different here than what you see happening in the world outside in terms of polarization?” The answers to this are eerily spot-on and reflect a wisdom beyond their years. “When we share our opinions, we don’t divide ourselves.” “We’re not judging and we’re able to listen.” “In this class, it feels like there is no right or wrong, just people sharing their point of view,” all said with a remarkable lack of self-importance. 

As they burst into the crowded hallway after class, it is impossible not to hope that what they take with them that day will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

The year is (sometime in the future), and a network of global leaders are working together across continents, languages, and disciplines on some of the world’s biggest problems. Be they scientists, artists, industry executives or NGO directors, they are particularly well-equipped with the skills needed to navigate a world with diverse cultures and common threats. Within their toolbox of competencies are empathy, agency, open-mindedness and grit. 

This is not a utopian fantasy, but rather the strategic vision that centers Mike Magee, PhD, and his students at Minerva University, a recently formed, selective institution aimed at developing the global leaders of the future. 

“Our mission is to develop leaders, problem-solvers, and entrepreneurs from every corner of the globe and to weave them together as one community committed to a world that is safe, sustainable and equitable,” said Magee, President of Minerva. 

Accredited in 2021, the university was originally called The Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute, founded by Ben Nelson and operated by the Minerva Institute for Research and Scholarship, where former US Senator and President Emeritus of the New School Bob Kerry served as executive chairman. Based in San Francisco, Minerva utilizes a hybrid platform of online learning and study away to engage high achieving students from around the world in a different kind of education. Within their regular studies, students work on location-based assignments in seven international cities. 

By design, it is the world’s most diverse university: less than 15% of its 600 students are from the US, and many come from low-income communities. Minerva has also been ranked “the world’s most innovative university,” and for good reason. To achieve a goal as ambitious as Magee describes within a system as traditional as higher education, Minerva had to reinvent pretty much everything. With minimal infrastructure, an unusual faculty profile, and a unique pedagogy, Minerva offers a fresh approach to higher education at a time of deep frustration with the status quo. 

College — reimagined 

One of the most obvious differences between Minerva and its elite peers is the environment in which students learn. Large, theater-style lecture halls do not exist. In fact, the school has minimal infrastructure which keeps the tuition about half that of many colleges. Classes of no more than 20 students are live and online and involve pre-class work and full participation. The goal is to create intimate learning environments that are dialogue based where students build relationships with peers and professors, even as they are mostly remote. After spending their first year in San Francisco taking the same general education curriculum, students move in cohorts to an additional 6 cities each semester: Berlin, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Taipei, and London.

“It’s a very special type of person who wants to work here.”

“From the beginning, we decided we were not going to build beautiful campuses. We were going to intentionally teach young people to treat economically and culturally vibrant cities as their campuses – to use their libraries, museums and labs and to immerse themselves in their cultures.”

Another feature that sets Minerva apart is the kind of people it attracts. Michael Horn is a trustee at Minerva and has been involved with the school since the beginning. “I see Minerva as a disruptive entrant into the elite higher education segment,” said Horn, who has authored several books including one with Clayton Christenson, considered the father of disruptive innovation theory. “It puts the learner and their needs first and prepares them for a complex world in a way that’s much more front and center than other higher ed institutions who are often asking themselves ‘Are we a research-first institution? Why do we exist?’ At Minerva, we are very clear. We are a learning institution.” 

A former international relations professor at the University of Southern California, Dollie   Davis taught in one of those large lecture halls and eventually left higher ed feeling unfulfilled. She worked in the non-profit sector until the chance to join Minerva lured her back to teaching. She is now Minerva’s dean of faculty.

“It’s a very special type of person who wants to work here,” she said. “We don’t have a publishing requirement and we don’t have tenure. Without the requirement to publish, we focus primarily on teaching. We care about our specific model of teaching and being engaged with our students.”

Davis says everything about Minerva is intentional which translates into a collective “buy-in” of the unusual culture. 

“The students know they are coming into a challenging university where classes are taught in the active learning style,” she said. “They know that they are going to be called on so as soon as they log on, they’re ready to go. It’s on us, the faculty, to promote a strong sense of community and a safe space in the classroom so they feel comfortable sharing new ideas. That’s a big part of our training.” 

Minerva professors are trained in an active learning pedagogy and the technology that enables it. With students and professors throughout the world, Minerva’s digital platform is critical, and the university is quick to distinguish it from the online accommodations colleges were forced to make due to the pandemic. The platform delivers real-time information to faculty and students during classroom discussion, which allows them to display material for the purpose of informing the conversation. Students and faculty see one another on a digital “stage” and can be moved around the screen. If students have worked together on a pre-class project and need to present, the professor can visually pair them with their material alongside them. Davis believes a digital theater can be more intimate than an actual classroom where it is easier to hide. 

Magee says many schools use online learning simply for knowledge transmission when they can be working the technology around the science of learning. “The technology should enable the pedagogy you choose. What do we want the classroom experience to be like? What type of outcomes are we trying to achieve for students?” In Minerva’s case, it is the evidence that emerging adults retain more knowledge from experiences and dialogue than they do from simply receiving information. 

An important distinction in the curriculum is the relevance of real-world problems which students work on in location-based assignments. Students in Buenos Aires taking Dean Davis’s economics class, for example, will attend a financial museum and discuss the history of the city’s economy and policies with the local experts there. Students who take sustainability courses on topics like energy or water can apply what they learn to projects they will work on in Seoul or Berlin. The variation in these experiences teaches students how different people and systems respond to similar challenges. 

To build their cultural competencies, students learn to master what the school calls “HC’s” – 75 habits and concepts that are basic tools for critical thinking and effective communication that students will use across their lifetime. They are particularly important when working across differences – a foundational principle in global citizen-building. Students are introduced to the HC’s in their first year and are assessed on them throughout their time at Minerva. Davis says the HC’s are continuously “pulled” throughout class and are referenced by hashtags that get students to think instantaneously. 

“When talking about a geopolitical conflict, I might say “hashtag – audience” to remind students of how what they’re saying affects others; or “hashtag – break it down” when we are working on problem-solving,” she said. 

The HC’s include personal characteristics such as purpose and resilience, which are linked to improved mental health and wellbeing, something that is highly valued at a school that asks a lot of its students. “Our curriculum is intentionally designed to build resilience in students and have them grow in those ways,” said Horn. “Resilience is incredibly important to wellbeing because things aren’t always going to be great, and it is how you respond that is important.” 

Magee said the challenges students face in becoming global citizens are not minimal. “I don’t want to give the impression that any of this is easy,” he said. “It’s really hard when you have young people who are by and large between the ages of 17 and 22 and they’re wary of one another and they’re still trying to develop their own sense of how the world works. And there’s a lot they still need to know about history and politics and identity.”

“If anyone wants to ‘do Minerva,’ you should be prepared that it will upend much of what you know about the world,” said Ezza Naveed, a Minerva alumnus of the class of 2021.

Naveed was a highschool student in her native Pakistan when she told her guidance counselor she was not interested in a traditional four-year university. “If it were up to me, I would have traveled the world instead of going to college – I think it would teach me more,” she said. But her mother had other ideas and so her guidance counselor suggested an alternative — Minerva. Naveed was an excellent student, though her grades had slipped that year due to a significant personal loss. She had achieved much in her young life including working on class poverty within her community, which she wrote about in her application. She was overjoyed when she was accepted.

“I think Minerva saw in me someone who, if given this education, was going to run with it and make a difference in people’s lives,” she said.

Naveed now says Minerva was the exciting, soul- searching, transformational experience she had hoped for, building her sense of empathy and understanding of different cultures and helping her discover new parts of herself. 

“The most formative experiences in my life happened in all of these cities around the world, in all these unique cultures where I learned new customs and made best friends for life,” she said. In Seoul, she joined the local debate team at Hanyang University and was amazed that she became a quarter finalist for the Seoul National Debate Tournament. During her trek to Patagonia whilst living in Buenos Aires, and doing solo hikes by herself, she realized something. “I, as a woman, can compete and do anything, anywhere in the world,” she remembers thinking, countering the cultural narrative she grew up with about the inferior capabilities of women. 

“For me, Minerva was about ‘unlearning that,’” she said. 

Naveed wrote her Minerva capstone on gender immobility of Pakistani women. “I was always passionate about this issue, but I wasn’t confident in my ability to bring that forward,” she said. “Minerva gave me that toolbox. I lived in 5 out of the 7 countries where I got to see what ‘normal’ was like for women in different parts of the world.”

When she returned to Pakistan after graduation, she sensed that her peers did not get the same opportunities and had not grown in the same ways, even those she considered “really smart.” She attributes that to a systemic and personal investment gap in their education. “At Minerva, my professors knew me so well, the staff knew me so well. They were so invested in my success, and they really cared for us, my friends cared for me, it was just a deeply caring community. I realized that’s not a universal thing.” Shortly after graduating, she formed a partnership with Codematics, a tech company in Pakistan to teach low-income students, aged 18 to 25, for her project “Young Leaders Program” at Urraan, both hard tech skills like coding but also personal, pragmatic skills like public speaking, how to pitch an idea and networking. She is particularly proud of the outcomes she has seen in her female students.

“I think Minerva saw in me someone who, if given this education, was going to run with it and make a difference in people’s lives.”

Naveed is now a student at Harvard Graduate School of Education where she runs the student organization, Women’s Education Movement which recently hosted a leadership forum for School of Leadership Afghanistan, Afghanistan’s first and only boarding school for girls.  She continues to feel the personal growth that occurred when at Minerva – “My friends and I can literally go anywhere and figure it out” — but she cautions that the school is not for everyone.

When asked about the challenges she encountered, Narveed is candid about the emotional toll it can take on students, particularly those, like her, who had suffered a loss or were emotionally vulnerable.

“The mental, emotional load of it was really tiring,” she said. “We had to uproot and reroute and establish community from scratch in all these places — and then there was the pandemic — it really took a toll on me, mentally, emotionally and physically.” Naveed said students, particularly in the early classes, felt particularly dependent on one another and their professors. “The only sense of stability came from our own friendship and community.”

The school has worked on strengthening its mental health services platform which included coordinating therapy appointments around countries and time zones which Naveed said was a problem early on. Her ability to put these challenges in the context of her overall experience hints at the resilience Minerva believes is a part of global leadership.

“It can be challenging but it is extremely worth it. If I could go back and do it all again, I absolutely would.” 

Expanding the pipeline

If there was one thing Magee would change about Minerva it would be to make it available to more students around the world which reflects a deep personal commitment to and experience with educational equity. An academic for many years, Magee left higher ed to found a network of new, racially integrated public schools in Rhode Island before coming to Minerva. 

“Since I was a child, I’ve been really fascinated by and passionate about the role that schools can play in bringing young people together from lots of different backgrounds and across many lines of difference into community and belonging with each other.”

Magee acknowledges that the rigorous pedagogy and international campus require a certain level of skill and maturity, (as Ezza Narveed points out, it’s not for everyone), but he hopes to open Minerva up to more students for whom the unique method would be beneficial. Last year, the school grew its student body by 20% and plans to do the same in the coming year. With faculty that can be onboarded anywhere in the world and ample real estate available in their host cities, Minerva’s model makes it easy to expand.

“I think it’s fair to say that none of us is satisfied with limiting this to 600 students,” said Michael Horn. 

In regard to being a prototype for change, Magee hopes other institutions will acknowledge the value of low capital costs to solve one of higher education’s biggest barriers, the rising cost of tuition. Magee blames the current unaffordability of higher ed for many Americans, and the resulting decline in public support for it, on a growing trend toward a business model more akin to a luxury brand or a country club membership. “The elite institutions started this trend by intentionally constraining supply, astronomically raising prices, emphasizing their elitism and not thinking about how to create an experience that is more available and less alienating,” he said. Magee believes the strategy pays off for the relatively few institutions whose alumni will enjoy a lifetime of social capital but is a debilitating trend for the rest. 

“It has really broken higher education in America.” 

If Minerva can offer an alternative path, one that can be scaled to reach far more of the future global citizens the world needs, Magee is happy to share it. His focus on growth also reveals a desire to prove something to those who may interpret “innovative” as “experimental.”  

“I think we can do a real service to higher ed by growing to a size where we’re a little less easy to dismiss.”

When Elizabeth Davis became President of Furman University in 2014, she looked to promote what was most distinctive about the small liberal arts school in Greenville, South Carolina. Furman had its share of awards and recognitions but Davis was seeking to capture what her listening tour had convinced her was a very different college experience for students, faculty and staff.  

Engaged, student-centered learning was part of Furman’s culture as far back as the early 1930’s.  Internships and study away had been available since the late 1960’s and undergraduate students had been offered research opportunities for decades. The faculty-as-mentor concept had been embraced at Furman long before it was linked to life-long wellbeing but no one was really talking about it. It occurred to Davis that combining all of these elements provided an advantage waiting to be named at a time when student emotional and behavioral health was becoming a national concern. 

“I had become really interested in the Gallup Purdue work that identified the big six experiences that you need to have in college in order to thrive in life and work and it was clear to me that many of our students were getting all six,” she said.  “We had faculty and staff who were interested in creating that kind of environment for our students and I thought this was really a differentiator.” 

The problem, according to Davis and her team, was bigger than finding the right slogan. In order to make Furman’s engaged learning culture an institutional asset, and a true promise to its students, they needed to increase the percentage of them who were experiencing these high impact practices. That meant informing more students about what was available and reducing the barriers to participation for students who, for whatever reason, were not taking part. 

In October, 2016, Furman launched a new strategic plan called The Furman Advantage (TFA).  Equal parts pedagogy and programming, TFA is a four-year individualized educational experience that progresses developmentally, is guided by specially trained advisors and exposes all students to engaged learning experiences like undergraduate research, study away, and internships. Underpinning all of it is a commitment to reflection — urging students to consider questions such as “What am I good at?” “What do I most care about?” 

The journey begins with Pathways, a two-year, 4 credit class of 15 students, taught by a professor or trained staff member who becomes a student’s pre-major advisor. Its curriculum covers topics like study skills, time management, and academic integrity, while exploring concepts such as belonging, identity, and empathy. Once their major is declared in year two, students spend years three and four on engaged learning experiences, and career and post-graduate exploration and preparation.  

“All of the things that were part of the core from a liberal arts education are in there,” said Beth Pontari, Provost at Furman and one of the lead architects of TFA. “It was just sort of highlighting and amplifying the things we care deeply about and ensuring access for all students by providing a level playing field that is foundational.”

Nothing says “we care about you,” like a personalized, developmentally-appropriate pathway of curricular and co-curricular activities.

The Furman Advantage has its own significant advantage in that it was funded by an extraordinary gift from The Duke Endowment. Now celebrating its 100^th anniversary, the Duke Endowment was established by industrialist James B. Duke to continuously fund, among other pursuits, four schools in North and South Carolina: Duke University, Davidson College, Furman University, and Johnson C. Smith University.  The unusual funding relationship allows the schools to experiment with concepts before they are proven.   

“We work really closely with the leaders of all four institutions to understand what their institutional priorities are and then determine how The Duke Endowment can best support them,”  said Kristi Walters, director of higher education at The Duke Endowment which funded the Furman Advantage in three large grants totaling around $75 million over several years.  “Our hope is that our support leads to high value education across all the schools.” 

At Furman, the Endowment’s backing fueled an institutional transformation that is difficult to achieve in higher education.  While The Furman Advantage is perceived as more of an iteration than a major change, making it the dominant nomenclature at the school took years of hard work that involved perennial challenges like getting faculty buy-in, aligning independent departments around common goals, and hoping the students would respond. 

Building the Advantage

Nothing says “we care about you” like a personalized, developmentally-appropriate pathway of curricular and co-curricular activities curated with the help of an engaged advisor. But the team at Furman does not want TFA to be confused with coddling students. In fact, when Elizabeth Davis was looking at Furman with fresh eyes, a group of administrators, faculty, researchers and practitioners were already participating in a multi-institutional effort to address what they saw as a lack of resilience among students.  

Early strategic discussions involving all Duke Endowment-funded schools concluded that student mental health was among each of their highest concerns. They agreed the best cumulative response was to focus on preventative strategies rather than service delivery only.  Hearing this, the Endowment agreed to fund a $3.4 million, five-year project called The Student Resilience and Well-Being Project with a mission “to better understand the challenges students face in college and to identify individual, interpersonal and institutional factors that promote and detract from student well-being in the face of challenge and stress.”  The aim was not to make things easier for students but to help them cope with the stresses of college and to develop the skills that would help them flourish in school and beyond. 

The project was launched in 2014 and involved nearly 20 faculty and administrators across the institutions focused on tracking the undergraduate class of 2018 through their entire collegiate experience.  It collected data on more than 6,600 variables across 11 waves of data collection from more than 2,000 students.  Some say the study itself did not reach its full potential due to pandemic-related disruptions, but the individual schools have benefited from the findings in a number of ways. 

By all accounts, Furman took the Resiliency Project, and the data it provided, very seriously.  Pontari says while academic rigor is expected at Furman, they were surprised to see that the level of academic stress reported by students, and continuing throughout their four years, was higher at Furman than at the other schools. Advising was another red flag. Furman had faculty advising only and as committed as many were to the practice, quality advising was reported to be inconsistent, leaving outcomes up to what they called “the advising lottery.”  

“When you see the data, you know what you’re dealing with and these were things we were not going to ignore,” said Pontari, who, through The Duke Endowment, hired Gallup to provide a baseline of knowledge about students’ experiences at Furman. For Davis, the Resiliency Project provided more material for the strategic initiative. Not only did the project identify key challenges that would make their way into TFA, it strengthened another one of Furman’s little known and unusual assets – the collaboration between academic and student affairs. In the Resiliency Project, Psychology professors found themselves working alongside mental health practitioners. Student affairs professionals and academic deans got to know and respect one another through years of working groups. 

Throughout the process, Pontari, who at the time was Associate Provost of Engaged Learning, worked hand in hand with Connie Carson, Furman’s Vice President of Student Affairs. Many, including Davis, consider their continued partnership to be one of the most important outcomes of the multi-year research project.

“The two domains of a student’s life – the in-class/out-of-class thing – they can either work well together or they can play against each other.”

“Beth and Connie developed a learning relationship that was so important to what we ended up doing,” she said. “The academic side got to learn what student life brings to the table.  It’s not all fun and games. It’s a real understanding of student development theory.” 

Carson sees the alignment as something that institutions can choose to value.   

“Higher education can be very competitive with lots of curiosity about who gets credit,” she said. “The two domains of a student’s life – the in-class/out-of-class thing – they can either work well together or they can play against each other.  Here, all we cared about was the impact on the student and so we said, ‘let’s make this an asset.’”

That asset is woven throughout The Furman Advantage, starting with Pathways, which involves both student affairs personnel and faculty as student advisors as well as teachers of a specially designed curriculum for first and second year students.  Based on a five year pilot that involved a student control group, Pathways is a best-practice boot camp of sorts where new students get exposed to college life, its stressors and opportunities, and build both academic and emotional skills. Students meet once a week for a 50 minute class led by their Pathways program advisor and a peer mentor who are trained to discuss issues like conflict resolution as easily as they are how to choose a major. Faculty and staff are compensated for their time, either through a stipend or by folding the course into their teaching load.  

 “The Furman Advantage concept was really thinking about – how do we engage in this developmental model and create it in a way where students will understand what they need to be doing and when in order to reach the goal of being prepared for work and life,” said Michelle Horhota, a psychologist and faculty member who is Furman’s first Associate Dean of Mentoring and Advising. “The Pathways program is the glue that holds it all together.”

Results from the Pathways pilot showed a 3% increase in first-year to sophomore retention, an 11% increase in first-year to sophomore retention in students of color; improvements in advising satisfaction among first-year students and increased utilization in services like career development and counseling. Surveys also showed a 9% increase in first-years’ sense of belonging; a 10% increase in feeling that they matter; and a 5% increase in first-years reporting they strongly agree that professors care about them as individuals. 

By design, Pathways exposes students to engaging learning experiences, but Pontari points out that “just because they know about them, doesn’t mean they will participate in them.” She says one of her most important roles at Furman has been to eliminate the barriers to participation, the most common of which are money and time. The school’s summer fellowship program began to include compensation for students who rely on summer income for undergraduate research and internships. It created a flexible study away program and on campus internships for athletes whose schedules did not allow for significant time away. 

Participation in Furman’s big three – study away, internships and undergraduate research — is now at around 95% which comes close to Davis’ original goal, though the cultural change is ongoing.  Not everyone on campus envisioned TFA as clearly as its leaders did and Davis says more work needs to be done to articulate the concept both internally and externally, particularly with faculty, many of whom voted against making Pathways a graduation requirement. 

Tim Fehler has been a history professor at Furman for nearly 30 years.  He said he “backed into” TFA by having been the Director of Undergraduate Research and Internships in the early 2000’s. He talks about his own “conversion” from the inside-the-classroom mindset to an understanding of how the intentionality of TFA might affect student development as well as the integrity of teaching at Furman. 

Fehler had been working with students on summer research projects for years, despite being in the humanities which didn’t naturally lend itself to the practice.   

“Doing research with me or in the chemistry department doesn’t mean you’re going to become a professor, in fact, most of our students will not,” he said. “But what they learn is just as valuable. Working in research helps you understand yourself and your abilities and your approach to problems. And it got me to see that students can do this kind of work and the effect it can have on them.”  

But despite leading these efforts and even joining The Furman Advantage committee, Fehler said even he had to be convinced about some of its components. 

“I understood research but when it came to internship applications, I was kind of like ‘who cares?’ – isn’t this just a job?” 

Fehler says it took reading the student’s reflections on their experiences with internships to understand that they were an opportunity to get students to think about who they are and who they will eventually become, not just another bullet point on a resume.  

Asked about faculty buy-in for TFA and the Pathways program in particular, Fehler said it was mixed with a fair amount of “eye rolling.” He says that while Furman was always a place that put teaching first, many saw Pathways as a separate duty that was placed on them and could distract them from what the university was really going to reward. For younger faculty, getting tenure is still the primary goal.  

“Some faculty still have that kind of expectation that this student-facing component is not quite what I went to graduate school for,” said Fehler.  “However, when faculty can witness the growth potential among students, we see how these activities can improve our work both in the classroom and professionally, plus the mentorship experiences can become deeper and richer.”

As Furman continues on its cultural journey, results from the Gallup study delivered good news. Furman alumni surpassed the national average in Gallup’s “Big Six” college experiences. The survey also found that Furman students are 3.4 times more likely to be engaged at work and 2.9 times more likely to be thriving in wellbeing.

Folks at Furman now call TFA an educational philosophy, as opposed to an initiative. “It’s just the way we do things now,” said Davis. Those in higher education who hope to follow Furman’s example might ask “Would Furman’s success with TFA be possible without its deep history of engaged learning? or the significant financial support of the Duke Endowment?”   

Davis says changing the philosophy around the co-dependence of activities inside and outside of the classroom remains the biggest lift even for a school that was ready for it.  In regards to funding, she acknowledges that it allowed them to accomplish a great deal quickly but encourages other schools to look at what Furman has already paid for. “We spent years having faculty and staff develop Pathways,” she said. “Now it exists.” 

Asked if she thinks The Furman Advantage is an even bigger advantage at a time when the value of higher education is in question, Davis is cautiously optimistic.  

“There is perceived value – rankings and acceptance rates and whatever you see on the web site – and then there is real value,” she said. “We can influence perceived value to some degree, but we really have to keep working on what the real value is – being able to sustain the promises we make to prospective students.”