We’re pleased to welcome Erin to the show this week to have her share reflections on the work at University of Oklahoma did over the past few years to expand their residential curriculum to their entire division of student affairs. She examines how to identify and take advantage of windows of opportunity for change making and the ways to leverage communities to keep ourselves afloat in turbulent times.
Guest: Erin Simpson, Ph.D. (she/her), Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs & Assistant Dean of Students at University of Oklahoma
Host: Dustin Ramsdell
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Transcript:
Dustin Ramsdell:
Welcome back everyone to Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast. Every episode, our team of hosts brings you timely discussions on a variety of topics of interest to hired professionals who work in and with university housing, Residence Life, residential education, et cetera, et cetera. So in this episode, it certainly is one where worlds are colliding, residential curriculums evolving or sort of going into divisional curriculums. I think that is something that has been happening. Sometimes they might start one way or the other, but we’re really digging in deep here with talking about going from residential curriculum to a divisional curriculum. So our guest today, Erin Simpson, if you want to briefly introduce yourself and give an overview of your professional background. I guess if you want to tie in the relations to the curricular approach, I guess as it’s relevant. Then we’ll from there sort of digging into this topic at hand.
Erin Simpson:
Yeah, thank you. Hi, y’all. My name is Erin Simpson. I serve as an Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs and Assistant Dean of students at the University of Oklahoma. But I grew up in housing. I’m a housing kid through and through. I spent about 15 years professionally in Residence Life and the University of Oklahoma has a divisional curriculum, but it started about nine, 10 years ago in our Residence Life unit. I have also worked in diversity and equity units. Now I work in the vice president’s office, and so I’ve had the opportunity to bounce around our division a little bit and just really found the value in what we started in Residence Life and how it’s translated beyond into the curricular approach for our entire division. I’ve served as an ICA faculty member at the Institute for Curricular Approach, I’ve co-chaired the institute a couple of times. I’m all in on the idea of curriculum and what it can do for us in higher education.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah. We love the ICA here a lot. We’ve always gotten episodes on it generally and anticipating it each year. So obviously that is a great resource just in general for this work and we’ve done a lot of episodes just hitting on so many different aspects of developing a new curricular approach from scratch or evaluating it, assessing it, and everything. So it’s really been great to cover all the corners here and this being one in particular where it may be you got something good going with a residential curriculum and how you can expand that work and everything. So if you can give a brief explanation of the divisional curriculum at OU as it stands now and then how it came to be.
Erin Simpson:
Sure. So our divisional curriculum was created literally by our entire division, which was such an interesting professional experience to watch all 23 of our departments come together and really, I want to say battle it out, but kindly like the Student Affairs way where you say things like, “I just feel like…”About what should be the three main buckets, the three big learning aids for our school? So we settled on three that feel really relevant to us. We’ve spent the last couple of years in divisional working groups. Every year we have a new working group come together and advance that good work that our entire division did initially. We do all kinds of professional development days around curriculum. We do all of these things. All of that is only possible because Residence Life had the cheat code. Residence Life already knew they had already done this work. That’s our largest division on our campus like it is in many places.
They have the most natural touch points with our students. We’re a one-year residential requirement, big public institution. So that means Residence Life is the front door to the student experience. It’s a major culture driver for us here at the University of Oklahoma. And so Residence Life already had this muscle memory around what curriculum building looks like it is, and they played really well. So they came to the table and said, “Well, this is what we’ve been doing for the past eight years. How can this speed up? What can this look like?” We didn’t copy and paste. So the residential curriculum that the university had enjoyed and been really successful at sunset a little bit, but the bones are still there. The idea of what curriculum is definitely still there, but the learning aims morphed to be more inclusive across our entire division.
Also, time happens, right? So the original learning goals that Residence Life had created were incredibly situated in a time that was pre-COVID, pre-pandemic, pre… Some other pieces that happened in the context of higher education, and it was time to revise those anyway. So Residence Life came to the table with all of the knowledge, with the muscle memory around how to make it work with the bones of, we know we need rubrics or we can show you what our facilitation guides look like and a buy-in. They brought a significant amount of buy-in to the process because they were like, “Well, this is what we’ve been doing and we actually don’t know how y’all have been doing your work without it.” At some point, it becomes such a natural component to the Res Life work that they felt really passionate about the rest of us, the rest of the division, having the opportunity to get to work within that structure as well.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, and I think the way that you framed that is a perfect segue to my next question because I would assume more often than not, and I guess especially if you look backward more that a divisional curriculum likely started as a residential curriculum. I think nowadays, and certainly, as we’re looking ahead, I can imagine that an institution that has nothing may be at maybe 50/50 or so starting at the divisional approach and certainly leaning a lot on like you’re saying to the folks in residence education where they have a lot of touch points and inputs and what are these student looking for, how do they want to get it? Anything to inform the process. But like you said, regardless whether you’re starting from nothing or building upon a residential curriculum, those are going to be colleagues that you’re leaning on a lot.
So to dig into the case study at OU, in what ways, if you want to expand on having a residential curriculum first, make it easier to implement a divisional curriculum? Because I think we’ve done episodes where it’s even just acknowledging sometimes the change management piece, all that emotional stuff, the battling out like you’re saying, that part of it even as much as logically people understanding concepts and going through policies, procedures and whatever else. So I feel like those are two sides of the coin. So whatever way you want to approach this, you had something you were building upon. How did that help with the divisional curriculum work?
Erin Simpson:
Well, we had anticipated beginning a divisional curriculum. So we sent our entire student affairs executive leadership team to ICA in fall 2019 and spring 2020 we were going to launch this. We were going to go, we were going to build this divisional curriculum. Well, spring 2020 did what it did. We descended into pandemic time and that didn’t happen. But there were some departments that had been represented on that trip to ICA where we took this massive group to be like, “This is what we’re going to do.” That said, “Well, hey, we don’t want to wait.” Residence Life has been so, so successful. We’re watching their student staff understand the point, right? We’re watching their coordinators, assistant associate directors feel really empowered in their work, feel really solid in what they want to put out into Residence Life and what they want students to get back from it.
So we’re watching all of this success, so we don’t actually want to wait because the division has very clearly and reasonably and necessarily put a pause on creating something new for us in these uncertain and troubling times. And so Residence Life actually got to be the blueprint for some other departments first. So our Student Life department, our Gender and Equality Center, one of our scholarship programs decided that they were going to launch departmental curriculums and they were going to teach their staff about it, and they were going to learn from Residence Life, and they were going to do all of these things prior to the division. Because at that point, I mean, we had no idea when we would be able to divisionally come back together around creative or innovative ideas that weren’t rooted in the fear and uncertainty of the times.
These departments very clearly were ready and so sort of launched something and then participated with Residence Life as much as possible. And also, I want to make sure that I acknowledge that Residence Life units across the country were carrying their institutions during COVID, and so they showed up in support of, right? They wanted to participate with, they were like, “Hey, we know that you are doing some massive things over here that weren’t perhaps on your Bingo card for what this experience would look like, and so how could we supplement? How can we feed in? How can we do these things?” So then what that looks like is all of a sudden you have one really seasoned department who believes in this quite a bit, and then you’ve got three baby departments who are just really eager, just really excited, and they’re putting stuff together and they’re feeling it out, but none of that’s really talking to each other short of those four departments maybe showing up at the same program or being like, “Oh, here’s a convergence point in some of our learning aids.”
So that’s when it became clearer to us as a division that yes, we had a lot going on. Everybody, all of 2020 and 2021 had a lot going on, but our departments were actually hungry for this type of structure, this kind of work, this kind of thinking, and this kind of collaboration. And so then that’s when we put together the idea of, okay, we’re going to spend the fall of ’22 building and so that’s what we did. We spent an entire fall semester coming together building all of these pieces. I think that was actually the fall of ’21 time is really hard and relative, and essentially at this point a circle. So we came together and all these units got to participate, but I’ve got Residence Life as the elder statesman in the room being like, “Well, these are the things,” and they carry a lot of cache and weight on our campus.
And then I’ve got departments like our Student Life unit who is essentially our engagement hub, a campus activities unit being like, “This is what it’s doing for us. We’re a baby. We’ve been doing this for a year, nine months, and this is how it’s showing up for us.” And then I’ve got former housing folks running other units being like, “Please, please, please, please. We really want this.” And so it really allowed our entire division even every time change happens, you’ve had episodes on change management, you’ve done all these things. There are always skeptics in the room.
There are always people who are interested in comfort and safety for very good reasons, particularly at that time in our sort of place, right? They’re like, “We’re actually doing really good and we’re just now coming out of something scary or beginning to emerge and you want us to change everything again?” But I got to be honest, it felt like the window for change was open because we had just changed everything we had done during COVID, and we’d figured out how to do things on Zoom that we would’ve never even considered. We had figured out, first of all, how to run Zoom. We had figured out all of these things, but that change window was just starting to close. At some point, people were going to be done and they were going to be like, “I need predictability, stability. I need to function in things that I already feel really good and competent at.”
But I think we just got in. We just got in that change window, and all of a sudden people were like, “Okay, so you mean if I can just link the things that I know my… I need to think about things in this learning way and not just recreate what we did before the pandemic because it turns out people aren’t actually showing up to those things right now.” And I was like, “Yeah.” That was it, right? That was it. All of a sudden we spent a lot of time talking about how this generation of students needs to see a ton of relevance. They need to see why this matters. They need to see why it matters for them. They have all kinds of things that are competing for their time, attention, energy and resources, and we’ve got to make it worth it.
They think about that, is this worth it? Versus I feel like at once upon a time, students just came to things because that was what they did. They were like, “Oh, this is happening.” So we go to that. That’s not happening. Students aren’t just showing up because it exists. It’s got to be relevant, it’s got to be worth it. It’s got to speak to some sense of something that they need, want, feel safe, affirmed by. And so this has helped. This has created that space for us. And when I think about the timeline of how we did it, it kind of overwhelms me because I’m flooded with the emotional response of that time. But I think that change window was just so important, and I tried really hard to keep it cracked open a little bit, right? Let’s be comfortable with change, let’s be comfortable with… And that I think has also been really helpful. Remember the last time we did this, it went really well. We all really liked it, and so we’ve been trying to really cash in on that a little bit.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I think that’s a great way to frame it because I was thinking an interesting question on that is that idea of acknowledging part of the change management equation is just where you are in time and space. Is there a change window that is opening or that you can open? Because I could even think about if there’s leadership transitions or changes. That’s always time when I think you can get that sort of support for things from that level. Certainly, if there’s a moment where I would hope is few and far between, but things come to an absolute halt, you can really evaluate, rebuild, and restart or something. But the other thing to me, I guess is a lot of institutions out there have had presidential curriculums maybe for several years and everything. I know this is not an exact case at OU, but I guess just confirm my suspicions.
Do you feel like it could be a good opportunity or way to frame this and start to open that window of opportunity of say, “Okay, well, we created this or implemented this curriculum however many years ago, we’re looking to evaluate it and do that evaluation in service of likely expanding that to a divisional level?” Do you feel like something like that would make sense you think for a lot of your colleagues at other institutions to where… Because I think again to sort of piggyback on the way that you’re framing this, which I think is really smart, that idea of sometimes the window just gets open, it gets thrust open by something and you’re like, “Well, okay… Well…” Other times it’s like, yeah, you need to start gently opening it and getting folks ready to do this work and make these transitions and everything. So that idea of the long tenure, an expiration date on a residential curriculum, evaluating, assessing, updating could be a good framework to expand it to a divisional level.
Erin Simpson:
I absolutely think yes. I also think it helps, there’s two sides to that coin. One coming forward and being like, “Hey, it’s time to revise advance, take a look at evaluate, assess,” do all these really good things that are actually an essential element of curriculum building. So that gives your division sort of the opportunity to say, “Oh, it’s my time to jump on the train.” But it also gives your Residence Life staff the opportunity to say, “This has served us really well, and it’s okay if we sunset pieces of it so that we can move forward in tandem with our colleagues across the division.” Because there were pieces… I was an architect of the residential curriculum at the University of Oklahoma, one of many, and so there were even pieces for me at that point when I was leading a divisional change where I was like, oh, I don’t want to say, “Oh, hang on.”
We worked really hard on that one phrase and this one narrative. Where’s it going to go? But I had the opportunity. I had the opportunity because that window was open and because Residence Life was coming forward and saying, “It’s also time for us to revise.” It felt natural to get the opportunity to let go peacefully to some of their pieces of their curriculum that maybe will show up. Nothing is in the trash can, so it’s not that it’s gone forever, it maybe didn’t fit in the first iterations of the divisional curriculum. And I think that was a really important piece for it as well, that we didn’t just come in and Bigfoot stomp all over their stuff. It was an invitation to collaborate and an invitation to figure out how some of their programmatic level, strategy level learning outcomes really did still fit, absolutely still fit in our larger divisional curriculum. When we think about what our Residence Life curriculum, our residential curriculum looked like, it’s reflected clearly in our divisional curriculum. It has to be right? It’s contextually specific.
It feels like the University of Oklahoma brand and style. And so of course there’s some pieces that feel very familiar, but they don’t feel identical. And I think that was a really good piece of that as well for both sides of that equation to feel like they had the opportunity to get to participate in advancing rather than one side feeling taken and one side feeling like you have to conform to what they’re doing. I think that was a really significant development in the collaborative change management friends let’s all be besties part of the curriculum building.
Dustin Ramsdell:
That’s part of, I guess all of this that is always just so fascinating to me because I think with so many things in higher ed, there’s the very much adherence to the collegiality and all that, but even still, there could be these artificial siloing or barriers in the sense of I think people do earnestly want to work together and be collegial and understand they’re all on the same team, but any number of things get in the way because certainly it’s an idea of like, well, I have my goals, I have the things that I’m trying to achieve and there’s only so many hours in the day kind of thing or whatever. But I think when you can get folks together for something like this, it’s just a great rallying cry to make sure everyone knows that we’re all striving towards the same goals, but doing it in our own ways and anything like that.
And I guess, yeah, just figuring out the right approach to that, timing for that. And even part of what you were getting at before of it’s not even saying that, “Well the way that you’re doing things is wrong, you need to do it this way and it’s because I said so.” Sometimes it is just being like, “No, just reframe and maybe contextualize what you’re doing in a different way. You’re already doing a lot of great amazing work that achieves what we’re hoping for students, but we just want to make sure that we can ground that and for lack of a better term, even just justify or defend what we’re doing by having it just fall in line with this framework that we’re establishing.” That everybody’s signing off on and agreeing to. And so I’m curious then specifically for what you’re doing, and it could be I guess things specific to OU or just what you’re seeing in the larger world impacting your work, what is on the horizon for your work in this area?
Erin Simpson:
So I think anybody who is thinking about higher education right now cannot in any format really cannot be ignoring legal and legislative frameworks that may be impacting the work that we’ve really been trying to advance. I’m spending a ton of time thinking about and working with other schools on what is the core value and how does it get talked about and how do you navigate and manage impending legislation either at the state or national level that impacts what you want to do. How do you navigate that? Is it a preservation strategy? Do you preserve the service, right? Or is it a vocabulary strategy? You just use different words, right? There’s no single answer because we’re all in these very specific tiny boats that are floating around in the same sea of uncertainty around what’s happening. I think you can’t ignore a dear colleague letter.
I don’t think you simply can’t ignore legislative action in your own states. You simply can’t do that. And so I think it’s important that institutions… It has always been, but it is so important that institutions are understanding what their strategies are, and Student Affairs has to be involved at the table for that. Simply has to be. You were talking about earlier, sort of our adherence to collegiality. And that’s what happens when you are as a field have been sort of structurally and systematically under resourced and put in this scarcity mindset. And so everybody is starting to feel really like, well, I have to hang on my piece so that I’m relevant. And we’re actually watching colleagues at institutions across the country lose their jobs for doing really good and important work.
And so if this isn’t on your mind as you’re structuring a curriculum that can stand up to scrutiny, then it has to be. It simply has to be, I wish that wasn’t what we were thinking about. Right? That’s not my favorite thing, but it absolutely is for the specific timing and context that we’re in right now. This is a movement in higher education that we can’t ignore and have to deal with. And it doesn’t matter what kind of state you think you live in, you have to be thinking about that. That’s just to me to not do that is honestly negligent. You have to be thinking about it in some way, shape, or form.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, and I mean, I was recording this on the last day of March, March 31st, 2025. I think that’s the idea. Who knows what exactly will happen in the coming months and everything, but I think the ambiguity, the unpredictability, the just turbulence, and choppy waters are not going to stop even if things like legislatively or policy-wise slow down. That doesn’t alleviate demographic cliffs or there’s other sort of things that have been happening and it’s like, “This isn’t helping. This is just one more thing that…” So I think it is even just generally that idea of this work is valuable as a grounding no matter what sort of turbulence that we’re going through. But I think especially now, it could be trying to build out that moat a little bit that’ll defend the castle of curricular approaches and knowing we’re doing what we’re doing with thoughtfulness and intentionality.
We can show our work, we can do all this stuff or is it just being a house of cards that could just blow over whatever a rough storm comes into town and stuff? And I’m always the optimist in the idea that work, this allows for that durability and everything. But certainly, it’s like you’re saying, just the awareness, the acknowledgment, the interfacing with what’s happening is important. You can’t just with me have this almost toxic positivity of just like, “I’m sure everything will work out. I don’t know we’ll just keep it whatever.” It’s like, do what you can, do what you have to be able to defend your work, justify it, and those sort of things, but then pivot where you need to just… I think certain things that could be like, I like that idea. Sometimes we’re just like it’s just like the vocabulary.
It’s like, “If you just want me to call it something different, I’ll do that,” but then we’ll keep doing the important work that we’re doing, whatever. That’d be an area where I’m happy to make that compromise for you so that you’re happy, but just the idea of these rug pulls and everything are just… Yeah, I mean, it’s not helping in any material sense, but I hope that folks are insulated a bit if they are doing this sort of curricular work and everything to where it is so integral to the student experience and you want to retain students. You want them to be happy so that this institution exists and whatever.
So yeah, we shall see what the future holds, but as folks are navigating this moment, I guess, whether it’s stuff to just grit and bear it and get through it or just help elevate and continue to enhance their work and sort of the curricular approach, any resources, advice that you may want to share for folks as they maybe are pursuing certainly similar journeys if they’re specifically going through changing from residential to divisional curricular approaches or anything like that.
Erin Simpson:
I’m always obviously, I started the podcast Planning ICA. That’s the gold standard of resources, and honestly, one of the better professional communities I’ve ever gotten to be a part of, right? People there are generous and transparent in failure, which is just not anyone’s favorite place to live, but is a thing that happens at ICA, and I really appreciate it. Also, in addition to that community, if you don’t have a local student affairs community with your rival up the highway or whatever, this is the time in our context where folks across states and across regions really need to be spending time creating more community. I am fascinated by what I learned from my friends in Oklahoma State, right?
We exchange ideas. We do not like each other on the football field, but we love each other. We have a student affairs context, and I think that’s really important. If there are spaces that you have opportunities to interact with folks who are in similar or even the same in your own state contexts, I think it’s great. I think it’s a really important time for that. We probably should have been doing that forever, and I don’t love that confusion about legislation is what’s bringing us closer together but interesting [inaudible 00:28:35] works.
So there’s that. I’m reading a book or I am constantly rereading Critical Hope. If that’s not a book that you’ve read, I would suggest putting it on your bookshelf. Hope is not a strategy is one of our favorite things to say in curricular work, but the book, Critical Hope is I think an incredibly important resource for us in this work right now. And then I’m trying to feed myself with positive spaces like this one, right? This is a podcast I listen to regularly to think about… I don’t even work in Residence Life anymore, but that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from this space. And so there are all kinds of things like that that I have to do to counterbalance everything else that’s sort of always pummeling us.
So I think that. Friends, the answer to most terrible things is to build more community. So if that’s something that you’re like, “Wow, I’m not sure that’s happening in my institution as well as it could be,” now’s the time. If you’re listening to this, you’re the person to do it. Just start inviting people to lunch. I don’t know. Community is the antidote to so many things, and I just think we are in a time that we need it more than ever.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Absolutely. And I think it is always good to get those little nudges, and I think I’d imagine if you’re the person listening who is now compelled to reach out to your colleagues and get that cup of coffee, lunch, whatever it might be, because I think we get in their heads about that of different notions of people like, “Oh, everybody’s busy,” or whatever else, but it’s like, no, we do need that now more than ever. And I think just getting into that habit so that you have it to get through the times now and to build your endurance and everything even further in the future when hopefully you won’t really need it as much. But I think, yeah, it is such an interesting moment, and I think that idea that hope is important, but also not a strategy.
So it’s like how do you balance that of, well, I need to build that sort of energy and maybe do that of find my communities, find different spaces and places and podcasts, and certainly appreciate you listening because that’s certainly good for me, is the idea that there are thoughtful people committed to trying to have the right conversations at the right time and drive work forward that is having a positive impact on others and all that.
So that’s always just a big part of my routine as well. I’m certainly working remotely, finding spaces and places for community and stuff is, I’ve found to be that much more important. Because there was a time where it was just like, “Oh, this is so great,” whatever, then I’m just like, “No, I’m itching to get out of the house and also just be in community with higher ed folks and everything.” So I think it could even be where you find it in unpredictable places kind of thing of like, oh, this is not exactly the idea of not working in Residence Life, but you still listen to the show. It’s like, yeah, we talk about a lot of different stuff or going out to a particular conference or whatever where it’s just like, “Oh, I work a lot with those people,” or, “I used to work in this space,” or whatever else.
I think just talking shop and being in community with people who work professionally in higher ed is always time well spent. Well, I appreciate you, your work, the time that you’ve given here, and all that you’ve shared, so ways to connect with you in the show notes. But yeah, this was a great conversation. I think again, just really trying to continue to drive forward, exploring all facets of developing, maintaining, enhancing, curricular approaches at institutions all over the country. So yeah, just thanks again.
Erin Simpson:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Super appreciated it.
