Welcome to Digication Scholars Conversations.
I'm your host, Jeff Yan.
In this episode, you will hear Part One of my conversation with Tonya Hendrix,
Demetri Kapetanakos, and Dionne Miller from LaGuardia Community College.
More links and information about today's conversation can be found on Digication's
Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Full episodes of Digication Scholars Conversations can be found on
YouTube or your favorite podcast app.
Welcome to DigiCation Scholars Conversations.
I'm your host, Jeff Yan.
My guests today are Tonya Hendrix, Demetri Kapetanakos, and Dionne Miller
from LaGuardia Community College.
They are authors of a paper recently published at the
International Journal of ePortfolio.
The title of this paper is Creating an Integrative Student's Liberal Arts
Identity, a reflection on the process of building an ePortfolio for a
community college Liberal Arts program.
Welcome, everyone.
And, uh, I want to say, first of all, I've always been a huge fan and
admirer of LaGuardia community college.
It is just, it's been a, uh, an honor and a pleasure to have been
able to work alongside folks at LaGuardia throughout the years.
And, uh, I think we've had now something like a 15 year long relationship.
Um, and it's, it's just one of the highlights of my life.
It's literally, is it's now a. A big portion of my life and, and it's one that
has been so, um, I'm, I'm continuously inspired and impressed by all that you do.
And, and the thing about it is it doesn't stop.
It was amazing in the beginning of that journey.
It is still amazing 15 years later.
And today we have three really just amazing educators here.
Um, so I wanted to just.
Um, maybe go around really quickly, ask you, what do you do at LaGuardia?
Really quickly.
Tell us that maybe starting with Tonya.
Hi everybody.
Um, I currently teach First Year Seminar classes and Biology classes at LaGuardia.
Great.
And Dionne.
I am an associate dean for academic affairs and I serve among other
things as the program director for the Liberal Arts major.
Awesome.
And Demetri.
So, um, I teach first year seminar, I teach English classes, and I'm actually
really, really excited because I'm actually teaching Classical Lit in
Homer for the first time to my students, so Sounds fun, and uh And nerdy!
Jeff and I'm sure that I'm sure that there you find race.
Well, just having interacted with you a little bit, I'm sure you find
really good ways to engage with them, which is a lot of what we're
going to be talking about today.
Um, I, I am so, so impressed by the paper that you wrote.
And I, I remember I w I read it and, and.
It actually co... coincides with a lot of how I've been feeling a lot
about, and it really starts with.
Actually, there is a somewhat of a decline confidence in higher education today in
the higher education landscape, not only I'm not talking specifically for, you
know, any kinds of like colleges or, you know, regions or the, you know, or, um,
you know, uh, but, but more in general, there has been a decline in confidence
in higher education, um, because of a sort of a drop in belief that the value
of a degree, what it means, and I think that in your paper it really, you know,
you had said that it, it had literally gone from something like 74 percent to
41%, you know, based on a study and, and that's, that's alarming to me.
Right.
It's alarming to me, by the way, not only, you know, I don't believe that we should
just blindly think that higher education is, and that the degree is good for you,
but we should realize that if it went from 74 percent to 41%, what changed and what,
what could make that be the case, right?
So Dionne, maybe I want to ask you first, as an Associate Dean, you are someone
who, who would be looking at these things.
Both you're thinking about, you know, from a student standpoint, the well being and
all of that, but you're also looking at the bigger picture of where we're going
as a college, you know, in your program.
So tell me a little bit about what you think, what you think when you,
when you discover these numbers.
It's very alarming, Jeff.
I agree.
I believe in the purpose of education, just as not only for the individual,
but also for society at large.
You know, I think apart from giving our students skills so that they
can, um, make progress economically.
That's important.
But we're also giving our students skills to make them good citizens.
And when we don't have students in our classroom, we don't have a chance to give
them the tools to really allow them to fully participate in their society and to
improve, you know, our role as a species.
overall, um, in the world.
So that really alarms me because, you know, I think just knowledge is such a
basic fundamental right and something that all of us should be striving to attain, no
matter what it is that we do in the world.
Yeah.
And Demetri, what does Homer say?
Oh, I don't know.
I mean,
I was actually reading the Iliad yesterday and it's really, One of the things that I
feel is missing and being at LaGuardia and working both with people like Dionne and
Tonya is thinking about how could we be reflexive about why all of this matters.
You know, why does the liberal arts matters?
Why do these different ideas swirling around?
Why does this possibly blind poet from 8th century Greece still matter?
And they all do.
And I feel that one of the things is that we live in a society right
now where this idea of reflection is missing and we really need to think
about how could we bring that back, not only to social media, not only
into the way we read people, but also.
That the value of an education is about helping you all do that.
And Tonya, do you see the same thing in your, your classes as well?
Absolutely.
Um, I think about students and their ability to, to do critical thinking.
Um, when I teach the scientific method, I teach it as evidence
based critical thinking because it is, and it's a necessary skill.
Um, so when I think about our students or.
Anybody that I love and care for, what I want you to be able to do is take the
facts and make them mean something and not have somebody else do that for you.
So I'm afraid that, you know, I don't really like to talk about
politics really, but there's this idea that an educated populace.
It's not good for somebody.
It's obviously good for us as citizens, but who is it not good for?
And that's something, um, that we should consider for our students
and help our students to consider.
And, and by the way, um, I want to, I want to point out something
that I think it's a myth.
I think it's people.
I think people, um, sort of puts this identity onto folks who are in
the sciences in STEM to think that these are people who only likes
to deal with the black and whites.
They do not value reflection.
They think it's too soft.
They think it's too touchy feely.
It is a hundred percent untrue.
We have someone on the panel right now who teaches in biology and
then another teaches Homer, right?
And that both of them are talking about the value of reflection and value of
what it means to be a productive citizen.
And these are the kinds of things that to me, I want to go back to Dionne.
You, you very just succinctly had said right away, we need these
people to become productive citizens.
We want them to have a sense of fulfillment and passion in life, right?
To enjoy themselves.
And you don't get to be able to do that.
If all you care about are sort of skills that learnable skills that are, you
know, from, um, uh, that, that, that, that seems to satisfy the short term
satisfaction of maybe a job requirement, but that doesn't bring you very far
because that job is going to change.
That job is going to get evolved over time.
Those skills gonna be outdated very quickly, right?
Many of those skills are not durable skills.
They are ephemeral.
They are, they're hype.
Half lives are short these days, especially when we encounter AI, right?
Like, like that's going to, that's going to... AI is.
However, we, we look at it, you know, we like it, we don't like it.
We, we, we, we think of it as an assistant.
We think of it as a collaborator, et cetera, et cetera, all the different
metaphors, but what, what is I think pretty easily identifiable is that it is.
Extremely studious.
So things that has been published in the world, things that it has his hands
on, it reads and it consumes everything.
So those kind of first level, I like to think of it as almost like the
first level learning, which is just, here's some, I hear some, here's
some content, read it, remember it.
And that's it, that AI is going to be really good at doing, but what I thought
was really amazing with Tonya, when you said, well, you need to make that your
own, you have to think through that.
That's where the critical thinking comes in, right?
So this is where you process that experience of, Hey!
I experienced some fact.
And if you can experience it even better is even better than reading about it, then
the process of doing that, like dealing with the experience seems to really
be the building block of the critical thinking and, and, and the purpose and
all of that, that you would talk about.
I, I, I got so much out of your paper and I wanted to then say, um, now I, I, and
I, I sometimes find that at LaGuardia.
Um, I'm always amazed by how incredibly diverse your demographic is.
Um, you, and, and that might, to me, it sometimes feel like
as people that work there, you must have almost like no choice.
Even if you wanted to, but to embrace that diversity, and then you can really use it.
And I actually do think that it is a special, um, scenario where
actually there are a lot of colleges don't have, and therefore they don't
truly understand what that means.
So maybe one of you can tell us a little bit about like, what does it mean by like,
you know, dive in a diverse demographic.
Um, I, I remember, I will just use one thing that I remember hearing about.
I think LaGuardia, there are something like over 150 languages spoken
amongst your population, right?
That's incredible.
That, that's really swell.
Suddenly it puts you into a perspective that says, Oh man, I don't even know.
How to name 150 languages.
Um, and, and that there are that many just within the, you know, on campus.
And so why don't you tell us a little bit about, you know, sort of
where LaGuardia is right now on the demographic, just, you know, ballpark.
I'd like to say what's fantastic about being in such a diverse
place is that you begin to understand that you don't have to.
Understand diversity in order to appreciate diversity.
So, of course, right?
I can't speak 150 languages, but I can appreciate that my
students speak multiple languages.
And sometimes in the classroom is really helpful for students that share the
same first language to have an in class conversation, because in your second
languages, in your second language, some things just don't come across.
And so just appreciating the diversity is such a big thing.
And, you know, we talk about our global society.
LaGuardia is like a microcosm of a global society.
So every day our students are learning and experiencing what it is to work with
people who may be with be like you or who are not like you or what I think
is even more important that someone that you think is different from you,
you'll see how they are similar to you.
So I, the diversity is such a huge boon for us.
Right.
It makes our classrooms really, really interesting.
And it's a, it's a boon for our students.
I love it.
And it's not all just about, you know, like, you know, dominated by racial
diversity, it's everything else too.
Right.
I read that something like a third of your students are not born,
were not born in the United States.
Right.
Like, that's really so interesting.
I wasn't born in the United States by the way.
Um, and and, and I think that there is so much, it's, it makes the
world so interesting when you see different perspectives, it allows
you to question your own perspectives because you see other people's, right?
I think it's interesting that a third of this team.
Wasn't born in the United States.
That's pretty, that's pretty, that's pretty astute.
So, so your, your faculty body also reflect on this, over the students
too, which is another part of, you know, being to be diverse like that.
It's, you know, I, I think there's, there's this weird,
well, I, I, I think it's weird.
I think many of my, our audience agree with us that is weird, but I
think that there is in the, in, in, in much of the sort of mainstream media
today, that is, there has been a sort of, you know, push back on diversity,
you know, like, Uh, big companies closing up their DEI initiatives.
They are, um, you know, there are of course, as educators, we know that in,
in a good number of States, DEI has been attacked and, but I also sometimes find
that, you know, I think there's some... sometimes, sometimes the, the programs
that are doing that weren't doing the real DEI like weren't really, weren't
really understanding what it meant, like the way that you had talked about, right?
You walked into a room with all these people having different perspectives.
You have almost no choice but to appreciate it.
And once you do, you see all of the good things that comes out of it, right?
It wasn't just something where you go.
I'm trying to satisfy some kind of quota, right?
That doesn't happen at LaGuardia.
But, but can I also say that one of the losses I think of also not thinking about
is how do these perspectives enhance the student's ability to be in the world?
So, you know, they are navigating multiple languages in many times, multiple
experiences, and this is a superpower.
And I think that even though a lot of our students don't necessarily have,
for example, that sort of traditional education, which is about going abroad
and experiencing it, they're already made.
They already have those skills ready to go.
And I think the question becomes, you know, how do we harness them in a way?
That actually gets them out in the world and really comes from those experiences,
even if though they're coming from community college, they're not coming
from prestigious four year college.
And yet, in many ways, they're even more prepared, I think, for the
world out there and to conquer it.
than many of the students that come out from these Ivy League schools.
So, I want to emphasize that too, that it's also about, you know, I mean, I
think that's one of our major, major, I think, you know, resources, and powers
Yeah, it is, I think, I agree, yeah.
Go ahead.
I would, you know, I would also like to add that that's how I see
our Liberal Arts program as well.
That Liberal Arts is a diverse field in that it exposes students to many
different disciplines, academic disciplines, and that's you know, an
academic diversity that we offer to our students that they can experience
all these different ways of knowing the world through science, through sociology,
anthropology, history, literature, and how that also really prepares them to,
to be excellent professionals in whatever field that they, um, they aspire to.
And, and this is why I believe in the liberal arts, that really it
helps students to really appreciate the breadth of human knowledge.
You know, I always say I want students to be Order by the knowledge that
exists in the world and how they can participate in even gaining
a little bit of that knowledge.
And we in the liberal arts do that in ways that many other really
focused disciplinary pathways can't.
And I, I want, I want to, let's talk about that for a little bit.
Um, I, I have, um,
you know, I, I feel like that for some odd reasons, our society has recently been.
Well, in the recent years, probably, you know, for, for, for, for, it's
been the trend now for a little while, maybe even since arguably
the industrial age that, that, that liberal arts is sort of, you know.
Like it's softer, you're not going to get this, the, the,
the hard skills to get that job.
You can't be the lawyer or the doctor, um, or the engineer
if you are doing liberal arts.
Um, but I think the people actually forget that, um, almost all the
people that are the most probably possibly many of the most powerful,
you know, organizations, companies.
Industry, they're actually run by people that actually really
just have those critical thinking skills and problem solving skills.
Oftentimes they are not practicing that one, you know, special disciplines.
Um, and, and for people to, to actually sort of, you know, look down on Liberal
Arts, I think it's really weird.
Um, I, not only do I think that it's weird for that reason, we also
have had in our history, you know, if we go back to the Renaissance.
Right?
Renaissance was about like, you know, you know, people like Leonardo da
Vinci, who, who, who knows everything, who's interested in it, who is
curious in the world, you know, who wants to think about flying machines
as he's about paintings, um, right.
Who likes to value all these things and make curiosity a
huge part of purpose in life.
And yet when it comes to sort of.
You know, sort of modern education, we seem to have, when I say industrial,
the industrial age, it seems to be almost like a very industrialized
factory like thinking in our, in our mental mindset, which is, well, how do
we specialize in some things to make it maybe more efficient to get you a little
further and deeper into that field.
Now, I, I think that that has.
In a weird way worked as a narrative for a while.
Um, but, but in reality, it doesn't actually really work when we map out
all the people that run our world.
And I'm not even talking about just, you know, people who are CEOs of
big companies or whatever, right?
Because you don't just major to be a CEO actually.
Um, um, but I'm also talking about, you know, all the people that do
communication, marketing, journalism.
So you forget that there is this whole swathe of people outside of
actually about half a dozen really sort of prominent, like fields
that are, that, that have the name.
And I'm, by the way, not saying that they're not good, like,
please, if you're passionate about being adopted, do it right.
But actually our world is also run by all these other people that do incredible
things that, that gives purpose.
Right?
And so somehow we sort of almost put all the narrative around, you
know, a few fields that have a good story, but then the rest of it, we've
sort of almost like ignored, um, as if they, they weren't of value.
I think, I think what's interesting is when.
And there have been many studies that show this when an employer is asked,
what do you want from your employees?
They want them to read well.
They want them to write well.
They want them to speak well.
They want their employees to have critical thinking skills.
That's the liberal arts.
That's the liberal art.
And if someone can do those things, well, then they can add additional skills.
They do it better.
They go further, don't they?
Yes.
So when you think about your biology students, if they do become, you know,
going into the medical path or they want to go, you know, into the research area.
Really, the building block doesn't come from just learning biology.
It comes from the Liberal Arts to make them better thinkers, better learners,
and then they go further there.
And by the way, I also think that there's one more thing too, that there's almost
like this, you just need some Liberal Arts in order to do something else.
I think liberal arts itself can be a pretty good end point to, um, you know,
there is nothing wrong about being like a really good general critical thinker
who can think for yourself, who can learn really well and go into the world.
And I would even argue, don't you think that, and I know that this
sounds like science fiction, but to me, you know, in the next few years,
as AI becomes better and better as.
You know, there's going to become a point where some of our graduates
not from the Liberal Arts program, actually Liberal Arts is the one
that's really hard to replace.
But, some of our graduates coming from programs where it's heavy skill
base or is very like many layers of skills, many, many, a lot of content,
the content heavy, you know, sort of majors, actually a lot of that content.
AI is going to be really good at doing, in fact, I would go as far as arguing
that it almost is going to be hard, if not impossible for our graduates
to be as good as the AI would be at, at, at just knowing that knowledge
and knowing that content, right?
So, so you're right.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I like to talk, but you're right in that.
What.
The encyclopedic knowledge, right, that we used to call smart has been
completely taken over by computers.
However, critical thinking cannot be taken over by computers.
And so I love that.
I love that.
I have a little theory on this, Tonya.
I want to see what you think about it.
I really think that the way that we do this, you know, the critical thinking,
you know, from a, you know, if you think about it from a cognitive neuroscience
standpoint is all of these nodes of, you know, sort of experiences that
we have and we learn to process them.
When we process them, we create links between these, you know, so
that's where the neural network comes in, into our brains, right?
That's, that's, That's, that's, that's really how, you know, our brains work
now that those pathways are very complex and they overlap and they go from,
you know, really simple, instinctive things to really difficult stuff.
Right.
And, and the way that we get better at learning and critical
thinking is through that processing of experience, which by the way.
Demetri, you talked about a bunch of times reflection,
that's really what it is, right?
So we develop these ways to build these neural networks and we, each
of us have our own stack of neural networks built through our experiences.
There is currently no way.
At least not yet that a machine and reach into our brain and build that for us.
Right.
What it can do is to give us a lot of those nodes of like experiences and maybe
like give you like, Hey, an encounter of, Hey, this is a recording of what happened.
This is something that someone wrote Demetri, right.
Back in, you know, like, uh, uh, over, uh, you know, like almost
2000, like over 2000 years ago.
Right.
But you still have to process it.
And it's that processor that we're having our students build.
I really think that that's what liberal arts does is that it,
it makes us better processors.
But I also think that it also, that's the requirement for us to become
better pedagogues and teachers, right?
I mean, I see our role, not necessarily only just sort of moving
forward with knowledge building, but also asking the right questions.
for the students to make the connections, and AI could never replace that.
And I think one of the things that I want to sort of just track back,
um, Jeff, about what you were saying before is that I think for so long, the
liberal arts has also been, I think, the domain of the privileged, right?
Because when you're talking about what What are our student incomes, right?
And they're looking for the job.
They're looking for that career or that thing that will bring in the money,
and yet they're not looking beyond.
And I think one of the things that has been so important, I think, both, um,
under sort of Gail Mello, our former president, and under the leadership
of Dionne, too, who has really sort of shaped the liberal arts department,
it really has been about access.
To those possibilities, which I think is really, really important.
And that's, I think, one of the things that I think makes LaGuardia
so great that we are not a work for a workforce development institution,
but we are one where there are multiple options and multiple paths
that could lead to many different possibilities and the liberal arts.
And I think Pedagogy or a form of teaching that actually is rooted in
reflection allows that to happen.
And that's really where social mobility is possible, right?
So the idea that, you know, you grew up in a home where you
don't have a lot of resources.
If you are continuously Thinking in those terms and thinking that your only path
is to quickly get a job, right, that can, that can, and you can skip over all
of the, the, you know, the, the other pieces, it, it makes it possible for
you to just keep continuing that cycle where you can get out of a certain level
of, you know, it's almost like that half of the world is not accessible to you.
Right.
Whereas the other half who realize that actually, no, that's where all the
thinking and enjoyment comes from, right.
They're doing that because you got, you almost got to believe that, well,
that's not for me because how, how am I going to get a job, you know, like
learning about thinking for myself, I just need to be able to do this.
Skill that can like quickly, like translate to a paycheck, except
that that's not even really true.
While, while it is possible to translate that into a paycheck, so can, so can all
the things that you do in liberal arts.
It's maybe slightly less obvious, but it's only slightly less obvious.
I think you can prove it quickly.
Here's a preview of what's coming up next in part two of my conversation with
Tonya Hendrix, Demetri Karpathianakos.
And Dionne Miller from LaGuardia Community College.
So, and I think it's taken students beyond, this is the
liberal arts, this is what I'm learning, to I am the liberal arts.
The liberal arts matters to me.
It's integral to who I am.