2019 Midwest First Year Conference – Part 1 – John Gardner Keynote

The Midwest First Year Conference is a regional conference for First-Year Experience programs.  The conference began in the Chicago area, and a few FYE professors and coordinators at my university serve on the planning committee.  My university previously hosted the conference.  This year (on Sept. 27, 2019), the conference was at Illinois State University.  Several FYE faculty, including me, gave presentations at this year’s conference.

In this post, I will describe the keynote address by John Gardner and Betsy Barefoot, creators of the Gardner Institute for the First Year Experience and nationally-recognized scholars in FYE.

The Keynote

The presentation highlighted a number of trends in the First-Year Experience program.  I think the overall message was that the entirety of what students do during the first year (take gateway courses, register for classes, have out-of-class experiences on campus, and more) constitutes “the first-year experience,” and it is important for schools to provide positive experiences during all of these activities.

During the presentation, Gardner and Barefoot reviewed the history of FYE, which is grounded in the philosophy that the first year of college matters.  Since the early 1980s, the FYE program has taken a number of forms:  seminar, learning community, orientation, advising/coaching, integration with housing, integration with student success, and peer leadership.  More recently, the FYE program has included guided pathways for meta-majors, a focus on inequities and social justice, and the use of outside companies and commercialization/branding of the FYE program.

Another focus point of the presentation was the need to improve the student experience.  Gardner showed several bar graphs that depict a large performance gap between students of different backgrounds in introductory-level Math, History, and Chemistry “gateway courses.”

John Gardner also urged schools to identify problems in student experience and to fix them.  I found the following statements particularly inciting:

• Who is responsible for a student’s academic performance?
• What is your “big idea”?  How can you take more responsibility for student learning?  How do you implement it?
• How do you develop a plan for students to have an excellent beginning?  Is it through an FYE program? through a course?
• What happens when a student gets a DFW grade in a gateway course?  Do they leave, or do they get kicked out?  What happens to them when they leave or are kicked out?
• What explains that a student (even a senior) cannot pass a gateway course?  Why are they failing?  What are we going to do?
• What justice do these students get?

The New Book

The presentation also provided an overview of the 2016 book The Undergraduate Experience.  The book contains six themes that define the first-year experience:  Learning, Relationships, Expectations, Alignment, Improvement, and Leadership.  Gardner and Barefoot defined each theme, briefly described why they are important, and how they are assessed.

Since the publication of the book, additional themes have become important as well.  These include Retention, Equity, Money, Technology and the Online experience, and Citizenship.

 

Feedback

In his keynote presentation, John Gardner posed a number of questions to urge institutions to think about how they could improve the first year experience.  What have you identified as a problem in the first year experience, and what are some suggestions for improvement?

 

Lirim Neziroski, Ph.D., MBA is an academic leader at a liberal arts university in the Chicago area.  He is an expert at curriculum development, assessment, academic technology, and strategic planning.  Contact Lirim for additional resources and for speaking, consulting, and writing opportunities.