The Augsburg Podcast

Bob Groven:                    You can have arguments that build relationships, that build friendships. You can be better friends after an argument than before an argument, or if you don't have a...

Sonja Hagander: Our graduates go on into seminaries and divinity schools who are powerful speakers for justice, who are innovative in the ways they think theologically, who are pushing systems. I want those peopl...

Paul Pribbenow: Are students college-ready? That's the kind of language that gets used and you hear it all the time. "Are students college-ready?" You will hear on a lot of campuses that there's real concern about that. We've...

Diane Pike: Augsburg needed to be what it was for the Lutheran students from the small towns, for the people who wanted to go to sem ... seminary. And now we need to be something else.

Paul Pribbenow: I'm Paul Pribbenow, president of Augsburg University. Augsburg educates students to be informed citizens, thoughtful stewards, critical thinkers, and responsible leaders. It's my great privilege to present the Augsburg Podcast, one way you can meet some of the faculty and staff I'm honored to work with every day.

Diane Pike: My name is Dianne Pike, and I'm a faculty member in the Sociology department. I grew up in Connecticut, and my father was a newspaper man; he was a journalist. I had had a sociology class and recognized that the structure and the vocabulary that sociology provides was very similar to what I saw happening in the news world with my dad. And it also gave me a way to make sense of things that I had been paying attention to and didn't have the vocabulary for. And we're lucky enough to have the kind of students here at Augsburg who are really eager to make sense of a world that's really complicated.

We want people to question what they take for granted, and we want people to have the tools to access the information and the data that could help them see something in a different way. I just said it in class this morning, "Personal opinion is no substitute for evidence." So that's a constant theme in what we try ... what I expose them to and what I try to get them to reflect on.

I know that I can't tell by looking at my students whether they come from affluence or not, but I know that the range is there. I know that students' ability to process information might be different. I can look across my students in the room and know there will be a range of students who think about sexuality differently. So, it's a fabulous place to teach because you can't do it one way, and you can't do it on autopilot.

When I arrived at Augsburg in the early 1980s, right, it was really about whether you were a Peterson or an Anderson. And the traditional orientation of Augsburg serving lots of Lutheran students, maybe many of them from small towns, that challenged my teaching, because I'm from the east coast, and I'm used to being in a place where you and I could argue about ideas and then go have a beer, and you come here and you argue with people about ideas and they don't talk to you anymore. And that was a real challenge here, and that was a real problem here in the culture, um, a very conflict avoidant culture, and a very reticent culture. That was a really big adjustment.

But what I've seen over the 35 years of my career has been this evolution of the institution in response to the changing needs of the community and the changing needs of society. And I think we are known now as a place where people want to come because of the diversity, that there's a genuineness to that.

As many people may know, we have a nationally known program that helps students who are in recovery. I would hypothesize, I would have to test this, that we get a significant number of students from the recovery program attracted to sociology, because for most of their lives, and certainly in most of their recovery, everything has been focused on either the biochemical or the psychological. And so to think about sociological explanations for phenomena, be it mental illness or addiction or other forms of behavior, is eye-opening for many of those students.

My area of expertise in sociology is the scholarship of teaching and learning. And so, um,

Michael Wentzel: One of the things I always tell students is I didn't come here to be average, and neither did they. And we're not gonna be average. We're gonna be excellent. All I ever will ask of them is their best every day. But I want the best. Let's be great.

Maybe I'm overly competitive. That's a problem. But (laughing) that's kind of where I, that's kind of how I view it.

Paul Pribbenow: Even as he teaches chemistry, Professor Michael [Wentzel 00:00:21] also teaches persistence. The drive to try, fail, and try again. To be better than yesterday and even better tomorrow. It's an infectious determination that serves his students well in the lab and working in the sciences after Augsburg, as many of his former students prove.

Augsburg University educates students to be informed citizens, thoughtful stewards, critical thinkers, and responsible leaders. I'm Paul Pribbenow, the President of Augsburg University, and it's my great privilege to present the Augsburg podcast, one way you can get to know some of the faculty and staff I'm honored to work with every day.

Michael Wentzel: I'm from a small Irish Catholic town in northwest Iowa called Emmetsburg. I mean I always laugh when people say like, like work, how hard work. My, I was like, I don't work hard, my dad works hard. My dad owns a hardware store, True Value hardware store, that's like work. I was growing up, he's there seven days a week, 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. easy, probably every day. That was just kind of the attitude. And then the part of it, I mean part of him was small town. You know, if you're gonna do it, you're gonna do it as best you can.

Irrational confidence I guess, we thought this is what, you know this is what you're supposed to do. Do your best, be the, you know, do as best you can. That was kind of the attitude.

I think um, the biggest thing research will teach you or teach, it teaches students is it teaches them how to fail. And to not be okay with it, but then how you respond to it. Some days, their best is not good enough and they have to realize okay, how are you gonna respond to that? That's one of the things I think sometimes they, that's hard too. It's like, you worked today, and you thought you did the best you could, I need more. It needs to be better.

So you need to have that experience where maybe there's not a clear answer. Especially science students, who are used to a right answer or this will work. That's a skill, to be able to face adversity and not like it, and then how do you respond to it.

One of my first research students was one of those cases where um, she had uh, literally actually been told in high school she wasn't good at chemistry. I don't know how that happened. Transfer student, had come here from the community college, was in organic chemistry doing super, super well. Very shy (laughing), very quiet. I remember I think I pulled her aside in lab one day, I said, "Hey, you know, are you interested in doing chemistry? You're really good." And she's like, "Why?" I'm like, "You're 90s, above 90s in all these tests," like, you know she's like, "I'm not, oh you think I'm good at it?" I was like, "Well, you don't think you're good at it? Look at these numbers." Like she literally, I think she literally said, "No one's ever told me I'm good at something," or, or "I could be good at chemistry." I was like, okay, I mean you know it's just hard for me like I, I just, it was like oh my gosh, really, like well, yeah.

And so then she did research with me. Uh,

Rebekah Dupont: I remember a story when one of our students was ... You could tell something was wrong. He wasn't himself and we found out that he was having a tooth problem and he didn't have the money to go to the dentist and it was impacting everything. If your tooth hurts, how can you learn physics? And so a family of people figured out a solution and it was, you know, it was taken care of, but that's the kind of thing that somewhere else, someone might, might just think that this student is not engaged or might, you know, might draw a different conclusions than what is the underlying cause why, um, the student isn't being successful right now and what's impacting you and how can I help.

Paul Pribbenow: Augsburg is built on its faculty and student relationships, and the discoveries and successes born from those meaningful convergences. Rebekah Dupont, director of STEM programs shares a few of her most memorable accounts. These are the stories of some of Augsburg's best and brightest and they're only a small taste of what takes place here each and every day. Augsburg University educates students to be informed citizens, thoughtful stewards, critical thinkers and responsible leaders. I'm Paul Pribbenow, the president of Augsburg University and it's my great privilege to present the Augsburg Podcast, one way you can get to know some of the faculty and stuff that I'm honored to work with every day.

Rebekah Dupont: Mike Alvaz was a student who came and visited Augsburg in the spring and had incredible interest in chemistry, and we encouraged him to apply for the scholarship and then we were able to connect him with Dave Hansen in the chemistry department to do summer research before he had even taken any classes at Augsburg. And so, he came to Augsburg, did full-time summer research, participated in the URGO summer research program and then started classes in the fall. By having that experience and that track record of on-campus experience, Mike was able to apply for a summer research experience at University of California, San Diego, and was selected to participate and he had a very positive experience there and also got to know many faculty mentors who were research faculty.

And he came back to Augsburg for his senior year, was continuing to do research here at Augsburg, so now he had multiple research experiences, he had research mentors, both at Augsburg and at other places nationally, and he applied for one of the most competitive scholarships for students going on in the sciences which is the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, which is a fellowship that if you receive it, you receive full funding for multiple years as a graduate student and so not only is your tuition paid for, but you receive an annual stipend that's very significant and it allows you to go and have your own research idea. You take that scholarship or fellowship rather with you to whatever institution you go to, so it makes you very, very desirable as a, as a graduate student. And he was able to receive one of those fellowships and is now studying at the University of California, San Diego, working on a PhD in environmental chemistry.

A student story that is really near and dear to my heart is a, an Alumna named Chandra Erdman. She was a McNair scholar and, um, mathematics major and also had studied, um, significant amount of sociology. And we worked together on a project that used census data. Chandra is African-American and had lived in North Minneapolis, and we looked at the sociological concept of hyper segregation and we wanted to look at using census data and looking at how we could do a mathematical model of this process. Chandra was a student who had a, a level of initiative and drive that was just very impressive,

Christopher H: Graphic design in general, the discipline, sits a lot of intersections with technology, client based work, and expression. Expression and activism. Parker Palmer has this great quote about, "the greatest act of rebellion we can offer the world is to show up as our full selves." And when I got here at Augsburg, I was really excited to show up as my full self.

Paul Pribbenow: Design has many meanings. Christopher [Hulkberg 00:00:28], Assistant Professor of Art, brings together community and classroom to create change, to celebrate diversity, and to empower his students to discover their own creative agency.

Augsburg University educates students to be informed citizens, thoughtful stewards, critical thinkers, and responsible leaders. I'm Paul Pribbenow, the President of Augsburg University, and it's my great privilege to present the Augsburg podcast, one way you can get to know some of the faculty and staff I'm honored to work with every day.

Christopher H: I approach teaching in a way that extends our classrooms into the community, and think about our community as local citizens first, so I think about the students as being citizens of this community. And as being a citizen, they have a responsibility to their neighbors, and they have a responsibility to contribute.

And as an extension of that, I started looking for ways for the students to use their skill set to access their agency to connect with another form of agency in the community and collectively, they can create something interesting.

For instance, there's a group of young Somali women that met at the Brian Coyle Center. And they had this dream to start a, a secondhand boutique store. And uh, as I begin to hear about this, I thought well, they're going to need some logos. Like, they're going to need some signage, they'll need a lot of collateral. We can do that. (laughing)

And so, we began a conversation with this organization. And first we just went in and listened to their vision and said, "Tell us what you're up to." I was with four advanced students at the time. And we went in for a listening session. And we just listened to their vision. Uh, we brought a bunch of images and patterns and colors, and we just asked them to put something together for who they thought they were. And, and how does that translate visually. And so uh, through the course of this relationship, we ended up designing a logo for them, some business cards, um, and, and most recently a, a sign uh, signage system so that they have for their store that sits across the street from Augsburg.

Every day I drive in, I get to see that signage, and I'm reminded of this amazing moment when two sets of power or influence come together, and now this store holds space in our neighborhood.

I began writing a curriculum to create a graphic design degree program that was built around these core values that the school holds, but also these core values that I was beginning to see incredibly valuable for our students. We've named our design agency ca- it's called Design and Agency. Really, it's a double entendre for us. On one hand, we provide a service to clients, and like any other agency we have a storefront, we function within a set of parameters. But on the other hand, agency is the conduit by which power is accessed. And when we think about agency, oftentimes in educational systems the student is put in a subordinate position automatically. And I just don't believe in that. I don't think that that's good practice.

John Cerrito: We're not afraid to seek God here, uh, which is, which I think is a, a tremendous benefit. We are preparing you just not for, uh, uh, uh, success in the business world. We intend to help prepar...