Speaker Urges Student Engagement

Northfield Mount Hermon recently welcomed to campus Dr. William Marsiglio to talk about his work on identity and belonging and to offer insights on ways young people can engage effectively in service and community building.

His daylong visit began with an all-school presentation, “Empowering Young People: Crafting a Social Tapestry of We-ness, Place, and Time,” in Memorial Chapel. A professor in the University of Florida’s Department of Sociology and Criminology and Law, Marsiglio focuses his work, in part, on the relationship between group belonging and personal identity. He’s also studied and written widely about how men construct their self identities and the social psychology of men's experiences with sex, reproduction, and fathering.

“We are all, by nature, interested in group belonging,” Marsiglio noted in his all-school talk. “We all want to have an identity that connects us to others.” But to connect to others in meaningful ways, he continued, a person needs to first develop a strong, healthy sense of self. In his work, Marsiglio uses the acronym MEAL to express the life skills that individuals need to successfully develop that sense of larger connection, or “we-ness”: mindfulness, empathy, altruism, and leadership.

He also discussed the importance of place in one’s understanding of their life experience. “We can develop a predisposition or tendency to accentuate place qualities as part of our everyday life experience and our wide-awake consciousness,” Marsiglio said. That sort of place consciousness allows the development of “ethical placemaking,” what he described as the “process of creating quality places that people want to live, work and play and spend time in.”

Marsiglio acknowledged the many challenges that students have faced in their lives, from the COVID-19 pandemic to a highly polarized political climate. He urged them to find opportunities to engage in their communities about issues that matter to them, for themselves and for generations to come. “Many of you are already leaders, and if you're not leaders, you can be leaders. Because leaders aren't born; they're grown, and you grow into roles,” he said. “The opportunities are available for you to become leaders if you choose to do so.”

After the all-school meeting, Marsiglio met with students in informal groups and classroom settings, including a 10th-grade Diversity and Social Justice seminar taught by Dean of Students Raheem Jackson ’13. Jackson had taken a class with Marsiglio as an undergraduate and described the experience as transformative, prompting him to invite the professor to come to NMH to speak with students.

In the class, Marsiglio expanded on his call for students to engage with their communities and causes they believe in. For inspiration, he offered material from his forthcoming book, “Empowering Young People: Nurturing the Seeds of Hope and Activism,” for which he interviewed young activists about their work, their motivations, and the challenges they’ve faced. Common themes that came up in those interviews included finding a passion, overcoming self-doubt, the importance of taking risks, and the need to disrupt the norm to make real change. 

In a question-and-answer session after his presentation, students shared some of their own concerns about finding ways to effectively engage with their communities, from overcoming a fear of rejection to the distinction between helping others for purely altruistic reasons and doing it for personal fulfillment. 

Helping others, Marsiglio responded, can have personal benefits, too, and that’s OK. “That's part of being empathetic,” he said. “Being able to figure out not just how you understand yourself, but how you can find a way to nurture others and help others grow. In helping others grow, you grow as well. There's nothing wrong with feeling good about helping other people or feeling good about your activities. And the more joy you get out of doing something for others, the more likely it is you're going to be passionate about that, and the more likely you're going to want to continue it.”

Photos by Lindsey Topham