Furman Professor Argues that Students Need Pathways
"They think they're a baked cake, but they're just cake mix right now," says Dr. Margaret Oakes
Welcome to Perspectives on Pathways — a compilation of interviews intended to make public a wide array of viewpoints on Furman’s two-year advising initiative.
This week, we bring you the perspective of Dr. Margaret Oakes, Professor of English and Chair of Furman’s Humanities Interdisciplinary Minor.
Dr. Oakes mounts a defense of The Pathways Program, arguing that students need the soft skills its curriculum seeks to inculcate, even if they don’t believe that as freshmen. She also responds to common criticisms and lays out some of the benefits she sees students reap from the program.
Tell me about your experience with Pathways.
I taught year-one Pathways for the first time this year, which means this is the first time I’ve had a group of kids. I will continue with my group next year for year-two Pathways. I also do upper-level Pathways with the English Department’s majors. That’s fun, because I’m the only professor who gets to meet all of the English majors, due to the two tracks we have in the department. I also had a little bit to do also with the initial development of the Pathways curriculum.
What is your evaluation of the program as it stands right now?
I recently got a message from somebody who graduated in 2019. This student was not an English major, and not somebody I ever expected to hear from, but he called out of the blue. He said, “I just wanted to call you and your colleague [who was with me on the study away trip that we went on] to apologize because I was kind of an immature person, and you guys gave me so much grace. I’m older and more mature and wiser now, and I would say thanks, and I’m sorry.”
My point here is that our job does not have immediate returns, and you have to sit with that as an educator. So I get phone calls like that. I get emails from people who are about 15 years graduated saying, “Hey, I’d like to have that book list again,” or, “This came up and it reminded me of something we read in class.”
So there’s two sides to this. One is, “I learned things, but I didn’t know how they would be important until later.” And the other one is, “I have become a better and more mature individual.” Both of those are aspects of college education. No one who’s a freshman in college thinks they need Pathways because, like my sister would say, they think they’re a baked cake, but they’re just cake mix right now. All the stuff is there, but it’s not done. If you’re a freshman in college, and you’ve been the cock of the walk last year, you think you’re a grown up. But you’re not. We all hope we’re better people than we were when we were 18.
I think the program’s value is in starting conversations to try and build the soft skills employers like. How do you manage people? How do you manage conversations? When you become a boss or a parent, you understand how important it is to engage in active listening, but when you’re 18, you don’t have enough experience to know that you will need that. So I think most of it is just planting seeds that, frankly, students don’t care about right now, but that’s fine, because they will grow. We also talked about really practical things like time management. But a lot of it is developing soft skills that students may not appreciate now, but that they’ll need later.
Are there any examples of this curriculum having an impact on students in the short term?
We were in a class discussion about how your words can impact other people, and you may not be aware of it. And one student said, “Yeah, I don’t really worry too much about what other people think about what I say.” And I didn’t say anything, but she got real quiet after that. I thought, “Maybe she’s thinking that that’s not the best idea.” These conversations can provide some space to reflect on your own approach to things. Maybe she’ll think about that, and start to think before she opens her mouth in the future. We have to just lay the groundwork, walk away and see where they take it.
Is the soft-skills building mostly discussion based?
It depends on the topic—we do go through some really practical stuff. Like, how to look through course listings and tips and tricks on how to make a good schedule so that the classes aren’t all full when you go to register. We get granular about college management. Much of it falls under “the stuff I wish that somebody had told me.” I would say that’s about half of it. We walk through the way we think about majors and minors at Furman. We’re also trying to alleviate somebody getting midway through junior year and thinking that they can do something, when they’ve actually blocked themselves out of it by not having a prerequisite. It’s an attempt to forestall problems in the future.
The other half is maturity skills. Such a variety of people come in as freshmen. Some students think that you can’t teach them anything, and some are having imposter syndrome and are scared that they shouldn’t be here. Those students are a little bit easier to teach sometimes, but you have to deal with both ends of that spectrum of approach to becoming an adult. “I think I already am, or I feel like I never will be.” I always try to say, “Hey, you’re going to be a boss someday, and you will need to know how to manage people and present ideas in a way that is persuasive.” So some of it’s discussion, some of it is logistical skills.
How much is the quality of the Pathways experience dependent on the quality of the instructor?
No more or less than any other class. There is a high number of staff who teach the program. I would like more faculty to do it. If a faculty member is already dealing with freshmen by teaching an FYW (First Year Writing Seminar) or first-year students in other capacities, that professor may not want to deal with first-year students in an additional capacity. So I totally get that. I do think some of the staff people are just killer at this. They see the students in ways that we don’t, and they know a lot more about their lives than we do.
So I think that’s a good balance, but I will say this about the curriculum itself. If you’ve never taught a class before, the Pathways curriculum has a very full facilitator guide, detailed down to the minute. I was pleased to see they created that mechanism. The curriculum is quite full, and then there’s a slide deck to go with each unit, which we can vary according to what we think is best. Sometimes a peer mentor might say “I don’t think that slide does them any good.” Or we might add something. I tend to downplay the kumbaya stuff a bit. So there’s definitely tweaking you can do yourself, depending on your own style and what you think your group of kids needs.
Are modules that were previously part of FYWs, like library skills and academic honesty, now components of Pathways?
No. There was some discussion when we first developed the FYWs about whether it would serve as an introduction to college. And those of us who were teaching said “No, there’s already too much in here.” That’s now part of what Pathways has become. It functions as a warning to students that they need to step up their game. Some students these days are much more passive than those we’ve had in the past. They think everything is going to be the way it was in high school. And college isn’t like that.
We do talk a little bit about using the library, but not much. It’s mostly just, “This is where the building is, this is what you do, and these are the people who can help you.” We don’t go that in depth on plagiarism. It’s wrapped up in generally being an ethical person. The most important thing I want them to understand is that they need to figure out what their professors’ policies are. That’s like the number one rule.
How do you see students change over the course of Pathways?
First-year students are very different people in the first semester than in the second, because they’ve gotten those grades that maybe they didn’t like, and when they come back second semester they find the content much more interesting because they realize they need it. First semester they’re all just trying to impress each other. They giggle after class and I just think, “Oh, you’re so 18.” But that’s fine. That’s all they’re supposed to be. They’re doing what they need to do. Everybody’s awkward at 14, and everybody’s awkward at 18 in a different kind of way.
Come second semester, they’ve settled down and bonded a little bit. They eventually stop seeing their teachers as the adults in the peanuts cartoons because they’re interacting with us so much over the course of their four years. And I think that makes Furman graduates better able to deal with adults after college, because you’re used to adult interaction.
Do you think Pathways has significantly improved freshman advising?
Oh yeah. Just because we’re with them all the time. I’m with them every week. When there are kids who are slowly slipping, but won’t show it on the outside, it’s harder for that to go unnoticed. It’s a safety net in the best sense of the word, in that nobody suddenly disappears. We can be more on top of that sort of thing and catch problems earlier and hopefully more successfully.
The most consistent critique I hear from students is that the program takes too much time. Are you sympathetic to that?
You can’t come in and tell me you spent five hours binge watching some show last night and then complain about a class that takes an hour a week. Then maybe you spend about 30 minutes to 45 minutes doing a little write up. It literally does not take that much time. It takes a lot more time for me, because of all the prep and engagement it requires. Anything you don’t want to do takes up too much time in your life. I think that’s the answer there.
Another criticism is that the program is insufficiently rigorous to receive academic credit. How do you respond to that?
This is the same thing we struggle with for things like internship classes. When I used to teach those internship classes I made sure there was some academic content to them. I think I will say this: Because the students do spend, at minimum, two hours a week doing this, I don’t really have a problem with one hour of academic credit, which is all they get. They can fail it, by the way—if people don’t show up or turn in their stuff, they can fail. I think the credit provides some incentive, but it’s absolutely not worth any more than what it gets.
I think in a larger scope of things, I don’t have a problem with it because of the psychological implications of a zero-credit class: zero credit means zero work. And I’d be thinking that too as a student. In fact, I tried making upper-level Pathways [what juniors and seniors take] pass/fail, and that didn’t work. I’m going back to giving an actual grade in there, because people respond to that letter grade more than anything else.
I make my upper-level Pathways students do a research project on the industry they’re interested in going into, and the relevant issues in the field. They have to do a bunch of reading and give a presentation on it. They’re asking questions like, “What is AI doing in my industry right now?” And to me, that is academic content.
What are some of Pathways’s other benefits?
I think it can provide a low-pressure environment for them to test the waters in small ways.
I had an instance where a student turned in a final reflection that was clearly written by AI. I had to turn it over to the dean. That student has to go have a conversation about cheating on the Pathways final reflection and I’m like “Really? You want to gamble the farm on that? You’re going to have an AI-plagiarism violation on your record!” But at the same time, since they did that for this class, that’s an almost no-cost life lesson.
We also try to work through scenarios ahead of time that are likely in life. When we talk about active listening, we’ll go through things like, if you have a friend who’s in some sort of problem, how helpful is it for you to say “Well, at least it’s not [fill in the blank]?” And so we’ll go through things that people often say to each other that are really not helpful, and talk about things you actually can say to your friend or, one day, your employee or patient.
So that gets back to the soft skills, but we introduce these real-world scenarios in very unweighted ways, so that maybe the next time your roommate has a problem, you’ll think instead of saying the first thing that comes into your mind. That’s step one in maturity. Pathways is a way to think about those things—about real-life ethics and real-life plagiarism—and their consequences in an environment that has no serious repercussions, so they can work through it some.
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