Caring Campus: Books & eBooks

A mentor, advisor, or even a friend? Making connections in college makes all the difference.

What single factor makes for an excellent college education? As it turns out, it's pretty simple: human relationships.

Decades of research demonstrate the transformative potential and the lasting legacies of a relationship-rich college experience.

Critics suggest that building connections with peers, faculty, staff, and other mentors is expensive and only an option at elite institutions where instructors have the luxury of time with students.

But in this revelatory book brimming with the voices of students, faculty, and staff from across the country, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert argue that relationship-rich environments can and should exist for all students at all types of institutions.

In Relationship-Rich Education, Felten and Lambert demonstrate that for relationships to be central in undergraduate education, colleges and universities do not require immense resources, privileged students, or specially qualified faculty and staff. All students learn best in an environment characterized by high expectations and high support, and all faculty and staff can learn to teach and work in ways that enable relationship-based education.

Emphasizing the centrality of the classroom experience to fostering quality relationships, Felten and Lambert focus on students' influence in shaping the learning environment for their peers, as well as the key difference a single, well-timed conversation can make in a student's life. They also stress that relationship-rich education is particularly important for first-generation college students, who bring significant capacities to college but often face long-standing inequities and barriers to attaining their educational aspirations.

Drawing on nearly 400 interviews with students, faculty, and staff at 29 higher education institutions across the country, Relationship-Rich Education provides readers with practical advice on how they can develop and sustain powerful relationship-based learning in their own contexts.

Ultimately, the book is an invitation--and a challenge--for faculty, administrators, and student life staff to move relationships from the periphery to the center of undergraduate education.

Print book

eBook

Print book

eBook

eBook

eBook

A practical guide to building the connections students need to thrive in and after college Decades of research demonstrate how important the relationships with peers and professors are for students academically, personally, and professionally. Yet many students lack the strategies to develop educationally purposeful relationships in college.

Connections Are Everything shows students the simple steps they can take to make their own college experience meaningful and transformational. In short, practical chapters, this guide helps readers learn how to build relationships through various strategies, including using "relationship accelerators" like internships and mentorships, undergraduate research, and campus employment. Undergraduate demographics have changed dramatically as students of color and first-generation students become the new majority at colleges and universities across the United States.

Connections are particularly significant for these students; the positive--and negative--impacts of peer, faculty, and staff relationships are magnified. Higher education cannot meet students' needs or achieve justice and inclusion without relationship-rich education. This book empowers students to seek out relationships by demystifying the varied ways they can cultivate significant connections.