In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, Host Paul sits down with Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez to dig into how to cultivate a learning-centric mindset amongst staff in the residence halls. They discuss the challenges of developing this within oneself as well as translating for different audiences. Also get a little preview of the upcoming Institute.
Guest: Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez (she/her/ella) serves as the Associate Director of Academic Engagement & Curricular at San Diego State University. Originally from California’s Central Valley, she is a proud first-generation college graduate of both UC Merced and San Diego State University. Citklali is passionate about residential curriculum, academic initiatives, and collaborating with brilliant colleagues to enhance staff experiences. She is deeply committed to creating intentional learning opportunities that support student success. Outside of work, Citklali enjoys reading, spending time with loved ones, and exploring coffee shops. Fun fact: her dog, Maya, is named after her favorite residence hall she has served!
Host: Dr. Paul Gordon Brown
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Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast is a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in residence life and college student housing. If you have a topic idea for an episode, let us know!
Transcript:
Paul Brown:
All right. Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast, the podcast where we talk about all things college and university housing and residence life. As you know, I’ve been doing a series of these with new members of our blog cohort for this year. And so, I’m excited to have another one on as a guest.
What I’m particularly excited about is our guest is a deep thinker, someone who really cares about the work, who thinks through things deeply. It’s one of the things that I think makes her such an incredible blogger. Also means that her posts are a little bit long as well, but I mean that in a good way. It’s because she’s so thorough and so thoughtful. So I want to welcome Citklali to the podcast today. How are you doing?
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Hello. Thank you, Paul. Thanks for having me. I’m super excited to be here. I’m a little nervous, but going to have a good time.
Paul Brown:
You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. We’re going to talk about all the things that we’re nerds about, so I think we’re in good shape. Do you want to give folks a little of your bio, your professional journey, how you ended up in where you are?
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Yeah, absolutely. Hi, all. Hi, on the net. Again, citklali Ibarra-Hernandez. I use she/her/ella pronouns. A little bit about me and my story. So I originally am from the Central Valley of California. I was a transfer student, navigated higher ed as a transfer student, and a lot of those experiences were really salient to my experience in how I show up as an educator now.
But, yeah, so I went to UC Merced for undergrad, got really involved in all things higher ed, as we do. Everything except Res Life, surprisingly. I was a computer student, so that’s always a fun caveat. It wasn’t until my graduate years at San Diego State where I’m currently serving now that I actually was introduced to residence life and have the privilege of learning in those two years that this is a career and functional area that I do have a lot of joy for and excitement.
And so, my career took me to … I had never left California. So I wanted to move and do all these crazy new things. So I moved to South Florida and I worked at Florida International University for my first stunt as a residence life coordinator. Learned a lot. COVID happened, hard times, good times. Then I relocated back to San Diego, and I’ve been navigating the Res Life experiences out here.
I actually returned as not an entry-level hall coordinator sort anymore, but I was an academic advisor that served in the residence halls. And so, that was a really unique niche experience and it definitely helped me have a better understanding of academic initiatives, supporting students as first and second year students holistically, but still had a lot of love for the curricular approach and was selected to be our inaugural associate director that works with the curriculum and learning communities and so forth.
So it’s been a lot of fun. I’ve learned a lot. I think the curricular approach has been the skill that has really allowed me to grow within these roles as not just a leader, but as an educator and someone who’s incredibly student-centered and just focused on all things learning. So that’s a little bit about me.
Paul Brown:
I love it. I mean if I ever went back to work at an institution, your job currently is the type of job that I would want. So I’m jealous of you, but I’m perfectly fine not working at an institution anymore-
Paul Brown:
… because I still could do the work without some of the other things. But it’s a fun-
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Yes. I’m still on duty. I still do all the things, but it’s a lot more project-based. But definitely I love my job.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. No, it’s a greatly configured job. You mentioned the curricular approach, of course, which is upcoming for this year, something I served on the faculty for, something you currently serve on the faculty for. I guess for listeners, what is it that drew you to that? Because I think sometimes people are like, “I’m not exactly sure what this is still,” or, “I think I know what it is,” or … What was your motivation? What brought you in? What do you think is that power there?
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
I think when it comes to residential curriculums and the curricular approach, it was for me at first just naming the things that we weren’t naming before. So I remember when I was at San Diego State, initially we had a programming model. But as a very intuitive and aware person, I felt like sometimes it wasn’t always an equitable experience for students across multiple halls and everybody ran in a siloed, things weren’t always clearly, I don’t know, mapped out or tied to an outcome that was like … I’m a very purpose-driven person, so I’m like, “Why are we doing this? I don’t understand.” It’s not from the context of wanting to change things, but really just trying to understand.
So at FIU, I was able to understand how a residence life department can operate through a curricular approach. And definitely wasn’t perfect at the time. Even when I trained student leaders and hall coordinators now, I share I wasn’t the biggest believer in the curriculum when I first started because I was very confused, it felt a little wordy, it felt like I didn’t really understand.
And so, what really drew me to wanting to be a leader in this role is how can I make these concepts accessible for folks to be able to take these big ideas and see themselves in the work, but really zoom out into the bigger picture of what is our role as educators, as practitioners beyond just managing these buildings, having one-on-ones, and programming, but it’s a much bigger piece of the puzzle that is different depending on whatever school you’re at. So I think for me, it’s definitely grounded me and helped me just be able to sell that dream to other people as well.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. I mean I think you hit on something that I think about a lot, which is the journey it takes to really understand or appreciate the curricular approach and to get a sophisticated level of thinking about it. A lot of people are like, “Oh, you know everything.” I’m like, I did not know at the beginning. There were things that I didn’t get and then things that would suddenly snap in my brain and go, “Oh, oh, got it, got it.” But I mean that took years of really living it, breathing it, thinking about it, interacting with really intelligent people who also think about it, who could challenge me or support me in different things.
What is it that makes it, you think, difficult for folks who aren’t familiar with the curricular approach to wrap their brain around it and really understand it and be like, “Got it. I can see it,” both understand it and put it into practice? What are some of those barriers, do you think, that hold people back from that?
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Yeah, I think about this a lot as right now I’m working on training for our professional staff, and I really try to I mean, obviously, sequence the way that we talk about the curriculum in a way that feels easier to understand, because when I first started in this role, I was giving folks too much information all at once and not really giving them the opportunity to digest it. And so, I have really awesome coworkers that have provided me the space to be able to have multiple smaller sessions with different folks on different concepts.
I think turning the concepts, so the barrier of, okay, conceptually, if this is the priority we have for our students and these are the goals, how does that reflect my role as a hall coordinator, as a professional staff member that has the responsibility of these concepts and what does that mean for me and my role?
I think, in the past, I had given them the concepts and then I had given them the strategies of like, “Here’s what your student leaders do. This is what you do. Here’s the facilitation guides for bulletin boards and the plan for the semester.” But I think what was missing was the in between space to really just ideate and process and make it your own. It’s honestly the committee folks that I work with that bring up so many awesome ideas that help me learn how to teach others.
And so, I was really proud of our ed plans, so our matrix is what we call it, and I love seeing it visually planned out. One of my hall coordinators, Andrew, was like, “Hey, I don’t know if this is like … Here’s an idea I have, what do you think, of how we create a tracking tool that’s still visually similar, but it’s more unique and targeted to hall coordinators to individualize it for each of their student leaders?” I was like, “If you like it, I love it. If that’s something we want to incorporate to make your job easier, I would love to be able to have that be a part of our role.”
And so, I do think having a committee that’s active and is willing to share and provide resources and their experiences and honesty. I feel like I set community guidelines that we know we really want an engaged committee. We want one that’s solution-oriented. Sometimes we can’t always make all of the decisions for what we want, but at least we have a space to talk about it. I think just creating that space and getting that buy-in really helps other folks get bought in, too. I know that was a lot at once.
Paul Brown:
No, no, you are making me think of … Erin Simpson serves as one of our fellows this year, and Erin’s been an institute faculty member for a long time as well in the past. Erin and I were talking about cultures and things like that and some of the learning. One of the things that Erin said that’s been stuck in my brain for the last two months, which is staff need to know what this looks like on a Tuesday.
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Oh yeah.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, meaning you can give all the, “Here’s the theory and the grounded,” and the things like that, but if they’re not moving from that mindset or from that lens, it becomes a checkbox behavior and they don’t know what it looks like on the ground. So then it’s like, “Oh, we need to do these … We did lesson plan, check.” But you’re like, a little bit more than that. I don’t want you just to check the box that you did it. The experiences have more meaning if you imbue that. Does that get at the practical bit, or how do you untangle some of that?
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Yeah. I think I … The quote you just said, I love that. I think that, especially for us, we streamline a lot of our processes very early. So the first three weeks of being on campus for our staff is really hard. There’s a lot of competing responsibilities. We have a lot of strategies that start. We try to be really intentional about getting our students onboarded and feeling that sense of belonging and knowing who their staff members are really fast.
I feel like the first few times that we were explaining it, we weren’t getting that actual tangible checklist of like, okay, what am I doing as a hall coordinator to ensure that my staff can complete all of these sociograms that lead to this community-wide event that we’re doing in a timely manner rather than just saying, okay, this should be done by the 30th if you don’t figure out how to do it.
And so, my coworker and I sat together and we were like, “Okay, let’s do a step-by-step of if this is on the 30th, maybe on the 20th, have the conversation with your student staff members. On the 22nd, send the building-wide email.”
And so, really just thinking proactively of what it needs, what we need to say, because I think we assume that people know what to do. But if we don’t give them the actual directives and spell things out, folks don’t always know what we think they know, and I think that’s okay. That’s our role as leaders is to be able to give them those tools and skills.
I really do try to lead with the assumption of I give a lot of context, I tell a lot of stories, I try to sell the purpose a lot because, if not, the work just feels very checklist-y.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, transactional. Yeah.
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Yeah, versus just being able to highlight why we’re doing it and what their role means in the bigger picture. Even things like door knocking, I feel like that’s been something that student leaders or RAs haven’t felt comfortable doing sometimes. It’s like, “Oh, that’s so awkward. Why am I going to go?” So part of our training is like, “Okay, let’s knock on the door and introduce ourselves. Are you ready for your residents to get here? Do you feel prepared pitching our first move-in programs?”
And so, in my head, I wouldn’t feel like I have to do this during training, but again, if we don’t practice it or if we don’t tell our staff this is important, they’re not going to understand and they’re going to be like, “Wow, that’s a piece that was missing.” So, yeah, it’s so interesting.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. I think it’s what gives it the meaning, the flavor, the … I think that’s when I see some schools that say … I’ve had schools that say, “We don’t do a curriculum anymore.” I say, “Oh, okay. Why is that?” et cetera. Typically, I think the answers that I sometimes get was they went down the path of it becoming check boxes. And so, staff are like, “I hate this,” and I get that.
I think rather than saying then how do we change our approach to the way that we engage the department on this, the answer becomes the approach itself is not going to work for us or is not right or we should do something else, rather than what about the way that we’ve approached this or the way that we understand this impacts our meaning? And so, I’ve seen folks go down that path.
Has anyone talked with you or you’ve engaged in anyone around those kinds of conversations? What has been your experience? Because it’s something I think about a ton.
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
I made this joke earlier, but I think it’s really just about how you’re able to market it to the person that you’re talking to. And so, when I speak to stakeholders about the curricular approach, it’s less about the day-to-day, but it’s more of the bigger initiatives that could be pertinent to how their areas and what could be a potential collaboration versus talking to student leaders is a lot less theoretical. No essential elements for them in that way, but more like, okay, what are these transferable skills that you’re gaining as a conflict mediator through these strategies instead of it being like, oh, you’re doing these shared living agreements, roommate agreements just to get something out of the way.
So I feel like I’m constantly having to ask my questions of who is my stakeholder and what skills do I have or what do I need to share about this ginormous topic, thought process, which is the curriculum, and being able to showcase that to them.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. It’s such an art to it that I think that’s what makes it … I want to say it’s not … I mean it is difficult, but it’s also not difficult.
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
It takes the right person for sure. I feel like it … Not to be braggy, but you do have to be very, I would say, positive and student-centered and a good communicator because, if not, it can feel very punitive at times of like you have to do these things or according to our curriculum, we have to do it. So a lot of the times I find myself saying, wow, we get to do this opportunity to help our residents experience better. It might seem like more work now, but it’s going to feel good later on when there’s less crisis or roommate conflicts or just communication issues. And so, I know it’s kind of cheesy, but I kind of just lead in with that as a leader for sure.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, I mean you … I went back and I looked at your application answers when you applied to be a part of the cohort, and one of the questions that I asked is, what topics could you foresee writing on potentially? And one of them actually stood out to me. I didn’t prep you on this one. One of them said, “Joy is a learning outcome.”
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Yes.
Paul Brown:
I loved that. Tell us what you mean by that. I mean I have guesses, but … There’s something that resonated with me when I read it, but what does that mean to you?
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
I think it’s a lot of things. I thought it was whimsical, and I know me and some of my fellow authors love whimsy in the workplace. I think that those moments of pure just human connection, joy, opportunities to be in community are really the things that ground. I think it’s so transferable to a curricular approach in the sense of this is fun, like this should be fun. We get to put on these initiatives to help students learn holistically as people.
Although we can get stuck in the weeds of, all right, we have 9,000 students moving in in two months or a month and a half, how can we still find joy in developing our move-in programs and our processes, developing joy and creating that culture of just happiness when it comes to work?
I know that’s not everybody’s style or the way that we operate naturally, and there’s days where it’s not for me either, but I think it’s a matter of how can we brighten up the communities that we get to serve through the curricular approach?
I’ve been sitting with that one a lot because I … I’ve thought about it a lot in a whimsical way of like, “Here are some things you can do to make your day a little bit more joyful.” But I really do think it’s like how can you as a person understand your values and show up as your true authentic self to work?
One of my strengths quests is the belief value, and I do think that friendship and community and joy are salient values of mine that, I’m fortunate enough, align with the work I do with the curricular approach, which is marketing this as a positive, joyful experience as much as we can.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, no, I love that. That’s where when we were talking before that I was making that connection in terms of building that cultural piece and that learning needs to go hand-in-hand with the this can be fun, this should be joyful. I would hope it would be a joyful experience in going through this. Because if it’s not, then we’ve probably got some other problems that are going on, right? Like-
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
It’s true sometimes, for sure.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. What about … I could flip it a little bit. What about joy as a learning outcome for our residents? If we were to take a look at someone’s curriculum and said, “Is there joy in this curriculum?” where would we find it? Where would we build it in? Where would it show up? Where would it be?
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Yeah. As an ICA faculty member, at times I have the honor to review other folks’ curriculum. And for me, the big factors I look at are sometimes folks come with questions about, okay, how can I get more campus partner buy-in or how can I get students to enjoy these processes? I look at their learning outcomes and sometimes they’re so robust and long, and I’m looking at them and I’m like, “Wow, this is a lot of work that you have to do to complete this one bullet point.”
And so, that’s my number one piece of feedback is sometimes your learning outcomes are too robust, but at the same time do you have a learning outcome that is focused on just joyful belonging and community and celebration? Being able to identify that if your students are choosing to live on campus, they are opting into this experience outside of commuting or living at home or living with friends off campus, but being able to be like, “Hey, I get to live at X, Y, Z institution. I’m super proud to live here, and these are the ways that I want to contribute to my community.”
And so, I honestly feel like there is kind of a recipe for learning outcome creation, and there’s usually a me learning outcome, there’s a we learning outcome, a kill, and then typically something for the community, but it definitely depends on each institution. But I do think the one thing that unites us all is wanting to create this experience that changes students’ lives and teaches them how to live.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. I think that’s what’s sometimes missed. I think if I went back and I thought about my times on the faculty, what I did … Not wrong, but I should have paid more attention to, was I think sometimes when we talked about educational outcomes, we assumed that also means that you’re attending to the community, that your residents know their names, your staff know their names, and those kinds of things. Yeah, you go to dinner together and you have fun. It doesn’t necessarily have to have a formal learning outcome attached to it. There’s great outcomes to come from just that social experience.
I think without explicitly naming it, it just kind of is, well, yeah, that’s important, but that’s not what we’re talking about here in this space. I feel like that sometimes made people walk away feeling like, “Oh, well, then the curricular approach isn’t about that at all.” And I don’t think any of the faculty would’ve ever said that, but I feel like that’s sometimes where people get tripped up a little bit.
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
For sure. Yeah, we are fortunate enough at my institution that we can take students on field trips as a strategy, which is really unique and awesome.
Paul Brown:
Oh, that’s fun.
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
It is. And we noticed that … Like we’ve tried to do a ton to different museums and have an educational piece, but at this point of the year, we’re really just selling our belonging field trips of like, “Hey, let’s get to know San Diego. Let’s take students to the zoo and let them engage in community. Bring your roommates and let’s go to this event.” That in itself is a learning experience that they’re getting by living on campus. It’s like, “I get to belong and contribute to my community through attending these programs and field trips.” So yeah.
Paul Brown:
If they go to the San Diego Zoo, they can also have a sloth experience. I know because I was very excited-
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
What? I love that.
Paul Brown:
… to go hang out with a sloth at the San Diego Zoo when I was visiting the city with them.
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Aw, I love it. No, they have a platypus now, which is pretty cool.
Paul Brown:
Oh, even better.
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
There’s not a lot of them in the United States.
Paul Brown:
That’s great. Well, so the institute’s … This episode’s coming out. We’re recording this a little bit late in the summer, but it’s going to be coming out a little bit closer in October to the institute itself. Is there anything that you want to tell folks who are planning to attend that they should look out for, they should think about, they should be prepared for, something and give them a little bit of advice heading there maybe?
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Yeah. Well, I’m really excited to serve as faculty for ICA, the Institute of the Curricular Approach. Again, this year, I’ll be working with any folks on the foundations track, so folks that are either beginning their journey with a curricular approach or are starting at a school that already has an established curricular approach.
My team is small but mighty, and we’re really looking forward to being able to create a really community-based experience that’s very engaging. So if you have a curriculum or want to learn more, bring it with you, and we’re going to have a lot of different conversations, opportunities to give feedback, to get consults from different faculty members and so forth.
We should be sending some information soon, if you have registered, about some of our pre-conference sessions. So we’ll be hosting a few different opportunities to get to know what to expect and make the most of your time.
ICA is definitely not your traditional big conference, but it’s definitely one that’s near and dear to my heart as it’s incredibly energizing to be in folks’ … Similar to folks like us who love the curricular approach, who are leaders and change makers who want to be able to create these experiences for our residents. Being able to be in that space is one of the best experiences.
Everything we do is super intentional. So even our plenary opening experience, our … I’ll be on a closing panel, so being able to highlight some of the ways that you can move your experience forward once you go back home.
This year, we’re really focusing on persona-based design and being able to think about who your individuals are that you’re serving. And so, if you’re curious about that and want to learn more, our keynote will be sharing a little bit more about that soon.
Paul Brown:
Oh, gosh. Well, then I can’t give it away, because I was like, “Tell me more about that.” I don’t know that I was going to [inaudible 00:25:43].
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
[inaudible 00:25:43]. Yeah.
Paul Brown:
Well, I’ll also be at the institute too, at least for a portion of it. So I’ll have to make sure that … Persona-based design is what you call that, huh?
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
Okay.
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Get excited.
Paul Brown:
I’ll be Googling something after our chat today. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. Love having you on the blog cohort. For folks that aren’t familiar, I’ll include links to all the posts so far and the future ones in the show notes so you can check it out. But hopefully both of us will see you at the institute later in October.
Citklali Ibarra-Hernandez:
Yes.
Paul Brown:
Thanks everyone.
