ResEdChat Ep 175: Flipped Residence Halls – Resident Learning, Restorative Practices, and Campus Dialogue

In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, Host Paul sits down with one of our 2026 Roompact Fellows, Kaleigh Mrowka, to discuss student learning and curriculum, restorative practices, and encouraging campus dialogue. An interesting through-line develops which can give residence hall professionals multiple strategies and elements to incorporate in their work of making meaningful spaces for resident students. (Ledo’s Pizza and a kitten also make an appearance.)

Guest: Kaleigh Mrowka (she/her) is a restorative practice scholar, trainer, consultant, and leader with over a decade of experience in restorative facilitation in college and university environments. Her work considers the ways that dialogue and restorative practice can be used to co-create healthier and more community-centered organizations, and she has worked with dozens of colleges and universities seeking to build more relational and restorative campus organizational cultures. Kaleigh began her career in residential life and is passionate about the ways that students learn from both their curricular and co-curricular college experiences. She holds a B.A. In Speech Communication from Ithaca College, a M.S. in Higher Education and Student Affairs Administration from SUNY Buffalo State and a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy and Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In her current role, Kaleigh serves as the Director of Campus Culture Transformation at the Constructive Dialogue Institute where she collaborates with campus leadership to build healthier campus cultures where dialogue across differences can thrive. 

Host: Paul Gordon Brown

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Listen to the Podcast:

Watch the Video:

Show Notes:

• Constructive Dialogue Institute
• The International Institute for Restorative Practices (the IIRP)
• A Residence Life and Education Framework: Three C’s: Community, Curriculum, & Care

Transcript:

Paul Brown:
All right. Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat where we talk with folks that are just doing cool stuff and interesting, innovative things across the sphere of residence life, residential education, college student housing, sometimes even student affairs in general. So, I’m excited today to have one of our Roompact Fellows join us. If you’re not familiar with our Roompact Fellows Program, it’s a scholar-in-residence and so they’ll be with us throughout the year contributing their knowledge, their expertise through our content channels like our webinars, this podcast, our blogs and they’re also able to help out with our schools with things that they might be encountering that they want to just consult on.
So, if you’re a Roompact member, you’ll be able to also meet them in person at the R2 Conference coming up in October so make sure that you register for that. So, Kaleigh Mrowka is our guest today. We go back quite far-

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Quite far, yeah.

Paul Brown:
… I don’t want to do the math but Kaleigh is someone that I really appreciate for just the way she thinks and the way her career has evolved because it’s not one that is that linear path of student affairs where first you start as the hall director then you move to area coordinator, things like that. She does have that element in her path but she’s also done some amazing work and taken on some jobs in specific areas that I think are interests to residence life people like restorative practices, dialogue, things of that sort, also a little bit of a curricular stuff in there too.
And the last thing I’ll say is Kaleigh is my go-to every time I am in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area to drag her to my favorite not good pizza place which is Ledo’s which I declare as the best not-good pizza in the country. Unlike, shots fired, the worst not good pizza which is Imo’s which is in St. Louis which is also where Kaleigh used to live for a while. I know I’m going to hear it from all the St. Lucians-

Kaleigh Mrowka:
And you know I’ve lived in St. Louis, Paul, so [inaudible 00:02:14].

Paul Brown:
I know, I know, I know. Kaleigh, tell us about yourself. Give me the more formal version besides the fact that you get dragged to pizza joints willingly on occasion.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Thanks, Paul. And I’m so excited to be here, excited to be in conversation with Roompact, excited for the fellow experience and thrilled that you started this conversation off with saying that I have a weird career path, that’s fantastic. And I do-

Paul Brown:
Untraditional. Did I say weird?

Kaleigh Mrowka:
No, that’s my word.

Paul Brown:
Okay, okay.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
But I think-

Paul Brown:
Non-traditional.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
… I did start really in the traditional res life format. I was in living learning community work, I did live in hall director work, moved up through residence education, spent about a decade in residence life before making a shift over to doing restorative justice and dialogue work full-time. I think I was facilitating restorative justice circles and working with student conduct, building restorative justice programs into student conduct programs throughout my time in residence life. And then, when I started my dissertation journey, I just realized that the dialogue part of the work, the restorative justice part of the work, thinking about harm and healing and helping students to do that work better was so core to the community experience of res life that I loved and so just followed that path.
So, I did two years working with the International Institute for Restorative Practices building a center for higher education and then now I’m working with the Constructive Dialogue Institute where I work with institutions to help think about integrating dialogue into their campus culture. So, my heart is still in res life, I still get to do res life work, I still do the curriculum work, I built a residential curriculum, have helped other schools to do so. My heart’s still there in a lot of ways but always excited to talk about that intersection, how can we think more about how conversations in community and dialogue fit into a residential space. So, thanks for having me.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. I was reflecting today about what we talk about and I think one of the things that is this interesting throughline in your career path is living learning communities, residential curriculum, restorative practices, dialogue are almost this very nice evolution of thoughts of they all function in a very similar space, I think, of how can we be intentional, what does this look like, how can we deepen the student learning experience and things like that and it’s almost like you’ve, oh, and then, oh, also this and I’m going to take a little bit of this.
How do you think that your intellectual journey of that path, what drew you to those topics, spaces, areas? Because to me it makes very sense that they’re very germane, does that make sense?

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Yeah. That’s a really good question, I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about it in that way. This won’t surprise you, I’m both a fixer and a developer, I’m a developer and strengths finder, I’m also restorative and strengths finder and so, I think as I was engaging in work, I would notice gaps or questions that I felt like needed more attention or that I wanted to be able to dig into more. So, when I was doing living learning community work, I noticed the high level of conflict that happened. I was excited about the classroom learning coming into residential spaces but, even in the intellectual conversations, the amount of conflict and struggle that students had through that experience and the way that that informed their learning process was super interesting to me.
I was really interested in harm and healing always, that was a topic of my undergraduate research and so restorative practices was a really natural fit for me throughout my career. But even in restorative practices, one of the things that we noticed, if folks are familiar with restorative justice, they know that people are invited into a restorative justice space, they have to be willing to take accountability for their actions and they have to want to make repair and restore that relationship within that community. And I started recognizing that it was hard sometimes to create those spaces, that if students didn’t see themselves as a strong part of a community then they were less likely to be willing to sit down and listen to other perspectives, to hear about the harm that maybe they had caused.
So, being connected to that community, being invested in that community, being able to work through those issues, the skills that they needed to do that just became really interesting to me. It was something that we kept talking about as such a natural part of the residential experience. Students are going to build community, students are going to have conflict, students are going to work through that conflict and the truth of that is so much messier. And so, I think, throughout my career, I’ve been following this question around what does it actually mean to build healthy communities in a resident’s life or a college environment. When those communities are challenged, how are we making sure that folks in that space have the skill, capacity and structure to help students learn and to work through those issues.
And how are we making sure that, when students leave our residence hall environments, when they leave our college environments, they’re better equipped to manage in this world that we have now which is highly polarized, extremely diverse and is going to require them to be able to do a lot of these things, to build a community outside of, hopefully, their cell phone, to be able to learn how to do that, to be able to go into the workplace and work with people from diverse perspectives and backgrounds. All of those pieces for me, I think, are really critical and are things that, the more work and the more time we spend in learning about them, the more impact we can have.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. You’re making me think of sometimes I’ll hear from folks that you’ve done work with residential curriculum, curricular approaches, I think sometimes I hear opposition to those approaches because they say, no, we need to focus on community. And, to me, nothing about … If I’m thinking about a curricular approach, I guess I’m just assuming that you’re also building community and I’m not spending time having to talk about it. I’m talking about the learning component of it but to me it’s assumed in there but I think sometimes people place it as almost like it’s this either or. You either do curriculum or you focus on community and, to me, it’s really both. But I think one of the … If I were to criticize sometimes because I was on the institute faculty like you for a number of years about maybe the way that we taught curriculum is we shortchange talking about the community spaces that need to occur in order for that curriculum to be successful.
Which is one of the things that I think, in terms of when you’re talking, I’m thinking about, yeah, sometimes people go, “Oh, you just throw them in the halls and they build community because they’re going to interact and that’s it, there’s nothing else to do. You throw up some bulletin boards, done, community,” but there’s just so much more deeper work you can do around building community and building relationships and building connections that I feel like the field of residence life has not given enough attention to. Does that resonate with you? Do you …

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Absolutely. And what a false binary between-

Paul Brown:
Total false binary.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
… you have to either do learning or community building and we have to be able … I think one of the things here is … One of the revolutions that the curriculum, in my perspective, brought about that’s really helpful is this idea of focusing in a learning outcome paradigm where we’re able to articulate our goals, we’re able to assess those goals, figure out if we’re doing them well, be really intentional and sequential about the way that we’re working with students and be able to communicate that message, learn from it and continue to improve. Fantastic, there’s nothing wrong with that message. What I think people sometimes come into conflict with is the fact that not every single experience the students are going to have in the residence halls is going to be about intellectual learning.
They’re having affective learning experiences, they’re learning how to manage their emotional intelligence and their ability to be in conversation with people who are different from them. And some of that stuff is measurable, how many times maybe they were in conversation, some of the learning experiences they go through but a lot of the learning that happens in residence halls doesn’t happen in a way that you can say students will blank because it’s going to be so informed by their affective experience, their mental health journey, the way that they learn about how they fit into a community. And I don’t think that means though, so this is the gap, I don’t think that means though that we pay any less attention to the importance of that world, to the fact that, if we’re not putting students into situations where they’re having conversations with each other, then they’re not going to have those learning experiences. If we’re going to switch everything over into a paradigm of learning, which is great, we want them to come away with certain knowledge, we also want them to have certain experiences that are going to allow them to develop as people.
And so, I think both of those things can be true and I don’t think that means that we have to assess them the same way. And I think that that’s one of the things that we need to do a little bit more work in digging and figuring out because what a community experience looks like, community learning looks like for me is going to look really different than it’s going to look like for you. Saying that students will be able to A, B and C isn’t going to always fit within a community paradigm. And so, we have to think about how we hold both of those things are important and we assess our success in those things maybe a little bit differently.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. That’s so resonating with me because one of the things I put out under Roompact the 3C framework for residence life practice and it’s community, curriculum and care. And the reason I did that, the reason it’s structured and the reason why I even call it a framework is that I felt there needed to be … I’ve always done curricular stuff but I felt like talking about it in a vacuum without talking about the community aspect and the care of making sure students don’t fall through the care aspects is shortchanging the whole system. And treating it as a framework, there’s lots of different models out there which would fit under the framework that might give different aspects more or less emphasis or structure those things differently, I think the model actually matters slightly less than the are you focusing on the right things.
At least that was what my attempt was to do and I think what you described fits in with that, not surprisingly, my vein of thinking since sometimes we tend to swim in the same direction on that thing.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
I love the 3Cs and, yes, absolutely. Sometimes when I’m working with hall directors, I’ll ask the question think back to your most salient learning experience when you were living at a residence hall in college. And admittedly, I will say I was a terrible resident, I didn’t go to programs, I was never an RA-

Paul Brown:
Same.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
… that all happened for me in grad school.

Paul Brown:
Oh, I was also a terrible RA. I was not only … I was a fine resident but I was a terrible RA.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Yeah, yeah. Good reminder, if you are working with RAs, they might still turn out to love this work even if they don’t do it on day one. But sometimes I’ll ask them that question and I thought it was just me but I’ve learned in asking that question to a lot of people that, most of us, our strongest learning experience was about a time someone gave us grace and we didn’t deserve it. An interaction that we had with someone that taught us something about ourselves or about the world, having a really tough conversation with a roommate and learning about that experience, some of those things are facilitated under a curricular model but very few people that I’ve talked to have been like, “There was this program I went to or there was this bulletin board or initiative that I learned from.”
And that’s not to say that those things aren’t important and we didn’t learn from them but there are impactful experiences that happen in the care and the community side of things that are no less important than the work that we’re doing around learning. And I’m so glad that the field has caught up and thought of ourselves as educators now, I just don’t want us to go so far in that direction that we’re missing and losing some of those community and care components that are so critical.

Paul Brown:
I’m going to throw you a tough question, something that goes on in my mind. Are most residence life departments, in terms of structure, in terms of personnel and things like that, sophisticated enough to pull that off well?

Kaleigh Mrowka:
That’s a good question. I think so.

Paul Brown:
I feel like it’s a really high bar and it can certainly be done but it’s also really difficult in residence life spaces where, yeah, you also have to make sure the HVAC works and there’s a fire alarm and there’s a lot of other things competing for time that sometimes can pull you away. Not that you can’t do it in a way that promotes those things but it’s trying to squeeze a lot out of something.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Yeah. Well, and this is another area … I am not meaning to be critical of the curricular model approach, I teach it and I love it and I think it’s great.

Paul Brown:
Same. Yeah, same.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
It’s another space where I think maybe we’ve leaned a little too far. I love the fact that we think of professionals as experts for learning and, at the same time, I think sometimes we lose the potential that our student leaders and our students have to help be part of our residence life experience. Rather than the professionals always having to carry the community and care components of the work, we can empower … Students are the experts of their own communities and their own experiences and their own relationships so if we can shift a little bit to do more co-creation, to build more capacities where they can manage conflict amongst themselves. Anyone who’s facilitated or worked with a residence hall floor, RA, hall director, even up higher that has seen the experience of a community really gelling doesn’t happen all the time.
But when you have a living learning community or just a random floor or a group of RAs that really, really gets and clicks on that community thing, they have shared norms, shared ways of doing things, you see the different ways that that takes the pressure off of the staff team. They hold each other accountable, they have good conversations, they push other ideas and things forward. And so, I wonder often about how can we figure out what’s working in those moments, do more to create environments where some of those learning experiences are happening at the student level that students can integrate and co-create and be a part of their own community experience. And with restorative practices, restorative justice work, one of the things that we found across the board just like the curriculum and maybe even more so, when we teach students how to manage conflict at the entry level of the moment and we don’t allow things to escalate, everybody else gets a ton more time back.
Because when things don’t escalate, we have less fires to put out, we’re spending less time in reactive moments with students, we have less issues to manage because those things can be dealt with at their inception instead of after they’ve escalated for months potentially .And so, I think there’s lots we can do to flip what we’re doing. We talk about the flipped classroom all the time but, for some reason, we’re not talking about the flipped residence hall. How do we really think about how do we do that in a residence hall environment both for the community learning and for our own sanity, I don’t know, there’s too much to do, we have too much to do.
We talk in restorative practices, Paul, about the 80/20 model which always makes people panic. So, in an ideal world, we’re doing proactive work, community building work, the work that makes our hearts feel full 80% of the time and only putting out fires and doing the response of work 20% of the time. And I feel like, for most res life people, that’s completely flipped. But yet, rather than tackling the cause of why we’re spending so much time putting out fires and really digging in and trying to figure that out, we just hire more staff or don’t sleep or try to find more efficient ways to report. So, I’d encourage people to think about how do we really think about that, how do we flip the classroom in the residence hall and think more proactively about this stuff.

Paul Brown:
As someone who’s a research tech in student learning and classroom spaces, flipped classrooms is something that I’ve talked about and ended. But yeah, flipped residence halls, great, now I know what the title of this episode will be. It’s interesting because I also was meeting with one of our other fellows Erin Long and Erin has a lot of expertise in design thinking which I think is also a nice throughline with this. But your discussion of making it student-driven, student-centered, et cetera was actually parallel to a conversation that I had with Erin which in her dissertation, in her implications was advocating for flipping this learning design for students from administrator-centered design to student-centered design which I feel like is exactly what, especially as someone with the deep restorative practices experience, fits in with that how are we bringing people in and co-creating instead of imposing bit.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Yeah. Well, first of all, Erin is brilliant, go listen to her podcast episode if it’s out-

Paul Brown:
Yeah, it was a good chat.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
… if it’s not out, then wait and go get it because I’m sure it’s going to be brilliant. Second of all, that makes me think, Paul, a little bit about, one, our skill training as professionals, are we training res life people to be able to do that well, to work with students in that way. And, secondly, I think there’s an ego component here, right?

Paul Brown:
Mm-hmm.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
I think that we like to drive the learning.

Paul Brown:
Sure.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Our assessment culture, our performance management process culture, there’s a legitimate need and desire to come in as a resident director and to prove that you can do this well. And it’s hard to flip that without a lot of institutional work which is why we talk about dialogue and restorative practices needing to infuse into the institution to instead say, no, rather than me driving the work and being able to promote myself, I want to be able to promote what’s important to the students. I want to meet the learning outcomes of my curriculum and I also want to really spend time meeting students where they are and doing that work on their level and I feel like there’s a little bit of a weird gap in our training and our reward structure there for folks in the field.
So, that’s something that I’ve been thinking about too. When we’re training hall directors, when we’re recruiting and interviewing hall directors, how are we signalling and shifting some of the ways that we’re showing them, creating the psychological safety that you don’t have to check every box and prove yourself 100% that you can drive this community forward, we want you to grow and build that community in a more facilitative way than more of a directive way. And that I think is a weird moment that we’re going to have to reconcile with as this more community infused mindset in res life starts to take hold.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. I even think it about in terms of, and I’ve talked about this before, that sometimes especially, I talk about it in a curricular sense but I think it’s also true in a lot of other spheres, is that you get really smart people, people that really know their stuff and they build something at an institution but, if it is not ingrained in the culture or it is not brought up so that everyone is participating, that person leaves, the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards because it was built on their sheer force of here’s what we’re doing and things like that. And sometimes that even meant that on paper it looks really great but then the practice falls apart because you’re like, “You’re not doing the things that we need to be” …
I say facilitate this learning experience but it’s not being facilitated but, if you look at the paper, it says that it is. But if you look at the actual practice because we’re not bringing the rest of the team along with it and ensconcing it in the organization, it falls apart. I’ve been guilty of that in a space where I’ve been that person that’s like, “Yeah, and this and that,” and then I left and then within a year people are like, “What are you talking about? We don’t do that here,” and I’m like, “Oh, well, I clearly didn’t build for longevity.”

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Well, and don’t even get me started on assessment. We can tell a really great story about this curriculum initiative that we’re doing in these learning programs and initiatives and ways that we’re bringing students together and beneath the data is a story where you’re hitting 10% of the students that live on your campus. And so, the success story is great because the work that you’re doing is really impactful for the students who are in the space and engaging but, for the ones who aren’t, that looks different. And so, how are we also really digging into the data to ask the question of whose voices are we not hearing and why aren’t they engaging, is it time, do they just have other priorities, is there something about the way that we’re approaching things that is creating barriers for them or have we just not helped them to see themselves as an important part of this community in a way that they want to engage in the moment or do they see their community different outside of our sort of structure.
I think those are questions that we need to ask particularly if we’re seeing … I was talking to a school a few weeks ago and they were like, “We have about a 15% attendance rate at our community meetings but we’re doing circles,” and I was like, “Okay, let’s talk about that.” Because it’s great that you’re having all of this great data happen from these circles but you’re only getting five or six students from your community and it’s a floor of 65 people so let’s talk about that, what’s going on there and is that okay. Of course you’re not going to get everybody, people have other priorities and that might not be about you but also we need to talk about it and figure out what is the story we’re telling and how do we frame that within that larger picture.

Paul Brown:
Yes. And you even hit on one thing that I could talk about all day which is using attendance as a form of assessment because … In precedent what it is, attendance is important because you need to show up in order for you to participate in the experience. So, on one level, attendance is still something that matters but you also have to contextualize the attendance, what kind of attendance is it, is it I grabbed food and then I left, well, then your attendance figure probably doesn’t matter that much. But if you’re doing in the reverse, if you’re like, “Oh, we’ve got low attendance and we’re impacting this smaller group,” that’s great for that group and the experience itself from a design perspective, learning all those kinds of things might be fantastic but, if it’s not reaching everyone, that’s a problem too.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Well, you’re missing so much.

Paul Brown:
So, I think … Sorry, that was just my … Huh?

Kaleigh Mrowka:
You’re missing so much with attendance, right?

Paul Brown:
I know. Well, attendance does-

Kaleigh Mrowka:
How are you assessing-

Paul Brown:
… matter but it also doesn’t matter.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Yeah, exactly.

Paul Brown:
It’s bold.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Yeah. We’re not assessing the good conversations that RAs have with people in their hall, we’re not assessing the late night deep conversation about a podcast or movie, we’re not finding ways to tell the whole story. And so, I know there are several faculty fellows in the assessment bucket of expertise so maybe we’ll throw those questions at them.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, they’ll just have to figure that out.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
Let us know what the answer is.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
I’m going to switch gears a little bit because I wanted to make sure that we talked about the work that you do now because Roompact has a ton of stuff out on curricular approaches. We had a blogger who I know you know very well, Jake Garner, who did some work with restorative practices and things like that through our blog and whatnot. But when you started working for CDI, I was like, “What is that? I don’t know what that is.” And then you explained it to me and I was like, “Okay, I do already know what that is, at least this.” But it’s something that struck me as conversations in residence life have been around this but not with the structure and the language that you were able to articulate in terms of what you do with that group and your own thinking about it now. Can you talk a little bit about dialogue and what that means and maybe, even in the contemporary context, why now?

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Yeah. Well, I think the why now for me, I’ll just share a little bit about why I decided to join CDI.

Paul Brown:
Yeah.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
I think there’s some really big problems that everyone is acknowledging and talking about that we’re not figuring out how to tackle on our campuses and in our world right now. So, deep polarization across political divides is one that people are really talking about, a lack of institutional trust is another one. Loneliness and mental health of our students which we know is deeply connected to their ability to connect and to being community, lack of conflict management skills. If you have been an RA or a resident director, you know that sometimes our students are struggling to work through even really basic level conflicts that occur in our residence halls. Issues of self-censorship in the classroom, students, at a really high rate, I think as much as 70% in one survey that I saw saying that they have not shared their perspective on something in the classroom or in a social environment in their college space because they don’t feel like it’s okay for them to express their perspective or their identity and how they feel.
Echo chambers on our campuses, so silos and things that are exacerbated by social media where you can block someone, where you can completely tune out a perspective that you just don’t want to hear or don’t want to engage with. And crisis escalation, how much more time are we spending on crisis in our space. There’s so much going on that I think dialogue has some core … There’s a core piece around the dialogue work that has a chance to help us to think critically about these issues, to build bridges and to do that in a way that’s not needing deep … just I did deep dialogue work, Paul, with restorative justice, we did small trainings, we did really deep engagements with students, fantastic, fantastic work, same really deep and really amazing work happening in intergroup dialogue spaces.
And the truth of that though is that you only reach the small group of students who volunteer themselves into those spaces and are willing to engage in a really high risk manner, those things are higher risk. So, they already have the skills, they have the capacities, they have the confidence and the willingness to take that risk to try those moments. There’s a huge group of students on our campuses that don’t walk into those spaces, that leave the college experience without those deep dialogue interactions and what I love about my work with CBI is we’re trying to answer the question how do we bring more of that work into the general campus culture, so more into the classroom spaces. How are we tackling conversations in the residence halls, helping students to listen to understand each other rather than to argue just their perspective, how are we thinking about the mindset that you have to have when you walk into a classroom and someone has a really different perspective than you.
That’s a decision that you’re making and an orientation to being able to listen and understand that a lot of us, even me as an adult right now, is struggling to have. But recognizing that, while it is not the whole picture, being able to build bridges has to be, in my opinion, one step in moving forward from the place we’re in as a society. There’s a lot of other things that have to happen and there’s a lot of good people doing the work in those areas but, for me, I think there’s a need for more bridge building, there’s a need to create more bridge builders in our student populations and a need for us to really dig into these issues.
So, that’s the work we’re doing at CDI, we’re working at a campus level where we’re able to trying to really scale and work with campuses to help them think about those issues and how they can make dialogue initiatives feel really authentic to their campus and access all of their population of faculty, staff and students.

Paul Brown:
I love the scaling of that because it reminds me too of … I used to work at Miami University many, many moons ago and they have some great leadership programs or at least they did at the time, I believe they still do. And it always struck me when I was thinking about leadership programs of there are sometimes some bespoke, really great, intensive leadership experiences like participating in LeaderShape if people know what that is but not every student’s going to be able to participate in a LeaderShape multi-day experience, it doesn’t scale. It’s an amazing program, it just can’t scale in that way. And I always would look at these leadership programs and say I feel like you need those experiences but you also need something that democratizes the leadership. Where’s everyone … Not everyone can do that so what are the other entry points so that all students get exposed to leadership education and leadership concepts and things like that.
And I think what you described is that there can be those intensive spaces [inaudible 00:33:08] but how are we making sure that that’s available to all students in a way that is scalable, in a way that they can all participate with various levels of engagement but still get those important pieces.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Yeah, and we talk about this in the curriculum. So, we have to get students to a level one before they can go to a level two. And so, when students come in that are really struggling with mindsets and skills around dialogue, not every student … Some students come in 100% willing and able to do that work but there are others who may be quiet in the classroom, who won’t say anything to their roommate who’s engaging in behaviors that’s impacting their ability to study and live and we have to help to get those students to a level one before we can then invite them to a LeaderShape or in a group dialogue conversation. They’re never going to walk into that space if that’s not a space that they feel comfortable to sit in.
So, I’m not saying every student has to, per your example, go through LeaderShape but how do we get more students to a level one and then those students will be more likely also to engage and to find value in those deeper initiatives too. And we’re finding that, we’re finding that, when we scale some of this work, the interest in co-creation and student government and being in those spaces that may have felt scarier for students, that actually can shift a little bit. So, students are more likely to feel like I can be in a space where I don’t feel 100% comfortable and I can be okay and so I’m more likely now to step into that space.

Paul Brown:
That’s great, that’s great. I guess I only have one final question for you. How can we heal the world, Kaleigh?

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Oh, that’s just a little … You saved the softball for last.

Paul Brown:
How can we heal the world? How could we do that?

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Obviously, I can’t answer that, Paul, but I do think it has something to do with community. So, local communities, relationships, the way that we care about and live with and interact with each other and the way that our universities reflect that and help students to move into community-oriented spaces while they’re in school and beyond it, I think it’s at least moving in the right direction. I think if people are more likely to … We talk a lot in our work about the difference between ideological polarization and affective polarization. So, ideological polarization, you and I think very differently. Affective polarization, because you and I think very differently, I don’t like you and I’m not going to listen to you.
And so, if we can create spaces where students are just a little bit more likely to say, “Oof, I disagree with you,” or to use restorative justice terms, I reject or disagree with your behavior but that doesn’t mean I’m going to identify that with you as a person. Your one bad idea doesn’t make you a less important member of this community and the society. That, I think, there’s something there that could help to move us forward. Is that going to heal the world? Maybe not for a while. There’s a lot of scaling to do there but I think it’s a place to start.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Looks like you had a friend join you there towards the end. Is there-

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Yeah, I had a little kitten pop up. So sorry about that, everyone.

Paul Brown:
Love that. No, that’s the next episode, I’ll just interview a kitten for 30 minutes.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
People would probably actually love-

Paul Brown:
Probably be really popular.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
… a pet episode. Yeah, everybody just brings their pets.

Paul Brown:
It’s just a video of a kitten while I ask it questions and it doesn’t answer, I love it.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Absolutely.

Paul Brown:
Well, thanks for being on the podcast, Kaleigh. I always enjoy talking to you, we always have great conversations from the silly to the nerdy and it’s one of the things I enjoy about you so much.

Kaleigh Mrowka:
Absolutely.

Paul Brown:
So, thanks for being on the podcast and hey, everyone, come join us for the next episode and we’ll see you next time.