James Wolfe appreciates the location of his office in the Campus Center’s Student Activities suite. Everyone coming and going has to literally pass by his door, and the door is always open. As a consequence, the Director of Student Activities often provides counsel on much more than planning events or administering Castleton’s many clubs. Whether it be a relationship problem or a grade on a test that brings a student to him for advice, James adopts the same approach: asking questions.
“Well, how did you study for the test?”
“What do you want to do about it?”
“What would be the best way to go next?”
Rather than giving students his opinion, he helps them to determine for themselves the answers about what’s gone wrong or is going right. He sees it as a way to help the students he advises to build their own sense of agency and their ability to cope with whatever challenges or opportunities school throws at them.
Some people would call the work that James directs “extra-curricular activities”, but James has embraced Castleton’s concept of “co-curricular learning”. As he describes it, “everything the students are doing outside the classroom is a mirror and enhances what they do in the classroom.” There’s something of that in his own story of finding his way from being a Castleton student to working on the student life staff.
Like many, maybe most students, James recalls that his idea of what college would be was not quite in line with what he discovered when he got here. The Texas native, via Connecticut, found that it wasn’t always the heady cerebral world of philosophizing that he had seen in pop culture. It was actually surprising to him when he found himself taking a deep dive into music, a lifelong interest but not something he had ever pursued seriously. One evening he was attending the “Open Mic Night”, an occasional program at Fireside Cafe. PT instructor/local musician Robert Wuagneux “encouraged” him to take the stage. It wasn’t something James was prepared to do, or even something he wanted to do. But Wuagneux, being Wuagneux, was not going to take “no” for an answer. And so off James went to his room to bring back his guitar. He performed Ray Wiley Hubbard’s “Snake Farm“. As Hubbard says, “It aint quite ‘Kumbaya’,” but by the end of the song James had sold the sing-along to the crowd at Fireside. Afterward, it wasn’t uncommon for students that term to sing the tune on their way to class. As James says, in that strange moment, “the world opened up.”
He credits his mentors Matt Patry and Victoria Angis for helping him to develop his skills working with students. But it is a story of former Grad Assistant Mariah O’Hara that crystalizes his philosophy. He recalls a quiet moment during his own days as a student here when she had stayed behind to help clean up after some event. It was her example that stuck with him and reminded him of something he had heard at a conference for student activities professionals: “When you go out into the world, never work for someone who hasn’t stayed after to put the chairs away.”
That observation stuck with him. He consciously carried some of that idea to his work as a student teacher. He saw the teachers who took time and “stayed behind” to “put the chairs away”, and those who didn’t. And when he had a chance to teach, he made a point to participate in all that is involved in leading a class and taking care of students. It went well beyond just delivering his own practice lesson and then racing back to campus. He doesn’t see those kinds of things as extra work, above and beyond, and it’s one reason students seem to come to him in times of challenge.
Looking back, having himself become an SGA president, Graduate Assistant, and then staff member at Castleton, he recognizes how O’Hara’s example contributed to his own outlook and to how he interacts with the students outside his office in the student Activities suite. “I don’t want to work with ‘current students’,” he says. “I want to work with ‘future colleagues’.”
