We were fortunate to have a visit from Dr. Henry Emmons this week. Dr. Emmons is a well-known psychiatrist who works with several colleges and is the author of The Chemistry of Joy and The Chemistry of Calm. He focuses primarily on resilience and came to speak with our Division of Student Life staff, students and faculty about building resilience in college students.
Resilience is a thing right now. It's teetering on the edge of being a buzzword in Student Affairs, but it's an emerging area of significance for our profession. Teaching resiliency skills is what will shift us to a proactive profession rather than a reactive profession.
During a focus group discussion today, some of the student affairs staff in the room talked about how we spend time and energy "wrapping around" our students to assist and protect them. This raises questions for me about how much we enable behavior that is not indicative of resilience and how much we limit growth for our students. Do we try so hard to protect that we actually inhibit growth?
The analogy that came to mind for what often happens in student affairs was of having your ankles taped. As any athlete (or washed-up former-wanna-be-athlete like myself) can attest, coaches and athletic trainers always insist upon having athletes tape their ankles for practice and games. The wrapping of ankles in layers of athletic tape stabilizes the muscles and ligaments to shore up against unnecessary contortions and potential injury. Taping limits the mobility of ankles - which lowers the risk of injury. After all, the less we stray from the straight and narrow the less likely we are to fail or get hurt.
Taping is tedious and time-consuming but ultimately gives the athlete peace of mind and a feeling of stability. But the theory always was that taping your ankles every single day ultimately lowered your resistance to injury the next time you did NOT have your ankles taped. The idea was that the security of the tape actually taught your muscles to weaken, therefore actually leaving you much more susceptible to injury when you were out working on your skills by yourself. As Student Affairs professionals, we often wrap our students in this protective layer that ultimately weakens the ability for student to develop the resiliency tools they need to be successful on their own.
I'm not sure if the theory that the constant use of tape actually weakens the muscles underneath is true. I asked the resident expert in my family (my brother-in-law is an athletic trainer in training) and he has heard that theory and said that he's not sure, though he knows for sure that taping an ankle really only truly provides optimal support for the first 15-20 minutes. The protective layer we wrap around our students really only enables them to have a strong start, but the stability begins to fade as they venture out on their own. This is a critique of our profession - we want to be supporters and the people who nudge students in the right direction, but too often I see us propping up, doing work for our students, and often working harder than they are to stay afloat. So whether the ankle tape theory is true or not, we don't really know for sure until we run out of tape.
Dr. Emmons left us with several important things to think about, but perhaps none more important to me than this: "There is no isolated environment." From residence halls to the classroom to the career center to the party on Saturday night - every environment within which our students engage affects them. And we can't insure that we have enough tape to get them through each one.
Teaching resiliency SKILLS is what matters. Knowledge is helpful, but skills - the actual tools - is what will affect our students the most. I encourage you to read, research and understand what resilience means on your campus and for your students and find ways to help teach those skills.
How will you help teach resiliency skills rather than reach for the tape the next time a student needs support?
2 comments:
My favorite theory is Sanford's challenge and support and this post gets at the heart of that - for students to learn, there needs to be the ideal balance of both support (tape) and challenge (practice without the tape). Bubble wrapping them won't work. Although, I've not actually tried to bubble wrap a student, so that's an assumption rather than a fact.
Great post, Charlie.
I love how you dig deeply into language and theory, Charlie. You're definitely after the professional part of my heart. :)
Your post definitely resonates for someone like me who has been chastised (rightly so) for calling students 'mine' or 'my babies' (insert eye roll here). We can get so caught up in our students' success that we, ultimately, lose track of what that success actually is or could look like. The protective layers we wrap our students in shields them from OUR understanding of failure and seeks to put them on the path toward OUR ideals of success. I often wonder if we need to teach students resiliency to help them sort through and, possibly, reject some of the standards and ideals we unfairly set for them. That isn't to say they shouldn't abide by community standards or follow rules we set for their safety and protection, but I do wonder how much we teach them to be resilient only in our own image. Thanks for poking the box, Charlie. This is needed.
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