(energetic music)
(audience applauds)
- Fresno State Belonging, what does it mean?
Well, I'm gonna start with a bunch of definitions.
We have a picture here from Preview Day just this weekend.
Dr. Castro and Dr. Llamas are off in a corner over there,
but the main story is the people in the middle.
This was about 5,000 parents and students who were here
on Saturday wondering if they belong,
kind of like Hesham in the first session here,
questioning about that.
Belonging is a core component to our story here.
Our 2016 strategic plan starts with belonging,
one of the first of the three Ds.
Discovery is this sense of engaging,
supporting a sense of belonging.
So, it's a deep-set part of our mission.
As well as of this January,
we just launched the principles of community,
and that starts with the second of the principles,
we are kind.
It starts with the same clause,
to foster a sense of belonging, we will.
And this is all founded on a two-year process,
and I was part of this,
faculty and staff reporting on what we want here.
To further define belonging,
we know it's important in the research.
It's important to student success.
It's core, but what does it mean?
So, I go to the dictionary,
and it says affinity for a place.
Like I said, Hesham, he said he felt more close here.
I go a little further back
in the dictionary to the 14th century,
and I see this sense of longing, all right.
Go even further to philosophers
and artists to try to get at longing.
So, belonging is kind of like to be longing.
You know, we see Martin Heidegger's thing.
Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.
It's profound, right?
And if you don't like that, just look at the art,
a picture of someone.
Things are close, but they're gone.
Maybe it's a long-passed memory that you used to have.
So, that sense of longing and the agony for it,
how can we build that into my anthropology class, right,
or Fresno State?
That's the challenge.
And that's a big challenge.
So, my final kind of definition thing is I did a study,
three students and myself Robin Draper, Liset Hernandez,
and Jazzman Hester, all 2015, '16 class graduates.
We conducted a rather large study
where we investigated Fresno State Belonging
from a student's perspective.
We used a novel sort of methodology from user design
where it's like William was talking about from IDEO.
You know, letting people,
rather than interviewing them, having them take pictures.
Walk around campus, take pictures,
and then describe what that was like.
From it, we ended up generating a lot of data
in terms of what it is
that a student perceives as belonging.
We used an application called dscout,
where we got around 50 students,
and we asked them to go around campus, take pictures,
and do the equivalent of a text message response
to some prompts.
And we had around 50 students did it.
They did around 10 photos each over three days,
three photos for three days.
We ended up with around 500 of these documents.
This is one page of one of the 500 data points.
And this, you can see it's a picture of a football game.
The student wrote is this belonging or not.
And they said yes, this is belonging,
and this is what happened.
It's like the comments up there.
On the bottom, there's some codes that me
and the team were coding this data to mean.
Now, again, we did a lot of that.
We built it up to make sense into personas,
which is another thing you hear from design anthropology.
What is a persona, these types of people?
So, I'm gonna go through a couple right now.
The spatial belonger is a type of student
who uses campus index points to feel they belong.
You know this quote, when I see the Union,
I think of me and my friends there.
I can get stuff.
I can buy tickets to shows and all that.
The academic belonger, it's nice we have some of them.
I feel I belong when at Fresno State at 8:00 a.m.
on Tuesday, Thursdays, I'm in my class.
If I'm not there, I feel I should be there.
That pulling, that longing for that class is another sense
of belonging that our students are perceiving and seeing.
This one, the school spirit belonger,
I wear Bulldog stuff,
or I see other people wearing Bulldog stuff off campus,
and it gives me that sense of solidarity
and social cohesion that makes me feel
I am part of this mission.
And wearing these team sweaters and all that.
And then a non-belonger, a busy non-belonger.
I commute everyday.
Took a picture of his car.
I commute everyday, and I feel I don't belong
because I see everybody else,
and they're so tight and cohesive, and I'm not.
I bet you this person was a first-year experience
'cause a lot of our commuters come, and they belong.
They find other ways of belonging.
But non-belonging is a part of belonging analytically.
You've gotta think about that, the two-tailed
I like this one, social belonger.
When student affairs and groups
and all that are having your booths out on campus,
and the student ignore you, they're not ignoring you.
Let me tell you, they're writing about feeling they belong.
You know, they're still not gonna stop
at your booth this year,
but they still want you out there
in the rain like this Saturday if need be.
This one was the best,
and this is where I got my epiphany from
looking at this data again this year.
Seeing that picture made the person belong.
Seeing that couch on the way to her dorm room
made her feel a sense of belonging or the library tower.
And it struck me then,
something that I remember from about 20 years ago
when I was in the Peace Corps in Mali, West Africa.
Yeah, the reveal.
When we left there after 2 1/2 years of service,
the psychologist told us you're going home,
but you're not going home.
Where you're home is
is where you put your toothbrush every morning
and where you eat breakfast every day,
and that's here in West Africa.
So, you're gonna go back to Milwaukee,
but you're not back home.
So, my big takeaway is that belonging is inscribed
in our daily activities,
and it's a classic truism for anthropology,
we live our sense of belonging.
The vision statements are all good,
but we have to bring it back to home,
to this moment, to the next hour,
to the glance while you're walking somewhere
or the non-glance.
If I have any sort of mission or invitation,
I want us to be more like covalent social bonders
rather than ionic.
If you remember your chemistry,
(laughs) you see the sodium atom.
An electron is stolen from it by the chlorine,
or chlorine has the extra atom, taking the extra atom.
So, they both have eight atoms,
which is something that you need when you're an atom.
A better way to do it potentially is two carbon atoms.
They both only have seven electrons each,
but they have a way of sharing them.
So, no one loses anything.
They both end up gaining what they need.
It's not a zero sum.
They both end up winning.
That's my inspiration to you all.
Thank you. (audience applauds)