Amen to all that

Part of the Division J Post-Conference Download series

by William G. Tierney, Wilbur Kieffer Professor of Higher Education, University Professor & Associate Dean for Research & Faculty Affairs, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California

A long time ago I served as Vice President of Division J.  I was also a member-at-large for the Council about a decade ago, and now I have concluded my 3 year presidential term.  One of the aspects of academic life I always have enjoyed is the ability to do different things rather than having to do the same thing over and over again.  AERA has enabled me to do a lot of different activities and learn a great deal about ideas and people.

AERA has changed a lot, but probably not changed enough.  It’s a conference, in some respects, that everyone loves to hate: It’s too crowded.  It’s too exhausting.  It’s too qualitative.   It’s too quantitative.  There are not enough sessions on (fill in the blank); there are too many sessions on (fill in the blank).  It’s also too expensive.  I could go on.  And on.

But people keep coming to the conference.  Last year we had 15,000 attendees; this year we had 14,000.  AERA works best when people are able to disagree with one another out in the public in sessions or in meetings or even in hallways.  We’re a ‘big tent’ organization and big tents should be able to hold lots of people with competing ideas.  At its best, AERA fosters conversations across disciplines and methods to help improve educational theory, policy, and practice.

However exhausted I am when I leave AERA I always head home with a sense of having learned something and made a new friend or two.  This year was a touch different because I’ve sort of come to the end of my AERA involvement.  I’ll still show up for the annual conference and publish an article here or there, but it’s time for me to look to other horizons and other adventures.  AERA helped foster that sense of intellectual adventure over the years, and I hope it does so for all of you.  Get involved.  Change the organization and move it in a direction that is responsive to the multiple needs we face.


This post is part of our Post-Conference Download series. Over the weeks following the 2014 Annual Meeting, we will feature several reflections on the conference.

AERA Hangover

Part of the Division J Post-Conference Download series

by Andre M. Perry, Founding Dean of Urban Education, Davenport University

I always leave the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) annual meeting with a hangover of renewal; the meeting generates in me energy to write 1,000 articles before the next. However, my arrival to my students and communities and the substantive problems they face quickly sobers me up. My return from AERA always represents what is effectually a vast gulf between the research of higher education and the political goals that should motivate it.

Having identified as a researcher then later on as an administrator in both K-12 and higher educational settings, I occasionally hallucinate during my colleagues’ paper presentations at AERA. I see a professor in regalia in an ivory tower meticulously describing the damage the oncoming wrecking ball will cause. In other words, the study of higher education needs fewer words, less data and more political action.

During my academic time at the University of New Orleans, Louisiana spent $1.4 billion for higher education in fiscal year 2007-08. However, in 2013 Gov. Bobby Jindal’s budget devolved to contain $284.5 million for colleges and universities. Many researchers meticulously situated the 80 percent reduction in state funding to a conservative agenda bent on political patronage. Following suit, university administrators managed their own downfalls by finding creative ways to cut budgets. While professors accurately described these phenomena, particular industrialists, lobbyists and non-governmental organizations in Louisiana mobilized constituents, aligned agendas and leveraged resources to redirect funding away from students and their postsecondary institutions.

Meanwhile at my former institution of UNO, leaders and researchers of higher education ostensibly did not have the skills to protect ourselves from a rival agenda or to defend the principles we stood upon. Many of us graduated from programs that taught us policy analysis, but didn’t teach us advocacy. We separated our research from political actors who could have found mutually beneficial ends. The field of higher education research seeks approval from peer reviewers (who are trained with the same deficiencies), rather than the positive impact our research can have on a community. I was warned by a higher education faculty and administration to not get too involved for it would hurt my chances of getting tenure (which I received) and my activities would stain the work. This was particularly surprising given our post-Katrina context. I couldn’t sip that Kool-Aid. What happened to improving my community?

If higher education research is to be taken seriously, researchers must see themselves as members of a political community bolstered by unappealable principles. Michelle Rhee and Diane Ravitch are rigid, often inconsistent and highly unreasonable. However, they defend their respective political communities and influence real outcomes. I can hear taunts from atop the ivory tower that say higher education doesn’t need another divisive character. However, higher education researchers do need principles, leadership and a true political agenda that advance those principles. Like it or not, researchers are influenced by multiple agendas. I would rather have my research promote my field’s political needs.

Our research must become more politically relevant. As a higher education scholar that worked in a post-Katrina environment, I can say my academic work helped erect effective schools, hire teachers committed to New Orleanians, increase college access and assist undocumented immigrant find postsecondary options. Research can stem from and give birth to outcomes that can be measured based on human capital gains. Research can produce political outcomes that don’t compromise the principles it stands upon.

Researchers talk of change that our political behaviors don’t reflect. One could easily argue that most higher education research defends the status quo because of its political detachment. Aloofness in higher education research conveniently serves the aforementioned conservative agenda. The language used in many of the sessions I attended on college access represented the same exclusivity the professors incoherently decried. I used to think that professors understood that discourse on “discourse” stays within the confines of privilege. Illuminating student outcomes using yet another design falls short of providing underserved students an education that results in employment. Waxing poetic about the travails of marginalized populations and evils of neoliberalism won’t pay students’ tuitions. An academic agenda for higher education should be measured based on its ability to deliver real human capital gains.

I actually entered the field in 1998 when President Bill Clinton pledged “to make the thirteenth and fourteenth years of education – at least two years of college – just as universal in America by the twenty-first century as a high school education is today.” I’m still waiting to see a readily accessible research agenda that is part of a movement toward that end. However, in the K-12 reform community, there’s an expectation that research contributes towards academic growth, school erection, improved teacher training, or some other tangible outcome. You don’t have to agree with what new-aged reformers stand for, but seeing a political agenda reflects their influence on delivering it.

If anyone outside of the AERA is to deem higher education research worthy, we must demonstrate its relevance. Education research can be and should be measured by its ability to add human capital to people who need it most. Enough with the affectations of word-making and “discourse shifting.” Enough replication of findings long since found. Enough of the poorly veiled polemics that are positioned as research based in discovery. As the urban research group N.W.A. once said, “Don’t get high off your own supply.”

It’s time higher education researchers made our politics explicit and our research matter. 

Dr. Andre Perry (@andreperryedu), founding dean of urban education at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Mich., is the author of The Garden Path: The Miseducation of a City (2011).


This post is part of our Post-Conference Download series. Over the weeks following the 2014 Annual Meeting, we will feature several reflections on the conference.

Needed: New Strands of Research in Higher Education Finance and Public Policy

by Christopher M. Mullin, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Policy and Research at the State University System of Florida, Board of Governors and Jennifer A. Delaney, Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The field of higher education has benefitted from the contributions of researchers applying various methodologies, frameworks, and perspectives. Using these tools, higher education public policy and finance scholars have shaped our collective understanding of the higher education enterprise.

The field of higher education finance has a number of important strands. For example, there exists a strong and enduring strand in the research literature that focuses on a student’s response to price, there is a strand devoted to examining how student aid is structured and delivered to impact student outcomes, there is a strand that examines the economic returns to college, there are studies focused on institutional expenditures and unit costs that drive the prices students pay, and a line of research on the models that allocate funding to public colleges, such as performance-based funding.

At the intersection of higher education finance and public policy, there are a number of important areas of inquiry and we often find both academics and policymakers working in this space. For example, there are reports that examine trends in higher education finance (such as reports from the College Board, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the State Higher Education Executive Officers).

These and other strands of research in the higher education finance and public policy fields are important and have informed (and likely will continue to inform) policy at the institutional, state, and federal levels to improve opportunity for the students who enroll, to advance innovations in research, and to strengthen communities.

There is yet one line of inquiry that we believe needs greater attention: efficiency and adequacy in higher education. Neither of these are new concepts, but higher education scholars tend to shy away from research on these subjects. On the campus and in the state capital where we work, we often hear deans and policymakers asking us to meet certain outcomes with a limited discussion of the resources required to meet these new outcome levels. However, we know little from a research standpoint about what this will entail or the impact that this approach will have.

Johnstone (1999) has written that the concepts of access, quality, and efficiency are in tension in higher education and are often treated as a zero sum game such that enhancing one will lead to reductions in the others. While there is rich scholarship in the areas of access and quality, scholarly research on efficiency is much sparser. Contributions to the field often discuss how to balance access and quality. Both of these goals can be accomplished through the allocation of additional resources. However, we have a much more limited understanding of how to efficiently maintain, or increase, both access and quality. This idea of efficiency needs to be researched and engaged in policy discussions. The field needs scholarship in all three areas to better understand the ways in which the finance of higher education either enhances or limits social mobility, social justice, equity, and both the preservation and creation of knowledge in postsecondary institutions.

Research to determine adequacy is not uncommon in K-12 finance and we believe that we have entered an era in which these arguments will increasingly impact higher education policy decisions. Adequacy not only has utility for institutions in terms of benchmarking their expenditures to the outcomes they seek to produce, it has an impact on access, equity, and success. Research on adequacy allows for conversations about the appropriate shares each revenue source contributes given the substantial returns to education. We also believe that better decisions can be made if based on a robust foundation of scholarship that considers efficiency in postsecondary settings and adequacy of funding at all levels of higher education.

A few scholars have written about efficiency in higher education at a conceptual level and the tension among access (equity), quality, and efficiency. In addition, a couple scholars have applied ideas of adequacy to the study of equity in higher education. However, we believe that more research like this should be done in the fields of higher education finance and public policy.

About the Bloggers

Jennifer A. Delaney served as a co-chair of Division J, Section 5 for the 2014 AERA annual meeting and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Christopher M. Mullin served as a co-chair of Division J, Section 5 for the 2014 AERA annual meeting and is currently the assistant vice chancellor for policy and research at the State University System of Florida, Board of Governors. He is also the co-author of a newly published monograph Higher Education Finance Research: Policy, Politics, and Practice.

Reference:

Johnstone, D. B. (1999). “Financing higher education: Who should pay?” In P. G. Altbach, R. O. Berdhal & P. J. Gumport (Eds.), American higher education in the twenty-first century: Social, political, and economic challenges (2nd ed.) (pp. 369-392). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Musings from Section 4 - Faculty, Curriculum & Teaching

by Rebecca D. Cox, Assistant Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University and Jeni Hart, Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the University of Missouri

As the program co-chairs of Division J’s Section 4—Faculty, Curriculum & Teaching—for the upcoming annual meeting, Jeni Hart and Rebecca Cox share their musings about the “teaching” in faculty, curriculum, and teaching.

By our count, roughly one-sixth of the conference program for Section 4 is focused on the topics of postsecondary curriculum and teaching.  Therefore, the majority of the Section 4 sessions is focused on faculty, rather than curriculum and teaching. This is not to suggest that the high quality research about faculty issues isn’t of value, rather we point this out to demonstrate the trends in current research submitted to Division J, and specifically to Section 4.

Why do we think this is problematic?  We believe there is a need for sustained and rigorous inquiry into the complexities of teaching and, in turn, the implications for learning. Specifically, in this era of accountability, the public is very much interested in what is happening in  college classrooms and the learning outcomes for students in those classrooms. As scholars in the field of higher education who want to influence public policy, we are uniquely positioned to conduct scholarship that can shape this national and international conversation. And while we are not recommending that all scholars investigate the same questions (in this case, questions about teaching and curriculum), we posit that there is substantial room for research in this area.

Upon further reflection of the dearth of proposals about teaching and curriculum in Section 4, we identified several possible explanations:

1.     Submissions on teaching were directed to other sections within Division J.  This may be a possible consequence of Division J’s separation between “teaching” (Section 4) and “learning” (Section 1—College Student Learning and Outcomes).

2.     Submissions on postsecondary teaching were directed to other Divisions and SIGs.  This raises the question of how Division J might encourage proposals on teaching and learning

3.     Doctoral programs in the field offer few courses on teaching and learning, which limits the number of scholars who have a foundation upon which to build a research agenda in these areas.

4.     The sheer difficulty of examining the complex and nuanced nature of teaching and learning may discourage researchers from taking it on, particularly if it means investing in an area in which they have little background knowledge while facing time constraints (e.g., degree completion or the tenure clock).

5.     Other areas of inquiry in the field are “sexier,” and therefore curriculum and instruction may not be seen as viable areas of investigation. Researchers themselves, and/or colleagues and mentors, may not consider the topic of teaching as interesting. The topic may also pale in comparison to what is perceived to be more popular, fundable, or “current,” resulting in the pursuit of other research agendas.

6.     Despite its centrality in the work lives of postsecondary faculty members, the practice of teaching remains largely private and invisible—even to the members of promotion and tenure committees, who rely heavily on proxies for teaching quality like student evaluations or a small sample of peer reviews.

Certainly, we recognize that our speculations as to why so few proposals in Section 4 focus on teaching and curriculum warrant a much deeper empirical examination. However, we hope that, at the very least, our musings provoke conversation among scholars about the need to support and conduct rigorous research in these areas. More importantly, we hope that such conversations result in more scholarship in these areas. As educational researchers, we have important contributions to make to the public debate about teaching and learning in the academy; if we ignore the conversation or assume someone else will conduct this work, we cannot be surprised when the public value of the academic enterprise continues to erode.

Making the Most of the AERA Annual Meeting: A Primer for Graduate Students and Other Higher Education Scholars

Greetings, Fellow Graduate Students and Higher Education Scholars!

As we approach this year’s Annual Meeting, we’ve been thinking about what we as Division J graduate students stand to gain from attending AERA’s major annual event, particularly given that it will take place in the awesome city of Philadelphia!  As such, we’ve performed our own AERA Annual Meeting attendance cost-benefit analyses.  Our findings suggest that the Meeting is surely worth the costs.  While it certainly can be an expensive and time-consuming event, the unparalleled opportunities for 1) cross-disciplinary learning, 2) meeting other graduate students, faculty members, and practitioners, and 3) professional development tailored specifically for graduate students (not to mention all that Philadelphia has to offer) make this Annual Meeting one you don't want to miss! 

Enhance your scholarship through cross-disciplinary learning.

It’s true, AERA is MASSIVE. For those of us who have attended other higher education conferences, AERA might sound overwhelming and perhaps impossible to navigate.  AERA brings together thousands of scholars from all over the country and even the world; in fact, in the hosting city, you’re basically guaranteed to see at least a few people with AERA nametags anywhere you go. While such an immense event is understandably intimidating for graduate students, AERA’s size is actually one of its strongest assets. AERA is the only conference that offers higher education scholars numerous opportunities for inter-divisional learning and interaction: 

●      Interested in the politics of higher education?  Division L scholars are doing some exciting work in policy and politics in education that you can couple with Division J activities

●      Interested in the social context of higher education? Division G

●      History of higher education? Division F

●      Administration? Division A

Even the best graduate programs are limited in their ability to expose students to various research topics, theories, and methods, particularly because graduate student instruction is often dependent upon the expertise of the faculty members in the department.  For this reason, conferences are invaluable opportunities to complement the training offered by our programs and gain exposure to those topics, theories, and methods we might not otherwise encounter.  AERA, in particular, has the added value of providing insight from other disciplines and niches within education research, practice, and policy, making it one conference no graduate student should miss!  For more information on other divisions and their events at this year’s Meeting, search by Unit-> Division on the Online Program Portal: http://convention2.allacademic.com/one/aera/aera14/index.php?cmd=Prepare+Online+Program&program_focus=main&PHPSESSID=lrhjajcvjmrhuo1feaaqis54f4

Establish meaningful relationships.

More people = greater probability that you will establish a meaningful relationship. 

Whether you are…

a)     On the job market and looking to meet other practitioners, faculty members, or administrators,

b)     Looking to find a scholar with whom to collaborate or bounce ideas off of for a research project,

c)     Curious about the graduate student experiences in other programs,

…you’re bound to find someone with whom you’ll connect!

Of course, for some of us it can be an anxiety-inducing experience to attend a social, introduce yourself to someone, or ask a question at the end of a paper presentation.  But don’t fret! Within the Division J graduate student community, we’ve tried to make this process more amiable by creating a sense of community. Here are a couple of things you can do to make AERA smaller:

●      Attend our graduate student breakfast social. Our Division J Vice President, Dr. Adrianna Kezar (University of Southern California), has been kind enough to offer her hotel suite as the venue for our graduate student breakfast.  This is an informal, casual opportunity to meet other graduate students and faculty members (and, of course, Dr. Kezar).  We’ve intentionally scheduled the social at the beginning of the conference to provide an opportunity to make a buddy or two from the start (trust me, it happens). Be sure to like our Facebook page for up to date announcements about the location of this event. RSVP here, https://www.facebook.com/events/356507494489152/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming&source=1#

●      Join our Mentoring Match program.  Our two awesome coordinators, Jason T. Jones and Luis Leyva, have created a program to match graduate students for the 2014 AERA Annual Meeting. Graduate students are matched based on professional and personal interests.  As a mentor or mentee, you can meet with your buddy once or you can attend multiple conference events together.  The best part: registration is now open. Sign up to be a mentor or mentee today! http://tinyurl.com/qh5bj8m

Develop professionally.

What if you’re not presenting?  The great thing about AERA is that it’s much more than just a research conference. In addition to simply demystifying the conference and presentation process (an important step for graduate students), AERA presents a myriad of opportunities for professional development.  For instance, the Division J Graduate Student Reps will be hosting two exciting panels with top scholars in the field:

●      Alleviating “Teamwork” Anxieties: How to Establish and Sustain Successful Collaborative Publication-Oriented Relationships –

Drs. Shaun Harper, Ryan Gildersleeve, Cecilia Rios- Aguilar, Nick Hillman, and Riyad Shahjahan will discuss ways in which you can get more involved with research (as graduate students) and, more importantly, how to navigate the collaboration process.

●      Beyond Academia: Reaching a Broader Audience –

Drs. Gary Rhoades, Marybeth Gasman, Erin Castro, and Liliana Garces will discuss challenges related to reaching a broader audience, including those that arise from engaging in efforts that are not traditionally rewarded in academia.

And now for the elephant in the room: the cost of attending AERA 2014.  We’ve wondered, too, why the “big” conferences in higher education always seem to be in the most expensive cities!   Especially for graduate student budgets, we understand the challenges associated with travelling to Philly and paying for a hotel.  Here are some ways to ease the pain:

1.     Split the room! We’ve put together a Division J roommate matching program. Check it out: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1d26lG18dkm0DzpSLG3ynczUqwJw1nSlHbZ9KD3xKVi4/viewform 

2.     If possible, take a bus or train

3.     Once there, take advantage of FREE FOOD at the many receptions throughout the conference, such as the Division J Graduate Student Breakfast and the Division J Business Meeting.

4.     Seek out departmental/institutional funding or travel grants

Now that you've decided to go (or at least are considering it), here are a few tips to make the best of your AERA experience:

●      Consider your goals. What do you intend to get out of your trip?  Do you hope to meet a faculty member? Do you hope to learn more about your dissertation topic? Do you plan to make at least one graduate student buddy? Do you want to learn about some potential methods to answer the research questions in which you’re interested? Do you want to successfully present your paper? (Do you want to visit the Liberty Bell?)

●      Review the Online Program. You don’t need to plan out every hour of every day (in fact, it’s probably a good idea to leave some room for unplanned activities), prioritize the socials you might want to attend and the presentations you might want to see. What topic are you interested in learning more about? What methods? Is there a scholar whose work you’ve been following and would like to learn more about?

o      Go to socials! These are the best opportunities to meet potential collaborators, other faculty members, or even a new friend. Don’t like to attend socials alone? Find a buddy to join you (perhaps a mentor or mentee).  Or, come talk to us (Div J Grad Student Reps)!  We’d be happy to introduce you to other grad students and would love to meet you!

o      Don’t be afraid to look outside Division J! Look for presentations, socials and other activities in other divisions that might be relevant to your research, personal or professional interests.  This is one of the coolest things about AERA - take advantage of it!

●      Set up meetings. Have an old colleague you want to catch up with?  How about a faculty member from your master’s program, or someone your advisor recommended talking to (e.g., regarding your research topics)?  Email them to see if they have some time to chat.  Don’t be discouraged if their schedule is booked – there’s always next year! If you do set up a time to chat with a faculty member, especially one with whom you’ve never met before, be sure to prep!  Know what you want to get out of the meeting and do your homework ahead of time. This might be an incredible opportunity and you certainly want to make a good first impression!

●      Pack appropriately. Make sure to pack professional clothes, casual clothes, and comfortable shoes. As you may have noticed, there are multiple venues for conference activities, which means you may be doing a lot of walking.

●      Finally, if you’re presenting, don’t forget to bring your materials, including printouts, a USB or whatever you might need.  Also, be sure to practice beforehand and to prep well for Q&A. Whether you’re presenting or not, be sure to hit as many of your Meeting goals as possible and, most importantly: HAVE A BLAST!  

As always, if you have any questions or comments regarding the Annual Meeting or anything else Division J Grad Students are doing, please don’t hesitate to contact us at aeradivjgradnet@gmail.com. Finally, consider getting more involved with AERA Division J!  We are currently looking for a graduate student representative and committee member- at- large.  Check out our Facebook page for more information on the call for applications.

See you in Philly!!

Denisa, Blanca and Catherine

Find us on Facebook, Twitter & Tumblr

https://www.facebook.com/DivJGraduateStudents

https://twitter.com/AERADivJGradNet

http://aeradivjgrad.tumblr.com/

(Re)Envisioning a Collective Agenda Focused on Systems and Transformation in Higher Education

by Samuel D. Museus, Associate Professor of Higher Education at the University of Denver and Fellow of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Research Coalition (ARC)

During his speech at the Council on Ethnic Participation business meeting at the 2013 Association for the Study of Higher Education conference in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Shaun Harper told the story about one of his mentees who decided to put off enrolling in graduate programs because he wanted to spend the next few years of his life making a real difference. He went on to talk about how many people who have chosen to pursue a doctorate in higher education have done so in order to have a positive impact on their communities, and many of us would argue that we entered the field to have a positive impact on higher education and society in general as well. However, Dr. Harper also noted that the field has not effectively engaged those passions to promote significant impact and we, as a community, have not engaged in the kind of activity that effectively addresses some of the most critical issues facing higher education. For me, his speech prompted a (re)envisioning of the nature of scholarship in higher education. In this essay, I build on Harper’s discussion, my own research agenda, and previous blog posts by Drs. Kezar and Gildersleeve, to offer some thoughts about how our scholarly community can (re)envision a higher education scholarly enterprise to more effectively serve our students, our institutions, our communities, and society at large.  

Systemic Problems Require Systemic Solutions

In her November essay, Kezar astutely noted that we are lacking a broader systems perspective in higher education scholarship, and this is readily apparent. In their previous pieces, both Kezar and Gildersleeve asserted that there is a plethora of higher education scholarship that examines students at the individual level being presented at national conferences. Yet, it is difficult to deny that the populations we study are heavily influenced by major systemic trends that surround and place immense pressures on postsecondary institutions and their leaders to adapt. Indeed, the rapid racial and ethnic diversification, widespread globalization, and pervasive digitization placing pressures on the higher education sector have no reservations in forcing college campuses to change the way they do business and deliver education in the 21st century. Unfortunately, institutions of higher education often take a reactionary – rather than an informed, complex, and visionary – approach to responding to these forces. For example, this reactionary institutional behavior has manifested in many institutions bringing increasingly diverse students to their campuses without transforming their organizational environments to reflect that diversity, or heavily recruiting international students without systemically and systematically integrating those students into the fabric of institutional life, or making fiscally responsible decisions that generate revenue without making morally responsible and strategic decisions about how they can bring in revenue while preserving academic freedom and supporting liberal arts disciplines that matter so much to the well being of society but are not aligned with the increasing market mentality of college campuses. These are systemic issues that require more intentional and meaningful systemic solutions. If these forces continue to place pressures on higher education leaders and we fail to generate meaningful, strategic, and large-scale methods of responding to them, our students and society will suffer as a result.

So, what does all this mean for the higher education scholarly community? And, how does our community of scholars respond to this conundrum? Kezar presented useful recommendations for advisors, discussants, and individuals in other positions in higher education to begin shifting their work to reflect more systems-level thinking. And, Gildersleeve offered very useful practical recommendations for individual scholars who are (re)constructing their scholarly agendas in a more systemic way in his January essay. Here, I compliment those suggestions with recommendations for the scholarly community to engage in a collective and systemic paradigmatic shift in order to make our research more relevant and responsive to the demands placed upon us by external forces.

(Re)Envisioning a Community Focused on Transformative Scholarship

I begin my (re)envisioning with a personal story. When I was in my doctoral program at Penn State, I was deeply concerned about the individual challenges faced by students of color as they navigated postsecondary environments and I did an extensive review of the higher education literature on diversity, campus environments, and college student success. From this review, I drew an overarching conclusion that our field had failed to generate an empirically based and complex understanding of the ways in which postsecondary institutions can and do construct campus environments to help diverse student populations thrive in college. Put another way, at the expense of sounding utopian of naively optimistic, I felt that we needed to illuminate what cultural and programmatic characteristics could be infused throughout a college or university environment to help diverse students thrive. For decades, higher education scholars – like Vince Tinto, Alexander Astin, and George Kuh – had stimulated vital research and discourse around student integration, involvement, and engagement. Similarly, for some time, postsecondary education researchers – such as Walter Allen, Sylvia Hurtado, Amaury Nora, Laura Rendon, and Daniel Solorzano – had produced ground breaking and valuable research that shed light on the problematic nature of racialized environments. But, a cohesive and coherent picture of what institutions can do to construct curricula, programs, and practices that maximize those students’ success in college was elusive.

The initial result was my dissertation, which built on the work of the aforementioned scholars and examined institutions that exhibited high and equitable persistence and graduation rates to understand how they had constructed campus cultures that facilitated success among diverse populations. Then, after conducting several other studies of campus environments and diverse populations as an early career faculty member, I generated the Culturally Engaging Campus Environments (CECE) Model and Survey (Museus, 2014), which incorporate knowledge from over 30 years of scholarship and several qualitative studies to convey how institutions can cultivate environments to help students thrive and provide tools that can constitute the foundation for the transformation of academic departments, residence halls, student affairs offices, classrooms, and other spaces across college campuses. I am now working with other scholars, my research team, and national leaders in student affairs to bring this knowledge onto college campuses for purposes of institutional assessment and transformation.

My point in sharing an overview of this one strand of my scholarly agenda is threefold: (1) to highlight that there was always a long-term vision of systemic transformation driving my agenda, (2) to demonstrate the reality that we have an ability to link the individual (e.g., diverse students’ success) to the systemic (e.g., organizational culture) and center this intersection in our empirical endeavors to advance such transformation goals, and (3) to illuminate the potential in reframing the way we think about progressive scholarly agendas in our field. Echoing and extending some of the valuable insights previously offered by Gildersleeve, I underscore that we do not have to stop studying individual students, but we can (re)center some of our agendas on the intersection between student experiences and institutional culture, or student lives and cultural communities, or student identities and classroom curricula, or student outcomes and federal or state policy. And, in doing so, we can help generate knowledge that is conducive to positive systemic transformation. Yet, individual researchers making conscious choices to engage in such an agenda is not sufficient, for the traditional structures that individual higher education scholars must navigate do not necessarily value or reward such agenda (re)envisioning. Thus, as a community of scholars, we also need to think about how we can (re)structure our own systems – our scholarly arenas and discourses – to promote such complex and transformative scholarship. I offer a few thoughts to begin this thinking and discussion.

Creating Space for Critical Conceptual Analysis of Systems: First, empirical research dominates our field. Even frameworks originally constructed to deconstruct pervasive systems more often than not drive empirical studies that examines individual experiences. Take, for example, the case of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Today, higher education scholars using CRT frequently apply this framework as a lens to examine individual racialized experiences and this work is undoubtedly important. Some of us have applied the framework to examine more systemic processes in our work. But, the utilization of CRT to illuminate the ways in which race and racism permeate broader federal and state policies or colorblind institutional cultures, policies, and structures are also important in underscoring systemic problems and are much more difficult to find. Undoubtedly, empirical qualitative and quantitative analyses are critical contributions to the higher education knowledgebase, but the potential of critical conceptual analyses of higher education systems is seldom realized.

In addition, young scholars need to produce, produce, and produce to get promoted and tenured. While many of us periodically emphasize scholarship quality over quantity in public forums, the reality is that many institutional cultures and promotion and tenure processes are at least partially driven by quantity and most pre-tenured faculty members know that one or two transformative articles or books might not get them tenure. The combined disproportionate emphasis on empirical inquiries and the generation of quick results and publications makes doing traditional student-focused research appealing (at least) or career-saving (at most). As a community, we need to do better at creating mechanisms for scholars to engage in deep critical analysis of social forces and deconstructing of systemic structures in higher education scholarly, policy, and practice arenas to shed light on pervasive problems and construct solutions to them.

Constructing New Theories that Catalyze New Scholarly Conversations: Theories that explain processes and experiences within the context of the larger contemporary social forces discussed above are difficult to find. My agenda discussed above evolved to address what was an absence of comprehensive, coherent, quantifiable, and culturally relevant and responsive theories that explain the impact of campus environments on diverse student success. But, where are the frameworks that explain the complex impact of globalization and academic capitalism on faculty life and outcomes? Where are models that help provide a framework for understanding how organizational change evolves in the context of current neoliberal ideologies and trends? Where are the evolving bodies of scholarship that test, retest, critique, and refine these models? Such models are critical for communicating critical evidence-based information to policymaker and practitioner audiences because they can convey a significant amount of information in condensed form and bridge the gap between spheres of influence.

Surely, some scholars have produced such scholarship in their work, but the generation of such frameworks has not been the norm in our field, has not been the focus of doctoral training in higher education programs, and has not kept pace with the increasing influence of contextual social forces influencing higher education. It behooves our community to think about ways that it can promote the generation of new contemporary frameworks that examine the impact of policies and organizations on today’s administrators, faculty members, and students, and the collective testing and analysis of these frameworks.

Engaging in Coalition Building and Collective Action: In Harper’s speech, discussed at the beginning of this essay, he referenced the low success rates of Black males in higher education and asked the question, why have we not built a national coalition to facilitate real systemic transformative change to address this issue? This is a great question, and reflecting on it can lead us to think about the possibilities of coalition building. Coalitions can offer vehicles for collaboration, enhanced visibility of scholarship, support networks for young scholars, and a broader reach and impact of scholarly works. These are just some of the reasons that my colleagues and I started the Asian American and Pacific Islander Research Coalition (ARC), which has already resulted in strengthened friendships within our network, emerging relationships with organizations in the practice arena working with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students, and a renewed or enhanced sense of hope among some of us that we can have a transformative impact on policy and practice in a way that will help more AAPI students and communities thrive in higher education. However, such coalition building is an immense amount of work and again our field is not currently structured in a way that supports such activities. The question is, how can we, as a scholarly community, create structures that reward the sweat and tears that go into forging such collaborations?

Breaking Down Barriers to Scholarly Isolation: We produce research and literature (and therefore ideas, models, and solutions) that are primarily consumed by other higher education scholars, and often does not reach policymakers and practitioners. Yet, our scholarship cannot be transformative if it is not consumed and integrated into policy and practice. As Chair of the ASHE evaluation committee for two years, it was readily apparent that policymakers and practitioners are few and far between in our scholarly arenas. Similarly, a handful of us attend conferences like the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) or the National Association of Personnel Administrators (NASPA), but we are not well represented in those arenas. As a result, practice is often more grounded in hunches than a comprehensive understanding of theory and evidence. Similarly, a few scholars have relationships with philanthropic foundations and policymakers, but such relationships are not yet prevalent within our community and few young scholars have the means to cultivate them. As a result, those in the philanthropic and policy world who want to support or utilize groundbreaking and transformative work will never be exposed to the vast majority of cutting edge ideas that emerge throughout our field, which limits the impact of our collective work.

I do not intend to argue that AERA and ASHE or ACPA and NASPA should transform primarily into a venue for discussing the application of research to practice or research to policy. But, I am arguing that our community – especially the leaders of it – should think of new ways to create space for more higher education researchers to cultivate relationships and engage in work with policymakers, practitioners, and foundations to collectively develop research that leads to real solutions for pervasive policy and practice problems. I must commend current ASHE President, Caroline Turner for moving the field in the right direction with the focus on catalyzing dialogue between researchers and policymakers at ASHE 2014, but such efforts are not yet commonplace.

In sum, I am arguing that we must (re)envision a scholarly community that is aimed at generating knowledge that can help institutions transform to thoughtfully and effectively respond to the immense social forces surrounding them in the present day while advancing core values of higher education, such as equity, public service, vibrant exchange of ideas, and the cultivation of socially responsible lifelong learners…. 

Building a Research Program of Consequence in the Study of Higher Education (or, thinking beyond student-focused research)

by Ryan Evely Gildersleeve, Associate Professor of Higher Education at the University of Denver's Morgridge College of Education

One of the more challenging tasks for some academics can be the development of a cogent and cohesive research agenda. Particularly at the turning points of our careers (e.g., dissertation, first job, new institution, promotion/tenure), we often bump our heads against a wall we might not have seen coming, jarring us to consider, “So, what now?” These moments are excellent opportunities to take stock of our achievement thus far, our interests and values, and the state of the field generally. They are built-in moments we can use to strategically situate our work and the contributions we hope to make for the next phase of our careers.

I am seizing one of those moments as I write this essay for the Division. Recently tenured, I recognize that three distinct yet complementary lines of inquiry mark my pre-tenure research agenda: 1) critical qualitative methodology, 2) cultural analyses of educational processes and practices, and 3) discursive analyses of higher education policy. Social justice, equity, and diversity have been prominent themes across my work, and problems related to access and success have been central concerns. I have done a lot of work related to Latina/o (im)migrant communities. These are the kind of articulations required in promotion/tenure dossiers. However, such clarity and sophistication has not always been so readily available to my thinking about my own research.

Like many, I have suffered from being interested in everything and wanting to do it all. I am privileged to have a supportive network of mentors, peers, and mentees to confront my wandering eye and support my efforts to bring focus to my research. In this first year of my tenured life, I am indulging in the opportunity to think strategically about where to head next. I take seriously that my personal interests are a significant dimension to my research agenda. However, if my work is to be consequential, particularly in the strengthening and on-going improvement of American higher education, then my work must reach beyond my personal interests. I need a well-informed assessment of what the field’s pressing needs might be. Where does the work need to be done?

A cursory glance at the Division J or ASHE programs is instructive. As a field of study, higher education knows a whole lot about students. So much so that in my relatively short time (11 years) as a member of these organizations, ASHE has gone from one to two to now three sections of conference proposals dedicated to students. Meanwhile, once dominant organizational and policy analyses have tapered, and curriculum, teaching, and learning studies are nearly extinct. I am uncertain if this signals any sort of crisis. Students are a core constituency in higher education and deserve attention. Yet, governance, policy, leadership, faculty, and curriculum are also imperative to understand – even if our primary concern might be students. And what to say of students’ primary activity in college – learning? Further, I often reflect on how changes in the attentions of our field have informed the decay of the once powerful notion of higher education as a social institution. What can be done? What can I do?

There are good reasons for the contemporary focus on students. First, they constitute a group of people central and critical to higher education. We need to know about them. Second, students are a readily available resource for empirical study. Every college/university has them. Recruiting student participation in research is usually a bit easier than, say, policymakers. Third, our field has some of the best and most user-friendly datasets about students available in UCLA’s Cooperative Institutional Research Project and Indiana’s National Survey of Student Engagement. These, and similar datasets, provide incredible resources for student-focused research programs. By contrast, large-scale national datasets from the U.S. Government or statewide data from individual states can be a bit more cumbersome to combine, clean, and manipulate for analysis, even when open-sourced.

Calls for increased attention to policy, organization, governance, finance, curriculum, and broader social contexts are not new. And the field definitely has strong leadership in each of these areas. Anna Neumann’s 2012 Presidential Address in Las Vegas surely inspired many to take seriously our role as pedagogical inquirers. Early-career scholar, Leslie Gonzales, is doing ground-breaking work around faculty behaviors in the Late Capitalist University. Luciana Dar continues to do cutting-edge work around financial aid and higher education funding models using some of the most advanced statistical analyses available. Anne-Marie Nuñez has complemented and transfigured her early student-focused work with institutional, policy, and curricular studies using mixed-methods traditions. Estela Bensimon provides innovation in the study of organizational transformation.

Our field does not lack for contemporary expertise or role models. Yet, student-focused research continues to dominate the landscape of studies at our national conferences. My point is not to lament our field’s strength in knowledge-production about students. Student issues of identity, access, and success – popular student-focused research topics – are perennial concerns that need constant and rigorous attention. But I am troubled by at least four consequences from this historical development in the study of higher education.

1. PREDICTABILITY: Our abundance of studies focused on students can lead to some predictability of analytical strategy, representation, and findings/outcomes. Personally, I have perused the program at AERA or ASHE, seen a title of interest, then often thought to myself, “But I’m pretty certain I already know what is going to be shared. It’s yet another investigation of [insert group] college choice process.” I’m not proud of myself in these cynical moments, but I rarely end up attending the session and/or finding myself more informed if I do. My good friend and colleague, Aaron Kuntz, is currently working on a book about methodological responsibility. Part of his thesis includes a directive for researchers to take risks in our work – that abiding by the status-quo is irresponsible in the pursuit of knowledge. Taking Kuntz’s instruction seriously encourages me to take pause when I think about the next steps of my own research program – how might I take risk in my next research project? How can I inform the experiences of Latina/o (im)migrant students while not studying students, per se?

2. INTERVENTION: The increased focus on students in higher education studies has come at a cost to other domains. Student-focused research most often designs and draws upon individual-level analysis, which then produces individual-level findings. These can often suggest organizational and systemic concerns that need to be addressed, but most student-focused research does not provide the data necessary for sophisticated understandings of organizational culture, process, and practice, much less provide opportunities for systemic analyses of governance, funding, politics, and leadership that help shape the conditions of access and success for students. When we ignore organizational and systemic concerns, we inevitably leave the development of our institutions in the hands of the market. In today’s neoliberal climate of educational reform, rigorous research from a variety of methodological traditions is one of our most powerful interventions into hegemonic political regimes. How will my research program intervene in the dominant discourse of higher education?

3. DISTRIBUTION OF KNOWLEDGE: Research questions about teaching, learning, curriculum, and the politics of knowledge, are in danger of becoming extinct. These are mission critical activities for any college/university. Again, if we as a field rely on too few of us to pursue these domains, we are inadvertently truncating knowledge production in the study of higher education. We have fewer voices to instruct us and provide direction in these areas than we do in student-focused, individual-level analyses. This dynamic concentrates expertise of mission critical activities in the hands of a few, which can potentially limit the field’s sphere of influence across the academy and its constituents. One of my early and long-lasting mentors, Kris Gutiérrez, has done extensive work on learning and development, provocatively asserting that knowledge is most productive when understood as distributed broadly, rather than concentrated narrowly. I must ask myself, how can I contribute to the broader distribution of core concepts, methods, and content in which I have expertise – and how can my knowledge base expand from the expertise distributed across other areas of inquiry?

4. SOCIAL JUSTICE: I fear that issues of social justice, equity, and diversity might become understood in isolation. The dangers of identity politics make it far too easy for discourses of equity and diversity to be co-opted as exclusive to work explicitly about particular populations. While most of my cultural analyses work has focused on Latina/o (im)migrants, which is arguably a disenfranchised group in American higher education, I contend that my discursive analyses of policy and my methodological theorizing equally contribute to social justice in distinct and significant ways. Studying higher education finance is no more nor less an inherent social justice/equity concern than studying homeless, lesbian, single-parent, first-generation students of color. Indeed, we can dangerously objectify subjectivities and perpetuate dehumanizing practices, policies, and processes regardless of our areas of research. In reflecting on how to augment my current research program to meet today’s needs, I need to ask myself “How does my research contribute to social justice?” not simply rely on the historical assumptions about my research subjects.

In order to mitigate these consequences from the abundance of student-centered, individual-level analyses, I am personally investigating ways to augment my research agenda and interests, based on the needs of the field, in order to conduct research of consequence. Some strategies I have deployed, largely based on conversations with other mentors, peers, and mentees, include:

a) Identify a policy concern directly related to my population of interest – 
This strategy led me to begin my work with in-state resident tuition (ISRT) policy and undocumented students. It has been a fruitful pursuit, garnering me a prestigious fellowship and a book contract. In my critical policy work, I examine how policy constrains opportunity for undocumented students, not via objective outcomes, but rather through its discursive rendering of policy subjects (i.e., students), and the construction of the policy problem itself. I ask, “What ‘problems’ does ISRT policy make available for the public to consider?”

b) Identify organizational constraints related to my core problems of concern – 
College access and success has been a cornerstone of my research agenda. Branching into organizational analyses of broad-access institutions (e.g., community colleges) seems like a potentially promising new direction within an existing area of interest. Yet, community colleges, as an institutional/organizational level analysis, are constrained by finances, the politics of state legislatures, policy regimes driving an ever-increasing reliance on contingent faculty, and systemic demands that the institution serve all parties and all purposes for postsecondary education. Each of these constraints provides an opportunity to intervene in the dominant discourse around college access and success – potentially contributing something consequential in the support of students.

c) Look to my existing findings for implications I cannot answer from my individual-level data – 
In my first book, Fracturing Opportunity: Mexican Migrant Students and College-going Literacy, I pointed to a number of ways to pursue more systemic analyses of migrant college-going. It would be a natural extension to follow-up on any of these implications. For example, I suggest that migrant college-going, as a system of activity itself, intersects with multiple other social systems. Examining the intersection of migrant college-going with migrant farm labor might potentially reveal systemic practices of the state that mediate migrant families’ opportunity to develop robust college-going literacies.

d) Consider organizational level spheres of influence most obviously related to access and success for underrepresented students – 
There are plenty of units within colleges/universities and plenty of institutional types across the diversity of American higher education with direct influence on diversity, equity, access, and success, for example: multicultural student affairs, enrollment services, and minority serving institutions. Studying the funding, governance, social contexts, and/or politics, of any of these organizations could make a much-needed contribution, of consequence, to the field.

I hope these reflections and strategies might prove useful to others who are similarly examining their research programs and seeking to augment or enhance their consequence in the field. Of course, robust and rigorous student-focused, individual-level analyses can make consequential contributions. I want to encourage more diverse ways of thinking about student-centered issues from organizational, systemic, and social context perspectives, as an additive approach to engaging within the study of higher education. As a field, I believe this might sharpen our cutting-edge, amplify our distribution of knowledge, increase our toolkit for intervention, and strengthen our commitments to social justice.