SWC Professionals help Bayan Scholars Develop Networking Skills

Photo by Ernesto Rivera

As we grow, Bayan plans to offer a mentor program, matching scholars with professionals for all the benefits we know that mentorship provides. Even as we aren’t at a place - yet! - for a full-blown mentor program as  PUENTE has, we can still help students develop skills they will need to make the most of mentor opportunities such as networking, introducing ourselves, asking questions - those “soft skills” that can make a huge difference. 

To that end, we set up a “mixer event” where students and Southwestern College professionals met “cocktail party-style” (there was no alcohol - just candy!) to practice meeting and greeting each other.

We broke the program up over a few days, reserving a portion of two class periods of Personal Development to prepare for the event. On the first day, students composed and practiced informal “elevator pitches,” quick self-introductions students might make when meeting a new teacher, prospective employer, or other person who they meet. The pitches we practiced were less formal than those proposed by Forbes or LinkedIn. Ours were intended for a more casual, low stakes situation. Folks jotted down their elevator pitches and practiced in front of the class and in pairs. 

Prepping for Finals: Finishing Strong!

At our last class meeting, the week before finals, we asked ourselves what we needed in order to finish the semester strong (yes, it should be "strongly", but artistic license, yeah?). For all but one student, this is first semester in college for everyone, our first experience with the ups and downs of the season, so we needed to spend a few minutes attending to this pressing issue. 

Scholars wrote their advice on index cards, and we collect them here in the two-minute video embedded above. In the spirit of helping ourselves, each other, and our followers, we share our collective advice for thriving during this crazy-making time of year.

What advice do you have for finishing out a session of school? What works for you? Share your comments below. Oh, and here's a link to the video should you want to share it. Cheers! 

Being Sweet: Caring for the Brains in our Bodies

In our quest to be more holistic in our approach in Bayan, we asked students to consider the concept of “sweet”. Not “sweet” as in sugar or candy, what FIlipinos would call mamatis. This "sweet" is an acronym to help us remember what we need to do to take care of the brains are in our body, to make sure that we attend to, crudely put, the physiology of learning. 

Sweet stands for Sleep, Water, Eating Healthy, Exercise, and Time to Relax, practices required to take care of our bodies, which in turn, keeps our brains working at top conditions for the cognitive challenges we face in our classes. 

With the exception of time, the elements of being sweet are easy to grasp. Time, in sweet terms, has to do with giving our brains and bodies “down time”, perhaps meditating or purposeful relaxation. Not channel surfing or binging on Netflix, but intentional practices to allow our bodies and brains to rest. Like the kind of "diffuse thinking" that Barbara Oakley discusses in her book Learning How to Learn. 

Jose Bowen, president of Goucher College and author of the provocatively titled  Teaching Naked discussed the “sweet” acronym on an episode of Teaching in Higher Education. We introduced sweet the first day of class. Every so often, we'd revisit the concept to check ourselves. Below is a Flipgrid, a video recording, of students' sweet self-evaluation we did right before the Thanksgiving long weekend because after the weekend, we only have one more week before finals. We figured that just before a break it would a good time to review how well we are treating the brains in our body. Have a look, and leave a comment about your sweet status below! 

Bayan Scholars Reflect on History & Heritage

October is Filipino American History Month, a commemoration instituted in 1991 by the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) to preserve, disseminate, and celebrate the history of Filipinos and Filipinas in the United States. To mark the event, we spent time in our English class considering what we know about our experiences in the USA. 

To get started, we used our writer’s notebook to generate and organize our ideas. The following questions focused our thinking:

• What do you think you know about Filipina/Filipino American history? How did you acquire that knowledge? 
• What's the difference between "history" and "heritage"?