Persisting Together: Themes for the 2025-26 Academic Year

By: Jeffrey L. Bernstein & Alivia Overbee

Welcome to the 2025-26 academic year! On behalf of all of us at the Faculty Development Center, we're glad to see you all back and look forward to a successful and meaningful year, even (or perhaps especially) in the face of all the challenges higher education in general and Eastern Michigan University in particular are facing. 

Our website and first newsletter highlight some of the activities we have planned for this semester. We're pleased to offer five learning communities in the upcoming semester; one that  focuses on wellbeing, another focused on online teaching, a third on building a community or caring, and two that are connected to our Teaching and Learning Together (TaLT) initiative (Collaborative Course (Re)Design as well as Instructional Partnerships). We will also offer numerous other workshops and programs throughout the year. Even as we write this, we are adding new programs to the list for the fall; please keep an eye on our website and newsletter to see what's coming down the pike. 

One of our major activities last year was a learning community called Persisting Together. Persisting Together was born from data showing that EMU’s first-to-second-year retention rates are not where any of us would like them to be. There are many reasons for this, many of which transcend the university (including economic and family concerns of our students). Many of these challenges also transcend what we are able to do in our specific roles at EMU; few of us, for example, can do anything to address the high cost of college faced by our students.

One thing we can do in our roles, however, is to try to create meaningful connections between those on our campus. Vincent Tinto and others argue that the decision a student makes whether or not to return to a particular college after their first or second year considers many factors, one of which is the connections the student has made on campus.  As a professor who has studied student success, and as a two-time parent of college students, I understand the role that connections play in the retention decision and in assessing satisfaction with their school.  When a student feels disconnected, they are unlikely to return to us. As Peter Felten, Leo Rich, Isis Artze-Vega, and Oscar Miranda Tapia remind us, “Connections Are Everything.”

Our Persisting Together group, which consisted of students, faculty and staff, met over the course of last year, seeking to understand the challenge and develop solutions. As co-leaders of the group, the two of us (Jeff is Director of the Faculty Development Center, while Liv is a graduate student in experimental psychology and GA for the Faculty Development Center) took an explicit perspective NOT to focus on large, expensive, and grandiose plans to improve retention far down the road.  These kinds of big ideas often cost more than an institution can afford, leading to problems with implementation, and often yield mixed results. 

We viewed the retention problem as too pressing to seek a solution that would bear fruit in five years. Rather, our group sought to come up with actionable items - deliverables, as we called them - that would enable us to make immediate changes that we felt were needed. You will hear much about this work throughout the year. 

For now, in this blog entry, we offer up a few thoughts for you. First, much of our work centered around creating a welcoming tone in individual classes. A few weeks ago, the FDC did a workshop on How to Create a Welcoming Syllabus. You can click on the link for the PowerPoint from that program as well as a recording of it. We also hosted workshops for faculty to drop in and talk to student members of the Persisting Together learning community about how they can make their syllabus even more welcoming for students. While it may be a little late for this semester to dig back into the syllabus, these resources will remain on our website going forward, and we intend to run programs to help faculty create welcoming syllabi again into the future. 

The general principles for welcoming students can transcend the syllabus document. We also want to get faculty thinking about ways to build connections in their classroom between them and their students, as well as connecting students to their peers. When a faculty member thinks about building these connections within their classroom, we don't want them to have to start from scratch and come up with ideas on their own! To this end, we asked members of our EMU community to share some of the ways they accomplish this, and are grateful to all who have shared. In the coming weeks, you have several ways to access these ideas. First, here you will find a document that compiles all the currently collected ideas (we will update it with additional ideas we receive throughout the year). We also plan to feature a blog and video series that allows us to elaborate on these fantastic ideas even more.

We also invite you to share with us your ideas, if you haven’t already. Our short survey, linked here, will stay open for the time being, allowing us to collect ideas that have not been shared yet, or new ideas that emerge throughout the semester.

A third piece of our Persisting Together initiative looks at connections, not just in a classroom, but between students and their major department.  A student’s home department has a lot to do with the experience they have at this university. Jeff has very warm memories of ways that his department (political science) collectively has reached out to students to build a community (and continues to do so to this day). As the semester rolls on, we will offer resources to help departments build connections with their students, such as by hosting departmental events or finding ways to enhance communication efforts. Our hope in doing so is not to tell departments what to do, but to offer resources to make it easier for departments to pursue these sorts of communications and connections in whatever form they wish. 

The litany of challenges facing EMU students today is well known and need not be recited here again. As faculty, we are somewhat limited in what we can do to address these challenges. We cannot directly affect the world affairs that may be stressing our students out. We cannot solve our students' economic needs or address the wellness challenges they are facing, much as we might wish we could wave a magic wand and do so.

What we can do, however, is to help make Eastern Michigan University the kind of place where students feel as if they are part of a caring community, and where they feel as if they belong. (We thank Ron Flowers, Kati Lebioda, and so many others for their tireless efforts in this area). The FDC initiatives we have described here, and others that you will see in the coming weeks and months, aim to address this one small step at a time. We hope, as our new semester begins, that you all might think about a few ways, even small ways, for you to take up this challenge. Together, let us resolve to help build the wherewithal in our students to be able to persist at EMU, get their degree, and leave here as a proud (and credentialed) Eagle! 

From all of us at the Bruce K. Nelson Faculty Development Center, we wish you health, happiness, and fulfillment in the coming semester.