Interview Transcript

Interviewer: Parker Banas

In your opinion, what is the point of the competencies at Champlain?

I think there are two ways to think about the competencies. One is that they really delineate and define what college does in general. In some ways, they’re incredibly practical and not necessarily unique or original when compared to our sister institutions—all schools try to build a similar set of skills and abilities in their students. That’s one side of it. But I do think the other side is that there are some competencies, particularly in the way they’re written and defined, that talk a bit more about what makes Champlain unique. So they do dual work: one, they situate us right in the middle of the pack where we should be with other colleges, and two, they get specific about what makes a Champlain education different from some other institutions.

How do you hope students will view the competencies throughout their time?

What I think is important is that they experience them and that they develop those competencies, whether they can put a finger on it or not. Obviously it’s great if they can, but I think it’s more about whether they can actually embody and practice the competencies. That’s far more important. So I wouldn’t lose sleep if they couldn’t recite them all. It’s more about experiencing them. I hope they can embody them and use them as they move forward, but whether they actually know what they are doesn’t matter much to me.

What lessons about the competencies do you want students to walk away from your class with?

This follows the previous question. I don’t know if there are any lessons about the competencies. This is a far deeper, much more wonky conversation, but I know that there are faculty members who for really good reasons want students to have that meta-analysis of what they’re experiencing—that real self-reflective capacity to contextualize their learning. I’m not someone who necessarily does that or focuses on that in my classroom. I want them doing things and experiencing things. I think the realizations and conclusions they’ll draw from those experiences will happen later on down the road. 

What are some of the ways that you integrate the competencies into your classes? You could talk about some of the ways you hope that students will experience them.

The competencies are broken down into interacting, thinking, and literacy categories. For me, the communication and collaboration piece is huge. Every single one of my classes is built around: How do you work with other people? How do you solve problems as a group? How do you move forward through a difficult scenario? How do you make decisions as a group when the decisions and goals might even be ambiguous—they might not even be clear? That’s everything about my class. The other big one doesn’t really fit into one specific competency, but it crosses between literacy pieces such as scientific literacy, information literacy, and technological literacy. For me, it’s more about what I would call landscape literacy—how you understand Vermont, not just the people here but other species, the landscape itself, its history. There’s a literacy piece that bridges scientific literacy and what is usually known as global and cultural awareness. Those are the main ones: communication and collaboration, and then this understanding—this ability to read landscapes both in terms of time and the ecosystems that exist there.

I was wondering if you could elaborate on the experiential learning aspects—what we did in field methods, the different transects, and even in some of your earlier core classes.

For me it’s all about communication. For better or worse, whether I’m good at it or not, I try to create spaces where students can say and ask and be however they need to be. There’s a traditional way you think you’re supposed to be in college and what a traditional college classroom is supposed to look like. We sometimes create a false narrative that you’re learning because you’re in this classroom, because you have your laptop open, because you’re filling out this thing. I try to dismantle all of that because I don’t think we need to pretend or create the false window dressing of learning. I think you can actually just go out and do it.

My favorite thing to do—and what I think is most useful—is to get students out into challenging environments that are sensory challenges (it can be cold or wet) but also physically challenging, maybe a little bit emotionally challenging. Within all that, I embed significant ambiguity—just not knowing what the next steps are, not knowing how to necessarily solve this problem, not knowing what’s coming at you on any given day. That bothers some students. I get some pretty annoyed evaluations, but I think that’s really key because the more comfortable you can get with ambiguity and not-knowingness, the more confident you’re going to be in life when things get weird and stuff starts to fall apart.

I try to put them in unfamiliar, sometimes chaotic and dynamic environments and give them as little structure as possible so that they have to rely upon themselves—but more importantly, on each other—to solve whatever problems they’re dealing with.

How have students responded to these projects and learning activities?

Most of them love it. I think Champlain attracts a certain kind of student who has become by default a certain kind of learner, and to be completely frank, I am trying to reverse all of that. They think they’re learning because they’re on the screen doing all the stuff. I’m not anti-technology—I use it all the time—but when we strip that stuff away, they actually get back to some of the more adventurous parts of themselves that are really important. In general, they really respond to that.

I have had students who have a really hard time with some of the stuff we do, especially students who are neurodiverse—they can sometimes really struggle with that unknowingness. They want to know how everything’s planned out. That’s the argument that’s been made in favor of Canvas and other things—that it regiments things. My thinking is that maybe that’s not a good thing. Maybe we need a little bit of that unknowingness so that we have to prepare ourselves for anything. It’s usually pretty good, but there are definitely some students who are not expecting this.

What sort of growth have you seen in students throughout a semester? What are some specific examples of student growth?

That’s a great question. Someone with your background—you’re a Vermont kid, an athlete—you don’t require much work from me. But the big wins and the things that really make me happy are when I have a student who might suffer from some chronic illness or has mental health issues, anxiety, depression — when those students realize that if they just engage in the world in this proactive way, outside in the landscape with other people, it makes them feel better. And when they feel better, they do better. That’s the success. To be honest, it comes from Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer. He says a tired dog is a happy dog, and a happy dog is a good dog. I think that’s true for all of us. When we strenuously engage with the world, we feel happier because of endorphins and all that stuff, and then we’re better—our minds are recalibrated. Students who are already naturally outdoorsy or adventurous don’t require much from me. I love it when I get students who have never done this kind of stuff. They’re really struggling for the first third of the semester, but by the end they’re just jumping in the river and doing whatever. That to me is the big success.

How have you used the competencies, knowingly or unknowingly, to get to where you are today in your career, and which ones have been the most important?

Communication and collaboration—those are the big ones. But I actually helped write the creativity one. I worked with the committee because my initial impulse was that we can’t have a competency about creativity. I’ve done a lot of research and writing around curiosity and creativity, and I didn’t want it to be categorized in that way. But it actually ended up being really helpful to think about what creativity is—what that actually looks like when you’re not trying to teach it, but how you can create experiences and environments where it might be able to exist and maybe even flourish. That to me is a really interesting question. I really loved working on that particular competency.

All the literacy ones make a ton of sense to me. And then the standards ones—the ones I mentioned at the top—analysis, inquiry—of course we should do that. A lot of the competencies are bulletproof—of course you should work on inquiry, on how you ask questions, how you discover things. Of course you should work on integration and analysis. And then there are other ones that I think are more specific to Champlain and more interesting. I think the collaboration one is huge—we’re doing better and better every year at capitalizing on it. I hope it keeps going even further. I hope we get more and more outside of this traditional classroom structure and just start doing more collaborative, open-ended group work.

Banas: I hope so as well. I think it’ll be really valuable for a lot of the students here.

Shonstrom: They need it.