Just like you, we staff and faculty are anticipating and preparing for the arrival of fall and the learning journey on which we will embark together this year.
Here at The Seattle School, as we tend to the learning and formation that our students and alumni experience, we talk about the Student and Alumni Lifecycle. While there are some shared rhythms and formational pathways that all students follow through our degree programs, every practitioner who trains at The Seattle School has their own unique stories and journey through our programs. Over time, we have collected data from students and alumni to help us understand the seasons of formation that students experience.
The Office of Students & Alumni (OSA) provides Lifecycle programming to support students throughout each season of their lifecycle as students at The Seattle School. These opportunities are designed to help you navigate your own pathway through your time in this community of learning practitioners.
We understand each student journey as happening in 3 phases: beginning, middle, and (s)ending. While your student journey will look different depending on your degree and pace, each student begins by applying and matriculating to The Seattle School and going through Orientation as a first year student.
First Year Student Lifecycle
The first year in graduate school can be quite a challenge. Whether you’ve just finished an undergraduate degree or are returning to school after quite some time, becoming a student at The Seattle School means learning a new language, developing new skills, and examining your own beliefs and stories for the purpose of deep formation. This work takes courage, community, and practice.
What’s more, those of you joining us in our low-residency cohorts are entering this journey from different locations and with different needs for community and formation. Throughout the first year, your Lifecycle Gatherings will focus on helping you enter community and engage in dialogue together across differences of geography, social location, belief, and experiences.
By choosing again and again to opt-in to your own journey of formation and to listen with curiosity to one another’s stories, you have the opportunity to co-create a culture and posture of learning that will empower you for vocations filled with transforming relationships with individuals and systems. Lifecycle Gatherings will be a place where we collectively press pause, breathe, and re-engage that commitment together.
First Year Student Lifecycle Programming begins before the start of weekly classes with Frameworks & Intersections, a self-paced online course where you’ll be introduced to the basics of our learning platforms, and begin your orientation into the culture and resources that will support your Seattle School journey. Frameworks & Intersections continues as a series of synchronous online roundtable gatherings for all first year students for 9 weeks across the fall term.
These roundtables orient you to academic, relational, and spiritual resources that are essential to your work as a student practitioner. We’ll connect you with student leaders, faculty, alumni, and staff for engaging conversation around how we co-create a supportive, challenging, and purposeful learning community that supports the needs of students from all backgrounds in their own particular lifecycle as practitioners in formation together at The Seattle School.
We look forward to beginning this journey with you in just a few weeks!
Stay tuned to your student email inbox for information about Frameworks & Intersections and other Lifecycle Programming that will be launching towards the end of August.
For more information, you can contact Daniel Tidwell-Davis, Supervisor of Accessibility & Vocational Programs at dtidwell@theseattleschool.edu.