ResEdChat Ep 170: Student-Centered Design Versus Administrator-Centered Design for Student with Erin Long

In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, Host Paul sits down with one of our 2026 Roompact Fellows, Erin Long, to discuss all things co-curricular learning. Erin recently completed her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and her dissertation focused on students perceptions of co-curricular learning and its implications for practice. Professionals who have curriculum and learning elements in their ResEd programs won’t want to miss this!

Guest: Erin Long (she/her/hers) currently serves as the Assistant Director for Volunteerism and Service-Learning at the University of Texas at Austin. She recently transitioned out of working in residential education for many years and has just earned her doctorate of Higher Education Leadership from UT. Erin is passionate about learning and ways to support students in any and all forms of learning. She loves to read and hopes to find other hobbies now that she is done with her degree.

Host: Paul Gordon Brown

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Transcript:

Paul Brown:
All right. Welcome back to Roompact’s Res Ed Chat. My name is Paul Brown and I am your host today. I haven’t hosted in a while, so please give me a little grace as I take some of the rest off or the rest of our team have been taking a lot of these. But we’re here to highlight great people doing great work, particularly in Res Ed and Residence Life environments. So I’m really excited today because we have one of our Roompact Fellows for this year joining us. For those of you not familiar with Roompact Fellows, they are our scholar in residence type positions. They work with us for a year. They share their knowledge, do some of our webinars, contribute to our blog, things like that.
So my guest today, Erin Long, this is not the first and only time that you will hear from her, not just in our context, but in general. But she’s going to share a lot of her thinking. And specifically, we’re going to talk a little bit about what her dissertation work was on, which I’m really excited about. But if you do not know Erin, I’m going to do a brief introduction, Erin, but I’m going to let you also introduce yourself. You can give your more formal version, but I’m going to say I’ve known Erin for years, primarily through the Institute on the Curricular Approach, and that’s how we first connected.
But one thing I love about Erin is she’s just a really deep, thoughtful thinker in terms of how do we design things that are intentional and what does that look like? And I think of the many professionals, I know it’s probably one of the things that is your strength and you do best is if I need someone to help me think through something and think through it really thoughtfully, what are our goals here and how can we do it in a meaningful way? Erin Long’s the person I turn to. So let’s turn it over to you, Erin Long. Tell us about yourself.

Erin Long:
Well, thank you so much for that intro. Yeah, so I have been working or had worked in Housing and Residence Life for… Well, I don’t really like to count up the years, but there were a lot of them and worked at a lot of different institutions. So I’ve done really small private institutions. I started at Presbyterian College in South Carolina, and then I’ve done huge institutions. My last housing job was at the University of Texas at Austin, so that’s the breadth of the experience I have in housing. I currently actually work in volunteerism and service learning, which has been a really exciting shift for me. But I had just finished my dissertation in December, just graduated, and I’m very excited to share it beyond the four people who are legally obligated to read it. So yeah.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I mean, a through-thread, even though you don’t work in Residence Life and Housing right now is always that student learning portion. Certainly in your job, you work with applied learning and things like that. That’s also what your dissertation’s about. I think that’s really a through-thread through everything that you do. You also have a deep background though, too, in design thinking.

Erin Long:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Brown:
Is that right? You were on our podcast actually previously to talk about this a little while ago.

Erin Long:
Yeah, a few years ago, I did a podcast on design thinking. I started getting into design thinking actually when I got to University of Texas, so probably about six years ago. I just find it absolutely fascinating to try and get into the mindset of whomever you’re designing for and being like, “Okay, what do I want? What is a good experience for the end user?” Or in our case, usually the student, how are we connecting to them? And so I’ve done a couple of different certificate courses through the LUMA Institute, which is in Pennsylvania. They do online courses, and that has been really helpful. But I just do a lot of reading on it. I took a class here at University of Texas on it, in my doctoral program, I took a class on that as well. And so it’s just been this recent through-line that I find really helpful as well as interesting because I think it helps us get out of this perspective of what’s best for us as educators and administrators into what is best for the students and how are they going to connect the material the best.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it resonates with me. Sometimes I think I’m like, “I should really focus in on being more knowledgeable and digging into that literature.” Because every time I encounter it, I think, “Oh, yeah, maybe I kind of already do that.” Or there’s a part of me that’s like, “No, this completely is synonymous, germane with what I do anyway. And if I just put a little extra effort into digging into it, it’d really help with my work and my thinking and the way that I put things together.” So that’s why I love when you talk about it and you invite it in your work, which it will show up in your dissertation. I do know that, having read it here.
But for those of you who missed Erin’s previous episode, I’ll put it in the show notes. So if you want to watch that and do a deeper dive on the design thinking, I’ll include that for everyone. But let’s talk about this dissertation. So there’s quite a few people that have done residential curriculum, curricular approach dissertations, different vantage points on it. You took a very student-centered vantage point on it. What are the students getting out of it? Other people have focused on systems, like how’s the system foster this or not, and things like that. Can you tell us a little bit about where did this come from? Usually for most people that write a dissertation, they’re like, “I was thinking one day this,” or, “This is what happened to me and that’s where it came from.” What motivated your dissertation here?

Erin Long:
So I think there’s two main things that really kind of were the spark of it. The first is the design thinking, because right around the time that I was starting my doctoral program, I was also starting learning about design thinking. And so that was already in the background and sort of percolating, as I had a professor who said, “You don’t procrastinate, you incubate.” And so it was incubating in my head just then. And then the second thing that happened was in my previous job, I did our big yearly survey. I was the one who was in charge of writing it and putting it together and sending it out and all the things. And I had one question in it that was, “Name one skill you’ve learned while living in the residence halls.”
And I got tons of great answers, especially around communication and conflict management. I got some that were like, “I learned laundry,” which yay, we need to know how to do laundry, so good for you. And then every year I would get one or two that were like, “I didn’t learn anything. I don’t know why you guys think that we would learn in the residence hall. It’s just a place where I lay my head.” And so that got me really thinking, “What do you consider learning? What as a student do you think learning is?”
And it’s interesting, you characterized my dissertation as a curricular dissertation and it is in there, but that wasn’t the impetus. That was the site I used was a curricular site. And the fact that there was the focus on learning made it a lot easier to do the dissertation, but that wasn’t the actual point.

Paul Brown:
Explicit.

Erin Long:
I didn’t set out to write a dissertation on a curriculum.

Paul Brown:
It just happened to be the vehicle that was there at the institution that you did the study.

Erin Long:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
And that’s one of the things I actually really liked about it because as I was writing it, I think I went in with the idea of, “Oh, this is going to be about curriculum.” And then when I was reading it, I was like, “Oh, it is, but it’s more about how do students understand what co-curricular learning is?” How do students understand learning writ large in what student affairs people would be like, “Oh, well, this is obvious. This is where learning occurs.” But how do students experience that, make sense of that, construct that? What do they see as valuable? What do they not see as valuable? The implications for how do we make it a space where that can occur, could occur whether you have a “formal curriculum” or not. Right?

Erin Long:
Right, right. And I also didn’t limit it, and this was a very conscious choice that my committee questioned me on multiple times was I didn’t limit it to the learning in the residence hall because that wasn’t to me the point, wasn’t the location. It was just that it was outside of the curricular sphere and what do they think that is? And so I would get answers from my students or they would tell me about their experiences, yes, in the residence hall, but also with sororities or with other clubs and organizations, they would tell me about their research that happened outside of class. And so there was a lot of great answers that I got from the students that had nothing to do with residence halls.
And Paul, we’ve both been housing professionals for many years, and we get into this thing, this mindset of housing is the only thing.

Paul Brown:
Sure.

Erin Long:
I feel like housing silos itself in this way that is really interesting. We kind of think ourselves experts on everything, and that’s not the case. And so we forget that there’s these things outside of it. And so I was very intentional to look at all of their co-curricular experiences or as many things as they could tell me that they experienced co-curricular. Yeah.

Paul Brown:
I don’t want to stray too far in this direction, but you did make me think of something here in the moment when you were talking about that. And I feel like other student affairs departments, let’s take student activities. I feel like students would say, “Oh yeah, I learned stuff in student activities,” because they can rely on leadership concepts. It’s a very clear skill, leadership, that you would presumably get in those spaces, amongst the other things, but leadership. But when you’re in the residence hall and you’re living there, I don’t know what our clear skill is. We might say something like living with others and conflict resolution and things like that, but you don’t have a lot of students going, “Man, I’m really excited to learn about conflict resolution and things like that.” But if you say leadership, they immediately can lash off. They make sense of it very quickly. And I don’t know if it’s marketing. I don’t know if it’s… Do you know what I’m talking about? Does this make sense?

Erin Long:
Yeah. It absolutely makes sense. So just to give a pretty ubiquitous example of roommate agreements, roommate agreements I think are an amazing tool to learn about how to clarify expectations, how to prevent conflict, all these kinds of things, but we don’t set them up as that. We don’t say, “This is what this is for.” We say, “Hey, this is…” We might say, “This is to set expectations,” but we don’t set it up as a learning experience. And so I think one of the things that I don’t know that I was super explicit about, because the goal of the dissertation was yes, to find something that people could do, a practical skill, because I just don’t like research that doesn’t go back to the practical, but I didn’t test anything. I didn’t test if we went out and were much more explicit with our roommate agreements and talked about the learning with it, if that would help them learn more.
But we don’t set the residence hall up very well, and maybe some people are doing it really great. I did not feel like I, at that point, was doing it as well as I probably could have, but we don’t set that environment up nearly as much as this place of learning and we don’t set our… I think we could do a better job of setting up our RAs so they could explain the learning that happens to others. I think RAs know that they learn during it, and especially in a curricular school, you’re talking a lot about how this is a learning experience and all these things that students are going to learn from, but I think we more talk at them than really get them to engage with that sometimes.
And again, maybe another school is doing it amazingly, and I would love to hear from y’all about how you’re setting that up. But where I am now in volunteerism and service learning, it’s in the title, right?

Paul Brown:
Right.

Erin Long:
We talk about-

Paul Brown:
That is what you do.

Erin Long:
Right, right. And we also have a department here called Texas LEAD. They’re really explicit about their teaching leadership skills, like you were saying. Whereas the residence hall, that’s not, I think, the expectation students go into living in the residence hall four. They are expecting hopefully community and they’re expecting this is going to be a really interesting situation and whatever building they might be in. And so they’re like, “This is my new home,” in a lot of ways, but they’re not expecting it to be a place of learning. And I think we could do a better job of really being explicit about that.

Paul Brown:
I don’t remember, but… I said I wasn’t going to go too far down this path than I am. I don’t remember living-learning communities.

Erin Long:
Yes.

Paul Brown:
Would that make a difference? Meaning, “Oh, well, I’m in a living-learning community.” I mean, it’s in title, living-learning.

Erin Long:
Right.

Paul Brown:
Because one of the findings in here was students struggled with, “What is this co-curricular learning thing that you’re talking about?” And maybe they could articulate those things, but they wouldn’t use that label and they didn’t know what that word meant. But I’m wondering if when we have living-learning communities in the halls, if that gives the structure, if that gives the marketing, if that gives the license to be like, “Oh, you mean my living-learning community where I,” this, this, this, this, and this? But when you absent that, that doesn’t have that structure. Did that show up at all or does that just resonate or am I completely off in a different direction?

Erin Long:
It did show up a little. We had one participant who was in a living-learning community and it was interesting, he was a transfer student, and so he had already lived in the residence halls and talked about things he had learned before he even came to the institution, the site institution, but he did go into that a little bit. I think he talked a lot more about the community that happened because of it than the learning that happened because of it. And those two things are kind of hard to tease out anyways. But yeah, I think that does help a little bit, but I do wonder, because… And again, this might be institution specific. I think a lot of times we talk about living-learning communities less in the learning and more in the community. This is a community of people who have similar interest to you, and we focus sometimes a little bit more on that than we do the learning aspect of it.
And also my site institution, most of their living-learning communities didn’t have a class connected to it, so it was a little more towards theme communities than a living-learning community. And I think that’s one part of this study that was like, it could have been better if I had had more sites or different types of institutions. That was one of the…

Paul Brown:
Limitations.

Erin Long:
… drawbacks to it. Yeah.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. That makes sense because I think… I went to a public liberal arts college and when I was a first-year student, I took a first-year seminar, a one credit seminar that was the Physics of Star Trek with a math professor and we read the book, The Physics of Star Trek. It was cool because she would come in and would try to explain how would a transporter work, how would phasers work? But it was really just the vehicle for them to check in on, “Hey, you’re going to register for classes for the first time.”
And that was the fun piece, but we would also go to her house for dinner or I think there was a Star Trek movie that came out during the course of that. And so we went as a group and it wasn’t residence hall based, but I would definitely say I was learning things in there because I had that class piece. And if it was in a residence hall, that blending made a lot of sense to me. So I would probably attribute this program experience, especially if it was tied to the residence hall would.

Erin Long:
So this is a little off-topic, but I think it’s really funny. My freshman year, and this was not my freshman seminar, I had one of those, but I took a class my freshman year that I got science credit for it that was called Vision, Reality and Beyond. And the class was literally, we read the 2001 Space Odyssey Series and did what you did and talked about what they considered or the technologies that they talked about, both real and imagined and how they would work in a scientific thing. And that was one of my favorite classes, and I’m still so excited I got science credits for that.

Paul Brown:
I majored in those classes. I also took the History of Mysticism and the Occult. Fantastic.

Erin Long:
That sounds fascinating. I would totally take that class.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, another thing that showed up, and this has actually been what I’ve been thinking about lately a lot, is the community belonging piece as kind of a prerequisite for learning, and that showed up with your participants a lot. Can you tell people a little bit about that? Because I feel like sometimes since there was a curricular approach in place at your site institution, some people are like, “Oh, we don’t do curriculum, we focus on belonging.” And I’m like, “Why aren’t you focusing on both?” And I feel like some people set this up as you either do one or the other. And I’m just like, “That doesn’t make sense to me.”

Erin Long:
No.

Paul Brown:
You can’t.

Erin Long:
Yeah. And so I had multiple participants who really talked about their RAs and specifically either said they didn’t go to things because they didn’t know their RAs. One of my participants, I think it was Karina, she talked about, “My RAs only talked to me once, and that was to tell me that my boyfriend couldn’t be in the hall without me, and that’s the only time I’ve talked to her. And so I don’t go to her with anything because I don’t know her. I don’t know people on the floor. I have other friends.” And then I had another student, I think it was Grace, another participant, Grace, who talked about… She really talked about a specific thing where she went to a program that taught ASL and really excited about just these intro ASL things that she learned. And she was like, “I went because I was friends with my RA and I love my RAs and they talk to me every time I pass them in the hall and they always want to know how we’re doing and they’re my friends.”
And so that was really in there as this piece of the puzzle of those who felt closer to their RAs definitely ended up going to things more or were more involved within the residence hall. And people who didn’t have that connection didn’t go to events. And I feel like that’s something that has always been… At least a thing I’ve told my RAs is always, if you are… It’s kind of been anecdotal a lot.
And so I think that definitely showed up in the dissertation. I think the other thing that showed up that was really interesting, and this was… Because I asked about… We did a lot of bulletin boards, and so we asked specifically some of the people, “Did you look at the bulletin boards?” And we had one student, Estella, who loved the bulletin boards, would literally go out of her way to go look at them and remembered specific bulletin boards from the previous-

Paul Brown:
Wow.

Erin Long:
Yeah. And the skills that she learned from it, she learned time management skills from it and was telling me all about it. And I was like, “Okay.”

Paul Brown:
You’re like a Residence Life professional’s dream.

Erin Long:
Right? And I specifically told her, I was like, “You need to tell your RAs that.” I was like, “They spend so much time on those bulletin boards and don’t always feel like they’re appreciated. You need to tell your RA that.” And I don’t know if she did or not, but that was a really cool moment for me as a housing professional, be like, “Oh, this thing I’ve been telling them to do actually worked. Yes.”

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, I wanted to bring that up in part, the bulletin board piece, but there’s a few other ones related to that that I wanted to bring up, but I wanted to bring up that one because some institutions aren’t even doing them anymore or they’re replaced with electronic signage. And it’s one of those things of, like… I think I wrote an article called Residence Life’s Problem with Bulletin Boards.
And it’s one of those things of what’s the time to impact ratio on that? When does that diminish? If your RAs are spending five hours doing a really beautiful board, is that worth their time investment for the impact that it has? But what if it was lower level, would that make more sense? But also my tech background and my dissertation stuff, the splintering of communication channels with students, bulletin boards still have a place, I think, but they’re one of many. Versus when I was in a Residence Hall, there was no social media. We had landline phones, we did not have mobile phones, texting or anything. We had internet, but we’re talking Napster era. AIM era was… AOL Instant Messenger.
So the competition for student time and the ways that they get their information is just different now. There’s not one channel where we can just be like, “Boom, it’s the only game in town. You have to look here in order to know what’s going on or other things.” Are they a learning tool? Are they still an effective learning tool? How much time should we spend on them? Should we care? Do we give them up? I mean, tell me, Dr. Long, what are we supposed to do about bulletin boards?

Erin Long:
So what’s really interesting is I actually worked with Dr. Daniel Beckton a few years before I did my dissertation and we wrote an article and his actual dissertation was a photo view of the bulletin boards in the residence halls. And then we actually had those students come into our staff meeting and talk about how they viewed the bulletin boards. So I think what we do wrong with bulletin boards is not that we do them. I think we do them and then we leave it there and don’t do anything else with it. Whereas I think when we ask students about it and talk to them and engage with it and be like, “Oh, so we did this bulletin board on time management and it was fantastic. Did you try any of these things? Is this the thing you’re struggling with?”
We don’t connect that to anything else that we do or these conversations that we’re having. And that’s what Daniel and I found was when you talked about it, they processed it on a different level and thought about it a lot deeper and the learning was deeper because of that. And so I think that’s sort of my stance on bulletin boards is, and you and I have talked a lot about intentional conversations as well, but what if we paired those two things or… I mean, Roompact does great microsurveys. Use that. What are ways that we can emphasize those bulletin boards in other ways so that it’s not just this thing that they pass by twice a day and starts just disappearing to them because they see it all the time. Yeah.

Paul Brown:
Well, and I think that’s one of the gifts that, regardless of whether a school uses a curricular approach or not, one of the concepts that I think I took away from curricular work is being more focused in your goals and your outcomes for students. Because I think when I was an RA, it was like, “Come up with a bulletin board, whatever you want it to be.” And when I was working at an institution and we were doing it, we were weaving the topics of the bulletin board so that it supported the program that was going on, which was supporting the conversations that… It was all part of one hole that we were weaving in. And I think that to me, I mean, I should have done further research on it, but I mean, that to me was giving it a bigger impact than a drop in this, whatever the RA happens to be passionate about topic, which is probably good, but absent the other things going on. It’s just not going to have the impact you want it to

Erin Long:
Have. Right, right. And I think in those cases, it’s not worth the RA’s time when they’re just kind of one-off like, “Ooh, I find Earth Day really interesting. Let me do a bulletin pole on Earth Day.” But when you combine it with maybe an event that’s about Earth Day and then they’re asked about your sustainability practices in the hall, or you have a contest done, recycling or whatever that might be, and you’re combining those things and having a little bit more focus on it, I think it’s just so much more impactful.

Paul Brown:
I mean, even on the information front, it’s like, “Well, you need to put it in the bulletin board, but you need to post it on Blue Sky and you need to do a TikTok video of it and you need to do it,” because everyone’s on every channel and everyone’s… It’s kind of hitting in multimethods and things like that, which kind of gets towards the last thing I wanted to hit on, which is, this goes back to the design thinking a little bit, but you talked about administrative-centered design versus student-centered design, and I think there’s some themes in what we were talking about with the bulletin boards that we hit on there. Can you tell people about that? Because I think that’s probably one of the most impactful commentaries and findings that you came [inaudible 00:27:31] and that speaks to your unique strength with the design thinking mindset to help people.

Erin Long:
Right. So it’s this theme that was woven throughout the dissertation of administrator design, it kind of asks the question, what’s easiest for us as educators to do? Is it I do the program at 4:00 PM on a Tuesday because that’s when it fits into my schedule versus what is it that works for the students? And I think we talk about that a lot in timing sometimes, but we don’t always talk about that a lot in the experience. Talking about conflict management, we might find it easiest to help students learn about that through a workshop, but that’s not, I think, the best way to learn about conflict management. You got to go through it. You got to be in conflict-

Paul Brown:
Also not very sexy of a topic to try to get students to attend either.

Erin Long:
No, no, they don’t want to do that. They don’t want to be in conflict.

Paul Brown:
I mean, I kind of don’t want to do that, so I get it.

Erin Long:
Yeah, it’s not my favorite, but I think in that specific example, sitting in the discomfort is part of the learning and how do you get comfortable sitting in that? And so thinking through what is the student already experiencing and how can we use those experiences to help the student learn is really an important thing and something that I don’t think that we do enough is thinking about… Because I get it, it’s what is easiest for us is a lot of time the conversation, but that’s not the most effective conversation for our students. And I don’t know if you caught this, Paul, but I rarely say, I try never to say we teach. I don’t like that language because I think teaching and learning are two very separate things. I feel like I’ve done many a conduct case where my goal was to teach them not to drink alcohol in the residence hall or to drink alcohol responsibility, but what they took from it, what they learned from it is how not to get caught.
And so those are two very different things. And so I think when we focus on how are the students going to learn this as opposed to how are we going to teach this, it really shifts the perspective and can help us come up with some really more effective programs or workshops or strategies or whatever you want to call that. And that was another underlying mindset that I think the dissertation was built on that maybe I didn’t make super explicit in it, but that’s I think really something that I think a lot about. And you can talk to people who’ve worked with me for many years and they will tell you, I hammer that in. We are not teaching them, they are learning.

Paul Brown:
Yeah.

Erin Long:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, I think if you even extend it to, because if people are thinking about how do I build a culture in our organization where that is valued, privileged, et cetera, I think you also have to go in with that mindset with the training of your staff. If I’m designing RA or whatever that position may be called or similar positions, training, how does that training look? Am I treating them as adult fellow learners? And yeah, there’s administrative procedures, we can do that, but what are the other things that we can do to build skills and things like that?
I feel like I’ve been at an institution that pivoted the training a little bit to be more like that. And the student staff were… The mindset shift was totally different because it was less like the, “Okay, now this, now we’re going to write an incident report,” da, da, da, da. We flipped it and said, “No, we’re going to start with leadership skills and then we’re going to do that stuff last.” And I think that sets the tone.

Erin Long:
Right. And I think one thing we do not talk about very much in student affairs is andragogy and what are the principles of andragogy and what do we get adults to learn? We are so weird with college students. Sometimes we treat them like kids and sometimes we treat them like adults.

Paul Brown:
No, that’s so true.

Erin Long:
Right. But especially with our student leaders, I think treating them as adults and bringing those principles of andragogy in is going to be really helpful for their learning. And I say that also because learning is work. I don’t think we think of it as work because we want to sit there and like, okay, we sit in this class and we absorb the knowledge and we just listen and it just flows through this and then we know a thing. We want it to be that simple and it’s just not. It is not clean. It is very messy and it takes work from both the facilitator, instructor, teacher, and the student. It takes work to reflect on that bulletin board and say, “Okay, I saw this thing about time management and it seems interesting, I want to learn how to do it.” And then you actually have to go and do it.
And we tend to do the easiest thing we can. Humans, it’s just kind of natural. We want the easiest path. It’s like water. It takes the easiest path it can, but that’s part of the necessity of intentionality is that if we’re not intentional about it, we’re not going to do it and they’re not going to do it in a way that’s actually beneficial to them and then they learn something.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. We’re kind of nearing our time here. Is there anything that I didn’t highlight that you’re like, “Paul, why did you not pick up on this?: Or, “I feel like people need to know this,” that you should mention?

Erin Long:
One of the things I would really love our field to start doing is really explaining learning to students. I think people just think that people know what learning is. It’s a very simple definition in a lot of ways, but when I ask students, I very much ask them to define learning and every one of them struggled with this concept of… And I started asking, it wasn’t originally in my interview protocol, but I started asking, “Do you think about learning? Is that a thing that you think about?” And they don’t. With the exception of the student who was an education major.

Paul Brown:
I was going to say an education major.

Erin Long:
She thought about learning a lot.

Paul Brown:
Of course. Of course they did.

Erin Long:
Right. So I think being explicit about… It goes back to this expectations in the residence hall. We need to be explicit about what learning is and how it happens so that they can do it and recognize it and think about it and think about what are the methods. It’s like that metacognition of thinking about your thinking and thinking about your learning, and we just don’t do that enough. And I think that is a real area of growth for our field is thinking about… But we don’t know… I don’t know that all of the administrators or educators think about it as much either what it is for themselves or for others.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. That’s great. Is it just reflection?

Erin Long:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
Is it creating reflective thinkers? Because I feel like when I was doing my master’s degree in student affairs work, we had a lot of reflection. I feel like my master’s degree is in reflection.

Erin Long:
Yes, I think it’s a lot of reflection. So not to get into theory too much because I know that’s not everyone’s favorite thing, but I used Baxter-Magolda as part of-

Paul Brown:
Be nerdy with me. Be nerdy with me. Forget we have an audience. This is for me.

Erin Long:
I used Baxter-Magolda’s epistemological reflection, and it was interesting because if you’ve looked at that theory at all, it looks at both where the learning is coming from and then how they evaluate the learning. And so sometimes I think we need to explicitly say, “You do not just learn in the classroom, you do not just learn from teachers, you learn outside of that.” And knowledge is not a black or white thing. It is something that you can evaluate and is in relation to other pieces of information or the context that you’re in and all those kinds of things.
And I think the more that we’re explicit about that, the quicker they’ll get to that kind of contextual knowledge and understanding of learning is not sitting, writing notes in a lecture hall. That’s not really what it is. It is one way to do it, but it’s not a good way necessarily. And so how are we really being explicit about that?

Paul Brown:
On the tandem bicycle with them, so to speak?

Erin Long:
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. For those of you not familiar, that’s one of the analogies that Marcia Baxter-Magolda uses. In fact, I have a video for Marcia’s, what was it? Retirement, anniversary, birthday. I don’t remember what event. It was an important event. Her students bought her a tandem bicycle, and I have a video of her riding it around in a parking lot at Miami University.

Erin Long:
That’s funny.

Paul Brown:
We’ll leave you with that image.

Erin Long:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
Well, thanks so much for joining me, Erin. We mentioned a few things, which we can put in the show notes for people if they want to dive deeper, but yeah, Erin’s going to be with us for all of this year as a fellow. So you’re going to see some additional blog posts and some webinars and other things. So not necessarily only on this topic, but also with the many things of which Erin is a master and scholar of. So we can look forward to that. But thanks for joining me, Erin, today, and we’ll see the rest of you on the next episode of Res Ed Chat.