Faculty Talk About Goodness at Exeter
Goodness and knowledge. For more than two centuries, the Academy has stressed the coexistence of these two values within the student body. Recently, with the administration’s initiation of “strategic planning,” over 20 faculty members convene regularly to discuss the extent to which these values manifest themselves in the lives of students at Exeter, with an eye towards mindfulness, deeper connections and intrinsic and external motivations, such as GPA.
The discussions originated from an informal conversation between instructors in varying departments who were concerned about the well-being of students at the Academy. “[The meetings] were inspired by faculty interest in finding better ways to help students handle the stress that sometimes leads to questionable decision-making or a general sense of purposelessness,” religion instructor Kathleen Brownback said.
“We have been talking broadly about questions relating to the Academy’s core values and how those values are expressed in the Harkness classroom, in extracurricular activities and in residential life,” religion department chair Thomas Ramsey said. “Do the ways we teach and learn, whether in the classroom, on the playing fields, and in the dorms reflect those core values? These questions are perennial ones, but arise with intensity at this time of rapid change in all of our lives and in the wider society.”
Brownback also noted that with the quickly and constantly reshaping landscape of schools in the nation, connections that are built in the Academy community, especially the teacher-to-student relationships, have turned into a matter often considered lightly or even overlooked.
“More recognition of each other’s humanity—in an era when everything is much faster, is often much more superficial,” she said. “So we’re considering things like that—ways to connect self and others at a deeper level.”
History instructor Amy Schwartz added that along with aiding students to to retrieve a sense of meaning in their academic lives, some instructors were concerned with encouraging students to be more aware of the consequences of focusing on physical results such as GPA, and to be empathetic towards their peers who might be having a discouraging experience in their lives in the Academy.
“A growing number of teachers are really interested in mindfulness and wellness and trying to deepen our students' experience here, not just academically but personally,” Schwartz said. “We are concerned about stress levels and unhappiness and burnout, and we feel many students are chasing external, extrinsic rewards such as grades and accolades while not always nurturing their own intrinsic motivation enough.”
Schwartz said that since most faculty members who have been attending these meetings have been through the stages of life that Exeter students are currently in, they wanted to allow students to avoid suffering that may come from pursuing superficial values in their academic careers.
Along with Schwartz, faculty members who have participated in these open discussions referred to the process of helping students find stability and purpose in their Exeter lives as “teaching goodness,” and said that the title encompasses a broad array of denotations and meanings.
“There is no exact definition,” science instructor Townley Chisholm said. “Some teachers focus most on mindfulness, the practice of being fully present in the moment and of thinking through what a person wants from his or her life. Others think about how students act in the community and wonder how to help students behave with greater respect for assembly speakers, for people who work at the school and who clean after students and for their fellow students.”
Brownback, however, noted that the meetings hold a common purpose for all faculty members: providing emotional and mental assistance for students to have the full Exeter experience and reach a level of excellence that each student is capable of achieving.
“Exeter students have high goals and most wouldn’t settle for less, so it’s not a matter of making the school less intellectually challenging,” Brownback said. “It’s about supporting students to be at their best—and to find out what their best really is.”
Although some feel that a deficiency in emotional connections and kindness between faculty members and students presents an issue that needs to be addressed, Brownback said that there is no severe conflict that threatens the Academy community’s overall awareness of goodness.
“There’s no great crisis of ‘badness’ that we want to counter with ‘goodness,’ just a sense that in every era these things need to be reopened and reconsidered,” Brownback said. “Next year we will be having more of this conversation with more of the faculty and with students.”