Recently, I met with a struggling student who had fallen behind after a series of personal setbacks. Our conversation was practical – we reviewed deadlines, clarified expectations, and outlined next steps. At the end of our meeting, he paused and said, “Your empathy is palpable. In this space, that is rare – and I am grateful.”
I was touched. And without premeditation, I replied, “I did not become an educator to be a gatekeeper; I became an educator to be a waymaker.”
The statement lingered with me long after the meeting ended.
Higher education has long been shaped by a gatekeeping narrative. Faculty are positioned as protectors of standards, arbiters of readiness, and guardians of disciplinary rigor. In some contexts, this role is framed as necessary to maintain academic quality. Yet too often gatekeeping drifts into something else: ambiguity mistaken for rigor, distance mistaken for professionalism, and difficulty mistaken for depth.
But what if rigor and empathy are not opposites? What if our role is not to guard the threshold, but to design the path forward?
The Limits of the Gatekeeping Paradigm
Research on student persistence suggests that belonging matters as much as preparation. Vincent Tinto argues that students persist when they feel academically and socially integrated into their institutions. When students perceive themselves as outsiders to academic culture, withdrawal becomes more likely.
Similarly, research by Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen on belonging uncertainty shows that students from marginalized or nontraditional backgrounds may interpret ordinary academic struggle as evidence that they do not belong. Small signals from instructors – tone, feedback, and clarity of expectations – can either exacerbate or reduce that uncertainty.
Gatekeeping, when enacted rigidly, can unintentionally amplify belonging uncertainty. Waymaking, by contrast, clarifies the path without lowering the bar.
Waymaking Is Not Leniency
To be a waymaker does not mean reducing standards or inflating grades. Waymaking provides transparency, scaffolds complexity, and preserves dignity while maintaining intellectual challenge. Essentially, waymaking creates avenues toward student success.
Research on transparent assignment design, led by Mary-Ann Winkelmes, demonstrates that when faculty clearly articulate the purpose, task, and criteria of assignments, student performance improves – particularly for first-generation and historically underserved students. Transparency does not dilute rigor; it enhances access to it. Likewise, John Hattie’s synthesis of research on feedback underscores that timely, specific, growth-oriented feedback has one of the strongest impacts on student achievement. Students improve not when we guard standards, but when we illuminate how to meet them.
Rigor is about cognitive demand, not obscurity. Waymaking asks:
- Have I clearly articulated what high-quality work looks like?
- Have I modeled the thinking process required?
- Have I provided opportunities for practice before high-stakes evaluation?
- Have I distinguished between cognitive rigor and facilitative rigidity?
- Have I created multiple and diverse pathways for achievement?
Practical Shifts Toward Waymaking
Shifting from gatekeeper to waymaker requires neither a full paradigm shift nor a complete course redesign. It begins with small but intentional changes.
1. Making the invisible visible.
Narrate your thinking. Provide exemplars. Offer transparency in assessment by making rubrics and guides available. Externalize the tacit knowledge that experts carry implicitly. This scaffolding reduces academic mystique and gives students a clear understanding of expectations.
2. Normalize “not yet.”
Language shapes motivation. Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset reminds us that framing ability as developable increases persistence. When feedback signals progress rather than deficiency, students are more likely to revise and reengage.
3. Use structured flexibility.
Clear policies paired with humane discretion communicate both standards and care. Exercising judgment does not weaken expectations; it reinforces professional discernment.
4. Build early mastery experiences.
According to Albert Bandura, self-efficacy develops through skill acquisition that leads to performance accomplishments. Low-stakes assessments early in a course allow students to calibrate their understanding before major evaluations, strengthening both competence and confidence.
These practices align with research on belonging, motivation, and self-efficacy. Students are more likely to engage deeply when they perceive both challenge and support.
Reframing Rigor
There is a persistent myth in higher education that compassion weakens standards. In practice, the opposite is often true. When expectations are unclear, students expend cognitive energy decoding assignments rather than engaging content. When feedback feels punitive, students protect their ego instead of revising their work. When policies are rigid without explanation, students may interpret struggle as exclusion rather than growth.
Waymaking reduces unnecessary friction so that intellectual effort can be directed where it belongs: analysis, synthesis, and application. Rigor, properly understood, involves sustained cognitive challenge supported by clear structure. This encourages depth of thinking while eliminating unnecessary obstacles.
A Professional Responsibility
Empathy in education is sometimes framed as a personality trait. I would argue it is a professional responsibility. Empathy does not require agreement with every request or the removal of every consequence. It requires perspective-taking. It asks us to consider what students can reasonably know, given their prior experiences, and how our design choices either widen or narrow access to success. When students say that empathy feels rare, that should give us pause.
Instructors operate under increasing pressure – large enrollments, institutional constraints, and workload strain. Gatekeeping can feel efficient. After all, it is faster to enforce a rule than to explain it, and easier to default to policy than to exercise judgment. But efficiency is not the same as effectiveness. If our aim is authentic learning, academic persistence, and intellectual development, then our task is not merely to sort students into categories of capable and incapable. Our task is to cultivate capability. That is the work of a waymaker.
At the end of that meeting, the student left with a plan – not a pass. He still had deadlines to meet, standards to satisfy, and work to complete. But he also left with clarity, dignity, and the belief that the path forward was visible. We cannot eliminate all barriers our students face. But within our courses, we can decide whether we stand at the threshold or walk alongside our students on the path. We can guard the gate – or we can make a way.
Crystal Donlan, MEd, DEd, is the Associate Director of Digital Pedagogy & Scholarship at Bucknell University, a long-standing adjunct professor at Luzerne County Community College, and a doctoral candidate in Learning and Performance Systems at Penn State University. A learning scientist and lifelong educator, her work focuses on distance learning, modern literacies, and human-centered practices toward belonging, persistence, and meaning.
References
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. Freeman.
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.
Tinto, V. (2012). Completing college: Rethinking institutional action. University of Chicago Press.
Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2011). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes. Science, 331(6023), 1447–1451.
Winkelmes, M.-A., Bernacki, M., Butler, J., Zochowski, M., Golanics, J., & Harriss Weavil, K. (2016). A teaching intervention that increases underserved college students’ success. Peer Review, 18(1/2).