By: Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer
Last week, Dr. Diana Brecher and I wrapped up our ninth training institute, a gathering of national educators to immerse in the research-rich, equity-driven Thriving in Action (TIA) program. The TiA curriculum, offered to students in every field of study, from first year of undergraduate through to doctorates, offers a blend of critical approaches to Positive Psychology essentials, from self-compassion to gratitude to creating new habits, integrated with holistic learning strategies, including mindful time management, embodied approaches to well-regulation, and empowered studying and test-taking skills. Participants’ follow-up feedback was rich with takeaways, including:
“The facilitators have brought together a wealth of knowledge and information from so many resources.”
“I felt very connected to the other participants. I loved that it spanned from Atlantic to Pacific, and the diversity of roles and wisdom shared.”
“It was a heart-opening and -warming experience that provided much information and inspiration. Many, many thanks.”
“It was a very welcoming space.”
Who Joins Us at the Institute?
Each year, Diana, a Clinical Psychologist, Scholar-in-Residence for Positive Psychology, faculty member, and creator of ThriveRU, and myself, a learning specialist, invite student affairs professionals, counsellors, accessibility advisors, higher education administrators, and faculty, along with high school teachers and those in psychology and pedagogy non-profits, consulting, and public service, to join us in learning about this Ryerson University flourishing initiative, and invite them to adopt the program as is or in any way they feel best fits their campus’ rhythms and communities.
What is TiA?
TiA is a weekly, semester-long transition, early alert, wellness and in retention intervention to help struggling students thrive, academically and personally; pre-COVID, it was held in person, now it is hosted synchronously online. Students learn together, in community, multidimensional ways to build motivation, inner-resourcing, and resilience; to experience more spaciousness, choice, and uplift in their studies, if even a little. One student, mature and in his second year of Nutrition, expresses his TiA experience:
I need to thank you for the group…it has become the highlight of my week. TiA has helped accelerate the fumbling process of de-languishing I’ve been going through for years, and I’m better for having joined. I’ve spent my whole life pinned by some internal gravity, and am pleased to feel a fair bit lighter thanks to your encouragement and insight.
Holistic & Health-Promoting
From note-taking to harnessing willpower, gratitude to collaborative group work, TiA is an inclusive, accessibility-minded curriculum comprising the latest in Positive Psychology, neuroscience, learning science, mindfulness, and somatic wisdoms, all in order to offer students a holistic, health-promoting experience. One core aim of TiA is to lay bare to students the often assumed or hidden skills and capacities to move through their academic journey and work around setbacks, like how to start writing an essay in the face of overwhelm, how to use sleep as a learning strategy, and how to craft professional emails to professors when requesting an extension or extra clarification. And, as we hear from the many, many alumni of the TiA program, these become transferable capacities, skills, and presence extending long after the school journey ends.
A Mind-Heart-Body-Spirit “Buffet”
TiA leads with an all-welcome, non-judgmental stance. I think of it as a pedagogy of accompaniment; one can never walk in another’s shoes, but we can weather the academic storms and setbacks alongside. The TiA curriculum isn’t one of imposition or rigidity or prescription; it offers a many-knowledged, inclusive, mind-heart-body-spirit “buffet” as Diana aptly calls it, from which students choose, experiment, and tailor according to what best fits; students fill their plates as, when, and with what they decide. TiA aims to serve under-reached and under-served students by making explicit myriad evidence-based ways to learn and navigate academic roadblocks with greater ease, comprehension, agency, and buoyancy.
Who Joins TiA?
TiA cohorts largely comprise students who self-identify as Black, Indigenous, LGBTQQIP2SAA, mature, international, as living with (a) disability/ies, as being on or nearing academic probation, as seeking or receiving counseling, as an injured or struggling athlete, as parents or caregivers, and as military veterans. Of the many shared and uniting experiences articulated by the students who comprise each of the more than 15 cohorts that have run since the Winter 2017 semester, is that to self-register for TiA is to acknowledge that the school journey isn’t going as hoped, and to express a desire to shape that journey a little, or a lot, differently.
Impacts & Indicators
Students learn specific how-to-learn skills, like how to disrupt procrastination, quiet an intrusive inner critic, learn from critical feedback, cultivate more awe, and enact numerous approaches to cope, particularly when it’s after-hours or no support appointment is available. Through participating in TiA, students report greater wellbeing, academic confidence, and multifaceted success, however individually defined, including but not limited to an increase in GPA.
Indeed, emerging from these TiA success, the program is also now offered as a full, for-credit course through Ryerson’s Faculty of Arts as well (SSH102).
Training Together
At our training sessions, like the one run last week, we share our evolving TiA curriculum, the underlying literature, our several research studies on the go, and students’ reflections. Institute participants are then free to use any aspect as they wish at their home base. Over 400 educators have attended one of the nine trainings held to date–running annually at Ryerson since 2017, offered as a pre-conference workshop at the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services annual conference CACUSS pre-conference in 2018, brought to a large staff team from Centennial, a college in Ontario, in that same year, hosted also for groups the Campus Living Centres and at the University of Toronto, expanded to a two-day live training in 2019, and, as offered last week, a five half-day virtual offering.
TiA Elsewhere
Many, like the University of Windsor, Western University, Mount Saint Vincent University, Sheridan College, Centennial College, and University of Toronto Scarborough Campus, have implemented the full program; other institutions have infused existing programs and workshops with TiA curriculum. To date, more than 30 post-secondary campuses are running some aspect of the program. This is a community centred around helping students to flourish that is itself flourishing. To keep connected, we come together in a TiA Community of Practice, now comprising over 150 whole-hearted and deeply collaborative professionals. Diana and I host monthly video-chats for COP members to drop in with questions, wonderings, resource-shares, and to connect with others across the country keen to, in their own way, make use of, blend, and make locally relevant this thriving program.
TiA Online
At this institute, we were excited to share our newly launched Thriving in Action Online (TiAO) resource, one attempt to scale up TiA, and to ensure access to students (pre-COVID) not able to make it into an in-person cohort. TiAO starts with the question, “How can I learn to love being a student?” and in response, we offer neither solutions nor prescriptive advice, but rather provocations, invitations, research, and reflection prompts to support a student in, perhaps, the quiet hours when a kind, warm, holistic approach to resilience might offer solace or support.
For any Supporting Student Success blog readers who would like to explore TiAO, we are offering free access for the remainder of the 2020 year given these strained times (there is usually a small licensing fee in order to white label and implement TiAO on other campuses). Please feel free to visit Thriving in Action Online at tia.ryerson.ca, logging in with the guest username of TiAO.Free.Guest, and using the password March2December!.
Tender Feedback: Part I
At last week’s institute, we also shared with participants TiA’s virtual pivot, namely our updated curriculum given the current online learning context. A handful of key themes included attention restoration, constructive rest, acts of kindness, intentional savouring, unpacked prioritization, active constructive response, beginner’s mind, unlearning, evoking curiosity, and micro-resilience strategies. Participants’ feedback for the training left us tender with its generosity and thoughtfulness:
“This programming has highlighted the importance of marrying the thriving skills with the holistic learning skills.”
“I am grateful for the positive focus. It is a wonderful antidote for compassion fatigue, and an opportunity for our students (and myself) to practice gratitude, savouring, kindness, and joy.”
“Your ways of being- your open-heartedness, generosity and your eloquence, and general positive energy were so inspiring. I can imagine that is so powerful for your students in TiA. Thank you for modelling that, reminding us to bring this to our students (and ourselves).”
“Learning strategies must be integrated with mindfulness to have a greatest impact on student experience and success…and, that body work is a learning strategy.”
“TiA is a solid, proven model.”
“The content is TOP NOTCH!”
“The aspect of community associated with TiA is very strong. Within this COP and within individual groups run on campus.”
“You’ve affirmed my belief in positive self-care and self-advocacy with research-based information.”
Tender Feedback: Part II
One key piece of feedback, taken perhaps to heart most of all, was the bolstering of participants who self-identify as BIPOC, and the encouragement to go further. As a white, cisgender person, able-bodied but for chronic pain, I am acutely aware of the complexities, conundrums, and potential for harm in me teaching resilience. Though I have faced personal challenges and significant trauma, none have been systemic, none have been institutional, none have been generational or historical in nature, none have interfered with my education or career pursuits, and few have been based on my body/bodily identity/embodiment. And yet…I teach learning strategies from a resilience, or academic buoyancy approach, primarily to students who self-identify as equity-seeking. One TiA training participant commented on our feedback form about the binary language in one active constructive response video clip we showed in which the key speaker gave examples solely using “he” and “she”.
What Rings Loudest
For that TiA participant, this rang louder than the message intended within the clip and in its inclusion in the presentation. One other participant from the training session shared their experience of exclusion from a video clip on acts of kindness, in which the sole Black actor had to portray someone implied as somewhat destitute and hungry. Though sorry to have selected films that were inequitable and outright unjust in their representations, and sorrier still to have perpetuated harm, we were also equally grateful for this important feedback and have taken action at once. This teaching was not the responsibility of either participant, and though both were generous and often effusive in their gratitude for the week-long training, we put two attendees in a place of deep and continuously-perpetuated harm.
Diving Deeply into Dissent
Since hearing from these two individuals, we are starting some revisions anew, and ramping up others already underway: we are doing a thorough review of all the images and videos we use, the metaphors we speak, the texts we turn to, in order to ensure just, fair, kind, and inclusive representation; we are bringing more and more texts of dissent into our thriving work; we are aiming to integrate more wisdoms and knowledges to reach more students; and, we are considering launching a podcast (Thrive Talk or Researching Resilience, perhaps). I hold close questions like, when we teach Flow, who has access to such active leisure pursuits that spur feeling “in the zone”? Or, in talking about Growth Mindset and learning from mistakes, who has the privilege of time and money to learn from mistakes? Or, the complexities of grit, that may be land as a burden to the individual learner who may for all kinds of contextual, systemic reasons, may not be able to “persevere”.
Aims Revisited
My aim as a lifelong, equity-committed learning strategist, as a lecturer, as President of the Learning Specialists of Canada, as co-creator of Thriving in Action, and as owner of Awakened Learning, is to help students who feel excluded, pushed out, and marginalized from their academic journey amass a self-tailored repertoire of relevant, resonant, and representative holistic strategies that no longer just prioritize the mind but also integrate the heart, body, and spirit. And to, alongside students, bolster them in implementing those strategies in ways that make most sense and meaning to them in order to move towards whatever hopes and goals they wish to move towards.
Deena Kara Shaffer, PhD, MEd, BEd, (Hons)BA, OCT is the Coordinator of Student Transitions and Retention, Student Wellbeing, at Ryerson University, and the President of the Learning Specialists Association of Canada. Whether by immersion in nature, somatic programming, digital strategies, or arts-based provocations, Deena helps students learn how to learn, and to do so from an equity-guided, research-driven, health-promoting approach. Formerly a learning strategist with Ryerson’s Disability Services Office, and a skilled OCT teacher, Deena offers a holistic, empathic, and joy-based pedagogical stance. Deena is co-initiator of the Thriving in Action resilience intervention, and oversees the Portage paddling program and Mood Routes campus st/rolling initiative. Deena holds a doctorate in nature-based pedagogy and learning strategies, and is also a trained yoga teacher (200 hour), restorative yoga teacher (60 hour), mindfulness meditation teacher, published poet (The Grey Tote, Véhicule Press, 2013), and a writer, public speaker, consultant on learning and well-becoming, and owner of Awakened Learning.
Gratitude to Jenny Sampirisi, Assessment and Research Specialist for Ryerson University’s Student Affairs and Rick Ezekiel, Director of Equitable Learning, Health & Wellness at Centennial College, for their thoughtful reads and reviews of this piece.
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