Category: Teaching & Learning

In his UF Quest course “Soccer Explains the World,” Professor Quinn Hansen brings first-year students through the history of the game, from its origins as a gentlemen’s sport in British public schools to its emergence as a vessel for fervent patriotism to its current status as a multi-billion-dollar business. Hansen says what starts as an engaging exploration of a popular and relatable topic becomes a series of thought-provoking discussions about a host of issues ranging from equity in education and child labor laws to gender politics, nationalism, and what it feels like to be a player bought and sold like a commodity. 

“It’s a bit of a bait-and-switch,” said Hansen, a linguist who also teaches Portuguese. “The topic is what excites the students, and when everybody is excited, great things happen in the classroom.”  

If Hansen’s class feels like a typical small-group elective offered at a liberal arts college, it is meant to. It was designed specifically for UF Quest, part of the general education curriculum at the University of Florida, recrafted over the past several years to create intimate, interactive learning communities within the large land-grant university in Gainesville. The intent behind UF Quest is to provide students, particularly FTICs (first time in college), an opportunity to learn how to learn from faculty who know their names before settling into the more impersonal tracks dictated by their declared major.  These classes typically involve critical thinking and robust debate about some of the world’s biggest problems, a process the web site describes as “engaging students in questions that are difficult to answer but impossible to ignore.” 

“With Quest, students begin a journey to understand what their potential roles are in answering some of these questions, whether it’s obvious to them or not” said Angela Lindner, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Affairs, who has led the development of Quest since her arrival at UF in 2015.  She is the first to admit it has been a hard-won endeavor.  At “Quest Day” in November, which commemorated the program’s 5-year anniversary, Lindner told an enthusiastic crowd, “My colleagues throughout the country repeatedly say to me ‘how in the world did you pull this off?’” 

Getting to Quest

Lindner is an engineer by training with a PhD from the University of Michigan and fond memories of her liberal arts undergraduate experience, which included strong relationships with her professors.  She was drawn to the school because of its student-centered culture and its early adherence to a core shared curriculum. In scouring historic catalogues (the university graduated its first class in 1857), she took as inspiration an adage that aligned with her philosophy on the developing student. “The choice of professional work is postponed until the student knows better his capacity and disposition to undertake work that will be profitable to himself and society…avoiding the handicap of narrow specialization,” it read.  

Lindner’s own adage was to “leave them alone” in their first two years as they transition from the black-and-white of high school to the gray abstract of the university.  This, and the belief that liberal arts-like experiences can happen anywhere, drove her to create the vision for what would eventually become UF Quest. 

But general education reform is not easy anywhere, and certainly not in public universities in Florida where the legislature weighs in on curriculum. The trend toward vocationalism in education and away from the humanities as the foundation for learning has been hurtling along for the past decade, accelerated by the great recession of 2008 and 9. Predictable barriers such as faculty push-back, turf wars, and the pace of committee decision-making, all made the eventual release of UF Quest in 2018 seem miraculous. Lindner says they had to redesign the UF Quest logo three times.  

Fortunately, long before Lindner’s arrival, the UF Task Force on Undergraduate Education of 2010 paved the way for Quest in calling for the creation of signature experiences for first-time in college students that are themed: an increase in academic experiential learning, service learning, and civic engagement opportunities. Its most notable change was the addition of the required course “The Good Life,” which gave FTIC’s exposure to great book philosophers and the Socratic method.  While the course itself is largely considered disappointing, the breakthrough of establishing a shared, core curricula for 6,500 incoming students provided a platform that could be revised. 

After countless hours of expansive consensus-building on campus, and the solid but intentionally understated support of then President Kent Fuchs, Lindner and a multi-disciplinary team of faculty, staff and academic administrators unveiled the first version of UF Quest in 2017, centered on “the exploration of grand challenges” (hence the name) in the Humanities, Natural and Social Sciences. The content of UF Quest 1 courses reflect one of five themes representing grand challenges in the Humanities – the Examined Life, Identities, Justice and Power, Nature and Culture, War and Peace.  

Quest 2 courses, also required, focus on what Lindner calls the “wicked questions” of the natural or social sciences. Quest 3 and 4, which are currently electives, rely more heavily on experiential learning components to send students into the world to try on for size what they have learned in the classroom. Quest 4 is a discipline rooted faculty-driven capstone course that allows them to synthesize their learning and hear from voices outside of higher education.  

Unlike other courses in the general education curriculum, UF Quest has a number of “non-negotiables” reflecting its mission. Every Quest course has to have small classes, faculty have to engage closely with students – they are expected to know every student’s name; they have to include reflection assignments and some element of experiential learning. In addition, every course has to pose an essential question. For example, in the anthropology course “Indigenous Values,” the instructor asks, “How can indigenous values about the relationship between nature and culture help us address the challenge of climate change, food insecurity, and public health?”

Faculty Expertise, Student Choice

It is clear that the role of the faculty in the development and execution of UF Quest cannot be overstated, both in terms of their buy-in and ownership of the program and in the way it has allowed them to teach.  UF Quest’s excerpt is “Faculty Expertise, Student Choice” which speaks volumes about the essential elements of the program.  “The only way this was going to work was to have faculty backing it,” said Quinn Hansen, who was introduced to UF Quest by a faculty colleague who thought he would be a good fit. “And the best way to get faculty bought in is to say to them ‘talk about what you like and what you’re passionate about.’  It’s all about proposing your own adventure.” 

Lindner believes Quest has influenced teaching generally at UF with professors reporting they now teach their other courses as they do their Quest courses – with a much stronger connection to their students. “I can’t tell you how many times I hear the word ‘love,’ from faculty,” she said. “They love their students, they are excited to get back to their ‘first love’ – teaching.” 

So how does all this feel for the students themselves, nearly all of whom are unaware of the general-ed revisions that were made on their behalf?  

Claire is a senior on full scholarship at UF. She is double majoring in biology and Japanese and is on her way to veterinarian school. Her UF Quest journey was not so much about discovering what she wanted to major in as it was about experiencing a different side to what she had already chosen to pursue. For her Quest course, Claire chose “The Anatomy of a Story,” mostly, she said, because it had anatomy in the name. The instructor used several media sources – books like When Breath Becomes Air and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as well as documentaries, poetry, and artwork – to convey the experience of either the patient or the practitioner. With humanities-related topics weaved throughout, the class was largely discussion-based, and students submitted a final essay interpreting one of the media sources they chose. 

“I can’t tell you how many times I hear the word ‘love,’ from faculty. They love their students, they are excited to get back to their ‘first love’ – teaching.”

“Being a biology major, a lot of what I do is listen to lectures and regurgitate information so having a discussion-based class where you hear other people’s opinions, that’s what I found most valuable about Quest,” she said. Claire’s experience included forging a close relationship with her professor. “She made a big impact on me because of how passionate she was about the material,” Claire said. “She has been a phenomenal mentor to me.”

Andrew, a third-year engineering major at UF, was also impressed with the energy and commitment faculty put into their Quest courses.  He took the “Good Life” in Quest 1 and while he was “meh” about the course, he said the instructor impressed him. “The professor made it way more than just about the material itself,” he said.  “He was a passionate musician, and he brought his music into different points of the course and gave us his own personal view.  He was also very interested in what we had to say.”  

Like Claire, Andrew viewed his Quest requirement as a respite from the load he was taking in engineering where he is studying digital arts and sciences. “As a student in a Quest course, you’re embracing a very different way of thinking than your major probably tracks you into,” he said. For Quest 2, Andrew chose “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” which he described as exploring what love, sex and romance actually mean.  “Each week we did readings that we would discuss, and we talked about how they made us feel, how this pertained to our own lives, and I think we all grew as people as a result,” he said.

In discussing the level of faculty engagement within his Quest courses, Andrew offered an astute observation even Lindner may not have anticipated. “The Quest instructors have more freedom and can arrange the curriculum with more fluidity in a way that’s productive and engaging and that tends to produce a higher quality of instruction.”

The Quest Forward

17,849 students have now successfully completed their Quest 1 requirement and 8,800 students have completed Quest 2 courses. Over 200 faculty from 69 units have developed and offered UF Quest courses and the qualitative and quantitative data have been positive. But UF Quest still faces a number of internal and external challenges that will determine just how much a change agent it proves to be for the university. 

Marketing the program wasn’t included in “getting it over the finish line” and there is a long way to go before students move from checking the box on their required Quest courses to promoting them as transformative experiences on TikTok. A related problem is getting traction on Quest 3 and 4. As important as it would seem to bring students through the full Quest trajectory, it is a tougher lift for third- and fourth-year students who are fully ensconced in their majors. In many ways, the challenge in implementing Quest’s later stages bumps up against the problem the program was created to address: students are worried they won’t have the time or the credit latitude for courses outside of their area of study. As excited as Andrew was to have participated in UF Quest, he was unsure if he would pursue Quest 2 and 3 when asked about it.  “As an engineering major, I have a lot of other big stones to step on.” 

Perhaps Quest’s biggest challenge is the chilling effect reported on college campuses in states, like Florida, with active legislation that restricts content of courses, combined with the increasing drumbeats calling for a return to prescribed classical education in core curriculum (both at odds with Quest’s excerpt of “Faculty Expertise and Student Choice” to encourage freedom of exploration, discovery, and meaning-making). Today, despite its tangible, transformative successes, this uncertainty leads to the question of whether Quest will be allowed to reach its full potential now that it has indeed hit its stride.  

Angela Lindner has recently retired from her position as Associate Provost, something she said she planned in anticipation of a research-based sabbatical that will lead to a teaching position in the engineering department. As proud as she is of the signature work she led with UF Quest, she said her greatest satisfaction came when people, particularly faculty, started calling it their own. 

When Hannah Herrera entered college, she thought she wanted to be an athletic trainer and physical therapist. In high school she’d been on the cross-country, track, and dance teams, and had a strong inclination towards helping student athletes.

At Tulane University, she took a class in life design principles, and gained some insights into her own motivations and goals. The first was that she didn’t love science classes. The second was that she wasn’t actually passionate about working with athletes, per se—she just really wanted to help young people. A third and pivotal bit of self-awareness was a greater appreciation of herself as a first-generation college student, and how it shaped her ambitions.

“There’s a strong sense of imposter syndrome among first-generation students, and a need to do well and make money so we can pay our families back. And that’s completely valid. But after taking these life design courses, I came to feel that I didn’t have to make the salary of someone in medicine to make a difference,” she said.

Hannah graduated last year and is now working as a wellness support coordinator in Residential Life. Her tentative plan is to get a master’s degree in a wellness field. “I can work with students who were like me four years ago, and if I can help a couple of students realize their dreams, I feel like that’s very much worth it. But I don’t have to decide. I just have to be headed in a direction that feels right.”

The life design classes were offerings in Tulane’s Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking. The center was founded in 2014, and in the years since, has evolved to include an intentional approach to career and life planning. Around the same time, on the other side of the country, Stanford University’s Bill Burnett was expanding the Life Design Lab he’d co-founded. The book he wrote applying the principles and class exercises to the general public would shoot those concepts into the motivational stratosphere. Designing Your Life became a #1 New York Times bestseller, shaping the public dialogue on building a career and life that is meaningful and productive. But it would also boomerang the conversation back to higher education, where Burnett and his team would have to manage a floodgate of inquiries from educators interested in bringing the work to their campuses.

At its core, life design is about curiosity, a desire to see what might be possible rather than coasting on autopilot to the next expected thing. At a time when the public dialogue (and every cash-strapped family) is asking about the value of a degree, schools applying design thinking to career development are providing students with a new way of thinking about not just their careers, but themselves.

Stanford’s Life Design Studio—and thanks to COVID, the Virtual Life Design Studio—has brought hundreds of schools like Tulane into the conversation. From Bowdoin to Berkeley, Northeastern to Northwestern, Harvard to Harvey Mudd—and across Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia—faculty and administrators in the workshops learn to guide students through envisioning many directions their lives might take based on their interests, aptitudes, and values. And because of this, increasing numbers of students are learning that their options are both more mappable and limitless than they’d ever imagined.

“After I took that class, I was able to identify the things that really mattered to me, the things I wanted from my career,” Hannah said. “It opened my mind to the possibilities that are out there by allowing yourself to try things out and see what sticks.”

For all its impact, Stanford’s Life Design Lab doesn’t have its own building, and isn’t a department students can major in. It’s a modest teaching lab that consists of four full-time staff lecturers tucked within the mechanical engineering department, simply because that’s where Burnett already taught product design. Classes are available to students whether they dream of being doctors, dancers, or data crunchers. The Lab team wants them to approach their goals by thinking like a designer, by which they mean, creating a methodology for creative problem-solving. It involves reframing challenges to generate out-of-the-box solutions, prototyping new ideas, and testing these prototypes with real users to create successful products. It’s called design thinking because you are actually designing your options the way you would a house, or a suite of software.

“After I took that class, I was able to identify the things that really mattered to me, the things I wanted from my career,” Hannah said. “It opened my mind to the possibilities that are out there by allowing yourself to try things out and see what sticks.”

Conceptually, Designing Your Life applies the process to adults in a range of life stages—early, mid, late career, or retirement (the “encore”)—and offers approaches to the various ways people get stuck. First, the individual needs to define what problem it is they’re actually solving—is it income, experience, time, connections, geography?—and take stock of the obstacles. The methodology is both mental, and visual; a new way of seeing things is called a successful reframing. And much of the language is tangible and evocative. People might be facing obstacles that are unfightable, which are “gravity problems” (essentially unchangeable), or merely “anchor problems” (you’re held back, but not by the immutable laws of physics). The process involves getting rid of dysfunctional beliefs to generate fresh ideas, then using the better ones to build experiments, or prototypes.

For students, prototyping might include trying out internships. Some tools take the form of exercises. Writing in a Good Time Journal involves listing your activities over the course of several weeks, and keeping track of which ones you find most engaging—quite literally, catching yourself in the act of having a good time. Mind Mapping uses a free association of words building outward from a core idea, making secondary connections quickly to bypass your inner censor. (For example, your censor might rule out “music” on the Mind Map, because you’d been told that karaoke performance wasn’t your finest hour.)

Tools can also be marching orders, activities to increase your knowledge base and test your hunches. An assignment to, say, simply go talk to people who do what you’re curious about doing.

“You wouldn’t think that would be life-changing. But for many people, it actually is. Because once you’re in conversations with people about things you’re curious about, then opportunities start to happen. Doors open,” said Kathy Davies, the managing director and studio lead for Stanford’s Life Design Lab. “But it’s no small step for a lot of people. Just getting in the practice of talking to people, especially post-Covid, frankly, can be hard to do.”

This way of thinking and the habits formed to solve problems have lasting effects for students stressed about their place in the workforce after graduation.

“What we hear from students over and over is:  ‘This is a place I get to have conversations that I don’t have anywhere else.’ And, ‘This gave me the tools to figure things out,’” said Davies. “When we’re looking at efficacy, we have data that show it reduces career anxiety, increases career agency, and increases people’s ability to be creative and diverge in their thinking before they convert.”

Big Thinking on the Ground  

Bowling Green State University (BGSU) has one of most extensive interpretations of Stanford’s life design programs in the country, applying the principles from the admissions process all the way through alumni relations. Life Design at BGSU began as a small pilot program in 2019. In 2020, 60 faculty and staff members from different departments participated in Bill Burnett’s three-day training, a collaborative examination of the key aspects of life design and how to apply them to shape student experience. Thanks to a $13.5 million alumni gift, the Geoffrey H. Radbill Center for College and Life Design, (along with the Michael and Sara Kuhlin Hub for Career Design and Connections) was built to be a comprehensive dual-focused program addressing students’ journeys through the school, and then their career visions.

Adrienne Ausdenmoore, executive director of the Radbill Center, had already been engrossed in life design concepts when she attended Stanford’s first studio workshop for educators in 2017. Bowling Green’s President Rodney Rogers had been in the process of creating a strategic plan to redefine student success when he picked up Designing Your Life on a trip and was so motivated by the concepts and curriculum that he asked Burnett’s team to lead a workshop on campus.

“The team at Stanford has built a really incredible global learning community that’s valuable from a professional development standpoint, as well as a global movement perspective,” said Ausdenmoore. “There are hundreds of schools that have participated in the workshops. Some come away and end up offering it in the form of one small workshop, and then you have universities doing it on a very large scale. We’re definitely one of those.”

“Students are trained to just ‘get through this,’ and they’ll come out with something at the other end. They’ve just been in linear thinking for so long, seeing their life as a progression of climbing the ladder.”

What does this look like for students experiencing the existential angst of what to do with their lives?  In the Radbill Center, there are collaborative workspaces strategically built around the perimeter, primarily used for one-on-one sessions with their assigned coaches. Most first-year students begin their initial semester at Bowling Green with a life design seminar that meets for an hour a week.  By the time they are seniors, they will have incorporated life design programming into their academic experience as well as career readiness needs.

Bowling Green also offers a life design track dedicated to addressing the unique needs of student athletes, in partnership with the athletic department. The goal, says Bryan Mestre, assistant director for student-athlete development, is to introduce them to design thinking skills to navigate challenges and discover solutions while partnering them with career mentors to explore career possibilities in addition to, or beyond, their sports. Thinking about their wellbeing is an added dimension. 

“The Life Design program empowers student athletes to champion their mental health, transforming challenges into opportunities through empathy, innovation, and resilience,” said Mestre, who co-teaches the class with a Life Design coach. One of his exercises walks student athletes through designing a “dashboard” to consider different dimensions of their lives—Academics, Career, Purpose, Well-Being, and Connections—and gauge how well-balanced they are.

Like Bowling Green, Tulane also has life design classes for freshmen, and for student athletes. Because of the city’s devastating legacy of Hurricane Katrina, Tulane has a strong focus on service and equity. It’s no accident that the life design program is anchored in the Phyllis M. Taylor Center, founded in 2014 to help students identify their path in making change. Tulane further extends its focus on equity by offering a life design course to its Bridge Program, geared toward students who benefit from added academic supports.

“Our unique lens is to help students hone in on a social or environmental challenge that they care about, and then use that as a portal to understand the ecosystem of people that are working to address that challenge,” said Dr. Julia Lang, the associate director of Career Education and Life Design, and the first staff member at the Taylor Center. “New Orleans is such a hotbed for so many of the social and environmental challenges that we see in the world, and it’s also a hotbed of innovation. Phyllis Taylor’s vision was to create a one-stop-shop kind of hub for students interested in changemaking while learning about design thinking, with the tools and methodologies that could help them be creative problem solvers.”

Recent graduate Zach Rubin is one example of Tulane’s integration of innovation and changemaking. When he arrived at Tulane, he knew he wanted to study business, and assumed he’d go into finance, maybe work in an investment bank. Once he delved into really exploring his interests and aptitudes, he zeroed in on architecture and urban planning, and wrote his honors thesis on sustainable design. He won Tulane’s change-maker Catalyst Award and Spark Innovation Award, which he used to travel to Singapore and continue his honors research.  He just graduated and is working in venture capital at the intersection of real estate development and community enrichment.

“I’m a very community-oriented person, so I’m looking to create change on issues that require a lot of deep domain expertise and knowledge,” he said. “So, I’m doing the hard work upfront, and [I’ll] pivot down the road to what I eventually want it to become.”

The applications of life design are as individual as the schools that conceive of them, and Stanford’s website has a page of clickable school logos to learn about the directions different institutions have taken. At Johns Hopkins, some faculty members set out to use design thinking to reframe the traditional annual performance review process with an annual self-review. Smith College created Designing Your Life for Women. Trinity College wanted to create a solution to a particular retention challenge: high achieving students who were not deeply engaged and disposed to thinking about transferring to other colleges. At Northwestern, the career center for the Kellogg School of Management decided to roll out a series of life design workshops for its alumni. And in remote western Australia, Curtin University applied a grant it received to focus on the region’s rural women by creating a life design program geared toward their economic empowerment and career sustainability. The options are as unlimited as a mind map.

Whatever the application, Life Design fills a self-examination gap for college students often constrained by externally imposed “tracks.” 

“We’re always considering the questions, ‘What do I want to do with the rest of my life?’ And ‘How do I get there?’ None of my friends from home, from high school, are doing something like this,” said Madeline Loiacono, a senior in the Nursing program at Bowling Green. “None of them have the same directionality and the same drive that life design has given me. I think when you give vocabulary to such a profound problem-solving process, and you give vocabulary to the growth mindset, and you really pick apart the way you think, it provides a new direction for what it means to think about your career.”

Dr. Lang finds it “mind-blowing” that students can spend a decade in school and thousands of dollars in tuition, but never be given the help to develop a thoughtful plan.

“Students are trained to just ‘get through this,’ and they’ll come out with something at the other end. They’ve just been in linear thinking for so long, seeing their life as a progression of climbing the ladder,” she said. “But if you don’t choose where and why you’re climbing, then all of a sudden you’re 40 and you go to open up this treasure that’s supposed to be hanging up at the top in front of you, and you realize there’s nothing actually there.

In 2005, Georgetown professor Joan Riley was walking across campus when she had an epiphany that would change the way she thought about teaching.  Riley has just been to an evening meeting of the “Friends” group—an intradepartmental team of administrators, students, and faculty members who were working together on harm reduction strategies to combat student alcohol misuse.  The silo-crossing activity was unusual for higher ed and got Riley thinking from a different perspective.

“I remember stopping in the middle of campus and asking myself, ‘What can I, as a professor, do to help address this problem?” The next day, she told the undergraduate students in her Health Promotion and Disease Prevention course to throw away their syllabi. For the rest of the semester, they studied the effects of alcohol throughout one’s lifetime, from the metabolic breakdown of alcohol, to familial alcohol patterns, to binge drinking, all in a way that engaged students both academically and personally.

“When you bring topics like these into the academic setting and use evidence to describe them, students listen in a way they don’t with other interventions,” said Riley.  “I started asking, ‘Why aren’t we talking about these subjects inside the classroom?’”

Riley’s seemingly simple question would lead to a precedent-setting initiative in curriculum infusion called the Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning. Launched in 2005, out of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), the Engelhard Project engages faculty in making connections between students’ academic studies and their broader life experiences, especially in the areas of well-being, flourishing, and mental health. You don’t have to be in health studies or psychology to teach an “Engelhard course,” as it is not so much about the topic as it is about the technique of combining learning with personal growth. While this approach is often touted, it is reluctantly applied in higher education, even at schools like Georgetown that seek to teach to the whole person.

“The tradition of academe, especially in highly competitive settings, was the radical mind-body split,” said Randy Bass, who led the creation of Engelhard as executive director of CNDLS and now oversees an education innovation unit at the school. “Classrooms were places for your head and the rest of the campus was the place for your body and soul.”

Building the Bridge

For Georgetown, the Engelhard Project’s effort to fuse these personal dimensions has been a steady progression, starting shortly after Riley’s course shake-up, and continuing to this day with the full weight of the president’s office behind it.  Georgetown President John J. DeGioia sees the project as the embodiment of the Jesuit school’s mission and is quick to thank the other woman who made it possible. Sally Engelhard Pingree funded CNDLS’ first proposal to infuse wellbeing into the classroom through Bringing Theory to Practice (BT2P), a fund she launched with Don Harward, who was, at the time, president of Bates College. Motivated by the personal experiences of Pingree’s daughter when she was a student at Bates, BT2P seeded campuses with the support to craft programs that focus on the intersection of student well-being, engaged learning, and civic engagement.

At an early BT2P conference, Riley met a faculty colleague in the Department of Philosophy named Alisa Carse and learned that she, too, was doing similar integration. Together with a student and the head of the counseling center, the Georgetown team began to explore how to make curriculum infusion its own program.  Under the leadership of Professor Randy Bass and Todd Olson, who was then vice president of Student Affairs, and others, Georgetown sought and received two rounds of multi-year funding to establish the framework, staff, and criteria for the new inter-disciplinary program. They named the program the Engelhard Faculty Fellows, with a nod to the professors who were recruited to mold the classes to their own design and comfort level. In 2010, they received an endowment gift from Pingree for what is now called The Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning.

“The tradition of academe, especially in highly competitive settings, was the radical mind-body split. Classrooms were places for your head and the rest of the campus was the place for your body and soul.”

“I wanted students to be healthier and supported and Georgetown was a perfect fit as a campus already dedicated to looking at the whole person,” said Pingree. “I feel very lucky to be included and able to interact with faculty and staff doing this work in the Engelhard community of practice and to witness the positive impacts on faculty and the Georgetown community.”

“Georgetown leaned into something that was deeply connected to their mission and then went about engaging faculty in ways that honored their time and seeded ownership,” said Ashley Finley, who was a national evaluator for BT2P and is now vice president for research and senior advisor to the president for the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).  In addition to the “faculty first” mentality, Finley said the intra-departmental nature of the work, led by an advisory committee of faculty, staff, and administrators, created a unique and powerful learning community.  

What began as five original classes has grown to over 500 courses in a wide variety of disciplines, with a combined student enrollment of 25,000 and the involvement of over 150 faculty members. Joselyn Lewis was a graduate associate at Georgetown when Engelhard first launched and she now leads the project as part of her education development work for faculty and graduate students at CNDLS.

Lewis is responsible for a large portion of faculty coming into the program and is adept at identifying the “sweet spot” that might get them engaged in designing or redesigning their course to integrate an element of student wellbeing.  Part of the recruitment involves reassuring faculty members who worry they will cross a boundary by bringing personal issues into the classroom or will “screw up” the unfamiliar approach.  Lewis addresses this by offering a robust orientation session and continued support along the way.  Monthly meetings and social gatherings for all Engelhard participants, past and present, are another level of security and offer friendships with colleagues one might not otherwise get to know. 

Part of reducing the barrier to entry is the program’s intentionally simple criteria. Faculty are asked to choose a wellbeing topic that connects to the course they teach. For one course meeting, they bring in a partner from a student-facing service area. This can be a clinician from Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), an expert in healthy eating, a Title IX coordinator, a DEI officer, even a financial aid advisor.  They then ask students to do a reflective writing piece about the experience.  

What does this look like for students? Lewis said most are unaware that they are in an Engelhard course as the wellbeing topics are so well integrated into the subject matter. They may study mental health within Foundations of Biology; examine sexual assault as part of Introduction to Ethics; or discuss anxiety in The Physics of Climate Change. The difference, whether they know it or not, is that the courses are designed to make connections that build relationships with their professors and with each other. 

Lewis said while the student affairs professionals appreciate the effectiveness of sharing important information inside the classroom, the program’s effects on teaching and learning at Georgetown have been profound. She said some faculty choose to do just the basics which allows students to make a connection between the content they are learning and their own wellbeing. Others do “All Engelhard, all the time,” embracing a full pedagogical shift that welcomes students’ interior lives into the learning process.

“I have faculty say to me ‘Engelhard gives me permission to teach the way I’ve always wanted to,” said Lewis. “I just didn’t know that it would be valued.’”

Just Breathe

Jennifer Woolard was one of the first faculty members to teach an Engelhard course at Georgetown and continues to do so today. As a psychology professor, she was eager to find a way to humanize mental health topics and found that forging a partnership with a professional from CAPS was a powerful statement that said, “Mental health is part of life.”  She begins every class with a breathing exercise as a way to ground students and ask that they pause and be present. For high achieving “perfectionists” like many of those who attend Georgetown, taking a moment like this can mean a lot.

“For me, Engelhard is about modeling,” said Woolard. “Taking the time out of class to discuss these issues, to invite colleagues from other departments in to join me, says to my students that I care about their wellbeing.”  Woolard said that the student reflections confirm this. One student reported, “I felt cared for—like the professor was genuinely interested in our wellbeing rather than us just churning out good grades.”

“I think the most powerful thing about being an Engelhard faculty member is that it allows you to communicate to your students that you care about them as people,” said Bass.

“I have faculty say to me, ‘Engelhard gives me permission to teach the way I’ve always wanted to,’” said Lewis.  “‘I just didn’t know that it would be valued.’”

In the near two decades since Engelhard was launched, rates of anxiety and depression reported by college students have nearly doubled.  During the 2020–2021 school year, more than 60% of college students met the criteria for at least one mental health problem, a near 50% increase from 2013, according to the Healthy Minds Study.  The stress and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these issues.  A 2021 survey of over 1,000 faculty across 12 diverse institutions by the Mary Christie Institute, the Boston University School of Public Health and the Healthy Minds Network found a strong majority (87%) believed that student mental health had “worsened” or “significantly worsened” during COVID-19. Almost 80% had one-on-one phone, video, or email conversations with students about their mental health. 

“There isn’t a faculty member in this country that doesn’t see that our students are struggling,” said Riley, pointing to a list over her door of the mental health issues she asked her students to identify having experienced. Loneliness topped the list.

“At the beginning, we didn’t talk a lot about addressing mental health issues in recruiting professors,” said Lewis. “They were really concerned about crossing that line into counseling, which is why our early work focused more on awareness of the campus safety net and referring students to CAPS.” Now, she said, faculty are becoming more comfortable with discussing mental health with their students; many open up about their own struggles. “A lot of our faculty say, ‘If I’m asking my students to come as whole people, I have to be able to model that.’”

While many professors value the Engelhard Project’s role in prioritizing mental health issues amidst alarming prevalence numbers, others resonate with decades of strong evidence on the impact of relationship-based learning on a range of positive student outcomes.  In their book, Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert cite ample evidence of this, including Mathew Mayhew’s book How College Affects Students, and write, “Students’ interactions with peers, faculty, and staff positively influence the breadth and depth of student learning, retention and graduation rates, and a wide range of other outcomes, including critical thinking, identity development, communication skills, and leadership abilities.”

Lewis said referencing literature on the strength of the pedagogy has convinced many professors to join the Engelhard Project and is one reason its appeal has crossed over into numerous departments.  While the faculty representation skews heavily female, the program has a good ratio of humanities and STEM courses.  One neuroscience professor told Lewis, “It’s not my job to know who my students are, but I am open to doing this because I believe it will make them better scientists.”  

Randy Bass said that some of the places the Engelhard Project has worked the best are those that are the least obvious, like in the sciences.  “If you ask students to examine the biological basis of any mental health issue,” as they do in a long-running Engelhard course taught by Heidi Elmendorf, “they will choose topics such as their mother’s alcoholism, their brother’s autism, their own eating disorder, or someone they know who was suicidal.  These are unbelievably personal connections that deepen their knowledge and appreciation of what it means to study biology.”

Can this Idea be Scaled?

Engelhard leaders are not aware of the existence of another wellbeing curriculum infusion program, to this degree, on any other US campus. They receive a fair amount of requests for information from other schools and try to respond among limited time and information. Outcomes for the project are largely anecdotal, but they have begun a check list for other schools on what needs to be in place for a program like this to gain traction, starting with a multi-stakeholder leadership team, an academic orientation, and the availability of willing student affairs professionals. This last category can be a problem for schools with fewer resources, but for the most part, the project is low cost, particularly when compared to more direct mental health interventions.  It is an important equity consideration as advocates like Felton and Lambert argue that high-impact practices, like those within the Engelhard Project, are particularly beneficial for first-generation, low-income students, and students of color.

At Georgetown, enrollment in the project has stayed about the same for several years despite a growing acknowledgement of its many benefits. Part of the plateau may be a continued reluctance, on the part of some faculty, to embrace the personal side of students. While this appears to be changing, Woolard says professors who view Engelhard as too “touchy feely” should probably sit out.  “There may be some faculty members for whom this is not a good option,” she said. 

Riley, who also recruits for the Engelhard Project, said professors are worried the project will take time away from their many responsibilities.  “The irony is the Engelhard method makes you a better teacher—like exercising over time—and that works in your favor when it comes to managing multiple roles.”

Another theory is that the Engelhard Project may still be ahead of its time. “I think what education will become about is the development of the inner self in relationship to the capacity to do external work, what we’ve called “the inner/outer” problem,” said Bass.  “That’s the next frontier in higher education, but most of higher education doesn’t know that yet.”

The Bucknell University seniors trod onto the grassy quad outside the Breakiron Engineering Building. Their professor, Joseph Tranquillo, explained the rules of the game, which were straightforward, though not necessarily intuitive: Make a human chain with your teammates without touching them. The students eyed each other nervously, waiting for someone else to kick things off. 

One walked out and turned to face the others, striking a pose before them. Then another moved to his side, making a shape with her body that linked with his. The rest of the class followed suit, sticking hands under bent elbows and air-hugging arms around ankles. Eventually their tangle of shapes came together to form a sculpture of limbs and torsos.  

Professor Tranquillo then asked them to complete the task more quickly, requiring a higher level of teamwork and a lower threshold for awkwardness. They met the challenge and got into a rhythm that taught them instinctively what Tranquillo was hoping to impart: When entering an existing situation, always look for the open opportunity. On a new team or organization, consider: “What can I learn here and how can I leave my own mark behind?”

This exercise was part of “Bucknell-on-Purpose,” a Senior Dinner Seminar Tranquillo, associate provost for Transformative Teaching and Learning, co-teaches with Keith Buffinton, dean emeritus of Engineering  at Bucknell. Part of the university’s Residential College Program, Bucknell’s Senior Dinner Seminars bring together an intimate group, in this case 17, once a week for an hour-and-a-half. Over two semesters, the students build trust and connection with each other and their instructors, while eating and exploring their course topic of choice.

In Tranquillo and Buffinton’s class, this topic—“purpose”—required students to reflect on their college experiences and, as those came to an end, their futures beyond just post-graduate jobs or degrees. Even Tranquillo’s warm-up exercises, like the game of allegorical Twister, emphasized collaboration and letting go of self-consciousness, but also prompted them to consider how they envision contributing to the wider world.

“We spend a lot of time preparing students academically for their professional lives after graduation but less so on their human development—their values and sense of purpose and how those align with what they decide to do,” said Keith Buffinton. “We chose to offer this seminar so seniors will ask themselves these important questions before they leave here.”

An emphasis on discovering purpose has become more prevalent in educational and professional spheres as a way to combat personal and professional discontent and increase engagement. Another driving force is its effect on wellbeing for an emerging generation experiencing widespread mental health issues. A 2019 report, “Forging Pathways to Purposeful Work: The Role of Higher Education,” produced by Gallup and Bates College, showed 80% of college graduates believed having purpose in their work was important, but less than 50% had actually found it. Graduates who reported having high purpose in their work were nearly ten times more likely than their low purpose peers to have high overall wellbeing.

“We spend a lot of time preparing students academically for their professional lives after graduation but less so on their human development—their values and sense of purpose and how those align with what they decide to do.”

The object of Tranquillo and Buffinton’s course was not necessarily to help students decide what career path would be most satisfying but to help them conceive of a more general blueprint by which to live their lives. Stanford University engineering professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans popularized this work—taking an intentional approach to plotting the future—with their course, “Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life.” In “Bucknell-on-Purpose,” students read excerpts and participated in activities from the Palo Alto team’s book by the same name.

“We looked, in particular, at balancing ‘Workview’ and ‘Lifeview’ and asked the students to complete worksheets from the book to better understand and to reconcile their ‘philosophy of work’ and their ‘philosophy of life,’” Buffinton wrote in his report on the class for Bucknell President John Bravman.

Coursework for the Bucknell seminar ventured beyond the “Designing Your Life” curriculum. In the first session, the seniors determined three major themes to guide the class: Discovering the Purpose Within, Exploring Purpose in Others, and Finding Purpose in Community. To explore these areas, they engaged in activities, including using body outlines and post-it notes to map their “external self” (how the outside world views them from surface-level interactions) compared to their “internal self” (more hidden thoughts or elements of who they are); and research and interviews to develop insight into and empathy for the unique experiences and senses of purpose of others. Guest speakers included Rev. Kurt Nelson, director of Religious and Spiritual Life at Bucknell, who talked about finding purpose through communal connection; and President Bravman, who participated in the external/internal mapping exercise. 

“Engaging students in any way that’s not their typical structure is difficult,” Tranquillo said of the course’s variable structure and emphasis on self-exploration. The instructors said they enjoyed allowing students to dictate the material, moving away from putting restrictions on what or how they choose to learn. Students also encountered a space, rare in most classrooms, to focus on better understanding themselves, rather than scholarly concepts. “We have faculty willing to go there [help students through questions of self or identity], but that’s not the point of their courses,” Tranquillo added. He and Buffinton hope similar, less traditionally “academic” forums will become available for not only seniors but all classes in the future.

As for teaching “purpose,” those interested in expanding the work may need to clarify what it entails for not only faculty but students. Some seniors in “Bucknell-on-Purpose” admitted to enrolling for the free dinner or because they already knew a friend or professor involved. “I had zero expectations. Someone I respected told me about it, so I took it,” one student revealed. He ended up getting more than he bargained for. “It surpassed my expectations because I thought I would just kind of learn facts, and it’s actually made me think about the world in a different way.”

The experiential nature of the course helps with understanding and internalizing purpose. One guest speaker asked the seniors, “When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?” One student grew up an aspiring car salesman, with a sister who planned to open a bakery attached to his dealership, but is now pursuing computer engineering to pay off tuition debt. Another was an animal lover whose veterinary dreams ended when she realized she wasn’t interested in dealing with blood but evolved into her current plans to build prosthetics for humans. One young man, David, talked about how his experience as an immigrant from Soweto, South Africa influenced his identity, how he thinks of himself, and what he hopes to do.

“I migrated to the inner cities of the U.S., and the question I always asked myself, growing up in Crenshaw, Los Angeles, was, ‘What would an average Black man who lived in the inner city, what could they see themselves becoming?’” David shared. He described feeling like his parents’ perspective as immigrants prompted him to envision a future outside the neighborhood where he grew up. Their encouragement continues to shape his plans for the future. “I think some form of the idea of stability has always been important to me—the idea of, ‘How do I make sure that if anything were to happen, my family comes first?’”

One of the ways in which the course changed students’ outlooks involved reframing the pressures they’ve internalized around professional success. “I feel like if you don’t have a job post-grad right now, it’s seen as a failure on your part,” Maya, who was also in the seminar, said. “This class really framed it more as a reflection of maybe that you don’t know what you want to do—and that’s okay. It’s okay to be kind of floundering or looking for new opportunities.”

“I think in our society, we correlate purpose with career a lot, and this class has opened up my perspective to show it’s more about the relationships that you make,” Emma, another student, added. “You can make relationships through your career, but other things outside of your career can also relate to purpose.”

While the prospect of graduating remains daunting, this course gave students tools to combat the uncertainty, even after they leave. “It has made me realize that I need to make space for these conversations in the future, regardless of where I am,” Maya said. She envisions herself carving out room for similar discussions when she matriculates to graduate school in the fall.

“I don’t think it needs to be this exact same structure of a class, but I think the idea of ‘Let’s think about things critically when we think about our future and our purpose’ is something I will be able to recreate, and want to, after this course.”

Sometimes first experiences can last a lifetime, which is why colleges and universities are raising the bar on programs that start before students begin school and continue throughout that important first year. From camping to community service, these experiential learning programs double as socializing opportunities to acclimate students to college life and to each other.  

The University of Maine System (UMS) has a track record of investing in first-year experiences, many involving the state’s rural environment. The University of Maine at Farmington’s popular “Fusion Week” includes overnights spent lakeside for the class “Freshwater in the Anthropocene” or in the woods hunting Sasquatch for “Bigfoot.” These early experience courses offered throughout the UMaine System are now expanding with the launch of a student success and retention initiative called UMS TRANSFORMS. This initiative has three programs, with two of the three focused primarily on the initial two years of a student’s college experiences, given their outsize influence over a student’s college trajectory as well as their ability to serve as a key retention driver. The first program within UMS TRANSFORMS, launched at the flagship, UMaine, is called “Research Learning Experiences” (RLEs) and consists of research-based experiential learning courses that have the added value of exposing young minds to research, a domain previously reserved for more senior undergraduate and graduate students.  

Investing in the retention and advancement of the next generation is particularly critical in the Pine Tree State. Today, Maine has the highest median age in the country. Between 1990 and 2019, the largest segment of the Maine population shifted from the 25- to 44-year-old to the 55- to 74-year-old age group. As of 2018, the number of residents between 16-24 and 25-34 was projected to continue declining through 2028, while the number of those 65 and over increases. The trends don’t bode well for enrollment in the public higher education system, and to make matters worse, just 54% of the dwindling high school graduates in Maine are going on to higher education afterward, whether in state or out. 

“We know that engaging in research makes you a part of something bigger, something important, and it allows you to form relationships with peers and professors who are in this with you. Why wouldn’t we want students to experience this right as they enter college?”

The quarter billion-dollar investment stands to help ensure those students who do matriculate at UMS make it to graduation, bolstering the ranks of young professionals within Maine’s workforce. Given the early success of the RLEs in the first two years of its implementation, the initiative could make a big impact. Already by the second year, two of the universities, UMaine and UMFarmington (UMF), had 20% of their first-year students participating in an RLE. 

In the fall of 2023, the other two programs in the initiative, Gateways to Success (GTS) and Pathways to Careers (PTC), will also launch. The ultimate plan is for all three to be offered throughout students’ four years and across all seven universities. Could these efforts succeed in improving outcomes for young people as well as influencing the economic fate of a state struggling to retain young citizens? And, in the process, could “creative student success” programs become the “UMaine thing”—a model for similar systems to retain and engage students for the sake of the individuals, their campuses, and the wider community?

Personal Research 

The website for Research and Learning Experiences (RLEs) at the University of Maine is engaging and student-friendly, using active language to advertise courses like “Print in 3D and Explore Off-Shore Wind,” “Hunt for Viruses,” and “Explore What you Eat.” These subjects, and many others, are the first installments of a large, collaborative process involving the provost’s office at the flagship and faculty and leadership throughout the UMaine System.  

“When we first started, for each one of these programs (RLEs, GTS, PTC) we established three very large committees of 18 or more faculty and staff from all seven universities. Since then, hundreds of people have been involved and built it together,” said Volin.

Shalin called the class “the biggest head start I could get.”

The provost’s office determined that the major reasons for students leaving college before graduation are academic success and finances, as well as social factors, including a low sense of belonging and mental health issues. To start, UMS prioritized building belonging. In 2021, faculty submitted proposals for the RLEs—small, one-credit seminars that would introduce first-year students to each other by having them do research together. While the intimate setting of the classes aims to bond classmates and their instructors, curricula focus on exploring open-ended questions geared toward less structured, college-style learning. A pre-orientation “Bridge Week,” following the model of UMF’s “Fusion week,” also immerses students in the work before the official start of the school year.

“RLEs have basically two distinct goals,” said Brian Olsen, professor of Ornithology at UMaine and executive director of UMS TRANSFORMS. “One is a wellness goal, which is a student success goal, and the other one is a preparation goal for more of a research or scholarship mindset.” 

Indeed, the crux of RLEs is the personal connections they cultivate. The success of the students both socially and academically depends on “the same base relationships,” Olsen said, “because that’s just the way that humans work.” Confronting the uncertainty of making friends or working through a complicated research question require talking and turning to others for support. “All of those things come down to sitting in a strong social network, where you’re supported by your peers, you’re supported by your faculty, you’re supported by the staff,” Olsen added. “You know where to go when you need help. You expect to run into snags now and again. You expect that everybody in that network runs into snags now and again. And you are neither doing any worse or any better necessarily than anyone around you.”

Olsen said that the key to this level of support is the dynamic built between professor and student, which is often determined by the way in which the class is taught. “There’s nothing an instructor wants more than their students to succeed, but to do that, you have to be able to understand them and empathize with them,” he said. “That takes repeated interactions, and not repeated actions while standing in front of the classroom. For really good teachers to function at their best, they have to understand the students that they’re working with, and they have to be able to have conversations with them and realize, ‘Whoa, you were thinking about it like that? That’s cool.’”

Though they may not have been part of the design, students within RLEs report appreciating the pedagogical difference. Dom, a first-year student at UMaine, participated in Phage Genomics RLE, or “Phage,” this past academic year, and said it was one of the most important experiences he has had at UMaine. “Most freshman courses are these huge lecture halls, and you don’t really get to talk to anyone. But in my Phage course, there were like 15 students, and we sat at small tables, and you have a single partner for the rest of the year, and it allows you to build connections that are otherwise hard to make.” 

The research component of the RLEs is a unique and added benefit, giving students who are drawn to the specific area of study offered in an RLE a leg up in their academic careers while exposing others to a field they may not have thought about. “I don’t know another university in the U.S. that gives the opportunity for all students to authentically engage in the very first semester in a research project across every discipline at the university,” said Volin.  

The research work students are exposed to in the RLEs provide research experience a first-year student would not otherwise get, and it also gives students agency—something that has shown to increase wellbeing.  “It is a really amazing opportunity,” said Dom. “By the end of the year, you will have written two manuscripts. You’ll have at least one publication, possibly two or more, and you get all sorts of experience that is so beneficial for your future. I would say 90% of the students in the class as freshmen are now working in labs. And they are not pressured to do it.” 

Students are confirming that the impact of RLEs on support and belonging are their greatest strength as well on their academic mindset. Asked in surveys about the benefits of taking RLEs, students often referred to acclimating to campus and making friends during Bridge Week, or Fusion week as it’s known at UMF. Compared to those who didn’t participate, students in RLEs were also more likely to report feeling supported or strongly supported by their classmates (68% of RLE students, compared to 45% of non-RLE students). Shalin, one of the first-year students at UMF who participated in the RLE “Urban Maine: The Stories and Sounds,” called the class “the biggest head-start I could get.” 

Compared to those who didn’t participate, students in RLEs were also more likely to report feeling supported or strongly supported by their classmates (68% of RLE students, compared to 45% of non-RLE ones).

To ensure that RLEs bring together as diverse a group of students as possible, the program directors decided to test out a new marketing strategy. For incoming students this fall, half will receive the same information about RLEs published in past years, emphasizing “research,” while the other half will see new content emphasizing “connection.” The goal is to determine whether the traditional, research-forward advertising pushes prospective students away. 

Starting this fall, exactly two years since RLEs first launched at UMaine, the courses will be active at all seven universities in the system, with over 1,000 seats available for students. More than two-thirds will also now earn students more than one credit. In addition, the system plans to replicate the small-class, experiential format to courses offered throughout all four years. The cumulative effect of this on retention and, by extension, on the state’s economy and workforce, will not be realized for several years.  But for Volin, this is only part of the equation. In his view, what began as a way to address Maine’s retention problems has become a catalyst for a new dimension of the student experience.

“Being able to expand this approach and scale it across a system of very different institutions is pretty remarkable,” he said.  “It demonstrates a deep desire for something new, something that helps students understand who they are and what they are capable of.”