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inquiry
What are they thinking?
Seminar tries to discover Bethel students’ real thoughts on campus diversity
by Melanie Zuercher
Where can you find the most racial and ethnic diversity on the Bethel College campus? Ask about any student, and he or she will say, “The football team and the nursing department” (in the junior and senior classes).
Take Michael Unruh, a senior biology major from Peabody, a “cradle Mennonite” and a wide receiver for Thresher football. At the beginning of last semester, John Sheriff called Unruh into his office to ask if he would be part of a “seminar on strategies to enhance diversity at Bethel College.”
“He briefly explained the Bethel College Project [under the auspices of which the seminar fell] and said that we are trying to increase diversity on Bethel’s campus,” Unruh says. “This seemed like an important issue to me because racial diversity, at least, is pretty limited to nursing and the football team. I wanted to be a part of broadening that diversity throughout the campus.”
Unruh agreed to join nine other students in the for-credit seminar that Sheriff and consultant Galyn Vesey of Wichita developed and led during spring semester 2007. The seminar was part of the implementation process for the Bethel College Project, which Vesey spearheaded on campus a year ago.
The Bethel College Project (BCP) is a focused effort throughout the campus community (students, faculty, staff and supporters) to create “a healthier multi-cultural environment as a means for improving the educational experience of all students.” After the release of Vesey’s report last summer, Bethel president Barry C. Bartel along with Sheriff created an implementation plan. It called for an advisory board to oversee implementation efforts and mandated the creation of a student steering committee – the 10 students who were part of the diversity seminar.
Sheriff and Vesey had three goals for the seminar. As Sheriff put it, “one was for this group of students to have a powerful, interracial, diverse experience discussing assigned literature, particularly a lot of first-person narratives from [varied] racial and ethnic backgrounds.”
The other goals, Sheriff says, were “to work with the three implementation committees [subsets of the advisory committee, that focused on either student life, constituent relations or curriculum/personnel] to implement the recommendations of the Bethel College Project and to conduct focus group surveys in order to get a real feel for what the student experience of diversity is on this campus.”
Sheriff admits that “for a class that met 14 times a semester [in two-hour blocks], this was way too ambitious – especially the first goal. We had only three free evenings when we weren’t meeting with the implementation committees. This group of students worked together well, but only a few times did we get to the level of discussing issues that made people uncomfortable because they were bumping up against personal experience.”
However, this is a normal part of creating something new, he says – you find out what works well and what doesn’t in order to make the next time better. The bottom line: “Including students in planning was a good idea. They never lost their energy for the work throughout the semester. They took a great deal of ownership, and we encouraged that – we wanted them to make this their project and they did.”
Yue Qiu Yu, known as Moon, was one of the seminar participants. She is a senior from Kaiping Guang Dong, China, majoring in elementary education.
“The more we participated as a team for the BCP, the better we understand each other’s different perspectives,” she said. “In our group, there were four students who are a minority – one of them is me. At the beginning of the seminar, I was concerned that I should not belong to this group due to my nationality. By the end of the semester, I feel I am part of Bethel College, even though I am just a student here. [The BCP] tells me the theme of Bethel College is faith, hope and charity.”
“It was of great importance for [us] to get together once a week, sometimes twice a week, who otherwise would not have interacted nearly as much without this opportunity,” added seminar member Josh Chittum, a junior English major from Demarest, Ga. “A large chunk of dismantling racism comes in the form of dialogue. The dialogue we participated in as students was rich and respectful and it resulted in a broadening of perspectives for me and I think many others that sat around the table.”
Seminar member Heidi Johnson, a senior English and education major from Topeka, noted, “Students got to say what they wanted. A lot of time, administrators have one idea – though well-intentioned – what will benefit students, but when students get to talk on a large scale, it allows the college to see trends and patterns.
“My most valuable learning is that race issues aren’t only relevant for some people,” she continued. “They affect everyone, whether you realize it or not. I realized how much you can benefit from really getting to know and become familiar with people from other backgrounds. I am excited for the chance to help [improve Bethel students’ experience] in this area.”
“I got to know some students that I hadn’t ever talked to before and strengthened relationships with others that I knew, even those who I’ve played football with since I've been here,” Unruh said. “I also learned a lot about what students actually think about the diversity on Bethel’s campus, not just what I think they think.”
Much of what the 10 students learned came from their face-to-face interaction throughout the semester as part of the seminar. However, a significant portion of it came from focus group surveys that the students, with Sheriff and Vesey, developed, consulting Paul Lewis, professor of psychology, on how to most effectively construct the questions, and professors of social work Larry Friesen and Ada Schmidt-Tieszen on forming and working with focus groups.
“The sample [of respondents via e-mail] was smaller than we wanted, so the students from the seminar set up outside the cafeteria and got more students to fill out the survey instrument,” Sheriff said.
Survey questions ranged from queries on racial/ethnic diversity of high schools, current campus involvement and religious affiliation to the people students live and socialize with, feelings about relationships with people of different racial/ethnic groups and perceptions of various kinds of diversity on campus.
“We learned quite a bit about student attitudes on campus, both good and bad,” Sheriff said. “We know quite a bit now that we didn’t before. We can program to it, hire to it, do things like bring in [convocation] speakers or perhaps develop a named visiting scholar endowment.
“We got students involved and engaged in this issue. The outcomes proved to be similar to the Vesey report, but it is important to have the student voice.”
Filling the Gaps
On a small college campus with limited resources, sometimes students see a need, decide to address it themselves and in doing so break new ground.
That’s the case with the Bethel College student chapter of National Black Nurses Association (NBNA) which, as it turns out, is the first and only student-led arm of the national organization.
Deborah Davis just graduated from Bethel with a bachelor’s degree in nursing. When she came as a junior, she says, she and some of her peers “looked around and saw what we wanted wasn’t here in terms of [black role models for] leadership and empowerment in the nursing profession.”
Thelma Latrice Moses, who also graduated in May with her nursing degree, adds, “We wanted something for minority [nursing] students that would get people actively involved in leadership. We were looking for mentors.”
Davis had a good friend, Anniece Berry, who is a nurse at Via Christi-Good Shepherd in Wichita and also the president of the Wichita chapter of NBNA. She and Moses joined the organization but they discovered that there was no student component, similar to the National Student Nurses’ Association.
“We wrote to the [NBNA] to see if they would approve us starting the first student chapter,” says Moses. They got approval, as long as the group was organized under the wing of the Wichita chapter. Davis and Moses served as co-chairs of Bethel’s first NBNA group, which had about 20 members in its first year. Rachel Garcia was secretary. Next year’s officers are Nikkii Dolce and Marla Bell, co-chairs, and Patricia Ngigi, secretary.
So far, the Bethel NBNA’s main activities have been fundraising in order to endow scholarships for nursing students – and the leaders emphasize that anyone of any race may apply for these. NBNA members had a mini health fair at the last Fall Festival and also participated in a larger local health fair. They raised money to send Moses to the NBNA national convention in Atlanta this summer, where they hope the organization will formally recognize the first student chapter.
“We’re satisfied with what we set out to accomplish,” Davis says. “We started with three people and we’ve grown. We’ve had several fundraisers and brought some speakers to campus.”
Continuing goals include finding black nursing professionals who can tutor and mentor Bethel students, she says.