Ep. 2 - Why and how you can help students tell their stories with Dr. Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins

Storytelling for students, especially first-generation students can be empowering and enlightening, Learn how to help students tell authentic, meaningful stories, for admissions, scholarships, interviews, and even dates!

Dr. Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins joins me to talk about storytelling (and tells a few stories about her family and her experiences teaching). She shares some wonderful tips about making space for students to reflect and write, how to come beside them to help them craft their story, and several ways to think about the stories being told about our students and what we and they can do about that.

Dr. Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins received her BA in English from Berea, her MA in English Literature from Northeastern Illinois, and her PhD in American Literature from the University of Kentucky. She's been an instructor teaching writing and storytelling at UK.

You can find her on LinkedIn and at TeaandStrategy.com.

You can find me at FirstGenFM.com and reach me using the form here. 

Please help others find this podcast by rating and reviewing wherever you listen!

You can find me at https://www.firstgenfm.com/ and on LinkedIn. My email is jen@firstgenfm.com.

Transcript

Jen: 0:10

Hi, and welcome to First Gen fm, a podcast for educators who wanna learn more about serving, working with, celebrating first generation college bound and college students. My name is Jen, and I am so excited to tell you more about our guest today because we had a fantastic conversation about storytelling. So I'm here today with Dr. Rebecca Berger Wiggins, who has been. Studying English for a long time. That is her jam. Whether she got her bachelor's degree in English at Berea, or continued to her master's in English literature at Northeastern Illinois to then getting her PhD at the University of Kentucky. Storytelling, working with adults and workforce education have been a theme throughout her education. And her career, and she has studied storytelling. She's done creative writing, and she's here to give us great ideas for how we can help our students tell their stories. She herself was a first generation college student, so she understands what the experience is like, and I am so happy to welcome Dr. Rebecca Berger Wiggins. Welcome Rebecca to the first Gen FM podcast. I am so excited you are here because I know that storytelling is something that you are Queen of let's say, this is what you do, this is what you talk about, this is what you study. And I know that talking to you will be really good for the listener because they're gonna walk away with just some really cool ideas of things that they can do to help their students tell their stories and even help us to tell our stories too. It's just so multifaceted, I think with storytelling. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience, and then we'll just get right into it

Rebecca: 2:09

excellent. I am really excited about this conversation too because I think that one of the things that first gen students struggle with is feeling a unempowered or disempowered because they don't have a lot of the privilege that their peers do that help them get ahead. And so it can be really difficult to know what power or what What, what you bring to the table that gives you an edge. And people's stories are the thing that always, that gives'em the edge, right? We are narrative beings. We understand the world through stories. And so when you choose to own your story and to choose how it's told, rather than letting other people tell stories about you, literally or figuratively, then you you go into every space with. Significantly more power and authority and presence. But it can be hard. I think that we forget sometimes that storytellers and storytelling is work and that you have to, the, the best storytellers, they make it seem so effortless. I come from an Appalachian heritage where storytelling is like, The norm, like people just do this. They have huge storytelling festivals where people go into the woods and tell stories for days. And I grew up in a family dynamic where people were always telling stories on all sides of my family and they knew how to make the dramatic paw and they knew how to build the suspense. And then my grandpa would talk about, you know, smoking his green, the green tobacco out of the tobacco barn and his, and trying to lie to his parents while he was coughing and turning green himself and things like that. And So I grew up in this context of people always telling their stories, and so I thought that that was kind of natural. But then when I had to start telling my own story, I realized that I didn't actually do this. My best friend told me one time years after we had been friends that I was really good at telling other people's stories, but I hardly ever shared my story. And I was really convicted by that. I was like, but if I want people to know me, I can't just tell my family stories or the funny stories that I've read about people or things that I need to figure out how to do that for myself. And working with students at all levels I have found that when they can figure out what the story is that they want to tell about themself, that they become They become creators of their own story in a totally different way because they're looking at themselves not just as like a passerby or a viewer, but actually the hero of their story, right? And everybody wants to be the hero of their story. If you are at all a reader, you know, you get into a novel and all of a sudden you're imagining yourself. In the role of the hero or heroine, and well, that's what makes it so exciting, right? Because you get to be, you know, you get to be a magician or you get to be a knight, or you get to be a, an astronaut or whatever, and you get to be and do all these things that you couldn't do in your daily life. But what we forget is that what we're doing in our daily life actually is exciting and actually is interesting. And I think we often take for granted that everybody's story is like our story. And so therefore we don't have anything unique to tell. Right,

Jen: 5:04

right. We sort of take for granted that we have a story because it's, we just, we know it. Mm-hmm. And so we just think, well, why would anybody be interested in that? It's just like everybody else's story. Yet our story is so unique to us that by sharing it, we can really open doors. And having been in admissions and read probably thousands of essays and scholarship essays, I can see when a student is really owning their story and they're really telling me something that's meaningful to them. And I know we had talked about that. It's, it's great to tell a story, but when you tell part of your story, there's a lot more meaning to that. So let's start with how did you just, how did you decide, I wanna tell my story, but I wanna teach others how to tell their story. So I think, I think part of it, it was just my background, right? Coming into the world in stories all of the time. I am a voracious reader. Which meant that after many, many years of schooling, I ended up with a PhD in American literature. Because there, I felt like there was no better way to understand the world than to understand the stories that were written in that time and who was writing and why, and what were they choosing to say and those sorts of things. But it all started because I When I was growing up, I wanted a way to have a life that was more interesting and exciting than what I had, and so I just read everything. Very indiscriminately. Neither of my parents are readers and so I, no, I had no guidance on like what I should read, so I just, if it had an interesting cover, if the librarian mentioned it, if some, if I, somebody said something about it, I read it. I read a lot of really trashy stuff. I'll have read a lot of like classics and things that, Children should not be reading. But nobody told me that I was not supposed to read Fahrenheit 4 51 when I was 10. And so so like that, that kind of shaped my understanding of the world. But then I realized as I got older that That I needed to understand my story because I needed to know who I was, not just who I could imagine myself to be. I, my family went through some really rocky periods when I was a young adult and a teenager, and our family dynamic changed a lot. My parents, Marriage relationship changed. My relationship with my sisters changed. We spent a lot more time together than we had when I was a younger child, and so I was like learning how to get along with my family. But one of my struggles was that I am temperamentally very different than both of my parents and both of my siblings. And if I did not look so much like both of my parents, I would've wondered how I ended up in my family. I actually feel like I should have been, I am the child of my father's older brother and my mother's older sister because I am much more like them than I am, like my actual parents. And so there was a lot of struggle for me because my parents literally did not understand me. Like they would just look at me sometimes when I got older. They would just look at me like, we do not understand what you need, Rebecca. We don't understand what you want. We don't understand why this matters to you so much. And so because they. Considered me, me to be mystifying. I was like, well, either something's wrong with me or I just need to figure this out for myself. Mm. And so, for a large season of my life, I did think that something was just wrong with me. But then I started reading more stories and meeting more people and realizing that there were other people in the world like me. And, but before I could, I don't know, basically, Find my tribe. I had to figure out who I was. And the way that I did that was through writing. I was a prolific journaler and letter writer. I had a hard time making friends when I was a child, I think because I was really introverted. And so my closest friendships. I really date when I was a teenager, when I had a whole bunch of pen pals. And so writing to them, it was much easier for me to like, tell the funny stories of what's happening in my family and to share what was important to me because sometimes in person talking to them or talking to people was really awkward for me, but writing was never awkward. Mm-hmm. And that became something really powerful for me as an educator because one, one of the things that I learned as an educator is that if I. Show up as my authentic self with my students, then I enable them to access that for themselves, right? Then they don't have to perform some kind of identity that they think they have to have in order to be successful. They can just say, here I am and help me to learn and help me to know what I need to do. Help me to grow, help me to learn these skills, those sorts of things. But you can't help somebody to understand someone that you don't know. And many of us, because we don't take the time or because we aren't encouraged to, we don't actually really know ourselves very well. And so when I was thinking about the question of storytelling and how educators can help their first gen students to tell their story or to use storytelling in a fruitful way one of the things that I realized is that it's really important for students to make space to think about the stories that they want to tell about themselves. Right, like what is it about what you love or what you've done or who you live with, or how your life has unfolded that you think is important because what we wanna, the story we wanna tell and the story that people wanna tell about us are oftentimes not the same. So I have worked with first gen students where they've grown up in context where the only story, the only narrative that's told about them is your brilliance will get you out of poverty. Or your hard work will make you successful, or you are so smart, of course this is gonna be easy for you to go to school. That was actually one that I wrestled with myself. My mom used to always tell me, well, you get a's all the time. And I'm like, but I have to work really hard to get these grades. And and the story that I was hearing was that my academic work wasn't really work right. Because I was just good at it. Right. And so you were talented. It wasn't about, yeah, it wasn't about the work you put in, it was just like a natural talent that you just sort of sprang from

Rebecca: 10:51

you. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't because I cared and that's why I did all this, but it was because I was just naturally good at it. And so, of course, like I was gonna have good grades. And so I think that the, the struggle that our students have is because they are young and their front frontal lobes are not developed yet, you know? And so they're still learning that judgment, but they need to have a space to be able to think about like, what are the stories that people are telling about me? Am I just the child that is going to bring my whole, you know, raise my whole family up because I'm the one who's gonna be successful? Am I the person who has been victorious over horrible odds, you know, through homelessness or because of broken family situations or because of poverty? Am I just that undocumented immigrant who, you know, wrote a boat through the ocean to to get there? Like those stories can be meaningful and they can be powerful, but they are oftentimes, All consuming and defining in a way that makes our identities really narrow. Mm-hmm. And makes it hard for us to recognize who we are as individuals. Right. You aren't just. An undocumented immigrant, you aren't just the child of a single parent. You aren't just somebody who grew up in poverty or who lived on a farm, or who has been working since you were 10. I mean, you may be those things, but that's not just who you are. Right. And if that's not the story you wanna tell, then you need to figure out what the story is that you wanna tell. Yeah.

Jen: 12:13

And I, and I love that about the, the idea of the stories that are put on you to tell, you know, again, I, I think about. Both the students who are writing their college essays and they think if they write the biggest struggle story that will get them in. Like even if they don't want to, or even if it's traumatic for them, they're like, I, I need to tell this story because this is what's gonna get me in. Or the students who, you know, are asked to participate in meeting with a donor, right? Because maybe they have a scholarship and they think like, oh, I'm gonna have to tell my, struggle story again. But that it, it's not comfortable for them. And so a lot of it is, is, I totally agree, that reflection time, what story is it? You wanna tell that, that says who you are and it's really meaningful to you. So I, I love that about making space.

Rebecca: 13:01

Yeah. And I think, I think what's really important to understand is that we are all multifaceted beings, right? So that story is a part of who you are, but it is a part of who they, who you are. And I think for us who work with students, especially if you work with a lot of students, right? If you ha teach a lot of seniors or you know, you, you were helping, you know, a hundred or 200 or 300 students with their college entrance exams, not. 10 or 15 and you don't actually know all of them or you don't actually know how to come beside them and help them recognize those stories. I think it's important to figure out how to make space for that. And some student, some educators I've seen have done do it really successfully by actually making that kind of reflective writing a part of everyday practice. When I was teaching at the high school level, that was something we did every class period, right? Five minutes. According to a prompt it was writing that I never read. But the act of writing makes you a better writer. As any writing pedi, writing pedagogy, teacher will tell you. And so I would just make my students write all the time. You know, after you write 50 paragraphs, your paragraphs get better. There's just no way around that because you recognize that you want something that's more coherent and more orderly. But what it also allowed is it allowed my, my students space for this kind of writing where they weren't going to be graded. So, Right. I wasn't even going to read it. And so they could write about whatever they wanted and sometimes they would just write, you know, for five minutes over and over again. I hate this class, I hate writing, whatever. And that was fine because what I wanted them to do was to write. That was the only requirement. But for some students, it really created a space where they were like, okay, I need to, there's something on my mind that I wanna get off my mind, or there's a feeling that I just need to deal with. And they could write about that knowing that nobody cared. Nobody, nobody was gonna look at that, but it gave them that kind of a safe space. There is a, a practice that creatives do oftentimes called artist pages. It's belong. It's the writer, Julia Cameron has a, a book called the The Artist's Way, and it's about how to tap into your creativity. And she has a practice, which she calls artist pages, where you sit down at the beginning of your day and you write three pages of like, stream of consciousness, just whatever comes to mind with this idea that it kind of clears the mental fog. And helps you to get going and it's not something that you're writing about what you care about. You might be writing about how you feel about the way the sun is shining in the window. Or you might write about the fact that you're so hungry that you don't know why you're doing these now because you really should have eaten your breakfast first. You know, that kind of stuff. It's not, it's not like I'm writing great mythical things. But that kind of low stakes, no pressure writing oftentimes allows things to percolate from our unconscious that then we can recognize and go, oh yeah, like I forgot about this thing, or, oh yeah, this keep, I noticed that I keep talk coming back over and over again to my relationship with my aunt. Or, you know what? I feel like that every time I get tired and a little weepy, all I wanna write about is my dog. Right? And so that, and what that shows is that there are stories inside of you that want to come out that need a space to go, but they may not be the stories that you expect. So that is a space where I really like to encourage educators and even just students, like, if you are writing for your essay and you don't know what to write, then you should just. Right. For five or 10 minutes every day about whatever is on your mind. Mm-hmm. And then see if something comes up. Because some of the best essays that I worked, I taught juniors for a long time, and so I worked with a lot of students doing college essays. And what I found is oftentimes the most interesting stories are those ones that are kind of idiosyncratic to your experience. Right. Not, not the big epic stories that sound like, oh, I am the savior of my people, or I am the hero of this tale. But the I had this really, you know, funny experience about the time that my dog literally chewed up my homework and nobody believed me. And then, Then they started pooping math problems. And, and then it was like I told you, like, you know, and then, and then my parents believe me that I did actually do my homework. And I've had students who've had those kinds of stories, right? Where it's like, this is a really, like, this is something that I wanna hear from you because I wanna know that your relationship with animals and with your pets is so important to you that you don't, that you don't want them to be blamed. For something. And so you'd rather be seen as a failure than have somebody tell you that you can't have your dog in your bedroom anymore because they eat your homework. Right? Right. So that's just kind of an off the wall sort of example. But yeah, I, I found that there are stories like that and for me personally, When I was learning to tell my story, I had to get away from that story that says, well, I am just really smart and I'm really good at books, and therefore I need to be in school because I need an opportunity to be smarter and to get better at books. And it sounds silly the way that I'm saying it, but that's kind of how my family perceived it, right? They like books was my thing. And so that's what I needed to do. That's what I needed to focus on. That was my identity. My identity is I am the bookish person in a family full of very concrete, very physical, very active people. I'm the person who chooses to sit on the, the front porch all summer long and read books. But what I realized is that those, that story was not the one that I really wanted to identify with. Because that's what people told me all the time, and I'm like, I have to be bigger than the books that I read. Right. There has to be more to me than just that. And so I was, so I, when I was going to college, and so for those of you who don't understand the weird dynamics of first gen people are coming from a fa, a non-college educated family. I'll just tell you. So I graduated from high school with honors as a homeschooled student. I was totally self-educated from the eighth grade onward because my mother graduated high school with a C average and was happy and she. Was not interested in doing a lot of the hard work. I did science labs with our friend who was a nurse. My dad could barely read, but he was brilliant at math. So he took me all the way through calculus and the rest was just me learning things that I was interested in and because that was the dynamic educationally in my family, I. When I finished high school, my parents were just like, oh, well, you know, whatever. A lot of people that I was in my circle were entrepreneurial, so people were starting businesses and stuff. I had a custom sewing business that I had started when I was about 16, and so I was doing that and then And then when I was about 23, I was actually in a pretty serious depression and I had a huge fight with my parents and my dad said, you're really smart. You should do something with that brain. And so that prompted the beginning of like applying to college and figuring out what I wanted to do and testing out of things that I thought that I already knew. I didn't take the a c T exam until I was 24. And I didn't go to college until I was 25. And and when I show showed up to go to college, like I didn't really know how to tell that story. How do you tell the story of, well, I was always really smart and then everybody around me said that it wasn't really important and that it was more important for me to work. And so I did some work and now I'm here because the work wasn't satisfying enough and I needed to use this. Big brain of mine. And so like, it's just, it's a very awkward story to tell. Yeah. And people look at you and they're like, why are you here? Because you're not 18. I was really blessed that I went to a school that had a pretty significant non-traditional student population. So there I did find my people that, you know, single moms who were there because it was the only way they could afford to go to school and things like that. But I realized I had to tell, I had to find a different story that was one that I actually felt like I could own.

Jen: 20:36

Did you have someone who gave you the space to start writing, how did, what was the spark for you that, helped you discover the story you wanted to tell?

Rebecca: 20:48

So this is actually a really fascinating story. I actually created a whole like, little online video about it for a composition class when I was in graduate school. But I When I was in seventh grade, I had went to public school for one year after having been in a very small private school for about for kindergarten through sixth grade. And my seventh grade English teacher told me in no uncertain terms that I would never be a writer. She would also say really negative things about my skills and abilities and just say, oh, well, she's good at that because she went to a private school, and then she would say all these really negative things about homeschoolers. And I, I mean, I'm 13 year old. Seventh grade is the worst time of your life, you know, I mean, there's just nothing positive about it. I grew four inches that year, so all I did was. Go to school and eat and sleep and play basketball and do my homework because I was like, my body was changing. Everything was crazy. But it made a really, really deep impression in me. And so even though I had been a prolific journaler, even as a child, I loved to write about things. And I went on to, I don't know, write, literally, I was trying to count literally at least tens of thousands of pages of writing in letters and in journals and things like that. I entered college with an identity that I was not a writer. Hmm, because Mrs. 80 had told me that I would never be a writer. And so obviously what I was doing was not really writing, like that was just the thing that I did. And then I met a woman. She is one of the Appalachian poets. Her name is Crystal Wilkinson, and she came as a writer in residence. To the school where I was going to college and there were these signs up all over the campus that said, do you write letters? Do you write journals? Come join our little writing group. And I was like, well, I write letters in journals, so I will come and see what this is about. And so I showed up and she gave us a writing prompt and we wrote for 20 minutes. And then people were able to share what they wrote. And at the end of that first meeting, she looked around and she says, really vibrantly beautiful. Tall, imposing black woman with these really long dreadlocks. And she looked around and she smiled at all of us and in her very southern voice said, isn't it amazing to be a writer? And I was like, wow. I'm a writer. Like I have been doing this all the time, and I, and so now I have this new identity that she has bestowed on me as this woman who writes amazing poetry and books that win awards and like, she's just this amazing person. And it totally changed my life because then it opened the door for me to see that all of this storytelling that I had been doing to myself for years actually had. Meaning and merit. And the other thing that I personally had to learn was that you can be a writer and a storyteller and never be able to write fiction. So I, the, the, the, the precipitating event in seventh grade that made my teacher tell me that I would never be a writer is I wrote a really, really flat, bland, totally unconvincing short story for our, like our, one of our assignments. And I knew it was bad when I wrote it. And I remember as a 13 year old thinking, I have no life experience. I don't know how to write a story about anything that's real. Like my entire life has happened in books up until this point. Like, how, what do I have? What kind of story can I tell? And so that burden kind of went with me and I felt like if I couldn't write fiction then I couldn't be a writer. But in my undergrad I ended up changing from being an art major to being an English major with a creative writing focus. And my my focus was in creative nonfiction because I was really good at like doing research and bringing research and story together to make it really compelling and And I also realized at that point that there were many, many stories that I wanted to tell that were both mine and mine only through inheritance stories about my grandmothers stories, about my great-grandmothers stories, about pieces of my family that I was coming to know as a young adult that I really like. I felt like I need to own these people because Stella Gibbs. Who has married to a merchant Marine and lives in the rural part of Michigan, who always grew, who grew up in a city and who has another child every time her husband comes home from the boats, is as much a part of me as any other, any of my personal experiences. Right. And my and Matilda Snodgrass, whose family fought on the side of the Confederacy, married to John Kilborn, who was a staunch unionist and their family gatherings every year where everybody knew without being told that you never talk about the Civil War because the Snodgrasses and the Kilborns cared about each other and loved each other even though they tried to kill each other. Less than a generation before that. Like that is part of who I am. And I get to choose which of these stories that I tell.

Jen: 25:24

Yes. Yes. So that that choice, that choice piece is just so important. So, all right, so you're working with students, you're, you're making space for them to write. How do I, and, and I'm sure you're asking this, you're listening to this, is how do I, how do we then help them think about. Crafting that into something that they're going to put on paper or they might talk to somebody about in a variety of

Rebecca: 25:54

settings. So I think about this often cuz you know, you, you get like that whole elevator speech sort of thing. Like I, I have been interviewing throughout my adult life in all different kinds of ways, and I was single till I was 39, so I went on a lot of first dates. So I have really, really perfected the, like, what is it that I want to tell people in one meal or in, you know, one encounter or in a five minute conversation. And one of the things that I realized, Is that one of the ways you can frame it for students is like, if pe, if you were going to leave a legacy and people were only gonna tell one story about you, what is the story that you want them to tell? If you, if your siblings or your parents, or your best friend was gonna write your obituary and you, and this is the, this is the story that they're gonna tell, that they're going to, that you're gonna be remembered for forever. What story is it that they're gonna tell? And what story do you want them to tell? Mm-hmm. Right? Because I think that one of the things that students often don't realize is they have a lot of agency and autonomy in this story, in choosing the story. Yes. And so, and telling them you have the right to pick the story that you want people to, to know about you or that you want to tell about yourself. You don't have to get, tell the stories other people tell, but doing these creative assignments where they're writing literally, A hundred words or 200 words to tell a story about themselves. Oftentimes asking them to do it from the eyes of someone else can help make them think a little bit more critically. What is the thing that my best friend would say about me? What is the thing that my first boyfriend or last girlfriend would say about me? What is the thing that my Sunday school teacher or my boy scout leader or my gymnastics coach would say about me and just start pulling those stories together and even they can go ask, like I, I have encouraged students in a journalistic way. Like, okay, here's the assignment. I want you to go talk to four different people who have known you for at least three years. And I want you to ask them if they had one story that they felt was quintessentially you. Like when they, when they hear it or when they think about it, they're like, yes, that's Rebecca. That is the story that I would tell if somebody asked me, who is Rebecca? And ask them what they say. People who are not your parents, right? Because you know a lot of what those stories are, but if you're brave enough or you have that relationship, you could even ask your parents because sometimes the stories that they would choose to tell about you are not the ones that they actually tell you. All the time. Right, right, right. I know, I know that my mom has had at various times told me stories that like, I didn't even remember like, of going camping and how much I was so obsessed. We, I guess we went camping at one point in this campground and we came out of the tent in the morning. The tent was covered with like, daddy, long leg spiders, you know, so it was a little teeny bodies and the really long legs. Oh yeah. Yep. My mom expected me as a little girl to be afraid of them, but rather than being afraid of them, I was totally fascinated by them. And so I got the squirt gun and I just sat there for like half an hour squirting the squirt gun off and squirting them off the tent because I thought it was so funny how they looked when they were falling and their legs were flailing and everything like that. I mean, now I'm like, that sounds a little bit like sadistic. But you know, I was five and they were spiders. But like I would have never. Chosen that story as a story to tell myself, because most of the time I don't even ever think about it. But to my mom, that was just like, you know, my curiosity and action and the fact that I wasn't afraid of things and the fact that I came up with this creative way to deal with something so that my sisters could get out of the tent cuz they were afraid of the spiders. And I didn't really wanna touch them so I didn't have to touch them, but I could still get rid of them. Yeah. And so I, so asking people in a journalistic way about yourself can be really, I. Enlightening.

Jen: 29:45

Yeah. And you make a really good point too, about, I wasn't, your mother took so much about you from you doing that. And so for students, I think too, and for, for me, it's also the, what does that say about you piece.

Rebecca: 30:02

Mm-hmm. Like what are, why are people

Jen: 30:04

choosing that story? And what meaning are they attributing to it? Because it's not just like, here's a story about you shooting daddy long legs. It's, you you weren't afraid. You were were joyful, you were observant,

Rebecca: 30:17

you were watching this, you know,

Jen: 30:19

You were creative and how you were gonna get rid of them. You know, it's, it's not just the

Rebecca: 30:23

story. Mm-hmm. And, and what's liberating also about this process is you can choose to accept. The, this person's interpretation, or you can choose to put your own interpretation on it, right? Mm-hmm. So if you know your your father loves to tell the story about the first time that you baked a cake, and, and so this is something that actually happened to me. So I wanted to surprise my dad. I. For Father's Day, and he loved this cherry coffee cake that my mom used to make all the time and the directions. My mom was really bad about writing down directions cuz she just kind of threw things together. And so the directions were like, put the bo the ba, like this is the batter, put it on a pan. This is the topping, put it on the pan and bake. What I didn't realize is that it was a very soft batter cuz I didn't know how to cook and I put it on a cookie sheet that did not have sides. Oh geez. And so I like it was thick when I was making it, but then as soon as it got hot, all the butter melted and it just started like cascading off the edge of the pan and there was like the smoke detector was going off and like I didn't know what to do and I was probably like 10 or 11 at the time. And my dad comes running into the kitchen and he opens the oven and he's like, whatcha doing? And I was like, I was gonna surprise you. I was gonna make the tray coffee cake. He's like, you have to put it in a jelly roll pan. My father never cooked. Like he can make macaroni and cheese. So it never occurred to me to ask him how to make this thing, cuz like it's baking. Like he doesn't know anything about baking. He may boils water and makes macaroni and cheese or pancakes when we're camping. And I'm like, what is a jelly roll pan? Like I, he's like, he's like, it's the cookie sheet with the sides. You have to have sides on it or it's gonna, and I'm like, well it's gonna overflow size. And so this is a story that I love to tell because it helped me to understand my father. In a completely different way because I had pigeonholed him as this like mechanic who was not domestic and you didn't know anything about these things, and so therefore he could never help me. With that part of my life. And then he came in and he knew exactly what to do and I would have never thought to ask him. And so when he and I talk about that story, we laugh about it because I am definitely the best cook in my entire family and I love cooking. But it takes those kinds of, of moments, right? Where I have using my mother's totally in if it insufficient recipe to make something that she makes all the time, but which I've never paid attention to while she was making it. Right? So I don't know that there's these limitations that I'm supposed to be acting in. And like my dad loves to tell that story about me. Like I have made so many amazing dishes in the course of my 40 plus years of life. I have cooked so many things that he's loved. And what does he love to tell the story about my absolute baking fiasco, which we resulted in having like an hour's worth of cleaning out the oven so we could use it again for a frozen pizza. You know, like cuz that's the direction it went after that. But I think that part of the reason that he loves to tell it is because there are so many things that I'm really good at and some PE people sometimes look at me like I've always been really good at those things. And so when he sits there and tells about my absolute cooking disaster at the age of 11, then it reminds people that. While I am putting amazing food on the table in front of you, that's very complicated and tasty, but that is not how I always was. Right? Like that, that there, this all has a beginning point and that's, and that's something that I've really appreciated as well, is sometimes you get in the middle of something and you think this is how it's always been, and the stories that people tell you about yourself reminds you that that's not always who you were, right? You weren't always able to do these things. There was a time when you started, there was a time when you failed. There was a time when you decided that this is the thing that you loved. And you may not remember that because it happened when you were five or when you were seven, or when you were 10, but it is, those formative stories may be more important in talking about who you are than the big thing that you did, or the big award that you won, or the big hardship that you overcame, right? Mm-hmm. Learning that you can ask your dad for baking help. Even though you've only ever seen him be successful in the garage is, you know, a relationship defining experience. It, it's a paradigm shift, right? Mm-hmm. It's just, it's like

Jen: 34:27

what? I see him in this way all of a sudden, my view has broadened. Yeah. I can remember sometimes with my dad was just my dad and I was not a fan of spiders, and there were like lots of spiders in my room and I'm like, they're spiders. Like I'm gonna call dad.

Rebecca: 34:45

And he came up and he was like, okay. But then I, I just had this thought like,

Jen: 34:50

what if he doesn't like spiders either? What if he's afraid of spiders? And I was like, like, My dad's a person, you know, all of a sudden it was like, he's a person. So I, and, and you just, you all these stories come up and they just remind you of, of these different learning experiences that you have. So I, I love, I love this creating space and, you know, the, the free writing and the asking other people or thinking about it from the perspective of other, of other people. When I interview students, I ask them, what are, what are some adjectives that your friends, your good friends would use to describe you? Because then that gets them out of their own head and thinking about their friends. Mm-hmm. And they're like, oh and I find I get some really good information that way. So I really, I like this. And I do think that you have to be a little braver to ask your parents.

Rebecca: 35:40

Mm-hmm. Oh yeah. Well, and, and that is a very fraught relationship. So I never require my students to talk to their family members about it because I don't want to send them back in. And that's actually something you mentioned this earlier, and I did, I do want to, wanted to circle back about that, and that is that, A lot of first gen students, especially if they come from really Marginalized backgrounds, oftentimes their stories involve trauma. Mm-hmm. And educators, it's important for them to remember that one, you are not a psychologist. Well, at least most of you aren't. Right. You're not a psychologist, you're not a therapist, you're not a counselor. You're the, you're their teacher. And so it is really helpful if you're going to ask your students to delve into their past or to delve into their stories to make sure that before that you. Make sure that they know of safe spaces or resources that are available, reminding them that if telling their story causes them pain, that they can talk to the school counselor or if they have trusted friends because you don't, one, you don't want them to be a reliant on you in that way, cuz that's not really a healthy student teacher or educator relationship. Mm-hmm. But also it acknowledges upfront that this could be a painful experience for them and that while you don't want to inflict pain on them, It's not wrong for them to acknowledge that it's painful because I think that there's a lot of, especially when you are moving into a more privileged space, right? You are gonna get to go to college, you're gonna get to do these things, and your family doesn't get to that. There is this idea that they absorb. Sometimes because people tell it to them and sometimes because it's just around them that they don't have the right to be damaged or hurt or unhappy about where they came from because they are getting out of that or they're moving ahead. Or they have to just grit their teeth and bear it because they're the one that's responsible to bringing their family members and their siblings into a better place. And so making space to acknowledge before you go into this like deep interpersonal delving that. That this could bring up pain and that if they need support, that you're willing to help them find it. And that if there are places they don't want to go because they're not ready to or able to deal with that pain, that that is okay. Mm-hmm. That they're, it is totally fine to not talk to that childhood friend who was with you when your sibling died in a car accident, right? Because that may be a definitive story, but it doesn't have to be the story that you tell. Right. If you don't have time to process that grief, then that's fine. You may wanna instead talk to this other friend with whom you did at a dog walking business when you were nine. Right. And talk about what, and, and that, that is totally as legitimately your story as this traumatic one that happened that defined you in so many ways. Yeah. And as an educator who's worked with a lot of people from a wide variety of backgrounds, including some pretty stressful, dangerous ones I have had to learn to be sensitive to that and to actually take some time to think about like what is likely to be the fallout if I'm asking my students to answer these questions, right? If my experience is from, I come from a stable home, I. I come from a pretty traditional background. I have not experienced any significant losses and I didn't experience any significant losses till I was well in my twenties or thirties. But now I'm dealing with students who have, you know, people in their lives that died in on because of violence or who died because of illness. People who were involved in leaving behind entire lives in order to escape some difficult situation and whether that's, you know, having to leave an abusive. Relationship, your, you know, your, or moving across town to escape some kind of other depressing situation or, or damaging situation. If you're gonna ask them to go to those places, you have to give them some kind of support or you have to give them a way out where they can still satisfy the requirements of what you're asking them to do without having to go to that space. Because I think sometimes we are defined by our most dramatic stories. And so, which also equals sometimes our most traumatic stories. Yes. And you don't, and and I think we talked about this a little bit before, right? Having to rehearse that trauma or having to rehearse that pain every time you are talking to a donor, or every time you're talking to an admissions counselor, or every time you're talking to a new educator or a new social worker or whatever. Can do more damage than it does good. Mm-hmm. If you aren't in a place where you have already processed that in a healthy environment with good care, and the reality is that a lot of first gen students come from backgrounds where mental health issues are not taken seriously, where people are skeptical of medical care because it's been used to abuse them historically. And so you can't just assume that they'll go see a counselor or a therapist, or they'll have a doctor or a nurse or somebody that they can lean on because they may not have anybody like them. That in their personal life. Yeah. And I think it's also important for students, regardless of their background, first gen or not, to know that their, their worst experiences are not the ones that define them. Right. They, they will always be there as a part of who they are and hopefully a, a time and will come when they can. Process them in a healthy and fruitful way. But it may be years and it may be taking a special and environment to be able to do that. And that may not be your classroom. In fact, it's not your classroom. Right, right, right. And so, so being able to steer them in other directions, towards victories, towards humorous stories, towards things that they like to remember. Having, having your students bring in a photograph from a period in their life where they were particularly excited about life Right. Or when they were learning a new thing and having them talk about that can be just as fruitful as going into those darker experiences because it's still helping them to understand themselves as people. Mm-hmm. Right? And remembering that they are a character in their story as well as the writer of their story. And so how they choose to approach that Can be done a lot of different ways that can be done safely without having to go to that, that hard place.

Jen: 41:29

Yeah. I think that that place about space and everything you've said is really about giving the students agency and, reminding them they have a multitude of stories and they get to choose. Which ones? Mm-hmm. That they wanna put out there to other people and that they wanna tell themselves and take ownership of. And that timing is also very important. Like, this is the time where this story may really resonate with you and be the one you wanna tell, but later on it's perfectly okay to have another story or a different story that is the one you wanna put out there because you're different now, than you were when you were in high school. So your high school story, your college story, your next story. They're going to be different. And I love how you gave the, the making space the, the coming beside them and helping them do that by telling them a, that you're a safe space. I, I love that you're like, free write. I'm not gonna read it. That takes a whole lot of pressure off right off the bat. And then you know the story you want to tell. What are the stories other people are telling about you? And then again, how much of that do you wanna, do you wanna take on? I just, I think those are some, Really good things that I'm gonna think about. I'm like, Hmm. Like how can I, how can I, how can I help my students do these things right now? So, is there any, as, as we close, is there any final advice you'd give to me, to us whether we're in the classroom or whether we're sort of in an office and, and a staff and working with students, especially first gen students about, their stories.

Rebecca: 43:10

So I think there's a couple of things that come to mind, and the first one is applicable across the board, regardless of who the students that you're working with. And that is that it is important as educators and counselors and advisors to remember that covid changed a lot of things. For students. When I was teaching this past year, I was amazed at the difference in positively and negatively, in the way the dynamics of working with my students versus when I was teaching first year writing five years ago. And one of the things that I realized is, one my students are much more aware of that mental health is a thing and that they need to take care, that it needs to be taken care of. And so they're more likely to advocate for themselves in that regard. But also I. That they have skill gaps and knowledge gaps. And this is gonna continue until the generations who were in kindergarten have gone all the way through. And so this is gonna be something that you're gonna be dealing with continually. They have, they have real, very real knowledge and skill gaps, and they don't necessarily know that they have them because they don't have any way of evaluating their performance. If that's all happened in the context of. Other people who had similar experience mostly. And so it's important to be sensitive to that and to kind of do a little bit work in the beginning to tease out like how comfortable do they feel writing, how comfortable do they feel storytelling? Have they thought about what the implications are of going on to more rigorous type of education. Some students are really self-aware about that. Other students, I. Are not prepared. And a lot of times the people who were underprepared 10 years ago are now so underprepared that they're gonna need a lot more support. Mm-hmm. And so it's worthwhile to just think, just to remember that these, that they are dealing with a whole set of circumstances that is totally not normal and educational process. But specifically relating to first gen students. And we talked about this a little bit before we started recording, and that is that it's important to remember that. Their family members may love them and want them to be successful, but they often have no idea how to support their children. In this process. And if their, if their children go back to them and say, I'm stressed out. I'm tired, I'm overwhelmed, I can't do this. They're just as likely to say, well, it's okay. You can come home, as they are to say, but this is just a season that's gonna pass. And so it's really important to help students to understand and to have accurate expectations of what's coming down the pipeline. Right? The first semester of college is really hard because everything is totally new and you need, you, you may want to not take on as many classes or as many activities because you're just gonna have to adjust to being in a new place. Get a lot of the like The programs for first gen students, they now have like first gen dorms and things like that where they can be in community with students who have, are in second and third and fourth year who can help them to navigate that. But remembering that they don't have necessarily a safety net that they can fall back on or people are gonna say, but it's okay. This is normal, this is, this is, you're gonna be okay. If they go home for a break, there is actually a very real danger that they won't come back. Because their family members will say, oh, but this is just too hard. You can come home, you can work in Papa's business. You can, you know, you can just go work at Walmart and it'll be fine. But they obviously don't want that. Or at least they thought at some time that they didn't want that. And so you wanna help them to remember what is the vision that they had from this new season? Why is it are they doing this thing? And that is the other thing that I would really encourage people working with first gen students, is to actually give them space to explore that question of why would they choose to go to college? Because as we all know, right, if you're doing something because you're intrinsically motivated, because this is something that you really want for yourself, then you're much more likely to complete and to do it successfully than if you're doing something because somebody tells you that you have to. Yes. And there are a lot of first gen students who, especially if they had success in the high school, in high school, who are being pressured by their families to be the person who changes that family dynamic. And that is a lot of weight pressure for a 17, 18, 19, 20 year old to carry, right? To know that you are carrying your family, not just your own ambitions and your own desires, and they may need space to process that. To decide if that's really what they wanna do. And I know that this is very non-traditional advice for people who, especially you're teaching college prep students, but there are spaces and places where, especially first gen students who are operating under the weight of a lot of family expectation, where they might need to be told that it is okay for them to take a gap year. Mm-hmm. Or to take a semester to pause and to stop being in school and go do something that they could do without being in school like, Working at retail or in food service or something like that, so that when they decide to go to school, they're doing it because it's what they wanna do. Having been a nontraditional student and a first gen student my college experience was totally different than my peers as a 25 year old because I had worked long enough to know that what I wanted to do required a degree. Yes. And so I was totally committed to doing that. And I also got there and realized that I have a lot of autonomy about my educational choices, right? And so I actually went and talked to the chairs of like three different departments. It was a small liberal arts college, so it was easy to do and asked them like, why do you study what you study? Because I didn't know what I wanted to do, especially after I decided not to be an art major because I was like, why am I paying to be in an art studio when I could do this at home? And I had that, like I didn't know what I wanted to do because nobody in my family had any advice for me about that. Like, why do people study political science? Why do people study philosophy? Why are you a historian? Like, I don't know. Why are people choosing to do this? Because nobody in my family was able to say, well, this is what a historian does, or This is why you might wanna study. You study mathematics or biology or whatever.

Jen: 49:03

I love that question. I'm going to have my students talk to faculty members and ask, why do you study what you study? That is such a good question. I, with the chair of the political science department, I asked him, so why are you a political science professor? And you know what he told me? He said that he enjoyed studying political science so much that he just decided to move to the other side of the desk. That was literally his answer. And I was like, well, okay, like you did this cuz you loved it. I understand that. So then I went and talked to the chair of the philosophy department. I'm like, why do you, why are you the why do you study philosophy? He's like, you want the honest answer? And I was like, yes. I want the honest answer. I, at this point, I'm like, I'm not 18. You can, you can tell me. He's like, well, the honest answer is I had a degree in engineering and I liked surfing better than engineering. So I decided that I didn't wanna be an engineer anymore, and I went to college in California where I could surf and study philosophy. And then I realized that if I was a philosophy professor, I could surf all summer long. This is a man in his fifties who still went surfing with his family every summer in California, even though he taught in like, you know, Appalachia. And so for me, realizing that people make decisions, one because they love their subject and the other because they want a certain kind of life. And this will give them that kind of life like, and he loved philosophy. He was passionate about philosophy. I took a class with him and I was like, man, this man loves Greek philosophy more than is natural or normal. And I'm not sure how I feel about this as a 26 year old. But he was a good teacher and it was obviously the right path for him. But his path to, into his path was because he was doing, wanted to do something that he loved. Right, right. And that nobody would've told me that you could find your career path because you wanted to surf. You didn't wanna sit in an office. Right? Like, what kind of, who makes decisions like that about their life? So yeah. So I feel like those kinds, asking people why they do that can be really illuminating. And in theory, that's what gen ed courses are supposed to do, right? Mm-hmm. They're supposed to expose you to a lot of things, but because they're often taught by grad students or people who are very new to their field and they don't really have pedagogical training, it often just becomes a like, let's. Rehash at a slightly higher level what you did in high school, and you're just gonna push through this so that you can go and do the thing that, well, you have to become a doctor or a lawyer, or a engineer because it will pay lots of money and it will make you successful. Yeah. And yeah. So, so I hope that that helps. But those are the things that I found are really, and, and, and as an educator, and I'm sure other educators, you understand this, right? Students are most successful when they're curious. Mm-hmm. So what you wanna do is make space for them to cultivate that curiosity about themselves. And about what life can be like because that's where the synergy happens when they have a story to tell that says, this is who I am and this is why I want to do the thing that I'm doing. Right. I had a horrible cooking experience because I did not ask help for help from people that who could help me, cuz I didn't recognize them as help. And I want to be the person. That's why I'm studying social work because I want to be the person that people can ask for help. Right. Because I learned when I was 11, That if you don't ask for help, you get disasters that you have to clean up sometimes all by yourself. Mm-hmm. I mean, and that's where those, that kind of story makes a huge impression because like, look, you've thought about who you are, you've thought about where you wanna go, and you found a way to make that creative connection. And that happens by cultivating curiosity about yourself and about what the world has to offer. Yeah. Brilliant, brilliant way to end. So if people wanna find you and they wanna, or maybe they have some questions that came up, maybe they're like, Ooh, you know, I'm thinking about this, you know, Rebecca, what should I do? How can they

Rebecca: 52:32

find you? So, there's two good places to find me. The social media place space where I'm most active is LinkedIn. And so it's, I'm just Rebecca Wilt Berger. Wiggins PhD is, Wilberg is W I l t B e r G E R. There's no other Rebecca Wiltbergers that exists. So I'm just the only one. Or I have a a small consulting company called Tea and Strategy, so you can find me@teaandstrategy.com. It's just a real simple website. You can contact me through there. I'm always open to new connections on LinkedIn. Just let me know where that, this is where you found me and I'm happy to connect. This applies to students as well as to As to a adults and professionals. If you have a student who's really interested in studying literature or something like that, or doing it going an ac more academic route, whether they're undergrads or high school students, I'm always open to talk to new students because I really love to help people understand more about who they are and why they wanna do the things they wanna do.

Jen: 53:28

Fantastic. I'll put links for that in the show notes so that people have an easy time of finding you. Well, Rebecca, thank you so much. This was, this was wonderful. It was, it was enlightening. It has left me with so many ideas and I hope it's left you with so many ideas. It has been a real pleasure talking to you, so I'm, I'm very glad you stepped forward and said, I would like to be on this podcast.

53:51

You can find me at first gen fm.com. And you can reach out to me through the contact form that's on the website. I would love to hear from you. If you have ideas about topics about guests, about a great article that you just read. I would love to hear all about that and you can also sign up for my newsletter on the site as well. Thank you so much for coming. And I look forward to creating a web of knowledgeable advocates for first gen students. And hopefully inspiring some great conversations between us thank you so much and i'll see you next week