Common Read creates campus-wide discussion for freshmen
By Liz Reichart// A&E Editor
Photo by: amazon.com
“Live. Learn. Grow.” It’s that phrase that graces every surface from the school’s supply of water bottles to the Campus Concierge Daily Update emails. “Growth mindset” is the refrain High Point University students have embraced this past year as part of the school’s freshly established quality enhancement plan, or “QEP.” The blueprint for learning emphasizes the challenging and experimental aspects of life-long learners. The result? More curious learners who are willing to engage, who are open to failure and who are ultimately more prepared to succeed.
A key starting point in the process of engraining the growth mindset on our campus is the Common Experience. The program implements a campus-wide focus on a specific topic that engages students of all disciplines in a larger conversation. In its inaugural year, the 2015 common experience focused on “Just Communities.” The Class of 2019 explored how communities debate and determine what is just. As students determined their respective roles in the HPU community, they were folded into broader conversations about how communities are formed, how they change and how they establish the rights and responsibilities of their members.
Dr. Jenn Brandt is the director of the Common Experience, and is excited to see where the program will go in its second year. “The Common Experience is important as it helps to create shared intellectual experiences and foster community for incoming students through co-curricular and residential programming,” Brandt said. “The Common Read, in particular, helps prepare students for the types of intellectual discussions they can expect in college.”
Unsurprisingly, this year’s common experience theme, “Growing our Future,” will work hand-in-hand with the growth mindset, but in different ways than “Just Communities.” Incoming freshmen have had and will have opportunities to consider the creation of fair and sustainable food systems from ground to table. “This exploration engages faculty, staff and students from every discipline on campus as we reflect on the ways in which people and cultures grow, consume and value food,” Brandt said.
A component of the Common Experience is the phenomenon of the Common Read, as part of which the entire incoming class attending a university reads the same book and then together engages in thought-provoking activities related to the subject matter. Across the country, the subject matter and genre of novel vary wildly, from Malala Yousafzai’s autobiography “I am Malala” at Washington State University to Homer’s epic poem “The Illiad” at Columbia University. The Common Read is so, for lack of a more befitting word, common at universities across the map, that it is almost unusual to find a school without a communal reading program.
“The American Way of Eating” by Tracie McMillan is the Class of 2020’s project. A 2012 novel that takes a deep dive into the broken American food chain, this award-winning journalist tells her account of what occurred when she fearlessly jumped in and got her hands dirty. The book is divided into three sections—“Farming,” “Selling” and “Cooking”—and follows McMillan’s undercover investigation as she works undercover at a garlic farm in California, a Detroit-area Walmart and in food prep at a Brooklyn Applebee’s. “The American Way of Eating” explores a number of aspects related to our theme,” Brandt said. “The book can be considered from a number of disciplinary standpoints — journalism, business/economics, sociology, ethics, religion, nutrition and health — and provides an entry point for students to think about food and food systems on a deeper level.”
But the Common Experience doesn’t end at the close of McMillan’s rousing account. Small group discussions on the book will be integrated into the Class of 2020’s academic orientation. English 1103 classes and many first-year seminars will be integrating themes from the novel into their curriculums. To drive the experience home, McMillan will be on campus in September to have a conversation with first-year students during the President’s Seminar. Students are additionally encouraged to explore the variety of Internet resources provided by the Common Experience portal, which include TED talks by noted doctors, biologists, reporters and sustainable innovators.
The success of a campus program such as the Common Experience hinges on how threads are pulled and maintained from one year to the next. It’s clear that “Just Communities” and “Growing our Future” in the abstract have common elements of existing as broader societal ideas. But a conversation about our food, as the Class of 2020 will come to realize throughout the course of the year, will extend further than the classroom and the residence hall in unexpected ways. “I think the Class of 2020, as well as our entire campus community, can find a great deal to think about in terms of ‘The American Way of Eating’ and our theme ‘Growing Our Future,’” Brandt said. “Food is such an important part of our lives, not only from a physical standpoint, but for cultural and social reasons. From people ‘instagramming’ their meals, to regional specialties, to holiday and religious connections to food, there are many ways in which we can connect with this theme.”
As for how much the Class of 2020 will embrace the conversation? The hope is that new students will plunge headfirst into not only the big-picture beyond-the-plate issues presented by the Common Read, but likewise into all areas of campus life. “My hope is that the Common Read helps prepare students for the kind of academic rigor they can expect in college and that once they get here, the Common Experience activities and residential programming will help them form a sense of community with their classmates,” Brandt said. “My advice to the incoming class is to embrace all the university has to offer. Be willing to try new things, be open to new ways of thinking and to engage broadly with the multitude of resources available here on campus.” Here’s to hoping for and encouraging a whole-hearted embrace by HPU’s newest arrivals of these important issues surrounding sustainable food supply development.