Presenters: Rebecca McCrory, David Gaskins, and Krisztina Roder
How many of your committee accomplishments go beyond measure? Are your meetings stale and inefficient? Do you want your projects to be more productive and rise as the breadwinner? This session is for YOU! The Supervision Collective is comprised of a diverse group of volunteers from different university departments, but we function as an interactive and contributing team that truly takes the cake. What are the ingredients that made it happen? Honestly, it occurred organically over time and may be difficult to replicate this nearly perfect bake. Just as Julia Child said, “No one is born a great cook, one learns by doing,” the Collective has become more cognizant of how it happened and developed a recipe for success. Join members of the Collective as they share insights and give you the baking utensils kneaded to inspire your inner collaborative chef.
What parts of your mission aim to directly impact contemporary/non-traditional students? What opportunities does your office or unit provide to include these students in your student leader positions and involvement? These are some of many questions to ask and answer yourselves to create inclusive spaces for more than just the “freshmen student.” Join us in this program to reflect, discuss, and takeaway best practices to support contemporary students in your offices as we strive to continue to provide contemporary students a greater sense of belonging and leadership opportunities at Mason.
Flexibility and adaptability have always been tools in the student affairs toolkit but never more than during the pandemic. Faced with reduced occupancy, socially distanced halls and engagement, and declining enrollment, Housing and Residence Life pivoted the existing in-person Learning Community model into twenty Virtual Learning Communities in collaboration with every college and several departments. This reflection based session will ask participants to examine core elements of their own programs or initiatives and further explore these elements with lessons learned from our journey. Join us as we share our story and advice from proposal to implementation - guided by best practices, teamwork, project management skills, and a little luck.
Presenters: Michael Galvin, Katie Clare, and Kerry Hentges
People who practice mindfulness say it fundamentally changes how they experience life, which then becomes the goal. In the first half of this session, participants will learn about the history and teaching of mindful embodiment practices, and that of mindful meditation practices, ideas about whole-self awareness (and beyond) and the benefits of combining body and mind practices. We will discuss how mindfulness of body and mind can be best infused into the curriculum and co-curriculum, the specific benefits to students and educators of a regular practice, and how to facilitate student practice. In the second half of the session, participants will join in a typical guided embodiment meditation and a lightly guided, breath-noting mindfulness meditation practice followed by a debrief. Participants will leave the session with these two practices to take home and into their lives (and work), information about opportunities to practice with others in the university context and out, pathways to sustained learning and exploration, and an opinion as to the role of educators in promoting promising practices to their students and peers.
Student affairs professionals develop empathetic relationships with students and are personally affected by the trauma and problems students bring. We stay late, answer texts from family dinners, and worry about our students well after we go home. Feelings of frustration and even burnout take over. This is called compassion fatigue and we need to talk about it in the student affairs profession. In this session, we will talk about how we experience compassion fatigue, how the pandemic has changed our experience of compassion fatigue, and how we can move toward compassion satisfaction in our work.
This presentation will share the data outcome of an in-person student event organized by the UL Campus Engagement Committee and Patriot Experience. The purpose of this event is twofold. First, to create a safe social distancing event where students can participate in person, and second, to solicit authentic students’ feedback in real-time on their current student experience for future planning purposes. This presentation will also showcase that engaging students on campus can be a collaborative effort within departments. The event had participation from multiple departments within the university from swag donation to volunteering at the event. The data collected from this event will ultimately be shared across departments. The collaboration provided an avenue to meet and re-establish relationships with campus partners after a year of social distancing and provided student perspectives to shape our new normal for a safe and engaging return to campus.