Peter Felten - Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College

You may have read the title of this book and thought to yourself, Yes, of course, relationships are crucial to advancing student learning and success; weve known this for quite some time. If so, you may also be wondering what Peter Felten and Leo Lambert will offer in the pages that follow, whether reading them will be worth your while. Our reactions, we admit, were similarwith perhaps one exception: We have both worked closely enough with them to know they would only pursue this work if they believed it would both fill a gap in our knowledge base and lead us to more humane coexistence. And indeed it does.

The books subtitle hints at what may be its most significant contribution; that is, an intentional shifting of the question from whether human connections drive college success to how they do so. By conducting nearly four hundred interviews at more than two dozen varied institutions, Felten and Lambert offer much-needed depictions of relationship-rich environments, telling and validating stories most of us would never have heard or perhaps never placed in their important context. In so doing, they have also enriched the scholarly record of contemporary higher education, adding a human element often relegated to the background, certainly today, when technology and analytics take center stage.

At the same time, this book makes clear that higher education leaders have not yet put meaningful human connections at the center of the undergraduate experience, despite evidence that has been mounting for more than forty years that relationships are crucial to students success. And the authors do this without judgment and with great care, taking the time to identify and examine the challenge and to propose principles that will guide us.

Felten and Lambert advance our understanding of relationships by expanding the scope and implementation of previous work. Indeed, their conception of relationships is broad, nimble, and imminently (even surprisingly) practical. The richness of practices they discuss is alive in authentic course materials, assignments, and curriculum, classrooms, residence halls, laboratories, advising offices, and mentoring communities and conversations. The authors show us that relationships can be invoked in a convocation speech, used to inform the layout of a library, or relayed via the simple question Whats your story?

We are reminded that our institutions are alivethey produce energy, and their parts work together and interact with one another at all times. What happens in one part influences all othersin service to health and well-being or to distrust, even disease. What becomes clear is that it all matters: how we interact, with whom we interact, and our intentions in our interactions with one another.

This book comes at a pivotal moment in our society and institutions. Many of our students express a deep desire for a sense of belonging on our campuses. There is much in our world that divides and disconnects us from our true values and makes it difficult to remember the very reasons for the journey in the first place. Notably, our student population in US higher education is more diverse than ever before. As the authors point out, more than 55 percent of undergraduates are women, 45 percent are students of color, and 40 percent are aged twenty-four or older. We know from experience and a growing body of research that students sense of belonging and connectedness in higher education institutions is tied to essential outcomes, including their academic achievement, their well-being, motivation, and retention. This is the case for all students, regardless of their background, but particularly for first-generation and minoritized students.

Two important points here worth calling out explicitly are that this time of unprecedented diversity makes the centering of human connection more urgent than it has been for quite some time, and that doing so brings additional, often invisible, challenges. As Jan Arminio, Vasti Torres, and Raechele Pope have written, learning through relationships with others is a core pillar of advancing inclusion in colleges and universities, yet attaining inclusion will require that we transcend our human instinct to relate to those similar to us. The tendency to associate with people most like us, Arminio, Torres, and Pope affirm, is the opposite of inclusion and is the force to be contended with in building inclusive communities. As such, we will need to be intentional about promoting connections among the diverse members of our communities, and we will each need to enhance our ability to relate to others, particularly across our ethnic and racial differences.

Contemporary higher education is also characterized by an increase in student stress levels and growing demand for more comprehensive approaches to the constantly evolving ways students experience the world. Here, too, we know from experience and research that relationships and connections matter. The Stanford Medicine Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education tells us that the absence of social connection is a greater detriment to health than obesity, smoking and high blood pressure; the center also describes the positive feedback loop of social, emotional and physical well-being that results from increasing human connection: People who feel more connected to others have lower levels of anxiety and depression. [T]hey also have higher self-esteem, greater empathy for others, are more trusting and cooperative and, as a consequence, others are more open to trusting and cooperating with them. Note that this research refers to