Today I decided to read Connections Are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education. It had been on my radar for a while. Britt Abel shared it with the Student-Ready Campus working group in Summer 2023 and Tom Halverson shared it with the faculty in his address at the start of Fall 2023.
I was immediately intrigued because of the title because community building has been on my mind for a while. I do think the book would be useful to students, but as an educator I wasn’t left with a lot of concrete strategies to try in my own classrooms. I do appreciate that this book, if read seriously by students, plays a role in students seeing their own role in building community. The different sources of relationships and the challenges acknowledged in the book are all things that I already knew about, but I did appreciate the “Ask Yourself…” and “Try This!” sections in the book. These could very well be a great source of reflection questions, which is always something that I love to get suggestions for.