Friday, April 13, 2012

Safe Spaces for DREAMers

A criticism of Safe Space (or Safe Zone) programs that has always gotten on my nerves is the question, "But why just the LGBTQ community? Don't we want our campus to be safe for all people?" Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with the sentiment of the person asking me the question, though it does make me question how the speaker feels about programs explicitly focusing on the needs of LGBTQ students (or any other social identity group, for that matter). Yet it has also given me pause as to why I feel so strongly that Safe Space programs remain structured as they are and not be watered down.

The main purpose Safe Space and similar programs serve on a college campus is identifying faculty and staff--institutional representatives--to whom a student can disclose her, his, or zir sexual orientation and/or gender identity without concern about potential negative repercussions. While college campuses today seem to be pretty safe places for students to come out, they weren't always this way--and for some students, depending where they are in terms of understanding this identity, they still are not. This is a need that is particularly salient for the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning) community. Identity disclosure carries much risk, and a Safe Space type program provides a way to alleviate as much of this risk as possible.

Tuesday's #MSAchat discussed the topic of supporting undocumented students on campus, which, for me, recalled my previous professional position working in a multicultural affairs office at a community college. I worked at a college in Washington State, a state where undocumented students are not only allowed to attend public institutions of higher education, but can also do so at the same rate as their in-state resident peers. The state has determined these students should be considered state residents as well. About a dozen states around the nation have similar laws, including three which also provide access to state financial aid (CA, TX, and NM).

I was also our campus liaison with the College Success Foundation, one of the largest scholarship providers for low-income students in Washington State, who intentionally decided not to make US citizenship a requirement to access their scholarships. In fact, many scholarship providers in states which consider undocumented students to be state residents use "state residency" as a requirement rather than "US citizenship." As a result, our office supported quite a few undocumented students, and I in turn learned much about what life without "papers" can be like.

After attending a forum on the DREAM Act (legislation pending in Congress to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented youth who had no choice in immigrating to the US but face few choices upon finishing school) at the University of Washington, one of the groups at the forum gave us placards to place on office doors and windows which were meant to indicate that the person in this office supports DREAMers (undocumented students). It was in that moment, in seeing the parallel between this action and the placards provided graduates of Safe Space training programs, I then realized that I was working with another population for whom identity disclosure carried much risk--and immediately placed the placard in my office.

After that, I started to think about how we make it known to DREAMers that we are safe people on whom they can rely as they pursue their educational goals. I began wondering what it might take to start a Safe Space like program for undocumented students, and was able to find one example after a brief Google Search (California State University, Long Beach). I mentioned this in the #MSAchat, and am hoping to keep this conversation going through this blog post.

I challenge student affairs professionals to learn more about the issues facing undocumented students in higher education. (Check out the College Board's advocacy website on the DREAM Act for more info, especially a great publication by Dr. Roberto Gonzales on the experiences of undocumented students.) Ask yourself a few questions:

  • Do you know who undocumented students are at your institution? If not, why don't you? (I'm not suggesting we identify and label them--I'm suggesting there are reasons why professionals on our campus will be aware or not aware of their mere presence on campus.)
  • If so, do you know what support services are available to them, specifically focused on their need for discretion?
  • Are undocumented students allowed to attend college in your state?
  • What are your state laws regarding access to public higher education for DREAMers?

On this topic, I think I'll write a follow-up post regarding my choice to attend--and experience attending--NASPA in Phoenix. Many of you are aware that NASPA's decision to continue to hold the 2012 Annual Conference following passage of Arizona's Senate Bill 1070 faced immense controversy in the field, including a decision by many professionals to not attend the conference as a result. I wonder how other professionals have been processing that experience and how it informs the way our professional associations conduct business in the future.

Let's keep this conversation going--how will we move forward with a campaign for safe spaces on campus for DREAMers? How are we, as higher education professionals, advocating for passage of the federal DREAM Act?

Bryce
Follow me on Twitter: @BryceEHughes

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

Friday, April 6, 2012

Slacktivists Can Change the World

I was thrilled to finally participate in #MSAchat for my first time this past Tuesday. #MSAchat is a specific hour on Twitter where people involved in Multicultural Student Affairs gather on Twitter to discuss a topic currently being faced by this particular functional area within Student Affairs. This past Tuesday we discussed campus reactions to the tragedy of Trayvon Martin which had made the news recently, and following this chat a conversation regarding "slacktivism" has continued, which prompted this post.

I remember as a college student being involved in many causes aimed at raising my peers' awareness to important issues in the world around us. I was an active member of our campus gay-straight alliance (HERO--Helping Educate Regarding Orientation), our Women's Studies Club, and our Young Democrats, as well as having honorary memberships in a number of other clubs, and frequently attended rallies, vigils, and other awareness-building events to educate my peers on what was happening outside the bubble of the campus community.

The term "slacktivism" has emerged as a way to describe the type of activism that has taken predominance in the era of social media. This neologism combines the words "slacker" and "activist" to describe the phenomena of "retweeting" or "liking" status updates and internet posts about important issues in our contemporary world. The term has taken significant precedence recently due to the flurry of activity around #Kony2012 and #TrayvonMartin on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking websites, demonstrating the first time how far social media's reach can go when it comes to "spreading the word" about something catching fire in people's minds. Sarah Kendzior provides a great analysis of just how subjective and problematic slacktivism can be when it comes to raising awareness to important issues.

The main issue I see with slacktivism is how unprepared we are to discuss these issues at a systemic level, in a manner which has the potential to lead to deep, sustainable change in social structures which would produce meaningful change. On the one hand, you have #TrayvonMartin. This is certainly not the first time a Black man has unjustly faced a tragic end as a consequence of a system which considers Black men suspect outside very specific contexts. And this is certainly a tragedy that would usually pass under the media's radar were it not for the tireless efforts of Trayvon's parents and antiracist activists leveraging the power of social media as a tool to raise awareness to this injustice.

On the other, you have #Kony2012. You have a cause which has not escaped critique ("Invisible Children"), critique which has been public long before this particular Twitter hashtag was created, but critique that was fairly unknown until the hashtag caught fire earlier this year. Millions of social media users viewed and reposted (retweeted) this video uncritically before realizing just how complex the situation and how problematic the video's message really were, highlighting some of the dangers to which slackstivism could easily give way.

Yet these examples do not mark slacktivism's emergence in American society. I brought up my earlier example of being involved in awareness-raising efforts on campus because these effort were very much like slacktivism--they were confined to our college campus bubble and they involved little effort on students' part in being present at a particular place and time to demonstrate our passion for a cause. You see, to me, the key to slacktivism is how visible the demonstration is, yet how little it contributes to deeper, structural changes in society.

Take, for example, Gap's (RED) campaign (really, any campaign which involves making purchases for a cause). You purchase merchandise branded with (red) and part of the proceeds go toward fighting HIV and AIDS in the world, generally Africa. In other words, you purchase an item which shows your passion for a cause, yet you never question the decision in terms of, "Would it have been more effective to donate the $10 I put towards this t-shirt to a local AIDS charity in the fight against AIDS?" Typically these type of national AIDS campaigns were directed towards fighting AIDS in Africa rather than AIDS domestically (because the recipient might be gay!) and very little of the purchase actually goes toward the charity (these companies gotta make a profit). The consumerism these decisions uphold might actually be maintaining structures which allow AIDS in both the US and Africa to persist because a) they uphold the capitalism which prevents health care reform which would benefit domestic AIDS patients, b) they ensure insufficient resources for AIDS patients both domestically and abroad (too much is eaten up by company profits), and c) they impede the actor (purchaser) from considering other ways in which they could more effectively help the cause. In other words, more resources are utilized in maintaining the IMAGE of support of the cause rather than actually SUPPORTING the cause itself.

The major issue is how unprepared we are to critically examine causes to ensure that our efforts make a real difference toward causing change in the world. To me, the role of MSA professionals is to foster the critical and ethical examination of one's actions in the world as they inhibit or facilitate deep, sustainable change in the world around us. Social media itself is not an evil, and in fact hold great power to deeply change the world around us. It is our responsibility to develop the critical eye it takes to harness this power most effectively, and then empower our peers and our students to do the same.

How do you think social media will change the world?

Bryce
Follow me on Twitter: @BryceEHughes