May 7 TALKS and Student Success Summit Keynote with Dr. Nick Sanders

The Loving Rituals of Yeast and Time: Notes Toward a Thriving, Humanizing Higher Education

Nick Sanders, PhD

How do higher education professionals tread forward when, in these times, our work is hard, at best, and at worst, bleak? How do we practice caring, humanizing, and transforming within our daily practices to sustain our communities? In this joint keynote address to Michigan State University’s TALKS and Student Success Summit, I draw on the dual positioning of university educators and student success professionals to advocate for humanizing rituals– small, transformative everyday practices that create thriving connection and caring conditions for all. I bring together thinkers who challenge the academy to move past survival and toward abundant living. Alongside these insights, I share experiences in teaching centers, classrooms, and student success spaces to offer lessons in smallness drawn from breadmaking– a series of deliberate rituals that when repeated, create pathways for abundant living. The ritual of breadmaking (assembly, proofing, stretching, pausing, and making) illustrates how small humanizing actions can sustain alternative, more generous ways of being in higher education– one that maintains that when higher education professionals thrive, students thrive. I offer practical takeaways for higher education professionals to showcase the transformative impact of ritual. Through ritual, I argue, we can create the conditions for a university rooted in care, love, and sustaining one another