making connections in research

I started thinking about my dislike of “text-to-self” reading exercises in elementary school. I always felt like my kids naturally experienced text-to-self without needing more concentrated effort. I wished that the teacher spent more time with text-to-world. Children don’t really need a push to think about themselves.

Then I started thinking about all the recent articles about Gen Z in college in the post-pandemic world.

The authors of those articles are telling us we need to help the Gen Z students (and parents) make connections. The school who makes the connection gets the enrollment.

It seems that we are living in a text-to-self world. If the school cannot convince students that they are central to the experience, those students won’t enroll. How do you convince students that often they will not be in the center. Often, in school and in life, other people are the protagonists. If we gave students more of a grounding in text-to-world when they were young, maybe we would have young adults who understood that.