As we continue with our First-Gen Celebration Week, Dr. Jones sits down with Dr. Richard Reddick (Associate for Equity, Community Engagement, and Outreach in the College of Education) about navigating higher education as a first-gen student and creating a vision of success for first gen students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As we continue with our First-Gen Celebration Week, Dr. Jones sits down with Dr. Richard Reddick (Associate for Equity, Community Engagement, and Outreach in the College of Education) about navigating higher education as a first-gen student and creating a vision of success for first gen students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/live\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/24\/2020\/11\/2020-11-12_L-I-V-E_Episode-11_mastered.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"46.95M","filesize_raw":"49233270","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[594,593,592,588,595],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-116","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-community-engagement","6":"tag-equity","7":"tag-first-gen-week","8":"tag-first-generation-students","9":"tag-outreach","10":"series-live","11":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":68,"post_author":"39","post_date":"2020-07-20 20:29:28","post_date_gmt":"2020-07-20 20:29:28","post_content":"","post_title":"Dr. Brandon Jones","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"dr-brandon-jones","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-07-20 20:33:17","post_modified_gmt":"2020-07-20 20:33:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/live\/?post_type=speaker&p=68","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":118,"post_author":"23","post_date":"2020-11-12 18:27:29","post_date_gmt":"2020-11-12 18:27:29","post_content":"\n
Richard J. Reddick, Ed.D. is the inaugural associate dean for equity, community engagement, and outreach for the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also Professor in the Program in Higher Education Leadership in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy (ELP) at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has served as a faculty member since 2007. Additionally, Dr. Reddick serves as the Assistant Director of the Plan II Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts. Dr. Reddick is a faculty member by courtesy in the Department for African and African Diaspora Studies, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and a fellow at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis. Dr. Reddick co-chairs the Council for Racial and Ethnic Equity and Diversity (CREED), serves on the Signature Course Advisory Committee (SCAC), and was named to the inaugural cohort of the Provost's Distinguished Service Academy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr. Reddick is the faculty co-chair for the Institute for Educational Management (IEM) at Harvard University, and teaches in the Institute for Management Leadership in Education. In spring 2018, Dr. Reddick was appointed as a Visiting Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Dr. Richard Reddick","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"dr-richard-reddick","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-11-12 19:01:10","post_modified_gmt":"2020-11-12 19:01:10","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/live\/?post_type=speaker&p=118","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"Transcript":"
[0:00:04 Speaker 0] Welcome to live leadership, innovation, ventures and entrepreneurship. Ah, podcast that showcases the talents, skills and abilities of U. T. Faculty, staff and students. I’m your host, Brandon Jones, associate director for student learning and development in housing and dining. And we’re excited to have you listening to us. You welcome everybody to the leadership, Innovation Ventures and Entrepreneurship podcast, also known as live. I’m your host, Brandon Jones, associate director for a student learning and development. And today we have, Ah, wonderful guest for you in the form of none other than Dr Richard Reddick. Um, Doc, how you doing this morning? Well, I’m doing great, Doctor Jones. It’s great to be here. I made it to live. I’m gonna put that on my resume. Man thing is, big man, this is big for me, man. So I appreciate the opportunity to be here, man. Hey, thank you for agreeing to meet with us this morning. So as the audience knows, this week while we’re recording this episode is the celebration of First Gen Week and you yourself happen to serve on the committee that’s helping to serve and establish programming and initiatives for our students and saw it. When? When? When I knew we were doing this slate of recordings, I had to reach out to you and somebody thankful that you’re gonna bless us today with your presence. And so why don’t you tell everybody a little bit about yourself? Your title, the department, you working and then we can dive into the work you’re doing with our first Gen students? Sure, Brandon. So first of all, today is Veterans Day. So I think it was shout out to my dad and all the veterans out there, and that’s part of my story because I’m an Air Force brat. So my dad served 26 years in the Air Force. We lived overseas in England and Florida and born in Texas. I’m very proud of that’s born in West Texas, in the country, the other side of the state from you, man. But I was born out there, and we moved to England right away. So I spent most of my time, my childhood, about 10 years living in the UK, and we moved to Austin in 1986. That was when my dad was stationed in his final changes station, which is Bergstrom Air Force Base, which is now the airport. And so we came to Austin and I was just like, Okay, this is, you know, I’m in Texas, you know, it’s not. It’s not raining anymore like it was in England all the time on. And so I went to. I graduated in 1990. I went to 12 different schools between kindergarten and graduation, and I went to four here in the city, graduate from Johnston High School in the east side of town, which is now called East Side Memorial. So I had a fairly interesting experience because I went to some of the schools. So department defense education activity schools are some of the schools with the slightest gap between nape stores among black Latino white students. The achievement is very close. It’s one of the most equitable school district in the country. Obviously, it’s not in the country, it’s overseas, but so I come. I came from that experience to Austin, Texas, and as you know, Austin has this reputation and actually in the data of inequity, right? This is amazing inequities educationally, socioeconomically, racially. And I had that experience, so it was very jarring. And so I think for me all through high school I was thinking about How is it that people in the same city or having such different educational experiences that is no state to my experiences? I had the most amazing teachers. E was taught by activists on the East Side of Austin, which was an amazing experience and long story short. I had opportunity come to UT in the fall of 1990 came on a scholarship and inequity became more of my conversation because I’m like, Okay, I go to school in the barrio with black and brown kids all the time. We’re diverse. We have We have kids from West Austin there, so we have white kids with wealthy kids. But I’m in a place where I clearly am the numerical minority. And furthermore, I’m experiencing all these things I read about, like in books about microaggressions and being treated certain way because you’re a black male, which I had never experienced before. So that was quite jarring. So that’s just to say that my entire schooling experience really sort of oriented me to focus on issues of equity, especially in education spaces. So I came back. It was a long story between that, but I came back to 2007 s a faculty member in the College of Education. Where do you go to graduate school? I went to Harvard Graduate School of Education at Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the cold. It was crazy mix. I had never been. I only been to Boston one time before I went there when I was on Will a fortune as a U T student for college week. So check this out. Y’all humble bragging here. Hey, straight up was about to skip completely over Harvard in Trou du Boise. Inform she was about the Straits Harvard experience. Well, the boys is a Harvard grad, so not to go deeper. But so we went to Boston to film the College Week. Will a fortune, Uh, in 1993 and I knew that Harvard was somewhere near Boston and remember getting to the cabin saying, Hey, where’s where’s Harvard? The cabbie said, That’s in Cambridge. I’m like, it’s all the same to me. No, I’m like, so cool. So I’ve been there one time, and so I basically went to Harvard Sight unseen because I didn’t know anything. And I said to myself. I’m gonna get the view book and this is before we had Internet websites. Eso the view book came and I said, If you book has black people in it or brown people in it, I’m gonna check it out. I’m gonna apply because, you know, it’s like That’s Harvard. It sounds so highfalutin. In truth, I was teaching in Houston at the time in h i S t and I was on a committee with a woman named Valencia. I can’t pronounce his last name, but she was just, like, bad. She just, like, had her stuff together. And she was at Harvard Superintendency program. So I’m like, Well, you know, if that’s what happens at Harvard. First of all, I’m not ready for that. And second of all, I’d like to be ready for that one day and she said, You should apply. Don’t even know. Don’t even think like that. You should apply E. I opened the book and I saw two black faces I saw rolling. Hence director of admissions at Harvard. And then I saw Charles Willy, uh, sociologist and Charles William Eliot, professor of education. I’m like I see two brothers. I’m on my way. There you go. Applied. Gotten in the U haul. We drove up there and lived in a square box in Harvard Square. Andi, I met Dr Willie the first day of my graduate school career and he and I have been tight ever since. We’re both We’re both Texans. I did not know this. He’s oak Cliff. Uh, you know, Morehouse Grad, both alphas. He just is just this transcendent figure in history, but the coolest Did you ever meet in your life and so warm and welcoming And so he just turned 92. So shout to Dr Willie. Uh, but he really sent my career in motion. I ended up taking half my course work with him in grad school. Was a master student. Stayed in touch over the years. He came to Austin one time, bro. And he called my parents. My parents called me and said, uh, your professor called us like, What’s up with that? Like, weren’t you in school last year? Like, why is he calling this now? Like they were actually kind of worried. I’m like, he’s cool. He’s supposed to say, you know, say hi to you all hang out And so, you know, I end up going back to grad school for my doctorate on. I worked closely with him. We wrote two books No, three books together. Uh, on Dr Willie is just, uh he’s a Mitch. He’s just amazing person and generous person. And the funny stories. When I came back to U T in 2007, I had to do with everything was done very late. Dissertation was turned in at the last possible date. Started the job in August 1st son Carl was born on October. It was a crazy year. I get a call like in November and they’re saying, Hey, rich, how’s it going in Austin? I’m like it’s going great. They’re like, Well, look, we have some good news for you. You’ve been named the class Marshall. Yeah, for Harvard. Um, I’m like, that’s great, but I live in Texas. So, you know, on I was like, Well, I wanna go to graduation. I wanna go to commencement. So they said, OK, well, you need to come back up and you need by the regalia blah, blah, blah. So, like, this is cool. But now we have a small child and we got a plan, a trip, all of us toe Boston and my folks. Everybody like that because I told this is my last graduation, you know? So this is gonna be any other chances to do this. So we went up there and we stay with Dr Willie. It was so great that he and his wife, Mary Sue, put us up in the house with our got Carl was like 78 months old, nine months. Hey, after the straight fool. Hey, hey. Acted out. He acted out the day of getting there and I was trying to get Thio. They live in Concord, which is outside of Cambridge and anywhere in New England. They call it New England because, like, England and anywhere in that space is not, you know, Ah, five mile distance will take you 30 minutes to drive. So literally I remember driving out, leaving the family behind, putting my robes on and jumping out the car during a barrel roll, getting in front on they all showed up. But we have pictures and it looks like it was a great day. And, you know, Carlos was Hey, man, he’s straight clown and cried and had fits. And of course, he’s always flexing like, Oh, yeah, I was up there with graduation. I’m like, Yeah, man, you were not cool. But it was a great experience, man. Thank you for sharing that. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, this week, Not only today, Veterans Day, so shout out to veterans, all the veterans listening. But also with this week is the time we set aside in higher education toe honor and celebrate the accomplishments off are first generation college students. Can you talkto the audience about why that’s important and why we should continue doing this Not just this particular week, but all year long? Absolutely, brother. I mean, I mean, one of the things I think about is my own personal experience. I had a very rich cultural educational experience. My parents didn’t go to college, though, So in my household it was always like, Hey, you know, just keep grinding, keep grinding, you know, keep getting those A’s and those high bees, But better A’s get the A’s we can on. By the time I got to the close to the end, they were like, Well, you should go to college. Whatever that issue know, however, that works, you should do it. And for me, a lot of things fell into place largely because I went to a school that was fairly integrated, and I had classmates whose parents went to college. I got a lot of college advising from peers, not from the counseling staff from those folks you know, get to U T. I’m an honest program again because my AP English teacher, her son, was in the plan to honest program and she said, You should apply this program I said, I don’t think so. I’m going to school to get see So I could just get through because that’s it, right after college, you’re done right? So there’s no point in trying to get AIDS in college, right? And she was like, Well, you know, if you don’t take apply for this program, you won’t pass AP English. You have an independent study assignment to do on. I’m like, Man, it’s so ill. But it changed my life. Of course, I’m the associate assistant director of Plan Two honors now, and that’s you know, that’s how it started because my AP English teacher forced me to a part of this pro much. I had no idea what it waas you oversee the program you came through. Ultimately didn’t want to even participated at one. Right, right? I was like plan to what you know, like the point is like, all things. I’m talking to you about a so circumstantial and just by fate, and we realized that’s not the way we want it to be. We we don’t want people stacking privilege and we don’t want people to be outside of the hidden curriculum. We want people to understand that first of all, you know, I’ve got Terry aosis work about community cultural wealth. There’s a lot of deficit thinking about first generation college students like, Oh, well, they don’t have this. They like this. They like that. And Terry Osa really talks about the fact that because of you getting to this point, whether it’s your navigational capital for Neil Capital, aspirational capital, all these different forms of of of strength, you have. So every time I talk to students who are first Gen I tell them that I said, You know, you got here despite every imaginable impediment. So you there’s no way this place could stop you. There’s nothing you can’t do. You didn’t reminded sometimes that you have these things because sometimes you forget. And sometimes it is isolating and sometimes the jargon. Tony Jack is a good friend of mine who’s at Harvard? Wrote a book called The Privileged Poor. He talks about this issue off first generation college students who are low income of color and the jargon that universities You not know this, right? I mean, there’s so many words. Weaken, drop in a conversation. The births are registrar, you know, semester credit hours and people are like What does that mean? You know, Q drop. What does that you know. So a lot of it’s just breaking down the vocabulary. And one of the great things I like about First Gen. Week is that we get to focus on those things on because we’re both higher ed. People were probably most jargon in people who ever lived. My dad’s in the military, and that’s a pretty jargon leading place. I think we have more jargon in higher ed, you know, our abbreviations are acronyms. We use eso just making it clear what those things are, and then Secondly, ensuring that both our faculty, staff, students, administrators and families understand that they really bring a dimension of the experience that we do not have access to. And they’re vitally important. Um, so I get really hyped for first Gen Week. In fact, on Thursday I’m opening my class, my graduate class, to some first Gen. Student to come visit just to check out grad school. Because I know every day, post graduation from high school was an adventure for me because literally, it was uncharted territory. And my family was always supportive Man, always, but not necessarily knowing how to support. They were like, Well, you know, you’re smart, you’ll figure it out. I’m like, Well, how do I figure it out? You know where I go. And so for me, being part of a number of success programs like the welcome program, which we had back in the nineties, that you tea with Mrs Brenda Bert, I mean, that really shaped my experience at U T. I mean, just working with, uh, many First, Gen not offers Jim, but many first gin, low income African American Latino students coming to U T. Uh was just transformative right you know, you you realize you know a little bit and what little bit you know, you could pass on to somebody else. And that gives you confidence because you’re like, I know something. You know, um, I became an orientation advisor into my first year and orientations where I really found my space. I did orientation for my gosh, four years I’d even maxed out. Apparently like last year, I was orientation special assistant because I’ve been doing orientation for, like, three years straight. Like we got to find a new category for you, Andi just working with our incoming students because again its powerful when they see you as a first gen low income student of color leading these organizational things. And secondly, it’s also a message to folks who are not first Gen that we are not deficient, like, Yo, this guy’s running orientation like it’s not like, you know, And he knew nothing about college three years ago, but he could give you the best campus tour. He could give you all the down. You know, all the information about registering for classes, where to live, all that stuff like that. So it’s, it’s it’s It’s such an exciting time to really remind our first gen students that you’re valued. We’re excited to have you here. It’s an honor to have you in the University of Texas. And how many of us have that same experience? Like, you know, administrators, faculty members, staff members, uh, students. We don’t walk around really with first Gen badges, but this week we do people know, like, you know, you might think, you know, fancy resume, fancy graduate school, whatever. Fancy title. But I am like you. I came to university with no idea what was going to do. No idea I’d be coming back several times. You know, for degrees, Um, and that’s really part of what this is about, is it’s giving people division. So one of the things that Terry also talks about is aspirational capital. You know, Ghana’s dreams, you know, And I think the first time I heard people talking about well, you could do all this stuff. I’m like I can Wow, that’s like I hadn’t even thought about those things. I was like, get the degree become employed, you know, And life, You know, I never thought Well, what if you do that for a while. Go back to school, get a degree, live in California, live in Georgia, you know, live back in, uh, Massachusetts, get another degree and then become a professor. That was not part of the plan. Uh, but thankfully, I had people around me who were always saying, you know, they could see it’s a little bit further than I could see. They’re just like, yeah, you should try for this. You should go for this. Mrs. Bert was that person for me, You know, why don’t you try? You know why we put you in this situation? Why don’t we give you this opportunity and every single time, you know, it worked out and I was just like, I got confidence. So the imposter syndrome from me. I mean, it’s always there, but it definitely became like, Well, yeah, I’m nervous. I don’t know if I could do this or not, but I’ve done things like this before, so you know, why not? Let’s give it a shot. And I think this environment, the people I was surrounded by really, uh, had that encouragement for me. And so if we could pay that forward for our first dance students and just say, Just listen to people like Dr Jones and Dr Reddick, who have been around a little bit saying, You know, this thing that’s out there, you should really think about doing that thing and don’t blow it off. And don’t say Oh, well, you all just be nice to me Know who was seriously like Go for this thing because you could do it right. And I appreciate you sharing that. One thing I wanna go back to that you had said was talking about this deficit thinking. And when Caylee Deficit and I were recording the episode the other day, we focused on that and I mentioned that, you know, in my dissertation, that’s one of the things that I focused on because I was talking about blackmail athletes and how I’ve stopped subscribing to deficit achievement frameworks. And I’m like Shaun Harper and others kind of started taking on this anti deficit achievement mindset, especially when it came toe black and brown students on college campuses. Can we can we talk about how we could help not just faculty, but also staff adopt that mindset and that language when we’re referring to and talking about our first gen students because a lot of the times that shows up in how we advise it shows up in the programs that we put out there. And then ultimately it shows up in how we treat these students when they’re in our classrooms or in our offices. So can you talk a little bit about that? Oh, absolutely. Shout out to the homey Caylee and harp over it. You see? You know O G s. You know, out there, you’re exactly right. I mean, you know, if you know anything about some of the work that Claude steals done on stereotype threat, right when you implant expectations on people, people live up or live down to them. Right? So the whole issue stereotype threat is when you are, uh, provoked to think about how deficient or how poorly people in your category perform, you tend to do less well in those environments, right? And and so you know when you understand that if you think oh, the students, the first generation college student, their low income oh, they probably haven’t had, like I just described to you. I grew up, you know, going to school next to castles. And I had this great cultural experience, but still low income student, right, So those things can exist, Like the assumption that because you’re low income of your first generation, that you’ve had a culturally vacant experience is problematic right now. It’s not to say that maybe you didn’t get a chance to go to France every summer. But you can read, you know, you could be exposed to great things. You have family members who give you that kind of access to those kinds of things. The second thing is acting as if the college experience is somehow, um, complete or somehow perfect, when in fact, the systems we have in place my teeth history of higher education. You know this, you know, have not changed radically from 16 36 right residential colleges, um, oriented towards the wealthy white, the mail, the privileged. You know, that’s still the paradigm that we use primarily in higher education at four year institutions that are considered, you know, competitive right, open access to universities, community colleges, you know, they have oriented themselves mawr towards the modern college students. But a lot of times were just kind of patch stuff from way back when and never thought about re imagining or reconstructing the educational experience. And we’re trying to do that. But institutions like higher education move slowly, right? It’s hard. So even when people frame will this child, the student is struggling. Reality is institutions struggling because the institution has not met the needs of the students that we are admitting. And that’s often because it’s a shared responsibility. So often we say, Well, the student didn’t do X, y and Z, and a good example of this is when I was a scope pro. Yes, I was on scope pro, and I felt terribly ashamed. I didn’t. I kind of hit out for, like, the first couple of weeks of the next semester because I thought everybody knew wasn’t scope pro. I tell people what that ISS Scholastic probation. That’s when your grades dip. And you’re like, Wow, you know, you don’t get them back up. No scholarship, no program, you know, hit the bricks. And so that was kind of jarring to me because, you know, look, now, today we have warning signs. We have ways through canvas, and our LMS is to track these things like we can tell the students coming to class and say, Hey, you know what’s going on? We don’t have that back in those days. If you had a professor who was concerned, I’ll tell you what happened to me. I was a large lecture classroom, and, um, I was in a class that was probably inappropriately advised to take. It was a physics class, and I didn’t take physics in high school. So why am I taking the honors physics class in college, right? There’s like scaffolding there that got missed the people. Oh, you’re smart. You figured it out. Um, I’m also a first year student, so I’m not the most responsible, you know, study focused person there. I’m trying to have a freshman year, and I’m not studying. I’m not going to extra office hours. I’m not doing those things. And I finally got desperate when I got my last couple of grades. Was like, This is looking bad and I went to the TA to beg, basically, and he said, Well, you know, if you came to class more frequently, I think you would blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, Oh, that’s, um shade. But I’m a black male student in electric class, where there are two black males and three black women. So he knows what? I’m not in class, you know? So and and secondly, s a lot of it’s my responsibility, but the other part of it is like nobody really reached out and said, Wait a minute. Um, what what’s going on with you? You know why you avoid in the class Is a class content too difficult? Do you need scaffolding and support? And when you’re the honest program, a lot of times you feel like there’s no way should ask for help because, your honor student, you should be asking for help. So for me, I mean, it was all of those psychological issues and then realizing, yes, I had a large responsibility in the in the in this, uh, lack of success, but also institutionally, there was some failures that we just didn’t attend to. And so now you remember reading in graduate school. Two books Losing the race by John McWhorter. Uh, John McWhorter is a brilliant linguist, but he has very problematic frame ings black students. My chair would not let me cite him in my dissertation. Well, Here’s the great thing about that, though. Sometimes reading Pedro Noguera was my professor. He’s Pedro. Is that to Dr Noguera? Man? Yeah, A E. Yeah, He said he’s at USC now. USC? That’s right. That’s right. Sorry, Dean. Uh, Negara s. So when I had him for a class, we had to read. You know, Charles Murray is the bell curve we had to read losing the race and we just get heated and angry. He was like, You need to understand what people are saying about our students. You understand that like, e I was like, That’s deep and reading McWhorter sort of complaining about his students, you know, students didn’t do X, y and Z, I’m like, What did you do? Did you do anything to reach out to these students? To maybe understand? They were feeling imposter syndrome and they felt embarrassed and ashamed to come to you and say, I know what’s going on. You could reach out. You reached out. They don’t respect, Okay, But you could have done those things on. That’s when I kind of triggered me to say I gotta do something different in this, And so I had a chance to talk to John McWhorter, um, came to Harvard to give a talk, and I just said, Okay. On page 76 losing the race, You describe the situation when you were, you know, doing the student. I’m just wondering if you ever thought about, uh, engaging with the students and finding out what was happening with them. You know, Inter personally, not just They were coming to class and they didn’t care. But you made an assumption about that. And he was just like, Well, I you know, e he didn’t answer the question. Basically s o e. I said, let me never be that kind of Professor Bond. I’m sure. Listen, John McWhorter I’ve gone to respect his work overtime in linguistics, so I’m sure he’s great in so many ways, but said Let me never be a callous sort of thinker. And of course you can talk about students having responsibility, But let me always be humble about how my students are experience the experience. I don’t what they’re going through. I don’t know what they’re experiencing at home. I don’t know. They’re experiencing financially, so let me always think about that first and foremost and make sure they’re okay. And then if you’re okay, I’m a light into you. Okay? Now we establish that you’re okay. You’re eating and you have a place to live, and you have the money you need to have. Why don’t you come to class? That’s how it starts. You know, not with this idea. Well, you really should step up to the game. I mean, that’s that’s all well and good, but we need to really think about this from a systems perspective. You know, what is a system doing to support you? What’s the system doing to either, uh, subvert your progress or is negligent in some ways? So we’re institutions of higher education. We’re constantly learning, or we should be constantly learning how to better serve our students. It’s not a one way street. And I love what you were saying there about thinking about it from a systems perspective because, you know, in research and athletes, there’s all this research out there, uh, Kristen Benson being one of my favorites When I got to meet her when I was at Tennessee and she talked about how the institution, at times let’s the players down a matter of fact a lot of the time because, you know, if if I come in wanting to do a major and you’re you’re creating all these barriers for me as an athlete to do these majors, ultimately, if I don’t go pro or if I don’t don’t you bear some responsibility in there for not helping me. And that’s why I, like some institutions like Clemson, have programs where players can come back and finish the degree if they if they’ve met a certain number of requirements. And so I’ve appreciated seeing more doors opening there. But I did appreciate the fact that you were pointing out that sometimes as an institution, we bear some responsibility, and we often don’t say that, especially when we’re talking about our first Gen students. I appreciate you putting that out there. I want to shift gears real quick because there’s one doesn’t experience that I want you thio talk Mawr about with our audience, and that’s what the trips that you take. Students Thio Cambridge talk about the importance of that. First of all, tell us why you do that, but also share the importance of, especially when you get some of those first gen students experiencing international life and other systems in other areas of the world for the very first time. Oh, man, you got my favorite topic now. Okay? This is gonna be great. You’re gonna love it. Yeah, so, you know, a za first gen low income student. I never troubled study abroad. It just looked. I saw the sticker price of, like what? I gotta work. Like, how do you How do you go abroad when you have a job and you have, you know, rent to pay? How do you do that? So I just never really give it much attention. And so I went to undergrad, and I always graduate. My wife went to Normandy. There’s normally scholar at UT, Uh, before when I was I think I graduated that time and she had already kind of Normandy and had this amazing experience, and I kind of felt like, man, I missed out. So I always had this regret. I mean, my UK experience was pretty full. I pretty much did everything I wanted to do. But the one thing which I had done a study abroad and a few years ago, when I was directing the master’s program in higher ed. Um, two of my students said we’re interested in studying abroad. I’m like your grad students. I think you could do that. They’re like we found when we could go to and we’re gonna go to this place in London. We’re gonna go to London over the summer and hang out. So they went and I had two other students who that year went when went to Finland. One went thio South America, and and I have to students in London. So I’m like, I got, like, four of my students who are studying abroad as graduate students. Okay, this is new to me. They came back and of course, least two of them were already very well seasoned and studying abroad. They’ve done it before in undergrad. They were addicted to it. It was like the thing they did. Um, another two came back and said, Dr Reddick, you know, it was Sunny and and Donna and they said, Look, we went toe, went to Oxford for a day, met this professor there. Peter Clouds. He’s amazing. He’s doing all this stuff for access. Sometimes you gotta lie, said Dr Klaus Nice to meet you. I’m ut Austin, and he was Hey, Rich, it’s great to meet you. You know, sometimes we should get together and talk about because you know, you’re working access issues, So, um, I, um And the reality is in the UK, um, social inequities are similar, but different eso there is racialized oppression. Of course, uh, there is racial gaps, but there’s also a socio economic and class gaps in a way that we’re not used to understanding. Right? Um, I was listening to radio four, which is like their NPR, and they had this discussion when they about people’s experiences with their accents. And most Americans think there’s one acts of the Hugh Grant accent, right? But there’s so many regional accents across the U. K. You can tell people are from based on their accents. And of course, most Americans can’t decipher what people are saying from these regional areas. It’s kind of East Texas accent, right? Uh, eso people were saying at the age of 12, I was told if I want to be successful in life, I’d have to drop my Mancunian accent or my Liverpool accent. Bond. You’re just like what? But you’re white you’re a white male. Why is this a problem? And it was painful. They were saying these experiences like, you know, I’ve actually lost contact with friends for my youth because they think I’m stuck up because I don’t speak that way anymore. Eso I was like, Wow, I’d like to look at that issue of inequity and racialized inequity, social inequity and the UK educational context and then compare it to the American context with my students Understand and know. And so we started this in 2019. We went over there, can tap 19, shout out to my home in 17 of them on again. I met these students three or four times. I was still learning names on the plane ride over to England like, Oh, my gosh, I know who this person is and brought in a month. I am shocked about how close we became as a group because we were navigating so many different things. So we were studying an academic concept on the trip. We had seven black women, right? We had first Gen students. We had Latino students. We had white students. We had students who came from privilege. We had this amazing mix of folks different majors. And we were all navigating, negotiating our own identity and trying to figure out Well, your experience has been like this, and people got to talk explicitly about that. I went to some of the best schools in Texas, went to private school, so I didn’t even know these. I know these things existed in the abstract, but you’re my peer at U T. And you went to a school. Had nothing I had. How did you get here? Yeah, it’s amazing, right? Just the respect and honor that people had that people had experiences. And secondly, for the folks who went from the experience that that we’re very privileged, the humility they brought to it. So the folks who had the public school experiences, like I did were like, you know, I thought everybody your experience was stuck up and snobby, and I’m realizing that you’re really deep thinker. And so, brother, I mean the final papers I have for my students, man, they still may be choked up because they were so reflective about and we talked about intersectional differences, too. So, you know, race and class being a primary one. But my students were concerned about mental health. They were concerned about lbgt que experiences, right? They were making comparisons constantly. We were in, you know, community college, which is like a basically a comprehensive middle toe high school. Talking to students talking to staff. There we went to 1\/6 form college, sixth form college, like a prep school for university. Uh, probably best story about that there was way came there that day and literally I said to the administrators, I said, Look, we’re interested in racial equity issues. Do you have students or staff we could talk to about that? And they called a young woman out of class and it was fami venue. Got called that class and said, There’s a bunch of Americans want to talk to you. Sam is a black woman. She comes to space. She’s 17 years old. She is running the schools equity systems. She’s having panels. She’s having people talk about the N word. She’s doing all sorts of 17 year old on we part of the space, and she came in and she’s like, Wait a minute, Look, there’s a whole lot of you out here and just a connection between the 17 year old black woman and these college age and my wife and my daughter, Black women just vibing, you know, just like I feel you. I feel you got home got this crazy long email from family. Just saying, Dr Reddick, you don’t understand how much this meant to me. It was just amazing to hear you all talked to me. And she says, And furthermore, you know my mom on. I’m like, How’s that? She says. My mom runs the Africa food. You know, the Nigerian place. You go to she when I said This professor from Texas, whose American she’s like, Oh, I know who he is. So we end up going to her restaurant and just kicking it way have a cipher. We basically I go there since come through. The Nigerian folks come through. We just have a conversation about blackness, mind blowing man. And it’s like you don’t plan for those things That’s not part of the agenda. It’s like that’s what happens. So the last day, brother, we go back, man, just to tears. Man, it was just like man, we were just like to this day I got a group me with my my can’t have 19 people. We talk constantly. You know, if something happened in the UK, we talked about it, so and of course, can’t have 20 shot to y’all. A lot of y’all gonna come with me on 21 cause we’re gonna make this happen this year. Praying is gonna happen this year. But, man, I mean what it does for you. As far as like I said, it’s a leveling, right, because everybody is a foreigner or new to this game, right? I don’t care how privileged you are. There’s something that experience is new to you. The other thing, of course, is that there’s not a language barrier per se. There is, but not in the traditional sense. Right? So you do find some access points. And what’s even more amazing, my students often would jump down the London London 60 miles from Cambridge. Go to Brixton. Brixton is black and black, black, black. You think that Jasper is amazing? Goto go to Brixton and see UK black West Indian blacks. You know blacks from Africa just having a vibe. I mean it. It’s so empowering, man. Brixton. And not just Idris Elba’s character in Hobbs and Shaw. Exactly brick side of us. That’s, That’s Brixton. That’s alright. People are like, Oh my God, first people sound funny these black British people and, you know, just like we consider ourselves 100% American, their 100% British, right? And that’s their legacy. Like my grandfather. I’m half Jamaican, my grandfather, you know, it was in the r A f in the Second World War. So all these things are part of the diaspora. And so when we think about trying to understand the diaspora, we often have a U. S centric perspective. We don’t think about Afro Brazilians with the largest number of Africans in the New World are in Brazil, not United States, right, the West Indies, Central America, all different places where blackness exists. So for my students were like, Yo, I met some German black people and it was just like off the chain, like I didn’t understand, like we had some common things and some things I’m like, What is that? You know, So just the experience was amazing for all of us, for the black student in particular. But for all the students, they were just like the such a rich cultural experience. Even in a place that apparently in Cambridge, is very white, it’s about 90% white, so you might argue that, well, it’s not very diverse. But what you get to learn is like, What is it like to live in the diaspora? Other places? One of the common experiences we have the day I left Storm Ze, who was a very popular UK rapper, is style called Grind. And this brother is just, like, amazing because he’s taking his wealth from music and decided to go all in education. He asked the question. Why is Cambridge University on? Lee admitted. You know, 12 black students in their entire undergraduate body clouds and created scholarships for these students. So there were three black women who went to Cambridge on a storm see scholarship, writing a book about their experiences. So things like that we’re just like part of the experience that I was just like, This is so dope. We had these guest speakers coming in telling us about their experiences, what they knew and sometimes they were just like I don’t know, I haven’t thought about those issues. My students were like, well, You probably should, You know, racial issues. And, of course, is Americans. Will Americans you think about race all the time? I’m like, Well, what we probably have this is a consciousness and awareness of these issues in the UK. I think they tend to subvert those issues. They tend to talk about things like class, which there’s easy to talk about, but less about race. We had some very vivid experiences about that Inter personally with folks we traveled with where they just didn’t. They’ve It’s not about race. It is about race. Very much so. So, yeah, it was amazing experience, brother. And I can’t wait if you’re interested. It’s called exploring UK education. I’m going this summer. Uh, deadline is the 15th. So you better hurry up. You’re trying to go this summer, but I’m also going next summer as well. So I’m doing with Dr Terrence Green, my homie over an LP, two black men leading a study abroad experience in the UK, which is gonna be dope. So I just cannot wait. Brother E. Well, I appreciate that we’re Dr Reddick. We’re definitely gonna have to have you back, because we gotta expand upon that blackness conversation Because, yes, I know that That’s something that, um because I got to get Eric Tang in here to talk about what is Asian too. Because some way so we’re gonna we’re gonna be We’re gonna be breaking bread and having this conversation again sometime soon. So everybody be on the lookout for the return of Dr Reddick. Doc, you got any final words for the folks know shot to Dr Teng, Especially home right there too, but yeah, I think I just think this experience, we have the opportunity. We have University of Texas Thio engage with people like you, Dr Jones and Brother Malik in NBC and Brandy and all the people, Holly, all the people we know on campus who are doing this work. It’s so exciting. So my advice and my suggestion everybody is to make sure you make those connections right? That’s the one thing we cannot. We can improve on. That You have to be able to step out and say, Doctor Jones, I need to talk to you. Or you know, Krista, I need to talk to you. You know, I need I need toe Betty Jean. I need to have Ah, shut up with you. The people I’m talking about naming are so open and welcome and committed to student success, they’ll take the time to do it. And it might take a, you know, a meant to get their calendars. It was busy. It’s more challenging the pandemic clearly, but those are the things that you need to make. I always tell my students every semester you need to plan to make a new BFF on the faculty and staff, right? Yes. Recommendation letters, letters for scholarships. You know, hook ups make at least one or two people semesters. When you walk out of this place, there’s eight people, at least, if not mawr, that can say, Yo, I got this. This person is amazing. They’ve done incredible things. That’s part of the experience. And you don’t necessarily know that. Sometimes coming. You think it’s just about getting grades? That’s important, but the networking parts even more important. Dr. Reddick, thank you so much for being with us today. Looking forward to our next conversation. Absolutely. Brother Jones, Stay black. Stay lifted. I cannot wait to talk again. And everybody have a great first Jim College week. Yes, sir. way. Hope you enjoyed today’s episode to catch the next installment. Be sure to follow us on Spotify apple podcasts, Google podcasts and stitcher. This podcast was recorded and edited in collaboration with the L. A. I. T s Development Studios Audio Department. More information could be found at liberal arts that utexas dot e d u slash L a I t s The interest song was composed by Ian Herrera and you confined his work at ian herrera dot com. The Outro song was composed by Noah Keller and you can find more of his work at noah d Keller dot com. 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