In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, host Jas sits down with Thomas Bruick to discuss “unlearning” and mindset change. In student affairs and higher education, unlearning refers to the intentional process of letting go of outdated beliefs, assumptions, or practices to make space for the “new.” It involves critical self-reflection, openness to change, and a commitment to slowing down our thoughts to make informed decisions. This process is especially relevant as institutions evolve to better serve and respond to societal shifts with our student populations.
Guest: Jasmine Nettles
Host: Thomas Bruick (he series), Associate Professor and Program Coordinator, University of Central Arkansas
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Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast is a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in residence life and college student housing. If you have a topic idea for an episode, let us know!
Transcript:
Jasmine Nettles:
So, hey y’all, and welcome back. My name is Jasmine Nettles and I am one of your hosts for the ResEdChat podcast. I have another special guest with me if you can’t tell. I’m going to say that probably about everybody that I bring on this episode, but today we’re going to talk about something that was pivotal in my journey in higher education, and that’s the courage to unlearn in order to relearn. And the person that is here is the person who taught me how to do that. So, Timmy Tom, can you introduce yourself to the people?
Thomas Bruick:
Hello, everyone. Dr. Thomas Bruik. I’m a faculty member and program coordinator in the college student personnel administration program at the University of Central Arkansas, where I have the wonderful opportunity to work with graduate students similar to Jas, now several years ago, which feels crazy.
Jasmine Nettles:
Yeah, six, seven?
Thomas Bruick:
Six.
Jasmine Nettles:
I graduated in 2020.
Thomas Bruick:
Yeah, yeah, don’t add more years to it.
Jasmine Nettles:
Don’t add more to it.
Thomas Bruick:
But prior to being in the faculty role, I was on the practitioner end. I worked in residence life for almost a decade, and then the last half of that was kind of half res Life, half student success, now I’m in the faculty role and then something new this fall, I’m starting to work with first year students again as part of my role. I’m not leaving the master’s program or anything, just getting back to some of that student success work alongside.
Jasmine Nettles:
Cool. See, I didn’t know that. Congrats, Tom.
Thomas Bruick:
Thank you.
Jasmine Nettles:
I’m going to call him probably several different nicknames, everybody. Just go with it. Okay? I love it. So like I said, today I want to talk about what it takes to unlearn things that you’ve always known from an educational standpoint. Because a lot of times when we talk about student affairs, work and how personal those connections are, our beliefs and our values come with that. And sometimes in this field, that is not something we have the luxury of being able to use or rely on when we’re making decisions, when we’re choosing jobs or just what we do in general. I know specifically in my current role for curriculum, living learning communities, if I programmed or I built a curriculum simply around what I understood, I would get nowhere or I would be the only person who understood it. So my first question for you, what are some common mindsets or practices that our higher ed professionals… What’s affected by having the courage to unlearn?
Thomas Bruick:
Definitely. So I think the first thing that always comes to mind here is even just the idea of best practice. So at first, I have to give credit where credit is due. One of my faculty members, when I was in my doctoral program, Dr. William Boone, is who introduced me to this idea of unlearning as part of your learning process. And then, like we do, we take good things that work well and we implement it with others, similar to what you were talking about earlier, Jas. So I think first always it makes me think about this idea of best practice and how it’s really not a reality in our work. When we think about the incredibly rich context of our work, the idea of a singular best practice or a set of… I always say there’s no manual for this work. And so I think from the conceptual level, it requires this idea that I’m not looking for the one right answer.
I need this approach that allows me to explore, allows me to examine myself, my context around me, my institutional context, my students, my colleagues, everything that goes into that complex context and really thinking about this idea of best process. And so what is my process of thinking, planning, and then doing before, so that our actions are grounded in that process, not in this idea of, “Well, this is what’s best.” Kind of like you were saying earlier, “This is what’s best, based on my current understanding at this moment in time.” We can stagnate when that’s the approach we take.
Jasmine Nettles:
I love that. And I think that one of the things that we did a lot of when we were in grad school was just having conversations. And I think that is a lost art when we look at higher education now. We can blame the panini press pandemic if we want to, but I think that at this point there has become a comfort in doing what we know and processing in a way that’s comfortable to us that people just rely on. And that’s where people stay. I know in my current experience with higher ed and just the roles that I’ve had, having to fight against the system of what we’ve always done, things like that, has been the biggest thing. So I would say, if you had to start at the beginning, what’s the most important initial thought or process for that, I need to unlearn this? What do you think that looks like for professionals?
Thomas Bruick:
No, I think that’s a wonderful question. I think it fundamentally is pushing against the flow of our work. So it’s the idea of fast versus slow thinking, which comes from Daniel Kahneman. And there’s a wonderful chapter in Student Affairs by the Numbers, by Sriram, who puts that in the higher ed context. But everything about our work is often structured to move quickly. Everything’s an emergency. And what happens is we become pre-programmed to be doers and not thinkers. So we need to be both. Now, the other side’s true. We can’t just sit back and talk all day and not do anything.
Jasmine Nettles:
And people would, if we let them go.
Thomas Bruick:
If they let us, we would. And so it’s really striking that balance, but starting with the thinking and the reflecting, the exploring, asking really good questions, like you referenced several times already. That’s how conversations start. The lost art of the conversation. I think a lot of it has to do with we operate so quickly, so fast thinking, and so you’re always going to go to your default practice, your default approach, when you have that fast thinking approach. And then learning how to ask a really good question, especially when you’re working with others, can really be that foundation point. I often think about our planning and things like that. Often think about training because that’s always a robust kind of endeavor. And I think about how many times we sit down to plan training and we say, “What do we want to do in training this year?,” instead of sitting down with that committee or whoever it is and saying, “What do we want to achieve in training this year?” Fundamentally different conversation and fundamentally different planning approach.
I think the last thing I’ll say there from that first step that you asked about, is sometimes it’s just we think we don’t have time for all this talk or all this reflection, things like that. I argue often that the investment time on the front end saves us time over the longevity of the endeavor because when we have that conversation about training, for example, of what do we want to achieve, we plan a structure in that approach where we have clear outcomes, we have clear goals. Then the next year when we revisit those, if we still want to achieve the same things, then we just have to go into, “Okay, what strategies worked, what strategies didn’t?” And so over time you’re going to save quite a bit of time, but it’s very opposite of the standard approach.
And so often we don’t give ourselves that space or create that space to do the reflective work ’cause we feel like, “I’ve got to get this done now.” So at its core level, it’s pushing back against that fast thinking. Because we do have emergencies. We don’t need to sit back and reflect when we have a facility emergency or things of that nature.
Jasmine Nettles:
Situational, yeah.
Thomas Bruick:
Yeah. But I think outside of that, we need to allow ourselves that slow thinking that actually leads to better practice and, I would argue, saves us time in the long run.
Jasmine Nettles:
Obviously the first time I heard of the concept of fast and slow thinking was in grad school with you. So when we would have conversations about things, especially when we started doing case studies, we would always jump straight to the answer of, I don’t want to say assigning blame or something like that, but just the way that we would process things, it would jump straight to something. And I think that something that you did so well for us was like, “Well, let’s unpack that a little bit.” That was our favorite thing to say in class.
Thomas Bruick:
Ah, so many memories.
Jasmine Nettles:
If you had to share a pivotal moment in your own experience, or maybe from a faculty standpoint, of a moment of unlearning or having to lead someone to that, what did that look like? Tell us about it.
Thomas Bruick:
So many, so many. So, one that comes to mind that I go back to often, and this was probably, goodness, 12 years ago now or so. I was working with a first year student success program. We were trying to grow our academic affairs collaboration. So by the nature of this program, some of it operated best being integrated into some of our first year seminars and some of our first year courses. So I was gradually trying to build those partnerships in collaboration with different faculty. And there was one music faculty member who was extremely dedicated to their students and student success, and he and I were meeting and we’re talking about the possibility of integrating this initiative as part of the course and what that could look like. And he had this moment of just pause and you could see the trouble on his face and he was trying to think about how that would look and could look. And he is like, “Well, I guess we don’t have to cover this composer as much.”
And I remember in that moment of realizing this was a… I knew him, I knew how much he was committed to his students, that this was a really, really difficult decision. And it’s because his curriculum is also extremely valuable to him. And so in that moment, I learned about just how culturally humble we have to be because our affairs and student affairs, fundamentally different cultures and even intellectually humble, and not knowing, not thinking, “I know exactly what you should do in order to integrate this.” And so that moment is pivotal to me often ’cause I unlearned what collaboration looked like, and really it set the foundation for my thinking around how I need to approach things with intellectual and cultural humility to truly engage in collaborative work. So I think about that moment. You mentioned an instructor one as well. I’m pretty sure it was your cohort. They do all start blending together, but teaching that diversity in higher ed course, and I wanted to establish-
Jasmine Nettles:
Ground rules on day one.
Thomas Bruick:
Yes. Yeah. You remember. And my heart was to again, establish a way where we could have the hard conversation. And it was about halfway through where I realized that approach actually was stifling.
Jasmine Nettles:
Yeah, because some of us were holding back more than others. Yeah.
Thomas Bruick:
Aha. Yeah. And so I think about that moment as well from an instructional standpoint of unlearning and what does it look like to co-create those spaces? So much of this is this idea of co-creation and construction. If we view learning as 100%, we achieve learning of this one thing, you can’t really unlearn and relearn in that space, whereas view it as, “I’m constantly moving.” Then sometimes if how my brain is wired leads me down a path that’s not effective, I have to back up a little bit, get some perspective on that, and then look at, “Okay, what would a new path look like?” And that often involves engaging others. Well, we keep coming back to that comment you made about the art of the sometimes challenging, sometimes uncomfortable, but extremely productive conversations. And they don’t always have to be uncomfortable. It’s just how often-
Jasmine Nettles:
I think most of the time they are, but not intentionally. I didn’t send this question, but you brought it up, so now I want to ask. What does that look like? So in those moments where you have to challenge someone’s thought, whether it’s the student or a colleague, how do you… I guess the word would probably just be recover the conversation or the point of where… If the idea was to get here and we had to stumble a little bit, but what does that look like for you as the person that works with them or has to lead them?
Thomas Bruick:
That’s a wonderful question. I think about the helping skills course when I went through the program, which, goodness, it’s almost 20 [inaudible 00:13:52].
Jasmine Nettles:
You don’t have to tell everybody.
Thomas Bruick:
Right. Almost, I said almost. That course changed how I saw interacting with others and helping or leading or being supportive, anything in that space, because telling is not an effective strategy. Even when we know, when we are certain-
Jasmine Nettles:
I think we know, yeah.
Thomas Bruick:
… telling still isn’t a great strategy. So in that case, you mentioned, I think the first thing is, “Do we establish that we do have a shared value or shared goal? So do we want these conversations to be productive? Do we want this course to be successful? Do we want this program to be successful?” If we’re shared there, then you can ask questions around, “Based on how we’re going right now, what do we anticipate the outcome to be?” ‘Cause that’s not something we naturally sit around and think. So we have to create that. Because again, we are programmed to be doers. So we’re going and we’re moving towards a shared goal, but we’re taking very different approaches to that. A question like, “If we keep going and with this strategy, what do we anticipate the outcomes to be?” It tells us to pause and stop and slow down and really examine.
Then asking things like, “What could it look like if we included this component with it?” But again, we’re not telling of like, “I think we need to think about X,” or, “e really need to.” It’s, “What could it look like?” It takes you away from that place of those… And then I think you have to think about power dynamics in this and those conversations as well. If I, as the faculty member for example, or as the supervisor, if I’m the one doing the telling, the structural power dynamics don’t give the student or the colleague that you supervise permission to ask until you do. You have to purposely break down that dynamic. Sometimes you’ll have colleagues who will ask, but we’re not trained that way socially. And so we have to be very aware. ‘Cause sometimes it’s like, “Well, why didn’t the students say something?,” or, “Why didn’t…” it’s like we have to create a space where they can, where it’s safe and it’s seen as productive, where it’s not even seen as a risk, but as an expectation to ask questions and engage in that dialogue.
Jasmine Nettles:
I think one of my favorite things about being connected to you, but also just the community of UCA is that the conversations never stop and they don’t stop. But some of the things that we talk about now, like we were trying to plan something last week, but even when we were supposed to meet originally, it was all of these things are happening. So our conversation went from, “I have to move this,” to, “What’s going on? Wait, what’s the conversation?” And there’s always an intention between our type of faculty student, I’ll always be your student, but that type of dynamic. You mentioned power dynamics, so can you talk a little bit more about that from a colleague perspective. When you’re having to serve on committees with people where you should be equal, but maybe your level of understanding, because you’ve been able to unlearn things and be okay with it being different than what you’re used to or maybe other people, what would that look like, do you think?
Thomas Bruick:
Again, I think humility is huge, right? And so humility allows you to explore. And so humility allows you to, even if you feel like inside, “I’ve explored this deeper than the colleagues in the room,” we don’t know that. There might be significant evidence.
Jasmine Nettles:
“I know a little bit more.”
Thomas Bruick:
But I think that’s the first thing is being able to look around a room and say, “I can learn from that person and with that person,” and that’s easier said than done sometimes. That’s a choice that we have to make sometimes, but then people surprise us. People surprise us in challenging ways sometimes. But I think we less often talk about how people surprise us in really good ways sometimes too, when again, the environment supports that. And so I think that humility would prompt you to ask the person, “What ideas do you have? What are we missing here?” Asking those good questions. And then I think about, yeah, we might all be the same positionally, but there’s always dynamics. There’s social dynamics, there’s institutional capital dynamics. Sometimes the most powerful person in the room is not the person with the most positional power.
Jasmine Nettles:
Right. Or degree
Thomas Bruick:
Or degree. There’s definitely some societal hierarchies and power dynamics and privileges and all of that, and then we take all that and we move it into a bunch of different rooms. And that stuff doesn’t stop at the door. It gets mixed up in different ways at every door. So every meeting is different ’cause you might have that colleague who, in that room, they are the person who could totally take over if the environment allowed them to, or if they didn’t approach with that humility, and then that same person might be in a meeting two hours later, where they’re the underdog.
Jasmine Nettles:
And there’s somebody else.
Thomas Bruick:
Right. And that’s what makes this challenging but also fascinating. And it’s just a huge opportunity for us to improve our work when we approach with that. So part of that unlearning process is just thinking about unlearning what it means in these different spaces. What does it look like to be intellectually and culturally humble context?
Jasmine Nettles:
I think that something that I know I wasn’t prepared for in going into student affairs, higher education, learning about theory and stuff, is how it would essentially shatter my worldview of things. And you were there, you got to see a lot of those initial reactions, like, “Wait, what are you talking about? What do you mean I have to change this?” And so for me, I was very fortunate to be in a cohort of people who were having the same types of experiences as me. And I mean you too. We went through the same program, just apart. What does it look like for you? Because unlearning still happens. Even after I’ve learned everything I thought I needed to know, it’s time for me to learn something else.
Thomas Bruick:
Always.
Jasmine Nettles:
What does it look like for you if and when you struggle to have to unlearn something even now you’re esteemed and published and all the great things? So what does it look like for you now?
Thomas Bruick:
No, I mean it really goes back to that idea of it’s a process. It’s a way of moving and thinking. It’s more engaging and it can help with burnout. It can help. Again, burnout is one of those topics, there’s a lot of factors contributing-
Jasmine Nettles:
Research and stuff.
Thomas Bruick:
Part of those factors are in our locus of control, but there’s a lot of them that aren’t. So I’m going to clear the air with that. But then sometimes we don’t allow ourselves to explore. There’s ways to build excitement into your own work too. I think it literally is, if you dive into the neuroscience of it, you’re literally changing your brain structure when you unlearn something. And I’m not a neuroscience expert, I just talk to people who are, so this is my little bit of learning after unlearning, but one of the famous sayings is, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” So like you’re saying, those things that got shattered in grad school, well, they were there because over time those thoughts and emotions and beliefs all fired and wired together. So they had this really strong connection.
And again, it takes someone who’s willing to move slow enough to not respond to that initial firing and be willing to look at it a different way, ’cause we also have this thing called neuroplasticity, where when we make that intentional choice, things literally start shaping different and start rehiring. And so for me, it’s constantly thinking about that and thinking about… I have to ask myself, “What have I unlearned?” When I find myself getting stagnant, “Okay, what have I not explored?” Or even a very, very practical, ’cause I don’t want to just live in the conceptual all day, in this role I purposely need to interact with practitioners and so I have to build in structures for that, where I then go and I’m asking them like… ‘Cause I haven’t interacted with an undergraduate student in a meaningful way in seven years and that’s-
Jasmine Nettles:
Wow, when you think about it like that. Yeah, that’s crazy.
Thomas Bruick:
Yeah. And I’m teaching people who will on a daily basis. So if I’m not at least talking to the practitioners and learning about what challenges are you facing and what’s changing. Like student engagement, we are unlearning and relearning what student engagement looks like right now because it’s changed. There’s a million theories on why, and honestly, it’s great to understand why, but we also need to think about what does it look like now and what are we going to do?
Jasmine Nettles:
What are we going to do? Exactly. What are we going to do? It’s different now, so what are we going to do?
Thomas Bruick:
Yeah. Yeah. And so again, I think it’s doing that environment scan to say, “Okay, where are there places where I’m going to have to force some unlearning on myself?” I call it getting out of my faculty cave. I have a window now though, so I guess I don’t need to call it my cave.
Jasmine Nettles:
Look at that.
Thomas Bruick:
But I mean, again, purposely, we can’t just trust ourselves to be these super reflective beings. Sometimes we have to build in structures to intentionally challenge intentionally, again, facilitate that unlearning process.
Jasmine Nettles:
Yeah, I love it. I think one of my things that I will always be grateful for from just getting to interact with you on a regular basis is the fact that you’ve made it okay to do that, and I don’t think a lot of people get that experience. I know just in meeting new colleagues and talk about their experience in grads, I’m like, “Oh no. He used to let us just argue about it until he had to pull us back and bring us back together and draw the point.” I’m like, “No, we have the safety of that” but I think that the perspective and the knowledge, a lot of times you just don’t get that until you’re in a position to be forced to do it. So I love that that is something that you challenge yourself on ’cause I know I have to do that to myself too.
And the comment that you made about having to engage with practitioners on a regular basis, same, which is why I try to do the conferences that I do and just the relationships I try to build because I don’t get it on a regular basis where I work with having to supervise RXEs. So it’s just a little bit different. But you mentioned the trends are changing, like a couple of things. So we’re talking about engagement, but are there any other trends? You don’t have to name a bunch, but I know you so you know probably all of them, but what other trends do you see changing that people are either struggling with or practitioners are struggling with or maybe more open to?
Thomas Bruick:
That was a really kind way of saying, don’t get on too many soapboxes.
Jasmine Nettles:
Because we could go all day. We only have 40 minutes.
Thomas Bruick:
I appreciate your framing there.
Jasmine Nettles:
We got to stay in the timeframe.
Thomas Bruick:
No, I think the one I would highlight is, and it might be ’cause I’m teaching the course right now or just it’s a passion area for me, as you know, is our assessment approach in the field. We have a very summative mindset, so when we think of assessment, I think we default to the idea of I need enough evidence so that my annual report looks good enough, so that the people above me think I do good work, which is a very summative approach to assessment. And I think that’s why assessment gets a bad name in the field so often, because nothing about that mindset is exciting.
Jasmine Nettles:
It is fun.
Thomas Bruick:
So I really think about, “What would it look like for us to break loose from that and truly take that formative approach of thinking about, ‘How do I use evidence to evaluate if I’m achieving what I want to achieve in my work?'” Here’s the beauty of it. When that annual report comes around, you’ll still have what you need, but you’ll actually have much more valuable things to go along with it too. And so I think that’s one big area of unlearning is… And again, it has historical backing because when the assessment movement started in higher ed, it very much was an accountability movement. And so you still see those historical patterns and how it emerges in the field. And again, we’ll repeat that over and over again unless we intentionally start rewiring how we think about things.
Jasmine Nettles:
That’s so good. So one of the things that I got tasked with this year is assessment, and ours was with Benchworks. So doing my one-on-one and talking to them, one, I think if people get into the mindset that assessment is supposed to help you not hurt you is the biggest thing, ’cause I had to explain to my RXEs, like, “No. 14 people coming to an event. It’s like 14 people telling you walking down the street, they like your T-shirt. That’s 14 people in engagement.” And so that’s such a good one. But of course you said assessment. Why would you not? I love it.
Thomas Bruick:
I mean, you just represented a beautiful unlearning of assessments to help not hurt. That’s statement itself, you hear the unlearning and relearning in that statement.
Jasmine Nettles:
Yeah, and I think my brain computes that because it’s been trained that way now and it did not before 2018, 2019, 2020. So I’m very appreciative, of course. You shared so many gems, of course, but I think if you had to give any piece of advice for practitioners who are maybe new to this approach or are being forced into the approach of unlearning, what would you tell them?
Thomas Bruick:
So I think the last thing I would share is this isn’t necessarily about change, it’s about richness. So what I mean by that is sometimes when people engage in this kind of thought process or approach, the thought is, “Well, that I need to do something fundamentally different.” So what’s interesting when you engage in unlearning, your final decision or action might be really similar or even identical, but the richness of your understanding that’s guiding that, will be fundamentally different. So this isn’t purely a change process. Your brain’s changing, but your behaviors might not drastically change, but the why and the motivation and the intentionality behind that will have fundamentally changed. You’ll have a richer reasoning for engaging the way you engage.
And then the last thing I’ll say, ’cause I know we’re getting close on time, for leaders, and leader is a loaded term. If you have influence with anybody, you have leadership. If we want to foster this type of environment, we have to make calculated risk-taking again, not recklessness, calculated risk-taking-
Jasmine Nettles:
Slow thinking
Thomas Bruick:
Slow thinking, calculated risk-taking and mistakes, something we encourage. And so it will pay dividends in the long run over and over again. I was talking to a vice president literally last week, and they were talking about how appreciative they are that their president allows them to take calculated risk. And when those things don’t work, it’s not a punishment environment. Again, if it’s something not working, we can’t just keep doing it. But again, that’s why we engage in the process. But if calculated risk-taking and not being perfect is punished, then there’s no space for this reflective kind of practice, and ultimately that will diminish what we’re offering our students.
Jasmine Nettles:
Yeah. Well, as always, you are the guru of everything for me, when it comes to talking about this stuff. But I love it. So for anybody listening that is either a mid-manager, an entry-level professional, or a senior level, a leader of a division or a faculty program, just remember that having the courage to unlearn is not as scary as it may seem because once you start, I guarantee you, you’re not going to want to stop because the intentionality behind that of letting go of things that you’ve always known, it’s been so refreshing living on the other side of that. So I love it. But thank you, Dr. B, for joining me, and I hope y’all enjoyed this episode of the Roompact ResEdChat podcast today, and I will see y’all next time.
