Diego James Navarro, Professor Emeritus at Cabrillo College and the founder of the Academy for College Excellence (ACE), helps colleges to adopt proven strategies that instill cultures of dignity and belonging. This approach utilizes evidence-based solutions and offers evidence-based professional development for faculty, staff and administrators. Professional development is offered through on-line workshops and in-person institutes and practicums. The following PBS Documentary ten minute excerpt, article and research report discuss the needs of disproportionately impacted students and how to address these needs.

Creating A culture of dignity

Hear a recent interview with Diego Navarro about his work creating cultures of dignity on Dr. Al Solano’s podcast.

We are living in a time where there is uncertainty in our lives and especially in our student’s lives. Covid has impacted all of us. All schools and colleges are impacted. Our communities, our families are impacted. Many students and many of us feel disconnected by their routines being interrupted, their social engagements limited and the effects of isolation.

There have been close to 750,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. and almost 5 million deaths worldwide. On May 25th, 2020 George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis and there have been protests against police brutality since his murder. There have been other murders before and after of which we are becoming aware. How do we create belonging and emotionally safety for our students in these times?

Belonging is important because it covers so many dimension: belonging to college, in this class, to this group of students, to the life of educated folk. And yet how do we create the conditions that amplify belonging?

Many times our interactions with students focus on efficiency (financial aid, admissions) or in the classroom we focus on skill-building at the expense of creating the conditions for belonging, community and emotional/psychological safety. These conditions help light the fire for learning. How do we create psychologically safe interactions with our students where our students become on fire for learning; where a question we ask or a statement we make evokes a response where deeper connections takes place?

Many of our students are essential workers who are employed in drug stores, grocery stores and as delivery persons. Some are experiencing that their lives are seen as expendable. How do we interact with our students and with one another that impedes a sense of dignity?

Part of our work is to become aware of what we are doing in order to do what we want. We want our students to feel that they belong at our college, that they see the culture of the college helping them thrive in their lives. For some students college is their hope to a better life, and even for some to change their family’s trajectory from poverty to living-wages, from dead-end jobs to careers with a future, from lack of education to higher education.

Our students come to us with many experiences wondering if our college will be a safe environment. Many of our disproportionately impacted students have shaming experiences in their encounters with education prior to coming to our college as well as at our college. These experiences for many are still alive in them when they arrive at our college or in our classes.

Without knowing it many of our students are watching us and sensing how we treat other students. To counteract our student’s hyper-vigilance and their experiences of indignities in their education there are two ways to address these issues:

• Creating a secure container — “what we call the glue” and

• Developing the capacity of embodied interactions which deepen student’s insights — “what we call the gravity.”

Counteracting a Student’s Sense of Threat

I’d like to share with you a secret that I learned after many years teaching students who have been affected by poverty in their lives. One of their strengths is persistence, resilience and survival. They are like dandelions growing out of the cracks in the side walks in the inner city; they are strong and capable. I’m sure you are saying, “Come on Diego…if they have this strength then why are their retention rates so low? Why is there an achievement gap with these students?”

I would answer, “Because we are failing them: We haven’t addressed the root cause of their challenges – it is not reading, writing or math — it is their human stress response system which has had to deal with toxic stress. Their human stress response system is very sensitive to environmental factors. Look at the research conducted by Jeremy Jamieson at University of Rochester on the stress response system and stress reappraisal interventions, and David Yeager at University of Texas – Austin. Or the books and articles by Paul Tough. Or the research from the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey (ACEs survey) developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente.

A significant result of growing up in poverty is elevated chronic stress, and increased stress has demonstrable physiological and psychological effects on student performance. The impact of stress on academic performance is a rich area of research. Students may respond to a stressor as a threat (where coping skills and resources are insufficient to meet the need). They are hypervigilant looking to see if there is a threat in their environments. Many of our disproportionately impacted students have trauma from their educational experiences. Many of our students from poverty need to feel legitimacy to help them counteract their feelings of being an imposter (the Imposter Syndrome).

We are failing our students from poverty and other marginalized student populations because: We do not understand our role in addressing their challenges. Our role is to help them translate their strength in persistence, resilience and survival to the academic environment so that they can meet their educational goals.

Watch out. When this happens these students outperform their peers because of their tenacity, determination and experience with hardship.

We have found that at the beginning of a student’s first semester of college we have to prioritize and focus on helping them feel psychologically and emotionally safe AND a sense of belonging – feeling a sense of inclusion and community. Once this happens then we focus on helping them make a systematic inquiry into how their behaviors either support or move them away from attaining their educational and career goals.

We are watering seeds and fertilizing the ground. Deeper learning happens when students feel safe, accepted and can let their guard down. To counteract a student’s sense of threat we need to:

• Create a psychologically safe environment

• Embodied interactions

To do this well we must identify activities on two dimensions:

• First dimension is the promotion of group cohesion and safety– what we call “a secure container” or what I refer to as the “glue.”

• The second dimension is the encouragement of deepening insight through what we call “embodied interactions” – what I refer to as the development of “gravity.”

 As group cohesion develops keep balancing these two dimensions. Observe these two dimensions in the students. State the behaviors you see that build cohesion.

And, address roadblocks to the cohesion. Our focus is on how to create the conditions in your college and in your classes where students feel a sense of belonging and psychological safety. A safe container is important to developing a sense of dignity and emotional safety.

Many of our students utilize a community of support to get to where they are in their lives attending your College. Many of our students thrive on community for survival. They watch each other’s backs, they provide each other with resources and human connection. A secure container builds a community for students.

sabbatical report — what i learned about poverty and learning

In the 2015 school year I had a year-long sabbatical. I received an appointment as a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching at Stanford. I spent the year studying the way affective learning strategies can overcome the effects of toxic-stress by interviewing experts, reading reports and thinking about why students succeed who were thrown-away by our society (many of our disproportionately impacted students). Here is what I learned.

my work:

My work is to help faculty, staff and administrators understand these issues and to develop the capacity to address them through evidence-based practices and professional development. We can help our students translate their inherent strengths in persistence, resilience and survival to their academic lives and professional careers.

We provide professional development through on-line workshops, webinars, in-person institutes (when the Pandemic ends), and classroom activities. We also provide on-line student-facing courses. Our on-line courses have served over 60,000 students with enrollments of over 1,500 students per month.

Please contact us if you are interested in bringing these ideas and practices to your college - 831 247-3902

My Motivations & Interests

ALLEVIATING Poverty through higher education

Growing up in a tough neighborhood and experiencing a disconnect between personal experiences and public school education, Diego pursued an alternative educational track post-high school that took him from attending a community college in southern California to living in a remote mountain village in Mexico, from studying neuroplasticity with Moshe Feldenkrais in Amherst, MA, to founding a software start-up company committed to impacting the social good in Berkeley, CA. 

Research & Curriculum: Adaptive Organizations & Scaling Innovations

After graduating from college, Diego looked for a mentor in the tenuous niche between business and social justice. His search led him to Harvard Business School where he studied adaptive organizations with Dr. Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Dr. J. Richard Hackman. In the summer before his second year of graduate school, Diego interned at Apple Computer and interviewed twenty-two visionaries in the computer science field.

Contribution: Technology Enhanced Learning Systems & Organizations

Diego spent the next seven plus years working in Hewlett Packard Labs where he developed the Team Server. After three more years as CEO of a software company in Silicon Valley, Diego felt his apprenticeship in the business world was over. Moving with his family to Costa Rica, Diego co-developed with HP the sustainable agriculture Certification And Traceability System (CATS).