The Importance Of Creating A Comfortable University Environment
We are, sometimes against our better judgment, time-traveling into the future at a rate of sixty minutes per hour. Locked by the despotic force of linear time, we, as a university community, as shown throughout history, are destined to become whatever the future thinks we were. Surely then, we want to give ourselves every possible opportunity to advance our collective knowledge, abilities and to become greater agents of social change, sooner rather than later.
In pursuit of this aforementioned, lofty and yet indispensable goal of, knowledge, social justice and reform, an increase to the University of Northern Colorado’s (UNC) GSA grant funding would be a foundational and necessary catalyst to expanding the number of professional opportunities for graduate students while simultaneously and convincingly professing the university’s investment in its masters and doctoral level scholars. Implementing and funding new graduate opportunities for subsidy ultimately allows for a new perspective in the classroom and beyond. Gordon Chamberlin explained that a student in higher education is, at their best, ‘encircled by a constituency’, which depends upon help or sponsorship to engage learning. In other words, each of us, as learners, has a habituated legacy of patterns in which we all learn with autonomy and, of course, support when needed.
In order to meet the complex needs of graduate level learners, the university must acknowledge, as a basic tenet, that every person is already a learner and much of what they do, they do by themselves, outside of the university bounds or internally. Learners, be they graduate or undergraduate, respond to stimuli; they observe, hypothesize, conduct experiments and, subsequently, interpret the results. This interlude is followed by reinterpretation as the learner repeatedly evokes their self-gotten lessons outside the context of the primary event and they start to shift their focus from the knowing of things to the relation between the experienced subject and the experienced object.
Therefore, I believe, it is paramount to create university environments that are stimulating, financially sustainable and provide a comfortable pathway for students to explore their own research, meanings, choices and values, both within, and outside, the walls of the university via research and professional conferences. In order to optimize this process of exploration, learners will need to be cognizant and able to engage with all the learning opportunities available to them. More specifically, learners will need to be empowered to, and financially able to, not only determine their values and identities, but help guide the educators and the university to produce an increasingly open forum on in which all learners are unburdened to request their needs be addressed. Therefore, if higher education is the occupation of readying the emergent generation, and the movement of knowledge transpires only through wonder, exploration and necessity, I believe it is an educator’s, and the institution’s, primary directive to instill wonder and remove barriers to learning of all kinds and tease out the learner’s infantile desires for exploration and foster these endeavors like a secondary Stages of Development.
Ultimately, the role of the educator and an institution of higher education is to, above all else, remain learners themselves. In doing so, they must continue active engagement in the process of exploration, learning and wonderment by removing barriers, be they physical or financial. In this way, there would be a resurgence of investment, pride and scholarship at the university, inciting joy and wonder in the cyclic process of learning through re-investment of its most advance students.
