ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú

Narrator (00:04):
This is Greater, We Ascend, a podcast from the ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú about Loggers reaching to the heights.

Prof. Nancy Bristow (00:14):
Hi, my name is Nancy Bristow and I teach in the history department at the ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú, and I also have the good fortune of serving on the leadership team of the Race & Pedagogy Institute. The Race & Pedagogy Institute is a really important part of the university. It serves as a liaison of sorts between the university and the campus community. We're committed to the work of making equitable education in the K-12 and beyond system and working in an anti-racist stance and bringing community partners into our shared work of creating education that is open to all accessible to all and is based in an anti-racist perspective. We also just provide a space for students who have interest in issues around race education and learning. So we have student workers who serve in our office who are sort of mentored for their own capacities in that line.

(01:13):
And then we do a lot of liaisoning with community partners, for instance, serving as a host for groups that might want to have us a space to meet and we can serve as that liaison for organizations to use our own campus spaces. So a wide range of things. And the last thing to say is we're very closely connected with the African American studies program. So though we don't focus exclusively on issues around black life, black education, and black experiences in the educational system, we do have a focus in particular on that because it's so essential to American life. I think the Race & Pedagogy Institute has a really important role to play on campus. It is able, I think, to open up conversations that are very difficult are issues around race and racism and white supremacy and the history of those and the ways in which those things are still a part of our institutions and our daily lives, whether we want them to be or not.

(02:06):
Those are very difficult and challenging conversations for people to have. And I think we are able, as a group, able to open up those kinds of conversations in ways that allow people perhaps, who have less experience with talking about those things, maybe have less background knowledge about them to enter into spaces and feel like there is room for them to learn, to make mistakes, to learn from one another, to share their own experiences. So I think what we do is really educational work. First and foremost, some of the members of the leadership team are truly deep experts in this field. Others of us, like myself, I think are learning as we go and provide in that sense both models of people who really understand, but also as a result, understand that working with issues of race is always about the process. We're always learning. There's not an end goal.

(02:58):
This is a long game that we're playing. And so the opportunity to be around true experts and also to be around people like myself who often do make mistakes, are correcting themselves, or learning as they go. So providing I think a range of models for the fact that we're all learning and that these particular questions are very, very difficult. And so having people who are ready to go as — my colleague, Grace Livingston would say — into the trenches to really engage with them, I think is a very valuable service that we provide to the university. The other thing I think we do that's really important is that moments of crisis, I think people are often afraid to step in because of that fear of, oh, what if I say the wrong thing? I don't know enough. This doesn't apply to me. I think we are a group who recognize that those are exactly the moments when really amazing learning can take place. It doesn't mean it's easy, it doesn't mean it's comfortable, but it means that it's an opportunity. Our worst moments can be times when we can learn a great deal and when we can actually build community in the midst of crisis rather than allowing divisions to take place. I think our effort is always to bring us together to have those hard conversations.

(04:09):
The Race & Pedagogy Institute, I think, has its foundations in the Tacoma community. In fact, when we were first getting going, it was primarily just brown bag lunches for faculty. And very quickly as we began to organize our first national conference, we recognized that the Tacoma community, in fact, the Greater South Sound community, had to be our partners right alongside us. This isn't something where we said at the end, oh, by the way, we're hosting something, we hope you'll come. But rather, in the early planning stages, invited people with a great investment in the Tacoma community to come to meet with us, to help us form everything from the decision about what conference themes would be, to what should be the spotlighted issues for that particular year. Who should the keynote speakers be? Members of the community serve on the program committee when we're deciding who will and won't have the opportunity to present.

(05:03):
They serve on all of the main committees when we're preparing for those national conferences. And we do that through what is called our Community Partners Forum. And this is a group that we've met with since the early 2000s with regularity. And again, building up the kind of trust that I think institutions often don't have with local communities because they leave the community out of the major decisions. For us. Community partners are very central to what we've always done. The students of the ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú are lively, intellectually curious, and very engaged. The thing that's really kept me at the university where I've been for 34 years is the reality that every single day I go into the classroom and I met with people who are sincerely interested in making sense of, in my case, the world as we know it today and how it got to be this way.

(05:55):
I teach U.S. history. And so they're deeply engaged in wanting to make sense of their own lives of the broader world around them. Their excitement and their sort of sincerity around learning is really something special. The other thing I really welcome about them is their sense of community. My classroom is based in what we call active learning, which is to say the students are very much a part of a conversation every day. And I find that they work with one another in a really collaborative, and I would say caring way, which again, I think is unusual. I think academics can often be sort of a competitive environment. I think our students recognize how much they can learn together as opposed to in a competition with one another. So again, I have this sense of partnership and collaboration in my classroom. And again, I think that speaks to students who love to learn and love to learn alongside one another and see in the educational process not something that's required to do, but that they're actually choosing to do.

(06:59):
Experiential learning at Puget Sound is essential to our institution's educational process at this point. In fact, the faculty chose a few years back to make this a requirement for all of our students. So it can mean a lot of different things, and for me, that's why it works. Experiential learning can be an internship during the summer. Experiential learning can be a lab opportunity working with a faculty member. Experiential learning can be studying abroad. Experiential learning can mean you have a volunteer position where you spend a certain number of hours off of the campus where you're learning in the process of doing this alongside a mentor. So for us, the idea is education in the 21st century certainly is still tied to the essentials of seeking the truth, doing research, measuring sources, learning to think critically, learning to communicate effectively. Our idea with experiential learning is that the sites for that absolutely should belong beyond the traditional classroom.

(08:00):
There's so much to learning and so many ways to learn and so many kinds of learning to do in one's life that to suggest that the only learning you do is in the classroom sets students up, I think, to miss the concept of lifelong learning, experiential learning for us is both part of the Puget Sound education. So for instance, my history majors may study abroad in Munich where they're able to study the Second World War and see the sights of the Second World War, but that also opens up for them the idea that, huh, when I go on a trip in the future, when I'm no longer in college, I can still be learning for me. And I think for our university, the idea of lifelong learning, it sounds like a catchphrase, but this is for real. If I can really set my students up to recognize that life is a learning process and that the process as my colleague, Dr. Brackett, would say, is the product that sets people up for a different kind of life, I think. And if institutions like Puget Sound can accomplish that, then I would say job well done. I don't care what the student's major is, if they've learned to really want to learn and have learned capacities for educating themselves and being in the world as a learner, we've done our work. I think the other thing that's really important is that I think the ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú also provides students with opportunities for leadership that reach far beyond the classroom. And I think it's really important to recognize how much of our students' learning isn't taking place with folks like me who wear the title of professor, but maybe taking place with people in Student Affairs where they are leading student groups on backpacking trips. It may happen with our students who serve as peer advisors, as literally advisors to our first-year students, helping them through the academic process.

(09:52):
It may be the students in our Center for Writing & Learning who are serving as literally as educational tutors helping students with their coursework. They may be learning from their coaches on the football team or the track team as they serve as captains. So again, I think our students are also gaining so many opportunities for real-life leadership in avenues across the campus. And I think that's not unique to Puget Sound, but I do think Puget Sound really does cultivate that in so many different kinds of spaces so that students have the opportunity to test out their leadership capacities. For me, "To the heights" is a really important concept. It's not about reaching a summit as some people may think, but for me, "To the heights" means it is the process that really matters. It is the journey itself that is central to what we're doing.

(10:44):
And if, again, if we can help people understand that learning is a process and that the purpose isn't, what is the grade I got on that paper, but what did I learn from the process of writing it? It's not the grade I get at the end of the course, but how was I challenged and what new things did I learn to do and think and process and problem solve? And so for me "To the heights" is really important because it's about aspiration, but not aspiration with the idea that there's a place that you arrive, but that the process itself is valuable. As I think about my own work, the thing I hope for most, I suppose, is that my students are learning to take on serious questions, the challenges that they live with every day in the real world, and recognize that they have a real role to play, and that each of them will have their own unique role to play.

(11:38):
So for instance, I teach a lot on the history of race, especially a focus on African American history. And through that work, my students learn to do a number of things. One is they learn to think really critically and ask hard questions and to confront historical realities are very hard. That may be very challenging for them to take on and to sort of process. But by doing so and recognizing that, oh, I survived that process, I learned something really hard. And I come out the other side more knowledgeable and actually stronger, not frightened, but stronger. So I think one thing is they learned to take on challenging questions in my case, especially around issues of difference and the historical realities that have created the inequities we live with currently. In addition, I really hope that it's helping them recognize their own capacities. Every student I teach has so much to offer.

(12:32):
They are so bright in so many different ways. I want each student to recognize, and I hope part of what I accomplish is that students recognize that they are ready in fact, to take on the world. That the world is a big complex place and it needs them. And guess what? They're ready. They can do this. They can ask hard questions and they can answer them, and they are bright and they can take on difficult things, and that they in fact, have a role to play each of them a unique role. And discovering what that uniqueness is, I think is part of what the entire university is trying to help them discover.

Narrator (13:11):
Greater, We Ascend, is a production of the ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú. This episode was produced by John Moe. Our theme music is by Skylar Hedblom, Puget Sound Class of 2025. Learn more at puget sound.edu/greater.