In our final, extra long Dear Neighbor episode, we listen to faculty and staff mourn the loss of their community, and the place they've called home, as they make their way through the last ever semester at the College of Saint Rose.

Today we are talking to faculty members in Teacher Education. They’ll talk about how Saint Rose is supporting future and current teachers through the Build the Teacher Pipeline.

Today, we hear from only students! No faculty, no staff, no administrators. Just students speaking together about their experience here in the Saint Rose Black Student Union. 

Liz's departmental colleague, Jessica Otitigbe, and her students talk about creating community in the classroom, on campus, and in the broader community through storytelling. 

And later in the program we’ll hear from members of the Saint Rose Black Student Union, 

Today we have folx from Academic Advising, who talk about the relationships they make with students for the entirety of their time at Saint Rose- they do so much more than discuss which classes students should take!

And later in the program we’ll hear from two students who attended a small group conversation with legal scholar Michelle Alexander, who visited Saint Rose back in October. They’ll be reflecting on their conversation about the school-to-prison pipeline, and how Saint Rose students can become change agents.

In this episode, we hear from Yolanda Caldwell, Chief Diversity Officer and Director of the BOLD Women’s Leadership Network, and Glesaidys Eve, a senior at Saint Rose and a BOLD scholar. They will reflect on our campus’ response to the “double pandemic” of the past two years and their shared experiences in facilitating community conversations and structural change.

If you haven’t listened to Episode 3 yet, we strongly recommend doing so, since it is the natural lead-in to today’s episode, which is part 2 of Conversations about race in the classroom and beyond. This episode delves deeper into the this topic by learning from folx who use anti-racist teaching tools in their course design.

We first return to our conversation last episode with Jada, a senior communications major, to get a student’s perspective on why it is so critical to support conversations about race on campus, and how an experience with the student group ALANA early in her time at Saint Rose was crucial to making such conversations productive. Then, we step further into the this topic by learning from folx who use anti-racist teaching tools in their course design.

In this episode, we build on our theme of welcome from Episode 1, and ask the questions “what happens when a physical place becomes virtual? How do we find our footing when we return? And most importantly, “how do we make a place our own? We start with a conversation Liz had, with Communications senior, Jada Hart. Then we shift into a conversation with administrators from Diversity and Inclusion and Residence Life, and students with whom they’ve worked. They discuss how they nurtured themselves to place, community, and home when life on campus was taken away during the pandemic.

On our pilot episode of Dear Neighbor, listen to professors and students work together to create a sense of welcome in the classroom, and how they build on that feeling of community to grow and learn.