Saturday, April 7, 2012

#SAchat as Scholarship

Joe Ginese recently posted about some of the more troubling aspects of the conference attendance experience. Mainly, much of his concern revolved around questioning just how much professionals attending national conferences (mainly NASPA and ACPA) gain professional development from these experiences. The conference experience is worthwhile, he argued, but how much of it revolves around finding ideas to bring back to our campuses rather than fostering an environment which encourages new ideas to transform our work and our profession?

In that sense, he concluded that attending national conferences does very little in providing these opportunities, and perhaps they should be rethink the way we do them.

I posted a comment that, for the most part, agreed with his points, though I felt an underlying issue was unintentionally omitted which could have even further strengthened his argument. In attending a conference on one's employer's buck, a person has to decide how to balance what she or he plans to get out of the conference personally for professional development with making sure that investment was well spent and ideas for improving the institution are brought back. But I gave this a little further thought, and I have another critique of Joe's post regarding the overall purpose of conferences. I'll get back to this in a moment.

In pondering the point of attending (even organizing) national conferences, I got to thinking about a point made by a former internship supervisor regarding the purpose of conferences for student affairs. She told me that presenting at conferences was a major way student affairs professionals engage in scholarship, a scholarship you might name, the scholarship of practice.

Let's look at the entire conference presentation process considering it as a form of scholarship. The first thing that happens is the presentation proposal. A student affairs professional, usually in collaboration with other peers, pulls together a proposal on a particular topic either within one's functional area, professional interests, or topic expertise. This proposal involves background research, an overview of the presentation content, and how the presentation will be facilitated. Once the proposal is complete, the author(s) submit it for review.

The proposal undergoes a peer review process where other student affairs professionals critique the proposed idea and determine if it merits space in the conference's overall program. The reviewers provide some feedback to the presenters related to whether it was selected for the program and how, if at all, it could be improved before the conference. At that point the presenters build their proposal into a full conference session and book their travel for the conference.

At the conference, the session gets a specific time slot in a particular room, and the presenters bring their materials, eager to engage the proposed topic with a (hopefully) full room of professionals also interested in said topic. Whether this happens in roundtable format, formal Powerpoint presentation, or, one of my favorites, as an "unsession," student affairs professionals with an interest in that particular topic gather to hear how a particular campus is addressing an issue or how people are finding innovative ways for professional development and engage with each other around that topic. The engagement may only be a Q&A session at the end of a formal presentation or throughout the session, depending on its format, but typically by the end of the session conversations about the topic have sprung up and, even more ideally, new connections have been made between participants. The session ends, but the conversation does not.

And this is the main vehicle by which student affairs professionals engage in scholarship. While it may not look like formal scholarship in publications, conference papers, or symposia, conference presentations are still a dialogic process, which is key to the scholarship process. Scholarship is a dialogue. The reason papers and articles include so much background information and previous citations is that each is a scholar's contribution to an on-going dialogue in the field. Scholars make sure to provide an overview of the dialogue as it has occurred within their fields to situate what they propose as a contribution. It has less to do with self-importance (though it probably does to a certain extent) and more to make sure to give credit where credit is due to situate one's work within the larger conversation.

In that sense conference presentations are contributions to an on-going dialogue within the field of student affairs. Presenting the program you run at your campus is not to just highlight how well you address a particular campus issue, but to engage your peers in a dialogue about that issue through how you address it in your work. Yes, we want to learn from each other new ways of doing our work which will enhance the service we provide, but much of the conference presentation is the continuation of an on-going dialogue on particular topics of importance to the contemporary student affairs field. Which is also why conference presentations need to be peer-reviewed (no matter how rigorous--or not--that process is).

In pondering this, I realized this is another critique I had about Joe's points. While it does make sense to provide space to talk about what's of immediate concern in the field, it's also important to recognize the role of the national (and regional) conference as a crucial vehicle for driving forward scholarship in the student affairs field (and again, not publications in a journal, but building the profession's conversation). This process does take time (unfortunately) but is also crucial in the advancement of student affairs.

After giving this much consideration, I realized a very important way in which this dialogic process happens on an on-going basis, especially between conferences. The #SAchat is an on-going conversation about student affairs. While it does not involve a great deal of situating one's tweets among previous tweets since the start of Twitter (you only get 140 characters!), the chat does flow as an on-going dialogue and is always full of some of the most relevant, important, crucial issues in student affairs today. And it still does involve a great deal of bringing in other voices to contribute content to the ongoing conversation--mainly through links to news articles, blog posts, and academic writing.

So forget the debate whether #SAchat is a network or a community--it's scholarship, and has thus been crucial to the advancement of the student affairs profession, possibly as much as the conferences themselves.

(Though, really, I think #SAchat is all of those--a network, a community, ongoing scholarship, and a whole lot more!)

Bryce
Follow me on Twitter: @BryceEHughes

2 comments:

  1. I had an immediate and visceral reaction to this post and I'm not entirely sure why. It may be a rejection of the idea itself and the notion that perfectly good and useful activities need to be reframed and dressed up as scholarship. Or it may be an intense sense of disappointment and dread that you may be right and that the state of "scholarship" in this profession is so poor that Twitter messages and conference presentation constitute the lion's share of "scholarship" for many people.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I understand the concern about reframing everything in student affairs as "scholarship" to, I guess, legitimize the work. My purpose was not to find some way to force conference sessions, Tweets, and the like into some scholarship girdle as a way to give them more importance. You are right, these activities do not need to be reframed.

      I think what I'm suggesting was best summed up in two Tweets by @stephaniemz: http://bit.ly/HtlZUz and http://bit.ly/HtmaPQ. It's not so much what student affairs professionals do that needs to be reframed as it is what constitutes scholarship needs to be revisited. Perhaps these activities do fit within the activity of scholarship, but because how narrowly folks in higher education view scholarship, we simply haven't placed them there.

      I do have to disagree that considering conference presentations and Twitter messages as scholarship in student affairs means the state of scholarship in the field is poor. Yes, there is a great deal of content within both of those media which lacks rigor (to put it nicely), but that isn't solely a problem in student affairs. There will definitely be a lot of junk obscuring what's valuable (think Antiques Roadshow), but that doesn't lessen its value. Anyways, to me it's not reframing student affairs to fit scholarship, but reconsidering scholarship as our media for sharing ideas and knowledge evolves.

      Thanks for commenting!

      Delete