Description
Book Synopsis
Dear Students: 10 Letters to Empower and Transform Your Higher Education Journey is a higher education guide that prepares students to authentically and intentionally do school. This is not your typical how-to guide. Dear Students uses narratives to illuminate critical topics that will foster the reader's understanding of valuable matters such as getting noticed and having your experiences centered; building a circle of support; the significance of faculty relationships including building those relationships in spaces like office hours; addressing fears of speaking, disrupting silence, and engaging voice in the classroom; developing deep listening; cultivating community; nurturing belonging; preparing to participate; and keeping hope alive. Readers will engage moments of critical reflection and leave with many diverse know-how strategies that will position them to do-school from a place of empowerment and for the purpose of transformation. This book will supp
Trade Review
"This is the 'handbook' I wish had been in my hands as a first-year student at a predominantly white liberal arts college as one of 12 Black students recruited, essentially, to integrate the institution. One parent came from a university-educated family, but she was an immigrant. The other parent finished his high-school equivalency in the US Army. Neither were equipped to guide or offer specific help. Dear Students: 10 Letters to Empower and Transform Your Higher Education Journey is a volume of 'multilingual' letters, so speaks as academic advisor, professor, and parent with concrete how-tos accompanied by institutional, socio-political, and psychological explanations of what students experience often without being able to comprehend fully. Therefore, they fall into the default: self-blame, shame, guilt with not many places to turn. This volume is exactly the resource needed to help ALL students engage fully, take risks, work hard, seek advice and support, and, simply, to bring their whole selves into the higher-education institution. Bravo!" Margo Okazawa-Rey, Professor Emerita, San Francisco State University
